Acoustic Analyses of Speech Sounds and Rhythms in Japanese- and English-Learning Infants

Yamashita, Yuko; Nakajima, Yoshitaka; Ueda, Kazuo; Shimada, Yoshimi; Hirsh, David; Seno, Takeharu; Smith, Benjamin

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00057

Cited by 9 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Seen in a broader context, the current investigation can be placed in the flow of several multilingual studies published recently 27–29 . Among them, it is especially worth noting that a study on the speech modulation spectrum demonstrates striking similarities among languages: Ding et al .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intelligibility of locally time-reversed speech: A multilingual comparison

Ueda

Nakajima

Ellermeier

et al. 2017

Sci Rep

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A set of experiments was performed to make a cross-language comparison of intelligibility of locally time-reversed speech, employing a total of 117 native listeners of English, German, Japanese, and Mandarin Chinese. The experiments enabled to examine whether the languages of three types of timing—stress-, syllable-, and mora-timed languages—exhibit different trends in intelligibility, depending on the duration of the segments that were temporally reversed. The results showed a strikingly similar trend across languages, especially when the time axis of segment duration was normalised with respect to the deviation of a talker’s speech rate from the average in each language. This similarity is somewhat surprising given the systematic differences in vocalic proportions characterising the languages studied which had been shown in previous research and were largely replicated with the present speech material. These findings suggest that a universal temporal window shorter than 20–40 ms plays a crucial role in perceiving locally time-reversed speech by working as a buffer in which temporal reorganisation can take place with regard to lexical and semantic processing.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intelligibility of locally time-reversed speech: A multilingual comparison

Ueda

Nakajima

Ellermeier

et al. 2017

Sci Rep

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“…They discovered that 3 common factors appeared in 20 critical-band power fluctuations derived from spoken sentences of eight different languages (American English, British English, Cantonese Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish). The same analysis was performed over speech samples from 15-, 20-, and 24-month-old infants, and the 3 common factors observed in adult voices were gradually formed along with language acquisition (Yamashita et al, 2013 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Three Factors Are Critical in Order to Synthesize Intelligible Noise-Vocoded Japanese Speech

et al. 2016

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Factor analysis (principal component analysis followed by varimax rotation) had shown that 3 common factors appear across 20 critical-band power fluctuations derived from spoken sentences of eight different languages [Ueda et al. (2010). Fechner Day 2010, Padua]. The present study investigated the contributions of such power-fluctuation factors to speech intelligibility. The method of factor analysis was modified to obtain factors suitable for resynthesizing speech sounds as 20-critical-band noise-vocoded speech. The resynthesized speech sounds were used for an intelligibility test. The modification of factor analysis ensured that the resynthesized speech sounds were not accompanied by a steady background noise caused by the data reduction procedure. Spoken sentences of British English, Japanese, and Mandarin Chinese were subjected to this modified analysis. Confirming the earlier analysis, indeed 3–4 factors were common to these languages. The number of power-fluctuation factors needed to make noise-vocoded speech intelligible was then examined. Critical-band power fluctuations of the Japanese spoken sentences were resynthesized from the obtained factors, resulting in noise-vocoded-speech stimuli, and the intelligibility of these speech stimuli was tested by 12 native Japanese speakers. Japanese mora (syllable-like phonological unit) identification performances were measured when the number of factors was 1–9. Statistically significant improvement in intelligibility was observed when the number of factors was increased stepwise up to 6. The 12 listeners identified 92.1% of the morae correctly on average in the 6-factor condition. The intelligibility improved sharply when the number of factors changed from 2 to 3. In this step, the cumulative contribution ratio of factors improved only by 10.6%, from 37.3 to 47.9%, but the average mora identification leaped from 6.9 to 69.2%. The results indicated that, if the number of factors is 3 or more, elementary linguistic information is preserved in such noise-vocoded speech.

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“…There were four girls and one boy from Japanese-speaking families and two girls and three boys from English-speaking families. Conversational speech between parents and children was recorded and transcribed from each audio ile in the Kyushu University children's database constructed by the author [22]. Monologue speech from either the parent or child and singing were not included in this study.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Response Behaviors in Conversational Speech among Japanese- and English-Speaking Parents and Their Toddlers

Yamashita¹

2017

Advances in Speech-Language Pathology

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The present study aimed at exploring the responses of listeners in conversational speech between parents and toddlers. Children's responses toward parents and parents' responses toward children were the focus of this study. Participants included ive dyads each of typically developing two-year-old toddlers and their parents from Japanese-and English-speaking families. Responses of a mother/father toward a child or a child toward a mother/father were classiied into three categories: non-lexical backchannels (e.g., hoo, nn, hai), phrasal backchannels (e.g., hontoo "really," soo desu ka "is that right?"), and repetition. The results showed that the average ratio of overall backchannels and repetitions produced by parents was quite similar in both languages and was much greater than that produced by children in both languages. Among Japanese-speaking parents, non-lexical backchannels and repetitions were preferred to phrasal backchannels, while among English-speaking parents non-lexical backchannels were most frequently used. With Japanese-speaking parents, almost half of the repetitions were exact repetitions.They frequently repeated what a child had said and added the sentence-inal particle "ne" or content words. These indings are expected to be useful in understanding response behaviors in spoken communication between parents and their children.

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Acoustic Analyses of Speech Sounds and Rhythms in Japanese- and English-Learning Infants

Cited by 9 publications

References 29 publications

Intelligibility of locally time-reversed speech: A multilingual comparison

Intelligibility of locally time-reversed speech: A multilingual comparison

Three Factors Are Critical in Order to Synthesize Intelligible Noise-Vocoded Japanese Speech

Response Behaviors in Conversational Speech among Japanese- and English-Speaking Parents and Their Toddlers

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