Congenital Amusia (or Tone-Deafness) Interferes with Pitch Processing in Tone Languages

Congenital amusia is a neurogenetic disorder that affects music processing and that is ascribed to a deficit in pitch processing. We investigated whether this deficit extended to pitch processing in speech, notably the pitch changes used to contrast lexical tones in tonal languages. Congenital amusics and matched controls, all non-tonal language speakers, were tested for lexical tone discrimination in Mandarin Chinese (Experiment 1) and in Thai (Experiment 2). Tones were presented in pairs and participants were required to make same/different judgments. Experiment 2 additionally included musical analogs of Thai tones for comparison. Performance of congenital amusics was inferior to that of controls for all materials, suggesting a domain-general pitch-processing deficit. The pitch deficit of amusia is thus not limited to music, but may compromise the ability to process and learn tonal languages. Combined with acoustic analyses of the tone material, the present findings provide new insights into the nature of the pitch-processing deficit exhibited by amusics

Estrada de Ferro Caravelas: trilhos pioneiros na trajetória socioeconômica do sul do Espírito Santo

O objetivo desta dissertação de História Social das Relações Políticas é discutir a relevância da Estrada de Ferro Caravelas para o desenvolvimento socioeconômico do Sul do Espírito Santo. Apresentamos uma breve abordagem histórica dos caminhos do ferro na Europa e no Brasil do século XIX. Em seguida, buscaremos compreender a conjuntura da economia nacional e a relação da economia cafeeira com a implantação das ferrovias no cenário nacional e capixaba. Apresentaremos também as dificuldades da implantação das ferrovias no cenário estadual e analisaremos os motivos do primeiro trecho ferroviário ter sido construído na região sul do Espírito Santo. Finalmente, evidenciaremos a importância da Estrada no cenário de desenvolvimento econômico da região, sob uma abordagem que englobe os aspectos econômicos e sociais; o impacto da implantação da Estrada de Ferro Caravelas e sua anexação à Leopoldina Railway Company ampliando o trecho ferroviário que ligava Cachoeiro de Itapemirim a Alegre e, posteriormente, a Espera Feliz. Utilizamos como principais fontes documentos oficiais e periódicos da época, com a perspectiva metodológica que buscou analisar os discursos presentes nessas fontes

Assessing road effects on bats: the role of landscape, road features, and bat activity on road-kills

Recent studies suggest that roads can significantly impact bat populations. Though bats are one of the most threatened groups of European vertebrates, studies aiming to quantify bat mortality and determine the main factors driving it remain scarce. Between March 16 and October 31 of 2009, we surveyed road-killed bats daily along a 51-km-long transect that incorporates different types of roads in southern Portugal. We found 154 road-killed bats of 11 species. The two most common species in the study area, Pipistrellus kuhlii and P. pygmaeus, were also the most commonly identified road-kill, representing 72 % of the total specimens collected. About two-thirds of the total mortality occurred between mid July and late September, peaking in the second half of August. We also recorded casualties of threatened and rare species, including Miniopterus schreibersii, Rhinolophus ferrumequinum, R. hipposideros, Barbastella barbastellus, and Nyctalus leisleri. These species were found mostly in early autumn, corresponding to the mating and swarming periods. Landscape features were the most important variable subset for explaining bat casualties. Road stretches crossing or in the vicinity of high-quality habitats for bats—including dense Mediterranean woodland (‘‘montado’’) areas, water courses with riparian gallery, and water reservoirs—yielded a significantly higher number of casualties. Additionally, more roadkilled bats were recorded on high-traffic road stretches with viaducts, in areas of higher bat activity and near known roosts

Language specific speech perception and the onset of reading

In two studies the relationship between the onset of reading and language specific speech perception, the degree to which native speech perception is superior to non-native speech perception, was investigated. In Experiment 1 with children of 4, 6, and 8 years, language specific speech perception occurred maximally at 6 years and was positively related to reading ability for age and language comprehension level. In Experiment 2, with an expanded range of ages and various stimulus and task changes, the relationship between reading and language specific speech perception still held, and maximal language specific speech perception occurred around the onset of reading instruction for three different sets of speech contrasts, but not for a control set of non-speech contrasts. The results show that language specific speech perception is a linguistic rather than an acoustic phenomenon. Results are discussed in terms of early speech perception abilities, experience with oral communication, cognitive ability, reading bility, alphabetic versus logographic languages, phonics versus whole word reading instruction, and the effect of age versus instruction

