|

Kelly Davis
Mozilla
|
Free(ing) Speech:
Collection, Validation, and Recognition
(Bio)
We’ll discuss
the past, present, and future of Mozilla’s Common
Voice (Collection & Validation) and Deep Speech
(Recognition), two projects that are freeing speech
by crowdsourcing collection and validation while
opening speech algorithms and models. Particular
focus will be placed on communications these
projects enable, anything from the transcription of
Māori radio shows to bootstrapping Kinyarwanda
speech technologies in Kigali.
|
|
|

Satoshi
Imaizumi
University of Tokyo Health Sciences
|
Speech Patterns of Children with Neuro-developmental
Disorders (Bio)
Recent neuroscientific studies suggest that
individuals with neuro-developmental disorders may
have atypical neural connectivity within and between
language-related cortical areas, which may result in
atypical patterns in their spontaneous speech. We
tested this hypothesis by analyzing developmental
changes in speech patterns of children and adults
who stutter. The effects of phrase syntactic class,
length, position in sentence, and manner of
articulation on stuttering rate for spontaneous
speech recorded from two age groups of Japanese
children who stutter. The participants were 14 young
children (YC: 2-6 years old) and 14 older children (OC:
7-11 years old). In total, 7406 (YC:3870, OC:3536)
spoken phrases were recorded from the participants
and classified into fluent versus stuttering
phrases. Stuttering rate was calculated as the
percentage of stuttering versus total number of
phrases. The effects of four independent variables
on the stuttering rate were analyzed using ANOVA and
a multiple logistic regression model of JMP Pro
version 14. The explanatory variables were Group (YC
vs. OC), Class (Content vs. Function), Length in
Number of morae (Short vs. Long), Phrase Position in
sentence (1, 2, 3 or more), and Manner of
articulation of phrase-initial consonant (Obstruent
vs. Sonorant). Following results were obtained. 1)
Phrase length and position significantly affect
stuttering rate regardless of age. Longer phrases
have higher stuttering rate than shorter ones for
both the age groups. The stuttering rate is higher
at the head of sentence than at the end of it, but
this position effect is smaller for the OC group
than the YC group. The effects of Length and
Position suggest children who stutter have more
difficulty to initiate utterances of longer phrases.
2) The significant effect of Class indicates that
content phrases have higher stuttering rate than
function phrases, and this effect is large for the
YC group and small for the OC group. This may
suggest difficulty in construction of long content
phrases affects stuttering rate more for younger
children. 3) Comparing to the YC group, the OC group
uses more long content phrases (Length=5 or more)
with less short function phrases (Length=2, 3, 4),
and has higher stuttering rate even at end of
sentence. This age-dependent variations may be due
to the required complexity of language use which
increases with age. 4) The YC group shows a
significant effect of Manner, that is, their
stuttering rate is higher when the initial consonant
is stops compared to the others. Manner has no
effect for the OC group. This result suggests manner
of articulation of sentence-head syllable affects
stuttering for the YC group. These results suggest
that complexities in linguistic phrase generation
and its articulatory difficulties are the main
factors to generate atypical speech pattern for
children who stutter, possibly reflecting atypical
coordination between cortical areas working for
message generation and articulatory control.
Acknowledgements: The authors appreciate all the
participants who made this study possible. This
study was approved by Research Ethics Committee of
Pref. Univ. Hiroshima, and was supported by JSPS
Grants.
|
|
|

Charles Yang
University of Pennsylvania
|
The Role of the Lexicon in Phonological Acquisition and Change (Bio)
How do children establish abstract phonological representations and processes from the gradient acoustic signal? In this talk, I revisit some classic ideas of how the lexicon provides the impetus for the development of phonology. Specifically, I will present a series of computational models that (a) partition the acoustic space for marking lexical distinctions, (b) establish allophonic alternations to maintain the compactness of the lexicon, and (c) assess the outcome of competing phonemic systems, as in the case of language/dialect contact, as a function of lexical processing cost.
|
|