This thesis explores the relationship between inhalation amplitude and turn-taking in spontaneous multiparty conversations held in Estonian. Respiratory activity is recorded with Respiratory Inductance Plethysmography. The main focus is on how inhalation amplitude varies between the inhalations produced directly before turn onset compared to the following inhalations within the same speaking turn. The results indicate a significant difference in amplitude, realised mainly by an increase in inhalation end lung volume values. One of the possible functions of this pattern is to signal an intention of taking the conversational turn. Another could be a phrasing or grouping function connected to lower inhalation amplitudes within turns.

Creakiness is a well-known turn-taking cue and has been observed to systematically accompany phrase and turn ends in several languages. In Estonian, creaky voice is frequently used by all speakers without any obvious evidence for its systematic use as a turn-taking cue. Rather, it signals a lack of prominence and is favored by lengthening and later timing in phrases. In this paper, we analyze the occurrence of creak with respect to properties of the respiratory cycle. We show that creak is more likely to accompany longer exhalations. Furthermore, the results suggest there is little difference in lung volume values regardless of the presence of creak, indicating that creaky voice might be employed to preserve air over the course of longer utterances. We discuss the results in connection to processes of speech planning in spontaneous speech.

The present study investigated the timing of backchannel onsets within speaker’s own and dialogue partner’s breathing cycle in two spontaneous conversations in Estonian. Results indicate that backchannels are mainly produced near the beginning, but also in the second half of the speaker’s exhalation phase. A similar tendency was observed in short non-backchannel utterances, indicating that timing of backchannels might be determined by their duration rather than their pragmatic function. By contrast, longer non-backchannel utterances were initiated almost exclusively right at the beginning of the exhalation. As expected, backchannels in the conversation partner’s breathing cycle occurred predominantly towards the end of the exhalation or at the beginning of the inhalation. 

This study explores the relationship between inhalation amplitude and turn management in four approximately 20 minute long spontaneous multiparty conversations in Estonian. The main focus of interest is whether inhalation amplitude is greater before turn onset than in the following inhalations within the same speaking turn. The results show that inhalations directly before turn onset are greater in amplitude than those later in the turn. The difference seems to be realized by ending the inhalation at a greater lung volume value, whereas the initial lung volume before inhalation onset remains roughly the same across a single turn. The findings suggest that the increased inhalation amplitude could function as a cue for claiming the conversational floor.

SPRINT is a language intervention project aimed to study the outcome of a parental home training program on children’s language development and future reading and writing skills. This study, which derives data from the SPRINT project, intended to examine the possible effects of a parental-based film intervention. It was conducted on toddlers aged 18-21 months from the Stockholm area with at least one parent who has Swedish as a first language. Parents of 78 children participated in the study and filled in 3 SECDI-w&s questionnaires rating their children's productive vocabulary. Children were randomized to either the intervention or the control group. Results indicated that the interventiongroup demonstrated significantly higher scores over time, F (2,78) = 5,192, p < .007. In the light of previous research it is concluded that this intervention contributes to an increase in productive vocabulary. However, the scores of the intervention group did not exceed the average range for Swedish children in the same age span. Furthermore the possible impact of parental education and thepresence of siblings on productive vocabulary was discussed.

Several studies have shown slight differences in language skills between genders, favouring females. In order to investigate gender differences in speech production for Swedish children, the productive vocabulary size of 295 children, aged 18-24 months, was measured by the validated instrument SECDI-2. The size of the productive vocabulary was found to grow rapidly during this age. Significant gender differences were found at 21 and 24 months, but not at 18 months. The girls’ mean scores were higher.

Language is a universal human ability, acquired readily by young children, who otherwise struggle with many basics of survival. And yet, language ability is variable across individuals. Naturalistic and experimental observations suggest that children’s linguistic skills vary with factors like socioeconomic status and children’s gender. But which factors really influence children’s day-to-day language use? Here, we leverage speech technology in a big-data approach to report on a unique cross-cultural and diverse data set: >2,500 d-long, child-centered audio-recordings of 1,001 2- to 48-mo-olds from 12 countries spanning six continents across urban, farmer-forager, and subsistence-farming contexts. As expected, age and language-relevant clinical risks and diagnoses predicted how much speech (and speech-like vocalization) children produced. Critically, so too did adult talk in children’s environments: Children who heard more talk from adults produced more speech. In contrast to previous conclusions based on more limited sampling methods and a different set of language proxies, socioeconomic status (operationalized as maternal education) was not significantly associated with children’s productions over the first 4y of life, and neither were gender or multilingualism. These findings from large-scale naturalistic data advance our understanding of which factors are robust predictors of variability in the speech behaviors of young learners in a wide range of everyday contexts.

