Versions Of Words Research Articles

Dichotic listening in monozygotic twins discordant and concordant for schizophrenia

Emotional and neutral word versions of the fused rhymed words dichotic listening test were administered to members of 18 pairs of monozygotic twins discordant for schizophrenia, 7 pairs concordant for schizophrenia, and 7 pairs of normal twins. In the discordant group, affected twins had smaller right ear advantages than did their unaffected cotwins for neutral words. The difference was completely attenuated with the presentation of emotional words or in less powerful between-group comparisons that included twins concordant for schizophrenia and normal twins. It is unlikely that this finding reflects an abnormality in the lateralized representation of language, both because we did not find a correlation between handedness scores and dichotic listening scores and because emotional stimuli normalized results. The finding may reflect abnormalities in the allocation of attention for priming language centers in the left hemisphere. ‘At risk’ subjects, i.e., the unaffected members of the discordant pairs, did not differ significantly from normal monozygotic twins on measures of dichotic listening.

The Background of the Grid Dimension: A Comment

The opportunity of commenting on James Spickard's article is welcome. Let me first say how much I appreciate the pains he has taken to identify shifts entailed in the development of grid/group analysis and the charity he has exercised in listing them. How right he is that I have not written running commentaries or kept proper track of changes as I should. And how kind to say that there are only three versions when, if I were to use the word version as he does, I would have to confess to many more, each one another expansion of the theoretical prospects. I am grateful for his emphatic insistence that this is not a determinist theory of culture and also for his perception that allowing weight to individual contributions to public concepts is a subtle problem taxing to any would-be theory of culture. Indeed, as he recognizes, the attempt to avoid inadvertently giving individuals the status of robots has been at the root of most of the reformulations that he has noted. In fact, the three versions represent two different moves in the history of this idea. The first move is covered by the first two editions of Natural Symbols in which I was concerned only to clarify an argument. The shift is not so much a changed way of depicting something, but a shift in the idea of what needs to be depicted. The argument was that much more regularity and predictability in cultural bias appears than is generally assumed: the demonstration needs a chart of possible social environments and a theory of the relation of individuals to the organizations they are in. By 1978, the program was not to make an argument but to design a method for testing a number of hypotheses about culture and society. So, 1978 has a new diagram of a newly defined subject. I may be wrong, but I get the impression that if one were to be introduced to grid/group analysis by Spickard's article one might have some trouble figuring out what it is used for and how it is understood. Let me remedy this by giving some background. Spickard is right in saying that Natural Symbols followed on the analysis of ideas of pollution and taboo in Purity and Danger (1966). In the latter text I seemed to have unintentionally conveyed the idea that all societies have the same reaction of revulsion to behavior that defies their local classification. To have given this impression I must have expressed myself very badly, for in that same book I had actually discussed the fact that matter out of place is not necessarily noticed, as well as the more obvious fact that being anomalous or classifiable is not a matter that arises in nature but in society and culture. This misunderstanding indicated the next task for inquiry, to locate particular ideas of contamination in different kinds of society.

Selected serials from Saskatchewan, Canada

Lakhanpal is collection development librarian at the University of Saskatchewan Library in Saskatoon. About a hundred years ago the territory now known as Saskatchewan was a part of Canada's Northwest Territories, which extended from the Great Lakes to British Columbia and from the United States border to the Arctic Ocean. Around 1900 the government of the Dominion of Canada decided to open this territory to people from other parts of Canada and the United States. Free agricultural lands and homesteads were offered to newcomers from eastern Canada, the United States, and even from the British Isles, Europe, and China. The result was a multicultural mosaic of newcomers, natives, French trappers, and the Metis. In 1905 approximately one-third of the Northwest Territories became a province in the Dominion of Canada and was named Saskatchewan, a name derived from an anglicized version of a Cree word meaning swiftly flowing river. At the time Regina and Saskatoon were the major cities; Regina became the capital, and Saskatoon became the home of the province's university. The legislative assembly of the province passed the act establishing the University of Saskatchewan on 3 April 1907. The first classes in arts and science began on 28 September 1909, when seventy students were registered. The people of Saskatchewan have always had a great regard for history and have therefore developed a strong tradition of local histories that document the many changes that have taken place in the society, the landscape, and the institutions and present the contributions of pioneers in the fields of religion, agriculture, education, and exploration. Serial publications have no doubt been a natural outgrowth of this desire to document the history of the province.

The relationship between intelligibility and naturalness in high quality synthetic speech

The relationship between intelligibility and naturalness in synthetic speech was examined. There has been evidence that in extreme cases very unnatural speech may be intelligible [R. E. Remez et al., Science 212, 947–950 (1981)] and very natural sounding speech may be unintelligible [E. Abberton and A. J. Fourcin, Lang. Speech 21, 305–318 (1978)]. However, there is little evidence regarding the independence of naturalness and intelligibility in relatively high quality synthetic speech. This relationship was investigated in the present experiment using a paired‐rating design, in which listeners were required to rate the intelligibility and naturalness of a pair of words on each trial. The first item was always a digitized natural token of a word and the second item was always a synthetic version of the same word. The synthetic stimuli were designed to mimic the specific acoustic correlates of three male and three female talkers. Overall, the listeners rated the synthetic speech as highly intelligible and natural. In addition, a principal component analysis indicated that the naturalness and intelligibility of the different synthetic talkers were independent factors. These results argue that even in the case of high quality synthetic speech, these two attributes of the signal are separate. [Work supported by NIH (NINCDS).]

