Hasil untuk "Oral communication. Speech"

Nina Lauharatanahirun, Andrea Stevenson Won, Angel Hsing-Chi Hwang

Agents are designed in the image of humans, both internally and externally. The internal systems of agents imitate the human brain, both at the levels of hardware (i.e., neuromorphic computing) and software (i.e., neural networks). Furthermore, the external appearance and behaviors of agents are designed by people and based on human data. Sometimes, these humanlike qualities of agents are purposely selected to increase their social influence over human users, and sometimes the human factors that influence perceptions of agents are hidden. Inspired by Blascovich’s “threshold of social influence’, a model designed to explain the effects of different methods of anthropomorphizing embodied agents in virtual environments, we propose a novel framework for understanding how humans’ attributions of human qualities to agents affects their social influence in human-agent interaction. The External and Internal Attributions model of social influence (EIA) builds on previous work on agent-avatars in immersive virtual reality and provides a framework to link previous social science theories to neuroscience. EIA connects external and internal attributions of agents to two brain networks related to social influence. the external perception system, and the mentalizing system. Focusing human-agent interaction research along each of the attributional dimensions of the EIA model, or at the functional integration of the two, may lead to a better understanding of the thresholds of social influence necessary for optimal human-agent interaction.

Blake Atwood

This article examines how Syrian refugee food‑delivery drivers working on the Toters app in Beirut experience the tension between autonomy and automation. Drawing on drivers’ freedom narratives and mapping practices, the study contrasts the app’s automated navigational systems with the drivers’ own social and geographic knowledge, showing how human agency is asserted within conditions of algorithmic surveillance and control.

Katijah Khoza-Shangase, Snethemba P. Mkhize

Background: In South Africa, the prevalence of tinnitus and its associated clinical and audiological characteristics remain underexplored, posing challenges in the assessment and management of the condition. This knowledge gap affects clinician preparedness and effectiveness in treating tinnitus. Objectives: This study aimed to explore the clinical and audiological characteristics of adult patients reporting tinnitus at a tertiary academic hospital in South Africa. Method: A quantitative, non-experimental, retrospective review of 129 patient audiological records from the Audiology Department at Helen Joseph Hospital was conducted. Among these, 71 records were of patients who reported experiences of tinnitus. Results: Tinnitus was reported by 55% of patients, with a higher prevalence in females (76%). The mean age of patients was 51.9 years. Unilateral tinnitus was present in 28% of cases, while 78% of patients had hearing loss, predominantly sensorineural. Common audiological characteristics included vertigo (24%), otalgia (14%), otorrhea (17%) and perforated tympanic membrane (15%). Clinical conditions associated with tinnitus included hypertension (32%), heart disease (28%), diabetes (9%) and head trauma (9%). Findings regarding age and gender differences in the clinical and audiological manifestations of tinnitus are presented. Conclusion: Further research with larger, diverse samples and prospective designs is necessary to confirm these findings and explore possible underlying causes. Contribution: The findings highlight the significant prevalence of tinnitus and its association with various clinical and audiological conditions in the South African context. Understanding these characteristics will enhance the clinician‘s ability to accurately assess, diagnose and manage tinnitus, leading to improved treatment outcomes.

Anisha Kumar, Maryam Zubair, Azouba Gulraiz et al.

