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Ugeskrift For Laeger Apr 2024Ankyloglossia 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,... (Review)
Review
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.
Topics: Humans; Ankyloglossia; Child; Language Development; Tongue; Lingual Frenum; Speech; Infant
PubMed: 38704717
DOI: 10.61409/V11230699 -
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews Jan 2024This paper concerns the distributed intelligence or federated inference that emerges under belief-sharing among agents who share a common world-and world model. Imagine,... (Review)
Review
This paper concerns the distributed intelligence or federated inference that emerges under belief-sharing among agents who share a common world-and world model. Imagine, for example, several animals keeping a lookout for predators. Their collective surveillance rests upon being able to communicate their beliefs-about what they see-among themselves. But, how is this possible? Here, we show how all the necessary components arise from minimising free energy. We use numerical studies to simulate the generation, acquisition and emergence of language in synthetic agents. Specifically, we consider inference, learning and selection as minimising the variational free energy of posterior (i.e., Bayesian) beliefs about the states, parameters and structure of generative models, respectively. The common theme-that attends these optimisation processes-is the selection of actions that minimise expected free energy, leading to active inference, learning and model selection (a.k.a., structure learning). We first illustrate the role of communication in resolving uncertainty about the latent states of a partially observed world, on which agents have complementary perspectives. We then consider the acquisition of the requisite language-entailed by a likelihood mapping from an agent's beliefs to their overt expression (e.g., speech)-showing that language can be transmitted across generations by active learning. Finally, we show that language is an emergent property of free energy minimisation, when agents operate within the same econiche. We conclude with a discussion of various perspectives on these phenomena; ranging from cultural niche construction, through federated learning, to the emergence of complexity in ensembles of self-organising systems.
Topics: Animals; Bayes Theorem; Communication; Language; Uncertainty; Speech
PubMed: 38056542
DOI: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2023.105500 -
Journal of Speech, Language, and... Jul 2023A major barrier to the wider use of language sample analysis (LSA) is the fact that transcription is very time intensive. Methods that can reduce the required time and...
PURPOSE
A major barrier to the wider use of language sample analysis (LSA) is the fact that transcription is very time intensive. Methods that can reduce the required time and effort could help in promoting the use of LSA for clinical practice and research.
METHOD
This article describes an automated pipeline, called Batchalign, that takes raw audio and creates full transcripts in Codes for the Human Analysis of Talk (CHAT) transcription format, complete with utterance- and word-level time alignments and morphosyntactic analysis. The pipeline only requires major human intervention for final checking. It combines a series of existing tools with additional novel reformatting processes. The steps in the pipeline are (a) automatic speech recognition, (b) utterance tokenization, (c) automatic corrections, (d) speaker ID assignment, (e) forced alignment, (f) user adjustments, and (g) automatic morphosyntactic and profiling analyses.
RESULTS
For work with recordings from adults with language disorders, six major results were obtained: (a) The word error rate was between 2.4% for controls and 3.4% for patients, (b) utterance tokenization accuracy was at the level reported for speakers without language disorders, (c) word-level diarization accuracy was at 93% for control participants and 83% for participants with language disorders, (d) utterance-level diarization accuracy based on word-level diarization was high, (e) adherence to CHAT format was fully accurate, and (f) human transcriber time was reduced by up to 75%.
CONCLUSION
The pipeline dramatically shortens the time gap between data collection and data analysis and provides an output superior to that typically generated by human transcribers.
Topics: Adult; Humans; Speech; Language; Language Disorders; Automation; Data Collection
PubMed: 37348510
DOI: 10.1044/2023_JSLHR-22-00642 -
CoDAS 2023Evaluate the performance in the Semantic and Phonemic Verbal Fluency tests in relation to the cognitive components of clustering and switching and explore the changes in...
PURPOSE
Evaluate the performance in the Semantic and Phonemic Verbal Fluency tests in relation to the cognitive components of clustering and switching and explore the changes in development in elementary school.
METHODS
Participants were 68 children from the 2nd to 5th grade of elementary school of a public school in the municipality of Santo André, divided into two groups, Learning Difficulty (LD) and Typical Development (TD).
