Linguistic analysis
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Oslabené sociokognitívne schopnosti môžu signalizovať riziko sociálnej (pragmatickej) komunikačnej poruchy alebo poruchy autistického spektra. Skorá identifikácia ťažkostí je kľúčová pre začatie cielenej intervencie a elimináciu prehlbovania existujúcich deficitov. Cieľom príspevku je predstaviť zahraničný diagnostický nástroj The Early Sociocognitive Battery (ESB) autoriek Shuly Chiat, Penny Roy a Jennifer Warwick, ktorý umožňuje priame hodnotenie sociokognitívnych schopností detí už v ranom veku. Teoretický opis ESB je doplnený o stručný prehľad výsledkov pilotného testovania 44 intaktných slovensky hovoriacich detí mladšieho predškolského veku, zameraného na analýzu výkonov detí v závislosti od pohlavia. Participanti boli hodnotení prostredníctvom batérie ESB, testu Opakovanie pseudoslov a Dotazníka použitia jazyka (LUI). Pilotné dáta ukazujú, že pohlavie detí nemá signifikantný vplyv na ich výkony v rámci nástroja ESB. Rovnako bola preukázaná štatisticky významná korelácia medzi celkovým skóre v dotazníku LUI a skóre v subteste Spoločná pozornosť batérie ESB. Výsledky podporujú aplikovateľnosť nástroja ESB aj v slovenskom kultúrnom a jazykovom prostredí.
Impaired sociocognitive abilities may signal the risk of a social (pragmatic) communication disorder or Autism Spectrum Disorder. Early identification of difficulties is crucial for initiating targeted intervention and preventing the escalation of existing deficits. The aim of this paper is to introduce the foreign diagnostic tool, the Early Sociocognitive Battery (ESB), developed by Shula Chiat, Penny Roy and Jennifer Warwick. This tool enables direct assessment of children's sociocognitive abilities at an early age. The theoretical description of the ESB is supplemented by a brief overview of the results from the pilot testing of 44 typically developing Slovak-speaking children in the younger preschool age group, focusing on the analysis of children's performance in relation to gender. Participants were assessed using the ESB, Nonword Repetition Task, and Language Use Inventory (LUI). Pilot data show that the children's gender does not have a significant impact on their performance within the ESB tool. In addition, a statistically significant correlation was found between the total score on the LUI and the score on the Joint Attention subtest of the ESB. The results support the applicability of the ESB tool in the Slovak cultural and linguistic context.
Digital transformation is widely understood as a process where technology is used to modify an organization's products and services and to create new ones. It is rapidly advancing in all sectors of society. Researchers have shown that it is a multidimensional process determined by human decisions based on ideologies, ideas, beliefs, goals, and the ways in which technology is used. In health care and health, the end result of digital transformation is digital health. In this study, a detailed literature review covering 560 research articles published in major journals was performed, followed by an analysis of ideas, beliefs, and goals guiding digital transformation and their possible consequences for privacy, human rights, dignity, and autonomy in health care and health. Results of literature analyses demonstrated that from the point of view of privacy, dignity, and human rights, the current laws, regulations, and system architectures have major weaknesses. One possible model of digital health is based on the dominant ideas and goals of the business world related to the digital economy and neoliberalism, including privatization of health care services, monetization and commodification of health data, and personal responsibility for health. These ideas represent meaningful risks to human rights, privacy, dignity, and autonomy. In this paper, we present an alternative solution for digital health called human-centric digital health (HCDH). Using system thinking and system modeling methods, we developed a system model for HCDH. It uses 5 views (ideas, health data, principles, regulation, and organizational and technical innovations) to align with human rights and values and support dignity, privacy, and autonomy. To make HCDH future proof, extensions to human rights, the adoption of the principle of restricted informational ownership of health data, and the development of new duties, responsibilities, and laws are needed. Finally, we developed a system-oriented, architecture-centric, ontology-based, and policy-driven approach to represent and manage HCDH ecosystems.
