Relative Weights of Temporal Envelope Cues in Different Frequency Regions for Mandarin Vowel, Consonant, and Lexical Tone Recognition

Objectives: Mandarin-speaking users of cochlear implants (CI) perform poorer than their English counterpart. This may be because present CI speech coding schemes are largely based on English. This study aims to evaluate the relative contributions of temporal envelope (E) cues to Mandarin phoneme (including vowel, and consonant) and lexical tone recognition to provide information for speech coding schemes specific to Mandarin.Design: Eleven normal hearing subjects were studied using acoustic temporal E cues that were extracted from 30 continuous frequency bands between 80 and 7,562 Hz using the Hilbert transform and divided into five frequency regions. Percent-correct recognition scores were obtained with acoustic E cues presented in three, four, and five frequency regions and their relative weights calculated using the least-square approach.Results: For stimuli with three, four, and five frequency regions, percent-correct scores for vowel recognition using E cues were 50.43–84.82%, 76.27–95.24%, and 96.58%, respectively; for consonant recognition 35.49–63.77%, 67.75–78.87%, and 87.87%; for lexical tone recognition 60.80–97.15%, 73.16–96.87%, and 96.73%. For frequency region 1 to frequency region 5, the mean weights in vowel recognition were 0.17, 0.31, 0.22, 0.18, and 0.12, respectively; in consonant recognition 0.10, 0.16, 0.18, 0.23, and 0.33; in lexical tone recognition 0.38, 0.18, 0.14, 0.16, and 0.14.Conclusion: Regions that contributed most for vowel recognition was Region 2 (502–1,022 Hz) that contains first formant (F1) information; Region 5 (3,856–7,562 Hz) contributed most to consonant recognition; Region 1 (80–502 Hz) that contains fundamental frequency (F0) information contributed most to lexical tone recognition.

Examining the Efficacy and Results of a Short-Form Alzheimer's Survey With College Students

College students are important stakeholders in addressing the significant costs of Alzheimer’s disease in their future roles as caretakers, health care consumers, taxpayers, and as individuals in the workforce whose careers may interact with and impact those with Alzheimer’s and their caregivers. To assess their knowledge of Alzheimer’s, a 10-item True/False on-line quiz was presented to 912 students in Introductory Psychology classes. Participants were 61% white, 13% Asian/Asian American, and 10% Latinx, with 14% reporting other racial and ethnic groups, including that of mixed heritage; 59% of the sample self-reported as female. The quiz was counterbalanced such that items appearing in one format (e.g., True) appeared in the other format (e.g., False) across the two forms of the quiz. A significant difference was found for percent correct in Form A (61.4%) versus Form B (59.3%). In order to prompt participants to consider the ways the disease may impact their own lives, additional questions examined students’ own experience with Alzheimer’s, their interest and willingness to take action towards supporting Alzheimer’s research, and their perceptions about how Alzheimer’s would impact their lives personally, financially, and in their career pursuits. The research extends the findings of earlier research on student knowledge of Alzheimer’s (e.g., Bailey, 2000; Eshbaugh, 2014) by allowing the results to be broken down by gender, race/ethnicity, and student major. It also expands upon those findings by identifying how college students project the societal effects and costs of Alzheimer’s to their own lives and livelihoods.

The effortful and invisible cost of repairing speech misperceptions by individuals who use cochlear implants

PurposeSpeech recognition percent-correct scores fail to capture the effort of mentally repairing the perception of speech that was initially misheard. This study includes two experiments to simulate and measure the effort of this experience of mental repair, from the perspective of both listener and talker.MethodsCochlear implant (CI) listeners heard and repeated sentences where single words were distorted or masked by noise, but recoverable based on later context – a signature of mental repair. Changes in pupil dilation were tracked as an index of effort and time-locked with specific landmarks during perception. Later, audio recordings of the participants’ responses were played for outside observers who judged whether they thought the CI user mentally repaired a word.ResultsEffort significantly increases when a listener needs to repair a misperceived word, even if the verbal response is ultimately correct. That increased effort lasts longer for CI users than for listeners with normal hearing. There was no success in detecting that effort by nearly 200 external observers including audiologists and others who profess to have experience and skill in conversing with people who have hearing loss. Mental repair of words in a sentence were accompanied by greater prevalence of errors elsewhere in the same sentence, suggesting that effort spreads to consume resources across time. ConclusionsListening effort is better explained by the mental repair and reconstruction of words rather than the appearance of correct or incorrect perception. Linguistic coherence drives effort more heavily than the mere presence of mistakes, highlighting the importance of effort that cannot be tracked with individual words or digits. However, an external observer is not able to reliably detect that extra effort in the listener’s voice.

