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The article analyzes the diction methods, proposed at the beginning of the twentieth century by a singing teacher Sergey P. Belov at the Teachers’ Seminary and at the Diocesan School of Kostroma. The importance of the methods is emphasized not only for school education, but also for teacher training. As a characteristic feature of the technique, the interaction of reading and singing, the use of exercises in oral speech and in vocal work is highlighted. Specific examples show the main stages of work on diction: breathing exercises, working on vowels, combining vowels, switching to consonants; working out sound combinations in increasing pronunciation difficulties; reading and singing phrases and fragments from literary works. Particular attention is paid to those elements of the methods that resonate with modern trends in the development of the theory and methods of music education: the practice of mutual evaluation in the process of working on diction; combination of individual group and front work; creative tasks for composing simple melodies for the proposed poetic phrase or fragment of the poem. Parallels are drawn with current trends in working on diction and support for voice health in the field of vocal and theater pedagogy.

This study examines speech reductions in the spontaneous Czech of six young adult speakers. Specifically, intervocalic plosives are analysed from the perspective of phonetic features, with the aim to discover these features’ relative stability. Auditory analysis was used to determine the realisation types of plosives, and these types were then verified by acoustic analyses of duration, intensity range, harmonicity, and voicing profile. The results show that phonologically voiced plosives undergo reduction processes more (40%), with semi-vocalised realisation being the most frequent, while voiceless plosives are reduced less often (20%), with fricative-like realisation being the most frequent reduction. The least stable phonetic feature of Czech plosives is thus closure, as confirmed by all the analysed acoustic parameters.

The efficiency of pronunciation training in the classroom in French learners of German was studied. To this end the German vowel length contrast and word initial [h] productions were examined. For this purpose, a speech corpus was compiled, which contains recordings of the learners’ speech assignments over a university semester. Acoustic analyses of the speech productions showed that French learners of German showed progress over the semester only for word initial [h] at the beginning of words, while their productions of the German vowel length contrast neither improved nor worsened.

The paper reviews speech behavior of Russian-speaking children aged 10–12 years. There are relatively few studies on speech development of this age group, nevertheless, in our work we attempt to identify some features of discursive and communicative skills built during this period. For this purpose, we used two corpora compiled of the dialogues of children and the dialogs of adults respectively. Namely, we paid attention to the duration of latency in the responses of the participants. A detailed analysis revealed that children need significantly more time to formulate a response than adults do in a similar situation.

The aim of this study is to examine the frequency and diversity of discourse markers used by German speakers (L2). The existing studies point to an underrepresentation of these expressions, which representan essential part of the speakers’ communicative competence and can therefore be directly connected to the development of speech fluency. Fourteen students of German studies at the Faculty of Philosophyin Splittook part in the research. The group performed two slightly different speaking tasks in German (L2). The speech samples were transcribed and analyzed. The results point to a significantly dominantdiscourse marker und, which was used extremely often for the beginning of an utterance to signal a transition or a sequencing of speech acts. The results obtained also confirm the conclusions of previous studies, indicating a significant underrepresentation of a variety of discourse markers. Based on the obtained data, it seems obvious that formal language teaching should focus on a more explicit teaching of a wider variety of other nativelike discourse markers in order to promote overall speech fluency. Thus, the fundamental educational motive is to increase the level of automation by using discourse markers in L2.

A broad sketch for a model of speech production is outlined which describes developmental aspects of its cognitive-linguistic and sensorimotor components. A description of the emergence of phonological knowledge is a central point in our model sketch. It will be shown that the phonological form level emerges during speech acquisition and becomes an important representation at the interface between cognitive-linguistic and sensorimotor processes. Motor planning as well as motor programming are defined as separate processes in our model sketch and it will be shown that both processes revert to the phonological information. Two computational simulation experiments based on quantitative implementations (simulation models) are undertaken to show proof of principle of key ideas of the model sketch: (i) the emergence of phonological information over developmental stages, (ii) the adaptation process for generating new motor programs, and (iii) the importance of various forms of phonological representation in that process. Based on the ideas developed within our sketch of a production model and its quantitative spell-out within the simulation models, motor planning can be defined here as the process of identifying a succession of executable chunks from a currently activated phoneme sequence and of coding them as raw gesture scores. Motor programming can be defined as the process of building up the complete set of motor commands by specifying all gestures in detail (fully specified gesture score including temporal relations). This full specification of gesture scores is achieved in our model by adapting motor information from phonologically similar syllables (adapting approach) or by assembling motor programs from sub-syllabic units (assembling approach).

Focus is known to be expressed by a wide range of phonetic cues but only a few studies have explicitly compared different phonetic variables within the same experiment. Therefore, we presented results from an analysis of 19 phonetic variables conducted on a data set of the German language that comprises the opposition of unaccented (background) vs. accented (in focus), as well as different focus types with the nuclear accent on the same syllable (broad, narrow, and contrastive focus). The phonetic variables are measures of the acoustic and articulographic signals of a target syllable. Overall, our results provide the highest number of reliable effects and largest effect sizes for accentuation (unaccented vs. accented), while the differentiation of focus types with accented target syllables (broad, narrow, and contrastive focus) are more subtle. The most important phonetic variables across all conditions are measures of the fundamental frequency. The articulatory variables and their corresponding acoustic formants reveal lower tongue positions for both vowels /o, a/, and larger lip openings for the vowel /a/ under increased prosodic prominence with the strongest effects for accentuation. While duration exhibits consistent mid-ranked results for both accentuation and the differentiation of focus types, measures related to intensity are particularly important for accentuation. Furthermore, voice quality and spectral tilt are affected by accentuation but also in the differentiation of focus types. Our results confirm that focus is realized via multiple phonetic cues. Additionally, the present analysis allows a comparison of the relative importance of different measures to better understand the phonetic space of focus marking.

