Francesco Cangemi’s research while affiliated with Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and other places

Although mentalizing abilities in autistic adults without intelligence deficits are similar to those of control participants in tasks relying on verbal information, they are dissimilar in tasks relying on non-verbal information. The current study aims to investigate mentalizing behavior in autism in a paradigm involving two important nonverbal means to communicate mental states: eye gaze and speech intonation. In an eye-tracking experiment, participants with ASD and a control group watched videos showing a virtual character gazing at objects while an utterance was presented auditorily. We varied the virtual character's gaze duration toward the object (600 or 1800 ms) and the height of the pitch peak on the accented syllable of the word denoting the object. Pitch height on the accented syllable was varied by 45 Hz, leading to high or low prosodic emphasis. Participants were asked to rate the importance of the given object for the virtual character. At the end of the experiment, we assessed how well participants recognized the objects they were presented with in a recognition task. Both longer gaze duration and higher pitch height increased the importance ratings of the object for the virtual character overall. Compared to the control group, ratings of the autistic group were lower for short gaze, but higher when gaze was long but pitch was low. Regardless of an ASD diagnosis, participants clustered into three behaviorally different subgroups, representing individuals whose ratings were influenced (1) predominantly by gaze duration, (2) predominantly by pitch height, or (3) by neither, accordingly labelled "Lookers," "Listeners" and "Neithers" in our study. "Lookers" spent more time fixating the virtual character's eye region than "Listeners," while both "Listeners" and "Neithers" spent more time fixating the object than "Lookers." Object recognition was independent of the virtual character's gaze duration towards the object and pitch height. It was also independent of an ASD diagnosis. Our results show that gaze duration and intonation are effectively used by autistic persons for inferring the importance of an object for a virtual character. Notably, compared to the control group, autistic participants were influenced more strongly by gaze duration than by pitch height.

Individuals with schizophrenia generally show difficulties in interpersonal communication. Linguistic analyses shed new light on speech atypicalities in schizophrenia. However, very little is known about conversational interaction management by these individuals. Moreover, the relationship between linguistic features, psychopathology, and patients’ subjectivity has received limited attention to date. We used a novel methodology to explore dyadic conversations involving 58 participants (29 individuals with schizophrenia and 29 control persons) and medical doctors. High-quality stereo recordings were obtained and used to quantify turn-taking patterns. We investigated psychopathological dimensions and subjective experiences using the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale for Schizophrenia (PANSS), the Examination of Anomalous Self Experience scale (EASE), the Autism Rating Scale (ARS) and the Abnormal Bodily Phenomena questionnaire (ABPq). Different turn-taking patterns of both patients and interviewers characterised conversations involving individuals with schizophrenia. We observed higher levels of overlap and mutual silence in dialogues with the patients compared to dialogues with control persons. Mutual silence was associated with negative symptom severity; no dialogical feature was correlated with anomalous subjective experiences. Our findings suggest that individuals with schizophrenia display peculiar turn-taking behaviour, thereby enhancing our understanding of interactional coordination in schizophrenia.

Backchannels (BCs) are signals produced by conversation partners to support the ongoing turn of the interlocutor. Audible backchannels can have a lexical (yes) or non-lexical form (mhm), consisting of one unit (mhm) or multiple units (mhm yes). In this paper, we analyse the form and function of Multi-Unit Backchannels (MUBs) in Italian conversational speech. Data are drawn from the DIA (Dialogic ItAlian) corpus, a collection of spontaneous and informal conversations between dyads of Italian speakers who know each other well. In this corpus, MUBs represent over 29% of total backchanneling signals. While most single-unit backchannels fulfil a single function, with Continuer being the most frequent, the majority of MUBs fulfil multiple functions simultaneously, usually involving Agreement. Although backchannels are regarded as very short utterances, a large proportion of MUBs are, in fact, not short in duration. Interestingly, in our corpus MUBs are produced more frequently by speakers who do not take a prominent role in the interaction.

Linguistic prosody involves the rhythm and melody of speech. It implicitly enhances or modifies the explicit meaning of spoken words. The literature on linguistic pros-ody related to autism spectrum disorder deals both with the production and perception of a broad range of linguistic functions. These functions range from the formal encoding of grammatical features (e.g. lexical stress, syntactic structure) to the less formal, more intuitive signalling of pragmatic or interactional aspects (speech acts, information structure, turn-taking in conversation). This narrative review reports mixed results from 51 studies, with tentative evidence for greater differences in the perception of intuitive functions. Apart from considerable methodological differences across the different studies, much of the variability in the results is due to the wide range of ages investigated , since difficulties encountered by autistic children do not always persist into adulthood and compensatory strategies can be learnt for using prosody in communication.

