An EMG study of the lip muscles during covert auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia

Purpose: Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) are speech perceptions in the absence of a external stimulation. An influential theoretical account of AVHs in schizophrenia claims that a deficit in inner speech monitoring would cause the verbal thoughts of the patient to be perceived as external voices. The account is based on a predictive control model, in which verbal self-monitoring is implemented. The aim of this study was to examine lip muscle activity during AVHs in schizophrenia patients, in order to check whether inner speech occurred. Methods: Lip muscle activity was recorded during covert AVHs (without articulation) and rest. Surface electromyography (EMG) was used on eleven schizophrenia patients. Results: Our results show an increase in EMG activity in the orbicularis oris inferior muscle, during covert AVHs relative to rest. This increase is not due to general muscular tension since there was no increase of muscular activity in the forearm muscle. Conclusion: This evidence that AVHs might be self-generated inner speech is discussed in the framework of a predictive control model. Further work is needed to better describe how the inner speech monitoring dysfunction occurs and how inner speech is controlled and monitored. This will help better understanding how AVHs occur

Recognizing prosody from the lips: is it possible to extract prosodic focus from lip features?

International audienceThe aim of this chapter is to examine the possibility of extracting prosodic information from lip features. We used two measurement techniques enabling automatic lip feature extraction to evaluate the "lip pattern" of prosodic focus in French. Two corpora with Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) sentences were designed. Four focus conditions (S, V, O or neutral) were elicited in a natural dialogue situation. In a first set of experiments, we recorded two speakers of French with front and profile video cameras. The speakers wore blue make-up and facial markers. In a second set we recorded five speakers with a 3D optical tracker. An analysis of the lip features showed that visible articulatory lip correlates of focus exist for all speakers. Two types of patterns were observed: absolute and differential. A potential outcome of this study is to provide criteria for automatic visual detection of prosodic focus from lip data

Strategy to design the sea-level monitoring networks for small tsunamigenic oceanic basins: the Western Mediterranean case

The 26 December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami triggered a number of international and national initiatives aimed at establishing modern, reliable and robust tsunami warning systems. In addition to the seismic network for initial warning, the main component of the monitoring system is the sea level network. Networks of coastal tide gages and tsunameters are implemented to detect the tsunami after the occurrence of a large earthquake, to confirm or refute the tsunami occurrence. Large oceans tsunami monitoring currently in place in the Pacific and in implementation in the Indian Ocean will be able to detect tsunamis in 1 h. But due to the very short time of waves propagation, in general less than 1 h, a tsunami monitoring system in a smaller basin requires a denser network located close to the seismic zones. A methodology is proposed based on the modeling of tsunami travel time and waveform, and on the estimation of the delay of transmission to design the location and the spacing of the stations. In the case of Western Mediterranean, we demonstrate that a network of around 17 coastal tide gages and 13 tsunameters located at 50 km along the shore is required to detect and measure nearly all tsunamis generated on the Northern coasts of Africa

The left inferior frontal gyrus under focus: an fMRI study of the production of deixis via syntactic extraction and prosodic focus: An fMRI study of the production of deixis

International audienceThe left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG, BA 44, 45, 47) has been associated with linguistic processing (from sentence- to syllable- parsing) as well as action analysis. We hypothesize that the function of the LIFG may be the monitoring of action, a function well adapted to agent deixis (verbal pointing at the agent of an action). The aim of this fMRI study was therefore to test the hypothesis that the LIFG is involved during the production of agent deixis. We performed an experiment whereby three kinds of deictic sentences were pronounced, involving prosodic focus, syntactic extraction and prosodic focus with syntactic extraction. A common pattern of activation was found for the three deixis conditions in the LIFG (BA 45 and/or 47), the left insula and the bilateral premotor (BA 6) cortex. Prosodic deixis additionally activated the left anterior cingulate gyrus (BA 24, 32), the left supramarginal gyrus (LSMG, BA 40) and Wernicke's area (BA 22). Our results suggest that the LIFG is involved during agent deixis, through either prosody or syntax, and that the LSMG and Wernicke's area are additionally required in prosody-driven deixis. Once grammaticalized, deixis would be handled solely by the LIFG, without the LSMG and Wernicke's area