This study aimed to investigate how different parameters of the voice (jitter, shimmer, LTAS and mean pitch) are affected by a late night out. Three recordings were made: one early evening before the night out, one after midnight, and one on the next day. Each recording consisted of a one minute reading and prolonged vowels. Five students took part in the experiment. Results varied among the participants, but some patterns were noticeable in all parameters. A trend towards increased mean pitch during the second recording was observed among four of the subjects. Somewhat unexpectedly, jitter and shimmer decreased between the first and second recordings and increased in the third one. Due to the lack of ethical testing, only a small number of participants were included. A larger sample is suggested for future research in order to generalize results.

Infant language acquisition research faces the challenge of dealing with subjects who are unable to provide spoken answers to research questions. To obtain comprehensible data from such subjects eye tracking is a suitable research tool, as the infants’ gaze can be interpreted as behavioural responses. The purpose of the current study was to investigate the amount of training necessary for participants to learn an audio-visual contingency and present anticipatory looking behaviour in response to an auditory stimulus. Infants (n=22) and adults (n=16) were presented with training sequences, every fourth of which was followed by a test sequence. Training sequences contained implicit audio-visual contingencies consisting of a syllable (/da/ or /ga/) followed by an image appearing on the left/right side of the screen. Test sequences were identical to training sequences except that no image appeared. The latency in time to first fixation towards the non-target area during test sequences was used as a measurement of whether the participants had grasped the contingency. Infants were found to present anticipatory looking behaviour after 24 training trials. Adults were found to present anticipatory looking behaviour after 28-36 training trials. In future research a more interactive experiment design will be employed in order to individualise the amount of training, which will increase the time span available for testing.

Speech perception is highly context-dependent. Sounds preceding speech stimuli affect how listeners categorise the stimuli, regardless of whether the context consists of speech or non-speech. This effect is acoustically contrastive; a preceding context with high-frequency acoustic energy tends to skew categorisation towards speech sounds possessing lower-frequency acoustic energy and vice versa (Mann, 1980; Holt, Lotto, Kluender, 2000; Holt, 2005). Partially replicating Holt's study from 2005, the present study investigates the effect of non-linguistic contexts in different frequency bands on speech categorisation. Adult participants (n=15) were exposed to Swedish syllables from a speech continuum ranging from /da/ to /ga/ varying in the onset frequencies of the second and third formants in equal steps. Contexts preceding the speech stimuli consisted of sequences of sine tones distributed in different frequency bands: high, mid and low. Participants were asked to categorise the syllables as /da/ or /ga/. As hypothesised, high frequency contexts shift the category boundary towards /da/, while lower frequency contexts shift the boundary towards /ga/, compared to the mid frequency context.

The amount of training necessary to trigger anticipatory looking was investigated in adults (n=16) using a simple testing paradigm, in order to create a baseline for studies on infants’ language acquisition. Participants were presented with training containing implicit associations between two syllables (/da/ and /ga/) and visual events displayed on different areas on the screen. The training series were periodically interrupted by test trials where a syllable was presented but no visual event was displayed. Significantly altered looking behaviour, as measured by participants’ first gaze fixation latency towards the Non-target area (where the visual event should not be expected), was found after 28-36 training trials.

This study will be a remake in part of Tyler & Lindblom "Preliminary study of simultaneous masking and pulsation-threshold patterns of vowels" (1982), with the use of today's technology. A steady-state vowel as masker and pure tones as signals will be presented using simultaneous-masking (SM) and pulsation-threshold (PT) procedures in an adjustment method to collect the vowel masking pattern. Vowel intensity is changed in three steps of 15 dB. For SM, each 15 dB change is expected to result in about a 10-13-dB change in signal thresholds. For PT, the change in signal thresholds with vowel intensity is expected to be about 3-4 dB. These results would correspond with the results from the Tyler & Lindblom study. Depending on technology outcome, further experiments can be made, involving representations of dynamic stimuli like CV-transitions and diphthongs.

