Individual differences in susceptibility to the "irrelevant speech effect"

Individual differences in objective effects of noise on performance were analyzed with respect to their distribution, temporal stability, and the precision of measurement to be attained. Seventy-two subjects had to memorize sequences of visually presented digits while being exposed to one of three auditory background conditions which were randomly mixed on a trial-by-trial basis: (1) foreign speech; (2) pink noise; and (3) silence. Individual "irrelevant speech effects," operationalized by the difference in recall errors under speech and in silence, were normally distributed over a wide range extending from slight facilitation to severe disruption. When 25 subjects repeated the experiment after four weeks, the individual differences were replicated with a reliability of rtt = 0.45. Internal consistency, a measure of the precision with which individual effects can be measured in a single session, was moderate (alpha = 0.55). However, both retest, and consistency coefficients are severely attenuated by the use of (sound-minus-silence) difference scores, the reliability of which is bound to be considerably lower than that of the original error scores whenever these are correlated. Given that the original error rates in a specific auditory condition can be determined with reliabilities approaching 0.85, it may be concluded that individual performance decrements due to noise can be reliably measured in the "irrelevant speech" paradigm. Self-report measures of noise susceptibility collected to explore potential sources of the large inter-individual variation exhibited only weak relationships with the objectively measured noise effects: Subjects were quite inaccurate in assessing their individual impairment in the three auditory conditions, and a questionnaire-based measure of general noise sensitivity only accounted for a small portion of the variance in objectively measured performance decrements, although in both cases the predictive relationship was much stronger in female than in male subjects.     

Repetitive speech disorder resulting from infarcts in the paramedian thalami and midbrain

A repetitive speech disorder resulting from infarcts in the paramedian thalami and the midbrain is reported. Although the speech disorder seemed like stuttering, the compulsive repetitions, constant rate and monotonous tone were not associated with ordinary stuttering. Since repetition was restricted to the first syllable, the speech disorder in our patient could be distinguished from palilalia. The extrapyramidal system is considered responsible for repetitive speech disorders resulting from infarcts in the paramedian thalami and the midbrain but without good reason. Repetitive speech disorder in patients with infarcts in the supplementary motor area (SMA) have similar clinical features to our patient. It is suggested that interruption in the projective system to the SMA is a possible cause of "stuttering like repetition".     

Transient "cerebellar" mutism

The term "cerebellar mutism" refers to a specific disorder in which a complete but transient loss of speech, followed by dysarthria, occurs following resection of intrinsic posterior cranial fossa tumors or cerebellar hemorrhages, or upon trauma. Although it is well known that the lack of long-tract findings and cranial nerve (CN) involvement is the rule, the pathophysiology of cerebellar mutism has not been clearly elucidated. A review of the relevant literature disclosed 93 patients with this condition, the majority of these being in the pediatric age group. The neuropathological findings were as follows: 57 primitive neuroectodermal tumors (PNET), 19 astrocytomas, 10 ependymomas, 5 vascular malformations, 1 metastatic tumor, and 1 traumatic injury. The interval before the onset of mutism ranged from 0 to 168 h (mean 40.9 h). The mutism lasted from 1 to 168 days (mean 37.6 days). Subsequent dysarthria was present in 75 (80%) of the 93 patients. In this article, some specific recent illustrative reports are presented, and the concept of the role of the cerebellum in language and cognition is discussed. With these data as our point of departure, various hypotheses that have been advanced to explain the pathogenesis of this transient speech disorder are analyzed. The findings of the study suggest that the cause of the cerebellar mutism is the ischemia caused by vasospasm, as it usually developed after a latent period.     

Speech impairment in Parkinson's disease is improved by transcranial application of electromagnetic fields

A 52 year old fully medicated physician with juvenile onset Parkinsonism experienced 4 years ago severe "on-off" fluctuations in motor disability and debilitating speech impairment with severe stuttering which occurred predominantly during "on-off" periods. His speech impairment improved 20%-30% when sertraline (75 mg/day), a serotonin reuptake inhibitor, was added to his dopaminergic medications which included levodopa, amantadine, selegiline and pergolide mesylate. A more dramatic and consistent improvement in his speech occurred over the past 4 years during which time the patient received, on a fairly regular basis, weekly transcranial treatments with AC pulsed electromagnetic fields (EMFs) of picotesla flux density. Recurrence of speech impairment was observed on several occasions when regular treatments with EMFs were temporarily discontinued. These findings demonstrate that AC pulsed applications of picotesla flux density EMFs may offer a nonpharmacologic approach to the management of speech disturbances in Parkinsonism. Furthermore, this case implicates cerebral serotonergic deficiency in the pathogenesis of Parkinsonian speech impairment which affects more than 50% of patients. It is believed that pulsed applications of EMFs improved this patient's speech impairment through the facilitation of serotonergic transmission which may have occurred in part through a synergistic interaction with sertraline.     

