Intonation features of the expression of emotions in Spanish: preliminary study for a prosody assessment procedure

This study aimed to find out what intonation features reliably represent the emotions of "liking" as opposed to "disliking" in the Spanish language, with a view to designing a prosody assessment procedure for use with children with speech and language disorders. 18 intonationally different prosodic realisations (tokens) of one word (limón) were recorded by one native Spanish speaker. The tokens were deemed representative of two categories of emotion: liking or disliking of the taste "lemon". 30 native Spanish speakers assigned them to the two categories and rated their expressiveness on a six-point scale. For all tokens except two, agreement between judges as to category was highly significant, some tokens attracting 100% agreement. The intonation contours most related to expressiveness levels were: for "liking", an inverted U form contour with exaggerated pitch peak within the tonic syllable; and for "disliking", a flat melodic contour with a slight fall.     

Question/statement judgments: an fMRI study of intonation processing

We examined changes in fMRI BOLD signal associated with question/statement judgments in an event‐related paradigm to investigate the neural basis of processing one aspect of intonation. Subjects made judgments about digitized recordings of three types of utterances: questions with rising intonation (RQ; e.g., “She was talking to her father?”), statements with a falling intonation (FS; e.g., “She was talking to her father.”), and questions with a falling intonation and a word order change (FQ; e.g., “Was she talking to her father?”). Functional echo planar imaging (EPI) scans were collected from 11 normal subjects. There was increased BOLD activity in bilateral inferior frontal and temporal regions for RQ over either FQ or FS stimuli. The study provides data relevant to the location of regions responsive to intonationally marked illocutionary differences between questions and statements. Hum Brain Mapping 23:85–98, 2004. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Intonation processing increases task‐specific fronto‐temporal connectivity in tonal language speakers

Language comprehension depends on tight functional interactions between distributed brain regions. While these interactions are established for semantic and syntactic processes, the functional network of speech intonation – the linguistic variation of pitch – has been scarcely defined. Particularly little is known about intonation in tonal languages, in which pitch not only serves intonation but also expresses meaning via lexical tones. The present study used psychophysiological interaction analyses of functional magnetic resonance imaging data to characterise the neural networks underlying intonation and tone processing in native Mandarin Chinese speakers. Participants categorised either intonation or tone of monosyllabic Mandarin words that gradually varied between statement and question and between Tone 2 and Tone 4. Intonation processing induced bilateral fronto‐temporal activity and increased functional connectivity between left inferior frontal gyrus and bilateral temporal regions, likely linking auditory perception and labelling of intonation categories in a phonological network. Tone processing induced bilateral temporal activity, associated with the auditory representation of tonal (phonemic) categories. Together, the present data demonstrate the breadth of the functional intonation network in a tonal language including higher‐level phonological processes in addition to auditory representations common to both intonation and tone.     

Processing melodic contour and speech intonation in congenital amusics with Mandarin Chinese

Congenital amusia is a disorder in the perception and production of musical pitch. It has been suggested that early exposure to a tonal language may compensate for the pitch disorder (Peretz, 2008). If so, it is reasonable to expect that there would be different characterizations of pitch perception in music and speech in congenital amusics who speak a tonal language, such as Mandarin. In this study, a group of 11 adults with amusia whose first language was Mandarin were tested with melodic contour and speech intonation discrimination and identification tasks. The participants with amusia were impaired in discriminating and identifying melodic contour. These abnormalities were also detected in identifying both speech and non-linguistic analogue derived patterns for the Mandarin intonation tasks. In addition, there was an overall trend for the participants with amusia to show deficits with respect to controls in the intonation discrimination tasks for both speech and non-linguistic analogues. These findings suggest that the amusics’ melodic pitch deficits may extend to the perception of speech, and could potentially result in some language deficits in those who speak a tonal language.     

