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Standard accounts hold that regularities of behavior must be arbitrary to constitute a convention. Yet, there is growing consensus that conventionality is a graded phenomenon, and that conventions can be more or less natural. I develop an account of natural conventions that distinguishes two basic dimensions of conventional naturalness: a probabilistic dimension and an inherent one. A convention is probabilistically natural if it is likely to emerge in a population of agents, and inherently natural if its content is a regularity that scores high on relevant measures for naturalness. I motivate the proposal on conceptual grounds and then showcase its descriptive benefits by discussing two case studies in language: the tendency towards word-length optimality and the prevalence of shape opacity in spoken language vocabularies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two major research issues for longitudinal investigations are the 'naturalness' of the learner language being studied, and the extent to which the research design is truly longitudinal. Regarding the first issue, data for longitudinal studies are usually collected in language classrooms or exams, with the writing tasks/topics being tightly controlled. A major disadvantage is that tasks can be unrepresentative of the writing required in disciplinary content courses. The present study analyzes writing development as it occurs 'naturally' in university disciplinary content courses, using four complexity features (i.e., finite adverbial clauses, finite relative clauses, attributive adjectives, and nouns as pre-modifiers) with the goal of comparing the kinds of findings in a True-longitudinal approach, a Quasi-longitudinal approach, and a Case study approach. This close examination of writing development that controlled for discipline and task showed an increase in development as measured by these linguistic indicators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An elicitation task was conducted with speakers of Japonic varieties to investigate whether stimuli of varying sensory modalities (e.g. audio, visual, tactile etc.) were more or less likely to elicit ideophones or iconic words. Stimuli representing sounds, movements, shapes and textures were most likely to elicit ideophones, and this is posited to reflect the relative ease or naturalness with which these domains can be mapped iconically to speech. The results mirror macro-level patterns of linguistic diversity, as these are also domains in which ideophones are most widely attested cross-linguistically. The findings call for the revision of a previously constructed implicational hierarchy for the semantic development of ideophone systems, adding to it the categories of FORM and TEXTURE as domains in which ideophones are most likely to develop, after SOUND and MOVEMENT. Independent evidence for the revised hierarchy comes from a semantic analysis of the elicited ideophones, where it was found that domains early in the hierarchy were more likely to be sources for semantic extension, while later domains were more likely to be targets. These findings are expected to be replicable for other languages, and offer exciting new directions for research into the semantic typology of ideophones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What makes a colored image, e.g. an abstract painting or a landscape, look pleasing? We hypothesized that a preference for complex color compositions, such as paintings and images of natural scenes, might be related to how natural the colors are perceived. We tested this possibility with two experiments in which the degree of naturalness of images was manipulated by rotating their color gamut rigidly in the color space CIELAB. This changed just the hue composition, but preserved saturation and lightness. In the first experiment we obtained individual scaling curves for perceived naturalness and for preference as a function of the angle of gamut rotation for a small set of images. The naturalness and preference scaling curves were found to be largely similar and their maxima were close to the original image. In the second experiment, we tested whether this effect generalized to a larger set of images. We used a simultaneous 5AFC procedure where in each trial participants had to select the most natural or the most preferred image from five different rotations of the color gamut. The results confirmed the first experiment and showed that, in general, the images perceived as the more natural tend to be the ones that are preferred. Together these results show that perceived naturalness and preference are indeed perceptually closely related and may be driven by related mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study examined the effects of Speech Intelligibility Treatment (SIT) on intelligibility and naturalness of narrative speech produced by francophone children with dysarthria due to cerebral palsy. Method: Ten francophone children with dysarthria were randomized to one of two treatments, SIT or Hand-Arm Bimanual Intensive Therapy Including Lower Extremities, a physical therapy (PT) treatment. Both treatments were conducted in a camp setting and were comparable in dosage. The children were recorded pre- and posttreatment producing a story narrative. Intelligibility was measured by means of 60 blinded listeners' orthographic transcription accuracy (percentage of words transcribed correctly). The listeners also rated the children's naturalness on a visual analogue scale. Results: A significant pre- to posttreatment increase in intelligibility was found for the SIT group, but not for the PT group, with great individual variability observed among the children. No significant changes were found for naturalness ratings or sound pressure level in the SIT group or the PT group posttreatment. Articulation rate increased in both treatment groups, although not differentially across treatments. Conclusions: Findings from this first treatment study on intelligibility in francophone children with dysarthria suggest that SIT shows promise for increasing narrative intelligibility in this population. Acoustic contributors to the increased intelligibility remain to be explored further. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many epistemological problems can be solved by the objective Bayesian view that there are rationality constraints on priors, that is, inductive probabilities. But attempts to work out these constraints have run into such serious problems that many have rejected objective Bayesianism altogether. I argue that the epistemologist should borrow the metaphysician's concept of naturalness and assign higher priors to more natural hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses one of the most contested issues in phonology: unnatural alternations. First, non-natural phonological processes are subdivided into unmotivated and unnatural. The central topic of the paper is an unnatural process: post-nasal devoicing (PND). I collect thirteen cases of PND and argue that in all reported cases, PND does not derive from a single unnatural sound change (as claimed in some individual accounts of the data), but rather from a combination of three sound changes, each of which is phonetically motivated. I present new evidence showing that the three stages are directly historically attested in the pre-history of Yaghnobi. Based on several discussed cases, I propose a new diachronic model for explaining unnatural phenomena called the Blurring Process and point to its advantages over competing approaches (hypercorrection, perceptual enhancement, and phonetic motivation). The Blurring Process establishes general diachronic conditions for unnatural synchronic processes and can be employed to explain unnatural processes beyond PND. Additionally, I provide a proof establishing the minimal sound changes required for an unmotivated/unnatural alternation to arise. The Blurring Process and Minimal Sound Change Requirement have implications for models of typology within the Channel Bias approach. This paper thus presents a first step toward the ultimate goal of quantifying the influences of Channel Bias on phonological typology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Randomly constructed 1+1 NN compounds receive an overall low score. • Elasticity has a significant effect on acceptability score. • Naturalness and frequency have a significant effect on acceptability score. Abstract Chinese 1+1 NNs refer to compounds made of two monosyllabic nouns, such as shū - bāo 'book-bag' and jī-dàn 'chicken-egg'. They occur frequently, do not violate any prosodic constraint, and appear to be highly productive. However, in Qin and Duanmu (2017) , it was found that the mean acceptability ranking was quite low for randomly constructed 1+1 NNs. Since the focus of Qin and Duanmu (2017) was on a different issue, the set of 1+1 NNs was small and not of balanced design. In this study, we gathered acceptability scores from 17 Chinese native speakers on 1000 randomly constructed 1+1 NNs. It is found that the mean acceptability score is only 22.6%, even lower than that of Qin and Duanmu (2017). In addition, while Qin and Duanmu (2017) found ambiguity, naturalness, and frequency to have significant effects on acceptability scores, the present study did not find ambiguity to be relevant. We also found that 1+1 NNs consisting of two elastic nouns are significantly less acceptable than those consisting of one or two non-elastic nouns, although the effect size is rather small. Possible reasons for the low acceptability of 1+1 NN compounds are discussed, including semantic transparency, grammatical relations between the two nouns of a compound, and modern vs. classic vocabulary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper presents a talking gesture generation system based on Generative Adversarial Networks, along with an evaluation of its adequateness. The talking gesture generation system produces a sequence of joint positions of the robot's upper body which keeps in step with an uttered sentence. The suitability of the approach is demonstrated with a real robot. Besides, the motion generation method is compared with other (non-deep) generative approaches. A two-step comparison is made. On the one hand, a statistical analysis is performed over movements generated by each approach by means of Principal Coordinate Analysis. On the other hand, the robot motion adequateness is measured by calculating the end effectors' jerk, path lengths and 3D space coverage. Highlights • Social robots need to show natural body language when talking. • A generative approach should allow to create novel movements. • GANs are regarded as producing better samples than other methods. • Statistical analysis confirms that GANs are better than other approaches. • Videos show the naturalness of the robot behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kris McDaniel has recently defended a criterion for being an ontological pluralist that classifies the quantifier variantist as one. In this paper, I argue that this is a mistake. There is an important difference between the two views, which is sometimes obscured by a common view in the metaphysics of fundamentality. According to the simple analysis, a language is ideal—it allows for a maximally metaphysically perspicuous description of reality—just in case all its primitives are perfectly natural. I argue that this analysis struggles to distinguish quantifier variance from ontological pluralism, and then I discuss various accounts that can do better. I then propose a criterion for being an ontological pluralist that does not misclassify the quantifier variantist. Finally, I discuss some additional advantages of my proposal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this journal, Schulte develops a novel solution to the problem of distal content: by virtue of what is a mental representation about a distal object (say, a snake) rather than a more proximal cause of that representation (say, a snake-shaped retinal impression)? Schulte maintains that in order for a (sensory-perceptual) representation to have a distal content, it must be produced by a constancy mechanism, along with two other conditions. I raise three objections to his solution. First, a core component of Schulte's solution is just a restrictive version of Dretske's solution, but Schulte gives no argument for his restriction. Second, his proposed solution to a disjunction problem (his 'naturalness' condition) is ad hoc. Finally, his 'far-out' version of the distality problem is not a version of the distality problem at all. I conclude that Dretske's solution is preferable to Schulte's. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Close temporal proximity between focused words and gestural apices was found. • Unlike previous findings, apex alignment was not dependent on F0 in Cantonese. • Both consistency and individuality in apex alignment pattern was observed. • Most speakers consistently aligned apices to the same syllable of focused words. • They differed in the syllable aligned while all maintained gestural naturalness. Abstract This study investigates the temporal relationship between focus prosody and co-speech pointing gestures in Hong Kong Cantonese. Previous studies have generally shown a close temporal proximity between prosodic and gestural prominence: Gestural prominence tends to be aligned with stressed syllables or words. However, this finding was based solely on studies of stress and pitch-accent languages, and no study has yet tested the phenomenon in a non-stress tone language. Ten native speakers of Hong Kong Cantonese participated in a picture-verification task in which pointing was elicited along with verbal corrections. The