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Philosophical Transactions of the Royal... May 2021This theme issue builds on the surge of interest in the field of language evolution as part of the broader field of human evolution, gathering some of the field's most...
This theme issue builds on the surge of interest in the field of language evolution as part of the broader field of human evolution, gathering some of the field's most prominent experts in order to achieve a deeper, richer understanding of human prehistory and the nature of prehistoric languages. Taken together, the contributions to this issue begin to outline a profile of the structural and functional features of prehistoric languages, including the type of sounds, the nature of the earliest grammars, the characteristics of the earliest vocabularies and some preferred uses, like conversation and insult. By also correlating certain specific features of language with the changes in brain organization during prehistory, the contributions to this issue directly engage the genetic and the neuroscientific aspects of human evolution and cognition. This article is part of the theme issue 'Reconstructing prehistoric languages'.
Topics: Cultural Evolution; Humans; Language; Linguistics; Speech
PubMed: 33745317
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2020.0187 -
The Journal of the Acoustical Society... Dec 2022Categorical perception (CP) is likely the single finding from speech perception with the biggest impact on cognitive science. However, within speech perception, it is... (Review)
Review
Categorical perception (CP) is likely the single finding from speech perception with the biggest impact on cognitive science. However, within speech perception, it is widely known to be an artifact of task demands. CP is empirically defined as a relationship between phoneme identification and discrimination. As discrimination tasks do not appear to require categorization, this was thought to support the claim that listeners perceive speech solely in terms of linguistic categories. However, 50 years of work using discrimination tasks, priming, the visual world paradigm, and event related potentials has rejected the strongest forms of CP and provided little strong evidence for any form of it. This paper reviews the origins and impact of this scientific meme and the work challenging it. It discusses work showing that the encoding of auditory input is largely continuous, not categorical, and describes the modern theoretical synthesis in which listeners preserve fine-grained detail to enable more flexible processing. This synthesis is fundamentally inconsistent with CP. This leads to a different understanding of how to use and interpret the most basic paradigms in speech perception-phoneme identification along a continuum-and has implications for understanding language and hearing disorders, development, and multilingualism.
Topics: Speech Perception; Language; Speech; Evoked Potentials; Multilingualism
PubMed: 36586868
DOI: 10.1121/10.0016614 -
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal... Feb 2023We explore the role of inner speech (covert self-directed talk) during the acquisition and use of concepts differing in abstractness. Following Vygotsky, inner speech... (Review)
Review
We explore the role of inner speech (covert self-directed talk) during the acquisition and use of concepts differing in abstractness. Following Vygotsky, inner speech results from the internalization of linguistically mediated interactions that regulate cognition and behaviour. When we acquire and process abstract concepts, uncertainties about word meaning might lead us to search actively for their meaning. Inner speech might play a role in this searching process and be differentially involved in concept learning compared with use of known concepts. Importantly, inner speech comes in different varieties-e.g. it can be expanded or condensed (with the latter involving syntactic and semantic forms of abbreviation). Do we use inner speech differently with concepts varying in abstractness? Which kinds of inner speech do we preferentially use with different kinds of abstract concepts (e.g. emotions versus numbers)? What other features of inner speech, such as dialogicality, might facilitate our use of concepts varying in abstractness (by allowing us to monitor the limits of our knowledge in simulated social exchanges, through a process we term )? In tackling these questions, we address the possibility that different varieties of inner speech are flexibly used during the acquisition of concepts and their everyday use. This article is part of the theme issue 'Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences'.
