Linguistic Perception Research Articles

Effect of 24 Hours of Sleep Deprivation on Auditory and Linguistic Perception: A Comparison Among Young Controls, Sleep-Deprived Participants, Dyslexic Readers, and Aging Adults

To test the effects of 24 hr of sleep deprivation on auditory and linguistic perception and to assess the magnitude of this effect by comparing such performance with that of aging adults on speech perception and with that of dyslexic readers on phonological awareness. Fifty-five sleep-deprived young adults were compared with 29 aging adults (older than 60 years) and with 18 young controls on auditory temporal order judgment (TOJ) and on speech perception tasks (Experiment 1). The sleep deprived were also compared with 51 dyslexic readers and with the young controls on TOJ and phonological awareness tasks (One-Minute Test for Pseudowords, Phoneme Deletion, Pig Latin, and Spoonerism; Experiment 2). Sleep deprivation resulted in longer TOJ thresholds, poorer speech perception, and poorer nonword reading compared with controls. The TOJ thresholds of the sleep deprived were comparable to those of the aging adults, but their pattern of speech performance differed. They also performed better on TOJ and phonological awareness than dyslexic readers. A variety of linguistic skills are affected by sleep deprivation. The comparison of sleep-deprived individuals with other groups with known difficulties in these linguistic skills might suggest that different groups exhibit common difficulties.

The Auditory Perception Test for the Hearing Impaired-Revised: Test-Retest Reliability, Intra-rater Reliability, and Inter-rater Reliability

Purpose: The aims of this study were to assess the test-retest, intra-rater, and inter-rater reliability of the Auditory Perception Test for the Hearing Impaired-Revised (APT/HI-R) for children with hearing loss. Method: This study used a cross-sectional design. Sixteen children between the ages of 3 and 10 years with bilateral hearing loss who wear amplification and use spoken language to communicate were included in this study. Results: Test-retest reliability was high (r = 0.98) for the complete test, and for all subsections of the test with the exception of the Linguistic Perception subsection. Reliability was also high for intra-rater (r = 0.99) and inter-rater (84%–92% rater agreement) reliability. Conclusion: The APT-HI/R showed high reliability in this study, comparable to results from the original pilot study.

An ecological alternative to a “sad response”: Public language use transcends the boundaries of the skin

Embedding theories of language production and comprehension in theories of action-perception is realistic and highlights that production and comprehension processes are interleaved. However, layers of internal models that repeatedly predict future linguistic actions and perceptions are implausible. I sketch an ecological alternative whereby perceiver/actors are modeled as dynamical systems coupled to one another and to the environment.

Styles, Stereotypes, and the South: Constructing Identities at the Linguistic Border

Where two dialect areas collide, one finds border regions, which serve as dynamic sites for identity construction. Louisville, Kentucky, in its position on the south side of the Ohio River, the geographical and political border between Kentucky and Indiana, is located at one such collision. While previous work in Louisville has demonstrated the border nature of the city, both in terms of linguistic production and perception, this article examines how individual speakers use different styles in their production of regional identity at the border. Specifically, this study addresses how speakers in Louisville define the area to which Louisville belongs. Using the theoretical notions of enregisterment, iconization, and recursivity, the author shows how these individuals, in recognition of the border, dynamically construct identities that are at the same time Southern and non-Southern, which provides further evidence of the fluid and hybrid nature of identities at the border.

It don't go both ways: Limited bidirectionality in sociolinguistic perception

This article explores the sociolinguistic perception of morphosyntactic variation, using sociolinguistic priming experiments. Two experiments tested participants' perception of the connection between social status and variation in two English subject‐verb agreement constructions: there's+NP and NP+don't. Experiment 1 tested sentence perception and found that exposure to non‐standard agreement boosted the perception of non‐standard agreement, but only for there's+NP. Social status cues had no effect on sentence perception. Experiment 2 tested speaker perception and found that participants were more likely to believe that non‐standard agreement was produced by low‐status than high‐status speakers. Results suggest that, especially for heavily stigmatized variables, non‐standard sentences strongly constrain the social judgments made by speakers, yet social cues do not necessarily constrain linguistic perception. The results suggest that the perceptual relationship between linguistic and social knowledge may be one of only limited bidirectionality. Implications for sociolinguistic perception and exemplar‐theoretic accounts of sociolinguistic competence are discussed.

The Generic and Registerial Features of Facebook Apology Messages Written by Americans and Jordanians

This paper aims at investigating the generic and registerial features of Arabic and English apology messages written on Facebook by Jordanian and American university students. The data collected by means of distributing a simulated written paragraph to the participants via Facebook consist of one hundred Arabic and English messages (fifty Arabic and fifty English). The results demonstrate that Arabic and English apology messages written on Facebook share the same communicative purposes, but differ with respect to the number of moves and the lexical and stylistic choices employed by both the Jordanian and American students. The findings of this study have been attributed to the universality of expressing apology, diglossia of Arabic, and to a variation in the subjects’ linguistic and sociocultural backgrounds and perceptions.