The current study investigates the intelligibility of face-masked speech while manipulating speaking style, presence of visual information about the speaker, and level of background noise. Speakers produced sentences while in both face-masked and non-face-masked conditions in clear and casual speaking styles. Two online experiments presented the sentences to listeners in multi-talker babble at different signal-to-noise ratios: −6 dB SNR and −3 dB SNR. Listeners completed a word identification task accompanied by either no visual information or visual information indicating whether the speaker was wearing a face mask or not (congruent with the actual face-masking condition). Across both studies, intelligibility is higher for clear speech. Intelligibility is also higher for face-masked speech, suggesting that speakers adapt their productions to be more intelligible in the presence of a physical barrier, namely a face mask. In addition, intelligibility is boosted when listeners are given visual cues that the speaker is wearing a face mask, but only at higher noise levels. We discuss these findings in terms of theories of speech production and perception.

Using fMRI, we investigated how right temporal lobe gliomas affecting the posterior superior temporal sulcus alter neural processing observed during speech perception and production tasks. Behavioural language testing showed that three pre-operative neurosurgical patients with grade 2, grade 3 or grade 4 tumours had the same pattern of mild language impairment in the domains of object naming and written word comprehension. When matching heard words for semantic relatedness (a speech perception task), these patients showed under-activation in the tumour infiltrated right superior temporal lobe compared to 61 neurotypical participants and 16 patients with tumours that preserved the right postero-superior temporal lobe, with enhanced activation within the (tumour-free) contralateral left superior temporal lobe. In contrast, when correctly naming objects (a speech production task), the patients with right postero-superior temporal lobe tumours showed higher activation than both control groups in the same right postero-superior temporal lobe region that was under-activated during auditory semantic matching. The task dependent pattern of under-activation during the auditory speech task and over-activation during object naming was also observed in eight stroke patients with right hemisphere infarcts that affected the right postero-superior temporal lobe compared to eight stroke patients with right hemisphere infarcts that spared it. These task-specific and site-specific cross-pathology effects highlight the importance of the right temporal lobe for language processing and motivate further study of how right temporal lobe tumours affect language performance and neural reorganisation. These findings may have important implications for surgical management of these patients, as knowledge of the regions showing functional reorganisation may help to avoid their inadvertent damage during neurosurgery.

Modeling speech production and speech articulation is still an evolving research topic. Some current core questions are: What is the underlying (neural) organization for controlling speech articulation? How to model speech articulators like lips and tongue and their movements in an efficient but also biologically realistic way? How to develop high-quality articulatory-acoustic models leading to high-quality articulatory speech synthesis? Thus, on the one hand computer-modeling will help us to unfold underlying biological as well as acoustic-articulatory concepts of speech production and on the other hand further modeling efforts will help us to reach the goal of high-quality articulatory-acoustic speech synthesis based on more detailed knowledge on vocal tract acoustics and speech articulation. Currently, articulatory models are not able to reach the quality level of corpus-based speech synthesis. Moreover, biomechanical and neuromuscular based approaches are complex and still not usable for sentence-level speech synthesis. This paper lists many computer-implemented articulatory models and provides criteria for dividing articulatory models in different categories. A recent major research question, i.e., how to control articulatory models in a neurobiologically adequate manner is discussed in detail. It can be concluded that there is a strong need to further developing articulatory-acoustic models in order to test quantitative neurobiologically based control concepts for speech articulation as well as to uncover the remaining details in human articulatory and acoustic signal generation. Furthermore, these efforts may help us to approach the goal of establishing high-quality articulatory-acoustic as well as neurobiologically grounded speech synthesis.

Morphological segmentability, i.e., the degree to which complex words can be decomposed into their morphological constituents, has been considered an important factor in research on morphological processing and is expected to affect acoustic duration (e.g., Hay, 2001, 2003). One way of operationalizing segmentability is through the relative frequency of a complex word to its base word. However, relative frequency has failed to affect duration for different affix categories in many previous studies. One potential reason is the fact that complex words vary in their prosodic structure, depending on the prosodic integration of the affix (Plag & Ben Hedia, 2018).In a large corpus study with three different corpora and eight affixes each, we investigate how prosodic word structure and relative frequency influence duration, and how these two factors interact. We find that prosodic structure does not significantly interact with relative frequency. Second, we show that relative frequency effects on duration do not emerge consistently across a large number of affixes. Third, not only does prosodic word structure not explain the absence of relative frequency effects, it also often cannot account for durational differences as such. We discuss these findings in light of phonological theory and speech production models.

Aims: To provide an overview of the Cleft Outcomes Research NETwork (CORNET) and the CORNET Speech and Surgery study. The study is (1) comparing speech outcomes and fistula rate between two common palate repair techniques, straight-line closure with intra-velar veloplasty (IVVP) and Furlow Double-Opposing Z-palatoplasty (Furlow Z-plasty); (2) summarizing practice variation in the utilization of early intervention speech-language (EI-SL) services; and (3) exploring the association between EI-SL services and speech outcomes., Design: Prospective, longitudinal, observational, comparative effectiveness, multi-center., Sites: Twenty sites across the United States., Participants: One thousand two hundred forty-seven children with cleft palate with or without cleft lip (CP ± L). Children with submucous cleft palate or bilateral sensorineural severe to profound hearing loss were excluded from participation., Interventions: Straight-line closure with IVVP or Furlow Z-plasty based on each surgeon's standard clinical protocol., Main Outcome Measure(s): The primary study outcome is perceptual ratings of hypernasality judged from speech samples collected at 3 years of age. Secondary outcomes are fistula rate, measures of speech production, and quality of life. The statistical analyses will include generalized estimating equations with propensity score weighting to address potential confounders., Current Progress: Recruitment was completed in February 2023; 80% of children have been retained to date. Five hundred sixty two children have completed their final 3-year speech assessment. Final study activities will end in early 2025., Conclusions: This study addresses long-standing questions related to the effectiveness of the two most common palatoplasty approaches and describes CORNET which provides an infrastructure that will streamline future studies in all areas of cleft care., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Evidence is lacking on the impact of bilingualism on the speech skills of children with cochlear implants (CIs). This study described the speech production of children with CIs acquiring French and one or more additional spoken languages. Four groups of children aged 4-11 were included: bilinguals (n = 15) and monolinguals (n = 14) with CIs and bilinguals (n = 14) and monolinguals (n = 20) with typical hearing. Data were collected about the percentage of consonant correct (PCC) and vowel correct (PVC) produced in French and intelligibility in all languages they spoke. Bilingual and monolingual children with CIs had comparable speech accuracy in French, but the pattern differed, impacting PCC for bilinguals and PVC for monolinguals. Most children with CIs had accurate and intelligible speech in French, but few bilingual children with CIs were highly intelligible in their home language. Therefore, bilingualism did not impede the speech production outcomes of bilingual children with CIs in the language of the wider community., (© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

