Dysarthrias, part of the class of neurogenic speech disorders, provide several sources of evidence concerning the neural control of speech. Although the dysarthrias have been studied primarily from a clinical perspective directed to issues of assessment and management, they have much to tell us about how the brain regulates the act of speaking. This paper considers "ve major areas in which diso...

Though anecdotal reports link certain speech disorders to increases in autonomic arousal, few studies have described the relationship between arousal and speech processes. Additionally, it is unclear how increases in arousal may interact with other cognitive-linguistic processes to affect speech motor control. In this experiment we examine potential interactions between autonomic arousal, lingu...

This article reviews the extant studies of the relation of oromotor nonspeech activities to speech production. The relevancy of nonspeech oral motor behaviors to speech motor performance in assessment and treatment is challenged on several grounds. First, contemporary motor theory suggests that movement control is task specific. In other words, it is tied to the unique goals, sources of informa...

Background: Stroke is one of the most disabling diseases worldwide. Herbal medicines, especially lavender, have been used to treat ischemic diseases today.  Objectives: The aim of our study was to investigate the effect of aromatherapy with lavender 10% essential oil on motor function, speech and delirium in acute thrombotic cerebral ischemia patients.  Materials & Methods: In this double bli...

UNLABELLED A fundamental problem for those interested in human communication is to determine how ideas and the various units of language structure are communicated through speaking. The physiological concepts involved in the control of muscle contraction and movement are theoretically distant from the processing levels and units postulated to exist in language production models. A review of the...

Control of speech production is part of the larger motor control system, and as such can be organized into coordinative structures (or functional synergies) with other motor behaviors, that can then be parameterized as single functional units. The current study explores this phenomenon, expanding previous findings with direct kinematic evidence of speech production. Findings indicate that ampli...

In this study, we demonstrate a motor induced suppression of the N100 auditory event related potential while using a motor-imagery brain-computer interface with instantaneous auditory feedback of synthesized speech. Specifically, active listening during motor imagery with synthesized speech feedback yielded an N100 response with less magnitude than when listening to synthesized speech alone. Ev...

Auditory and somatosensory systems play a key role in speech motor control. In the act of speaking, segmental speech movements are programmed to reach phonemic sensory goals, which in turn are used to estimate actual sensory feedback in order to further control production. The adult's tendency to automatically imitate a number of acoustic-phonetic characteristics in another speaker's speech how...