Phoneme Similarity and Confusability

Science.gov (United States)

Bailey, T.M.; Hahn, U.

2005-01-01

Similarity between component speech sounds influences language processing in numerous ways. Explanation and detailed prediction of linguistic performance consequently requires an understanding of these basic similarities. The research reported in this paper contrasts two broad classes of approach to the issue of phoneme similarity-theoretically…

Parent-administered computer-assisted tutoring targeting letter-sound knowledge: Evaluation via multiple-baseline across three preschool students.

Science.gov (United States)

DuBois, Matthew R; Volpe, Robert J; Burns, Matthew K; Hoffman, Jessica A

2016-12-01

Knowledge of letters sounds has been identified as a primary objective of preschool instruction and intervention. Despite this designation, large disparities exist in the number of letter sounds children know at school entry. Enhancing caregivers' ability to teach their preschool-aged children letter sounds may represent an effective practice for reducing this variability and ensuring that more children are prepared to experience early school success. This study used a non-concurrent multiple-baseline-across-participants design to evaluate the effectiveness of caregivers (N=3) delivering a computer-assisted tutoring program (Tutoring Buddy) targeting letter sound knowledge to their preschool-aged children. Visual analyses and effect size estimates derived from Percentage of All Non-Overlapping Data (PAND) statistics indicated consistent results for letter sound acquisition, as 6weeks of intervention yielded large effects for letter sound knowledge (LSK) across all three children. Large effect sizes were also found for letter sound fluency (LSF) and nonsense word fluency (NWF) for two children. All three caregivers rated the intervention as highly usable and were able to administer it with high levels of fidelity. Taken together, the results of the present study found Tutoring Buddy to be an effective, simple, and usable way for the caregivers to support their children's literacy development. Copyright © 2016 Society for the Study of School Psychology. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Deficits in Letter-Speech Sound Associations but Intact Visual Conflict Processing in Dyslexia: Results from a Novel ERP-Paradigm

OpenAIRE

Bakos, Sarolta; Landerl, Karin; Bartling, Jürgen; Schulte-Körne, Gerd; Moll, Kristina

2017-01-01

The reading and spelling deficits characteristic of developmental dyslexia (dyslexia) have been related to problems in phonological processing and in learning associations between letters and speech-sounds. Even when children with dyslexia have learned the letters and their corresponding speech sounds, letter-speech sound associations might still be less automatized compared to children with age-adequate literacy skills. In order to examine automaticity in letter-speech sound associations and...

What Does the Right Hemisphere Know about Phoneme Categories?

Science.gov (United States)

Wolmetz, Michael; Poeppel, David; Rapp, Brenda

2011-01-01

Innate auditory sensitivities and familiarity with the sounds of language give rise to clear influences of phonemic categories on adult perception of speech. With few exceptions, current models endorse highly left-hemisphere-lateralized mechanisms responsible for the influence of phonemic category on speech perception, based primarily on results…

Parietotemporal Stimulation Affects Acquisition of Novel Grapheme-Phoneme Mappings in Adult Readers

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jessica W. Younger

2018-03-01

Full Text Available Neuroimaging work from developmental and reading intervention research has suggested a cause of reading failure may be lack of engagement of parietotemporal cortex during initial acquisition of grapheme-phoneme (letter-sound mappings. Parietotemporal activation increases following grapheme-phoneme learning and successful reading intervention. Further, stimulation of parietotemporal cortex improves reading skill in lower ability adults. However, it is unclear whether these improvements following stimulation are due to enhanced grapheme-phoneme mapping abilities. To test this hypothesis, we used transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS to manipulate parietotemporal function in adult readers as they learned a novel artificial orthography with new grapheme-phoneme mappings. Participants received real or sham stimulation to the left inferior parietal lobe (L IPL for 20 min before training. They received explicit training over the course of 3 days on 10 novel words each day. Learning of the artificial orthography was assessed at a pre-training baseline session, the end of each of the three training sessions, an immediate post-training session and a delayed post-training session about 4 weeks after training. Stimulation interacted with baseline reading skill to affect learning of trained words and transfer to untrained words. Lower skill readers showed better acquisition, whereas higher skill readers showed worse acquisition, when training was paired with real stimulation, as compared to readers who received sham stimulation. However, readers of all skill levels showed better maintenance of trained material following parietotemporal stimulation, indicating a differential effect of stimulation on initial learning and consolidation. Overall, these results indicate that parietotemporal stimulation can enhance learning of new grapheme-phoneme relationships in readers with lower reading skill. Yet, while parietotemporal function is critical to new

Parietotemporal Stimulation Affects Acquisition of Novel Grapheme-Phoneme Mappings in Adult Readers

Science.gov (United States)

Younger, Jessica W.; Booth, James R.

2018-01-01

Neuroimaging work from developmental and reading intervention research has suggested a cause of reading failure may be lack of engagement of parietotemporal cortex during initial acquisition of grapheme-phoneme (letter-sound) mappings. Parietotemporal activation increases following grapheme-phoneme learning and successful reading intervention. Further, stimulation of parietotemporal cortex improves reading skill in lower ability adults. However, it is unclear whether these improvements following stimulation are due to enhanced grapheme-phoneme mapping abilities. To test this hypothesis, we used transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to manipulate parietotemporal function in adult readers as they learned a novel artificial orthography with new grapheme-phoneme mappings. Participants received real or sham stimulation to the left inferior parietal lobe (L IPL) for 20 min before training. They received explicit training over the course of 3 days on 10 novel words each day. Learning of the artificial orthography was assessed at a pre-training baseline session, the end of each of the three training sessions, an immediate post-training session and a delayed post-training session about 4 weeks after training. Stimulation interacted with baseline reading skill to affect learning of trained words and transfer to untrained words. Lower skill readers showed better acquisition, whereas higher skill readers showed worse acquisition, when training was paired with real stimulation, as compared to readers who received sham stimulation. However, readers of all skill levels showed better maintenance of trained material following parietotemporal stimulation, indicating a differential effect of stimulation on initial learning and consolidation. Overall, these results indicate that parietotemporal stimulation can enhance learning of new grapheme-phoneme relationships in readers with lower reading skill. Yet, while parietotemporal function is critical to new learning, its role in

Functions of graphemic and phonemic codes in visual word-recognition.

Science.gov (United States)

Meyer, D E; Schvaneveldt, R W; Ruddy, M G

1974-03-01

Previous investigators have argued that printed words are recognized directly from visual representations and/or phonological representations obtained through phonemic recoding. The present research tested these hypotheses by manipulating graphemic and phonemic relations within various pairs of letter strings. Ss in two experiments classified the pairs as words or nonwords. Reaction times and error rates were relatively small for word pairs (e.g., BRIBE-TRIBE) that were both graphemically, and phonemically similar. Graphemic similarity alone inhibited performance on other word pairs (e.g., COUCH-TOUCH). These and other results suggest that phonological representations play a significant role in visual word recognition and that there is a dependence between successive phonemic-encoding operations. An encoding-bias model is proposed to explain the data.

Thomas Merton’s poetics of translation in his letters to writers

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Marcela María Raggio

2016-05-01

Full Text Available This article explores Thomas Merton’s poetics of translation as reflected in his letters to writers. There, Merton expresses his ideas on poetic translation, the methods and the experience of approaching foreign literature through translation. Then, a translation analysis of a sample revises the connection between Merton’s poetics and practice of translation.

Letter-Transposition Effects Are Not Universal: The Impact of Transposing Letters in Hebrew

Science.gov (United States)

Velan, Hadas; Frost, Ram

2009-01-01

We examined the effects of letter-transposition in Hebrew in three masked-priming experiments. Hebrew, like English has an alphabetic orthography where sequential and contiguous letter strings represent phonemes. However, being a Semitic language it has a non-concatenated morphology that is based on root derivations. Experiment 1 showed that…

"Letter-Space": Typographic Translations of Urban Place

Science.gov (United States)

Naismith, Jacqueline; O'Sullivan, Annette

2011-01-01

This article discusses a Bachelor of Design honours year typography project in the medium of letterpress. The "Letter-space" project positioned letterpress as a textual, spatial and structural visual language, through which the experiences and meanings of a local urban place were translated, mapped and given form through typographic design. We…

Relating Pitch Awareness to Phonemic Awareness in Children: Implications for Tone-Deafness and Dyslexia

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Psyche eLoui

2011-05-01

Full Text Available Language and music are complex cognitive and neural functions that rely on awareness of one’s own sound productions. Information on the awareness of vocal pitch, and its relation to phonemic awareness which is crucial for learning to read, will be important for understanding the relationship between tone-deafness and developmental language disorders such as dyslexia. Here we show that phonemic awareness skills are positively correlated with pitch perception-production skills in children. Children between the ages of 7 and 9 were tested on pitch perception and production, phonemic awareness, and IQ. Results showed a significant positive correlation between pitch perception-production and phonemic awareness, suggesting that the relationship between musical and linguistic sound processing is intimately linked to awareness at the level of pitch and phonemes. Since tone-deafness is a pitch-related impairment and dyslexia is a deficit of phonemic awareness, we suggest that dyslexia and tone-deafness may have a shared and/or common neural basis.

Catch Up® Literacy: Evaluation Report and Executive Summary

Science.gov (United States)

Rutt, Simon; Kettlewell, Kelly; Bernardinelli, Daniele

2015-01-01

Catch Up® Literacy is a structured one-to-one literacy intervention for pupils between the ages of 6 and 14 who are struggling to learn to read. It teaches pupils to blend phonemes (combine letter sounds into words), segment phonemes (separate words into letter sounds), and memorise particular words so they can be understood without needing to use…

The absoluteness of semantic processing: lessons from the analysis of temporal clusters in phonemic verbal fluency.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Isabelle Vonberg

Full Text Available For word production, we may consciously pursue semantic or phonological search strategies, but it is uncertain whether we can retrieve the different aspects of lexical information independently from each other. We therefore studied the spread of semantic information into words produced under exclusively phonemic task demands.42 subjects participated in a letter verbal fluency task, demanding the production of as many s-words as possible in two minutes. Based on curve fittings for the time courses of word production, output spurts (temporal clusters considered to reflect rapid lexical retrieval based on automatic activation spread, were identified. Semantic and phonemic word relatedness within versus between these clusters was assessed by respective scores (0 meaning no relation, 4 maximum relation.Subjects produced 27.5 (±9.4 words belonging to 6.7 (±2.4 clusters. Both phonemically and semantically words were more related within clusters than between clusters (phon: 0.33±0.22 vs. 0.19±0.17, p<.01; sem: 0.65±0.29 vs. 0.37±0.29, p<.01. Whereas the extent of phonemic relatedness correlated with high task performance, the contrary was the case for the extent of semantic relatedness.The results indicate that semantic information spread occurs, even if the consciously pursued word search strategy is purely phonological. This, together with the negative correlation between semantic relatedness and verbal output suits the idea of a semantic default mode of lexical search, acting against rapid task performance in the given scenario of phonemic verbal fluency. The simultaneity of enhanced semantic and phonemic word relatedness within the same temporal cluster boundaries suggests an interaction between content and sound-related information whenever a new semantic field has been opened.

Effects of emotion on different phoneme classes

Science.gov (United States)

Lee, Chul Min; Yildirim, Serdar; Bulut, Murtaza; Busso, Carlos; Kazemzadeh, Abe; Lee, Sungbok; Narayanan, Shrikanth

2004-10-01

This study investigates the effects of emotion on different phoneme classes using short-term spectral features. In the research on emotion in speech, most studies have focused on prosodic features of speech. In this study, based on the hypothesis that different emotions have varying effects on the properties of the different speech sounds, we investigate the usefulness of phoneme-class level acoustic modeling for automatic emotion classification. Hidden Markov models (HMM) based on short-term spectral features for five broad phonetic classes are used for this purpose using data obtained from recordings of two actresses. Each speaker produces 211 sentences with four different emotions (neutral, sad, angry, happy). Using the speech material we trained and compared the performances of two sets of HMM classifiers: a generic set of ``emotional speech'' HMMs (one for each emotion) and a set of broad phonetic-class based HMMs (vowel, glide, nasal, stop, fricative) for each emotion type considered. Comparison of classification results indicates that different phoneme classes were affected differently by emotional change and that the vowel sounds are the most important indicator of emotions in speech. Detailed results and their implications on the underlying speech articulation will be discussed.

Teaching Letter Sounds in Preschool, Kindergarten, and Special Education: Five Strategies to Ease the Memory Burden

Science.gov (United States)

Gordon, Lynn

2010-01-01

Teaching students the most frequent sounds of the alphabet letters is the first crucial step in good phonics instruction. But beginning letter and sound lessons, especially if poorly taught or too rapidly paced, can be overwhelming and confusing for some young children and struggling readers. How can we simplify the cognitive task for such…

Phonemes as short time cognitive components

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Feng, Ling; Hansen, Lars Kai

2006-01-01

are the smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a language. Generalizable components were found deriving from phonemes based on homomorphic filtering features with basic time scale (20 msec). We sparsified the features based on energy as a preprocessing means to eliminate the intrinsic noise. Independent...

Automatic phoneme category selectivity in the dorsal auditory stream.

Science.gov (United States)

Chevillet, Mark A; Jiang, Xiong; Rauschecker, Josef P; Riesenhuber, Maximilian

2013-03-20

Debates about motor theories of speech perception have recently been reignited by a burst of reports implicating premotor cortex (PMC) in speech perception. Often, however, these debates conflate perceptual and decision processes. Evidence that PMC activity correlates with task difficulty and subject performance suggests that PMC might be recruited, in certain cases, to facilitate category judgments about speech sounds (rather than speech perception, which involves decoding of sounds). However, it remains unclear whether PMC does, indeed, exhibit neural selectivity that is relevant for speech decisions. Further, it is unknown whether PMC activity in such cases reflects input via the dorsal or ventral auditory pathway, and whether PMC processing of speech is automatic or task-dependent. In a novel modified categorization paradigm, we presented human subjects with paired speech sounds from a phonetic continuum but diverted their attention from phoneme category using a challenging dichotic listening task. Using fMRI rapid adaptation to probe neural selectivity, we observed acoustic-phonetic selectivity in left anterior and left posterior auditory cortical regions. Conversely, we observed phoneme-category selectivity in left PMC that correlated with explicit phoneme-categorization performance measured after scanning, suggesting that PMC recruitment can account for performance on phoneme-categorization tasks. Structural equation modeling revealed connectivity from posterior, but not anterior, auditory cortex to PMC, suggesting a dorsal route for auditory input to PMC. Our results provide evidence for an account of speech processing in which the dorsal stream mediates automatic sensorimotor integration of speech and may be recruited to support speech decision tasks.

Is School a Better Environment than Home for Digital Game-Based Learning? The Case of GraphoGame

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Miia Ronimus

2015-01-01

Full Text Available This study investigated how the use of an online reading game differs in home and school environments. First and second graders (N = 194 participated in an 8-week training during which they used the reading program GraphoGame either at home or at school under the supervision of parents or teachers. Child participants were recommended by parents and teachers recruited from the list of GraphoGame users, and adults decided whether the training took place at home or at school. We measured the frequency and duration of playing, children’s engagement, development of reading skill and reading interest, and adult supportive involvement. The results revealed that children who played GraphoGame at school showed higher engagement and used it more frequently than players at home. Although teachers were more involved in the children’s playing than were parents, only parental involvement was significantly associated with a child’s engagement during training and the child’s learning outcomes.

AFRREV LALIGENS

African Journals Online (AJOL)

User

phoneme as a mental or psychological reality but for the sake of this study, ..... Phonetics like many scientific subjects such as mathematics, physics, chemistry ... one think of the phoneme not as “the sounds that letters make” but the sounds.

Learning to Read and Spell in Persian: A Cross-Sectional Study from Grades 1 to 4

Science.gov (United States)

Rahbari, Noriyeh; Senechal, Monique

2010-01-01

We investigated the reading and spelling development of 140 Persian children attending Grades 1-4 in Iran. Persian has very consistent letter-sound correspondences, but it varies in transparency because 3 of its 6 vowel phonemes are not marked with letters. Persian also varies in spelling consistency because 6 phonemes have more than one…

The voiced pronunciation of initial phonemes predicts the gender of names.

Science.gov (United States)

Slepian, Michael L; Galinsky, Adam D

2016-04-01

Although it is known that certain names gain popularity within a culture because of historical events, it is unknown how names become associated with different social categories in the first place. We propose that vocal cord vibration during the pronunciation of an initial phoneme plays a critical role in explaining which names are assigned to males versus females. This produces a voiced gendered name effect, whereby voiced phonemes (vibration of the vocal cords) are more associated with male names, and unvoiced phonemes (no vibration of the vocal cords) are more associated with female names. Eleven studies test this association between voiced names and gender (a) using 270 million names (more than 80,000 unique names) given to children over 75 years, (b) names across 2 cultures (the U.S. and India), and (c) hundreds of novel names. The voiced gendered name effect was mediated through how hard or soft names sounded, and moderated by gender stereotype endorsement. Although extensive work has demonstrated morphological and physical cues to gender (e.g., facial, bodily, vocal), this work provides a systematic account of name-based cues to gender. Overall, the current research extends work on sound symbolism to names; the way in which a name sounds can be symbolically related to stereotypes associated with its social category. (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

The level of audiovisual print-speech integration deficits in dyslexia.

Science.gov (United States)

Kronschnabel, Jens; Brem, Silvia; Maurer, Urs; Brandeis, Daniel

2014-09-01

The classical phonological deficit account of dyslexia is increasingly linked to impairments in grapho-phonological conversion, and to dysfunctions in superior temporal regions associated with audiovisual integration. The present study investigates mechanisms of audiovisual integration in typical and impaired readers at the critical developmental stage of adolescence. Congruent and incongruent audiovisual as well as unimodal (visual only and auditory only) material was presented. Audiovisual presentations were single letters and three-letter (consonant-vowel-consonant) stimuli accompanied by matching or mismatching speech sounds. Three-letter stimuli exhibited fast phonetic transitions as in real-life language processing and reading. Congruency effects, i.e. different brain responses to congruent and incongruent stimuli were taken as an indicator of audiovisual integration at a phonetic level (grapho-phonological conversion). Comparisons of unimodal and audiovisual stimuli revealed basic, more sensory aspects of audiovisual integration. By means of these two criteria of audiovisual integration, the generalizability of audiovisual deficits in dyslexia was tested. Moreover, it was expected that the more naturalistic three-letter stimuli are superior to single letters in revealing group differences. Electrophysiological and hemodynamic (EEG and fMRI) data were acquired simultaneously in a simple target detection task. Applying the same statistical models to event-related EEG potentials and fMRI responses allowed comparing the effects detected by the two techniques at a descriptive level. Group differences in congruency effects (congruent against incongruent) were observed in regions involved in grapho-phonological processing, including the left inferior frontal and angular gyri and the inferotemporal cortex. Importantly, such differences also emerged in superior temporal key regions. Three-letter stimuli revealed stronger group differences than single letters. No

A randomized controlled trial on the beneficial effects of training letter-speech sound integration on reading fluency in children with dyslexia

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Fraga González, G.; Žarić, G.; Tijms, J.; Bonte, M.; Blomert, L.; van der Molen, M.W.

2015-01-01

A recent account of dyslexia assumes that a failure to develop automated letter-speech sound integration might be responsible for the observed lack of reading fluency. This study uses a pre-test-training-post-test design to evaluate the effects of a training program based on letter-speech sound

An exploratory study of early letter-sound knowledge in a low socio-economic context in South Africa

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Shelley O'Carroll

2011-05-01

Full Text Available This paper explores one aspect of early literacy development in a low socio-economic context in South Africa. Assessments conducted with a sample of children from two disadvantaged communities in Cape Town indicated that in this context, almost half of the learners entering Grade One were unable to recognise any letters. A Grade R intervention conducted by volunteers showed that children from this context were able to learn letter-sounds in Grade R through a programme that focused on teaching letter-sounds in the context of building language skills, emergent writing and concepts about print. In order to strengthen the effectiveness of the intervention, the volunteer programme was supplemented by support for the Grade R teacher and teaching assistant. Follow-up assessments of one of the intervention groups at the end of Grade One revealed significant correlations between early Grade One letter knowledge and end of Grade One word reading and spelling skills. The findings of this exploratory study are in line with research that shows the importance of letter-sound knowledge in the earliest stages of learning to read. This raises concerns about the historical lack of emphasis in the Grade R curriculum on this aspect of early literacy development. Although the study has a narrow focus and conclusions cannot be drawn about other aspects of early literacy learning in this context, the results suggest an urgent need for quality Grade R teacher training programmes with a specific focus on emergent literacy.

GraphoGame SI : the development of a technology-enhanced literacy learning tool for Standard Indonesian

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Borleffs, Elisabeth; Glatz, Toivo; Daulay, Debby A.; Richardson, Ulla; Zwarts, Frans; Maassen, Ben A. M.

2017-01-01

Early intervention programs are generally considered the most efficient and beneficial approach to providing support to struggling beginning readers. This paper discusses the theoretical background, development, and design of, as well as the first results obtained with, GraphoGame for Standard

Grapho-Lexical Features of Selected Poems in Niyi Osundare's Village Voices

OpenAIRE

Segun Aminu; Samson Oluwagbenga

2017-01-01

Language is a means of human communication. Indeed, the skillful use of language in poetry, one of the genres of literature, is significant for interpretation. Thus, language is regarded as an indispensable tool in the world of poetry. It is imperative to note that Niyi Osundare’s poems are unique and outstanding among his contemporaries because of his style. Therefore, this paper examines how Niyi Osundare creatively employs grapho-lexical features to convey his socio-political messages in h...

Pronunciation modelling of foreign words for Sepedi ASR

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Modipa, T

2010-11-01

Full Text Available , specifically: (1) using language-specific letter-to-sound rules to predict the pronunciation of each word (based on the language of the word) and mapping foreign phonemes to Sepedi phonemes using linguistically motivated mappings, (2) experimenting with data...

Elegant grapheme-phoneme correspondence: a periodic chart and singularity generalization unify decoding.

Science.gov (United States)

Gates, Louis

2017-12-11

The accompanying article introduces highly transparent grapheme-phoneme relationships embodied within a Periodic table of decoding cells, which arguably presents the quintessential transparent decoding elements. The study then folds these cells into one highly transparent but simply stated singularity generalization-this generalization unifies the decoding cells (97% transparency). Deeper, the periodic table and singularity generalization together highlight the connectivity of the periodic cells. Moreover, these interrelated cells, coupled with the singularity generalization, clarify teaching targets and enable efficient learning of the letter-sound code. This singularity generalization, in turn, serves as a model for creating unified but easily stated subordinate generalizations for any one of the transparent cells or groups of cells shown within the tables. The article then expands the periodic cells into two tables of teacher-ready sample word lists-one table includes sample words for the basic and phonogram vowel cells, and the other table embraces word samples for the transparent consonant cells. The paper concludes with suggestions for teaching the cellular transparency embedded within reoccurring isolated words and running text to promote decoding automaticity of the periodic cells.

Grapho-Morphological Awareness in Spanish L2 Reading: How Do Learners Use This Metalinguistic Skill?

Science.gov (United States)

Miguel, Nausica Marcos

2012-01-01

This paper contributes to the literature on the transferability of grapho-morphological awareness (GMA) for second language (L2) learners by analysing L2 learners' knowledge of morphology in reading. GMA helps readers to identify grammatical categories, infer meanings of unfamiliar words, and access stored lexical information. Previous research…

Dynamic Assessment of Phonological Awareness for Children with Speech Sound Disorders

Science.gov (United States)

Gillam, Sandra Laing; Ford, Mikenzi Bentley

2012-01-01

The current study was designed to examine the relationships between performance on a nonverbal phoneme deletion task administered in a dynamic assessment format with performance on measures of phoneme deletion, word-level reading, and speech sound production that required verbal responses for school-age children with speech sound disorders (SSDs).…

Phonemes: Lexical access and beyond.

Science.gov (United States)

Kazanina, Nina; Bowers, Jeffrey S; Idsardi, William

2018-04-01

Phonemes play a central role in traditional theories as units of speech perception and access codes to lexical representations. Phonemes have two essential properties: they are 'segment-sized' (the size of a consonant or vowel) and abstract (a single phoneme may be have different acoustic realisations). Nevertheless, there is a long history of challenging the phoneme hypothesis, with some theorists arguing for differently sized phonological units (e.g. features or syllables) and others rejecting abstract codes in favour of representations that encode detailed acoustic properties of the stimulus. The phoneme hypothesis is the minority view today. We defend the phoneme hypothesis in two complementary ways. First, we show that rejection of phonemes is based on a flawed interpretation of empirical findings. For example, it is commonly argued that the failure to find acoustic invariances for phonemes rules out phonemes. However, the lack of invariance is only a problem on the assumption that speech perception is a bottom-up process. If learned sublexical codes are modified by top-down constraints (which they are), then this argument loses all force. Second, we provide strong positive evidence for phonemes on the basis of linguistic data. Almost all findings that are taken (incorrectly) as evidence against phonemes are based on psycholinguistic studies of single words. However, phonemes were first introduced in linguistics, and the best evidence for phonemes comes from linguistic analyses of complex word forms and sentences. In short, the rejection of phonemes is based on a false analysis and a too-narrow consideration of the relevant data.

Eliciting the Dutch loan phoneme /g/ with the Menu Task

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Hamann, S.; de Jonge, A.

2015-01-01

This article introduces the menu task, which can be used to elicit infrequent sounds such as loan phonemes that only occur in a restricted set of words. The menu task is similar to the well-known map task and involves the interaction of two participants to create a menu on the basis of a list of

Phonemic Awareness and the Teaching of Reading. A Position Statement from the Board of Directors of the International Reading Association.

Science.gov (United States)

International Reading Association, Newark, DE.

This position paper considers the complex relation between phonemic awareness and reading. The paper seeks to define phonemic awareness (although there is no single definition), stating that it is typically described as an insight about oral language and in particular about the segmentation of sounds that are used in speech communication. It also…

Reduced neural integration of letters and speech sounds in dyslexic children scales with individual differences in reading fluency.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Gojko Žarić

Full Text Available The acquisition of letter-speech sound associations is one of the basic requirements for fluent reading acquisition and its failure may contribute to reading difficulties in developmental dyslexia. Here we investigated event-related potential (ERP measures of letter-speech sound integration in 9-year-old typical and dyslexic readers and specifically test their relation to individual differences in reading fluency. We employed an audiovisual oddball paradigm in typical readers (n = 20, dysfluent (n = 18 and severely dysfluent (n = 18 dyslexic children. In one auditory and two audiovisual conditions the Dutch spoken vowels/a/and/o/were presented as standard and deviant stimuli. In audiovisual blocks, the letter 'a' was presented either simultaneously (AV0, or 200 ms before (AV200 vowel sound onset. Across the three children groups, vowel deviancy in auditory blocks elicited comparable mismatch negativity (MMN and late negativity (LN responses. In typical readers, both audiovisual conditions (AV0 and AV200 led to enhanced MMN and LN amplitudes. In both dyslexic groups, the audiovisual LN effects were mildly reduced. Most interestingly, individual differences in reading fluency were correlated with MMN latency in the AV0 condition. A further analysis revealed that this effect was driven by a short-lived MMN effect encompassing only the N1 window in severely dysfluent dyslexics versus a longer MMN effect encompassing both the N1 and P2 windows in the other two groups. Our results confirm and extend previous findings in dyslexic children by demonstrating a deficient pattern of letter-speech sound integration depending on the level of reading dysfluency. These findings underscore the importance of considering individual differences across the entire spectrum of reading skills in addition to group differences between typical and dyslexic readers.

Morphology and Spelling in French Students with Dyslexia: The Case of Silent Final Letters

Science.gov (United States)

Quémart, Pauline; Casalis, Séverine

2017-01-01

Spelling is a challenge for individuals with dyslexia. Phoneme-to-grapheme correspondence rules are highly inconsistent in French, which make them very difficult to master, in particular for dyslexics. One recurrent manifestation of this inconsistency is the presence of silent letters at the end of words. Many of these silent letters perform a…

Letter-transposition effects are not universal: The impact of transposing letters in Hebrew.

Science.gov (United States)

Velan, Hadas; Frost, Ram

2009-10-01

We examined the effects of letter transposition in Hebrew in three masked-priming experiments. Hebrew, like English has an alphabetic orthography where sequential and contiguous letter strings represent phonemes. However, being a Semitic language it has a non-concatenated morphology that is based on root derivations. Experiment 1 showed that transposed-letter (TL) root primes inhibited responses to targets derived from the non-transposed root letters, and that this inhibition was unrelated to relative root frequency. Experiment 2 replicated this result and showed that if the transposed letters of the root created a nonsense-root that had no lexical representation, then no inhibition and no facilitation were obtained. Finally, Experiment 3 demonstrated that in contrast to English, French, or Spanish, TL nonword primes did not facilitate recognition of targets, and when the root letters embedded in them consisted of a legal root morpheme, they produced inhibition. These results suggest that lexical space in alphabetic orthographies may be structured very differently in different languages if their morphological structure diverges qualitatively. In Hebrew, lexical space is organized according to root families rather than simple orthographic structure, so that all words derived from the same root are interconnected or clustered together, independent of overall orthographic similarity.

Speaker-specific variability of phoneme durations

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Van Heerden, CJ

2007-11-01

Full Text Available The durations of phonemes varies for different speakers. To this end, the correlations between phonemes across different speakers are studied and a novel approach to predict unknown phoneme durations from the values of known phoneme durations for a...

A Randomized Controlled Trial on The Beneficial Effects of Training Letter-Speech Sound Integration on Reading Fluency in Children with Dyslexia.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Gorka Fraga González

Full Text Available A recent account of dyslexia assumes that a failure to develop automated letter-speech sound integration might be responsible for the observed lack of reading fluency. This study uses a pre-test-training-post-test design to evaluate the effects of a training program based on letter-speech sound associations with a special focus on gains in reading fluency. A sample of 44 children with dyslexia and 23 typical readers, aged 8 to 9, was recruited. Children with dyslexia were randomly allocated to either the training program group (n = 23 or a waiting-list control group (n = 21. The training intensively focused on letter-speech sound mapping and consisted of 34 individual sessions of 45 minutes over a five month period. The children with dyslexia showed substantial reading gains for the main word reading and spelling measures after training, improving at a faster rate than typical readers and waiting-list controls. The results are interpreted within the conceptual framework assuming a multisensory integration deficit as the most proximal cause of dysfluent reading in dyslexia.ISRCTN register ISRCTN12783279.

Phonemic Awareness and Young Children.

Science.gov (United States)

Wasik, Barbara A.

2001-01-01

Asserts that regardless of the method used to teach reading, children first need a strong basis in phonemic awareness. Describes phonemic awareness, differentiates it from phonics, and presents available research findings. Advises on the development of phonemic awareness and creation of a classroom environment supportive of its development. (SD)

What's in a Name? Sound Symbolism and Gender in First Names.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

David M Sidhu

Full Text Available Although the arbitrariness of language has been considered one of its defining features, studies have demonstrated that certain phonemes tend to be associated with certain kinds of meaning. A well-known example is the Bouba/Kiki effect, in which nonwords like bouba are associated with round shapes while nonwords like kiki are associated with sharp shapes. These sound symbolic associations have thus far been limited to nonwords. Here we tested whether or not the Bouba/Kiki effect extends to existing lexical stimuli; in particular, real first names. We found that the roundness/sharpness of the phonemes in first names impacted whether the names were associated with round or sharp shapes in the form of character silhouettes (Experiments 1a and 1b. We also observed an association between femaleness and round shapes, and maleness and sharp shapes. We next investigated whether this association would extend to the features of language and found the proportion of round-sounding phonemes was related to name gender (Analysis of Category Norms. Finally, we investigated whether sound symbolic associations for first names would be observed for other abstract properties; in particular, personality traits (Experiment 2. We found that adjectives previously judged to be either descriptive of a figuratively 'round' or a 'sharp' personality were associated with names containing either round- or sharp-sounding phonemes, respectively. These results demonstrate that sound symbolic associations extend to existing lexical stimuli, providing a new example of non-arbitrary mappings between form and meaning.

Modeling phoneme perception. II: A model of stop consonant discrimination.

Science.gov (United States)

van Hessen, A J; Schouten, M E

1992-10-01

Combining elements from two existing theories of speech sound discrimination, dual process theory (DPT) and trace context theory (TCT), a new theory, called phoneme perception theory, is proposed, consisting of a long-term phoneme memory, a context-coding memory, and a trace memory, each with its own time constants. This theory is tested by means of stop-consonant discrimination data in which interstimulus interval (ISI; values of 100, 300, and 2000 ms) is an important variable. It is shown that discrimination in which labeling plays an important part (2IFC and AX between category) benefits from increased ISI, whereas discrimination in which only sensory traces are compared (AX within category), decreases with increasing ISI. The theory is also tested on speech discrimination data from the literature in which ISI is a variable [Pisoni, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 36, 277-282 (1964); Cowan and Morse, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 79, 500-507 (1986)]. It is concluded that the number of parameters in trace context theory is not sufficient to account for most speech-sound discrimination data and that a few additional assumptions are needed, such as a form of sublabeling, in which subjects encode the quality of a stimulus as a member of a category, and which requires processing time.

Computer-assisted training of phoneme-grapheme correspondence for children who are deaf and hard of hearing: effects on phonological processing skills.

Science.gov (United States)

Nakeva von Mentzer, Cecilia; Lyxell, Björn; Sahlén, Birgitta; Wass, Malin; Lindgren, Magnus; Ors, Marianne; Kallioinen, Petter; Uhlén, Inger

2013-12-01

Examine deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children's phonological processing skills in relation to a reference group of children with normal hearing (NH) at two baselines pre intervention. Study the effects of computer-assisted phoneme-grapheme correspondence training in the children. Specifically analyze possible effects on DHH children's phonological processing skills. The study included 48 children who participated in a computer-assisted intervention study, which focuses on phoneme-grapheme correspondence. Children were 5, 6, and 7 years of age. There were 32 DHH children using cochlear implants (CI) or hearing aids (HA), or both in combination, and 16 children with NH. The study had a quasi-experimental design with three test occasions separated in time by four weeks; baseline 1 and 2 pre intervention, and 3 post intervention. Children performed tasks measuring lexical access, phonological processing, and letter knowledge. All children were asked to practice ten minutes per day at home supported by their parents. NH children outperformed DHH children on the majority of tasks. All children improved their accuracy in phoneme-grapheme correspondence and output phonology as a function of the computer-assisted intervention. For the whole group of children, and specifically for children with CI, a lower initial phonological composite score was associated with a larger phonological change between baseline 2 and post intervention. Finally, 18 DHH children, whereof 11 children with CI, showed specific intervention effects on their phonological processing skills, and strong effect sizes for their improved accuracy of phoneme-grapheme correspondence. For some DHH children phonological processing skills are boosted relatively more by phoneme-grapheme correspondence training. This reflects the reciprocal relationship between phonological change and exposure to and manipulations of letters. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Achieving Sound Beauty in Chinese Translations of English Songs

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

陶薪平

2017-01-01

Song is a kind of combination of language and music. Song achieves its aesthetic information and arouses feeling with its own sentiments and aesthetic effect. However, various kinds of present problems lead to much loss of beauty. Besides, the theoretical works concerning this area is much meager. Translation of English songs into Chinese has been studied from functional equivalence theory or the functionalism. The present thesis offers a new perspective―beauty in sound from Xu Yuanchong's"three beauties principle", aiming to seek possible ways to represent beauty in translation practice, and some typical examples are compared and analyzed.

Sex-Biased Sound Symbolism in English-Language First Names

Science.gov (United States)

Pitcher, Benjamin J.; Mesoudi, Alex; McElligott, Alan G.

2013-01-01

Sexual selection has resulted in sex-based size dimorphism in many mammals, including humans. In Western societies, average to taller stature men and comparatively shorter, slimmer women have higher reproductive success and are typically considered more attractive. This size dimorphism also extends to vocalisations in many species, again including humans, with larger individuals exhibiting lower formant frequencies than smaller individuals. Further, across many languages there are associations between phonemes and the expression of size (e.g. large /a, o/, small /i, e/), consistent with the frequency-size relationship in vocalisations. We suggest that naming preferences are a product of this frequency-size relationship, driving male names to sound larger and female names smaller, through sound symbolism. In a 10-year dataset of the most popular British, Australian and American names we show that male names are significantly more likely to contain larger sounding phonemes (e.g. “Thomas”), while female names are significantly more likely to contain smaller phonemes (e.g. “Emily”). The desire of parents to have comparatively larger, more masculine sons, and smaller, more feminine daughters, and the increased social success that accompanies more sex-stereotyped names, is likely to be driving English-language first names to exploit sound symbolism of size in line with sexual body size dimorphism. PMID:23755148

The selective role of premotor cortex in speech perception: a contribution to phoneme judgements but not speech comprehension.

Science.gov (United States)

Krieger-Redwood, Katya; Gaskell, M Gareth; Lindsay, Shane; Jefferies, Elizabeth

2013-12-01

Several accounts of speech perception propose that the areas involved in producing language are also involved in perceiving it. In line with this view, neuroimaging studies show activation of premotor cortex (PMC) during phoneme judgment tasks; however, there is debate about whether speech perception necessarily involves motor processes, across all task contexts, or whether the contribution of PMC is restricted to tasks requiring explicit phoneme awareness. Some aspects of speech processing, such as mapping sounds onto meaning, may proceed without the involvement of motor speech areas if PMC specifically contributes to the manipulation and categorical perception of phonemes. We applied TMS to three sites-PMC, posterior superior temporal gyrus, and occipital pole-and for the first time within the TMS literature, directly contrasted two speech perception tasks that required explicit phoneme decisions and mapping of speech sounds onto semantic categories, respectively. TMS to PMC disrupted explicit phonological judgments but not access to meaning for the same speech stimuli. TMS to two further sites confirmed that this pattern was site specific and did not reflect a generic difference in the susceptibility of our experimental tasks to TMS: stimulation of pSTG, a site involved in auditory processing, disrupted performance in both language tasks, whereas stimulation of occipital pole had no effect on performance in either task. These findings demonstrate that, although PMC is important for explicit phonological judgments, crucially, PMC is not necessary for mapping speech onto meanings.

Phonemic verbal fluency task in adults with high-level literacy.

Science.gov (United States)

Opasso, Patrícia Romano; Barreto, Simone Dos Santos; Ortiz, Karin Zazo

2016-01-01

To establish normative parameters for the F-A-S form of the phonemic verbal fluency test, in a population of Brazilian Portuguese speaking adults with high-level literacy. The sample comprised 40 male and female volunteers aged 19 to 59 years, and at least 8 years of formal education. Volunteers were first submitted to the Mini-Mental State Examination and the Clock Drawing cognitive screening tests, then to the F-A-S Verbal Phonemic Fluency Test; in this test, examinees were given 60 seconds to generate as many words as possible beginning with each of the three test letters. The means for number of words beginning the letters F, A and S and for total number of words beginning with either letter generated per minute corresponded to 15.3, 14.4, 13.9 and 43.5, respectively. Reference values obtained from young adults with high levels of literacy submitted to the F-A-S Verbal Phonemic Fluency Test in this study were similar to those reported in the international literature. These reference values can be used for clinical assessment of language disorder and neuropsychological evaluation. Obter parâmetros de normalidade na tarefa de fluência verbal fonêmica, versão F-A-S, em uma população de alto letramento de adultos falantes do português brasileiro. A amostra foi constituída por 40 voluntários, de ambos os sexos, com idade entre 19 e 59 anos, e com mais de 8 anos de estudo. Todos os voluntários foram inicialmente submetidos ao Miniexame do Estado Mental e ao Teste do Desenho do Relógio, para fins de rastreio cognitivo, e, então, ao Teste de Fluência Verbal Fonêmica F-A-S. Neste último, os indivíduos foram orientados a produzirem o maior número de palavras que conseguissem, iniciadas com cada uma das três letras ditas pelo examinador, em um intervalo de 60 segundos cada. As médias das palavras produzidas com as letras F-A-S foram as seguintes: "F" = 15,3 palavras por minuto; "A" = 14,4 palavras por minuto; e "S" = 13,9 palavras por minuto. A m

Toward a model of phoneme perception.

