@article {35, title = {Articulatory asymmetries in speech production}, year = {2015}, publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen}, address = {Utrecht, The Netherlands}, abstract = {

This paper presents the results from an investigation of asymmetries in speech articulation on the basis of 1,502 previously published palatograms of a wide variety of speech sounds in a range of languages. For each palatogram, the direction and degree of tongue-palate contact was quantified by means of an index capturing the degree of lateral asymmetry.

The results of this investigation show that lingual asymmetry in the articulation of speech sounds is substantial: 83 \% of the palatograms are asymmetrical. With respect to the direction of the asymmetry it is found that the asymmetry is more often towards the left side of the palate (45 \%) than to the right side (38 \%). Further analysis reveals that there are significant differences in both the direction and the degree of the asymmetry as a function of manner and place of articulation.

}, author = {Jo Verhoeven and Ilke De Clerck and Peter Mariën} } @article {35, title = {Prosodic prominence production in the babbles of Cochlear Implanted (CI) and normally hearing (NH) infants: A perceptual experiment}, year = {2015}, publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen}, address = {Utrecht, The Netherlands}, abstract = {

A recent acoustical study of prominence production has shown that infants with CI differentiate less between syllables in terms of fundamental frequency and intensity, even from babbling on [1]. The present study investigates if this acoustical difference beween infants with CI and NH infants is also perceivable by listeners.

The stimuli used in this study were disyllabic babbles produced by Dutch-acquiring infants with CI (n=9) and NH infants (n=9). The stimuli (n=527) were presented one by one to adult judges (n=30) in a perceptual rating task. The raters had to indicate the prosodic differentiation between the two syllbales by moving a slider on a visual analogue scale (VAS).

The first analysis on the entire dataset showed that the babbles of the CI infants were not perceived as having less differentiated prominence. A second analysis was conducted on the ratings at the extremes of the VAS. The results showed that NH babbles were more likely to be rated at the extremes and thus as having differentiated prominence. It is concluded that even in prelexical utterances there is a slight perceivable discrepancy between the prominence production of CI and NH infants, confirming previous acoustical findings [1].

  1. Pettinato, M., De Clerck, I., Verhoeven, J., \& Gillis, S. (2015). The production of word stress in babbles and early words: a comparison between normally hearing infants and infants with cochlear implants. Paper presented at the 18th international congress of phonetic sciences, Glasgow, Scotland.
}, author = {Ilke De Clerck} }