884 research outputs found
Lexical Effects in Perception of Tamil Geminates
Lexical status effects are a phenomenon in which listeners use their prior lexical knowledge of a language to identify ambiguous speech sounds in a word based on its word or nonword status. This phenomenon has been demonstrated for ambiguous initial English consonants (one example being the Ganong Effect, a phenomenon in which listeners perceive an ambiguous speech sound as a phoneme that would complete a real word rather than a nonsense word) as a supporting factor for top-down lexical processing affecting listeners' subsequent acoustic judgement, but not for ambiguous mid-word consonants in non-English languages. In this experiment, we attempt to look at ambiguous mid-word consonants with Tamil, a South Asian language in order to see if the same top-down lexical effect was applicable outside of English. These Tamil consonants can present as either singletons (single speech sounds) or geminates (doubled speech sounds).We hypothesized that by creating ambiguous stimuli between a geminate word kuppam and a singleton non-word like kubam, participants would be more likely to perceive the ambiguous sound as a phoneme that completes the real word rather than the nonword (in this case, perceiving the ambiguous sound as a /p/ for kuppam instead of kubam). Participants listened to the ambiguous stimuli in two separate sets of continua (kuppam/suppam and nakkam/pakkam) and then indicated which word they heard in a four-alternative forced choice word identification task. Results showed that participants identified the ambiguous sounds as the sound that completed the actual word, but only for one set of continua (kuppam/suppam). These data suggest that there may be strong top-down lexical effects for ambiguous sounds in certain stimuli in Tamil, but not others.No embargoAcademic Major: LinguisticsAcademic Major: Psycholog
The Making of a ‘Kumauni’ Artifact: The Epic Malushahi
This essay will look at the making of the social imaginary of Kumaun through the study of print media and the performance practice of a popular ballad from the region: Malushahi. During the last two centuries, this classic love story has seen various incarnations. It has been a part of many print versions in Kumauni, Garhwali, Hindi and English—as poetry, prose, a novel, plays, and stories for children. It has been included partially or in full in various folk collections of Kumaun. It has also generated a reasonable amount of discussion in academic circles. A definitive version of the text in Kumauni, Hindi and English, with notes and information about the singer Gopi Das, was produced by the anthropologist Konrad Meissner. Folklorists, historians, litterateurs, linguists, ethnomusicologists and anthropologists have paid great attention to both the form and content of its narrative. It has also been sung and recorded in many versions for radio, video, film, CD, DVD, and VCD. Various versions are available on YouTube. Probably its most popular form is that of a musical written and directed by Mohan Upreti and performed regularly since the 1980s by the Parvatiya Kala Kendra, Delhi. The transformation of this ballad from the folk repertoire to a modern musical and part of the canon of Kumauni literature marks the emergence of a Kumauni identity
Erratum to: ‘Justice at Sea: Fishers’ politics and marine conservation in coastal Odisha, India’
Book Review: Seeing Through Texts: Doing Theology Among the Srivaisnavas of South India
A review of Francis X. Clooney\u27s Seeing Through Texts: Doing Theology Among the Srivaisnavas of South India
Edge states and the bulk-boundary correspondence in Dirac Hamiltonians
We present an analytic prescription for computing the edge dispersion E(k) of
a tight-binding Dirac Hamiltonian terminated at an abrupt crystalline edge.
Specifically, we consider translationally invariant Dirac Hamiltonians with
nearest-layer interaction. We present and prove a geometric formula that
relates the existence of surface states as well as their energy dispersion to
properties of the bulk Hamiltonian. We further prove the bulk-boundary
correspondence between the Chern number and the chiral edge modes for quantum
Hall systems within the class of Hamiltonians studied in the paper. Our results
can be extended to the case of continuum theories which are quadratic in the
momentum, as well as other symmetry classes.Comment: 8 pages + appendice
Quench dynamics and parity blocking in Majorana wires
We theoretically explore quench dynamics in a finite-sized topological
fermionic p-wave superconducting wire with the goal of demonstrating that
topological order can have marked effects on such non-equilibrium dynamics. In
the case studied here, topological order is reflected in the presence of two
(nearly) isolated Majorana fermionic end bound modes together forming an
electronic state that can be occupied or not, leading to two (nearly)
degenerate ground states characterized by fermion parity. Our study begins with
a characterization of the static properties of the finite-sized wire, including
the behavior of the Majorana end modes and the form of the tunnel coupling
between them; a transfer matrix approach to analytically determine the
locations of the zero energy contours where this coupling vanishes; and a
Pfaffian approach to map the ground state parity in the associated phase
diagram. We next study the quench dynamics resulting from initializing the
system in a topological ground state and then dynamically tuning one of the
parameters of the Hamiltonian. For this, we develop a dynamic quantum many-body
technique that invokes a Wick's theorem for Majorana fermions, vastly reducing
the numerical effort given the exponentially large Hilbert space. We
investigate the salient and detailed features of two dynamic quantities - the
overlap between the time-evolved state and the instantaneous ground state
(adiabatic fidelity) and the residual energy. When the parity of the
instantaneous ground state flips successively with time, we find that the
time-evolved state can dramatically switch back and forth between this state
and an excited state even when the quenching is very slow, a phenomenon that we
term "parity blocking". This parity blocking becomes prominently manifest as
non-analytic jumps as a function of time in both dynamic quantities
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