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Abstract: Fraenkel and Simpson [A.S. Fraenkel, J. Simpson, How many squares can a string contain? J. Combin. Theory Ser. A 82 (1998) 112–120] proved that the number of squares in a word of length is bounded by . In this note we improve this bound to . Based on the numerical evidence, the conjectured bound is . [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper investigates spatio-temporal variability during the production of the lingual consonants /t, k, s, x, n, l, ▒/ by four Greek speakers with profound hearing impairment and with differences in the intelligibility of their speech. It examines important factors that have been documented to influence intelligibility, i.e. durational variability, articulatory (token-to-token) variability, and coarticulatory patterns. The technique of electropalatography was used to record tongue-palate contact patterns during consonant production in order to examine differences in articulatory variability among speakers and in V-to-C coarticulatory effects. The study reports durational differences in consonant production between speakers with hearing impairment and normal hearing and investigates the relationship between token-to-token variability in tongue-palate contact patterns and duration. The results indicate a negative relationship between duration and variability, i.e. as segmental duration decreases there is an increase in variability in tongue-palate contact patterns. Significant speaker-dependent differences in duration, articulatory variability and coarticulatory patterns are reported and are discussed in relation to differences in intelligibility among the speakers with hearing impairment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This research compares speaking times and turns of female and male presenters and audience members at the 2000 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). In their presentations, males spoke longer than females, but the differences were not statistically significant. They spoke significantly longer than females, however, when posing questions or comments during open discussions, and they made a significantly greater number of responses to these questions and comments. Some chairs were inconsistent in monitoring allotted speaking times. Females' participation was lower in less-structured situations, such as open discussions and co-presented papers, than in settings with greater structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children with developmental dyslexia appear to be insensitive to basic auditory cues to speech rhythm and stress. For example, they experience difficulties in processing duration and amplitude envelope onset cues. Here we explored the sensitivity of adults with developmental dyslexia to the same cues. In addition, relations with expressive and receptive rhythm tasks, such as tempi recognition and manual tapping to a metronome, were explored. Our goal was to investigate whether the auditory deficits seen in dyslexia are specific to cues to speech rhythm and stress, or are part of a wider rhythmic awareness problem. A group of 19 undergraduate students with dyslexia were compared with 20 age- and ability-matched controls. The findings confirmed a relationship between auditory rhythm sensitivity and literacy in adults, as well as showing an association with metronome inter-tap-interval variability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotion is an important element in expressive speech synthesis. Unlike traditional discrete emotion simulations, this paper attempts to synthesize emotional speech by using "strong," "medium" and "weak" classifications. This paper tests different models, a linear modification model (LMM), a Gaussian mixture model (GMM), and a classification and regression tree (CART) model. The linear modification model makes direct modification of sentence F0 contours and syllabic durations from acoustic distributions of emotional speech, such as, F0 topline, F0 baseline, durations, and intensities. Further analysis shows that emotional speech is also related to stress and linguistic information. Unlike the linear modification method, the GMM and CART models try to map the subtle prosody distributions between neutral and emotional speech. While the GMM just uses the features, the CART model integrates linguistic features into the mapping. A pitch target model which is optimized to describe Mandarin F0 contours is also introduced. For all conversion methods, a deviation of perceived expressiveness (DPE) measure is created to evaluate the expressiveness of the output speech. The results show that the LMM gives the worst results among the three methods. The GMM method is more suitable for a small training set, while the CART method gives the better emotional speech output if trained with a large context-balanced corpus. The methods discussed in this paper indicate ways to generate emotional speech in speech synthesis. The objective and subjective evaluation processes are also analyzed. These results support the use of a neutral semantic content text in data-bases for emotional speech synthesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an expressive voice conversion model (DeBi-HMM) as the post processing of a text-to-speech (TTS) system for expressive speech synthesis. DeBi-HMM is named for its duration-embedded characteristic of the two HMMs for modeling the source and target speech signals, respectively. Joint estimation of source and target HMMs is exploited for spectrum conversion from neutral to expressive speech. Gamma distribution is embedded as the duration model for each state in source and target HMMs. The expressive style-dependent decision trees achieve prosodic conversion. The STRAIGHT algorithm is adopted for the analysis and synthesis process. A set of small-sized speech databases for each expressive style is designed and collected to train the DeBi-HMM voice conversion models. Several experiments with statistical hypothesis testing are conducted to evaluate the quality of synthetic speech as perceived by human subjects. Compared with previous voice conversion methods, the proposed method exhibits encouraging potential in expressive speech synthesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of the empirical research about the word stress acoustic parameters in different languages concluded that this phonological feature is basically expressed by means of variations on the intensity, pitch and duration of vocalic segments-besides of other secondary correlates (Leah 1977, Al-Ani 1992, De Jong y Zawaydeh 1999: 5). However, in the Hispanic Linguistics field, most of the studies traditionally used diverse methodologies to their results, mostly claiming there is just one acoustic marker for lexical stress, depending on the author: pitch, intensity or duration (Quilis 1993, Bolinger y Hodapp 1961, Contreras 1963, Garrido et al. 1995)--. This paper presents the materials, methods and conclusions of a laboratory research work, based only on digital equipment (such as Multispeech 3.1), to essentially conclude that the word stress in Spanishis better described on the jointly basis of those three parameters: intensity, pitch and duration --seemingly, a reduced set of quite universal parameters--. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cerebellum plays an important role in speech motor control. Various tasks like sustained phonation, diadochokinesis and conversation have been used to tap the speech timing abilities of dysarthric clients with cerebellar lesion. It has recently been proposed that not all areas of the cerebellum may be involved in speech motor control; especially aspects concerned with timing of speech events. In the present study, the timing of articulatory movements in three clients with lesions restricted to different cerebellar loci was investigated. A relational speech timing paradigm was used to investigate initial syllable vowel duration (ISVD) in these three clients. The findings were compared with 15 age and gender matched controls. The results suggest that subjects with cerebellar right hemispheric cerebellar lesion showed reduced preservation of relational timing measures as compared to cerebellar vermis lesion i.e. midline structures and cerebellar left cerebellar hemispheric lesion, thus indirectly suggesting a differential loci specific control in cerebellum for relational speech timing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present results of four experiments that examined the role of prosodic boundaries in sentence comprehension of syntactically ambiguous constructions in Korean. Considering the fact that there has been relatively less work on languages other than English on this topic, it will be interesting to see how the previous findings of prosodic effects on sentence comprehension will be manifested in this language. The main focus in this study was to see how prosodic structures interact with the head-final and pro-drop nature of this language. Results show robust effects of prosodic boundaries on resolving syntactically ambiguous sentences, confirming previous findings on the role of prosody on sentence comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work has shown that prosodic information has a number of important effects on human sentence processing, including effects on the semantic integration of clauses ( Schafer 1997 ). In an effort to learn more about the nature of these prosodic effects, we ran an experiment that manipulated not only prosody, but also the type of initial subordinating conjunction, which we predicted might have a similar effect on processing. Our results confirmed previous work on the effects of conjunction type ( Townsend & Bever 1978 ; Townsend 1983 ), and they replicated the basic pattern of the prosodic effect from Schafer (1997) . However, a more in-depth analysis suggests (i) that prosody and conjunction type are playing different, interacting roles in this ‘‘makes sense’’ decision task, and (ii) that the prosodic effect may be more directly dependent on the gradient phonetic feature of phrase-final lengthening, rather than on an abstract phonological prosodic category. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I provide an account of the durative aspect morpheme in Tawala, an Austronesian language spoken in Papua New Guinea. Within the framework of Optimality Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1993a, Prince & Smolensky 1993), I show that the three different reduplicant shapes, previously accounted for through the use of three separate templates, actually arise from the dynamic between the drive to copy, in terms of reduplication, and the drive to dissimilate at the level of the syllable. Central to my analysis is *REPEAT (Yip 1995, 1998), a constraint prohibiting identical adjacent syllables between the reduplicant and its stem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concerns the longest common subsequence (LCS) shared by two sequences (or strings) of length N, whose elements are chosen at random from a finite alphabet. The exact distribution and the expected value of the length of the LCS, k say, between two random sequences is still an open problem in applied probability. While the expected valueE(N) of the length of the LCS of two random strings is known to lie within certain limits, the exact value ofE(N) and the exact distribution are unknown. In this paper, we calculate the length of the LCS for all possible pairs of binary sequences fromN=1 to 14. The length of the LCS and the Hamming distance are represented in color on two all-against-all arrays. An iterative approach is then introduced in which we determine the pairs of sequences whose LCS lengths increased by one upon the addition of one letter to each sequence. The pairs whose score did increase are shown in black and white on an array, which has an interesting fractal-like structure. As the sequence length increases,R(N) (the proportion of sequences whose score increased) approaches the Chvátal-Sankoff constantac (the proportionality constant for the linear growth of the expected length of the LCS with sequence length). We show thatR(N) is converging more rapidly toac thanE(N)/N. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The description of Atlantic Creoles has relied mostly on comparative studies with intonational languages. However, there are few corresponding tonal properties between Atlantic Creoles with tonal systems and their Indo-European lexifiers. The description of the tonal systems of these Creoles must precede any comparative study with intonational languages. This research supplements previous phonological descriptions of Papiamentu, an Atlantic Creole spoken in the Netherlands Antilles, St. Maarten, St. Eustatius, and Saba, through the use of experimental data focusing on tone and stress distinctions and their phonetic correlates. This paper expands initial descriptions of the tone and stress systems in Papiamentu (as it is spoken by an Aruban speaker) to include instrumental analysis of prosodic characteristics including numerical analysis of frequency and length in monosyllables and polysyllabic words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous temporal relations of verbal actions have been analysed in terms of various grammatical means of expressing verbal temporalisation such as tense, aspect, duration and iteration. Here the temporal relations within verb semantics, particularly ordered pairs of verb entailment, are studied using Allen's interval-based temporal formalism. Their application to the compositional visual definitions in our intelligent storytelling system, CONFUCIUS, is presented, including the representation of procedural events, achievement events and lexical causatives. In applying these methods we consider both language modalities and visual modalities since CONFUCIUS is a multimodal system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

