Objective eye-gaze behaviour during face-to-face communication with proficient alaryngeal speakers: a preliminary study.

Science.gov (United States)

Evitts, Paul; Gallop, Robert

2011-01-01

There is a large body of research demonstrating the impact of visual information on speaker intelligibility in both normal and disordered speaker populations. However, there is minimal information on which specific visual features listeners find salient during conversational discourse. To investigate listeners' eye-gaze behaviour during face-to-face conversation with normal, laryngeal and proficient alaryngeal speakers. Sixty participants individually participated in a 10-min conversation with one of four speakers (typical laryngeal, tracheoesophageal, oesophageal, electrolaryngeal; 15 participants randomly assigned to one mode of speech). All speakers were > 85% intelligible and were judged to be 'proficient' by two certified speech-language pathologists. Participants were fitted with a head-mounted eye-gaze tracking device (Mobile Eye, ASL) that calculated the region of interest and mean duration of eye-gaze. Self-reported gaze behaviour was also obtained following the conversation using a 10 cm visual analogue scale. While listening, participants viewed the lower facial region of the oesophageal speaker more than the normal or tracheoesophageal speaker. Results of non-hierarchical cluster analyses showed that while listening, the pattern of eye-gaze was predominantly directed at the lower face of the oesophageal and electrolaryngeal speaker and more evenly dispersed among the background, lower face, and eyes of the normal and tracheoesophageal speakers. Finally, results show a low correlation between self-reported eye-gaze behaviour and objective regions of interest data. Overall, results suggest similar eye-gaze behaviour when healthy controls converse with normal and tracheoesophageal speakers and that participants had significantly different eye-gaze patterns when conversing with an oesophageal speaker. Results are discussed in terms of existing eye-gaze data and its potential implications on auditory-visual speech perception. © 2011 Royal College of Speech

Theory of Mind and Context Processing in Schizophrenia: The Role of Social Knowledge.

Science.gov (United States)

Champagne-Lavau, Maud; Charest, Anick

2015-01-01

The present study sought to determine whether social knowledge such as speaker occupation stereotypes may impact theory of mind (ToM) ability in patients with schizophrenia (SZ). Thirty individuals with SZ and 30 matched healthy control (HC) participants were tested individually on their ToM ability using a paradigm showing that stereotypes such as speaker occupation influences the extent to which speaker ironic intent is understood. ToM ability was assessed with open questions on the speaker ironic intent, irony rating, and mockery rating. Social perception was also assessed through politeness rating. The main results showed that SZ participants, like HC participants, were sensitive to the social stereotypes. They used these stereotypes adequately to attribute mental states such as speaker ironic intent to a protagonist while they found it difficult to explicitly judge and attribute negative attitude and emotion, as evidenced by mockery rating. No difference was found between the two groups regarding social perception ability. These performances were not associated with clinical symptoms. The integration of contextual information seems to be a good target for cognitive remediation aiming to increase social cognition ability.

Theory of mind and context processing in schizophrenia: the role of social knowledge

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Maud eChampagne-Lavau

2015-07-01

Full Text Available The present study sought to determine whether social knowledge such as speaker occupation stereotypes may impact theory of mind (ToM ability in patients with schizophrenia. Thirty individuals with schizophrenia (SZ and 30 matched healthy control (HC participants were tested individually on their ToM ability using a paradigm showing that stereotypes such as speaker occupation influences the extent to which speaker ironic intent is understood. ToM ability was assessed with open questions on the speaker ironic intent, irony rating and mockery rating. Social perception was also assessed through politeness rating. The main results showed that SZ participants, like HC participants, were sensitive to the social stereotypes. They used these stereotypes adequately to attribute mental states such as speaker ironic intent to a protagonist while they found it difficult to explicitly judge and attribute negative attitude and emotion, as evidenced by mockery rating. No difference was found between the two groups regarding social perception ability. These performances were not associated with clinical symptoms. The integration of contextual information seems to be a good target for cognitive remediation aiming to increase social cognition ability.

Clear Speech - Mere Speech? How segmental and prosodic speech reduction shape the impression that speakers create on listeners

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Niebuhr, Oliver

2017-01-01

of reduction levels and perceived speaker attributes in which moderate reduction can make a better impression on listeners than no reduction. In addition to its relevance in reduction models and theories, this interplay is instructive for various fields of speech application from social robotics to charisma...... whether variation in the degree of reduction also has a systematic effect on the attributes we ascribe to the speaker who produces the speech signal. A perception experiment was carried out for German in which 46 listeners judged whether or not speakers showing 3 different combinations of segmental...... and prosodic reduction levels (unreduced, moderately reduced, strongly reduced) are appropriately described by 13 physical, social, and cognitive attributes. The experiment shows that clear speech is not mere speech, and less clear speech is not just reduced either. Rather, results revealed a complex interplay...

Speaker Authentication

CERN Document Server

Li, Qi (Peter)

2012-01-01

This book focuses on use of voice as a biometric measure for personal authentication. In particular, "Speaker Recognition" covers two approaches in speaker authentication: speaker verification (SV) and verbal information verification (VIV). The SV approach attempts to verify a speaker’s identity based on his/her voice characteristics while the VIV approach validates a speaker’s identity through verification of the content of his/her utterance(s). SV and VIV can be combined for new applications. This is still a new research topic with significant potential applications. The book provides with a broad overview of the recent advances in speaker authentication while giving enough attention to advanced and useful algorithms and techniques. It also provides a step by step introduction to the current state of the speaker authentication technology, from the fundamental concepts to advanced algorithms. We will also present major design methodologies and share our experience in developing real and successful speake...

Judging the Judges: finding value in these problematic characters

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

L R Martin

2008-05-01

Full Text Available The biblical judges are well known for their less than exemplary behaviour. In the past, these judges have been appreciated largely as examples of how a charismatic leader should not behave. In spite of the judges� questionable morals, the writer of the book of Hebrews commends four of them (Barak, Gideon, Jephthah, and Samson for their faith. This paper evaluates these judges in light of their characterisations in the book of Hebrews and in the book of Judges and suggests that our struggle with the judges parallels the contemporary integrity crisis in Christian leadership.

Tolerance for audiovisual asynchrony is enhanced by the spectrotemporal fidelity of the speaker's mouth movements and speech.

Science.gov (United States)

Shahin, Antoine J; Shen, Stanley; Kerlin, Jess R

2017-01-01

We examined the relationship between tolerance for audiovisual onset asynchrony (AVOA) and the spectrotemporal fidelity of the spoken words and the speaker's mouth movements. In two experiments that only varied in the temporal order of sensory modality, visual speech leading (exp1) or lagging (exp2) acoustic speech, participants watched intact and blurred videos of a speaker uttering trisyllabic words and nonwords that were noise vocoded with 4-, 8-, 16-, and 32-channels. They judged whether the speaker's mouth movements and the speech sounds were in-sync or out-of-sync . Individuals perceived synchrony (tolerated AVOA) on more trials when the acoustic speech was more speech-like (8 channels and higher vs. 4 channels), and when visual speech was intact than blurred (exp1 only). These findings suggest that enhanced spectrotemporal fidelity of the audiovisual (AV) signal prompts the brain to widen the window of integration promoting the fusion of temporally distant AV percepts.

Methods of Speakers\\' Effects on the Audience

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

فریبا حسینی

2010-09-01

Full Text Available Methods of Speakers' Effects on the Audience    Nasrollah Shameli *   Fariba Hosayni **     Abstract   This article is focused on four issues. The first issue is related to the speaker's external appearance including the beauty of face, the power of his voice, moves and signals by hand, the stick and eyebrow as well as the height. Such characteristics could have an important effect on the audience. The second issue is related to internal features of the speaker. These include the ethics of the preacher , his/her piety and intention on the speakers based on their personalities, habits and emotions, knowledge and culture, and speed of learning. The third issue is concerned with the appearance of the lecture. Words should be clear enough as well as being mixed with Quranic verses, poetry and proverbs. The final issue is related to the content. It is argued that the subject of the talk should be in accordance with the level of understanding of listeners as well as being new and interesting for them.   3 - A phenomenon rhetoric: It was noted in this section How to give words and phrases so that these words and phrases are clear, correct, mixed in parables, governance and Quranic verses, and appropriate their meaning.   4 - the content of Oratory : It was noted in this section to the topic of Oratory and say that the Oratory should be the theme commensurate with the minds of audiences and also should mean that agree with the case may be, then I say: that the rhetoric if the theme was innovative and new is affecting more and more on the audience.     Key words : Oratory , Preacher , Audience, Influence of speech     * Associate Professor, Department of Arabic Language and Literature, University of Isfahan E-mail: Dr-Nasrolla Shameli@Yahoo.com   * * M.A. in Arabic Language and Literature from Isfahan University E-mail: faribahosayni@yahoo.com

Reflecting on the dichotomy native-non native speakers in an EFL context

OpenAIRE

Mariño, Claudia

2011-01-01

This article provides a discussion based on constructs about the dichotomy betweennative and non-native speakers. Several models and examples are displayed about thespreading of the English language with the intention of understanding its developmentin the whole world and in Colombia, specifically. Then, some possible definitions aregiven to the term “native speaker” and its conceptualization is described as both realityand myth. One of the main reasons for writing this article is grounded on...

Working with Speakers.

Science.gov (United States)

Pestel, Ann

1989-01-01

The author discusses working with speakers from business and industry to present career information at the secondary level. Advice for speakers is presented, as well as tips for program coordinators. (CH)

On the optimization of a mixed speaker array in an enclosed space using the virtual-speaker weighting method

Science.gov (United States)

Peng, Bo; Zheng, Sifa; Liao, Xiangning; Lian, Xiaomin

2018-03-01

In order to achieve sound field reproduction in a wide frequency band, multiple-type speakers are used. The reproduction accuracy is not only affected by the signals sent to the speakers, but also depends on the position and the number of each type of speaker. The method of optimizing a mixed speaker array is investigated in this paper. A virtual-speaker weighting method is proposed to optimize both the position and the number of each type of speaker. In this method, a virtual-speaker model is proposed to quantify the increment of controllability of the speaker array when the speaker number increases. While optimizing a mixed speaker array, the gain of the virtual-speaker transfer function is used to determine the priority orders of the candidate speaker positions, which optimizes the position of each type of speaker. Then the relative gain of the virtual-speaker transfer function is used to determine whether the speakers are redundant, which optimizes the number of each type of speaker. Finally the virtual-speaker weighting method is verified by reproduction experiments of the interior sound field in a passenger car. The results validate that the optimum mixed speaker array can be obtained using the proposed method.

76 FR 17843 - Intent To Compromise Claim Against the District of Columbia Public Schools

Science.gov (United States)

2011-03-31

... District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) now pending before the Office of Administrative Law Judges (OALJ... DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Intent To Compromise Claim Against the District of Columbia Public Schools... Application for Review of this PDL with the Office of Administrative Law Judges (OALJ) on September 10, 2007...

Gender parity trends for invited speakers at four prominent virology conference series.

Science.gov (United States)

Kalejta, Robert F; Palmenberg, Ann C

2017-06-07

speakers at international scientific conferences exemplifies a present-day discussion topic usually occurring without facts to support or refute the arguments. We now provide records profiling four prominent virology conferences over the years 1982 to 2017 with the intention that the trends and accompanying analyses of the gender parity of invited speakers may allow the ongoing discussions to be informed. Copyright © 2017 American Society for Microbiology.

Variations in judgments of intentional action and moral evaluation across eight cultures.

Science.gov (United States)

Robbins, Erin; Shepard, Jason; Rochat, Philippe

2017-07-01

Individuals tend to judge bad side effects as more intentional than good side effects (the Knobe or side-effect effect). Here, we assessed how widespread these findings are by testing eleven adult cohorts of eight highly contrasted cultures on their attributions of intentional action as well as ratings of blame and praise. We found limited generalizability of the original side-effect effect, and even a reversal of the effect in two rural, traditional cultures (Samoa and Vanuatu) where participants were more likely to judge the good side effect as intentional. Three follow-up experiments indicate that this reversal of the side-effect effect is not due to semantics and may be linked to the perception of the status of the protagonist. These results highlight the importance of factoring cultural context in our understanding of moral cognition. Copyright © 2017. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Supervised and Unsupervised Speaker Adaptation in the NIST 2005 Speaker Recognition Evaluation

National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

Hansen, Eric G; Slyh, Raymond E; Anderson, Timothy R

2006-01-01

Starting in 2004, the annual NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE) has added an optional unsupervised speaker adaptation track where test files are processed sequentially and one may update the target model...

Evaluating judge performance in sport.

Science.gov (United States)

Looney, Marilyn A

2004-01-01

Many sports, such as, gymnastics, diving, ski jumping, and figure skating, use judges' scores to determine the winner of a competition. These judges use some type of rating scale when judging performances (e.g., figure skating: 0.0 - 6.0). Sport governing bodies have the responsibility of setting and enforcing quality control parameters for judge performance. Given the judging scandals in figure skating at the 1998 and 2002 Olympics, judge performance in sport is receiving greater scrutiny. The purpose of this article is to illustrate how results from Rasch analyses can be used to provide in-depth feedback to judges about their scoring patterns. Nine judges' scores for 20 pairs of figure skaters who competed at the 2002 Winter Olympics were analyzed using a four-faceted (skater pair ability, skating aspect difficulty, program difficulty, and judge severity) Rasch rating scale model that was not common to all judges. Fit statistics, the logical ordering of skating aspects, skating programs, and separation indices all indicated a good fit of the data to the model. The type of feedback that can be given to judges about their scoring pattern was illustrated for one judge (USA) whose performance was flagged as being unpredictable. Feedback included a detailed description of how the rating scale was used; for example, 10% of all marks given by the American judge were unexpected by the model (Z > |2|). Three figures illustrated differences between the judge's observed and expected marks arranged according to the pairs' skating order and final placement in the competition. Scores which may represent "nationalistic bias" or a skating order influence were flagged by looking at these figures. If sport governing bodies wish to improve the performance of their judges, they need to employ methods that monitor the internal consistency of each judge as a many-facet Rasch analysis does.

Understanding intentional actions from observers' viewpoints: A social neuroscience perspective.

Science.gov (United States)

Isoda, Masaki

2016-11-01

When we see others, we also try to 'see' their unobservable states of minds, such as beliefs, desires, and intentions. We carefully monitor others' actions, as we assume that those actions are outward manifestations of their internal states. Actors and observers can have divergent views on the cause of the same actions. Critically, it is often the observers' view that affects important decisions in social life, from deciding the optimal level of cooperation to judging moral responsibility and court's decisions. Thus, the judgment about intentionality and agency in others' actions determines the way in which the observer deals with the actor. The primate brain has two separate neural systems that function in understanding others' actions and intentions. The mirror system is activated by others' visible actions and predicts their physical consequences in goal terms, whereas the mentalizing system is primarily involved in the prediction of others' intentions and upcoming actions regardless of whether others' actions are directly observable or not. The functional roles of the two systems have sometimes been described as mutually independent or even oppositional. I propose a hypothesis that the two systems may collaborate closely for judging the sense of other-agency. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ireland Ltd and Japan Neuroscience Society. All rights reserved.

Intentional switching in auditory selective attention: Exploring age-related effects in a spatial setup requiring speech perception.

Science.gov (United States)

Oberem, Josefa; Koch, Iring; Fels, Janina

2017-06-01

Using a binaural-listening paradigm, age-related differences in the ability to intentionally switch auditory selective attention between two speakers, defined by their spatial location, were examined. Therefore 40 normal-hearing participants (20 young, Ø 24.8years; 20 older Ø 67.8years) were tested. The spatial reproduction of stimuli was provided by headphones using head-related-transfer-functions of an artificial head. Spoken number words of two speakers were presented simultaneously to participants from two out of eight locations on the horizontal plane. Guided by a visual cue indicating the spatial location of the target speaker, the participants were asked to categorize the target's number word into smaller vs. greater than five while ignoring the distractor's speech. Results showed significantly higher reaction times and error rates for older participants. The relative influence of the spatial switch of the target-speaker (switch or repetition of speaker's direction in space) was identical across age groups. Congruency effects (stimuli spoken by target and distractor may evoke the same answer or different answers) were increased for older participants and depend on the target's position. Results suggest that the ability to intentionally switch auditory attention to a new cued location was unimpaired whereas it was generally harder for older participants to suppress processing the distractor's speech. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

"Necesita una vacuna": what Spanish-speakers want in text-message immunization reminders.

Science.gov (United States)

Ahlers-Schmidt, Carolyn R; Chesser, Amy; Brannon, Jennifer; Lopez, Venessa; Shah-Haque, Sapna; Williams, Katherine; Hart, Traci

2013-08-01

Appointment reminders help parents deal with complex immunization schedules. Preferred content of text-message reminders has been identified for English-speakers. Spanish-speaking parents of children under three years old were recruited to develop Spanish text-message immunization reminders. Structured interviews included questions about demographic characteristics, use of technology, and willingness to receive text reminders. Each participant was assigned to one user-centered design (UCD) test: card sort, needs analysis or comprehension testing. Respondents (N=54) were female (70%) and averaged 27 years of age (SD=7). A card sort of 20 immunization-related statements resulted in identification of seven pieces of critical information, which were compiled into eight example texts. These texts were ranked in the needs assessment and the top two were assessed for comprehension. All participants were able to understand the content and describe intention to act. Utilizing UCD testing, Spanish-speakers identified short, specific text content that differed from preferred content of English-speaking parents.

When speaker identity is unavoidable: Neural processing of speaker identity cues in natural speech.

Science.gov (United States)

Tuninetti, Alba; Chládková, Kateřina; Peter, Varghese; Schiller, Niels O; Escudero, Paola

2017-11-01

Speech sound acoustic properties vary largely across speakers and accents. When perceiving speech, adult listeners normally disregard non-linguistic variation caused by speaker or accent differences, in order to comprehend the linguistic message, e.g. to correctly identify a speech sound or a word. Here we tested whether the process of normalizing speaker and accent differences, facilitating the recognition of linguistic information, is found at the level of neural processing, and whether it is modulated by the listeners' native language. In a multi-deviant oddball paradigm, native and nonnative speakers of Dutch were exposed to naturally-produced Dutch vowels varying in speaker, sex, accent, and phoneme identity. Unexpectedly, the analysis of mismatch negativity (MMN) amplitudes elicited by each type of change shows a large degree of early perceptual sensitivity to non-linguistic cues. This finding on perception of naturally-produced stimuli contrasts with previous studies examining the perception of synthetic stimuli wherein adult listeners automatically disregard acoustic cues to speaker identity. The present finding bears relevance to speech normalization theories, suggesting that at an unattended level of processing, listeners are indeed sensitive to changes in fundamental frequency in natural speech tokens. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Similar speaker recognition using nonlinear analysis

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Seo, J.P.; Kim, M.S.; Baek, I.C.; Kwon, Y.H.; Lee, K.S.; Chang, S.W.; Yang, S.I.

2004-01-01

Speech features of the conventional speaker identification system, are usually obtained by linear methods in spectral space. However, these methods have the drawback that speakers with similar voices cannot be distinguished, because the characteristics of their voices are also similar in spectral space. To overcome the difficulty in linear methods, we propose to use the correlation exponent in the nonlinear space as a new feature vector for speaker identification among persons with similar voices. We show that our proposed method surprisingly reduces the error rate of speaker identification system to speakers with similar voices

The empathy impulse: A multinomial model of intentional and unintentional empathy for pain.

Science.gov (United States)

Cameron, C Daryl; Spring, Victoria L; Todd, Andrew R

2017-04-01

Empathy for pain is often described as automatic. Here, we used implicit measurement and multinomial modeling to formally quantify unintentional empathy for pain: empathy that occurs despite intentions to the contrary. We developed the pain identification task (PIT), a sequential priming task wherein participants judge the painfulness of target experiences while trying to avoid the influence of prime experiences. Using multinomial modeling, we distinguished 3 component processes underlying PIT performance: empathy toward target stimuli (Intentional Empathy), empathy toward prime stimuli (Unintentional Empathy), and bias to judge target stimuli as painful (Response Bias). In Experiment 1, imposing a fast (vs. slow) response deadline uniquely reduced Intentional Empathy. In Experiment 2, inducing imagine-self (vs. imagine-other) perspective-taking uniquely increased Unintentional Empathy. In Experiment 3, Intentional and Unintentional Empathy were stronger toward targets with typical (vs. atypical) pain outcomes, suggesting that outcome information matters and that effects on the PIT are not reducible to affective priming. Typicality of pain outcomes more weakly affected task performance when target stimuli were merely categorized rather than judged for painfulness, suggesting that effects on the latter are not reducible to semantic priming. In Experiment 4, Unintentional Empathy was stronger for participants who engaged in costly donation to cancer charities, but this parameter was also high for those who donated to an objectively worse but socially more popular charity, suggesting that overly high empathy may facilitate maladaptive altruism. Theoretical and practical applications of our modeling approach for understanding variation in empathy are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

Two Distinct Moral Mechanisms for Ascribing and Denying Intentionality.

Science.gov (United States)

Ngo, Lawrence; Kelly, Meagan; Coutlee, Christopher G; Carter, R McKell; Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter; Huettel, Scott A

2015-12-04

Philosophers and legal scholars have long theorized about how intentionality serves as a critical input for morality and culpability, but the emerging field of experimental philosophy has revealed a puzzling asymmetry. People judge actions leading to negative consequences as being more intentional than those leading to positive ones. The implications of this asymmetry remain unclear because there is no consensus regarding the underlying mechanism. Based on converging behavioral and neural evidence, we demonstrate that there is no single underlying mechanism. Instead, two distinct mechanisms together generate the asymmetry. Emotion drives ascriptions of intentionality for negative consequences, while the consideration of statistical norms leads to the denial of intentionality for positive consequences. We employ this novel two-mechanism model to illustrate that morality can paradoxically shape judgments of intentionality. This is consequential for mens rea in legal practice and arguments in moral philosophy pertaining to terror bombing, abortion, and euthanasia among others.

Grammatical Planning Units during Real-Time Sentence Production in Speakers with Agrammatic Aphasia and Healthy Speakers

Science.gov (United States)

Lee, Jiyeon; Yoshida, Masaya; Thompson, Cynthia K.

2015-01-01

Purpose: Grammatical encoding (GE) is impaired in agrammatic aphasia; however, the nature of such deficits remains unclear. We examined grammatical planning units during real-time sentence production in speakers with agrammatic aphasia and control speakers, testing two competing models of GE. We queried whether speakers with agrammatic aphasia…

The 2016 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation

Science.gov (United States)

2017-08-20

impact on system performance. Index Terms: NIST evaluation, NIST SRE, speaker detection, speaker recognition, speaker verification 1. Introduction NIST... self -reported. Second, there were two training conditions in SRE16, namely fixed and open. In the fixed training condition, par- ticipants were only

Arctic Visiting Speakers Series (AVS)

Science.gov (United States)

Fox, S. E.; Griswold, J.

2011-12-01

The Arctic Visiting Speakers (AVS) Series funds researchers and other arctic experts to travel and share their knowledge in communities where they might not otherwise connect. Speakers cover a wide range of arctic research topics and can address a variety of audiences including K-12 students, graduate and undergraduate students, and the general public. Host applications are accepted on an on-going basis, depending on funding availability. Applications need to be submitted at least 1 month prior to the expected tour dates. Interested hosts can choose speakers from an online Speakers Bureau or invite a speaker of their choice. Preference is given to individuals and organizations to host speakers that reach a broad audience and the general public. AVS tours are encouraged to span several days, allowing ample time for interactions with faculty, students, local media, and community members. Applications for both domestic and international visits will be considered. Applications for international visits should involve participation of more than one host organization and must include either a US-based speaker or a US-based organization. This is a small but important program that educates the public about Arctic issues. There have been 27 tours since 2007 that have impacted communities across the globe including: Gatineau, Quebec Canada; St. Petersburg, Russia; Piscataway, New Jersey; Cordova, Alaska; Nuuk, Greenland; Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania; Oslo, Norway; Inari, Finland; Borgarnes, Iceland; San Francisco, California and Wolcott, Vermont to name a few. Tours have included lectures to K-12 schools, college and university students, tribal organizations, Boy Scout troops, science center and museum patrons, and the general public. There are approximately 300 attendees enjoying each AVS tour, roughly 4100 people have been reached since 2007. The expectations for each tour are extremely manageable. Hosts must submit a schedule of events and a tour summary to be posted online

Hybrid Speaker Recognition Using Universal Acoustic Model

Science.gov (United States)

Nishimura, Jun; Kuroda, Tadahiro

We propose a novel speaker recognition approach using a speaker-independent universal acoustic model (UAM) for sensornet applications. In sensornet applications such as “Business Microscope”, interactions among knowledge workers in an organization can be visualized by sensing face-to-face communication using wearable sensor nodes. In conventional studies, speakers are detected by comparing energy of input speech signals among the nodes. However, there are often synchronization errors among the nodes which degrade the speaker recognition performance. By focusing on property of the speaker's acoustic channel, UAM can provide robustness against the synchronization error. The overall speaker recognition accuracy is improved by combining UAM with the energy-based approach. For 0.1s speech inputs and 4 subjects, speaker recognition accuracy of 94% is achieved at the synchronization error less than 100ms.

Two Distinct Moral Mechanisms for Ascribing and Denying Intentionality

Science.gov (United States)

Ngo, Lawrence; Kelly, Meagan; Coutlee, Christopher G.; Carter, R. McKell; Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter; Huettel, Scott A.

2015-01-01

Philosophers and legal scholars have long theorized about how intentionality serves as a critical input for morality and culpability, but the emerging field of experimental philosophy has revealed a puzzling asymmetry. People judge actions leading to negative consequences as being more intentional than those leading to positive ones. The implications of this asymmetry remain unclear because there is no consensus regarding the underlying mechanism. Based on converging behavioral and neural evidence, we demonstrate that there is no single underlying mechanism. Instead, two distinct mechanisms together generate the asymmetry. Emotion drives ascriptions of intentionality for negative consequences, while the consideration of statistical norms leads to the denial of intentionality for positive consequences. We employ this novel two-mechanism model to illustrate that morality can paradoxically shape judgments of intentionality. This is consequential for mens rea in legal practice and arguments in moral philosophy pertaining to terror bombing, abortion, and euthanasia among others. PMID:26634909

Variations in judgments of intentional action and moral evaluation across eight cultures

OpenAIRE

Robbins, Erin; Shepard, Jason; Rochat, Philippe

2017-01-01

Individuals tend to judge bad side effects as more intentional than good side effects (the Knobe or side-effect effect). Here, we assessed how widespread these findings are by testing eleven adult cohorts of eight highly contrasted cultures on their attributions of intentional action as well as ratings of blame and praise. We found limited generalizability of the original side-effect effect, and even a reversal of the effect in two rural, traditional cultures (Samoa and Vanuatu) where partici...

A question of intention in motor imagery.

Science.gov (United States)

Gabbard, Carl; Cordova, Alberto; Lee, Sunghan

2009-03-01

We examined the question-is the intention of completing a simulated motor action the same as the intention used in processing overt actions? Participants used motor imagery to estimate distance reachability in two conditions: Imagery-Only (IO) and Imagery-Execution (IE). With IO (red target) only a verbal estimate using imagery was given. With IE (green target) participants knew that they would actually reach after giving a verbal estimate and be judged on accuracy. After measuring actual maximum reach, used for the comparison, imagery targets were randomly presented across peripersonal- (within reach) and extrapersonal (beyond reach) space. Results indicated no difference in overall accuracy by condition, however, there was a significant distinction by space; participants were more accurate in peripersonal space. Although more research is needed, these findings support an increasing body of evidence suggesting that the neurocognitive processes (in this case, intention) driving motor imagery and overt actions are similar.

5 CFR 2421.9 - Administrative Law Judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... Administrative Law Judge. Administrative Law Judge means the Chief Administrative Law Judge or any Administrative Law Judge designated by the Chief Administrative Law Judge to conduct a hearing in cases under 5 U.S.C... 5 Administrative Personnel 3 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Administrative Law Judge. 2421.9 Section...

Multimodal Speaker Diarization.

Science.gov (United States)

Noulas, A; Englebienne, G; Krose, B J A

2012-01-01

We present a novel probabilistic framework that fuses information coming from the audio and video modality to perform speaker diarization. The proposed framework is a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) that is an extension of a factorial Hidden Markov Model (fHMM) and models the people appearing in an audiovisual recording as multimodal entities that generate observations in the audio stream, the video stream, and the joint audiovisual space. The framework is very robust to different contexts, makes no assumptions about the location of the recording equipment, and does not require labeled training data as it acquires the model parameters using the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. We apply the proposed model to two meeting videos and a news broadcast video, all of which come from publicly available data sets. The results acquired in speaker diarization are in favor of the proposed multimodal framework, which outperforms the single modality analysis results and improves over the state-of-the-art audio-based speaker diarization.

English Speakers Attend More Strongly than Spanish Speakers to Manner of Motion when Classifying Novel Objects and Events

Science.gov (United States)

Kersten, Alan W.; Meissner, Christian A.; Lechuga, Julia; Schwartz, Bennett L.; Albrechtsen, Justin S.; Iglesias, Adam

2010-01-01

Three experiments provide evidence that the conceptualization of moving objects and events is influenced by one's native language, consistent with linguistic relativity theory. Monolingual English speakers and bilingual Spanish/English speakers tested in an English-speaking context performed better than monolingual Spanish speakers and bilingual…

13 CFR 134.218 - Judges.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... Administrative Law Judge. The AA/OHA will assign all other cases before OHA to either an Administrative Law Judge... Business Credit and Assistance SMALL BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION RULES OF PROCEDURE GOVERNING CASES BEFORE THE OFFICE OF HEARINGS AND APPEALS Rules of Practice for Most Cases § 134.218 Judges. (a) Assignment. The AA...

Utterance Verification for Text-Dependent Speaker Recognition

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Kinnunen, Tomi; Sahidullah, Md; Kukanov, Ivan

2016-01-01

Text-dependent automatic speaker verification naturally calls for the simultaneous verification of speaker identity and spoken content. These two tasks can be achieved with automatic speaker verification (ASV) and utterance verification (UV) technologies. While both have been addressed previously...

The Speaker Gender Gap at Critical Care Conferences.

Science.gov (United States)

Mehta, Sangeeta; Rose, Louise; Cook, Deborah; Herridge, Margaret; Owais, Sawayra; Metaxa, Victoria

2018-06-01

To review women's participation as faculty at five critical care conferences over 7 years. Retrospective analysis of five scientific programs to identify the proportion of females and each speaker's profession based on conference conveners, program documents, or internet research. Three international (European Society of Intensive Care Medicine, International Symposium on Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine, Society of Critical Care Medicine) and two national (Critical Care Canada Forum, U.K. Intensive Care Society State of the Art Meeting) annual critical care conferences held between 2010 and 2016. Female faculty speakers. None. Male speakers outnumbered female speakers at all five conferences, in all 7 years. Overall, women represented 5-31% of speakers, and female physicians represented 5-26% of speakers. Nursing and allied health professional faculty represented 0-25% of speakers; in general, more than 50% of allied health professionals were women. Over the 7 years, Society of Critical Care Medicine had the highest representation of female (27% overall) and nursing/allied health professional (16-25%) speakers; notably, male physicians substantially outnumbered female physicians in all years (62-70% vs 10-19%, respectively). Women's representation on conference program committees ranged from 0% to 40%, with Society of Critical Care Medicine having the highest representation of women (26-40%). The female proportions of speakers, physician speakers, and program committee members increased significantly over time at the Society of Critical Care Medicine and U.K. Intensive Care Society State of the Art Meeting conferences (p gap at critical care conferences, with male faculty outnumbering female faculty. This gap is more marked among physician speakers than those speakers representing nursing and allied health professionals. Several organizational strategies can address this gender gap.

22 CFR 128.2 - Administrative Law Judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-04-01

... 22 Foreign Relations 1 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 false Administrative Law Judge. 128.2 Section 128.2... § 128.2 Administrative Law Judge. The Administrative Law Judge referred to in this part is an Administrative Law Judge appointed by the Department of State. The Administrative Law Judge is authorized to...

Acceptability and purchase intention of goat’s Coalho cheese seasoned with cachaça

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Vanessa Bonfim da Silva

2017-08-01

addition, 76,3% of the judges affirmed that they would buy the goat cheese seasoned with cachaça. Thus, the elaborated cheese obtained good acceptability and purchase intention, indicating that the cachaça can be used

Physiological responses at short distances from a parametric speaker

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Lee Soomin

2012-06-01

Full Text Available Abstract In recent years, parametric speakers have been used in various circumstances. In our previous studies, we verified that the physiological burden of the sound of parametric speaker set at 2.6 m from the subjects was lower than that of the general speaker. However, nothing has yet been demonstrated about the effects of the sound of a parametric speaker at the shorter distance between parametric speakers the human body. Therefore, we studied this effect on physiological functions and task performance. Nine male subjects participated in this study. They completed three consecutive sessions: a 20-minute quiet period as a baseline, a 30-minute mental task period with general speakers or parametric speakers, and a 20-minute recovery period. We measured electrocardiogram (ECG photoplethysmogram (PTG, electroencephalogram (EEG, systolic and diastolic blood pressure. Four experiments, one with a speaker condition (general speaker and parametric speaker, the other with a distance condition (0.3 m and 1.0 m, were conducted respectively at the same time of day on separate days. To examine the effects of the speaker and distance, three-way repeated measures ANOVA (speaker factor x distance factor x time factor were conducted. In conclusion, we found that the physiological responses were not significantly different between the speaker condition and the distance condition. Meanwhile, it was shown that the physiological burdens increased with progress in time independently of speaker condition and distance condition. In summary, the effects of the parametric speaker at the 2.6 m distance were not obtained at the distance of 1 m or less.

"Judges of the Velum" and "Judges of the Hippodrome" in Thessalonike (11th c.

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Andreas GKOUTZIOUKOSTAS

2010-09-01

Full Text Available The present study focuses on judicial officers coming from Constantinople to Thessalonike in the 11th century. The judge of the theme of Thessalonike was in charge of trying cases in the region. From the second fifth of the 11th century, however, his jurisdiction was extended to the greater financial and judicial unit of Boleron, Strymon and Thessalonike as well. Lead seals and documents from the archives of the monasteries of Athos prove that many of the krites of Boleron, Strymon and Thessalonike had been previously krites of the velum and judges of the hippodrome who performed their duties in the capital and belonged to the ranks of the “small judges”. These judicial officers tried cases that were referred to them, while they could also function as assessors of the “great” or superior judges of Constantinople, i.e. the droungarios of the vigla, the dikaiodotes, the protoasecretis, the eparchos of the city, the koiaistor and the epi ton kriseon. The latter could delegate the authority to try cases to the “small” or inferior judges. Consequently, the judges of the velum and the judges of the hippodrome could also be sent from Constantinople to the themes by the emperor or other officials, in order to examine some cases and then return to the capital. This is confirmed by the primary sources, which mention for example the case of judge of the hippodrome Michael Rhodios, who was sent by Alexios I Komnenos in 1084 from Constantinople to the region of Thessalonike, in order to examine a dispute between the Lavra monastery and the brother of the emperor, Adrian. Some years later Michael Rhodios was sent again to try cases in Thessalonike, but this time as krites of Boleron, Strymon and Thessalonike. Consequently, apart from the judge of Boleron, Strymon and Thessalonike, other judges delegated by the emperor or by high officers could also examine cases there, as happened in other themes. From the 14th century on, as Macedonia developed

Audiovisual perceptual learning with multiple speakers.

Science.gov (United States)

Mitchel, Aaron D; Gerfen, Chip; Weiss, Daniel J

2016-05-01

One challenge for speech perception is between-speaker variability in the acoustic parameters of speech. For example, the same phoneme (e.g. the vowel in "cat") may have substantially different acoustic properties when produced by two different speakers and yet the listener must be able to interpret these disparate stimuli as equivalent. Perceptual tuning, the use of contextual information to adjust phonemic representations, may be one mechanism that helps listeners overcome obstacles they face due to this variability during speech perception. Here we test whether visual contextual cues to speaker identity may facilitate the formation and maintenance of distributional representations for individual speakers, allowing listeners to adjust phoneme boundaries in a speaker-specific manner. We familiarized participants to an audiovisual continuum between /aba/ and /ada/. During familiarization, the "b-face" mouthed /aba/ when an ambiguous token was played, while the "D-face" mouthed /ada/. At test, the same ambiguous token was more likely to be identified as /aba/ when paired with a stilled image of the "b-face" than with an image of the "D-face." This was not the case in the control condition when the two faces were paired equally with the ambiguous token. Together, these results suggest that listeners may form speaker-specific phonemic representations using facial identity cues.

The development of intent-based moral judgment.

Science.gov (United States)

Cushman, Fiery; Sheketoff, Rachel; Wharton, Sophie; Carey, Susan

2013-04-01

Between the ages of 4 and 8 children increasingly make moral judgments on the basis of an actor's intent, as opposed to the outcome that the actor brings about. Does this reflect a reorganization of concepts in the moral domain, or simply the development of capacities outside the moral domain such as theory of mind and executive function? Motivated by the past evidence that adults rely partially on outcome-based judgment for judgments of deserved punishment, but not for judgments of moral wrongness, we explore the same categories of judgment in young children. We find that intent-based judgments emerge first in children's assessments of naughtiness and that this subsequently constrains their judgments of deserved punishment. We also find that this developmental trajectory differs for judgments of accidental harm (a bad outcome with benign intent) and judgments of attempted harm (a benign outcome with bad intent). Our findings support a two process model derived from studies of adults: a mental-state based process of judging wrongness constrains an outcome-based process of assigning punishment. The emergence of this two-process architecture in childhood suggests that the developmental shift from outcome- to intent-based judgment involves a conceptual reorganization within the moral domain. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Speakers' choice of frame in binary choice

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Marc van Buiten

2009-02-01

Full Text Available A distinction is proposed between extit{recommending for} preferred choice options and extit{recommending against} non-preferred choice options. In binary choice, both recommendation modes are logically, though not psychologically, equivalent. We report empirical evidence showing that speakers recommending for preferred options predominantly select positive frames, which are less common when speakers recommend against non-preferred options. In addition, option attractiveness is shown to affect speakers' choice of frame, and adoption of recommendation mode. The results are interpreted in terms of three compatibility effects, (i extit{recommendation mode---valence framing compatibility}: speakers' preference for positive framing is enhanced under extit{recommending for} and diminished under extit{recommending against} instructions, (ii extit{option attractiveness---valence framing compatibility}: speakers' preference for positive framing is more pronounced for attractive than for unattractive options, and (iii extit{recommendation mode---option attractiveness compatibility}: speakers are more likely to adopt a extit{recommending for} approach for attractive than for unattractive binary choice pairs.

Novelties in the judges's selection

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Anna-Maria Getoš

2013-01-01

Full Text Available The authors analyze the legal position of the judiciary in the separation of powers in the Republic of Croatia, as well as the procedure for the election of members of the State Judicial Council and its President, its scope and operation. The analysis covers the principle, as well as the practical and normative level, hereby especially focusing on the provisions of the ‘State Judicial Council Act’ from 2010 (ZDSV, which introduced significant novelties to the appointment procedure of judges. This is due to the fact that, according to the authors, the role of judges, appointed by the State Judicial Council, in the way of the Croatian accession to the European Union is quite significant, since the judges with their work, and how the interpretation of applicable regulations in the spirit of EU law, provide the essential convergence judiciary in Croatia with the acquis and the highest standards of the European Union. It gives a special and comprehensive view of general and special conditions in the appointment of judges for the period before and after 31 December 2012, and a comparative view on conditions of appointment of judges in continental European countries, the circle of countries, where Croatia belongs to, with special reference to legal status, scope, operation and role of the State School for the judicial officers in the process of appointing judges. Performs the analysis and outlines the procedure for appointment of judges, with special emphasis on each stage: the stage of calling the ads and collecting applications, testing stage of candidates for judges and candidates who are not judges and the decision stage on the appointment, with special emphasis on the criteria and evaluation of candidates who have been determined for the appointment, in the normative sense and practical action, which is a standardized procedure, the legal level and in essence, ZDSV, along with suggestions de lege ferenda.

Benchmarking the Kansas 4-H Judging System

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Amy M. Taylor

2009-12-01

Full Text Available This study investigated the methods and policies associated with 4-H project judging at the county level within the Kansas 4-H Program. Extension Agents surveyed about current 4-H judging processes indicated a variety of methods used. Data collected showed that 21.8% of the counties surveyed practiced some type of project judging without the 4-H member present. In regard to feedback received by the youth in non-livestock project judging, 64.1% of counties reported both verbal and written forms of feedback, with 25.6% receiving only verbal. In livestock project judging, 93.8% reported that youth receive feedback only verbally. The majority of non-livestock projects are judged using the Danish system, while the number of livestock projects judged are split among both the Danish system and peer system of competitive judging. It was concluded that a wide-variety of judging methods are used, resulting in incongruent programs offered to 4-H members.

Creating EU law judges

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Mayoral Diaz-Asensio, Juan Antonio; Jaremba, Urszula; Nowak, Tobias

2014-01-01

The judicial protection system in the European Union (EU) is premised on the fact that national judges are supposed to act as decentralized EU judges. This role is exercised through tools enshrined in, inter alia, primacy, direct and indirect effect of EU law, and the preliminary ruling procedure...

Speaker-dependent Dictionary-based Speech Enhancement for Text-Dependent Speaker Verification

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Thomsen, Nicolai Bæk; Thomsen, Dennis Alexander Lehmann; Tan, Zheng-Hua

2016-01-01

not perform well in this setting. In this work we compare the performance of different noise reduction methods under different noise conditions in terms of speaker verification when the text is known and the system is trained on clean data (mis-matched conditions). We furthermore propose a new approach based......The problem of text-dependent speaker verification under noisy conditions is becoming ever more relevant, due to increased usage for authentication in real-world applications. Classical methods for noise reduction such as spectral subtraction and Wiener filtering introduce distortion and do...... on dictionary-based noise reduction and compare it to the baseline methods....

Apology Strategy in English By Native Speaker

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mezia Kemala Sari

2016-05-01

Full Text Available This research discussed apology strategies in English by native speaker. This descriptive study was presented within the framework of Pragmatics based on the forms of strategies due to the coding manual as found in CCSARP (Cross-Cultural Speech Acts Realization Project.The goals of this study were to describe the apology strategies in English by native speaker and identify the influencing factors of it. Data were collected through the use of the questionnaire in the form of Discourse Completion Test, which was distributed to 30 native speakers. Data were classified based on the degree of familiarity and the social distance between speaker and hearer and then the data of native will be separated and classified by the type of strategies in coding manual. The results of this study are the pattern of apology strategies of native speaker brief with the pattern that potentially occurs IFID plus Offer of repair plus Taking on responsibility. While Alerters, Explanation and Downgrading appear with less number of percentage. Then, the factors that influence the apology utterance by native speakers are the social situation, the degree of familiarity and degree of the offence which more complicated the mistake tend to produce the most complex utterances by the speaker.

Expressive intent, ambiguity, and aesthetic experiences of music and poetry.

Science.gov (United States)

Margulis, Elizabeth Hellmuth; Levine, William H; Simchy-Gross, Rhimmon; Kroger, Carolyn

2017-01-01

A growing number of studies are investigating the way that aesthetic experiences are generated across different media. Empathy with a perceived human artist has been suggested as a common mechanism [1]. In this study, people heard 30 s excerpts of ambiguous music and poetry preceded by neutral, positively valenced, or negatively valenced information about the composer's or author's intent. The information influenced their perception of the excerpts-excerpts paired with positive intent information were perceived as happier and excerpts paired with negative intent information were perceived as sadder (although across intent conditions, musical excerpts were perceived as happier than poetry excerpts). Moreover, the information modulated the aesthetic experience of the excerpts in different ways for the different excerpt types: positive intent information increased enjoyment and the degree to which people found the musical excerpts to be moving, but negative intent information increased these qualities for poetry. Additionally, positive intent information was judged to better match musical excerpts and negative intent information to better match poetic excerpts. These results suggest that empathy with a perceived human artist is indeed an important shared factor across experiences of music and poetry, but that other mechanisms distinguish the generation of aesthetic appreciation between these two media.

Expressive intent, ambiguity, and aesthetic experiences of music and poetry

Science.gov (United States)

Margulis, Elizabeth Hellmuth; Levine, William H.; Simchy-Gross, Rhimmon; Kroger, Carolyn

2017-01-01

A growing number of studies are investigating the way that aesthetic experiences are generated across different media. Empathy with a perceived human artist has been suggested as a common mechanism [1]. In this study, people heard 30 s excerpts of ambiguous music and poetry preceded by neutral, positively valenced, or negatively valenced information about the composer's or author’s intent. The information influenced their perception of the excerpts—excerpts paired with positive intent information were perceived as happier and excerpts paired with negative intent information were perceived as sadder (although across intent conditions, musical excerpts were perceived as happier than poetry excerpts). Moreover, the information modulated the aesthetic experience of the excerpts in different ways for the different excerpt types: positive intent information increased enjoyment and the degree to which people found the musical excerpts to be moving, but negative intent information increased these qualities for poetry. Additionally, positive intent information was judged to better match musical excerpts and negative intent information to better match poetic excerpts. These results suggest that empathy with a perceived human artist is indeed an important shared factor across experiences of music and poetry, but that other mechanisms distinguish the generation of aesthetic appreciation between these two media. PMID:28746376

Pitch Correlogram Clustering for Fast Speaker Identification

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Nitin Jhanwar

2004-12-01

Full Text Available Gaussian mixture models (GMMs are commonly used in text-independent speaker identification systems. However, for large speaker databases, their high computational run-time limits their use in online or real-time speaker identification situations. Two-stage identification systems, in which the database is partitioned into clusters based on some proximity criteria and only a single-cluster GMM is run in every test, have been suggested in literature to speed up the identification process. However, most clustering algorithms used have shown limited success, apparently because the clustering and GMM feature spaces used are derived from similar speech characteristics. This paper presents a new clustering approach based on the concept of a pitch correlogram that captures frame-to-frame pitch variations of a speaker rather than short-time spectral characteristics like cepstral coefficient, spectral slopes, and so forth. The effectiveness of this two-stage identification process is demonstrated on the IVIE corpus of 110 speakers. The overall system achieves a run-time advantage of 500% as well as a 10% reduction of error in overall speaker identification.

