The Phonetics Laboratory
Dr Maria Kaltsa
The aim of this research is to assess the cognitive and linguistic abilities of preterm children using the eye-tracking method and to examine their relationship with the outcomes of neurodevelopmental assessment. This interdisciplinary study, situated at the intersection of memory, language, and neurodevelopment, seeks to evaluate a non-invasive diagnostic tool, the eye-tracker, as a means of assessing child development and enabling the valid and early detection of neurodevelopmental disorders in preterm children, with the ultimate goal of facilitating early intervention for optimal cognitive development.
Dr. Elina Nirgianaki
Her post-doctoral studies focus on the acquisition and development of Greek fricative consonants by young children. Basic aims of the research are the description of the Greek fricative consonants as produced by young children with the use of reliable acoustic measures, the role of the age, gender and vowel context to their production, as well as their interpretational power in relation to the anatomical/ physiological differences in childhood and the possible differentiation in the space-temporal coordination of children’s movements. Moreonver, through an impressionistic analysis, the researcher will investigate how adults perceive fricatives produced by children and what is the relationship of this perception to the acoustic analysis results.
Dr. Anna Sfakianaki
Individuals with hearing impairment present deficits in speech development. These deficits can be segmental, such as vowel or consonant errors, or suprasegemental, that is, they can be located in the way sounds are coproduced to form running speech (Fowler, 1980). Moreover, research on American English reports that coarticulatory differences between deaf and normally hearing speakers are not attributable to differences in speaking rate, but rather to specific timing differentiation in their productions (Okalidou, 2002). The present study focuses on a) a systematic investigation of the relationship between coarticulation and intelligibility in hearing-impaired speech, and b) the investigation of relative segmental duration of hearing-impaired vs normal-hearing productions, and its influence on the degree of coarticulation and speech intelligibility. To that end, speech production and perception experiments were conducted with participants with prelingual, profound (91+ dB), sensorineural hearing loss, and with normal hearing. The present study holds implications for the construction and selection of suitable materials for speech and language therapy. Therapeutic goals should focus on the improvement of individual coarticulatory strategies that are detrimental to intelligibility. One of the questions we attempt to answer is whether a speech therapy programme that includes training in relative segmental duration could lead to an improvement of speech parameters, such as coarticulation and timing, and ultimately communication.
Dr. Evaggelia Kyritsi
The aim is to investigate language skills in deaf Greek children. This study partially builds on the doctoral research of Kyritsi (2007), which focused on the development of phonological awareness and the emergence of literacy in deaf children. The fact that deaf children develop phonological representations partly through speechreading has been supported for many years. What emerges from more recent studies—and has particularly important implications for the education of deaf children—is that speechreading, together with vocabulary knowledge, constitutes a predictive factor for reading ability. In addition, in deaf children, language skills such as speech perception, speech production, and speechreading are directly related to the development of phonological awareness. This study aims to help us investigate language skills in deaf Greek children and may serve as the starting point for a long-term study examining the role of these skills in the later academic performance of deaf children.
Dr. Angelos Lengeris
The aim of this project is to examine the effect of computer-based phonetic training on Greek speakers’ perception and pronunciation of English vowels and consonants. We will train one group of Greek speakers on English vowels and another on English consonants using the same training stimuli. This will allow testing whether the two groups (vowel-attending group and consonant-attending group) will improve not only in the type of sounds they attend to (vowels and consonants respectively) but also in the type of sounds they do not attend to (consonants and vowels respectively). Participants’ perception will be tested on English sentences instead of isolated words used in previous research. Participants’ production will be assessed using acoustic, perceptual and articulatory measures (Electropalatography) in sentences and in conversational speech (using a variant of a Map Task). The research findings will explore the role of attention in phonetic learning and, importantly, will provide important information on how academic knowledge can be put into practice to improve L2 perception and pronunciation in EFL settings.
Study 1
Study 1 will identify those English consonants that pose difficulties for Greek
learners of English and will be appropriate for the computer-based training
since, apart from impressionistic data and general predictions based on a
phonemic comparison of the two consonant systems (e.g. English has both alveolar
and postalveolar fricatives while Greek has only alveolar ones which makes it
difficult for Greek speakers to differentiate and produce the two places of
articulation), there are no experimental studies in the literature examining the
identification and production of the full set of English consonants by Greek
speakers. In addition, our participants will complete a battery of perception
tasks (e.g. frequency discrimination, Phonological Short-term Memory, perceptual
assimilation to L1 categories) in an attempt to explore sources of individual
differences in their performance.
Study 2
Study 2 will train Greek speakers on English vowels and consonants using the
High-Variability Phonetic Training approach. Pre- and post-training tasks will
examine the perception and production of English consonants and vowels. L2
perception will be tested using an identification task with English sentences
containing the target vowels and consonants. L2 production will be tested by
recording participants (a) reading sentences containing the target vowels and
consonants and (b) producing spontaneous speech containing the target vowels and
consonants. To elicit spontaneous speech, we will use a variant of a
recently-developed method for obtaining spontaneous laboratory-quality speech
containing specific words of interest whereby participants perform a ‘spot the
difference task’ (Van Engen et al., 2010; Baker and Hazan, 2009). Participants’
production will be assessed using acoustic, perceptual and articulatory (EPG)
measures.
