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Statement of problem Prosthetic rehabilitation, especially with removable complete dentures (CDs), can contribute to speech problems, although the prevalence of the problem is unclear. Purpose The purpose of this systematic review was to examine the influence of implant-supported fixed complete dentures (FCDs), implant-supported overdentures, and removable CDs on speech articulation disorders in patients with at least 1 completely edentulous jaw. Material and methods This study was prepared according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines and registered in the International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews (CRD42020182705). The PubMed/Medline, Embase, Web of Science, Scopus, Latin American and Caribbean Health Sciences, Brazilian Clinical Trials Registry, and Cochrane Library databases were searched through April 2020 to identify clinical trials comparing maxillary and/or mandibular implant-supported dentures with removable CD use in terms of speech articulation in participants with at least 1 completely edentulous jaw. The risk of bias of selected studies was assessed with the Joanna Briggs Institute critical appraisal tools, and the quality of evidence was tested by using the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) approach. Results Initially, 2586 articles were identified, and their titles and abstracts were read. Sixteen articles were read in full, and 8 studies (4 paired clinical trials and 4 cross-sectional studies) were included in this review. In total, 290 prosthesis users aged 29 to 90 years, approximately 44 of whom had hearing difficulties, were included. Four studies had a low risk of bias, and 4 studies had a high risk of bias. Distortions of the /s/ phoneme were observed more often in the first 6 months of maxillary FCD use than with removable CD use. Speech articulation did not differ between mandibular FCD and removable CD users. The quality of evidence for speech articulation disorders was low. Conclusions Given the low quality of evidence on speech articulation disorders, further research on speech articulation disorders in prosthesis wearers is needed.

The massive and growing burden imposed on modern society by depression has motivated investigations into early detection through automated, scalable and non-invasive methods, including those based on speech. However, speech-based methods that capture articulatory information effectively across different recording devices and in naturalistic environments are still needed. This article proposes two feature sets associated with speech articulation events based on counts and durations of sequential landmark groups or n-grams. Statistical analysis of the duration-based features reveals that durations from several consecutive landmark bigrams and onset-offset landmark pairs are significant in discriminating depressed from non-depressed speakers. In addition to investigating different normalization approaches and values of n for landmark n-gram features, experiments across different elicitation tasks suggest that the features can be tailored to capture different articulatory aspects of depressed voices. Evaluations of both landmark duration features and landmark n-gram features on the DAIC-WOZ and SH2 datasets show that they are highly effective, either alone or fused, relative to existing approaches.

Vocal tract elongation, which uniformly lowers vocal tract resonances (formant frequencies) in animal vocalizations, has evolved independently in several vertebrate groups as a means for vocalizers to exaggerate their apparent body size. Here, we propose that smaller speech-like articulatory movements that alter only individual formants can serve a similar yet less energetically costly size-exaggerating function. To test this, we examine whether uneven formant spacing alters the perceived body size of vocalizers in synthesized human vowels and animal calls. Among six synthetic vowel patterns, those characterized by the lowest first and second formant (the vowel /u/ as in ‘boot’) are consistently perceived as produced by the largest vocalizer. Crucially, lowering only one or two formants in animal-like calls also conveys the impression of a larger body size, and lowering the second and third formants simultaneously exaggerates perceived size to a similar extent as rescaling all formants. As the articulatory movements required for individual formant shifts are minor compared to full vocal tract extension, they represent a rapid and energetically efficient mechanism for acoustic size exaggeration. We suggest that, by favouring the evolution of uneven formant patterns in vocal communication, this deceptive strategy may have contributed to the origins of the phonemic diversification required for articulated speech. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part II)’.

Non-native mispronunciation verification is designed to provide feedback to guide language learners to correct their pronunciation errors in their further learning and it plays an important role in the computer-aided pronunciation training (CAPT) system. Most existing approaches focus on establishing the acoustic model directly using non-native corpus thus they are suffering the data sparsity problem due to time-consuming non-native speech data collection and annotation tasks. In this work, to address this problem, we propose a pre-trained approach to utilize the speech data of two native languages (the learner’s native and target languages) for non-native mispronunciation verification. We set up an unsupervised model to extract knowledge from a large scale of unlabeled raw speech of the target language by making predictions about future observations in the speech signal, then the model is trained with language adversarial training using the learner’s native language to align the feature distribution of two languages by confusing a language discriminator. In addition, sinc filter is incorporated at the first convolutional layer to capture the formant-like feature. Formant is relevant to the place and manner of articulation. Therefore, it is useful not only for pronunciation error detection but also for providing instructive feedback. Then the pre-trained model serves as the feature extractor in the downstream mispronunciation verification task. Through the experiments on the Japanese part of the BLCU inter-Chinese speech corpus, the experimental results demonstrate that for the non-native phone recognition and mispronunciation verification tasks (1) the knowledge learned from two native languages speech with the proposed unsupervised approach is useful for these two tasks (2) our proposed language adversarial representation learning is effective to improve the performance (3) formant-like feature can be incorporated by introducing sinc filter to further improve the performance of mispronunciation verification.

