Monitoring syllable boundaries during speech production

This study investigated the encoding of syllable boundary information during speech production in Dutch. Based on Levelt's model of phonological encoding, we hypothesized segments and syllable boundaries to be encoded in an incremental way. In a self-monitoring experiment, decisions about the syllable affiliation (first or second syllable) of a pre-specified consonant, which was the third phoneme in a word, were required (e.g., ka.No 'canoe' vs. kaN.sel 'pulpit'; capital letters indicate pivotal consonants, dots mark syllable boundaries). First syllable responses were faster than second syllable responses, indicating the incremental nature of segmental encoding and syllabification during speech production planning. The results of the experiment are discussed in the context of Levelt's model of phonological encoding.     

Development of infant ear asymmetries for speech and music

Groups of 2-, 3-, and 4-month olds were tested for dichotic ear differences in memory-based phonetic and music timbre discriminations. A right-ear advantage for speech and a left-ear advantage (LEA) for music were found in the 3- and 4-month-olds. However, the 2-month-olds showed only the music LEA, with no reliable evidence of memory-based speech discrimination by either hemisphere. Thus, the responses of all groups to speech contrasts were different from those to music contrasts, but the pattern of the response dichotomy in the youngest group deviated from that found in the older infants. It is suggested that the quality or use of lefthemisphere phonetic memory may change between 2 and 3 months, and that the engagement of right-hemisphere specialized memory for musical timbre may precede that for left-hemisphere phonetic memory. Several directions for future research are suggested to determine whether infant short-term memory asymmetries for speech and music are attributable to acoustic factors, to different modes or strategies in perception, or to structural and dynamic properties of natural sound sources.     

Similar patterns of age-related differences in emotion recognition from speech and music

Young and old adults’ ability to recognize emotions from vocal expressions and music performances was compared. The stimuli consisted of (a) acted speech (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness; each posed with both weak and strong emotion intensity), (b) synthesized speech (anger, fear, happiness, and sadness), and (c) short melodies played on the electric guitar (anger, fear, happiness, and sadness; each played with both weak and strong emotion intensity). The listeners’ recognition of discrete emotions and emotion intensity was assessed and the recognition rates were controlled for various response biases. Results showed emotion-specific age-related differences in recognition accuracy. Old adults consistently received significantly lower recognition rates for negative, but not for positive, emotions for both speech and music stimuli. Some age-related differences were also evident in the listeners’ ratings of emotion intensity. The results show the importance of considering individual emotions in studies on age-related differences in emotion recognition.     

Phonotactic knowledge of word boundaries and its use in infant speech perception

The development of a lexicon critically depends on the infant’s ability to identify wordlike units in the auditory speech input. The present study investigated at what age infants become sensitive to language-specific phonotactic features that signal word boundaries and to what extent they are able to use this knowledgeto segment speech input. Experiment 1 showed that infants at the age of 9 months were sensitive to the phonotactic structure of word boundaries when wordlike units were presented in isolation. Experiments 2 to 5 demonstrated that this sensitivity was present even when critical items were presented in context, although only under certain conditions. Preferences for legal over illegal word boundary clusters were found when critical items were embedded in two identical syllables, keeping language processing requirements and attentional requirements low. Experiment 6 replicated the findings of Experiment 1. Experiment 7 was a low-pass-filtered version of Experiment 6 that left the prosody of the stimulus items intact while removing most of the distinctive phonotactic cues. As expected, no listening preference for legal over illegal word boundary clusters was found in this experiment. This clearly suggests that the preferential patterns observed can be attributed to the infants’ sensitivity to phonotactic constraints on word boundaries in a given language and not to suprasegmental cues.     

音乐学习对语言加工的促进作用

音乐学习可以增强个体的艺术素养,同时,音乐学习对其他认知加工过程尤其是语言学习还有正面的促进作用。近年来国内外学者主要围绕着音乐家、音乐学习障碍个体开展了一系列相关工作,同时还进行了相关的追踪研究。值得注意的是,有关音乐学习促进语言加工的实证依据主要来自横断研究,还需要更多的纵向追踪研究来进一步提供因果关系的证据。这方面的工作将最终促进音乐学习与训练在教育与医疗领域的广泛应用。     

The role of prosodic boundaries in the resolution of lexical embedding in speech comprehension

Participants' eye movements were monitored as they heard sentences and saw four pictured objects on a computer screen. Participants were instructed to click on the object mentioned in the sentence. There were more transitory fixations to pictures representing monosyllabic words (e.g. ham) when the first syllable of the target word (e.g. hamster) had been replaced by a recording of the monosyllabic word than when it came from a different recording of the target word. This demonstrates that a phonemically identical sequence can contain cues that modulate its lexical interpretation. This effect was governed by the duration of the sequence, rather than by its origin (i.e. which type of word it came from). The longer the sequence, the more monosyllabic-word interpretations it generated. We argue that cues to lexical-embedding disambiguation, such as segmental lengthening, result from the realization of a prosodic boundary that often but not always follows monosyllabic words, and that lexical candidates whose word boundaries are aligned with prosodic boundaries are favored in the word-recognition process.     

