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The purpose of this investigation was to evaluate the efficacy of expansion points (EXP) intervention with a modified criterion for preschool children with speech sound disorders (SSD). Three preschool-aged children were enrolled in a single-subject multiple baseline intervention study. Intervention took place over 16 sessions. Pre- and post-intervention data are provided. Three outcome measures (generalization to probe words and gains in percent consonants correct, PCC, in words and in conversation) were evaluated to measure the effectiveness of the EXP intervention. All three of the participants demonstrated gains by the end of the intervention phase when measuring PCC in single words. Two of the three participants demonstrated gains in PCC in conversational speech. Progress on individual phonemes was variable across participants. Utilizing the EXP approach, two of the three children showed gains in all three outcome measures. One child showed variable performance in one outcome measure, improvement in one, and a decrease in one. Findings suggest that EXP should be further explored to evaluate intervention efficacy.

This article introduces a novel approach to voice therapy called conversation training therapy (CTT). CTT is the first voice therapy approach to remove the therapeutic hierarchy common in most treatment programs. Rather, CTT uses patient-driven conversation as the sole stimuli in therapy to increase perceptual awareness of voice production in conversational speech. The genesis as to why CTT was developed, as well as the conceptual, theoretical, and component parts of CTT, will be explained. In addition, this article will offer examples of the language of therapy, as it applies to CTT and how to trouble-shoot if problems arise. Medical documentation relevant to CTT will also be outlined. Last, results from a recent efficacy study on CTT will be reported.

Background Clear speech is an effective communication strategy to improve speech intelligibility. While clear speech in several languages has been shown to significantly benefit intelligibility among listeners with differential hearing sensitivities and across environments of different noise levels, whether these results apply to Korean clear speech is unclear on account of the language's unique acoustic and linguistic characteristics. Purpose This study aimed to measure the intelligibility benefits of Korean clear speech relative to those of conversational speech among listeners with normal hearing and hearing loss. Research Design We used a mixed-model design that included both within-subject (effects of speaking style and listening condition) and between-subject (hearing status) elements. Data Collection and Analysis We compared the rationalized arcsine unit scores, which were transformed from the number of keywords recognized and repeated, between clear and conversational speech in groups with different hearing sensitivities across five listening conditions (quiet and 10, 5, 0, and –5 dB signal-to-noise ratio) using a mixed model analysis. Results The intelligibility scores of Korean clear speech were significantly higher than those of conversational speech under most listening conditions in all groups; the former yielded increases of 6 to 32 rationalized arcsine units in intelligibility. Conclusion The present study provides information on the actual benefits of Korean clear speech for listeners with varying hearing sensitivities. Audiologists or hearing professionals may use this information to establish communication strategies for Korean patients with hearing loss.

Objective:The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness, satisfaction, and acceptance of a low-cost Lombard-response (LR) device in a group of individuals with Parkinson’s disease (IWPD) and their communication partners (CPs).Method:Sixteen IWPD and hypophonia and their CPs participated in the study. The IWPD wore a LR device that included a small MP3 player (Sony Walkman) and headphones playing a multi-talker noise audio file at 80 dB during lab-based speech tasks and during their daily conversational speech over a 2-week device trial period. Outcome measures included average conversational speech intensity and scores on a questionnaire related to speech impairment, communication effectiveness, and device satisfaction.Results:Conversational speech intensity of the IWPD is increased by 7 to 10 dB with the LR device. Following a 2-week trial period, eight of the IWPD (50%) gave the LR device moderate-to-high satisfaction and effectiveness ratings and decided to purchase the device for long-term daily use. At the 4-month follow-up, none of the IWPDs were still using the LR device. Device rejection was related to discomfort (loudness), headaches, interference with cognition, and difficulty controlling device.Conclusion:Short-term acceptance and satisfaction with the LR device was moderate, but long-term acceptance, beyond 4 months, was absent. Future studies are required to determine if other types of low-cost LR devices can be developed that improve long-term efficacy and device acceptance in IWPD and hypophonia.

The present study examined the effect of intelligibility-enhancing clear speech on listeners' recall. Native (n = 57) and non-native (n = 31) English listeners heard meaningful sentences produced in clear and conversational speech, and then completed a cued-recall task. Results showed that listeners recalled more words from clearly produced sentences. Sentence-level analysis revealed that listening to clear speech increased the odds of recalling whole sentences and decreased the odds of erroneous and omitted responses. This study showed that the clear speech benefit extends beyond word- and sentence-level recognition memory to include deeper linguistic encoding at the level of syntactic and semantic information.

