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Tag: Speech & Language

  • Speech Accessibility Project begins recruiting people who have had a stroke

    Speech Accessibility Project begins recruiting people who have had a stroke

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    BYLINE: Meg Dickinson

    Newswise — The Speech Accessibility Project has begun recruiting U.S. and Puerto Rican adults who have had a stroke.

    Those interested can sign up online.

    Funded by Big Tech companies Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign aims to train voice recognition technologies to understand people with diverse speech patterns and disabilities. The project is also recruiting adults with Parkinson’s disease, Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

    “A stroke can cause big changes, including changes to your ability to speak,” said Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, the project’s leader and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Illinois. “Our goal is to teach AI to understand you the way you speak right now, so that you can use AI to help you on the job or in activities of daily life. The Speech Accessibility Project is about empowerment; the potential for empowerment of people post-stroke is huge and wonderful.”

    The project has partnered with Lingraphica’s research team to recruit people who have had a stroke. Mentors will connect with those who want to participate, screen their speech, and help them understand and consent to participate.

    Shawnise Carter, Lingraphica’s senior research manager and a speech language pathologist, said she’s thrilled to join the project and called it “ambitious and necessary.”

    “It is essential for individuals with communication impairments to have access to technology in a way that can suit their needs,” Carter said. “The hope is that it will allow people who have had a stroke to access smart devices and smart technology while decreasing frustration resulting from voice recognition technology not recognizing impaired speech.”

    Such technology doesn’t currently account for people with speech impairments, she said.

    “Creating a database that considers this is a huge contribution to the field of communication sciences and disorders and more research of this nature should continue,” she said.

    Clarion Mendes, a clinical assistant professor of speech and hearing science at Illinois and a speech language pathologist, added that the Speech Accessibility Project could also improve quality of life for family members and loved ones of people who have had a stroke.

    “Communication difficulties associated with a cerebrovascular accident, commonly known as stroke, are diverse in both their severity and how they impact individuals and their families. Speech, language, and cognitive processes may be affected,” Mendes said. “Including stroke survivors with aphasia and their caregivers in the Speech Accessibility Project is an exciting new chapter. There’s outstanding potential for increasing quality of life for stroke survivors and decreasing caregiver burden.”



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    Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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  • Speech Accessibility Project now recruiting adults with Down syndrome

    Speech Accessibility Project now recruiting adults with Down syndrome

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    BYLINE: Meg Dickinson

    Newswise — The Speech Accessibility Project is now recruiting U.S. adults with Down syndrome. The project aims to make voice recognition technology more useful for people with diverse speech patterns and different disabilities.

    Those interested in participating can sign up online.

    The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, a historic leader in accessibility, is securely recording participants and safeguarding their private information. Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are funding the project and are already using participants’ recorded voices to make voice recognition technology more useful.

    The project has so far collected more than 100,000 recordings from participants with Parkinson’s disease. In addition to Down syndrome, the project will also soon be recruiting adults with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, cerebral palsy, and those who have had a stroke.

    Making speech recognition tools accessible to people with Down syndrome could change the way they interact with technology, and could have even more profound effects, as well, said Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UIUC and the project’s leader.

    “The Speech Accessibility Project is fundamentally about human rights,” Hasegawa-Johnson said. “Everyone has the right to seek education, to seek employment, and to seek access to government services.”

    But people with Down syndrome may struggle with those, he said.

    “I think speech technology can help by making information about education, employment, and government services more easily accessible,” he said. “We are at a unique point in human history. With a perfectly reasonable amount of collaboration between the Down syndrome community and the technology community, we can make automatic speech recognition available to people with Down syndrome.”

    Having improved access to speech recognition technology could dramatically improve quality of life for many, said Clarion Mendes, a speech-language pathologist, clinical assistant professor of speech and hearing science, and member of the project team.

    “Down syndrome is the most commonly identified chromosomal difference in the U.S.,” she said. “Nearly all individuals with Down syndrome experience challenges with communication — including speech clarity. By including individuals with Down syndrome in the Speech Accessibility Project, the potential to engage with the world through communication increases.”

    The Speech Accessibility Project team has partnered with Laura Mattie and Marie Channell, both associate professors in the Department of Speech and Hearing Science.

    “The opportunity to promote inclusion and accessibility for people with Down syndrome is incredibly important,” Mattie said. “We jumped right on board. We can see the future impact that it can have on their lives.”

    Channell studies independence and transitions to adulthood in people with Down syndrome.

    “They go through all of life and school with educational supports, therapy, and services,” 

    she said. “As soon as they leave high school and hit early adulthood, these supports abruptly stop.”

    The so-called “service delivery cliff” means those individuals suddenly need to navigate services for adults, and many systems aren’t built for people with Down syndrome or who have intellectual disabilities.

    “Finding ways to support people who want to live independent lives and gain meaningful employment are limited,” she said. “Some of our research has found that about 50 percent are employed at some level, and most are under-employed. The Speech Accessibility Project will provide them with access to more tools to help them communicate and navigate through adult spaces in the community, just like everyone else.”

    Graduate students working with Channell and Mattie will walk potential participants and their caregivers through the process of signing up and participating in the project.

