Foreign accent strength and listener familiarity with an accent codetermine speed of perceptual adaptation

We investigated how the strength of a foreign accent and varying types of experience with foreign-accented speech influence the recognition of accented words. In Experiment 1, native Dutch listeners with limited or extensive prior experience with German-accented Dutch completed a cross-modal priming experiment with strongly, medium, and weakly accented words. Participants with limited experience were primed by the medium and weakly accented words, but not by the strongly accented words. Participants with extensive experience were primed by all accent types. In Experiments 2 and 3, Dutch listeners with limited experience listened to a short story before doing the cross-modal priming task. In Experiment 2, the story was spoken by the priming task speaker and either contained strongly accented words or did not. Strongly accented exposure led to immediate priming by novel strongly accented words, while exposure to the speaker without strongly accented tokens led to priming only in the experiment’s second half. In Experiment 3, listeners listened to the story with strongly accented words spoken by a different German-accented speaker. Listeners were primed by the strongly accented words, but again only in the experiment’s second half. Together, these results show that adaptation to foreign-accented speech is rapid but depends on accent strength and on listener familiarity with those strongly accented words.     

Examining talker effects in the perception of native- and foreign-accented speech

Understanding the circumstances under which talker (and other types of) variability affects language perception represents an important area of research in the field of spoken word recognition. Previous work has demonstrated that talker effects are more likely when processing is relatively slow (M^cLennan & Luce, 2005). Given that listeners may take longer to process foreign-accented speech than native-accented speech (Munro & Derwing, Language and Speech, 38, 289?C306 1995), talker effects should be more likely when listeners are presented with words spoken in a foreign accent than when they are presented with those same words spoken in a native accent. The results of two experiments, conducted in two different countries and in two different languages, are consistent with this prediction.     

Tolerance for inconsistency in foreign-accented speech

Are listeners able to adapt to a foreign-accented speaker who has, as is often the case, an inconsistent accent? Two groups of native Dutch listeners participated in a cross-modal priming experiment, either in a consistent-accent condition (German-accented items only) or in an inconsistent-accent condition (German-accented and nativelike pronunciations intermixed). The experimental words were identical for both groups (words with vowel substitutions characteristic of German-accented speech); additional contextual words differed in accentedness (German-accented or nativelike words). All items were spoken by the same speaker: a German native who could produce the accented forms but could also pass for a Dutch native speaker. Listeners in the consistent-accent group were able to adapt quickly to the speaker (i.e., showed facilitatory priming for words with vocalic substitutions). Listeners in the inconsistent-accent condition showed adaptation to words with vocalic substitutions only in the second half of the experiment. These results indicate that adaptation to foreign-accented speech is rapid. Accent inconsistency slows listeners down initially, but a short period of additional exposure is enough for them to adapt to the speaker. Listeners can therefore tolerate inconsistency in foreign-accented speech.     

Seven things to consider when measuring religious identity

Measuring religious identity is complex. The author offers seven suggestions for those who wish to describe and understand religious identity using survey data:

• (1)?Definitions and measures of religious identity shape knowledge about religious groups;

• (2)?Variation in question wording leads to variation in responses;

• (3)?Comparing results across surveys provides valuable perspective;

• (4)?Incentives shape how respondents report their religious identity;

• (5)?Religious identity may be liminal;

• (6)?Salient identity categories are often unmeasured; and

• (7)?Religious identity and religious practice may not seem congruent.

This essay includes many examples to illustrate these measurement suggestions.     

On the ethical analysis of value issues in public decision-making

Abstract

The nature, methodology, importance and implications of an ethical analysis of value issues pertaining to public decision-making is not evident. In this paper I would like to address these issues by posing the following questions:

• Why is it important to focus on values in any process of public decision-making?

• What is the nature of an ethical analysis of the value issues involved?

• What is the basis, if any, for ethical analysis that moves beyond relativism and subjectivity?

