Re-understanding speech understanding: Closing the cohort loop

Human listeners understand spoken language literally as they hear it, reflecting a perceptually seamless process of real-time comprehension of what the speaker is saying. This remarkable experience of immediacy is rooted in the exceptional earliness with which information carried by successive words is integrated into the interpretation of the current utterance. But despite 50 years of research, there has been no accepted mechanistic neurobiological account of the brain systems that support this process. Only recently have scientific tools emerged that allow us to probe the real-time activity of these brain systems, telling us where and when such activity can be detected and what their neurocomputational content might be. The resulting research enables us, first, to reject the historically dominant account of early speech interpretation as a linguistically stratified computational hierarchy, centered around the notion of a phoneme, and based on sequential transitions between successive representational states.

A Survey on The Impact of Early Speech and Vocal Changes on Young Onset Parkinson’s Disease.

Patients with Young Onset Parkinson's Disease may have a long medical journey to receive their diagnosis due to their atypical age. Parkinson's Disease is typically diagnosed in a geriatric population and thus assumed to be a late-onset neurodegenerative disorder. Therefore, when younger people approach clinicians with parkinsonian symptoms, they are typically overlooked as they do not meet the age criteria, and thus the diagnosis may be missed or delayed. In late-onset Parkinson's Disease, a classic primary symptom pertains to voice and speech disorders due to the high prevalence of hypokinetic dysarthria. Thus, a review of speech and voice deficits that are seen prior to or within the time frame of diagnosis can highlight the speech and vocal patterns clinicians may see within a younger population. This could provide an effective tool for clinicians to make a quicker diagnosis for patients and administer medication such as Levodopa without having the patient go through rigorous, time-consuming testing. Furthermore, within neuroscience, little attention is paid to the impact of early speech and vocal changes. Therefore, this study would also like to explore the impact of these changes, highlighting the urge for clinicians not to stigmatise younger patients by age to receive a rapid diagnosis and treatment. This study follows the proceedings of a survey methodology via a formulated questionnaireinserted in a Google Form containing 12 statements, which contained closed-ended questions (Yes/No indicators) and open-ended questions where the participants indicated their answer by filling in a short statement regarding their experience. The statements contained questions about the diagnosis of Parkinson's Disease, the speech and vocal changes experienced, the socio-social effects of the speech and vocal changes on their personal lives and if they found that medication helped their vocal and speech symptoms. The questionnaire yielded a total of 43 participants with young-onset Parkinson's Disease. The results indicated that most of the participants suffered from speech and vocal changes, which resembled the clinical profile of severe hypokinetic dysarthria, typically seen in later stages of Parkinson's Disease in late-onset. In addition, the changes in speech and voice were so impactful that they caused significant distress in the psychosocial domain of their lives. Despite the severity of the speech and vocal changes, most participants struggled to receive a diagnosis, while hardly any received appropriate speech therapy treatment to aid their overall quality of life. Thus, this study concludes that the results of this study are essential to break stigmas and open the conversation in neuroscience and neurology on YOPD. Improvement clinical knowledge of this unique subtype of Parkinson's needs to be stressed amongst clinical practitioners that age of onset does not play a role in managing, treating, and diagnosing Parkinson's Disease.

Relationship between Behavioral Infant Speech Perception and Hearing Age for Children with Hearing Loss

(1) Background: Research has demonstrated that early intervention for children who are hard-of-hearing (CHH) facilitates improved language development. Early speech perception abilities may impact CHH outcomes and guide future intervention. The objective of this study was to examine the use of a conditioned head turn (CHT) task as a measure of speech discrimination in CHH using a clinically feasible protocol. (2) Methods: Speech perception was assessed for a consonant and vowel contrast among 57 CHH and 70 children with normal hearing (CNH) aged 5–17 months using a CHT paradigm. (3) Results: Regardless of hearing status, 74% of CHH and 77% of CNH could discriminate /a-i/, and 55% of CHH and 56% of CNH could discriminate /ba-da/. Regression models revealed that both CHH and CNH performed better on /ba-da/ at 70 dBA compared to 50 dBA. Performance by hearing age showed no speech perception differences for CNH and children with mild hearing loss for either contrast. However, children with hearing losses ≥ 41 dB HL performed significantly poorer than CNH for /a-i/. (4) Conclusions: This study demonstrates the clinical feasibility of assessing early speech perception in infants with hearing loss and replicates previous findings of speech perception abilities among CHH and CNH.

Performative Function of Voice in Early Speech Acts

This study is aimed at the early practice of speech (or speech acts) as a functional tool in performative constructions, which can be considered as an integral part of the cultural heart and the reflection of an important semantic and pragmatic connection between the intentions and actions in mythical thinking. This way of thinking created images on the interpretation of the world as a system determined by supreme forces (gods). Communication of people with higher forces as an early speech practice of Indo-European cultures is traced in ancient prayers, rituals, incantations, spells, etc. They not only reflect the fixed language formulae which are a base of a cultural matrix but also offer a whole picture of the mythical thinking functioning. The following fundamental cultural phenomena are noted: the power of the word, as a primary vocal image; the act of assigning a name as giving birth to a creature (what is not named, does not exist), voice as a ritual constitutive force in prayers, and in the tabooing. The study of performative constructions in ancient Indo-European language data (Avesta, Upanishads, Edda, Old /New Testaments, Old Church Slavonic, and Anglo-Saxon spells) has revealed a strong relation of the functional power of voice to the ritual actions, which reflect in the traditional performative constructions - first person singular verbs: 1) prayers - I pray, I ask; 2) naming - I name, I give a name; 3) actions taken during incantation - I stretch out [my hands], I order; 4) and also the representation of voice as a divine being, which reflects in the concept of true godly knowledge and corresponds with the physical ability to attract attention and ask to follow with voice. In early performative practice, to legitimize the action it must be followed with words said out loud properly. And this interdependent phenomenon forms the heart of culture.

An investigation of iconic language development in four datasets

Iconic words imitate their meanings. Previous work has demonstrated that iconic words are more common in infants’ early speech, and in adults’ child-directed speech (e.g., Perry et al., 2015; 2018). This is consistent with the proposal that iconicity provides a benefit to word learning. Here we explored iconicity in four diverse language development datasets: a production corpus for infants and preschoolers (MacWhinney, 2000), comprehension data for school-aged children to young adults (Dale & O'Rourke, 1981), word frequency norms from educational texts for school aged children to young adults (Zeno et al., 1995), and a database of parent-reported infant word production (Frank et al., 2017). In all four analyses, we found that iconic words were more common at younger ages. We also explored how this relationship differed by syntactic class, finding only modest evidence for differences. Overall, the results suggest that, beyond infancy, iconicity is an important factor in language acquisition.