Nonword Repetition
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250px, Children copy with their own mouths the words spoken by the mouths of those around them. That enables them to learn the pronunciation of words not already in their vocabulary. Speech repetition occurs when individuals speech, speak the sounds that they have heard another person Speech production, pronounce or say. In other words, it is the saying by one individual of the spoken vocalizations made by another individual. Speech repetition requires the person repeating the utterance to have the ability to map the sounds that they hear from the other person's oral pronunciation to similar
places Place may refer to: Geography * Place (United States Census Bureau), defined as any concentration of population ** Census-designated place, a populated area lacking its own municipal government * "Place", a type of street or road name ** Oft ...
and
manners of articulation In articulatory phonetics, the manner of articulation is the configuration and interaction of the articulators (speech organs such as the tongue, lips, and palate) when making a speech sound. One parameter of manner is ''stricture,'' that is, h ...
in their own
vocal tract The vocal tract is the cavity in human bodies and in animals where the sound produced at the sound source (larynx in mammals; syrinx in birds) is filtered. In birds, it consists of the trachea, the syrinx, the oral cavity, the upper part of t ...
. Such speech imitation often occurs independently of speech comprehension such as in
speech shadowing Speech shadowing is a psycholinguistic experimental technique in which subjects repeat speech at a delay to the onset of hearing the phrase. The time between hearing the speech and responding, is how long the brain takes to process and produce spe ...
in which people automatically say words heard in
earphones Headphones are a pair of small loudspeaker drivers worn on or around the head over a user's ears. They are electroacoustic transducers, which convert an electrical signal to a corresponding sound. Headphones let a single user listen to an ...
, and the pathological condition of
echolalia Echolalia is the unsolicited repetition of vocalizations made by another person; when repeated by the same person, it is called palilalia. In its profound form it is automatic and effortless. It is one of the echophenomena, closely related to ...
in which people
reflex In biology, a reflex, or reflex action, is an involuntary, unplanned sequence or action and nearly instantaneous response to a stimulus. Reflexes are found with varying levels of complexity in organisms with a nervous system. A reflex occurs ...
ively repeat overheard words. That links to speech repetition of words being separate in the
brain The brain is an organ (biology), organ that serves as the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals. It consists of nervous tissue and is typically located in the head (cephalization), usually near organs for ...
to
speech perception Speech perception is the process by which the sounds of language are heard, interpreted, and understood. The study of speech perception is closely linked to the fields of phonology and phonetics in linguistics and cognitive psychology and percept ...
. Speech repetition occurs in the dorsal speech processing stream, and speech perception occurs in the ventral speech processing stream. Repetitions are often incorporated unawares by that route into spontaneous novel sentences immediately or after delay after the storage in phonological memory. In humans, the ability to map heard input vocalizations into motor output is highly developed because of the copying ability playing a critical role in children's rapid expansion of their spoken vocabulary. In older children and adults, that ability remains important, as it enables the continued learning of novel words and names and additional languages. That repetition is also necessary for the propagation of language from generation to generation. It has also been suggested that the phonetic units out of which speech is made have been selected upon by the process of vocabulary expansion and vocabulary transmissions because children prefer to copy words in terms of more easily imitated elementary units.


