Do pictures' emotional valence and arousal affect younger and older adults' narratives?

Emotional content, specifically negative valence, can differentially influence speech production in younger and older adults' autobiographical narratives, which have been interpreted as reflecting age differences in emotion regulation. However, age differences in emotional reactivity are another possible explanation, as younger and older adults frequently differ in their affective responses to negative and positive pictures. The present experiment investigated whether a picture's valence (pleasantness) and arousal (intensity) influenced older adults' production of narratives about those pictures. Thirty younger and 30 older participants produced narratives about pictures that varied in valence (positive, negative, and neutral) and arousal (high, low). Narratives were recorded via Zoom, transcribed, and analyzed with Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count-22 to get measures of emotional word use, disfluencies, and linguistic distance. Results showed that negative valence increased age differences in speech production independent of picture arousal: Relative to younger adults, older adults used more positive words, fewer negative words, and had more silent pauses when telling narratives about negative pictures. In contrast, high arousal decreased age differences such that older adults used fewer positive words in narratives about positive pictures and more linguistically distant words evidenced by fewer present-tense verbs, relative to narratives about low-arousal pictures. Contrary to an explanation of enhanced regulation or control over emotions in older adulthood, these findings support the idea that older adults' speech production is influenced by their reactivity or affective response to emotional stimuli even when the task is not to communicate one's emotions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The Speech without Doors: A Genre, 1627-1769.

In 1644 George Wither stood outside or without the doors of the House of Commons and delivered a speech to Parliament and the nation simultaneously. Not only did this "print oration" function as a prototype for Areopagitica, A Speech of John Milton [. . .] to the Parliament of England, but it inspired a genre of print pamphlets that would extend well into the eighteenth century. This article identifies and argues for the popular consequences of the genre, detailing its contribution to England's developing structure of political communication and representation.

The influence of tight tongue-ties and tongue-tie clips on speech development.

Ankyloglossia or tongue-tie is a condition where the anatomical variation of the sublingual frenulum can limit normal tongue function. In Denmark, as in other countries, an increase in the number of children treated for ankyloglossia has been described over the past years. Whether or not ankyloglossia and its release affect the speech has also been increasingly discussed on Danish television and social media. In this review, the possible connection between ankyloglossia, its surgical treatment, and speech development in children is discussed.

Signatures of speech and song: "Universal" links despite cultural diversity.

Equitable collaboration between culturally diverse scientists reveals that acoustic fingerprints of human speech and song share parallel relationships across the globe.

Attention capture by own name decreases with speech compression.

Auditory stimuli that are relevant to a listener have the potential to capture focal attention even when unattended, the listener's own name being a particularly effective stimulus. We report two experiments to test the attention-capturing potential of the listener's own name in normal speech and time-compressed speech. In Experiment 1, 39 participants were tested with a visual word categorization task with uncompressed spoken names as background auditory distractors. Participants' word categorization performance was slower when hearing their own name rather than other names, and in a final test, they were faster at detecting their own name than other names. Experiment 2 used the same task paradigm, but the auditory distractors were time-compressed names. Three compression levels were tested with 25 participants in each condition. Participants' word categorization performance was again slower when hearing their own name than when hearing other names; the slowing was strongest with slight compression and weakest with intense compression. Personally relevant time-compressed speech has the potential to capture attention, but the degree of capture depends on the level of compression. Attention capture by time-compressed speech has practical significance and provides partial evidence for the duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction.

Globally, songs and instrumental melodies are slower and higher and use more stable pitches than speech: A Registered Report.

Both music and language are found in all known human societies, yet no studies have compared similarities and differences between song, speech, and instrumental music on a global scale. In this Registered Report, we analyzed two global datasets: (i) 300 annotated audio recordings representing matched sets of traditional songs, recited lyrics, conversational speech, and instrumental melodies from our 75 coauthors speaking 55 languages; and (ii) 418 previously published adult-directed song and speech recordings from 209 individuals speaking 16 languages. Of our six preregistered predictions, five were strongly supported: Relative to speech, songs use (i) higher pitch, (ii) slower temporal rate, and (iii) more stable pitches, while both songs and speech used similar (iv) pitch interval size and (v) timbral brightness. Exploratory analyses suggest that features vary along a "musi-linguistic" continuum when including instrumental melodies and recited lyrics. Our study provides strong empirical evidence of cross-cultural regularities in music and speech.

