MEASURES OF FLUENCY AND OTHER PROSODIC ASPECTS

Fluency:-

ž  Fluency is a speech and language pathology term that means the smoothness or flow with which sound, syllables, word and phrases are joined together when speaking quickly.

ž  A communication disorder is an impairment in the ability to receive, send, process and comprehend concept or verbal, non-verbal and graphic symbol system.                  

                                                                                                                             (ASHA,1982)                                                                                      

Fluency in speech

ž  “Fluency disorder” is used as a collective term for cluttering and stuttering. Both disorder have break in the fluency breakdown of repetition of part of speech.

ž  Fluency disorder are most often complex in nature and they tend to occur more often in boys than in girls.

ž  Language fluency is the degree to which one is fluent in a language. Someone is said to be fluent if they have a high level of language proficiency.

ž  Fluent language users (particularly uneducated native speaker) may have narrow vocabularies, limited discourse stratergies, in adequate word use. They may be illiterate as well as native speaker are often incorrectly reffered to as fluent.

Skills in fluency

ž  In the sense of proficiency, “fluency encompasses a number of related but separable skills.

ž  READING:-the ability to easily read and understand texts written in the language.

ž  WRITING:- the ability to formulate written texts in the language.

ž  SPEAKING:- The ability to produce speech in the language and be understand by its speaker.

ž  LISTENING COMREHENSION:- the ability to follow and understand speech in the language.

ž  READING COMPREHENTION:- the level of understanding  of text or message.

Measures of fluency

1.LINGUISTICS:-

            LINGUISTICS is the scientific study of language, and involves an analysis of language form, language meaning, and language in context.

 2.PHONICS:-

Phonics is a method for teaching reading and writing of the English language by developing learners.

   phonemic awareness:- the ability to hear, identify and to manipulate phonemes in order to teach the correspondence between these sounds and the spelling pattern.

The goal of phonics is to enable beginning readers to decode new writing words by sounding them out, or, in phonics terms, blending of sounds spelling pattern, since it focuses on the spoken and written units within words, phonics is a sublexical approach and,as a result ,is often contrasted with whole language , a word-level-up philosophy for teaching reading.

3.PRECISION TEACHING:-

Precision teaching is a precise and systematic method of evaluating instructional tactics and curricula. It is one of the few quantitative analyses of behavior forms of applied behavior analysis.It comes from a very strong quantitative scientific basis and was pioneered by ogden lindsley in the 1960 based largely on skinner operant conditioning .    

        Precision teaching is a type of programmed instruction that focus heavily on frequency as its main datum.

   4.SPEECH LANGUAGE PATHOLOGY:-

speech language pathology is a field of expertise practiced by a clinician known as a speech language pathologist (SLP),also called speech and language therapist,or speech therapist ,who specializes in the evaluation ,diagnosis and treatment of communication disorders ,cognition,voice disorder ,and swallowing disorders.

A common misconception is that speech-language pathology is restricted to correcting pronunciation difficulties , such as helping english speaking individuals enunciate their “s” and “r” sounds, and helping people who stutter to speak more fluently. In fact, speech language pathology is concerned with a braod scope of speech, language, swallowing and voice issue involving communication

5.SYNTHETIC PHONICS:-

synthetic phonics (UK) or blended phonics (US), also know as inductive phonics, is a method of teaching reading which first teaches the letter sounds and then builds up to blending these sounds together to achieve full pronunciation of whole words. This article relates to the english language only.

6.SPEECH DISFLUENCY

         speech disfluency, also spelled speech disfluency, is any of various breaks, irregularities (within the english language, similary speech disfluency occur in different forms in other language) or lexical vocables that occurs within the flow of otherwise fluent speech. These includes false start, I.e words and sentences that are cut off mid-utterences, phrases that are restarted or repeated and repeated syllables, filters that is grunts or non-lexical utterences such as “huh”,”uh”,”erm”, “um”, “well”, “so”, and “like”. And repaired utterences, i.e. instances of speaker correcting their own slips of the tongue or mispronunciations (before anyone else gets a chance to). “huh” is claimed to be universal syllable.

Other aspects of fluency

SOCIAL AND COGNITIVE ASPECTS:-

     FLUENCY is a behaviour topic generally considered to be within the province of the speech- language pathologist and is usually thought of in terms of stuttering. Further more, fluency tends to be defined by what it is  not (Freeman,1982),that is, as disruptions in the continuity of the speech flow.

ž  These disruptions are most typically referred to as disfluencies or hesitations, less commonly as self-interruptions, and are accepted as frequently occurring behaviours inseparable from the temporal act of speaking

                                           [Goldman –Eisler ,1968]

ASPECTS OF FLUENCY IN WRITING

The notion of “fluency” most often associated with spoken language phenomena such as stuttering that investigates the relevance of considering fluency in writing .

