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Tijdschrift Voor Psychiatrie 2023This special issue discusses the roles and functions of language in psychiatric practice from different perspectives. As an introduction, we discuss the phenomenon...
BACKGROUND
This special issue discusses the roles and functions of language in psychiatric practice from different perspectives. As an introduction, we discuss the phenomenon ‘language’ as an object of scientific investigation.
AIM
To give a brief introduction to this theme issue.
METHOD
After a terminological introduction and an outline of linguistics, we discuss some of the cognitive processes that enable humans to produce and interpret verbal utterances.
RESULTS
The mental lexicon, the dictionary in our head, plays a central role in both language production and understanding. The starting point for language comprehension is recognizing basic form elements in the speech or sign stream (phonemes). Next, the perceiver must determine how words are related grammatically in order to deduce sentence meanings. We distinguish three successive steps in the production of language: conceptualizing, formulating and articulating.
CONCLUSION
Production and understanding words and sentences rely on a complex interplay of cognitive processes. In communication, we use words and sentences to convey and recognize intentions. This requires close cooperation between interlocutors.
Topics: Humans; Language; Communication; Linguistics; Speech
PubMed: 36951766
DOI: No ID Found -
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal... Dec 2021Voice modulatory cues such as variations in fundamental frequency, duration and pauses are key factors for structuring vocal signals in human speech and vocal... (Review)
Review
Voice modulatory cues such as variations in fundamental frequency, duration and pauses are key factors for structuring vocal signals in human speech and vocal communication in other tetrapods. Voice modulation physiology is highly similar in humans and other tetrapods due to shared ancestry and shared functional pressures for efficient communication. This has led to similarly structured vocalizations across humans and other tetrapods. Nonetheless, in their details, structural characteristics may vary across species and languages. Because data concerning voice modulation in non-human tetrapod vocal production and especially perception are relatively scarce compared to human vocal production and perception, this review focuses on voice modulatory cues used for speech segmentation across human languages, highlighting comparative data where available. Cues that are used similarly across many languages may help indicate which cues may result from physiological or basic cognitive constraints, and which cues may be employed more flexibly and are shaped by cultural evolution. This suggests promising candidates for future investigation of cues to structure in non-human tetrapod vocalizations. This article is part of the theme issue 'Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part I)'.
Topics: Cues; Language; Speech; Speech Perception; Voice
PubMed: 34719253
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2020.0393 -
CoDAS 2021The aim of this study is to analyze and compare the performance and strategies used by control subjects and patients with unilateral brain damage on phonemic and...
PURPOSE
The aim of this study is to analyze and compare the performance and strategies used by control subjects and patients with unilateral brain damage on phonemic and semantic Verbal Fluency tasks.
METHODS
The sample consisted of 104 participants divided into four groups (26 with left hemisphere damage and aphasia- LHDa, 28 with left hemisphere damage and no aphasia- LHDna, 25 with right hemisphere damage- RHD and 25 neurologically healthy control subjects). All participants were administered the phonemic ("M" letter-based) and semantic (animals) verbal fluency tasks from the Montreal-Toulouse Language Assessment Battery (MTL-BR).
RESULTS
Patients in the LHDa group showed the worst performance (fewer words produced, fewer clusters and switches) in both types of fluency task. RHD group showed fewer switching productions when compared with controls and LHDna had fewer words productions than controls in the first 30 seconds block.
CONCLUSION
Our findings suggest that the LHDa group obtained lower scores in most measures of SVF and PVF when compared to the other groups.
Topics: Animals; Aphasia; Brain; Brain Injuries; Cluster Analysis; Humans; Neuropsychological Tests; Semantics; Verbal Behavior
PubMed: 34816946
DOI: 10.1590/2317-1782/20212020365 -
Scientific Reports Feb 2024Speech emotion recognition (SER) has gained an increased interest during the last decades as part of enriched affective computing. As a consequence, a variety of...
Speech emotion recognition (SER) has gained an increased interest during the last decades as part of enriched affective computing. As a consequence, a variety of engineering approaches have been developed addressing the challenge of the SER problem, exploiting different features, learning algorithms, and datasets. In this paper, we propose the application of the graph theory for classifying emotionally-colored speech signals. Graph theory provides tools for extracting statistical as well as structural information from any time series. We propose to use the mentioned information as a novel feature set. Furthermore, we suggest setting a unique feature-based identity for each emotion belonging to each speaker. The emotion classification is performed by a Random Forest classifier in a Leave-One-Speaker-Out Cross Validation (LOSO-CV) scheme. The proposed method is compared with two state-of-the-art approaches involving well known hand-crafted features as well as deep learning architectures operating on mel-spectrograms. Experimental results on three datasets, EMODB (German, acted) and AESDD (Greek, acted), and DEMoS (Italian, in-the-wild), reveal that our proposed method outperforms the comparative methods in these datasets. Specifically, we observe an average UAR increase of almost [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text], respectively.
