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The Scottish philosopher Norman Kemp Smith (1872–1958) is best known for his 1929 English translation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and for his incisive commentaries on Descartes, Hume, and Kant. These achievements have overshadowed his original philosophical work in several areas, including the experience of time. A realist with idealist sympathies, Kemp Smith developed a non-transcendental version of Kant's conception of time as a 'pure intuition' (though he insisted that temporal perception involved 'categories'). He employed this conception to solve a problem that was widely discussed in early twentieth-century European and American philosophy, which William James dubbed the 'specious present': how can we perceive an extended duration, like a full golf swing, or the cadence of a brief tune, if we only perceive the present? A closely related problem: if we only ever perceive the present, how can we distinguish among the future, present, and past? In this paper, I explain Kemp Smith's proposed solution, and compare it with two of his contemporary influences: Samuel Alexander and George F. Stout. Finally, I suggest that these problems are still with us, and are likely to be for some time, especially if we ignore the insights offered by earlier discussions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A prominent principle in explaining a range of word-order regularities is dependency locality, which minimizes the linear distances (dependency lengths) between a head and its dependents. However, it remains unclear to what extent language users in fact observe locality when producing sentences under diverse conditions of cross-categorical harmony (such as the placement of verbal and nominal heads on the same vs. different sides of their dependents), dependency direction (head-final vs. head-initial), and parallel vs. hierarchical dependency structures (e.g. multiple adjectives dependent on the same head vs. nested genitive dependents). Using forty-five dependency- annotated corpora of diverse languages, we find that after controlling for harmony and conditioning on dependency types, dependency-length minimization (DLM) is inversely correlated with the overall presence of head-final dependencies. This anti-DLM effect in sentences with more head-final dependencies is specifically associated with an accumulation of dependents in parallel structures and with disharmonic orders in hierarchical structures. We propose a detailed interpretation of these results and tentatively suggest a role for a probabilistic principle that favors embedding head-initial (e.g. VO) structures inside equally head-initial and thereby length-minimizing structures (e.g. relative clauses after the head noun), while head-final (OV) structures have a less pronounced preference for harmony and DLM. This is in line with earlier findings in research on the Greenbergian word-order universals and with a probabilistic version of what has been suggested more recently as the final-over-final condition.* [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How to distinguish emotions such as envy, disgust, and shame from sentiments such as love, hate, and adoration? While the standard approach argues that emotions and sentiments differ in terms of their temporal structures (e.g., Ben-ze'ev, 2000; Deonna & Teroni, 2012), this paper sketches an alternative approach according to which each of these states exhibits a distinctive intentional structure. More precisely, this paper argues that emotions and sentiments exhibit distinct forms of affective intentionality. The paper begins by examining the temporal criteria of duration, etiology, and phenomenology widely employed to distinguish between both states. It demonstrates that none of them provides a clear-cut distinction between emotions and sentiments. Next, it presents the intentional approach as an alternative. To this end, it discusses what I call the axiological account (De Monticelli's 2006; 2020), before introducing my version of the intentional approach according to which emotions and sentiments exhibit different forms of affective intentionality. The main findings are summarized in the conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background/objectives: Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is one of the most common chronic illnesses in the United Kingdom accounting for approximately 15% of deaths per year. Growing evidence suggests that sleep duration and quality contributes towards this. This study aimed to determine whether there was a significant relationship between the elevation of haemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) level, sleep quality (SQ) and sleep duration (SD) in clinically diagnosed pre-diabetic patients. Subjects/methods: Following referral from a relevant healthcare professional, participants (n = 40) were registered on the National Health Service England, funded Healthier You: National Diabetes Prevention Programme and completed a Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index questionnaire to evaluate SQ and SD. Results: A Spearman's correlation showed an association between HbA1c, SQ and SD measures. A simple linear regression showed a significant large positive association (rs = 0.913, p < 0.001) and significant regression (F (1) = 39, p < 0.001) with an R2 of 0.842 between HbA1c level and SQ. Additionally, a significant large negative association (rs = 0.757, p < 0.001) and significant regression was found (F (1) = 39, p < 0.001) with an R2 of 0.570 between HbA1c and SD. Conclusions: This study suggests a relationship between SQ, SD and the elevation of HbA1c which may contribute towards prevalence of T2DM and may help to increase adherence to diabetes prevention programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Real-time altered feedback has demonstrated a key role for auditory feedback in both online feedback control and in updating feedforward control for future utterances. The aim of this study was to examine adaptation in response to temporal perturbation