Speaker-controlled variability in children's speech in interaction.
Lead Research Organisation:
University College London
Department Name: Speech Hearing and Phonetic Science
Abstract
Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.
Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
| Valerie Hazan (Principal Investigator) |
Publications
Granlund S
(2018)
Children's Acoustic and Linguistic Adaptations to Peers With Hearing Impairment.
in Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR
Hazan V
(2016)
Suprasegmental Characteristics of Spontaneous Speech Produced in Good and Challenging Communicative Conditions by Talkers Aged 9-14 Years.
in Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR
Hazan, V.
(2017)
Speech Communication across the Life Span
in Acoustics Today
Hazan, V.
(2014)
Book of abstracts
Pettinato M
(2016)
Vowel space area in later childhood and adolescence: Effects of age, sex and ease of communication
in Journal of Phonetics
Pettinato M
(2019)
Corrigendum to "Vowel space area in later childhood and adolescence: Effects of age, sex and ease of communication" [J. Phon. 54 (2016) 1-14]
in Journal of Phonetics
| Description | In this project, speech recordings were made for 96 child participants (46M, 50F, range 9;0 to 14;11 years) while they carried out a collaborative 'spot the difference' picture task in pairs, either in good listening conditions or in a condition when perception was deliberately impaired for one of the participants (via vocoded speech or babble noise). The aim was to examine the development of clarification strategies used by children in adverse communicative conditions. In a first phase, extensive acoustic-phonetic analyses of the speech produced in the easy and difficult communicative conditions were carried out. Children's conversational speech tended to be more hyperarticulated than in adults, with a larger vowel space, slower articulation rate, higher intensity, higher pitch mean and range, potentially limiting further hyperarticulation in clear speaking styles. Child speakers made acoustic-phonetic adaptations to their speech in difficult communicative conditions but the extent of adaptations was not as great as that seen in adults, and, in the vocoder condition, children made use of certain strategies (increasing pitch range) unlikely to be helpful to counter the speech degradation, while adults used strategies that were more appropriate. The age effect was seen in terms of increasing hypoarticulation in the easy-listening condition rather than increased adaptations when communication was more difficult. The impact of the lesser degree of acoustic-phonetic differentiation between conversational and clear speech in children was seen in the perceptual experiments, where listeners were asked to judge the clarity of speech excerpt on a 7 point scale: the difference in clarity scores across speech conditions was significantly lower for children's than adults' speech. The interactions were also analysed in terms of the repair strategies used by children when a communication breakdown occurred. Older children were more effective at resolving communication breakdowns, as a greater proportion of miscommunications were resolved by a single repair. However, minimal age effects were found in the type of clarification requests used and in repair strategies. In another phase of the study, we examined phonetic category structure for two phonetic contrasts to establish whether phonetic categories produced by children within this age range were more internally-variable than adults'. The same child participants produced multiple repetitions of a set of keywords in a picture naming task. Children produced farther yet also much more dispersed categories than adults with increasing discriminability with age, such that by age 13, children's categories were no less discriminable than those of adults. Overall, this study provides evidence for ongoing developments in certain aspects of speech communication until late teenage years. Plans for future research An ESRC project on speech communication in older adults has been funded (ES/L007002/1). It will expand our exploration of communication in adverse conditions and will use some of the procedures used in the recently completed project. A further ESRC project due to start in June 2017 will take a lifespan approach for the investigation of speech communication in adverse conditions and will build on the research carried out within this project. |
| Exploitation Route | Academic users Our kidLUCID corpus of fully-transcribed and annotated spontaneous speech dialogues between pairs of child speakers is a rich source of information for researchers investigating other aspects of speech and language development. This corpus is now fully available online. Non-academic users A better understanding that the process of speech and language acquisition is still ongoing in teenage years is relevant for Speech and Language Therapists: our kidLUCID corpus and findings provide rare data on spontaneous speech produced in communicative conditions in older typically-developing children. This is an important baseline against which to compare communicative difficulties experienced by youngsters with hearing or language impairments. The understanding that communication in challenging conditions has a greater impact on youngsters than on adults is also relevant to educational settings, both in terms of communication in noisy in reverberant environments and communication with peers who may have hearing or language difficulties. |
| Sectors | Education,Healthcare |
| URL | https://www.ucl.ac.uk/pals/research/shaps/research/clear-speech-strategies |
