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<b>Introduction:</b> Speech audiometry is well established and frequently used test in audiology as well as in cochlear implant recipient's performance evaluation. Expanding indications for cochlear implantation forces use of more refined methods of both assessment and prognosis of outcome of aural rehabilitation. Variability of speech intelligibility tests and materials require standardized protocol facilitating outcome comparison.<b>Aim:</b> Aim of this review paper is analysis of usage of speech audiometry and other speech intelligibility tests and its results reporting in patients with cochlear implant in Poland and in the World.<b>Materials and methods:</b> Protocols of many different domestic and foreign health centers where compared, showing many methodological differences. Selection of literature for analysis was made according to PRISMA algorithm recommendations. Twenty research papers were chosen for review process.<b>Discussion:</b> In many papers we found lack of data regarding methodology of performed tests. Many authors indicate difficulties in comparing results, especially if publication lacks basic technical information. Despite that if right method is applied, results can be compared. In literature only one level of material presentation in test is prevalent. Speech audiometry is significant in exploring connections between multiple pre-op and post-op prognostic aspects of cochlear implantation.<b>Conclusions:</b> Because of variability in presentation and reporting of CI patients outcomes, consensus is needed in area of system facilitating comparison of research results. This may provide simple solution for accurate analysis and choosing right set of data. Schematic of presentation of audiological data in authors health center was proposed as example.

In recent years, the research pertaining to speech recognition technology in the Kazakh language has gained significant importance. This is due to the increasing demand for natural language processing applications in the region where Kazakh is predominantly spoken. Thus, there exists an urgent requirement for precise and dependable speech recognition systems. The research study examines the application of sophisticated deep learning methodologies, such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Hidden Markov Model (HMM), in facilitating speech recognition for the Kazakh language. Additionally, the investigation delves into how various techniques, including data preprocessing, acoustic modeling, and language modeling, can aid in devising effective speech recognition systems. The article deliberates on the feasible uses of speech recognition technology in the geographic area where Kazakh language is spoken and outlines its future research prospects. The investigation underscores the significance of persistent inquiry in this realm to confront distinctive obstacles encountered in creating speech recognition systems for languages with restricted resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how listeners categorize second language (L2) accents and how their linguistic background affects this categorization. Ninety-eight adult bilingual and multilingual Greek listeners categorized accents in a familiar (British English)-unfamiliar (Australian English) L2 accent condition. Data were collected through an online survey and analysed using binomial mixed-effects models and signal detection analysis. The results demonstrated that both bilinguals and multilinguals exhibited low performance in the task, potentially due to their decreased familiarity with the Australian English accent and the fact that the two accents are phonetically similar. However, despite both groups' low performance, multilinguals outperformed bilinguals in accent categorization accuracy. This advantage could be attributed to a combination of cognitive and social dynamics. Results expand upon prior research, indicating that exposure to accent variation enhances listeners' abilities to categorize non-native accents. The study provides important theoretical implications for the perception of accents and practical insights into foreign language learning and multilingual communication., (© 2024 The Author(s). British Journal of Developmental Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Psychological Society.)

Objectives: Despite performing well in standard clinical assessments of speech perception, many cochlear implant (CI) users report experiencing significant difficulties when listening in real-world environments. We hypothesize that this disconnect may be related, in part, to the limited ecological validity of tests that are currently used clinically and in research laboratories. The challenges that arise from degraded auditory information provided by a CI, combined with the listener's finite cognitive resources, may lead to difficulties when processing speech material that is more demanding than the single words or single sentences that are used in clinical tests., Design: Here, we investigate whether speech identification performance and processing effort (indexed by pupil dilation measures) are affected when CI users or normal-hearing control subjects are asked to repeat two sentences presented sequentially instead of just one sentence., Results: Response accuracy was minimally affected in normal-hearing listeners, but CI users showed a wide range of outcomes, from no change to decrements of up to 45 percentage points. The amount of decrement was not predictable from the CI users' performance in standard clinical tests. Pupillometry measures tracked closely with task difficulty in both the CI group and the normal-hearing group, even though the latter had speech perception scores near ceiling levels for all conditions., Conclusions: Speech identification performance is significantly degraded in many (but not all) CI users in response to input that is only slightly more challenging than standard clinical tests; specifically, when two sentences are presented sequentially before requesting a response, instead of presenting just a single sentence at a time. This potential "2-sentence problem" represents one of the simplest possible scenarios that go beyond presentation of the single words or sentences used in most clinical tests of speech perception, and it raises the possibility that even good performers in single-sentence tests may be seriously impaired by other ecologically relevant manipulations. The present findings also raise the possibility that a clinical version of a 2-sentence test may provide actionable information for counseling and rehabilitating CI users, and for people who interact with them closely., Competing Interests: The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose., (Copyright © 2024 Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc. All rights reserved.)

Connected speech processes (CSPs) occur randomly in everyday conversations of native speakers; however, such phonological variations can bring about challenges for non-native listeners. Looking at CSP literature, there seems to be very few studies that involved young foreign language learners. Therefore, the present study aimed to explore the development of connected speech perception skills by focusing on 201 9- to 12-year-old Chinese EFL children. It also incorporated systematic error analysis to further probe into the specific perceptual difficulties. The results indicate that: (1) Despite a significantly ascending trend for the overall growth of perception skills, no significant differences were found between 11 and 12 year olds in elision and contraction, which suggests that the developmental trend varied depending on different CSP types; (2) Although random errors decreased with age, the number of lexicon and syntax errors gradually increased, and the distribution of perceptual errors shifted from the level of words and syllables to that of phonemes; (3) The primary types of errors resulting in the perception difficulties for elision and contraction were consonant errors, grammatical errors and morphology errors. Ergo, this study enhances the understanding of connected speech perception among EFL children and provides some implications for EFL/ESL listening instructions., (© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston.)

Computational models of infant word-finding typically operate over transcriptions of infant-directed speech corpora. It is now possible to test models of word segmentation on speech materials, rather than transcriptions of speech. We propose that such modeling efforts be conducted over the speech of the experimental stimuli used in studies measuring infants' capacity for learning from spoken sentences. Correspondence with infant outcomes in such experiments is an appropriate benchmark for models of infants. We demonstrate such an analysis by applying the DP-Parser model of Algayres and colleagues to auditory stimuli used in infant psycholinguistic experiments by Pelucchi and colleagues. The DP-Parser model takes speech as input, and creates multiple overlapping embeddings from each utterance. Prospective words are identified as clusters of similar embedded segments. This allows segmentation of each utterance into possible words, using a dynamic programming method that maximizes the frequency of constituent segments. We show that DP-Parse mimics American English learners' performance in extracting words from Italian sentences, favoring the segmentation of words with high syllabic transitional probability. This kind of computational analysis over actual stimuli from infant experiments may be helpful in tuning future models to match human performance., (© 2024 The Authors. Cognitive Science published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Cognitive Science Society (CSS).)

Vowel hiatus is typically resolved in Australian English through complementary strategies of liaison (j-gliding/w-gliding/linking-r) and glottalisation. Previous work suggests a change in progress towards increased use of glottalisation as an optimal hiatus-breaker, which creates syntagmatic contrast between adjacent vowels, particularly when the right-edge vowel is strong (i.e. at the foot boundary). Liaison continues to be used when right-edge vowels are weak, but glottalisation as a hiatus resolution strategy in general appears to be increasing and may be more common in speakers from non-English speaking backgrounds raising the question of whether exposure to linguistic diversity could be driving the change. We examine hiatus resolution in speakers from neighbourhoods that vary according to levels of language diversity. We elicited gliding and linking-r hiatus contexts to determine how prosodic strength of flanking vowels and speakers' exposure to linguistic diversity affect hiatus resolution. Results confirm that glottalisation occurs most frequently with strong right-edge vowels, and gliding/linking-r are more likely with weak right-edge vowels. However, strategies differ between gliding and linking-r contexts, suggesting differing implementation mechanisms. In addition, speakers from ethnolinguistically diverse areas produce increased glottalisation in all contexts supporting the idea that change to the hiatus resolution system may be driven by language contact., (© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston.)

