An Information Theoretic perspective on perceptual structure: cross-accent vowel perception

Analytical tools from Information Theory were used to quantify behaviour in cross-accent vowel perception by Australian, London, New Zealand, Yorkshire and Newcastle UK listeners. Results show that Australian listeners impose expected patterns of perceptual similarity from their own accent experience on unfamiliar accents, regardless of the actual phonetic distance between accents

Input matters: speed of word recognition in 2-year-olds exposed to multiple accents

Although studies investigating language abilities in young children exposed to more than one language have become common, there is still surprisingly little research examining language development in children exposed to more than one accent. Here, we report two looking-while-listening experiments examining the impact of routine home exposure to multiple accents on 2-year-olds’ word recognition abilities. In Experiment 1, we found that monolingual English-learning 24-month-olds who routinely receive exposure to both Canadian English and a non-native variant of English are less efficient in their recognition of familiar words spoken in Canadian English than monolingual English-learning 24-month-olds who hear only Canadian English at home. In Experiment 2, we found that by 34 months of age all children recognize words equally quickly regardless of their accent exposure at home. We conclude that monolingual toddlers in some locations may form a less homogeneous population than past work has assumed, a factor that should be considered when drawing generalizations about language development across different populations

Osmotyczno-konwekcyjne suszenie jablek

Zbadano wpływ rodzaju czynnika osmotycznego na kinetykę odwadniania jabłek, jak również na kinetykę wnikania substancji z uwzględnieniem szybkości procesów, zbadano również wpływ rodzaju czynnika osmotycznego i sposobu jego usunięcia na kinetykę dosuszania konwekcyjnego, a w szczególności na czas procesu suszenia (do wilgotności końcowej, wynoszącej 16%) oraz na cechy jakościowe suszu w porównaniu do uzyskanego w suszarce konwekcyjnej.The influence of an osmotic factor type on dehydration kinetics of apples and on penetration kinetics of substance, considering the rate of processes, was investigated. The effects of osmotic factor type and the method of its removing on kinetics of convection drying were also studied, especially the impact on the time of drying process (to final moisture content of 16 %) and on qualitative features of dried fruits, as compared to that obtained in convection drier

Indexical and linguistic processing by 12-month-olds: discrimination of speaker, accent and vowel differences

Infants preferentially discriminate between speech tokens that cross native category boundaries prior to acquiring a large receptive vocabulary, implying a major role for unsupervised distributional learning strategies in phoneme acquisition in the first year of life. Multiple sources of between-speaker variability contribute to children’s language input and thus complicate the problem of distributional learning. Adults resolve this type of indexical variability by adjusting their speech processing for individual speakers. For infants to handle indexical variation in the same way, they must be sensitive to both linguistic and indexical cues. To assess infants’ sensitivity to and relative weighting of indexical and linguistic cues, we familiarized 12-month-old infants to tokens of a vowel produced by one speaker, and tested their listening preference to trials containing a vowel category change produced by the same speaker (linguistic information), and the same vowel category produced by another speaker of the same or a different accent (indexical information). Infants noticed linguistic and indexical differences, suggesting that both are salient in infant speech processing. Future research should explore how infants weight these cues in a distributional learning context that contains both phonetic and indexical variation

Message vs. messenger effects on cross-modal matching for spoken phrases

A core issue in speech perception and word recognition research is the nature of information perceivers use to identify spoken utterances across indexical variations in their phonetic details, such as talker and accent differences. Separately, a crucial question in audio-visual research is the nature of information perceivers use to recognize phonetic congruency between the audio and visual (talking face) signals that arise from speaking. We combined these issues in a study examining how differences between connected speech utterances (messages) versus between talkers and accents (messenger characteristics) contribute to recognition of crossmodal articulatory congruence between audio-only (AO) and video-only (VO) components of spoken utterances. Participants heard AO phrases in their native regional English accent or another English accent, and then saw two synchronous VO displays of point-light talking faces from which they had to select the one that corresponded to the audio target. The incorrect video in each pair was either the same or a different phrase as the audio target, produced by the same or a different talker, who spoke in either the same or a different English accent. Results indicate that cross-modal articulatory correspondence is more accurately and quickly detected for message content than for messenger details, suggesting that recognising the linguistic message is more fundamental than messenger features is to cross-modal detection of audio-visual articulatory congruency. Nonetheless, messenger characteristics, especially accent, affected performance to some degree, analogous to recent findings in AO speech research