Distribution Of Sounds Research Articles

Some remarks on stress and reduction correlations in Spanish

Spanish is well-known for its consonant reduction processes across all dialects. At the same time, its vowel inventory is not particularly rich, with 5 evenly distributed, stable vowel categories that tend not to change their qualities regardless of stress and rhythm. Meanwhile, several Spanish varieties show vowel reduction, but crucially without accompanying advancement in terms of consonantal weakening. Based on this evidence it is proposed that the two types of reduction are correlated to the extent that one excludes the other. Given the extraordinary stability of the Spanish vowels in the vast majority of the dialects, the paper investigates various cues to stress and reduction, which is followed by a discussion of empirical studies on SLA and speech perception and production. These studies point to the fact that given the distribution of Spanish sounds and the Spanish stress system, changes in stress and vowel quality inhibit comprehension of native categories (sounds, words and prosodic elements). This should be taken as a point of departure for further studies on speech perception, second language acquisition by speakers of languages with rigid vowel systems and the correlation between vocalic and consonantal weakening (reduction).

The Development of Coda Consonants in the Speech of a Bilingual Child: A Case Study

This paper reports on the findings of a study that explored the development of consonants in coda position in the speech of a bilingual child. This data was collected through parental diaries. The researcher traced the development of English and Arabic consonants in coda position in her own child’s production between the ages of 1.4 and 5. The analysis suggests that frequency of occurrence in the child's input plays a major role in the early appearance of particular sounds in coda position in the child's production. The analysis also reveals that the most used English consonants in coda position in the child's production are those which prefer coda position to onset position. Due to the absence of studies about the distribution of Arabic sounds within onset and coda positions, the factor that has been adopted analyzing the development of Arabic consonants in coda position is the frequency of occurrence in the child's input (parental speech). The analysis assures that the Universal Grammar Constraints also have a role in the development of some English and Arabic consonants in coda position.

Propaganda on shellac, vinyl and plastic: The politics of record production during the Cultural Revolution in China (1966–76)

Abstract When the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, Shanghai’s recording industry was nationalized and turned into a propaganda enterprise. For the next decades, the China Record Factory became China’s sole recording company. This article investigates the politics of record production and the development and organization of China’s recording industry. Censorship and control reached its peak during the Cultural Revolution; almost simultaneously the distribution of revolutionary sounds increased via a new record format: flexible plastic records. While revolutionary enthusiasm hit the factories, the goal of spreading the voice of Mao Zedong motivated record production until the late 1960s. Afterwards, however, the narrow record repertoire, ever-changing political slogans and campaigns resulted in a behaviour of avoiding risk that affected the entire industry and severely hampered record distribution and propaganda especially in the provinces.

ANOMALOUS SEISMO-ACOUSTIC WAVE PROPAGATION AND DETERMINATION SOURCE OF INFRASOUND

The network of infrasound stations (I34MN) in Mongolia daily registers set of infrasound from various sources besides explosions. The data from explosions in mines in region and from other sources detected since 2000 to 2009 in seismic and infrasound stations is analyzed. The analysis these signals dependence of speed distribution of sound from seasonal, wind forces and direction moreover on short distances. From detected in infrasound stations (I34MN) in year 80-90 % of signals make microbaroms, the wide range of their sources is visible from the frequency analysis. From the general analysis registered seismo and acoustic signals of explosions on the seismic and infrasound networks stations miscalculate not only speeds of distribution of sounds on close distances (50-500 km), and also the speed model of atmosphere is made.

Comparing malleability of phonetic category between [i] and [u

This study reports differential category retuning effect between [i] and [u]. Two groups of American listeners were exposed to ambiguous vowels ([i/u]) within words that index a phoneme /i/ (e.g., athl[i/u]t) (i-group) or /u/ (e.g., aftern[i/u]n) (u-group). Before and after the exposure these listeners categorized sounds from a [bip]-[bup] continuum. The i-group significantly increased /bip/ responses after exposure, but the u-group did not change their responses significantly. These results suggest that the way mental representation handles phonetic variation may influence malleability of each category, highlighting the complex relationship among distribution of sounds, their mental representation, and speech perception.

