On French listeners’ ability to use stress during spoken word processing

Previous studies have suggested that French listeners experience difficulties when they have to discriminate between words that differ in stress. A limitation is that these studies used stress patterns that do not respect the rules of stress placement in French. In this study, three stress patterns were tested on bisyllabic words (1) the legal stress pattern in French, namely words that were unstressed compared to words that bore primary stress on their last syllable (/?u?i/-/?u’?i/), (2) an illegal stress location pattern, namely words that bore primary stress on their first syllable compared to words that bore primary stress on their last syllable (/’?u?i/-/?u’?i/) and (3) an illegal pattern that involves an unstressed word, namely words that were unstressed compared to words that bore primary stress on their first syllable (/?u?i/-/’?u?i/). In an ABX task, participants heard three items produced by three different speakers and had to indicate whether X was identical to A or B. The stimuli A and B varied in stress (/?u’?i/-/?u?i/-/?u’?i/), in one phoneme (/?u’?i/-/?u’???/-/?u’?i/) or in both stress and one phoneme (/?u’?i/-/?u???/-/?u’?i/). The results showed that French listeners are fully able to discriminate between two words differing in stress provided that the stress pattern included an unstressed word. More importantly, they suggest that the French listeners’ difficulties mainly reside in locating stress within words.     

Evaluation of an integrated fluency and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy intervention for adolescents and adults who stutter: Participant perspectives

PurposeChildhood-onset stuttering is a neurodevelopmental disorder that may cause pervasive negative consequences for adults who stutter. In addition to significant challenges in personal, social, and emotional domains, stuttering has been shown to impose an economic burden on adults who stutter. Intervention for adults who stutter has historically addressed speech fluency more so than the covert psychosocial aspects of the disorder. There is an identified clinical need for holistic, efficacious, and cost-effective stuttering interventions that meet consumer needs. The purpose of the present study is to evaluate a novel, integrated intervention that combined traditional fluency techniques with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, from the perspective of the adults who stutter who participated in the intervention.MethodTwenty-eight adults who stutter completed the intervention program. Participants were invited to complete an online post-program written survey (including qualitative comments) and a semi-structured interview to explore their evaluations of the program with respect to its authenticity, acceptability, and social validity.ResultsParticipants perceived positive psychosocial changes as a result of the program, and were satisfied with the program overall. Qualitative thematic analyses of the written survey comments and the semi-structured interviews identified two major themes: factors specific to the intervention and factors specific to the therapeutic process. Several important sub-themes were also identified.ConclusionFindings support the authenticity, acceptability, and social validity of an integrated fluency and psychosocial intervention for stuttering. Findings also highlight the need for consideration of the consumer voice in the management of stuttering disorders, in keeping with person-centred care.     

Evidence of Absence: Abstract Metrical Structure in Speech Planning

Rhythmic structure in speech is characterized by sequences of stressed and unstressed syllables. A large body of literature suggests that speakers of English attempt to achieve rhythmic harmony by evenly distributing stressed syllables throughout prosodic phrases. The question remains as to how speakers plan metrical structure during speech production and whether it is planned independently of phonemes. To examine this, we designed a tongue twister task consisting of disyllabic word pairs with overlapping phonological segments and either matching or non-matching metrical structure. Results showed that speakers had more difficulty producing metrically regular word pairs, compared to irregular pairs; that is, word pairs with irregular meter had faster productions and fewer speech errors in this production task. This finding of metrical regularity inhibiting production is inconsistent with an abstract metrical structure that is planned independently of phonemes at the point of phonological encoding.     

Attention allocation in social anxiety during a speech

Cognitive models assume that social anxiety is associated with and maintained by biased information processing, leading to change in attention allocation, which can be measured by examining eye movement. However, little is known about the distribution of attention among positive, neutral and negative stimuli during a social task and the relative importance of positive versus negative biases in social anxiety. In this study, eye movement, subjective state anxiety and psychophysiology of individuals with high trait social anxiety (HSA) and low trait social anxiety (LSA) were measured during a speech task with a pre-recorded audience. The HSA group showed longer total fixation on negative stimuli and shorter total fixation on positive stimuli compared to the LSA group. We observed that the LSA group shifted attention away from negative stimuli, whereas the HSA group showed no differential attention allocation. The total duration of fixation on negative stimuli predicted subjective anxiety ratings. These results point to a negative bias as well as a lack of a positive bias in HSA individuals during social threat.     

Breaking Down the Bilingual Cost in Speech Production

Bilinguals have been shown to perform worse than monolinguals in a variety of verbal tasks. This study investigated this bilingual verbal cost in a large‐scale picture‐naming study conducted in Spanish. We explored how individual characteristics of the participants and the linguistic properties of the words being spoken influence this performance cost. In particular, we focused on the contributions of lexical frequency and phonological similarity across translations. The naming performance of Spanish‐Catalan bilinguals speaking in their dominant and non‐dominant language was compared to that of Spanish monolinguals. Single trial naming latencies were analyzed by means of linear mixed models accounting for individual effects at the participant and item level. While decreasing lexical frequency was shown to increase naming latencies in all groups, this variable by itself did not account for the bilingual cost. In turn, our results showed that the bilingual cost disappeared when naming words with high phonological similarity across translations. In short, our results show that frequency of use can play a role in the emergence of the bilingual cost, but that phonological similarity across translations should be regarded as one of the most important variables that determine the bilingual cost in speech production. Low phonological similarity across translations yields worse performance in bilinguals and promotes the bilingual cost in naming performance. The implications of our results for the effect of phonological similarity across translations within the bilingual speech production system are discussed.     

