Expectations from preceding prosody influence segmentation in online sentence processing

Previous work examining prosodic cues in online spoken-word recognition has focused primarily on local cues to word identity. However, recent studies have suggested that utterance-level prosodic patterns can also influence the interpretation of subsequent sequences of lexically ambiguous syllables (Dilley, Mattys, & Vinke, Journal of Memory and Language, 63:274–294, 2010; Dilley & McAuley, Journal of Memory and Language, 59:294–311, 2008). To test the hypothesis that these distal prosody effects are based on expectations about the organization of upcoming material, we conducted a visual-world experiment. We examined fixations to competing alternatives such as pan and panda upon hearing the target word panda in utterances in which the acoustic properties of the preceding sentence material had been manipulated. The proportions of fixations to the monosyllabic competitor were higher beginning 200 ms after target word onset when the preceding prosody supported a prosodic constituent boundary following pan-, rather than following panda. These findings support the hypothesis that expectations based on perceived prosodic patterns in the distal context influence lexical segmentation and word recognition.     

Prosodic disturbance in aphasia: Vowel length in Thai

The aim of this study is to determine to what extent a phonologically contrastive function of the prosodic feature of length is resistant to impairment in aphasia. The language chosen for investigation is Thai, a language which contrasts short and long vowels. Subjects included two Broca aphasics, one transcortical motor aphasic, one Wernicke aphasic, one conduction aphasic, one nonaphasic right-brain-damaged patient, one nonaphasic cerebellar dysarthric patient, and five normal controls. The subjects read a list of words containing short and long vowels. Vowel durations were measured from spectrograms. The results showed that the timing of vowel duration for signaling the contrast between short and long vowels remains relatively intact in nonfluent as well as fluent aphasic patients. These data are brought to bear on issues concerning the specialization of the left hemisphere for temporal processing, the contribution of the right hemisphere to the processing of nonaffective components of prosody, the nature of prosodic disturbance in Broca's aphasia and cerebellar dysarthria, and the separate disruption of prosodic features.     

普通话韵律词重音知觉

实验一研究了韵律词重音的多个声学相关物,及其对韵律词重音知觉贡献的大小,结果表明,按照贡献大小的次序,影响普通话韵律词重音感知的声学参数是：时长、音高、频谱倾斜和平均能量。实验二研究非声学参数因素对普通话韵律词重音知觉的影响,实验结果表明,听者关于普通话韵律词重音方面的语言学知识对韵律词重音的知觉有显著影响。     

Neuromotor speech deficits in children and adults with spina bifida and hydrocephalus

Acquired cerebellar lesions are associated with motor speech deficits. Spina bifida with hydrocephalus (SBH) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that involves significant dysmorphology of the cerebellum. Videotaped narratives produced by 40 children and adults with SBH and their 40 age-matched controls were coded for three motor speech deficits: dysfluency, ataxic dysarthria (articulatory inaccuracy, prosodic excess, and phonatory-prosodic insufficiency) (Brown, Darley, & Aronson, 1970; Darley, Aronson, & Brown, 1969a), and speech rate. Individuals with SBH had more motor speech deficits than controls. Dysfluency was related to an interaction between chronological age and SBH. Speech rate was related independently to chronological age and SBH. Ataxic dysarthria was related to the biology of SBH, and was associated with both physical phenotype (level of spinal cord lesion) and medical history (number of shunt revisions). The data show that developmental as well as acquired lesions of the cerebellum disrupt motor speech, and add to the developmental role of the cerebellum in the automatization of motor skills, including speech.     

Dysarthria in Friedreich disease

Perceptual judgments have previously been used to rate the speech of patients with Friedreich disease. This study attempted to define speech patterns of dysarthria in Friedreich disease using acoustic analyses. The results from 14 patients indicated sudden variations in fundamental frequency and intensity, variability of segment durations, slowness of speech, and low diadochokinetic rate.     

Multiple component agraphia in a patient with atypical cerebral dominance: an error analysis

A 52-year-old man with atypical cerebral dominance (left-handed for writing but mixed handedness for other tasks) suffered an extensive right hemisphere stroke, resulting in a combination of deficits that has not been previously reported. There were profound visual constructive and visual perceptual disturbances and a spatial agraphia, which were consistent with a nondominant hemisphere lesion. There was also a severe apraxic agraphia, which is typically associated with a dominant hemisphere lesion, but no other signs of dominant hemisphere dysfunction such as linguistic disturbance or limb-motor apraxia were present. This case serves to highlight the functional and anatomical relationship between handwriting and other forms of praxis; the various sources of error in letter formation; the need to be specific in labeling and describing agraphias ; and the role of a detailed analysis of writing errors in delineating the neuropsychological processes involved in handwriting.     