| Description | The focus of this research was to increase our understanding of later stages of speech development so the work can be classified as basic research with potential longer-term societal impact rather than a project with very immediate impact beyond academia. A linked doctoral project investigated speech communication between deaf adolescents and with their peers. As regards the clinical area of speech and language therapy, the findings of this research provide normative data on the characteristics of spontaneous speech produced by older children and adolescents and how this differ from adult norms. It also provides a normative benchmark for examining the speech of older children with communication difficulties due to e.g. language impairment or hearing loss. A news item publicising the outcome of the study together with a link to the project website with detailed information appeared in the October issue of the Bulletin, the official magazine of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT) which has very wide distribution in the profession. We were invited to present an overview of the study at a meeting of the South East Deafness Special Interest Group of the RCSLT in May 2015. The Diapix picture materials used to elicit controlled spontaneous speech in children also have potential for being used in clinical settings with both adults and children. They were publicised to the South East Deafness SIG and made available to clinicians via a Dropbox link. We have received a number of requests from clinicians for these materials and continue in our efforts to publicise their availability. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2015 |
| Sector | Healthcare |
| Impact Types | Societal |
| Description | ESRC Research Grants |
| Amount | £324,431 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | ES/L007002/1 |
| Organisation | Economic and Social Research Council |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 08/2014 |
| End | 07/2017 |
| Title | kidLUCID audio corpus |
| Description | This corpus contains high-quality speech recordings for 96 child speakers aged between 9 and 14 years inclusive while they were engaged, in pairs, in an interactive task in good and challenging communicative conditions. The corpus includes orthographic transcriptions as well as word- and phoneme-level aligned labels. It is available online. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2014 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | This corpus is now available for use by other researchers both at UCL and elsewhere for further analyses of speech communication in children. |
| URL | https://oscaar.ci.northwestern.edu/overview.php |
| Title | kidLUCID transcription database |
| Description | This database includes orthographic transcriptions with time alignments for all recordings in the kidLUCID corpus. These are freely downloadable online. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2014 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | This makes an extensive set of transcripts of spontaneous child speech available for further linguistic analysis. |
| URL | http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/project/kidLUCID/index.php |
| Description | 'Clang Bang Swoosh Boom' art installation at Bloomsbury Festival (October 2016) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | A collaboration between speech scientists Outi Tuomainen and Valerie Hazan and sound artist Thor McIntyre-Burnie (ASWARM) resulted in the creation of a sound installation entitled Clang Bang Swoosh Boom which was exhibited at the Bloomsbury Festival as part of the Beyond Words day of events based at UCL. Our installation aimed to focus attention on how we adapt our speech to communicate effectively in an increasingly noisy world. It also highlighted how noisy environments particularly affect communication in children and older adults. The sound materials used in the installation were extracted from the speech corpora collected within our ESRC-funded projects on speech communication in adverse conditions in children and adults. Each of four audio channels within the installation played the voice of either a child, young or older adult. Beyond Words was attended by several thousand people and a steady stream of members of the public of all ages came to experience our sound installation. We were on hand to discuss the work and the science behind it with the audience. A leaflet describing 'The Science behind Clang Bang Swoosh Boom', with a short biography of members of our team was also distributed. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| URL | http://valeriehazan.com/wp/index.php/public-engagement/ |
| Description | Conference presentation (Acoustical Society of America) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | This was a presentation at the Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America which is one of the premier meetings for speech sciences research. Our ESRC project was publicised to many key research groups from the US and Europe. Contacts were renewed with other groups currently researching aspects of speaker-listener interactions. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2013 |
| URL | http://www.ucl.ac.uk/pals/research/shaps/research/clear-speech-strategies/Publications/pettinato_and... |
| Description | Invited presentation (Conference on Speech in Noise, Groningen, Netherlands) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Our presentation at this conference led to further discussions with a researcher at a major hearing aid company and to new links with researchers at the University of Linköping in Denmark, leading to a joint supervision of a MSc project that will trial the use of our diapix method in a study on automatic speech recognition. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| URL | http://spin2016.nl/ |
| Description | Invited presentation (special session on Speech Development across the Lifespan, Acoustical Society of America meeting, Jacksonville, USA) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | This talk was part of a special session on speech development across the lifespan. There was a group discussion on conclusion of the session which also discussed methodological issues relating to lifespan studies. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://acousticalsociety.org/content/fall-2015-meeting |