Introduction Communication is the exchange of information through speaking, writing, and other mediums. Speech is the expression of thoughts in spoken words. Language is the principal method that humans use for relaying information; consisting of words conveyed by speech, writing, or gestures. Language is the conceptual processing of communication. Problems in communication or oral motor function are called speech and language disorders. Developmental delay is diagnosed when a child does not attain normal developmental milestones at the expected age. Speech and/or language disorders are amongst the most common developmental difficulties in childhood. Such difficulties are termed 'primary' if they have no known etiology, and 'secondary' if they are caused by another condition such as hearing and neurological impairment, and developmental, behavioral, or emotional difficulties. Objectives The objective of our study was to observe the risk factors for speech and language delay in the children presenting to the speech therapy clinic of a tertiary care hospital in a large urban center. Methodology A cross-sectional study was conducted on 150 children presenting at the speech therapy clinic of Lahore General Hospital from July to August 2021. A well-designed questionnaire was used to collect data about the sociodemographic profile, and biological, developmental, and environmental risk factors of speech and language delay in children. SPSS, version 25 (IBM Corp., Armonk, NY) was used to enter and analyze the data. Results Parents or caretakers of a total of 98 male and 52 female children took part in this study aged 2-11 years. The average age of speech and language delay among the children was 5.65 years, 66.7% of which went to normal school while 31.3% went to special school; 66.7% were from urban areas. Around 60% had middle ear infections, and 34.7% were found to have oropharyngeal anomalies. A history of intrapartum complications was found in 68.4% of children; 46.7% of children had a history of use of a pacifier and 38% had a history of thumb sucking. Nearly 39% of children belonged to a multilingual family environment and 66.7% had a family history of screen viewing for more than two hours. Conclusion The major risk factors contributing to speech and language delay in children are family history of speech and language delay, prolonged sucking habits, male gender, oropharyngeal anomalies, hearing problems, and middle ear infections. Measures should be taken to educate people regarding risk factors, courses, and management of speech and language delay in children.

Lottie D. Morison, R. Braden, D. Amor et al.

G. Ockey, E. Chukharev-Hudilainen

A challenge of large-scale oral communication assessments is to feasibly assess a broad construct that includes interactional competence. One possible approach in addressing this challenge is to use a spoken dialog system (SDS), with the computer acting as a peer to elicit a ratable speech sample. With this aim, an SDS was built and four trained human raters assessed the discourse elicited from 40 test takers that completed a paired oral task with both a human and a computer partner. The test takers were evaluated based on the analytic operational oral communication rating scales which included interactional competence, fluency, pronunciation, and grammar/vocabulary. Repeated-measures ANOVA indicated that fluency, pronunciation, and grammar and vocabulary were scored similarly across the two conditions, while interactional competence was scored substantially higher in the human partner condition. A g-study indicated that the computer partner was more reliable in assessing interactional competence, and rater questionnaire and interview data suggested the computer provided a more standardized assessment. Conversely, raters generally favored the human partner, in part because of its perceived authenticity and naturalness.

Jennifer L. Gibb, Gavin L. Kirkwood, Chengyu Fang et al.

Intelligent technologies have the potential to transform organizations and organizing processes. In particular, they are unique from prior organizational technologies in that they reposition technology as agent rather than a tool or object of use. Scholars studying human-machine communication (HMC) have begun to theorize the dual role played by human and machine agency, but they have focused primarily on the individual level. Drawing on Structuration Theory (Giddens, 1984), we propose a theoretical framework to explain agency in HMC as a process involving the negotiation of control between human and machine agents. This article contributes to HMC scholarship by offering a framework and research agenda to guide future theory-building and research on the use of intelligent technologies in organizational contexts.

David I. Tafler

For First Nations people living in the central desert of Australia, the performance of oral storytelling drawing in the sand drives new agency in the cultural metamorphosis of communication practices accelerated by the proliferation of portable digital devices. Drawing on the ground sustains the proxemic and kinesthetic aspects of performative storytelling as a sign gesture system. When rendering this drawing supra-language, the people negotiate and ride the ontological divide symbolized by traditional elders in First Nations communities and digital engineers who program and code. In particular, storytelling’s chronemic encounter offsets the estrangement of the recorded event and maintains every participants’ ability to shape identity and navigate space-time relationships. Drawing storytelling demonstrates a concomitant capacity to mediate changes in tradition and spiritual systems. While the digital portals of the global arena remain open and luring, the force enabled by the chiasmic entwinement of speech, gesture and sand continues to map the frontier of First Nations identity formation and reformation.

