In the Absence of Animacy: Superordinate Category Structure Affects Subordinate Label Verification (vol 8, e83282, 2013)

Theoretical accounts as well as behavioral studies reporting animacy effects offer inconsistent and sometimes contradictory results. A possible explanation for these inconsistencies may be inadvertent biases in the stimuli selected for test - with category-specific effects driven by characteristics of test stimuli other than animacy per se. In this study, we pit animacy against feature structure (intra-item variability), in a picture-word matching task. For unimpaired adults, regardless of whether objects were from animate (mammals; insects) or inanimate (clothes; musical instruments) superordinate categories, participants were faster to match basic level labels with objects from categories with low intra-item variability (mammals; clothes) than from categories with high intra-item variability (insects; instruments). Thus, pitting animacy against variability allowed us to clarify that observable differences in processing speed between animals and instruments are systematically driven by the intra-item variability of the superordinate categories, and not by animacy itself

Investigating model performance in language identification: beyond simple error statistics

Language development experts need tools that can automatically identify languages from fluent, conversational speech, and provide reliable estimates of usage rates at the level of an individual recording. However, language identification systems are typically evaluated on metrics such as equal error rate and balanced accuracy, applied at the level of an entire speech corpus. These overview metrics do not provide information about model performance at the level of individual speakers, recordings, or units of speech with different linguistic characteristics. Overview statistics may therefore mask systematic errors in model performance for some subsets of the data, and consequently, have worse performance on data derived from some subsets of human speakers, creating a kind of algorithmic bias. In the current paper, we investigate how well a number of language identification systems perform on individual recordings and speech units with different linguistic properties in the MERLIon CCS Challenge. The Challenge dataset features accented English-Mandarin code-switched child-directed speech.Comment: Accepted to Interspeech 2023, 5 pages, 5 figure

MERLIon CCS Challenge: A English-Mandarin code-switching child-directed speech corpus for language identification and diarization

To enhance the reliability and robustness of language identification (LID) and language diarization (LD) systems for heterogeneous populations and scenarios, there is a need for speech processing models to be trained on datasets that feature diverse language registers and speech patterns. We present the MERLIon CCS challenge, featuring a first-of-its-kind Zoom video call dataset of parent-child shared book reading, of over 30 hours with over 300 recordings, annotated by multilingual transcribers using a high-fidelity linguistic transcription protocol. The audio corpus features spontaneous and in-the-wild English-Mandarin code-switching, child-directed speech in non-standard accents with diverse language-mixing patterns recorded in a variety of home environments. This report describes the corpus, as well as LID and LD results for our baseline and several systems submitted to the MERLIon CCS challenge using the corpus.Comment: Accepted by Interspeech 2023, 5 pages, 2 figures, 3 table

Good scientific practice in MEEG Research: Progress and Perspectives

Good Scientific Practice (GSP) refers to both explicit and implicit rules, recommendations, and guidelines that help scientists to produce work that is of the highest quality at any given time, and to efficiently share that work with the community for further scrutiny or utilization.For experimental research using magneto- and electroencephalography (MEEG), GSP includes specific standards and guidelines for technical competence, which are periodically updated and adapted to new findings. However, GSP also needs to be periodically revisited in a broader light. At the LiveMEEG 2020 conference, a reflection on GSP was fostered that included explicitly documented guidelines and technical advances, but also emphasized intangible GSP: a general awareness of personal, organizational, and societal realities and how they can influence MEEG research.This article provides an extensive report on most of the LiveMEEG contributions and new literature, with the additional aim to synthesize ongoing cultural changes in GSP. It first covers GSP with respect to cognitive biases and logical fallacies, pre-registration as a tool to avoid those and other early pitfalls, and a number of resources to enable collaborative and reproducible research as a general approach to minimize misconceptions. Second, it covers GSP with respect to data acquisition, analysis, reporting, and sharing, including new tools and frameworks to support collaborative work. Finally, GSP is considered in light of ethical implications of MEEG research and the resulting responsibility that scientists have to engage with societal challenges.Considering among other things the benefits of peer review and open access at all stages, the need to coordinate larger international projects, the complexity of MEEG subject matter, and today's prioritization of fairness, privacy, and the environment, we find that current GSP tends to favor collective and cooperative work, for both scientific and for societal reasons

Pitch-cued spoken vowels

This report describes an elicitation technique to generate pitch-matched natural speech stimuli. In this example, the vowels /i/, /a/, /u/ and /y/ were spoken at 3 target pitches within the comfortable vocal range of the speaker. Raw (pitch-cued) recordings and recordings with minor pitch accuracy adjustment are included

Tackling WEIRD+ Bias in the undergraduate psychology curriculum

This archive contains teaching resources including lecture slides and teaching materials that help undergraduate students learn more about WEIRD+ bias in psychology (and other human-centered sciences), and develop a critical sense for the generalizability of published findings to a broad range of humans. Materials developed by Suzy J Styles in undergraduate teaching at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Research Burger - Understanding the structure of written research reports

Research Burger: Understanding the structure of written research reports. OER by Suzy J Styles. The Research Burger can help you recognise different elements in a research report, so you can figure out which bits are critical for your current needs. You can use the model to critique your own work (hmmm... have I got enough impact tomato? is there too much cheese?), or decide which parts of an article to focus on when you are reading (hmmm... maybe I’ll skip to the meat). With a bit of practice, you’ll also be able to recognise different kinds of Research Burger when you spot them in the wild