Effects of ethanol intoxication on speech suprasegmentals

The impact of alcohol on affiliative verbal behavior: A systematic review and meta-analysis

BACKGROUND

Language is a fundamental aspect of human social behavior that is linked to many rewarding social experiences, such as social bonding. Potential effects of alcohol on affiliative language may therefore be an essential feature of alcohol reward and may elucidate pathways through which alcohol is linked to social facilitation. Examinations of alcohol's impact on language content, however, are sparse. Accordingly, this investigation represents the first systematic review and meta-analysis of alcohol's effects on affiliative language. We test the hypothesis that alcohol increases affiliative verbal approach behaviors and discuss future research directions.

METHODS

PsycInfo and Web of Science were systematically searched in March 2023 according to our preregistered plan. Eligible studies included social alcohol administration experiments in which affiliative verbal language was assessed. We present a random-effects meta-analysis that examines the effect of alcohol compared to control on measures of affiliative verbal behavior.

RESULTS

Our search identified 16 distinct investigations (comprising 961 participants) that examined the effect of alcohol on affiliative verbal behavior. Studies varied greatly in methods and measures. Meta-analytic results demonstrated that alcohol is modestly associated with increases in affiliative verbal behavior (Hedges' g = 0.164, 95% CI [0.027, 0.301], p = 0.019). Study quality was rated using an adapted version of the Quality Assessment Tool for Quantitative Studies and did not significantly moderate alcohol's effects.

CONCLUSIONS

This study provides preliminary evidence that alcohol can increase affiliative verbal behaviors. This effect may be an important feature of alcohol reward. Given heterogeneity in study features, low study quality ratings, and limited reporting of effect size data, results simultaneously highlight the promise of this research area and the need for more work. Advances in language processing methodologies that could allow future work to systematically expand upon this finding are discussed.

Beyond Last Words: Patterns of Linguistic and Interactional Behavior in a Historical Sample of Dying Hospital Patients

Patterns of linguistic and interactional behavior by people at the very end of their lives are not well described, partly because data is difficult to obtain. This paper analyzes descriptions of 486 deaths gathered from 1900 to 1904 in the first-ever clinical study of dying by noted Canadian physician, Sir William Osler. Only 16 patients were noted speaking, and only four canonical last words were reported. The most frequent observation by medical staff was that the deaths were quiet (n = 30), though range of other behaviors were noted (e.g., moaning, delirium, seeming intention to speak). Osler's problematic study left behind data whose analysis is a small step toward empirically characterizing the linguistic and interactional details of a previously under-described phenomena as well as the importance of the social context in which they occur.

Intoxication and pitch control in tonal and non-tonal language speakers

Alcohol intoxication is known to affect pitch variability in non-tonal languages. In this study, intoxication's effects on pitch were examined in tonal and non-tonal language speakers, in both their native language (L1; German, Korean, Mandarin) and nonnative language (L2; English). Intoxication significantly increased pitch variability in the German group (in L1 and L2), but not in the Korean or Mandarin groups (in L1 or L2), although there were individual differences. These results support the view that pitch control is related to the functional load of pitch and is an aspect of speech production that can be advantageously transferred across languages, overriding the expected effects of alcohol.

The Impact of Alcohol on L1 versus L2

Alcohol intoxication is known to affect many aspects of human behavior and cognition; one of such affected systems is articulation during speech production. Although much research has revealed that alcohol negatively impacts pronunciation in a first language (L1), there is only initial evidence suggesting a potential beneficial effect of inebriation on articulation in a non-native language (L2). The aim of this study was thus to compare the effect of alcohol consumption on pronunciation in an L1 and an L2. Participants who had ingested different amounts of alcohol provided speech samples in their L1 (Dutch) and L2 (English), and native speakers of each language subsequently rated the pronunciation of these samples on their intelligibility (for the L1) and accent nativelikeness (for the L2). These data were analyzed with generalized additive mixed modeling. Participants' blood alcohol concentration indeed negatively affected pronunciation in L1, but it produced no significant effect on the L2 accent ratings. The expected negative impact of alcohol on L1 articulation can be explained by reduction in fine motor control. We present two hypotheses to account for the absence of any effects of intoxication on L2 pronunciation: (1) there may be a reduction in L1 interference on L2 speech due to decreased motor control or (2) alcohol may produce a differential effect on each of the two linguistic subsystems.

