Communication Department, Rhode Island College.
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2023 May;152(5):1469-1483. doi: 10.1037/xge0001346. Epub 2023 Apr 13.
Aphasia is a profound language pathology hampering speech production and/or comprehension. People With Aphasia (PWA) use more manual gestures than Non-Brain Injured (NBI) individuals. This intuitively invokes the idea that gesture is compensatory in some way, but there is variable evidence of a gesture-boosting effect on speech processes. The status quo in gesture research with PWA is an emphasis on categorical analysis of gesture types, focusing on how often they are recruited, and whether more or less gesturing aids communication or speaking. However, there are increasingly louder calls for the investigation of gesture and speech as continuous entangled modes of expression. In NBI adults, expressive moments of gesture and speech are synchronized on the prosodic level. It has been neglected how this is instantiated in PWA. In the current study, we perform the first acoustic-kinematic gesture-speech analysis in Persons With Aphasia (i.e., Wernicke's, Broca's, Anomic) relative to age-matched controls, where we apply several multimodal signal analysis methods. Specifically, we related the speech peaks (smoothed amplitude envelope change) with that of the nearest peaks in the gesture acceleration profile. We obtained that the magnitude of gesture versus speech peaks are positively related across the groups, though more variably for PWA, and such coupling was related to less severe Aphasia-related symptoms. No differences were found between controls and PWA in terms of temporal ordering of speech envelope versus acceleration peaks. Finally, we show that both gesture and speech have slower quasi-rhythmic structure, indicating that next to speech, gesture is slowed down too. The current results indicate that there is a basic gesture-speech coupling mechanism that is not fully reliant on core linguistic competences, as it is found relatively intact in PWA. This resonates with a recent biomechanical theory of gesture, which renders gesture-vocal coupling as fundamental and a priori to the (evolutionary) development of core linguistic competences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
失语症是一种严重的语言病理学障碍，会影响言语产生和/或理解。与非脑损伤个体相比，失语症患者（PWA）使用更多的手动姿势。这直观地让人联想到姿势在某种程度上是补偿性的，但关于姿势对言语过程的促进作用的证据并不一致。目前 PWA 手势研究的现状是强调对手势类型的分类分析，重点关注它们被招募的频率，以及更多或更少的手势是否有助于交流或说话。然而，越来越多的人呼吁对手势和言语进行连续的、纠缠的表达模式的研究。在非脑损伤成年人中，言语和姿势的表达时刻在韵律层面上是同步的。但在 PWA 中，这种情况是如何体现的却被忽视了。在当前的研究中，我们对失语症患者（即 Wernicke 氏失语症、Broca 氏失语症、命名性失语症）与年龄匹配的对照组进行了首次声学运动学的手势言语分析，我们应用了几种多模态信号分析方法。具体来说，我们将言语峰值（平滑后的幅度包络变化）与手势加速度轮廓中的最近峰值进行了相关分析。我们发现，尽管 PWA 的变化更大，但在所有组中，手势峰值与言语峰值的幅度呈正相关，而这种耦合与更轻微的失语症相关症状有关。在言语包络与加速度峰值的时间顺序方面，对照组和 PWA 之间没有发现差异。最后，我们发现手势和言语都具有较慢的准节奏结构，这表明除了言语之外，手势也会变慢。目前的结果表明，存在一种基本的手势言语耦合机制，它不完全依赖于核心语言能力，因为它在 PWA 中相对完整。这与手势的一种新的生物力学理论相呼应，该理论认为手势-声音的耦合是基本的和先验的，是核心语言能力的（进化）发展的基础。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2023 APA，保留所有权利）。