This study aims to analyze the modality development of beginners of Korean and discuss the development order of the modality. The modality is a grammatical category that indicates speaker’s subjective judgment and attitude toward the proposition that has highly semantic and pragmatic usefulness in communication. In this study free conversational speech of 8 beginners of Korean were collected regularly for 5 months and examined the frequency of use and the number of speakers of modal grammar. As a results, among the various grammatical items, ‘-고 싶다’, ‘-(으)ㄹ 것이다’(의향), ‘-(으)ㄹ 수 있다/없다’, ‘-아/어 보다’, ‘-아야/어야 되다/하다’ were uttered relatively frequently, in the early periods in about 3months after the beginning of Korean learning, and about six months after the beginning of the Korean learning, -는/(으)ㄴ/(으)ㄹ 것 같다’, ‘-(으)ㄹ 것이다’(추측), ‘-아/어 주다’ were uttered by almost all learners. This modality development was not completely consistent with the order of learning. This study is meaningful in that it provides important information needed to determine the order of modality. (Wonkwang Digital University)

Purpose Talkers typically use a slow speaking rate when producing clear speech, a speaking style that has been widely shown to improve intelligibility over conversational speech in difficult communication environments. With training, however, talkers can learn to produce a form of clear speech at normal speaking rates that provides young listeners with normal hearing much of the same intelligibility benefit. The purpose of this study was to determine if older listeners with normal hearing can also obtain an intelligibility benefit from clear speech at normal rates. Method Eight older listeners (55–68 years of age) with normal hearing were presented with nonsense sentences from 4 talkers in a background of speech-shaped noise (signal-to-noise ratio = 0 dB). Intelligibility (percent correct key words) was evaluated for conversational and clear speech produced at 2 speaking rates (normal and slow), for a total of 4 conditions: conv/normal, conv/slow, clear/normal, and clear/slow. Results As expected, the clear/slow speaking condition provided a large and robust intelligibility advantage (23 points) over conv/normal speech. The conv/slow condition provided almost as much benefit on average (21 points) but was highly variable across talkers. Notably, the clear/normal speaking condition provided the same size intelligibility advantage (14 points), previously reported for young listeners with normal hearing ( Krause & Braida, 2002 ), thus extending the benefit of clear speech at normal speaking rates to older normal-hearing listeners. Conclusions Applications based on clear/normal speech (e.g., signal processing approaches for hearing aids) have the potential to provide comparable intelligibility improvements to older and younger listeners alike.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Clear speech is an effective communication strategy used in difficult listening situations that draws on techniques such as accurate articulation, a slow speech rate, and the inclusion of pauses. Although too slow speech and improperly amplified spectral information can deteriorate overall speech intelligibility, certain amplitude of increments of the mid-frequency bands (1 to 3 dB) and around 50% slower speech rates of clear speech, when compared to those in conversational speech, were reported as factors that can improve speech intelligibility positively. The purpose of this study was to identify whether amplitude increments of mid-frequency areas and slower speech rates were evident in Korean clear speech as they were in English clear speech. SUBJECTS AND METHODS To compare the acoustic characteristics of the two methods of speech production, the voices of 60 participants were recorded during conversational speech and then again during clear speech using a standardized sentence material. RESULTS The speech rate and longterm average speech spectrum (LTASS) were analyzed and compared. Speech rates for clear speech were slower than those for conversational speech. Increased amplitudes in the mid-frequency bands were evident for the LTASS of clear speech. CONCLUSIONS The observed differences in the acoustic characteristics between the two types of speech production suggest that Korean clear speech can be an effective communication strategy to improve speech intelligibility.

In spoken language, reductions of word forms occur regularly and need to be accommodated by the listener. Intriguingly, this accommodation is usually achieved without any apparent effort. The neural bases of this cognitive skill are not yet fully understood. We here presented participants with reduced words that were either preceded by a related or an unrelated visual prime and compared electric brain responses to reduced words with those to their full counterparts. In time-domain, we found a positivity between 400 and 600 ms differing between reduced and full forms. A later positivity distinguished primed and unprimed words and was modulated by reduction. In frequency-domain, alpha suppression was stronger for reduced than for full words. The time- and frequency-domain reduction effects converge towards the view that reduced words draw on attention and memory mechanisms. Our data demonstrate the importance of interactive processing of bottom-up and top-down information for the comprehension of reduced words.

Listeners often have the intuition that the speech of broadcast news reporters somehow ‘sounds different’; previous literature supports this observation and has described some distinctive aspects of newscaster register. This article presents two studies further describing the characteristic properties and functions of American English newscaster speech, focusing specifically on prosody. In the first, we investigate the production of newscaster speech. We describe the measurable differences in pitch, speed, intensity, and melodic features between newscaster and conversational speech, and connect those traits to perceptions of authority, credibility, charisma, and related characteristics. In the second, we investigate the perception of newscaster speech. Our experiments demonstrate that listeners can distinguish newscaster from conversational speech given only prosodic information, and that they use a subset of the newscasters’ distinguishing features to do so. (News, prosody, discourse registers, speech perception, credibility, authority)*

Bipolar disorder (BD) and borderline personality disorder (BPD) are two chronic mental health conditions that clinicians find challenging to distinguish based on clinical interviews, due to their overlapping symptoms. In this work, we investigate the automatic detection of these two conditions by modelling both verbal and non-verbal cues in a set of interviews. We propose a new approach of modelling short-term features with visibility-signature transform, and compare it with widely used high-level statistical functions. We demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed signature-based model. Furthermore, we show the role of different sets of features in characterising BD and BPD.