using real-time perturbation of ongoing speech. Method: Twenty native English speakers with no reported history of speech or hearing disorders participated in this study. The study consisted of four word blocks, using the phrases "a capper," "a gapper," "a sapper," and "a zapper" (due to issues with the implementation of perturbation, "gapper" was excluded from analysis). In each block, participants completed a baseline phase (30 trials of veridical feedback), a ramp phase (feedback perturbation increasing to maximum over 30 trials), a hold phase (60 trials with perturbation held at maximum), and a washout phase (30 trials, feedback abruptly returned to veridical feedback). Word-initial consonant targets (voice onset time for /k, g/ and fricative duration for /s, z/) were lengthened, and the following stressed vowel (/æ/) was shortened. Results: Overall, speakers did not adapt the production of their consonants but did lengthen their vowel production in response to shortening. Vowel lengthening showed continued aftereffects during the early portion of the washout phase. Although speakers did not adapt absolute consonant durations, consonant duration was reduced as a proportion of the total syllable duration. This is consistent with previous research that suggests that speakers attend to proportional durations rather than absolute durations. Conclusion: These results indicate that speakers actively monitor proportional durations and update the temporal dynamics of planning units extending beyond a single segment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This meta‐analysis examined associations between the quantity and quality of parental linguistic input and children's language. Pooled effect size for quality (i.e., vocabulary diversity and syntactic complexity; k = 35; N = 1,958; r =.33) was more robust than for quantity (i.e., number of words/tokens/utterances; k = 33; N = 1,411; r =.20) of linguistic input. For quality and quantity of parental linguistic input, effect sizes were stronger when input was observed in naturalistic contexts compared to free play tasks. For quality of parental linguistic input, effect sizes also increased as child age and observation length increased. Effect sizes were not moderated by socioeconomic status or child gender. Findings highlight parental linguistic input as a key environmental factor in children's language skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We experimentally demonstrate the net third order dispersion (TOD) compensation in an all-fibre stretched chirped pulse amplification (CPA) system, which contained chirped fibre Bragg gratings (CFBG) as a stretcher and 1450 lines/mm grating-pair as a compressor. The mathematical model is built to find a temperature field distribution that is suited to eliminate TOD. According to the model, six different temperature fields is competed by five TEC, which are used to tuneable TOD in the CPA system. One of the temperature fields, fit well to the model, could obtain the better pulse shape with the pulse duration 789 fs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frequency of disfluencies in speech is often analysed in different age groups, but functions of certain types of disfluencies are rarely examined. The aim of this study is to analyse durational patterns and functions of the repeated words in diverse age groups (from preschool children to elderly speakers). Functions of repetitions are well determinable from their durational patterns and pauses around the first and second instances of the repeated words. Results show that disfluent word-repetitions are good predictors for detecting some age-dependent changes in speech production process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current work, an efficient approach has been implemented to model the fractional delay in the elongated cylindrical segments of the vocal tract in waveguide modeling. The vocal tract has been divided into uniform cylindrical segments of the variable lengths. In this case, the time taken by the sound wave to propagate through a cylindrical segment in an axial direction may not be an integer multiple of each other. This means that the delay in an axial direction is necessarily a fractional delay for each fractional elongated segment. In the previous work, to accommodate the fractional delay for each elongated cylindrical segment, two extra cylindrical segments of same lengths were added to maintain the even number of segments. In the proposed work, we add only a single extra segment for each fractional elongated segment which reduces memory and computational cost as well. To keep the even number of segments, we assume that the extra and original segments constitute a single long segment. Lagrange interpolation is used for the approximation of the fractional delay. The proposed model has been devised for the elongation of any arbitrary cylindrical segment by a suitable scaling factor. These results are validated with an accurate benchmark model. This model has a single algorithm and there is no need to make sections of the segments for the elongation of the intermediate segments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spectrotemporally complex sounds carry important information for acoustic communication. Among the important features of these sounds is the temporal duration. An event‐related potential called mismatch negativity indexes auditory change detection in humans. An analogous response (mismatch response) has been found to duration changes in speech sounds in rats but not yet in mice. We addressed whether mice show this response, and, if elicited, whether this response is functionally analogous to mismatch negativity or whether adaptation‐based models suffice to explain them. Auditory‐evoked potentials were epidurally recorded above the mice auditory cortex. The differential response to the changes in a repeated human speech sound /a/ was elicited 53–259 ms post‐change (oddball condition). The differential response was observable to the largest duration change (from 200 to 110 ms). Any smaller (from 200 to 120–180 