    Participants can receive up to $180 and caregivers can receive up to $90 in Amazon gift cards.

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    Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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  • What’s love got to do with it? An exception to the recognition of musical themes

    What’s love got to do with it? An exception to the recognition of musical themes

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    Newswise — New Haven, Conn. — Music can take on many forms in cultures across the globe, but Yale researchers have found in a new study that some themes are universally recognizable by people everywhere with one notable exception — love songs.

    “All around the world, people sing in similar ways,” said senior author Samuel Mehr, who splits his time between the Yale Child Study Center, where he is an assistant professor adjunct, and the University of Auckland, where he is senior lecturer in psychology. “Music is deeply rooted in human social interaction.”

    For the new study, published Sept. 7 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Yale researchers played 14-second snippets of vocals from a bank of songs that originated from a host of cultures to more than 5,000 people from 49 countries. The research team included subjects not only from the industrialized world, but more than 100 individuals who live in three small, relatively isolated groups of no more than 100.

    They then asked the listeners to rank the likelihood of each sample as being one of four music types: dance, lullabies, “healing” music, or love music.

    Unlike most psychology experiments, which are conducted in one language, this experiment was performed in 31 languages. Yet regardless of the language used in the survey, people from all cultures could easily identify dance music, lullabies, and, to a lesser extent, even music created to heal. Recognition of what the researchers identified as love songs, however, lagged these other categories.

    For instance, when we they analyzed responses based on language groupings, they found that 27 of the 28 groups correctly rated dance songs as more appropriate for dancing than other songs. All 28 of the groups were able to identify lullabies. But only 12 of the 28 groups were able to identify love songs.

    Why the difficulty in identifying musical themes about love?

    “One reason for this could be that love songs may be a particularly fuzzy category that includes songs that express happiness and attraction, but also sadness and jealousy,” said lead author  Lidya Yurdum, who works as research assistant at the Yale Child Study Center and is also a graduate student at the University of Amsterdam. “Listeners who heard love songs from neighboring countries and in languages related to their own actually did a little better, likely because of the familiar linguistic and cultural clues.”

    But other than love songs, the authors discovered, the listeners’ “ratings were largely accurate, consistent with one another, and not explained by their linguistic or geographical proximity to the singer — showing that musical diversity is underlain by universal psychological phenomena.” 

    “Our minds have evolved to listen to music. It is not a recent invention,” Yurdum said. “But if we only study songs from the western world and listeners from the western world, we can only draw conclusions about the western world — not humans in general.”

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    Yale University

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  • Can robots boost team creativity with charisma?

    Can robots boost team creativity with charisma?

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    Newswise — Increasingly, social robots are being used for support in educational contexts. But does the sound of a social robot affect how well they perform, especially when dealing with teams of humans? Teamwork is a key factor in human creativity, boosting collaboration and new ideas. Danish scientists set out to understand whether robots using a voice designed to sound charismatic would be more successful as team creativity facilitators.

    “We had a robot instruct teams of students in a creativity task. The robot either used a confident, passionate — ie charismatic — tone of voice or a normal, matter-of-fact tone of voice,” said Dr Kerstin Fischer of the University of Southern Denmark, corresponding author of the study in Frontiers in Communication. “We found that when the robot spoke in a charismatic speaking style, students’ ideas were more original and more elaborate.”

    Can a robot be charismatic?

    We know that social robots acting as facilitators can boost creativity, and that the success of facilitators is at least partly dependent on charisma: people respond to charismatic speech by becoming more confident and engaged. Fischer and her colleagues aimed to see if this effect could be reproduced with the voices of social robots by using a text-to-speech function engineered for characteristics associated with charismatic speaking, such as a specific pitch range and way of stressing words. Two voices were developed, one charismatic and one less expressive, based on a range of parameters which correlate with perceived speaker charisma.

    The scientists recruited five classes of university students, all taking courses which included an element of team creativity. The students were told that they were testing a creativity workshop, which involved brainstorming ideas based on images and then using those ideas to come up with a new chocolate product. The workshop was led by videos of a robot speaking: introducing the task, reassuring the teams of students that there were no bad ideas, and then congratulating them for completing the task and asking them to fill out a self-evaluation questionnaire. The questionnaire evaluated the robot’s performance, the students’ own views on how their teamwork went, and the success of the session. The creativity of each session, as measured by the number of original ideas produced and how elaborate they were, was also measured by the researchers.

    Powering creativity with charisma

    The group that heard the charismatic voice rated the robot more positively, finding it more charismatic and interactive. Their perception of their teamwork was more positive, and they produced more original and elaborate ideas. They rated their teamwork more highly. However, the group that heard the non-charismatic voice perceived themselves as more resilient and efficient, possibly because a less charismatic leader led to better organization by the team members themselves, even though they produced fewer ideas.

    “I had suspected that charismatic speech has very important effects, but our study provides clear evidence for the effect of charismatic speech on listener creativity,” said Dr Oliver Niebuhr of the University of Southern Denmark, co-author of the study. “This is the first time that such a link between charismatic voices, artificial speakers, and creativity outputs has been found.”