The basic argument for raising this question is empirical –it follows from a focus on difficulties in writing and spoken language as manifestation of different problem which should be investigated separately on the basis of their symptoms.

Key –logging  instruments provides new possibilities for the study of writing. A more sophisticated application is to exploit the key –logging instrument in order to test basic assumptions of contemporary theories of spelling .

If we are talking about writing aspects ,main problems will occur in the syntactic level than in  the grammatical aspects of sentence and spelling of words.

ASPECTS OF FLUENCY IN READING

ž  This is composed of 3 main components :à

๑       speed

๑       accuracy

๑       prosody

ž  Person with problems in  fluency often do not recognize and acquire linguistic pattern with the same ease as others.

The reading capability of the individual will be lag in its appropriate speed ,accurate production of words and prosodic feature.

ASPECTS OF FLUENY IN READING COMPREHENSION

ž  Read words correctly and effortlessly. Prosody refers to the ability to read with appropriate expression and phrasing .

ž  Accuracy rate and prosody are relative to each other and to overall reading comprehension .

ž  Fluency is a critical literacy component that is necessary for successful reading comprehension.

Other Prosodic Aspects or the suprasegmentals

Content:-

1)      continuity

2)       rate

3)       effort

4)       rhythm

5)      Stress

6)      Intonation

7)      loudness

8)      Pitch level

9)      Juncture

10)  Vowel reduction

11)  language complexity

12)   physiological factors

INTRODUCTION

      Suprasegmentals are the characteristics of speech that involve units such as syllables, words, phrases or even sentences.

      Briefly defined, these are the prosodies or prosodic features , properties of speech that have domain larger than a single segment.

      But it doesn’t mean that a single segment can’t at times, carry the bulk of information for a given suprasegmental; occasionally a segment, like a vowel , can convey most of the relevant information.

      Most suprasegmental information in speech can be described by the basic physical quantities of amplitude (or intensity), duration, fundamental frequency of the voice.

      Stated briefly, amplitude refers to the perceptual attribute of loudness; duration, to the perceptual attribute of length; and fundamental frequency, to the perceptual attribute of vocal pitch

1. CONTINUITY

      Pauses whether filled or unfilled are a common feature of speech.

      We pause on the average every 4.8 words and our perception of speech seems to be more continuous than the reality of it.

      Presumably, this happens because we focus on the content of communication we listen to the ideas and not contribute to these ideas is filtered out by our perceptual mechanism.

-(Stark Weather 1987).

Ü  There has been a presumption from the earliest days of research in this area, that the pauses were occasions on which language was being formulated and although it seems likely that this is true for some pauses it may not be true for all pauses.

Ü  In support of the idea that the two types of pauses are different in kind, Clark notes that idiosyncratic pauses convey no information, and tend to be overlooked and concludes that “conventional pauses are information bearing elements of sentences”.

2. RATE OF SPEECH

      This is the rate in which continuous syllables can be produced as a function of speed of articulatory movement and the degree of co-articulatory overlap.                                                                                             -(Gay,1978; Stark Weather, 1981)

      Females produce utterance that are more variable in rate and longer utterances and they are more fluent than males.

                   -(Malecot, Johnson and Kizzias, 1972)

      Rate depends on the type of syllables produced, CCV and CVC syllables are produced at a faster rate than VCC syllables.

      The rate of speaking is usually measured in words per second, syllables per second or phonemes per second.

      The syllables most vulnerable to contraction as a speaker talks more rapidly are pauses, vowels and consonant segments involving a sustained (like fricatives).

      Apparently most speakers don’t really increase the rate of individual articulatory movement as they increase their rate of speech.Rather, they reduce the duration of some segments and reduce the overall range of articulatory movement

-(Lindblom,1963)

3. EFFORT

∆       Speech being produced effortlessly is a characteristic of fluent speech.

  -(Stark Weather,1987)

∆       The two types of efforts are :

            - mental effort or concentration is where the thoughts are focused on the content rather than on the processes of utterances.

            - muscular effort is where the effort provides a flow of air, opens and closes the glottis and moves the tongue, lips, jaw, velum and pharynx.

      Among the speech sounds, stops,affricates & fricatives require more effort than nasals and glides.                                                           -(Malecot,1955; Worth & Sakuda,1966)

      Effort is consequently related to  rate, stress & duration of speech sounds.

      Effort of mind & effort of muscle are both aspects of fluency. It is difficult to measure the former.

