Elicitation Task Research Articles

Preliminary findings of expository discourse in older adults

Aims: The purpose of this study was to: 1) examine older adults' ability to deliver coherent discourse in expository discourse elicitation tasks; and 2) explore whether cognitive ability and social behavior activity predict coherent discourse production in healthy older adults, separately by gender. Methods: Study participants included 58 neurologically healthy older adults–male (n\,=\,19) and female (n\,=\,39). For the discourse elicitation task, participants provided their opinion in response to four controversial topics. They also completed executive function measures and social engagement questionnaires. Results: Years of education significantly differed between the two groups; thus, education was used as a covariate. A 2 × 4 mixed analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was conducted. Main effect differences for gender and topic for discourse coherence were not found. In order to examine the contributions of executive function and social engagement on discourse coherence by gender, multiple regression analysis was conducted. For the male group, social activity and social network were significant predictors of the ability to convey coherent discourse on the healthcare topic. For the female group, only executive function was a significant predictor of the coherent discourse production on the marriage topic. Conclusions: The findings suggest that in the same type of discourse elicitation task, the nature of topic influences performance in elicited expository discourse. Moreover, results indicated that the influence of cognitive ability and social engagement on discourse coherence differed between the two gender groups.

Validation of a brief image elicitation task as an indicator of subjective wellbeing in the general population.

A novel image-based method (AgileBrain) demonstrates construct validity as a measure of wellbeing in the general working adult population. Analysis of data from four large nationally representative samples of American full-time workers employed by mid-to-large size companies conducted in November 2021 (n = 812), May 2022 (n = 810), June 2023 (n = 986), and January 2024 (n = 1,179). Across all four studies, AgileBrain demonstrates convergent validity across multiple established indicators of subjective wellbeing including the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (CESD-10), Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale (GAD-7), Neuroticism (BFI-S), UCLA Loneliness Scale, Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10), Coping Styles (Brief COPE-28), self-reported diagnosed neurodiversity conditions and symptoms, and trauma history. Results across these studies suggest that AgileBrain is useful as a screening tool for detecting compromised wellbeing in terms of construct validity. Given strong preferences for brief, gamified assessments, the validity advantages stemming from less consciously controllable responses, and the statistical advantages of measures associated with high response rates and normal distributions, AgileBrain emerges as strong tool for assessing subjective wellbeing at the population level and offers a promising approach to monitoring treatment effectiveness.

Elicitation tasks, language contact, and syllable structure in Budai Rukai

Abstract This target paper builds on previous literature in Budai Rukai to develop a nuanced framework for examining the syllable structure and the impact of Chinese language education on speakers’ judgments. It demonstrates new dimensions of overarching corroboration of intonational phonology and is a worthwhile endeavor. In this commentary, I address the issues of elicitation tasks and language contact by illustrating that the syllable structure of Budai Rukai is still undergoing age-related changes and remains to be discussed.

The Effects of Home Language Use on Spanish Speech Measures in Bilingual Children With Hearing Loss Who Use Cochlear Implants and Their Peers With Normal Hearing.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how the amount of home language use between the primary caregiver and bilingual Spanish- and English-speaking children with hearing loss who use cochlear implants (CIs) versus their bilingual age-matched peers with normal hearing (NH) can impact speech outcomes in the home language. Thirty-four bilingual Spanish- and English-speaking children (17 CI users and 17 with NH) between the ages of 5;3 and 7;9 (years;months) participated in this study. Independent variables were the amount of home language use with the primary caregiver and hearing status, and dependent variables were vowels and consonants correctly produced and occurrence of selected phonological processes. The amount of home language use was ascertained from surveys, and the dependent measures were based on a single-word picture elicitation task. Bilingual children with CIs who are exposed to Spanish for more than 80% of the time via their primary caregiver performed better on Spanish segmental accuracy measures than those who are exposed to Spanish from only 20% to 50% of the time, specifically on vowels (partial η2 = .31) and consonants (partial η2 = .025). Children with NH outperformed children with CIs on all accuracy measures in Spanish. Preliminary results suggest the importance of language exposure through interactions with the primary caregiver for speech development in bilingual children. Future studies should investigate strategies to facilitate home language development in bilingual children with CIs, enabling them to reach their full potential.