ms at 10 ms steps) duration changes did elicit an observable response. The response to the largest duration change did not robustly differ in amplitude from the response to the change‐inducing sound presented without its repetitive background (equiprobable condition). The findings suggest that adaptation may suffice to explain responses to duration changes in spectrotemporally complex sounds in anaesthetized mice. The results pave way for development of a variety of murine models of acoustic communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How the brain encodes abstract numerical symbols is a fundamental question in philosophy and cognitive neuroscience alike. Here we probe the nature of symbolic number representation in the brain by characterizing the neural similarity space for symbolic quantities in regions sensitive to their semantic content. In parietal and occipital regions, the similarity space of number symbols was positively predicted by the lexical frequency of numerals in parietal and occipital areas, and was unrelated to numerical ratio. These results are more consistent with a categorical, frequency-based account of symbolic quantity encoding. In contrast, the similarity space of analog quantities was positively predicted by ratio in prefrontal, parietal and occipital regions. We thus provide an explanation for why previous work has indicated that symbolic and analog quantities are distinct: number symbols operate primarily like discrete categories sensitive to input frequency, while analog quantities operate more like approximate perceptual magnitudes. In addition, we find substantial evidence for related patterns of activity across formats in prefrontal, parietal and occipital regions. Crucially however, between-format relations were not specific to individual quantities, indicating common processing as opposed to common representation. Moreover, evidence for between-format processing was strongest for quantities that could be represented as exact, discrete values in both systems (quantities in the 'subitizing' range: 1–4). In sum, converging evidence presented here indicates that symbolic quantities are coded in the brain as discrete categories sensitive to input frequency and largely independent of approximate, analog quantities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Infant vocal durations have been studied from a variety of perspectives, including medical, social, and linguistic. The resultant developmental profile across the first 6 months of life, however, is still far from clear. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the durational properties of infant vocalizations from the unique perspective of voice quality. By considering an infant's modal and nonmodal voice qualities, the developmental range of vocalizations produced by infants during the early months of life was captured. Method: Four Australian English--speaking infants were recorded for approximately 1 hr per week during the first 6 months of life. A total of 6,309 vocalizations were perceptually identified and labeled according to voice quality. The duration of each vocalization was subsequently measured. Results: A nonlinear curve was evident for the duration of all vocalizations combined. Duration increased significantly between Months 3 and 5. Modal voice was the only voice quality that displayed a linear increase in duration across the study. All other voice qualities displayed polynomial trends. Conclusions: Based on the current results, the inconsistent pattern of vocal duration development found previously can be reconciled when voice quality properties of vocalizations are taken into account. A nonlinear curve is evident when a broad corpus of infant vocalizations is used, whereas a narrow corpus containing predominantly modal vocalizations displays a linear trend. The results demonstrate the necessity of including nonmodal voice qualities in infant duration experiments so as to not overstate the linear nature of duration increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interesting aspect of the Dravidian languages is a commonality through a shared script, similar vocabulary, and their common root language. In this work, an attempt has been made to classify the four complex Dravidian languages using cepstral coefficients and prosodic features. The speech of Dravidian languages has been recorded in various environments and considered as a database. It is demonstrated that while cepstral coefficients can indeed identify the language correctly with a fair degree of accuracy, prosodic features are added to the cepstral coefficients to improve language identification performance. Legendre polynomial fitting and the principle component analysis (PCA) are applied on feature vectors to reduce dimensionality which further resolves the issue of time complexity. In the experiments conducted, it is found that using both cepstral coefficients and prosodic features, a language identification rate of around 87% is obtained, which is about 18% above the baseline system using Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs). It is observed from the results that the temporal variations and prosody are the important factors needed to be considered for the tasks of language identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most widely studied observations in linguistic phonetics is that, all else being equal, vowels are longer before voiced than before voiceless obstruents. The causes of this phonetic generalization are, however, poorly understood and several competing explanations have been proposed. No studies have so far measured vowel duration before stops with yet another laryngeal feature: ejectives. This study fills this gap and presents results from an experiment that measures vowel duration before stops with all three laryngeal features in Georgian and models effects of both closure and voice onset time (VOT) on preceding vowel duration at the same time. The results show that vowels have significantly different durations before all three series of stops, voiced, ejective, and voiceless aspirated, even