    The scientists pointed out that although the sessions with the charismatic voice were generally more successful, not all the teams responded identically to the different voices: previous experiences in their different classes may have affected their response. Larger studies will be needed to understand how these external factors affected team performance.

    “The robot was present only in videos, but one could suspect that more exposure or repeated exposure to the charismatic speaking style would have even stronger effects,” said Fischer. “Moreover, we have only varied a few features between the two robot conditions. We don’t know how the effect size would change if other or more features were varied. Finally, since charismatic speaking patterns differ between cultures, we would expect that the same stimuli will not yield the same results in all languages and cultures.”

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    Frontiers

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  • Immigration experts on Title 42, analysis of immigration policies, and other migrant news in the Immigration Channel

    Immigration experts on Title 42, analysis of immigration policies, and other migrant news in the Immigration Channel

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    Title 42, the United States pandemic rule that had been used to immediately deport hundreds of thousands of migrants who crossed the border illegally over the last three years, has expired. Those migrants will have the opportunity to apply for asylum. President Biden’s new rules to replace Title 42 are facing legal challenges. The US Homeland Security Department announced a rule to make it extremely difficult for anyone who travels through another country, like Mexico, to qualify for asylum. Border crossings have already risen sharply, as many migrants attempted to cross before the measure expired on Thursday night. Some have said they worry about tighter controls and uncertainty ahead. Immigration is once again a major focus of the media as we examine the humanitarian, political, and public health issues migrants must face. 

    Below are some of the latest headlines in the Immigration channel on Newswise.

    Expert Commentary

    Experts Available on Ending of Title 42

    George Washington University Experts on End of Title 42

    ‘No one wins when immigrants cannot readily access healthcare’

    URI professor discusses worsening child labor in the United States

    Biden ‘between a rock and a hard place’ on immigration

    University of Notre Dame Expert Available to Comment on House Bill Regarding Immigration Legislation, Border Safety and Security Act

    American University Experts Available to Discuss President Biden’s Visit to U.S.-Mexico Border

    Title 42 termination ‘overdue’, not ‘effective’ to manage migration

    Research and Features

    Study: Survey Methodology Should Be Calibrated to Account for Negative Attitudes About Immigrants and Asylum-Seekers

    A study analyses racial discrimination in job recruitment in Europe

    DACA has not had a negative impact on the U.S. job market

    ASBMB cautions against drastic immigration fee increases

    Study compares NGO communication around migration

    Collaboration, support structures needed to address ‘polycrisis’ in the Americas

    TTUHSC El Paso Faculty Teach Students While Caring for Migrants

    Immigrants Report Declining Alcohol Use during First Two Years after Arriving in U.S.

    How asylum seeker credibility is assessed by authorities

    Speeding up and simplifying immigration claims urgently needed to help with dire situation for migrants experiencing homelessness

    Training Individuals to Work in their Communities to Reduce Health Disparities

    ‘Regulation by reputation’: Rating program can help combat migrant abuse in the Gulf

    Migration of academics: Economic development does not necessarily lead to brain drain

    How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected immigration?

    Immigrants with Darker Skin Tones Perceive More Discrimination

     

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    Newswise

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  • Is the Language You Speak Tied to Outcome After Stroke?

    Is the Language You Speak Tied to Outcome After Stroke?

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    EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 12, 2023

    Newswise — MINNEAPOLIS – Studies have shown that Mexican Americans have worse outcomes after a stroke than non-Hispanic white Americans. A new study looks at whether the language Mexican American people speak is linked to how well they recover after a stroke. The study is published in the April 12, 2023, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

    “Our study found that Mexican American people who spoke only Spanish had worse neurologic outcomes three months after having a stroke than Mexican American people who spoke only English or were bilingual,” said study author Lewis B. Morgenstern, MD, of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and a Fellow of the American Academy of Neurology. “More research is needed into what factors and barriers may influence these worse outcomes.”

    The study involved 1,096 Mexican American people in Corpus Christi, Texas, who had a stroke over a 10-year period. Researchers looked at results three months after the stroke in three areas: neurologic, functional and thinking and memory skills. Neurologic results cover areas such as muscle strength and coordination and problems with speech or vision. Functional results look at how well people can complete their daily activities such as showering and preparing meals.

    The 170 people who spoke Spanish only were compared to the 926 people who spoke English only or were bilingual. Those who spoke Spanish only were older, had received less education and had worse neurologic scores at the time of the stroke than those in the other group.

    Three months after the stroke, the Spanish-only speakers had average neurologic scores of seven, where scores of five to 14 indicate moderate effects from a stroke. The English-only and bilingual speakers had average scores of four, where scores of one to four indicate mild effects. The results remained after researchers adjusted for the differences between the two groups and other factors that could affect stroke risk, such as high blood pressure and diabetes.

    The study found no difference between the two groups in how well they recovered their ability to complete their daily activities or in their thinking and memory skills.

    “We conducted an earlier study in this same community finding that the language people spoke was not associated with any delay in their getting to the hospital or using emergency medical services after an ischemic stroke, so we definitely need more information to determine what is driving the differences in outcomes between these two groups,” Morgenstern said.

    A limitation of the study was that there was a low number of Spanish-only speakers. Also, the majority of Mexican Americans in Corpus Christi are born in the United States, so these results may not be applicable to areas with a larger population of people born outside the United States.

