Effects of experience on fetal voice recognition

Abstract - The ability of human fetuses to recognize their own mother's voice was examined. Sixty term fetuses were assigned to one of two conditions during which they were exposed to a tape recording of their mother or a female stranger reading a passage. Voice stimuli were delivered through a loudspeaker held approximately 10 cm above the maternal abdomen and played at an average of 95 dB SPL. Each condition consisted of three 2-min periods: no stimulus, voice (mother or stranger), and no stimulus. Fetal heart rate increased in response to the mother's voice and decreased in response to the stranger's; both responses were sustained for 4 min. The finding of differential behavior in response to a familiar versus a novel voice provides evidence that experience influences fetal voice processing. It supports an epigenetic model of speech perception, presuming an interaction between genetic expression of neural development and species-specific experience.     

The voice problems of stutterers: A practical approach from clinical experience

Voice disorders, which may be caused by the stuttering problem, have been noted in at least one-third of stutterers seen. Basically, stutterers have false speech images that normal speech is perfect and without natural dysfluencies (repetitions, pauses, etc.). Many stutterers also have erroneous vocal images of how they should or should not sound. Both images control speech and voice. Clinical experience indicates that vocal rehabilitation should be used in conjunction with speech therapy for many stutterers.     

Personality inference from voice quality: The loud voice of extroversion

Investigated the process of personality inference from voice quality using 24 male American stimulus persons who served as subjects in simulated jury discussions. Applying a Brunswikian lens model of the inference process, criteria, distal cues, proximal cues and attributions were measured by independent groups of judges: personality criteria by three peers of each stimulus person and, on the basis of content-masked voice samples, distal voice quality indicator cues by six phoneticians, proximal voice percept by ten naive judges, personality attributions by nine naive judges. Only extroversion attributions correlate significantly with the criterion, replicating earlier findings. For the inference of extroversion, contrary to other traits which apparently cannot be inferred accurately from voice quality, the following conditions are met: (a) the criterion is associated with ecologically valid voice energy cues (vocal effort and dynamic range), (b) these indicator cues are adequately represented as proximal voice percepts (particularly loudness and sharpness), and(c) percept utilization in the judges' inferential strategy corresponds to the association between criterion and distal indicator cues. Path-analytic procedures are used to test empirically the adequacy of the inference model to (a) account for the variance in the attributions, and (b) explain significant correlations between criteria and attributions in terms of mediating variables.     

让建言更多含金量：员工建言质量的前因机制

员工高质量的建议是企业提质增效的重要途径。然而, 以往研究主要聚焦在员工的“建言参与”和“建言数量”上, 忽略了一个最本质的问题——员工的建言质量如何?为解决这一关键问题, 分别从员工建言质量的内涵、测量、前因机制的角度构建一个关于员工建言质量的系统研究。研究一基于扎根理论, 探讨员工建言质量的内涵与结构, 开发员工建言质量的测量工具; 研究二是基于内隐建言理论, 从个体和团队两个层面探讨员工与领导的批判性思维对员工建言质量的影响机制。理论贡献在于推动员工建言质量的理论构建, 拓展批判性思维理论、内隐建言理论的应用。     

The rhetorical voice of psychoanalysis

The rhetorical voice of psychoanalysis has a long history and has only recently come to be seen as a special feature of the theory. Its beginnings can be found in Freud's earliest pleadings for the usefulness of metaphor and analogy, although he felt that they were largely provisional and would eventually be replaced by more durable concepts. We have begun to see problems in replacing the central metaphors; the rhetorical base of psychoanalysis may be more enduring than we thought. While our metaphors may never provide epistemic access to the stuff of the mind, they can and do point to specific clinical encounters. Ways must be found to expand our rhetorical treasure chest and develop language even better suited to our concepts and observations.     

管理者征求建言的内在机制

在中国高权力距离文化背景下, 员工对于建言大多抱有观望的心态, 管理者向下属征求建言可能是破解员工建言难题的关键所在。在回顾相关研究的基础上, 基于沟通要素模型, 提出管理者征求建言在形式与内容上存在差异。基于计划行为理论, 进一步提出, 管理者的权力距离、变革氛围感知、管理者自我效能通过征求建言意向的中介作用影响征求建言, 而变革氛围感知、管理者自我效能的调节作用会影响管理者征求建言的形式与内容。对管理者征求建言的分析, 从关注员工开口说转变为关注管理者开口问, 为探讨中国文化背景下的建言行为提供了新的视角。     

The voice of the counselee

Conclusion Unfortunately, case excerpts and histories in which the voice of counselee is largely ignored appear very frequently in the pastoral care and counseling literature. More unfortunately, these excerpts are often lifted up, as is the one discussed in this article, as examples of very good counseling. The plea from the counselees, which can be heard very clearly through these excerpts and histories, is quite simply that their voices be heard and their experiences of their own suffering validated.     

Prenatal experience with low-frequency maternal-voice sounds influence neonatal perception of maternal voice samples

By sucking on a nonnutritive nipple in the presence of one discriminative stimulus, newborns were reinforced with a low-pass filtered tape recording of their mothers' voices. Sucking in the presence of a different discriminative stimulus was reinforced with unfiltered maternal-voice recordings. Filtered versions simulated maternal-voice sounds that were available before birth and unfiltered versions simulated maternal-voice sounds available after birth. Newborns in the control group could be reinforced with the same stimuli in the same way, but the voices were unfamiliar to them. Infants hearing their mothers' voices had no preference for either version, but infants hearing the unfamiliar voices preferred the unfiltered version. The difference in the between-groups responsiveness to the low-pass voice samples is consistent with the hypothesis that prenatal experience with low-frequency characteristics of maternal voices influences early postnatal perception of maternal voices.     