Implicit measures of “wanting” and “liking” in humans

Incentive Sensitization Theory (IST; e.g., Robinson and Berridge, 1993. Brain Res. Rev., 18, 291; Robinson and Berridge, 2003 Trends Neurosci., 26, 507) suggests that a common dopamine system that deals with incentive salience attribution is affected by different types of drugs. Repeated drug use will sensitize this neural system, which means that drugs increasingly trigger the experience of incentive salience or “wanting”. Importantly, Robinson and Berridge stress that there is a dissociation between drug “wanting” (the unconscious attribution of incentive salience) and drug “liking” (the unconscious hedonic experience when one consumes drugs). Whereas the former plays an essential role in the development and maintenance of drug addiction, the latter does not. Although this model was based mainly on research with non-human animals, more recently the dissociation between “wanting” and “liking” has been examined in humans as well. A widely used and promising means of studying these processes are behavioral implicit measures such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT), the Approach-Avoidance Task (AAT), different types of Stimulus-Response Compatibility (SRC) tasks, and Affective Simon Tasks (AST).IST makes the clear prediction that (1) there should be a positive correlation between indices of “wanting” (e.g., drug consumption) and implicit “wanting” scores. Similarly, there should be a positive correlation between indices of “liking” (e.g., various expressions of subjective pleasure) and implicit “liking” scores; (2) there should be higher “wanting” scores in substance abusers or frequent substance users compared to non-users or infrequent users, and there should be no differences in “liking” between these groups (or even less “liking” in frequent substance users); (3) manipulations of “wanting” should affect implicit “wanting” scores whereas manipulations of “liking” should affect implicit “liking” scores. However, studies that tested these hypotheses did not produce equivocal results. To shed light on these discrepancies, we first discuss the different definitions of “wanting” and “liking” and the different tests that have been used to assess these processes. Then, we discuss whether it is reasonable to assume that these tests are valid measures of “wanting” and “liking” and we review correlational, quasi-experimental, and experimental studies that inform us about this issue. Finally, we discuss the future potential of implicit measures in research on IST and make several recommendations to improve both theory and methodology.     

Arrest history,stigma, and self-esteem: a modified labeling theory approach to understanding how arrests impact lives

Purpose

Modified labeling theory theorizes that when people acquire a label, personally held views about that label gain relevance and exert negative effects. We assessed whether being arrested reduces self-esteem to different extents based on the degree to which individuals hold stigmatizing beliefs about people with arrest records.

Methods

Adults living in the South Bronx, New York City (N = 532, 56% of whom had ever been arrested) indicated their level of agreement with statements about people with arrest records. We used exploratory factor analysis to identify categories of stigmatizing views, and calculated scores for the two following categories: “stereotype awareness” and “stereotype agreement.” Self-esteem was assessed with the Rosenberg self-esteem scale. Using fitted linear regression models, we assessed interaction between arrest history and each stigma score, and calculated mean differences representing the association between arrest history and self-esteem score, for those with stigma scores one standard deviation (SD) below and above the mean.

Results

For each type of stigma, participants with stigma scores one SD below the mean had similar self-esteem scores, regardless of arrest history. However, among participants with stigma scores one SD above the mean, those who had experienced an arrest had lower self-esteem scores than those who had not (mean difference = − 2.07, 95% CI − 3.16, − 0.99 for “stereotype awareness”; mean difference = − 2.92, 95% CI − 4.05, − 1.79 for “stereotype agreement”).

Conclusion

Being arrested affects self-esteem to a greater degree among persons who hold stigmatizing views about people with arrest records. These findings support a modified labeling theory of arrest-related stigma.

     

A standardized nomenclature for spectrogram EEG patterns: Inter-rater agreement and correspondence with common intensive care unit EEG patterns

ObjectiveTo determine the inter-rater agreement (IRA) of a standardized nomenclature for EEG spectrogram patterns, and to estimate the probability distribution of ictal-interictal continuum (IIC) patterns vs. other EEG patterns within each category in this nomenclature.MethodsWe defined seven spectrogram categories: “Solid Flames”, “Irregular Flames”, “Broadband-monotonous”, “Narrowband-monotonous”, “Stripes”, “Low power”, and “Artifact”. Ten electroencephalographers scored 115 spectrograms and the corresponding raw EEG samples. Gwet's agreement coefficient was used to calculate IRA.ResultsSolid Flames represented seizures or IIC patterns 69.4% of the time. Irregular Flames represented seizures or IIC patterns 38.7% of the time. Broadband-monotonous primarily corresponded with seizures or IIC (54.3%) and Narrowband-monotonous with focal or generalized slowing (43.8%). Stripes were associated with burst-suppression (37.2%) and generalized suppression (34.4%). Low Power category was associated with generalized suppression (94%). There was “near perfect” agreement for Solid Flames (κ = 94.36), Low power (κ = 92.61), and Artifact (κ = 93.72). There was “substantial agreement” for all other categories (κ = 74.65–79.49).ConclusionsThis EEG spectrogram nomenclature has high IRA among electroencephalographers.SignificanceThe nomenclature can be a useful tool for EEG screening. Future studies are needed to determine if using this nomenclature shortens time to IIC identification, and how best to use it in practice to reduce time to intervention.     

