Picture Perfect Speech

There are many aspects of Video Voice that can be adapted to meet the individual needs of the people you work with. You can specify the kinds of reward images and sounds that you want to see and hear. You can choose how scores appear in the Formant and P-A-R displays, as well as some aspects of their calculation. In the games, you can control which reward sounds are played at the end of the game, default Fade Speed, Pitch Range and other aspects of score display and game operation.  Changes you make can be stored as part of your Therapist ID settings , or, if you have a individual’s data folder active, settings can be permanently saved there.  Then, any time you reactivate that person’s data folder, the individualized settings  are automatically used.

The game that has the most options for customization is Voice-A-Sketch.  In that game, meeting the defined speech goal results in a picture appearing, either in pieces or in "window shade" fashion.  (The goals can be continuous phonation, volume above or below a defined target level, production of a target sound or work, and more.)  There are 78 high-quality built-in pictures to choose from, but you can also use images you have stored on your computer.

A few years ago, a therapist who works with autistic children said she felt they would respond more favorably if familiar images appeared - family members, pets or other objects of particular interest to them.  We responded by adding a new Graphics Source control that lets you use either the Built-In or My Own Pictures.  If you choose the latter, Video Voice looks in the My Documents/My Pictures area of your computer, and lets you choose from any images you have stored there.

This provides some very powerful personalization of the game. Say you’ve got a little girl who is very motivated by horses, or a little boy who loves sports cars. You can set up folders under their names in your My Pictures area and fill them with those kinds of images.

There are literally thousands of pictures available online of nearly any image type. Google or other search engines can assist you in locating them. When you find one you want to use, simply right-click on it and use the "Save Image As" option to put a copy of the .jpg or .gif in the desired My Pictures folder.  Voila!  You’ve now got a picture you can use in Voice-A-Sketch.

When importing pictures into Voice-A-Sketch, you don’t have to worry about the shape and size. Video Voice will size the pictures to best fit within the available space and adapt the picture frame accordingly.  The best images will be landscape in orientation, because that’s how the screen’s "easel space" is laid out, but any size or shape will work.

The possibilities are endless!  Have fun personalizing Voice-A-Sketch to make it even more uniquely motivating for individual cases.  If it’s an option for you, you even can involve them in the search for pictures they’d like to see, and use that as a therapy activity, too.

Yours in good speech,

Video Voice Support Team
http://www.videovoice.com/
1-800-537-2182
mv@videovoice.com

Where's That Vowel?

One of the things Video Voice is helpful with is training production and differentiation of vowel sounds. In fact, in its original, prototype form, with only an F2/F1 display, that’s all it really could do!  The people who developed it were particularly interested in vowel production work, and based the display on Grant Fairbanks’ 1959 Voice and Articulation Drill Book (see History of Video Voice http://videovoicetalk.blogspot.com/2011_03_01_archive.html). 

In the F2/F1 display, vowels map into regions of the screen that generally correspond to place of production in the mouth, where the left side of the screen is the front of the mouth, and the right side, the back. The sample screen below illustrates this with a high front vowel (/i/) and a low back vowel (/a/) map in this display.

Minor changes in articulator position can affect the sounds that are produced, but the ear is ingeniously capable of differentiating, or in some cases, "glossing over" them. The difference between the long and short "E" sounds ("beet" and "bit") is a slight relaxation of the tongue away from the hard palate. These subtle differences can be difficult for speakers of other languages to hear and master, although they make a very real difference to native speakers. The difference in meaning is significant, for example, with something like "sheet metal."

"ih" (as in "bit) and "eh" ("bet") are also similar sounds, although the latter is produced slightly lower and farther back in the mouth. Again, other languages may not have the same set of vowel sounds, so learning to produce and differentiate these sounds can be a challenge. The F2/F1 display can help make these subtle differences more obvious.

The "squiggly" lines that represent these sounds in the F2/F1 display are formed from the speech data  that comprises them. Some of the dots result from the initial onset of sound and trailing off to silence at the end, and those dots are less meaningful than the ones related to the actual sound, which typically appear in clusters in a general area of the screen.

If those you’re working with young children or others who find the standard F2/F1 display difficult to interpret, you can use an alternate way to illustrate sounds - the Spheres Style. This is particularly useful for single-sound targets. Activate this in the F2/F1 display after producing targets by clicking the Style control, and the patterns change from squiggly lines to blue and red spheres which illustrate the greatest density of dots in the pattern. You can then have the speaker try to match the location of vowels that way. (If you want the Style option to be the default display, use the Adjust button to change that control.)

We added this control after talking with a speech professor who was interested in exploring differences between vowel locations with groups of individuals - men vs. women, children vs. adults, native vs. non-native speakers. Pitch differences between speakers do affect the formant frequencies of sounds, and this is another way to show that fact. If you’re interested in more technical aspects of the sounds, you can dwell with your cursor over the spheres to see the F2 and F1 frequency values. (This works with the regular "squiggly" patterns as well.)

Video Voice has lots of options for changing how the displays operate to make them the most useful for people you’re working with. Any adjustable control is highlighted in cyan color, and the cursor also changes to a "hand" graphic to let you know something can be changed, and you’ll also see a "tool tip" that provides a brief description of its function. So have fun, experiment and explore all it can do!

Video Voice Support Team
1-800-537-2182
mv@videovoice.com