Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research最新文献

Purpose: A relevant aspect of listening is the effort required during speech processing, which can be assessed by pupillometry. Here, we assessed the pupil dilation response of normal-hearing (NH) and hard of hearing (HH) individuals during listening to clear sentences and masked or degraded sentences. We combined this assessment with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural correlates of the pupil dilation response.

Method: Seventeen NH participants (M_age = 46 years) were compared to 17 HH participants (M_age = 45 years) who were individually matched in age and educational level. Participants repeated sentences that were presented clearly, that were distorted, or that were masked. The sentence intelligibility level of masked and distorted sentences was 50% correct. Silent baseline trials were presented as well. Performance measures, pupil dilation responses, and fMRI data were acquired.

Results: HH individuals had overall poorer speech reception than the NH participants, but not for noise-vocoded speech. In addition, an interaction effect was observed with smaller pupil dilation responses in HH than in NH listeners for the degraded speech conditions. Hearing impairment was associated with higher activation across conditions in the left superior temporal gyrus, as compared to the silent baseline. However, the region of interest analysis indicated lower activation during degraded speech relative to clear speech in bilateral frontal regions and the insular cortex, for HH compared to NH listeners. Hearing impairment was also associated with a weaker relation between the pupil response and activation in the right inferior frontal gyrus. Overall, degraded speech evoked higher frontal activation than clear speech.

Conclusion: Brain areas associated with attentional and cognitive-control processes may be increasingly recruited when speech is degraded and are related to the pupil dilation response, but this relationship is weaker in HH listeners.

Supplemental material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.27162135.

Purpose: This study investigated articulatory patterns for American English /ɹ/ in children with and without a history of residual speech sound disorder (RSSD). It was hypothesized that children without RSSD would favor bunched tongue shapes, similar to American adults reported in previous literature. Based on clinical cueing practices, it was hypothesized that children with RSSD might produce retroflex tongue shape patterns at a higher relative rate. Finally, it was hypothesized that, among children who use a mixture of bunched and retroflex shapes, phonetic context would impact tongue shape as reported in the adult literature.

Method: These hypotheses were tested using ultrasound data from a stimulability task eliciting /ɹ/ in syllabic, postvocalic, and onset contexts. Participants were two groups of children/adolescents aged 9-15 years: 36 with RSSD who completed a study of ultrasound biofeedback treatment and 33 with no history of RSSD. Tongue shapes were qualitatively coded as bunched or retroflex using a flowchart from previous research.

Results: Children with no history of RSSD were found to use bunched-only tongue shape patterns at a rate higher than adults, but those who used a mixture of shapes for /ɹ/ followed the expected phonetic contextual patterning. Children with RSSD were found to use retroflex-only patterns at a substantially higher rate than adults, and those using a mixture of shapes did not exhibit the expected patterning by phonetic context.

Conclusions: These findings suggest that clients receiving ultrasound biofeedback treatment for /ɹ/ may be most responsive to clinician cueing of retroflex shapes, at least early on. However, retroflex-only cueing may be a limiting and insufficient strategy, particularly in light of our finding of a lack of typical variation across phonetic contexts in children with remediated /ɹ/. Future research should more specifically track cueing strategies to better understand the relationship between clinician cues, tongue shapes, and generalization across a range of contexts.

Supplemental material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.26801050.

Purpose: This work introduces updated transcripts, disfluency annotations, and word timings for FluencyBank, which we refer to as FluencyBank Timestamped. This data set will enable the thorough analysis of how speech processing models (such as speech recognition and disfluency detection models) perform when evaluated with typical speech versus speech from people who stutter (PWS).

