This paper aims to investigate domain-specificity of SLI, by examining SLI children’s semantic knowledge through their intonation patterns for contrastive focus and prosodic boundaries. Our results revealed that 1) SLI children's placement of contrastive focus is comparable to that of normally developing children, 2) SLI children has wider pitch range than normally developing children, and 3) S...

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Previous research by Dupoux et al. [Dupoux, E., Pallier, C., Sebastián, N., & Mehler, J. (1997). A destressing "deafness" in French? Journal of Memory Language 36, 406-421; Dupoux, E., Peperkamp, S., & Sebastián-Gallés (2001). A robust method to study stress' deafness. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 110, 1608-1618.] found that French speakers, as opposed to Spanish ones, are impai...

Learning algorithms for energy based Boltzmann architectures that rely on gradient descent are in general computationally prohibitive, typically due to the exponential number of terms involved in computing the partition function. In this way one has to resort to approximation schemes for the evaluation of the gradient. This is the case of Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM) and its learning alg...

We present a new technique called contrastive principal component analysis (cPCA) that is designed to discover low-dimensional structure that is unique to a dataset, or enriched in one dataset relative to other data. The technique is a generalization of standard PCA, for the setting where multiple datasets are available – e.g. a treatment and a control group, or a mixed versus a homogeneous pop...

In models that define probabilities via energies, maximum likelihood learning typically involves using Markov Chain Monte Carlo to sample from the model’s distribution. If the Markov chain is started at the data distribution, learning often works well even if the chain is only run for a few time steps [3]. But if the data distribution contains modes separated by regions of very low density, bri...

this paper seeks to find out the degree of the rhetorical variation between the introduction sections of research papers published in english for international journals and those published in farsi in the area of computer sciences. to this end, a corpus of 100 farsi and 100 english research papers were collected and analyzed sentence by sentence based on swales’ 1990 cars model. the results rev...

In a brief passage, David Lewis derives from quantum-theory a dilemma regarding the explanation of chance events which he tries to solve by first distinguishing plain from contrastive why-questions, and then arguing that with respect to chance events, only plain why-questions have answers. His brevity warrants elaboration and critique. I endorse his derivation, but I make a structural objection...

Both off-line and on-line comprehension studies suggest not only toddlers and preschoolers, but also older school-age children have trouble interpreting contrast-marking pitch prominence. To test whether children achieve adult-like proficiency in processing contrast-marking prosody during school years, an eye-tracking experiment examined the effect of accent on referential resolution in six- to...

This chapter deals with the articulatory and acoustic correlates of contrastive focus in French, in children and adults. Ten speakers (three 4-year-old, three 8-year-old children, and four adult males and females) were recorded while producing repetitions of the [baba] sequence in two prosodic contexts: in neutral condition and under contrastive focus. The opening (from the consonant into the v...