Purpose We examined how consonant perception is affected by a preceding speech carrier simulated in the same or a different room, for different classes of consonants. Carrier room, carrier length, and carrier length/target room uncertainty were manipulated. A phonetic feature analysis tested which phonetic categories are influenced by the manipulations in the acoustic context of the carrier. Method Two experiments were performed, each with nine participants. Targets consisted of 10 or 16 vowel–consonant (VC) syllables presented in one of two strongly reverberant rooms, preceded by a multiple-VC carrier presented in either the same room, a different reverberant room, or an anechoic room. In Experiment 1, the carrier length and the target room randomly varied from trial to trial, whereas in Experiment 2, they were fixed within a block of trials. Results Overall, a consistent carrier provided an advantage for consonant perception compared to inconsistent carriers, whether in anechoic or differently reverberant rooms. Phonetic analysis showed that carrier inconsistency significantly degraded identification of the manner of articulation, especially for stop consonants and, in one of the rooms, also of voicing. Carrier length and carrier/target uncertainty did not affect adaptation to reverberation for individual phonetic features. The detrimental effects of anechoic and different reverberant carriers on target perception were similar. Conclusions The strength of calibration varies across different phonetic features, as well as across rooms with different levels of reverberation. Even though place of articulation is the feature that is affected by reverberation the most, it is the manner of articulation and, partially, voicing for which room adaptation is observed.

Auditory feedback while speaking plays an important role in stably controlling speech articulation. Its importance has been verified in formant-altered auditory feedback (AAF) experiments where speakers utter while listening to speech with perturbed first (F1) and second (F2) formant frequencies. However, the contribution of the frequency components higher than F2 to the articulatory control under the perturbations of F1 and F2 has not yet been investigated. In this study, a formant-AAF experiment was conducted in which a low-pass filter was applied to speech. The experimental results showed that the deviation in the compensatory response was significantly larger when a low-pass filter with a cutoff frequency of 3 kHz was used compared to that when cutoff frequencies of 4 and 8 kHz were used. It was also found that the deviation in the 3-kHz condition correlated with the fundamental frequency and spectral tilt of the produced speech. Additional simulation results using a neurocomputational model of speech production (SimpleDIVA model) and the experimental data showed that the feedforward learning rate increased as the cutoff frequency decreased. These results suggest that high-frequency components of the auditory feedback would be involved in the determination of corrective motor commands from auditory errors.

Soft palate tumors pose the challenge during reconstructive and rehabilitating procedures. Surgical resection of these tumors leads to velopharyngeal insufficiency (VPI). The primary effects of VPI are hypernasality and air-flow escape, while the secondary effects are abnormalities in speech articulation. Surgical revision along with speech therapy is a common approach to the treatment of VPI. Prosthetic management by means of speech aid prosthesis helps to reduce resonance, nasal emission and consonants errors. This clinical report describes the different stages of rehabilitation of velopharyngeal insufficiency defect following resection of malignant melanoma of left posterior alveolar ridge and soft palate. The speech aid prosthesis helped to rehabilitate the velopharyngeal insufficiency defect and aided in the diagnosis of extent of speech function improvement by perceptual and objective methods.

Distinctive phonetic features (DPFs) abstractedly describe the place, manner of articulation, and voicing of the language phonemes. While DPFs are powerful features of speech signals that capture the unique articulatory characteristics of each phoneme, the task of DPF extraction is challenged by the need for efficient computational model. Unlike the ordinary acoustic features that can be directly determined form speech waveform using closed-form expressions, DPF elements are extracted from acoustic features using machine learning (ML) techniques. Therefore, for the objective of developing an acoustic-to-phonetic converter of high accuracy and low complexity, it is important to select the input acoustic features that are simple, yet carry adequate information. This paper examines the effectiveness of using spectrogram as the acoustic feature with DPFs modeled using two deep learning techniques: the deep belief network (DBN) and the convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN). The proposed method is applied on Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Multi-label modeling is considered in the proposed acoustic-to-phonetic converter. The learning techniques were evaluated by proper evaluation measures that accommodate the imbalanced nature of DPF elements. The results showed that the CRNN is more accurate in extracting the DPFs than the DBN.