: ObjectiveTo evaluate whether healthy young children are able to perform automated static perimetry reliably using the frequency-doubling technology (FDT) perimeter.: DesignProspective, observational case series.: ParticipantsForty healthy children aged 4 to 14 years.: TestingSubjects underwent, in 1 randomly chosen eye, 2 consecutive visual field (VF) tests using the C-20 full-threshold program of the commercially available FDT.: Main outcome measuresGlobal measures included mean deviation (MD), pattern standard deviation (PSD), test duration and reliability indices, including fixation losses and false-positive and false-negative errors. Fixation losses are checked 6 times throughout the examination, rather than being continuously monitored. Two scoring systems, based on the total deviation probability plot, classified each VF as normal or abnormal.: ResultsAll subjects completed the VF test. The better of 2 examinations (as determined by the MD score) was used for analysis. The average test duration was 4.9±0.7 minutes for the entire group. The mean MD and PSD were −0.78±4.9 and 6.7±6.2, respectively. A clear correlation to age was found for MD, PSD, abnormality of the VF, and test duration (all P<0.05). Of all VFs, 32.5% were unreliable, such that at younger than 8 years of age, 42.9% of the VFs were unreliable, compared with 23.1% for those older than 8 years. Younger than 8 years of age, 78.6% of VFs were abnormal, whereas for ages 8 years and older, 26.9% of VFs were abnormal.: ConclusionsFrequency-doubling technology seems to be a clinically feasible VF method for evaluating young children older than approximately 8 years of age. The reliability indices, MD, test duration, and the reproducibility of the VF test were found to be highly correlated with age, in such a way that these parameters all improved with increasing age. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This study was designed to investigate if persons who stutter differ from persons who do not stutter in the coproduction of different types of consonant clusters, as measured in the number of dysfluencies and incorrect speech productions, in speech reaction times and in word durations. Based on the Gestural Phonology Model of Browman and Goldstein, two types of consonant clusters were formed: homorganic and heterorganic clusters, both intra-syllabic (CVCC) and inter-syllabic (CVC#CVC). Overall, the results indicated that homorganic clusters elicited more incorrect speech productions and longer reaction times than the heterorganic clusters, but there was no difference between the homorganic and the heterorganic clusters in the word duration data. Persons who stutter showed a higher percentage dysfluencies and a higher percentage incorrect speech productions than PWNS but there were no main group effects in reaction times and word durations. However, there was a significant three-way interaction effect between group, cluster type and cluster place: homorganic clusters elicited longer reaction times than heterorganic clusters, but only in the inter-syllabic condition and only for persons who stutter. These results suggest that the production of two consonants with the same place of articulation across a syllable boundary puts higher demands on motor planning and/or initiation than producing the same cluster at the end of a syllable, in particular for PWS. The findings are discussed in light of current theories on speech motor control in stuttering.Educational objectives: The reader will be able to describe: (1) the effect of gestural overlap between consonant clusters on speech reaction time and word duration of people who do and do not stutter and be able to (2) identify the literature in the field of gestural overlap between consonant clusters. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The phenomenon of attentional capture by a unique yet irrelevant singleton distractor has typically been studied in visual search. In this article, the authors examine whether a similar phenomenon occurs in the auditory domain. Participants searched sequences of sounds for targets defined by frequency, intensity, or duration. The presence of a singleton distractor that was unique on an irrelevant dimension (e.g. a low-frequency singleton in search for a target of high intensity) was associated with search costs in both detection and discrimination tasks. However, if the singleton feature coincided with the target item, search was facilitated. These results establish the phenomenon of auditory attentional capture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pre-aspirated stops, known to be quite rare in the world's languages, are shown herein to be significantly rarer still. Their aspiration component is typically reinforced by an oral gesture that