Testing for canonical form orientation in speech tempo perception.

We report on two experiments that aimed to test the hypothesis that English listeners orient to full pronunciation forms-"canonical forms"-in judging the tempo of speech that features deletions. If listeners orient to canonical forms, this should mean that the perceived tempo of speech containing deletions is highly relative to the speech's articulation rate calculated on the basis of surface phone strings. We used controlled stimuli to test this hypothesis.

Informativeness, Timing and Tempo in Lexical Self-Repair.

This paper presents a study of the temporal organization of lexical repair in spontaneous Dutch speech. It assesses the extent to which offset-to-repair duration and repair tempo can be predicted on the basis of offset timing, reparandum tempo and measures of the informativeness of the crucial lexical items in the repair. Specifically, we address the expectations that repairs that are initiated relatively early are produced relatively fast throughout, and that relatively highly informative repairs are produced relatively slowly.

Prosodic marking, pitch and intensity in spontaneous lexical self-repair in dutch.

This paper presents results of a phonetic analysis of instances of lexical self-repair drawn from a corpus of spontaneous Dutch speech. The analysis addresses questions concerning the phonetic details of prosodic marking in self-repair and its conditioning factors. In particular, it examines the relevance of semantic, temporal and frequency-related factors in modelling f0 and intensity measures and auditory judgements of whether repairs are prosodically marked.

Using interactional and linguistic analysis to distinguish between epileptic and psychogenic nonepileptic seizures: a prospective, blinded multirater study.

This study was carried out to test the suggestion that close interactional and linguistic examination of the communication between neurologists and patients during a first encounter can contribute to the differential diagnosis of epilepsy or psychogenic nonepileptic seizures. Twenty unselected patients admitted for video/EEG telemetry because of diagnostic uncertainty were included. Two linguists blinded to all medical data independently studied video recordings and transcripts of 25- to 35-minute interactions.

Seizure metaphors differ in patients' accounts of epileptic and psychogenic nonepileptic seizures.

Purpose: To increase understanding of the subjective symptomatology of seizure experiences and improve differential diagnosis by studying the seizure metaphors used by patients with (psychogenic) nonepileptic seizures (NES) and epilepsy.

Methods: Twenty-one unselected patients taking part in this study were admitted for 48 h of video-EEG (electroenceophalography) observation because of uncertainty about the diagnosis. Eight were proven to have epilepsy, 13 to have psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES).

Making the diagnosis in patients with blackouts: it's all in the history.

The distinction between the different causes of blackouts is an important and challenging clinical task. Given that treatment is very diagnosis-specific, therapeutic success depends entirely on the correct categorisation of the problem. However, despite impressive technological advances in brain imaging and improved access to tests such as video-EEG monitoring and tilt-table testing, the act of taking and interpreting the patient's history is still the most important diagnostic tool in the evaluation of patients presenting with blackouts; in many if not most cases it provides the only diagnostic pointers.

Conversation analysis can help to distinguish between epilepsy and non-epileptic seizure disorders: a case comparison.

Purpose: Factual items in patients' histories are of limited discriminating value in the differential diagnosis of epilepsy and non-epileptic seizures (NES). A number of studies using a transcript-based sociolinguistic research method inspired by Conversation Analysis (CA) suggest that it is helpful to focus on how patients talk. Previous reports communicated these findings by using particularly clear examples of diagnostically relevant interactional, linguistic and topical features from different patients.

From words to actions: the phonetics of eigenlijkin two communicative contexts.

This paper presents the results of an investigation into the distribution of phonetic variants of the Dutch discourse marker eigenlijk, combining phonetic and conversation analytic methods. The paper shows that the phonetic form of eigenlijk depends to some extent on the sequential environment in which the item is used; moreover, it shows that in the case of two such environments, the forms of eigenlijk are representative of tempo and reduction patterns spanning entire turns or turn-constructional units. These patterns can be related to the interactive function of the turns; thus, the findings presented here contribute to our as yet limited knowledge of the phonetic correlates of communicative actions.

A parametric approach to the phonetics of postvocalic /r/ in Dutch.

This paper describes the phonetic exponents of rhoticity in postvocalic position in the speech of 4 young adult speakers of Standard Dutch. In addition to describing aspects of the segmental realisation of /r/, the paper focusses on parametric differences between rhymes with and without postvocalic /r/ in the material under consideration, presenting both impressionistic observations and instrumental measurements. Results of the investigation suggest that parametric analysis is a crucial complement to segmental classification, in providing insights into the relation between segmental realisations and 'contextual effects' of /r/, the phonetics of /r/ deletion and similarities and differences between rhotics cross-linguistically.