Phonetics

The auditory brainstem response reflects neural encoding of the acoustic characteristic of a speech syllable with remarkable precision. Some children with learning impairments demonstrate abnormalities in this preconscious measure of neural encoding especially in background noise.

10. DC cultures were generated as described (5, 22). Immature I-A kϩ DCs grown from C3H/HeN, C3H/HeJ, and CBA/J (Jackson Labs, Bar Harbor, ME) marrow suspensions were pulsed with HEL (1 to 3 mg/ml) with or without LPS (1 to 10 ng/ml, E. coli 0111.B4) for 1 to 3 hours, washed, and chased in HEL-and LPS-free media. Similar results were obtained with DCs from each strain. DC cultures contained supernatant from mGM-CSFexpressing J558L cells (from A. Lanzavecchia, Basel Institute, Basel, Switzerland). LPS was removed from HEL (Sigma) with Kuttsuclean adsorbent (Maruha Corporation, Ibaraki, Japan). Maturation stimuli included LPS, CD40L, tumor necrosis factor-␣, or replating (22). 11. DCs were fixed with 4% (wt/vol) paraformaldehyde and washed in phosphate-buffered saline. Cells were incubated with monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) on ice as described (23). The rat mAb C4H3 was provided by R. Germain (NIH, Bethesda, MD). C4H3 was purified on protein A-Sepharose and biotinylated. Cells were labeled with biotin-conjugated mAbs (Pharmingen) to I-E k (14-4-4S) or I-A k (10-2.16) and fluorescein

This paper presents a comprehensive phonetic and phonological description of Northern Sangtam, an essentially undescribed Tibeto-Burman language of central Nagaland belonging to the Aoic subgroup. It is a noteworthy language from a number of phonological perspectives, not least because its phoneme inventory contains two of the world's rarest phonemes: a pre-stopped bilabial trill, and a doubly-articulated labial-coronal nasal. These unique segments are described in detail, and an attempt is made to determine how they might have developed their phonemic status. The tone system is also of interest, as it demonstrates evidence of debuccalization resulting in the development of a new high tone. Following a systematic description of the syllable and word structure, the tone system, and the segmental phonology, some observed age-related differences in the phoneme inventory are discussed. The paper is linked to an online repository containing the audiovisual data and transcribed word lists of approximately 900 items, based on the recorded utterances of eight speakers.

Thirty-four second grade children read target homophonic pseudowords (e.g., slurst/slirst) in the context of real stories in a test of the self-teaching theory of early reading acquisition. The degree of orthographic learning was assessed with three converging tasks: homophonic choice, spelling, and target naming. Each of the tasks indicated that orthographic learning had taken place because processing of target homophones (e.g., yait) was superior to that of their homophonic controls (e.g., yate). Consistent with the self-teaching hypothesis, we obtained a substantial correlation (r ¼ :52) between orthographic learning and the number of target homophones correctly decoded during story reading. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses indicated that neither RAN tasks nor general cognitive ability predicted variance in orthographic learning once the number of target homophones correctly decoded during story reading had been partialed out. In contrast, a measure of orthographic

La Fonética contrastiva, como parte de la Lingüística contrastiva, tiene por objetivo la comparación de los sistemas de la lengua materna del alumno (L1) y de la lengua meta (L2/LE), en este caso, en el ámbito fonético y fonológico. Dicha comparación permite anticiparse a los errores que mas probablemente cometerá el alumno, y lo que es más importante: conocer sus causas e idear soluciones eficaces.
Este trabajo presenta una serie de aportaciones de la Fonética contrastiva y enumera algunos de los aspectos que deben ser abordados a la hora de realizar un análisis contrastivo, tanto en el ámbito de lo segmental como de lo suprasegmental. Tras dicha exposición, se plantean algunas lineas de actuación recomendadas para sacar el mayor provecho posible de esas contribuciones potenciales.

