Search PubMed⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search PubMed

Results for “PHONETICS”

Search indexed PubMed citations on genomics, clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health. Explore titles, authors and supplied subject terms, then open the PubMed record.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 199 records · Page 11Linked to original sources
PubMed1996

[Materials for the training of hearing based on phonetic-acoustic features of the Polish language].

Even a careful fitting of hearing aid cannot always guarantee full recompensation for lost hearing. Although speech is significantly strengthened by the hearing aid, the received signals sound slightly differently. To take full advantage of hearing aid capacity and to understand speech better, it is necessary to carry out exercises within the hearing training. The aim of the exercises is to acquire perceptive differences appearing between particular speech sounds. Each exercise deals with particular phonetic distinctive feature differentiating the speech sounds of the Polish language. Language substance comprises the so-called minimal pairs: pairs of words which differ only by one speech sound e.g. park, kark. Preservation of identical phonetic structure within remaining parts of words allows for the exposure of sound differences referring to selected speech sounds. First exercises with children who lost hearing in the prelingual period should be carried out for a period between a few weeks to a few month with the cooperation and under a supervision of a specialist (logopedics or surdopedagogics).

Hearing↗
PubMed1975

[Surgical procedures in cleft-palate patients, with reference to phonetic function: primary and secondary methods (author's transl)].

Surgeons undertaking the closure of cleft lip and cleft palate must develop a therapeutic technique that will give the best possible phonetic results and cause the minimum disturbance to normal growth of the maxillae in each case. Clinical observations reveal that different operative procedures achieve normal phonetic function in 60-80 percent of cases. The author has observed the best results when patients have been operated on for cleft lips at 4-6 months of age and for cleft palate at 2-3 years. If nasal speech persists after a cleft-palate operation, a secondary pharyngoplasty can be undertaken in the preschool period, with favorable results in about 70 percent of cases.

Child↗
PubMed1991

Phonetic recoding of print and its effect on the detection of concurrent speech in amplitude-modulated noise.

When an amplitude-modulated noise generated from a spoken word is presented simultaneously with the word's printed version, the noise sounds more speechlike. This auditory illusion obtained by Frost, Repp, and Katz (1988) suggests that subjects detect correspondences between speech amplitude envelopes and printed stimuli. The present study investigated whether the speech envelope is assembled from the printed word or whether it is lexically addressed. In two experiments subjects were presented with speech-plus-noise and with noise-only trials, and were required to detect the speech in the noise. The auditory stimuli were accompanied with matching or non-matching Hebrew print, which was unvoweled in Experiment 1 and voweled in Experiment 2. The stimuli of both experiments consisted of high-frequency words, low-frequency words, and non-words. The results demonstrated that matching print caused a strong bias to detect speech in the noise when the stimuli were either high- or low-frequency words, whereas no bias was found for non-words. The bias effect for words or non-words was not affected by spelling to sound regularity; that is, similar effects were obtained in the voweled and the unvoweled conditions. These results suggest that the amplitude envelope of the word is not assembled from the print. Rather, it is addressed directly from the printed word and retrieved from the mental lexicon. Since amplitude envelopes are contingent on detailed phonetic structures, this outcome suggests that representations of words in the mental lexicon are not only phonological but also phonetic in character.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed1998

Dissociation of brain ERP topographies for tonal and phonetic oddball tasks.

ERP topographies for 30 scalp electrodes were examined in 26 healthy right-handed volunteers during oddball tasks (20% targets) using binaurally presented consonant-vowel syllables or complex tones. Response hand was counterbalanced across participants. Both window averages and a principal components analysis (PCA) with Varimax rotation revealed task-related (tonal/phonetic) hemispheric asymmetries for N2, early P3, and particularly for N2-P3 amplitude. In the tonal task, N2 was maximal over right lateral-temporal regions, and early P3 over right medial-parietal regions. For the phonetic task, N2 was maximal over the left lateral-parietal regions, and late P3/N3 over left medial-parietal regions. A response-related frontal negativity (N3) interacted with task-related asymmetries in an unbalanced fashion. The distinct, asymmetric N2 and P3 topographies for tonal and phonetic tasks presumably reflect differential involvement of cortical structures in pitch (right frontotemporal) and phoneme (left parietotemporal) discrimination.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2002

Longitudinal changes in articulation rate and phonetic phrase length in children with speech delay.