Denna rapport är en del av en longitudinell studie av psykolingvistisk ålder och språklig medvetenhet hos elever i årskurs 1 på två olika skolor i Vallentuna kommun. I studien har material från de tre senaste projektåren bearbetats. Syftet med undersökningen var att undersöka huruvida fonologisk träning enligt den s.k. Bornholmsmodellen under elevernas tid i 6-årsklass återspeglar sig i ökad språklig medvetenhet och högre psykolingvistisk ålder i årskurs 1. Vidare undersöktes om den fonologiska träningen kan ha påverkat barnens arbetsminne. Två typer av test användes: UMESOL för kartläggning av fonologisk medvetenhet och ITPA, ett standardiserat test av psykolingvistiska färdigheter. Resultaten visar att det finns ett klart samband mellan fonologisk träning enligt Bornholmsmodellen i förskolan och elevernas språkliga medvetenhet i grundskolan. Vidare visar resultaten att även om minnesträningen i Bornholmsmodellen inte direkt påverkat resultaten vid ITPA, så finns det ett starkt samband mellan minnestestet i ITPA och elevernas prestation vid UMESOL.

I en longitudinell studie har elever i årskurs 1 och 2 på två olika skolor i Vallentuna kommun undersökts under tre på varandra följande projektår. Huvudsyftet med denna studie var att undersöka huruvida träning i fonologisk medvetenhet enligt den s.k. Bornholmsmodellen under elevernas tid i sexårsklass påverkar deras läs- och skrivinlärning. Tre typer av test användes, under årskurs 1 administrerades UMESOL för kartläggning av fonologisk medvetenhet och ITPA, för kartläggning av psykolingvistiska färdigheter. Under årskurs 2 kartlades elevernas läs- och skrivutveckling med UMESOL, ”läsning och skrivning”. I kontrast med tidigare forskningsresultat som pekade på en fördelaktig användning av Bornholmsmodellen under elevernas förskoleklassår, visade resultaten i denna studie inte på entydiga långsiktiga effekter för de elever som tränats fonologiskt enligt Bornholmsmodellen. Istället verkade den avgörande faktorn för elevernas läs- och skrivutveckling vara skoltillhörighet och pedagogisk ledning under dessa första skolår.

Som en del av pågående forskning vid fonetiklaboratoriet, SU, utförs månatligen inspelningar med syfte att studera interaktionen i en mor-barndyad, där barnet har ett medfött produktions- och perceptionshandikapp. En pojke, född med Hemifacial Mikrosomia, vilket innebär partiellt försämrad hörsel, undersöks under åldrarna 8-30 månader. Syndromet inbegriper bl a avsaknad av vänster ytteröra, kind- och okben. Barnet har sondmatats via näsan upp till ca 8 månaders ålder. Studien är inriktad på pojkens språkliga och kommunikativa utveckling och på föräldrarnas samspel med honom. För att undersöka hur representationer av barnets tidiga ord kan utvecklas hos ett handikappat barn görs dels analyser av barnets vokalisationer, joller och tal och dels analyser av moderns lingvistiska struktur, timing och turtagning, repetitioner och strategi att anpassa sig till barnets uppmärksamhetsfokus. Audio- och videoinspelningar används för att samla in data på förälder-barn interaktionen och barnets vokalisationer. Eyetracking mäter barnets ögonrörelser vid presentation av audiovisuella stimuli. SECDI formulär används regelbundet för att undersöka utvecklingen av barnets lexikala produktion. Preliminära analyser tyder på generella ökade interaktiva åtgärder från föräldrarna. För att underlätta kommunikation och språklig utveckling har föräldrarna bl a introducerat tecken som stöd (TSS).

The perceptual significance of enhancing amplitude contrasts at the onset of formant transitions in CV-syllables and of reducing the “speaking” tempo was studied with a group of normally developing school children. Natural and synthetic speech stimuli were used in the perception experiments. A total of 83 children, second and third graders, were tested on their ability to discriminate between CV syllables presented in pairs. The results indicate that the children’s discrimination performance resisted acoustic manipulations of both the natural and synthetic stimuli. Neither spectral nor timing manipulations rendered significant differencesin discrimination results.

This paper reports a study of the possible impact of pre-school phonological training on first and second graders' reading and writing abilities. Two public schools in the Stockholm metropolitan area were selected. The children were divided in two groups, depending on whether or not they had participated in a phonological training program in their last pre-school year. The children's linguistic and literacy development was followed during their first two school years. Psycholinguistic profiles (ITPA) were obtained for all the first grade children, along with an assessment of their phonological awareness. In the second grade, the children were reassessed to map their reading and writing abilities. Although the results suggested an initial advantage in general linguistic awareness for the children enrolled in the phonological training program, that advantage seems to be quickly overshadowed by social and personal factors such as continuity in the pedagogical leadership and attended school.

