Explore the vast range of titles available.

The inferior colliculus (IC) has traditionally been regarded as an important relay in the auditory pathway, primarily involved in relaying auditory information from the brainstem to the thalamus. However, this study uncovers the multifaceted role of the IC in bridging auditory processing, sensory prediction, and reward prediction. Through extracellular recordings in monkeys engaged in a sound duration-based deviation detection task, we observed a 'climbing effect' in neuronal firing rates, indicative of an enhanced response over sound sequences linked to sensory prediction rather than reward anticipation. Moreover, our findings demonstrate reward prediction errors within the IC, highlighting its complex integration in auditory and reward processing. Further analysis revealed a direct correlation between IC neuronal activity and behavioral choices, suggesting its involvement in decision-making processes. This research highlights a more complex role for the IC than traditionally understood, showcasing its integral role in cognitive and sensory processing and emphasizing its importance in integrated brain functions.

In second language (L2) research and testing, measures of oral fluency are used as diagnostics for proficiency. However, fluency is also determined by personality or speaking style, raising the question to what extent L2 fluency measures are valid indicators of L2 proficiency. In this study, we obtained a measure of L2 (Dutch) proficiency (vocabulary knowledge), L2 fluency measures, and fluency measures that were corrected for first language behavior from the same group of Turkish and English native speakers (N = 51). For most measures of fluency, except for silent pause duration, both the corrected and the uncorrected measures significantly predicted L2 proficiency. For syllable duration, the corrected measure was a stronger predictor of L2 proficiency than was the uncorrected measure. We conclude that for L2 research purposes, as well as for some types of L2 testing, it is useful to obtain corrected measures of syllable duration to measure L2-specific fluency.

Purpose: The question of what type of utterance--a sustained vowel or continuous speech--is best for voice quality analysis has been extensively studied but with equivocal results. This study examines whether previously reported differences derive from the articulatory and prosodic factors occurring in continuous speech versus sustained phonation. Method: Speakers with voice disorders sustained vowels and read sentences. Vowel samples were excerpted from the steadiest portion of each vowel in the sentences. In addition to sustained and excerpted vowels, a 3rd set of stimuli was created by shortening sustained vowel productions to match the duration of vowels excerpted from continuous speech. Acoustic measures were made on the stimuli, and listeners judged the severity of vocal quality deviation. Results: Sustained vowels and those extracted from continuous speech contain essentially the same acoustic and perceptual information about vocal quality deviation. Conclusions: Perceived and/or measured differences between continuous speech and sustained vowels derive largely from voice source variability across segmental and prosodic contexts and not from variations in vocal fold vibration in the quasisteady portion of the vowels. Approaches to voice quality assessment by using continuous speech samples average across utterances and may not adequately quantify the variability they are intended to assess.

Background. Cough is one of the most common clinical manifestations of COVID-19. Objective of our study was to perform analysis of cough duration, energy and sound frequency in COVID-19 patients, compared to induced cough in controls and the cough in asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients. Methods. The following characteristics of cough sounds were obtained: duration, Q coefficient - low/medium-frequency energy (60–600 Hz) to high-frequency energy (600–6000 Hz) ratio, and frequency of maximum sound energy. The cough was divided into three phases and assessment of characteristics was applied to the entire coughing act and to each phase separately in controls and patients with COVID-19, asthma and COPD. Results. The cough sounds of COVID-19 patients were characterized by a shorter duration, a predominance of high-frequency energy and higher maximum frequency of the energy, compared with the induced cough of controls. However, the frequencies of the maximum sound energy of the individual cough phases did not differ significantly, as did the duration of the first phase. In addition, the significant differences were demonstrated in some time-frequency parameters of cough sounds in the patients with asthma and COPD as compared to COVID-19 patients. Conclusion. Therefore, we have shown the distinction between the cough characteristics of COVID-19 patients compared to controls and patients with asthma or COPD.

