Word Utterances Research Articles

Maternal Question Use Relates to Syntactic Skills in 5- to 7-Year-Old Children.

This study examined how mothers' question-asking behavior relates to their child's syntactic skills. One important aspect of maternal question-asking behavior is the use of complex questions when speaking with children. These questions can differ based on both their purpose and structure. The purpose may be to seek out information, to teach, or to get a simple yes/no response. Questions may even be rhetorical, with no answer intended at all. Structurally, questions can include a wh-word (who, what, when, where, why, and how) or not; however, these wh-questions are important because they elicit utterances from the child and support vocabulary development. Despite wh-questions eliciting a response from children, it remains unknown how these questions relate to children's syntactic skills. Thirty-four mother-child dyads participated in a 15-min seminaturalistic play session. Children were between the ages of 5 and 7 years (M = 6.26 years, SD = 1.04 years; 20 girls/14 boys). The Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation (DELV) assessment was used to measure syntactic skills in children. Using the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts, questions were categorized based on structure (wh-questions vs. non-wh-questions) and purpose (information-seeking, pedagogical, or yes/no and rhetorical questions). A repeated-measures analysis of covariance and a linear regression model were implemented to address the frequency of different questions asked by mothers, as well as what types of questions are most related to children's concurrent syntactic skills. When controlling for total maternal utterances, results revealed that non-wh-questions and rhetorical/yes and no questions were the most frequent types of questions produced by mothers, in terms of structure and purpose, respectively. However, wh-questions were predominantly information-seeking questions. This is important, as the use of information-seeking wh-questions was positively associated with children's syntactic skills, as measured by the DELV, and resulted in children producing longer utterances in response to these questions, as determined by child mean length of utterance in words. Taken together, these findings suggest maternal use of wh-questions aids syntactic skills in children ages 5-7 years, likely because they require a more syntactically complex response on the child's behalf. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.27276891.

The role of connected speech in distinguishing types of apraxia of speech following brain damage

Apraxia of speech (AOS) is a common condition resulting from brain damage causing impairments to speech planning and programming that is distinct from aphasia and dysarthria. Following a stroke, AOS is most often seen as a part of nonfluent Broca’s aphasia. Recovery and dissolution of speech in stroke induced apraxia of speech (sAOS) and progressive AOS (pAOS) appear on a symptomatic level to be reversals of each other, but the existing evidence shows that sAOS is distinct from pAOS. This suggests different causes that have relevance for management of pAOS. In this article, we examine the similarities and differences between sAOS and pAOS and conclude that while the two conditions present similarly, certain features differ significantly, which may suggest different mechanisms underlying their manifestation. The role of connected speech as opposed to single word utterances is noted.

A Comparative Analysis of Parent–Child Interaction Therapy Procedures Used to Facilitate Verbalizations by Children with Autism

AbstractThe current study conducted a comparative analysis of the effects of select components of Parent–Child Interaction Therapy, labeled praise, behavior descriptions, and reflections on child vocalizations in two children with autism spectrum disorder and accompanying language delays using a concurrent multiple baseline across participants design. The frequency of verbalizations, the frequency of different verbalizations, and the mean length of utterance of words (MLUw) were measured during a baseline condition followed sequentially by two experimental conditions during a free play environment. The total number of therapist–child interactions remained consistent across all experimental conditions such that only the topography of the interactions varied across conditions. During the first experimental condition the clinician used labeled praise and behavior descriptions during child play. After establishing stability of changes under these conditions, the therapist systematically added reflections of child vocalizations in the second experimental condition. Total verbalizations, different verbalizations, and MLUw increased following the introduction of labeled praise and behavior descriptions. Total verbalizations and different verbalizations increased and the frequencies accelerated following the systematic introduction of reflections. The study showed the relative value of reflections of child verbalizations as a powerful component of Parent–Child Interaction Therapy procedures to facilitate verbalizations by children with autism.

