Relationship between inner dialog and ideas of reference and the mediating role of dissociation

Recent lines of research have begun to concentrate on internal dialogue and its relationship to a diversity of psychopathological phenomena present in psychotic disorders. This study was intended as a preliminary exploration of the relationship of internal dialogue, dissociation and ideas of reference. To do this, a sample of 318 students filled in an internal dialogue scale (the VISQ, McCarthy‐Jones & Fernyhough), one for dissociation (DES‐II, Carlson & Putnam) and another for ideas of reference (REF, Lenzenweger, Bennett & Lilenfeld). The results confirm the hypothesis posed in the sense that internal dialogue was positively associated with dissociation and with ideas of reference. A partial mediation effect of dissociation was also found between inner speech and ideas of reference. Lines of future research this study opens and its possible integration in a model on ideas of reference are discussed.     

Where do dialectal effects on speech processing come from? Evidence from a cross-dialect investigation

Accented speech has been seen as an additional impediment for speech processing; it usually adds linguistic and cognitive load to the listener's task. In the current study we analyse where the processing costs of regional dialects come from, a question that has not been answered yet. We quantify the proficiency of Basque–Spanish bilinguals who have different native dialects of Basque on many dimensions and test for costs at each of three levels of processing–phonemic discrimination, word recognition, and semantic processing. The ability to discriminate a dialect-specific contrast is affected by a bilingual's linguistic background less than lexical access is, and an individual's difficulty in lexical access is correlated with basic discrimination problems. Once lexical access is achieved, dialectal variation has little impact on semantic processing. The results are discussed in terms of the presence or absence of correlations between different processing levels. The implications of the results are considered for how models of spoken word recognition handle dialectal variation.     

The role of vowel formant frequencies and duration in the perception of foreign accent

ABSTRACT

This study used synthesis to manipulate vowel formant frequencies and durations to evaluate their role on foreign accent perception. Formant frequencies and durations for the vowels /æ/, /?/, and /a/ were manipulated with changes toward and away from the mean native English and Spanish-accented values from Sidaras, S. K., Alexander, J. E. D., & Nygaard, L. C. (2009. Perceptual learning of systematic variation in Spanish-accented speech. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 125, 3306–3316). Native listeners rated these stimuli on degree of accentedness and comprehensibility. Gradual changes in formant frequencies from native to non-native values impacted /a/ negatively, /?/ positively, and /æ/ minimally. Effects of vowel duration on either type of ratings were small and restricted to vowel-specific interactions. The current findings suggest that vowel formant frequencies are primary cues to foreign accent. Their influence depends upon whether or not frequencies could reflect alternative vowel categories.     

Do age-related word retrieval difficulties appear (or disappear) in connected speech?

We conducted a comprehensive literature review of studies of word retrieval in connected speech in healthy aging and reviewed relevant aphasia research that could shed light on the aging literature. Four main hypotheses guided the review: (1) Significant retrieval difficulties would lead to reduced output in connected speech. (2) Significant retrieval difficulties would lead to a more limited lexical variety in connected speech. (3) Significant retrieval difficulties would lead to an increase in word substitution errors and in pronoun use as well as to greater dysfluency and hesitation in connected speech. (4) Retrieval difficulties on tests of single-word production would be associated with measures of word retrieval in connected speech. Studies on aging did not confirm these four hypotheses, unlike studies on aphasia that generally did. The review suggests that future research should investigate how context facilitates word production in old age.     

Age-related cognitive decline as a function of daytime testing

The current study investigates the effects of age, cognitive load, optimal time-of-day testing, and irrelevant background noise suppression on mental processing. One hundred and seventy-eight young (M = 22.97 years) and 114 old adults (M = 56.38 years) were assessed for implicit learning and speed of information processing under irrelevant sound interference early during daytime (7AM–2.30PM) or in the afternoons (3PM–midnight). No direct effect of irrelevant speech effect was found on implicit learning. An optimal time of testing per age group was identified according to the ability to suppress irrelevant auditory information. If no semantic meaning was derived from the sound conditions, irrelevant sound was easily inhibited leaving no room for declined cognitive performance. This suggests an intact phonological inhibition in older adults and a further circumvention of the phonological loop. However, when difficulty was increased, a widened performance gap between young and old people could be observed. Education modulated difficult performance irrespective of age. With increasing age, task demand fulfillment becomes a function of a limited time mechanism. If extraneous time is not adapted to cognitive skills and performance, higher order processing cannot be reached, rendering older adults slower than their younger counterparts.     