Speech volume indexes sex differences in the social-emotional effects of alcohol

Men and women differ dramatically in their rates of alcohol use disorder (AUD), and researchers have long been interested in identifying mechanisms underlying male vulnerability to problem drinking. Surveys suggest that social processes underlie sex differences in drinking patterns, with men reporting greater social enhancement from alcohol than women, and all-male social drinking contexts being associated with particularly high rates of hazardous drinking. But experimental evidence for sex differences in social-emotional response to alcohol has heretofore been lacking. Research using larger sample sizes, a social context, and more sensitive measures of alcohol's rewarding effects may be necessary to better understand sex differences in the etiology of AUD. This study explored the acute effects of alcohol during social exchange on speech volume--an objective measure of social-emotional experience that was reliably captured at the group level. Social drinkers (360 male; 360 female) consumed alcohol (.82 g/kg males; .74 g/kg females), placebo, or a no-alcohol control beverage in groups of 3 over 36-min. Within each of the 3 beverage conditions, equal numbers of groups consisted of all males, all females, 2 females and 1 male, and 1 female and 2 males. Speech volume was monitored continuously throughout the drink period, and group volume emerged as a robust correlate of self-report and facial indexes of social reward. Notably, alcohol-related increases in group volume were observed selectively in all-male groups but not in groups containing any females. Results point to social enhancement as a promising direction for research exploring factors underlying sex differences in problem drinking.

Drinking songs: alcohol effects on learned song of zebra finches

Speech impairment is one of the most intriguing and least understood effects of alcohol on cognitive function, largely due to the lack of data on alcohol effects on vocalizations in the context of an appropriate experimental model organism. Zebra finches, a representative songbird and a premier model for understanding the neurobiology of vocal production and learning, learn song in a manner analogous to how humans learn speech. Here we show that when allowed access, finches readily drink alcohol, increase their blood ethanol concentrations (BEC) significantly, and sing a song with altered acoustic structure. The most pronounced effects were decreased amplitude and increased entropy, the latter likely reflecting a disruption in the birds’ ability to maintain the spectral structure of song under alcohol. Furthermore, specific syllables, which have distinct acoustic structures, were differentially influenced by alcohol, likely reflecting a diversity in the neural mechanisms required for their production. Remarkably, these effects on vocalizations occurred without overt effects on general behavioral measures, and importantly, they occurred within a range of BEC that can be considered risky for humans. Our results suggest that the variable effects of alcohol on finch song reflect differential alcohol sensitivity of the brain circuitry elements that control different aspects of song production. They also point to finches as an informative model for understanding how alcohol affects the neuronal circuits that control the production of learned motor behaviors.

The effect of alcohol on speech production

The present study investigates the effect of acute alcohol consumption on speech in Hungarian subjects. The measures used to reveal these effects were tongue-twisters, which were grouped according to their linguistic features. The number and type of speech errors while uttering the tongue-twisters were compared between intoxicated and sober conditions. The results showed that subjects made more speech errors in alcohol influenced than in sober states in all types of the tongue-twisters except for those using foreign words. Changes in the articulation rate, number of pauses and fundamental frequency were investigated as well. In the intoxicated state, no changes were observed in fundamental frequency and articulation rate, while the number of pauses increased.

The influence of alcoholic intoxication on the short-time energy function of speech

This study investigates rhythmic features based on the short-time energy function of speech signals with the aim of finding robust, speaker-independent features that indicate speaker intoxication. Data from the German Alcohol Language Corpus, which comprises read, spontaneous, and command&control speech uttered by 162 speakers of both genders and various age groups when sober and intoxicated, were analyzed. Energy contours are compared directly (Root Mean Squared Error, statistical correlation, or the Euclidean distance in the spectral space of the contour) and by parameterization of the contour using the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and the first and second moments of the lower DCT spectrum. Contours are also analyzed by Principal Components Analysis aiming at fundamental "eigen contour" changes that might encode intoxication. Energy contours differ significantly with intoxication in terms of distance measures, the second and fourth DCT coefficients, and the first and second moments of the lower DCT spectrum. Principal Components Analysis did not yield interpretable "eigen contours" that could be used in distinguishing intoxicated from sober contours.