Science.gov (United States)

Ardila, A

1993-05-01

Hemisphere asymmetry in phoneme perception was analyzed. Three basic mechanisms underlying phoneme perception are proposed. Left temporal lobe would be specialized in: (1) ultrashort auditory (echoic) memory; (2) higher resolution power for some language frequencies; and (3) recognition of rapidly changing and time-dependent auditory signals. An attempt was made to apply some neurophysiological mechanisms described for the visual system to phoneme recognition in the auditory system.

Pedagogical and didactical rationale of phonemic stimulation process in pre-school age children

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

López, Yudenia

2010-01-01

Full Text Available The paper describes the main results of a regional research problem dealing with education in pre-school age. It examines the effectiveness of the didactic conception of the process of phonemic stimulation in children from 3 to 5 years old. The pedagogical and didactic rationale of the process, viewed from the evolutionary, ontogeny, systemic perspective is explained. Likewise, possible scaffolding is illustrated. The suggested procedures focus the provision of support on a systematic and purposely practice which involve first the discrimination of non-verbal sounds and the discrimi-nation of verbal sound later, aiming to the creation of a phonological consciousness.

Investigating lexical competition and the cost of phonemic restoration

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Balling, Laura Winther; Morris, David Jackson; Tøndering, John

2017-01-01

Due to phonemic restoration, listeners can reliably perceive words when a phoneme is replaced with noise. The cost associated with this process was investigated along with the effect of lexical uniqueness on phonemic restoration, using data from a lexical decision experiment where noise replaced...... phonemes that were either uniqueness points (the phoneme at which a word deviates from all nonrelated words that share the same onset) or phonemes immediately prior to these. A baseline condition was also included with no noise-interrupted stimuli. Results showed a significant cost of phonemic restoration......, with 100 ms longer word identification times and a 14% decrease in word identification accuracy for interrupted stimuli compared to the baseline. Regression analysis of response times from the interrupted conditions showed no effect of whether the interrupted phoneme was a uniqueness point, but significant...

Investigating Lexical Competition and the Cost of Phonemic Restoration

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Balling, Laura Winther; Morris, David Jackson; Tøndering, John

2017-01-01

Due to phonemic restoration, listeners can reliably perceive words when a phoneme is replaced with noise. The cost associated with this process was investigated along with the effect of lexical uniqueness on phonemic restoration, using data from a lexical decision experiment where noise replaced...... phonemes that were either uniqueness points (the phoneme at which a word deviates from all nonrelated words that share the same onset) or phonemes immediately prior to these. A baseline condition was also included with no noise-interrupted stimuli. Results showed a significant cost of phonemic restoration......, with 100 ms longer word identification times and a 14% decrease in word identification accuracy for interrupted stimuli compared to the baseline. Regression analysis of response times from the interrupted conditions showed no effect of whether the interrupted phoneme was a uniqueness point, but significant...

Human phoneme recognition depending on speech-intrinsic variability.

Science.gov (United States)

Meyer, Bernd T; Jürgens, Tim; Wesker, Thorsten; Brand, Thomas; Kollmeier, Birger

2010-11-01

The influence of different sources of speech-intrinsic variation (speaking rate, effort, style and dialect or accent) on human speech perception was investigated. In listening experiments with 16 listeners, confusions of consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) and vowel-consonant-vowel (VCV) sounds in speech-weighted noise were analyzed. Experiments were based on the OLLO logatome speech database, which was designed for a man-machine comparison. It contains utterances spoken by 50 speakers from five dialect/accent regions and covers several intrinsic variations. By comparing results depending on intrinsic and extrinsic variations (i.e., different levels of masking noise), the degradation induced by variabilities can be expressed in terms of the SNR. The spectral level distance between the respective speech segment and the long-term spectrum of the masking noise was found to be a good predictor for recognition rates, while phoneme confusions were influenced by the distance to spectrally close phonemes. An analysis based on transmitted information of articulatory features showed that voicing and manner of articulation are comparatively robust cues in the presence of intrinsic variations, whereas the coding of place is more degraded. The database and detailed results have been made available for comparisons between human speech recognition (HSR) and automatic speech recognizers (ASR).

Contributions of Letter-Speech Sound Learning and Visual Print Tuning to Reading Improvement: Evidence from Brain Potential and Dyslexia Training Studies

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Fraga González, G.; Žarić, G.; Tijms, J.; Bonte, M.; van der Molen, M.W.

We use a neurocognitive perspective to discuss the contribution of learning letter-speech sound (L-SS) associations and visual specialization in the initial phases of reading in dyslexic children. We review findings from associative learning studies on related cognitive skills important for

Extracting pronunciation rules for phonemic variants

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Davel, M

2006-04-01

Full Text Available Various automated techniques can be used to generalise from phonemic lexicons through the extraction of grapheme-to-phoneme rule sets. These techniques are particularly useful when developing pronunciation models for previously unmodelled languages...

Evidence for direct geographic influences on linguistic sounds: the case of ejectives.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Caleb Everett

Full Text Available We present evidence that the geographic context in which a language is spoken may directly impact its phonological form. We examined the geographic coordinates and elevations of 567 language locations represented in a worldwide phonetic database. Languages with phonemic ejective consonants were found to occur closer to inhabitable regions of high elevation, when contrasted to languages without this class of sounds. In addition, the mean and median elevations of the locations of languages with ejectives were found to be comparatively high. The patterns uncovered surface on all major world landmasses, and are not the result of the influence of particular language families. They reflect a significant and positive worldwide correlation between elevation and the likelihood that a language employs ejective phonemes. In addition to documenting this correlation in detail, we offer two plausible motivations for its existence. We suggest that ejective sounds might be facilitated at higher elevations due to the associated decrease in ambient air pressure, which reduces the physiological effort required for the compression of air in the pharyngeal cavity--a unique articulatory component of ejective sounds. In addition, we hypothesize that ejective sounds may help to mitigate rates of water vapor loss through exhaled air. These explications demonstrate how a reduction of ambient air density could promote the usage of ejective phonemes in a given language. Our results reveal the direct influence of a geographic factor on the basic sound inventories of human languages.

Investigating lexical competition and the cost of phonemic restoration.

Science.gov (United States)

Balling, Laura Winther; Morris, David Jackson; Tøndering, John

2017-12-01

Due to phonemic restoration, listeners can reliably perceive words when a phoneme is replaced with noise. The cost associated with this process was investigated along with the effect of lexical uniqueness on phonemic restoration, using data from a lexical decision experiment where noise replaced phonemes that were either uniqueness points (the phoneme at which a word deviates from all nonrelated words that share the same onset) or phonemes immediately prior to these. A baseline condition was also included with no noise-interrupted stimuli. Results showed a significant cost of phonemic restoration, with 100 ms longer word identification times and a 14% decrease in word identification accuracy for interrupted stimuli compared to the baseline. Regression analysis of response times from the interrupted conditions showed no effect of whether the interrupted phoneme was a uniqueness point, but significant effects for several temporal attributes of the stimuli, including the duration and position of the interrupted segment. These results indicate that uniqueness points are not distinct breakpoints in the cohort reduction that occurs during lexical processing, but that temporal properties of the interrupted stimuli are central to auditory word recognition. These results are interpreted in the context of models of speech perception.

Dyslexia and early intervention: what did we learn from the Dutch Dyslexia Programme?

NARCIS (Netherlands)

van der Leij, A.

2013-01-01

Part of the Dutch Dyslexia Programme has been dedicated to early intervention. The question of whether the genetically affected learning mechanism of children who are at familial risk (FR) of developing dyslexia could be influenced by training phoneme awareness and letter-sound associations in the

Oscillatory Dynamics Underlying Perceptual Narrowing of Native Phoneme Mapping from 6 to 12 Months of Age.

Science.gov (United States)

Ortiz-Mantilla, Silvia; Hämäläinen, Jarmo A; Realpe-Bonilla, Teresa; Benasich, April A

2016-11-30

During the first months of life, human infants process phonemic elements from all languages similarly. However, by 12 months of age, as language-specific phonemic maps are established, infants respond preferentially to their native language. This process, known as perceptual narrowing, supports neural representation and thus efficient processing of the distinctive phonemes within the sound environment. Although oscillatory mechanisms underlying processing of native and non-native phonemic contrasts were recently delineated in 6-month-old infants, the maturational trajectory of these mechanisms remained unclear. A group of typically developing infants born into monolingual English families, were followed from 6 to 12 months and presented with English and Spanish syllable contrasts varying in voice-onset time. Brain responses were recorded with high-density electroencephalogram, and sources of event-related potential generators identified at right and left auditory cortices at 6 and 12 months and also at frontal cortex at 6 months. Time-frequency analyses conducted at source level found variations in both θ and γ ranges across age. Compared with 6-month-olds, 12-month-olds' responses to native phonemes showed smaller and faster phase synchronization and less spectral power in the θ range, and increases in left phase synchrony as well as induced high-γ activity in both frontal and left auditory sources. These results demonstrate that infants become more automatized and efficient in processing their native language as they approach 12 months of age via the interplay between θ and γ oscillations. We suggest that, while θ oscillations support syllable processing, γ oscillations underlie phonemic perceptual narrowing, progressively favoring mapping of native over non-native language across the first year of life. During early language acquisition, typically developing infants gradually construct phonemic maps of their native language in auditory cortex. It is well

Letter Knowledge in Parent–Child Conversations

Science.gov (United States)

Robins, Sarah; Treiman, Rebecca; Rosales, Nicole

2014-01-01

Learning about letters is an important component of emergent literacy. We explored the possibility that parent speech provides information about letters, and also that children’s speech reflects their own letter knowledge. By studying conversations transcribed in CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000) between parents and children aged one to five, we found that alphabetic order influenced use of individual letters and letter sequences. The frequency of letters in children’s books influenced parent utterances throughout the age range studied, but children’s utterances only after age two. Conversations emphasized some literacy-relevant features of letters, such as their shapes and association with words, but not letters’ sounds. Describing these patterns and how they change over the preschool years offers important insight into the home literacy environment. PMID:25598577

Sound Effects in Translation

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Mees, Inger M.; Dragsted, Barbara; Gorm Hansen, Inge

2013-01-01

On the basis of a pilot study using speech recognition (SR) software, this paper attempts to illustrate the benefits of adopting an interdisciplinary approach in translator training. It shows how the collaboration between phoneticians, translators and interpreters can (1) advance research, (2) have......), Translog was employed to measure task times. The quality of the products was assessed by three experienced translators, and the number and types of misrecognitions were identified by a phonetician. Results indicate that SR translation provides a potentially useful supplement to written translation...

Early intervention with children of dyslexic parents: Effects of computer-based reading instruction at home on literacy acquisition

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Regtvoort, A.G.F.M.; van der Leij, A.

2007-01-01

The hereditary basis of dyslexia makes it possible to identify children at risk early on. Pre-reading children genetically at risk received during 14 weeks a home- and computer-based training in phonemic awareness and letter-sound relationships in the context of reading instruction. At posttest

The relationship between maternal education and the neural substrates of phoneme perception in children: Interactions between socioeconomic status and proficiency level.

Science.gov (United States)

Conant, Lisa L; Liebenthal, Einat; Desai, Anjali; Binder, Jeffrey R

2017-08-01

Relationships between maternal education (ME) and both behavioral performances and brain activation during the discrimination of phonemic and nonphonemic sounds were examined using fMRI in children with different levels of phoneme categorization proficiency (CP). Significant relationships were found between ME and intellectual functioning and vocabulary, with a trend for phonological awareness. A significant interaction between CP and ME was seen for nonverbal reasoning abilities. In addition, fMRI analyses revealed a significant interaction between CP and ME for phonemic discrimination in left prefrontal cortex. Thus, ME was associated with differential patterns of both neuropsychological performance and brain activation contingent on the level of CP. These results highlight the importance of examining SES effects at different proficiency levels. The pattern of results may suggest the presence of neurobiological differences in the children with low CP that affect the nature of relationships with ME. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

A classification of marked hijaiyah letters' pronunciation using hidden Markov model

Science.gov (United States)

Wisesty, Untari N.; Mubarok, M. Syahrul; Adiwijaya

2017-08-01

Hijaiyah letters are the letters that arrange the words in Al Qur'an consisting of 28 letters. They symbolize the consonant sounds. On the other hand, the vowel sounds are symbolized by harokat/marks. Speech recognition system is a system used to process the sound signal to be data so that it can be recognized by computer. To build the system, some stages are needed i.e characteristics/feature extraction and classification. In this research, LPC and MFCC extraction method, K-Means Quantization vector and Hidden Markov Model classification are used. The data used are the 28 letters and 6 harakat with the total class of 168. After several are testing done, it can be concluded that the system can recognize the pronunciation pattern of marked hijaiyah letter very well in the training data with its highest accuracy of 96.1% using the feature of LPC extraction and 94% using the MFCC. Meanwhile, when testing system is used, the accuracy decreases up to 41%.

The Effectiveness of a Multi Sensory Approach in Improving Letter-Sound Correspondence among Mild Intellectual Disabled Students in State of Kuwait

Science.gov (United States)

Moustafa, Amr; Ghani, Mohd Zuri

2016-01-01

This research examines the effectiveness of multi sensory approach for the purpose of improving the knowledge on English Letter sound correspondence among mild disabled students in the state of Kuwait. The discussion in this study is based on the multisensory approach that could be applied in the teaching of reading skills as well as phonemic…

Phonemic awareness as a pathway to number transcoding

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Júlia Beatriz Lopes-Silva

2014-01-01

Full Text Available Although verbal and numerical abilities have a well-established interaction, the impact of phonological processing on numeric abilities remains elusive. The aim of this study is to investigate the role of phonemic awareness in number processing and to explore its association with other functions such as working memory and magnitude processing. One hundred seventy-two children in 2nd grade to 4th grade were evaluated in terms of their intelligence, number transcoding, phonemic awareness, verbal and visuospatial working memory and number sense (nonsymbolic magnitude comparison performance. All of the children had normal intelligence. Among these measurements of magnitude processing, working memory and phonemic awareness, only the last was retained in regression and path models predicting transcoding ability. Phonemic awareness mediated the influence of verbal working memory on number transcoding. The evidence suggests that phonemic awareness significantly affects number transcoding. Such an association is robust and should be considered in cognitive models of both dyslexia and dyscalculia.

Sound Effects in Translation

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Mees, Inger M.; Dragsted, Barbara; Gorm Hansen, Inge

2015-01-01

), Translog was employed to measure task times. The quality of the products was assessed by three experienced translators, and the number and types of misrecognitions were identified by a phonetician. Results indicate that SR translation provides a potentially useful supplement to written translation...

Cultural and biological evolution of phonemic speech

NARCIS (Netherlands)

de Boer, B.; Freitas, A.A.; Capcarrere, M.S.; Bentley, Peter J.; Johnson, Colin G.; Timmis, Jon

2005-01-01

This paper investigates the interaction between cultural evolution and biological evolution in the emergence of phonemic coding in speech. It is observed that our nearest relatives, the primates, use holistic utterances, whereas humans use phonemic utterances. It can therefore be argued that our

Effects of Dual Coded Multimedia Instruction Employing Image Morphing on Learning a Logographic Language

Science.gov (United States)

Wang, Ling; Blackwell, Aleka Akoyunoglou

2015-01-01

Native speakers of alphabetic languages, which use letters governed by grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules, often find it particularly challenging to learn a logographic language whose writing system employs symbols with no direct sound-to-spelling connection but links to the visual and semantic information. The visuospatial properties of…

ON THE IMPORTANCE OF THE PHONEME THEORY FONEM TEORİSİNİN ÖNEMİ HAKKINDA

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Kerim DEMİRCİ

2011-06-01

Full Text Available Analyzing the structure of language has primarily to do with understanding the sounds that make up language. Saussure’s idea of ‘language is a system of mutually defining entities’ [there is nothing but differences in language] has been the main incentive behind the phoneme theory. The theory in modern terms has been formed especially by Baudouin de Courtenay and linguitsts such as Nikolai Trubetzkoy, Paul Passy, Roman Jakobson, Sergey Karçevski. These scholars made a tremendous contribution to linguistics by setting a system that made possible to differentiate speech sounds and phonemes from all other unprocessed (raw ones. This system laid the foundation of modern phonetic and phonology. This study examines the main features of the phoneme theory that analyzes distinctive features of speech sounds from a systematic approach Dilin yapısını çözümlemek öncelikli olarak dili oluşturan seslerin anlaşılmasıyla ilişkilidir. Ferdinand de Saussure’ün ‘Dilde aykırılıklardan başka bir şey yoktur’ varsayımından yola çıkan dilciler fonem teorisinin ortaya çıkmasını sağlamışlardır. Modern anlamda fonem teorisi, özellikle Rus bilgin Baudouin de Courtenay başta olmak üzere Nikolai Trubetzkoy, Paul Passy, Roman Jakobson, Sergey Karçevski gibi birçok uzmanın çalışmalarıyla şekillenmiştir. Bu bilginler dillerin konuşma seslerini çözümlemeyi mümkün kılan bir sitemi dilbilime kazandırmıştır. Bu sistem modern fonetik ve fonoloji çalışmalarının altyapısını oluşturmuştur. Bu yazıda konuşma seslerine mahsus ayırt edici özelliklerin bilimsel metotlarla tespitine dayanan fonem teorisinin en temel özellikleri ele alınacaktır.

Multidimensional Approach to the Development of a Mandarin Chinese-Oriented Sound Test

Science.gov (United States)

Hung, Yu-Chen; Lin, Chun-Yi; Tsai, Li-Chiun; Lee, Ya-Jung

2016-01-01

Purpose: Because the Ling six-sound test is based on American English phonemes, it can yield unreliable results when administered to non-English speakers. In this study, we aimed to improve specifically the diagnostic palette for Mandarin Chinese users by developing an adapted version of the Ling six-sound test. Method: To determine the set of…

Learning to Read Setswana and English: Cross-Language Transference of Letter Knowledge, Phonological Awareness and Word Reading Skills

Science.gov (United States)

Lekgoko, Olemme; Winskel, Heather

2008-01-01

The current study investigates how beginner readers learn to read Setswana and English, and whether there is cross-language transference of skills between these two languages. Letter knowledge, phoneme awareness and reading of words and pseudowords in both Setswana and English were assessed in 36 Grade 2 children. A complex pattern emerged.…

Detecting Phonemes and Letters in Text: Interactions Between Different Types and Levels of Processes

National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

Schnelder, Vivian

1998-01-01

.... In addition, visual word unitization processes were implicated. Experiments 3 and 4 provided support for the hypothesis that the Gestalt goodness of pattern affected detection errors when subjects searched for letters...

Multisensory speech perception in autism spectrum disorder: From phoneme to whole-word perception.

Science.gov (United States)

Stevenson, Ryan A; Baum, Sarah H; Segers, Magali; Ferber, Susanne; Barense, Morgan D; Wallace, Mark T

2017-07-01

Speech perception in noisy environments is boosted when a listener can see the speaker's mouth and integrate the auditory and visual speech information. Autistic children have a diminished capacity to integrate sensory information across modalities, which contributes to core symptoms of autism, such as impairments in social communication. We investigated the abilities of autistic and typically-developing (TD) children to integrate auditory and visual speech stimuli in various signal-to-noise ratios (SNR). Measurements of both whole-word and phoneme recognition were recorded. At the level of whole-word recognition, autistic children exhibited reduced performance in both the auditory and audiovisual modalities. Importantly, autistic children showed reduced behavioral benefit from multisensory integration with whole-word recognition, specifically at low SNRs. At the level of phoneme recognition, autistic children exhibited reduced performance relative to their TD peers in auditory, visual, and audiovisual modalities. However, and in contrast to their performance at the level of whole-word recognition, both autistic and TD children showed benefits from multisensory integration for phoneme recognition. In accordance with the principle of inverse effectiveness, both groups exhibited greater benefit at low SNRs relative to high SNRs. Thus, while autistic children showed typical multisensory benefits during phoneme recognition, these benefits did not translate to typical multisensory benefit of whole-word recognition in noisy environments. We hypothesize that sensory impairments in autistic children raise the SNR threshold needed to extract meaningful information from a given sensory input, resulting in subsequent failure to exhibit behavioral benefits from additional sensory information at the level of whole-word recognition. Autism Res 2017. © 2017 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Autism Res 2017, 10: 1280-1290. © 2017 International

Early Intervention with Children of Dyslexic Parents: Effects of Computer-Based Reading Instruction at Home on Literacy Acquisition

Science.gov (United States)

Regtvoort, Anne G. F. M.; van der Leij, Aryan

2007-01-01

The hereditary basis of dyslexia makes it possible to identify children at risk early on. Pre-reading children genetically at risk received during 14 weeks a home- and computer-based training in phonemic awareness and letter-sound relationships in the context of reading instruction. At posttest training effects were found for both phonemic…

The Linguistic Affiliation Constraint and Phoneme Recognition in Diglossic Arabic

Science.gov (United States)

Saiegh-Haddad, Elinor; Levin, Iris; Hende, Nareman; Ziv, Margalit

2011-01-01

This study tested the effect of the phoneme's linguistic affiliation (Standard Arabic versus Spoken Arabic) on phoneme recognition among five-year-old Arabic native speaking kindergarteners (N=60). Using a picture selection task of words beginning with the same phoneme, and through careful manipulation of the phonological properties of target…

ORTHOGRAPHIC INTERFERENCE and THE TEACHING OF BRITISH PRONUNCIATION TO TURKISH LEARNERS

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Prof. Dr.Sinan Bayraktaroğlu

2008-10-01

Full Text Available This article is the report of an investigation of pronunciation difficulties of Turkish speakers/learners of English which are due to differences in the sound-letter representations in the orthographies of the two languages, namely called “ortographic interference”. These difficulties are different in nature than those arising from differences in the sound sysytems of Turkish and English.1While Turkish orthography is to a large extent phonemic, i.e. employing a one-to-one letter-sound correspondence (with few exceptions such as k - kâr- ɡ - yegane- gavur, etc., English orthography, on the other hand, represents 46 sounds of the spoken language with 102 single or group of letters in the written language.Such actual difficulties arising from the differences in the orthographic sound-letter represenatations of Turkish and English are classified, evaluated, and their sources are explained through a detailed phonetic analysis as applied to research methods of “contarstive analysis” and “error analysis”, which are effective approaches in the field of Applied Linguistics and Foreign Language Learning.For different categories of difficulties, corrective exercises are recommended for the teaching and learning of English pronunciation to Turkish students.

Letter to Carl Niigeli

Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

We reproduce an english translation of one of these letters below, in which ... contemporary scientific knowledge, and that under the circumstances ... generation it became necessary to limit the numbers because of lack of space, so that, in.

Auditory Phoneme Discrimination in Illiterates: Mismatch Negativity--A Question of Literacy?

Science.gov (United States)

Schaadt, Gesa; Pannekamp, Ann; van der Meer, Elke

2013-01-01

These days, illiteracy is still a major problem. There is empirical evidence that auditory phoneme discrimination is one of the factors contributing to written language acquisition. The current study investigated auditory phoneme discrimination in participants who did not acquire written language sufficiently. Auditory phoneme discrimination was…

What Do Children Do in the Rime-Analogy Task? An Examination of the Skills and Strategies Used by Early Readers.

Science.gov (United States)

Roberts, Lynne; McDougall, Sine

2003-01-01

This study contrasted and compared the extent to which phoneme and rhyme-based skills and letter-sound knowledge predicted 4- and 5-year-olds' performance in the analogy task and in a test of single work reading. Findings suggested that the balance of skills that children drew upon was determined by the demands of the task. Findings pose…

Return to sender: Constantijn Huygens as a man of letters

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Gosseye, L.; Blom, F.; Leerintveld, A.

2013-01-01

Return to Sender takes as its starting point Constantijn Huygens’ letters and shows us the author in his different guises: intimus of René Descartes, translator of John Donne, collector of art, writer of flirtatious love letters and the author of a long consolatory letter-poem for an ailing friend

Phoneme categorization and discrimination in younger and older adults: a comparative analysis of perceptual, lexical, and attentional factors.

Science.gov (United States)

Mattys, Sven L; Scharenborg, Odette

2014-03-01

This study investigates the extent to which age-related language processing difficulties are due to a decline in sensory processes or to a deterioration of cognitive factors, specifically, attentional control. Two facets of attentional control were examined: inhibition of irrelevant information and divided attention. Younger and older adults were asked to categorize the initial phoneme of spoken syllables ("Was it m or n?"), trying to ignore the lexical status of the syllables. The phonemes were manipulated to range in eight steps from m to n. Participants also did a discrimination task on syllable pairs ("Were the initial sounds the same or different?"). Categorization and discrimination were performed under either divided attention (concurrent visual-search task) or focused attention (no visual task). The results showed that even when the younger and older adults were matched on their discrimination scores: (1) the older adults had more difficulty inhibiting lexical knowledge than did younger adults, (2) divided attention weakened lexical inhibition in both younger and older adults, and (3) divided attention impaired sound discrimination more in older than younger listeners. The results confirm the independent and combined contribution of sensory decline and deficit in attentional control to language processing difficulties associated with aging. The relative weight of these variables and their mechanisms of action are discussed in the context of theories of aging and language. (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.

Nurturing Phonemic Awareness and Alphabetic Knowledge in Pre-Kindergartners.

Science.gov (United States)

Steinhaus, Patricia L.

Reading research continues to identify phonemic awareness and knowledge of the alphabetic principle as key factors in the literacy acquisition process and to indicate that they greatly facilitate decoding efforts. While research indicates that phonemic awareness and alphabetic knowledge are necessary to literacy acquisition, many early childhood…

Cascading activation from lexical processing to letter-level processing in written word production.

Science.gov (United States)

Buchwald, Adam; Falconer, Carolyn

2014-01-01

Descriptions of language production have identified processes involved in producing language and the presence and type of interaction among those processes. In the case of spoken language production, consensus has emerged that there is interaction among lexical selection processes and phoneme-level processing. This issue has received less attention in written language production. In this paper, we present a novel analysis of the writing-to-dictation performance of an individual with acquired dysgraphia revealing cascading activation from lexical processing to letter-level processing. The individual produced frequent lexical-semantic errors (e.g., chipmunk → SQUIRREL) as well as letter errors (e.g., inhibit → INBHITI) and had a profile consistent with impairment affecting both lexical processing and letter-level processing. The presence of cascading activation is suggested by lower letter accuracy on words that are more weakly activated during lexical selection than on those that are more strongly activated. We operationalize weakly activated lexemes as those lexemes that are produced as lexical-semantic errors (e.g., lethal in deadly → LETAHL) compared to strongly activated lexemes where the intended target word (e.g., lethal) is the lexeme selected for production.

Spectro-Temporal Analysis of Speech for Spanish Phoneme Recognition

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Sharifzadeh, Sara; Serrano, Javier; Carrabina, Jordi

2012-01-01

are considered. This has improved the recognition performance especially in case of noisy situation and phonemes with time domain modulations such as stops. In this method, the 2D Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) is applied on small overlapped 2D Hamming windowed patches of spectrogram of Spanish phonemes...

Letters of Marcus Antonius Kappus from colonial America IV

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Janez Stanonik

1989-12-01

Full Text Available The letter of Marcus Antonius Kappus which we publish in our present the fourth - continuation of his letters from Colonial America, is not preserved - as the first three letters are - in a manuscript. Instead we find it published in the famous contemporary collection of Jesuitic letters which appeared from 1728 till 1758 under the editorship of Joseph Stöcklein and his successors in Augsburg and Graz under the title Der neue Welt-Bott mit Allerhand Nachrichten derer Missionariorum Soc. Jesu. Kappus' letter can be found in vol. I, part II, p. 86-88 under the number 56. It has never since 1728 been reprinted in German, neither has it ever been published in an English translation. Our reprint of the German text is justified because Stöcklein's collection is generally not available even in the largest libraries, especially in America. An English translation can be useful because of the difficulties the old form of its German with its localisms can cause to its readers.

Evaluation of articulation of Turkish phonemes after removable partial denture application

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Özbeki Murat

2003-01-01

Full Text Available In this study, the adaptation of patients to removable partial dentures was evaluated related to articulation of Turkish phonemes. Articulation of /t,d,n,l,r/, /g,k/, /b,p,m/ and /s,z,Õ,v,f,y,j,h,c/ phonemes were evaluated by three speech pathologists, on records taken from 15 patients before the insertion of a removable partial denture, just after insertion, and one week later. The test consisted of evaluation of phoneme articulation of independent syllables in terms of distortion, omission, substitution, mass effect, hypernasality and hyponasality. Data were evaluated with Cochrane Q, McNemar and Kruskal-Wallis tests. The results showed that for some phonemes, problems in articulation occurred after the insertion of a removable partial denture while for others a significant amelioration was observed after the insertion of a removable partial denture. In general, problems in articulation of evaluated phonemes were resolved after one week of use.

Integrated Phoneme Subspace Method for Speech Feature Extraction

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Park Hyunsin

2009-01-01

Full Text Available Speech feature extraction has been a key focus in robust speech recognition research. In this work, we discuss data-driven linear feature transformations applied to feature vectors in the logarithmic mel-frequency filter bank domain. Transformations are based on principal component analysis (PCA, independent component analysis (ICA, and linear discriminant analysis (LDA. Furthermore, this paper introduces a new feature extraction technique that collects the correlation information among phoneme subspaces and reconstructs feature space for representing phonemic information efficiently. The proposed speech feature vector is generated by projecting an observed vector onto an integrated phoneme subspace (IPS based on PCA or ICA. The performance of the new feature was evaluated for isolated word speech recognition. The proposed method provided higher recognition accuracy than conventional methods in clean and reverberant environments.

Acquisition of Letter Naming Knowledge, Phonological Awareness, and Spelling Knowledge of Kindergarten Children at Risk for Learning to Read

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

David D. Paige

2018-01-01

Full Text Available This study measures letter naming, phonological awareness, and spelling knowledge in 2,100 kindergarten students attending 63 schools within a large, urban school district. Students were assessed across December, February, and May of the kindergarten year. Results found that, by May, 71.8% of students had attained full letter naming knowledge. Phonological awareness emerged more slowly with 48% of students able to reliably segment and blend phonemes in words. Spelling development, a measure of phonics knowledge, found that, by May, 71.8% of students were in the partial-alphabetic phase. A series of regression analyses revealed that by the end of kindergarten both letter naming and phonological awareness were significant predictors of spelling knowledge (b = .332 and .518 for LK and PA, resp., explaining 52.7% of the variance.

Phonetic basis of phonemic paraphasias in aphasia: Evidence for cascading activation.

Science.gov (United States)

Kurowski, Kathleen; Blumstein, Sheila E

2016-02-01

Phonemic paraphasias are a common presenting symptom in aphasia and are thought to reflect a deficit in which selecting an incorrect phonemic segment results in the clear-cut substitution of one phonemic segment for another. The current study re-examines the basis of these paraphasias. Seven left hemisphere-damaged aphasics with a range of left hemisphere lesions and clinical diagnoses including Broca's, Conduction, and Wernicke's aphasia, were asked to produce syllable-initial voiced and voiceless fricative consonants, [z] and [s], in CV syllables followed by one of five vowels [i e a o u] in isolation and in a carrier phrase. Acoustic analyses were conducted focusing on two acoustic parameters signaling voicing in fricative consonants: duration and amplitude properties of the fricative noise. Results show that for all participants, regardless of clinical diagnosis or lesion site, phonemic paraphasias leave an acoustic trace of the original target in the error production. These findings challenge the view that phonemic paraphasias arise from a mis-selection of phonemic units followed by its correct implementation, as traditionally proposed. Rather, they appear to derive from a common mechanism with speech errors reflecting the co-activation of a target and competitor resulting in speech output that has some phonetic properties of both segments. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Contributions of Emergent Literacy Skills to Name Writing, Letter Writing, and Spelling in Preschool Children

Science.gov (United States)

Puranik, Cynthia S.; Lonigan, Christopher J.; Kim, Young-Suk

2011-01-01

The purpose of this study was to examine which emergent literacy skills contribute to preschool children’s emergent writing (name-writing, letter-writing, and spelling) skills. Emergent reading and writing tasks were administered to 296 preschool children aged 4–5 years. Print knowledge and letter-writing skills made positive contributions to name writing; whereas alphabet knowledge, print knowledge, and name writing made positive contributions to letter writing. Both name-writing and letter-writing skills made significant contributions to the prediction of spelling after controlling for age, parental education, print knowledge, phonological awareness, and letter-name and letter-sound knowledge; however, only letter-writing abilities made a significant unique contribution to the prediction of spelling when both letter-writing and name-writing skills were considered together. Name writing reflects knowledge of some letters rather than a broader knowledge of letters that may be needed to support early spelling. Children’s letter-writing skills may be a better indicator of children’s emergent literacy and developing spelling skills than are their name-writing skills at the end of the preschool year. Spelling is a developmentally complex skill beginning in preschool and includes letter writing and blending skills, print knowledge, and letter-name and letter-sound knowledge. PMID:21927537

Serial recall of rhythms and verbal sequences: Impacts of concurrent tasks and irrelevant sound.

Science.gov (United States)

Hall, Debbora; Gathercole, Susan E

2011-08-01

Rhythmic grouping enhances verbal serial recall, yet very little is known about memory for rhythmic patterns. The aim of this study was to compare the cognitive processes supporting memory for rhythmic and verbal sequences using a range of concurrent tasks and irrelevant sounds. In Experiment 1, both concurrent articulation and paced finger tapping during presentation and during a retention interval impaired rhythm recall, while letter recall was only impaired by concurrent articulation. In Experiments 2 and 3, irrelevant sound consisted of irrelevant speech or tones, changing-state or steady-state sound, and syncopated or paced sound during presentation and during a retention interval. Irrelevant speech was more damaging to rhythm and letter recall than was irrelevant tone sound, but there was no effect of changing state on rhythm recall, while letter recall accuracy was disrupted by changing-state sound. Pacing of sound did not consistently affect either rhythm or letter recall. There are similarities in the way speech and rhythms are processed that appear to extend beyond reliance on temporal coding mechanisms involved in serial-order recall.

Detecting regular sound changes in linguistics as events of concerted evolution.

Science.gov (United States)

Hruschka, Daniel J; Branford, Simon; Smith, Eric D; Wilkins, Jon; Meade, Andrew; Pagel, Mark; Bhattacharya, Tanmoy

2015-01-05

Concerted evolution is normally used to describe parallel changes at different sites in a genome, but it is also observed in languages where a specific phoneme changes to the same other phoneme in many words in the lexicon—a phenomenon known as regular sound change. We develop a general statistical model that can detect concerted changes in aligned sequence data and apply it to study regular sound changes in the Turkic language family. Linguistic evolution, unlike the genetic substitutional process, is dominated by events of concerted evolutionary change. Our model identified more than 70 historical events of regular sound change that occurred throughout the evolution of the Turkic language family, while simultaneously inferring a dated phylogenetic tree. Including regular sound changes yielded an approximately 4-fold improvement in the characterization of linguistic change over a simpler model of sporadic change, improved phylogenetic inference, and returned more reliable and plausible dates for events on the phylogenies. The historical timings of the concerted changes closely follow a Poisson process model, and the sound transition networks derived from our model mirror linguistic expectations. We demonstrate that a model with no prior knowledge of complex concerted or regular changes can nevertheless infer the historical timings and genealogical placements of events of concerted change from the signals left in contemporary data. Our model can be applied wherever discrete elements—such as genes, words, cultural trends, technologies, or morphological traits—can change in parallel within an organism or other evolving group. Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Why not model spoken word recognition instead of phoneme monitoring?

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Vroomen, J.; de Gelder, B.

2000-01-01

Norris, McQueen & Cutler present a detailed account of the decision stage of the phoneme monitoring task. However, we question whether this contributes to our understanding of the speech recognition process itself, and we fail to see why phonotactic knowledge is playing a role in phoneme

Graphemes Sharing Phonetic Features Tend to Induce Similar Synesthetic Colors

OpenAIRE

Kang, Mi-Jeong; Kim, Yeseul; Shin, Ji-Young; Kim, Chai-Youn

2017-01-01

Individuals with grapheme-color synesthesia experience idiosyncratic colors when viewing achromatic letters or digits. Despite large individual differences in grapheme-color association, synesthetes tend to associate graphemes sharing a perceptual feature with similar synesthetic colors. Sound has been suggested as one such feature. In the present study, we investigated whether graphemes of which representative phonemes have similar phonetic features tend to be associated with analogous synes...

An orthographic effect in phoneme processing, and its limitations

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Anne eCutler

2012-02-01

Full Text Available To examine whether lexically stored knowledge about spelling influences phoneme evaluation, we conducted three experiments with a low-level phonetic judgement task: phoneme goodness rating. In each experiment, listeners heard phonetic tokens varying along a continuum centred on /s/, occurring finally in isolated word or nonword tokens. An effect of spelling appeared in Experiment 1: Native English speakers’ goodness ratings for the best /s/ tokens were significantly higher in words spelled with S (e.g., bless than in words spelled with C (e.g., voice. No such difference appeared when nonnative speakers rated the same materials in Experiment 2, indicating that the difference could not be due to acoustic characteristics of the S- versus C-words. In Experiment 3, nonwords with lexical neighbours consistently spelled with S (e.g., pless versus with C (e.g., floice failed to elicit orthographic neighbourhood effects; no significant difference appeared in native English speakers’ ratings for the S-consistent versus the C-consistent sets. Obligatory influence of lexical knowledge on phonemic processing would have predicted such neighbourhood effects; the findings are thus better accommodated by models in which phonemic decisions draw strategically upon lexical information.

The letter knowledge assessment tool.

Science.gov (United States)

Pedro, Cassandra; Lousada, Marisa; Pereira, Rita; Hall, Andreia; Jesus, Luis M T

2017-10-10

There is a need to develop letter knowledge assessment tools to characterise the letter knowledge in Portuguese pre-schoolers and to compare it with pre-schoolers from other countries, but there are no tools for this purpose in Portugal. The aim of this paper is to describe the development and validation procedures of the Prova de Avaliação de Competências de Pré-Literacia (PACPL), which assesses letter knowledge. This study includes data that has been gathered in two phases: pilot and main study. In the pilot study, an expert panel of six speech and language pathologists analysed the instrument. Children (n = 216) aged 5;0-7;11 participated in the main study that reports data related to the psychometric characteristics of the PACPL. Content validity, internal consistency, reliability and contributing factors to performance were examined statistically. A modified Bland-Altman method revealed good agreement amongst evaluators. The main study showed that the PACPL has a very good internal consistency and high inter-rater (96.2% of agreement and a Cohen's k value of 0.92) and intra-rater (95.6% of agreement and a Cohen's k value of 0.91) agreement. Construct validity of the PCAPL was also assured (Cronbach's α of 0.982). Significant differences were found between age groups with children increasing their letter knowledge with age. In addition, they were better at identifying than at producing both letter names and letter sounds. The PACPL is a valid and reliable instrument to assess letter knowledge in Portuguese children.

Processing of syllable stress is functionally different from phoneme processing and does not profit from literacy acquisition

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ulrike eSchild

2014-06-01

Full Text Available Speech is characterized by phonemes and prosody. Neurocognitive evidence supports the separate processing of each type of information. Therefore, one might suggest individual development of both pathways. In this study, we examine literacy acquisition in middle childhood. Children become aware of the phonemes in speech at that time and refine phoneme processing when they acquire an alphabetic writing system. We test whether an enhanced sensitivity to phonemes in middle childhood extends to other aspects of the speech signal, such as prosody. To investigate prosodic processing, we used stress priming. Spoken stressed and unstressed syllables (primes preceded spoken German words with stress on the first syllable (targets. We orthogonally varied stress overlap and phoneme overlap between the primes and onsets of the targets. Lexical decisions and Event-Related Potentials (ERPs for the targets were obtained for pre-reading preschoolers, reading pupils and adults. The behavioral and ERP results were largely comparable across all groups. The fastest responses were observed when the first syllable of the target word shared stress and phonemes with the preceding prime. ERP stress priming and ERP phoneme priming started 200 ms after the target word onset. Bilateral ERP stress priming was characterized by enhanced ERP amplitudes for stress overlap. Left-lateralized ERP phoneme priming replicates previously observed reduced ERP amplitudes for phoneme overlap. Groups differed in the strength of the behavioral phoneme priming and in the late ERP phoneme priming effect. The present results show that enhanced phonological processing in middle childhood is restricted to phonemes and does not extend to prosody. These results are indicative of two parallel processing systems for phonemes and prosody that might follow different developmental trajectories in middle childhood as a function of alphabetic literacy.