The Role of Orthotactic Probability in Incidental and Intentional Vocabulary Acquisition L1 and L2

Science.gov (United States)

Bordag, Denisa; Kirschenbaum, Amit; Rogahn, Maria; Tschirner, Erwin

2017-01-01

Four experiments were conducted to examine the role of orthotactic probability, i.e. the sequential letter probability, in the early stages of vocabulary acquisition by adult native speakers and advanced learners of German. The results show different effects for orthographic probability in incidental and intentional vocabulary acquisition: Whereas…

8 CFR 1003.10 - Immigration judges.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 8 Aliens and Nationality 1 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Immigration judges. 1003.10 Section 1003.10 Aliens and Nationality EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW, DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE GENERAL PROVISIONS EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW Office of the Chief Immigration Judge § 1003.10 Immigration judges...

49 CFR 386.54 - Administrative Law Judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-10-01

... 49 Transportation 5 2010-10-01 2010-10-01 false Administrative Law Judge. 386.54 Section 386.54... General Rules and Hearings § 386.54 Administrative Law Judge. (a) Powers of an Administrative Law Judge. The Administrative Law Judge may take any action and may prescribe all necessary rules and regulations...

THE RECONFIGURATION OF THE JUDGE`S ROLE IN THE ROMANO-GERMANIC LAW SYSTEM

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ELENA ANGHEL

2013-05-01

Full Text Available The role assigned to the judge varies from one legal system to another. In the Anglo-Saxon legal systems, in the context of the absence of an independent legislative body, judge is the one who creates law; his mission consists in solving a specific case, given the existing judicial precedents; if he can not find an appropriate rule of law, the judge has to create one and to apply it. On the other hand, in the continental system, creation of law is the mission of the legislator. Evolving under the influence of Roman law, the continental law systems differ from the Anglo-Saxons by: the assuming of Corpus iuris civilis; the tendency to abstraction, leading to the creation of a rational law; the rule of law, with the consequence of blurring the role of jurisprudence. In spite of these essential differences, the last decades of the twentieth century have found out the convergence of the written coded system and the common law system. Thus, the increasing of the legislature`s role in common law system is accompanied by the reconsideration of the judge`s role in the Roman-Germanic legal system. While Anglo-Saxons accept the "compromise" of coding, Continentals shyly step towards rethinking the status of law source of the jurisprudence. History has shown that, one by one, law and jurisprudence have disputed the the role of prime creator of law. Emphasizing the creative force of jurisprudence, Vladimir Hanga wrote: "The law remains in its essence abstract, but the appreciation of the jurisprudence makes it alive, as the judge, understanding the law, examining the interests of parties and taking inspiration from equity, ensures the ultimate purpose of the law: suum cuique tribuere”1. However, as we shall see below, in the Roman-Germanic law system, the creative role of jurisprudence still raises controversy.

Who spoke when? Audio-based speaker location estimation for diarization

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Dadvar, M.

2011-01-01

Speaker diarization is the process which detects active speakers and groups those speech signals which has been uttered by the same speaker. Generally we can find two main applications for speaker diarization. Automatic Speech Recognition systems make use of the speaker homogeneous clusters to adapt

22 CFR 1421.8 - Administrative law judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-04-01

... Law Judge to conduct a hearing in cases under 22 U.S.C. 4115, and such other matters as may be... 22 Foreign Relations 2 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 true Administrative law judge. 1421.8 Section 1421.8... TERMS AS USED IN THIS SUBCHAPTER § 1421.8 Administrative law judge. Administrative law judge means the...

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...

Unsupervised Speaker Change Detection for Broadcast News Segmentation

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Jørgensen, Kasper Winther; Mølgaard, Lasse Lohilahti; Hansen, Lars Kai

2006-01-01

This paper presents a speaker change detection system for news broadcast segmentation based on a vector quantization (VQ) approach. The system does not make any assumption about the number of speakers or speaker identity. The system uses mel frequency cepstral coefficients and change detection...

A New Database for Speaker Recognition

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Feng, Ling; Hansen, Lars Kai

2005-01-01

In this paper we discuss properties of speech databases used for speaker recognition research and evaluation, and we characterize some popular standard databases. The paper presents a new database called ELSDSR dedicated to speaker recognition applications. The main characteristics of this database...

Speaker Segmentation and Clustering Using Gender Information

Science.gov (United States)

2006-02-01

used in the first stages of segmentation forder information in the clustering of the opposite-gender speaker diarization of news broadcasts. files, the...AFRL-HE-WP-TP-2006-0026 AIR FORCE RESEARCH LABORATORY Speaker Segmentation and Clustering Using Gender Information Brian M. Ore General Dynamics...COVERED (From - To) February 2006 ProceedinLgs 4. TITLE AND SUBTITLE 5a. CONTRACT NUMBER Speaker Segmentation and Clustering Using Gender Information 5b

Judging emotional congruency: Explicit attention to situational context modulates processing of facial expressions of emotion.

Science.gov (United States)

Diéguez-Risco, Teresa; Aguado, Luis; Albert, Jacobo; Hinojosa, José Antonio

2015-12-01

The influence of explicit evaluative processes on the contextual integration of facial expressions of emotion was studied in a procedure that required the participants to judge the congruency of happy and angry faces with preceding sentences describing emotion-inducing situations. Judgments were faster on congruent trials in the case of happy faces and on incongruent trials in the case of angry faces. At the electrophysiological level, a congruency effect was observed in the face-sensitive N170 component that showed larger amplitudes on incongruent trials. An interactive effect of congruency and emotion appeared on the LPP (late positive potential), with larger amplitudes in response to happy faces that followed anger-inducing situations. These results show that the deliberate intention to judge the contextual congruency of facial expressions influences not only processes involved in affective evaluation such as those indexed by the LPP but also earlier processing stages that are involved in face perception. Copyright © 2015. Published by Elsevier B.V.

(En)countering native-speakerism global perspectives

CERN Document Server

Holliday, Adrian; Swan, Anne

2015-01-01

The book addresses the issue of native-speakerism, an ideology based on the assumption that 'native speakers' of English have a special claim to the language itself, through critical qualitative studies of the lived experiences of practising teachers and students in a range of scenarios.

Robust speaker recognition in noisy environments

CERN Document Server

Rao, K Sreenivasa

2014-01-01

This book discusses speaker recognition methods to deal with realistic variable noisy environments. The text covers authentication systems for; robust noisy background environments, functions in real time and incorporated in mobile devices. The book focuses on different approaches to enhance the accuracy of speaker recognition in presence of varying background environments. The authors examine: (a) Feature compensation using multiple background models, (b) Feature mapping using data-driven stochastic models, (c) Design of super vector- based GMM-SVM framework for robust speaker recognition, (d) Total variability modeling (i-vectors) in a discriminative framework and (e) Boosting method to fuse evidences from multiple SVM models.

FPGA Implementation for GMM-Based Speaker Identification

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Phaklen EhKan

2011-01-01

Full Text Available In today's society, highly accurate personal identification systems are required. Passwords or pin numbers can be forgotten or forged and are no longer considered to offer a high level of security. The use of biological features, biometrics, is becoming widely accepted as the next level for security systems. Biometric-based speaker identification is a method of identifying persons from their voice. Speaker-specific characteristics exist in speech signals due to different speakers having different resonances of the vocal tract. These differences can be exploited by extracting feature vectors such as Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs from the speech signal. A well-known statistical modelling process, the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM, then models the distribution of each speaker's MFCCs in a multidimensional acoustic space. The GMM-based speaker identification system has features that make it promising for hardware acceleration. This paper describes the hardware implementation for classification of a text-independent GMM-based speaker identification system. The aim was to produce a system that can perform simultaneous identification of large numbers of voice streams in real time. This has important potential applications in security and in automated call centre applications. A speedup factor of ninety was achieved compared to a software implementation on a standard PC.

A system of automatic speaker recognition on a minicomputer

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

El Chafei, Cherif

1978-01-01

This study describes a system of automatic speaker recognition using the pitch of the voice. The pre-treatment consists in the extraction of the speakers' discriminating characteristics taken from the pitch. The programme of recognition gives, firstly, a preselection and then calculates the distance between the speaker's characteristics to be recognized and those of the speakers already recorded. An experience of recognition has been realized. It has been undertaken with 15 speakers and included 566 tests spread over an intermittent period of four months. The discriminating characteristics used offer several interesting qualities. The algorithms concerning the measure of the characteristics on one hand, the speakers' classification on the other hand, are simple. The results obtained in real time with a minicomputer are satisfactory. Furthermore they probably could be improved if we considered other speaker's discriminating characteristics but this was unfortunately not in our possibilities. (author) [fr

Speaker diarization system using HXLPS and deep neural network

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

V. Subba Ramaiah

2018-03-01

Full Text Available In general, speaker diarization is defined as the process of segmenting the input speech signal and grouped the homogenous regions with regard to the speaker identity. The main idea behind this system is that it is able to discriminate the speaker signal by assigning the label of the each speaker signal. Due to rapid growth of broadcasting and meeting, the speaker diarization is burdensome to enhance the readability of the speech transcription. In order to solve this issue, Holoentropy with the eXtended Linear Prediction using autocorrelation Snapshot (HXLPS and deep neural network (DNN is proposed for the speaker diarization system. The HXLPS extraction method is newly developed by incorporating the Holoentropy with the XLPS. Once we attain the features, the speech and non-speech signals are detected by the Voice Activity Detection (VAD method. Then, i-vector representation of every segmented signal is obtained using Universal Background Model (UBM model. Consequently, DNN is utilized to assign the label for the speaker signal which is then clustered according to the speaker label. The performance is analysed using the evaluation metrics, such as tracking distance, false alarm rate and diarization error rate. The outcome of the proposed method ensures the better diarization performance by achieving the lower DER of 1.36% based on lambda value and DER of 2.23% depends on the frame length. Keywords: Speaker diarization, HXLPS feature extraction, Voice activity detection, Deep neural network, Speaker clustering, Diarization Error Rate (DER

Judging Judges: A Study of U.S. Federal District Court Judges in the 10th Circuit

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Eli Wald

2017-12-01

Full Text Available This paper examines the demographics of federal district court judges in the 10th Circuit. Consistent with the glass-ceiling effect literature in positions of power and influence in the legal profession, the study finds that women judges are under-represented on the 10th Circuit bench compared with their numbers as lawyers in the jurisdictions of the Circuit. However, the study finds that minority judges are over-represented in the Circuit. The paper next explores the relationship between under-representation, over-representation and discrimination. Under-representation that cannot be explained in terms of merit criteria or informed opting out, such as the under-representation of women on the 10th Circuit, strongly suggests the lingering effects of past exclusion and discrimination, as well as the current effects of implicit bias. As demonstrated by the over-representation of minority judges, the political commission process can break through the gender glass-ceiling by over-representing qualified women judges in the short run until their overall numbers better reflect equality. Este artículo examina la demografía de los jueces federales de tribunales de distrito del 10º Circuito. Corroborando la literatura sobre el efecto del techo de cristal en posiciones de poder e influencia en la profesión jurídica, el estudio descubre que las juezas están infrarrepresentadas en el 10º Circuito en comparación con el número de abogadas en las jurisdicciones del Circuito. Sin embargo, el estudio descubre que los jueces de grupos sociales minoritarios están sobrerrepresentados en el Circuito. A continuación, el artículo explora la relación entre la infrarrepresentación, la sobrerrepresentación y la discriminación. La infrarrepresentación que no puede ser explicada en términos de criterios de mérito o de la renuncia informada, como es el caso de la infrarrepresentación de mujeres en el 10º Circuito, apoya fuertemente la idea de que

Learning speaker-specific characteristics with a deep neural architecture.

Science.gov (United States)

Chen, Ke; Salman, Ahmad

2011-11-01

Speech signals convey various yet mixed information ranging from linguistic to speaker-specific information. However, most of acoustic representations characterize all different kinds of information as whole, which could hinder either a speech or a speaker recognition (SR) system from producing a better performance. In this paper, we propose a novel deep neural architecture (DNA) especially for learning speaker-specific characteristics from mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, an acoustic representation commonly used in both speech recognition and SR, which results in a speaker-specific overcomplete representation. In order to learn intrinsic speaker-specific characteristics, we come up with an objective function consisting of contrastive losses in terms of speaker similarity/dissimilarity and data reconstruction losses used as regularization to normalize the interference of non-speaker-related information. Moreover, we employ a hybrid learning strategy for learning parameters of the deep neural networks: i.e., local yet greedy layerwise unsupervised pretraining for initialization and global supervised learning for the ultimate discriminative goal. With four Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) benchmarks and two non-English corpora, we demonstrate that our overcomplete representation is robust in characterizing various speakers, no matter whether their utterances have been used in training our DNA, and highly insensitive to text and languages spoken. Extensive comparative studies suggest that our approach yields favorite results in speaker verification and segmentation. Finally, we discuss several issues concerning our proposed approach.

Robustness-related issues in speaker recognition

CERN Document Server

Zheng, Thomas Fang

2017-01-01

This book presents an overview of speaker recognition technologies with an emphasis on dealing with robustness issues. Firstly, the book gives an overview of speaker recognition, such as the basic system framework, categories under different criteria, performance evaluation and its development history. Secondly, with regard to robustness issues, the book presents three categories, including environment-related issues, speaker-related issues and application-oriented issues. For each category, the book describes the current hot topics, existing technologies, and potential research focuses in the future. The book is a useful reference book and self-learning guide for early researchers working in the field of robust speech recognition.

Real Time Recognition Of Speakers From Internet Audio Stream

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Weychan Radoslaw

2015-09-01

Full Text Available In this paper we present an automatic speaker recognition technique with the use of the Internet radio lossy (encoded speech signal streams. We show an influence of the audio encoder (e.g., bitrate on the speaker model quality. The model of each speaker was calculated with the use of the Gaussian mixture model (GMM approach. Both the speaker recognition and the further analysis were realized with the use of short utterances to facilitate real time processing. The neighborhoods of the speaker models were analyzed with the use of the ISOMAP algorithm. The experiments were based on four 1-hour public debates with 7–8 speakers (including the moderator, acquired from the Polish radio Internet services. The presented software was developed with the MATLAB environment.

Accent Attribution in Speakers with Foreign Accent Syndrome

Science.gov (United States)

Verhoeven, Jo; De Pauw, Guy; Pettinato, Michele; Hirson, Allen; Van Borsel, John; Marien, Peter

2013-01-01

Purpose: The main aim of this experiment was to investigate the perception of Foreign Accent Syndrome in comparison to speakers with an authentic foreign accent. Method: Three groups of listeners attributed accents to conversational speech samples of 5 FAS speakers which were embedded amongst those of 5 speakers with a real foreign accent and 5…

Comparison of Diarization Tools for Building Speaker Database

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Eva Kiktova

2015-01-01

Full Text Available This paper compares open source diarization toolkits (LIUM, DiarTK, ALIZE-Lia_Ral, which were designed for extraction of speaker identity from audio records without any prior information about the analysed data. The comparative study of used diarization tools was performed for three different types of analysed data (broadcast news - BN and TV shows. Corresponding values of achieved DER measure are presented here. The automatic speaker diarization system developed by LIUM was able to identified speech segments belonging to speakers at very good level. Its segmentation outputs can be used to build a speaker database.

An introduction to application-independent evaluation of speaker recognition systems

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Leeuwen, D.A. van; Brümmer, N.

2007-01-01

In the evaluation of speaker recognition systems - an important part of speaker classification [1], the trade-off between missed speakers and false alarms has always been an important diagnostic tool. NIST has defined the task of speaker detection with the associated Detection Cost Function (DCF) to

31 CFR 10.70 - Administrative Law Judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... 31 Money and Finance: Treasury 1 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Administrative Law Judge. 10.70... INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE Rules Applicable to Disciplinary Proceedings § 10.70 Administrative Law Judge. (a..., firm or other entity, or appraiser will be conducted by an Administrative Law Judge appointed as...

14 CFR 302.17 - Administrative law judges.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 14 Aeronautics and Space 4 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Administrative law judges. 302.17 Section... Evidentiary Hearing Proceedings § 302.17 Administrative law judges. (a) Powers and delegation of authority. (1) An administrative law judge shall have the following powers, in addition to any others specified in...

31 CFR 8.62 - Administrative Law Judge.

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2010-07-01

... 31 Money and Finance: Treasury 1 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Administrative Law Judge. 8.62... BUREAU OF ALCOHOL, TOBACCO AND FIREARMS Disciplinary Proceedings § 8.62 Administrative Law Judge. (a) Appointment. An Administrative Law Judge, appointed as provided by 5 U.S.C. 3105, shall conduct proceedings...

47 CFR 1.244 - Designation of a settlement judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-10-01

... Proceedings Presiding Officer § 1.244 Designation of a settlement judge. (a) In broadcast comparative cases... Administrative Law Judge for action. (c) If, in the discretion of the Chief Administrative Law Judge, it appears... Commission's Administrative Law Judges are eligible to act as settlement judges, except that an...

Role of Speaker Cues in Attention Inference

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jin Joo Lee

2017-10-01

Full Text Available Current state-of-the-art approaches to emotion recognition primarily focus on modeling the nonverbal expressions of the sole individual without reference to contextual elements such as the co-presence of the partner. In this paper, we demonstrate that the accurate inference of listeners’ social-emotional state of attention depends on accounting for the nonverbal behaviors of their storytelling partner, namely their speaker cues. To gain a deeper understanding of the role of speaker cues in attention inference, we conduct investigations into real-world interactions of children (5–6 years old storytelling with their peers. Through in-depth analysis of human–human interaction data, we first identify nonverbal speaker cues (i.e., backchannel-inviting cues and listener responses (i.e., backchannel feedback. We then demonstrate how speaker cues can modify the interpretation of attention-related backchannels as well as serve as a means to regulate the responsiveness of listeners. We discuss the design implications of our findings toward our primary goal of developing attention recognition models for storytelling robots, and we argue that social robots can proactively use speaker cues to form more accurate inferences about the attentive state of their human partners.

Speaker and Observer Perceptions of Physical Tension during Stuttering.

Science.gov (United States)

Tichenor, Seth; Leslie, Paula; Shaiman, Susan; Yaruss, J Scott

2017-01-01

Speech-language pathologists routinely assess physical tension during evaluation of those who stutter. If speakers experience tension that is not visible to clinicians, then judgments of severity may be inaccurate. This study addressed this potential discrepancy by comparing judgments of tension by people who stutter and expert clinicians to determine if clinicians could accurately identify the speakers' experience of physical tension. Ten adults who stutter were audio-video recorded in two speaking samples. Two board-certified specialists in fluency evaluated the samples using the Stuttering Severity Instrument-4 and a checklist adapted for this study. Speakers rated their tension using the same forms, and then discussed their experiences in a qualitative interview so that themes related to physical tension could be identified. The degree of tension reported by speakers was higher than that observed by specialists. Tension in parts of the body that were less visible to the observer (chest, abdomen, throat) was reported more by speakers than by specialists. The thematic analysis revealed that speakers' experience of tension changes over time and that these changes may be related to speakers' acceptance of stuttering. The lack of agreement between speaker and specialist perceptions of tension suggests that using self-reports is a necessary component for supporting the accurate diagnosis of tension in stuttering. © 2018 S. Karger AG, Basel.

Forensic speaker recognition

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Meuwly, Didier

2013-01-01

The aim of forensic speaker recognition is to establish links between individuals and criminal activities, through audio speech recordings. This field is multidisciplinary, combining predominantly phonetics, linguistics, speech signal processing, and forensic statistics. On these bases, expert-based

Livestock Judges Training Provides Hands-On Experience

Science.gov (United States)

Nash, Scott; Harrison, Steve; Packham, Joel; Sanchez, Dawn; Jensen, Jim; Kaysen, Brett; King, Marc

2016-01-01

The judging of a market animal at a fair is the highlight of a youth-owned livestock project. Livestock judges are hired to evaluate youth projects at fairs. They are critical ambassadors for agriculture and influence countless youths and adults. Judges must be knowledgeable about current animal evaluation methods that support youth development.…

Data-Model Relationship in Text-Independent Speaker Recognition

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Stapert Robert

2005-01-01

Full Text Available Text-independent speaker recognition systems such as those based on Gaussian mixture models (GMMs do not include time sequence information (TSI within the model itself. The level of importance of TSI in speaker recognition is an interesting question and one addressed in this paper. Recent works has shown that the utilisation of higher-level information such as idiolect, pronunciation, and prosodics can be useful in reducing speaker recognition error rates. In accordance with these developments, the aim of this paper is to show that as more data becomes available, the basic GMM can be enhanced by utilising TSI, even in a text-independent mode. This paper presents experimental work incorporating TSI into the conventional GMM. The resulting system, known as the segmental mixture model (SMM, embeds dynamic time warping (DTW into a GMM framework. Results are presented on the 2000-speaker SpeechDat Welsh database which show improved speaker recognition performance with the SMM.

What matters when judging intentionality-moral content or normative status? Testing the rational scientist model of the side-effect.

Science.gov (United States)

Papadopoulos, C; Hayes, B K

2018-06-01

Previous work has demonstrated a "side-effect effect," such that intentionality is more likely to be attributed to agents who bring about negatively valenced as opposed to positively valenced side effects. The rational-scientist model explains this by suggesting that norm-violating side effects are more informative for inferring intentionality than norm-conforming side effects. In the present study we reexamined this account, addressing limitations of previous empirical tests (e.g., Uttich & Lombrozo, Cognition 116: 87-100, 2010). Side-effect valence and norm status were manipulated factorially, enabling an examination of the impact of norm status on intentionality judgments in both positively and negatively valenced side effects. Additionally, the impact of side-effect norm status on the perceived valences of side effects and agents was examined. Effects of norm status were found for both positive and negative side effects. Violation of an ostensibly neutral norm led to negative perceptions of the side effect. However, a norm status effect on intentionality judgments persisted when these effects were controlled. These results support the view that the side-effect effect is the result of the rational use of social-cognitive evidence.

Speaker-dependent Multipitch Tracking Using Deep Neural Networks

Science.gov (United States)

2015-01-01

sentences spoken by each of 34 speakers (18 male, 16 female). Two male and two female speakers (No. 1, 2, 18, 20, same as [30]), denoted as MA1, MA2 ...Engineering Technical Report #12, 2015 Speaker Pairs MA1- MA2 MA1-FE1 MA1-FE2 MA2 -FE1 MA2 -FE2 FE1-FE2 E T ot al 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 Jin and Wang Hu and...Pitch 1 Estimated Pitch 2 (d) Figure 6: Multipitch tracking results on a test mixture (pbbv6n and priv3n) for the MA1- MA2 speaker pair. (a) Groundtruth

Joint Single-Channel Speech Separation and Speaker Identification

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Mowlaee, Pejman; Saeidi, Rahim; Tan, Zheng-Hua

2010-01-01

In this paper, we propose a closed loop system to improve the performance of single-channel speech separation in a speaker independent scenario. The system is composed of two interconnected blocks: a separation block and a speaker identiſcation block. The improvement is accomplished by incorporat......In this paper, we propose a closed loop system to improve the performance of single-channel speech separation in a speaker independent scenario. The system is composed of two interconnected blocks: a separation block and a speaker identiſcation block. The improvement is accomplished...... enhances the quality of the separated output signals. To assess the improvements, the results are reported in terms of PESQ for both target and masked signals....

Reactor power distribution pattern judging device

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Ikehara, Tadashi.

1992-01-01

The judging device of the present invention comprises a power distribution readout system for intaking a power value from a fuel segment, a neural network having an experience learning function for receiving a power distribution value as an input variant, mapping it into a desirable property and self-organizing the map, and a learning date base storing a plurality of learnt samples. The read power distribution is classified depending on the similarity thereof with any one of representative learnt power distribution, and the corresponding state of the reactor core is outputted as a result of the judgement. When an error is found in the classified judging operation, erroneous cases are additionally learnt by using the experience and learning function, thereby improving the accuracy of the reactor core characteristic estimation operation. Since the device is mainly based on the neural network having a self-learning function and a pattern classification and judging function, a judging device having a human's intuitive pattern recognition performance and a pattern experience and learning performance is obtainable, thereby enabling to judge the state of the reactor core accurately. (N.H.)

Optimization of multilayer neural network parameters for speaker recognition

Science.gov (United States)

Tovarek, Jaromir; Partila, Pavol; Rozhon, Jan; Voznak, Miroslav; Skapa, Jan; Uhrin, Dominik; Chmelikova, Zdenka

2016-05-01

This article discusses the impact of multilayer neural network parameters for speaker identification. The main task of speaker identification is to find a specific person in the known set of speakers. It means that the voice of an unknown speaker (wanted person) belongs to a group of reference speakers from the voice database. One of the requests was to develop the text-independent system, which means to classify wanted person regardless of content and language. Multilayer neural network has been used for speaker identification in this research. Artificial neural network (ANN) needs to set parameters like activation function of neurons, steepness of activation functions, learning rate, the maximum number of iterations and a number of neurons in the hidden and output layers. ANN accuracy and validation time are directly influenced by the parameter settings. Different roles require different settings. Identification accuracy and ANN validation time were evaluated with the same input data but different parameter settings. The goal was to find parameters for the neural network with the highest precision and shortest validation time. Input data of neural networks are a Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC). These parameters describe the properties of the vocal tract. Audio samples were recorded for all speakers in a laboratory environment. Training, testing and validation data set were split into 70, 15 and 15 %. The result of the research described in this article is different parameter setting for the multilayer neural network for four speakers.

Request Strategies in Everyday Interactions of Persian and English Speakers

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Shiler Yazdanfar

2016-12-01

Full Text Available Cross-cultural studies of speech acts in different linguistic contexts might have interesting implications for language researchers and practitioners. Drawing on the Speech Act Theory, the present study aimed at conducting a comparative study of request speech act in Persian and English. Specifically, the study endeavored to explore the request strategies used in daily interactions of Persian and English speakers based on directness level and supportive moves. To this end, English and Persian TV series were observed and requestive utterances were transcribed. The utterances were then categorized based on Blum-Kulka and Olshtain’s Cross-Cultural Study of Speech Act Realization Pattern (CCSARP for directness level and internal and external mitigation devises. According to the results, although speakers of both languages opted for the direct level as their most frequently used strategy in their daily interactions, the English speakers used more conventionally indirect strategies than the Persian speakers did, and the Persian speakers used more non-conventionally indirect strategies than the English speakers did. Furthermore, the analyzed data revealed the fact that American English speakers use more mitigation devices in their daily interactions with friends and family members than Persian speakers.

29 CFR 457.17 - Administrative Law Judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... Administrative Law Judge to conduct a hearing in cases under 5 U.S.C. 7120 or 22 U.S.C. 4117 as implemented by... 29 Labor 2 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Administrative Law Judge. 457.17 Section 457.17 Labor... GENERAL Meaning of Terms as Used in This Chapter § 457.17 Administrative Law Judge. Administrative Law...

Speaker Reliability Guides Children's Inductive Inferences about Novel Properties

Science.gov (United States)

Kim, Sunae; Kalish, Charles W.; Harris, Paul L.

2012-01-01

Prior work shows that children can make inductive inferences about objects based on their labels rather than their appearance (Gelman, 2003). A separate line of research shows that children's trust in a speaker's label is selective. Children accept labels from a reliable speaker over an unreliable speaker (e.g., Koenig & Harris, 2005). In the…

Guest Speakers in School-Based Sexuality Education

Science.gov (United States)

McRee, Annie-Laurie; Madsen, Nikki; Eisenberg, Marla E.

2014-01-01

This study, using data from a statewide survey (n = 332), examined teachers' practices regarding the inclusion of guest speakers to cover sexuality content. More than half of teachers (58%) included guest speakers. In multivariate analyses, teachers who taught high school, had professional preparation in health education, or who received…

Situation and person attributions under spontaneous and intentional instructions: an fMRI study.

Science.gov (United States)

Kestemont, Jenny; Vandekerckhove, Marie; Ma, Ning; Van Hoeck, Nicole; Van Overwalle, Frank

2013-06-01

This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research explores how observers make causal beliefs about an event in terms of the person or situation. Thirty-four participants read various short descriptions of social events that implied either the person or the situation as the cause. Half of them were explicitly instructed to judge whether the event was caused by something about the person or the situation (intentional inferences), whereas the other half was instructed simply to read the material carefully (spontaneous inferences). The results showed common activation in areas related to mentalizing, across all types of causes or instructions (posterior superior temporal sulcus, temporo-parietal junction, precuneus). However, the medial prefrontal cortex was activated only under spontaneous instructions, but not under intentional instruction. This suggests a bias toward person attributions (e.g. fundamental attribution bias). Complementary to this, intentional situation attributions activated a stronger and more extended network compared to intentional person attributions, suggesting that situation attributions require more controlled, extended and broader processing of the information.

The Communication of Public Speaking Anxiety: Perceptions of Asian and American Speakers.

Science.gov (United States)

Martini, Marianne; And Others

1992-01-01

Finds that U.S. audiences perceive Asian speakers to have more speech anxiety than U.S. speakers, even though Asian speakers do not self-report higher anxiety levels. Confirms that speech state anxiety is not communicated effectively between speakers and audiences for Asian or U.S. speakers. (SR)

The Judge on Facebook

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Paul van den Hoven

2015-07-01

Full Text Available In many social realms, social media are employed by institutions to establish direct relations between ‘key agents’ and their clients or customers. In this article I explain why as yet the civil law judge cannot be expected to start using social networking sites to advance the transparency of the judicial decision-making process in a relatively open, form-free interaction with his or her ‘clients’. This explanation is grounded on the hybrid character of social networking sites. On the one hand, these sites are direct, interactive, informal, and personalized media; but on the other, they are public and basically permanent. Their direct, interactive, informal and personalized character is highly compatible with the multimodal, network-embedded, form-free self-representation of the modern judge in the courtroom. However, their public and permanent character manifests in the second performance of a judge, being held publicly and permanently accountable for what is decided. This performance is characterized by a unimodal, ‘punctualized’, formal self-representation. Referring to the work of legal sociologists as well as discourse scholars, it is underlined how much this public judicial self-representation is part of a persistent ritual that renders it incompatible with direct, interactive, informal and personalized communication. The hybrid character of social media does not allow judges to utilize them to act as key-agents: to open up the ‘backstage area’ to reveal the actual dynamics of the decision-making process, and to transparently connect the judicial performance in the courtroom session with the second performance when issuing a decision.

28 CFR 0.117 - Office of Chief Immigration Judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... 28 Judicial Administration 1 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Office of Chief Immigration Judge. 0.117... Executive Office for Immigration Review § 0.117 Office of Chief Immigration Judge. The Chief Immigration Judge shall provide general supervision to the Immigration Judges in performance of their duties in...

8 CFR 1240.41 - Immigration judges.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 8 Aliens and Nationality 1 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Immigration judges. 1240.41 Section 1240.41 Aliens and Nationality EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW, DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE IMMIGRATION..., 1997) § 1240.41 Immigration judges. (a) Authority. In any proceeding conducted under this part the...

Application of Native Speaker Models for Identifying Deviations in Rhetorical Moves in Non-Native Speaker Manuscripts

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Assef Khalili

2016-06-01

Full Text Available Introduction: Explicit teaching of generic conventions of a text genre, usually extracted from native-speaker (NS manuscripts, has long been emphasized in the teaching of Academic Writing inEnglish for Specific Purposes (henceforthESP classes, both in theory and practice. While consciousness-raising about rhetorical structure can be instrumental to non-native speakers(NNS, it has to be admitted that most works done in the field of ESP have tended to focus almost exclusively on native-speaker (NS productions, giving scant attention to non-native speaker (NNS manuscripts. That is, having outlined established norms for good writing on the basis of NS productions, few have been inclined to provide a descriptive account of NNS attempts at trying to produce a research article (RA in English. That is what we have tried to do in the present research. Methods: We randomly selected 20 RAs in dentistry and used two well-established models for results and discussion sections to try to describe the move structure of these articles and show the points of divergence from the established norms. Results: The results pointed to significant divergences that could seriously compromise the quality of an RA. Conclusion: It is believed that the insights gained on the deviations in NNS manuscripts could prove very useful in designing syllabi for ESP classes.

The neural correlates of agrammatism: Evidence from aphasic and healthy speakers performing an overt picture description task

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Eva eSchoenberger

2014-03-01

Full Text Available Functional brain imaging studies have improved our knowledge of the neural localization of language functions and the functional recovery after a lesion. However, the neural correlates of agrammatic symptoms in aphasia remain largely unknown. The present fMRI study examined the neural correlates of morpho-syntactic encoding and agrammatic errors in continuous language production by combining three approaches. First, the neural mechanisms underlying natural morpho-syntactic processing in a picture description task were analyzed in 15 healthy speakers. Second, agrammatic-like speech behavior was induced in the same group of healthy speakers to study the underlying functional processes by limiting the utterance length. In a third approach, five agrammatic participants performed the picture description task to gain insights in the neural correlates of agrammatism and the functional reorganization of language processing after stroke. In all approaches, utterances were analyzed for syntactic completeness, complexity and morphology. Event-related data analysis was conducted by defining every clause-like unit (CLU as an event with its onset-time and duration. Agrammatic and correct CLUs were contrasted. Due to the small sample size as well as heterogeneous lesion sizes and sites with lesion foci in the insula lobe, inferior frontal, superior temporal and inferior parietal areas the activation patterns in the agrammatic speakers were analyzed on a single subject level. In the group of healthy speakers, posterior temporal and inferior parietal areas were associated with greater morpho-syntactic demands in complete and complex CLUs. The intentional manipulation of morpho-syntactic structures and the omission of function words were associated with additional inferior frontal activation. Overall, the results revealed that the investigation of the neural correlates of agrammatic language production can be reasonably conducted with an overt language production

The neural correlates of agrammatism: Evidence from aphasic and healthy speakers performing an overt picture description task.

Science.gov (United States)

Schönberger, Eva; Heim, Stefan; Meffert, Elisabeth; Pieperhoff, Peter; da Costa Avelar, Patricia; Huber, Walter; Binkofski, Ferdinand; Grande, Marion

2014-01-01

Functional brain imaging studies have improved our knowledge of the neural localization of language functions and the functional reorganization after a lesion. However, the neural correlates of agrammatic symptoms in aphasia remain largely unknown. The present fMRI study examined the neural correlates of morpho-syntactic encoding and agrammatic errors in continuous language production by combining three approaches. First, the neural mechanisms underlying natural morpho-syntactic processing in a picture description task were analyzed in 15 healthy speakers. Second, agrammatic-like speech behavior was induced in the same group of healthy speakers to study the underlying functional processes by limiting the utterance length. In a third approach, five agrammatic participants performed the picture description task to gain insights in the neural correlates of agrammatism and the functional reorganization of language processing after stroke. In all approaches, utterances were analyzed for syntactic completeness, complexity, and morphology. Event-related data analysis was conducted by defining every clause-like unit (CLU) as an event with its onset-time and duration. Agrammatic and correct CLUs were contrasted. Due to the small sample size as well as heterogeneous lesion sizes and sites with lesion foci in the insula lobe, inferior frontal, superior temporal and inferior parietal areas the activation patterns in the agrammatic speakers were analyzed on a single subject level. In the group of healthy speakers, posterior temporal and inferior parietal areas were associated with greater morpho-syntactic demands in complete and complex CLUs. The intentional manipulation of morpho-syntactic structures and the omission of function words were associated with additional inferior frontal activation. Overall, the results revealed that the investigation of the neural correlates of agrammatic language production can be reasonably conducted with an overt language production paradigm.

Speaker Clustering for a Mixture of Singing and Reading (Preprint)

Science.gov (United States)

2012-03-01

diarization [2, 3] which answers the ques- tion of ”who spoke when?” is a combination of speaker segmentation and clustering. Although it is possible to...focuses on speaker clustering, the techniques developed here can be applied to speaker diarization . For the remainder of this paper, the term ”speech...and retrieval,” Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 88, 2000. [2] S. Tranter and D. Reynolds, “An overview of automatic speaker diarization systems,” IEEE

8 CFR 1240.1 - Immigration judges.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 8 Aliens and Nationality 1 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Immigration judges. 1240.1 Section 1240.1 Aliens and Nationality EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW, DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE IMMIGRATION... Immigration judges. (a) Authority. (1) In any removal proceeding pursuant to section 240 of the Act, the...

Human and automatic speaker recognition over telecommunication channels

CERN Document Server

Fernández Gallardo, Laura

2016-01-01

This work addresses the evaluation of the human and the automatic speaker recognition performances under different channel distortions caused by bandwidth limitation, codecs, and electro-acoustic user interfaces, among other impairments. Its main contribution is the demonstration of the benefits of communication channels of extended bandwidth, together with an insight into how speaker-specific characteristics of speech are preserved through different transmissions. It provides sufficient motivation for considering speaker recognition as a criterion for the migration from narrowband to enhanced bandwidths, such as wideband and super-wideband.

Electrophysiology of subject-verb agreement mediated by speakers' gender.

Science.gov (United States)

Hanulíková, Adriana; Carreiras, Manuel

2015-01-01

An important property of speech is that it explicitly conveys features of a speaker's identity such as age or gender. This event-related potential (ERP) study examined the effects of social information provided by a speaker's gender, i.e., the conceptual representation of gender, on subject-verb agreement. Despite numerous studies on agreement, little is known about syntactic computations generated by speaker characteristics extracted from the acoustic signal. Slovak is well suited to investigate this issue because it is a morphologically rich language in which agreement involves features for number, case, and gender. Grammaticality of a sentence can be evaluated by checking a speaker's gender as conveyed by his/her voice. We examined how conceptual information about speaker gender, which is not syntactic but rather social and pragmatic in nature, is interpreted for the computation of agreement patterns. ERP responses to verbs disagreeing with the speaker's gender (e.g., a sentence including a masculine verbal inflection spoken by a female person 'the neighbors were upset because I (∗)stoleMASC plums') elicited a larger early posterior negativity compared to correct sentences. When the agreement was purely syntactic and did not depend on the speaker's gender, a disagreement between a formally marked subject and the verb inflection (e.g., the womanFEM (∗)stoleMASC plums) resulted in a larger P600 preceded by a larger anterior negativity compared to the control sentences. This result is in line with proposals according to which the recruitment of non-syntactic information such as the gender of the speaker results in N400-like effects, while formally marked syntactic features lead to structural integration as reflected in a LAN/P600 complex.

Speakers of different languages process the visual world differently.

Science.gov (United States)

Chabal, Sarah; Marian, Viorica

2015-06-01

Language and vision are highly interactive. Here we show that people activate language when they perceive the visual world, and that this language information impacts how speakers of different languages focus their attention. For example, when searching for an item (e.g., clock) in the same visual display, English and Spanish speakers look at different objects. Whereas English speakers searching for the clock also look at a cloud, Spanish speakers searching for the clock also look at a gift, because the Spanish names for gift (regalo) and clock (reloj) overlap phonologically. These different looking patterns emerge despite an absence of direct language input, showing that linguistic information is automatically activated by visual scene processing. We conclude that the varying linguistic information available to speakers of different languages affects visual perception, leading to differences in how the visual world is processed. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

Multimodal Speaker Diarization

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Noulas, A.; Englebienne, G.; Kröse, B.J.A.

2012-01-01

We present a novel probabilistic framework that fuses information coming from the audio and video modality to perform speaker diarization. The proposed framework is a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) that is an extension of a factorial Hidden Markov Model (fHMM) and models the people appearing in an

29 CFR 18.614 - Calling and interrogation of witnesses by judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... 29 Labor 1 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 true Calling and interrogation of witnesses by judge. 18.614... interrogation of witnesses by judge. (a) Calling by the judge. The judge may, on the judge's own motion or at... thus called. (b) Interrogation by the judge. The judge may interrogate witnesses, whether called by the...

Speakers' assumptions about the lexical flexibility of idioms.

Science.gov (United States)

Gibbs, R W; Nayak, N P; Bolton, J L; Keppel, M E

1989-01-01

In three experiments, we examined why some idioms can be lexically altered and still retain their figurative meanings (e.g., John buttoned his lips about Mary can be changed into John fastened his lips about Mary and still mean "John didn't say anything about Mary"), whereas other idioms cannot be lexically altered without losing their figurative meanings (e.g., John kicked the bucket, meaning "John died," loses its idiomatic meaning when changed into John kicked the pail). Our hypothesis was that the lexical flexibility of idioms is determined by speakers' assumptions about the ways in which parts of idioms contribute to their figurative interpretations as a whole. The results of the three experiments indicated that idioms whose individual semantic components contribute to their overall figurative meanings (e.g., go out on a limb) were judged as less disrupted by changes in their lexical items (e.g., go out on a branch) than were nondecomposable idioms (e.g., kick the bucket) when their individual words were altered (e.g., punt the pail). These findings lend support to the idea that both the syntactic productivity and the lexical makeup of idioms are matters of degree, depending on the idioms' compositional properties. This conclusion suggests that idioms do not form a unique class of linguistic items, but share many of the properties of more literal language.

31 CFR 15.737-19 - Administrative Law Judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... 31 Money and Finance: Treasury 1 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Administrative Law Judge. 15.737-19... CONFLICT OF INTEREST Administrative Enforcement Proceedings § 15.737-19 Administrative Law Judge. (a) Appointment. An Administrative Law Judge appointed as provided by 5 U.S.C. 3105 (1966), shall conduct...

29 CFR 101.11 - Administrative law judge's decision.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... 29 Labor 2 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Administrative law judge's decision. 101.11 Section 101.11... Practice Cases Under Section 10 (a) to (i) of the Act and Telegraph Merger Act Cases § 101.11 Administrative law judge's decision. (a) At the conclusion of the hearing the administrative law judge prepares a...

Studies on inter-speaker variability in speech and its application in ...

Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

tic representation of vowel realizations by different speakers. ... in regional background, education level and gender of speaker. A more ...... formal maps such as bilinear transform and its generalizations for speaker normalization. Since.

Content-specific coordination of listeners' to speakers' EEG during communication.

Science.gov (United States)

Kuhlen, Anna K; Allefeld, Carsten; Haynes, John-Dylan

2012-01-01

Cognitive neuroscience has recently begun to extend its focus from the isolated individual mind to two or more individuals coordinating with each other. In this study we uncover a coordination of neural activity between the ongoing electroencephalogram (EEG) of two people-a person speaking and a person listening. The EEG of one set of twelve participants ("speakers") was recorded while they were narrating short stories. The EEG of another set of twelve participants ("listeners") was recorded while watching audiovisual recordings of these stories. Specifically, listeners watched the superimposed videos of two speakers simultaneously and were instructed to attend either to one or the other speaker. This allowed us to isolate neural coordination due to processing the communicated content from the effects of sensory input. We find several neural signatures of communication: First, the EEG is more similar among listeners attending to the same speaker than among listeners attending to different speakers, indicating that listeners' EEG reflects content-specific information. Secondly, listeners' EEG activity correlates with the attended speakers' EEG, peaking at a time delay of about 12.5 s. This correlation takes place not only between homologous, but also between non-homologous brain areas in speakers and listeners. A semantic analysis of the stories suggests that listeners coordinate with speakers at the level of complex semantic representations, so-called "situation models". With this study we link a coordination of neural activity between individuals directly to verbally communicated information.

Forensic Speaker Recognition Law Enforcement and Counter-Terrorism

CERN Document Server

Patil, Hemant

2012-01-01

Forensic Speaker Recognition: Law Enforcement and Counter-Terrorism is an anthology of the research findings of 35 speaker recognition experts from around the world. The volume provides a multidimensional view of the complex science involved in determining whether a suspect’s voice truly matches forensic speech samples, collected by law enforcement and counter-terrorism agencies, that are associated with the commission of a terrorist act or other crimes. While addressing such topics as the challenges of forensic case work, handling speech signal degradation, analyzing features of speaker recognition to optimize voice verification system performance, and designing voice applications that meet the practical needs of law enforcement and counter-terrorism agencies, this material all sounds a common theme: how the rigors of forensic utility are demanding new levels of excellence in all aspects of speaker recognition. The contributors are among the most eminent scientists in speech engineering and signal process...

Gricean Semantics and Vague Speaker-Meaning

OpenAIRE

Schiffer, Stephen

2017-01-01

Presentations of Gricean semantics, including Stephen Neale’s in “Silent Reference,” totally ignore vagueness, even though virtually every utterance is vague. I ask how Gricean semantics might be adjusted to accommodate vague speaker-meaning. My answer is that it can’t accommodate it: the Gricean program collapses in the face of vague speaker-meaning. The Gricean might, however, fi nd some solace in knowing that every other extant meta-semantic and semantic program is in the same boat.

Effect of lisping on audience evaluation of male speakers.

Science.gov (United States)

Mowrer, D E; Wahl, P; Doolan, S J

1978-05-01

The social consequences of adult listeners' first impression of lisping were evaluated in two studies. Five adult speakers were rated by adult listeners with regard to speaking ability, intelligence, education, masculinity, and friendship. Results from both studies indicate that listeners rate adult speakers who demonstrate frontal lisping lower than nonlispers in all five categories investigated. Efforts to correct frontal lisping are justifiable on the basis of the poor impression lisping speakers make on the listener.

Recognition of speaker-dependent continuous speech with KEAL

Science.gov (United States)

Mercier, G.; Bigorgne, D.; Miclet, L.; Le Guennec, L.; Querre, M.

1989-04-01

A description of the speaker-dependent continuous speech recognition system KEAL is given. An unknown utterance, is recognized by means of the followng procedures: acoustic analysis, phonetic segmentation and identification, word and sentence analysis. The combination of feature-based, speaker-independent coarse phonetic segmentation with speaker-dependent statistical classification techniques is one of the main design features of the acoustic-phonetic decoder. The lexical access component is essentially based on a statistical dynamic programming technique which aims at matching a phonemic lexical entry containing various phonological forms, against a phonetic lattice. Sentence recognition is achieved by use of a context-free grammar and a parsing algorithm derived from Earley's parser. A speaker adaptation module allows some of the system parameters to be adjusted by matching known utterances with their acoustical representation. The task to be performed, described by its vocabulary and its grammar, is given as a parameter of the system. Continuously spoken sentences extracted from a 'pseudo-Logo' language are analyzed and results are presented.

