Children’s Neural Sensitivity to Prosodic Features of Natural Speech and Its Significance to Speech Development in Cochlear Implanted Children
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Chen Y
PROVIDER: S-EPMC9315047 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Variation in pitch, amplitude and rhythm adds crucial paralinguistic information to human speech. Such prosodic cues can reveal information about the meaning or emphasis of a sentence or the emotional state of the speaker. To examine the hypothesis that sensitivity to prosodic cues is language independent and not human specific, we tested prosody perception in a controlled experiment with zebra finches. Using a go/no-go procedure, subjects were trained to discriminate between speech syllables arranged in XYXY patterns with prosodic stress on the first syllable and XXYY patterns with prosodic stress on the final syllable. To systematically determine the salience of the various prosodic cues (pitch, duration and amplitude) to the zebra finches, they were subjected to five tests with different combinations of these cues. The zebra finches generalized the prosodic pattern to sequences that consisted of new syllables and used prosodic features over structural ones to discriminate between stimuli. This strong sensitivity to the prosodic pattern was maintained when only a single prosodic cue was available. The change in pitch was treated as more salient than changes in the other prosodic features. These results show that zebra finches are sensitive to the same prosodic cues known to affect human speech perception.
| S-EPMC4071541 | biostudies-literature
Project description:ObjectivesNormally-hearing (NH) listeners rely more on prosodic cues than on lexical-semantic cues for emotion perception in speech. In everyday spoken communication, the ability to decipher conflicting information between prosodic and lexical-semantic cues to emotion can be important: for example, in identifying sarcasm or irony. Speech degradation in cochlear implants (CIs) can be sufficiently overcome to identify lexical-semantic cues, but the distortion of voice pitch cues makes it particularly challenging to hear prosody with CIs. The purpose of this study was to examine changes in relative reliance on prosodic and lexical-semantic cues in NH adults listening to spectrally degraded speech and adult CI users. We hypothesized that, compared with NH counterparts, CI users would show increased reliance on lexical-semantic cues and reduced reliance on prosodic cues for emotion perception. We predicted that NH listeners would show a similar pattern when listening to CI-simulated versions of emotional speech.DesignSixteen NH adults and 8 postlingually deafened adult CI users participated in the study. Sentences were created to convey five lexical-semantic emotions (angry, happy, neutral, sad, and scared), with five sentences expressing each category of emotion. Each of these 25 sentences was then recorded with the 5 (angry, happy, neutral, sad, and scared) prosodic emotions by 2 adult female talkers. The resulting stimulus set included 125 recordings (25 Sentences × 5 Prosodic Emotions) per talker, of which 25 were congruent (consistent lexical-semantic and prosodic cues to emotion) and the remaining 100 were incongruent (conflicting lexical-semantic and prosodic cues to emotion). The recordings were processed to have 3 levels of spectral degradation: full-spectrum, CI-simulated (noise-vocoded) to have 8 channels and 16 channels of spectral information, respectively. Twenty-five recordings (one sentence per lexical-semantic emotion recorded in all five prosodies) were used for a practice run in the full-spectrum condition. The remaining 100 recordings were used as test stimuli. For each talker and condition of spectral degradation, listeners indicated the emotion associated with each recording in a single-interval, five-alternative forced-choice task. The responses were scored as proportion correct, where "correct" responses corresponded to the lexical-semantic emotion. CI users heard only the full-spectrum condition.ResultsThe results showed a significant interaction between hearing status (NH, CI) and congruency in identifying the lexical-semantic emotion associated with the stimuli. This interaction was as predicted, that is, CI users showed increased reliance on lexical-semantic cues in the incongruent conditions, while NH listeners showed increased reliance on the prosodic cues in the incongruent conditions. As predicted, NH listeners showed increased reliance on lexical-semantic cues to emotion when the stimuli were spectrally degraded.ConclusionsThe present study confirmed previous findings of prosodic dominance for emotion perception by NH listeners in the full-spectrum condition. Further, novel findings with CI patients and NH listeners in the CI-simulated conditions showed reduced reliance on prosodic cues and increased reliance on lexical-semantic cues to emotion. These results have implications for CI listeners' ability to perceive conflicts between prosodic and lexical-semantic cues, with repercussions for their identification of sarcasm and humor. Understanding instances of sarcasm or humor can impact a person's ability to develop relationships, follow conversation, understand vocal emotion and intended message of a speaker, following jokes, and everyday communication in general.
