Kathrin RothermichEast Carolina University | ECU · Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders
Kathrin Rothermich
PhD
About
50
Publications
31,966
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
1,032
Citations
Introduction
I have over 10 years of research experience in cognitive neuroscience, communication sciences and disorders, and neurolinguistics. My main goal as a director of the SCONE Lab is to advance knowledge about how humans communicate and perceive communicative intentions. To that end, I use behavioral tools, eye tracking, neuroimaging, and brain stimulation to explore social-pragmatic communication abilities in healthy participants as well as in individuals with neurogenic disorders, such as Parkinson's Disease.
Additional affiliations
September 2017 - present
January 2013 - August 2016
September 2016 - August 2017
Publications
Publications (50)
Indirect forms of speech, such as sarcasm, jocularity (joking), and ‘white lies’ told to spare another’s feelings, occur frequently in daily life and are a problem for many clinical populations. During social interactions, information about the literal or nonliteral meaning of a speaker unfolds simultaneously in several communication channels (e.g....
Purpose
This study examined the race identification of Southern American English speakers from two geographically distant regions in North Carolina. The purpose of this work is to explore how talkers' self-identified race, talker dialect region, and acoustic speech variables contribute to listener categorization of talker races.
Method
Two groups...
Dans les interactions quotidiennes, les individus utilisent l’ironie et les mensonges prosociaux pour diverses raisons, par exemple pour faire de l’humour, pour critiquer ou pour faire preuve de politesse. Bien que certaines études aient examiné les différences individuelles dans la perception de la politesse de ce type de langage, les recherches u...
Individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) often show breakdown in the production and interpretation of aspects of social communication. However, there is no current method of assessment for evaluating social communication dysfunction in individuals with PD. The aim of this study was to develop a self-report questionnaire for individuals with PD to...
Background:
Proficient speakers of a language often accommodate less proficient speakers during conversation to facilitate comprehension, but information about factors such as personality and language experience that may shape how speakers perceive accommodation is limited.
Purpose:
We developed an online questionnaire to clarify the use of spee...
Understanding insincere language (sarcasm and teasing) is a fundamental part of communication and crucial for maintaining social relationships. This can be a challenging task for cochlear implant (CIs) users who receive degraded suprasegmental information important for perceiving a speaker’s attitude. We measured the perception of speaker sincerity...
When we hear an emotional voice, does this alter how the brain perceives and evaluates a subsequent face? Here, we tested this question by comparing event-related potentials evoked by angry, sad, and happy faces following vocal expressions which varied in form (speech-embedded emotions, non-linguistic vocalizations) and emotional relationship (cong...
The current study explored the judgment of communicative appropriateness while processing a dialogue between two individuals. All stimuli were presented as audio-visual as well as audio-only vignettes and 24 young adults reported their social impression (appropriateness) of literal, blunt, sarcastic, and teasing statements. On average, teasing stat...
Besides motor symptoms, people with Parkinson’s Disease (PD) often exhibit social cognition difficulties. The assessment of social cognition in early PD is crucial, as these deficits may impact patients' social interactions and quality of life. The current study used naturalistic, dynamic video clips to examine the ability of individuals with idiop...
Nonliteral language represents a complex form of communication that can be interpreted in numerous different ways. Our study explored how individual differences in personality and communication styles affect the evaluation of literal and nonliteral language in the context of assumptions made by the Tinge Hypothesis (Dews & Winner, 1995). Participan...
L1 speakers often accommodate L2 speakers in a phenomenon known as “foreigner-directed speech” (FDS; Hatch, 1978). FDS is frequently employed as a strategy by L1 speakers to adapt their speech when talking to learners of a specific language; it is generally described as a rapport-building behavior that helps L2 speakers understand the conversation...
Individuals with Parkinson’s Disease (PD) often show breakdown in the interpretation of pragmatic language meaning. However, there is no current standard of care for evaluating social communication dysfunction in PD which affects the persons with PD and their caregivers. Thus, we developed a questionnaire for individuals with PD to evaluate social...