when closure and VOT durations are controlled for. The results also suggest that closure and VOT durations are inversely correlated with preceding vowel duration. These results combined bear several implications for the discussion of causes of vowel duration differences: the data support the hypotheses that claim that laryngeal gestures, temporal compensation, and closure velocity affect vowel duration. Some explanations, especially perceptual and airflow expenditure explanations, are considerably weakened by the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attunement to native phonological categories and the specification of relevant phonological features in the lexicon occur early in development for monolingual and monodialectal speakers. However, few studies have investigated whether and how early exposure to two dialects of a language might influence the development of phonological categories, especially when a phonemic contrast exists only in one dialect. This study compared perceptual sensitivity to mispronunciations in phonemic vowel length in Australian English adult listeners with and without early exposure to another English dialect that did not have this contrast. The results showed that, while both mono- and bi-dialectal groups were sensitive to mispronunciations in vowel length, the bi-dialectal adults were more likely to accept a mispronunciation in vowel length compared to mono-dialectal adults. The bi-dialectal group accepted mispronunciations in vowel length more than in vowel height and backness. These results suggest that the bi-dialectal Australian English adults may employ a more flexible vowel length category for spoken word processing compared to mono-dialectal adults. The findings reveal a complex influence of early exposure to another dialect on the development of phonological categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Treating a text, after the removal of paragraphs and punctuations, as a spectrum of blanks, the distributions of the length of words of ten languages are analyzed. Using models from the statistical theory of spectra, it is found that the ten languages can be classified into two families: one with words that follow a Wigner-like distribution while the words of the other obey a Poisson-like distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous experimental studies showed that in Japanese, vowels are longer after shorter onset consonants; there is durational compensation within a CV-mora. In order to address whether this compensation occurs in natural speech, this study re-examines this observation using the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese. The results, which are based on more than 200 000 CV-mora tokens, show that there is a negative correlation between the onset consonant and the following vowel in terms of their duration. The statistical significance of this negative correlation is assessed by a traditional correlation analysis as well as a bootstrap resampling analysis, which both show that it is unlikely that the observed compensation effect occurred by chance. The compensation is not perfect, however, suggesting that it is a stochastic tendency rather than an absolute principle. This paper closes with a discussion of potential factors that may interact with the durational compensation effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Algorithmic modifications to the durational structure of speech designed to avoid intervals of intense masking lead to increases in intelligibility, but the basis for such gains is not clear. The current study addressed the possibility that the reduced information load produced by speech rate slowing might explain some or all of the benefits of durational modifications. The study also investigated the influence of masker stationarity on the effectiveness of durational changes. Listeners identified keywords in sentences that had undergone linear and nonlinear speech rate changes resulting in overall temporal lengthening in the presence of stationary and fluctuating maskers. Relative to unmodified speech, a slower speech rate produced no intelligibility gains for the stationary masker, suggesting that a reduction in information rate does not underlie intelligibility benefits of durationally modified speech. However, both linear and nonlinear modifications led to substantial intelligibility increases in fluctuating noise. One possibility is that overall increases in speech duration provide no new phonetic information in stationary masking conditions, but that temporal fluctuations in the background increase the likelihood of glimpsing additional salient speech cues. Alternatively, listeners may have benefitted from an increase in the difference in speech rates between the target and background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents results of an identification experiment with speakers of Medʉmba, a Grassfields Bantu language, aimed at evaluating the relative effects of f0 and duration in cuing tonal contrasts, as well as the role of lexical vs non-speech pitch contexts in biasing tone perception. Results show that duration is a cue for tone perception, with the influence of duration strongest where target f0 values were lower. Lexical tone perception is also sensitive to the identity of a preceding lexical tone, but not to the presence of a preceding non-speech pure tone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rhythm in music and speech can be characterized by a constellation of several acoustic cues. Individually, these cues have different effects on rhythmic perception: sequences of sounds alternating in duration are perceived as short-long pairs (weak-strong/iambic pattern), whereas sequences of sounds alternating in intensity or pitch are perceived as loud-soft, or high-low pairs (strong-weak/trochaic pattern). This perceptual bias--called the Iambic-Trochaic Law (ITL)--has been claimed to be an universal property of the auditory system applying in both the music and the language domains. Recent studies have shown that language experience can modulate the effects of the ITL on