Recent empirical studies have highlighted the large degree of analytic flexibility in data analysis that can lead to substantially different conclusions based on the same data set. Thus, researchers have expressed their concerns that these researcher degrees of freedom might facilitate bias and can lead to claims that do not stand the test of time. Even greater flexibility is to be expected in fields in which the primary data lend themselves to a variety of possible operationalizations. The multidimensional, temporally extended nature of speech constitutes an ideal testing ground for assessing the variability in analytic approaches, which derives not only from aspects of statistical modeling but also from decisions regarding the quantification of the measured behavior. In this study, we gave the same speech-production data set to 46 teams of researchers and asked them to answer the same research question, resulting in substantial variability in reported effect sizes and their interpretation. Using Bayesian meta-analytic tools, we further found little to no evidence that the observed variability can be explained by analysts’ prior beliefs, expertise, or the perceived quality of their analyses. In light of this idiosyncratic variability, we recommend that researchers more transparently share details of their analysis, strengthen the link between theoretical construct and quantitative system, and calibrate their (un)certainty in their conclusions.

Introduction Patients with schizophrenia present severe communication difficulties in various linguistic areas. In the last two decades research has invested significant effort in trying to better characterize the linguistic profile of patients with schizophrenia, with the purpose to help and guide diagnosis and treatment. Moreover, speech data could be easily gathered through non-invasive techniques and are therefore seen as particularly promising by clinicians. However, surprisingly very little is known about interactional dialogue management, i.e. turn-taking, in these patients. ‘Schizophrenic autism’, the peculiar intersubjective experience also linked to anomalies in the sense of the self (‘Self-disorders’) presented by these patients, could be at the basis of an unusual turn-taking management. Objectives The objective of the present study was to investigate turn-taking patterns of patients with schizophrenia and to explore their possible associations with psychopathological dimensions and subjective experiences. Methods We obtained double-channel audio-recordings from interviews with twenty patients with schizophrenia (SCZ) and twenty healthy controls (HC). Participants answered general questions to elicit spontaneous dialogues, to improve the ecological validity of the task. The audio files obtained were then analyzed with Praat, a software widely used in experimental phonetics. We subsequently quantified a set of conversational metrics (participant floor occupation, mutual silence, overlap between speakers, speaking turn and pause duration). Patients also underwent a thorough psychopathological and phenomenological evaluation with the Positive And Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS), the Examination of Anomalous Self Experience scale (EASE) and the Autism Rating Scale (ARS). Results Our results show that the SCZ group displayed a reduced participant floor occupation, an increased mutual silence, and shorter speaking turns as compared to the HC. (Fig. 1, Fig. 2). We found significant associations between conversational features and psychopathology (Fig. 3). Two multivariate linear regressions showed that the participant occupation floor and the average speaking turn duration (dependent variables) were negatively related to the severity of negative symptoms and Self-Disorders. Interestingly, Self-Disorders were the best predictors of conversational engagement. Conclusions Our results, although preliminary, suggest the existence of peculiar turn-taking patterns in schizophrenia, linked to negative symptoms and disturbances of the subjective experience, particularly in the Self domain. Our results suggest also how the use of experimental linguistic methodology is applicable to clinical settings and underscores the importance of research projects in this field that are strongly interdisciplinary in both design and conduct. Disclosure of Interest None Declared

Schizophrenia is characterised by a variety of symptoms, many of which are expressed verbally. However, privacy concerns limit the possibility of collecting and sharing large corpora of schizophrenic speech. As a result, variability in the communicative behaviour of individuals with schizophrenia is currently poorly understood. In this study we explore how far content-free speech activity records can successfully profile the behaviour of patients with schizophrenia. We used data from one of the very few publicly available corpora of conversations with patients with schizophrenia, featuring interviews between a therapist and three patients with different symptoms. Crucially, in this study we annotated only moments of speech and silence during the interview, and we entirely discarded the verbal content of the interview. In this way we perform a type of analysis that fully preserves the speakers’ privacy, while still allowing for comparisons with the full original recorded material. We developed several types of analyses and corresponding visualisations from the activity records. Exemplifying these analyses, clear patient-specific profiles can be derived, based on the dimensions of total silence duration and the speech duration of patients and therapists. These findings are consistent with an independent phenomenological assessment of the three patients.

The organisation of who speaks when in conversation is perhaps the most fundamental aspect of human communication. Research on a wide variety of groups of speakers has revealed a seemingly universal preference for between-speaker transitions consisting of very short silent gaps. Previous research on conversational turn-taking in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) consists of only a handful of studies, most of which are limited in scope and based on the non-spontaneous speech of children and adolescents. No previous studies have investigated dialogues between autistic adults. We analysed the conversational turn-taking behaviour of 28 adult native German speakers in two groups of dyads, in which both interlocutors either did or did not have a diagnosis of ASD. We found no clear difference in turn-timing between the ASD and the control group overall, with both groups showing the same preference for very short silent-gap transitions that has been described for many other groups of speakers in the past. We did, however, find a clear difference between groups specifically in the earliest stages of dialogue, where ASD dyads produced considerably longer silent gaps than controls. We discuss our findings in the context of the previous literature, the implications of diverging behaviour specifically in the early stages of conversation, and the general importance of studying the neglected aspect of interactions between autistic adults.