Relationship between Speech Production and Perception in People Who Stutter.

Differences in sensorimotor integration mechanisms have been observed between people who stutter (PWS) and controls who do not. Delayed auditory feedback (DAF) introduces timing discrepancies between perception and action, disrupting sequence production in verbal and non-verbal domains. While DAF consistently enhances speech fluency in PWS, its impact on non-verbal sensorimotor synchronization abilities remains unexplored. A total of 11 PWS and 13 matched controls completed five tasks: (1) unpaced tapping; (2) synchronization-continuation task (SCT) without auditory feedback; (3) SCT with DAF, with instruction either to align the sound in time with the metronome; or (4) to ignore the sound and align their physical tap to the metronome. Additionally, we measured participants' sensitivity to detecting delayed feedback using a (5) delay discrimination task. Results showed that DAF significantly affected performance in controls as a function of delay duration, despite being irrelevant to the task. Conversely, PWS performance remained stable across delays. When auditory feedback was absent, no differences were found between PWS and controls. Moreover, PWS were less able to detect delays in speech and tapping tasks. These findings show subtle differences in non-verbal sensorimotor performance between PWS and controls, specifically when action-perception loops are disrupted by delays, contributing to models of sensorimotor integration in stuttering.

Purpose: A limited number of studies have ex- plored attitudes toward people who stutter (PWS) in different cultures. Recent studies have looked at the attitudes of Arab parents toward PWS. The current study explores attitudes reported by Arab teachers from Kuwait and provides a pre- liminary comparison with attitudes reported by teachers from the United States. Method: This study used an English version and an Arabic translation of a 14-item semantic differential (SD) scale (Bur- ley & Rinaldi, 1986) to assess differences in American and Arab teachers' attitudes toward PWS. Results: A majority of Arab teachers from Kuwait reported neutral to positive attitudes toward PWS on the SD scale. However, ~ 1

This work studies the experiences of people who stutter (PWS) with videoconferencing (VC) and VC technologies. Our interview study with 13 adults who stutter uncovers extra challenges introduced by current VC platforms to people who stutter. While some of the challenges are a direct result of the characteristics of stuttering (e.g. people/systems mistaking pauses as end of turn), a bigger yet less visible challenge comes with the significant amount of emotional and cognitive effort required to manage one’s speech and identity over VC, in which people’s existing communication strategies - such as body language and eye contact - are under-supported and their biggest discomfort - such as seeing oneself stutter - are exacerbated by preset features like self view. Overall, our work sheds light on the structural barriers and the opportunities for PWS to engage and enjoy virtual communications via VC technologies.

Anxiety and speaking in people who stutter: An investigation using the emotional Stroop task

People Who Stutter (PWS) can experience considerable social stigma. Stuttering has generally been understood as a disorder that is best addressed through helping PWS to alter stuttered speech. Recently, new lines of inquiry inspired by disability theory are turning attention towards the systems of privilege that uphold fluency and marginalise dysfluency. Taking up these commitments, this paper presents findings from an exploratory online survey that aimed to understand the nature and frequency of ableist microaggressions perceived by PWS. Overall, participants reported encountering microaggressions frequently. Our thematic analysis of participants’ descriptions of stuttering microaggression experiences highlights the mundane and diminishing nature of these interactions, and the power differential that exists between PWS and non-stutterers. We identify an urgent need to challenge ableist constructions of dysfluent speech as deficit.

Motor and visual influences on auditory neural processing during speaking and listening

Developmental stuttering is a disorder of speech fluency affecting 1% of the adult population. Long-term reductions in stuttering are difficult for adults to achieve with behavioural therapies. We investigated whether a single session of transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS) could improve fluency in people who stutter (PWS). In separate sessions, either anodal TDCS (1mA for 20min) or sham stimulation was applied over the left inferior frontal cortex while PWS read sentences aloud. Fluency was induced during the stimulation period by using choral speech, that is, participants read in unison with another speaker. Stuttering frequency during sentence reading, paragraph reading and conversation was measured at baseline and at two outcome time points: immediately after the stimulation period and 1h later. Stuttering was reduced significantly at both outcome time points for the sentence-reading task, presumably due to practice, but not during the paragraph reading or conversation tasks. None of the outcome measures were significantly modulated by anodal TDCS. Although the results of this single-session study showed no significant TDCS-induced improvements in fluency, there were some indications that further research is warranted. We discuss factors that we believe may have obscured the expected positive effects of TDCS on fluency, such as heterogeneity in stuttering severity for the sample and variations across sessions. Consideration of such factors may inform future studies aimed at determining the potential of TDCS in the treatment of developmental stuttering.