This is a preliminary report of a study of some linguistic and interactive aspects available in an adult-child dyad where the child is partially hearing impaired, during the ages 8 - 20 months. The investigation involves a male child, born with Hemifacial Microsomia. Audio and video recordings are used to collect data on child vocalization and parent-child interaction. Eye-tracking is used to measure eye movements when presented with audio-visual stimuli. SECDI forms are applied to observe the development of the child's lexical production. Preliminary analyses indicate increased overall parental interactive behaviour. As babbling is somewhat delayed due to physical limitations, signed supported Swedish is used to facilitate communication and language development. Further collection and analysis of data is in progress in search of valuable information of the linguistic development from a pathological perspective of language acquisition.

Speech and voice is governed by complicated processes, where a variety of different functions are used in its production and perception. Speech and voice differs in many ways from the objective measurable acoustic speech signal. The intensity of the fundamental frequency, F0, and what is called the speaker formant are two parameters that affect how voice is perceived. The purpose of the study was to investigate if the varied intensity of F0 and with or without speaker formant affect what stimuli untrained voice assessors like the most. To do so, a synthetic /a/ was created, formed by formant frequencies for Swedish vowels (Fant, 1959), varied with with or without speaker formant, and seven different intensities of the fundamental frequency, creating a total of 14 stimuli. Twelve women and eight men were asked to listen to and grade the stimuli, from the /a/ that was liked the most to the one that was liked the least. The expectations of the study were confirmed, the variation of the intensity of F0 and with or without speaker formant, did affect which stimuli the listeners preferred, and also confirmed that men and women preferred different stimuli. The two /a/’s with the weakest and the /a/ with the strongest intensity of F0, were least liked. The four /a/s with varying intensity of F0 in between, were liked approximately the same. If men and women ratings were studied separately from one another, the result differed. Women preferred stimuli with speaker formant more than the ones without, whereas men more appreciated stimuli with strong intensity of F0. If the study was the be retested and the results would be confirmed, further tests would be of interest to do, to investigate if the differences of preferences affect how speech is perceived and interpreted. 

Much of the existing research on prominence perception has focused on read speech in American English and German. The present paper presents two experiments that build on and extend insights from these studies in two ways. Firstly, we elicit prominence judgments on spontaneous speech. Secondly, we investigate gradient rather than binary prominence judgments by introducing a finger tapping task. We additionally provide a within-participant comparison of gradient prominence results with binary prominence judgments to evaluate their correspondence. Our results show that participants exhibit different success rates in tapping the prominence pattern of spontaneous data, but generally tapping results correlate well with binary prominence judgments within individuals. Random forest analysis of the acoustic parameters involved shows that pitch accentuation and duration play important roles in both binary judgments and prominence tapping patterns. We can also confirm earlier findings from read speech that differences exist between participants in the relative importance rankings of various signal and systematic properties.

Pairs of Thai tones were presented for perceptual discrimination inthree linguistic contexts (normal speech, low-pass filtered speech,and as musical (violin) sounds) to tonal language speakers, Thaiand Cantonese, and non-tonal (English) language speakers.English speakers discriminated the tonal contrasts significantlybetter in the musical context than in filtered speech, and in filteredspeech better than in full speech. On the other hand, both Thaiand Cantonese speakers perceived the tonal contrasts equally wellin all three contexts. Thus developmental absence of exposure tolexical tone results in a linguistic mode of processing whichinvolves the attenuation of a basic psychoacoustic ability, pitchdiscrimination.

Two experiments focus on Thai tone perception by native speakers of tone languages (Thai, Cantonese, and Mandarin), a pitch–accent (Swedish), and a nontonal (English) language. In Experiment 1, there was better auditory-only and auditory–visual discrimination by tone and pitch–accent language speakers than by nontone language speakers. Conversely and counterintuitively, there was better visual-only discrimination by nontone language speakers than tone and pitch–accent language speakers. Nevertheless, visual augmentation of auditory tone perception in noise was evident for all five language groups. In Experiment 2, involving discrimination in three fundamental frequency equivalent auditory contexts, tone and pitch–accent language participants showed equivalent discrimination for normal Thai speech, filtered speech, and violin sounds. In contrast, nontone language listeners had significantly better discrimination for violin sounds than filtered speech and in turn speech. Together the results show that tone perception is determined by both auditory and visual information, by acoustic and linguistic contexts, and by universal and experiential factors.