Does perceptual high variability phonetic training improve L2 speech production? A meta-analysis of perception-production connection

Abstract This meta-analysis of 31 studies aimed to determine the effectiveness of perception-based high variability phonetic training (HVPT) for second language (L2) production learning and to identify learner-related and methodological variables that influence production gains. Based on independent effect sizes for 43 within-participant and 17 between-participant designs, small-to-medium effects of post-training improvement were found. The average production gains for trained items and untrained items were 10.50% and 4.50%, respectively. Neither strong support for long-term retention of production learning nor generalization to untrained stimuli was observed, however. Moderator analyses showed that post-training production gains were influenced by a number of factors related to learner profiles (age and learning context), training features (provision of phonetic information, training duration, and training time per session), and features of production tests (elicitation tasks, prompt modality, and outcome measures). The relationship between perception and production gains was negligible at the participant level, but was significant and moderate at the level of individual studies for post-training and retention data. These findings provide partial support for a perception-production link. This study makes several recommendations for future studies investigating the effects of HVPT on L2 speech production learning.

Personalized fMRI tasks for grief severity in bereaved individuals: Emotional counting Stroop and grief elicitation protocols

Approximately 7–10% of people experiencing bereavement following a death develop prolonged grief disorder, a psychiatric disorder included in the DSM-5-TR. Prolonged grief disorder encompasses core symptoms of intense yearning/longing for and preoccupation with thoughts or memories of the deceased person experienced to a clinically significant degree for at least the last month, other key associated symptoms (e.g., avoidance, emotional pain), and the death must have occurred at least one year prior to diagnosis. Extant research has shown a relationship between activation in the reward pathway (e.g., nucleus accumbens) and grief severity. To date, functional MRI studies have primarily utilized the Emotional Counting Stroop task (ecStroop) and the Grief Elicitation task to explore these relationships. However, these prior studies are not without limitations, including small sample sizes and absence of a unified task protocol, hindering meaningful comparisons between studies. This protocol paper describes the ecStroop task and the Grief Elicitation task, which will be vital for facilitating multisite studies and enabling comparisons across studies. This will aid to advance the field by identifying neurophysiological measures that may, in the future, serve as potential biomarkers of prolonged grief disorder.

Greek-Cypriot learners’ perception and production of L2 English vowels

Acquiring L2 segments is particularly challenging for L2 learners, especially when the L1 and L2 inventories involve different contrasts and acoustic cues. The present research investigated the perception and production of L2 English vowels by adult Greek-Cypriot learners and examined the effects of orthographic cues and consonantal context in their performance. Perceptual performance was assessed through a forced-choice identification task and production performance through a wordlist-reading and an elicitation task, both analyzed acoustically and through intelligibility ratings. The findings showed the influence of the L1 on both the perception and production of L2 segments, supporting the assumptions of current models of speech perception and production. Learners faced challenges in perceiving the members of L2 contrasts and mostly used their L1 articulatory routines in their productions of L2 vowels. Orthographic cues or consonantal context did not significantly affect learners’ productions or overall perception, although strong contextual effects were observed in individual target vowels. This study is the first to provide an in-depth comparison of CYG and English vowels as well as an examination of the acquisition of L2 English vowels by this population, which can guide EFL teachers and course developers in developing appropriate EFL curricula that incorporate pronunciation instruction.

Speaker judgments alone cannot diagnose syllable structure

Abstract The ease and consistency with which speakers of many languages provide direct judgments about syllable structure has been taken by scholars as evidence that these judgments are accurate and sufficient argumentation for an analysis of syllable structure in descriptive works. This paper questions whether the results of direct elicitation tasks reliably indicate a prosodic domain that is meaningful in the language’s phonology and provides alternative forms of evidence for syllable structure from intonation. This is done through a case study of Budai Rukai, a Formosan language whose contact relationship with Sinitic languages affects how speakers respond to syllable judgment tasks.

