Individual variation in the development of the Western Vowel System of Utah

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (s2) ◽  
Author(s):  
David Bowie
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Individual Variation ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Intraindividual Variation ◽  
Monotonic Change ◽  
Intraindividual Change ◽  
Adult Lives ◽  
Linguistic Behavior ◽  
Consistent Direction

AbstractThe BIT, BING, BET, BAT, BAN, BOOK, and BUT vowels of ten Utah English speakers (born 1883–1928) were analyzed over the course of several decades of their adult lives. Most speakers participated in the Western Vowel System by lowering BIT and BET, retracting BAT, and raising BAN, with some fronting BOOK and BUT. Speakers generally did not exhibit monotonic change across the years from expected positions for BET, BAT, and BAN, and for the most part for BOOK and BUT; however, most speakers showed change with regard to BIT, though speakers differed from each other on the direction of change. Even for those vowels with no consistent direction of intraindividual change, however, in many cases speakers were inconsistent in their production from year to year. Further, speakers’ envelopes of variation were different for various vowels, with the widest range of intraindividual variation in BET and BAT, less variation in BAN and BUT, and little in BIT and BOOK. It is suggested that the envelope of variation is at least as much as an important issue for studies of linguistic behavior across adulthood as any actual shift in linguistic behavior across real time.

Intercultural pragmatics at work: (Self-)perceptions of intercultural behavior of Chinese and English speakers and interpreters in healthcare interactions

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Hlavac ◽  
Zhichang Xu ◽  
David Xiong Yong
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Cultural Groups ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Patient Centered ◽  
Chinese Speakers ◽  
Intercultural Pragmatics ◽  
Linguistic Behavior ◽  
Healthcare Situation ◽  
Chinese And English

AbstractInterpreters are expected to have an advanced command of not only the vocabulary and grammar of their working languages, but also the pragmatic norms that speakers of their working languages employ in communicative interactions. The aim of this paper is to explore the perceptions and practices of interpreters in relation to intercultural pragmatics at work in healthcare interactions. The paper employs two theoretical frameworks: the first is based on interpretations of behavior according to speakers' discourse-pragmatic features as representative of “high” or “low” context cultures (cf. Hall 1976); the second applies Celce-Murcia's (2007) more refined notion of “communicative competence.” The data sample of this paper focuses on cultural-pragmatic features of two linguistic and cultural groups – 25 Chinese speakers and 24 English speakers – and contrasts their selected responses to five features of Chinese-English interpreted healthcare interactions. Responses from 33 Chinese-English interpreters are matched against those from speakers of the two groups to examine the degree of congruence that interpreters have with the self-reported (para-)linguistic behavior of the two groups of speakers, for whom they interpret. This study shows that the self-reported (para-)linguistic behavior of both groups is determined by their adoption of a particular approach (doctor- vs. patient-centered approach) and other micro-level features (perceived time constraints, different notions of “small talk”) that limit elaborate pragmatic enactments. Over-arching cultural-pragmatic models based on “high” (or “low”) context communication, or “vertical” (vs. “horizontal”) hierarchical perceptions of role and status appear to have limited application to the data. Instead, local features specific to the healthcare situation co-determine both English and Chinese speakers' responses to questions about their use of pragmatics. Findings indicate that interpreters attend to each group's enactment of pragmatic features and, as expert language users, are able to recognize features and components of interactions and their functions to a greater degree than the Chinese and English speakers.

Quantify individual variation of real‐time PM 2.5 exposure in urban Chinese homes based on a novel method

Indoor Air ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yungui Li ◽  
Yuqiong Wang ◽  
Jinze Wang ◽  
Long Chen ◽  
Zhenglu Wang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Individual Variation ◽  
Pm 2.5 ◽  
Novel Method

Topic affects perception of degree of foreign accent in a non-dominant language

Linguistics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ksenia Gnevsheva
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
Speech Perception ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Foreign Accent ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Social Category ◽  
Linguistic Information ◽  
Audio Recordings ◽  
Linguistic Behavior

AbstractMultiple studies demonstrate that social and linguistic information is connected in speech perception such that the priming of a social category will affect listeners’ linguistic behavior. At the same time, the degree to which social information is relied upon during speech perception is less well understood. The current study investigates whether priming of a country affects the perceived degree of foreign accent and whether this effect varies across different social groups. Two groups of bilinguals (one dominant in Russian, another dominant in English) listened to audio recordings of monolingual and bilingual (also either dominant in Russian or English) speakers and rated the degree of their foreign accentedness in English and Russian. The recordings were divided by topic: neutral, Russia-related, and Australia-related. Statistical analysis revealed a significant effect of topic: Russia-related clips were rated as more foreign-accented in English by bilinguals dominant in Russian, and Australia-related clips were rated as less foreign-accented in Russian when produced by bilinguals dominant in English. The variation is explained through listeners’ using social information more when the linguistic information is less reliable.