Spontaneous speech: a robust measurement before, during and after awake brain surgery in patients with glioma

Background Patients with glioma often report language complaints with devastating effect on daily life. Analysing spontaneous speech can help to understand underlying language problems. Spontaneous speech monitoring is also of importance during awake brain surgery: it can guide tumour resection and contributes to maintaining language function. We aimed to investigate the spontaneous speech of patients with glioma in the perioperative period and the additional value of spontaneous speech analyses compared to standardised language testing. Methods We elicited and transcribed spontaneous speech of eight patients with glioma elected for awake brain surgery preoperatively, intraoperatively and 2.0–3.5 months postoperatively. Linguistic errors were coded. Type Token Ratio, Mean Length of Utterance of words, minimal utterances, and errors were extracted from the transcriptions. Patients were categorised based on total error patterns: stable, decrease or increase during surgery. Reliable Change Index scores were calculated for all spontaneous speech variables to objectify changes between time points. Language performance on language tests was compared to spontaneous speech variables. Results Most errors occurred in lexico-syntax, followed by phonology/articulation, syntax, and semantics. The predominant errors were Repetitions, Self-corrections, and Incomplete sentences. Most patients remained stable over time in almost all spontaneous speech variables, except in Incomplete sentences, which deteriorated in most patients postoperatively compared to intraoperatively. Some spontaneous speech variables (total errors, MLUw, TTR) gave more information on language change than a standard language test. Conclusions While the course of spontaneous speech over time remained relatively stable in most patients, Incomplete sentences seems to be a robust marker of language difficulties patients with glioma. These errors can be prioritised in spontaneous speech analysis to save time, especially to determine intra- to postoperative deterioration. Importantly, spontaneous speech analyses can give more information on language change than standardised language testing and should therefore be used in addition to standardised language tests.

Distribution of words across the first years of life: A longitudinal analysis of everyday language input to three English-learning infants.

Many in-lab studies have demonstrated that the distribution of word learning moments affects the strength and quality of word representations. How are words distributed in speech to children in their daily lives, and how is distribution related to other input characteristics? The present study analyzes transcripts of language input to English-learning infants from three longitudinal, naturalistic corpora captured between 6 and 39months of age. To describe how word frequency varies across time, we calculated dispersion scores for all word types for each child. Dispersion quantifies the deviation of observed frequencies in each recording session from expected (uniform across sessions) word frequency, providing a measure of how evenly word utterances were spread across sessions. Dispersion is strongly correlated with frequency and moderately correlated with concreteness across all corpora, such that high frequency and low concreteness words are more evenly dispersed. Correlations with measures of age of acquisition (AoA) varied across corpora, and dispersion did not reliably predict AoA above and beyond frequency and concreteness. The contradiction between the current results and results from in-lab experiments is discussed. This study provides a foundation to explore how word learning unfolds across time and contexts in the real world.

Mean length of utterance in words (MLUw) and lexical diversity among Urdu speaking children between 3 to 3.11 years of age

Background: Language is an excellent and convenient means of communication. Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) measures linguistic productivity in children. Objectives: to find the mean length of utterance in words and lexical diversity among children aged 3-3.11 years typically developing Urdu-speaking. Methods: The data of n=100 children of both genders of age between (3 to 3.11 years) who performed on blank levels 1 and 2 was collected through a cross-sectional survey. The data was collected from daycare centers and schools in Rawalpindi and Islamabad from November 2022 to June 2023. MLU calculation procedure was carried out through activities from ICW and Blank Level. For the calculation of MLU, the formula was used. Results: The Mean Length of Utterance at word level (MLUw)of children aged between 3 to 3.11 years was 3.43. In lexical diversity (LD) children have used Nouns (NN) most abundantly as 55% of Verbs (VB) with 35% Tense Auxiliaries (TA)30%. Conclusion: It is found that children's MLUw of 3.43 between the ages of 3 and 4 indicates an increase in speech complexity. Nouns, verbs, and tense auxiliaries have been recognized as the main elements via lexical analysis.

