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The Journal of the Acoustical Society... Nov 2019The human voice is a complex acoustic signal that conveys talker identity via individual differences in numerous features, including vocal source acoustics, vocal tract...
The human voice is a complex acoustic signal that conveys talker identity via individual differences in numerous features, including vocal source acoustics, vocal tract resonances, and dynamic articulations during speech. It remains poorly understood how differences in these features contribute to perceptual dissimilarity of voices and, moreover, whether linguistic differences between listeners and talkers interact during perceptual judgments of voices. Here, native English- and Mandarin-speaking listeners rated the perceptual dissimilarity of voices speaking English or Mandarin from either forward or time-reversed speech. The language spoken by talkers, but not listeners, principally influenced perceptual judgments of voices. Perceptual dissimilarity judgments of voices were always highly correlated between listener groups and forward/time-reversed speech. Representational similarity analyses that explored how acoustic features (fundamental frequency mean and variation, jitter, harmonics-to-noise ratio, speech rate, and formant dispersion) contributed to listeners' perceptual dissimilarity judgments, including how talker- and listener-language affected these relationships, found the largest effects relating to voice pitch. Overall, these data suggest that, while linguistic factors may influence perceptual judgments of voices, the magnitude of such effects tends to be very small. Perceptual judgments of voices by listeners of different native language backgrounds tend to be more alike than different.
Topics: Adult; Female; Humans; Male; Phonetics; Psycholinguistics; Speech Acoustics; Speech Perception; Voice
PubMed: 31795676
DOI: 10.1121/1.5126697 -
Schizophrenia Research Jul 2018Acoustic phonetic methods are useful in examining some symptoms of schizophrenia; we used such methods to understand the underpinnings of aprosody. We hypothesized that,...
OBJECTIVE
Acoustic phonetic methods are useful in examining some symptoms of schizophrenia; we used such methods to understand the underpinnings of aprosody. We hypothesized that, compared to controls and patients without clinically rated aprosody, patients with aprosody would exhibit reduced variability in: pitch (F0), jaw/mouth opening and tongue height (formant F1), tongue front/back position and/or lip rounding (formant F2), and intensity/loudness.
METHODS
Audiorecorded speech was obtained from 98 patients (including 25 with clinically rated aprosody and 29 without) and 102 unaffected controls using five tasks: one describing a drawing, two based on spontaneous speech elicited through a question (Tasks 2 and 3), and two based on reading prose excerpts (Tasks 4 and 5). We compared groups on variation in pitch (F0), formant F1 and F2, and intensity/loudness.
RESULTS
Regarding pitch variation, patients with aprosody differed significantly from controls in Task 5 in both unadjusted tests and those adjusted for sociodemographics. For the standard deviation (SD) of F1, no significant differences were found in adjusted tests. Regarding SD of F2, patients with aprosody had lower values than controls in Task 3, 4, and 5. For variation in intensity/loudness, patients with aprosody had lower values than patients without aprosody and controls across the five tasks.
CONCLUSIONS
Findings could represent a step toward developing new methods for measuring and tracking the severity of this specific negative symptom using acoustic phonetic parameters; such work is relevant to other psychiatric and neurological disorders.
Topics: Adult; Female; Humans; Male; Phonetics; Psycholinguistics; Psychotic Disorders; Schizophrenia; Speech Acoustics; Speech Disorders; Speech Production Measurement
PubMed: 29449060
DOI: 10.1016/j.schres.2018.01.007 -
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research Feb 2015It is proposed that humans have available to them two systems for interpreting natural language. One system is familiar from formal semantics. It is a type based system... (Review)
Review
It is proposed that humans have available to them two systems for interpreting natural language. One system is familiar from formal semantics. It is a type based system that pairs a syntactic form with its interpretation using grammatical rules of composition. This system delivers both plausible and implausible meanings. The other proposed system is one that uses the grammar together with knowledge of how the human production system works. It is token based and only delivers plausible meanings, including meanings based on a repaired input when the input might have been produced as a speech error.
