Encoding and memory for visible speech and gestures: A comparison between young and older adults.

Two experiments explored whether older adults have developed a strategy of compensating for slower speeds of language processing and hearing loss by relying more on the visual modality. Experiment 1 examined the influence of visual articulatory movements of the face (visible speech) in auditory–visual syllable classification in young adults and older adults. Older adults showed a significantly greater influence of visible speech. Experiment 2 examined immediate recall in three spoken-language sentence conditions: speech alone, with visible speech, or with both visible speech and iconic gestures. Sentences also varied in meaningfulness and speech rate. In the old adult group, recall was better for sentences containing visible speech compared with the speech-alone sentences in the meaningful sentence condition. Old adults' recall showed no overall benefit of the presence of gestures. Young adults' recall on meaningful sentences was not higher for the visible speech compared with the speech-alone condition, whereas recall was significantly higher with the addition of iconic gestures. In the anomalous sentence condition, both young and old adults showed an advantage in recall by the presence of visible speech.… (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Speaking clearly for the hard of hearing IV: Further studies of the role of speaking rate

The contribution of reduced speaking rate to the intelligibility of "clear" speech (Picheny, Durlach, & Braida, 1985) was evaluated by adjusting the durations of speech segments (a) via nonuniform signal time-scaling, (b) by deleting and inserting pauses, and (c) by eliciting materials from a professional speaker at a wide range of speaking rates. Key words in clearly spoken nonsense sentences were substantially more intelligible than those spoken conversationally (15 points) when presented in quiet for listeners with sensorineural impairments and when presented in a noise background to listeners with normal hearing. Repeated presentation of conversational materials also improved scores (6 points). However, degradations introduced by segment-by-segment time-scaling rendered this time-scaling technique problematic as a means of converting speaking styles. Scores for key words excised from these materials and presented in isolation generally exhibited the same trends as in sentence contexts. Manipulation of pause structure reduced scores both when additional pauses were introduced into conversational sentences and when pauses were deleted from clear sentences. Key-word scores for materials produced by a professional talker were inversely correlated with speaking rate, but conversational rate scores did not approach those of clear speech for other talkers. In all experiments, listeners with normal hearing exposed to flat-spectrum background noise performed similarly to listeners with hearing loss.     

Scanning electron microscopy of the bone-bioactive implant interface

The purpose of this study was to compare the intelligibility of two types of alaryngeal speech commonly used after total laryngectomy. Four male oesophageal speakers and four male tracheo-oesophageal speakers read a series of monosyllabic words, multisyllabic words and sentences. The monosyllabic word list consisted of several minimal pairs for each of eight phonetic contrasts; multisyllabic words and sentences were not selected on specific phonetic grounds. Audio recordings of all subjects' readings were presented to eight na?ve adult listeners who completed both an item identification task and a scaling procedure. The item identification task revealed higher intelligibility fpr tracheo-oesophageal speakers than for oesophageal speakers during the monosyllabic word condition. Results from the scaling procedure indicated that listeners' subjective intelligibility ratings were also higher for the tracheo-oesophageal speakers than for the oesophageal speakers. Moreover, a high positive correlation was found between the speakers' intelligibility scores obtained from the word identification task and the scaling procedure.     

Semantic relatedness and the scope of facilitation for upcoming words in sentences.

Three experiments examined the generality of context effects displayed for congruous completions appearing in high- and low-constraint sentences. Exp 1 found an effect of context for a broader range of completions for low-constraint than high-constraint sentences. Lexical decisions for unexpected congruous words that were related in meaning to the most expected completion for the sentence showed a benefit from context in low-constraint sentences only. Unexpected words that were unrelated to the most expected completion never benefited from appearing in either high- or low-constraint sentence contexts. Exp 2 varied the semantic relatedness of the unexpected words within Ss and found that unrelated words still did not benefit from sentence context. Exp 3 included only low-constraint sentences to encourage Ss to develop broader expectations for upcoming words. Unrelated words continued not to display any benefit from context. It is concluded that the scope of facilitation for upcoming words demonstrated in a lexical decision task is wider for low-constraint than high-constraint sentences, but never includes unrelated, although acceptable, completions for the sentence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of language and task on children's patterns of sentence verification and denial.

