This paper evaluates a novel high variability phonetic training paradigm that involves presenting spoken words in adverse conditions. The effectiveness, generalizability, and longevity of this high variability phonetic training in adverse conditions was evaluated using English phoneme contrasts in three experiments with Malaysian multilinguals. Adverse conditions were created by presenting spoken words against background multi-talker babble. In Experiment 1, the adverse condition level was set at a fixed level throughout the training and in Experiment 2 the adverse condition level was determined for each participant before training using an adaptive staircase procedure. To explore the effectiveness and sustainability of the training, phonemic discrimination ability was assessed before and immediately after training (Experiments 1 and 2) and 6 months after training (Experiment 3). Generalization of training was evaluated within and across phonemic contrasts using trained and untrained stimuli. Results revealed significant perceptual improvements after just three 20-minute training sessions and these improvements were maintained after 6 months. The training benefits also generalized from trained to untrained stimuli. Crucially, perceptual improvements were significantly larger when the adverse conditions were adapted before each training session than when it was set at a fixed level. As the training improvements observed here are markedly larger than those reported in the literature, this indicates that the individualized phonetic training regime in adaptive adverse conditions (HVPT-AAC) is highly effective at improving speech perception.
The existence of word stress in Indonesian languages has been controversial. Recent acoustic analyses of Papuan Malay suggest that this language has word stress, counter to other studies and unlike closely related languages. The current study further investigates Papuan Malay by means of lexical (non-acoustic) analyses of two different aspects of word stress. In particular, this paper reports two distribution analyses of a word corpus, 1) investigating the extent to which stress patterns may help word recognition and 2) exploring the phonological factors that predict the distribution of stress patterns. The facilitating role of stress patterns in word recognition was investigated in a lexical analysis of word embeddings. The results show that Papuan Malay word stress (potentially) helps to disambiguate words. As for stress predictors, a random forest analysis investigated the effect of multiple morpho-phonological factors on stress placement. It was found that the mid vowels /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ play a central role in stress placement, refining the conclusions of previous work that mainly focused on /ɛ/. The current study confirms that non-acoustic research on stress can complement acoustic research in important ways. Crucially, the combined findings on stress in Papuan Malay so far give rise to an integrated perspective to word stress, in which phonetic, phonological and cognitive factors are considered.
In the recent years, many research works have been published using speech related features for speech emotion recognition, however, recent studies show that there is a strong correlation between emotional states and glottal features. In this work, Mel-frequency cepstralcoefficients (MFCCs), linear predictive cepstral coefficients (LPCCs), perceptual linear predictive (PLP) features, gammatone filter outputs, timbral texture features, stationary wavelet transform based timbral texture features and relative wavelet packet energy and entropy features were extracted from the emotional speech (ES) signals and its glottal waveforms(GW). Particle swarm optimization based clustering (PSOC) and wrapper based particle swarm optimization (WPSO) were proposed to enhance the discerning ability of the features and to select the discriminating features respectively. Three different emotional speech databases were utilized to gauge the proposed method. Extreme learning machine (ELM) was employed to classify the different types of emotions. Different experiments were conducted and the results show that the proposed method significantly improves the speech emotion recognition performance compared to previous works published in the literature.
We report the findings of a multi-language and multi-lab investigation of young infants' ability to discriminate lexical tones as a function of their native language, age and language experience, as well as of tone properties. Given the high prevalence of lexical tones across human languages, understanding lexical tone acquisition is fundamental for comprehensive theories of language learning. While there are some similarities between the developmental course of lexical tone perception and that of vowels and consonants, findings for lexical tones tend to vary greatly across different laboratories. To reconcile these differences and to assess the developmental trajectory of native and non-native perception of tone contrasts, this study employed a single experimental paradigm with the same two pairs of Cantonese tone contrasts (perceptually similar vs. distinct) across 13 laboratories in Asia-Pacific, Europe and North-America testing 5-, 10- and 17-month-old monolingual (tone, pitch-accent, non-tone) and bilingual (tone/non-tone, non-tone/non-tone) infants. Across the age range and language backgrounds, infants who were not exposed to Cantonese showed robust discrimination of the two non-native lexical tone contrasts. Contrary to this overall finding, the statistical model assessing native discrimination by Cantonese-learning infants failed to yield significant effects. These findings indicate that lexical tone sensitivity is maintained from 5 to 17 months in infants acquiring tone and non-tone languages, challenging the generalisability of the existing theoretical accounts of perceptual narrowing in the first months of life. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: This is a multi-language and multi-lab investigation of young infants' ability to discriminate lexical tones. This study included data from 13 laboratories testing 5-, 10-, and 17-month-old monolingual (tone, pitch-accent, non-tone) and bilingual (tone/non-tone, non-tone/non-tone) infants. Overall, infants discriminated a perceptually similar and a distinct non-native tone contrast, although there was no evidence of a native tone-language advantage in discrimination. These results demonstrate maintenance of tone discrimination throughout development.
