The development of gaze to a speaking face.

When a speaker talks, the visible consequences of what they are saying can be seen. Listeners are influenced by this visible speech both in a noisy listening environment and even when auditory speech can easily be heard. While visible influence on heard speech has been reported to increase from early to late childhood, little is known about the mechanism that underlies this developmental trend. One possible account of developmental differences is that looking behavior to the face of a speaker changes with age. To examine this possibility, the gaze to a speaking face was examined in children from 5 to 10 yrs of age and adults. Participants viewed a speaker's face in a range of conditions that elicit looking: in a visual only (speech reading) condition, in the presence of auditory noise (speech in noise) condition, and in an audiovisual mismatch (McGurk) condition. Results indicate an increase in gaze on the face, and specifically, to the mouth of a speaker between the ages of 5 and 10 for all conditions. This change in looking behavior may help account for previous findings in the literature showing that visual influence on heard speech increases with development.

Beyond Versailles: Recovering the Voices of-Nurses in Post-World War I U.S.-European Relations.

From late 1918 to 1922, the American Red Cross (ARC) enlisted roughly six hundred American nurses and scores of female auxiliary staff to labor in post-World War I continental Europe, Russia, and the Near East, mostly stationed in Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Balkan states, and Siberia. The ARC nurses ran health clinics, made home visits, and opened nurse training schools. Close readings of letters, diaries, official reports, and published articles help recover the place of these women in postwar European history and the history of U.S. foreign relations. Their writings reveal their perceptions about eastern European and Russian politics and culture, their assumptions about the proper U.S. role in the region's affairs, and their efforts to influence popular U.S. discourse on these topics. This article argues that American nurses and support staff are central-yet neglected-players in the history of U.S.-European affairs. Through its bottom-up approach, it offers a more personal and intimate perspective on the history of U.S. international relations during this time.

Impaired Driving Performance as Evidence of a Magnocellular Deficit in Dyslexia and Visual Stress.

High comorbidity and an overlap in symptomology have been demonstrated between dyslexia and visual stress. Several researchers have hypothesized an underlying or causal influence that may account for this relationship. The magnocellular theory of dyslexia proposes that a deficit in visuo-temporal processing can explain symptomology for both disorders. If the magnocellular theory holds true, individuals who experience symptomology for these disorders should show impairment on a visuo-temporal task, such as driving. Eighteen male participants formed the sample for this study. Self-report measures assessed dyslexia and visual stress symptomology as well as participant IQ. Participants completed a drive simulation in which errors in response to road signs were measured. Bivariate correlations revealed significant associations between scores on measures of dyslexia and visual stress. Results also demonstrated that self-reported symptomology predicts magnocellular impairment as measured by performance on a driving task. Results from this study suggest that a magnocellular deficit offers a likely explanation for individuals who report high symptomology across both conditions. While conclusions about the impact of these disorders on driving performance should not be derived from this research alone, this study provides a platform for the development of future research, utilizing a clinical population and on-road driving assessment techniques.

Perception of Speech Sounds in School-Aged Children with Speech Sound Disorders.

Children with speech sound disorders may perceive speech differently than children with typical speech development. The nature of these speech differences is reviewed with an emphasis on assessing phoneme-specific perception for speech sounds that are produced in error. Category goodness judgment, or the ability to judge accurate and inaccurate tokens of speech sounds, plays an important role in phonological development. The software Speech Assessment and Interactive Learning System, which has been effectively used to assess preschoolers' ability to perform goodness judgments, is explored for school-aged children with residual speech errors (RSEs). However, data suggest that this particular task may not be sensitive to perceptual differences in school-aged children. The need for the development of clinical tools for assessment of speech perception in school-aged children with RSE is highlighted, and clinical suggestions are provided.

Development of an audiovisual speech perception app for children with autism spectrum disorders.

Perception of spoken language requires attention to acoustic as well as visible phonetic information. This article reviews the known differences in audiovisual speech perception in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and specifies the need for interventions that address this construct. Elements of an audiovisual training program are described. This researcher-developed program delivered via an iPad app presents natural speech in the context of increasing noise, but supported with a speaking face. Children are cued to attend to visible articulatory information to assist in perception of the spoken words. Data from four children with ASD ages 8-10 are presented showing that the children improved their performance on an untrained auditory speech-in-noise task.

Development of phonological constancy: 19-month-olds, but not 15-month-olds, identify words in a non-native regional accent.

By 12 months, children grasp that a phonetic change to a word can change its identity (phonological distinctiveness). However, they must also grasp that some phonetic changes do not (phonological constancy). To test development of phonological constancy, sixteen 15-month-olds and sixteen 19-month-olds completed an eye-tracking task that tracked their gaze to named versus unnamed images for familiar words spoken in their native (Australian) and an unfamiliar non-native (Jamaican) regional accent of English. Both groups looked longer at named than unnamed images for Australian pronunciations, but only 19-month-olds did so for Jamaican pronunciations, indicating that phonological constancy emerges by 19 months. Vocabulary size predicted 15-month-olds' identifications for the Jamaican pronunciations, suggesting vocabulary growth is a viable predictor for phonological constancy development.