The present study examined the cross-modal cueing effect of musical rhythmic beats on non-native speech rhythm production. Two groups of Chinese learners of French were cued respectively with rhythmic beats that either matched (matching group) or mismatched (mismatching group) the rhythm patterns of the target French sentences. The participants were asked to produce the target sentences after cueing and their speech production was compared with their baseline condition in which no cueing was used. The results showed that the matching group produced the target French rhythm significantly better after cueing with musical rhythmic beats that matched the French rhythm, in contrast to the mismatching group where no significant improvement was found. Individual differences in auditory short-term memory and rhythmic skills were not related to improvement in producing French rhythm after cueing. The results suggest that musical rhythmic cueing can be used to improve non-native speech rhythm production, further indicating a close link between speech and music in the temporal domain., (© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.)

We investigate how three adult groups - experienced L2 English listeners; experienced D2 (second dialect) listeners; and native L1/D1 listeners - categorise Australian English (AusE) lax front vowels /ɪ e æ/ in /hVt/, /hVl/ and /mVl/ environments in a forced-choice categorisation task of synthesised continua. In study 1, AusE listeners show predictable categorisations, with an effect of coarticulation raising the vowel in perception for nasal onset stimuli, and a following lateral lowering the vowel in perception. In study 2, Irish (D2) and Chinese listeners (L2) have different categorisations than AusE listeners, likely guided by their D1/L1. Coarticulation influences the D1/D2 groups in similar ways, but results in more difficulty and less agreement for the Chinese. We also investigate the role of extralinguistic factors. For the Chinese listeners, higher proficiency in English does not correlate with more Australian-like categorisation behaviour. However, having fewer Chinese in their social network results in more Australian-like categorisation for some stimuli. These findings lend partial support to the role of experience and exposure in L2/D2 contexts, whereby categorisation is likely still driven by native categories, with increased exposure leading to better mapping, but not to a restructuring of underlying phonetic categories., (© 2023 the author(s), published by De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston.)

Listening to conversing talkers in quiet environments and remembering the content is a common activity. However, research on the cognitive demands involved is limited. This study investigates the relevance of individuals' cognitive functions for listeners' memory of two-talker conversations and their listening effort in quiet listening settings. A dual-task paradigm was employed to explore memory of conversational content and listening effort while analyzing the role of participants' (n = 29) working memory capacity (measured through the operation span task), attention (Frankfurt attention inventory 2), and information-processing speed (trail making test). In the primary task, participants listened to a conversation between a male and female talker and answered content-related questions. The two talkers' audio signals were presented through headphones, either spatially separated (+ /- 60°) or co-located (0°). Participants concurrently performed a vibrotactile pattern recognition task as a secondary task to measure listening effort. Results indicated that attention and processing speed were related to memory of conversational content and that all three cognitive functions were related to listening effort. Memory performance and listening effort were similar for spatially separated and co-located talkers when considering the psychometric measures. This research offers valuable insights into cognitive processes during two-talker conversations in quiet settings., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Perceptual narrowing of speech perception supposes that young infants can discriminate most speech sounds early in life. During the second half of the first year, infants' phonetic sensitivity is attuned to their native phonology. However, supporting evidence for this pattern comes primarily from learners from a limited number of regions and languages. Very little evidence has accumulated on infants learning languages spoken in Asia, which accounts for most of the world's population. The present study examined the developmental trajectory of Korean-learning infants' sensitivity to a native stop contrast during the first year of life. The Korean language utilizes unusual voiceless three-way stop categories, requiring target categories to be derived from tight phonetic space. Further, two of these categories-lenis and aspirated-have undergone a diachronic change in recent decades as the primary acoustic cue for distinction has shifted among modern speakers. Consequently, the input distributions of these categories are mixed across speakers and speech styles, requiring learners to build flexible representations of target categories along these variations. The results showed that among the three age groups-4-6 months, 7-9 months, and 10-12 months-we tested, only 10-12-month-olds showed weak sensitivity to the two categories, suggesting that robust discrimination is not in place by the end of the first year. The study adds scarcely represented data, lending additional support for the lack of early sensitivity and prolonged emergence of native phonology that are inconsistent with learners of predominant studies and calls for more diverse samples to verify the generality of the typical perceptual narrowing pattern. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: We investigated Korean-learning infants' developmental trajectory of native phoneme categories and whether they show the typical perceptual narrowing pattern. Robust discrimination did not appear until 12 months, suggesting that Korean infants' native phonology is not stabilized by the end of the first year. The prolonged emergence of sensitivity could be due to restricted phonetic space and input variations but suggests the possibility of a different developmental trajectory. The current study contributes scarcely represented Korean-learning infants' phonetic discrimination data to the speech development field., (© 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Objectives: Understanding speech in noise (SIN) is the dominant complaint of individuals with hearing loss. For decades, the default test of speech perception in routine audiologic assessment has been monosyllabic word recognition in quiet (WRQ), which does not directly address patient concerns, leading some to advocate that measures of SIN should be integrated into routine practice. However, very little is known with regard to how SIN abilities are affected by different types of hearing loss. Here, we examine performance on clinical measures of WRQ and SIN in a large patient base consisting of a variety of hearing loss types, including conductive (CHL), mixed (MHL), and sensorineural (SNHL) losses., Design: In a retrospective study, we examined data from 5593 patients (51% female) who underwent audiometric assessment at the Stanford Ear Institute. All individuals completed pure-tone audiometry, and speech perception testing of monaural WRQ, and monaural QuickSIN. Patient ages ranged from 18 to 104 years (average = 57). The average age in years for the different classifications of hearing loss was 51.1 (NH), 48.5 (CHL), 64.2 (MHL), and 68.5 (SNHL), respectively. Generalized linear mixed-effect models and quartile regression were used to determine the relationship between hearing loss type and severity for the different speech-recognition outcome measures., Results: Patients with CHL had similar performance to patients with normal hearing on both WRQ and QuickSIN, regardless of the hearing loss severity. In patients with MHL or SNHL, WRQ scores remained largely excellent with increasing hearing loss until the loss was moderately severe or worse. In contrast, QuickSIN signal to noise ratio (SNR) losses showed an orderly systematic decrease as the degree of hearing loss became more severe. This effect scaled with the data, with threshold-QuickSIN relationships absent for CHL, and becoming increasingly stronger for MHL and strongest in patients with SNHL. However, the variability in these data suggests that only 57% of the variance in WRQ scores, and 50% of the variance in QuickSIN SNR losses, could be accounted for by the audiometric thresholds. Patients who would not be differentiated by WRQ scores are shown to be potentially differentiable by SIN scores., Conclusions: In this data set, conductive hearing loss had little effect on WRQ scores or QuickSIN SNR losses. However, for patients with MHL or SNHL, speech perception abilities decreased as the severity of the hearing loss increased. In these data, QuickSIN SNR losses showed deficits in performance with degrees of hearing loss that yielded largely excellent WRQ scores. However, the considerable variability in the data suggests that even after classifying patients according to their type of hearing loss, hearing thresholds only account for a portion of the variance in speech perception abilities, particularly in noise. These results are consistent with the idea that variables such as cochlear health and aging add explanatory power over audibility alone., Competing Interests: The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Ear & Hearing is published on behalf of the American Auditory Society, by Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc.)

