Speech Task Research Articles

EEG-based covert speech decoding using random rotation extreme learning machine ensemble for intuitive BCI communication

Background and motivation:Brain–computer interfaces (BCI) assist communication for the handicapped and disabled. Previous work has shown that it is usually non-intuitive, and it frequently employs Electroencephalogram (EEG) based motor imagery. Ensemble learning has been shown to be reliable in a variety of BCI classification tasks, including motor imagery and P300 event-related potential. The purpose of ensemble learning, according to past research, is to get trained accurate but diverse base classifiers to increase generalization performance. Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) with fast learning speed has been proven effective in classification applications and suitable for ensemble learning due to its randomness. The suitability of ensemble methods for intuitive BCI communication using EEG data of different covert speech words is investigated in this work. Methods:To achieve this goal, we construct a random rotation based kernel ELM ensemble, resulting in very diverse classifiers which can learn through transformed spaces. Minimize error ensemble pruning is used to prune low complementarity classifiers, and consequently, combining the remaining high complementarity classifiers to get the final ensemble classifier. Eight subjects performed covert speech tasks which involved mentally repeating five words namely; ‘left’, ‘right’, ‘up’, ‘down’, and ‘stop’. Results:We achieved classification accuracy with pruning and without pruning of 63.67% and 57.13% respectively. Experimental results show that, in comparison to other classification techniques, the proposed technique produces competitive results. Conclusion and Significance:Our findings indicate the potential of random rotation kernel ELM ensemble pruning to effectively classify EEG-based covert speech signals. This proposed research involving an ensemble method for the classification of covert speech words can make a significant contribution towards intuitive BCI development using silent speech.

A Descriptive Study of Speech Breathing in Children With Cerebral Palsy During Two Types of Connected Speech Tasks.

This study examined speech breathing during two connected speech tasks in children with cerebral palsy (CP) and typically developing (TD) peers. Understanding how the respiratory system supports speech production during various speech tasks can help researchers construct appropriate models of speech production and clinicians remediate speech disorders effectively. Four children with CP and four age- and sex-matched TD peers completed two speech tasks, reading and extemporaneous speech. Respiratory kinematic and acoustic data were collected. Dependent variables included utterance length, speech rate, sound pressure level, and lung volume variables. Based on descriptive results, children with CP and speech motor involvement demonstrated reduced utterance length and speech rate, equivalent intensity levels, and changes in lung volume variables indicative of respiratory physiological impairment as compared to their TD peers. However, children with CP and no speech motor involvement exhibited speech production and speech breathing variables in the more typical range. In relation to task effects, the majority of children (CP and TD) produced shorter utterances, slower speech rates, equivalent intensity levels, higher lung volume initiation, termination, excursion, higher percent vital capacity per syllable, and longer inspiratory duration during extemporaneous speech as compared to reading. Two major themes emerged from the data: (a) Children with CP, particularly those with concomitant speech motor involvement, demonstrate different speech production and speech breathing patterns than their TD peers. (b) Speech task impacts speech production and speech breathing variables in both children with CP and their TD peers, but the extemporaneous speech task did not seem to exaggerate group differences.

What’s the Evidence? A Commentary on FEES Research

Purpose: Fiberoptic endoscopic evaluation of swallowing (FEES) is a well-respected swallowing assessment, harking back to 1988 when it was first published by Susan Langmore as a procedure. Since then, its methodology has evolved to afford clinicians, researchers, and patients a sensitive, specific, and predictive exam. A myriad research has investigated FEES technique and its outcomes, rendering it an effective and efficient procedure for swallowing assessment and therapy. This commentary will outline evidence for FEES to support evidence-based practice. What is the evidence for speech tasks? Secretion scales? What is the predictive nature of aspiration as seen on FEES? This comprehensive review will outline the science bolstering the use and confidence in FEES. Conclusions: This commentary reviews studies that have proposed normative data collected via FEES for decision making, specifically when assessing pharyngeal and laryngeal anatomy, bolus spillage, and the white out period. Evidence for FEES sensitivity and predictive aspects are reviewed in relationship to speech tasks, secretions, aspiration and penetration–aspiration scale scores, and pharyngeal residue scales. The acute care advantage of FEES is defined in its use on postextubation populations, assessment of dysphagia in COVID-19 positive patients, and safe evaluation during ice chip administration with acutely ill patients. Finally, inference making on FEES is discussed in regard to epiglottic retroflexion and depth of aspiration. When it comes to assessing pharyngeal dysphagia, the true strengths of FEES are rooted in evidence. It has been shown to be sensitive, predictive, and practical and will likely continue to have stronger support as research continues to enrich its potential. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.21498699