The visual dimension has featured prominently in person perception in the last 25 years. Alone, this dimension cannot give the complete 'picture' of others because language and speech (i.e., the auditory dimension) are also highly informative. Social-cognition research investigates the role of auditory information for impression formation. In a series of experiments, we tested perceived competence, hirability, and socio-intellectual status of different targets based on their regional accents. Given identical content of statements in different conditions of an alleged job interview, regional German accents (Saxon, Bavarian, and Berlin) resulted in lower perceived competence and hirability than standard German, even though the Bavarian accent at the same time resulted in higher ratings of socio-intellectual status compared to other regional accents (Experiment 1). These findings were confirmed when using a broader population sample and a 'matched guise' technique (Experiment 2). Our findings indicate that regional accents, similar to faces, can be very powerful in creating differentiated pictures of individuals.

This study examines morphological awareness in developmental dyslexia. While the poor phonological awareness of dyslexic children has been related to their difficulty in handling the alphabetical principle, less is known about their morphological awareness, which also plays an important part in reading development. The aim of this study was to analyze in more detail the implications of the phonological impairments of dyslexics in dealing with larger units of language such as morphemes. First, the performance of dyslexic children in a series of morphological tasks was compared with the performance of children matched on reading-level and chronological age. In all the tasks, the dyslexic group performed below the chronological age control group, suggesting that morphological awareness cannot be developed entirely independently of reading experience and/or phonological skills. Comparisons with the reading-age control group indicated that, while the dyslexic children were poorer in the morphemic segmentation tasks, 115 they performed normally for their reading level in the sentence completion tasks. Furthermore, they produced more derived words in the production task. This suggests that phonological impairments prevent the explicit segmentation of affixes while allowing the development of productive morphological knowledge. A second study compared dyslexic subgroups defined by their degree of phonological impairment. Our results suggest that dyslexics develop a certain type of morphological knowledge, which they use as a compensatory reading strategy.

Pronunciation is an integral part of foreign language learning since it directly affects learners' communicative competence as well as performance. Limited pronunciation skills can decrease learners' self-confidence, restrict social interactions, and negatively affect estimations of a speaker's credibility and abilities. The current focus on communicative approaches to EFL pronunciation learning and the concern for building communication skills are renewing interest in the role that pronunciation plays in EFL learners' overall communicative competence. The goals of this paper are to identify the features of pronunciation, explain factors affecting the learning of pronunciation, elaborate the integration of pronunciation into the curriculum, discuss the strategies for teaching pronunciation that can help EFL learners meet their personal and professional needs. The review of literature shows that with careful preparation and integration, pronunciation can play a significant role in supporting the learners' overall communicative skill.

Course Objectives: (i) To allow students to gain a sufficient amount of Explicit Knowledge of Traditional English Grammar concepts (ii) To provide students with the tools necessary for understanding Language Structure. The course is divided into three basic levels of language structure: Word-level (Lexical), Phrase-level Morphologies (Inflectional vs. Derivational), and Clause/Sentence-level (Syntax and Transformations). Also, a brief presentation of Phonology (IPA) is provided.

The role of morphology in reading aloud was examined measuring naming latencies to pseudowords and words composed of morphemes (roots and derivational suffixes) and corresponding simple pseudowords and words. Three groups of Italian children of different ages and reading abilities, including dyslexic children, as well as one group of adult readers participated in the study. All four groups read faster

Attention! The related software (PANM script) can be downloaded from here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B4QKykn2bzqQa0JQRTZtU08yZWs?resourcekey=0-kYz6XS59uRJCKj4YuhaqhQ
Background: This study aimed to introduce a low-cost system measuring nasalance, which can often be performed with high-cost systems, and to present the normative nasalance values for adults using this system.
Materials and Methods: This study included 96 standard native Turkish-speaking literate volunteers who had no hearing and speech problems or nasal obstruction. Nasalance values were measured using the system developed by the principal author, which is called the Praat-Assisted Nasalance Meter, using speech materials and related methods.
Results: The participants were 18-65 (average, 33.7) years old. They were divided into three groups according to their age: 18-25, 26-40, and 41-65. A significant difference was found in the nasalance values between the genders. For nearly all speech materials, higher nasalance values were measured in women than in men.
Conclusion: There is no generally accepted rule to ascertain if a speaker’s resonance is abnormal according to nasalance values. Therefore, the proposed threshold values should not be considered absolute values but should be decided with perceptual evaluation.

