Auditory-guided vocal learning is a mechanism that operates both in humans and other animal species making us capable to imitate arbitrary sounds. Both auditory memories and auditory feedback interact to guide vocal learning. This may explain why it is easier for humans to imitate the pitch of a human voice than the pitch of a synthesized sound. In this study, we compared the effects of two different feedback modalities in learning pitch-matching abilities using a synthesized pure tone (...) in 47 participants with no prior music experience. Participants were divided into three groups: a feedback group receiving real-time visual feedback of their pitch as well as knowledge of results; an equal-timbre group receiving additional auditory feedback of the target note with a similar timbre to the instrument being used ; and a control group practicing without any feedback or knowledge of results. An additional fourth group of violin experts performed the same task for comparative purposes. All groups were posteriorly evaluated in a transfer phase. Both experimental groups improved their intonation abilities with the synthesized sound after receiving feedback. Participants from the equal-timber group seemed as capable as the feedback group of producing the required pitch with the voice after listening to the human voice, but not with the violin. In addition, only participants receiving real-time visual feedback learned and retained in the transfer phase the mapping between the synthesized pitch and its correspondence with the produced vocal or violin pitch. It is suggested that both the effect of an objective external reward, together with the experience of exploring the pitch space with their instrument in an explicit manner, helped participants to understand how to control their pitch production, strengthening their schemas, and favoring retention. (shrink)

This paper presents a numerical investigation of bird attitude angles affecting the soft-impact damage of a full fan assembly. Firstly, considering the geometry of a mallard, a real bird model is established by the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics method and calibrated with available test data. Then, complying with airworthiness requirements, simulations of a full-bladed fan assembly subjected to a real bird were conducted to determine the critical ingestion parameters. Furthermore, a real bird with different attitude angles aimed at a full fan (...) assembly was simulated. Results show that attitude angles of the bird produce a significant impact on the effect of the bird strike on rotating blades and would increase the possibility of blade failures, especially for the yaw angle of -45° and the pitch angle of −60°. It is invaluable for commercial airlines and engine manufactures to provide safe flight and landing by adopting the real bird model with critical yaw and pitch angles in the design for resistance to bird ingestion. (shrink)

Previous work demonstrated that dynamic pitch (i.e., pitch variation in speech) aids speech recognition in various types of noises. While this finding suggests dynamic pitch enhancement in target speech can benefit speech recognition in noise, it is of importance to know what noise characteristics affect dynamic pitch benefit and who will benefit from enhanced dynamic pitch cues. Following our recent finding that temporal modulation in noise influences dynamic pitch benefit, we examined the effect (...) of speech masker characteristics on dynamic pitch benefit. Specifically, the first goal of the study was to test the hypothesis that dynamic pitch benefit varies depending on the availability of pitch cues in the masker and the intelligibility of masker. The second goal of this study was to investigate whether older listeners as a group can benefit from dynamic pitch for speech recognition in speech maskers. In addition, individual factors of hearing loss and working memory capacity were examined for their impact on older listeners’ dynamic pitch benefit. Twenty-three younger listeners with normal hearing and 37 older listeners with varying levels of hearing sensitivity participated the study, in which speech reception thresholds were measured with sentences in speech maskers. While we did not find an effect of masker characteristics on dynamic pitch benefit, the results showed older listeners can benefit from dynamic pitch for recognizing speech in speech maskers. The data also suggest that among those older listeners with hearing loss, dynamic pitch benefit is stronger for individuals with higher working memory capacity. This can be attributed to their ability to exploit facilitated lexical access in processing of degraded speech signal. (shrink)

In this study, Limburgian and Dutch 2,5- to 4-year-olds and adults took part in a word learning experiment. Following the procedure employed by Quam and Swingley (2010) and Singh et al. (2014), participants learned two novel word-object mappings. After training, word recognition was tested in correct pronunciation (CP) trials and mispronunciation (MP) trials featuring a pitch change. Since Limburgian is considered a restricted tone language, we expected that the pitch change would hinder word recognition in Limburgian, but not (...) in non-tonal Dutch listeners. Contrary to our expectations, both Limburgian and Dutch children appeared to be sensitive to pitch changes in newly learned words, indicated by a significant decrease in target fixation in MP trials compared to CP trials. Limburgian and Dutch adults showed very strong naming effects in both trial types. The results are discussed against the background of the influence of the native prosodic system. (shrink)