Pitch perception in lexical tone and melody

Music is frequently compared to language, both structurally and psychologically, but the cognitive relationship between the two is still not well understood. This review examines pitch, a salient acoustic property shared by language and music, in order to evaluate the state of knowledge regarding the effects of musical and linguistic experience on the other domain. Specifically, the linguistic property of lexical tone is discussed in relation to musical melody. Basic facts about lexical tone systems are described, along with factors relevant to their perception. Structural components of melody and their perception are discussed, and parallels are drawn between aspects of melodic and linguistic perception. Cases of interaction between linguistic and musical pitch perception are reviewed, and theoretical perspectives on their relationship are compared. A set of perceptual models are identified that generate hypotheses about shared perceptual properties, which have the potential to further explain and specify the mutual influence between music and language cognition.

Japoncada “hara” Türkçede “karın” sözcüğü ile oluşan deyimlerin kavramsal/anlamsal karşılaştırması

Cognitive linguistics, unlike the other fields of linguistics, is a interdisciplinary fieldwhich puts human and human perception in the center. Considering human andhuman body as a whole in human perception and describing the importance of thehuman body in the formation of linguistic perception have increased rapidly especially with cognitive linguistics. In this study, Japanese and Turkish idioms are compared including body parts ofhara and karın conceptually and semantically. With this comparison, perceptualsimilarities and differences in both languages have been revealed. As a result, considering in terms of meanings, it is understood that hara and karınrefer to the same part of body and semantic frameworks of this words are quiteclose to each other except for a few differences. However cosidering the idiomsincluding this words, it is identified that both languages have just a few phraseswith the same meaning. The result of this study, it is found that hara has a widerand deeper conceptual framework

Speaker attitude as a predictive factor in listener perception of gay men’s speech

Research on listener identification of sexual orientation (e.g., Gaudio 1994, Piccolo 2008) has produced conflicting results. I argue that one contributing factor to linguistic perception of sexual orientation is the speaker’s assumptions about gay male ways of speaking American English or about specific linguistic features that the speaker believes listeners will associate with “sounding gay” in American English. Interviews I conducted with eight gay men highlight the ways in which positive and negative attitudes become realized in discourse about sounding gay or gay male ways of speaking and its link to other social practices. I then present results from a language perception study, which suggest that negative attitudes toward sounding gay decrease the possibility that a speaker will use linguistic features associated with sounding gay and will, as a result, be less likely to be perceived as gay than gay men who hold positive attitudes toward sounding gay.

Perception of musical and lexical tones by musicians and nonmusicians

This study explores the relationship between musical and linguistic pitch perception. We asked whether the ability to identify musical tones is associated with the ability to identify lexical tones. English-speaking musicians and nonmusicians were asked to identify Taiwanese level tones produced by multiple speakers. Because pitch range varies across speakers and the tones were produced in isolation, participants had to estimate relative pitch height without cues typically available for speaker normalization. The musician participants were also asked to identify synthesized musical tones without a reference pitch. The results showed that both musicians and nonmusicians were able to identify Taiwanese tones above chance, but only for tones in the extremes of the speakers’ overall pitch range. Preliminary data from the musicians show that musical tone identification accuracy was low and not associated with accuracy in the Taiwanese tone task. Implications of these findings for the music-speech relationship are discussed.

A linguagem como instrumento cognitivo no trabalho dos operadores de processo contínuo de produção

Este artigo demonstra que há uma forte relação entre linguagem, cognição e percepção na atividade de trabalho de controle de processo contínuo. O método de pesquisa adotado foi a análise ergonômica do trabalho. Um grupo de 35 operadores de controle de processo contínuo foi estudado. Os resultados sugerem que expressões linguísticas e percepção evidenciam experiências corporais recorrentes, e mostram que a estrutura da linguagem que o operador habitualmente usa influencia o modo como ele percebe seu ambiente, e o modo como ele percebe seu ambiente influencia a estrutura da linguagem no trabalho. A linguagem não é meramente uma expressão do conhecimento adquirido pelo operador. Há uma correspondência fundamental entre pensamento, linguagem e percepção, de modo que um fornece recursos para o outro. Os significados básicos de termos do trabalho assim adquiridos serão embriões para a formação de conceitos importantes para a atividade de trabalho. Um operador inicialmente aparenta usar a linguagem para uma interação social superficial mas, a partir de certo ponto, esta linguagem penetra no subconsciente vindo a se constituir na estrutura do pensamento do operador no trabalho.