is influenced by the following stop and/or the preceding vowel. Alternatively, the aspiration component weakens to zero and is replaced by vowel length. In this typological study I document the phonetic details of so-called pre-aspirates and offer phonetic explanations for their rarity and their diachronic instability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ryle (1949, Chapter V) discusses a range of predicates which in different ways exemplify a property I shall call quasi-duality – they appear to report two actions or events in one predicate. Quasi-duality is the key property of predicates Ryle classed as achievements. Ryle's criteria for classification were not temporal or aspectual, and Vendler's subsequent adoption of the term achievement for the aktionsart of momentary events changes the term – Rylean achievements and Vendlerian achievements are in principle different classes. Nevertheless, I shall argue in this paper that certain kinds of quasi-duality do have aspectual significance. This paper examines a number of quasi-dual predicates which are not generally discussed in the aktionsart literature, including break a promise, miscount, and cure the patient. Two types of quasi-dual predicates are identified and dubbed criterion predicates and causative upshot predicates. It is shown that both types of quasi-dual predicate lack process progressives, despite being durative, and it is argued that the lack of process progressives identifies these predicates as (aspectual) achievements. They are termed durative achievements to distinguish them from canonical, momentary achievements. It is argued that these predicates lack process progressives, and hence are achievements, because they express individual-level predicates on the event argument. A process progressive is stage-level for the event, and hence is incompatible with a predicate which is lexically individual-level for the event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigated the effects of phrase length and scrambling in the processing of Japanese sentences. Reading times of short phrases, long phrases, verbs, and whole sentences, measured by the method of self-paced reading, did not differ in terms of phrase-length order and scrambling. In addition, four types of sentences constructed on the basis of phrase-length order and scrambling did not affect duration times of correctness decision-making for sentences. However, error rates differed between canonical and scrambled sentences regardless of phrase-length order. This result implies that scrambled sentences were harder to judge as correct sentences than canonical sentences. Thus, scrambling affects the appropriate integration of information, whereas phrase-length order is simply an indication of preference and not of cognitive processing. To explain the present result, the authors propose the “configurational structure without movement,” which predicts no difference in speed between the processing of canonical and scrambled sentences, apart from error rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Duration Calculus was introduced as a logic to specify real-time requirements of computing systems. It has been used successfully in a number of case studies. Moreover, many variants were proposed to deal with various features of real time systems, including sequential communicating processes, sequential hybrid systems and imperative programming languages. This paper aims to integrate several variants of Duration Calculus, and to provide a semantic framework for real-time programming languages and sequential hybrid programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between the way in which people describe an event and people's estimates of the duration of the event is investigated in three studies. People are told to use different writing styles designed to produce different characteristics. For example, a ‘tabloid’ condition was designed to produce words with higher implied action. Across all three studies, differences among the event descriptions only produced small differences in the duration estimates. These results question the direct causal relation between language use and duration estimates. We discuss these findings in relation to memory reconstruction and eyewitness testimony. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Santiago, MacKay, Palma, and Rho (2000) report two picture naming experiments examining the role of syllable onset complexity and number of syllables in spoken word production. Experiment 1 showed that naming latencies are longer for words with two syllables (e.g., demon) than one syllable (e.g., duck), and longer for words beginning with a consonant cluster (e.g., drill) than a single consonant (e.g., duck). Experiment 2 replicated these findings and showed that the complexity of the syllable nucleus and coda has no effect. These results are taken to support MacKay's (1987) Node Structure theory and to refute models such as WEAVER++ (Roelofs, 1997a) that predict effects of word length but not of onset complexity and number of syllables per se. In this comment, I show that a re-analysis of the data of Santiago et al. that takes word length into account leads to the opposite conclusion. The observed effects of onset complexity and number of syllables appear to be length effects, supporting WEAVER++ and contradicting the Node Structure theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Roelofs (2002) showed that by-item picture naming latencies in Santiago, MacKay, Palma, & Rho (2000) were linearly related to total number of segments across conditions, suggesting that structural effects of number of syllables and onset complexity might reflect a confound with phonological length. However, Roelofs failed to test the statistical reliability of this relationship with structural factors as covariates, and when we ran these and other analyses on our data, length effects were non-significant for two measures of length. We then discuss three additional Santiago et al. results favouring structural accounts but not length accounts, with number of syllables and onset complexity as the strongest structural factors, with a smaller effect (if any) of coda complexity, and no effect of vowel nucleus complexity. Finally, we argue that structure-sensitive phonological encoding mechanisms that may operate differently in different languages provide a better account of available evidence, including word production data that Roelofs (2002) claims support length accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine whether speech durations and speech content vary by social structure in groups and the content of preceding speeches. When actors art, structural equals in groups, an observable interaction order emerges from interaction processes. When we experimentally impose authority, skill, or sentiment structures, structural advantage is related to longer speech durations. When structures are combined such that an actor is advantaged in more titan one social structure, then the actor engages in shorter speech durations, although dominance (as measured by perceived contributions to the group) remains high far the actor. In addition, the likelihood that an actor contributes a solution to a group problem or invites other contributions is highly dependent on whether the preceding speech included positive feedback. The expected interdependence between contributions and invitations to contribute was not evident in our data. Thus our research provides new insight on the sequential dependencies between speech acts in groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to describe the acoustic characteristics of Spanish vowels in subjects who had undergone a total laryngectomy and to compare the results with those obtained in a control group of subjects who spoke normally. Our results are discussed in relation to those obtained in previous studies with English-speaking laryngectomized patients. The comparison between English and Spanish, which differ widely in the size of their vowel inventories, will help us to determine specific or universal vowel production characteristics in these patients. Our second objective was to relate the acoustic properties of these vowels to the perceptual data obtained in our previous work (J. L. Miralles & T. Cervera, 1995). In that study, results indicated that vowels produced by alaryngeal speakers were well perceived in word context. Vowels were produced in CVCV word context by two groups of patients who had undergone laryngectomy: tracheoesophageal speakers (TES) and esophageal speakers. In addition a control group of normal talkers was included. Audio recordings of 24 Spanish words produced by each speaker were analyzed using CSL (Kay Elemetrics). Results showed that F1, F2, and vowel duration of alaryngeal speakers differ significantly from normal values. In general, laryngectomized patients produce vowels with higher formant frequencies and longer durations than the group of laryngeal subjects. Thus, the data indicate modifications either in the frequency or temporal domain, following the same tendency found in previous studies with English-speaking laryngectomized speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates the effect of presentation duration on false recall induced by presentation of semantically associated and phonologically associated word lists. Patterns of false recall; Concept of a dual-process model; Similarities and differences between the mechanisms underlying semantically and phonologically induced false recall.