    The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the TRANSCENDS (Training in Research for Academic Neurologists to Sustain Careers and Enhance the Numbers of Diverse Scholars) program funded by the National Institutes of Health.  

    Learn more about stroke at BrainandLife.org, home of the American Academy of Neurology’s free patient and caregiver magazine focused on the intersection of neurologic disease and brain health. Follow Brain & Life® on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

    When posting to social media channels about this research, we encourage you to use the hashtags #Neurology and #AANscience.

    The American Academy of Neurology is the world’s largest association of neurologists and neuroscience professionals, with over 40,000 members. The AAN is dedicated to promoting the highest quality patient-centered neurologic care. A neurologist is a doctor with specialized training in diagnosing, treating and managing disorders of the brain and nervous system such as Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, migraine, multiple sclerosis, concussion, Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy.

    For more information about the American Academy of Neurology, visit AAN.com or find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube.

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    American Academy of Neurology (AAN)

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  • LaundryCares Offers Free Laundry and Literacy Day Events in Florida

    LaundryCares Offers Free Laundry and Literacy Day Events in Florida

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    Newswise — OAKBROOK TERRACE, IL, March 10, 2023 – The LaundryCares Foundation welcomes the community of Gainesville, Florida, to experience a Free Laundry and Literacy Day event at two laundromat locations throughout the greater Gainesville area on Tuesday, March 28. Guests can enjoy complimentary laundry services and cleaning products plus free food and fun activities for children and adults from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. There is no limit to the amount of clothing and linens that can be laundered – guests can bring as much as they want and wash it for free.

    Participating laundromat locations include:

    • Fresh Laundry, 3830 SW 13th St., Gainesville, FL 32608
    • Wash King, 210 NE 16th Ave., Gainesville, FL 32602

    The Fresh Laundry and Wash King locations will include “Family Read, Play, Learn” spaces for children to build language and learning skills in comfortable, engaging, language-rich environments. The “Family Read, Play, Learn” spaces are part of an initiative of the LaundryCares Foundation and Too Small to Fail which together formed the Laundry Literacy Coalition to help support young children’s early language development and help bridge the large child literacy gap across the country. Community members are encouraged to take advantage of the Free Laundry and Literacy Day events on Tuesday, March 28.

    Local partners, including librarians from the Alachua County Library, will be onsite at both locations to provide interactive literacy activities and educational resources for families. Children can play educational games, participate in reading activities, and will receive a free book from Scholastic® to take home with them.

    “Our organization is dedicated to helping under-resourced neighborhoods by making literacy and learning attainable,” said Dan Naumann, Executive VP, LaundryCares Foundation. “The Free Laundry and Literacy Day events are an important recognition of a growing U.S. population with children and families who often find it challenging to have basic needs met.”

    The LaundryCares Foundation works with laundromat owners and community organizations throughout the U.S. to connect communities with literacy resources in safe, clean, and comfortable settings within laundromats. Interested parties can enroll in the LaundryCares Network at no charge to become part of the movement that’s helping to bridge the large child literacy gap at local laundromats in historically excluded communities.

    # # #

    About the LaundryCares Foundation

    The LaundryCares Foundation is dedicated to enriching communities through the coordinated efforts of local businesses, community leaders and individuals to help better the lives of their neighbors. Since 2006, LaundryCares’ three pillars of philanthropy include offering free laundry services, support of key literacy skills in early childhood development, and disaster relief assistance.

    The LaundryCares Foundation is the philanthropic arm of the Coin Laundry Association (CLA) a national, nonprofit organization, with a membership of more than 300 manufacturers and distributors, and 1,500 owners in the self-service laundry industry. For more information about the LaundryCares Foundation, visit laundrycares.org.

    About Too Small to Fail

    Too Small to Fail, the early childhood initiative of the Clinton Foundation, promotes early brain and language development by supporting parents and caregivers with tools to talk, read, and sing with their young children from birth. Today, almost 60 percent of children in the United States start kindergarten unprepared, lagging behind their peers in critical language and reading skills. Through partnerships with pediatricians, hospitals, faith-based leaders, community-based organizations, businesses, entertainment industry leaders, and others, Too Small to Fail is meeting parents where they are to help them prepare their children for success in school and beyond. Whether at the pediatrician’s office or the playground, Too Small to Fail aims to make small moments big by creating opportunities for meaningful interactions anytime, anywhere. Learn more at www.toosmall.org.

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    LaundryCares Foundation

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  • Tart, sour, or sweet? Virginia Tech researchers create hard cider lexicon for accurate, shared descriptions

    Tart, sour, or sweet? Virginia Tech researchers create hard cider lexicon for accurate, shared descriptions

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    Newswise — Citrus, caramelized sugar, vinegary, puckering, sour, and solvent. These are just a handful of the 33 terms that researchers in the Virginia Tech College of Agriculture and Life Sciences found after conducting a sensory descriptive analysis of hard cider.

    This lexicon didn’t previously exist for hard cider, and its development will aid producers in Virginia’s robust cider industry as well as anyone who chooses to enjoy these beverages. Producers will be able to describe their products with precision and clarity because of the study conducted in the Sensory Evaluation Lab at Virginia Tech.