Perceptual evaluation of tonal and contextual cues to sarcasm in French

International audienceVerbal irony is a mode of expression in which what is stated differs from (or is even opposed to) what is meant. Irony exists in the majority of the languages and cultures of the world (Pexman, 2008). Some researchers have proposed that acoustic irony cues are only employed if the common ground is not sufficient to indicate the intended message (Cutler, 1974). More recent research has shown that ironic content can be identified even in absence of contextual cues thanks to global acoustic/prosodic cues (Bryant & Fox Tree 2002). However, we still do not know what is the actual role of prosody, in particular of intonational phonology features (Ladd, 1996/2008), in irony comprehension. Concerning actual acoustic cues, sarcasm appears to be encoded in speech through various global manipulations in acoustic parameters such as fundamental frequency (f0), amplitude, speech rate, voice quality and vowel hyperarticulation (Attardo et al., 2003; Bryant & Fox Tree, 2005; Cheang & Pell, 2008; Rockwell, 2000; Sharrer & Christman, 2011; inter alia). In this study, we explore the expression of sarcasm in French, for which phonological data are still lacking. Specifically, here we test the acceptability of prototypical sarcastic tonal contours in presence of matching or conflicting contextual cues

Distribution of the retrotransposable element 412 in Drosophila species

Copy numbers of sequences homologous to the Drosophila melanogaster retrotransposable element 412, their dis tribution between the chromosome arms and the chromocenter, and whether they contain full-size copies were analyzed for 55 species of the Drosophila genus. Element 412 insertion sites were detected on the chromosome arms of D. melanogaster, Drosophila simulans, and a few species of the obscura group, but the chromocenter was labeled in almost all species. The presence of element 412 sequences in the majority of species shows that this element has a long evolutionary history in Drosophilidae, although it may have recently invaded the chromosomes in some species, such as D. simulans. Differences in copy number between species may be due to population size or specific endogenous or environmental factors and may follow the worldwide invasion of the species. Putative full-length copies were detected in the chromocenters of some species with no copies on the chromosome arms, suggesting that the chromocenter may be a shelter for such copies and not only for deleted ones.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Are tones aligned with articulatory events? Evidence from Italian and French

International audienceTonal alignment work has suggested that the temporal location of tonal targets relative to segmental "anchors" might be governed by principles of synchrony and stability (Arvaniti et al 1998, Ladd et al. 1999, inter alia). However, a number of discrepancies have emerged in the cross-linguistic study of alignment. For instance, despite some regularities in the alignment of L targets (Caspers and van Heuven 1993; Prieto et al. 1995), the alignment of H targets appears to be quite controversial. In fact, it is sometimes difficult to find definite segmental landmarks to which such targets might be aligned. Also, most of the alignment proposals so far inherently assume that if some anchors for tonal alignment do exist they must be acoustic in nature. A plausible alternative would be to assume that such anchors are primarily articulatory, which would explain why in some cases the underlying regularities would be masked. Hence, we adopt a new experimental paradigm for alignment research in which articulatory measures are performed simultaneously with acoustic measures. In order to test the constant alignment hypothesis, a preliminary study (D'Imperio et al. 2003) was conducted in which various latency measures, both acoustically and articulatorily based, were analyzed. Specifically, the kinematics of OPTOTRAK markers attached to the speaker's upper and lower lip was tracked over time during the production of the corpus sentences. The melodic target considered is the H tone of LH nuclear rises in Neapolitan Italian. In this variety, yes/no question LH rises are systematically later than (narrow focus) statement LH rises (D'Imperio 2000, 2001, 2002; D'Imperio and House 1997). In order to test the hypothesis of constant anchoring of H targets, the materials were produced with two different rates of speech, i.e. normal and fast. Summarizing the results, H targets of nuclear rises in Neapolitan statements and questions appear to be more closely phased with the articulatory dimension of between-lip distance than with two of the most commonly employed acoustic segmental landmarks for tonal alignment (i.e., onset and offset of stressed vowel). Statement H tones are phased with maximum between-lip distance within the stressed syllable. Note that this location does not correspond to any identifiable segmental boundary, acoustic event or phonological unit, and does not overlap with RMS peak amplitude. In fact, RMS peaks were generally much earlier than articulatory peaks, hence further away from H peaks. This calls for the collection and analysis of more articulatory data (especially jaw and tongue movements) to shed light on tonal alignment issues.In a second study, a French corpus was collected on the basis of the alignment contrast found by Welby (2003, in press). Welby's results show that listeners use the alignment of the initial rise (LHi) in French Accentual Phrases as a cue to speech segmentation. Specifically, listeners exploit the presence of an early rise to demarcate the beginning of a content word. In the present study, a corpus was built with a set of utterances displaying this specific alignment contrast. The kinematics of 10 pellets (8 on the face and tongue, 2 references) was tracked over time using an electromagnetometer (EMA, Carstens). The phasing of several articulatory events relative to the L and H part of the early rise were examined. The preliminary results seem to point to some kind of fine alignment specification for the L and H target. Specifically, we hypothesize that tonal target commands of Neapolitan as well as French rises are phased with commands of the supralaryngeal articulator involved to produce the segments to which the tone is associated. Regarding the word segmentation issue for French, it is important to study alignment in a diachronic perspective since we know of case of speech segmentation errors that can lead to lexical reinterpretation and change (l'abondance "abundance" > la bondance, from Welby 2003). We also take these results to suggest that not all rises align in the same way with the associated syllable. Though the role of articulatory constraints is important, the exact phasing properties of prosodic events are language-specific. Since prosody has recently become the realm of investigation of the Task Dynamics program (Byrd and Saltzman 2003), our alignment work will be cast under such a perspective