Universal and Language-Specific Constraints on Phonemic Awareness: Evidence from Russian-Hebrew Bilingual Children

Science.gov (United States)

Saiegh-Haddad, Elinor; Kogan, Nadya; Walters, Joel

2010-01-01

The study tested phonemic awareness in the two languages of Russian (L1)-Hebrew (L2) sequential bilingual children (N = 20) using phoneme deletion tasks where the phoneme to be deleted occurred word initial, word final, as a singleton, or part of a cluster, in long and short words and stressed and unstressed syllables. The experiments were…

THE ( AND ( PHONEMES AS FOSSILIZED PRONUNCIATION ERRORS FOR TURKISH ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHERS AND STUDENTS: UNDOING THE FOSSILIZED PRONUNCIATION ERROR

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mehmet Demirezen

2008-10-01

Full Text Available According to Haycraft, (1984: 90, “Since all humans have almost identical speechorgans, there should not be any ‘difficult’ sounds.” This is not a totally true thought becausethe nonnative speaking students apply the pronunciation rules of their native language, andthe result of such a conduct is the establishment of mother-tongue interference which boilsdown to be an unavoidable intrusion while learning a foreign language. A great majority ofpronunciation errors are due to inevitable mother-tongue pronunciation habits, which exhibitcertain resistance to the sounds of the target language. The mother-tongue association to theacquisition of some target language phonemes that are called the core sounds. (Demirezen2007e. The core sounds of the English language, such “consonants like / t ---> T, d ---> D, v---> w / and vowels like / e ---> Q, e ---> E, Q ----> E, « ---> Q, Q ---> Ã,  ----> ow, V-----> Vw /, constitute the prime fossilized mistake continuum for the Turkish teachers,teacher trainees and students in learning and teaching English as a foreign language.”Demirezen, 2007e: 306. This articles aims at analyzing and offering rehabilitative solutionsto one of such core sounds, namely / Q ---> à / contrast that harms the pronunciation ofTurkish learners of English.

Examining Word Factors and Child Factors for Acquisition of Conditional Sound-Spelling Consistencies: A Longitudinal Study

Science.gov (United States)

Kim, Young-Suk Grace; Petscher, Yaacov; Park, Younghee

2016-01-01

It has been suggested that children acquire spelling by picking up conditional sound-spelling consistencies. To examine this hypothesis, we investigated how variation in word characteristics (words that vary systematically in terms of phoneme-grapheme correspondences) and child factors (individual differences in the ability to extract…

Using Start/End Timings of Spectral Transitions Between Phonemes in Concatenative Speech Synthesis

OpenAIRE

Toshio Hirai; Seiichi Tenpaku; Kiyohiro Shikano

2002-01-01

The definition of "phoneme boundary timing" in a speech corpus affects the quality of concatenative speech synthesis systems. For example, if the selected speech unit is not appropriately match to the speech unit of the required phoneme environment, the quality may be degraded. In this paper, a dynamic segment boundary defi- nition is proposed. In the definition, the concatenation point is chosen from the start or end timings of spectral transition depending on the phoneme environment at the ...

A Letter of Ladizlaus, the Franciscan Custodian of Gazaria (Caffa, April 10, 1287.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Roman Hautala

2017-03-01

Full Text Available The following letter of Friar Ladizlaus, Franciscan Custodian of Gazaria (that is, of the Northern Black Sea region, contains an interesting description of the collision between Catholic missionaries and Muslim residents of Solkhat. In his letter, Friar Ladizalus describes the circumstances of the conflict that arose in the summer of 1286 between the Franciscans of Solkhat and local Muslim residents who were angered by Catholics’ habit of sound a bell on their church. During the conflict, the Solkhat Muslims demolished this bell and destroyed the Catholic church. In turn, the Franciscans submitted a complaint against their actions to khan Tula-Buga and Nogay. In response to the Minorites’ petition, Jochid rulers sent their representatives to Solkhat. Despite personal commitment to the Muslim faith, these representatives severely punished Franciscans’ offenders and allowed the Minorites both to rebuild their church and to hang three bells instead of one destroyed earlier. Letter’s translation is provided with the necessary comments, which will be expanded in the future monograph of the author. It is appropriate to note that the letter was analyzed in detail in a recent article of the Hungarian researcher Szylvia Kovács [4, p. 157–164]. The Latin text of the letter is reproduced according to Girolamo Golubovich’s edition based on the Codex Ottoboniana 2115 from the Vatican library (fol. 62 [3, p. 444–445]. Discrepancies from the followin earlier editions are also taken into account in the text: [8, no. 250, s. 248–250 (referred to as Starzer & Redlich; 2, p. 165, nota 1 (referred to as Eubel].

Rene Descartes’ letter to abbot Mersenne. November, 20, 1629. Translation from English

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Goncharova Alina Alekseevna

2015-04-01

Full Text Available This letter is of value for lingua-philosophical and linguistic researches. Rene Descartes’ remarks about the first proposal for the universal language are expounded in it. Descartes was considered as a pioneer in linguistic constructions due to these remarks. This letter contains philosopher’s conclusions about the universal language’s grammar and use, as well as project’s implementation obstacles.

Written Spelling to Dictation: Sound-To-Spelling Regularity Affects Both Writing Latencies and Durations

Science.gov (United States)

Delattre, Marie; Bonin, Patrick; Barry, Christopher

2006-01-01

The authors examined the effect of sound-to-spelling regularity on written spelling latencies and writing durations in a dictation task in which participants had to write each target word 3 times in succession. The authors found that irregular words (i.e., those containing low-probability phoneme-to-grapheme mappings) were slower both to…

Stochastic Model for Phonemes Uncovers an Author-Dependency of Their Usage.

Science.gov (United States)

Deng, Weibing; Allahverdyan, Armen E

2016-01-01

We study rank-frequency relations for phonemes, the minimal units that still relate to linguistic meaning. We show that these relations can be described by the Dirichlet distribution, a direct analogue of the ideal-gas model in statistical mechanics. This description allows us to demonstrate that the rank-frequency relations for phonemes of a text do depend on its author. The author-dependency effect is not caused by the author's vocabulary (common words used in different texts), and is confirmed by several alternative means. This suggests that it can be directly related to phonemes. These features contrast to rank-frequency relations for words, which are both author and text independent and are governed by the Zipf's law.

The speech perception skills of children with and without speech sound disorder.

Science.gov (United States)

Hearnshaw, Stephanie; Baker, Elise; Munro, Natalie

To investigate whether Australian-English speaking children with and without speech sound disorder (SSD) differ in their overall speech perception accuracy. Additionally, to investigate differences in the perception of specific phonemes and the association between speech perception and speech production skills. Twenty-five Australian-English speaking children aged 48-60 months participated in this study. The SSD group included 12 children and the typically developing (TD) group included 13 children. Children completed routine speech and language assessments in addition to an experimental Australian-English lexical and phonetic judgement task based on Rvachew's Speech Assessment and Interactive Learning System (SAILS) program (Rvachew, 2009). This task included eight words across four word-initial phonemes-/k, ɹ, ʃ, s/. Children with SSD showed significantly poorer perceptual accuracy on the lexical and phonetic judgement task compared with TD peers. The phonemes /ɹ/ and /s/ were most frequently perceived in error across both groups. Additionally, the phoneme /ɹ/ was most commonly produced in error. There was also a positive correlation between overall speech perception and speech production scores. Children with SSD perceived speech less accurately than their typically developing peers. The findings suggest that an Australian-English variation of a lexical and phonetic judgement task similar to the SAILS program is promising and worthy of a larger scale study. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Phonemic discrimination and its relation to phonological disorder Discriminação fonêmica e sua relação com o transtorno fonológico

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Karine Leyla de Castro Oliveira

2012-12-01

Full Text Available It was performed a nonsystematic review on the importance of the phonemic discrimination to the phonological acquisition and its relation to the phonological disorder. Studies indicate that phonemic discrimination represents an essential ability in the process of acquiring sounds of speech and that children with phonological disorder present difficulties in that ability.Foi realizada uma revisão não sistemática sobre a importância da discriminação fonêmica para a aquisição dos sons da fala e sua relação com o transtorno fonológico. Os estudos indicam que a discriminação fonêmica representa uma habilidade essencial no processo de aquisição dos sons da fala e que as crianças com transtorno fonológico apresentam dificuldade nesta habilidade.

New Grapheme Generation Rules for Two-Stage Modelbased Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Seng Kheang

2015-01-01

Full Text Available The precise conversion of arbitrary text into its  corresponding phoneme sequence (grapheme-to-phoneme or G2P conversion is implemented in speech synthesis and recognition, pronunciation learning software, spoken term detection and spoken document retrieval systems. Because the quality of this module plays an important role in the performance of such systems and many problems regarding G2P conversion have been reported, we propose a novel two-stage model-based approach, which is implemented using an existing weighted finite-state transducer-based G2P conversion framework, to improve the performance of the G2P conversion model. The first-stage model is built for automatic conversion of words  to phonemes, while  the second-stage  model utilizes the input graphemes and output phonemes obtained from the first stage to determine the best final output phoneme sequence. Additionally, we designed new grapheme generation rules, which enable extra detail for the vowel and consonant graphemes appearing within a word. When compared with previous approaches, the evaluation results indicate that our approach using rules focusing on the vowel graphemes slightly improved the accuracy of the out-of-vocabulary dataset and consistently increased the accuracy of the in-vocabulary dataset.

A Phonemic and Acoustic Analysis of Hindko Oral Stops

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Haroon Ur RASHID

2014-12-01

Full Text Available Hindko is an Indo-Aryan language that is mainly spoken in Khyber Pukhtoonkhaw province of Pakistan. This work aims to identify the oral stops of Hindko and determine the intrinsic acoustic cues for them. The phonemic analysis is done with the help of minimal pairs and phoneme distribution in contrastive environments which reveals that Hindko has twelve oral stops with three way series. The acoustic analysis of these segments shows that intrinsically voice onset time (VOT, closure duration and burst are reliable and distinguishing cues of stops in Hindko.

Stochastic Model for Phonemes Uncovers an Author-Dependency of Their Usage.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Weibing Deng

Full Text Available We study rank-frequency relations for phonemes, the minimal units that still relate to linguistic meaning. We show that these relations can be described by the Dirichlet distribution, a direct analogue of the ideal-gas model in statistical mechanics. This description allows us to demonstrate that the rank-frequency relations for phonemes of a text do depend on its author. The author-dependency effect is not caused by the author's vocabulary (common words used in different texts, and is confirmed by several alternative means. This suggests that it can be directly related to phonemes. These features contrast to rank-frequency relations for words, which are both author and text independent and are governed by the Zipf's law.

Sound wave transmission (image)

Science.gov (United States)

When sounds waves reach the ear, they are translated into nerve impulses. These impulses then travel to the brain where they are interpreted by the brain as sound. The hearing mechanisms within the inner ear, can ...

Can a linguistic serial founder effect originating in Africa explain the worldwide phonemic cline?

Science.gov (United States)

Fort, Joaquim; Pérez-Losada, Joaquim

2016-04-01

It has been proposed that a serial founder effect could have caused the present observed pattern of global phonemic diversity. Here we present a model that simulates the human range expansion out of Africa and the subsequent spatial linguistic dynamics until today. It does not assume copying errors, Darwinian competition, reduced contrastive possibilities or any other specific linguistic mechanism. We show that the decrease of linguistic diversity with distance (from the presumed origin of the expansion) arises under three assumptions, previously introduced by other authors: (i) an accumulation rate for phonemes; (ii) small phonemic inventories for the languages spoken before the out-of-Africa dispersal; (iii) an increase in the phonemic accumulation rate with the number of speakers per unit area. Numerical simulations show that the predictions of the model agree with the observed decrease of linguistic diversity with increasing distance from the most likely origin of the out-of-Africa dispersal. Thus, the proposal that a serial founder effect could have caused the present observed pattern of global phonemic diversity is viable, if three strong assumptions are satisfied. © 2016 The Authors.

Can a linguistic serial founder effect originating in Africa explain the worldwide phonemic cline?

Science.gov (United States)

2016-01-01

It has been proposed that a serial founder effect could have caused the present observed pattern of global phonemic diversity. Here we present a model that simulates the human range expansion out of Africa and the subsequent spatial linguistic dynamics until today. It does not assume copying errors, Darwinian competition, reduced contrastive possibilities or any other specific linguistic mechanism. We show that the decrease of linguistic diversity with distance (from the presumed origin of the expansion) arises under three assumptions, previously introduced by other authors: (i) an accumulation rate for phonemes; (ii) small phonemic inventories for the languages spoken before the out-of-Africa dispersal; (iii) an increase in the phonemic accumulation rate with the number of speakers per unit area. Numerical simulations show that the predictions of the model agree with the observed decrease of linguistic diversity with increasing distance from the most likely origin of the out-of-Africa dispersal. Thus, the proposal that a serial founder effect could have caused the present observed pattern of global phonemic diversity is viable, if three strong assumptions are satisfied. PMID:27122180

Shared perceptual processes in phoneme and word perception: Evidence from aphasia

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Heather Raye Dial

2014-04-01

Replicating previous studies, performance on the two word recognition tasks without closely matched distractors (WAB and PWM was at ceiling for some subjects with impairments on consonant discrimination (see Figures 1a/1b. However, as shown in Figures 1c/1d, for word processing tasks matched in phonological discriminability to the consonant discrimination task, scores on consonant discrimination and word processing were highly correlated, and no individual demonstrated substantially better performance on word than phoneme perception. One patient demonstrated worse performance on lexical decision (d’ = .21 than phoneme perception (d’ = 1.72, which can be attributed to impaired lexical or semantic processing. These data argue against the hypothesis that phoneme and word perception rely on different perceptual processes/routes for processing, and instead indicate that word perception depends on perception of sublexical units.

Phonological Iconicity electrifies: An ERP study on affective sound-to-meaning correspondences in German

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Susann Ullrich

2016-08-01

Full Text Available While linguistic theory posits an arbitrary relation between signifiers and the signified (de Saussure, 1916, our analysis of a large-scale German database containing affective ratings of words revealed that certain phoneme clusters occur more often in words denoting concepts with negative and arousing meaning. Here, we investigate how such phoneme clusters that potentially serve as sublexical markers of affect can influence language processing. We registered the EEG signal during a lexical decision task with a novel manipulation of the words’ putative sublexical affective potential: the means of valence and arousal values for single phoneme clusters, each computed as a function of respective values of words from the database these phoneme clusters occur in. Our experimental manipulations also investigate potential contributions of formal salience to the sublexical affective potential: Typically, negative high-arousing phonological segments—based on our calculations—tend to be less frequent and more structurally complex than neutral ones. We thus constructed two experimental sets, one involving this natural confound, while controlling for it in the other. A negative high-arousing sublexical affective potential in the strictly controlled stimulus set yielded an early posterior negativity (EPN, in similar ways as an independent manipulation of lexical affective content. When other potentially salient formal features at the sublexical level were not controlled for, the effect of the sublexical affective potential was strengthened and prolonged (250-650 ms, presumably because formal salience helps making specific phoneme clusters efficient sublexical markers of negative high-arousing affective meaning. These neurophysiological data support the assumption that the organization of a language´s vocabulary involves systematic sound-to-meaning correspondences at the phonemic level that influence the way we process language.

Using generalized maxout networks and phoneme mapping for low resource ASR- a case study on Flemish-Afrikaans

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Sahraeian, R

2015-11-01

Full Text Available -driven phoneme mapping we propose to use an approximation of Kullback Leibler Divergence (KLD) to generate a confusion matrix and find the best matching phonemes of the target language for each individual phoneme in the donor language. Moreover, we explore...

Developing consistent pronunciation models for phonemic variants

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Davel, M

2006-09-01

Full Text Available Pronunciation lexicons often contain pronunciation variants. This can create two problems: It can be difficult to define these variants in an internally consistent way and it can also be difficult to extract generalised grapheme-to-phoneme rule sets...

12 CFR 614.4810 - Standby letters of credit.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... party in the performance of an obligation. (b) As a matter of sound banking practice, banks for... 12 Banks and Banking 6 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Standby letters of credit. 614.4810 Section 614.4810 Banks and Banking FARM CREDIT ADMINISTRATION FARM CREDIT SYSTEM LOAN POLICIES AND OPERATIONS Banks...

Machine Translation Tools - Tools of The Translator's Trade

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Kastberg, Peter

2012-01-01

In this article three of the more common types of translation tools are presented, discussed and critically evaluated. The types of translation tools dealt with in this article are: Fully Automated Machine Translation (or FAMT), Human Aided Machine Translation (or HAMT) and Machine Aided Human...... Translation (or MAHT). The strengths and weaknesses of the different types of tools are discussed and evaluated by means of a number of examples. The article aims at two things: at presenting a sort of state of the art of what is commonly referred to as “machine translation” as well as at providing the reader...... with a sound basis for considering what translation tool (if any) is the most appropriate in order to meet his or her specific translation needs....

Phonemic Transcriptions in British and American Dictionaries

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rastislav Šuštaršič

2005-06-01

Full Text Available In view of recent criticisms concerning vowel symbols in some British English dictionaries (in particular by J. Windsor Lewis in JIPA (Windsor Lewis, 2003, with regard to the Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation (Upton, 2001, this article extends the discussion on English phonemic transcriptions by including those that typically occur in standard American dictionaries, and by comparing the most common conventions of British and American dictionaries. In addition to symbols for both vowels and consonants, the paper also deals with the different representations of word accentuation and the issue of consistency regarding application of phonemic (systemic, broad, rather than phonetic (allophonic, narrow transcription. The different transcriptions are assessed from the points of view of their departures from the International Phonetic Alphabet, their overlapping with orthographic representation (spelling and their appropriateness in terms of reflecting actual pronunciation in standard British and/or American pronunciation.

Auditory ERB like admissible wavelet packet features for TIMIT phoneme recognition

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

P.K. Sahu

2014-09-01

Full Text Available In recent years wavelet transform has been found to be an effective tool for time–frequency analysis. Wavelet transform has been used as feature extraction in speech recognition applications and it has proved to be an effective technique for unvoiced phoneme classification. In this paper a new filter structure using admissible wavelet packet is analyzed for English phoneme recognition. These filters have the benefit of having frequency bands spacing similar to the auditory Equivalent Rectangular Bandwidth (ERB scale. Central frequencies of ERB scale are equally distributed along the frequency response of human cochlea. A new sets of features are derived using wavelet packet transform's multi-resolution capabilities and found to be better than conventional features for unvoiced phoneme problems. Some of the noises from NOISEX-92 database has been used for preparing the artificial noisy database to test the robustness of wavelet based features.

Emergent Literacy in Thai Preschoolers: A Preliminary Study.

Science.gov (United States)

Yampratoom, Ramorn; Aroonyadech, Nawarat; Ruangdaraganon, Nichara; Roongpraiwan, Rawiwan; Kositprapa, Jariya

To investigate emergent literacy skills, including phonological awareness when presented with an initial phoneme-matching task and letter knowledge when presented with a letter-naming task in Thai preschoolers, and to identify key factors associated with those skills. Four hundred twelve typically developing children in their final kindergarten year were enrolled in this study. Their emergent reading skills were measured by initial phoneme-matching and letter-naming tasks. Determinant variables, such as parents' education and teachers' perception, were collected by self-report questionnaires. The mean score of the initial phoneme-matching task was 4.5 (45% of a total of 10 scores). The mean score of the letter-naming task without a picture representing the target letter name was 30.2 (68.6% of a total of 44 scores), which increased to 38.8 (88.2% of a total of 44 scores) in the letter-naming task when a picture representing the target letter name was provided. Both initial phoneme-matching and letter-naming abilities were associated with the mother's education and household income. Letter-naming ability was also influenced by home reading activities and gender. This was a preliminary study into emergent literacy skills of Thai preschoolers. The findings supported the importance of focusing on phonological awareness and phonics, especially in the socioeconomic disadvantaged group.

Five mechanisms of sound symbolic association.

Science.gov (United States)

Sidhu, David M; Pexman, Penny M

2017-08-24

Sound symbolism refers to an association between phonemes and stimuli containing particular perceptual and/or semantic elements (e.g., objects of a certain size or shape). Some of the best-known examples include the mil/mal effect (Sapir, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12, 225-239, 1929) and the maluma/takete effect (Köhler, 1929). Interest in this topic has been on the rise within psychology, and studies have demonstrated that sound symbolic effects are relevant for many facets of cognition, including language, action, memory, and categorization. Sound symbolism also provides a mechanism by which words' forms can have nonarbitrary, iconic relationships with their meanings. Although various proposals have been put forth for how phonetic features (both acoustic and articulatory) come to be associated with stimuli, there is as yet no generally agreed-upon explanation. We review five proposals: statistical co-occurrence between phonetic features and associated stimuli in the environment, a shared property among phonetic features and stimuli; neural factors; species-general, evolved associations; and patterns extracted from language. We identify a number of outstanding questions that need to be addressed on this topic and suggest next steps for the field.

The Phonemic Awareness Skills of Cochlear Implant Children and Children with Normal Hearing in Primary School

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Aliakbar Dashtelei

2015-12-01

Full Text Available Objectives: Phonemic awareness skills have a significant impact on children speech and language. The purpose of this study was investigating the phonemic awareness skills of children with cochlear implant and normal hearing peers in primary school. Methods: phonemic awareness subscales of phonological awareness test were administered to 30 children with cochlear implantation at the first to sixth grades of primary school and 30 children with normal hearing who were matched in age with cochlear implant group. All of children were between 6 to 11 years old. Children with cochlear implant had at least 1 to 2 years of implant experience and they were over 5 years when they receive implantation. Children with cochlear implant were selected from Special education centers in Tehran and children with normal hearing were recruited from primary schools in Tehran. The phonemic awareness skills were assessed in both groups. Results: The results showed that the Mean scores of phonemic awareness skills in cochlear implant children were significantly lower than children with normal hearing (P<.0001. Discussion: children with cochlear implant, despite Cochlear implantation prosthesis, had lower performance in phonemic awareness when compared with normal hearing children. Therefore, due to importance of phonemic awareness skills in learning of literacy skills, and defects of these skills in children with cochlear implant, these skills should be assessed carefully in children with cochlear implant and rehabilitative interventions should be considered.

Low-Frequency Cortical Entrainment to Speech Reflects Phoneme-Level Processing.

Science.gov (United States)

Di Liberto, Giovanni M; O'Sullivan, James A; Lalor, Edmund C

2015-10-05

The human ability to understand speech is underpinned by a hierarchical auditory system whose successive stages process increasingly complex attributes of the acoustic input. It has been suggested that to produce categorical speech perception, this system must elicit consistent neural responses to speech tokens (e.g., phonemes) despite variations in their acoustics. Here, using electroencephalography (EEG), we provide evidence for this categorical phoneme-level speech processing by showing that the relationship between continuous speech and neural activity is best described when that speech is represented using both low-level spectrotemporal information and categorical labeling of phonetic features. Furthermore, the mapping between phonemes and EEG becomes more discriminative for phonetic features at longer latencies, in line with what one might expect from a hierarchical system. Importantly, these effects are not seen for time-reversed speech. These findings may form the basis for future research on natural language processing in specific cohorts of interest and for broader insights into how brains transform acoustic input into meaning. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The Effect of Adaptive Nonlinear Frequency Compression on Phoneme Perception.

Science.gov (United States)

Glista, Danielle; Hawkins, Marianne; Bohnert, Andrea; Rehmann, Julia; Wolfe, Jace; Scollie, Susan

2017-12-12

This study implemented a fitting method, developed for use with frequency lowering hearing aids, across multiple testing sites, participants, and hearing aid conditions to evaluate speech perception with a novel type of frequency lowering. A total of 8 participants, including children and young adults, participated in real-world hearing aid trials. A blinded crossover design, including posttrial withdrawal testing, was used to assess aided phoneme perception. The hearing aid conditions included adaptive nonlinear frequency compression (NFC), static NFC, and conventional processing. Enabling either adaptive NFC or static NFC improved group-level detection and recognition results for some high-frequency phonemes, when compared with conventional processing. Mean results for the distinction component of the Phoneme Perception Test (Schmitt, Winkler, Boretzki, & Holube, 2016) were similar to those obtained with conventional processing. Findings suggest that both types of NFC tested in this study provided a similar amount of speech perception benefit, when compared with group-level performance with conventional hearing aid technology. Individual-level results are presented with discussion around patterns of results that differ from the group average.

平仮名表記の特質と学習指導原理

OpenAIRE

首藤, 久義

2003-01-01

The teaching of Hiragana is one of the most important tasks for the first grade teachers. Learning to read and write in Hiragana is easier for Japanese children than English writing systems are for the first grade speakers of English. There are three reasons for this: 1) The present Hiragana writing system is based on modern Japanese sounds. 2) Each Hiragana letter represents a syllable in Japanese. And recognizing each syllable is easier than recognizing each phoneme. And the structure of Ja...

How to translate a massless particle (the Weyl neutrino)

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Berger, S.B.

1979-01-01

Previous work indicated a deep connection between translations and rotations for a Weyl neutrino (a massless particle). In the letter the explicit form of a translation in the z-direction is given assuming a translation operator of the form esup(i anti g.anti x). (author)

Phonemic verbal fluency and severity of anxiety disorders in young children

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rudineia Toazza

Full Text Available Abstract Introduction: Previous studies have implicated impaired verbal fluency as being associated with anxiety disorders in adolescents. Objectives: To replicate and extend previously reported evidence by investigating whether performance in phonemic verbal fluency tasks is related to severity of anxiety symptoms in young children with anxiety disorders. We also aim to investigate whether putative associations are independent from co-occurring attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD symptoms. Methods: Sixty children (6-12 years old with primary diagnoses of anxiety disorders participated in this study. Severity of symptoms was measured using clinician-based, parent-rated and self-rated validated scales. Verbal fluency was assessed using a simple task that measures the number of words evoked in 1-minute with the letter F, from which we quantified the number of isolated words, number of clusters (groups of similar words and number of switches (transitions between clusters and/or between isolated words. Results: There was a significant association between the number of clusters and anxiety scores. Further analysis revealed associations were independent from co-occurring ADHD symptoms. Conclusion: We replicate and extend previous findings showing that verbal fluency is consistently associated with severity in anxiety disorders in children. Further studies should explore the potential effect of cognitive training on symptoms of anxiety disorders.

Phonaesthemes and sound symbolism in Swedish brand names

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Åsa Abelin

2015-01-01

Full Text Available This study examines the prevalence of sound symbolism in Swedish brand names. A general principle of brand name design is that effective names should be distinctive, recognizable, easy to pronounce and meaningful. Much money is invested in designing powerful brand names, where the emotional impact of the names on consumers is also relevant and it is important to avoid negative connotations. Customers prefer brand names, which say something about the product, as this reduces product uncertainty (Klink, 2001. Therefore, consumers might prefer sound symbolic names. It has been shown that people associate the sounds of the nonsense words maluma and takete with round and angular shapes, respectively. By extension, more complex shapes and textures might activate words containing certain sounds. This study focuses on semantic dimensions expected to be relevant to product names, such as mobility, consistency, texture and shape. These dimensions are related to the senses of sight, hearing and touch and are also interesting from a cognitive linguistic perspective. Cross-modal assessment and priming experiments with pictures and written words were performed and the results analysed in relation to brand name databases and to sound symbolic sound combinations in Swedish (Abelin, 1999. The results show that brand names virtually never contain pejorative, i.e. depreciatory, consonant clusters, and that certain sounds and sound combinations are overrepresented in certain content categories. Assessment tests show correlations between pictured objects and phoneme combinations in newly created words (non-words. The priming experiment shows that object images prime newly created words as expected, based on the presence of compatible consonant clusters.

PEMEROLEHAN FONOLOGI DAN METATESIS: STUDI KASUS PADA ANAK USIA 2 TAHUN 10 BULAN

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Aria Septi Anggaira

2016-12-01

Full Text Available Abstract           This study aimed to describe the phonemes produced by children aged 2 years and 10 months and describes forms of exchange or metathesis sound that occurs in producing the sounds of language in words. The data collection technique use three stages of strategic sequence. These stages are (1 a method of providing data, (2 data analysis methods, and (3 methods of presenting the results of the analysis. Data in the form of speech is transcribed into a phonetic transcription. The findings of this research are: The respondent has been able to produce almost any sounds or phonemes that exist in Indonesian. Phonemes produced consisting of consonant phonemes that are already emerging that a total of 18 phonemes: / b /, / t∫ /, / d /, / g /, / d /, / dj /, / k /, / l /, / m /, / n /, / ŋ /, / ñ /, / p /, / r /, / s /, / t /, / w /, / y /. From the 18 consonant phonemes are emerging, 8 of them have variations, so that the number of phonemes is generated as a whole is 27 consonant phonemes. Respondents have been able to produce six vowel phonemes plus two variations so that all amount to 8 vowel phonemes. It was found five pieces of diphthongs are: / au /, / ai /, / ei /, / o /, and / ua /. In the span of less than one month found 19 words that contain elements of metathesis. From the 19 words, found 5 types or form of an exchange of sounds and sound accompaniment of addition and subtraction.           Keywords: language acquisition, phonology, metathesis, phonemes.

Color improves ‘visual’ acuity via sound

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Shelly eLevy-Tzedek

2014-11-01

Full Text Available Visual-to-auditory sensory substitution devices (SSDs convey visual information via sound, with the primary goal of making visual information accessible to blind and visually impaired individuals. We developed the EyeMusic SSD, which transforms shape, location and color information into musical notes. We tested the 'visual' acuity of 23 individuals (13 blind and 10 blindfolded sighted on the Snellen tumbling-E test, with the EyeMusic. Participants were asked to determine the orientation of the letter ‘E’. The test was repeated twice: in one test, the letter ‘E’ was drawn with a single color (white, and in the other test, with two colors (red and white. In the latter case, the vertical line in the letter, when upright, was drawn in red, with the three horizontal lines drawn in white. We found no significant differences in performance between the blind and the sighted groups. We found a significant effect of the added color on the ‘visual’ acuity. The highest acuity participants reached in the monochromatic test was 20/800, whereas with the added color, acuity doubled to 20/400. We conclude that color improves 'visual' acuity via sound.

A Model to Rehabilitate a Fossilized Pronunciation Error of Turkish English Language Teachers: the English Consonant Phoneme ( Wrongly Articulated as ( Through Nasal Devoicing

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mehmet Demirezen

2007-10-01

Full Text Available Turkish English language teachers have a general affinity to mispronounce theword-final /ng/ sound combination as /ŋk/ form, but not in an /Iŋ/ form, which is theright case. This is a typical case of a fossilized pronunciation. The result of thearticulation is a bad sounding articulation that gives a serious hardship to the foreignlanguage teacher. It must be borne in mind that bad pronunciation impedes and obscuresintelligibility, accuracy, fluency, and automatic control of pronunciation in the targetlanguage. The fossilized pronunciation errors keep bothering the communicativefluency of the teacher trainees and novice foreign language teachers who are on the job.Since teaching foreign languages is a vocational job, developing a good intelligiblepronunciation skill is an integral part of the profession. In this study, a very commonand wrong articulation of /N/ phoneme as /Nk/ by Turkish English teachers will be triedto be rehabilitated by using the audioarticulation model.

On Spoken English Phoneme Evaluation Method Based on Sphinx-4 Computer System

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Li Qin

2017-12-01

Full Text Available In oral English learning, HDPs (phonemes that are hard to be distinguished are areas where Chinese students frequently make mistakes in pronunciation. This paper studies a speech phoneme evaluation method for HDPs, hoping to improve the ability of individualized evaluation on HDPs and help provide a personalized learning platform for English learners. First of all, this paper briefly introduces relevant phonetic recognition technologies and pronunciation evaluation algorithms and also describes the phonetic retrieving, phonetic decoding and phonetic knowledge base in the Sphinx-4 computer system, which constitute the technological foundation for phoneme evaluation. Then it proposes an HDP evaluation model, which integrates the reliability of the speech processing system and the individualization of spoken English learners into the evaluation system. After collecting HDPs of spoken English learners and sorting them into different sets, it uses the evaluation system to recognize these HDP sets and at last analyzes the experimental results of HDP evaluation, which proves the effectiveness of the HDP evaluation model.

Teaching Adults to Read Braille Using Phonological Methods: Single-Case Studies

Science.gov (United States)

Crawford, Shauna; Elliott, Robert T.

2009-01-01

Four women with visual impairments were taught 13 braille letters as phonemes and another 13 braille letters as graphemes and then were taught 10 braille words as onset-rime and another 10 braille words as whole words. Phoneme and onset-rime instruction resulted in faster and more accurate performance. (Contains 1 table and 2 figures.)

A Novel Handwritten Letter Recognizer Using Enhanced Evolutionary Neural Network

Science.gov (United States)

Mahmoudi, Fariborz; Mirzashaeri, Mohsen; Shahamatnia, Ehsan; Faridnia, Saed

This paper introduces a novel design for handwritten letter recognition by employing a hybrid back-propagation neural network with an enhanced evolutionary algorithm. Feeding the neural network consists of a new approach which is invariant to translation, rotation, and scaling of input letters. Evolutionary algorithm is used for the global search of the search space and the back-propagation algorithm is used for the local search. The results have been computed by implementing this approach for recognizing 26 English capital letters in the handwritings of different people. The computational results show that the neural network reaches very satisfying results with relatively scarce input data and a promising performance improvement in convergence of the hybrid evolutionary back-propagation algorithms is exhibited.

Comparison of HMM and DTW methods in automatic recognition of pathological phoneme pronunciation

OpenAIRE

Wielgat, Robert; Zielinski, Tomasz P.; Swietojanski, Pawel; Zoladz, Piotr; Król, Daniel; Wozniak, Tomasz; Grabias, Stanislaw

2007-01-01

In the paper recently proposed Human Factor Cepstral Coefficients (HFCC) are used to automatic recognition of pathological phoneme pronunciation in speech of impaired children and efficiency of this approach is compared to application of the standard Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) as a feature vector. Both dynamic time warping (DTW), working on whole words or embedded phoneme patterns, and hidden Markov models (HMM) are used as classifiers in the presented research. Obtained resul...

Melanie Klein's letters addressed to Marcelle Spira (1955-1960).

Science.gov (United States)

Quinodoz, Jean-Michel

2009-12-01

Between 1955 and 1960, Melanie Klein wrote some 45 hitherto unpublished letters to Marcelle Spira, the Swiss psychoanalyst living at that time in Geneva. In 2006, after Spira's death, these letters were deposited with the Raymond de Saussure Psychoanalysis Centre in Geneva. They are the only known letters that Klein addressed to her psychoanalyst colleagues. Several topics are mentioned in them: (1) the meetings between the two women in Geneva and London; (2) Spira's contribution to Boulanger's translation into French of The Psychoanalysis of Children, which Klein herself carefully revised; (3) the papers that Klein was at that time working on, including Envy and Gratitude; (4) Spira's own work; (5) the difficulties that Spira, a Kleinian psychoanalyst who trained in Buenos Aires, was encountering in her attempt to be admitted to the Swiss Psychoanalytical Society; and (6) a few items of personal and family news. In addition to the invaluable historical information that these letters provide, they offer us a very moving epistolary self-portrait of Melanie Klein, enabling us to discover her personality in the final years of her life - she died in September 1960, just two months after writing her last letter to Spira.

Two spelling programmes that promote understanding of the alphabetic principle in preschool children

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Margarida Alves Martins & Cristina Silva

2009-11-01

Full Text Available Our aim in this study was to test two programmes designed to lead preschool children to use conventional letters to spell the initial consonants of words. These programmes differed in terms of the characteristics of the vowels that followed those consonants. The participants were 45 five-year-old Portuguese children whose spelling was pre-syllabic - they used strings of random letters in their spelling, making no attempt to match the oral to the written language. They were divided into two experimental and a control group. Their age, level of intelligence, and phonological awareness were controlled. Their spelling was assessed in a pre- and a post-test. In-between, children from the experimental groups participated in two programmes where they had to think about the relationships between the initial consonant and the corresponding phoneme in different words: In Experimental Group 1, the initial consonants were followed by an open vowel, and in Experimental Group 2, these same consonants were followed by a closed vowel. The control group classified geometric shapes. Experimental Group 1 achieved better results than Experimental Group 2 following open vowels, being more able to generalize the phonological procedures to sounds that were not taught during the programmes. Both experimental groups used conventional letters to represent several phonemes in the post-test whereas the control group continued to produce pre-syllabic spellings.

Paced Reading in Semantic Dementia: Word Knowledge Contributes to Phoneme Binding in Rapid Speech Production

Science.gov (United States)

Jefferies, Elizabeth; Grogan, John; Mapelli, Cristina; Isella, Valeria

2012-01-01

Patients with semantic dementia (SD) show deficits in phoneme binding in immediate serial recall: when attempting to reproduce a sequence of words that they no longer fully understand, they show frequent migrations of phonemes between items (e.g., cap, frog recalled as "frap, cog"). This suggests that verbal short-term memory emerges directly from…

TRANSLATING SERVICE TECHNICAL PROSE

African Journals Online (AJOL)

language. The Application of Technical Service. Prose. To form a good idea of the appl ication .... cost lives. In this particular domain, translators must have a sound technical ... These semantic ... another language and often, in doing so, changing its meaning. The words ..... He will hand out tasks to each translator and after.

Cortical oscillations related to processing congruent and incongruent grapheme-phoneme pairs.

Science.gov (United States)

Herdman, Anthony T; Fujioka, Takako; Chau, Wilkin; Ross, Bernhard; Pantev, Christo; Picton, Terence W

2006-05-15

In this study, we investigated changes in cortical oscillations following congruent and incongruent grapheme-phoneme stimuli. Hiragana graphemes and phonemes were simultaneously presented as congruent or incongruent audiovisual stimuli to native Japanese-speaking participants. The discriminative reaction time was 57 ms shorter for congruent than incongruent stimuli. Analysis of MEG responses using synthetic aperture magnetometry (SAM) revealed that congruent stimuli evoked larger 2-10 Hz activity in the left auditory cortex within the first 250 ms after stimulus onset, and smaller 2-16 Hz activity in bilateral visual cortices between 250 and 500 ms. These results indicate that congruent visual input can modify cortical activity in the left auditory cortex.

Hemispheric lateralization in an analysis of speech sounds. Left hemisphere dominance replicated in Japanese subjects.

Science.gov (United States)

Koyama, S; Gunji, A; Yabe, H; Oiwa, S; Akahane-Yamada, R; Kakigi, R; Näätänen, R

2000-09-01

Evoked magnetic responses to speech sounds [R. Näätänen, A. Lehtokoski, M. Lennes, M. Cheour, M. Huotilainen, A. Iivonen, M. Vainio, P. Alku, R.J. Ilmoniemi, A. Luuk, J. Allik, J. Sinkkonen and K. Alho, Language-specific phoneme representations revealed by electric and magnetic brain responses. Nature, 385 (1997) 432-434.] were recorded from 13 Japanese subjects (right-handed). Infrequently presented vowels ([o]) among repetitive vowels ([e]) elicited the magnetic counterpart of mismatch negativity, MMNm (Bilateral, nine subjects; Left hemisphere alone, three subjects; Right hemisphere alone, one subject). The estimated source of the MMNm was stronger in the left than in the right auditory cortex. The sources were located posteriorly in the left than in the right auditory cortex. These findings are consistent with the results obtained in Finnish [R. Näätänen, A. Lehtokoski, M. Lennes, M. Cheour, M. Huotilainen, A. Iivonen, M.Vainio, P.Alku, R.J. Ilmoniemi, A. Luuk, J. Allik, J. Sinkkonen and K. Alho, Language-specific phoneme representations revealed by electric and magnetic brain responses. Nature, 385 (1997) 432-434.][T. Rinne, K. Alho, P. Alku, M. Holi, J. Sinkkonen, J. Virtanen, O. Bertrand and R. Näätänen, Analysis of speech sounds is left-hemisphere predominant at 100-150 ms after sound onset. Neuroreport, 10 (1999) 1113-1117.] and English [K. Alho, J.F. Connolly, M. Cheour, A. Lehtokoski, M. Huotilainen, J. Virtanen, R. Aulanko and R.J. Ilmoniemi, Hemispheric lateralization in preattentive processing of speech sounds. Neurosci. Lett., 258 (1998) 9-12.] subjects. Instead of the P1m observed in Finnish [M. Tervaniemi, A. Kujala, K. Alho, J. Virtanen, R.J. Ilmoniemi and R. Näätänen, Functional specialization of the human auditory cortex in processing phonetic and musical sounds: A magnetoencephalographic (MEG) study. Neuroimage, 9 (1999) 330-336.] and English [K. Alho, J. F. Connolly, M. Cheour, A. Lehtokoski, M. Huotilainen, J. Virtanen, R. Aulanko

Activations of human auditory cortex to phonemic and nonphonemic vowels during discrimination and memory tasks.