Animal cognition: Dogs build semantic expectations between spoken words and objects.

A recent study has used scalp-recorded electroencephalography to obtain evidence of semantic processing of human speech and objects by domesticated dogs. The results suggest that dogs do comprehend the meaning of familiar spoken words, in that a word can evoke the mental representation of the object to which it refers.

Feasibility of decoding covert speech in ECoG with a Transformer trained on overt speech.

Several attempts for speech brain-computer interfacing (BCI) have been made to decode phonemes, sub-words, words, or sentences using invasive measurements, such as the electrocorticogram (ECoG), during auditory speech perception, overt speech, or imagined (covert) speech. Decoding sentences from covert speech is a challenging task. Sixteen epilepsy patients with intracranially implanted electrodes participated in this study, and ECoGs were recorded during overt speech and covert speech of eight Japanese sentences, each consisting of three tokens. In particular, Transformer neural network model was applied to decode text sentences from covert speech, which was trained using ECoGs obtained during overt speech. We first examined the proposed Transformer model using the same task for training and testing, and then evaluated the model's performance when trained with overt task for decoding covert speech. The Transformer model trained on covert speech achieved an average token error rate (TER) of 46.6% for decoding covert speech, whereas the model trained on overt speech achieved a TER of 46.3% ( p > 0.05 ; d = 0.07 ) . Therefore, the challenge of collecting training data for covert speech can be addressed using overt speech. The performance of covert speech can improve by employing several overt speeches.

What's special about human speech? A student exercise for comparing speech production between humans and chimpanzees.

Modern humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor on the phylogenetic tree, yet chimpanzees do not spontaneously produce speech or speech sounds. The lab exercise presented in this paper was developed for undergraduate students in a course entitled "What's Special About Human Speech?" The exercise is based on acoustic analyses of the words "cup" and "papa" as spoken by Viki, a home-raised, speech-trained chimpanzee, as well as the words spoken by a human. The analyses allow students to relate differences in articulation and vocal abilities between Viki and humans to the known anatomical differences in their vocal systems. Anatomical and articulation differences between humans and Viki include (1) potential tongue movements, (2) presence or absence of laryngeal air sacs, (3) presence or absence of vocal membranes, and (4) exhalation vs inhalation during production.

Exploring neural tracking of acoustic and linguistic speech representations in individuals with post-stroke aphasia.

Aphasia is a communication disorder that affects processing of language at different levels (e.g., acoustic, phonological, semantic). Recording brain activity via Electroencephalography while people listen to a continuous story allows to analyze brain responses to acoustic and linguistic properties of speech. When the neural activity aligns with these speech properties, it is referred to as neural tracking. Even though measuring neural tracking of speech may present an interesting approach to studying aphasia in an ecologically valid way, it has not yet been investigated in individuals with stroke-induced aphasia. Here, we explored processing of acoustic and linguistic speech representations in individuals with aphasia in the chronic phase after stroke and age-matched healthy controls. We found decreased neural tracking of acoustic speech representations (envelope and envelope onsets) in individuals with aphasia. In addition, word surprisal displayed decreased amplitudes in individuals with aphasia around 195 ms over frontal electrodes, although this effect was not corrected for multiple comparisons. These results show that there is potential to capture language processing impairments in individuals with aphasia by measuring neural tracking of continuous speech. However, more research is needed to validate these results. Nonetheless, this exploratory study shows that neural tracking of naturalistic, continuous speech presents a powerful approach to studying aphasia.

Speaking in Public Coping Scale (ECOFAP): content and response process validity evidence. / Escala de Coping para Fala em Público (ECOFAP): evidências de validade de conteúdo e processos de resposta.

PURPOSE: To present the content and response process validity evidence of the Speaking in Public Coping of Scale (ECOFAP). METHODS: A methodological study to develop and validate the instrument. It followed the instrument development method with theoretical, empirical, and analytical procedures, based on the validity criteria of the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (SEPT). The process of obtaining content validity evidence had two stages: 1) conceptual definition of the construct, based on theoretical precepts of speaking in public and the Motivational Theory of Coping (MTC); 2) developing items and response keys, structuring the instrument, assessment by a committee with 10 specialists, restructuring scale items, and developing the ECOFAP pilot version. Item representativity was analyzed through the item content validity index. The response process was conducted in a single stage with a convenience sample of 30 people with and without difficulties speaking in public, from the campus of a Brazilian university, belonging to various social and professional strata. In this process, the respondents' verbal and nonverbal reactions were qualitatively analyzed. RESULTS: The initial version of ECOFAP, consisting of 46 items, was evaluated by judges and later reformulated, resulting in a second version with 60 items. This second version was again submitted for expert analysis, and the content validity index per item was calculated. 18 items were excluded, resulting in a third version of 42 items. The validity evidence based on the response processes of the 42-item version was applied to a sample of 30 individuals, resulting in the rewriting of one item and the inclusion of six more items, resulting in the pilot version of ECOFAP with 48 items. CONCLUSION: ECOFAP pilot version has items with well-structured semantics and syntactic, representing strategies to cope with speaking in public.

