scholarly journals The Role of the Auditory and Visual Modalities in the Perceptual Identification of Brazilian Portuguese Statements and Echo Questions

2020 ◽  
pp. 002383091989888
Author(s):  
Luma Miranda ◽  
Marc Swerts ◽  
João Moraes ◽  
Albert Rilliard

This paper presents the results of three perceptual experiments investigating the role of auditory and visual channels for the identification of statements and echo questions in Brazilian Portuguese. Ten Brazilian speakers (five male) were video-recorded (frontal view of the face) while they produced a sentence (“ Como você sabe”), either as a statement (meaning “ As you know.”) or as an echo question (meaning “ As you know?”). Experiments were set up including the two different intonation contours. Stimuli were presented in conditions with clear and degraded audio as well as congruent and incongruent information from both channels. Results show that Brazilian listeners were able to distinguish statements and questions prosodically and visually, with auditory cues being dominant over visual ones. In noisy conditions, the visual channel improved the interpretation of prosodic cues robustly, while it degraded them in conditions where the visual information was incongruent with the auditory information. This study shows that auditory and visual information are integrated during speech perception, also when applied to prosodic patterns.

2012 ◽  
Vol 25 (0) ◽  
pp. 148
Author(s):  
Marcia Grabowecky ◽  
Emmanuel Guzman-Martinez ◽  
Laura Ortega ◽  
Satoru Suzuki

Watching moving lips facilitates auditory speech perception when the mouth is attended. However, recent evidence suggests that visual attention and awareness are mediated by separate mechanisms. We investigated whether lip movements suppressed from visual awareness can facilitate speech perception. We used a word categorization task in which participants listened to spoken words and determined as quickly and accurately as possible whether or not each word named a tool. While participants listened to the words they watched a visual display that presented a video clip of the speaker synchronously speaking the auditorily presented words, or the same speaker articulating different words. Critically, the speaker’s face was either visible (the aware trials), or suppressed from awareness using continuous flash suppression. Aware and suppressed trials were randomly intermixed. A secondary probe-detection task ensured that participants attended to the mouth region regardless of whether the face was visible or suppressed. On the aware trials responses to the tool targets were no faster with the synchronous than asynchronous lip movements, perhaps because the visual information was inconsistent with the auditory information on 50% of the trials. However, on the suppressed trials responses to the tool targets were significantly faster with the synchronous than asynchronous lip movements. These results demonstrate that even when a random dynamic mask renders a face invisible, lip movements are processed by the visual system with sufficiently high temporal resolution to facilitate speech perception.


1980 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-405 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernst B. Haas

Why do nations create institutionalized modes of multilateral collaboration? How can common interests develop in the face of inequalities in power and asymmetries in interdependence? The author explores the role of knowledge in the definition of political objectives and interests. The systematic interplay of changing knowledge and changing objectives results in the redefinition of “issues” and the practice of “issue linkage.” The dynamics of issue-linkage, in turn, tell us something about international regimes for the management of progressively more complex issue areas. An ideal-typical “regime” is described, theoretically applicable to all types of issues. Since the cognitive attributes of the actors who set up such a regime cannot be expected to remain stable, this concept of a “regime” can illuminate cliscussion and analysis, but cannot be expected to provide a clear model for desirable policy. However, it can illustrate the options open to policy makers wishing to choose a mode of collaboration. Regimes dealing with money, the oceans, and technology transfer are used for illustrative purposes.


2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 653-679 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nida Latif ◽  
Agnès Alsius ◽  
K. G. Munhall

During conversations, we engage in turn-taking behaviour that proceeds back and forth effortlessly as we communicate. In any given day, we participate in numerous face-to-face interactions that contain social cues from our partner and we interpret these cues to rapidly identify whether it is appropriate to speak. Although the benefit provided by visual cues has been well established in several areas of communication, the use of visual information to make turn-taking decisions during conversation is unclear. Here we conducted two experiments to investigate the role of visual information in identifying conversational turn exchanges. We presented clips containing single utterances spoken by single individuals engaged in a natural conversation with another. These utterances were from either right before a turn exchange (i.e., when the current talker would finish and the other would begin) or were utterances where the same talker would continue speaking. In Experiment 1, participants were presented audiovisual, auditory-only and visual-only versions of our stimuli and identified whether a turn exchange would occur or not. We demonstrated that although participants could identify turn exchanges with unimodal information alone, they performed best in the audiovisual modality. In Experiment 2, we presented participants audiovisual turn exchanges where the talker, the listener or both were visible. We showed that participants suffered a cost at identifying turns exchanges when visual cues from the listener were not available. Overall, we demonstrate that although auditory information is sufficient for successful conversation, visual information plays an important role in the overall efficiency of communication.