Prosodic cues of sarcastic speech in French: slower, higher, wider

International audienceVerbal irony is characterized by the use of specific acoustic modulations, especially global prosodic cues as well as vowel hyperarticulation. Little is known concerning the expression of sarcastic speech in French. Here we report on global prosodic features of sarcastic speech in a corpus of declarative French utterances. Our data show that sarcastic productions are characterized by utterance lengthening, by increased f0 modulations and a global raising of the pitch level and range. The results are discussed in the light of results on the acoustic features of ironic speech in languages other than French

Multimodal Perception of Prosodic Contrastive Focus in French: A Preliminary fMRI Study

http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/events/summerschool_2007/index.htmInternational audienceContrastive focus is used to emphasize a word or group of words in an utterance as opposed to another. In French, it can be conveyed by prosody using a specific intonational contour on the constituent pointed at (XXXf a mangé la pomme. 'XXXf ate the apple.'). It remains unclear what neural processes underlie the perception of prosodic focus. Meanwhile studies have shown that prosodic processing in general cannot be restricted to the right hemisphere (see [1] for review). Moreover it appears ([2]) that even though the perception of prosodic focus was often considered as uniquely auditory, it is possible to perceive prosodic focus visually and the visual modality can enhance perception when prosodic auditory cues are degraded (whispered speech). This finding emphasizes the necessity to consider the perception of prosodic contrastive focus and speech prosody in general as multimodal. The aim of this study is to analyze the neural processing of prosodic focus from a multimodal point of view

Cerebral correlates of multimodal pointing: An fmri study of prosodic focus, syntactic extraction, digital- and ocular- pointing

International audienceDeixis or pointing plays a crucial role in language acquisition and speech communication and can be conveyed in several modalities. The aim of this paper is to explore the cerebral substrate of multimodal pointing actions. We present an fMRI study of pointing including: 1) index finger pointing, 2) eye pointing, 3) prosodic focus production, 4) syntactic extraction (during speech production). Fifteen subjects were examined while they gave digital, ocular and oral responses inside the 3T imager. Results of a random effect group analysis show that digital and prosodic pointings recruit the parietal lobe bilaterally, while ocular and syntactic pointings do not. A grammaticalization process is suggested to explain the lack of parietal activation in the syntactic condition. Further analyses are carried out on the link between digital and prosodic parietal activations