- MeSH
- digitální technologie MeSH
- digitální zdraví * MeSH
- lidé MeSH
- lidská práva MeSH
- péče orientovaná na pacienta * MeSH
- soukromí MeSH
- Check Tag
- lidé MeSH
- Publikační typ
- časopisecké články MeSH
- přehledy MeSH
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The impact of dopaminergic medication on language in Parkinson's disease (PD) remains poorly understood. This observational, naturalistic study aimed to investigate the effects of long-term dopaminergic therapy on language performance in patients with de-novo PD based on a high-level linguistic analysis of natural spontaneous discourse. METHODS: A fairy-tale narration was recorded at baseline and a 12-month follow-up. The speech samples were automatically analyzed using six representative lexical and syntactic features based on automatic speech recognition and natural language processing. RESULTS: We enrolled 109 de-novo PD patients compared to 68 healthy controls. All subjects completed the 12-month follow-up; 92 PD patients were on stable dopaminergic medication (PD-treated), while 17 PD patients remained without medication (PD-untreated). At baseline, the PD-treated group exhibited abnormalities in syntactic domains, particularly in sentence length (p = 0.018) and sentence development (p = 0.042) compared to healthy controls. After 12 months of dopaminergic therapy, PD-treated showed improvements in the syntactic domain, including sentence length (p = 0.012) and sentence development (p = 0.030). Of all PD-treated patients, 37 were on monotherapy with dopamine agonists and manifested improvement in sentence length (p = 0.048), while 32 were on monotherapy with levodopa and had no language amelioration. No changes in language parameters over time were seen in both the PD-untreated group and healthy controls. DISCUSSION: Initiation of dopaminergic therapy improved high-language syntactic deficits in de-novo PD, confirming the role of dopamine in cognitive-linguistic processing. Automated linguistic analysis of spontaneous speech via natural language processing can assist in improving the prediction and management of language deficits in PD.
- MeSH
- agonisté dopaminu * terapeutické užití MeSH
- antiparkinsonika * terapeutické užití MeSH
- dopaminové látky * terapeutické užití MeSH
- lidé středního věku MeSH
- lidé MeSH
- následné studie MeSH
- Parkinsonova nemoc * farmakoterapie komplikace MeSH
- řeč * účinky léků MeSH
- senioři MeSH
- výsledek terapie MeSH
- Check Tag
- lidé středního věku MeSH
- lidé MeSH
- mužské pohlaví MeSH
- senioři MeSH
- ženské pohlaví MeSH
- Publikační typ
- časopisecké články MeSH
- pozorovací studie MeSH
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Patients with synucleinopathies such as multiple system atrophy (MSA) and Parkinson's disease (PD) frequently display speech and language abnormalities. We explore the diagnostic potential of automated linguistic analysis of natural spontaneous speech to differentiate MSA and PD. METHODS: Spontaneous speech of 39 participants with MSA compared to 39 drug-naive PD and 39 healthy controls matched for age and sex was transcribed and linguistically annotated using automatic speech recognition and natural language processing. A quantitative analysis was performed using 6 lexical and syntactic and 2 acoustic features. Results were compared with human-controlled analysis to assess the robustness of the approach. Diagnostic accuracy was evaluated using sensitivity analysis. RESULTS: Despite similar disease duration, linguistic abnormalities were generally more severe in MSA than in PD, leading to high diagnostic accuracy with an area under the curve of 0.81. Compared to controls, MSA showed decreased grammatical component usage, more repetitive phrases, shorter sentences, reduced sentence development, slower articulation rate, and increased duration of pauses, whereas PD had only shorter sentences, reduced sentence development, and longer pauses. Only slower articulation rate was distinctive for MSA while unchanged for PD relative to controls. The highest correlation was found between bulbar/pseudobulbar clinical score and sentence length (r = -0.49, p = 0.002). Despite the relatively high severity of dysarthria in MSA, a strong agreement between manually and automatically computed results was achieved. DISCUSSION: Automated linguistic analysis may offer an objective, cost-effective, and widely applicable biomarker to differentiate synucleinopathies with similar clinical manifestations.
