The motor theory of speech perception revisited

Galantucci, Fowler, and Turvey (2006) have claimed that perceiving speech is perceiving gestures and that the motor system is recruited for perceiving speech. We make the counter argument that perceiving speech is not perceiving gestures, that the motor system is not recruitedfor perceiving speech, and that speech perception can be adequately described by a prototypical pattern recognition model, the fuzzy logical model of perception (FLMP). Empirical evidence taken as support for gesture and motor theory is reconsidered in more detail and in the framework of the FLMR Additional theoretical and logical arguments are made to challenge gesture and motor theory.     

Diagnosing a male hysteric: Don Juan-type

The aim of this paper is to provide a clinical account of a male hysteric, Don Juan-type, taken from the early stages of treatment. The patient presented with a relationship problem but there soon emerged a form of compulsive sexuality or hypersexuality in his love relations that became a central feature of the clinical picture. This hypersexuality expressed itself in a compulsive need to stage, or to stage-manage, interpersonal scenaria of a sexual or sexualised nature. These scenaria, which were repeated in different variations and with different personnel, are seen by the author as a dramatisation of the primal scene with the patient taking up the position of the oedipal father. Explanations for the disappearance of male hysteria are given, including a new theory which claims that an imbalance in psychoanalytic theory itself led to the feminisation of hysteria. This critique allows certain forms of hypersexuality in men to be promoted as a form of hysteria, the most common example being Don Juanism-a form of compulsive sexuality that encompasses normative, conversion and character features. The paper also examines the male hysteric's developmental agenda. What the patient's compulsive sexual tableaux exposed was that he had never faced a separation that was not a triangular experience. This meant that his separations were experienced as two developmental agonies telescoped into one-separation (pre-oedipal) and exclusion (early oedipal). This combination, the author suggests, is so frightening in a particular group of men as to explain the choice of hysteria as opposed to some other choice of neurosis.     

Hannah Arendt & Jean Baudrillard: Pedagogy in the Consumer Society

This paper considers the place of education within our “consumers’ society”, beginning with Hannah Arendt’s account of the rise of consumerism to a position of political dominance and the resulting eclipse of public life. Connections are then made between Arendt’s account of this rise and Jean Baudrillard’s account of the postmodern proliferation of signs and the transformation of the sign into a commodity. This radical “semiurgy” accelerates into a self-referential series of signs which entails the loss of reality – it contributes to the disappearance of the human subjectivity behind the creation of images. I argue that Baudrillard does not respond adequately to the dynamic that he describes so well. By contrast, Arendt’s concept of natality, I suggest, prepares the ground for a response to the forces of commodification that colonize the educational environment and threaten its critical possibilities. As youth and schools receive more and more attention from advertisers, students are sold by educational institutions to commercial interests who seek unfettered access to this “captive audience”. Yet education is profoundly compromised when youths are viewed as consumers and not as a social investment, when education is viewed merely as an opportunity to secure a new market.     

Evaluating small‐scale simulation for training firearm safety skills

There is limited research using small‐scale simulation in applied behavior analysis. We used small‐scale simulation to train firearm safety skills to 3‐ to 5‐year‐old children and assessed whether the skills generalized to the natural environment through in situ assessment. Three participants completed the training, and all participants learned the safety skills from simulation training. Two of the participants acquired the safety skills after the first simulation training, and the third participant required one booster training before demonstrating the safety skills in the natural environment.     

The role of binaural and fundamental frequency difference cues in the identification of concurrently presented vowels

The relative importance of voice pitch and interaural difference cues in facilitating the recognition of both of two concurrently presented synthetic vowels was measured. The interaural difference cues used were an interaural time difference (400 μsec ITD), two magnitudes of interaural level difference (15 dB and infinite ILD), and a combination of ITD and ILD (400 μsec plus 15 dB). The results are analysed separately for those cases where both vowels are identical and those where they are different. When the two vowels are different, a voice pitch difference of one semitone is found to improve the percentage of correct reports of both vowels by 35.8% on average. However, the use of interaural difference cues results in an improvement of 11.5% on average when there is a voice pitch difference of one semitone, but only a non-significant 0.1% when there is no voice pitch difference. When the two vowels are identical, imposition of either a voice pitch difference or binaural difference reduces performance, in a subtractive manner. It is argued that the smaller size of the interaural difference effect is not due to a “ceiling effect” but is characteristic of the relative importance of the two kinds of cues in this type of experiment. The possibility that the improvement due to interaural difference cues may in fact be due to monaural processing is discussed. A control experiment is reported for the ITD condition, which suggests binaural processing does occur for this condition. However, it is not certain whether the improvement in the ILD condition is due to binaural processing or use of the improvement in signal-to-noise ratio for a single vowel at each ear.     

A funny thing happened on the way to articulation: N400 attenuation despite behavioral interference in picture naming

We measured Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) and naming times to picture targets preceded by masked words (stimulus onset asynchrony: 80 ms) that shared one of three different types of relationship with the names of the pictures: (1) Identity related, in which the prime was the name of the picture ("socks" - ), (2) Phonemic Onset related, in which the initial segment of the prime was the same as the name of the picture ("log" - ), and (3) Semantically related in which the prime was a co-category exemplar and associated with the name of the picture ("cake" - ). Each type of related picture target was contrasted with an Unrelated picture target, resulting in a 3×2 design that crossed Relationship Type between the word and the target picture (Identity, Phonemic Onset and Semantic) with Relatedness (Related and Unrelated). Modulation of the N400 component to related (versus unrelated) pictures was taken to reflect semantic processing at the interface between the picture's conceptual features and its lemma, while naming times reflected the end product of all stages of processing. Both attenuation of the N400 and shorter naming times were observed to pictures preceded by Identity related (versus Unrelated) words. No ERP effects within 600 ms, but shorter naming times, were observed to pictures preceded by Phonemic Onset related (versus Unrelated) words. An attenuated N400 (electrophysiological semantic priming) but longer naming times (behavioral semantic interference) were observed to pictures preceded by Semantically related (versus Unrelated) words. These dissociations between ERP modulation and naming times suggest that (a) phonemic onset priming occurred late, during encoding of the articulatory response, and (b) semantic behavioral interference was not driven by competition at the lemma level of representation, but rather occurred at a later stage of production.