Übersetzung als komplexer kognitiv basierter Prozess

The following article concentrates on cognitive aspects of the translation. We are interestedin course of the translation process in the brain, which is one of the most complicated processes connected with language. It integrates not only the linguistic perception and production,but also code-switching. During the translation process occurs activation of the linguistic information organized in mental lexicon, along with the nonlinguistic knowledge stored in other components of the memory.

Sobre las relaciones entre la Música y el Lenguaje

Este artículo expone una reflexión acerca de los paralelismos y los contrastes entre la música y el lenguaje. La comparación se circunscribe a la música tonal occidental y a la modalidad oral del lenguaje. El artículo comienza con una breve exposición de los aspectos en los que la música y el lenguaje son susceptibles de comparación, destacándose el carácter social y cultural de ambos, las experiencias estéticas que suscitan, el soporte sensoriomotor y corporal en el que se asientan, el medio acústico en el que se desar-rollan y las facultades neurocognitivas en las que se apoyan. Seguidamente, se exponen algunos paralelismos o propiedades similares relativas al origen y desarrollo de las competencias musicales y lingüísticas en el individuo (ontogénesis) y la especie (filogénesis), y a los componentes integrantes de las facultades musical y lingüística (sonidos, estruc-tura y significado). Esta comparación revela la existencia de un conjunto de parámetros comunes, como el acento, la duración o la altura tonal, en el ámbito de los sonidos, la combinación reglada de unidades sonoras para formar estructuras jerárquicas, en el plano de la estructura, y la expresión de emociones y la evocación de experiencias, en el terreno del significado. No obstante, también se subrayan aspectos singulares de cada dominio que no encuentran correspondencia en el otro; así, la armonía en la música o la composicionalidad del significado en el lenguaje. A continuación se realiza una exploración comparada de la arquitectura de los procesos cognitivos que soportan las facultades musical y lingüística y de los recursos de atención y memoria que consumen dichos procesos. En este terreno se revisan datos empíricos provenientes del estudio de las alteraciones de las habilidades musicales (amusias) y lingüísticas (afasias), de la in-vestigación del procesamiento musical y lingüístico mediante el registro de potenciales cerebrales evocados y técnicas de neuroimagen cerebral y de experimentos con tareas conductuales de percepción y producción musical y lingüística. El artículo concluye con algunas observaciones sobre las correspondencias mínimas entre música y lenguaje en materia de arquitectura cognitiva y recursos compartidos entre ambas facultades, en un intento de justificar la relevancia de la pregunta acerca de las relaciones entre la música y el lenguaje desde una perspectiva psicológica.

Explaining individual variation in L2 perception: Rounded vowels in English learners of German

Most empirical research in L2 vowel perception focuses on the development of groups of learners. However, recent studies indicate that individual learners' developmental paths in L2 vowel perception may not be uniform (e.g., Escudero, 2001; Escudero and Boersma, 2004; Morrison, 2009). The aim of the present study is to add to this line of research by investigating (1) whether individual English learners of German follow different paths in their perceptual development of six rounded German vowels, and (2) whether the observed patterns are explicable on the basis of Escudero's (2005)Second-Language Linguistic Perception(L2LP) model. A cross-language perceptual assimilation experiment revealed that learners’ assimilation of L2 sounds to native categories is indeed highly diverse, yet systematic. Importantly, these cross-language mapping patterns largely predict the learners’ further development in L2 vowel perception, as assessed in a forced-choice identification task. Implications for explanatory frameworks in second-language speech research are discussed.

Accessing psycho-acoustic perception and language-specific perception with speech sounds

AbstractIn this paper we review the results of four speech perception experiments that explore the difference between language-specific perception and psycho-acoustic auditory perception. The first two experiments examine this difference with voiceless fricatives by American English and Dutch listeners. The second series of experiments explores the perception of consonant palatalization by American English and Russian listeners. These experiments examine this processing difference through two tasks: speeded AX discrimination (“same” or “different” response) and similarity rating. The fast-paced nature of the AX discrimination task is designed to bypass linguistic processing and hone in on pure auditory similarity. The similarity rating task asks listeners to compare two stimuli at a more leisurely pace and language-specific perception is evaluated. The results of these experiments suggest that psycho-acoustic perception can be evaluated apart from linguistic perception. Other work using this experimental paradigm, however, has found language effects in both AX discrimination and rating tasks (Boomershine et al., The impact of allophony vs. contrast on speech perception, Mouton de Gruyter, 2008; McGuire, Phonetic category learning, The Ohio State University, 2007). We reconcile our findings with the contrary results by demonstrating that language effects tend to appear in the longer response latencies that naturally allow for linguistic processing and are attenuated in the fast responses.

Perception of talker information by children with typical and impaired linguistic development.

