Improved status following behavioural intervention in a case of severe dysarthria with stroke aetiology

There is little published intervention outcome literature concerning dysarthria acquired from stroke. Single case studies have the potential to provide more detailed specification and interpretation than is generally possible with larger participant numbers and are thus informative for clinicians who may deal with similar cases. Such research also contributes to the future planning of larger scale investigations. Behavioural intervention is described which was carried out with a man with severe dysarthria following stroke, beginning at seven and ending at nine months after stroke. Pre-intervention stability between five and seven months contrasted with significant improvements post-intervention on listener-rated measures of word and reading intelligibility and communication effectiveness in conversation. A range of speech analyses were undertaken (comprising of rate, pause and intonation characteristics in connected speech and phonetic transcription of single word production), with the aim of identifying components of speech which might explain the listeners’ perceptions of improvement. Pre- and post intervention changes could be detected mainly in parameters related to utterance segmentation and intonation. The basis of improvement in dysarthria following intervention is complex, both in terms of the active therapeutic dimensions and also the specific speech alterations which account for changes to intelligibility and effectiveness. Single case results are not necessarily generalisable to other cases and outcomes may be affected by participant factors and therapeutic variables, which are not readily controllable

Beyond ‘Interaction’: How to Understand Social Effects on Social Cognition

In recent years, a number of philosophers and cognitive scientists have advocated for an ‘interactive turn’ in the methodology of social-cognition research: to become more ecologically valid, we must design experiments that are interactive, rather than merely observational. While the practical aim of improving ecological validity in the study of social cognition is laudable, we think that the notion of ‘interaction’ is not suitable for this task: as it is currently deployed in the social cognition literature, this notion leads to serious conceptual and methodological confusion. In this paper, we tackle this confusion on three fronts: 1) we revise the ‘interactionist’ definition of interaction; 2) we demonstrate a number of potential methodological confounds that arise in interactive experimental designs; and 3) we show that ersatz interactivity works just as well as the real thing. We conclude that the notion of ‘interaction’, as it is currently being deployed in this literature, obscures an accurate understanding of human social cognition

The influence of linguistic and social factors on the recent decline of French ne

In this article we present some results showing the decline in radio speech in the use of the French negative particle ne over the last forty years or so. These results derive from a comparison of two radio corpora: an archival corpus recorded by Ågren (1973) in 1960–61. The second, contemporary corpus was recorded and analysed by one of the present authors (Smith) in 1997. Having described the variable in question, we present these corpora in turn and analyse results deriving from them. We then examine some of the linguistic constraints that endorse the progressive decline of ne in some contexts while hindering the process in others. Finally we consider some elements of the social context within which the decline of ne has been occurring

Connected speech features from picture description in Alzheimer's disease: a systematic review

The language changes that occur over the course of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) can impact communication abilities and have profound functional consequences. Picture description tasks can be used to approximate everyday communication abilities of AD patients. As various methods and variables have been studied over the years, current knowledge about the most affected features of AD discourse in the context of picture descriptions is difficult to summarize. This systematic review aims to provide researchers with an overview of the most common areas of impairment in AD discourse as they appear in picture description tasks. Based on the 44 articles fulfilling inclusion criteria, our findings reflect a multidimensional pattern of changes in the production (speech rate), syntactic (length of utterance), lexical (word-frequency and use of pronouns), fluency (repetitions and word-finding difficulties), semantic (information units), and discourse (efficiency) domains. We discuss our findings in the light of current research and point to potential scientific and clinical uses of picture description tasks in the context of AD

Event Processing through naming: Investigating event focus in two people with aphasia

Some people with aphasia may have trouble with verbs because of fundamental difficulties in processing situations in a way that maps readily onto language. This paper describes a novel assessment, the Order of Naming Test, that explores the conceptual processing of events through the order in which people name the entities involved. The performance of non-brain damaged control participants is described. The responses of two people with non-fluent aphasia are then discussed. Both 'Helen' and 'Ron' showed significant difficulty with verbs and sentences. Ron also had trouble on a range of tasks tapping aspects of event processing, despite intact non-verbal cognition. While Helen's performance on the Order of Naming Test was very similar to the controls, Ron's differed in a number of respects, suggesting that he was less focused on the main participant entities. However, certain aspects of his response pointed at covert event processing abilities that might be fruitfully exploited in therapy