The Emergence of Verb Patterns in Arabic in Children With Developmental Language Disorder Compared to Children With Typical Development.

The Arabic verb system features a nonlinear root and pattern derivational morphology. Previous studies suggest that young Arabic and Hebrew speakers' early verb use is based on semantic complexity rather than derivational morphological structure. The present study examines the role of morphological and semantic complexity in the emergence of the verb derivational morphology in Arabic speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD) compared to children with typical language development (TLD). Natural language data were collected from native Arabic-speaking children (40 with DLD; aged 4-6 years and 133 with TLD aged 2;6-6;0 [years;months]) using picture-based elicitation tasks, and verbs were coded morphologically for derivational features and for features of semantic complexity. The results showed that children with DLD demonstrated a more limited production of verb patterns, both in types and in tokens, than age-matched children with TLD. Also, children with DLD age 5;0-6;0 were similar in types and tokens of verb patterns to younger children with TLD at the age of 3;6-4 years. Moreover, while children with TLD at the age of 2;6-3 years used a smaller number of verb patterns than older 4;0-5;0 aged children with DLD, the two groups were not different in verb semantics. Finally, the morphological and semantic diversity demonstrated by the children with DLD was similar to the morphological and semantic diversity shown by children with TLD. Our findings support the conclusion that children with DLD and with TLD acquire the derivational verb system in the same pathway and the quantitative lexical differences between the two groups support a delay rather than a deviation from the typical developmental trajectory.

Global coherence in structured and unstructured discourse types in neurotypical adults

BackgroundResearch on global coherence in neurotypical aging has predominantly focused on different methods of elicitation and their impact on age. The use of structured versus unstructured discourse tasks can have varying effects on global coherence. Comparative studies investigating this effect within Tamil language-speaking populations are scarce. This study seeks to address this gap by examining global coherence in structured and unstructured tasks among speakers of Tamil language.AimThis study aimed to identify any significant differences in the global coherence of discourse, as measured through structured (picture description) and unstructured (conversation) tasks, in middle-aged and older neurotypical individuals across ages and genders.MethodThirty Tamil-speaking individuals participated in the study, which included 15 middle-aged adults (aged 44–59 years) and 15 older adults (aged 60–80 years), with an equal number of males and females. Discourse samples were audio recorded using structured (picture description) and unstructured (conversational discourse) tasks. The picture description task included describing a single picture (of a birthday scene) and a sequential picture stimulus (depicting an argument event). The conversational task consisted of two topics of conversation (family and work) with the investigator. Each discourse task lasted for at least a minute. The recorded samples were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using a 4-point Global Coherence Rating Scale.ResultsParticipants exhibited significant differences, with the unstructured discourse task having a significantly higher global coherence rating (p ≤ 0.05) than both structured discourse tasks. The varying cognitive demands, functional purposes, and contextual factors across various discourse elicitation tasks could be attributed to these differences. No significant differences were observed in the coherence ratings between middle-aged and older adults or between genders.ConclusionThe method used to elicit discourse and the type of discourse need to be considered when exploring global coherence measures. The current study has important methodological implications for the coherence analysis of the Tamil-speaking population in both structured and unstructured tasks.

The Acquisition of a Diglossic Language by Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students: Evidence From a Sentence Production Task.

The current study aimed to examine morphosyntactic errors in sentences produced by DHH students, who are signers of Israeli Sign Language, and also users of Palestinian Colloquial Arabic (PCA) and written Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Nineteen school-age DHH students participated in a sentence elicitation task in which they retold events portrayed in 24 videos in PCA and MSA. A control group of 19 hearing students was tested with the same task. Sentences in each language variety were coded for grammatical versus ungrammatical productions and for type of morphosyntactic errors for the latter. In addition, code-switched words were counted. The hearing group showed no morphosyntactic errors, whereas the DHH students showed morphosyntactic errors in both PCA and MSA. In addition, both groups code-switched in both PCA and MSA, with more code-switching in the MSA task than in the PCA task. Furthermore, an interaction with age revealed that young students code-switched more in MSA and older students code-switched more in PCA. It is suggested that the morphosyntactic abilities of DHH students are incomplete in both language varieties. Lack of spoken language input may negatively influence the acquisition of spoken language, which impacts further the acquisition of the standard language in diglossic contexts. Code-switching is explained as both due to lexical gaps, when occurring in MSA, and an effort to raise the register in PCA.

