Disfluency and listeners' attention: An investigation of the immediate and lasting e ects of hesitations in speech

Hesitations in speech marked by pauses, fillers such as er, and prolongations of words are remarkably common in most spontaneous speech. Experimental evidence indicates that they affect both the processing of speech and the lasting representation of the spoken material. One theory as to the mechanisms that underlie these effects is that filled pauses heighten listeners' attention to upcoming speech. For example, in the utterance: (1) She hated the CD, but then she's never liked my taste in er music The hesitation marked by the filler er would heighten listeners' attention to the post-dis fluent material (music) which would then be processed and represented differently to an equivalent stimulus in a passage of fluent speech. The thesis examines this proposition in the context of an explicit de finition of attention. The first half of the work investigates whether hesitations heighten two different aspects of listeners' attention: these are the immediate engagement of attention to post-dis fluent stimuli at the point they are encountered, and the continued attention to the representation of stimuli after they are encountered. In experiment 1, a speech `oddball' paradigm is used to show that event-related potentials (ERPs) associated with attention (MMN and P3) are affected by a preceding hesitation, indicating an immediate effect of hesitations on listeners overt attention. Experiments 2 and 3 use behavioural responses and eye-movements measures during a change-detection paradigm. These experiments show that there is also an effect on the listeners' attention to the post-dis fluent material after the initial presentation of the utterance. The second half of the thesis concerns itself with the timecourse of the attentional effects. It addresses questions such as: how long-lived is the attentional heightening and what is the attentional heightening trigger? Experiments 4{7 explore the relationship between the filler er and periods of silent pause that surround it. Behavioural (exp. 4{6) and ERP (exp. 7) results show that while extending the period of silence after the filler er does not affect the immediate engagement of attention, it will affect subsequent attention to the post-disfluent material: constituents that are not immediately preceded by the filler er are not attended to in an enhanced way. Together, these experiments confirm the proposition that hesitations heighten listeners' attention to upcoming speech. The thesis outlines the ways in which the components of this attentional heightening are differentially affected by interaction between the content and timing of the hesitations encountered. Attention has an important role to play in the processing of any stimulus. Using disfluency as a test case, this thesis illuminates its importance in language comprehension

The Pelagic - Sargassum Ichthyofauna of the Eastern Gulf of Mexico

A total of 2857 fishes comprising 15 families and 40 species was collected at 62 localities in the eastern Gulf of Mexico between 1971 and 1976. The fauna was dominated by the Carangidae, Balistidae, and Syngnathidae. Monacanthus hispidus was the most abundant species and comprised 84.5% of the total fauna. Species diversity (H\u27) was variable within the Gulf and low in comparison with the western Atlantic Sargassum - associated ichthyofauna. Index of Affinity was high within the Gulf due to the abundance of M. hispidus. Perhaps conditions associated with community dispersal, for which M. hispidus is better adapted, permit this species to dominate this community. Additionally, species diversity differences may be due to substrate area or clumpsize

Attention orienting effects of hesitations in speech: evidence from ERPs

Filled-pause disfluencies such as um and er affect listeners’ comprehension, possibly mediated by attentional mechanisms (J. E. Fox Tree, 2001). However, there is little direct evidence that hesitations affect attention. The current study used an coustic manipulation of continuous speech to induce event-related potential components associated with attention (mismatch negativity [MMN] and P300) during the comprehension of fluent and disfluent utterances. In fluent cases, infrequently occurring acoustically manipulated target words gave rise to typical MMN and P300 components when compared to nonmanipulated controls. In disfluent cases, where targets were preceded by natural sounding hesitations culminating in the filled pause er, an MMN (reflecting a detection of deviance) was still apparent for manipulated words, but there was little evidence of a subsequent P300. This suggests that attention was not reoriented to deviant words in disfluent cases. A subsequent recognition test showed that nonmanipulated words were more likely to be remembered if they had been preceded by a hesitation. Taken together, these results strongly implicate attention in an account of disfluency processing: Hesitations orient listeners’ attention, with consequences for the immediate processing and later representation of an utterance

Sunset haematology: improving the end-of-life journey for patients and caregivers, in patients with haematologic malignancies

BACKGROUND AND AIM Haematologic Malignancies (HM) are diverse diseases with differing illness trajectories and therapeutic pathways. Unfortunately HM patients may rapidly and unexpectedly clinically deteriorate, resulting in suboptimal engagement of palliative and end-of-life (EOL) care.  Compared to patients with solid tumours, HM patients have many different factors affecting their end-of-life (EOL) journey. Uniquely, a subset of HM patients with bone marrow failure (BMF) can be supported for significant, but highly variable, periods of time with red blood cell transfusions (RBCT), platelet transfusions (PT) and prophylactic antibiotics.  Availability of chronic RBCTs and PTs make HM patients with BMF similar to elderly and poor prognosis patients with end stage kidney disease (ESKD). Multidisciplinary Palliative Supportive Care programs have been shown to be effective for these EKSD patients and may serve as supportive care models for EOL journey in HM patients. This project is  a pilot study aiming to provide a template for management of EOL for patients with HM with BMF, and their care-givers. METHODS Three components are being developed: 1) Survey of patient opinions around treatment decision-making. 2) Analyses of the impact of patient, disease and treatment factors on the probability of survival from start of PT, to inform patients. 3) Collaborative involvement between Haematology and Palliative Care staff involved in the local ESKD program, to develop a template for earlier EOL pathway planning in HM patients. CONCLUSION Progress of work to date will be presented including preliminary findings and next steps

