
Annie C GilbertMcGill University | McGill · School of Communication Sciences and Disorders
Annie C Gilbert
Ph.D.
Research Associate, School of communication sciences and disorders, McGill University
About
35
Publications
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300
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Introduction
For publication updates, please visit my LinkedIn account: www.linkedin.com/in/annie-c-gilbert-953b0b94/
or my personal website: www.anniegilbert.info
Additional affiliations
Education
April 2014 - December 2018
April 2012 - March 2014
September 2006 - January 2013
Publications
Publications (35)
We examined how perceptual chunks of varying size in utterances can influence immediate memory of heard items (monosyllabic words). Using behavioral measures and event-related potentials (N400) we evaluated the quality of the memory trace for targets taken from perceived temporal groups (TGs) of three and four items. Variations in the amplitude of...
In tasks involving the learning of verbal or non-verbal sequences, groupings are spontaneously produced. These groupings are generally marked by a lengthening of final elements and have been attributed to a domain-general perceptual chunking linked to working memory. Yet, no study has shown how this domain-general chunking applies to speech process...
Despite the significant impact of prosody on L2 speakers' intelligibility, few studies have examined the production of prosodic cues associated with word segmentation in non-native or non-dominant languages. Here, 62 French-English bilingual adults, who varied in L1 (French or English) and language dominance, produced sentences built around syllabl...
The psycholinguistic literature suggests that the length of a to-be-spoken phrase impacts the scope of speech planning, as reflected by different patterns of speech onset latencies. However, it is unclear whether such findings extend to first and second language (L1, L2) speech planning. Here, the same bilingual adults produced multi-phrase numeric...
Despite the multifactorial space of language experience in which people continuously vary, bilinguals are often dichotomized into ostensibly homogeneous groups. The timing of language exposure (age of acquisition; AoA) to a second language (L2) is one well-studied construct that is known to impact language processing, cognitive processing, and brai...
Purpose
Greater recognition of the impact of hearing loss on cognitive functions has led speech/hearing clinics to focus more on auditory memory outcomes. Typically evaluated by scoring participants' recall on a list of unrelated words after they have heard the list read out loud, this method implies pitch and timing variations across words. Here,...
Previous research has identified regions of the brain that are sensitive to emotional intensity in faces, with some evidence for developmental differences in this pattern of response. However, comparable understanding of how the brain tracks linear variations in emotional prosody is limited—especially in youth samples. The current study used novel...
Despite the importance of prosodic processing in utterance parsing, a majority of studies investigating boundary localization in a second language focus on word segmentation. The goal of the present study was to investigate the parsing of phrase boundaries in first and second languages from different prosodic typologies (stress-timed vs. syllable-t...
Auditory memory is an important everyday skill evaluated more and more frequently in clinical settings as there is recently a greater recognition of the cost of hearing loss to cognitive systems. Testing often involves reading a list of unrelated items aloud; but prosodic variations in pitch and timing across the list can affect the number of items...
Research on bilingualism has grown exponentially in recent years. However, the comprehension of speech in noise, given the ubiquity of both bilingualism and noisy environments, has seen only limited focus. Electroencephalogram (EEG) studies in monolinguals show an increase in alpha power when listening to speech in noise, which, in the theoretical...
Nonverbal expressions of emotion can vary in intensity, from ambiguous to prototypical exemplars: for instance, facial displays of happiness may range from a faint smile to a full-blown grin. Previous work suggests that the accuracy with which facial expressions are recognized as the intended emotion increases with emotional intensity, although thi...
Previous studies of word segmentation in a second language have yielded equivocal results. This is not surprising given the differences in the bilingual experience and proficiency of the participants and the varied experimental designs that have been used. The present study tried to account for a number of relevant variables to determine if bilingu...
We examined lexical stress processing in English-French bilinguals. Auditory mismatch negativity (MMN) responses were recorded in response to English and French pseudowords, whose primary stress occurred either on a language-consistent “usual” or language-inconsistent “unusual” syllable. In most conditions, the pseudowords elicited two consecutive...
Despite the multifactorial space of language experience in which people continuously vary, bilinguals are often dichotomized into ostensibly homogeneous groups. The timing of language exposure (age of acquisition) to a second language (L2) is one well-studied construct that is known to impact language processing, cognitive processing, and brain org...
Although bilinguals benefit from semantic context while perceiving speech-in-noise in their native language (L1), the extent to which bilinguals benefit from semantic context in their second language (L2) is unclear. Here, 57 highly proficient English–French/French–English bilinguals, who varied in L2 age of acquisition, performed a speech-percepti...
Learning a second language (L2) at a young age is a driving factor of functional neuroplasticity in the auditory brainstem. To date, it remains unclear whether these effects remain stable until adulthood and to what degree the amount of exposure to the L2 in early childhood might affect their outcome.