Previous studies have shown that Chinese speakers and non-Chinese speakers exhibit different patterns of cross-modal congruence for the lexical tones of Mandarin Chinese, depending on which features of the pitch they attend to. But is this pattern of language-specific listening a conscious cultural strategy or an automatic processing effect? If automatic, does it also apply when the same pitch contours no longer sound like speech? Implicit Association Tests (IATs) provide an indirect measure of cross-modal association. In a (...) series of IAT studies, conducted with participants with three kinds of language backgrounds (Chinese-dominant bilinguals, Chinese balanced bilinguals, and English speakers with no Chinese experience) we find language-specific congruence effects for Mandarin lexical tones but not for matched sine-wave stimuli. That is, for linguistic stimuli, non-Chinese speakers show advantages for pitch-height congruence (high-pointy, low-curvy); no congruence effects were found for Chinese speakers. For non-linguistic stimuli, all participant groups showed advantages for pitch-height congruence. The present findings suggest that non-lexical tone congruence (high-pointy, low-curvy) is a basic congruence pattern, and the acquisition of a language with lexical tone can alter this perception. (shrink)

Audio features such as inharmonicity, noisiness, and spectral roll-off have been identified as correlates of “noisy” sounds. However, such features are likely involved in the experience of multiple semantic timbre categories of varied meaning and valence. This paper examines the relationships of stimulus properties and audio features with the semantic timbre categories raspy/grainy/rough, harsh/noisy, and airy/breathy. Participants rated a random subset of 52 stimuli from a set of 156 approximately 2-s orchestral instrument sounds representing varied instrument families, registers, and both (...) traditional and extended playing techniques. Stimuli were rated on the three semantic categories of interest, as well as on perceived playing exertion and emotional valence. Correlational analyses demonstrated a strong negative relationship between positive valence and perceived physical exertion. Exploratory linear mixed models revealed significant effects of extended technique and pitch register on valence, the perception of physical exertion, raspy/grainy/rough, and harsh/noisy. Instrument family was significantly related to ratings of airy/breathy. With an updated version of the Timbre Toolbox, we used 44 summary audio features, extracted from the stimuli using spectral and harmonic representations, as input for various models built to predict mean semantic ratings for each sound on the three semantic categories, on perceived exertion, and on valence. Random Forest models predicting semantic ratings from audio features outperformed Partial Least-Squares Regression models, consistent with previous results suggesting that non-linear methods are advantageous in timbre semantic predictions using audio features. Relative Variable Importance measures from the models among the three semantic categories demonstrate that although these related semantic categories are associated in part with overlapping features, they can be differentiated through individual patterns of audio feature relationships. (shrink)

Although acoustic frequency is not a spatial property of physical objects, in common language, pitch, i.e., the psychological correlated of frequency, is often labeled spatially (i.e., “high in pitch” or “low in pitch”). Pitch-height is known to modulate (and interact with) the response of participants when they are asked to judge spatial properties of non-auditory stimuli (e.g., visual) in a variety of behavioral tasks. In the current study we investigated whether the modulatory action of pitch-height (...) extended to the haptic estimation of height of a virtual step. We implemented a HW/SW setup which is able to render virtual 3D objects (stair-steps) haptically through a PHANTOM device, and to provide real-time continuous auditory feedback depending on the user interaction with the object. The haptic exploration was associated with a sinusoidal tone whose pitch varied as a function of the interaction point’s height within (i) a narrower and (ii) a wider pitch range, or (iii) a random pitch variation acting as a control audio condition. Explorations were also performed with no sound (haptic only). Participants were instructed to explore the virtual step freely, and to communicate height estimation by opening their thumb and index finger to mimic the step riser height, or verbally by reporting the height in centimeters of the step riser. We analyzed the role of musical expertise by dividing participants into non musicians and musicians. Results showed no effects of musical pitch on high-realistic haptic feedback. Overall there is no difference between the two groups in the proposed multimodal conditions. Additionally, we observed a different haptic response distribution between musicians and non musicians when estimations of the auditory conditions are matched with estimations in the no sound condition. (shrink)