Despite the relatively large number of studies documenting the interaction of talker and linguistic information during speech perception in adults, such as talker-contingent phoneme processing or language-dependent processing of talker information, there is little work examining the development of talker processing in children. This study investigated the extent to which language familiarity affects the perception of the talker dimension of the speech signal by testing children’s discrimination of bilingual voices across two different languages. Children—aged 7 to 12—heard pairs of words either in English (familiar language) or German (unfamiliar language) and judged whether the two words were spoken by the same or different talkers. The results of this study indicate that children are able to perform this task at above-chance levels, revealing that the perception of indexical information appears early in development. Furthermore, children are able to process this information even when they are unfamiliar with the language and, therefore, lack access to linguistic information. A comparison between children with typical language development and those with specific language impairment suggests that the perception of indexical information can be retained even when linguistic perception is impaired.

Tussentaal wordt omgangstaal in Vlaanderen

Can the language of young people in Flanders tell us something about the future look and sound of Dutch in Flanders? To answer that question we start from the results of recent research on the informal language of people between 18 and 24 years old. The recordings used are part of the Corpus Gesproken Nederlands (CGN – Corpus of Spoken Dutch). When asked to hold an informal conversation in standard Dutch, most young people in Flanders will not use standard Dutch, but an intermediate variety between dialect and standard Dutch, the so-called tussentaal (literally: language-in-between). In the eyes of the propagators of the official language policy in Flanders this intermediate variety is unacceptable; people should either use dialect or standard Dutch, but not a mixture of both. In the eyes of the young people the tussentaal is no less than their mother tongue, and perfectly fit for all types of supra-regional informal communication. If urged to use standard Dutch, as with the CGN recordings, they will make a few adjustments – lexical, phonological, morpho-syntactical – to their colloquial speech, but they will not switch to the standard code. This behaviour may be very informative when speculating about the status of Dutch in Flanders. However, if we want to know whether standard Dutch still has a future as a spoken language in Flanders, we need to collect more and better data on the linguistic perception and attitudes of the younger generations in Flanders.

A Formal Syntax of Natural Languages and the Deductive Grammar

This paper presents a formal syntax framework of natural languages for computational linguistics. The abstract syntax of natural languages, particularly English, and their formal manipulations are described. On the basis of the abstract syntax, a universal language processing model and the deductive grammar of English are developed toward the formalization of Chomsky's universal grammar in linguistics. Comparative analyses of natural and programming languages, as well as the linguistic perception on software engineering, are discussed. A wide range of applications of the deductive grammar of English have been explored in language acquisition, comprehension, generation, and processing in cognitive informatics, computational intelligence, and cognitive computing.

Symmetry in Visual and Linguistic Perception

Like linguistic perception, visual perception is an active process in which the mind makes use of innate structural principles in the computational process. It is therefore useful to ask whether the visual and linguistic computational systems make use of the same or similar principles. This article describes the role played by principles of symmetry in visual perception as suggested by researchers in that field, and suggests that a subset of those principles play a strong role in the perception of linguistic structure. It is claimed that a distinction should be made between the construction of linguistic structure and its perception in the computational system, and that principles of sym-metry apply in subtly different ways in each. It is argued that movement’s inherent locality, successive-cyclicity, has a bipartite nature, being sensitive only to certain barrier nodes in the construction of structure while adjoining to every intermediate projection in the perception of structure.

Perceptual Reasoning for Perceptual Computing

In 1996, Zadeh proposed the paradigm of computing with words (CWW). A specific architecture for making subjective judgments using CWW was proposed by Mendel in 2001. It is called a Perceptual Computer (Per-C), and because words can mean different things to different people, it uses interval type-2 fuzzy set (IT2 FS) models for all words. The Per-C has three elements: the encoder, which transforms linguistic perceptions into IT2 FSs that activate a CWW engine; the decoder, which maps the output of a CWW engine back into a word; and the CWW engine. Although di-fferent kinds of CWW engines are possible, this paper only focuses on CWW engines that are rule-based and the computations that map its input IT2 FSs into its output IT2 FS. Five assumptions are made for a rule-based CWW engine, the most important of which is: The result of combining fired rules must lead to a footprint of uncertainty (FOU) that resembles the three kinds of FOU that have previously been shown to model words (interior, left-shoulder, and right-shoulder FOUs). Requiring this means that the output FOU from a rule-based CWW engine will look similar in shape to an FOU in a codebook (i.e., a vocabulary of words and their respective FOUs) for an application, so that the decoder can therefore sensibly establish the word most similar to the CWW engine output FOU. Because existing approximate reasoning methods do not satisfy this assumption, a new kind of rule-based CWW engine is proposed, one that is called Perceptual Reasoning, and is proved to always satisfy this assumption. Additionally, because all IT2 FSs in the rules as well as those that excite the rules are either an interior, left-shoulder, or right-shoulder FOU, it is possible to carry out the sup-min calculations that are required by the inference engine, and those calculations are also in this paper. The results in this paper let us implement a rule-based CWW engine for the Per-C.