Robin J Lickley

Queen Margaret University | QMU · Clinical Audiology Speech and Language Research Centre (CASL)

This paper discusses what happens when things go wrong in the planning and execution of running speech, comparing disfluency in typical speech with pathological disfluency in stuttering. Spontaneous speech by typical speakers is rarely completely fluent. There are several reasons why fluency can break down in typical speech. Various studies suggest...

While many studies have examined the effects of disfluency on word recognition and local syntactic or semantic issues, fewer have addressed the impact on comprehension at a discourse level. In this work, we ask what effects features typical in the pathological condition of cluttering (essentially, rapid, disfluent and unintelligible speech) have on...

A tip-of-the-tongue state (TOT) occurs when a speaker knows a word but cannot retrieve its phonological form from memory. While previous studies have found that disfluencies are related to lexical retrieval difficulties, the literature lacks studies which have specifically investigated the impact of TOTs on disfluency. This study explores the relat...

We present a new approach to the investigation of dynamic ultrasound tongue imaging (UTI) data, applied here to analyse the subtle aspects of the fluency of people who stutter (PWS). Fluent productions of CV syllables (C = /k/; V = /ɑ, i, ə/) from three PWS and three control speakers (PNS) were analysed for duration and peak velocity relative to ar...

Disfluency rates vary considerably between individuals. Previous studies have considered gender, age and conversational roles amongst other factors that may affect fluency. Testing a non-clinical, gender-balanced population of young adults performing the same speaking tasks, this study explores how inter-speaker variations in working memory and in...

Speech production involves a remarkably complex combination of processes. Prior to articulation, it involves rapid interactions of processes of utterance planning, formulation, and motor planning for execution whose timing requires close coordination. During articulation, motor commands activating several muscle systems need to ensure that respirat...

Purpose In this study, the authors compared coarticulation and lingual kinematics in preadolescents and adults in order to establish whether preadolescents had a greater degree of random variability in tongue posture and whether their patterns of lingual coarticulation differed from those of adults. Method High-speed ultrasound tongue contour data...

We demonstrate the workability of an experimental facility that is geared towards the acquisition of articulatory data from a variety of speech styles common in language use, by means of two synchronized electromagnetic articulography (EMA) devices. This approach synthesizes the advantages of real dialogue settings for speech research with a detail...

Unlabelled: This paper reviews Bloodstein's (1975) Anticipatory Struggle Hypothesis of stuttering, identifies its weaknesses, and proposes modifications to bring it into line with recent advances in psycholinguistic theory. The review concludes that the Anticipatory Struggle Hypothesis provides a plausible explanation for the variation in the seve...

Unlabelled: This study investigates whether the experience of stuttering can result from the speaker's anticipation of his words being misrecognized. Twelve adults who stutter (AWS) repeated single words into what appeared to be an automatic speech-recognition system. Following each iteration of each word, participants provided a self-rating of wh...

Prediction; Visual world paradigm; English It is now widely accepted that language comprehension involves prediction. Upon hearing eat in the sentence "the boy will eat the cake", listeners are more likely to look toward an edible object than upon hearing a verb that does not impose this restriction upon its theme, such as move (Altmann & Kamide, 1...

It has long been known that conversational partners tend to align on common ways of talking about the world, not only in choice of syntactic structures or referring expressions (Pickering & Garrod, 2004), but also in manner (Giles et al., 1991). Alignment in both of these areas has received considerable theoretical attention, however while accounts...

The EPSRC-funded Edinburgh Speech Production is built around two synchronized Carstens AG500 electromagnetic articulographs (EMAs) in order to capture articulatory∕acoustic data from spontaneous dialogue. An initial articulatory corpus was designed with two aims. The first was to elicit a range of speech styles∕registers from speakers, and therefor...

The DoubleTalk articulatory corpus was collected at the Edinburgh Speech Production Facility (ESPF) using two synchronized Carstens AG500 electromagnetic articulometers. The first release of the corpus comprises orthographic transcriptions aligned at phrasal level to EMA and audio data for each of 6 mixed-dialect speaker pairs. It is available from...

Bothe, A. K., Davidow, J. H., Bramlett, R. E., & Ingham, R. J. (2006). Stuttering treatment research 1970-2005: I. systematic review incorporating trial quality assessment of behavioral, cognitive, and related approaches. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 15, 321-341.

We measured the alignment of f0 landmarks with segmental landmarks in nuclear “pointed hat” accents in controlled speech materials in Dutch. We varied the phonological length of the stressed vowel and the “right context” (syllable membership of following consonant, presence/absence of stress clash). The nuclear accented word was always followed by...

Two experiments used a magnitude estimation paradigm to test whether perception of disfluency is a function of whether the speaker and the listener stutter or do not stutter. Utterances produced by people who stutter were judged as "less fluent," and, critically, this held for apparently fluent utterances as well as for utterances identified as con...

In the first part of this study, we measured the alignment (relative to segmental landmarks) of the low F0 turning points between the accentual fall and the final boundary rise in short Dutch falling-rising questions of the form Do you live in [place name]? produced as read speech in a laboratory setting. We found that the alignment of these turnin...