Topics: Speech; Emotions; Algorithms
PubMed: 38396002
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-52989-2 -
PloS One 2021The present research examined the extent to which transmale individuals' functional brain organization resembles that of their assigned sex or gender identity....
The present research examined the extent to which transmale individuals' functional brain organization resembles that of their assigned sex or gender identity. Cisgender-female, cisgender-male, and transmale participants, who were assigned female sex but did not have a female gender identity, were compared in terms of effects that have been observed in cisgender individuals: task-domain effects, in which males perform better than females on spatial tasks and females perform better than males on verbal tasks; and hemisphere-asymmetry effects, in which males show larger differences between the left and right hemispheres than females. In addition, the present research measured participants' intelligence in order to control for potential moderating effects. Participants performed spatial (mental rotation) and verbal (lexical decision) tasks presented to each hemisphere using a divided-visual field paradigm, and then completed an intelligence assessment. In the mental-rotation task, cismale and transmale participants performed better than cisfemale participants, however this group difference was explained by intelligence scores, with higher scores predicting better performance. In the lexical-decision task, cismale and transmale participants exhibited a greater left-hemisphere advantage than cisfemales, and this difference was not affected by intelligence scores. Taken together, results do not support task-domain effects when intelligence is accounted for; however, they do demonstrate a hemisphere-asymmetry effect in the verbal domain that is moderated by gender identity and not assigned sex.
Topics: Female; Functional Laterality; Gender Identity; Humans; Male; Spatial Behavior; Transgender Persons; Verbal Behavior; Young Adult
PubMed: 34874973
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0260542 -
PLoS Computational Biology Jul 2022Temporal synchrony between facial motion and acoustic modulations is a hallmark feature of audiovisual speech. The moving face and mouth during natural speech is known...
Temporal synchrony between facial motion and acoustic modulations is a hallmark feature of audiovisual speech. The moving face and mouth during natural speech is known to be correlated with low-frequency acoustic envelope fluctuations (below 10 Hz), but the precise rates at which envelope information is synchronized with motion in different parts of the face are less clear. Here, we used regularized canonical correlation analysis (rCCA) to learn speech envelope filters whose outputs correlate with motion in different parts of the speakers face. We leveraged recent advances in video-based 3D facial landmark estimation allowing us to examine statistical envelope-face correlations across a large number of speakers (∼4000). Specifically, rCCA was used to learn modulation transfer functions (MTFs) for the speech envelope that significantly predict correlation with facial motion across different speakers. The AV analysis revealed bandpass speech envelope filters at distinct temporal scales. A first set of MTFs showed peaks around 3-4 Hz and were correlated with mouth movements. A second set of MTFs captured envelope fluctuations in the 1-2 Hz range correlated with more global face and head motion. These two distinctive timescales emerged only as a property of natural AV speech statistics across many speakers. A similar analysis of fewer speakers performing a controlled speech task highlighted only the well-known temporal modulations around 4 Hz correlated with orofacial motion. The different bandpass ranges of AV correlation align notably with the average rates at which syllables (3-4 Hz) and phrases (1-2 Hz) are produced in natural speech. Whereas periodicities at the syllable rate are evident in the envelope spectrum of the speech signal itself, slower 1-2 Hz regularities thus only become prominent when considering crossmodal signal statistics. This may indicate a motor origin of temporal regularities at the timescales of syllables and phrases in natural speech.
Topics: Acoustic Stimulation; Acoustics; Speech; Speech Perception; Time Factors
PubMed: 35852989
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010273 -
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal... May 2021Can language relatedness be established without cognate words? This question has remained unresolved since the nineteenth century, leaving language prehistory beyond...
Can language relatedness be established without cognate words? This question has remained unresolved since the nineteenth century, leaving language prehistory beyond etymologically established families largely undefined. We address this problem through a theory of universal syntactic characters. We show that not only does syntax allow for comparison across distinct traditional language families, but that the probability of deeper historical relatedness between such families can be statistically tested through a dedicated algorithm which implements the concept of 'possible languages' suggested by a formal syntactic theory. Controversial clusters such as e.g. Altaic and Uralo-Altaic are significantly supported by our test, while other possible macro-groupings, e.g. Indo-Uralic or Basque-(Northeast) Caucasian, prove to be indistinguishable from a randomly generated distribution of language distances. These results suggest that syntactic diversity, modelled through a generative biolinguistic framework, can be used to provide a proof of historical relationship between different families irrespectively of the presence of a common lexicon from which regular sound correspondences can be determined; therefore, we argue that syntax may expand the time limits imposed by the classical comparative method. This article is part of the theme issue 'Reconstructing prehistoric languages'.
Topics: Cultural Evolution; Humans; Language; Linguistics; Speech
PubMed: 33745316
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2020.0197 -
Psychiatry Research Mar 2022Linguistic abnormalities can emerge early in the course of psychotic illness. Computational tools that quantify similarity of responses in standardized language-based...
