scholarly journals General-Purpose Monitoring during Speech Production

2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (6) ◽  
pp. 1419-1436 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stéphanie Riès ◽  
Niels Janssen ◽  
Stéphane Dufau ◽  
F.-Xavier Alario ◽  
Borís Burle

The concept of “monitoring” refers to our ability to control our actions on-line. Monitoring involved in speech production is often described in psycholinguistic models as an inherent part of the language system. We probed the specificity of speech monitoring in two psycholinguistic experiments where electroencephalographic activities were recorded. Our focus was on a component previously reported in nonlinguistic manual tasks and interpreted as a marker of monitoring processes. The error negativity (Ne, or error-related negativity), thought to originate in medial frontal areas, peaks shortly after erroneous responses. A component of seemingly comparable properties has been reported, after errors, in tasks requiring access to linguistic knowledge (e.g., speech production), compatible with a generic error-detection process. However, in contrast to its original name, advanced processing methods later revealed that this component is also present after correct responses in visuomotor tasks. Here, we reported the observation of the same negativity after correct responses across output modalities (manual and vocal responses). This indicates that, in language production too, the Ne reflects on-line response monitoring rather than error detection specifically. Furthermore, the temporal properties of the Ne suggest that this monitoring mechanism is engaged before any auditory feedback. The convergence of our findings with those obtained with nonlinguistic tasks suggests that at least part of the monitoring involved in speech production is subtended by a general-purpose mechanism.

1991 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 258-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beverly Wulfeck ◽  
Elizabeth Bates

We investigated the effect of morphosyntactic violation type on accuracy and processing time in Broca's aphasics engaged in an on-line error detection task. Five agrammatic Broca's aphasic subjects and 15 age-matched control subjects performed grammaticality judgments on auditorily presented grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. Both judgment accuracy and decision time were measured, so that the data revealed not only whether aphasics detected violations, but when they noticed them. The ungrammatical sentences were created by changing quantifiers and auxiliary verbs in one of two ways: substituting one quantifier or auxiliary for another to create agreement errors, or moving the quantifier or auxiliary “downstream” from its proper site to create word order errors. Also, the position of the violation in the sentence (early versus late) as well as the distance relationships among sentence elements involved in the violation (local versus global) were manipulated. Results suggest that aphasic subjects retain some sensitivity to grammaticality, knowledge that they are able to use “online.” Performance was also affected by type of violation. Aphasic subjects were less sensitive to agreement violations than they were to violations created by moving the same elements to an illegal position—and this tended to be reflected in decision times as well as accuracy. These results support two conclusions. First, although the performance of aphasic subjects was degraded relative to control subjects, the findings of overall grammaticality sensitivity and relatively rapid decision times suggest that the locus of grammatical impairment in these patients has more to do with the accessing of linguistic information than with loss of linguistic knowledge. Second, the difference between agreement and movement violations provides further evidence that morphological marking is relatively vulnerable in aphasia, compared with the principles that govern word and morpheme ordering.


2001 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 219-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Q. Huang ◽  
B. Shen ◽  
K. L. Mak

TELD stands for “Teaching by Examples and Learning by Doing.” It is an on-line courseware engine over the World Wide Web. There are four folds of meanings in TELD. First, TELD represents a teaching and learning method that unifies a number of contemporary methods such as Problem-Based Learning (PBL) in medical education, Project-Based Learning (PBL) in engineering education, and Case Method (CM) in business education. Second, TELD serves as a Web server for hosting teaching and learning materials especially based on the TELD method. A variety of on-line facilities are provided for editing and uploading course materials such as syllabus, schedule, curriculum, examples of case study, exercises of mini-project, formative and summative assessments, etc. Third, TELD is a courseware search engine where educators are able to register their course materials and search for materials suitable for a particular course. In contrast with general-purpose search engines, TELD is set up for the special purpose of education. Therefore, the time and efforts spent on surfing are expected to be reduced dramatically. Finally, TELD is an on-line virtual classroom for electronic delivery of electronic curriculum materials. In addition to providing the lecture notes, TELD not only provides discussion questions for conducting in-class discussions and homework as formative assessment but also provides facilities for students to plan and submit their group work. This article presents an overview of the TELD courseware engine together with its background and underlying philosophy.


