Do children enhance phonetic contrasts in speech directed to a hearing-impaired peer?

This study examines whether normal-hearing (NH) children enhance phonetic contrasts when speaking to a hearing-impaired (HI) peer. A problem-solving ‘Grid’ task was developed to elicit frequent repetitions of /p/-/b/, /s/-/S/ and /i/-/I/ segmental contrasts and point vowels in communicative spontaneous speech. Eighteen NH children between 9 and 15 years old performed the task once with a NH friend and once with a HI friend. Both category means and within-speaker variability were analysed. Results suggest that although HI interlocutors are likely to find the phonetic contrasts difficult to produce and perceive, children’s HI-directed speech contains little evidence of phonetic category enhancement

Acoustic-Phonetic Characteristics of Clear Speech in Bilinguals

This study examined the language-dependency of clear speech modifications by comparing the clear speech strategies of late bilinguals in both their L1 (Finnish) and L2 (English). Results generally supported the hypothesis of language-independent enhancement of global clear speech modifications, but language-dependent segmental enhancement. The global clear speech strategies produced by Finnish-English bilinguals in their L2 (English) were similar in the extent of the modifications to those of native English speakers, indicating a surprising flexibility of the non-native speech production system

Children's acoustic and linguistic adaptations of peers with hearing impairment

Purpose: This study aims to examine the clear speaking strategies used by older children when interacting with a peer with hearing loss, focusing on both acoustic and linguistic adaptations in speech. Method: The Grid task, a problem-solving task developed to elicit spontaneous interactive speech, was used to obtain a range of global acoustic and linguistic measures. Eighteen 9- to 14-year-old children with normal-hearing (NH) performed the task in pairs, once with a friend with NH, and once with a friend with a hearing-impairment (HI). Results: In HI-directed speech, children increased their fundamental frequency range and mid-frequency intensity, decreased the number of words per phrase, and expanded their vowel space area by increasing F1 and F2 range, relative to NH-directed speech. However, participants did not appear to make changes to their articulation rate, the lexical frequency of content words, or to lexical diversity, when talking to their friend with HI compared to their friend with NH. Conclusions: Older children show evidence of listener-oriented adaptations to their speech production; although their speech production systems are still developing, they are able to make speech adaptations to benefit the needs of a peer with HI, even without being given specific instruction to do so

An acoustic-phonetic comparison of the clear speaking styles of late Finnish-English bilinguals

Research on clear speech, an intelligibility-enhancing speaking style, has proposed that global clear speech modifications which make speech more perceptible in adverse conditions are language-independent, while the more fine-grained segmental clear speech modifications, which enhance the salience of phonological contrasts, are language-specific [Bradlow, A.R. & Bent, T., 2002. The clear speech effect for non-native listeners. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 112, 272–284]. This study assessed the claim by contrasting the clear speech strategies used by twelve Finnish-English late bilinguals in their two languages, using spontaneous speech and sentence reading tasks. Their global clear speech modifications were also compared to those of native English speakers. Global measures included mean energy between 1-3k Hz, f0 median and range, and speech rate, while segmental measures included VOT for initial stop consonants and vowel spectral and temporal characteristics for two vowel contrasts. The global clear speech strategies of late bilinguals approximated those of native English speakers. Findings generally support the hypothesis that global enhancements are language-independent while segmental enhancements are language-dependent: the late bilinguals enhanced some of the segmental detail differently in clear speech according to the language being spoken, but most of the global clear speech modifications were consistent across languages

Management Accountant's Role and Functions in the Enterprise Resource Planning Environment - Author's Own Research into Enterprises in Poland

This article seeks to answer whether the implementation of an ERP system has an effect on the management accountant's tasks and functions, especially in the field of performance measurement and internal reporting. The ERP impacts on the controller's role in the organization will be evaluated using field studies on six enterprises owned by multinational corporations. The question that should be asked here is whether controller's functions and tasks will also be unaffected.Celem badania jest próba odpowiedzi na pytanie czy zastosowanie zintegrowanego systemu informatycznego w przedsiębiorstwie zmienia zadania i funkcje specjalisty do spraw rachunkowości zarządczej. Na podstawie studium przypadku sześciu przedsiębiorstw będących częścią koncernów międzynarodowych zostaje dokonana ocena wpływu zastosowania ERP na rolę kontrolera w organizacji. Autor odpowiada również na pytanie czy w funkcjach i zadaniach kontrolera nie zaobserwowane zostaną zmiany w związku z implementacją ERP

Theoretical analysis of perching and hovering maneuvers

Unsteady aerodynamic phenomena are encountered in a large number of modern aerospace and non-aerospace applications. Leading edge vortices (LEVs) are of particular interest because of their large impact on the forces and performance. In rotorcraft applications, they cause large vibrations and torsional loads (dynamic stall), affecting the performance adversely. In insect flight however, they contribute positively by enabling high-lift flight. Identifying the conditions that result in LEV formation and modeling their effects on the flow is an important ongoing challenge. Perching (airfoil decelerates to rest) and hovering (zero freestream velocity) maneuvers are of special interest. In earlier work by the authors, a Leading Edge Suction Parameter (LESP) was developed to predict LEV formation for airfoils undergoing arbitrary variation in pitch and plunge at a constant freestream velocity. In this research, the LESP criterion is extended to situations where the freestream velocity is varying or zero. A point-vortex model based on this criterion is developed and results from the model are compared against those from a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method. Abstractions of perching and hovering maneuvers are used to validate the low-order model's performance in highly unsteady vortex-dominated flows, where the time-varying freestream/translational velocity is small in magnitude compared to the other contributions to the velocity experienced by the leading edge region of the airfoil. Time instants of LEV formation, flow topologies and force coefficient histories for the various motion kinematics from the low-order model and CFD are obtained and compared. The LESP criterion is seen to be successful in predicting the start of LEV formation and the point-vortex method is effective in modeling the flow development and forces on the airfoil. Typical run-times for the low-order method are between 30-40 seconds, making it a potentially convenient tool for control/design applications

SkyMapper and the Southern Sky Survey

This paper presents the design and science goals for the SkyMapper telescope. SkyMapper is a 1.3m telescope featuring a 5.7 square degree field-of-view Cassegrain imager commissioned for the Australian National University's Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. It is located at Siding Spring Observatory, Coonabarabran, NSW, Australia and will see first light in late 2007. The imager possesses 16kx16k 0.5 arcsec pixels. The primary scientific goal of the facility is to perform the Southern Sky Survey, a six colour and multi-epoch (4 hour, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 1 year sampling) photometric survey of the southerly 2pi steradians to g~23 mag. The survey will provide photometry to better than 3% global accuracy and astrometry to better than 50 mas. Data will be supplied to the community as part of the Virtual Observatory effort. The survey will take five years to complete

Cognitive Information Processing

Contains research objectives and summary of research on five research projects.National Science Foundation (Grant SED74-12653-A01)Joint Services Electronics Program (Contract DAAB07-76-C-1400)National Science Foundation (Grant ENG74-24344)Associated Press (Grant)National Institutes of Health (Grant 1 ROI GM22547-01)National Institutes of Health (Grant 2 PO1 GM19428-04