• What difference can such an ethical analysis make to public decision-making?

During the course of discussing these issues, the question “What is ethics?” will be addressed in passing, as well as the usual objections against ethics and the consideration of value issues in public decision-making, namely that

• values cannot be analysed and discussed objectively

• values and ethics are relative to people and cultures

• value and ethical questions cannot be settled in a rational manner

• ethics cannot provide answers

• arguments about value and ethical issues move in circles, taking us nowhere

• values and ethics are so intertwined with emotions and biases that one cannot take them seriously in any process of public decision-making.

     

Accent modulates access to word meaning: Evidence for a speaker-model account of spoken word recognition

Speech carries accent information relevant to determining the speaker’s linguistic and social background. A series of web-based experiments demonstrate that accent cues can modulate access to word meaning. In Experiments 1–3, British participants were more likely to retrieve the American dominant meaning (e.g., hat meaning of “bonnet”) in a word association task if they heard the words in an American than a British accent. In addition, results from a speeded semantic decision task (Experiment 4) and sentence comprehension task (Experiment 5) confirm that accent modulates on-line meaning retrieval such that comprehension of ambiguous words is easier when the relevant word meaning is dominant in the speaker’s dialect. Critically, neutral-accent speech items, created by morphing British- and American-accented recordings, were interpreted in a similar way to accented words when embedded in a context of accented words (Experiment 2). This finding indicates that listeners do not use accent to guide meaning retrieval on a word-by-word basis; instead they use accent information to determine the dialectic identity of a speaker and then use their experience of that dialect to guide meaning access for all words spoken by that person. These results motivate a speaker-model account of spoken word recognition in which comprehenders determine key characteristics of their interlocutor and use this knowledge to guide word meaning access.     

Boundaries of semantic distraction: Dominance and lexicality act at retrieval

Three experiments investigated memory for semantic information with the goal of determining boundary conditions for the manifestation of semantic auditory distraction. Irrelevant speech disrupted the free recall of semantic category- exemplars to an equal degree regardless of whether the speech coincided with presentation or test phases of the task (Experiment 1), and this occurred regardless of whether it comprised random words or coherent sentences (Experiment 2). The effects of background speech were greater when the irrelevant speech was semantically related to the to-be-remembered material, but only when the irrelevant words were high in output dominance (Experiment 3). The implications of these findings in relation to the processing of task material and the processing of background speech are discussed.     

Access to Health Care for Transgendered Persons: Results of a Needs Assessment in Boston

SUMMARY

The transgender community is a population group that has experienced an increase in visibility, with only a small, concomitant increase in understanding. This study reports on four focus groups, in which 34 transgendered individuals discussed their experiences and interactions with the health care system.

The specific aims of the study were as follows:

• Identify the health needs of transgender and transsexual (TG/TS) individuals;

• Hear the experiences and perceptions of TG/TS individuals who are using the current health care system;

• Identify any barriers to obtaining services, support and/or resources;

• Assess the extent to which health care providers and systems are able to offer sensitive, high quality and user friendly services that meet TG/TS consumers' needs; and

• Identify ways that health care services can be enhanced to better meet the needs of the target population.

What the study found was a system that was anything but high quality in meeting the needs of TG/TS individuals. Ignorance, insensitivity and discrimination appear to be the norm. Specifically, the focus groups found the following:

• Transgendered and transsexual persons frequently encounter providers who will not treat them and blatantly say so. There is a need for education and a change in anti-discrimination law needed to change this.

• The lack of provider training on transgender issues creates insensitivity to simple issues of respect for trans people. One example is the unwillingness to address TG/TS people by the pronoun preferred by the patient/client.

• Many providers lack the knowledge to adequately treat many of the routine health care needs of TG/TS individuals when such treatment relates to issues of hormone use, gynecological care, HIV prevention counseling, or other concerns related to gender or sexuality.

