Phonetic discrimination ability of an English vowel contrast by German infants

Workshops

Today, we have Hiromasa Kotera to present the preliminary work of his PhD study, which is about the retainability and sustainability of phonetic discrimination ability of infants.

Rationale:

The perceptual attunement effect has been hotly discussed in linguistics and child development. It refers to a change in infants’ discrimination ability of language sounds. At first, infants can discriminate all sounds in human languages. However, being exposed much to their native language, infants start not to be able to tell certain sounds apart if they do not exist in their L1. Previous studies have shown that short-term exposure to certain languages with the target sounds can allow infants to regain the ability of phonetic discrimination. German does not have the vowel /æ/, and the sound /ɛ/ in German differs from English.

Research question:

This study is to see if the finding can be generalized for long-term effect by testing German infants’ phonetic discrimination ability of English vowels /æ/ and /ɛ/.

Preliminary research:

Three groups of infants aged 5-6 (n=40), 7-8 (30) and 12-13 (30) months are exposed to American English carrier words of the two test sounds: MAF /mæf/ and MEF /mɛf/. A visual habituation paradigm is employed involving three phases: habituation phase, test phase, and control phase. Infants’ looking time to a checkerboard is measured while listening to MAF or MEF.

Findings:

  1. For infants at 5-6 months old, there is a significant difference existing among conditions. In habituation, infants’ looking time when they heard MEF was longer than when they heard MAF.
  2. As for the other two groups of infants, no significant difference was detected among conditions. This supports the perceptual attunement effect.

Feedback from the group:

  1. It may be worthwhile to consider how well the test sounds recordings represent that category.
  2. It is also worth thinking about the difference between phonetic discrimination and perception.

Stefano Coretta’s Workshop on Electroglottography (EGG)

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Date: 06/27/2021

Stefano Coretta from the University of Edinburgh has a wide range of knowledge in statistical analyses and research methods in linguistics research. Today we had him walk us through how to operate the EGG machine, apply it in the practical study and process the data.

Anatomy

We firstly started with the anatomy of larynx. 

  1. When making voiced sounds, the vocal cords would contact and dispart over time. 
  2. The frequency of vocal-fold vibration varies between sounds and speakers. For the same sound, if produced in certain distinctive voices, like in creaky or breathy voices, the vocal folds would vibrate differently, which can be measured by the EGG. 

Electroglottography

We learned about the principles of the EGG and got the chance to see how to use the machine.

  1. The principle of EGG is that there are two metal signal-receiving tabs, which would be put against the neck skin. When the two larynges contact each other, the current is allowed to pass, which would be recorded as waveforms. 
  2. The maximum of the EGG signals corresponds to the close phase of the glottis, and the minimum corresponds to the open phase of the glottis.
  3. The EGG can be used to measure
  • Robust estimation of fundamental frequency (f0).
  • Detection of voiced/voiceless intervals.
  • Voice quality via Contact Quotient (CQ): higher CQ = creakier voice, lower CQ = breathier voice.
  • Vocal Folds configuration via complex methods like wavegram.

4. The limitation of the EGG is that it only works when there is vocal fold vibration and shows no information when there is a voiceless interval.

Analysing the EGG signal

There are various ways to analyse the EGG data, which can be processed on different platforms, including Praat, R, Matlab, Python and so on. To process the EGG signal, what usually needs to be done are:

  • Pre-processing

       – Filtering

       – Calculate the first derivative (dEGG)

  • Extract measurements

       – Contact Quotient (ratio between closed phase and glottal cycle)

       – Wavegram (Herbst 2010)

  • Analyse measurements

       – WaveGAMs (Coretta 2019)

Calculate measurements

We can get various measurements with the use of different tools. For example:

In Praat:

  1. Get maxima and minima of the dEGG.
  2. Calculate the glottal period.

In R:

  1. Calculate the Contact Quotient.
  2. Calculate f0.

Reflections from our Research Group

  • Our group has long been exploring different quantitative research methods and data analyses in linguistics. This workshop is very relevant to what we are pursuing.
  • It gave us a clear understanding of using the EGG.
  • This gave us the confidence to look at glottal movements in our research.

