Ellen Marklund

Pause and utterance duration in child-directed speech in relation to child vocabulary size.

This study compares parental pause and utterance duration in conversations with Swedish speaking children at age 1;6 who have either a large, typical, or small expressive vocabulary, as measured by the Swedish version of the McArthur-Bates CDI. The adjustments that parents do when they speak to children are similar across all three vocabulary groups; they use longer utterances than when speaking to adults, and respond faster to children than they do to other adults. However, overall pause duration varies with the vocabulary size of the children, and as a result durational aspects of the language environment to which the children are exposed differ between groups. Parents of children in the large vocabulary size group respond faster to child utterances than do parents of children in the typical vocabulary size group, who in turn respond faster to child utterances than do parents of children in the small vocabulary size group.

Mismatch negativity at Fz in response to within-category changes of the vowel /i/.

The amplitude of the mismatch negativity response for acoustic within-category deviations in speech stimuli was investigated by presenting participants with different exemplars of the vowel /i/ in an odd-ball paradigm. The deviants differed from the standard either in terms of fundamental frequency, the first formant, or the second formant. Changes in fundamental frequency are generally more salient than changes in the first formant, which in turn are more salient than changes in the second formant. The mismatch negativity response was expected to reflect this with greater amplitude for more salient deviations. The fundamental frequency deviants did indeed result in greater amplitude than both first formant deviants and second formant deviants, but no difference was found between the first formant deviants and the second formant deviants. It is concluded that greater difference between standard and within-category deviants across different acoustic dimensions results in greater mismatch negativity amplitude, suggesting that the processing of linguistically irrelevant changes in speech sounds may be processed similar to nonspeech sound changes.

Introducing WCM-SE: The word complexity measure phonetically justified and adapted to Swedish

ABSTRACT This paper presents the Word Complexity Measure for Swedish (WCM-SE), an adaptation of the original WCM developed for English by Stoel-Gammon. These measures are used to calculate the phonological complexity of words or vocalizations, based on a number of phonological complexity parameters. Each production receives a complexity score based on how many of the parameters are present in the production. Using phonological complexity scores to measure expressive phonology is suitable for assessing very young children, children with early phonology and children with phonological deficits. It is useful for both relational and independent analyses and enables comparisons between children and across development. The original WCM uses eight phonological complexity parameters in three domains: word patterns, syllable structures and sound classes. The parameters selected are phonological characteristics that are acquired late in development among English-speaking children. In the WCM-SE, complexity parameters in the domain sound classes were modified or added according to Swedish or universal patterns of phonology development. The parameters’ complexity is accounted for in terms of language-general phonetic characteristics.

Using rotated speech to approximate the acoustic mismatch negativity response to speech

HighlightsThe rotated versions of a vowel pair can be used to approximate the MMN‐response to the acoustic difference between speech sounds.The MMN amplitude reflects acoustic difference between standards and deviants.It also reflects whether the change is linguistically relevant or not.Separating the acoustic and linguistic parts of the MMN is useful.Rotated speech can be used to approximate the acoustic MMN elicited by speech sounds. ABSTRACT The mismatch negativity (MMN) response is influenced by the magnitude of the acoustic difference between standard and deviant, and the response is typically larger to linguistically relevant changes than to linguistically irrelevant changes. Linguistically relevant changes between standard and deviant typically co‐occur with differences between the two acoustic signals. It is therefore not straightforward to determine the contribution of each of those two factors to the MMN response. This study investigated whether spectrally rotated speech can be used to determine the impact of the acoustic difference on the MMN response to a combined linguistic and acoustic change between standard and deviant. Changes between rotated vowels elicited an MMN of comparable amplitude to the one elicited by a within‐category vowel change, whereas the between‐category vowel change resulted in an MMN amplitude of greater magnitude. A change between rotated vowels resulted in an MMN ampltude more similar to that of a within‐vowel change than a complex tone change did. This suggests that the MMN amplitude reflecting the acoustic difference between two speech sounds can be well approximated by the MMN amplitude elicited in response to their rotated counterparts, in turn making it possible to estimate the part of the response specific to the linguistic difference.

Preceding non-linguistic stimuli affect categorisation of Swedish plosives

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 Holts 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/. ...