Cost-Sensitive Learning for Emotion Robust Speaker Recognition

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Dongdong Li

2014-01-01

Full Text Available In the field of information security, voice is one of the most important parts in biometrics. Especially, with the development of voice communication through the Internet or telephone system, huge voice data resources are accessed. In speaker recognition, voiceprint can be applied as the unique password for the user to prove his/her identity. However, speech with various emotions can cause an unacceptably high error rate and aggravate the performance of speaker recognition system. This paper deals with this problem by introducing a cost-sensitive learning technology to reweight the probability of test affective utterances in the pitch envelop level, which can enhance the robustness in emotion-dependent speaker recognition effectively. Based on that technology, a new architecture of recognition system as well as its components is proposed in this paper. The experiment conducted on the Mandarin Affective Speech Corpus shows that an improvement of 8% identification rate over the traditional speaker recognition is achieved.

Cost-sensitive learning for emotion robust speaker recognition.

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Dongdong; Yang, Yingchun; Dai, Weihui

2014-01-01

In the field of information security, voice is one of the most important parts in biometrics. Especially, with the development of voice communication through the Internet or telephone system, huge voice data resources are accessed. In speaker recognition, voiceprint can be applied as the unique password for the user to prove his/her identity. However, speech with various emotions can cause an unacceptably high error rate and aggravate the performance of speaker recognition system. This paper deals with this problem by introducing a cost-sensitive learning technology to reweight the probability of test affective utterances in the pitch envelop level, which can enhance the robustness in emotion-dependent speaker recognition effectively. Based on that technology, a new architecture of recognition system as well as its components is proposed in this paper. The experiment conducted on the Mandarin Affective Speech Corpus shows that an improvement of 8% identification rate over the traditional speaker recognition is achieved.

Young Children's Sensitivity to Speaker Gender When Learning from Others

Science.gov (United States)

Ma, Lili; Woolley, Jacqueline D.

2013-01-01

This research explores whether young children are sensitive to speaker gender when learning novel information from others. Four- and 6-year-olds ("N" = 144) chose between conflicting statements from a male versus a female speaker (Studies 1 and 3) or decided which speaker (male or female) they would ask (Study 2) when learning about the functions…

Fluency profile: comparison between Brazilian and European Portuguese speakers.

Science.gov (United States)

Castro, Blenda Stephanie Alves e; Martins-Reis, Vanessa de Oliveira; Baptista, Ana Catarina; Celeste, Letícia Correa

2014-01-01

The purpose of the study was to compare the speech fluency of Brazilian Portuguese speakers with that of European Portuguese speakers. The study participants were 76 individuals of any ethnicity or skin color aged 18-29 years. Of the participants, 38 lived in Brazil and 38 in Portugal. Speech samples from all participants were obtained and analyzed according to the variables of typology and frequency of speech disruptions and speech rate. Descriptive and inferential statistical analyses were performed to assess the association between the fluency profile and linguistic variant variables. We found that the speech rate of European Portuguese speakers was higher than the speech rate of Brazilian Portuguese speakers in words per minute (p=0.004). The qualitative distribution of the typology of common dysfluencies (pPortuguese speakers is not available, speech therapists in Portugal can use the same speech fluency assessment as has been used in Brazil to establish a diagnosis of stuttering, especially in regard to typical and stuttering dysfluencies, with care taken when evaluating the speech rate.

Direct Speaker Gaze Promotes Trust in Truth-Ambiguous Statements.

Science.gov (United States)

Kreysa, Helene; Kessler, Luise; Schweinberger, Stefan R

2016-01-01

A speaker's gaze behaviour can provide perceivers with a multitude of cues which are relevant for communication, thus constituting an important non-verbal interaction channel. The present study investigated whether direct eye gaze of a speaker affects the likelihood of listeners believing truth-ambiguous statements. Participants were presented with videos in which a speaker produced such statements with either direct or averted gaze. The statements were selected through a rating study to ensure that participants were unlikely to know a-priori whether they were true or not (e.g., "sniffer dogs cannot smell the difference between identical twins"). Participants indicated in a forced-choice task whether or not they believed each statement. We found that participants were more likely to believe statements by a speaker looking at them directly, compared to a speaker with averted gaze. Moreover, when participants disagreed with a statement, they were slower to do so when the statement was uttered with direct (compared to averted) gaze, suggesting that the process of rejecting a statement as untrue may be inhibited when that statement is accompanied by direct gaze.

20 CFR 404.944 - Administrative law judge hearing procedures-general.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-04-01

... order to receive new and material evidence. The administrative law judge may decide when the evidence... 20 Employees' Benefits 2 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 false Administrative law judge hearing procedures... Determinations and Decisions Administrative Law Judge Hearing Procedures § 404.944 Administrative law judge...

Toward a Needs-Based Architecture for ‘Intelligent’ Communicative Agents: Speaking with Intention

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Roger K. Moore

2017-12-01

Full Text Available The past few years have seen considerable progress in the deployment of voice-enabled personal assistants, first on smartphones (such as Apple’s Siri and most recently as standalone devices in people’s homes (such as Amazon’s Alexa. Such ‘intelligent’ communicative agents are distinguished from the previous generation of speech-based systems in that they claim to offer access to services and information via conversational interaction (rather than simple voice commands. In reality, conversations with such agents have limited depth and, after initial enthusiasm, users typically revert to more traditional ways of getting things done. It is argued here that one source of the problem is that the standard architecture for a contemporary spoken language interface fails to capture the fundamental teleological properties of human spoken language. As a consequence, users have difficulty engaging with such systems, primarily due to a gross mismatch in intentional priors. This paper presents an alternative needs-driven cognitive architecture which models speech-based interaction as an emergent property of coupled hierarchical feedback-control processes in which a speaker has in mind the needs of a listener and a listener has in mind the intentions of a speaker. The implications of this architecture for future spoken language systems are illustrated using results from a new type of ‘intentional speech synthesiser’ that is capable of optimising its pronunciation in unpredictable acoustic environments as a function of its perceived communicative success. It is concluded that such purposeful behavior is essential to the facilitation of meaningful and productive spoken language interaction between human beings and autonomous social agents (such as robots. However, it is also noted that persistent mismatched priors may ultimately impose a fundamental limit on the effectiveness of speech-based human–robot interaction.

Situation and person attributions under spontaneous and intentional instructions: an fMRI study

Science.gov (United States)

Kestemont, Jenny; Vandekerckhove, Marie; Ma, Ning; Van Hoeck, Nicole

2013-01-01

This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research explores how observers make causal beliefs about an event in terms of the person or situation. Thirty-four participants read various short descriptions of social events that implied either the person or the situation as the cause. Half of them were explicitly instructed to judge whether the event was caused by something about the person or the situation (intentional inferences), whereas the other half was instructed simply to read the material carefully (spontaneous inferences). The results showed common activation in areas related to mentalizing, across all types of causes or instructions (posterior superior temporal sulcus, temporo-parietal junction, precuneus). However, the medial prefrontal cortex was activated only under spontaneous instructions, but not under intentional instruction. This suggests a bias toward person attributions (e.g. fundamental attribution bias). Complementary to this, intentional situation attributions activated a stronger and more extended network compared to intentional person attributions, suggesting that situation attributions require more controlled, extended and broader processing of the information. PMID:22345370

5 CFR 1201.125 - Administrative law judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... PRACTICES AND PROCEDURES Procedures for Original Jurisdiction Cases Special Counsel Disciplinary Actions § 1201.125 Administrative law judge. (a) An administrative law judge will hear a disciplinary action... complaint seeking disciplinary action against a Federal or District of Columbia government employee for a...

A hybrid generative-discriminative approach to speaker diarization

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Noulas, A.K.; van Kasteren, T.; Kröse, B.J.A.

2008-01-01

In this paper we present a sound probabilistic approach to speaker diarization. We use a hybrid framework where a distribution over the number of speakers at each point of a multimodal stream is estimated with a discriminative model. The output of this process is used as input in a generative model

Noise Reduction with Microphone Arrays for Speaker Identification

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Cohen, Z

2011-12-22

Reducing acoustic noise in audio recordings is an ongoing problem that plagues many applications. This noise is hard to reduce because of interfering sources and non-stationary behavior of the overall background noise. Many single channel noise reduction algorithms exist but are limited in that the more the noise is reduced; the more the signal of interest is distorted due to the fact that the signal and noise overlap in frequency. Specifically acoustic background noise causes problems in the area of speaker identification. Recording a speaker in the presence of acoustic noise ultimately limits the performance and confidence of speaker identification algorithms. In situations where it is impossible to control the environment where the speech sample is taken, noise reduction filtering algorithms need to be developed to clean the recorded speech of background noise. Because single channel noise reduction algorithms would distort the speech signal, the overall challenge of this project was to see if spatial information provided by microphone arrays could be exploited to aid in speaker identification. The goals are: (1) Test the feasibility of using microphone arrays to reduce background noise in speech recordings; (2) Characterize and compare different multichannel noise reduction algorithms; (3) Provide recommendations for using these multichannel algorithms; and (4) Ultimately answer the question - Can the use of microphone arrays aid in speaker identification?

Gymnastic Judges Benefit from Their Own Motor Experience as Gymnasts

Science.gov (United States)

Pizzera, Alexandra

2012-01-01

Gymnastic judges have the difficult task of evaluating highly complex skills. My purpose in the current study was to examine evidence that judges use their sensorimotor experiences to enhance their perceptual judgments. In a video test, 58 judges rated 31 gymnasts performing a balance beam skill. I compared decision quality between judges who…

Understanding speaker attitudes from prosody by adults with Parkinson's disease.

Science.gov (United States)

Monetta, Laura; Cheang, Henry S; Pell, Marc D

2008-09-01

The ability to interpret vocal (prosodic) cues during social interactions can be disrupted by Parkinson's disease, with notable effects on how emotions are understood from speech. This study investigated whether PD patients who have emotional prosody deficits exhibit further difficulties decoding the attitude of a speaker from prosody. Vocally inflected but semantically nonsensical 'pseudo-utterances' were presented to listener groups with and without PD in two separate rating tasks. Task I required participants to rate how confident a speaker sounded from their voice and Task 2 required listeners to rate how polite the speaker sounded for a comparable set of pseudo-utterances. The results showed that PD patients were significantly less able than HC participants to use prosodic cues to differentiate intended levels of speaker confidence in speech, although the patients could accurately detect the politelimpolite attitude of the speaker from prosody in most cases. Our data suggest that many PD patients fail to use vocal cues to effectively infer a speaker's emotions as well as certain attitudes in speech such as confidence, consistent with the idea that the basal ganglia play a role in the meaningful processing of prosodic sequences in spoken language (Pell & Leonard, 2003).

Psychological Peculiarities of Judge Professional Activity and Decision-Making

Science.gov (United States)

Uspanov, Zholdybai T.; Turabayeva, Dana S.

2016-01-01

The article considers the psychological peculiarities of judge professional activity and decision-making, judge's mental set and requirements to ethical and moral requirements and quality. Moreover, this work offers original job analysis and competency model of judge professional activity. The authors have studied the problems concerning the…

A Method to Integrate GMM, SVM and DTW for Speaker Recognition

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ing-Jr Ding

2014-01-01

Full Text Available This paper develops an effective and efficient scheme to integrate Gaussian mixture model (GMM, support vector machine (SVM, and dynamic time wrapping (DTW for automatic speaker recognition. GMM and SVM are two popular classifiers for speaker recognition applications. DTW is a fast and simple template matching method, and it is frequently seen in applications of speech recognition. In this work, DTW does not play a role to perform speech recognition, and it will be employed to be a verifier for verification of valid speakers. The proposed combination scheme of GMM, SVM and DTW, called SVMGMM-DTW, for speaker recognition in this study is a two-phase verification process task including GMM-SVM verification of the first phase and DTW verification of the second phase. By providing a double check to verify the identity of a speaker, it will be difficult for imposters to try to pass the security protection; therefore, the safety degree of speaker recognition systems will be largely increased. A series of experiments designed on door access control applications demonstrated that the superiority of the developed SVMGMM-DTW on speaker recognition accuracy.

Folk-Psychological Interpretation of Human vs. Humanoid Robot Behavior: Exploring the Intentional Stance toward Robots.

Science.gov (United States)

Thellman, Sam; Silvervarg, Annika; Ziemke, Tom

2017-01-01

People rely on shared folk-psychological theories when judging behavior. These theories guide people's social interactions and therefore need to be taken into consideration in the design of robots and other autonomous systems expected to interact socially with people. It is, however, not yet clear to what degree the mechanisms that underlie people's judgments of robot behavior overlap or differ from the case of human or animal behavior. To explore this issue, participants ( N = 90) were exposed to images and verbal descriptions of eight different behaviors exhibited either by a person or a humanoid robot. Participants were asked to rate the intentionality, controllability and desirability of the behaviors, and to judge the plausibility of seven different types of explanations derived from a recently proposed psychological model of lay causal explanation of human behavior. Results indicate: substantially similar judgments of human and robot behavior, both in terms of (1a) ascriptions of intentionality/controllability/desirability and in terms of (1b) plausibility judgments of behavior explanations; (2a) high level of agreement in judgments of robot behavior - (2b) slightly lower but still largely similar to agreement over human behaviors; (3) systematic differences in judgments concerning the plausibility of goals and dispositions as explanations of human vs. humanoid behavior. Taken together, these results suggest that people's intentional stance toward the robot was in this case very similar to their stance toward the human.

16 CFR 0.14 - Office of Administrative Law Judges.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 16 Commercial Practices 1 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Office of Administrative Law Judges. 0.14 Section 0.14 Commercial Practices FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION ORGANIZATION, PROCEDURES AND RULES OF PRACTICE ORGANIZATION § 0.14 Office of Administrative Law Judges. Administrative law judges are officials to whom the...

LEARNING VECTOR QUANTIZATION FOR ADAPTED GAUSSIAN MIXTURE MODELS IN AUTOMATIC SPEAKER IDENTIFICATION

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

IMEN TRABELSI

2017-05-01

Full Text Available Speaker Identification (SI aims at automatically identifying an individual by extracting and processing information from his/her voice. Speaker voice is a robust a biometric modality that has a strong impact in several application areas. In this study, a new combination learning scheme has been proposed based on Gaussian mixture model-universal background model (GMM-UBM and Learning vector quantization (LVQ for automatic text-independent speaker identification. Features vectors, constituted by the Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC extracted from the speech signal are used to train the New England subset of the TIMIT database. The best results obtained (90% for gender- independent speaker identification, 97 % for male speakers and 93% for female speakers for test data using 36 MFCC features.

Direct Speaker Gaze Promotes Trust in Truth-Ambiguous Statements.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Helene Kreysa

Full Text Available A speaker's gaze behaviour can provide perceivers with a multitude of cues which are relevant for communication, thus constituting an important non-verbal interaction channel. The present study investigated whether direct eye gaze of a speaker affects the likelihood of listeners believing truth-ambiguous statements. Participants were presented with videos in which a speaker produced such statements with either direct or averted gaze. The statements were selected through a rating study to ensure that participants were unlikely to know a-priori whether they were true or not (e.g., "sniffer dogs cannot smell the difference between identical twins". Participants indicated in a forced-choice task whether or not they believed each statement. We found that participants were more likely to believe statements by a speaker looking at them directly, compared to a speaker with averted gaze. Moreover, when participants disagreed with a statement, they were slower to do so when the statement was uttered with direct (compared to averted gaze, suggesting that the process of rejecting a statement as untrue may be inhibited when that statement is accompanied by direct gaze.

Visual speaker gender affects vowel identification in Danish

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Larsen, Charlotte; Tøndering, John

2013-01-01

The experiment examined the effect of visual speaker gender on the vowel perception of 20 native Danish-speaking subjects. Auditory stimuli consisting of a continuum between /muːlə/ ‘muzzle’ and /moːlə/ ‘pier’ generated using TANDEM-STRAIGHT matched with video clips of a female and a male speaker...

Bilingual and Monolingual Children Prefer Native-Accented Speakers

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Andre L. eSouza

2013-12-01

Full Text Available Adults and young children prefer to affiliate with some individuals rather than others. Studies have shown that monolingual children show in-group biases for individuals who speak their native language without a foreign accent (Kinzler, Dupoux, & Spelke, 2007. Some studies have suggested that bilingual children are less influenced than monolinguals by language variety when attributing personality traits to different speakers (Anisfeld & Lambert, 1964, which could indicate that bilinguals have fewer in-group biases and perhaps greater social flexibility. However, no previous studies have compared monolingual and bilingual children’s reactions to speakers with unfamiliar foreign accents. In the present study, we investigated the social preferences of 5-year-old English and French monolinguals and English-French bilinguals. Contrary to our predictions, both monolingual and bilingual preschoolers preferred to be friends with native-accented speakers over speakers who spoke their dominant language with an unfamiliar foreign accent. This result suggests that both monolingual and bilingual children have strong preferences for in-group members who use a familiar language variety, and that bilingualism does not lead to generalized social flexibility.

Bilingual and monolingual children prefer native-accented speakers.

Science.gov (United States)

Souza, André L; Byers-Heinlein, Krista; Poulin-Dubois, Diane

2013-01-01

Adults and young children prefer to affiliate with some individuals rather than others. Studies have shown that monolingual children show in-group biases for individuals who speak their native language without a foreign accent (Kinzler et al., 2007). Some studies have suggested that bilingual children are less influenced than monolinguals by language variety when attributing personality traits to different speakers (Anisfeld and Lambert, 1964), which could indicate that bilinguals have fewer in-group biases and perhaps greater social flexibility. However, no previous studies have compared monolingual and bilingual children's reactions to speakers with unfamiliar foreign accents. In the present study, we investigated the social preferences of 5-year-old English and French monolinguals and English-French bilinguals. Contrary to our predictions, both monolingual and bilingual preschoolers preferred to be friends with native-accented speakers over speakers who spoke their dominant language with an unfamiliar foreign accent. This result suggests that both monolingual and bilingual children have strong preferences for in-group members who use a familiar language variety, and that bilingualism does not lead to generalized social flexibility.

Differences in Sickness Allowance Receipt between Swedish Speakers and Finnish Speakers in Finland

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Kaarina S. Reini

2017-12-01

Full Text Available Previous research has documented lower disability retirement and mortality rates of Swedish speakers as compared with Finnish speakers in Finland. This paper is the first to compare the two language groups with regard to the receipt of sickness allowance, which is an objective health measure that reflects a less severe poor health condition. Register-based data covering the years 1988-2011 are used. We estimate logistic regression models with generalized estimating equations to account for repeated observations at the individual level. We find that Swedish-speaking men have approximately 30 percent lower odds of receiving sickness allowance than Finnish-speaking men, whereas the difference in women is about 15 percent. In correspondence with previous research on all-cause mortality at working ages, we find no language-group difference in sickness allowance receipt in the socially most successful subgroup of the population.

On the improvement of speaker diarization by detecting overlapped speech

OpenAIRE

Hernando Pericás, Francisco Javier; Hernando Pericás, Francisco Javier

2010-01-01

Simultaneous speech in meeting environment is responsible for a certain amount of errors caused by standard speaker diarization systems. We are presenting an overlap detection system for far-field data based on spectral and spatial features, where the spatial features obtained on different microphone pairs are fused by means of principal component analysis. Detected overlap segments are applied for speaker diarization in order to increase the purity of speaker clusters an...

In the CJEU Judges Trust

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Mayoral, Juan A.

2016-01-01

. A theory is offered in the article, which links national judges' trust in the CJEU to their corporatist identification and profile, to their attitudes towards the EU, and to their beliefs about the CJEU's ability to provide decisions that: 1) offer a clear guidance on European Union law, and 2......This article aims to highlight the relevance of judicial trust in international courts, focusing on national judges' trust in the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). EU scholars have put a great deal of effort into explaining how legal and political factors affect the use of preliminary...

Individual Differences in Accurately Judging Personality From Text.

Science.gov (United States)

Hall, Judith A; Goh, Jin X; Mast, Marianne Schmid; Hagedorn, Christian

2016-08-01

This research examines correlates of accuracy in judging Big Five traits from first-person text excerpts. Participants in six studies were recruited from psychology courses or online. In each study, participants performed a task of judging personality from text and performed other ability tasks and/or filled out questionnaires. Participants who were more accurate in judging personality from text were more likely to be female; had personalities that were more agreeable, conscientious, and feminine, and less neurotic and dominant (all controlling for participant gender); scored higher on empathic concern; self-reported more interest in, and attentiveness to, people's personalities in their daily lives; and reported reading more for pleasure, especially fiction. Accuracy was not associated with SAT scores but had a significant relation to vocabulary knowledge. Accuracy did not correlate with tests of judging personality and emotion based on audiovisual cues. This research is the first to address individual differences in accurate judgment of personality from text, thus adding to the literature on correlates of the good judge of personality. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Role of Speaker Cues in Attention Inference

OpenAIRE

Jin Joo Lee; Cynthia Breazeal; David DeSteno

2017-01-01

Current state-of-the-art approaches to emotion recognition primarily focus on modeling the nonverbal expressions of the sole individual without reference to contextual elements such as the co-presence of the partner. In this paper, we demonstrate that the accurate inference of listeners’ social-emotional state of attention depends on accounting for the nonverbal behaviors of their storytelling partner, namely their speaker cues. To gain a deeper understanding of the role of speaker cues in at...

Speaker recognition through NLP and CWT modeling.

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Brown-VanHoozer, A.; Kercel, S. W.; Tucker, R. W.

1999-06-23

The objective of this research is to develop a system capable of identifying speakers on wiretaps from a large database (>500 speakers) with a short search time duration (<30 seconds), and with better than 90% accuracy. Much previous research in speaker recognition has led to algorithms that produced encouraging preliminary results, but were overwhelmed when applied to populations of more than a dozen or so different speakers. The authors are investigating a solution to the ''huge population'' problem by seeking two completely different kinds of characterizing features. These features are extracted using the techniques of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and the continuous wavelet transform (CWT). NLP extracts precise neurological, verbal and non-verbal information, and assimilates the information into useful patterns. These patterns are based on specific cues demonstrated by each individual, and provide ways of determining congruency between verbal and non-verbal cues. The primary NLP modalities are characterized through word spotting (or verbal predicates cues, e.g., see, sound, feel, etc.) while the secondary modalities would be characterized through the speech transcription used by the individual. This has the practical effect of reducing the size of the search space, and greatly speeding up the process of identifying an unknown speaker. The wavelet-based line of investigation concentrates on using vowel phonemes and non-verbal cues, such as tempo. The rationale for concentrating on vowels is there are a limited number of vowels phonemes, and at least one of them usually appears in even the shortest of speech segments. Using the fast, CWT algorithm, the details of both the formant frequency and the glottal excitation characteristics can be easily extracted from voice waveforms. The differences in the glottal excitation waveforms as well as the formant frequency are evident in the CWT output. More significantly, the CWT reveals significant

49 CFR 1503.607 - Administrative law judges.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-10-01

... 49 Transportation 9 2010-10-01 2010-10-01 false Administrative law judges. 1503.607 Section 1503... PROCEDURES Rules of Practice in TSA Civil Penalty Actions § 1503.607 Administrative law judges. (a) Powers of...) Administer oaths and affirmations. (4) Issue subpoenas authorized by law. (5) Rule on offers of proof. (6...

Race in Conflict with Heritage: "Black" Heritage Language Speaker of Japanese

Science.gov (United States)

Doerr, Neriko Musha; Kumagai, Yuri

2014-01-01

"Heritage language speaker" is a relatively new term to denote minority language speakers who grew up in a household where the language was used or those who have a family, ancestral, or racial connection to the minority language. In research on heritage language speakers, overlap between these 2 definitions is often assumed--that is,…

Are Cantonese-speakers really descriptivists? Revisiting cross-cultural semantics.

Science.gov (United States)

Lam, Barry

2010-05-01

In an article in Cognition [Machery, E., Mallon, R., Nichols, S., & Stich, S. (2004). Semantics cross-cultural style. Cognition, 92, B1-B12] present data which purports to show that East Asian Cantonese-speakers tend to have descriptivist intuitions about the referents of proper names, while Western English-speakers tend to have causal-historical intuitions about proper names. Machery et al. take this finding to support the view that some intuitions, the universality of which they claim is central to philosophical theories, vary according to cultural background. Machery et al. conclude from their findings that the philosophical methodology of consulting intuitions about hypothetical cases is flawed vis a vis the goal of determining truths about some philosophical domains like philosophical semantics. In the following study, three new vignettes in English were given to Western native English-speakers, and Cantonese translations were given to native Cantonese-speaking immigrants from a Cantonese community in Southern California. For all three vignettes, questions were given to elicit intuitions about the referent of a proper name and the truth-value of an uttered sentence containing a proper name. The results from this study reveal that East Asian Cantonese-speakers do not differ from Western English-speakers in ways that support Machery et al.'s conclusions. This new data concerning the intuitions of Cantonese-speakers raises questions about whether cross-cultural variation in answers to questions on certain vignettes reveal genuine differences in intuitions, or whether such differences stem from non-intuitional differences, such as differences in linguistic competence. Copyright 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Analysis of human scream and its impact on text-independent speaker verification.

Science.gov (United States)

Hansen, John H L; Nandwana, Mahesh Kumar; Shokouhi, Navid

2017-04-01

Scream is defined as sustained, high-energy vocalizations that lack phonological structure. Lack of phonological structure is how scream is identified from other forms of loud vocalization, such as "yell." This study investigates the acoustic aspects of screams and addresses those that are known to prevent standard speaker identification systems from recognizing the identity of screaming speakers. It is well established that speaker variability due to changes in vocal effort and Lombard effect contribute to degraded performance in automatic speech systems (i.e., speech recognition, speaker identification, diarization, etc.). However, previous research in the general area of speaker variability has concentrated on human speech production, whereas less is known about non-speech vocalizations. The UT-NonSpeech corpus is developed here to investigate speaker verification from scream samples. This study considers a detailed analysis in terms of fundamental frequency, spectral peak shift, frame energy distribution, and spectral tilt. It is shown that traditional speaker recognition based on the Gaussian mixture models-universal background model framework is unreliable when evaluated with screams.

Robust Digital Speech Watermarking For Online Speaker Recognition

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mohammad Ali Nematollahi

2015-01-01

Full Text Available A robust and blind digital speech watermarking technique has been proposed for online speaker recognition systems based on Discrete Wavelet Packet Transform (DWPT and multiplication to embed the watermark in the amplitudes of the wavelet’s subbands. In order to minimize the degradation effect of the watermark, these subbands are selected where less speaker-specific information was available (500 Hz–3500 Hz and 6000 Hz–7000 Hz. Experimental results on Texas Instruments Massachusetts Institute of Technology (TIMIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, and Mobile Biometry (MOBIO show that the degradation for speaker verification and identification is 1.16% and 2.52%, respectively. Furthermore, the proposed watermark technique can provide enough robustness against different signal processing attacks.

Judging in Rhythmic Gymnastics at Different Levels of Performance.

Science.gov (United States)

Leandro, Catarina; Ávila-Carvalho, Lurdes; Sierra-Palmeiro, Elena; Bobo-Arce, Marta

2017-12-01

This study aimed to analyse the quality of difficulty judging in rhythmic gymnastics, at different levels of performance. The sample consisted of 1152 difficulty scores concerning 288 individual routines, performed in the World Championships in 2013. The data were analysed using the mean absolute judge deviation from the final difficulty score, a Cronbach's alpha coefficient and intra-class correlations, for consistency and reliability assessment. For validity assessment, mean deviations of judges' difficulty scores, the Kendall's coefficient of concordance W and ANOVA eta-squared values were calculated. Overall, the results in terms of consistency (Cronbach's alpha mostly above 0.90) and reliability (intra-class correlations for single and average measures above 0.70 and 0.90, respectively) were satisfactory, in the first and third parts of the ranking on all apparatus. The medium level gymnasts, those in the second part of the ranking, had inferior reliability indices and highest score dispersion. In this part, the minimum of corrected item-total correlation of individual judges was 0.55, with most values well below, and the matrix for between-judge correlations identified remarkable inferior correlations. These findings suggest that the quality of difficulty judging in rhythmic gymnastics may be compromised at certain levels of performance. In future, special attention should be paid to the judging analysis of the medium level gymnasts, as well as the Code of Points applicability at this level.

A Joint Approach for Single-Channel Speaker Identification and Speech Separation

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Mowlaee, Pejman; Saeidi, Rahim; Christensen, Mads Græsbøll

2012-01-01

) accuracy, here, we report the objective and subjective results as well. The results show that the proposed system performs as well as the best of the state-of-the-art in terms of perceived quality while its performance in terms of speaker identification and automatic speech recognition results......In this paper, we present a novel system for joint speaker identification and speech separation. For speaker identification a single-channel speaker identification algorithm is proposed which provides an estimate of signal-to-signal ratio (SSR) as a by-product. For speech separation, we propose...... a sinusoidal model-based algorithm. The speech separation algorithm consists of a double-talk/single-talk detector followed by a minimum mean square error estimator of sinusoidal parameters for finding optimal codevectors from pre-trained speaker codebooks. In evaluating the proposed system, we start from...

A Study on Metadiscoursive Interaction in the MA Theses of the Native Speakers of English and the Turkish Speakers of English

Science.gov (United States)

Köroglu, Zehra; Tüm, Gülden

2017-01-01

This study has been conducted to evaluate the TM usage in the MA theses written by the native speakers (NSs) of English and the Turkish speakers (TSs) of English. The purpose is to compare the TM usage in the introduction, results and discussion, and conclusion sections by both groups' randomly selected MA theses in the field of ELT between the…

Speaker Recognition from Emotional Speech Using I-vector Approach

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MACKOVÁ Lenka

2014-05-01

Full Text Available In recent years the concept of i-vectors become very popular and successful in the field of the speaker verification. The basic principle of i-vectors is that each utterance is represented by fixed-length feature vector of low-dimension. In the literature for purpose of speaker verification various recordings obtained from telephones or microphones were used. The aim of this experiment was to perform speaker verification using speaker model trained with emotional recordings on i-vector basis. The Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC, log energy, their deltas and acceleration coefficients were used in process of features extraction. As the classification methods of the verification system Mahalanobis distance metric in combination with Eigen Factor Radial normalization was used and in the second approach Cosine Distance Scoring (CSS metric with Within-class Covariance Normalization as a channel compensation was employed. This verification system used emotional recordings of male subjects from freely available German emotional database (Emo-DB.

Segmentation of the Speaker's Face Region with Audiovisual Correlation

Science.gov (United States)

Liu, Yuyu; Sato, Yoichi

The ability to find the speaker's face region in a video is useful for various applications. In this work, we develop a novel technique to find this region within different time windows, which is robust against the changes of view, scale, and background. The main thrust of our technique is to integrate audiovisual correlation analysis into a video segmentation framework. We analyze the audiovisual correlation locally by computing quadratic mutual information between our audiovisual features. The computation of quadratic mutual information is based on the probability density functions estimated by kernel density estimation with adaptive kernel bandwidth. The results of this audiovisual correlation analysis are incorporated into graph cut-based video segmentation to resolve a globally optimum extraction of the speaker's face region. The setting of any heuristic threshold in this segmentation is avoided by learning the correlation distributions of speaker and background by expectation maximization. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can detect the speaker's face region accurately and robustly for different views, scales, and backgrounds.

The TNO speaker diarization system for NIST RT05s meeting data

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Leeuwen, D.A. van

2006-01-01

The TNO speaker speaker diarization system is based on a standard BIC segmentation and clustering algorithm. Since for the NIST Rich Transcription speaker dizarization evaluation measure correct speech detection appears to be essential, we have developed a speech activity detector (SAD) as well.

Constitutional judges (guarantee of the Constitution and responsibility

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Francisco Javier Ansuátegui Roig

2012-06-01

Full Text Available My aim in this paper is to propose a reflection on the position and the importance that the constitutional judge has in the legal systems of contemporary constitutionalism. The figure of the judge responsible of protecting the Constitution is a key institution, without which we cannot understand the laws of constitutional democracies, their current lines of development, and the guarantee of rights and freedoms that constitute the normative core of these systems. Moreover, the reflection on the exercise of the powers of the judge, its scope and its justification is an important part of contemporary legal discussion, still relevant, albeit not exclusively - in the field of legal philosophy. The object of attention of my reflection is the judge who has the power of judicial review, in a scheme of defense of the Constitution, regardless the specific ways of this defense.

Internal request modification by first and second language speakers ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

This study focuses on the question of whether Luganda English speakers would negatively transfer into their English speech the use of syntactic and lexical down graders resulting in pragmatic failure. Data were collected from Luganda and Luganda English speakers by means of a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) ...

Speaker Input Variability Does Not Explain Why Larger Populations Have Simpler Languages.

Science.gov (United States)

Atkinson, Mark; Kirby, Simon; Smith, Kenny

2015-01-01

A learner's linguistic input is more variable if it comes from a greater number of speakers. Higher speaker input variability has been shown to facilitate the acquisition of phonemic boundaries, since data drawn from multiple speakers provides more information about the distribution of phonemes in a speech community. It has also been proposed that speaker input variability may have a systematic influence on individual-level learning of morphology, which can in turn influence the group-level characteristics of a language. Languages spoken by larger groups of people have less complex morphology than those spoken in smaller communities. While a mechanism by which the number of speakers could have such an effect is yet to be convincingly identified, differences in speaker input variability, which is thought to be larger in larger groups, may provide an explanation. By hindering the acquisition, and hence faithful cross-generational transfer, of complex morphology, higher speaker input variability may result in structural simplification. We assess this claim in two experiments which investigate the effect of such variability on language learning, considering its influence on a learner's ability to segment a continuous speech stream and acquire a morphologically complex miniature language. We ultimately find no evidence to support the proposal that speaker input variability influences language learning and so cannot support the hypothesis that it explains how population size determines the structural properties of language.

Pitch perception and production in congenital amusia: Evidence from Cantonese speakers.

Science.gov (United States)

Liu, Fang; Chan, Alice H D; Ciocca, Valter; Roquet, Catherine; Peretz, Isabelle; Wong, Patrick C M

2016-07-01

This study investigated pitch perception and production in speech and music in individuals with congenital amusia (a disorder of musical pitch processing) who are native speakers of Cantonese, a tone language with a highly complex tonal system. Sixteen Cantonese-speaking congenital amusics and 16 controls performed a set of lexical tone perception, production, singing, and psychophysical pitch threshold tasks. Their tone production accuracy and singing proficiency were subsequently judged by independent listeners, and subjected to acoustic analyses. Relative to controls, amusics showed impaired discrimination of lexical tones in both speech and non-speech conditions. They also received lower ratings for singing proficiency, producing larger pitch interval deviations and making more pitch interval errors compared to controls. Demonstrating higher pitch direction identification thresholds than controls for both speech syllables and piano tones, amusics nevertheless produced native lexical tones with comparable pitch trajectories and intelligibility as controls. Significant correlations were found between pitch threshold and lexical tone perception, music perception and production, but not between lexical tone perception and production for amusics. These findings provide further evidence that congenital amusia is a domain-general language-independent pitch-processing deficit that is associated with severely impaired music perception and production, mildly impaired speech perception, and largely intact speech production.

The problem of the quality of judging in rhythmic gymnastics

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V.V. Perederij

2013-03-01

Full Text Available The aim of the study is to develop a classification of factors influencing the quality of judging in rhythmic gymnastics. As a result of consolidation of theoretical information and practical experience was a list of the factors that negatively affect the behavior of judges in gymnastics, which were divided into two groups: the objective and non-objective (subjective. Objective factors include intense competition schedule, fatigue, especially memory, attention, competition rules, to the subjective: the ratio of judges to their gymnast (team or to the opposing team, the lack of interest in the performance, composition of the judging panel, the influence of authority and popularity sportswomen dependence on its management. Respondents were unanimous in that independent professional judges are needed in a rhythmic gymnastics. It is set that 64% respondent mark the presence of pressure on judges from the side of competitors.

29 CFR 18.9 - Consent order or settlement; settlement judge procedure.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... has sole discretion to decide whether to appoint a settlement judge, except that a settlement judge... assigned to hear and decide the case. (ii) The settlement judge shall not be appointed to hear and decide... 29 Labor 1 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 true Consent order or settlement; settlement judge procedure. 18...

Signal-to-Signal Ratio Independent Speaker Identification for Co-channel Speech Signals

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Saeidi, Rahim; Mowlaee, Pejman; Kinnunen, Tomi

2010-01-01

In this paper, we consider speaker identification for the co-channel scenario in which speech mixture from speakers is recorded by one microphone only. The goal is to identify both of the speakers from their mixed signal. High recognition accuracies have already been reported when an accurately...

8 CFR 246.4 - Immigration judge's authority; withdrawal and substitution.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 8 Aliens and Nationality 1 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Immigration judge's authority; withdrawal... IMMIGRATION REGULATIONS RESCISSION OF ADJUSTMENT OF STATUS § 246.4 Immigration judge's authority; withdrawal and substitution. In any proceeding conducted under this part, the immigration judge shall have...

20 CFR 416.1444 - Administrative law judge hearing procedures-general.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-04-01

... in order to receive new and material evidence. The administrative law judge may decide when the... 20 Employees' Benefits 2 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 false Administrative law judge hearing procedures... Reopening of Determinations and Decisions Administrative Law Judge Hearing Procedures § 416.1444...

5 CFR 1201.142 - Actions filed by administrative law judges.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 5 Administrative Personnel 3 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Actions filed by administrative law... AND PROCEDURES PRACTICES AND PROCEDURES Procedures for Original Jurisdiction Cases Actions Against Administrative Law Judges § 1201.142 Actions filed by administrative law judges. An administrative law judge who...

Does verbatim sentence recall underestimate the language competence of near-native speakers?

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Judith eSchweppe

2015-02-01

Full Text Available Verbatim sentence recall is widely used to test the language competence of native and non-native speakers since it involves comprehension and production of connected speech. However, we assume that, to maintain surface information, sentence recall relies particularly on attentional resources, which differentially affects native and non-native speakers. Since even in near-natives language processing is less automatized than in native speakers, processing a sentence in a foreign language plus retaining its surface may result in a cognitive overload. We contrasted sentence recall performance of German native speakers with that of highly proficient non-natives. Non-natives recalled the sentences significantly poorer than the natives, but performed equally well on a cloze test. This implies that sentence recall underestimates the language competence of good non-native speakers in mixed groups with native speakers. The findings also suggest that theories of sentence recall need to consider both its linguistic and its attentional aspects.

"The empathy impulse: A multinomial model of intentional and unintentional empathy for pain": Correction.

Science.gov (United States)

2018-04-01

Reports an error in "The empathy impulse: A multinomial model of intentional and unintentional empathy for pain" by C. Daryl Cameron, Victoria L. Spring and Andrew R. Todd ( Emotion , 2017[Apr], Vol 17[3], 395-411). In this article, there was an error in the calculation of some of the effect sizes. The w effect size was manually computed incorrectly. The incorrect number of total observations was used, which affected the final effect size estimates. This computing error does not change any of the results or interpretations about model fit based on the G² statistic, or about significant differences across conditions in process parameters. Therefore, it does not change any of the hypothesis tests or conclusions. The w statistics for overall model fit should be .02 instead of .04 in Study 1, .01 instead of .02 in Study 2, .01 instead of .03 for the OIT in Study 3 (model fit for the PIT remains the same: .00), and .02 instead of .03 in Study 4. The corrected tables can be seen here: http://osf.io/qebku at the Open Science Framework site for the article. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2017-01641-001.) Empathy for pain is often described as automatic. Here, we used implicit measurement and multinomial modeling to formally quantify unintentional empathy for pain: empathy that occurs despite intentions to the contrary. We developed the pain identification task (PIT), a sequential priming task wherein participants judge the painfulness of target experiences while trying to avoid the influence of prime experiences. Using multinomial modeling, we distinguished 3 component processes underlying PIT performance: empathy toward target stimuli (Intentional Empathy), empathy toward prime stimuli (Unintentional Empathy), and bias to judge target stimuli as painful (Response Bias). In Experiment 1, imposing a fast (vs. slow) response deadline uniquely reduced Intentional Empathy. In Experiment 2, inducing imagine-self (vs. imagine

20 CFR 405.320 - Administrative law judge hearing procedures-general.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-04-01

...) Conduct of the hearing. The administrative law judge will decide the order in which the evidence will be... 20 Employees' Benefits 2 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 false Administrative law judge hearing procedures... PROCESS FOR ADJUDICATING INITIAL DISABILITY CLAIMS Administrative Law Judge Hearing § 405.320...

Are Cantonese-Speakers Really Descriptivists? Revisiting Cross-Cultural Semantics

Science.gov (United States)

Lam, Barry

2010-01-01

In an article in "Cognition" [Machery, E., Mallon, R., Nichols, S., & Stich, S. (2004). "Semantics cross-cultural style." "Cognition, 92", B1-B12] present data which purports to show that East Asian Cantonese-speakers tend to have descriptivist intuitions about the referents of proper names, while Western English-speakers tend to have…

Individual Evaluation of Judges in Germany

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Johannes Riedel

2014-12-01

Full Text Available In Germany, with the exception of the five federal supreme courts, court organization is a responsibility of the Länder (federal states. In some of the Länder, so-called employee profiles (“Anforderungsprofile“ have been established for judicial office. These lists attempt to describe criteria for certain judicial positions. They are applied in the process of promotion but also serve as an indicator for initial appointment.The European picture with respect to individual evaluation of judges is extremely diverse. In preparation for this paper, the author attempted to ascertain the situation in the Council of Europe member states. The results of this survey (to which 23 members of the CCJE have replied are listed in Appendix I.The general difficulty of professional evaluation of judges lies in the limits that have to be observed for constitutional reasons. In Germany, the overall rule of every evaluation is that there has to be a reliable factual basis. The evaluator is under a duty not to omit relevant aspects, to consider all the facts that make part of the picture, not to select arbitrarily but to try to paint a true and full picture of the person who is being evaluated. In the case of judges, it is unacceptable to comment on the core of judicial decision-making. Evaluations may be challenged in the administrative court on grounds of fact as well as on grounds of law. En Alemania, con la excepción de las cinco cortes supremas federales, la organización judicial es responsabilidad de los Länder (estados federales. En algunos de estos Länder, se han establecido los denominados perfiles de empleados (“Anforderungsprofile” para la oficina judicial. Estas listas pretenden describir los criterios para determinados cargos judiciales. Se aplican en los procesos de promoción, pero también sirven como un indicador para el nombramiento inicial.El panorama europeo respecto a la evaluación individual de los jueces es muy diverso. Preparando

“Judge-Only” Justice V. Collaborators: Introduction

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Maria Cristina Reale

2011-12-01

Full Text Available Who and how many are the collaborators of judges? The answer may differ according to the perspective under which Justice is considered. In this introduction, and in the light of the papers submitted in the first session of the workshop, a distinction is proposed between “direct” and “indirect” collaborators of judges, according to the side of Justice observed. If Justice is confined simply to the classical function performed by courts, i.e. deciding cases according to the law, it seems quite obvious to remark that judges never act alone, since they normally benefit from the help of different kinds of assistants who, at different levels, help them in their daily work. But when paying attention to the facet of Justice concerning the concrete enforcement of decision, it becomes inevitable to take into account different categories of subjects involved in the “administration” of justice. Under this second perspective, justice is a matter for everyone: not only judges and prosecutors, but other professionals and bodies, including also Governments and other public institutions, since their decisions concerning, for example, human and material resources assigned to the judicial system have inevitably an impact on Justice considered as a public service. Lastly, the aptitude of the public opinion cannot be ignored: the degree of public satisfaction with the judicial system may influence the demand of justice as well as its material functioning. Accordingly, even common citizens could be seen as a very peculiar sort of “collaborators” of judges.

Utilising Tree-Based Ensemble Learning for Speaker Segmentation

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Abou-Zleikha, Mohamed; Tan, Zheng-Hua; Christensen, Mads Græsbøll

2014-01-01

In audio and speech processing, accurate detection of the changing points between multiple speakers in speech segments is an important stage for several applications such as speaker identification and tracking. Bayesian Information Criteria (BIC)-based approaches are the most traditionally used...... for a certain condition, the model becomes biased to the data used for training limiting the model’s generalisation ability. In this paper, we propose a BIC-based tuning-free approach for speaker segmentation through the use of ensemble-based learning. A forest of segmentation trees is constructed in which each...... tree is trained using a sampled version of the speech segment. During the tree construction process, a set of randomly selected points in the input sequence is examined as potential segmentation points. The point that yields the highest ΔBIC is chosen and the same process is repeated for the resultant...

13 CFR 134.715 - Can a Judge reconsider his decision?

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 13 Business Credit and Assistance 1 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Can a Judge reconsider his decision? 134.715 Section 134.715 Business Credit and Assistance SMALL BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION RULES OF....715 Can a Judge reconsider his decision? (a) The Judge may reconsider an appeal decision within 20...

8 CFR 1235.6 - Referral to immigration judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 8 Aliens and Nationality 1 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Referral to immigration judge. 1235.6 Section 1235.6 Aliens and Nationality EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW, DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE IMMIGRATION REGULATIONS INSPECTION OF PERSONS APPLYING FOR ADMISSION § 1235.6 Referral to immigration judge...

29 CFR 6.19 - Decision of the Administrative Law Judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... Contracts Subject to the Service Contract Act) § 6.19 Decision of the Administrative Law Judge. (a) Proposed... presented on the record. The decision of the Administrative Law Judge shall be based upon a consideration of... respondent is found to have violated the Service Contract Act, the Administrative Law Judge shall include in...

20 CFR 405.325 - Issues before an administrative law judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-04-01

..., before deciding the issue, provides you an opportunity to address it. The administrative law judge or any... Act, we already may have decided a fact that is an issue before the administrative law judge. If this... 20 Employees' Benefits 2 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 false Issues before an administrative law judge...

Judging Anomalies at the 2010 Olympics in Men's Figure Skating

Science.gov (United States)

Looney, Marilyn A.