Intoxicated Speech Detection: A Fusion Framework with Speaker-Normalized Hierarchical Functionals and GMM Supervectors

Segmental and suprasegmental speech signal modulations offer information about paralinguistic content such as affect, age and gender, pathology, and speaker state. Speaker state encompasses medium-term, temporary physiological phenomena influenced by internal or external biochemical actions (e.g., sleepiness, alcohol intoxication). Perceptual and computational research indicates that detecting speaker state from speech is a challenging task. In this paper, we present a system constructed with multiple representations of prosodic and spectral features that provided the best result at the Intoxication Subchallenge of Interspeech 2011 on the Alcohol Language Corpus. We discuss the details of each classifier and show that fusion improves performance. We additionally address the question of how best to construct a speaker state detection system in terms of robust and practical marginalization of associated variability such as through modeling speakers, utterance type, gender, and utterance length. As is the case in human perception, speaker normalization provides significant improvements to our system. We show that a held-out set of baseline (sober) data can be used to achieve comparable gains to other speaker normalization techniques. Our fused frame-level statistic-functional systems, fused GMM systems, and final combined system achieve unweighted average recalls (UARs) of 69.7%, 65.1%, and 68.8%, respectively, on the test set. More consistent numbers compared to development set results occur with matched-prompt training, where the UARs are 70.4%, 66.2%, and 71.4%, respectively. The combined system improves over the Challenge baseline by 5.5% absolute (8.4% relative), also improving upon our previously best result.

The influence of alcoholic intoxication on the fundamental frequency of female and male speakers

This study investigates long-term features and utterance contours of fundamental frequency (f0) derived from the German Alcohol Language Corpus. The corpus comprises read, spontaneous, and command&control speech uttered by 148 speakers of both genders and various age groups when sober and intoxicated. f0 median, f0 range, and f0 contours are analyzed for intoxication and interactions with gender and age. Contours are compared both directly (root mean squared error, statistical correlation, or the Euclidean distance in the spectral space of the contour) and by parameterization of the contour using discrete cosine transform and the first and second moment of the lower contour spectrum. Results partly confirm earlier findings, i.e., f0 average and range are mostly raised with intoxication, and also suggest that the majority of speakers do not follow a general trend, but show idiosyncratic alterations to f0. f0 contours differ significantly with intoxication, but a more detailed analysis could not assign these changes to specific general form changes like decline or curvature. The results suggest that it is not possible to predict intoxication from f0 in a single model across different speakers. Instead a speaker-dependent model to account for the individual speaker behavior is proposed.

Functional biomarkers for the acute effects of alcohol on the central nervous system in healthy volunteers

The central nervous system (CNS) effects of acute alcohol administration have been frequently assessed. Such studies often use a wide range of methods to study each of these effects. Unfortunately, the sensitivity of these tests has not completely been ascertained. A literature search was performed to recognize the most useful tests (or biomarkers) for identifying the acute CNS effects of alcohol in healthy volunteers. All tests were grouped in clusters and functional domains. Afterwards, the effect of alcohol administration on these tests was scored as improvement, impairment or as no effect. Furthermore, dose-response relationships were established. A total number of 218 studies, describing 342 different tests (or test variants) were evaluated. Alcohol affected a wide range of CNS domains. Divided attention, focused attention, visuo-motor control and scales of feeling high and of subjective drug effects were identified as the most sensitive functional biomarkers for the acute CNS effects of alcohol. The large number of CNS tests that are used to determine the effects of alcohol interferes with the identification of the most sensitive ones and of drug-response relationships. Our results may be helpful in selecting rational biomarkers for studies investigating the acute CNS effects of alcohol or for future alcohol- interaction studies.