Examining Adolescent Language Performance in Discourse Production Across Four Elicitation Tasks.

Comprehensive spoken language assessment should include the evaluation of language use in naturalistic contexts. Discourse elicitation and analysis provides the opportunity for such an evaluation to occur. In this article, our overall aim was to describe adolescents' language performance on four elicitation tasks and determine if there are task-related differences across the elicitation tasks. Forty-four typically developing adolescents with ages ranging from 12;2 to 17;11 (years;months; M = 15;2; 21 boys and 23 girls) participated in the study. They completed four spoken discourse tasks: (a) story generation using a wordless picture book, (b) fable retell, (c) six personal narratives in response to emotion-based prompts, and (d) monologic response to two stories that contained a moral dilemma. Responses were transcribed and analyzed for four language performance measures tapping into language productivity, syntactic complexity, lexical diversity, and verbal facility. Despite individual variability in performance, mean scores were close to median scores for most measures, suggesting a symmetrical distribution. As expected, all four language performance measures were significantly different across the four elicitation tasks. The personal narrative task elicited the longest samples, with the highest verbal fluency. In contrast, both lexical diversity and syntactic complexity were the strongest in response to the fable retell and the moral dilemma tasks. This investigation provides speech-language pathologists with an overview of how task-related factors may impact adolescent language performance. These findings may be used to support their clinical decision-making processes in choosing a suitable discourse task when conducting a comprehensive spoken language assessment. Three hypothetical case examples are used to illustrate the decision-making process. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.25761768.

Transfer effects of recursive self-feedback on connected speech production in patients with chronic nonfluent aphasia: Preliminary results

ABSTRACT Background Persons with nonfluent aphasia (PWNA) have deficits with online feedback for speech error detection and correction which have debilitating effects on language relearning in learned and novel contexts. Previous studies have shown that aphasia treatments that combine PWNA’s offline self-feedback and external feedback from speech-language pathologists (SLPs) improve language production in learned and novel contexts. However, it remains unclear whether PWNA can use their offline self-feedback alone during treatments that generalizes to improvement in connected speech production. Here, we examine generalization effects of recursive self-feedback on PWNA’s connected speech production. Recursive self-feedback utilizes offline self-feedback loops alone to help PWNA optimize their error monitoring and correction abilities for language production in learned and novel contexts. Method A crossover design was used to investigate generalization effects of two treatments on connected speech production in four PWNA. These treatments comprised script production with recursive self-feedback and script production with external feedback. Employing a mobile health approach, treatments were remotely administered to participants within the comfort of their homes. Practice of both treatment blocks occurred intensively over two hours per day, five days per week, spanning two to three weeks. Each treatment block featured pretreatment and posttreatment assessment phases, with the sequencing of treatment blocks evenly counterbalanced across all participants. Following the initial treatment block, a two-week period devoid of treatment preceded the commencement of the second treatment block. Untrained narrative elicitation tasks were utilized to prompt connected speech production samples from all participants during the assessment phases of each treatment block. Effect sizes per participant were computed using within-case standard mean difference analysis. Results PWNA exhibited variability in performance, showing improvement in microlinguistic measures of connected speech following both script production with recursive self-feedback and script production with external feedback. Particularly, script production with recursive self-feedback demonstrated marginally superior enhancement in connected speech measures compared to its counterpart. Conclusion The study provides preliminary evidence for generalization effects of recursive self-feedback training and external feedback training on PWNA’s connected speech production. Further research is required to corroborate the findings and to implement recursive self-feedback procedures optimized specifically for spontaneous speech.

