RESUMEN
PURPOSE: Script training is a well-established treatment for aphasia, but its evidence comes almost exclusively from monolingual English speakers with aphasia. Furthermore, its active ingredients and profiles of people with aphasia (PWA) that respond to this treatment remain understudied. This study aimed to adapt a scripted-sentence learning protocol to Colombian Spanish speakers with aphasia, investigate speech entrainment (i.e., unison production of sentences) as an active ingredient for scripted-sentence learning, and identify patient profiles associated with better scripted-sentence learning. METHOD: Fourteen monolingual Spanish speakers with aphasia learned a set of 30 sentences. To examine speech entrainment as an active ingredient for scripted-sentence learning, we investigated whether sentences containing externally added rhythmic cues (involving stress-aligned vs. metronomic rhythmic cues) would result in better scripted-sentence learning compared with control sentences. Learning was measured via postsession probes and analyzed using mixed-effects logistic regression models. The relationship between scripted-sentence learning and baseline language and rhythmic processing measures was also examined. RESULTS: Significant scripted-sentence learning over time indicated a successful adaptation of a script-training protocol to Spanish. PWA learned significantly more scripted sentences in the rhythmically enhanced conditions compared with the control condition. There were no differences between rhythmically enhanced conditions (stress-aligned vs. metronomic). In terms of patient profiles, it was found that PWA with more severe aphasia demonstrated larger learning gains, but rhythmic processing showed little association with learning estimates. CONCLUSIONS: To our knowledge, this study provides the first adaptation of a scripted-sentence learning protocol for monolingual Spanish speakers with aphasia, demonstrating cross-linguistic benefits of script training interventions. Highlighting rhythmic features during speech entrainment facilitated scripted-sentence learning in Spanish speakers with aphasia, suggesting that speech entrainment may be an active ingredient for scripted-sentence learning. More severe aphasia was associated with better scripted-sentence learning, suggesting that more severely impaired individuals are likely to benefit most from this treatment. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.19241847.
Asunto(s)
Afasia , Lenguaje , Afasia/terapia , Señales (Psicología) , Humanos , Lingüística , HablaRESUMEN
Changing the F0-contour of English words does not change their lexical meaning. However, it changes the meaning in tonal languages such as Mandarin. Given this important difference and knowing that words in the two languages of a bilingual lexicon interact, the question arises as to how Mandarin-English speakers process pitch in their bilingual lexicon. The few studies that addressed this question showed that Mandarin-English speakers did not perceive pitch in English words as native English speakers did. These studies, however, used English words as stimuli failing to examine nonwords and Mandarin words. Consequently, possible pre-lexical effects and L1 transfer were not ruled out. The present study fills this gap by examining pitch perception in Mandarin and English words and nonwords by Mandarin-English speakers and a group of native English controls. Results showed the tonal experience of Chinese-English speakers modulated their perception of pitch in their non-tonal language at both pre-lexical and lexical levels. In comparison to native English controls, tonal speakers were more sensitive to the acoustic salience of F0-contours in the pre-lexical processing due to top-down feedback. At the lexical level, Mandarin-English speakers organized words in their two languages according to similarity criteria based on both F0 and segmental information, whereas only the segmental information was relevant to the control group. These results in perception together with consistently reported production patterns in previous literature suggest that Mandarin-English speakers process pitch in English as if it was a one-tone language.
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Lenguaje , Percepción del Habla , Acústica , China , Humanos , Percepción de la Altura TonalRESUMEN
Cross-language studies have shown that English speakers use suprasegmental cues to lexical stress less consistently than speakers of Spanish and other Germanic languages ; accordingly, these studies have attributed this asymmetry to a possible trade-off between the use of vowel reduction and suprasegmental cues in lexical access. We put forward the hypothesis that this "cue trade-off" modulates intonation processing as well, so that English speakers make less use of suprasegmental cues in comparison to Spanish speakers when processing intonation in utterances causing processing asymmetries between these two languages. In three cross-language experiments comparing English and Spanish speakers' prediction of hypo-articulated utterances in focal sentences and reporting speech, we have provided evidence for our hypothesis and proposed a mechanism, the Cue-Driven Window Length model, which accounts for the observed cross-language processing asymmetries between English and Spanish at both lexical and utterance levels. Altogether, results from these experiments illustrated in detail how different types of low-level acoustic information (e.g., vowel reduction versus duration) interacted with higher-level expectations based on the speakers' knowledge of intonation providing support for our hypothesis. These interactions were coherent with an active model of speech perception that entailed real-time adjusting to feedback and to information from the context, challenging more traditional models that consider speech perception as a passive, bottom-up pattern-matching process.
