Papers by Claudio Zmarich
![Research paper thumbnail of [Developmental aspects of language articulation in preterm and small fullterm infants]](https://a.academia-assets.com/images/blank-paper.jpg)
PubMed, 1992
The data to be discussed in this paper are drawn from a study of three groups of infants: small (... more The data to be discussed in this paper are drawn from a study of three groups of infants: small (low birth weight less than 10 centile for gestational age), preterm (gestational age less than 37 weeks) and full term. The total population of this study consisted of 12 children (4 subjects for each group). The purpose of the study was to examine phonetic and lexical development in these three populations to determine both normal and delayed patterns of this development over the second year of life. The time sampled for early behaviors were 18, 19, 20, and 21 months, based on chronological age. The spontaneous verbal productions of the subjects were tape-recorded and transcribed using phonetic symbols (IPA). Comparison were made between preterm and full term infants based on both chronological and gestational age. The data resulting from the comparison of our subjects on these parameters provide us with evidence that there can be early indicators of later speech and lexical development of the group of preterm infants.
Hearing, Balance and Communication
Officinaventuno; copyright AISV, 2016
La fonetica sperimentale: Metodo e Applicazioni. 4° Convegno Nazionale AISV - Associazione Italiana di Scienze della Voce, 2009
Bulzoni eBooks, 2013
The present study examines the syllables produced by 10 children between the ages of 42 to 47 mon... more The present study examines the syllables produced by 10 children between the ages of 42 to 47 months, to assess their level of achievement for the VOT and C-V coarticulation. Generally speaking, children are producing a voicing contrast by differentiating the voiceless bilabial and dental consonants, but have some difficulty in the production of sonority for velars. Regarding coarticulation, the present results suggest the existence of two types of evolutionary paths, based on place of articulations (and on coarticulatory strategies rooted in the underlying biomechanical constraints), i.e bilabial vs. velars and dentals.
In this paper, the phonetic aspects of babbling and early wordsare investigated through auditory ... more In this paper, the phonetic aspects of babbling and early wordsare investigated through auditory and acoustic analysis. Twochildren were recorded at 10, 12, 14, 16 months of age duringplay situations in the presence of their mothers. Everyoccurrences of babbling episodes and early words suitable foracoustic analysis were classified for consonantal and vocaliccategories according to IPA symbols. Acoustic analysis was thenperformed on the vowels to describe their F1 and F2 values. Theacoustic values of the vowels were compared longitudinally withthe available data for a representative sample of 7-years-oldItalian children and adults (males and females). 1. INTRODUCTION The great individual variability of the speech development duringbabbling and the first words stage has been highlighted by anumber of authors (cf. [1]).The key issue is represented here by the complex time-course of the progressive disengagement from the bio-mechanical constraints grounded in the canonical babblingtowa...
Proceedings of the 4th EAI International Conference on Smart Objects and Technologies for Social Good - Goodtechs '18, 2018
In this paper, we propose a new set of experiments to further evaluate the performance of a previ... more In this paper, we propose a new set of experiments to further evaluate the performance of a previously presented system based on an adaptive strategy for stimuli selection masked behind a gamified activity. This involves two virtual agents creating a social setting designed to support a narrative to engage young children. With respect to previously obtained results, we further evaluate the quality of the support for diagnosis purposes and we present a first investigation concerning the applicability of the system for therapeutic goals.
In this work we describe the current stage of development of a software architecture designed to ... more In this work we describe the current stage of development of a software architecture designed to present discrimination tests to pre-school children in the form of gamified tasks. We interpret the problem of administering these tests as a dialogue model using probabilistic rules to generate customised tests on the basis of the child’s performance. In the proposed architecture, the dialogue system controls a gaming setup composed of a virtual agent and a robotic companion that needs to be taught how to talk. This learning-by-teaching approach is used to camouflage a phonemes discrimination test that has the added value of being generated at runtime on the basis of the child’s performance. We will describe the architectural components involved and we will describe how the dialogue system can make use of linguistic knowledge to generate the discrimination test and administer it by controlling the agents involved in the game.