Method: We update the FluencyBank data set, which includes audio recordings from adults who stutter, to explore the robustness of speech processing models. Our update (semi-automated with manual review) includes new transcripts with timestamps and disfluency labels corresponding to each token in the transcript. Our disfluency labels capture typical disfluencies (filled pauses, repetitions, revisions, and partial words), and we explore how speech model performance compares for Switchboard (typical speech) and FluencyBank Timestamped. We present benchmarks for three speech tasks: intended speech recognition, text-based disfluency detection, and audio-based disfluency detection. For the first task, we evaluate how well Whisper performs for intended speech recognition (i.e., transcribing speech without disfluencies). For the next tasks, we evaluate how well a Bidirectional Embedding Representations from Transformers (BERT) text-based model and a Whisper audio-based model perform for disfluency detection. We select these models, BERT and Whisper, as they have shown high accuracies on a broad range of tasks in their language and audio domains, respectively.

Results: For the transcription task, we calculate an intended speech word error rate (isWER) between the model's output and the speaker's intended speech (i.e., speech without disfluencies). We find isWER is comparable between Switchboard and FluencyBank Timestamped, but that Whisper transcribes filled pauses and partial words at higher rates in the latter data set. Within FluencyBank Timestamped, isWER increases with stuttering severity. For the disfluency detection tasks, we find the models detect filled pauses, revisions, and partial words relatively well in FluencyBank Timestamped, but performance drops substantially for repetitions because the models are unable to generalize to the different types of repetitions (e.g., multiple repetitions and sound repetitions) from PWS. We hope that FluencyBank Timestamped will allow researchers to explore closing performance gaps between typical speech and speech from PWS.

Conclusions: Our analysis shows that there are gaps in speech recognition and disfluency detection performance between typical speech and speech from PWS. We hope that FluencyBank Timestamped will contribute to more advancements in training robust speech processing models.

Purpose: Developmental language disorder (DLD) is a multifaceted disorder. Recently, interest has grown in prosodic aspects of DLD, but most investigations of possible prosodic causes focus on speech perception tasks. Here, we focus on speech production from a speech amplitude envelope (AE) perspective. Perceptual studies have indicated a role for difficulties in AE processing in DLD related to sensory/neural processing of prosody. We explore possible matching AE difficulties in production.

Method: Fifty-seven children with and without DLD completed a computerized imitation task, copying aloud 30 familiar targets such as "alligator." Children with DLD (n = 20) were compared with typically developing children (age-matched controls [AMC], n = 21) and younger language controls (YLC, n = 16). Similarity of the child's productions to the target in terms of the continuous AE and pitch contour was computed using two similarity metrics, correlation, and mutual information. Both the speech AE and the pitch contour contain important information about stress patterning and intonational information over time.

Results: Children with DLD showed significantly reduced imitation for both the AE and pitch contour metrics compared to AMC children. The opportunity to repeat the targets had no impact on performance for any group. Word length effects were similar across groups.

Conclusions: The spoken production of multisyllabic words by children with DLD is atypical regarding both the AE and the pitch contour. This is consistent with a theoretical explanation of DLD based on impaired sensory/neural processing of low-frequency (slow) amplitude and frequency modulations, as predicted by the temporal sampling theory.

Supplemental material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.27165690.

Purpose: Both fictional oral narrative and expository oral discourse skills are critical language competencies that support children's academic success. Few studies, however, have examined African American children's microstructure performance across these genres. To address this gap in the literature, the study compared African American children's microstructure productivity and complexity across three discourse contexts: fictional narratives, informational discourse, and procedural discourse. The study also examined whether there were age-related differences in microstructure performance by discourse type.

Method: Participants were 130 typically developing African American children, aged 59-95 months old, enrolled in kindergarten through second grades in a Midwestern U.S. public school district. Wordless children's books were used to elicit fictional narratives, informational, and procedural discourse. Indicators of microstructure performance included measures of productivity (i.e., number of total words and number of different words) and complexity (i.e., mean length of communication unit and complex syntax rate). The effects of genre and age on microstructure performance were assessed using linear mixed-effects regression models.

