Perception and production of a feature correlation in Chinese characters

Although linguistic politeness has been studied and theorized about extensively, the role of prosody in the perception of (im)polite attitudes has been somewhat neglected. In the present study, we used experimental methods to investigate the interaction of linguistic form, imposition, and prosody in the perception of (im)polite requests. A written task established a baseline for the level of politeness associated with certain linguistic structures. Then stimuli were recorded in polite and rude prosodic conditions and in a perceptual experiment they were judged for politeness. Results revealed that, although both linguistic structure and prosody had a significant effect on politeness ratings, the effect of prosody was much more robust. In fact, rude prosody led in some cases to the neutralization of (extra)linguistic distinctions. The important contribution of prosody to (im)politeness inferences was also revealed by a comparison of the written and auditory tasks. These findings have important implications for models of (im)politeness and more generally for theories of affective speech. Implications for the generation of Particularized Conversational Implicatures (PCIs) of (im)politeness are also discussed.

It is by now widely accepted that the articulation of speech is influenced by the prosodic structure into which the utterance is organized. Furthermore, the effect of prosody on F0 realization has been shown to be mainly phonological [Beckman and Pierrehumbert (1986); Selkirk and Shen (1990)]. This paper presents data from the F0 realizations of lexical tones in Standard Chinese and shows that prosodic factors may influence the articulation of a lexical tone and induce phonetic variations in its surface F0 contours, similar to the phonetic effect of prosody on segment articulation [de Jong (1995); Keating and Foureron (1997)]. Data were elicited from four native speakers of Standard Chinese producing all four lexical tones in different tonal contexts and under various focus conditions (i.e., under focus, no focus, and post focus), with three renditions for each condition. The observed F0 variations are argued to be best analyzed as resulted from prosodically driven differences in the phonetic implementation of the lexical tonal targets, which in turn is induced by pragmatically driven differences in how distinctive an underlying tonal target should be realized. Implications of this study on the phonetic implementation of phonological tonal targets will also be discussed.

This report summarizes the results of a series of studies that examined the effects of alcohol on the acoustic-phonetic properties of speech. Audio recordings were made of male talkers producing lists of sentences under a sober condition and an intoxicated condition. These speech samples were then subjected to perceptual and acoustic analyses. In one perceptual experiment, listeners heard matched pairs of sentences from four talkers and were required to identify the sentence that was produced while the talker was intoxicated. In a second perceptual experiment, Indiana State Troopers and college undergraduates were required to judge whether individual sentences presented in isolation were produced in a sober or an intoxicated condition. The results of the perceptual experiments indicated that groups of listeners can significantly discriminate between speech samples produced under sober and intoxicated conditions. For acoustic analyses, digital signal processing techniques were used to measure acoustic-phonetic changes that took place in speech production when the talker was intoxicated. The results of the acoustical analyses revealed consistent and well-defined changes in speech articulation between sober and intoxicated conditions. Because speech production requires fine motor control and timing of the articulators, it may be possible to use acoustic-phonetic measures as sensitive indices of sensory-motor impairment due to alcohol consumption.

Learning to write Chinese character is a crucial process for non-native speakers in Chinese learning and a big stumbling block also. Luckily there are numbers of websites providing online learning of Chinese character writing which may benefit learners in overcoming the barriers. In this study we focus on these websites and emphasizes on the instruction of Chinese character writing. There were 24 of the websites screened from the Internet for further investigation. After intensive analysis and comparison, eight main factors in interface design of Chinese character writing were identified. They are: Media of presentation, Grid pattern, Tracing outline, Color coding, Stroke labeling, Play control, Stroke speed, and Writing exercise. Based on the analysis of the advantage and disadvantage of different implementations of these 8 main factors, an improved interface design proposal for Chinese character writing instruction is then propose to the follow-up research.KeywordsChinese charactersChinese learningChinese character writingInteractive interfaceInterface design

Understanding charismatic speech becomes a highly relevant issue in times of globalized markets and mobile on-demand mass media that strengthen the influence of individuals. Pushing phonetic research further into the realm of non-lexical charisma triggers, the present study is the first to investigate the combined effects of variation in attire and prosody on the perception of male and female speaker charisma. A perception experiment was carried out with Attire and Prosody as independent variables, each with two manipulation steps and embedded in a 2 × 2 orthogonal design. A total of 53 participants took part in the experiment and rated eight senior business leaders of well-known US American companies, four males and four females, on three approved charisma-related scales: convincing, passionate, charming. The audio-visual stimuli consisted of a keynote-speech excerpt of a speaker in combination with a matching photograph. Results clearly show that both Attire and Prosody had significant effects on the speakers’ perceived charisma. The charisma effects of Attire and Prosody are additive, but in gender-specific ways and with gender-specific effect sizes. A bipartite results pattern among the female speakers further suggests that it depends on their physical attractiveness whether Attire and Prosody conditions have a charisma-supporting or charisma-reducing effect. The results are discussed in terms of their practical implications for the daily business life of men and women.