Brain activity during shadowing of audiovisual cocktail party speech, contributions of auditory–motor integration and selective attention

Selective listening to cocktail-party speech involves a network of auditory and inferior frontal cortical regions. However, cognitive and motor cortical regions are differentially activated depending on whether the task emphasizes semantic or phonological aspects of speech. Here we tested whether processing of cocktail-party speech differs when participants perform a shadowing (immediate speech repetition) task compared to an attentive listening task in the presence of irrelevant speech. Participants viewed audiovisual dialogues with concurrent distracting speech during functional imaging. Participants either attentively listened to the dialogue, overtly repeated (i.e., shadowed) attended speech, or performed visual or speech motor control tasks where they did not attend to speech and responses were not related to the speech input. Dialogues were presented with good or poor auditory and visual quality. As a novel result, we show that attentive processing of speech activated the same network of sensory and frontal regions during listening and shadowing. However, in the superior temporal gyrus (STG), peak activations during shadowing were posterior to those during listening, suggesting that an anterior–posterior distinction is present for motor vs. perceptual processing of speech already at the level of the auditory cortex. We also found that activations along the dorsal auditory processing stream were specifically associated with the shadowing task. These activations are likely to be due to complex interactions between perceptual, attention dependent speech processing and motor speech generation that matches the heard speech. Our results suggest that interactions between perceptual and motor processing of speech relies on a distributed network of temporal and motor regions rather than any specific anatomical landmark as suggested by some previous studies.

A longitudinal observational study of home-based conversations for detecting early dementia: protocol for the CUBOId TV task

IntroductionLimitations in effective dementia therapies mean that early diagnosis and monitoring are critical for disease management, but current clinical tools are impractical and/or unreliable, and disregard short-term symptom variability. Behavioural...

Comparison of Acoustic Voice Features Derived From Mobile Devices and Studio Microphone Recordings

Improvements in mobile device technology offer new opportunities for remote monitoring of voice for home and clinical assessment. However, there is a need to establish equivalence between features derived from signals recorded from mobile devices and gold standard microphone-preamplifiers. In this study acoustic voice features from android smartphone, tablet, and microphone-preamplifier recordings were compared. Data were recorded from 37 volunteers (20 female) with no history of speech disorder and six volunteers with Huntington's disease (HD) during sustained vowel (SV) phonation, reading passage (RP), and five syllable repetition (SR) tasks. The following features were estimated: fundamental frequency median and standard deviation (F0 and SD F0), harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR), local jitter, relative average perturbation of jitter (RAP), five-point period perturbation quotient (PPQ5), difference of differences of amplitude and periods (DDA and DDP), shimmer, and amplitude perturbation quotients (APQ3, APQ5, and APQ11). Bland-Altman analysis revealed good agreement between microphone and mobile devices for fundamental frequency, jitter, RAP, PPQ5, and DDP during all tasks and a bias for HNR, shimmer and its variants (APQ3, APQ5, APQ11, and DDA). Significant differences were observed between devices for HNR, shimmer, and its variants for all tasks. High correlation was observed between devices for all features, except SD F0 for RP. Similar results were observed in the HD group for SV and SR task. Biological sex had a significant effect on F0 and HNR during all tests, and for jitter, RAP, PPQ5, DDP, and shimmer for RP and SR. No significant effect of age was observed. Mobile devices provided good agreement with state of the art, high-quality microphones during structured speech tasks for features derived from frequency components of the audio recordings. Caution should be taken when estimating HNR, shimmer and its variants from recordings made with mobile devices.

Feedback Schedule Effects on Speech Motor Learning in Older Adults

<strong>Purpose:</strong> The Principles of Motor Learning (PML) emerged from studies of limb motor skills in healthy, young adults. The applicability of these principles to speech motor learning, and to older adults, is uncertain. The purpose of this study was to examine one PML, feedback frequency, and to elucidate whether it affects the retention of a speech motor task. <strong>Method:</strong> Thirty older participants were randomly assigned to one of the three feedback frequency groups (every trial, every 5^th, every 10^th) and trained to produce a phrase 2 times and 3 times slower than their habitual rate. Over 100 practice trials, all participants demonstrated a reduction in error, suggesting they understood and acquired the task. Mean absolute error (MAE) was measured to examine delayed 2- to 4- day retention. <strong>Results:</strong> When participants returned for retention testing 2 to 4 days post-training, those receiving feedback every 5^th trial demonstrated significantly lower MAE (enhanced retention) compared to those receiving high frequency feedback following every trial. There were no significant differences between participants receiving feedback following every trial or every 5^th trial versus every 10^th trial. <strong>Conclusions:</strong> Enhanced retention of the trained speech motor task for participants receiving low frequency feedback following every 5^th trial, relative to those receiving high frequency feedback following every trial, is consistent with the extensive limb motor learning literature and the trend of a small number of speech motor learning studies, suggesting provision of low frequency feedback enhances retention of trained novel movements.