rhythmic perception of both speech and non-speech sequences in adults, and of non-speech sequences in 7.5-month-old infants. The goal of the present study was to explore whether language experience also modulates infants' grouping of speech. To do so, we presented sequences of syllables to monolingual French- and German-learning 7.5-month-olds. Using the Headturn Preference Procedure (HPP), we examined whether they were able to perceive a rhythmic structure in sequences of syllables that alternated in duration, pitch, or intensity. Our findings show that both French- and German-learning infants perceived a rhythmic structure when it was cued by duration or pitch but not intensity. Our findings also show differences in how these infants use duration and pitch cues to group syllable sequences, suggesting that pitch cues were the easier ones to use. Moreover, performance did not differ across languages, failing to reveal early language effects on rhythmic perception. These results contribute to our understanding of the origin of rhythmic perception and perceptual mechanisms shared across music and speech, which may bootstrap language acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By investigating prosody beyond pitch and duration, this article provides a detailed and multifaceted picture of focus marking in a language that differs substantially from more extensively studied languages like English. A production study examined prosodic focus marking in Finnish based on acoustic analyses of 947 short SVO sentences spoken by 17 native speakers. The results indicated effects of information structure on five acoustic measures: f0, duration, intensity, the use of pauses and non-modal voice quality. Words in narrow focus had a larger f0 range, longer duration, larger intensity range and were followed by pauses more often than words in other information structural conditions. Conversely, contextually given words showed a smaller f0 range, shorter duration, and, in post-focal condition, lower intensity. Moreover, realisations with non-modal voice quality were more frequent for all syllables of post-focal given words compared to the broad focus condition, whereas for words in narrow focus, non-modal realisations were more frequent only on the last syllable. Observing these effects in parallel, the findings exceeded previous studies in scope, providing encouragement for a broader approach to the investigation of prosodic focus marking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the rhythm syllables of the Kodály music teaching method in the U.S. It states that the syllables show duration of sound in consistent manner regardless of where the sound occurs. It notes that they are learned through hearing rhythmic value in context of beat. It mentions that it shows rhythmic-value relationships of one to other.

In this paper I discuss two types of total reduplication that prove to be productive in Contemporary German: real-X Reduplication (RXR) and Durative Reduplication (DR). The function of the former, RXR, is to restrict the meaning of a word to its prototypical content (cf. Buchbuch 'book-book; real book, not an e-book'). Based on corpus data I address the question whether we are dealing with reduplication or with compounding here. As a result it will become apparent that the process of RXR, while showing some parallels to compounding, lacks crucial characteristics of compounding and is therefore to be seen as a case of reduplication. The latter type of total reduplication, DR, involves the doubling of a bare, inflectionless verb stem, thus encoding durativity of the denoted event or activity (cf. grummel-grummel 'grumble-grumble, to be continuously grumbling'). Finally I sketch a path of diachronic development of the emergence of DR from ideophones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies have investigated the temporal characteristics of the word-medial singletons and geminates in Indo-Aryan languages. However, little is known about the acoustic cues distinguishing between the word-medial singletons and geminates of Punjabi. The present study examines the temporal characteristics of Punjabi word-medial singleton and geminate stops in a C1V1C2V2 template. The results from five Punjabi speakers showed that, unlike previous studies of Indo-Aryan languages, the durations of C2 and V2 are the most important acoustic correlates of singleton and geminate stops in Punjabi. These findings therefore point towards the cross-linguistic differences in the acoustic correlates of singletons and geminates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common finding in time psychophysics is that temporal acuity is much better for auditory than for visual stimuli. The present study aimed to examine modality-specific differences in duration discrimination within the conceptual framework of the Distinct Timing Hypothesis. This theoretical account proposes that durations in the lower milliseconds range are processed automatically while longer durations are processed by a cognitive mechanism. A sample of 46 participants performed two auditory and visual duration discrimination tasks with extremely brief (50-ms standard duration) and longer (1000-ms standard duration) intervals. Better discrimination performance for auditory compared to visual intervals could be established for extremely brief and longer intervals. However, when performance on duration discrimination of longer intervals in the 1-s range was controlled for modality-specific input from the sensory-automatic timing mechanism, the visual-auditory difference disappeared completely as indicated by virtually identical Weber fractions for both sensory modalities. These findings support the idea of a sensory-automatic mechanism underlying the observed visual-auditory differences in duration discrimination of extremely brief intervals in the millisecond range and longer intervals in the 1-s range. Our data are consistent with the notion of a gradual transition from a purely modality-specific, sensory-automatic to a more cognitive, amodal timing mechanism. Within this transition