Several studies have signaled grammatical difficulties in individuals with developmental dyslexia. These difficulties may stem from a phonological deficit, but may alternatively be explained through ...a domain-general deficit in statistical learning. This study investigates grammar in children with and without dyslexia, and whether phonological memory and/or statistical learning ability contribute to individual differences in grammatical performance. We administered the CELF “word structure” and “recalling sentences” subtests and measures of phonological memory (digit span, nonword repetition) and statistical learning (serial reaction time, nonadjacent dependency learning) among 8- to 11-year-old children with and without dyslexia (N = 50 per group). Consistent with previous findings, our results show subtle difficulties in grammar, as children with dyslexia achieved lower scores on the CELF (word structure: p = .0027, recalling sentences: p = .053). While the two phonological memory measures were found to contribute to individual differences in grammatical performance, no evidence for a relationship with statistical learning was found. An error analysis revealed errors in irregular morphology (e.g., plural and past tense), suggesting problems with lexical retrieval. These findings are discussed in light of theoretical accounts of the underlying deficit in dyslexia.
This paper examines four acoustic properties (duration F0, F1, and F2) of the monophthongal vowels of Iberian Spanish (IS) from Madrid and Peruvian Spanish (PS) from Lima in various consonantal ...contexts (/s/, /f/, /t/, /p/, and /k/) and in various phrasal contexts (in isolated words and sentence-internally). Acoustic measurements on 39 speakers, balanced by dialect and gender, can be generalized to the following differences between the two dialects. The vowel /a/ has a lower first formant in PS than in IS by 6.3%. The vowels /e/ and /o/ have more peripheral second-formant (F2) values in PS than in IS by about 4%. The consonant /s/ causes more centralization of the F2 of neighboring vowels in IS than in PS. No dialectal differences are found for the effect of phrasal context. Next to the between-dialect differences in the vowels, the present study finds that /s/ has a higher spectral center of gravity in PS than in IS by about 10%, that PS speakers speak slower than IS speakers by about 9%, and that Spanish-speaking women speak slower than Spanish-speaking men by about 5% (irrespective of dialect).
Intonation in Robot Speech Velner, Ella; Boersma, Paul P.G.; de Graaf, Maartje M.A.
2020 15th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI),
03/2020
Conference Proceeding
Human-robot interaction (HRI) research aims to design natural interactions between humans and robots. Intonation, a social signaling function in human speech investigated thoroughly in linguistics, ...has not yet been studied in HRI. This study investigates the effect of robot speech intonation in four conditions (no intonation, focus intonation, end-of-utterance intonation, or combined intonation) on conversational naturalness, social engagement, and people's humanlike perception of the robot collecting objective and subjective data of participant conversations (n = 120). Our results showed that humanlike intonation partially improved subjective naturalness but not observed fluency, and that intonation partially improved social engagement but did not affect humanlike perceptions of the robot. Given that our results mainly differed from our hypotheses based on human speech intonation, we discuss the implications and provide suggestions for future research to further investigate conversational naturalness in robot speech intonation.
This paper examines four acoustic correlates of vowel identity in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and European Portuguese (EP): first formant (F1), second formant (F2), duration, and fundamental frequency ...(F0). Both varieties of Portuguese display some cross-linguistically common phenomena: vowel-intrinsic duration, vowel-intrinsic pitch, gender-dependent size of the vowel space, gender-dependent duration, and a skewed symmetry in F1 between front and back vowels. Also, the average difference between the vocal tract sizes associated with /i/ and /u/, as measured from formant analyses, is comparable to the average difference between male and female vocal tract sizes. A language-specific phenomenon is that in both varieties of Portuguese the vowel-intrinsic duration effect is larger than in many other languages. Differences between BP and EP are found in duration (BP has longer stressed vowels than EP), in F1 (the lower-mid front vowel approaches its higher-mid counterpart more closely in EP than in BP), and in the size of the intrinsic pitch effect (larger for BP than for EP).
In multilevel parallel Optimality Theory grammars, the number of candidates (possible paths from the input to the output level) increases exponentially with the number of levels of representation. ...The problem with this is that with the customary strategy of listing all candidates in a tableau, the computation time for evaluation (i.e., choosing the winning candidate) and learning (i.e., reranking the constraints on the basis of language data) increases exponentially with the number of levels as well. This article proposes instead to collect the candidates in a graph in which the number of nodes and the number of connections increase only linearly with the number of levels of representation. As a result, there exist procedures for evaluation and learning that increase only linearly with the number of levels. These efficient procedures help to make multilevel parallel constraint grammars more feasible as models of human language processing. We illustrate visualization, evaluation, and learning with a toy grammar for a traditional case that has already previously been analyzed in terms of parallel evaluation, namely, French liaison.
