A Preliminary Study of Subjective Frequency Estimates of Words Spoken in Cantonese

2001 ◽  
Vol 88 (3_suppl) ◽  
pp. 1253-1258 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael C. W. Yip
Keyword(s):  
Word Recognition ◽  
University Students ◽  
Chinese Characters ◽  
Subjective Frequency ◽  
Lexical Representations ◽  
Distributional Information ◽  
Preliminary Study ◽  
Listening Task ◽  
Frequency Counts

A database is presented of the subjective frequency estimates for a set of 30 Chinese homophones. The estimates are based on analysis of responses from a simple listening task by 120 University students. On the listening task, they are asked to mention the first meaning thought of upon hearing a Chinese homophone by writing down the corresponding Chinese characters. There was correlation of .66 between the frequency of spoken and written words, suggesting distributional information about the lexical representations is generally independent of modality. These subjective frequency counts should be useful in the construction of material sets for research on word recognition using spoken Chinese (Cantonese).

scholarly journals Physical Feature Encoding and Word Recognition Abilities Are Altered in Children with Intractable Epilepsy: Preliminary Neuromagnetic Evidence

2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Pardos ◽  
Milena Korostenskaja ◽  
Jing Xiang ◽  
Hisako Fujiwara ◽  
Ki H. Lee ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Word Recognition ◽  
Intractable Epilepsy ◽  
Objective Evaluation ◽  
Healthy Children ◽  
Healthy Controls ◽  
Language Function ◽  
Sensory Inputs ◽  
Feature Encoding ◽  
Preliminary Study ◽  
Age And Sex

Objective evaluation of language function is critical for children with intractable epilepsy under consideration for epilepsy surgery. The purpose of this preliminary study was to evaluate word recognition in children with intractable epilepsy by using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Ten children with intractable epilepsy (M/F 6/4, mean ± SD 13.4 ± 2.2 years) were matched on age and sex to healthy controls. Common nouns were presented simultaneously from visual and auditory sensory inputs in “match” and “mismatch” conditions. Neuromagnetic responses M1, M2, M3, M4, and M5 with latencies of ~100 ms, ~150 ms, ~250 ms, ~350 ms, and ~450 ms, respectively, elicited during the “match” condition were identified. Compared to healthy children, epilepsy patients had both significantly delayed latency of the M1 and reduced amplitudes of M3 and M5 responses. These results provide neurophysiologic evidence of altered word recognition in children with intractable epilepsy.

Relationships between structural and acoustic properties of maternal talk and children’s early word recognition

2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (6) ◽  
pp. 612-629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chiara Suttora ◽  
Nicoletta Salerni ◽  
Paola Zanchi ◽  
Laura Zampini ◽  
Maria Spinelli ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Word Recognition ◽  
Acoustic Properties ◽  
Final Position ◽  
Syntactic Complexity ◽  
High Pitch ◽  
Acoustic Characteristics ◽  
Child Interaction ◽  
Speech Features ◽  
Final Syllable ◽  
Listening Task

This study aimed to investigate specific associations between structural and acoustic characteristics of infant-directed (ID) speech and word recognition. Thirty Italian-acquiring children and their mothers were tested when the children were 1;3. Children’s word recognition was measured with the looking-while-listening task. Maternal ID speech was recorded during a mother–child interaction session and analyzed in terms of amount of speech, lexical and syntactic complexity, positional salience of nouns and verbs, high pitch and variation, and temporal characteristics. The analyses revealed that final syllable length positively predicts children’s accuracy in word recognition whereas the use of verbs in the utterance-final position has an adverse effect on children’s performance. Several of the expected associations between ID speech features and children’s word recognition skills, however, were not significant. Taken together, these findings suggest that only specific structural and acoustic properties of ID speech can facilitate word recognition in children, thereby fostering their ability to extrapolate sound patterns from the stream and map them with their referents.

scholarly journals Avoiding Conflict: When Speaker Coordination Does Not Require Conceptual Agreement

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandre Kabbach ◽  
Aurélie Herbelot
Keyword(s):  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Semantic Space ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Linguistic Community ◽  
Dense Matrix ◽  
Lexical Representations ◽  
Successful Communication ◽  
Distributional Information ◽  
Distributional Semantic Models ◽  
Value Decomposition

