Search

International audience; Following the release of the SLEEP corpus during the Interspeech 2019 paralinguistic continuous sleepiness estimation challenge, a paper presented at Interspeech 2020 by Huckvale et al. examined the reasons for the poor performance of the models proposed for this task. Careful analyses of the corpus led to the conclusion that its bias makes it hazardous to use for training machine learning systems, but a perceptual experiment on a subset of this corpus seemed to indicate that human hearing is however able to estimate sleepiness on this corpus.In this study, we present the results of the Endymion replication study, in which the same samples were rated by thirty French-speaking naive listeners. We then discuss the causes of the differences between the two studies and examine the effect of listener and sample characteristics on annotation performances

All Italian consonants affected by gemination, that is affricates, fricatives, liquids, nasals, and stops, were analyzed within a project named GEMMA that lasted over a span of about 25 years. Results of the analysis on stops, as published in (Esposito, A., and Di Benedetto, M. G. (1999). “Acoustic and Perceptual Study of Gemination in Italian Stops,” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, ASA, Vol. 30, pp. 175-185) showed that the main acoustic cue to gemination in Italian was closure duration, while frequency and energy domain parameters were not significantly affected by gemination. This paper - the first of a set of two covering all remaining consonants - addresses nasals and liquids; its companion paper addresses affricates and fricatives. Results on nasals and liquids confirm the findings on stops, in particular that the primary acoustic cue to gemination in Italian is durational in nature and corresponds to a lengthened consonant duration. Results also show an inverse correlation between consonant and pre-consonant vowel durations which is, however, also present when considering singleton vs. geminate word sets separately, indicating a sort of duration compensation between these segments to eventually preserve rhythmical structures; this inverse correlation is reinforced when considering singleton and geminate sets combined. Classification tests of singleton vs. geminate consonants show that, for both nasals and liquids, best classification scores are obtained when consonant duration is used as a classification parameter. Although slightly less performing, the ratio between consonant and pre-consonant vowel durations is also a potential good candidate for automatic classification of geminate vs singleton nasals and liquids in Italian.

One way to illustrate distributions of samples is through the use of violin plots. The original design is a combination of boxplot and density plot mirrored and plot around the boxplot. However, there are other designs in literature. Although they seem a powerful way to illustrate distributions, the fact that they encode distributions makes them difficult to read. Users have problems comparing two different distributions, and certain basic statistics such as the mean can be difficult to estimate properly. To get more insights on how people interprets violin plots, we have carried out an experiment to analyze how the different configurations affect judgments over values encoded in those plots. This project has been supported by project TIN2017-88515-C2-1- R(GEN3DLIVE), from the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, by 839 FEDER (EU) funds.

The main focus of the existing research study was to examine the impact of recreational activities upon youth from social prospective healthy lifestyle. The study Population consist of 520 Teachers, 15890 Students and 14926Parents from Government Girls Colleges (GGC), Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Five districts Swabi, Peshawar, Kohat, Lakki Marwat and Dera Ismail Khan (20% percent of 25 districts) were randomly selected from the population further the researcher using proportionate sampling technique for the data collection. Self- developed and administered questionnaire was used for the present study to draw finding and conclusion. Both descriptive frequency and percentage and inferential statistic was used for such as regression and ANOVA were used for the data analysis. It was concluded that the researcher concluded that a very positive stance was received regarding effectiveness of recreation in individual lives and particularly among the youngster. The respondents of all categories i.e. parents, students and teachers thought that recreation is very effective tool to promote and develop healthy lifestyle.

International audience; The purpose of this paper is to report on an ongoing experimental work on vibratory feedback perception, in the case of the solid body electric guitar. The aim of this work is to understand the link between effective vibrotactile information transmitted to the body of the musician, through a reproduction of the real vibratory signal (when guitar players pluck the strings) thanks to actuators. The experiment conducted for this work shows similarities between the two signals (plucked-string excitation and re-injected excitation) and in each case, the frequencies near the string's fundamental and partial components clearly emerge in the vibration measurements. Perceptual tests must be conducted to understand which contribution (string or guitar body modes) is the most important regarding the musician's perception, and these tests will be conducted to link the results to the human perception.