Impaired processing of prosodic and musical patterns after right hemisphere damage

The distinction between the processing of musical information and segmental speech information (i.e., consonants and vowels) has been much explored. In contrast, the relationship between the processing of music and prosodic speech information (e.g., intonation) has been largely ignored. We report an assessment of prosodic perception for an amateur musician, KB, who became amusic following a right-hemisphere stroke. Relative to matched controls, KB's segmental speech perception was preserved. However, KB was unable to discriminate pitch or rhythm patterns in linguistic or musical stimuli. He was also impaired on prosodic perception tasks (e.g., discriminating statements from questions). Results are discussed in terms of common neural mechanisms that may underlie the processing of some aspects of both music and speech prosody.     

Longitudinal neuropsychological report of aphasia following left-subcortical hemorrhage

The neuropsychological assessments of a patient with language disturbance following left thalamic-putaminal hemorrhage over a $\text{2}\text{1}\text{2}\text{-}\text{year}$ period are presented together with premorbid measures of performance. Findings indicate that behavioral deficits which are both linguistic and nonlinguistic in nature differ from cortical aphasic syndromes in symptomatology and recovery course. The deficit pattern is also unlike that in other reported cases of left-subcortical lesions. Persistent dysarthria with fluent speech, limitation of verbal span and repetition, agraphia and anomia, and disturbances in self-regulation of behavior were noted, in addition to recovery of an initially severe auditory comprehension deficit. A distinguishing feature of this case was the relative preservation of reading comprehension in all four assessments.     

Language production in Parkinson's disease: acoustic and linguistic considerations

The hypokinetic dysarthria of Parkinson's disease (PD) has been described extensively. In contrast, patterns of hesitation and the language structure in spontaneous speech of the PD patient have not been investigated, although several studies have shown language-related abnormalities in word naming, word generation, and verbal recall. In the present study, 10 male Parkinson's patients and 10 normal male speakers were compared in a reading and spontaneous speaking paradigm for acoustic and linguistic features. Among acoustic measures, fundamental frequency and relative intensity differentiated PD from control subjects, consistent with reported features of hypokinetic dysarthria. The striking observations among linguistic measures differentiating PD from control subjects were an increase in the number of (a) silent hesitations per minute, (b) abnormally long silent hesitations, (c) words per silent hesitation, (d) open class phrases, and (e) optional open phrases per speech sample, and a decrease in the number of modalizations and interjections. An increase in the number of filled hesitations occurring per minute, as well as a decrease in syntactic complexity separated moderate from mild Parkinson's patients. Our interpretation of the data favors the hypothesis that changes in the structure of spontaneous language production with increasing severity of dysarthria reflect PD patients' adaptation to their disease.     

Prosodic cues for morphological complexity: The case of Dutch plural nouns

It has recently been shown that listeners use systematic differences in vowel length and intonation to resolve ambiguities between onset-matched simple words (Davis, Marslen-Wilson, & Gaskell, 2002; Salverda, Dahan, & McQueen, 2003). The present study shows that listeners also use prosodic information in the speech signal to optimize morphological processing. The precise acoustic realization of the stem provides crucial information to the listener about the morphological context in which the stem appears and attenuates the competition between stored inflectional variants. We argue that listeners are able to make use of prosodic information, even though the speech signal is highly variable within and between speakers, by virtue of the relative invariance of the duration of the onset. This provides listeners with a baseline against which the durational cues in a vowel and a coda can be evaluated. Furthermore, our experiments provide evidence for item-specific prosodic effects.     

A case report of pathological rule-governed syllable intrusion

A detailed analysis of a unique speech disturbance, marked by the frequent appearance in the speech stream of a meaningless intrusive syllable, is presented. Following a lengthy thoracic surgery, an American English speaking patient began to speak with non-English prosodic patterns, which evolved to a conspicuous intrusion in his speech of the syllable /sis/. This syllable and its variants were attached to words in a manner which conformed to the regular phonological rules in English (for formation of plural, possessive, and third person singular morphemes). The distribution and frequency of the intrusive syllable are described, and possible explanations for the abnormal occurrence of this particular syllable are discussed.     

口语句子的韵律边界：窥探言语理解的秘窗

韵律边界加工与言语理解紧密相关, 最近十几年来逐渐成为心理学和语言学的研究焦点。韵律系统包含若干由小到大的韵律单位, 不同单位的韵律成分其边界强度不同, 表现在音高、延宕和停顿三个声学线索上的参数也不同。句子的听力理解过程中, 听话人运用声学线索感知权重策略对韵律边界的声学线索进行加工。从神经层面上来看, 对于韵律边界的加工, 大脑显示出独立且特异性的神经机制。韵律边界的加工能力在婴儿出生后随年龄的增长而发展, 到了老年阶段则逐渐退化, 而且似乎能够对二语迁移。未来, 需要扩大对韵律边界声学表现的考查范围, 进一步明确韵律边界的加工过程, 进一步厘清韵律边界加工和句法加工之间的关系, 进一步关注二语者韵律边界加工能力的发展。     

Pre-schoolers use head gestures rather than prosodic cues to highlight important information in speech