Japanese-speaking and English-speaking children differ in performance on sentence-verification and denial tasks (M. M. Akiyama, see PA, Vol 71:14618 and PA, Vol 72:16907). Although the Japanese and Korean languages are similar, Korean-speaking children performed like English speakers on such tasks. In Experiment 1, 32 monolingual Korean and 24 English speakers with a mean age of 4 years, 5 months were asked to respond "right" or "wrong" on a sentence–picture or a sentence–knowledge verification task. Both language groups found true negatives the hardest sentences to verify in both tasks. In Experiment 2, 16 Korean speakers aged 4–7 years were asked to deny statements. Like English speakers, they produced more affirmative denials than negative ones. The common performances of Korean-speaking and English speaking children were accounted for by considering differences in pragmatics and the types of negative constructions found in the 3 languages. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's memory for auditory and visual information on television.

Examined the relationship between children's cognitive processing of video and audio information on TV. 96 5-yr-olds viewed a videotaped segment of Sesame Street followed by comprehension and recognition tests. Ss viewed experimental segments in which (a) the audio and video tracks were from the same segment (A/V match), (b) the audio and video tracks were not from the same segment (A/V mismatch), (c) the video track was presented alone, or (d) the audio track was presented alone. This design allowed unconfounded comparisons of modality-specific processing. In the A/V mismatch condition, memory for audio information was reduced more than memory for video information. However, comprehension and recognition of audio information was similar in the audio-only and A/V match conditions. Results suggest that in regular TV programs, the video information does not interfere with processing the audio information but is more salient and memorable than the audio material. (13 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Auditory-phonetic projection and lexical structure in the recognition of sine-wave words.

Speech remains intelligible despite the elimination of canonical acoustic correlates of phonemes from the spectrum. A portion of this perceptual flexibility can be attributed to modulation sensitivity in the auditory-to-phonetic projection, although signal-independent properties of lexical neighborhoods also affect intelligibility in utterances composed of words. Three tests were conducted to estimate the effects of exposure to natural and sine-wave samples of speech in this kind of perceptual versatility. First, sine-wave versions of the easy and hard word sets were created, modeled on the speech samples of a single talker. The performance difference in recognition of easy and hard words was used to index the perceptual reliance on signal-independent properties of lexical contrasts. Second, several kinds of exposure produced familiarity with an aspect of sine-wave speech: (a) sine-wave sentences modeled on the same talker; (b) sine-wave sentences modeled on a different talker, to create familiarity with a sine-wave carrier; and (c) natural sentences spoken by the same talker, to create familiarity with the idiolect expressed in the sine-wave words. Recognition performance with both easy and hard sine-wave words improved after exposure only to sine-wave sentences modeled on the same talker. Third, a control test showed that signal-independent uncertainty is a plausible cause of differences in recognition of easy and hard sine-wave words. The conditions of beneficial exposure reveal the specificity of attention underlying versatility in speech perception. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Electrophysiological analysis of context effects in Alzheimer's disease.

Event-related potentials elicited by semantically associated and unassociated word pairs embedded in congruous and semantically anomalous spoken sentences were recorded from patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and healthy older and young controls as a means of examining the nature, time course, and relation between word and sentence context effects. All groups demonstrated lexical priming in nonsensical sentences, but it was earlier in the young (200-600 ms) than in the older controls (600-800 ms), and even later in the probable AD patients (800-1,000 ms). Moreover, processing in both the elderly and AD groups benefited disproportionately from a meaningful sentence context. The results do not accord well with either a strictly structural or a strictly functional account of the semantic impairments in AD. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Experimentally disentangling what's beneficial about elderspeak from what's not.