Amaç: Bu çalışmanın amacı, genellikle yüksek maliyetli sistemlerle gerçekleştirilebilen nazalans parametresi ölçümü için kullanılabilecek kendi geliştirdiğimiz düşük maliyetli bir sistemi tanıtmak ve bu sistem kullanılarak erişkinler için belirlenen normatif nazalans değerlerini sunmaktır.
Gereç ve Yöntemler: Standart Türkiye Türkçesi konuşan ve okuma yazma bilen 96 gönüllü çalışmaya dahil edildi. Deneklerin işitme ve konuşma problemi, burun tıkanıklığı yapan herhangi bir hastalığının olmamasına dikkat edildi. Birinci yazar tarafından geliştirilen ve Praat Yardımlı Nazalans Ölçer (PYNÖ) adı verilen sistem yardımıyla aşağıda belirtilen konuşma malzemesi ve yöntem kullanılarak nazalans ölçümü yapıldı.
Bulgular: Çalışmaya katılan 96 konuşmacının yaşları 18 ile 65 arasında değişiyordu (ortalama 33,7 yıl). Katılımcılar yaşlarına göre 18-25, 26-40 ve 41-65 şeklinde üç gruba ayrılarak incelendi. Elde edilen değerler cinsiyet grubuna göre karşılaştırıldığında aradaki farkların istatistiksel olarak anlamlı olduğu görüldü. Hemen her konuşma malzemesi için kadınlarda erkeklerden daha yüksek nazalans değerleri elde edildi.
Sonuç: Bir konuşmacı üzerinde ölçülen nazalans ölçüm sonuçlarının anormal olduğunu söylemek için genel kabul gören bir kural yoktur. Bu nedenle, bu çalışmada önerilen eşik değerler mutlak değerler olarak düşünülmemeli, algısal değerlendirmeyle birlikte karar verilmelidir.

We compared the reading-related skills of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders who have hyperlexia (ASD + HPL) with age-matched children with ASD without HPL (ASD -HPL) and with singleword reading-matched typically developing children (TYP). Children with ASD + HPL performed (1) better than did children with ASD -HPL on tasks of single-word reading and pseudoword decoding and equivalently well compared to word-reading-matched TYP children on all reading-related tasks except reading comprehension. It appears that the general underlying model of single-word reading is the same in principle for ''typical'' and hyperlexic reading. Yet, the study revealed some dissimilarities between these two types of reading when more fine-grained cognitive and linguistic abilities were considered; these dissimilarities warrant further investigations.

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In this study, it was postulated that typically developing (i.e., normally developing without incidence of a speech or language delay or disorder) Spanish/Englishspeaking children ages 4 to 5 years old would show different articulation productions and phonological patterns in both languages. Sixteen participants from Florida were tested with Spanish and English articulation and phonology tests. For articulation, two manner or

Cross-language studies have shown that Voice Onset Time (VOT) is a sufficient cue to separate initial stop consonants into phonemic categories. The present study used VOT as a linguistic cue in examining the perception and production of stop consonants in three groups of subjects: unilingual Canadian French, unilingual Canadian English, and bilingual French-English speakers. Perception was studied by having subjects label synthetically produced stop-vowel syllables while production was as•ssed through spectrographic measure-menCs of VOT in word-initial stops. Six stop consonants, common to both languages, were used for these tasks. On the perception task, the two groups of unilingual subjects showed different perceptual cro•sovers with those of the bilinguals occupying an intermediate position. The production data indicate that VOT measures can separate voicing contrasts for speakers of Canadian English, but not for speakers of Canadian French. The data also show that language switching in bilinguals is well controlled for production but poorly controlled for perception at the phonological level.