Previous evidence suggests that children's mastery of prosodic modulations to signal the informational status of discourse referents emerges quite late in development. In the present study, we investigate the children's use of head gestures as it compares to prosodic cues to signal a referent as being contrastive relative to a set of possible alternatives. A group of French-speaking pre-schoolers were audio-visually recorded while playing in a semi-spontaneous but controlled production task, to elicit target words in the context of broad focus, contrastive focus, or corrective focus utterances. We analysed the acoustic features of the target words (syllable duration and word-level pitch range), as well as the head gesture features accompanying these target words (head gesture type, alignment patterns with speech). We found that children's production of head gestures, but not their use of either syllable duration or word-level pitch range, was affected by focus condition. Children mostly aligned head gestures with relevant speech units, especially when the target word was in phrase-final position. Moreover, the presence of a head gesture was linked to greater syllable duration patterns in all focus conditions. Our results show that (a) 4- and 5-year-old French-speaking children use head gestures rather than prosodic cues to mark the informational status of discourse referents, (b) the use of head gestures may gradually entrain the production of adult-like prosodic features, and that (c) head gestures with no referential relation with speech may serve a linguistic structuring function in communication, at least during language development.     

Unattended emotional intonations modulate linguistic prosody processing

Prosody or speech melody subserves linguistic (e.g., question intonation) and emotional functions in speech communication. Findings from lesion studies and imaging experiments suggest that, depending on function or acoustic stimulus structure, prosodic speech components are differentially processed in the right and left hemispheres. This direct current (DC) potential study investigated the linguistic processing of digitally manipulated pitch contours of sentences that carried an emotional or neutral intonation. Discrimination of linguistic prosody was better for neutral stimuli as compared to happily as well as fearfully spoken sentences. Brain activation was increased during the processing of happy sentences as compared to neutral utterances. Neither neutral nor emotional stimuli evoked lateralized processing in the left or right hemisphere, indicating bilateral mechanisms of linguistic processing for pitch direction. Acoustic stimulus analysis suggested that prosodic components related to emotional intonation, such as pitch variability, interfered with linguistic processing of pitch course direction.     

The influence of prosodic structure on the resolution of temporary syntactic closure ambiguities

This paper investigates the influence of prosodic structure on the process of sentence comprehension, with a specific focus on the relative contributions of syntactic and prosodic information to the resolution of temporary syntactic closure ambiguities. We argue that prosodic structure provides an initial memory representation for spoken sentences, and that information from this prosodic representation is available to inform syntactic parsing decisions. This view makes three predictions for the processing of temporary syntactic ambiguity: 1. When prosodic and syntactic boundaries coincide, syntactic processing should be facilitated. 2. When prosodic boundaries are placed at misleading points in syntactic structure, syntactic processing should show interference effects. 3. The processing difficulties that have been reliably demonstrated in reading experiments for syntactically complex sentences should disappear when those sentences are presented with a felicitous prosodic structure in listening experiments. These predictions were confirmed by series of experiments measuring end-of-sentence comprehension time and cross-modal naming time for sentences with temporary syntactic closure ambiguities. Sentences with coinciding or conflicting prosodic and syntactic boundaries were compared to a prosodic baseline condition.This research was supported in part by NIMH grant R29 MH51768 to the first author and NIMH grant T32 MH19729 to the Northeastern University Psychology Department.     

Fundamental frequency encoding of linguistic and emotional prosody by right hemisphere-damaged speakers.

To illuminate the nature of the right hemisphere's involvement in expressive prosodic functions, a story completion task was administered to matched groups of right hemisphere-damaged (RHD) and nonneurological control subjects. Utterances which simultaneously specified three prosodic distinctions (emphatic stress, sentence modality, emotional tone) were elicited from each subject group and then subjected to acoustic analysis to examine various fundamental frequency (F(0)) attributes of the stimuli. Results indicated that RHD speakers tended to produce F(0) patterns that resembled normal productions in overall shape, but with significantly less F(0) variation. The RHD patients were also less reliable than normal speakers at transmitting emphasis or emotional contrasts when judged from the listener's perspective. Examination of the results across a wide variety of stimulus types pointed to a deficit in successfully implementing continuous aspects of F(0) patterns following right hemisphere insult.     

词切分的韵律学线索

本文是关于汉语普通话词切分的一个实验报告。用无意文重复句和合成句作语音材料,探讨音节时长分布、基频曲线、音节强度以及共振峰等韵律学线索在词切分中的作用。得到的主要结果是,在排除语义和音段层面信息的条件下,听者能够根据句子的韵律学特征进行句子结构的判断和词的切分;在对切分有效的韵律学线索中,最重要的是音节的时长分布模式,其次是基频曲线,音节的强度和共振峰变化对切分没有贡献。     

Oculomotor programming disturbances in the dementia syndrome

Three types of oculomotor programming disturbances are described in patients with the dementia syndrome. This report describes two of these abnormalities, poorly regulated gaze patterns and a programming type of gaze perseveration. All patients showed poorly regulated gaze patterns in contrast to the normal controls, whereas on the whole only the moderately affected patients showed the programming type of gaze perseveration. The third type of oculomotor programming disturbance is efferent perseveration of gaze (a hypokinetic, "staring" type of gaze pattern) and can be seen with severe dementia. The possible significance of these findings is discussed.