In order to investigate the relation between reading accuracy and speech processing, 20 children from grades 2 and 3 who were skilled in reading were compared with 20 less skilled readers on a speech perception and production task. The two groups of readers were indistinguishable in their production of the two-syllable words dippy, deepy, tippy, and teepy and in their perception of the stop consonants /d/ versus /t/. Less skilled readers were significantly less accurate than the skilled readers in a vowel identification task involving the lax and tense high vowels /i/ and /i/. The error pattern for vowel identification was similar across groups, with both groups making fewer errors when short and longer segments were alternated. The results imply that vowel phonemes are less securely represented in the perceptual system of less skilled readers than are consonant phonemes. In addition, the results raise the possibility that a selective perceptual impairment underlies at least some of the phonemic awareness problems that have been associated with poor reading.

The nature and cause of auditory processing deficits in dyslexic individuals have been debated for decades. Auditory processing deficits were argued to be the first step in a causal chain of difficulties, leading to difficulties in speech perception and thereby phonological processing and literacy difficulties. More recently, it has been argued that auditory processing difficulties may not be causally related to language and literacy difficulties. This study compares two groups who have phonological processing impairments for different reasons: dyslexia and a history of otitis media (OM). We compared their discrimination thresholds and response variability to chronological age- and reading age-matched controls, across three auditory processing tasks: frequency discrimination, rise-time discrimination and speech perception. Dyslexic children showed raised frequency discrimination thresholds in comparison with age-matched controls but did not differ from reading age-matched controls or individuals with a history of OM. There were no group differences on speech perception or rise-time tasks. For the dyslexic children, there was an association between phonological awareness and frequency discrimination response variability, but no association with thresholds. These findings are not consistent with a 'causal chain' explanation but could be accounted for within a multiple deficits view of literacy difficulties.

The primary objective of this article is to study whether an assessment instrument specifically designed to assess speech motor control on word level productions would be able to add differential diagnostic speech characteristics between people who clutter and people who stutter. It was hypothesized that cluttering is a fluency disorder in which speech motor control on word level is disturbed in high speech rate, resulting in errors in flow of speech and sequencing. An assessment instrument on speech motor coordination on word level was developed and validated. In an elicitation procedure, repetitions of complex multi-syllabic words at a fast speech rate were obtained from 47 dysfluent participants (mean age 24.3; SD 10.25, range 14.2–47.4 yrs) and 327 controls (mean age 25.56 yrs; SD 8.49; age range 14.3–50.1). Speech production was judged on articulatory accuracy, smooth-flow (coarticulation, flow and sequencing) and articulatory rate. Results from people who clutter (PWC) and people who stutter (PWS) were compared to normative data based on control group data. PWC produced significantly more flow and sequencing errors compared to PWS. Further research is needed in order to study speech motor control in spontaneous speech of people who clutter.

Auditory temporal processing, reading, and phonological awareness among aging adults

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), a non-invasive optical neuroimaging technique, has demonstrated its great potential in monitoring cerebral activity as an alternative to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in research and clinical usage. fNIRS has seen increasing applications in studying the auditory cortex in healthy subjects and cochlear implant users. However, fNIRS is susceptible to motion artifacts, especially those related to jaw movement, which can affect fNIRS signals in speech and auditory tasks. This study aimed to investigate the motion artifacts related to jaw movements including clenching, speaking, swallowing, and sniffing in a group of human subjects, and test whether our previously established denoising algorithm namely PCA-GLM can reduce the motion artifacts. Our results have shown that the jaw movements introduced artifacts that resemble task-evoked activations and that the PCA-GLM method effectively reduced the motion artifacts due to the clenching movements. The preliminary results of the present study underline the importance of the removal of the jaw-movement-related artifacts in fNIRS signals and suggest the efficacy of our PCA-GLM method in reducing the motion artifacts. Clinical Relevance- This work studies the motion artifacts due to jaw movements that frequently occur in speech perception and production tasks and validates the efficacy of an established denoising algorithm which benefits fNIRS studies on auditory and language functions.