The neurophysiological aspects of the recurrent functioning of the "hidden" variables of the speech apparatus

The "hidden" recurrent structure is established of temporal organization of acoustic speech signal. Such "hidden" recurrence can be revealed only due to experimentally established existence of two qualitatively different modes in the temporal organization of stutterers' speech. A theoretical model of speech generation is developed with a logistical property of "hidden" parameters in order to explain this phenomenon. This model is stated in terms of chaotic dynamics and is based on the neurophysiological striopallidal mechanisms which are realized under conditions of polysensory afferent impulsation. The effects of speech memory and actualization of its traces are explained on the basis of our earlier concept of perception of the rhythmical speech sequence. This concept allowed us to discuss the experimentally observed phenomenon of inhibitory modulation under conditions of both ipsi- and contralateral global negative feedback.     

Schizophrenia, language, and reality.

Discusses schizophrenic delusions, language patterns, and patient governments from the viewpoint of a social psychologist who spent 3 wks observing and interacting with hospitalized schizophrenics. No evidence of "schizophrenic speech" (i.e., childlike linguistic properties) was observed. It is suggested that this term is erroneously used as a synonym for "schizophrenic thought," which was evident in the content of patients' verbalizations. It is also suggested that schizophrenic delusions and thought patterns represent insufficient reality testing, and that this "reality" is culturally and historically determined. A review of the literature on interjudge reliability concerning schizophrenic vs normal linguistic productions is also presented. (19 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On the "folkloric" psychotherapy to schizophrenic patients--based on phenomenological study

Psychotherapeutic treatment of schizophrenia is generally considered difficult. One reason for this is that the doctor and patient can easily fall into a relationship of conflict with each other concerning the propriety of "judgments which are morbidly and mistakenly made (K. Jaspers)", referred to as delusions. We carried out close phenomenological structure-analyses of the delusions and of patients' fundamental experiences, based on the premise that a patient with delusions probably has some actual grounding for these in the patient's own concepts, considering the fact that the patient firmly believes these delusions. As a result, we have clarified the following matters from the primary experience of delusions. 1) We found that patients are in a conflicted mental condition which can be considered a collapse of adaptability to "Seken". 2) In this condition of conflict, patients feel guilt relative to "Seken" or feel that they are indebted and should be punished. When patients complained of their primary experience, we were able to persuade them to reserve their judgment of their primary experience, by 3) having each patient listen to the folktale "Torikuyou" in which the "logic of stealing" and the "logic of being stolen", appear in a reciprocal relationship relative to the constitution of crime and punishment, by 4) explaining to each patient about the ambiguity and reciprocity of reality experienced, 5) instead of disputing the propriety of patient's judgment about primary experience, doctor and patient worked together to enable the patient to form a positive understanding of the primary experience. 6) We reduced the patient's psychological conflict relative to primary experience, and were able to defuse and distance the patient's delusions caused by erroneous judgment of primary experience. 7) Regarding the area in which this type of psychotherapeutic approach shows efficacy, we analyzed the concept of "Seken" as a world which can cause conflicts relative to primary experiences. 8) We also analyzed "Giri" as a norm of "Seken" from which patients misconceive that they have deviated, in addition, 9) from the viewpoints of anthropology and cultural anthropology, we analyzed the bases for "Kotowaza (proverbs)" and "Monogatari (folktale)" such as "Torikuyou", which themselves can show psychotherapeutic efficacy. We consider that the psychotherapeutic approach has previously been developed around the concepts of the "individual" and "society", but we made our psychotherapeutic approach from the concept of "Seken" (yononaka = hito: person) that is a structure with deep strata of tradition and culture in Japan, and have reported its concrete development through the presentation of 3 typical cases of schizophrenia with difficulty in adapting to society due to showing the delusion of persecution in their foreground.     