The current study aimed to explore the frequency and types of stuttering in the oral reading and conversational samples of Arabic adults who stutter (AWS). Twelve Kuwaiti-Arabic AWS (mean age: 27.3 years) participated in the study. Each participant's stuttering was analyzed in two speaking contexts -oral reading of a standard Arabic passage and spontaneous conversational speech. The results showed that among a majority of the participants the amount of stuttering in conversation was significantly lower than that of reading. However, no significant differences were found in disfluency types within and between samples. The higher occurrence of stuttering in reading may be related to the diglossic nature of Arabic. The linguistic and rhythmic distinctions between Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Kuwaiti dialectal Arabic are explored to further explain the findings.

Background: Increasing efforts have focused on the establishment of novel biomarkers for the early detection of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and prediction of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI)-to-AD conversion. Behavioral changes over the course of healthy ageing, at disease onset and during disease progression, have been recently put forward as promising markers for the detection of MCI and AD. The present study examines whether the temporal characteristics of speech in a collaborative referencing task are associated with cognitive function and the volumes of brain regions involved in speech production and known to be reduced in MCI and AD pathology. We then explore the discriminative ability of the temporal speech measures for the classification of MCI and AD.Method: Individuals with MCI, mild-to-moderate AD and healthy controls (HCs) underwent a structural MRI scan and a battery of neuropsychological tests. They also engaged in a collaborative referencing task with a caregiver. The associations between the conversational speech timing features, cognitive function (domain-specific) and regional brain volumes were examined by means of linear mixed-effect modeling. Genetic programming was used to explore the discriminative ability of the conversational speech features.Results: MCI and mild-to-moderate AD are characterized by a general slowness of speech, attributed to slower speech rate and slower turn-taking in conversational settings. The speech characteristics appear to be reflective of episodic, lexico-semantic, executive functioning and visuospatial deficits and underlying volume reductions in frontal, temporal and cerebellar areas.Conclusion: The implementation of conversational speech timing-based technologies in clinical and community settings may provide additional markers for the early detection of cognitive deficits and structural changes associated with MCI and AD.

The main goal of the present study was to assess the role of the fundamental frequency (F0) range on the clear-speech benefit. Conversational- and clear-speech sentences were recorded for four male speakers: the speakers' clear-speech productions had slower speaking rates, wider F0 range, more high-frequency energy, expanded vowel space, and higher vocal intensity level relative to their conversational-speech productions. To examine if F0 range contributes to the clear-speech benefit, the F0 range of clear-speech sentences was compressed to match that of the speakers' conversational-speech sentences. Fifteen listeners were presented with conversational, clear, and F0-compressed sentences in sustained speech-shaped noise. All talkers elicited substantial intelligibility benefits (keyword percent correct) from clear and F0-compressed speech when compared with conversational speech. There was no significant difference in performance between clear and F0-compressed speech. These results leave open the possibility that a clear-speech benefit could be a result of its F0 contours rather than its wide F0 range. Intelligibility predictions based on acoustic characteristics of clear speech, specifically high-frequency emphasis and pauses, accounted for either small or negligible amounts of the clear-speech benefit.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language processing (NLP) are expected to benefit from an effective, simple, and reliable method to automatically parse conversational speech. The ability to parse conversational speech depends crucially on the ability to identify boundaries between prosodic phrases. This is done naturally by the human ear, yet has proved surprisingly difficult to achieve reliably and simply in an automatic manner. Efforts to date have focused on detecting phrase boundaries using a variety of linguistic and acoustic cues. We propose a method which does not require model training and utilizes two prosodic cues that are based on ASR output. Boundaries are identified using discontinuities in speech rate (pre-boundary lengthening and phrase-initial acceleration) and silent pauses. The resulting phrases preserve syntactic validity, exhibit pitch reset, and compare well with manual tagging of prosodic boundaries. Collectively, our findings support the notion of prosodic phrases that represent coherent patterns across textual and acoustic parameters.

Digital screening and monitoring applications can aid providers in the management of behavioral health conditions. We explore deep language models for detecting depression, anxiety, and their comorbidity using input from conversational speech. Speech data comprise 16k spoken interactions labeled for both depression and anxiety. We find that results for binary classification range from 0.86 to 0.79 AUC, depending on condition and comorbidity. Best performance occurs for comorbid cases. We show that this result is not attributable to data skew. Finally, we find evidence suggesting that underlying word sequence cues may be more salient for depression than for anxiety.