Effect of aging on audiovisual integration: Comparison of high- and low-intensity conditions in a speech discrimination task.

Audiovisual integration is an essential process that influences speech perception in conversation. However, it is still debated whether older individuals benefit more from audiovisual integration than younger individuals. This ambiguity is likely due to stimulus features, such as stimulus intensity. The purpose of the current study was to explore the effect of aging on audiovisual integration, using event-related potentials (ERPs) at different stimulus intensities. The results showed greater audiovisual integration in older adults at 320-360 ms. Conversely, at 460-500 ms, older adults displayed attenuated audiovisual integration in the frontal, fronto-central, central, and centro-parietal regions compared to younger adults. In addition, we found older adults had greater audiovisual integration at 200-230 ms under the low-intensity condition compared to the high-intensity condition, suggesting inverse effectiveness occurred. However, inverse effectiveness was not found in younger adults. Taken together, the results suggested that there was age-related dissociation in audiovisual integration and inverse effectiveness, indicating that the neural mechanisms underlying audiovisual integration differed between older adults and younger adults.

The efficacy of acoustic-based articulatory phenotyping for characterizing and classifying four divergent neurodegenerative diseases using sequential motion rates.

Despite the impacts of neurodegeneration on speech function, little is known about how to comprehensively characterize the resulting speech abnormalities using a set of objective measures. Quantitative phenotyping of speech motor impairments may have important implications for identifying clinical syndromes and their underlying etiologies, monitoring disease progression over time, and improving treatment efficacy. The goal of this research was to investigate the validity and classification accuracy of comprehensive acoustic-based articulatory phenotypes in speakers with distinct neurodegenerative diseases. Articulatory phenotypes were characterized based on acoustic features that were selected to represent five components of motor performance: Coordination, Consistency, Speed, Precision, and Rate. The phenotypes were first used to characterize the articulatory abnormalities across four progressive neurologic diseases known to have divergent speech motor deficits: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), progressive ataxia (PA), Parkinson's disease (PD), and the nonfluent variant of primary progressive aphasia and progressive apraxia of speech (nfPPA + PAOS). We then examined the efficacy of articulatory phenotyping for disease classification. Acoustic analyses were conducted on audio recordings of 217 participants (i.e., 46 ALS, 52 PA, 60 PD, 20 nfPPA + PAOS, and 39 controls) during a sequential speech task. Results revealed evidence of distinct articulatory phenotypes for the four clinical groups and that the phenotypes demonstrated strong classification accuracy for all groups except ALS. Our results highlight the phenotypic variability present across neurodegenerative diseases, which, in turn, may inform (1) the differential diagnosis of neurological diseases and (2) the development of sensitive outcome measures for monitoring disease progression or assessing treatment efficacy.

Acoustic and Kinematic Assessment of Motor Speech Impairment in Patients With Suspected Four-Repeat Tauopathies.

The aim of this study was to use acoustic and kinematic speech measures to characterize type of motor speech impairment-apraxia of speech (AOS) versus dysarthria-in individuals with four-repeat tauopathy (4RT)-associated syndromes, including nonfluent variant primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA), primary progressive AOS (PPAOS), corticobasal syndrome (CBS), and progressive supranuclear palsy syndrome (PSPs). Twenty patient participants were recruited and stratified into two groups: (a) a motor-speech-impaired group of individuals with nfvPPA, PPAOS, CBS, or PSPs and suspected 4RT pathology ("MSI+") and (b) a non-motor-speech-impaired group of individuals with logopenic variant primary progressive aphasia ("MSI-"). Ten healthy, age-matched controls also participated in the study. Participants completed a battery of speech tasks, and 15 acoustic and kinematic speech measures were derived. Quantitative speech measures were grouped into feature categories ("AOS features," "dysarthria features," "shared features"). In addition to quantitative speech measures, two certified speech-language pathologists made independent, blinded auditory-perceptual ratings of motor speech impairment. A principal component analysis (PCA) was conducted to investigate the relative contributions of quantitative features. Quantitative speech measures were generally concordant with independent clinician ratings of motor speech impairment severity. Hypothesis-driven groupings of quantitative measures differentiated predominantly apraxic from predominantly dysarthric presentations within the MSI+ group. PCA results provided additional evidence for differential profiles of motor speech impairment in the MSI+ group; heterogeneity across individuals is explained in large part by varying levels of overall severity-captured by the shared feature variable group-and degree of apraxia severity, as measured by the AOS feature variable group. Quantitative features reveal heterogeneity of MSI in the 4RT group in terms of both overall severity and subtype of MSI. Results suggest the potential for acoustic and kinematic speech assessment methods to inform characterization of motor speech impairment in 4RT-associated syndromes. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.21401778.

