Search results for "Spoke"

2018

According to the two-systems account of theory of mind (ToM), understanding mental states of others involves both fast social-perceptual processes, as well as slower, reflexive cognitive operations (Frith and Frith, 2008; Apperly and Butterfill, 2009). To test the respective roles of specific abilities in either of these processes we administered 15 experimental procedures to a large sample of 343 participants, testing ability in face recognition and holistic perception, language, and reasoning. ToM was measured by a set of tasks requiring ability to track and to infer complex emotional and mental states of others from faces, eyes, spoken language, and prosody. We used structural equation m…

RIFLESSIONI SU LINGUAGGIO E COGNIZIONE SPAZIALE Un confronto tra lingue vocali e lingue dei segni

2012

Depending on which theoretical paradigm is used, the relationship between spatial language and spatial thought could be presented in different ways. What is the nature of this relationship? Are spatial cognitive abilities a prerequisite for spatial language or, vice-versa, is it spatial language that shapes and affects our spatial reasoning? This paper is aimed at highlighting the dynamic interaction between spatial language and spatial cognition. That is, we need some spatial abilities in order to acquire spatial language. We share most of these core spatial abilities with other animals. These structures are the basis for spatial language, and this explains the presence of universal featur…

Lexical and sublexical units in speech perception.

2009

Saffran, Newport, and Aslin (1996a) found that human infants are sensitive to statistical regularities corresponding to lexical units when hearing an artificial spoken language. Two sorts of segmentation strategies have been proposed to account for this early word-segmentation ability: bracketing strategies, in which infants are assumed to insert boundaries into continuous speech, and clustering strategies, in which infants are assumed to group certain speech sequences together into units (Swingley, 2005). In the present study, we test the predictions of two computational models instantiating each of these strategies i.e., Serial Recurrent Networks: Elman, 1990; and Parser: Perruchet & Vint…

Interaction in Spoken Word Recognition Models: Feedback Helps

2018

Human perception, cognition, and action requires fast integration of bottom-up signals with top-down knowledge and context. A key theoretical perspective in cognitive science is the interactive activation hypothesis: forward and backward flow in bidirectionally connected neural networks allows humans and other biological systems to approximate optimal integration of bottom-up and top-down information under real-world constraints. An alternative view is that online feedback is neither necessary nor helpful; purely feed forward alternatives can be constructed for any feedback system, and online feedback could not improve processing and would preclude veridical perception. In the domain of spo…

2019

The development of phonological awareness, the knowledge of the structural combinatoriality of a language, has been widely investigated in relation to reading (dis)ability across languages. However, the extent to which knowledge of phonemic units may interact with spoken language organization in (transparent) alphabetical languages has hardly been investigated. The present study examined whether phonemic awareness correlates with coarticulation degree, commonly used as a metric for estimating the size of children's production units. A speech production task was designed to test for developmental differences in intra-syllabic coarticulation degree in 41 German children from 4 to 7 years of a…

Spoken Word Production

2018

This chapter examines two distinct stages of the production of spoken words: the retrieval of semantic and lexical representations, followed by morphological and phonological processing. In both cases, it summarizes models of lexical representation and lexical selection that have focused on the retrieval of single words. These models agree that different lexical information becomes available at different points in time, with access to semantic and syntactic information preceding access to information about lexical form. The structure of this review reflects this dichotomy. Comprehensive production models must also account for the sequencing and timing of lexical processing in multiword utte…

2021

Abstract Developmental dyslexia is a specific learning disorder with impairments in reading and spelling acquisition. Apart from literacy problems, dyslexics show inefficient speech encoding and deficient novel word learning, with underlying problems in phonological processing and learning. These problems have been suggested to be related to deficient specialization of the left hemisphere for language processing. To examine this possibility, we tracked with magnetoencephalography (MEG) the activation of the bilateral temporal cortices during formation of neural memory traces for new spoken word forms in 7–8-year-old children with high familial dyslexia risk and in controls. The at-risk chil…

La Strategia del Ventriloquo. Sul Portavoce

2016

This paper examines the activity of the spokesperson by means of an analogy with the art of ventriloquism. It is composed of three parts: in the first one we introduce some definitions of «spokesperson» in order to explain in what consists his activity. The second part is devoted to the analysis of the linguistic aspects of the spokesperson’s activity with particular reference to some language operations: a) self-effacement; b) attribution of agentivity. Finally, in the last part we discuss some questions that remain open in the debate on spokesperson’s activity.

The Neural Basis of Idea Density During Natural Spoken Language

2019

Idea density (ID) evolved as a quantification of propositional base structure. Besides its function as a measure of linguistic complexity, ID has also been used as an index of general linguistic ability. In order to find the neural basis for the processing of high or low ID during spontaneous speech, a sample of healthy adults was assessed using the functional resonance imaging (fMRI) technique; participants described pictures presented to them while in the scanner. Differential patterns of activation were observed for the low- and high-ID conditions, providing new insights into the processing correlates of ID.

Discourse Markers in Speech: Distinctive Features and Corpus Annotation

2017

It is generally acknowledged that discourse markers are used differently in speech and writing, yet many general descriptions and most annotation frameworks are written-based, thus partially unfit to be applied in spoken corpora. This paper identifies the major distinctive features of discourse markers in spoken language, which can be associated with problems related to their scope and structure, their meaning and their tendency to co-occur. The description is based on authentic examples and is followed by methodological recommendations on how to deal with these phenomena in more exhaustive, speech-friendly annotation models.