Purpose: The Microphone and Receiver in the ear (M&RIE) hearing aid is designed to consider the pinna cues by placing an additional microphone along with a standard receiver at the entrance of the ear canal. There is a need to clinically validate the technology using speech identification measures, as a literature shortage exists. The objective of the study was to evaluate speech identification and quality rating with hearing aids fitted with standard and M&RIE receivers., Method: Twenty individuals (mean ± SD age being 34.10 ± 11.9 years) with mild-to-moderately severe sensorineural hearing loss were divided into two groups: naïve and experienced. Their speech identification obtained using the receiver in the ear hearing aid compatible with standard and M&RIE receivers were compared. The study assessed speech identification in quiet using ten sentences, calculated SNR-50 using the Spearman-Karber equation, and used an 11-point scale for self-perceived quality rating., Results: The study analyzed data using SPSS and found no significant difference between naive and experienced hearing aid users in quiet and SNR-50 conditions (p > 0.05). However, naive users rated higher in clarity, naturalness, pleasantness, and overall impression of standard receiver settings. Across different receiver settings, both naïve and experienced groups revealed better speech identification with the M&RIE receiver for both SIS (p < 0.05) and SNR-50 (p < 0.05) measures., Conclusion: The study found that placing a third microphone in the ear canal improves speech identification and quality rating in both naïve and experienced users, with pinna and ear canal resonance playing a crucial role in prescribing hearing aid gain., (© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

Objectives: This study aimed to determine whether the improvement of hearing by surgical treatment alleviates cognitive demands through pupil response in patients with unilateral congenital aural atresia (CAA)., Design: A prospective study was performed on patients with unilateral CAA who were scheduled to undergo primary atresioplasty between November 2017 and May 2020. Pure-tone audiometry, auditory digit span test, Korean Speech Perception in Noise test, pupil measurement during speech tests, and questionnaires (Sound-Spatial-Qualities of Hearing Scale; subjective listening effort rating) were performed before and 6 months after surgery., Results: Of 30 consecutive patients who initially enrolled, only 18 patients (12 males and 6 females) were included in the analysis. When the improvement of the air-bone gap and interaural difference of air conduction within 30 dB was defined as a successful hearing outcome, successful hearing improvement was achieved in 50% of the 18 patients. In pupil measurement, the success group had a significantly smaller mean pupil dilation response than the nonsuccess group at 0 and -3 dB signal to noise ratio (SNR) (all p < 0.01). In addition, significant differences were identified between the two groups for peak dilation and peak latency at all noise levels (all p < 0.01). When analyzing the change in pupil response before and after surgery, the difference in relative mean pupil dilation in the success group was significantly greater than that in the nonsuccess group at -3 dB SNR ( p = 0.02). In addition, the success group showed a significantly greater change in peak latency than the nonsuccess group at the -3 dB SNR ( p < 0.01). The difference in peak dilation tended to be greater in the success group than in the nonsuccess group, but the difference was not statistically significant., Conclusions: Patients with unilateral CAA who achieved surgically improved hearing had a smaller pupil dilation response than those who did not. These results suggest that successful hearing outcomes after surgery in patients with unilateral CAA may reduce the cognitive effort required to understand speech under difficult listening conditions., Competing Interests: The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose., (Copyright © 2024 Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc. All rights reserved.)

Objectives: Older adults often complain of difficulty in communicating in noisy environments. Contextual information is considered an important cue for identifying everyday speech. To date, it has not been clear exactly how context use (CU) and reliance on context in older adults are affected by hearing status and cognitive function. The present study examined the effects of semantic context on the performance of speech recognition, recall, perceived listening effort (LE), and noise tolerance, and further explored the impacts of hearing loss and working memory capacity on CU and reliance on context among older adults., Design: Fifty older adults with normal hearing and 56 older adults with mild-to-moderate hearing loss between the ages of 60 and 95 years participated in this study. A median split of the backward digit span further classified the participants into high working memory (HWM) and low working memory (LWM) capacity groups. Each participant performed high- and low-context Repeat and Recall tests, including a sentence repeat and delayed recall task, subjective assessments of LE, and tolerable time under seven signal to noise ratios (SNRs). CU was calculated as the difference between high- and low-context sentences for each outcome measure. The proportion of context use (PCU) in high-context performance was taken as the reliance on context to explain the degree to which participants relied on context when they repeated and recalled high-context sentences., Results: Semantic context helps improve the performance of speech recognition and delayed recall, reduces perceived LE, and prolongs noise tolerance in older adults with and without hearing loss. In addition, the adverse effects of hearing loss on the performance of repeat tasks were more pronounced in low context than in high context, whereas the effects on recall tasks and noise tolerance time were more significant in high context than in low context. Compared with other tasks, the CU and PCU in repeat tasks were more affected by listening status and working memory capacity. In the repeat phase, hearing loss increased older adults' reliance on the context of a relatively challenging listening environment, as shown by the fact that when the SNR was 0 and -5 dB, the PCU (repeat) of the hearing loss group was significantly greater than that of the normal-hearing group, whereas there was no significant difference between the two hearing groups under the remaining SNRs. In addition, older adults with LWM had significantly greater CU and PCU in repeat tasks than those with HWM, especially at SNRs with moderate task demands., Conclusions: Taken together, semantic context not only improved speech perception intelligibility but also released cognitive resources for memory encoding in older adults. Mild-to-moderate hearing loss and LWM capacity in older adults significantly increased the use and reliance on semantic context, which was also modulated by the level of SNR., (Copyright © 2024 Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc. All rights reserved.)

The developmental trajectory of audiovisual speech perception in Mandarin-speaking children remains understudied. This cross-sectional study in Mandarin-speaking 3- to 4-year-old, 5- to 6-year-old, 7- to 8-year-old children, and adults from Xiamen, China (n = 87, 44 males) investigated this issue using the McGurk paradigm with three levels of auditory noise. For the identification of congruent stimuli, 3- to 4-year-olds underperformed older groups whose performances were comparable. For the perception of the incongruent stimuli, a developmental shift was observed as 3- to 4-year-olds made significantly more audio-dominant but fewer audiovisual-integrated responses to incongruent stimuli than older groups. With increasing auditory noise, the difference between children and adults widened in identifying congruent stimuli but narrowed in perceiving incongruent ones. The findings regarding noise effects agree with the statistically optimal hypothesis., (© 2023 The Authors. Child Development © 2023 Society for Research in Child Development.)

Objectives: Mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) can have persistent effects in the auditory domain (e.g., difficulty listening in noise), despite individuals having normal pure-tone auditory sensitivity. Individuals with a history of mild TBI often perceive hearing difficulty and greater listening effort in complex listening situations. The purpose of the present study was to examine self-perceived hearing difficulty, listening effort, and performance on an auditory processing test battery in adults with a history of mild TBI compared with a control group., Design: Twenty adults ages 20 to 53 years old participated divided into a mild TBI (n = 10) and control group (n = 10). Perceived hearing difficulties were measured using the Adult Auditory Processing Scale and the Hearing Handicap Inventory for Adults. Listening effort was measured using the National Aeronautics and Space Administration-Task Load Index. Listening effort ratings were obtained at baseline, after each auditory processing test, and at the completion of the test battery. The auditory processing test battery included (1) dichotic word recognition, (2) the 500-Hz masking level difference, (3) the Listening in Spatialized Noise-Sentences test, and (4) the Word Auditory Recognition and Recall Measure (WARRM)., Results: Results indicated that individuals with a history of mild TBI perceived significantly greater degrees of hearing difficulty and listening effort than the control group. There were no significant group differences on two of the auditory processing tasks (dichotic word recognition or Listening in Spatialized Noise-Sentences). The mild TBI group exhibited significantly poorer performance on the 500-Hz MLD and the WARRM, a measure of auditory working memory, than the control group. Greater degrees of self-perceived hearing difficulty were significantly associated with greater listening effort and poorer auditory working memory. Greater listening effort was also significantly associated with poorer auditory working memory., Conclusions: Results demonstrate that adults with a history of mild TBI may experience subjective hearing difficulty and listening effort when listening in challenging acoustic environments. Poorer auditory working memory on the WARRM task was observed for the adults with mild TBI and was associated with greater hearing difficulty and listening effort. Taken together, the present study suggests that conventional clinical audiometric battery alone may not provide enough information about auditory processing deficits in individuals with a history of mild TBI. The results support the use of a multifaceted battery of auditory processing tasks and subjective measures when evaluating individuals with a history of mild TBI., Competing Interests: The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose., (Copyright © 2024 Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc. All rights reserved.)