Stuttering has been traditionally defined by making reference to the auditory detection and quali... more Stuttering has been traditionally defined by making reference to the auditory detection and qualitative assessment of the dysfluencies (some of them being abnormal for number, type, duration and position) and their distributional patterns have been explained by invoking the same dysfunctions of the linguistic representations and processes which generate lapsus and disfluencies in non-stuttering speakers. However, fluency is multidimensional: not only the fluent speech is (relatively) devoid of discontinuities, but it is also produced with a regular rhythmic beat, at fast rate and without an excessive physical and mental effort. As a phonetician, two main questions about stuttering are worthwhile. The first is: “Why would Phonetics be so important in the study of stuttering?” A possible answer could be that Phonetics is at the convergence of different scientific realms, and for such a role it holds a privileged key for unifying and simplifying the understanding of the multidimensiona...
This contribution is part of a wider project aiming at the creation of a phonological discriminat... more This contribution is part of a wider project aiming at the creation of a phonological discrimination test for preschool subjects (48to 72-months-old). Children with primary language impairment are usually affected by deficits in speech production and/or in the phonological representation of speech sounds causing discrimination disorders. The proposed test is designed to evaluate the ability to discriminate pairs of non-words through a “same/different” judgment. The test items combined in pairs examine all the possible contrasts’ simplifications (i.e. “phonological processes”) that may accompany the speech production of typical developing preschool children even if these processes are not always (and all) present during language development, and even if there is currently no consensus in the literature on which processes belong to typical or atypical development.
The phonetic aspects of babbling and early words were longitudinally investigated in four Italian... more The phonetic aspects of babbling and early words were longitudinally investigated in four Italian children from the 10 to the 18 month of age. The speech occurrences were classified for consonantal and vocalic categories, and the frequencies of single vowels and consonants, their cooccurences in the syllable and the types of syllables have been compared with frequencies drawn from the segmental and syllabic characteristics of the infant lexical targets and Italian language in general.
We describe the 3D spatial characteristics of upper and lower lip in the articulatory production ... more We describe the 3D spatial characteristics of upper and lower lip in the articulatory production of /p/ and /f/ consonantal targets in ‘VCV pseudo-words (V: /a i u/). Results will be relevant to the discussion of articulatory production and coarticulation theories, to the cross-linguistic comparisons, to the visual articulatory perception and to the bimodal speech synthesis.
L'A. expose les applications les plus formelles et convaincantes a l'etude du begaiement ... more L'A. expose les applications les plus formelles et convaincantes a l'etude du begaiement de certains modeles psycholinguistiques sur la production normale du langage. Trois theories sont presentees: Wingate (1988), Perkins, Kent & Curlee (1991), Postma & Kolk (1993). Elles different en bien des points mais partagent la conception de base d'une capacite limite de traitement des informations phonologiques chez les begues
Multimedia Tools and Applications, 2019
With the recent availability of industry-grade, high-performing engines for video games productio... more With the recent availability of industry-grade, high-performing engines for video games production, researchers in different fields have been exploiting the advanced technologies offered by these artefacts to improve the quality of the interactive experiences they design. While these engines provide excellent and easy-to-use tools to design interfaces and complex rule-based systems to control the experience, there are some aspects of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research they do not support in the same way because of their original mission and related design patterns pointing at a different primary target audience. In particular, the more research in HCI evolves towards natural, socially engaging approaches, the more there is the need to rapidly design and deploy software architectures to support these new paradigms. Topics such as knowledge representation, probabilistic reasoning and voice synthesis demand space as possible instruments within this new ideal design environment. In this work, we propose a framework, named FANTASIA, designed to integrate a set of chosen modules (a graph database, a dialogue manager, a game engine and a voice synthesis engine) and support rapid design and implementation of interactive applications for HCI studies. We will present a number of different case studies to exemplify how the proposed tools can be deployed to develop very different kinds of interactive applications and we will discuss ongoing and future work to further extend the framework we propose.
9780953850815, 2003
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Atti delle XXIV Giornate di Studio del …, 1997
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Papers by Claudio Zmarich