Beyond Percent Correct: Measuring Change in Individual Picture Naming Ability

Purpose: Meaningful changes in picture naming responses may be obscured when measuring accuracy instead of quality. A statistic that incorporates information about the severity and nature of impairments may be more sensitive to the effects of treatment. Method: We analyzed data from repeated administrations of a naming test to 72 participants with stroke aphasia in a clinical trial for anomia therapy. Participants were divided into two groups for analysis to demonstrate replicability. We assessed reliability among response type scores from five raters. We then derived four summary statistics of naming ability and their changes over time for each participant: (a) the standard accuracy measure, (b) an accuracy measure adjusted for item difficulty, (c) an accuracy measure adjusted for item difficulty for specific response types, and (d) a distance measure adjusted for item difficulty for specific response types. While accuracy measures address the likelihood of a correct response, the distance measure reflects that different response types range in their similarity to the target. Model fit was assessed. The frequency of significant improvements and the average magnitude of improvements for each summary statistic were compared between treatment groups and a control group. Effect sizes for each model-based statistic were compared with the effect size for the standard accuracy measure. Results: Interrater and intrarater reliability were near perfect, on average, though compromised somewhat by phonological-level errors. The effects of treatment were more evident, in terms of both frequency and magnitude, when using the distance measure versus the other accuracy statistics. Conclusions: Consideration of item difficulty and response types revealed additional effects of treatment on naming scores beyond those observed for the standard accuracy measure. The results support theories that assume naming ability is decomposable into subabilities rather than being monolithic, suggesting new opportunities for measuring treatment outcomes. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.17019515

Future-relevant memories are not selectively strengthened during sleep

Overnight consolidation processes are thought to operate in a selective manner, such that important (i.e. future-relevant) memories are strengthened ahead of irrelevant information. Using an online protocol, we sought to replicate the seminal finding that the memory benefits of sleep are enhanced when people expect a future test [Wilhelm et al., 2011]. Participants memorised verbal paired associates to a criterion of 60 percent (Experiment 1) or 40 percent correct (Experiment 2) before a 12-hour delay containing overnight sleep (sleep group) or daytime wakefulness (wake group). Critically, half of the participants were informed that they would be tested again the following day, whereas the other half were told that they would carry out a different set of tasks. We observed a robust memory benefit of overnight consolidation, with the sleep group outperforming the wake group in both experiments. However, knowledge of an upcoming test had no impact on sleep-associated consolidation in either experiment, suggesting that overnight memory processes were not enhanced for future-relevant information. These findings, together with other failed replication attempts, show that sleep does not provide selective support to memories that are deemed relevant for the future.

A Randomized Controlled Trial of the Effects of Group Conversation Treatment on Monologic Discourse in Aphasia

Purpose Evidence has shown that group conversation treatment may improve communication and reduce social isolation for people with aphasia. However, little is known about the impact of conversation group treatment on measures of discourse. This project explored the impact of conversation treatment on measures of monologic discourse. Method In this randomized controlled trial, 48 participants with chronic aphasia were randomly assigned to dyadic, large group, or control conditions. Conversation group treatment was provided for 1 hr, twice per week, for 10 weeks. Discourse samples were collected and coded at pretreatment, posttreatment, and 6-week maintenance. There were three narrative tasks: (a) Comprehensive Aphasia Test (CAT) picture description, (b) Cat Rescue Picture, and (c) Cinderella retell. All narratives were coded using the percent correct information units (percent CIUs), the CAT standardized narrative analysis method, and the complete utterance (CU) method. Results No significant changes were observed on percent CIU, which was the primary outcome measure. The treated groups demonstrated improvement on aspects of the CU method following treatment, whereas the control group did not. Significant changes were observed for other CIU measures and the CAT standardized narrative analysis in both the treated and control groups. Conclusions The results suggest that the CU measures were more sensitive to the effects of conversation treatment in monologic discourse compared to CIU and CAT measures. Changes were more common in absolute rather than relative values, suggesting that conversation treatment impacts the overall amount of language produced rather than efficiency of production.

Humans monitor learning progress in curiosity-driven exploration

Curiosity-driven learning is foundational to human cognition. By enabling humans to autonomously decide when and what to learn, curiosity has been argued to be crucial for self-organizing temporally extended learning curricula. However, the mechanisms driving people to set intrinsic goals, when they are free to explore multiple learning activities, are still poorly understood. Computational theories propose different heuristics, including competence measures (e.g., percent correct) and learning progress, that could be used as intrinsic utility functions to efficiently organize exploration. Such intrinsic utilities constitute computationally cheap but smart heuristics to prevent people from laboring in vain on unlearnable activities, while still motivating them to self-challenge on difficult learnable activities. Here, we provide empirical evidence for these ideas by means of a free-choice experimental paradigm and computational modeling. We show that while humans rely on competence information to avoid easy tasks, models that include a learning-progress component provide the best fit to task selection data. These results bridge the research in artificial and biological curiosity, reveal strategies that are used by humans but have not been considered in computational research, and introduce tools for probing how humans become intrinsically motivated to learn and acquire interests and skills on extended time scales.