- MeSH
- diferenciální diagnóza MeSH
- lidé středního věku MeSH
- lidé MeSH
- multisystémová atrofie * diagnóza patofyziologie komplikace MeSH
- Parkinsonova nemoc * diagnóza komplikace patofyziologie MeSH
- řeč fyziologie MeSH
- senioři MeSH
- zpracování přirozeného jazyka MeSH
- Check Tag
- lidé středního věku MeSH
- lidé MeSH
- mužské pohlaví MeSH
- senioři MeSH
- ženské pohlaví MeSH
- Publikační typ
- časopisecké články MeSH
OBJECTIVE: This study assessed the relationship between speech and language impairment and outcome in a multicenter cohort of isolated/idiopathic rapid eye movement (REM) sleep behavior disorder (iRBD). METHODS: Patients with iRBD from 7 centers speaking Czech, English, German, French, and Italian languages underwent a detailed speech assessment at baseline. Story-tale narratives were transcribed and linguistically annotated using fully automated methods based on automatic speech recognition and natural language processing algorithms, leading to the 3 distinctive linguistic and 2 acoustic patterns of language deterioration and associated composite indexes of their overall severity. Patients were then prospectively followed and received assessments for parkinsonism or dementia during follow-up. The Cox proportional hazard was performed to evaluate the predictive value of language patterns for phenoconversion over a follow-up period of 5 years. RESULTS: Of 180 patients free of parkinsonism or dementia, 156 provided follow-up information. After a mean follow-up of 2.7 years, 42 (26.9%) patients developed neurodegenerative disease. Patients with higher severity of linguistic abnormalities (hazard ratio [HR = 2.35]) and acoustic abnormalities (HR = 1.92) were more likely to develop a defined neurodegenerative disease, with converters having lower content richness (HR = 1.74), slower articulation rate (HR = 1.58), and prolonged pauses (HR = 1.46). Dementia-first (n = 16) and parkinsonism-first with mild cognitive impairment (n = 9) converters had higher severity of linguistic abnormalities than parkinsonism-first with normal cognition converters (n = 17). INTERPRETATION: Automated language analysis might provide a predictor of phenoconversion from iRBD into synucleinopathy subtypes with cognitive impairment, and thus can be used to stratify patients for neuroprotective trials. ANN NEUROL 2024;95:530-543.
Verifying the speaker of a speech fragment can be crucial in attributing a crime to a suspect. The question can be addressed given disputed and reference speech material, adopting the recommended and scientifically accepted likelihood ratio framework for reporting evidential strength in court. In forensic practice, usually, auditory and acoustic analyses are performed to carry out such a verification task considering a diversity of features, such as language competence, pronunciation, or other linguistic features. Automated speaker comparison systems can also be used alongside those manual analyses. State-of-the-art automatic speaker comparison systems are based on deep neural networks that take acoustic features as input. Additional information, though, may be obtained from linguistic analysis. In this paper, we aim to answer if, when and how modern acoustic-based systems can be complemented by an authorship technique based on frequent words, within the likelihood ratio framework. We consider three different approaches to derive a combined likelihood ratio: using a support vector machine algorithm, fitting bivariate normal distributions, and passing the score of the acoustic system as additional input to the frequent-word analysis. We apply our method to the forensically relevant dataset FRIDA and the FISHER corpus, and we explore under which conditions fusion is valuable. We evaluate our results in terms of log likelihood ratio cost (Cllr) and equal error rate (EER). We show that fusion can be beneficial, especially in the case of intercepted phone calls with noise in the background.
- MeSH
- akustika řeči MeSH
- algoritmy MeSH
- lidé MeSH
- lingvistika MeSH
- pravděpodobnostní funkce MeSH
- řeč MeSH
- soudní vědy * metody MeSH
- support vector machine MeSH
- Check Tag
- lidé MeSH
- Publikační typ
- časopisecké články MeSH
Objectives. This article reports on the adaptation procedure of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (MB-CDI): Words & Gestures into Czech. The parental-report questionnaire screens communicative development in infants aged 8 to 18 months and focuses on general communicative skills, active and passive vocabulary, and communicative gestures. The content of the Czech adaptation needs to reflect the communicative practices specific to the Czech language and cultural environment. Methods. The final item list for the questionnaire was developed by combining a variety of methods including translations, parental diaries from 44 caregivers, an expert focus group, and a corpus survey. The preliminary questionnaire was piloted in two rounds, altogether in 95 Czech caregivers and 100 children. Preliminary content was drawn from translations and parental diaries. These items were reduced based on assessment of child-development experts and frequency in four Czech-language corpora. Item analysis was conducted after each of the pilot rounds to remove from the final content words or gestures which were infrequently checked. Conclusions. This process assured that the Czech CDI screens communicative development on items relevant to the Czech linguistic and social landscape. As such, Dovyko I offers a powerful tool to measure communicative development in local children and may also find use in research of children with different developmental and linguistic characteristics. Limitations. The questionnaire is designed as a complement to other existing methods of communicative screening. The tool thus does not serve for final diagnosis but may help indicate an area problematic for the child or motivate further medical, cognitive, or linguistic assessment. The norming, validity, and reliability studies, which have been completed with Czech-speaking families, are not described in this article but separately in the tool’s manual.