acoustic results showed that the corrective focus was marked solely by an on-focus durational increase. The gestural results revealed that there was an alignment between prosodic and gestural prominence, as most of the gesture apices were produced within the focused words. However, in contrast to previous findings, no significant effect of F0 (tone) or focus position was found. Instead, most speakers consistently aligned their apices with the same syllable position in disyllables. Based on the current findings, the prosodic anchor of prosody-gesture alignment is suggested to be the focused word in this language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Source-filter interaction explains the drop in pitch in voiced consonant due to constriction in the vocal tract during vowel-consonant-vowel (VCV) production. In this work, a perceptual study is conducted where the pitch contour in the voiced consonant region is modified to four different levels and a listening test is performed to assess the naturalness of the VCVs synthesized with the modified pitch contour. The listening test with 30 listeners shows no statistically significant difference between the naturalness of the original and synthesized VCVs with modified pitch indicating that pitch drop due to source-filter interaction may not be critical for the perceived naturalness of VCVs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we offer new arguments for bivalence of morphological features. In the domain of person, we argue in support of the system using the features [±speaker] and [±hearer], on the basis of plural marking in Cheyenne. In the domain of gender, we argue in support of the system using the features [±masculine] and [±feminine], on the basis of gender agreement in Serbian coordinate structures. The property of binary systems crucial for our proposal is that they allow combinations of disagreeing feature values, given that in such systems every morphological category is represented as a combination of two values. Our main empirical goal is to show that some languages treat such combinations of disagreeing feature values (as well as combinations of agreeing values) as natural classes (e.g., Noyer, Rolf. 1992. Features, positions and affixes in autonomous morphological structure. Ph.D. dissertation. Massachusetts Institute of Technology). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In human languages, different speech sounds can be contextual variants of a single phoneme, called allophones. Learning which sounds are allophones is an integral part of the acquisition of phonemes. Whether given sounds are separate phonemes or allophones in a listener's language affects speech perception. Listeners tend to be less sensitive to acoustic differences between sounds that are allophones. This study investigated the mechanisms behind the learning of allophones by looking at adults’ sensitivity to acoustic differences between two unfamiliar sounds when they were exposed to input in which the sounds behave like separate phonemes versus allophones in terms of their contextual distribution. The results of two experiments showed that adults became less sensitive to acoustic differences between two unfamiliar sounds after being exposed to input in which the sounds were in complementary distribution and that the emergence of allophonic perception was constrained by the phonetic naturalness of complementary distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phonological processes typically affect natural classes of sounds, with the members of such classes sharing some phonetic property to the exclusion of other sounds. Recent typological work shows that not all phonological classes are natural, however (Mielke 2008). This paper considers the class of glides and laryngeals, a combination of sounds which resists a straightforward characterization in terms of shared features. Adopting the framework of Element Theory (Harris & Lindsey 1995; Backley 2011), we argue that class behaviour of glides and laryngeals is due not to their having shared phonetic content, but shared phonological structure: glides and laryngeals contain a single element in their melodic structure. We conclude that phonological processes can be sensitive to the difference between simple and complex expressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is part of a perfectly natural, or fundamental, relation? Philosophers have been hesitant to take a stand on this issue. One reason for this hesitancy is the worry that, if parthood is perfectly natural, then the perfectly natural properties and relations are not suitably 'independent' of one another. (Roughly, the perfectly natural properties are not suitably independent if there are necessary connections among them.) In this paper, I argue that parthood is a perfectly natural relation. In so doing, I argue that this 'independence' worry is unfounded. I conclude by noting some consequences of the naturalness of parthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Naturalness is important and valued by most lay Western individuals. Yet, little is known about the lay meaning of "natural". We examine the phenomenon of additivity dominance: adding something to a natural product (additive) reduces naturalness more than removing an equivalent entity ("subtractive"). We demonstrate additivity dominance for the first time using equivalent adding and subtracting procedures. We find that adding something reduces naturalness more than removing the same thing (e.g., adding pulp to orange juice reduces naturalness more than removing pulp from orange juice; Study 1); an organism with a gene added is less natural than one with a gene removed (Study 2); and framing a product as an additive (versus as a subtractive) reduces naturalness (Study 3). We begin to examine accounts of additivity dominance. We find that it is not due to the connotations of the word "additive" (Study 4). However, data are consistent with an extra processing account -where additives involve more processing (extracting and adding) than subtractives (only removing)-and with a contagion account - where adding is more contaminating than removing (Study 5). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the interpretative properties of two clefts in French; the well-known c’est -cleft and the under-studied y’a -cleft. A prevalent assumption is that, when they signal narrow-focus, these two clefts differ with respect to exhaustivity ; the former specifies a unique referent for the focus variable, but not the latter. Empirical evidence from a forced-choice task suggests that this analysis is going down the right path. Yet, the paper argues for a refined understanding of the conditions of use for these two clefts, positing that c’est - and y’a -clefts do not occur in the exact same narrow-focus context. Rather, their alternation is linked to the type of question asked—a feature absent from past studies. In a nutshell, I argue that c’est -clefts are more naturally found with questions that require a full answer (i.e. Mention-All questions), whereas y’a -clefts are more appropriate in contexts where the question allows for a non-maximal answer (i.e. Mention-Some questions). Additionally, when y’a -clefts occur as answers to Mention-All questions, they convey an ignorance inference, which is much weaker in Mention-Some contexts. Evidence supporting this proposal comes from a second experiment; a rating task whose results also suggest that the type of question asked not only influences naturalness, but also the strength of the inferences respectively associated with the two clefts (exhaustivity and ignorance). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some seemingly robust linguistic generalizations remain controversial for years, often for lack of experimental verification. As a case study, we examine word length preferences in Chinese NN compounds. Since the original observation of Lü (1963) , there has been a broad consensus that 1+2 (monosyllabic + disyllabic) is ill formed, while 2+1, 2+2 and 1+1 are well-formed. In addition, it has been shown that the preferences can be derived from metrical principles. However, a judgment experiment is yet to be offered to verify the preferences, and without it some scholars remain skeptical. We offer such an experimental study, in which 15 native speakers are asked to rate the acceptability of 1,132 randomly generated NN compounds, with 283 each of the four length patterns. It is found that 2+2 is the most acceptable, followed by 2+1, while 1+2 and 1+1 are the least acceptable. The high rating of 2+2 and the low rating of 1+2 support previous predictions. The rating for 2+1 is slightly lower than expected, and that of 1+1 is most unexpected. It is also found that four other factors (the naturalness of the referent, homograph ambiguity, the boundness of a morpheme, and frequency) have significant effects on acceptability judgment, although their sizes are smaller than that of the length effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kant saw science as presupposing that the natural laws bring maximal diversity under maximal unity. Many philosophers, such as David Lewis, have regarded objective chances as upshots of science's aim at systematic unity--as ideal credences projected onto the world. This Kantian projectivism has seemed the only possible way to account for the rational constraint (codified by the 'Principal Principle') that our credences about chances impose on our credences regarding what they are chances of. This paper examines three ways of elaborating Lewis's Kantian strategy for explaining this rational constraint. After arguing that none of these three approaches is unproblematic, the paper proposes a non-Kantian alternative account according to which a chance measures the strength of a causal tendency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses a famous objection against David Lewis's Best System Analysis (BSA) of laws of nature. The objection--anticipated and discussed by Lewis (1994)-- focuses on the standards of simplicity and strength being (in part) a matter of psychology. Lewis's answer to the objection relies on his metaphysics of natural properties and its ability to single out the robustly best system, a system that is expected to come out far ahead of its rivals under any standard of simplicity and strength. The main task of this paper is to argue that Lewis's reply to the objection in terms of nature being kind to us does not succeed, if nature's kindness is understood in terms of the naturalness of the properties composing the Humean mosaic. For epistemic access to natural properties is downstream to any previous identification of the best system. A possible Lewisian rejoinder in terms of a cross-world Humean mosaic of natural properties is considered and rebutted. The paper concludes by suggesting that Lewis could instead avail himself of a better answer to the objection, if the standards of simplicity and strength were reinterpreted along perspectivalist lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of an internally versus externally cued speech task on perceived understandability and naturalness in speakers with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and cerebellar disease (CD). Method: Sentences extracted from a covertly recorded conversation (internally cued) were compared to the same sentences read aloud (externally cued) by speakers with PD and a clinical comparison group of speakers with CD. Experienced listeners rated the speech samples using a visual analog scale for the perceptual dimensions of understandability and naturalness. Results: Results suggest that experienced listeners rated the speech of participants with PD as significantly more natural and more understandable during the reading condition. Participants with CD were also rated as significantly more understandable during the reading condition, but ratings of naturalness did not differ between conversation and reading. Conclusions: Speech tasks can have a pronounced impact on perceived speech patterns. For individuals with PD, both understandability and naturalness can improve during reading tasks versus conversational tasks. The speech benefits from reading may be attributed to several mechanisms, including possible improvement from an externally cued speech task. These findings have implications for speech task selection in evaluating individuals with dysarthria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We prove that, for a natural class of Bridgeland stability conditions on P¹ x P¹ and the blow-up of P² at a point, the moduli spaces of Bridgeland semistable objects are projective. Our technique is to find suitable regions of stability conditions with hearts that are (after "rotation") equivalent to representations of a quiver. The helix and tilting theory is well-behaved on Del Pezzo surfaces and we conjecture that this program (begun in [3]) runs successfully for all Del Pezzo surfaces, and the analogous Bridgeland moduli spaces are projective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following George Eliot, Elizabeth von Arnim showcases a male rhetoric of naturalness. Her men cultivate and punish their women when they resist naturalizing. Without denigrating the intelligence of women, von Arnim shows their unwitting complicity in their subjection. InThe Pastor’s Wife(1914) and inVera(1921), the highly literate women have read the wrong books or missed the unfriendly truths about relationships in those they have read. The husbands and lovers make shallow use of philosophical and scientific reasoning to justify their control and enforce female uniformity deemed ‘natural’. Darwin is misappropriated by the tyrannical Wemyss: evolutionary theories support his imperious dismissal of Lucy’s aunt and