Linguistic abnormalities can emerge early in the course of psychotic illness. Computational tools that quantify similarity of responses in standardized language-based tasks such as the verbal fluency test could efficiently characterize the nature and functional correlates of these disturbances. Participants with early-stage psychosis (n=20) and demographically matched controls without a psychiatric diagnosis (n=20) performed category and letter verbal fluency. Semantic similarity was measured via predicted context co-occurrence in a large text corpus using Word2Vec. Phonetic similarity was measured via edit distance using the VFClust tool. Responses were designated as clusters (related items) or switches (transitions to less related items) using similarity-based thresholds. Results revealed that participants with early-stage psychosis compared to controls had lower fluency scores, lower cluster-related semantic similarity, and fewer switches; mean cluster size and phonetic similarity did not differ by group. Lower fluency semantic similarity was correlated with greater speech disorganization (Communication Disturbances Index), although more strongly in controls, and correlated with poorer social functioning (Global Functioning: Social), primarily in the psychosis group. Findings suggest that search for semantically related words may be impaired soon after psychosis onset. Future work is warranted to investigate the impact of language disturbances on social functioning over the course of psychotic illness.
Topics: Humans; Language; Neuropsychological Tests; Phonetics; Psychotic Disorders; Semantics; Speech; Verbal Behavior
PubMed: 35066310
DOI: 10.1016/j.psychres.2022.114404 -
Parkinsonism & Related Disorders Aug 2019Verbal fluency deficits are common in patients with Parkinson's disease. The association of these impairments with regional neuropathological changes is unexplored.
BACKGROUND
Verbal fluency deficits are common in patients with Parkinson's disease. The association of these impairments with regional neuropathological changes is unexplored.
OBJECTIVES
Determine if patients with verbal fluency impairments have greater neuropathological burden in frontal, temporal, and limbic regions and if Lewy bodies or neurofibrillary tangles were associated with verbal fluency impairments.
METHODS
Data was derived from the Arizona Study of Aging and Neurodegenerative Disorders. 47 individuals who completed phonemic and semantic verbal fluency tasks and met clinicopathological criteria for Parkinson's disease (with and without comorbid Alzheimer's disease) were included. Impairment on fluency tasks was defined by normative data, and the density of neuropathology in temporal, limbic, and frontal regions was compared between groups.
RESULTS
Individuals with semantic fluency impairments had greater total pathology (Lewy bodies + neurofibrillary tangles) in limbic structures (W = 320.0, p = .033, r = .33), while those who had phonemic fluency impairments had increased total neuropathology in frontal (W = 364.5, p = .011, r = .37), temporal (W = 356.5, p = .022, r = .34), and limbic regions (W = 357.0, p = .024, r = .34). Greater Lewy body density was found in those with verbal fluency impairments, though trends for greater neurofibrillary tangle density were noted as well.
CONCLUSIONS
Impaired phonemic fluency was associated with higher Lewy body and tangle burden in frontal, temporal, and limbic regions, while impaired semantic fluency was associated with greater limbic pathology. Though neurofibrillary tangles trended higher in several regions in those with impaired verbal fluency, higher Lewy body density in general was associated with verbal fluency deficits. Implications for research and clinical practice are discussed.
Topics: Aged; Aged, 80 and over; Brain; Female; Humans; Male; Neuropsychological Tests; Parkinson Disease; Semantics; Speech Disorders; Verbal Behavior
PubMed: 31109728
DOI: 10.1016/j.parkreldis.2019.05.014 -
Nature Communications Sep 2023Imagine being in a crowded room with a cacophony of speakers and having the ability to focus on or remove speech from a specific 2D region. This would require...
Imagine being in a crowded room with a cacophony of speakers and having the ability to focus on or remove speech from a specific 2D region. This would require understanding and manipulating an acoustic scene, isolating each speaker, and associating a 2D spatial context with each constituent speech. However, separating speech from a large number of concurrent speakers in a room into individual streams and identifying their precise 2D locations is challenging, even for the human brain. Here, we present the first acoustic swarm that demonstrates cooperative navigation with centimeter-resolution using sound, eliminating the need for cameras or external infrastructure. Our acoustic swarm forms a self-distributing wireless microphone array, which, along with our attention-based neural network framework, lets us separate and localize concurrent human speakers in the 2D space, enabling speech zones. Our evaluations showed that the acoustic swarm could localize and separate 3-5 concurrent speech sources in real-world unseen reverberant environments with median and 90-percentile 2D errors of 15 cm and 50 cm, respectively. Our system enables applications like mute zones (parts of the room where sounds are muted), active zones (regions where sounds are captured), multi-conversation separation and location-aware interaction.
Topics: Humans; Speech; Acoustics; Sound; Communication; Awareness
PubMed: 37735445
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-40869-8