Results: Children produced longer discourse and used a greater diversity of words for their fictional stories compared to their informational or procedural discourse. Grammatical complexity was greater for fictional narratives and procedural discourse than informational discourse. Results showed greater productivity and complexity among older children compared to younger children, particularly for fictional and informational discourse.

Conclusions: African American children exhibit variation in their microstructure performance by discourse context and age. Understanding this variation is key to providing African American children with support to maximize their oral language competencies.

Purpose: The aim of this study was to decode intended and overt speech from neuromagnetic signals while the participants performed spontaneous overt speech tasks without cues or prompts (stimuli).

Method: Magnetoencephalography (MEG), a noninvasive neuroimaging technique, was used to collect neural signals from seven healthy adult English speakers performing spontaneous, overt speech tasks. The participants randomly spoke the words yes or no at a self-paced rate without cues. Two machine learning models, namely, linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D CNN), were employed to classify the two words from the recorded MEG signals.

Results: LDA and 1D CNN achieved average decoding accuracies of 79.02% and 90.40%, respectively, in decoding overt speech, significantly surpassing the chance level (50%). The accuracy for decoding intended speech was 67.19% using 1D CNN.

Conclusions: This study showcases the possibility of decoding spontaneous overt and intended speech directly from neural signals in the absence of perceptual interference. We believe that these findings make a steady step toward the future spontaneous speech-based brain-computer interface.

Purpose: This study investigated conflict adaptation in aphasia, specifically whether upregulating cognitive control improves sentence comprehension.

Method: Four individuals with mild aphasia completed four eye tracking sessions with interleaved auditory Stroop and sentence-to-picture matching trials (critical and filler sentences). Auditory Stroop congruency (congruent/incongruent across a male/female voice saying "boy"/"girl") was crossed with sentence congruency (syntactically correct sentences that are semantically plausible/implausible), resulting in four experimental conditions (congruent auditory Stroop followed by incongruent sentence [CI], incongruent auditory Stroop followed by incongruent sentence [II], congruent auditory Stroop followed by congruent sentence [CC], and incongruent auditory Stroop followed by congruent sentence [IC]). Critical sentences were always preceded by auditory Stroop trials. At the end of each session, a five-item questionnaire was administered to assess overall well-being and fatigue. We conducted individual-level mixed-effects regressions on reaction times and growth curve analyses on the proportion of eye fixations to target pictures during incongruent sentences.

Results: One participant showed conflict adaptation indicated by faster reaction times on active sentences and more rapid growth in fixations to target pictures on passive sentences in the II condition compared to the CI condition. Incongruent auditory Stroop also modulated active-sentence processing in an additional participant, as indicated by eye movements.

Conclusions: This is the first study to observe conflict adaptation in sentence comprehension in people with aphasia. The extent of adaptation varied across individuals. Eye tracking revealed subtler effects than overt behavioral measures. The results extend the study of conflict adaptation beyond neurotypical adults and suggest that upregulating cognitive control may be a potential treatment avenue for some individuals with aphasia.

Supplemental material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.27056149.

Purpose: When vowel formants are externally perturbed, speakers change their production to oppose that perturbation both during the ongoing production (compensation) and in future productions (adaptation). To date, attempts to explain the large variability across individuals in these responses have focused on trait-based characteristics such as auditory acuity, but evidence from other motor domains suggests that attention may modulate the motor response to sensory perturbations. Here, we test the extent to which divided attention impacts sensorimotor control for supralaryngeal articulation.

Method: Neurobiologically healthy speakers were exposed to random (Experiment 1) or consistent (Experiment 2) real-time auditory perturbation of vowel formants to measure online compensation and trial-to-trial adaptation, respectively. In both experiments, participants completed two conditions: one with a simultaneous visual distractor task to divide attention and one without this secondary task.

Results: Divided visual attention slightly reduced online compensation, but only starting > 300 ms after vowel onset, well beyond the typical duration of vowels in speech. Divided attention had no effect on adaptation.