Schizophrenia has been proposed as a self-disorder, and Anomalous Self-Experiences (ASEs) have been consistently identified as a relevant finding in people with psychosis, even in at-risk states and early stages, remaining stable within this syndrome.These experiences translate into an impairment or loss of the natural, preconscious evidence by which we identify our mental contents as our own, encompassing both cognitive and somatic aspects.Thus, ASEs can potentially impair the experience of ipseity, i.e., the automatic and preconscious experience of individual identity.The ipseity disturbance model suggests that diverse symptoms, including positive, negative, cognitive, and disorganized ones, may all share forms of disturbed ipseity.Given the preconscious nature of ASEs, it is likely that some neural alteration underlies them.However, current studies reveal little about the possible neural mechanisms involved.The accurate identification of actions and thoughts originating from ourselves is fundamental for developing and maintaining an intact sense of self.Corollary discharge is a neural mechanism by which the sensory consequences of self-initiated acts are attenuated or suppressed.The integrity of this mechanism is essential for developing a sense of agency over psychomotor experiences and sensations arising from self-generated acts, as opposed to externally generated perceptions.This phenomenon contributes to self-identification and appears to be altered in people with schizophrenia.A potential link between ASEs and alterations in corollary discharge has been proposed, suggesting that early corollary discharge dysfunction could hinder the pre-reflective coordination of an individual's sensorimotor actions with their environment, gradually diminishing the sense of self-agency over one's

One of the most important problems in the field of pediatric cochlear implants is understanding the enormous individual differences in performance among children on a wide variety of outcome measures that assess speech perception, language comprehension. speech intelligibility, and reading. Some deaf children with cochlear implants do very well on standardized audiological and language tests and appear to be well on their way to acquiring spoken language through their implants, whereas other children do much more poorly and apparently never appear to reach these critical milestones in speech and language development.1 What is the basis for these individual differences? Recent findings suggest that one factor may be related to the perceptual processing of spoken words, that is, the encoding, storage, and retrieval of the phonological representations of spoken words, and the use of working memory and rehearsal mechanisms.1,2 To examine the role of working memory in speech perception, word recognition, speech production, language, and reading tasks, we obtained auditory digit spans from 8- and 9-year-old prelingually deaf children who had used their implants for a period of at least 4 years, then computed correlations between digit span and 4 sets of outcome measures.

Background and Aim: Many older adults experience difficulty in speech perception in noisy environments and fast speech. Speech perception is dependent on bottom-up and top-down auditory processing information. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between Interaural Time Difference (ITD) and speech processing speed in older adults with difficulty in speech perception in noise. Methods: In this study, 36 Iranian older adults with normal hearing (23 men and 13 women) aged 65–75 years who had complaints about the difficulty with speech perception in noise, participated. The ITD test with two stimuli (high-pass and low-pass noise) was used to asess the auditory localization ability. Time-Compressed Speech Test (TCST) and reaction time test were used to measure their speech processing speed. Pearson correlation test was performed to examine the relationship between ITD and speech processing speed. Results: The auditory localization errors were more significant for ITDs with low-pass noise than high-pass noise. The results showed a negative correlation between localization errors and the TCST score at time compression ratios of 40% (p=0.005) and 60% (p=0.002). The highest correlation was observed between ITD (low-pass noise) and the TCST score at the time compression ratio of 60% in the right ear (r=–0.66). The mean ITD errors were not significantly correlated to the reaction time test score (p>0.05). Conclusion: Word recognition in the elderly declines with increasing speech rate. The findings of this study can be used in clinical practice for consultation and rehabilitation of older adults with communication difficulties. Keywords: Sound localization; speed processing; speech perception; elderly