2012-01-01

The purpose of this study was to determine if the 2010 Olympic figure skating judges had trouble scoring Plushenko and the transitions program component, and if the International Skating Union's (ISU) "corridor" method flagged the same judging anomalies as the Rasch analyses. A 3-facet (skater by program component by judge) Rasch rating…

Teaching Portuguese to Spanish Speakers: A Case for Trilingualism

Science.gov (United States)

Carvalho, Ana M.; Freire, Juliana Luna; da Silva, Antonio J. B.

2010-01-01

Portuguese is the sixth-most-spoken native language in the world, with approximately 240,000,000 speakers. Within the United States, there is a growing demand for K-12 language programs to engage the community of Portuguese heritage speakers. According to the 2000 U.S. census, 85,000 school-age children speak Portuguese at home. As a result, more…

Speaker diarization system on the 2007 NIST rich transcription meeting recognition evaluation

Science.gov (United States)

Sun, Hanwu; Nwe, Tin Lay; Koh, Eugene Chin Wei; Bin, Ma; Li, Haizhou

2007-09-01

This paper presents a speaker diarization system developed at the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) for NIST Rich Transcription 2007 (RT-07) evaluation task. We describe in details our primary approaches for the speaker diarization on the Multiple Distant Microphones (MDM) conditions in conference room scenario. Our proposed system consists of six modules: 1). Least-mean squared (NLMS) adaptive filter for the speaker direction estimate via Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA), 2). An initial speaker clustering via two-stage TDOA histogram distribution quantization approach, 3). Multiple microphone speaker data alignment via GCC-PHAT Time Delay Estimate (TDE) among all the distant microphone channel signals, 4). A speaker clustering algorithm based on GMM modeling approach, 5). Non-speech removal via speech/non-speech verification mechanism and, 6). Silence removal via "Double-Layer Windowing"(DLW) method. We achieves error rate of 31.02% on the 2006 Spring (RT-06s) MDM evaluation task and a competitive overall error rate of 15.32% for the NIST Rich Transcription 2007 (RT-07) MDM evaluation task.

20 CFR 658.710 - Decision of the Administrative Law Judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-04-01

... 20 Employees' Benefits 3 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 false Decision of the Administrative Law Judge. 658... Agencies § 658.710 Decision of the Administrative Law Judge. (a) The Administrative Law Judge shall have jurisdiction to decide all issues of fact and related issues of law and to grant or deny appropriate motions...

HUD Administrative Law Judges Decisions

Data.gov (United States)

Department of Housing and Urban Development — This site contains substantive and precedential decisions issued by the Office of Administrative Law Judges. The site does not contain subsequent rulings or...

8 CFR 235.6 - Referral to immigration judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 8 Aliens and Nationality 1 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Referral to immigration judge. 235.6 Section 235.6 Aliens and Nationality DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY IMMIGRATION REGULATIONS INSPECTION OF PERSONS APPLYING FOR ADMISSION § 235.6 Referral to immigration judge. (a) Notice—(1) Referral by Form I...

29 CFR 6.41 - Referral to Chief Administrative Law Judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... Administrative Law Judge to conduct such hearings as may be necessary to decide the disputed matters. A copy of... 29 Labor 1 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 true Referral to Chief Administrative Law Judge. 6.41 Section 6... Substantial Interest Proceedings § 6.41 Referral to Chief Administrative Law Judge. (a) Upon timely receipt of...

Speaker Introductions at Internal Medicine Grand Rounds: Forms of Address Reveal Gender Bias.

Science.gov (United States)

Files, Julia A; Mayer, Anita P; Ko, Marcia G; Friedrich, Patricia; Jenkins, Marjorie; Bryan, Michael J; Vegunta, Suneela; Wittich, Christopher M; Lyle, Melissa A; Melikian, Ryan; Duston, Trevor; Chang, Yu-Hui H; Hayes, Sharonne N

2017-05-01

Gender bias has been identified as one of the drivers of gender disparity in academic medicine. Bias may be reinforced by gender subordinating language or differential use of formality in forms of address. Professional titles may influence the perceived expertise and authority of the referenced individual. The objective of this study is to examine how professional titles were used in the same and mixed-gender speaker introductions at Internal Medicine Grand Rounds (IMGR). A retrospective observational study of video-archived speaker introductions at consecutive IMGR was conducted at two different locations (Arizona, Minnesota) of an academic medical center. Introducers and speakers at IMGR were physician and scientist peers holding MD, PhD, or MD/PhD degrees. The primary outcome was whether or not a speaker's professional title was used during the first form of address during speaker introductions at IMGR. As secondary outcomes, we evaluated whether or not the speakers professional title was used in any form of address during the introduction. Three hundred twenty-one forms of address were analyzed. Female introducers were more likely to use professional titles when introducing any speaker during the first form of address compared with male introducers (96.2% [102/106] vs. 65.6% [141/215]; p form of address 97.8% (45/46) compared with male dyads who utilized a formal title 72.4% (110/152) of the time (p = 0.007). In mixed-gender dyads, where the introducer was female and speaker male, formal titles were used 95.0% (57/60) of the time. Male introducers of female speakers utilized professional titles 49.2% (31/63) of the time (p addressed by professional title than were men introduced by men. Differential formality in speaker introductions may amplify isolation, marginalization, and professional discomfiture expressed by women faculty in academic medicine.

Shhh… I Need Quiet! Children's Understanding of American, British, and Japanese-accented English Speakers.

Science.gov (United States)

Bent, Tessa; Holt, Rachael Frush

2018-02-01

Children's ability to understand speakers with a wide range of dialects and accents is essential for efficient language development and communication in a global society. Here, the impact of regional dialect and foreign-accent variability on children's speech understanding was evaluated in both quiet and noisy conditions. Five- to seven-year-old children ( n = 90) and adults ( n = 96) repeated sentences produced by three speakers with different accents-American English, British English, and Japanese-accented English-in quiet or noisy conditions. Adults had no difficulty understanding any speaker in quiet conditions. Their performance declined for the nonnative speaker with a moderate amount of noise; their performance only substantially declined for the British English speaker (i.e., below 93% correct) when their understanding of the American English speaker was also impeded. In contrast, although children showed accurate word recognition for the American and British English speakers in quiet conditions, they had difficulty understanding the nonnative speaker even under ideal listening conditions. With a moderate amount of noise, their perception of British English speech declined substantially and their ability to understand the nonnative speaker was particularly poor. These results suggest that although school-aged children can understand unfamiliar native dialects under ideal listening conditions, their ability to recognize words in these dialects may be highly susceptible to the influence of environmental degradation. Fully adult-like word identification for speakers with unfamiliar accents and dialects may exhibit a protracted developmental trajectory.

Google Home: smart speaker as environmental control unit.

Science.gov (United States)

Noda, Kenichiro

2017-08-23

Environmental Control Units (ECU) are devices or a system that allows a person to control appliances in their home or work environment. Such system can be utilized by clients with physical and/or functional disability to enhance their ability to control their environment, to promote independence and improve their quality of life. Over the last several years, there have been an emergence of several inexpensive, commercially-available, voice activated smart speakers into the market such as Google Home and Amazon Echo. These smart speakers are equipped with far field microphone that supports voice recognition, and allows for complete hand-free operation for various purposes, including for playing music, for information retrieval, and most importantly, for environmental control. Clients with disability could utilize these features to turn the unit into a simple ECU that is completely voice activated and wirelessly connected to appliances. Smart speakers, with their ease of setup, low cost and versatility, may be a more affordable and accessible alternative to the traditional ECU. Implications for Rehabilitation Environmental Control Units (ECU) enable independence for physically and functionally disabled clients, and reduce burden and frequency of demands on carers. Traditional ECU can be costly and may require clients to learn specialized skills to use. Smart speakers have the potential to be used as a new-age ECU by overcoming these barriers, and can be used by a wider range of clients.

Soft Regulators, though judges

NARCIS (Netherlands)

de Geest, G.G.A.; Dari Mattiacci, G.

Judges have a tendency to be more demanding than regulators. In the United States, a majority of the courts has adopted the rule that the unexcused violation of a statutory standard is negligence per se. However, the converse does not hold: compliance with regulation does not relieve the injurer of

A general auditory bias for handling speaker variability in speech? Evidence in humans and songbirds

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Buddhamas eKriengwatana

2015-08-01

Full Text Available Different speakers produce the same speech sound differently, yet listeners are still able to reliably identify the speech sound. How listeners can adjust their perception to compensate for speaker differences in speech, and whether these compensatory processes are unique only to humans, is still not fully understood. In this study we compare the ability of humans and zebra finches to categorize vowels despite speaker variation in speech in order to test the hypothesis that accommodating speaker and gender differences in isolated vowels can be achieved without prior experience with speaker-related variability. Using a behavioural Go/No-go task and identical stimuli, we compared Australian English adults’ (naïve to Dutch and zebra finches’ (naïve to human speech ability to categorize /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ vowels of an novel Dutch speaker after learning to discriminate those vowels from only one other speaker. Experiment 1 and 2 presented vowels of two speakers interspersed or blocked, respectively. Results demonstrate that categorization of vowels is possible without prior exposure to speaker-related variability in speech for zebra finches, and in non-native vowel categories for humans. Therefore, this study is the first to provide evidence for what might be a species-shared auditory bias that may supersede speaker-related information during vowel categorization. It additionally provides behavioural evidence contradicting a prior hypothesis that accommodation of speaker differences is achieved via the use of formant ratios. Therefore, investigations of alternative accounts of vowel normalization that incorporate the possibility of an auditory bias for disregarding inter-speaker variability are warranted.

Presenting and processing information in background noise: A combined speaker-listener perspective.

Science.gov (United States)

Bockstael, Annelies; Samyn, Laurie; Corthals, Paul; Botteldooren, Dick

2018-01-01

Transferring information orally in background noise is challenging, for both speaker and listener. Successful transfer depends on complex interaction between characteristics related to listener, speaker, task, background noise, and context. To fully assess the underlying real-life mechanisms, experimental design has to mimic this complex reality. In the current study, the effects of different types of background noise have been studied in an ecologically valid test design. Documentary-style information had to be presented by the speaker and simultaneously acquired by the listener in four conditions: quiet, unintelligible multitalker babble, fluctuating city street noise, and little varying highway noise. For both speaker and listener, the primary task was to focus on the content that had to be transferred. In addition, for the speakers, the occurrence of hesitation phenomena was assessed. The listener had to perform an additional secondary task to address listening effort. For the listener the condition with the most eventful background noise, i.e., fluctuating city street noise, appeared to be the most difficult with markedly longer duration of the secondary task. In the same fluctuating background noise, speech appeared to be less disfluent, suggesting a higher level of concentration from the speaker's side.

Key-note speaker: Predictors of weight loss after preventive Health consultations

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Lous, Jørgen; Freund, Kirsten S

2018-01-01

Invited key-note speaker ved conferencen: Preventive Medicine and Public Health Conference 2018, July 16-17, London.......Invited key-note speaker ved conferencen: Preventive Medicine and Public Health Conference 2018, July 16-17, London....

Automaticity and stability of adaptation to a foreign-accented speaker

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Witteman, M.J.; Bardhan, N.P.; Weber, A.C.; McQueen, J.M.

2015-01-01

In three cross-modal priming experiments we asked whether adaptation to a foreign-accented speaker is automatic, and whether adaptation can be seen after a long delay between initial exposure and test. Dutch listeners were exposed to a Hebrew-accented Dutch speaker with two types of Dutch words:

Dysprosody and Stimulus Effects in Cantonese Speakers with Parkinson's Disease

Science.gov (United States)

Ma, Joan K.-Y.; Whitehill, Tara; Cheung, Katherine S.-K.

2010-01-01

Background: Dysprosody is a common feature in speakers with hypokinetic dysarthria. However, speech prosody varies across different types of speech materials. This raises the question of what is the most appropriate speech material for the evaluation of dysprosody. Aims: To characterize the prosodic impairment in Cantonese speakers with…

Profiles of an Acquisition Generation: Nontraditional Heritage Speakers of Spanish

Science.gov (United States)

DeFeo, Dayna Jean

2018-01-01

Though definitions vary, the literature on heritage speakers of Spanish identifies two primary attributes: a linguistic and cultural connection to the language. This article profiles four Anglo college students who grew up in bilingual or Spanish-dominant communities in the Southwest who self-identified as Spanish heritage speakers, citing…

20 CFR 416.1452 - Consolidated hearings before an administrative law judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-04-01

... are involved in another claim you have pending before us. (2) If the administrative law judge decides... administrative law judge. 416.1452 Section 416.1452 Employees' Benefits SOCIAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATION..., and Reopening of Determinations and Decisions Administrative Law Judge Hearing Procedures § 416.1452...

20 CFR 405.365 - Consolidated hearing before an administrative law judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-04-01

... before us. (2) If the administrative law judge consolidates the claims, he or she will decide both claims... law judge. 405.365 Section 405.365 Employees' Benefits SOCIAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATION ADMINISTRATIVE REVIEW PROCESS FOR ADJUDICATING INITIAL DISABILITY CLAIMS Administrative Law Judge Hearing § 405.365...

Quantile Acoustic Vectors vs. MFCC Applied to Speaker Verification

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mayorga-Ortiz Pedro

2014-02-01

Full Text Available In this paper we describe speaker and command recognition related experiments, through quantile vectors and Gaussian Mixture Modelling (GMM. Over the past several years GMM and MFCC have become two of the dominant approaches for modelling speaker and speech recognition applications. However, memory and computational costs are important drawbacks, because autonomous systems suffer processing and power consumption constraints; thus, having a good trade-off between accuracy and computational requirements is mandatory. We decided to explore another approach (quantile vectors in several tasks and a comparison with MFCC was made. Quantile acoustic vectors are proposed for speaker verification and command recognition tasks and the results showed very good recognition efficiency. This method offered a good trade-off between computation times, characteristics vector complexity and overall achieved efficiency.

Defining "Native Speaker" in Multilingual Settings: English as a Native Language in Asia

Science.gov (United States)

Hansen Edwards, Jette G.

2017-01-01

The current study examines how and why speakers of English from multilingual contexts in Asia are identifying as native speakers of English. Eighteen participants from different contexts in Asia, including Singapore, Malaysia, India, Taiwan, and The Philippines, who self-identified as native speakers of English participated in hour-long interviews…

Using Avatars for Improving Speaker Identification in Captioning

Science.gov (United States)

Vy, Quoc V.; Fels, Deborah I.

Captioning is the main method for accessing television and film content by people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing. One major difficulty consistently identified by the community is that of knowing who is speaking particularly for an off screen narrator. A captioning system was created using a participatory design method to improve speaker identification. The final prototype contained avatars and a coloured border for identifying specific speakers. Evaluation results were very positive; however participants also wanted to customize various components such as caption and avatar location.

Sensitivity to phonological context in L2 spelling: evidence from Russian ESL speakers

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Dich, Nadya

2010-01-01

The study attempts to investigate factors underlying the development of spellers’ sensitivity to phonological context in English. Native English speakers and Russian speakers of English as a second language (ESL) were tested on their ability to use information about the coda to predict the spelling...... on the information about the coda when spelling vowels in nonwords. In both native and non-native speakers, context sensitivity was predicted by English word spelling; in Russian ESL speakers this relationship was mediated by English proficiency. L1 spelling proficiency did not facilitate L2 context sensitivity...

Civil Justice: Lay Judges in the EU Countries

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Stefan Machura

2016-06-01

Full Text Available Lay judges fulfill important functions for the justice system of a country. In the European Union member states, scholars have analysed the use of lay judges in criminal cases. However, little is known about lay participation in civil justice. The paper introduces commonly cited reasons to have lay judges as well as the principal forms of lay participation and then surveys the EU countries for its implementation in civil cases. Mixed tribunals, involving lay judges under the leadership of a professional judge, are relatively frequent. Several countries have special labour courts or commercial courts with lay members and others have single lay judges, or all-lay judge panels. Roughly a third of the 28 EU member states have no lay participation in civil justice but only three of those have no lay judges in any branch of the courts. Almost all the reasons for including lay decision makers are served somehow by the existing forms, including providing different experiences and perhaps expert knowledge. The article concludes, citing non-EU states and lay participation in criminal and administrative courts as further evidence, that lay judges in one form or another are an element of European legal systems. Los jueces legos cumplen funciones importantes para el sistema de justicia de un país. En los Estados miembro de la Unión Europea, académicos han analizado el uso de jueces legos en casos criminales. Sin embargo, se sabe poco acerca de la participación de los legos en la justicia civil. El artículo presenta las razones que habitualmente se citan para tener jueces legos, así como las formas principales de la participación de legos, para a continuación medir su implementación en casos civiles en los países de la Unión Europea. Son relativamente frecuentes los tribunales mixtos, en los que participan jueces legos, bajo la dirección de un juez profesional. Varios países tienen tribunales laborales especiales o tribunales comerciales con

Does Judge Turnover Affect Judicial Performance?

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Guerra, Alice; Tagliapietra, Claudio

2017-01-01

office to another after three years of mandate, and the law prescribes their transfer after ten years to guarantee their independence. Flaws in the process managing the backlog of outbound judges and the existence of asynchrony between outbound and inbound transfers produce a chain of delays...... to the disposition of court cases. Using a novel dataset on Court of Appeal Districts in Italy (2008–2012), we provide evidence of a strong negative relation between high turnover rates and judicial performance. We find that marginal increases in judge turnover rates lead to a statistically significant decrease...... in judicial performance over two years of time...

An analysis of topics and vocabulary in Chinese oral narratives by normal speakers and speakers with fluent aphasia.

Science.gov (United States)

Law, Sam-Po; Kong, Anthony Pak-Hin; Lai, Christy

2018-01-01

This study analysed the topic and vocabulary of Chinese speakers based on language samples of personal recounts in a large spoken Chinese database recently made available in the public domain, i.e. Cantonese AphasiaBank ( http://www.speech.hku.hk/caphbank/search/ ). The goal of the analysis is to offer clinicians a rich source for selecting ecologically valid training materials for rehabilitating Chinese-speaking people with aphasia (PWA) in the design and planning of culturally and linguistically appropriate treatments. Discourse production of 65 Chinese-speaking PWA of fluent types (henceforth, PWFA) and their non-aphasic controls narrating an important event in their life were extracted from Cantonese AphasiaBank. Analyses of topics and vocabularies in terms of part-of-speech, word frequency, lexical semantics, and diversity were conducted. There was significant overlap in topics between the two groups. While the vocabulary was larger for controls than that of PWFA as expected, they were similar in distribution across parts-of-speech, frequency of occurrence, and the ratio of concrete to abstract items in major open word classes. Moreover, proportionately more different verbs than nouns were employed at the individual level for both speaker groups. The findings provide important implications for guiding directions of aphasia rehabilitation not only of fluent but also non-fluent Chinese aphasic speakers.

Revisiting vocal perception in non-human animals: a review of vowel discrimination, speaker voice recognition, and speaker normalization

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Buddhamas eKriengwatana

2015-01-01

Full Text Available The extent to which human speech perception evolved by taking advantage of predispositions and pre-existing features of vertebrate auditory and cognitive systems remains a central question in the evolution of speech. This paper reviews asymmetries in vowel perception, speaker voice recognition, and speaker normalization in non-human animals – topics that have not been thoroughly discussed in relation to the abilities of non-human animals, but are nonetheless important aspects of vocal perception. Throughout this paper we demonstrate that addressing these issues in non-human animals is relevant and worthwhile because many non-human animals must deal with similar issues in their natural environment. That is, they must also discriminate between similar-sounding vocalizations, determine signaler identity from vocalizations, and resolve signaler-dependent variation in vocalizations from conspecifics. Overall, we find that, although plausible, the current evidence is insufficiently strong to conclude that directional asymmetries in vowel perception are specific to humans, or that non-human animals can use voice characteristics to recognize human individuals. However, we do find some indication that non-human animals can normalize speaker differences. Accordingly, we identify avenues for future research that would greatly improve and advance our understanding of these topics.

The Status of Native Speaker Intuitions in a Polylectal Grammar.

Science.gov (United States)

Debose, Charles E.

A study of one speaker's intuitions about and performance in Black English is presented with relation to Saussure's "langue-parole" dichotomy. Native speakers of a language have intuitions about the static synchronic entities although the data of their speaking is variable and panchronic. These entities are in a diglossic relationship to each…

Progress in the AMIDA speaker diarization system for meeting data

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Leeuwen, D.A. van; Konečný, M.

2008-01-01

In this paper we describe the AMIDA speaker dizarization system as it was submitted to the NIST Rich Transcription evaluation 2007 for conference room data. This is done in the context of the history of this system and other speaker diarization systems. One of the goals of our system is to have as

20 CFR 404.952 - Consolidated hearing before an administrative law judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-04-01

... before us. (2) If the administrative law judge decides to hold the hearing on both claims, he or she... law judge. 404.952 Section 404.952 Employees' Benefits SOCIAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATION FEDERAL OLD-AGE... Determinations and Decisions Administrative Law Judge Hearing Procedures § 404.952 Consolidated hearing before an...

Speaker and Accent Variation Are Handled Differently: Evidence in Native and Non-Native Listeners

Science.gov (United States)

Kriengwatana, Buddhamas; Terry, Josephine; Chládková, Kateřina; Escudero, Paola

2016-01-01

Listeners are able to cope with between-speaker variability in speech that stems from anatomical sources (i.e. individual and sex differences in vocal tract size) and sociolinguistic sources (i.e. accents). We hypothesized that listeners adapt to these two types of variation differently because prior work indicates that adapting to speaker/sex variability may occur pre-lexically while adapting to accent variability may require learning from attention to explicit cues (i.e. feedback). In Experiment 1, we tested our hypothesis by training native Dutch listeners and Australian-English (AusE) listeners without any experience with Dutch or Flemish to discriminate between the Dutch vowels /I/ and /ε/ from a single speaker. We then tested their ability to classify /I/ and /ε/ vowels of a novel Dutch speaker (i.e. speaker or sex change only), or vowels of a novel Flemish speaker (i.e. speaker or sex change plus accent change). We found that both Dutch and AusE listeners could successfully categorize vowels if the change involved a speaker/sex change, but not if the change involved an accent change. When AusE listeners were given feedback on their categorization responses to the novel speaker in Experiment 2, they were able to successfully categorize vowels involving an accent change. These results suggest that adapting to accents may be a two-step process, whereby the first step involves adapting to speaker differences at a pre-lexical level, and the second step involves adapting to accent differences at a contextual level, where listeners have access to word meaning or are given feedback that allows them to appropriately adjust their perceptual category boundaries. PMID:27309889

End-of-life issues as perceived by Lebanese judges.

Science.gov (United States)

Adib, Salim M; Kawas, Sami H; Hajjar, Theresa A

2003-05-01

to assess the attitudes of judges in Beirut, Lebanon, regarding end-of-life issues such as assisted suicide and withholding or withdrawing life-sustaining treatment. 85% of all currently acting and in-training judges and public prosecutors in Beirut (N=135) were surveyed using a mailed questionnaire that assessed attitudes toward intervention in five hypothetical cases. The associations of attitudes, on a scale from least to most 'sympathetic' toward assisting those who desire to end their lives, were measured by a variety of personal, social and professional variables. younger individuals, and those who have not yet been formally appointed as judges, were significantly more sympathetic to withdrawal or withholding of life-sustaining devices when patients or their proxies requested it, and more in support of assisted suicide. Gender, religious denomination, religious practice, and personal experience with prolonged illness leading to death among close friends or family, were generally not significant predictors of respondents' attitudes. Years of experience as a judge correlated strongly with age and may have contributed to its predictive effect. a relatively more sympathetic attitude among younger judges, many of them women, and among trainees, may reflect a historical evolution in younger age-groups in Lebanon today. A survey of opinions in the public may help reach a more conclusive understanding in this regard. In any case, judges in Lebanon will remain important partners in the debate, as they will continue to be the final interpreters of the letter of the law in end-of-life issues.

Children's Understanding That Utterances Emanate from Minds: Using Speaker Belief To Aid Interpretation.

Science.gov (United States)

Mitchell, Peter; Robinson, Elizabeth J.; Thompson, Doreen E.

1999-01-01

Three experiments examined 3- to 6-year olds' ability to use a speaker's utterance based on false belief to identify which of several referents was intended. Found that many 4- to 5-year olds performed correctly only when it was unnecessary to consider the speaker's belief. When the speaker gave an ambiguous utterance, many 3- to 6-year olds…

Comparative Analysys of Speech Parameters for the Design of Speaker Verification Systems

National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

Souza, A

2001-01-01

Speaker verification systems are basically composed of three stages: feature extraction, feature processing and comparison of the modified features from speaker voice and from the voice that should be...

Towards a More Responsive Judge: Challenges and Opportunities

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Machteld W. de Hoon

2014-11-01

Full Text Available This paper explores the changes that have taken place in the attitude of judges towards their role and tasks as well as actual judicial practices. The result of this exploration is a reflection upon the challenges and opportunities for a new, more responsive judge. The main characteristic of this new judge is that he or she looks beyond the purely legal coordinates of the dispute, in order to discuss which method of dispute resolution (a settlement, a referral to mediation or a court decision is most likely to result in a viable and sustainable solution. These changes in attitude are part of broader developments that have taken place in actual judicial practices. The context in which these changes have occurred helps us to gain a better understanding of the changes, the barriers to change and the opportunities to overcome these challenges. The leading assumption in this research is that during the past ten years there has been an extensive change in the way judges think about their role in dispute resolution and at the same time many judges experience difficulties in applying their new-found understanding to their work in the courts. Our data have been gathered through court observations, interviews and expert meetings. In addition, our analyses are based on relevant literature in the field of judicial dispute resolution (JDR as well as insights from our own previous research projects. We primarily focus on civil and administrative disputes in the Netherlands. Occasionally, we also point to trends and challenges elsewhere.

The (TNO) Speaker Diarization System for NIST Rich Transcription Evaluation 2005 for meeting data

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Leeuwen, D.A. van

2005-01-01

Abstract. The TNO speaker speaker diarization system is based on a standard BIC segmentation and clustering algorithm. Since for the NIST Rich Transcription speaker dizarization evaluation measure correct speech detection appears to be essential, we have developed a speech activity detector (SAD) as

Popular Public Discourse at Speakers' Corner: Negotiating Cultural Identities in Interaction

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

McIlvenny, Paul

1996-01-01

, religious and general topical 'soap-box' oration. However, audiences are not passive receivers of rhetorical messages. They are active negotiators of interpretations and alignments that may conflict with the speaker's and other audience members' orientations to prior talk. Speakers' Corner is a space...

Perception of contrastive bi-syllabic lexical stress in unaccented and accented words by younger and older listeners

Science.gov (United States)

Gordon-Salant, Sandra; Yeni-Komshian, Grace H.; Pickett, Erin J.; Fitzgibbons, Peter J.

2016-01-01

This study examined the ability of older and younger listeners to perceive contrastive syllable stress in unaccented and Spanish-accented cognate bi-syllabic English words. Younger listeners with normal hearing, older listeners with normal hearing, and older listeners with hearing impairment judged recordings of words that contrasted in stress that conveyed a noun or verb form (e.g., CONduct/conDUCT), using two paradigms differing in the amount of semantic support. The stimuli were spoken by four speakers: one native English speaker and three Spanish-accented speakers (one moderately and two mildly accented). The results indicate that all listeners showed the lowest accuracy scores in responding to the most heavily accented speaker and the highest accuracy in judging the productions of the native English speaker. The two older groups showed lower accuracy in judging contrastive lexical stress than the younger group, especially for verbs produced by the most accented speaker. This general pattern of performance was observed in the two experimental paradigms, although performance was generally lower in the paradigm without semantic support. The findings suggest that age-related difficulty in adjusting to deviations in contrastive bi-syllabic lexical stress produced with a Spanish accent may be an important factor limiting perception of accented English by older people. PMID:27036250

Priming children's use of intentions in moral judgement with a metacognitive training

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Katarina eGvozdic

2016-03-01

Full Text Available Typically, adults give a primary role to the agent’s intention to harm when performing a moral judgment of accidental harm. By contrast, children often focus on outcomes, underestimating the actor’s mental states when judging someone for his action, and rely on what we suppose to be intuitive and emotional processes. The present study explored the processes involved in the development of the capacity to integrate agents’ intentions into their moral judgment of accidental harm in 5 to 8 year old children. This was done by the use of different metacognitive trainings reinforcing different abilities involved in moral judgments (mentalising abilities, executive abilities or no reinforcement, similar to a paradigm previously used in the field of deductive logic. Children’s moral judgments were gathered before and after the training with non-verbal cartoons depicting agents whose actions differed only based on their causal role or their intention to harm. We demonstrated that a metacognitive training could induce an important shift in children’s moral abilities, showing that only children who were explicitly instructed to not focus too much on the consequences of accidental harm, preferentially weighted the agents’ intentions in their moral judgments. Our findings confirm that children between the ages of 5 and 8 are sensitive to the intention of agents, however, at that age, this ability is insufficient in order to give a mature moral judgment. Our experiment is the first that suggests the critical role of inhibitory resources in processing accidental harm.

13 CFR 134.404 - Decision by Administrative Law Judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 13 Business Credit and Assistance 1 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Decision by Administrative Law Judge. 134.404 Section 134.404 Business Credit and Assistance SMALL BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION RULES OF... 8(a) Program § 134.404 Decision by Administrative Law Judge. Appeal proceedings brought under this...

Judging children's participatory parity from social justice and the ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

This article proposes a model for judging children's participatory parity in different social spaces. The notion of participatory parity originates in Nancy Fraser's normative theory for social justice, where it concerns the participatory status of adults. What, then, constitutes participatory parity for children? How should we judge ...

Using timing information in speaker verification

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Van Heerden, CJ

2005-11-01

Full Text Available This paper presents an analysis of temporal information as a feature for use in speaker verification systems. The relevance of temporal information in a speaker’s utterances is investigated, both with regard to improving the robustness of modern...

Speaker Linking and Applications using Non-Parametric Hashing Methods

Science.gov (United States)

2016-09-08

nonparametric estimate of a multivariate density function,” The Annals of Math- ematical Statistics , vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 1049–1051, 1965. [9] E. A. Patrick...Speaker Linking and Applications using Non-Parametric Hashing Methods† Douglas Sturim and William M. Campbell MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, MA...with many approaches [1, 2]. For this paper, we focus on using i-vectors [2], but the methods apply to any embedding. For the task of speaker QBE and

Moving-Talker, Speaker-Independent Feature Study, and Baseline Results Using the CUAVE Multimodal Speech Corpus

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Patterson Eric K

2002-01-01

Full Text Available Strides in computer technology and the search for deeper, more powerful techniques in signal processing have brought multimodal research to the forefront in recent years. Audio-visual speech processing has become an important part of this research because it holds great potential for overcoming certain problems of traditional audio-only methods. Difficulties, due to background noise and multiple speakers in an application environment, are significantly reduced by the additional information provided by visual features. This paper presents information on a new audio-visual database, a feature study on moving speakers, and on baseline results for the whole speaker group. Although a few databases have been collected in this area, none has emerged as a standard for comparison. Also, efforts to date have often been limited, focusing on cropped video or stationary speakers. This paper seeks to introduce a challenging audio-visual database that is flexible and fairly comprehensive, yet easily available to researchers on one DVD. The Clemson University Audio-Visual Experiments (CUAVE database is a speaker-independent corpus of both connected and continuous digit strings totaling over 7000 utterances. It contains a wide variety of speakers and is designed to meet several goals discussed in this paper. One of these goals is to allow testing of adverse conditions such as moving talkers and speaker pairs. A feature study of connected digit strings is also discussed. It compares stationary and moving talkers in a speaker-independent grouping. An image-processing-based contour technique, an image transform method, and a deformable template scheme are used in this comparison to obtain visual features. This paper also presents methods and results in an attempt to make these techniques more robust to speaker movement. Finally, initial baseline speaker-independent results are included using all speakers, and conclusions as well as suggested areas of research are

A simple optical method for measuring the vibration amplitude of a speaker

OpenAIRE

UEDA, Masahiro; YAMAGUCHI, Toshihiko; KAKIUCHI, Hiroki; SUGA, Hiroshi

1999-01-01

A simple optical method has been proposed for measuring the vibration amplitude of a speaker vibrating with a frequency of approximately 10 kHz. The method is based on a multiple reflection between a vibrating speaker plane and a mirror parallel to that speaker plane. The multiple reflection can magnify a dispersion of the laser beam caused by the vibration, and easily make a measurement of the amplitude. The measuring sensitivity ranges between sub-microns and 1 mm. A preliminary experim...

Coronal View Ultrasound Imaging of Movement in Different Segments of the Tongue during Paced Recital: Findings from Four Normal Speakers and a Speaker with Partial Glossectomy

Science.gov (United States)

Bressmann, Tim; Flowers, Heather; Wong, Willy; Irish, Jonathan C.

2010-01-01

The goal of this study was to quantitatively describe aspects of coronal tongue movement in different anatomical regions of the tongue. Four normal speakers and a speaker with partial glossectomy read four repetitions of a metronome-paced poem. Their tongue movement was recorded in four coronal planes using two-dimensional B-mode ultrasound…

Inter-Judge Agreement in Classifying Students as Learning Disabled.

Science.gov (United States)

Epps, Susan; And Others

Eighteen judges with backgrounds in assessment, decision making, and learning disabilities were asked to use an array of information to differentiate learning disabled (LD) and non-learning disabled students. Each judge was provided with forms containing information on 42 test or subtest scores of 50 school-identified LD students and 49 non-LD…

Intelligibility of Standard German and Low German to Speakers of Dutch

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Gooskens, C.S.; Kürschner, Sebastian; van Bezooijen, R.

2011-01-01

This paper reports on the intelligibility of spoken Low German and Standard German for speakers of Dutch. Two aspects are considered. First, the relative potential for intelligibility of the Low German variety of Bremen and the High German variety of Modern Standard German for speakers of Dutch is

Speaker detection for conversational robots using synchrony between audio and video

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Noulas, A.; Englebienne, G.; Terwijn, B.; Kröse, B.; Hanheide, M.; Zender, H.

2010-01-01

This paper compares different methods for detecting the speaking person when multiple persons are interacting with a robot. We evaluate the state-of-the-art speaker detection methods on the iCat robot. These methods use the synchrony between audio and video to locate the most probable speaker. We

Perception of English palatal codas by Korean speakers of English

Science.gov (United States)

Yeon, Sang-Hee

2003-04-01

This study aimed at looking at perception of English palatal codas by Korean speakers of English to determine if perception problems are the source of production problems. In particular, first, this study looked at the possible first language effect on the perception of English palatal codas. Second, a possible perceptual source of vowel epenthesis after English palatal codas was investigated. In addition, individual factors, such as length of residence, TOEFL score, gender and academic status, were compared to determine if those affected the varying degree of the perception accuracy. Eleven adult Korean speakers of English as well as three native speakers of English participated in the study. Three sets of a perception test including identification of minimally different English pseudo- or real words were carried out. The results showed that, first, the Korean speakers perceived the English codas significantly worse than the Americans. Second, the study supported the idea that Koreans perceived an extra /i/ after the final affricates due to final release. Finally, none of the individual factors explained the varying degree of the perceptional accuracy. In particular, TOEFL scores and the perception test scores did not have any statistically significant association.

Evaluating acoustic speaker normalization algorithms: evidence from longitudinal child data.

Science.gov (United States)

Kohn, Mary Elizabeth; Farrington, Charlie

2012-03-01

Speaker vowel formant normalization, a technique that controls for variation introduced by physical differences between speakers, is necessary in variationist studies to compare speakers of different ages, genders, and physiological makeup in order to understand non-physiological variation patterns within populations. Many algorithms have been established to reduce variation introduced into vocalic data from physiological sources. The lack of real-time studies tracking the effectiveness of these normalization algorithms from childhood through adolescence inhibits exploration of child participation in vowel shifts. This analysis compares normalization techniques applied to data collected from ten African American children across five time points. Linear regressions compare the reduction in variation attributable to age and gender for each speaker for the vowels BEET, BAT, BOT, BUT, and BOAR. A normalization technique is successful if it maintains variation attributable to a reference sociolinguistic variable, while reducing variation attributable to age. Results indicate that normalization techniques which rely on both a measure of central tendency and range of the vowel space perform best at reducing variation attributable to age, although some variation attributable to age persists after normalization for some sections of the vowel space. © 2012 Acoustical Society of America

Key features of hip hop dance motions affect evaluation by judges.

Science.gov (United States)

Sato, Nahoko; Nunome, Hiroyuki; Ikegami, Yasuo

2014-06-01

The evaluation of hip hop dancers presently lacks clearly defined criteria and is often dependent on the subjective impressions of judges. Our study objective was to extract hidden motion characteristics that could potentially distinguish the skill levels of hip hop dancers and to examine the relationship between performance kinematics and judging scores. Eleven expert, six nonexpert, and nine novice dancers participated in the study, where each performed the "wave" motion as an experimental task. The movements of their upper extremities were captured by a motion capture system, and several kinematic parameters including the propagation velocity of the wave were calculated. Twelve judges evaluated the performances of the dancers, and we compared the kinematic parameters of the three groups and examined the relationship between the judging scores and the kinematic parameters. We found the coefficient of variation of the propagation velocity to be significantly different among the groups (P < .01) and highly correlated with the judging scores (r = -0.800, P < .01). This revealed that the variation of propagation velocity was the most dominant variable representing the skill level of the dancers and that the smooth propagation of the wave was most closely related to the evaluation by judges.

Some features of a typical house as perceived by native speakers of English and of Serbian

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Dilparić Branislava M.

2015-01-01

Full Text Available The paper reports findings from one of the two differently-designed surveys conducted among groups of both native speakers of English and native speakers of Serbian with a common general objective to obtain a picture of better candidates for a role of the whole (to be analyzed into its constituent elements in the contrastive study on the lexical field a house and its parts in English and Serbian. The specific objective of the survey presented here, however, was to build up the target picture with some of the features of the ideal example of the house category, such as the shape of the house, the key materials its principal structural elements (foundations, walls, a roof are made of, the number of residential units in the house and the type of the household that occupies it, the number of the house levels, the minimum of its interior spatial components and their functions, the types of systemic parts in the house, the status and position of the house relative to surround­ing buildings, etc. Also, taking into consideration that the demographic profiles of the survey participants reflected various cultural backgrounds (which significantly influence the formation of mental images of a typical sample of the category, the survey aimed to compare the similarities and differences between the 'English' and the 'Serbian' typical house, that is the features assigned to a typical house by most of the surveyed representa­tives of Anglo-American and by those of Serbian culture. Judging exclusively by the features observed and the results obtained, the study concludes that the 'English' and the 'Serbian' typical house look very similar in many aspect and that the two different cultures are not as distant as they may seem.

Do children go for the nice guys? The influence of speaker benevolence and certainty on selective word learning.

Science.gov (United States)

Bergstra, Myrthe; DE Mulder, Hannah N M; Coopmans, Peter

2018-04-06

This study investigated how speaker certainty (a rational cue) and speaker benevolence (an emotional cue) influence children's willingness to learn words in a selective learning paradigm. In two experiments four- to six-year-olds learnt novel labels from two speakers and, after a week, their memory for these labels was reassessed. Results demonstrated that children retained the label-object pairings for at least a week. Furthermore, children preferred to learn from certain over uncertain speakers, but they had no significant preference for nice over nasty speakers. When the cues were combined, children followed certain speakers, even if they were nasty. However, children did prefer to learn from nice and certain speakers over nasty and certain speakers. These results suggest that rational cues regarding a speaker's linguistic competence trump emotional cues regarding a speaker's affective status in word learning. However, emotional cues were found to have a subtle influence on this process.

2010 Administrative Law Judge Initial Decisions

Data.gov (United States)

Securities and Exchange Commission — The initial decisions issued by administrative law judges in 2010 that contains findings of fact, legal conclusions, and an order that often contains a sanction....

2009 Administrative Law Judge Initial Decisions

Data.gov (United States)

Securities and Exchange Commission — The initial decisions issued by administrative law judges in 2009 that contains findings of fact, legal conclusions, and an order that often contains a sanction....

ProofJudge: Automated Proof Judging Tool for Learning Mathematical Logic

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Villadsen, Jørgen

2015-01-01

Today we have software in many artefacts, from medical devices to cars and airplanes, and the software must not only be efficient and intelligent but also reliable and secure. Tests can show the presence of bugs but cannot guarantee their absence. A machine-checked proof using mathematical logic...... pen and paper because no adequate tool was available. The learning problem is how to make abstract concepts of logic as concrete as possible. ProofJudge is a computer system and teaching approach for teaching mathematical logic and automated reasoning which augments the e-learning tool NaDeA (Natural...

ProofJudge: Automated Proof Judging Tool for Learning Mathematical Logic

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Villadsen, Jørgen

2016-01-01

Today we have software in many artefacts, from medical devices to cars and airplanes, and the software must not only be efficient and intelligent but also reliable and secure. Tests can show the presence of bugs but cannot guarantee their absence. A machine-checked proof using mathematical logic...... using pen and paper because no adequate tool was available. The learning problem is how to make abstract concepts of logic as concrete as possible. ProofJudge is a computer system and teaching approach for teaching mathematical logic and automated reasoning which augments the e-learning tool Na...

43 CFR 30.243 - How will the judge decide my petition for reopening?

Science.gov (United States)

2010-10-01

... 43 Public Lands: Interior 1 2010-10-01 2010-10-01 false How will the judge decide my petition for... the judge decide my petition for reopening? (a) If the judge finds that proper grounds are not shown, the judge will issue an order denying the petition for reopening and giving the reasons for the denial...

Effects of Language Background on Gaze Behavior: A Crosslinguistic Comparison Between Korean and German Speakers

Science.gov (United States)

Goller, Florian; Lee, Donghoon; Ansorge, Ulrich; Choi, Soonja

2017-01-01

Languages differ in how they categorize spatial relations: While German differentiates between containment (in) and support (auf) with distinct spatial words—(a) den Kuli IN die Kappe stecken (”put pen in cap”); (b) die Kappe AUF den Kuli stecken (”put cap on pen”)—Korean uses a single spatial word (kkita) collapsing (a) and (b) into one semantic category, particularly when the spatial enclosure is tight-fit. Korean uses a different word (i.e., netha) for loose-fits (e.g., apple in bowl). We tested whether these differences influence the attention of the speaker. In a crosslinguistic study, we compared native German speakers with native Korean speakers. Participants rated the similarity of two successive video clips of several scenes where two objects were joined or nested (either in a tight or loose manner). The rating data show that Korean speakers base their rating of similarity more on tight- versus loose-fit, whereas German speakers base their rating more on containment versus support (in vs. auf). Throughout the experiment, we also measured the participants’ eye movements. Korean speakers looked equally long at the moving Figure object and at the stationary Ground object, whereas German speakers were more biased to look at the Ground object. Additionally, Korean speakers also looked more at the region where the two objects touched than did German speakers. We discuss our data in the light of crosslinguistic semantics and the extent of their influence on spatial cognition and perception. PMID:29362644

Optical, gravitational, and kinesthetic determinants of judged eye level

Science.gov (United States)

Stoper, Arnold E.; Cohen, Malcolm M.

1989-01-01

Subjects judged eye level, defined in three distinct ways relative to three distinct reference planes: a gravitational horizontal, giving the gravitationally referenced eye level (GREL); a visible surface, giving the surface-referenced eye level (SREL); and a plane fixed with respect to the head, giving the head-referenced eye level (HREL). The information available for these judgements was varied by having the subjects view an illuminated target that could be placed in a box which: (1) was pitched at various angles, (2) was illuminated or kept in darkness, (3) was moved to different positions along the subject's head-to-foot body axis, and (4) was viewed with the subjects upright or reclining. The results showed: (1) judgements of GREL made in the dark were 2.5 deg lower than in the light, with a significantly greater variability; (2) judged GREL was shifted approximately half of the way toward SREL when these two eye levels did not coincide; (3) judged SREL was shifted about 12 percent of the way toward HREL when these two eye levels did not coincide, (4) judged HREL was shifted about half way toward SREL when these two eye level did not coincide and when the subject was upright (when the subject was reclining, HREL was shifted approx. 90 percent toward SREL); (5) the variability of the judged HREL in the dark was nearly twice as great with the subject reclining than with the subject upright. These results indicate that gravity is an important source of information for judgement of eye level. In the absence of information concerning the direction of gravity, the ability to judge HREL is extremely poor. A visible environment does not seem to afford precise information as to judgements of direction, but it probably does afford significant information as to the stability of these judgements.

Popular Public Discourse at Speakers' Corner: Negotiating Cultural Identities in Interaction

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

McIlvenny, Paul

1996-01-01

In this paper I examine how cultural identities are actively negotiated in popular debate at a multicultural public setting in London. Speakers at Speakers' Corner manage the local construction of group affiliation, audience response and argument in and through talk, within the context of ethnic...... in which participant 'citizens' in the public sphere can actively struggle over cultural representation and identities. Using transcribed examples of video data recorded at Speakers' Corner my paper will examine how cultural identity is invoked in the management of active participation. Audiences...... and their affiliations are regulated and made accountable through the routines of membership categorisation and the policing of cultural identities and their imaginary borders....

Speaker identification for the improvement of the security communication between law enforcement units

Science.gov (United States)

Tovarek, Jaromir; Partila, Pavol

2017-05-01

This article discusses the speaker identification for the improvement of the security communication between law enforcement units. The main task of this research was to develop the text-independent speaker identification system which can be used for real-time recognition. This system is designed for identification in the open set. It means that the unknown speaker can be anyone. Communication itself is secured, but we have to check the authorization of the communication parties. We have to decide if the unknown speaker is the authorized for the given action. The calls are recorded by IP telephony server and then these recordings are evaluate using classification If the system evaluates that the speaker is not authorized, it sends a warning message to the administrator. This message can detect, for example a stolen phone or other unusual situation. The administrator then performs the appropriate actions. Our novel proposal system uses multilayer neural network for classification and it consists of three layers (input layer, hidden layer, and output layer). A number of neurons in input layer corresponds with the length of speech features. Output layer then represents classified speakers. Artificial Neural Network classifies speech signal frame by frame, but the final decision is done over the complete record. This rule substantially increases accuracy of the classification. Input data for the neural network are a thirteen Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, which describe the behavior of the vocal tract. These parameters are the most used for speaker recognition. Parameters for training, testing and validation were extracted from recordings of authorized users. Recording conditions for training data correspond with the real traffic of the system (sampling frequency, bit rate). The main benefit of the research is the system developed for text-independent speaker identification which is applied to secure communication between law enforcement units.