Name agreement (NA) refers to the degree to which speakers agree on a picture's name. A robust finding is that speakers are faster to name pictures with high agreement (HA) than those with low agreement (LA). This NA effect is thought to occur because LA pictures strongly activate several names, so speakers need time to select one. HA pictures, in contrast, strongly activate a single name, so there is no need to select one name out of several alternatives. Recent models of lexical access suggest that the structure of the mental lexicon changes with experience. Thus, speakers should consider a range of names when naming LA pictures, but the extent to which they consider each of these names should change with experience. We tested these hypotheses in two picture-naming experiments. In Experiment 1, participants were faster to name LA than HA pictures when they named each picture once. Importantly, they were faster to produce modal names (provided by most participants) than alternative names for LA pictures, consistent with the view that speakers activate multiple names for LA pictures. In Experiment 2, participants were familiarised with the modal name before the experiment and named each picture three times. Although there was still an NA effect when participants named the pictures the first time, it was reduced in comparison to Experiment 1 and was further reduced with each picture repetition. Thus, familiarisation and repetition reduced the NA effect but did not eliminate it, suggesting speakers activate a range of plausible names., Competing Interests: Declaration of conflicting interestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

A widely held belief is that speech perception and speech production are tightly linked, with each modality available to help with learning in the other modality. This positive relationship is often summarized as perception and production being "two sides of the same coin." There are, indeed, many situations that have shown this mutually supportive relationship. However, there is a growing body of research showing very different results, with the modalities operating independently, or even in opposition to each other. We review the now-sizeable literature demonstrating the negative effect that speech production can have on perceptual learning of speech, at multiple levels (particularly at the lexical and sublexical levels). By comparing the situations that show this pattern with ones in which more positive interactions occur, we provide an initial account of why the different outcomes are found, identifying factors that lead to either positive or negative effects of production on perception. The review clarifies the complex relationship that exists between the two modalities: They are indeed linked, but their relationship is more complicated than is suggested by the notion that they are two sides of the same coin., (© 2024. The Psychonomic Society, Inc.)

Evidence suggests that the articulatory motor system contributes to speech perception in a context-dependent manner. This study tested 2 hypotheses using magnetoencephalography: (i) the motor cortex is involved in phonological processing, and (ii) it aids in compensating for speech-in-noise challenges. A total of 32 young adults performed a phonological discrimination task under 3 noise conditions while their brain activity was recorded using magnetoencephalography. We observed simultaneous activation in the left ventral primary motor cortex and bilateral posterior-superior temporal gyrus when participants correctly identified pairs of syllables. This activation was significantly more pronounced for phonologically different than identical syllable pairs. Notably, phonological differences were resolved more quickly in the left ventral primary motor cortex than in the left posterior-superior temporal gyrus. Conversely, the noise level did not modulate the activity in frontal motor regions and the involvement of the left ventral primary motor cortex in phonological discrimination was comparable across all noise conditions. Our results show that the ventral primary motor cortex is crucial for phonological processing but not for compensation in challenging listening conditions. Simultaneous activation of left ventral primary motor cortex and bilateral posterior-superior temporal gyrus supports an interactive model of speech perception, where auditory and motor regions shape perception. The ventral primary motor cortex may be involved in a predictive coding mechanism that influences auditory-phonetic processing., (© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press.)