Semantics guide infants’ vowel learning: Computational and experimental evidence

In their first year, infants’ perceptual abilities zoom in on only those speech sound contrasts that are relevant for their language. Infants’ lexicons do not yet contain sufficient minimal pairs to explain this phonetic categorization process. Therefore, researchers suggested a bottom-up learning mechanism: infants create categories aligned with the frequency distributions of sounds in their input. Recent evidence shows that this bottom-up mechanism may be complemented by the semantic context in which speech sounds occur, such as simultaneously present objects. To test this hypothesis, we investigated whether discrimination of a non-native vowel contrast improves when sounds from the contrast were paired consistently or randomly with two distinct visually presented objects, while the distribution of speech tokens suggested a single broad category. This was assessed in two ways: computationally, namely in a neural network simulation, and experimentally, namely in a group of 8-month-old infants. The neural network, trained with a large set of sound–meaning pairs, revealed that two categories emerge only if sounds are consistently paired with objects. A group of 49 real 8-month-old infants did not immediately show sensitivity to the pairing condition; a later test at 18 months with some of the same infants, however, showed that this sensitivity at 8 months interacted with their vocabulary size at 18 months. This interaction can be explained by the idea that infants with larger future vocabularies are more positively influenced by consistent training (and/or more negatively influenced by inconsistent training) than infants with smaller future vocabularies. This suggests that consistent pairing with distinct visual objects can help infants to discriminate speech sounds even when the auditory information does not signal a distinction. Together our results give computational as well as experimental support for the idea that semantic context plays a role in disambiguating phonetic auditory input.

Discriminating Non-native Vowels on the Basis of Multimodal, Auditory or Visual Information: Effects on Infants' Looking Patterns and Discrimination.

Infants’ perception of speech sound contrasts is modulated by their language environment, for example by the statistical distributions of the speech sounds they hear. Infants learn to discriminate speech sounds better when their input contains a two-peaked frequency distribution of those speech sounds than when their input contains a one-peaked frequency distribution. Effects of frequency distributions on phonetic learning have been tested almost exclusively for auditory input. But auditory speech is usually accompanied by visual information, that is, by visible articulations. This study tested whether infants’ phonological perception is shaped by distributions of visual speech as well as by distributions of auditory speech, by comparing learning from multimodal (i.e., auditory–visual), visual-only, or auditory-only information. Dutch 8-month-old infants were exposed to either a one-peaked or two-peaked distribution from a continuum of vowels that formed a contrast in English, but not in Dutch. We used eye tracking to measure effects of distribution and sensory modality on infants’ discrimination of the contrast. Although there were no overall effects of distribution or modality, separate t-tests in each of the six training conditions demonstrated significant discrimination of the vowel contrast in the two-peaked multimodal condition. For the modalities where the mouth was visible (visual-only and multimodal) we further examined infant looking patterns for the dynamic speaker’s face. Infants in the two-peaked multimodal condition looked longer at her mouth than infants in any of the three other conditions. We propose that by 8 months, infants’ native vowel categories are established insofar that learning a novel contrast is supported by attention to additional information, such as visual articulations.

On the distribution of impulsive sound events for environmental noise assessment

The noise levels of impulsive sounds are subject to variation, mostly due to changes in the meteorological situation which have a strong influence on the noise propagation. For environmental noise assessment studies the variation in the single events levels as well as the long term (averaged) level should be considered. To calculate these one can use a number of variations for the atmospheric absorption and the excess attenuation, alongside with histograms of for instance the wind speed and wind directions. Just recently, a new approach has been enforced in the Netherlands to assess the sound from shooting ranges. Details on this calculation method will be given in which meteorological classes are used to account for varying wind speed and temperature gradients. This method makes it also possible to describe the distribution of occurring sound exposure levels around shooting ranges. The distribution of impulsive sounds is further illustrated with data obtained from projects carried out on: long range prop...

A descriptive study of the phonology of Gurezi Shina

Gurezi Shina is a lesser known variety of Shina language being spoken by the inhabitants of Gurez, a remote northern valley in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. The paper reports a part of the findings of a major research study, undertaken for the description and documentation of this language with an aim to substantiate efforts for its preservation. The paper is a first attempt to present the sound system of Gurezi Shina in detail; the vowels and consonants of the language have been identified through minimal pair of words. Distribution of sounds in words are given in detail. An introduction to the linguistic classification of the language has also been presented. The data for the study have been collected during several field visits to Gurez valley.

