A better communicator is always a better scientist, or the reason why every PhD student should engage in science outreach

The ability to communicate with all audiences is a skill that is rapidly becoming a must-have for any future scientist. As more physicists engage in communicating science to non-expert audiences, research shows that this experience helps them to get a better understanding of their own research and the impact on society, improves the perception of science by lay audiences and can also become an area of personal growth as a citizen. A recent deployment of a PhD student to the Amundsen Scott South Pole Station, as part of the IceCube Collaboration, provided a ready opportunity to spark interest. We present results of the efforts made by the Universit\'e libre de Bruxelles (ULB), the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and the Interuniversity Institute for High Energies, IIHE (ULB-VUB), to introduce Belgian students and citizens to science and the life of a scientist. The essential parts of this program will be identified to show why the contributions of a PhD student to the organization of these activities are beneficial to the development of new skills as a scientist, but also to broaden the audiences and the impact of the local university and/or the specific research outreach program.Comment: Submitted to the 35th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC 2017, Busan, South Korea

Expansion of prosodic abilities at the transition from babble to words: a comparison between children with cochlear implants and normally hearing children

Objectives: This longitudinal study examined the impact of emerging vocabulary production on the ability to produce the phonetic cues to prosodic prominence in babbled and lexical disyllables of infants with Cochlear Implants (CI) and normally hearing infants (NH). Current research on typical language acquisition emphasizes the importance of vocabulary development for phonological and phonetic acquisition. Children with cochlear implants (CI) experience significant difficulties with the perception and production of prosody, and the role of possible top-down effects is therefore particularly relevant for this population. Design: Isolated disyllabic babble and first words were identified and segmented in longitudinal audio-video recordings and transcriptions for 9 NH infants and 9 infants with CI interacting with their parents. Monthly recordings were included from the onset of babbling until children had reached a cumulative vocabulary of 200 words. Three cues to prosodic prominence, F0, intensity and duration, were measured in the vocalic portions of stand-alone disyllables. In order to represent the degree of prosodic differentiation between two syllables in an utterance, the raw values for intensity and duration were transformed to ratios, and for f0 a measure of the perceptual distance in semitones was derived. The degree of prosodic differentiation for disyllabic babble and words for each cue was compared between groups. In addition, group and individual tendencies on the types of stress patterns for babble and words were also examined. Results: The CI group had overall smaller pitch and intensity distances than the NH group. For the NH group, words had greater pitch and intensity distances than babbled disyllables. Especially for pitch distance, this was accompanied by a shift towards a more clearly expressed stress pattern that reflected the influence of the ambient language. For the CI group, the same expansion in words did not take place for pitch. For intensity, the CI group gave evidence of some increase of prosodic differentiation. The results for the duration measure showed evidence of utterance-final lengthening in both groups. In words, the CI group significantly reduced durational differences between syllables so that a more even-timed, less differentiated pattern emerged. Conclusions: The onset of vocabulary production did not have the same facilitatory effect for the CI infants on the production of phonetic cues for prosody, especially for pitch. It was argued that the results for duration may reflect greater articulatory difficulties in words for the CI group than the NH group. It was suggested that the lack of clear top-down effects of the vocabulary in the CI group may be due to a lag in development caused by an initial lack of auditory stimulation, possibly compounded by the absence of auditory feedback during the babble phase

Linguistic assessment tools for the Digisonic® Dual electric-acoustic speech processor

Interdisciplinary domains LUC

The effects of stimulus complexity on the preattentive processing of self-generated and nonself voices: an ERP study

The ability to differentiate one's own voice from the voice of somebody else plays a critical role in successful verbal self-monitoring processes and in communication. However, most of the existing studies have only focused on the sensory correlates of self-generated voice processing, whereas the effects of attentional demands and stimulus complexity on self-generated voice processing remain largely unknown. In this study, we investigated the effects of stimulus complexity on the preattentive processing of self and nonself voice stimuli. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 17 healthy males who watched a silent movie while ignoring prerecorded self-generated (SGV) and nonself (NSV) voice stimuli, consisting of a vocalization (vocalization category condition: VCC) or of a disyllabic word (word category condition: WCC). All voice stimuli were presented as standard and deviant events in four distinct oddball sequences. The mismatch negativity (MMN) ERP component peaked earlier for NSV than for SGV stimuli. Moreover, when compared with SGV stimuli, the P3a amplitude was increased for NSV stimuli in the VCC only, whereas in the WCC no significant differences were found between the two voice types. These findings suggest differences in the time course of automatic detection of a change in voice identity. In addition, they suggest that stimulus complexity modulates the magnitude of the orienting response to SGV and NSV stimuli, extending previous findings on self-voice processing.This work was supported by Grant Numbers IF/00334/2012, PTDC/PSI-PCL/116626/2010, and PTDC/MHN-PCN/3606/2012, funded by the Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (FCT, Portugal) and the Fundo Europeu de Desenvolvimento Regional through the European programs Quadro de Referencia Estrategico Nacional and Programa Operacional Factores de Competitividade, awarded to A.P.P., and by FCT Doctoral Grant Number SFRH/BD/77681/2011, awarded to T.C.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Deutscher Gesamtkatalog. Herausgegeben von der Preussischen Staatsbibliothek

Schauwers Fr. Deutscher Gesamtkatalog. Herausgegeben von der Preussischen Staatsbibliothek. In: Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire, tome 16, fasc. 1-2, 1937. pp. 352-355