Impressions about harm are formed rapidly and then refined, modulated by serotonin.

Attributing motives to others is a crucial aspect of mentalizing, can be biased by prejudice, and is affected by common psychiatric disorders. It is therefore important to understand in depth the mechanisms underpinning it. Toward improving models of mentalizing motives, we hypothesized that people quickly infer whether other's motives are likely beneficial or detrimental, then refine their judgment (classify-refine).

Testing hypotheses about the harm that capitalism causes to the mind and brain: a theoretical framework for neuroscience research.

In this paper, we will attempt to outline the key ideas of a theoretical framework for neuroscience research that reflects critically on the neoliberal capitalist context. We argue that neuroscience can and should illuminate the effects of neoliberal capitalism on the brains and minds of the population living under such socioeconomic systems. Firstly, we review the available empirical research indicating that the socio-economic environment is harmful to minds and brains.

Auditory rhythm discrimination in adults who stutter: An fMRI study.

Rhythm perception deficits have been linked to neurodevelopmental disorders affecting speech and language. Children who stutter have shown poorer rhythm discrimination and attenuated functional connectivity in rhythm-related brain areas, which may negatively impact timing control required for speech. It is unclear whether adults who stutter (AWS), who are likely to have acquired compensatory adaptations in response to rhythm processing/timing deficits, are similarly affected.

Prosodic Development During the Early School-Age Years.

Purpose: This study used a cross-sequential design to identify developmental changes in narrative speech rhythm and intonation. The aim was to provide a robust, clinically relevant characterization of normative changes in speech prosody across the early school-age years.

Method: Structured spontaneous narratives were elicited annually from 60 children over a 3-year period.

Variability in Quantity and Quality of Early Linguistic Experience in Children With Cochlear Implants: Evidence from Analysis of Natural Auditory Environments.

Objectives: Understanding how quantity and quality of language input vary across children with cochlear implants (CIs) is important for explaining sources of large individual differences in language outcomes of this at-risk pediatric population. Studies have mostly focused either on intervention-related, device-related, and/or patient-related factors, or relied on data from parental reports and laboratory-based speech corpus to unravel factors explaining individual differences in language outcomes among children with CIs. However, little is known about the extent to which children with CIs differ in quantity and quality of language input they experience in their natural linguistic environments.

Home Auditory Environments of Children With Cochlear Implants and Children With Normal Hearing.

Objectives: Early home auditory environment plays an important role in children's spoken language development and overall well-being. This study explored differences in the home auditory environment experienced by children with cochlear implants (CIs) relative to children with normal hearing (NH).

Design: Measures of the child's home auditory environment, including adult word count (AWC), conversational turns (CTs), child vocalizations (CVs), television and media (TVN), overlapping sound (OLN), and noise (NON), were gathered using the Language Environment Analysis System.

Syllable Inference as a Mechanism for Spoken Language Understanding.

A classic problem in spoken language comprehension is how listeners perceive speech as being composed of discrete words, given the variable time-course of information in continuous signals. We propose a syllable inference account of spoken word recognition and segmentation, according to which alternative hierarchical models of syllables, words, and phonemes are dynamically posited, which are expected to maximally predict incoming sensory input. Generative models are combined with current estimates of context speech rate drawn from neural oscillatory dynamics, which are sensitive to amplitude rises.

Estimating the reduced benefit of infant-directed speech in cochlear implant-related speech processing.

Caregivers modify their speech when talking to infants, a specific type of speech known as infant-directed speech (IDS). This speaking style facilitates language learning compared to adult-directed speech (ADS) in infants with normal hearing (NH). While infants with NH and those with cochlear implants (CIs) prefer listening to IDS over ADS, it is yet unknown how CI processing may affect the acoustic distinctiveness between ADS and IDS, as well as the degree of intelligibility of these.

A meta-analysis of the predictability of LENA™ automated measures for child language development.

Early language environment plays a critical role in child language development. The Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA™) system allows researchers and clinicians to collect daylong recordings and obtain automated measures to characterize a child's language environment. This meta-analysis evaluates the predictability of LENA's automated measures for language skills in young children.

Individual Differences in Mothers' Spontaneous Infant-Directed Speech Predict Language Attainment in Children With Cochlear Implants.

Purpose Differences across language environments of prelingually deaf children who receive cochlear implants (CIs) may affect language acquisition; yet, whether mothers show individual differences in how they modify infant-directed (ID) compared with adult-directed (AD) speech has seldom been studied. This study assessed individual differences in how mothers realized speech modifications in ID register and whether these predicted differences in language outcomes for children with CIs. Method Participants were 36 dyads of mothers and their children aged 0;8-2;5 (years;months) at the time of CI implantation.

Circumspection in using automated measures: Talker gender and addressee affect error rates for adult speech detection in the Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) system.

Automatic speech processing devices have become popular for quantifying amounts of ambient language input to children in their home environments. We assessed error rates for language input estimates for the Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) audio processing system, asking whether error rates differed as a function of adult talkers' gender and whether they were speaking to children or adults. Audio was sampled from within LENA recordings from 23 families with children aged 4-34 months.

Statistical distributions of consonant variants in infant-directed speech: evidence that /t/ may be exceptional.