Cognitive Bias for Learning Speech Sounds From a Continuous Signal Space Seems Nonlinguistic.

When learning language, humans have a tendency to produce more extreme distributions of speech sounds than those observed most frequently: In rapid, casual speech, vowel sounds are centralized, yet cross-linguistically, peripheral vowels occur almost universally. We investigate whether adults’ generalization behavior reveals selective pressure for communication when they learn skewed distributions of speech-like sounds from a continuous signal space. The domain-specific hypothesis predicts that the emergence of sound categories is driven by a cognitive bias to make these categories maximally distinct, resulting in more skewed distributions in participants’ reproductions. However, our participants showed more centered distributions, which goes against this hypothesis, indicating that there are no strong innate linguistic biases that affect learning these speech-like sounds. The centralization behavior can be explained by a lack of communicative pressure to maintain categories.

Observed effects of "distributional learning" may not relate to the number of peaks. A test of "dispersion" as a confounding factor.

Distributional learning of speech sounds is learning from simply being exposed to frequency distributions of speech sounds in one’s surroundings. In laboratory settings, the mechanism has been reported to be discernible already after a few minutes of exposure, in both infants and adults. These “effects of distributional training” have traditionally been attributed to the difference in the number of peaks between the experimental distribution (two peaks) and the control distribution (one or zero peaks). However, none of the earlier studies fully excluded a possibly confounding effect of the dispersion in the distributions. Additionally, some studies with a non-speech control condition did not control for a possible difference between processing speech and non-speech. The current study presents an experiment that corrects both imperfections. Spanish listeners were exposed to either a bimodal distribution encompassing the Dutch contrast /ɑ/∼/a/ or a unimodal distribution with the same dispersion. Before and after training, their accuracy of categorization of [ɑ]- and [a]-tokens was measured. A traditionally calculated p-value showed no significant difference in categorization improvement between bimodally and unimodally trained participants. Because of this null result, a Bayesian method was used to assess the odds in favor of the null hypothesis. Four different Bayes factors, each calculated on a different belief in the truth value of previously found effect sizes, indicated the absence of a difference between bimodally and unimodally trained participants. The implication is that “effects of distributional training” observed in the lab are not induced by the number of peaks in the distributions.

High functional complexity despite an extremely small repertoire of calls in the Spotted Crake (Porzana porzana)

ABSTRACT Vocal learning and nonlearning birds frequently use the same habitats and are subject to similar selection pressures. However, although the repertoires of learning species are usually more complex, we know much less about how nonlearners encode information in acoustic signals. The present study describes the use of 3 basic mechanisms of acoustic encoding in signals of a vocal nonlearner: in repertoire, in acoustic structure, and in the temporal distribution of sounds. The study is based on observations of a simulated territorial intrusion in the Spotted Crake (Porzana porzana), a cryptic rail from Western and Central Eurasia. Males produced 5 types of calls. The loudest, the whitt call, consisted of 2 independent sounds with different fundamental frequencies: a soft and low F call and a loud and high G call. Before the playback, all males produced calls that consisted of both frequencies (F+G calls), and most of the birds still produced such calls after the playback. Only birds that approached th...

Pattern-Induced Covert Category Learning in Songbirds

Language is uniquely human, but its acquisition may involve cognitive capacities shared with other species. During development, language experience alters speech sound (phoneme) categorization. Newborn infants distinguish the phonemes in all languages but by 10 months show adult-like greater sensitivity to native language phonemic contrasts than non-native contrasts. Distributional theories account for phonetic learning by positing that infants infer category boundaries from modal distributions of speech sounds along acoustic continua. For example, tokens of the sounds /b/ and /p/ cluster around different mean voice onset times. To disambiguate overlapping distributions, contextual theories propose that phonetic category learning is informed by higher-level patterns (e.g., words) in which phonemes normally occur. For example, the vowel sounds /Ι/ and /e/ can occupy similar perceptual spaces but can be distinguished in the context of "with" and "well." Both distributional and contextual cues appear to function in speech acquisition. Non-human species also benefit from distributional cues for category learning, but whether category learning benefits from contextual information in non-human animals is unknown. The use of higher-level patterns to guide lower-level category learning may reflect uniquely human capacities tied to language acquisition or more general learning abilities reflecting shared neurobiological mechanisms. Using songbirds, European starlings, we show that higher-level pattern learning covertly enhances categorization of the natural communication sounds. This observation mirrors the support for contextual theories of phonemic category learning in humans and demonstrates a general form of learning not unique to humans or language.

