abstractthe liquid crystal director distribution is determined for a confined chiral nematic slab. the molecular director distribution of the field-controlled chiral nematic slab is directly calculated. the director profiles for the tilt and the twist angles, under different applied fields, are calculated in the slab with weak boundary conditions. then, the dependence of the threshold field on ...

This study explores boundary pitch movements in Taiwan Southern Min (TSM) by investigating pitch variations of final particles. Based on annotation research on the pitch targets of final particles in a 117-minute spontaneous speech corpus, it is proposed that instead of viewing such pitch variations as lexical tones, these variations should be referred to as three types boundary pitch movements...

Pitch and timbre perception are both based on the frequency content of sound, but previous perceptual experiments have disagreed about whether these two dimensions are processed independently from each other. We tested the interaction of pitch and timbre variations using sequential comparisons of sound pairs. Listeners judged whether two sequential sounds were identical along the dimension of e...

Congenital amusia, characterized by a severe problem in detecting anomalies in melodies, is a lifelong disorder that has been ascribed to an acoustical pitch deficit. In the present study, we investigated how the perception of a duration is altered when it is bounded by tones varying in pitch. The results show that temporal accuracy is impaired by pitch variations as small as a quarter of a sem...

In this work, following our previous studies, we study and quantify the effect of pitch on LPCC and PLPC features and explore their efficacy for children’s mismatched ASR in comparison to MFCC. Our analysis shows that, unlike MFCC, LPCC feature has no major influence of pitch variations. On the other hand, similar to MFCC, though PLPC is also found to be significantly effected by pitch variatio...

In this paper, we propose a preliminary framework for accounting for certain surface F0 variations in speech. The framework consists of de®nitions for pitch targets and rules of their implementation. Pitch targets are de®ned as the smallest operable units associated with linguistically functional pitch units, and they are comparable to segmental phones. The implementation rules are based on pos...

Learners of lexical tone languages (e.g., Mandarin) develop sensitivity to tonal contrasts and recognize pitch-matched, but not pitch-mismatched, familiar words by 11 months. Learners of non-tone languages (e.g., English) also show a tendency to treat pitch patterns as lexically contrastive up to about 18 months. In this study, we examined if this early-developing capacity to lexically encode p...