This paper presents the results of a rate scaling speech production experiment which seeks to replicate and examine in greater detail the results of a set of experiments reported in Stetson (1951). Stetson observed, based on a set of pioneering articulatory experiments, that coda consonants resyllabify as onset consonants in syllables repeated at fast speech rates. In the current experiment, speakers produced repetitions of simple CV and VC syllables in time to a metronome pacer which systematically changed in period. Data indicate that, while durational patterns for CV and VC syllables are very different at slow rates, the patterns tend to converge at fast rates. However, closer examination of fast rate tokens, reveals that differences between CV and VC tokens persist at fast rates, even though such tokens are generally heard as CV tokens. These results are discussed with respect to the nature of CV and VC organization and the effect of the rate-changing task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides an alternative explanation to the position-of-irregularity effect in serial processing. Interaction between word length and lexicality; Role of grapheme-phoneme consistency in producing positional-of-irregularity effect; Observance of a position-sensitive Stroop effect; Importance of the computational approach in experimental cognitive psychology.

Investigates vowel duration in open and closed syllables in groups of ten normal children and adults. Observation of developmental effects in mean and variability of vowel duration; Observation of a context effect; Results suggesting that both phonemic and phonetic factors are important in accounting for developmental changes in mean and variability of vowel duration.

Studies disagree regarding the relationship between word frequency and apparent duration. The present experiments evaluate factors that might explain conflict in prior studies. In Experiment 1, word frequency was manipulated factorially with three stimulus durations. High-frequency words were judged longer in duration than low-frequency words at each exposure duration. When briefer durations were used in Experiment 2, frequency did not affect subjective duration. In Experiment 3, a wider range of frequency restored the longer apparent duration of high-frequency words. Use of a postexposure mask lengthened duration judgments but did not interact with the frequency effect. Use of a paired comparison procedure in Experiment 4 again showed the frequency effect. The results are consistent with an attentional model that suggests that subjective time estimation is directly related to the amount of attention remaining to evaluate the passage of time once the stimulus target has been cognitively processed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the reduplicative babbling of French and English-learning infants for evidence of language-specific rhythmic patterns. Comparison of final-syllable lengthening, timing of non-final syllables and number of syllables per utterance; Characteristics of the ambient language; Implications for child language acquisition.