    Humans can experience upwards of 10,000 unique aromas in both food and beverage, which presents a unique challenge to describe the vast wealth of aromas.

    “Sensory science” is a field within food science that studies reactions people have to food or beverages and allows for differentiation for the flavors people experience from normal language. This science helps people articulate what they are experiencing, similar to how people describe things they touch or the sounds they hear.

    “Because we are minimally trained on using taste and smell, we have a hard time putting a word to a specific taste or smell,” said Martha Calvert, the doctoral student leading the project and graduate research assistant in the Department of Food Science and Technology. “Sensory terms help to distinguish hard cider products and give producers and consumers tools for talking about cider flavors they experience.”

    Funded through a USDA grant, the research was published recently in the Journal of Food Science.

    Creating the lexicon – or any sensory lexicon – is extremely challenging and requires extensively trained panelists before any tastings occur. This training includes using consumer-inclusive language so that the word bank generated by the panelists is usable by the general public.

    To accurately develop the lexicon, all cider tastings were blind, meaning the panelists didn’t know what cider they were drinking. After taking a sip, the panelists would write down every term that could be experienced from that tasting.

    “If one was experiencing tart and, another, sour, we would have a group discussion about what the words mean to us and exactly what we are referring to in our heads so we can pick one term,” Calvert said.

    Repetitive terms were consolidated to eliminate repeating or closely overlapping words. Then panelists picked words that they felt most reliably and clearly articulated their experiences. For example, the panelists equated sour to the traditional sour patch sensation and vinegary to represent a tart-like sensation.

    Of the 33 terms generated, 29 of them varied significantly across the cider samples.

    “This means that most of the terms generated are important to describing sensory quality and distinguishing cider products from each other,” Calvert said. “Some of these terms fit broadly into four categories that I called rich, fruity, sour, and funky.”

    For rich, think caramelized sugar or butter. Fruity could be grape or apple. Funky could be earthy or metallic, and sour could be the sour patch or vinegar taste.

    The researchers, which include Jacob Lahne, an assistant professor in the department and principal investigator of the project, will conduct a validation study in which the terms are grouped based on similarity. Ultimately, the research will be used to generate the cider flavor wheel that both cider producers and consumers will be able to use to help them describe the products that they make and taste.

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    Virginia Tech

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  • Happy birthday to Dr. Seuss: FSU literacy researcher offers tips to get kids reading

    Happy birthday to Dr. Seuss: FSU literacy researcher offers tips to get kids reading

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    BYLINE: Kathleen Haughney

    Newswise — With school-aged children celebrating the joy of reading through Read Across America Day or Dr. Seuss Day this week, many parents and teachers are capitalizing on that joy to remind kids of the power of a good book.

    Florida State University Assistant Professor Lakeisha Johnson, a faculty affiliate for The Florida Center for Reading Research, has assembled a tip sheet for parents using this time to encourage their children to read more.

    “Sometimes, finding the right book or format can light a spark that will stay with children forever,” Johnson said.

    Here are some tips:

    Let your child lead.
    Allow your child to choose books based on their interests. Whether they like picture books or graphic novels, fiction or biographies, poetry or sci-fi, children are more motivated to read when they are interested in the topic.

    Make reading a family activity.
    Choose a time of day when all members of the family drop everything and read. Children often follow the models shown by adults and will value reading when they see their grown-ups doing it for pleasure.

    Keep reading aloud.
    Read books together, even when your child is old enough to read on their own. When grown-ups read aloud, the mental space needed to decode is freed up and the child can focus solely on understanding the story and actively participating in conversations beyond the text.

    Introduce a fun series.
    No one likes a cliffhanger. Captivating series are a great way to keep children engaged and wanting to read the next story.

    Go beyond storybooks.
    Reading doesn’t always have to be a traditional book. Read through a recipe book to find a new meal or dessert idea. Find a children’s magazine to spark interest in a new topic. Try listening to audiobooks for a fun switch in your normal reading routine.

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    Florida State University

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  • Decision Guide Clarifies Indicators for Swallowing Consults

    Decision Guide Clarifies Indicators for Swallowing Consults

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    Newswise — A multidisciplinary group at ECU Health Medical Center in Greenville, North Carolina, developed a decision guide to provide healthcare teams with specific guidelines for swallowing care after extubation. The decision guide standardizes the process for clinicians to determine which recently extubated patients required further swallowing assessment by an appropriate professional.

    As the only Level 1 trauma center east of Raleigh, North Carolina, ECU Health Medical Center serves a vast rural region home to more than 1.4 million people and is the largest resource for critically ill patients in eastern North Carolina. Critically ill patients are frequently intubated with an endotracheal tube to maintain an adequate airway for breathing. After the endotracheal tube is removed, patients often experience difficulty swallowing, also known as dysphagia, which is associated with a variety of poor outcomes. 

    “It is important that patients experiencing dysphagia be treated swiftly because dysphagia can cause difficulty eating, drinking or swallowing necessary medications,” said Waverlyn J. Royals, MS, CCC-SLP, speech-language pathology (SLP) clinical specialist and student education coordinator for rehabilitation services at ECU Health Medical Center. “Determining which patients need a swallowing assessment helps care teams intervene early and improve outcomes, as well as more efficiently use resources and reduce costs.” 

