Language in interaction: turn-taking patterns in conversations involving individuals with schizophrenia.

Individuals with schizophrenia generally show difficulties in interpersonal communication. Linguistic analyses shed new light on speech atypicalities in schizophrenia. However, very little is known about conversational interaction management by these individuals.

Exploring and explaining variation in phrase-final f0 movements in spontaneous Papuan Malay.

This study investigates the variation in phrase-final f0 movements found in dyadic unscripted conversations in Papuan Malay, an Eastern Indonesian language. This is done by a novel combination of exploratory and confirmatory classification techniques. In particular, this study investigates the linguistic factors that potentially drive f0 contour variation in phrase-final words produced in a naturalistic interactive dialogue task.

Auditory Processing of Intonational Rises and Falls in German: Rises Are Special in Attention Orienting.

This article investigates the processing of intonational rises and falls when presented unexpectedly in a stream of repetitive auditory stimuli. It examines the neurophysiological correlates (ERPs) of attention to these unexpected stimuli through the use of an oddball paradigm where sequences of repetitive stimuli are occasionally interspersed with a deviant stimulus, allowing for elicitation of an MMN. Whereas previous oddball studies on attention toward unexpected sounds involving pitch rises were conducted on nonlinguistic stimuli, the present study uses as stimuli lexical items in German with naturalistic intonation contours.

Filled Pauses Produced by Autistic Adults Differ in Prosodic Realisation, but not Rate or Lexical Type.

We examined the use of filled pauses in conversations between homogeneous pairs of autistic and non-autistic adults. A corpus of semi-spontaneous speech was used to analyse the rate, lexical type (nasal "uhm" or non-nasal "uh"), and prosodic realisation (rising, level or falling) of filled pauses. We used Bayesian modelling for statistical analysis.

Turn-timing in conversations between autistic adults: Typical short-gap transitions are preferred, but not achieved instantly.

The organisation of who speaks when in conversation is perhaps the most fundamental aspect of human communication. Research on a wide variety of groups of speakers has revealed a seemingly universal preference for between-speaker transitions consisting of very short silent gaps. Previous research on conversational turn-taking in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) consists of only a handful of studies, most of which are limited in scope and based on the non-spontaneous speech of children and adolescents.

Conversational metrics, psychopathological dimensions and self-disturbances in patients with schizophrenia.

Difficulties in interpersonal communication, including conversational skill impairments, are core features of schizophrenia. However, very few studies have performed conversation analyses in a clinical population of schizophrenia patients. Here we investigate the conversational patterns of dialogues in schizophrenia patients to assess possible associations with symptom dimensions, subjective self-disturbances and social functioning.

Prosodic Prominence - A Cross-Linguistic Perspective.

This paper is concerned with the contributions of signal-driven and expectation-driven mechanisms to a general understanding of the phenomenon of prosodic prominence from a cross-linguistic perspective. It serves as an introduction to the concept of prosodic prominence and discusses the eight papers in the Special Issue, which cover a genetically diverse range of languages. These include Djambarrpuyŋu (an Australian Pama-Nyungan language), Samoan (an Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian language), the Indo-European languages English (Germanic), French (Romance), and Russian (Slavic), Korean (Koreanic), Medumba (Bantu), and two Sino-Tibetan languages, Mandarin and Taiwanese Southern Min.

Speech Prosody as a Bridge Between Psychopathology and Linguistics: The Case of the Schizophrenia Spectrum.

Patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders experience severe difficulties in interpersonal communication, as described by traditional psychopathology and current research on social cognition. From a linguistic perspective, pragmatic abilities are crucial for successful communication. Empirical studies have shown that these abilities are significantly impaired in this group of patients.

Attention allocation in a language with post-focal prominences.

Accentuation influences selective attention and the depth of semantic processing during online speech comprehension. We investigated the processing of semantically congruent and incongruent words in a language that presents cues to prosodic prominences in the region of the utterance occurring after the focussed information (the post-focal region). This language is Italian, in particular the variety spoken in Bari.

