Matlock Family Papers (MSS 450)

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 450. Personal papers, mostly tax receipts and deeds, of the Matlock family of Logan County, Kentucky. Includes some genealogical data and a journal of a trip to London kept by an Englishwoman whose relation to the family is unknown

Põhjasõja, selle põhjuste, eelloo ning järelmõjude käsitlemisest Tartu ülikoolis XIX sajandi lõpus ja XX sajandi alguses töötanud ajaloolaste töödes

The Great Northern War, its background, causes and consequences as treated in the writings of the historians who worked at the University of Tartu in late 19th century and early 20th centur

Surviving in Overijssel:An Analysis of Life Expectancy, 1812–1912

The rise in life expectancy is one of the main processes of social change in the 19th century. In the Netherlands, regional differences in life expectancy, and their development, were huge. Therefore, studies on average life expectancy or studies, which examine the whole of the Netherlands do not fully capture the differential determinants of this process. This study focuses on social, economic, and geographic differences in life expectancy in 19th-century Overijssel using the Historical Sample of the Netherlands (HSN). Exploiting Cox regression, the influence of several factors on life expectancy are investigated. The article shows that birth cohort, urbanisation, and gender had an important relation with life expectancy in 19th-century Overijssel, while industrialisation, religion, and inheritance customs were not associated with age at death

Engaging the articulators enhances perception of concordant visible speech movements

PURPOSE This study aimed to test whether (and how) somatosensory feedback signals from the vocal tract affect concurrent unimodal visual speech perception. METHOD Participants discriminated pairs of silent visual utterances of vowels under 3 experimental conditions: (a) normal (baseline) and while holding either (b) a bite block or (c) a lip tube in their mouths. To test the specificity of somatosensory-visual interactions during perception, we assessed discrimination of vowel contrasts optically distinguished based on their mandibular (English /ɛ/-/æ/) or labial (English /u/-French /u/) postures. In addition, we assessed perception of each contrast using dynamically articulating videos and static (single-frame) images of each gesture (at vowel midpoint). RESULTS Engaging the jaw selectively facilitated perception of the dynamic gestures optically distinct in terms of jaw height, whereas engaging the lips selectively facilitated perception of the dynamic gestures optically distinct in terms of their degree of lip compression and protrusion. Thus, participants perceived visible speech movements in relation to the configuration and shape of their own vocal tract (and possibly their ability to produce covert vowel production-like movements). In contrast, engaging the articulators had no effect when the speaking faces did not move, suggesting that the somatosensory inputs affected perception of time-varying kinematic information rather than changes in target (movement end point) mouth shapes. CONCLUSIONS These findings suggest that orofacial somatosensory inputs associated with speech production prime premotor and somatosensory brain regions involved in the sensorimotor control of speech, thereby facilitating perception of concordant visible speech movements. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.9911846R01 DC002852 - NIDCD NIH HHSAccepted manuscrip

Lexical Access Model for Italian -- Modeling human speech processing: identification of words in running speech toward lexical access based on the detection of landmarks and other acoustic cues to features

Modelling the process that a listener actuates in deriving the words intended by a speaker requires setting a hypothesis on how lexical items are stored in memory. This work aims at developing a system that imitates humans when identifying words in running speech and, in this way, provide a framework to better understand human speech processing. We build a speech recognizer for Italian based on the principles of Stevens' model of Lexical Access in which words are stored as hierarchical arrangements of distinctive features (Stevens, K. N. (2002). "Toward a model for lexical access based on acoustic landmarks and distinctive features," J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 111(4):1872-1891). Over the past few decades, the Speech Communication Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed a speech recognition system for English based on this approach. Italian will be the first language beyond English to be explored; the extension to another language provides the opportunity to test the hypothesis that words are represented in memory as a set of hierarchically-arranged distinctive features, and reveal which of the underlying mechanisms may have a language-independent nature. This paper also introduces a new Lexical Access corpus, the LaMIT database, created and labeled specifically for this work, that will be provided freely to the speech research community. Future developments will test the hypothesis that specific acoustic discontinuities - called landmarks - that serve as cues to features, are language independent, while other cues may be language-dependent, with powerful implications for understanding how the human brain recognizes speech.Comment: Submitted to Language and Speech, 202

Brief Studies

Centennial of the Neuendettelsau Deaconess Institute, 1854-195