Diana Van Lancker Sidtis

• Ph.D., CCC/SLP
• Professor (Full) at New York University

This study aimed to explore the production of familiar expressions (e.g. idioms, proverbs and pause fillers), including different subtypes, and their variation across different types of elicited discourse in individuals with aphasia due to left hemisphere damage (LHD) and those with right hemisphere damage (RHD) to healthy control (HCs). Twenty-nin...

Communication, specifically the elements crucial for typical social interaction, can be significantly affected in psychiatric illness, especially depression. Of specific importance to conversational competence are familiar expressions (prefabricated expressions known to the language community) including formulaic expressions (conversational speech...

Purpose This study examined spontaneous, spoken-to-a-model, and two sung modes in speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD), speakers with cerebellar disease (CD), and healthy controls. Vocal performance was measured by intelligibility scores and listeners' perceptual ratings. Method Participants included speakers with hypokinetic dysarthria secondar...

Foundations of Familiar Language is renowned scholar Diana Sidtis's new contribution to the study of familiar language through a wide-ranging overview of a large group of language behaviors that share characteristics of cohesion and familiarity, including a rational classification system of familiar language into formulaic expressions, lexical bund...

This book reviews 50 years of studies of familiar language, including formulaic expressions, lexical bundles, and collocations, providing a psycholinguistic and neurological model of familiar and novel language processing. This dual model proposes separate brain systems for familiar and novel language. Classification systems, definitions, myriad ex...

The vocal pattern from its very beginning in evolution and the role of familiarity in vocal communication.

Recent studies have demonstrated that details of verbal material are retained in memory. Further, converging evidence points to a memory-enhancing effect of emotion such that memory for emotional events is stronger than memory for neutral events. Building upon this work, it appears likely that verbatim sentence forms will be remembered better when...

Background: Deep brain stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus (STN-DBS) is an effective treatment for Parkinson's disease (PD) but can have an adverse effect on speech. In normal speakers and in those with spinocerebellar ataxia, an inverse relationship between regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) in the left inferior frontal (IFG) region and the ri...

Personal identity can be discerned from fleeting instances of speech, and, remains recognizable after temporal displacements of years. The science of voice, including the nature of the voice as social object, the auditory‐acoustic cues that are accountable for the recognition or discrimination of individual voice patterns, information carried in th...

This chapter provides an overview of formulaic language (FL), reviewing function, mental representation, and evidence for its unique status in a model of language, followed by a review of the perceptual characteristics of FL. In speech perception, retention by listeners of auditory‐acoustic characteristics in spoken sentences suggests that acoustic...

The relationship between speech and singing in cerebral function is not fully understood. The effects of focal brain damage on pitch, timing, and rhythm in speech and singing were retrospectively investigated in 2 persons diagnosed with dysprosodic speech following cerebral vascular accidents; both were experienced singers. Participant 1 suffered a...

The relationship between speech and singing in cerebral function is not fully understood. The effects of focal brain damage on pitch, timing, and rhythm in speech and singing were retrospectively investigated in two persons diagnosed with dysprosodic speech following cerebral vascular accidents; both were experienced singers. Participant 1 suffered...

Purpose An impoverished production of routinized expressions, namely, formulaic language, has been reported for monolingual speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD). Little is known regarding how formulaic expressions might be manifested in individuals with neurological damage who speak more than one language. This study investigated the processing o...

Overview of prosody in neurological settings

Language practices, whether global, national, or at the personal level, carry influence for both good and ill. It is important that linguistic ventures into sociopolitical realms be well-informed. One such incursion has arisen from professors and administrators in university and government offices, who declare their pronoun choice, appending statem...

Observations from aphasic speech suggest that some kinds of speech are subserved by the right hemisphere.

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) has become an effective and widely used tool in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease (PD). STN-DBS has varied effects on speech. Clinical speech ratings suggest worsening following STN-DBS, but quantitative intelligibility, perceptual, and acoustic studies have produced mixed and inconsi...

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) has become an effective and widely used tool in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease (PD). STN-DBS has varied effects on speech. Clinical speech ratings suggest worsening following STN-DBS, but quantitative intelligibility, perceptual, and acoustic studies have produced mixed and inconsi...

Pronoun preferences as revealed in German and Greek.

Little is known about age effects on formulaic language acquisition in second language (L2) learners. This research compared use and comprehension of formulaic expressions (FEs) in English and Russian by two groups of Russian bilingual speakers differing in age of arrival (AoA) to the USA. A critical period perspective predicts better performance i...

Studies of voice recognition in biology suggest that long exposure may not satisfactorily represent the voice acquisition process. The current study proposes that humans can acquire a newly familiar voice from brief exposure to spontaneous speech, given a personally engaging context. Studies have shown that arousing and emotionally engaging experie...