Positive wellbeing and resilience following adolescent victimisation: An exploration into protective factors across development

Background Not all victims of bullying go on to develop problems with their mental health. To understand factors that may confer resilience, many have explored the moderating role of protective factors in relation to mental illness. No study to date, however, has considered moderators of adult wellbeing following victimisation. We explore 14 protective factors and test whether these promote good adult wellbeing in addition to prevent mental illness following victimisation. In doing so, we aimed to understand how positive mental health and resilience can be promoted. Methods Data were derived from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. Participants were assessed for wellbeing and depressive symptoms at age 23, as well as victimisation in adolescence, and protective factors across development. Protective factors were categorised into individual-, family- and peer-level, and included factors like social skills, perceived school competence, and relationships with family and peers. The moderating role of the protective factors were examined using interactive regression models. Results Perceived scholastic competence was the only factor that mitigated some of the negative effects of victimisation. Individuals with higher perceptions of scholastic competence had higher wellbeing in adulthood than victims with lower perceptions of competence. No protective factors positively moderated life satisfaction or the risk of depressive symptoms; although findings suggest that friendships in late adolescence may be protective for individuals exposed to less frequent victimisation. Conclusions Our study is the first to explore a wide range of protective factors in predicting adult wellbeing following victimisation. We identify factors involved specifically in supporting wellbeing but not in reducing the risk of depression. Findings suggest that interventions aimed at increasing perceptions of scholastic competence in childhood may help to support more positive wellbeing in adulthood

Slower rates of prism adaptation but intact aftereffects in patients with early to mid-stage Parkinson's disease

There is currently mixed evidence on the effect of Parkinson's disease on motor adaptation. Some studies report that patients display adaptation comparable to age-matched controls, while others report a complete inability to adapt to novel sensory perturbations. Here, early to mid-stage Parkinson's patients were recruited to perform a prism adaptation task. When compared to controls, patients showed slower rates of initial adaptation but intact aftereffects. These results support the suggestion that patients with early to mid-stage Parkinson's disease display intact adaptation driven by sensory prediction errors, as shown by the intact aftereffect. But impaired facilitation of performance through cognitive strategies informed by task error, as shown by the impaired initial adaptation. These results support recent studies that suggest that patients with Parkinson's disease retain the ability to perform visuomotor adaptation, but display altered use of cognitive strategies to aid performance and generalises these previous findings to the classical prism adaptation task

Up-Regulation and Profibrotic Role of Osteopontin in Human Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis

BACKGROUND: Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is a progressive and lethal disorder characterized by fibroproliferation and excessive accumulation of extracellular matrix in the lung. METHODS AND FINDINGS: Using oligonucleotide arrays, we identified osteopontin as one of the genes that significantly distinguishes IPF from normal lungs. Osteopontin was localized to alveolar epithelial cells in IPF lungs and was also significantly elevated in bronchoalveolar lavage from IPF patients. To study the fibrosis-relevant effects of osteopontin we stimulated primary human lung fibroblasts and alveolar epithelial cells (A549) with recombinant osteopontin. Osteopontin induced a significant increase of migration and proliferation in both fibroblasts and epithelial cells. Epithelial growth was inhibited by the pentapeptide Gly-Arg-Gly-Asp-Ser (GRGDS) and antibody to CD44, while fibroproliferation was inhibited by GRGDS and antibody to α(v)β(3) integrin. Fibroblast and epithelial cell migration were inhibited by GRGDS, anti-CD44, and anti-α(v)β(3). In fibroblasts, osteopontin up-regulated tissue inhibitor of metalloprotease-1 and type I collagen, and down-regulated matrix metalloprotease-1 (MMP-1) expression, while in A549 cells it caused up-regulation of MMP-7. In human IPF lungs, osteopontin colocalized with MMP-7 in alveolar epithelial cells, and application of weakest link statistical models to microarray data suggested a significant interaction between osteopontin and MMP-7. CONCLUSIONS: Our results provide a potential mechanism by which osteopontin secreted from the alveolar epithelium may exert a profibrotic effect in IPF lungs and highlight osteopontin as a potential target for therapeutic intervention in this incurable disease

Divided attention selectively impairs memory for self-relevant information

Information that is relevant to oneself tends to be remembered more than information that relates to other people, but the role of attention in eliciting this "self-reference effect" is unclear. In the present study, we assessed the importance of attention in self-referential encoding using an ownership paradigm, which required participants to encode items under conditions of imagined ownership by themselves or by another person. Previous work has established that this paradigm elicits a robust self-reference effect, with more "self-owned" items being remembered than "other-owned" items. Access to attentional resources was manipulated using divided-attention tasks at encoding. A significant self-reference effect emerged under full-attention conditions and was related to an increase in episodic recollection for self-owned items, but dividing attention eliminated this memory advantage. These findings are discussed in relation to the nature of self-referential cognition and the importance of attentional resources at encoding in the manifestation of the self-reference effect in memory