Lingual coarticulation in preadolescents and adults: an ultrasound study
Lead Research Organisation:
Queen Margaret University
Department Name: Clinical Audiology Speech &Lang Res Cen
Abstract
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Organisations
Publications
Zharkova N
(2013)
Using ultrasound to quantify tongue shape and movement characteristics.
in The Cleft palate-craniofacial journal : official publication of the American Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Association
Zharkova N
(2014)
Spatial and temporal lingual coarticulation and motor control in preadolescents.
in Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR
Zharkova N
(2013)
A normative-speaker validation study of two indices developed to quantify tongue dorsum activity from midsagittal tongue shapes.
in Clinical linguistics & phonetics
Zharkova N
(2016)
Ultrasound and acoustic analysis of sibilant fricatives in preadolescents and adults.
in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
| Description | In this project, for the first time, a quantitative analysis of the dynamics of tongue movements was performed. The project used high-speed ultrasound to measure lingual coarticulation in the syllables "she", "shah", "sea" and "Sah", comparing preadolescent children (ie 10-12-year-olds) and adults, fifteen speakers in each age group. A database of synchronised ultrasound tongue video and audio signals was collected. The findings on vowel-on-consonant lingual coarticulation, published in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research (2014), suggest that in this age group, children are still not quite like adults in controlling their tongue movements while producing speech. In both age groups and both consonants, the tongue position at mid-consonant was affected by the identity of the following vowel. There was no significant effect of age on the size of the vowel-related difference in tongue posture, nor on within-speaker variability in tongue placement. Age-related differences were observed in the onset of coarticulation. While in the adults, the vowel effect was present throughout the consonant for both consonants, in preadolescents the effect was apparent later into the first half of the consonant. These results suggest a near-adult-like achievement in the development of lingual control by preadolescents, with respect to the coarticulation of fricative-vowel sequences. However age-related differences in timing may indicate that preadolescents have still to gain the extent of forward planning in speech production which is possible for a typical adult. Further fine differences between preadolescents and adults in the timing of tongue control were reported in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (2016). The paper focussed on age-related differences in differentiating between "s" and "sh" sounds in children's productions, compared with those by adults. The study demonstrated the importance of incorporating information on the dynamics of speech production in describing speech development in children. The combination of methodological and theoretical advances made during the project enabled us to extend the scope of our research in our further work, incorporating a wider range of child ages in a follow-up study funded by the ESRC (ES/K002597/1, "Coarticulation and tongue differentiation in children between three and thirteen years old", PI Dr Natalia Zharkova). |
| Exploitation Route | The database collected during the project is freely available to academics and students, for research and teaching purposes (http://edata.qmu.ac.uk/14/). The methodology of analysing tongue dynamics can be adopted in other studies. The results can be drawn upon in research on typical and disordered speech motor control development in children, as well as in applying speech technologies to synthesising child speech. Our work reporting results from this project has been increasingly cited in publications by external authors in international peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America; Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research; Computer Speech and Language; Ear and Hearing; Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics. Our database is currently being used in Ultrax 2020, an EPSRC-funded project (August 2017 - November 2020) aimed at improving automatic classification of tongue patterns in school-aged children with speech disorders. |
| Sectors | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Education,Healthcare |
| Description | Research Grant, "Coarticulation and tongue differentiation in children between three and thirteen years old" |
| Amount | £303,763 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | ES/K002597/1 |
| Organisation | Economic and Social Research Council |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 10/2012 |
| End | 02/2016 |
| Title | R script for calculating Nearest Neighbour distances between tongue curves |
| Description | The R script, written by Natalia Zharkova in 2014, implements in R the method of quantitative ultrasound tongue data analysis, described in Zharkova & Hewlett (2009, Journal of Phonetics). The method makes it possible to quantitatively compare sets tongue curves and to establish whether the two sets are significantly different from each other, and the extent of any difference. The method has been used in several publications funded by a succession of ESRC grants to Natalia Zharkova (e.g., Zharkova et al. 2011 Motor Control, 2012 JIPA, 2014 JSLHR). The reference to R is as follows: R Development Core Team. R: a language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing; 2011. Available at http://www.R-project.org. Accessed June 1, 2012. |
| Type Of Material | Physiological assessment or outcome measure |