Event-Related Potentials in Assessing Visual Speech Cues in the Broader Autism Phenotype: Evidence from a Phonemic Restoration Paradigm.

Audiovisual speech perception includes the simultaneous processing of auditory and visual speech. Deficits in audiovisual speech perception are reported in autistic individuals; however, less is known regarding audiovisual speech perception within the broader autism phenotype (BAP), which includes individuals with elevated, yet subclinical, levels of autistic traits. We investigate the neural indices of audiovisual speech perception in adults exhibiting a range of autism-like traits using event-related potentials (ERPs) in a phonemic restoration paradigm. In this paradigm, we consider conditions where speech articulators (mouth and jaw) are present (AV condition) and obscured by a pixelated mask (PX condition). These two face conditions were included in both passive (simply viewing a speaking face) and active (participants were required to press a button for a specific consonant-vowel stimulus) experiments. The results revealed an N100 ERP component which was present for all listening contexts and conditions; however, it was attenuated in the active AV condition where participants were able to view the speaker's face, including the mouth and jaw. The P300 ERP component was present within the active experiment only, and significantly greater within the AV condition compared to the PX condition. This suggests increased neural effort for detecting deviant stimuli when visible articulation was present and visual influence on perception. Finally, the P300 response was negatively correlated with autism-like traits, suggesting that higher autistic traits were associated with generally smaller P300 responses in the active AV and PX conditions. The conclusions support the finding that atypical audiovisual processing may be characteristic of the BAP in adults.

Neural and Behavioral Differences in Speech Perception for Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders Within an Audiovisual Context.

PURPOSE: Reduced use of visible articulatory information on a speaker's face has been implicated as a possible contributor to language deficits in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We employ an audiovisual (AV) phonemic restoration paradigm to measure behavioral performance (button press) and event-related potentials (ERPs) of visual speech perception in children with ASD and their neurotypical peers to assess potential neural substrates that contribute to group differences. METHOD: Two sets of speech stimuli, /ba/-"/a/" ("/a/" was created from the /ba/ token by a reducing the initial consonant) and /ba/-/pa/, were presented within an auditory oddball paradigm to children aged 6-13 years with ASD (n = 17) and typical development (TD; n = 33) within two conditions. The AV condition contained a fully visible speaking face; the pixelated (PX) condition included a face, but the mouth and jaw were PX, removing all articulatory information. When articulatory features were present for the /ba/-"/a/" contrast, it was expected that the influence of the visual articulators would facilitate a phonemic restoration effect in which "/a/" would be perceived as /ba/. ERPs were recorded during the experiment while children were required to press a button for the deviant sound for both sets of speech contrasts within both conditions. RESULTS: Button press data revealed that TD children were more accurate in discriminating between /ba/-"/a/" and /ba/-/pa/ contrasts in the PX condition relative to the ASD group. ERPs in response to the /ba/-/pa/ contrast within both AV and PX conditions differed between children with ASD and TD children (earlier P300 responses for children with ASD). CONCLUSION: Children with ASD differ in the underlying neural mechanisms responsible for speech processing compared with TD peers within an AV context.

Where on the face do we look during phonemic restoration: An eye-tracking study.

Face to face communication typically involves audio and visual components to the speech signal. To examine the effect of task demands on gaze patterns in response to a speaking face, adults participated in two eye-tracking experiments with an audiovisual (articulatory information from the mouth was visible) and a pixelated condition (articulatory information was not visible). Further, task demands were manipulated by having listeners respond in a passive (no response) or an active (button press response) context. The active experiment required participants to discriminate between speech stimuli and was designed to mimic environmental situations which require one to use visual information to disambiguate the speaker's message, simulating different listening conditions in real-world settings. Stimuli included a clear exemplar of the syllable /ba/ and a second exemplar in which the formant initial consonant was reduced creating an /a/-like consonant. Consistent with our hypothesis, results revealed that the greatest fixations to the mouth were present in the audiovisual active experiment and visual articulatory information led to a phonemic restoration effect for the /a/ speech token. In the pixelated condition, participants fixated on the eyes, and discrimination of the deviant token within the active experiment was significantly greater than the audiovisual condition. These results suggest that when required to disambiguate changes in speech, adults may look to the mouth for additional cues to support processing when it is available.

Audiovisual Speech Perception in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders: Evidence from Visual Phonemic Restoration.