One reason why specific language impairment (SLI) is grossly under-identified in Malaysia is the absence of locally- developed norm-referenced language assessment tools for its multilingual and multicultural population. Spontaneous language samples provide quantitative information for language assessment, and useful descriptive information on child language development in complex language and cultural environments. This research consisted of two studies and investigated the use of measures obtained from English conversational samples among bilingual Chinese-English Malaysian preschoolers. The research found that the language sample measures were sensitive to developmental changes in this population and could identify SLI. The first study examined the relationship between age and mean length of utterance (MLU(w)), lexical diversity (D), and the index of productive syntax (IPSyn) among 52 typically-developing (TD) children aged between 3;4-6;9. Analyses showed a significant linear relationship between age and D (r = .450), the IPsyn (r = .441), and MLU(w) (r = .318). The second study compared the same measures obtained from 10 children with SLI, aged between 3;8-5;11, and their age-matched controls. The children with SLI had significantly shorter MLU(w) and lower IPSyn scores than the TD children. These findings suggest that utterance length and syntax production can be potential clinical markers of SLI in Chinese-English Malaysian children.
Malay is a consistent alphabetic orthography with complex syllable structures. The focus of this research was to investigate word recognition performance in order to inform reading interventions for low-progress early readers. Forty-six Grade 1 students were sampled and 11 were identified as low-progress readers. The results indicated that both syllable awareness and phoneme blending were significant predictors of word recognition, suggesting that both syllable and phonemic grain-sizes are important in Malay word recognition. Item analysis revealed a hierarchical pattern of difficulty based on the syllable and the phonic structure of the words. Error analysis identified the sources of errors to be errors due to inefficient syllable segmentation, oversimplification of syllables, insufficient grapheme-phoneme knowledge and inefficient phonemic code assembly. Evidence also suggests that direct instruction in syllable segmentation, phonemic awareness and grapheme-phoneme correspondence is necessary for low-progress readers to acquire word recognition skills. Finally, a logical sequence to teach grapheme-phoneme decoding in Malay is suggested.
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is currently used in many assistive technologies, such as helping individuals with speech impairment in their communication ability. One challenge in ASR for speech-impaired individuals is the difficulty in obtaining a good speech database of impaired speakers for building an effective speech acoustic model. Because there are very few existing databases of impaired speech, which are also limited in size, the obvious solution to build a speech acoustic model of impaired speech is by employing adaptation techniques. However, issues that have not been addressed in existing studies in the area of adaptation for speech impairment are as follows: (1) identifying the most effective adaptation technique for impaired speech; and (2) the use of suitable source models to build an effective impaired-speech acoustic model. This research investigates the above-mentioned two issues on dysarthria, a type of speech impairment affecting millions of people. We applied both unimpaired and impaired speech as the source model with well-known adaptation techniques like the maximum likelihood linear regression (MLLR) and the constrained-MLLR(C-MLLR). The recognition accuracy of each impaired speech acoustic model is measured in terms of word error rate (WER), with further assessments, including phoneme insertion, substitution and deletion rates. Unimpaired speech when combined with limited high-quality speech-impaired data improves performance of ASR systems in recognising severely impaired dysarthric speech. The C-MLLR adaptation technique was also found to be better than MLLR in recognising mildly and moderately impaired speech based on the statistical analysis of the WER. It was found that phoneme substitution was the biggest contributing factor in WER in dysarthric speech for all levels of severity. The results show that the speech acoustic models derived from suitable adaptation techniques improve the performance of ASR systems in recognising impaired speech with limited adaptation data.
Speech audiometry is a method for assessing the ability of the auditory system using speech sounds as stimuli. A list of phonemically balanced bisyllabic consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel (c-v-c-v) Malay words was produced. All the bisyllabic words (c-v-c-v) thought to be commonly used in everyday conversations were listed from the Dewan Bahasa dictionary and their suitability assessed. The chosen words were divided into 25 groups containing 10 words each. The list was then recorded by a professional male newscaster in a sound proof studio. A normal speech audiometry curve was obtained by testing 60 normal hearing subjects using the prerecorded speech material. The result of the study showed that the normal Malay speech audiometry curve was comparable to those of English and Arabic speech audiometry, in which it was sigmoidal with the optimum discrimination score of 40 dB and half peak level of 17.5 dB.