An exploration of the rhythm of Malay

In recent years there has been a surge of interest in speech rhythm. However we still lack a clear understanding of the nature of rhythm and rhythmic differences across languages. Various metrics have been proposed as means for measuring rhythm on the phonetic level and making typological comparisons between languages (Ramus et al, 1999; Grabe & Low, 2002; Dellwo, 2006) but the debate is ongoing on the extent to which these metrics capture the rhythmic basis of speech (Arvaniti, 2009; Fletcher, in press). Furthermore, cross linguistic studies of rhythm have covered a relatively small number of languages and research on previously unclassified languages is necessary to fully develop the typology of rhythm. This study examines the rhythmic features of Malay, for which, to date, relatively little work has been carried out on aspects rhythm and timing. The material for the analysis comprised 10 sentences produced by 20 speakers of standard Malay (10 males and 10 females). The recordings were first analysed using rhythm metrics proposed by Ramus et. al (1999) and Grabe & Low (2002). These metrics (∆C, %V, rPVI, nPVI) are based on durational measurements of vocalic and consonantal intervals. The results indicated that Malay clustered with other so-called syllable-timed languages like French and Spanish on the basis of all metrics. However, underlying the overall findings for these metrics there was a large degree of variability in values across speakers and sentences, with some speakers having values in the range typical of stressed-timed languages like English. Further analysis has been carried out in light of Fletcher’s (in press) argument that measurements based on duration do not wholly reflect speech rhythm as there are many other factors that can influence values of consonantal and vocalic intervals, and Arvaniti’s (2009) suggestion that other features of speech should also be considered in description of rhythm to discover what contributes to listeners’ perception of regularity. Spectrographic analysis of the Malay recordings brought to light two parameters that displayed consistency and regularity for all speakers and sentences: the duration of individual vowels and the duration of intervals between intensity minima. This poster presents the results of these investigations and points to connections between the features which seem to be consistently regulated in the timing of Malay connected speech and aspects of Malay phonology. The results are discussed in light of current debate on the descriptions of rhythm

Using corpus methods to investigate classroom interaction and teacher discourse in special educational needs (SEN) classrooms: an investigation of methodological possibilities

This thesis uses corpus methods to investigate classroom interaction in SEN classrooms. Typically research in the field of teacher talk takes a pedagogic or psychological perspective and has therefore utilised experimental or observational data on a much smaller scale than this corpus-based analysis. The advantages of such a corpus analysis is considered, including the benefits of a larger and empirical data set and automated analyses. The SEN Classrooms Corpus created for purpose of this study amounts to 52,813 words of spoken teacher-pupil interaction. Data comes from 16 lessons from two classes with two different teachers in a single SEN school over a two-year period. All interactions involve at least one teacher and groups of between three and nine pupils engaging in literacy classes with a focus upon shared reading. As features of teacher discourse were often only vaguely defined by function in the relevant literature, a methodological process was adapted to translate these into automatic corpus queries. First, definitions were combined with definitions from contemporary English grammars in order to provide a linguistic form for each teacher discourse feature. These forms were then translated into CQP advanced syntax queries, allowing us to retrieval examples of each feature from the SEN Classrooms Corpus. Analyses in this thesis focuses upon the four most common features of teacher discourse as identified in the literature and based upon the pilot study (Smith, 2015): questions, directives, augmentative and alternative communication and feedback. Following the creation of queries, corpus methods including frequency, distribution and concordancing were used in order to assess both how often and in what contexts individual features were used within the SEN Classrooms Corpus. This, in turn, allows us to investigate exactly how teacher discourse occurs within these classrooms. This thesis provides three major conclusions regarding the use of corpus methods to assess teacher scaffolding in SEN classrooms. First, it demonstrates how a corpus of such interactive data might be created, including important methodological considerations. Second, it provides a framework by which we might move from ill-defined features in literature to complete corpus queries that aid automated corpus analyses. Finally, the use of this unique corpus and this set of methods and queries allows us to investigate how different features of teacher discourse are used by teachers within the SEN Classrooms Corpus, including whether these uses confirm or challenge the findings of previous empirical research