Reading is Hard just because Listening is Easy

In their work on reading and the difficulties that attend it. investigators have commonly omitted to ask the questions that are. in my view, prior to all others: why is it easier to perceive speech than to read, and why is it easier to speak a word than to spell it? My aim is to repair these omissions. To that end, I divide my talk into two parts. First, I say why we should consider that the greater ease of perceiving and producing speech is paradoxical, by which I mean to suggest that the reasons are not to be found among surface appearances. Then I propose how, by going beneath the surface, we can find the reasons, and so resolve the paradox. THE PARADOX Before developing the paradox. I should first remind you that perceiving and produCing speech are easier than reading or writing. for thiS is the point from which I depart and to which I will. at the end. return. The relevant facts include the following. (1) All communities of human beings have a fully developed spoken language; in contrast. only a minority of these languages has a written form. and not all of these are in common use. (2) Speech is first in the history of the race, as it is in the child; readin

Do Postures of Distal Effectors Affect the Control of Actions of Other Distal Effectors? Evidence for a System of Interactions between Hand and Mouth

The present study aimed at determining whether, in healthy humans, postures assumed by distal effectors affect the control of the successive grasp executed with other distal effectors. In experiments 1 and 2, participants reached different objects with their head and grasped them with their mouth, after assuming different hand postures. The postures could be implicitly associated with interactions with large or small objects. The kinematics of lip shaping during grasp varied congruently with the hand posture, i.e. it was larger or smaller when it could be associated with the grasping of large or small objects, respectively. In experiments 3 and 4, participants reached and grasped different objects with their hand, after assuming the postures of mouth aperture or closure (experiment 3) and the postures of toe extension or flexion (experiment 4). The mouth postures affected the kinematics of finger shaping during grasp, that is larger finger shaping corresponded with opened mouth and smaller finger shaping with closed mouth. In contrast, the foot postures did not influence the hand grasp kinematics. Finally, in experiment 5 participants reached-grasped different objects with their hand while pronouncing opened and closed vowels, as verified by the analysis of their vocal spectra. Open and closed vowels induced larger and smaller finger shaping, respectively. In all experiments postures of the distal effectors induced no effect, or only unspecific effects on the kinematics of the reach proximal/axial component. The data from the present study support the hypothesis that there exists a system involved in establishing interactions between movements and postures of hand and mouth. This system might have been used to transfer a repertoire of hand gestures to mouth articulation postures during language evolution and, in modern humans, it may have evolved a system controlling the interactions existing between speech and gestures

Disease and the Extended Phenotype: Parasites Control Host Performance and Survival through Induced Changes in Body Plan

BACKGROUND: By definition, parasites harm their hosts. However, some forms of parasite-induced alterations increase parasite transmission between hosts, such that manipulated hosts can be considered extensions of the parasite's phenotype. While well accepted in principle, surprisingly few studies have quantified how parasite manipulations alter host performance and survival under field and laboratory conditions. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: By interfering with limb development, the trematode Ribeiroia ondatrae causes particularly severe morphological alterations within amphibian hosts that provide an ideal system to evaluate parasite-induced changes in phenotype. Here, we coupled laboratory performance trials with a capture-mark-recapture study of 1388 Pacific chorus frogs (Pseudacris regilla) to quantify the effects of parasite-induced malformations on host locomotion, foraging, and survival. Malformations, which affected ~50% of metamorphosing frogs in nature, caused dramatic reductions in all measures of organismal function. Malformed frogs exhibited significantly shorter jumping distances (41% reduction), slower swimming speeds (37% reduction), reduced endurance (66% reduction), and lower foraging success relative to infected hosts without malformations. Furthermore, while normal and malformed individuals had comparable survival within predator-free exclosures, deformed frogs in natural populations had 22% lower biweekly survival than normal frogs and rarely recruited to the adult population over a two-year period. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Our results highlight the ability of parasites to deeply alter multiple dimensions of host phenotype with important consequences for performance and survival. These patterns were best explained by malformation status, rather than infection per se, helping to decouple the direct and indirect effects of parasitism on host fitness.Brett A. Goodman and Pieter T. J. Johnso

Vowel reduction in word-final position by early and late Spanish-English bilinguals

