Król (review) Bye, Sean Gasper
World Literature Today,
05/2017, Letnik:
91, Številka:
3
Journal Article, Book Review
Recenzirano
Alongside the gritty tone, Twardoch imbues every page with an irresistible sense of style: clothing, cars, guns, blood, and sex are all described in intricate, loving detail. Ultimately, The King ...seems a study in extremes: love and violence, sympathy and revulsion, fantasy and reality.
This study sought to understand the effects of tone language repertoire and musical experience on nonnative lexical tone perception and production. Thirty-one participants completed a tone ...discrimination task, an imitation task, and a musical abilities task. Results showed that a larger tone language repertoire and musical experience both enhanced tone discrimination performance. However, the effects were not additive, as musical experience was associated with tone discrimination performance for single-tone language speakers, but such association was not seen for dual-tone language speakers. Furthermore, among single-tone language speakers, but not among dual-tone language speakers, musical experience and musical aptitude positively correlated with tone discrimination accuracy. It is thus concluded that individuals with varying extents of tone language experience may adopt different strategies when performing tone discrimination tasks; single-tone language speakers may draw on their musical expertise while dual-tone language speakers may rely on their extensive tone language experience instead.
Objective
Pure tone audiometry (PTA) is the gold standard for hearing assessment. However, it requires access to specialized equipment. Smartphone audiometry applications (apps) have been developed ...to perform automated threshold audiometry and could allow patients to perform self‐administered screening or monitoring. This study aimed to assess the validity and feasibility of patients using apps to self‐assess hearing thresholds at home, with comparison to PTA.
Methods
A multi‐center, prospective randomized study was conducted amongst patients undergoing PTA in clinics. Participants were randomly allocated to one of four publicly‐available apps designed to measure pure tone thresholds. Participants used an app once in optimal sound‐treated conditions and a further three times at home. Ear‐specific frequency‐specific thresholds and pure tone average were compared using Pearson correlation coefficient. The percentage of app hearing tests with results within ±10 dB of PTA was calculated. Patient acceptability was assessed via an online survey.
Results
One hundred thirty‐nine participants submitted data. The results of two at‐home automated smartphone apps correlated strongly/very strongly with PTA average and their frequency‐specific median was within ±10 dB accuracy. Smartphone audiometry performed in sound‐treated and home conditions were very strongly correlated. The apps were rated as easy/very easy to use by 90% of participants and 90% would be happy/very happy to use an app to monitor their hearing.
Conclusion
Judicious use of self‐performed smartphone audiometry was both valid and feasible for two of four apps. It could provide frequency‐specific threshold estimates at home, potentially allowing assessments of patients remotely or monitoring of fluctuating hearing loss.
Level of Evidence
2 Laryngoscope, 134:2864–2870, 2024
This study explores whether patients can monitor their own hearing at home using applications (“apps”) on their own smartphones. Based on these results, two apps (one from each of iOS and Android operating systems) could be recommended and may be useful for monitoring trends in hearing thresholds at home.
From the physiology and acoustics to their patterning across human languages, tone is one of the fundamental constructs in human languages that is also among the hardest to apprehend. Drawing upon a ...large number of languages around the world, this volume explores the concept of tone starting from its physical properties of articulation and acoustics to its manifestation in phonology. Designed as a comprehensive study accessible to the novice and useful for the expert, each chapter covers a particular aspect of tone in increasing depth and complexity, weaving together key concepts and theories that provide complementing or competing accounts of tone's phonological intricacies. In the process, one uncovers the underlying laws and principles that inform today's understanding of the subject to form a more synthesized view that also allows us to explore the relation of tone to other important areas of humanity such as literature, history, music and cognition.
In The Race of Sound Nina Sun Eidsheim traces the ways in which sonic attributes that might seem natural, such as the voice and its qualities, are socially produced. Eidsheim illustrates how ...listeners measure race through sound and locate racial subjectivities in vocal timbre—the color or tone of a voice. Eidsheim examines singers Marian Anderson, Billie Holiday, and Jimmy Scott as well as the vocal synthesis technology Vocaloid to show how listeners carry a series of assumptions about the nature of the voice and to whom it belongs. Outlining how the voice is linked to ideas of racial essentialism and authenticity, Eidsheim untangles the relationship between race, gender, vocal technique, and timbre while addressing an undertheorized space of racial and ethnic performance. In so doing, she advances our knowledge of the cultural-historical formation of the timbral politics of difference and the ways that comprehending voice remains central to understanding human experience, all the while advocating for a form of listening that would allow us to hear singers in a self-reflexive, denaturalized way.