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Señales (Psicología) , Lenguaje , Fonética , Acústica del Lenguaje , Percepción del Habla , Adulto , Femenino , Humanos , Masculino , Adulto JovenRESUMEN
In Mandarin Chinese pitch is used to express both lexical meanings via tones and sentence-level meanings via pitch-accents raising the question of which information is processed first. While research with meaningful sentence materials suggested a general processing advantage of tone over pitch-accents, research on pure tones and nonce speech in pre-attentive processing found that the f0-shape led to timing and site processing differences. The current study reconciles these results by exploring whether the tone advantage found in meaningful speech materials is modulated by the f0-shape by establishing via a gating paradigm the relative timing of tone and pitch-accent identification. Target words containing static (T1) and dynamic (T2, T4) tones were embedded into meaningful sentences and were divided into 50 ms gates which were added incrementally either from the left- or right-edge of the target word. Results showed that dynamic targets had either a tone or pitch-accent advantage contingent on the direction of gate processing. In contrast, for static T1 targets, tone and pitch-accent were identified simultaneously regardless of the direction of gate processing. Altogether, these results indicate that the f0-shape, as defined by pitch dimensions of f0 and pitch range, mediates the timing of tone and pitch-accent identification in meaningful speech supporting highly interactive models of speech perception.
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Fonética , Percepción de la Altura Tonal , Acústica del Lenguaje , Percepción del Habla , Calidad de la Voz , Estimulación Acústica , Adolescente , Adulto , Señales (Psicología) , Humanos , Masculino , Discriminación de la Altura Tonal , Factores de Tiempo , Adulto JovenRESUMEN
The general literature on the phonetic correlates of stress agrees that duration, and in stress accent languages, F0 are consistent correlates of stress. However, the role of amplitude changes in the speech signal is more controversial. In particular, the conflicting results of spectral tilt as a correlate of stress have been attributed to the effects of vowel reduction. We examined the stress correlates of duration, overall intensity and spectral tilt in Catalan and Spanish in both accented and unaccented contexts while controlling for formant frequency differences between morphologically corresponding vowels in stressed and unstressed environments by comparing vowels that maintain the same quality across stress contexts with those that do not. Duration was a consistent stress correlate in all vowels in both languages, regardless of their formant frequency differences across stress contexts and of the absence of pitch accents. In fact, stress-related formant frequency differences between corresponding vowels amplify the duration cues to the stress contrast. On the other hand, the use speakers made of intensity was not as pervasive as that of duration. Specifically, changes in spectral tilt were significant only in Catalan and in those vowels that alternate a more open and peripheral realization in stressed syllables with a mid-central realization in unstressed syllables, indicating that spectral tilt is related to the formant frequency differences linked to the centralization processes rather than to the stress contrast.
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Lenguaje , Fonética , Acústica del Lenguaje , Inteligibilidad del Habla , Adulto , Señales (Psicología) , Femenino , Humanos , Masculino , Psicolingüística , Espectrografía del Sonido , Medición de la Producción del Habla , Factores de Tiempo , Adulto JovenRESUMEN
In unaccented contexts, formant frequency differences related to vowel reduction constitute a consistent cue to word stress in English, whereas in languages such as Spanish that have no systematic vowel reduction, stress perception is based on duration and intensity cues. This article examines the perception of word stress by speakers of Central Catalan, in which, due to its vowel reduction patterns, words either alternate stressed open vowels with unstressed mid-central vowels as in English or contain no vowel quality cues to stress, as in Spanish. Results show that Catalan listeners perceive stress based mainly on duration cues in both word types. Other cues pattern together with duration to make stress perception more robust. However, no single cue is absolutely necessary and trading effects compensate for a lack of differentiation in one dimension by changes in another dimension. In particular, speakers identify longer mid-central vowels as more stressed than shorter open vowels. These results and those obtained in other stress-accent languages provide cumulative evidence that word stress is perceived independently of pitch accents by relying on a set of cues with trading effects so that no single cue, including formant frequency differences related to vowel reduction, is absolutely necessary for stress perception.
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Fonética , Acústica del Lenguaje , Percepción del Habla , Habla , Adulto , Señales (Psicología) , Humanos , Lenguaje , Modelos Logísticos , Espectrografía del Sonido , Factores de Tiempo , Adulto JovenRESUMEN
This study assessed the extent to which second-language learners are sensitive to phonetic information contained in visual cues when identifying a non-native phonemic contrast. In experiment 1, Spanish and Japanese learners of English were tested on their perception of a labial/ labiodental consonant contrast in audio (A), visual (V), and audio-visual (AV) modalities. Spanish students showed better performance overall, and much greater sensitivity to visual cues than Japanese students. Both learner groups achieved higher scores in the AV than in the A test condition, thus showing evidence of audio-visual benefit. Experiment 2 examined the perception of the less visually-salient /1/-/r/ contrast in Japanese and Korean learners of English. Korean learners obtained much higher scores in auditory and audio-visual conditions than in the visual condition, while Japanese learners generally performed poorly in both modalities. Neither group showed evidence of audio-visual benefit. These results show the impact of the language background of the learner and visual salience of the contrast on the use of visual cues for a non-native contrast. Significant correlations between scores in the auditory and visual conditions suggest that increasing auditory proficiency in identifying a non-native contrast is linked with an increasing proficiency in using visual cues to the contrast.