Posts tagged speech
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Most Neanderthals were right handed, just like modern humans, and this tendency suggests that they may have had the capacity for speech, new research claims.
A new investigation by Professor Frayer and an international team led by Virginie Volpato of the Senckenberg Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, has confirmed Regourdou’s right-handedness by looking more closely at the robustness of the arms and shoulders, and comparing it with scratches on his teeth.
'We’ve been studying scratch marks on Neanderthal teeth, but in all cases they were isolated teeth, or teeth in mandibles not directly associated with skeletal material,' said Professor Frayer.
'This is the first time we can check the pattern that’s seen in the teeth with the pattern that’s seen in the arms. We did more sophisticated analysis of the arms — the collarbone, the humerus, the radius and the ulna — because we have them on both sides. And we looked at cortical thickness and other biomechanical measurements. All of them confirmed that everything was more robust on the right side then the left.'
Diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease at 21, British physicist Stephen Hawking, now 70, relies on a computerized device to speak. Engineers are investigating the use of brainwaves to create a new form of communication for Hawking and other people suffering from paralysis.
-Daily Mail
Scientists at UCLA and the Technion, Israel’s Institute of Technology, have unraveled how our brain cells encode the pronunciation of individual vowels in speech. Published in the Aug. 21 edition of Nature Communications, the discovery could lead to new technology that verbalizes the unspoken words of people paralyzed by injury or disease.
Where you look predicts what you’re going to say
23 July 2012 by Will Heaven
Watch where you look – it can be used to predict what you’ll say. A new study shows that it is possible to guess what sentences people will use to describe a scene by tracking their eye movements.
Moreno Coco and Frank Keller at the University of Edinburgh, UK, presented 24 volunteers with a series of photo-realistic images depicting indoor scenes such as a hotel reception. They then tracked the sequence of objects that each volunteer looked at after being asked to describe what they saw.
Other than being prompted with a keyword, such as “man” or “suitcase”, participants were free to describe the scene however they liked. Some typical sentences included “the man is standing in the reception of a hotel” or “the suitcase is on the floor”.
The order in which a participant’s gaze settled on objects in each scene tended to mirror the order of nouns in the sentence used to describe it. “We were surprised there was such a close correlation,” says Keller. Given that multiple cognitive processes are involved in sentence formation, Coco says “it is remarkable to find evidence of similarity between speech and visual attention”.
Word prediction
The team used the discovery to see if they could predict what sentences would be used to describe a scene based on eye movement alone. They developed an algorithm that was able to use the eye gazes recorded from the previous experiment to predict the correct sentence from a choice of 576 descriptions.
Changsong Liu of Michigan State University’s Language and Interaction Research lab, in East Lansing, who was not involved in the study, suggests these results could motivate novel designs for human-machine interfaces that take advantage of visual cues to improve speech recognition software.
Gaze information is already used to help with disambiguation. For example, if a speech recognition system can tell that you are looking at a tree, it is less likely to guess that you just said “three”. Sentence prediction, perhaps in combination with augmented reality headsets that track eye movement, for example, is one possible application.
Coco and Keller are now looking into the role of coordinated visual and linguistic processes in conversations between two people. “People engaged in a dialogue use similar syntactic forms, expressions and eye-movements,” says Coco. One hypothesis is that such “coordinative mimicry” might be important for joint decision-making.
Source: NewScientist
Infants’ Recognition of Speech More Sophisticated Than Previously Known
ScienceDaily (July 17, 2012) — The ability of infants to recognize speech is more sophisticated than previously known, researchers in New York University’s Department of Psychology have found. Their study, which appears in the journal Developmental Psychology, showed that infants, as early as nine months old, could make distinctions between speech and non-speech sounds in both humans and animals.
A new study shows that infants, as early as nine months old, could make distinctions between speech and non-speech sounds in both humans and animals. (Credit: © ChantalS / Fotolia)
"Our results show that infant speech perception is resilient and flexible," explained Athena Vouloumanos, an assistant professor at NYU and the study’s lead author. "This means that our recognition of speech is more refined at an earlier age than we’d thought."
It is well-known that adults’ speech perception is fine-tuned — they can detect speech among a range of ambiguous sounds. But much less is known about the capability of infants to make similar assessments. Understanding when these abilities become instilled would shed new light on how early in life we develop the ability to recognize speech.
In order to gauge the aptitude to perceive speech at any early age, the researchers examined the responses of infants, approximately nine months in age, to recorded human and parrot speech and non-speech sounds. Human (an adult female voice) and parrot speech sounds included the words “truck,” “treat,” “dinner,” and “two.” The adult non-speech sounds were whistles and a clearing of the throat while the parrot non-speech sounds were squawks and chirps. The recorded parrot speech sounds were those of Alex, an African Gray parrot that had the ability to talk and reason and whose behaviors were studied by psychology researcher Irene Pepperberg.
Since infants cannot verbally communicate their recognition of speech, the researchers employed a commonly used method to measure this process: looking longer at what they find either interesting or unusual. Under this method, looking longer at a visual paired with a sound may be interpreted as a reflection of recognition. In this study, sounds were paired with a series of visuals: a checkerboard-like image, adult female faces, and a cup.
The results showed that infants listened longer to human speech compared to human non-speech sounds regardless of the visual stimulus, revealing the ability recognize human speech independent of the context.
Their findings on non-human speech were more nuanced. When paired with human-face visuals or human artifacts like cups, the infants listened to parrot speech longer than they did non-speech, such that their preference for parrot speech was similar to their preference for human speech sounds. However, this did not occur in the presence of other visual stimuli. In other words, infants were able to distinguish animal speech from non-speech, but only in some contexts.
"Parrot speech is unlike human speech, so the results show infants have the ability to detect different types of speech, even if they need visual cues to assist in this process," explained Vouloumanos.
Source: Science Daily