Science.gov (United States)

Harinen, Kirsi; Rinne, Teemu

2013-08-15

We used fMRI to investigate activations within human auditory cortex (AC) to vowels during vowel discrimination, vowel (categorical n-back) memory, and visual tasks. Based on our previous studies, we hypothesized that the vowel discrimination task would be associated with increased activations in the anterior superior temporal gyrus (STG), while the vowel memory task would enhance activations in the posterior STG and inferior parietal lobule (IPL). In particular, we tested the hypothesis that activations in the IPL during vowel memory tasks are associated with categorical processing. Namely, activations due to categorical processing should be higher during tasks performed on nonphonemic (hard to categorize) than on phonemic (easy to categorize) vowels. As expected, we found distinct activation patterns during vowel discrimination and vowel memory tasks. Further, these task-dependent activations were different during tasks performed on phonemic or nonphonemic vowels. However, activations in the IPL associated with the vowel memory task were not stronger during nonphonemic than phonemic vowel blocks. Together these results demonstrate that activations in human AC to vowels depend on both the requirements of the behavioral task and the phonemic status of the vowels. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Word and phoneme frequency of occurrence in conversational ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Frequency of occurrence of Setswana consonant phonemes in a conversational sample of 49 358 Setswana-words was deter- mined. The percentage of occurrence of each consonant in each of the three positions of words was found to be 53.9% in the initial, 41.8% in the medial and 4.1% in the final positions. In addition ...

Neural initialization of audiovisual integration in prereaders at varying risk for developmental dyslexia.

Science.gov (United States)

I Karipidis, Iliana; Pleisch, Georgette; Röthlisberger, Martina; Hofstetter, Christoph; Dornbierer, Dario; Stämpfli, Philipp; Brem, Silvia

2017-02-01

Learning letter-speech sound correspondences is a major step in reading acquisition and is severely impaired in children with dyslexia. Up to now, it remains largely unknown how quickly neural networks adopt specific functions during audiovisual integration of linguistic information when prereading children learn letter-speech sound correspondences. Here, we simulated the process of learning letter-speech sound correspondences in 20 prereading children (6.13-7.17 years) at varying risk for dyslexia by training artificial letter-speech sound correspondences within a single experimental session. Subsequently, we acquired simultaneously event-related potentials (ERP) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans during implicit audiovisual presentation of trained and untrained pairs. Audiovisual integration of trained pairs correlated with individual learning rates in right superior temporal, left inferior temporal, and bilateral parietal areas and with phonological awareness in left temporal areas. In correspondence, a differential left-lateralized parietooccipitotemporal ERP at 400 ms for trained pairs correlated with learning achievement and familial risk. Finally, a late (650 ms) posterior negativity indicating audiovisual congruency of trained pairs was associated with increased fMRI activation in the left occipital cortex. Taken together, a short (audiovisual integration in neural systems that are responsible for processing linguistic information in proficient readers. To conclude, the ability to learn grapheme-phoneme correspondences, the familial history of reading disability, and phonological awareness of prereading children account for the degree of audiovisual integration in a distributed brain network. Such findings on emerging linguistic audiovisual integration could allow for distinguishing between children with typical and atypical reading development. Hum Brain Mapp 38:1038-1055, 2017. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals

Behavioural evidence of a dissociation between voice gender categorization and phoneme categorization using auditory morphed stimuli

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Cyril R Pernet

2014-01-01

Full Text Available Both voice gender and speech perception rely on neuronal populations located in the peri-sylvian areas. However, whilst functional imaging studies suggest a left versus right hemisphere and anterior versus posterior dissociation between voice and speech categorization, psycholinguistic studies on talker variability suggest that these two processes (voice and speech categorization share common mechanisms. In this study, we investigated the categorical perception of voice gender (male vs. female and phonemes (/pa/ vs. /ta/ using the same stimulus continua generated by morphing. This allowed the investigation of behavioural differences while controlling acoustic characteristics, since the same stimuli were used in both tasks. Despite a higher acoustic dissimilarity between items during the phoneme categorization task (a male and female voice producing the same phonemes than the gender task (the same person producing 2 phonemes, results showed that speech information is being processed much faster than voice information. In addition, f0 or timbre equalization did not affect RT, which disagrees with the classical psycholinguistic models in which voice information is stripped away or normalized to access phonetic content. Also, despite similar response (percentages and perceptual (d’ curves, a reverse correlation analysis on acoustic features revealed, as expected, that the formant frequencies of the consonant distinguished stimuli in the phoneme task, but that only the vowel formant frequencies distinguish stimuli in the gender task. The 2nd set of results thus also disagrees with models postulating that the same acoustic information is used for voice and speech. Altogether these results suggest that voice gender categorization and phoneme categorization are dissociated at an early stage on the basis of different enhanced acoustic features that are diagnostic to the task at hand.

Translation and adaptation of functional auditory performance indicators (FAPI

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Karina Ferreira

2011-12-01

Full Text Available Work with deaf children has gained new attention since the expectation and goal of therapy has expanded to language development and subsequent language learning. Many clinical tests were developed for evaluation of speech sound perception in young children in response to the need for accurate assessment of hearing skills that developed from the use of individual hearing aids or cochlear implants. These tests also allow the evaluation of the rehabilitation program. However, few of these tests are available in Portuguese. Evaluation with the Functional Auditory Performance Indicators (FAPI generates a child's functional auditory skills profile, which lists auditory skills in an integrated and hierarchical order. It has seven hierarchical categories, including sound awareness, meaningful sound, auditory feedback, sound source localizing, auditory discrimination, short-term auditory memory, and linguistic auditory processing. FAPI evaluation allows the therapist to map the child's hearing profile performance, determine the target for increasing the hearing abilities, and develop an effective therapeutic plan. Objective: Since the FAPI is an American test, the inventory was adapted for application in the Brazilian population. Material and Methods: The translation was done following the steps of translation and back translation, and reproducibility was evaluated. Four translated versions (two originals and two back-translated were compared, and revisions were done to ensure language adaptation and grammatical and idiomatic equivalence. Results: The inventory was duly translated and adapted. Conclusion: Further studies about the application of the translated FAPI are necessary to make the test practicable in Brazilian clinical use.

Pragmatic Aspects of the Translation of Slang and Four-Letter Words.

Science.gov (United States)

Zauberga, Ieva

1994-01-01

Offers a historical view of the Latvian language to show ways in which different political realities have affected Latvian vocabulary; for instance, in terms of loan words, and ways in which Latvian perceptions of loans shed light on cross-cultural aspects of translation. Discusses strategies by which Latvian translators have tried to solve these…

Bilateral capacity for speech sound processing in auditory comprehension: evidence from Wada procedures.

Science.gov (United States)

Hickok, G; Okada, K; Barr, W; Pa, J; Rogalsky, C; Donnelly, K; Barde, L; Grant, A

2008-12-01

Data from lesion studies suggest that the ability to perceive speech sounds, as measured by auditory comprehension tasks, is supported by temporal lobe systems in both the left and right hemisphere. For example, patients with left temporal lobe damage and auditory comprehension deficits (i.e., Wernicke's aphasics), nonetheless comprehend isolated words better than one would expect if their speech perception system had been largely destroyed (70-80% accuracy). Further, when comprehension fails in such patients their errors are more often semantically-based, than-phonemically based. The question addressed by the present study is whether this ability of the right hemisphere to process speech sounds is a result of plastic reorganization following chronic left hemisphere damage, or whether the ability exists in undamaged language systems. We sought to test these possibilities by studying auditory comprehension in acute left versus right hemisphere deactivation during Wada procedures. A series of 20 patients undergoing clinically indicated Wada procedures were asked to listen to an auditorily presented stimulus word, and then point to its matching picture on a card that contained the target picture, a semantic foil, a phonemic foil, and an unrelated foil. This task was performed under three conditions, baseline, during left carotid injection of sodium amytal, and during right carotid injection of sodium amytal. Overall, left hemisphere injection led to a significantly higher error rate than right hemisphere injection. However, consistent with lesion work, the majority (75%) of these errors were semantic in nature. These findings suggest that auditory comprehension deficits are predominantly semantic in nature, even following acute left hemisphere disruption. This, in turn, supports the hypothesis that the right hemisphere is capable of speech sound processing in the intact brain.

Ultra-thin smart acoustic metasurface for low-frequency sound insulation

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, Hao; Xiao, Yong; Wen, Jihong; Yu, Dianlong; Wen, Xisen

2016-04-01

Insulating low-frequency sound is a conventional challenge due to the high areal mass required by mass law. In this letter, we propose a smart acoustic metasurface consisting of an ultra-thin aluminum foil bonded with piezoelectric resonators. Numerical and experimental results show that the metasurface can break the conventional mass law of sound insulation by 30 dB in the low frequency regime (sound insulation performance is attributed to the infinite effective dynamic mass density produced by the smart resonators. It is also demonstrated that the excellent sound insulation property can be conveniently tuned by simply adjusting the external circuits instead of modifying the structure of the metasurface.

Problems catching up – age disadvantage in letter recognition, phoneme awareness and speed naming in Danish five-year-olds at school entry does not disappear after the first school year

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Wilms, Inge Linda

2017-01-01

(a) Research findings: Purpose: The purpose of the study was to investigate the development in mastery of preparatory reading skills at the first school year. Method: 96 children from a high income, high resource area of Denmark were tested on alphabet knowledge, phonemic awareness, word mobiliza......(a) Research findings: Purpose: The purpose of the study was to investigate the development in mastery of preparatory reading skills at the first school year. Method: 96 children from a high income, high resource area of Denmark were tested on alphabet knowledge, phonemic awareness, word...... mobilization and word reading at the entry and exit to school (0-grade). Results: There are significant differences in preparatory reading skills in five and six year old children. The differences in performance scores are not evened out during the first school year but remain the same. Conclusion: Even...... with intensive day care and similar demographical and socio-economical factors, children will start school with different levels of preparatory reading skills depending on entry to school age. The Danish curriculum which favors standardized reading practice will not be sufficient to even out skills differences...

Comparing grapheme-based and phoneme-based speech recognition for Afrikaans

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Basson, WD

2012-11-01

Full Text Available This paper compares the recognition accuracy of a phoneme-based automatic speech recognition system with that of a grapheme-based system, using Afrikaans as case study. The first system is developed using a conventional pronunciation dictionary...

"These forecasts may be substantially different from actual results." The use of epistemic modal markers in English and German original letters to shareholders and in English-German translations*

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Andrea Bicsár

2012-01-01

Full Text Available Letters to shareholders (i. e. the first part of a company's Annual Report represent an interesting genre for the analysis of epistemic modal expressions. They serve the function to present a short overview of the company's main achievements as well as an outlook into the future. They additionally serve a more marketing-oriented goal: to inspire confidence in the company. Epistemic modal expressions (e. g. may, perhaps, probably are used in texts for two main reasons: Firstly, speakers can signal with these markers that they have content-based reasons to be unsure about the states of affairs they are talking about. This type of use can be expected to be typical in the context of predictions of future developments. Secondly, speakers can use them for interpersonal reasons, to open up the discursive space for alternative positions, leaving the readers their right to form their own opinion. This type of use can be expected in positive evaluations of one’s own company, which are thus presented in a mitigated way, avoiding the impression of boasting.It is in particular the second type of use that can be expected to be highly sensitive to cultural differences. The present paper analyzes to what extent US-English and German letters to shareholders differ in the use of these markers, and how these differences are reflected in English-German translations. Our quantitative analysis of the distribution of all epistemic modal markers in a multilingual corpus comes to the conclusion that there are notable differences between English and German original texts. Unlike in other studies on English-German translations (e. g. Kranich/House/Becher 2012, however, we arrive at the conclusion that the English-German translations are very closely adapted to the target-language conventions and show little interference from the English originals.

Michael Maier--nine newly discovered letters.

Science.gov (United States)

Lenke, Nils; Roudet, Nicolas; Tilton, Hereward

2014-02-01

The authors provide a transcription, translation, and evaluation of nine newly discovered letters from the alchemist Michael Maier (1568-1622) to Gebhardt Johann von Alvensleben (1576-1631), a noble landholder in the vicinity of Magdeburg. Stemming from the final year of his life, this correspondence casts new light on Maier's biography, detailing his efforts to secure patronage amid the financial crisis of the early Thirty Years' War. While his ill-fated quest to perfect potable gold continued to form the central focus of his patronage suits, Maier also offered his services in several arts that he had condemned in his printed works, namely astrology and "supernatural" magic. Remarks concerning his previously unknown acquaintance with Heinrich Khunrath call for a re-evaluation of Maier's negotiation of the discursive boundaries between Lutheran orthodoxy and Paracelsianism. The letters also reveal Maier's substantial contribution to a work previously ascribed solely to the English alchemist Francis Anthony.

Speech-specific tuning of neurons in human superior temporal gyrus.

Science.gov (United States)

Chan, Alexander M; Dykstra, Andrew R; Jayaram, Vinay; Leonard, Matthew K; Travis, Katherine E; Gygi, Brian; Baker, Janet M; Eskandar, Emad; Hochberg, Leigh R; Halgren, Eric; Cash, Sydney S

2014-10-01

How the brain extracts words from auditory signals is an unanswered question. We recorded approximately 150 single and multi-units from the left anterior superior temporal gyrus of a patient during multiple auditory experiments. Against low background activity, 45% of units robustly fired to particular spoken words with little or no response to pure tones, noise-vocoded speech, or environmental sounds. Many units were tuned to complex but specific sets of phonemes, which were influenced by local context but invariant to speaker, and suppressed during self-produced speech. The firing of several units to specific visual letters was correlated with their response to the corresponding auditory phonemes, providing the first direct neural evidence for phonological recoding during reading. Maximal decoding of individual phonemes and words identities was attained using firing rates from approximately 5 neurons within 200 ms after word onset. Thus, neurons in human superior temporal gyrus use sparse spatially organized population encoding of complex acoustic-phonetic features to help recognize auditory and visual words. © The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

MEANING AND FORM IN NURSERY RHYMES TRANSLATION

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ikke Dewi Pratama

2017-07-01

Full Text Available Abstract MAKNA DAN BENTUK DALAM PENERJEMAHAN LAGU-LAGU ANAK Abstract Translating nursery rhymes is not an easy task. The problems of equivalence in meaning and form as well as in the harmony between the translated lyrics and the music are aspects that need to be considered by the translators. By considering nursery rhyme lyric as poetry text, this research analyzes the equivalence of meaning and form in nursery rhymes translation. This research focuses on five nursery rhymes. The meaning analysis was done by conducting particular procedures on translation quality assessment. Meanwhile, the analysis of the form was conducted by comparing the two versions of the nursery rhymes focusing on the sound values. From the equivalence of meaning, the result shows that most nursery rhymes are translated less accurately. On the other hand, the finding of the equivalence in form shows that most of the auditory devices are deleted while most of the rhymes are shifted. This research is expected to give a contribution to song translation activities especially those involving children as the target listeners. Keywords: equivalence, accuracy, sound values, auditory devices, rhymes Abstrak Menerjemahkan lagu anak bukanlah hal yang mudah. Masalah kesepadanan makna dan bentuk, serta harmonisasi antara lirik terjemahan dan musik adalah aspek-aspek yang harus dipertimbangkan oleh penerjemah. Dengan mempertimbangkan lirik lagu anak sebagai teks puisi, penelitian ini menganalisis kesepadanan antara makna dan bentuk dalam terjemahan lagu anak. Dengan menggunakan teknik sampling, penelitian ini berfokus kepada lima lagu anak. Analisis makna dilakukan dengan prosedur penelitian kualitas terjemahan sedangkan analisis bentuk dilakukan dengan membandingkan dua versi lagu anak dengan fokus kepada sound values (bunyi. Analisis kesepadanan makna menunjukkan bahwa sebagian besar lagu anak diterjemahkan dengan kurang akurat. Dari segi bentuk, sebagian besar auditory devices

Training Phoneme Blending Skills in Children with Down Syndrome

Science.gov (United States)

Burgoyne, Kelly; Duff, Fiona; Snowling, Maggie; Buckley, Sue; Hulme, Charles

2013-01-01

This article reports the evaluation of a 6-week programme of teaching designed to support the development of phoneme blending skills in children with Down syndrome (DS). Teaching assistants (TAs) were trained to deliver the intervention to individual children in daily 10-15-minute sessions, within a broader context of reading and language…

Morpho-phonemic analysis boosts word reading for adult struggling readers.

Science.gov (United States)

Gray, Susan H; Ehri, Linnea C; Locke, John L

2018-01-01

A randomized control trial compared the effects of two kinds of vocabulary instruction on component reading skills of adult struggling readers. Participants seeking alternative high school diplomas received 8 h of scripted tutoring to learn forty academic vocabulary words embedded within a civics curriculum. They were matched for language background and reading levels, then randomly assigned to either morpho-phonemic analysis teaching word origins, morpheme and syllable structures, or traditional whole word study teaching multiple sentence contexts, meaningful connections, and spellings. Both groups made comparable gains in learning the target words, but the morpho-phonemic group showed greater gains in reading unfamiliar words on standardized tests of word reading, including word attack and word recognition. Findings support theories of word learning and literacy that promote explicit instruction in word analysis to increase poor readers' linguistic awareness by revealing connections between morphological, phonological, and orthographic structures within words.

Computer game as a tool for training the identification of phonemic length.

Science.gov (United States)

Pennala, Riitta; Richardson, Ulla; Ylinen, Sari; Lyytinen, Heikki; Martin, Maisa

2014-12-01

Computer-assisted training of Finnish phonemic length was conducted with 7-year-old Russian-speaking second-language learners of Finnish. Phonemic length plays a different role in these two languages. The training included game activities with two- and three-syllable word and pseudo-word minimal pairs with prototypical vowel durations. The lowest accuracy scores were recorded for two-syllable words. Accuracy scores were higher for the minimal pairs with larger rather than smaller differences in duration. Accuracy scores were lower for long duration than for short duration. The ability to identify quantity degree was generalized to stimuli used in the identification test in two of the children. Ideas for improving the game are introduced.

Reading disorders and dyslexia.

Science.gov (United States)

Hulme, Charles; Snowling, Margaret J

2016-12-01

We review current knowledge about the nature of reading development and disorders, distinguishing between the processes involved in learning to decode print, and the processes involved in reading comprehension. Children with decoding difficulties/dyslexia experience deficits in phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge and rapid automatized naming in the preschool years and beyond. These phonological/language difficulties appear to be proximal causes of the problems in learning to decode print in dyslexia. We review data from a prospective study of children at high risk of dyslexia to show that being at family risk of dyslexia is a primary risk factor for poor reading and children with persistent language difficulties at school entry are more likely to develop reading problems. Early oral language difficulties are strong predictors of later difficulties in reading comprehension. There are two distinct forms of reading disorder in children: dyslexia (a difficulty in learning to translate print into speech) and reading comprehension impairment. Both forms of reading problem appear to be predominantly caused by deficits in underlying oral language skills. Implications for screening and for the delivery of robust interventions for language and reading are discussed.

Evidences of Factorial Structure and Precision of Phonemic Awareness Tasks (TCFe

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Dalva Maria Alves Godoy

2015-12-01

Full Text Available AbstractTo assess phonological awareness - a decisive skill for learning to read and write - it is necessary to provide evidence about an instrument construct to present trustworthy parameters for both empirical research and the development of educational intervention and rehabilitation programs. In Brazil, at this moment, there are no studies regarding the internal structure for tests of phonological awareness. This article shows the factorial validity of a test of phonological awareness composed by three sub-tests: two tasks of subtraction of initial phoneme and one of phonemic segmentation. The multidimensional confirmatory factorial analysis was applied to a sample of 176 Brazilian students ( Mage= 9.3 years from the first to fifth grade of elementary school. Results indicated a well-adjusted model, with items of intermediate difficulty and high factor loadings; thus, this corroboratedthe internal structure and well-designed theoretical conception.

BRAND NAMING: SOUND SYMBOLISM, BRAND PREFERENCE AND BRAND PERFORMANCE

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Alina Catalina Duduciuc

2015-01-01

Full Text Available The aim of this study is to highlight the importance of sound symbolism for Romanian marketing and advertising applied research. Previous research showed that the phonetic structure of brand name communicates its characteristics, i.e. it drives consumers to assess certain features and performance of the product. We assumed that when consumers encounter an unknown brand name, they automatically infer characteristics from the meaning conveyed by the sounds (e.g. phonemes. Therefore, we supposed that a brand name for a shampoo (artificially created on experimental purpose containing back vowels is evaluated better by consumers when they compare it to another brand name with front vowels. Furthermore, we tested the influence of the stops and fricatives consonants in inferring certain attributes of product. To this end, fifty nine students (N=59 participated in a research based on questionnaire. The results revealed that subjects evaluated better the brand names containing back vowels than brand names with front vowel. No effect was obtained regarding the presence of stops and fricatives consonants in assessing the brand performance.

Some Pitfalls of Translation Greek

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Fernández Marcos, Natalio

2004-12-01

Full Text Available In textual criticism it is important to detect the genesis of mistakes; sometimes the true reading is only reached through the unmasking of the wrong one. Likewise, in order to use critically the Septuagint it is indispensable to find out first its corruptions and mistranslations. The making of a Greek-Hebrew Index of the Antiochene Text in the Historical Books is an excellent occasion to observe the translation process and find out the most common errors made by the translators. A few examples will be commented concerning the following issues: inner-Greek corruptions and misleading translations caused by the graphic confusion of similar letters (paleography or sounds (phonetics, and by a different reading or vocalization of the consonantal text. In several cases this analysis may open a window towards a non-Masoretic Hebrew Vorlage.

En crítica textual es muy importante descubrir la génesis de los errores; a veces la lectura verdadera sólo se descubre desenmascarando la falsa. De igual manera, para usar críticamente la Septuaginta es imprescindible descubrir primero las corrupciones y los errores de traducción. La confección de un índice griego-hebreo del texto antioqueno en los libros históricos es una ocasión excelente para analizar el proceso de traducción y detectar los errores más comunes cometidos por los traductores. En el artículo se estudian algunos ejemplos con relación a los siguientes fenómenos: corrupciones internas al griego y traducciones equivocadas motivadas por la confusión gráfica de letras (paleografía o sonidos (fonética semejantes y por una vocalización diferente del texto consonántico. En varios casos este análisis permite vislumbrar un texto base hebreo distinto del masorético.

Precision of working memory for speech sounds.

Science.gov (United States)

Joseph, Sabine; Iverson, Paul; Manohar, Sanjay; Fox, Zoe; Scott, Sophie K; Husain, Masud

2015-01-01

Memory for speech sounds is a key component of models of verbal working memory (WM). But how good is verbal WM? Most investigations assess this using binary report measures to derive a fixed number of items that can be stored. However, recent findings in visual WM have challenged such "quantized" views by employing measures of recall precision with an analogue response scale. WM for speech sounds might rely on both continuous and categorical storage mechanisms. Using a novel speech matching paradigm, we measured WM recall precision for phonemes. Vowel qualities were sampled from a formant space continuum. A probe vowel had to be adjusted to match the vowel quality of a target on a continuous, analogue response scale. Crucially, this provided an index of the variability of a memory representation around its true value and thus allowed us to estimate how memories were distorted from the original sounds. Memory load affected the quality of speech sound recall in two ways. First, there was a gradual decline in recall precision with increasing number of items, consistent with the view that WM representations of speech sounds become noisier with an increase in the number of items held in memory, just as for vision. Based on multidimensional scaling (MDS), the level of noise appeared to be reflected in distortions of the formant space. Second, as memory load increased, there was evidence of greater clustering of participants' responses around particular vowels. A mixture model captured both continuous and categorical responses, demonstrating a shift from continuous to categorical memory with increasing WM load. This suggests that direct acoustic storage can be used for single items, but when more items must be stored, categorical representations must be used.

Contributions of Letter-Speech Sound Learning and Visual Print Tuning to Reading Improvement: Evidence from Brain Potential and Dyslexia Training Studies

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Gorka Fraga González

2017-01-01

Full Text Available We use a neurocognitive perspective to discuss the contribution of learning letter-speech sound (L-SS associations and visual specialization in the initial phases of reading in dyslexic children. We review findings from associative learning studies on related cognitive skills important for establishing and consolidating L-SS associations. Then we review brain potential studies, including our own, that yielded two markers associated with reading fluency. Here we show that the marker related to visual specialization (N170 predicts word and pseudoword reading fluency in children who received additional practice in the processing of morphological word structure. Conversely, L-SS integration (indexed by mismatch negativity (MMN may only remain important when direct orthography to semantic conversion is not possible, such as in pseudoword reading. In addition, the correlation between these two markers supports the notion that multisensory integration facilitates visual specialization. Finally, we review the role of implicit learning and executive functions in audiovisual learning in dyslexia. Implications for remedial research are discussed and suggestions for future studies are presented.

Letters in the Forest: Global precedence effect disappears for letters but not for non-letters under reading-like conditions

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Thomas eLachmann

2014-07-01

Full Text Available Normally-skilled reading involves special processing strategies for letters, which are habitually funneled into an abstract letter code. On the basis of previous studies we argue that this habit leads to the preferred usage of an analytic strategy for the processing of letters, while non-letters are preferably processed via a holistic strategy. The well-known Global Precedence Effect (GPE seems to contradict to this assumption, since, with compound, hierarchical figures, including letter items, faster responses are observed to the global than to the local level of the figure, as well as an asymmetric interference effect from global to local level. We argue that with letters these effects depend on presentation conditions; only when they elicit the processing strategies automatized for reading, an analytic strategy for letters in contrast to non-letters is to be expected. We compared the GPE for letters and non-letters in central viewing, with the global stimulus size close to the functional visual field in whole word reading (6.5o of visual angle and local stimuli close to the critical size for fluent reading of individual letters (.5o of visual angle. Under these conditions, the GPE remained robust for non-letters. For letters, however, it disappeared: letters showed no overall response time advantage for the global level and symmetric congruence effects (local-to-global as well as global-to local interference. We interpret these results as according to the view that reading is based on resident analytic visual processing strategies for letters.

Evaluation of soft segment modeling on a context independent phoneme classification system

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Razzazi, F.; Sayadiyan, A.

2007-01-01

The geometric distribution of states duration is one of the main performance limiting assumptions of hidden Markov modeling of speech signals. Stochastic segment models, generally, and segmental HMM, specifically overcome this deficiency partly at the cost of more complexity in both training and recognition phases. In addition to this assumption, the gradual temporal changes of speech statistics has not been modeled in HMM. In this paper, a new duration modeling approach is presented. The main idea of the model is to consider the effect of adjacent segments on the probability density function estimation and evaluation of each acoustic segment. This idea not only makes the model robust against segmentation errors, but also it models gradual change from one segment to the next one with a minimum set of parameters. The proposed idea is analytically formulated and tested on a TIMIT based context independent phenomena classification system. During the test procedure, the phoneme classification of different phoneme classes was performed by applying various proposed recognition algorithms. The system was optimized and the results have been compared with a continuous density hidden Markov model (CDHMM) with similar computational complexity. The results show 8-10% improvement in phoneme recognition rate in comparison with standard continuous density hidden Markov model. This indicates improved compatibility of the proposed model with the speech nature. (author)

Particles and nuclei, letters

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

2002-01-01

The present collection of letters from JINR, Dubna, contains ten separate records on Wien filter using in exploring on low-energy radioactive nuclei, memory effects in dissipative nucleus-nucleus collision, topological charge and topological susceptibility in connection with translation and gauge invariance, solutions of the multitime Dirac equation, the maximum entropy technique. System's statistical description, the charged conductor inside dielectric. Solution of boundary condition by means of auxiliary charges and the method of linear algebraic equations, optical constants of the TGS single crystal irradiated by power pulsed electron beam, interatomic pair potential and n-e amplitude from slow neutron scattering by noble gases, the two-coordinate multiwire proportional chamber of the high spatial resolution and neutron drip line in the region of O-Mg isotopes

A Brief Critique of Chomsky's Challenge to Classical Phonemic Phonology.

Science.gov (United States)

Liu, Ngar-Fun

1994-01-01

Phonemic phonology became important because it provided a descriptive account of dialects and languages that had never been transcribed before, and it derives its greatest strength from its practical orientation, which has proved beneficial to language teaching and learning. Noam Chomsky's criticisms of it are largely unjust because he has not…

A personal letter to an aspiring physician or nurse (or other caring professional).

Science.gov (United States)

Savett, Laurence A

2014-01-01

In a letter to an aspiring physician or nurse, the author describes some of the important dimensions and timeless values of a fulfilling career in health care, the importance of the professional-patient relationship, ways to make an informed career choice, the guidance provided by sound values, and his response to some of the myths about health care careers.

Phoneme Awareness, Visual-Verbal Paired-Associate Learning, and Rapid Automatized Naming as Predictors of Individual Differences in Reading Ability

Science.gov (United States)

Warmington, Meesha; Hulme, Charles

2012-01-01

This study examines the concurrent relationships between phoneme awareness, visual-verbal paired-associate learning, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and reading skills in 7- to 11-year-old children. Path analyses showed that visual-verbal paired-associate learning and RAN, but not phoneme awareness, were unique predictors of word recognition,…

Detection of target phonemes in spontaneous and read speech.

Science.gov (United States)

Mehta, G; Cutler, A

1988-01-01

Although spontaneous speech occurs more frequently in most listeners' experience than read speech, laboratory studies of human speech recognition typically use carefully controlled materials read from a script. The phonological and prosodic characteristics of spontaneous and read speech differ considerably, however, which suggests that laboratory results may not generalise to the recognition of spontaneous speech. In the present study listeners were presented with both spontaneous and read speech materials, and their response time to detect word-initial target phonemes was measured. Responses were, overall, equally fast in each speech mode. However, analysis of effects previously reported in phoneme detection studies revealed significant differences between speech modes. In read speech but not in spontaneous speech, later targets were detected more rapidly than targets preceded by short words. In contrast, in spontaneous speech but not in read speech, targets were detected more rapidly in accented than in unaccented words and in strong than in weak syllables. An explanation for this pattern is offered in terms of characteristic prosodic differences between spontaneous and read speech. The results support claims from previous work that listeners pay great attention to prosodic information in the process of recognising speech.

Understanding native Russian listeners' errors on an English word recognition test: model-based analysis of phoneme confusion.

Science.gov (United States)

Shi, Lu-Feng; Morozova, Natalia

2012-08-01

Word recognition is a basic component in a comprehensive hearing evaluation, but data are lacking for listeners speaking two languages. This study obtained such data for Russian natives in the US and analysed the data using the perceptual assimilation model (PAM) and speech learning model (SLM). Listeners were randomly presented 200 NU-6 words in quiet. Listeners responded verbally and in writing. Performance was scored on words and phonemes (word-initial consonants, vowels, and word-final consonants). Seven normal-hearing, adult monolingual English natives (NM), 16 English-dominant (ED), and 15 Russian-dominant (RD) Russian natives participated. ED and RD listeners differed significantly in their language background. Consistent with the SLM, NM outperformed ED listeners and ED outperformed RD listeners, whether responses were scored on words or phonemes. NM and ED listeners shared similar phoneme error patterns, whereas RD listeners' errors had unique patterns that could be largely understood via the PAM. RD listeners had particular difficulty differentiating vowel contrasts /i-I/, /æ-ε/, and /ɑ-Λ/, word-initial consonant contrasts /p-h/ and /b-f/, and word-final contrasts /f-v/. Both first-language phonology and second-language learning history affect word and phoneme recognition. Current findings may help clinicians differentiate word recognition errors due to language background from hearing pathologies.

Computer-based auditory phoneme discrimination training improves speech recognition in noise in experienced adult cochlear implant listeners.

Science.gov (United States)

Schumann, Annette; Serman, Maja; Gefeller, Olaf; Hoppe, Ulrich

2015-03-01

Specific computer-based auditory training may be a useful completion in the rehabilitation process for cochlear implant (CI) listeners to achieve sufficient speech intelligibility. This study evaluated the effectiveness of a computerized, phoneme-discrimination training programme. The study employed a pretest-post-test design; participants were randomly assigned to the training or control group. Over a period of three weeks, the training group was instructed to train in phoneme discrimination via computer, twice a week. Sentence recognition in different noise conditions (moderate to difficult) was tested pre- and post-training, and six months after the training was completed. The control group was tested and retested within one month. Twenty-seven adult CI listeners who had been using cochlear implants for more than two years participated in the programme; 15 adults in the training group, 12 adults in the control group. Besides significant improvements for the trained phoneme-identification task, a generalized training effect was noted via significantly improved sentence recognition in moderate noise. No significant changes were noted in the difficult noise conditions. Improved performance was maintained over an extended period. Phoneme-discrimination training improves experienced CI listeners' speech perception in noise. Additional research is needed to optimize auditory training for individual benefit.

Sound iconicity of abstract concepts: Place of articulation is implicitly associated with abstract concepts of size and social dominance.

Science.gov (United States)

Auracher, Jan

2017-01-01

The concept of sound iconicity implies that phonemes are intrinsically associated with non-acoustic phenomena, such as emotional expression, object size or shape, or other perceptual features. In this respect, sound iconicity is related to other forms of cross-modal associations in which stimuli from different sensory modalities are associated with each other due to the implicitly perceived correspondence of their primal features. One prominent example is the association between vowels, categorized according to their place of articulation, and size, with back vowels being associated with bigness and front vowels with smallness. However, to date the relative influence of perceptual and conceptual cognitive processing on this association is not clear. To bridge this gap, three experiments were conducted in which associations between nonsense words and pictures of animals or emotional body postures were tested. In these experiments participants had to infer the relation between visual stimuli and the notion of size from the content of the pictures, while directly perceivable features did not support-or even contradicted-the predicted association. Results show that implicit associations between articulatory-acoustic characteristics of phonemes and pictures are mainly influenced by semantic features, i.e., the content of a picture, whereas the influence of perceivable features, i.e., size or shape, is overridden. This suggests that abstract semantic concepts can function as an interface between different sensory modalities, facilitating cross-modal associations.

Sons fricativos surdos Voiceless fricatives sounds

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Carla Aparecida Cielo

2008-01-01

Full Text Available TEMA: características dos sons fricativos surdos. OBJETIVO: propor uma revisão da literatura pertinente às características acústicas, fonéticas e fonológicas dos fonemas fricativos surdos que integram o sistema fonológico do Português. Além disso, são descritas suas aplicações na terapia vocal. CONCLUSÕES: os fricativos são fonemas agudos, abrangendo de 2500 a 8000Hz; são plenamente adquiridos até os 3:7 anos de idade; o /s/ que também é o mais afetado em casos de frênulo lingual curto; a omissão do /s/ é uma das ocorrências mais freqüentes na alfabetização; sendo que, no desvio fonológico e na fissura lábio-palatina, freqüentemente ocorre comprometimento de toda a classe de fricativos. Na avaliação de voz, os fricativos são mencionados com as medidas de TMF e relação s/z, bem como seu uso como sons de apoio na fonoterapia.BACKGROUND: characteristics of voiceless fricative sounds PURPOSE: to review the literature related to acoustic, phonetics and phonological characteristics of voiceless fricative sounds that are part of the phonological system of the Portuguese Language. Furthermore, it describes the use of these sounds in voice therapy. CONCLUSIONS: fricatives are acute phonemes comprised between 2500 and 8000 Hz; they are fully acquired up to the age of 3:7 years; the /s/, which is the most affected in cases of short lingual frenum; omission of the /s/ is one of the most frequent occurrences during literacy education; and in the phonological deviation and labial-palatine fissure the entire class of fricatives is frequently affected. In voice assessment, fricative sounds are mentioned as TMF measurements and s/z relationship, and their use as support sounds in speech therapy.

[Prevention of dyslexia – short-term and intermediate effects of promoting phonological awareness and letter-sound correspondence with at-risk preschool children].

Science.gov (United States)

Höse, Anna; Wyschkon, Anne; Moraske, Svenja; Eggeling, Marie; Quandte, Sabine; Kohn, Juliane; Poltz, Nadine; von Aster, Michael; Esser, Günter

2016-09-01

This study assesses the short-term and intermediate effects of preschool training stimulating phonological awareness and letter-sound correspondence for children at risk of developing dyslexia. Moreover, we examined whether training reduced the frequency of subsequent dyslexic problems. 25 children at risk of developing dyslexia were trained with Hören, Lauschen, Lernen 1 und 2 (Küspert & Schneider, 2008; Plume & Schneider, 2004) by their kindergarten teachers and were compared with 60 untrained at-risk children. The training revealed a significant short-term effect: The phonological awareness of trained at-risk children increased significantly over that of untrained at-risk children. However, there were no differences in phonological awareness, spelling, and reading ability between the first-graders in the training and control group. Furthermore, reading problems were reduced in the training group. In the future, phonological awareness as well as additional predictors should be included when identifying children vulnerable to developing dyslexia. Moreover, in order to prevent dyslexia, additional prerequisite deficits need to be identified, alleviated, and their effects evaluated.

Detection of target phonemes in spontaneous and read speech

OpenAIRE

Mehta, G.; Cutler, A.

1988-01-01

Although spontaneous speech occurs more frequently in most listeners’ experience than read speech, laboratory studies of human speech recognition typically use carefully controlled materials read from a script. The phonological and prosodic characteristics of spontaneous and read speech differ considerably, however, which suggests that laboratory results may not generalize to the recognition of spontaneous and read speech materials, and their response time to detect word-initial target phonem...

Speech Rate Normalization and Phonemic Boundary Perception in Cochlear-Implant Users

Science.gov (United States)

Jaekel, Brittany N.; Newman, Rochelle S.; Goupell, Matthew J.

2017-01-01

Purpose: Normal-hearing (NH) listeners rate normalize, temporarily remapping phonemic category boundaries to account for a talker's speech rate. It is unknown if adults who use auditory prostheses called cochlear implants (CI) can rate normalize, as CIs transmit degraded speech signals to the auditory nerve. Ineffective adjustment to rate…

The Influence of Spanish Vocabulary and Phonemic Awareness on Beginning English Reading Development: A Three-Year (K-2nd) Longitudinal Study

Science.gov (United States)

Kelley, Michael F.; Roe, Mary; Blanchard, Jay; Atwill, Kim

2015-01-01

This investigation examined the influence of varying levels of Spanish receptive vocabulary and phonemic awareness ability on beginning English vocabulary, phonemic awareness, word reading fluency, and reading comprehension development across kindergarten through second grade. The 80 respondents were Spanish speaking children with no English…

Enhanced Sensitivity to Subphonemic Segments in Dyslexia: A New Instance of Allophonic Perception

Science.gov (United States)

Serniclaes, Willy; Seck, M’ballo

2018-01-01

Although dyslexia can be individuated in many different ways, it has only three discernable sources: a visual deficit that affects the perception of letters, a phonological deficit that affects the perception of speech sounds, and an audio-visual deficit that disturbs the association of letters with speech sounds. However, the very nature of each of these core deficits remains debatable. The phonological deficit in dyslexia, which is generally attributed to a deficit of phonological awareness, might result from a specific mode of speech perception characterized by the use of allophonic (i.e., subphonemic) units. Here we will summarize the available evidence and present new data in support of the “allophonic theory” of dyslexia. Previous studies have shown that the dyslexia deficit in the categorical perception of phonemic features (e.g., the voicing contrast between /t/ and /d/) is due to the enhanced sensitivity to allophonic features (e.g., the difference between two variants of /d/). Another consequence of allophonic perception is that it should also give rise to an enhanced sensitivity to allophonic segments, such as those that take place within a consonant cluster. This latter prediction is validated by the data presented in this paper. PMID:29587419

Zero sound in a two-dimensional dipolar Fermi gas

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Lu, Z.K.; Matveenko, S.I.; Shlyapnikov, G.V.