This study sets out to investigate the potential effect of males' testosterone level on speech production and speech perception. Regarding speech production, we investigate intra- and inter-individual variation in mean fundamental frequency (f o ) and formant frequencies and highlight the potential interacting effect of another hormone, i.e. cortisol. In addition, we investigate the influence of different speech materials on the relationship between testosterone and speech production. Regarding speech perception, we investigate the potential effect of individual differences in males' testosterone level on ratings of attractiveness of female voices. In the production study, data is gathered from 30 healthy adult males ranging from 19 to 27 years (mean age: 22.4, SD: 2.2) who recorded their voices and provided saliva samples at 9 am, 12 noon and 3 pm on a single day. Speech material consists of sustained vowels, counting, read speech and a free description of pictures. Biological measures comprise speakers' height, grip strength, and hormone levels (testosterone and cortisol). In the perception study, participants were asked to rate the attractiveness of female voice stimuli (sentence stimulus, same-speaker pairs) that were manipulated in three steps regarding mean f o and formant frequencies. Regarding speech production, our results show that testosterone affected mean f o (but not formants) both within and between speakers. This relationship was weakened in speakers with high cortisol levels and depended on the speech material. Regarding speech perception, we found female stimuli with higher mean f o and formants to be rated as sounding more attractive than stimuli with lower mean f o and formants. Moreover, listeners with low testosterone showed an increased sensitivity to vocal cues of female attractiveness. While our results of the production study support earlier findings of a relationship between testosterone and mean f o in males (which is mediated by cortisol), they also highlight the relevance of the speech material: The effect of testosterone was strongest in sustained vowels, potentially due to a strengthened effect of hormones on physiologically strongly influenced tasks such as sustained vowels in contrast to more free speech tasks such as a picture description. The perception study is the first to show an effect of males' testosterone level on female attractiveness ratings using voice stimuli., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest No competing financial or nonfinancial interests existed at the time of publication, (Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Several studies have shown that mouth movements related to the pronunciation of individual phonemes are represented in the sensorimotor cortex. This would theoretically allow for brain computer interfaces that are capable of decoding continuous speech by training classifiers based on the activity in the sensorimotor cortex related to the production of individual phonemes. To address this, we investigated the decodability of trials with individual and paired phonemes (pronounced consecutively with one second interval) using activity in the sensorimotor cortex. Fifteen participants pronounced 3 different phonemes and 3 combinations of two of the same phonemes in a 7T functional MRI experiment. We confirmed that support vector machine (SVM) classification of single and paired phonemes was possible. Importantly, by combining classifiers trained on single phonemes, we were able to classify paired phonemes with an accuracy of 53% (33% chance level), demonstrating that activity of isolated phonemes is present and distinguishable in combined phonemes. A SVM searchlight analysis showed that the phoneme representations are widely distributed in the ventral sensorimotor cortex. These findings provide insights about the neural representations of single and paired phonemes. Furthermore, it supports the notion that speech BCI may be feasible based on machine learning algorithms trained on individual phonemes using intracranial electrode grids., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Objective: The LittlEARS® Early Speech Production Questionnaire (LEESPQ) was developed to provide professionals with valuable information about children's earliest language development and has been successfully validated in several languages. This study aimed to validate the Serbian version of the LEESPQ in typically developing children and compare the results with validation studies in other languages., Methods: The English version of the LEESPQ was back-translated into Serbian. Parents completed the questionnaire in paper or electronic form either during the visit to the paediatric clinic or through personal contact. A total of 206 completed questionnaires were collected. Standardized expected values were calculated using a second-order polynomial model for children up to 18 months of age to create a norm curve for the Serbian language. The results were then used to determine confidence intervals, with the lower limit being the critical limit for typical speech-language development. Finally, the results were compared with German and Canadian English developmental norms., Results: The Serbian LEESPQ version showed high homogeneity (r = .622) and internal consistency (α = .882), indicating that it almost exclusively measures speech production ability. No significant difference in total score was found between male and female infants (U = 4429.500, p = .090), so it can be considered a gender-independent questionnaire. The results of the comparison between Serbian and German (U = 645.500, p = .673) and Serbian and English norm curves (U = 652.000, p = .725) show that the LEESPQ can be applied to different population groups, regardless of linguistic, cultural or sociological differences., Conclusion: The LEESPQ is a valid, age-dependent and gender-independent questionnaire suitable for assessing early speech development in children aged from birth to 18 months., (© 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

The relationship between speech production and perception is a topic of ongoing debate. Some argue that there is little interaction between the two, while others claim they share representations and processes. One perspective suggests increased recruitment of the speech motor system in demanding listening situations to facilitate perception. However, uncertainties persist regarding the specific regions involved and the listening conditions influencing its engagement. This study used activation likelihood estimation in coordinate-based meta-analyses to investigate the neural overlap between speech production and three speech perception conditions: speech-in-noise, spectrally degraded speech and linguistically complex speech. Neural overlap was observed in the left frontal, insular and temporal regions. Key nodes included the left frontal operculum (FOC), left posterior lateral part of the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), left planum temporale (PT), and left pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA). The left IFG activation was consistently observed during linguistic processing, suggesting sensitivity to the linguistic content of speech. In comparison, the left pre-SMA activation was observed when processing degraded and noisy signals, indicating sensitivity to signal quality. Activations of the left PT and FOC activation were noted in all conditions, with the posterior FOC area overlapping in all conditions. Our meta-analysis reveals context-independent (FOC, PT) and context-dependent (pre-SMA, posterior lateral IFG) regions within the speech motor system during challenging speech perception. These regions could contribute to sensorimotor integration and executive cognitive control for perception and production., (© 2024 The Author(s). Human Brain Mapping published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

There are few investigations comparing practice schedules in speech motor learning, despite certain schedules being recommended for the clinical treatment of speech motor disorders. This study compared effects of random, blocked and mixed practice on tongue twister accuracy in unimpaired speakers. We hypothesized that blocked practice would benefit acquisition of learning, but that random practice and mixed blocked-then-random practice would yield superior retention of learning. We found that the random and blocked-random practice schedules yielded superior accuracy at the end of the acquisition phase of learning and at a 1-week retention test. Exploratory post hoc analyses raised the possibility that the retention effects were most evident when tongue twisters were elicited in a random schedule. Theoretical accounts of these results are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cognitive architecture and function of co-speech gesturehas been the subject of a large body of research. We investigatetwo main questions in this field, namely, whether language andgesture are the same or two inter-related systems, and whethergestures help resolve speech problems, by examining therelationship between gesture and disfluency in neurotypicalspeakers. Our results support the view of separate, but inter-related systems by showing that speech problems do notnecessarily cause gesture problems, and on many occasions,gestures signal an upcoming speech problem even before itsurfaces in overt speech. We also show that while gestures aremore common on fluent trials, speakers use both iconic andbeat gestures on disfluent trials to facilitate communication,although the two gesture types support communication indifferent ways.

