Listeners normalize speech for contextual speech rate even without an explicit recognition task

Speech can be produced at different rates. Listeners take this rate variation into account by normalizing vowel duration for contextual speech rate: An ambiguous Dutch word /m?t/ is perceived as short /mAt/ when embedded in a slow context, but long /ma:t/ in a fast context. Whilst some have argued that this rate normalization involves low-level automatic perceptual processing, there is also evidence that it arises at higher-level cognitive processing stages, such as decision making. Prior research on rate-dependent speech perception has only used explicit recognition tasks to investigate the phenomenon, involving both perceptual processing and decision making. This study tested whether speech rate normalization can be observed without explicit decision making, using a cross-modal repetition priming paradigm. Results show that a fast precursor sentence makes an embedded ambiguous prime (/m?t/) sound (implicitly) more /a:/-like, facilitating lexical access to the long target word "maat" in a (explicit) lexical decision task. This result suggests that rate normalization is automatic, taking place even in the absence of an explicit recognition task. Thus, rate normalization is placed within the realm of everyday spoken conversation, where explicit categorization of ambiguous sounds is rare

Conversational Standing: A New Approach to an Old Privacy Problem

American society has long considered certain conversations private amongst the participants in those conversations. In other words, when two or more people are conversing in a variety of settings and through a variety of media, there are times when all parties to the conversation can reasonably expect freedom from improper government intrusion, whether through direct participation or secret monitoring. This shared expectation of privacy has been slow to gain judicial recognition. Courts have indicated that the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution only protects certain elements of the conversation, such as where and how it takes place, but that it does not necessarily encompass a shared expectation of privacy in a conversation. This Article argues that all invited participants to a conversation should have standing to challenge unreasonable government intrusion on that conversation under the Fourth Amendment. The new approach would validate a principle that has existed since the Fourth Amendment was enacted but that the judiciary has skirted. Moreover, the privacy rights in the conversations should not depend on the means of transmission, particularly during this time of growth in communication technologies. The Article examines the history of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence and outlines the details of “conversational standing” both in theory and practice. It demonstrates that the approach would not represent a major doctrinal shift, as well as the urgency of recognizing the concept in order to create a manageable standard in an increasingly complex field

After the crisis, economics needs to slow down

This is the twelfth post in a six-week series: Rapid or Rushed? exploring rapid response publishing in covid times. Read the rest of the series here. As part of the series, there was a virtual roundtable featuring Professor Joshua Gans (Economics in the Age of COVID-19, MIT Press), in conversation with Richard Horton (The COVID-19 Catastrophe, Polity Press and Editor of The Lancet), Victoria Pittman (Bristol University Press) and Qudsiya Ahmed (Cambridge University Press, India) In this post, Joshua Gans, a panellist on the Impact blog’s virtual roundtable reflects on how the covid crisis has accelerated research and publishing in the field of economics. Academic books have been reinvigorated for scholarly pursuits in responding to the pandemic. However, the current rate of publishing is both too slow (with newsletters providing a more real-time dissemination of research than articles or books) and too fast- economic research is supposed to have a slow considered pace, and affecting conventional economic policy is a long process

Fluency in dialogue: Turn‐taking behavior shapes perceived fluency in native and nonnative speech

Fluency is an important part of research on second language learning, but most research on language proficiency typically has not included oral fluency as part of interaction, even though natural communication usually occurs in conversations. The present study considered aspects of turn-taking behavior as part of the construct of fluency and investigated whether these aspects differentially influence perceived fluency ratings of native and non-native speech. Results from two experiments using acoustically manipulated speech showed that, in native speech, too ‘eager’ (interrupting a question with a fast answer) and too ‘reluctant’ answers (answering slowly after a long turn gap) negatively affected fluency ratings. However, in non-native speech, only too ‘reluctant’ answers led to lower fluency ratings. Thus, we demonstrate that acoustic properties of dialogue are perceived as part of fluency. By adding to our current understanding of dialogue fluency, these lab-based findings carry implications for language teaching and assessmen

Communicative Practices in an American Gamelan Orchestra

Gamelan adalah tradisi musik yang berakar di Indonesia, dipertunjukkan di kepulauan Jawa, Madura, dan Bali dalam upacara-upacara adat dan ritual-ritual agama. Kendati secara tradisional gamelan dimainkan oleh warga pribumi, dengan meningkatnya popularitas budaya etnis Indonesia dalam lingkup Internasional, gamelan baru-baru ini dimainkan pula oleh orang-orang asing. Studi berikut ini merupakan etnografi dari proses komunikasi dalam sebuah Orkestra Gamelan Amerika yang mengidentifikasi dua pertanyaan kunci: (1) Bagaimana gamelan dipelajari di luar konteks sosiokultural orisinalnya? (2) Bagaimana pengetahuan tersebar di antara komunitas yang spesifik ini? Melibatkan kurang lebih 30 anggota (pemusik dan penari) dari sebuah kelompok Gamelan Bali, dengan beragam latar belakang etnis, kebangsaan dan latar belakang musik, penelitian ini menyimpulkan adanya empat praktik komunikasi dalam mempelajari gamelan: (1) Vokalisasi (sebagai metode utama instruktur dalam mengajarkan cara memainkan gamelan); (2) Percakapan informal (sebagai bentuk praktik komunikasi yang memungkinkan anggota kelompok berinteraksi dalam percakapan bebas); (3) Metawacana (suatu proses di mana anggota-anggota senior mencapai keputusan manajemen pertunjukan); dan (4) Blessings, semacam upacara keagamaan memohon restu dari Yang Mahakuasa untuk kesuksesan acara. Keempat praktik komunikasi ini tidak sekadar membantu anggota mempelajari musik tradisional, tetapi juga memungkinkan para musisi tersebut menjadi anggota aktif dalam komunitas yang dikerangka oleh batas-batas kultural. Pada akhirnya, praktik komunikasi semacam ini membantu proses penyebaran pengetahuan di antara anggota-anggota kelompok

