Production of English lexical stress by Mandarin speakers: Acoustics and kinematics

This study aims to understand if Mandarin late learners of English can successfully manipulate acoustic and kinematic cues to deliver English stress contrast in production. Mandarin ( N = 8) and English ( N = 8) speakers were recorded producing English trochaic (initial stress) and iambic (final stress) items during a nonword repetition task. Speakers’ jaw movement for the utterances was tracked and analysed. Acoustic and kinematic cues were measured for each syllable, including acoustic duration, fundamental frequency (F0), and intensity, as well as jaw movement duration, displacement, peak velocity, and stiffness. Stress ratios (syllable 1 / syllable 2) were calculated for each cue and compared between groups. Results showed that English and Mandarin speakers had generally comparable performance in differentiating trochaic from iambic patterns, as well as in the degree of between-syllable contrast within each pattern. Between-group differences were only observed in acoustic duration and jaw movement velocity/stiffness. These results suggest that the experience with Mandarin stress contributes to Mandarin speakers’ overall successful production of English stress but also results in nonnative use of some acoustic/kinematic cues.

Stress Level Detection and Evaluation from Phonation and PPG Signals Recorded in an Open-Air MRI Device

This paper deals with two modalities for stress detection and evaluation—vowel phonation speech signal and photo-plethysmography (PPG) signal. The main measurement is carried out in four phases representing different stress conditions for the tested person. The first and last phases are realized in laboratory conditions. The PPG and phonation signals are recorded inside the magnetic resonance imaging scanner working with a weak magnetic field up to 0.2 T in a silent state and/or with a running scan sequence during the middle two phases. From the recorded phonation signal, different speech features are determined for statistical analysis and evaluation by the Gaussian mixture models (GMM) classifier. A database of affective sounds and two databases of emotional speech were used for GMM creation and training. The second part of the developed method gives comparison of results obtained from the statistical description of the sensed PPG wave together with the determined heart rate and Oliva–Roztocil index values. The fusion of results obtained from both modalities gives the final stress level. The performed experiments confirm our working assumption that a fusion of both types of analysis is usable for this task—the final stress level values give better results than the speech or PPG signals alone.

Analysis and Design of Reinforced Concrete Thin Cylindrical Shell

The need to come up with economical and efficient structural design led the engineers and researchers to focus more on shell structures. It is more durable, economical as it requires a minimum amount of material provides larger interior space and is aesthetic. A shell dominantly behaves as a membrane, though, at the edges, bending stresses get accumulated. Albeit several theories have been put forward, Schorer’s theory is eminent in the analysis of the long span thin cylindrical shells. This study is focused on the analysis of the stresses by utilizing the Fourier series and Schorer’s theory. Further, the shell is designed for the steel reinforcement as per the Concrete Reinforcing Steel Institute (CRSI) Design Handbook after calculating the final stress resultants and the detailing is also depicted.

San’ani Arabic Stress in Harmonic Serialism

The word stress system in San’ani Arabic exhibits patterns of stress placement that associate some level of prominence with syllables with long vowels and syllables that end in the left-leg of a geminate. The fact that such syllables always succeed in attracting stress away from other non-final CVC syllables, even beyond the final trisyllabic window, clearly indicates the role that underlying moraicity plays in the stress algorithm. The proposed account, offered in this paper for the word stress system in San’ani, is couched in Harmonic Serialism, as a serial version of Optimality Theory. Key to the analyses presented is the assumption of gradual prosodification. The distinction drawn between faithful and unfaithful prosodic operations allows for applying some in a parallel fashion, but confines others to serialism. Central to the analysis, as well, is the exceptional case of final stress, which is mainly attributed to the intrinsic prominence of syllables with underlying bimoraic sequences.

An Integrated Virtual Engineering Methodology to Evaluate Manufacturing Residual Stress in Cylinder Blocks through Casting and Quenching

Engine cylinder block cracking is a costly engine component failure that is often discovered late, either in the product verification phase by dynamometer testing or after product launch during vehicle operations. It is well established that the crack issues are related to the residual stress induced in the casting and heat treatment processes. To identify the quality risk in a short turn-around time and a cost-effective fashion, using computer simulations to evaluate the state of stress during casting and heat treat processes is the trend in automotive industry. In recent years, CAE methodologies have advanced significantly in both CFD and FEA to model the casting process, the quenching process, the residual stress, and the high cycle fatigue (HCF). However, calculating the final stress in the cylinder block requires several CAE software tools to work together as an integrated, streamlined engineering method and these CAE tools could be very different in meshing topologies, numerical methods, data structure, and post-processing capabilities. The intent of this research is to develop an integrated virtual engineering methodology combining casting simulation, computational fluid dynamics and finite element method to simulate the manufacturing process from the beginning of casting, through water quenching heat treatment, to engine dynamometer testing. The methodology involves three CAE tools, MAGMASOFT®, AVL FIRETM/FIRETM-M and ABAQUS, and considerable amounts of research and development work are concentrated on the validation of each individual numerical method and tools for data exchange between the software tools.