Revisiting the automatic prediction of lexical errors in Mandarin

Abstract Speech errors provide cues for explaining the process of word retrieval. For example, speech errors are less likely to occur with high-frequency words since these words already receive a high level of activation. The current analysis further develops existing findings in two ways. First, instead of considering the overall frequency of the words in the entire corpora, we consider the gap in frequency between sequential pairs of words. We hypothesize that speech errors are more likely to occur if the target has a much lower frequency than its preceding word. Second, we use word embedding methods to quantify the semantic distance between sequential pairs of words. We hypothesize that speech errors are more likely to occur with words that have a large semantic distance from their preceding context. We also consider the potential effects of phonetic distance between sequential pairs of words and position-in-utterance of words in utterances. The results from a Mandarin corpus of speech errors show that word frequency and semantic distance between sequential pairs of words can be used to predict the occurrence of speech errors with an accuracy above the majority baseline.

Does Gestural Communication Influence Later Spoken Language Ability in Minimally Verbal Autistic Children?

The current study examined the predictive role of gestures and gesture-speech combinations on later spoken language outcomes in minimally verbal (MV) autistic children enrolled in a blended naturalistic developmental/behavioral intervention (Joint Attention, Symbolic Play, Engagement, and Regulation [JASPER] + Enhanced Milieu Teaching [EMT]). Participants were 50 MV autistic children (40 boys), ages 54-105 months (M = 75.54, SD = 16.45). MV was defined as producing fewer than 20 spontaneous, unique, and socially communicative words. Autism symptom severity (Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule-Second Edition) and nonverbal cognitive skills (Leiter-R Brief IQ) were assessed at entry. A natural language sample (NLS), a 20-min examiner-child interaction with specified toys, was collected at entry (Week 1) and exit (Week 18) from JASPER + EMT intervention. The NLS was coded for gestures (deictic, conventional, and representational) and gesture-speech combinations (reinforcing, disambiguating, supplementary, other) at entry and spoken language outcomes: speech quantity (rate of speech utterances) and speech quality (number of different words [NDW] and mean length of utterance in words [MLUw]) at exit using European Distributed Corpora Project Linguistic Annotator and Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts. Controlling for nonverbal IQ and autism symptom severity at entry, rate of gesture-speech combinations (but not gestures alone) at entry was a significant predictor of rate of speech utterances and MLUw at exit. The rate of supplementary gesture-speech combinations, in particular, significantly predicted rate of speech utterances and NDW at exit. These findings highlight the critical importance of gestural communication, particularly gesture-speech (supplementary) combinations in supporting spoken language development in MV autistic children.

A personal narrative intervention combined with self-monitoring strategies: Outcomes for Mandarin-speaking adolescents with Down syndrome.

Personal narratives play an essential role in children's social and academic development. However, children with Down syndrome have ongoing challenges with constructing and communicating personal narratives. Using a single-case multiple-probe across participants design, we examined whether a targeted intervention could improve both micro- and macro-structural aspects of personal narratives from Chinese adolescents with Down syndrome. All three participants demonstrated high treatment effects in two macrostructural narrative outcomes (i.e., narrative element complexity and narrative coherence) in response to the intervention and moderate to high treatment effects in the microstructural narrative outcomes (i.e., the mean length of utterance in words and the number of different words). However, all participants demonstrated limited improvements in narrative cohesion. These effects were maintained and generalised in a different narrative condition. The preliminary findings support the feasibility and effectiveness of the personal narrative intervention incorporated with self-monitoring strategies for adolescents with Down syndrome.

Channel-Aware Decoupling Network for Multiturn Dialog Comprehension.