2015 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 443-461 ◽  
Author(s):  
TAHIR KAMRAN

AbstractThis article sets out to delineate the process that led to the establishment of Mayo School of Arts in Lahore in 1875. It lays down the context within which the plan to set up art institutions in India was conceived. Contrary to Krishnan Kumar's view whereby the coloniser and the colonised constituted an adult-child relationship the coloniser, in that particular relationship took the role of the adult whereas the native became the child which had been a salient feature of the educational and academic landscape of British India. By challenging Krishna Kumar, this article while drawing on the inferences of Partha Mitter and Hussain Ahmad Khan, argues that in the realm of art instruction the analysis of colonial strategies of adjustment and readjustment provide useful insights about the administrative constraints and cognitive failures of the colonial administrators in the nineteenth-Century Punjab. Challenges like space-selection for MSA campus, appropriate Curriculum for the students and their inadequate language skills stared its founder Principal Lockwood Kipling (1837–19011) in the face. This forms the major focus of the article.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Hye-Jung CHO ◽  
Jieun KIAER ◽  
Naya CHOI ◽  
Jieun SONG

Abstract In Korean language, questions containing ambiguous wh-words may be interpreted as either wh-questions or yes-no questions. This study investigated 43 Korean three-year-olds’ ability to disambiguate eight indeterminate questions using prosodic and visual cues. The intonation of each question provided a cue as to whether it should be interpreted as a wh-question or a yes-no question. The questions were presented alongside picture stimuli, which acted as either a matched (presentation of corresponding auditory-visual stimuli) or a mismatched contextual cue (presentation conflicting auditory-visual stimuli). Like adults, the children preferred to comprehend questions involving ambiguous wh-words as wh-questions, rather than yes-no questions. In addition, children were as effective as adults in disambiguating indeterminate questions using prosodic cues regardless of the visual cue. However, when confronted with conflicting auditory-visual stimuli (mismatched), the quality of children's responses was less accurate than adults’ responses.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 03-13
Author(s):  
René Alain Santana de Almeida ◽  
Miguel Oliveira Junior ◽  
Reinier Cozijn

The present paper aims to analyze the role of prosody in the resolution of global ambiguity in sentences of the type NP1 - Verb - NP2 - Adverb of place - Adverb of intensity (very) - Attribute, e.g., “The guitarist received the drummer at the room very drugged” (O guitarrista recebeu o baterista no quarto bastante drogado), in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). We consider the hypothesis that prosodic cues, such as stress and pause, assist in the process of disambiguation, both in isolation and in conjunction. The experimental paradigm of the present study used an off-line method of linguistic processing through a questionnaire with Likert scale questions. The results revealed a predominance of non-local apposition judgments in all analyzed conditions. However, the choice of assigning the adjective to the first nominal phrase increased, in a statistically significant way, in the conditions in which there was prosodic manipulation for that purpose, confirmation our hypothesis.


2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 654-690
Author(s):  
RADHA KAPURIA

AbstractThis article focuses on performing artists at the court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh (r. 1801–39), the last fully sovereign ruler of the Punjab and leader of what is termed the Sikh empire. After Ranjit's death, his successors ruled for a mere decade before British annexation in 1849. Ranjit Singh's kingdom has been studied for the extraordinary authority it exercised over warring Sikh factions and for the strong challenge it posed to political rivals like the British. Scholarly exploration of cultural efflorescence at the Lahore court has ignored the role of performing artistes, despite a preponderance of references to them in both Persian chronicles of the Lahore court and in European travelogues of the time. I demonstrate how Ranjit Singh was partial to musicians and dancers as a class, even marrying two Muslim courtesans in the face of stiff Sikh orthodoxy. A particular focus is on Ranjit's corps of ‘Amazons’—female dancers performing martial feats dressed as men—the cynosure of all eyes, especially male European, and their significance in representing the martial glory of the Sikh state. Finally, I evaluate the curious cultural misunderstandings that arose when English ‘dancing’ encountered Indian ‘nautching’, revealing how gender was the primary axis around which Indian and European male statesmen alike expressed their power. Ubiquitous in the daily routine of Ranjit and the lavish entertainments set up for visitors, musicians and female performers lay at the interstices of the Indo-European encounter, and Anglo-Sikh interactions in particular.