OBJETIVO: Apresentar as evidências de validade baseadas no conteúdo e nos processos de resposta da Escala de Coping para a Fala em Público (ECOFAP). MÉTODO: Estudo metodológico de elaboração e validação de instrumento. Seguiu-se o modelo de elaboração de instrumentos com procedimentos teóricos, empíricos e analíticos, baseados nos critérios de validade do Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (SEPT). O processo de obtenção das evidências de validade baseadas no conteúdo foi realizado em duas etapas: 1) definição conceitual do construto, elaborado com base nos preceitos teóricos da fala em público e da Teoria Motivacional do Coping (TMC); 2) elaboração dos itens e chave de respostas, estruturação do instrumento, avaliação por comitê de dez especialistas, reestruturação dos itens da escala, realizada em três momentos, até a elaboração da versão piloto da ECOFAP. O processo de resposta foi realizado com amostra de conveniência de 30 indivíduos, com e sem dificuldades de fala em público, no campus de uma universidade brasileira, pertencentes a diferentes extratos sociais e profissões. Nesse processo, foram analisadas qualitativamente as reações verbais e não verbais dos respondentes. RESULTADOS: A primeira versão da ECOFAP, composta por 46 itens, foi avaliada pelos juízes e posteriormente reformulada, resultando em uma segunda versão com 60 itens. Essa segunda versão foi novamente submetida à análise de especialistas e calculado o índice de validade de conteúdo por item. Foram excluídos 18 itens, originando uma terceira versão de 42 itens. As evidências de validade com base nos processos de resposta da versão de 42 itens foram aplicadas em uma amostra de 30 indivíduos, resultando na reescrita de um item e inclusão de mais seis itens, originando a versão piloto da ECOFAP de 48 itens. CONCLUSÃO: A versão piloto da ECOFAP apresenta itens bem estruturados semântica e sintaticamente que representam estratégias de enfrentamento para a fala em público.

Are minimally verbal autistic children's modality and form of communication associated with parent responsivity?

Prior work examined how minimally verbal (MV) children with autism used their gestural communication during social interactions. However, interactions are exchanges between social partners. Examining parent-child social interactions is critically important given the influence of parent responsivity on children's communicative development. Specifically, parent responses that are semantically contingent to the child's communication plays an important role in further shaping children's language learning. This study examines whether MV autistic children's (N = 47; 48-95 months; 10 females) modality and form of communication are associated with parent responsivity during an in-home parent-child interaction (PCI). The PCI was collected using natural language sampling methods and coded for child modality and form of communication and parent responses. Findings from Kruskal-Wallis H tests revealed that there was no significant difference in parent semantically contingent responses based on child communication modality (spoken language, gesture, gesture-speech combinations, and AAC) and form of communication (precise vs. imprecise). Findings highlight the importance of examining multiple modalities and forms of communication in MV children with autism to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of their communication abilities; and underscore the inclusion of interactionist models of communication to examine children's input on parent responses in further shaping language learning experiences.

Revealing the spatiotemporal brain dynamics of covert speech compared with overt speech: A simultaneous EEG-fMRI study.