Articulatory Movements during Vowels in Speakers with Dysarthria and Healthy Controls

Science.gov (United States)

Yunusova, Yana; Weismer, Gary; Westbury, John R.; Lindstrom, Mary J.

2008-01-01

Purpose: This study compared movement characteristics of markers attached to the jaw, lower lip, tongue blade, and dorsum during production of selected English vowels by normal speakers and speakers with dysarthria due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Parkinson disease (PD). The study asked the following questions: (a) Are movement…

EPA Administrative Law Judge Legal Documents

Data.gov (United States)

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — This dataset contains Decisions and Orders originating from EPAs Office of Administrative Law Judges (OALJ), which is an independent office in the Office of the...

49 CFR 821.16 - Interlocutory appeals from law judges' rulings on motions.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-10-01

... Appealable Orders § 821.16 Interlocutory appeals from law judges' rulings on motions. Rulings of law judges... 49 Transportation 7 2010-10-01 2010-10-01 false Interlocutory appeals from law judges' rulings on motions. 821.16 Section 821.16 Transportation Other Regulations Relating to Transportation (Continued...

A Comparison of Coverbal Gesture Use in Oral Discourse Among Speakers With Fluent and Nonfluent Aphasia

Science.gov (United States)

Law, Sam-Po; Chak, Gigi Wan-Chi

2017-01-01

Purpose Coverbal gesture use, which is affected by the presence and degree of aphasia, can be culturally specific. The purpose of this study was to compare gesture use among Cantonese-speaking individuals: 23 neurologically healthy speakers, 23 speakers with fluent aphasia, and 21 speakers with nonfluent aphasia. Method Multimedia data of discourse samples from these speakers were extracted from the Cantonese AphasiaBank. Gestures were independently annotated on their forms and functions to determine how gesturing rate and distribution of gestures differed across speaker groups. A multiple regression was conducted to determine the most predictive variable(s) for gesture-to-word ratio. Results Although speakers with nonfluent aphasia gestured most frequently, the rate of gesture use in counterparts with fluent aphasia did not differ significantly from controls. Different patterns of gesture functions in the 3 speaker groups revealed that gesture plays a minor role in lexical retrieval whereas its role in enhancing communication dominates among the speakers with aphasia. The percentages of complete sentences and dysfluency strongly predicted the gesturing rate in aphasia. Conclusions The current results supported the sketch model of language–gesture association. The relationship between gesture production and linguistic abilities and clinical implications for gesture-based language intervention for speakers with aphasia are also discussed. PMID:28609510

Gender Identification of the Speaker Using VQ Method

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Vasif V. Nabiyev

2009-11-01

Full Text Available Speaking is the easiest and natural form of communication between people. Intensive studies are made in order to provide this communication via computers between people. The systems using voice biometric technology are attracting attention especially in the angle of cost and usage. When compared with the other biometic systems the application is much more practical. For example by using a microphone placed in the environment voice record can be obtained even without notifying the user and the system can be applied. Moreover the remote access facility is one of the other advantages of voice biometry. In this study, it is aimed to automatically determine the gender of the speaker through the speech waves which include personal information. If the speaker gender can be determined while composing models according to the gender information, the success of voice recognition systems can be increased in an important degree. Generally all the speaker recognition systems are composed of two parts which are feature extraction and matching. Feature extraction is the procedure in which the least information presenting the speech and the speaker is determined through voice signal. There are different features used in voice applications such as LPC, MFCC and PLP. In this study as a feature vector MFCC is used. Feature mathcing is the procedure in which the features derived from unknown speakers and known speaker group are compared. According to the text used in comparison the system is devided to two parts that are text dependent and text independent. While the same text is used in text dependent systems, different texts are used in indepentent text systems. Nowadays, DTW and HMM are text dependent, VQ and GMM are text indepentent matching methods. In this study due to the high success ratio and simple application features VQ approach is used.In this study a system which determines the speaker gender automatically and text independent is proposed. The proposed

Use of the BAT with a Cantonese-Putonghua Speaker with Aphasia

Science.gov (United States)

Kong, Anthony Pak-Hin; Weekes, Brendan Stuart

2011-01-01

The aim of this article is to illustrate the use of the Bilingual Aphasia Test (BAT) with a Cantonese-Putonghua speaker. We describe G, who is a relatively young Chinese bilingual speaker with aphasia. G's communication abilities in his L2, Putonghua, were impaired following brain damage. This impairment caused specific difficulties in…

Distortions in Judged Spatial Relations.

Science.gov (United States)

Stevens, Albert

1978-01-01

Distortions in judgments of relative geographical relations were observed, particularly when the locations were in different geographical or political units. Subjects distorted the judged relation to conform with the relation of the superordinate political unit. A model for the hierachical storage of spatial information is presented. (Author/RD)

Judges Awareness, Understanding, and Application of Digital Evidence

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Gary C Kessler

2011-03-01

Full Text Available As digital evidence grows in both volume and importance in criminal and civil courts, judges need to fairly and justly evaluate the merits of the offered evidence. To do so, judges need a general understanding of the underlying technologies and applications from which digital evidence is derived. Due to the relative newness of the computer forensics field, there have been few studies on the use of digital forensic evidence and none about judges’ relationship with digital evidence.This paper describes a recent study, using grounded theory methods, into judges’ awareness, knowledge, and perceptions of digital evidence. This study is the first in the U.S. to examine judges and digital forensics, thus opening up a new avenue of research. It is the second time that grounded theory has been employed in a published digital forensics study, demonstrating the applicability of that methodology to this discipline.

Processing advantage for emotional words in bilingual speakers.

Science.gov (United States)

Ponari, Marta; Rodríguez-Cuadrado, Sara; Vinson, David; Fox, Neil; Costa, Albert; Vigliocco, Gabriella

2015-10-01

Effects of emotion on word processing are well established in monolingual speakers. However, studies that have assessed whether affective features of words undergo the same processing in a native and nonnative language have provided mixed results: Studies that have found differences between native language (L1) and second language (L2) processing attributed the difference to the fact that L2 learned late in life would not be processed affectively, because affective associations are established during childhood. Other studies suggest that adult learners show similar effects of emotional features in L1 and L2. Differences in affective processing of L2 words can be linked to age and context of learning, proficiency, language dominance, and degree of similarity between L2 and L1. Here, in a lexical decision task on tightly matched negative, positive, and neutral words, highly proficient English speakers from typologically different L1s showed the same facilitation in processing emotionally valenced words as native English speakers, regardless of their L1, the age of English acquisition, or the frequency and context of English use. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

Towards an Intelligent Acoustic Front End for Automatic Speech Recognition: Built-in Speaker Normalization

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Umit H. Yapanel

2008-08-01

Full Text Available A proven method for achieving effective automatic speech recognition (ASR due to speaker differences is to perform acoustic feature speaker normalization. More effective speaker normalization methods are needed which require limited computing resources for real-time performance. The most popular speaker normalization technique is vocal-tract length normalization (VTLN, despite the fact that it is computationally expensive. In this study, we propose a novel online VTLN algorithm entitled built-in speaker normalization (BISN, where normalization is performed on-the-fly within a newly proposed PMVDR acoustic front end. The novel algorithm aspect is that in conventional frontend processing with PMVDR and VTLN, two separating warping phases are needed; while in the proposed BISN method only one single speaker dependent warp is used to achieve both the PMVDR perceptual warp and VTLN warp simultaneously. This improved integration unifies the nonlinear warping performed in the front end and reduces simultaneously. This improved integration unifies the nonlinear warping performed in the front end and reduces computational requirements, thereby offering advantages for real-time ASR systems. Evaluations are performed for (i an in-car extended digit recognition task, where an on-the-fly BISN implementation reduces the relative word error rate (WER by 24%, and (ii for a diverse noisy speech task (SPINE 2, where the relative WER improvement was 9%, both relative to the baseline speaker normalization method.

Towards an Intelligent Acoustic Front End for Automatic Speech Recognition: Built-in Speaker Normalization

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yapanel UmitH

2008-01-01

Full Text Available A proven method for achieving effective automatic speech recognition (ASR due to speaker differences is to perform acoustic feature speaker normalization. More effective speaker normalization methods are needed which require limited computing resources for real-time performance. The most popular speaker normalization technique is vocal-tract length normalization (VTLN, despite the fact that it is computationally expensive. In this study, we propose a novel online VTLN algorithm entitled built-in speaker normalization (BISN, where normalization is performed on-the-fly within a newly proposed PMVDR acoustic front end. The novel algorithm aspect is that in conventional frontend processing with PMVDR and VTLN, two separating warping phases are needed; while in the proposed BISN method only one single speaker dependent warp is used to achieve both the PMVDR perceptual warp and VTLN warp simultaneously. This improved integration unifies the nonlinear warping performed in the front end and reduces simultaneously. This improved integration unifies the nonlinear warping performed in the front end and reduces computational requirements, thereby offering advantages for real-time ASR systems. Evaluations are performed for (i an in-car extended digit recognition task, where an on-the-fly BISN implementation reduces the relative word error rate (WER by 24%, and (ii for a diverse noisy speech task (SPINE 2, where the relative WER improvement was 9%, both relative to the baseline speaker normalization method.

A toolbox for European judges

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Hesselink, M.W.

2011-01-01

The forthcoming instrument on European contract law, be it in the shape of an optional code for cross-border contracts or as an official toolbox for the European legislator, is likely to have a spill-over effect on private law adjudication in Europe. Judges will have no great difficulty in finding

Language control in different contexts: the behavioural ecology of bilingual speakers

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

David William Green

2011-05-01

Full Text Available This paper proposes that different experimental contexts (single or dual language contexts permit different neural loci at which words in the target language can be selected. However, in order to develop a fuller understanding of the neural circuit mediating language control we need to consider the community context in which bilingual speakers typically use their two languages (the behavioural ecology of bilingual speakers. The contrast between speakers from code-switching and non-code switching communities offers a way to increase our understanding of the cortical, subcortical and, in particular, cerebellar structures involved in language control. It will also help us identify the non-verbal behavioural correlates associated with these control processes.

Artificially intelligent recognition of Arabic speaker using voice print-based local features

Science.gov (United States)

Mahmood, Awais; Alsulaiman, Mansour; Muhammad, Ghulam; Akram, Sheeraz

2016-11-01

Local features for any pattern recognition system are based on the information extracted locally. In this paper, a local feature extraction technique was developed. This feature was extracted in the time-frequency plain by taking the moving average on the diagonal directions of the time-frequency plane. This feature captured the time-frequency events producing a unique pattern for each speaker that can be viewed as a voice print of the speaker. Hence, we referred to this technique as voice print-based local feature. The proposed feature was compared to other features including mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) for speaker recognition using two different databases. One of the databases used in the comparison is a subset of an LDC database that consisted of two short sentences uttered by 182 speakers. The proposed feature attained 98.35% recognition rate compared to 96.7% for MFCC using the LDC subset.

Judges Awareness, Understanding, and Application of Digital Evidence

OpenAIRE

Gary C Kessler

2011-01-01

As digital evidence grows in both volume and importance in criminal and civil courts, judges need to fairly and justly evaluate the merits of the offered evidence. To do so, judges need a general understanding of the underlying technologies and applications from which digital evidence is derived. Due to the relative newness of the computer forensics field, there have been few studies on the use of digital forensic evidence and none about judges’ relationship with digital evidence.This paper d...

4 CFR 28.22 - Administrative judges.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

.... Administrative judges shall conduct fair and impartial hearings and take all necessary action to avoid delay in...; (8) Require the filing of memoranda of law and the presentation of oral argument with respect to any...

Judicial law-making: Unlocking the creative powers of judges in ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

... the creative powers of judges in terms of Section 39(2) of the constitution. ... that judges do indeed have a law-making function in the process of interpretation. ... The article examines the extent to which the judiciary can use this power in a ...

Speaker Prediction based on Head Orientations

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Rienks, R.J.; Poppe, Ronald Walter; van Otterlo, M.; Poel, Mannes; Poel, M.; Nijholt, A.; Nijholt, Antinus

2005-01-01

To gain insight into gaze behavior in meetings, this paper compares the results from a Naive Bayes classifier, Neural Networks and humans on speaker prediction in four-person meetings given solely the azimuth head angles. The Naive Bayes classifier scored 69.4% correctly, Neural Networks 62.3% and

The AMI speaker diarization system for NIST RT06s meeting data

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Leeuwen, D.A. van; Huijbregts, Marijn

2006-01-01

We describe the systems submitted to the NIST RT06s evaluation for the Speech Activity Detection (SAD) and Speaker Diarization (SPKR) tasks. For speech activity detection, a new analysis methodology is presented that generalizes the Detection Erorr Tradeoff analysis commonly used in speaker

The AMI speaker diarization system for NIST RT06s meeting data

NARCIS (Netherlands)

van Leeuwen, David A.; Huijbregts, M.A.H.

2007-01-01

We describe the systems submitted to the NIST RT06s evaluation for the Speech Activity Detection (SAD) and Speaker Diarization (SPKR) tasks. For speech activity detection, a new analysis methodology is presented that generalizes the Detection Erorr Tradeoff analysis commonly used in speaker detection

7 CFR 1.173 - Judges.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... proceeding, (2) is related within the third degree by blood or marriage to any party to the proceeding, or (3... present. Any memorandum or other communication addressed to the Judicial Officer or a Judge, during the... prior to any hearing to be conducted by telephone or audio-visual telecommunication; (8) Require that...

An acoustic analysis of English vowels produced by speakers of seven different native-language backgrounds

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Heuven, van V.J.J.P.; Gooskens, C.

2017-01-01

We measured F1, F2 and duration of ten English monophthongs produced by American native speakers and by Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Dutch, Hungarian and Chinese L2 speakers. We hypothesized that (i) L2 speakers would approximate the English vowels more closely as the phonological distance between

8 CFR 1003.9 - Office of the Chief Immigration Judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 8 Aliens and Nationality 1 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Office of the Chief Immigration Judge. 1003.9 Section 1003.9 Aliens and Nationality EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW, DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE GENERAL PROVISIONS EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW Office of the Chief Immigration Judge...

8 CFR 1246.4 - Immigration judge's authority; withdrawal and substitution.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 8 Aliens and Nationality 1 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Immigration judge's authority; withdrawal and substitution. 1246.4 Section 1246.4 Aliens and Nationality EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW, DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE IMMIGRATION REGULATIONS RESCISSION OF ADJUSTMENT OF STATUS § 1246.4 Immigration judge's...

The Acquisition of English Focus Marking by Non-Native Speakers

Science.gov (United States)

Baker, Rachel Elizabeth

This dissertation examines Mandarin and Korean speakers' acquisition of English focus marking, which is realized by accenting particular words within a focused constituent. It is important for non-native speakers to learn how accent placement relates to focus in English because appropriate accent placement and realization makes a learner's English more native-like and easier to understand. Such knowledge may also improve their English comprehension skills. In this study, 20 native English speakers, 20 native Mandarin speakers, and 20 native Korean speakers participated in four experiments: (1) a production experiment, in which they were recorded reading the answers to questions, (2) a perception experiment, in which they were asked to determine which word in a recording was the last prominent word, (3) an understanding experiment, in which they were asked whether the answers in recorded question-answer pairs had context-appropriate prosody, and (4) an accent placement experiment, in which they were asked which word they would make prominent in a particular context. Finally, a new group of native English speakers listened to utterances produced in the production experiment, and determined whether the prosody of each utterance was appropriate for its context. The results of the five experiments support a novel predictive model for second language prosodic focus marking acquisition. This model holds that both transfer of linguistic features from a learner's native language (L1) and features of their second language (L2) affect learners' acquisition of prosodic focus marking. As a result, the model includes two complementary components: the Transfer Component and the L2 Challenge Component. The Transfer Component predicts that prosodic structures in the L2 will be more easily acquired by language learners that have similar structures in their L1 than those who do not, even if there are differences between the L1 and L2 in how the structures are realized. The L2

Speaker transfer in children's peer conversation: completing communication-aid-mediated contributions.

Science.gov (United States)

Clarke, Michael; Bloch, Steven; Wilkinson, Ray

2013-03-01

Managing the exchange of speakers from one person to another effectively is a key issue for participants in everyday conversational interaction. Speakers use a range of resources to indicate, in advance, when their turn will come to an end, and listeners attend to such signals in order to know when they might legitimately speak. Using the principles and findings from conversation analysis, this paper examines features of speaker transfer in a conversation between a boy with cerebral palsy who has been provided with a voice-output communication aid (VOCA), and a peer without physical or communication difficulties. Specifically, the analysis focuses on turn exchange, where a VOCA-mediated contribution approach completion, and the child without communication needs is due to speak next.

THE INDEPENDENCE OF SOUTH AFRICAN JUDGES: A CONSTITUTIONAL AND LEGISLATIVE PERSPECTIVE

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Lunga Siyo

2015-11-01

Full Text Available Judicial independence is fundamental to democracy. It is in that context that this paper considers whether the existing constitutional and legislative mechanisms provide sufficient judicial independence to South African judges. In so doing, the paper focuses on impartiality, judicial appointments and security of tenure. It also discusses the sensitive matter of complaints and disciplinary proceedings against judges and their removal from office. The issue of the remuneration of judges is also explored. In discussing the challenges facing judicial independence some incidents that have appeared to compromise such independence are highlighted. These include the controversial appointments of Advocate Mpshe as an acting judge in the North West Province in 2010 and Judge Heath as the Head of the Special Investigative Unit (SIU in 2011. The never-ending controversy surrounding the Cape Judge President John Hlophe and his alleged attempts to improperly influence two Constitutional Court judges in a case involving President Jacob Zuma is also highlighted. Another issue that has brought judicial independence into sharp focus is the June 2015 visit to South Africa of Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir, who was on a warrant of arrest from the International Criminal Court (ICC for genocide and war crimes in the Darfur region of Sudan. A decision by the North Gauteng High Court on his presence in South Africa and the attacks on the judiciary made by various government officials as a result are discussed. Several conclusions are drawn but in the main, it is generally concluded that the constitutional and legislative framework adopted by South Africa sufficiently insulates judges from improper influence. However, there have been several notable challenges that particularly relate to judicial appointments and how the JSC has handled certain matters. Irresponsible and uninformed political statements by politicians and unwarranted political attacks on the judiciary

Comparing headphone and speaker effects on simulated driving.

Science.gov (United States)

Nelson, T M; Nilsson, T H

1990-12-01

Twelve persons drove for three hours in an automobile simulator while listening to music at sound level 63dB over stereo headphones during one session and from a dashboard speaker during another session. They were required to steer a mountain highway, maintain a certain indicated speed, shift gears, and respond to occasional hazards. Steering and speed control were dependent on visual cues. The need to shift and the hazards were indicated by sound and vibration effects. With the headphones, the driver's average reaction time for the most complex task presented--shifting gears--was about one-third second longer than with the speaker. The use of headphones did not delay the development of subjective fatigue.

Unravelling intention

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Vinding, Mikkel Christoffer; Pedersen, Michael Nygaard; Overgaard, Morten

2013-01-01

Experimental studies investigating the contribution of conscious intention to the generation of a sense of agency for one’s own actions tend to rely upon a narrow definition of intention. Often it is operationalized as the conscious sensation of wanting to move right before movement. Existing...... results and discussion are therefore missing crucial aspects of intentions, namely intention as the conscious sensation of wanting to move in advance of the movement. In the present experiment we used an intentional binding paradigm, in which we distinguished between immediate (proximal) intention......, as usually investigated, and longer standing (distal) intention. The results showed that the binding effect was significantly enhanced for distal intentions compared to proximal intentions, indicating that the former leads to stronger sense of agency. Our finding provides empirical support for a crucial...

Speaker information affects false recognition of unstudied lexical-semantic associates.

Science.gov (United States)

Luthra, Sahil; Fox, Neal P; Blumstein, Sheila E

2018-05-01

Recognition of and memory for a spoken word can be facilitated by a prior presentation of that word spoken by the same talker. However, it is less clear whether this speaker congruency advantage generalizes to facilitate recognition of unheard related words. The present investigation employed a false memory paradigm to examine whether information about a speaker's identity in items heard by listeners could influence the recognition of novel items (critical intruders) phonologically or semantically related to the studied items. In Experiment 1, false recognition of semantically associated critical intruders was sensitive to speaker information, though only when subjects attended to talker identity during encoding. Results from Experiment 2 also provide some evidence that talker information affects the false recognition of critical intruders. Taken together, the present findings indicate that indexical information is able to contact the lexical-semantic network to affect the processing of unheard words.

Using Reversed MFCC and IT-EM for Automatic Speaker Verification

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sheeraz Memon

2012-01-01

Full Text Available This paper proposes text independent automatic speaker verification system using IMFCC (Inverse/ Reverse Mel Frequency Coefficients and IT-EM (Information Theoretic Expectation Maximization. To perform speaker verification, feature extraction using Mel scale has been widely applied and has established better results. The IMFCC is based on inverse Mel-scale. The IMFCC effectively captures information available at the high frequency formants which is ignored by the MFCC. In this paper the fusion of MFCC and IMFCC at input level is proposed. GMMs (Gaussian Mixture Models based on EM (Expectation Maximization have been widely used for classification of text independent verification. However EM comes across the convergence issue. In this paper we use our proposed IT-EM which has faster convergence, to train speaker models. IT-EM uses information theory principles such as PDE (Parzen Density Estimation and KL (Kullback-Leibler divergence measure. IT-EM acclimatizes the weights, means and covariances, like EM. However, IT-EM process is not performed on feature vector sets but on a set of centroids obtained using IT (Information Theoretic metric. The IT-EM process at once diminishes divergence measure between PDE estimates of features distribution within a given class and the centroids distribution within the same class. The feature level fusion and IT-EM is tested for the task of speaker verification using NIST2001 and NIST2004. The experimental evaluation validates that MFCC/IMFCC has better results than the conventional delta/MFCC feature set. The MFCC/IMFCC feature vector size is also much smaller than the delta MFCC thus reducing the computational burden as well. IT-EM method also showed faster convergence, than the conventional EM method, and thus it leads to higher speaker recognition scores.

Study of audio speakers containing ferrofluid

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Rosensweig, R E [34 Gloucester Road, Summit, NJ 07901 (United States); Hirota, Y; Tsuda, S [Ferrotec, 1-4-14 Kyobashi, chuo-Ku, Tokyo 104-0031 (Japan); Raj, K [Ferrotec, 33 Constitution Drive, Bedford, NH 03110 (United States)

2008-05-21

This work validates a method for increasing the radial restoring force on the voice coil in audio speakers containing ferrofluid. In addition, a study is made of factors influencing splash loss of the ferrofluid due to shock. Ferrohydrodynamic analysis is employed throughout to model behavior, and predictions are compared to experimental data.

Designing, Modeling, Constructing, and Testing a Flat Panel Speaker and Sound Diffuser for a Simulator

Science.gov (United States)

Dillon, Christina

2013-01-01

The goal of this project was to design, model, build, and test a flat panel speaker and frame for a spherical dome structure being made into a simulator. The simulator will be a test bed for evaluating an immersive environment for human interfaces. This project focused on the loud speakers and a sound diffuser for the dome. The rest of the team worked on an Ambisonics 3D sound system, video projection system, and multi-direction treadmill to create the most realistic scene possible. The main programs utilized in this project, were Pro-E and COMSOL. Pro-E was used for creating detailed figures for the fabrication of a frame that held a flat panel loud speaker. The loud speaker was made from a thin sheet of Plexiglas and 4 acoustic exciters. COMSOL, a multiphysics finite analysis simulator, was used to model and evaluate all stages of the loud speaker, frame, and sound diffuser. Acoustical testing measurements were utilized to create polar plots from the working prototype which were then compared to the COMSOL simulations to select the optimal design for the dome. The final goal of the project was to install the flat panel loud speaker design in addition to a sound diffuser on to the wall of the dome. After running tests in COMSOL on various speaker configurations, including a warped Plexiglas version, the optimal speaker design included a flat piece of Plexiglas with a rounded frame to match the curvature of the dome. Eight of these loud speakers will be mounted into an inch and a half of high performance acoustic insulation, or Thinsulate, that will cover the inside of the dome. The following technical paper discusses these projects and explains the engineering processes used, knowledge gained, and the projected future goals of this project

Data requirements for speaker independent acoustic models

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Badenhorst, JAC

2008-11-01

Full Text Available When developing speech recognition systems in resource-constrained environments, careful design of the training corpus can play an important role in compensating for data scarcity. One of the factors to consider relates to the speaker composition...

32 CFR 776.53 - Responsibilities of the Judge Advocate General and supervisory attorneys.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... of the Judge Advocate General and supervisory attorneys. (a) Responsibilities of the Judge Advocate General and supervisory attorneys. (1) The JAG and supervisory attorneys shall make reasonable efforts to... 32 National Defense 5 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Responsibilities of the Judge Advocate General...

During Threaded Discussions Are Non-Native English Speakers Always at a Disadvantage?

Science.gov (United States)

Shafer Willner, Lynn

2014-01-01

When participating in threaded discussions, under what conditions might non¬native speakers of English (NNSE) be at a comparative disadvantage to their classmates who are native speakers of English (NSE)? This study compares the threaded discussion perspectives of closely-matched NNSE and NSE adult students having different levels of threaded…

Analysis of Acoustic Features in Speakers with Cognitive Disorders and Speech Impairments

Science.gov (United States)

Saz, Oscar; Simón, Javier; Rodríguez, W. Ricardo; Lleida, Eduardo; Vaquero, Carlos

2009-12-01

This work presents the results in the analysis of the acoustic features (formants and the three suprasegmental features: tone, intensity and duration) of the vowel production in a group of 14 young speakers suffering different kinds of speech impairments due to physical and cognitive disorders. A corpus with unimpaired children's speech is used to determine the reference values for these features in speakers without any kind of speech impairment within the same domain of the impaired speakers; this is 57 isolated words. The signal processing to extract the formant and pitch values is based on a Linear Prediction Coefficients (LPCs) analysis of the segments considered as vowels in a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based Viterbi forced alignment. Intensity and duration are also based in the outcome of the automated segmentation. As main conclusion of the work, it is shown that intelligibility of the vowel production is lowered in impaired speakers even when the vowel is perceived as correct by human labelers. The decrease in intelligibility is due to a 30% of increase in confusability in the formants map, a reduction of 50% in the discriminative power in energy between stressed and unstressed vowels and to a 50% increase of the standard deviation in the length of the vowels. On the other hand, impaired speakers keep good control of tone in the production of stressed and unstressed vowels.

Evaluation of Speakers at a National Continuing Medical Education (CME Course

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jannette Collins, MD, MEd, FCCP

2002-12-01

Full Text Available Purpose: Evaluations of a national radiology continuing medical education (CME course in thoracic imaging were analyzed to determine what constitutes effective and ineffective lecturing. Methods and Materials: Evaluations of sessions and individual speakers participating in a five-day course jointly sponsored by the Society of Thoracic Radiology (STR and the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA were tallied by the RSNA Department of Data Management and three members of the STR Training Committee. Comments were collated and analyzed to determine the number of positive and negative comments and common themes related to ineffective lecturing. Results: Twenty-two sessions were evaluated by 234 (75.7% of 309 professional registrants. Eighty-one speakers were evaluated by an average of 153 registrants (range, 2 – 313. Mean ratings for 10 items evaluating sessions ranged from 1.28 – 2.05 (1=most positive, 4=least positive; SD .451 - .902. The average speaker rating was 5.7 (1=very poor, 7=outstanding; SD 0.94; range 4.3 – 6.4. Total number of comments analyzed was 862, with 505 (58.6% considered positive and 404 (46.9% considered negative (the total number exceeds 862 as a “comment” could consist of both positive and negative statements. Poor content was mentioned most frequently, making up 107 (26.5% of 404 negative comments, and applied to 51 (63% of 81 speakers. Other negative comments, in order of decreasing frequency, were related to delivery, image slides, command of the English language, text slides, and handouts. Conclusions: Individual evaluations of speakers at a national CME course provided information regarding the quality of lectures that was not provided by evaluations of grouped presentations. Systematic review of speaker evaluations provided specific information related to the types and frequency of features related to ineffective lecturing. This information can be used to design CME course evaluations, design future CME

Complimenting Functions by Native English Speakers and Iranian EFL Learners: A Divergence or Convergence

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ali Akbar Ansarin

2016-01-01

Full Text Available The study of compliment speech act has been under investigation on many occasions in recent years. In this study, an attempt is made to explore appraisals performed by native English speakers and Iranian EFL learners to find out how these two groups diverge or converge from each other with regard to complimenting patterns and norms. The participants of the study were 60 advanced Iranian EFL learners who were speaking Persian as their first language and 60 native English speakers. Through a written Discourse Completion Task comprised of eight different scenarios, compliments were analyzed with regard to topics (performance, personality, possession, and skill, functions (explicit, implicit, and opt-out, gender differences and the common positive adjectives used by two groups of native and nonnative participants. The findings suggested that native English speakers praised individuals more implicitly in comparison with Iranian EFL learners and native speakers provided opt-outs more frequently than Iranian EFL learners did. The analysis of data by Chi-square showed that gender and macro functions are independent of each other among Iranian EFL learners’ compliments while for native speakers, gender played a significant role in the distribution of appraisals. Iranian EFL learners’ complimenting patterns converge more towards those of native English speakers. Moreover, both groups favored explicit compliments. However, Iranian EFL learners were more inclined to provide explicit compliments. It can be concluded that there were more similarities rather than differences between Iranian EFL learners and native English speakers regarding compliment speech act. The results of this study can benefit researchers, teachers, material developers, and EFL learners.

7 CFR 247.13 - Provisions for non-English or limited-English speakers.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 7 Agriculture 4 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Provisions for non-English or limited-English speakers... § 247.13 Provisions for non-English or limited-English speakers. (a) What must State and local agencies do to ensure that non-English or limited-English speaking persons are aware of their rights and...

Analysis of Feature Extraction Methods for Speaker Dependent Speech Recognition

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Gurpreet Kaur

2017-02-01

Full Text Available Speech recognition is about what is being said, irrespective of who is saying. Speech recognition is a growing field. Major progress is taking place on the technology of automatic speech recognition (ASR. Still, there are lots of barriers in this field in terms of recognition rate, background noise, speaker variability, speaking rate, accent etc. Speech recognition rate mainly depends on the selection of features and feature extraction methods. This paper outlines the feature extraction techniques for speaker dependent speech recognition for isolated words. A brief survey of different feature extraction techniques like Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC, Linear Predictive Coding Coefficients (LPCC, Perceptual Linear Prediction (PLP, Relative Spectra Perceptual linear Predictive (RASTA-PLP analysis are presented and evaluation is done. Speech recognition has various applications from daily use to commercial use. We have made a speaker dependent system and this system can be useful in many areas like controlling a patient vehicle using simple commands.

Communication Interface for Mexican Spanish Dysarthric Speakers

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Gladys Bonilla-Enriquez

2012-03-01

Full Text Available La disartria es una discapacidad motora del habla caracterizada por debilidad o poca coordinación de los músculos del habla. Esta condición puede ser causada por un infarto, parálisis cerebral, o por una lesión severa en el cerebro. Para mexicanos con esta condición hay muy pocas, si es que hay alguna, tecnologías de asistencia para mejorar sus habilidades sociales de interacción. En este artículo presentamos nuestros avances hacia el desarrollo de una interfazde comunicación para hablantes con disartria cuya lengua materna sea el español mexicano. La metodología propuesta depende de (1 diseño especial de un corpus de entrenamiento con voz normal y recursos limitados, (2 adaptación de usuario estándar, y (3 control de la perplejidad del modelo de lenguaje para lograr alta precisión en el Reconocimiento Automático del Habla (RAH. La interfaz permite al usuario y terapéuta el realizar actividades como adaptación dinámica de usuario, adaptación de vocabulario, y síntesis de texto a voz. Pruebas en vivo fueron realizadas con un usuario con disartria leve, logrando precisiones de 93%-95% para habla espontánea.Dysarthria is a motor speech disorder due to weakness or poor coordination of the speechmuscles. This condition can be caused by a stroke, cerebral palsy, or by a traumatic braininjury. For Mexican people with this condition there are few, if any, assistive technologies to improve their social interaction skills. In this paper we present our advances towards the development of a communication interface for dysarthric speakers whose native language is Mexican Spanish. We propose a methodology that relies on (1 special design of a training normal-speech corpus with limited resources, (2 standard speaker adaptation, and (3 control of language model perplexity, to achieve high Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR accuracy. The interface allows the user and therapist to perform tasks such as dynamic speaker adaptation, vocabulary

Domestic Violence Protective Orders: A Qualitative Examination of Judges' Decision-Making Processes.

Science.gov (United States)

Agnew-Brune, Christine; Beth Moracco, Kathryn E; Person, Cara J; Bowling, J Michael

2015-06-17

Approximately one in three women in the United States experience intimate partner violence (IPV). IPV is associated with long-term negative health consequences; therefore, there is a need to examine potential prevention strategies. Evidence suggests that domestic violence protective orders (DVPOs), a legal intervention that prevents contact between two parties for up to 12 months, are an effective secondary prevention tool. However, because judges have relative autonomy in granting or denying DVPOs, research is needed to examine the processes they use to guide their decisions. The aim of the study was to investigate how District Court judges decide whether to issue a DVPO. Using in-depth interviews with 20 North Carolina District Court judges, the present study addressed three research questions: (a) what factors influence judges' decisions to grant or deny a DVPO, (b) what heuristics or cognitive shortcuts potentially guide their decisions, and (c) what judges worry about when making decisions. Three themes emerged from the data analyses: (a) violent incidents must reach a certain threshold, (b) the presence of children creates competing concerns, and (c) judges worry about the negative impact their decisions may have on the lives of those involved. Recommendations for improving the DVPO issuance process are also discussed. © The Author(s) 2015.

Within-category variance and lexical tone discrimination in native and non-native speakers

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Hoffmann, C.W.G.; Sadakata, M.; Chen, A.; Desain, P.W.M.; McQueen, J.M.; Gussenhove, C.; Chen, Y.; Dediu, D.

2014-01-01

In this paper, we show how acoustic variance within lexical tones in disyllabic Mandarin Chinese pseudowords affects discrimination abilities in both native and non-native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. Within-category acoustic variance did not hinder native speakers in discriminating between lexical

The Acquisition of Clitic Pronouns in the Spanish Interlanguage of Peruvian Quechua Speakers.

Science.gov (United States)

Klee, Carol A.

1989-01-01

Analysis of four adult Quechua speakers' acquisition of clitic pronouns in Spanish revealed that educational attainment and amount of contact with monolingual Spanish speakers were positively related to native-like norms of competence in the use of object pronouns in Spanish. (CB)

"I May Be a Native Speaker but I'm Not Monolingual": Reimagining "All" Teachers' Linguistic Identities in TESOL

Science.gov (United States)

Ellis, Elizabeth M.

2016-01-01

Teacher linguistic identity has so far mainly been researched in terms of whether a teacher identifies (or is identified by others) as a native speaker (NEST) or nonnative speaker (NNEST) (Moussu & Llurda, 2008; Reis, 2011). Native speakers are presumed to be monolingual, and nonnative speakers, although by definition bilingual, tend to be…

43 CFR 4.2 - Membership of appeals boards; decisions, functions of Chief Judges.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-10-01

... direct that an appeal may be decided by a panel of any two Administrative Judges of the Board, but if..., functions of Chief Judges. 4.2 Section 4.2 Public Lands: Interior Office of the Secretary of the Interior... appeals boards; decisions, functions of Chief Judges. (a) The Appeals Boards consist of regular members...

Bridging Gaps in Common Ground: Speakers Design Their Gestures for Their Listeners

Science.gov (United States)

Hilliard, Caitlin; Cook, Susan Wagner

2016-01-01

Communication is shaped both by what we are trying to say and by whom we are saying it to. We examined whether and how shared information influences the gestures speakers produce along with their speech. Unlike prior work examining effects of common ground on speech and gesture, we examined a situation in which some speakers have the same amount…

Civil Remedies Division Administrative Law Judge Decisions

Data.gov (United States)

U.S. Department of Health & Human Services — Decisions issued by Administrative Law Judges of the Departmental Appeals Board's Civil Remedies Division concerning fraud and abuse determinations by the Office of...

Unravelling intention: distal intentions increase the subjective sense of agency.

Science.gov (United States)

Vinding, Mikkel C; Pedersen, Michael N; Overgaard, Morten

2013-09-01

Experimental studies investigating the contribution of conscious intention to the generation of a sense of agency for one's own actions tend to rely upon a narrow definition of intention. Often it is operationalized as the conscious sensation of wanting to move right before movement. Existing results and discussion are therefore missing crucial aspects of intentions, namely intention as the conscious sensation of wanting to move in advance of the movement. In the present experiment we used an intentional binding paradigm, in which we distinguished between immediate (proximal) intention, as usually investigated, and longer standing (distal) intention. The results showed that the binding effect was significantly enhanced for distal intentions compared to proximal intentions, indicating that the former leads to stronger sense of agency. Our finding provides empirical support for a crucial distinction between at least two types of intention when addressing the efficacy of conscious intentions. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Encoding, rehearsal, and recall in signers and speakers: shared network but differential engagement.

Science.gov (United States)

Bavelier, D; Newman, A J; Mukherjee, M; Hauser, P; Kemeny, S; Braun, A; Boutla, M

2008-10-01

Short-term memory (STM), or the ability to hold verbal information in mind for a few seconds, is known to rely on the integrity of a frontoparietal network of areas. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to ask whether a similar network is engaged when verbal information is conveyed through a visuospatial language, American Sign Language, rather than speech. Deaf native signers and hearing native English speakers performed a verbal recall task, where they had to first encode a list of letters in memory, maintain it for a few seconds, and finally recall it in the order presented. The frontoparietal network described to mediate STM in speakers was also observed in signers, with its recruitment appearing independent of the modality of the language. This finding supports the view that signed and spoken STM rely on similar mechanisms. However, deaf signers and hearing speakers differentially engaged key structures of the frontoparietal network as the stages of STM unfold. In particular, deaf signers relied to a greater extent than hearing speakers on passive memory storage areas during encoding and maintenance, but on executive process areas during recall. This work opens new avenues for understanding similarities and differences in STM performance in signers and speakers.

Incorporating Pass-Phrase Dependent Background Models for Text-Dependent Speaker verification

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Sarkar, Achintya Kumar; Tan, Zheng-Hua

2018-01-01

-dependent. We show that the proposed method significantly reduces the error rates of text-dependent speaker verification for the non-target types: target-wrong and impostor-wrong while it maintains comparable TD-SV performance when impostors speak a correct utterance with respect to the conventional system......In this paper, we propose pass-phrase dependent background models (PBMs) for text-dependent (TD) speaker verification (SV) to integrate the pass-phrase identification process into the conventional TD-SV system, where a PBM is derived from a text-independent background model through adaptation using...... the utterances of a particular pass-phrase. During training, pass-phrase specific target speaker models are derived from the particular PBM using the training data for the respective target model. While testing, the best PBM is first selected for the test utterance in the maximum likelihood (ML) sense...

43 CFR 30.239 - How will the judge decide a petition for rehearing?

Science.gov (United States)

2010-10-01

... 43 Public Lands: Interior 1 2010-10-01 2010-10-01 false How will the judge decide a petition for... the judge decide a petition for rehearing? (a) If proper grounds are not shown, or if the petition is not timely filed, the judge will: (1) Issue an order denying the petition for rehearing and including...

43 CFR 30.145 - When can a judge reduce or disallow a claim?

Science.gov (United States)

2010-10-01

... 43 Public Lands: Interior 1 2010-10-01 2010-10-01 false When can a judge reduce or disallow a... PROBATE HEARINGS PROCEDURES Claims § 30.145 When can a judge reduce or disallow a claim? The judge has discretion to decide whether part or all of an otherwise valid claim is unreasonable, and if so, to reduce...

Judging Criterion of Controlled Structures with Closely Spaced Natural Frequencies

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Xie Faxiang; Sun Limin

2010-01-01

The structures with closely spaced natural frequencies widely exist in civil engineering; however, the judging criterion of the density of closely spaced frequencies is in dispute. This paper suggests a judging criterion for structures with closely spaced natural frequencies based on the analysis on a controlled 2-DOF structure. The analysis results indicate that the optimal control gain of the structure with velocity feedback is dependent on the frequency density parameter of structure and the maximum attainable additional modal damping ratio is 1.72 times of the frequency density parameter when state feedback is applied. Based on a brief review on the previous researches, a judging criterion related the minimum frequency density parameter and the required mode damping ratio was proposed.

Speaker-Sex Discrimination for Voiced and Whispered Vowels at Short Durations

OpenAIRE

Smith, David R. R.

2016-01-01

Whispered vowels, produced with no vocal fold vibration, lack the periodic temporal fine structure which in voiced vowels underlies the perceptual attribute of pitch (a salient auditory cue to speaker sex). Voiced vowels possess no temporal fine structure at very short durations (below two glottal cycles). The prediction was that speaker-sex discrimination performance for whispered and voiced vowels would be similar for very short durations but, as stimulus duration increases, voiced vowel pe...

Identifying the nonlinear mechanical behaviour of micro-speakers from their quasi-linear electrical response

Science.gov (United States)

Zilletti, Michele; Marker, Arthur; Elliott, Stephen John; Holland, Keith

2017-05-01

In this study model identification of the nonlinear dynamics of a micro-speaker is carried out by purely electrical measurements, avoiding any explicit vibration measurements. It is shown that a dynamic model of the micro-speaker, which takes into account the nonlinear damping characteristic of the device, can be identified by measuring the response between the voltage input and the current flowing into the coil. An analytical formulation of the quasi-linear model of the micro-speaker is first derived and an optimisation method is then used to identify a polynomial function which describes the mechanical damping behaviour of the micro-speaker. The analytical results of the quasi-linear model are compared with numerical results. This study potentially opens up the possibility of efficiently implementing nonlinear echo cancellers.

Government instability shifts skin tone representations of and intentions to vote for political candidates.

Science.gov (United States)

Stern, Chadly; Balcetis, Emily; Cole, Shana; West, Tessa V; Caruso, Eugene M

2016-01-01

Does government stability shift the way White and Black Americans represent and make voting decisions about political candidates? Participants judged how representative lightened, darkened, and unaltered photographs were of a racially ambiguous candidate ostensibly running for political office (Studies 1-3). When the governmental system was presented as stable, White participants who shared (vs. did not share) the candidate's political beliefs rated a lightened photo as more representative of the candidate, and Black participants who shared (vs. did not share) the candidate's political beliefs rated a darkened photo as more representative (Studies 1-3). However, under conditions of instability, both Whites and Blacks who shared (vs. did not share) the candidate's political beliefs rated a lightened photo as more representative (Study 3). Representations of (Studies 2 and 3) and actual differences in (Studies 4a and 4b) skin tone predicted intentions to vote for candidates, as a function of government stability and participants' race. Further evidence suggested that system stability shifted the motivations that guided voting decisions (Study 4a and 4b). When the system was stable, the motivation to enhance one's group predicted greater intentions to vote for lighter skinned candidates among Whites, and greater intentions to vote for darker skinned candidates among Blacks. When the system was unstable, however, lacking confidence in the sociopolitical system predicted intentions to vote for lighter skinned candidates among both Whites and Blacks. Implications for political leadership and social perception are discussed. (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

43 CFR 30.235 - What will the judge's decision in a formal probate proceeding contain?

Science.gov (United States)

2010-10-01

....235 What will the judge's decision in a formal probate proceeding contain? The judge must decide the... 43 Public Lands: Interior 1 2010-10-01 2010-10-01 false What will the judge's decision in a formal... requirements of this section. (a) In all cases, the judge's decision must: (1) Include the name, birth date...

Promoting Communities of Practice among Non-Native Speakers of English in Online Discussions

Science.gov (United States)

Kim, Hoe Kyeung

2011-01-01

An online discussion involving text-based computer-mediated communication has great potential for promoting equal participation among non-native speakers of English. Several studies claimed that online discussions could enhance the academic participation of non-native speakers of English. However, there is little research around participation…

Learning foreign labels from a foreign speaker: the role of (limited) exposure to a second language.

Science.gov (United States)

Akhtar, Nameera; Menjivar, Jennifer; Hoicka, Elena; Sabbagh, Mark A

2012-11-01

Three- and four-year-olds (N = 144) were introduced to novel labels by an English speaker and a foreign speaker (of Nordish, a made-up language), and were asked to endorse one of the speaker's labels. Monolingual English-speaking children were compared to bilingual children and English-speaking children who were regularly exposed to a language other than English. All children tended to endorse the English speaker's labels when asked 'What do you call this?', but when asked 'What do you call this in Nordish?', children with exposure to a second language were more likely to endorse the foreign label than monolingual and bilingual children. The findings suggest that, at this age, exposure to, but not necessarily immersion in, more than one language may promote the ability to learn foreign words from a foreign speaker.

Is the superior verbal memory span of Mandarin speakers due to faster rehearsal?

Science.gov (United States)

Mattys, Sven L; Baddeley, Alan; Trenkic, Danijela

2018-04-01

It is well established that digit span in native Chinese speakers is atypically high. This is commonly attributed to a capacity for more rapid subvocal rehearsal for that group. We explored this hypothesis by testing a group of English-speaking native Mandarin speakers on digit span and word span in both Mandarin and English, together with a measure of speed of articulation for each. When compared to the performance of native English speakers, the Mandarin group proved to be superior on both digit and word spans while predictably having lower spans in English. This suggests that the Mandarin advantage is not limited to digits. Speed of rehearsal correlated with span performance across materials. However, this correlation was more pronounced for English speakers than for any of the Chinese measures. Further analysis suggested that speed of rehearsal did not provide an adequate account of differences between Mandarin and English spans or for the advantage of digits over words. Possible alternative explanations are discussed.