Investigating auditory-visual speech perception development

Optical information from facial movements of a talker contributes to speech perception not only when acoustic information is degraded (Sumby and Pollack 1954) or when the listener is hearing-impaired, but also when the acoustic information is clearly audible. This is most clearly shown in the classic McGurk effect or fusion illusion, in which dubbing the auditory speech syllable /ba/ onto the lip movements for /ga/ results in the emergent perception of ’da’ or ‘tha’. This occurs both when the observer is aware, and when the observer is unaware of the conflicting sources of information (McGurk and MacDonald 1976; McDonald and McGurk 1978). The beauty of this effect is not the fact that it results in an illusion, but that it unequivocally shows that visual information is used in speech perception even when auditory information is clear and undegraded. Thus speech perception is a multisensory event, and as such it is an exemplar of humans’ and other animals’ ubiquitous propensity for multisensory perception. Given that speech perception is an auditory-visual phenomenon, two intriguing questions arise: By what process does auditory-visual speech perception occur? What is the developmental course of auditory-visual speech perception; how does auditory-visual speech perception change as a function of age and type of experience? The chapter addresses these two questions, with due consideration of the appropriate research methods to be used for their resolution. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of this work for automatic speech recognition

The effect of auditory-visual information and orthographic background in L2 acquisition

Visual information from the lips and face is an integral part of speech perception. In addition, orthography can play a role in disambiguating the speech signal in foreign/second language (L2) perception and production. The current study investigates the effect of auditory and visual speech information and orthographic depth, the degree to which a language is transparent (high phoneme-grapheme correspondence), or opaque (low phoneme-grapheme correspondence) on L2 acquisition. Speakers of Turkish and Australian English (transparent and opaque orthographies, respectively) were tested for their production of legal non-words in Spanish and Irish (transparent and opaque orthographies, respectively). Transparent orthographic input (Spanish) enhanced pronunciation in L2, and orthographic reproduction. Native speaker ratings of the participants’ productions also revealed that orthographic input improves accent. Overall results confirm previous findings that visual information enhances speech perception and production, and extend previous results to show the facilitative effects of orthographic input in L2 acquisition under certain conditions

Lexical tone and pitch perception in tone and non-tone language speakers

Past research on categorical perception of lexical tone has produced contradictory results. In Experiment 1 tonal (Mandarin, Vietnamese) and non-tonal (Australian) adults were tested for identification and discrimination on speech and non-speech (sine-wave) tone continua. Tonal language speakers’ category boundaries and discrimination peaks were near the middle of the asymmetric continuum, whereas non-tonal speakers used an acoustically flat stimulus as a reference, indicating that tone space is linguistically oriented in tonal, and acoustically oriented in non-tonal language speakers. In Experiment 2, three tonal-language (Thai) groups (musicians, perfect pitch musicians, and non-musicians) were tested on two new continua represented as speech or sine-wave tones. Identification boundaries were in the middle of the continuum for most participants. In discrimination, the flat stimulus was used as a perceptual anchor, and this was independent of musical background, indicating that the musical Thai participants use the same mid-continuum strategy as the Mandarin and Vietnamese speakers in identification, but the flat no-contour strategy in discrimination. Hence, perception depends on the type of task in Thai speakers: it is linguistic in identification, but acoustic in discrimination

The role of audiovisual speech and orthographic information in nonnative speech production

Visual information from the face is an integral part of speech perception. Additionally, orthography can play a role in disambiguating the speech signal in nonnative speech. This study investigates the effect of audiovisual speech information and orthography on nonnative speech. Particularly, orthographic depth is of interest. Turkish (transparent) and Australian English (opaque) speakers were tested for their production of nonwords in Spanish (transparent) and Irish (opaque). We found that transparent orthography enhanced pronunciation and orthographic responses. Results confirm previous findings that visual information enhances speech production and extend them to show the facilitative effects of orthography under certain conditions. Implications are discussed in relation to audiovisual speech perception and orthographic processing and practical considerations such as second language instruction

Auditory-visual speech integration by prelinguistic infants : perception of an emergent consonant in the McGurk effect

The McGurk effect, in which auditory [ba] dubbed onto [ga] lip movements is perceived as da or tha, was employed in a real-time task to investigate auditory-visual speech perception in prelingual infants. Experiments 1A and 1B established the validity of real-time dubbing for producing the effect. In Experiment 2, 4½-month-olds were tested in a habituation-test paradigm, in which an auditory-visual stimulus was presented contingent upon visual fixation of a live face. The experimental group was habituated to a McGurk stimulus (auditory [ba] visual [ga]), and the control group to matching auditory-visual [ba]. Each group was then presented with three auditory-only test trials, [ba], [da], and [a] (as in then). Visual-fixation durations in test trials showed that the experimental group treated the emergent percept in the McGurk effect, [da] or [a], as familiar (even though they had not heard these sounds previously) and [ba] as novel. For control group infants [da] and [a] were no more familiar than [ba]. These results are consistent with infants' perception of the McGurk effect, and support the conclusion that prelinguistic infants integrate auditory and visual speech information