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Due to their antimicrobial properties, silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) have become more popular in consumer and industrial products, leading to increasing agricultural and environmental concentrations. ...Exposure to AgNPs could be detrimental to plants, microbes, and their symbiotic relationships. When subjected to 10 µg/mL AgNPs in a 96-well plate, growth of Bradyrhizobium japonicum USDA 110 was halted. In hydroponic culture with 2.5 µg/mL AgNPs, biomass of inoculated Glycine max (L.) Merr. was 50% of control. Axenic plants were unaffected by this dose, but growth was inhibited at higher doses, indicating that AgNPs inhibit both nodulation and growth. Nodules treated with 2.5 µg/mL AgNPs were absent of bacteroids, and plants given 0.5-2.5 µg/mL AgNPs had 40-65% decreased nitrogen fixation. In conclusion, I determined AgNPs not only interfere with plant-microbe relations but also with general plant and bacterial growth. As a consequence, we should be mindful of not releasing AgNPs to the environment and agricultural land.
Infants' perception of speech sound contrasts is modulated by their language environment, for example by the statistical distributions of the speech sounds they hear. Infants learn to discriminate ...speech sounds better when their input contains a two-peaked frequency distribution of those speech sounds than when their input contains a one-peaked frequency distribution. Effects of frequency distributions on phonetic learning have been tested almost exclusively for auditory input. But auditory speech is usually accompanied by visual information, that is, by visible articulations. This study tested whether infants' phonological perception is shaped by distributions of visual speech as well as by distributions of auditory speech, by comparing learning from multimodal (i.e., auditory-visual), visual-only, or auditory-only information. Dutch 8-month-old infants were exposed to either a one-peaked or two-peaked distribution from a continuum of vowels that formed a contrast in English, but not in Dutch. We used eye tracking to measure effects of distribution and sensory modality on infants' discrimination of the contrast. Although there were no overall effects of distribution or modality, separate t-tests in each of the six training conditions demonstrated significant discrimination of the vowel contrast in the two-peaked multimodal condition. For the modalities where the mouth was visible (visual-only and multimodal) we further examined infant looking patterns for the dynamic speaker's face. Infants in the two-peaked multimodal condition looked longer at her mouth than infants in any of the three other conditions. We propose that by 8 months, infants' native vowel categories are established insofar that learning a novel contrast is supported by attention to additional information, such as visual articulations.
De fonologie houdt zich bezig met de klanksystematiek binnen de grammatica van de taal, en de fonetiek met het waarnemen en produceren van spraakgeluid. De fonetici hebben heel wat te leren van de ...fonologen, namelijk het gebruik van een expliciet beslissingsmodel inclusief leeralgoritme; als de fonetici daarop ingaan, kunnen ze overstappen van beschrijving naar verklaring. Omgekeerd hebben de fonologen ook heel wat te leren van de fonetici, namelijk dat continue representaties in het brein serieus genomen dienen te worden; als de fonologen daarop ingaan, kunnen ze hun grammaticatheorieën flink vereenvoudigen. Deze oratie laat aan de hand van een buigzaam model van zes hersencellen zien hoe de integratie tussen fonologie en fonetiek kan verlopen, en wat we daaruit nu al kunnen leren.
We present a method for assessing categorical perception from continuous discrimination data. Until recently, categorical perception of speech has exclusively been measured by discrimination and ...identification experiments with a small number of different stimuli, each of which is presented multiple times. Experiments by Rogers and Davis (2009), however, suggest that using non-repeating stimuli yields a more reliable measure of categorization. If this idea is applied to a single phonetic continuum, the continuum has to be densely sampled and the obtained discrimination data is nearly continuous. In the present study, we describe a maximum-likelihood method that is appropriate for analysing such continuous discrimination data.
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Distributional learning of speech sounds is learning from simply being exposed to frequency distributions of speech sounds in one's surroundings. In laboratory settings, the mechanism has been ...reported to be discernible already after a few minutes of exposure, in both infants and adults. These "effects of distributional training" have traditionally been attributed to the difference in the number of peaks between the experimental distribution (two peaks) and the control distribution (one or zero peaks). However, none of the earlier studies fully excluded a possibly confounding effect of the dispersion in the distributions. Additionally, some studies with a non-speech control condition did not control for a possible difference between processing speech and non-speech. The current study presents an experiment that corrects both imperfections. Spanish listeners were exposed to either a bimodal distribution encompassing the Dutch contrast /ɑ/∼/a/ or a unimodal distribution with the same dispersion. Before and after training, their accuracy of categorization of ɑ- and a-tokens was measured. A traditionally calculated p-value showed no significant difference in categorization improvement between bimodally and unimodally trained participants. Because of this null result, a Bayesian method was used to assess the odds in favor of the null hypothesis. Four different Bayes factors, each calculated on a different belief in the truth value of previously found effect sizes, indicated the absence of a difference between bimodally and unimodally trained participants. The implication is that "effects of distributional training" observed in the lab are not induced by the number of peaks in the distributions.
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