EFFICIENCY OF THE METHODS OF FORMING COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE IN CHILDREN OF OLDER PRESCHOOL AGE WITH MOTOR ALALIA

The article substantiates the feasibility of using special psychological and pedagogical conditions in the process of forming communicative competence in older preschool children with motor alalia, which provide for the creation of an educational-corrective, speech-communicative space with the help of a specially organized communicative environment. The step-by-step (coordination-diagnostic, correction-motivational and reproductive-communicative) work on the formation of communicative competence in older preschool children with motor alalia is characterized based on the developed methodology, which made it necessary to conduct the formative stage of the experiment. The effectiveness of the author’s methodology, which contributed to the control of communicative and speech development of children, ensuring wide dynamic connections with the environment, and the continuity of the results of the process, was proven. Quantitative and qualitative indicators of the formation of communicative competence in older preschool children with motor alalia are highlighted. The indicators of the formation of communicative competence determine the levels (high, sufficient, average, low) of the formation of the structural components of communicative and speech activity: impressive-active, non-verbal-impressive, expressive-active, non-verbal-expressive, communicative-active, which are subordinate to the goals of forming communicative competence in children with motor alalia. The indicators indicate significant changes in the direction of improvement, which took place under the condition of an integrated approach to the planning of corrective speech tasks and a system of organizational-methodical and corrective speech therapy measures taking into account the components of speech and communicative competence in each speech therapy class. This confirms the effectiveness of the application of the method of forming communicative competence in children of older preschool age with motor alalia.&#x0D; Keywords: communicative competence; communicative and speech development; psychological and pedagogical conditions; speech; diagnosis; efficiency of the technique; children with motor alalia; children of older preschool age.

Life event stress is associated with blunted cardiovascular responding to both personally salient and personally non-salient laboratory tasks.

Life event stress has been associated with blunted cardiovascular reactivity to acute psychological stress. However, recent studies have suggested that blunted reactivity to stress only arises when the laboratory tasks are not personally salient to the individual. We re-analyzed data from 136 healthy young adults where we had previously reported a negative association between life event stress and cardiovascular reactivity to two combined stressors. Participants completed a mental arithmetic task and a personally salient speech task, following a formal baseline period with Finometer-assessed cardiovascular parameters. The reanalyses examined reactivity to the verbal mental arithmetic (personally non-salient) and speech (personally salient) tasks separately and found that life event stress was negatively associated with diastolic blood pressure reactivity, to both the personally non-salient, β=-.20, p=.023, and personally salient stressors, β=-.24, p=.004. Life event stress was negatively associated with systolic blood pressure reactivity to the personally salient stressor only, β=-.20, p=.021, and was not associated with heart rate reactivity. This study provides evidence against the argument that blunted reactivity to stress emerges as a result of stressor context, with findings indicating that low reactors show lower reactivity to both personally salient and personally non-salient stress.

Ambulatory Monitoring of Subglottal Pressure Estimated from Neck-Surface Vibration in Individuals with and without Voice Disorders.

