Name agreement (NA) refers to the degree to which speakers agree on a picture\'s name. A robust finding is that speakers are faster to name pictures with high agreement (HA) than those with low agreement (LA). This NA effect is thought to occur because LA pictures strongly activate several names, and so speakers need time to select one. HA pictures, in contrast, strongly activate a single name and so there is no need to select one name out of several alternatives. Recent models of lexical access suggest that the structure of the mental lexicon changes with experience. Thus, speakers should consider a range of names when naming LA pictures, but the extent to which they consider each of these names should change with experience. We tested these hypotheses in two picture-naming experiments. In Experiment 1, participants were faster to name LA than HA pictures when they named each picture once. Importantly, they were faster to produce modal names (provided by most participants) than alternative names for LA pictures, consistent with the view that speakers activate multiple names for LA pictures. In Experiment 2, participants were familiarised with the modal name before the experiment and named each picture three times. Although there was still an NA effect when participants named the pictures the first time, it was reduced in comparison to Experiment 1 and was further reduced with each picture repetition.Thus, familiarisation and repetition reduced the NA effect, but did not eliminate it, suggesting speakers activate a range of plausible names.

OBJECTIVE: The LittlEARS® Early Speech Production Questionnaire (LEESPQ) was developed to provide professionals with valuable information about children\'s earliest language development and has been successfully validated in several languages. This study aimed to validate the Serbian version of the LEESPQ in typically developing children and compare the results with validation studies in other languages.
METHODS: The English version of the LEESPQ was back-translated into Serbian. Parents completed the questionnaire in paper or electronic form either during the visit to the paediatric clinic or through personal contact. A total of 206 completed questionnaires were collected. Standardized expected values were calculated using a second-order polynomial model for children up to 18 months of age to create a norm curve for the Serbian language. The results were then used to determine confidence intervals, with the lower limit being the critical limit for typical speech-language development. Finally, the results were compared with German and Canadian English developmental norms.
RESULTS: The Serbian LEESPQ version showed high homogeneity (r = .622) and internal consistency (α = .882), indicating that it almost exclusively measures speech production ability. No significant difference in total score was found between male and female infants (U = 4429.500, p = .090), so it can be considered a gender-independent questionnaire. The results of the comparison between Serbian and German (U = 645.500, p = .673) and Serbian and English norm curves (U = 652.000, p = .725) show that the LEESPQ can be applied to different population groups, regardless of linguistic, cultural or sociological differences.
CONCLUSIONS: The LEESPQ is a valid, age-dependent and gender-independent questionnaire suitable for assessing early speech development in children aged from birth to 18 months.

BACKGROUND: The predominant alterations in voice of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) are phonatory instability, vocal asthenia and roughness, shortness of breath, hypophonia, and hypernasality. However, research on alterations of acoustic parameters has few studies and disparate results. The objective of this study was to investigate voice disturbances in patients with MS, both with objective measures (analysis of biomechanical) and subjective measures (scales and questionnaires).
METHODS: This is an experimental study with a total of 20 participants with MS. Voice samples were collected, and biomechanical correlates were analyzed through the Clinical Voice Systems program, Online Lab App. The VHI-30 (Voice Handicap Index) questionnaire, the GRBAS (grade, roughness, breathiness, asthenia, strain) scale, and the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale were used as subjective measures.
RESULTS: Ninety-five percentages of participants feel and describe dysphonic difficulties. Self-perception of vocal disability correlated with auditory vocal perceptual analysis in the sample of women.
CONCLUSIONS: The biomechanical parameters showed alterations in the strength of the glottic closure, the efficiency index, and the structural imbalance index.