Familiarity with a talker's voice provides numerous benefits to speech perception, including faster responses and improved intelligibility in quiet and in noise. Yet, it is unclear whether familiarity facilitates talker adaptation, or the processing benefit stemming from hearing speech from one talker compared to multiple different talkers. Here, listeners completed a speeded recognition task for words presented in either single-talker or multiple-talker blocks. Talkers were either famous (the last five Presidents of the United States of America) or non-famous (other male politicians of similar ages). Participants either received no information about the talkers before the word recognition task (Experiments 1 and 3) or heard the talkers and saw their names first (Experiment 2). As expected, responses were faster in the single-talker blocks than in the multiple-talker blocks. Famous voices elicited faster responses in Experiment 1, but familiarity effects were extinguished in Experiment 2, possibly by hearing all voices recently before the experiment. When talkers were counterbalanced across single-talker and mixed-talker blocks in Experiment 3, no familiarity effects were observed. Predictions of familiarity facilitating talker adaptation (smaller increase in response times across single- and multiple-talker blocks for famous voices) were not confirmed. Thus, talker familiarity might not augment adaptation to a consistent talker., (© 2022. The Psychonomic Society, Inc.)

Purpose: In patients with unilateral sensorineural hearing loss (USNHL), we explored both objective functional audiological gains and subjective satisfaction, indicating when a unilateral hearing aid is valuable., Methods: Thirty-seven patients with mild-to-moderate USNHL (mean pure-tone thresholds between 25 and 70 dB) were prescribed unilateral hearing aids. Functional gain, the aided speech discrimination score (SDS), the Hearing in Noise Test (HINT) score, and the sound localization test score were collected, and a questionnaire (the Hearing Handicap Inventory for the Elderly, HHIE) completed after 1, 2, and 3 months of hearing aid use. We classified the participants as having 'no handicap' (HHIE < 17), 'mild-to-moderate handicap' (17-42), and 'significant handicap' (> 42)., Results: The decrease in handicap afforded by unilateral hearing aids was largest in the 'significant handicap' group (the HHIE total score fell from 59.1 to 37.2; P = 0.007). There were no between-group differences in either functional gain or the aided SDS. Only the 'significant handicap' group evidenced an improved HINT score; the composite signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) fell from - 1.5 to - 2.2 dB [S/N] (P = 0.023). The HHIE usefully indicated when a hearing aid alleviated the discomfort of USNHL; patients with unaided HHIE scores ≥ 20 evidenced significant decreases in the composite SNR (- 1.7 to - 2.0 dB [S/N]; P = 0.045)., Conclusions: When considering whether to prescribe a unilateral hearing aid for patients with mild-to-moderate USNHL, it is helpful to use the HHIE to evaluate discomfort. If the total score is ≥ 20, a hearing aid is appropriate., (© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

Background and Objectives: The ability to localize sounds is partly recovered in patients using a cochlear implant (CI) in one ear and a hearing aid (HA) on the contralateral side. Binaural processing seems effective at least to some extent, despite the difference between electric and acoustic stimulation in each ear. To obtain further insights into the mechanisms of binaural hearing in these listeners, localization of low- and high-frequency sounds was tested., Study Design: The study used a within-subject design, where participants were tasked with localizing sound sources in the horizontal plane. The experiment was conducted in an anechoic chamber, where an array of seven loudspeakers was mounted along the 24 azimuthal angle span from -90° to +90°. Stimuli were applied with different frequencies: broadband noise and high- and low-frequency noise., Subjects: Ten CI recipients participated in the study. All had an asymmetric hearing loss with a CI in the poorer ear and an HA on the contralateral side., Main Outcome Measures: Accuracy of sound localization in terms of angular error and percentage of correct localization scores., Results: The median angular error was 40° in bimodal conditions for both broadband noise and high-frequency noise stimuli. The angular error increased to 47° for low-frequency noise stimuli. In the unilaterally aided condition with an HA, only a median angular error of 78° was observed., Conclusions: Irrespective of the frequency composition of the stimuli, this group of bimodal listeners showed some ability to localize sounds. Angular errors were larger than those reported in the literature for bilateral CI users or single-sided deaf listeners with a CI. In the unilateral listening condition with HA, only localization of sounds was not possible for most subjects., Competing Interests: Conflict of interest: The authors declare no conflicts of interest., (Copyright © 2024, Otology & Neurotology, Inc.)

The Language ENvironment Analysis system (LENA) records children's language environment and provides an automatic estimate of adult-child conversational turn count (CTC) by automatically identifying adult and child speech in close temporal proximity. To assess the reliability of this measure, we examine correlation and agreement between LENA's CTC estimates and manual measurement of adult-child turn-taking in two corpora collected in the USA: a bilingual corpus of Spanish-English-speaking families with infants between 4 and 22 months (n = 37), and a corpus of monolingual families with English-speaking 5-year-olds (n = 56). In each corpus for each child, 100 30-second segments were extracted from daylong recordings in two ways, yielding a total of 9300 minutes of manually annotated audio. LENA's CTC estimate for the same segments was obtained through the LENA software. The two measures of CTC had low correlations for the segments from the monolingual 5-year-olds sampled in both ways, and somewhat higher correlations for the bilingual samples. LENA substantially overestimated CTC on average, relative to manual measurement, for three out of four analysis conditions, and limits of agreement were wide in all cases. Segment-level analyses demonstrated that accidental contiguity had the largest individual impact on LENA's average CTC error, affecting 12-17% of analyzed segments. Other factors significantly contributing to CTC error were speech from other children, presence of multiple adults, and presence of electronic media. These results indicate wide discrepancies between LENA's CTC estimates and manual CTCs, and call into question the comparability of LENA's CTC measure across participants, conditions, and developmental time points., (© 2023. The Psychonomic Society, Inc.)

