Neurodevelopmental disorders such as Fragile X Syndrome (FXS) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are characterized by disrupted cortical oscillatory activity, particularly in the alpha and gamma frequency bands. These abnormalities are linked to deficits in attention, sensory processing, and cognitive function. In this work, we present an adaptive machine learning-based brain-computer interface (BCI) system designed to modulate neural oscillations through frequency-specific auditory stimulation to enhance cognitive readiness in individuals with FXS. EEG data were recorded from 38 participants using a 128-channel system under a stimulation paradigm consisting of a 30-second baseline (no stimulus) followed by 60-second auditory entrainment episodes at 7Hz, 9Hz, 11Hz, and 13Hz. A comprehensive analysis of power spectral features (Alpha, Gamma, Delta, Theta, Beta) and cross-frequency coupling metrics (Alpha-Gamma, Alpha-Beta, etc.) was conducted. The results identified Peak Alpha Power, Peak Gamma Power, and Alpha Power per second per channel as the most discriminative biomarkers. The 13Hz stimulation condition consistently elicited a significant increase in Alpha activity and suppression of Gamma activity, aligning with our optimization objective. A supervised machine learning framework was developed to predict EEG responses and dynamically adjust stimulation parameters, enabling real-time, subject-specific adaptation. This work establishes a novel EEG-driven optimization framework for cognitive neuromodulation, providing a foundational model for next-generation AI-integrated BCI systems aimed at personalized neurorehabilitation in FXS and related disorders.

Most state-of-the-art sign language models are trained on interpreter or isolated vocabulary data, which overlooks the variability that characterizes natural dialogue. However, human communication dynamically adapts to contexts and interlocutors through spatiotemporal changes and articulation style. This specifically manifests itself in educational settings, where novel vocabularies are used by teachers, and students. To address this gap, we collect a motion capture dataset of American Sign Language (ASL) STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) dialogue that enables quantitative comparison between dyadic interactive signing, solo signed lecture, and interpreted articles. Using continuous kinematic features, we disentangle dialogue-specific entrainment from individual effort reduction and show spatiotemporal changes across repeated mentions of STEM terms. On average, dialogue signs are 24.6%-44.6% shorter in duration than the isolated signs, and show significant reductions absent in monologue contexts. Finally, we evaluate sign embedding models on their ability to recognize STEM signs and approximate how entrained the participants become over time. Our study bridges linguistic analysis and computational modeling to understand how pragmatics shape sign articulation and its representation in sign language technologies.

Do binaural beats really help you focus? The auditory illusion can create a phantom tone in your head said to promote focus, relaxation, and cognition. Binaural beats promise to sharpen focus and quiet the mind with nothing more than sound. But do they actually work? Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday.

The growing prevalence of conversational voice interfaces, powered by developments in both speech and language technologies, raises important questions about their influence on human communication. While written communication can signal identity through lexical and stylistic choices, voice-based interactions inherently amplify socioindexical elements - such as accent, intonation, and speech style - which more prominently convey social identity and group affiliation. There is evidence that even passive media such as television is likely to influence the audience's linguistic patterns. Unlike passive media, conversational AI is interactive, creating a more immersive and reciprocal dynamic that holds a greater potential to impact how individuals speak in everyday interactions. Such heightened influence can be expected to arise from phenomena such as acoustic-prosodic entrainment and linguistic accommodation, which occur naturally during interaction and enable users to adapt their speech patterns in response to the system. While this phenomenon is still emerging, its potential societal impact could provide organisations, movements, and brands with a subtle yet powerful avenue for shaping and controlling public perception and social identity. We argue that the socioindexical influence of AI-generated speech warrants attention and should become a focus of interdisciplinary research, leveraging new and existing methodologies and technologies to better understand its implications.

This study explores F0 entrainment in second language (L2) English speech imitation during an Alternating Reading Task (ART). Participants with Italian, French, and Slovak native languages imitated English utterances, and their F0 entrainment was quantified using the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) distance between the parameterized F0 contours of the imitated utterances and those of the model utterances. Results indicate a nuanced relationship between L2 English proficiency and entrainment: speakers with higher proficiency generally exhibit less entrainment in pitch variation and declination. However, within dyads, the more proficient speakers demonstrate a greater ability to mimic pitch range, leading to increased entrainment. This suggests that proficiency influences entrainment differently at individual and dyadic levels, highlighting the complex interplay between language skill and prosodic adaptation.