PurposePersons with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may demonstrate abnormal prosodic patterns in conversational speech, which can negatively affect social interactions. The purpose of this systematic review was to identify interventions measuring the improvement of expressive speech prosody in persons with ASD in order to support clinician's evidence-based decision making.MethodWe used 13 electronic databases to search for relevant articles using terms related to autism, intervention, and speech prosody. The databases identified a total of nine articles for the title, abstract, and full-text reviews. Five more articles were included after performing descendant and reference searches. One peer-reviewed article was excluded due to insufficient data received from the authors. We coded the resulting 13 articles for report, setting, intervention, outcome, and results characteristics and methodological quality.ResultsResults showed that interventions specifically targeting speech prosody using established and emerging evidence-based practices across more than 1 treatment day resulted in moderate to large improvements in speech prosody in persons with ASD. Interventions that indirectly targeted prosody or were very short resulted in small or nonsignificant effects.DiscussionThe results of this literature review suggest that interventions that directly target speech prosody using established evidence-based practices for ASD may be most effective for increasing typical prosodic patterns during speech for persons with ASD. Further research is needed to establish which interventions are most effective for each age range and context.Supplemental Materialhttps://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12735926

The ability to detect talker changes when listening to conversational speech is fundamental to perception and understanding of multi-talker speech. In this paper, we propose an experimental paradigm to provide insights on the impact of language familiarity on talker change detection. Two multi-talker speech stimulus sets, one in a language familiar to the listeners (English) and the other unfamiliar (Chinese), are created. A listening test is performed in which listeners indicate the number of talkers in the presented stimuli. Analysis of human performance shows statistically significant results for: (a) lower miss (and a higher false alarm) rate in familiar versus unfamiliar language, and (b) longer response time in familiar versus unfamiliar language. These results signify a link between perception of talker attributes and language proficiency. Subsequently, a machine system is designed to perform the same task. The system makes use of the current state-of-the-art diarization approach with x-vector embeddings. A performance comparison on the same stimulus set indicates that the machine system falls short of human performance by a huge margin, for both languages.

Previous studies found that older speakers generally speak slower than younger speakers and further showed that listeners make use of this age-rate correlation in estimating speakers’ age. This study examines how speakers’ speech rates affect the perception of speaker age in conversational speech as well as how listeners’ own age affects age perception. After hearing a short dialogue in which two speakers’ speech rates were varied orthogonally, listeners estimated the age of each speaker. The results showed that listeners judged slower voices as older than faster voices and this effect was more pronounced for older speakers. We found no effect of interlocutors’ speech rate, indicating that the listeners were able to reliably separate the speech rate information of the two speakers in the dialogue. We also found a significant effect of listeners’ own age; other things being equal, younger listeners judged the speakers to be younger than older listeners.

Objectives This study investigates the hypothesis that hearing aid amplification reduces effort within conversation for both hearing aid wearers and their communication partners. Levels of effort, in the form of speech production modifications, required to maintain successful spoken communication in a range of acoustic environments are compared to earlier reported results measured in unaided conversation conditions. Design Fifteen young adult normal-hearing participants and 15 older adult hearing-impaired participants were tested in pairs. Each pair consisted of one young normal-hearing participant and one older hearing-impaired participant. Hearing-impaired participants received directional hearing aid amplification, according to their audiogram, via a master hearing aid with gain provided according to the NAL-NL2 fitting formula. Pairs of participants were required to take part in naturalistic conversations through the use of a referential communication task. Each pair took part in five conversations, each of 5-min duration. During each conversation, participants were exposed to one of five different realistic acoustic environments presented through highly open headphones. The ordering of acoustic environments across experimental blocks was pseudorandomized. Resulting recordings of conversational speech were analyzed to determine the magnitude of speech modifications, in terms of vocal level and spectrum, produced by normal-hearing talkers as a function of both acoustic environment and the degree of high-frequency average hearing impairment of their conversation partner. Results The magnitude of spectral modifications of speech produced by normal-hearing talkers during conversations with aided hearing-impaired interlocutors was smaller than the speech modifications observed during conversations between the same pairs of participants in the absence of hearing aid amplification. Conclusions The provision of hearing aid amplification reduces the effort required to maintain communication in adverse conditions. This reduction in effort provides benefit to hearing-impaired individuals and also to the conversation partners of hearing-impaired individuals. By considering the impact of amplification on both sides of dyadic conversations, this approach contributes to an increased understanding of the likely impact of hearing impairment on everyday communication.

The PlantBot is a home device that shows iconographic or simple lights to depict actions that it requests a young person (its user) to do as part of Behavioral Activation therapy. In this initial proto- type, a separate conversational speech agent (i.e., Amazon Alexa) is wizarded to act as a second system the user can interact with.