The present study examines cognate effects in the phonetic production and processing of the Catalan back mid-vowel contrast (/o/-/ɔ/) by 24 early and highly proficient Spanish-Catalan bilinguals in Majorca (Spain). Participants completed a picture-naming task and a forced-choice lexical decision task in which they were presented with either words (e.g., /bɔsk/ "forest") or non-words based on real words, but with the alternate mid-vowel pair in stressed position ((*)/bosk/). The same cognate and non-cognate lexical items were included in the production and lexical decision experiments. The results indicate that even though these early bilinguals maintained the back mid-vowel contrast in their productions, they had great difficulties identifying non-words and real words based on the identity of the Catalan mid-vowel. The analyses revealed language dominance and cognate effects: Spanish-dominants exhibited higher error rates than Catalan-dominants, and production and lexical decision accuracy were also affected by cognate status. The present study contributes to the discussion of the organization of early bilinguals' dominant and non-dominant sound systems, and proposes that exemplar theoretic approaches can be extended to include bilingual lexical connections that account for the interactions between the phonetic and lexical levels of early bilingual individuals.

The non-fluent/agrammatic variant of primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA) and the behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) are focal neurodegenerative disorders belonging to the FTD-spectrum clinical syndromes. NfvPPA is characterized by effortful speech and/or agrammatism and left frontal atrophy, while bvFTD is characterized by social-emotional dysfunction often accompanied by right-lateralized frontal damage. Despite their contrasting clinical presentations, both disorders show prominent left anterior insula atrophy. We investigated differential patterns of insular sub-region atrophy in nfvPPA and bvFTD. Based on knowledge of insular connectivity and physiology, we hypothesized that the left superior precentral region of the dorsal anterior insula (SPGI) would be more atrophic in nvfPPA due to its critical role in motor speech, whereas the ventral anterior region would be more atrophied in bvFTD reflecting its known role in social-emotional-autonomic functions. Early stage nfvPPA and bvFTD patients matched for disease severity, age, gender and education and healthy controls participated in the study. Detailed clinical history, neurological examination, neuropsychological screening evaluation, and high-resolution T1-weighted brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) were collected. Voxel-based morphometry (VBM) was applied to perform group comparisons across the whole brain and in bilateral insula region of interest (ROI). Correlation analyses between insular sub-region atrophy and relevant clinical features were performed. Whole brain group comparisons between nfvPPA and bvFTD showed the expected predominantly left or right anterior insular atrophy pattern. ROI analysis of bilateral insula showed that the left SPGI was significantly more atrophied in nfvPPA compared to bvFTD, while the bilateral ventral anterior and right dorsal anterior insula sub-regions were more atrophied in bvFTD than nfvPPA. Only left SPGI volume correlated with speech production abilities, while left and right ventral anterior insula volumes correlated with ratings of aberrant eating behavior. These two FTD clinical variants show different patterns of insular sub-region atrophy in the left precentral dorsal anterior and bilateral ventral anterior regions, providing further evidence for the role of these sub-regions in speech production and social-emotional function.

Bilinguals are known to switch language spontaneously in everyday conversations, even if there are no external requirements to do so. However, in the laboratory setting, language control is often investigated using forced switching tasks, which result in significant performance costs. The present study assessed whether switching would be less costly when performed in a more natural fashion, and what factors might account for this. Mandarin-English bilinguals engaged in language switching under three different contexts with varied task demands. We examined two factors which may be characteristic of natural switching: (i) freedom of language selection; (ii) consistency of language used to name each item. Participants’ brain activities were recorded using magnetoencephalography (MEG), along with behavioural measures of reaction speed and accuracy. The natural context (with both free selection and consistent language use for each item) produced better performance overall, showing reduced mixing cost and no significant switch cost. The neural effect of language mixing was also reversed in this context, suggesting that freely mixing two languages was easier than staying in a single language. Further, while switching in the forced context elicited increased brain activity in the right inferior frontal gyrus, this switch effect disappeared when the language used to name each item was consistent. Together, these findings demonstrate that the two factors above conjointly contribute to eliminating significant performance costs and cognitive demands associated with language switching and mixing. Such evidence aligns with lexical selection models which do not assume bilingual production to be inherently effortful.