Perceiving speech rhythm in music: Listeners classify instrumental songs according to language of origin

Recent evidence suggests that the musical rhythm of a particular culture may parallel the speech rhythm of that culture’s language (Patel, A. D., & Daniele, J. R. (2003). An empirical comparison of rhythm in language and music. Cognition, 87, B35-B45). The present experiments aimed to determine whether listeners actually perceive such rhythmic differences in a purely musical context (i.e., in instrumental music without words). In Experiment 1a, listeners successfully classified instrumental renditions of French and English songs having highly contrastive rhythmic differences. Experiment 1b replicated this result with the same songs containing rhythmic information only. In Experiments 2a and 2b, listeners successfully classified original and rhythm-only stimuli when language-specific rhythmic differences were less contrastive but more representative of differences found in actual music and speech. These findings indicate that listeners can use rhythmic similarities and differences to classify songs originally composed in two languages having contrasting rhythmic prosody.     

Categories and Dimensions

ABSTRACT— The distinction between categories and dimensions has important consequences for basic and applied science in many areas of psychological research. Decisions as to whether individuals should be assigned to groups or located along one or more continua often are based on personal preferences or discipline-specific measurement traditions, which can lead to the creation, use, or reification of spurious categories or dimensions. Methods for evaluating the latent structure of psychological constructs, using powerful and informative tests between competing models, are available. Rather than choosing on a priori grounds, investigators can perform structural research to evaluate the strength and consistency with which results tease apart categorical and dimensional models. Here, we review why researchers should make this distinction empirically, briefly discuss methods available for doing so, and describe the breadth of areas ripe for exploiting the largely untapped potential of structural research.     

Categories and Facets in Integrative Levels

Facets and general categories used in bibliographic classification have been based on a disciplinary organization of knowledge. However, facets and categories of phenomena independent from disciplines can be identified similarly. Phenomena can be classified according to a series of integrative levels (layers), which in turn can be grouped into the major strata of form, matter, life, mind, society and culture, agreeing with Nicolai Hartmann’s ontology. Unlike a layer, a stratum is not constituted of elements of the lower ones; rather, it represents the formal pattern of the lower ones, like the horse hoof represents the shape of the steppe. Bibliographic categories can now be seen in the light of level theory: some categories are truly general, while others only appear at a given level, being the realization of a general category in the specific context of the level: these are the facets of that level. In the notation of the Integrative Level Classification project, categories and facets are represented by digits, and displayed in a Web interface with the help of colours.     

Ontological Categories in GOL

General Ontological Language (GOL) is a formal framework for representing and building ontologies. The purpose of GOL is to provide a system of top-level ontologies which can be used as a basis for building domain-specific ontologies. The present paper gives an overview about the basic categories of the GOL-ontology. GOL is part of the work of the research group Ontologies in Medicine (Onto-Med) at the University of Leipzig which is based on the collaborative work of the Institute of Medical Informatics (IMISE) and the Institute for Computer Science (IfI). It represents work in progress toward a proposal for an integrated family of top-level ontologies and will be applied to several fields of medicine, in particular to the field of Clinical Trials.     

Gender and Other Categories

In my discussion of Bordo's paper I leave aside the particulars of her detailed critique of Grimshaw and the issue of the “maleness” of philosophy and focus instead on some questions raised by her analysis of heterogeneity and generality. I find this analysis very persuasive, particularly her counterarguments to the “theoretics of heterogeneity.” However, 1 am less persuaded by her concluding points and suggestions for future directions.     

Coherence in Substructural Categories

It is proved that MacLane's coherence results for monoidal and symmetric monoidal categories can be extended to some other categories with multiplication; namely, to relevant, affine and cartesian categories. All results are formulated in terms of natural transformations equipped with graphs (g-natural transformations) and corresponding morphism theorems are given as consequences. Using these results, some basic relations between the free categories of these classes are obtained.