scholarly journals Towards a richer evolutionary game theory

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (88) ◽  
pp. 20130544 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. McNamara
Keyword(s):  
Game Theory ◽  
Life History ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Evolutionary Game Theory ◽  
Individual Variation ◽  
Evolutionary Game ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Simplified Models ◽  
Psychological Mechanisms ◽  
Reductionist Approach

Most examples of the application of evolutionary game theory to problems in biology involve highly simplified models. I contend that it is time to move on and include much more richness in models. In particular, more thought needs to be given to the importance of (i) between-individual variation; (ii) the interaction between individuals, and hence the process by which decisions are reached; (iii) the ecological and life-history context of the situation; (iv) the traits that are under selection, and (v) the underlying psychological mechanisms that lead to behaviour. I give examples where including variation between individuals fundamentally changes predicted outcomes of a game. Variation also selects for real-time responses, again resulting in changed outcomes. Variation can select for other traits, such as choosiness and social sensitivity. More generally, many problems involve coevolution of more than one trait. I identify situations where a reductionist approach, in which a game is isolated from is ecological setting, can be misleading. I also highlight the need to consider flexibility of behaviour, mental states and other issues concerned with the evolution of mechanism.

Derivational complexity vs. transfer effects

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 341-375 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger Hopp ◽  
Michael T. Putnam ◽  
Nora Vosburg
Keyword(s):  
English Speakers ◽  
Left Periphery ◽  
Matrix Clause ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
English Only ◽  
Low German ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Linguistic Transfer ◽  
Linguistic Behavior

Abstract We investigate whether non-target wh-questions in heritage Low German and L2 English speakers are due primarily to cross-linguistic transfer or the reduction of grammatical complexity in developing grammars as modelled by the Derivational Complexity Hypothesis (DCH, Jakubowicz 2005). Previous research shows that complex (i.e. cross-clausal) wh-dependencies pose more difficulty to child L1 and adult L2 learners than monoclausal dependencies (Jakubowicz & Strik, 2008; Schulz, 2011; Slavkov, 2015). To avoid complex dependencies, learners often use medial constructions where the wh-item surfaces once at the left periphery of the embedded CP and a second time at the left periphery of the matrix clause. Medial-wh is ungrammatical in English, though possible in German and its varieties, e.g. the low German Plautdietsch. In this study, we investigate the linguistic behavior of twelve (n = 12) bilingual Plautdietsch-English speakers in Southwestern Kansas, analyzing their production and judgments of wh-questions in both languages. In production and judgment tasks, we find that, in the L1, only heritage speakers produced medial-wh, while in L2 English, only late L2 learners produced medial-wh. This pattern cannot be due to transfer, since speakers produce medial-wh in only one of their languages. Instead, medial-wh surfaces as a mechanism to reduce syntactic complexity in the less dominant language, irrespective of whether it is the L1 or the L2 or whether it was acquired early or late. We argue that the DCH can account for grammatical restructuring in both heritage L1 speakers and late L2 speakers and discuss its potential as a metric of incomplete acquisition and attrition in bilingual syntax.

Grammars for people

1995 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 393-399 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Lightfoot
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Individual Variation ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Childhood Experience ◽  
Initial Assumption ◽  
Learning Constraints ◽  
Internal Properties ◽  
The Mind

TWO VIEWS OF GRAMMARFor many years, many people have used the term ‘grammar’ to indicate something which represents an individual's mature linguistic capacity and which arises in the mind/brain of that individual on exposure to some relevant childhood experience. The grammar interacts with other aspects of a person's mental make-up, in a modular conception of mind. Different experiences may give rise to different grammars in different individuals, but it is a plausible initial assumption that grammars arise in everybody in the same way, subject to the same principles, parameters and learning constraints, which are common to the species. This is a biological view of grammars. Countless questions arise about these grammars, about their internal properties, about how they are represented in brains, about how they emerge in young children. Under this view there is no grammar of English, rather various grammars which exist in the minds of English speakers; grammars hold of people and not of languages. Let us distinguish terminology from reality here: proponents of the biological view of grammars sometimes use ‘the grammar of French’ to refer to the grammars of French speakers in a kind of shorthand which abstracts away from individual variation. This usage may have been misleading but, as noted in Lightfoot (1991, henceforth HSP, 162), it is comparable to references to the French liver, the American brain, or the Irish wit; nobody believes that there is such an entity but sometimes it is a convenient abstraction.

scholarly journals Multimodal dataset of real-time 2D and static 3D MRI of healthy French speakers