20 CFR 405.301 - Hearing before an administrative law judge-general.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-04-01

... law judge. (c) You may examine the evidence used in making the decision or determination under review... 20 Employees' Benefits 2 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 false Hearing before an administrative law judge-general. 405.301 Section 405.301 Employees' Benefits SOCIAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATION ADMINISTRATIVE REVIEW...

40 CFR 164.40 - Qualifications and duties of Administrative Law Judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... Administrative Law Judge. 164.40 Section 164.40 Protection of Environment ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY... Judicial Ethics of the American Bar Association. (d) Power. Subject to review, as provided elsewhere in... Law Judge, the Administrator or the Environmental Appeals Board. [38 FR 19371, July 20, 1973, as...

Variation among heritage speakers: Sequential vs. simultaneous bilinguals

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Teresa Lee

2013-08-01

Full Text Available This study examines the differences in the grammatical knowledge of two types of heritage speakers of Korean. Early simultaneous bilinguals are exposed to both English and the heritage language from birth, whereas early sequential bilinguals are exposed to the heritage language first and then to English upon schooling. A listening comprehension task involving relative clauses was conducted with 51 beginning-level Korean heritage speakers. The results showed that the early sequential bilinguals exhibited much more accurate knowledge than the early simultaneous bilinguals, who lacked rudimentary knowledge of Korean relative clauses. Drawing on the findings of adult and child Korean L1 data on the acquisition of relative clauses, the performance of each group is discussed with respect to attrition and incomplete acquisition of the heritage language.

The native-speaker fever in English language teaching (ELT: Pitting pedagogical competence against historical origin

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Anchimbe, Eric A.

2006-01-01

Full Text Available This paper discusses English language teaching (ELT around the world, and argues that as a profession, it should emphasise pedagogical competence rather than native-speaker requirement in the recruitment of teachers in English as a foreign language (EFL and English as a second language (ESL contexts. It establishes that being a native speaker does not make one automatically a competent speaker or, of that matter, a competent teacher of the language. It observes that on many grounds, including physical, sociocultural, technological and economic changes in the world as well as the status of English as official and national language in many post-colonial regions, the distinction between native and non-native speakers is no longer valid.

Psychophysical Boundary for Categorization of Voiced-Voiceless Stop Consonants in Native Japanese Speakers

Science.gov (United States)

Tamura, Shunsuke; Ito, Kazuhito; Hirose, Nobuyuki; Mori, Shuji

2018-01-01

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the psychophysical boundary used for categorization of voiced-voiceless stop consonants in native Japanese speakers. Method: Twelve native Japanese speakers participated in the experiment. The stimuli were synthetic stop consonant-vowel stimuli varying in voice onset time (VOT) with…

Physiological Indices of Bilingualism: Oral–Motor Coordination and Speech Rate in Bengali–English Speakers

Science.gov (United States)

Chakraborty, Rahul; Goffman, Lisa; Smith, Anne

2009-01-01

Purpose To examine how age of immersion and proficiency in a 2nd language influence speech movement variability and speaking rate in both a 1st language and a 2nd language. Method A group of 21 Bengali–English bilingual speakers participated. Lip and jaw movements were recorded. For all 21 speakers, lip movement variability was assessed based on productions of Bengali (L1; 1st language) and English (L2; 2nd language) sentences. For analyses related to the influence of L2 proficiency on speech production processes, participants were sorted into low- (n = 7) and high-proficiency (n = 7) groups. Lip movement variability and speech rate were evaluated for both of these groups across L1 and L2 sentences. Results Surprisingly, adult bilingual speakers produced equally consistent speech movement patterns in their production of L1 and L2. When groups were sorted according to proficiency, highly proficient speakers were marginally more variable in their L1. In addition, there were some phoneme-specific effects, most markedly that segments not shared by both languages were treated differently in production. Consistent with previous studies, movement durations were longer for less proficient speakers in both L1 and L2. Interpretation In contrast to those of child learners, the speech motor systems of adult L2 speakers show a high degree of consistency. Such lack of variability presumably contributes to protracted difficulties with acquiring nativelike pronunciation in L2. The proficiency results suggest bidirectional interactions across L1 and L2, which is consistent with hypotheses regarding interference and the sharing of phonological space. A slower speech rate in less proficient speakers implies that there are increased task demands on speech production processes. PMID:18367680

Does training make French speakers more able to identify lexical stress?

OpenAIRE

Schwab, Sandra; Llisterri, Joaquim

2013-01-01

This research takes the stress deafness hypothesis as a starting point (e.g. Dupoux et al., 2008), and, more specifically, the fact that French speakers present difficulties in perceiving lexical stress in a free-stress language. In this framework, we aim at determining whether a prosodic training could improve the ability of French speakers to identify the stressed syllable in Spanish words. Three groups of participants took part in this experiment. The Native group was composed of 16 speake...

a sociophonetic study of young nigerian english speakers

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Oladipupo

between male and female speakers in boundary consonant deletion, (F(1, .... speech perception (Foulkes 2006, Clopper & Pisoni, 2005, Thomas 2002). ... in Nigeria, and had had the privilege of travelling to Europe and the Americas for the.

Classifications of Vocalic Segments from Articulatory Kinematics: Healthy Controls and Speakers with Dysarthria

Science.gov (United States)

Yunusova, Yana; Weismer, Gary G.; Lindstrom, Mary J.

2011-01-01

Purpose: In this study, the authors classified vocalic segments produced by control speakers (C) and speakers with dysarthria due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Parkinson's disease (PD); classification was based on movement measures. The researchers asked the following questions: (a) Can vowels be classified on the basis of selected…

THE GORONTALO RELIGIOUS COURT JUDGES RESPONSE TOWARD THEIR ABSOLUTE COMPETENCE IN RESOLVING SHARIAH ECONOMY DISPUTES

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Andi Mardiana

2015-06-01

Full Text Available Post the first amendment of Religious Courts Bill that provides wider authority toward Religious Courts in investigate and decide Islamic economics disputes has responses, whether support or pessimistic, especially among Religious Court judges themselves. This paper examines the Gorontalo Religious Courts judges response about their authority in resolve Shariah economy disputes. This paper is a qualitative descriptive research and the data was collected using observation, interviews and document reviews. The finding of this study revealed that the Gorontalo Religious Courts judges response well to trust laws in handling disputes Shariah economy. In other words, in principle, they are ready to handle disputes Islamic economics. Readiness, such as: the handling disputes Shariah economy is Religious Courts judges authorities and it is a professional responsibility as a judge; Religious Courts formed a special judge to handle falling out or cases of Shariah economy, and Religious Courts judges provides knowledge of Shariah economy without trainings or workshops.

On the Use of Complementary Spectral Features for Speaker Recognition

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Sridhar Krishnan

2007-12-01

Full Text Available The most popular features for speaker recognition are Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs and linear prediction cepstral coefficients (LPCCs. These features are used extensively because they characterize the vocal tract configuration which is known to be highly speaker-dependent. In this work, several features are introduced that can characterize the vocal system in order to complement the traditional features and produce better speaker recognition models. The spectral centroid (SC, spectral bandwidth (SBW, spectral band energy (SBE, spectral crest factor (SCF, spectral flatness measure (SFM, Shannon entropy (SE, and Renyi entropy (RE were utilized for this purpose. This work demonstrates that these features are robust in noisy conditions by simulating some common distortions that are found in the speakers' environment and a typical telephone channel. Babble noise, additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN, and a bandpass channel with 1 dB of ripple were used to simulate these noisy conditions. The results show significant improvements in classification performance for all noise conditions when these features were used to complement the MFCC and ΔMFCC features. In particular, the SC and SCF improved performance in almost all noise conditions within the examined SNR range (10–40 dB. For example, in cases where there was only one source of distortion, classification improvements of up to 8% and 10% were achieved under babble noise and AWGN, respectively, using the SCF feature.

Method for prejudging intention of warship to attack air target

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ZHAO Handong

2018-02-01

Full Text Available [Objectives] This paper proposes a heterogeneous integrated learner to solve the problem of fuzzy uncertainty classification in order to judge the target intention of air attack in a short time. [Methods] First, a limit learning machine, decision tree, Skohonen neural network and LVQ neural network are selected to construct the heterogeneous integrated learner using the integrated learning strategy. Next, the training program is trained 100 times using the integrated learner to obtain the classification experiment average accuracy and calculation time. In order to improve the accuracy, integrated pruning is carried out to eliminate the "poor quality" LVQ neural network, and a more efficient heterogeneous integrated learner is reconstructed. The experimental results are extremely accurate but the calculation is time-consuming. In this paper, the Skohonen neural network sub-classifier is proposed as an "offline training and online call". [Results] Simulation experiments show that the time consumed from detecting the air targets to prejudging the intention of each incoming target is 4.972 s with an accuracy of 99.93%, which is excellent for meeting accuracy and real-time requirements. [Conclusions] This study provides a new and effective method for air defense decision-making. The method used in this paper also provides a better way of realizing the classification problem of small samples.

Speaker's voice as a memory cue.

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Campeanu, Sandra; Craik, Fergus I M; Alain, Claude

2015-02-01

Speaker's voice occupies a central role as the cornerstone of auditory social interaction. Here, we review the evidence suggesting that speaker's voice constitutes an integral context cue in auditory memory. Investigation into the nature of voice representation as a memory cue is essential to understanding auditory memory and the neural correlates which underlie it. Evidence from behavioral and electrophysiological studies suggest that while specific voice reinstatement (i.e., same speaker) often appears to facilitate word memory even without attention to voice at study, the presence of a partial benefit of similar voices between study and test is less clear. In terms of explicit memory experiments utilizing unfamiliar voices, encoding methods appear to play a pivotal role. Voice congruency effects have been found when voice is specifically attended at study (i.e., when relatively shallow, perceptual encoding takes place). These behavioral findings coincide with neural indices of memory performance such as the parietal old/new recollection effect and the late right frontal effect. The former distinguishes between correctly identified old words and correctly identified new words, and reflects voice congruency only when voice is attended at study. Characterization of the latter likely depends upon voice memory, rather than word memory. There is also evidence to suggest that voice effects can be found in implicit memory paradigms. However, the presence of voice effects appears to depend greatly on the task employed. Using a word identification task, perceptual similarity between study and test conditions is, like for explicit memory tests, crucial. In addition, the type of noise employed appears to have a differential effect. While voice effects have been observed when white noise is used at both study and test, using multi-talker babble does not confer the same results. In terms of neuroimaging research modulations, characterization of an implicit memory effect

Who decides? The decision-making process of juvenile judges concerning minors with mental disorders.

Science.gov (United States)

Cappon, Leen

2016-01-01

Previous research on juvenile judges' decision-making process has neglected the role of the different actors involved in judicial procedures. The decision can be considered as a result of information exchange between the different actors involved. The process of making a decision is equally important as the decision itself, especially when the decision considers minors with mental disorders. The presence and the type of interaction determine the information available to the juvenile judges to make their final decision. The overall aim of this study is to gain insight into the role of all actors, including the juvenile judge, in the juvenile judge's decision-making process in cases relating to minors with mental disorders. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with professional actors (n=32), minors (n=31) and parents (n=17). The findings indicated that the judge's decision is overall the result of an interaction between the juvenile judge, the social services investigator and the youth psychiatrist. The other professional actors, the minors and the parents had only a limited role in the decision-making process. The research concludes that the judge's decision-making process should be based on dialogue, and requires enhanced collaboration between the juvenile court and youth psychiatrists from mental health services. Future decision-making research should pay more attention to the interactions of the actors that guide a juvenile judge's decision. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

An Attempt at Matching Waking Events Into Dream Reports by Independent Judges

Science.gov (United States)

Wang, Jia Xi; Shen, He Yong

2018-01-01

Correlations between memories and dreaming has typically been studied by linking conscious experiences and dream reports, which has illustrated that dreaming reflects waking life events, thoughts, and emotions. As some research suggests that sleep has a function of memory consolidation, and dreams reflect this, researching this relationship further may uncover more useful insights. However, most related research has been conducted using the self-report method which asks participants to judge the relationship between their own conscious experiences and dreams. This method may cause errors when the research purpose is to make comparisons between different groups, because individual differences cannot be balanced out when the results are compared among groups. Based on a knowledge of metaphors and symbols, we developed two operationalized definitions for independent judges to match conscious experiences and dreams, the descriptive incorporation and the metaphorical incorporation, and tested their reliability for the matching purpose. Two independent judges were asked to complete a linking task for 212 paired event-dreams. Results showed almost half dreams can be matched by independent judges, and the independent-judge method could provide similar proportions for the linking task, when compared with the self-report method. PMID:29681873

The effect on recognition memory of noise cancelling headphones in a noisy environment with native and nonnative speakers

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Brett R C Molesworth

2014-01-01

Full Text Available Noise has the potential to impair cognitive performance. For nonnative speakers, the effect of noise on performance is more severe than their native counterparts. What remains unknown is the effectiveness of countermeasures such as noise attenuating devices in such circumstances. Therefore, the main aim of the present research was to examine the effectiveness of active noise attenuating countermeasures in the presence of simulated aircraft noise for both native and nonnative English speakers. Thirty-two participants, half native English speakers and half native German speakers completed four recognition (cued recall tasks presented in English under four different audio conditions, all in the presence of simulated aircraft noise. The results of the research indicated that in simulated aircraft noise at 65 dB(A, performance of nonnative English speakers was poorer than for native English speakers. The beneficial effects of noise cancelling headphones in improving the signal to noise ratio led to an improved performance for nonnative speakers. These results have particular importance for organizations operating in a safety-critical environment such as aviation.

Front-Stage Stars and Backstage Producers: The Role of Judges in Problem-Solving Courts1

OpenAIRE

Portillo, Shannon; Rudes, Danielle; Viglione, Jill; Nelson, Matthew; Taxman, Faye

2013-01-01

In problem-solving courts judges are no longer neutral arbitrators in adversarial justice processes. Instead, judges directly engage with court participants. The movement towards problem-solving court models emerges from a collaborative therapeutic jurisprudence framework. While most scholars argue judges are the central courtroom actors within problem-solving courts, we find judges are the stars front-stage, but play a more supporting role backstage. We use Goffman's front-stage-backstage fr...

Continuing Medical Education Speakers with High Evaluation Scores Use more Image-based Slides

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Ferguson, Ian

2017-01-01

Full Text Available Although continuing medical education (CME presentations are common across health professions, it is unknown whether slide design is independently associated with audience evaluations of the speaker. Based on the conceptual framework of Mayer’s theory of multimedia learning, this study aimed to determine whether image use and text density in presentation slides are associated with overall speaker evaluations. This retrospective analysis of six sequential CME conferences (two annual emergency medicine conferences over a three-year period used a mixed linear regression model to assess whether postconference speaker evaluations were associated with image fraction (percentage of image-based slides per presentation and text density (number of words per slide. A total of 105 unique lectures were given by 49 faculty members, and 1,222 evaluations (70.1% response rate were available for analysis. On average, 47.4% (SD=25.36 of slides had at least one educationally-relevant image (image fraction. Image fraction significantly predicted overall higher evaluation scores [F(1, 100.676=6.158, p=0.015] in the mixed linear regression model. The mean (SD text density was 25.61 (8.14 words/slide but was not a significant predictor [F(1, 86.293=0.55, p=0.815]. Of note, the individual speaker [χ2 (1=2.952, p=0.003] and speaker seniority [F(3, 59.713=4.083, p=0.011] significantly predicted higher scores. This is the first published study to date assessing the linkage between slide design and CME speaker evaluations by an audience of practicing clinicians. The incorporation of images was associated with higher evaluation scores, in alignment with Mayer’s theory of multimedia learning. Contrary to this theory, however, text density showed no significant association, suggesting that these scores may be multifactorial. Professional development efforts should focus on teaching best practices in both slide design and presentation skills.

Continuing Medical Education Speakers with High Evaluation Scores Use more Image-based Slides.

Science.gov (United States)

Ferguson, Ian; Phillips, Andrew W; Lin, Michelle

2017-01-01

Although continuing medical education (CME) presentations are common across health professions, it is unknown whether slide design is independently associated with audience evaluations of the speaker. Based on the conceptual framework of Mayer's theory of multimedia learning, this study aimed to determine whether image use and text density in presentation slides are associated with overall speaker evaluations. This retrospective analysis of six sequential CME conferences (two annual emergency medicine conferences over a three-year period) used a mixed linear regression model to assess whether post-conference speaker evaluations were associated with image fraction (percentage of image-based slides per presentation) and text density (number of words per slide). A total of 105 unique lectures were given by 49 faculty members, and 1,222 evaluations (70.1% response rate) were available for analysis. On average, 47.4% (SD=25.36) of slides had at least one educationally-relevant image (image fraction). Image fraction significantly predicted overall higher evaluation scores [F(1, 100.676)=6.158, p=0.015] in the mixed linear regression model. The mean (SD) text density was 25.61 (8.14) words/slide but was not a significant predictor [F(1, 86.293)=0.55, p=0.815]. Of note, the individual speaker [χ 2 (1)=2.952, p=0.003] and speaker seniority [F(3, 59.713)=4.083, p=0.011] significantly predicted higher scores. This is the first published study to date assessing the linkage between slide design and CME speaker evaluations by an audience of practicing clinicians. The incorporation of images was associated with higher evaluation scores, in alignment with Mayer's theory of multimedia learning. Contrary to this theory, however, text density showed no significant association, suggesting that these scores may be multifactorial. Professional development efforts should focus on teaching best practices in both slide design and presentation skills.

Speaker-Sex Discrimination for Voiced and Whispered Vowels at Short Durations.

Science.gov (United States)

Smith, David R R

2016-01-01

Whispered vowels, produced with no vocal fold vibration, lack the periodic temporal fine structure which in voiced vowels underlies the perceptual attribute of pitch (a salient auditory cue to speaker sex). Voiced vowels possess no temporal fine structure at very short durations (below two glottal cycles). The prediction was that speaker-sex discrimination performance for whispered and voiced vowels would be similar for very short durations but, as stimulus duration increases, voiced vowel performance would improve relative to whispered vowel performance as pitch information becomes available. This pattern of results was shown for women's but not for men's voices. A whispered vowel needs to have a duration three times longer than a voiced vowel before listeners can reliably tell whether it's spoken by a man or woman (∼30 ms vs. ∼10 ms). Listeners were half as sensitive to information about speaker-sex when it is carried by whispered compared with voiced vowels.

Infant sensitivity to speaker and language in learning a second label.

Science.gov (United States)

Bhagwat, Jui; Casasola, Marianella

2014-02-01

Two experiments examined when monolingual, English-learning 19-month-old infants learn a second object label. Two experimenters sat together. One labeled a novel object with one novel label, whereas the other labeled the same object with a different label in either the same or a different language. Infants were tested on their comprehension of each label immediately following its presentation. Infants mapped the first label at above chance levels, but they did so with the second label only when requested by the speaker who provided it (Experiment 1) or when the second experimenter labeled the object in a different language (Experiment 2). These results show that 19-month-olds learn second object labels but do not readily generalize them across speakers of the same language. The results highlight how speaker and language spoken guide infants' acceptance of second labels, supporting sociopragmatic views of word learning. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

A Recommender System for Programming Online Judges Using Fuzzy Information Modeling

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Raciel Yera Toledo

2018-04-01

Full Text Available Programming online judges (POJs are an emerging application scenario in e-learning recommendation areas. Specifically, they are e-learning tools usually used in programming practices for the automatic evaluation of source code developed by students when they are solving programming problems. Usually, they contain a large collection of such problems, to be solved by students at their own personalized pace. The more problems in the POJ the harder the selection of the right problem to solve according to previous users performance, causing information overload and a widespread discouragement. This paper presents a recommendation framework to mitigate this issue by suggesting problems to solve in programming online judges, through the use of fuzzy tools which manage the uncertainty related to this scenario. The evaluation of the proposal uses real data obtained from a programming online judge, and shows that the new approach improves previous recommendation strategies which do not consider uncertainty management in the programming online judge scenarios. Specifically, the best results were obtained for short recommendation lists.

B Anand | Speakers | Indian Academy of Sciences

Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

However, the mechanism by which this protospacer fragment gets integrated in a directional fashion into the leader proximal end is elusive. The speakers group identified that the leader region abutting the first CRISPR repeat localizes Integration Host Factor (IHF) and Cas1-2 complex in Escherichia coli. IHF binding to the ...

L2 speakers decompose morphologically complex verbs: fMRI evidence from priming of transparent derived verbs

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Sophie eDe Grauwe

2014-10-01

Full Text Available In this fMRI long-lag priming study, we investigated the processing of Dutch semantically transparent, derived prefix verbs. In such words, the meaning of the word as a whole can be deduced from the meanings of its parts, e.g. wegleggen ‘put aside’. Many behavioral and some fMRI studies suggest that native (L1 speakers decompose transparent derived words. The brain region usually implicated in morphological decomposition is the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG. In non-native (L2 speakers, the processing of transparent derived words has hardly been investigated, especially in fMRI studies, and results are contradictory: Some studies find more reliance on holistic (i.e. non-decompositional processing by L2 speakers; some find no difference between L1 and L2 speakers. In this study, we wanted to find out whether Dutch transparent derived prefix verbs are decomposed or processed holistically by German L2 speakers of Dutch. Half of the derived verbs (e.g. omvallen ‘fall down’ were preceded by their stem (e.g. vallen ‘fall’ with a lag of 4 to 6 words (‘primed’; the other half (e.g. inslapen ‘fall asleep’ were not (‘unprimed’. L1 and L2 speakers of Dutch made lexical decisions on these visually presented verbs. Both ROI analyses and whole-brain analyses showed that there was a significant repetition suppression effect for primed compared to unprimed derived verbs in the LIFG. This was true both for the analyses over L2 speakers only and for the analyses over the two language groups together. The latter did not reveal any interaction with language group (L1 vs. L2 in the LIFG. Thus, L2 speakers show a clear priming effect in the LIFG, an area that has been associated with morphological decomposition. Our findings are consistent with the idea that L2 speakers engage in decomposition of transparent derived verbs rather than processing them holistically.

Congenital Amusia in Speakers of a Tone Language: Association with Lexical Tone Agnosia

Science.gov (United States)

Nan, Yun; Sun, Yanan; Peretz, Isabelle

2010-01-01

Congenital amusia is a neurogenetic disorder that affects the processing of musical pitch in speakers of non-tonal languages like English and French. We assessed whether this musical disorder exists among speakers of Mandarin Chinese who use pitch to alter the meaning of words. Using the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia, we tested 117…

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

Combining Behavioral and ERP Methodologies to Investigate the Differences Between McGurk Effects Demonstrated by Cantonese and Mandarin Speakers

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Juan Zhang

2018-05-01

Full Text Available The present study investigated the impact of Chinese dialects on McGurk effect using behavioral and event-related potential (ERP methodologies. Specifically, intra-language comparison of McGurk effect was conducted between Mandarin and Cantonese speakers. The behavioral results showed that Cantonese speakers exhibited a stronger McGurk effect in audiovisual speech perception compared to Mandarin speakers, although both groups performed equally in the auditory and visual conditions. ERP results revealed that Cantonese speakers were more sensitive to visual cues than Mandarin speakers, though this was not the case for the auditory cues. Taken together, the current findings suggest that the McGurk effect generated by Chinese speakers is mainly influenced by segmental phonology during audiovisual speech integration.

Combining Behavioral and ERP Methodologies to Investigate the Differences Between McGurk Effects Demonstrated by Cantonese and Mandarin Speakers

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, Juan; Meng, Yaxuan; McBride, Catherine; Fan, Xitao; Yuan, Zhen

2018-01-01

The present study investigated the impact of Chinese dialects on McGurk effect using behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) methodologies. Specifically, intra-language comparison of McGurk effect was conducted between Mandarin and Cantonese speakers. The behavioral results showed that Cantonese speakers exhibited a stronger McGurk effect in audiovisual speech perception compared to Mandarin speakers, although both groups performed equally in the auditory and visual conditions. ERP results revealed that Cantonese speakers were more sensitive to visual cues than Mandarin speakers, though this was not the case for the auditory cues. Taken together, the current findings suggest that the McGurk effect generated by Chinese speakers is mainly influenced by segmental phonology during audiovisual speech integration. PMID:29780312

Communication‐related affective, behavioral, and cognitive reactions in speakers with spasmodic dysphonia

Science.gov (United States)

Vanryckeghem, Martine

2017-01-01

Objectives To investigate the self‐perceived affective, behavioral, and cognitive reactions associated with communication of speakers with spasmodic dysphonia as a function of employment status. Study Design Prospective cross‐sectional investigation Methods 148 Participants with spasmodic dysphonia (SD) completed an adapted version of the Behavior Assessment Battery (BAB‐Voice), a multidimensional assessment of self‐perceived reactions to communication. The BAB‐Voice consisted of four subtests: the Speech Situation Checklist for A) Emotional Reaction (SSC‐ER) and B) Speech Disruption (SSC‐SD), C) the Behavior Checklist (BCL), and D) the Communication Attitude Test for Adults (BigCAT). Participants were assigned to groups based on employment status (working versus retired). Results Descriptive comparison of the BAB‐Voice in speakers with SD to previously published non‐dysphonic speaker data revealed substantially higher scores associated with SD across all four subtests. Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) revealed no significantly different BAB‐Voice subtest scores as a function of SD group status (working vs. retired). Conclusions BAB‐Voice scores revealed that speakers with SD experienced substantial impact of their voice disorder on communication attitude, coping behaviors, and affective reactions in speaking situations as reflected in their high BAB scores. These impacts do not appear to be influenced by work status, as speakers with SD who were employed or retired experienced similar levels of affective and behavioral reactions in various speaking situations and cognitive responses. These findings are consistent with previously published pilot data. The specificity of items assessed by means of the BAB‐Voice may inform the clinician of valid patient‐centered treatment goals which target the impairment extended beyond the physiological dimension. Level of Evidence 2b PMID:29299525

Communication-related affective, behavioral, and cognitive reactions in speakers with spasmodic dysphonia.

Science.gov (United States)

Watts, Christopher R; Vanryckeghem, Martine

2017-12-01

To investigate the self-perceived affective, behavioral, and cognitive reactions associated with communication of speakers with spasmodic dysphonia as a function of employment status. Prospective cross-sectional investigation. 148 Participants with spasmodic dysphonia (SD) completed an adapted version of the Behavior Assessment Battery (BAB-Voice), a multidimensional assessment of self-perceived reactions to communication. The BAB-Voice consisted of four subtests: the Speech Situation Checklist for A) Emotional Reaction (SSC-ER) and B) Speech Disruption (SSC-SD), C) the Behavior Checklist (BCL), and D) the Communication Attitude Test for Adults (BigCAT). Participants were assigned to groups based on employment status (working versus retired). Descriptive comparison of the BAB-Voice in speakers with SD to previously published non-dysphonic speaker data revealed substantially higher scores associated with SD across all four subtests. Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) revealed no significantly different BAB-Voice subtest scores as a function of SD group status (working vs. retired). BAB-Voice scores revealed that speakers with SD experienced substantial impact of their voice disorder on communication attitude, coping behaviors, and affective reactions in speaking situations as reflected in their high BAB scores. These impacts do not appear to be influenced by work status, as speakers with SD who were employed or retired experienced similar levels of affective and behavioral reactions in various speaking situations and cognitive responses. These findings are consistent with previously published pilot data. The specificity of items assessed by means of the BAB-Voice may inform the clinician of valid patient-centered treatment goals which target the impairment extended beyond the physiological dimension. 2b.

Effect of Accent and Dialect on Employability

Science.gov (United States)

Carlson, Holly K.; McHenry, Monica A.

2006-01-01

This study was designed to determine how ethnicity, the amount of perceived accent or dialect, and comprehensibility affect a speaker's employability. Sixty human resource specialists judged 3 female potential applicants. The applicants represented speakers of Spanish-influenced English, Asian-influenced English, and African American Vernacular…

Schizophrenia among Sesotho speakers in South Africa | Mosotho ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Results: Core symptoms of schizophrenia among Sesotho speakers do not differ significantly from other cultures. However, the content of psychological symptoms such as delusions and hallucinations is strongly affected by cultural variables. Somatic symptoms such as headaches, palpitations, dizziness and excessive ...

Sentence comprehension in Swahili-English bilingual agrammatic speakers

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Abuom, Tom O.; Shah, Emmah; Bastiaanse, Roelien

For this study, sentence comprehension was tested in Swahili-English bilingual agrammatic speakers. The sentences were controlled for four factors: (1) order of the arguments (base vs. derived); (2) embedding (declarative vs. relative sentences); (3) overt use of the relative pronoun "who"; (4)

An evidence-based rehabilitation program for tracheoesophageal speakers

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Jongmans, P.; Rossum, M.; As-Brooks, C.; Hilgers, F.; Pols, L.; Hilgers, F.J.M.; Pols, L.C.W.; van Rossum, M.; van den Brekel, M.W.M.

2008-01-01

Objectives: to develop an evidence-based therapy program aimed at improving tracheoesophageal speech intelligibility. The therapy program is based on particular problems found for TE speakers in a previous study as performed by the authors. Patients/Materials and Methods: 9 male laryngectomized

On the same wavelength: predictable language enhances speaker-listener brain-to-brain synchrony in posterior superior temporal gyrus.

Science.gov (United States)

Dikker, Suzanne; Silbert, Lauren J; Hasson, Uri; Zevin, Jason D

2014-04-30

Recent research has shown that the degree to which speakers and listeners exhibit similar brain activity patterns during human linguistic interaction is correlated with communicative success. Here, we used an intersubject correlation approach in fMRI to test the hypothesis that a listener's ability to predict a speaker's utterance increases such neural coupling between speakers and listeners. Nine subjects listened to recordings of a speaker describing visual scenes that varied in the degree to which they permitted specific linguistic predictions. In line with our hypothesis, the temporal profile of listeners' brain activity was significantly more synchronous with the speaker's brain activity for highly predictive contexts in left posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG), an area previously associated with predictive auditory language processing. In this region, predictability differentially affected the temporal profiles of brain responses in the speaker and listeners respectively, in turn affecting correlated activity between the two: whereas pSTG activation increased with predictability in the speaker, listeners' pSTG activity instead decreased for more predictable sentences. Listeners additionally showed stronger BOLD responses for predictive images before sentence onset, suggesting that highly predictable contexts lead comprehenders to preactivate predicted words.

Student perceptions of native and non-native speaker language instructors: A comparison of ESL and Spanish

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Laura Callahan

2006-12-01

Full Text Available The question of the native vs. non-native speaker status of second and foreign language instructors has been investigated chiefly from the perspective of the teacher. Anecdotal evidence suggests that students have strong opinions on the relative qualities of instruction by native and non-native speakers. Most research focuses on students of English as a foreign or second language. This paper reports on data gathered through a questionnaire administered to 55 university students: 31 students of Spanish as FL and 24 students of English as SL. Qualitative results show what strengths students believe each type of instructor has, and quantitative results confirm that any gap students may perceive between the abilities of native and non-native instructors is not so wide as one might expect based on popular notions of the issue. ESL students showed a stronger preference for native-speaker instructors overall, and were at variance with the SFL students' ratings of native-speaker instructors' performance on a number of aspects. There was a significant correlation in both groups between having a family member who is a native speaker of the target language and student preference for and self-identification with a native speaker as instructor. (English text

Thermal Stresses Analysis and Optimized TTP Processes to Achieved CNT-Based Diaphragm for Thin Panel Speakers

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Feng-Min Lai

2016-01-01

Full Text Available Industrial companies popularly used the powder coating, classing, and thermal transfer printing (TTP technique to avoid oxidation on the metallic surface and stiffened speaker diaphragm. This study developed a TTP technique to fabricate a carbon nanotubes (CNTs stiffened speaker diaphragm for thin panel speaker. The self-developed TTP stiffening technique did not require a high curing temperature that decreased the mechanical property of CNTs. In addition to increasing the stiffness of diaphragm substrate, this technique alleviated the middle and high frequency attenuation associated with the smoothing sound pressure curve of thin panel speaker. The advantage of TTP technique is less harmful to the ecology, but it causes thermal residual stresses and some unstable connections between printed plates. Thus, this study used the numerical analysis software (ANSYS to analyze the stress and thermal of work piece which have not delaminated problems in transfer interface. The Taguchi quality engineering method was applied to identify the optimal manufacturing parameters. Finally, the optimal manufacturing parameters were employed to fabricate a CNT-based diaphragm, which was then assembled onto a speaker. The result indicated that the CNT-based diaphragm improved the sound pressure curve smoothness of the speaker, which produced a minimum high frequency dip difference (ΔdB value.

20 CFR 405.315 - Time and place for a hearing before an administrative law judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-04-01

... administrative law judge will decide whether to have that person appear in person or by video teleconference... administrative law judge. 405.315 Section 405.315 Employees' Benefits SOCIAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATION ADMINISTRATIVE REVIEW PROCESS FOR ADJUDICATING INITIAL DISABILITY CLAIMS Administrative Law Judge Hearing § 405...

The Space-Time Topography of English Speakers

Science.gov (United States)

Duman, Steve

2016-01-01

English speakers talk and think about Time in terms of physical space. The past is behind us, and the future is in front of us. In this way, we "map" space onto Time. This dissertation addresses the specificity of this physical space, or its topography. Inspired by languages like Yupno (Nunez, et al., 2012) and Bamileke-Dschang (Hyman,…

Does dynamic information about the speaker's face contribute to semantic speech processing? ERP evidence.

Science.gov (United States)

Hernández-Gutiérrez, David; Abdel Rahman, Rasha; Martín-Loeches, Manuel; Muñoz, Francisco; Schacht, Annekathrin; Sommer, Werner

2018-07-01

Face-to-face interactions characterize communication in social contexts. These situations are typically multimodal, requiring the integration of linguistic auditory input with facial information from the speaker. In particular, eye gaze and visual speech provide the listener with social and linguistic information, respectively. Despite the importance of this context for an ecological study of language, research on audiovisual integration has mainly focused on the phonological level, leaving aside effects on semantic comprehension. Here we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the influence of facial dynamic information on semantic processing of connected speech. Participants were presented with either a video or a still picture of the speaker, concomitant to auditory sentences. Along three experiments, we manipulated the presence or absence of the speaker's dynamic facial features (mouth and eyes) and compared the amplitudes of the semantic N400 elicited by unexpected words. Contrary to our predictions, the N400 was not modulated by dynamic facial information; therefore, semantic processing seems to be unaffected by the speaker's gaze and visual speech. Even though, during the processing of expected words, dynamic faces elicited a long-lasting late posterior positivity compared to the static condition. This effect was significantly reduced when the mouth of the speaker was covered. Our findings may indicate an increase of attentional processing to richer communicative contexts. The present findings also demonstrate that in natural communicative face-to-face encounters, perceiving the face of a speaker in motion provides supplementary information that is taken into account by the listener, especially when auditory comprehension is non-demanding. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Efficient on-line setup correction strategies using plan-intent functions

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Keller, Harry; Jaffray, David A.; Rosewall, Tara; White, Elizabeth

2006-01-01

With the introduction of image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT) delivery systems on-line set-up correction strategies have gained in popularity. Usually, the correction workload of these strategies is high compared to off-line strategies as daily setup corrections have to be performed based on a predefined action level. In this work, it is proposed that on-line strategies must not only be judged in terms of workload but also in terms of efficacy. While workload can be easily predicted for such strategies, the efficacy must ultimately reflect the efficiency with which the original treatment plan intent is met. The purpose of this work is to investigate the tradeoff between workload and efficacy of three different on-line set-up correction strategies: The common fixed action level strategy and two novel on-line setup correction strategies, i.e., a dose-volume histogram (DVH) constraint and an equivalent uniform dose (EUD) score strategy that aim directly for better compliance with original treatment plan intent. All strategies were reformulated in terms of a score function that reflected treatment plan intent. A retrospective study was conducted on 5 prostate patients (7-field conformal, 79.8 Gy, 42 fractions). PTV margins were 10 mm except in the posterior direction (7 mm). The original treatment plan intent for these patients was defined using a set of DVH constraints. The results show that the on-line setup correction strategy based on a fixed action level of 3 mm resulted in a considerable correction workload. For larger action levels, a dose benefit (in terms of EUD) in the rectum and bladder was observed for all patients which is clinically ''fortuitous'' but difficult to take advantage of. In contrast, the application of the two novel strategies generally resulted in a controlled decrease of the dose to the rectum and the bladder with a smaller workload. It is concluded that using information about target anatomy and the planned dose distribution allows the

Infants' Selectively Pay Attention to the Information They Receive from a Native Speaker of Their Language.

Science.gov (United States)

Marno, Hanna; Guellai, Bahia; Vidal, Yamil; Franzoi, Julia; Nespor, Marina; Mehler, Jacques

2016-01-01

From the first moments of their life, infants show a preference for their native language, as well as toward speakers with whom they share the same language. This preference appears to have broad consequences in various domains later on, supporting group affiliations and collaborative actions in children. Here, we propose that infants' preference for native speakers of their language also serves a further purpose, specifically allowing them to efficiently acquire culture specific knowledge via social learning. By selectively attending to informants who are native speakers of their language and who probably also share the same cultural background with the infant, young learners can maximize the possibility to acquire cultural knowledge. To test whether infants would preferably attend the information they receive from a speaker of their native language, we familiarized 12-month-old infants with a native and a foreign speaker, and then presented them with movies where each of the speakers silently gazed toward unfamiliar objects. At test, infants' looking behavior to the two objects alone was measured. Results revealed that infants preferred to look longer at the object presented by the native speaker. Strikingly, the effect was replicated also with 5-month-old infants, indicating an early development of such preference. These findings provide evidence that young infants pay more attention to the information presented by a person with whom they share the same language. This selectivity can serve as a basis for efficient social learning by influencing how infants' allocate attention between potential sources of information in their environment.

Daniel Dennett: intentionality system. An interpretation of intentional strategy

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Viorel ROTILĂ

2015-07-01

Full Text Available In this article, we show some of the meanings in which Daniel Dennett uses the term intentionality, in an attempt to establish to it the quality of key concept for understanding the mind, namely consciousness. By analyzing the American thinker’s ideas, we consider that in all of them an intentionality system can be identified, which includes the approaches and different names that he dedicates to this concept. Qualitative differences in the discourse about intentionality can open the way of the approach of intentionality from an evolutionary perspective, indicating the changes over time. The intentionality system is a proposal for understanding Dennett’s thinking in a coherent paradigm.

A model for gossip-mediated evolution of altruism with various types of false information by speakers and assessment by listeners.

Science.gov (United States)

Seki, Motohide; Nakamaru, Mayuko

2016-10-21

Indirect reciprocity is considered to be important for explaining altruism among humans. The evolution of altruism has been modeled using several types of reputational scores, most of which were assumed to be updated immediately after each game session. In this study, we introduce gossip sessions held between game sessions to capture the spread of reputation and examine the effects of false information intentionally introduced by some players. Analytical and individual-based simulation results indicated that the frequent exchange of gossip favored the evolution of altruism when no players started false information. In contrast, intermediate repetitions of gossip sessions were favored when the population included liars or biased gossipers. In addition, we found that a gossip listener's strategy of incorporating any gossip regardless of speakers usually worked better than an alternative strategy of not believing gossip from untrustworthy players. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Joint Intentionality

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Koreň Ladislav

2016-03-01

Full Text Available According to the shared intentionality hypothesis proposed by Michael Tomasello, two cognitive upgrades – joint and collective intentionality, respectively – make human thinking unique. Joint intentionality, in particular, is a mindset supposed to account for our early, species-specific capacity to participate in collaborative activities involving two (or a few agents. In order to elucidate such activities and their proximate cognitive-motivational mechanism, Tomasello draws on philosophical accounts of shared intentionality. I argue that his deference to such cognitively demanding accounts of shared intentional activities is problematic if his theoretical ambition is in part to show that and how early (prelinguistic and precultural capacities for joint action contribute to the development of higher cognitive capacities.

Towards PLDA-RBM based speaker recognition in mobile environment: Designing stacked/deep PLDA-RBM systems

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Nautsch, Andreas; Hao, Hong; Stafylakis, Themos

2016-01-01

recognition: two deep architectures are presented and examined, which aim at suppressing channel effects and recovering speaker-discriminative information on back-ends trained on a small dataset. Experiments are carried out on the MOBIO SRE'13 database, which is a challenging and publicly available dataset...... for mobile speaker recognition with limited amounts of training data. The experiments show that the proposed system outperforms the baseline i-vector/PLDA approach by relative gains of 31% on female and 9% on male speakers in terms of half total error rate....

Neural bases of congenital amusia in tonal language speakers.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, Caicai; Peng, Gang; Shao, Jing; Wang, William S-Y

2017-03-01

Congenital amusia is a lifelong neurodevelopmental disorder of fine-grained pitch processing. In this fMRI study, we examined the neural bases of congenial amusia in speakers of a tonal language - Cantonese. Previous studies on non-tonal language speakers suggest that the neural deficits of congenital amusia lie in the music-selective neural circuitry in the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). However, it is unclear whether this finding can generalize to congenital amusics in tonal languages. Tonal language experience has been reported to shape the neural processing of pitch, which raises the question of how tonal language experience affects the neural bases of congenital amusia. To investigate this question, we examined the neural circuitries sub-serving the processing of relative pitch interval in pitch-matched Cantonese level tone and musical stimuli in 11 Cantonese-speaking amusics and 11 musically intact controls. Cantonese-speaking amusics exhibited abnormal brain activities in a widely distributed neural network during the processing of lexical tone and musical stimuli. Whereas the controls exhibited significant activation in the right superior temporal gyrus (STG) in the lexical tone condition and in the cerebellum regardless of the lexical tone and music conditions, no activation was found in the amusics in those regions, which likely reflects a dysfunctional neural mechanism of relative pitch processing in the amusics. Furthermore, the amusics showed abnormally strong activation of the right middle frontal gyrus and precuneus when the pitch stimuli were repeated, which presumably reflect deficits of attending to repeated pitch stimuli or encoding them into working memory. No significant group difference was found in the right IFG in either the whole-brain analysis or region-of-interest analysis. These findings imply that the neural deficits in tonal language speakers might differ from those in non-tonal language speakers, and overlap partly with the

78 FR 30864 - Judges Panel of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award

Science.gov (United States)

2013-05-23

... performing the non- exclusive duties of the Chief Financial Officer and Assistant Secretary for... time. The purpose of this meeting is to discuss and review the role and responsibilities of the Judges... ensure the integrity of the Award selection process. The agenda will include: The Role of the Judges...

Time-Contrastive Learning Based DNN Bottleneck Features for Text-Dependent Speaker Verification

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Sarkar, Achintya Kumar; Tan, Zheng-Hua

2017-01-01

In this paper, we present a time-contrastive learning (TCL) based bottleneck (BN) feature extraction method for speech signals with an application to text-dependent (TD) speaker verification (SV). It is well-known that speech signals exhibit quasi-stationary behavior in and only in a short interval......, and the TCL method aims to exploit this temporal structure. More specifically, it trains deep neural networks (DNNs) to discriminate temporal events obtained by uniformly segmenting speech signals, in contrast to existing DNN based BN feature extraction methods that train DNNs using labeled data...... to discriminate speakers or pass-phrases or phones or a combination of them. In the context of speaker verification, speech data of fixed pass-phrases are used for TCL-BN training, while the pass-phrases used for TCL-BN training are excluded from being used for SV, so that the learned features can be considered...

Perceptual and acoustic analysis of lexical stress in Greek speakers with dysarthria.

Science.gov (United States)

Papakyritsis, Ioannis; Müller, Nicole

2014-01-01

The study reported in this paper investigated the abilities of Greek speakers with dysarthria to signal lexical stress at the single word level. Three speakers with dysarthria and two unimpaired control participants were recorded completing a repetition task of a list of words consisting of minimal pairs of Greek disyllabic words contrasted by lexical stress location only. Fourteen listeners were asked to determine the attempted stress location for each word pair. Acoustic analyses of duration and intensity ratios, both within and across words, were undertaken to identify possible acoustic correlates of the listeners' judgments concerning stress location. Acoustic and perceptual data indicate that while each participant with dysarthria in this study had some difficulty in signaling stress unambiguously, the pattern of difficulty was different for each speaker. Further, it was found that the relationship between the listeners' judgments of stress location and the acoustic data was not conclusive.

Switches to English during French Service Encounters: Relationships with L2 French Speakers' Willingness to Communicate and Motivation

Science.gov (United States)

McNaughton, Stephanie; McDonough, Kim

2015-01-01

This exploratory study investigated second language (L2) French speakers' service encounters in the multilingual setting of Montreal, specifically whether switches to English during French service encounters were related to L2 speakers' willingness to communicate or motivation. Over a two-week period, 17 French L2 speakers in Montreal submitted…

Judges, commerce and contract law

OpenAIRE

Gava, John

2010-01-01

John Gava, Reader at Adelaide Law School, considers the question how should judges decide commercial cases, in particular, contract cases? He looks at the circumstances and impact of the use of contract law, with attention on common law contract and market needs. Published in Amicus Curiae – Journal of the Society for Advanced Legal Studies at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. The Journal is produced by SALS at the IALS (Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, School of Advanced Study, Un...

Musical Sophistication and the Effect of Complexity on Auditory Discrimination in Finnish Speakers

Science.gov (United States)

Dawson, Caitlin; Aalto, Daniel; Šimko, Juraj; Vainio, Martti; Tervaniemi, Mari

2017-01-01

Musical experiences and native language are both known to affect auditory processing. The present work aims to disentangle the influences of native language phonology and musicality on behavioral and subcortical sound feature processing in a population of musically diverse Finnish speakers as well as to investigate the specificity of enhancement from musical training. Finnish speakers are highly sensitive to duration cues since in Finnish, vowel and consonant duration determine word meaning. Using a correlational approach with a set of behavioral sound feature discrimination tasks, brainstem recordings, and a musical sophistication questionnaire, we find no evidence for an association between musical sophistication and more precise duration processing in Finnish speakers either in the auditory brainstem response or in behavioral tasks, but they do show an enhanced pitch discrimination compared to Finnish speakers with less musical experience and show greater duration modulation in a complex task. These results are consistent with a ceiling effect set for certain sound features which corresponds to the phonology of the native language, leaving an opportunity for music experience-based enhancement of sound features not explicitly encoded in the language (such as pitch, which is not explicitly encoded in Finnish). Finally, the pattern of duration modulation in more musically sophisticated Finnish speakers suggests integrated feature processing for greater efficiency in a real world musical situation. These results have implications for research into the specificity of plasticity in the auditory system as well as to the effects of interaction of specific language features with musical experiences. PMID:28450829

Musical Sophistication and the Effect of Complexity on Auditory Discrimination in Finnish Speakers.