Vocal music and spoken language both have important roles in human communication, but it is unclear why these two different modes of vocal communication exist. Although similar, speech and song differ in certain design features. One interesting difference is in the pitch intonation contour, which consists of discrete tones in song, vs. gliding intonation contours in speech. Here, we investigated whether vocal phrases consisting of discrete pitches (song-like) or gliding pitches (speech-like) are remembered better, conducting three studies implementing auditory (...) same-different tasks at three levels of difficulty. We tested two hypotheses: that discrete pitch contours aid auditory memory, independent of musical experience (“song memory advantage hypothesis”), or that the higher everyday experience perceiving and producing speech make speech intonation easier to remember (“experience advantage hypothesis”). We used closely matched stimuli, controlling for rhythm and timbre, and we included a stimulus intermediate between song-like and speech-like pitch contours (with partially gliding and partially discrete pitches). We also assessed participants' musicality to evaluate experience-dependent effects. We found that song-like vocal phrases are remembered better than speech-like vocal phrases, and that intermediate vocal phrases evoked a similar advantage to song-like vocal phrases. Participants with more musical experience were better in remembering all three types of vocal phrases. The precise roles of absolute and relative pitch perception and the influence of top-down vs. bottom-up processing should be clarified in future studies. However, our results suggest that one potential reason for the emergence of discrete pitch–a feature that characterises music across cultures–might be that it enhances auditory memory. (shrink)

Music impacting on speech processing is vividly evidenced in most reports involving professional musicians, while the question of whether the facilitative effects of music are limited to experts or may extend to amateurs remains to be resolved. Previous research has suggested that analogous to language experience, musicianship also modulates lexical tone perception but the influence of amateur musical experience in adulthood is poorly understood. Furthermore, little is known about how acoustic information and phonological information of lexical tones are processed by (...) amateur musicians. This study aimed to provide neural evidence of cortical plasticity by examining categorical perception of lexical tones in Chinese adults with amateur musical experience relative to the non-musician counterparts. Fifteen adult Chinese amateur musicians and an equal number of non-musicians participated in an event-related potential (ERP) experiment. Their mismatch negativities (MMNs) to lexical tones from Mandarin Tone 2–Tone 4 continuum and non-speech tone analogs were measured. It was hypothesized that amateur musicians would exhibit different MMNs to their non-musician counterparts in processing two aspects of information in lexical tones. Results showed that the MMN mean amplitude evoked by within-category deviants was significantly larger for amateur musicians than non-musicians regardless of speech or non-speech condition. This implies the strengthened processing of acoustic information by adult amateur musicians without the need of focused attention, as the detection of subtle acoustic nuances of pitch was measurably improved. In addition, the MMN peak latency elicited by across-category deviants was significantly shorter than that by within-category deviants for both groups, indicative of the earlier processing of phonological information than acoustic information of lexical tones at the pre-attentive stage. The results mentioned above suggest that cortical plasticity can still be induced in adulthood, hence non-musicians should be defined more strictly than before. Besides, the current study enlarges the population demonstrating the beneficial effects of musical experience on perceptual and cognitive functions, namely, the effects of enhanced speech processing from music are not confined to a small group of experts but extend to a large population of amateurs. (shrink)

Binaural pitch fusion is the perceptual integration of stimuli that evoke different pitches between the ears into a single auditory image. This study was designed to investigate how steady background noise can influence binaural pitch fusion. The binaural fusion ranges, the frequency ranges over which binaural pitch fusion occurred, were measured with three signal-to-noise ratios of the pink noise and compared with those measured in quiet. The preliminary results show that addition of an appropriate amount of noise (...) can reduce binaural fusion ranges, an effect called stochastic resonance. This finding increases the understanding of how specific noise levels can sharpen binaural pitch fusion in normal hearing individuals. Furthermore, it elicits more pathways for research to explore how this benefit can practically be used to help improve binaural auditory perception. (shrink)

