Face-zine: the Future

Research building on work of Salmon and Laurillard. The project focuses on teacher education and skills and strategies for success online

Intonation in Spanish declaratives : differences between lab speech and spontaneous speech

The present study compares the intonation of Spanish declarative utterances in lab speech and spontaneous speech. Most studies of Spanish intonation have used lab speech, collected in an experimental setting and often scripted. This allows the researcher to control many factors, but the results cannot be assumed to be representative of spontaneous speech. The present study takes the most characteristic traits of the intonation of declarative sentences in Spanish lab speech and examines whether the same traits exist in spontaneous speech. It is shown that there are notable differences between the intonation of Spanish declaratives in lab speech and spontaneous speech. While some of the differences are minor, others are quite significant. Differences of one degree or another exist in the areas of the presence of F0 rises through stressed syllables, F0 peak alignment, downstepping, final lowering and deaccenting

El estado final de la adquisición de las vibrantes españolas por inmigrantes a España con inglés como primera lengua

This study investigates the ultimate attainment of the second language acquisition of Spanish rhotics by a group of U.S.-born, native English speaking immigrants to central Spain who are long-time residents. While previous studies examine the second language acquisition of Spanish rhotics, these tend to focus on university students learning Spanish, and thus nothing is known about the extent to which advanced second language learners develop in their rhotic pronunciation and how closely they approximate the pronunciation of native speakers. The extensive immersion in the Spanish language and culture that characterizes these immigrants gives them as high a likelihood as one could expect of second language learners of achieving native-like pronunciation. As a group, however, acoustic analysis reveals that the immigrants do not approximate nativespeaker performance, though they far exceed that of learners in other studies. While one immigrant does come close to native-like performance, most fall short.Este estudio investiga el estado final de la adquisición de las vibrantes del español por un grupo de inmigrantes al centro de España, hablantes nativos del inglés nacidos en Estados Unidos. Aunque varios estudios investigan la adquisición de las vibrantes del español por hablantes del inglés, tienden a enfocarse en los universitarios que estudian español, y por eso no se sabe nada del nivel que pueden alcanzar hablantes avanzados del español como segunda lengua. La extensiva inmersión en la lengua y la cultura españolas que caracteriza a los inmigrantes del presente estudio les hacen ejemplares de aprendices del español como segunda lengua que más se puede esperar haber adquirido una pronunciación nativa. A pesar de esto, el análisis acústico revela que como grupo los inmigrantes no aproximan a la pronunciación de los hablantes nativos del español, aunque alcanzan un nivel superior a los visto en los hablantes de estudios previos. Aunque un hablante sí aproxima a la pronunciación de los hablantes nativos, la pronunciación de la mayoría está muy por debajo de este nivel

Primary care physicians and insulin initiation: multiple barriers, lack of knowledge or both?

Primary care physicians (PCPs) provide diabetes care for 82% of patients with type 2 diabetes (1). Many patients with type 2 diabetes will eventually need insulin. The UKPDS (2) showed that ß-cell failure is progressive. From 50% of normal ß-cell function present at diagnosis, there is a steady decline with almost complete loss of ß-cell mass within 10-15 years, even earlier in some patients. On average, as many as 40-80% of patients with type 2 diabetes will need insulin within 10 years after diagnosis (1,2). These statistics can vary between patients and depending on the different agents used after the initial diagnosis. UKPDS did not include thiazolidinediones or GLP-1 based therapies, which could potentially have a completely different effect on the ß-cells and perhaps delay the need for insulin