Play Therapy – respecting the spirit of the child

Play Therapy is an appropriate form of counselling for children; it is based in a therapeutic relationship where communication is developmentally appropriate and easily expressed. Using a variety of methods from non-directional to co-operative play, the therapist acts to affirm, articulate and co-regulate emotional expressions and joins the child in finding meaning, and understanding of the environment. Play Therapy is presented in this paper as an expression of spiritual connection. The relationship of mutual respect and positive expectation between therapist and child allows new understanding to emerge. The interaction between these two areas of knowledge, Play Therapy and children’s spirituality is examined through case study notes and experience of Play Therapy as an early intervention response to children at a time of community disaster. The author is a Clinical Play Therapist as well as a lecturer in children’s spirituality, so this work emphasises the importance of the spiritual nature of the child and the use of a spiritual connection with the therapist for children recovering from psychological distress.     

Pupillometry reveals increased pupil size during indirect request comprehension

Fluctuations in pupil size have been shown to reflect variations in processing demands during lexical and syntactic processing in language comprehension. An issue that has not received attention is whether pupil size also varies due to pragmatic manipulations. In two pupillometry experiments, we investigated whether pupil diameter was sensitive to increased processing demands as a result of comprehending an indirect request versus a direct statement. Adult participants were presented with 120 picture–sentence combinations that could be interpreted either as an indirect request (a picture of a window with the sentence “it's very hot here”) or as a statement (a picture of a window with the sentence “it's very nice here”). Based on the hypothesis that understanding indirect utterances requires additional inferences to be made on the part of the listener, we predicted a larger pupil diameter for indirect requests than statements. The results of both experiments are consistent with this expectation. We suggest that the increase in pupil size reflects additional processing demands for the comprehension of indirect requests as compared to statements. This research demonstrates the usefulness of pupillometry as a tool for experimental research in pragmatics.     

Lessons from the Transition to Relational Teletherapy During COVID-19

When the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic, clinicians were challenged to maintain continuity of care. Teletherapy became the primary means of service delivery for many who had never or only sparingly used it. The Family Institute at Northwestern University, in response to encouraging findings with respect to the effectiveness of teletherapy and recognizing advantages with respect to access to care, launched our teletherapy services in 2018. As a relationship-based organization, we were keen to exploit the opportunity that teletherapy provides to integrate additional members of the client system into the treatment. Over these two plus years, we have learned a great deal. Our learning was greatly accelerated by our transition to a 100% teletherapy practice in the wake of the pandemic. Teletherapy is a different context. Intentionally managing the context’s constraints and exploiting its strengths is key to providing high-quality couple and family therapy. This step is often overlooked or resisted when teletherapy is an occasional add-on to a face-to-face practice.     

Schizotypal traits are not related to multisensory integration or audiovisual speech perception

Multisensory integration, the binding of sensory information from different sensory modalities, may contribute to perceptual symptomatology in schizophrenia, including hallucinations and aberrant speech perception. Differences in multisensory integration and temporal processing, an important component of multisensory integration, are consistently found in schizophrenia. Evidence is emerging that these differences extend across the schizophrenia spectrum, including individuals in the general population with higher schizotypal traits. In the current study, we investigated the relationship between schizotypal traits and perceptual functioning, using audiovisual speech-in-noise, McGurk, and ternary synchrony judgment tasks. We measured schizotypal traits using the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ), hypothesizing that higher scores on Unusual Perceptual Experiences and Odd Speech subscales would be associated with decreased multisensory integration, increased susceptibility to distracting auditory speech, and less precise temporal processing. Surprisingly, these measures were not associated with the predicted subscales, suggesting that these perceptual differences may not be present across the schizophrenia spectrum.     

Le dégoût dans le trouble obsessionnel compulsif,mécanismes, évaluation,implications pour des pistes thérapeutiques

IntroductionAlthough considered a basic emotion, disgust has received little attention from research from the psychology of emotions compared to other emotions such as fear or sadness.Literature findingsMany empirical and experimental data suggest, however, that disgust plays a determining role not only in our ability to adapt to our environment but also in the maintenance and development of certain psychopathological states such as obsessive-compulsive disorders. The purpose of this article is to review the literature on the construct of disgust, including its two basic dimensions of disgust and disgust. A first part will be dedicated to the acquisition of disgust in the framework of evaluative and Pavlovian learning, we will then describe in detail the assessment tools available in the literature allowing to evaluate the different dimensions, then we will address the continuum. Experience of disgust, from normal disgust to pathological disgust, and will particularly target its role in dysfunctional obsessions of contamination and emotional distress.DiscussionIf, from a theoretical point of view, the understanding of the underlying mechanisms of pathological disgust reactions improves, the proposals for treatment to mitigate these reactions are rare. New approaches to care will be described to allow the development of empirically based psychological interventions.ConclusionThe recognition of emotional influences beyond anxiety in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) stems from the fundamental importance of a dimensional approach to psychopathology and support. The accumulated data suggest that the inclusion of disgust in the theoretical models of OCD, in particular those with contamination concern, will thus improve our understanding and treatment of this disorder.