Putting the Choice in Choice Tasks: Incorporating Preference Elicitation Tasks in Health Preference Research.

Choice-based preference elicitation methods such as the discrete choice experiment (DCE) present hypothetical choices to respondents, with an expectation that these hypothetical choices accurately reflect a 'real world' health-related decision context and that consequently the choice data can be held to be a true representation of the respondent's health or treatment preferences. For this to be the case, careful consideration needs to be given to the format of the choice task in a choice experiment. The overarching aim of this paper is to highlight important aspects to consider when designing and 'setting up' the choice tasks to be presented to respondents in a DCE. This includes the importance of considering the potential impact of format (e.g. choice context, choice set presentation and size) as well as choice set content (e.g. labelled and unlabelled choice sets and inclusion of reference alternatives) and choice questions (stated choice versus additional questions designed to explore complete preference orders) on the preference estimates that are elicited from studies. We endeavoure to instil a holistic approach to choice task design that considers format alongside content, experimental design and analysis.

QUESTION PRODUCTION IN ITALIAN-SPEAKING PWAGR

This paper presents the results of an elicitation task run with Italian-speaking people with agrammatic aphasia (PWAgr). Linguistic theories of aphasia have analysed the production of PWAgr as stemming either from a deterioration of grammatical knowledge or a limitation of extra-linguistic capacities which affect language. Among the former, the Tree Pruning Hypothesis (Friedmann and Grodzinsky, 1997) relates the height of the projections involved in the production of a structure with the chances of it being produced: the stronger the impairment in the speaker, the less likely they are to produce a structure involving higher nodes. Alternatively, syntactic knowledge may be preserved but its use is compromised by Working Memory (WM) limitations (e.g., Miyake et al., 1994; Jakubowicz, 2005). The two approaches make different predictions with respect to question production in Italian: according to the TPH, the production rates of yes/no-questions and who-questions should be comparable in moderate and mild aphasia. Why-questions involve a higher node and should thus not be available. Under a WM-limitation approach, the production rates of why-questions and yes/no-questions should be comparable and higher than those of who-questions. To determine which, if any, of the two approaches makes the correct predictions, three adult Italian speakers diagnosed with Broca’s aphasia and one with anomia performed an elicitation task targeting these three types of structures. Overall, yes/no-questions were the most frequent structures to be produced. The lack of who-questions, as opposed to the production of yes/no-questions, can be accounted for only if derivational complexity is taken into account, but the scarcity of why-questions suggests that the height of the nodes involved may play a role as well.

REFLEXIVE AND ANTI-CAUSATIVE VERB PRODUCTION REVISITED

The aim of the present research was to reexamine the production of reflexive and anti-causative se-verbs in Serbian at different stages of language acquisition after a nine-month period from the first experiment (Ilić, 2019). The results of the first experiment suggest the following order of acquisition: lexical reflexive > true reflexive > anti-causative verbs. Moreover, they speak in favour of the Continuity Hypothesis (Snyder et al., 1995; Snyder & Hyams, 2015), since the children were able to produce reflexive forms correctly from the earliest tested age. The verbs which were tested in both experiments were true reflexive (e.g. kupati se ‘wash oneself’), lexical reflexive (e.g. vrteti se ‘spin’) and anti-causative se-verbs (e.g. otvoriti se ‘open’). A total of sixty subjects belonging to three age groups (40-51, 52-63, 65-77 months, twenty participants in each group) took part in the research. The data collection technique was a verb elicitation task, and the children were asked to name the activities presented in the visual stimuli. The number of tested verbs was the same for each verb type (six per group). The production of verbs across age groups improved in comparison with the first experiment. The production of lexical reflexive verbs was significantly better than the production of anti-causative verbs in the youngest group. Therefore, the results of the follow-up experiment have confirmed the suggested order of acquisition. However, no differences were found in the two older groups, which indicates that the production of more complex verb types improves considerably between the ages of four and five.

Individual differences in representational gesture production are associated with cognitive and empathy skills.

