Search results for "PROSODY"
showing 10 items of 71 documents
A prosodic analysis of truncated structures in Spanish colloquial conversation: the functions of formulation and mitigation
2018
Este trabajo analiza las características prosódicas de las estructuras truncadas en la conversación coloquial española con el fin de determinar si los rasgos prosódicos son índices predictivos de las funciones de formulación y atenuación. A partir de un estudio de corpus de conversaciones espontáneas, se analizan determinados fenómenos –duración, velocidad de habla, F0, pausas, inflexiones tonales– para elucidar si existe una correlación entre la interfaz prosódica y la pragmática. This study analyses the prosodic features of truncated structures in Spanish colloquial conversation with the aim of determining whether these prosodic features are predictable indices of the pragmatic functions …
Rasch analysis of the Lower Extremity Functional Scale for foot and ankle patients.
2018
Purpose: The Lower Extremity Functional Scale (LEFS) is a widely used 20-item patient-reported outcome instrument with five response categories. We investigated the measurement properties of the Finnish version of the LEFS among foot and ankle patients to refine the scale to measure more accurately what is relevant for patients.Materials and methods: Data were obtained from 182 patients who had undergone foot and ankle surgery for various reasons. The Rasch Measurement Theory and Cronbach's alpha were employed for analyses of model and item fit, response category thresholds, targeting, person separation index, and internal consistency.Results: Threshold misfit was noted in 13 of the 20 item…
Children show right-lateralized effects of spoken word-form learning
2017
It is commonly thought that phonological learning is different in young children compared to adults, possibly due to the speech processing system not yet having reached full native-language specialization. However, the neurocognitive mechanisms of phonological learning in children are poorly understood. We employed magnetoencephalography (MEG) to track cortical correlates of incidental learning of meaningless word forms over two days as 6±8-year-olds overtly repeated them. Native (Finnish) pseudowords were compared with words of foreign sound structure (Korean) to investigate whether the cortical learning effects would be more dependent on previous proficiency in the language rather than ma…
Linguistic relevance of duration within the native language determines the accuracy of speech-sound duration processing.
2003
As indexed by electrophysiological measures, in native speakers of a language with linguistically significant opposition between short and long phonemes, the pre-attentive detection accuracy of duration changes in speech sounds was tuned in comparison with that in non-speech sounds. This was not observed in advanced second-language users of the same language, suggesting that second-language acquisition does not lead to speech-specific tuning of the duration processing as does native language acquisition in early childhood.
Hidden sources of joy, fear, and sadness: Explicit versus implicit neural processing of musical emotions.
2016
Music is often used to regulate emotions and mood. Typically, music conveys and induces emotions even when one does not attend to them. Studies on the neural substrates of musical emotions have, however, only examined brain activity when subjects have focused on the emotional content of the music. Here we address with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) the neural processing of happy, sad, and fearful music with a paradigm in which 56 subjects were instructed to either classify the emotions (explicit condition) or pay attention to the number of instruments playing (implicit condition) in 4-s music clips. In the implicit vs. explicit condition, stimuli activated bilaterally the infe…
Representation and Processing of Lexical Tone and Tonal Variants: Evidence from the Mismatch Negativity
2015
Pronunciation variation is ubiquitous in the speech signal. Different models of lexical representation have been put forward to deal with speech variability, which differ in the level as well as the nature of mental representation. We present the first mismatch negativity (MMN) study investigating the effect of allophonic variation on the mental representation and neural processing of lexical tones. Native speakers of Standard Chinese (SC) participated in an oddball electroencephalography (EEG) experiment. All stimuli have the same segments (ma) but different lexical tones: level [T1], rising [T2], and dipping [T3]. In connected speech with a T3T3 sequence, the first T3 may undergo allopho…
Processing of prosodic changes in natural speech stimuli in school-age children.
2012
Speech prosody conveys information about important aspects of communication: the meaning of the sentence and the emotional state or intention of the speaker. The present study addressed processing of emotional prosodic changes in natural speech stimuli in school-age children (mean age 10 years) by recording the electroencephalogram, facial electromyography, and behavioral responses. The stimulus was a semantically neutral Finnish word uttered with four different emotional connotations: neutral, commanding, sad, and scornful. In the behavioral sound-discrimination task the reaction times were fastest for the commanding stimulus and longest for the scornful stimulus, and faster for the neutra…
Early signs of dyslexia from the speech and language processing of children
2009
The Jyvaskyla Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia project (JLD) has followed the development of 200 children from birth until 10 years of age. Half the children are from families in which at least one of the parents has dyslexia, thus the child has a high risk of becoming dyslexic, and half have no such risk. Here the main findings of four studies in linguistics from the JLD project are reviewed. The speech processing skills were studied in 6, 18, 24 and 30-month-old children. The findings show that early signs of dyslexia can be detected in speech processing both phonologically and morphosyntactically. These precursors can be seen in perception or production of duration, in the prosody and phon…
Early perception of phrasal prosody and its role in syntactic and lexical acquisition
2018
Chapter: 2, pp. 17-35; International audience; This chapter will review empirical findings on the perception of phrasal prosody in very young infants, and how it develops in first language acquisition. The ability to process phrasal prosody impacts learning of important aspects of language, specifically word segmentation and syntactic parsing. We will see that infants are able to perceive crucial aspects of phrasal prosody before the end of their first year of life, and that a few months later they are able to exploit the prosodic structure of an utterance to constrain its syntactic analysis, and therefore, to infer the meaning of unknown words.
La definizione di sillaba della poetica di Aristotele
2013
This paper is an attempt to reconsider the definition of syllable in Aristotle’s Poetics. The problems arising from this text can be solved, in my opinion, by reading it in the full context of the twentieth chapter of the Poet- ics, and by comparing it with what Aristotle wrote about syllables and phonet- ic unities in the whole Corpus Aristotelicum. The definition of ‘syllable’ (syl- labé) must thus be read in close connection with the definition of ‘element’ (stoicheion). For Aristotle, the syllable cannot be reduced to its elements (Met. Z 17), because the syllable has a prosodic and metrical structure which de- fines it as minimal linguistic unity. A vocal expression is a prosodic confi…