Purpose The purpose of this study was to investigate whether preschool-age children who stutter (CWS) were more likely to exhibit a temperamental trait of behavioral inhibition (BI), a correlate of shyness, than children who do not stutter (CWNS) and whether this temperamental trait affected preschool-age children's speech fluency and language complexity during a conversation with an unfamiliar adult. Method Sixty-eight preschool-age children (31 CWS, 37 CWNS) participated. The degree of BI was assessed by measuring the latency to their sixth spontaneous comment and the number of all spontaneous comments during a conversation with an unfamiliar examiner (following Kagan et al.'s [1987] methodology). Parent report of shyness from the Children's Behavior Questionnaire served as an indirect measure of BI. Children's language complexity was assessed by measuring their mean length of utterance and the number of words spoken. For CWS, the frequency of stuttering and the negative impact of stuttering were also assessed. Results First, we found no between-group differences in the degree of BI across the behavioral observation measures. However, CWS were rated shyer by parents than CWNS. Second, for CWS only, higher BI was associated with less complex utterances and fewer words spoken. Third, for CWS, higher BI was associated with fewer stuttered disfluencies produced. Conclusions This study provides empirical evidence that BI to the unfamiliar may have salience for childhood stuttering as it affected the quantity and quality of language spoken with an unfamiliar adult. Clinical implications of high BI for the assessment and treatment of preschool-age stuttering are discussed.

Purpose The aim of this study was to investigate the typical disfluency rates at 30 months old in a large group of simultaneous bilingual children and also investigate the relationships between disfluency rates and linguistic complexity (mean length of utterance in words [MLU-W]), vocabulary diversity (VocD), and speaking rate (utterances per unit time). Method Fifty-three typically developing children who had been exposed to Spanish and English from birth participated in this descriptive study. The average percent input at home was 46% in English and 54% in Spanish. Outside the home, the children averaged 9 hr of exposure per week in each language. Spontaneous speech samples in both languages were obtained during play sessions between the children and a parent. Results Nonparametric tests revealed a significant difference in typical disfluency rates across languages, with more children being disfluent in English and with a larger range of disfluency rates in English. The effect size for this difference was small. The children had significantly higher MLU-W in English; there were no differences in VocD or speaking rate between the 2 languages. Typical disfluency rate in Spanish was not significantly correlated with MLU-W, VocD, or speaking rate. Typical disfluency rates in English were correlated with MLU-W and VocD, but not with speaking rate. Conclusion This article described the typical disfluency rates of a large group of simultaneous Spanish–English bilingual children at 30 months of age. The typical disfluency rates reported here are lower than those reported in the literature for monolingual children of similar ages. Clinical implications of these findings are addressed.

Formulaic language forms about one-fourth of everyday talk. Formulaic (fixed expressions) and novel (grammatical language) differ in important characteristics. The features of idioms, slang, expletives, proverbs, aphorisms, conversational speech formulas, and other fixed expressions include ranges of length, flexible cohesion, memory storage, nonliteral and situation meaning, and affective content. Neurolinguistic observations in persons with focal brain damage or progressive neurological disease suggest that producing formulaic expressions can be achieved by interactions between the right hemisphere and subcortical structures. The known functional characteristics of these structures form a compatible substrate for production of formulaic expressions. Functional imaging using a performance-based analysis supported a right hemisphere involvement in producing conversational speech formulas, while indicating that the pause fillers, uh and um, engage the left hemisphere and function like lexical items. Together these findings support a dual-process model of language, whereby formulaic and grammatical language are modulated by different cerebral structures.

This paper examines potential prosodic cues for level of formality in Japanese conversational speech using speech data gathered via one-on-one interviews. Based on previous work on the phonetic properties of formality in Japanese (Ofuka et al. 2000, Ito 2002), further studies of Korean (Winter & Grawunder 2012) and Catalan Spanish (Hübscher, Borràs-Comes & Prieto 2017), and on a lab-based pilot study, the study examined properties off0, intensity, pause frequency, and articulation rate via mixed effects regression models and a functional data analysis (Grabe, Kochanski & Coleman 2007, Ramsay 2006). Analysis of the speech data shows significant relationships between a number of prosodic variables and level of formality, and suggests that some of these relationships may apply cross-linguistically.