Approaches to second language teaching have included continuous exposure, grammar lessons, and a various combinations of these methods. Recent studies highlight specific, detailed knowledge, in speakers of a language, of the phonetic and structural information of many kinds of phrases. These include formulaic expressions (idioms, proverbs, conversa...

Under the umbrella term of "familiar phrases," this paper reviews current understanding of formulaic expressions (idioms, proverbs, conversational speech formulas, expletives), lexical bundles (sentence stems, conventional expressions, discourse organizers), and collocations (a range of other unitary, multiword expressions). These exemplars share t...

Neurolinguistics of formulaic language

This chapter describes a course designed to teach formulaic language from several perspectives: linguistic, psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic. The course was conducted at Carleton College, Northfield, MN, in 1999.

The past decades have seen an explosion of research into the psychological, cognitive, neural, biological, and technical mechanisms of voice perception. These mechanisms refer to the general ability to extract information from voices expressed by other living beings or by technical systems. Voice perception research is now a lively area of research...

Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research 140 Old Orangeburg Road Orangeburg, New York Familiar voice recognition appeared on the earth 250 million years ago with the advent of frogs. Interestingly, air breathing and vocalization co-emerged in the amphibian, as they do as first gesture in the human newborn, suggesting that the larynx was desi...

Contemporary imaging techniques have increased the potential for establishing how brain regions interact during spoken language. Some imaging methods report bilateral changes in brain activity during speech, whereas another approach finds that the relationship between individual variability in speech measures and individual variability in brain act...

Recent years have seen growing interest in the mechanisms that underlie the online processing of formulaic sequences. The present chapter reviews a bulk of evidence that comes from psycholinguistic – comprehension and production – studies employing a range of paradigms (e.g., behavioural, eye-tracking, and ERPs), capitalizing on the differences bet...

Formulaic language forms about one-fourth of everyday talk. Formulaic (fixed expressions) and novel (grammatical language) differ in important characteristics. The features of idioms, slang, expletives, proverbs, aphorisms, conversational speech formulas, and other fixed expressions include ranges of length, flexible cohesion, memory storage, nonli...

This chapter recounts the history of early studies of familiar voice recognition

Formulaic expressions naturally convey affective content. The unique formal and functional characteristics of idioms, slang, expletives, proverbs, conversational speech formulas, and the many other conventional expressions in this repertory have been well-described: these include unitary form, conventionalized and non-literal meanings, and reliance...

There is considerable evidence that childhood trauma can affect the whole brain. In a related perspective, studies on brain and voice suggest that it takes a whole brain to produce a voice. Indeed, phonation is highly interconnected with activity at all cerebral levels, from brainstem to cortex, and within all cerebral systems, including limbic, mo...

Language has been modeled as a rule governed behavior for generating an unlimited number of novel utterances using phonological, syntactic, and lexical processes. This view of language as essentially propositional is expanding as the role of formulaic expressions (e.g., you know, have a nice day, how are you?) is increasingly recognized. The basic...

Background: Formulaic expressions, including idioms and other fixed expressions, comprise a significant proportion of discourse. Although much has been written about this topic, controversy remains about their psychological status. An important claim about formulaic expressions, that they are known to native speakers, has seldom been directly demon...

Objective: Parkinson’s disease (PD), caused by basal ganglia dysfunction, is associated with motor disturbances including dysarthria. Stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus, a preferred treatment targeting basal ganglia function, improves features of the motor disorder, but has uncertain effects on speech. We studied speech during contrasting st...

This report describes an unusual presentation of a voice disorder arising from inability to coordinate the three components of motor speech: respiration, phonation, and articulation. These systems were individually intact, as demonstrated by laryngoscopy, motor speech examination, and treatment methods achieving success under controlled conditions....

The present study compares vocal parameters in bilinguals’ use of two languages across different speech tasks, in order to examine whether language selection and task type will manifest different outcomes. Korean-English (KE) and Mandarin-English (ME) speakers performed three speech tasks – a reading passage, a monologue, and a picture description...

The effects of the DBS on speech remain controversial. This approach used intelligibility by listeners and acoustic parameters as measures of conversation and repeated speech. Persons with DBS-STN provided conversational speech samples and then repeated portions of their conversation in both on and off stimulation. Excerpts were arranged for a list...

Despite bilateral brain activation during speech tasks, we have shown that performance is predicted by a blood flow increase in the left inferior frontal region and decrease in the right caudate, consistent with classic lesion studies. This study characterized the structural connections between these brain areas using diffusion tensor imaging and e...

This study investigates the effects of left- (LHD) or right-hemisphere damage (RHD) on the production of matched idiomatic or literal expressions by examining healthy listeners' abilities to identify, evaluate and perceptually characterize the utterances. Native speakers of Korean with LHD or RHD and healthy controls (HCs) produced six ditropically...