OBJECTIVE: The present investigation examined how factors such as cleft type, age of primary palatal surgery, diagnosed syndromes, hearing problems, and malocclusions could predict persistent speech difficulties and the need for speech services in school-aged children with cleft palate.
METHODS: Participants included 100 school-aged children with cleft palate. Americleft speech protocol was used to assess the perceptual aspects of speech production. The logistic regression was performed to evaluate the impact of independent variables (IV) on the dependent variables (DV): intelligibility, posterior oral CSCs, audible nasal emission, hypernasality, anterior oral CSCs, and speech therapy required.
RESULTS: Sixty-five percent of the children were enrolled in (or had received) speech therapy. The logistic regression model shows a good fit to the data for the need for speech therapy (Hosmer and Lemeshow\'s χ2(8)=9.647,p=.291). No IVs were found to have a significant impact on the need for speech therapy. A diagnosed syndrome was associated with poorer intelligibility (Pulkstenis-Robinson\'s χ2(11)=7.120,p=.789). Children with diagnosed syndromes have about six times the odds of a higher hypernasality rating (Odds Ratio = 5.703) than others. The cleft type was significantly associated with audible nasal emission (Fisher\'sexactp=.006). At the same time, malocclusion had a significant association with anterior oral CSCs (Fisher\'sexactp=.005).
CONCLUSIONS: According to the latest data in the Cleft Registry and Audit Network Annual Report for the UK, the majority of children with cleft palate attain typical speech by age five. However, it is crucial to delve into the factors that may influence the continuation of speech disorders beyond this age. This understanding is vital for formulating intervention strategies aimed at mitigating the long-term effects of speech disorders as individuals grow older.

This study tested the hypothesis that speaking with other voices can influence sensorimotor predictions of one\'s own voice. Real-time manipulations of auditory feedback were used to drive sensorimotor adaptation in speech, while participants spoke sentences in synchrony with another voice, a task known to induce implicit imitation (phonetic convergence). The acoustic-phonetic properties of the other voice were manipulated between groups, such that convergence with it would either oppose (incongruent group, n = 15) or align with (congruent group, n = 16) speech motor adaptation. As predicted, significantly greater adaptation was seen in the congruent compared to the incongruent group. This suggests the use of shared sensory targets in speech for predicting the sensory outcomes of both the actions of others (speech perception) and the actions of the self (speech production). This finding has important implications for wider theories of shared predictive mechanisms across perception and action, such as active inference.

In two speech production studies conducted in Italian, we investigated the impact of phonological neighbourhood properties such as the neighbourhood density and the mean frequency of the neighbours on speech processing. Two populations of healthy (Study 1) and neurologically impaired (Study 2) individuals were tested. We employed multi-regression methods to analyse naming latencies in Study 1 and accuracy rates in Study 2 while controlling for various psycholinguistic predictors. In Study 1, pictures with words from high-density neighbourhoods were named faster than those from low-density neighbourhoods. Additionally, words with high-frequency neighbours were named faster in Study 1 and yielded higher accuracy rates in Study 2. The results suggest facilitatory effects of both the phonological neighbourhood density and frequency neighbourhood variables. Furthermore, we observed interactions between these two phonological neighbourhood variables and name agreement and repetition. Specifically, the facilitation effect was more pronounced for pictures with lower name agreement and during the initial presentation of the pictures. These findings are discussed in the context of previous literature and within the framework of interactive models of speech production.

UNASSIGNED: Emerging studies in humans have established the modulatory effects of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) over primary somatosensory cortex (S1) on somatosensory cortex activity and perception. However, to date, research in this area has primarily focused on the hand and fingers, leaving a gap in our understanding of the modulatory effects of rTMS on somatosensory perception of the orofacial system and speech articulators.
UNASSIGNED: The present study aimed to examine the effects of different types of theta-burst stimulation-continuous TBS (cTBS), intermittent TBS (iTBS), or sham-over the tongue representation of left S1 on tactile acuity of the tongue.
UNASSIGNED: In a repeated-measures design, fifteen volunteers participated in four separate sessions, where cTBS, iTBS, sham, or no stimulation was applied over the tongue representation of left S1. Effects of TBS were measured on both temporal and spatial perceptual acuity of tongue using a custom vibrotactile stimulator.
UNASSIGNED: CTBS significantly impaired spatial amplitude threshold at the time window of 16-30 minutes after stimulation, while iTBS improved it at the same time window. The effect of iTBS, however, was smaller than cTBS. In contrast, neither cTBS nor iTBS had any effect on the temporal discrimination threshold.
UNASSIGNED: The current study establishes the validity of using TBS to modulate somatosensory perception of the orofacial system. Directly modifying somatosensation in the orofacial system has the potential to benefit clinical populations with abnormal tactile acuity, improve our understanding of the role of sensory systems in speech production, and enhance speech motor learning and rehabilitation.