Time Limit: 1 second In the Marvelous Mountain, there are N attractions. Each attraction is labeled from 1 to N. There are M one-way cable car lines to connect pairs of attractions. The length of a cable car line is a positive integer. As we want most visitors to travel from the attraction S to the attraction T, we should consider possible plans to reduce the length of the shortest path to travel from S to T. We have a list of proposals with K new two-way cable car lines that can be built. Your task is to select one of the K proposed cable car lines to build so that, upon finishing this new cable car line, the length of the shortest path from S to T is minimized. Input The first line contains five integer numbers: N, M, K, S, and T (N ≤ 10 5 , M ≤ 2 × 10 5 , K < 10 5 , 1 ≤ S, T ≤ N, and S ≠ T). The i th line of the following M lines contains 3 positive integer numbers: ai, bi, and li, denoting that the i th cable car line is from the attraction ai to the attraction bi, and has the length of li (li ≤ 10 9). The j th line of the following K lines contains 3 positive integer numbers: uj, vj, qj, denoting that the new possible two-way cable car line can be built from uj to vj (and vice versa), with the length for each way of qj (qj ≤ 10 9). Output Display an integer number that is the minimum length of the shortest path to go from S to T, after building a new two-way cable car line. Print-1 if there is no way to go from S to T, even with any new cable car line in the proposal list.

A case study with a 12-year-old boy, R.F., who was a monolingual speaker of Greek is reported. R.F. showed slow word reading and a difficulty in spelling irregular words but not nonwords. Assessments revealed that R.F. did not appear to have a phonological deficit, but indicated impaired multicharacter processing ability for visually presented letter arrays. On the basis of previous research linking multicharacter processing and reading we developed an intervention aimed at improving R.F.’s ability to report letter arrays of increasing length. Following a 9-week programme, improvement was observed, and investigation of R.F.’s reading revealed gains in single word reading speed and accuracy. The findings support the significance of intervention studies for testing hypotheses regarding causal relationships among cognitive processes and the notion of specific profiles of developmental dyslexia/dysgraphia in both opaque and transparent orthographies.

Disponível em: http://www.redalyc.org/src/inicio/ArtPdfRed.jsp?iCve=169320515017 ... Redalyc Sistema de Informação Científica Rede de Revistas Científicas da América Latina o Caribe, a Espanha e Portugal ... Nogueira Gregio, Fabiana; Gama-Rossi, Aglael; Madureira, ...

Biological and cultural factors have been found to have a significant influence on cognitive development and performance in neuropsychological instruments such as verbal fluency tasks (VFT). Variations of traditional VFT, involving unconstrained word production and increased retrieval times, may provide further data regarding the executive, attentional, mnemonic, and linguistic abilities involved in VFT. As such, the aim of this study was to investigate the impact of age and school type on the performance of 6- to 12-year-old children in unconstrained, phonemic, and semantic VFT. The VFT were administered to 460 participants. The effects of age and school type on verbal fluency (VF) performance were analyzed using a two-way analysis of variance, followed by Bonferroni post-hoc tests (p ≤ .05). A repeated-measures analysis was also used to evaluate VF performance over time (p ≤ .05). Main effects of age and school type were identified on all measures (effect sizes ranged from .05 to .32, p ≤ .05). VF scores increased with age and were higher among private school students. The influence of age on VFT may be associated with the development of executive functions. The impact of type of school on VF performance may be explained by the greater availability of cognitive stimulation (semantic knowledge) provided by private schools and families with better socioeconomic levels.

Achieving progress in understanding the cause, nature, and treatment of autism requires an integration of concepts, approaches, and empirical findings from genetic, cognitive neuroscience, animal, and clinical studies. The need for such integration has been a fundamental tenet of the discipline of developmental psychopathology from its inception. It is likely that the discovery of autism susceptibility genes will depend on the development of dimensional measures of broader phenotype autism traits. It is argued that knowledge of the cognitive neuroscience of social and language behavior will provide a useful framework for defining such measures. In this article, the current state of knowledge of the cognitive neuroscience of social and language impairments in autism is reviewed. Following from this, six candidate broader phenotype autism traits are proposed: (a) face processing, including structural encoding of facial features and face movements, such as eye gaze; (b) social affiliat...

The authors used 2 "visual-world" eye-tracking experiments to examine lexical access using Dutch constructions in which the verb did or did not place semantic constraints on its subsequent subject noun phrase. In Experiment 1, fixations to the picture of a cohort competitor (overlapping with the onset of the referent's name, the subject) did not differ from fixations to a distractor in the constraining-verb condition. In Experiment 2, cross-splicing introduced phonetic information that temporarily biased the input toward the cohort competitor. Fixations to the cohort competitor temporarily increased in both the neutral and constraining conditions. These results favor models in which mapping from the input onto meaning is continuous over models in which contextual effects follow access of an initial form-based competitor set.