Three-minute thesis final

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Date: 16th June, 16:00 – 18:00 
Location: Baddiley Clark Seminar Room
Book: https://workshops.ncl.ac.uk/view/book/modal/50275/ Drinks reception and canapés from 16:00  Presentations will begin at 17:00

The finals of the 3-minute thesis are taking place on the 16th of June. One of our members, Carol-Ann McConnellogue, has made it to the final. Carol-Ann is developing an individualised speech therapy programme for children with cerebral palsy and is doing her PhD jointly with ECLS and FMS.

The Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition asks doctoral students to explain their research in just three minutes using only one slide. The explanation should be easily understood by a non-specialist. Originally developed by the University of Queensland, Australia it has been taken up by Universities across the world. The competition offers training then the opportunity to compete in a University final in front of the public. The winner of this final will go forward to compete in the national Vitae 3MT competition in September.

It’s a great opportunity to listen to students from different disciplines talk about their PhD topics in a succinct and non-technical way.

Recap Semester 2 2021/2022

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From January 2022 to May 2022, our research group has continued to be well-engaged in projects from Semester 1 and arranged new workshops to discuss topics of interest amongst our team members. The following is a summary of what we covered this semester:

  • Accent and Social Justice

Since the beginning of this academic year, we have focused on the theme ‘Accent and Social Justice’, reviewed several related articles, and had Melissa Baese-Berk from the University of Oregon share her and her colleagues’ recent research with us. We organised and held an interdisciplinary workshop on accent, communication, and social justice in March of this Semester which was very successful. We were honoured to have presenters from both within our research group and outside of the group share their research and opinions. More information can be found in this blog post.

  • Many Speech Analyses

One of our main discussion topics of Semester 2 has been the Many Speech Analyses project we signed up for at the end of last semester. This project aims to compare what approaches different researchers take to answer the same research question using the same dataset. The general research question is: ‘Do speakers phonetically modulate utterances to signal atypical word combinations?’. We scheduled fortnightly meetings for this project. We started by reviewing other studies to help us plan a suitable analysis and decided to measure the timing of utterances to answer the research question. We imported the sound files to the MFA (Montreal Forced Aligner) for the forced alignment, and the results were distributed to the members for the crossed hand-correcting. Rory Turnbull, our project leader who is also a member of the P&P research group, guided us in extracting the timing of articulation of certain vowels. After analysing the dataset and submitting our report, we took a few weeks to review the reports from other researchers/research groups. Some peer analyses involved certain research methods or related tools unfamiliar to us, allowing us to expand our knowledge outside our expertise. These included:

  • Forced alignment and inter-rater reliability in Praat

During a couple of weekly meetings, we had Caitlin Halfacre and Rory run Forced alignment in the Montreal Forced Aligner and demonstrate how to hand-correct it in Praat, such as tier setting, labelling and calibration of the initial phone etc. Group members teamed up separately to help each other and shoot problems together. Bruce Wang coded in Praat to sample and measure the agreement of each text grid from the crossed hand-correct. The inter-rater reliability of our group members turned out to be quite strong.

  • Praat Phonetic Analysis 

After checking the correctness and reliability of phone alignment, Rory led two sessions demonstrating how to extract specific labels and measure the timing of utterances by coding in Praat.

  • Digital Signal Processing (DSP)

When we reviewed other researchers’ reports, we found certain research methods which were unfamiliar to us, such as DSP. We used a session as an introduction to these techniques. During this session, we watched a video to recap the anatomy of sound perception, discussed the anatomy of the cochlea, and talked about the acoustic versus auditory differences between two tones that are 100 Hz apart and gammatone filter back. However, without a well-established background in neurolinguistics, it’s still difficult for us to fully understand what the results of one peer reviewed report meant.

