The analysis of Fluency Disorders with an application of the methodology of Optimality Theory and its statistic inspection

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26580073
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Linguistics
• Research Institution: Niigata University of Rehabilitation
• Principal Investigator: Ujihira Akira 新潟リハビリテーション大学, 医療学部, 客員教授 (10334012)
• Project Period (FY): 2014-04-01 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: 発話の非流暢性 / 非流暢性の引き金 / 音声の移行 / 語頭 / 韻律(リズム）の単位 / 共鳴音同士 / 共鳴音・阻害音間

Outline of Final Research Achievements

This study provides a framework which shows how fluency disorders are produced. For the type of disfluency where the subject focuses on repetitions of the constituents in a word, the triggers of the repetitions are examined according to evidence from the statistic studies whose speech samples are about 21000 produced by 600 speakers. The triggers are phonetic transitions, prosodic units,and word initial positions. Each trigger corresponds to a particular symptom. Based on Optimality Theory, trigger rankings are caluculated for stutterers and non-stutterers, for each language. Non-stutterers' disfluencies are brought about by a phonetic taransition between sonorants. They break OCP. Stuttering is caused by anaother phonetic transition between sonorants and obstruents. It stumbles on a hard phonetic transition. Prosodic units and word initial positions stay in the middle of the ranking. They form some inherent morphological styles of repetitions in each language.

Free Research Field

音声学，言語学