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Mapping and manipulating facial expression.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 partic...
Source: Language and Speech - July 26, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Theobald BJ, Matthews I, Mangini M, Spies JR, Brick TR, Cohn JF, Boker SM Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

MushyPeek: a framework for online investigation of audiovisual dialogue phenomena.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 - July 26, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Edlund J, Beskow J Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Recalibration of phonetic categories by lipread speech: measuring aftereffects after a 24-hour delay.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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...
Source: Language and Speech - July 26, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Vroomen J, Baart M Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Mixed signals: combining linguistic and affective functions of eyebrows in questions in sign language of the Netherlands.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 fu...
Source: Language and Speech - July 26, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: de Vos C, van der Kooij E, Crasborn O Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Visual intonation in the prosody of a sign language.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 ...
Source: Language and Speech - July 26, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Dachkovsky S, Sandler W Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Effects of varying rate of signing on ASL manual signs and nonmanual markers.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 ...
Source: Language and Speech - July 26, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Wilbur RB Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Multimodal indices to Japanese and French prosodically expressed social affects.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 bet...
Source: Language and Speech - July 26, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Rilliard A, Shochi T, Martin JC, Erickson D, Aubergé V Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Are eyebrow movements linked to voice variations and turn-taking in dialogue? An experimental investigation.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 (occur...
Source: Language and Speech - July 26, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Guaïtella I, Santi S, Lagrue B, Cavé C Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Interaction of audition and vision for the perception of prosodic contrastive focus.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 resul...
Source: Language and Speech - July 26, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Dohen M, Loevenbruck H Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Optical phonetics and visual perception of lexical and phrasal stress in English.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 perceiv...
Source: Language and Speech - July 26, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Scarborough R, Keating P, Mattys SL, Cho T, Alwan A Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Audiovisual prosody--introduction to the special issue.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 19624027 [PubMed - in process]
Source: Language and Speech - July 26, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Krahmer E, Swerts M Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Independent effects of orthographic and phonological facilitation on spoken word production in Mandarin.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 SO...
Source: Language and Speech - April 11, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Zhang Q, Chen HC, Weekes BS, Yang Y Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Japanese mental syllabary and effects of mora, syllable, bi-mora and word frequencies on Japanese speech production.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 ba...
Source: Language and Speech - April 11, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Tamaoka K, Makioka S Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Measuring phonological development: a follow-up study of five children acquiring Finnish.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 sequence...
Source: Language and Speech - April 11, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Saaristo-Helin K Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Syllable timing and pausing: evidence from Cantonese.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 sy...
Source: Language and Speech - April 11, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Perry C, Wong RK, Matthews S Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Automatic syllabification in English: a comparison of different algorithms.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 d...
Source: Language and Speech - April 11, 2009 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Marchand Y, Adsett CR, Damper RI Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

The interpretation of disjunction in universal grammar.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 d...
Source: Language and Speech - June 20, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Crain S Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

An event-structural account of passive acquisition in Korean.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 ch...
Source: Language and Speech - June 20, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Lee KO, Lee Y Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Scope-marking strategies in the acquisition of long distance wh-questions in French and Dutch.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 Derivationa...
Source: Language and Speech - June 20, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Jakubowicz C, Strik N Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

The Delay of Principle B Effect (DPBE) and its absence in some languages.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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...
Source: Language and Speech - June 20, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Di Sciullo AM, Agüero-Bautista C Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Bootstrapping lexical and syntactic acquisition.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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...
Source: Language and Speech - June 20, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Christophe A, Millotte S, Bernal S, Lidz J Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Inflectional bootstrapping in 2-year-olds.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 ...
Source: Language and Speech - June 20, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Jolly HR, Plunkett K Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Do 11-month-old French infants process articles?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 th...
Source: Language and Speech - June 20, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Hallé PA, Durand C, de Boysson-Bardies B Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Phonological specificity of vowel contrasts at 18-months.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 sens...
Source: Language and Speech - June 20, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Mani N, Coleman J, Plunkett K Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Phonological, lexical and syntactic components of language development. Preface.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 18561540 [PubMed - in process]
Source: Language and Speech - June 20, 2008 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Frauenfelder U, Rizzi L, Zesiger P Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Structural influences on initial accent placement in French.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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...
Source: Language and Speech - November 3, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Astésano C, Bard EG, Turk A Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

