An introduction to the Yanomaman family and a closer look at two of the languages
Monthly Archives: March 2018
LingLang Lunch (3/14/2018): Susan Kalt (Roxbury Community College)
Acquisition, loss and change in Southern Quechua and Spanish – what happened to evidential marking?
Please note that this LingLang Lunch will take place in the McKinney Conference Room (353) at the Watson Institute (111 Thayer Street), at the regular time.
LingLang Lunch (Lite) (3/7/2018): Kasia Hitczenko (University of Maryland)
How to use context to disambiguate overlapping categories: The test case of Japanese vowel length
New paper published by Masapollo et al.: Articulatory peripherality modulates relative attention to the mouth during visual vowel discrimination (J Acoust Soc Am. 141(5): 4037)
Congratulations to Matt, Lauren, and Jim for a paper published recently in the Journal of the Acoustic Society of America! The title and abstract are as follows:
Masapollo, Polka, and Ménard (2016) have recently reported that adults from different language backgrounds show robust directional asymmetries in unimodal visual-only vowel discrimination: a change in mouth-shape from one associated with a relatively less peripheral vowel to one associated with a relatively more peripheral vowel (in F1-F2 articulatory/acoustic vowel space) results in significantly better performance than a change in the reverse direction. In the present study, we used eye-tracking methodology to examine the gaze behavior of English-speaking subjects while they performed Masapollo et al.’s visual vowel discrimination task. We successfully replicated this directional effect using Masapollo et al.’s visual stimulus materials, and found that subjects deployed selective attention to the oral region compared to the ocular region of the model speaker’s face. In addition, gaze fixations to the mouth were found to increase while subjects viewed the more peripheral vocalic articulations compared to the less peripheral articulations, perhaps due to their larger, more extreme oral-facial kinematic patterns. This bias in subjects’ pattern of gaze behavior may contribute to asymmetries in visual vowel perception.
The full paper can be found here.