William J. Hardcastle's research while affiliated with Queen Margaret University and other places

... Previous acoustic studies of fricatives have approached fricative spectra as static entities, characterizing them by means of spectral properties extracted from a single window, or averaged across several windows, in the fricative noise [e.g., Jongman et al. (2000) and Romeo et al. (2013)]. However, articulatory studies show that the tongue and jaw move continuously in production of fricatives [e.g., Iskarous et al. (2011) and Zharkova et al. (2018)]. Moreover, acoustic studies demonstrate that the characteristics of the spectral energy distribution changes across the duration of the fricative (Iskarous et al., 2011;Reidy, 2016;Zharkova et al., 2018), mirroring articulatory movements (see Sec. II B for more on spectral dynamics). ...

... To mitigate this, patients will be offered U-VBF at the completion of the study, if their speech errors remain. A previous study trialing a similar technologybased intervention with children with Down syndrome showed that no children were lost to follow-up in either arm of the trial when this was offered [32]. A further limitation of the current study, which cannot be completely mitigated, is a potential preference from the treating clinicians for one intervention over the other, in particular the trial intervention. ...

... Several research studies have been using US tongue images to investigate, on different languages, the articulatory correlates of vowel production [54,56,57]. Most of them have focused on coarticulation aspects among children, adolescents, and adults [20,55,58,59]. Concerning the articulatory parameters, tongue contour, height, and advancement of the highest point of the tongue (i.e., TH and TA), lengths of posterior tongue surface (LPTS) and anterior oral cavity (LAOC) have been successfully used in previous US studies with vowels [60][61][62][63]. ...

... For/p/bilabial consonant,/f/labial-dental consonant and/s/and/t/alveolar consonants, the difference of tongue shapes in/i/and/a/vowel contexts was clear. This part of the study results is consistent with several studies in speaking Scottish English speakers that showed/t/,/f/,/p/and/s/is affected by following vowels [6,17,22,[24][25][26][27]. However, there was no significant effect of the vowel context on DEI for the/k/velar consonant. ...

... VOCAL TRACT The branching passage between the LARYNX and the mouth and nose. Notes 1. Readers interested in articulation videos of words and phrases produced with various regional accents of English are referred to the Dynamic Dialects website (Lawson et al. 2015a) http://www.dynamicdialects.ac.uk. 2. This should not be confused with reports of positive training outcomes using visual biofeedback provided by, for example, electropalatography or UTI for pronunciation training in a foreign language (Schmidt 2012;Wu et al. 2015) and speech therapy (Gibbon et al. 1996;Bernhardt et al. 2008). 3. Relatedly, the benefits of visual presentation of internal articulators appear dramatic in speech production training of people with hearing loss (Massaro 2003). ...

... Several research studies have been using US tongue images to investigate, on different languages, the articulatory correlates of vowel production [54,56,57]. Most of them have focused on coarticulation aspects among children, adolescents, and adults [20,55,58,59]. Concerning the articulatory parameters, tongue contour, height, and advancement of the highest point of the tongue (i.e., TH and TA), lengths of posterior tongue surface (LPTS) and anterior oral cavity (LAOC) have been successfully used in previous US studies with vowels [60][61][62][63]. ...

... This is known as the coarticulation effect. 27 Triphone models are trained to capture this effect. A triphone model considers a central phoneme, the immediate phoneme to the right and the immediate phoneme to the left. ...

... These differences between the ideal excitation signal and the LP residual reflect the mismatch between the true characteristics of the speech production system, and that modeled by the source-filter theory using LP analysis [5,26,27]. Nevertheless, due to lack of better alternatives, LP analysis, and the LP residual, in particular, has remained the cornerstone in a multitude of efforts for estimating the GCIs. One of the first methods to utilize the LP residual in estimating the GCIs was the Epoch Filter (EF) [4]. ...

... Most of the studies that have used electropalatography focused on the position of the tongue and the maximum contact pattern based on repetitive learning. This pattern analysis is very important for the electropalatography system to provide visual feedback to the patient and bring about improvement through the rehabilitation [15][16][17][23][24][25]. The proposed K-EPG system also requires additional iterations to enhance the sensor's sensitivity and maximize the contact pattern in order to more accurately determine the contact force level. ...

... In the research, this is often used as a comparator intervention (Bessell et al., 2013), and children tend to make progress using this approach. It has been proposed that, additional supports, such as visual biofeedback using electropalatography (Gibbon et al., 2001) or nasoendoscopy (Ysunza et al., 1997), might provide more rapid progress than articulation-based approaches alone. Motor-based treatments have been directly compared with phonological approaches, and the results indicated that, while phonological approaches can result in more rapid progress (e.g., M. C. Pamplona et al., 1999), motor-based approaches are effective as well (Hardin-Jones & Chapman, 2008). ...