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The number of older inpatients in forensic hospitals is growing. Overall, complex needs in treatment are identified for this group, and differ significantly from those of younger forensic patients. To date, there has been little awareness of the relevance of age-related changes in cognitive function of older forensic patients. Data on the prevalence of cognitive disorders in older forensic inpatients are rare, and, for German forensic hospitals, completely lacking. Against this background, a pilot project was conducted in forensic departments of five Psychiatric hospitals in North Rhine Westphalia, Germany. Sociodemographics, crime-related characteristics and medical data of inpatients aged 60 years and older were collected. Established cognitive screening instruments were administered. 34 of 134 forensic patients aged 60–91 years participated in the study. Dependent on the instrument used, up to 65% showed impairment in global cognitive functioning and up to 68% showed executive dysfunctions. Our pilot data indicate that cognitive impairment in older forensic patients in Germany is more frequent than reported for the older general population in Germany. Based on the findings, the extent to which diagnostic routines should be implemented and the complex factors (e.g. the underlying mental illness) that need to be taken into account are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prosodic word (PW) has been proposed as a planning unit in speech production (Levelt et al. [1999. A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 1–75]), supported by evidence that speech initiation time (RT) is faster for Dutch utterances with fewer PWs due to cliticisation (with the number of lexical words and syllables kept constant) (Wheeldon & Lahiri [1997. Prosodic units in speech production. Journal of Memory and Language, 37(3), 356–381. https://doi.org/10.1006/jmla.1997.2517], W&L). The present study examined prosodic cliticisation (and resulting RT) for a different set of potential clitics (articles, direct-object pronouns), in English, using a different response task (immediate reading aloud). W&L's result of shorter RTs for fewer PWs was replicated for articles, but not for pronouns, suggesting a difference in cliticisation for these two function word types. However, a post-hoc analysis of the duration of the verb preceding the clitic suggests that both are cliticised. These findings highlight the importance of supplementing production latency measures with phonetic duration measures to understand different stages of language production during utterance planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although a large amount of acoustic indicators have already been proposed in the literature to evaluate the hypokinetic dysarthria of people with Parkinson’s Disease, the goal of this work is to identify and interpret new reliable and complementary articulatory biomarkers that could be applied to predict/evaluate Parkinson’s Disease from a diadochokinetic test, contributing to the possibility of a further multidimensional analysis of the speech of parkinsonian patients. The new biomarkers proposed are based on the kinetic behaviour of the envelope trace, which is directly linked with the articulatory dysfunctions introduced by the disease since the early stages. The interest of these new articulatory indicators stands on their easiness of identification and interpretation, and their potential to be translated into computer based automatic methods to screen the disease from the speech. Throughout this paper, the accuracy provided by these acoustic kinetic biomarkers is compared with the one obtained with a baseline system based on speaker identification techniques. Results show accuracies around 85% that are in line with those obtained with the complex state of the art speaker recognition techniques, but with an easier physical interpretation, which open the possibility to be transferred to a clinical setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neonatal anthropometric data reflect intrauterine development and correlate with postnatal outcome. Therefore, classification of neonates by body dimensions, using gestational age-adjusted population percentiles, is clinically practiced. However, neonatal anthropometric variables are also influenced by maternal constitution and the extent of this influence is currently unknown. We analyzed small for gestational age (SGA) and large for gestational age (LGA) rates according to maternal height and weight. We used data of about 2.3 million singleton pregnancies from the German Perinatal Survey of 1995-2000. A close correlation between maternal and neonatal anthropometric data was found; SGA rates were inversely proportional and LGA rates were directly proportional to maternal height, weight, and body mass index. Neonates of small and light mothers (<155 cm, <50 kg) had, according to the presently used classification scheme, an SGA rate of 25.3% and an LGA rate of 1.7%, respectively. Newborns to tall and heavy women (>179 cm, >89 kg) had a much lower SGA rate (3.1%) and a much higher LGA rate (30.6%). Neonatal body length and head circumference depended on maternal stature in a similar way. Some neonates who are 'appropriate' for their gestational age in that they achieve their genetically determined growth potential are therefore apparently misclassified as SGA or LGA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Prosodic structure and syntactic structure are not identical; neither are they unrelated. Knowing when and how the two correspond could yield better quality speech synthesis, could aid in the disambiguation of competing syntactic hypotheses in speech understanding, and could lead to a more comprehensive view of human speech processing. In a set of experiments involving 35 pairs of phonetically similar sentences representing seven types of structural contrasts, the perceptual evidence shows that some, but not all, of the pairs can be disambiguated on the basis of prosodic differences. The phonological evidence relates the disambiguation primarily to boundary phenomena, although prominences sometimes play a role. Finally, phonetic analyses describing the attributes of these phonological markers indicate the importance of both absolute and relative measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prosody consists of that information in speech which can be suprasegmental, i.e., operate over units larger than a single segment. Prosodic contours may span a word, phrase, or larger units. The goal of this study is to understand the mapping between discrete, abstract units (e.g., boundary tones, pitch accents) and their observed continuously varying acoustic correlates (e.g., duration and F0). Since prosody synthesis and analysis have traditionally been a challenging problem, the initial focus of this study has been restricted to the FM radio news broadcasting style of speech. This pilot study indicates that in this speech style, prosodic units appear to be more strongly and more regularly marked than in conversational styles. Time- and pitch-scale modification is employed using a sinusoidal model to change the duration and F0 contours of natural utterances. This technique allows synthesis of an utterance with a new prosodic contour, taking the input parameters from a linguistic model of prosody, or from another utterance with different phrasing. In this way, the perceptual effectiveness of various models in marking prosodic prominences and boundaries can be explored. The details of the method will be discussed, and a sample tape will be played. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Serial ordering errors in spontaneous speech often involve individual phoneme-like segments, but seldom larger syllabic components containing both consonants and vowels. This observation suggests that syllabic structure provides a framework for the serial ordering of individual phonemic segments, while larger subsyllabic units and entire syllables do not themselves undergo such ordering during normal production planning (Shattuck-Hufnagel 1979; Shattuck-Hufnagel and Klatt 1979). When speakers repeated syllable sequences constructed by alternating pairs of consonants in conflicting patterns (e.g., PAN FILL FUN POLL, where initial /p, f/ alternate in the pattern ABBA, final /n, l/ in ABAB), 95% of the errors involved a change in a single segment and only 5% involved a CV, VC, or CVC unit. These findings support the view that speech production planning involves the serial ordering of phoneme-like segments, and not of larger syllabic components. Further questions about the nature of position constraints on segments interacting in errors, and about the role of word stress in constraining single-segment errors, are also being explored using this method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fifteen hundred phonetic substitution errors were collected from spontaneous conversations of adult native speakers of English and formed into a confusion matrix of target versus intrusion phonemes. The matrix was analyzed using several methods for evidence of distinctive feature constraints on substitution patterns. Results are compared with evidence from studies of phoneme confusions in perception and in short-term memory. For many features, a substitution in the consonant matrix is significantly more likely to preserve the feature value of the target than would be expected by chance, suggesting that at some point in the production process, segments are represented psychologically in terms of features. The matrix formed by vowel substitutions, although smaller, also supports a traditional feature analysis, but the distinction between front and back vowels is often lost in substitutions. Other constraints which emerge from the error matrix include a sharp distinction between consonants and vowels, and little support for a strictly binary feature system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]