Individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD) experience difficulties in various motor functions due to decreased amplitude and sensory guidance. Speech production is a motoric behavior, and difficulties with oral communication are often seen in these patients. The communication problems are primarily due to decreased airflow from the lungs, incomplete vocal fold vibration, and an insufficient rang...

In searching for the roots of human language, comparative researchers investigate whether precursors to language are already present in our closest relatives, the nonhuman primates. As the majority of studies into primates’ communication use a unimodal approach with focus on one signal type only, researchers investigate very different aspects depending on whether they are interested in vocal, g...



 Based on a review of models and theories in speech communication, this paper proposes an original Bayesian framework able to express each of them in a unified way. This framework allows to selectively incorporate motor processes in perception or auditory representations in production, thus implementing components of a perceptuo-motor link in speech communication processes. This provides a ba...

task assignment problem (tap) involves assigning a number of tasks to a number of processors in distributed computing systems and its objective is to minimize the sum of the total execution and communication costs, subject to all of the resource constraints. tap is a combinatorial optimization problem and np-complete. this paper proposes a hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm for solving tap in a h...

Different animals use widely different frequencies for sound communication, and it is reasonable to assume that evolution has adapted these frequencies to give greatest conspecific communication distance for a given vocal effort. Acoustic analysis shows that the optimal communication frequency is inversely proportional to about the 0.4 power of the animal's body mass. Comparison with observatio...

One pragmatic underlying successful vocal communication is the ability to take turns. Taking turns - a form of cooperation - facilitates the transmission of signals by reducing the amount of their overlap. This allows vocalizations to be better heard. Until recently, non-human primates were not thought of as particularly cooperative, especially in the vocal domain. We recently demonstrated that...

This study on common marmosets Callithrix jacchus is the first to examine noise-dependent mechanisms of vocal plasticity in a New World monkey. Since acoustic communication can be considerably impaired by environmental noise, some animals have evolved adaptations to counteract its masking effects. The studied marmosets increased the sound level of their spontaneous calls in response to increase...

A new study shows that vocal sequences produced by newborn marmoset monkeys are driven by slow fluctuations in physiological state; the results shed light on the evolution of vocal communication between newborns and parents.