A Comparison Between the Korean Digits-in-Noise Test and the Korean Speech Perception-in-Noise Test in Normal-Hearing and Hearing-Impaired Listeners

Background and Objectives: The purpose of the present study was to validate the performance and diagnostic efficacy of the Korean digits-in-noise (K-DIN) test in comparison to the Korean speech perception-in-noise (K-SPIN) test, which is the representative speech-in-noise test in clinical practice.Subjects and Methods: Twenty-seven subjects (15 normal-hearing and 12 hearing-impaired listeners) participated. The recorded Korean 0-9 digits were used to form quasirandom digit triplets; 50 target digit triplets were presented at the most comfortable level of each subject while presenting speech-shaped background noise at various levels of signal-to-noise ratios (-12.5, -10, -5, or +5 dB). Subjects were then instructed to listen to both target and noise masker unilaterally and bilaterally through a headphone. K-SPIN test was also conducted using the same procedure as the K-DIN. After calculating their percent correct responses, K-DIN and K-SPIN results were compared using a Pearson-correlation test.Results: Results showed a statistically significant correlation between K-DIN and K-SPIN in all hearing conditions (left: r=0.814, p<0.001; right: r=0.788, p<0.001; bilateral: r=0.727, p<0.001). Moreover, the K-DIN test achieved better testing efficacy, shorter average listening time (5 min vs. 30 min), and easier performance of task according to participants’ qualitative reports than the K-SPIN test.Conclusions: In this study, the Korean version of digit triplet test was validated in both normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners. The findings suggest that the K-DIN test can be used as a simple and time-efficient hearing-in-noise test in audiology clinics in Korea.

Assessing Language in Unstructured Conversation in People With Aphasia: Methods, Psychometric Integrity, Normative Data, and Comparison to a Structured Narrative Task

Purpose This study evaluated interrater reliability (IRR) and test–retest stability (TRTS) of seven linguistic measures (percent correct information units, relevance, subject–verb–[object], complete utterance, grammaticality, referential cohesion, global coherence), and communicative success in unstructured conversation and in a story narrative monologue (SNM) in persons with aphasia (PWAs) and matched participants without aphasia (M-PWoAs). Furthermore, the relationship of language in unstructured conversation and SNM was investigated for these measures. Methods Twenty PWAs and 20 M-PWoAs participated in two unstructured conversations on different days with different speech-language pathologists trained as social conversation partners. An 8- to 12-min segment of each conversation was analyzed. Additionally, a wordless picture book was used to elicit an SNM sample at each visit. Correlational analyses were conducted to address the primary research questions. Normative range and minimal detectable change data were also calculated for the measures in both conditions. Results IRR and TRTS were moderate to good for parametric measures and moderate to excellent for nonparametric measures for both groups, except for TRTS for referential cohesion for the PWAs in conversation. Furthermore, in PWAs, a strong correlation was demonstrated for three of eight measures across conditions. Moderate or weaker correlations were demonstrated for three of eight measures, and correlations for two of eight measures were not significant. An ancillary finding was no significant differences occurred for sample-to-sample variability between the two conditions for any measure. Conclusions This study replicates previous research demonstrating the feasibility to reliably measure language in unstructured conversation in PWAs. Furthermore, this study provides preliminary evidence that language production varies for some measures between unstructured conversation and SNM, contributing to a literature base that demonstrates language variation between different types of monologue. Thus, these findings suggest that inclusion of the specific types of discourse of interest to the PWA may be important for comprehensive assessment of aphasia. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.16569360

Curriculum Transition From Lecture-Based to Team-Based Learning is Associated With Improved Performance on Internal Medicine In-Training Examination

ABSTRACT Background Team-based learning (TBL) is an alternative to traditional lectures in graduate medical education, but evidence is scarce regarding its impact on knowledge acquisition and standardized testing performance. Objective We examined the association between resident performance on the Internal Medicine In-Training Examination (IM-ITE) and these 2 educational methods. Methods In 2013, the internal medicine residency program at Albany Medical College transitioned from a lecture-based curriculum to TBL. Residents enrolled in academic years 2011–2012 and 2012–2013 comprised the lecture cohort, and those enrolled in 2015–2016 and 2016–2017 the TBL cohort. Covariates included the type of medical school attended, gender, and United States Medical Licensing Examination Step 2 Clinical Knowledge scores. We performed univariate analysis and multivariable regression to determine the association between covariates and ITE scores. Results Of 120 residents, 60 were in the lecture cohort and 60 in the TBL cohort. The IM-ITE percent correct scores were higher with TBL than lecture (PGY-1 61.0% vs 55.0%, P &lt; .001; PGY-2 69.0% vs 59.7%, P &lt; .001; PGY-3 73.2% vs 61.7%, P &lt; .001). In a multivariable regression analysis of 3 PGYs combined, the transition from lecture to TBL resulted in an increase in IM-ITE Z-score of 0.415 (P &lt; .001), equivalent to 0.415 SD, when including the effects of all covariates. Conclusions Compared to a lecture-based curriculum, TBL was associated with improved resident medical knowledge acquisition as evidenced by higher IM-ITE scores.