Background
Humour and sarcasm may be used as potential coping strategies during challenging times and to improve wellbeing. We investigated changes in humor and sarcasm use during the COVID-19 pandemic in participants with varying anxiety and depression symptom severity, and in those with versus without psychiatric disorders.
Methods
Online data w...
Recognizing sarcasm and jocularity during face-to-face communication requires the integration of verbal, paralinguistic, and nonverbal cues, yet most previous research on nonliteral language processing has been carried out using written or static stimuli. In the current study, we examined the processing of dynamic literal and nonliteral intentions...
Aim
The aim of this scoping review is to identify the eye tracking paradigms and eye movement measures used to investigate auditory and reading comprehension deficits in persons with aphasia (PWA).
Method
MEDLINE via PubMed, Cochrane, CINAHL, Embase, PsycINFO, OTseeker, Scopus, Google Scholar, Grey Literature Database, and ProQuest Search (Dissert...
This study used a trait-level approach to understanding pro-environmental behavior in the context of climate change. We asked 194 adult participants to report their belief in climate change and their risk perception and then tested the correlation between self-reported Big Five traits, trait-level anxiety, and empathy. Our analysis revealed that Op...
Studies investigating the effects of aging on nonliteral language processing have mainly focused on one sensory modality, for example written vignettes. In the current study, we used a video-based task to examine the effect of healthy aging on social communication perception using a novel database called RISC (Relation Inference in Social Communica...
Purpose:
The goal of this study is to determine the typical range of asymmetry between the length and thickness of the levator veli palatini muscle and to explore the impact of the observed asymmetry on velopharyngeal closure. A second objective is to report normative length and thickness of the levator veli palatini muscle among adults with typic...
Background
The Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) is one of the most widely used batteries for assessing people with aphasia. Despite longstanding use, it is unclear how the individual components of the battery contribute to the aphasia quotient (AQ), which profiles aphasia severity.
Objectives
The primary objective of this study was to explore the ind...
Studies testing the effects of aging on social communication have mainly focused on one sensory modality, for example using written vignettes. In the current study, we examine the effect of healthy aging, empathy, and anxiety traits on a social communication task using video stimuli that reflect real-world interactions. By means of an online recrui...
Frequently people we interact with on social media influence decisions we make in daily life. This study explored the connection between parasocial interaction and imitative buying intentions in blog media space. Using a 2 (Stance: Anti, Pro) X 4 (Risk Behavior: Drinking, E-Cigarette, Product, Control) X 2 (Order) mixed factorial design experiment...
Interpreting other people's intentions during communication represents a remarkable challenge for children. Although many studies have examined children's understanding of, for example, sarcasm, less is known about their interpretation. Using realistic audiovisual scenes, we invited 124 children between 8 and 12 years old to watch video clips of yo...
Background
According to sociolinguistic frameworks such as Communication Accommodation Theory, English native speakers modify their speech to meet the communicative needs of non-native speakers ( Beebe & Giles, 1984 ). However, when foreigner-directed speech is used inappropriately, it may lead to overaccommodation, which in turn can act counterpro...
In daily life, humans often tell lies to make another person feel better about themselves, or to be polite, or socially appropriate in situations when telling the blunt truth would be perceived as inappropriate. Prosocial lies are a form of non-literal communication used cross-culturally, but how they are evaluated depends on socio-moral values, an...
Non-native speakers of a particular language face communicative challenges when interacting with native speakers in everyday life. A strategy frequently employed by native speakers to ensure smooth communication is speech accommodation in the form of foreigner-directed speech. Most of the research on foreigner-directed speech has focused on acousti...
Five percent of the U.S. population speak English “not well” or not at all, often leading to miscommunication, which can be especially problematic in a healthcare environment or at the workplace. According to socio-linguistic frameworks such as Communication Accommodation Theory, native speakers have interactional goals and strategies to communicat...
In social life, humans do not always communicate their sincere feelings, and speakers often tell ‘prosocial lies’ to prevent others from being hurt by negative truths. Data illuminating how a speaker's voice carries sincere or insincere attitudes in speech, and how social context shapes the expression and perception of (in)sincere utterances, are s...