The covert repair hypothesis (CRH) of stuttering (Postma & Kolk, 1993) considers disfluencies to be the result of covert self-monitoring and self- repair of speech errors. In this chapter, we consider how well this hypothesis accounts for an interaction between lexical type and position in a phonological unit on stuttering frequency (Au-Yeung, Howe...

Psychologists normally attribute the surfacing of phonological speech errors to one of two factors: editing of the speech plan [Levelt (1989)] or feedback between word and phoneme levels [Dell (1986)]. This paper assesses the relative contributions of each factor, focusing on the perception and articulation of elicited speech errors. Experiments on...

This paper addresses the causes of disfluency. Disfluency has been described as a strategic device for intentionally signalling to an interlocutor that the speaker is committed to an utterance under construction [14, 21]. It is also described as an automatic effect of cognitive burdens, particularly of managing speech production during other tasks...

Proceedings of DiSS’03 – Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech. Robert Eklund, editor. ISSN 0349-1021.

This study investigated the abilities of adults and children to distinguish direct reported speech from indirect reported speech in sentences read aloud by a native English speaker. The adults were highly successful, the older children less so and the younger children were relatively unsuccessful. Indirect reported speech appeared to be the default...

This study uses the multi-level coding of a designed corpus of unscripted task-oriented dialogues to demonstrate that time to respond (Inter-Move Interval, IMI) and rate of disfluency behave like psycholinguistic measures, reaction time and error rate, in reflecting the speakers' cognitive burdens. Multiple-regression analyses show that IMI is sens...

The question addressed by this paper is whether disfluency resembles Inter-Move Interval, a measure of reaction time in conversation, in displaying effects of the overall difficulty of conducting a coherent conversation. Five sources of difficulty are considered as potential causes of disfluency: planning and producing an utterance, comprehending t...

This paper describes a study in which we compare human and automatic recognition of words in fluent and disfluent spontaneous speech. In a word-level gating study with confidence judgements, we examine how the recognition and confidence of recognition of words by humans develops over utterances and show how disfluency disrupts the process. We give...

We investigate how non-linguistic factors influence rates of disfluency in spontaneous speech in a set of task-oriented dialogues (the HCRC Map Task Corpus). The factors we consider are: sex of the speaker; sex of the addressee; conversational role; ability to see the addressee; familiarity with the addressee; and practice at the task. Our analyses...

Three experiments investigated listeners' ability to detect disfluency in spontaneous speech. All employed gated word recognition with judgments of disfluency for spontaneous utterances containing disfluencies and for three kinds of fluent control utterances from the same six speakers: repetitions of corrected recordings of original disfluent items...

Disfluencies - repetitions and reformulations mid- sentence in normal spontaneous speech - are problematic for both psychological and computational models of speech understanding. Much effort is being applied to finding ways of adapting computational systems to detect and delete disfluencies. The input to such systems is usually an accurate transcr...

Tests the hypothesis that listeners miss disfluencies or fail to transcribe them accurately because disfluencies interfere with the normal relationship between speech sound and linguistic context in human spoken word recognition. In a word-level gating experiment, 16 listeners heard a total of 56 disfluent utterances selected from a corpus of spont...

The paper describes properties of normal disfluent speech which help listeners to distinguish disfluent from fluent strings of speech. It focuses on juncture phenomena in cases where there is no clear silent pause at the interruption point. Recent attempts to define acoustically identifiable features of speech which can be seen as reliable indicato...

Clause-internal filled pauses and preceding peak fundamental frequency (F0) values were analyzed to determine whether the intonation of filled pauses is relative to, or independent of, prior prosodic context. Higher peaks were found to be systematically associated with higher filled-pause values, supporting the 'relative' hypothesis. A linear model...

Clause-internal filled pauses and preceding peak fundamental frequency (F₀) values were analyzed to determine whether the intonation of filled pauses is relative to, or independent of, prior prosodic context. Higher peaks were found to be systematically associated with higher filled-pause values, supporting the ‘relative’ hypothesis. A linear model...

Everyone produces disfluencies when they speak spontaneously. However, whereas most disfluencies pass unnoticed, the repetitions, blocks and prolongations produced by stutterers can have a severely disruptive effect on communication. The causes of stuttering have proven hard to pin down - researchers differ widely in their views on the cognitive me...

People with autism are perceived to have 'odd' prosody, but is it malfunctioning? A new prosody test assesses the functionality of prosody in four aspects of speech (phrasing, affect, turn-end and focus) by tasks that elicit utterances in which prosody alone conveys the meaning. The test was used with 100 typically-developing children (TD), 39 with...

Recent accounts of stuttering (7, 15) consider disfluencies the result of an interaction between speech planning and self- monitoring, emphasizing the continuity between errors made in everyday speech and those made by people who stutter. On Vasiç & Wijnen's (14, 15) account, the monitor is hypervigilant for upcoming problems and interrupts and res...

This paper describes an experimental pilot study of disfluency and gesture rates in spontaneous speech where speakers perform a communication task in three conditions: hands free, one arm immobilized, both arms immobilized. Previous work suggests that the restriction of the ability to gesture can have an impact on the fluency of speech. In particul...