2013-01-01

We study zero sound in a weakly interacting two-dimensional (2D) gas of single-component fermionic dipoles (polar molecules or atoms with a large magnetic moment) tilted with respect to the plane of their translational motion. It is shown that the propagation of zero sound is provided by both

Structured printed referral letter (form letter; saves time and improves communication

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

R.P.J.C. Ramanayake

2013-01-01

Full Text Available Referral of patients to hospitals, specialists and other institutions is an essential part of primary health care. Patients are referred to specialists when investigation or therapeutic options are exhausted in primary care or when opinion or advice is needed from them. Referral has considerable implications for patients, health care system and health care costs. Good communication between primary and secondary care is essential for the smooth running of any health care system. Referral and reply letters are the sole means of communication between doctors most of the time and breakdown in communication could lead to poor continuity of care, delayed diagnoses, polypharmacy, increased litigation risk and unnecessary testing. A referral letter also helps to avoid patient dissatisfaction and loss of confidence in family physician. Studies of referral letters have reported that specialists are dissatisfied with their quality and content. Inclusion of letter writing skills in the medical curriculum, peer assessment and feedback have shown to improve the quality of referral letters. . Form letters have shown to enhance information content and communication in referral process. In Sri Lanka referral letters are usually hand written and frequent complaints are that these letters do not contain adequate information and retrieval of information is a problem due to poor legibility and clarity. Sometimes Primary care doctors refer patients to hospitals and specialists with only verbal instructions. To address these short comings this form letter was introduced. Based on the guidelines and systematic review of published articles, items of information to be included were decided. Printed forms of the letter are kept in the practice and the doctor has to just fill up relevant information under each heading. The objectives of introducing this structured referral letter was to improve the quality and standard of referral letters and save time for both general

A Nonverbal Phoneme Deletion Task Administered in a Dynamic Assessment Format

Science.gov (United States)

Gillam, Sandra Laing; Fargo, Jamison; Foley, Beth; Olszewski, Abbie

2011-01-01

Purpose: The purpose of the project was to design a nonverbal dynamic assessment of phoneme deletion that may prove useful with individuals who demonstrate complex communication needs (CCN) and are unable to communicate using natural speech or who present with moderate-severe speech impairments. Method: A nonverbal dynamic assessment of phoneme…

Letter of the Synod of Paris (360/1 to eastern bishops

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Zakharov Georgii

2013-08-01

Full Text Available The Russian translation from Latin of the letter of the synod of Paris (360/1 to Eastern bishops which is included in Fragmenta historica of Hilarius of Poitiers is published for the first time. The text contains some important evidences on participation of Gallic bishops in the Arian controversy and also attests the high degree of consolidation of the local Churches in Gaul.

The letter, the dictionary and the laboratory: translating chemistry and mineralogy in eighteenth-century France.

Science.gov (United States)

Bret, Patrice

2016-04-01

Eighteenth-century scientific translation was not just a linguistic or intellectual affair. It included numerous material aspects requiring a social organization to marshal the indispensable human and non-human actors. Paratexts and actors' correspondences provide a good observatory to get information about aspects such as shipments and routes, processes of translation and language acquisition (dictionaries, grammars and other helpful materials, such as translated works in both languages), texts acquisition and dissemination (including author's additions and corrections, oral presentations in academic meetings and announcements of forthcoming translations). The nature of scientific translation changed in France during the second half of the eighteenth century. Beside solitary translators, it also happened to become a collective enterprise, dedicated to providing abridgements (Collection académique, 1755-79) or enriching the learned journals with full translations of the most recent foreign texts (Guyton de Morveau's 'Bureau de traduction de Dijon', devoted to chemistry and mineralogy, 1781-90). That new trend clearly had a decisive influence on the nature of the scientific press itself. A way to set up science as a social activity in the provincial capital of Dijon, translation required a local and international network for acquiring the linguistic and scientific expertise, along with the original texts, as quickly as possible. Laboratory results and mineralogical observations were used to compare material facts (colour, odour, shape of crystals, etc.) with those described in the original text. By providing a double kind of validation - with both the experiments and the translations - the laboratory thus happened to play a major role in translation.

Modulating phonemic fluency performance in healthy subjects with transcranial magnetic stimulation over the left or right lateral frontal cortex.

Science.gov (United States)

Smirni, Daniela; Turriziani, Patrizia; Mangano, Giuseppa Renata; Bracco, Martina; Oliveri, Massimiliano; Cipolotti, Lisa

2017-07-28

A growing body of evidence have suggested that non-invasive brain stimulation techniques, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), can improve the performance of aphasic patients in language tasks. For example, application of inhibitory rTMS or tDCs over the right frontal lobe of dysphasic patients resulted in improved naming abilities. Several studies have also reported that in healthy controls (HC) tDCS application over the left prefrontal cortex (PFC) improve performance in naming and semantic fluency tasks. The aim of this study was to investigate in HC, for the first time, the effects of inhibitory repetitive TMS (rTMS) over left and right lateral frontal cortex (BA 47) on two phonemic fluency tasks (FAS or FPL). 44 right-handed HCs were administered rTMS or sham over the left or right lateral frontal cortex in two separate testing sessions, with a 24h interval, followed by the two phonemic fluency tasks. To account for possible practice effects, an additional 22 HCs were tested on only the phonemic fluency task across two sessions with no stimulation. We found that rTMS-inhibition over the left lateral frontal cortex significantly worsened phonemic fluency performance when compared to sham. In contrast, rTMS-inhibition over the right lateral frontal cortex significantly improved phonemic fluency performance when compared to sham. These results were not accounted for practice effects. We speculated that rTMS over the right lateral frontal cortex may induce plastic neural changes to the left lateral frontal cortex by suppressing interhemispheric inhibitory interactions. This resulted in an increased excitability (disinhibition) of the contralateral unstimulated left lateral frontal cortex, consequently enhancing phonemic fluency performance. Conversely, application of rTMS over the left lateral frontal cortex may induce a temporary, virtual lesion, with effects similar to those reported in left frontal

First Language Grapheme-Phoneme Transparency Effects in Adult Second Language Learning

Science.gov (United States)

Ijalba, Elizabeth; Obler, Loraine K.

2015-01-01

The Spanish writing system has consistent grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences (GPC), rendering it more transparent than English. We compared first-language (L1) orthographic transparency on how monolingual English- and Spanish-readers learned a novel writing system with a 1:1 (LT) and a 1:2 (LO) GPC. Our dependent variables were learning time,…

Letter of Polish Hetman Jan Zamoyski “About Passage of Tatars through Pokuttya in 1594”.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Roman Hautala

2017-06-01

Full Text Available The present article contains the text of the letter sent by Polish hetman Jan Zamoyski to Cardinal Cinzio Aldobrandini August 12, 1594 describing the circumstances of the recent invasion of Tatar troops in Hungary. Judging by contents of the letter, Zamoyski did not hide his desire to be justified in the eyes of the Roman Curia for the ineffectiveness of his actions, which would have to prevent Tatars to invade Hungary through Ukrainian territory that was subordinated to Rzeczpospolita. Thus, this letter is interesting for two reasons. In the first place, Zamoyski’s letter contains detailed information about movement of Tartar troops to the west and stratagemme of khan Ghazi Giray, which allowed Tatars to lull Polish hetman and painlessly penetrate into Hungarian territory. On the other hand, the letter contains somewhat clumsy attempts of Zamoyski to justify his unsuccessful actions, which represent a particular interest. This article, therefore, contains the Latin text of the letter and its Russian translation as well as the preface and necessary comments to the text explaining the reasons and the very course of Tatar invasion of the Kingdom of Hungary. In addition, the authors placed facsimiles of two handwritten copies of the letter from the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan at the end of the article.

Neural speech recognition: continuous phoneme decoding using spatiotemporal representations of human cortical activity

Science.gov (United States)

Moses, David A.; Mesgarani, Nima; Leonard, Matthew K.; Chang, Edward F.

2016-10-01

Objective. The superior temporal gyrus (STG) and neighboring brain regions play a key role in human language processing. Previous studies have attempted to reconstruct speech information from brain activity in the STG, but few of them incorporate the probabilistic framework and engineering methodology used in modern speech recognition systems. In this work, we describe the initial efforts toward the design of a neural speech recognition (NSR) system that performs continuous phoneme recognition on English stimuli with arbitrary vocabulary sizes using the high gamma band power of local field potentials in the STG and neighboring cortical areas obtained via electrocorticography. Approach. The system implements a Viterbi decoder that incorporates phoneme likelihood estimates from a linear discriminant analysis model and transition probabilities from an n-gram phonemic language model. Grid searches were used in an attempt to determine optimal parameterizations of the feature vectors and Viterbi decoder. Main results. The performance of the system was significantly improved by using spatiotemporal representations of the neural activity (as opposed to purely spatial representations) and by including language modeling and Viterbi decoding in the NSR system. Significance. These results emphasize the importance of modeling the temporal dynamics of neural responses when analyzing their variations with respect to varying stimuli and demonstrate that speech recognition techniques can be successfully leveraged when decoding speech from neural signals. Guided by the results detailed in this work, further development of the NSR system could have applications in the fields of automatic speech recognition and neural prosthetics.

Letter and symbol identification: No evidence for letter-specific crowding mechanisms.

Science.gov (United States)

Castet, Eric; Descamps, Marine; Denis-Noël, Ambre; Colé, Pascale

2017-09-01

It has been proposed that letters, as opposed to symbols, trigger specialized crowding processes, boosting identification of the first and last letters of words. This hypothesis is based on evidence that single-letter accuracy as a function of within-string position has a W shape (the classic serial position function [SPF] in psycholinguistics) whereas an inverted V shape is obtained when measured with symbols. Our main goal was to test the robustness of the latter result. Our hypothesis was that any letter/symbol difference might result from short-term visual memory processes (due to the partial report [PR] procedures used in SPF studies) rather than from crowding. We therefore removed the involvement of short-term memory by precueing target-item position and compared SPFs with precueing and postcueing. Perimetric complexity was stringently matched between letters and symbols. In postcueing conditions similar to previous studies, we did not reproduce the inverted V shape for symbols: Clear-cut W shapes were observed with an overall smaller accuracy for symbols compared to letters. This letter/symbol difference was dramatically reduced in precueing conditions in keeping with our prediction. Our results are not consistent with the claim that letter strings trigger specialized crowding processes. We argue that PR procedures are not fit to isolate crowding processes.

Dutch home-based pre-reading intervention with children at familial risk of dyslexia

OpenAIRE

van Otterloo, Sandra G.; van der Leij, Aryan

2009-01-01

Children (5 and 6 years old, n = 30) at familial risk of dyslexia received a home-based intervention that focused on phoneme awareness and letter knowledge in the year prior to formal reading instruction. The children were compared to a no-training at-risk control group (n = 27), which was selected a year earlier. After training, we found a small effect on a composite score of phoneme awareness (d = 0.29) and a large effect on receptive letter knowledge (d  = 0.88). In first grade, however, t...

The effect of letter string length and report condition on letter recognition accuracy.

Science.gov (United States)

Raghunandan, Avesh; Karmazinaite, Berta; Rossow, Andrea S

Letter sequence recognition accuracy has been postulated to be limited primarily by low-level visual factors. The influence of high level factors such as visual memory (load and decay) has been largely overlooked. This study provides insight into the role of these factors by investigating the interaction between letter sequence recognition accuracy, letter string length and report condition. Letter sequence recognition accuracy for trigrams and pentagrams were measured in 10 adult subjects for two report conditions. In the complete report condition subjects reported all 3 or all 5 letters comprising trigrams and pentagrams, respectively. In the partial report condition, subjects reported only a single letter in the trigram or pentagram. Letters were presented for 100ms and rendered in high contrast, using black lowercase Courier font that subtended 0.4° at the fixation distance of 0.57m. Letter sequence recognition accuracy was consistently higher for trigrams compared to pentagrams especially for letter positions away from fixation. While partial report increased recognition accuracy in both string length conditions, the effect was larger for pentagrams, and most evident for the final letter positions within trigrams and pentagrams. The effect of partial report on recognition accuracy for the final letter positions increased as eccentricity increased away from fixation, and was independent of the inner/outer position of a letter. Higher-level visual memory functions (memory load and decay) play a role in letter sequence recognition accuracy. There is also suggestion of additional delays imposed on memory encoding by crowded letter elements. Copyright © 2016 Spanish General Council of Optometry. Published by Elsevier España, S.L.U. All rights reserved.

Letters and Letter Writing in Early Modern Culture: An Introduction

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Gabriella Del Lungo Camiciotti

2014-04-01

Full Text Available The recently renewed scholarly interest in historical letters and letter writing has given rise to several studies which explore the culture of epistolarity from different perspectives. The article offers an introduction to recent scholarship on epistolary discourse and practices in early modern culture. Given the importance of letters as data for several types of diachronic investigation, the article focuses on three points that are crucial for an understanding of the relevance of epistolary discourse itself in early modern European culture. Firstly, letters are invaluable data for historical linguistics, to which they provide information for the history of languages, and sociohistorical and sociolinguistic research. A second recent field of investigation considers letters as documents and material items; the results of research in this area have contributed to the reconstruction of official relationships and information exchanges in past cultures and shed light on social interaction. A third, more traditional area of study, deals with the letter as a form that has given rise to many different genres across the centuries, both practical and literary.

Effect of orthographic processes on letter-identity and letter-position encoding in dyslexic children

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Caroline eReilhac

2012-05-01

Full Text Available The ability to identify letters and encode their position is a crucial step of the word recognition process. However and despite their word identification problem, the ability of dyslexic children to encode letter-identity and letter-position within strings was not systematically investigated. This study aimed at filling this gap and further explored how letter identity and letter position encoding is modulated by letter context in developmental dyslexia. For this purpose, a letter-string comparison task was administered to French dyslexic children and two chronological-age (CA and reading-age (RA-matched control groups. Children had to judge whether two successively and briefly presented 4-letter-strings were identical or different. Letter-position and letter-identity were manipulated through the transposition (e.g., RTGM vs. RMGT or substitution of two letters (e.g., TSHF vs. TGHD. Non-words, pseudo-words and words were used as stimuli to investigate sub-lexical and lexical effects on letter encoding. Dyslexic children showed both substitution and transposition detection problems relative to CA controls. A substitution advantage over transpositions was only found for words in dyslexic children whereas it extended to pseudo-words in RA controls and to all type of items in CA controls. Letters were better identified in the dyslexic group when belonging to orthographically familiar strings. Letter position encoding was very impaired in dyslexic children who did not show any word context effect in contrast to CA controls. Overall, the current findings point to a strong letter identity and letter position encoding disorder in developmental dyslexia.

Türkçede Ön Seste Y Initial Phonem Y In Turkish

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sertan ALİBEKİROĞLU

2013-03-01

Full Text Available The Turkish language, which has an ancient history, is spread to a wide geography in the old continents. In classification of Turkish, Turcologists use different measures because this spread and natural qualifier of languages which is being alive are the main reasons that Turkish to branch into many dialects and accents. Studies ofTurcologists who use dialect for the classification of Turkish show thatthere are equivalences between West and East branches of theFirst/Proto Turkish on “l-ş”, “r-z” in internal and final phoneme; andon y-s/ş in initial phonemes. Between the Ancient and ModernTurkish, there emerged-especially base on time and place-manyphoneme evaluations and formed phoneme equivalences betweendialects. These equivalences allow us to understand current situationof the language and have information for the future while they shedlight evaluation of Turkish in its long historical journey. This studyaims to show the changes of the initial phoneme y which is used inclassification based on dialects. These changes will be shown byfirstly, determining if during the First Turkish, there were theconsonant primarily “y-” in initial phonemes of words, anddetermining the position of “y-” before the written era of Turkish; andsecondly, presenting the positions of initial phoneme y- during thewritten era of Turkish. Following these motivations, the study onlyconsiders the initial phoneme “y-” and does not include the changes ininternal and final phonemes. Kökleri çok eski tarihlere uzanan Türkçe, eski kıtalar üzerinde çok geniş coğrafyalara yayılmıştır. Bu coğrafyalara yayılım ve dilin doğasında bulunan canlı bir varlık olma vasfının Türkçenin çok çeşitli lehçe ve şivelere ayrılarak dallanmasının ana sebeplerini oluşturması, Türkologların, Türkçeyi tasnif ederken değişik ölçüler kullanmalarına neden olmuştur. Coğrafya, boy adları ve lehçe özelliklerine göre tasnif edilmeye �

Neural Correlates in the Processing of Phoneme-Level Complexity in Vowel Production

Science.gov (United States)

Park, Haeil; Iverson, Gregory K.; Park, Hae-Jeong

2011-01-01

We investigated how articulatory complexity at the phoneme level is manifested neurobiologically in an overt production task. fMRI images were acquired from young Korean-speaking adults as they pronounced bisyllabic pseudowords in which we manipulated phonological complexity defined in terms of vowel duration and instability (viz., COMPLEX:…

Strategy Of Translating Gadget Brochure

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Deny Kusuma

2015-10-01

Full Text Available The title of this writing is strategy of translating gadget brochure. There were two problems discussed in this thesis, namely (1 terms found in the gadget manual book and its equivalence in Indonesia, (2 strategies applied in translating gadget brochure. Based on the analysis result, it was found that the terms and its equivalent words found in the gadget brochure were classified based on: 1 simple words or compound words and terminology forming phrase. 2 words category found are: noun and verb. The recommended pattern to determine the equivalent word was pure borrowing strategy, not adaptation borrowing strategy. The adaptation borrowing in this context was related to the spellings, the pronunciation or sound adaptation in the TL rather than adaptation for the cultural substitutes that conceptually mismatches with the standardized terminology in the SL. In addition, the result of the analysis that there were seven strategies found in gadget brochure, they were translation by more general word (Superordinate, translation by a more neutral/expressive word, translation by cultural substitution, translation by using loan word or loan word plus explanation, translation by paraphrase using related word, translation by omission and translation by illustration.

Morpho-phonemic analysis boosts word reading for adult struggling readers

OpenAIRE

Gray, Susan H.; Ehri, Linnea C.; Locke, John L.

2017-01-01

A randomized control trial compared the effects of two kinds of vocabulary instruction on component reading skills of adult struggling readers. Participants seeking alternative high school diplomas received 8 h of scripted tutoring to learn forty academic vocabulary words embedded within a civics curriculum. They were matched for language background and reading levels, then randomly assigned to either morpho-phonemic analysis teaching word origins, morpheme and syllable structures, or traditi...

Polish Phoneme Statistics Obtained On Large Set Of Written Texts

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Bartosz Ziółko

2009-01-01

Full Text Available The phonetical statistics were collected from several Polish corpora. The paper is a summaryof the data which are phoneme n-grams and some phenomena in the statistics. Triphonestatistics apply context-dependent speech units which have an important role in speech recognitionsystems and were never calculated for a large set of Polish written texts. The standardphonetic alphabet for Polish, SAMPA, and methods of providing phonetic transcriptions are described.

Phoneme Error Pattern by Heritage Speakers of Spanish on an English Word Recognition Test.

Science.gov (United States)

Shi, Lu-Feng

2017-04-01

Heritage speakers acquire their native language from home use in their early childhood. As the native language is typically a minority language in the society, these individuals receive their formal education in the majority language and eventually develop greater competency with the majority than their native language. To date, there have not been specific research attempts to understand word recognition by heritage speakers. It is not clear if and to what degree we may infer from evidence based on bilingual listeners in general. This preliminary study investigated how heritage speakers of Spanish perform on an English word recognition test and analyzed their phoneme errors. A prospective, cross-sectional, observational design was employed. Twelve normal-hearing adult Spanish heritage speakers (four men, eight women, 20-38 yr old) participated in the study. Their language background was obtained through the Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire. Nine English monolingual listeners (three men, six women, 20-41 yr old) were also included for comparison purposes. Listeners were presented with 200 Northwestern University Auditory Test No. 6 words in quiet. They repeated each word orally and in writing. Their responses were scored by word, word-initial consonant, vowel, and word-final consonant. Performance was compared between groups with Student's t test or analysis of variance. Group-specific error patterns were primarily descriptive, but intergroup comparisons were made using 95% or 99% confidence intervals for proportional data. The two groups of listeners yielded comparable scores when their responses were examined by word, vowel, and final consonant. However, heritage speakers of Spanish misidentified significantly more word-initial consonants and had significantly more difficulty with initial /p, b, h/ than their monolingual peers. The two groups yielded similar patterns for vowel and word-final consonants, but heritage speakers made significantly

Action video games improve reading abilities and visual-to-auditory attentional shifting in English-speaking children with dyslexia.

Science.gov (United States)

Franceschini, Sandro; Trevisan, Piergiorgio; Ronconi, Luca; Bertoni, Sara; Colmar, Susan; Double, Kit; Facoetti, Andrea; Gori, Simone

2017-07-19

Dyslexia is characterized by difficulties in learning to read and there is some evidence that action video games (AVG), without any direct phonological or orthographic stimulation, improve reading efficiency in Italian children with dyslexia. However, the cognitive mechanism underlying this improvement and the extent to which the benefits of AVG training would generalize to deep English orthography, remain two critical questions. During reading acquisition, children have to integrate written letters with speech sounds, rapidly shifting their attention from visual to auditory modality. In our study, we tested reading skills and phonological working memory, visuo-spatial attention, auditory, visual and audio-visual stimuli localization, and cross-sensory attentional shifting in two matched groups of English-speaking children with dyslexia before and after they played AVG or non-action video games. The speed of words recognition and phonological decoding increased after playing AVG, but not non-action video games. Furthermore, focused visuo-spatial attention and visual-to-auditory attentional shifting also improved only after AVG training. This unconventional reading remediation program also increased phonological short-term memory and phoneme blending skills. Our report shows that an enhancement of visuo-spatial attention and phonological working memory, and an acceleration of visual-to-auditory attentional shifting can directly translate into better reading in English-speaking children with dyslexia.

Phoneme Awareness, Vocabulary and Word Decoding in Monolingual and Bilingual Dutch Children

Science.gov (United States)

Janssen, Marije; Bosman, Anna M. T.; Leseman, Paul P. M.

2013-01-01

The aim of this study was to investigate whether bilingually raised children in the Netherlands, who receive literacy instruction in their second language only, show an advantage on Dutch phoneme-awareness tasks compared with monolingual Dutch-speaking children. Language performance of a group of 47 immigrant first-grade children with various…

Onomatopoeias: a new perspective around space, image schemas and phoneme clusters.

Science.gov (United States)

Catricalà, Maria; Guidi, Annarita

2015-09-01

Onomatopoeias (grammatical) descriptive and explicative model of onomatopoeia, because the rules that constrain processes of selection and construction remain idiosyncratic and variable (Dogana in Le parole dell'incanto. FrancoAngeli, Milano, 2002; Catricalà 2011). This article proposes a classification model based on spatial cognition criteria. The hypothesis (Catricalà 2011) is that onomatopoeias are related to image schemas (Johnson in The body in the mind. University Press, Chicago, 1987), i.e. to the visual mapping of a movement. We also refer to force dynamic (Talmy in Language typology and lexical description, pp 36-149, 1985; Jackendoff in Semantic structures. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1990) as a basic model of conceptual maps (Langacker in Grammar and conceptualization. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 1999). Categories are related to the presence of specific phonemes and phoneme clusters, while visual patterns correspond to different image schemas. The association between specific categories of pseudo-onomatopoeias and specific spatial/movement patterns is also the object of an experiment focused on onomatopoeia interpretation. Most part of data confirms a correlation between image schemas as CONTAINER/CONTAINMENT (crunch, plop) or SOURCE-PATH-GOAL (tattarrattat 'shots') and an occlusive consonant, while liquid and trill consonants correlate with PATH (vroom).

How Important Is Teaching Phonemic Awareness to Children Learning to Read in Spanish?

Science.gov (United States)

Goldenberg, Claude; Tolar, Tammy D.; Reese, Leslie; Francis, David J.; Bazán, Antonio Ray; Mejía-Arauz, Rebeca

2014-01-01

This comparative study examines relationships between phonemic awareness and Spanish reading skill acquisition among three groups of Spanish-speaking first and second graders: children in Mexico receiving reading instruction in Spanish and children in the United States receiving reading instruction in either Spanish or English. Children were…

Synesthetic colors are elicited by sound quality in Japanese synesthetes.

Science.gov (United States)

Asano, Michiko; Yokosawa, Kazuhiko

2011-12-01

Determinants of synesthetic color choice for Japanese phonetic characters were studied in six Japanese synesthetes. The study used Hiragana and Katakana characters, which represent the same set of syllables although their visual forms are dissimilar. From a palette of 138 colors, synesthetes selected a color corresponding to each character. Results revealed that synesthetic color choices for Hiragana characters and those for their Katakana counterparts were remarkably consistent, indicating that color selection depended on character-related sounds and not visual form. This Hiragana-Katakana invariance cannot be regarded as the same phenomenon as letter case invariance, usually reported for English grapheme-color synesthesia, because Hiragana and Katakana characters have different identities whereas upper and lower case letters have the same identity. This involvement of phonology suggests that cross-activation between an inducer (i.e., letter/character) brain region and that of the concurrent (i.e., color) area in grapheme-color synesthesia is mediated by higher order cortical processing areas. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

What Do Letter Migration Errors Reveal About Letter Position Coding in Visual Word Recognition?

Science.gov (United States)

Davis, Colin J.; Bowers, Jeffrey S.

2004-01-01

Dividing attention across multiple words occasionally results in misidentifications whereby letters apparently migrate between words. Previous studies have found that letter migrations preserve within-word letter position, which has been interpreted as support for position-specific letter coding. To investigate this issue, the authors used word…

Analysis of reliability of professor recommendation letters based on concordance with self-introduction letter.

Science.gov (United States)

Kim, Sang Hyun

2013-12-01

The purpose of this study was to examine the concordance between a checklist's categories of professor recommendation letters and characteristics of the self-introduction letter. Checklists of professor recommendation letters were analyzed and classified into cognitive, social, and affective domains. Simple correlation was performed to determine whether the characteristics of the checklists were concordant with those of the self-introduction letter. The difference in ratings of the checklists by pass or fail grades was analyzed by independent sample t-test. Logistic regression analysis was performed to determine whether a pass or fail grade was influenced by ratings on the checklists. The Cronbach alpha value of the checklists was 0.854. Initiative, as an affective domain, in the professor's recommendation letter was highly ranked among the six checklist categories. Self-directed learning in the self-introduction letter was influenced by a pass or fail grade by logistic regression analysis (pprofessor recommendation letters and the sum of all characteristics in the self-introduction letter.

Pattern-Induced Covert Category Learning in Songbirds.

Science.gov (United States)

Comins, Jordan A; Gentner, Timothy Q

2015-07-20

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. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Assessing the efficacy of hearing-aid amplification using a phoneme test

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Scheidiger, Christoph; Allen, Jont B; Dau, Torsten

2017-01-01

Consonant-vowel (CV) perception experiments provide valuable insights into how humans process speech. Here, two CV identification experiments were conducted in a group of hearing-impaired (HI) listeners, using 14 consonants followed by the vowel /ɑ/. The CVs were presented in quiet and with added......, in combination with a well-controlled phoneme speech test, may be used to assess the impact of hearing-aid signal processing on speech intelligibility....

THE LANGUAGE OF FRIENDSHIP IN THE ERASMUS’LETTERS TO SERVATIUS ROGERUS

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

L. V. Sofronova

2016-01-01

Full Text Available The authors analyze early letters of the Dutch humanist Erasmus Roterodam (1487-1488 in the first year of his stay in the monastery of Steyn. The Epistles addressed to his fellow countryman and the young monk of the same monastery Servatius Roger. The authors explore the possibility of interpretation this texts from three points of view: as some samples of epistolary art; as some patterns of homosexual behaviours of the young Erasmus; as evidence of sentimental masculine friendship phenomenon inherent in the medieval monastic culture and tradition of devotiomoderna. The letters allow the authors to put the question of the role of rhetorical standards in describing the emotional experiences as well as to analyze Erasmus’ views on friendship, love, regulations of everyday life and their interrelations. The first Russian translation of one of the Erasmus-Servatius correspondence is given in the issue.

A STUDY ON LEGIBILITY OF LETTERING

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Merve ERSAN,

2016-04-01

Full Text Available In the most general sense, lettering is the art of drawing letters, in which the letter forms carry illustrtive features. In this research which is titled "An Analysis on Legibility in Letterings Used in Print Advertisements", letterings used in and specially designed for print ads are analysed and their contribution to the ads are examined. Legibility, which is the fundamental function of writing and typography is examined in the field of lettering that has an illustrative approach. Also, the article puts emphasis on the technique and form’s contribution on content in letterings. Keywords: Lettering, print advertisements, letter design, illustration, legibility.

Multilingual Aspects of Speech Sound Disorders in Children. Communication Disorders across Languages

Science.gov (United States)

McLeod, Sharynne; Goldstein, Brian

2012-01-01

Multilingual Aspects of Speech Sound Disorders in Children explores both multilingual and multicultural aspects of children with speech sound disorders. The 30 chapters have been written by 44 authors from 16 different countries about 112 languages and dialects. The book is designed to translate research into clinical practice. It is divided into…

“Le parole che vengono da fuori”: i forestierismi nella lingua cinese contemporanea

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Alessandro Tosco

2015-10-01

Full Text Available This article explores how the words of foreign origin (loanwords, in Chinese wailaici are integrated in the modern and contemporary Chinese language. The phenomenon of the introduction of the loanwords in Chinese has become more and more productive, specially in the last thirty years. Over the time the Chinese language has devised many strategies to integrate foreign words; most of the words of Japanese origin are introduced as graphic loans, while the words introduced by Western languages (specially English are integrated as phonemic loans, loan-translations, semantic loans, or hybrid words. In recent years, many loanwords and neologisms have been created by using the language of the network, as the acronyms written in Latin letters.

The interface between spoken and written language: developmental disorders.

Science.gov (United States)

Hulme, Charles; Snowling, Margaret J

2014-01-01

We review current knowledge about reading development and the origins of difficulties in learning to read. We distinguish between the processes involved in learning to decode print, and the processes involved in reading for meaning (reading comprehension). At a cognitive level, difficulties in learning to read appear to be predominantly caused by deficits in underlying oral language skills. The development of decoding skills appears to depend critically upon phonological language skills, and variations in phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge and rapid automatized naming each appear to be causally related to problems in learning to read. Reading comprehension difficulties in contrast appear to be critically dependent on a range of oral language comprehension skills (including vocabulary knowledge and grammatical, morphological and pragmatic skills).

Rapid Naming and Phonemic Awareness in Children with or without Reading Disabilities and/or ADHD

NARCIS (Netherlands)

de Groot, Barry J.A.; van den Bos, Kees P.; van der Meulen, Bieuwe F.; Minnaert, Alexander E.M.G.

2017-01-01

Employing a large sample of children from Dutch regular elementary schools, this study assessed the contributing and discriminating values of reading disability (RD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to two types of phonological processing skills, phonemic awareness (PA) and rapid

Phonemes as images : An experimental inquiry into shape-sound symbolism applied to the distinctive features of French

OpenAIRE

Nobile , Luca

2015-01-01

International audience; This paper attempts to improve the understanding of shape-sound symbolism by isolating the phonological features of the pseudo-words used in the experiments and the graphic features of the figures matched with them. In a first section, it analyses the classic maluma-takete effect from both an articulatory and acoustical point of view, showing that it is determined by several phonological features operating simultaneously. In a second section, two new experiments are pr...

Error Variability and the Differentiation between Apraxia of Speech and Aphasia with Phonemic Paraphasia

Science.gov (United States)

Haley, Katarina L.; Jacks, Adam; Cunningham, Kevin T.

2013-01-01

Purpose: This study was conducted to evaluate the clinical utility of error variability for differentiating between apraxia of speech (AOS) and aphasia with phonemic paraphasia. Method: Participants were 32 individuals with aphasia after left cerebral injury. Diagnostic groups were formed on the basis of operationalized measures of recognized…

Sources of Phoneme Errors in Repetition: Perseverative, Neologistic, and Lesion Patterns in Jargon Aphasia

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Emma Pilkington

2017-05-01

Full Text Available This study examined patterns of neologistic and perseverative errors during word repetition in fluent Jargon aphasia. The principal hypotheses accounting for Jargon production indicate that poor activation of a target stimulus leads to weakly activated target phoneme segments, which are outcompeted at the phonological encoding level. Voxel-lesion symptom mapping studies of word repetition errors suggest a breakdown in the translation from auditory-phonological analysis to motor activation. Behavioral analyses of repetition data were used to analyse the target relatedness (Phonological Overlap Index: POI of neologistic errors and patterns of perseveration in 25 individuals with Jargon aphasia. Lesion-symptom analyses explored the relationship between neurological damage and jargon repetition in a group of 38 aphasia participants. Behavioral results showed that neologisms produced by 23 jargon individuals contained greater degrees of target lexico-phonological information than predicted by chance and that neologistic and perseverative production were closely associated. A significant relationship between jargon production and lesions to temporoparietal regions was identified. Region of interest regression analyses suggested that damage to the posterior superior temporal gyrus and superior temporal sulcus in combination was best predictive of a Jargon aphasia profile. Taken together, these results suggest that poor phonological encoding, secondary to impairment in sensory-motor integration, alongside impairments in self-monitoring result in jargon repetition. Insights for clinical management and future directions are discussed.

Effect of dental wear, stabilization appliance and anterior tooth reconstruction on mandibular movements during speech.

Science.gov (United States)

Serrano, Priscila de Oliveira; Faot, Fernanda; Del Bel Cury, Altair Antoninha; Rodrigues Garcia, Renata Cunha Matheus

2008-01-01

This study described changes in mandibular movements during pronunciation of /m/ and /s/ sounds in Portuguese, in patients presenting dental wear before and after appliance insertion and tooth reconstruction. Subjects were divided into a control group of dentate patients and an experimental group of patients with incisal tooth wear due to bruxism. A magnetic jaw tracking device measured the jaw opening, and translations to left and right sides of the mandible during pronunciation of phonemes. Evaluations were carried out 1 week and immediately before appliance insertion; 24 h, 7, 30 and 60 days after appliance insertion; and 1 week and 1 month after tooth reconstruction. Data were submitted to two-way ANOVA, Mann-Whitney and Friedman tests (pspeech of /m/ and /s/ sounds were not changed after appliance insertion and reconstruction of teeth.

Exploring the role of hand gestures in learning novel phoneme contrasts and vocabulary in a second language

Science.gov (United States)

Kelly, Spencer D.; Hirata, Yukari; Manansala, Michael; Huang, Jessica

2014-01-01

Co-speech hand gestures are a type of multimodal input that has received relatively little attention in the context of second language learning. The present study explored the role that observing and producing different types of gestures plays in learning novel speech sounds and word meanings in an L2. Naïve English-speakers were taught two components of Japanese—novel phonemic vowel length contrasts and vocabulary items comprised of those contrasts—in one of four different gesture conditions: Syllable Observe, Syllable Produce, Mora Observe, and Mora Produce. Half of the gestures conveyed intuitive information about syllable structure, and the other half, unintuitive information about Japanese mora structure. Within each Syllable and Mora condition, half of the participants only observed the gestures that accompanied speech during training, and the other half also produced the gestures that they observed along with the speech. The main finding was that participants across all four conditions had similar outcomes in two different types of auditory identification tasks and a vocabulary test. The results suggest that hand gestures may not be well suited for learning novel phonetic distinctions at the syllable level within a word, and thus, gesture-speech integration may break down at the lowest levels of language processing and learning. PMID:25071646

Letter-speech sound learning in children with dyslexia : From behavioral research to clinical practice

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Aravena, S.

2017-01-01

In alphabetic languages, learning to associate speech-sounds with unfamiliar characters is a critical step in becoming a proficient reader. This dissertation aimed at expanding our knowledge of this learning process and its relation to dyslexia, with an emphasis on bridging the gap between

Ageing dynamics of translational and rotational diffusion in a colloidal glass

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Jabbari-Farouji, Sara; Eiser, Erika; Wegdam, Gerard H; Bonn, Daniel

2004-01-01

We study the dynamics of translational and rotational diffusion during the ageing of a colloidal glass of Laponite using polarized and depolarized dynamic light scattering. The dynamics are qualitatively similar between the two degrees of freedom. The short-time diffusion is independent of the time elapsed since the sample preparation. The intermediate- and long-time diffusion, on the other hand, slows down by several orders of magnitude during the ageing. The slowing down of the rotational diffusion is found to be much faster than that of the translational diffusion. (letter to the editor)

Credit Card Debt Hardship Letter Samples

OpenAIRE

lissa coffey

2016-01-01

Having trouble with your credit card debt? Below you will find examples of hardship letters. There are several things to consider when writing a credit card hardship letter. A hardship letter is the first step to letting the credit card company know that things are bad. This free credit card hardship letter sample is only a guide in order to start the negotiation. Credit card debt hardship letter example, hardship letter to credit card. If you are having trouble paying off your debt and need ...

Critical contrastive rhetoric: The influence of L2 letter writing instruction on L1letter writing

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mehrnoosh Fakharzadeh

2014-08-01

Full Text Available The present study employed critical contrastive rhetoric to investigate the L2 to L1 transfer of organizational pattern and directness level of speech acts in business complaint letters. By examining the L1 complaint letters of 30 tourism university students in two phases of study, pre and post instruction of English complaint letter, the study revealed that the rhetorical organization of Persian letters are in a state of hybridity. The post instruction comparison of letters, however, showed a tendency towards applying English conventions both in organization and directness level of complaint speech act in the L1 complaint letters. The results also revealed that after instruction the expert in the field of tourism viewed some letters as inappropriate in terms of politeness which is reflected through some lexical items.

A Model of Classification of Phonemic and Phonetic Negative Transfer: The case of Turkish –English Interlanguage with Pedagogical Applications

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sinan Bayraktaroğlu

2011-04-01

Full Text Available This article introduces a model of classification of phonemic and phonetic negative- transfer based on an empirical study of Turkish-English Interlanguage. The model sets out a hierarchy of difficulties, starting from the most crucial phonemic features affecting “intelligibility”, down to other distributional, phonetic, and allophonic features which need to be acquired if a “near-native” level of phonological competence is aimed at. Unlike previous theoretical studies of predictions of classification of phonemic and phonetic L1 interference (Moulton 1962a 1962b; Wiik 1965, this model is based on an empirical study of the recorded materials of Turkish-English IL speakers transcribed allophonically using the IPA Alphabet and diacritics. For different categories of observed systematic negative- transfer and their avoidance of getting “fossilized” in the IL process, remedial exercises are recommended for the teaching and learning BBC Pronunciation. In conclusıon, few methodological phonetic techniques, approaches, and specifications are put forward for their use in designing the curriculum and syllabus content of teaching L2 pronunciation.

Poor Phonemic Discrimination Does Not Underlie Poor Verbal Short-Term Memory in Down Syndrome

Science.gov (United States)

Purser, Harry R. M.; Jarrold, Christopher

2013-01-01

Individuals with Down syndrome tend to have a marked impairment of verbal short-term memory. The chief aim of this study was to investigate whether phonemic discrimination contributes to this deficit. The secondary aim was to investigate whether phonological representations are degraded in verbal short-term memory in people with Down syndrome…

Learning of a Formation Principle for the Secondary Phonemic Function of a Syllabic Orthography

Science.gov (United States)

Fletcher-Flinn, Claire M.; Thompson, G. Brian; Yamada, Megumi; Meissel, Kane

2014-01-01

It has been observed in Japanese children learning to read that there is an early and rapid shift from exclusive reading of hiragana as syllabograms to the dual-use convention in which some hiragana also represent phonemic elements. Such rapid initial learning appears contrary to the standard theories of reading acquisition that require…

A Letter to Ahmad Khan

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

I.M. Mirgaleev

2016-12-01

Full Text Available We bring to attention of specialists an undated letter of Ottoman ruler Mehmed II Fatih to the Great Horde khan Ahmad from the collection of famous collector of Ottoman charters Feridun-bey [1, S. 289]. The addressee is the famous ruler of the Great Horde, khan Ahmad. Daulat Khan mentioned in the letter is Nur-Davlet. He was connected with khan Ahmad, and, as indicated by the letter, he had also set in close contact with the Ottomans whose ruler openly declares in a letter that “our sight of benevolence and patronage is directed toward him”. Thereby the Sultan made it clear to the “principal” Tatar khan Akhmad that Nur-Davlet was under the patronage of the Ottoman Empire. Considering the period of activity of Nur-Davlet in Crimea, presumably the letter was written in 1477. Famous researcher of the Crimean Khanate V.D. Smirnov had already examined the letter and the question of why Ahmad Khan was named the Crimean khan in the title of the letter [2, p. 221–222].