Pet-directed speech (PDS) is often produced by humans when addressing dogs. Similar to infant-directed speech, PDS is marked by a relatively higher and more modulated fundamental frequency (f 0) than is adult-directed speech. We tested the prediction that increasing eye size in dogs, one facial feature of neoteny (juvenilisation), would elicit exaggerated prosodic qualities or pet-directed speech. We experimentally manipulated eye size in photographs of twelve dog breeds by −15%, +15% and +30%. We first showed that dogs with larger eyes (...) were indeed perceived as younger. We then recorded men and women speaking towards these photographs, who also rated these images for cuteness. Linear mixed-effects models demonstrated that increasing eye size by 15% significantly increased pitch range (f 0 range) and variability (f 0CV) among women only. Cuteness ratings did not vary with eye size, due to a possible ceiling effect across eye sizes. Our results offer preliminary evidence that large eyes can elicit pet-directed speech and suggest that PDS may be modulated by perceived juvenility rather than cuteness. We discuss these findings in the context of inter-species vocal communication. (shrink)

In a realistic steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) based brain-computer interface (BCI) application like driving a car or controlling a quadrotor, observing the surrounding environment while simultaneously gazing at the stimulus is necessary. This kind of application inevitably could cause head movements and variation of the accompanying gaze fixation point, which might affect the SSVEP and BCI’s performance. However, few papers studied the effects of head movements and gaze fixation switch on SSVEP response, and the corresponding BCI performance. This study (...) aimed to explore these effects by designing a new ball tracking paradigm in a virtual reality (VR) environment with two different moving tasks, i.e., the following and free moving tasks, and three moving patterns, pitch, yaw, and static. Sixteen subjects were recruited to conduct a BCI VR experiment. The offline data analysis showed that head moving patterns [F(2, 30) = 9.369, p = 0.001, effect size = 0.384] resulted in significantly different BCI decoding performance but the moving tasks had no effect on the results [F(1, 15) = 3.484, p = 0.082, effect size = 0.188]. Besides, the canonical correlation analysis (CCA) and filter bank canonical correlation analysis (FBCCA) accuracy were better than the PSDA and MEC methods in all of the conditions. These results implied that head movement could significantly affect the SSVEP performance but it was possible to switch gaze fixation to interact with the surroundings in a realistic BCI application. (shrink)