Dutch and German employ voicing contrasts, but Dutch lacks the 'voiced' dorsal plosive /ɡ/. We exploited this accidental phonological gap, measuring the presence of prevoicing and voice onset time durations during speech production to determine (1) whether preliterate bilingual Dutch–German and monolingual Dutch-speaking children aged 3;6–6;0 years generalized voicing to /ɡ/ in Dutch; and (2) whether there was evidence for featural cross-linguistic influence from Dutch to German in bilingual children, testing monolingual German-speaking children as controls. Bilingual and monolingual children's production of /ɡ/ provided partial evidence for feature generalization: in Dutch, both bilingual and monolingual children either recombined Dutch voicing and place features to produce /ɡ/, suggesting feature generalization, or resorted to producing familiar /k/, suggesting segment-level adaptation within their Dutch phonological system. In German, bilingual children's production of /ɡ/ was influenced by Dutch although the Dutch phoneme inventory lacks /ɡ/. This suggests that not only segments but also voicing features can exert cross-linguistic influence. Taken together, phonological features appear to play a crucial role in aspects of bilingual and monolingual children's speech production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Auditory brainstem implantation (ABI) is a recent innovation in pediatric hearing restoration in children with a sensorineural hearing impairment. Only limited information is available on the spontaneous speech development of severe-to-profound congenitally hearing-impaired children who received an ABI. The purpose of this study was to investigate longitudinally the accuracy of ABI children's word productions in spontaneous speech in comparison to the accuracy of children who received a cochlear implant and children with normal hearing. The data of this study consist of recordings of the spontaneous speech of the first three Dutch-speaking children living in Belgium who received an ABI. The children's utterances were phonemically transcribed and for each word, the distance between the child's production and the standard adult phonemic transcription was computed using the Levenshtein Distance as a metric. The same procedure was applied to the longitudinal data of the children with CI and the normally hearing children. The main result was that the Levenshtein Distance decreased in the three children with ABI but it remained significantly higher than that of children with typical hearing and cochlear implants matched on chronological age, hearing age, and lexicon size. In other words, the phonemic accuracy increased in the children with ABI but stayed well below that of children without hearing loss and children with cochlear implants. Moreover, the analyses revealed considerable individual variation between the children with ABI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For aging speech, there is limited knowledge regarding the articulatory adjustments underlying the acoustic findings observed in previous studies. In order to investigate the age-related articulatory differences in European Portuguese (EP) vowels, the present study analyzes the tongue configuration of the nine EP oral vowels (isolated context and pseudoword context) produced by 10 female speakers of two different age groups (young and old). From the tongue contours automatically segmented from the US images and manually revised, the parameters (tongue height and tongue advancement) were extracted. The results suggest that the tongue tends to be higher and more advanced for the older females compared to the younger ones for almost all vowels. Thus, the vowel articulatory space tends to be higher, advanced, and bigger with age. For older females, unlike younger females that presented a sharp reduction in the articulatory vowel space in disyllabic sequences, the vowel space tends to be more advanced for isolated vowels compared with vowels produced in disyllabic sequences. This study extends our pilot research by reporting articulatory data from more speakers based on an improved automatic method of tongue contours tracing, and it performs an inter-speaker comparison through the application of a novel normalization procedure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When attempting to maintain conversations in noisy communicative settings, talkers typically modify their speech to make themselves understood by the listener. In this study, we investigated the impact of background interference type and talker age on speech adaptations, vocal effort and communicative success. We measured speech acoustics (articulation rate, mid-frequency energy, fundamental frequency), vocal effort (correlation between mid-frequency energy and fundamental frequency) and task completion time in 114 participants aged 8-80 years carrying out an interactive problem-solving task in good and noisy listening conditions (quiet, non-speech noise, background speech). We found greater changes in fundamental frequency and mid-frequency energy in non-speech noise than in background speech and similar reductions in articulation rate in both. However, older participants (50+ years) increased vocal effort in both background interference types, whereas younger children (less than 13 years) increased vocal effort only in background speech. The presence of background interference did not lead to longer task completion times. These results suggest that when the background interference involves a higher cognitive load, as in the case of other speech of other talkers, children and older talkers need to exert more vocal effort to ensure successful communication. We discuss these findings within the communication effort framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary psycholinguistic models place significant emphasis on the cognitive processes involved in the acquisition, recognition, and production of language but neglect many issues related to the representation of language‐related information in the mental lexicon. In contrast, a central tenet of network science is that the structure of a network influences the processes that operate in that system, making process and representation inextricably connected. Here, we consider how the structure found across phonological networks of several languages from different language families may influence language processing as we age and experience diseases that affect cognition during the typical and atypical acquisition of new words, during typical perception and production of speech in adults, and during language change over time. We conclude that the network science approach may not only provide insights into specific language processes but also provide a way to connect the work from these domains, which are becoming increasingly balkanized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Variability in oral reading fluency (ORF), an indicator of foundational reading skills, has been linked to characteristics of texts. Such text-based variability in ORF has been traditionally attributed to text complexity, but substantial text-based variability has still been observed after accounting for text complexity. We consider that oral reading requires pronouncing the text aloud, which makes it subject to the same articulatory and prosodic constraints as other types of speech productions. Thus, texts with similar levels of complexity may still differ in expected durations when read aloud because of the texts' segmental and prosodic structure, leading to differences in reading rate. We propose that these production-related effects are also important sources of text-based ORF variability. Data from upper elementary school students in the United States reading a large variety of passages from a popular fiction book showed that a composite measure of production-related effects (i.e., reading rate estimates derived from a text-to-speech synthesis system) explained a substantial amount of text-based ORF variability. Follow-up exploratory analyses indicated that these production-related effects are robust. Because text complexity metrics consist of features that also tap into production constraints, our results motivate an updated interpretation of text complexity effects on ORF and highlight the importance of accounting for production-related effects on ORF, which remain to be acknowledged in the ORF literature as potential sources of text-based variability. Educational Impact and Implications Statement: Although the achievement of oral reading fluency (ORF) is a milestone in reading development on its own, it is also a popular indicator of other critical reading skills, such as reading comprehension. ORF is measured by having students read some text aloud for some time, and the average number of words they correctly read in a minute is calculated. One well-known complication of this measure is that the measure partly depends on the properties of the text being read. More complex texts are expected to take longer to read, so text complexity metrics are often used when selecting passages to measure ORF. In this article, we show that the relationship between text complexity and ORF is not straightforward because some properties of texts could make them both more complex and slower to utter, but other properties could increase the complexity but make them faster to utter; thus, the oral and the reading parts of "oral reading" both need to be modeled to successfully explain the effects of text properties on ORF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The picture-word task presents participants with a number of pictured objects together with a written distractor word superimposed upon each picture, and their task is to name the depicted object while ignoring the distractor word. Depending on the specific picture and word combination, various effects, including the identity facilitation effect (e.g., DOG + dog) and the semantic interference