Evaluating Models of Gesture and Speech Production for People With Aphasia.

People with aphasia use gestures not only to communicate relevant content but also to compensate for their verbal limitations. The Sketch Model (De Ruiter, 2000) assumes a flexible relationship between gesture and speech with the possibility of a compensatory use of the two modalities. In the successor of the Sketch Model, the AR-Sketch Model (De Ruiter, 2017), the relationship between iconic gestures and speech is no longer assumed to be flexible and compensatory, but instead iconic gestures are assumed to express information that is redundant to speech.

The Production of Gesture and Speech by People With Aphasia: Influence of Communicative Constraints.

Purpose People with aphasia (PWA) use different kinds of gesture spontaneously when they communicate. Although there is evidence that the nature of the communicative task influences the linguistic performance of PWA, so far little is known about the influence of the communicative task on the production of gestures by PWA. We aimed to investigate the influence of varying communicative constraints on the production of gesture and spoken expression by PWA in comparison to persons without language impairment.

Reliability and validity of cervical auscultation.

We conducted a two-part study that contributes to the discussion about cervical auscultation (CA) as a scientifically justifiable and medically useful tool to identify patients with a high risk of aspiration/penetration. We sought to determine (1) acoustic features that mark a deglutition act as dysphagic; (2) acoustic changes in healthy older deglutition profiles compared with those of younger adults; (3) the correctness and concordance of rater judgments based on CA; and (4) if education in CA improves individual reliability. The first part of the study focused on a comparison of the "swallow morphology" of dysphagic as opposed to healthy subjects' deglutition in terms of structure properties of the pharyngeal phase of deglutition.

Emotional and linguistic perception of prosody. Reception of prosody.

The objective of the study was to find out whether there is a connection between the perception of linguistic intonation contours and emotional intonation. Twenty-four subjects were asked to identify and discriminate emotional prosody listening to subtests 8A and 8B of the Tübinger Affect Battery as well as to 36 utterances that differed in linguistic intonation contour and were first presented normally and then low-pass-filtered. The subjects were divided into an older and a younger group in order to detect a possible age effect.