Covert speech (CS) refers to speaking internally to oneself without producing any sound or movement. CS is involved in multiple cognitive functions and disorders. Reconstructing CS content by brain-computer interface (BCI) is also an emerging technique. However, it is still controversial whether CS is a truncated neural process of overt speech (OS) or involves independent patterns. Here, we performed a word-speaking experiment with simultaneous EEG-fMRI. It involved 32 participants, who generated words both overtly and covertly. By integrating spatial constraints from fMRI into EEG source localization, we precisely estimated the spatiotemporal dynamics of neural activity. During CS, EEG source activity was localized in three regions: the left precentral gyrus, the left supplementary motor area, and the left putamen. Although OS involved more brain regions with stronger activations, CS was characterized by an earlier event-locked activation in the left putamen (peak at 262 ms versus 1170 ms). The left putamen was also identified as the only hub node within the functional connectivity (FC) networks of both OS and CS, while showing weaker FC strength towards speech-related regions in the dominant hemisphere during CS. Path analysis revealed significant multivariate associations, indicating an indirect association between the earlier activation in the left putamen and CS, which was mediated by reduced FC towards speech-related regions. These findings revealed the specific spatiotemporal dynamics of CS, offering insights into CS mechanisms that are potentially relevant for future treatment of self-regulation deficits, speech disorders, and development of BCI speech applications.

Switching off: disruptive TMS reveals distinct contributions of the posterior middle temporal gyrus and angular gyrus to bilingual speech production.

The role of the left temporoparietal cortex in speech production has been extensively studied during native language processing, proving crucial in controlled lexico-semantic retrieval under varying cognitive demands. Yet, its role in bilinguals, fluent in both native and second languages, remains poorly understood. Here, we employed continuous theta burst stimulation to disrupt neural activity in the left posterior middle-temporal gyrus (pMTG) and angular gyrus (AG) while Italian-Friulian bilinguals performed a cued picture-naming task. The task involved between-language (naming objects in Italian or Friulian) and within-language blocks (naming objects ["knife"] or associated actions ["cut"] in a single language) in which participants could either maintain (non-switch) or change (switch) instructions based on cues. During within-language blocks, cTBS over the pMTG entailed faster naming for high-demanding switch trials, while cTBS to the AG elicited slower latencies in low-demanding non-switch trials. No cTBS effects were observed in the between-language block. Our findings suggest a causal involvement of the left pMTG and AG in lexico-semantic processing across languages, with distinct contributions to controlled vs. "automatic" retrieval, respectively. However, they do not support the existence of shared control mechanisms within and between language(s) production. Altogether, these results inform neurobiological models of semantic control in bilinguals.

Movement-related cortical potential and speech-induced suppression during speech production in younger and older adults.

With age, the speech system undergoes important changes that render speech production more laborious, slower and often less intelligible. And yet, the neural mechanisms that underlie these age-related changes remain unclear. In this EEG study, we examined two important mechanisms in speech motor control: pre-speech movement-related cortical potential (MRCP), which reflects speech motor planning, and speaking-induced suppression (SIS), which indexes auditory predictions of speech motor commands, in 20 healthy young and 20 healthy older adults. Participants undertook a vowel production task which was followed by passive listening of their own recorded vowels. Our results revealed extensive differences in MRCP in older compared to younger adults. Further, while longer latencies were observed in older adults on N1 and P2, in contrast, the SIS was preserved. The observed reduced MRCP appears as a potential explanatory mechanism for the known age-related slowing of speech production, while preserved SIS suggests intact motor-to-auditory integration.

Subthalamic nucleus-language network connectivity predicts dopaminergic modulation of speech function in Parkinson's disease.

Speech impediments are a prominent yet understudied symptom of Parkinson's disease (PD). While the subthalamic nucleus (STN) is an established clinical target for treating motor symptoms, these interventions can lead to further worsening of speech. The interplay between dopaminergic medication, STN circuitry, and their downstream effects on speech in PD is not yet fully understood. Here, we investigate the effect of dopaminergic medication on STN circuitry and probe its association with speech and cognitive functions in PD patients. We found that changes in intrinsic functional connectivity of the STN were associated with alterations in speech functions in PD. Interestingly, this relationship was characterized by altered functional connectivity of the dorsolateral and ventromedial subdivisions of the STN with the language network. Crucially, medication-induced changes in functional connectivity between the STN's dorsolateral subdivision and key regions in the language network, including the left inferior frontal cortex and the left superior temporal gyrus, correlated with alterations on a standardized neuropsychological test requiring oral responses. This relation was not observed in the written version of the same test. Furthermore, changes in functional connectivity between STN and language regions predicted the medication's downstream effects on speech-related cognitive performance. These findings reveal a previously unidentified brain mechanism through which dopaminergic medication influences speech function in PD. Our study sheds light into the subcortical-cortical circuit mechanisms underlying impaired speech control in PD. The insights gained here could inform treatment strategies aimed at mitigating speech deficits in PD and enhancing the quality of life for affected individuals.

Recurrence plot embeddings as short segment nonlinear features for multimodal speaker identification using air, bone and throat microphones.