This study attempts to investigate whether Korean young EFL learners could differently perceive the difference between English tense and lax vowels (/i/-/ɪ/) with the voicing contrast in the postvocalic consonants. Two perception tests (4I-oddity test and Identification test) are conducted with the following research questions. 1) Do Korean young EFL learners show any difference in correctly discriminating tense and lax vowels according to the voicing contrast in postvocalic consonants at the auditory level? 2) Do they differently identify English tense and lax vowels according to voicing contrasts at the phonological level? 3) Do they differently identify English tense and lax vowels according to different manners of articulation (stops vs. fricatives)? For each experimental test, 11 Korean speakers and 5 native speakers (as a control group) participate in the study. The main findings from the tests are as follows. First, Korean learners perform as well in the 4I-oddity discrimination test as native speakers do, while more poorly performing in the identification test. Second, Korean learners did not use vowel length as an acoustic cue to differentiate between English tense and lax vowels in both perception tests regardless of voicing contrasts or manner of articulation in postvocalic consonants. According to these findings, the study concludes that the absent feature of vowel length in the L1 does not facilitate Korean speakers’ accurate perception of English tense and lax vowels at the phonological level.

This paper continues a research project aimed at proving that the fortis-lenis distinction is more appropriate for studying the Welsh language than the voiced-voiceless divide. Previous analyses of articulatory timing revealed potentially distinctive features characteristic for Welsh plosives and fricatives. Even though the phonological features such as [spread glottis] or [voice] may be used both for distinguishing between the series of plosives and fricatives, the phonetic features responsible for the distinction are likely to differ due to the different phonetic nature of the manner of articulation and the position of fricatives and plosives (Honeybone 2005: 333–334). The aim of this paper is, therefore, to draw general conclusions from analysing the two sets of factors and find some universal features or characteristics of fortis and lenis obstruents in Welsh. Based on the previous studies, the importance of aspiration and voicing length are analysed in Welsh plosives. For fricatives, friction and voicing length are studied as potentially contrastive. The main hypotheses are that (i) phonetic voicing is not decisive in distinguishing between the two series of sounds in all places of articulation and (ii) other aspects of articulatory timing such as friction, aspiration length and hold phase duration appear to be more important in the fortis-lenis distinction and form a general pattern where the fortis sounds are generally longer than their lenis counterparts.

This study examines consonant manner of articulation at four coronal places of articulation, using ultrasound and formant analyses of the Australian language Arrernte. Stop, nasal, and lateral articulations are examined at the dental, alveolar, retroflex, and alveo-palatal places of articulation: /t̪ n̪ l̪ / vs /t n l/ vs /ʈɳɭ/ vs /c ɲ ʎ/. Ultrasound data clearly show a more retracted tongue root for the lateral, and a more advanced tongue root for the nasal, as compared to the stop. However, the magnitude of the differences is much greater for the stop∼lateral contrast than for the stop∼nasal contrast. Acoustic results show clear effects on F1 in the adjacent vowels, in particular the preceding vowel, with F1 lower adjacent to nasals and higher adjacent to laterals, as compared to stops. Correlations between the articulatory and acoustic data are particularly strong for this formant. However, the retroflex place of articulation shows effects according to manner for higher formants as well, suggesting that a better understanding of retroflex acoustics for different manners of articulation is required. The study also suggests that articulatory symmetry and gestural economy are affected by the size of the phonemic inventory.