Properties


Automatic

Vocal imitation happens quickly: words can be repeated within 250-300
millisecond A millisecond (from '' milli-'' and second; symbol: ms) is a unit of time in the International System of Units equal to one thousandth (0.001 or 10−3 or 1/1000) of a second or 1000 microseconds. A millisecond is to one second, as one second i ...
s both in normals (during
speech shadowing Speech shadowing is a psycholinguistic experimental technique in which subjects repeat speech at a delay to the onset of hearing the phrase. The time between hearing the speech and responding, is how long the brain takes to process and produce spe ...
) and during
echolalia Echolalia is the unsolicited repetition of vocalizations made by another person; when repeated by the same person, it is called palilalia. In its profound form it is automatic and effortless. It is one of the echophenomena, closely related to ...
. The imitation of speech syllables possibly happens even more quickly: people begin imitating the second phone in the syllable oearlier than they can identify it (out of the set o æand i. Indeed, "...simply executing a shift to upon detection of a second vowel in otakes very little longer than does interpreting and executing it as a shadowed response". Neurobiologically this suggests "...that the early phases of speech analysis yield information which is directly convertible to information required for speech production". Vocal repetition can be done immediately as in speech shadowing and echolalia. It can also be done after the pattern of pronunciation is stored in
short-term memory Short-term memory (or "primary" or "active memory") is the capacity for holding a small amount of information in an active, readily available state for a short interval. For example, short-term memory holds a phone number that has just been recit ...
or
long-term memory Long-term memory (LTM) is the stage of the Atkinson–Shiffrin memory model in which informative knowledge is held indefinitely. It is defined in contrast to sensory memory, the initial stage, and short-term or working memory, the second stage ...
. It automatically uses both auditory and where available visual information about how a word is produced. The automatic nature of speech repetition was noted by
Carl Wernicke Carl (or Karl) Wernicke (; ; 15 May 1848 – 15 June 1905) was a German physician, anatomist, psychiatrist and neuropathologist. He is known for his influential research into the pathological effects of specific forms of encephalopathy and also ...
, the late nineteenth century
neurologist Neurology (from , "string, nerve" and the suffix -logia, "study of") is the branch of medicine dealing with the diagnosis and treatment of all categories of conditions and disease involving the nervous system, which comprises the brain, the ...
, who observed that "The primary speech movements, enacted before the development of consciousness, are reflexive and mimicking in nature..".Wernicke K. The aphasia symptom-complex. 1874. Breslau, Cohn and Weigert. Translated in: Eling P, editor. Reader in the history of aphasia. Vol. 4. Amsterdam: John Benjamins; 1994. p. 69–89.


Independent of speech

Vocal imitation arises in
development Development or developing may refer to: Arts *Development (music), the process by which thematic material is reshaped * Photographic development *Filmmaking, development phase, including finance and budgeting * Development hell, when a proje ...
before speech comprehension and also
babbling A babbling infant, age 6 months, making ''ba'' and ''ma'' sounds Babbling is a stage in child development and a state in language acquisition during which an infant appears to be experimenting with uttering articulate sounds, but does not y ...
: 18-week-old
infants In common terminology, a baby is the very young offspring of adult human beings, while infant (from the Latin word ''infans'', meaning 'baby' or 'child') is a formal or specialised synonym. The terms may also be used to refer to juveniles of ...
spontaneously copy vocal expressions provided the accompanying voice matches. Imitation of
vowels A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...
has been found as young as 12 weeks. It is independent of native language, language skills, word comprehension and a speaker's
intelligence Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. It can be described as t ...
. Many
autistic Autism, also known as autism spectrum disorder (ASD), is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by differences or difficulties in social communication and interaction, a preference for predictability and routine, sensory processing di ...
and some
mentally disabled Developmental disability is a diverse group of chronic conditions, comprising mental or physical impairments that arise before adulthood. Developmental disabilities cause individuals living with them many difficulties in certain areas of life, espe ...
people engage in the echolalia of overheard words (often their only vocal interaction with others) without understanding what they echo. Reflex uncontrolled echoing of others words and sentences occurs in roughly half of those with
Gilles de la Tourette syndrome Tourette syndrome (TS), or simply Tourette's, is a common neurodevelopmental disorder that begins in childhood or adolescence. It is characterized by multiple movement (motor) tics and at least one vocal (phonic) tic. Common tics are blinkin ...
. The ability to repeat words without comprehension also occurs in mixed transcortical aphasia where it links to the sparing of the short-term phonological store. The ability to repeat and imitate speech sounds occurs separately to that of normal speech. Speech shadowing provides evidence of a 'privileged' input/output speech loop that is distinct to the other components of the speech system.McLeod P. Posner MI. (1984). Privileged loops from percept to act. In H. Bouma D. Bouwhuis, (Eds), Attention and performance X (pp. 55-66). Hillsdale, NJ, Erlbaum.
Neurocognitive Neurocognitive functions are cognitive functions closely linked to the function of particular areas, neural pathways, or cortical networks in the brain, ultimately served by the substrate of the brain's neurological matrix (i.e. at the cellular a ...
research likewise finds evidence of a direct (nonlexical) link between phonological analysis input and motor programming output.