The speech signal is rife with variations in phonetic ambiguity. For instance, when talkers speak in a conversational register, they demonstrate less articulatory precision, leading to greater potential for confusability at the phonetic level compared with a clear speech register. Current psycholinguistic models assume that ambiguous speech sounds activate more than one phonological category and that competition at prelexical levels cascades to lexical levels of processing. Imaging studies have shown that the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) is modulated by phonetic competition between simultaneously activated categories, with increases in activation for more ambiguous tokens. Yet, these studies have often used artificially manipulated speech and/or metalinguistic tasks, which arguably may recruit neural regions that are not critical for natural speech recognition. Indeed, a prominent model of speech processing, the dual-stream model, posits that the LIFG is not involved in prelexical processing in receptive language processing. In the current study, we exploited natural variation in phonetic competition in the speech signal to investigate the neural systems sensitive to phonetic competition as listeners engage in a receptive language task. Participants heard nonsense sentences spoken in either a clear or conversational register as neural activity was monitored using fMRI. Conversational sentences contained greater phonetic competition, as estimated by measures of vowel confusability, and these sentences also elicited greater activation in a region in the LIFG. Sentence-level phonetic competition metrics uniquely correlated with LIFG activity as well. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that the LIFG responds to competition at multiple levels of language processing and that recruitment of this region does not require an explicit phonological judgment.

This paper describes a corpus of task-based conversational speech produced by English and Spanish native talkers speaking English and Spanish as both a first and a second language. For cross-language comparability, speech material was elicited using a picture-based task common to each native language group. The bi-directionality of the corpus, stemming from the use of the same speakers and the same language pairing, makes it possible to separate native language factors from the influence of speaking in a first or second language. The potential for studying first language influences and non-native speech using the corpus is illustrated by means of a series of explorations of acoustic, segmental, suprasegmental, and conversational phenomena. These analyses demonstrate the breadth of factors that are amenable to investigation in a conversational corpus and reveal different types of interactions between the first language, the second language, and non-nativeness.

The present study was designed to teach conversational speech using text-message prompts to children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in home play settings with siblings and peers. A multiple baseline design across children was used. Children learned conversational speech through the text-message prompts, and the behavior generalized across peers and settings. Maintenance of treatment gains was seen at 1-month follow-up probes. Social validity measures indicated that parents of typically developing children viewed the participants' conversational speech as much improved after the intervention. Results are discussed in terms of the efficacy of text-message prompts as a promising way to improve conversational speech for children with ASD.

When investigating how listeners evaluate the social meaning of variability in speech, researchers using the Matched Guise Technique (MGT) must decide whether to use read speech or conversational speech stimuli. An MGT experiment comparing social evaluation of /ɪŋ/ ∼ /ɪn/ variation in read and conversational speech styles found no evidence that the social evaluation of this variation differed across frame utterance styles. This suggests that use of read speech stimuli can be an appropriate methodological choice in MGT research.

This study investigates the psycholinguistic process underlying triggered codeswitching – codeswitching facilitated by the occurrence of cognates – within the context of conversational dynamics. It confirms that, in natural bilingual speech, lexical selection of cognates can facilitate codeswitching by enhancing the activation of the non-selected language. Analyses of a large-scale corpus of Welsh–English conversational speech showed that 1) producing cognates facilitated codeswitching, 2) speakers who generally produced more cognates generally codeswitched more, even in clauses that did not contain cognates, 3) larger numbers of cognates in a clause increased the likelihood of codeswitching, 4) codeswitching temporarily remained facilitated after the production of cognates, and 5) hearing rather than producing cognates did not facilitate codeswitching. The findings confirm the validity of the proposed cognitive account of triggered codeswitching, and clarify the relation between the lexical activation of cognates and consecutive language choice, in accord with current insights in lexical processing.

