This study investigates the importance of source spectrum slopes in the perception of phonation by White Hmong listeners. In White Hmong, non-modal phonation (breathy or creaky voice) accompanies certain lexical tones, but its importance in tonal contrasts is unclear. In this study, native listeners participated in two perception tasks, in which they were asked to identify the word they heard. ...

Acquisitionists in the 1960's and 1970's have interpreted the semantic and syntactic patterns evident in children's two -word combinations under one of three analyses. These consist of (i) combinations of closed classes of constant terms (pivots) with a set of open class forms (Braine 1963), (ii) a set of surface structures reduced by transformations from underlying structures displaying semant...

In a previous production study [1] we explored the prosodic marking of thematic material in contrastive and non-contrastive contexts in German. While both conditions resulted in a prenuclear rise, we found that themes in contrastive context exhibited a significantly longer stressed vowel, together with a higher and later peak. Interestingly, speakers varied as to whether they used peak alignmen...

Lifelong competence development is a fundamental premise for an information society, as well as major aim and challenge. Facing the variety of learning programs and qualification measures, problems emerge in supporting lifelong learning. Efficient competence development necessitates providing learners with learning opportunities which are appropriate for their current knowledge and for their in...

This paper investigates Arabic terms used as equivalents for English consonants and vowels. The terms, namely harf sakin (consonants) harakat (vowels), are specifically tailored the study of linguistic items. In bilingual dictionaries, do not truly reflect realities represented by vowels consonants. aim is therefore to identify that represent within environment. A sketch contrastive analysis in...

PURPOSE This study examined the perception of fundamental frequency (f0) patterns by Cantonese children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). METHOD Participants were 14 five-year-old children with SLI, and 14 age-matched (AM) and 13 four-year-old vocabulary-matched (VM) controls. The children identified a word from familiar word pairs that illustrated the 8 minimally contrasti...

The human semantic combinatorial system allows us to create a wide number of new meanings from a finite number of existing representations. The present study investigates the neural dynamics underlying the semantic processing of different conceptual constructions based on predictions from previous neuroanatomical models of the semantic processing network. In two experiments, participants read s...

Pseudo-likelihood and contrastive divergence are two well-known examples of contrastive methods. These algorithms trade off the probability of the correct label with the probabilities of other “nearby” instantiations. In this paper we explore more general types of contrastive objectives, which trade off the probability of the correct label against an arbitrary set of other instantiations. We pr...