Search results for "speech"
showing 10 items of 1281 documents
Rapid serial naming: relations between different stimuli and neuropsychological factors.
2004
We report two studies on rapid serial naming (RSN). Study 1 addressed the relations among RSN tasks comprising different stimuli. Separate components for RSN of alphanumeric and non-alphanumeric stimuli, as well as for tasks in which the stimuli alternated between categories were identified. In Study 2, phonological skills, processing speed, motor dexterity, and verbal fluency were found to explain RSN performance. The studies indicate: (1) that RSN tasks vary in their properties according to the stimuli used and according to the way the tasks are arranged, and (2) that RSN tasks are multi-componented.
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…
Head movements in Finnish Sign Language on the basis of Motion Capture data
2015
This paper reports a study of the forms and functions of head movements produced in the dimension of depth in Finnish Sign Language (FinSL). Specifically, the paper describes and analyzes the phonetic forms and prosodic, grammatical, communicative, and textual functions of nods, head thrusts, nodding, and head pulls occurring in FinSL data consisting of a continuous dialogue recorded with motion capture technology. The analysis yields a novel classification of the kinematic characteristics and functional properties of the four types of head movement. However, it also reveals that there is no perfect correspondence between form and function in the head movements investigated.
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 …
EVALUATIVE LANGUAGE IN SPOKEN AND SIGNED STORIES TOLD BY A DEAF CHILD WITH A COCHLEAR IMPLANT: WORDS, SIGNS OR PARALINGUISTIC EXPRESSIONS?
2011
In this paper the use and quality of the evaluative language produced by a bilingual child in a story-telling situation is analysed. The subject, an 11-year-old Finnish boy, Jimmy, is bilingual in Finnish sign language (FinSL) and spoken Finnish. He was born deaf but got a cochlear implant at the age of five. The data consist of a spoken and a signed version of “The Frog Story”. The analysis shows that evaluative devices and expressions differ in the spoken and signed stories told by the child. In his Finnish story he uses mostly lexical devices – comments on a character and the character’s actions as well as quoted speech occasionally combined with prosodic features. In his FinSL story he…
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…
Breaking down the word length effect on readers’ eye movements
2015
Previous research on the effect of word length on reading confounded the number of letters (NrL) in a word with its spatial width. Consequently, the extent to which visuospatial and attentional-linguistic processes contribute to the word length effect on parafoveal and foveal vision in reading and dyslexia is unknown. Scholars recently suggested that visual crowding is an important factor for determining an individual’s reading speed in fluent and dyslexic reading. We studied whether the NrL or the spatial width of target words affects fixation duration and saccadic measures in natural reading in fluent and dysfluent readers of a transparent orthography. Participants read natural sentences …
<em>(Inter-)Fonología del Español Contemporáneo</em> (I)FEC: Methodology of a research program for corpus phonology
2018
The present contribution describes and discusses the methodology of the corpus phonological research program (Inter-)Fonología del Español Contemporáneo —(I)FEC—, which aims to document both the phonic variation in the Spanish-speaking world and the pronunciation of Spanish as an L2 and a foreign language in different learner groups. Partly based on the methodology of the French research program (Inter)Phonologie du Français Contemporain —(I)PFC—, (I)FEC includes, in addition to a word list with several (potential) minimal pairs and a reading task, also a discourse completion task (DCT) aiming to collect data for the analysis of different intonational tunes. The paper offers a detailed desc…
Predicting Word Maturity from Frequency and Semantic Diversity: A Computational Study
2016
Semantic word representation changes over different ages of childhood until it reaches its adult form. One method to formally model this change is the word maturity paradigm. This method uses a text sample for each age, including adult age, and transforms the samples into a semantic space by means of Latent Semantic Analysis. The representation of a word at every age is then compared with its adult representation via computational maturity indices. The present study used this paradigm to explore to the impact of word frequency and semantic diversity on maturation indices. To do this, word maturity indices were extracted from a Spanish incremental corpus and validated, using correlation scor…
Reconciling time, space and function: a new dorsal-ventral stream model of sentence comprehension.
2013
We present a new dorsal–ventral stream framework for language comprehension which unifies basic neurobiological assumptions (Rauschecker & Scott, 2009) with a cross-linguistic neurocognitive sentence comprehension model (eADM; Bornkessel & Schlesewsky, 2006). The dissociation between (time-dependent)syntactic structure-building and (time-independent) sentence interpretation assumed within thee ADM provides a basis for the division of labour between the dorsal and ventral streams in comprehension.We posit that the ventral stream performs time-independent unifications of conceptual schemata,serving to create auditory objects of increasing complexity. The dorsal stream engages in the time-depe…