| Year Produced | 2014 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | The script has been requested by academics and students from a number of universities, including Queen Margaret University, the University of Glasgow, Universidade Estadual Paulista (Brazil), Yale University (New Haven, USA), Tokyo Dental College (Tokyo, Japan), Royal Holloway University of London, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Bozen-Bolzano, Italy), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Barcelona, Spain), University of Strathclyde (Glasgow). The method has been applied to analysing typical and disordered speech in children and adults: in a study of speech production by American English speaking young adults who stutter and typically fluent adults (Frisch, S. A., Maxfield, N. & Belmont, A. 2016. Anticipatory coarticulation and stability of speech in typically fluent speakers and people who stutter. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 30, 277-291), and in a study of Italian speaking children who stutter and typically developing children (Lenocci, G. & Ricci, I. 2017. Coarticulation and stability of speech in Italian children who stutter and normally fluent children: an ultrasound study. Oral presentation at Ultrafest VIII, University of Potsdam, Germany, 4-6 October 2017). |
| URL | http://edata.qmu.ac.uk/20/ |
| Title | R scripts for calculating two indices that quantify tongue dorsum activity (DEI and TCPI) |
| Description | The two indices, Dorsum Excursion Index (DEI) and Tongue Constraint Position Index (TCPI), were developed by Natalia Zharkova with the aim to quantify potential tongue dorsum overuse in speakers with cleft palate (Zharkova 2013, Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Journal). The indices have been validated on typical adult speech (Zharkova 2013, Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics) and applied to typical child and adolescent speech (Zharkova, Lickley and Hardcastle 2014, Proceedings of ISSP; Zharkova 2016, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America; Zharkova et al. 2015, Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics; Zharkova 2017, Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics). The reference to R is as follows: R Development Core Team. R: a language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing; 2011. Available at http://www.R-project.org. Accessed June 1, 2012. |
| Type Of Material | Physiological assessment or outcome measure |
| Year Produced | 2014 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | The indices have been requested by academics, practitioners and students from a number of countries, including from Queen Margaret University, the University of Glasgow, University College Cork (Cork, Republic of Ireland), the University of Toronto (Toronto, Canada), New York University (New York, USA), Universidade Estadual Paulista (Brazil), Yale University (New Haven, USA), University of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, Ohio, USA), Tokyo Dental College (Tokyo, Japan), Royal Holloway University of London, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Bozen-Bolzano, Italy), Linköping University (Linköping, Sweden), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Barcelona, Spain), University of Strathclyde (Glasgow). The indices have been used in an ultrasound study of Croatian vowel system (Carovic, PhD thesis, University of Zagreb, 2014). DEI has been used to study typical and disordered productions of velar stop consonants by preschool children speaking American English (McAllister Byun, T., Buchwald, A. & Mizoguchi, A. 2016. Convert contrast in velar fronting: an acoustic and ultrasound study. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 30, 249-276). DEI is currently used in a research project funded by Action Medical Research, for quantifying tongue shape in the speech produced by children with cleft lip and palate ("Visualising speech: ultrasound assessment and speech therapy for children with cleft lip and palate"; University of Strathclyde, PI Dr Joanne Cleland, April 2017 - July 2018). |
| URL | http://edata.qmu.ac.uk/20/ |
| Title | High speed ultrasound/acoustic database of lingual articulation in preadolescents and adults |
| Description | The database consists of acoustic recordings of spoken sentences, synchronised with dynamic ultrasound images of the tongue, with the ultrasound frame rate of 100 Hz. The speakers were 15 adults and 15 preadolescents, native speakers of Standard Scottish English. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2011 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | The information on lingual articulations in preadolescents obtained from the database led to discussions and to developing a new collaborative grant proposal with Prof Fiona Gibbon from the University College Cork (successful, ES/K002597/1), aiming to provide information that will potentially be very useful in assessment of developmental speech disorders, particularly the data on age-appropriate limits of articulatory variability. The dataset has been used in the following publications: Zharkova (2013, Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Journal); Zharkova, Hewlett, Hardcastle & Lickley (2014, Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research); Zharkova (2016, Journal of the Acoustic Society of America). The database is currently used in an EPSRC-funded project, Ultrax 2020 (PI Prof Steve Renals, Edinburgh University), for the purpose of training datasets in order to achieve automated classification of tongue shapes for different speech sounds in school-aged children with speech disorders. |
| URL | http://edata.qmu.ac.uk/14/ |
| Title | Typical adult speakers' tongue shapes for several consonants in contrasting vowel environments |
| Description | The dataset contains text files with x-y coordinate values of tongue curves for seven different consonants (/p, t, k, f, s, l, r/) produced in two different vowel contexts (/i/ and /a/) by six adult speakers of Scottish Standard English, in carrier sentences. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2014 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | The dataset, generated by Natalia Zharkova during the ESRC postdoctoral fellowship, has been used in a number of research papers (Zharkova 2007, 2008, 2013 CLP, 2013 CPCJ). The dataset has also been requested by researchers and PhD students from the UK, Canada, the United States, Brazil, Japan, Sweden and Spain. |
| URL | http://edata.qmu.ac.uk/20/ |
| Description | Conference poster (Barcelona), The opposition of /i/ and /u/ in Scottish English children: acoustic and articulatory evidence |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.) |