The study compared the suitability of geometric figures and Chinese characters for assessing visual memory. In Study 1, 40 Chinese characters were found to be significantly less verbalisable than were 40 geometric figures from the Biber Figure Learning Test. In Study 2, memory for Chinese characters, for Biber figures, and for items on the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test were compared using 14 subjects with left cerebrovascular accident, 15 subjects with right cerebrovascular accident, and 29 matched controls. Subjects in the left hemisphere group showed impairment on the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test but not on Chinese characters, whereas subjects in the right hemisphere group showed impairment on Chinese characters but not on the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test. This double dissociation was not evident when comparisons involved the Biber Figure Learning Test. The Chinese character set used in this study was thus judged to be more suitable than were geometric figures in the Biber Figure Learning Test for assessing visual memory.

The largely effortless process of segmenting a continuous speech stream into words has been shown cross-linguistically to be influenced by implicit knowledge about the distributional probabilities of phonotactics, stress assignment, and word size. Work in tonal languages provides compelling evidence that tones are also likely to be a source of probabilistic information for speakers of these languages. It has been shown that probability of syllable + tone combinations play a role in speech processing in Mandarin (Wiener & Ito, 2016; 2015; Wiener & Turnbull, 2013). Work in Cantonese has also demonstrated that transitional probabilities of lexical tones paired with vowels aid listeners in segmentation (Gomez, et al., 2018). Here we conducted two perception experiments with fifty native-Mandarin speakers and manipulated two potential segmentation cues: word size and tonal sequence probability. Contrary to our hypothesis that participants would make segmentation errors which reflect the most probable word size in Mandarin (two-syllable words) with highly probable tonal sequences, participants’ errors were overwhelmingly three-syllable words with low probability tonal sequences. This suggests that biases towards segmentation errors are not predictable based on straightforward probabilities.

The origin and evolution of the Hawley retainer for the effectiveness to maintain tooth position after fixed orthodontic treatment compare to vacuum-formed retainer: A systematic review of RCTs

Sonority is a fundamental notion in phonetics and phonology, central to many descriptions of the syllable and various useful predictions in phonotactics. Although widely accepted, sonority lacks a clear basis in speech articulation or perception, given that traditional formal principles in linguistic theory are often exclusively based on discrete units in symbolic representation and are typically not designed to be compatible with auditory perception, sensorimotor control, or general cognitive capacities. In addition, traditional sonority principles also exhibit systematic gaps in empirical coverage. Against this backdrop, we propose the incorporation of symbol-based and signal-based models to adequately account for sonority in a complementary manner. We claim that sonority is primarily a perceptual phenomenon related to pitch, driving the optimization of syllables as pitch-bearing units in all language systems. We suggest a measurable acoustic correlate for sonority in terms of periodic energy, and we provide a novel principle that can account for syllabic well-formedness, the nucleus attraction principle (NAP). We present perception experiments that test our two NAP-based models against four traditional sonority models, and we use a Bayesian data analysis approach to test and compare them. Our symbolic NAP model outperforms all the other models we test, while our continuous bottom-up NAP model is at second place, along with the best performing traditional models. We interpret the results as providing strong support for our proposals: (i) the designation of periodic energy as the acoustic correlate of sonority; (ii) the incorporation of continuous entities in phonological models of perception; and (iii) the dual-model strategy that separately analyzes symbol-based top-down processes and signal-based bottom-up processes in speechperception.

Background: Apraxia of speech (AOS) is commonly thought of as a motor programming deficit, but could be due to impaired ability to maintain the sequence of phonemes (speech sounds) in short-term memory (STM) while articulating the word. We hypothesized that AOS and impaired digit span are associated with acute ischemia (infarct and/or hypoperfusion) of pars opercularis of Broca’s area (Brodmann's area 44), and that severity of AOS and digit span would be strongly correlated. Methods: We tested 87 patients on the first day of admission for left hemisphere acute ischemic stroke (mean age= 60.0±15.9; mean education 13.6±3.7 years) with Apraxia Battery for Adults-II and digit span tests and MRI, including Diffusion and Perfusion Weighted Imaging (DWI, PWI). We defined Apraxia of Speech (AOS) as 3 or 4 abnormal scores on the subtests of ABA-II: Words of Increasing Length A and B (which scores an increase in articulatory errors with increased word length for short and longer words/phrases, respectively), Repeated Trials (which scores variability in errors in repetition of the same polysyllabic words), and Inventory of Articulation (which scores characteristics of AOS). We defined impaired phonological STM as forward digit span < 5 or backward digit span < 3. The first author and 1 other technician, masked to the AOS results, examined MRI DWI and PWI scans for the presence or absence of ischemia (bright on DWI and/or hypoperfused on PWI) in each of 12 regions of interest: Brodmann’s area (BA) 4, 6, 10, 11, 19, 20, 21, 22, 37, 38, 39, 40, 44, 45, anterior and posterior insula. Hypoperfusion was defined as > 4 sec delay in TTP compared to opposite hemisphere. We evaluated association between the ischemia in each Brodmann area (BA) and (1) presence of AOS and (2) impaired STM using chi square tests. Results: AOS was significantly associated only with BA 6 (premotor cortex; chi square= 7.07; df1; p<.003) and BA 44 (pars opercularis of Broca’s area; chi square= 5.3; df1; p<.02), but not BA 45 (pars triangularis) or other ROIs. Impaired STM measured by forward digit span <5 was associated with BA 6 (chi square= 20.2; df1; p<.000001) and BA 44 (chi square= 15.2; df1; p=.00009), and BA 45 (chi square= 19.2; df1; p=.0001). There was strong correlation between digits forward span and Repeated Trials score (r=.35; p=.003), either because both speech articulation and STM rely on Broca’s area, or because orchestration of speech articulation demands holding phoneme sequences in phonological STM. Conclusions: Acute ischemia of the pars opercularis of Broca’s area (Brodmann’s Area 44) is associated with AOS and STM deficits. The severity of AOS and digit span deficits were highly correlated. The relationship between AOS and phonological STM begs further investigation.