| S-EPMC8545870 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Attempts to develop speech enhancement algorithms with improved speech intelligibility for cochlear implant (CI) users have met with limited success. To improve speech enhancement methods for CI users, we propose to perform speech enhancement in a cochlear filter-bank feature space, a feature-set specifically designed for CI users based on CI auditory stimuli. We leverage a convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract both stationary and non-stationary components of environmental acoustics and speech. We propose three CNN architectures: (1) vanilla CNN that directly generates the enhanced signal; (2) spectral-subtraction-style CNN (SS-CNN) that first predicts noise and then generates the enhanced signal by subtracting noise from the noisy signal; (3) Wiener-style CNN (Wiener-CNN) that generates an optimal mask for suppressing noise. An important problem of the proposed networks is that they introduce considerable delays, which limits their real-time application for CI users. To address this, this study also considers causal variations of these networks. Our experiments show that the proposed networks (both causal and non-causal forms) achieve significant improvement over existing baseline systems. We also found that causal Wiener-CNN outperforms other networks, and leads to the best overall envelope coefficient measure (ECM). The proposed algorithms represent a viable option for implementation on the CCi-MOBILE research platform as a pre-processor for CI users in naturalistic environments.
| S-EPMC8296973 | biostudies-literature
Project description:IntroductionSpeech breathing is a term usually used to refer to the manner in which expired air and lung mechanics are utilized for the production of the airflow necessary for phonation. Neurologically, speech breathing overrides the normal rhythms of alveolar ventilation. Speech breathing is generated using the diaphragm, glottis, and tongue. The glottis is the opening between the vocal folds in the larynx; it is the primary valve between the lungs and the mouth, and by varying its degree of opening, the sound can be varied. The use of voice as an indicator of health has been widely reported. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is the most common long-term respiratory disease. The main symptoms of COPD are increasing breathlessness, a persistent chesty cough with phlegm, frequent chest infections, and persistent wheezing. There is no cure for COPD, and it is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. The principal cause of COPD is tobacco smoking, and estimates indicate that COPD will become the third leading cause of death worldwide by 2030. The long-term aim of this research program is to understand how speech generation, breathing, and lung function are linked in people with chronic respiratory diseases such as COPD.MethodsThis pilot study was designed to test an articulatory speech task that uses a single word ("helicopter"), repeated multiple times, to challenge speech-generated breathing and breathlessness. Specifically, a single-word articulation task was used to challenge respiratory system endurance in people with healthy lungs by asking participants to rapidly repeat the word "helicopter" for three 20-s runs interspersed with two 20-s rest periods of silent relaxed breathing. Acoustic and prosodic features were then extracted from the audio recordings of each adult participant.Results and discussionThe pause ratio increased from the first run to the third, representing an increasing demand for breath. These data show that the repeated articulation task challenges speech articulation in a quantifiable manner, which may prove useful in defining respiratory ill-health.
| S-EPMC10499508 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Speech understanding in noisy environments is still one of the major challenges for cochlear implant (CI) users in everyday life. We evaluated a speech enhancement algorithm based on neural networks (NNSE) for improving speech intelligibility in noise for CI users. The algorithm decomposes the noisy speech signal into time-frequency units, extracts a set of auditory-inspired features and feeds them to the neural network to produce an estimation of which frequency channels contain more perceptually important information (higher signal-to-noise ratio, SNR). This estimate is used to attenuate noise-dominated and retain speech-dominated CI channels for electrical stimulation, as in traditional n-of-m CI coding strategies. The proposed algorithm was evaluated by measuring the speech-in-noise performance of 14 CI users using three types of background noise. Two NNSE algorithms were compared: a speaker-dependent algorithm, that was trained on the target speaker used for testing, and a speaker-independent algorithm, that was trained on different speakers. Significant improvements in the intelligibility of speech in stationary and fluctuating noises were found relative to the unprocessed condition for the speaker-dependent algorithm in all noise types and for the speaker-independent algorithm in 2 out of 3 noise types. The NNSE algorithms used noise-specific neural networks that generalized to novel segments of the same noise type and worked over a range of SNRs. The proposed algorithm has the potential to improve the intelligibility of speech in noise for CI users while meeting the requirements of low computational complexity and processing delay for application in CI devices.
| S-EPMC5256482 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The primary goal of most cochlear implant procedures is to improve a patient's ability to discriminate speech. To accomplish this, cochlear implants are programmed so as to maximize speech understanding. However, programming a cochlear implant can be an iterative, labor-intensive process that takes place over months. In this study, we sought to determine whether functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), a non-invasive neuroimaging method which is safe to use repeatedly and for extended periods of time, can provide an objective measure of whether a subject is hearing normal speech or distorted speech. We used a 140 channel fNIRS system to measure activation within the auditory cortex in 19 normal hearing subjects while they listed to speech with different levels of intelligibility. Custom software was developed to analyze the data and compute topographic maps from the measured changes in oxyhemoglobin and deoxyhemoglobin concentration. Normal speech reliably evoked the strongest responses within the auditory cortex. Distorted speech produced less region-specific cortical activation. Environmental sounds were used as a control, and they produced the least cortical activation. These data collected using fNIRS are consistent with the fMRI literature and thus demonstrate the feasibility of using this technique to objectively detect differences in cortical responses to speech of different intelligibility.