    Since ECU Health is an academic health system, its partnership with Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University allows for team members such as Royals to conduct research to continue finding best practices for patients and care teams. The multidisciplinary group conducted a literature review as part of a process improvement project to help clarify decision-making for patients post-extubation. This review identified specific risk factors that healthcare teams should consider regarding dysphagia post-extubation.

    These risk factors became points of decision in the guide. A “yes” answer to any of the decision points resulted in the patient’s continued non-oral status and triggered a consult to SLP professionals. If each question has a “no” response, it eliminates unnecessary requests to assess patients who already tolerate an oral diet. For patients with no positive indicators from the decision guide, including a water swallowing challenge, the nurse consulted with a healthcare provider about starting an oral diet.  

    “In addition to clarifying which patients need further evaluation, the guide provides nurses and providers with clear indicators to answer questions from patients and families about why individuals were deemed unready to safely resume eating and drinking,” Royals said.

    “A Decision Guide for Assessing the Recently Extubated Patient’s Readiness for Safe Oral Intake” details the development of the guide, as well as the risk factors and clinical indicators it covers. The study is published in the February issue of Critical Care Nurse (CCN).

    As the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses’ bimonthly clinical practice journal for acute and critical care nurses, CCN is a trusted source of information related to the bedside care of critically and acutely ill patients. Access the article abstract and full-text PDF by visiting the CCN website at http://ccn.aacnjournals.org.

    About Critical Care Nurse: Critical Care Nurse (CCN), a bimonthly clinical practice journal published by the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses, provides current, relevant and useful information about the bedside care of critically and acutely ill patients. The award-winning journal also offers columns on traditional and emerging issues across the spectrum of critical care, keeping critical care nurses informed on topics that affect their practice in acute, progressive and critical care settings. CCN enjoys a circulation of more than 128,000 and can be accessed at http://ccn.aacnjournals.org/.

    About the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses: For more than 50 years, the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN) has been dedicated to acute and critical care nursing excellence. The organization’s vision is to create a healthcare system driven by the needs of patients and their families in which acute and critical care nurses make their optimal contribution. AACN is the world’s largest specialty nursing organization, with about 130,000 members and over 200 chapters in the United States.

    American Association of Critical-Care Nurses, 27071 Aliso Creek Road, Aliso Viejo, CA 92656; 949-362-2000; www.aacn.org; facebook.com/aacnface; twitter.com/aacnme

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    American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN)

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  • How your mood affects the way you process language

    How your mood affects the way you process language

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    Newswise — When people are in a negative mood, they may be quicker to spot inconsistencies in things they read, a new University of Arizona-led study suggests.

    The study, published in Frontiers in Communication, builds on existing research on how the brain processes language.

    Vicky Lai, a UArizona assistant professor of psychology and cognitive science, worked with collaborators in the Netherlands to explore how people’s brains react to language when they are in a happy mood versus a negative mood.

    “Mood and language seem to be supported by different brain networks. But we have one brain, and the two are processed in the same brain, so there is a lot of interaction going on,” Lai said. “We show that when people are in a negative mood, they are more careful and analytical. They scrutinize what’s actually stated in a text, and they don’t just fall back on their default world knowledge.”

    Lai and her study co-authors set out to manipulate study participants’ moods by showing them clips from a sad movie – “Sophie’s Choice” – or a funny television show – “Friends.” A computerized survey was used to evaluate participants’ moods before and after watching the clips. While the funny clips did not impact participants’ moods, the sad clips succeeded in putting participants in a more negative mood, the researchers found.

    The participants then listened to a series of emotionally neutral audio recordings of four-sentence stories that each contained a “critical sentence” that either supported or violated default, or familiar, word knowledge. That sentence was displayed one word at a time on a computer screen, while participants’ brain waves were monitored by EEG, a test that measures brain waves.

    For example, the researchers presented study participants with a story about driving at night that ended with the critical sentence “With the lights on, you can see more.” In a separate story about stargazing, the same critical sentence was altered to read “With the lights on, you can see less.” Although that statement is accurate in the context of stargazing, the idea that turning on the lights would cause a person to see less is a much less familiar concept that defies default knowledge.

    The researchers also presented versions of the stories in which the critical sentences were swapped so that they did not fit the context of the story. For example, the story about driving at night would include the sentence “With the lights on, you can see less.”

    They then looked at how the brain reacted to the inconsistencies, depending on mood.  

    They found that when participants were in a negative mood, based on their survey responses, they showed a type of brain activity closely associated with re-analysis.

    “We show that mood matters, and perhaps when we do some tasks we should pay attention to our mood,” Lai said. “If we’re in a bad mood, maybe we should do things that are more detail-oriented, such as proofreading.”

    Study participants completed the experiment twice – once in the negative mood condition and once in the happy mood condition. Each trial took place one week apart, with the same stories presented each time.

    “These are the same stories, but in different moods, the brain sees them differently, with the sad mood being the more analytical mood,” Lai said.