Speech motor resources may be recruited to assist challenging speech perception in younger normally hearing listeners, but the extent to which this occurs for older adult listeners is unclear. We investigated if speech motor resources are also recruited in older adults during speech perception. Specifically, we investigated if suppression of speech motor resources via sub-vocal rehearsal affects speech perception compared to non-speech motor suppression (jaw movement) and passive listening. Participants identified words in speech-shaped noise at signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) from -16 to +16 dB in three listening conditions during which participants: (1) opened and closed their jaw (non-speech movement); (2) sub-vocally mimed 'the' (articulatory suppression); (3) produced no concurrent movement (passive listening). Data from 46 younger adults (M age = 20.17 years, SD = 1.61, 36 female) and 41 older adults (M age = 69 years, SD = 5.82, 21 female) were analysed. Linear mixed effects modelling investigated the impact of age, listening condition, and self-reported hearing ability on speech perception (d' prime). Results indicated that speech perception ability was significantly worse in older adults relative to younger adults across all listening conditions. A significant interaction between age group and listening condition indicated that younger adults showed poorer performance during articulatory suppression compared to passive listening, but older adults performed equivalently across conditions. This finding suggests that speech motor resources are less available to support speech perception in older adults, providing important insights for auditory-motor integration for speech understanding and communication in ageing., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

Objective: To investigate the safety and efficacy of a novel active transcutaneous bone conduction implant (BCI) device for patients with single-sided deafness (SSD)., Study Design: Prospective cohort study., Setting: Tertiary referral hospitals., Methods: This prospective multicenter study was conducted at 15 institutions nationwide. Thirty adult (aged ≥19 years) SSD patients were recruited. They underwent implantation of an active transcutaneous BCI device (Bonebridge BCI602). Objective outcomes included aided pure-tone thresholds, aided speech discrimination scores (SDSs), and the Hearing in Noise Test (HINT) and sound localization test results. The Bern Benefit in Single-Sided Deafness (BBSS) questionnaire, the Abbreviated Profile of Hearing Aid Benefit (APHAB) questionnaire, and the Tinnitus Handicap Inventory (THI) were used to measure subjective benefits., Results: The mean aided pure-tone threshold was 34.2 (11.3), mean (SD), dB HL at 500 to 4000 Hz. The mean total BBSS score was 27.5 (13.8). All APHAB questionnaire domain scores showed significant improvements: ease of communication, 33.6 (23.2) versus 22.6 (21.3), P = .025; reverberation, 44.8 (16.6) versus 32.8 (15.9), P = .002; background noise, 55.5 (23.6) versus 35.2 (18.1), P < .001; and aversiveness, 36.7 (22.8) versus 25.8 (21.4), P = .028. Moreover, the THI scores were significantly reduced [47.4 (30.1) versus 31.1 (27.0), P = .003]. Congenital SSD was a significant factor of subjective benefit (-11.643; 95% confidence interval: -21.946 to -1.340)., Conclusion: The BCI602 active transcutaneous BCI device can provide functional hearing gain without any adverse effects and is a feasible option for acquired SSD patients with long-term deafness., (© 2023 American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery Foundation.)

The aim of this paper is to greatly decrease the use of physical devices. To achieve this, the approach of humancomputer interaction was employed, implementing a system that uses only finger movements to control the mouse pointer on the screen without relying on any hardware like a physical mouse. This system uses OpenCV as a medium for input obtained from a live camera and uses media pipe models to convert plane inputs from OpenCV into useful data, which is more efficient compared to traditional models like object and color detection. Along with the contactless mouse, this paper also implemented a voice system to support the contactless mouse in its activation and deactivation. This is achieved with the help of modules like speech recognition and PyAudio. This system also assists the user with simple tasks, such as opening Google or browsing content. By combining both voice recognition and a contactless mouse using hand movements, the system was converted into a seemingly contactless device. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Speech recognition is a critical task in spoken language applications. Globally known models such as DeepSpeech2 are effective for English speech recognition, however, they are not well-suited for languages like Arabic. This paper is interested in recognizing the Arabic language, especially Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). This paper proposed two models that utilize "Franco-Arabic" as an encoding mechanism and additional enhancements to recognize MSA. The first model uses Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) as input features, while the second employs six sequential Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) layers. Each model is then followed by a fully connected layer with a dropout layer which helped reduce overfitting. The Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss is used to calculate the prediction error and to maximize the correct transcription likelihood. Two experiments were conducted for each model. The first experiment involved 41 h of continuous speech over 15 epochs. Whereas, the second one utilized 69 h over 30 epochs. The experiments showed that the first model excels in speed while the second excels in accuracy, and both outperformed the well-known DeepSpeech2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Limited data availability remains a significant challenge for Whisper's low-resource speech recognition performance, falling short of practical application requirements. While previous studies have successfully reduced the recognition error rates of target language speech through fine-tuning, a comprehensive exploration and analysis of Whisper's fine-tuning capabilities and the advantages and disadvantages of various fine-tuning strategies are still lacking. This paper aims to fill this gap by conducting comprehensive experimental exploration for Whisper's low-resource speech recognition performance using five fine-tuning strategies with limited supervised data from seven low-resource languages. The results and analysis demonstrate that all fine-tuning strategies explored in this paper significantly enhance Whisper's performance. However, different strategies vary in their suitability and practical effectiveness, highlighting the need for careful selection based on specific use cases and resources available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English speech incorporates numerous features associated with the speaker's emotions, offering valuable cues for emotion recognition. This paper begins by briefly outlining preprocessing approaches for English speech signals. Subsequently, the Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC), energy, and short-time zero-crossing rate were chosen as features, and their statistical properties were computed. The resulting 250-dimensional feature fusion was employed as input. A novel approach that combined gated recurrent unit (GRU) and a convolutional neural network (CNN) was designed for emotion recognition. The bidirectional GRU (BiGRU) method was enhanced through jump-joining to create a CNN-Skip-BiGRU model as an emotion recognition method for English speech. Experimental evaluations were conducted using the IEMOCAP dataset. The findings indicated that the fusion features exhibited superior performance in emotion recognition, achieving an unweighted accuracy rate of 70.31% and a weighted accuracy rate of 70.88%. In contrast to models like CNN-long short-term memory (LSTM), the CNN-Skip-BiGRU model demonstrated enhanced discriminative capabilities for different emotions. Moreover, it stood favorably against several existing emotion recognition methods. These results underscore the efficacy of the improved method in English speech emotion identification, suggesting its potential practical applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The traditional wheelchair focuses on the "human-chair" motor function interaction to ensure the elderly and people with disabilities' basic travel. For people with visual, hearing, physical disabilities, etc., the current wheelchairs show shortcomings in terms of accessibility and independent travel for this group. Therefore, this paper develops an intelligent wheelchair with multimodal human–computer interaction and autonomous navigation technology. Firstly, it researches the multimodal human–computer interaction technology of occupant gesture recognition, speech recognition, and head posture recognition and proposes a wheelchair control method of three-dimensional head posture mapping the two-dimensional plane. After testing, the average accuracy of the gesture, head posture and voice control modes of the motorized wheelchair proposed in this study reaches more than 95 percent. Secondly, the LiDAR-based smart wheelchair indoor autonomous navigation technology is investigated to realize the autonomous navigation of the wheelchair by constructing an environment map, using A* and DWA algorithms for global and local path planning, and adaptive Monte Carlo simulation algorithms for real-time localization. Experiments show that the position error of the wheelchair is within 10 cm, and the heading angle error is less than 5° during the autonomous navigation. The multimode human–computer interaction and assisted driving technology proposed in this study can partially compensate and replace the functional deficiencies of the disabled population and improve the quality of life of the elderly and disabled population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project will study a fast retrieval method for music humming speech recognition based on sentence features and deep learning. The method proposed in this paper can realize the fast extraction of songs. According to the characteristics of the natural pause mode of the song, the song database and the song fragments provided by the user are divided into different sentences. The deep learning algorithm of BDTW is used to calculate the similarity of the song's pitch, and users can set matching conditions according to their preferences. It can identify the most significant differences between music fragments and the order of queries in the database. Then, a retrieval method of a music database based on DIS is proposed. It can shorten the acquisition time. Experiments show that the algorithm can recognize humming songs quickly and efficiently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the correct intention of a speaker is critical for social interaction. Speech prosody is an important source for understanding speakers' intentions during verbal communication. However, the neural dynamics by which the human brain translates the prosodic cues into a mental representation of communicative intentions in real time remains unclear. Here, we recorded EEG (electroencephalograph) while participants listened to dialogues. The prosodic features of the critical words at the end of sentences were manipulated to signal either suggestion, warning, or neutral intentions. The results showed that suggestion and warning intentions evoked enhanced late positive event-related potentials (ERPs) compared to the neutral condition. Linear mixed-effects model (LMEM) regression and representational similarity analysis (RSA) analyses revealed that these ERP effects were distinctively correlated with prosodic acoustic analysis, emotional valence evaluation, and intention interpretation in different time windows; The onset latency significantly increased as the processing level of abstractness and communicative intentionality increased. Neural representations of intention and emotional information emerged and parallelly persisted over a long time window, guiding the correct identification of communicative intention. These results provide new insights into understanding the structural components of intention processing and their temporal neural dynamics underlying communicative intention comprehension from speech prosody in online social interactions., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