The aerodynamic voice assessment of subglottal air pressure can discriminate between speakers with typical voices from patients with voice disorders, with further evidence validating subglottal pressure as a clinical outcome measure. Although estimating subglottal pressure during phonation is an important component of a standard voice assessment, current methods for estimating subglottal pressure rely on non-natural speech tasks in a clinical or laboratory setting. This study reports on the validation of a method for subglottal pressure estimation in individuals with and without voice disorders that can be translated to connected speech to enable the monitoring of vocal function and behavior in real-world settings. During a laboratory calibration session, a participant-specific multiple regression model was derived to estimate subglottal pressure from a neck-surface vibration signal that can be recorded during natural speech production. The model was derived for vocally typical individuals and patients diagnosed with phonotraumatic vocal fold lesions, primary muscle tension dysphonia, and unilateral vocal fold paralysis. Estimates of subglottal pressure using the developed method exhibited significantly lower error than alternative methods in the literature, with average errors ranging from 1.13 to 2.08 cm H2O for the participant groups. The model was then applied during activities of daily living, thus yielding ambulatory estimates of subglottal pressure for the first time in these populations. Results point to the feasibility and potential of real-time monitoring of subglottal pressure during an individual's daily life for the prevention, assessment, and treatment of voice disorders.

Odd-even oddball task: Evaluating event-related potentials during word discrimination compared to speech-token and tone discrimination.

Tonal and speech token auditory oddball tasks have been commonly used to assess auditory processing in various populations; however, tasks using non-word sounds may fail to capture the higher-level ability to interpret and discriminate stimuli based on meaning, which are critical to language comprehension. As such, this study examines how neural signals associated with discrimination and evaluation-processes (P3b) from semantic stimuli compare with those elicited by tones and speech tokens. This study comprises of two experiments, both containing thirteen adults with normal hearing in both ears (PTA ≤ 20 dB HL). Scalp electroencephalography and auditory event related potentials were recorded in free field while they completed three different oddball tasks: (1) tones, (2) speech tokens and (3) odd/even numbers. Based on the findings of experiment one, experiment two was conducted to understand if the difference in responses from the three tasks was attributable to stimulus duration or other factors. Therefore, in experiment one, stimulus duration was not controlled and in experiment two, the duration of each stimulus was modified to be the same across all three tasks (∼400 ms). In both experiments, P3b peak latency was significantly different between all three tasks. P3b amplitude was sensitive to reaction time, with tasks that had a large reaction time variability resulting in the P3b amplitude to be smeared, thereby reducing the amplitude size. The findings from this study highlight the need to consider all factors of the task before attributing any effects to any additional process, such as semantic processing and mental effort. Furthermore, it highlights the need for more cautious interpretation of P3b results in auditory oddball tasks.

Language Identification-Based Evaluation of Single Channel Speech Separation of Overlapped Speeches

In multi-lingual, multi-speaker environments (e.g., international conference scenarios), speech, language, and background sounds can overlap. In real-world scenarios, source separation techniques are needed to separate target sounds. Downstream tasks, such as ASR, speaker recognition, speech recognition, VAD, etc., can be combined with speech separation tasks to gain a better understanding. Since most of the evaluation methods for monophonic separation are either single or subjective, this paper used the downstream recognition task as an overall evaluation criterion. Thus, the performance could be directly evaluated by the metrics of the downstream task. In this paper, we investigated a two-stage training scheme that combined speech separation and language identification tasks. To analyze and optimize the separation performance of single-channel overlapping speech, the separated speech was fed to a language identification engine to evaluate its accuracy. The speech separation model was a single-channel speech separation network trained with WSJ0-2mix. For the language identification system, we used an Oriental Language Dataset and a dataset synthesized by directly mixing different proportions of speech groups. The combined effect of these two models was evaluated for various overlapping speech scenarios. When the language identification network model was based on single-person single-speech frequency spectrum features, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, and Vietnamese had significantly improved recognition results over the mixed audio spectrum.

Close Encounters of the Word Kind: Attested Distributional Information Boosts Statistical Learning

AbstractStatistical learning, the ability to extract regularities from input (e.g., in language), is likely supported by learners’ prior expectations about how component units co‐occur. In this study, we investigated how adults’ prior experience with sublexical regularities in their native language influences performance on an empirical language learning task. Forty German‐speaking adults completed a speech repetition task in which they repeated eight‐syllable sequences from two experimental languages: one containing disyllabic words comprised of frequently occurring German syllable transitions (naturalistic words) and the other containing words made from unattested syllable transitions (non‐naturalistic words). The participants demonstrated learning from both naturalistic and non‐naturalistic stimuli. However, learning was superior for the naturalistic sequences, indicating that the participants had used their existing distributional knowledge of German to extract the naturalistic words faster and more accurately than the non‐naturalistic words. This finding supports theories of statistical learning as a form of chunking, whereby frequently co‐occurring units become entrenched in long‐term memory.