Previous research on foreign accent perception has largely focused on speaker-dependent factors such as age of learning and length of residence. Factors that are independent of a speaker's language learning history have also been shown to affect perception of second language speech. The present study examined the effects of two such factors--listening context and lexical frequency--on the perception of foreign-accented speech. Listeners rated foreign accent in two listening contexts: auditory-only, where listeners only heard the target stimuli, and auditory + orthography, where listeners were presented with both an auditory signal and an orthographic display of the target word. Results revealed that higher frequency words were consistently rated as less accented than lower frequency words. The effect of the listening context emerged in two interactions: the auditory + orthography context reduced the effects of lexical frequency, but increased the perceived differences between native and non-native speakers. Acoustic measurements revealed some production differences for words of different levels of lexical frequency, though these differences could not account for all of the observed interactions from the perceptual experiment. These results suggest that factors independent of the speakers' actual speech articulations can influence the perception of degree of foreign accent.

Intervocalic fricative perception in European Portuguese: An articulatory synthesis study

In this thesis, different aspects concerning how to make synthetic talking faces more expressive have been studied. How can we collect data for the studies, how is the lip articulation affected by expressive speech, can the recorded data be used interchangeably in different face models, can we use eye movements in the agent for communicative purposes? The work of this thesis includes studies of these questions and also an experiment using a talking head as a complement to a targeted audio device, in order to increase the intelligibility of the speech. The data collection described in the first paper resulted in two multimodal speech corpora. In the following analysis of the recorded data it could be stated that expressive modes strongly affect the speech articulation, although further studies are needed in order to acquire more quantitative results and to cover more phonemes and expressions as well as to be able to generalise the results to more than one individual. When switching the files containing facial animation parameters (FAPs) between different face models (as well as research sites), some problematic issues were encountered despite the fact that both face models were created according to the MPEG-4 standard. The evaluation test of the implemented emotional expressions showed that best recognition results were obtained when the face model and FAP-file originated from the same site. The perception experiment where a synthetic talking head was combined with a targeted audio, parametric loudspeaker showed that the virtual face augmented the intelligibility of speech, especially when the sound beam was directed slightly to the side of the listener i. e. at lower sound intesities. In the experiment with eye gaze in a virtual talking head, the possibility of achieving mutual gaze with the observer was assessed. The results indicated that it is possible, but also pointed at some design features in the face model that need to be altered in order to achieve a better control of the perceived gaze direction.

Purpose Previous studies of speech articulation have shown that individuals who can perceive smaller differences between similar-sounding phonemes showed larger contrasts in their productions of those phonemes. Here, a similar relationship was examined between the perception and production of breathy voice quality. Method Twenty females with healthy voices were recruited to participate in both a voice production and a perception experiment. Each participant produced repetitions of a sustained vowel, and acoustic correlates of breathiness were calculated. Identification and discrimination tasks were performed with a series of synthetic stimuli along a breathiness continuum. Categorical boundary location and boundary width were obtained from the identification task as a measurement of perception of breathiness. Spearman's correlation analysis was performed to estimate associations between values of boundary location and width and the acoustic correlates of breathiness from the participants' voices. Results Significant correlations between boundary width (r = -.53 to -.6) and some acoustic correlates were found, but no significant relationships were observed between boundary location and the acoustic correlates. Conclusions Speakers with small boundary widths, which suggest higher perceptual precision in differentiating breathiness, had typical voices that were less breathy, as estimated with acoustic measures, compared to speakers with large boundary widths. Our findings may support a link between perception and production of breathy voice quality. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.9808478.

Orthographic effects on the perception and production of L2 mandarin tones