Learning word order at birth: A NIRS study

In language, the relative order of words in sentences carries important grammatical functions. However, the developmental origins and the neural correlates of the ability to track word order are to date poorly understood. The current study therefore investigates the origins of infants’ ability to learn about the sequential order of words, using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) with newborn infants. We have conducted two experiments: one in which a word order change was implemented in 4-word sequences recorded with a list intonation (as if each word was a separate item in a list; list prosody condition, Experiment 1) and one in which the same 4-word sequences were recorded with a well-formed utterance-level prosodic contour (utterance prosody condition, Experiment 2). We found that newborns could detect the violation of the word order in the list prosody condition, but not in the utterance prosody condition. These results suggest that while newborns are already sensitive to word order in linguistic sequences, prosody appears to be a stronger cue than word order for the identification of linguistic units at birth.     

Intonation in Broca's aphasia

The intonation contours of the sentence “Construisons notre maison”produced by a group of Broca's aphasic patients were compared to those of this same sentence produced by a group of normal speakers. It was found that the Broca's aphasic patients demonstrated significantly restricted ranges of intonation when compared to the productions of the normal subjects. Different possible underlying mechanisms for this intonation compression are then discussed.     

The assessment of limb apraxia: Relationship between performances on single- and multiple-object tasks by left hemisphere damaged aphasic subjects

Two types of object manipulation tests, commonly advocated for the assessment of limb apraxia, were administered to 30 left hemisphere damaged aphasic (LHD) adults and 10 non-neurologically impaired control subjects. The tests were a multiple-object (MOT), requiring the manipulation of several related objects (e.g., lighting a candle when given a candle, a handle holder, and a match), and a single-object test (SOT) (e.g., lighting a match). Each of the subject's responses was assigned to one of six response categories: Standard (in which the response met all criteria for a faultless response) and five Nonstandard categories (Clumsy, Mislocation, Object Misuse, Perplexity, Omission). The results on comparing performances on the two tests showed that the SOT was “harder” than the MOT. Also, analyses of the relationship between MOT and SOT performances for the LHD subjects resulted in strong correlations between tests, loadings on the same two factors, and no evidence of double dissociations between the two tests for individual subjects. The two factors were interpreted to be a “conceptual/semantic” and a “motor execution” factor. The strong relationship and absence of double dissociations between response categories across the SOT and MOT suggest that both tasks are mediated by the same two neuropsychological processes. Clinical and theoretical implications of the findings are discussed.     

English performance of proficient bilingual adults on the Boston Naming Test

Background: The Boston Naming Test is widely used in several versions and languages. However, there are few studies of its use with bilingual adults. A recent study by Kohnert, Hernandez, and Bates (1998) found that Spanish/English bilingual adults scored well below unilingual adults. Aims: This study tested two hypotheses. (1) Fluently bilingual adults will obtain significantly lower scores than unilingual, English-speaking adults on the BNT, in English. (2) The order of difficulty of the 60 items will differ for the bilingual and unilingual groups. Methods & Procedures: This study compared the English performance of unilingual speakers (n = 42) to that of two groups of bilingual adults: Spanish/English (n = 32) and French/English (n = 49). All bilingual participants learned English as a second language as children and claimed high levels of ability in English. All participants completed high school (range 11–27 years of schooling). The three groups did not differ significantly in age or education. An ANOVA compared the mean Total Correct obtained by the three groups. Outcomes & Results: Both hypotheses were confirmed. The mean scores (Total Corrrect) for the bilingual groups (42.6 and 39.5/60) were both significantly below the mean score of the unilingual group (50.9/60) but not different from each other. Item difficulty showed some similarities but also important differences across groups. Conclusions: The English language norms cannot be used, even with proficient bilingual speakers. Cultural factors appear less important than bilingualism. Some items on the Boston Naming Test have more than one correct name and suggestions for “lenient” scoring are given.     

The relevance of object categorization to cross-modal performance by chimpanzees

Two hundred objects from the Yerkes collection were categorized by human subjects independently by size (“large”, “mediumly large”, “mediumly small” and “small”) and by texture (“rough”, “mediumly rough”, “mediumly smooth” and “smooth”). The human subjects showed impressive consistency. Three highly experienced chimpanzees were then each given 200 trials of cross-modal matching (tactile sample, visual objects) with 68 of the objects which had been assigned to each of the eight categories by agreement between four of four human subjects. It was expected that the apes would make fewer errors when the visual objects were drawn from classes on different sides of a dimensional boundary than when drawn from classes to the same side of the boundaries. This expectation was not fulfilled and the possible reasons are discussed.     

