Breathing and Speech Adaptation: Do Speakers Adapt Toward a Confederate Talking Under Physical Effort?

Purpose: This study investigated whether speakers adapt their breathing and speech (fundamental frequency []) to a prerecorded confederate who is sitting or moving under different levels of physical effort and who is either speaking or not. Following Paccalin and Jeannerod (2000), we would expect breathing rate to change in the direction of the confederate's, even if the participant is physically inactive. This might in turn affect their speech acoustics.

Acoustics of Breath Noises in Human Speech: Descriptive and Three-Dimensional Modeling Approaches.

Purpose: Breathing is ubiquitous in speech production, crucial for structuring speech, and a potential diagnostic indicator for respiratory diseases. However, the acoustic characteristics of speech breathing remain underresearched. This work aims to characterize the spectral properties of human inhalation noises in a large speaker sample and explore their potential similarities with speech sounds.

Does a robot's gaze aversion affect human gaze aversion?

Gaze cues serve an important role in facilitating human conversations and are generally considered to be one of the most important non-verbal cues. Gaze cues are used to manage turn-taking, coordinate joint attention, regulate intimacy, and signal cognitive effort. In particular, it is well established that gaze aversion is used in conversations to avoid prolonged periods of mutual gaze.

Undercompression errors as evidence for conceptual primitives.

The Meaning First Approach offers a model of the relation between thought and language that includes a Generator and a Compressor. The Generator build non-linguistic thought structures and the Compressor is responsible for its articulation through three processes: structure-preserving linearization, lexification, and compression via non-articulation of concepts when licensed. One goal of this paper is to show that a range of phenomena in child language can be explained in a unified way within the Meaning First Approach by the assumption that children differ from adults with respect to compression and, specifically, that they may undercompress in production, an idea that sets a research agenda for the study of language acquisition.

Left-behind experience and language proficiency predict narrative abilities in the home language of Kam-speaking minority children in China.

Introduction: Studies have documented that child experiences such as external/environmental factors as well as internal factors jointly affect acquisition outcomes in child language. Thus far, the findings have been heavily skewed toward Indo-European languages and children in the Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies. By contrast, this study features an understudied minority language Kam, and a group of so-called left-behind children in China growing up in a unique social-communicative environment.

Leg movements affect speech intensity.

Coordination between speech acoustics and manual gestures has been conceived as "not biologically mandated" (McClave E. 27(1): 69-89, 1998). However, recent work suggests a biomechanical entanglement between the upper limbs and the respiratory-vocal system (Pouw W, de Jonge-Hoekstra D, Harrison SJ, Paxton A, Dixon JA.

Developmental Changes in Coarticulation Degree Relate to Differences in Articulatory Patterns: An Empirically Grounded Modeling Approach.

Purpose: Coarticulatory effects in speech vary across development, but the sources of this variation remain unclear. This study investigated whether developmental differences in intrasyllabic coarticulation degree could be explained by differences in children's articulatory patterns compared to adults.

Method: To address this question, we first compared the tongue configurations of 3- to 7-year-old German children to those of adults.

Verifying Negative Sentences.

In the long history of psycholinguistic research on verifying negative sentences, an often-reported finding is that participants take longer to correctly judge negative sentences true than false, while being faster to judge their positive counterparts true (e.g. Clark & Chase, Cogn Psychol 3(3):472-517, 1972; Carpenter & Just, Psychol Rev 82(1):45-73, 1975).

Speech breathing: variable but individual over time and according to limb movements.

Breathing is variable but also highly individual. Since the 1980s, evidence of a ventilatory personality has been observed in different physiological studies. This original term refers to within-speaker consistency in breathing characteristics across days or even years.

Corrigendum: Syllable Complexity and Morphological Synthesis: A Well-Motivated Positive Complexity Correlation Across Subdomains.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.

Syllable Complexity and Morphological Synthesis: A Well-Motivated Positive Complexity Correlation Across Subdomains.

Relationships between phonological and morphological complexity have long been proposed in the linguistic literature, with empirical investigations often seeking complexity trade-offs. Positive complexity correlations tend not to be viewed in terms of motivations. We argue that positive complexity correlations can be diachronically well-motivated, emerging from crosslinguistically prevalent processes of language change.

Assessing vowel effects on voice quality, and voice quality effects on the respiratory system.

This study assesses (a) effects of vowel height and tense-lax status on the laryngeal closed quotient (CQ) and (b) whether respiratory volume changes vary with differences in CQ. German speakers produced words containing eight different vowels in normal and loud conditions. The only significant vowel effect was found for the /a:-a/ pair, with lower CQ in /a/ at normal intensity.

Generative Grammar: A Meaning First Approach.

The theory of language must predict the possible thought-signal (or meaning-sound or sign) pairings of a language. We argue for a Meaning First architecture of language where a thought structure is generated first. The thought structure is then realized using language to communicate the thought, to memorize it, or perhaps with another purpose.

Comprehension of the Presupposition Trigger "Also" by Mandarin-Speaking Preschoolers With and Without Autism Spectrum Disorders.

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have been reported to be widely impaired in their understanding of linguistic expressions that rely on elements of the context or norms of communication. The accurate interpretation of sentences conveying presuppositions often relies on such content, however, little previous research has investigated the ASD population's understanding of these sentences. The present study attempts to remedy this by exploring the understanding that Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with ASD and their typically developing (TD) peers have of sentence containing the presupposition trigger "also".

Differential contributions of the two cerebral hemispheres to temporal and spectral speech feedback control.

Proper speech production requires auditory speech feedback control. Models of speech production associate this function with the right cerebral hemisphere while the left hemisphere is proposed to host speech motor programs. However, previous studies have investigated only spectral perturbations of the auditory speech feedback.

Vowel Formants in Normal and Loud Speech.

Purpose This study evaluated how 1st and 2nd vowel formant frequencies (F1, F2) differ between normal and loud speech in multiple speaking tasks to assess claims that loudness leads to exaggerated vowel articulation. Method Eleven healthy German-speaking women produced normal and loud speech in 3 tasks that varied in the degree of spontaneity: reading sentences that contained isolated /i: a: u:/, responding to questions that included target words with controlled consonantal contexts but varying vowel qualities, and a recipe recall task. Loudness variation was elicited naturalistically by changing interlocutor distance.

Exploring the source of short-term variations in respiratory data.

This study explores short-term respiratory volume changes in German oral and nasal stops and discusses to what extent these changes may be explained by laryngeal-oral coordination. It is expected that respiratory volumes decrease more rapidly when the glottis and the vocal tract are open after the release of voiceless aspirated stops. Two experiments were performed using Inductance Plethysmography and acoustics, varying consonantal properties, loudness, and prosodic focus.

Relations among subglottal pressure, breathing, and acoustic parameters of sentence-level prominence in German.

This study investigates whether acoustic correlates of prominence are related to actions of the respiratory system resulting in local changes of subglottal pressure (Psub). Simultaneous recordings were made of acoustics; intraoral pressure (Pio), as an estimate of Psub; and thoracic and abdominal volume changes. Ten German speakers read sentences containing a verb ending with /t/ followed by a noun starting with /t/.