We investigated how neural oscillations code the hierarchical nature of stress rhythms in speech and how stress processing varies with language experience. By measuring phase synchrony of multilevel EEG-acoustic tracking and intra-brain cross-frequency coupling, we show the encoding of stress involves different neural signatures (delta rhythms = stress foot rate; theta rhythms = syllable rate), is stronger for amplitude vs. duration stress cues, and induces nested delta-theta coherence mirroring the stress-syllable hierarchy in speech. Only native English, but not Mandarin, speakers exhibited enhanced neural entrainment at central stress (2 Hz) and syllable (4 Hz) rates intrinsic to natural English. English individuals with superior cortical-stress tracking capabilities also displayed stronger neural hierarchical coherence, highlighting a nuanced interplay between internal nesting of brain rhythms and external entrainment rooted in language-specific speech rhythms. Our cross-language findings reveal brain-speech synchronization is not purely a "bottom-up" but benefits from "top-down" processing from listeners' language-specific experience., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Reporting discomfort when noise affects listening experience suggests that listeners may be aware, at least to some extent, of adverse environmental conditions and their impact on listening experience. This involves monitoring internal states (effort and confidence). Here we quantified continuous self-report indices that track one's own internal states and investigated age-related differences in this ability. We instructed two groups of young and older adults to continuously report their confidence and effort while listening to stories in fluctuating noise. Using cross-correlation analyses between the time series of fluctuating noise and those of perceived effort or confidence, we showed that (1) participants modified their assessment of effort and confidence based on variations in the noise, with a 4 s lag; (2) there were no differences between the groups. These findings imply extending this method to other areas, expanding the definition of metacognition, and highlighting the value of this ability for older adults., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Objectives: This paper reports a noninvasive method for quantifying neural synchrony in the cochlear nerve (i.e., peripheral neural synchrony) in cochlear implant (CI) users, which allows for evaluating this physiological phenomenon in human CI users for the first time in the literature. In addition, this study assessed how peripheral neural synchrony was correlated with temporal resolution acuity and speech perception outcomes measured in quiet and in noise in postlingually deafened adult CI users. It tested the hypothesis that peripheral neural synchrony was an important factor for temporal resolution acuity and speech perception outcomes in noise in postlingually deafened adult CI users., Design: Study participants included 24 postlingually deafened adult CI users with a Cochlear™ Nucleus® device. Three study participants were implanted bilaterally, and each ear was tested separately. For each of the 27 implanted ears tested in this study, 400 sweeps of the electrically evoked compound action potential (eCAP) were measured at four electrode locations across the electrode array. Peripheral neural synchrony was quantified at each electrode location using the phase-locking value (PLV), which is a measure of trial-by-trial phase coherence among eCAP sweeps/trials. Temporal resolution acuity was evaluated by measuring the within-channel gap detection threshold (GDT) using a three-alternative, forced-choice procedure in a subgroup of 20 participants (23 implanted ears). For each ear tested in these participants, GDTs were measured at two electrode locations with a large difference in PLVs. For 26 implanted ears tested in 23 participants, speech perception performance was evaluated using consonant-nucleus-consonant (CNC) word lists presented in quiet and in noise at signal to noise ratios (SNRs) of +10 and +5 dB. Linear Mixed effect Models were used to evaluate the effect of electrode location on the PLV and the effect of the PLV on GDT after controlling for the stimulation level effects. Pearson product-moment correlation tests were used to assess the correlations between PLVs, CNC word scores measured in different conditions, and the degree of noise effect on CNC word scores., Results: There was a significant effect of electrode location on the PLV after controlling for the effect of stimulation level. There was a significant effect of the PLV on GDT after controlling for the effects of stimulation level, where higher PLVs (greater synchrony) led to lower GDTs (better temporal resolution acuity). PLVs were not significantly correlated with CNC word scores measured in any listening condition or the effect of competing background noise presented at an SNR of +10 dB on CNC word scores. In contrast, there was a significant negative correlation between the PLV and the degree of noise effect on CNC word scores for a competing background noise presented at an SNR of +5 dB, where higher PLVs (greater synchrony) correlated with smaller noise effects on CNC word scores., Conclusions: This newly developed method can be used to assess peripheral neural synchrony in CI users, a physiological phenomenon that has not been systematically evaluated in electrical hearing. Poorer peripheral neural synchrony leads to lower temporal resolution acuity and is correlated with a larger detrimental effect of competing background noise presented at an SNR of 5 dB on speech perception performance in postlingually deafened adult CI users., Competing Interests: The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose., (Copyright © 2024 Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc. All rights reserved.)

Better communication with older people requires not only improving speech intelligibility but also understanding how well emotions can be conveyed and the effect of age and hearing loss (HL) on emotion perception. In this paper, emotion discrimination experiments were conducted using a vocal morphing method and an HL simulator in young normal hearing (YNH) and older participants. Speech sounds were morphed to represent intermediate emotions between all combinations of happiness, sadness, and anger. Discrimination performance was compared when the YNH listened to normal sounds, when the same YNH listened to HL simulated sounds, and when older people listened to the same normal sounds. The results showed that there was no significant difference between discrimination with and without HL simulation, suggesting that peripheral HL may not affect emotion perception. The discrimination performance of the older participants was significantly worse only for the anger-happiness pair than for the other emotion pairs and for the YNH. It was also found that the difficulty increases with age, not just with hearing level., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Recognizing acoustically degraded speech relies on predictive processing whereby incomplete auditory cues are mapped to stored linguistic representations via pattern recognition processes. While listeners vary in their ability to recognize degraded speech, performance improves when a written transcription is presented, allowing completion of the partial sensory pattern to preexisting representations. Building on work characterizing predictive processing as pattern completion, we examined the relationship between domain-general pattern recognition and individual variation in degraded speech learning. Participants completed a visual pattern recognition task to measure individual-level tendency towards pattern completion. Participants were also trained to recognize noise-vocoded speech with written transcriptions and tested on speech recognition pre- and post-training using a retrieval-based transcription task. Listeners significantly improved in recognizing speech after training, and pattern completion on the visual task predicted improvement for novel items. The results implicate pattern completion as a domain-general learning mechanism that can facilitate speech adaptation in challenging contexts., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

In language comprehension, we use perceptual cues to infer meanings. Some of these cues reside on perceptual dimensions. For example, the difference between bear and pear is cued by a difference in voice onset time (VOT), which is a continuous perceptual dimension. The present paper asks whether, and when, experience with a single value on a dimension behaving unexpectedly is used by the learner to reweight the whole dimension. We show that learners reweight the whole VOT dimension when exposed to a single VOT value (e.g., 45 ms) and provided with feedback indicating that the speaker intended to produce a /b/ 50% of the time and a /p/ the other 50% of the time. Importantly, dimensional reweighting occurs only if 1) the 50/50 feedback is unexpected for the VOT value, and 2) there is another dimension that is predictive of feedback. When no predictive dimension is available, listeners reassociate the experienced VOT value with the more surprising outcome but do not downweight the entire VOT dimension. These results provide support for perceptual representations of speech sounds that combine cues and dimensions, for viewing perceptual learning in speech as a combination of error-driven cue reassociation and dimensional reweighting, and for considering dimensional reweighting to be reallocation of attention that occurs only when there is evidence that reallocating attention would improve prediction accuracy (Harmon, Z., Idemaru, K., & Kapatsinski, V. 2019. Learning mechanisms in cue reweighting. Cognition, 189, 76-88.)., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