Psycholinguistic research has long established that focus-marked words have a processing advantage over other words in an utterance, e.g. they are recognised more quickly and remembered better. More recently, studies have shown that listeners infer contextual alternatives to a focused word in a spoken utterance, when marked with a contrastive accent, even when the alternatives are not explicitly mentioned in the discourse. This has been shown by strengthened priming of contextual alternatives to the word, but not other noncontrastive semantic associates, (...) when it is contrastively accented, e.g. after hearing ``The {\em customer} opened the window", {\em salesman} is strongly primed, but not {\em product}. This is consistent with Rooth's (1992) theory that \deleted{the focus is not only the most informative part of an utterance, but also that} focus-marking signals the presence of alternatives to the focus. However, almost all of the research carried out in this area has been on Germanic languages. Further, most of this work has looked only at one kind of focus-marking, by contrastive accenting (prosody). This paper reports on a cross-modal lexical priming study in Mandarin Chinese, looking at whether focus-marking heightens activation, i.e. priming, of words and their alternatives. Two kinds of focus-marking were investigated: prosodic and syntactic. Prosodic prominence is an important means of focus-marking in Chinese, however, it is realised through pitch range expansion, rather than accenting. The results showed that focus\added{ed} words, as well as their alternatives, were primed when the subject prime word carried contrastive prosodic prominence. Syntactic focus-marking, however, did not enhance priming of focused words or their alternatives. Noncontrastive semantic associates were not primed with either kind of focus-marking. These results extend previous findings on focus and alternative priming for the first time to Chinese. They also suggest that the processing advantages of focus, including priming alternatives, are particularly related to prosodic prominence, at least in Chinese and Germanic languages. This research sheds light on what linguistic mechanisms listeners use to identify important information, generate alternatives and understand implicature necessary for successful communication. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Credibility, Persuasiveness, and EffectivenessPatricia A. King (bio)Since the early 1970s, complex ethical, social, legal, and scientific controversies generated by biomedicine have been referred to governmentally created commissions, committees, boards, and panels that are commonly referred to as “ethics” committees. The Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments is the most recent example of such a group. Although it is too early to know the full impact of the Committee’s work, (...) it is important to reflect on aspects of its deliberations that shed light on the public policy role of ethics bodies. Specifically, I will reflect on matters that go to the credibility, persuasiveness, and effectiveness of these committees.The point should be made at the outset that these ethics committees are, first and foremost, public policy groups. Governmentally created bodies of all types, including ethics committees, are established to provide pragmatic advice to governments about specific problems and controversies or to complete specified tasks on behalf of governments. What distinguishes ethics committees from other advisory groups is that the issues assigned to them are presumed to be primarily ethical, as opposed to, say, economic, in nature. It is expected that ethical analyses and premises will play a significant, albeit not exclusive, role in the committee’s deliberations. 1 As with other advisory groups, the primary responsibility of ethics committees is to respond to the branches of government that were instrumental in their creation as well as to the public at large. Since political concerns undoubtedly play a role in the creation of these groups, it is understandable that political concerns have some impact on the committee’s work. Thus, ethics committees are generally cognizant of the need to ensure that their processes and substantive conclusions are credible, persuasive, and effective.In my experience, members of ethics commissions understand the need to offer principled arguments that are factually accurate to justify their recommendations and conclusions. They also appreciate the need for consensus and rightly worry about disagreement among members. I believe, however, that committee members are less attentive than they should be to the social and political contexts in which they operate. This is not surprising. Members of these committees, and often their staffs as well, are typically experts drawn from the academy. [End Page 313] Scholars traditionally offer advice or influence policy through articles and scholarly work undertaken individually or in cooperation with like-minded individuals who do not need to be persuaded about the merits of a specific position. Moreover, scholarly articles are often pitched at a level of abstraction that may be of limited utility in the context of concrete decision making.Scholarly efforts are important. Particularly in bioethics, these scholarly efforts often have furnished the conceptual frameworks that are critical to the efforts of those who grapple with complex matters, the appropriate resolution of which pose moral disagreement and genuine perplexity. Policy formulation by its very nature, however, requires more. Attention must be paid to competing moral and social frameworks. Logical, rational arguments and risk/benefit assessments are important, but emotion, passion and values grounded in experience also demand consideration. Policy formulation as a result can be a quite messy process.Members of the academy are often uncomfortable in this environment. Pursuing the messy details can be threatening and at times at odds with values that academics prize highly. I believe this discomfort was evident in the reluctance of several Advisory Committee members to obtain security clearances that were required in order to see classified material related to the Committee’s work. Secrecy may have seemed at odds with cherished values of openness. As a result the perusal of classified materials was left to those with clearances. Fortunately, the Committee was successful in having relevant information declassified so all committee members read and deliberated about the same information. Committees needing to see more contemporaneous classified information might not be so fortunate.Ethics commission members correctly worry about disagreement. The ability to reach consensus helps to give recommendations a compelling quality. Morris Abram, chairman of the President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, makes this point powerfully. He states that “a commission requires agreement that is as... (shrink)