The effect of pitch peak alignment on sentence type identification in Russian.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 pea...
Source: Language and Speech - November 3, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Makarova V Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Tone features, tone perception, and peak alignment in Thai.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 ton...
Source: Language and Speech - November 3, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Zsiga E, Nitisaroj R Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Tongue kinematics during utterances elicited with the SLIP technique.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 erro...
Source: Language and Speech - November 3, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Pouplier M Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Connecting intonation labels to mathematical descriptions of fundamental frequency.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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. The...
Source: Language and Speech - November 3, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Grabe E, Kochanski G, Coleman J Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Caught in the ACT: the timing of aspiration and voicing in East Bengali.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 notio...
Source: Language and Speech - September 25, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Mikuteit S, Reetz H Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Measuring syntactic complexity in spontaneous spoken Swedish.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 ...
Source: Language and Speech - September 25, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Roll M, Frid J, Horne M Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

The relationship between musical skills, music training, and intonation analysis skills.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 ...
Source: Language and Speech - September 25, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Dankovicová J, House J, Crooks A, Jones K Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Jaw and order.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 introduc...
Source: Language and Speech - September 25, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Mooshammer C, Hoole P, Geumann A Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

The acoustic correlates of perceived masculinity, perceived femininity, and perceived sexual orientation.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 o...
Source: Language and Speech - September 25, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Munson B Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Does horse activate mother? Processing lexical tone in form priming.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 thro...
Source: Language and Speech - September 25, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Lee CY Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Perceptual tests of rhythmic similarity: I. Mora rhythm.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 the...
Source: Language and Speech - September 25, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Murty L, Otake T, Cutler A Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

The role of additional processing time and lexical constraint in spoken word recognition.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 sens...
Source: Language and Speech - September 25, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: LoCasto PC, Connine CM, Patterson D Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Perceptual distortions in the adaptation of English consonant clusters: syllable structure or consonantal contact constraints?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 t...
Source: Language and Speech - September 25, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Kabak B, Idsardi WJ Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Focus and VP ellipsis.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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) constituen...
Source: Language and Speech - September 25, 2007 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Frazier L, Clifton C, Carlson K Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

What does more time buy you? Another look at the effects of long-term residence on production accuracy of English /inverted r/ and /l/ by Japanese speakers.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 ...
Source: Language and Speech - January 1, 2006 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Larson-Hall J Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

On the function of stress rhythms in speech: evidence of a link with grouping effects on serial memory.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 inte...
Source: Language and Speech - January 1, 2006 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Boucher VJ Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Phonetics and phonology of thematic contrast in German.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 sentenc...
Source: Language and Speech - January 1, 2006 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Braun B Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Tonal association and tonal alignment: evidence from Greek polar questions and contrastive statements.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 degree...
Source: Language and Speech - January 1, 2006 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Arvaniti A, Ladd DR, Mennen I Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Within- word prosodic constraint on coarticulation in Japanese.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 carryove...
Source: Language and Speech - January 1, 2006 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Kondo Y Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Finding referents in time: eye-tracking evidence for the role of contrastive accents.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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) a...
Source: Language and Speech - January 1, 2006 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Weber A, Braun B, Crocker MW Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Spontaneous speech events in two speech databases of human-computer and human-human dialogs in Spanish.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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, ...
Source: Language and Speech - January 1, 2006 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Rodríguez LJ, Inés Torres M Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Rhythmic characteristics of colloquial and formal Tamil.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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, indi...
Source: Language and Speech - January 1, 2006 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Keane E Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

Input frequency and word truncation in child Japanese: structural and lexical effects.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 f...
Source: Language and Speech - January 1, 2006 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Ota M Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals

The relevance of metrical information in early prosodic word acquisition: a comparison of Catalan and Spanish.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
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 ...
Source: Language and Speech - January 1, 2006 Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Prieto P Tags: Lang Speech Source Type: journals