An investigation of acoustic cues to tonal registers and voicing in Donglei Kama).

The Kam language has experienced historical tonal splits, resulting in the development of a complex tonal system. However, there is still limited knowledge regarding the acoustic characteristics associated with aspiration-based tone splitting. This study aims to investigate the acoustic cues related to the tonal registers and laryngeal configurations in Donglei Kam, a dialect of Southern Kam. Sixteen native speakers of Donglei Kam participated, producing lexical tones. Statistical analyses were conducted to examine the acoustic distinctions between tonal registers, using measurements of voice onset time, spectral tilt, noise, and energy. The results indicated that Donglei Kam retained a two-way contrast of aspiration, albeit with a trend toward gradual loss. Additionally, a breathy voice was detected in the Ciyin tonal register, characterized by elevated spectral tilt values and spectral noise throughout the vowels. Moreover, machine learning classifiers effectively identified tonal registers using voice-quality data, suggesting that the phonation contrast between breathy and modal voice could contribute to the tonal split alongside pitch contrast. In summary, these findings enhance our understanding of the acoustic implementation of breathiness in Kam and offer valuable insights into the role of laryngeal contrast in tonal splits.

Speech intelligibility and talker identification with non-telephone frequencies.

Although the telephone band (0.3-3 kHz) provides sufficient information for speech recognition, the contribution of the non-telephone band (<0.3 and >3 kHz) is unclear. To investigate its contribution, speech intelligibility and talker identification were evaluated using consonants, vowels, and sentences. The non-telephone band produced relatively good intelligibility for consonants (76.0%) and sentences (77.4%), but not vowels (11.5%). The non-telephone band supported good talker identification only with sentences (74.5%), but not vowels (45.8%) or consonants (10.8%). Furthermore, the non-telephone band cannot produce satisfactory speech intelligibility in noise at the sentence level, suggesting the importance of full-band access in realistic listening.

Chimpanzee utterances refute purported missing links for novel vocalizations and syllabic speech.

Nonhuman great apes have been claimed to be unable to learn human words due to a lack of the necessary neural circuitry. We recovered original footage of two enculturated chimpanzees uttering the word "mama" and subjected recordings to phonetic analysis. Our analyses demonstrate that chimpanzees are capable of syllabic production, achieving consonant-to-vowel phonetic contrasts via the simultaneous recruitment and coupling of voice, jaw and lips. In an online experiment, human listeners naive to the recordings' origins reliably perceived chimpanzee utterances as syllabic utterances, primarily as "ma-ma", among foil syllables. Our findings demonstrate that in the absence of direct data-driven examination, great ape vocal production capacities have been underestimated. Chimpanzees possess the neural building blocks necessary for speech.

Word Forms Reflect Trade-Offs Between Speaker Effort and Robust Listener Recognition.

How do cognitive pressures shape the lexicons of natural languages? Here, we reframe George Kingsley Zipf's proposed "law of abbreviation" within a more general framework that relates it to cognitive pressures that affect speakers and listeners. In this new framework, speakers' drive to reduce effort (Zipf's proposal) is counteracted by the need for low-frequency words to have word forms that are sufficiently distinctive to allow for accurate recognition by listeners. To support this framework, we replicate and extend recent work using the prevalence of subword phonemic sequences (phonotactic probability) to measure speakers' production effort in place of Zipf's measure of length. Across languages and corpora, phonotactic probability is more strongly correlated with word frequency than word length. We also show this measure of ease of speech production (phonotactic probability) is strongly correlated with a measure of perceptual difficulty that indexes the degree of competition from alternative interpretations in word recognition. This is consistent with the claim that there must be trade-offs between these two factors, and is inconsistent with a recent proposal that phonotactic probability facilitates both perception and production. To our knowledge, this is the first work to offer an explanation why long, phonotactically improbable word forms remain in the lexicons of natural languages.

Vowel nasalization does not cue ambisyllabicity in American English nasals: Evidence from nasometrya).