Topics: Speech; Cognition; Concept Formation; Emotions; Metacognition
PubMed: 36571134
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2021.0371 -
Perspectives on Psychological Science :... Jan 2023Women are thought to fare better in verbal abilities, especially in verbal-fluency and verbal-memory tasks. However, the last meta-analysis on sex/gender differences in... (Meta-Analysis)
Meta-Analysis
Women are thought to fare better in verbal abilities, especially in verbal-fluency and verbal-memory tasks. However, the last meta-analysis on sex/gender differences in verbal fluency dates from 1988. Although verbal memory has only recently been investigated meta-analytically, a comprehensive meta-analysis is lacking that focuses on verbal memory as it is typically assessed, for example, in neuropsychological settings. On the basis of 496 effect sizes and 355,173 participants, in the current meta-analysis, we found that women/girls outperformed men/boys in phonemic fluency (s = 0.12-0.13) but not in semantic fluency (s = 0.01-0.02), for which the sex/gender difference appeared to be category-dependent. Women/girls also outperformed men/boys in recall ( = 0.28) and recognition (s = 0.12-0.17). Although effect sizes are small, the female advantage was relatively stable over the past 50 years and across lifetime. Published articles reported stronger female advantages than unpublished studies, and first authors reported better performance for members of their own sex/gender. We conclude that a small female advantage in phonemic fluency, recall, and recognition exists and is partly subject to publication bias. Considerable variance suggests further contributing factors, such as participants' language and country/region.
Topics: Male; Humans; Female; Sex Factors; Verbal Behavior; Memory, Episodic; Neuropsychological Tests; Semantics
PubMed: 35867343
DOI: 10.1177/17456916221082116 -
Topics in Cognitive Science Apr 2021For people to communicate with each other, they must tie, or anchor, each of their utterances to the speaker, addressees, place, time, display, and purpose of that...
For people to communicate with each other, they must tie, or anchor, each of their utterances to the speaker, addressees, place, time, display, and purpose of that utterance. Doing this takes coordination. Producers must index each of these entities for their addressees, and addressees must identify each of the entities the producers are indexing. When people are face to face, they have a battery of resources for doing this-speech, gestures of all kinds, and interactive strategies. But when addressees are separated from producers in space, time, or worlds, as on the telephone or in print, the available resources are more limited. The problem is that research on comprehension, production, and communication has often ignored, disguised, or distorted anchoring. As a result, accounts of these processes are often incomplete, misleading, or incorrect.
Topics: Communication; Comprehension; Cues; Female; Gestures; Humans; Male; Mass Media; Speech; Telephone; Verbal Behavior
PubMed: 32202068
DOI: 10.1111/tops.12496 -
Journal of Speech, Language, and... Sep 2021Purpose Adults who stutter (AWS) often attempt, with varying degrees of success, to suppress their stuttered speech. The ability to effectively suppress motoric behavior...
Purpose Adults who stutter (AWS) often attempt, with varying degrees of success, to suppress their stuttered speech. The ability to effectively suppress motoric behavior after initiation relies on executive functions such as nonselective inhibition. Although previous studies found that AWS were slower to inhibit manual, button-press response than adults who do not stutter (AWNS), research has yet to confirm a consistent relationship between manual and verbal inhibition. No study has examined verbal inhibition ability in AWS. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to compare verbal response inhibition between AWS and AWNS, and compare verbal response inhibition to both the overt stuttering and the lived experience of stuttering. Method Thirty-four adults (17 AWNS, 17 AWS) completed one manual and three verbal stop-signal tasks. AWS were assessed for stuttering severity (Stuttering Severity Instrument-Fourth Edition: SSI-4) and experience with stuttering (Overall Assessment of the Speaker's Experience With Stuttering [OASES]). Results Results indicate no correlation between manual and verbal inhibition for either group. Generalized linear mixed-model analyses suggested no significant group differences in manual or verbal inhibition. Manual and verbal inhibition did not predict SSI-4 in AWS. However, verbal inhibition was uniquely associated with OASES scores. Conclusion Although underlying manual and verbal inhibition was comparable between AWS and AWNS, verbal inhibition may be linked to the adverse experience of stuttering rather than the overt symptoms of stuttering severity. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.15145185.
Topics: Adult; Humans; Inhibition, Psychological; Speech; Stuttering
PubMed: 34403265
DOI: 10.1044/2021_JSLHR-20-00739 -
Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) May 2022The task of converting text input into video content is becoming an important topic for synthetic media generation. Several methods have been proposed with some of them...