Previous research has shown that people adapt the way they speak depending on the perceived comprehension level of the listener (Uther et al., 2007) including when they speak to foreigners. While the acoustic properties of accommodations such as foreign speech are well documented, few studies have investigated how second language learners in partic...
Introduction: Recognizing emotions in others is a pivotal part of socioemotional functioning and plays a central role in social interactions. It has been shown that individuals suffering from Parkinson’s disease (PD) are less accurate at identifying basic emotions such as fear, sadness, and happiness; however, previous studies have predominantly as...
This study uses behavioral measurements (ratings of attractiveness and age), as well as event-related potentials, to test whether speech induced feelings of disgust and happiness can cross-modally influence a person’s judgment of another person’s physical attractiveness. Furthermore, we investigated the type of information driving the effect; namel...
Objective:
Our study assessed how nondemented patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) interpret the affective and mental states of others from spoken language (adopt a "theory of mind") in ecologically valid social contexts. A secondary goal was to examine the relationship between emotion processing, mentalizing, and executive functions in PD durin...
In order to adjust to an ever-changing environment, our brain constantly constructs predictions for various inputs. The auditory system in particular has been shown to automatically use predictions to facilitate sequential processing.Predictive coding theories suppose that the brain extracts regularities to actively predict what is next. It is assu...
When listening to speech we not only form predictions about what is coming next, but also when something is coming. For example, metric stress may be utilized to predict the next salient speech event (i.e. the next stressed syllable) and in turn facilitate speech comprehension. However, speech comprehension can also be facilitated by semantic conte...
IntroductionSyntactic ProcessesSemantic ProcessesInterfaces of Language Subprocesses: An OutlookConclusion
References
Rhythm is a phenomenon that fundamentally affects the perception of events unfolding in time. In language, we define 'rhythm' as the temporal structure that underlies the perception and production of utterances, whereas 'meter' is defined as the regular occurrence of beats (i.e. stressed syllables). In stress-timed languages such as German, this re...
The ability to assess temporal structure is crucial in order to adapt to an ever-changing environment. Increasing evidence suggests that the supplementary motor area (SMA) is involved in both sensory and sensorimotor processing of temporal structure. However, it is not entirely clear whether the structural differentiation of the SMA translates into...
Temporal regularity allows predicting the temporal locus of future information thereby potentially facilitating cognitive processing. We applied event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate how temporal regularity impacts pre-attentive and attentive processing of deviance in the auditory modality. Participants listened to sequences of sinus...
Event-related potential (ERP) data in French and German have shown that metric violations (i.e. incorrectly stressed words) in a sentence elicit a P600. Furthermore, French speakers find it difficult to discriminate stimuli that vary in word stress position and have been labelled as "stress deaf." In the current study we investigated (i) whether Fr...
Numerous studies have provided evidence that physical activity promotes cortical plasticity in the adult brain and in turn facilitates learning. However, until now, the effect of simultaneous physical activity (e.g. bicycling) on learning performance has not been investigated systematically. The current study aims at clarifying whether simultaneous...
In stress-timed languages, the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables (or 'meter') is an important formal and temporal cue to guide speech processing. Previous electroencephalography studies have shown that metric violations result in an early negative event-related potential. It is unclear whether this 'metric' negativity is an N400 elic...
Questions
Questions (8)
We are planning an eye tracking experiment and would like to measure pupil size. Our stimuli are dynamic videos entailing human interaction, and they are about 10 seconds in length. To get reliable measures of pupil size, how should the baseline be designed? How closely do we need to match the baseline to the brightness/luminosity of the videos? How long do we need to show it, and do we have to show it before every trial? Thanks!
I would like to analyze an EEG study that looks at social-pragmatic processing, for example comparing sincere and sarcastic items, and was recorded using video stimuli. I have started to work with fieldtrip, but had trouble finding example scripts that would wrk with my data.
I am planning a large rating study testing different age groups and plan to do a big portion via online testing. I have video stimuli and wanted to see if anybody has experience and can share some insights or suggestions. Thanks!