Using visual spectrographic examination of vowel nasalization to diagnose the syllabic affiliation of phonologically ambisyllabic nasal consonants (e.g., gamma), Durvasula and Huang [(2017). Lang. Sci. 62, 17-36] argued that anticipatory vowel nasalization in these words patterns with word-medial codas. Using nasometry, the current study finds that anticipatory nasalization before monomorphemic and multimorphemic (scammer) ambisyllabic nasals differ from word-medial coda (gamble) and word-final nasals (scam), but not from other intervocalic nasals. Additionally, vowel nasalization is sensitive to the manner of the preceding phoneme. These findings demonstrate that quantifying anticipatory nasalization using nasometry differs from visual spectrographic criteria.

The impact of temporal processing on reading in dyslexia with rapid automatized naming deficits.

In the present study, we aimed to investigate the different impacts of temporal processing on reading by Chinese children with and without dyslexia. In total, 27 children with dyslexia who had a deficit in rapid automatized naming (RAN) (D_R), 37 children with dyslexia who had deficits in both RAN and phonological awareness (PA) (D_RP), and 40 typically developing children (TD) were recruited in Taiwan. The children were asked to complete non-verbal intelligence, PA, RAN, Chinese character reading tasks and an auditory temporal order judgement (ATOJ) task. Our results of a multiple regression model showed that the ATOJ accounted for unique variances in the reading differences between the children in the D_R and TD groups; performance was controlled for non-verbal intelligence, PA and RAN tasks. Theoretically, we provide possible explanations for the controversial findings in the field of Chinese children with dyslexia and, practically, suggest different interventions should be provided for children with dyslexia with different underlying impairments.

Language-general versus language-specific processes in bilingual voice learning.

Language experience confers a benefit to voice learning, a concept described in the literature as the language familiarity effect (LFE). What experiences are necessary for the LFE to be conferred is less clear. We contribute empirically and theoretically to this debate by examining within and across language voice learning with Cantonese-English bilingual voices in a talker-voice association paradigm. Listeners were trained in Cantonese or English and assessed on their abilities to generalize voice learning at test on Cantonese and English utterances. By testing listeners from four language backgrounds - English Monolingual, Cantonese-English Multilingual, Tone Multilingual, and Non-tone Multilingual groups - we assess whether the LFE and group-level differences in voice learning are due to varying abilities (1) in accessing the relative acoustic-phonetic features that distinguish a voice, (2) learning at a given rate, or (3) generalizing learning of talker-voice associations to novel same-language and different-language utterances. The specific four language background groups allow us to investigate the roles of language-specific familiarity, tone language experience, and generic multilingual experience in voice learning. Differences in performance across listener groups shows evidence in support of the LFE and the role of two mechanisms for voice learning: the extraction and association of talker-specific, language-general information that is more robustly generalized across languages, and talker-specific, language-specific information that may be more readily accessible and learnable, but due to its language-specific nature, is less able to be extended to another language.

Learning English vowels: The effects of different phonetic training modes on Arabic learners' production and perceptiona).

This study investigated the effect of different types of phonetic training on potential changes in the production and perception of English vowels by Arabic learners of English. Forty-six Arabic learners of English were randomly assigned to one of three high variability vowel training programs: Perception training (High Variability Phonetic Training), Production training, and a Hybrid Training program (production and perception training). Pre- and post-tests (vowel identification, category discrimination, speech recognition in noise, and vowel production) showed that all training types led to improvements in perception and production. There was some evidence that improvements were linked to training type: learners in the Perception Training condition improved in vowel identification but not vowel production, while those in the Production Training condition showed only small improvements in performance on perceptual tasks, but greater improvement in production. However, the effects of training modality were complicated by proficiency, with high proficiency learners benefitting more from different types of training regardless of training mode than lower proficiency learners.

Semantic encoding during language comprehension at single-cell resolution.