The effects of meaningful irrelevant speech and road traffic noise on teachers' attention, episodic and semantic memory

The aim of the present experiment was to examine the effects of meaningful irrelevant speech and road traffic noise on attention, episodic and semantic memory, and also to examine whether the noise effects were age-dependent. A total of 96 male and female teachers in the age range of 35-45 and 55-65 years were randomly assigned to a silent or the two noise conditions. Noise effects found in episodic memory were limited to a meaningful text, where cued recall contrary to expectations was equally impaired by the two types of noise. However, meaningful irrelevant speech also deteriorated recognition of the text, whereas road traffic noise caused no decrement. Retrieval from two word fluency tests in semantic memory showed strong effects of noise exposure, one affected by meaningful irrelevant speech and the other by road traffic noise. The results implied that both acoustic variation and the semantic interference could be of importance for noise impairments. The expected age-dependent noise effects did not show up.     

Possible-Word Constraints in Cantonese Speech Segmentation

A Cantonese syllable-spotting experiment was conducted to examine whether the Possible-Word Constraint (PWC), proposed by Norris, McQueen, Cutler, and Butterfield (1997), can apply in Cantonese speech segmentation. In the experiment, listeners were asked to spot out the target Cantonese syllable from a series of nonsense sound strings. Results suggested that listeners found it more difficult to spot out the target syllable [kDm1] in the nonsense sound strings that attached with a single consonant [tkDm1] than in the nonsense sound strings that attached either with a vowel [a:kDm1] or a pseudo-syllable [khow1kDm1]. Finally, the current set of results further supported that the PWC appears to be a language-universal mechanism in segmenting continuous speech.     

Clinical and anatomical correlates of apraxia of speech

In a previous study (Dronkers, 1996), stroke patients identified as having apraxia of speech (AOS), an articulatory disorder, were found to have damage to the left superior precentral gyrus of the insula (SPGI). The present study sought (1) to characterize the performance of patients with AOS on a classic motor speech evaluation, and (2) to examine whether severity of AOS was influenced by the extent of the lesion. Videotaped speech evaluations of stroke patients with and without AOS were reviewed by two speech-language pathologists and independently scored. Results indicated that patients with AOS made the most errors on tasks requiring the coordination of complex, but not simple, articulatory movements. Patients scored lowest on the repetition of multisyllabic words and sentences that required immediate shifting between place and manner of articulation and rapid coordination of the lips, tongue, velum, and larynx. Last, all patients with AOS had lesions in the SPGI, whereas patients without apraxia of speech did not. Additional involvement of neighboring brain areas was associated with more severe forms of both AOS as well as language deficits, such as aphasia.     

Syllable monitoring in internally and externally generated English words

The ability of English speakers to monitor internally and externally generated words for syllables was investigated in this paper. An internal speech monitoring task required participants to silently generate a carrier word on hearing a semantically related prompt word (e.g., reveal—divulge). These productions were monitored for prespecified target strings that were either a syllable match (e.g., /dai/), a syllable mismatch (e.g., /daiv/), or unrelated (e.g., /hju:/) to the initial syllable of the word. In all three experiments the longer target sequence was monitored for faster. However, this tendency reached significance only when the longer string also matched a syllable in the carrier word. External speech versions of each experiment were run that yielded a similar influence of syllabicity but only when the syllable match string also had a closed structure. It was concluded that any influence of syllabicity found using either task reflected the properties of a shared perception-based monitoring system.     

Probabilistic constraint satisfaction at the lexical/phonetic interface: evidence for gradient effects of within-category VOT on lexical access

Research in speech perception has been dominated by a search for invariant properties of the signal that correlate with lexical and sublexical categories. We argue that this search for invariance has led researchers to ignore the perceptual consequences of systematic variation within such categories and that sensitivity to this variation may provide an important source of information for integrating information over time in speech perception. Data from a study manipulating VOT continua in words using an eye-movement paradigm indicate that lexical access shows graded sensitivity to within-category variation in VOT and that this sensitivity has a duration sufficient to be useful for information integration. These data support a model in which the perceptual system integrates information from multiple sources and from the surrounding temporal context using probabilistic cue-weighting mechanisms.