On the application of embedded digit training to speaker independent connected digit recognition

In recent years, several algorithms have been proposed for recognizing a string of connected words (typically digits) by optimally piecing together reference patterns corresponding to the words in the string. Although the algorithms differ greatly in details of implementation, storage requirements, etc., they all have essentially the same performance in that their ability to match the unknown string is related to how well words spoken in isolation can match their counterparts in connected speech. For low rates of articulation (i.e., about 100-130 words per minute) the performance of such connected word recognition systems is excellent. However, as the articulation rate approaches that of continuous discourse (180-300 words per minute) the performance of such connected word recognizers falls dramatically. To partially alleviate these problems a modified training procedure was devised in which multiple versions of each reference word were used. The multiple versions included an isolated form for each word, and 2 versions of the word extracted from the middle of 3 word sequences. One of these embedded reference patterns represented a noncontextual token of the word (i.e., spoken in a format where the words on either side had minimal effect on the acoustic properties at the boundaries), and the second represented a highly contextual token of the word. It was shown that a training algorithm could be devised to obtain these embedded reference tokens, and that when using the multiple reference patterns, the performance in a speaker trained system was greatly improved at faster talking rates. In this paper we show how the embedded training technique can be extended to the case of speaker, independent connected word recognizers. In particular, we show that improved recognition performance on connected digit strings is obtained by using standard clustering procedures on the embedded tokens to give a speaker-independent embedded reference set. We also show that the use of the K-nearest neighbor (KNN) rule leads to additional real improvements in performance for recognizing strings of connected digits. A discussion of the types of problems that remain is given.

A Two-Dimensional Quantizer for Coding of Digital Imagery

A spatial domain image coding method which is computationally straightforward and requires only one pass through the incoming data is presented. The technique is based on approximating a near-optimal three-level uniform quantizer over a spatially local region of the image. This method can maintain single pixel resolution and is therefore applicable to wide bandwidth data. Results of applying this procedure to a variety of images are given, along with comparisons to some other image coding techniques. A variablelength code word version providing increased compression is also developed.

Considerations in applying clustering techniques to speaker-independent word recognition

Recent work at Bell Laboratories has demonstrated the utility of applying sophisticated pattern recognition techniques to obtain a set of speaker-independent word templates for an isolated word recognition system [Levinson et al.,IEEE Trans. Acoust. Speech Signal Process. ASSP-27 (2), 134--141 (1979); Rabiner et al., IEEE Trans. Acoust. Speech Signal Process.(in press)]. In these studies, it was shown that a careful experimenter could guide the clustering algorithms to choose a small set of templates that were representative of a large number of replications for each word in the vocabulary. Subsequent word recognition tests verified that the templates chosen were indeed representative of a fairly large population of talkers. Given the success of this approach, the next important step is to investigate fully automatic techniques for clustering multiple versions of a single word into a set of speaker-independent word templates. Two such techniques are described in this paper. The first method uses distance data (between replications of a word) to segment the population into stable clusters. The word template is obtained as either the cluster minimax, or as an averaged version of all the elements in the cluster. The second method is a variation of the one described by Rabiner [IEEE Trans. Acoust. Speech Signal Process. ASSP-26 (3), 34--42 (1978)] in which averaging techniques are directly combined with the nearest neighbor rule to simultaneously define both the word template (i.e., the cluster center) and the elements in the cluster. Experimental data show the first method to be superior to the second method when three or more clusters per word are used in the recognition task.

The role of medial consonant transitions in word perception.

In VCV nonsense forms (such as /epsilondepsilon/, while both the CV transition and the VC transition are perceptible in isolation, the CV transition dominates identification of the stop consonant. Thus, the question arises, what role, if any, do VC transitions play in word perception? Stimuli were two-syllable English words in which the medial consonant was either a stop or a fricative (e.g., "feeding" and "gravy"). Each word was constructed in three ways: (1) the VC transition was incompatible with the CV in either place, manner of articulation, or both; (2) the VC transition was eliminated and the steady-state portion of first vowel was substituted in its place; and (3) the original word. All versions of a particular word were identical with respect to duration, pitch contour, and amplitude envelope. While an intelligibility test revealed no differences among the three conditions, data from a paired comparison preference task and an unspeeded lexical decision task indicated that incompatible VC transitions hindered word perception, but lack of VC transitions did not. However, there were clear differences among the three conditions in the speeded lexical decision task for word stimuli, but not for nonword stimuli that were constructed in an analogous fashion. We discuss the use of lexical tasks for speech quality assessment and possible processes by which listeners recognize spoken words.

Some English Loan-words in Gujarati

The following loan-words are taken from two newspapers, the Kheḍā vartamān of 5th December, 1928, and the Gujarat Times of 1st January, 1929.The editors are both Hindus and the readers were for the most part Hindu also. The newspapers contain only a few words in English characters, perhaps eight or nine in each number. The proportion of English loan-words to the total may be about 2 per cent, but this is inevitably only a rough estimate.The words have been transliterated faithfully with two exceptions—(1) Inherent a of final consonants is omitted.(2) Inherent a (not final) is omitted, if not pronounced. In such cases it is indicated by a dot. In Gujarati, however, there are certain consonants which do not alter their form when conjunct, such as “ ka ”. For practical purposes, this is of little importance, as conjunct consonants are often not used, when permissible.In preparing the list some very uncommon words and transitory political expressions like “Sāyaman gobek” have been omitted. There are one or two words included, which are not English, e.g. peseṭā and Mādrīd, which have been included for their interest. Peseṭā has probably been taken for the English version of the Spanish word, as the t is retroflex. It is not clear, however, why the dental d is used for Mādrīd.The articles in which few, if any, loan-words occur, are the political leading articles, a notice of a meeting of Brahmans, and a serial story about old Rajputana.

A Strange Version of the First Word from the Cross

A Strange Version of the First Word from the Cross