Perceiving locations of moving objects across eye blinks

Eye blinks cause disruption of visual input that generally goes unnoticed. It is thought that the brain uses active suppression to prevent awareness of the gaps, but it is unclear how suppression would affect the perception of dynamic events, when visual input changes across the blink. Here we addressed this question by studying the perception of moving objects around eye blinks. In Experiment 1 (N = 16), we observed that when motion terminates during a blink, the last perceived position is shifted forward from its actual last position. In Experiment 2 (N = 8), we found that motion trajectories were perceived as more continuous when the object jumped backward during the blink, cancelling a fraction of the space it travelled. This suggests subjective underestimation of blink duration. These results reveal the strategies used by the visual system to compensate for disruptions and maintain perceptual continuity: time elapsed during eye blinks is perceptually compressed and filled with extrapolated information

Spring-Village minimal pairs in Mandarin Chinese: word identification and pronunciation for adult speakers of Mandarin Chinese

The standard Beijing variety of Mandarin, has a clear alveolar-retroflex contrast for phonemes featuring voiceless sibilant frication (i.e., /s/, /ʂ/, /ʈs/, /ʈʂ/, /ʈsʰ/, /ʈʂʰ/). However, some studies show that varieties in the ‘outer-circle,’ such in Taiwan, have a reduced contrast for these speech sounds via a process known as “deretroflexion”. The variety of Mandarin spoken in Singapore is also considered ‘outer circle’, as it exhibits influences from Min Nan varieties. We investigated how bilinguals of Singapore Mandarin and English perceive and produce speech tokens in minimal pairs differing only in the alveolar/retroflex place of articulation. 50 Participants took part in two tasks. In task one, participants performed a lexical identification task for minimal pairs differing only the alveolar/retroflex place of articulation, as spoken by native speakers of two varieties: Beijing Mandarin and Singapore Mandarin. No difference in comprehension of the words was observed between the two varieties indicating that both varieties contain sufficient acoustic information for discrimination. In task two, participants read aloud from the list of minimal pairs while their voices were recorded. Acoustic analysis revealed that the phonemes do indeed differ acoustically in terms of centre of gravity of the frication, and in an alternative measure: long term averaged spectra. The magnitude of this difference appears to be smaller than previously reported differences for the Beijing variety. These findings show that although some deretroflexion is evident in the speech of bilinguals of the Singaporean variety of Mandarin, it does not translate to ambiguity in the speech signal

Investigating links in perception and production of a Singapore Mandarin alveolar-retroflex contrast

Existing studies have suggested that there may be a link between perception and production of speech sounds. We examine perception-production links using data collected from Singapore English-Mandarin bilingual adults. We used a 2AFC task (the Spring-Village CROWN Game) to measure perception of the Singapore Mandarin [tsʰuə́n]-[ʈʂʰuə́n] alveolar-retroflex contrast, and measured frication production using centre of gravity (CoG) and long-term averaged spectra (LTAS) measurements on speech recordings of word tokens of [tsʰuə́n] and [ʈʂʰuə́n] . We found that a perception-production link may exist in our participants, with participants who exhibit less retroflexion in speech showing less sensitivity to retroflexion in ambiguous speech sounds

Documenting differences in perception of the Singapore Mandarin alveolar-retroflex contrast

While the Mandarin alveolar-retroflex phoneme contrast has been extensively studied in Beijing and Taiwan Mandarin, little analysis exists for the Singapore variety of Mandarin. In this study, we explore in detail how English-Mandarin bilinguals resolve ambiguity for words that differ in the voiceless alveolar-retroflex affricate contrast in Singapore Mandarin. We created a 2-alternative-forced-choice (2AFC) lexical identity task with a novel set of stimuli consisting of an 8-step alveolar-retroflex [tsʰuə́n]-[ʈʂʰuə́n] continuum, synthesized from speech of a Singapore Mandarin speaker and aligned to the acoustic characteristics of 34 Singapore Mandarin speakers. We recruited 62 participants for this study. Our results show a range of individual variation in identification of words starting with [tsʰ] and [ʈʂʰ], with decision gradients varying in slope steepness. Our investigation into whether Mandarin understanding proficiency might be associated with these differences in perception showed that there is no evidence for a association between these two factors in our sample size