The voice of self-control: Blocking the inner voice increases impulsive responding

Philosophers and psychologists have long-debated the notion that the voice in our heads might help us to control our actions. Evidence from a number of lines of research suggests that verbal resources help us to focus attention, providing reason to believe that the inner voice might aid self-control via this capacity. In this study we explored the link between verbal resources and self-control by occupying the inner voice and then assessing behavioral indices of self-control. Participants completed regular and switching versions of the Go/No-Go task while doing verbal or spatial secondary tasks. Compared with the spatial task, doing the verbal task resulted in more impulsive responding, as indicated by a greater tendency to make a ‘Go’ response, a pattern that was accentuated in the switching version of the Go/No-Go. Our results suggest that the inner voice helps us to exert self-control by enhancing our ability to restrain our impulses.     

The rise of the child's voice; the silencing of the spiritual voice

In recent years the notion of the child's voice has gained prominence, particularly influenced by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1989 which outlined rights for children on an international scale. Many countries, including the UK, subsequently legislated for the child's voice to be heard in a variety of arenas including the education system. Despite the concept of the child's voice now being firmly established within schools in England, this paper argues that one aspect of their voice is not being heard: their spiritual voice. Drawing on evidence from research, this paper proposes that a variety of factors have culminated in a tendency towards a silencing of the child's spiritual voice. It argues that this silencing is an important one which should be acknowledged and rectified if educators in all schools are to treat the concept of the whole child seriously, and fully value their well‐being.     

Heeding the voice of experience: the role of talker variation in lexical access

Two experiments used the head-mounted eye-tracking methodology to examine the time course of lexical activation in the face of a non-phonemic cue, talker variation. We found that lexical competition was attenuated by consistent talker differences between words that would otherwise be lexical competitors. In Experiment 1, some English cohort word-pairs were consistently spoken by a single talker (male couch, male cows), while other word-pairs were spoken by different talkers (male sheep, female sheet). After repeated instances of talker-word pairings, words from different-talker pairs showed smaller proportions of competitor fixations than words from same-talker pairs. In Experiment 2, participants learned to identify black-and-white shapes from novel labels spoken by one of two talkers. All of the 16 novel labels were VCVCV word-forms atypical of, but not phonologically illegal in, English. Again, a word was consistently spoken by one talker, and its cohort or rhyme competitor was consistently spoken either by that same talker (same-talker competitor) or the other talker (different-talker competitor). Targets with different-talker cohorts received greater fixation proportions than targets with same-talker cohorts, while the reverse was true for fixations to cohort competitors; there were fewer erroneous selections of competitor referents for different-talker competitors than same-talker competitors. Overall, these results support a view of the lexicon in which entries contain extra-phonemic information. Extensions of the artificial lexicon paradigm and developmental implications are discussed.     

The delayed trigger voice key: an improved analogue voice key for psycholinguistic research

Many researchers rely on analogue voice keys for psycholinguistic research. However, the triggering of traditional simple threshold voice keys (STVKs) is delayed after response onset, and the delay duration may vary depending on initial phoneme type. The delayed trigger voice key (DTVK), a standalone electronic device that incorporates an additional minimum signal duration parameter, is described and validated in two experiments. In Experiment 1, recorded responses from a nonword naming task were presented to the DTVK and an STVK. As compared with hand-coded reaction times from visual inspection of the waveform, the DTVK was more accurate than the STVK, overall and across initial phoneme type. Rastle and Davis (2002) showed that an STVK more accurately detected an initial [s] when it was followed by a vowel than when followed by a consonant. Participants’ responses from that study were presented to the DTVK in Experiment 2, and accuracy was equivalent for initial [s] in vowel and consonant contexts. Details for the construction of the DTVK are provided.     

促进型和抑制型建言的差异

本文系统地回顾了促进型和抑制型建言在前因与后果上的差异。这些差异的理论基础包括计划行为理论、调节焦点理论、目标导向理论、社会期望理论、资源保存理论、归因理论、自我损耗理论、认知评价理论以及情感事件理论。与理论相对应, 两类建言前因的差异体现在建言者特质(如人格、动机)、领导风格与行为、领导成员交换和组织层面的因素(如组织政治、组织公平)等方面; 后果的差异体现在建言者工作态度与行为(如绩效、工作满意度)、领导建言采纳和团队绩效等方面。未来可能的研究方向包括:探讨两类建言在团队中的共存、两类建言的文化差异等。     

The role of language familiarity in voice identification

Four experiments examined the effects of language characteristics on voice identification. In Experiment 1, monolingual English listeners identified bilinguals' voices much better when they spoke English than when they spoke German. The opposite outcome was found in Experiment 2, in which the listeners were monolingual in German. In Experiment 3, monolingual English listeners also showed better voice identification when bilinguals spoke a familiar language (English) than when they spoke an unfamiliar one (Spanish). However, English-Spanish bilinguals hearing the same voices showed a different pattern, with the English-Spanish difference being statistically eliminated. Finally, Experiment 4 demonstrated that, for English-dominant listeners, voice recognition deteriorates systematically as the passage being spoken is made less similar to English by rearranging words, rearranging syllables, and reversing normal text. Taken together, the four experiments confirm that language familiarity plays an important role in voice identification.     

Thinking the voice: neural correlates of voice perception

The human voice is the carrier of speech, but also an "auditory face" that conveys important affective and identity information. Little is known about the neural bases of our abilities to perceive such paralinguistic information in voice. Results from recent neuroimaging studies suggest that the different types of vocal information could be processed in partially dissociated functional pathways, and support a neurocognitive model of voice perception largely similar to that proposed for face perception.