A person's voice is complex and often difficult for untrained listeners to describe verbally. This may lead to valuable information being lost in criminal investigations involving earwitnesses. The purpose of this study was to investigate acoustic correlates to common voice descriptions in order to enhance the usefulness of earwitness testimonies. 126 untrained listeners assessed voice characteristics of seven middle-aged men reading a Swedish text. Voices with a higher first formant were judged as more tense and harsh, and voices with a higher third formant were perceived as more common. Women rated voices with a higher fundamental frequency as higher. Voices that were perceived as high were also judged as tense and unstable, and those perceived as soft tended to be judged as relaxed and melodic. The results should be considered with some caution due to the low number of stimuli, but they indicate that formants play a crucial role in voice perception. The results can contribute to the understanding of earwitness testimonies as well as to develop effective methods for interviewing earwitnesses. Acoustic phantom voices are discussed as an interesting application. Future studies should investigate similar questions with more speakers as well as other types of speech material. 

Föräldrar till barn i åldrarna 8-16 månader har i samband med en forskningsstudie vid Stockholms universitet skattat sina barns färdigheter och förmågor med hjälp av formuläret SECDI. För undersökning av motorisk och språkliga utveckling hos barn valdes barn i åldrarna 8, 10, 12, 14 och 16 månader ut. Barnens skattade språkliga förmågor jämfördes med deras skattade motoriska förmågor. Syftet med detta specialarbete är att utifrån föräldrarnas skattningar av sina barns färdigheter undersöka om det finns ett samband mellan motorisk och språklig färdighet hos små barn. Undersökningens resultat påvisar ett sådant samband. Summan av antal förstådda respektive sagda ord korrelerade starkt med summan av antal gester. En bakomliggande variabel tros vara barnens ålder vilket visar sig som en signifikant korrelation mellan barnens språkliga och motoriska utveckling samt ålder.

This study assessed the influence of speaker similarity and sample length on the performance of an automatic speaker recognition (ASR) system utilizing the SpeechBrain toolkit. The dataset comprised recordings from 20 male identical twin speakers engaged in spontaneous dialogues and interviews. Performance evaluations involved comparing identical twins, all speakers in the dataset (including twin pairs), and all speakers excluding twin pairs. Speech samples, ranging from 5 to 30 s, underwent assessment based on equal error rates (EER) and Log cost-likelihood ratios (Cllr). Results highlight the substantial challenge posed by identical twins to the ASR system, leading to a decrease in overall speaker recognition accuracy. Furthermore, analyses based on longer speech samples outperformed those using shorter samples. As sample size increased, standard deviation values for both intra and inter-speaker similarity scores decreased, indicating reduced variability in estimating speaker similarity/dissimilarity levels in longer speech stretches compared to shorter ones. The study also uncovered varying degrees of likeness among identical twins, with certain pairs presenting a greater challenge for ASR systems. These outcomes align with prior research and are discussed within the context of relevant literature.

This pilot study set out to assess the speaker discriminatory power asymmetry regarding parameters from different phonetic dimensions in spontaneous speech, i.e., spectral, melodic, and temporal. The speech material consisted of spontaneous telephone conversations between siblings. The participants were 20 male subjects, Brazilian Portuguese speakers from the same dialectal area. Six acoustic-phonetic parameters were chosen for the comparison: f0 median, f0 baseline, speech rate, articulation rate, F3, and F4. Overall, acoustic parameters pertaining to the speech tempo category depicted the worse performance in terms of speaker discriminatory power when assessed in isolation. Such a trend was indicated by the relatively higher median and mean Cllr and EER values. Moreover, from the set of parameters assessed, high formant frequencies, i.e., F3 and F4, were the best- performing estimates in terms of discriminability depicting the lowest EER and Cllr values. The results suggested a speaker discriminatory power asymmetry concerning different acoustic-phonetic parameters, in which speech tempo estimates presented a lower discriminatory power when compared to melodic and spectral parameters. The findings also suggest that data sampling is crucial for the reliability of Cllr and EER calculations.