zone, both mechanisms appear to operate simultaneously but the influence of the sensory-automatic timing mechanism is expected to continuously decrease with increasing interval duration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The local dialect spoken in the Shetland Isles constitutes a form of Lowland Scots. It has been suggested that stressed syllables in Shetland Scots tend to contain either a long vowel followed by a short consonant (V:C) or a short vowel followed by a long consonant (VC:), and furthermore that this pattern constitutes a trace of complementary quantity in Norn, a Nordic language spoken in Shetland approximately until the end of the eighteenth century. The existence of such a pattern has also been supported by acoustic measurements. Following a summary and overview of Norn's demise in the Shetland Isles, this paper presents a regional survey of the relationship between vowel and consonant duration in stressed syllables in Shetland Scots. Based on acoustic data from 43 speakers, representing ten separate regions across the Shetland Isles, the inverse correlation between vowel and consonant duration is assessed. The results reveal that the inverse correlation is strongest in the northern part of Shetland and weakest in the south, and displays a general north-to-south decline across Shetland. The results are thus generally consistent with predictions that follow from regional variation concerning Norn's death; evidence suggests that it survived the longest in the northern parts of Shetland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long-range correlations have been evidenced in a number of experiments, generally using overlearned and overpracticed tasks. The authors hypothesized that long-range correlation could represent the byproduct of learning. They analyzed the series of periods produced by a group of expert and a group of novices during prolonged trials on a ski simulator. Results showed a very low variability in expert's series, as compared to novices. Fractal analyses showed that fluctuations were significantly more structured and correlated in experts. These results suggest that learning could be conceived as the progressive installation of complexity in the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT.Anticipatory adjustments to abrupt load changes are based on task-specific predictive information. The authors asked whether anticipatory adjustments to abrupt offsets of horizontal forces are related to expectancy. In two experiments participants held a position against an opposing force or moved against it. At force offset they had to stop rapidly. Duration of the opposing force or distance moved against it varied between blocks of trials and was constant within each block, or it varied from trial to trial. These two variations resulted in opposite changes of the expectancy of force offset with the passage of time or distance. With constant force durations or distances in each block of trials, anticipatory adjustments tended to be poorest with the longest duration or distance, but with variable force durations or distances they tended to be best with the longest duration or distance. Thus anticipatory adjustments were related to expectancy rather than time or distance per se. Anticipatory adjustments resulted in shorter peak amplitudes of the involuntary movements, accompanied by longer movement times in Experiment 1 and faster movement times in Experiment 2. Thus, for different states of the limb at abrupt dynamic changes anticipatory adjustments involve different mechanisms that modulate different mechanical characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Alfa: Revista de Lingüística is the property of Alfa: Revista de Linguistica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In some languages (such as Dutch), speakers produce duration differences between vowels, but it is unclear whether they also encode short versus long speech sounds into different phonological categories. To examine whether they have abstract representations for 'short' versus 'long' contrasts, we assessed Dutch listeners' perceptual sensitivity to duration in two vowel qualities: [a] and [a], as in the words maan 'moon' and man 'man,' which are realized with long and short duration respectively. If Dutch represents this phonetic durational difference as a 'short'-'long' contrast in its phonology, duration changes in [a] and [a] should elicit similar neural responses [specifically, the mismatch negativity (MMN)]. However, we found that duration changes evoked larger MMN amplitude for [a] than for [a]. This finding indicates that duration is phonemically relevant for the maan-vowel that is represented as 'long,' while it is not phonemically specified for the man-vowel. We argue that speakers who in speech production distinguish a given vowel pair on the basis of duration may not necessarily encode this durational distinction as a binary 'short'-'long' contrast in their phonological lexicon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: to compare the findings of behavioral assessment of temporal auditory processing in children with and without Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity. Methods: study participants were 30 children aged 8-12 years, 15 in the control group and 15 of the study group, with audiometric thresholds within normal limits. As procedures were performed testing temporal frequency pattern and duration. Results: in comparing the temporal evaluation of study group and control group in both tests - Standard Frequency and Standard Time, significant differences were found between the groups, with the study group showed abnormal results in most cases, while all control group children were normal. It was also possible to observe that all the children in both groups had lower results for Standard Time when compared to the results of Standard Frequency. Conclusion: the behavioral assessment of temporal auditory processing in children with and without Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity showed that subjects with Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity had changes, whereas the group without ADHD normal results on both tests. The present study has enabled a greater understanding of the central auditory pathways of children with and without Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity D, but further studies are needed, especially in the national literature, in order to better understand the functioning of the auditory processing of these populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents results on optimizing the MOVPE technology of light-emitting diode (LED) structures in a Dragon-125 system to accelerate the technological cycle. Due to the high growth rate of GaN layers and optimization of the initial GaN growth phase, the total duration of the epitaxial process is reduced from 4 h 45 min to 2 h 44 min. The LED diode structures grown by this technique compare well in quality with LEDs grown by the standard method in the commercially available AIX2000HT system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has shown that listeners can tell the difference between phonemically identical onsets of monomorphemic words (e.g., cap and captain) using acoustic cues (Davis, Marslen-Wilson, & Gaskell, 2002). This study investigates whether this finding extends to multimorphemic words, asking whether listeners can use phonetic information to distinguish unsuffixed from suffixed words before they differ phonemically (e.g., clue vs. clueless). We report 4 experiments investigating this issue using forced-choice identification and mouse-tracking tasks. We find that listeners are in fact able to distinguish mono- and multimorphemic words using only subphonemic information. Our experiments reveal that duration information alone is sufficient to make this discrimination and that listeners make use of an abstract rule that relates duration to morphological structure. The implications of these results for theories of morphological processing are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study starts from the need to enhance the scientific knowledge on prosody features that characterize the human communication and in particular on the importance they have to attribute meaning to sentences. Starting from these considerations the focus of the paper is to distinguish the role that prosodic features have in distinguishing four different kinds of Italian sentences (statements, questions, commands, and exclamations). The methodology used for the analysis is the case study. 50 Italian users of the Institute of Research on Population and Social Policies (IRPPS) of the National Research Council of Rome participated in this study. Results of the case study showed different associations between the sentence types and tone types both for tonic and pre-tonic parts of the sentences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The perceived duration of 1-kHz pure tones with increasing or decreasing intensity profiles was measured. The ratio between the down- and up-ramp durations at equal subjective durations was examined as a function of the sound duration (50, 100, 200, 500, 1000, 2000ms). At 50 and 100ms, the ratio was constant and equaled about 1.7, then it logarithmically decreased from 100 to 1000ms to reach a constant value of 1 at 1 and 2 s. The different mechanisms proposed in the literature to explain the perceived duration asymmetry between up-ramp and down-ramp were discussed in the light of the dependence of this ratio on duration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Givón's (1995) quantity principle about the diagrammatic iconicity of coding forms has mostly been investigated for topic continuity and nominal elements. The present paper considers its applicability both to participant continuity and the continuity of time, focussing on their interaction in the organisation of narrative discourse. As an additional test of the hypothesis, the paper studies historical data, examining the structuring roles of signals of participant and temporal continuities in Old English narrative prose. The findings indicate that the choice of signals of the continuities of time and participants follows the iconic quantity principle of longer and informationally-heavier forms encoding greater degrees of discontinuity. The paper also underlines the importance of text type and genre-specific factors in investigations of discourse-structural signals. Specifically for the Old English narrative data, the study provides further support for the discourse marker role of þa 'then' as distinct from other temporal expressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The classical Chinese poetry is a remarkable form of art in traditional Chinese character. However, it is difficult for people who are unfamiliar with ancient Chinese to experience the artistic content of the poetry. In this study, a sonification scheme, Tx2Ms (Text-to-Music), is proposed to extract the poetry features between lines in verses; moreover, dynamics and interval relations are modeled to map those features to the movement of multi-dimensional musical elements such as durations. This conversion is based on poetry intonation and acoustic analysis of the pronunciations of poems; and a stochastic compositional algorithm is created by applying a Markov chain. In addition, the best pentatonic mode for a specific poem is recommended according to the formants analysis. Therefore, the sonification of classical Chinese poetry not only provides a novel way for people to appreciate Chinese poetry but also enriches the state of mind and imagery in the delivery process, and the experiment results show that the proposed system is successfully accepted by most people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to further examine the possible quality differences between produced short and long Finnish vowels, we studied the formant frequencies F1-F4 and duration of the eight Finnish vowels /a/, /e/, /I/, /o/, /u/, /y/, /æ/ and /ø/¹ when uttered in carrier words (e.g., /tili/ -- /tiili/) in two different masking conditions and without a noise mask. Babble noise at 92dB SPL was used to simulate