• Providers frequently refer to trans issues in unrelated health care situations such as setting a broken bone, filling a cavity or treating a cold. Greater familiarity with the health care needs of the trans population would reduce such incidents.

• Mental health and substance abuse treatment providers need additional training in order to work cooperatively with TG/TS clients to identify when gender issues are or are not relevant to specific mental health or substance abuse treatment episodes. Sometimes gender issues are central to mental health or substance abuse treatment, sometimes they are peripheral and sometimes they are unrelated.

• Discrimination in health insurance is the rule, not the exception. There is a need for education to encourage policy changes on the part of insurers and public policy changes on the part of legislators and regulators.

     

Are the spoken durations of rare words longer than those of common words?

The effects of word frequency, word length, and practice were examined in oral productions of subjects reading lists of 25 rare or common monosyllabic words. Articulation and pause durations, their ratio, and total reading durations were derived from recordings of subjects’ speech. Recorded speech was sampled at 10 kHz, and a criterion of eight times the mean noise level was used to classify productions as articulation or pause. Lists of high frequency words were read more quickly than lists of low-frequency words. No differences were observed in the articulation component. Pause duration was greater for rare than for common words. The ratio of pause to articulation varied with length and word type. No differences were found for high-frequency words, but the ratio of five-letter words was significantly greater than that of three- or four-letter rare words. Results were discussed in relation to the nature and locus of the word-frequency effect. Criteria for defining and measuring speech productions were also raised.     

The Calgary semantic decision project: concrete/abstract decision data for 10,000 English words

Psycholinguistic research has been advanced by the development of word recognition megastudies. For instance, the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2007) provides researchers with access to naming and lexical-decision latencies for over 40,000 words. In the present work, we extended the megastudy approach to a task that emphasizes semantic processing. Using a concrete/abstract semantic decision (i.e., does the word refer to something concrete or abstract?), we collected decision latencies and accuracy rates for 10,000 English words. The stimuli were concrete and abstract words selected from Brysbaert, Warriner, and Kuperman’s (2013) comprehensive list of concreteness ratings. In total, 321 participants provided responses to 1,000 words each. Whereas semantic effects tend to be quite modest in naming and lexical decision studies, analyses of the concrete/abstract semantic decision responses show that a substantial proportion of variance can be explained by semantic variables. The item-level and trial-level data will be useful for other researchers interested in the semantic processing of concrete and abstract words.     

The Role of Native-Language Phonology in the Auditory Word Identification and Visual Word Recognition of Russian–English Bilinguals

Does native language phonology influence visual word processing in a second language? This question was investigated in two experiments with two groups of Russian-English bilinguals, differing in their English experience, and a monolingual English control group. Experiment 1 tested visual word recognition following semantic categorization of words containing four phonological vowel contrasts (\({/{{\rm i}}/-/{{\rm u}}/, /{{\rm I}}/-/\wedge/, /{{\rm i}}/-/{{\rm I}}/, /{{\varepsilon}}/-/\ae/}\)). Experiment 2 assessed auditory identification accuracy of words containing these four contrasts. Both bilingual groups demonstrated reduced accuracy in auditory identification of two English vowel contrasts absent in their native phonology (\(/{{\rm i}}/-/{{\rm I}}/, /{\varepsilon}/-/\ae/\)). For late- bilinguals, auditory identification difficulty was accompanied by poor visual word recognition for one difficult contrast (/i/-/I/). Bilinguals’ visual word recognition moderately correlated with their auditory identification of difficult contrasts. These results indicate that native language phonology can play a role in visual processing of second language words. However, this effect may be considerably constrained by orthographic systems of specific languages.     

Identifying Training Needs of Health-Care Providers Related to Treatment and Care of Transgendered Patients: A Qualitative Needs Assessment Conducted in New England

SUMMARY

The Transgender Training Project of the New England AIDS Education and Training Center has been providing training on transgender-related issues to health-care providers in the New England region since 1999, having trained nearly 600 providers in that time. The Transgender Training Project embarked on a study during the 2001–2002 grant year to interview providers of HIV-related care and advocacy on their knowledge and experience with working with trans-gendered people and to assess training needs to increase their effectiveness with transgendered clients.

