We present a method that determines articulatory movements from speech acoustics using an HMM (Hidden Markov Model)-based speech production model. The model statistically generates speech acoustics and articulatory movements from a given phonemic string. It consists of HMMs of articulatory movements for each phoneme and an articulatory-to-acoustic mapping for each HMM state. For a given speech ...

Two components of verbal fluency performance--clustering (i.e., generating words within subcategories) and switching (i.e., shifting between subcategories)--were examined in patients with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT), patients with dementia with Parkinson's disease (DPD), nondemented patients with Parkinson's disease (NPD), and demographically matched controls. The DAT and DPD groups we...

The present study explores the relationship between the short version of Korean Boston Naming Test (S-K-BNT), Controlled Oral Word Association Test phonemic (COWAT-/k/) & semantic (COWAT-Animal), and Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) & Mild Dementia. Total of 594 communitydwelling seniors over 60 years of age consisting of normal elderly, (n=333) those with MCI (n=241), and those with mild dement...

A meta-analysis of 30 studies with 1,511 participants was conducted to estimate and compare the magnitude of deficits on tests of phonemic and semantic fluency for patients with Huntington's disease (HD) relative to healthy control participants. As has been found for patients with focal frontal cortical lesions (but not for patients with focal temporal cortical lesions), symptomatic HD patients...

Phonemic restoration refers to the synthesis of missing phonemes in speech when sufficient lexical context is present. Current models for phonemic restoration however, make no use of any lexical knowledge. Such models are inherently inadequate for restoring unvoiced phonemes and may be limited in their ability to restore voiced phonemes too. We present a predominantly top-down model for phonemi...

In this paper, we present a statistical analysis of Korean pronunciation variations using a Grapheme-to-Phoneme (GTP) system. The GPT system generates pronunciation variants by applying rules modeling obligatory and optional phonemic changes and allophonic changes in spoken Korean. Experimental results using a PBS (Phonetically Balanced Sentence) Speech DB of 60,000 sentences show that the most...

Gujarati and White Hmong are among a small handful of languages known to maintain a phonemic contrast between breathy and modal voice across both obstruents and vowels. Given that breathiness on stop consonants is realized as a breathy-voiced aspirated release into the following vowel, how is consonant breathiness distinguished from vocalic breathiness, if at all? We examine acoustic and electr...

Word finding difficulty is a known impairments in multiple sclerosis (MS). The purpose of this study is to adapt homophone meaning generation test to Persian language, and then examine word storage and access in multiple sclerosis patients through these three word-finding tests. This study examined the word retrieval in 90 Persian speaking patients with multiple sclerosis and 90 matched healthy...

The main goal of this study was to produce adjusted normative data for the Portuguese population on two verbal fluency measures: the semantic fluency test (animals category) and the phonemic fluency test (letters M, R, and P). The study included 950 community-dwelling individuals (624 women and 326 men) aged between 18 and 98 (mean = 57.8, SD = 19.0), who had educational backgrounds ranging fro...

Auditory perceptual learning has been proposed as effective for remediating impaired language and for enhancing normal language development. We examined the effect of phonemic contrast discrimination training on the discrimination of whole words and on phonological awareness in 8- to 10-year-old mainstream school children. Eleven phonemic contrast continua were synthesised using linear interpol...