High-frequency audibility: benefits for hearing-impaired listeners

The present study was a systematic investigation of the benefit of providing hearing-impaired listeners with audible high-frequency speech information. Five normal-hearing and nine high-frequency hearing-impaired listeners identified nonsense syllables that were low-pass filtered at a number of cutoff frequencies. As a means of quantifying audibility for each condition, Articulation Index (AI) was calculated for each condition for each listener. Most hearing-impaired listeners demonstrated an improvement in speech recognition as additional audible high-frequency information was provided. In some cases for more severely impaired listeners, increasing the audibility of high-frequency speech information resulted in no further improvement in speech recognition, or even decreases in speech recognition. A new measure of how well hearing-impaired listeners used information within specific frequency bands called "efficiency" was devised. This measure compared the benefit of providing a given increase in speech audibility to a hearing-impaired listener to the benefit observed in normal-hearing listeners for the same increase in speech audibility. Efficiencies were calculated using the old AI method and the new AI method (which takes into account the effects of high speech presentation levels). There was a clear pattern in the results suggesting that as the degree of hearing loss at a given frequency increased beyond 55 dB HL, the efficacy of providing additional audibility to that frequency region was diminished, especially when this degree of hearing loss was present at frequencies of 4000 Hz and above. A comparison of analyses from the "old" and "new" AI procedures suggests that some, but not all, of the deficiencies of speech recognition in these listeners was due to high presentation levels.     

Motor activation from visible speech: Evidence from stimulus response compatibility.

In speech perception, phonetic information can be acquired optically as well as acoustically. The motor theory of speech perception holds that motor control structures are involved in the processing of visible speech, whereas perceptual accounts do not make this assumption. Motor involvement in speech perception was examined by showing participants response-irrelevant movies of a mouth articulating /bΛ/ or /dΛ/ and asking them to verbally respond with either the same or a different syllable. The letters "Ba" and "Da" appeared on the speaker's mouth to indicate which response was to be performed. A reliable interference effect was observed. In subsequent experiments, perceptual interference was ruled out by using response-unrelated imperative stimuli and by preexposing the relevant stimulus information. Further, it was demonstrated that simple directional features (opening and closing) do not account for the effect. Rather, the present study provides evidence for the view that visible speech is processed up to a late, response-related processing stage, as predicted by the motor theory of speech perception. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Gesture, speech, and computational stages: A reply to McNeill.

McNeill (1985) claimed that speech and its accompanying gestures "share a common computational stage" that is located early in the speech production process. This position depends on two crucial arguments that we believe are unsound: first, that gestures "are synchronized with linguistic units in speech" and, second, that gestures "have semantic and pragmatic functions that parallel those of speech." Careful analysis of the relevant data indicated that although the processes underlying gestural production are globally autonomous, they are linked to speech production at more than just one computational stage. An account is offered that explicates these links. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Paradoxical Words and Hope in Psychoanalysis.

The analytic method links hope to the curative power of speech between patient and analyst. During development, the child associates speech with the hope of help coming from parents. Maternal and paternal voices constitute the child as the "you" parents address, and they function as the child's first mirror. One cannot separate the act of speaking from the hopes it awakens about personal communication, self-discovery, and transformation. Analysis brings about change by engaging the analysand in affectively meaningful speech. Analysis restores the capacity to speak with full meaning about personal experiences and helps the analysand to renounce pathogenic hopes and to pursue attainable desires. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Expanded intonation contours in mothers' speech to newborns.

Examined the prosodic characteristics of "motherese" in the speech of 24 German mothers to their newborns. Each S was recorded in 3 observational conditions, while addressing (1) her 3–5 day old baby (MB speech), (2) the absent infant as if present (simulated MB speech), and (3) the adult interviewer (MA speech). For each S, 2-min speech samples from each condition were acoustically analyzed. It was found that in MB speech, Ss spoke with higher pitch, wider pitch excursions, longer pauses, shorter utterances, and more prosodic repetition than in MA speech. 77% of the utterances in the MB speech sample conformed to a limited set of prosodic patterns that occurred only rarely in adult-directed speech (i.e., they consisted of characteristic expanded intonation contours, or they were whispered). The prosody of mothers' speech is discussed in terms of its immediate influence within the context of mother–infant interaction, as well as its potential long-range contribution to perceptual, social, and linguistic development. The exaggerated, rhythmic vocalizations of mothers' speech to newborns may serve to regulate infant attention and responsiveness and later contribute to prelinguistic skills. (36 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Toxic sock" syndrome

For several months, a 17-year-old male athlete noticed that his feet had an itchy, burning sensation at the heels and toes. His foot odor had become so malodorous (somewhat akin to rotting fish) that he would not remove his shoes except immediately before washing his feet. Washing made the odor somewhat milder, but only for a short time. The patient had tried an over-the-counter "athlete's foot" powder without results. He had no other health problems and was not taking any medication. The accompanying figure shows the toes of his right foot.     