In an online class, students respond to queries initiated by the educator through voice, video, or chat. The educator receives these responses but cannot ascertain the emotion carried in these responses with confidence. This emotional limitation in online classes is a major drawback as emotions play a very important role in gauging student engagement and learning. This limitation in the detection of emotions or affective states in the responses of the student makes it difficult for the educator to decide if the student is on the right track or needs more help. On the other hand, if a negative affective state is detected, the educator could modify their teaching approach, speed, or content to the advantage of the student. This poses as an additional disadvantage to educators who suffer from any form of hearing impairment like late or acquired deafness, as they would have difficulty in hearing as well as gauging the emotion from student's feedback. Emotions being a key element in decision making and speech being one of the affective measurement channels, a useful solution would be to use an automatic speech emotion recognition system. In this paper, speech emotion recognition systems (SER) have been reviewed with the intention of identifying research gaps that need to be bridged before an effective SER application can be incorporated in any online education system for teaching. This would guarantee inclusivity as it would benefit all educators, especially the late deafened. This paper has been written with the intention of providing an in-depth understanding of SER components, spanning from emotional models to classifiers. The opportunities for possible improvements have also been touched upon. Special attention is given to deep learning approaches to understand their main contributions and challenges so far in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper surveys human-inspired speech technologies developed for European Portuguese and the computational models they integrate and made them possible. In this regard, it covers systems for synthesis and recognition as well as information on the methods adopted for the speech production studies that were performed, in parallel, to support them. And, on doing so, it can also contribute to provide an entry point for those who work in the field but are not familiar with these particular areas, including: context, history, and comprehensive references. As the great majority of work in these areas for European Portuguese was done by the first author's research group, this paper can also be seen as a review of more than 25 years of research at University of Aveiro in these topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human–computer interaction, Artificial Intelligence, and the multilingualism of digital culture open up unexpected scenarios in the contemporary design of cultural spaces with the creation of artifacts in which the analogic and digital dimensions come together to enhance the experience. Sensors and devices track user movement in the real world and translate the inputs into commands through hand gestures, speech recognition, head movements, tangible interfaces, or a combination of these elements. Through theorical models, concepts and tools, the paper reports the evolution of "User Experience" applied to personalized enjoyment and use of cultural places. The functional-performance survey of tools and technologies for perception, narrative and augmented interaction revealed models that highlight the diversity and richness of tangible and intangible cultural heritage through new forms of interaction and knowledge transfer. In this direction, new technological tools make it possible to detect, track and evaluate the personalized user experience by processing or producing large amounts of data. Therefore, on one hand the paper explores the limitations dictated by data management and user privacy in using such systems and, on the other, it prefigures new scenarios for amplifying and personalizing the user experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children with single-sided deafness (SSD) may experience delays in language and speech development. Reduced speech discrimination and poor sound localization abilities in young SSD patients may result in greater cognitive efforts required to focus and process auditory information, as well as increased listening-related fatigue. Consequently, these children can have a higher risk of academic failure and are often in need of extra help at school. Recently, cochlear implants (CIs) have been introduced as a rehabilitative option for these children, but their effectiveness is still a topic of debate. A literature review was performed according to PRISMA guidelines, searching the Medline database from inception to October 2023. The research identified nine papers that met the inclusion criteria. Data extracted from the selected studies included 311 children affected by SSD and cochlear implants. The reported audiological outcomes were further analyzed. Overall, a high level of satisfaction was described by parents of children with SSD and CI, and those who received a CI under the age of 3 presented better results. However, a proportion of patients did not use the device daily. Our review highlights the possible, and still controversial, role of CI for the hearing rehabilitation of children with unilateral deafness, underlining the need for further research in this field. To date, careful and comprehensive counseling with the child and the family is necessary before considering this option. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of automatic question generation (AQG) systems in education is recognized for automating tasks and providing adaptive assessments. Recent research focuses on improving quality with advanced neural networks and machine learning techniques. However, selecting the appropriate target sentences and concepts remains challenging in AQG systems. To address this problem, the authors created a novel system that combined sentence structure analysis, dependency parsing approach, and named entity recognition techniques to select the relevant target words from the given sentence. The main goal of this paper is to develop an AQG system using syntactic and semantic sentence structure analysis. Evaluation using manual and automatic metrics shows good performance on simple and short sentences, with an overall score of 3.67 out of 5.0. As the field of AQG continues to evolve rapidly, future research should focus on developing more advanced models that can generate a wider range of questions, especially for complex sentence structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The neural correlates of predictive processing in language, critical for efficient sentence comprehension, is well documented in adults. Specifically, adults exhibit alpha power (9-12 Hz) suppression when processing high versus low predictability sentences. This study explores whether young children exhibit similar neural mechanisms. We analyzed EEG data from 29 children aged 3-5 years listening to sentences of varying predictability. Our results revealed significant neural oscillation differences in the 5-12 Hz range between high and low predictability sentences, similar to adult patterns. Crucially, the degree of these differences correlated with children's language abilities. These findings are the first to demonstrate the neural basis of predictive processing in young children and its association with language development., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Considerable work has investigated similarities between the processing of music and language, but it remains unclear whether typical, genuine music can influence speech processing via cross-domain priming. To investigate this, we measured ERPs to musical phrases and to syntactically ambiguous Chinese phrases that could be disambiguated by early or late prosodic boundaries. Musical primes also had either early or late prosodic boundaries and we asked participants to judge whether the prime and target have the same structure. Within musical phrases, prosodic boundaries elicited reduced N1 and enhanced P2 components (relative to the no-boundary condition) and musical phrases with late boundaries exhibited a closure positive shift (CPS) component. More importantly, primed target phrases elicited a smaller CPS compared to non-primed phrases, regardless of the type of ambiguous phrase. These results suggest that prosodic priming can occur across domains, supporting the existence of common neural processes in music and language processing., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

