Objectives. In 2 studies, we aimed to describe the content of mothers’ verbal warnings to their young children and to investigate whether mothers modify their warnings based on the type of dangerous situation and children’s age. Study 1. Mothers of 12-, 18-, and 24-month-olds reported in a telephone interview the words and phrases they would use to prevent their children from falling, touching ...

Information Extraction (IE) from text /web documents has become an important application area of AI. As the number of web sites and documents has grown dramatically, the users need an easy, fast and flexible ways of generating systems that can carry out specific IE tasks. This can be achieved with the help of Machine Learning (ML) techniques. We have developed a system that exploits this strate...

In an eye-tracking study, we examined how fine-grained phonetic detail, such as segment duration, influences the lexical competition process during spoken word recognition. Dutch listeners' eye movements to pictures of four objects were monitored as they heard sentences in which a stop-initial target word (e.g., pijp "pipe") was preceded by an [s]. The participants made more fixations to pictur...

The present study investigated whether aurally presented mimetic words affect the judgment of the final position of a moving object. In Experiment 1, horizontal apparent motion of a visual target was presented, and an auditory mimetic word of "byun" (representing rapid forward motion), "pitari" (representing stop of motion), or "nisahi" (nonsense syllable) was presented via headphones. Observer...

To distinguish Japanese single and geminate stops in twoand three-mora words spoken at varied speaking rates, the ratio of stop closure to the word in native speakers’ production was previously found to be a reliable measure. It was not clear, however, whether the stop closure relates more stably (1) to the entire “word” of any length than just (2) to the moras preceding and following the contr...

Passage retrieval plays an important role in a Chinese factoid Question Answering (QA) system. Query term selection is the process of choosing keywords from a given question to make the most use of information retrieval engines. Query terms selected by humans are analyzed to measure the difficulty and for evaluating machine generated results. Three approaches, namely stop words elimination, rul...

This longitudinal study examined individual patterns and changes in /s/ + stop cluster simplifications of six normally developing children. Subjects produced selected words containing initial voiced and voiceless stops and /s/ + stop clusters at monthly intervals. Speech samples were transcribed phonetically, and voice onset times (VOT) of the stop consonants were measured. The results revealed...

This study examined duration of Japanese threeand four-mora words produced by native speakers at three speaking rates. Examined word pairs had single and geminate stop contrasts. Three types of words were used that differed in their moraic compositions including (1) a CV mora, (2) a moraic nasal, and (3) a long vowel. We found that the word type had differential effects on the contrasting stop ...