Science.gov (United States)

Dawson, Caitlin; Aalto, Daniel; Šimko, Juraj; Vainio, Martti; Tervaniemi, Mari

2017-01-01

Musical experiences and native language are both known to affect auditory processing. The present work aims to disentangle the influences of native language phonology and musicality on behavioral and subcortical sound feature processing in a population of musically diverse Finnish speakers as well as to investigate the specificity of enhancement from musical training. Finnish speakers are highly sensitive to duration cues since in Finnish, vowel and consonant duration determine word meaning. Using a correlational approach with a set of behavioral sound feature discrimination tasks, brainstem recordings, and a musical sophistication questionnaire, we find no evidence for an association between musical sophistication and more precise duration processing in Finnish speakers either in the auditory brainstem response or in behavioral tasks, but they do show an enhanced pitch discrimination compared to Finnish speakers with less musical experience and show greater duration modulation in a complex task. These results are consistent with a ceiling effect set for certain sound features which corresponds to the phonology of the native language, leaving an opportunity for music experience-based enhancement of sound features not explicitly encoded in the language (such as pitch, which is not explicitly encoded in Finnish). Finally, the pattern of duration modulation in more musically sophisticated Finnish speakers suggests integrated feature processing for greater efficiency in a real world musical situation. These results have implications for research into the specificity of plasticity in the auditory system as well as to the effects of interaction of specific language features with musical experiences.

Willing Learners yet Unwilling Speakers in ESL Classrooms

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Zuraidah Ali

2007-12-01

Full Text Available To some of us, speech production in ESL has become so natural and integral that we seem to take it for granted. We often do not even remember how we struggled through the initial process of mastering English. Unfortunately, to students who are still learning English, they seem to face myriad problems that make them appear unwilling or reluctant ESL speakers. This study will investigate this phenomenon which is very common in the ESL classroom. Setting its background on related research findings on this matter, a qualitative study was conducted among foreign students enrolled in the Intensive English Programme (IEP at Institute of Liberal Studies (IKAL, University Tenaga Nasional (UNITEN. The results will show and discuss an extent of truth behind this perplexing phenomenon: willing learners, yet unwilling speakers of ESL, in our effort to provide supportive learning cultures in second language acquisition (SLA to this group of students.

English exposed common mistakes made by Chinese speakers

CERN Document Server

Hart, Steve

2017-01-01

Having analysed the most common English errors made in over 600 academic papers written by Chinese undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers, Steve Hart has written an essential, practical guide specifically for the native Chinese speaker on how to write good academic English. English Exposed: Common Mistakes Made by Chinese Speakers is divided into three main sections. The first section examines errors made with verbs, nouns, prepositions, and other grammatical classes of words. The second section focuses on problems of word choice. In addition to helping the reader find the right word, it provides instruction for selecting the right style too. The third section covers a variety of other areas essential for the academic writer, such as using punctuation, adding appropriate references, referring to tables and figures, and selecting among various English date and time phrases. Using English Exposed will allow a writer to produce material where content and ideas-not language mistakes-speak the loudest.

Neurogenetic evidence in the courtroom: a randomised controlled trial with German judges.

Science.gov (United States)

Fuss, Johannes; Dressing, Harald; Briken, Peer

2015-11-01

Prominent court decisions and recent research suggest that introduction of neurogenetic evidence, for example, monoamine oxidase A alleles, may reduce the sentence of convicted psychopaths. Here, we are aiming to demonstrate that judges' response to neurogenetic evidence is highly influenced by the legal system in which they operate. Participating German judges (n=372) received a hypothetical case vignette of aggravated battery, and were randomly assigned to expert testimonies that either involved a neurogenetic explanation of the offender's psychopathy or only a psychiatric diagnosis of psychopathy. Testimonies were presented either by the prosecution or defence. Neurogenetic evidence significantly reduced judges' estimation of legal responsibility of the convict. Nevertheless, the average prison sentence was not affected in the German legal system. Most interestingly, analysis of judges' reasoning revealed that neurogenetic arguments presented by the prosecution significantly increased the number of judges (23% compared with ∼ 6%) ordering an involuntary commitment in a forensic psychiatric hospital. Such an involuntary commitment due to diminished or absent legal responsibility may last much longer than a prison sentence in the German legal system. Our data, thus, demonstrate the socially contingent nature of legal responses to neurogenetic evidence in criminal cases. Published by the BMJ Publishing Group Limited. For permission to use (where not already granted under a licence) please go to http://group.bmj.com/group/rights-licensing/permissions.

Neural decoding of attentional selection in multi-speaker environments without access to clean sources

Science.gov (United States)

O'Sullivan, James; Chen, Zhuo; Herrero, Jose; McKhann, Guy M.; Sheth, Sameer A.; Mehta, Ashesh D.; Mesgarani, Nima

2017-10-01

Objective. People who suffer from hearing impairments can find it difficult to follow a conversation in a multi-speaker environment. Current hearing aids can suppress background noise; however, there is little that can be done to help a user attend to a single conversation amongst many without knowing which speaker the user is attending to. Cognitively controlled hearing aids that use auditory attention decoding (AAD) methods are the next step in offering help. Translating the successes in AAD research to real-world applications poses a number of challenges, including the lack of access to the clean sound sources in the environment with which to compare with the neural signals. We propose a novel framework that combines single-channel speech separation algorithms with AAD. Approach. We present an end-to-end system that (1) receives a single audio channel containing a mixture of speakers that is heard by a listener along with the listener’s neural signals, (2) automatically separates the individual speakers in the mixture, (3) determines the attended speaker, and (4) amplifies the attended speaker’s voice to assist the listener. Main results. Using invasive electrophysiology recordings, we identified the regions of the auditory cortex that contribute to AAD. Given appropriate electrode locations, our system is able to decode the attention of subjects and amplify the attended speaker using only the mixed audio. Our quality assessment of the modified audio demonstrates a significant improvement in both subjective and objective speech quality measures. Significance. Our novel framework for AAD bridges the gap between the most recent advancements in speech processing technologies and speech prosthesis research and moves us closer to the development of cognitively controlled hearable devices for the hearing impaired.

Insight into the Attitudes of Speakers of Urban Meccan Hijazi Arabic towards their Dialect

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sameeha D. Alahmadi

2016-04-01

Full Text Available The current study mainly aims to examine the attitudes of speakers of Urban Meccan Hijazi Arabic (UMHA towards their dialect, which is spoken in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. It also investigates whether the participants’ age, sex and educational level have any impact on their perception of their dialect. To this end, I designed a 5-point-Likert-scale questionnaire, requiring participants to rate their attitudes towards their dialect. I asked 80 participants, whose first language is UMHA, to fill out the questionnaire. On the basis of the three independent variables, namely, age, sex and educational level, the participants were divided into three groups: old and young speakers, male and female speakers and educated and uneducated speakers. The results reveal that in general, all the groups (young and old, male and female, and educated and uneducated participants have a sense of responsibility towards their dialect, making their attitudes towards their dialect positive. However, differences exist between the three groups. For instance, old speakers tend to express their pride of their dialect more than young speakers. The same pattern is observed in male and female groups. The results show that females may feel embarrassed to provide answers that may imply that they are not proud of their own dialect, since the majority of women in the Arab world, in general, are under more pressure to conform to the overt norms of the society than males. Therefore, I argue that most Arab women may not have the same freedom to express their opinions and feelings about various issues. Based on the results, the study concludes with some recommendations for further research.  Keywords: sociolinguistics, language attitudes, dialectology, social variables, Urban Meccan Hijazi Arabic

20 CFR 655.645 - Administrative law judge proceedings.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-04-01

... EMPLOYMENT OF FOREIGN WORKERS IN THE UNITED STATES Enforcement of the Limitations Imposed on Employers Using... administrative law judge shall notify all interested parties of the date, time and place of the hearing. All...

Accuracy of MFCC-Based Speaker Recognition in Series 60 Device

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Pasi Fränti

2005-10-01

Full Text Available A fixed point implementation of speaker recognition based on MFCC signal processing is considered. We analyze the numerical error of the MFCC and its effect on the recognition accuracy. Techniques to reduce the information loss in a converted fixed point implementation are introduced. We increase the signal processing accuracy by adjusting the ratio of presentation accuracy of the operators and the signal. The signal processing error is found out to be more important to the speaker recognition accuracy than the error in the classification algorithm. The results are verified by applying the alternative technique to speech data. We also discuss the specific programming requirements set up by the Symbian and Series 60.

Lip-Synching Using Speaker-Specific Articulation, Shape and Appearance Models

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Gaspard Breton

2009-01-01

Full Text Available We describe here the control, shape and appearance models that are built using an original photogrammetric method to capture characteristics of speaker-specific facial articulation, anatomy, and texture. Two original contributions are put forward here: the trainable trajectory formation model that predicts articulatory trajectories of a talking face from phonetic input and the texture model that computes a texture for each 3D facial shape according to articulation. Using motion capture data from different speakers and module-specific evaluation procedures, we show here that this cloning system restores detailed idiosyncrasies and the global coherence of visible articulation. Results of a subjective evaluation of the global system with competing trajectory formation models are further presented and commented.

34 CFR 81.5 - Authority and responsibility of an Administrative Law Judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... Judge. 81.5 Section 81.5 Education Office of the Secretary, Department of Education GENERAL EDUCATION... Judge. (a) An ALJ assigned to a case conducts a hearing on the record. The ALJ regulates the course of... decides the disqualification matter before proceeding further with the case. (Authority: 5 U.S.C. 556(b...

Front-Stage Stars and Backstage Producers: The Role of Judges in Problem-Solving Courts().

Science.gov (United States)

Portillo, Shannon; Rudes, Danielle; Viglione, Jill; Nelson, Matthew; Taxman, Faye

2013-01-01

In problem-solving courts judges are no longer neutral arbitrators in adversarial justice processes. Instead, judges directly engage with court participants. The movement towards problem-solving court models emerges from a collaborative therapeutic jurisprudence framework. While most scholars argue judges are the central courtroom actors within problem-solving courts, we find judges are the stars front-stage, but play a more supporting role backstage. We use Goffman's front-stage-backstage framework to analyze 350 hours of ethnographic fieldwork within five problem-solving courts. Problem-solving courts are collaborative organizations with shifting leadership, based on forum. Understanding how the roles of courtroom workgroup actors adapt under the new court model is foundational for effective implementation of these justice processes.

Umesh V Waghmare | Speakers | Indian Academy of Sciences

Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

Umesh V Waghmare. Theoretical Sciences Unit, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Jakkur P.O., Bangalore 560 064, ... These ideas apply quite well to dynamical structure of a crystal, as described by the dispersion of its phonons or vibrational waves. The speakers group has shown an interesting ...

A general auditory bias for handling speaker variability in speech? Evidence in humans and songbirds

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Kriengwatana, B.; Escudero, P.; Kerkhoven, A.H.; ten Cate, C.

2015-01-01

Different speakers produce the same speech sound differently, yet listeners are still able to reliably identify the speech sound. How listeners can adjust their perception to compensate for speaker differences in speech, and whether these compensatory processes are unique only to humans, is still

29 CFR 102.35 - Duties and powers of administrative law judges; stipulations of cases to administrative law...

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

..., the judge (or the Board) will decide the case or make other disposition of it. (10) To make and file... 29 Labor 2 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Duties and powers of administrative law judges; stipulations of cases to administrative law judges or to the Board; assignment and powers of settlement judges...

Age differences in vocal emotion perception: on the role of speaker age and listener sex.

Science.gov (United States)

Sen, Antarika; Isaacowitz, Derek; Schirmer, Annett

2017-10-24

Older adults have greater difficulty than younger adults perceiving vocal emotions. To better characterise this effect, we explored its relation to age differences in sensory, cognitive and emotional functioning. Additionally, we examined the role of speaker age and listener sex. Participants (N = 163) aged 19-34 years and 60-85 years categorised neutral sentences spoken by ten younger and ten older speakers with a happy, neutral, sad, or angry voice. Acoustic analyses indicated that expressions from younger and older speakers denoted the intended emotion with similar accuracy. As expected, younger participants outperformed older participants and this effect was statistically mediated by an age-related decline in both optimism and working-memory. Additionally, age differences in emotion perception were larger for younger as compared to older speakers and a better perception of younger as compared to older speakers was greater in younger as compared to older participants. Last, a female perception benefit was less pervasive in the older than the younger group. Together, these findings suggest that the role of age for emotion perception is multi-faceted. It is linked to emotional and cognitive change, to processing biases that benefit young and own-age expressions, and to the different aptitudes of women and men.

29 CFR 1980.109 - Decision and orders of the administrative law judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... review by the administrative law judge, and a complaint may not be remanded for the completion of an... 29 Labor 9 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Decision and orders of the administrative law judge. 1980... SECTION 806 OF THE CORPORATE AND CRIMINAL FRAUD ACCOUNTABILITY ACT OF 2002, TITLE VIII OF THE SARBANES...

What makes a charismatic speaker?

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Niebuhr, Oliver; Voße, Jana; Brem, Alexander

2016-01-01

The former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was one of the most charismatic speakers of the past decades. However, there is, as yet, no detailed quantitative profile of his way of speaking. We used state-of-the-art computer techniques to acoustically analyze his speech behavior and relate it to reference...... samples. Our paper provides the first-ever acoustic profile of Steve Jobs, based on about 4000 syllables and 12,000 individual speech sounds from his two most outstanding and well-known product presentations: the introductions of the iPhone 4 and the iPad 2. Our results show that Steve Jobs stands out...

Judges' perception of candidates' organization and communication, in relation to oral certification examination ratings.

Science.gov (United States)

Houston, James E; Myford, Carol M

2009-11-01

To determine (1) whether judges differed in the levels of severity they exercised when rating candidates' performance in an oral certification exam, (2) to what extent candidates' clinical competence ratings were related to their organization/communication ratings, and (3) to what extent clinical competence ratings could predict organization/communication ratings. Six hundred eighty-four physicians participated in a medical specialty board's 2002 oral examination. Ninety-nine senior members of the medical specialty served as judges, rating candidates' performances. Candidates' clinical competence ratings were analyzed using multifaceted Rasch measurement to investigate judge severity. A Pearson correlation was calculated to examine the relationship between ratings of clinical competence and organization/communication. Logistic regression was used to determine to what extent clinical competence ratings predicted organization/communication ratings. There were about three statistically distinct strata of judge severity; judges were not interchangeable. There was a moderately strong relationship between the two sets of candidate ratings. Higher clinical competence ratings were associated with an organization/communication rating of acceptable, whereas lower clinical competence ratings were associated with an organization/communication rating of unacceptable. The judges' clinical competence ratings correctly predicted 61.9% of the acceptable and 88.3% of the unacceptable organization/communication ratings. Overall, the clinical competence ratings correctly predicted 80% of the organization/communication ratings. The close association between the two sets of ratings was possibly due to a "halo" effect. Several explanations for this relationship were explored, and the authors considered the implications for their understanding of how judges carry out this complex rating task.

Processing ser and estar to locate objects and events: An ERP study with L2 speakers of Spanish.

Science.gov (United States)

Dussias, Paola E; Contemori, Carla; Román, Patricia

2014-01-01

In Spanish locative constructions, a different form of the copula is selected in relation to the semantic properties of the grammatical subject: sentences that locate objects require estar while those that locate events require ser (both translated in English as 'to be'). In an ERP study, we examined whether second language (L2) speakers of Spanish are sensitive to the selectional restrictions that the different types of subjects impose on the choice of the two copulas. Twenty-four native speakers of Spanish and two groups of L2 Spanish speakers (24 beginners and 18 advanced speakers) were recruited to investigate the processing of 'object/event + estar/ser ' permutations. Participants provided grammaticality judgments on correct (object + estar ; event + ser ) and incorrect (object + ser ; event + estar ) sentences while their brain activity was recorded. In line with previous studies (Leone-Fernández, Molinaro, Carreiras, & Barber, 2012; Sera, Gathje, & Pintado, 1999), the results of the grammaticality judgment for the native speakers showed that participants correctly accepted object + estar and event + ser constructions. In addition, while 'object + ser ' constructions were considered grossly ungrammatical, 'event + estar ' combinations were perceived as unacceptable to a lesser degree. For these same participants, ERP recording time-locked to the onset of the critical word ' en ' showed a larger P600 for the ser predicates when the subject was an object than when it was an event (*La silla es en la cocina vs. La fiesta es en la cocina). This P600 effect is consistent with syntactic repair of the defining predicate when it does not fit with the adequate semantic properties of the subject. For estar predicates (La silla está en la cocina vs. *La fiesta está en la cocina), the findings showed a central-frontal negativity between 500-700 ms. Grammaticality judgment data for the L2 speakers of Spanish showed that beginners were significantly less accurate than

The Effect of Noise on Relationships Between Speech Intelligibility and Self-Reported Communication Measures in Tracheoesophageal Speakers.

Science.gov (United States)

Eadie, Tanya L; Otero, Devon Sawin; Bolt, Susan; Kapsner-Smith, Mara; Sullivan, Jessica R

2016-08-01

The purpose of this study was to examine how sentence intelligibility relates to self-reported communication in tracheoesophageal speakers when speech intelligibility is measured in quiet and noise. Twenty-four tracheoesophageal speakers who were at least 1 year postlaryngectomy provided audio recordings of 5 sentences from the Sentence Intelligibility Test. Speakers also completed self-reported measures of communication-the Voice Handicap Index-10 and the Communicative Participation Item Bank short form. Speech recordings were presented to 2 groups of inexperienced listeners who heard sentences in quiet or noise. Listeners transcribed the sentences to yield speech intelligibility scores. Very weak relationships were found between intelligibility in quiet and measures of voice handicap and communicative participation. Slightly stronger, but still weak and nonsignificant, relationships were observed between measures of intelligibility in noise and both self-reported measures. However, 12 speakers who were more than 65% intelligible in noise showed strong and statistically significant relationships with both self-reported measures (R2 = .76-.79). Speech intelligibility in quiet is a weak predictor of self-reported communication measures in tracheoesophageal speakers. Speech intelligibility in noise may be a better metric of self-reported communicative function for speakers who demonstrate higher speech intelligibility in noise.

Native Speakers' Perception of Non-Native English Speech

Science.gov (United States)

Jaber, Maysa; Hussein, Riyad F.

2011-01-01

This study is aimed at investigating the rating and intelligibility of different non-native varieties of English, namely French English, Japanese English and Jordanian English by native English speakers and their attitudes towards these foreign accents. To achieve the goals of this study, the researchers used a web-based questionnaire which…

The fan-judges: Clues to a jurisculture of Sherlockian fandom [symposium

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ross E. Davies

2017-03-01

Full Text Available American judges sometimes encourage other participants in the legal system to behave like Sherlock Holmes. They are relying on a shared culture that both appreciates a literary figure and recognizes a human capacity to emulate an imaginary creature (here, Sherlock outside the context in which it was created. Consciously or not, the judges are tapping into classic fandom, but do they think of it that way, and should they?

Constructing agency: The role of language

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Caitlin M Fausey

2010-10-01

Full Text Available Is agency a straightforward and universal feature of human experience? Or is the construction of agency (including attention to and memory for people involved in events guided by patterns in culture? In this paper we focus on one aspect of cultural experience: patterns in language. We examined English and Japanese speakers’ descriptions of intentional and accidental events. English and Japanese speakers described intentional events similarly, using mostly agentive language (e.g., She broke the vase. However, when it came to accidental events English speakers used more agentive language than did Japanese speakers. We then tested whether these different patterns found in language may also manifest in cross-cultural differences in attention and memory. Results from a non-linguistic memory task showed that English and Japanese speakers remembered the agents of intentional events equally well. However, English speakers remembered the agents of accidents better than did Japanese speakers, as predicted from patterns in language. Further, directly manipulating agency in language during another laboratory task changed people’s eye-witness memory, confirming a possible causal role for language. Patterns in one’s linguistic environment may promote and support how people instantiate agency in context.

Effects of setting creative goals of different specificity on judged creativity of the product

OpenAIRE

Čorko, Irena; Vranić, Andrea

2005-01-01

The study examined the effect of setting creative goals of different specificity on judged creativity of the product. Female psychology students (N=47) were divided in 3 groups. Experimental task was to make a collage. Groups differed in the level of specificity of the given goal. Collages were judged by 11 judges using the consensual assessment technique. Factor analysis of these judgments confirmed 2 orthogonal factors: creativity and technical goodness. Results show that setting a specific...

31 CFR 501.742 - Secretary's designee's consideration of decisions by Administrative Law Judges.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

....742 Secretary's designee's consideration of decisions by Administrative Law Judges. (a) Scope of... 31 Money and Finance: Treasury 3 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Secretary's designee's consideration of decisions by Administrative Law Judges. 501.742 Section 501.742 Money and Finance: Treasury...

The Role of Sharia Judges in Indonesia: Between the Common Law and the Civil Law Systems

OpenAIRE

Alfitri, Alfitri

2017-01-01

This article seeks to analyse the role of Religious Courts' (Pengadilan Agama or PA) Judges in the formation of Islamic law in Indonesia. As part of the civil legal system, PA Judges are bound by legal provisions in handling legal disputes in court. They must apply the applicable legal provisions to decide upon a case. This condition can also be understood from the aspect of appointment of judges in Indonesia, including PA Judges, which is conducted not through professional career path as in ...

The initiative of the judge in matters of evidence. Aspects of comparative law

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Andreea Ciurea

2012-01-01

Full Text Available This paper aims at exploring a controversial issue in doctrine, jurisprudence and legislation of European countries and Latin America: the role judges should play in the system of evidence in the civil trial. Certain legislations and some theorists argue for a judge to be an "expectant observer", other for an active judge, a guide of the trial. We will try to emphasize the practical advantages and disadvantages of the existing theories (especially the Romanian, French and Spanish ones, in order to decide which solution is the most effective to achieve the purpose of civil trial: social peace.

Judging the Ability of Friends and Foes.

Science.gov (United States)

Cook, Jennifer L; Murphy, Jennifer; Bird, Geoffrey

2016-10-01

Collaboration leads us to judge our own ability to be more similar to our collaborators and their ability to be more similar to our own, while competition leads us to exaggerate the gap between our abilities. How does this happen and what does it mean? Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Facial Expression Generation from Speaker's Emotional States in Daily Conversation

Science.gov (United States)

Mori, Hiroki; Ohshima, Koh

A framework for generating facial expressions from emotional states in daily conversation is described. It provides a mapping between emotional states and facial expressions, where the former is represented by vectors with psychologically-defined abstract dimensions, and the latter is coded by the Facial Action Coding System. In order to obtain the mapping, parallel data with rated emotional states and facial expressions were collected for utterances of a female speaker, and a neural network was trained with the data. The effectiveness of proposed method is verified by a subjective evaluation test. As the result, the Mean Opinion Score with respect to the suitability of generated facial expression was 3.86 for the speaker, which was close to that of hand-made facial expressions.

Disability Case Review of Administrative Law Judge Hearing Decisions

Data.gov (United States)

Social Security Administration — The Disability Case Review is a post-effectuation quality review of administrative law judge (ALJ) disability hearing decisions. This dataset includes results from...

White Native English Speakers Needed: The Rhetorical Construction of Privilege in Online Teacher Recruitment Spaces

Science.gov (United States)

Ruecker, Todd; Ives, Lindsey

2015-01-01

Over the past few decades, scholars have paid increasing attention to the role of native speakerism in the field of TESOL. Several recent studies have exposed instances of native speakerism in TESOL recruitment discourses published through a variety of media, but none have focused specifically on professional websites advertising programs in…

Distinct electrophysiological potentials for intention in action and prior intention for action

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Vinding, Mikkel C; Jensen, Mads; Overgaard, Morten

2014-01-01

The role of conscious intention in relation to motoric movements has become a major topic of investigation in neuroscience. Traditionally, reports of conscious intention have been compared to various features of the readiness-potential (RP) – an electrophysiological signal that appears before...... electrophysiological “intention potential” above the mid-frontal areas at the time participants formed a distal intention. This potential was only found when the distal intention was self-paced and not when the intention was formed in response to an external cue....

3-Year-Old Children Make Relevance Inferences in Indirect Verbal Communication

Science.gov (United States)

Schulze, Cornelia; Grassmann, Susanne; Tomasello, Michael

2013-01-01

Three studies investigated 3-year-old children's ability to determine a speaker's communicative intent when the speaker's overt utterance related to that intent only indirectly. Studies 1 and 2 examined children's comprehension of indirectly stated requests (e.g., "I find Xs good" can imply, in context, a request for…

Don't Judge a Book by its Cover: Examiner Expectancy Effects Predict Neuropsychological Performance for Individuals Judged as Chronic Cannabis Users.

Science.gov (United States)

Sodos, Louise M; Hirst, Rayna B; Watson, Jessica; Vaughn, Dylan

2018-01-12

The experimenter expectancy effect confound remains largely unexplored in neuropsychological research and has never been investigated among cannabis users. This study investigated whether examiner expectancies of cannabis user status affected examinees' neuropsychological performance. Participants included 41 cannabis users and 20 non-users. Before testing, examiners who were blind to participant user status privately rated whether they believed the examinee was a cannabis user or non-user. Examiners then administered a battery of neuropsychological and performance validity measures. Multiple regression analyses compared performance between examinees judged as cannabis users (n = 37) and those judged as non-users (n = 24). Examiners' judgments of cannabis users were 75% accurate; judgments of non-users were at chance. After controlling for age, gender, and actual user status, examiner judgments of cannabis user status predicted performance on two measures (California Verbal Learning Test-II, and Trail Making Test B; p users obtained lower scores than those judged as non-users. Examiners' judgments of cannabis user status predicted performance even after controlling for actual user status, indicating vulnerability to examiner expectancy effects. These findings have important implications for both research and clinical settings, as scores may partially reflect examiners' expectations regarding cannabis effects rather than participants' cognitive abilities. These results demonstrate the need for expectancy effect research in the neuropsychological assessment of all populations, not just cannabis users. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Waiver Process Places Judges in Pivotal Role

Science.gov (United States)

McNeil, Michele

2011-01-01

Although U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan ultimately decides which states get relief from key requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act, a group of outside judges will wield tremendous influence in deciding states' fates. With states facing compliance deadlines under the law and Congress moving slowly on reauthorizing the Elementary and…

Extending Situated Language Comprehension (Accounts) with Speaker and Comprehender Characteristics: Toward Socially Situated Interpretation.

Science.gov (United States)

Münster, Katja; Knoeferle, Pia

2017-01-01

More and more findings suggest a tight temporal coupling between (non-linguistic) socially interpreted context and language processing. Still, real-time language processing accounts remain largely elusive with respect to the influence of biological (e.g., age) and experiential (e.g., world and moral knowledge) comprehender characteristics and the influence of the 'socially interpreted' context, as for instance provided by the speaker. This context could include actions, facial expressions, a speaker's voice or gaze, and gestures among others. We review findings from social psychology, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics to highlight the relevance of (the interplay between) the socially interpreted context and comprehender characteristics for language processing. The review informs the extension of an extant real-time processing account (already featuring a coordinated interplay between language comprehension and the non-linguistic visual context) with a variable ('ProCom') that captures characteristics of the language user and with a first approximation of the comprehender's speaker representation. Extending the CIA to the sCIA (social Coordinated Interplay Account) is the first step toward a real-time language comprehension account which might eventually accommodate the socially situated communicative interplay between comprehenders and speakers.

Omission of definite and indefinite articles in the spontaneous speech of agrammatic speakers with Broca's aphasia

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Havik, E.; Bastiaanse, Y.R.M.

2004-01-01

Background: Cross-linguistic investigation of agrammatic speech in speakers of different languages allows us to tests theoretical accounts of the nature of agrammatism. A significant feature of the speech of many agrammatic speakers is a problem with article production. Mansson and Ahlsen (2001)

Comparing five front-of-pack nutrition labels' influence on consumers' perceptions and purchase intentions.

Science.gov (United States)

Gorski Findling, Mary T; Werth, Paul M; Musicus, Aviva A; Bragg, Marie A; Graham, Dan J; Elbel, Brian; Roberto, Christina A

2018-01-01

In 2011, a National Academy of Medicine report recommended that packaged food in the U.S. display a uniform front-of-package nutrition label, using a system such as a 0-3 star ranking. Few studies have directly compared this to other labels to determine which best informs consumers and encourages healthier purchases. In 2013, we randomized adult participants (N=1247) in an Internet-based survey to one of six conditions: no label control; single traffic light; multiple traffic light; Facts Up Front; NuVal; or 0-3 star ranking. We compared groups on purchase intentions and accuracy of participants' interpretation of food labels. There were no differences in the nutritional quality of hypothetical shopping baskets across conditions (p=0.845). All labels improved consumers' abilities to judge the nutritional quality of foods relative to no label, but the best designs varied by outcomes. NuVal and multiple traffic light labels led to the greatest accuracy identifying the healthier of two products (ppurchase intentions. Results did not point to a clearly superior label design, but they suggest that a 3-star label might not be best for educating consumers. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Left hemisphere lateralization for lexical and acoustic pitch processing in Cantonese speakers as revealed by mismatch negativity.

Science.gov (United States)

Gu, Feng; Zhang, Caicai; Hu, Axu; Zhao, Guoping

2013-12-01

For nontonal language speakers, speech processing is lateralized to the left hemisphere and musical processing is lateralized to the right hemisphere (i.e., function-dependent brain asymmetry). On the other hand, acoustic temporal processing is lateralized to the left hemisphere and spectral/pitch processing is lateralized to the right hemisphere (i.e., acoustic-dependent brain asymmetry). In this study, we examine whether the hemispheric lateralization of lexical pitch and acoustic pitch processing in tonal language speakers is consistent with the patterns of function- and acoustic-dependent brain asymmetry in nontonal language speakers. Pitch contrast in both speech stimuli (syllable /ji/ in Experiment 1) and nonspeech stimuli (harmonic tone in Experiment 1; pure tone in Experiment 2) was presented to native Cantonese speakers in passive oddball paradigms. We found that the mismatch negativity (MMN) elicited by lexical pitch contrast was lateralized to the left hemisphere, which is consistent with the pattern of function-dependent brain asymmetry (i.e., left hemisphere lateralization for speech processing) in nontonal language speakers. However, the MMN elicited by acoustic pitch contrast was also left hemisphere lateralized (harmonic tone in Experiment 1) or showed a tendency for left hemisphere lateralization (pure tone in Experiment 2), which is inconsistent with the pattern of acoustic-dependent brain asymmetry (i.e., right hemisphere lateralization for acoustic pitch processing) in nontonal language speakers. The consistent pattern of function-dependent brain asymmetry and the inconsistent pattern of acoustic-dependent brain asymmetry between tonal and nontonal language speakers can be explained by the hypothesis that the acoustic-dependent brain asymmetry is the consequence of a carryover effect from function-dependent brain asymmetry. Potential evolutionary implication of this hypothesis is discussed. © 2013.

Behavioural model in social psychology: Model development and model studies on the behavioral intentions of individuals and groups in energy policy problems

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Bergius, R; Engemann, A; Guenther, R; Kimmelmann, G; Radtke, M; Sachs, S; Schmidt, F

1982-10-01

We describe a model which allows to simulate inference and evaluation processes and also the resulting behavioral intentions. The model is the base of the program REASON. The program needs as input knowledge about the part of the world which is to be evaluated and values and criteria which are used to judge the conclusions of the inference process. The program provides as output the scores of the various criteria and accumulated evaluations of the options. Also if desired a protocol of the inference process is available. The program is demonstrated by examples showing support in generating concepts. A detailed concept was developed for the installation of the heating system in a new home. REASON is applied together with this concept to simulate the behavioral intentions of the home owners towards the installation of the various heating systems.

L'evaluation du francais des jeunes Anglo-montrealais par leurs pairs francophones (Evaluation of the French of Young Montreal Anglophones by Their Francophone Peers).

Science.gov (United States)

Thibault, Pierrette; Sankoff, Gillian

1999-01-01

Analyzes the reactions of francophone Montrealers (n=116) to the recorded speech of English speakers using French. Particular focus is on finding out which linguistic traits of speech triggered the judgments on the speakers' competence and to what extent they met the judges expectations with regard to their job suitability. (Author/VWL)

Credibility of native and non-native speakers of English revisited: Do non-native listeners feel the same?

OpenAIRE

Hanzlíková, Dagmar; Skarnitzl, Radek

2017-01-01

This study reports on research stimulated by Lev-Ari and Keysar (2010) who showed that native listeners find statements delivered by foreign-accented speakers to be less true than those read by native speakers. Our objective was to replicate the study with non-native listeners to see whether this effect is also relevant in international communication contexts. The same set of statements from the original study was recorded by 6 native and 6 nonnative speakers of English. 121 non-native listen...

Federal Judge Orders Showing of Controversial Film.

Science.gov (United States)

Flygare, Thomas J.

1987-01-01

Reviews a recent court decision in Nebraska regarding the cancellation of a controversial film on the University of Nebraska campus. The film was cancelled after a state senator threatened to close the theater if the movie was shown. The lawsuit alleged the university violated the First Amendment in cancelling the film; the judge ruled for the…

FINANCIAL SECURITY OF MILITARY JUDGES IN SOUTH AFRICA ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Abstract. The status of military courts within the South African judicial system is ... that the question of financial security of military judges is a complex one and ...... that the force of the recommendations of the Commission is weak, as it is entirely.

Television Judge Shows: Nordic and U.S. Perspectives

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Porsdam, Helle

2017-01-01

Legal discourse is language that people use in a globalizing and multicultural society to negotiate acceptable behaviors and values. We see this played out in popular cultural forums such as judicial television dramas. In the American context, television judge shows are virtually synonymous...

Disrupted behaviour in grammatical morphology in French speakers with autism spectrum disorders.

Science.gov (United States)

Le Normand, Marie-Thérèse; Blanc, Romuald; Caldani, Simona; Bonnet-Brilhault, Frédérique

2018-01-18

Mixed and inconsistent findings have been reported across languages concerning grammatical morphology in speakers with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Some researchers argue for a selective sparing of grammar whereas others claim to have identified grammatical deficits. The present study aimed to investigate this issue in 26 participants with ASD speaking European French who were matched on age, gender and SES to 26 participants with typical development (TD). The groups were compared regarding their productivity and accuracy of syntactic and agreement categories using the French MOR part-of-speech tagger available from the CHILDES. The groups significantly differed in productivity with respect to nouns, adjectives, determiners, prepositions and gender markers. Error analysis revealed that ASD speakers exhibited a disrupted behaviour in grammatical morphology. They made gender, tense and preposition errors and they omitted determiners and pronouns in nominal and verbal contexts. ASD speakers may have a reduced sensitivity to perceiving and processing the distributional structure of syntactic categories when producing grammatical morphemes and agreement categories. The theoretical and cross-linguistic implications of these findings are discussed.

Stern-judging: A simple, successful norm which promotes cooperation under indirect reciprocity.

Science.gov (United States)

Pacheco, Jorge M; Santos, Francisco C; Chalub, Fabio A C C

2006-12-29

We study the evolution of cooperation under indirect reciprocity, believed to constitute the biological basis of morality. We employ an evolutionary game theoretical model of multilevel selection, and show that natural selection and mutation lead to the emergence of a robust and simple social norm, which we call stern-judging. Under stern-judging, helping a good individual or refusing help to a bad individual leads to a good reputation, whereas refusing help to a good individual or helping a bad one leads to a bad reputation. Similarly for tit-for-tat and win-stay-lose-shift, the simplest ubiquitous strategies in direct reciprocity, the lack of ambiguity of stern-judging, where implacable punishment is compensated by prompt forgiving, supports the idea that simplicity is often associated with evolutionary success.

Stern-judging: A simple, successful norm which promotes cooperation under indirect reciprocity.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jorge M Pacheco

2006-12-01

Full Text Available We study the evolution of cooperation under indirect reciprocity, believed to constitute the biological basis of morality. We employ an evolutionary game theoretical model of multilevel selection, and show that natural selection and mutation lead to the emergence of a robust and simple social norm, which we call stern-judging. Under stern-judging, helping a good individual or refusing help to a bad individual leads to a good reputation, whereas refusing help to a good individual or helping a bad one leads to a bad reputation. Similarly for tit-for-tat and win-stay-lose-shift, the simplest ubiquitous strategies in direct reciprocity, the lack of ambiguity of stern-judging, where implacable punishment is compensated by prompt forgiving, supports the idea that simplicity is often associated with evolutionary success.

Improving Speaker Recognition by Biometric Voice Deconstruction

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Luis Miguel eMazaira-Fernández

2015-09-01

Full Text Available Person identification, especially in critical environments, has always been a subject of great interest. However, it has gained a new dimension in a world threatened by a new kind of terrorism that uses social networks (e.g. YouTube to broadcast its message. In this new scenario, classical identification methods (such fingerprints or face recognition have been forcedly replaced by alternative biometric characteristics such as voice, as sometimes this is the only feature available. Through the present paper, a new methodology to characterize speakers will be shown. This methodology is benefiting from the advances achieved during the last years in understanding and modelling voice production. The paper hypothesizes that a gender dependent characterization of speakers combined with the use of a new set of biometric parameters extracted from the components resulting from the deconstruction of the voice into its glottal source and vocal tract estimates, will enhance recognition rates when compared to classical approaches. A general description about the main hypothesis and the methodology followed to extract gender-dependent extended biometric parameters are given. Experimental validation is carried out both on a highly controlled acoustic condition database, and on a mobile phone network recorded under non-controlled acoustic conditions.

Mediator of moderators: temporal stability of intention and the intention-behavior relation.

Science.gov (United States)

Sheeran, Paschal; Abraham, Charles

2003-02-01

Intention certainty, past behavior, self-schema, anticipated regret, and attitudinal versus normative control all have been found to moderate intention-behavior relations. It is argued that moderation occurs because these variables produce "strong" intentions. Stability of intention over time is a key index of intention strength. Consequently, it was hypothesized that temporal stability of intention would mediate moderation by these other moderators. Participants (N = 185) completed questionnaire measures of theory of planned behavior constructs and moderator variables at two time points and subsequently reported their exercise behavior. Findings showed that all of the moderators, including temporal stability, were associated with significant improvements in consistency between intention and behavior. Temporal stability also mediated the effects of the other moderators, supporting the study hypothesis. Copyright 2003 Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

Pragmatic Instruction May Not Be Necessary among Heritage Speakers of Spanish: A Study on Requests

Science.gov (United States)

Barros García, María J.; Bachelor, Jeremy W.

2018-01-01

This paper studies the pragmatic competence of U.S. heritage speakers of Spanish in an attempt to determine (a) the degree of pragmatic transfer from English to Spanish experienced by heritage speakers when producing different types of requests in Spanish; and (b) how to best teach pragmatics to students of Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL).…

The effects of L2 proficiency level on the processing of wh-questions among Dutch second language speakers of English

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Jackson, C.N.; Hell, J.G. van

2011-01-01

Using a self-paced reading task, the present study explores how Dutch-English L2 speakers parse English wh-subject-extractions and wh-object-extractions. Results suggest that English native speakers and highly-proficient Dutch–English L2 speakers do not always exhibit measurable signs of on-line

Inductive reasoning and the understanding of intention in schizophrenia.

Science.gov (United States)

Corcoran, Rhiannon

2003-08-01

The study explored the relationship between the understanding of intention in veiled speech acts and the ability to reason inductively. A total of 39 people with DSM-IV-defined schizophrenia with no behavioural signs and 44 healthy participants performed the Hinting Task, a measure of pragmatic language in which the speaker's intention must be inferred, and a measure of inductive reasoning (Aha! Sentences) in which the meaning of ambiguous nonsocial sentences had to be inferred. The participants also completed measures of general intellectual ability, immediate memory for narrative and social problem-solving ability. A substantial correlation was found between performance on the inductive reasoning task and the Hinting Task in the sample of people with schizophrenia. The same relationship was not seen in the normal control sample. The robust relationship between these two measures in this sample survived when the roles of immediate memory for narrative and intellectual ability were controlled for. Furthermore, the relationship was distinctly more compelling for the patients who were currently ill compared to those in remission. These data suggest that people with schizophrenia use a different strategy to infer the meaning behind pragmatic language than that used by normally functioning adults. It is suggested that a reliance on different, possibly less specialised, skills in this group to perform this simple social inference task underlies their deficient performance on this and other measures of social inference. The fact that the relationship between the tasks in patients in remission is not as robust implies that the use of specialised skills to perform social inference tasks may be compromised most significantly during acute phases.

Within the School and the Community--A Speaker's Bureau.

Science.gov (United States)

McClintock, Joy H.

Student interest prompted the formation of a Speaker's Bureau in Seminole Senior High School, Seminole, Florida. First, students compiled a list of community contacts, including civic clubs, churches, retirement villages, newspaper offices, and the County School Administration media center. A letter of introduction was composed and speaking…

The Removal of the Judge as a Guarantee of Fair Criminal Justice

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yury V. Derishev

2016-11-01

Full Text Available The article is devoted to the institution of the removal of a judge in criminal trial proceedings, which is regarded as the most important guarantees of fair criminal justice. Based on the definition of the nature and content of the mechanism for the removal of a judge, the Authors offer an analysis of the problems of the application of law that accompany its implementation in modern criminal proceedings

20 CFR 667.830 - When will the Administrative Law Judge issue a decision?

Science.gov (United States)

2010-04-01

... 20 Employees' Benefits 3 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 false When will the Administrative Law Judge issue... Adjudication and Judicial Review § 667.830 When will the Administrative Law Judge issue a decision? (a) The ALJ... ARB must be decided within 180 days of acceptance. If not so decided, the decision of the ALJ...

Non-English speakers attend gastroenterology clinic appointments at higher rates than English speakers in a vulnerable patient population

Science.gov (United States)

Sewell, Justin L.; Kushel, Margot B.; Inadomi, John M.; Yee, Hal F.

2009-01-01

Goals We sought to identify factors associated with gastroenterology clinic attendance in an urban safety net healthcare system. Background Missed clinic appointments reduce the efficiency and availability of healthcare, but subspecialty clinic attendance among patients with established healthcare access has not been studied. Study We performed an observational study using secondary data from administrative sources to study patients referred to, and scheduled for an appointment in, the adult gastroenterology clinic serving the safety net healthcare system of San Francisco, California. Our dependent variable was whether subjects attended or missed a scheduled appointment. Analysis included multivariable logistic regression and classification tree analysis. 1,833 patients were referred and scheduled for an appointment between 05/2005 and 08/2006. Prisoners were excluded. All patients had a primary care provider. Results 683 patients (37.3%) missed their appointment; 1,150 (62.7%) attended. Language was highly associated with attendance in the logistic regression; non-English speakers were less likely than English speakers to miss an appointment (adjusted odds ratio 0.42 [0.28,0.63] for Spanish, 0.56 [0.38,0.82] for Asian language, p gastroenterology clinic appointment, not speaking English was most strongly associated with higher attendance rates. Patient related factors associated with not speaking English likely influence subspecialty clinic attendance rates, and these factors may differ from those affecting general healthcare access. PMID:19169147

Practical approach to a procedure for judging the results of analytical verification measurements

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Beyrich, W.; Spannagel, G.

1979-01-01

For practical safeguards a particularly transparent procedure is described to judge analytical differences between declared and verified values based on experimental data relevant to the actual status of the measurement technique concerned. Essentially it consists of two parts: Derivation of distribution curves for the occurrence of interlaboratory differences from the results of analytical intercomparison programmes; and judging of observed differences using criteria established on the basis of these probability curves. By courtesy of the Euratom Safeguards Directorate, Luxembourg, the applicability of this judging procedure has been checked in practical data verification for safeguarding; the experience gained was encouraging and implementation of the method is intended. Its reliability might be improved further by evaluation of additional experimental data. (author)

Front-Stage Stars and Backstage Producers: The Role of Judges in Problem-Solving Courts1

Science.gov (United States)

Portillo, Shannon; Rudes, Danielle; Viglione, Jill; Nelson, Matthew; Taxman, Faye

2012-01-01

In problem-solving courts judges are no longer neutral arbitrators in adversarial justice processes. Instead, judges directly engage with court participants. The movement towards problem-solving court models emerges from a collaborative therapeutic jurisprudence framework. While most scholars argue judges are the central courtroom actors within problem-solving courts, we find judges are the stars front-stage, but play a more supporting role backstage. We use Goffman's front-stage-backstage framework to analyze 350 hours of ethnographic fieldwork within five problem-solving courts. Problem-solving courts are collaborative organizations with shifting leadership, based on forum. Understanding how the roles of courtroom workgroup actors adapt under the new court model is foundational for effective implementation of these justice processes. PMID:23397430

Speaker gaze increases information coupling between infant and adult brains.

Science.gov (United States)

Leong, Victoria; Byrne, Elizabeth; Clackson, Kaili; Georgieva, Stanimira; Lam, Sarah; Wass, Sam

2017-12-12

When infants and adults communicate, they exchange social signals of availability and communicative intention such as eye gaze. Previous research indicates that when communication is successful, close temporal dependencies arise between adult speakers' and listeners' neural activity. However, it is not known whether similar neural contingencies exist within adult-infant dyads. Here, we used dual-electroencephalography to assess whether direct gaze increases neural coupling between adults and infants during screen-based and live interactions. In experiment 1 ( n = 17), infants viewed videos of an adult who was singing nursery rhymes with ( i ) direct gaze (looking forward), ( ii ) indirect gaze (head and eyes averted by 20°), or ( iii ) direct-oblique gaze (head averted but eyes orientated forward). In experiment 2 ( n = 19), infants viewed the same adult in a live context, singing with direct or indirect gaze. Gaze-related changes in adult-infant neural network connectivity were measured using partial directed coherence. Across both experiments, the adult had a significant (Granger) causal influence on infants' neural activity, which was stronger during direct and direct-oblique gaze relative to indirect gaze. During live interactions, infants also influenced the adult more during direct than indirect gaze. Further, infants vocalized more frequently during live direct gaze, and individual infants who vocalized longer also elicited stronger synchronization from the adult. These results demonstrate that direct gaze strengthens bidirectional adult-infant neural connectivity during communication. Thus, ostensive social signals could act to bring brains into mutual temporal alignment, creating a joint-networked state that is structured to facilitate information transfer during early communication and learning. Copyright © 2017 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.