    The study was conducted in the Netherlands; participants were native Dutch speakers, and the study was conducted in Dutch. But Lai believes their findings translate across languages and cultures.

    By design, the study participants were all women, because Lai and her colleagues wanted to align their study with existing literature that was limited to female participants. Lai said future studies should include more diverse gender representation.

    In the meantime, Lai and her colleagues say mood may affect us in more ways than we previously realized.

    Researcher Jos van Berkum of the Netherlands’ Utrecht University, co-authored the study with Lai and Peter Hagoort of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands.

    “When thinking about how mood affects them, many people just consider things like being grumpy, eating more ice cream, or – at best – interpreting somebody else’s talk in a biased way,” van Berkum said. “But there’s much more going on, also in unexpected corners of our minds. That’s really interesting. Imagine your laptop being more or less precise as a function of its battery level – that’s unthinkable. But in human information processing, and presumably also in (information processing) of related species, something like that seems to be going on.”

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    University of Arizona

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  • Saint Louis University School of Education Announces Partnership with 2023 Scripps National Spelling Bee

    Saint Louis University School of Education Announces Partnership with 2023 Scripps National Spelling Bee

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    Newswise — ST. LOUIS, MO – As part of its commitment to promote youth education in the St. Louis community, Saint Louis University’s School of Education is proud to announce it is an official 2023 Scripps National Spelling Bee regional partner to give local students and schools the opportunity to participate in America’s longest-running educational competition.

    As the exclusive regional partner for the St. Louis region, SLU’s School of Education will sponsor the regional spelling bee competition which will be held on March 25, 2023, at SLU’s Center for Global Citizenship. The regional champion will go on to the national competition in May, where they will have the opportunity to compete for the Scripps Cup. 

    The 2022 Scripps National Spelling Bee champion was Harini Logan, a 14-year-old from San Antonio, Texas. Logan won the coveted title after competing in the Bee’s first-ever spell-off.

    This is the inaugural year for the SLU/Scripps partnership. 

    “The Scripps regional spelling bee program gives students the opportunity to develop their skills and confidence. We value the school partners who enroll in the regional bee so that their students can participate in this exciting experience,” said Ryan Wilson, program coordinator for the School of Education.  

    By inspiring the exploration of words, the Scripps National Spelling Bee illuminates pathways to lifelong curiosity, celebrates academic achievement, and enriches communities. Each year, the Bee reaches millions of students across the country and around the world with the classroom materials it provides schools enrolled in the yearlong program.

    Participation in regional bees also provides an opportunity for students to gain experience in public speaking and inspires a love of learning and connection with their peers. 

    Schools in the St. Louis region are eligible to enroll in the 2022-2023 program now through Jan. 17, 2023. The regional spelling bee is open to students in the City of St. Louis, St. Louis County, Adair, Clinton, Franklin, Jefferson, Lincoln, Monroe, St. Charles, St. Clair, Warren and Washington Counties in Missouri and Calhoun, Clinton, Jersey, Madison and Monroe Counties in Illinois. 

    Educators can visit spellingbee.com/enrollment to learn more and enroll their schools in the program. 

    Scripps National Spelling Bee

    The Scripps National Spelling Bee is the nation’s largest and longest-running educational program, having launched in 1925. By inspiring the exploration of words, the Bee illuminates pathways to lifelong curiosity, celebrates academic achievement, and enriches communities. Visit spellingbee.com for more information about the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which is administered on a not-for-profit basis by The E.W. Scripps Company.  

    Saint Louis University School of Education

    The mission of the Saint Louis University School of Education is to improve our world by inspiring educators as leaders of change, with and for others, through intentional relationships and responsive action. Our learning, teaching, research, service, and advocacy is focused on the greater good so that all can flourish.

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    Saint Louis University

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  • Brain-machine interface device predicts internal speech

    Brain-machine interface device predicts internal speech

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    Newswise — New Caltech research is showing how devices implanted into people’s brains, called brain-machine interfaces (BMIs), could one day help patients who have lost their ability to speak. In a new study presented at the 2022 Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego, the researchers demonstrated that they could use a BMI to accurately predict which words a tetraplegic participant was simply thinking and not speaking or miming.

    “You may already have seen videos of people with tetraplegia using BMIs to control robotic arms and hands, for example to grab a bottle and to drink from it or to eat a piece of chocolate,” says Sarah Wandelt, a Caltech graduate student in the lab of Richard Andersen, James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience and director of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Brain-Machine Interface Center at Caltech. 

    “These new results are promising in the areas of language and communication. We used a BMI to reconstruct speech,” says Wandelt, who presented the results at the conference on November 13. 

    Previous studies have had some success at predicting participants’ speech by analyzing brain signals recorded from motor areas when a participant whispered or mimed words. But predicting what somebody is thinking, internal dialogue, is much more difficult, as it does not involve any movement, explains Wandelt. “In the past, algorithms that tried to predict internal speech have only been able to predict three or four words and with low accuracy or not in real time,” Wandelt says.

    The new research is the most accurate yet at predicting internal words. In this case, brain signals were recorded from single neurons in a brain area called the supramarginal gyrus, located in the posterior parietal cortex. The researchers had found in a previous study that this brain area represents spoken words. 

