Browsing by Subject "speech"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Assessment of Dysphonia in Children with Pompe Disease Using Auditory-Perceptual and Acoustic/Physiologic Methods.
    (Journal of clinical medicine, 2021-08-16) Crisp, Kelly D; Neel, Amy T; Amarasekara, Sathya; Marcus, Jill; Nichting, Gretchen; Korlimarla, Aditi; Kishnani, Priya S; Jones, Harrison N
    Bulbar and respiratory weakness occur commonly in children with Pompe disease and frequently lead to dysarthria. However, changes in vocal quality associated with this motor speech disorder are poorly described. The goal of this study was to characterize the vocal function of children with Pompe disease using auditory-perceptual and physiologic/acoustic methods. High-quality voice recordings were collected from 21 children with Pompe disease. The Grade, Roughness, Breathiness, Asthenia, and Strain (GRBAS) scale was used to assess voice quality and ratings were compared to physiologic/acoustic measurements collected during sustained phonation tasks, reading of a standard passage, and repetition of a short phrase at maximal volume. Based on ratings of grade, dysphonia was present in 90% of participants and was most commonly rated as mild or moderate in severity. Duration of sustained phonation tasks was reduced and shimmer was increased in comparison to published reference values for children without dysphonia. Specific measures of loudness were found to have statistically significant relationships with perceptual ratings of grade, breathiness, asthenia, and strain. Our data suggest that dysphonia is common in children with Pompe disease and primarily reflects impairments in respiratory and laryngeal function; however, the primary cause of dysphonia remains unclear. Future studies should seek to quantify the relative contribution of deficits in individual speech subsystems on voice quality and motor speech performance more broadly.
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    Brain evolution by brain pathway duplication.
    (Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci, 2015-12-19) Chakraborty, Mukta; Jarvis, Erich D
    Understanding the mechanisms of evolution of brain pathways for complex behaviours is still in its infancy. Making further advances requires a deeper understanding of brain homologies, novelties and analogies. It also requires an understanding of how adaptive genetic modifications lead to restructuring of the brain. Recent advances in genomic and molecular biology techniques applied to brain research have provided exciting insights into how complex behaviours are shaped by selection of novel brain pathways and functions of the nervous system. Here, we review and further develop some insights to a new hypothesis on one mechanism that may contribute to nervous system evolution, in particular by brain pathway duplication. Like gene duplication, we propose that whole brain pathways can duplicate and the duplicated pathway diverge to take on new functions. We suggest that one mechanism of brain pathway duplication could be through gene duplication, although other mechanisms are possible. We focus on brain pathways for vocal learning and spoken language in song-learning birds and humans as example systems. This view presents a new framework for future research in our understanding of brain evolution and novel behavioural traits.
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    I see what you are saying.
    (Elife, 2016-06-09) Cogan, Gregory B
    The motor cortex in the brain tracks lip movements to help with speech perception.
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    Vocal development in a large-scale crosslinguistic corpus.
    (Developmental science, 2021-01-26) Cychosz, Margaret; Cristia, Alejandrina; Bergelson, Elika; Casillas, Marisa; Baudet, Gladys; Warlaumont, Anne S; Scaff, Camila; Yankowitz, Lisa; Seidl, Amanda
    This study evaluates whether early vocalizations develop in similar ways in children across diverse cultural contexts. We analyze data from daylong audio recordings of 49 children (1-36 months) from five different language/cultural backgrounds. Citizen scientists annotated these recordings to determine if child vocalizations contained canonical transitions or not (e.g., "ba" versus "ee"). Results revealed that the proportion of clips reported to contain canonical transitions increased with age. Further, this proportion exceeded 0.15 by around 7 months, replicating and extending previous findings on canonical vocalization development but using data from the natural environments of a culturally and linguistically diverse sample. This work explores how crowdsourcing can be used to annotate corpora, helping establish developmental milestones relevant to multiple languages and cultures. Lower inter-annotator reliability on the crowdsourcing platform, relative to more traditional in-lab expert annotators, means that a larger number of unique annotators and/or annotations are required and that crowdsourcing may not be a suitable method for more fine-grained annotation decisions. Audio clips used for this project are compiled into a large-scale infant vocalization corpus that is available for other researchers to use in future work.