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Autism Research : Official Journal of... Mar 2023Fine motor skill is associated with expressive language outcomes in infants who have an autistic sibling and in young autistic children. Fewer studies have focused on...
Fine motor skill is associated with expressive language outcomes in infants who have an autistic sibling and in young autistic children. Fewer studies have focused on school-aged children even though around 80% have motor impairments and 30% remain minimally verbal (MV) into their school years. Moreover, expressive language is not a unitary construct, but it is made up of components such as speech production, structural language, and social-pragmatic language use. We used natural language sampling to investigate the relationship between fine motor and speech intelligibility, mean length of utterance and conversational turns in MV and verbal autistic children between the ages of 4 and 7 while controlling for age and adaptive behavior. Fine motor skill predicted speech production, measured by percent intelligible utterances. Fine motor skill and adaptive behavior predicted structural language, measured by mean length of utterance in morphemes. Adaptive behavior, but not fine motor skill, predicted social-pragmatic language use measured by number of conversational turns. Simple linear regressions by group corrected for multiple comparisons showed that fine motor skill predicted intelligibility for MV but not verbal children. Fine motor skill and adaptive behavior predicted mean length of utterance for both MV and verbal children. These findings suggest that future studies should explore whether MV children may benefit from interventions targeting fine motor along with speech and language into their school years.
Topics: Infant; Child; Humans; Child, Preschool; Autistic Disorder; Motor Skills; Autism Spectrum Disorder; Language; Speech; Verbal Behavior
PubMed: 36578205
DOI: 10.1002/aur.2883 -
Scientific Reports Feb 2022The Down syndrome (DS) phenotype is usually characterized by relative strengths in non-verbal skills and deficits in verbal processing, but high interindividual...
The Down syndrome (DS) phenotype is usually characterized by relative strengths in non-verbal skills and deficits in verbal processing, but high interindividual variability has been registered in the syndrome. The goal of this study was to explore the cognitive profile, considering verbal and non-verbal intelligence, of children and adolescents with DS, also taking into account interindividual variability. We particularly aimed to investigate whether this variability means that we should envisage more than one cognitive profile in this population. The correlation between cognitive profile and medical conditions, parents' education levels and developmental milestones was also explored. Seventy-two children/adolescents with DS, aged 7-16 years, were assessed with the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence-III. Age-equivalent scores were adopted, and Verbal and Non-Verbal indices were obtained for each individual. The cognitive profile of the group as a whole was characterized by similar scores in the verbal and non-verbal domain. Cluster analysis revealed three different profiles, however: one group, with the lowest scores, had the typical profile associated with DS (with higher non-verbal than verbal intelligence); one, with intermediate scores, had greater verbal than non-verbal intelligence; and one, with the highest scores, fared equally well in the verbal and non-verbal domain. Three cognitive profiles emerged, suggesting that educational support for children and adolescents with DS may need to be more specific.
Topics: Adolescent; Adolescent Behavior; Adolescent Development; Age Factors; Biological Variation, Population; Child; Child Behavior; Child Development; Child Language; Cognition; Down Syndrome; Education of Intellectually Disabled; Educational Status; Female; Humans; Intelligence; Male; Persons with Mental Disabilities; Verbal Behavior; Vocabulary
PubMed: 35121796
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-05825-4 -
PloS One 2023Interpersonal communication includes verbal and nonverbal communication. Verbal communication comprises one-way (e.g., a speech or lecture) and interactive verbal...
Interpersonal communication includes verbal and nonverbal communication. Verbal communication comprises one-way (e.g., a speech or lecture) and interactive verbal communication (e.g., daily conversations or meetings), which we frequently encounter. Nonverbal communication has considerable influence on interpersonal communication, and body motion synchrony is known to be an important factor for successful communication and social interaction. However, most research on body motion synchrony has been elucidated by either the setting of one-way verbal transmission or the verbal interaction setting, and it remains unclear whether verbal directionality and interactivity affect body motion synchrony. One-way and two-way (interactive) verbal communication is implicated in designed or undesigned leader-follower relationships, and also in the complexity and diversity of interpersonal interactions, where two-way verbal communication is more complex and diverse than in the one-way condition. In this study, we tested head motion synchrony between the one-way verbal communication condition (in which the roles of the speaker and listener are fixed) and the two-way verbal communication condition (where the speaker and listener can freely engage in a conversation). Therefore, although no statistically significant difference in synchrony activity (relative frequency) was found, a statistically significant difference was observed in synchrony direction (temporal lead-lag structure as mimicry) and intensity. Specifically, the synchrony direction in two-way verbal communication was close to zero, but this in one-way verbal communication was synchronized with the listener's movement predominantly delayed. Furthermore, synchrony intensity, in terms of the degree of variation in the phase difference distribution, was significantly higher in the one-way verbal communication than in the two-way condition, with bigger time-shifts being observed in the latter. This result suggests that verbal interaction does not affect the overall frequency of head motion synchrony but does affect the temporal lead-lag structure and coherence.
Topics: Communication; Motion; Speech; Information Science; Movement
PubMed: 37224121
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0286098 -
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 -
Journal of Neurophysiology Nov 2022Coordination between speech acoustics and manual gestures has been conceived as "not biologically mandated" (McClave E. 27(1): 69-89, 1998). However, recent work...