This study examined long-term changes in articulation rate (the pace at which speech segments are produced) and phonetic phrase length in the conversational speech of two groups of children with speech delay (SD) of unknown origin. Initial testing for both groups occurred at preschool age, with follow-up testing conducted for the Early Follow-Up Group (n = 17) at age 9 years and for the Late Follow-Up Group (n = 36) at age 12-16 years. At follow-up testing both groups produced significantly faster articulation rates (measured in both syllables per second and phones per second) and significantly longer phonetic phrases (measured in both syllables and phones) than at initial testing. Articulation rates at both test times were also judged to be similar to published values from typically developing children of similar ages when measured in syllables per second. However, findings for rate in phones per second suggested that at least at initial testing the children were articulating speech at a slower rate than their typically developing peers. This latter finding, however, may have been an artifact of the high frequency of errors--such as cluster reduction and final consonant deletion--observed in the initial samples. It would appear, therefore, that children with SD of unknown origin may start out with slower than normal articulation rates but eventually catch up to their typically developing peers.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1982

Phonetic disintegration in a five-year-old following sudden hearing loss.

The speech of a five-year-old boy who suffered a profound hearing loss following meningitis was sampled at two-week intervals for nine months. Speech samples were subjected to phonetic transcription, spectrographic analysis, and intelligibility testing. Immediately post-trauma, the child displayed slightly slower, F0 elevated, acoustically intense speech in which phonemic distortion and syllabification of consonants occurred occasionally; single word intelligibility was depressed below normal between 20-30%. By the 18th week, a sudden decline in intelligibility, increasing monotony of pitch, and a pattern of strongly emphatic, prolonged, aspirated, syllabified, and increasingly distorted consonants were manifest. At year's end, the child's speech bore some resemblance to the speech of the deaf in terms of suprasegmentals, intonation, and intelligibility, but differed because the child rarely, if ever deleted speech sounds or diphthongized vowels strongly. It is speculated that phonetic processes such as diphthongization, syllabification, and prolonged duration may be strategies for enhancing feedback during speech.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1995

Absence of ear advantage on the consonant-vowel dichotic listening test in adolescent and adult dyslexics: specific auditory-phonetic dysfunction.

The present study investigated auditory-phonetic processing in a group of adolescent and adult reading disabled subjects. Right- and left-handed dyslexic subjects were compared with an age, sex, and handedness matched control group. All subjects were studied with a consonant-vowel version of the dichotic listening task with repeated presentations of dichotically presented pairs of CV-syllables. Left and right ear correct scores were compared for ear advantage in each of the different subgroups of subjects. The main finding was the absence of an expected right-ear advantage (REA) in the right-handed dyslexic group as compared to the right-handed normal readers. Both the dyslexic and normal left-handed groups did not show a REA. The findings are discussed within a theoretical framework that focuses on a basic auditory-phonetic processing dysfunction in developmental dyslexia that persists into adulthood.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Auditory and phonetic perception of vowels in children with apraxic speech disorders.

The aim of this study was to assess auditory and phonetic perceptual processing of vowels in children with apraxic disorders, who demonstrated clinically with only a speech output deficit. Two experiments were conducted. In the preparatory Experiment 1 series of vowels were constructed by moving formant frequencies away from the extreme values in the vowel space in the direction of a 'neutral-vowel position'. These were presented to adults and children with no speech-language involvement. Based on identification performance low-redundancy vowels were selected, which served as the end-points of two vowel continua: /i/-/i/ and /a/-/a/. In Experiment 2 these continua were used in identification and discrimination tasks, presented to 11 children with apraxic speech problems (aged 6:11 to 9:6 years) and 12 normally developing children. The results showed poorer perception of vowels for the children with apraxic speech problems than for the control children for both continua. Identification functions indicated poorer phonetic processing; discrimination functions indicated poorer auditory processing. Furthermore, a combination of perception measures (identification and discrimination) proved to have a high differential and clinical value for the assessment of children with apraxic speech problems. The results support the view that subtle (subclinical) auditory processing deficits make part of speech output disorders.

Adult↗
PubMed1992

Linguistic experience alters phonetic perception in infants by 6 months of age.