RESULTS
The Verbal Fluency tests were compared for the number of clusters, mean size of the clusters, and number of switches. All variables compared showed a statistically significant higher score for Semantic Verbal Fluency. Means and standard deviations of the same variables for year and group effect were realized in both Verbal Fluency tests. A statistically significant difference was observed only for the total number of clusters in the Semantic Verbal Fluency test for group effect, with the best performance of the TD group. A high correlation was observed between the total number of correct answers with the total number of clusters and number of switches in both Verbal Fluency tests. In addition, a correlation was observed between the total number of correct answers and the mean size of the clusters only in the Phonemic Verbal Fluency. Linear regression analysis showed greater variance for the total number of clusters, making it more predictable for performance in both verbal fluency tests.
CONCLUSION
Verbal Fluency tests may be sensitive and predictive for the identification of possible differences in school performance associated with reading.
Topics: Humans; Child; Semantics; Cognition; Schools; Educational Status; Cluster Analysis; Verbal Behavior; Neuropsychological Tests
PubMed: 37820096
DOI: 10.1590/2317-1782/20232022003pt -
Neurobiology of Disease Sep 2023Speech impairment is commonly reported in Parkinson's disease and is not consistently improved by available therapies - including deep brain stimulation of the...
BACKGROUND
Speech impairment is commonly reported in Parkinson's disease and is not consistently improved by available therapies - including deep brain stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus (STN-DBS), which can worsen communication performance in some patients. Improving the outcome of STN-DBS on speech is difficult due to our incomplete understanding of the contribution of the STN to fluent speaking.
OBJECTIVE
To assess the relationship between subthalamic neural activity and speech production and intelligibility.
METHODS
We investigated bilateral STN local field potentials (LFPs) in nine parkinsonian patients chronically implanted with DBS during overt reading. LFP spectral features were correlated with clinical scores and measures of speech intelligibility.
RESULTS
Overt reading was associated with increased beta-low ([1220) Hz) power in the left STN, whereas speech intelligibility correlated positively with beta-high ([2030) Hz) power in the right STN.
CONCLUSION
We identified separate contributions from frequency and brain lateralization of the STN in the execution of an overt reading motor task and its intelligibility. This subcortical organization could be exploited for new adaptive stimulation strategies capable of identifying the occurrence of speaking behavior and facilitating its functional execution.
Topics: Humans; Parkinson Disease; Speech; Deep Brain Stimulation; Subthalamic Nucleus; Cognition
PubMed: 37499882
DOI: 10.1016/j.nbd.2023.106239 -
Journal of Speech, Language, and... Oct 2023As evidenced by perceptual learning studies involving adult listeners and speakers with dysarthria, adaptation to dysarthric speech is driven by signal predictability...
PURPOSE
As evidenced by perceptual learning studies involving adult listeners and speakers with dysarthria, adaptation to dysarthric speech is driven by signal predictability (speaker property) and a flexible speech perception system (listener property). Here, we extend adaptation investigations to adolescent populations and examine whether adult and adolescent listeners can learn to better understand an adolescent speaker with dysarthria.
METHOD
Classified by developmental stage, adult ( = 42) and adolescent ( = 40) listeners completed a three-phase perceptual learning protocol (pretest, familiarization, and posttest). During pretest and posttest, all listeners transcribed speech produced by a 13-year-old adolescent with spastic dysarthria associated with cerebral palsy. During familiarization, half of the adult and adolescent listeners engaged in structured familiarization (audio and lexical feedback) with the speech of the adolescent speaker with dysarthria; and the other half, with the speech of a neurotypical adolescent speaker (control).
RESULTS
Intelligibility scores increased from pretest to posttest for all listeners. However, listeners who received dysarthria familiarization achieved greater intelligibility improvements than those who received control familiarization. Furthermore, there was a significant effect of developmental stage, where the adults achieved greater intelligibility improvements relative to the adolescents.
CONCLUSIONS
This study provides the first tranche of evidence that adolescent dysarthric speech is learnable-a finding that holds even for adolescent listeners whose speech perception systems are not yet fully developed. Given the formative role that social interactions play during adolescence, these findings of improved intelligibility afford important clinical implications.