Aurélia Poujois, Michaela Pernon, Jean-Marc Trocello et al.

Wilson disease (WD) is a rare genetic disorder characterized by copper overload in the liver and the brain. Neurological presentations are mainly related to the accumulation of copper in the basal ganglia, the brainstem, and the cerebellum. Dysarthria is a frequent symptom, with dystonic, spastic, or parkinsonian components and is usually resistant to medical or voice rehabilitation therapies. Here, we report the case of a patient with WD diagnosed at the age of 12, who presented a severe and constant dysarthria from dystonic origin which was unresponsive to benzodiazepines and anticholinergic drugs. When she was 25-year-old, she tried zolpidem at bedtime for sleeping difficulties and reported a paradoxical effect of this drug on her voice. To confirm the effect of zolpidem on her dystonic dysarthria, we realized a full evaluation of her dysarthria at baseline without zolpidem and after 4 days of treatment by 10 mg twice a day. Lexical access was evaluated by the semantic fluency; dysarthria by the Intelligibility Score, the spontaneous speech and reading rates, the maximum phonation time on the sustained vowel [a] and by a perceptive evaluation. Two hours after the intake of zolpidem, improvement of all the parameters tested, with the exception of the maximum phonation time, was observed. Semantic fluency increased by 59%, the spontaneous speech rate by 88% and the reading rate by 76%. General dystonia remained unchanged and the tolerance of zolpidem was satisfactory. Since then, the patient takes zolpidem 5 mg five times a day, and 4 years later shows persistent improvement in oral communication and a good drug tolerance. In this single-case study, we showed that regular daytime intake of zolpidem could have a persisting effect on a complex dystonic dysarthria that was resistant to usual medical treatments.

Jing Xu

Collocation, known as words that commonly co-occur, is a major category of formulaic language. There is now general consensus among language researchers that collocation is essential to effective language use in real-world communication situations (Ellis, 2008; Nesselhauf, 2005; Schmitt, 2010; Wray, 2002). Although a number of contemporary speech-processing theories assume the importance of formulaic language to spontaneous speaking (Bygate, 1987; de Bot, 1992; Kormos, 2006; Levelt, 1999), none of them gives an adequate explanation of the role that collocation plays in speech communication. In the practices of L2 speaking assessment, a test taker’s collocational performance is usually not separately scored mainly because human raters can only focus on a limited range of speech characteristics (Luoma, 2004). This paper argues for the centrality of collocation evaluation to communicationoriented L2 oral assessment. Based on a logical analysis of the conceptual connections among collocation, speech-processing theories, and rubrics for oral language assessment, I formulated a new construct called Spoken Collocational Competence (SCC). In light of Skehan’s (1998, 2009) trade-off hypothesis, I developed a series of measures for SCC, namely Operational Collocational Performance Measures (OCPMs), to cover three dimensions of learner collocation performance in spontaneous speaking: collocation accuracy, collocation complexity, and collocation fluency. I then investigated the empirical performance of these measures with 2344 lexical collocations extracted from sixty adult English as a second language (ESL) learners’ oral assessment data collected in two distinctive contexts of language use: conversing with an interlocutor on daily-life topics (or the SPEAK exam) and giving an academic lecture

Emmanouil Tsardoulias, A. Symeonidis, P. Mitkas

Elizabeth Ann Hirshorn, Elizabeth Ann Hirshorn, Matthew William Geoffrey Dye et al.