It has been previously proposed that small native vowel inventories impede the acquisition of foreign language vowels that come from larger inventories. The present study aims to investigate how the already-formed Greek phonological system is modified after the perception of the English vowels in a non-naturalistic environment and to what extent Greek speakers are able to discriminate challenging English vowel contrasts. Also, it aims to examine if learning experience enhances sensitivity to acoustical information of the foreign language vowels. The study relies on the theoretical framework of the Perceptual Assimilation Model-Second Language (PAM-L2). For developing predictions about the perception of the English vowels by Greek speakers, the vowel spaces of both Greek and English native speakers were investigated; 3 native speakers of Greek and 3 native speakers of English produced vowels in their native language. 26 Greek learners of English as a foreign language in Cyprus with an age that varied from 8 to 12 years participated in the perceptual study. Learners were divided into two groups according to their proficiency level in English. The participants took an identification test in order to determine how English vowels were assimilated to the listeners’ native phonological categories and then they were tested in an AXB discrimination task in order to investigate to what extent they are able to discriminate English vowel contrasts. The results showed that several pairs of two or more English vowels were assimilated to a single Greek phonological category. Furthermore, the discrimination test showed poor to moderate discrimination accuracy for both groups regarding the English vowel contrasts, yet differences in the discrimination accuracy of the contrasts between the novice and the more advanced group of learners were minimal; only the English/e/-/ɜː/contrast was discriminated slightly better by the advanced learners. Thus, learners with a higher proficiency level did not generally perceive the English vowels better than learners with a lower proficiency level, signifying that perception of foreign language vowels is not merely a matter of amount of exposure to the foreign stimuli. Conclusions are drawn about the interference of native Greek with the learning of English vowels and the acquisition of the foreign language stimuli in a classroom environment.

SUMMARY Objective In order to maintain characterization throughout a production, opera singers frequently need skills in more than one vocal task. This exploratory study investigated spoken dialogue before and after two hours of training (one-hour class, one-hour tutorial) in the use of language as an actor, with breath management, pitch range, and resonance strategies of a singer. Comparative recordings of sung and spoken material were analyzed for acoustic qualities. Design At the National Opera Center, New York, six professional singers from different voice categories recorded one minute of spoken dialogue before training. Approximately a week later, they recorded one minute of an aria, unaccompanied, followed by the spoken dialogue post-training, then improvised a one - two-minute performance moving between singing and speaking. Data were analyzed for fundamental frequency (F0), sound pressure level (SPL), and long-term average spectrum (LTAS). Results Comparing for all singers pre- to post-training, mean F0 of spoken dialogue increased and SPL mean and range increased. Comparing aria to spoken dialogue post-training, SPL range increased. F0 ranges were closer to each other in improvisation than in separate performances of aria and dialogue. Energy peaks between 2 and 4 kHz on LTAS appeared in more than one performing condition. Conclusions In spoken dialogue post-training, some F0 and SPL data gravitated toward those of the aria and away from the initial recording, suggesting that participants were beginning to transfer production skills from singing to speaking. A perceptual study is needed to assess characterization and the use of language pre- and post-training.

This paper contributes the first large-scale dataset of 17,979 hand-drawn sketches of 21 UI element categories collected from 967 participants, including UI/UX designers, front-end developers, HCI, and CS grad students, from 10 different countries. We performed a perceptual study with this dataset and found out that UI/UX designers can recognize the UI element sketches with ~96% accuracy. To compare human performance against computational recognition methods, we trained the state-of-the-art DNN-based image classification models to recognize the UI elements sketches. This study revealed that the ResNet-152 model outperforms other classification networks and detects unknown UI element sketches with 91.77% accuracy (chance is 4.76%). We have open-sourced the entire dataset of UI element sketches to the community intending to pave the way for further research in utilizing AI to assist the conversion of lo-fi UI sketches to higher fidelities.

To create aesthetically pleasing aerial footage, the correct framing of camera targets is crucial. However, current quadrotor camera tools do not consider the 3D extent of actual camera targets in their optimization schemes and simply interpolate between keyframes when generating a trajectory. This can yield videos with aesthetically unpleasing target framing. In this paper, we propose a target framing algorithm that optimizes the quadrotor camera pose such that targets are positioned at desirable screen locations according to videographic compositional rules and entirely visible throughout a shot. Camera targets are identified using a semi-automatic pipeline which leverages a deep-learning-based visual saliency model. A large-scale perceptual study (N ≈ 500) shows that our method enables users to produce shots with a target framing that is closer to what they intended to create and more or as aesthetically pleasing than with the previous state of the art.

