Search results for "Percept"

Photoreceptors, lightness constancy and color vision.

1986

Implementations of a novel algorithm for colour constancy

1997

AbstractIn agreement with the principles of the relativistic model proposed by Creutzfeldtet al., with the photometric rule (lightness anchoring rule) and with the influence of simultaneous contrast in the appearance of a visual scene, we propose a first-stage mechanism yielding substantial colour constancy. We have defined a set of first-stage colour descriptors, and to test their utility, we have performed a simulation using a Machine Vision System (MVS). The statistical stability of the descriptors for Munsell samples under different illuminants is good.

Bengali nasal vowels: Lexical representation and listener perception

2022

This paper focuses on the question of the representation of nasality as well as speakers’ awareness and perceptual use of phonetic nasalisation by examining surface nasalisation in two types of vowels in Bengali: underlying nasal vowels (CṼC) and nasalised vowels before a nasal consonant (CVN). A series of three cross-modal forced-choice experiments was used to investigate the hypothesis that only unpredictable nasalisation is stored and that this sparse representation governs how listeners interpret vowel nasality. Visual full-word targets were preceded by auditory primes consisting of CV segments of CVC words with nasal vowels ([tʃɑ̃] for [tʃɑ̃d] ‘moon’), oral vowels ([tʃɑ] for [tʃɑl] ‘un…

Learner Perspective on English Pronunciation Teaching in an EFL Context

2013

This paper reports on an interview study with EFL learners that aimed to explore learners’ perceptions and views on English pronunciation teaching. The participants of the present study were ten EFL learners studying in the public educational system of Finland. Six of the participants were pupils attending basic education class nine, i.e. 15- to 16-year-old lower secondary level pupils. Two were primary level pupils attending basic education class four (aged 10), and two were upper secondary school pupils (aged 18). The interviews were thematic, and the learners were encouraged to speak freely about the English pronunciation teaching they were receiving and their opinions on this. In additi…

What can synaesthesia tell us about our minds?

2014

Synaesthesia is considered here as a cognitive phenomenon in the context of developmental, neuropathological and linguistic perspectives. Developmental synaesthesia seems to arise as an effect of interplay between genotype and phenotype, during the implicit learning process in childhood, in those individuals who possess an inborn susceptibility to it. Some connections between synaesthesia and extraordinary experiences, brain restructuration and pain, are examined. Acquired types of synaesthesia may be related to sensory deprivation. The somatosensory cortex may be significant for cognitive synaesthesia, with especial importance placed on a mirror system. It is suggested here that synaesthes…

Text type attribution modulates pre-stimulus alpha power in sentence reading

2021

Prior knowledge and context-specific expectations influence the perception of sensory events, e.g., speech, as well as complex higher-order cognitive operations like text reading. Here, we focused on pre-stimulus neural activity during sentence reading to examine text type-dependent attentional bias in anticipation of written stimuli, capitalizing on the functional relevance of brain oscillations in the alpha (8–12 Hz) frequency range. Two sex- and age-matched groups of participants (n = 24 each) read identical sentences on a screen at a fixed per-constituent presentation rate while their electroencephalogram was recorded; the groups were differentially instructed to read “sentences” (genre…

Cognitive factors in the evaluation of synthetic speech

1998

Abstract This paper illustrates the importance of various cognitive factors involved in perceiving and comprehending synthetic speech. It includes findings drawn from the relative psychological and psycholinguistic literature together with experimental results obtained at the Fondazione Ugo Bordoni laboratory. Overall, it is shown that listening to and comprehending synthetic voices is more difficult than with a natural voice. However, and more importantly, this difficulty can and does decrease with the subjects' exposure to said synthetic voices. Furthermore, greater workload demands are associated with synthetic speech and subjects listening to synthetic passages are required to pay more …

Modeling Listeners’ Emotional Response to Music

2012

An overview of the computational prediction of emotional responses to music is presented. Communication of emotions by music has received a great deal of attention during the last years and a large number of empirical studies have described the role of individual features (tempo, mode, articulation, timbre) in predicting the emotions suggested or invoked by the music. However, unlike the present work, relatively few studies have attempted to model continua of expressed emotions using a variety of musical features from audio-based representations in a correlation design. The construction of the computational model is divided into four separate phases, with a different focus for evaluation. T…

Listening to Voices and Judging People

2010

The impact of vocal cues on personality judgments is investigated in an experimental study that used technically manipulated levels of pitch (low and high frequency), sex of the speaker, and content area (e.g., fixing a bike, baking, reading directory information) as independent and the entailing personality judgments as dependent variables. Subjects (48 male and 48 female) were presented with voice probes and ratings of physical (age, sex, height, stature), and psychological characteristics (bipolar adjectives representing the “Big Five” dimensions of personality) were collected. Results confirm that voice characteristics have an impact on interpersonal perception and that vocal cues are p…

¡Vaya Valla! El yeísmo en el español de Valencia

2016

In the last few years, the notion of yeismo has been approached from different perspectives; one of them is Sociolinguistics, the field in which the contribution of the present work is embedded. The aim of this article is to present the evolution of the phonetic process of delateralization of the phoneme /ʎ/ in favour of /ʝ/ in the use of Spanish by speakers in the bilingual speech community in Valencia and the sorrounding areas. From a traditional perspective, it was claimed that speakers in Valencia maintained the differentiation between the lateral and fricative palatals. However, more recent studies focus on the introduction and expansion of yeismo in particular areas in the Valencian r…