Three studies evaluated different varieties of elderspeak using a referential communication task. Experiment 1 compared the effects of syntactic simplifications and semantic elaborations. Experiment 2 contrasted syntactic simplifications and prosodic exaggerations. Experiment 3 contrasted 2 different syntactic simplification strategies and 2 different prosodic exaggerations. Providing semantic elaborations and reducing the use of subordinate and embedded clauses benefit older adults and improve their performance on the referential communication task, whereas reducing sentence length, slowing speaking rate, and using high pitch do not. The use of short sentences, a slow rate of speaking, and high pitch resulted in older adults' reporting more communication problems. These experiments validate a version of elderspeak that benefits older adults without sounding patronizing and insulting. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Brain potential correlates of number errors in the Turkish language

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 16 native speakers of Turkish while they watched Turkish sentences flashed upon the screen of a videomonitor. The sentences were three words long and contained a verb at the terminal position that was manipulated (1) to have either the correct or the incorrect number with regard to the subject of the sentence, and (2) to be semantically appropriate, inappropriate or to be a pseudoverb. The ERPs from 19 scalp channels revealed a more positive waveform at the left-fronto-temporal site with an onset latency of about 200 ms for the verbs having the wrong number regardless of the semantic appropriateness of the word, while at right fronto-temporal sites a more negative waveform was observed for plural words only. This number incongruency ERP-effect in Turkish is clearly at odds with findings from other languages.     

Speaking turns in small group interaction: A context-sensitive event sequence model.

A hierarchy of models that describe the sequences of speaking turns in nine 4-man groups was developed and analyzed. The best context-free model was one that predicted the next speaker on the basis of the two preceding speakers (a second-order Markov model). A context-sensitive model that described sequences of speaker roles instead of speaking turns and that incorporated different conditional probabilities in each of four contexts was found to be a substantial improvement over the previous model. In general, it was apparent that two group members held the floor at any given time. One was the person speaking; the other was a designated next speaker who was usually the last person to speak before the current speaker. The alternating turn-taking pattern produced by these two speakers identified the context of the Floor. Whenever the Floor context was broken, the pattern of conditional probabilities changed, reflecting the likelihood that the speakers who had been holding the floor were more likely to reestablish their floor than any of the context-free models had predicted. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On the flexibility of grammatical advance planning during sentence production: Effects of cognitive load on multiple lexical access.

Three picture–word interference experiments addressed the question of whether the scope of grammatical advance planning in sentence production corresponds to some fixed unit or rather is flexible. Subjects produced sentences of different formats under varying amounts of cognitive load. When speakers described 2-object displays with simple sentences of the form “the frog is next to the mug,” the 2 nouns were found to be lexically–semantically activated to similar degrees at speech onset, as indexed by similarly sized interference effects from semantic distractors related to either the first or the second noun. When speakers used more complex sentences (including prenominal color adjectives; e.g., “the blue frog is next to the blue mug”) much larger interference effects were observed for the first than the second noun, suggesting that the second noun was lexically–semantically activated before speech onset on only a subset of trials. With increased cognitive load, introduced by an additional conceptual decision task and variable utterance formats, the interference effect for the first noun was increased and the interference effect for second noun disappeared, suggesting that the scope of advance planning had been narrowed. By contrast, if cognitive load was induced by a secondary working memory task to be performed during speech planning, the interference effect for both nouns was increased, suggesting that the scope of advance planning had not been affected. In all, the data suggest that the scope of advance planning during grammatical encoding in sentence production is flexible, rather than structurally fixed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Building up linguistic context in schizophrenia: Evidence from self-paced reading.

An impairment in the build-up and use of context has been proposed as a core feature of schizophrenia. The current study tested the hypothesis that schizophrenia patients show impairments in building up context within sentences because of abnormalities in combining semantic with syntactic information. Schizophrenia patients and healthy controls read and made acceptability judgments about sentences containing verbs that were semantically associated with individual preceding words but that violated either the meaning (animacy/semantic constraints) or the syntactic structure (morphosyntactic constraints) of their preceding contexts. To override these semantic associations and determine that such sentences are unacceptable, participants must integrate semantic with syntactic information. These sentences were compared with congruous and pragmatically/semantically violated sentences that imposed fewer semantic-syntactic integration demands. At sentence-final words and decisions, patients showed smaller reaction time differences than controls to animacy/semantically violated or morphosyntactically violated sentences relative to pragmatically/semantically violated or nonviolated sentences. The relative insensitivity to these violations in patients with schizophrenia may arise from impairments in combining semantic and syntactic information to build up sentence context. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Performance of adult aphasics on a sentence evaluation and revision task

Adult aphasics completed a sentence evaluation and revision task to test some aspects of their linguistic competence. Grammatical and ungrammatical sentences served as the stimuli. Ungrammatical sentences were characterized by violations of syntactic or semantic structure, or both. Aphasics evaluated correctly the grammaticality of most stimulus sentences. Incorrect evaluations were associated with sentences characterized by violations of syntactic structure. Aphasics' revisions of sentences that they judged to be ungrammatical were in the direction of appropriate grammatical structures. Omission of morphological endings was the most frequent sentence revision error. Aphasics' errors on both tasks could be accounted for by performance deficits such as inattentiveness to syntactic detail, auditory perceptual impairments, and inefficient lexical retrieval. These findings lend support to the argument that aphasia is best characterized as a performance rather than competence disruption.     