WstępSłuch fonemowy, jako jeden z rodzajów słuchu mownego, jest zdolnością odbioru dźwięków mowy dotyczącą ich struktury fonemowej w oparciu o czynności recepcji, rozróżniania, różnicowania i pamięci słuchowej. Przyjęte w niniejszej pracy rozumienie terminu „słuch fonemowy” odnosi się do systemu fonologicznego w jego aspekcie segmentalnym. Prawidłowo wykształcony słuch fonemowy pozwala dziecku właściwie dekodować znaczenie wyrazów, różnicować sylaby i głoski, co na etapie edukacji wczesnoszkolnej ma zasadnicze znaczenie dla rozwoju mowy i komunikacji, czytania oraz pisania. Zaprezentowane w artykule wyniki dotyczą badanej grupy 7-latków i stanowią przyczynek do planowanych analiz słuchu fonemowego u dzieci z klas pierwszych w kontekście nauki czytania i pisania.CelCelem pracy było zbadanie słuchu fonemowego uczniów z integracyjnej I klasy szkoły podstawowej rozpoczynających naukę czytania i pisania oraz analiza trudności edukacyjnych dzieci, u których zdiagnozowano zaburzenia identyfikowania dystynktywnych cech głosek.Materiał i metodaGrupa badawcza składała się z 20 uczniów w wieku 7 lat uczęszczających do I klasy o profilu integracyjnym. W tej klasie zdiagnozowano dwoje uczniów z dyslalią wieloraką i troje z afazją motoryczną. Grupę kontrolną stanowiło 20 uczniów z równoległej klasy bez profilu integracyjnego. Badania wykonano wystandaryzowanym narzędziem autorstwa J. Gruby: Test do badania słuchu fonemowego (Gliwice, 2012).WynikiDiagnozę przeprowadzono pod koniec I półrocza szkolnego. Trudności w słuchowym różnicowaniu głosek z opozycji fonologicznych, różniących się: miejscem artykulacji, dwiema cechami dystynktywnymi, sposobem artykulacji i dźwięcznością, odnotowano u 8 uczniów. Zaburzenia słuchu fonemowego stanowiły część składową problemów w nabywaniu systemu językowego u 3 dzieci z afazją motoryczną, 2 uczniów z dyslalią wieloraką, ale również 3 pierwszoklasistów, u których nie zdiagnozowano wad wymowy czy zaburzeń mowy. W grupie kontrolnej dwoje dzieci nie różnicowało poprawnie fonemów różniących się dwiema cechami dystynktywnymi i sposobem artykulacji.WnioskiPrzeprowadzone badania stanowią element oceny gotowości szkolnej dzieci rozpoczynających edukację. Zaburzenia słuchu fonemowego badanych uczniów są jedną z przyczyn utrzymujących się wad wymowy, trudności w czytaniu metodą analityczną i pisaniu ze słuchu. Wyniki wskazują na potrzebę kontynuacji badań przesiewowych słuchu fonemowego w klasach pierwszych. Zdiagnozowanie problemów w słuchowym różnicowaniu dystynktywnych cech głosek przyczyniło się do wprowadzenia programu terapeutycznego w szkole. Słowa kluczowe: słuch fonemowy • zaburzenia słuchu fonemowego • czytanie i pisanie a słuch fonemowy.

Articulatory data are provided showing that, in languages in which they have phonemic status, (alveolo)palatal consonants, dark /l/ and the trill /r/ are articulated with a single lingual gesture instead of two independent tongue front and tongue body gestures. They are therefore simple, not complex segments. It is argued that tongue body lowering and retraction for dark /l/ and the trill /r/ is associated with manner of articulation requirements and with requirements on the implementation of the darkness percept in the case of dark /l/, and that tongue body raising and fronting for (alveolo)palatals results naturally from the contraction of the genioglossus muscle. These consonant units resemble truly complex palatalized and velarized or pharyngealized dentoalveolars regarding lingual configuration and kinematics, as well as coarticulatory efects and phonological and sound change processes. Contrary to some views, the study also contends that clear /l/ and the tap /?/ are not complex segments but consonants articulated with a more or less neutral tongue body configuration which is subject to considerable vowel coarticulation.

Setting familiarity, morphology, semantics, and pragmatics aside, the study investigates the ability of the phonological structures of Saudi first names to solely indicate the gender of that name. The first names of Saudi females ( ) and Saudi males ( ) as drawn from the registrar of a Saudi university situated in Riyadh were analyzed according to several phonological parameters, including the number of phonemes, the number of syllables, open vs. closed syllables, the manner of articulation of name-initial, and name- final sounds, stress position, and the state of the glottis. The quantitative study concludes that when contrasted with male names, female names tend to have less phonemes, have a higher likelihood of second stress position, have a higher likelihood of the final consonant being voiceless or a vowel, have a higher likelihood of beginning with a glottal stop and a trill, and have a higher likelihood of ending with a glottal fricative or with a vowel.