This paper explores the effects of talker-to-listener distance (TLD) on tone and examines its impact on tone perception by both native listeners and second language learners.
Speakers naturally ...adjust vocal effort to talk to people at different distances, which leads to changes not only in intensity, duration and formant frequencies, but also in fundamental frequency (f0). Fundamental frequency is the primary acoustic cue that differentiates Mandarin lexical tones from one another. This study aims to answer the question of whether changes in f0 as a function of TLD affect tone perception by native (L1) and second language (L2) listeners. If so, what are the specific changes that have an impact on tone perception?
The production study investigates the acoustic correlates of the effects of TLD on tone, using 7959 monosyllabic Mandarin speech files recorded by three speakers under 11 levels of TLD. The perception study explores the effects of TLD on L1 and L2 tone perception by 2 native listeners and 52 L2 listeners.
The effects of TLD on speech production are systematic, and we present models and analyses with sufficient detail to simulate these effects. Intensity, duration, and initial and maximum f0 increase along with TLD, while time-normalized toneshapes remain invariant. The results of the perception study show that native listeners' performance is robust under changes in TLD, while L2 listeners' perception of tone interacts with TLD. One significant finding is that tone 3 recognition improves with TLD.
This work investigates the relationship between speech production and perception when acoustic attributes change naturally in response to the demands of speech communication. The results have potential applications in speech synthesis, pronunciation training and second language testing.
•We model the effects of talker-to-listener distance (TLD) on tone.•We examine the effects of TLD on tone perception by L1 and L2 listeners.•Farther TLDs help tone perception by increasing pitch, intensity and duration.•Two invariant tone features preserve tone information under changes in TLD.
湖北省鄂州市の官話方言における中古漢語去声の分裂 Kenstowicz, Michael J; Yu, Mengwei
Onsei Kenkyū = Journal of the Phonetic Society of Japan,
2022/10/31, Letnik:
26, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This article reports the results of an investigation into the phonetic correlates of the tonal inventory of the Mandarin dialect of Èzhōu. Our study focuses on the reflexes of the Middle Chinese (MC) ...qù (falling) tone, which has split into upper and lower-register rising tones in Èzhōu. This split as well as a distinct reflex for the MC entering (checked syllable) tone were identified by Chao et al. (1948) as defining characteristics of the Chǔyǔ dialects located in the southeastern region of the Mandarin speaking area.
•We studied whether perceptual adaptation is affected by perceptual acuity, i.e., amusia.•Amusics showed reduced categorical perception of lexical tones.•Amusics failed to recalibrate their tonal ...categories based on different contexts.•Perceptual adaptation is a higher-order cognitive process that depends on perceptual acuity.
Perceptual adaptation is an active cognitive process where listeners re-analyse speech categories based on new contexts/situations/talkers. It involves top-down influences from higher cortical levels on lower-level auditory processes. Individuals with congenital amusia have impaired pitch processing with reduced connectivity between frontal and temporal regions. This study examined whether deficits in amusia would lead to impaired perceptual adaptation in lexical tone perception. Thirteen Mandarin-speaking amusics and 13 controls identified the category of target tones on an 8-step continuum ranging from rising to high-level, either in isolation or in a high-/low-pitched context. For tones with no context, amusics exhibited reduced categorical perception than controls. While controls’ lexical tone categorization demonstrated a significant context effect due to perceptual adaptation, amusics showed similar categorization patterns across both contexts. These findings suggest that congenital amusia impacts the extraction of context-dependent tonal categories in speech perception, indicating that perceptual adaptation may depend on listeners’ perceptual acuity.
Phonological third tone sandhi studies in Mandarin Chinese will lead more often to a lab-centered research, whereas the incorporation of phonetic tone sandhi studies into phonological analyses will ...shed a light on a classroom-centered study. This incorporation suggests a revised approach to the third tone sandhi from an articulatory perspective. As a result, the study of pitch values and pitch contours of a third tone are taken over by the study of sound positions and jaw/chin movements. The well-known five-level tonal diagram is challenged and replaced by a seven-level tonal diagram with an application of only two forms of pronouncing a third tone ---pseudo third tone and pseudo second tone. All these aim to investigate a classroom-centered study of a third tone as an understudied area to provide practical guidance for Mandarin instructors and learners of Mandarin as second language.
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