This study aimed to assess what we refer to as the speaker discriminatory power asymmetry and its forensic implications in comparisons performed in different speaking styles: spontaneous dialogues vs. interviews. We also addressed the impact of data sampling on the speaker's discriminatory performance concerning different acoustic-phonetic estimates. The participants were 20 male speakers, Brazilian Portuguese speakers from the same dialectal area. The speech material consisted of spontaneous telephone conversations between familiar individuals, and interviews conducted between each individual participant and the researcher. Nine acoustic-phonetic parameters were chosen for the comparisons, spanning from temporal and melodic to spectral acoustic-phonetic estimates. Ultimately, an analysis based on the combination of different parameters was also conducted. Two speaker discriminatory metrics were examined: Cost Log-likelihood-ratio (Cllr) and Equal Error Rate (EER) values. A general speaker discriminatory trend was suggested when assessing the parameters individually. Parameters pertaining to the temporal acoustic-phonetic class depicted the weakest performance in terms of speaker contrasting power as evidenced by the relatively higher Cllr and EER values. Moreover, from the set of acoustic parameters assessed, spectral parameters, mainly high formant frequencies, i.e., F3 and F4, were the best performing in terms of speaker discrimination, depicting the lowest EER and Cllr scores. The results appear to suggest a speaker discriminatory power asymmetryconcerning parameters from different acoustic-phonetic classes, in which temporal parameters tended to present a lower discriminatory power. The speaking style mismatch also seemed to considerably impact the speaker comparison task, by undermining the overall discriminatory performance. A statistical model based on the combination of different acoustic-phonetic estimates was found to perform best in this case. Finally, data sampling has proven to be of crucial relevance for the reliability of discriminatory power assessment.

This study aimed to analyze the impact of the amount of data on the discriminatory performance of acoustic-phonetic parameters, some of which are frequently assessed in forensic speaker comparisons. Parameters from three distinct phonetic domains were considered, namely, spectral, melodic, and temporal, which were assessed separately within the same phonetic domain and in combination.

The speech material consisted of spontaneous telephone conversations between two subjects. During the recording sessions, the participants were placed in different rooms, not directly seeing, hearing, or interacting with each other. The speakers were encouraged to start a conversation using a mobile phone while being simultaneously recorded.

All recordings were carried out with a high resolution (44.1 kHz and 16-bit). Data segmentation and transcription were performed in the Praat software [1]. The participants were 20 male subjects, Brazilian Portuguese speakers from the same dialectal area. Their age ranged from 19 to 35 years, with a mean of 26.4 years. Although the subjects (10 identical twin pairs) were recruited from a twin research project, cf. [2, 3, 4], the focus here was comparisons among all speakers (i.e., 190 inter-speaker comparisons) rather than on individual twin pairs

The traditional way of estimating the formant frequencies from articulatory data presupposes knowledge of how the vocal tract cross-sectional area varies for a given articulatory shape (Fant 1960/1970). Accordingly, in order to derive the formant pattern of a given articulation, the three-dimensional shape of the vocal tract (VT) needs to be known. In the past cross-sectional areas have typically been derived by means of ‘d-to-A rules’ that use the mid-sagittal cross-distance d at each point along the VT to produce a corresponding cross-sectional area A. X-ray and MRI data have been used to calibrate such rules (Heinz & Stevens 1964, Sundberg et al. 1987, Ericsdotter 2005). Although this procedure has produced many useful results it is time consuming and laborious. It is speaker-specific. It presupposes access to information on the three-dimensional shape of the VT, which is not experimentally readily accessible. Such observations raise the question whether sufficiently accurate alternative approaches can be developed. Is it possible to go straight from articulatory data to formant frequencies without having to construct a cross-sectional area function? If such methods could be developed it would have many uses both in phonetics and practical applications.

This paper reports an attempt to map the time variations of selected articulatory parameters from X-ray profiles directly on the formant tracks using multiple regression analysis. Preliminary results for F1 indicate that multiple regression analysis can indeed be useful for making such predictions. The prospects of extending the present analyses to other formants are discussed.

WILD 2015 is the second Workshop on Infant Language Development, held June 10-12 2015 in Stockholm, Sweden. WILD 2015 was organized by Stockholm Babylab and the Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University. About 150 delegates met over three conference days, convening on infant speech perception, social factors of language acquisition, bilingual language development in infancy, early language comprehension and lexical development, neurodevelopmental aspects of language acquisition, methodological issues in infant language research, modeling infant language development, early speech production, and infant-directed speech. Keynote speakers were Alejandrina Cristia, Linda Polka, Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz, Angela D. Friederici and Paula Fikkert.

Organizing this conference would of course not have been possible without our funding agencies Vetenskapsrådet and Riksbankens Jubiléumsfond. We would like to thank Francisco Lacerda, Head of the Department of Linguistics, and the Departmental Board for agreeing to host WILD this year. We would also like to thank the administrative staff for their help and support in this undertaking, especially Ann Lorentz-Baarman and Linda Habermann.