While reading is challenging for many deaf individuals, some become proficient readers. Yet we do not know the component processes that support reading comprehension in these individuals. Speech-based phonological knowledge is one of the strongest predictors of reading comprehension in hearing individuals, yet its role in deaf readers is controversial. This could reflect the highly varied language backgrounds among deaf readers as well as the difficulty of disentangling the relative contribution of phonological versus orthographic knowledge of spoken language, in our case ‘English’, in this population. Here we assessed the impact of language experience on reading comprehension in deaf readers by recruiting oral deaf individuals, who use spoken English as their primary mode of communication, and deaf native signers of American Sign Language. First, to address the contribution of spoken English phonological knowledge in deaf readers, we present novel tasks that evaluate phonological versus orthographic knowledge. Second, the impact of this knowledge, as well as verbal short-term memory and long-term memory skills, on reading comprehension was evaluated. The best predictor of reading comprehension differed as a function of language experience, with long-term memory, as measured by free recall, being a better predictor in deaf native signers than in oral deaf. In contrast, the measures of English phonological knowledge, independent of orthographic knowledge, best predicted reading comprehension in oral deaf individuals. These results suggest successful reading strategies differ across deaf readers as a function of their language experience, and highlight a possible alternative route to literacy in deaf native signers.

J. Mccroskey

Jilliam Joe, J. C. Harmes, Corey A. Hickerson

S. Bodnar, C. Cucchiarini, H. Strik

Gaining the ability to speak proficiently is an important goal in second language learning, and grammatical correctness is an important dimension of oral proficiency. To acquire the ability to produce grammatically correct speech in everyday conversational situations, learners must practice producing speech until they can do so with little to no concious effort. For maximum pedagogical effectiveness, practice exercises should challenge learners to produce spoken output and provide corrective feedback (CF) on their productions so that learners may notice and correct their mistakes. In this paper, we survey the field of Intelligent Computerassisted Language Learning (ICALL) to examine the extent to which current offerings meet the pedagogical requirements for training grammatical accuracy in oral communication. Our analysis shows that few grammarfocused systems support oral practice, and that systems which do offer oral practice tend to train conversational fluency. In response to these findings, we present our position that grammar accuracy should be addressed in ICALL systems and that, in spite of technological limitations, it is possible to deploy speech technology in ICALL systems to support spoken interaction and allow individualized oral grammar practice and feedback.

José Manuel Pedrosa

RESUMEN. Análisis de una fórmula poética (el amante que quiere ser enterrado en la barbilla o en el cuerpo de la amada) documentada desde los tiempos de Cervantes, Góngora o Meléndez Valdés hasta la poesía tradicional de España e Hispanoamérica del siglo XXI. Comparación con versiones musicales compuestas por Rückert y Schumann, o Gauthier y Berlioz. ABSTRACT. Analysis of a poetic formula (about a lover who claims for being buried inside his beloved’s chin) that we know from the times of Cervantes, Góngora and Meléndez Valdés until Spanish and Latin American oral poetry of the XXIst century. Comparison with some musical versions by Rückert and Schumann, as well as Gauthier and Berlioz.

Jill L. Elfenbein, M. Hardin-Jones, Julia M. Davis

Elaine Pienaar, Natalie Stearn, De Wet Swanepoel

Hearing impairment has far reaching consequences for affected individuals, in terms of quality of life indicators. In a developing South African context the hearing impaired population is faced with limited aural rehabilitation services. This study evaluated self-reported outcomes of aural rehabilitation in a group of adults in the public healthcare sector with a standardized outcomes measurement tool (IOI-HA). Sixty-one respondents participated (44% males; 56% females), with a mean age of 69.7 years. Results revealed that the majority of respondents experienced favourable outcomes in all domains of the inventory comprising of: daily use of hearing aids, benefits provided by hearing aids, residual activity limitation, satisfaction with hearing aids, residual participation restriction, impact of hearing difficulties on others, and changes in quality of life. Statistically significant relationships were obtained between the daily use of hearing aids, the degree of hearing loss, and the type of hearing aids fitted, as well as the benefits received from hearing aids in difficult listening environments (p < 0.05). Despite challenges of developing contexts, the mean scores distribution compared positively to similar reports from developed countries. Outcomes of improved quality of life emphasize the importance of providing affordable hearing aids and services to all hearing impaired individuals in South Africa.

Naeimeh Daneshmandan, P. Borghei, Nasrin Yazdany et al.