<p>Four- to eight-month-old infants (n=56) were examined on their ability to acquire verb meaning. In a visual preference procedure they were tested on their ability to form verb-action associations by detecting the correlation between auditory speech stimuli and actions presented in short movie clips on a screen. If associations were formed, they were expected to significantly modify their looking behavior after exposure, looking closer to the target than during baseline. Instead of measuring total looking time as response, distance to target was the chosen measure. Eight-month-olds as well as a reference group of adults acquired the verb-action associations. Thus, eight months is the youngest age at which verb meaning acquisition could be demonstrated so far.</p>

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

In speech recognition algorithms and certain theories of speech perception the interpretation of the signal is based on " distance scores " for comparisons of the signal with stored references; in these theories, perception is seen as a product of stimulus and experience. The aim of the present thesis is to evaluate such distance measures by investigating the perceptual confusions of the Swedish voiced stops [b,d,q,g] in systematically varied fragments of vowel-consonantvowel stimuli providing 25 vowel contexts for each consonant. To what extent can perceptual identifications be accounted for in terms of the acoustic properties of  the stimuli? Short stimulus segments following stop release, chosen to elicit perceptual confusions, constituted the main material for this investigation. The resulting confusions were shown to form a regular pattern depending mainly on the acute/grave dimension of the following vowel. The acoustic distances calculated were based partly on formant frequencies at the consonant-vowel boundary, partly on filter-band spectra. B oth models provided distance measures which revealed regular patterns related in their essentials to the confusions. However, the predictive capacity of both models was improved by including the dynamic properties of the stimuli in the distance measures. The highest correlation between predicted and observed percent confusions, r=.85, was obtained with the fOlmant-based model. The asymmetries in the listeners' confusions were also shown to be predictable given acoustic data on the following vowel and were included in the calculations. / För att köpa boken skicka en beställning till exp@ling.su.se/ To order the book send an e-mail to exp@ling.su.se

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Edinburgh, 1978. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 332-347).

Thèse--Faculté des lettres de Paris. / "Bibliographie": p. [5-6].

Thesis (B.Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 26-30) Also available in print.

Thèse--Faculté des lettres de Paris. / "Bibliographie": p. [5-6].

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1968. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.