Topics: Adult; Humans; Adolescent; Speech Intelligibility; Dysarthria; Learning; Cognition; Speech Perception
PubMed: 37616225
DOI: 10.1044/2023_JSLHR-23-00231 -
Perspectives on Psychological Science :... Sep 2023Natural human interaction requires us to produce and process many different signals, including speech, hand and head gestures, and facial expressions. These... (Review)
Review
Natural human interaction requires us to produce and process many different signals, including speech, hand and head gestures, and facial expressions. These communicative signals, which occur in a variety of temporal relations with each other (e.g., parallel or temporally misaligned), must be rapidly processed as a coherent message by the receiver. In this contribution, we introduce the notion of interactionally embedded, affordance-driven gestalt perception as a framework that can explain how this rapid processing of multimodal signals is achieved as efficiently as it is. We discuss empirical evidence showing how basic principles of gestalt perception can explain some aspects of unimodal phenomena such as verbal language processing and visual scene perception but require additional features to explain multimodal human communication. We propose a framework in which high-level gestalt predictions are continuously updated by incoming sensory input, such as unfolding speech and visual signals. We outline the constituent processes that shape high-level gestalt perception and their role in perceiving relevance and . Finally, we provide testable predictions that arise from this multimodal interactionally embedded gestalt-perception framework. This review and framework therefore provide a theoretically motivated account of how we may understand the highly complex, multimodal behaviors inherent in natural social interaction.
Topics: Humans; Communication; Language; Visual Perception; Speech
PubMed: 36634318
DOI: 10.1177/17456916221141422 -
Trends in Neurosciences Sep 2023Learning to decode and produce speech is one of the most demanding tasks faced by infants. Nevertheless, infants typically utter their first words within a year, and... (Review)
Review
Learning to decode and produce speech is one of the most demanding tasks faced by infants. Nevertheless, infants typically utter their first words within a year, and phrases soon follow. Here we review cognitive abilities of newborn infants that promote language acquisition, focusing primarily on studies tapping neural activity. The results of these studies indicate that infants possess core adult auditory abilities already at birth, including statistical learning and rule extraction from variable speech input. Thus, the neonatal brain is ready to categorize sounds, detect word boundaries, learn words, and separate speech streams: in short, to acquire language quickly and efficiently from everyday linguistic input.
Topics: Infant; Infant, Newborn; Adult; Humans; Speech Perception; Language Development; Language; Learning; Brain; Speech
PubMed: 37344237
DOI: 10.1016/j.tins.2023.05.011 -
Assessment Oct 2023Category and letter verbal fluency assessment is widely used in basic and clinical research. Yet, the nature of the processes measured by such means remains a matter of...
Category and letter verbal fluency assessment is widely used in basic and clinical research. Yet, the nature of the processes measured by such means remains a matter of debate. To delineate automatic (free-associative) versus controlled (dissociative) retrieval processes involved in verbal fluency tasks, we carried out a psychometric study combining a novel lexical-semantic retrieval paradigm and structural equation modeling. We show that category fluency primarily engages a free-associative retrieval, whereas letter fluency exerts executive suppression of habitual semantic associates. Importantly, the models demonstrated that this dissociation is parametric rather than absolute, exhibiting a degree of unity as well as diversity among the retrieval measures. These findings and further exploratory analyses validate that category and letter fluency tasks reflect partially distinct forms of memory search and retrieval control, warranting different application in basic research and clinical assessment. Finally, we conclude that the novel associative-dissociative paradigm provides straightforward and useful behavioral measures for the assessment and differentiation of automatic versus controlled retrieval ability.
Topics: Humans; Neuropsychological Tests; Semantics; Verbal Behavior
PubMed: 35979927
DOI: 10.1177/10731911221117512 -
JASA Express Letters Aug 2023Demographic differences in acoustic environments are usually studied using geographic area monitoring. This approach, however, may miss valuable information...
Demographic differences in acoustic environments are usually studied using geographic area monitoring. This approach, however, may miss valuable information differentiating cultures. This motivated the current study, which used wearable sound recorders to measure noise levels and speech-to-noise ratios (SNRs) in the immediate acoustic environment of Latinx and European-American college students. Latinx experienced higher noise levels (64.8 dBC) and lower SNRs (3.7 dB) compared to European-Americans (noise levels, 63 dB; SNRs, 5.4 dB). This work provides a framework for a larger study on the impact of culture on auditory ecology.
Topics: Humans; Acoustics; Ecology; Sound; Speech; Students
PubMed: 37589565
DOI: 10.1121/10.0020608