Intonation does aid serial recall after all.

A sequence of spoken digits is easier to recall if the digits are grouped into smaller chunks (e.g., through the insertion of pauses).

The effects of thalamic and posterior subthalamic deep brain stimulation on speech in patients with essential tremor - A prospective, randomized, doubleblind crossover study.

Objective: To prospectively evaluate the effect of PSA- and VIM DBS on speech in ET patients.

Methods: Leads were implanted bilaterally with contacts placed in both VIM and PSA. Thirteen patients were analyzed pre- and postoperatively.

The dynamics of intonation: Categorical and continuous variation in an attractor-based model.

The framework of dynamical systems offers powerful tools to understand the relation between stability and variability in human cognition in general and in speech in particular. In the current paper, we propose a dynamical systems approach to the description of German nuclear pitch accents in focus marking to account for both the categorical as well as the continuous variation found in intonational data. We report on results from 27 native speakers and employ an attractor landscape to represent pitch accent types in terms of f0 measures in a continuous dimension.

Word final schwa is driven by intonation-The case of Bari Italian.

In order to convey pragmatic functions, a speaker has to select an intonation contour (the tune) in addition to the words that are to be spoken (the text). The tune and text are assumed to be independent of each other, such that any one intonation contour can be produced on different phrases, regardless of the number and nature of the segments they are made up of. However, if the segmental string is too short, certain tunes-especially those with a rising component-call for adjustments to the text.

The effects of Thalamic Deep Brain Stimulation on speech dynamics in patients with Essential Tremor: An articulographic study.

Acoustic studies have revealed that patients with Essential Tremor treated with thalamic Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) may suffer from speech deterioration in terms of imprecise oral articulation and reduced voicing control. Based on the acoustic signal one cannot infer, however, whether this deterioration is due to a general slowing down of the speech motor system (e.g.

The Effect of Uni- and Bilateral Thalamic Deep Brain Stimulation on Speech in Patients With Essential Tremor: Acoustics and Intelligibility.

Background: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the ventral intermediate nucleus (VIM) is performed to suppress medically-resistant essential tremor (ET). However, stimulation induced dysarthria (SID) is a common side effect, limiting the extent to which tremor can be suppressed. To date, the exact pathogenesis of SID in VIM-DBS treated ET patients is unknown.

The role of tonal onglides in German nuclear pitch accents.

A perception experiment with native German listeners provided evidence for the relevance of the tonal onglide in nuclear accents--the pitch movement leading towards the target on the accented syllable. Listeners were able to distinguish between two pragmatic meanings of a short phrase (given/non-contrastive and new/contrastive) using the tonal onglide as the sole acoustic cue. On the basis of these findings, we argue that the onglide merits a phonological status in an intonation model of German and should not be regarded as merely phonetic detail.

Mood is linked to vowel type: the role of articulatory movements.

This study investigates the relation between vowel identity and emotional state. In Experiment 1, (pseudo)words were invented and articulated in a positive or negative mood condition. Subjects in a positive mood produced more words containing /i:/, a vowel involving the same muscle that is used in smiling--the zygomaticus major muscle (ZMM).

Masked auditory feedback affects speech motor learning of a plosive duration contrast.

Adult speakers have developed precise forward models of articulation for their native language and seem to rely less on auditory sensory feedback. However, for learning of the production of new speech sounds, auditory perception provides a corrective signal for motor control. We assessed adult German speakers' speech motor learning capacity in the absence of auditory feedback but with clear somatosensory information.

The role of prosody in the interpretation of structural ambiguities: a study of anticipatory eye movements.

An eye-tracking experiment examined whether prosodic cues can affect the interpretation of grammatical functions in the absence of clear morphological information. German listeners were presented with scenes depicting three potential referents while hearing temporarily ambiguous SVO and OVS sentences. While case marking on the first noun phrase (NP) was ambiguous, clear case marking on the second NP disambiguated sentences towards SVO or OVS.