6- to 9-Month old infants discriminate vowel durations in variable speech contexts

Discriminating temporal relationships in speech is crucial for speech and language development. However, temporal variation of vowels is difficult to perceive for young infants when it is determined by surrounding speech sounds. Using a familiarization-discrimination paradigm, we show that English-learning 6- to 9-month-olds are capable of discriminating non-native acoustic vowel duration differences that systematically vary with subsequent consonantal durations. Furthermore, temporal regularity of stimulus presentation potentially makes the task easier for infants. These findings show that young infants can process fine-grained temporal aspects of speech sounds, a capacity that lays the foundation for building a phonological system of their ambient language(s).     

单克隆抗体的治病与“致病”

对单克隆抗体在病毒性疾病治疗和引起病毒感染增强两方面的作用进行了综述，分析了各自涉及的机理。指出于者是矛盾的统一体，辨证地看待是前提，深入研究是关键，合理和才是目标。     

Enlivening thinking and speech in search of spiritual identity: the role of ‘speech formation’ in Steiner’s Waldorf education

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to clarify Steiner’s understanding of thinking and the way it influences the use of language in the classroom of 6–18 years old, and through that, to discuss how it eventually serves to capture one’s spiritual identity. First, the paper introduces Steiner’s notion of thinking, and then offers a general picture of what ‘speech formation’ is, and how it is actually used in a classroom. Secondly, the paper reviews Steiner’s view on child development and examines his understanding of embodied thinking in accordance with will, feeling and ‘I’ consciousness. Finally, it considers the role of ‘speech formation’ in relation to the development of thinking and speech, and to the genius of language which comes to work in the ‘space’ created through dialogue. (129 words)     

Using targeted visceroception to improve interoceptive sensibility and emotion regulation

Focusing on one's body can improve the awareness and regulation of emotion. Interoception – sensing the physiological condition of the body, particularly of the viscera – appears to play an important role. While the majority of previous research studies have examined interoceptive sensitivity (i.e., detection of objectively measurable physiological changes), there has been relatively limited investigation of interoceptive sensibility (i.e., subjective awareness of those changes), and even fewer studies permitting causal conclusions. The current study is part of a randomised controlled trial on visceroception in the context of emotion regulation, using an 8-week intervention involving focused attention on either cardiac or gastrointestinal activity. Group differences in emotion regulation and reactivity were assessed using the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA), the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale, and the Emotion Reactivity Scale (ERS). The findings suggest that focussed attention on gastrointestinal activity (i.e., gastroception), in particular, improves interoceptive sensibility and emotion regulation, as evidenced by increases on the MAIA's Noticing, Body Listening, and Self-regulation subscales, and decreases on the Arousal subscale of the ERS. Gastroception may make distinct contributions to the benefits of body focus in a research context where the gut is often overlooked.     

Robust Lexically Mediated Compensation for Coarticulation: Christmash Time Is Here Again

A long-standing question in cognitive science is how high-level knowledge is integrated with sensory input. For example, listeners can leverage lexical knowledge to interpret an ambiguous speech sound, but do such effects reflect direct top-down influences on perception or merely postperceptual biases? A critical test case in the domain of spoken word recognition is lexically mediated compensation for coarticulation (LCfC). Previous LCfC studies have shown that a lexically restored context phoneme (e.g., /s/ in Christma#) can alter the perceived place of articulation of a subsequent target phoneme (e.g., the initial phoneme of a stimulus from a tapes-capes continuum), consistent with the influence of an unambiguous context phoneme in the same position. Because this phoneme-to-phoneme compensation for coarticulation is considered sublexical, scientists agree that evidence for LCfC would constitute strong support for top–down interaction. However, results from previous LCfC studies have been inconsistent, and positive effects have often been small. Here, we conducted extensive piloting of stimuli prior to testing for LCfC. Specifically, we ensured that context items elicited robust phoneme restoration (e.g., that the final phoneme of Christma# was reliably identified as /s/) and that unambiguous context-final segments (e.g., a clear /s/ at the end of Christmas) drove reliable compensation for coarticulation for a subsequent target phoneme. We observed robust LCfC in a well-powered, preregistered experiment with these pretested items (N = 40) as well as in a direct replication study (N = 40). These results provide strong evidence in favor of computational models of spoken word recognition that include top–down feedback.     

