Lexical Speech Features of Spontaneous Speech in Older Persons With and Without Cognitive Impairment: Reliability Analysis.

Background: Speech analysis data are promising digital biomarkers for the early detection of Alzheimer disease. However, despite its importance, very few studies in this area have examined whether older adults produce spontaneous speech with characteristics that are sufficiently consistent to be used as proxy markers of cognitive status.

Objective: This preliminary study seeks to investigate consistency across lexical characteristics of speech in older adults with and without cognitive impairment.

Semantic priming from McGurk words: Priming depends on perception.

The McGurk effect is an illusion in which visible articulations alter the perception of auditory speech (e.g., video 'da' dubbed with audio 'ba' may be heard as 'da').

Lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on language processing.

A central question in understanding human language is how people store, access, and comprehend words. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic presented a natural experiment to investigate whether language comprehension can be changed in a lasting way by external experiences. We leveraged the sudden increase in the frequency of certain words (mask, isolation, lockdown) to investigate the effects of rapid contextual changes on word comprehension, measured over 10 months within the first year of the pandemic.

It's alignment all the way down, but not all the way up: Speakers align on some features but not others within a dialogue.

During conversation, speakers modulate characteristics of their production to match their interlocutors' characteristics. This behavior is known as . Speakers align at many linguistic levels, including the syntactic, lexical, and phonetic levels.

Automated Computer Vision Assessment of Hypomimia in Parkinson Disease: Proof-of-Principle Pilot Study.

Background: Facial expressions require the complex coordination of 43 different facial muscles. Parkinson disease (PD) affects facial musculature leading to "hypomimia" or "masked facies."

Objective: We aimed to determine whether modern computer vision techniques can be applied to detect masked facies and quantify drug states in PD.

Automated assessment of speech production and prediction of MCI in older adults.

The population of older adults is growing dramatically and, with it comes increased prevalence of neurological disorders, including Alzheimer's disease (AD). Though existing cognitive screening tests can aid early detection of cognitive decline, these methods are limited in their sensitivity and require trained administrators. The current study sought to determine whether it is possible to identify persons with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) using automated analysis of spontaneous speech.

Using Automatic Assessment of Speech Production to Predict Current and Future Cognitive Function in Older Adults.

Neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer disease affect millions and have no known cure, making early detection important. In addition to memory impairments, dementia causes substantial changes in speech production, particularly lexical-semantic characteristics. Existing clinical tools for detecting change often require considerable expertise or time, and efficient methods for identifying persons at risk are needed.

Detection of acute 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) effects across protocols using automated natural language processing.

The detection of changes in mental states such as those caused by psychoactive drugs relies on clinical assessments that are inherently subjective. Automated speech analysis may represent a novel method to detect objective markers, which could help improve the characterization of these mental states. In this study, we employed computer-extracted speech features from multiple domains (acoustic, semantic, and psycholinguistic) to assess mental states after controlled administration of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) and intranasal oxytocin.

Syntactic Entrainment: The Repetition of Syntactic Structures in Event Descriptions.

Syntactic structures can convey certain (subtle) emergent properties of events. For example, the double-object dative ("the doctor is giving a patient pills") can convey the successful transfer of possession, whereas its syntactic alternative, the prepositional dative ("the doctor is giving pills to a patient"), conveys just a transfer to a location. Four experiments explore how syntactic structures may become associated with particular semantic content - such as these emergent properties of events.

Repeat After Us: Syntactic Alignment is Not Partner-Specific.

Conversational partners match each other's speech, a process known as . Such alignment can be , when speakers match particular partners' production distributions, or , when speakers match aggregated linguistic statistics across their input. However, partner-specificity has only been assessed in situations where it had clear communicative utility, and non-alignment might cause communicative difficulty.

What you see isn't always what you get: Auditory word signals trump consciously perceived words in lexical access.

Human speech perception often includes both an auditory and visual component. A conflict in these signals can result in the McGurk illusion, in which the listener perceives a fusion of the two streams, implying that information from both has been integrated. We report two experiments investigating whether auditory-visual integration of speech occurs before or after lexical access, and whether the visual signal influences lexical access at all.

When Hearing Lips and Seeing Voices Becomes Perceiving Speech: Auditory-Visual Integration in Lexical Access.

In the McGurk Effect, a visual stimulus can affect the perception of an auditory signal, suggesting integration of the auditory and visual streams. However, it is unclear when in speech processing this auditory-visual integration occurs. The present study used a semantic priming paradigm to investigate whether integration occurs before, during, or after access of the lexical-semantic network.