This study intends to explore the effects of gender differences on the perception and production of emotional intonation with willingness and reluctance. In the perceptual study, 20 native Mandarin listeners were instructed to rate perceived degree of willingness from the utterances (with willingness, reluctance, and neutrality) produced by 6 native Mandarin speakers. The rating results showed that 1) utterances of willingness and reluctance were more accurately perceived than those of neutrality; 2) female listeners were better at perceiving emotional intonation; 3) female speakers’ utterances tend to be perceived as willing attitude. In the acoustic analysis, we selected the utterances which were validly rated and further analyzed their acoustic features, including fundamental frequency, amplitude, and speaking rate. Our findings suggest significant effects of gender on the perception and production of Chinese utterances with willingness and reluctance.

In recent years, a variety of methods have been introduced to exploit the decrease in visual acuity of peripheral vision, known as foveated rendering. As more and more computationally involved shading is requested and display resolutions increase, maintaining low latencies is challenging when rendering in a virtual reality context. Here, foveated rendering is a promising approach for reducing the number of shaded samples. However, besides the reduction of the visual acuity, the eye is an optical system, filtering radiance through lenses. The lenses create depth-of-field (DoF) effects when accommodated to objects at varying distances. The central idea of this article is to exploit these effects as a filtering method to conceal rendering artifacts. To showcase the potential of such filters, we present a foveated rendering system, tightly integrated with a gaze-contingent DoF filter. Besides presenting benchmarks of the DoF and rendering pipeline, we carried out a perceptual study, showing that rendering quality is rated almost on par with full rendering when using DoF in our foveated mode, while shaded samples are reduced by more than 69%.

Cross-linguistic influence has been observed across all domains of language. However, nothing is known about the role of cross-linguistic influence in bilingual speakers’ use of vocal fry. Several ...

A perceptual study investigated the ability of scale degrees to evoke qualia, and the impact of harmonic context in shaping a scale degree’s qualia. In addition, the following questions were addressed: What role does music training have in shaping qualia? Are listeners consistent in their descriptions? Are experiences similar across participants, or are they individual and subjective? Listeners with or without music-theoretic training were asked to rate the qualia of scale degrees following various chord progressions, each ending with a different final harmony. Scale degrees were found to exhibit relatively consistent musical qualia; however, the local chord context was found to significantly influence qualia ratings. In general, both groups of listeners were found to be fairly consistent in their ratings of scale-degree qualia; however, as expected, musician listeners were more consistent than nonmusician listeners. Finally, a subset of the musical qualia ratings were compared against Krumhansl and Kessler’s (1982) scale-degree “profiles.” While profiles created from the present data, overall, were correlated with the K&K profiles, their claim that tonal stability accounts for the high ratings ascribed to tonic triad members was found to be better explained by the effect of the local chord context.

The influence of vegetation design in public park became indicator that look through in character vegetation preferences to perceived safety among women park user. The women's perception in safety that perceived of personal and physical safety. This study was conducted in comparative public park on women's perception of character vegetation that prefer to visit the park which looked in term of individual safety. The methodology used is quantitative which self administered questionnaire. This study was carried out in three public parks under majlisBandaraya Shah Alam (MBSA) jurisdiction area.

Presently, it is noticeable that there is a significant influence of public open space about house price, especially in many developed nations. Literature suggests the relationship between the two aspects give impact on the housing market, however not many studies undertaken in Malaysia. Thus, this research was initiated to analyse the relationship of open space and house price via the techniques of GIS-Hedonic Pricing Model. In this regards, the GIS tool indicates the pattern of the relationship between open space and house price spatially. Meanwhile, Hedonic Pricing Model demonstrates the index of the selected criteria in determining the housing price. This research is a perceptual study of 200 respondents who were the house owners of double-storey terrace houses in four townships, namely Bandar Baru Bangi, Taman Melawati, Subang Jaya and Shah Alam, in Klang Valley. The key research question is whether the relationship between open space and house price exists and the nature of its pattern and intensity. The findings indicate that there is a positive correlation between open space and house price. Correlation analysis reveals that a weak relationship (rs < 0.1) established between the variable of open space and house price (rs = 0.91, N = 200, p = 0.2). Consequently, the rate of house price change is rather small. In overall, this research has achieved its research aims and thus, offers the value added in applying the GIS-Hedonic pricing model in analysing the influence of open space to the house price in the form of spatially and textually.