Conclusions: The results from both experiments suggest that the use of sensory feedback in typical speech motor control is a largely automatic process unaffected by divided visual attention, suggesting that the source of cross-speaker variability in response to formant perturbations likely lies within the speech production system rather than in higher-level cognitive processes. Methodologically, these results suggest that compensation for formant perturbations should be measured prior to 300 ms after vowel onset to avoid any potential impact of attention or other higher-order cognitive factors.

Purpose: Individuals with proximal 16p11.2 copy number variants (CNVs), either deletions (16p11.2DS) or duplications (16p11.2Dup), are predisposed to neurodevelopmental difficulties and disorders, such as language disorders, intellectual disability, and autism spectrum disorder. The purpose of the current study was to characterize language profiles of school-age children with proximal 16p11.2 CNVs, in relation to the normative sample and unaffected siblings of children with 16p11.2DS.

Method: Standardized language tests were conducted in 33 school-age children with BP4-BP5 16p11.2 CNVs and eight unaffected siblings of children with 16p11.2DS to evaluate language production and comprehension skills across various language domains. A standardized intelligence test was also administered, and parents completed a standardized questionnaire to assess autistic traits. Language profiles were compared across 16p11.2 CNVs and intrafamilial pairs. The influence of nonverbal intelligence and autistic traits on language outcomes was investigated.

Results: No significant differences were found between children with 16p11.2DS and those with 16p11.2Dup, although both groups exhibited significantly poorer language skills compared to the normative sample and unaffected siblings of children with 16p11.2DS. Severe language deficits were identified in 70% of individuals with 16p11.2 CNVs across all language subdomains, with significantly better receptive vocabulary skills than overall receptive language abilities. In children with 16p11.2DS, expressive language deficits were more pronounced than receptive deficits. In contrast, only in children with 16p11.2Dup did nonverbal intelligence influence their language outcomes.

Conclusions: The current study contributes to the deeper understanding of language profiles in 16p11.2 CNVs in a clinically ascertained cohort, indicating generalized deficits across multiple language domains, rather than a syndrome-specific pattern targeting specific subdomains. The findings underscore the importance of early diagnosis, targeted therapy, and monitoring of language skills in children with 16p11.2 CNVs.

Supplemental material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.27228702.

Notice of retraction: https://doi.org/10.1044/2024_Nov2024ASHA.

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the relationship between oral and written language skills in narrative production among Arabic-speaking children, focusing on cognitive and linguistic abilities. It examines the differences in narrative parameters between oral and written narratives and explores the associations between these parameters and cognitive and linguistic skills.

Method: The research involved 237 sixth-grade Arabic-speaking students from low-socioeconomic status schools in Israel. Each participant was instructed to orally tell a narrative and to write another narrative based on two sets of six sequential pictures. Various narrative features were analyzed, including word count for length, type-token ratio (TTR) for lexical diversity, mean length of utterance (MLU) for morphosyntax, and number of episodes for macrostructure. Cognitive linguistic measures, including Raven's Progressive Matrices, reading comprehension (RC), and morphological awareness (MA) were also assessed.

Results: The study found significant differences between oral and written narratives regarding lexical diversity and macrostructure. Participants exhibited significantly higher TTR in written narratives compared to oral narratives, whereas the number of episodes was significantly higher in oral narratives than in written ones. However, no significant differences were observed in narrative length or MLU. Moreover, the study identified significant predictors for various aspects of written narratives, particularly MA and RC, which significantly predicted TTR, MLU, and macrostructure. Additionally, the inclusion of word count in oral narratives significantly enhanced the explained variance for narrative length and macrostructure in written language.

Conclusions: The results highlight the importance of the oral-written interface in both micro- and macrostructure representations in both oral and written modalities. They suggest that cognitive and linguistic skills, such as MA and RC, play a crucial role in narrative production. The findings have implications for educational practices and literacy outcomes in the Arab world, enhancing the understanding of the challenges and strategies involved in written language production among Arabic-speaking children.