Joseph Bochner - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Joseph Bochner

American Journal of Audiology

Purpose: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is commonly used to produce telephone captions to pro... more Purpose: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is commonly used to produce telephone captions to provide telecommunication access for individuals who are d/Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH). However, little is known about the effects of degraded telephone audio on the intelligibility of ASR captioning. This research note investigates the accuracy of telephone captions produced by ASR under degraded audio conditions. Method: Packet loss, delay, and repetition are common sources of degradation in sound quality for telephone audio. Eleven sets of wideband filtered sentences were degraded by high and low levels of simulated packet loss, delay, and repetition. These sets, along with a clean set of sentences, were submitted to ASR, and the accuracy of the resulting output was evaluated using three metrics: a word recognition score, word error rate, and word information loss. Results: The resulting pattern of data indicated the relative impact of each degraded condition on message intelligibilit...

$Research paper thumbnail of When is a Difference Really Different? Learners\u27 Discrimination of Linguistic Contrasts in American Sign Language$

Learners’ ability to recognize linguistic contrasts in American Sign Language (ASL)was investigat... more Learners’ ability to recognize linguistic contrasts in American Sign Language (ASL)was investigated using a paired-comparison discrimination task. Minimal pairs containing contrasts in five linguistic categories (i.e., the formational parameters of movement, handshape, orientation, and location in ASL phonology, and a category comprised of contrasts in complex morphology) were presented in sentence contexts to a sample of 127 hearing learners at beginning and intermediate levels of proficiency and 10 Deaf native signers. Participants’ responses were analyzed to determine the relative difficulty of the linguistic categories and the effect of proficiency level on performance. The results indicated that movement contrasts were the most difficult and location contrasts the easiest, with the other categories of stimuli of intermediate difficulty. These findings have implications for language learning in situations in which the first language is a spoken language and the second language (...

Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research

Purpose: Phoneme categorization (PC) for voice onset time and second formant transition was studi... more Purpose: Phoneme categorization (PC) for voice onset time and second formant transition was studied in adult cochlear implant (CI) users with early-onset deafness and hearing controls. Method: Identification and discrimination tasks were administered to 30 participants implanted before 4 years of age, 21 participants implanted after 7 years of age, and 21 hearing individuals. Results: Distinctive identification and discrimination functions confirmed PC within all groups. Compared to hearing participants, the CI groups generally displayed longer/higher category boundaries, shallower identification function slopes, reduced identification consistency, and reduced discrimination performance. A principal component analysis revealed that identification consistency, discrimination accuracy, and identification function slope, but not boundary location, loaded on a single factor, reflecting general PC performance. Earlier implantation was associated with better PC performance within the earl...

Assessment Update, 2009

Slit: One pf the most difficult problems Of modern school practice is how to prevent overcrowding... more Slit: One pf the most difficult problems Of modern school practice is how to prevent overcrowding The Curriculum, breaking up the school day into small fragments of time devoted to disconnected tasks, and dissipating the energies of the children to' such an extent. that the process of education is hindered rather than helped by our attempts to enrich and modernize the courses of study. The solution of the problem lies in a closer correlation of subjects and especially of formal subjects with content subjeps, and it is fortunate that when the correlation is well made both subjects can be better taught an44,in less time than either alone. This is especially true of language, the most eSective learning of which comes, in the 'elementary grades, as a by-product of the right study of content subjects. How to teach language through the study of agriculture and domestic science is the theme of the accompanying manuscript by Prof. M. A. Leiper, of the Western Kentucky State Normal School. Prof. Leiper has chosen his content subjects wisely, since our language and those from which it has most freely borrowed had their origin and deveOpment in the country and the home. The primitive

Indirect tests of writing competency are often used at the col-lege level for a variety of educat... more Indirect tests of writing competency are often used at the col-lege level for a variety of educational, programmatic, and re-search purposes. Although such tests may have been vali-dated on hearing populations, it cannot be assumed that they validry assess the writing competency of deaf and hard-of-hearing students. This study used a direct criterion measure of writing competency to determine the criterion validity of two indirect measures of writing competency. Results suggest that the validity of indirect writing tests for deaf and hard-of-hearing baccalaureate-level students is weak. We recommend that direct writing tests be used with this population to en-sure fair and accurate assessment of writing competency. The assessment of writing skills is commonplace in ed-ucational environments. During a student's education, writing skills are assessed at various stages, both for-mally and informally, for a variety of reasons. Writing is generally assessed through tests administere...

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2015

Journal of Phonetics, 1987

American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1997

Language Learning and Deafness, 2000

... At the same time, he warned that metaphors, while usually enlightening, are also somewhat mis... more ... At the same time, he warned that metaphors, while usually enlightening, are also somewhat misleading. ... With regard to synchrony, Bellugi and Fischer (1972) found that nearly twice as many words as signs were used by their subjects to relate spoken and signed versions ...

International journal of audiology, Jan 24, 2015

This study evaluated the diagnostic capabilities of an adaptive speech recognition protocol (NSRT... more This study evaluated the diagnostic capabilities of an adaptive speech recognition protocol (NSRT(®)) that can be self-administered in non-clinical venues by listeners using internet-based software. All participants were given an audiological evaluation, including pure-tone testing, and responded to the NSRT administered in quiet and + 5 dB SNR listening conditions. The NSRT test materials are sentence-length utterances containing phonetic contrasts, primarily minimal pairs. Subjects were 123 adults with normal hearing to moderately severe sensorineural hearing loss (mean age = 55 years, SD = 23). Performance on the NSRT is strongly related to pure-tone thresholds. Linear regression analyses support the utility of the NSRT as a proxy for clinically-obtained hearing thresholds across the octave frequencies 0.5 to 8 kHz, primarily for individuals in the - 10 to 55 dB HL range. Other NSRT results are linked to analyses of phonetic errors and components of aural rehabilitation. Among it...

American annals of the deaf

This paper identifies a general limitation on printed text as a source of input for language acqu... more This paper identifies a general limitation on printed text as a source of input for language acquisition. The paper contends that printed material can only serve as a source of linguistic input to the extent that the learner is able to make use of phonological information in reading. Focusing on evidence from the acquisition of spoken language and literacy skills in deaf individuals, the paper explains why print is not an adequate source of input for language acquisition in learners with limited phonological knowledge of a spoken language.

Scandinavian audiology, 1992

This paper reports the results of a componential analysis of items comprising the Speech Sound Pa... more This paper reports the results of a componential analysis of items comprising the Speech Sound Pattern Discrimination Test (SSPDT). The SSPDT, developed by Bochner et al. (1986), uses a closed-set sentence discrimination task to assess the auditory speech processing skill of severely and profoundly hearing-impaired individuals. A set of components reflecting differences in the phonetic and task-related characteristics of the test stimuli was developed, and the contributions of the components to discrimination task difficulty were evaluated using linear regression methodology. Discrimination task difficulty indices were transformations of percent-correct scores, resulting from fit of the SSPDT data to the Rasch measurement model. Three of the hypothesized components (one spectral, one temporal, and one task-related) entered a stepwise regression solution. These components have an intrinsic role in the construct validity of the instrument. The structure of the discrimination task, how...