Drawing upon sociocultural theory of Vygotsky, the current study aims to investigate the effect of dyadic interaction in mixed and matched level proficiency pairings on comprehension and production of request and apology speech acts. The participants were 125 EFL learners who were randomly assigned to control and experimental (interaction) groups. Based on their scores in the pretest including ...

INTRODUCTION Many studies highlight that an impaired ability to communicate is one of the key clinical features of Alzheimer disease (AD). OBJECTIVE To study temporal organisation of speech in an oral reading task in patients with AD and in matched healthy controls using a semi-automatic method, and evaluate that method's ability to discriminate between the 2 groups. SUBJECTS AND METHODS A ...

We present an automatic speech-to-speech translation system for Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) that helps oral communication between Japanese and English speakers in various situations while traveling. Our own compact large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition engine and compact translation engine based on a lexicalized grammar provided the basis for the Japanese/English bi-directional ...

OBJECTIVE It has been the aim of the present study to introduce a novel automatic technique for the objective and quantitative assessment of speech intelligibility to the evaluation of postoperative outcome. PATIENTS AND METHODS Forty-six patients with oral carcinomas, mean age 59.8 +/- 10.1 years, and an age-matched control group of 40 subjects without oral diseases. Recordings of a standard...

Adults produce rapid, interleaved sequences of speech sounds by controlling the relative motions in time and space of the oral articulators. The control and coordination of these effectors appear to be automatic, effortless, and usually error free. If speech production is viewed within the framework of classical motor control theories, we can infer that adults have organized functional synergie...

In order to investigate the nature of motor defects of the speech musculatures in dysar thric patients due to cerebral vascular accidents, non-verbal oral movements were studied in relation to overall intelligibility of speech, coordinative movements of speech organs and swal lowing movements. The results led us to the following conclusions. 1. The degree of individual isolated oral movements w...

The disfluencies inherent in spontaneous speaking and out-of-vocabulary words omnipresent in any transcribed oral utterance by speech recognition, are a real challenge for speech understanding systems. Thus, we propose in this paper, a method for processing disfluencies and out-ofvocabulary words in the context of automatic Arabic speech understanding. Our method based on a robust and partial a...

We report the case of a 7-year-old male of Western European origin presenting with moderate intellectual disability, severe childhood apraxia of speech in the presence of oral and manual dyspraxia, and hypotonia across motor systems including the oral and speech motor systems. Exome sequencing revealed a de novo frameshift protein truncating mutation in the fourth exon of BCL11A, a gene recentl...

This study compares velar movements for nasal vowels and consonants; it investigates contextual nasalisation; and it provides new data on how nasalisation is affected by speech rate. Velar position is measured with an electromagnetic articulatograph (EMA) for two French speakers. Our results confirm that (i) nasal vowels are produced with a lower velum height than nasal consonants; (ii) the con...