To conclude, we successfully ran the ‘Accent and Social Justice’ workshop and completed the Many Speech Analyses project together this semester and learnt much research knowledge and relevant expertise from this experience. We expect to explore more exciting topics and themes in the future and keep updating and publicising our work here.

LabVanced Workshops and the Lab Tour

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We are excited to announce that our linguistics laboratory, which was under refurbishment last year, has been reopened. The Lab has many world-class pieces of equipment. It has two small sound-treated isolation booths and one sizeable sound-proof booth to provide an ideal experimental environment. It is also equipped with high-quality phonetic and speech recording tools, as well as ultrasound tongue imaging. The Lab can support a wide range of articulatory, phonetic, psycholinguistic, and corpus research, and you can read here for more information.

The Lab is licensed to use LabVanced, an online experimental designing and launching system. On the 19th and 25th May, Fengting Du and Andreas Krug, who are members of our research group, demonstrated how they used LabVanced to benefit their research. The questions covered were: (1) how to start up a new study; (2) how to import your stimuli; (3) how to set variables and record the data you want; (4) how to randomize the order of your questions or stimuli; and (5) how to launch your study and export your data. We also shot some problems about data analysis together during the workshops.

After the workshop, the research group had a demonstration of ultrasound tongue imaging from the Lab administrators. If you are interested in the Lab equipment and want to know more, you can call into the Lab or book the Lab here.

Please leave a comment if you have questions on LanVanced or would be interested in another training session. We look forward to arranging further workshops like this.

Accent and Social Justice Workshop

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Our research theme for 2021/22 has been “Accent and Social Justice”. We have read and reviewed literature on accent processing and perception, and discussed the prejudices towards certain accents and the injustices those may experience.

In order to spread awareness about accent and social justice, and the research our group has undertaken, we have organised an interdisciplinary workshop on accent, communication and social justice, which will be held on 30/03/2022.

The workshop will consist of presentations from members of our research group and academics outside of the field of Phonetics and Phonology who have an interest and knowledge in our research theme. Topics which will be discussed include self-descriptions of UK-based English accents; constructing native speakerism in Chinese community schooling; and racist nativism in England’s education policy, to name a few. The abstracts for each presentation can be found here. There will be time for discussion after each presentation to give attendees the chance to ask questions, exchange ideas, and explore the topics further.

The workshop will begin at 9am on Wednesday 30th March. It will be a hybrid event meaning people can attend in person or via Zoom. For those attending in person, the workshop will be held in room G.21/22 of the Devonshire Building at Newcastle University. Lunch will begin at 12pm and refreshments will be provided. This will be another opportunity for attendees to mingle and discuss the topics explored. The workshop will end at 1pm. The full workshop programme can be viewed here.

If you are interested in attending our workshop, you can sign up using this link.

We look forward to seeing you and hope this workshop enables you to delve into rich discussion around a very important issue.

Recap Semester 1 2021/2022

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From September 2021 to February 2022, our research group has been very active and involved in several projects. Here is a short summary of what we discussed during our weekly meetings:

  • Accent and Social Justice:
    Within our research theme for this year, “Accent and Social Justice”, we reviewed recent literature on how different accents are processed, perceived and potentially discriminated against. We also attended a talk by Melissa Base-Berk from the University of Oregon, in which she discussed her novel and fascinating research on accent perception and adaptation. Have a look at this blog post if you would like to find out more. Currently, we are organising an interdisciplinary workshop on accent, communication and social justice, to be held in March 2022. Watch this space for further information on the event.
  • Quantitative Methods:
    Bilal Alsharif, a member of our research group, provided us with an introduction to Bayesian methods. We discussed their benefits and challenges in comparison with frequentist methods. Our interest in everything quantitative did not stop there, as we held weekly study group meetings to brush up on our statistics and R skills. The statistic study group will be continuing this semester.
  • Many Speech Analyses:
    As a group, we signed up for this large collaborative project. The aim of the project is to compare the approaches that different researchers take to answer the same research question (“Do speakers phonetically modulate utterances to signal atypical word combinations?”) with the same dataset. We have already explored the dataset and will discuss in the following weeks which methods we want to use. You can find out more about Many Speech Analysis on the project website.
  • Noise-Masking of Speech:
    Another topic of discussion came from Andreas Krug, who was wondering why some of the speakers in his study were easier to hear over noise than others. We had a look at potential acoustic measures to quantify this and how to deal with these differences in an experimental design and statistical analysis.
  • Transcription Training:
    We practised our phonetic transcription skills with some of Ghada Khattab‘s Arabic data. We discussed the differences in our transcriptions and compared the realisations we heard with the target realisations in Arabic. We are planning to practise transcriptions of other speech data this semester, including dysarthric speech, to further our transcription skills.
  • New Doctors:
    Our members Nief Al-Gambi and Bruce Wang successfully completed their vivas. Congratulations to the two of them!

We are looking forward to keep working on these projects in Semester 2. You can check our website to keep up to date with our work.

Melissa Baese-Berk’s Talk

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Date: 06/12/2021

Prof. Melissa and her colleagues and students are constantly productive in the research of speech processing as well as accent perception and adaptation. In her talk, she walked us through their new work on the adaptation to unfamiliar speech and the perception of non-native speech (see Cheng et al., 2021). 

The main examining issues in their studies include:

  1. The difficulties in communication brought about by linguistics properties of non-native speech, language background of talkers and listeners, and certain cognitive factors (McLaughlin, Baese-Berk, Bent, Borrie & Van Engen 2018)
  2. The conditions under which accent general adaptation might occur (Afghani, Baese-Berk & Waddell, under review at the time when the talk happened)

The main results found by them are:

  1. Listeners may make the most of different resources to facilitate their speech processing; some cognitive factors, like vocabulary and working memory, correlate with listening challenges; the noises from the environment can degrade rhythm perception (McLaughlin et al., 2018).
  2. Incentives may be an answer for a better performance in speech processing, and listeners incentivised can start processing better and learn more quickly than those who are not (Afghani, Baese-Berk, & Waddell, under review at the time of the talk).

Speech perception is more difficult when it is:

  • Dysarthric speech
  • Speech-in-noise
  • Time-compressed speech
  • Synthetic speech

However, practice listening in these conditions may improve speech processing for listeners.

The issues to be looked at next:

  1. The role of memory in comprehension
  2. The similarities / difference between the adaptation to a talker and to an accent
  3. The interaction between adaptation and physical and linguistics context

Reflections from our Research Group:

  • This is a very relevant topic to what is currently being discussed in our research group around accent and social justice. Our group is hosting an event in Spring 2022 which will discuss some of the topics addressed. 
  • It directed us to other literature surrounding the topic.
  • A good way to network with others interested in the topic.
  • I found it very interesting that incentivising participants can make a significant difference in how they process speech.

Melissa’s Twitter: @uospplab 

Job: Lecturer/Senior Lecturer

Job Vacancies, ,

For current researchers in this area at the university you can see the Phonetics & Phonology research groups people page.
Posted date: 06-Dec-2021
Closing date: 10-Jan-2022

More Information

Full job description can be found at here.

The Role

The School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences (ECLS) is seeking to appoint a member of staff at Lecturer/Senior Lecturer level in Phonetics and Phonology. The successful applicant will be part of a diverse and collegiate team of academics, clinicians, researchers and professional support staff delivering high quality teaching and research in Speech and Language Sciences. You will have a strong background in phonetics and phonology and a strong research profile in this area. You will have expertise in practical phonetics (ear training), laboratory-based methodologies and quantitative analysis of phonetic data. You will make a significant contribution to teaching and supervision within the Speech and Language Sciences (SLS) section across both undergraduate and post graduate pre-registration speech and language therapy Health and Care Professions Council approved programmes, as well the IPhD in Phonetics and Phonology. You will carry out high quality research in the area of phonetics and/or laboratory phonology, contribute to the profile and to the research culture of the Phonetics and Phonology Research Group, the School and the relevant research centres and institutes across campus. You will, where appropriate, make a contribution to administration within the School.