4. RHYTHM

¯  Rather than being a dimension of fluency, rhythm seems to promote or enhance fluency.

¯  Speech rhythm serves fluency by making it easier for us to talk faster. 

¯  It does this in several ways- unstressed syllables are shorter and thus require less time.

Martin(1972) says that “rhythmic patterning carries a heavy information load in ordinary connected speech”

5. STRESS

≡        It refers to the degree of effort, prominence or importance given to some part of an utterance.

≡        E.g. àif a speaker wishes to emphasize that someone should take the red car (as opposed to blue or green one), the speaker might say “be sure to take the red one” .

≡        Any utterance of 2 or more syllables may be described in terms of its stress pattern, because stress has influences that extend beyond the segment and stress usually is discussed with respect to syllables.

≡        NOTEà The pronouncing guide of a dictionary places special marks after individual syllables to indicate stress and the IPA uses a different stress notation from that of what’s commonly found in dictionaries.

6. INTONATION

• It’s the vocal pitch contour of an utterance. That’s the way in which the fundamental frequency changes from syllable to syllable and even segment to segment.
• It can get affected by factors such as stress pattern of an utterance, tongue position of a vowel (high vowels have a higher fundamental frequency) and even the speakers’ emotional state.

7.LOUDNESS

      Its related to sound intensity or to the amount of vocal effort that a speaker uses.

      Although its ordinarily thought to be related to the amplitude or intensity of a sound, some evidence suggests that a listener’s judgments of loudness of speech are related more directly to the perceived vocal effort, essentially the amount of work that a speaker does .

-(Cavagana & Margaria,1968)

v  There’s some evidence that intensity variations in speech result mostly from respiratory activity, but variations of fundamental frequency are easily accomplished at the level of vocal folds.

-(Hixon,1971; Mac Neilage,1972)

8.PITCH LEVEL

      It’s the average pitch of a speaker’s voice and relates to the mean fundamental frequency of an utterance.

      A speaker may be described as having either of high mid or low pitch.

9.JUNCTURE

‡         Also called Vocal Punctuation at times.

‡         It’s a combination of intonation, pausing and other suprasegmentals to mark special distinctions in speech or to express certain grammatical divisions.

‡         E.g. à the sentence “Let’s eat, Grandma” has a much different meaning that the same sentence without the comma ; “Let’s eat Grandma”!

      A speaker can mark a comma vocally with a short pause and an adjustment in intonation.

      Juncture is also used to make distinctions between similar articulations; such as between the word.

      E.g. à  a name       an aim

                 shore train   short rain

                four met        form ate

                it swings        its wings

10.VOWEL REDUCTION

†         Vowels are particularly susceptible to articulatory change as speaking rate is increased or stress is decreased.

†         Such articulatory alterations are termed as reduction.

11. LANGUAGE COMPLEXITY

≈        Analysis of language samples of Haynes & Hood (1978) who studied 20 males & 20 female children between 5 to 6years supported that language influences dysfluency especially in the complex modeling condition.

≈        Significant increase in word repetition, revision, incomplete phrase and dysrhythmic phonations occurred in the complex modeling situation.

≈        Watkins and Johnson (2004), however, pointed out that in many past studies reporting lower language skills in children who stutter, the comparison groups of normally speaking subjects were selected in biased ways, often coming from appreciably higher social groups known to have richer language.

≈         In contrast, the Illinois studies addressed this problem by comparing the performance of the stuttering children to a much broader base of well-established normative data.  It is possible, however, that further research with preschool children using more sensitive tools will reveal discrete language differences between groups

12. PHYSIOLOGICAL FACTORS

ü  Dejoy & Gregory (1985) indicated that during the later preschool years, children become more accomplished in the symbolic/ motoric selection.

ü  They added that the forward flow of speech becomes relatively more automatic .

ü  The reduction in frequency may well reflect increased temporal precision and control and simplification of the control process. -(Sharkey & Polkins, 1985)

ü  Van riper (1971) indicated that disruption of proper programming of the physiological movements necessary for fluent speech causes stuttering.

ü  Spatial & timing co-ordination are essential physiological aspects of fluency .

                                                                                   -(Stark Weather,1987)

CONCLUSION

      Because suprasegmentals like stress and rate of speech influence the segmental articulation, some care should be taken to control the suprasegmental variables in articulation tests and speech materials used in treatment.

      Vowels carry much of these information in speech, but stress, rate of speech, and other suprasegmentals can influence consonant articulation as well.

RFERENCE(S)à

[  ASHA Website

[  A Handbook on Stuttering (5^th Edition) by Oliver Bloodstein

[  Articulation & Phonological Disorders by Bernthal & Bankson(2^nd Edition