How visual cues to speech rate influence speech perception

Spoken words are highly variable and therefore listeners interpret speech sounds relative to the surrounding acoustic context, such as the speech rate of a preceding sentence. For instance, a vowel midway between short /ɑ/ and long /a:/ in Dutch is perceived as short /ɑ/ in the context of preceding slow speech, but as long /a:/ if preceded by a fast context. Despite the well-established influence of visual articulatory cues on speech comprehension, it remains unclear whether visual cues to speech rate also influence subsequent spoken word recognition. In two ‘Go Fish’-like experiments, participants were presented with audio-only (auditory speech + fixation cross), visual-only (mute videos of talking head), and audiovisual (speech + videos) context sentences, followed by ambiguous target words containing vowels midway between short /ɑ/ and long /a:/. In Experiment 1, target words were always presented auditorily, without visual articulatory cues. Although the audio-only and audiovisual contexts induced a rate effect (i.e., more long /a:/ responses after fast contexts), the visual-only condition did not. When, in Experiment 2, target words were presented audiovisually, rate effects were observed in all three conditions, including visual-only. This suggests that visual cues to speech rate in a context sentence influence the perception of following visual target cues (e.g., duration of lip aperture), which at an audiovisual integration stage bias participants’ target categorization responses. These findings contribute to a better understanding of how what we see influences what we hear

On (Not) Being Milton: Tony Harrison’s Liminal Voice

The paper examines the relation between poetic identity, whose ongoing construction remains one of the most persistently reoccurring themes of Harrison’s work, and the liminal position occupied by the speaker of Harrison’s verse. In the context of the sociological thought of such scholars as Zygmunt Bauman and Stuart Hall, the following paper discusses the way in which the idea of being in-between operates in “On Not Being Milton,” an initial poem from Harrison’s widely acclaimed sonnet sequence The School of Eloquence, whose unique character stems partly from the fact that it constitutes an ongoing poetic project which has continued from 1978 onwards, reflecting the social and cultural changes of contemporary Britain

Politics of silence : aporias and temporality of the political

My thesis investigates how Habermasian deliberative democracies are prone to create zones of silence. Legislation for Habermas, which is a speech-act, relies on the communicative power of sovereignty, but his theory disregards emergent agendas, new subjects, and disruptive acts and speeches of the political. It thus reduces speech of new political subjects to silence. Liberal deliberative democracies are grounded in the political authority granted by the people's presence in the law-making process. The rule of law is equated to the sovereignty of self-rule that constitutes the legitimizing ground of norms. However, "the people" is not only a constitutive but also a constituted power. Their presence and self need to be constituted to be agreeable and represented via speech that makes them recognizable by the law. One of the aporias I am interested in is the paradox of normativity: while subjects may speak to authorize the norms, speech constitutes subjects authorized to make norms, and norms subjectify people authorized to speak. I argue that the people emerge, act and become socio-politically present before speech legitimizes the emergence by a representation. The people are the source of the very law they violate. I aim to answer the following question: If a wrong by the law occurs within this closed circuit of normativity, can one talk against the norms that give one the authority to talk? I argue that the wrong occurs as the law, bent on security from risk, overcoming of alienation and hostility, and unpredictability only recognizes and authorizes what it constitutes. The wrong consists of self-rule, i.e. sovereignty. Lyotard's Differend, Ranciere's disagreement and Butler's disruption and finally disidentification may remind us that the unsayable is the political word to come, that a silent presence may present a better hope of living together than the policed sayable. Our present engages in a violent encounter with the unsayable that at the present takes the representative form of a material silence, i.e. the matter of the community. How is the social bond to be conceived? What are the material conditions of responsiveness to those who are silenced by sovereignty? This presence that wishes-to-say is thus first encountered as the visibility of an unrecognizable embodiment, as the bodily presence of those who do not have the authority to speak. In offering their visibility, they ask "Will you hear my story?," and in speaking they demand an ethical wish to hear the unsayable, i.e. what could not make sense by the political rationality of their time, viz. the principles that materialize the community. Thus they also demand a speech-act that identifies and recognize them and poetic creativity to sense the meaning in their senseless, unrecognizable presence and traces of the unsayable in the already-heard. I try to answer the following questions: How is recognition to be understood in this context? What is the demand to be recognized? Finally, I will argue that the silent presence of those who demand recognition address us to a future community. Thus the basic political speech-act is futural

English Spelling Among the Top Priorities in Pronunciation Teaching: Polglish Local Versus Global(ised) Errors in the Production and Perception of Words Commonly Mispronounced

The results of the study confirm the necessity for explicit instruction on the regularity rather than irregularity of English spelling in order to eradicate globalised and ‘either-or’ pronunciation errors in the speech of students. The avoidable globalised errors which have turned out to be the most numerous in a production task include such areas of English phonotactics as: the letters and , ‘mute consonant letters’, ‘isolated errors’ and two categories related to the reduction of unstressed syllables: ‘reduce the vowel in stress-adjacent syllables and in syllables following the stressed one to /ə/ or /ɪ/’ and ‘reduce , , and in nouns and adjectives.’ The hope is also expressed that once introducing spelling-to-sound relations becomes a routine procedure in pronunciation training, the strain on part of the students of memorizing a list of true local errors, phonetically challenging pronunciation exceptions, will be reduced to the absolute minimum

Oralism: a sign of the times? The contest for deaf communication in education provision in late nineteenth-century Scotland

Disability history is a diverse field. In focussing upon children within deaf education in late nineteenth-century Scotland, this essay reflects some of that diversity. In 1880, the International Congress on the Education of the Deaf in Milan stipulated that speech should have ‘preference’ over signs in the education of deaf children. The mode of achieving this, however, effectively banned sign language. Endeavours to teach deaf children to articulate were not new, but this decision placed pressures on deaf institutions to favour the oral system of deaf communication over other methods. In Scotland efforts were made to adopt oralism, and yet educators were faced with the reality that this was not good educational practice for most pupils. This article will consider responses of Scottish educators of deaf children from the 1870s until the beginning of the twentieth century