O fenótipo ampliado do autismo (FAA) tem sido definido como traços subclínicos que configuram a expressão fenotípica de uma suscetibilidade genética para o desenvolvimento do Transtorno do Espectro Autista (TEA). A literatura tem apontado para a relação entre habilidades comunicativo-pragmáticas e autismo. No entanto, há controvérsia quanto à possibilidade dessas habilidades constituírem uma especificidade do FAA. Ainda, pesquisas com parentes de primeiro grau de pessoas com TEA ainda não obtiveram sucesso em estabelecer marcadores definitivos. Assim, este estudo comparou o desempenho de pais e mães de crianças com TEA (n=26) e sem TEA (n=26) em tarefas de habilidades comunicativo-pragmáticas e indicadores de FAA. Foram aplicados o Broader Autism Phenotype Questionnaire (BAPQ) e subtestes da Bateria Montreal de Avaliação da Comunicação (Bateria mac), além da Escala de Inteligência Wechsler Abreviada (WASI). Os resultados indicaram que os pais de crianças com TEA apresentaram maior dificuldade em linguagem pragmática do BAPQ, ainda que não tenham fechado critério para FAA, e nas habilidades comunicativo-pragmáticas de discurso conversacional, prosódia emocional, interpretação de metáforas e de atos de fala indiretos. Foi também verificado que o grupo clínico apresentou menor escore em qi verbal em relação ao grupo comparativo. Conclui-se que maiores dificuldades em habilidades cognitivo-pragmáticas podem ser um aspecto central e provavelmente específico do FAA em familiares de crianças com TEA, assim como dificuldades em aspectos estruturais da linguagem, como inteligência verbal. Estes resultados têm implicações para a compreensão da possível influência de fatores sociocognitivos familiares na gênese do autismo. The broader autism phenotype (BAP) has been defined as subclinical traits that configure the phenotypic expression of genetic susceptibility to the development of Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The literature has pointed to the relationship between communicative-pragmatic skills and autism. However, there is controversy as to whether these skills constitute a specific feature of the BAP. Still, research with first-degree relatives of people with ASD has not yet been successful in establishing definitive markers. Thus, this study compared the performance of parents of children with (n=26) and without ASD (n=26) in communicative-pragmatic skills tasks and BAP indicators. The Broader Autism Phenotype Questionnaire (BAPQ) and subtests of the Montreal Communication Evaluation Battery (mac Battery), and the Wechsler Abbreviated Intelligence Scale (WASI) were applied. The results indicated that parents of children with ASD had greater difficulty in the pragmatic language of the BAPQ, although they did not meet the criteria for BAP and in communicative-pragmatic skills of conversational speech, emotional prosody, metaphor interpretation, and indirect speech acts. The clinical group also presented a lower verbal iq score compared to the nonclinical group. It is concluded that greater difficulties in cognitive-pragmatic skills may be a central and probably specific aspect of the BAP in family members of children with ASD, as well as difficulties in structural aspects of language, such as verbal intelligence. These results have implications for understanding the possible influence of familiar socio-cognitive factors on the genesis of autism. El fenotipo ampliado del autismo (FAA) se ha definido como trazos subclínicos que configuran la expresión fenotípica de una susceptibilidad genética para el desarrollo del Trastorno del Espectro Autista (TEA). La literatura ha apuntado hacia la relación entre habilidades comunicativo-pragmáticas y autismo. Sin embargo, hay controversia en cuanto a la posibilidad de que esas habilidades constituyan una especificidad del FAA. Así mismo, investigaciones con parientes de primer grado de personas con TEA han fallado en establecer marcadores definitivos. Este estudio comparó el desempeño de padres y madres de niños con TEA (n=26) y sin TEA (n=26) en tareas de habilidades comunicativo-pragmáticas e indicadores de FAA. Fueron aplicados el Broader Autism Phenotype Questionnaire (BAPQ) y subpruebas de la Batería Montreal de evaluación de la Comunicación (Batería MAC), además de la Escala de Inteligencia Wechsler Abreviada (WASI). Los resultados indicaron que los padres de niños con TEA presentaron mayor dificultad en lenguaje pragmático del BAPQ, aunque no hayan cumplido el criterio para FAA, y en las habilidades comunicativo-pragmáticas de discurso conversacional, prosodia emocional, interpretación de metáforas y de actos de habla indirectos. También se verificó que el grupo clínico presentó menor puntaje en ci verbal en relación con el grupo comparativo. Se concluyó que mayores dificultades en habilidades cognitivo-pragmáticas pueden ser un aspecto central y probablemente específico del FAA en familiares de niños con TEA, así como dificultades en aspectos estructurales del lenguaje, como inteligencia verbal. Estos resultados tienen implicaciones para comprender la posible influencia de factores sociocognitivos familiares en la génesis del autismo.

BackgroundSimulated learning environments are increasingly common in interprofessional education (IPE). While reflection is key to simulated learning, little is known about the nature of these conversations during simulation. The aim of this exploratory paper was to quantify communicative features of conversations during interprofessional simulation scenarios between dietetics students, speech-language therapy students and their educators.MethodsConversations between students and educators during the pauses between simulated scenario phases were recorded and transcribed. Student and educator utterances were quantitatively analysed for speech acts, question types and elements of IPE (clinical reasoning, roles and responsibilities, client and family centred care, interprofessional collaboration, clinical procedural tasks).ResultsAcross 1340 utterances from six scenarios, analyses of conversational speech acts and question types highlighted similar patterns of usage between two educators despite different clinical scenarios and professional backgrounds. Educators used a minimally higher proportion of open compared with closed questions, and higher-level problem-solving questions predominated in comparison to simple factual questioning. Educators used more requests for action and attention and students displayed more performative and responsive acts (pConclusionsConversations during pauses in immersive simulated scenarios between educators and students enable rich IPE opportunities and higher-level problem-solving. Educators encouraged students to problem solve within and across disciplines with open questions. Educators provided few factual responses to questions themselves rather diverting questions back to the students. This approach to the analysis of conversation can support educators to evaluate their own communication during interprofessional simulations.