Ankyloglossia or tongue-tie is the result of a tight and short lingual frenulum which causes difficulty in breast feeding, eating and speech articulation due to limited tongue movement. In this condition, the tip of the tongue cannot be protruded beyond the lower incisor teeth because of a short lingual frenum. In this article, we have reported a 26 year old female patient with tongue-tie who complained of difficult in speech. She underwent frenectomy procedure under local anaesthesis without any complications. This was followed by speech therapy sessions.

Nowadays the main stream in the most fields of linguistics including phonology is minimalism and redundancy removing, which derives from the principle of the economy of language. The advent of under specification theory in the late 19th century can be considered as the beginning of redundancy removing in the domain of phonology. During recent decades different versions of under specification such as Radical Under specification, Contrastive Specification and Modified Contrastive Specification (MCS) have been presented. Modified Contrastive Specification (MCS), which is the finding of Toronto Phonology School is based on Contrastive Hypothesis in which a contrastive hierarchy is applied to specify the contrastive features. It is believed that only contrastive features are specified in phonological representations and redundant values never exist in underlying representations. This paper aims to present a novel analysis of total assimilation process in terms of the manner of articulation in consonant clusters having the structures of –st and –zd in Persian which is an active process in phonology of Persian. Working within the framework of the MCS, through drawing a contrastive hierarchy for phonological features, this paper leads to this conclusion that the feature [continuant] in Persian consonants is a contrastive feature so by spreading this feature, the coronal stops /t/, /d/ assimilate to fricatives /s/ and /z/ respectively. To represent contrast and markedness in this system, we have proposed a contrastive hierarchy of [son] > [lab] > [cont]> [voiced] for consonants involved in the process of total assimilation in Persian.

Aims: to identify and describe the instruments and methods available to evaluate speech articulation, and investigate the evidence of validity and reliability for each of these tests in their target populations. Method: The study was conducted according to PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines. Two researchers conducted a search of the PubMed and Scopus databases using keywords related to assessment, articulation, assessment methods and speech. Search results were limited to studies involving children and adolescents, published in English, Portuguese or Spanish. Results: 78% of studies involved children aged 6 years to 9 years 9 months. 28% of articles used instruments to evaluate language and communication as a whole, and detect language disorders using tasks which evaluated specific skills including phonological processing, working memory, automatization of speech production and phonological awareness. Other authors used custom assessment protocols to evaluate the repetition or enunciation of words, sentences and syllables. Only six studies provided validity and normative data for assessment instruments. Conclusion: The majority of studies used commercial or research instruments to evaluate speech articulation. All studies also evaluated speech perception. Psychometric studies were available for most of the instruments used to evaluate speech articulation in the studies reviewed.

The extent that articulatory information embedded in incoming speech contributes to the formation of new perceptual categories for speech sounds has been a matter of discourse for decades. It has been theorized that the acquisition of new speech sound categories requires a network of sensory and speech motor cortical areas (the “dorsal stream”) to successfully integrate auditory and articulatory information. However, it is possible that these brain regions are not sensitive specifically to articulatory information, but instead are sensitive to the abstract phonological categories being learned. We tested this hypothesis by training participants over the course of several days on an articulable non-native speech contrast and acoustically matched inarticulable nonspeech analogues. After reaching comparable levels of proficiency with the two sets of stimuli, activation was measured in fMRI as participants passively listened to both sound types. Decoding of category membership for the articulable speech contrast alone revealed a series of left and right hemisphere regions outside of the dorsal stream that have previously been implicated in the emergence of non-native speech sound categories, while no regions could successfully decode the inarticulable nonspeech contrast. Although activation patterns in the left inferior frontal gyrus, the middle temporal gyrus, and the supplementary motor area provided better information for decoding articulable (speech) sounds compared to the inarticulable (sine wave) sounds, the finding that dorsal stream regions do not emerge as good decoders of the articulable contrast alone suggests that other factors, including the strength and structure of the emerging speech categories are more likely drivers of dorsal stream activation for novel sound learning.

Background: The temporomandibular dysfunction (TMD) is one of the most complex disorders of the body, capable of triggering changes in mandibular function and speech articulation. In the case of teachers, probably due to long periods of speech, since it is known that most of them work in classrooms with too many students, end up making use of the voice incorrectly and may lead to changes in the function of the stomatognathic system. Objective: To investigate the association between TMD and mandibular functional limitation in teachers of an elementary school in the city of Uberlandia. Methods: The study was carried out in 49 teachers. The data were collected through Helkimo’s Clinical Dysfunction Index (IDCCM) and Mandibular Function Impairment Questionnaire (MFIQ). Results: It was observed that all teachers in both genders showed some degree of TMD and, consequently, the higher the TMD degree the greater is the changing the jaw function. Conclusions: Based on the data and through studies carried out with this group of teachers, it is concluded that as the TMD degree increases, it causes alteration of the mandibular function and can lead to a decreased in the mandibular amplitude and to limit movement.

