General-Purpose Monitoring during Speech Production

WOS:000289063000012International audienceThe concept of "monitoring" refers to our ability to control our actions on-line. Monitoring involved in speech production is often described in psycholinguistic models as an inherent part of the language system. We probed the specificity of speech monitoring in two psycholinguistic experiments where electro-encephalographic activities were recorded. Our focus was on a component previously reported in nonlinguistic manual tasks and interpreted as a marker of monitoring processes. The error negativity (Ne, or error-related negativity), thought to originate in medial frontal areas, peaks shortly after erroneous responses. A component of seemingly comparable properties has been reported, after errors, in tasks requiring access to linguistic knowledge (e.g., speech production), compatible with a generic error-detection process. However, in contrast to its original name, advanced processing methods later revealed that this component is also present after correct responses in visuomotor tasks. Here, we reported the observation of the same negativity after correct responses across output modalities (manual and vocal responses). This indicates that, in language production too, the Ne reflects on-line response monitoring rather than error detection specifically. Furthermore, the temporal properties of the Ne suggest that this monitoring mechanism is engaged before any auditory feedback. The convergence of our findings with those obtained with nonlinguistic tasks suggests that at least part of the monitoring involved in speech production is subtended by a general-purpose mechanism

Emotions in context: examining pervasive affective sensing systems, applications, and analyses

Pervasive sensing has opened up new opportunities for measuring our feelings and understanding our behavior by monitoring our affective states while mobile. This review paper surveys pervasive affect sensing by examining and considering three major elements of affective pervasive systems, namely; “sensing”, “analysis”, and “application”. Sensing investigates the different sensing modalities that are used in existing real-time affective applications, Analysis explores different approaches to emotion recognition and visualization based on different types of collected data, and Application investigates different leading areas of affective applications. For each of the three aspects, the paper includes an extensive survey of the literature and finally outlines some of challenges and future research opportunities of affective sensing in the context of pervasive computing