Children with autism spectrum disorders have been reported to be less influenced by a speaker's face during speech perception than those with typically development. To more closely examine these reported differences, a novel visual phonemic restoration paradigm was used to assess neural signatures (event-related potentials [ERPs]) of audiovisual processing in typically developing children and in children with autism spectrum disorder. Video of a speaker saying the syllable /ba/ was paired with (1) a synthesized /ba/ or (2) a synthesized syllable derived from /ba/ in which auditory cues for the consonant were substantially weakened, thereby sounding more like /a/. The auditory stimuli are easily discriminable; however, in the context of a visual /ba/, the auditory /a/ is typically perceived as /ba/, producing a visual phonemic restoration. Only children with ASD showed a large /ba/-/a/ discrimination response in the presence of a speaker producing /ba/, suggesting reduced influence of visual speech.

Can children with autism spectrum disorders "hear" a speaking face?

This study used eye-tracking methodology to assess audiovisual speech perception in 26 children ranging in age from 5 to 15 years, half with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and half with typical development. Given the characteristic reduction in gaze to the faces of others in children with ASD, it was hypothesized that they would show reduced influence of visual information on heard speech. Responses were compared on a set of auditory, visual, and audiovisual speech perception tasks. Even when fixated on the face of the speaker, children with ASD were less visually influenced than typical development controls. This indicates fundamental differences in the processing of audiovisual speech in children with ASD, which may contribute to their language and communication impairments.

Functional activation for imitation of seen and heard speech.

This study examined fMRI activation when perceivers either passively observed or observed and imitated matched or mismatched audiovisual ("McGurk") speech stimuli. Greater activation was observed in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) overall for imitation than for perception of audiovisual speech and for imitation of the McGurk-type mismatched stimuli than matched audiovisual stimuli. This unique activation in the IFG during imitation of incongruent audiovisual speech may reflect activation associated with direct matching of incongruent auditory and visual stimuli or conflict between category responses. This study provides novel data about the underlying neurobiology of imitation and integration of AV speech.

Nurses without borders: the history of nursing as U.S. international history.

During World War I and its aftermath, thousands of U.S. nurses put their domestic careers on hold to work overseas. Many volunteered in the wake of war and disaster. Others worked as instructors in nursing schools and as the staff of fledgling public health agencies. This article charts the international travels of four especially mobile nurses, whose globetrotting careers took them to Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean. These women aspired to tackle world health issues, motivated by the conviction that the spread of U.S. professional nursing ideas stood to modernize the world. This article tells these nurses' stories and analyzes their ideologies of development and progress. In so doing, it demonstrates that professional women, working outside state channels, played a principal role in expanding U.S. influence in the world. Moreover, it makes the case for the centrality of nursing history to the history of U.S. foreign relations.

The mere presence of a mobile phone: Does it influence driving performance?

The ubiquity of mobile phones has led to a rapid increase in its presence and use in vehicles, especially among young adults (up to 25 years), who are generally the least experienced group of drivers. The potential for phones to draw attention away from the main driving task has significant consequences for road safety. Previous studies have found that the mere presence of a mobile phone can be distracting by impairing attention in experimental non-driving contexts. However, the effect of phone presence, independent to usage, has not yet been examined in the context of driving. As such, the present study examined whether the mere presence of a mobile phone, its proximity to the driver, and power status (on/off) influenced the driving performance of young drivers. Additionally, this study assessed whether the effects of phone presence and proximity were moderated by an individual's level of dependence on, or emotional attachment to, their phone. A sample of 127 undergraduate psychology students (M = 19.76, SD = 1.63) were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: (1) phone absent (control), (2) phone on, in holder, (3) phone off, in holder, and (4) phone on, in pocket. They all completed the same simulated drive, and were measured for degree of phone dependence and phone emotional attachment. Overall, drivers in all the phone present conditions made significantly more driving errors (speeding and collision) compared to those in the phone absent (control) condition, irrespective of proximity to the phone and whether it was on or off. Phone dependence, but not phone emotional attachment, moderated the effect of phone presence on speeding behaviour. These findings suggest that the mere presence of a phone is distracting for drivers, especially so for those who are highly dependent on their phone, which may place them at a greater risk of a distraction induced crash.

N400 amplitude, latency, and variability reflect temporal integration of beat gesture and pitch accent during language processing.

This study examines how across-trial (average) and trial-by-trial (variability in) amplitude and latency of the N400 event-related potential (ERP) reflect temporal integration of pitch accent and beat gesture. Thirty native English speakers viewed videos of a talker producing sentences with beat gesture co-occurring with a pitch accented focus word (synchronous), beat gesture co-occurring with the onset of a subsequent non-focused word (asynchronous), or the absence of beat gesture (no beat). Across trials, increased amplitude and earlier latency were observed when beat gesture was temporally asynchronous with pitch accenting than when it was temporally synchronous with pitch accenting or absent. Moreover, temporal asynchrony of beat gesture relative to pitch accent increased trial-by-trial variability of N400 amplitude and latency and influenced the relationship between across-trial and trial-by-trial N400 latency. These results indicate that across-trial and trial-by-trial amplitude and latency of the N400 ERP reflect temporal integration of beat gesture and pitch accent during language comprehension, supporting extension of the integrated systems hypothesis of gesture-speech processing and neural noise theories to focus processing in typical adult populations.