Topics: Humans; Language; Linguistics; Psycholinguistics; Semantics
PubMed: 25420935
DOI: 10.1007/s10936-014-9328-0 -
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review Jun 2017The complexity of eye-movement control during reading allows measurement of many dependent variables, the most prominent ones being fixation durations and their... (Review)
Review
The complexity of eye-movement control during reading allows measurement of many dependent variables, the most prominent ones being fixation durations and their locations in words. In current practice, either variable may serve as dependent variable or covariate for the other in linear mixed models (LMMs) featuring also psycholinguistic covariates of word recognition and sentence comprehension. Rather than analyzing fixation location and duration with separate LMMs, we propose linking the two according to their sequential dependency. Specifically, we include predicted fixation location (estimated in the first LMM from psycholinguistic covariates) and its associated residual fixation location as covariates in the second, fixation-duration LMM. This linked LMM affords a distinction between direct and indirect effects (mediated through fixation location) of psycholinguistic covariates on fixation durations. Results confirm the robustness of distributed processing in the perceptual span. They also offer a resolution of the paradox of the inverted optimal viewing position (IOVP) effect (i.e., longer fixation durations in the center than at the beginning and end of words) although the opposite (i.e., an OVP effect) is predicted from default assumptions of psycholinguistic processing efficiency: The IOVP effect in fixation durations is due to the residual fixation-location covariate, presumably driven primarily by saccadic error, and the OVP effect (at least the left part of it) is uncovered with the predicted fixation-location covariate, capturing the indirect effects of psycholinguistic covariates. We expect that linked LMMs will be useful for the analysis of other dynamically related multiple outcomes, a conundrum of most psychonomic research.
Topics: Comprehension; Eye Movements; Fixation, Ocular; Humans; Linear Models; Pattern Recognition, Visual; Psycholinguistics; Reading; Saccades; Time Factors
PubMed: 27612862
DOI: 10.3758/s13423-016-1138-y -
Behavior Research Methods Oct 2022Emotion lexicons are useful in research across various disciplines, but the availability of such resources remains limited for most languages. While existing emotion...
Emotion lexicons are useful in research across various disciplines, but the availability of such resources remains limited for most languages. While existing emotion lexicons typically comprise words, it is a particular meaning of a word (rather than the word itself) that conveys emotion. To mitigate this issue, we present the Emotion Meanings dataset, a novel dataset of 6000 Polish word meanings. The word meanings are derived from the Polish wordnet (plWordNet), a large semantic network interlinking words by means of lexical and conceptual relations. The word meanings were manually rated for valence and arousal, along with a variety of basic emotion categories (anger, disgust, fear, sadness, anticipation, happiness, surprise, and trust). The annotations were found to be highly reliable, as demonstrated by the similarity between data collected in two independent samples: unsupervised (n = 21,317) and supervised (n = 561). Although we found the annotations to be relatively stable for female, male, younger, and older participants, we share both summary data and individual data to enable emotion research on different demographically specific subgroups. The word meanings are further accompanied by the relevant metadata, derived from open-source linguistic resources. Direct mapping to Princeton WordNet makes the dataset suitable for research on multiple languages. Altogether, this dataset provides a versatile resource that can be employed for emotion research in psychology, cognitive science, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, and natural language processing.
Topics: Male; Female; Humans; Poland; Language; Emotions; Linguistics; Psycholinguistics
PubMed: 34893969
DOI: 10.3758/s13428-021-01697-0 -
Behavior Research Methods Aug 2021This study provides implicit verb consequentiality norms for a corpus of 305 English verbs, for which Ferstl et al. (Behavior Research Methods, 43, 124-135, 2011)...
This study provides implicit verb consequentiality norms for a corpus of 305 English verbs, for which Ferstl et al. (Behavior Research Methods, 43, 124-135, 2011) previously provided implicit causality norms. An online sentence completion study was conducted, with data analyzed from 124 respondents who completed fragments such as "John liked Mary and so…". The resulting bias scores are presented in an Appendix, with more detail in supplementary material in the University of Sussex Research Data Repository (via https://doi.org/10.25377/sussex.c.5082122 ), where we also present lexical and semantic verb features: frequency, semantic class and emotional valence of the verbs. We compare our results with those of our study of implicit causality and with the few published studies of implicit consequentiality. As in our previous study, we also considered effects of gender and verb valence, which requires stable norms for a large number of verbs. The corpus will facilitate future studies in a range of areas, including psycholinguistics and social psychology, particularly those requiring parallel sentence completion norms for both causality and consequentiality.
Topics: Emotions; Humans; Language; Prejudice; Psycholinguistics; Semantics
PubMed: 33269445
DOI: 10.3758/s13428-020-01507-z -
PloS One 2023Previous studies used techniques from network science to identify individual nodes and a set of nodes that were "important" in a network of phonological word-forms from...