Effector independent

Speech sounds can be imitatively mapped into vocal articulations in spite of vocal tract anatomy differences in size and shape due to
gender Gender is the range of social, psychological, cultural, and behavioral aspects of being a man (or boy), woman (or girl), or third gender. Although gender often corresponds to sex, a transgender person may identify with a gender other tha ...
,
age Age or AGE may refer to: Time and its effects * Age, the amount of time someone has been alive or something has existed ** East Asian age reckoning, an Asian system of marking age starting at 1 * Ageing or aging, the process of becoming older ...
and individual
anatomical Anatomy () is the branch of morphology concerned with the study of the internal structure of organisms and their parts. Anatomy is a branch of natural science that deals with the structural organization of living things. It is an old scien ...
variability. Such variability is extensive making input output mapping of speech more complex than a simple mapping of vocal track movements. The shape of the mouth varies widely:
dentist A dentist, also known as a dental doctor, dental physician, dental surgeon, is a health care professional who specializes in dentistry, the branch of medicine focused on the teeth, gums, and mouth. The dentist's supporting team aids in provi ...
s recognize three basic shapes of
palate The palate () is the roof of the mouth in humans and other mammals. It separates the oral cavity from the nasal cavity. A similar structure is found in crocodilians, but in most other tetrapods, the oral and nasal cavities are not truly sep ...
: trapezoid, ovoid, and triangular; six types of
malocclusion In orthodontics, a malocclusion is a misalignment or incorrect relation between the teeth of the upper and lower dental arches when they approach each other as the jaws close. The English-language term dates from 1864; Edward Angle (1855–1 ...
between the two
jaw The jaws are a pair of opposable articulated structures at the entrance of the mouth, typically used for grasping and manipulating food. The term ''jaws'' is also broadly applied to the whole of the structures constituting the vault of the mouth ...
s; nine ways teeth relate to the
dental arch The dental arches are the two arches (crescent arrangements) of teeth, one on each jaw, that together constitute the dentition. In humans and many other species, the superior (maxillary or upper) dental arch is a little larger than the inferi ...
and a wide range of
maxilla In vertebrates, the maxilla (: maxillae ) is the upper fixed (not fixed in Neopterygii) bone of the jaw formed from the fusion of two maxillary bones. In humans, the upper jaw includes the hard palate in the front of the mouth. The two maxil ...
ry and
mandible In jawed vertebrates, the mandible (from the Latin ''mandibula'', 'for chewing'), lower jaw, or jawbone is a bone that makes up the lowerand typically more mobilecomponent of the mouth (the upper jaw being known as the maxilla). The jawbone i ...
deformities. Vocal sound can also vary due to dental injury and
dental caries Tooth decay, also known as caries,The word 'caries' is a mass noun, and is not a plural of 'carie'.'' is the breakdown of teeth due to acids produced by bacteria. The resulting cavities may be a number of different colors, from yellow to black ...
. Other factors that do not impede the sensory motor mapping needed for vocal imitation are gross oral deformations such as
hare-lip A cleft lip contains an opening in the upper lip that may extend into the nose. The opening may be on one side, both sides, or in the middle. A cleft palate occurs when the palate (the roof of the mouth) contains an opening into the nasal cavi ...
s,
cleft palate A cleft lip contains an opening in the upper lip that may extend into the nose. The opening may be on one side, both sides, or in the middle. A cleft palate occurs when the palate (the roof of the mouth) contains an opening into the nose. The ...
s or amputations of the tongue tip, pipe smoking, pencil biting and teeth clinching (such as in
ventriloquism Ventriloquism or ventriloquy is an act of stagecraft in which a person (a ventriloquist) speaks in such a way that it seems like their voice is coming from a different location, usually through a puppet known as a "dummy". The act of ventrilo ...
).
Paranasal sinuses Paranasal sinuses are a group of four paired air-filled spaces that surround the nasal cavity. The maxillary sinuses are located under the eyes; the frontal sinuses are above the eyes; the ethmoidal sinuses are between the eyes and the sphe ...
vary between individuals 20-fold in volume, and differ in the presence and the degree of their asymmetry.


Diverse linguistic vocalizations

Vocal imitation occurs potentially in regard to a diverse range of phonetic units and types of vocalization. The world's languages use consonant, consonantal phones that differ in thirteen imitable vocal tract place of articulations (from the lips to the glottis). These phones can potentially be pronounced with eleven types of imitable manner of articulations (nasal stops to lateral clicks). Speech can be copied in regard to its Accent (sociolinguistics), social accent, Intonation (linguistics), intonation, Pitch accent, pitch and individuality (as with entertainment impersonators). Speech can be articulated in ways which diverge considerably in speed, timbre, pitch, loudness and emotion. Speech further exists in different forms such as song, Poetry, verse, Vociferation, scream and whispering, whisper. Intelligible speech can be produced with pragmatic intonation and in regional dialects and Accent (dialect), foreign accents. These aspects are readily copied: people asked to repeat speech-like words imitate not only phones but also accurately other pronunciation aspects such as fundamental frequency, schwa-syllable expression, voice spectrum, spectra and lip kinematics, voice onset times, and regional accent.