On the quality of VoIP with DCCP for satellite communications

We present experimental results for the performance of selected voice codecs using DCCP with CCID4 congestion control over a satellite link. We evaluate the performance of both constant and variable data rate speech codecs for a number of simultaneous calls using the ITU E-model. We analyse the sources of packet losses and additionally analyse the effect of jitter which is one of the crucial parameters contributing to VoIP quality and has, to the best of our knowledge, not been considered previously in the published DCCP performance results. We propose modifications to the CCID4 algorithm and demonstrate how these improve the VoIP performance, without the need for additional link information other than what is already monitored by CCID4. We also demonstrate the fairness of the proposed modifications to other flows. Although the recently adopted changes to TFRC specification alleviate some of the performance issues for VoIP on satellite links, we argue that the characteristics of commercial satellite links necessitate consideration of further improvements. We identify the additional benefit of DCCP when used in VoIP admission control mechanisms and draw conclusions about the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed DCCP/CCID4 congestion control mechanism for use with VoIP applications

Predictability of conversation partners

Recent developments in sensing technologies have enabled us to examine the nature of human social behavior in greater detail. By applying an information theoretic method to the spatiotemporal data of cell-phone locations, [C. Song et al. Science 327, 1018 (2010)] found that human mobility patterns are remarkably predictable. Inspired by their work, we address a similar predictability question in a different kind of human social activity: conversation events. The predictability in the sequence of one's conversation partners is defined as the degree to which one's next conversation partner can be predicted given the current partner. We quantify this predictability by using the mutual information. We examine the predictability of conversation events for each individual using the longitudinal data of face-to-face interactions collected from two company offices in Japan. Each subject wears a name tag equipped with an infrared sensor node, and conversation events are marked when signals are exchanged between sensor nodes in close proximity. We find that the conversation events are predictable to some extent; knowing the current partner decreases the uncertainty about the next partner by 28.4% on average. Much of the predictability is explained by long-tailed distributions of interevent intervals. However, a predictability also exists in the data, apart from the contribution of their long-tailed nature. In addition, an individual's predictability is correlated with the position in the static social network derived from the data. Individuals confined in a community - in the sense of an abundance of surrounding triangles - tend to have low predictability, and those bridging different communities tend to have high predictability.Comment: 38 pages, 19 figure

Spending time with money: from shared values to social connectivity

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.There is a rapidly growing momentum driving the development of mobile payment systems for co-present interactions, using near-field communication on smartphones and contactless payment systems. The design (and marketing) imperative for this is to enable faster, simpler, effortless and secure transactions, yet our evidence shows that this focus on reducing transactional friction may ignore other important features around making payments. We draw from empirical data to consider user interactions around financial exchanges made on mobile phones. Our findings examine how the practices around making payments support people in making connections, to other people, to their communities, to the places they move through, to their environment, and to what they consume. While these social and community bonds shape the kinds of interactions that become possible, they also shape how users feel about, and act on, the values that they hold with their co-users. We draw implications for future payment systems that make use of community connections, build trust, leverage transactional latency, and generate opportunities for rich social interactions

On the simulation of interactive non-verbal behaviour in virtual humans

Development of virtual humans has focused mainly in two broad areas - conversational agents and computer game characters. Computer game characters have traditionally been action-oriented - focused on the game-play - and conversational agents have been focused on sensible/intelligent conversation. While virtual humans have incorporated some form of non-verbal behaviour, this has been quite limited and more importantly not connected or connected very loosely with the behaviour of a real human interacting with the virtual human - due to a lack of sensor data and no system to respond to that data. The interactional aspect of non-verbal behaviour is highly important in human-human interactions and previous research has demonstrated that people treat media (and therefore virtual humans) as real people, and so interactive non-verbal behaviour is also important in the development of virtual humans. This paper presents the challenges in creating virtual humans that are non-verbally interactive and drawing corollaries with the development history of control systems in robotics presents some approaches to solving these challenges - specifically using behaviour based systems - and shows how an order of magnitude increase in response time of virtual humans in conversation can be obtained and that the development of rapidly responding non-verbal behaviours can start with just a few behaviours with more behaviours added without difficulty later in development