From sequences of speech sounds1,2 or letters3, humans can extract rich and nuanced meaning through language. This capacity is essential for human communication. Yet, despite a growing understanding of the brain areas that support linguistic and semantic processing4-12, the derivation of linguistic meaning in neural tissue at the cellular level and over the timescale of action potentials remains largely unknown. Here we recorded from single cells in the left language-dominant prefrontal cortex as participants listened to semantically diverse sentences and naturalistic stories. By tracking their activities during natural speech processing, we discover a fine-scale cortical representation of semantic information by individual neurons. These neurons responded selectively to specific word meanings and reliably distinguished words from nonwords. Moreover, rather than responding to the words as fixed memory representations, their activities were highly dynamic, reflecting the words' meanings based on their specific sentence contexts and independent of their phonetic form. Collectively, we show how these cell ensembles accurately predicted the broad semantic categories of the words as they were heard in real time during speech and how they tracked the sentences in which they appeared. We also show how they encoded the hierarchical structure of these meaning representations and how these representations mapped onto the cell population. Together, these findings reveal a finely detailed cortical organization of semantic representations at the neuron scale in humans and begin to illuminate the cellular-level processing of meaning during language comprehension.

Comparing human and machine's use of coarticulatory vowel nasalization for linguistic classificationa).

Anticipatory coarticulation is a highly informative cue to upcoming linguistic information: listeners can identify that the word is ben and not bed by hearing the vowel alone. The present study compares the relative performances of human listeners and a self-supervised pre-trained speech model (wav2vec 2.0) in the use of nasal coarticulation to classify vowels. Stimuli consisted of nasalized (from CVN words) and non-nasalized (from CVCs) American English vowels produced by 60 humans and generated in 36 TTS voices. wav2vec 2.0 performance is similar to human listener performance, in aggregate. Broken down by vowel type: both wav2vec 2.0 and listeners perform higher for non-nasalized vowels produced naturally by humans. However, wav2vec 2.0 shows higher correct classification performance for nasalized vowels, than for non-nasalized vowels, for TTS voices. Speaker-level patterns reveal that listeners' use of coarticulation is highly variable across talkers. wav2vec 2.0 also shows cross-talker variability in performance. Analyses also reveal differences in the use of multiple acoustic cues in nasalized vowel classifications across listeners and the wav2vec 2.0. Findings have implications for understanding how coarticulatory variation is used in speech perception. Results also can provide insight into how neural systems learn to attend to the unique acoustic features of coarticulation.

Putting the child in the driver's seat: Insights into language development from children's interactions in preschool classrooms.

Children's own language production has a role in structuring the language of their conversation partners and influences their own development. Children's active participation in their own language development is most apparent in the rich body of work investigating language in natural environments. The advent of automated measures of vocalizations and movement have made such in situ research increasingly feasible. In this chapter, we review recent research on children's language development in context with a particular focus on research employing automated methods in preschool classrooms for children between ages 2 and 5 years. These automated methods indicate that the speech directed to preschool children from specific peers predicts the child's speech to those peers on a subsequent observation occasion. Similar patterns are seen in the influence of peer and teacher phonemic diversity on the phonemic diversity of children's speech to those partners. In both cases, children's own speech to partners was the best predictor of their language abilities, suggesting their active role in their own development. Finally, new research suggests the potential of machine learning to predict children's speech in group contexts, and to transcribe classroom speech to better understand the content of children's conversations and how they change with development.

A Feature-Space Theory of the Production Effect in Recognition.

Mathematical models explaining production effects assume that production leads to the encoding of additional features, such as phonological ones. This improves memory with a combination of encoding strength and feature distinctiveness, implementing aspects of propositional theories. However, it is not clear why production differs from other manipulations such as study time and spaced repetition, which are also thought to influence strength. Here we extend attentional subsetting theory and propose an explanation based on the dimensionality of feature spaces. Specifically, we suggest phonological features are drawn from a compact feature space. Deeper features are sparsely subselected from a larger subspace. Algebraic and numerical solutions shed light on several findings, including the dependency of production effects on how other list items are encoded (differing from other strength factors) and the production advantage even for homophones. This places production within a continuum of strength-like manipulations that differ in terms of the feature subspaces they operate upon and leads to novel predictions based on direct manipulations of feature-space properties.