Differentiation of logopenic (lvPPA) and nonfluent/agrammatic (nfvPPA) variants of Primary Progressive Aphasia is important yet remains challenging since it hinges on expert based evaluation of speech and language production. In this study acoustic measures of speech in conjunction with voxel-based morphometry were used to determine the success of the measures as an adjunct to diagnosis and to explore the neural basis of apraxia of speech in nfvPPA. Forty-one patients (21 lvPPA, 20 nfvPPA) were recruited from a consecutive sample with suspected frontotemporal dementia. Patients were diagnosed using the current gold-standard of expert perceptual judgment, based on presence/absence of particular speech features during speaking tasks. Seventeen healthy age-matched adults served as controls. MRI scans were available for 11 control and 37 PPA cases; 23 of the PPA cases underwent amyloid ligand PET imaging. Measures, corresponding to perceptual features of apraxia of speech, were periods of silence during reading and relative vowel duration and intensity in polysyllable word repetition. Discriminant function analyses revealed that a measure of relative vowel duration differentiated nfvPPA cases from both control and lvPPA cases (r(2) = 0.47) with 88% agreement with expert judgment of presence of apraxia of speech in nfvPPA cases. VBM analysis showed that relative vowel duration covaried with grey matter intensity in areas critical for speech motor planning and programming: precentral gyrus, supplementary motor area and inferior frontal gyrus bilaterally, only affected in the nfvPPA group. This bilateral involvement of frontal speech networks in nfvPPA potentially affects access to compensatory mechanisms involving right hemisphere homologues. Measures of silences during reading also discriminated the PPA and control groups, but did not increase predictive accuracy. Findings suggest that a measure of relative vowel duration from of a polysyllable word repetition task may be sufficient for detecting most cases of apraxia of speech and distinguishing between nfvPPA and lvPPA.

Hearing is the most accurate sense for perceiving duration. However, rarely it produces inaccurate estimates of duration, for example when it compares the subjective duration of tones that are increasing in intensity over time (i.e., ramped) with that of tones that are decreasing in intensity over time (i.e., damped). The literature reports that the damped tones are perceived as much being shorter than the ramped tones of the same length. The short subjective duration of damped tones may originate from a decay suppression mechanism that parses the source-informative part of many natural sounds (i.e., the beginning) from the less informative part of them (the decay): listeners may interpret the tail of damped tones like an echo or like the decay portion of an impact sound and exclude it from the account of the duration of the tone. In the natural soundscape, the tail of sounds produced in reverberant environments and the tail of impact sounds have a frequency content that is constant throughout the sound’s duration. Here, the carriers used for ramped and damped sounds were a tone constant in frequency and a tone modulated in frequency. The frequency modulation was introduced to prevent the listener from interpreting the tail of these tones as the result of reverberation or the decay portion of an impact sound. Frequency constant damped tones were largely underestimated in duration whereas frequency modulated ones were not (or were only slightly), demonstrating that the decay suppression mechanism is a worthy explanation for the short subjective duration of damped tones.

When speaking to infants, adults often produce speech that differs systematically from that directed to other adults. To quantify the acoustic properties of this speech style across a wide variety of languages and cultures, we extracted results from empirical studies on the acoustic features of infant-directed speech. We analysed data from 88 unique studies (734 effect sizes) on the following five acoustic parameters that have been systematically examined in the literature: fundamental frequency ( f 0 ), f 0 variability, vowel space area, articulation rate and vowel duration. Moderator analyses were conducted in hierarchical Bayesian robust regression models to examine how these features change with infant age and differ across languages, experimental tasks and recording environments. The moderator analyses indicated that f 0 , articulation rate and vowel duration became more similar to adult-directed speech over time, whereas f 0 variability and vowel space area exhibited stability throughout development. These results point the way for future research to disentangle different accounts of the functions and learnability of infant-directed speech by conducting theory-driven comparisons among different languages and using computational models to formulate testable predictions. This meta-analysis examines different features of infant-directed speech across languages and infant ages. The results suggest that there are cross-linguistic tendencies and that caregivers adjust the properties of infant-directed speech to suit infants’ changing needs.