Phonetic tests are one of the most important methods for the proper positioning of the teeth and identifying the vertical dimension of occlusion in denture fabrication. Purpose: Assessment of the level of awareness of dental practitioners and dental technicians regarding the impact of the vertical dimension of occlusion and the teeth arrangement on speech articulation. Material/Methods: 369 dental practitioners from 70 settlements (67 of which – towns and 3 – villages), and 84 dental technicians from 19 settlements (towns only) in Bulgaria were part of the research. The questionnaire study took 5 months (starting 2018). Results: The research results prove that speech function is influenced by both the vertical dimension of occlusion (opinion of 93.80 of the dental practitioners and 85.80 % of the dental technicians) and the arrangement of the artificial teeth (opinion of 94.80 of the dental practitioners and 91.70 % of the dental technicians). Conclusion:A high proportion of the inquired participants (over 90 %) admit the negative impact on the speech exerted by incorrect vertical dimension of occlusion and arrangement of teeth, and these are seen as a major factor for compromising the speech function.

A phonetic pilot study of Yorubá vowel deletion shows that the vowel that remains after an adjacent vowel deletes is slightly but significantly longer than a short vowel in non-deletional contexts (p < 0.001). In the configuration studied here, deletion occurs in the vowel of a CV verb when occurring before a V-initial direct object (/CVi +V2 / → [CV2]). However, instead of full vowel deletion as it is previously analysed (e.g. Akinlabi and Oyebade 1987, Ola Orie and Pulleyblank 2002), a compensatory lengthening analysis is proposed based on this new phonetic evidence. The experiment for this study controlled for inherent vowel duration, voicing, and manner of articulation of the surrounding consonants. These results are in line with a similar result regarding Yorubá tone (Ajibóyè et al. 2011) in the same syntactic (verb + direct object) configuration.

Background This study investigated the outcomes of pharyngeal flap surgery in Asian patients with velopharyngeal dysfunction (VPD), with a focus on postoperative improvements in speech articulation and complications. Additionally, this study explored whether the cause of VPD and the timing of surgery affected outcomes in terms of speech improvement. Methods A retrospective review was conducted of the medical records of 72 Asian VPD patients who underwent pharyngeal flap surgery performed by a single surgeon from 1996 to 2014. Operative complications were analyzed for all 72 patients, and preoperative and postoperative speech articulation tests were compared for the subset of 43 patients in whom such testing was possible. The relationships of age at surgery and the cause of VPD with the extent of improvement in speech articulation were also investigated. Results Nine of the 72 patients (13%) experienced wound-related complications. Furthermore, 34 patients (47%) reported persistent snoring lasting for over 3 months, and 16 (22%) reported snoring for over 1 year. Three patients (4%) underwent reoperation. Speech articulation scores significantly improved postoperatively across all groups. Younger age at surgery was associated with greater improvements in speech outcomes, but no significant relationship was found between the cause of VPD and the extent of the postoperative improvement in speech outcomes. Conclusion Speech outcomes improved after pharyngeal surgery in Asian patients with VPD. Early surgery was associated with favorable speech outcomes, but no association was found between the cause of VPD and postoperative speech outcomes.

Phoneme recognition is an essential step in the development of a speech recognition system (SRS), as phonemes are fundamental building blocks in a spoken language. This research work aimed to present phoneme recognition with systematic confusion analysis for the Hindi language. The accuracy of phoneme recognition is the foundation for developing an efficient SRS. Therefore, the systematic confusion analysis for phoneme recognition is essential to improve speech recognition performance. Experiments conducted on Continuous Hindi speech corpus for phoneme recognition with speaker-dependent mode using Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based tool kit HTK. Feature extraction technique Perceptual Linear Predictive Coefficient (PLP) was used with five states Monophones HMM model. Tests were performed for exploring the recognition of Hindi vowels and consonants. Confusion matrices were presented for both vowels and consonants with analysis and possible solutions. During systematic analysis, the vowels were divided into front, middle, and back vowels while consonants were categorized based on place of articulation and manner of articulation. Research findings show that some Hindi phonemes have significant effects on speech recognition. The investigations also reveal that some Hindi phonemes are mostly confused, and some phonemes have more deletions and insertions. The research further demonstrates that the words made of less number of phonemes show more insertion errors. It was also found that most of the Hindi sentences end with some specific words. These particular words can be used to reduce the search place in language modeling for improving speech recognition. The research findings can be utilized to enhance the performance of the speech recognition system by selecting suitable feature extraction techniques and classification techniques for phonemes. The outcome of the research can also be used to develop improved pronunciation dictionaries and designing the text for developing phonetically balanced speech corpus for improvement in speech recognition. Experimental results show an average corrected recognition score of 70% for vowel class and consonant categories, the maximum average corrected recognition score of 94% was obtained with palatal sounds, and the lowest average corrected recognition score of 54% was achieved with liquid sounds. The comparative analysis of the presented work was made to similar existing works.