Intelligibility of tracheoesophageal speech among naive listeners

Tracheoesophageal (TE) speech is now the most common method of voice rehabilitation after total laryngectomy. The speech intelligibility of laryngectomees who use TE speech as their primary mode of communication was evaluated by 20 "naive" listeners. Two speech intelligibility tests were administered using phonetically balanced rhyming words or lists of spondee words. The overall intelligibility for the group of laryngectomees was 76%, with a wide range of variability among the individual TE speakers. We concluded that TE speech is significantly less intelligible to naive listeners than normal laryngeal speech; further refinement of voice rehabilitation for laryngectomees is needed.     

Secondary baby talk: Judgments by institutionalized elderly and their caregivers.

60 care receivers (aged 62–100 yrs) and 39 of their caregivers judged vocal nonverbal messages prepared from audiotapes of caregivers interacting with their co-workers and elderly nursing home residents. The relationship between these judgments and, respectively, the functional ability of the aged judges and the expectations of the elderly held by the caregivers were investigated. The stimulus tape judged consisted of 3 types of messages: caregivers' speech to care receivers in baby talk, caregivers' speech to care receivers not in baby talk, and speech to other caregivers assumed to be in normal adult speech. For the elderly judges, lower functional ability scores were associated with a greater liking for baby talk speech as compared to other speech, but no relationships were found for their judgments of "soothing" or "irritating." For caregivers, expectancy was associated with their predictions of residents' liking for baby talk speech and caregivers' endorsements that adult speech would not be effective for interacting with care receivers. Results suggest that variations in caregiver expectancy may operate through a common social stereotype of the elderly. (18 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of speech style and sex of speaker on person perception.

R. T. Lakoff (1975) has suggested that men and women use different speech styles, with women's speech more polite but less assertive than men's. The assumption that 3 of Lakoff's linguistic variables (tag questions, qualifiers, and compound requests) affect person perception in these ways was tested. Sex of speaker was also varied. In Exp I, 80 undergraduates rated the assertiveness, warmth, and politeness of 2 male and 2 female speakers who used or did not use the 3 linguistic forms. All 3 "female" linguistic forms were rated less assertive than corresponding "male" forms; qualified speech and compound requests were rated warmer and compound requests more polite. Sex of speaker was a significant factor in only one possible comparison. These results were substantially replicated in Exp II, in which older and/or less educated women (32 18–58 yr olds) acted as judges. Findings suggest that Lakoff's intuitions concerning effects of speech styles on person perception are largely correct and that modification of speech styles could allow men and women to affect how they are perceived. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self-regulatory functions of children's private speech: A critical analysis of recent challenges to Vygotsky's theory.

Recent empirical findings have challenged L. S. Vygotsky's (1962) theory regarding the self-regulatory functions of children's private speech by suggesting that such speech occurs infrequently and that there is little functional relationship between children's production of private speech and success in cognitive tasks. It is hypothesized that the scarcity of private speech is an artifact of the typical research paradigm used in recent investigations. Within a Vygotskian framework, private speech will tend to co-occur with failure in cognitive tasks because both private speech and the likelihood of failure increase with task difficulty. In the present study, 32 3.5–6 yr olds were videotaped while performing semantic and perceptual tasks, and their verbalizations were transcribed and coded into social and private speech categories. Results indicate that the condition most frequently used in recent studies indeed minimized production of private speech and that failure in tasks was associated with greater production of self-regulatory speech. As the number of self-regulatory utterances declined, the number of whispers and mutterings increased, supporting Vygotsky's notion that private speech does not disappear with age but "goes underground" to constitute inner speech. (13 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive Impairments and Disordered Speech in Schizophrenia: Thought Disorder, Disorganization, and Communication Failure Perspectives.

This article posits that basic cognitive impairments in schizophrenia are more highly related to speech disorder measured as communication failures than speech disorder measured as thought disorder or disorganization. The author tested 47 schizophrenia patients and 36 control participants for sustained attention, sequencing, and conceptual sequencing ability. Their speech was also rated for communication failures, thought disorder, and conceptual disorganization. Attention and sequencing impairments, examined hierarchically, explained a substantial 38% of the variance in the communication measure of speech disorder but little of the variance in formal thought disorder or conceptual disorganization. The author concludes that (a) impairments in attention and sequencing abilities contribute substantially to schizophrenic communication failures, and (b) it is important to consider lower level cognitive "3rd variables" when examining higher level cognitive associates of speech disorder. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)