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Abstract The present investigation focused on how temporal degradation affected intelligibility in two types of languages, i.e., a tonal language (Mandarin Chinese) and a non-tonal language (Japanese). The temporal resolution of common daily-life sentences spoken by native speakers was systematically degraded with mosaicking (mosaicising), in which the power of original speech in each of regularly spaced time-frequency unit was averaged and temporal fine structure was removed. The results showed very similar patterns of variations in intelligibility for these two languages over a wide range of temporal resolution, implying that temporal degradation crucially affected speech cues other than tonal cues in degraded speech without temporal fine structure. Specifically, the intelligibility of both languages maintained a ceiling up to about the 40-ms segment duration, then the performance gradually declined with increasing segment duration, and reached a floor at about the 150-ms segment duration or longer. The same limitations for the ceiling performance up to 40 ms appeared for the other method of degradation, i.e., local time-reversal, implying that a common temporal processing mechanism was related to the limitations. The general tendency fitted to a dual time-window model of speech processing, in which a short (~ 20–30 ms) and a long (~ 200 ms) time-window run in parallel.

Abstract Introduction Alglucosidase alfa received marketing approval for the treatment of Pompe disease in Japan in 2007. We conducted a post-marketing surveillance study to monitor the long-term safety and efficacy of alglucosidase alfa therapy among Japanese patients with Pompe disease. Methods The safety and efficacy outcomes were collected as real-world data for up to 9 years following the initiation of treatment with alglucosidase alfa, without any intervention to treatment strategies. The safety of the drug was assessed in 73 patients in terms of the rate of drug-related adverse events, infusion-associated reactions, and antibody titers. The efficacy was evaluated in 72 patients on the basis of subjective evaluation of their general condition after treatment, pulmonary function, 6-min walk test, and survival rate. Results Drug-related adverse events were observed in 29 of 73 (39.7%) cases, and the cumulative adverse event rate during the 9 years of the study was 45.7%. Immunoglobulin G antibodies against alglucosidase alfa were positive in 59 of 61 cases in which the titers were not correlated with drug-related adverse events or infusion-associated reactions. After the final dosing, the treating physicians determined that the disease was at least stabilized in 62 of 72 cases (86.1%), while the results of the physical function tests suggested that disease progression was actually not stopped completely. Survival of infantile-onset cases was sustained for 9 years. Conclusion The drug was generally well tolerated, and treatment with alglucosidase alfa was able to suppress disease progression in the majority of Japanese patients with Pompe disease included in this study. Funding Sanofi

In the field of psychology, the merge of decision-theory and neuroscientific methods produces an array of scientifically recognized paradigms. For example, by exploring consumer’s eye-movement behavior, researchers aim to deepen the understanding of how patterns of retinal activation are being meaningfully transformed into visual experiences and connected with specific reactions (e.g., purchase). Notably, eye-movements provide knowledge of one’s homeostatic balance and gatekeep information that shape decisions. Hence, vision science investigates the quality of observed environments determined under various experimental conditions. Moreover, it answers questions on how human process visual stimuli and use gained information for a successful strategy to achieve certain goals. While capturing cognitive states with the support of the eye-trackers progresses at a relatively fast pace in decision-making research, measuring the visual performance of real-life tasks, which require complex cognitive skills, is tentatively translated into clinical experiments. Nevertheless, the potential of the human eye as a highly valuable source of biomarkers has been underlined. In this article, we aim to draw readers attention to decision-making experimental paradigms supported with eye-tracking technology among clinical populations. Such interdisciplinary approach may become an important component that will (i) help in objectively illustrating patient’s models of beliefs and values, (ii) support clinical interventions, and (iii) contribute to health services. It is possible that shortly, eye-movement data from decision-making experiments will grant the scientific community a greater understanding of mechanisms underlining mental states and consumption practices that medical professionals consider as obsessions, disorders or addiction.

Abstract A set of experiments was performed to make a cross-language comparison of intelligibility of locally time-reversed speech, employing a total of 117 native listeners of English, German, Japanese, and Mandarin Chinese. The experiments enabled to examine whether the languages of three types of timing—stress-, syllable-, and mora-timed languages—exhibit different trends in intelligibility, depending on the duration of the segments that were temporally reversed. The results showed a strikingly similar trend across languages, especially when the time axis of segment duration was normalised with respect to the deviation of a talker’s speech rate from the average in each language. This similarity is somewhat surprising given the systematic differences in vocalic proportions characterising the languages studied which had been shown in previous research and were largely replicated with the present speech material. These findings suggest that a universal temporal window shorter than 20–40 ms plays a crucial role in perceiving locally time-reversed speech by working as a buffer in which temporal reorganisation can take place with regard to lexical and semantic processing.

Mosaic speech is degraded speech that is segmented into time × frequency blocks. Earlier research with Japanese mosaic speech has shown that its intelligibility is almost perfect for mosaic block durations (MBD) up to 40 ms. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the intelligibility of English mosaic speech, and whether its intelligibility would vary if it was compressed in time, preserved, or stretched in time. Furthermore, we investigated whether intelligibility differed between native and non-native speakers of English. English (n = 19), Indonesian (n = 19), and Chinese (n = 20) listeners participated in an experiment, in which the mosaic speech stimuli were presented, and they had to type what they had heard. The results showed that compressing or stretching the English mosaic speech resulted in similar trends in intelligibility among the three language groups, with some exceptions. Generally, the intelligibility for MBDs of 20 and 40 ms after preserving/stretching was higher, and decreased beyond MBDs of 80 ms after stretching. Compression also lowered intelligibility. This suggests that humans can extract new information from individual speech segments of about 40 ms, but that there is a limit to the amount of linguistic information that can be conveyed within a block of about 40 ms or below.

A newly developed factor analysis, origin-shifted factor analysis, was compared with a normal factor analysis to analyze the spectral changes of English speech. Our first aim was to investigate whether these analyses would cause differences in the factor loadings and the extracted spectral-factor scores. The methods mainly differed in whether to use cepstral liftering and an origin shift. The results showed that three spectral factors were obtained in four main frequency bands, but neither the cepstral liftering nor the origin shift distorted the essential characteristics of the factors. This confirms that the origin-shifted factor analysis is more recommendable for future speech analyses, since it would reduce the generation of noise in resynthesized speech. Our second aim was to further identify acoustic correlates of English phonemes. Our data show for the first time that the distribution of obstruents in English speech constitutes an L-shape related to two spectral factors on the three-dimensional configuration. One factor had center loadings around 4100 Hz, while the other was bimodal with peaks around 300 Hz and 2300 Hz. This new finding validates the use of multivariate analyses to connect English phonology and speech acoustics.

Temporal resolution needed for Japanese speech communication was measured. A new experimental paradigm that can reflect the spectro-temporal resolution necessary for healthy listeners to perceive speech is introduced. As a first step, we report listeners' intelligibility scores of Japanese speech with a systematically degraded temporal resolution, so-called “mosaic speech”: speech mosaicized in the coordinates of time and frequency. The results of two experiments show that mosaic speech cut into short static segments was almost perfectly intelligible with a temporal resolution of 40 ms or finer. Intelligibility dropped for a temporal resolution of 80 ms, but was still around 50%-correct level. The data are in line with previous results showing that speech signals separated into short temporal segments of