Diagnostic criteria for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: A multicentre study of inter-rater variation and sensitivity

ObjectiveThis study assesses inter-rater agreement and sensitivity of diagnostic criteria for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).MethodsClinical and electrophysiological data of 399 patients with suspected ALS were collected by eleven experienced physicians from ten different countries. Eight physicians classified patients independently and blinded according to the revised El Escorial Criteria (rEEC) and to the Awaji Criteria (AC). Inter-rater agreement was assessed by Kappa coefficients, sensitivity by majority diagnosis on 350 patients with follow-up data.ResultsInter-rater agreement was generally low both for rEEC and AC. Agreement was best on the categories “Not-ALS”, “Definite”, and “Probable”, and poorest for “Possible” and “Probable Laboratory-supported”.Sensitivity was equal for rEEC (64%) and AC (63%), probably due to downgrading of “Probable Laboratory-supported” patients by AC. However, AC was significantly more effective in classifying patients as “ALS” versus “Not-ALS” (p < 0.0001).ConclusionsInter-rater variation is high both for rEEC and for AC probably due to a high complexity of the rEEC inherent in the AC.The gain of AC on diagnostic sensitivity is reduced by the omission of the “Probable Laboratory-supported” category.SignificanceThe results highlight a need for initiatives to develop simpler and more reproducible diagnostic criteria for ALS in clinical practice and research.     

Attention to prosody (intonation) and content in children with autism and in typical children using spoken sentences in a computer game

This study validated a video game paradigm to explore attention to prosodic and linguistic components of spoken sentences in nine moderate-to-low functioning children with autism and impaired verbal skills. Nine typically developing children were also included. The children listened to pre-recorded sentences varying with respect to content (e.g., “Max ate a grape” vs. “Tom threw a ball”) and prosody (i.e., intonation of statement vs. question). During training, children learned to select one of two sentences differing in both content and prosody. At testing, children listened to stimuli consisting of recombinations of the content and prosodic features of the training stimuli. Testing performance indicated that the children with autism attended to the content and prosodic features of the training stimuli equally, whereas the children with typical development showed a clear preference for content over prosody. Both groups showed accurate discrimination of the training stimuli from the recombined test stimuli. The findings are interpreted in light of three approaches to explain the unusual attention patterns in autism: stimulus overselectivity, weak central coherence, and enhanced perceptual functioning.     

Self-control instruction for children's fear-reduction

Five boys and two girls, 8 to 12 years of age, with severe night time fears of long duration, participated with their parents in three instruction sessions of self-control training for home-based practice. The parents supervised, monitored and rewarded with praise and “bravery tokens” their children's self-control exercises practiced nightly before bed, i.e., (1) muscle relaxation; (2) imaging a pleasant scene, and (3) reciting special “brave” self-statements. The long-standing, highly resistant problems of night time fears were solved for all families. No newfears or other problems occurred over the three-month, six-month and one-year follow-ups.     

Language Learning From Positive Evidence,Reconsidered: A Simplicity‐Based Approach

Children learn their native language by exposure to their linguistic and communicative environment, but apparently without requiring that their mistakes be corrected. Such learning from “positive evidence” has been viewed as raising “logical” problems for language acquisition. In particular, without correction, how is the child to recover from conjecturing an over‐general grammar, which will be consistent with any sentence that the child hears? There have been many proposals concerning how this “logical problem” can be dissolved. In this study, we review recent formal results showing that the learner has sufficient data to learn successfully from positive evidence, if it favors the simplest encoding of the linguistic input. Results include the learnability of linguistic prediction, grammaticality judgments, language production, and form‐meaning mappings. The simplicity approach can also be “scaled down” to analyze the learnability of specific linguistic constructions, and it is amenable to empirical testing as a framework for describing human language acquisition.     

Proper name anomia after right-hemispheric lesion: a case study

This study describes the case of CH, a 68-year-old left-handed woman who suffered a right temporo-parieto-occipital infarct in the territory of the middle cerebral artery and who exhibits severe proper name anomia. During the acute stage, CH was diagnosed with severe amnestic aphasia (Aachen Aphasia Test). Her lesion mirrors those of left hemisphere impairing the processing proper names, without an aphasic language disorder in general. Seven weeks later, language improved to a mild amnestic aphasia that currently does not interfere with her daily life. However, the use of proper names in both the visual and auditory modalities was still impaired and showed no improvement after 6 months of speech therapy. While not being able to name family members or familiar persons, she was, however, still able to describe the persons’ backgrounds along with some additional semantic information. Furthermore, in a simple semantic design test, CH was selectively impaired in correctly classifying proper names into their respective word classes. Conversely, she was able to correctly name and classify other word categories (e.g., common nouns). In the subsequent study, we assessed the modalities “auditory comprehension,” “picture naming,” and “reading comprehension” and classified her responses in the categories “correctly named,” “correctly classified,” “correctly described attributes” (e.g., occupation) and “falsely named.” The results were compared with those of an age-matched healthy control group. In the visual task, CH correctly named 80% of the visualized objects, 3% of the familiar persons and 15% of the familiar city views.     