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Karyna Isaieva ◽  
Yves Laprie ◽  
Justine Leclère ◽  
Ioannis K. Douros ◽  
Jacques Felblinger ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Speech Production ◽  
Temporal Resolution ◽  
Vocal Tract ◽  
Wide Spectrum ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
3D Mri ◽  
Mr Images ◽  
Phonetic Context ◽  
Good Coverage

AbstractThe study of articulatory gestures has a wide spectrum of applications, notably in speech production and recognition. Sets of phonemes, as well as their articulation, are language-specific; however, existing MRI databases mostly include English speakers. In our present work, we introduce a dataset acquired with MRI from 10 healthy native French speakers. A corpus consisting of synthetic sentences was used to ensure a good coverage of the French phonetic context. A real-time MRI technology with temporal resolution of 20 ms was used to acquire vocal tract images of the participants speaking. The sound was recorded simultaneously with MRI, denoised and temporally aligned with the images. The speech was transcribed to obtain phoneme-wise segmentation of sound. We also acquired static 3D MR images for a wide list of French phonemes. In addition, we include annotations of spontaneous swallowing.

scholarly journals Individual variation in avian avoidance behaviours in response to repeated, simulated vehicle approach

2018 ◽  
Vol 96 (5) ◽  
pp. 441-446 ◽  
Author(s):  
T.L. DeVault ◽  
T.W. Seamans ◽  
B.F. Blackwell ◽  
S.L. Lima ◽  
E. Fernández-Juricic
Keyword(s):  
Individual Variation ◽  
Molothrus Ater ◽  
Interindividual Variation ◽  
Individual Treatment ◽  
Video Playback ◽  
Intraindividual Variation ◽  
Vehicle Collisions ◽  
Repeated Presentation ◽  
Ongoing Development ◽  
Over Time

Birds exhibit variation in alert and flight behaviours in response to vehicles within and between species, but it is unclear how properties inherent to individuals influence variation in avoidance responses over time. We examined individual variation in avoidance behaviours of Brown-headed Cowbirds (Molothrus ater (Boddaert, 1783)) in response to repeated presentation of a simulated vehicle approach in a video playback scenario. We modeled temporal alert and flight behaviours to determine whether overall behavioural variation resulted primarily from variation within individuals (i.e., intraindividual variation) or between individuals (i.e., interindividual variation). We examined reaction norms (individual × treatment day) and whether birds showed plasticity in responses via habituation or sensitization. Repeatability in the response metrics for individuals was low (∼0.22 for alert and flight), indicating that model variation was due primarily to within-individual variation rather than between-individual variation. We observed sensitization in alert responses over time, but no sensitization or habituation in flight responses. Our results indicate that individuals learned to anticipate the vehicle approach but did not vary their escape behaviour, suggesting that alert and flight behaviours might be affected differently by cues associated with oncoming objects or experience with them. We consider our findings in light of the ongoing development of strategies to reduce animal–vehicle collisions.

Analysis of gene expression in the rat hippocampus using real time PCR reveals high inter-individual variation in mRNA expression levels

2002 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julieta Alfonso ◽  
Guido D. Pollevick ◽  
Anja Castensson ◽  
Elena Jazin ◽  
Alberto C.C. Frasch
Keyword(s):  
Gene Expression ◽  
Mrna Expression ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Individual Variation ◽  
Real Time Pcr ◽  
Rat Hippocampus ◽  
Expression Levels ◽  
Mrna Expression Levels

The influence of prominence cues in 7- to 10-year-olds’ pronoun resolution: Disentangling order of mention, grammatical role, and semantic role

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Liam P. BLYTHING ◽  
Maialen IRAOLA AZPIROZ ◽  
Shanley ALLEN ◽  
Regina HERT ◽  
Juhani JÄRVIKIVI
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Individual Variation ◽  
Personal Pronoun ◽  
Semantic Role ◽  
Visual World ◽  
Pronoun Resolution ◽  
Semantic Cues ◽  
Demonstrative Pronoun

Abstract In two visual world experiments we disentangled the influence of order of mention (first vs. second mention), grammatical role (subject vs object), and semantic role (proto-agent vs proto-patient) on 7- to 10-year-olds’ real-time interpretation of German pronouns. Children listened to SVO or OVS sentences containing active accusative verbs (küssen “to kiss”) in Experiment 1 (N = 72), or dative object-experiencer verbs (gefallen “to like”) in Experiment 2 (N = 64). This was followed by the personal pronoun er or the demonstrative pronoun der. Interpretive preferences for er were most robust when high prominence cues (first mention, subject, proto-agent) were aligned onto the same entity; and the same applied to der for low prominence cues (second mention, object, proto-patient). These preferences were reduced in conditions where cues were misaligned, and there was evidence that each cue independently influenced performance. Crucially, individual variation in age predicted adult-like weighting preferences for semantic cues (Schumacher, Roberts & Järvikivi, 2017).

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