Qualifications

Essential:  
PhD in linguistics, speech and language sciences or related discipline, with focus on phonetics and phonology

Desirable:
Recognised HE teaching qualification

The University and the Department

Newcastle University is committed to being a fully inclusive Global University which actively recruits, supports and retains colleagues from all sectors of society.  We value diversity as well as celebrate, support and thrive on the contributions of all our employees and the communities they represent.  We are proud to be an equal opportunities employer and encourage applications from everybody, regardless of race, sex, ethnicity, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, age, disability, gender identity, marital status/civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, as well as being open to flexible working practices.

The University holds a silver Athena SWAN award in recognition of our good employment practices for the advancement of gender equality. The University also holds the HR Excellence in Research award for our work to support the career development of our researchers, and is a member of the Euraxess initiative supporting researchers in Europe.

The School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences (ECLS) is an inter-disciplinary school with staff and students working in the fields of Speech and Language Sciences, Linguistics, Applied Linguistics and Communication and Education. Researchers in the school employ a variety of experimental methods including audio-visual, acoustic, and articulatory speech analysis, eye tracking, psycholinguistic experiments, and language learning paradigms and platforms.

Contact

Any informal enquiries should be directed to Dr Janet Webster, Head of Speech and Language Sciences (janet.webster@ncl.ac.uk), or Professor Ghada Khattab (ghada.khattab@ncl.ac.uk). 

Job: Research Assistant (Laboratory Manager)

Job Vacancies, , , ,

For current researchers in this area at the university you can see the Phonetics & Phonology research groups people page.
Posted date: 23-Nov-2021
Closing date: 7-Dec-2021

More Information

Full job description can be found at here.

The Role

The School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences (ECLS) seeks you for the position of Research Assistant (Laboratory Manager). You will support the research of academic staff and students in experimental and laboratory projects which take place in the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences and across the faculty. This includes support for one of more of the following co-located labs:

  1. A psycholinguistics lab with an eyetracker and a range of software programs for behavioural experiments and audio-visual transcription and editing facilities (e.g. EyeLink, Eprime, Labvanced, Gorilla, Adobe Editing Suite, ELAN, PRAAT etc.)
  2. A phonetics lab with:
    • audio-visual recording facilities, including an anechoic chamber, edirol recorders for high quality auditory recordings for acoustic analysis and camcorders for video recordings.
    • articulatory recording facilities, including ultrasound tongue imaging, electropalatography, electro-glottography, and nasometry.

The University and the Department

Newcastle University is committed to being a fully inclusive Global University which actively recruits, supports and retains colleagues from all sectors of society.  We value diversity as well as celebrate, support and thrive on the contributions of all our employees and the communities they represent.  We are proud to be an equal opportunities employer and encourage applications from everybody, regardless of race, sex, ethnicity, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, age, disability, gender identity, marital status/civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, as well as being open to flexible working practices.

The University holds a silver Athena SWAN award in recognition of our good employment practices for the advancement of gender equality. The University also holds the HR Excellence in Research award for our work to support the career development of our researchers, and is a member of the Euraxess initiative supporting researchers in Europe.

The School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences (ECLS) is an inter-disciplinary school with staff and students working in the fields of Speech and Language Sciences, Linguistics, Applied Linguistics and Communication and Education. Researchers in the school employ a variety of experimental methods including audio-visual, acoustic, and articulatory speech analysis, eye tracking, psycholinguistic experiments, and language learning paradigms and platforms.

Contact

Please apply from the university website. For informal enquires, please contact professor Ghada Khattab ghada.khattab@newcastle.ac.uk.