Speech is one of the oldest media of communication of thoughts. It has affected human behavior and progress so greatly that it has been one of the important determinants of psychosocial health of the human beings. The dental profession, as a guardian of oral health, is engaged to a great extent in altering and restoring structures within the oral cavity, to alleviate the ravages of disease and developmental abnormalities. A major portion of speech articulation takes place within the oral cavity, and any alteration or restorations of structures therein will adversely affect speech proportionate to the location and magnitude of alteration. This article provides an updated literature review on the role of pedodontists in early diagnosis and intervention of speech impairments. How to cite this article: Bommangoudar JS, Chandrashekhar S, Shetty S, et al. Pedodontist's Role in Managing Speech Impairments Due to Structural Imperfections and Oral Habits: A Literature Review. Int J Clin Pediatr Dent 2020;13(1):85-90.

Recent advances in real-time Magnetic Resonance Imaging (rtMRI) provide an invaluable tool to study speech articulation. In this paper, we present an effective deep learning approach for supervised detection and tracking of vocal tract contours in a sequence of rtMRI frames. We train a single input multiple output deep temporal regression network (DTRN) to detect the vocal tract (VT) contour and the separation boundary between different articulators. The DTRN learns the non-linear mapping from an overlapping fixed-length sequence of rtMRI frames to the corresponding articulatory movements, where a blend of the overlapping contour estimates defines the detected VT contour. The detected contour is refined at a post-processing stage using an appearance model to further improve the accuracy of VT contour detection. The proposed VT contour tracking model is trained and evaluated over the USC-TIMIT dataset. Performance evaluation is carried out using three objective assessment metrics for the separating landmark detection, contour tracking and temporal stability of the contour landmarks in comparison with three baseline approaches from the recent literature. Results indicate significant improvements with the proposed method over the state-of-the-art baselines., NA

This is a qualitative research that focuses on the meaning represented in the phoneme contained in English onomatopoeic words. Onomatopoeia is word that imitates the sounds of human, animal, things, actions, and nature in the world. Onomatopoeia exists in many reading materials such as comics, fables, tales and poetry. This research focuses on the onomatopoeic words which are contained in Oxford English Dictionary for the dictionary is regularly updated. Out of two kinds of phoneme, which are consonants and vowels, this research limit s the investigation for only English front vowels . Based on the manner of articulation, English front vowels are divided into front high tense unrounded vowel /i/, front high lax unrounded vowel /ɪ/, front mid tense unrounded vowel /e/, front mid lax unrounded vowel /ɛ/, and front low lax unrounded vowel /ӕ/. This approach used in this research is called sound symbolism which is a study of relation between sound and meaning. This research applies low-level properties, a mechanism in sound symbolism that is associating the sound to the meaning based on the shared perceptual feature in both phoneme and associated stimuli. The mechanism is used as the method of the research for the researcher explore s the characteristics of front vowels contained in English onomatopoeic word s that are used to represent the sounds produced by human, animals, natures, machines, and other things . Based on the investigation, t he result indicates that the higher vowels the more diminutive meaning it indicates , while the lower vowels the more augmentative meaning it indicates.

Effects of temporal distortions on consonant perception were measured using locally time-reversed nonsense syllables. Consonant recognition was measured in both audio and audio-visual modalities for assessing whether the addition of visual speech cues can recover consonant errors caused by time reversing. The degradation in consonant recognition depended highly on the manner of articulation, with sibilant fricatives, affricates, and nasals showing the least degradation. Because consonant errors induced by time reversing were primarily in voicing and place-of-articulation (mostly limited to stop-plosives and non-sibilant fricatives), undistorted visual speech cues could resolve only about half the errors (i.e., only place-of-articulation errors).

