Normative nasalance scores for Estonian children.

Normative nasalance scores are essential for the treatment and assessment purposes for clinicians. Till date, no studies have been done on nasalance in Estonia. This research was conducted to develop Estonia-specific optimized speech stimuli for Nasometer II and establish the normative nasalance scores. Ninety-two randomly selected healthy and 14 cleft palate Estonian monolingual children, aged four to seven years, were included as participants. Estonian language-specific test material was developed. The Estonian test material consisted of 24 speech stimuli. Based on the phoneme content, the stimuli were divided into three groups: (1) sentences that included oral and nasal phonemes and targeted the same phoneme distribution as in spontaneous speech, (2) sentences that included only oral phonemes and (3) sentences that were loaded with nasal phonemes. Nasometer II software was used to calculate the nasalance scores for each child and each sentence. Results indicated that there were significant differences in nasalance scores for oronasal and oral stimuli scores, and no significant differences were found in nasal stimuli scores between the study and control group. The threshold for oronasal stimuli was 42.1-18.9, oral stimuli was 27.9-3.9 and nasal stimuli was 69.4-46.2. In conclusion, Estonia-specific optimized speech stimuli were developed and normative nasalance scores were established. These normative scores can be used for the diagnosis and follow-up treatment of patients with resonance disorders, especially for patients with cleft palate.

Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Effects in Estonian Spontaneous Speech.

Recent evidence indicates that a word's paradigmatic neighbors affect production. However, these findings have mostly been obtained in careful laboratory settings using words in isolation, and thus ignoring potential effects that may arise from the syntagmatic context, which is typically present in spontaneous speech. The current corpus analysis investigates paradigmatic and syntagmatic effects in Estonian spontaneous speech. Following work on English, we focus on the duration of inflected and uninflected word-final /-s/ in content words, while simultaneously investigating whole words. Our analyses reveal three points. First, we find an effect of realized inflectional paradigm size, such that smaller paradigms actively used by the speakers lead to longer durations. Second, higher conditional probability is associated with shorter word forms and shorter segments. Finally, we do not directly replicate previous work on effects of inflectional status as in English word-final /-s/. Instead, we find that inflectional status interacts with conditional probability. We discuss the results in light of models of speech production and how they account for morphologically complex words and their paradigmatic neighbors.

Maturation of the mismatch response in pre-school children: Systematic literature review and meta-analysis.

Event-related potentials (ERPs), specifically the Mismatch Response (MMR), holds promise for investigating auditory maturation in children. It has the potential to predict language development and distinguish between language-impaired and typically developing groups. However, summarizing the MMR's developmental trajectory in typically developing children remains challenging despite numerous studies. This pioneering meta-analysis outlines changes in MMR amplitude among typically developing children, while offering methodological best-practices. Our search identified 51 articles for methodology analysis and 21 for meta-analysis, involving 0-8-year-old participants from 2000 to 2022. Risk of Bias assessment and methodology analysis revealed shortcomings in control condition usage and reporting of study confounders. The meta-analysis results were inconsistent, indicating large effect sizes in some conditions and no effect sizes in others. Subgroup analysis revealed the main effects of age and brain region, as well as an interaction of age and time-window of the MMR. Future research requires a specific protocol, larger samples, and replication studies to deepen the understanding of the auditory discrimination maturation process in children.

The bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems.

The bouba/kiki effect-the association of the nonce word bouba with a round shape and kiki with a spiky shape-is a type of correspondence between speech sounds and visual properties with potentially deep implications for the evolution of spoken language. However, there is debate over the robustness of the effect across cultures and the influence of orthography. We report an online experiment that tested the bouba/kiki effect across speakers of 25 languages representing nine language families and 10 writing systems. Overall, we found strong evidence for the effect across languages, with bouba eliciting more congruent responses than kiki. Participants who spoke languages with Roman scripts were only marginally more likely to show the effect, and analysis of the orthographic shape of the words in different scripts showed that the effect was no stronger for scripts that use rounder forms for bouba and spikier forms for kiki. These results confirm that the bouba/kiki phenomenon is rooted in crossmodal correspondence between aspects of the voice and visual shape, largely independent of orthography. They provide the strongest demonstration to date that the bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems. This article is part of the theme issue 'Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part II)'.

Perceptual Asymmetries and Auditory Processing of Estonian Quantities.

Similar to visual perception, auditory perception also has a clearly described "pop-out" effect, where an element with some extra feature is easier to detect among elements without an extra feature. This phenomenon is better known as auditory perceptual asymmetry. We investigated such asymmetry between shorter or longer duration, and level or falling of pitch of linguistic stimuli that carry a meaning in one language (Estonian), but not in another (Russian). For the mismatch negativity (MMN) experiment, we created four different types of stimuli by modifying the duration of the first vowel [ɑ] (170, 290 ms) and pitch contour (level vs. falling pitch) of the stimuli words ('SATA,' 'SAKI'). The stimuli were synthesized from Estonian words ('SATA,' 'SAKI') and follow the Estonian language three-way quantity system, which incorporates tonal features (falling pitch contour) together with temporal patterns. This made the meaning of the word dependent on the combination of both features and allows us to compare the relative contribution of duration and pitch contour in discrimination of language stimuli in the brain via MMN generation. The participants of the experiment were 12 Russian native speakers with little or no experience in Estonian and living in Estonia short-term, and 12 Estonian native speakers (age 18-27 years). We found that participants' perception of the linguistic stimuli differed not only according to the physical features but also according to their native language, confirming that the meaning of the word interferes with the early automatic processing of phonological features. The GAMM and ANOVA analysis of the reversed design results showed that the deviant with longer duration among shorter standards elicited a MMN response with greater amplitude than the short deviant among long standards, while changes in pitch contour (falling vs. level pitch) produced neither strong MMN nor asymmetry. Thus, we demonstrate the effect of language background on asymmetric perception of linguistic stimuli that aligns with those of previous studies (Jaramillo et al., 2000), and contributes to the growing body of knowledge supporting auditory perceptual asymmetry.

Novel vocalizations are understood across cultures.

Linguistic communication requires speakers to mutually agree on the meanings of words, but how does such a system first get off the ground? One solution is to rely on iconic gestures: visual signs whose form directly resembles or otherwise cues their meaning without any previously established correspondence. However, it is debated whether vocalizations could have played a similar role. We report the first extensive cross-cultural study investigating whether people from diverse linguistic backgrounds can understand novel vocalizations for a range of meanings. In two comprehension experiments, we tested whether vocalizations produced by English speakers could be understood by listeners from 28 languages from 12 language families. Listeners from each language were more accurate than chance at guessing the intended referent of the vocalizations for each of the meanings tested. Our findings challenge the often-cited idea that vocalizations have limited potential for iconic representation, demonstrating that in the absence of words people can use vocalizations to communicate a variety of meanings.