We compared three groups of adult English-Frenc...
In tasks involving spoken language comprehension, prosodic cues serve as a guide to correct linguistic processing. In a statement, for instance, a set of prosodic cues is used to segment and organize speech into intonational phrases (IP) and phonological utterances (U). Though these two highest prosodic constituents are delimited by the same set of...
Studies that use measures of cerebro-acoustic coherence have shown that theta oscillations (3–10 Hz) entrain to syllable-size modulations in the energy envelope of speech. This entrainment creates sensory windows in processing acoustic cues. Recent reports submit that delta oscillations (<3 Hz) can be entrained by nonsensory content units like phra...
Why does symbolic communication in humans develop primarily in an oral medium, and how do theories of language origin explain this? Non-human primates, despite their ability to learn and use symbolic signs, do not develop symbols as in oral language. This partly owes to the lack of a direct cortico-motoneuron control of vocalizations in these speci...
Adapting one’s production of prosodic cues to a second or non-dominant language
can be difficult. The present study focuses on French-English bilinguals’ ability to
adapt their prosody to coordinate phrase-final lengthening and lexical stress.
Because French has no lexically-coded prosody, it might be difficult for Frenchdominant
speakers to simult...
Research on the sensory entrainment of neural oscillations provides a novel way of
understanding how the brain processes spoken language without postulates of
interim linguistic units. Several reports have shown that oscillations in the theta
range (3-10 Hz) are entrained by syllable-size modulations in the energy envelope of
speech. This entrainme...
An extensive body of research on word segmentation has shown that different languages rely on different cues and strategies to segment meaningful units from the speech stream. These cross-language differences make segmentation difficult for L2 learners, and some previous work showed that bilingual speakers tend to keep applying their L1 segmentatio...
Though tests of working memory (WM) correlate with scales of language development, it is unclear how WM capacity relates to spoken-language processing. However, Gilbert et al. (2014) have shown that listeners perceptually chunk speech in temporal groups (TGs) and that the span these TGs influences memory of heard items. Assuming that WM capacity li...
It is established that temporal grouping or “chunking” arises in serial recall as it does in speech. For instance, chunking appears in common tasks like remembering series such as phone numbers. In the present study, we examine how detected chunks in meaningless strings of syllables and meaningful utterances influence memory. We use a Sternberg tas...
Our presentation summarizes evidence showing that listeners chunk speech in terms of rhythm groups. We discuss previous work involving both behavioral and EEG observations, which suggest an on-line segmentation of speech in rhythmic groups. A brief experiment is presented that further supports the view that statistical learning effects operate by r...
This study examines, via evoked potentials called closure-positive-shifts (CPSs), how listeners segment heard utterances on-line. The aim was to determine whether marks of rhythm groups in heard utterances can evoke CPSs independent of varying intonation and syntactic structures. Ten subjects were presented with sets of utterances bearing changing...
“Vocal fatigue” is associated with excessive voice use and reflects a condition that can lead to vocal-fold lesions. We present a two-part synthesis of our findings on the physiological and acoustic effects of vocal effort. In this second part, we summarize the results of two experiments. The first shows that peaks of vocal tremor are specifically...
“Vocal fatigue” is associated with excessive voice use and reflects a condition that can lead to vocal-fold lesions. We present a two-part synthesis of our findings on the physiological and acoustic effects of vocal effort. In this first part, we report on the results of an experiment showing that, contrary to received views, vocal effort causes fa...
Since speech involves fleeting acoustic events some portions of heard utterances must be parsed and stored on-line in order to be interpreted. Our previous work has shown that in recalling novel series, rhythmic grouping of up to 4 syllables facilitates memory, and this corresponds to size limits on rhythm groups observed in speech. Such results su...
We address the problem of defining universal processes of speech segmentation in view of criticisms that conceptual linguistic units derive from western writing. A synthesis of our recent experimental studies is presented bearing on processes of serial-order and rhythmic grouping. First, on how serial-order operates, we use EMG and speech-motion da...
While the role and origin of prosodic structures remain unclear, there is evidence that prosody bears an intriguing relationship with serial memory processes and grouping effects. This link is seen in the fact that the recall of presented prosodic patterns and their production in speech are both restricted in term of a syllable count. The present e...
This poster examines size-limits on intonation (F0) contours in spontaneous speech and presents the results of an experiment on a syllable-count principle, which is seen to constitute, irrespective of syntax, a factor restricting the length of F0 groups. Studies of various languages indicate a general tendency to restrict stress-groups in speech to...
This study investigates the correspondence between memory of stress rhythms in the context of a serial recall task and the organization of stress patterns in meaningful utterances. French speakers' (n = 40) reproduction of stress patterns in recalling series of syllables with stress groups of differing size shows a floor effect for groups that exce...