Acoustic characteristics of infant- and foreigner-directed speech with Mandarin as the target language.

The quality of speech input influences the efficiency of L1 and L2 acquisition. This study examined modifications in infant-directed speech (IDS) and foreigner-directed speech (FDS) in Standard Mandarin-a tonal language-and explored how IDS and FDS features were manifested in disyllabic words and a longer discourse. The study aimed to determine which characteristics of IDS and FDS were enhanced in comparison with adult-directed speech (ADS), and how IDS and FDS differed when measured in a common set of acoustic parameters. For words, it was found that tone-bearing vowel duration, mean and range of fundamental frequency (F0), and the lexical tone contours were enhanced in IDS and FDS relative to ADS, except for the dipping Tone 3 that exhibited an unexpected lowering in FDS, but no modification in IDS when compared with ADS. For the discourse, different aspects of temporal and F0 enhancements were emphasized in IDS and FDS: the mean F0 was higher in IDS whereas the total discourse duration was greater in FDS. These findings add to the growing literature on L1 and L2 speech input characteristics and their role in language acquisition.

Response to intervention as an identification strategy of the risk for dyslexia. / Resposta à intervenção como estratégia de identificação do risco para dislexia.

PURPOSE: To develop on intervention process to identify children at risk of dyslexia, based on the Response to Intervention model. Specifically, to identify the pattern of changes in post-intervention performance in tasks of phonological awareness, working memory, lexical access, reading and writing; and to analyze which cognitive functions had a significant effect on the discriminating students at risk of dyslexia. METHOD: Sample of 30 participants with Reading and writing difficulties, aged 8-11, from public/private schools, students from 3rd to 5th grade. Participants were submitted to a battery of cognitive-linguistic tests, before and after 12 intervention sessions. To monitor their performance, five reading and writing lists of words and pseudowords were applied. We qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed the differences in pre- and post-intervention performance of each participant; and among participants in the post-assessment, to understand the patterns of dyslexia vs non-dyslexia groups. RESULTS: There were statistically significant changes in: rapid automatized naming, narrative text comprehension, phonological awareness, rate and typology of hits/misses in reading and writing, and reading speed. Being the last three variables the most sensitive to discriminate the two groups, all with less post-intervention gains for the dyslexia group. CONCLUSIONS: The intervention focused on the stimulation of phonological skills and explicit and systematic teaching of graphophonemic correspondences contributed positively to the evolution of the group's participants. The intervention response approach favored the identification of children with a profile at risk for dyslexia, as distinct from children with other learning difficulties.

OBJETIVO: desenvolver um processo de intervenção para identificação de crianças em risco para dislexia, baseado no modelo de resposta à intervenção. Especificamente, identificar o perfil de mudança no desempenho pós-intervenção em tarefas de consciência fonológica, memória operacional, acesso lexical, leitura, escrita; e analisar quais funções cognitivas tiveram efeito significativo para discriminação de estudantes em risco para dislexia. MÉTODO: amostra composta por 30 participantes com dificuldades na leitura e escrita, entre 8 e 11 anos, de escola pública ou particular, estudantes do 3º ao 5º ano. Todos foram submetidos a uma bateria de testes cognitivo-linguísticos, antes e após a realização de 12 sessões de intervenção. Para monitoramento do desempenho foram aplicadas cinco listas de leitura e escrita de palavras/pseudopalavras. Foram realizadas análises, qualitativas e quantitativas, das diferenças de desempenho pré e pós-intervenção; e entre os participantes na pós avaliação, para compreensão de grupos perfil em risco para dislexia vs não-dislexia. RESULTADOS: ocorreram mudanças estatisticamente significativas em nomeação automática rápida, compreensão de texto, consciência fonológica, taxa e tipologia de acertos/erros na leitura/escrita e velocidade de leitura. Sendo essas três últimas variáveis as que se mostraram mais discriminativas dos grupos, todas com menos ganhos na pós-intervenção para o grupo com perfil em risco de dislexia. CONCLUSÃO: a intervenção com foco na estimulação das habilidades fonológicas e ensino explícito das correspondências grafofonêmicas contribuiu para a evolução dos participantes. A abordagem de resposta à intervenção favoreceu a identificação de crianças com perfil em risco para dislexia, as diferenciando de crianças com outras dificuldades de aprendizagem.