Pronounceability: a measure of language samples based on children's mastery of the phonemes employed in them.

Science.gov (United States)

Whissell, Cynthia

2003-06-01

56 samples (n > half a million phonemes) of names (e.g., men's, women's jets'), song lyrics (e.g., Paul Simon's, rap, Beatles'), poems (frequently anthologized English poems), and children's materials (books directed at children ages 3-10 years) were used to study a proposed new measure of English language samples--Pronounceability-based on children's mastery of some phonemes in advance of others. This measure was provisionally equated with greater "youthfulness" and "playfulness" in language samples and with less "maturity." Findings include the facts that women's names were less pronounceable than men's and that poetry was less pronounceable than song lyrics or children's materials. In a supplementary study, 13 university student volunteers' assessments of the youth of randomly constructed names was linearly related to how pronounceable each name was (eta = .8), providing construct validity for the interpretation of Pronounceability as a measure of Youthfulness.

Ethical perspectives on knowledge translation in rehabilitation.

Science.gov (United States)

Banja, John D; Eisen, Arri

2013-01-01

Although the literature on the ethical dimensions of knowledge creation, use, and dissemination is voluminous, it has not particularly examined the ethical dimensions of knowledge translation in rehabilitation. Yet, whether research is done in a wet lab or treatments are provided to patients in therapeutic settings, rehabilitation professionals commonly use (as well as create) knowledge and disseminate it to peers, patients, and various others. This article will refer to knowledge creation, use, and transfer as knowledge translation and examine some of its numerous ethical challenges. Three ethical dimensions of knowledge translation will particularly attract our attention: (1) the quality of knowledge disseminated to rehabilitationists; (2) ethical challenges in being too easily persuaded by or unreasonably resistant to putative knowledge; and (3) organizational barriers to knowledge translation. We will conclude with some recommendations on facilitating the ethical soundness of knowledge translation in rehabilitation. Copyright © 2013 American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Exploring Phonetic Realization in Danish by Transformation-Based Learning

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Uneson, Marcus; Schachtenhaufen, Ruben

2011-01-01

We align phonemic and semi-narrow phonetic transcriptions in the DanPASS corpus and extend the phonemic description with sound classes and with traditional phonetic features. From this representation, we induce rules for phonetic realization by Transformation-Based Learning (TBL). The rules thus ...

The Predictive Power of Phonemic Awareness and Naming Speed for Early Dutch Word Recognition

Science.gov (United States)

Verhagen, Wim G. M.; Aarnoutse, Cor A. J.; van Leeuwe, Jan F. J.

2009-01-01

Effects of phonemic awareness and naming speed on the speed and accuracy of Dutch children's word recognition were investigated in a longitudinal study. Both the speed and accuracy of word recognition at the end of Grade 2 were predicted by naming speed from both kindergarten and Grade 1, after control for autoregressive relations, kindergarten…

An Investigation of Pun Translatability in English Translations of Sa'di's Ghazals Based on Delabastita's Proposed Model

Science.gov (United States)

Koochacki, Fahime

2016-01-01

The rich cultural connotations behind puns and the distinctive features of the puns' form, sound and meanings pose great challenges to the translator. Furthermore, given puns' non-negligible effects in Persian literary texts, it has been the aim of the present study to analyze and measure how puns in Sa'di's Ghazals have actually been treated in…

From the Bob/Kirk effect to the Benoit/Éric effect: Testing the mechanism of name sound symbolism in two languages.

Science.gov (United States)

Sidhu, David M; Pexman, Penny M; Saint-Aubin, Jean

2016-09-01

Although it is often assumed that language involves an arbitrary relationship between form and meaning, many studies have demonstrated that nonwords like maluma are associated with round shapes, while nonwords like takete are associated with sharp shapes (i.e., the Maluma/Takete effect, Köhler, 1929/1947). The majority of the research on sound symbolism has used nonwords, but Sidhu and Pexman (2015) recently extended this effect to existing labels: real English first names (i.e., the Bob/Kirk effect). In the present research we tested whether the effects of name sound symbolism generalize to French speakers (Experiment 1) and French names (Experiment 2). In addition, we assessed the underlying mechanism of name sound symbolism, investigating the roles of phonology and orthography in the effect. Results showed that name sound symbolism does generalize to French speakers and French names. Further, this robust effect remained the same when names were presented in a curved vs. angular font (Experiment 3), or when the salience of orthographic information was reduced through auditory presentation (Experiment 4). Together these results suggest that the Bob/Kirk effect is pervasive, and that it is based on fundamental features of name phonemes. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Assessing the Double Phonemic Representation in Bilingual Speakers of Spanish and English: An Electrophysiological Study

Science.gov (United States)

Garcia-Sierra, Adrian; Ramirez-Esparza, Nairan; Silva-Pereyra, Juan; Siard, Jennifer; Champlin, Craig A.

2012-01-01

Event Related Potentials (ERPs) were recorded from Spanish-English bilinguals (N = 10) to test pre-attentive speech discrimination in two language contexts. ERPs were recorded while participants silently read magazines in English or Spanish. Two speech contrast conditions were recorded in each language context. In the "phonemic in English"…

Effects of single-channel phonemic compression schemes on the understanding of speech by hearing-impaired listeners

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Goedegebure, A.; Hulshof, M.; Maas, R. J.; Dreschler, W. A.; Verschuure, H.

2001-01-01

The effect of digital processing on speech intelligibility was studied in hearing-impaired listeners with moderate to severe high-frequency losses. The amount of smoothed phonemic compression in a high-frequency channel was varied using wide-band control. Two alternative systems were tested to

Evaluation of phoneme compression schemes designed to compensate for temporal and spectral masking in background noise

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Goedegebure, A.; Goedegebure-Hulshof, M.; Dreschler, W. A.; Verschuure, J.

2005-01-01

The effect of phonemic compression has been studied on speech intelligibility in background noise in hearing-impaired listeners with moderate-to-severe high-frequency losses. One configuration, anti-upward-spread-of-masking (anti-USOM) focuses on a release from spectral masking of high-frequency

Translating Politeness in Bilingual English-Spanish Business Correspondence

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Nielsen, Sandro; Fuertes Olivera, Pedro

2008-01-01

which pragmatic information types are needed when translating business letters. The analysis focuses on a Spanish-English business dictionary and its treatment of politeness in special sections dealing with business correspondence. The findings show that the treatment is insufficient, because users......Politeness is an important element in interlingual business communication. Translators uae bilingual dictionaries as tools helping them in business discourse across cultures, but dictionaries do not contain the relevant pragmatic information. The functions of dictionaries are used to determine......' business-language competence does not enable them to express the right level of politeness. Bilingual dictionaries should offer a systematic treatment of cultural and genre-specific means of expressing politeness in contrastive, informative texts showing the specific uses of politeness in business...

Overt use of a tactile-kinesthetic strategy shifts to covert processing in rehabilitation of letter-by-letter reading.

Science.gov (United States)

Lott, Susan Nitzberg; Carney, Aimee Syms; Glezer, Laurie S; Friedman, Rhonda B

2010-11-01

BACKGROUND: Letter-by-letter readers identify each letter of the word they are reading serially in left to right order before recognizing the word. When their letter naming is also impaired, letter-by-letter reading is inaccurate and can render even single word reading very poor. Tactile and/or kinesthetic strategies have been reported to improve reading in these patients, but only under certain conditions or for a limited set of stimuli. AIMS: The primary aim of the current study was to determine whether a tactile/kinesthetic treatment could significantly improve reading specifically under normal reading conditions, i.e. reading untrained words presented in free vision and read without overt use of the strategy. METHODS #ENTITYSTARTX00026; PROCEDURES: Three chronic letter-by-letter readers participated in a tactile/kinesthetic treatment aimed at first improving letter naming accuracy (phase 1) and then letter-by-letter reading speed (phase 2). In a multiple case series design, accuracy and speed of reading untrained words without overt use of the trained tactile/kinesthetic strategy was assessed before phase 1, after phase 1 and again after phase 2. OUTCOMES #ENTITYSTARTX00026; RESULTS: All three patients significantly improved both their speed and accuracy reading untrained words without overt use of the trained tactile/kinesthetic strategy. All three patients required the additional practice in phase 2 to achieve significant improvement. Treatment did not target sentence level reading, yet two of the three patients became so adept that they could read entire sentences. CONCLUSIONS: This study replicates previous findings on the efficacy of tactile/kinesthetic treatment for letter-by-letter readers with poor letter naming. It further demonstrates that this treatment can alter cognitive processing such that words never specifically trained can be read in free vision without overtly using the trained strategy. The data suggest that an important element in achieving

Writing more informative letters of reference.

Science.gov (United States)

Wright, Scott M; Ziegelstein, Roy C

2004-05-01

Writing a meaningful and valuable letter of reference is not an easy task. Several factors influence the quality of any letter of reference. First, the accuracy and reliability of the writer's impressions and judgment depend on how well he knows the individual being described. Second, the writer's frame of reference, which is determined by the number of persons at the same level that he has worked with, will impact the context and significance of his beliefs and estimations. Third, the letter-writing skills of the person composing the letter will naturally affect the letter. To support the other components of a candidate's application, a letter of reference should provide specific examples of how an individual's behavior or attitude compares to a reference group and should assess "intangibles" that are hard to glean from a curriculum vitae or from test scores. This report offers suggestions that should help physicians write more informative letters of reference.

Letters From Peplau.

Science.gov (United States)

Peden, Ann R

2018-03-01

Dr. Hildegard Peplau, considered to be our first modern Nurse theorist and the Mother of Psychiatric Nursing, was a prolific writer, engaging in correspondence with colleagues and students who sought her professional and theoretical expertise. Through these letters, she influenced psychiatric nursing while maintaining a broad international network of professional colleagues. An analysis of letters, written between 1990 and 1998, provides insights into Peplau's last decade of professional life and a model of how to support the next generation of nurse scholars. Using content analysis, 24 letters received between 1990 and 1998 were read, reread, and coded. Recurring themes were identified. Three themes were identified. These include Peplau, the Person: Living a Life of Professional Balance; Lighting a Spark: Investing in the Next Generation; and Work in the Vineyards of Nursing: Maintaining a Life of Scholarship. The letters depict Peplau's keen intellect, her wide professional network, her leisure time spent with family and friends, and her own work to assure that her theoretical legacy continued. Peplau's insights continue to be relevant as psychiatric mental health nursing leaders engage in activities to support the next generation of scholars and leaders.

The legibility of letters and words

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Beier, Sofie

2016-01-01

The saying made famous by Mathew Carter that "type is a beautiful group of letters, not a group of beautiful letters”, highlights the fact that although a typeface consists of a number of letters it is when the letters are assembled in a word that they become type. However, research indicates...... that what makes letters legible in isolation is not necessarily the same as what makes them legible in words. Is it possible to create a typeface where both letters and words have a high level of legibility or are those factors so different that they cannot be combined? Through a literature review...... on relevant experimental investigations, I will in this talk present examples of when the legibility findings on letters and words correlate and when they differ....

Sound is Multi-Dimensional

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Bergstrøm-Nielsen, Carl

2006-01-01

First part of this work examines the concept of musical parameter theory and discusses its methodical use. Second part is an annotated catalogue of 33 different students' compositions, presented in their totality with English translations, created between 1985 and 2006 as part of the subject...... Intuitive Music at Music Therapy, AAU. 20 of these have sound files as well. The work thus serves as an anthology of this form of composition. All the compositions are systematically presented according to parameters: pitch, duration, dynamics, timbre, density, pulse-no pulse, tempo, stylistic...

Effect of speech-intrinsic variations on human and automatic recognition of spoken phonemes.

Science.gov (United States)

Meyer, Bernd T; Brand, Thomas; Kollmeier, Birger

2011-01-01

The aim of this study is to quantify the gap between the recognition performance of human listeners and an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system with special focus on intrinsic variations of speech, such as speaking rate and effort, altered pitch, and the presence of dialect and accent. Second, it is investigated if the most common ASR features contain all information required to recognize speech in noisy environments by using resynthesized ASR features in listening experiments. For the phoneme recognition task, the ASR system achieved the human performance level only when the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) was increased by 15 dB, which is an estimate for the human-machine gap in terms of the SNR. The major part of this gap is attributed to the feature extraction stage, since human listeners achieve comparable recognition scores when the SNR difference between unaltered and resynthesized utterances is 10 dB. Intrinsic variabilities result in strong increases of error rates, both in human speech recognition (HSR) and ASR (with a relative increase of up to 120%). An analysis of phoneme duration and recognition rates indicates that human listeners are better able to identify temporal cues than the machine at low SNRs, which suggests incorporating information about the temporal dynamics of speech into ASR systems.

Can "CANISO" Activate "CASINO"? Transposed-Letter Similarity Effects with Nonadjacent Letter Positions

Science.gov (United States)

Perea, Manuel; Lupker, Stephen J.

2004-01-01

Nonwords created by transposing two "adjacent" letters (i.e., transposed-letter (TL) nonwords like "jugde") are very effective at activating the lexical representation of their base words. This fact poses problems for most computational models of word recognition (e.g., the interactive-activation model and its extensions), which assume that exact…

Dutch home-based pre-reading intervention with children at familial risk of dyslexia.

Science.gov (United States)

van Otterloo, Sandra G; van der Leij, Aryan

2009-12-01

Children (5 and 6 years old, n = 30) at familial risk of dyslexia received a home-based intervention that focused on phoneme awareness and letter knowledge in the year prior to formal reading instruction. The children were compared to a no-training at-risk control group (n = 27), which was selected a year earlier. After training, we found a small effect on a composite score of phoneme awareness (d = 0.29) and a large effect on receptive letter knowledge (d = 0.88). In first grade, however, this did not result in beneficial effects for the experimental group in word reading and spelling. Results are compared to three former intervention studies in The Netherlands and comparable studies from Denmark and Australia.

Sound and sound sources

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Larsen, Ole Næsbye; Wahlberg, Magnus

2017-01-01

There is no difference in principle between the infrasonic and ultrasonic sounds, which are inaudible to humans (or other animals) and the sounds that we can hear. In all cases, sound is a wave of pressure and particle oscillations propagating through an elastic medium, such as air. This chapter...... is about the physical laws that govern how animals produce sound signals and how physical principles determine the signals’ frequency content and sound level, the nature of the sound field (sound pressure versus particle vibrations) as well as directional properties of the emitted signal. Many...... of these properties are dictated by simple physical relationships between the size of the sound emitter and the wavelength of emitted sound. The wavelengths of the signals need to be sufficiently short in relation to the size of the emitter to allow for the efficient production of propagating sound pressure waves...

The Malay Lexicon Project: a database of lexical statistics for 9,592 words.

Science.gov (United States)

Yap, Melvin J; Liow, Susan J Rickard; Jalil, Sajlia Binte; Faizal, Siti Syuhada Binte

2010-11-01

Malay, a language spoken by 250 million people, has a shallow alphabetic orthography, simple syllable structures, and transparent affixation--characteristics that contrast sharply with those of English. In the present article, we first compare the letter-phoneme and letter-syllable ratios for a sample of alphabetic orthographies to highlight the importance of separating language-specific from language-universal reading processes. Then, in order to develop a better understanding of word recognition in orthographies with more consistent mappings to phonology than English, we compiled a database of lexical variables (letter length, syllable length, phoneme length, morpheme length, word frequency, orthographic and phonological neighborhood sizes, and orthographic and phonological Levenshtein distances) for 9,592 Malay words. Separate hierarchical regression analyses for Malay and English revealed how the consistency of orthography-phonology mappings selectively modulates the effects of different lexical variables on lexical decision and speeded pronunciation performance. The database of lexical and behavioral measures for Malay is available at http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.

Ecologically Sound Procedural Generation of Natural Environments

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Benny Onrust

2017-01-01

Full Text Available Current techniques for the creation and exploration of virtual worlds are largely unable to generate sound natural environments from ecological data and to provide interactive web-based visualizations of such detailed environments. We tackle this challenge and propose a novel framework that (i explores the advantages of landscape maps and ecological statistical data, translating them to an ecologically sound plant distribution, and (ii creates a visually convincing 3D representation of the natural environment suitable for its interactive visualization over the web. Our vegetation model improves techniques from procedural ecosystem generation and neutral landscape modeling. It is able to generate diverse ecological sound plant distributions directly from landscape maps with statistical ecological data. Our visualization model integrates existing level of detail and illumination techniques to achieve interactive frame rates and improve realism. We validated with ecology experts the outcome of our framework using two case studies and concluded that it provides convincing interactive visualizations of large natural environments.

Benefits of phoneme discrimination training in a randomized controlled trial of 50- to 74-year-olds with mild hearing loss.

Science.gov (United States)

Ferguson, Melanie A; Henshaw, Helen; Clark, Daniel P A; Moore, David R

2014-01-01

The aims of this study were to (i) evaluate the efficacy of phoneme discrimination training for hearing and cognitive abilities of adults aged 50 to 74 years with mild sensorineural hearing loss who were not users of hearing aids, and to (ii) determine participant compliance with a self-administered, computer-delivered, home- and game-based auditory training program. This study was a randomized controlled trial with repeated measures and crossover design. Participants were trained and tested over an 8- to 12-week period. One group (Immediate Training) trained during weeks 1 and 4. A second waitlist group (Delayed Training) did no training during weeks 1 and 4, but then trained during weeks 5 and 8. On-task (phoneme discrimination) and transferable outcome measures (speech perception, cognition, self-report of hearing disability) for both groups were obtained during weeks 0, 4, and 8, and for the Delayed Training group only at week 12. Robust phoneme discrimination learning was found for both groups, with the largest improvements in threshold shown for those with the poorest initial thresholds. Between weeks 1 and 4, the Immediate Training group showed moderate, significant improvements on self-report of hearing disability, divided attention, and working memory, specifically for conditions or situations that were more complex and therefore more challenging. Training did not result in consistent improvements in speech perception in noise. There was no evidence of any test-retest effects between weeks 1 and 4 for the Delayed Training group. Retention of benefit at 4 weeks post-training was shown for phoneme discrimination, divided attention, working memory, and self-report of hearing disability. Improved divided attention and reduced self-reported hearing difficulties were highly correlated. It was observed that phoneme discrimination training benefits some but not all people with mild hearing loss. Evidence presented here, together with that of other studies that

ERP correlates of letter identity and letter position are modulated by lexical frequency

Science.gov (United States)

Vergara-Martínez, Marta; Perea, Manuel; Gómez, Pablo; Swaab, Tamara Y.

2013-01-01

The encoding of letter position is a key aspect in all recently proposed models of visual-word recognition. We analyzed the impact of lexical frequency on letter position assignment by examining the temporal dynamics of lexical activation induced by pseudowords extracted from words of different frequencies. For each word (e.g., BRIDGE), we created two pseudowords: A transposed-letter (TL: BRIGDE) and a replaced-letter pseudoword (RL: BRITGE). ERPs were recorded while participants read words and pseudowords in two tasks: Semantic categorization (Experiment 1) and lexical decision (Experiment 2). For high-frequency stimuli, similar ERPs were obtained for words and TL-pseudowords, but the N400 component to words was reduced relative to RL-pseudowords, indicating less lexical/semantic activation. In contrast, TL- and RL-pseudowords created from low-frequency stimuli elicited similar ERPs. Behavioral responses in the lexical decision task paralleled this asymmetry. The present findings impose constraints on computational and neural models of visual-word recognition. PMID:23454070

Dynamic-range reduction by peak clipping or compression and its effects on phoneme perception in hearing-impaired listeners

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Dreschler, W. A.

1988-01-01

In this study, differences between dynamic-range reduction by peak clipping and single-channel compression for phoneme perception through conventional hearing aids have been investigated. The results from 16 hearing-impaired listeners show that compression limiting yields significantly better

Learning about the Dynamic Sun through Sounds

Science.gov (United States)

Quinn, M.; Peticolas, L. M.; Luhmann, J.; MacCallum, J.

2008-06-01

Can we hear the Sun or its solar wind? Not in the sense that they make sound. But we can take the particle, magnetic field, electric field, and image data and turn it into sound to demonstrate what the data tells us. We present work on turning data from the two-satellite NASA mission called STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) into sounds and music (sonification). STEREO has two satellites orbiting the Sun near Earth's orbit to study the coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from the Corona. One sonification project aims to inspire musicians, museum patrons, and the public to learn more about CMEs by downloading STEREO data and using it to make music. We demonstrate the software and discuss the way in which it was developed. A second project aims to produce a museum exhibit using STEREO imagery and sounds from STEREO data. We demonstrate a "walk across the Sun" created for this exhibit so people can hear the features on solar images. We show how pixel intensity translates into pitches from selectable scales with selectable musical scale size and octave locations. We also share our successes and lessons learned.

Lifted Java: A Minimal Calculus for Translation Polymorphism

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Ingesman, Matthias Diehn; Ernst, Erik

2011-01-01

To support roles and similar notions involving multiple views on an object, languages like Object Teams and CaesarJ include mechanisms known as lifting and lowering. These mechanisms connect pairs of objects of otherwise unrelated types, and enables programmers to consider such a pair almost...... of translation polymorphism has not been proved. This paper presents a simple model that extends Featherweight Java with the core operations of translation polymorphism, provides a Coq proof that its type system is sound, and shows that the ambiguity problem associated with the so-called smart lifting mechanism...... can be eliminated by a very simple semantics for lifting....

7 CFR 3560.709 - Demand letter.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 7 Agriculture 15 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Demand letter. 3560.709 Section 3560.709 Agriculture... DIRECT MULTI-FAMILY HOUSING LOANS AND GRANTS Unauthorized Assistance § 3560.709 Demand letter. (a) If a... repayment schedule, the Agency will send the borrower a demand letter specifying: (1) The amount of...

Letters of Map Change (LOMC)

Data.gov (United States)

Department of Homeland Security — Documents, including different types of Letters of MAP Revision (LOMR) and Letters of Map Amendment (LOMA), which are issued by FEMA to revise or amend the flood...

Dyslexia risk gene relates to representation of sound in the auditory brainstem.

Science.gov (United States)

Neef, Nicole E; Müller, Bent; Liebig, Johanna; Schaadt, Gesa; Grigutsch, Maren; Gunter, Thomas C; Wilcke, Arndt; Kirsten, Holger; Skeide, Michael A; Kraft, Indra; Kraus, Nina; Emmrich, Frank; Brauer, Jens; Boltze, Johannes; Friederici, Angela D

2017-04-01

Dyslexia is a reading disorder with strong associations with KIAA0319 and DCDC2. Both genes play a functional role in spike time precision of neurons. Strikingly, poor readers show an imprecise encoding of fast transients of speech in the auditory brainstem. Whether dyslexia risk genes are related to the quality of sound encoding in the auditory brainstem remains to be investigated. Here, we quantified the response consistency of speech-evoked brainstem responses to the acoustically presented syllable [da] in 159 genotyped, literate and preliterate children. When controlling for age, sex, familial risk and intelligence, partial correlation analyses associated a higher dyslexia risk loading with KIAA0319 with noisier responses. In contrast, a higher risk loading with DCDC2 was associated with a trend towards more stable responses. These results suggest that unstable representation of sound, and thus, reduced neural discrimination ability of stop consonants, occurred in genotypes carrying a higher amount of KIAA0319 risk alleles. Current data provide the first evidence that the dyslexia-associated gene KIAA0319 can alter brainstem responses and impair phoneme processing in the auditory brainstem. This brain-gene relationship provides insight into the complex relationships between phenotype and genotype thereby improving the understanding of the dyslexia-inherent complex multifactorial condition. Copyright © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

English Orthographic Learning in Chinese-L1 Young EFL Beginners.

Science.gov (United States)

Cheng, Yu-Lin

2017-12-01

English orthographic learning, among Chinese-L1 children who were beginning to learn English as a foreign language, was documented when: (1) only visual memory was at their disposal, (2) visual memory and either some letter-sound knowledge or some semantic information was available, and (3) visual memory, some letter-sound knowledge and some semantic information were all available. When only visual memory was available, orthographic learning (measured via an orthographic choice test) was meagre. Orthographic learning was significant when either semantic information or letter-sound knowledge supplemented visual memory, with letter-sound knowledge generating greater significance. Although the results suggest that letter-sound knowledge plays a more important role than semantic information, letter-sound knowledge alone does not suffice to achieve perfect orthographic learning, as orthographic learning was greatest when letter-sound knowledge and semantic information were both available. The present findings are congruent with a view that the orthography of a foreign language drives its orthographic learning more than L1 orthographic learning experience, thus extending Share's (Cognition 55:151-218, 1995) self-teaching hypothesis to include non-alphabetic L1 children's orthographic learning of an alphabetic foreign language. The little letter-sound knowledge development observed in the experiment-I control group indicates that very little letter-sound knowledge develops in the absence of dedicated letter-sound training. Given the important role of letter-sound knowledge in English orthographic learning, dedicated letter-sound instruction is highly recommended.

31 CFR 29.511 - Demand letters.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... 31 Money and Finance: Treasury 1 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Demand letters. 29.511 Section 29.511... Overpayments § 29.511 Demand letters. Except as provided in § 29.516(e), before starting collection action to recover an overpayment, the Benefits Administrator must send a demand letter that informs the debtor in...

From phonemes to images : levels of representation in a recurrent neural model of visually-grounded language learning

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Gelderloos, L.J.; Chrupala, Grzegorz

2016-01-01

We present a model of visually-grounded language learning based on stacked gated recurrent neural networks which learns to predict visual features given an image description in the form of a sequence of phonemes. The learning task resembles that faced by human language learners who need to discover

Letter Dice. Technical Note No. 6.

Science.gov (United States)

Gunter, Jock

Letter and syllable dice devised for a project in rural Ecuador provide inexpensive, easily reproducible learning materials for practice in basic literary skills. Eleven wooden cubes with six letters on each cube are cast onto a surface and the player constructs words from the letters on the top side of the dice. After a word is formed and…

The Impact of Teaching Phonemic Awareness by Means of Direct Instruction on Reading Achievement of Students with Reading Disorder

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ahmad Sharifi

2012-03-01

Full Text Available Background: Phonemic awareness is one of the most important predictors of reading skills that has been taught by different procedures. One of the procedures is implementation of direct instruction in instruction of phonemic awareness. Current study is one of the unique studies in Iran that investigate impact of direct instruction in phonemic awareness on reading achievement of students with reading disorder.Case: Three male second grade elementary students with reading disorder in a regular school in district six of the office of education in Tehran were selected. Multiple-baseline across subjects was selected as a research design. The following tests were used as diagnostic criteria: reading and dyslexia test and Wechsler intelligence scale for children-revised. Moreover, a reading inventory consisting of 100 words was developed by researchers to assess the reading ability of the subjects. Data were collected in three phases: baseline, intervention, and follow-up. During the intervention phase, the intervention strategies were used while during baseline and follow-up, data were collected without any intervention. Comparing three phases of the study, we may conclude that intervention package consisting of direct instruction of phonological awareness was an effective strategy in reading achievement of all three students. In addition, follow-up data indicated that the effects of the intervention procedures were stable across time.Conclusion: Direct instruction of phonological awareness was effective in reading achievement of students with reading disorder in elementary school and increasing their abilities in reading.

Framewise phoneme classification with bidirectional LSTM and other neural network architectures.

Science.gov (United States)

Graves, Alex; Schmidhuber, Jürgen

2005-01-01

In this paper, we present bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks, and a modified, full gradient version of the LSTM learning algorithm. We evaluate Bidirectional LSTM (BLSTM) and several other network architectures on the benchmark task of framewise phoneme classification, using the TIMIT database. Our main findings are that bidirectional networks outperform unidirectional ones, and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) is much faster and also more accurate than both standard Recurrent Neural Nets (RNNs) and time-windowed Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs). Our results support the view that contextual information is crucial to speech processing, and suggest that BLSTM is an effective architecture with which to exploit it.

«Lei è ebreo?». Mondi a confronto nelle Lettere a Milena di Kafka

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Claudia Sonino

2017-12-01

The essay aims at analyzing, by examining the special bond between Franz Kafka and Milena Jesenská through the lens of their letters, Prague's cultural life in the aftermath of the fall of the Habsburg Empire; an historical event marked by an increasingly threatening and aggressive antisemitism, which made the relationship between the Jewish community and other social units, such as the Czech population, more problematic. The relationship between the Jewish writer and his Czech translator, close friend and confidante, unfolds against this background. A rich and complicated relationship between different albeit communicating worlds.

Letter to the parliament:

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

2017-01-01

This piece was a letter directed towards various ministers in the parliament, targeted at raising a discussion on the values in the education of architects in Denmark and various related topics.......This piece was a letter directed towards various ministers in the parliament, targeted at raising a discussion on the values in the education of architects in Denmark and various related topics....

An investigation of sound fields based on the acousto-optic effect

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Torras Rosell, Antoni; Barrera Figueroa, Salvador; Jacobsen, Finn

2011-01-01

Various types of transducers are nowadays capable of translating different properties of sound waves into mechanical/electrical quantities, which can afterwards be reinterpreted into acoustical ones. However, in certain applications, for example when using microphone arrays, the presence of bulk...... range, and in two different measurement scenarios where the sound field is well-known: in a rectangular duct and in an anechoic room. Models for predicting the acousto-optic effect in such scenarios are derived and measurements are carried out with a laser Doppler vibrometer. The results show a fairly...

Effects of bottom-up and top-down intervention principles in emergent literacy in children at risk of developmental dyslexia: a longitudinal study.

Science.gov (United States)

Helland, Turid; Tjus, Tomas; Hovden, Marit; Ofte, Sonja; Heimann, Mikael

2011-01-01

This longitudinal study focused on the effects of two different principles of intervention in children at risk of developing dyslexia from 5 to 8 years old. The children were selected on the basis of a background questionnaire given to parents and preschool teachers, with cognitive and functional magnetic resonance imaging results substantiating group differences in neuropsychological processes associated with phonology, orthography, and phoneme-grapheme correspondence (i.e., alphabetic principle). The two principles of intervention were bottom-up (BU), "from sound to meaning", and top-down (TD), "from meaning to sound." Thus, four subgroups were established: risk/BU, risk/TD, control/BU, and control/TD. Computer-based training took place for 2 months every spring, and cognitive assessments were performed each fall of the project period. Measures of preliteracy skills for reading and spelling were phonological awareness, working memory, verbal learning, and letter knowledge. Literacy skills were assessed by word reading and spelling. At project end the control group scored significantly above age norm, whereas the risk group scored within the norm. In the at-risk group, training based on the BU principle had the strongest effects on phonological awareness and working memory scores, whereas training based on the TD principle had the strongest effects on verbal learning, letter knowledge, and literacy scores. It was concluded that appropriate, specific, data-based intervention starting in preschool can mitigate literacy impairment and that interventions should contain BU training for preliteracy skills and TD training for literacy training.

Spelling impairments in Italian dyslexic children: phenomenological changes in primary school.

Science.gov (United States)

Angelelli, Paola; Notarnicola, Alessandra; Judica, Anna; Zoccolotti, Pierluigi; Luzzatti, Claudio

2010-01-01

Although spelling difficulties are constantly associated with developmental dyslexia, they have been largely neglected by the majority of studies in this area. This study analyzes spelling impairments in developmental dyslexia across school grades in Italian, a language with high grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence. The performances of 33 Italian dyslexic children attending Grades 3 and 5 were compared with those of age-matched control participants. Writing abilities were investigated through a spelling test that included regular words with one-sound-to-one-letter correspondence, regular words requiring the application of context-sensitive conversion rules, words with unpredictable transcription and nonwords with one-sound-to-one-letter correspondence. Both accuracy and error analyses indicate that the spelling impairment assumes different characteristics at different grades: Grade 3 children showed an undifferentiated spelling deficit (involving regular words, regular nonwords and words with unpredictable spelling), whereas the fifth graders were prevalently impaired in writing words with unpredictable transcription. The error analysis confirms these results, with third graders producing a high rate of all types of errors (i.e., phonologically plausible, simple and context-sensitive conversion errors), whereas most errors committed by fifth graders were phonologically plausible. Results are coherent with the hypothesis that dyslexic children learning a shallow orthography suffer from delayed acquisition and some fragility of the sub-word level routine, together with a severe and long-lasting deficit of orthographic lexical acquisition. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Srl. All rights reserved.

THE PRINCIPLES OF PHONOLOGICAL WORD STRUCTURE COMPARISON OF RUSSIAN AND CHINESE LANGUAGES

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Alexey N. Aleksakhin

2014-01-01

Full Text Available The article is devoted to the phonological structure of words of Russian and Chinese languages. With phonological point of view the word as a Central significant unit of language is a sequence of consonants and vowel phonemes. A comparative study shows that the phonological structure of the Russian words prevail consonant phonemes and the phonological structure of the Chinese words prevail vowel phonemes. The phonological system of the Russian language is characterized by consonant dominant, and the phonological system of the Chinese language Mandarin is characterized by vocal dominant. In the vowel system of the Russian language there are six vowel phonemes, in the vowel system of the Chinese language Mandarin there are thirty-one vowel phonemes. The typical sound pattern of words of the Chinese language consists of vowel combinations. The strong (vowels differ in different effective modes of vocal cords vowels are implemented in the even phonological position; the weak vowels are implemented in the left and right odd phonological positions of the syllabic matrix 0123. Consonant phonemes of the Chinese language are implemented only in the zero phonological position. The Sound variety of simple one-syllable words of the Chinese language is constructed by oppositions: twenty-five consonants in the zero position, thirty-one strong vowel phonemes in the even position, as well as three weak vowels in the left odd position and five weak vowels in the right odd position . The typical distribution of consonant and vowel phonemes is shown in the following examples of words: 0123 - guai «obedient», gudi «rotate», guài «strange». The opposition of weak vowels with a derivative phonological zero is also an effective method of making words: guai «obedient» - gai «must» - gua « blow» - ga «a dark corner». Both Russian and Chinese Synharmonia variety of sound words is supported by five derivative phonological zeros that are phonetically in

The Principles Of Phonological Word Structure Comparison Of Russian And Chinese Languages

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Alexey N. Aleksakhin

2014-01-01

Full Text Available The article is devoted to the phonological structure of words of Russian and Chinese languages. With phonological point of view the word as a Central significant unit of language is a sequence of consonants and vowel phonemes. A comparative study shows that the phonological structure of the Russian words prevail consonant phonemes and the phonological structure of the Chinese words prevail vowel phonemes. The phonological system of the Russian language is characterized by consonant dominant, and the phonological system of the Chinese language Mandarin is characterized by vocal dominant. In the vowel system of the Russian language there are six vowel phonemes, in the vowel system of the Chinese language Mandarin there are thirty-one vowel phonemes. The typical sound pattern of words of the Chinese language consists of vowel combinations. The strong (vowels differ in different effective modes of vocal cords vowels are implemented in the even phonological position; the weak vowels are implemented in the left and right odd phonological positions of the syllabic matrix 0123. Consonant phonemes of the Chinese language are implemented only in the zero phonological position. The Sound variety of simple one-syllable words of the Chinese language is constructed by oppositions: twenty-five consonants in the zero position, thirty-one strong vowel phonemes in the even position, as well as three weak vowels in the left odd position and five weak vowels in the right odd position . The typical distribution of consonant and vowel phonemes is shown in the following examples of words: 0123 - guai «obedient», gudi «rotate», guài «strange». The opposition of weak vowels with a derivative phonological zero is also an effective method of making words: guai «obedient» - gai «must» - gua « blow» - ga «a dark corner». Both Russian and Chinese Synharmonia variety of sound words is supported by five derivative phonological zeros that are phonetically in

Resource Letter: GW-1: Global warming

Science.gov (United States)

Firor, John W.

1994-06-01

This Resource Letter provides a guide to the literature on the possibility of a human-induced climate change—a global warming. Journal articles and books are cited for the following topics: the Greenhouse Effect, sources of infrared-trapping gases, climate models and their uncertainties, verification of climate models, past climate changes, and economics, ethics, and politics of policy responses to climate change. [The letter E after an item indicates elementary level or material of general interest to persons becoming informed in the field. The letter I, for intermediate level, indicates material of somewhat more specialized nature, and the letter A indicates rather specialized or advanced material.

Implied reading direction and prioritization of letter encoding.

Science.gov (United States)

Holcombe, Alex O; Nguyen, Elizabeth H L; Goodbourn, Patrick T

2017-10-01

Capacity limits hinder processing of multiple stimuli, contributing to poorer performance for identifying two briefly presented letters than for identifying a single letter. Higher accuracy is typically found for identifying the letter on the left, which has been attributed to a right-hemisphere dominance for selective attention. Here, we use rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) of letters in two locations at once. The letters to be identified are simultaneous and cued by rings. In the first experiment, we manipulated implied reading direction by rotating or mirror-reversing the letters to face to the left rather than to the right. The left-side performance advantage was eliminated. In the second experiment, letters were positioned above and below fixation, oriented such that they appeared to face downward (90° clockwise rotation) or upward (90° counterclockwise rotation). Again consistent with an effect of implied reading direction, performance was better for the top position in the downward condition, but not in the upward condition. In both experiments, mixture modeling of participants' report errors revealed that attentional sampling from the two locations was approximately simultaneous, ruling out the theory that the letter on one side was processed first, followed by a shift of attention to sample the other letter. Thus, the orientation of the letters apparently controls not when the letters are sampled from the scene, but rather the dynamics of a subsequent process, such as tokenization or memory consolidation. Implied reading direction appears to determine the letter prioritized at a high-level processing bottleneck. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

Do Adults with Cochlear Implants Rely on Different Acoustic Cues for Phoneme Perception than Adults with Normal Hearing?

Science.gov (United States)

Moberly, Aaron C.; Lowenstein, Joanna H.; Tarr, Eric; Caldwell-Tarr, Amanda; Welling, D. Bradley; Shahin, Antoine J.; Nittrouer, Susan

2014-01-01

Purpose: Several acoustic cues specify any single phonemic contrast. Nonetheless, adult, native speakers of a language share weighting strategies, showing preferential attention to some properties over others. Cochlear implant (CI) signal processing disrupts the salience of some cues: In general, amplitude structure remains readily available, but…

Hypernasality in a Shona child with a cleft palate: A phonological ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Individuals with hypernasality produce oral sounds with a nasal resonance because of the existence of a cleft palate. This phenomenon has been considered from a number of perspectives, but this article is a description of a phonemic inventory of oral speech sounds produced as nasal sounds by the child under study.

Coupled dynamics of translation and collapse of acoustically driven microbubbles.

Science.gov (United States)

Reddy, Anil J; Szeri, Andrew J

2002-10-01

Pressure gradients drive the motion of microbubbles relative to liquids in which they are suspended. Examples include the hydrostatic pressure due to a gravitational field, and the pressure gradients in a sound field, useful for acoustic levitation. In this paper, the equations describing the coupled dynamics of radial oscillation and translation of a microbubble are given. The formulation is based on a recently derived expression for the hydrodynamic force on a bubble of changing size in an incompressible liquid [J. Magnaudet and D. Legendre, Phys. Fluids 10, 550-556 (1998)]. The complex interaction between radial and translation dynamics is best understood by examination of the added momentum associated with the liquid motion caused by the moving bubble. Translation is maximized when the bubble collapses violently. The new theory for coupled collapse and translation dynamics is compared to past experiments and to previous theories for decoupled translation dynamics. Special attention is paid to bubbles of relevance in biomedical applications.