Substantial individual variation exists in the frequency of gestures produced while speaking. This study investigated the associations between cognitive abilities, empathy levels, and personality traits with the frequency of representational gestures. A cartoon narration task and a social dilemma solving task were used to elicit gestures. Predictor variables were selected based on prior research on individual differences in gesture production and the cognitive and communicative functions of gestures in speech. Our findings revealed that an increased frequency of representational gestures was associated with higher empathy levels in the cartoon narration task. However, in the social dilemma solving task, a higher frequency of representational gestures was associated with lower visuospatial working memory, spatial transformation, and inhibition control abilities. Moreover, no significant relationships were found between verbal working memory, personality traits, and the frequency of representational gestures in either task. These findings suggested that predictor variables for representational gesture production vary depending on the nature of the gesture elicitation task (e.g., spatiomotoric vs. abstract topics). Future research should examine the relationship between individuals' cognitive abilities, empathy and gesture production with across a broader range of topics and in more ecologically valid contexts.

Measuring strength of altruistic motives

AbstractWe introduce a novel way to elicit individuals’ strength of altruistic motivation in the context of charitable donations, ranging from pure warm glow to pure altruism. Using the giving-type elicitation task of Gangadharan et al. (2018) and assuming that individuals maximise a Cobb–Douglas impure altruism utility function, as is used in Ottoni-Wilhelm et al. (2017), we can uniquely identify the strength of altruistic motivation for impure altruists, which is typically found to be the largest category of donors. We compare the introduced measure to an alternative survey-based elicitation from Carpenter (2021).

Variation in the 1sg.indef: More than you wanted to know

AbstractThe first person singular indefinite or non-definite of Hungarian verbs that end in -ik shows variation between the regular -k suffix and the -m suffix, used otherwise in the definite. This variation is systematic and subject to metalinguistic awareness. Our study relies on previous quantitative work, a frequency dictionary compiled from the new Hungarian Webcorpus, as well as a forced-choice elicitation experiment to assess the role of word frequency, word length, derivational endings, and across-form similarity in shaping this variation. We find that first person singular indefinite variation is largely defined by natural categories: verbs that look similar will also show a similar preference to -k/-m. This pattern is attested in the webcorpus as well as in participant responses in the elicitation task.

Task-related differences in the gesture production of young autistic children.

In typically developing (TD) children, gesture emerges around 9months of age, allowing children to communicate prior to speech. Due to the important role gesture plays in the early communication of autistic and TD children, various tasks have been used to assess gesture ability. However, few data exist on whether and how tasks differentially elicit gesture, particularly for samples of racially and ethnically diverse autistic children. In this study, we explored if task (a naturalistic parent-child interaction [NPCI]; structured assessment of child communication) differentially elicited rate or type of gesture production for young autistic children. This secondary analysis included baseline data from 80 racially and ethnically diverse autistic children aged 18-59months who participated in one of two larger studies. Video recordings of NPCIs and an assessment of child communication with standardised administration procedures were collected at baseline. Child gesture rate (number of gestures produced per 10min) and type were extracted from these recordings and analysed. The structured assessment elicited more gestures than the NPCI. In terms of gesture type, points, gives, and reaches accounted for 76% of child gestures. Points (which are developmentally more advanced than reaches and gives) were produced at the highest rates within book exploration. Distal points (which are more developmentally advanced than proximal or contact points) were produced at the highest rates when children were tempted to request. Our findings indicate elicitation tasks differentially elicit type and rate of gesture for young autistic children. To assess the gesture production of young autistic children, a structured task designed to elicit child requests will probe the developmental sophistication of the child's gesture repertoire, eliciting both the most gestures and the most developmentally advanced gestures. What is already known on the subject Because of the importance of gesture in early communication for autistic and typically developing children, various tasks have been used to assess it. However, little is known about whether tasks differentially elicit type or rate of gesture for young autistic children from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. What this paper adds to existing knowledge Elicitation tasks differentially elicit type and rate of gesture for young autistic children in the early stages of gesture. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? We recommend a structured task designed to elicit child requests to assess the developmental sophistication of a child's gesture repertoire.