Biomedical subjects

Kathryn Hird

Publications and source records attributed to Kathryn Hird.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Affective speech elicited with a computer game.

To determine the degree to which emotional changes in speech reflect factors other than arousal, such as valence, the authors used a computer game to induce natural emotional speech. Voice samples were elicited following game events that were either conducive or obstructive to the goal of winning and were accompanied by either pleasant or unpleasant sounds. Acoustic analysis of the speech recordings of 30 adolescents revealed that mean energy, fundamental-frequency level, utterance duration, and the proportion of an utterance that was voiced varied with goal conduciveness; spectral energy distribution depended on manipulations of pleasantness; and pitch dynamics depended on the interaction of pleasantness and goal conduciveness. The results suggest that a single arousal dimension does not adequately characterize a number of emotion-related vocal changes, lending weight to multidimensional theories of emotional response patterning.

Acoustics↗

PubMed2002

The relationship between prosody and breathing in spontaneous discourse.

This article is concerned with the role of prosody in discourse. Three experiments explored the relationship between inspiration, declination, and syntactic boundaries in normal and RHD participants. Fundamental frequency and intensity were measured at the beginning and end of breath units excised from conversational samples. The results revealed evidence of declination of intensity in all samples measured. However, resetting of fundamental frequency was observed only in the samples of normal participants and then only when a breath coincided with the beginning of a sentence. The results suggest that resetting and declination play separate roles in discourse parsing.

Adult↗

PubMed2002

Perception of synthesized voice quality in connected speech by Cantonese speakers.

Perceptual voice analysis is a subjective process. However, despite reports of varying degrees of intrajudge and interjudge reliability, it is widely used in clinical voice evaluation. One of the ways to improve the reliability of this procedure is to provide judges with signals as external standards so that comparison can be made in relation to these "anchor" signals. The present study used a Klatt speech synthesizer to create a set of speech signals with varying degree of three different voice qualities based on a Cantonese sentence. The primary objective of the study was to determine whether different abnormal voice qualities could be synthesized using the "built-in" synthesis parameters using a perceptual study. The second objective was to determine the relationship between acoustic characteristics of the synthesized signals and perceptual judgment. Twenty Cantonese-speaking speech pathologists with at least three years of clinical experience in perceptual voice evaluation were asked to undertake two tasks. The first was to decide whether the voice quality of the synthesized signals was normal or not. The second was to decide whether the abnormal signals should be described as rough, breathy, or vocal fry. The results showed that signals generated with a small degree of aspiration noise were perceived as breathiness while signals with a small degree of flutter or double pulsing were perceived as roughness. When the flutter or double pulsing increased further, tremor and vocal fry, rather than roughness, were perceived. Furthermore, the amount of aspiration noise, flutter, or double pulsing required for male voice stimuli was different from that required for the female voice stimuli with a similar level of perceptual breathiness and roughness. These findings showed that changes in perceived vocal quality could be achieved by systematic modifications of synthesis parameters. This opens up the possibility of using synthesized voice signals as external standards or "anchors" to improve the reliability of clinical perceptual voice evaluation.

Communication Devices for People with Disabilities↗

PubMedDate not supplied

The effect of right cerebral hemisphere damage on collaborative planning in conversation: an analysis of intentional structure.

This study investigated the impact of right cerebral hemisphere damage on the capacity to take shared responsibility for the development of an intentional structure in conversation. Intentions are important determiners of both discourse structure and utterance meaning in context. Right-hemisphere damaged (RHD) individuals have been reported to have difficulty in the use of prosody as well as performing and appreciating the process of discourse tailoring which is dependent on recognizing speakers intentions. Audio taped samples of naturalistic conversations between RHD individuals and normal speakers were analysed. Text-level discourse processing analyses involved measures of global discourse structure and self-monitoring accuracy. Prosodic analyses included fundamental frequency (F0) resetting, pause durations and inter-turn intervals. The results revealed that speakers with right cerebral hemisphere damage do not, first, use prosody to alert listeners to changes in discourse structure, and, second, assume equal responsibility for the development and maintenance discourse structure.

Adult↗