Picture description in the assessment of connected speech intelligibility in Parkinson's disease: A pilot study

Introduction: Assessment of intelligibility in dysarthria tends to rely on oral reading of sentences or words. However, self-generated utterances are closer to a clients’ natural speech. This study investigated how transcription of utterances elicited by picture description can be used in the assessment of intelligibility in speakers with Parkinson’s disease. Methods: Speech samples from eleven speakers with Parkinson’s disease and six neurologically healthy persons were audio-recorded. Forty-two naive listeners completed transcriptions of self-generated sentences from a picture description task and orally read sentences from the Swedish Test of Intelligibility, as well as scaled ratings of narrative speech samples. Results: Intelligibility was higher in orally read than self-generated sentences and higher for content words than for the whole sentence in self-generated sentences for most of the speakers, although these within-group differences were not statistically significant at group level. Adding contextual leads for the listeners increased intelligibility in self-generated utterances significantly, but with individual variation. Although correlations between the intelligibility measures were at least moderate or strong, there was a considerable inter- and intra-speaker variability in intelligibility scores between tasks for the speakers with Parkinson’s disease, indicating individual variation of factors that impact intelligibility. Intelligibility scores from neurologically healthy speakers were generally high across tasks with no significant differences between the conditions. Discussion/Conclusion: Within-speaker variability support literature recommendations to use multiple methods and tasks when assessing intelligibility. The inclusion of transcription of self-generated utterances elicited by picture description to the intelligibility assessment has the potential to provide additional information to assessment methods based on oral reading of pre-scripted sentences, and to inform the planning of interventions.

The interaction of working memory capacity and engagement with recasts on different L2 outcome measures: A replication of Révész ()

We report on a conceptual replication of Révész (2012) in order to investigate the idea whether learners provided with recasts do engage in different kinds of behavioral engagement as a function of their working memory and if/how this engagement comes to bear on performance on different measures. Engagement with recasts was measured through a coding method categorizing responses to the recasts running the gamut from: (1) no opportunity, (2) opportunity, but did not repeat, (3) repeated the recasted form, (4) negotiated the response, to (5) used the recasted form later in the discourse. Consistent with Révész (2012), though with lower effect sizes, the results showed that recasts were most conducive to gains on an oral task and less so on a written description task, but non-effective on a grammaticality judgment task. Furthermore, it was revealed that learners with a high phonological short-term memory were more prone to recast-induced engagement on an oral production task, whereas those enjoying a higher reading span were considerably less so. We propose that learner engagement be deemed more important in future interaction research.

Spatio-Semantic Graphs From Picture Description: Applications to Detection of Cognitive Impairment

Clinical assessments often use complex picture description tasks to elicit natural speech patterns and magnify changes occurring in brain regions implicated in Alzheimer's disease and dementia. As The Cookie Theft picture description task is used in the largest Alzheimer's disease and dementia cohort studies available, we aimed to create algorithms that could characterize the visual narrative path a participant takes in describing what is happening in this image. We proposed spatio-semantic graphs, models based on graph theory that transform the participants' narratives into graphs that retain semantic order and encode the visuospatial information between content units in the image. The resulting graphs differ between Cognitively Impaired and Unimpaired participants in several important ways. Cognitively Impaired participants consistently scored higher on features that are heavily associated with symptoms of cognitive decline, including repetition, evidence of short-term memory lapses, and generally disorganized narrative descriptions, while Cognitively Unimpaired participants produced more efficient narrative paths. These results provide evidence that spatio-semantic graph analysis of these tasks can generate important insights into a participant's cognitive performance that cannot be generated from semantic analysis alone.

Written Discourse Task Helps to Identify Progression from Mild Cognitive Impairment to Dementia

<b><i>Purpose:</i></b> We aimed to investigate: (1) the clinical, diagnostic value of a written discourse task, and (2) the relationship between executive functions and written discourse within the spectrum of individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). <b><i>Method:</i></b> To determine whether written discourse performance predicts clinical course among individuals with MCI, we retrospectively classified individuals with MCI as converters (<i>N</i> = 26) who were later diagnosed with dementia or as a stable MCI group (<i>N</i> = 45). We quantified core word measures from written discourse samples obtained from the Cookie Theft picture description task. <b><i>Result:</i></b> Written discourse measures differentiated converters from the stable MCI group. Converters produced a fewer number of core words than the stable MCI group. A measure of executive function significantly predicted performance on the production of core words in written discourse for the converters. In a multivariable regression, production of core words remained the only explanatory variable closely associated with the progression to dementia in MCI. <b><i>Conclusion:</i></b> Written discourse tasks can predict the likelihood of MCI progressing to dementia, independently of recall and an executive function measure. Correlational results suggest that written discourse performance was associated with executive function as measured by the Trail Making Test. Our findings emphasize the usefulness of including written discourse tasks in language assessment batteries targeting preclinical dementia populations.

