Cocaine—review of current literature and interface with the law

Cocaine use in the United States has currently reached epidemic proportions. This has resulted in syndromes of intoxication, overdose, and withdrawal, meeting all DMS-III criteria for a substance that can cause dependence as well as abuse syndromes. This paper reviews the current epidemiology of cocaine, its history and pharmacology with major focus on clinical syndromes. This is followed by a review of the current knowledge of the relationship between cocaine and violence and the forensic-psychiatric issues surrounding cocaine.     

Personal Respect, Private Property, And Market Economy: What Critical Theory Can Learn From Hegel

The aim of the present paper is to show that Hegel’s concept of personal respect is of great interest to contemporary Critical Theory. The author first analyzes this notion as it appears in the Philosophy of Right and then offers a new interpretation of the conceptual relation between personal respect and the institutions of (private) property and (capitalist) markets. In doing so, he shows why Hegel’s concept of personal respect allows us to understand markets as possible institutionalizations of this kind of recognition, and why it is compatible with a critique of neoliberal capitalism. He argues that due to these features Hegel’s notion of personal respect is of great interest to theoreticians within the tradition of critical theory.

Hemispheric differences in the effects of context on vowel perception

Listeners perceive speech sounds relative to context. Contextual influences might differ over hemispheres if different types of auditory processing are lateralized. Hemispheric differences in contextual influences on vowel perception were investigated by presenting speech targets and both speech and non-speech contexts to listeners’ right or left ears (contexts and targets either to the same or to opposite ears). Listeners performed a discrimination task. Vowel perception was influenced by acoustic properties of the context signals. The strength of this influence depended on laterality of target presentation, and on the speech/non-speech status of the context signal. We conclude that contrastive contextual influences on vowel perception are stronger when targets are processed predominately by the right hemisphere. In the left hemisphere, contrastive effects are smaller and largely restricted to speech contexts.     

Coping with phonological assimilation in speech perception: evidence for early compensation

The pronunciation of the same word may vary considerably as a consequence of its context. The Dutch word tuin (English, garden) may be pronounced tuim if followed by bank (English, bench), but not if followed by stoel (English, chair). In a series of four experiments, we examined how Dutch listeners cope with this context sensitivity in their native language. A first word identification experiment showed that the perception of a word-final nasal depends on the subsequent context. Viable assimilations, but not unviable assimilations, were often confused perceptually with canonical word forms in a word identification task. Two control experiments ruled out the possibility that this effect was caused by perceptual masking or was influenced by lexical top-down effects. A passive-listening study in which electrophysiological measurements were used showed that only unviable, but not viable, phonological changes elicited a significant mismatch negativity. The results indicate that phonological assimilations are dealt with by an early prelexical mechanism.     

Constraints on the processes responsible for the extrinsic normalization of vowels

Listeners tune in to talkers’ vowels through extrinsic normalization. We asked here whether this process could be based on compensation for the long-term average spectrum (LTAS) of preceding sounds and whether the mechanisms responsible for normalization are indifferent to the nature of those sounds. If so, normalization should apply to nonspeech stimuli. Previous findings were replicated with first-formant (F1) manipulations of speech. Targets on a [pt]–[p?t] (low–high F1) continuum were labeled as [pt] more after high-F1 than after low-F1 precursors. Spectrally rotated nonspeech versions of these materials produced similar normalization. None occurred, however, with nonspeech stimuli that were less speechlike, even though precursor–target LTAS relations were equivalent to those used earlier. Additional experiments investigated the roles of pitch movement, amplitude variation, formant location, and the stimuli's perceived similarity to speech. It appears that normalization is not restricted to speech but that the nature of the preceding sounds does matter. Extrinsic normalization of vowels is due, at least in part, to an auditory process that may require familiarity with the spectrotemporal characteristics of speech.     

The mental lexicon is fully specified: evidence from eye-tracking

Four visual-world experiments, in which listeners heard spoken words and saw printed words, compared an optimal-perception account with the theory of phonological underspecification. This theory argues that default phonological features are not specified in the mental lexicon, leading to asymmetric lexical matching: Mismatching input (pin) activates lexical entries with underspecified coronal stops (tin), but lexical entries with specified labial stops (pin) are not activated by mismatching input (tin). The eye-tracking data failed to show such a pattern. Although words that were phonologically similar to the spoken target attracted more looks than did unrelated distractors, this effect was symmetric in Experiment 1 with minimal pairs (tin-pin) and in Experiments 2 and 3 with words with an onset overlap (peacock-teacake). Experiment 4 revealed that /t/-initial words were looked at more frequently if the spoken input mismatched only in terms of place than if it mismatched in place and voice, contrary to the assumption that /t/ is unspecified for place and voice. These results show that speech perception uses signal-driven information to the fullest, as was predicted by an optimal perception account.