effect (e.g., GOAT + cow), are often observed. The response patterns of the picture-word task in terms of naming latencies reflect the mechanisms underlying lexical selection in speech production. Research using this method, however, has typically focused on alphabetic languages, or involved bilingual populations, making it difficult to specifically investigate orthographic effects in isolation. In this paper, we report five experiments investigating the role of orthography in the picture-word task by varying distractor script (using the multiscriptal language Japanese, and pseudohomophonic spellings in English) across three different populations (Japanese monolinguals, Japanese-English bilinguals, and English monolinguals), investigating both the identity facilitation effect and the semantic interference effect. The results generally show that the magnitude of facilitation is affected by orthography even within a single language. The findings and specific patterns of results are discussed in relation to current theories on speech production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the acquisition of the non-sibilant anterior fricatives /v, θ, ð/ by adult second language (L2) English talkers. Twenty-four Mandarin Chinese-L2 English talkers read aloud fricative-initial words. These talkers were chosen as their L1 contained /f/ but not /v, θ, ð/. Twenty L1 English listeners were asked to identify the L2-produced speech and rate the talker's accent. On average, 69% of the fricatives were correctly identified. /v/ was the most difficult to correctly identify and was identified less accurately than /θ/ and /ð/. A 'moderate' accent was reported by L1 listeners, but accent rating did not predict L1 identification behavior. An exploratory acoustic analysis involving the correctly identified words from 22 talkers revealed that L2 talkers produced mean temporal differences used for voicing in line with published L1 data. Non-sibilant fricatives – particularly /v/ – may require pedagogical interventions to push L2 talkers off their learning plateau. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, work carried out in the context of the implicit prosody hypothesis (IPH) has called into question the assumption that implicit (i.e., silently generated) prosody and explicit (overtly produced) prosody are similar in form. Focusing on prosodic phrasing, the present study explored this issue using an individual differences approach, and using methods that do not rely on the sentence comprehension tests characteristic of work within the IPH program. A large group of native English speakers participated in a production experiment intended to identify individual differences in average prosodic phrase length, phonologically defined. We then explored whether these (explicit) prosodic differences were related to two other kinds of variation, each with a connection to implicit prosody. First, we tested whether individual differences in explicit prosodic phrase length were predicted by individual differences in working memory capacity, a relationship that has been established for implicit prosody. Second, we explored whether participants' explicit prosodic phrase lengths were predictive of their behavior in a silent-reading task in which they had to identify their own implicit prosodic groupings. In both cases, the findings are argued to be consistent with a similarity between explicit and implicit prosody. First, participants with higher working memory capacity (as estimated by reading spans) were associated with longer prosodic phrases. Second, participants who produced longer explicit prosodic phrases in speech tended to report generating longer prosodic phrases in silent reading. Implications for the nature of implicit prosody, and how it can be studied, are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report presents a corpus of articulations recorded with Schlieren photography, a recording technique to visualize aeroflow dynamics for two purposes. First, as a means to investigate aerodynamic processes during speech production without any obstruction of the lips and the nose. Second, to provide material for lecturers of phonetics to illustrates these aerodynamic processes. Speech production was recorded with 10 kHz frame rate for statistical video analyses. Downsampled videos (500 Hz) were uplodad to a youtube channel for illustrative purposes. Preliminary analyses demonstrate potential in applying Schlieren photography in research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has acknowledged the effect of prosody on inter-gestural coordination, but specifically the effect of tones is still understudied. This paper has a two-fold purpose. First, it aims to explore effects of the Swedish word accents on word-initial consonant–vowel (CV) coarticulation. Second, it aims to revisit the existing evidence for tonal integration. Based on Articulatory Phonology, it has been suggested that tones – in tone languages – are integrated in the gestural organization of a syllable-initial CV sequence in the same manner as would an additional consonant (CCV), indicated by a time lag between the gestural onsets of the C and the V gesture (CV onset time lag). However, we argue that the existing evidence is inconclusive, because previous cross-linguistic research has used small-scale data sets (one to seven speakers), and we still lack a well-grounded consensus on how gestural onsets are to be measured. This study uses Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA) to investigate word-initial CV coordination in a lexical pitch-accent language (Swedish) with a binary tonal word accent distinction: a tonal fall and a tonal rise, respectively. A selection of 13 spatial, temporal or coordinative measures of bilabial and tongue body data from 19 speakers, and acoustic fo data, were examined to study the CV sequence /ma/. Mixed effects regression models revealed a longer tongue body movement in the rising tone context and small but significant differences in tongue body height, in the closing and the opening of the lips, as well as in the CV onset time lag between the two tonal contexts. We argue that these effects are biomechanical in nature, due to the physiological connections between the tongue, the jaw, and the larynx. In addition, our results suggest either synchronized CV onsets or a CV onset time lag (as in tone languages), depending on the timing landmarks used. In order to evaluate such results as evidence for or against the integration of tone in CV coarticulation, we argue that future research needs to compare data from a variety of languages using a considerable number of speakers. The present study provides new reference values for such comparisons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research suggests that different types of word-final /s/ and /z/ (e.g. non-morphemic vs. plural or clitic morpheme) in English show realisational differences in duration. However, there is disagreement on the nature of these differences, as experimental studies have provided evidence for durational differences of the opposite direction as results from corpus studies (i.e. non-morphemic > plural > clitic /s/). The experimental study reported here focuses on four types of word-final /s/ in English, i.e. non-morphemic, plural, and is- and has-clitic /s/. We conducted a pseudoword production study with native speakers of Southern British English. The results show that non-morphemic /s/ is significantly longer than plural /s/, which in turn is longer than clitic /s/, while there is no durational difference between the two clitics. This aligns with previous corpus rather than experimental studies. Thus, the morphological category of a word-final /s/ appears to be a robust predictor for its phonetic realisation influencing speech production in such a way that systematic subphonemic differences arise. This finding calls for revisions of current models of speech production in which morphology plays no role in later stages of production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives/hypothesisLaryngeal adductor muscle dysfunction is a common cause of voice disorders. Reconstitution of adductor muscle function is often the target of therapy, but the effects of these muscles on voice production remain to be fully understood. This study investigated the differential roles of thyroarytenoid (TA) and lateral cricoarytenoid (LCA) muscles on voice production.Study designBasic science study using an in vivo canine model of phonation.MethodsThe TA and LCA muscle nerve branches were stimulated to obtain seven graded levels of muscle activation, from threshold to maximal contraction. The effects of LCA muscle activation alone, TA muscle activation alone, and combined TA and LCA muscle activation on phonation onset parameters were investigated. Phonatory posture, phonation onset type, fundamental frequency (F0), phonation onset pressure, and airflow were evaluated.ResultsLCA muscle activation closed the posterior glottis, but the midmembranous gap remained. TA muscle activation closed the membranous glottis, but the posterior gap remained. Complete glottal closure was obtained only with combined TA and LCA muscle activation. Phonation onset with the LCA muscle alone was characterized by multiple modes (soft, aperiodic, periodic), whereas with the TA muscle alone it was abrupt and periodic but had significant baseline noise. Combined muscle activation led to elimination of baseline noise with stable abrupt periodic onset of phonation. Combined muscle activation was also necessary for F0 variation. The LCA muscle assisted the TA muscle in increasing subglottal pressure while concurrently reducing phonation onset airflow.ConclusionsThe TA muscle is necessary for F0 variation, stable onset phonation, and increased subglottal pressure, but needs the LCA muscle for optimal effectiveness and to reduce airflow requirements with increased activation.Level of evidenceNA.