Reading decoding ability is a fundamental skill to acquire word-specific orthographic information necessary for skilled reading. Decoding ability and its underlying phonological processing skills have been heavily investigated typically among developing students. However, the issue has rarely been noticed among students with intellectual disability who commonly suffer from reading decoding problems. This study is aimed at determining the contributions of phonological awareness, phonological short-term memory, and rapid automated naming, as three well known phonological processing skills, to decoding ability among 60 participants with mild intellectual disability of unspecified origin ranging from 15 to 23 years old. The results of the correlation analysis revealed that all three aspects of phonological processing are significantly correlated with decoding ability. Furthermore, a series of hierarchical regression analysis indicated that after controlling the effect of IQ, phonological awareness, and rapid automated naming are two distinct sources of decoding ability, but phonological short-term memory significantly contributes to decoding ability under the realm of phonological awareness.
This study examined the phonological and reading performance in English of Malaysian children whose home language was Bahasa Malaysia (BM). A sample of 69 Malaysian Standard Two pupils (aged 7-8 years) was selected for the study. Since commencing school at the age of 6 years, the children had been learning to read in BM and had subsequently also been learning to read in English for some 12 months. The study was part of a larger scale research programme that fully recognized the limitations of tests that had not been developed and standardized in Malaysia. Nevertheless, as a first step to developing such tests, a comparison with existing norms for the Phonological Assessment Battery (PhAB) and the Wechsler Objective Reading Dimension (WORD) was undertaken in relation to information about the children's L1 and L2 language competencies. Results showed that the children's performance on PhAB was at least comparable to the UK norms while, not surprisingly, they fared less well on WORD. The results are discussed in terms of L1 and L2 transfer, whereby the transparency of written BM and the structured way in which reading is taught in BM facilitates performance on phonological tasks in English. This has implications for identifying children with phonologically based reading difficulties.
Research on orthographic consistency in English words has selectively identified different sub-syllabic units in isolation (grapheme, onset, vowel, coda, rime), yet there is no comprehensive assessment of how these measures affect word identification when taken together. To study which aspects of consistency are more psychologically relevant, we investigated their independent and composite effects on human reading behavior using large-scale databases. Study 1 found effects on adults' naming responses of both feedforward consistency (orthography to phonology) and feedback consistency (phonology to orthography). Study 2 found feedback but no feedforward consistency effects on visual and auditory lexical decision tasks, with the best predictor being a composite measure of consistency across grapheme, rime, OVC, and word-initial letter-phoneme. In Study 3, we explicitly modeled the reading process with forward and backward flow in a bidirectionally connected neural network. The model captured latent dimensions of quasi-regular mapping that explain additional variance in human reading and spelling behavior, compared to the established measures. Together, the results suggest interactive activation between phonological and orthographic word representations. They also validate the role of computational analyses of language to better understand how print maps to sound, and what properties of natural language affect reading complexity.
Denture esthetics as defined by Glossary of prosthodontics terms the effect produced by a dental prosthesis that affects the beauty and attractiveness of the person. [1] Removable partial dentures (RPDs) are the widely accepted and treatment of choice for most cases as it is both effective and affordable. Partially edentulous treatment planning includes both esthetics and masticatory function. A prosthesis that is highly esthetic will improve patient's motivation and acceptance. It is a very wrong notion to expect that patients will tolerate unesthetic partial dentures because good masticatory capability has been achieved. Esthetics plays a vital role in the success of partial dentures, and the length and mobility of the patient's lips play a significant role in achieving it. [2] Patients with short lips or highly mobile lips pose problems as esthetics are compromised because most clasp arms, denture borders, and other components will show when the patient smiles or speaks. [3] RPDs can easily look artificial; hence, special emphasis should aim toward restoring function, phonetics, esthetics with a long-term benefits which requires meticulous attention during fabrication. This case reports is an esthetic clasp designed for a cast partial denture for a young girl for esthetic and function.