Left cheek poses garner more likes: the effect of pose orientation on Instagram engagement

In social media’s attention economy “likes” are currency; photos showing faces attract more “likes.” Previous research has established a left cheek bias in photos uploaded to social media, but whether left cheek poses induce more engagement than right cheek poses remains to be determined. The present study thus examined whether pose orientation influences the number of “likes” and comments garnered by photos uploaded to Instagram. The top 20 single-user Instagram accounts were identified, and the most recent 10 left and 10 right cheek images were selected, resulting in a total of 400 images. The number of “likes” and comments were tallied for each image, netting over 1 billion “likes” and 14 million comments for analysis. Results confirmed that pose orientation influences audience engagement: left cheek poses garner >10% more “likes” than right cheek poses. Gender did not influence “likes”. Comments were not affected by either pose orientation or gender, likely reflecting the different levels of effort and motivations involved in “liking” vs. commenting on an image. These data indicate that a seemingly inconsequential turn of the head profoundly impacts audience engagement: left cheek poses gained >330,000 more “likes”, offering clear implications for marketers and others in the social media economy.     

Functionally relevant items in the treatment of aphasia (part I): Challenges for current practice

Background: Aphasiologists are motivated to select “functional”, “relevant” and “useful” items for use in therapy; yet the field lacks discussion on what is meant by these terms and how to identify such items.

Aims: The purpose of this article is to review the meaning of “functionally relevant” in the aphasia treatment literature and to specify challenges in identifying potentially relevant items for therapy.

Main Contribution: This article shows that aphasiologists lack clear definitions, strategies and concrete tools to assist with identification of functionally relevant items for language therapy. Two main categories of functional vocabulary are defined—personally chosen vocabulary and generally frequent vocabulary. The review of the existing aphasia literature demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches. Two critical points are raised related to selection of therapy items using data from language corpora. Firstly, it is paradoxical that aphasiologists often try to target the most common vocabulary in therapy but that language corpora have not been used to determine the identity of the most frequent words. Secondly, the analyses of the language corpora show that the most frequent spoken words represent a wide variety of word classes, such as adjectives, adverbs and pronouns. Yet, only a few treatment studies have targeted words other than concrete nouns and verbs.

Conclusions: There is a need to use objective sources to identify and choose treatment targets. In addition, more therapy attempts should be directed to words other than the most concrete nouns and verbs. Use of frequency-based lists provides one way to identify and increase the number of items that are potentially relevant across people. Frequency-based vocabulary lists can also be used as a tool when asking people with aphasia or their significant others to identify items that they personally think should be targeted in therapy. Without creating and publishing common tools for this purpose, change in practice is difficult.     

Examining the structure of ideas of reference in clinical and community samples

AimsThis study addresses the psychometric properties of a Spanish validation of the REF scale of ideas of reference (IRs) in detecting and following at-risk mental states and psychosis.MethodsA total of 9447 participants were distributed in three groups: 676 patients with various diagnoses—154 with psychotic disorders, 6291 youths aged 11 to 20, and 2480 adult participants aged 21 to 84.ResultsYouths had higher scores than adults on IRs, observing a progressive decrease and stabilization in the twenties. Exploratory factor analysis provided a structure for the overall IRs score, with five first-order dimensions and one second-order dimension. Confirmatory factor analysis supported the structure with excellent fit. The REF scale was invariant across sex and samples. The internal consistency of the complete scale was excellent and acceptable across the five first-order factors. Strong relationships were found with the positive dimension of the community assessment of psychic experience-42, as well as with aberrant salience. Low and moderate relationships were found with public self-consciousness, anxiety, and depression. Youths and patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders had a high mean IRs frequency. Male sex, greater age (among the adults), and the “causal explanations”, “Songs, newspapers, books” and “laughing and commenting” REF subscales showed predictive power in the diagnostic categories of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders.ConclusionsThe results provide satisfactory that the REF scale could be used to study psychosis.