friends. Wemyss’s most monstrous actions suggest an atavistic patriarchal dominance like the hereditary reversion theorized by Samuel Butler as unconscious memory. Wemyss brings up the issue of England’s inheritance, and a disturbing vision dawns as the philistine and self-appointed natural man subdues Lucy. Daphne du Maurier’sRebecca(1938) followsVera’s plot, but it does not interrogate naturalness in the same way. Entrapped in her husband’s vision of a natural woman, the narrator registers Rebecca’s wild transgressiveness as more powerful and universal than her own tamed naturalness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The leading account of intrinsicality over the last thirty years has arguably been David Lewis's account in terms of perfect naturalness. Lewis's account, however, has three serious problems: i) it cannot allow necessarily coextensive properties to differ in whether they are intrinsic; ii) it falsely classifies non-qualitative properties like being Obama as non-intrinsic; and iii) it is incompatible with a number of metaphysical theories that posit irreducibly non-categorical properties. I argue that, as a result of these problems, Lewis's account should be rejected and replaced with an alternative account, which also analyses intrinsicality in terms of perfect naturalness, but which avoids these problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The public exhibitions of plastinated (preserved) and dissected human cadavers have proved exceedingly popular and also very contentious. However, there has been little in the way of sustained analysis of these exhibitions from a Christian angle. The technique of plastination enables whole bodies to be displayed as though standing and playing a variety of sports, and with ‘life-like’ facial expressions. In analyzing this phenomenon, the plastination procedure is outlined, and the degree of naturalness of the whole body plastinates assessed. In searching for theological directives the debate over burial and cremation is used as a means of exploring the respect we give the dead body, and the significance of the resurrection of the body for our views of the dead body. In particular, attention is paid to devaluation of the dead body in situations ranging from dissection of the body through to commercial public exhibitions. The centrality of notions of altruism and ‘gift’ is discussed. It is concluded that there are many disquieting features to these exhibitions, necessitating caution in approaching them. Nevertheless, in reminding visitors of their mortality and the wonders of the human body, they are not to be dismissed entirely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existentialism and postmodernism have both abandoned the idea of a human nature. Also, the idea of naturalness as a value for education has been targeted as a blind for conservative ideology. There are, however, good reasons to re-establish a sound concept of human naturalness. First of all, the concept does not seem to have disappeared from common usage, despite all criticism. Secondly, the idea of naturalness seems essential to our sense of ourselves and for the formation of our identities. And finally, the idea is the inevitable basis for the possibility of a radical criticism of society and culture. This paper presents two suggestions for a rehabilitation of the concept of naturalness: Gernot Böhme's phenomenology of body and nature, and Christoph Menke's 'genealogical reflexion'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The perfectly natural properties and relations are special--they are all and only those that "carve nature at its joints." They act as reference magnets, form a minimal supervenience base, figure in fundamental physics and in the laws of nature, and never divide duplicates within or between worlds. If the perfectly natural properties are the (metaphysically) important ones, we should expect being a perfectly natural property to itself be one of the (perfectly) natural properties. This paper argues that being a perfectly natural property is not a very natural property, and examines the consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present a silent speech interface (SSI) system aimed at restoring speech communication for individuals who have lost their voice due to laryngectomy or diseases affecting the vocal folds. In the proposed system, articulatory data captured from the lips and tongue using permanent magnet articulography (PMA) are converted into audible speech using a speaker-dependent transformation learned from simultaneous recordings of PMA and audio signals acquired before laryngectomy. The transformation is represented using a mixture of factor analysers, which is a generative model that allows us to efficiently model non-linear behaviour and perform dimensionality reduction at the same time. The learned transformation is then deployed during normal usage of the SSI to restore the acoustic speech signal associated with the captured PMA data. The proposed system is evaluated using objective quality measures and listening tests on two databases containing PMA and audio recordings for normal speakers. Results show that it is possible to reconstruct speech from articulator movements captured by an unobtrusive technique without an intermediate recognition step. The SSI is capable of producing speech of sufficient intelligibility and naturalness that the speaker is clearly identifiable, but problems remain in scaling up the process to function consistently for phonetically rich vocabularies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to proponents of one influential account of metaphysical naturalness, properties fall along a spectrum from perfectly natural to highly non-natural. Theperfectly naturalend of the spectrum is occupied by properties that appear in the laws of nature, account for resemblance and causal powers, and ground other properties, whereas thehighly non-naturalproperties at the spectrum’s other end are not like this at all. However, there is another phenomenon thatlooksvery much like metaphysical naturalness but is context-dependent. I call this phenomenoncontext-dependent naturalness. In this paper I describe two cases in which inappropriate use is made of metaphysical naturalness and argue that in such cases, the context-dependent importance of certain properties has been confused for the context-independent importance of those properties. I argue that in order to avoid such problems we should embrace context-dependent naturalness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Purpose: Although dysarthria affects the large majority of individuals with cerebral palsy (CP) and can substantially complicate everyday communication, previous research has provided an incomplete picture of its clinical features. We aimed to comprehensively describe characteristics of dysarthria in adults with CP and to elucidate