Companies in the world are constantly seeking for new ways to reach consumers. Recently, there are numerous social media platforms through which people are connected. Companies are using social media to influence customer Purchase Intention. YouTube is one of the new social media platforms used by the companies for advertisement of their products. The increasing focus on social media shaped state of the art advertising and shifted the way companies interact with their target groups. The main objective of this research is to identify the factors that affect purchase intention of customer who watch product related YouTube videos. This study is one of the rare studies that combine YouTube videos and their effects on purchase intention. Number of Views, Likes, Comments and Replies (NVLCR), Perceived Credibility (PC), Perceived Usefulness (PU), Perceived Video Characteristics (PVC), Attitude towards Purchase (ATP) are various factors studied in association with purchase intention. In this study, a Video was shown to the respondents and Online Questionnaire based on video was filled by respondents. Multiple Regression Test was applied to the relationships between variables.

International audience

Auditory localization cues in the near-field (

This work presents a perceptual study on how acoustic details and knowledge of the lexicon influence discrimination decisions. English-speaking listeners were less likely to identify phonologically matching items as the same when they differed in vowel duration, but differences in mean F0 did not have an effect. Although both are components of English contrasts, the results only provide evidence for attention to vowel duration as a potentially contrastive cue. Lexical ambiguity was a predictor of response time. Pairs with matching duration were identified more quickly than pairs with distinct duration, but only among lexically ambiguous items, indicating that lexical ambiguity mediates attention to acoustic detail. Lexical ambiguity also interacted with neighborhood density: Among lexically unambiguous words, the proportion of 'same' responses decreased with neighborhood density, but there was no effect among lexically ambiguous words. This interaction suggests that evaluating phonological similarity depends more on lexical information when the items are lexically unambiguous.

Human perceptual studies have shown that facial characteristics affect judgments about the personality of a person. For example, larger facial width has been associated with judgments of aggressiveness, dominance, and untrustworthiness. Previous studies of virtual faces have not been able to reflect the same perceptual rules, but have used characters with unrealistic feature sizes or highly abstract characters. For this study, we created virtual characters with realistic feature dimensions and investigated the effects of facial width and eye size on personality perception. Our results indicate that virtual characters may indeed follow different perceptual rules for facial width, and care must be taken when manipulating eye size. These findings are useful for effective character design for video games, movies, and embodied virtual agents.

Despite the prevalence of real-world and laboratory tasks where people select among many options, cognitive models have traditionally focused on choices among small sets of alternatives. This has resulted in theoretical and empirical gaps in understanding the decision processes that go into selections among many alternatives or responses that fall along a continuum. This paper addresses these issues by modeling decisions in a perceptual study where participants produce continuous orientation judgments. The experiments showed that manipulations of stimulus difficulty and time pressure have parallel effects to binary choice, with greater stimulus difficulty yielding slower and less accurate responses and time pressure resulting in faster responses at the expense of accuracy. These effects were well accounted for by the circular diffusion model developed by Smith (2016), with drift magnitude parameters shifting with difficulty and threshold parameters shifting with time pressure. However, a manipulation of bias using a predecision cue resulted in bimodal distributions of responses that cannot be explained by the model in its original formulation. To account for this result, I developed a theory of bias based on split attention and racing 2D diffusion processes. This model suggests that responses are determined by both cue-driven and stimulus-driven evidence accumulation processes, such that the winning process determines responses and response times (RTs). As a result, it predicts critical features of responses and response times in the conditions with predecision cues, including bimodal distributions of responses and the longer RTs observed when there was a discrepancy between cue and stimulus orientations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Quality of life (QOL) is both individual and collective attributes. Quality of life should encompass both objective and subjective measures whilst promoting for balance in every aspect of human existence. The objective of this study is to assess the QOL of the population in Malaysia by using Selangor as a case study. 600 samples from four districts in Selangor were selected through random sampling method. From literature review, 9 main components of QOL were identified and included in questionnaire form. Relative importance index (RII) equation was then used to report on the analysis of QOL components. Results from the survey indicated that majority of the respondents were likely to perceive QOL components as moderate and highly satisfied. Overall, respondents claimed that they were satisfied and enjoying their lives and at the same time satisfied with their current quality of life. The results indirectly show that each of QOL component was interrelated with each other in creating the satisfaction on quality of life of the people. This is in line with the findings on the three basic human relationships with Allah SWT, with other human and with nature in protecting their faith (din), human self (nafs), intellect ('aql), posterity (nasl) and wealth (mal) through establishing justice, eliminating prejudice and alleviating hardship by promoting good and preventing harm to self and others.