This study aims to characterize the nature of the dynamic spectral change in vowels in three distinct regional varieties of American English spoken in the Western North Carolina, in Central Ohio, and in Southern Wisconsin. The vowels /(, , e, ae, a(/ were produced by 48 women for a total of 1920 utterances and were contained in words of the structure /bVts/ and /bVdz/ in sentences which elicited nonemphatic and emphatic vowels. Measurements made at the vowel target ͑i.e., the central 60% of the vowel͒ produced a set of acoustic parameters which included position and movement in the F1 by F2 space, vowel duration, amount of spectral change ͓measured as vector length ͑VL͒ and trajectory length ͑TL͔͒, and spectral rate of change. Results revealed expected variation in formant dynamics as a function of phonetic factors ͑vowel emphasis and consonantal context͒. However, for each vowel and for each measure employed, dialect was a strong source of variation in vowel-inherent spectral change. In general, the dialect-specific nature and amount of spectral change can be characterized quite effectively by position and movement in the F1 by F2 space, vowel duration, TL ͑but not VL which underestimates formant movement͒, and spectral rate of change.

This study investigated the effect of multilingual linguistic experience on the perception of Japanese durational contrast by learners of Japanese as a foreign language at the basic level. Five monolingual and five multilingual learners listened to recorded sentences c)ntaining the utterances /iken/ or /ikken/ and were asked to identify which of the two utterances was employed in each sentence. Amongst the multilingual subjects, some spoke languages that utilize segmental durations phonemically, whilst some spoke languages that did not. Although the results indicated superior perceptual performance by multilingual learners over monolingual learners, there was no significant difference between the two types of multilingual subjects. The results support the hypothesis that not only specific but also non-specific, broadened linguistic experience can result in increased perceptual performance. Other results and their implications are discussed. (Contains 29 references.) (MDM) Reproducti...

Italian roots in Australian soil: coronal obstruents in native dialect speech of Italian-Australians from two areas of Veneto. We will discuss the maintenance of the heritage dialect coronal fricatives in the speech of Italian-Australian trilinguals (dialect/Italian/English) originating from North Veneto, Italy, as compared to the variability found in the productions of comparable Italian-Australian trilinguals originating from Central Veneto. Results on coronal fricatives&#39; distribution based on narrow phonetic trancriptions and on their acoustic characteristics based on spectral moments analysis show that the immigrants have generally maintained the fine-grained features of their dialect. After more than five decades of residence in Australia, traces of interlinguistic influences exerted by L3-English are evident in one speaker only. We consider both internal (linguistic) and external (sociolinguistic) factors for this difference in maintenance of first language speech features...

Young children with Pierre Robin sequence are at considerable risk to develop delayed or disordered communication development. This study investigated the effectiveness of early communication intervention with four young children with Pierre Robin sequence, aged 5 to 28 months. The Proportional Change Index (Wolery, 1983) was used to determine the amount of child progress that took place during the intervention period. The results indicated that regular early communication intervention sessions over an extended period of time produced positive results, especially for expressive language abilities. The presence of a slight hearing loss due to otitis media, seemed to have influenced the effectiveness of early communication intervention. One subject displayed an associated disorder and evidenced the slowest rate of development for receptive and expressive language abilities as well as a limited phonetic repertoire for consonants. All but one subject had limited phonetic repertoires pos...

This study tested the relationship between prelinguistic vocalization and expressive vocabulary 1 year later in young children with mild to moderate developmental delays. Three vocalization variables were tested: rate of all vocalization, rate of vocalizations with consonants, and rate of vocalizations used interactively. The 58 toddlers in the study were 17–34 months old, not sensory impaired, and had Bayley Mental Development Indices (Bayley, 1969; Bayley, 1993) from 35–85. In addition, the children had fewer than 3 words in their expressive vocabularies and during classroom observation each showed at least one instance of intentional prelinguistic communication before testing. Selected sections of the Communication and Symbolic Behavior Scales procedures (CSBS; Wetherby & Prizant, 1993) were administered at the beginning and at the end of the study. The vocal measures were obtained in the initial CSBS session. One measure of expressive vocabulary was obtained in the CSBS session ...