In this article, we examine the influence of scene articulation on transparent layer constancy. We argue that the term articulation may be understood as an aspect of the more general concept naturalness of a stimulus that relates to the degree of enrichment compared with a minimal stimulus and to the extent to which a stimulus contains regularities that are typically found in natural scenes. We conducted two matching experiments, in which we used strongly reduced scenes and operationalized articulation by the number of background reflectances (numerosity). The results of the first experiment show that higher numerosity actually leads to an increase in transparent layer constancy when reflectances are randomly drawn from a fixed population. However, this advantage disappears if the spatial mean and the variation of the subset colors are controlled as in our second experiment. Furthermore, our results suggest that the mechanism underlying transparent layer constancy leads to a rather stable compromise between two matching criteria, namely, proximal identity and constant filter properties according to our perceptual model. For filters with an additive component, which appear more or less hazy, we observed improved recovered filter properties and correspondingly higher degrees of transparent layer constancy, suggesting an additional mechanism in this type of filter.

Articulation problems seriously impact speech communication and comprehension. Hence, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has been applied to detect and analyze articulation from speech signals in various applications such as: clinical protocols, foreign language learning, and language proficiency testing. However, articulation detection and analysis has not been adequately evaluated due to its complex nature. The challenging task is that speech signal alone contains insufficient information for articulation detection and analysis. Hence, we propose an alternative approach for articulation detection and analysis by developing a system that senses users’ articulatory organs (tongue and lips) based on phonetic rules. The system employs speech and ultrasonic signals simultaneously to read lip shape and tongue position. We also implemented the proposed technique on an off-the-shelf smartphone to enhance applicability in real-world scenarios. We evaluated the system using four languages: French, Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin Chinese. The result of our evaluation shows that our system is robust in recognizing vowel sound articulation with an overall accuracy of 94.74%.

Introduction Cochlear implantation (CI) is considered in children with asymmetric sensorineural hearing loss (ASHL), or severe to profound sensorineural hearing loss in one ear, and better hearing contralaterally. The benefits of a CI in these children are not well established. This study investigated the impact of unilateral CI on speech and language outcomes in pediatric patients with ASHL. Methods The retrospective chart review identified pediatric patients who underwent cochlear implantation for ASHL at a tertiary single center institution between 2014 and 2017. Children who underwent cochlear implantation in the poorer ear and maintained a hearing aid in the better ear were included, while children with cognitive impairment or prior cochlear nerve deficiency and auditory neuropathy were excluded. Speech and language measures were evaluated prior to implantation and at regular six-month intervals postoperatively. Ear specific Audiometry was evaluated at every visit and varied developmentally appropriate speech recognition tasks, including questionnaires, closed-set, and open-set measures, accounted for advancing childhood milestones. Specific measures of speech articulation, expressive and receptive language, and vocabulary were assessed including: Goldman Fristoe Test of Articulation (GFTA-3), Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (CELF-P2 or CELF-5), Receptive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test (ROWPVT) and Expressive One Word Picture Vocabulary Test (EOWPVT). The mean difference and standard deviation of speech and language outcomes at preoperative and postoperative evaluations were calculated. The change in outcomes were further assessed over each post-operative time point. Results Twenty-six children with asymmetric sensorineural hearing loss were included in the analysis, with 11 (42%) having bilateral enlarged vestibular aqueducts (EVA). At time of CI, unaided mean Pure Tone Average (PTA-4) for the better ear was 62Db HL, and worse ear was 92Db HL. There was an improvement in speech recognition in the implanted ear as expected. All preoperative speech and language evaluations were conducted within 7 months of cochlear implantation. Twenty-three patients had at least 1 postoperative re-evaluation. Fourteen children had preoperative and postoperative assessments with the same tool, with 13 patients (93%) showing improvement in at least 1 domain. For patients with repeated assessment within 12 months of surgery, we observed an average improvement in standard scores of: GFTA-3 (+11.2), CELF-P2 Core Language (+10.3), CELF-5 Core Language (+7.0), ROWPVT (+2.8) and EOWPVT (+4.5). Individual results are described. Conclusion Improvement in speech and language measures can be demonstrated in children undergoing unilateral cochlear implantation for asymmetric sensorineural hearing losses. These children, who are not typical CI candidates, can benefit from a CI in the poorer ear.