To date, there has been little research done on phonological acquisition in the Malay language of typically developing Malay-speaking children. This study serves to fill this gap by providing a systematic description of Malay consonant acquisition in a large cohort of preschool-aged children between 4- and 6-years-old. In the study, 326 Malay-dominant speaking children were assessed using a picture naming task that elicited 53 single words containing all the primary consonants in Malay. Two main analyses were conducted to study their consonant acquisition: (1) age of customary and mastery production of consonants; and (2) consonant accuracy. Results revealed that Malay children acquired all the syllable-initial and syllable-final consonants before 4;06-years-old, with the exception of syllable-final /s/, /h/ and /l/ which were acquired after 5;06-years-old. The development of Malay consonants increased gradually from 4- to 6 years old, with female children performing better than male children. The accuracy of consonants based on manner of articulation showed that glides, affricates, nasals, and stops were higher than fricatives and liquids. In general, syllable-initial consonants were more accurate than syllable-final consonants while consonants in monosyllabic and disyllabic words were more accurate than polysyllabic words. These findings will provide significant information for speech-language pathologists for assessing Malay-speaking children and designing treatment objectives that reflect the course of phonological development in Malay.
The acoustic characteristics of sustained vowel have been widely investigated across various languages and ethnic groups. These acoustic measures, including fundamental frequency (F(0)), jitter (Jitt), relative average perturbation (RAP), five-point period perturbation quotient (PPQ5), shimmer (Shim), and 11-point amplitude perturbation quotient (APQ11) are not well established for Malaysian Malay young adults. This article studies the acoustic measures of Malaysian Malay adults using acoustical analysis. The study analyzed six sustained Malay vowels of 60 normal native Malaysian Malay adults with a mean of 21.19 years. The F(0) values of Malaysian Malay males and females were reported as 134.85±18.54 and 238.27±24.06Hz, respectively. Malaysian Malay females had significantly higher F(0) than that of males for all the vowels. However, no significant differences were observed between the genders for the perturbation measures in all the vowels, except RAP in /e/. No significant F(0) differences between the vowels were observed. Significant differences between the vowels were reported for all perturbation measures in Malaysian Malay males. As for Malaysian Malay females, significant differences between the vowels were reported for Shim and APQ11. Multiethnic comparisons indicate that F(0) varies between Malaysian Malay and other ethnic groups. However, the perturbation measures cannot be directly compared, where the measures vary significantly across different speech analysis softwares.
Speech is one of the prevalent communication mediums for humans. Identifying the gender of a child speaker based on his/her speech is crucial in telecommunication and speech therapy. This article investigates the use of fundamental and formant frequencies from sustained vowel phonation to distinguish the gender of Malay children aged between 7 and 12 years. The Euclidean minimum distance and multilayer perceptron were used to classify the gender of 360 Malay children based on different combinations of fundamental and formant frequencies (F0, F1, F2, and F3). The Euclidean minimum distance with normalized frequency data achieved a classification accuracy of 79.44%, which was higher than that of the nonnormalized frequency data. Age-dependent modeling was used to improve the accuracy of gender classification. The Euclidean distance method obtained 84.17% based on the optimal classification accuracy for all age groups. The accuracy was further increased to 99.81% using multilayer perceptron based on mel-frequency cepstral coefficients.
This study investigates the effect of dialect on phonological analyses in Chinese-influenced Malaysian English (ChME) speaking children. A total of 264 typically-developing ChME speaking children aged 3-7 years participated in this cross-sectional study. A single word naming task consisting of 195 words was used to elicit speech from the children. The samples obtained were transcribed phonetically and analysed descriptively and statistically. Phonological analyses were completed for speech sound accuracy, age of consonant acquisition, percentage of phonological process occurrence, and age of suppression for phonological processes. All these measurements differed based on whether or not ChME dialectal features were considered correct, with children gaining higher scores when ChME dialect features were considered correct. The findings of the present study provide guidelines for Malaysian speech-language pathologists and stress the need to appropriately consider ChME dialectal features in the phonological analysis of ChME speaking children. They also highlight the issues in accurate differential diagnosis of speech impairment for speech-language pathologists working with children from any linguistically diverse background.
