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Minimal research exists regarding the effectiveness of pause time as an independent strategy for communication partners to support the communication of young people who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). To date, pause time has been investigated as component of a group of interaction strategies only; therefore its validity as an interaction strategy for communication partners is unknown. The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of variation in pause time as an interaction strategy when communicating with young people who use AAC. Eight participants aged 8:11 to 20:08 years (mean 16.02 years), who used a variety of AAC systems, participated in the study. Three pause time conditions were trialed during a scripted shared storybook reading task: two, 10 and 45 seconds in which to initiate a response. A total of 27 conversational turn opportunities were provided to participants over the course of the task. If no response was initiated within the pause time, the examiner moved on to the next turn opportunity. If a response was initiated, the participant was provided time to finish their turn. Turns were analyzed for percentage of responses made to a turn opportunity, mean length of utterance in words (MLU), percentage of assertive conversational acts made and the modes of communication used. Findings of the study indicated that participants were more likely to respond to a turn opportunity when their communication partner allowed a longer pause time. Additionally, a longer pause time resulted in a higher MLU. Participants did not use a greater number of assertive conversational acts or use their AAC system over other modes of communication when provided a longer pause time. Results are discussed in relation to the current AAC literature and implications of the findings for clinicians and communication partners of young people who use AAC.

abstract: With the rise of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among adults in the United States, understanding the processes of trauma, trauma related disorders, and the long-term impact of living with them is an area of continued focus for researchers. This is especially a concern in the case of current and former military service members (veterans), whose work activities and deployment cycles place them at an increased risk of exposure to trauma-inducing experiences but who have a low rate of self-referral to healthcare professionals. There is thus an urgent need for developing procedures for early diagnosis and treatment. The present study examines how the tools and findings of the field of linguistics may contribute to the field of trauma research. Previous research has shown that cognition and language production are closely linked. This study focuses on the role of prosody in PTSD and pilots a procedure for the data collection and analysis. Data consist of monologic talk from a sample of student-veterans and analyzed with speech software (Praat) for pauses greater than 250 milliseconds per 100 words. The pause frequency was compared to a PCL-5 score, an assessment used to check for PTSD symptoms and evaluate need for further assessment and possible diagnosis of PTSD. This pilot study found the methods successfully elicited data that could be used to measure and test the research questions. Although the findings of the study were inconclusive due to limitations of the participant pool, it found that the research model proved effect as a model for future linguistic research on trauma. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis English 2020

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A prevalent feature of typical spontaneous speech are speech pauses. Longer speech pauses, known as cognitive pauses, occur in typical speech and are indicative of higher-level cognitive processes. Atypical cognitive pauses, however, are prevalent in the speech of people with aphasia consequent to their communication disorder. Research has shown that these atypical pauses may contribute to negative listener perceptions. This study aimed to determine the influence of atypical speech pause on listener perceptions of communicative effectiveness and speaker likeability. Specifically, this study evaluated the relationship between listener ratings of communicative effectiveness and likeability and acoustic measures of between-utterance pause duration, within-utterance pause duration, and the location of within-utterance pauses. This study also examined the relationship between listener ratings of communicative effectiveness and likeability. Target stimuli included 30-second samples of speech from two individuals with mild aphasia and four with moderate aphasia. Using a visual analog scale, 40 adult listeners listened to these speech samples and rated each sample according to the speaker's communicative effectiveness and likeability. Overall, listeners were not as sensitive to between-utterance pauses. While listeners were more sensitive to within-utterance pauses greater than one second, they were similarly impacted by within-utterance pauses between 250-999 milliseconds. Listeners were also more affected by pauses at the beginning of an utterance than at the end of an utterance. Results also demonstrated a strong positive correlation between listener ratings of communicative effectiveness and likeability. In general, results suggest that the location and length of pauses in the speech of people with aphasia have an impact on listeners' perceptions. In combination with future research, the results of this study will provide a deeper understanding of the impact of cognitive pause in people with aphasia, thus improving future clinical assessment and treatment of aphasia.

This study is an examination of how a word’s syntactic category, word length, and usage frequency might impact a speaker’s use of communicative pause. Previously collected between and within utterance language samples from 21 people with aphasia (Harmon, 2018) were evaluated in this study. Participants consisted of 11 individuals diagnosed with mild or very mild aphasia and 10 individuals with moderate aphasia;15 who exhibited fluent subtypes and 6 non-fluent subtypes of aphasia. Data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) was used to code the word frequency and syntactic category of each word in the language samples. Generally, speakers with both non-fluent and fluent aphasia produced more monosyllabic words of very high frequency with a greater percentage of function words than content words. Analyses revealed no significant correlations between the pause duration for either the word length or word frequency for either group of speakers. In relation to syntactic category, no significant differences in pause duration were found between content and function words in the between utterance condition. However, non-fluent speakers preceded content words with significantly shorter pause durations within utterances when compared with the function words. Due to differences in sample sizes between the speaker and syntactic groups, non-parametric statistics were used for some comparisons. In addition, this study does not fully account for the influence of fillers and incomplete words. Despite these limitations, this study will contribute to the research regarding communicative speech pause in speakers with aphasia and provide insight into more useful diagnostic and treatment strategies.