2012 ◽  
Vol 23 (12) ◽  
pp. 1455-1460 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Legault ◽  
Timour Al-Khindi ◽  
Michael Inzlicht

Self-affirmation produces large effects: Even a simple reminder of one’s core values reduces defensiveness against threatening information. But how, exactly, does self-affirmation work? We explored this question by examining the impact of self-affirmation on neurophysiological responses to threatening events. We hypothesized that because self-affirmation increases openness to threat and enhances approachability of unfavorable feedback, it should augment attention and emotional receptivity to performance errors. We further hypothesized that this augmentation could be assessed directly, at the level of the brain. We measured self-affirmed and nonaffirmed participants’ electrophysiological responses to making errors on a task. As we anticipated, self-affirmation elicited greater error responsiveness than did nonaffirmation, as indexed by the error-related negativity, a neural signal of error monitoring. Self-affirmed participants also performed better on the task than did nonaffirmed participants. We offer novel brain evidence that self-affirmation increases openness to threat and discuss the role of error detection in the link between self-affirmation and performance.


1994 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 749-761 ◽  
Author(s):  
I. Leudar ◽  
P. Thomas ◽  
M. Johnston

SynopsisThis paper reports results of a study on self-monitoring in speech production. Thirty schizophrenics, varying in verbal hallucination and in negative symptoms status, and 17 controls were tested on the reporter test. The position of interruptions of the speech-flow to repair errors was used to indicate whether the detection of the errors was through monitoring of internal phonetic plans or through external acoustic feedback. We have found that the internal error detection was twice as frequent in controls as in schizophrenics. The relevance of this finding to Frith's (1992) model of schizophrenia is discussed. Our conclusion is that the problem with internal monitoring of phonetic plans is common to all schizophrenics, and not just to those with verbal hallucinations.


1998 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 499-511 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter F. MacNeilage

The species-specific organizational property of speech is a continual mouth open-close alternation, the two phases of which are subject to continual articulatory modulation. The cycle constitutes the syllable, and the open and closed phases are segments – vowels and consonants, respectively. The fact that segmental serial ordering errors in normal adults obey syllable structure constraints suggests that syllabic “frames” and segmental “content” elements are separately controlled in the speech production process. The frames may derive from cycles of mandibular oscillation present in humans from babbling onset, which are responsible for the open-close alternation. These communication- related frames perhaps first evolved when the ingestion-related cyclicities of mandibular oscillation (associated with mastication [chewing] sucking and licking) took on communicative significance as lipsmacks, tonguesmacks, and teeth chatters – displays that are prominent in many nonhuman primates. The new role of Broca's area and its surround in human vocal communication may have derived from its evolutionary history as the main cortical center for the control of ingestive processes. The frame and content components of speech may have subsequently evolved separate realizations within two general purpose primate motor control systems: (1) a motivation-related medial “intrinsic” system, including anterior cingulate cortex and the supplementary motor area, for self-generated behavior, formerly responsible for ancestral vocalization control and now also responsible for frames, and (2) a lateral “extrinsic” system, including Broca's area and surround, and Wernicke's area, specialized for response to external input (and therefore the emergent vocal learning capacity) and more responsible for content.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 96
Author(s):  
Gary Blau ◽  
John DiMino ◽  
Iris Abreu ◽  
Kayla LeLeux-LaBarge

The general purpose of this study was to examine counseling services as a correlate of institutional commitment and related variables over time on a sample of non-urgent undergraduates. Data for non-urgent clients at a University Counseling Center (UCC) were collected using on-line surveys over four time-periods. Within-time correlations generally showed that mental health concerns was negatively related to institutional commitment, while counseling help belief was positively related. Institutional commitment is defined as a student feeling that he or she selected the right institution to attend Using a smaller sample, i.e., n = 15, of complete-data clients matched-over-time, overall level of mental health concerns significantly declined, while institutional commitment significantly increased. Counseling help belief decreased from Time 1 to Time 2 but then increased over time. Scientifically demonstrating to higher-level University administration that counseling over time can positively influence undergraduates’ institutional commitment can help the UCC to increase its allocation of university-based resources to keep pace with non-urgent client demands.


NeuroImage ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 126 ◽  
pp. 96-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanna S. Gauvin ◽  
Wouter De Baene ◽  
Marcel Brass ◽  
Robert J. Hartsuiker

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document