Web page translating software program The Hon-yaku; Hon'yaku software 'The hon'yaku

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

NONE

2000-03-01

A translating software program The Hon-yaku (the translator) Internet V4.0 has been developed, which provides an optimum means to help those who have to perform English-Japanese and Japanese-English translation on the Internet in collecting information from abroad, e-mailing to other countries, and chatting (exchanging of messages or dialogues) with friends overseas. When the Shortcut Read function is used, the user is instantly provided with the gist of the page on the screen even if it is full of long sentences. The program, furthermore, is equipped with a function of translating documents prepared using the state-of-the-art XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and PDF (Portable Document Format) technologies. Another translation software program The Hon-yaku Office V2.0 has also been developed, which adds a translating function to Microsoft(reg sign) Office 2000. Using this program, translation is completed upon clicking on the translation button on a Word, Excel, or Power Point(reg sign) screen. A template etc. are also provided, which simplifies the preparation of business letters in English. (translated by NEDO)

Linguistic Levels of Translation: A Generic Exploration of Translation Difficulties in Literary Textual Corpus

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Magda Madkour

2016-11-01

Full Text Available This case study research was based on a generic exploration of the translation problems that graduate students face in literary translation. Literary translation is fundamental to translation programs at higher education due to the upsurge that has occurred in publishing classical and modern literary works from various cultures. However, literary texts have special characteristics that make the process of transferring them from one language into another a daunting task. Translating literary texts is difficult even for professional translators because misinterpreting the messages of the source texts can lead to distorting the aesthetic aspects of the literary work. Students need to learn various linguistic levels of literary translation as well as strategies and methods of translation. Learning the linguistics levels of translation necessitates providing adequate training that is based on enhancing students’ cognitive abilities. Cognitive-based translation training helps students learn the procedures of solving the problems of translating sound and literary devices. Cognitive approaches are relevant to the translation process since cognition implies mental activities that students can use to understand and synthesize the literary text, and reconstruct it creatively. Therefore, the current study aimed at examining the relationship between cognitive teaching methodologies and students’ performance in literary translation. To examine this relationship, qualitative and quantitative data was collected from graduate students at the College of Languages and Translation at Imam Mohammed bin Saud Islamic University (IMAMU University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. In addition, corpus data was gathered from authentic literary texts including, novels, short stories, and poetry, to investigate the effect of linguistic analysis and cognitive strategies on the quality of literary translation. Quantitative data was analyzed using the Statistical Package for the

Effects of lips and hands on auditory learning of second-language speech sounds.

Science.gov (United States)

Hirata, Yukari; Kelly, Spencer D

2010-04-01

Previous research has found that auditory training helps native English speakers to perceive phonemic vowel length contrasts in Japanese, but their performance did not reach native levels after training. Given that multimodal information, such as lip movement and hand gesture, influences many aspects of native language processing, the authors examined whether multimodal input helps to improve native English speakers' ability to perceive Japanese vowel length contrasts. Sixty native English speakers participated in 1 of 4 types of training: (a) audio-only; (b) audio-mouth; (c) audio-hands; and (d) audio-mouth-hands. Before and after training, participants were given phoneme perception tests that measured their ability to identify short and long vowels in Japanese (e.g., /kato/ vs. /kato/). Although all 4 groups improved from pre- to posttest (replicating previous research), the participants in the audio-mouth condition improved more than those in the audio-only condition, whereas the 2 conditions involving hand gestures did not. Seeing lip movements during training significantly helps learners to perceive difficult second-language phonemic contrasts, but seeing hand gestures does not. The authors discuss possible benefits and limitations of using multimodal information in second-language phoneme learning.

48 CFR 42.504 - Postaward letters.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-10-01

... CONTRACT ADMINISTRATION AND AUDIT SERVICES Postaward Orientation 42.504 Postaward letters. In some circumstances, a letter or other written form of communication to the contractor may be adequate postaward...

Functional translation and linguistic variation: the use of didactic sequence in teaching languages

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Valdecy Oliveira Pontes

2017-12-01

Full Text Available In the context of the approach of the linguistic variation of Spanish and the use of Functionalist Translation in Foreign Language classes, this article aims to report the results of the application of a Didactic Sequence (SD, in the style of the Geneva School, Hispanic plays for the teaching of linguistic variation in the pronominal treatment forms of the Spanish-Portuguese Brazilian language pair. SD was applied in the subject "Introduction to Translation Studies in Spanish Language" (2nd semester, offered by the course in Letters - Spanish Language and its Literatures, of the Federal University of Ceará. This article was based on the theoretical foundations of Functionalist Translation (NORD, 1994, 1996, 2009, 2012, Translation and Sociolinguistics (BOLAÑOS-CUELLAR, 2000; MAYORAL, 1998, elaboration of SD (DOLZ; NOVERRAZ; SCHNEUWLY, 2004; CRISTÓVÃO, 2010; BARROS, 2012 and research on the variation in the forms of treatment of Spanish and Portuguese (FONTANELLA DE WEINBER, 1999; SCHERRE et al, 2015.

A Stimulus Sampling Theory of Letter Identity and Order

Science.gov (United States)

Norris, Dennis; Kinoshita, Sachiko; van Casteren, Maarten

2010-01-01

Early on during word recognition, letter positions are not accurately coded. Evidence for this comes from transposed-letter (TL) priming effects, in which letter strings generated by transposing two adjacent letters (e.g., "jugde") produce large priming effects, more than primes with the letters replaced in the corresponding position (e.g.,…

Three-dimensional sound localisation with a lizard peripheral auditory model

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Kjær Schmidt, Michael; Shaikh, Danish

the networks learned a transfer function that translated the three-dimensional non-linear mapping into estimated azimuth and elevation values for the acoustic target. The neural network with two hidden layers as expected performed better than that with only one hidden layer. Our approach assumes that for any...... location of an acoustic target in three dimensions. Our approach utilises a model of the peripheral auditory system of lizards [Christensen-Dalsgaard and Manley 2005] coupled with a multi-layer perceptron neural network. The peripheral auditory model’s response to sound input encodes sound direction...... information in a single plane which by itself is insufficient to localise the acoustic target in three dimensions. A multi-layer perceptron neural network is used to combine two independent responses of the model, corresponding to two rotational movements, into an estimate of the sound direction in terms...

Launch of Zoological Letters.

Science.gov (United States)

Fukatsu, Takema; Kuratani, Shigeru

2016-02-01

A new open-access journal, Zoological Letters, was launched as a sister journal to Zoological Science, in January 2015. The new journal aims at publishing topical papers of high quality from a wide range of basic zoological research fields. This review highlights the notable reviews and research articles that have been published in the first year of Zoological Letters, providing an overview on the current achievements and future directions of the journal.

Letters to those who Dare Feel: Using Reflective Letter-Writing to Explore the Emotionality of Research

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan

2012-02-01

Full Text Available Using reflective letter-writing as a method of generating data, a group of four researchers embarked on a collaborative autoethnographic inquiry into the emotional dimensions of researching social aspects of HIV & AIDS. In this article, we use the medium of a narrative dialogue to represent and re-examine our reflective letter-writing method. The dialogue draws attention to key features of reflective letter-writing as a collaborative autoethnographic research method and, in so doing, highlights and explores the nature, potential significance, and challenges of this method. Our discussion points to the value of a collaborative process of reflective letter-writing as a way for researchers to access and portray emotional aspects of their research experience, to deepen their engagement with these emotional dimensions, and to gain insight into their own and others' lived research experiences.

Foley Sounds vs Real Sounds

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Trento, Stefano; Götzen, Amalia De

2011-01-01

This paper is an initial attempt to study the world of sound effects for motion pictures, also known as Foley sounds. Throughout several audio and audio-video tests we have compared both Foley and real sounds originated by an identical action. The main purpose was to evaluate if sound effects...

Written Communications Simulation: Write Me a Letter.

Science.gov (United States)

North Carolina State Dept. of Public Instruction, Raleigh. Div. of Vocational Education.

This simulation is intended for use as a culminating activity after students have been exposed to personal and/or business letter writing, use of reference manuals, typing of letters, mailing procedures, typing of numbers, punctuation practice, and filing procedures. Stated objectives are to enable students to type a mailable letter; to inspect,…

Electrophysiological correlates of grapheme-phoneme conversion.

Science.gov (United States)

Huang, Koongliang; Itoh, Kosuke; Suwazono, Shugo; Nakada, Tsutomu

2004-08-19

The cortical processes underlying grapheme-phoneme conversion were investigated by event-related potentials (ERPs). The task consisted of silent reading or vowel-matching of three Japanese hiragana characters, each representing a consonant-vowel syllable. At earlier latencies, typical components of the visual ERP, namely, P1 (110 ms), N1 (170 ms) and P2 (300 ms), were elicited in the temporo-occipital area for both tasks as well as control task (observing the orthographic shapes of three Korean characters). Following these earlier components, two sustained negativities were identified. The earlier sustained negativity, referred here to as SN1, was found in both the silent-reading and vowel-matching task but not in the control task. The scalp distribution of SN1 was over the left occipito-temporal area, with maximum amplitude over O1. The amplitude of SN1 was larger in the vowel-matching task compared to the silent-reading task, consistent with previous reports that ERP amplitude correlates with task difficulty. SN2, the later sustained negativity, was only observed in the vowel-matching task. The scalp distribution of SN2 was over the midsagittal centro-parietal area with maximum amplitude over Cz. Elicitation of SN2 in the vowel-matching task suggested that the vowel-matching task requires a wider range of neural activities exceeding the established conventional area of language processing.

“YOUR P.C.W.” THE UNPUBLISHED LETTERS OF PAUL SCHEERBART TO ERICH MÜHSAM

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Alexander N. Belarev

2016-12-01

Full Text Available The archive of a German writer and anarchist Erich Mühsam (1878– 1934 is a significant but “unexplored” part of the manuscript collection of the A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences. I publish three letters of a German science fiction writer Paul Scheerbart (1863– 1915 to Mühsam and a postcard that Scheerbart sent to a German writer Hans Heinz Ewers. The letters to Mühsam record negotiations with publishing houses in Munich and Berlin about the publication of Scheerbart’s manuscripts (1909. In the postcard to Ewers, Sheerbart writes about the progress in his work on the perpetual motion machine that he tried to construct in 1908–1909. The letters are published in German with Russian translation and commentary. The introductory article gives an overview of Scheerbart’s life and career, the specificity of his works, their problematics and poetics and especially focuses on Scheerbart’s epistolary heritage. These letters are the token of friendship and professional collaboration of the two writers that is reflected in their mutual work on the unrealized project of publishing a satirical newspaper “Vaterland.” The IWL archives contain the unpublished manuscripts of Scheerbart and Mühsam related to this project as well. The history and the structure of the Mühsam archive is another aspect covered in the introductory article. Both Erich and Zenzl Mühsam were victims of totalitarian regimes. Erich was killed by the Nazis and his spouse Zenzl spent many years in Soviet labor camps. The history of the Mühsam manuscripts became intertwined with Zenzl’s life. That is why the article devotes space to Zenzl’s biography and attempts to answer the following questions connected to the archive: how did the manuscripts get to the Soviet Union? Why is the archive uncomplete? Finally, I discuss the publication history of Scheerbart letters from the IWL collection. Keywords: Paul Scheerbart, Erich

On Coding Non-Contiguous Letter Combinations

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Frédéric eDandurand

2011-06-01

Full Text Available Starting from the hypothesis that printed word identification initially involves the parallel mapping of visual features onto location-specific letter identities, we analyze the type of information that would be involved in optimally mapping this location-specific orthographic code onto a location-invariant lexical code. We assume that some intermediate level of coding exists between individual letters and whole words, and that this involves the representation of letter combinations. We then investigate the nature of this intermediate level of coding given the constraints of optimality. This intermediate level of coding is expected to compress data while retaining as much information as possible about word identity. Information conveyed by letters is a function of how much they constrain word identity and how visible they are. Optimization of this coding is a combination of minimizing resources (using the most compact representations and maximizing information. We show that in a large proportion of cases, non-contiguous letter sequences contain more information than contiguous sequences, while at the same time requiring less precise coding. Moreover, we found that the best predictor of human performance in orthographic priming experiments was within-word ranking of conditional probabilities, rather than average conditional probabilities. We conclude that from an optimality perspective, readers learn to select certain contiguous and non-contiguous letter combinations as information that provides the best cue to word identity.

78 FR 13869 - Puget Sound Energy, Inc.; Puget Sound Energy, Inc.; Puget Sound Energy, Inc.; Puget Sound Energy...

Science.gov (United States)

2013-03-01

...-123-LNG; 12-128-NG; 12-148-NG; 12- 158-NG] Puget Sound Energy, Inc.; Puget Sound Energy, Inc.; Puget Sound Energy, Inc.; Puget Sound Energy, Inc.; Puget Sound Energy, Inc.; CE FLNG, LLC; Consolidated...-NG Puget Sound Energy, Inc Order granting long- term authority to import/export natural gas from/to...

Writing More Informative Letters of Reference

OpenAIRE

Wright, Scott M; Ziegelstein, Roy C

2004-01-01

Writing a meaningful and valuable letter of reference is not an easy task. Several factors influence the quality of any letter of reference. First, the accuracy and reliability of the writer's impressions and judgment depend on how well he knows the individual being described. Second, the writer's frame of reference, which is determined by the number of persons at the same level that he has worked with, will impact the context and significance of his beliefs and estimations. Third, the letter...

Use of Standard Guidelines for Department of Medicine Summary Letters.

Science.gov (United States)

Fitz, Matthew; La Rochelle, Jeffrey; Lang, Valerie; DeWaay, Deborah; Adams, William; Nasraty, Farah

2018-04-12

Phenomenon: Fourth-year medical students obtain Department of Medicine (DOM) letters ("Chair" letters) to support their residency applications. Writing and interpreting DOM letters are challenging. There is heterogeneity in the letters that makes it difficult to both write and read these letters. The purpose of this study is to determine the value of new guidelines developed by a task force of clerkship directors and program directors in internal medicine and assess the implementation of these guidelines. The Clerkship Directors in Internal Medicine performed a cross-sectional survey of internal medicine clerkship directors at U.S. and Canadian medical schools in 2014. In addition, the primary author's institution reviewed 1,347 DOM letters between 2012 and 2014 to assess the implementation of these guidelines. The survey response rate was 78%. DOM letter writers reported the guidelines were better, easier to implement, and more compatible with the purpose of DOM letters than previously. Most letter readers reported that letters using the guidelines were more credible. Writers of DOM letters in lower academic ranks rated the letters with guidelines higher in several domains than those in higher academic ranks. Readers of DOM letters in higher academic ranks rated the letters with guidelines higher in several domains than those in lower academic ranks. In the DOM letters examined, the odds of meeting each guideline increased with each additional year. However, for 3 guidelines there was an initial decline in adherence from 2012 to 2013 before increasing again in 2014-the recommended length, clerkship description, and detailed narrative guidelines. Letters solely written by a chair were less likely to incorporate the guidelines. Insights: Clerkship directors often write the DOM letters and identify with the purpose of the guidelines. As writers, lower ranking academic faculty value the guidelines more than higher ranking academic faculty. As readers of DOM letters

How 'direct' can a direct translation be? Some perspectives from the ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Some perspectives from the realities of a new type of church Bible. ... the Bible have sounded in Afrikaans in the context envisaged for its hypothesised first ... in the process of Bible translation as a difficult form of secondary communication, ... difficult secondary intercultural communication as well as the subjective theories of ...

Maritime Geo-Fence Letter Report

Science.gov (United States)

2016-07-01

1 Classification | CG-926 RDC | author | audience | month year Maritime Geo-Fence Letter Report Authors: Irene Gonin and Gregory...Johnson   Distribution Statement A: Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited. July 2016 Report No. CG-D-10-16 Maritime Geo-Fence...United States Coast Guard Research & Development Center 1 Chelsea Street New London, CT 06320 Maritime Geo-Fence Letter Report 1

The role of sensorimotor learning in the perception of letter-like forms: tracking the causes of neural specialization for letters.

Science.gov (United States)

James, Karin H; Atwood, Thea P

2009-02-01

Functional specialization in the brain is considered a hallmark of efficient processing. It is therefore not surprising that there are brain areas specialized for processing letters. To better understand the causes of functional specialization for letters, we explore the emergence of this pattern of response in the ventral processing stream through a training paradigm. Previously, we hypothesized that the specialized response pattern seen during letter perception may be due in part to our experience in writing letters. The work presented here investigates whether or not this aspect of letter processing-the integration of sensorimotor systems through writing-leads to functional specialization in the visual system. To test this idea, we investigated whether or not different types of experiences with letter-like stimuli ("pseudoletters") led to functional specialization similar to that which exists for letters. Neural activation patterns were measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) before and after three different types of training sessions. Participants were trained to recognize pseudoletters by writing, typing, or purely visual practice. Results suggested that only after writing practice did neural activation patterns to pseudoletters resemble patterns seen for letters. That is, neural activation in the left fusiform and dorsal precentral gyrus was greater when participants viewed pseudoletters than other, similar stimuli but only after writing experience. Neural activation also increased after typing practice in the right fusiform and left precentral gyrus, suggesting that in some areas, any motor experience may change visual processing. The results of this experiment suggest an intimate interaction among perceptual and motor systems during pseudoletter perception that may be extended to everyday letter perception.

China’s language input system in the digital age affects children’s reading development

OpenAIRE

Tan, Li Hai; Xu, Min; Chang, Chun Qi; Siok, Wai Ting

2012-01-01

Written Chinese as a logographic system was developed over 3,000 y ago. Historically, Chinese children have learned to read by learning to associate the visuo-graphic properties of Chinese characters with lexical meaning, typically through handwriting. In recent years, however, many Chinese children have learned to use electronic communication devices based on the pinyin input method, which associates phonemes and English letters with characters. When children use pinyin to key in letters, th...

Bilingual Dictionaries for Communication in the Domain of Economics: Function-Based Translation Dictionaries

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Nielsen, Sandro

2015-01-01

With their focus on terms, bilingual dictionaries are important tools for translating texts on economics. The most common type is the multi-fi eld dictionary covering several related subject fi elds; however, multi-fi eld dictionaries treat one or few fi elds extensively thereby neglecting other fi...... elds in contrast to single-fi eld and sub-fi eld dictionaries. Furthermore, recent research shows that economic translation is not limited to terms so lexicographers who identify and analyse the needs of translators, usage situations and stages in translating economic texts will have a sound basis...... for designing their lexicographic tools. The function theory allows lexicographers to study these basics so that they can offer translation tools to the domain of economics. Dictionaries should include data about terms, their grammatical properties, and their combinatorial potential as well as language...

The Relationship between Articulatory Control and Improved Phonemic Accuracy in Childhood Apraxia of Speech: A Longitudinal Case Study

Science.gov (United States)

Grigos, Maria I.; Kolenda, Nicole

2010-01-01

Jaw movement patterns were examined longitudinally in a 3-year-old male with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) and compared with a typically developing control group. The child with CAS was followed for 8 months, until he began accurately and consistently producing the bilabial phonemes /p/, /b/, and /m/. A movement tracking system was used to…

Phonological abilities in literacy-impaired children: Brain potentials reveal deficient phoneme discrimination, but intact prosodic processing

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Claudia Männel

2017-02-01

Full Text Available Intact phonological processing is crucial for successful literacy acquisition. While individuals with difficulties in reading and spelling (i.e., developmental dyslexia are known to experience deficient phoneme discrimination (i.e., segmental phonology, findings concerning their prosodic processing (i.e., suprasegmental phonology are controversial. Because there are no behavior-independent studies on the underlying neural correlates of prosodic processing in dyslexia, these controversial findings might be explained by different task demands. To provide an objective behavior-independent picture of segmental and suprasegmental phonological processing in impaired literacy acquisition, we investigated event-related brain potentials during passive listening in typically and poor-spelling German school children. For segmental phonology, we analyzed the Mismatch Negativity (MMN during vowel length discrimination, capturing automatic auditory deviancy detection in repetitive contexts. For suprasegmental phonology, we analyzed the Closure Positive Shift (CPS that automatically occurs in response to prosodic boundaries. Our results revealed spelling group differences for the MMN, but not for the CPS, indicating deficient segmental, but intact suprasegmental phonological processing in poor spellers. The present findings point towards a differential role of segmental and suprasegmental phonology in literacy disorders and call for interventions that invigorate impaired literacy by utilizing intact prosody in addition to training deficient phonemic awareness.

Cross-modal attention influences auditory contrast sensitivity: Decreasing visual load improves auditory thresholds for amplitude- and frequency-modulated sounds.

Science.gov (United States)

Ciaramitaro, Vivian M; Chow, Hiu Mei; Eglington, Luke G

2017-03-01

We used a cross-modal dual task to examine how changing visual-task demands influenced auditory processing, namely auditory thresholds for amplitude- and frequency-modulated sounds. Observers had to attend to two consecutive intervals of sounds and report which interval contained the auditory stimulus that was modulated in amplitude (Experiment 1) or frequency (Experiment 2). During auditory-stimulus presentation, observers simultaneously attended to a rapid sequential visual presentation-two consecutive intervals of streams of visual letters-and had to report which interval contained a particular color (low load, demanding less attentional resources) or, in separate blocks of trials, which interval contained more of a target letter (high load, demanding more attentional resources). We hypothesized that if attention is a shared resource across vision and audition, an easier visual task should free up more attentional resources for auditory processing on an unrelated task, hence improving auditory thresholds. Auditory detection thresholds were lower-that is, auditory sensitivity was improved-for both amplitude- and frequency-modulated sounds when observers engaged in a less demanding (compared to a more demanding) visual task. In accord with previous work, our findings suggest that visual-task demands can influence the processing of auditory information on an unrelated concurrent task, providing support for shared attentional resources. More importantly, our results suggest that attending to information in a different modality, cross-modal attention, can influence basic auditory contrast sensitivity functions, highlighting potential similarities between basic mechanisms for visual and auditory attention.

Teaching Complaint and Adjustment Letters--And Tact (My Favorite Assignment).

Science.gov (United States)

Deimling, Paula

1992-01-01

Describes a three-part assignment in which each student writes a complaint letter and an adjustment letter responding to another student's complaint letter. Discusses how the third part of the assignment--journal entries--allows students to formulate their own criteria for excellent letters based upon their reactions to the letters they receive.…

Fiche Pratique: Histoire de modes . . . toujours; Premiers contacts; Jongler avec les lettres; Un conte a votre facon (Practical Ideas: On the Subject of Verbal Moods . . . Again; First Contacts; Juggling letters; A Story Your Own Way).

Science.gov (United States)

Weiss, Francois; And Others

1993-01-01

The four language classroom activities described include work with verbal moods (subjunctive, conditional) by eliciting student suggestions for ways to help third-world countries; ways to practice social meeting/greeting/introduction situations; development of phonetic understanding and vocabulary through letter and sound changes; use of…

QEFSM model and Markov Algorithm for translating Quran reciting rules into Braille code

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Abdallah M. Abualkishik

2015-07-01

Full Text Available The Holy Quran is the central religious verbal text of Islam. Muslims are expected to read, understand, and apply the teachings of the Holy Quran. The Holy Quran was translated to Braille code as a normal Arabic text without having its reciting rules included. It is obvious that the users of this transliteration will not be able to recite the Quran the right way. Through this work, Quran Braille Translator (QBT presents a specific translator to translate Quran verses and their reciting rules into the Braille code. Quran Extended Finite State Machine (QEFSM model is proposed through this study as it is able to detect the Quran reciting rules (QRR from the Quran text. Basis path testing was used to evaluate the inner work for the model by checking all the test cases for the model. Markov Algorithm (MA was used for translating the detected QRR and Quran text into the matched Braille code. The data entries for QBT are Arabic letters and diacritics. The outputs of this study are seen in the double lines of Braille symbols; the first line is the proposed Quran reciting rules and the second line is for the Quran scripts.

Exploring Corporate Rhetoric: Metadiscourse in the CEO's Letter.

Science.gov (United States)

Hyland, Ken

1998-01-01

Examines how metadiscourse is used to create a positive corporate image in 137 CEOs' letters, showing how CEOs use nonpropositional material to realize rational, credible, and affective appeals. Reveals the essentially rhetorical nature of CEOs' letters by comparing the frequency and distribution of metadiscourse in their letters and directors'…

Interactive Sonification of Spontaneous Movement of Children - Cross-modal Mapping and the Perception of Body Movement Qualities through Sound

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Emma Frid

2016-11-01

-modal mapping of body motion qualitiesfrom bodily movement to sounds. Sound can be translated and understood from bodily motion,conveyed through sound visualizations in the shape of drawings and translated back from sound visualizations to audio. The work underlines the potential of using interactive sonification to communicate high-level features of human movement data.

The Effect of Tier 2 Intervention for Phonemic Awareness in a Response-to-Intervention Model in Low-Income Preschool Classrooms

Science.gov (United States)

Koutsoftas, Anthony D.; Harmon, Mary Towle; Gray, Shelley

2009-01-01

Purpose: This study assessed the effectiveness of a Tier 2 intervention that was designed to increase the phonemic awareness skills of low-income preschoolers who were enrolled in Early Reading First classrooms. Method: Thirty-four preschoolers participated in a multiple baseline across participants treatment design. Tier 2 intervention for…

Angles of Refraction: The Letters of Mary Delany

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Eleonora Chiavetta

2014-04-01

Full Text Available Mary Delany (1700-1788 is particularly famous for her paper-cuttings or ‘mosaicks’ based on botanical subjects. A very lively woman of fashion, she was close to Queen Charlotte and one of the Bluestocking Ladies. She left a vivid portrait of life and society in eighteenth century England and Ireland in the six volumes of her Autobiography and Letters, edited in 1861 by her descendant Lady Llanover. Her autobiography is made up of 18 letters sent to her most intimate friend, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Portland. The first letter is dated 1740, but in this, as in the following ones, Mrs. Delany narrates her past life to her friend, starting from the early years of her life, describing her unhappy marriage, financial difficulties as a widow, and family relationships. Along with these ‘autobiographical’ letters, other letters written by her to her sister Ann are introduced, which date to the periods of life Mrs. Delany is dealing with. The aim of this paper is to focus on the textual, linguistic and content differences between the two letter types, and analyse how the identity of Mary Delany is differently constructed and perceived in the explicit autobiographical letters addressed to the Duchess of Portland, and the ones written to her sister. 

Discovery of Sound in the Sea 2013 Annual Report

Science.gov (United States)

2013-09-30

develop and maintain resources that address the long-term goal. The resources include a website (Figure 1), a tri-fold educational pamphlet (available in...on whale watches during the winter months. The DOSITS tri-fold brochure was translated to French for distribution at the 21st International...University of Rhode Island. (tri-fold pamphlet ) Vigness-Raposa, K.J., Scowcroft, G., Miller, J.H., and Ketten, D.R. 2012. Discovery of Sound in

Sound

CERN Document Server

Robertson, William C

2003-01-01

Muddled about what makes music? Stuck on the study of harmonics? Dumbfounded by how sound gets around? Now you no longer have to struggle to teach concepts you really don t grasp yourself. Sound takes an intentionally light touch to help out all those adults science teachers, parents wanting to help with homework, home-schoolers seeking necessary scientific background to teach middle school physics with confidence. The book introduces sound waves and uses that model to explain sound-related occurrences. Starting with the basics of what causes sound and how it travels, you'll learn how musical instruments work, how sound waves add and subtract, how the human ear works, and even why you can sound like a Munchkin when you inhale helium. Sound is the fourth book in the award-winning Stop Faking It! Series, published by NSTA Press. Like the other popular volumes, it is written by irreverent educator Bill Robertson, who offers this Sound recommendation: One of the coolest activities is whacking a spinning metal rod...

Student Teacher Letters of Reference: A Critical Analysis

Science.gov (United States)

Mason, Richard W.; Schroeder, Mark P.

2012-01-01

Letters of reference are commonly used in acquiring a job in education. Despite serious issues of validity and reliability in writing and evaluating letters, there is a dearth of research that systematically examines the evaluation process and defines the constructs that define high quality letters. The current study used NVivo to examine 160…

Sixty-Minute Review of Letter Writing

Science.gov (United States)

Cunningham, Donald H.; Graham, Louise

1974-01-01

The article describes a one-hour presentation which provides a basic stereotyped pattern of letter organization for the four types of letters (order, request, claim, and reply) the business of secretarial student is most likely to have to write. The four paragraphs of the pattern are: purpose, explanation, optional, and closing. (AG)

Sensory illusions: Common mistakes in physics regarding sound, light and radio waves

Science.gov (United States)

Briles, T. M.; Tabor-Morris, A. E.

2013-03-01

Optical illusions are well known as effects that we see that are not representative of reality. Sensory illusions are similar but can involve other senses than sight, such as hearing or touch. One mistake commonly noted among instructors is that students often mis-identify radio signals as sound waves and not as part of the electromagnetic spectrum. A survey of physics students from multiple high schools highlights the frequency of this common misconception, as well as other nuances on this misunderstanding. Many students appear to conclude that, since they experience radio broadcasts as sound, then sound waves are the actual transmission of radio signals and not, as is actually true, a representation of those waves as produced by the translator box, the radio. Steps to help students identify and correct sensory illusion misconceptions are discussed. School of Education

Theoretical and practical reviews of the Indonesian translated “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” novel

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Zulfadli A. Aziz

2015-10-01

Full Text Available This paper investigates the results of translation of the English novel “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” into Indonesian. The Indonesian version of the novel was compared with the English original one to find the translation practices used by the translator. The translation was analysed by focusing on the strategies the translator used in translating the text from the Second Language into the Target Language. It was found that the translator of the novel used four strategies: foreignization and domestication, cultural equivalences, zero-translation, and pragmatic translation. Furthermore, the cultural differences and new words which were created by the original author were the most difficult ones to find equivalences for in Indonesian. The translator tended to use original words from the source text un-translated into the TL. As a result, the target text does not read smoothly, or naturally, and may sound “foreign” to readers. It is suggested that translators should attempt to translate literary works by applying proper translation theory and practice.

A Study of Memory and Forgetting in The Sound of One Hand Clapping

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

杨炤宇

2011-01-01

The Sound of One Hand Clapping is a 1997 novel by Australian author Richard Flanagan. Richard Flanagan was born in 1961 in Tasmania. He left school at 16, later winning a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, where he took a Master of Letters degree. He later worked as a labourer and river guide. The Sound of One Hand Clapping （1998） is his second novel which tells the story of Slovenian immigrants; Richard Flanagan also wrote and directed the film version of The Sound of One Hand Clapping, which was re- leased in 1998, and world premiered at the 1998 Berlin Film Festival, where it was nominated for Golden Bear for Best film. The novel, The Sound of One Hand Clapping （1998）, examines the Tasmanian immigrant experience. It asks us not to ignore the existence of the soul and the spirit, not to sublimate all to a blind rationality, Flanagan also suggests that healing is not only possible but that it should be looked for. Original, poetic and compelling, this novel comes highly recommended,？As the novel is formed largely by means of memory and forgetting. So the author of this paper intends to give a tentative study of memory as well as forgetting, Wing to figure out the reasons and influences that memory and forgetting brings on different characters.

How Iconicity Helps People Learn New Words: Neural Correlates and Individual Differences in Sound-Symbolic Bootstrapping

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Gwilym Lockwood

2016-07-01

Full Text Available Sound symbolism is increasingly understood as involving iconicity, or perceptual analogies and cross-modal correspondences between form and meaning, but the search for its functional and neural correlates is ongoing. Here we study how people learn sound-symbolic words, using behavioural, electrophysiological and individual difference measures. Dutch participants learned Japanese ideophones —lexical sound- symbolic words— with a translation of either the real meaning (in which form and meaning show cross-modal correspondences or the opposite meaning (in which form and meaning show cross-modal clashes. Participants were significantly better at identifying the words they learned in the real condition, correctly remembering the real word pairing 86.7% of the time, but the opposite word pairing only 71.3% of the time. Analysing event-related potentials (ERPs during the test round showed that ideophones in the real condition elicited a greater P3 component and late positive complex than ideophones in the opposite condition. In a subsequent forced choice task, participants were asked to guess the real translation from two alternatives. They did this with 73.0% accuracy, well above chance level even for words they had encountered in the opposite condition, showing that people are generally sensitive to the sound-symbolic cues in ideophones. Individual difference measures showed that the ERP effect in the test round of the learning task was greater for participants who were more sensitive to sound symbolism in the forced choice task. The main driver of the difference was a lower amplitude of the P3 component in response to ideophones in the opposite condition, suggesting that people who are more sensitive to sound symbolism may have more difficulty to suppress conflicting cross-modal information. The findings provide new evidence that cross-modal correspondences between sound and meaning facilitate word learning, while cross-modal clashes make word

Analytical Lie-algebraic solution of a 3D sound propagation problem in the ocean

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Petrov, P.S., E-mail: petrov@poi.dvo.ru [Il' ichev Pacific Oceanological Institute, 43 Baltiyskaya str., Vladivostok, 690041 (Russian Federation); Prants, S.V., E-mail: prants@poi.dvo.ru [Il' ichev Pacific Oceanological Institute, 43 Baltiyskaya str., Vladivostok, 690041 (Russian Federation); Petrova, T.N., E-mail: petrova.tn@dvfu.ru [Far Eastern Federal University, 8 Sukhanova str., 690950, Vladivostok (Russian Federation)

2017-06-21

The problem of sound propagation in a shallow sea with variable bottom slope is considered. The sound pressure field produced by a time-harmonic point source in such inhomogeneous 3D waveguide is expressed in the form of a modal expansion. The expansion coefficients are computed using the adiabatic mode parabolic equation theory. The mode parabolic equations are solved explicitly, and the analytical expressions for the modal coefficients are obtained using a Lie-algebraic technique. - Highlights: • A group-theoretical approach is applied to a problem of sound propagation in a shallow sea with variable bottom slope. • An analytical solution of this problem is obtained in the form of modal expansion with analytical expressions of the coefficients. • Our result is the only analytical solution of the 3D sound propagation problem with no translational invariance. • This solution can be used for the validation of the numerical propagation models.

Knockdown of the dyslexia-associated gene Kiaa0319 impairs temporal responses to speech stimuli in rat primary auditory cortex.

Science.gov (United States)

Centanni, T M; Booker, A B; Sloan, A M; Chen, F; Maher, B J; Carraway, R S; Khodaparast, N; Rennaker, R; LoTurco, J J; Kilgard, M P

2014-07-01

One in 15 school age children have dyslexia, which is characterized by phoneme-processing problems and difficulty learning to read. Dyslexia is associated with mutations in the gene KIAA0319. It is not known whether reduced expression of KIAA0319 can degrade the brain's ability to process phonemes. In the current study, we used RNA interference (RNAi) to reduce expression of Kiaa0319 (the rat homolog of the human gene KIAA0319) and evaluate the effect in a rat model of phoneme discrimination. Speech discrimination thresholds in normal rats are nearly identical to human thresholds. We recorded multiunit neural responses to isolated speech sounds in primary auditory cortex (A1) of rats that received in utero RNAi of Kiaa0319. Reduced expression of Kiaa0319 increased the trial-by-trial variability of speech responses and reduced the neural discrimination ability of speech sounds. Intracellular recordings from affected neurons revealed that reduced expression of Kiaa0319 increased neural excitability and input resistance. These results provide the first evidence that decreased expression of the dyslexia-associated gene Kiaa0319 can alter cortical responses and impair phoneme processing in auditory cortex. © The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Translation of the New World: intercultural dialogue or confrontation of cultures? Approach to a vision of the Other in the discovery and the Conquest chronicles

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Iwona Kasperska

2012-01-01

Full Text Available The objective of this paper is to show main difficulties in the intercultural translation process which has been taking place during the Discovery and the Conquest of the New World, in the 15th and 16th centuries. These historical facts are considered as a metaphor of translation in general, and letters, chronicles and histories of some Spanish authors of that period are analyzed as examples of interpretation / translation based on their eurocentric and Christian background. Finally, domestication of the New Spain culture is indicated as a main translation strategy and a confrontation of cultures rather than dialogue is stressed as a general feature of the cultural contact.

RETRACTED: Translating Connotative Meaning in Literary Texts at the University of Petra

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Akram M. Beiruti

2013-09-01

Full Text Available This article is primarily concerned with the investigation of the importance of connotation in translation. The four meanings normally discussed in semantics are denotation, connotation, reference and sense. Denotation is the frame of meaning, which is found in definitions given by dictionaries; while connotation is an additional shade of meaning added to the denotation of a word. Pragmatic meanings play an important role in the interpretation of a literary text. They need to be handled carefully by translators, and are likely not to survive the process of translation. Their meanings are fragile and often culture specific. They may also be highly personal associated with the author himself. In literary translation, meaning can only be accurate to a certain degree, since it is looking for the connotative as well as the denotative meanings. As such the successful translator is aware of the multiple meanings of the word. Whilst the translator has to cope with the different shades of word meanings, which are in non-literary translation, he can achieve anywhere near perfection. It worth mentioning that poetry is the hardest of all literary genres to translate, because it has some linguistic factors to account for (notably sound, rhyme and meter and connotation. Thus the importance of connotation is of utmost importance in translation. which translators have to be aware of.

Initial and noninitial name-letter preferences as obtained through repeated letter rating tasks continue to reflect (different aspects of) self-esteem.

Science.gov (United States)

Hoorens, Vera; Takano, Keisuke; Franck, Erik; Roberts, John E; Raes, Filip

2015-09-01

We tested the usefulness of name-letter preference scores as indirect indicators of self-esteem by exploring whether multiple unsupervised self-administrations of letter rating tasks within a short period of time yield useful data. We also examined whether preferences for initials and noninitial name-letters tap different aspects of self-esteem. Participants from a community sample (N = 164; 58 men and 106 women, 17-67 years, Mage = 34.57, SD = 13.28) completed daily letter rating tasks and state self-esteem questionnaires for 7 consecutive days. They also completed a trait self-esteem questionnaire on the first measurement day as well as 6 months later. Preference scores for first-name initials were stronger but more unstable than preference scores for other name-letters. Preferences for first-name initials were primarily associated with directly measured state self-esteem whereas preferences for noninitials were primarily associated with directly measured trait self-esteem even if the latter was measured 6 months later. Thus, we showed that preferences for initials and noninitials are not simply interchangeable. Previous letter rating studies, which almost exclusively used initial preferences, should be interpreted in terms of state rather than trait self-esteem. In future studies, researchers should focus on the name-letter preference that reflects the aspect of self-esteem they wish to address. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved.

Predictors of Reading Skills for Kindergartners and First Grade Students in Spanish: A Longitudinal Study

Science.gov (United States)

Kim, Young-Suk; Pallante, Daniel

2012-01-01

This study investigated predictors of word reading and reading comprehension skills using longitudinal data from Spanish-speaking kindergartners (N = 163) and first grade students (N = 305) from high SES families in Chile. Individual differences in letter-naming fluency and phonemic segmentation fluency, but not vocabulary, were positive…

Advice letter on policy instruments renewable electricity

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

2011-01-01

In a letter of July 2010 the Energy Council made recommendations for a policy framework with more obligations and fewer subsidies. This included the Energy Council's advice to investigate whether the introduction of a supplier obligation could play a major role in the realisation of the CO2 emission target of the Netherlands and increase the share of renewable energy in line with European agreements. This advice letter deals with one aspect of the broader considerations: the share of renewable electricity and the kind of incentive framework that is needed to achieve the target concerned. In this letter we will examine the possibilities of the SDE+ support (financial incentive for renewable energy) scheme and the supplier obligation, the effects on the market and the consequences for achieving the target. This letter closes with conclusions and recommendations. [nl

Alphabetical: How Every Letter Tells a Story

OpenAIRE

Rosen, Michael

2013-01-01

From minding your Ps and Qs to wondering why X should mark the spot, Alphabetical is a book for everyone who loves words and language. Whether it's how letters are arranged on keyboards or Viking runes, textspeak or zip codes, this book will change the way you think about letters for ever. How on Earth did we fix upon our twenty-six letters, what do they really mean, and how did we come to write them down in the first place? Michael Rosen takes you on an unforgettable adventure through the hi...

Rethermalization of a field-reversed configuration plasma in translation experiments

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Himura, H.; Okada, S.; Sugimoto, S.; Goto, S.