In this paper we discuss the socialization hypothesis—the idea that speakers of the same (linguistic) community should share similar concepts given that they are exposed to similar environments and operate in highly-coordinated social contexts—and challenge the fact that it is assumed to constitute a prerequisite to successful communication. We do so using distributional semantic models of meaning (DSMs) which create lexical representations via latent aggregation of co-occurrence information between words and contexts. We argue that DSMs constitute particularly adequate tools for exploring the socialization hypothesis given that 1) they provide full control over the notion of background environment, formally characterized as the training corpus from which distributional information is aggregated; and 2) their geometric structure allows for exploiting alignment-based similarity metrics to measure inter-subject alignment over an entire semantic space, rather than a set of limited entries. We propose to model coordination between two different DSMs trained on two distinct corpora as dimensionality selection over a dense matrix obtained via Singular Value Decomposition This approximates an ad-hoc coordination scenario between two speakers as the attempt to align their similarity ratings on a set of word pairs. Our results underline the specific way in which linguistic information is spread across singular vectors, and highlight the need to distinguish agreement from mere compatibility in alignment-based notions of conceptual similarity. Indeed, we show that compatibility emerges from idiosyncrasy so that the unique and distinctive aspects of speakers’ background experiences can actually facilitate—rather than impede—coordination and communication between them. We conclude that the socialization hypothesis may constitute an unnecessary prerequisite to successful communication and that, all things considered, communication is probably best formalized as the cooperative act of avoiding conflict, rather than maximizing agreement.

Developing a New Shadowing Procedure for Japanese EFL Learners

RELC Journal ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 003368822093762
Author(s):  
Yo Hamada
Keyword(s):  
University Students ◽  
Explicit Instruction ◽  
Corrective Feedback ◽  
Primary Study ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Japanese University ◽  
Speakers Of Other Languages ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Preliminary Study

Shadowing, a practice of repeating what one hears as simultaneously and accurately as possible, has been researched in the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) field for years. The research findings have shown that shadowing contributes to English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ bottom-up listening skills, which leads to their overall listening comprehension skills. However, the accumulated research findings have not uncovered what aspects of bottom-up skills shadowing precisely contributes to. Thus, this study attempts to examine the aspects of bottom-up skills to which shadowing contributes and proposes a new shadowing procedure to compensate for the limitation of the current shadowing procedure. To this end, a preliminary study and a primary study were conducted. In the preliminary study, the bottom-up skill development through shadowing practice was precisely examined, using a 112-item bottom-up listening test. Thirty-six Japanese university students participated in the experiment and engaged in shadowing practice in eight lessons for a month. The result showed that shadowing practice was effective for developing the skill of identifying prominence in a speech, and word recognition skills but not effective for enhancing phonemic discrimination skills. In the primary study, to overcome the limitation of the shadowing procedure, a new shadowing procedure including three components of attention to output, corrective feedback, and explicit instruction was proposed. Twelve Japanese university students participated and engaged in the new shadowing procedure for three months. Their progress was assessed by a 32-item phonemic discrimination test, and the result showed that the new output-based shadowing procedure with explicit instruction and corrective feedback improved phonemic discrimination skills for intermediate level Japanese EFL learners.

scholarly journals Unstressed Vowel Reduction Across Majorcan Catalan Dialects: Production and Spoken Word Recognition

2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 430-465 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miquel Llompart ◽  
Miquel Simonet
Keyword(s):  
Word Recognition ◽  
Lexical Processing ◽  
Spoken Word Recognition ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Decision Task ◽  
Vowel Duration ◽  
Lexical Representations ◽  
Production Study ◽  
Speech Performance

This study investigates the production and auditory lexical processing of words involved in a patterned phonological alternation in two dialects of Catalan spoken on the island of Majorca, Spain. One of these dialects, that of Palma, merges /ɔ/ and /o/ as [o] in unstressed position, and it maintains /u/ as an independent category, [u]. In the dialect of Sóller, a small village, speakers merge unstressed /ɔ/, /o/, and /u/ to [u]. First, a production study asks whether the discrete, rule-based descriptions of the vowel alternations provided in the dialectological literature are able to account adequately for these processes: are mergers complete? Results show that mergers are complete with regards to the main acoustic cue to these vowel contrasts, that is, F1. However, minor differences are maintained for F2 and vowel duration. Second, a lexical decision task using cross-modal priming investigates the strength with which words produced in the phonetic form of the neighboring (versus one’s own) dialect activate the listeners’ lexical representations during spoken word recognition: are words within and across dialects accessed efficiently? The study finds that listeners from one of these dialects, Sóller, process their own and the neighboring forms equally efficiently, while listeners from the other one, Palma, process their own forms more efficiently than those of the neighboring dialect. This study has implications for our understanding of the role of lifelong linguistic experience on speech performance.

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