Language acquisition


Vocabulary expansion

In 1874 Carl Wernicke proposed that the ability to imitate speech plays a key role in language acquisition. This is now a widely researched issue in child development.Miller GA. (1977). Spontaneous apprentices: Children and language. New York, Seabury Press. PDF
A study of 17,000 one and two word utterances made by six children between 18 months to 25 months found that, depending upon the particular infant, between 5% and 45% of their words might be mimicked. These figures are minima since they concern only immediately heard words. Many words that may seem spontaneous are in fact delayed imitations heard days or weeks previously. At 13 months children who imitate new words (but not ones they already know) show a greater increase in noun vocabulary at four months and non noun vocabulary at eight months. A major predictor of vocabulary increase in both 20 months, 24 months, and older children between 4 and 8 years is their skill in repeating nonword phone sequences (a measure of mimicry and storage). This is also the case with children with Down syndrome, Down's syndrome . The effect is larger than even age: in a study of 222 two-year-old children that had spoken vocabularies ranging between 3–601 words the ability to repeat nonwords accounted for 24% of the variance compared to 15% for age and 6% for
gender Gender is the range of social, psychological, cultural, and behavioral aspects of being a man (or boy), woman (or girl), or third gender. Although gender often corresponds to sex, a transgender person may identify with a gender other tha ...
(girls better than boys).


Nonvocabulary expansion uses of imitation

Imitation provides the basis for making longer sentences than children could otherwise spontaneously make on their own. Children analyze the syntax, linguistic rules, phonetics, pronunciation patterns, and conversational pragmatics of speech by making monologues (often in crib talk) in which they repeat and manipulate in word play phrases and sentences previously overheard. Many proto-conversations involve children (and parents) repeating what each other has said in order to sustain social and linguistic interaction. It has been suggested that the conversion of speech sound into motor responses helps aid the vocal "alignment of interactions" by "coordinating the rhythm and melody of their speech". Repetition enables immigrant monolingual children to learn a second language by allowing them to take part in 'conversations'. Imitation related processes aids the storage of overheard words by putting them into speech based short- and long-term memory.


Language learning

The ability to repeat nonwords predicts the ability to learn second-language vocabulary. A study found that adult Multilingualism, polyglots performed better in short-term memory tasks such as repeating nonword vocalizations compared to nonpolyglots though both are otherwise similar in general intelligence, visuo-spatial short-term memory and paired-associate learning ability. Language delay in contrast links to impairments in vocal imitation.


Speech repetition and phones

Electrical brain stimulation research upon the human brain finds that 81% of areas that show disruption of phone identification are also those in which the imitating of oral movements is disrupted and vice versa; Brain damage, Brain injuries in the speech areas show a 0.9 correlation between those causing impairments to the copying of oral movements and those impairing phone production and perception.


Mechanism

Spoken words are sequences of motor movements organized around vocal tract gesture motor targets. Vocalization due to this is copied in terms of the motor goals that organize it rather than the exact movements with which it is produced. These vocal motor goals are auditory. According to James Abbs 'For speech motor actions, the individual articulatory movements would not appear to be controlled with regard to three- dimensional spatial targets, but rather with regard to their contribution to complex vocal tract goals such as resonance properties (e.g., shape, degree of constriction) and or aerodynamically significant variables'. Speech sounds also have duplicable higher-order characteristics such as rates and shape of modulations and rates and shape of frequency shifts. Such complex auditory goals (which often link—though not always—to internal vocal gestures) are detectable from the speech sound which they create.