Training machines to understand natural language and interact with humans is one of the major goals of artificial intelligence. Recent years have witnessed an evolution from matching networks to pretrained language models (PrLMs). In contrast to the plain-text modeling as the focus of the PrLMs, dialog texts involve multiple speakers and reflect special characteristics, such as topic transitions and structure dependencies, between distant utterances. However, the related PrLM models commonly represent dialogs sequentially by processing the pairwise dialog history as a whole. Thus, the hierarchical information on either utterance interrelation or speaker roles coupled in such representations is not well addressed. In this work, we propose compositional learning for holistic interaction across the utterances beyond the sequential contextualization from PrLMs, in order to capture the utterance-aware and speaker-aware representations entailed in a dialog history. We decouple the contextualized word representations by masking mechanisms in transformer-based PrLM, making each word only focus on the words in the current utterance, other utterances, and two speaker roles (i.e., utterances of the sender and utterances of the receiver), respectively. In addition, we employ domain-adaptive training strategies to help the model adapt to the dialog domains. Experimental results show that our method substantially boosts the strong PrLM baselines in four public benchmark datasets, achieving new state-of-the-art performance over previous methods.

Slips of the tongue in patients with Gilles de la Tourette syndrome

BackgroundMotor and vocal tics are the main symptom of Gilles de la Tourette-syndrome (GTS). A particular complex vocal tic comprises the utterance of swear words, termed coprolalia. Since taboo words are socially inappropriate, they are normally suppressed by people, which implies cognitive control processes.MethodTo investigate the control of the unintentional pronunciation of taboo words and the associated processes of conflict monitoring, we used the “Spoonerisms of Laboratory Induced Predisposition” (SLIP) paradigm. Participants read multiple inductor word pairs with the same phonemes, followed by pronouncing a target pair with inverse phonemes. This led to a conflict between two competing speech plans: the correct word pair and the word pair with inverted phonemes. Latter speech error, a spoonerism, could result in a neutral or taboo word. We investigated 19 patients with GTS and 23 typically developed controls (TDC) and measured participants’ electroencephalography (EEG) during the SLIP task.ResultsAt the behavioral level less taboo than neutral word spoonerisms occurred in both groups without significant differences. Event-related brain potentials (ERP) revealed a difference between taboo and neutral word conditions in the GTS group at the midline electrodes in a time range of 250–400 ms after the speech prompt, which was not found in the TDC group. The extent of this effect depended on the number of inductor word pairs, suggesting an increasing level of cognitive control in the GTS group.ConclusionThe differences between taboo and neutral word conditions in patients with GTS compared to TDC suggest an altered recruitment of cognitive control processes in GTS, likely enlisted to suppress taboo words.

The power of sacrifice and word in Igbo magical powers

Sacrifice is a religious act in which an object is offered to supernatural beings in order to build up, maintain or restore a right relationship of men to pure or perfect order. It is an essential means of restitution of vital force. Sacrifice is an important aspect of every religion and occultic practices. Magicians are seen performing different kinds of sacrifices. These sacrifices are performed at different times of the day; in the morning, at noon and/or in the midnight when everyone including spirits are believed to must have returned from their daily engagements. While offering sacrifices, the magician utters words, incantations and prayers. The word is indispensable in the practice of magic. Considering the inevitability of these two; sacrifice and the word in the magician's practice of his calling, one begins to wonder what role they play. What is the role of sacrifices in magical powers? Why are these sacrifices performed with vocalized prayers? Are uttered words really indispensable in the practice of magic? Why are most of their prayers and supplications during the sacrifice voiced? A hermeneutic approach to this study reveals that sacrifice revitalizes the potency and the efficacy of the magic and also a way of manipulating nature to achieve the magician's goal. It also shows that voiced words of prayer are more potent than silent words of prayer.

On the Role of Intonation in Defining the Boundary of Words in English and Azerbaijani Utterances

On the Role of Intonation in Defining the Boundary of Words in English and Azerbaijani Utterances

How Toddlers Use Core and Fringe Vocabulary: What's in an Utterance?