2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 204-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janne Weijkamp ◽  
Makiko Sadakata

Individuals with more musical training repeatedly demonstrate enhanced auditory perception abilities. The current study examined how these enhanced auditory skills interact with attention to affective audio-visual stimuli. A total of 16 participants with more than 5 years of musical training (musician group) and 16 participants with less than 2 years of musical training (non-musician group) took part in a version of the audio-visual emotional Stroop test, using happy, neutral, and sad emotions. Participants were presented with congruent and incongruent combinations of face and voice stimuli while judging the emotion of either the face or the voice. As predicted, musicians were less susceptible to interference from visual information on auditory emotion judgments than non-musicians, as evidenced by musicians being more accurate when judging auditory emotions when presented with congruent and incongruent visual information. Musicians were also more accurate than non-musicians at identifying visual emotions when presented with concurrent auditory information. Thus, musicians were less influenced by congruent/incongruent information in a non-target modality compared to non-musicians. The results suggest that musical training influences audio-visual information processing.


Author(s):  
Hendrik Hart

Religion acquired a bad press in philosophical modernity after a rivalry developed between philosophy and theology, originating in philosophy’s adopting the role of our culture’s superjudge in all of morality and knowledge, and in faith’s coming to be seen as belief, that is, as assent to propositional content. Religion, no longer trust in the face of mystery, became a belief system. Reason as judge of propositional belief set up religion’s decline. But spirituality is on the rise, and favors trust over reason. Philosophy could make space for the spiritual by acknowledging a difference between belief as propositional assent and religious faith as trust, a distinction lost with the mixing of Greek philosophy and Christian faith. Artistic or religious truth disappeared as authentic forms of knowing. But Michael Polanyi reintroduced knowledge as more than can be thought. Also postmodern and feminist thought urge us to abandon autonomous reason as sole limit to knowledge. We have space again for philosophy to look at openness to the spiritual. If spirituality confronts us with the mystery of the existential boundary conditions, religion may be a form of relating to the mystery that confronts us from beyond the bounds of reason. That mystery demands our attention if we are to be fully in touch with perennial issues of human meaning.


2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 120-140
Author(s):  
Maria Cristina Vidotte Blanco Tárrega

O escravismo colonial, como vetor de um processo de organização do capital e de construção de um sistema mundo, engendra uma perene desqualificação do Negro e o coloca às margens do mundo ocidental, transformando-o, no mundo globalizado contemporâneo, em sujeito de conflitos ecológicos distributivos, na luta por seus direitos. A partir disso e na perspectiva do direito, propõe-se refletir sobre a condição histórica do Negro como agente central e sujeito da luta e da resistência na conformação do capitalismo, para ressignificar o papel desses sujeitos de direito e de suas lutas nos conflitos originários do desenvolvimentismo globalizado. Faz-se uma abordagem analítica na literatura especializada sobre escravidão. Os conflitos ecológicos foram pensados a partir da ecologia política e o racismo foi abordado a partir da filosofia e da história críticas. Dos resultados, têm-se que o regime escravocrata foi central na construção do sistema mundo capitalista e que o direito estatal moderno serviu a instituição desse regime, negando a condição de sujeitos de direito aos escravizados.  O direito moderno legitimou a hegemonia dos senhores de escravos e a inexistência de direitos aos cativos, mas criou as condições necessárias para a insurgência e o devir de resistência do ser escravizado, no âmbito de sua humanidade prorrogada.  Essa resistência é perene diante do avanço das fronteiras do progresso, que invadem os territórios tradicionais ocupados pelos excluídos do direito no sistema capitalista, sobretudo os Negros. Instalam-se conflitos ecológicos distributivos e no âmbito deles as gentes resistem e os massacres acontecem. O racismo, como processo histórico continua. Abstract: The colonial slavery, as a vector of a process of capital organization and the construction of a world system, engenders a perennial disqualification of the Black people and places it on the margins of the Western world, transforming it into a subject of ecological conflicts in the contemporary globalized world distributive, in the fight for their rights. From this and from the perspective of law, it is proposed to reflect on the historical condition of the Negro as a central agent and subject of struggle and resistance in the conformation of capitalism, to re-signify the role of these subjects of law and their struggles in the conflicts originated in the development. An analytical approach is made in the specialized literature on slavery. The ecological conflicts were thought from the political ecology and the racism was approached from the critical philosophy and history. From the results, it is shown that the slave system was central to the construction of the capitalist world system and that modern state law served the institution of this regime, denying the condition of subjects of law to the enslaved. Modern law legitimized the hegemony of the slave owners and the lack of rights to the captives but created the necessary conditions for the insurgency and the becoming of resistance of the enslaved, within the scope of his extended humanity. This resistance is perennial in the face of the advance of the frontiers of progress, which invade the traditional territories occupied by those excluded from law in the capitalist system, especially the Blacks. Distributive ecological conflicts are set up and within them people resist and massacres happen. Racism as a historical process continues.


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