    Now, the team has extended its findings to internal speech. In the study, the researchers first trained the BMI device to recognize the brain patterns produced when certain words were spoken internally, or thought, by the tetraplegic participant. This training period took about 15 minutes. They then flashed a word on a screen and asked the participant to say the word internally. The results showed that the BMI algorithms were able to predict eight words with an accuracy up to 91 percent.

    The work is still preliminary but could help patients with brain injuries, paralysis, or diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) that affect speech. “Neurological disorders can lead to complete paralysis of voluntary muscles, resulting in patients being unable to speak or move, but they are still able to think and reason. For that population, an internal speech BMI would be incredibly helpful,” Wandelt says.  

    “We have previously shown that we can decode imagined hand shapes for grasping from the human supramarginal gyrus,” says Andersen. “Being able to also decode speech from this area suggests that one implant can recover two important human abilities: grasping and speech.”

    The researchers also point out that the BMIs cannot be used to read people’s minds; the device would need to be trained in each person’s brain separately, and they only work when a person focuses on the word. 

    The study, which is in the process of journal submission but is not yet peer reviewed, is titled “Online internal speech decoding from single neurons in a human participant.” It was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Brain-Machine Interface Center, and the Boswell Foundation. Other Caltech authors besides Wandelt and Andersen include David Bjanes, Kelsie Pejsa, Brian Lee (PhD ’06), and Charles Liu. Lee and Liu are Caltech visiting associates who are on the faculty of the Keck School of Medicine at USC.
     

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    California Institute of Technology

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  • Leadership Online: Charisma Matters Most in Video Communication

    Leadership Online: Charisma Matters Most in Video Communication

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    Newswise — Managers need to make a consistent impression in order to motivate and inspire people, and that applies even more to video communication than to other digital channels. That is the result of a study by researchers at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). They investigated the influence that charismatic leadership tactics used in text, audio and video communication channels have on employee performance. They focused on mobile work and the gig economy, in which jobs are flexibly assigned to freelancers via online platforms. The results of the study have been published in The Leadership Quarterly. (DOI: 10.1016/j.leaqua.2022.101631)

     Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, more and more people are working partly or entirely from home or in mobile work arrangements. At the same time, the so-called gig economy is growing. It involves the flexible assignment of short-term work to freelancers or part-time, low-wage staff via online platforms. Both trends are accelerating the digitalization of work. However, compared to face-to-face conversation between people in the same place, communication through digital channels offers fewer opportunities to motivate people and show charisma. This presents new challenges for managers. The impact of charismatic leadership tactics (CLTs) and the choice of communications channel (text, audio or video) on staff performance is the subject of a study by Petra Nieken, professor of human resource management at the Institute of Management at KIT. The study has been published in the journal The Leadership Quarterly.

    Charismatic Leadership Tactics Can Be Learned and Objectively Observed

    A charismatic leadership style can be learned; researchers speak of charismatic leadership tactics, which include verbal, paraverbal and non-verbal means such as metaphors, anecdotes, contrasts, rhetorical questions, pitch and tone of voice, and gestures. CLTs can be objectively observed and measured. They can be selectively changed in randomized controlled trials. “Managers can use the entire range of CLTs in face-to-face meetings. Digital communication reduces the opportunities to signal charisma,” says Nieken. “Depending on the communication channel, visual and/or acoustic cues can be missing. The question is whether people’s performance suffers as a result or if they adjust their expectations to the selected channel.”

    In the first part of her study, Nieken conducted a field test with text, audio and video communication channels in which a task description was presented neutrally in one case and with the use of as many CLTs as possible in the other. In the neutral case, video messages led to lower performance than did audio and text messages. In contrast, there were no significant differences in performance in the CLT case. “The results show a positive correlation between video communication and charismatic communication; the charismatic video led to better performance than the neutral video,” explains Nieken. “So we can conclude that it’s most important for managers to convey a consistent impression when they use the video channel.”

    Traditional Charisma Questionnaires Do Not Predict Staff Performance

    In the second part of her study, Nieken had the different cases assessed with traditional questionnaires like the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) and compared the results with those from the first part. Charisma noted in the questionnaires correlated with the use of CLTs but not with staff performance. “Traditional questionnaires like the MLQ are not suitable for predicting how people will perform in mobile work situations, working from home or in the gig economy,” concludes Nieken. 

    Original publication

    Petra Nieken: Charisma in the gig economy: The impact of digital leadership and communication channels on performance. The Leadership Quarterly, 2022. DOI: 10.1016/j.leaqua.2022.101631

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1048984322000340

    Being “The Research University in the Helmholtz Association”, KIT creates and imparts knowledge for the society and the environment. It is the objective to make significant contributions to the global challenges in the fields of energy, mobility, and information. For this, about 9,800 employees cooperate in a broad range of disciplines in natural sciences, engineering sciences, economics, and the humanities and social sciences. KIT prepares its 22,300 students for responsible tasks in society, industry, and science by offering research-based study programs. Innovation efforts at KIT build a bridge between important scientific findings and their application for the benefit of society, economic prosperity, and the preservation of our natural basis of life. KIT is one of the German universities of excellence.

     

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    Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)

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