1,720,985 research outputs found
The neonate brain's sensitivity to repetition-based structure: Specific to speech?
Full text linkNewborns are able to extract and learn repetition-based regularities from the speech input, that is, they show greater brain activation in the bilateral temporal and left inferior frontal regions to trisyllabic pseudowords of the form AAB (e.g., "babamu") than to random ABC sequences (e.g., "bamuge"). Whether this ability is specific to speech or also applies to other auditory stimuli remains unexplored. To investigate this, we tested whether newborns are sensitive to regularities in musical tones. Neonates listened to AAB and ABC tones sequences, while their brain activity was recorded using functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS). The paradigm, the frequency of occurrence and the distribution of the tones were identical to those of the syllables used in previous studies with speech. We observed a greater inverted (negative) hemodynamic response to AAB than to ABC sequences in the bilateral temporal and fronto-parietal areas. This inverted response was caused by a decrease in response amplitude, attributed to habituation, over the course of the experiment in the left fronto-temporal region for the ABC condition and in the right fronto-temporal region for both conditions. These findings show that newborns' ability to discriminate AAB from ABC sequences is not specific to speech. However, the neural response to musical tones and spoken language is markedly different. Tones gave rise to habituation, whereas speech was shown to trigger increasing responses over the time course of the study. Relatedly, the repetition regularity gave rise to an inverted hemodynamic response when carried by tones, while it was canonical for speech. Thus, newborns' ability to detect repetition is not speech-specific, but it engages distinct brain mechanisms for speech and music. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTSThe ability of newborns' to detect repetition-based regularities is not specific to speech, but also extends to other auditory modalities.The brain mechanisms underlying speech and music processing are markedly different
Acoustic -perceptual salience and developmental speech perception.
No full textInspired by the notion that some typologically less common contrasts may be perceptually less salient than ubiquitous contrasts, this dissertation investigates the perception, by infants and adults, of a relatively uncommon nasal place contrast (onset /na-na/) against a more common nasal contrast (/ma-na/) in order to assess the role of acoustic-perceptual salience in the development of speech perception. Do perceptually less salient contrasts show a pattern of development different from the well-known tendency for infants to successfully discriminate native and non-native contrasts in young infancy? It is argued that phonetic contrasts that are perceptually less salient than others may require language experience to be discriminated in infancy. An acoustic analysis (Experiment 1) of onset /m n n/ in Filipino showed that, in the perceptually relevant F2xF3 space, [na] was closer to [na] than to [ma]. When presented with these same stimuli in a discrimination task (Experiment 2), English- and Filipino-speaking adults accurately discriminated [ma]-[na], native to both language groups. The [na]-[na] contrast, native to Filipino but not English speakers, was discriminated at chance level by the English listeners and was well discriminated by the Filipino listeners, although slightly but significantly less accurately than [ma]-[na]. When Filipino listeners were presented with the same contrasts in two noisy listening conditions (Experiment 7), discrimination of [na]-[na] fell to near chance levels in the noisier condition (-5dB SNR), while accuracy on [ma]-[na] remained above 90% in both noisy conditions. These findings suggest that the [ma]-[na] contrast is perceptually more salient than [na]-[na] for adult listeners regardless of language experience. When English-hearing infants, aged 4-12 months, were presented with the two Filipino contrasts (Experiments 3-5), they successfully discriminate contrast but not [na]-[na]. In Experiment 6, Filipino-hearing infants successfully discriminated native [na]-[na] at 10-12 months, but not at 6-8 months. Taken together, the results suggest that acoustic-perceptual salience affects the discrimination of nasal place contrasts in infancy, with the less salient [na]-[na] contrast being more difficult to discriminate in infancy than more salient [ma]-[na]. Native language experience is required for the infant to perceptually segregate acoustically similar categories.PhDCognitive psychologyDevelopmental psychologyLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsLinguisticsPsychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/126241/2/3238039.pd
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Coverbal speech gestures signal phrase boundaries: A production study of Japanese and English infant- and adult-directed speech
Full text linkInternational audienceThe acoustic realization of phrasal prominence is proposed to correlate with the order of V(erbs) and O(bjects) in natural languages. The present production study with 15 talkers of Japanese (OV) and English (VO) investigates whether the speech signal contains coverbal visual information that covaries with auditory prosody, in Infant- and Adult-Directed Speech (IDS and ADS). Acoustic analysis revealed that phrasal prominence is carried bydifferent acoustic cues in the two languages and speech styles, while analyses of motion showed that this acoustic prominence is not accompaniedby coverbal gestures. Instead, the talkers of both languages produced eyebrow movements to mark the boundaries of target phrases withinelicited utterances in combination with head nods. These results suggest that the signal might contain multimodal information to phrase boundaries,which could help listeners chunk phrases from the input
Finding Phrases: The Interplay of Word Frequency, Phrasal Prosody and Co-speech Visual Information in Chunking Speech by Monolingual and Bilingual Adults
Full text linkInternational audienceThe audiovisual speech signal contains multimodal information to phrase boundaries. In three artificial language learning studies with 12 groups of adult participants we investigated whether English monolinguals and bilingual speakers of English and a language with opposite basic word order (i.e., in which objects precede verbs) can use word frequency, phrasal prosody and co-speech (facial) visual information, namely head nods, to parse unknown languages into phrase-like units. We showed that monolinguals and bilinguals used the auditory and visual sources of information to chunk “phrases” from the input. These results suggest that speech segmentation is a bimodal process, though the influence of co-speech facial gestures is rather limited and linked to the presence of auditory prosody. Importantly, a pragmatic factor, namely the language of the context, seems to determine the bilinguals’ segmentation, overriding the auditory and visual cues and revealing a factor that begs further exploration
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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