the impact of dysarthric symptoms on parameters relevant for communication. Method: Forty-two adults with CP underwent speech assessment by means of standardized auditory rating scales. Listening experiments were conducted to obtain communication-related parameters--that is, intelligibility and naturalness--as well as age and gender estimates. Results: The majority of adults with CP showed moderate to severe dysarthria with symptoms on all dimensions of speech, most prominently voice quality, respiration, and prosody. Regression analyses revealed that articulatory, respiratory, and prosodic features were the strongest predictors of intelligibility and naturalness of speech. Listeners' estimates of the speakers' age and gender were predominantly determined by voice parameters. Conclusion: This study provides an overview on the clinical presentation of dysarthria in a convenience sample of adults with CP. The complexity of the functional impairment described and the consequences on the individuals' communication call for a stronger consideration of dysarthria in CP both in clinical care and in research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We compare the complexity of idiosyncratic sound patterns involving American English /ʁ/ with the relative simplicity of clear/dark /l/-allophony patterns found in English and other languages. For /ʁ/, we report an ultrasound-based articulatory study of twenty-seven speakers of American English. Two speakers use only retroflex /ʁ/, sixteen use only bunched /ʁ/, and nine use both /ʁ/ types, with idiosyncratic allophonic distributions. These allophony patterns are covert, because the difference between bunched and retroflex /ʁ/ is not readily perceived by listeners. We compare this typology of /l/-allophony patterns to clear/dark /l/-allophony patterns in seventeen languages. On the basis of the observed patterns, we show that individual-level /ʁ/allophony and language-level /l/ allophony exhibit similar phonetic grounding, but that /ʁ/-allophony patterns are considerably more complex. The low complexity of language-level /l/-allophony patterns, which are more readily perceived by listeners, is argued to be the result of individual-level contact in the development of sound patterns. More generally, we argue that familiar phonological patterns (which are relatively simple and homogeneous within communities) may arise from individual-level articulatory patterns, which may be complex and speaker-specific, by a process of koineization. We conclude that two classic properties of phonological rules, phonetic naturalness and simplicity, arise from different sources.* [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We show how to interpret quantified arguments of predicates in situ, avoiding recourse to LF movement or Geach division. Two merits of this approach are as follows: one, it enables an account of the naturalness of object narrow scope readings over object wide scope ones. And two, it enables us to characterize object DP interpretations which mathematically extend far beyond those available for subject DPs, specifically nominal and predicate anaphors, as well as referentially autonomous expressions which occur in both grammatical roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research problem: Deciding whether to accept or reject contract clauses in software purchasing contracts is a complex communication-related task, which is likely faced daily by a multitude of software purchasing professionals in a variety of organizations. Research question: What are the effects of viewing contract clauses as video clips, compared to viewing clauses as text only, in terms of cognitive effort, communication ambiguity, and correctness in the acceptance or rejection of clauses in software purchasing contracts? Literature review: The literature on the Media Richness and Media Naturalness theories suggest that viewing contract clauses as video clips should reduce cognitive effort and communication ambiguity. However, while Media Richness theory suggests that correctness in the acceptance or rejection of clauses in software purchasing contracts should increase with the use of video clips, Media Naturalness theory suggests a neutral overall effect. Methodology: An experiment was conducted in which student participants were asked to either accept or reject 20 clauses from a software contract, placing themselves in the position of buyers. Of the 20 clauses, 6 were intentionally deceitful and potentially harmful to the buyer. Approximately half of the participants reviewed the contract clauses as web-based text, and the remaining as web-based video clips. Results and conclusions: Viewing contract clauses as video clips was associated with significantly less cognitive effort and less communication ambiguity than viewing the clauses as text only. Counterintuitively, increases in perceived cognitive effort and communication ambiguity were associated with more successful identification and rejection of deceitful contract clauses. The combination of these competing effects led to an overall neutral effect of the medium on the correctness in the acceptance or rejection of clauses. These findings are consistent with expectations based on Media Naturalness theory, particularly its compensatory adaptation proposition, and inconsistent with expectations based on Media Richness theory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Objectives: To assess the perceived pitch and naturalness of popular music by cochlear implant (CI) users.Methods: Eleven experienced post-lingually deafened adult CI users rated the pitch, naturalness, and clarity of a popular song with 10 frequency allocation settings, including the default. The alternative settings all had logarithmic frequency spacing and frequency shifts of less than one octave compared with the default map. For maps which were perceived as having incorrect pitch, participants adjusted the pitch of the song in real time using a slider, in order to normalize it, and the amount of adjustment was recorded.Results: The default map was rated as having close to correct pitch. Naturalness rating was negatively correlated with basal shift from a baseline logarithmic map, which was the same as the default map for basal electrodes (R(2) = 0.77). Ratings of the clarity of the lyrics were adversely affected by basal shift. The majority of participants were able to rate and adjust pitch appropriately. The frequency shift in the map was highly correlated with participants' adjustments of the pitch slider (R(2) = 0.94), but the adjustments were less than expected for the majority of participants.Discussion: The pitch ratings for the default allocation suggest that participants have acclimatized to their processors' frequency allocations. Adjustment of the pitch of the song was possible for the majority and suggested that all but one participant was experiencing