Cognitive constraints on advance planning of sentence intonation

Pitch peaks tend to be higher at the beginning of longer than shorter sentences (e.g., ‘A farmer is pulling donkeys’ vs ‘A farmer is pulling a donkey and goat’), whereas pitch valleys at the ends of sentences are rather constant for a given speaker. These data seem to imply that speakers avoid dropping their voice pitch too low by planning the height of sentence-initial pitch peaks prior to speaking. However, the length effect on sentence-initial pitch peaks appears to vary across different types of sentences, speakers and languages. Therefore, the notion that speakers plan sentence intonation in advance due to the limitations in low voice pitch leaves part of the data unexplained. Consequently, this study suggests a complementary cognitive account of length-dependent pitch scaling. In particular, it proposes that the sentence-initial pitch raise in long sentences is related to high demands on mental resources during the early stages of sentence planning. To tap into the cognitive underpinnings of planning sentence intonation, this study adopts the methodology of recording eye movements during a picture description task, as the eye movements are the established approximation of the real-time planning processes. Measures of voice pitch (Fundamental Frequency) and incrementality (eye movements) are used to examine the relationship between (verbal) working memory (WM), incrementality of sentence planning and the height of sentence-initial pitch peaks.

A STUDY ON PATTERN OF CODE MIXING IN A SEQUENTIAL BILINGUAL YOUNG ADULTS

The present study aimed to investigate and compares the pattern of Code Mixing in Sequential bilingual young adult. Thirty Sequential bilingual (Tamil-English) adults between the age range of 18-25 years were participated in this study. The bilingual participants were asked to describe the cookie-theft picture in Tamil. The patterns of Code Mixing (Intra Sentential Mixing and Intra Lexical Mixing) were analysed from the collected data. The results showed sequential bilingual adult uses 4.8% of Intra Sentential Mixing and 5.3% of Intra Lexical Mixing. In pattern of Code Mixing, Intra Sentential Mixing found to more in women. The present study concluded that Sequential bilingual speaker uses slightly higher percentage of Intra Lexical Mixing when compared to Intra Sentential Mixing in the picture description task. This finding will help Speech Language Pathologist to plan assessment, intervention and to development appropriate material for Sequential bilingual speakers in making clinical decision.

The effect of encoding task on the forgetting of object gist and details

One important feature of episodic memory is that it contains fine-grained and vividly recollected details. How to improve and maintain detailed information over time has been one of the central issues in memory research. Previous studies have inconsistent findings on whether detailed memory is forgotten more rapidly than gist memory. In this study, we investigated to what extent different encoding tasks modulated forgetting of gist and detailed information. In three experiments, participants were presented pictures of common objects and were asked to name them (Experiment 1), describe the details about them (Experiment 2) or imagine scenes associated with them (Experiment 3). After intervals of 10 minutes, one day, one week and one month, gist and detailed memories of the pictures were tested and assessed using a remember/know/guess judgement. The results showed that after the naming task, gist and detailed memories were forgotten at a similar rate, but after the description and the imagination tasks, detailed memory was forgotten at a slower rate than gist memory. The forgetting rate of gist memory was the slowest after the naming task, while that of detailed memory was the slowest after the description task. In addition, when three experiments were compared, the naming task enhanced the contributions of recollection and familiarity for gist memory, while the description task enhanced the contribution of familiarity for detailed memory. These results reveal the importance of the encoding task in the forgetting of gist and detailed information, and suggest a possible way to maintain perceptual details of objects at longer intervals.

Number attraction in verb and anaphor production: narrowing a production–comprehension contrast

Although reflexive–antecedent agreement shows little susceptibility to number attraction in comprehension, prior production research using the preamble-completion paradigm has demonstrated attraction for both verbs and anaphora. In four production experiments, we compared number attraction effects on subject–verb and reflexive–antecedent agreement using a novel scene-description task in addition to a more traditional preamble elicitation paradigm. While the results from the preamble task align with prior findings, the more naturalistic scene description task produced the same contrast observed in comprehension, with robust verb attraction but minimal anaphor attraction. In addition to analyzing agreement error distributions, we also analyzed the production time-course of participant responses, finding timing effects that pattern with error distributions, even when no error is present. The results suggest that production agreement processes show similar profiles to comprehension processes. We discuss potential sources of variable susceptibility to agreement attraction, suggesting that differences may arise from the time-course of information processing across tasks and linguistic dependencies.