Acoustic analysis of the effects of sustained wakefulness on speech

Exposing healthy adults to extended periods of wakefulness is known to induce changes in psychomotor functioning [Maruff et al. (2005). J. Sleep Res. 14, 21-27]. The effect of fatigue on speech is less well understood. To date, no studies have examined the pitch and timing of neurologically healthy individuals over 24 h of sustained wakefulness. Therefore, speech samples were systematically acquired (e.g., every 4 h) from 18 healthy adults over 24 h. Stimuli included automated and extemporaneous speech tasks, sustained vowel, and a read passage. Measures of timing, frequency and spectral energy were derived acoustically using PRAAT and significant changes were observed on all tasks. The effect of fatigue on speech was found to be strongest just before dawn (after 22 h). Specifically, total speech time, mean pause length, and total signal time all increased as a function of increasing levels of fatigue on the reading tasks; percentage pause and mean pause length decreased on the counting task; F4 variation decreased on the sustained vowel tasks /a:/; and alpha ratio increased on the extemporaneous speech tasks. These findings suggest that acoustic methodologies provide objective data on central nervous system functioning and that changes in speech production occur in healthy adults after just 24 h of sustained wakefulness.

Disability associated with alcohol abuse and dependence

BACKGROUND

 Alcohol use disorders (AUD), i.e., alcohol dependence and abuse, are major contributors to burden of disease. A large part of this burden is because of disability. However, there is still controversy about the best disability weighting for AUD. The objective of this study was to provide an overview of alcohol-related disabilities.

METHODS

Systematic literature review and expert interviews.

RESULTS

There is heterogeneity in experts' descriptions of disabilities related to AUD. The major core attributes of disability related to AUD are changes of emotional state, social relationships, memory and thinking. The most important supplementary attributes are anxiety, impairments of speech and hearing.

CONCLUSIONS

This review identified the main patterns of disability associated with AUD. However, there was considerable variability, and data on less prominent patterns were fragmented. Further and systematic research is required for increasing the knowledge on disability related to AUD and for application of interventions for reducing the associated burden.

Perceiving the effects of ethanol intoxication on voice

Many conditions operate to degrade the quality of the human voice. Alcohol intoxication is one of them. In this project, the objectives were to examine the ability of human listeners to accurately estimate both the presence and severity of intoxication from two types of speech samples. A review of available data suggests that, although listeners can often identify individuals who are intoxicated simply by hearing samples of their voice, they are less efficient at accurately determining the severity of this condition. A number of aural-perceptual studies were carried out to test these relationships. Populations of speakers, selected based on rigorous criteria, provided orally read and extemporaneous utterances when sober and at three highly controlled levels of intoxication. Listener groups of university students and professionals attempted to identify both the existence and specific level of intoxication present. It was found that these individuals were proficient in recognizing the presence of, and increases in, intoxication but were less accurate in gauging the specific levels. Several subordinate relationships were also investigated. In this regard, statistically significant differences were not found between male and female listeners or between professionals and lay listeners; however, they were found for different classes of speech. That is, it was shown that text difficulty correlated with severity of effect.

Evaluation of the NITV CVSA

The purpose of this study was to evaluate a commonly used voice stress analyzer, the National Institute of Truth Verification's (NITV) Computer Voice Stress Analyzer (CVSA), using a speech database containing materials recorded (i) in the laboratory, while highly controlled deceptive and shock-induced stress levels were systematically varied, and (ii) during a field procedure. Subjects were 24 each males/females (age range 18-63 years) drawn from a representative population. All held strong views on an issue and were required to make sharply derogatory statements about it. The CVSA system was then evaluated in a double-blind study using three sets of examiners: (i) two UF scientists trained/certified by NITV in CVSA operation, (ii) three experienced NITV operators provided by the manufacturer and (iii) five experimental phoneticians. The results showed that the "true positive" (or hit) rates for all examiners ranged from chance to somewhat higher levels (c. 50-65%) for all conditions and types of materials (e.g., stress vs. unstressed, truth vs. deception). However, the false-positive rate was just as high - often higher. Sensitivity statistics demonstrated that the CVSA system operated at about chance level.