Considerable debate exists about the interplay between auditory and motor speech systems. Some argue for common neural mechanisms, whereas others assert that there are few shared resources. In four experiments, we tested the hypothesis that priming the speech motor system by repeating syllable pairs aloud improves subsequent syllable discrimination in noise compared with a priming discrimination task involving same-different judgments via button presses. Our results consistently showed that participants who engaged in syllable repetition performed better in syllable discrimination in noise than those who engaged in the priming discrimination task. This gain in accuracy was observed for primed and new syllable pairs, highlighting increased sensitivity to phonological details. The benefits were comparable whether the priming tasks involved auditory or visual presentation. Inserting a 1-h delay between the priming tasks and the syllable-in-noise task, the benefits persisted but were confined to primed syllable pairs. Finally, we demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach in older adults. Our findings substantiate the existence of a speech production-perception relationship. They also have clinical relevance as they raise the possibility of production-based interventions to improve speech perception ability. This would be particularly relevant for older adults who often encounter difficulties in perceiving speech in noise.

Speech can be defined as the human ability to communicate through a sequence of vocal sounds. Consequently, speech requires an emitter (the speaker) capable of generating the acoustic signal and a receiver (the listener) able to successfully decode the sounds produced by the emitter (i.e., the acoustic signal). Time plays a central role at both ends of this interaction. On the one hand, speech production requires precise and rapid coordination, typically within the order of milliseconds, of the upper vocal tract articulators (i.e., tongue, jaw, lips, and velum), their composite movements, and the activation of the vocal folds. On the other hand, the generated acoustic signal unfolds in time, carrying information at different timescales. This information must be parsed and integrated by the receiver for the correct transmission of meaning. This chapter describes the temporal patterns that characterize the speech signal and reviews research that explores the neural mechanisms underlying the generation of these patterns and the role they play in speech comprehension.

Frequency distributions are known to widely affect psycholinguistic processes. The effects of word frequency in turns-at-talk, the nucleus of social action in conversation, have, by contrast, been largely neglected. This study probes into this gap by applying corpus-linguistic methods on the conversational component of the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Freiburg Multimodal Interaction Corpus (FreMIC). The latter includes continuous pupil size measures of participants of the recorded conversations, allowing for a systematic investigation of patterns in the contained speech and language on the one hand and their relation to concurrent processing costs they may incur in speakers and recipients on the other hand. We test a first hypothesis in this vein, analyzing whether word frequency distributions within turns-at-talk are correlated with interlocutors\' processing effort during the production and reception of these turns. Turns are found to generally show a regular distribution pattern of word frequency, with highly frequent words in turn-initial positions, mid-range frequency words in turn-medial positions, and low-frequency words in turn-final positions. Speakers\' pupil size is found to tend to increase during the course of a turn at talk, reaching a climax toward the turn end. Notably, the observed decrease in word frequency within turns is inversely correlated with the observed increase in pupil size in speakers, but not in recipients, with steeper decreases in word frequency going along with steeper increases in pupil size in speakers. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of speech processing, turn structure, and information packaging. Crucially, we propose that the intensification of processing effort in speakers during a turn at talk is owed to an informational climax, which entails a progression from high-frequency, low-information words through intermediate levels to low-frequency, high-information words. At least in English conversation, interlocutors seem to make use of this pattern as one way to achieve efficiency in conversational interaction, creating a regularly recurring distribution of processing load across speaking turns, which aids smooth turn transitions, content prediction, and effective information transfer.