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18 pages, 5308 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Occurrence and Duration of Pauses in Relation to Speech Tempo and Structural Organization in Two Speech Genres

by Pavel Šturm and Jan Volín

Languages 2023, 8(1), 23; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages8010023 - 11 Jan 2023

Cited by 7 | Viewed by 3799

Pauses act as important acoustic cues to prosodic phrase boundaries. However, the distribution and phonetic characteristics of pauses have not yet been fully described either cross-linguistically or in different genres and speech styles within languages. The current study examines the pausal performance of 24 Czech speakers in two genres of read speech: news reading and poetry reciting. The pause rate and pause duration are related to genre differences, overt and covert text organization, and speech tempo. We found a significant effect of several levels of text organization, including a strong effect of punctuation. This was reflected in both measures of pausal performance. A grammatically informed analysis of a subset of pauses within the smallest units revealed a significant contribution for pause rate only. An effect of tempo was found in poetry reciting at a macro level (speaker averages) but not when pauses were observed individually. Genre differences did not manifest consistently and analogically for the two measures. The findings provide evidence that pausing is used systematically by speakers in read speech to convey not only prosodic phrasing but also text structure, among other things. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Pauses in Speech)

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13 pages, 660 KiB

Open AccessReview

Artificial Intelligence and Its Application to Minimal Hepatic Encephalopathy Diagnosis

by Jakub Gazda, Peter Drotar, Sylvia Drazilova, Juraj Gazda, Matej Gazda, Martin Janicko and Peter Jarcuska

J. Pers. Med. 2021, 11(11), 1090; https://doi.org/10.3390/jpm11111090 - 26 Oct 2021

Cited by 9 | Viewed by 3030

Abstract

Hepatic encephalopathy (HE) is a brain dysfunction caused by liver insufficiency and/or portosystemic shunting. HE manifests as a spectrum of neurological or psychiatric abnormalities. Diagnosis of overt HE (OHE) is based on the typical clinical manifestation, but covert HE (CHE) has only very subtle clinical signs and minimal HE (MHE) is detected only by specialized time-consuming psychometric tests, for which there is still no universally accepted gold standard. Significant progress has been made in artificial intelligence and its application to medicine. In this review, we introduce how artificial intelligence has been used to diagnose minimal hepatic encephalopathy thus far, and we discuss its further potential in analyzing speech and handwriting data, which are probably the most accessible data for evaluating the cognitive state of the patient. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Application of Artificial Intelligence in Personalized Medicine)

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13 pages, 703 KiB

Open AccessReview

The Changing Role of Phonology in Reading Development

by Sara V. Milledge and Hazel I. Blythe

Vision 2019, 3(2), 23; https://doi.org/10.3390/vision3020023 - 30 May 2019

Cited by 17 | Viewed by 7827

Abstract

Processing of both a word’s orthography (its printed form) and phonology (its associated speech sounds) are critical for lexical identification during reading, both in beginning and skilled readers. Theories of learning to read typically posit a developmental change, from early readers’ reliance on phonology to more skilled readers’ development of direct orthographic-semantic links. Specifically, in becoming a skilled reader, the extent to which an individual processes phonology during lexical identification is thought to decrease. Recent data from eye movement research suggests, however, that the developmental change in phonological processing is somewhat more nuanced than this. Such studies show that phonology influences lexical identification in beginning and skilled readers in both typically and atypically developing populations. These data indicate, therefore, that the developmental change might better be characterised as a transition from overt decoding to abstract, covert recoding. We do not stop processing phonology as we become more skilled at reading; rather, the nature of that processing changes. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Eye Movements and Visual Cognition)

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10 pages, 1829 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Classification of Overt and Covert Speech for Near-Infrared Spectroscopy-Based Brain Computer Interface

by Ernest Nlandu Kamavuako, Usman Ayub Sheikh, Syed Omer Gilani, Mohsin Jamil and Imran Khan Niazi

Sensors 2018, 18(9), 2989; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18092989 - 7 Sep 2018

Cited by 6 | Viewed by 5348

Abstract

People suffering from neuromuscular disorders such as locked-in syndrome (LIS) are left in a paralyzed state with preserved awareness and cognition. In this study, it was hypothesized that changes in local hemodynamic activity, due to the activation of Broca’s area during overt/covert speech, can be harnessed to create an intuitive Brain Computer Interface based on Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS). A 12-channel square template was used to cover inferior frontal gyrus and changes in hemoglobin concentration corresponding to six aloud (overtly) and six silently (covertly) spoken words were collected from eight healthy participants. An unsupervised feature extraction algorithm was implemented with an optimized support vector machine for classification. For all participants, when considering overt and covert classes regardless of words, classification accuracy of 92.88 ± 18.49% was achieved with oxy-hemoglobin (O2Hb) and 95.14 ± 5.39% with deoxy-hemoglobin (HHb) as a chromophore. For a six-active-class problem of overtly spoken words, 88.19 ± 7.12% accuracy was achieved for O2Hb and 78.82 ± 15.76% for HHb. Similarly, for a six-active-class classification of covertly spoken words, 79.17 ± 14.30% accuracy was achieved with O2Hb and 86.81 ± 9.90% with HHb as an absorber. These results indicate that a control paradigm based on covert speech can be reliably implemented into future Brain–Computer Interfaces (BCIs) based on NIRS. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Biomedical Infrared Imaging: From Sensors to Applications)

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