The WILD 2015 Organizing Committee: Ellen Marklund, Iris-Corinna Schwarz, Elísabet Eir Cortes, Johan Sjons, Ulrika Marklund, Tove Gerholm, Kristina Nilsson Björkenstam and Monika Molnar.

In terms of anatomical geometry the infant Vocal Tract undergoes significant change during development. This research note reports an attempt to reconstruct an infant VT from adult data. Comparable landmarks were identified on the fixed structures of adult articulatory lateral profiles (obtained from X-ray images) and matching infant profiles (obtained from published data in the literature, Sobotta [Putz & Pabst 2001, and personal communication from author Prof. Dr. med. R. Pabst]. The x-coordinates of the infant landmarks could be accurately derived by a linear scaling of the adult data whereas the y-values required information on both the x- and the y-coordinates of the adult. These scaling rules were applied to about 400 adult articulatory profiles to derive a set of corresponding infant articulations. A Principal Components Analysis was performed on these shapes to compare the shapes of the infant and adult articulatory spaces. As expected from the scaling results the infant space is significantly compressed in relation to the adult space suggesting that the main articulatory degree of freedom for the child is jaw opening. This finding is in perfect agreement with published descriptions of the phonetics of early vocalizations. 

This paper reports an attempt to map the time variations of selected articulatory parameters (from X-ray profiles) directly on the F1, F2 and F3 formant tracks using multiple regression analysis (MRA). The results indicate that MRA can indeed be useful for predicting formant frequencies. Since the results reported here are limited to preliminary observations of F1 only, further studies including F2 and F3 are needed to evaluate the method more definitively.

Articulatory features from two datasets, Slovak and Swedish, were compared to see whether different methods of eliciting loud speech (ambient noise vs. visually presented loudness target) result in different articulatory behavior. The features studied were temporal and kinematic characteristics of lip separation within the closing and opening gestures of bilabial consonants, and of the tongue body movement from /i/ to /a/ through a bilabial consonant. The results indicate larger hyper - articulation in the speech elicited with visually presented target. While individual articulatory strategies are evident, t he speaker groups agree on increasing the kinematic features consistently within each gesture in response to the increased vocal effort. Another concerted strategy is keeping the tongue response considerably smaller than that of the lips, presumably to preserve acoustic prerequisites necessary for the adequate vowel identity. While the method of visually presented loudness target elicits larger span of vocal effort, the two elicitation methods achieve comparable consistency per loudness conditions.

Listeners rely on speech vocal cues to judge speakers’ age, size, personality, and other paralinguistic and extralinguistic features. These judgements are often based on vocal stereotypes which may be universally or culturally determined. This study examines how physical, psychological, social, and vocal features are perceived by listeners and which acoustic features may influence their judgements. An experiment integrating a perceptual test and acoustic measurements was performed. The corpus consisted of speech utterances produced by five animated film characters, dubbed in Brazilian Portuguese. The stimuli were judged by 77 Brazilian Portuguese native speakers, 46 women and 31 men, aged 20 to 50. The acoustic analysis was performed automatically. Acoustic measures included mean f0, f0 baseline, spectral emphasis and H1-H2. For inter-rater agreement analysis, Cronbach's Alpha was chosen. The results indicated close agreements among judges for all characters. Overall scores obtained for all characters were above .90. In interpreting the results, the influence sound symbolism codes may have on listeners’ judgments and the factors influencing vocal stereotypes have been considered. The discussion of the acoustic and perceptual analysis results takes into consideration if voice actors adapt their voices to fit the characters or otherwise are cast because of their natural voice characteristics

Our study examines the attribution of physical and psychosocial features to the characters of a dubbed animated film by comparing the results of a listening test experiment with the results of a reading test experiment. The aim of this study was to investigate the potential influence of lexical content on the perceptual evaluation of speaker characteristics. In the listening test, respondents were asked to listen to audio samples of dubbed dialogues in the film produced by voice actors and rate the characters on fourteen bipolar continuous scales. The task in the reading test was the same, except for the stimuli, which were transcriptions of the audio files. Results from both tests are congruent, as the character profiles based on the perception scores from each test are nearly identical for all characters. Differences are mainly due to the degree judgement scores are amplified by the characters' voice quality profiles.

Studies of child language development have shown that children from an early age are aware of turn-taking patterns in interaction. The aim of this study is to investigate if there is a relationship between turn-taking pauses in parent-child interaction and child vocabulary at 18 months of age. Analysis of pause duration is conducted on recordings from the SPRINT language intervention project and pause duration is found to correlate with child vocabulary size. Different possible reasons for this correlation are discussed.