Linguistic experience affects phonetic perception. However, the critical period during which experience affects perception and the mechanism responsible for these effects are unknown. This study of 6-month-old infants from two countries, the United States and Sweden, shows that exposure to a specific language in the first half year of life alters infants' phonetic perception.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMedDate not supplied

The phonetic potential of nonhuman vocal tracts: comparative cineradiographic observations of vocalizing animals.

For more than a century it has been noted that the adult human vocal tract differs from that of other mammals, in that the resting position of the larynx is much lower in humans. While animals habitually breathe with the larynx inserted into the nasal cavity, adult humans are unable to do this. This anatomical difference has been cited as an important factor limiting the vocal potential of nonhuman animals, because the low larynx of humans allows a wider range of vocal tract shapes and thus formant patterns than is available to other species. However, it is not clear that the static anatomy of dead animals provides an accurate guide to the phonetic potential of the living animal's vocal tract. Here I present X-ray video observations of four mammal species (dogs Canis familiaris, goats Capra hircus, pigs Sus scrofa and cotton-top tamarins Sagunius oedipus). In all four species, the larynx was lowered from the nasopharynx, and the velum was closed, during loud calls. In dogs this temporary lowering was particularly pronounced. Although preliminary, these results suggest that the nonhuman vocal tract is more flexible than previously supposed, and that static postmortem anatomy provides an incomplete guide to the phonetic potential of nonhuman animals. The implications of these findings for theories of speech evolution are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Phonetic diversity, statistical learning, and acquisition of phonology.

In learning to perceive and produce speech, children master complex language-specific patterns. Daunting language-specific variation is found both in the segmental domain and in the domain of prosody and intonation. This article reviews the challenges posed by results in phonetic typology and sociolinguistics for the theory of language acquisition. It argues that categories are initiated bottom-up from statistical modes in use of the phonetic space, and sketches how exemplar theory can be used to model the updating of categories once they are initiated. It also argues that bottom-up initiation of categories is successful thanks to the perception-production loop operating in the speech community. The behavior of this loop means that the superficial statistical properties of speech available to the infant indirectly reflect the contrastiveness and discriminability of categories in the adult grammar. The article also argues that the developing system is refined using internal feedback from type statistics over the lexicon, once the lexicon is well-developed. The application of type statistics to a system initiated with surface statistics does not cause a fundamental reorganization of the system. Instead, it exploits confluences across levels of representation which characterize human language and make bootstrapping possible.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed2002

Cognitive ERPs in depressive and anxiety disorders during tonal and phonetic oddball tasks.

This report compares event-related brain potentials (ERPs) of patients having a depressive disorder alone (n = 58), an anxiety disorder alone (n = 22), comorbidity of these disorders (n = 18), and healthy controls (n = 49). ERPs were recorded from 30 electrode sites during auditory oddball tasks using consonant-vowel syllables (phonetic) or complex tones (tonal). Overlapping ERP components were identified and measured using covariance-based principal components analysis. An early P3 subcomponent (P315) was larger in patients having an anxiety disorder alone when compared to depressed patients with or without an anxiety disorder and healthy controls, whereas a late P3 subcomponent (P400) was larger in patients having comorbidity of anxiety and depressive disorders than in the other groups. Also, the N2-P3 complex showed task-dependent hemispheric asymmetries, including larger N2-P3 amplitude over left than right temporoparietal sites during the phonetic oddball task. This hemispheric asymmetry was greatest in patients having a depressive disorder alone and smallest in patients having an anxiety disorder alone. The opposite nature of the alterations of hemispheric asymmetry and early P3 amplitude in depressive and anxiety disorders underscores the importance of taking comorbidity with anxiety into account in studies of cognitive ERPs in depressive disorders.

Adult↗
PubMed1998

[The study on the acoustic-phonetic features of marginal velopharyngeal closure].

OBJECTIVE: To study the acoustic-phonetic features of the cleft patients with marginal velopharyngeal closure. METHODS: The acoustic-phonetic features of 17 cleft patients with marginal velopharyngeal closure were analyzed with USSA sound spectrograph, contrasted by the features of 28 cleft patients with velopharyngeal incompetence and 18 patients with velopharyngeal competence. RESULTS: The manifestations of single vowel spectrum differ from that of the same vowel in sentence for MVPC patients. There are extra formants or strong nasal formants in a number of vowels spectrums in sentence, while they do not occur on single vowel spectrum. The spike and stop gap in the spectrograms of stops and affricatives may be absent or existing occasionally, and the noise energy in the lowest frequency area in the spectrograms of aspirated consonants may be watched or not. CONCLUSION: Acoustic analysis is very valuable to evaluate the state of marginal velopharyngeal closure. Analyzing the acoustic features of multiple vowels and consonants, and comparing the resonance characteristics of single vowel with the same vowel in continuous speech simultaneously are emphasized.