Do Oral and Silent Word-Reading Fluency Rely on the Same Cognitive-Linguistic Skills? Evidence from a Cross-Sectional Study in Greek.

Researchers tend to use oral- and silent-reading fluency measures interchangeably and to generalize research findings across reading modes, especially from oral to silent reading. In this study, we sought to examine if oral and silent word-reading fluency rely on the same cognitive-linguistic skills. Three hundred and forty-five Greek children (80 from Grade 2, 85 from Grade 4, 91 from Grade 6, and 89 from Grade 10) were assessed on measures of general cognitive ability, speed of processing, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, orthographic knowledge, articulation rate, and word-reading fluency (oral and silent). Results of hierarchical regression analyses revealed that phonological awareness was a unique predictor of both reading outcomes in Grade 2 and orthographic knowledge was a unique predictor of both reading outcomes in Grades 4, 6, and 10. However, rapid automatized naming predicted only oral word-reading fluency. These findings suggest that silent and oral word-reading fluency do not necessarily rely on the same cognitive-linguistic skills at the same grade level and we need to exercise some caution when we generalize the findings across reading modes.

Masked Translation Priming Effects for Chinese-English-Japanese Triple Cognates in Lexical Decision Tasks.

Previous research has demonstrated cognate translation priming effects in masked priming lexical decision tasks (LDTs) even when a bilingual's two languages have different scripts. Because those effect sizes are normally larger than with noncognates, the effects have been partially attributed to the impact of prime-target phonological similarity. The present research extended that work by examining priming effects when using triple different-script cognates, i.e., /ka1 feɪ1/-coffee-コーヒー/KoRhiR/. Specifically, masked cognate priming effects were examined in six different priming directions (i.e., L1↔L2, L1↔L3, and L2↔L3) for Chinese-English-Japanese trilinguals using LDTs. Significant priming effects were observed only when the primes were from the stronger language. This asymmetric pattern suggests that the phonological similarity of cognate primes only facilitates the processing of different-script triple cognates to the extent that the processing of the prime is robust enough to make phonology available before target processing is finished.

Reading instruction for students with intellectual disabilities who require augmentative and alternative communication: A multiple single case study with baseline, posttest, follow-up, and maintenance.

The purpose of the current study was to examine whether seven children, aged 6-10 years, with intellectual disabilities who require augmentative and alternative communication, could acquire phonological awareness and reading skills by using a reading material that is based on research on the evidence-based reading program Accessible literacy learning. The effect of the measures has been examined using a multiple single-case design with baseline, posttest, follow-up, and maintenance. All the teachers were trained to deliver the reading intervention in the students' familiar place at school. The results indicated that students with intellectual disabilities who require augmentative and alternative communication could acquire phonological awareness and decoding by working systematically with reading material based on evidence-based strategies.

Multiple evolutionary pressures shape identical consonant avoidance in the world's languages.