frequency compression. Expansion of the frequency allocation might help to alleviate this.Conclusion: Adjustment of the pitch of a popular song could be helpful for tuning CIs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an average voice model training technique based on a speaker clustering approach to generate synthetic speech with enhanced similarity to the target speakers’ speech. A novel point of the proposed technique is the use of the speaker characteristics (called “speaker class”), which are obtained from unsupervised clustering, as the additional contextual factor for the average voice based speech synthesis. In the model training process, first, speaker clustering is performed for all speakers used for model training to obtain the speaker class for each speaker. The average voice model with multiple speaker characteristics is trained by using the obtained speaker class. For the speaker adaptation and speech parameter generation, the speaker class of the target speaker is estimated on the basis of the Euclidean distance between the centroids of each cluster and the target speaker’s feature. The use of the estimated speaker class makes it possible to utilize the model parameters that have speaker characteristics similar to those of the target speaker for speaker adaptation and speech parameter generation. The results of objective and subjective experiments indicated the proposed technique can synthesize speech with improved similarity and naturalness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three experiments investigated the processing of the implicature associated with some using a 'gumball paradigm.' On each trial, participants saw an image of a gumball machine with an upper chamber with 13 gumballs and an empty lower chamber. Gumballs then dropped to the lower chamber and participants evaluated statements, such as 'You got some of the gumballs.' Experiment 1 established that some is less natural for reference to small sets (1, 2, and 3 of the 13 gumballs) and unpartitioned sets (all 13 gumballs) compared to intermediate sets (6-8). Partitive some of was less natural than simple some when used with the unpartitioned set. In Experiment 2, including exact number descriptions lowered naturalness ratings for some with small sets but not for intermediate size sets and the unpartitioned set. In Experiment 3, the naturalness ratings from Experiment 2 predicted response times. The results are interpreted as evidence for a Constraint-Based account of scalar implicature processing and against both two-stage, Literal-First models and pragmatic Default models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adding a sound to a certain environment is likely to be effective for design of impression there in acoustical point of view. However, until now, little is known about the effectiveness of additional sound on the change in impression. In order to investigate the effect of additional sound, an experiment was conducted by using three kinds of audio-visual materials offering three environments and five kinds of additional sounds. The audio-visual materials were respectively recorded at ''forest,'' ''park,'' and ''shopping street.'' They represent ''natural,'' ''artificial green,'' and ''urban'' environments, respectively. Five kinds of sound stimuli were respectively chosen as: ''bird singing,'' ''sound of stream,'' ''roaring of waves,'' ''traffic noise,'' and ''hum of voices.'' The former three stimuli are regarded as sounds in nature, while the latter two are regarded as artificial ones. The experiment was based on the method of paired comparison, consisting of the unprocessed original audio-visual material and that with one of the additional sounds. The subjects evaluated relative comfortableness and naturalness of each pair. Sound pressure level of the additional sound was controlled in order to discuss the influence of the loudness of the additional sound to the evaluation. The experimental results showed that the comfortableness was improved when the additional sound was 'bird singing' or 'sound of stream' categorized in the nature sound and its sound pressure level was a little lower than that at the original environment. Moreover, it was found out that the naturalness is degraded gradually for almost of the additional sound stimuli, as their sound pressure level is increased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of linguistic studies is now deploying judgment experiments to probe both syntactic and phonological knowledge. Thus a research question arises as to what kind of judgment format is useful for probing our linguistic knowledge. Against this theoretical background, this study compares two types of phonological judgment experimentation: a scale-based naturalness judgment task and a forced-choice wug test. The current analysis uses the data from two previously published studies on rendaku, a famous voicing phenomenon found in Japanese compound formation, and Lyman's Law, which is known to inhibit rendaku. Although the two tasks at first sight show a close correlation with each other, a detailed examination of the data shows that the forced-choice wug-test reveals the influence of Lyman's Law on rendaku more clearly than the naturalness judgment experiment. To the extent that the effect of Lyman's Law is real, the current comparison shows that a forced-choice wug experiment is better than a naturalness judgment experiment. While the impact of the current results is limited and modest, this study provides a first step toward understanding how different tasks in phonological experimentation may compare to one another. It is hoped that the current study will plant a seed for a research program which addresses which kind of phonological judgment experimentation is best-suited to reveal our phonological knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Central Catalan, word-final sibilants and stop + sibilant clusters undergo voicing when followed by a vowel in the next word. In word-final pre-vocalic singleton stops, however, no voicing is observed. This asymmetry is unexpected from the point of view of phonetic naturalness, and it invites a closer empirical investigation, especially in the light of recent phonetic findings which challenge earlier descriptions of a similar voicing process before sonorant consonants in Catalan. This study presents a systematic acoustic comparison of voicing in pre-vocalic stops /p, b/, sibilants /s, z/ and stop + sibilant clusters /bz/ with voicing before obstruents and before sonorant consonants. The results show that while pre-sonorant voicing is limited and highly variable, pre-vocalic sibilant and cluster voicing are both robust categorical processes for most speakers. Drawing on evidence from how voicing is realised in a subset of gradient cases, I propose that pre-vocalic cluster voicing developed from pre-vocalic sibilant voicing which in turn