Audiovisual processing in children with and without autism spectrum disorders.

Fifteen children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and twenty-one children without ASD completed six perceptual tasks designed to characterize the nature of the audiovisual processing difficulties experienced by children with ASD. Children with ASD scored significantly lower than children without ASD on audiovisual tasks involving human faces and voices, but scored similarly to children without ASD on audiovisual tasks involving nonhuman stimuli (bouncing balls). Results suggest that children with ASD may use visual information for speech differently from children without ASD. Exploratory results support an inverse association between audiovisual speech processing capacities and social impairment in children with ASD.

Electrophysiological Indices of Audiovisual Speech Perception: Beyond the McGurk Effect and Speech in Noise.

Visual information on a talker's face can influence what a listener hears. Commonly used approaches to study this include mismatched audiovisual stimuli (e.g., McGurk type stimuli) or visual speech in auditory noise. In this paper we discuss potential limitations of these approaches and introduce a novel visual phonemic restoration method. This method always presents the same visual stimulus (e.g., /ba/) dubbed with a matched auditory stimulus (/ba/) or one that has weakened consonantal information and sounds more /a/-like). When this reduced auditory stimulus (or /a/) is dubbed with the visual /ba/, a visual influence will result in effectively 'restoring' the weakened auditory cues so that the stimulus is perceived as a /ba/. An oddball design in which participants are asked to detect the /a/ among a stream of more frequently occurring /ba/s while either a speaking face or face with no visual speech was used. In addition, the same paradigm was presented for a second contrast in which participants detected /pa/ among /ba/s, a contrast which should be unaltered by the presence of visual speech. Behavioral and some ERP findings reflect the expected phonemic restoration for the /ba/ vs. /a/ contrast; specifically, we observed reduced accuracy and P300 response in the presence of visual speech. Further, we report an unexpected finding of reduced accuracy and P300 response for both speech contrasts in the presence of visual speech, suggesting overall modulation of the auditory signal in the presence of visual speech. Consistent with this, we observed a mismatch negativity (MMN) effect for the /ba/ vs. /pa/ contrast only that was larger in absence of visual speech. We discuss the potential utility for this paradigm for listeners who cannot respond actively, such as infants and individuals with developmental disabilities.

Audiovisual speech perception: A new approach and implications for clinical populations.

This selected overview of audiovisual (AV) speech perception examines the influence of visible articulatory information on what is heard. Thought to be a cross-cultural phenomenon that emerges early in typical language development, variables that influence AV speech perception include properties of the visual and the auditory signal, attentional demands, and individual differences. A brief review of the existing neurobiological evidence on how visual information influences heard speech indicates potential loci, timing, and facilitatory effects of AV over auditory only speech. The current literature on AV speech in certain clinical populations (individuals with an autism spectrum disorder, developmental language disorder, or hearing loss) reveals differences in processing that may inform interventions. Finally, a new method of assessing AV speech that does not require obvious cross-category mismatch or auditory noise was presented as a novel approach for investigators.

The effects of anti-speeding advertisements on the simulated driving behaviour of young drivers.

Recent examinations of road safety communications, including anti-speeding advertisements, have considered the differential effects of positive and negative emotional appeals on driver behaviour. However, empirical evaluations of anti-speeding messages have largely relied on measures of viewers' reported intentions to comply with speed limits and the self-reported driving behaviour of viewers post-exposure, which might not be indicative of the direct effects that these messages have on real-world driving behaviour. The current research constitutes a first empirical evaluation of different real-world anti-speeding advertisements, as measured by their effects on young drivers' speeding behaviour, using a driving simulator. Licensed drivers (N=116) aged 17-25 years completed driving measures prior to, immediately following, and 7-10days after viewing one of four social marketing advertisements. Results indicated that young drivers' average driving speeds were modestly reduced immediately after they viewed an anti-speeding advertisement that depicted social consequences for speeding and employed a positive emotional appeal when compared to an emotion-matched control advertisement; however, this effect was not found for the anti-speeding advertisement depicting a crash. Interestingly, the results based on reported intentions to reduce speeding predicted the opposite pattern of results. However, there was no evidence that the immediate changes to speeding were maintained 7-10days later, and prompts during Phase 2 did not appear to have an effect. The implications of these findings for road safety advertisements targeting young drivers are discussed.