1995-01-01

A translation experiment of field-reversed configuration (FRC) plasma is performed on the FIX machine [Shiokawa and Goto, Phys. Fluids B 5, 534 (1993)]. The translated FRC bounces between magnetic mirror fields at both ends of a confinement region. The plasma loses some of its axial kinetic energy when it is reflected by the magnetic mirror field, and eventually settles down in the confinement region. In this reflection process, the plasma temperature rises significantly. Such plasma rethermalization has been observed in OCT-L1 experiments [Ito et al., Phys. Fluids 30, 168 (1987)], but rarely in FRX-C/T experiments [Rej et al., Phys. Fluids 29, 852 (1986)]. It is found that the rethermalization depends on the relation between the plasma temperature and the translation velocity. The rethermalization occurs only in the case where the translation velocity exceeds the sound velocity. This result implies the rethermalization is caused by a shock wave induced within the FRC when the plasma is reflected by the magnetic mirror field. copyright 1995 American Institute of Physics

Shallow versus deep footprints in pseudo-word grapheme-to-phoneme conversion: Dutch and English

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Borgwaldt, S.R.; Bolger, P.; Jakab, E.

2010-01-01

Our study is concerned with reading processes. Using a letter-detection paradigm with masked priming, we tested for the existence and time course of vowel digraph effects in Dutch and English. Whereas Dutch readers showed digraph effects with 67-ms primes, English readers showed only letter effects

Open letter to Pope John Paul II.

Science.gov (United States)

Sai, F

1991-01-01

In an Open Letter to Pope John Paul II, written on World Population Day (July 11) 1991, Dr. Fred Sai, President of International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), called for a dialogue on voluntary family planning as a means of avoiding unwanted pregnancy. A half million women die each year from pregnancy-related causes--a death toll that could be dramatically reduced by universal access to low cost, effective contraception. Family planning further represents the best protection against abortion. The Catholic Church's vehement opposition to abortion and family planning methods other than periodic abstinence is in marked contrast to its support to human rights in other settings. The Church has supported struggles for economic ju stice in and among nations, sided with the poor, and advocated for transitions to democracy. At the same time, the family planning movement--which has as its overall objective the protection of the health and welfare of women, children, and families--is viewed by the Vatican as a vehicle for the enslavement rather than liberation of women. The opening of a sensitive dialogue between the Catholic Church and supporters of voluntary family planning could help couples make sound moral decisions about their families and contribute to saving the lives of millions of women, most of them poor.

Visual and Artistic Functions of Letters in Khaghani’s Poetry

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mohsen Zolfaghari

2013-11-01

Full Text Available Abstract The intensity of emotion and fluctuation of meaning in the poet's mind causes him to go beyond the ordinary language and convey intellectual and emotional meanings through metaphors, similes and linguistic preparations. He has sharp eyes and a sensitive spirit and creative temperament and attempts strengthening his own literary language and creating personal style by inventing novel images, showing the creativity and imagination and entering in various arenas of imagination. This point more than anything else could be done by presenting images and new figures. Perhaps in the sixth century, and especially in Azerbaijani school, more than other periods, poets have been looking for creating innovative style in eloquence. Their major attempts were mainly in imaging, a wide field that they have competed. It is obvious that in this illustration the alphabet letters would be very helpful. Khaghani's Divan of poetry, as one of the greatest poets of this school, is the perfect poetical book of paintings in which meaning has been hidden under a delicate pattern and new different scientific, cultural and religious images. Letters are a broad range of elements that put a new field in front of the poet and he is aware of the potential features of the letters, new images, and artistic creativity techniques as well. This paper shows descriptive - analytical study of various aspects of Khaghani’s poetry and frequency of letters in the alphabet letters, alphabetic-based authenticity of images, different similarity reasons, semantic and literal multi-relevance of letters in the context of poetry, producing figures of speech based on letters, sensational relationship exists between images and letters which have been shown in his poetry. Letter have a double and even multiple application in Khaghani's poetic works (divan and moreover the construction of words and conveying meaning which is the real and common usage, they were used as artistic instruments

Letter position coding across modalities: the case of Braille readers.

Science.gov (United States)

Perea, Manuel; García-Chamorro, Cristina; Martín-Suesta, Miguel; Gómez, Pablo

2012-01-01

The question of how the brain encodes letter position in written words has attracted increasing attention in recent years. A number of models have recently been proposed to accommodate the fact that transposed-letter stimuli like jugde or caniso are perceptually very close to their base words. Here we examined how letter position coding is attained in the tactile modality via Braille reading. The idea is that Braille word recognition may provide more serial processing than the visual modality, and this may produce differences in the input coding schemes employed to encode letters in written words. To that end, we conducted a lexical decision experiment with adult Braille readers in which the pseudowords were created by transposing/replacing two letters. We found a word-frequency effect for words. In addition, unlike parallel experiments in the visual modality, we failed to find any clear signs of transposed-letter confusability effects. This dissociation highlights the differences between modalities. The present data argue against models of letter position coding that assume that transposed-letter effects (in the visual modality) occur at a relatively late, abstract locus.

Large-corpus phoneme and word recognition and the generality of lexical context in CVC word perception.

Science.gov (United States)

Gelfand, Jessica T; Christie, Robert E; Gelfand, Stanley A

2014-02-01

Speech recognition may be analyzed in terms of recognition probabilities for perceptual wholes (e.g., words) and parts (e.g., phonemes), where j or the j-factor reveals the number of independent perceptual units required for recognition of the whole (Boothroyd, 1968b; Boothroyd & Nittrouer, 1988; Nittrouer & Boothroyd, 1990). For consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) nonsense syllables, j ∼ 3 because all 3 phonemes are needed to identify the syllable, but j ∼ 2.5 for real-word CVCs (revealing ∼2.5 independent perceptual units) because higher level contributions such as lexical knowledge enable word recognition even if less than 3 phonemes are accurately received. These findings were almost exclusively determined with the 120-word corpus of the isophonemic word lists (Boothroyd, 1968a; Boothroyd & Nittrouer, 1988), presented one word at a time. It is therefore possible that its generality or applicability may be limited. This study thus determined j by using a much larger and less restricted corpus of real-word CVCs presented in 3-word groups as well as whether j is influenced by test size. The j-factor for real-word CVCs was derived from the recognition performance of 223 individuals with a broad range of hearing sensitivity by using the Tri-Word Test (Gelfand, 1998), which involves 50 three-word presentations and a corpus of 450 words. The influence of test size was determined from a subsample of 96 participants with separate scores for the first 10, 20, and 25 (and all 50) presentation sets of the full test. The mean value of j was 2.48 with a 95% confidence interval of 2.44-2.53, which is in good agreement with values obtained with isophonemic word lists, although its value varies among individuals. A significant correlation was found between percent-correct scores and j, but it was small and accounted for only 12.4% of the variance in j for phoneme scores ≥60%. Mean j-factors for the 10-, 20-, 25-, and 50-set test sizes were between 2.49 and 2.53 and were not

Digit and letter alexia in carbon monoxide poisoning

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

Qingyu Shen; Xiaoming Rong; Rui Pan; Ying Peng; Wei Peng; Yamei Tang

2012-01-01

This study examined a 24-year-old patient with delayed encephalopathy, who was admitted to hospital with complaints of headache and visual impairment 1 week after acute carbon monoxide poisoning. The results of a visual field assessment, electroencephalography and head magnetic resonance imaging indicated damage to the cerebral cortex. After a 2-week treatment period, the patient had recovered from the visual impairment, but exhibited digit- and letter-reading difficulty. The Chinese aphasia battery and the number and letter battery supplement were conducted. The results revealed that the patient exhibited digit and letter alexia, while the ability to read Chinese characters was preserved. In contrast, the patient exhibited a deficit in Chinese character writing, while number and letter writing remained intact. Following treatment, reading and writing ability was improved and electroencephalographic abnormalities were ameliorated. Overall, our experimental findings demonstrated that delayed encephalopathy following acute carbon monoxide poisoning was characterized by digit and letter alexia.

The Indirect Empathic Approach to Claim Letters.

Science.gov (United States)

Bell, James D.

1985-01-01

In discussing letter-writing methods for business communication classes, the article explains that claim letter formats other than the direct approach are not only legitimate, but also effective, and suggests that the approach selected should depend upon the circumstances surrounding the claim. (CT)

Culture and subculture in transactional letter writing

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Shaw, Philip; Okamura, Akiko

2000-01-01

This study examines the relative contributions of subculture membership and mother-tongue status/target culture membership in writing transactional letters. We examined the letters accompanying articles initially submitted for publication by 26 NSE and 23 NNSE academics, and compared them with ef...

ADVERTISING BRANDS BY MEANS OF SOUNDS SYMBOLISM: THE INFLUENCE OF VOWELS ON PERCEIVED BRAND CHARACTERISTICS

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Alina Catalina Duduciuc

2015-07-01

Full Text Available The aim of this study is to test the influence of sound symbolism on perceived characteristics of a brand as well as to highlight the importance of applied social psychology to current practice of advertising. Previous research showed that the phonetic structure of brand name communicates its characteristics, i.e. it drives consumers to assess certain features and performance of the product. I assumed that when consumers encounter an unknown brand name, they automatically infer characteristics from the meaning conveyed by the sounds (e.g. phonemes. Therefore, I supposed that a brand name for a shampoo (artificially created on experimental purpose containing back vowel is evaluated better by consumers when they compare it to another brand name with front vowels. Furthermore, for the accuracy of responses, I used the semantic differential scale to measure the differences between two brands in terms of certain attributes of product. To this end, fifty students (N=50 participated in a research based on questionnaire. As the results of the current research showed, the brand name with back vowel outnumbered the brand name with front vowel on two dimension, i.e. on brand activity and brand efficiency. The brand name containing front vowel was rated better when subjects evaluated the product in generally. Last, but not least, when it comes to convey meanings, the sound of back vowels [a] could be used more when marketers promote products that communicate its characteristics such as efficiency, velocity and health. The back vowel could be also assessed to products with larger packing or special sailing such as extra quantity. Meanwhile, the brand names with front vowels [ie] could be created for more expensive products with good quality, mainly addressed to men.

Exploring science with sound: sonification and the use of sonograms as data analysis tool

CERN Multimedia

CERN. Geneva; Williams, Genevieve

2017-01-01

Resonances, periodicity, patterns and spectra are well-known notions that play crucial roles in particle physics, and that have always been at the junction between sound/music analysis and scientific exploration. Detecting the shape of a particular energy spectrum, studying the stability of a particle beam in a synchrotron, and separating signals from a noisy background are just a few examples where the connection with sound can be very strong, all sharing the same concepts of oscillations, cycles and frequency. This seminar will focus on analysing data and their relations by translating measurements into audible signals and using the natural capability of the ear to distinguish, characterise and analyse waveform shapes, amplitudes and relations. This process is called data sonification, and one of the main tools to investigate the structure of the sound is the sonogram (sometimes also called a spectrogram). A sonogram is a visual representation of how the spectrum of a certain sound signal changes with time...

50 CFR 216.257 - Letters of Authorization.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-10-01

... ADMINISTRATION, DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE MARINE MAMMALS REGULATIONS GOVERNING THE TAKING AND IMPORTING OF MARINE MAMMALS Taking Marine Mammals Incidental to Conducting Precision Strike Weapon Missions in the Gulf of Mexico § 216.257 Letters of Authorization. (a) A Letter of Authorization, unless suspended or revoked...

Particles and nuclei, letters

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

2004-01-01

The present collection of letters from JINR, Dubna, contains nine separate letters on data on elastic (p,n) charge exchange: compilation, the potentialities of δ-electron control of luminosity in experiments with internal targets at the Nuclotron, pion broadening and low-mass dilepton production, fluctuation of electromagnetic cascade axis in dense amorphous segmented media, the forward detector of the ANKE spectrometer. Tracking system and its use in data analysis, quantum field theory with three-dimensional vector time, curvature decomposition and the Einstein-Yang-Mills equations, an integral equation for the spinor amplitude of a massive neutral Dirac particle in a curved space time with arbitrary geometry and surprising resonances in 147 Sm(nα) 144 Nd reaction

Interactive Sonification of Spontaneous Movement of Children-Cross-Modal Mapping and the Perception of Body Movement Qualities through Sound.

Science.gov (United States)

Frid, Emma; Bresin, Roberto; Alborno, Paolo; Elblaus, Ludvig

2016-01-01

cross-modal mapping of body motion qualities from bodily movement to sounds. Sound can be translated and understood from bodily motion, conveyed through sound visualizations in the shape of drawings and translated back from sound visualizations to audio. The work underlines the potential of using interactive sonification to communicate high-level features of human movement data.

Interactive Sonification of Spontaneous Movement of Children—Cross-Modal Mapping and the Perception of Body Movement Qualities through Sound

Science.gov (United States)

Frid, Emma; Bresin, Roberto; Alborno, Paolo; Elblaus, Ludvig

2016-01-01

cross-modal mapping of body motion qualities from bodily movement to sounds. Sound can be translated and understood from bodily motion, conveyed through sound visualizations in the shape of drawings and translated back from sound visualizations to audio. The work underlines the potential of using interactive sonification to communicate high-level features of human movement data. PMID:27891074

Computer Processing of Esperanto Text.

Science.gov (United States)

Sherwood, Bruce

1981-01-01

Basic aspects of computer processing of Esperanto are considered in relation to orthography and computer representation, phonetics, morphology, one-syllable and multisyllable words, lexicon, semantics, and syntax. There are 28 phonemes in Esperanto, each represented in orthography by a single letter. The PLATO system handles diacritics by using a…

Reading and Language Intervention for Children at Risk of Dyslexia: A Randomised Controlled Trial

Science.gov (United States)

Duff, Fiona J.; Hulme, Charles; Grainger, Katy; Hardwick, Samantha J.; Miles, Jeremy N. V.; Snowling, Margaret J.

2014-01-01

Background: Intervention studies for children at risk of dyslexia have typically been delivered preschool, and show short-term effects on letter knowledge and phoneme awareness, with little transfer to literacy. Methods: This randomised controlled trial evaluated the effectiveness of a reading and language intervention for 6-year-old children…

Computer-Based Learning of Spelling Skills in Children with and without Dyslexia

Science.gov (United States)

Kast, Monika; Baschera, Gian-Marco; Gross, Markus; Jancke, Lutz; Meyer, Martin

2011-01-01

Our spelling training software recodes words into multisensory representations comprising visual and auditory codes. These codes represent information about letters and syllables of a word. An enhanced version, developed for this study, contains an additional phonological code and an improved word selection controller relying on a phoneme-based…

Letter position coding across modalities: the case of Braille readers.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Manuel Perea

Full Text Available The question of how the brain encodes letter position in written words has attracted increasing attention in recent years. A number of models have recently been proposed to accommodate the fact that transposed-letter stimuli like jugde or caniso are perceptually very close to their base words.Here we examined how letter position coding is attained in the tactile modality via Braille reading. The idea is that Braille word recognition may provide more serial processing than the visual modality, and this may produce differences in the input coding schemes employed to encode letters in written words. To that end, we conducted a lexical decision experiment with adult Braille readers in which the pseudowords were created by transposing/replacing two letters.We found a word-frequency effect for words. In addition, unlike parallel experiments in the visual modality, we failed to find any clear signs of transposed-letter confusability effects. This dissociation highlights the differences between modalities.The present data argue against models of letter position coding that assume that transposed-letter effects (in the visual modality occur at a relatively late, abstract locus.

Experimental test of contemporary mathematical models of visual letter recognition.

Science.gov (United States)

Townsend, J T; Ashby, F G

1982-12-01

A letter confusion experiment that used brief durations manipulated payoffs across the four stimulus letters, which were composed of line segments equal in length. The observers were required to report the features they perceived as well as to give a letter response. The early feature-sampling process is separated from the later letter-decision process in the substantive feature models, and predictions are thus obtained for the frequencies of feature report as well as letter report. Four substantive visual feature-processing models are developed and tested against one another and against three models of a more descriptive nature. The substantive models predict the decisional letter report phase much better than they do the feature-sampling phase, but the best overall 4 X 4 letter confusion matrix fits are obtained with one of the descriptive models, the similarity choice model. The present and other recent results suggest that the assumption that features are sampled in a stochastically independent manner may not be generally valid. The traditional high-threshold conceptualization of feature sampling is also falsified by the frequent reporting by observers of features not contained in the stimulus letter.

Polysyllable Speech Accuracy and Predictors of Later Literacy Development in Preschool Children With Speech Sound Disorders.

Science.gov (United States)

Masso, Sarah; Baker, Elise; McLeod, Sharynne; Wang, Cen

2017-07-12

The aim of this study was to determine if polysyllable accuracy in preschoolers with speech sound disorders (SSD) was related to known predictors of later literacy development: phonological processing, receptive vocabulary, and print knowledge. Polysyllables-words of three or more syllables-are important to consider because unlike monosyllables, polysyllables have been associated with phonological processing and literacy difficulties in school-aged children. They therefore have the potential to help identify preschoolers most at risk of future literacy difficulties. Participants were 93 preschool children with SSD from the Sound Start Study. Participants completed the Polysyllable Preschool Test (Baker, 2013) as well as phonological processing, receptive vocabulary, and print knowledge tasks. Cluster analysis was completed, and 2 clusters were identified: low polysyllable accuracy and moderate polysyllable accuracy. The clusters were significantly different based on 2 measures of phonological awareness and measures of receptive vocabulary, rapid naming, and digit span. The clusters were not significantly different on sound matching accuracy or letter, sound, or print concept knowledge. The participants' poor performance on print knowledge tasks suggested that as a group, they were at risk of literacy difficulties but that there was a cluster of participants at greater risk-those with both low polysyllable accuracy and poor phonological processing.

When Do First Letters Mnemonics Aid Recall?

Science.gov (United States)

Morris, P. E.; Cook, N.

1978-01-01

The evidence for the effectiveness of the first letter mnemonic technique is confused. There are at least three studies showing no effect, and one where an improvement in recall occurred. Reports two experiments which attempted to locate the conditions under which the first letter mnemonic is effective. (Author/RK)

Musical and linguistic expertise influence pre-attentive and attentive processing of non-speech sounds.

Science.gov (United States)

Marie, Céline; Kujala, Teija; Besson, Mireille

2012-04-01

The aim of this experiment was two-fold. Our first goal was to determine whether linguistic expertise influences the pre-attentive [as reflected by the Mismatch Negativity - (MMN)] and the attentive processing (as reflected by behavioural discrimination accuracy) of non-speech, harmonic sounds. The second was to directly compare the effects of linguistic and musical expertise. To this end, we compared non-musician native speakers of a quantity language, Finnish, in which duration is a phonemically contrastive cue, with French musicians and French non-musicians. Results revealed that pre-attentive and attentive processing of duration deviants was enhanced in Finn non-musicians and French musicians compared to French non-musicians. By contrast, MMN in French musicians was larger than in both Finns and French non-musicians for frequency deviants, whereas no between-group differences were found for intensity deviants. By showing similar effects of linguistic and musical expertise, these results argue in favor of common processing of duration in music and speech. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Srl. All rights reserved.

Letter to the editor regarding "GRAS from the ground up: Review of the Interim Pilot Program for GRAS notification" by.

Science.gov (United States)

Sewalt, Vincent; LaMarta, James; Shanahan, Diane; Gregg, Lori; Carrillo, Roberto

2017-09-01

Present letter is aimed at clarifying some critical points highlighted by Hanlon et al. regarding the common knowledge element of the safety of food enzymes in support of their GRAS designation. Particularly, we outline the development of peer-reviewed, generally recognized safety evaluation methodology for microbial enzymes and its adoption by the enzyme industry, which provides the US FDA with a review framework for enzyme GRAS Notices. This approach may serve as a model to other food ingredient categories for a scientifically sound, rigorous, and transparent application of the GRAS concept. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Extra-large letter spacing improves reading in dyslexia

Science.gov (United States)

Zorzi, Marco; Barbiero, Chiara; Facoetti, Andrea; Lonciari, Isabella; Carrozzi, Marco; Montico, Marcella; Bravar, Laura; George, Florence; Pech-Georgel, Catherine; Ziegler, Johannes C.

2012-01-01

Although the causes of dyslexia are still debated, all researchers agree that the main challenge is to find ways that allow a child with dyslexia to read more words in less time, because reading more is undisputedly the most efficient intervention for dyslexia. Sophisticated training programs exist, but they typically target the component skills of reading, such as phonological awareness. After the component skills have improved, the main challenge remains (that is, reading deficits must be treated by reading more—a vicious circle for a dyslexic child). Here, we show that a simple manipulation of letter spacing substantially improved text reading performance on the fly (without any training) in a large, unselected sample of Italian and French dyslexic children. Extra-large letter spacing helps reading, because dyslexics are abnormally affected by crowding, a perceptual phenomenon with detrimental effects on letter recognition that is modulated by the spacing between letters. Extra-large letter spacing may help to break the vicious circle by rendering the reading material more easily accessible. PMID:22665803

Sound algorithms

OpenAIRE

De Götzen , Amalia; Mion , Luca; Tache , Olivier

2007-01-01

International audience; We call sound algorithms the categories of algorithms that deal with digital sound signal. Sound algorithms appeared in the very infancy of computer. Sound algorithms present strong specificities that are the consequence of two dual considerations: the properties of the digital sound signal itself and its uses, and the properties of auditory perception.

Auditory comprehension: from the voice up to the single word level

OpenAIRE

Jones, Anna Barbara

2016-01-01

Auditory comprehension, the ability to understand spoken language, consists of a number of different auditory processing skills. In the five studies presented in this thesis I investigated both intact and impaired auditory comprehension at different levels: voice versus phoneme perception, as well as single word auditory comprehension in terms of phonemic and semantic content. In the first study, using sounds from different continua of ‘male’-/pæ/ to ‘female’-/tæ/ and ‘male’...

The Predictive Validity of Teacher Candidate Letters of Reference

Science.gov (United States)

Mason, Richard W.; Schroeder, Mark P.

2014-01-01

Letters of reference are widely used as an essential part of the hiring process of newly licensed teachers. While the predictive validity of these letters of reference has been called into question it has never been empirically studied. The current study examined the predictive validity of the quality of letters of reference for forty-one student…

The Impact of Machine Translation and Computer-aided Translation on Translators

Science.gov (United States)

Peng, Hao

2018-03-01

Under the context of globalization, communications between countries and cultures are becoming increasingly frequent, which make it imperative to use some techniques to help translate. This paper is to explore the influence of computer-aided translation on translators, which is derived from the field of the computer-aided translation (CAT) and machine translation (MT). Followed by an introduction to the development of machine and computer-aided translation, it then depicts the technologies practicable to translators, which are trying to analyze the demand of designing the computer-aided translation so far in translation practice, and optimize the designation of computer-aided translation techniques, and analyze its operability in translation. The findings underline the advantages and disadvantages of MT and CAT tools, and the serviceability and future development of MT and CAT technologies. Finally, this thesis probes into the impact of these new technologies on translators in hope that more translators and translation researchers can learn to use such tools to improve their productivity.

46 CFR 7.20 - Nantucket Sound, Vineyard Sound, Buzzards Bay, Narragansett Bay, MA, Block Island Sound and...

Science.gov (United States)

2010-10-01

... 46 Shipping 1 2010-10-01 2010-10-01 false Nantucket Sound, Vineyard Sound, Buzzards Bay, Narragansett Bay, MA, Block Island Sound and easterly entrance to Long Island Sound, NY. 7.20 Section 7.20... Atlantic Coast § 7.20 Nantucket Sound, Vineyard Sound, Buzzards Bay, Narragansett Bay, MA, Block Island...

40 CFR 280.99 - Letter of credit.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... (UST) Financial Responsibility § 280.99 Letter of credit. (a) An owner or operator may satisfy the... brackets are to be replaced with the relevant information and the brackets deleted: Irrevocable Standby.... We certify that the wording of this letter of credit is identical to the wording specified in 40 CFR...

Particles and Nuclei, Letters

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

2004-01-01

The present collection of letters from JINR, Dubna, contains eight separate letters on analysis of experimental data on relativistic nuclear collisions in the Lobachevski space, relativistic contribution of the final-state interaction to deuteron photodisintegration, on the charge asymmetry of the like-sign lepton pairs induced by B - B bar - production asymmetry, limits on the ν e → ν e neutrino oscillation parameters from an experiment at the IHEP-JINR neutrino detector, excitation of high spin isomers in photonuclear reactions, study of product formation in proton-nuclear reactions on the 129 I target induced by 660-MeV protons, application of jet pumps in the cryogenic system of the Nuclotron - superconducting accelerator of relativistic particles and study of the silicon drift detector performance with inclined tracks

Early Home-Based Intervention in the Netherlands for Children at Familial Risk of Dyslexia

Science.gov (United States)

van Otterloo, Sandra G.; van der Leij, Aryan; Henrichs, Lotte F.

2009-01-01

Dutch children at higher familial risk of reading disability received a home-based intervention programme before formal reading instruction started to investigate whether this would reduce the risk of dyslexia. The experimental group (n = 23) received a specific training in phoneme awareness and letter knowledge. A control group (n = 25) received…

Pre-Service Teachers' Knowledge of Phonemic Awareness: Relationship to Perceived Knowledge, Self-Efficacy Beliefs, and Exposure to a Multimedia-Enhanced Lecture

Science.gov (United States)

Martinussen, Rhonda; Ferrari, Julia; Aitken, Madison; Willows, Dale

2015-01-01

This study examined the relations among perceived and actual knowledge of phonemic awareness (PA), exposure to PA instruction during practicum, and self-efficacy for teaching PA in a sample of 54 teacher candidates (TCs) enrolled in a 1-year Bachelor of Education program in a Canadian university. It also assessed the effects of a brief…

Direct and Indirect Effects of Stimulating Phoneme Awareness vs. Other Linguistic Skills in Preschoolers with Co-Occurring Speech and Language Impairments

Science.gov (United States)

Tyler, Ann A.; Gillon, Gail; Macrae, Toby; Johnson, Roberta L.

2011-01-01

Aim: The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of an integrated phoneme awareness/speech intervention in comparison to an alternating speech/morphosyntax intervention for specific areas targeted by the different interventions, as well as the extent of indirect gains in nontargeted areas. Method: A total of 30 children with co-occurring…

Teste de figuras para discriminação fonêmica: uma proposta Phoneme Discrimination Picture Test: a proposal

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Beatriz dos Santos-Carvalho

2008-01-01

Full Text Available OBJETIVOS: Propor um teste que avaliasse a discriminação fonêmica por meio de pares mínimos, abrangendo todos os fonemas do Português Brasileiro e utilizando-os em palavras que possam ser facilmente representadas por figuras. Buscou-se que este teste contribua para o diagnóstico de alterações fonoaudiológicas e para a pesquisa científica. Procurou-se fazer um teste que fosse de fácil aplicação, podendo ser utilizado em qualquer local de trabalho dos fonoaudiólogos. MÉTODOS: Selecionou-se pares mínimos que opusessem fonemas em relação ao valor binário de cada traço distintivo e às combinações possíveis entre os traços de lugar ([labial], [coronal], [dorsal] bem como pelas oposições de estruturas silábicas. Criou-se figuras que representam as palavras dos pares. RESULTADOS: Elaborou-se o Teste de Figuras para Discriminação Fonêmica, que avalia a habilidade de discriminação fonêmica em crianças de quatro a oito anos. Este teste contém 40 apresentações, das quais 30 são pares mínimos e dez pares de palavras iguais. Nestas 30 apresentações, opôs-se os traços distintivos [+/- soante], [+/- aproximante], [+/- contínuo], [+/- voz], [coronal+/-ant], [labial] x [coronal], [dorsal] x [coronal] e [labial] x [dorsal]. Igualmente foram opostas as seguintes estruturas silábicas: V x CV, CV x CCV, CV x CVC. CONCLUSÃO: Conclui-se que os objetivos deste trabalho foram alcançados com êxito, pois o Teste de Figura para Discriminação Fonêmica contempla tudo a que se propôs. Acredita-se que o teste deva ser aplicado em um estudo piloto para averiguar se as palavras e as figuras estão adequadas para a faixa etária. Posteriormente, deve ser aplicado em diversas regiões do país para ser devidamente padronizado.PURPOSE: To propose a test to evaluate phonemic discrimination using minimum pairs, comprising all Brazilian Portuguese phonemes and using them in words which can be easily represented by pictures. The

Examining the Translation and Scanlation of the Manga Naruto into Turkish from a Translator’s Perspective

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ayşe Şirin Okyayuz

2017-10-01

Full Text Available The collective power of Japanese popular culture permeating the rest of the world through manga and anime is a recent issue of interest for scholars. Studying the scanlation and translation of the manga, which are multimodal texts that hybridize linguistic and visual arts, also entails several topics of discussion and interest for the translation scholar. There are facets of these multimodal texts as in manga the narrative is conveyed through composite, cinematographic narrative with integrated frames. In turn these can yield interesting translation solutions and strategies, especially when compared in terms of the two mediums of production (i.e., in print and on the Internet. The following study entails a comparative analysis of the scanlation and translation of the manga Naruto into Turkish especially concentrating on: the format (i.e., arrangement of pages, lettering, typography, what was translated what was not (i.e., dialogues, onomatopoeia, honorifics, names, and the use of diverse translation strategies (i.e., adding notes, dealing with discourses, registers and translators choices. In this sense, as is the aim behind the study, manga translations present translation studies with rich grounds of research into multimodal, multicultural dialogue and interaction. As the potential for intercultural dialogue through comics has never been stronger than the present, manga seem to be a medium through which this may be achieved across cultures. Comparative studies in different languages and cultures would not only be a benefit for the comics’ translators and scholars, but also the field of translation, as discussing the abundance of decisions and possibilities would enrich the discipline.

Translation Theory 'Translated'

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Wæraas, Arild; Nielsen, Jeppe

2016-01-01

Translation theory has proved to be a versatile analytical lens used by scholars working from different traditions. On the basis of a systematic literature review, this study adds to our understanding of the ‘translations’ of translation theory by identifying the distinguishing features of the most...... common theoretical approaches to translation within the organization and management discipline: actor-network theory, knowledge-based theory, and Scandinavian institutionalism. Although each of these approaches already has borne much fruit in research, the literature is diverse and somewhat fragmented......, but also overlapping. We discuss the ways in which the three versions of translation theory may be combined and enrich each other so as to inform future research, thereby offering a more complete understanding of translation in and across organizational settings....

Binary translation using peephole translation rules

Science.gov (United States)

Bansal, Sorav; Aiken, Alex

2010-05-04

An efficient binary translator uses peephole translation rules to directly translate executable code from one instruction set to another. In a preferred embodiment, the translation rules are generated using superoptimization techniques that enable the translator to automatically learn translation rules for translating code from the source to target instruction set architecture.

The Task of Manga Translation: Akira in the West

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Martin de la Iglesia

2016-01-01

Full Text Available Translated editions of Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s manga 'Akira' played an important role in the popularisation of manga in the Western world. Published in Japan between 1982 and 1990, editions in European languages followed as soon as the late 1980s. In the first US edition (Epic 1988–1995 the originally black and white manga was printed in colour and published in 38 issues, which were designed not unlike typical American comic books. The first German edition (Carlsen 1991–1996 marked the beginning of Carlsen’s manga publishing efforts. It was based on the English-language edition and also printed in colour, and combined two American issues in one. This article analyses the materiality of these two translated editions with a focus on three main issues – the mirroring (or ‘flipping’ which changes the reading direction from right-to-left into left-to-right, the colouring of the originally black and white artwork, and the translation of different kinds of script (sound effects, speech bubble text, and inscriptions or labels

The elaboration of motor programs for the automation of letter production.

Science.gov (United States)

Thibon, Laurence Séraphin; Gerber, Silvain; Kandel, Sonia

2018-01-01

We investigated how children learn to write letters. Letter writing evolves from stroke-by-stroke to whole-letter programming. Children of ages 6 to 9 (N=98) wrote letters of varying complexity on a digitizer. At ages 6 and 7 movement duration, dysfluency and trajectory increased with stroke number. This indicates that the motor program they activated mainly coded information on stroke production. Stroke number affected the older children's production much less, suggesting that they programmed stroke chunks or the whole letter. The fact that movement duration and dysfluency decreased from ages 6 to 8, and remained stable at ages 8 and 9 suggests that automation of letter writing begins at age 8. Automation seems to require the elaboration of stroke chunks and/or letter-sized motor programs. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The Relative Predictive Contribution and Causal Role of Phoneme Awareness, Rhyme Awareness, and Verbal Short-Term Memory in Reading Skills: A Review

Science.gov (United States)

Melby-Lervag, Monica

2012-01-01

The acknowledgement that educational achievement is highly dependent on successful reading development has led to extensive research on its underlying factors. A strong argument has been made for a causal relationship between reading and phoneme awareness; similarly, causal relations have been suggested for reading with short-term memory and rhyme…

Peer assessment of outpatient consultation letters – feasibility and satisfaction

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Dojeiji Suzan

2007-05-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Written correspondence is one of the most important forms of communication between health care providers, yet there is little feedback provided to specialists. The objective of this study was to determine the feasibility and satisfaction of a peer assessment program on consultation letters and to determine inter-rater reliability between family physicians and specialists. Methods A rating scale of nine 5-point Likert scale items including specific content, style items, education value of the letter and an overall rating was developed from a previous validated tool. Nine Internal Medicine specialists/subspecialists from two tertiary care centres submitted 10 letters with patient and physician identifiers removed. Two Internal Medicine specialists, and 2 family physicians from the other centre rated each letter (to protect writer anonymity. A satisfaction survey was sent to each writer and rater after collation of the results. A follow-up survey was sent 6–8 months later. Results There was a high degree of satisfaction with the process and feedback. The rating scale information was felt to be useful and appropriate for evaluating the quality of consultation letters by 6/7 writers. 5/7 seven writers felt that the feedback they received resulted in immediate changes to their letters. Six months later, 6/9 writers indicated they had maintained changes in their letters. Raters rank ordered letters similarly (Cronbach's alpha 0.57–0.84 but mean scores were highly variant. At site 1 there were significant differences in scoring brevity (p Conclusion Most participants found peer assessment of letters feasible and beneficial and longstanding changes occurred in some individuals. Family physicians and specialists appear to have different expectations on some items. Further studies on reliability and validity, with a larger sample, are required before high stakes professional assessments include consultation letters.

Pseudo-synesthesia through reading books with colored letters.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Olympia Colizoli

Full Text Available BACKGROUND: Synesthesia is a phenomenon where a stimulus produces consistent extraordinary subjective experiences. A relatively common type of synesthesia involves perception of color when viewing letters (e.g. the letter 'a' always appears as light blue. In this study, we examine whether traits typically regarded as markers of synesthesia can be acquired by simply reading in color. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Non-synesthetes were given specially prepared colored books to read. A modified Stroop task was administered before and after reading. A perceptual crowding task was administered after reading. Reading one book (>49,000 words was sufficient to induce effects regarded as behavioral markers for synesthesia. The results of the Stroop tasks indicate that it is possible to learn letter-color associations through reading in color (F(1, 14 = 5.85, p = .030. Furthermore, Stroop effects correlated with subjective reports about experiencing letters in color (r(13 = 0.51, p = .05. The frequency of viewing letters is related to the level of association as seen by the difference in the Stroop effect size between upper- and lower-case letters (t(14 = 2.79, p = .014 and in a subgroup of participants whose Stroop effects increased as they continued to read in color. Readers did not show significant performance advantages on the crowding task compared to controls. Acknowledging the many differences between trainees and synesthetes, results suggest that it may be possible to acquire a subset of synesthetic behavioral traits in adulthood through training. CONCLUSION/SIGNIFICANCE: To our knowledge, this is the first evidence of acquiring letter-color associations through reading in color. Reading in color appears to be a promising avenue in which we may explore the differences and similarities between synesthetes and non-synesthetes. Additionally, reading in color is a plausible method for a long-term 'synesthetic' training program.

Danish-accented Chinese

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Wang, Lei; Sloos, Marjoleine 莱娜; Zhang, Chun

In search for a linguistic basis for the education of Chinese as a foreign language CFL in Denmark, we set up a new line of investigation into CFL. This research focuses on the phonetics and phonology of Mandarin Chinese as compared to Danish. Considering the sound systems of both languages, we......-ba /pha pa/ ta-da /tha ta/ ka-ga / kha-ka/ For L2 acquisition it is held that same and new phonemes are (relatively) easy acquired, whereas similar but not identical sounds are difficult to learn. New sounds are initially mapped onto the L1 phoneme inventory (Kuhl 1991). For Danish, this would predict...... instruction, which pitch contours do the Danish learners of Chinese use on neutral tones and to what extent does their production match that of native speakers? Future research may include Norwegian and Swedish-accented Chinese and a comparison between the different Germanic accents of CFL. Reference Kuhl, P...

Letter of Map Revision

Data.gov (United States)

Earth Data Analysis Center, University of New Mexico — The National Flood Hazard Layer (NFHL) data incorporates all Digital Flood Insurance Rate Map(DFIRM) databases published by FEMA, and any Letters Of Map Revision...

Particles and nuclei, letters

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

2004-01-01

The present collection of letters from JINR, Dubna, contains nine separate letters on nonlocal chiral quark model with confinement, perturbation of finite-lattice spectral levels by nearby nuclear resonances, on the application of 'Z 0 + jet' events for determining the gluon distribution in a proton at the LHC, account of light velocity constancy in the Galilean problem on the free movement of a particle and its fall onto the ground, first results of crystal deflector investigations at the Nuclotron external beams, decay parameters of K mesons, measured at proton synchrotron U-70 using 'Hyperon' set-up and modern world data, prototype of atomic-emission spectrometer on the basis of one-electrode impulse RF discharge for analytical measurements, polarimeter for Nuclotron internal beam and primordial bubbles of colour superconducting quark matter

Patient information letters on nutrition: development and implementation.

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Binsbergen, J.J. van; Drenthen, A.J.

2003-01-01

BACKGROUND: In 1998 the Dutch College of General Practitioners (NHG) began developing patient information letters (PILs), based on the practice guidelines for family physicians (FPs) (NHG standards). Five nutritional guidance letters have since been developed with the Dutch Nutrition Center.

Dual-frequency radio soundings of planetary ionospheres avoid misinterpretations of ionospheric features

Science.gov (United States)

Paetzold, M.; Andert, T.; Bird, M. K.; Häusler, B.; Hinson, D. P.; Peter, K.; Tellmann, S.

2017-12-01

Planetary ionospheres are usually sounded at single frequency, e.g. S-band or X-band, or at dual-frequencies, e.g. simultaneous S-band and X-band frequencies. The differential Doppler is computed from the received dual-frequency sounding and it has the advantage that any residual motion by the spaceraft body is compensated. The electron density profile is derived from the propagation of the two radio signals through the ionospheric plasma. Vibrational motion of small amplitude by the spacecraft body may still be contained in the single frequency residuals and may be translated into electron densities. Examples from Mars Express and Venus Express shall be presented. Cases from other missions shall be presented where wave-like structures in the upper ionosphere may be a misinterpretation.

Dutch home-based pre-reading intervention with children at familial risk of dyslexia

NARCIS (Netherlands)

van Otterloo, S.G.; van der Leij, A.

2009-01-01

Children (5 and 6 years old, n = 30) at familial risk of dyslexia received a home-based intervention that focused on phoneme awareness and letter knowledge in the year prior to formal reading instruction. The children were compared to a no-training at-risk control group (n = 27), which was selected

THE PHONOLOGICAL SYSTEM OF SPANISH

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Claudia S. Salcedo

2010-10-01

Full Text Available Spanish articulatory phonetics, the classification of sounds and the physiological mechanism used in the production of phonemes are discussed in this article. The process of learning a language consists of classifying sounds within the target language. Since the learner may be hearing the utterance in a different way than the native speaker some objective criteria are needed to classify sounds. If these distinctions are not mastered, he may be perceived as sounding awkward. Other phonological processes are applied in informal situations due to socio-linguistic factors such as age, social class, and education. Sound deletion in particular phonological environments are not done randomly by the speaker, but by necessity to retain semantic comprehension. Allophonic choices within phonemes make up the dialect for a particular area.