descended from an earlier intervocalic voicing process. I further question whether the outcome of the sound changes in Catalan can be synchronically analysed using grounded markedness constraints, and to what extent the pre-vocalic voicing may be regulated by universal vs. language-specific mechanisms of phonological abstraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Douglas Ehring (2011) has proposed a conception of natural classes of tropes to fulfill the roles usually attributed to universals. Natural classes of tropes can avoid the difficulties that affect the classic theory of tropes – as claimed by D. C. Williams and Keith Campbell – where tropes are simple and, by themselves, are particulars and have an intrinsic nature. Natural classes of tropes are also preferable to primitive resemblance classes of tropes, because they can explain the characteristics of the relation of resemblance and can also ground an internal relation of resemblance between tropes. It is contended here that the conception proposed works very differently whether tropes are conceived as modifier tropes or as module tropes. In the first case, tropes cannot be grouped directly in natural classes, because tropes have no intrinsic character. They ground the character possessed by their bearer, but they themselves have none. So, the character attributed to a trope due to its belonging to a natural class is dependent, on its turn, on the natural classes or the resemblance classes into which the objects that bear those tropes enter. In the second case, tropes do have a character. Then, they can enter 'directly' into natural classes. The problem in this case, though, is that tropes seem to have many different characters and seem vulnerable to the traditional problems of the 'imperfect community' and the 'company' that affect resemblance nominalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] We propose a technique for adding prosodic variations in HMM-based speech synthesis. [•] Phrase-level contexts are defined that compensate the lack of prosodic variations. [•] Average prosodic difference between original and synthetic speech is used. [•] Expressive speech of sales talk and fairy tale is used for evaluation. [•] Users can manually change phrase-level pitch without degrading naturalness. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This essay asserts that Basho created an Eternal Now in his frog haiku, reflecting the Buddhist insight into the present moment. For a better understanding of characteristics of nowness, instantaneity and naturalness, the essay discusses 1) the stylistic features such as terseness, phonological pattern and musicality that form a wholeness of Basho's haiku, and 2) naturalness and simplicity that reflect the Buddhist philosophy. Though written in a traditional form of seventeen onji, the frog haiku has only eleven words. Although some words are kanji, borrowings from the Chinese language, they are polysyllabic in the Japanese language. For instance, (furu),(ike),(kawazu),(mizu), and (oto). And the assonance in these words makes a pleasant melody in the one-line structure, showing that the repetition, variation and arrangement of the vowels can distinguish this haiku in musicality and in two kinds of sound: the sound of vowels that produce the rhythm and the sound of water made by the hopping frog. The essay also discusses the three steps of reading the frog haiku, believing that the third one gets the kernel of simplicity. In fact, the most fascinating part of Basho's haiku is its naturalness and simplicity, which reflect the Japanese aesthetic attitude toward nature and human harmony with nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent interest in the idea that there can be scientific understanding without explanation lends new relevance to Duhem's notion of natural classification. According to Duhem, a classification that is natural teaches us something about nature without being explanatory. However, his conception of naturalness leaves much to be desired from the point of view of contemporary discussions. In this paper, I argue that we can measure the naturalness of classification by using an amended version of the notion of unification as defined by Schurz and Lambert. If this thesis is correct, it leads to a better conceptual understanding of scientific understanding, and also gives the nascent literature on this topic some much-needed precision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The memory space and bandwidth may be limited in speech signal communication. To solve the problem, a low rate speech coding and decoding system has been developed to realize speech communication with a high condensation. This system is composed of micro-controller STM32, special speech processor TR600, speech codec chip TLV320AIC10, speech acquisition and playback circuit. This design can code and decode speech in 0. 6 Kbps, 0. 8 Kbps, 1. 2 Kbps and 2. 4 Kbps. The tests show that the system' s reconstructive speech could maintain high naturalness, articulation and intelligibility, hence it reflects the design is feasible, stable and valuable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how consideration of the notions of naturalness and eligibility, which have played an increasingly significant role in contemporary metaphysics, might impact on the study of truth. In particular, it aims to demonstrate how taking such notions seriously may be of benefit to 'representational' theories of truth by showing how the naturalness of truth on a representational account provides a response to the 'Scope Problem' presented by Lynch (2009). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper develops the approach to testing considered in [1]. A formal model of test interaction of the most general type and reduction-type conformance are proposed for which there is hardly any dependence between errors. It is shown that many known types of conformance in various interaction semantics are particular cases of this general model. The paper is devoted to the problem of dependence between errors defined by specification and to the related problem of optimization of tests. There is dependence between errors if there exists a strict subset of errors such that any nonconformal implementation (i.e., implementation that contains some error) contains an error from this subset. Accordingly, it is sufficient that the tests detect errors only from this subset. In the general model proposed, the dependence between errors may arise when one chooses, as a class of implementations under test, some strict subset of the class of all implementations. Partial interaction semantics and/or various implementation hypotheses (in particular, a safety hypothesis) precisely suggest that an implementation under test is not arbitrary but belongs to some subclass of (safe) implementations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]