| Results and Impact | A poster by Natalia Zharkova at the Workshop on Sound Change, Barcelona, Spain, 21-22 October 2010. Discussions after this talk led to formulating new ideas for postgraduate and undergraduate research student projects, particularly focussed on vowel production in children. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2010 |
| Description | Conference poster (Glasgow), Timing of tongue movement in preadolescents |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.) |
| Results and Impact | Poster by Natalia Zharkova at Perspectives on Rhythm and Timing (PoRT), a three-day interdisciplinary workshop, 19-21 July 2012, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK. Feedback from discussions at this poster contributed to improving existing methods of analysing tongue curves to achieve clinically relevant results. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2012 |
| Description | Conference poster (Leeds), Vowel-on-fricative dynamic lingual coarticulation in preadolescents and adults |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.) |
| Results and Impact | A poster by Natalia Zharkova at the British Association of Academic Phoneticians Colloquium, Leeds, 26-28 March 2012. Discussions after this talk led to formulating new ideas for postgraduate and undergraduate research student projects. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2012 |
| Description | Conference poster (York), Lingual coarticulation dynamics in preadolescents: an ultrasound study |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.) |
| Results and Impact | A poster by Natalia Zharkova, Nigel Hewlett, Robin Lickley and William Hardcastle at the International Child Phonology Conference, York, 16-18 June 2011. Discussions with clinical phoneticians at the conference led to the development of ideas for a research project aiming to trace typical motor speech development over the course of childhood (ESRC, successful, ES/K002597/1, PI Natalia Zharkova). |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2011 |
| Description | Conference talk (Cork, Republic of Ireland), Tongue shape measures based on ultrasound data |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.) |
| Results and Impact | A talk by Natalia Zharkova at the 14th Meeting of the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association, Cork, Ireland, 27-30 June 2012. The discussion generated by this talk led to information requests about the presented measures and to the development of new ideas on analysing tongue shape using ultrasound data without head-to-transducer stabilisation, particularly relevant to very young children and certain populations with speech disorders. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2012 |
| Description | Invited talk (Munich, Germany), Coarticulation development: evidence from ultrasound tongue imaging |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Invited talk by Natalia Zharkova at the weekly post-doctoral/doctoral research seminar series, the Institute of Phonetics, Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, Munich, 9 February 2012. There was particular interest to the methodological aspects of recording ultrasound tongue data from children, to inform a new research project in the University of Munich involving recording and analysing ultrasound tongue movement data from children. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2012 |
| URL | http://www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/~hoole/kurse/mampf/mampf.html |
| Description | Oral presentation (Barcelona, Spain), Segment-specific and developmental articulatory constraints: findings from ultrasound studies of lingual coarticulation in children |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | This oral presentation at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona generated challenging questions and an interesting discussion. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| URL | http://sct.uab.cat/stp/content/seminaris-i-congressos |
| Description | Research information day (Edinburgh) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Participants in your research and patient groups |
| Results and Impact | A research information day was organised at the end of the grant ES/H043349/1 for the project participants, academics and the wider public. The results of the project were presented, the use of ultrasound for tongue imaging was demonstrated, and implications of studying typical articulation for helping people with speech disorders were discussed. Applications of ultrasound in foreign language teaching were explored. Over 20 people attended, around a half of the attendees were children. Feedback was very positive, encouraging organisation of similar events in future research projects. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2011 |
| Description | Seminar talk (Edinburgh), How do preadolescents talk? Evidence from tongue movements |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.) |
| Results and Impact | Oral paper by Natalia Zharkova at the Speech and Communication Research Seminar 2010-2011, Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, on 9 February 2011. Discussions after this talk led to formulating new ideas for postgraduate and undergraduate research student projects, as well as ideas for improving existing methods of analysing tongue curves to achieve clinically relevant results. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2011 |
| Description | Seminar talk (Edinburgh), Tongue dynamics and speech motor control in preadolescents |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Other academic audiences (collaborators, peers etc.) |
| Results and Impact | A talk by Natalia Zharkova at the Phonetics/Phonology Workshop 2010-2011, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, 26 May 2011. The discussion after this talk led to formulating new ideas for postgraduate and undergraduate research student projects, and ideas for clinically relevant dynamic measures of coarticulation. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2011 |