The methodology consisted of face-to-face interviews with 13 providers of HIV treatment and care who are affiliated with the New England AIDS Education and Training Center network to discuss clinical challenges in working with transgendered people.

In this exploratory study, we found that providers had:

1. Desire to treat transgendered patients respectfully but admitted discomfort and lack of tools for specific interviewing/assessments.

2. Experience with a range of transgendered patients, but lack of information on distinctions among transgendered experiences.

3. Restrictions based on time constraints that create an overarching barrier in building trusting relationships with clients, and trusting relationships are integral to quality care.

4. Concern and frustration with lack of information, studies and research.

5. Concern and frustration with lack of treatment guidelines, (or ability to access them), referral contacts and ways to advocate for transgender clients.

6. Belief that training by transgendered people themselves was an essential teaching element.

These results point to the need for the development and dissemination of specific training materials and resources for health-care providers serving transgendered people living with or at risk for HIV.     

Speaker information affects false recognition of unstudied lexical-semantic associates

Recognition of and memory for a spoken word can be facilitated by a prior presentation of that word spoken by the same talker. However, it is less clear whether this speaker congruency advantage generalizes to facilitate recognition of unheard related words. The present investigation employed a false memory paradigm to examine whether information about a speaker’s identity in items heard by listeners could influence the recognition of novel items (critical intruders) phonologically or semantically related to the studied items. In Experiment 1, false recognition of semantically associated critical intruders was sensitive to speaker information, though only when subjects attended to talker identity during encoding. Results from Experiment 2 also provide some evidence that talker information affects the false recognition of critical intruders. Taken together, the present findings indicate that indexical information is able to contact the lexical-semantic network to affect the processing of unheard words.     

Parent–child interaction therapy (PCIT) in young children with autism spectrum disorder

Abstract

Parent–child interaction therapy (PCIT) is an evidence-based treatment for typically developing children with disruptive behavior. We conducted a randomized-controlled trial of PCIT versus wait-list control (WLC) with 23 children with ASD (3–7?years) and disruptive behavior. Over 16 treatment sessions, PCIT significantly predicted reductions in disruptive behavior over WLC and explained a significant variation in scores on the ECBI Intensity subscale. Additionally, parent skills improved significantly compared to WLC. However, no statistically significant group differences were found on child compliance rates, autism severity, or parental stress. Results support PCIT as an evidence-based treatment for disruptive behavior in ASD.

• Highlights

• Parent skills were significantly improved for those receiving PCIT

• Intensity of disruptive behaviors decreased significantly for those receiving PCIT

• Parental stress and autism severity did not significantly decrease with PCIT

     

Six Levels of Mentality

Abstract

Examination of recent debates about belief shows the need to distinguish:

• (a)?non–linguistic informational states in animal perception;

• (b)?the uncritical use of language, e.g. by children;

• (c)?adult humans' reasoned judgments.

If we also distinguish between mind-directed and object–directed mental states, we have: 1. Perceptual ‘beliefs’ of animals and infants about their material environment.

2. ‘Beliefs’ of animals and infants about the mental states of others.

3. Linguistically-expressible beliefs about the world, resulting from e.g. the uncritical tendency to believe what we are told.

4. Uncritically-formed beliefs about the mental states.

5. Beliefs about the material world arrived at by the weighing of evidence.

6. Beliefs about mental states formed by critical assessment.

     

Children's selective trust in native-accented speakers

Across two experiments, preschool-aged children demonstrated selective learning of non-linguistic information from native-accented rather than foreign-accented speakers. In Experiment 1, children saw videos of a native- and a foreign-accented speaker of English who each spoke for 10 seconds, and then silently demonstrated different functions with novel objects. Children selectively endorsed the silent object function provided by the native-accented speaker. In Experiment 2, children again endorsed the native-accented over the foreign-accented speaker, even though both informants previously spoke only in nonsense speech. Thus, young children demonstrate selective trust in native-accented speakers even when neither informant's speech relays meaningful semantic content, and the information that both informants provide is non-linguistic. We propose that children orient towards members of their native community to guide their early cultural learning.     