Selecting vocabulary for preliterate individuals who use augmentative and alternative communication presents multiple challenges, as the number of symbols provided must be balanced with cognitive, motoric, and other needs. Prioritizing certain types of vocabulary thus becomes a necessity. For example, prioritizing core vocabulary-that is, words that are commonly used across a group of people and contexts-is a common practice that attempts to address some of these issues. However, most core vocabulary research to date has narrowly focused on individual word counts, ignoring other critical aspects of language development such as how vocabulary aligns with typical development and how children use core and fringe vocabulary within their utterances. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze 112 transcripts to describe how typically developing toddlers (aged 2.5 years) use core and fringe vocabulary within their utterances, in reference to a range of commonly used core vocabulary lists. Results indicated that the proportion of the toddlers' utterances that consisted of only core, only fringe, or core + fringe vocabulary varied dramatically depending on the size of the core vocabulary list used, with smaller core lists yielding few "core-only" utterances. Furthermore, utterances containing both core and fringe vocabulary were both grammatically and semantically superior to utterances containing only core or only fringe vocabulary, as evidenced by measures such as mean length of utterance and total number of words. Thus, relying on word frequency counts is an insufficient basis for selecting vocabulary for aided preliterate communicators.

Agencement of onlife and phygital: smart tech–enabled value co-creation practices

PurposeIn this article, we reflect on how smart technology is transforming service research discourses about service innovation and value co-creation. We adopt the concept of technology smartness’ to refer to the ability of technology to sense, adapt and learn from interactions. Accordingly, we seek to address how smart technologies (i.e. cognitive and distributed technology) can be powerful resources, capable of innovating in relation to actors’ agency, the structure of the service ecosystem and value co-creation practices.Design/methodology/approachThis conceptual article integrates evidence from the existing theories with illustrative examples to advance research on service innovation and value co-creation.FindingsThrough the performative utterances of new tech words, such as onlife and materiality, this article identifies the emergence of innovative forms of agency and structure. Onlife agency entails automated, relational and performative forms, which provide for new decision-making capabilities and expanded opportunities to co-create value. Phygital materiality pertains to new structural features, comprised of new resources and contexts that have distinctive intelligence, autonomy and performativity. The dialectic between onlife agency and phygital materiality (structure) lies in the agencement of smart tech–enabled value co-creation practices based on the notion of becoming that involves not only resources but also actors and contexts.Originality/valueThis paper proposes a novel conceptual framework that advances a tech-based ecology for service ecosystems, in which value co-creation is enacted by the smartness of technology, which emerges through systemic and performative intra-actions between actors (onlife agency), resources and contexts (phygital materiality and structure).

Analyzing The Use of Speech Acts in The Animated Film Entitled “Turning Red”

Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics, which is the study of language. One of the pragmatics components is speech acts. Understanding speech acts is crucial for effective communication as it helps to interpret meaning beyond the literal words and to navigate the social and pragmatic aspects of language. The dialogue between the characters in a film is similar to the dialogue in a drama or novel as they are a piece of literary works. The message of the film can be gleaned from the conversations between each character. These are the uttered words, which are made up of different speech acts. Thus, the aim of this study is to identify speech acts used in the animated film entitled “Turning Red”. The researchers used a descriptive qualitative method. The findings showed that there are five speech acts used in the “Turning Red” animated film, such as declarative, commissive, directive, representative, and expressive. Keywords: Animated film, speech acts, Turning Red

Direction of arrival estimation in reverberant environments using a single vibration sensor on an elastic panel

The vibrational response of an elastic panel to an incoming acoustic pressure wave is dependent on the coupling between the incident angle and the panel’s bending modes. By examining the relative modal excitations recorded by a single structural vibration sensor affixed to the panel, the direction of arrival (DOA) of the incident wave may be inferred. In reverberant environments, determination of the DOA of a sound source is complicated by acoustic reflections. Panel microphones may be particularly susceptible to this effect due to their large surface areas and finite modal decay times. A study on the impact of reverberation on DOA estimation using panel microphones was conducted. The panel’s response to wake word utterances was recorded in eight spaces, with reverberation times (RT60s) ranging from 0.27 to 3.00 s. These responses were used to train neural networks for DOA estimation. Results indicate an inverse relationship between RT60 and DOA estimation reliability. Within ±5°, DOA estimation reliability was measured at 95% in the least reverberant space and decreased to 78% in the most reverberant space. Results also suggest that DOA estimation using panel microphones can adapt to diverse acoustic environments by training the system with data from multiple spaces with different RT60s.

