Leendert Plug

Using interactional and linguistic analysis to distinguish between epileptic and psychogenic nonepileptic seizures: A prospective, blinded multirater study

This study was carried out to test the suggestion that close interactional and linguistic examination of the communication between neurologists and patients during a first encounter can contribute to the differential diagnosis of epilepsy or psychogenic nonepileptic seizures. Twenty unselected patients admitted for video/EEG telemetry because of diagnostic uncertainty were included. Two linguists blinded to all medical data independently studied video recordings and transcripts of 25- to 35-minute interactions. They attempted to predict the medical diagnosis on the basis of qualitative assessments addressing 17 separate observations. They also used a diagnostic scoring aid (DSA) to convert their qualitative assessments into a simple numeric score. Using qualitative assessment, both linguists predicted 17 of 20 (85%) diagnoses (kappa=0.59). With the DSA, diagnoses were predicted with a sensitivity of 85.7% (71.4%) and a specificity of 84.6% (92.3%). This blinded, prospective multirater study confirms the diagnostic value of linguistic and interactional observations in the seizure clinic setting.

Seizure metaphors differ in patients' accounts of epileptic and psychogenic nonepileptic seizures

Purpose:  To increase understanding of the subjective symptomatology of seizure experiences and improve differential diagnosis by studying the seizure metaphors used by patients with (psychogenic) nonepileptic seizures (NES) and epilepsy.

Phonetic reduction and informational redundancy in self-initiated self-repair in Dutch

This paper presents a phonetic analysis of instances of self-initiated self-repair taken from a corpus of Dutch conversation, focusing on their temporal and articulatory characteristics. In particular, the paper investigates whether error repairs and appropriateness repairs, two subtypes of self-repair which differ in the degree of informational redundancy of the repair stretch, are different in terms of the phonetic relationship between reparandum and repair stretch. One might expect error repairs, whose repair stretch is more informative than that of appropriateness repairs, to be associated with local hyperarticulation in the repair stretch, while appropriateness repairs are more likely to be associated with phonetic reduction. Furthermore, the frequent presence of informationally redundant editing terms and repeated lexical items is expected to result in variation within the repair stretch along a hypo–hyper continuum. The paper reports on temporal measurements with controls for the internal structure of the repair, as well as auditory analysis and an attempt at quantifying a ‘reduction quotient’ for the stretches involved. The results show that local hyperarticulation is rare, and increased phonetic reduction in the repair stretch widespread. No significant differences between error and appropriateness repairs are observed. The findings are discussed with reference to the role of information status and pragmatic constraints in governing variation in speech production.

Lenition, fortition and the status of plosive affrication: the case of spontaneous RP English /t/ *

This paper reports on a phonetic and phonological study of /t/-affrication in spontaneous British English Received Pronunciation. The study is motivated by the uncertainty surrounding plosive affrication in the literature on lenition and fortition. We suggest that a decision as to the status of a given pattern involving affrication in terms of lenition or fortition should be based on thorough phonetic and phonological analysis. We present a phonetic and phonological account of /t/-affrication, which takes into consideration the temporal and spectral characteristics of the sounds involved, as well as their distribution across phonological environments. Crucially, we compare affricated instances of /t/ with aspirated and fricated ones in the same dataset ― the former arguably unmarked in this variety, the latter uncontroversially the result of lenition. We argue that the phonetic and phonological characteristics of /t/-affrication presented in this paper are consistent with an account in terms of fortition rather than lenition.

Timing and tempo in spontaneous phonological error repair

This paper reports on a study of the temporal characteristics of phonological error repair in spontaneous Dutch speech, with a focus on how the articulation rate of the correct target word production — the repair — compares to that of the preceding erroneous target word attempt — the reparandum. The study is motivated by two findings from recent independent studies: first, that self-repair is generally associated with relative temporal compression — that is, a local increase in articulation rate — following the repair initiation; second, that the timing of the repair initiation relative to the error is consequential for the prosody of the repair component. This study investigates to what extent these findings generalise to a collection of spontaneous phonological error repairs sampled from the Spoken Dutch Corpus. The study also asks how best to quantify repair timing, considers whether timing is consequential for the duration of the ‘offset-to-repair interval’, and tests for effects of lexical frequency. The results confirm that temporal compression following the repair initiation is more common than temporal expansion, and that repair timing has a significant effect on both offset-to-repair duration and repair tempo — at least in a subset of the data. A frequency effect is also observed. The results suggest that proportional measures of target word completeness provide the most informative quantifications of repair timing in modelling the overall temporal organisation of phonological error repairs.

Informativeness, Timing and Tempo in Lexical Self-Repair

This paper presents a study of the temporal organization of lexical repair in spontaneous Dutch speech. It assesses the extent to which offset-to-repair duration and repair tempo can be predicted on the basis of offset timing, reparandum tempo and measures of the informativeness of the crucial lexical items in the repair. Specifically, we address the expectations that repairs that are initiated relatively early are produced relatively fast throughout, and that relatively highly informative repairs are produced relatively slowly. For informativeness, we implement measures based on repair semantics, lexical frequency counts and cloze probabilities. Our results highlight differences between factual and linguistic error repairs, which have not been consistently distinguished in previous studies, and provide some evidence to support the notion that repairs that are initiated relatively early are produced relatively fast. They confirm that lexical frequency counts are rough measures of contextual predictability at best, and reveal very few significant effects of our informativeness measures on the temporal organization of lexical self-repair. Moreover, although we can confirm that most repairs have a repair portion that is fast relative to its reparandum, this cannot be attributed to the relative informativeness of the two portions. Our findings inform the current debate on the division of labour between inner and overt speech monitoring, and suggest that, although the influence of informativeness on speech production is extensive, it is not ubiquitous.