We present an attempt at using 3rd party observer gaze to get a measure of how appropriate each segment in a dialogue is for a speaker change. The method is a step away from the current dependency of speaker turns or talkspurts towards a more general view of speaker changes. We show that 3rd party observers do indeed largely look at the same thing (the speaker), and how this can be captured and utilized to provide insights into human communication. In addition, the results also suggest that there might be differences in the distribution of 3rd party observer gaze depending on how information-rich an utterance is. 

The ability of people, and of machines, to determine the position of a sound source in a room is well studied. The related ability to determine the orientation of a directed sound source, on the other hand, is not, but the few studies there are show people to be surprisingly skilled at it. This has bearing for studies of face-to- face interaction and of embodied spoken dialogue systems, as sound source orientation of a speaker is connected to the head pose of the speaker, which is meaningful in a number of ways. The feature most often implicated for detection of sound source orientation is the inter-aural level difference - a feature which it is assumed is more easily exploited in anechoic chambers than in everyday surroundings. We expand here on our previous studies and compare detection of speaker orientation within and outside of the anechoic chamber. Our results show that listeners find the task easier, rather than harder, in everyday surroundings, which suggests that inter-aural level differences is not the only feature at play. 

The ability of people, and of machines, to determine the position of a sound source in a room is well studied. The related ability to determine the orientation of a directed sound source, on the other hand, is not, but the few studies there are show people to be surprisingly skilled at it. This has bearing for studies of face-to-face interaction and of embodied spoken dialogue systems, as sound source orientation of a speaker is connected to the head pose of the speaker, which is meaningful in a number of ways. We describe in passing some preliminary findings that led us onto this line of investigation, and in detail a study in which we extend an experiment design intended to measure perception of gaze direction to test instead for perception of sound source orientation. The results corroborate those of previous studies, and further show that people are very good at performing this skill outside of studio conditions as well. 

The paper describes the design of a novel multimodal corpus of spontaneous multiparty conversations in Swedish. The corpus is collected with the primary goal of investigating the role of breathing and its perceptual cues for interactive control of interaction. Physiological correlates of breathing are captured by means of respiratory belts, which measure changes in cross sectional area of the rib cage and the abdomen. Additionally, auditory and visual correlates of breathing are recorded in parallel to the actual conversations. The corpus allows studying respiratory mechanisms underlying organisation of spontaneous conversation, especially in connection with turn management. As such, it is a valuable resource both for fundamental research and speech techonology applications.

MMN is an ERP component that reflects preattentive discrimination between a recurring standard sound and a deviating sound. MMN is frequently used in infant studies focused on speech development since its elicitation does not require the attention of the child. The general ability of infants to discriminate speech sounds is gradually specialized towards discrimination of phonetic contrasts in their mother tongue. The aim of the present study was to examine if an MMN response is elicited by naturally varying speech stimuli (/ ti/ and / ki/) and if this response is stronger for the speech sound that infants typically produce at this age (/ t/). An EEG experiment with an oddball paradigm was designed. Participants were 19 infants (9-mo). An MMN-like negative response to deviants compared to standards was found, however it was not statistically significant. No significant interaction effect was found for MMN and type of deviant stimulus. Variation in the standard stimuli may have contributed to the lack of effect. It is also possible that the infants already were equally competent in discriminating both speech sounds, which may account for the small difference between the deviant waveforms.

The present study investigates adult imitations of infant vocalizations in a cross-linguistic perspective. Japanese-learning and Swedish-learning infants were recorded at ages 16-21 and 78-79 weeks. Vowel-like utterances (n=210) were selected from the recordings and presented to Japanese (n=3) and Swedish (n=3) adults. The adults were asked to imitate what they heard, simulating a spontaneous feedback situation between caregiver and infant. Formant data (F1 and F2) was extracted from all utterances and validated by comparing original and formant re-synthesized utterances. The data was normalized for fundamental frequency and time, and the accumulated spectral difference was calculated between each infant utterance and each imitation of that utterance. The mean spectral difference was calculated and compared, grouped by native language of infant and adult, as well as age of the infant. Preliminary results show smaller spectral difference in the imitations of older infants compared to imitations of the younger group, regardless of infant and adult native language. This may be explained by the increasing stability and more speech-like quality of infants' vocalizations as they grow older (and thus have been exposed to their native language for a longer period of time), making their utterances easier for adults to imitate.