An acoustic study of Luganda liquid allophones

AbstractTranscription-based descriptions of Luganda (Bantu, Uganda) have stated that there is a rhotic (r) in the language that occurs only after a front vowel, in complementary distribution with a lateral (l) that occurs only elsewhere. However, these descriptions of the pattern have disagreed about the nature and distribution of the sounds involved. Such a pattern has been reported in a number of Bantu and non-Bantu languages, and it is intriguing because its phonetic basis is not obvious, since there is nothing rhotic about a front vowel or lateral about a non-front vowel. To clarify the facts and provide insight into this kind of pattern, a production study was conducted in which Luganda speakers produced the liquid in varying vocalic contexts. F1, F2, duration, mean harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR), and intensity were measured. The results support the characterization of the liquid after a front vowel as a nonlateral tap, and elsewhere as a lateral sonorant. But the intensity data also show a continuum in the degree of tongue tip constriction, ranging from approximant to tap, depending on the frontness of both the preceding and following vowels. The pattern of distribution is thus more complex and gradient than has been evident from transcriptions alone.

Distributional vowel training is less effective for adults than for infants. A study using the mismatch response.

Distributional learning of speech sounds (i.e., learning from simple exposure to frequency distributions of speech sounds in the environment) has been observed in the lab repeatedly in both infants and adults. The current study is the first attempt to examine whether the capacity for using the mechanism is different in adults than in infants. To this end, a previous event-related potential study that had shown distributional learning of the English vowel contrast /æ/∼/ε/ in 2-to-3-month old Dutch infants was repeated with Dutch adults. Specifically, the adults were exposed to either a bimodal distribution that suggested the existence of the two vowels (as appropriate in English), or to a unimodal distribution that did not (as appropriate in Dutch). After exposure the participants were tested on their discrimination of a representative [æ] and a representative [ε], in an oddball paradigm for measuring mismatch responses (MMRs). Bimodally trained adults did not have a significantly larger MMR amplitude, and hence did not show significantly better neural discrimination of the test vowels, than unimodally trained adults. A direct comparison between the normalized MMR amplitudes of the adults with those of the previously tested infants showed that within a reasonable range of normalization parameters, the bimodal advantage is reliably smaller in adults than in infants, indicating that distributional learning is a weaker mechanism for learning speech sounds in adults (if it exists in that group at all) than in infants.

Shelf-scale mapping of fish sound production with ocean gliders

Ocean gliders are a powerful platform for collecting large-scale data on the distribution of sound-producing animals while also collecting environmental data that may influence their distribution. Since 2009, we have performed extensive mapping on the West Florida Shelf with ocean gliders equipped with passive acoustic recorders. These missions have revealed the distribution of red grouper as well as identified several unknown sounds likely produced by fishes. In March 2014, we ran a mission along the shelf edge from Cape Canaveral, FL to North Carolina to map fish sound production. The Gulf Stream and its strong currents necessitated a team effort with ocean modeling to guide the glider successfully to two marine protected areas. This mission also revealed large distributions of unknown sounds, especially on the shallower portions of the shelf. Gliders provide valuable spatial coverage, but because they are moving and most fish have strong diurnal sound production patterns, data analysis on presence and absence must be made carefully. In many of these cases, it is best to use a combination of platforms, including fixed recorders and ocean profilers to measure temporal patterns of sound production.

Small-scale soundscapes over coral reef ecosystems: Latitudinal variation in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands

Two-dimensional seafloor “maps” of near-field ambient sound produced by biological sources in a coral reef environment were obtained from four spur-and-groove shallow water reef environments along a latitudinal gradient in the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Acoustic data were collected in conjunction with SCUBA based ecological surveys in an effort to establish correlation between components of the acoustic field and the ecological state of each field site. Simultaneous acoustic measurements and remote underwater photographs taken during the day and at night allowed for comparisons of biological activity with recordings over time. Using a bottom-mounted L-shaped array of hydrophones, the spatial distribution, frequency, and temporal characteristics of sounds produced by small-scale biological processes were estimated within a 40 m by 40 m region around the array. A fast cross-correlation guidance technique lessened the computational burden imposed by conventional and white noise constrained adaptive focusing (curved-wavefront beamforming). Likely sources of biological sound and variation of the acoustic field within and between the sample sites will be discussed. The variation of sound field properties over latitude and correlation with ecological information obtained at each site may be useful in underwater biological surveys that utilize passive acoustic recording.