Brain structure can predict many aspects of human behavior, though the extent of this relationship in healthy adults, particularly for language-related skills, remains largely unknown. The objective of the present study was to explore this relation using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) on a group of 21 healthy young adults who completed two language tasks: (1) semantic fluency and (2) sentence generation. For each region of interest, cortical thickness, surface area, and volume were calculated. The results show that verbal fluency scores correlated mainly with measures of brain morphology in the left inferior frontal cortex and bilateral insula. Sentence generation scores correlated with structure of the left inferior parietal and right inferior frontal regions. These results reveal that the anatomy of several structures in frontal and parietal lobes is associated with spoken language performance. The presence of both negative and positive correlations highlights the complex relation between brain and language.

Comprehenders predict upcoming speech and text on the basis of linguistic input. How many predictions do comprehenders make for an upcoming word? If a listener strongly expects to hear the word "sock", is the word "shirt" partially expected as well, is it actively inhibited, or is it ignored? The present research addressed these questions by measuring the "downstream" effects of prediction on the processing of subsequently presented stimuli using the cumulative semantic interference paradigm. In three experiments, subjects named pictures (sock) that were presented either in isolation or after strongly constraining sentence frames ("After doing his laundry, Mark always seemed to be missing one…"). Naming sock slowed the subsequent naming of the picture shirt - the standard cumulative semantic interference effect. However, although picture naming was much faster after sentence frames, the interference effect was not modulated by the context (bare vs. sentence) in which either picture was presented. According to the only model of cumulative semantic interference that can account for such a pattern of data, this indicates that comprehenders pre-activated and maintained the pre-activation of best sentence completions (sock) but did not maintain the pre-activation of less likely completions (shirt). Thus, comprehenders predicted only the most probable completion for each sentence.

For more than a century, speech repetition has been used as an assay for gauging the integrity of the auditory-motor pathway in aphasia, thought classically to involve a linkage between Wernicke's area and Broca's area via the arcuate fasciculus. During the last decade, evidence primarily from functional imaging in healthy individuals has refined this picture both computationally and anatomically, suggesting the existence of a cortical hub located at the parietal-temporal boundary (area Spt) that functions to integrate auditory and motor speech networks for both repetition and spontaneous speech production. While functional imaging research can pinpoint the regions activated in repetition/auditory-motor integration, lesion-based studies are needed to infer causal involvement. Previous lesion studies of repetition have yielded mixed results with respect to Spt's critical involvement in speech repetition. The present study used voxel-based lesion symptom mapping (VLSM) to investigate the neuroanatomy of repetition of both real words and non-words in a sample of 47 patients with focal left hemisphere brain damage. VLSMs identified a large voxel cluster spanning gray and white matter in the left temporal-parietal junction, including area Spt, where damage was significantly related to poor non-word repetition. Repetition of real words implicated a very similar dorsal network including area Spt. Cortical regions including Spt were implicated in repetition performance even when white matter damage was factored out. In addition, removing variance associated with speech perception abilities did not alter the overall lesion pattern for either task. Together with past functional imaging work, our results suggest that area Spt is integral in both word and non-word repetition, that its contribution is above and beyond that made by white matter pathways, and is not driven by perceptual processes alone. These findings are highly consistent with the claim that Spt is an area of sensory-motor translation in speech processing.

Background: and purpose: Speech entrainment therapy (SET) is a computerized therapeutic approach that involves mimicking an audiovisual speech model to improve speech production. In a pilot study using SET for treatment of post-stroke non-fluent aphasia, significant gains were achieved in verbs per minute (VPM) during discourse using untrained items 1 and 6 weeks after treatment, suggesting that SET may yield meaningful improvements in fluent spontaneous speech for individuals with non-fluent aphasia. Methods: The Speech Entrainment for Aphasia Recovery (SpARc) trial is a prospective, randomized, assessor-blinded, multicenter phase II clinical trial studying persons with chronic post-stroke non-fluent aphasia. Participants will be randomized to 3 weeks, 4.5 weeks, or 6 weeks of SET delivered via telehealth or a no SET control condition for 6 weeks. 80 adults (ages 21–81) with history of left hemisphere ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke with residual chronic (>6 months post stroke) non-fluent aphasia diagnosed by the Western Aphasia Battery-Revised (WAB-R) will be randomized (1:1:1:1) over 4 years. The trial will be conducted at the clinical research facilities at three sites: the Medical University of South Carolina, the University of South Carolina, and the University of Utah. Conclusions: This paper details the trial design of the SpARc trial, which aims to determine the dose of SET that will generate the highest effect size on speech fluency, VPM, sustained at 3 months post-treatment compared to a no SET control arm, for individuals with chronic post-stroke non-fluent aphasia to permit a future definitive trial to test the clinical utility of SET.