eprime capabilities

Mon Dec 13 01:48:10 UTC 2010

We did take into account the difficulties of identifying syllable boundaries and have decided to use voiced plosives as a starter as they can be determined easiest in signal analysis. We are just concentrating on duration in therapy, but will be measuring for intensity and pitch and expecting these to generalise also. Doing these kind of analyses offline is not our concern, its the real-time, objective analyses that is the difficult.

Will let you know what we end up doing!

________________________________
From: e-prime at googlegroups.com [e-prime at googlegroups.com] on behalf of Lidia Suarez [nusphd at gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, December 12, 2010 1:45 PM
To: e-prime at googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: eprime capabilities

Ah! I would appreciate you let us know what you used  to objectively measure syllabic stress eventually! This is interesting.

On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 10:42 AM, Lidia Suarez <nusphd at gmail.com<mailto:nusphd at gmail.com>> wrote:
Thanks Michiel for all the suggestions. Yes, it is very difficult to identify syllable boundaries because of co-articulation. Merry, note that lexical stress is defined by changes in pitch, duration, and intensity. All three features are interrelated, choosing just duration may be not enough. Therefore, you may need to support the results given by the software with some kind of "human" rating. For example, you could have two judges and calculate inter-rater agreement or have a sample of "naive/healthy" participants to rate lexical stress of the words pronounced by  children with CAS.

On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 3:14 PM, Peter Quain <pquain at une.edu.au<mailto:pquain at une.edu.au>> wrote:

My guess is that you'd need signal analysis software (and good code) to sort out syllable boundaries, and WS or SW emphasis, or syllable length (is this related to WS SW?). Neither e-prime or DMDX is a signal processing software. They are designed to time presention of stimuli accurately, and to accurately collect responses to the stimuli, and to provide feedback when needed. I think that they cannot do what I think you are wishing they would do, no matter how you fiddle.

At 05:50 PM 10/12/2010, you wrote:
Sorry for the confusion.

I want e-prime to record vocal responses, and determine whether the duration of the first syllable is longer than the second syllable, and vice versa. So yes, i wanted e-prime to do real-time analysis and provide instant feedback on the responses.
PVI is a calculation equation about the duration of syllables to determine stress, that I assume would have to be part of the programming script in order for it to be able to do. Currently I am fiddling with DMDX to see if it is able to do this kind of analysis.

Thanks for your help.
________________________________________
From: e-prime at googlegroups.com<mailto:e-prime at googlegroups.com> [e-prime at googlegroups.com<mailto:e-prime at googlegroups.com>] on behalf of David McFarlane [mcfarla9 at msu.edu<mailto:mcfarla9 at msu.edu>]
Sent: Friday, December 10, 2010 2:52 AM
To: e-prime at googlegroups.com<mailto:e-prime at googlegroups.com>
Subject: RE: eprime capabilities

Merry,

I had pretty much the same reaction as did Mich
to your question.  EP can readily present your
visual and auditory stimuli and present feedback,
and might even collect the subjects' responses
(EP2 can even record subjects' vocalizations into
.wav files).  But by "have the computer judge ...
whether they correctly used weak-strong (WS) or
strong-weak (SW) stress" do I correctly
understand that you wish EP to do real-time vocal
recognition & analysis?  That *is* a tall
order!  Do you know of any other current software
or hardware that can not only recognize WS vs. SW
stress, but do so reliably enough to pass
scientific muster?  Or is that what the PVI does,
based merely on the raw sound-pressure waveforms?

To be sure, in principle EP might well be
*capable* of "judging" WS vs. SW stress, but it
would pose a formidable programming challenge and so would not be *practical*.

But perhaps I misunderstand and you have something simpler in mind.

-- David McFarlane, Professional Faultfinder

At 12/9/2010 07:27 AM Thursday, Michiel Spape wrote:
>Hi,
>What exactly do you wish E-Prime to calculate?
>“whether they correctly used weak-strong (WS) or
>strong-weak (SW) stress (this could be
>calculated using a pairwise variability index
>(PVI) - a positive PVI would indicate SW, and a
>negative PVI would indicate weak-strong stress)”
>would mean that the computer A) records vocal
>responses (possible in E-Prime), B) that vocal
>responses are classified as WS/SW, right? I’d
>imagine if you would do the test semi-automatic
>- let e-prime record responses and so on, and
>then have the experimenter classify the words
>immediately after the participant says them (I
>mean, after every trial, for instance), this
>would be possible. If you wish to know whether
>E-Prime can do any sort of higher-order
>analysis, the answer is no (unless you are
>REALLY REALLY good with programming, in which
>case you could do the same with much more ease
>in .NET, c#, Matlab, etc). It cannot do signal
>analysis at all (therefore no acoustic analysis
>either), nor is it (I imagine) intended to do such things.
>
>BUT, the semi-automatic way is probably much
>easier for anyone involved. I mean, the few
>times I did a Stroop task with vocal responses,
>I classified the subjects’ responses (tip for
>those thinking of it: classify the first letter
>of their literal response (‘g’ if green, for
>instance), not whether it is correct, or _you_
>will have a Stroop effect as well as the
>subjects!) as well. You will have to endure
>[number of subjects * boredom involved in task = ] total boredom though.
>
>Hope that helps,
>Mich
>
>
>Michiel Spapé
>Research Fellow
>Perception & Action group
>University of Nottingham
>School of Psychology
>www.cognitology.eu<http://www.cognitology.eu/>
>
>From: e-prime at googlegroups.com<mailto:e-prime at googlegroups.com>
>[mailto:e-prime at googlegroups.com<mailto:e-prime at googlegroups.com>] On Behalf Of Merry Ha
>Sent: 09 December 2010 11:32
>To: e-prime at googlegroups.com<mailto:e-prime at googlegroups.com>
>Subject: eprime capabilities
>
>Hi,
>I'm a speech pathology honours student from the
>University of Sydney working on my project at
>the moment using e-prime for the first time.  My
>honours project will be used for children with
>Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS).
>
>We will be presenting novel word stimuli on the
>screen visually and auditorily, and then have
>the child to imitate the computer, or read off
>the screen. Children with CAS tend to say words
>with equal stress, and the aim of the experiment
>was to have the computer judge and provide
>feedback whether they correctly used weak-strong
>(WS) or strong-weak (SW) stress (this could be
>calculated using a pairwise variability index
>(PVI) - a positive PVI would indicate SW, and a
>negative PVI would indicate weak-strong stress).
>Do you know if this programming is possible for e-prime?
>
>Merry

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