Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Date of Graduation
Spring 2019
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Science (BS)
Department
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders
Advisor(s)
Christina Kuo
Abstract
Conversational speech tasks are utilized in research and clinical practice of speech and hearing sciences. Nonetheless, conversational speech is often defined and implemented differently across contexts, which poses a challenge for the interpretation and comparison of data gathered. The purpose of this pilot study is to compare speech characteristics elicited with different speech tasks that have been adopted to elicit conversational speech. Specifically, speech produced during an interview, a topic-driven free conversation, and a Diapix is compared. An interview is a task where one individual (the researcher) leads the conversation by asking the other individual questions. A topic-driven free conversation is conversation that results from an individual (the researcher) asking a specific question intended to create conversational speech, for example the question “What are your plans for the weekend?”. A Diapix is a task based conversational task where partners spot the differences within a set of pictures by speaking with each other. Selected acoustic measures associated with speech timing, articulation, and prosody were examined. Findings suggest that speech acoustic characteristics vary across tasks as well as between individuals. The implication of these results is that it may not be appropriate to be use these tasks interchangeably within clinical or research settings.
Recommended Citation
Cox, Ashley, "Speech characteristics of conversational speech tasks" (2019). Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019. 660.
https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/honors201019/660
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