Development of cross-linguistic variation in speech and gesture: Motion events in English and Turkish.

The way adults express manner and path components of a motion event varies across typologically different languages both in speech and cospeech gestures, showing that language specificity in event encoding influences gesture. The authors tracked when and how this multimodal cross-linguistic variation develops in children learning Turkish and English, 2 typologically distinct languages. They found that children learn to speak in language-specific ways from age 3 onward (i.e., English speakers used 1 clause and Turkish speakers used 2 clauses to express manner and path). In contrast, English- and Turkish-speaking children's gestures looked similar at ages 3 and 5 (i.e., separate gestures for manner and path), differing from each other only at age 9 and in adulthood (i.e., English speakers used 1 gesture, but Turkish speakers used separate gestures for manner and path). The authors argue that this pattern of the development of cospeech gestures reflects a gradual shift to language-specific representations during speaking and shows that looking at speech alone may not be sufficient to understand the full process of language acquisition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sentence verification and delusions: a content-specific deficit

BACKGROUND: A sentence verification task was developed to investigate semantic memory in schizophrenia. METHODS: The test consisted of three types of sentence (true, unlikely and nonsense) and seven different types of content (neutral, persecutory, grandiose, political, religious, relationships and somatic) representing common delusional themes present in schizophrenic patients. Sixty-three schizophrenic patients and 66 matched control subjects were asked to make true/false judgements to 143 sentences. RESULTS: Overall accuracy was similar across the two groups; sentences with some emotional themes and sentences of the unlikely type produced the most violations. Significant differences between the two subject groups were found specifically on nonsense sentences with persecutory and religious themes. Patients made significantly more incorrect responses (acceptance) to nonsense sentences that had an emotional content congruent with their delusional beliefs, past or present, and also on unlikely sentences (incorrect rejections) whose content was not congruent with their delusions. Further analysis of response bias in the patients showed, overall, that there were more incorrect rejections (a reflection of the large number of unlikely sentence errors) and more incorrect responses to sentences congruent with patients delusions. Furthermore, analysis of those patients currently experiencing delusions revealed more incorrect responses to sentences congruent with their delusional ideas compared with patients not currently deluded. CONCLUSIONS: These findings are indicative of cognitive bias in schizophrenia towards certain emotional themes that may underlie illogical semantic connections and delusions.     

Retention of related and unrelated sentences.

Memory for meaningful information was studied in 5 experiments investigating the effect on retention exerted by one sentence upon another when learned together as part of a set. Each experiment used 10th or 11th graders ( N = 404) from a different school. Effects were hypothesized to result from semantic linking by common concepts or by linking that reflected semantic ordering. Linking of sentences improved retention in 2 of the 1st 3 experiments; in the other, where overt answers to questions about the sentences were not required at the time of learning, retention was not enhanced. The last 2 experiments indicated that semantic ordering of sentences increased the number of sentences retained and that this effect was greater than could be accounted for by common linking concepts. (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Normes de complétion pour 744 contextes linguistiques fran?ais de différents formats.

Discusses the significance of the N400 component in event-related brain potentials and in testing models derived from psycholinguistic research. Most previous research has been conducted in English and has used standardized materials which allow comparison between results obtained in different labs. This study provides such materials in French. 744 sentences were construced and presented to 52 native French speakers. The last word of each sentence was omitted, and Ss completed the sentence context with the 1st word that came to mind. The Cloze probability was computed for each sentence. Results are presented as a function of the number of words per sentence. Three sets of sentences were created depending on the terminal word's Cloze probability. The use of these sentences in experiments on the electrophysiology of language processing and as a database in psycholinguistics and cognitive neuropsychology is discussed. (French & English abstracts) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)