Neurology


Dorsal speech processing stream function

Two cortical processing streams exist: a ventral one which maps sound onto meaning, and a dorsal one, that maps sound onto motor representations. The dorsal stream projects from the posterior Sylvian fissure at the temporoparietal junction, onto frontal motor areas, and is not normally involved in speech perception.
Carl Wernicke Carl (or Karl) Wernicke (; ; 15 May 1848 – 15 June 1905) was a German physician, anatomist, psychiatrist and neuropathologist. He is known for his influential research into the pathological effects of specific forms of encephalopathy and also ...
identified a pathway between the left posterior superior temporal sulcus (a cerebral cortex region sometimes called the Wernicke's area) as a centre of the sound "images" of speech and its syllables that connected through the arcuate fasciculus with part of the inferior frontal gyrus (sometimes called the Broca's area) responsible for their articulation. This pathway is now broadly identified as the dorsal speech pathway, one of the two pathways (together with the ventral pathway) that process speech. The posterior superior temporal gyrus is specialized for the transient representation of the phonetic sequences used for vocal repetition. Part of the auditory cortex also can represent aspects of speech such as its consonantal features.


Mirror neurons

Mirror neurons have been identified that both process the perception and production of motor movements. This is done not in terms of their exact motor performance but an inference of the intended motor goals with which it is organized. Mirror neurons that both perceive and produce the motor movements of speech have been identified. Speech is mirrored constantly into its articulations since speakers cannot know in advance that a word is unfamiliar and in need of repetition—which is only learnt after the opportunity to map it into articulations has gone. Thus, speakers if they are to incorporate unfamiliar words into their spoken vocabulary must by default map all spoken input.


Sign language

Words in sign languages, unlike those in spoken ones, are made not of sequential units but of Three-dimensional space, spatial configurations of subword unit arrangements, the spatial analogue of the sonic-chronological morphemes of spoken language.Poizner H. Klima ES. Bellugi U. (1987). What the hands reveal about the brain. MIT Press. These words, like spoken ones, are learnt by imitation. Indeed, rare cases of compulsive sign-language echolalia exist in otherwise language-deficient deaf autistic individuals born into signing families. At least some cortical areas neurobiologically active during both sign and vocal speech, such as the auditory cortex, are associated with the act of imitation.


Nonhuman animals


Birds

Birds learn their Bird vocalization, songs from those made by other birds. In several examples, birds show highly developed repetition abilities: the Sri Lankan Greater racket-tailed drongo (''Dicrurus paradiseus'') copies the calls of predators and the alarm signals of other birds Albert's lyrebird (''Menura alberti'') can accurately imitate the satin bowerbird (''Ptilonorhynchus violaceus''), Research upon Bird vocalization#Neurophysiology, avian vocal motor neurons finds that they perceive their song as a series of articulatory gestures as in humans. Birds that can imitate humans, such as the Indian hill myna (Gracula religiosa), imitate human speech by mimicking the various speech formants, created by changing the shape of the human vocal tract, with different vibration frequencies of its Syrinx (biology), internal tympaniform membrane. Indian hill mynahs also imitate such phonetic characteristics as Voice (phonetics), voicing, Voice frequency, fundamental frequencies, Formant, formant transitions, nasalization, and timing, through their vocal movements are made in a different way from those of the human vocal apparatus.


Nonhuman mammals

* Bottlenose dolphins can show spontaneous vocal mimicry of computer-generated whistles. * Killer whales can mimic the barks of California sea lions. * Harbor seals can mimic in a speech-like manner one or more English words and phrases * Elephants can Elephant intelligence#Mimicry, imitate trunk sounds. * Lesser spear-nosed bat can learn their call structure from artificial playback. * An orangutan has spontaneously copied the whistles of humans.


Apes

Great ape language, Apes taught language show an ability to imitate language signs with Common chimpanzee, chimpanzees such as Washoe (chimpanzee), Washoe who was able to learn with his arms a vocabulary of 250 American Sign Language gestures. However, such human trained apes show no ability to imitate human speech vocalizations.Hayes C. (1951). The ape in our house, Harper, New York.


See also

* Alan Baddeley * Auditory processing disorder * Baddeley's model of working memory * Conduction aphasia * Developmental verbal dyspraxia * Echoic memory * Echolalia * Language development * Language acquisition * Language-based learning disability * Mirror neurons * Mirroring (psychology) * Motor cognition * Motor theory of speech perception * Origin of language * Passive speakers (language), Passive speakers * Phonological development * Pronunciation * Second-language acquisition * Short-term memory * Speech perception * Thematic coherence * Transcortical motor aphasia * Transcortical sensory aphasia * Vocabulary#Vocabulary growth, Vocabulary growth * Vocal learning


Footnotes

{{reflist, 2 Developmental psychology Evolution of language Language Language acquisition Motor control Phonetics Speech and language pathology Speech recognition Speech