Reconsidering a Focal Typology: Evidence from Spanish and Italian

International audienceMuch work has been done on focus (and the related concepts of topic, comment, theme and rheme) in Spanish and Italian, with the majority concentrating on the ways in which word order is used to convey the interpretation of a grammatical element as the focus of the sentence (e.g. Bolinger 1954, 1954-1955; Contreras 1978, 1980 for Spanish and Antinucci and Cinque 1977; Benincà, Salvi and Frison 1988 for Italian). However, in traditional accounts of focus in these two languages, intonation has received very little consideration. A typical treatment is that of Bolinger (1954-1955) who, in a footnote in his article "Meaningful word order in Spanish" says that he has left intonation out of his account "in order not to complicate matters" (56). Despite the recognition by Bolinger and some other scholars that intonation is likely to be involved in conveying narrow focus, there remains a widely accepted division between languages that mark narrow focus through word order (without necessarily changing intonation pattern) and those that mark it through intonation alone (i.e. without a focal word order per se). Even in a book dedicated to intonation, this belief is evident: Ladd (1996:191) claims that in word order languages sentences like The COFFEE machine broke generally invert the subject and verb, resulting in, for example, S'è rotta la CAFFETTIERA in Italian, with the focal word occurring at the end of the utterance. Ladd goes on to say that "Word order modifications in languages like Spanish and Italian may indirectly achieve the accentual effects that English accomplishes directly by manipulating the location of the nuclear accent" (191). This type of statement not only maintains the traditional division between word order languages and intonation languages in the marking of narrow focus, but it also makes one wonder at how one way of marking narrow focus is more "direct" than the other. What is more, a number of Romance languages appear to use special tunes to express narrow as opposed to broad focus (e.g. Grice, 1995 for Palermo Italian; D'Imperio 2000, 2002 for Neapolitan Italian; Sosa 1999 for American Spanish; Frota 1995 for European Portuguese). There are two types of evidence that lead us to reconsider the traditional division between languages that mark narrow focus with word order and those that mark it with intonation. The first is that native speakers of Spanish and Italian have the intuition that they can emphasize a particular word of an utterance without manipulating word order. The second type of evidence comes from our recent experimental studies (e.g. Face 2001, 2002a, 2002b, 2002c, 2003 for Castilian Spanish and D'Imperio 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 for Neapolitan Italian; see Section 2.2) that have begun to look at the ways in which intonation is used as a marker of narrow focus in these two languages. Of particular interest to the issue of a typology based on word order and intonational marking of focus is that the intonational markers of narrow focus found in these studies do not simply accompany changes in word order. Rather they are used independently of word order to mark narrow focus in cases where the canonical broad focus SVO word order is employed. While intonation is used in Spanish and Italian to mark narrow focus, it is also important to point out that the traditional view is not without foundation. Both Spanish and Italian also use changes in word order to mark narrow focus, but the interaction of word order and intonation is different in the two languages. Therefore we propose a revision of the word order vs. intonation focal typology that is less rigid and that more adequately accounts for the differences between Spanish and Italian on the one hand and English on the other, and that also deals with the differences between Spanish and Italian. The varieties of the two Romance languages we will focus on are respectively the Castilian variety for Spanish and the Neapolitan variety for Italian since both have been extensively covered by recent experimental literature

On Face Segmentation, Face Swapping, and Face Perception

We show that even when face images are unconstrained and arbitrarily paired, face swapping between them is actually quite simple. To this end, we make the following contributions. (a) Instead of tailoring systems for face segmentation, as others previously proposed, we show that a standard fully convolutional network (FCN) can achieve remarkably fast and accurate segmentations, provided that it is trained on a rich enough example set. For this purpose, we describe novel data collection and generation routines which provide challenging segmented face examples. (b) We use our segmentations to enable robust face swapping under unprecedented conditions. (c) Unlike previous work, our swapping is robust enough to allow for extensive quantitative tests. To this end, we use the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) benchmark and measure the effect of intra- and inter-subject face swapping on recognition. We show that our intra-subject swapped faces remain as recognizable as their sources, testifying to the effectiveness of our method. In line with well known perceptual studies, we show that better face swapping produces less recognizable inter-subject results. This is the first time this effect was quantitatively demonstrated for machine vision systems