Objectives. The goal of this qualitative study is to show the latent potential of the Thematic-Apperception Test in the context of creativity research. The secondary objective is to capture possible differences in the area of creativity and personality of various groups of artists. Sample and settings. The target group was various artists. Thirty artists were divided into three groups according to the type of art and educational attainment. The first group consists of musicians with formal musical education, the second one consists of self-taught musicians and the third group is the most diverse, created by various visual artists. All the members of the third group also have formal education in their field. Analysis. The starting point of this qualitative oriented research is 300 stories created on the basis of TAT, which was openly presented to the participants as a creativity test. Their stories were then further explored to capture and identify characteristics that may indicate the author’s creativity. One manifestation was the variety of genres used by the narrator in a single TAT protocol. Genre analysis of the stories revealed differences in their occurrence among the groups. Results. Visual artists more often created abstract narratives, frequently extending far into the realm of bizarreness. It also seems that autodidact musicians tend to create tragedy-oriented stories and lean towards positive genres only rarely. Limitations. The selection of participants did not avoid certain weaknesses. Part of the sample is made up of participants whom we know in person and only during the collection of data we switched to snowball sampling. The entire research group is also made up of Slovak artists, so all the stories were created in the Slovak language. Many language-specific metaphorical expressions and linguistic nuances related to creativity which are unique to each language and thus would be lost in translation.
Objectives. The goal of this qualitative study is to show the latent potential of the Thematic-Apperception Test in the context of creativity research. The secondary objective is to capture possible differences in the area of creativity and personality of various groups of artists. Sample and settings. The target group was various artists. Thirty artists were divided into three groups according to the type of art and educational attainment. The first group consists of musicians with formal musical education, the second one consists of self-taught musicians and the third group is the most diverse, created by various visual artists. All the members of the third group also have formal education in their field. Analysis. The starting point of this qualitative oriented research is 300 stories created on the basis of TAT, which was openly presented to the participants as a creativity test. Their stories were then further explored to capture and identify characteristics that may indicate the author’s creativity. One manifestation was the variety of genres used by the narrator in a single TAT protocol. Genre analysis of the stories revealed differences in their occurrence among the groups. Results. Visual artists more often created abstract narratives, frequently extending far into the realm of bizarreness. It also seems that autodidact musicians tend to create tragedy-oriented stories and lean towards positive genres only rarely. Limitations. The selection of participants did not avoid certain weaknesses. Part of the sample is made up of participants whom we know in person and only during the collection of data we switched to snowball sampling. The entire research group is also made up of Slovak artists, so all the stories were created in the Slovak language. Many language-specific metaphorical expressions and linguistic nuances related to creativity which are unique to each language and thus would be lost in translation.
Although Covid-19 was not the first pandemic, it was unique in the scale and intensity with which societies responded. Countries reacted differently to the threat posed by the new virus. The public health crisis affected European societies in many ways. It also influenced the way the media portrayed vaccines and discussed factors related to vaccine hesitancy. Europeans differed in their risk perceptions, attitudes towards vaccines and vaccine uptake. In European countries, Covid-19-related discourses were at the centre of media attention for many months. This paper reports on a media analysis which revealed significant differences as well as some similarities in the media debates in different countries. The study focused on seven European countries and considered two dimensions of comparison: between the pre-Covid period and the beginning of the Covid pandemic period, and between countries. The rich methodological approach, including linguistics, semantic field analysis and discourse analysis of mainstream news media, allowed the authors to explore the set of meanings related to vaccination that might influence actors' agency. This approach led the authors to redefine vaccine hesitancy in terms of characteristics of the "society in the situation" rather than the psychological profile of individuals. We argue that vaccine hesitancy can be understood in terms of agency and temporality. This dilemma of choice that transforms the present into an irreversible past and must be taken in relation to an uncertain future, is particularly acute under the pressure of urgency and when someone's health is at stake. As such, it is linked to how vaccine meaning is co-produced within public discourses.
- MeSH
- COVID-19 * epidemiologie prevence a kontrola MeSH
- lidé MeSH
- nejistota MeSH
- sociální média * MeSH
- vakcinace MeSH
- vakcíny * terapeutické užití MeSH
- Check Tag
- lidé MeSH
- Publikační typ
- časopisecké články MeSH
- Geografické názvy
- Evropa MeSH