Do you say what you hear? Perception-production link of a phoneme contrast in Singapore Mandarin

Existing studies have suggested that there may be a link between perception and production of speech sounds. In this paper we examine this link using data collected on Singapore English-Mandarin bilingual adults. We used a 2AFC task to measure perception of the Singapore Mandarin [tsʰuə́n]-[ʈʂʰuə́n] alveolar-retroflex contrast, and measured production using centre of gravity (CoG) measurements on speech recordings of alveolar and retroflex words. We found that a perception-production link may exist in our participants, with participants who exhibit less retroflexion in speech showing less sensitivity to retroflexion in ambiguous speech sounds.National Research Foundation (NRF

Perceiving locations of moving objects across eyeblinks

Eyeblinks cause disruption of visual input that generally goes unnoticed. It is thought that the brain uses active suppression to prevent awareness of the gaps, but it is unclear how suppression would affect the perception of dynamic events when visual input changes across the blink. Here, we addressed this question by studying the perception of moving objects around eyeblinks. In Experiment 1 (N = 16), we observed that when motion terminates during a blink, the last perceived position is shifted forward from its actual last position. In Experiment 2 (N = 8), we found that motion trajectories were perceived as more continuous when the object jumped backward during the blink, canceling a fraction of the space that it traveled. This suggests subjective underestimation of blink duration. These results reveal the strategies used by the visual system to compensate for disruptions and maintain perceptual continuity: Time elapsed during eyeblinks is perceptually compressed and filled with extrapolated information

Perceiving locations of moving objects across eye blinks

Eye blinks cause disruption of visual input that generally goes unnoticed. It is thought that the brain uses active suppression to prevent awareness of the gaps, but it is unclear how suppression would affect the perception of dynamic events, when visual input changes across the blink. Here we addressed this question by studying the perception of moving objects around eye blinks. In Experiment 1 (N = 16), we observed that when motion terminates during a blink, the last perceived position is shifted forward from its actual last position. In Experiment 2 (N = 8), we found that motion trajectories were perceived as more continuous when the object jumped backward during the blink, cancelling a fraction of the space it travelled. This suggests subjective underestimation of blink duration. These results reveal the strategies used by the visual system to compensate for disruptions and maintain perceptual continuity: time elapsed during eye blinks is perceptually compressed and filled with extrapolated information

Is retroflexion a stable cue for distributional learning for speech sounds across languages? Learning for some bilingual adults, but not generalisable to a wider population in a well powered pre-registered study

Bilinguals are widely reported to have certain kinds of cognitive advantages, including language learning advantages. One possible pathway is a language-specific transfer effect, whereby sensitivity to structural regularities in known languages can be brought to to-be-acquired languages that share particular features. Here we tested for transfer of a specific linguistic property, sensitivity to retroflexion as contrastive phonemic feature. We designed a task for bilinguals with homogeneous language exposure (i.e., bilingual in the same languages) and heterogeneous feature representation (i.e., differing levels of proficiency). Hindi and Mandarin Chinese both have retroflexion in phoneme contrasts (Hindi: stop consonants, Mandarin: sibilants). In a preregistered study, we conducted a statistical learning task for the Hindi dental-retroflex stop contrast with a group of early parallel English-Mandarin bilinguals, who varied in their Mandarin understanding levels. We based the target sample size on power analysis of a pilot study with a Bayesian stop-rule after minimum threshold. Contrary to the pilot study (N = 15), the main study (N = 50) did not find evidence for a learning effect, nor language-experience variance within the group. This finding suggests that statistical learning effects for the feature in question may be more fragile than commonly assumed, and may be evident in only a small subsample of the general population (as in our pilot). These stimuli have previously shown learning effects in children, so an additional possibility is that neural commitment to adults’ languages prevents learning of the fine-stimulus contrast in question for this adult population