Sing for me, Mama! Infants' discrimination of novel vowels in song

When adults speak or sing with infants, they sound differently than in adult communication. Infant-directed (ID) communication helps caregivers to regulate infants’ emotions, and helps infants to process speech information, at least from ID-speech. However, it is largely unclear whether infants might also process speech information presented in ID-singing. Therefore, we examined whether infants discriminate vowels in ID-singing, as well as potential differences with ID-speech. Using an Alternating-Trial-Preference-Procedure, infants aged 4-6 and 8-10 months were tested on their discrimination of an unfamiliar non-native vowel contrast presented in ID-like speech and singing. Relying on models of early speech sound perception, we expected that infants in their first half year of life would discriminate the vowels, in contrast to older infants whose non-native sound perception should deteriorate, at least in ID-like speech. Our results showed that infants of both age groups were able to discriminate the vowels in ID-like singing, while only the younger group discriminated the vowels in ID-like speech. These results show that infants process speech sound information in song from early on. They also hint at diverging perceptual or attentional mechanisms guiding infants’ sound processing in ID-speech vs. -singing towards the end of the first year of life

Can humain association norm evaluate latent semantic analysis?

This paper presents the comparison of word association norm created by a psycholinguistic experiment to association lists generated by algorithms operating on text corpora. We compare lists generated by Church and Hanks algorithm and lists generated by LSA algorithm. An argument is presented on how those automatically generated lists reflect real semantic relations

Focus Particles and Extraction – An Experimental Investigation of German and English Focus Particles in Constructions with Leftward Association

In my dissertation on leftward association of English and German focus particles, I investigate the following overall research questions: How strong is the c-command relation between focus particles and their associated focus? Is their relation fixed or are there factors which can license leftward association? In my study, I focus on the English particles "only" and "even" and the corresponding German particles "nur" and "sogar". These particles preferably c-command their associated focus constituent (as in "Only SAM will eat chocolate). It is controversial in the literature how strong this c-command relation is and whether leftward association of these particles is acceptable (as in "SAM will only eat chocolate"). To my knowledge, my study provides the first experimental investigation dealing with this phenomenon. In the analysis of examples from everyday language and in various acceptability judgment studies, I identified the following factors which license leftward association of the German particles under consideration: (i) prosody, (ii) speaker evaluation, and (iii) special emphasis. I conclude that the c-command relation between focus particles and their associated focus is strong but not fixed in such a way that leftward association is impossible, as there are factors which improve and license this construction. Moreover, German examples I collected from spontaneous speech provide evidence that leftward association of the German particles under consideration occurs in spoken language. I base my explanations of the data on theories dealing with emphatic syntactic constructions and on theories dealing with salience and cognitive prominence. I propose an account which combines information structure, pragmatics, and processing