Purpose This study investigates the effects of left- and right-hemisphere damage (LHD and RHD) on the production of idiomatic or literal expressions utilizing acoustic analyses. Method Twenty-one native speakers of Korean with LHD or RHD and in a healthy control (HC) group produced 6 ditropically ambiguous (idiomatic or literal) sentences in 2 dif...

Background: Stimulation of the subthalamic nuclei (STN) is an effective treatment for Parkinson’s disease, but complaints of speech difficulties after surgery have been difficult to quantify. Speech measures do not convincingly account for such reports. Objective: This study examined STN stimulation effects on vowel production, in order to probe wh...

Background: Formulaic expressions—conversational speech formulas, idioms, pause fillers, conventional phrases, proverbs, expletives, and so on—constitute on average about 25% proportionally of everyday communication. While some clinical and experimental studies have implicated a right hemisphere involvement, controversy remains surrounding cerebral...

Decades of research highlight the importance of formulaic expressions in everyday spoken language (Vihman, 1982; Wray, 2002; Kuiper, 2009). Along with idioms, expletives, and proverbs, this linguistic category includes conversational speech formulas, such as “You've got to be kidding,” “Excuse me?” or “Hang on a minute” (Fillmore, 1979; Pawley and...

Purpose The production of formulaic expressions (conversational speech formulas, pause fillers, idioms, and other fixed expressions) is excessive in the left hemisphere and deficient in the right hemisphere and in subcortical stroke. Speakers with Alzheimer's disease (AD), having functional basal ganglia, reveal abnormally high proportions of formu...

Schemata are expressions that are fixed except for slots available for novel words (I’m not a …person). Our goals were to quantify speakers’ knowledge, examine semantic flexibility in open slots, and compare performance data in two generations of speakers using cloze procedures in formulaic expressions, schemata open slots, fixed portions of schema...

The use of "pragmatic repetition," the iteration of one's own speech or the speech of a co-participant, while known to occur in conversation, has been overlooked in the language sciences. This study presents a method for establishing incidence, characteristics, and functions of pragmatic repetition during conversational exchanges. The method is app...

Formulaic expressions (such as idioms, proverbs, and conversational speech formulas) are currently a topic of interest. Examination of prosody in formulaic utterances, a less explored property of formulaic expressions, has yielded controversial views. The present study investigates prosodic characteristics of proverbs, as one type of formulaic expr...

Previous studies have suggested that formulaic and literal expressions are stored and processed according to differing characteristics, and that certain auditory-acoustic cues serve to distinguish formulaic from literal meanings. This study took these observations a step further by investigating listeners' ability to discriminate between literal or...

The human brain is a veritable hodgepodge of ad hoc assemblages of the old, the borrowed, and the new, gerrymandered in response to millennia of internal and external forces. Formulaic language has recently received benefit of scrutiny from a broad range of disciplines. The unique characteristics of formulaic expressions distinguish learning, emoti...

Abstract The goal of this study was to further investigate hemispheric specialization for proper and common nouns by examining the ability of individuals with left hemisphere damage (LHD) to perceive and verbally reproduce famous names and matched common names compared with the performance of matched healthy controls (HC). Ten individuals with LHD...

Background: Repetition occurs plentifully in normal conversation, but empirical studies of the pragmatic use of repetition are rare and pragmatic repetition, defined as verbal repetition in conversational use, in disordered language has not been systematically investigated. Applying a method of analysis that was piloted utilising normal discourse,...

The present study examined pausing patterns in spontaneous speech as a measure of the effect of deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) on parkinsonian speech. Pauses reflect various aspects of speech and language processes, including motor initiation and linguistic planning. Relatively little attention has been given to pause...

This study explored retention of idioms and novel (i.e. newly created or grammatically generated) expressions in English-speaking girls following exposure only once during a conversation. Our hypothesis was that idioms, because of their inherent holistic, nonliteral and social characteristics,are acquired differently and more rapidly than novel utt...

Studies of productive language in Alzheimer's disease (AD) have focused on formal testing of syntax and semantics but have directed less attention to naturalistic discourse and formulaic language. Clinical observations suggest that individuals with AD retain the ability to produce formulaic language long after other cognitive abilities have deterio...

This study explored retention of idioms and novel (i.e., newly created or grammatically generated) expressions in English-speaking girls following exposure only once during a conversation. Our hypothesis was that idioms, because of their inherent holistic, nonliteral and social characteristics, are acquired differently and more rapidly than novel u...

Initial shortening of stem vowels in three-word derivational paradigms (e.g., zip, zipper, zippering) was studied in persons with Parkinson's disease (PWPD) with and without deep brain stimulation (DBS), and in normal speakers. Seven PWPD without DBS, 7 PWPD with DBS ON (DBSN) or OFF (DBSF), and 6 healthy control (CON) persons were studied. Stimuli...