Speech is produced by a nonlinear, dynamical Vocal Tract (VT) system, and is transmitted through multiple (air, bone and skin conduction) modes, as captured by the air, bone and throat microphones respectively. Speaker specific characteristics that capture this nonlinearity are rarely used as stand-alone features for speaker modeling, and at best have been used in tandem with well known linear spectral features to produce tangible results. This paper proposes Recurrent Plot (RP) embeddings as stand-alone, non-linear speaker-discriminating features. Two datasets, the continuous multimodal TIMIT speech corpus and the consonant-vowel unimodal syllable dataset, are used in this study for conducting closed-set speaker identification experiments. Experiments with unimodal speaker recognition systems show that RP embeddings capture the nonlinear dynamics of the VT system which are unique to every speaker, in all the modes of speech. The Air (A), Bone (B) and Throat (T) microphone systems, trained purely on RP embeddings perform with an accuracy of 95.81%, 98.18% and 99.74%, respectively. Experiments using the joint feature space of combined RP embeddings for bimodal (A-T, A-B, B-T) and trimodal (A-B-T) systems show that the best trimodal system (99.84% accuracy) performs on par with trimodal systems using spectrogram (99.45%) and MFCC (99.98%). The 98.84% performance of the B-T bimodal system shows the efficacy of a speaker recognition system based entirely on alternate (bone and throat) speech, in the absence of the standard (air) speech. The results underscore the significance of the RP embedding, as a nonlinear feature representation of the dynamical VT system that can act independently for speaker recognition. It is envisaged that speech recognition too will benefit from this nonlinear feature.

Visual scanning patterns of a talking face when evaluating phonetic information in a native and non-native language.

When comprehending speech, listeners can use information encoded in visual cues from a face to enhance auditory speech comprehension. For example, prior work has shown that the mouth movements reflect articulatory features of speech segments and durational information, while pitch and speech amplitude are primarily cued by eyebrow and head movements. Little is known about how the visual perception of segmental and prosodic speech information is influenced by linguistic experience. Using eye-tracking, we studied how perceivers' visual scanning of different regions on a talking face predicts accuracy in a task targeting both segmental versus prosodic information, and also asked how this was influenced by language familiarity. Twenty-four native English perceivers heard two audio sentences in either English or Mandarin (an unfamiliar, non-native language), which sometimes differed in segmental or prosodic information (or both). Perceivers then saw a silent video of a talking face, and judged whether that video matched either the first or second audio sentence (or whether both sentences were the same). First, increased looking to the mouth predicted correct responses only for non-native language trials. Second, the start of a successful search for speech information in the mouth area was significantly delayed in non-native versus native trials, but just when there were only prosodic differences in the auditory sentences, and not when there were segmental differences. Third, (in correct trials) the saccade amplitude in native language trials was significantly greater than in non-native trials, indicating more intensely focused fixations in the latter. Taken together, these results suggest that mouth-looking was generally more evident when processing a non-native versus native language in all analyses, but fascinatingly, when measuring perceivers' latency to fixate the mouth, this language effect was largest in trials where only prosodic information was useful for the task.

The human auditory system uses amplitude modulation to distinguish music from speech.

Music and speech are complex and distinct auditory signals that are both foundational to the human experience. The mechanisms underpinning each domain are widely investigated. However, what perceptual mechanism transforms a sound into music or speech and how basic acoustic information is required to distinguish between them remain open questions. Here, we hypothesized that a sound's amplitude modulation (AM), an essential temporal acoustic feature driving the auditory system across processing levels, is critical for distinguishing music and speech. Specifically, in contrast to paradigms using naturalistic acoustic signals (that can be challenging to interpret), we used a noise-probing approach to untangle the auditory mechanism: If AM rate and regularity are critical for perceptually distinguishing music and speech, judging artificially noise-synthesized ambiguous audio signals should align with their AM parameters. Across 4 experiments (N = 335), signals with a higher peak AM frequency tend to be judged as speech, lower as music. Interestingly, this principle is consistently used by all listeners for speech judgments, but only by musically sophisticated listeners for music. In addition, signals with more regular AM are judged as music over speech, and this feature is more critical for music judgment, regardless of musical sophistication. The data suggest that the auditory system can rely on a low-level acoustic property as basic as AM to distinguish music from speech, a simple principle that provokes both neurophysiological and evolutionary experiments and speculations.