Previous studies used techniques from network science to identify individual nodes and a set of nodes that were "important" in a network of phonological word-forms from English. In the present study we used a network simplification process-known as the backbone-that removed redundant edges to extract a subnetwork of "important" words from the network of phonological word-forms. The backbone procedure removed 68.5% of the edges in the original network to extract a backbone with a giant component containing 6,211 words. We compared psycholinguistic and network measures of the words in the backbone to the words that did not survive the backbone extraction procedure. Words in the backbone occurred more frequently in the language, were shorter in length, were similar to more phonological neighbors, and were closer to other words than words that did not survive the backbone extraction procedure. Words in the backbone of the phonological network might form a "kernel lexicon"-a small but essential set of words that allows one to communicate in a wide-range of situations-and may provide guidance to clinicians and researchers on which words to focus on to facilitate typical development, or to accelerate rehabilitation efforts. The backbone extraction method may also prove useful in other applications of network science to the speech, language, hearing and cognitive sciences.
Topics: Phonetics; Language; Speech; Psycholinguistics; Hearing
PubMed: 37352192
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0287197 -
PloS One 2020Recent years have seen a growing amount of research effort directed toward what positive media psychologists refer to as self-transcendent emotions, such as awe,...
Recent years have seen a growing amount of research effort directed toward what positive media psychologists refer to as self-transcendent emotions, such as awe, admiration, elevation, gratitude, inspiration, and hope. While these emotions are invaluable to promote greater human connectedness, prosociality, and human flourishing, researchers are constrained in terms of analyzing self-transcendent emotions as expressed in spoken and written languages. Drawing upon the word-counting approach of the text analysis paradigm, this project aimed at constructing a dictionary tool-Self-Transcendent Emotion Dictionary (STED)-which can be uploaded into mainstream, text analytic software (e.g., LIWC) to identify and analyze self-transcendent emotions in large corpora. This dictionary tool was then refined and validated via three studies, where individual words were first rated with regard to their fitness into the proposed construct (Step 1), and then used to analyze essays written to reflect the corresponding construct (Step 2). Finally, the refined dictionary was applied to examine words used in nearly 4,000 human-coded New York Times articles (Step 3). Results indicated that the final dictionary, consisting of 351 lexicons and phrases, exhibits acceptable face and construct validity, and possesses a reasonable level of external validity and applicability. Despite its shortcoming in accounting for the rhetorical techniques ingrained in natural human language, the STED could be instrumental for social scientific inquiry of positive emotions in textual narratives.
Topics: Data Mining; Dictionaries as Topic; Emotions; Hope; Humans; Language; Narration; Newspapers as Topic; Psycholinguistics; Semantics; Software; Writing
PubMed: 32915905
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0239050 -
Topics in Cognitive Science Jan 2020This is the Editor's introduction to the Special Issue of TopiCS in honor of Lila R. Gleitman's receipt of the 2017 David E. Rumelhart Prize. The introduction gives an...
This is the Editor's introduction to the Special Issue of TopiCS in honor of Lila R. Gleitman's receipt of the 2017 David E. Rumelhart Prize. The introduction gives an overview of Gleitman's intellectual history and scientific contributions, and it briefly reviews each of the contributions to the issue.
Topics: Awards and Prizes; Cognitive Science; History, 20th Century; History, 21st Century; Humans; Psycholinguistics
PubMed: 31904915
DOI: 10.1111/tops.12484 -
Topics in Cognitive Science Oct 2018The paper defines the core components of an interactive-phonetic (IP) sound change model. The starting point for the IP-model is that a phonological category is often... (Review)
Review
The paper defines the core components of an interactive-phonetic (IP) sound change model. The starting point for the IP-model is that a phonological category is often skewed phonetically in a certain direction by the production and perception of speech. A prediction of the model is that sound change is likely to come about as a result of perceiving phonetic variants in the direction of the skew and at the probabilistic edge of the listener's phonological category. The results of agent-based computational simulations applied to the sound change in progress, /u/-fronting in Standard Southern British, were consistent with this hypothesis. The model was extended to sound changes involving splits and mergers by using the interaction between the agents to drive the phonological reclassification of perceived speech signals. The simulations showed no evidence of any acoustic change when this extended model was applied to Australian English data in which /s/ has been shown to retract due to coarticulation in /str/ clusters. Some agents nevertheless varied in their phonological categorizations during interaction between /str/ and /ʃtr/: This vacillation may represent the potential for sound change to occur. The general conclusion is that many types of sound change are the outcome of how phonetic distributions are oriented with respect to each other, their association to phonological classes, and how these types of information vary between speakers that happen to interact with each other.
Topics: Humans; Models, Psychological; Phonetics; Psycholinguistics; Speech Perception
PubMed: 29582572
DOI: 10.1111/tops.12329