a loud, crowded cocktail party, and pink noise at 83dB SPL an environment with the maximum noise level allowed for continuous working. Minor quality differences were found between the short and long vowels. Noise masking caused a significant prolongation of produced short vowels, and a significant increase in the F1 frequency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the first acoustic study of monophthongs and diphthongs in the Kihnu variety of Estonian. The focus is on six diphthongs which have arisen after the diphthongization of long open and mid vowels. The comparison of their components with monophthongs revealed that the target values of the diphthongs are close to the corresponding monophthongs. There was some variation due to coarticulatory influences between the diphthong components. It was shown that the duration of both target vowels in the diphthong is longer in the third quantity than in the second quantity. The analysis also revealed that there is an acoustic basis for postulating the existence of two triphthongs in Kihnu. Formant trajectory length proved to be a useful measure for comparing monophthongs, diphthongs and triphthongs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: There is now considerable evidence showing that the time to read a word out loud is influenced by an interaction between orthographic length and lexicality. Given that length effects are interpreted by advocates of dual-route models as evidence of serial processing this would seem to pose a serious challenge to models of single word reading which postulate a common parallel processing mechanism for reading both words and nonwords (). However, an alternative explanation of these data is that visual processes outside the scope of existing parallel models are responsible for generating the word-length related phenomena (). Here we demonstrate that a parallel model of single word reading can account for the differential word-length effects found in the naming latencies of words and nonwords, provided that it includes a mapping from visual to orthographic representations, and that the nature of those orthographic representations are not preconstrained. The model can also simulate other supposedly “serial” effects. The overall findings were consistent with the view that visual processing contributes substantially to the word-length effects in normal reading and provided evidence to support the single-route theory which assumes words and nonwords are processed in parallel by a common mechanism. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The author discusses the quantitative aspects of communication processes that are dealt with in communication process research. He talks about the enhancement of the generality of quantitative process research by widening the scope of observing a process. Factors that move the process forward through sequential and specific phases are explored. The role of duration analysis in making quantitative sense of the evolutionary or transformational dynamics of a phasic process is also mentioned.

Abstract: In English, theme/rheme status (or topic/comment) is claimed to be marked by pitch accent type, i.e. L+H⁎ (LH%) versus H⁎ (LL%). claims that, rather, themes are relatively less prominent than rhemes. The phonetic realisation of themes and rhemes was looked at in a semi-spontaneous game task, e.g. (following Will the banana land on some money?) No, the lollipop (rheme) will land on some money (theme), the banana (theme) will land on a monster (rheme). There were some phonetic differences consistent with an accent type difference: the preceding L pitch elbow, and the H peak, of (L+)H⁎ accents were later and lower on themes than rhemes. Themes also had a high boundary (LH%, HH% or H-) more often. However, these differences were small and not consistent. On the other hand, there were large and consistent differences in the relative prominence of paired themes and rhemes (e.g. lollipop and money). In theme–rheme order, the rheme f0 peak was slightly higher, whereas in rheme–theme order, it was substantially higher. The f0 peaks of paired themes and rhemes were also highly correlated. There were smaller differences in mean intensity and duration. This is clear support for Calhoun''s claim that relative prominence marks the theme/rheme distinction, and for the importance of metrical prominence in signalling information structure. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: According to the identity group interpretation of the quantity opposition in Finnish, long vowels are perceived as two successive short vowels of the same spectral quality. Some recent studies, however, challenge this general view. To investigate this, 16 listeners were first asked to categorize four sets of 19 synthesized stimuli, each set representing the Finnish vowel continuum /y/–/i/ at one of the following stimulus durations: 50ms, 100ms, 250ms, and 500ms, which cover the reported durational variations of short and long Finnish vowels. The stimuli on the /y/–/i/ continuum varied for the second formant (F2) in steps of 30mel. Large individual variation was found in the categorization, but the category boundary F2 value and the boundary width were independent of duration in the group level, suggesting that quantity does not affect the category formation between /y/ and /i/. Normalized reaction times showed that the categorization was most difficult at 100ms, that is, a duration that falls between a typical short and long Finnish vowel. Following the categorization task, in order to find the prototypical /i/, the same listeners were asked to evaluate the goodness of those vowels they had individually identified as /i/. The goodness rating scores and F2 frequencies of the /i/ prototypes thus found were essentially the same at all durations, suggesting that phoneme prototypes are not demonstrably dependent on the phonological quantity opposition. In conclusion, the results of this study are in accordance with the identity group interpretation of Finnish quantity opposition. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]