We are performing a vlsm analysis on lesion data and several behavioral predictors and I am looking for insights on how to interpret the different outputs in MRIcron. Thanks!
We are planning to use SDA in R to do a MVPA analysis and can't find proper tutorials or example scripts online. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
I am answering questions for manuscript revisions concerning our eye tracking experiment, and one of the reviewers wants to know if we used "absolute diameters".
I am currently analyzing data from a behavioral study on emotion perception using lmer model comparisons in R. I have a fairly simple design, with emotional intensity as repeated measure and valence (positive, negative) and group (controls, patients) as fixed effects. Random effects are subject (n=37) and stimulus (n=8). I am comparing a simple model with more complex models using the anova function, but I ran into two problems. My degress of freedom for one of the model comparisons is 0, and it seems to matter in which order I put the models when comparing them. Here's the set up and outputs:
Models:
intensity.valence.1 <- lmer(intensity ~ 1 + (1| subject) + (1 | stimulus), data = BehavIntens,REML=FALSE)
intensity.valence.2 <- lmer(intensity ~ group + (1 | subject) + (1 | stimulus), data = BehavIntens,REML=FALSE)
intensity.valence.3 <- lmer(intensity ~ valence + (1| subject) + (1 | stimulus), data = BehavIntens,REML=FALSE)
intensity.valence.4 <- lmer(intensity ~ valence + group + (1 | subject) + (1 | stimulus), data = BehavIntens,REML=FALSE)
intensity.valence.5 <- lmer(intensity ~ valence * group + (1 | subject) + (1 | stimulus), data = BehavIntens,REML=FALSE)
Comparison 1:
anova(intensity.valence.1,intensity.valence.2,intensity.valence.3,intensity.valence.4,intensity.valence.5)
Data: BehavIntens
Models:
object: intensity ~ 1 + (1 | subject) + (1 | stimulus)
..1: intensity ~ group + (1 | subject) + (1 | stimulus)
..2: intensity ~ valence + (1 | subject) + (1 | stimulus)
..3: intensity ~ valence + group + (1 | subject) + (1 | stimulus)
..4: intensity ~ valence * group + (1 | subject) + (1 | stimulus)
Df AIC BIC logLik deviance Chisq Chi Df Pr(>Chisq)
object 4 1060.4 1075.2 -526.20 1052.4
..1 5 1062.1 1080.6 -526.06 1052.1 0.2730 1 0.6013
..2 5 1062.4 1080.8 -526.18 1052.4 0.0000 0 1.0000
..3 6 1064.1 1086.2 -526.04 1052.1 0.2730 1 0.6013
..4 7 1064.6 1090.5 -525.31 1050.6 1.4601 1 0.2269
Comparison 2:
anova(intensity.valence.1,intensity.valence.3,intensity.valence.2,intensity.valence.4,intensity.valence.5)
Data: BehavIntens
Models:
object: intensity ~ 1 + (1 | subject) + (1 | stimulus)
..1: intensity ~ valence + (1 | subject) + (1 | stimulus)
..2: intensity ~ group + (1 | subject) + (1 | stimulus)
..3: intensity ~ valence + group + (1 | subject) + (1 | stimulus)
..4: intensity ~ valence * group + (1 | subject) + (1 | stimulus)
Df AIC BIC logLik deviance Chisq Chi Df Pr(>Chisq)
object 4 1060.4 1075.2 -526.20 1052.4
..1 5 1062.4 1080.8 -526.18 1052.4 0.0330 1 0.8558
..2 5 1062.1 1080.6 -526.06 1052.1 0.2400 0 <2e-16 ***
..3 6 1064.1 1086.2 -526.04 1052.1 0.0330 1 0.8558
..4 7 1064.6 1090.5 -525.31 1050.6 1.4601 1 0.2269
---
Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1
I am wondering if anybody has an idea what is going wrong. Thanks in advance for your help!
I am analyzing data from an eye tracking study using emotional video clips and want to look at pupil dilation as a measure. However, I read that one has to be careful about luminance confounds. Does anybody know a way to measure luminance in a video?