Languages disfavor word forms containing sequences of similar or identical consonants, due to the biomechanical and cognitive difficulties posed by patterns of this sort. However, the specific evolutionary processes responsible for this phenomenon are not fully understood. Words containing sequences of identical consonants may be more likely to arise than those without; processes of word form mutation may be more likely to remove than create sequences of identical consonants in word forms; finally, words containing identical consonants may die out more frequently than those without. Phylogenetic analyses of the evolution of homologous word forms indicate that words with identical consonants arise less frequently than those without. However, words with identical consonants do not die out more frequently than those without. Further analyses reveal that forms with identical consonants are replaced in basic meaning functions more frequently than words without. Taken together, results suggest that the underrepresentation of sequences of identical consonants is overwhelmingly a by-product of constraints on word form coinage, though processes related to word usage also serve to ensure that such patterns are infrequent in more salient vocabulary items. These findings clarify aspects of processes of lexical evolution and competition that take place during language change, optimizing communicative systems.

Acquisition of Gutturals by Ammani-Jordanian Arabic-Speaking Preschoolers.

PURPOSE: This study aims at investigating the phonological development of the six guttural consonants of Jordanian Arabic, /χ/, /ʁ/, /h/, /ʕ/, /ʔ/, and /h/. METHOD: An articulation test is designed to involve two tasks: picture naming and repetition. The test includes 54 words for picture naming and 18 words for repetition, representing all possible positions of the targeted guttural sounds. Samples are collected from 40 typically developing Ammani-Jordanian Arabic-speaking monolingual children, living in Amman, Jordan. Respondents are equally divided into eight age-related trajectories: 2-2;6, 2;6-3, 3-3;6, 3;6-4, 4-4;6, 4;6-5, 5-5;6, and 5;6-6 (years;months). No child with a history of hearing, speech, or vision disorders is included. The data are analyzed using production accuracy, where the three developmental trajectories of production (customary, acquisition, and mastery) are determined for each guttural, and error analysis, addressed based on perceptual judgments, providing details of every mispronounced or deleted guttural. RESULTS: The results show that /χ/, /h/, /ʕ/, and /ʔ/ are acquired before the age of 6 years, while /ʁ/ and /h/ are still not acquired by this age. Respondents use relatively variant alternatives for the mispronounced cognates, including guttural, nonguttural sounds, and vowel substitution. The /ʁ/ is the guttural with the highest number of alternatives, while /ʔ/ gets the least. The analysis also reveals patterns of guttural deletion, with variations across different guttural sounds and positions. Despite errors/deviations made, respondents score accuracy percentages that gradually increase in correlation with age. The guttural /ʁ/ starts with the lowest accuracy percentages, while /ʔ/ and /h/ start with the highest. CONCLUSIONS: These findings illuminate on the developmental trajectory of guttural acquisition and enrich our understanding of children's evolving perception and production abilities. They offer valuable insights into the patterns of guttural sound production in Jordanian Arabic-speaking children, laying the groundwork for further research and the development of targeted assessment and intervention strategies to support phonological development in this population.

Lexical Morphology as a Source of Risk and Resilience for Learning to Read With Dyslexia: An fNIRS Investigation.

PURPOSE: We examined the neurocognitive bases of lexical morphology in children of varied reading abilities to understand the role of meaning-based skills in learning to read with dyslexia. METHOD: Children completed auditory morphological and phonological awareness tasks during functional near-infrared spectroscopy neuroimaging. We first examined the relation between lexical morphology and phonological processes in typically developing readers (Study 1, N = 66, Mage = 8.39), followed by a more focal inquiry into lexical morphology processes in dyslexia (Study 2, N = 50, Mage = 8.62). RESULTS: Typical readers exhibited stronger engagement of language neurocircuitry during the morphology task relative to the phonology task, suggesting that morphological analyses involve synthesizing multiple components of sublexical processing. This effect was stronger for more analytically complex derivational affixes (like + ly) than more semantically transparent free base morphemes (snow + man). In contrast, children with dyslexia exhibited stronger activation during the free base condition relative to derivational affix condition. Taken together, the findings suggest that although children with dyslexia may struggle with derivational morphology, they may also use free base morphemes' semantic information to boost word recognition. CONCLUSION: This study informs literacy theories by identifying an interaction between reading ability, word structure, and how the developing brain learns to recognize words in speech and print. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.25944949.