Vowel reduction is a prominent feature of American English, as well as other stress-timed languages. As a phonological process, vowel reduction neutralizes multiple vowel quality contrasts in unstressed syllables. For bilinguals whose native language is not characterized by large spectral and durational differences between tonic and atonic vowels, systematically reducing unstressed vowels to the central vowel space can be problematic. Failure to maintain this pattern of stressed-unstressed syllables in American English is one key element that contributes to a ?foreign accent? in second language speakers. Reduced vowels, or ?schwas,? have also been identified as particularly vulnerable to the co-articulatory effects of adjacent consonants. The current study examined the effects of adjacent sounds on the spectral and temporal qualities of schwa in word-final position. Three groups of English-speaking adults were tested: Miami-based monolingual English speakers, early Spanish-English bilinguals, and late Spanish-English bilinguals. Subjects performed a reading task to examine their schwa productions in fluent speech when schwas were preceded by consonants from various points of articulation. Results indicated that monolingual English and late Spanish-English bilingual groups produced targeted vowel qualities for schwa, whereas early Spanish-English bilinguals lacked homogeneity in their vowel productions. This extends prior claims that schwa is targetless for F2 position for native speakers to highly-proficient bilingual speakers. Though spectral qualities lacked homogeneity for early Spanish-English bilinguals, early bilinguals produced schwas with near native-like vowel duration. In contrast, late bilinguals produced schwas with significantly longer durations than English monolinguals or early Spanish-English bilinguals. Our results suggest that the temporal properties of a language are better integrated into second language phonologies than spectral qualities. Finally, we examined the role of nonstructural variables (e.g. linguistic history measures) in predicting native-like vowel duration. These factors included: Age of L2 learning, amount of L1 use, and self-reported bilingual dominance. Our results suggested that different sociolinguistic factors predicted native-like reduced vowel duration than predicted native-like vowel qualities across multiple phonetic environments

The time course of auditory and language-specific mechanisms in compensation for sibilant assimilation

Models of spoken-word recognition differ on whether compensation for assimilation is language-specific or depends on general auditory processing. English and French participants were taught words that began or ended with the sibilants /s/ and /∫/. Both languages exhibit some assimilation in sibilant sequences (e.g., /s/ becomes like [∫] in dress shop and classe chargée), but they differ in the strength and predominance of anticipatory versus carryover assimilation. After training, participants were presented with novel words embedded in sentences, some of which contained an assimilatory context either preceding or following. A continuum of target sounds ranging from [s] to [∫] was spliced into the novel words, representing a range of possible assimilation strengths. Listeners' perceptions were examined using a visual-world eyetracking paradigm in which the listener clicked on pictures matching the novel words. We found two distinct language-general context effects: a contrastive effect when the assimilating context preceded the target, and flattening of the sibilant categorization function (increased ambiguity) when the assimilating context followed. Furthermore, we found that English but not French listeners were able to resolve the ambiguity created by the following assimilatory context, consistent with their greater experience with assimilation in this context. The combination of these mechanisms allows listeners to deal flexibly with variability in speech forms

Hydrocarbon Contamination Decreases Mating Success in a Marine Planktonic Copepod

The mating behavior and the mating success of copepods rely on chemoreception to locate and track a sexual partner. However, the potential impact of the water-soluble fraction of hydrocarbons on these aspects of copepod reproduction has never been tested despite the widely acknowledged acute chemosensory abilities of copepods. I examined whether three concentrations of the water-soluble fraction of diesel oil (0.01%, 0.1% and 1%) impacts (i) the swimming behavior of both adult males and females of the widespread calanoid copepod Temora longcornis, and (ii) the ability of males to locate, track and mate with females. The three concentrations of the water-soluble fraction of diesel oil (WSF) significantly and non-significantly affect female and male swimming velocities, respectively. In contrast, both the complexity of male and female swimming paths significantly decreased with increasing WSF concentrations, hence suggesting a sex-specific sensitivity to WSF contaminated seawater. In addition, the three WSF concentrations impacted both T. longicornis mating behavior and mating success. Specifically, the ability of males to detect female pheromone trails, to accurately follow trails and to successfully track a female significantly decreased with increasing WSF concentrations. This led to a significant decrease in contact and capture rates from control to WSF contaminated seawater. These results indicate that hydrocarbon contamination of seawater decreases the ability of male copepods to detect and track a female, hence suggest an overall impact on population fitness and dynamics

Timing in talking: What is it used for, and how is it controlled?

In the first part of the paper, we summarize the linguistic factors that shape speech timing patterns, including the prosodic structures which govern them, and suggest that speech timing patterns are used to aid utterance recognition. In the spirit of optimal control theory, we propose that recognition requirements are balanced against requirements such as rate of speech and style, as well as movement costs, to yield (near-)optimal planned surface timing patterns; additional factors may influence the implementation of that plan. In the second part of the paper, we discuss theories of timing control in models of speech production and motor control. We present three types of evidence that support models of speech production that involve extrinsic timing. These include (i) increasing variability with increases in interval duration, (ii) evidence that speakers refer to and plan surface durations, and (iii) independent timing of movement onsets and offsets

QCD and strongly coupled gauge theories : challenges and perspectives

We highlight the progress, current status, and open challenges of QCD-driven physics, in theory and in experiment. We discuss how the strong interaction is intimately connected to a broad sweep of physical problems, in settings ranging from astrophysics and cosmology to strongly coupled, complex systems in particle and condensed-matter physics, as well as to searches for physics beyond the Standard Model. We also discuss how success in describing the strong interaction impacts other fields, and, in turn, how such subjects can impact studies of the strong interaction. In the course of the work we offer a perspective on the many research streams which flow into and out of QCD, as well as a vision for future developments.Peer reviewe