BACKGROUND Even today the reliable diagnosis of the prodromal stages of Alzheimer's disease (AD) remains a great challenge. Our research focuses on the earliest detectable indicators of cognitive decline in mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Since the presence of language impairment has been reported even in the mild stage of AD, the aim of this study is to develop a sensitive neuropsychological ...

Earlier impressionistic analyses of Dalabon indicate that the grammatical word is often realized as either an accentual phrase, or an intonational phrase, followed by a pause. Unusually, it can also be interrupted by a silent pause, with each section being realized as separate intonational phrases. Our results support these earlier impressions, although this use of the silent pause appears to b...

Abstract This paper provides a comparative analysis of word-final nasals in Yucatecan Spanish and Yucatec Maya based on speech data from Quintana Roo (Mexico). In Spanish, nasal is often pronounced as [m] if placed at the end word (e.g., Yucatá instead [n]). Since this phenomenon widespread Yucatán Peninsula, but largely unknown other Spanish-speaking regions, it linked to influence indigenous ...

The effect of 24 hours of sustained wakefulness on the speech of healthy adults is poorly documented. Therefore, speech samples were systematically acquired (e.g., every four hours) from 18 healthy adults over 24 hours. Stimuli included automated and extemporaneous tasks, sustained vowel and a read passage. Measures of timing and frequency were derived acoustically using Praat and significant c...

A joint speech signal enhancement based on singular value decomposition filter after spectral subtraction (SSVD) is proposed in this paper. The residual noise after spectral subtraction, which results for audible musical noise, is reduced further by SVD filter. The matrix size in spectral domain can be reduced half, and larger step-length adopted by SVD filter in spectral domain leads to lower ...

Polymerase II (Pol II) transcriptional termination depends on two independent genetic elements: poly(A) signals and downstream terminator sequences. The latter may either promote cotranscriptional RNA cleavage or pause elongating Pol II. We demonstrate that the previously characterized MAZ4 pause element promotes Pol II termination downstream of a poly(A) signal, dependent on both the proximity...

A critical question in tapping behavior is to understand whether the temporal control is exerted on the duration and trajectory of the downward-upward hand movement or on the pause between hand movements. In the present study, we determined the duration of both the movement execution and pauses of monkeys performing a synchronization-continuation task (SCT), using the speed profile of their tap...

Pauses in spontaneous speaking constitute a rich source of data for several disciplines. They have been used to enhance automatic segmentation of speech, classification of patients with acquired communication disorders, the design of psycholinguistic models of speaking, and the analysis of psychological disorders. Unfortunately, however, although pause analysis has been with us for more than 40...

The study discusses the role of prosodic grouping in the Mandarin Relative Clause attachment disambiguation. The grouping effect is explored under the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (IPH) from four aspects of sentence processing experiments: default production, contrast production, online processing, as well as offline processing. It is found that (1) the length of RC greatly impacts ambiguity res...