A special instance of formulaic expression is the linguistic schema: most of the expression is fixed, with one or more slots left open for insertion of novel words, such as I can _____ with one hand tied behind my back. This study aimed to determine whether native speakers demonstrate knowledge of the fixed portions of the schemata and flexibility...

In motor speech disorders, dysarthric features impacting intelligibility, articulation, fluency and voice emerge more saliently in conversation than in repetition, reading or singing. A role of the basal ganglia in these task discrepancies has been identified. Further, more recent studies of naturalistic speech in basal ganglia dysfunction have rev...

Background Description of Formulaic ExpressionsLinguistic and Psycholinguistic Studies of Formulaic ExpressionsCerebral Processing: Comprehension StudiesConclusions: Dual-Process Processing of Novel and Formulaic LanguageImplications for Evaluation and Treatment in Communicative DisordersReferencesAppendix I. Speech Samples

The importance of formulaic language is recognized by many branches of the language sciences. Second language learners acquire a language using a maturationally advanced neurological substrate, leading to a profile of formulaic language use and knowledge that differs from that of the prepuberty learner. Unlike the considerable interest in formulaic...

Chronic, high-frequency electrical stimulation of the subthalamic nuclei (STNs) has become an effective and widely used therapy in Parkinson's disease (PD), but the therapeutic mechanism is not understood. Stimulation of the STN is believed to reorganize neurophysiological activity patterns within the basal ganglia, whereas local field effects exte...

The human voice is described in dialogic linguistics as an embodiment of self in a social context, contributing to expression, perception and mutual exchange of self, consciousness, inner life, and personhood. While these approaches are subjective and arise from phenomenological perspectives, scientific facts about personal vocal identity, and its...

Advances in neurobiology are providing new opportunities to investigate the neurological systems underlying motor speech control. This study explores the perceptual characteristics of the speech of three genotypes of spino-cerebellar ataxia (SCA) as manifest in four different speech tasks. Speech samples from 26 speakers with SCA were perceptually...

Introduction Respiration The Larynx and Phonation The Supraglottal Vocal Tract and Resonance Kinds of Acoustic Analyses Controlling the Sound of a Voice What Gives Rise to Individual Voice Quality?

Why Should We Care About Voice Quality? What is Voice? What is Voice Quality? The Definitional Dilemma Measuring Voice Quality Alternatives to Dimensional and Featural Measurement Systems for Voice Quality Organization of the Book

Introduction Neurological Substrates of Voice Production Neuropsychology of Face Perception: An Analog to Voice Perception The Neuropsychology of Voice Perception How are Familiar Voices Acquired? A Neuropsychological Model of Voice Perception Conclusions and Summary

Introduction Age and the Voice Sex and the Voice Race and Voice Inferring a Speaker's Physical Size and Overall Appearance from Voice Summary and Conclusions

Introduction Speaker Factors Factors Related to Speech Samples or the Utterances Heard Factors Related to the Transmission System Listener Factors Recognizing the Voice: Testing Procedures Impact on Juries Summary and Conclusions

Introduction Interactions Between What is Said and How it is Said Brain Function Underlying Emotions and Emotional Nuances in Speech The Nature and Function of Emotions Experimental Approaches to the Study of Vocal Emotion How Does Emotion Affect the Voice? How do Listeners Perceive Emotion from Voices? Biological, Social, and Cross-Cultural Perspe...

Introduction and Overview Legal Issues Advertising, Marketing, Persuasion, and Other Related Applications Dubbing and Voiceovers Announcing, Newscasting, and Sportscasting Singing

Introduction Essentials of Hearing and Auditory Perception in Animals and Humans Summary and Conclusion for Audition

Introduction Kinds of Tasks and Theoretical Preliminaries Recognizing Familiar Voices Summary of Animal and Human Studies

Introduction Ontological Differences Between Language and Prosody The Acoustic-Auditory Basis: The Elements of Prosody Functional Levels of Prosodic Cues in Language Voice Quality and the Pragmatics of Communication Paralanguage: Attitudes and Emotions Voice Identity Summary and Relation to Other Chapters

Purpose Speaking, which naturally occurs in different modes or “tasks” such as conversation and repetition, relies on intact basal ganglia nuclei. Recent studies suggest that voice and fluency parameters are differentially affected by speech task. In this study, the authors examine the effects of subcortical functionality on voice and fluency, comp...

Ditropic sentences are utterances that convey either a literal or an idiomatic meaning (e.g., It broke the ice). This study investigated listener's ability to discriminate between literal or idiomatic meanings and examined the acoustic features contributing to this distinction. Ten ditropically ambiguous Korean sentences were audio-recorded by four...