MedWorm.com provides a medical RSS filtering service. Over 6000 RSS medical sources are combined and output via different filters. This feed contains the latest items from the 'Language and Speech' source. Sat, 10 Oct 2009 19:33:45 +0100 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2639783&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D19624027%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Krahmer E, Swerts M PMID: 19624027 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Language and Speech) Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2639783 Sun, 26 Jul 2009 13:08:03 +0100 2639783 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2639782&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D19624028%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Scarborough R, Keating P, Mattys SL, Cho T, Alwan A In a study of optical cues to the visual perception of stress, three American English talkers spoke words that differed in lexical stress and sentences that differed in phrasal stress, while video and movements of the face were recorded. The production of stressed and unstressed syllables from these utterances was analyzed along many measures of facial movement, which were generally larger and faster in the stressed condition. In a visual perception experiment, 16 perceivers identified the location of stress in forced-choice judgments of video clips of these utterances (without audio). Phrasal stress was better perceived than lexical stress. The relation of the visual intelligibility of the prosody of these utterances to the ... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2639782 Sun, 26 Jul 2009 13:08:03 +0100 2639782 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2639781&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D19624029%26dopt%3DAbstract This study aimed at analyzing auditory-visual perception of prosodic focus by elaborating a paradigm enabling an auditory-visual advantage measurement (avoiding the ceiling effect) and by examining the interaction between audition and vision. A first experiment proved the efficiency of a whispered speech paradigm to measure an auditory-visual advantage for the perception of prosodic features. A second experiment used this paradigm to examine and characterize the auditory-visual perceptual processes. It combined performance assessment (focus detection score) to reaction time measurements and confirmed and extended the results from the first experiment. This study showed that adding vision to audition for perception of prosodic focus can not only improve focus detection but also reduce react... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2639781 Sun, 26 Jul 2009 13:08:03 +0100 2639781 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2639780&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D19624030%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Guaïtella I, Santi S, Lagrue B, Cavé C Following our work on the relationship between eyebrow movements and the fundamental frequency of the voice, this article presents the results of a study on this phenomenon, and also on the temporal location of rapid eyebrow movements with respect to speaking turns during dialogue. We used an automatic movement-acquisition system coupled with the simultaneous, synchronized recording of the vocal production. This procedure permits an objective analysis of eyebrow movements in relation to the vocal production. The data obtained showed that the speakers' rapid eyebrow movements were associated both with turn-taking (occurring right before or right after speaking turn onset) and with changes in the fundamental frequency. These findi... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2639780 Sun, 26 Jul 2009 13:08:03 +0100 2639780 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2639779&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D19624031%26dopt%3DAbstract This article presents a perception study of the audovisual expression of 12 Japanese and 6 French attitudes in order to understand the contribution of audio and visual modalities for affective communication. The relative importance of each modality in the perceptual decoding of the expressions of four speakers is analyzed as a first step towards a deeper comprehension of their influence on the expression of social affects. Then, the audovisual productions of two speakers (one for each language) are acoustically (F0, duration and intensity) and visually (in terms of Action Units) analyzed, in order to match the relation between objective parameters and listeners' perception of these social affects. The most pertinent objective features, either acoustic or visual, are then discussed, in a bi... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2639779 Sun, 26 Jul 2009 13:08:03 +0100 2639779 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2639778&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D19624032%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Wilbur RB Spoken languages are characterized by flexible, multivariate prosodic systems. As a natural language, American Sign Language (ASL), and other sign languages (SLs), are also expected to be characterized in the same way. Artificially created signing systems for classroom use, such as signed English, serve as a contrast to natural sign languages. The present article explores the effects of changes in signing rate on signs, pauses, and, unlike previous studies, a variety of nonmanual markers. Rate was a main effect on the duration of signs, the number of pauses and pause duration, the duration of brow raises, the duration of licensed lowered brows, the number and duration of blinks, all of which decreased with increased signing rate. This indicates that signers produced ... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2639778 Sun, 26 Jul 2009 13:08:03 +0100 2639778 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2639777&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D19624033%26dopt%3DAbstract This article provides an analysis of visual signals that comprise part of the intonational system of a sign language. The system is conveyed mainly by particular actions of the upper face, and is shown to pattern linguistically and predictably in Israeli Sign Language. Its components, aligned with prosodic constituents, are associated with particular but general meanings and may be combined to derive complex meanings. The Brow Raise component is functionally comparable to H tones, signaling continuation and dependency, and characterizing yes/no questions and the if-clause of conditionals, for example. The component Squint instructs the addressee to retrieve information that is not readily accessible, and characterizes relative clauses, topics, and other structures. The details of the compo... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2639777 Sun, 26 Jul 2009 13:08:03 +0100 2639777 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2639776&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D19624034%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: de Vos C, van der Kooij E, Crasborn O The eyebrows are used as conversational signals in face-to-face spoken interaction (Ekman, 1979). In Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT), the eyebrows are typically furrowed in content questions, and raised in polar questions (Coerts, 1992). On the other hand, these eyebrow positions are also associated with anger and surprise, respectively, in general human communication (Ekman, 1993). This overlap in the functional load of the eyebrow positions results in a potential conflict for NGT signers when combining these functions simultaneously. In order to investigate the effect of the simultaneous realization of both functions on the eyebrow position we elicited instances of both question types with neutral affect and with various affective... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2639776 Sun, 26 Jul 2009 13:08:03 +0100 2639776 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2639775&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D19624035%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Vroomen J, Baart M Listeners hearing an ambiguous speech sound flexibly adjust their phonetic categories in accordance with lipread information telling what the phoneme should be (recalibration). Here, we tested the stability of lipread-induced recalibration over time. Listeners were exposed to an ambiguous sound halfway between /t/ and /p/ that was dubbed onto a face articulating either /t/ or /p/. When tested immediately, listeners exposed to lipread /t/ were more likely to categorize the ambiguous sound as /t/ than listeners exposed to /p/. This aftereffect dissipated quickly with prolonged testing and did not reappear after a 24-hour delay. Recalibration of phonetic categories is thus a fragile phenomenon. PMID: 19624035 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Language and Spee... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2639775 Sun, 26 Jul 2009 13:08:03 +0100 2639775 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2639774&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D19624036%26dopt%3DAbstract This article describes MushyPeek, an experiment framework that allows us to manipulate the audiovisual behavior of interlocutors in a setting similar to face-to-face human-human dialogue. The setup connects two subjects to each other over a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone connection and simultaneously provides each of them with an avatar representing the other. We present a first experiment which inaugurates, exemplifies, and validates the framework. The experiment corroborates earlier findings on the use of gaze and head pose gestures in turn-taking. PMID: 19624036 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Language and Speech) Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2639774 Sun, 26 Jul 2009 13:08:03 +0100 2639774 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2639773&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D19624037%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Theobald BJ, Matthews I, Mangini M, Spies JR, Brick TR, Cohn JF, Boker SM Nonverbal visual cues accompany speech to supplement the meaning of spoken words, signify emotional state, indicate position in discourse, and provide back-channel feedback. This visual information includes head movements, facial expressions and body gestures. In this article we describe techniques for manipulating both verbal and nonverbal facial gestures in video sequences of people engaged in conversation. We are developing a system for use in psychological experiments, where the effects of manipulating individual components of nonverbal visual behavior during live face-to-face conversation can be studied. In particular, the techniques we describe operate in real-time at video frame-rate and the manip... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2639773 Sun, 26 Jul 2009 13:08:03 +0100 2639773 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2320827&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D19334414%26dopt%3DAbstract This article compares the performance of several variants of the two basic approaches. Given the problems of definition, it is difficult to determine a correct syllabification in all cases and so to establish the quality of the "gold standard" corpus used either to evaluate quantitatively the output of an automatic algorithm or as the example-set on which data-driven methods crucially depend. Thus, we look for consensus in the entries in multiple lexical databases of pre-syllabified words. In this work, we have used two independent lexicons, and extracted from them the same 18,016 words with their corresponding (possibly different) syllabifications. We have also created a third lexicon corresponding to the 13,594 words that share the same syllabifications in these two sources. As well as t... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2320827 Fri, 10 Apr 2009 23:09:19 +0100 2320827 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2320820&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D19334415%26dopt%3DAbstract We examined the relationship between the acoustic duration of syllables and the silent pauses that follow them in Cantonese. The results showed that at major syntactic junctures, acoustic plus silent pause durations were quite similar for a number of different syllable types whose acoustic durations differed substantially. In addition, it appeared that CV: syllables, which had the longest acoustic duration of all syllable types that were examined, were also the least likely to have silent pauses after them. These results suggest that cross-language differences between the probability that silent pauses are used at major syntactic junctures might potentially be explained by the accuracy at which timing slots can be assigned for syllables, rather than more complex explanations that have been... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2320820 Fri, 10 Apr 2009 23:09:19 +0100 2320820 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2320814&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D19334416%26dopt%3DAbstract This study applies the Phonological Mean Length of Utterance measurement (PMLU; Ingram & Ingram, 2001; Ingram, 2002) to the data of five children acquiring Finnish and evaluates their phonological development longitudinally at four different age points: 2;0, 2;6, 3;0, and 3;6. The children's results on PMLU and related measures are discussed together with remarks on individual differences regarding the acquisition of consonants, consonant clusters and word length. During the period analyzed the children's phonetic inventories increase and they gradually overcome the constraints against long words and consonant sequences. The PMLU method's ability to reflect the qualitative changes and individual differences between the children is found to be limited in some respects, although overall ... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2320814 Fri, 10 Apr 2009 23:09:19 +0100 2320814 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2320806&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D19334417%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Tamaoka K, Makioka S The present study investigated the existence of a Japanese mental syllabary and units stored therein for speech production. Experiment 1 compared naming latencies between high and low initial mora frequencies using CVCVCV nonwords, indicating that nonwords with a high initial mora frequency were named faster than those with a low frequency initial mora. Experiments 2 and 3 clarified the possibility of CV light and CVN/CVR heavy syllables as being units implicated in speech production. CVNCV nonwords in Experiment 2 and CVRCV nonwords in Experiment 3 displayed shorter naming latencies and lower error rates than their baseline (same bi-mora frequencies) of CVCVCV-structured nonwords. Since bi-mora frequencies between CVN/CVR and CVCV were the same, heavy syl... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2320806 Fri, 10 Apr 2009 23:09:19 +0100 2320806 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2320799&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D19334418%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Zhang Q, Chen HC, Weekes BS, Yang Y A picture-word interference paradigm with visually presented distractors was used to investigate the independent effects of orthographic and phonological facilitation on Mandarin monosyllabic word production. Both the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) and the picture-word relationship along different lexical dimensions were varied. We observed a pure orthographic facilitation effect and a pure phonological facilitation effect, and found that the patterns of orthographic and phonological facilitation were different. Of most interest, the additive effects of orthographic and phonological facilitation at -150-ms and 0-ms SOAs indicated that the orthographic effect was largely independent of the phonological effect on spoken picture naming. We arg... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2320799 Fri, 10 Apr 2009 23:09:19 +0100 2320799 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1531534&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D18561540%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Frauenfelder U, Rizzi L, Zesiger P PMID: 18561540 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Language and Speech) Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1531534 Fri, 20 Jun 2008 20:59:06 +0100 1531534 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1531533&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D18561541%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Mani N, Coleman J, Plunkett K Previous research has shown that English infants are sensitive to mispronunciations of vowels in familiar words by as early as 15-months of age. These results suggest that not only are infants sensitive to large mispronunciations of the vowels in words, but also sensitive to smaller mispronunciations, involving changes to only one dimension of the vowel. The current study broadens this research by comparing infants' sensitivity to the different types of changes involved in the mispronunciations. These included changes to the backness, height, and roundedness of the vowel. Our results confirm that 18-month-olds are sensitive to small changes to the vowels in familiar words. Our results also indicate a differential sensitivity of vocalic specificati... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1531533 Fri, 20 Jun 2008 20:59:06 +0100 1531533 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1531532&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D18561542%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Hallé PA, Durand C, de Boysson-Bardies B The first part of this study examined (Parisian) French-learning 11-month-old infants' recognition of the six definite and indefinite French articles: le, la, les, un, une, and des. The six articles were compared with pseudoarticles in the context of disyllabic or monosyllabic nouns, using the Head-turn Preference Procedure. The pseudo articles were similar to real articles in terms of phonetic composition and phonotactic probability, and real and pseudo noun phrases were alike in terms of overall prosodic contour. In three experiments, 11-month-old infants showed preference for real over pseudo articles, suggesting they have the articles' word-forms stored in long-term memory. The second part of the study evaluates several hypothe... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1531532 Fri, 20 Jun 2008 20:59:06 +0100 1531532 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1531531&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D18561543%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Jolly HR, Plunkett K The theory of syntactic bootstrapping proposes that children can use syntax to infer the meanings of words. This paper presents experimental evidence that children are also able to use word inflections to infer word reference. Twenty-four- and 30-month-olds were tested in a preferential looking experiment. Children were shown a pair of novel images, one showing a single object, the other a pair of objects, whilst they heard novel words with and without the English plural inflection. Word-image associations were then assessed. Analyses revealed that the older group of children had learnt to associate the words with the appropriate pictures. These results demonstrate that early in the third year, children are readily able to identify whether a spoken word is... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1531531 Fri, 20 Jun 2008 20:59:06 +0100 1531531 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1531530&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D18561544%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Christophe A, Millotte S, Bernal S, Lidz J This paper focuses on how phrasal prosody and function words may interact during early language acquisition. Experimental results show that infants have access to intermediate prosodic phrases (phonological phrases) during the first year of life, and use these to constrain lexical segmentation. These same intermediate prosodic phrases are used by adults to constrain on-line syntactic analysis. In addition, by two years of age infants can exploit function words to infer the syntactic category of unknown content words (nouns vs. verbs) and guess their plausible meaning (object vs. action). We speculate on how infants may build a partial syntactic structure by relying on both phonological phrase boundaries and function words, and present... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1531530 Fri, 20 Jun 2008 20:59:06 +0100 1531530 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1531529&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D18561545%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Di Sciullo AM, Agüero-Bautista C The Delay of Principle B Effect (DPBE) has been discussed in various studies that show that children around age 5 seem to violate Principle B of Binding Theory (Chomsky, 1981, and related works), when the antecedent of the pronoun is a name, but not when the antecedent is a quantifier. The analysis we propose can explain the DPBE in languages of the Dutch-English type, and its exemption in languages with (dis)placed pronouns (clitics). In both types of languages, the phenomenon arises when children have to compare two alternative representations for equivalence. The principle that induces the comparison is different in both cases, however. The comparision of children speaking languages with pronouns occurring within the VP is induced by Gr... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1531529 Fri, 20 Jun 2008 20:59:06 +0100 1531529 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1531528&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D18561546%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Jakubowicz C, Strik N This paper reports the results of an elicited production task of Long Distance (LD) wh-questions conducted with typically developing French- and Dutch-speaking children aged four and six, and adult control groups for each language. It is shown that besides input-convergent wh-questions, in both languages children use nontarget strategies to express scope. While in both French and Dutch children produce Partial Movement and wh-copying questions, only French children use Partial Movement without an overt scope-marker in the left periphery of the matrix clause. We argue that our results are consistent with the Derivational Complexity hypothesis put forward by Jakubowicz (2004, 2005). Moreover our results confirm that parametric choices regarding the position... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1531528 Fri, 20 Jun 2008 20:59:06 +0100 1531528 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1531527&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D18561547%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Lee KO, Lee Y Some peculiar properties of children's passives have long been observed in various languages such as an asymmetry between actional passives and nonactional passives. These peculiarities have been accounted for under the hypothesis that children's early passives are adjectival, and as such exhibit properties of adjectival passives in adult grammar. Under this hypothesis, a new prediction follows, namely that children's comprehension of passive predicates will vary depending upon the event structures of predicates. If a predicate has a target/result state in its event structure, it makes a good adjectival passive, and children will comprehend the predicate more easily. By contrast, if a predicate lacks a target/result state, it does not make a good adjectival passi... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1531527 Fri, 20 Jun 2008 20:59:06 +0100 1531527 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1531526&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D18561548%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Crain S Child and adult speakers of English have different ideas of what 'or' means in ordinary statements of the form 'A or B'. Even more far-reaching differences between children and adults are found in other languages. This tells us that young children do not learn what 'or' means by watching how adults use 'or'. An alternative is to suppose that children draw upon a priori knowledge of the meaning of 'or'. This conclusion is reinforced by the observation that all languages adopt the same meaning of 'or' in certain structures. For example, statements of the form 'not S[A or B]' have the same meanings in all languages, and disjunctive statements receive a uniform interpretation in sentences that contain certain focus expressions, such as English 'only'. These observations ar... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1531526 Fri, 20 Jun 2008 20:59:06 +0100 1531526 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1001722&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17974321%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Grabe E, Kochanski G, Coleman J The mathematical models of intonation used in speech technology are often inaccessible to linguists. By the same token, phonological descriptions of intonation are rarely used by speech technologists, as they cannot be implemented directly in applications. Consequently, these research communities do not benefit much from each other's insights. In this paper, we explore the interface between the disciplines, in search of bridges between intonational phonology and speech technology. In a corpus of speech data from seven dialects of English, we hand-labeled over 700 sentences and identified seven nuclear accent types. Then we fitted a third-order polynomial to the fundamental frequency (F0) contour in the region around the accent mark. The polynomi... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1001722 Sat, 03 Nov 2007 13:20:59 +0100 1001722 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1001721&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17974322%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Pouplier M In the past years, there have been an increasing number of instrumental investigations as to the nature of speech production errors, prompted by the concern that decades of transcription-based speech error data may be tainted by perceptual biases. While all of these instrumental studies suggest that errors are not, as previously thought, necessarily a matter of all-or-none, it is unclear what implications these studies have for phonological encoding as a cognitive process. Due to their repetition-based design, the ill-formed errors obtained in these studies may be articulation errors rather than cognitive planning errors. The present study reports for the first time tongue movement data collected during an error elicitation study based on the SLIP technique, which h... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1001721 Sat, 03 Nov 2007 13:20:59 +0100 1001721 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1001720&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17974323%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Zsiga E, Nitisaroj R This paper investigates the relationship between the phonological features of tone and tone perception in Thai. Specifically, it tests the hypothesis (proposed by Morén & Zsiga) that the principle perceptual cues to the five-way tonal contrast in Thai are high and low pitch targets aligned to moras. Results of four perception studies, one using natural speech and three using digitally-altered speech, are presented in support of the hypothesis. It is argued that, by associating tones to moras, a straightforward mapping from the abstract autosegmental features H and L to the production and perception of Thai tones, a heretofore elusive goal, can be accomplished. This result has consequences for theories of contour tone perception, the distinctive fe... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1001720 Sat, 03 Nov 2007 13:20:59 +0100 1001720 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1001719&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17974324%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Makarova V This paper reports the results of an experimental phonetic study examining pitch peak alignment in production and perception of three-syllable one-word sentences with phonetic rising-falling pitch movement by speakers of Russian. The first part of the study (Experiment 1) utilizes 22 one-word three-syllable utterances read by five female speakers of Russian as a declarative, an exclamation, and an interrogative. Significant differences in the alignment of pitch peak across declaratives and exclamations on the one hand and interrogatives on the other hand are observed. The second experiment tests whether these pitch peak alignment differences are employed in speech perception. Experiment 2 is performed with a series of resynthesized three-syllable stimuli which diffe... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1001719 Sat, 03 Nov 2007 13:20:59 +0100 1001719 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1001718&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17974325%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Astésano C, Bard EG, Turk A In addition to the phrase-final accent (FA), the French phonological system includes a phonetically distinct Initial Accent (IA). The present study tested two proposals: that IA marks the onset of phonological phrases, and that it has an independent rhythmic function. Eight adult native speakers of French were instructed to read syntactically ambiguous French sentences (e.g., Les gants et les bas lisses 'the smooth gloves and stockings') in a way that disambiguated the scope of the adjective. When the final adjective (lisses) applies to the conjoined NP, a prosodic boundary is warranted immediately before the adjective; when it applies to the second NP alone, a boundary before that NP is more appropriate. Length of the second noun and the adjec... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1001718 Sat, 03 Nov 2007 13:20:59 +0100 1001718 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896462&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17518101%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Frazier L, Clifton C, Carlson K In spoken English, pitch accents can convey the focus associated with new or contrasted constituents. Two listening experiments were conducted to determine whether accenting a subject makes its predicate a more tempting antecedent for an elided verb phrase, presumably because the accent helps focus the subject of the antecedent clause, increasing its likelihood of contrasting with the subject of the elided clause. The results of Experiment 1 supported the predictions of this "Contrasted Remnant hypothesis" but in principle could also be caused by listeners avoiding antecedents containing a focused (F-marked) constituent. Experiment 2 disconfirmed the hypothesis that listeners avoid antecedents containing a focused constituent, although pitch acc... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896462 Tue, 25 Sep 2007 01:12:18 +0100 896462 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896461&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17518102%26dopt%3DAbstract We present the results from an experiment that tests the perception of English consonantal sequences by Korean speakers and we confirm that perceptual epenthesis in a second languge (L2) arises from syllable structure restrictions of the first language (L1), rather than linear co-occurence restrictions. Our study replicates and extends Dupoux, Kakehi, Hirose, Pallier, & Mehler's (1999) results that suggested that listeners perceive epenthetic vowels within consonantal sequences that violate the phonotactics of their L1. Korean employs at least two kinds of phonotactic restrictions: (i) syllable structure restrictions that prohibit the occurence of certain consonants in coda position STRUCTURE (e.g., *[c.], *[g.]), while allowing others (e.g., [k.], [l.]), and (ii) consonantal contact r... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896461 Tue, 25 Sep 2007 01:12:18 +0100 896461 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896460&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17518103%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: LoCasto PC, Connine CM, Patterson D Three phoneme monitoring experiments examined the manner in which additional processing time influences spoken word recognition. Experiment 1a introduced a version of the phoneme monitoring paradigm in which a silent interval is inserted prior to the word-final target phoneme. Phoneme monitoring reaction time decreased as the silent interval increased indicating that lexical knowledge was utilized more effectively with additional processing time. Experiment 1b used short, medium, and long words and derived nonwords with word-initial mismatching segments. Phoneme monitoring response times to words and nonwords were sensitive to both additional processing time (silent interval delay) and word length. Experiment 2 examined the utilization of an... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896460 Tue, 25 Sep 2007 01:12:18 +0100 896460 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896459&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17518104%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Murty L, Otake T, Cutler A Listeners rely on native-language rhythm in segmenting speech; in different languages, stress-, syllable- or mora-based rhythm is exploited. The rhythmic similarity hypothesis holds that where two languages have similar rhythm, listeners of each language should segment their own and the other language similarly. Such similarity in listening was previously observed only for related languages (English-Dutch; French-Spanish). We now report three experiments in which speakers of Telugu, a Dravidian language unrelated to Japanese but similar to it in crucial aspects of rhythmic structure, heard speech in Japanese and in their own language, and Japanese listeners heard Telugu. For the Telugu listeners, detection of target sequences in Japanese speech was h... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896459 Tue, 25 Sep 2007 01:12:18 +0100 896459 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896458&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17518105%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Lee CY Lexical tone languages make up the majority of all known languages of the world, but the role of tone in lexical processing remains unclear. In the present study, four form priming experiments examined the role of Mandarin tones in constraining lexical activation and the time course of the activation. When a prime and a target were related directly in form (e.g., lou3 'hug'--lou2 'hall'), competitors that differed from the prime in tone failed to be activated, indicating the use of tonal information to distinguish between segmentally identical words. When a prime and a target were not form-related but were related through a third word that was not actually presented (e.g., lou3 'hug'--jian4zhu0 'building', where lou3 is form-related to lou2 'hall', which was semanticall... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896458 Tue, 25 Sep 2007 01:12:18 +0100 896458 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896457&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17518106%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Munson B Previous studies have shown that a subset of gay, lesbian, and bisexual (GLB) and heterosexual adults produce distinctive patterns of phonetic variation that allow listeners to detect their sexual orientation from audio-only samples of read speech. The current investigation examined the extent to which judgments of sexual orientation from speech are related to judgments of masculinity or femininity made by an independent group of listeners. It also examined the acoustic measures that predict perceived sexual orientation and perceived masculinity/femininity. Ten listeners judged the perceived masculinity or femininity of 44 talkers (11 heterosexual men, 11 heterosexual women, 11 gay men, and 11 lesbian or bisexual women). These were compared to measures of the talkers'... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896457 Tue, 25 Sep 2007 01:12:18 +0100 896457 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896456&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17702471%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Mooshammer C, Hoole P, Geumann A It is well-accepted that the jaw plays an active role in influencing vowel height. The general aim of the current study is to further investigate the extent to which the jaw is active in producing consonantal distinctions, with specific focus on coronal consonants. Therefore, tongue tip and jaw positions are compared for the German coronal consonants /s, f, t, d, n, l/, that is, consonants having the same active articulators (apical/laminal) but differing in manner of articulation. In order to test the stability of articulatory positions for each of these coronal consonants, a natural perturbation paradigm was introduced by recording two levels of vocal effort: comfortable, and loud without shouting. Tongue and jaw movements of five speakers of... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896456 Tue, 25 Sep 2007 01:12:18 +0100 896456 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896455&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17702472%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Dankovicová J, House J, Crooks A, Jones K Few attempts have been made to look systematically at the relationship between musical and intonation analysis skills, a relationship that has been to date suggested only by informal observations. Following Mackenzie Beck (2003), who showed that musical ability was a useful predictor of general phonetic skills, we report on two studies investigating the relationship between musical skills, musical training, and intonation analysis skills in English. The specially designed music tasks targeted pitch direction judgments and tonal memory. The intonation tasks involved locating the nucleus, identifying the nuclear tone in stimuli of different length and complexity, and same/different contour judgments. The subjects were university stu... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896455 Tue, 25 Sep 2007 01:12:18 +0100 896455 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896454&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17702473%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Roll M, Frid J, Horne M Hesitation disfluencies after phonetically prominent stranded function words are thought to reflect the cognitive coding of complex structures. Speech fragments following the Swedish function word att 'that' were analyzed syntactically, and divided into two groups: one with att in disfluent contexts, and the other with att in fluent contexts. Complexity was calculated in terms of a number of measures related to syntactic tree structures produced by the analysis tool GRAMMAL. Results showed that disfluent att is in general associated with significantly higher mean complexity values than fluent att. This information can be used to predict whether the function word at the beginning of a fragment is likely to be disfluent or not. Two kinds of statistical cl... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896454 Tue, 25 Sep 2007 01:12:18 +0100 896454 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896453&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17702474%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Mikuteit S, Reetz H East Bengali is a language that displays a four-way contrast of voiced/voiceless and aspirated/unaspirated oral stops and affricates in all word positions. Additionally, in intervocalic position there is a quantity contrast between long and short obstruents. In this production study we investigate medial palato-alveolar affricates and stops at the labial, dental, retroflex, and velar places of articulation and address the problems of VOT measurements. We introduce a different approach of measuring lag times, henceforth called after closure time (ACT). The results show that this approach can do away with the extra notion of breathy voice to distinguish between the voiced aspirates and unaspirates. Moreover, as a result of analyzing the aspirated stops and af... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896453 Tue, 25 Sep 2007 01:12:18 +0100 896453 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896482&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16922060%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Hollich G This paper provides three representative examples that highlight the ways in which procedures can be combined to study interactions across traditional domains of study: segmentation, word learning, and grammar. The first section uses visual familiarization prior to the Headturn Preference Procedure to demonstrate that synchronized visual information aids in speech segmentation in noise. The second section uses audio familiarization prior to the Preferential Looking Procedure to demonstrate that speech perception aids in the learning of meaning. The third section uses visual familiarization prior to the Preferential Looking Procedure to demonstrate that attentional distractions inhibit grammatical understanding. Thus, what infants see affects what they hear. What infa... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896482 Sun, 01 Jan 2006 05:00:00 +0100 896482 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896481&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16922061%26dopt%3DAbstract We report four experiments designed to determine whether visual information affects judgments of acoustically-specified nonspeech events as well as speech events (the "McGurk effect"). Previous findings have shown only weak McGurk effects for nonspeech stimuli, whereas strong effects are found for consonants. We used click sounds that serve as consonants in some African languages, but that are perceived as nonspeech by American English listeners. We found a significant McGurk effect for clicks presented in isolation that was much smaller than that found for stop-consonant-vowel syllables. In subsequent experiments, we found strong McGurk effects, comparable to those found for English syllables, for click-vowel syllables, and weak effects, comparable to those found for isolated clicks, for ... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896481 Sun, 01 Jan 2006 05:00:00 +0100 896481 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896480&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16922062%26dopt%3DAbstract We describe the particular issue to which this research is directed (the relationship between print and the sound system of the language), and describe the characteristics of the Korean writing system that are relevant to this issue. We then outline our research examining the use of lexical and sublexical processes in recognizing Korean words. We use these studies to argue that cross-linguistic and developmental investigations may constrain models of language processes, and must be considered for a complete understanding of word-recognition and reading processes. PMID: 16922062 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] (Source: Language and Speech) Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896480 Sun, 01 Jan 2006 05:00:00 +0100 896480 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896479&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16922063%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Titone DA, Koh CK, Kjelgaard MM, Bruce S, Speer SR, Wingfield A Two experiments examined whether young and older adults differ in comprehending sentences that contain temporary syntactic closure ambiguities. Experiment 1 examined age-related differences using the Auditory Moving Window (AMW) task, in which sentences were presented in a segment-by-segment self-paced fashion. Experiment 2 examined age-related differences using a sentence recall task, in which sentences were presented in their entirety. Sentences were constructed to have cooperating prosody (i.e., where prosody is consistent with the syntactic boundaries), baseline prosody (i.e., where prosody is ambiguous in the syntactically ambiguous region), and conflicting prosody (i.e., where cross-splicing relocates the pr... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896479 Sun, 01 Jan 2006 05:00:00 +0100 896479 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896478&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16922064%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: McQueen JM, Norris D, Cutler A The speech perception system must be flexible in responding to the variability in speech sounds caused by differences among speakers and by language change over the lifespan of the listener. Indeed, listeners use lexical knowledge phonetic to retune perception of novel speech (Norris, McQueen, & Cutler, 2003). In categorization that study, Dutch listeners made lexical decisions to spoken stimuli, including words with an ambiguous fricative (between [f] and [s]), in either [f]- or speech [s]-biased lexical contexts. In a subsequent categorization test, the former perception group of listeners identified more sounds on an [epsilonf]-[epsilons] continuum as [f] than the latter group. In the present experiment, listeners received the same exposur... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896478 Sun, 01 Jan 2006 05:00:00 +0100 896478 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896477&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16922065%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: McLennan CT Although spoken language is communicated via a rapidly varying signal, human listeners recognize spoken words both quickly and accurately. Nonetheless, variability in speech does have implications for both the processes and representations involved in spoken language perception. Moreover, variability effects have been observed across the lifespan, ranging from infants to older adults. Many factors could potentially modulate the degree to which variability affects spoken language perception. In particular, recent findings demonstrate that variability effects follow a time course, manifesting themselves at predictable points during perceptual processing. However, time course investigations are currently limited to young adults. Therefore, the current paper explores h... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896477 Sun, 01 Jan 2006 05:00:00 +0100 896477 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896476&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17037119%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Demuth K PMID: 17037119 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] (Source: Language and Speech) Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896476 Sun, 01 Jan 2006 05:00:00 +0100 896476 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896475&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17037120%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Demuth K, Culbertson J, Alter J Many languages exhibit constraints on prosodic words, where lexical items must be composed of at least two moras of structure, or a binary foot. Demuth and Fee (1995) proposed that children demonstrate early sensitivity to word-minimality effects, exhibiting a period of vowel lengthening or vowel epenthesis if coda consonants cannot be produced. This paper evaluates this proposal by examining the development of word-final coda consonants in the spontaneous speech of four English-speaking children between the ages of one and two. Although there was no evidence of vowel lengthening, coda consonants were more accurately produced in monosyllabic target words with monomoriac vowels, suggesting earlier use of coda consonants in contexts where they can... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896475 Sun, 01 Jan 2006 05:00:00 +0100 896475 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896474&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17037121%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Vigário M, Freitas MJ, Frota S This paper investigates the acquisition of prosodic words in European Portuguese (EP) through analysis of grammatical and statistical properties of the target language and child speech. The analysis of grammatical properties shows that there are solid cues to the prosodic word (PW) in EP, and the presence of early word-based phonology in child speech shows that EP children are aware of these cues. It is thus hypothesized that grammatical properties could play a role in the development of the PW by promoting the early production of the different word shapes found in the language. The analysis of statistical properties of the input, namely word shape frequencies in adult speech and child-directed speech, shows that they constrain early word sh... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896474 Sun, 01 Jan 2006 05:00:00 +0100 896474 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896473&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17037122%26dopt%3DAbstract This article examines the constraints on Prosodic Word production in Spanish by three monolingual and three Spanish-German bilingual children from the beginning of word production until 2;2. It also considers the relationship between Prosodic Words and Phonological Phrases, and in the case of monosyllabic words, it takes into consideration syllable structure (i.e., presence or absence of codas), in order to ascertain the importance of foot binarity in early child speech. Although the preferred Prosodic Word shape is that of a trochee, there appear a few monosyllables, consisting of CVC (or CV), which are produced earlier by the bilinguals than by the monolinguals. The minimality constraint is violated by the production of CV forms. Maximality constraints are observed for a very short time,... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896473 Sun, 01 Jan 2006 05:00:00 +0100 896473 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896472&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17037123%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Prieto P This paper focuses on the development of Prosodic Word shapes in Catalan, a language which differs from both Spanish and English in the distribution of PW structures. Of particular interest are the truncations of initial unstressed syllables, and how these develop over time. Developmental qualitative and quantitative data from seven Catalan-speaking children reveal that maximality constraints are active at two stages, namely, the moraic trochee stage, and the bisyllabic foot stage. One of the noteworthy differences between Catalan and Spanish is the rate of acquisition of weak initial syllables in WS words, as Catalan learners omit initial syllables in WS target iambs for a significantly longer time than Spanish learners, despite the fact that Catalan is a language wh... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896472 Sun, 01 Jan 2006 05:00:00 +0100 896472 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896471&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17037124%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Ota M Recent research indicates that the statistical properties of the input have an impact on the prosodic shape of young children's word production. However, it is still not clear whether the effects of input statistics emerge from the frequency of prosodic structures or the frequency of individual lexical items. This issue is investigated in this study by analyzing cases of word truncation spontaneously produced by three Japanese-speaking children (1;5-2;1) and the frequencies of relevant words and prosodic word structures produced by their mothers. A significant correlation was found between children's truncation rates for individual target words and the frequency of the same words in the maternal input, but not between the truncation rates for different prosodic word stru... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896471 Sun, 01 Jan 2006 05:00:00 +0100 896471 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896470&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17225669%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Keane E Application of recently developed rhythmic measures to passages of read speech in colloquial and formal Tamil revealed some significant differences between the two varieties, which are in diglossic distribution. Both were also distinguished from a set of control data from British English speakers reading an equivalent passage. The findings have implications for the usefulness of the rhythmic measures and also the temporal characteristics of Tamil. High levels of interspeaker variability affected the measures; in some cases differences within each group of five speakers exceeded those separating distinct languages, indicating that such measures may not be reliable indicators of typological status. Discrepancies between previous findings and remeasurements of the same da... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896470 Sun, 01 Jan 2006 05:00:00 +0100 896470 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896469&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17225670%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Rodríguez LJ, Inés Torres M Previous works in English have revealed that disfluencies follow regular patterns and that incorporating them into the language model of a speech recognizer leads to lower perplexities and sometimes to a better performance. Although work on disfluency modeling has been applied outside the English community (e.g., in Japanese), as far as we know there is no specific work dealing with disfluencies in Spanish. In this paper, we follow a data driven approach in exploring the potential benefit of modeling disfluencies in a speech recognizer in Spanish. Two databases of human-computer and human-human dialogs are considered, which allow the absolute and relative frequencies of disfluencies in the two situations to be compared. The rate of disflue... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896469 Sun, 01 Jan 2006 05:00:00 +0100 896469 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896468&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17225671%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Weber A, Braun B, Crocker MW In two eye-tracking experiments the role of contrastive pitch accents during the on-line determination of referents was examined. In both experiments, German listeners looked earlier at the picture of a referent belonging to a contrast pair (red scissors, given purple scissors) when instructions to click on it carried a contrastive accent on the color adjective (L + H*) than when the adjective was not accented. In addition to this prosodic facilitation, a general preference to interpret adjectives contrastively was found in Experiment 1: Along with the contrast pair, a noncontrastive referent was displayed (red vase) and listeners looked more often at the contrastive referent than at the noncontrastive referent even when the adjective was not focus... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896468 Sun, 01 Jan 2006 05:00:00 +0100 896468 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896467&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17225672%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Kondo Y The present study addresses the question of how within-word prosodic constituent boundaries constrain V-to-V coarticulation in Japanese. The smallest prosodic unit that might affect V-to-V coarticulation is the bimoraic foot. The effect of the foot boundary is observed in the present study: the bimoraic foot constrains the extent of V-to-V coarticulation in both left-to-right and right-to-left directions. For the target vowel /a/, anticipatory V-to-V effects are stronger than carryover effects for both within-foot and across-foot conditions. Also, the foot constraint works more strongly on anticipatory than on carryover effects. Some idiosyncratic variation is observed across speakers; however, even some deviant behavior can partly be explained as the result of the int... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896467 Sun, 01 Jan 2006 05:00:00 +0100 896467 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896466&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17326587%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Arvaniti A, Ladd DR, Mennen I This paper compares the production and perception of the rise-fall contour of contrastive statements and the final rise-fall part of polar questions in Greek. The results show that these superficially similar rise-falls exhibit fine phonetic differences in the alignment of tonal targets with the segmental string, and that these differences can be used by native speakers under experimental conditions to identify the two contour types. It is further shown here that the observed differences in alignment are best attributed to differences in the overall tonal composition of these contours, which results in different degrees of crowding for the targets involved. This analysis accounts for the differences in phonetic detail between the two contours, whi... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896466 Sun, 01 Jan 2006 05:00:00 +0100 896466 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896465&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17326588%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Braun B It is acknowledged that contrast plays an important role in understanding discourse and information structure. While it is commonly assumed that contrast can be marked by intonation only, our understanding of the intonational realization of contrast is limited. For German there is mainly introspective evidence that the rising theme accent (or topic accent) is realized differently when signaling contrast than when not. In this article, the acoustic basis for the reported impressionistic differences is investigated in terms of the scaling (height) and alignment (positioning) of tonal targets. Subjects read target sentences in a contrastive and a noncontrastive context (Experiment 1). Prosodic annotation revealed that thematic accents were not realized with different acce... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896465 Sun, 01 Jan 2006 05:00:00 +0100 896465 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896464&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17326589%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Boucher VJ Language learning requires a capacity to recall novel series of speech sounds. Research shows that prosodic marks create grouping effects enhancing serial recall. However, any restriction on memory affecting the reproduction of prosody would limit the set of patterns that could be learned and subsequently used in speech. By implication, grouping effects of prosody would also be limited to reproducible patterns. This view of the role of prosody and the contribution of memory processes in the organization of prosodic patterns is examined by evaluating the correspondence between a reported tendency to restrict stress intervals in speech and size limits on stress-grouping effects. French speech is used where stress defines the endpoints of groups. In Experiment 1, 40 sp... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896464 Sun, 01 Jan 2006 05:00:00 +0100 896464 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896463&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17326590%26dopt%3DAbstract This study tested the issue of whether extended length of residence (LOR) in adulthood can provide sufficient input to overcome age effects. The study replicates Flege, Takagi, and Mann (1995), which found that 10 out of 12 Japanese learners of English with extensive residence (12 years or more) produced liquids as accurately as native speakers of English (NS). Further, for both accuracy and native-like accentedness, the Japanese with extensive residence performed statistically better as a group than inexperienced Japanese (less than 3 years of residence). Results with a new sample of Japanese learners in this study found no statistical difference between the Japanese groups with extended versus short LOR although both reported equal levels of daily input in English. Additionally, both gro... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896463 Sun, 01 Jan 2006 05:00:00 +0100 896463 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896500&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16161470%26dopt%3DAbstract The objective of this study was to determine how bilinguals' age at the time of language acquisition influenced the organization of their phonetic system(s). The productions of six English and five Korean vowels by English and Korean monolinguals were compared to the productions of the same vowels by early and late Korean-English bilinguals varying in amount of exposure to their second language. Results indicated that bilinguals' age profoundly influenced both the degree and the direction of the interaction between the phonetic systems of their native (L1) and second (L2) languages. In particular, early bilinguals manifested a bidirectional L1-L2 influence and produced distinct acoustic realizations of L1 and L2 vowels. Late bilinguals, however, showed evidence of a unidirectional influenc... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896500 Sat, 01 Jan 2005 05:00:00 +0100 896500 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896499&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16161471%26dopt%3DAbstract We describe two experiments on signaling and detecting uncertainty in audiovisual speech by adults and children. In the first study, utterances from adult speakers and child speakers (aged 7-8) were elicited and annotated with a set of six audiovisual features. It was found that when adult speakers were uncertain they were more likely to produce fillers, delays, high intonation, eyebrow movements, and "funny faces." The basic picture for the child speakers was somewhat similar, in that the presence of certain audiovisual cues correlated with uncertainty, but the differences were relatively small and less often significant. In the second study both adult and child judges watched responses from adult and child speakers selected from the first study to find out whether they were able to corre... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896499 Sat, 01 Jan 2005 05:00:00 +0100 896499 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896498&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16161472%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Stockmal V, Markus D, Bond D The traditional phonetic classification of language rhythm as stress-timed or syllable-timed is attributed to Pike. Recently, two different proposals have been offered for describing the rhythmic structure of languages from acoustic-phonetic measurements. Ramus has suggested a metric based on the proportion of vocalic intervals and the variability (SD) of consonantal intervals. Grabe has proposed Pairwise Variability Indices (nPVI, rPVI) calculated from the differences in vocalic and consonantal durations between successive syllables. We have calculated both the Ramus and Grabe metrics for Latvian, traditionally considered a syllable rhythm language, and for Latvian as spoken by Russian learners. Native speakers and proficient learners were very si... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896498 Sat, 01 Jan 2005 05:00:00 +0100 896498 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896497&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16161473%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Tokimoto S This paper experimentally examines the effects of the case-markings and the constraint on the assignments and the receptions of thematic roles in Japanese sentence processing. A self-paced reading experiment was carried out with syntactically well-controlled Japanese sentences including homonyms locally ambiguous between nouns and verbs. The results showed that the homonyms were preferably disambiguated as verbs. We interpret this disambiguation as the result of the application of the thematic constraint to the input items on the basis of the correspondence between the case-markings and the grammatical functions in Japanese. We further examined the effect of pragmatic plausibility on the interpretation of the homonyms by questionnaire, and claim that the thematic co... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896497 Sat, 01 Jan 2005 05:00:00 +0100 896497 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896496&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16161474%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Yu MC The present study examines sociolinguistic features of a particular speech act, paying compliments, by comparing and contrasting native Chinese and native American speakers' performances. By focusing on a relatively understudied speaker group such as the Chinese, typically regarded as having rules of speaking and social norms very different from those of Westerners, this paper aims at illuminating the fact that, in cross-cultural communication, foreign language speakers have to pay close attention to sociolinguistic rules of the target language in addition to structure and discourse rules to meet the needs of linguistic accuracy and fluency. This is due to the fact that such rules play an indispensable role in appropriating the proper use of linguistic forms. The data fo... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896496 Sat, 01 Jan 2005 05:00:00 +0100 896496 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896495&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16411502%26dopt%3DAbstract This study investigated how lexical access in naming tasks (picture naming, naming to open-ended sentences, and naming to category exemplars) might be influenced by different lexical factors during adolescence and adulthood. Participants included 1075 individuals, ranging in age from 12 to 83 years. Lexical factors examined included word frequency and familiarity, age of acquisition, neighborhood density, and phonotactic probability. As expected, each of these factors influenced lexical access, and there was a general trend towards less accurate naming with age. More interestingly, word frequency and neighborhood density both showed larger effects for adolescents than for adults, but then showed constant effects on lexical access throughout adulthood. Phonotactic probability showed constan... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896495 Sat, 01 Jan 2005 05:00:00 +0100 896495 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896494&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16411503%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Lickley RJ, Schepman A, Ladd DR In the first part of this study, we measured the alignment (relative to segmental landmarks) of the low F0 turning points between the accentual fall and the final boundary rise in short Dutch falling-rising questions of the form Do you live in [place name]? produced as read speech in a laboratory setting. We found that the alignment of these turning points is affected by the location of a postaccentual secondary stressed syllable if one is present. This is consistent with the findings and analyses of Grice, Ladd, & Arvaniti, 2000 (Phonology 17, 143-185), suggesting that the low turning points are the phonetic reflex of a "phrase accent." In the second part of this study, we measured the low turning points in falling-rising questions produced... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896494 Sat, 01 Jan 2005 05:00:00 +0100 896494 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896493&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16411504%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Fais L, Kajikawa S, Werker J, Amano S The canonical form for Japanese words is (Consonant)Vowel(Consonant) Vowel-. However, a regular process of high vowel devoicing between voiceless consonants and word-finally after voiceless consonants results in consonant clusters and word-final consonants, apparent violations of that phonotactic pattern. We investigated Japanese adults' perceptions of these violations, asking them to rate both canonical and noncanonical nonsense forms on a scale of goodness. Results indicate that adults show evidence of being guided in making their judgments by an implicit understanding of both typical canonical forms and appropriate contexts for vowel devoicing. PMID: 16411504 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] (Source: Language and Speech) Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896493 Sat, 01 Jan 2005 05:00:00 +0100 896493 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896492&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16411505%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Gagné CL, Spalding TL, Gorrie MC Two experiments investigated the influence of sentential context on the relative ease of deriving a particular meaning for novel and familiar compounds. Experiment 1 determined which of two possible meanings was preferred for a set of novel phrases. Experiment 2 used both novel (e.g., brain sponge) and familiar compounds (e.g., bug spray). The compounds appeared in a sentential context that supported either the dominant or subdominant meaning. Next, participants saw either the dominant or subdominant definition and indicated whether it was plausible. When the definition was consistent with the preceding sentence, the participants were more likely to consider the definition plausible regardless of whether the compound was novel or familiar,... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896492 Sat, 01 Jan 2005 05:00:00 +0100 896492 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896491&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16411506%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Mattys SL, Melhorn JF The involvement of syllables in the perception of spoken English has traditionally been regarded as minimal because of ambiguous syllable boundaries and overriding rhythmic segmentation cues. The present experiments test the perceptual separability of syllables and vowels in spoken English using the migration paradigm. Experiments 1 and 2 show that syllables migrate considerably more than full and reduced vowels, and this effect is not influenced by the lexicality of the stimuli, their stress pattern, or the syllables' position relative to the edge of the stimuli. Experiment 3 confirms the predominance of syllable migration against a pseudosyllable baseline, and provides some evidence that syllable migration depends on whether syllable boundaries are clea... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896491 Sat, 01 Jan 2005 05:00:00 +0100 896491 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896490&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16416937%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Bryant GA, Fox Tree JE Research on nonverbal vocal cues and verbal irony has often relied on the concept of an ironic tone of voice. Here we provide acoustic analysis and experimental evidence that this notion is oversimplified and misguided. Acoustic analyses of spontaneous ironic speech extracted from talk radio shows, both ambiguous and unambiguous in written form, revealed only a difference in amplitude variability compared to matched nonironic speech from the same sources, and that was only among the most clear-cut items. In a series of experiments, participants rated content-filtered versions of the same ironic and nonironic utterances on a range of affective and linguistic dimensions. Listeners did not rely on any set of vocal cues to identify verbal irony that was sepa... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896490 Sat, 01 Jan 2005 05:00:00 +0100 896490 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896489&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16416938%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Nazzi T, Dilley LC, Jusczyk AM, Shattuck-Hufnagel S, Jusczyk PW Two experiments sought to extend the demonstration of English-learning infants' abilities to segment nouns from fluent speech to a new lexical class: verbs. Moreover, we explored whether two factors previously shown to influence noun segmentation, stress pattern (strong-weak or weak-strong) and type of initial phoneme (consonant or vowel), also influence verb segmentation. Our results establish the early emergence of verb segmentation in English: by 13.5 months for strong-weak consonant- or vowel-initial verbs and for weak-strong consonant-initial verbs; and by 16.5 months for weak-strong verbs beginning with a vowel. This generalizes previous reports of early segmentation to a new lexical class, thereby providing... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896489 Sat, 01 Jan 2005 05:00:00 +0100 896489 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896488&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16416939%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Lickley RJ, Hartsuiker RJ, Corley M, Russell M, Nelson R Two experiments used a magnitude estimation paradigm to test whether perception of disfluency is a function of whether the speaker and the listener stutter or do not stutter. Utterances produced by people who stutter were judged as "less fluent," and, critically, this held for apparently fluent utterances as well as for utterances identified as containing disfluency. Additionally, people who stutter tended to perceive utterances as less fluent, independent of who produced these utterances. We argue that these findings are consistent with a view that articulatory differences between the speech of people who stutter and people who do not stutter lead to perceptually relevant vocal differences. We suggest that these differe... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896488 Sat, 01 Jan 2005 05:00:00 +0100 896488 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896487&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16416940%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Ylinen S, Shestakova A, Alku P, Huotilainen M Some languages, such as Finnish, use speech-sound duration as the primary cue for a phonological quantity distinction. For second-language (L2) learners, quantity is often difficult to master if speech-sound duration plays a less important role in the phonology of their native language (L1). By comparing the categorization performance of native speakers of Finnish, Russian L2 users of Finnish, and non-Finnish-speaking Russians, the present study aimed to determine whether the L2 users, whose native language does not have a quantity distinction, have been able to establish categories for Finnish quantity. The results suggest that the native speakers and some of the L2 users that have been exposed to Finnish for a longer time have ac... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896487 Sat, 01 Jan 2005 05:00:00 +0100 896487 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896486&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16715681%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Warren P Some key issues in the study of intonation in language varieties are presented and discussed with reference to recent research on the intonation of New Zealand English. The particular issues that are highlighted include the determination of the intonational phonological categories of a language variety, and the attribution of varietal differences as realizational differences between varieties or as systemic differences in the categories found to be present in each variety. PMID: 16715681 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] (Source: Language and Speech) Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896486 Sat, 01 Jan 2005 05:00:00 +0100 896486 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896485&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16715682%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Prieto P, D'Imperio M, Fivela BG The article describes the contrastive possibilities of alignment of high accents in three Romance varieties, namely, Central Catalan, Neapolitan Italian, and Pisa Italian. The Romance languages analyzed in this article provide crucial evidence that small differences in alignment in rising accents should be encoded phonologically. To account for such facts within the AM model, the article develops the notion of "phonological anchoring" as an extension of the concept of secondary association originally proposed by Pierrehumbert and Beckman (1988), and later adopted by Grice (1995), Grice, Ladd, and Arvaniti (2000), and others to explain the behavior of edge tones. The Romance data represent evidence that not only peripheral edge tones seek second... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896485 Sat, 01 Jan 2005 05:00:00 +0100 896485 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896484&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16715683%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Elordieta G, Calleja N This paper presents patterns of accentual alignment in two varieties of Spanish spoken in the Basque Country: Lekeitio Spanish (LS), with speakers whose other native language is Lekeitio Basque (LB); and Vitoria Spanish (VS), with monolingual speakers of Spanish from the city of Vitoria. These patterns are compared to those of Madrid Spanish (MS), compare Face (2002). In LS, accents are realized as pitch rises rather than falls, like in MS and unlike in LB, but peaks are aligned before the offset of the accented syllable, unlike in MS and like in LB. At the end of the subject phrase, peaks display later alignment, like in MS. Thus, LS displays mixed properties of Basque and Spanish intonation. In VS, stress is also realized as a tonal rise, with peaks al... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896484 Sat, 01 Jan 2005 05:00:00 +0100 896484 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896483&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16715684%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Dalton M, Chasaide AN A comparison of the contour alignment of nuclear and initial prenuclear accents was carried out for the Irish dialects of Gaoth Dobhair in Ulster (GD-U) and Cois Fharraige in Connaught (CF-C). This was done across conditions where the number of unstressed syllables following the nuclear and preceding the initial prenuclear accents was varied from 2-0. This tests a variable peak hypothesis prompted by findings for other languages, that peak timing drifts as a function of the number of syllables preceding (the prenuclear) and following (the nuclear) accent. These data also test a second hypothesis that the L*+H dominant accent of GD-U might be viewed as being underlyingly the same as the dominant H* or H*+L accent of the CF-C dialect. According to this real... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896483 Sat, 01 Jan 2005 05:00:00 +0100 896483 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896515&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15298328%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Alcock KJ, Ngorosho D Grammatical priming of picture naming was investigated in Kiswahili, which has a complex grammatical noun class system (a system like grammatical gender), with up to 15 noun classes that have obligatory agreements on adjectives, verbs, pronouns and other parts of speech. Participants heard a grammatically agreeing (concordant), nonagreeing (discordant) or neutral prime before seeing a picture of a common object and being asked to name the object. Priming was found, with naming following concordant primes being faster than naming following the neutral prime ('say'). However, more interestingly, effects were found such that where two noun classes share a prefix, the grammatical prime from each of these two noun classes also primed words that have the same p... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896515 Thu, 01 Jan 2004 05:00:00 +0100 896515 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896514&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15298329%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Aylett M, Turk A This paper explores two related factors which influence variation in duration, prosodic structure and redundancy in spontaneous speech. We argue that the constraint of producing robust communication while efficiently expending articulatory effort leads to an inverse relationship between language redundancy and duration. The inverse relationship improves communication robustness by spreading information more evenly across the speech signal, yielding a smoother signal redundancy profile. We argue that prosodic prominence is a linguistic means of achieving smooth signal redundancy. Prosodic prominence increases syllable duration and coincides to a large extent with unpredictable sections of speech, and thus leads to a smoother signal redundancy. The results of li... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896514 Thu, 01 Jan 2004 05:00:00 +0100 896514 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896513&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15298330%26dopt%3DAbstract This study looks at the syllable onset interval (SOI) patterning in Taiwan Mandarin spontaneous speech and its relationship to discourse and syntactic units. Monologs were elicited by asking readers to tell stories depicted in comic strips and were transcribed and segmented into Discourse Segment Units (Grosz & Sidner, 1986), clauses, and phrases. Results showed that the degree of final lengthening was modulated by boundary types. Lengthening before discourse boundaries was longer than that before clausal boundaries, which was in turn longer than that before phrasal boundaries. Final SOI lengthening also seemed to reflect cognitive load. At the discourse and clausal levels, the degree of lengthening is modulated by narration order. First narrations tended to have longer final SOIs than... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896513 Thu, 01 Jan 2004 05:00:00 +0100 896513 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896512&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15298331%26dopt%3DAbstract This study addresses the possibility that interfixes in multiconstituent nominal compounds in German and Dutch are functional as markers of immediate constituent structure. We report a lexical statistical survey of interfixation in the lexicons of German and Dutch which shows that all interfixes of German and one interfix of Dutch are significantly more likely to appear at the major constituent boundary than expected under chance conditions. A series of experiments provides evidence that speakers of German and Dutch are sensitive to the probabilistic cues to constituent structure provided by the interfixes. Thus, our data provide evidence that probability is part and parcel of grammatical competence. PMID: 15298331 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] (Source: Language and Speech) Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896512 Thu, 01 Jan 2004 05:00:00 +0100 896512 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896511&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15581188%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Liu S, Samuel AG In tone languages, the identity of a word depends on its tone pattern as well as its phonetic structure. The primary cue to tone identity is the fundamental frequency (F0) contour. Two experiments explore spoken word recognition how listeners perceive Mandarin monosyllables in which all or part of the F0 information has been neutralized. In Experiment 1, tone languages supposedly critical portions of the tonal pattern were neutralized with signal processing techniques, yet identification of the tonal pattern remained quite good. In Experiment 2, even more drastic removal of tonal information was tested, using stimuli whispered by Mandarin speakers, or signal processed to remove the pitch cues. Again, performance was surprisingly good, showing that listeners ca... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896511 Thu, 01 Jan 2004 05:00:00 +0100 896511 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896510&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15581189%26dopt%3DAbstract This study compared the intelligibility of native and foreign-accented bilingualism English speech presented in quiet and mixed with three different levels of background noise. Two native American English speakers and four native Mandarin Chinese speakers for whom English is a second language each read a list of 50 phonetically balanced sentences (Egan, 1948). The authors speech intelligibility identified two of the Mandarin-accented English speakers as high-proficiency speakers and two as lower proficiency speakers, based on their speech intelligibility in quiet (about 95% and 80%, respectively). Original record-perception ings and noise-masked versions of 48 utterances were presented to monolingual American English speakers. Listeners were asked to write down the words they heard the spe... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896510 Thu, 01 Jan 2004 05:00:00 +0100 896510 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896509&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15581190%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Whalen DH, Magen HS, Pouplier M, Kang AM, Iskarous K The ability of speakers to exaggerate speech sounds ("hyperarticulation") has led to the theory that the targets themselves must be hyperspace hyperarticulated. Johnson, Flemming, and Wright (1993) found that perceptual "best exemplar" choices for vowels were more speech extreme than listeners' own productions. Our first experiment, using their procedure, only partially replicated their results. Low vowels vowel perception showed a higher F1, consistent with hyperspace. Front vowels also showed more frontness in F2, but back vowels were less extreme ("hypoarticulated") on F2. Our second experiment used an identification and rating of each stimulus, yielding similar results of a smaller magnitude. Our results indicate that th... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896509 Thu, 01 Jan 2004 05:00:00 +0100 896509 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896508&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15581191%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Wurm LH, Vakoch DA, Seaman SR Until recently most models of word recognition have assumed that semantic auditory naming effects come into play only after the identification of the word in question. What little evidence exists for early semantic effects in word recognition lexical decision has relied primarily on priming manipulations using the lexical decision task, and has used visual stimulus presentation. The current study uses semantics auditory stimulus presentation and multiple experimental tasks, and does not use priming. Response latencies for 100 common nouns were found to speech perception depend on perceptual dimensions identified by Osgood (1969): Evaluation, Potency, and Activity. In addition, the two-way interactions between these word recognition dimensions were... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896508 Thu, 01 Jan 2004 05:00:00 +0100 896508 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896507&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15697151%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Clopper CG, Pisoni DB Two groups of listeners learned to categorize a set of unfamiliar talkers by dialect region using sentences selected from the TIMIT speech corpus. One group learned to categorize a single talker from each of six American English dialect regions. A second group learned to categorize three talkers from each dialect region. Following training, both groups were asked to categorize new talkers using the same categorization task. While the single-talker group was more accurate during initial training and test phases when familiar talkers produced the sentences, the three-talker group performed better on the generalization task with unfamiliar talkers. This cross-over effect in dialect categorization suggests that while talker variation during initial perceptual... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896507 Thu, 01 Jan 2004 05:00:00 +0100 896507 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896506&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15697152%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: de Jong KJ, Lim BJ, Nagao K Stetson (1951) noted that repeating singleton coda consonants at fast speech rates makes them be perceived as onset consonants affiliated with a following vowel. The current study documents the perception of rate-induced resyllabification, as well as what temporal properties give rise to the perception of syllable affiliation. Stimuli were extracted from a previous study of repeated stop + vowel and vowel + stop syllables (de Jong, 2001a, 2001b). Forced-choice identification tasks show that slow repetitions are clearly distinguished. As speakers increase rate, they reach a point after which listeners disagree as to the affiliation of the stop. This pattern is found for voiced and voiceless consonants using different stimulus extraction techniques. A... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896506 Thu, 01 Jan 2004 05:00:00 +0100 896506 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896505&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15697153%26dopt%3DAbstract This study used perceptual and articulatory data to investigate a language specific phonemic inventory, and allophonic rules for homorganic initial voiced stops versus homorganic nasal stops, and oral versus nasal vowels in Taiwanese. Four experiments were conducted: concept formation, gating, and two airflow studies. Results of a first nasal airflow study on syllable initial voiced stops and nasal stops showed that initial voiced stops were nasalized when preceded by a nasal consonant across a word boundary. Results of a concept formation experiment indicated that Taiwanese listeners grouped homorganic voiced stops and nasal stops into the same category. A gating experiment showed that subjects were insensitive to the phonetic differences between homorganic voiced stops and nasal stops. T... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896505 Thu, 01 Jan 2004 05:00:00 +0100 896505 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896504&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15697154%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Verhoeven J, De Pauw G, Kloots H This paper investigates speech rate in two standard national varieties of Dutch on the basis of 160 15 mins conversations with native speakers who belong to four different regions in the Netherlands and four in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium (Flanders). Speech rate was quantified as articulation rate and speaking rate, both expressed as the number of syllables per second (syll/s). The results show a significant effect of speakers' country of origin: subjects in the Netherlands speak 16% faster than subjects in Belgium (articulation: 5.05 vs. 4.23 syll/s, speaking: 4.23 vs. 4.00 syll/s). In addition, the independent variable sex was also found to be significant: on average, men speak 6% faster than women (articulation: 4.79 vs. 4.50 syll/s, ... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896504 Thu, 01 Jan 2004 05:00:00 +0100 896504 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896503&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16038447%26dopt%3DAbstract This study examines the perception of paralinguistic intonational meanings deriving from Ohala's Frequency Code (Experiment 1) and Gussenhoven's Effort Code (Experiment 2) in British English and Dutch. Native speakers of British English and Dutch listened to a number of stimuli in their native language and judged each stimulus on four semantic scales deriving from these two codes: SELF-CONFIDENT versus NOT SELF-CONFIDENT, FRIENDLY versus NOT FRIENDLY (Frequency Code); SURPRISED versus NOT SURPRISED, and EMPHATIC versus NOT EMPHATIC (Effort Code). The stimuli, which were lexically equivalent across the two languages, differed in pitch contour, pitch register and pitch span in Experiment 1, and in pitch register, peak height, peak alignment and end pitch in Experiment 2. Contrary to the trad... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896503 Thu, 01 Jan 2004 05:00:00 +0100 896503 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896502&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16038448%26dopt%3DAbstract This study investigated the perception of place and secondary articulation contrasts in different syllable positions by Russian and Japanese listeners. The consonants involved in the study were the Russian plain (velarized) and palatalized labial and coronal voiceless stops in syllable-initial and syllable-final positions at word boundaries. The findings revealed substantial asymmetries in the perception of the contrasts by both groups of listeners: With respect to positions, consonants in syllable-final position were characterized by lower correct identification rates and (less consistently) longer reaction time than the same consonants in syllable-initial position. Positional syllable position differences were accompanied by differences in segment-specific contexts. With respect to indiv... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896502 Thu, 01 Jan 2004 05:00:00 +0100 896502 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896501&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16038449%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Toivanen J, Väyrynen E, Seppänen T In this paper, experiments on the automatic discrimination of basic emotions from spoken Finnish are described. For the purpose of the study, a large emotional speech corpus of Finnish was collected; 14 professional actors acted as speakers, and simulated four primary emotions when reading out a semantically neutral text. More than 40 prosodic features were derived and automatically computed from the speech samples. Two application scenarios were tested: the first scenario was speaker-independent for a small domain of speakers while the second scenario was completely speaker-independent. Human listening experiments were conducted to assess the perceptual adequacy of the emotional speech samples. Statistical classification experiment... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896501 Thu, 01 Jan 2004 05:00:00 +0100 896501 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896530&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D14529109%26dopt%3DAbstract We examined the processing of potential auditory and visual cues that differentiate statements from echoic questions. In Experiment 1, four natural speech statement-question pairs were identified by participants, and then analyzed to determine which characteristics were ecologically valid. These characteristics were tested in subsequent experiments to determine if they were also functionally valid. In Experiment 2, the characteristics of the most discriminable utterance pair were successfully extended to the other utterance pairs. For Experiment 3, an auditory continuum (varying in F0, amplitude, duration) was crossed with a visual continuum (varying in eyebrow raise, head tilt), using synthetic speech and a computer-animated head. Participants judged five levels along each of these two sp... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896530 Sat, 01 Mar 2003 05:00:00 +0100 896530 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896529&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D14529110%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Miyamoto ET When processing the initial segment of a sentence, readers may favor an interpretation that will turn out to be incorrect as more words are read. In these cases, a reanalysis process is necessary in order to correct the mental representation built up to that point. It has been previously proposed that readers obey a minimum change restriction, as they prefer to change the mental representation as little as possible. The present paper reports two experiments in Japanese suggesting that a minimal change restriction is unnecessary to characterize reanalysis. It is proposed instead that the present data and previous observations are more naturally explained by a constraint-driven model in which revisions are performed only when required by parsing constraints. PMID... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896529 Sat, 01 Mar 2003 05:00:00 +0100 896529 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896528&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D14529111%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Welby P This paper examines predictions made by two theories of the relationship between pitch accent and focus. The empirical evidence presented suggests that listeners are sensitive to a variety of factors that may affect the focus projection ability of pitch accents, that is the ability of a pitch accent on one word to mark focus on a larger constituent. The findings suggest that listeners' interpretation of focus structure is most sensitive to the presence or absence of a pitch accent on a focused constituent and the deaccenting of following unfocused material (pitch accent position). Preliminary evidence suggests that the status of a pitch accent as nuclear or prenuclear may also affect listeners' interpretations, though to a lesser extent than accent position. Finally, t... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896528 Sat, 01 Mar 2003 05:00:00 +0100 896528 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896527&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D14679960%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: PMID: 14679960 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] (Source: Language and Speech) Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896527 Sat, 01 Mar 2003 05:00:00 +0100 896527 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896526&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D14748441%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Peperkamp S Infants' phonological acquisition during the first 18 months of life has been some 30 years. Current research themes include statistical learning mechanisms, early lexical development, and models of phonetic category perception. So far, linguistic theories have hardly been taken into account. These theories are based upon the assumption that there is a common core of innate phonological knowledge across speakers of all human languages, and they contain detailed proposals concerning phonological representations and the derivations by which abstract underlying forms are mapped onto concrete surface forms. It remains to be investigated experimentally if there is innate phonological knowledge and how the language-specific phonological grammar is acquired. In the presen... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896526 Wed, 01 Jan 2003 05:00:00 +0100 896526 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896525&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D14748442%26dopt%3DAbstract This article reviews the challenges posed by results in phonetic typology and sociolinguistics for the theory of language acquisition. It argues that categories are initiated bottom-up from statistical modes in use of the phonetic space, and sketches how exemplar theory can be used to model the updating of categories once they are initiated. It also argues that bottom-up initiation of categories is successful thanks to the perception-production loop operating in the speech community. The behavior of this loop means that the superficial statistical properties of speech available to the infant indirectly reflect the contrastiveness and discriminability of categories in the adult grammar. The article also argues that the developing system is refined using internal feedback from type statistic... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896525 Wed, 01 Jan 2003 05:00:00 +0100 896525 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896524&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D14748443%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Anderson JL, Morgan JL, White KS Infants under six months are able to discriminate native and non-native consonant contrasts equally well, but as they learn the phonological systems of their native language, this ability declines. Current explanations of this phenomenon agree that the decline in discrimination ability is linked to the formation of native-language phonemic categories. The goal of this study was to evaluate the role of input statistics in learning these categories: our hypothesis was that relative frequency is a determinant of the relative order in which categories are acquired. English-learning infants of two age groups (6.5 months and 8.5 months) were tested on their ability to discriminate non-native consonant contrasts using the Conditioned Head Turn Procedu... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896524 Wed, 01 Jan 2003 05:00:00 +0100 896524 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896523&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D14748444%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Best CC, McRoberts GW Numerous findings suggest that non-native speech perception undergoes dramatic changes before the infant's first birthday. Yet the nature and cause of these changes remain uncertain. We evaluated the predictions of several theoretical accounts of developmental change in infants' perception of non-native consonant contrasts. Experiment 1 assessed English-learning infants' discrimination of three isiZulu distinctions that American adults had categorized and discriminated quite differently, consistent with the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM: Best, 1995; Best et al., 1988). All involved a distinction employing a single articulatory organ, in this case the larynx. Consistent with all theoretical accounts, 6-8 month olds discriminated all contrasts. However... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896523 Wed, 01 Jan 2003 05:00:00 +0100 896523 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896522&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D14748445%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Bosch L, Sebastián-Gallés N Behavioral studies have shown that while young infants can discriminate many different phonetic contrasts, a shift from a language-general to a language-specific pattern of discrimination is found during the second semester of life, beginning earlier for vowels than for consonants. This age-related decline in sensitivity to perceive non-native contrasts has been generally attested in monolinguals. In order to analyze the impact of bilingual exposure on the perception of native-sound contrasts and the early building of language-specific contrastive categories, four-month-old and eight-month-old infants from Spanish monolingual, Catalan monolingual and Spanish-Catalan bilingual environments have been tested with a familiarization-preference ... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896522 Wed, 01 Jan 2003 05:00:00 +0100 896522 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896521&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D14748446%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Fennell CT, Werker JF Several recent studies from our laboratory have shown that 14-month-old infants have difficulty learning to associate two phonetically similar new words to two different objects when tested in the Switch task. Because the infants can discriminate the same phonetic detail that they fail to use in the associative word-learning situation, we have argued that this word-learning failure results from a processing overload. Here we explore how infants perform in the Switch task with already known minimally different words. The experiment involved the same phonetic difference as used in our earlier word-learning studies. Following habituation to two familiar minimal pair object-label combinations (ball and doll), infants of 14 months looked longer to a violation ... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896521 Wed, 01 Jan 2003 05:00:00 +0100 896521 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896520&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D14748447%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Swingley D Although infants show remarkable sensitivity to linguistically relevant phonetic variation in speech, young children sometimes appear not to make use of this sensitivity. Here, children's knowledge of the sound-forms of familiar words was assessed using a visual fixation task. Dutch 19-month-olds were shown pairs of pictures and heard correct pronunciations and mispronunciations of familiar words naming one of the pictures. Mispronunciations were word-initial in Experiment 1 and word-medial in Experiment 2, and in both experiments involved substituting one segment with [d] (a common sound in Dutch) or [g] (a rare sound). In both experiments, word recognition performance was better for correct pronunciations than for mispronunciations involving either substituted con... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896520 Wed, 01 Jan 2003 05:00:00 +0100 896520 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896519&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D14748448%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Kingston J Two hypotheses have recently been put forward to account for listeners' ability to distinguish and learn contrasts between speech sounds in foreign languages. First, Best's Perceptual Assimilation Model and Flege's Speech Learning Model both predict that the ease with which a listener can tell one non-native phoneme from another varies directly with the extent to which these sounds assimilate to different native phonemes (Best, 1994; also Best, McRoberts, & Goodell, 2001; Flege, 1991). Second, Logan, Lively, & Pisoni (1991) have argued that training listeners to identify non-native phonemes teaches them sets of exemplars rather than more abstract distinctive feature values. I report here the results of three sets of experiments designed to test these hypothe... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896519 Wed, 01 Jan 2003 05:00:00 +0100 896519 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896518&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15198112%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Arciuli J, Cupples L The experiments reported here were designed to investigate the influence of stress typicality during speeded grammatical classification of disyllabic English words by native and non-native speakers. Trochaic nouns and iambic gram verbs were considered to be typically stressed, whereas iambic nouns and trochaic verbs were considered to be atypically stressed. Experiments 1a and 2a showed that while native speakers classified typically stressed words individual more quickly and more accurately than atypically stressed words during differences reading, there were no overall effects during classification of spoken stimuli. However, a subgroup of native speakers with high error rates did show a significant effect during classification of spoken stimuli. Experim... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896518 Wed, 01 Jan 2003 05:00:00 +0100 896518 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896517&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15198113%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Grabe E, Rosner BS, García-Albea JE, Zhou X Native language affects the perception of segmental phonetic structure, of stress, and of semantic and pragmatic effects of intonation. Similarly, native language might influence the perception of similarities and differences among intonation contours. To test this hypothesis, a cross-language experiment was conducted. An English utterance was resynthesized with seven falling and four rising intonation contours. English, Iberian Spanish, and Chinese listeners then rated each pair of nonidentical stimuli for degree of difference. Multidimensional scaling of the results supported the hypothesis. The three groups of listeners produced statistically different perceptual configurations for the falling contours. All groups, however, p... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896517 Wed, 01 Jan 2003 05:00:00 +0100 896517 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896516&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15198114%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Guion SG, Clark JJ, Harada T, Wayland RP Seventeen native English speakers participated in an investigation of language users' knowledge of English main stress patterns. First, they produced 40 two-syllable nonwords of varying syllabic structure as nouns and verbs. Second, they indicated their preference for first or second syllable stress of the same words in a perception task. Finally, they indicated words they considered to be phonologically similar to the nonwords. Analyses of variance on the production and perception data indicated that both syllabic structure and lexical class (noun or verb) had an effect on main stress assignment. In logistic regression analyses on the production and perception responses. predictions of stress placement made by (1) syllable structure, (... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896516 Wed, 01 Jan 2003 05:00:00 +0100 896516 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896534&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D12866908%26dopt%3DAbstract This study explored whether adults produce predictable output patterns when reducing words. Undergraduate participants heard a list of polysyllabic words varying systematically across syllable number and primary stress location and were asked to generate a "reduced" form, similar to common English reductions (e.g., rhinóceros --> rhino). Regardless of stress and syllable number, participants reduced the stimulus words significantly more often to left-headed disyllabic or monosyllabic feet, retaining stressed syllables and omitting unstressed syllables. The general bias found was similar to that which children exhibit in natural speech, namely, to maintain well-formed prosodic patterns and preserve salient syllables. On the other hand, a tendency to preserve word-initial instead of ... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896534 Sun, 01 Dec 2002 05:00:00 +0100 896534 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896533&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D12866909%26dopt%3DAbstract This study investigated how English and Japanese speakers syllabify two-syllable English words and nonwords with single intervocalic consonants. In oral tasks, participants inserted a pause between two parts of English words and nonwords. In written tasks, they selected their preferred syllabification of English words between two alternatives. In Experiment 1 both English and Japanese speakers generally tended to place intervocalic consonants in the second syllables, following the maximum onset principle. Japanese speakers showed a stronger preference for this type of segmentation than English speakers. Responses by speakers of both languages were affected by the position of stress, the length of the stressed vowel, and the sonority of the consonant, reflecting the universal effects of the... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896533 Sun, 01 Dec 2002 05:00:00 +0100 896533 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896532&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D12866910%26dopt%3DAbstract This study aimed to (1) investigate a new research design for the collection of reliable tone perception data from young children; (2) compare lexical and nonlexical items for testing tone perception ability; and (3) identify the relative ease of perceiving the three basic tone contrasts in Cantonese, that is, high level/high rising (T1/T2), high level/low falling (T1/T4), and, high rising/low falling tones (T2/T4). The three tone pairs were presented to 31 children in the form of word and nonword stimuli. It was found that the research design could be used to assess the tone perception knowledge of children as young as 2;09. Significant differences were found between word and nonword stimuli and also in the identification of the T2/T4 contrast in comparison with the other two pairs. Child... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896532 Sun, 01 Dec 2002 05:00:00 +0100 896532 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896531&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D12866911%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Vitevitch MS A comparison of the lexical characteristics of 88 auditory misperceptions (i.e., slips of the ear) showed no difference in word-frequency, neighborhood density, and neighborhood frequency between the actual and the perceived utterances. Another comparison of slip of the ear tokens (i.e., actual and perceived utterances) and words in general (i.e., randomly selected from the lexicon) showed that slip of the ear tokens had denser neighborhoods and higher neighborhood frequency than words in general, as predicted from laboratory studies. Contrary to prediction, slip of the ear tokens were higher in frequency of occurrence than words in general. Additional laboratory-based investigations examined the possible source of the contradictory word frequency finding, highlig... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896531 Sun, 01 Dec 2002 05:00:00 +0100 896531 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896538&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D12693685%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Cooper N, Cutler A, Wales R Four cross-modal priming experiments and two forced-choice identification experiments investigated the use of suprasegmental cues to stress in the recognition of spoken English words, by native (English-speaking) and non-native (Dutch) listeners. Previous results had indicated that suprasegmental information was exploited in lexical access by Dutch but not by English listeners For both listener groups, recognition of visually presented target words was faster, in comparison to a control condition, after stress-matching spoken primes, either monosyllabic (mus- from MUsic/muSEum) or bisyl-word recognition labic (admi-from ADmiral/admiRAtion). For native listeners, the effect of stress-mismatching bisyllabic primes was not different from that of contro... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896538 Sun, 01 Sep 2002 04:00:00 +0100 896538 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896537&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D12693686%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Fletcher J, Stirling L, Mushin L, Wales R Eight map task dialogs representative of General Australian English, were coded for speaker turn, and for dialog acts using a version of SWBD-DAMSL, a dialog act annotation scheme. High, low, simple, and complex rising tunes, and any corresponding dialog act codes were then compared. Dialog acts corresponding to information requests were consistently realized as high-onset high rises ((L +)H * H - H%). However low-onset high rises (e.g., L * H - H%) corresponded to a wider range of other "forward-looking" communicative functions, such as statements and action directives, and were rarely associated with information requests. Low-range rises (L*L - H%), by contrast, were mostly associated with backward-looking functions, like acknowledgm... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896537 Sun, 01 Sep 2002 04:00:00 +0100 896537 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896536&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D12693687%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Mullennix JW, Bihon T, Bricklemyer J, Gaston J, Keener JM The effects of variation from stimulus to stimulus in emotional tone of voice on speech perception were examined through a series of perceptual experiments. Stimuli were recorded from human speakers who produced utterances in tones of voice designed to convey affective information. Then, stimuli varying in talker voice and emotional tone were presented to listeners for perceptual matching and classification. The results showed that both intertalker variation in talker voice and intratalker variation in emotional tone had a negative effect on perceptual performance. The results suggest that sources of variation in the speech signal that affect the spectral/temporal properties of speech (i.e., talker voice, speech rate, e... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896536 Sun, 01 Sep 2002 04:00:00 +0100 896536 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896535&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D12693688%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Newnan RS, German DJ This investigation studied the influence of lexical factors, known to impact lexical access in adults, on the word retrieval of children. Participants included 320 typical and atypical (word-finding difficulties) language-learning children, ranging in age from 7 to 12 years. Lexical factors examined included word frequency, age-of-acquisition, neighborhood density, neighborhood frequency, and stress pattern. Findings indicated that these factors did influence lexical access in children. Words which were high in frequency and neighborhood frequency, low in neighborhood density and age-of-acquisition, and which contained the typical stress pattern for the language were easier to name. Further, the number of neighbors that were more frequent than the target w... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896535 Sun, 01 Sep 2002 04:00:00 +0100 896535 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896542&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D12613557%26dopt%3DAbstract We present three listening experiments that test an alternative position suggested in Carlson, Clifton, and Frazier (2001) as the "informative boundary" hypothesis. This hypothesis claims that the interpretation of a prosodic boundary is determined not by its absolute size but by its size relative to relevant certain other boundaries. Experiment 1 confirmed the predictions of this hypothesis in phrases like the old men and women with very large houses, manipulating the boundaries before and and with. Experiment 2 investigated the effect in a variety of diverse syntactic structures, varying syntactic category and status (head vs. nonhead) of the ambiguous constituent. It confirmed the predictions of the informative boundary hypothesis in every structure tested except for '-ly' adverbs that ... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896542 Sat, 01 Jun 2002 04:00:00 +0100 896542 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896541&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D12613558%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Peters J, Gilles P, Auer P, Selting M Two experiments examined the commonly held belief that regional varieties of German can be identified by intonational features alone. In both experiments, listeners were presented with regional intonational contours of German. In the first experiment, listeners judged contours of Hamburg urban vernacular compared with contours of Northern Standard German. In the second experiment, listeners judged contours of Berlin urban vernacular compared with contours of both Northern Standard German and Low Alemannic German. The performance of listeners was found to vary with their linguistic experience. Listeners who were familiar both with the local variety and with some nonlocal variety by personal contact performed better than listeners who were f... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896541 Sat, 01 Jun 2002 04:00:00 +0100 896541 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896540&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D12613559%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Smith CL Prosodic boundaries are marked in speech by modifications to dimensions such as F0, duration, and segmental quality. The experiment reported here tests the hypothesis that modifications at the end of a prosodic domain may be amplified or attenuated depending on the type of sentence (statement or question). The prosodic modifications investigated here for French are sentence-final lengthening and vowel devoicing, which is related to changes in voice quality. Six native speakers of French read 10 matched sets of sentences, which included both statements and questions. Measurements were made of the last vowel in each test sentence and of sentence-medial vowels in control sentences. Statement-final vowels were less periodic and more often devoiced than vowels at the end o... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896540 Sat, 01 Jun 2002 04:00:00 +0100 896540 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896539&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D12613560%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Teixeira ER, Davis BL Sound patterns in the speech of two Brazilian-Portuguese speaking children are compared with early production patterns in English-learning children as well as English and Brazilian-Portuguese (BP) characteristics. The relationship between production system effects and ambient language influences in the acquisition of early sound patterns is of primary interest, as English and BP are characterized by differing phonological systems. Results emphasize the primacy of production system effects in early acquisition, although even the earliest word forms show evidence of perceptual effects from the ambient language in both BP children. Use of labials and coronals and low and midfront vowels in simple syllable shapes is consistent with acquisition data for this p... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896539 Sat, 01 Jun 2002 04:00:00 +0100 896539 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896545&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D12375817%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Herman R, McGory JT Tests of intertranscriber agreement in prosodically-labeled corpora have been used as an objective performance measure of reliability. Reasonably high agreements among labelers have been found, but systematic disagreements exist, indicating that some intonational patterns are more difficult for transcribers to label while others are easier. This may be due to differences in the way transcribers distinguish between tonal labels for pitch events. We developed a method to map the subjective similarity space for the categories in an intonational transcription system. From this map, we derived a conceptual tone similarity similarity index indicating the distance between tone categories. This subjective similarity index is used to predict the intertranscriber rel... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896545 Fri, 01 Mar 2002 05:00:00 +0100 896545 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896544&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D12375818%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Weber A Previous studies have shown that spoken-language processing is inhibited by violation of obligatory regressive assimilation. Weber (2001) replicated this inhibitory effect in a phoneme-monitoring study examining regressive place assimilation of nasals, but found facilitation for violation of progressive assimilation. German listeners detected the velar fricative [x] more quickly when fricative assimilation was violated (e.g., see text) than when no violation occurred (e.g., [baxt] or [see text]). It was argued that a combination of two factors caused facilitation: (1) progressive assimilation creates different restrictions for the monitoring target than regressive assimilation does, and (2) the sequences violating assimilation (e.g., *[ix]) are novel for German listene... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896544 Fri, 01 Mar 2002 05:00:00 +0100 896544 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896543&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D12375819%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Cowie R, Douglas-Cowie E, Wichmann A Statistical methods of describing prosody were used to study fluency, expressiveness and their relationship among 8-10-year-old readers. 67 children were rated on fluency and expressiveness. The two were partially independent in the full sample: expressiveness rarely occurred without fluency, but fluency occurred without expressiveness. A balanced subsample of 24 was selected for closer instrumental and statistical analysis. There were robust relationships between fluency and measures associated with temporal organization.between expressiveness and variables associated with pitch mobility; and Interactions indicated that the relationships were not simple. Differences between groups depended on sentence content and position-expressive reader... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896543 Fri, 01 Mar 2002 05:00:00 +0100 896543 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896548&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D12162693%26dopt%3DAbstract In this study the performance of five, French specific, syllabification procedures were compared and contrasted both against each other, using lexical analysis, and against human syllable boundary placement, using a metalinguistic syllable repetition task. Lexical analysis revealed substantial, practical differences in the application of procedures, with disagreements rising along with consonant cluster complexity. Results from the syllable repetition task showed differences in participant's syllabification consistency due to experimental condition, that is, syllable onset or offset detection, and the consonant cluster used in the stimuli. Comparison between the predictions of syllabification procedures and human segmentation show greater agreement for procedures based upon phonotactic reg... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896548 Sat, 01 Dec 2001 05:00:00 +0100 896548 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896547&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D12162694%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Lu CC, Bates E, Hung D, Tzeng O, Hsu J, Tsai CH, Roe K Syntactic priming of Chinese nouns and verbs was investigated in word recognition (cued shadowing of auditory targets) and production (picture naming). Disyllabic compound words were presented after syntactically congruent, incongruent, or neutral auditory contexts, with a zero delay between offset of the context and onset of the target. Significant priming was observed in both tasks, including facilitation as well as inhibition. Post hoc analyses showed that reaction times were also affected by sublexical variables that are especially relevant for Chinese, including syllable density (number of word types and tokens in the language with the same first or second syllable) and semantic transparency (whether the meaning of th... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896547 Sat, 01 Dec 2001 05:00:00 +0100 896547 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896546&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D12162695%26dopt%3DAbstract The objective of this investigation is to gain insight in diachronic development in lexical tone systems. The Rise toneme features the most variation, both within and between dialects. Evidence is presented that the diachronic, between-dialect variation in the Rise toneme is due to synchronic between-context variation (cf. Ohala, 1989). While this synchronic variation is still evident in the Salawati dialect, the two other dialects developed in radically different directions. In the Misool dialect, the generalization of one of the realizations of the Rise triggered a push-chain style tonal change, in which another toneme, the Fall, shifted upward in the tonal space, ensuring perceptual contrast. In the Laganyan dialect, on the other hand, the tonal contrast between the Fall and the Rise is... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896546 Sat, 01 Dec 2001 05:00:00 +0100 896546 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896552&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D11814216%26dopt%3DAbstract We present a new dimension of lexical variation that is addressed to this concern. Contextual Distinctiveness (CD), a corpus-derived summary measure of the frequency distribution of the contexts in which a word occurs, is naturally compatible with contextual theories of semantic representation and meaning. Experiment 1 demonstrates that CD is a significantly better predictor of lexical decision latencies than occurrence frequency, suggesting that CD is the more psychologically relevant variable. We additionally explore the relationship between CD and six subjectively-defined measures: Concreteness, Context Availability, Number of Contexts, Ambiguity, Age of Acquisition and Familiarity and find CD to be reliably related to Ambiguity only. We argue for the priority of immediate context in de... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896552 Sat, 01 Sep 2001 04:00:00 +0100 896552 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896551&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D11814217%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Murfitt T, McAllister J Prior research has identified a number of dimensions along which speakers modify referring expressions. The present study aimed to determine and describe the actual relationship existing between these production characteristics and corresponding measures of listener comprehension. Spoken descriptions were elicited from eight speakers during monolog and dialog conditions of the tangram task. In a subsequent listening experiment, 163 new subjects listened to the referring expressions from the speech corpus, and were asked to select, from an array of tangram figures, the one that was being described in the referring expression. Results revealed that the production variables most commonly documented by previous researchers collectively contributed to listen... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896551 Sat, 01 Sep 2001 04:00:00 +0100 896551 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896550&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D11814218%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Taft M The research presented here examines the proposal that orthographic processing in reading polysyllabic words takes place via an analysis of the word into an orthographic/morphological structure called the Basic Orthographic Syllabic Structure or BOSS. This structure includes the largest possible coda in the first component (e.g., the THUND of THUNDER) and, as such, it cuts across the phonological syllable boundary (e.g., THUN + DER). The existence of the BOSS has been previously supported by showing that words physically divided at their BOSS (e.g., THUND ER) are faster to recognize than those divided at their syllable (e.g., THUN DER). However, there has been little, if any, report of confirmatory evidence for this conclusion. Three experiments are reported here demons... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896550 Sat, 01 Sep 2001 04:00:00 +0100 896550 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=896549&cid=s_36272_52_f&fid=36272&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D11814219%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Wester M, Kessens JM, Cucchiarini C, Strik H In this article, we address the issue of using a continuous speech recognition tool to obtain phonetic or phonological representations of speech. Two experiments were carried out in which the performance of a continuous speech recognizer (CSR) was compared to the performance of expert listeners in a task of judging whether a number of prespecified phones had been realized in an utterance. In the first experiment, nine expert listeners and the CSR carried out exactly the same task: deciding whether a segment was present or not in 467 cases. In the second experiment, we expanded on the first experiment by focusing on two phonological processes: schwa-deletion and schwa-insertion. The results of these experiments show that significant ... Language and Speech journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=896549 Sat, 01 Sep 2001 04:00:00 +0100 896549