Busy but beautiful first-year study

For my research:

I started my PhD study at Radboud University on the 1st of June in 2018 supported by the TAPAS project. The project is about developing valid measurements of pathological speech intelligibility. Speech intelligibility reflects a complex subjective mechanism of listeners on speech. A standardized procedure for obtaining reliable intelligibility ratings is really necessary and important. We have proposed a procedure which has taken into account as many as possible impact factors. This listening experiment is conducted as a web application using Django.

Besides, collecting subjective ratings is very time-consuming. It is helpful to have valid objective measurements to predict speech intelligibility. In the past year, we have explored the correlation between many acoustic characteristics and intelligibility ratings obtained by different methods. The results suggest that it is more reliable to include different speech materials and different speaker types when collecting speech intelligibility. Moreover, intelligibility ratings at different levels are also very different reflected on acoustic features.

For sharing knowledge:

I attended a symposium called CROSSING THE BOUNDARIES: LANGUAGE IN INTERACTION (see https://www.languageininteraction.nl/symposium.html) held at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. I found some interesting posters that were related to my topic. One of them also extracted speech rate as a feature for assessing speech. 

At the end of this month, I will give a presentation to one of my study in Graz. I think it will be a great experience for me since sharing knowledge is one of my motivations for my PhD study.