Arabic has a vowel system with three long and three short monophthongs. One of the parameters that accounts for qualitative differences between long and short vowels across languages is tenseness/laxness of vowels located on the peripheral/non-peripheral tracks in the vowel space. The present study investigates acoustical cues (F1, F2, and duration) of vowels using the data obtained from 21 speakers of Qatari Arabic. The vowels were produced in four phonetic contexts: labial, alveolar, uvular, and pharyngeal. The results revealed considerable qualitative differences between long and short vowels. The long vowels were articulated at the periphery of vowel space; the short vowels occupied more centralized positions. The co-articulatory effect of the preceding consonant was more prominent in short vowels. Short high vowels /i u/ were lowered toward the mid position; short low /a/ was fronted; long low /aː/ was retracted and raised. The findings suggest that short vowels in Qatari Arabic are lax and non-peripheral.

This research investigates the tone system of an understudied language, Du’an Zhuang and its interaction with duration. Cross-linguistically, tones tend to be less complex in shorter duration contexts. In Du’an Zhuang, syllable type provides these contexts: There are six contrastive tones among unchecked syllables with longer rhyme duration, but this is reduced to four tones in shorter duration checked syllables. Acoustic analyses of f0 and duration from six native speakers were performed to check whether tonal complexity is reduced in the shorter duration checked syllables. The results showed this was true with some exceptions. The two tones in CVVO syllables corresponded to the two least complex tones; however, one of the two CVO tones included a more complex rising tone. This rising tone exhibited a reduced f0 excursion though. Finally, there is a two-way phonological vowel length contrast in Du’an Zhuang, which necessarily interacts with syllable type via its effect on rhyme duration. However, based on our vowel duration measurements, this vowel length contrast only exists in unchecked syllables with sonorant codas, the only syllable type where rhyme duration and vowel duration could possibly differ. In this context, a sonorant coda contributes to the syllable’s rhyme duration, but not to vowel duration, allowing syllable type and vowel length to contrast independently, only in this phonological context.

Analysis reported in this paper aimed at eliciting the effects of stress, vowel segment duration, openness/closedness of the syllable and number of syllables constituting the word upon the temporal relationship between the nuclei of adjoining stressed and unstressed syllables. Observations were made on spontaneously produced one-word utterances. Main spoken varieties of Erzya were represented in the materials by a group of idiolects characterised by the use of full vowels and three groups of idiolects exhibiting different types and degrees of vowel reduction. The results confirm the validity of indications obtained previously on the effects of word structure upon vowel duration in controlled speech. Analyses focused on the occurrences of comparable sets of vowels across the idiolect groups. The overall results revealed idiolect-specific sources of vowel duration variability. In the idiolects lacking reduction, stress and vowel duration were found to be independent. Vowels in the adjoining stressed and unstressed syllables tended to have equal duration. In the idiolects having reduction, the duration of the syllable nuclei showed dependence on stress. Stressed syllable nuclei were consistently longer than unstressed counterparts. The effect of the openness/closedness of the syllable was not explicitly manifested either in the reading or spontaneous speech data. Vowel duration variations in words with open/open and open/closed syllables were found to be statistically significant in some of the idiolects with reduction. Trisyllabic words compared to disyllabic ones in both types of idiolects had shorter syllable nuclei but higher duration ratios within the duple foot. Differences in the values of duration between stressed and unstressed syllable nuclei were not significant in the idiolects lacking reduction. The tendency towards equal duration of the vowels observed in disyllabic words persisted in trisyllabic words, as well. In the idiolects with reduction, statistically significant differences were found between vowel durations in the stressed and unstressed syllables both in di- and trisyllabic words, as well as between the duration ratios for the duple foot of trisyllabic and disyllabic words. Data obtained in the study provide evidence of differences in the rhythmic patterning of the two idiolect types.