Investigates the frequency, duration and distribution of pauses in French. Types of speech styles; Characteristics of political speeches; Importance of hesitation in spontaneous speech.

Examines the influence of postvocalic consonants on vowel duration in esophageal speech. Comparison of the duration of vowels preceding voiced-voiceless stops in utterances between esophageal speakers and normal speakers; Conclusion that the vowel length variation is a language-specific behavior governed by a phonological rule of the English language rather than a language-universal behavior governed by inherent physiological characteristics of the speech production mechanism.

Frequency spectra for words of coinciding length are observed. To this end a method of representation of empirical word frequency spectra is proposed. The exponent of the Zipfian power law shows a strong dependency on word length. For short words this exponent assumes values which cannot be accounted for by Mandelbrot's deduction of the Zipfian law. A theoretical model based on a stochastic process is proposed to explain the unusual values of the exponent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on the state and perspectives of the Göttingen Quantitative Linguistics Project, which is, in the first place, concerned with investigations of word-length distributions in texts and also considers a number of further topics. The study of word length distributions goes back to investigations by Cebanov, Fucks, Grotjahn and others, and has been conducted, from the very beginning, in close cooperation with G. Altmann (Bochum) on the theoretical basis provided by Altmann, Grotjahn, Köhler, and Wimmer in several recent publications. Notes on all relevant aspects of the Göttingen project can be found on the Internet (URL: http://www.gwdg.de/~kbest/projekt.htm); an interim report has been included in Best and Altmann (1996). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantity as a source of style has not yet been interpreted in a pragmatic and cognitive frame. The theoretical part of the paper gives a summary of both traditional and pragmatic style theories, concentrating on the question of quantity. The examples show the possibilities of cognitive analysis and give models of perception, ways of cognition and understanding concerning quantity and frequency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Determines whether the auditory perceptual abilities of children are characterized by an age-related improvement in duration discrimination. Existence of a developmental pattern for Difference Limens for Duration (DLD); Analysis of the age X Direction; Impact of the increment and decrement patterns for the variable on DLD; Possible contributors for the developmental patterns.

Compares the syllable stress production of deaf and normally hearing speakers. Measurement of the syllabic differences in intensity, duration and fundamental frequency; Judgments on the stressing of syllable; Presence of acoustic cues.

The article presents an analysis of duration of periods and glottal articulation changes between the release of the word closure and voice onset time in English as considered in phonetics. For quotation type of words the stop closure is distinct, creating a greater time interval which helps distinguish the two phonemes clearly. In normal course of speech, the stop closure is not complete, leading to a smaller interval time and even overlapping along the dimension of voice onset time. In case of a stressed syllable or the syllables in final sentence, stress tends to create a longer voicing lag. The role of contextual features responsible for apparent overlap of dimension along the voice onset time in running speech needs to be explored further.

The article discusses a study which investigates the alleged contrast in spoken German, between long and overlong vowels. Comparisons of the results showed that the presence of a long and overlong vowels contrast as a valid signal element is extremely doubtful. The investigation revealed the occurrence of numerous reversals and no definite pattern was observed even in the speech of individuals. The study concluded that there is no systematic pattern of any kind in the alleged contrast between long and overlong in German vowels.

The article presents research comparing the functional and methodological distinction between the pause perception threshold for junction and hesitation pauses in speech. Psycholinguistic investigators have increasingly turned to the study of pauses because they are considered extralinguistic and thus less subject to uniform cultural control. Researchers, using highly sensitive recording equipment capable of capturing pauses far below the human threshold for pause discrimination, found the juncture pause to be more subject to cultural control than the hesitation pause. Study results also suggest that juncture pauses are functionally different than hesitation pauses as they aid a listener by helping them grasp the syntactic structure of a communication.

The article is concerned with the lengths of the individual pauses and their distribution over extensive tracts of speech. The technique rests as before on the transformation of sound to visible recordings. The pen-recorder connected with the tape recorder was run at a speed such that 3 mm on the visual record represented one second. The lengths of individual pauses are distributed differently for different individuals. The distribution of pause lengths is determined by the type of situation in which speech is uttered.

The article explores the discrimination of durations of silence with and without phonemic significance. Discrimination of an acoustic variable was measured when, as part of a synthetic speech pattern, that variable cued a phonemic distinction and when the same variable appeared in a non-speech context. With stimuli that vary along a single dimension like, of frequency, intensity, or duration, one typically finds that subjects discriminate many times more stimuli than they can identify absolutely.

The article presents a study designed to measure the effect on stress judgments of changes in three of these physical dimensions, duration, intensity and fundamental frequency. The experimental method was to synthesize speech stimuli in which these quantities could be controlled and varied over a considerable range and to use this material to construct listening tests which were carried out by large groups of subjects. The results showed that both duration and intensity act as cues in stress judgments. Among the physical dimension, duration produced the greater overall fluctuation in the judgments.