Coordination between speech acoustics and manual gestures has been conceived as "not biologically mandated" (McClave E. 27(1): 69-89, 1998). However, recent work suggests a biomechanical entanglement between the upper limbs and the respiratory-vocal system (Pouw W, de Jonge-Hoekstra D, Harrison SJ, Paxton A, Dixon JA. 1491(1): 89-105, 2021). Pouw et al. found that for movements with a high physical impulse, speech acoustics co-occur with the physical impulses of upper limb movements. They interpret this result in terms of biomechanical coupling between arm motion and speech via the breathing system. This coupling could support the synchrony observed between speech prosody and arm gestures during communication. The present study investigates whether the effect of physical impulse on speech acoustics can be extended to leg motion, assumed to be controlled independently from oral communication. The study involved 25 native speakers of German who recalled short stories while biking with their arms or their legs. These conditions were compared with a static condition in which participants could not move their arms. Our analyses are similar to that of Pouw et al. (Pouw W, de Jonge-Hoekstra D, Harrison SJ, Paxton A, Dixon JA. 1491(1): 89-105, 2021). Results reveal that the presence of intensity peaks in the acoustic signal co-occur with the time of peak acceleration of legs' biking movements. However, this was not observed when biking with the arms, which corresponded to lower acceleration peaks. In contrast to intensity, F0 was not affected in the arm and leg conditions. These results suggest that ) the biomechanical entanglements between the respiratory-vocal system and the lower limbs may also impact speech; ) the physical impulse may have to reach a threshold to impact speech acoustics. The link between speech and limb motion is an interdisciplinary challenge and a core issue in motor control and language research. Our research aims to disentangle the potential biomechanical links between lower limbs and the speech apparatus, by investigating the effect of leg movements on speech acoustics.
Topics: Leg; Speech; Movement; Arm; Upper Extremity
PubMed: 36130171
DOI: 10.1152/jn.00282.2022 -
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal... Oct 2021
Topics: Animals; Humans; Learning; Speech; Vocalization, Animal
PubMed: 34482718
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2020.0234 -
Schizophrenia Bulletin Mar 2023This special issue of DISCOURSE in Psychosis focuses on the role of language in psychosis, including the relationships between formal thought disorder and conceptual...
This special issue of DISCOURSE in Psychosis focuses on the role of language in psychosis, including the relationships between formal thought disorder and conceptual disorganization, with speech and language markers and the neural mechanisms underlying these features in psychosis. It also covers the application of computational techniques in the study of language in psychosis, as well as the potential for using speech and language data for digital phenotyping in psychiatry.
Topics: Humans; Language; Psychotic Disorders; Speech
PubMed: 36946524
DOI: 10.1093/schbul/sbac211 -
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 -
American Journal of Speech-language... Aug 2020Purpose Literature was reviewed on the development of vowels in children's speech and on vowel disorders in children and adults, with an emphasis on studies using... (Review)
Review
Purpose Literature was reviewed on the development of vowels in children's speech and on vowel disorders in children and adults, with an emphasis on studies using acoustic methods. Method Searches were conducted with PubMed/MEDLINE, Google Scholar, CINAHL, HighWire Press, and legacy sources in retrieved articles. The primary search items included, but were not limited to, vowels, vowel development, vowel disorders, vowel formants, vowel therapy, vowel inherent spectral change, speech rhythm, and prosody. Results/Discussion The main conclusions reached in this review are that vowels are (a) important to speech intelligibility; (b) intrinsically dynamic; (c) refined in both perceptual and productive aspects beyond the age typically given for their phonetic mastery; (d) produced to compensate for articulatory and auditory perturbations; (e) influenced by language and dialect even in early childhood; (f) affected by a variety of speech, language, and hearing disorders in children and adults; (g) inadequately assessed by standardized articulation tests; and (h) characterized by at least three factors-articulatory configuration, extrinsic and intrinsic regulation of duration, and role in speech rhythm and prosody. Also discussed are stages in typical vowel ontogeny, acoustic characterization of rhotic vowels, a sensory-motor perspective on vowel production, and implications for clinical assessment of vowels.
Topics: Acoustics; Adult; Child; Child, Preschool; Humans; Language; Phonetics; Speech; Speech Acoustics; Speech Intelligibility; Speech Perception
PubMed: 32631070
DOI: 10.1044/2020_AJSLP-19-00178 -
Autism Research : Official Journal of... May 2023Oromotor functioning plays a foundational role in spoken communication and feeding, two areas of significant difficulty for many autistic individuals. However, despite... (Review)
Review
Oromotor functioning plays a foundational role in spoken communication and feeding, two areas of significant difficulty for many autistic individuals. However, despite years of research and established differences in gross and fine motor skills in this population, there is currently no clear consensus regarding the presence or nature of oral motor control deficits in autistic individuals. In this scoping review, we summarize research published between 1994 and 2022 to answer the following research questions: (1) What methods have been used to investigate oromotor functioning in autistic individuals? (2) Which oromotor behaviors have been investigated in this population? and (3) What conclusions can be drawn regarding oromotor skills in this population? Seven online databases were searched resulting in 107 studies meeting our inclusion criteria. Included studies varied widely in sample characteristics, behaviors analyzed, and research methodology. The large majority (81%) of included studies report a significant oromotor abnormality related to speech production, nonspeech oromotor skills, or feeding within a sample of autistic individuals based on age norms or in comparison to a control group. We examine these findings to identify trends, address methodological aspects hindering cross-study synthesis and generalization, and provide suggestions for future research.
Topics: Humans; Autism Spectrum Disorder; Speech; Autistic Disorder; Communication
PubMed: 37010327
DOI: 10.1002/aur.2923