Work function dependence on the thickness and substrate of carbon contamination layers by Kelvin probe force microscopy

The contact potential difference (CPD) between carbon contamination (CC) layers and the several substrates on which they were deposited has been measured as a function of the film thickness by means of Kelvin probe force microscopy (KPFM). The observed CPD trends may be divided into three categories:

2. an increase, or decrease, in CPD with thickness up to a saturation value with sign inversion with respect to the substrates (Al and Si);

3. an oscillation with no sign inversion (substrates, gold and platinum);

4. an oscillation through sign inversion (palladium substrate).

Effects (ii) and (iii) seem to be typical of CC, since they have not been observed for other materials, including evaporated carbon. Several possible causes of the above two effects are examined, but a satisfactory interpretation has not been found yet. The sensitivity of KPFM is such that CC layers 10 nm thick are easily visible, whereas they are hardly detectable by topography.     

A new magna charta

In seeking an interpretation of the theory of Gestalt, the analysis revealed that the concept of Gestalt applies to processes and particularly to the way in which events or processes take place. The essential condition for the emergence of Gestalten or configurational properties was found to be—the ability of the parts or factors in the process to influence each other.

In considering first, the more dynamic or formative phase of processes, the significant factors which influence the reciprocity of influence between the parts or factors of the process were found to be

• (i) the properties of the individual parts or factors,

• (ii) the properties of the intervening medium,

• (iii) the ‘distance’ between the parts or factors,

• (vi) ‘factors of rigidity or constraint’.

It was emphasised that these factors operate relatively to one another. The concept of ‘wholeness’ was found to apply to both the dynamic and the more static phase of the process. The resultant or equilibrium position of the process derives some contribution from the whole matrix of interacting factors or influences which are responsible for the resultant being precisely what it is.

The recognition of the causal significance of even small contributions to an event or process is consistent with the concept of ‘wholeness’ and with the ‘matrix’ view of causal explanation. This view of causal explanation is the consistent implication of the theory of Gestalt and the many experimental results associated with this school.     

The Internal Problem of Dreaming: Detection and Epistemic Risk

Abstract

There are two epistemological problems connected with dreaming, which are of different kinds and require different treatment. The internal problem is best seen as a problem of rational consistency, of how we can maintain all of:

1. Dreams are experiences we have during sleep.

2. Dream‐experiences are sufficiently similar to waking experiences for the subject to be able to mistake them for waking experiences.

3. We can tell that we are awake.

(1)–(3) threaten to violate a requirement on discrimination: that we can only tell Xs from Ys if there is some detectable difference between Xs and Ys. Attempts to solve the problem by Descartes and Williams are considered. It is suggested that if we take account of levels of epistemic risk, we can use Descartes’s criterion of lack of coherence, at least with hindsight – which is the time when we need to use it.     

False memories of emotional and neutral words

This study used the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm to investigate the direction and the extent to which emotional valence in semantic word lists influences the formation of false memories (FM). The experimental paradigm consisted of 1) a study phase (learning of neutral and negative lists of words semantically associated to a non-presented critical lure (CL), 2) a free recall phase, and 3) a recognition phase. Participants had to indicate whether the displayed item was "new" (new item or non-studied CL) or "old" (studied list item). CL associated with negative word lists elicited significantly more FM than CL associated with neutral word lists. This finding is in contrast to previous work showing that emotional words elicit fewer FM than neutral words. The results of our study also suggest that valence is capable of influencing emotional memory in terms of encoding and retrieval processes.