| Description | Invited presentations (Israeli Speech Hearing and Language conference, Jerusalem, Israel) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | I gave two lecture-length presentations about different aspects of our work on speech communication in adverse conditions to Speech and Language Therapists and Audiologists in Israel. A number expressed an interest in methods to evaluate speech in interaction in children and adults with hearing or language impairment. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| URL | http://www.congress.co.il/ishla/ |
| Description | Invited seminar (Laboratoire Parole et Langage, CNRS, Aix-en-Provence, France) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | This invited talk was part of a workshop on production and perception of speech variation organised at the CNRS attended by postgraduate students and researchers from the Provence region. The aim was to focus students' attention on issues of variability and how to quantify them. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| Description | Invited seminar presentation (University of Saarbrueken, Germany) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | I was invited to present our work on speech adaptations in speaker-listener interactions. The presentation was attended by a large number of students and staff from different departments of the university. As many work in speech technology, the issue of human speaker-listener interaction is not one they are directly addressing but it is highly relevant to research in human-machine interaction. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/page.php?id=news |
| Description | Invited seminar talk (University of Edinburgh) |
| 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 | Invited presentation at the Linguistics Circle Seminar series of the University of Edinburgh, presenting an overview of our research findings Requests for our diapixUK materials for a new project that was being planned at the university of Edinburgh. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2013 |
| URL | http://www.ppls.ed.ac.uk/lel/events/listing/linguistic-circle/2013/11 |
| Description | Invited talk (University of Concepcion, Chile) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | I gave a presentation on 'Speech Communication across the Lifespan' to mainly postgraduate students at the University of Concepcion in Chile. This was broadly attended and one positive outcome of discussions that followed the talk was that one student from this university applied for a postgraduate scholarship within a Marie-Curie network that i am a member of. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | Keynote presentation at Workshop on challenges in the analysis and processing of spontaneous speech (CAPSS), Budapest, Hungary |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Valerie Hazan gave a keynote presentation entitled 'Spontaneous speech adaptations in challenging communicative conditions across the lifespan' |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| URL | http://capss2017.nytud.hu/ |
| Description | Media interest (child study) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A press release, press conference or response to a media enquiry/interview |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Media (as a channel to the public) |
| Results and Impact | Our presentation at the Acoustical Society of America conference was one of only 20 selected by the press office for highlighting to the media ('lay language papers'). As a result, a web page summarising some of the main findings of our study in an accessible way and including sound demonstrations was produced and remains on the AIP press office website. Our presentation was also highlighted in information sent to student attendees as 'one to watch'. This publicity resulted in an increase in interest in our presentation at the conference. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| URL | https://acoustics.org/?p=371 |
| Description | Press release for publications aimed at speech and language therapists, speech technology engineers and educationalists. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A press release, press conference or response to a media enquiry/interview |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | A short 'news item' about the outcome of our project and about the existence of our kidLUCID speech corpus appears in the October 2014 edition of the Bulletin (the official magazine of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists), which reaches 14,700 speech and language therapists. An item advertising our kidLUCID corpus also appears as an ongoing item in the monthly newsletter sent to members of the International Speech and Communication Association (ISCA). A press release was sent to SecEd, a magazine sent to Secondary Education teachers, but this was not taken up. It is too early to assess the impact that arose from these press releases. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| Description | Talk to Special Interest Group in Deafness of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (London) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | This was a talk given to speech and language therapists to inform then about recent research on speech development in hearing and deaf children. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| Description | Work experience placement |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | Yes |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | The work placement was extremely successful both for the student and for our research team. We have committed to accepting another student for a two-week placement in 2015, working with us on our new ESRC project. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2013 |