The purpose of this study was to examine how length and location of speech pausing affects a listeners' perception of likability and communication effectiveness. Furthermore, the end goal of this study is to understand how to better assess atypical speech pause for persons with aphasia (PWA). Speech samples were collected from two neurotypical speakers over the age of 75. The speech samples were the recorded responses of picture description tasks found in the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) and the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (BDAE). These speech samples were then modified to include artificial pauses located both within sentence and between sentence, as well as differing lengths of three seconds, five seconds, and seven seconds. Forty-one listeners (31 female, 8 male) were recruited to listen to the 28 speech samples. Using a visual analogy scale, listeners rated each sample on their perception of likability and communication effectiveness. Communication effectiveness and likability ratings were significantly higher for between-utterance pauses. Likewise, ratings were highest for the baseline (no pause) stimuli and decreased as pause length increased. Across all conditions, ratings for the male speaker were rated slightly greater than that of the female speaker. Results of this study provide preliminary evidence that longer speech pause, especially found within utterance, affect the likability and communication effectiveness of PWA. It is hoped that additional research regarding speech pause will be conducted to determine how best to assess speech pause in PWA.

The purpose of this study was to examine more deeply the relationship between pause location and duration and its connection to clause and phrase boundaries for native English speakers (NESs). Previous research has shown pauses produced by NESs to be located at clause boundaries (Brown & Miron, 1971; Hawkins, 1971; Tavakoli, 2011), but little empirical work has been done to probe this issue further. For this research, 80 speech samples, 40 male and 40 female, were randomly selected from the International Dialects of English Archive (IDEA) representing different regions in the United States. Oral data from the read-aloud portion of the samples were used for this research. The grammatical structures within the speech sample were tagged, and the filled and unfilled pauses were marked for location and duration. The utterances were analyzed for pauses occurring at grammatical boundaries and punctuation marks. The results showed that 91.5% of all pauses in the speech samples were found after clauses, phrases, or punctuation marks, leaving only 8.5% to occur within these structures. The number of pauses per boundary out of the potential pauses at those boundaries was also analyzed. The findings from this study indicate that NESs pause after 94.2% of the available periods, 69.4% of the clauses, 44.7% of the commas, and 5.7% of the phrases. In addition to these findings on pause location, pauses were found to be longest at clause and period boundaries with average pause lengths of 652 ms and 734 ms respectively and shortest at phrase and comma boundaries with average pause lengths of 471 ms and 511 ms respectively. The results also showed that these differences were statistically significant between clauses and phrases as well as periods and commas. Although filled pauses were marked, no meaningful findings can be reported due to there only being a total of 10 filled pauses in all 80 speech samples. Gender differences were also statistically significant when measuring pause duration with the average pause length of males being 659 ms and those of females being 550 ms. In addition to providing new empirical evidence describing NESs' use of pausing, these findings have potential implications to help non-native English speakers (NNESs) improve their use of pausing in English as a means of enhancing their fluency and intelligibility.

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Afin de caractériser les profils de distribution de l’ARN Pol II en aval des EAGs, j’ai réalisé des expériences de ChIP-seq en utilisant un anticorps reconnaissant toutes les formes d’ARN Pol II humaine. J’ai analysé les profils de Pol II en aval de 13787 gènes qui n’ont pas de gène flanquant à +/- 4kb en amont ou en aval. Nos résultats ont été analysés en comparaison avec des données disponibles de séquençage à haut débit d’ARN naissants (Global Run On assay coupled sequencing : GRO-seq). Nos résultats montrent qu’un enrichissement de la Pol II en aval de l’extrémité des unités de transcription est une caractéristique partagée par tous les gènes exprimés et reflète la présence d’ARN Pol II active. Des analyses bioinformatiques (K-means clustering) m’ont permis de distinguer quatre groupes de gènes : le premier groupe (H) est caractérisé par un profil de pause étroit alors que les trois autres groupes (PA1-PA3) montrent un profil large ou très large, pouvant aller jusqu’à 6kb en aval des EAGs. Des analyses d’annotations (Gene Ontology) révèlent que le groupe H contient pratiquement exclusivement des gènes d’histones qui ne contiennent pas d’intron et dont les transcrits ne sont pas polyadénylés. A l’inverse, les groupes PA1-PA3 contiennent des gènes codant pour des transcrits polyadénylés. J’ai confirmé par des expériences de ChIP couplées à une analyse par qPCR les différents types de profils de distribution de Pol II décrits par analyse bioinformatique. Nos résultats sont en accord avec d’autres publications et suggèrent un lien entre le profil de distribution de la Pol II à l’extrémité 3’ des gènes histones et les mécanismes particuliers de maturation de l’extrémité 3’ de ces transcrits. Cette idée est renforcée par nos analyses fonctionnelles montrant que l’inhibition des mécanismes de polyadénylation augment la présence de l’ARN Pol II en 3’ des EAGs pour les gènes codant pour des transcrits polyadénylés. / The Pol II transcription cycle can be divided into three main phases: transcription initiation, elongation and termination. Each phase represent a possibility for the regulation of gene expression. Recently, genome-wide studies demonstrated that Pol II pausing is an important regulatory step that is present at almost every eukaryotic Pol II promoter. Surprisingly, paused or slowed down polymerases were also discovered downstream of 3’ end of genes, of which the exact role is still not fully understood.During my Ph.D. I carried out projects using chromatin immunoprecipitation assay coupled to high-throughput sequencing techniques to analyze genome-wide Pol II behavior in two aspects:First, we analyzed Pol II occupancy downstream of 3’ end of transcription units. Our analyses suggest that accumulation of Pol II downstream of genes is a genome-wide feature of active transcription. We found broad, often up to 6kb long Pol II occupancy signals at genes coding for polyadenylated transcripts. In contrast, Pol II occupancy shows a narrow profile at the annotated end of core histone genes. We also found a link between RNA 3’ end processing and Pol II accumulation at the end of transcription units.Second, we were following the genome-wide response and alteration of Pol II transcription upon genotoxic stress. Following UV-B treatment we observed a progressive Pol II signal loss from the promoters of expressed genes, which will then extend through the entire transcription unit, up to four hours after irradiation. This is in good agreement with the observation that after UV irradiation transcription is arrested during the period of transcription-coupled repair (TCR).