SWEARING SPEECH IN THE COMMENTS COLUMN AT @JAKARTAKERAS

Swear words on social media are increasingly widespread, many netizens are issuing swear words on anyone's Instagram account, including this @jakartakeras Instagram account. This study aims to describe swear words on the Instagram account @jakartakeras. This study examines the utterances of swear words into several forms and models of the swear words. This research is a qualitative descriptive study. The subject of this study is the comment column on the Instagram account @jakartakeras. The object of this research is to study swear words into several categories. The technique used to collect data in this study used the techniques simak bebas libat cakap. Advanced techniques used to collect data then use screenshot techniques or screenshots. Then use note-taking techniques to record swear words in the comments column of the Instagram account @jakartakeras. The method used in this study uses the padan method. then using the technique of sorting out the determining elements of the speech of Instagram users which contain swear words divided based on the shape and model of the swear words. Then the agih method is used with the direct element division technique to divide the forms of swear words based on their grammatical. Based on the research that has been analyzed, the results in this study are, swear speech is divided into seven categories or forms, namely first lexical swear words of animals, second genitals, third physical or mental state of a person, fourth object, five spirits, six professions, and seven sexual activities.

Diagnostic Accuracy of Grammaticality and Utterance Length in Bilingual Children.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the diagnostic accuracy of two measures derived from spontaneous language samples, mean length of utterance in words (MLUw) and percentage of grammatical utterances (PGU), in identifying developmental language disorder (DLD) in Spanish-English bilingual children. We examined two approaches: best language and total language. The participants in this study included 74 Spanish-English bilingual children with (n = 36) and without (n = 38) DLD. Language samples were elicited through a story retell and story generation task using Frog wordless picture books in English and Spanish. Stories were transcribed and coded using the Systematic Analysis of Language Samples (Miller & Iglesias, 2020) to extract MLUw and PGU in both languages. Logistic regression analyses suggested that a model that included PGU, MLUw, and age achieved the best diagnostic accuracy in predicting group membership. Both approaches, best language and total language, had fair diagnostic accuracy. In combination, PGU and MLUw seem to be useful diagnostic tools to differentiate bilingual children with and without DLD. Clinical implications and usability are discussed.

Language uncovers visuospatial dysfunction in posterior cortical atrophy: a natural language processing approach.

Posterior Cortical Atrophy (PCA) is a syndrome characterized by a progressive decline in higher-order visuospatial processing, leading to symptoms such as space perception deficit, simultanagnosia, and object perception impairment. While PCA is primarily known for its impact on visuospatial abilities, recent studies have documented language abnormalities in PCA patients. This study aims to delineate the nature and origin of language impairments in PCA, hypothesizing that language deficits reflect the visuospatial processing impairments of the disease. We compared the language samples of 25 patients with PCA with age-matched cognitively normal (CN) individuals across two distinct tasks: a visually-dependent picture description and a visually-independent job description task. We extracted word frequency, word utterance latency, and spatial relational words for this comparison. We then conducted an in-depth analysis of the language used in the picture description task to identify specific linguistic indicators that reflect the visuospatial processing deficits of PCA. Patients with PCA showed significant language deficits in the visually-dependent task, characterized by higher word frequency, prolonged utterance latency, and fewer spatial relational words, but not in the visually-independent task. An in-depth analysis of the picture description task further showed that PCA patients struggled to identify certain visual elements as well as the overall theme of the picture. A predictive model based on these language features distinguished PCA patients from CN individuals with high classification accuracy. The findings indicate that language is a sensitive behavioral construct to detect visuospatial processing abnormalities of PCA. These insights offer theoretical and clinical avenues for understanding and managing PCA, underscoring language as a crucial marker for the visuospatial deficits of this atypical variant of Alzheimer's disease.