8 CFR 1240.31 - Authority of immigration judges.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 8 Aliens and Nationality 1 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Authority of immigration judges. 1240.31 Section 1240.31 Aliens and Nationality EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW, DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE IMMIGRATION REGULATIONS PROCEEDINGS TO DETERMINE REMOVABILITY OF ALIENS IN THE UNITED STATES Exclusion of...

Preferences for School Finance Systems: Voters versus Judges.

Science.gov (United States)

Campbell, Colin D.; Fischel, William A.

1996-01-01

A theory that urges judges to decide that locally financed school systems are unconstitutional holds that courts must implement reforms because the legislative process is dominated by property-rich communities. However, the defeat of a New Hampshire gubernatorial candidate who advocated such reforms contradicts the theory. (JOW)

The judge on Facebook; neglecting a persistent ritual?

NARCIS (Netherlands)

van den Hoven, P.J.

In many social realms, social media are employed by institutions to establish direct relations between their representatives and their clients or customers. In this article I explain why the civil law judge cannot be expected to begin using social networking sites to advance the transparency of the

Forensic Automatic Speaker Recognition Based on Likelihood Ratio Using Acoustic-phonetic Features Measured Automatically

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Huapeng Wang

2015-01-01

Full Text Available Forensic speaker recognition is experiencing a remarkable paradigm shift in terms of the evaluation framework and presentation of voice evidence. This paper proposes a new method of forensic automatic speaker recognition using the likelihood ratio framework to quantify the strength of voice evidence. The proposed method uses a reference database to calculate the within- and between-speaker variability. Some acoustic-phonetic features are extracted automatically using the software VoiceSauce. The effectiveness of the approach was tested using two Mandarin databases: A mobile telephone database and a landline database. The experiment's results indicate that these acoustic-phonetic features do have some discriminating potential and are worth trying in discrimination. The automatic acoustic-phonetic features have acceptable discriminative performance and can provide more reliable results in evidence analysis when fused with other kind of voice features.

Positivity bias in judging ingroup members' emotional expressions.

Science.gov (United States)

Lazerus, Talya; Ingbretsen, Zachary A; Stolier, Ryan M; Freeman, Jonathan B; Cikara, Mina

2016-12-01

We investigated how group membership impacts valence judgments of ingroup and outgroup members' emotional expressions. In Experiment 1, participants, randomized into 2 novel, competitive groups, rated the valence of in- and outgroup members' facial expressions (e.g., fearful, happy, neutral) using a circumplex affect grid. Across all emotions, participants judged ingroup members' expressions as more positive than outgroup members' expressions. In Experiment 2, participants categorized fearful and happy expressions as being either positive or negative using a mouse-tracking paradigm. Participants exhibited the most direct trajectories toward the "positive" label for ingroup happy expressions and an initial attraction toward positive for ingroup expressions of fear, with outgroup emotion trajectories falling in between. Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 2 and demonstrated that the effect could not be accounted for by targets' gaze direction. Overall, people judged ingroup faces as more positive, regardless of emotion, both in deliberate and implicit judgments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

"Real Language": Combining Intermediate Spanish Language Learners and ESOL/Native Speakers for Vernacular Language Acquisition

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Joe LaValle

2017-06-01

Full Text Available This paper addresses the possibilities of combining Spanish language learners and English language learners in high school and post-secondary institutions for mutual benefit to learn authentic language. Academic or "classroom" Spanish is insufficient to empower students for today's workplace. The concept behind "Real Language" is illustrated by an example of an interdisciplinary activity to facilitate communicative interaction in genuine language and promote cultural understanding between intermediate Spanish students and ESOL/native speakers at the high school and post-secondary level. Students are asked to utilize their life skills in interactive, freestyle conversation without the intervention of an instructor. The learning space for language exchange is an out-of-class venue for a non-intimidating, more authentic setting. This simple qualitative study investigates the potential value of this sort of interdisciplinary activity. The intent is to evaluate attitudes of the participants in relation to confidence in their ability to use the target language, and their willingness to use it in social and professional environments and, in addition, to facilitate cultural understanding. The positive result of the project is validated by the voice of the student participants as they reflect on their experience in "Real Language". Could this concept facilitate evolving strategies for interdisciplinary contemporary foreign language learning?

A virtual speaker in noisy classroom conditions: supporting or disrupting children's listening comprehension?

Science.gov (United States)

Nirme, Jens; Haake, Magnus; Lyberg Åhlander, Viveka; Brännström, Jonas; Sahlén, Birgitta

2018-04-05

Seeing a speaker's face facilitates speech recognition, particularly under noisy conditions. Evidence for how it might affect comprehension of the content of the speech is more sparse. We investigated how children's listening comprehension is affected by multi-talker babble noise, with or without presentation of a digitally animated virtual speaker, and whether successful comprehension is related to performance on a test of executive functioning. We performed a mixed-design experiment with 55 (34 female) participants (8- to 9-year-olds), recruited from Swedish elementary schools. The children were presented with four different narratives, each in one of four conditions: audio-only presentation in a quiet setting, audio-only presentation in noisy setting, audio-visual presentation in a quiet setting, and audio-visual presentation in a noisy setting. After each narrative, the children answered questions on the content and rated their perceived listening effort. Finally, they performed a test of executive functioning. We found significantly fewer correct answers to explicit content questions after listening in noise. This negative effect was only mitigated to a marginally significant degree by audio-visual presentation. Strong executive function only predicted more correct answers in quiet settings. Altogether, our results are inconclusive regarding how seeing a virtual speaker affects listening comprehension. We discuss how methodological adjustments, including modifications to our virtual speaker, can be used to discriminate between possible explanations to our results and contribute to understanding the listening conditions children face in a typical classroom.

Revisiting Phenomenal Intentionality

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Farid Masrour

2016-04-01

Full Text Available This essay has two goals. The goal of the first section is to raise a few clarificatory questions about the exact contour of Crane’s account of intentionality, its relation to phenomenology, and his motivation for it. The second section aims to describe a general worry about programs that combine a broadly anti-externalist outlook on intentionality with the idea that there is an intimate connection between phenomenology and intentionality. I argue that programs like this either suffer from a problem that I call intentional luck or, in the attempt to avoid this problem, have to weaken the connection between intentionality and phenomenology. Since Crane’s general outlook falls under this program, it is subject to this worry.

29 CFR 102.45 - Administrative law judge's decision; contents; service; transfer of case to the Board; contents...

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... and Transfer of Case to the Board § 102.45 Administrative law judge's decision; contents; service... administrative law judge's decision and of the order transferring the case to the Board shall be complete upon... 29 Labor 2 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Administrative law judge's decision; contents; service...

29 CFR 102.153 - Administrative law judge's decision; contents; service; transfer of case to the Board; contents...

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... Expenses § 102.153 Administrative law judge's decision; contents; service; transfer of case to the Board... administrative law judge's decision and of the order transferring the case to the Board shall be complete upon... 29 Labor 2 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Administrative law judge's decision; contents; service...

Gesturing by Speakers with Aphasia: How Does It Compare?

Science.gov (United States)

Mol, Lisette; Krahmer, Emiel; van de Sandt-Koenderman, Mieke

2013-01-01

Purpose: To study the independence of gesture and verbal language production. The authors assessed whether gesture can be semantically compensatory in cases of verbal language impairment and whether speakers with aphasia and control participants use similar depiction techniques in gesture. Method: The informativeness of gesture was assessed in 3…

Effect of implementation intentions to change behaviour: moderation by intention stability.

Science.gov (United States)

Godin, Gaston; Bélanger-Gravel, Ariane; Amireault, Steve; Gallani, Maria-Cecilia B J; Vohl, Marie-Claude; Pérusse, Louis

2010-02-01

The aim of this study was to assess the effects of implementation intentions on leisure-time physical activity, taking into account the stability of intention. At baseline (T0), 349 participants completed a psychosocial questionnaire and were randomly assigned to implementation intention or control condition. Three months after baseline assessment (T1), participants in the experimental group were asked to plan where, when, and how they would exercise. Leisure-time physical activity was assessed 3 mo. later (i.e., at 6-mo. follow-up; T2). The intervention had no significant effect on physical activity at 6-mo. follow-up. However, a significant interaction of group and intention stability was observed, with the effect of the intervention on behaviour statistically significant only among those with unstable intention. Intention stability thus moderated the effect of the intervention, i.e., the intervention was more successful among individuals who needed support to change (unstable intenders).

A comparison of three speaker-intrinsic vowel formant frequency normalization algorithms for sociophonetics

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Fabricius, Anne; Watt, Dominic; Johnson, Daniel Ezra

2009-01-01

from RP and Aberdeen English (northeast Scotland). We conclude that, for the data examined here, the S-centroid W&F procedures performs at least as well as the two most recognized speaker-intrinsic, vowel-extrinsic, formant-intrinsic normalization methods, Lobanov's (1971) z-score procedure and Nearey......This paper evaluates a speaker-intrinsic vowel formant frequency normalization algorithm initially proposed in Watt & Fabricius (2002). We compare how well this routine, known as the S-centroid procedure, performs as a sociophonetic research tool in three ways: reducing variance in area ratios...

The Role of Sharia Judges in Indonesia: Between The Common Law and The Civil Law Systems

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Alfitri

2017-12-01

Full Text Available This article seeks to analyse the role of Religious Courts’ (Pengadilan Agama or PA Judges in the formation of Islamic law in Indonesia. As part of the civil legal system, PA Judges are bound by legal provisions in handling legal disputes in court. They must apply the applicable legal provisions to decide upon a case. This condition can also be understood from the aspect of appointment of judges in Indonesia, including PA Judges, which is conducted not through professional career path as in the common law system. Thus, they are appointed from a new graduate of law/sharia faculty and then trained, inter alia, to apply and/or interpret applicable laws (legislation; and not to make the law itself. However, on the basis of secondary data analysis, studies on the ijtihad of PA Judges reveal that they are no longer only fixated on the provisions of statutes in deciding cases. They also make laws, cases in point are the Compilation of Islamic Law (KHI and the Compilation of Sharia Economic Law (KHES, do ijtihad on the books of fiqh which became the basis for the drafting of Islamic legislation in Indonesia. Some of them even do direct ijtihad from Sharia sources, namely the Qur'an and Hadith. This condition is arguably more in accordance with the character of judges (qadis in Islamic history which on a certain level similar to the role of judges in common law system.

Mapping Judicial Dialogue across National Borders: An Exploratory Network Study of Learning from Lobbying among European Intellectual Property Judges

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Emmanuel Lazega

2012-05-01

Full Text Available This paper looks at dialogue and collective learning across borders through personal networks of judges. We focus on judges participating in the Venice Forum, bringing together European patent judges involved in institutional lobbying for the construction of a European Patent Court. Empirical observation shows that personal networks of discussion with foreign judges, reading of their work and references to their decisions do exist in this milieu and can be mapped. Our network study shows that judges from some European countries are more active in this dialogue than judges from other countries. The learning process is driven, to some extent, by a small subset of super-central judges who frame this dialogue and can be considered to be opinion leaders in this social milieu. We measure a strong level of consensus among the judges on several controversial issues surrounding the procedure of a possible future European Patent Court. But strong differences between them remain. Dialogue and collective learning do not, by themselves, lead to convergence towards a uniform position in these controversies.

Imago iudicis, Four Images from the History of Ideas on Judging (Imago iudicis, štiri podobe iz idejne zgodovine sojenja

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Aleš Novak

2015-11-01

Full Text Available The article traces the developing image of a judge in Western legal thought. It starts with the famous Montesquieu’s characterisation of a judge as “the mouth that pronounces the words of the law”. Despite our common intuition (that he was describing a Continental judge, he was, the author argues, in fact offering his best understanding of an English judge. His portrayal has to a large extent corresponded with the self-understanding an English judge of that time (and long afterwards surely held. Gradually, Montesquieu’s image of a judge became synonymous with formalistic approach to judging, triggering a backlash. The German Free Law Movement is perhaps the most influential embodiment of such a reaction. Arguing for the recognition of a creative aspect of judging, they relied on their understanding of a common law judge, which was then still at odds with the official self-image cultivated by English judges. In the next decades, the same disillusion with a mechanistic image of judging prevalent also in the United States gave rise to American Legal Realism. The Realists adopted the Free Law Movement agenda to an important extent, part and parcel with the conviction that judicial creativity is an innate characteristic of a judge’s role. It is this conviction that still occupies the centre of all modern theories on judicial decision-making.

Testing Template and Testing Concept of Operations for Speaker Authentication Technology

National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

Sipko, Marek M

2006-01-01

This thesis documents the findings of developing a generic testing template and supporting concept of operations for speaker verification technology as part of the Iraqi Enrollment via Voice Authentication Project (IEVAP...

Accent, Intelligibility, and the Role of the Listener: Perceptions of English-Accented German by Native German Speakers

Science.gov (United States)

Hayes-Harb, Rachel; Watzinger-Tharp, Johanna

2012-01-01

We explore the relationship between accentedness and intelligibility, and investigate how listeners' beliefs about nonnative speech interact with their accentedness and intelligibility judgments. Native German speakers and native English learners of German produced German sentences, which were presented to 12 native German speakers in accentedness…

Grounds for the Specialization of Courts and Judges in Russia

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Lydia Terekhova

2014-01-01

Full Text Available This article touches upon the different ways of specialization of courts and judges that exist under the legislation of the Russian Federation. The lack of a unified and circumspect approach is noted. The formation of specialized courts, according to the national legislation, takes the form of their establishing within the existing subsystems of regular and arbitration courts. As for the specialization of judges, it is more diversified and is presented by either creation of separate types of procedure (special proceedings, proceedings on cases arising from public relations and some other, or by introduction of special rules on jurisdiction that establish competence of specific courts to consider cases of a particular category: on the compensation for the excessive time taken to consider a case, on the adoption of a child by a foreign national and others.An analysis of existing literature on the issue in question shows that Russian scholars support the idea of judges’ specialization. Against specialization of courts the following arguments are brought: significant material costs, not being in accordance with the small number of cases decided by specialized courts; problems with access to justice; and the necessity to give special training to narrowly specialized judges.

Implementation-intention encoding in a prospective memory task enhances spontaneous retrieval of intentions.

Science.gov (United States)

Rummel, Jan; Einstein, Gilles O; Rampey, Hilary

2012-01-01

Although forming implementation intentions (Gollwitzer, 1999) has been demonstrated to generally improve prospective memory, the underlying cognitive mechanisms are not completely understood. It has been proposed that implementation-intention encoding encourages spontaneous retrieval (McDaniel & Scullin, 2010). Alternatively one could assume the positive effect of implementation-intention encoding is caused by increased or more efficient monitoring for target cues. To test these alternative explanations and to further investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying implementation-intention benefits, in two experiments participants formed the intention to respond to specific target cues in a lexical decision task with a special key, but then had to suspend this intention during an intervening word-categorisation task. Response times on trials directly following the occurrence of target cues in the intervening task were significantly slower with implementation-intention encoding than with standard encoding, indicating that spontaneous retrieval was increased (Experiment 1). However, when activation of the target cues was controlled for, similar slowing was found with both standard and implementation-intention encoding (Experiment 2). The results imply that implementation-intention encoding as well as increased target-cue activation foster spontaneous retrieval processes.

The intention interference effect.

Science.gov (United States)

Cohen, Anna-Lisa; Kantner, Justin; Dixon, Roger A; Lindsay, D Stephen

2011-01-01

Intentions have been shown to be more accessible (e.g., more quickly and accurately recalled) compared to other sorts of to-be-remembered information; a result termed an intention superiority effect (Goschke & Kuhl, 1993). In the current study, we demonstrate an intention interference effect (IIE) in which color-naming performance in a Stroop task was slower for words belonging to an intention that participants had to remember to carry out (Do-the-Task condition) versus an intention that did not have to be executed (Ignore-the-Task condition). In previous work (e.g., Cohen et al., 2005), having a prospective intention in mind was confounded with carrying a memory load. In Experiment 1, we added a digit-retention task to control for effects of cognitive load. In Experiment 2, we eliminated the memory confound in a new way, by comparing intention-related and control words within each trial. Results from both Experiments 1 and 2 revealed an IIE suggesting that interference is very specific to the intention, not just to a memory load.

Beyond the language given: the neural correlates of inferring speaker meaning.

Science.gov (United States)

Bašnáková, Jana; Weber, Kirsten; Petersson, Karl Magnus; van Berkum, Jos; Hagoort, Peter

2014-10-01

Even though language allows us to say exactly what we mean, we often use language to say things indirectly, in a way that depends on the specific communicative context. For example, we can use an apparently straightforward sentence like "It is hard to give a good presentation" to convey deeper meanings, like "Your talk was a mess!" One of the big puzzles in language science is how listeners work out what speakers really mean, which is a skill absolutely central to communication. However, most neuroimaging studies of language comprehension have focused on the arguably much simpler, context-independent process of understanding direct utterances. To examine the neural systems involved in getting at contextually constrained indirect meaning, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging as people listened to indirect replies in spoken dialog. Relative to direct control utterances, indirect replies engaged dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, right temporo-parietal junction and insula, as well as bilateral inferior frontal gyrus and right medial temporal gyrus. This suggests that listeners take the speaker's perspective on both cognitive (theory of mind) and affective (empathy-like) levels. In line with classic pragmatic theories, our results also indicate that currently popular "simulationist" accounts of language comprehension fail to explain how listeners understand the speaker's intended message. © The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Evilness as intention

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Bertelsen, Preben

2005-01-01

The purpose of this article is to examine on which psychological foundation we might be able to identify evil as an independent psychological phenomenon which requires its own. non-clinical concept and diagnostics. An evil act, it is proposed, is something which a person does intentionally and can...... be held responsible for. A basic model of human activity is presented based on human connectedness to the world in general and on co-existence as a core of the human condition in particular. Genuine evilness is defined as intentional detachment from and destruction of human co-existence. This definition...... presupposes a level of selforganization where co-existence can be an intentional project in itself. Only beings that can have co-existence as an intentional project in itself can intentionally detach from it and act destructively towards it in a genuinely evil manner....

Evilness as intention

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Bertelsen, Preben

2005-01-01

be held responsible for. A basic model of human activity is presented based on human connectedness to the world in general and on co-existence as a core of the human condition in particular. Genuine evilness is defined as intentional detachment from and destruction of human co-existence. This definition...... presupposes a level of selforganization where co-existence can be an intentional project in itself. Only beings that can have co-existence as an intentional project in itself can intentionally detach from it and act destructively towards it in a genuinely evil manner.......The purpose of this article is to examine on which psychological foundation we might be able to identify evil as an independent psychological phenomenon which requires its own. non-clinical concept and diagnostics. An evil act, it is proposed, is something which a person does intentionally and can...

Revisiting the role of language in spatial cognition: Categorical perception of spatial relations in English and Korean speakers.

Science.gov (United States)

Holmes, Kevin J; Moty, Kelsey; Regier, Terry

2017-12-01

The spatial relation of support has been regarded as universally privileged in nonlinguistic cognition and immune to the influence of language. English, but not Korean, obligatorily distinguishes support from nonsupport via basic spatial terms. Despite this linguistic difference, previous research suggests that English and Korean speakers show comparable nonlinguistic sensitivity to the support/nonsupport distinction. Here, using a paradigm previously found to elicit cross-language differences in color discrimination, we provide evidence for a difference in sensitivity to support/nonsupport between native English speakers and native Korean speakers who were late English learners and tested in a context that privileged Korean. Whereas the former group showed categorical perception (CP) when discriminating spatial scenes capturing the support/nonsupport distinction, the latter did not. An additional group of native Korean speakers-relatively early English learners tested in an English-salient context-patterned with the native English speakers in showing CP for support/nonsupport. These findings suggest that obligatory marking of support/nonsupport in one's native language can affect nonlinguistic sensitivity to this distinction, contra earlier findings, but that such sensitivity may also depend on aspects of language background and the immediate linguistic context.

Age of acquisition and naming performance in Frisian-Dutch bilingual speakers with dementia.

Science.gov (United States)

Veenstra, Wencke S; Huisman, Mark; Miller, Nick

2014-01-01

Age of acquisition (AoA) of words is a recognised variable affecting language processing in speakers with and without language disorders. For bi- and multilingual speakers their languages can be differentially affected in neurological illness. Study of language loss in bilingual speakers with dementia has been relatively neglected. We investigated whether AoA of words was associated with level of naming impairment in bilingual speakers with probable Alzheimer's dementia within and across their languages. Twenty-six Frisian-Dutch bilinguals with mild to moderate dementia named 90 pictures in each language, employing items with rated AoA and other word variable measures matched across languages. Quantitative (totals correct) and qualitative (error types and (in)appropriate switching) aspects were measured. Impaired retrieval occurred in Frisian (Language 1) and Dutch (Language 2), with a significant effect of AoA on naming in both languages. Earlier acquired words were better preserved and retrieved. Performance was identical across languages, but better in Dutch when controlling for covariates. However, participants demonstrated more inappropriate code switching within the Frisian test setting. On qualitative analysis, no differences in overall error distribution were found between languages for early or late acquired words. There existed a significantly higher percentage of semantically than visually-related errors. These findings have implications for understanding problems in lexical retrieval among bilingual individuals with dementia and its relation to decline in other cognitive functions which may play a role in inappropriate code switching. We discuss the findings in the light of the close relationship between Frisian and Dutch and the pattern of usage across the life-span.

Speaker-sensitive emotion recognition via ranking: Studies on acted and spontaneous speech☆

Science.gov (United States)

Cao, Houwei; Verma, Ragini; Nenkova, Ani

2015-01-01

We introduce a ranking approach for emotion recognition which naturally incorporates information about the general expressivity of speakers. We demonstrate that our approach leads to substantial gains in accuracy compared to conventional approaches. We train ranking SVMs for individual emotions, treating the data from each speaker as a separate query, and combine the predictions from all rankers to perform multi-class prediction. The ranking method provides two natural benefits. It captures speaker specific information even in speaker-independent training/testing conditions. It also incorporates the intuition that each utterance can express a mix of possible emotion and that considering the degree to which each emotion is expressed can be productively exploited to identify the dominant emotion. We compare the performance of the rankers and their combination to standard SVM classification approaches on two publicly available datasets of acted emotional speech, Berlin and LDC, as well as on spontaneous emotional data from the FAU Aibo dataset. On acted data, ranking approaches exhibit significantly better performance compared to SVM classification both in distinguishing a specific emotion from all others and in multi-class prediction. On the spontaneous data, which contains mostly neutral utterances with a relatively small portion of less intense emotional utterances, ranking-based classifiers again achieve much higher precision in identifying emotional utterances than conventional SVM classifiers. In addition, we discuss the complementarity of conventional SVM and ranking-based classifiers. On all three datasets we find dramatically higher accuracy for the test items on whose prediction the two methods agree compared to the accuracy of individual methods. Furthermore on the spontaneous data the ranking and standard classification are complementary and we obtain marked improvement when we combine the two classifiers by late-stage fusion.

Why reference to the past is difficult for agrammatic speakers

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Bastiaanse, Roelien

Many studies have shown that verb inflections are difficult to produce for agrammatic aphasic speakers: they are frequently omitted and substituted. The present article gives an overview of our search to understanding why this is the case. The hypothesis is that grammatical morphology referring to

Improving the Effectiveness of Speaker Verification Domain Adaptation With Inadequate In-Domain Data

Science.gov (United States)

2017-08-20

M speakers. We seek a probabilistic solution to domain adap- tation, and so we encode knowledge of the out-of-domain data in prior distributions...the VB solution from (16)-(21) becomes: µ =αȳ + (1− α)µout, (24) Σa =α ( 1 NT NT∑ n=1 〈ynyTn 〉 − ȳȳT ) + (1− α) Σouta (25) + α (1− α) ( ȳ − µout...non- English languages and from unseen channels. An inadequate in-domain set was provided, which consisted of 2272 samples from 1164 speakers, and

49 CFR 1515.11 - Review by administrative law judge and TSA Final Decision Maker.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-10-01

... 49 Transportation 9 2010-10-01 2010-10-01 false Review by administrative law judge and TSA Final... Review by administrative law judge and TSA Final Decision Maker. (a) Scope. This section applies to the following applicants: (1) An applicant who seeks review of a decision by TSA denying a request for a waiver...

Infants' Understanding of False Labeling Events: The Referential Roles of Words and the Speakers Who Use Them.

Science.gov (United States)

Koenig, Melissa A.; Echols, Catharine H.

2003-01-01

Four studies examined whether 16-month-olds' responses to true/false utterances interacted with their knowledge of human agents. Findings suggested that infants are developing a critical conception of human speakers as truthful communicators and that infants understand that human speakers may provide uniquely useful information when a word fails…

Teaching the Native English Speaker How to Teach English

Science.gov (United States)

Odhuu, Kelli

2014-01-01

This article speaks to teachers who have been paired with native speakers (NSs) who have never taught before, and the feelings of frustration, discouragement, and nervousness on the teacher's behalf that can occur as a result. In order to effectively tackle this situation, teachers need to work together with the NSs. Teachers in this scenario…

Multi-Frame Rate Based Multiple-Model Training for Robust Speaker Identification of Disguised Voice

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Prasad, Swati; Tan, Zheng-Hua; Prasad, Ramjee

2013-01-01

Speaker identification systems are prone to attack when voice disguise is adopted by the user. To address this issue,our paper studies the effect of using different frame rates on the accuracy of the speaker identification system for disguised voice.In addition, a multi-frame rate based multiple......-model training method is proposed. The experimental results show the superior performance of the proposed method compared to the commonly used single frame rate method for three types of disguised voice taken from the CHAINS corpus....

Phraseology and Frequency of Occurrence on the Web: Native Speakers' Perceptions of Google-Informed Second Language Writing

Science.gov (United States)

Geluso, Joe

2013-01-01

Usage-based theories of language learning suggest that native speakers of a language are acutely aware of formulaic language due in large part to frequency effects. Corpora and data-driven learning can offer useful insights into frequent patterns of naturally occurring language to second/foreign language learners who, unlike native speakers, are…

One of My Favorite Judges: Constitutional Interpretation, Democracy and Antonin Scalia

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Allan James

2017-05-01

Full Text Available In this article the author explains why Antonin Scalia was one of his favourite judges. It starts by excerpting some of Justice Scalia’s most biting and funny comments, both from judicial and extra-judicial sources. Then it explains the attractions of an originalist approach to constitutional interpretation, though arguing that the intentionalist strain is preferable to Scalia’s ‘original public meaning’ or ‘new originalism’ approach. Finally, it argues that within the confines of a constitutional structure with an entrenched bill of rights, Scalia was a strong proponent of democratic decision-making to resolve key social policy decisions, unlike many other top judges.

The Freedom of the Judge to Express his Personal Opinions and Convictions under the ECHR

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sietske Dijkstra

2017-01-01

Full Text Available The freedom of the judge to express his personal opinions and convictions is limited by his special position. The question arises where these limits lie: what are the possibilities for judges to express their personal views on religious, political or other subjects, whether it is through speech, writing, wearing religious symbols or membership of an association or church? In this article the limits of the freedom of the judge will be studied as they appear from the case law of the ECtHR. Two types of cases from this case law are relevant for this subject: cases based on complaints from judges about a violation of their rights under Article 9-11 ECHR and cases based on complaints from litigants and suspects about a violation of their right to a fair trial under Article 6(1 ECHR. The question is asked how the limits of judicial freedom are defined in the case law of the ECtHR and where these limits lie.

A Cross-Cultural Comparative Study of Apology Strategies Employed by Iranian EFL Learners and English Native Speakers

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Elham Abedi

2016-10-01

Full Text Available The development of speech-act theory has provided the hearers with a better understanding of what speakers intend to perform in the act of communication. One type of speech act is apologizing. When an action or utterance has resulted in an offense, the offender needs to apologize. In the present study, an attempt was made to compare the apology strategies employed by Iranian EFL learners and those of English native speakers in order to find out the possible differences and similarities. To this end, a discourse completion test (DCT was given to 100 male and female Iranian EFL learners and English native speakers. The respondents were supposed to complete the DCTs based on nine situations, which varied in terms of power between the interlocutors and level of imposition. This study employed Cohen and Olshtain's (1981 model to classify various types of apology strategies. The obtained results revealed some similarities along with some (statistically insignificant differences between EFL learners and American English speakers in terms of their use of apology strategies. Furthermore, it was found that the illocutionary force indicating devices (IFIDs, such as request for forgiveness and an offer of apology were the strategies mostly employed by the Iranian EFL learners while taking on responsibility such as explicit self-blame, and expression of self-deficiency were found to be the strategies mostly used by English native speakers. In terms of gender, the male and female respondents more or less used the same apology strategies in response to the situations. The findings of the present research can be used by language teachers as well as sociolinguists. Keywords: Speech act theory, Speech act of apology, Apology strategies, Iranian EFL learners, English Native speakers, Gender

Scientific Letter: High-intent suicide and the Beck's Suicide Intent ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Scientific Letter: High-intent suicide and the Beck's Suicide Intent scale: a case report. ... African Journal of Psychiatry. Journal Home · ABOUT THIS JOURNAL · Advanced Search · Current ... Abstract. Scientific Letter - No Abstract Available ...

Evidential Uses in the Spanish of Quechua Speakers in Peru.

Science.gov (United States)

Escobar, Anna Maria

1994-01-01

Analysis of recordings of spontaneous speech of native speakers of Quechua speaking Spanish as a second language reveals that, using verbal morphological resources of Spanish, they have grammaticalized an epistemic marking system resembling that of Quechua. Sources of this process in both Quechua and Spanish are analyzed. (MSE)

Openings and Closings in Telephone Conversations between Native Spanish Speakers.

Science.gov (United States)

Coronel-Molina, Serafin M.

1998-01-01

A study analyzed the opening and closing sequences of 11 dyads of native Spanish-speakers in natural telephone conversations conducted in Spanish. The objective was to determine how closely Hispanic cultural patterns of conduct for telephone conversations follow the sequences outlined in previous research. It is concluded that Spanish…

Age of acquisition and naming performance in Frisian-Dutch bilingual speakers with dementia

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Wencke S. Veenstra

Full Text Available Age of acquisition (AoA of words is a recognised variable affecting language processing in speakers with and without language disorders. For bi- and multilingual speakers their languages can be differentially affected in neurological illness. Study of language loss in bilingual speakers with dementia has been relatively neglected.OBJECTIVE:We investigated whether AoA of words was associated with level of naming impairment in bilingual speakers with probable Alzheimer's dementia within and across their languages.METHODS:Twenty-six Frisian-Dutch bilinguals with mild to moderate dementia named 90 pictures in each language, employing items with rated AoA and other word variable measures matched across languages. Quantitative (totals correct and qualitative (error types and (inappropriate switching aspects were measured.RESULTSImpaired retrieval occurred in Frisian (Language 1 and Dutch (Language 2, with a significant effect of AoA on naming in both languages. Earlier acquired words were better preserved and retrieved. Performance was identical across languages, but better in Dutch when controlling for covariates. However, participants demonstrated more inappropriate code switching within the Frisian test setting. On qualitative analysis, no differences in overall error distribution were found between languages for early or late acquired words. There existed a significantly higher percentage of semantically than visually-related errors.CONCLUSIONThese findings have implications for understanding problems in lexical retrieval among bilingual individuals with dementia and its relation to decline in other cognitive functions which may play a role in inappropriate code switching. We discuss the findings in the light of the close relationship between Frisian and Dutch and the pattern of usage across the life-span.

Effects of a metronome on the filled pauses of fluent speakers.

Science.gov (United States)

Christenfeld, N

1996-12-01

Filled pauses (the "ums" and "uhs" that litter spontaneous speech) seem to be a product of the speaker paying deliberate attention to the normally automatic act of talking. This is the same sort of explanation that has been offered for stuttering. In this paper we explore whether a manipulation that has long been known to decrease stuttering, synchronizing speech to the beats of a metronome, will then also decrease filled pauses. Two experiments indicate that a metronome has a dramatic effect on the production of filled pauses. This effect is not due to any simplification or slowing of the speech and supports the view that a metronome causes speakers to attend more to how they are talking and less to what they are saying. It also lends support to the connection between stutters and filled pauses.

A Novel Approach in Text-Independent Speaker Recognition in Noisy Environment

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Nona Heydari Esfahani

2014-10-01

Full Text Available In this paper, robust text-independent speaker recognition is taken into consideration. The proposed method performs on manual silence-removed utterances that are segmented into smaller speech units containing few phones and at least one vowel. The segments are basic units for long-term feature extraction. Sub-band entropy is directly extracted in each segment. A robust vowel detection method is then applied on each segment to separate a high energy vowel that is used as unit for pitch frequency and formant extraction. By applying a clustering technique, extracted short-term features namely MFCC coefficients are combined with long term features. Experiments using MLP classifier show that the average speaker accuracy recognition rate is 97.33% for clean speech and 61.33% in noisy environment for -2db SNR, that shows improvement compared to other conventional methods.

8 CFR 1240.12 - Decision of the immigration judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 8 Aliens and Nationality 1 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Decision of the immigration judge. 1240.12 Section 1240.12 Aliens and Nationality EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW, DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE IMMIGRATION REGULATIONS PROCEEDINGS TO DETERMINE REMOVABILITY OF ALIENS IN THE UNITED STATES Removal...

8 CFR 1240.50 - Decision of the immigration judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... 8 Aliens and Nationality 1 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Decision of the immigration judge. 1240.50 Section 1240.50 Aliens and Nationality EXECUTIVE OFFICE FOR IMMIGRATION REVIEW, DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE IMMIGRATION REGULATIONS PROCEEDINGS TO DETERMINE REMOVABILITY OF ALIENS IN THE UNITED STATES Proceedings To...

29 CFR 2704.307 - Decision of administrative law judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... 29 Labor 9 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Decision of administrative law judge. 2704.307 Section 2704.307 Labor Regulations Relating to Labor (Continued) FEDERAL MINE SAFETY AND HEALTH REVIEW COMMISSION IMPLEMENTATION OF THE EQUAL ACCESS TO JUSTICE ACT IN COMMISSION PROCEEDINGS Procedures for Considering...

Self-Perceived Career and Interpersonal Skills Gained from Participation on a Collegiate Livestock Judging Team

Science.gov (United States)

Bolton, Sarah; Duncan, Dennis W.; Fuhrman, Nicholas E.; Flanders, Frank

2015-01-01

Collegiate livestock judging is primarily an extracurricular activity that reinforces concepts taught in the classroom. Previous research has determined that participating on a livestock judging team can aid in the development of perceived life skills. Participants of this study indicated that their experience on a collegiate team helped them…

5 CFR 2423.31 - Powers and duties of the Administrative Law Judge at the hearing.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

... review will cause undue harm to a party or the public. (2) If the motion is granted, the Judge or... Law Judge at the hearing. 2423.31 Section 2423.31 Administrative Personnel FEDERAL LABOR RELATIONS AUTHORITY, GENERAL COUNSEL OF THE FEDERAL LABOR RELATIONS AUTHORITY AND FEDERAL SERVICE IMPASSES PANEL...

29 CFR 1955.12 - Administrative law judge; powers and duties.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... U.S.C. 554-557 (hereinafter called the APA). (b) On any procedural question not otherwise regulated by this part, the Act, or the APA, the administrative law judge shall be guided to the extent...

Pragmatics & rationality.

OpenAIRE

Allott, N. E.

2007-01-01

This thesis is about the reconciliation of realistic views of rationality with inferential-intentional theories of communication. Grice (1957 1975) argued that working out what a speaker meant by an utterance is a matter of inferring the speaker's intentions on the presumption that she is acting rationally. This is abductive inference: inference to the best explanation for the utterance. Thus an utterance both rationalises and causes the interpretation the hearer constructs. Human rationality...

The Blame Game: Performance Analysis of Speaker Diarization System Components

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Huijbregts, M.A.H.; Wooters, Chuck

2007-01-01

In this paper we discuss the performance analysis of a speaker diarization system similar to the system that was submitted by ICSI at the NIST RT06s evaluation benchmark. The analysis that is based on a series of oracle experiments, provides a good understanding of the performance of each system

Integrating an Automatic Judge into an Open Source LMS

Science.gov (United States)

Georgouli, Katerina; Guerreiro, Pedro

2011-01-01

This paper presents the successful integration of the evaluation engine of Mooshak into the open source learning management system Claroline. Mooshak is an open source online automatic judge that has been used for international and national programming competitions. although it was originally designed for programming competitions, Mooshak has also…

Financial security of military judges in South Africa | Tshivhase ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The status of military courts within the South African judicial system is uncertain. This uncertainty makes it challenging to determine the acceptable degree of their independence, including determining the acceptable basic financial security of military judges. In Van Rooyen v The State (2002) 5 SA 246 (CC), the ...

29 CFR 502.37 - Referral to Administrative Law Judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... 29 Labor 3 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Referral to Administrative Law Judge. 502.37 Section 502.37 Labor Regulations Relating to Labor (Continued) WAGE AND HOUR DIVISION, DEPARTMENT OF LABOR REGULATIONS ENFORCEMENT OF CONTRACTUAL OBLIGATIONS FOR TEMPORARY ALIEN AGRICULTURAL WORKERS ADMITTED UNDER SECTION 218 OF...

Adaptive Communication: Languages with More Non-Native Speakers Tend to Have Fewer Word Forms.

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Christian Bentz

Full Text Available Explaining the diversity of languages across the world is one of the central aims of typological, historical, and evolutionary linguistics. We consider the effect of language contact-the number of non-native speakers a language has-on the way languages change and evolve. By analysing hundreds of languages within and across language families, regions, and text types, we show that languages with greater levels of contact typically employ fewer word forms to encode the same information content (a property we refer to as lexical diversity. Based on three types of statistical analyses, we demonstrate that this variance can in part be explained by the impact of non-native speakers on information encoding strategies. Finally, we argue that languages are information encoding systems shaped by the varying needs of their speakers. Language evolution and change should be modeled as the co-evolution of multiple intertwined adaptive systems: On one hand, the structure of human societies and human learning capabilities, and on the other, the structure of language.

Adaptive Communication: Languages with More Non-Native Speakers Tend to Have Fewer Word Forms

Science.gov (United States)

Bentz, Christian; Verkerk, Annemarie; Kiela, Douwe; Hill, Felix; Buttery, Paula

2015-01-01

Explaining the diversity of languages across the world is one of the central aims of typological, historical, and evolutionary linguistics. We consider the effect of language contact-the number of non-native speakers a language has-on the way languages change and evolve. By analysing hundreds of languages within and across language families, regions, and text types, we show that languages with greater levels of contact typically employ fewer word forms to encode the same information content (a property we refer to as lexical diversity). Based on three types of statistical analyses, we demonstrate that this variance can in part be explained by the impact of non-native speakers on information encoding strategies. Finally, we argue that languages are information encoding systems shaped by the varying needs of their speakers. Language evolution and change should be modeled as the co-evolution of multiple intertwined adaptive systems: On one hand, the structure of human societies and human learning capabilities, and on the other, the structure of language. PMID:26083380

Speech Clarity Index (Ψ): A Distance-Based Speech Quality Indicator and Recognition Rate Prediction for Dysarthric Speakers with Cerebral Palsy

Science.gov (United States)

Kayasith, Prakasith; Theeramunkong, Thanaruk

It is a tedious and subjective task to measure severity of a dysarthria by manually evaluating his/her speech using available standard assessment methods based on human perception. This paper presents an automated approach to assess speech quality of a dysarthric speaker with cerebral palsy. With the consideration of two complementary factors, speech consistency and speech distinction, a speech quality indicator called speech clarity index (Ψ) is proposed as a measure of the speaker's ability to produce consistent speech signal for a certain word and distinguished speech signal for different words. As an application, it can be used to assess speech quality and forecast speech recognition rate of speech made by an individual dysarthric speaker before actual exhaustive implementation of an automatic speech recognition system for the speaker. The effectiveness of Ψ as a speech recognition rate predictor is evaluated by rank-order inconsistency, correlation coefficient, and root-mean-square of difference. The evaluations had been done by comparing its predicted recognition rates with ones predicted by the standard methods called the articulatory and intelligibility tests based on the two recognition systems (HMM and ANN). The results show that Ψ is a promising indicator for predicting recognition rate of dysarthric speech. All experiments had been done on speech corpus composed of speech data from eight normal speakers and eight dysarthric speakers.

An e-Learning Collaborative Filtering Approach to Suggest Problems to Solve in Programming Online Judges

Science.gov (United States)

Toledo, Raciel Yera; Mota, Yailé Caballero

2014-01-01

The paper proposes a recommender system approach to cover online judge's domains. Online judges are e-learning tools that support the automatic evaluation of programming tasks done by individual users, and for this reason they are usually used for training students in programming contest and for supporting basic programming teachings. The…

20 CFR 405.340 - Deciding a claim without a hearing before an administrative law judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-04-01

....340 Deciding a claim without a hearing before an administrative law judge. (a) Decision wholly... the decision is based. (b) You do not wish to appear. The administrative law judge may decide a claim... 20 Employees' Benefits 2 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 false Deciding a claim without a hearing before an...

Use of sustainability appraisal by English planning inspectors and judges

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Therivel, Riki, E-mail: riki@levett-therivel.co.uk

2013-01-15

This article considers how sustainability appraisals (SA - an English form of SEA that also considers social and economic issues) are treated at the end of the plan-making process: by planning inspectors who review plans before they are adopted, and by judges in the case of legal challenge to plans and their SAs. It briefly describes the role of inspectors and judges, and how their decisions influence SA. It presents the conclusions of 81 planning inspectors' reports about local authority development plans and their SAs, including three cases where inspectors required further SA information and reasons given by inspectors for not challenging the legal adequacy of other SAs. The three main successful English legal challenges to SA are then summarised. Planning inspectors seemed prone, until recently, to not challenge even quite poor quality SAs. This seems to be changing in the wake of recent court judgements, and in turn is affecting planners' SA practice. However it is unclear whether these changes will affect only the procedural aspects of SA or also planners' and inspectors' 'hearts and minds'. - Highlights: Black-Right-Pointing-Pointer Inspectors tend to err in favour of the submitted plan, even where its sustainability or the quality of its SA is dubious. Black-Right-Pointing-Pointer In contrast to inspectors, judges seem to be taking a broad and rigorous view of SEA requirements. Black-Right-Pointing-Pointer Planners and inspectors are changing their behaviour to avoid legal challenge.

Use of sustainability appraisal by English planning inspectors and judges

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Therivel, Riki

2013-01-01

This article considers how sustainability appraisals (SA — an English form of SEA that also considers social and economic issues) are treated at the end of the plan-making process: by planning inspectors who review plans before they are adopted, and by judges in the case of legal challenge to plans and their SAs. It briefly describes the role of inspectors and judges, and how their decisions influence SA. It presents the conclusions of 81 planning inspectors' reports about local authority development plans and their SAs, including three cases where inspectors required further SA information and reasons given by inspectors for not challenging the legal adequacy of other SAs. The three main successful English legal challenges to SA are then summarised. Planning inspectors seemed prone, until recently, to not challenge even quite poor quality SAs. This seems to be changing in the wake of recent court judgements, and in turn is affecting planners' SA practice. However it is unclear whether these changes will affect only the procedural aspects of SA or also planners' and inspectors' ‘hearts and minds’. - Highlights: ► Inspectors tend to err in favour of the submitted plan, even where its sustainability or the quality of its SA is dubious. ► In contrast to inspectors, judges seem to be taking a broad and rigorous view of SEA requirements. ► Planners and inspectors are changing their behaviour to avoid legal challenge.

Do Speakers and Listeners Observe the Gricean Maxim of Quantity?

Science.gov (United States)

Engelhardt, Paul E.; Bailey, Karl G. D.; Ferreira, Fernanda

2006-01-01

The Gricean Maxim of Quantity is believed to govern linguistic performance. Speakers are assumed to provide as much information as required for referent identification and no more, and listeners are believed to expect unambiguous but concise descriptions. In three experiments we examined the extent to which naive participants are sensitive to the…

Speech overlap detection in a two-pass speaker diarization system

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Huijbregts, M.A.H.; Leeuwen, D.A. van; Jong, F. M. G de

2009-01-01

In this paper we present the two-pass speaker diarization system that we developed for the NIST RT09s evaluation. In the first pass of our system a model for speech overlap detection is gen- erated automatically. This model is used in two ways to reduce the diarization errors due to overlapping

Speech overlap detection in a two-pass speaker diarization system

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Huijbregts, M.; Leeuwen, D.A. van; Jong, F.M.G. de

2009-01-01

In this paper we present the two-pass speaker diarization system that we developed for the NIST RT09s evaluation. In the first pass of our system a model for speech overlap detection is generated automatically. This model is used in two ways to reduce the diarization errors due to overlapping

Reading and Vocabulary Recommendations for Spanish for Native Speakers Materials.

Science.gov (United States)

Spencer, Laura Gutierrez

1995-01-01

Focuses on the need for appropriate materials to address the needs of native speakers of Spanish who study Spanish in American universities and high schools. The most important factors influencing the selection of readings should include the practical nature of themes for reading and vocabulary development, level of difficulty, and variety in…

24 CFR 17.153 - Determination of the Administrative Judge.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-04-01

... Administrative Judge shall issue a written decision which includes the supporting rationale for the decision. The... Department, the Department's Office of Finance and Accounting, the debtor, and the debtor's attorney or other... determination is received by the Department's Chief Financial Officer. No referral will be made to the IRS or...