We introduce the Alternating Reading Task (ART) Corpus, a collection of dyadic sentence reading for studying the entrainment and imitation behaviour in speech communication. The ART corpus features three experimental conditions - solo reading, alternating reading, and deliberate imitation - as well as three sub-corpora encompassing French-, Italian-, and Slovak-accented English. This design allows systematic investigation of speech entrainment in a controlled and less-spontaneous setting. Alongside detailed transcriptions, it includes English proficiency scores, demographics, and in-experiment questionnaires for probing linguistic, personal and interpersonal influences on entrainment. Our presentation covers its design, collection, annotation processes, initial analysis, and future research prospects.

Successful entrainment during collaboration positively affects trust, willingness to collaborate, and likeability towards collaborators. In this paper, we present a mixed-method study to investigate characteristics of successful entrainment leading to pair and group-based synchronisation. Drawing inspiration from industrial settings, we designed a fast-paced, short-cycle repetitive task. Using motion tracking, we investigated entrainment in both dyadic and triadic task completion. Furthermore, we utilise audio-video recordings and semi-structured interviews to contextualise participants' experiences. This paper contributes to the Human-Computer/Robot Interaction (HCI/HRI) literature using a human-centred approach to identify characteristics of entrainment during pair- and group-based collaboration. We present five characteristics related to successful entrainment. These are related to the occurrence of entrainment, leader-follower patterns, interpersonal communication, the importance of the point-of-assembly, and the value of acoustic feedback. Finally, we present three design considerations for future research and design on collaboration with robots.

Speakers tend to engage in adaptive behavior, known as entrainment, when they become similar to their interlocutor in various aspects of speaking. We present an unsupervised deep learning framework that derives meaningful representation from textual features for developing semantic entrainment. We investigate the model's performance by extracting features using different variations of the BERT model (DistilBERT and XLM-RoBERTa) and Google's universal sentence encoder (USE) embeddings on two human-human (HH) corpora (The Fisher Corpus English Part 1, Columbia games corpus) and one human-machine (HM) corpus (Voice Assistant Conversation Corpus (VACC)). In addition to semantic features we also trained DNN-based models utilizing two auditory embeddings (TRIpLet Loss network (TRILL) vectors, Low-level descriptors (LLD) features) and two units of analysis (Inter pausal unit and Turn). The results show that semantic entrainment can be assessed with our model, that models can distinguish between HH and HM interactions and that the two units of analysis for extracting acoustic features provide comparable findings.

Linguistic entrainment, or alignment, represents a phenomenon where linguistic patterns employed by conversational participants converge to one another. While alignment has been shown to produce a more natural user experience, most dialogue systems do not have any provisions for it. In this work, we introduce methods for achieving dialogue alignment in a GPT-2-based end-to-end dialogue system through the utilization of shared vocabulary. We experiment with training instance weighting, alignment-specific loss, and additional conditioning to generate responses that align with the user. By comparing different entrainment techniques on the MultiWOZ dataset, we demonstrate that all three approaches produce significantly better-aligned results than the baseline, as confirmed by both automated and manual evaluation metrics.

Conversational agents have become ubiquitous in assisting with daily tasks, and are expected to possess human-like features. One such feature is lexical entrainment (LE), a phenomenon in which speakers in human-human conversations tend to naturally and subconsciously align their lexical choices with those of their interlocutors, leading to more successful and engaging conversations. As an example, if a digital assistant replies 'Your appointment for Jinling Noodle Pub is at 7 pm' to the question 'When is my reservation for Jinling Noodle Bar today?', it may feel as though the assistant is trying to correct the speaker, whereas a response of 'Your reservation for Jinling Noodle Bar is at 7 pm' would likely be perceived as more positive. This highlights the importance of LE in establishing a shared terminology for maximum clarity and reducing ambiguity in conversations. However, we demonstrate in this work that current response generation models do not adequately address this crucial humanlike phenomenon. To address this, we propose a new dataset, named MULTIWOZ-ENTR, and a measure for LE for conversational systems. Additionally, we suggest a way to explicitly integrate LE into conversational systems with two new tasks, a LE extraction task and a LE generation task. We also present two baseline approaches for the LE extraction task, which aim to detect LE expressions from dialogue contexts.