Fast phonetic learning occurs already in 2-to-3-month old infants: an ERP study.

An important mechanism for learning speech sounds in the first year of life is “distributional learning,” i.e., learning by simply listening to the frequency distributions of the speech sounds in the environment. In the lab, fast distributional learning has been reported for infants in the second half of the first year; the present study examined whether it can also be demonstrated at a much younger age, long before the onset of language-specific speech perception (which roughly emerges between 6 and 12 months). To investigate this, Dutch infants aged 2 to 3 months were presented with either a unimodal or a bimodal vowel distribution based on the English /æ/~/ε/ contrast, for only 12 minutes. Subsequently, mismatch responses (MMRs) were measured in an oddball paradigm, where one half of the infants in each group heard a representative [æ] as the standard and a representative [ε] as the deviant, and the other half heard the same reversed. The results (from the combined MMRs during wakefulness and active sleep) disclosed a larger MMR, implying better discrimination of [æ] and [ε], for bimodally than unimodally trained infants, thus extending an effect of distributional training found in previous behavioral research to a much younger age when speech perception is still universal rather than language-specific, and to a new method (using event-related potentials). Moreover, the analysis revealed a robust interaction between the distribution (unimodal vs. bimodal) and the identity of the standard stimulus ([æ] vs. [ε]), which provides evidence for an interplay between a perceptual asymmetry and distributional learning. The outcomes show that distributional learning can affect vowel perception already in the first months of life.

An automatic detection algorithm for extracting the representative frequency of cetacean tonal sounds

Most studies on tonal sounds extract contour parameters from fundamental frequencies. The presence of harmonics and the frequency distribution of multiple tonal sounds have not been well researched. To investigate the occurrence and frequency modulation of cetacean tonal sounds, the procedure of detecting the instantaneous frequency bandwidth of tonal spectral peaks was integrated within the local-max detector to extract adopted frequencies. The adopted frequencies, considered the representative frequencies of tonal sounds, are used to find the presence of harmonics and overlapping tonal sounds. The utility and detection performance are demonstrated on acoustic recordings of five species from two databases. The recordings of humpback dolphins showed a 75% detection rate with a 5% false detection rate, and recordings from the MobySound archive showed an 85% detection rate with a 5% false detection rate. These detections were achieved in signal-to-noise ratios of -12 to 21 dB. The parameters that measured the distribution of adopted frequency, as well as the prominence of harmonics and overlaps, indicate that the modulation of tonal sounds varied among different species and behaviors. This algorithm can be applied to studies on cetacean communication signals and long-term passive acoustic monitoring.

A Literatura na Era Digital

This work aims at answering the following question: “What are the novel’s possibilities today, in these times of immaterial ‘bits’ and digital culture?”To do so, it makes use of a doublecritical strategy: on the one hand,it examinessome answersproposed byliterary critics; on the other, it examines some of Enrique Vila-Matas’ novels, notably Montano’s malady(2002), Never any end to Paris(2003), and Dublinesque(2010), which are immanently considered. In this tense analytic movement, which may recall the construction of a (weak) constellation, the answers provided by critics are confronted with the actual experience of literary construction and the universe of such novels, always in the hope that such a contrast may reveal the dilemmas and problems currently faced by the literary production. Along the way, a complementary but necessary goal emerges: to identify and interpret the various literary modes and procedures these novels resort to in order to draw on their fragile bodies a specifically literary concept about their objective situation in a world that is down right hostile to them. In this perspective, the subject of the deathof literature, comprising different nuances and occupying the foreground, can be interpreted as a social determination to produce the current literary creation, although exploring it so ironically; or rather, as away of building a kind of literary resistance to the competition imposed by the new means of expression coming from sophisticated technological devices for the productionand distribution of images and sounds, a fact that objectively and constantly restrict sreadership. The conclusion,equally not devoid of some irony, points toa freak and anachronistic fact: in today’s society, some dead enjoy good health