Perceptual narrowing in face- and speech-perception domains in infancy: A longitudinal approach

During the first year of life, infants undergo a process known as perceptual narrowing, which reduces their sensitivity to classes of stimuli which the infants do not encounter in their environment. It has been proposed that perceptual narrowing for faces and speech may be driven by shared domain-general processes. To investigate this theory, our study longitudinally tested 50 German Caucasian infants with respect to these domains first at 6 months of age followed by a second testing at 9 months of age. We used an infant-controlled habituation-dishabituation paradigm to test the infants’ ability to discriminate among other-race Asian faces and non-native Cantonese speech tones, as well as same-race Caucasian faces as a control. We found that while at 6 months of age infants could discriminate among all stimuli, by 9 months of age they could no longer discriminate among other-race faces or non-native tones. However, infants could discriminate among same-race stimuli both at 6 and at 9 months of age. These results demonstrate that the same infants undergo perceptual narrowing for both other-race faces and non-native speech tones between the ages of 6 and 9 months. This parallel development of perceptual narrowing occurring in both the face and speech perception modalities over the same period of time lends support to the domain-general theory of perceptual narrowing in face and speech perception.     

Factors affecting perceived safety and enjoyment based on driver experience

A positive driving experience, especially for older drivers, increases the attention to the emotional dimensions of driving, such as the driver’s perceived safety. Therefore, this study empirically presents factors affecting driver experience and compares them between older and younger drivers. Consequently, we conducted a face-to-face survey on elderly and young drivers and analyzed the data of 246 drivers using structural equation modeling. The analysis presented measurements and structural model evaluations. Considering the analysis, it was found that driving-related information and car-exterior context affect the perceived safety and enjoyment of a driver’s experience. Additionally, car-exterior context exerts a greater influence on the perceived safety and enjoyment of the elderly drivers’ group than the young drivers’ group. The results of this study will empirically contribute to the satisfaction of driver experience and perceived safety improvement in the future. It also provides a basis for the development of driving interfaces to improve the quality of the driving experience of the elderly.     

The Learning Signal in Perceptual Tuning of Speech: Bottom Up Versus Top-Down Information

Cognitive systems face a tension between stability and plasticity. The maintenance of long-term representations that reflect the global regularities of the environment is often at odds with pressure to flexibly adjust to short-term input regularities that may deviate from the norm. This tension is abundantly clear in speech communication when talkers with accents or dialects produce input that deviates from a listener's language community norms. Prior research demonstrates that when bottom-up acoustic information or top-down word knowledge is available to disambiguate speech input, there is short-term adaptive plasticity such that subsequent speech perception is shifted even in the absence of the disambiguating information. Although such effects are well-documented, it is not yet known whether bottom-up and top-down resolution of ambiguity may operate through common processes, or how these information sources may interact in guiding the adaptive plasticity of speech perception. The present study investigates the joint contributions of bottom-up information from the acoustic signal and top-down information from lexical knowledge in the adaptive plasticity of speech categorization according to short-term input regularities. The results implicate speech category activation, whether from top-down or bottom-up sources, in driving rapid adjustment of listeners' reliance on acoustic dimensions in speech categorization. Broadly, this pattern of perception is consistent with dynamic mapping of input to category representations that is flexibly tuned according to interactive processing accommodating both lexical knowledge and idiosyncrasies of the acoustic input.     

ON AGGRESSION TURNED AGAINST THE SELF

Deliberate self‐harm is a common presenting problem suffered by young people. Several patients referred to the NHS outpatient clinic where I work have been able to stop harming themselves during intensive psychoanalytic psychotherapy. In this paper, I shall discuss a variety of motives for persistent cutting by one adolescent girl. I am most interested to show how the healthier part of her personality overcame her motives for harming herself, and eventually allowed her to make use of my understanding of a sadomasochistic internal object that worked against us.