Statistical distributions of phonetic variants in spoken language influence speech perception for both language learners and mature users. We theorized that patterns of phonetic variant processing of consonants demonstrated by adults might stem in part from patterns of early exposure to statistics of phonetic variants in infant-directed (ID) speech. In particular, we hypothesized that ID speech might involve greater proportions of canonical /t/ pronunciations compared to adult-directed (AD) speech in at least some phonological contexts.

Not just a function of function words: Distal speech rate influences perception of prosodically weak syllables.

Listeners resolve ambiguities in speech perception using multiple sources, including non-local or distal speech rate (i.e., the speech rate of material surrounding a particular region).

Revisiting Neil Armstrongs Moon-Landing Quote: Implications for Speech Perception, Function Word Reduction, and Acoustic Ambiguity.

Neil Armstrong insisted that his quote upon landing on the moon was misheard, and that he had said one small step for a man, instead of one small step for man. What he said is unclear in part because function words like a can be reduced and spectrally indistinguishable from the preceding context. Therefore, their presence can be ambiguous, and they may disappear perceptually depending on the rate of surrounding speech.

Rate dependent speech processing can be speech specific: Evidence from the perceptual disappearance of words under changes in context speech rate.

The perception of reduced syllables, including function words, produced in casual speech can be made to disappear by slowing the rate at which surrounding words are spoken (Dilley & Pitt, Psychological Science, 21(11), 1664-1670. doi: 10.1177/0956797610384743 , 2010).

Individual differences in the perception of melodic contours and pitch-accent timing in speech: Support for domain-generality of pitch processing.

Do the same mechanisms underlie processing of music and language? Recent investigations of this question have yielded inconsistent results. Likely factors contributing to discrepant findings are use of small samples and failure to control for individual differences in cognitive ability. We investigated the relationship between music and speech prosody processing, while controlling for cognitive ability.

The Role of Secondary-Stressed and Unstressed-Unreduced Syllables in Word Recognition: Acoustic and Perceptual Studies with Russian Learners of English.

The importance of secondary-stressed (SS) and unstressed-unreduced (UU) syllable accuracy for spoken word recognition in English is as yet unclear. An acoustic study first investigated Russian learners' of English production of SS and UU syllables. Significant vowel quality and duration reductions in Russian-spoken SS and UU vowels were found, likely due to a transfer of native phonological features.

Evidence for a rhythm perception deficit in children who stutter.

Stuttering is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects the timing and rhythmic flow of speech production. When speech is synchronized with an external rhythmic pacing signal (e.g.

Age-Related Differences in Speech Rate Perception Do Not Necessarily Entail Age-Related Differences in Speech Rate Use.

Purpose: A new literature has suggested that speech rate can influence the parsing of words quite strongly in speech. The purpose of this study was to investigate differences between younger adults and older adults in the use of context speech rate in word segmentation, given that older adults perceive timing information differently from younger ones.

Method: Younger (18-25 years) and older (55-65 years) adults performed a sentence transcription task for sentences that varied in speech rate context (i.

Interactions between distal speech rate, linguistic knowledge, and speech environment.

During lexical access, listeners use both signal-based and knowledge-based cues, and information from the linguistic context can affect the perception of acoustic speech information. Recent findings suggest that the various cues used in lexical access are implemented with flexibility and may be affected by information from the larger speech context. We conducted 2 experiments to examine effects of a signal-based cue (distal speech rate) and a knowledge-based cue (linguistic structure) on lexical perception.

Phonetic modification of vowel space in storybook speech to infants up to 2 years of age.

Purpose: A large body of literature has indicated vowel space area expansion in infant-directed (ID) speech compared with adult-directed (AD) speech, which may promote language acquisition. The current study tested whether this expansion occurs in storybook speech read to infants at various points during their first 2 years of life.

Method: In 2 studies, mothers read a storybook containing target vowels in ID and AD speech conditions.

Vowel space characteristics of speech directed to children with and without hearing loss.

Purpose: This study examined vowel characteristics in adult-directed (AD) and infant-directed (ID) speech to children with hearing impairment who received cochlear implants or hearing aids compared with speech to children with normal hearing.

Method: Mothers' AD and ID speech to children with cochlear implants (Study 1, n=20) or hearing aids (Study 2, n=11) was compared with mothers' speech to controls matched on age and hearing experience. The first and second formants of vowels /i/, /ɑ/, and /u/ were measured, and vowel space area and dispersion were calculated.

Metrical expectations from preceding prosody influence perception of lexical stress.

Two visual-world experiments tested the hypothesis that expectations based on preceding prosody influence the perception of suprasegmental cues to lexical stress. The results demonstrate that listeners' consideration of competing alternatives with different stress patterns (e.g.

Distal prosody affects learning of novel words in an artificial language.

The distal prosodic patterning established at the beginning of an utterance has been shown to influence downstream word segmentation and lexical access. In this study, we investigated whether distal prosody also affects word learning in a novel (artificial) language. Listeners were exposed to syllable sequences in which the embedded words were either congruent or incongruent with the distal prosody of a carrier phrase.

Long-term temporal tracking of speech rate affects spoken-word recognition.

Humans unconsciously track a wide array of distributional characteristics in their sensory environment. Recent research in spoken-language processing has demonstrated that the speech rate surrounding a target region within an utterance influences which words, and how many words, listeners hear later in that utterance. On the basis of hypotheses that listeners track timing information in speech over long timescales, we investigated the possibility that the perception of words is sensitive to speech rate over such a timescale (e.