Amplifier analysis using superposition is often facilitated by the use of signal flow graphs. A signal flow graph, or flow graph for short, is a graphical representation of a set of linear equations which can be used to write by inspection the solution to the set of equations. For example, consider the set of equations

Background: Analyses from the Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia project show that the key childhood predictors (phonological awareness, short-term memory, rapid naming, expressive vocabulary, pseudoword repetition, and letter naming) of dyslexia differentiate the group with reading disability (n ¼ 46) and the group without reading problems (n ¼ 152) at the end of the 2nd grade. These measures were employed at the ages of 3.5, 4.5 and 5.5 years and information regarding the familial risk of dyslexia was used to find the most sensitive indices of an individual child's risk for reading disability. Methods: Age-specific and across-age logistic regression models were constructed to produce the risk indices. The predictive ability of the risk indices was explored using the ROC (receiver operating curve) plot. Information from the logistic models was further utilised in illustrating the risk with probability curve presentations. Results: The logistic regression models with familial risk, letter knowledge, phonological awareness and RAN provided a prediction probability above .80 (area under ROC). Conclusions: The models including familial risk status and the three above-mentioned measures offer a rough screening procedure for estimating an individual child's risk for reading disability at the age of 3.5 years. Probability curves are presented as a method of illustrating the risk.

Normal maturation and functioning of the central auditory system affects the development of speech perception and oral language capabilities. This study examined maturation of central auditory pathways as reflected by age-related changes in the P1/N1 components of the auditory evoked potential (AEP). A synthesized consonant-vowel syllable (ba) was used to elicit cortical AEPs in 86 normal children ranging in age from 6 to 15 years and ten normal adults. Distinct age-related changes were observed in the morphology of the AEP waveform. The adult response consists of a prominent negativity (N1) at about 100 ms, preceded by a smaller P1 component at about 50 ms. In contrast, the child response is characterized by a large P1 response at about 100 ms. This wave decreases significantly in latency and amplitude up to about 20 years of age. In children, P1 is followed by a broad negativity at about 200 ms which we term N1b. Many subjects (especially older children) also show an earlier negativity (N1a). Both N1a and N1b latencies decrease significantly with age. Amplitudes of N1a and N1b do not show significant age-related changes. All children have the N1b; however, the frequency of occurrence of N1a increases with age. Data indicate that the child P1 develops systematically into the adult response; however, the relationship of N1a and N1b to the adult N1 is unclear. These results indicate that maturational changes in the central auditory system are complex and extend well into the second decade of life.

The present study examined listeners' identification and rating of words in passages as "stuttered" when the duration and frequency of occurrence of sound prolongations were manipulated. Thirty-six participants listened to a 219-word passage containing voiceless fricatives digitally increased from their normal durations to 200, 300, and 420 ms. Listeners heard one of three passages that contained 5%, 10% or 15% altered stimuli within the passage. In Condition 1, listeners identified words considered "stuttered." In Condition 2, listeners rated specifically selected words in the passage relative to the extent they considered the words "stuttered." The results showed that 1) both the duration and the frequency of occurrence of the altered phonemes within the paragraph length material had an impact on listeners' perception of words identified as a sound prolongation; 2) listeners gave significantly higher ratings in Condition 2 than Condition 1 when determining if a word was stuttered or produced fluently. The implications of these results are discussed.

Reading involves phonologic decoding, in which readers ``sound out&#39;&#39; a word; orthographic decoding, in which readers recognize a word visually, as in ``sight reading&#39;&#39;; and comprehension. Because reading can involve multiple processes, dyslexia might be a heterogeneous disorder. This study investigated behavior and gross lobar anatomy in subtypes of dyslexic and control subjects. Subjects aged 18 to 25 years with identified reading problems and a group of healthy controls were given cognitive and behavioral tests and volumetric brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Because atypical cerebral laterality has been proposed as a potential neural risk for dyslexia, dyslexic and control subjects were compared on anatomy of gross lobar regions. On asymmetry quotients, no significant differences were found between groups. Examination of the percentage of total brain volume of each structure revealed that control and dyslexic subjects were significantly different (P = .018)....