The effects of background noise on speech-evoked cortical auditory evoked potentials (CAEPs) can provide insight into the physiology of the auditory system. The purpose of this study was to determine background noise effects on neural coding of different phonemes within a syllable. CAEPs were recorded from 15 young normal-hearing adults in response to speech signals /s/, /ɑ/, and /sɑ/. Signals were presented at varying signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). The effects of SNR and context (in isolation or within syllable) were analyzed for both phonemes. For all three stimuli, latencies generally decreased and amplitudes generally increased as SNR improved, and context effects were not present; however, the amplitude of the /ɑ/ response was the exception, showing no SNR effect and a significant context effect. Differential coding of /s/ and /ɑ/ likely result from level and timing differences. Neural refractoriness may result in the lack of a robust SNR effect on amplitude in the syllable context. The stable amplitude across SNRs in response to the vowel in /sɑ/ suggests the combined effects of (1) acoustic characteristics of the syllable and noise at poor SNRs and (2) refractory effects resulting from phoneme timing at good SNRs. Results provide insights into the coding of multiple-onset speech syllables in varying levels of background noise and, together with behavioral measures, may help to improve our understanding of speech-perception-in-noise difficulties.
Child multilingual phonological errors are under-explored. Cross-linguistic studies suggest monolingual children make phonological errors that are subject to effects of language universality and ambient language characteristics. Bilingual Chinese children were observed to use not only typical, but also atypical phonological errors compared to monolingual peers acquiring similar languages. Atypical errors are a result of specific bilingual pair effects. Close-language-relatedness (Cantonese-Mandarin) is claimed to be responsible for the nonexistence of atypical errors in both languages, whilst distant-language-relatedness (Cantonese-English) is observed to cause atypical errors in both languages. The present novel cross-sectional study investigated phonological acquisition in three typologically distant languages: English-Mandarin-Malay by 64 multilingual Chinese children aged 2½-4½. The present research aimed to explore if multilingual Chinese children exhibit phonological errors which commensurate to that of monolingual and bilingual Chinese children acquiring similar languages as described in the literature. The single-word phonological test results revealed that the multilinguals exhibited typical and atypical phonological patterns which largely commensurate with the monolinguals and bilinguals. Similar to bilingual children, the multilingual children showed more atypical errors in English than in Mandarin, demonstrating effects of individual language irrespective of potential interaction with additional languages. The present result did not fully support the link between closeness in typology of languages and the absence of atypical errors. Rare atypical errors were found in Mandarin and Malay, two typologically different languages, and both were also interacting with English, another typologically different language. The present findings provided useful preliminary multilingual speech norms for the use of speech therapists.
This study was designed to develop language-specific stimuli for the assessment of resonance and to obtain nasalance scores using the newly developed speech stimuli in Mandarin. Gender and age influences on nasalance scores for each of the stimulus were also examined. Participants recruited were typically developing Mandarin-speaking ethnic Chinese children aged 6;00-7;11 growing up in Malaysia. Perceptual ratings of nasality were made based on the GOS.SP.ASS.'98 (revised) for children while nasalance scores were recorded for each stimulus using the Nasometer II (Model 6400). Fifty Mandarin-speaking children (24 males and 26 females) were recruited. None of the participants were perceived with abnormal nasality on the three stimuli. The mean nasalance scores for the Mandarin stimuli were 16.08% (SD = 2.57, 95% CI = 15.35-16.81) for the Oral passage, 25.20% (SD = 3.63, 95% CI = 24.17-26.23) for the Oral-Nasal passage and 55.44% (SD = 4.17, 95% CI = 54.25-56.63) for the Nasal passage. No significant age- and gender-related differences were observed for all the three stimuli. This is the first set of Mandarin stimuli and nasalance norms for Mandarin-speaking children in Malaysia. The influence of phonetic content on nasalance is supported. Findings call for language-specific normative nasalance data and careful selection of stimuli for the assessment of resonance.
Is there a universal hierarchy of the senses, such that some senses (e.g., vision) are more accessible to consciousness and linguistic description than others (e.g., smell)? The long-standing presumption in Western thought has been that vision and audition are more objective than the other senses, serving as the basis of knowledge and understanding, whereas touch, taste, and smell are crude and of little value. This predicts that humans ought to be better at communicating about sight and hearing than the other senses, and decades of work based on English and related languages certainly suggests this is true. However, how well does this reflect the diversity of languages and communities worldwide? To test whether there is a universal hierarchy of the senses, stimuli from the five basic senses were used to elicit descriptions in 20 diverse languages, including 3 unrelated sign languages. We found that languages differ fundamentally in which sensory domains they linguistically code systematically, and how they do so. The tendency for better coding in some domains can be explained in part by cultural preoccupations. Although languages seem free to elaborate specific sensory domains, some general tendencies emerge: for example, with some exceptions, smell is poorly coded. The surprise is that, despite the gradual phylogenetic accumulation of the senses, and the imbalances in the neural tissue dedicated to them, no single hierarchy of the senses imposes itself upon language.