Language batteries used to assess the skills of elderly individuals, such as naming and semantic verbal fluency, present some limitations in differentiating healthy controls from patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (a-MCI). Deficits in narrative discourse occur early in dementia caused by Alzheimer's disease (AD), and the narrative discourse abilities of a-MCI patients are poorly d...

BACKGROUND Previous studies of therapy for acquired anomia have treated nouns in isolation. The effect on nouns in connected speech remains unclear. In a recent study in 2012, we used a novel noun syntax therapy and found an increase in the number of determiner plus noun constructions in narrative after therapy. AIMS Two aims arose from the previous study: to identify the critical ingredient ...

Seventeen Ss were videotaped as they provided narrative descriptions of 13 photographs. Judgments from 129 naive untrained Ss were used to isolate 60 speech-related gestures and their lexical affiliates (i.e., the accompanying word or phrase judged as related in meaning) from these 221 narratives. A computer-video interface measured each gesture, and a 3rd group of Ss rated word familiarity of ...

PURPOSE The main purpose of this study was to examine how children with isolated speech sound disorders (SSDs; n = 20), children with combined SSDs and language impairment (LI; n = 20), and typically developing children (n = 20), ages 3;3 (years;months) to 6;6, differ in narrative ability. The second purpose was to determine if early narrative ability predicts school-age (8-12 years) literacy s...

Previous work has demonstrated that gesture production is affected by common ground (shared background knowledge). For example, studies have demonstrated that new information gets larger, clearer gestures while old/shared information gets smaller, less precise gestures (Gerwing & Bavelas, 2004); new information is likely to be expressed in gesture (with or without speech) while shared informati...

Narrative, spontaneous speech can provide a valuable source of information about an individual’s cognitive state. Unfortunately, clinical transcription of this type of data is typically done by hand, which is prohibitively time-consuming. In order to automate the entire process, we optimize automatic speech recognition (ASR) for participants with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in a relatively large c...

We report new developments on affect detection from textual metaphorical affective expression and affect sensing from speech. The textual affect detection component has been embedded in an intelligent conversational AI agent interacting with human users under loose scenarios. The detected affective states from text also play an important role in producing emotional animation for users’ avatars....

In order to produce a coherent narrative, speakers must identify the characters in the tale so that listeners can figure out who is doing what to whom. This paper explores whether speakers use gesture, as well as speech, for this purpose. English speakers were shown vignettes of two stories and asked to retell the stories to an experimenter. Their speech and gestures were transcribed and coded ...