This paper provides a selective overview of some of the research that has followed from the publication of Werker and Tees (1984a) "Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for Perceptual Reorganization During the First Year of Life." Specifically, I briefly present the original finding, our interpretation of its meaning, and some key replications and extensions. I then review some of the work that has followed, including work with different kinds of populations, different kinds of speech sound contrasts, as well as attunement (perceptual reorganization) to additional properties of language beyond phonetic contrasts. Included is the body of work that queries whether perceptual attunement is a critical period phenomenon. Potential learning mechanisms for how experience functions to guide phonetic perceptual development are also presented, as is work on the relation between speech perception and word learning., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest None, (Crown Copyright © 2024. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Background: History-taking is an essential clinical competency for qualified doctors. The limitations of the standardized patient (SP) in taking history can be addressed by the virtual standardized patient (VSP). This paper investigates the accuracy of virtual standardized patient simulators and evaluates the applicability of the improved system's accuracy for diagnostic teaching support and performance assessment. Methods: Data from the application of VSP to medical residents and students were gathered for this prospective study. In a human–machine collaboration mode, students completed exams involving taking SP histories while VSP provided real-time scoring. Every participant had VSP and SP scores. Lastly, using the voice and text records as a guide, the technicians will adjust the system's intention recognition accuracy and speech recognition accuracy. Results: The research revealed significant differences in scoring across several iterations of VSP and SP (p < 0.001). Across various clinical cases, there were differences in application accuracy for different versions of VSP (p < 0.001). Among training groups, the diarrhea case showed significant differences in speech recognition accuracy (Z = -2.719, p = 0.007) and intent recognition accuracy (Z = -2.406, p = 0.016). Scoring and intent recognition accuracy improved significantly after system upgrades. Conclusion: VSP has a comprehensive and detailed scoring system and demonstrates good scoring accuracy, which can be a valuable tool for history-taking training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Aims Method Main Contribution Conclusions & Implications WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS What is already known on the subject What this paper adds to the existing knowledge What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? Speech sound disorders (SSDs) in children are heterogeneous. Differentiating children with SSDs into distinct subtypes is important so that each child receives a treatment approach well suited to the particular difficulties they are experiencing.To study the distinct underlying processes that differentiate phonological processing, phonological planning or motor planning deficits.The literature on the nature of SSDs is reviewed to reveal diagnostic signs at the level of distal causes, proximal factors and surface characteristics.Subtypes of SSDs may be identified by linking the surface characteristics of the children's speech to underlying explanatory proximal factors. The proximal factors may be revealed by measures of speech perception skills, phonological memory and speech–motor control. The evidence suggests that consistent phonological disorder (CPD) can be identified by predictable patterns of speech error associated with speech perception errors. Inconsistent phonological disorder (IPD) is associated with a deficit in the selection and sequencing of phonemes, that is, revealed as within‐word inconsistency and poor phonological memory. The motor planning deficit that is specific to childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is revealed by transcoding errors on the syllable repetition task and an inability to produce [pətəkə] accurately and rapidly.Children with SSDs form a heterogeneous population. Surface characteristics overlap considerably among those with severe disorders, but certain signs are unique to particular subtypes. Careful attention to underlying causal factors will support the accurate diagnosis and selection of personalized treatment options. SSD in children are heterogenous, with numerous subtypes of primary SSD proposed. Diagnosing the specific subtype of SSD is important in order to assign the most efficacious treatment approach for each child. Identifying the distinct subtype for each child is difficult because the surface characteristics of certain subtypes overlap among categories (e.g., CPD or IPD; CAS).SSD in children are heterogenous, with numerous subtypes of primary SSD proposed. Diagnosing the specific subtype of SSD is important in order to assign the most efficacious treatment approach for each child. Identifying the distinct subtype for each child is difficult because the surface characteristics of certain subtypes overlap among categories (e.g., CPD or IPD; CAS). The diagnostic challenge might be eased by systematic attention to explanatory factors in relation to the surface characteristics, using specific tests for this purpose. Word identification tasks tap speech perception skills; repetition of short versus long strings of nonsense syllables permits observation of phonological memory and phonological planning skills; and standard maximum performance tests provide considerable information about speech motor control.The diagnostic challenge might be eased by systematic attention to explanatory factors in relation to the surface characteristics, using specific tests for this purpose. Word identification tasks tap speech perception skills; repetition of short versus long strings of nonsense syllables permits observation of phonological memory and phonological planning skills; and standard maximum performance tests provide considerable information about speech motor control. Children with SSDs should receive comprehensive assessments of their phonological processing, phonological planning and motor planning skills frequently, alongside examinations of their error patterns in connected speech. Such assessments will serve to identify the child's primary challenges currently and as they change over developmental time.Children with SSDs should receive comprehensive assessments of their phonological processing, phonological planning and motor planning skills frequently, alongside examinations of their error patterns in connected speech. Such assessments will serve to identify the child's primary challenges currently and as they change over developmental time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Misunderstandings in dyadic interactions often persist despite our best efforts, particularly between native and non-native speakers, resembling a broken duet that refuses to harmonise. This paper delves into the computational mechanisms underpinning these misunderstandings through the lens of the broken Lorenz system—a continuous dynamical model. By manipulating a specific parameter regime, we induce bistability within the Lorenz equations, thereby confining trajectories to distinct attractors based on initial conditions. This mirrors the persistence of divergent interpretations that often result in misunderstandings. Our simulations reveal that differing prior beliefs between interlocutors result in misaligned generative models, leading to stable yet divergent states of understanding when exposed to the same percept. Specifically, native speakers equipped with precise (i.e., overconfident) priors expect inputs to align closely with their internal models, thus struggling with unexpected variations. Conversely, non-native speakers with imprecise (i.e., less confident) priors exhibit a greater capacity to adjust and accommodate unforeseen inputs. Our results underscore the important role of generative models in facilitating mutual understanding (i.e., establishing a shared narrative) and highlight the necessity of accounting for multistable dynamics in dyadic interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multimodal brain signal analysis has shown great potential in decoding complex cognitive processes, particularly in the challenging task of inner speech recognition. This paper introduces an innovative I nner Speech Recognition via Cross-Perception (ISRCP) approach that significantly enhances accuracy by fusing electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. Our approach comprises three core components: (1) multigranularity encoders that separately process EEG time series, EEG Markov Transition Fields, and fMRI spatial data; (2) a cross-perception expert structure that learns both modality-specific and shared representations; and (3) an attention-based adaptive fusion strategy that dynamically adjusts the contributions of different modalities based on task relevance. Extensive experiments on the Bimodal Dataset on Inner Speech demonstrate that our model outperforms existing methods across accuracy and F1 score. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes how automatic speech recognition (ASR) can be used to explore electronic patient records (EPR) in a sterile environment. As an information display, we used a system that was developed for the presentation of patient data and for supporting surgical hand disinfection. The speech recognition was performed using the Mozilla Web Speech API. A room microphone, a Jabra Box, and a directional microphone, a RØDE NT-USB Mini, were tested at various positions. Interactions with the EPR are triggered with a list of commands. The interaction was working as indented and test persons reported the system as intuitive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the listening capacity exists in humans, they are facing the critical issues of understanding the speeches even in the presence of some background or other noises in the world. To diminish the noises, Speech Enhancement (SE) is the process of improving the quality of the speech signal by applying some techniques without degrading any such information. Hence, it is used for hearing-aid people, speech recognition, etc. Recent researchers have developed some works to increase speech intelligibility. Substantial success has been achieved by executing the supervised learning methods. Nevertheless, the existing process incurs such shortcomings as attaining maximum error, computation burden, and so on. To overcome that, certain deep learning methodologies are immensely involved in SE for determining the spectrogram magnitude when reconstructing the signal source by removing the noise. Thus, it also becomes a more challenging task to acquire a clean speech signal. Though these methods aim to present the speech as more clear and intelligible, it may arise such intricacies that degrade the quality and efficiency. As it contains beneficial structure and resources, still it is in the scope of developing the novel SE model. To conquer these complexities, a successful SE task is offered utilizing deep learning in this paper. This recommended work performs the SE which employs deep learning to denoise a noisy speech to generate a quality speech. At first, the speech signal that contains noises such as cooler noise or fan noise, restaurant noise, railway station noise, factory noise, traffic in the journey, bus-stand noise, cinema theater noise, and clouding areas noise are gathered from the standard online sources. After that, this noisy speech signal is forwarded to Adaptive Residual Convolutional Neural Networks with Encoder-Decoder (ARCNNetED) architecture, where the parameters involved in this framework are optimized with the support of Random Revised Drawer Algorithm (RRDA). Thus, the noise presented in the input speech signal is completely removed by the suggested ARCNNetED and the quality of the speech also is enhanced. Finally, the performance of the suggested speech enhancement approach is evaluated over various traditional tasks with the support of several metrics. The findings of the developed model show better performance in terms of MAE, RMSE, and PSNR showing the value of 0.03, 0.19, and 62.26. This analysis significantly handles the error rate to offer accurate outcomes in the speech recognition framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]