The Menn Phonetic Mini-Corpus: Articulatory Gestures as Precursors to the Emergence of Segments.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Menn L
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8113676 | biostudies-literature | 2021
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
The Menn Phonetic Mini-Corpus: Articulatory Gestures as Precursors to the Emergence of Segments.
Menn Lise L Peters Ann M AM Rose Yvan Y
Frontiers in psychology 20210428
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Project description:The exact nature of the role of Broca's area in control of speech and whether it is exerted at the cognitive or at the motor level is still debated. Intraoperative evidence of a lack of motor responses to direct electrical stimulation (DES) of Broca's area and the observation that its stimulation induces a "speech arrest" without an apparent effect on the ongoing activity of phono-articulatory muscles, raises the argument. Essentially, attribution of direct involvement of Broca's area in motor control of speech, requires evidence of a functional connection of this area with the phono-articulatory muscles' motoneurons. With a quantitative approach we investigated, in 20 patients undergoing surgery for brain tumors, whether DES delivered on Broca's area affects the recruitment of the phono-articulatory muscles' motor units. The electromyography (EMG) of the muscles active during two speech tasks (object picture naming and counting) was recorded during and in absence of DES on Broca's area. Offline, the EMG of each muscle was analyzed in frequency (power spectrum, PS) and time domain (root mean square, RMS) and the two conditions compared. Results show that DES on Broca's area induces an intensity-dependent "speech arrest." The intensity of DES needed to induce "speech arrest" when applied on Broca's area was higher when compared to the intensity effective on the neighboring pre-motor/motor cortices. Notably, PS and RMS measured on the EMG recorded during "speech arrest" were superimposable to those recorded at baseline. Partial interruptions of speech were not observed. Speech arrest was an "all-or-none" effect: muscle activation started only by removing DES, as if DES prevented speech onset. The same effect was observed when stimulating directly the subcortical fibers running below Broca's area. Intraoperative data point to Broca's area as a functional gate authorizing the phonetic translation to be executed by the motor areas. Given the absence of a direct effect on motor units recruitment, a direct control of Broca's area on the phono-articulatory apparatus seems unlikely. Moreover, the strict correlation between DES-intensity and speech prevention, might attribute this effect to the inactivation of the subcortical fibers rather than to Broca's cortical neurons.
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Project description:Understanding how the human speech production system is related to the human auditory system has been a perennial subject of inquiry. To investigate the production-perception link, in this paper, a computational analysis has been performed using the articulatory movement data obtained during speech production with concurrently recorded acoustic speech signals from multiple subjects in three different languages: English, Cantonese, and Georgian. The form of articulatory gestures during speech production varies across languages, and this variation is considered to be reflected in the articulatory position and kinematics. The auditory processing of the acoustic speech signal is modeled by a parametric representation of the cochlear filterbank which allows for realizing various candidate filterbank structures by changing the parameter value. Using mathematical communication theory, it is found that the uncertainty about the articulatory gestures in each language is maximally reduced when the acoustic speech signal is represented using the output of a filterbank similar to the empirically established cochlear filterbank in the human auditory system. Possible interpretations of this finding are discussed.
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Project description:In their first year, infants begin to learn the speech sounds of their language. This process is typically modeled as an unsupervised clustering problem in which phonetically similar speech-sound tokens are grouped into phonetic categories by infants using their domain-general inference abilities. We argue here that maternal speech is too phonetically variable for this account to be plausible, and we provide phonetic evidence from Spanish showing that infant-directed Spanish vowels are more readily clustered over word types than over vowel tokens. The results suggest that infants' early adaptation to native-language phonetics depends on their word-form lexicon, implicating a much wider range of potential sources of influence on infants' developmental trajectories in language learning.
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Project description:Crystallization of amorphous precursors into metastable crystals plays a fundamental role in the formation of new matter, from geological to biological processes in nature to the synthesis and development of new materials in the laboratory. Reliably predicting the outcome of such a process would enable new research directions in these areas, but has remained beyond the reach of molecular modeling or ab initio methods. Here we show that candidates for the crystallization products of amorphous precursors can be predicted in many inorganic systems by sampling the local structural motifs at the atomistic level using universal deep learning interatomic potentials. We show that this approach identifies, with high accuracy, the most likely crystal structures of the polymorphs that initially nucleate from amorphous precursors, across a diverse set of material systems, including polymorphic oxides, nitrides, carbides, fluorides, chlorides, chalcogenides and metal alloys.
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Project description:PurposeThe aim of this study was to leverage data-driven approaches, including a novel articulatory consonant distinctiveness space (ACDS) approach, to better understand speech motor control in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).MethodElectromagnetic articulography was used to record tongue and lip movement data during the production of 10 consonants from healthy controls (n = 15) and individuals with ALS (n = 47). To assess phoneme distinctness, speech data were analyzed using two classification algorithms, Procrustes matching (PM) and support vector machine (SVM), and the area/volume of the ACDS. Pearson's correlation coefficient was used to examine the relationship between bulbar impairment and the ACDS. Analysis of variance was used to examine the effects of bulbar impairment on consonant distinctiveness and consonant classification accuracies in clinical subgroups.ResultsThere was a significant relationship between the ACDS and intelligible speaking rate (area, p = .003; volume, p = .010), and the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Functional Rating Scale-Revised (ALSFRS-R) bulbar subscore (area, p = .009; volume, p = .027). Consonant classification performance followed a consistent pattern with bulbar severity, where consonants produced by speakers with more severe ALS were classified less accurately (SVM = 75.27%; PM = 74.54%) than the healthy, asymptomatic, and mild-moderate groups. In severe ALS, area of the ACDS was significantly condensed compared to both asymptomatic (p = .004) and mild-moderate (p = .013) groups. There was no statistically significant difference in area between the severe ALS group and healthy speakers (p = .292).ConclusionsOur comprehensive approach is sensitive to early oromotor changes in response due to disease progression. The preserved articulatory consonant space may capture the use of compensatory adaptations to counteract influences of neurodegeneration.Supplemental materialhttps://doi.org/10.23641/asha.22044320.
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Project description:Before they even speak, infants become attuned to the sounds of the language(s) they hear, processing native phonetic contrasts more easily than nonnative ones. For example, between 6 to 8 mo and 10 to 12 mo, infants learning American English get better at distinguishing English and [l], as in "rock" vs. "lock," relative to infants learning Japanese. Influential accounts of this early phonetic learning phenomenon initially proposed that infants group sounds into native vowel- and consonant-like phonetic categories-like and [l] in English-through a statistical clustering mechanism dubbed "distributional learning." The feasibility of this mechanism for learning phonetic categories has been challenged, however. Here, we demonstrate that a distributional learning algorithm operating on naturalistic speech can predict early phonetic learning, as observed in Japanese and American English infants, suggesting that infants might learn through distributional learning after all. We further show, however, that, contrary to the original distributional learning proposal, our model learns units too brief and too fine-grained acoustically to correspond to phonetic categories. This challenges the influential idea that what infants learn are phonetic categories. More broadly, our work introduces a mechanism-driven approach to the study of early phonetic learning, together with a quantitative modeling framework that can handle realistic input. This allows accounts of early phonetic learning to be linked to concrete, systematic predictions regarding infants' attunement.
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