Evolution Analysis of Process-induced Residual Stress During the Manufacture of Diesel Body

Residual stress is most likely to cause deformation in a diesel body (DB). The traditional independent analysis method is no longer suitable for obtaining the residual stress of multi-process DBs, because the stress is constantly produced and changed during the casting, heat treatment, and cutting processes. Therefore, an evolution analysis method(EAM) is proposed. First, an evolution analysis model of a DB was established. Subsequently, the residual stress of the DB in the casting and heat treatment processes was analysed using ProCAST and ABAQUS. Finally, the material removal of the DB during the machining process was simulated by using ABAQUS. The residual stresses for every process were calculated by coupling inherited and process-induced stresses. Thus, the final stress distribution of the DB was deduced by considering the entire machining process. The evolution analysis of the residual stress is significant for controlling the deformation of the DB.

EXPRESS: The role of orthographic cues to stress in Italian visual word recognition

In the present study stress diacritics were used to investigate the processing of stress information in lexical decision. We ran two experiments in Italian, a language in which stress position is not predictable by rule and only final stress – i.e., the less common pattern – is orthographically marked with a diacritic. In Experiment 1, a lexical decision task, two factors were manipulated: The stress pattern of words – antepenultimate (non dominant) and penultimate (dominant) – and the presence/absence of the diacritics, signalling the stress position. Participants were faster to categorize stimuli as words when they bear dominant than non dominant stress. However, the advantage disappeared when the diacritic was used. In Experiment 2, a same-different verification task was used in which participants had to decide if a referent word and a target were same (carota-CAROTA, /ka'rɔta/; tavolo-TAVOLO, /'tavolo/) or different. We compared two conditions requiring a "different" response, in which referent and target with dominant and non dominant stress were congruent (caròta-CAROTA; tàvolo-TAVOLO) or incongruent (càrota-CAROTA; tavòlo-TAVOLO) with the word’s stress. For words with dominant stress, “different” responses were faster in the incongruent condition than the congruent condition. This congruency effect was not observed for words with non-dominant stress pattern. Overall, the data suggest that stress information is based on lexical phonology, and the stress dominance effect has a lexical base in word recognition.

Acoustic properties of word and phrasal prominence in Uzbek

Based on a large-scale corpus of experimental data produced by 8 native speakers of Tashkent Uzbek, we assess the presence of canonical word-final stress in real words spoken in three dialogue types: without focus, with contrastive focus, and with new information focus on the target. The first context provides baseline information regarding the manifestation of stress, in the absence of additional focus properties. By comparing the latter two contexts with the former, we are also able to assess the acoustic manifestation of the two types of focus. The most noteworthy properties of the final syllable are its relatively long duration and sharp falling contour, potentially serving as the cues to lexical stress, and enhanced by both types of focus. Due to the word-final position of stress, however, the patterns we observe could also be consistent with boundary properties, a possibility we consider as well. In addition, we briefly compare the prosodic patterns we observe in Uzbek with similarly collected data in Turkish. We find that the prominence patterns in Uzbek, while not particularly strong, are nevertheless stronger than those in Turkish, and also exhibit crucial differences. Implications for Turkic prosody more generally are also suggested.

Experimental Investigation and Plasticity Modeling of SS316L Microtubes Under Varying Deformation Paths

In this paper, results for SS316L microtube experiments under combined inflation and axial loading for single and multi-loading segment deformation paths are presented along with a plasticity model to predict the associated stress and strain paths. The microtube inflation/tension machine, utilized for these experiments, creates biaxial stress states by applying axial tension or compression and internal pressure simultaneously. Two types of loading paths are considered in this paper, proportional (where a single loading path with a given axial:hoop stress ratio is followed) and corner (where an initial pure loading segment, i.e., axial or hoop, is followed by a secondary loading segment in the transverse direction, i.e., either hoop or axial, respectively). The experiments are designed to produce the same final strain state under different deformation paths, resulting in different final stress states. This difference in stress state can affect the material properties of the final part, which can be varied for the intended application, e.g., biomedical hardware, while maintaining the desired geometry. The experiments are replicated in a reasonable way by a material model that combines the Hill 1948 anisotropic yield function and the Hockett-Sherby hardening law. Discussion of the grain size effects during microforming impacting the ability to achieve consistent deformation path results is included.

On stress *

This chapter explains the difference between syllables with primary stress and syllables which receive secondary or tertiary stress. These notions are relevant because words may consist of many syllables, thereby in principle each offering an equal number of candidates for primary stress. In uninflected words primary stress can fall on any syllable; per word there is a fixed syllable bearing stress, but as soon as inflectional elements kick in, this may change. Many inflectional suffixes attract stress and this gives the general impression that the stress position shifts with every addition, but on the other hand, some word stems with non-final stress retain their primary stress position when inflected. This chapter ends by pointing out that for some words the meaning depends on the stress position.