| S-EPMC3939048 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Speech technology applications have emerged as a promising method for assessing speech-language abilities and at-home therapy, including prosody. Many applications assume that observed prosody errors are due to an underlying disorder; however, they may be instead due to atypical representations of prosody such as immature and developing speech motor control, or compensatory adaptations by those with congenital neuromotor disorders. The result is the same - vocal productions may not be a reliable measure of prosody knowledge. Therefore, in this study we examine the usability of a new technology application to express prosody knowledge without relying on vocalizations using the Prosodic Marionette (PM) graphical user interface for artificial resynthesis of speech prosody. We tested the ability of neurotypical participants to use the PM interface to control prosody through 2D movements of word-icon blocks vertically (fundamental frequency), horizontally (pause length), and by stretching (word duration) to correctly mark target prosodic contrasts. Nearly all participants used vertical movements to correctly mark fundamental frequency changes where appropriate (e.g., raised second word for pitch accent on second word). A smaller percentage of participants used the stretching feature to mark duration changes; when used, participants correctly lengthened the appropriate word (e.g., stretch the second item to accent the second word). Our results suggest the PM interface can be used reliably to correctly signal speech prosody, which validates future use of the interface to assess prosody in clinical and developmental populations with atypical speech motor control.
| S-EPMC6516857 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Although cochlear implantation enables some children to attain age-appropriate speech and language development, communicative delays persist in others, and outcomes are quite variable and difficult to predict, even for children implanted early in life. To understand the neurobiological basis of this variability, we used presurgical neural morphological data obtained from MRI of individual pediatric cochlear implant (CI) candidates implanted younger than 3.5 years to predict variability of their speech-perception improvement after surgery. We first compared neuroanatomical density and spatial pattern similarity of CI candidates to that of age-matched children with normal hearing, which allowed us to detail neuroanatomical networks that were either affected or unaffected by auditory deprivation. This information enables us to build machine-learning models to predict the individual children's speech development following CI. We found that regions of the brain that were unaffected by auditory deprivation, in particular the auditory association and cognitive brain regions, produced the highest accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity in patient classification and the most precise prediction results. These findings suggest that brain areas unaffected by auditory deprivation are critical to developing closer to typical speech outcomes. Moreover, the findings suggest that determination of the type of neural reorganization caused by auditory deprivation before implantation is valuable for predicting post-CI language outcomes for young children.
| S-EPMC5798370 | biostudies-literature
Project description:ObjectiveInvestigation of the gustatory function in a large cohort of cochlear implanted patients using lateralized taste-strip tests.Patients and methodsOne hundred and seven unilaterally or bilaterally profoundly hearing impaired or deaf patients who received cochlear implants (n = 113) were included in this study. Data on gustometry, subjective gustatory dysfunction, and the detailed surgical procedure were acquired retrospectively. Gustatory function, assessed using lateralized taste-strip tests, was performed the day before, 3 days after cochlear implantation, and on the day of the initial CI adjustment (39 days ±7.3 SD).ResultsAveraged taste-strip scores of the cohort declined significantly from preoperatively 12.3 [11.8; 12.7] (mean [95% confidence intervals]) to 10.5 [9.7; 11.2] on the implanted side about 6 weeks after surgery. Patients with intraoperatively exposed and rerouted, or a severed, chorda tympani nerve (CTN) showed significantly reduced unilateral postoperative scores (10.1 [8.8; 11.4] and 9.3 [8.1; 10.5], respectively), when compared to not exposing or to leaving a bony layer over the CTN. Total taste-strip test scores showed a significant decline 6 weeks postoperatively in CI-patients expressing a subjective gustatory dysfunction (from 23.6 [21.4; 25.8] to 17.5 [14.2; 20.8]), as opposed to patients with a documented subjectively normal taste.ConclusionWe consider postoperative gustatory dysfunction as a relevant side effect post cochlear implantation, at least within the first month. Taste-strip based gustometry is a suitable diagnostic tool to assess taste function in CI patients and is recommended to be performed routinely.Level of evidence3, retrospective, nonrandomized follow-up study.
| S-EPMC8223453 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Primary progressive apraxia of speech (PPAOS) is a clinical syndrome in which apraxia of speech is the initial indication of neurodegenerative disease. Prior studies of PPAOS have identified hypometabolism, grey matter atrophy, and white matter tract degeneration in the frontal gyri, precentral cortex, and supplementary motor area (SMA). Recent clinical observations suggest two distinct subtypes of PPAOS may exist. Phonetic PPAOS is characterized predominantly by distorted sound substitutions. Prosodic PPAOS is characterized predominantly by slow, segmented speech. Demographic, clinical, and neuroimaging data (MRI, DTI, and FDG-PET) were analyzed to validate these subtypes and explore anatomic correlates. The Phonetic subtype demonstrated bilateral involvement of the SMA, precentral gyrus, and cerebellar crus. The Prosodic subtype demonstrated more focal involvement in the SMA and right superior cerebellar peduncle. The findings provide converging evidence that differences in the reliably determined predominant clinical characteristics of AOS are associated with distinct imaging patterns, independent of severity.
| S-EPMC6171111 | biostudies-literature