No abstract

One of the major difficulties of teaching is accessing the vast amounts of material/resources already available to instructors. The Speech and Language Resource Bank (SLRB) is a platform and central repository for sharing, managing, and growing community resources for teaching and research in the speech and language sciences.

Studies on acoustic and visual characteristics of English tense and lax vowels show consistent enhancement of tensity contrasts in clear speech. However, the degree to which listeners utilize these enhancements in speech perception remains unclear. The present study addresses this issue by testing speech style effects on tense and lax vowel perception by 23 native English and 30 non-native Mandarin-Chinese listeners in audio-only (AO), audio-visual (AV), and visual-only (VO) stimulus modes. English and Chinese listeners showed similar relative differences in performance by mode (VO < AO < AV) and style (plain < clear). However, the two groups differed in the nature of the interaction between tensity, style, and stimulus mode. English listeners showed advantages for clear speech for both tense and lax vowels in all but VO stimuli, whereas Chinese listeners showed a clear speech advantage only for tense vowels, while clear lax vowels showed no improvement in AO and reduced accuracy in AV and VO. While temporal and spectral acoustic cues may coordinate to preserve or improve tense-lax category identity in clear speech, non-native listeners may not be attending to both dimensions. Further, Chinese listeners' greater reliance on visual information may account for their less accurate lax vowel identification.

Aerodynamic and acoustic data on voiceless dorsal fricatives [x/χ] in Arabic, Persian, and Spanish were recorded to measure the extent to which such productions involve trilling of the uvula, thus exhibiting a sound source which, contrary to assumptions for voiceless fricatives, is mixed rather than aperiodic. Oscillation in airflow indicative of uvular vibration was present more often than not in Arabic (63%) and Persian (75%), while Spanish dorsal fricatives were more commonly produced with unimodal flow indicative of an aperiodic source. When present, uvular vibration frequencies averaged 68 Hz in Arabic and 67 Hz in Persian. Rates of uvular vibration were highly variable, however, and ranged between 40 and 116 Hz, with oscillatory periods averaging 4-5 cycles in duration, with a range of 1-12. The effect of these source characteristics on dorsal fricative acoustics was to significantly skew the spectral shape parameters (M1-M4) commonly used to characterize properties of the anterior filter; however, spectral peak frequency was found to be stable to changes in source characteristics, suggesting the occurrence of trilled tokens is not due to velar-uvular allophony, but rather is more fundamental to dorsal fricative production.

The increasing proliferation of code, scripts, and programming language libraries for use in speech science research raises concerns over the maintenance and organization of this disparate code base. These concerns have motivated us to explore the development a federated code repository under the umbrella of the Acoustical Society of America. Our primary goal for this repository is to serve as a central point from which researchers in the speech sciences can access code and data from the community that adheres to a set of established standards for documentation. The code will also be reviewed by other researchers for errors, vulnerabilities, and algorithmic misspecifications. Further, this repository will serve as a starting point for the future development of parallel libraries in open-source languages like R, Python, and Julia. In this talk, we will outline our plans for the repository and identify key open challenges and questions to be answered by contributors regarding repository structure, the code submission and review process, and documentation standards to adopt.