Acoustics↗
PubMed1978

[Detection of phonetically significant nonuniformity by the high frequency slope of the spectrum of a synthetic vowel].

Conditions for perception of phonetically relevant ununiformity at high frequency slope of the spectrum of synthetic noise--excited vowel were studied with the aid of psychoacoustic technique. The threshold for detection of high frequency spectral peak did not depend on the properties of the stimulus spectrum in low frequency region. The detection threshold could be influenced by spectrum properties near the peak location. The data obtained are inconsistent with the hypothesis of identification of spectral peaks with formants being the intermediate procedure in phonetic interpretation of the vowel.

Humans↗
PubMed1982

Patterns in the performance-intensity functions for phonetically balanced word lists and synthetic sentences in aged listeners.

The performance intensity-phonetically balanced (PI-PB) and performance intensity-synthetic sentence identification (PI-SSI) functions were determined for 62 elderly patients (100 ears) with presbyacusis. A comparison of these functions was performed to determine whether patients older than 60 years exhibited peripheral or central PI-PB/PI-SSI patterning. Fifty-eight ears of the 100 ears examined showed central patterning. Furthermore, two diagnostically important central patterns were identified. The implications of the current data as well as the clinical application of PI-PB/PI-SSI testing for the evaluation of peripheral and central auditory effects in aged listeners are described.

Aged↗
PubMed2000

Identification reaction times of voiced/voiceless continua: a right-ear advantage for VOT values near the phonetic boundary.

We explored the degree to which the duration of acoustic cues contributes to the respective involvement of the two hemispheres in the perception of speech. To this end, we recorded the reaction time needed to identify monaurally presented natural French plosives with varying VOT values. The results show that a right-ear advantage is significant only when the phonetic boundary is close to the release burst, i.e., when the identification of the two successive acoustical events (the onset of voicing and the release from closure) needed to perceive a phoneme as voiced or voiceless requires rapid information processing. These results are consistent with the recent hypothesis that the left hemisphere is superior in the processing of rapidly changing acoustical information.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

Neurological evidence in support of a specialized phonetic processing module.

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were utilized to study brain activity while subjects listened to speech and nonspeech stimuli. The effect of duplex perception was exploited, in which listeners perceive formant transitions that are isolated as nonspeech "chirps," but perceive formant transitions that are embedded in synthetic syllables as unique linguistic events with no chirp-like sounds heard at all (Mattingly et al., 1971). Brain ERPs were recorded while subjects listened to and silently identified plain speech-only tokens, duplex tokens, and tone glides (perceived as "chirps" by listeners). A highly controlled set of stimuli was developed that represented equivalent speech and nonspeech stimulus tokens such that the differences were limited to a single acoustic parameter: amplitude. The acoustic elements were matched in terms of number and frequency of components. Results indicated that the neural activity in response to the stimuli was different for different stimulus types. Duplex tokens had significantly longer latencies than the pure speech tokens. The data are consistent with the contention of separate modules for phonetic and auditory stimuli.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Infants' ability to match dynamic phonetic and gender information in the face and voice.

Six experiments tested young infants' sensitivity to vowel and gender information in dynamic faces and voices. Infants were presented with side-by-side displays of two faces articulating the vowels /a/ or /i/ in synchrony. The heard voice matched the gender of one face in some studies and the vowel of one face in other studies and, in some studies, vowel and gender were placed in conflict. Infants of age 4.5 months showed no evidence of matching face and voice on the basis of gender, but were able to ignore irrelevant gender information and match on the basis of the vowel. Robust evidence of the ability to match on the basis of gender was not evident until 8 months of age. This set of findings suggests that, when identical stimuli are used, gender matching does not emerge until a later age than does phonetic matching. Results are discussed in relation to key theories of intermodal development.

Age Factors↗