How do people hear laughter in expressive, unprompted speechƒ What is the range of expressivity and function of laughter in this speech, and how can laughter inform the recognition of higher-level expressive dimensions in a corpusƒ This paper presents a scalable method for collecting natural human description of laughter, transforming the description to a vector of quantifiable laughter dimensions, and deriving baseline classifiers for the different dimensions of expressive laughter. Then, it explores the impact of leveraging nuances of laughter in the recognition of higher-level, general expressive dimensions, discovered in the same way, such as genuine happiness, sarcasm, nervous reflection, and more. The performance of the low-level laughter classifiers is presented, along with the performance of the high-level laughter-aware and laughter-unaware classifiers.

Precise timing is crucial for many behaviors ranging from street crossing, conversational speech, to athletic performance. The precision of motor timing has been suggested to result from the strength of phase-amplitude coupling (PAC) between the phase of alpha oscillations (α, 8-12 Hz) and the power of beta activity (β, 14-30 Hz), herein referred to as α-β PAC. The amplitude of β oscillations has been proposed to code for temporally relevant information, and the locking of β power to the phase of α oscillations to maintain timing precision. Motor timing precision has at least two sources of variability: variability of timekeeping mechanism and variability of motor control. There is ambiguity to with of these two factors α-β PAC could be ascribed to. Whether α-β PAC indexes precision of internal timekeeping mechanisms like a stopwatch, or α-β PAC indexes motor control precision is unclear. To disentangle these two hypotheses, we tested how oscillatory coupling at different stages of time reproduction related to temporal precision. Human participants perceived, and subsequently reproduced, a time interval while magnetoencephalography was recorded. The data show a robust α-β PAC during both the encoding and the reproduction of a temporal interval, a pattern which could not be predicted for by the motor control account. Specifically, we found that timing precision resulted from the tradeoff between the strength of α-β PAC during the encoding and during the reproduction of intervals. We interpret these results as supporting evidence for the hypothesis that α-β PAC codes for precision of temporal representations in the human brain.Highlights-Encoding and reproducing temporal intervals implicate α-β PAC.-α-β PAC does not represent solely motor control.-α-β PAC maintains the precision of temporal representations.

Objective: This is the first study to investigate the behavioral nature (topography) of stuttering in Cantonese. Cantonese, a Sino-Tibetan language, is both tonal and syllable-timed. Previous studies of stuttering topography have mainly been in Western languages, which are mainly stress-timed. Methods: Conversational speech samples were collected from 24 native Cantonese-speaking adults who stuttered. Six consecutive stuttering moments from each participant were analyzed using the Lidcombe behavioral data language (LBDL). A complexity analysis based on the LBDL was developed to indicate the proportion of multiple-behavior stuttering moments for each participant. Results: There was no significant difference in the frequency of the 7 LBDL behaviors. Almost half the stuttering moments across participants were reported as complex, containing more than 1 stuttering behavior, and stuttering complexity correlated significantly with stuttering severity. Conclusions: These preliminary findings require replication because of their important theoretical and clinical implications. Differences in topography across languages have the potential to contribute to our understanding of the nature of stuttering. Clinically, the recognition of such differences may assist practitioners in identifying stuttering, for example when screening for early stuttering. The LBDL complexity score developed in this study has the potential to be used in other languages.

Background A considerable amount of research has identified inhibition differences, including slower inhibition of manual responses, in people who stutter. Recent investigations have failed to link slowed motor inhibition with overt stuttering severity. This study investigated the potential relationship between slowed manual response inhibition and the negative impact of stuttering upon individual lives of adults who stutter (AWS). Methods Thirty-four adults (AWS, n = 17; AWNS, n = 17) matched by nonverbal IQ completed a manual stop-signal task and provided a conversational speech sample. Motor inhibition latency for AWS and AWNS were compared. For AWS, motor inhibition latency was compared to the four subsections of the Overall Assessment of the Speaker’s Experience with Stuttering (OASES; Yaruss & Quesal, 2006; General Information, Reactions to Stuttering, Communication in Daily Situations, Quality of Life). Results Similar to previous studies, AWS were significantly slower to inhibit inaccurate manual responses than AWNS. Quality of Life subtest of the OASES was found to significantly predict inhibition latency. Conclusion These data replicate findings that indicate that AWS exhibit slower manual inhibition latency, and suggest that these inhibition differences may be associated with an individual’s negative experience with stuttering rather than stuttering severity.

Although the way tones are acquired by second or foreign language learners has attracted some scholarly attention, detailed knowledge of the factors that promote efficient learning is lacking. In this article, we look at the effect of visual cues (comparing audio-only with audio-visual presentations) and speaking style (comparing a natural speaking style with a teaching speaking style) on the perception of Mandarin tones by non-native listeners, looking both at the relative strength of these two factors and their possible interactions. Both the accuracy and reaction time of the listeners were measured in a task of tone identification. Results showed that participants in the audio-visual condition distinguished tones more accurately than participants in the audio-only condition. Interestingly, this varied as a function of speaking style, but only for stimuli from specific speakers. Additionally, some tones (notably tone 3) were recognized more quickly and accurately than others.