The task of converting text input into video content is becoming an important topic for synthetic media generation. Several methods have been proposed with some of them reaching close-to-natural performances in constrained tasks. In this paper, we tackle a subissue of the text-to-video generation problem, by converting the text into lip landmarks. However, we do this using a modular, controllable system architecture and evaluate each of its individual components. Our system, entitled FlexLip, is split into two separate modules: text-to-speech and speech-to-lip, both having underlying controllable deep neural network architectures. This modularity enables the easy replacement of each of its components, while also ensuring the fast adaptation to new speaker identities by disentangling or projecting the input features. We show that by using as little as 20 min of data for the audio generation component, and as little as 5 min for the speech-to-lip component, the objective measures of the generated lip landmarks are comparable with those obtained when using a larger set of training samples. We also introduce a series of objective evaluation measures over the complete flow of our system by taking into consideration several aspects of the data and system configuration. These aspects pertain to the quality and amount of training data, the use of pretrained models, and the data contained therein, as well as the identity of the target speaker; with regard to the latter, we show that we can perform zero-shot lip adaptation to an unseen identity by simply updating the shape of the lips in our model.
Topics: Lip; Neural Networks, Computer; Speech
PubMed: 35684727
DOI: 10.3390/s22114104 -
JASA Express Letters Jun 2022Interrupted speech and text are used to measure processes of linguistic closure that are important for recognition under adverse backgrounds. The present study compared...
Interrupted speech and text are used to measure processes of linguistic closure that are important for recognition under adverse backgrounds. The present study compared recognition of speech and text that had been periodically interrupted with matched amounts of silence or white space, respectively. Recognition thresholds were obtained for younger and older adults with normal or simulated/impaired hearing and correlated with recognition of speech-in-babble. Results demonstrate domain-general, age-related processes in linguistic closure affecting high context sentences and domain-specific, hearing-related processes in speech recognition affecting low context sentences. Text recognition captures domain-general linguistic processes in speech recognition susceptible to age-related effects.
Topics: Hearing; Language; Linguistics; Speech; Speech Perception
PubMed: 36154160
DOI: 10.1121/10.0011571 -
PloS One 2023Online hate speech is a critical and worsening problem, with extremists using social media platforms to radicalize recruits and coordinate offline violent events. While...
Online hate speech is a critical and worsening problem, with extremists using social media platforms to radicalize recruits and coordinate offline violent events. While much progress has been made in analyzing online hate speech, no study to date has classified multiple types of hate speech across both mainstream and fringe platforms. We conduct a supervised machine learning analysis of 7 types of online hate speech on 6 interconnected online platforms. We find that offline trigger events, such as protests and elections, are often followed by increases in types of online hate speech that bear seemingly little connection to the underlying event. This occurs on both mainstream and fringe platforms, despite moderation efforts, raising new research questions about the relationship between offline events and online speech, as well as implications for online content moderation.
Topics: Humans; Hate; Aggression; Speech; Social Media
PubMed: 36696388
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0278511 -
Turk Psikiyatri Dergisi = Turkish... 2022The aim of this study was to obtain normative data for Verbal Fluency Test and investigate the effects of age, gender, and education on verbal fluency in native...
OBJECTIVE
The aim of this study was to obtain normative data for Verbal Fluency Test and investigate the effects of age, gender, and education on verbal fluency in native Turkish-speaking individuals.
METHOD
A pilot study was conducted to determine 3 letters with differing levels of difficulty for completing the phonemic fluency task. First names and animals were chosen for the semantic fluency task, and an alternating semantic task (first name-animal) was also used. In total, 415 participants (208 male and 207 female) were recruited and stratified based on the age and education levels.
RESULTS
Level of education had a main effect on all verbal fluency tasks; people with higher education performed better. Age and gender were found to have no effect on phonemic verbal fluency. Only the < name production task was affected by gender, women performed better. Younger age groups produced more words in name generation and semantic alternating fluency tasks.
CONCLUSION
The effects of age, gender and education on verbal fluency are in accordance with many previous reports. Analysis of various errors were also conducted. Results for Turkish are presented and discussed in the light of literature.
Topics: Animals; Educational Status; Female; Humans; Male; Neuropsychological Tests; Pilot Projects; Semantics; Verbal Behavior
PubMed: 35343581
DOI: 10.5080/u25553