Ecological momentary assessment of post-event processing in between two speech tasks: Relationships with cognitive and affective factors involved in the maintenance of social anxiety

Socially anxious individuals tend to review past distressing social situations, a process called post-event processing. The goal of this 4-day study was to investigate how PEP evolved over time in between two speech tasks in a sample of 101 students using ecological momentary assessment (EMA). In addition, we examined the relationships between post-event processing and other cognitive and affective processes involved in social anxiety, including anticipatory processing, anxiety, performance appraisals, and memory. Results from EMA showed that post-event and anticipatory processing decreased over time. Higher anxiety during the speech and poorer performance appraisals predicted more post-event processing, though post-event processing was unrelated to changes in performance appraisals over time. Post-event processing the day following the first speech was positively associated with anticipatory processing the day before the second speech. Participants who engaged in more post-event processing also remembered the first speech differently (e.g., more negative and emotionally intense). Implications for the cognitive-behavioural treatment of social anxiety are discussed.

Inferring Mechanisms of Auditory Attentional Modulation with Deep Neural Networks.

Humans have an exceptional ability to extract specific audio streams of interest in a noisy environment; this is known as the cocktail party effect. It is widely accepted that this ability is related to selective attention, a mental process that enables individuals to focus on a particular object. Evidence suggests that sensory neurons can be modulated by top-down signals transmitted from the prefrontal cortex. However, exactly how the projection of attention signals to the cortex and subcortex influences the cocktail effect is unclear. We constructed computational models to study whether attentional modulation is more effective at earlier or later stages for solving the cocktail party problem along the auditory pathway. We modeled the auditory pathway using deep neural networks (DNNs), which can generate representational neural patterns that resemble the human brain. We constructed a series of DNN models in which the main structures were autoencoders. We then trained these DNNs on a speech separation task derived from the dichotic listening paradigm, a common paradigm to investigate the cocktail party effect. We next analyzed the modulation effects of attention signals during all stages. Our results showed that the attentional modulation effect is more effective at the lower stages of the DNNs. This suggests that the projection of attention signals to lower stages within the auditory pathway plays a more significant role than the higher stages in solving the cocktail party problem. This prediction could be tested using neurophysiological experiments.

Attentional Demand of Motor Speech Encoding: Evidence From Parkinson's Disease.

While the involvement of attention in utterance planning is well established at the conceptual and lexical levels, the attentional demands of postlexical processes are still debated. This study investigates the involvement of attentional resources on motor speech encoding during utterance production in the context of Parkinson's disease (PD), a population allowing to assess if the attentional demands observed in a dual-task paradigm (the dual-task costs [DTCs]) are explained by postlexical difficulties and not solely by executive impairment. Speech production was analyzed in a dual-task paradigm with 30 participants presenting with motor speech disorders due to hypokinetic dysarthria in the context of PD. The dual-task comprised an automatic speech task in which participants recited the days of the week and two nonverbal tasks evaluating processing speed and inhibition. The severity of dysarthria and performance in several executive tests (inhibition, verbal fluency, and cognitive shifting) were used as potential predictors of the DTCs. Individuals with PD exhibited a DTC on the nonverbal tasks and on the speech task when the secondary task was inhibition (the most difficult one). Additionally, the severity of dysarthria and a poorer performance in cognitive shifting predicted a more severe DTC on speech rate. Finally, modulation of the magnitude of the DTCs was observed, depending on the difficulty of the nonverbal secondary task. The results suggest that, in PD, postlexical processes require attentional resources and cognitive shifting is related to dual-task performance in speech. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.21265893.

Cocktail party effect in team sports: A perceptual advantage

This study focuses on possible perceptual advantage in speech perception in team sports players. The overall aim was to compare the speech perception in team sports persons versus non-team sports persons, in quiet and in noise. Twenty adults including team sports players and non-team sports players performed speech discrimination task and a speech identification task. Natural digitized speech stimuli including /a/-/a/, /a/-/s/, /s/-/a/, /s/-/s/ were presented binaurally at comfortable loudness level in two conditions—in quiet and in background noise. For noise, talker babble was used at a signal-to noise ratio (SNR) of 0. Percent correct scores and reaction times were measured. Statistical analyses included a mixed model ANOVA. Results were considered significant when pi&amp;lt; 0.05. Significant group differences were present between team sports persons versus non-team sports persons specifically for the speech identification task. The team sports persons had higher speech identification scores and faster reaction times relative to non-team sports persons, specifically in noise (p &amp;lt; 0.05), thus illustrating better auditory separation of signal from noise. The findings from this research serve as a frontier to many studies in expanding our knowledge about speech perception and application of auditory training in team sports players.