Why does symbolic communication in humans develop primarily in an oral medium, and how do theories of language origin explain this? Non-human primates, despite their ability to learn and use symbolic signs, do not develop symbols as in oral language. This partly owes to the lack of a direct cortico-motoneuron control of vocalizations in these species compared to humans. Yet such modality-related factors that can impinge on the rise of symbolic language are interpreted differently in two types of evolutionary storylines. (...) 1) Some theories posit that symbolic language originated in a gestural modality, as in “sign languages”. However, this overlooks work on emerging sign and spoken language showing that gestures and speech shape signs differently. 2) In modality-dependent theories, some emphasize the role of iconic sounds, though these lack the efficiency of arbitrary symbols. Other theorists suggest that ontogenesis serves to identify human-specific mechanisms underlying an evolutionary shift from pitch varying to orally-modulated vocalizations (babble). This shift creates numerous oral features that can support efficient symbolic associations. We illustrate this principle using a sound-picture association task with 40 learners who hear words in an unfamiliar language (Mandarin) with and without a filtering of oral features. Symbolic associations arise more rapidly and accurately for sounds containing oral features compared to sounds bearing only pitch features, an effect also reported in experiments with infants. The results imply that, beyond a competence to learn and use symbols, the rise of symbolic language rests on the types of signs that a modality of expression affords. (shrink)

If the words of natural human language possess a universal positivity bias, as assumed by Boucher and Osgood’s (1969) famous Pollyanna hypothesis and computationally confirmed for large text corpora in several languages (Dodds et al., 2015), then children and youth literature (CYL) should also show a Pollyanna effect. Here we tested this prediction applying a vector space model- based sentiment analysis tool called SentiArt (Jacobs, 2019) to two CYL corpora, one in English (372 books) and one in German (500 (...) books). Pitching our analysis at the sentence level, and assessing semantic as well as lexico-grammatical information, bBoth corpora show the Pollyanna effect and thus add further evidence to the universality hypothesis. The results of our multivariate sentiment analyses provide interesting testable predictions for future scientific studies of literature. (shrink)

Psychophysical scaling models of the form R = f, with R the response and I some intensity of an attribute, all assume that people judge the amounts of an attribute. With simple biases excepted, most also assume that judgments are independent of space, time, and features of the situation other than the one being judged. Many data support these ideas: Magnitude estimations of brightness increase with luminance. Nevertheless, I argue that the general model is wrong. The stabilized retinal image literature (...) shows that nothing is seen if light does not change over time. The classification literature shows that dimensions often combine to produce emergent properties that cannot be described by the elements in the stimulus. These and other effects cannot be adjusted for by simply adding variables to the general model because some factors do not combine linearly. The proposed alternative is that people initially judge the entire stimulus – the object in terms of its environment. This agrees with the constancy literature that shows that objects and their attributes are identified through their relations to other aspects of the scene. That the environment determines judgments is masked in scaling studies where the standard procedure is to hold context constant. In a typical brightness study the essential stimulus might be the intensity of the light or a difference between the light and the background. The two are perfectly confounded. This issue is examined in the case of audition. Judgments of the loudness of a tone depend on how much that tone differs from the previous tone in both pitch and loudness. To judge loudness people first seem to process the stimulus object in terms of differences between it and other aspects in the situation; only then do they assess the feature of interest. Psychophysical judgments will therefore be better interpreted by theories of attention that are based in biology or psychology than those that are based in classical physics. (shrink)

Many perception and processing effects of the lexical status of tone have been found in behavioral, psycholinguistic, and neuroscientific research, often pitting varieties of tonal Chinese against non-tonal Germanic languages. While the linguistic and cognitive evidence for lexical tone is therefore beyond dispute, the word prosodic systems of many languages continue to escape the categorizations of typologists. One controversy concerns the existence of a typological class of “pitch accent languages,” another the underlying phonological nature of surface tone contrasts, which (...) in some cases have been claimed to be metrical rather than tonal. We address the question whether the Sequence Recall Task, which has been shown to discriminate between languages with and without word stress, can distinguish languages with and without lexical tone. Using participants from non-tonal Indonesian, semi-tonal Swedish, and two varieties of tonal Mandarin, we ran SRTs with monosyllabic tonal contrasts to test the hypothesis that high performance in a tonal SRT indicates the lexical status of tone. An additional question concerned the extent to which accuracy scores depended on phonological and phonetic properties of a language’s tone system, like its complexity, the existence of an experimental contrast in a language’s phonology, and the phonetic salience of a contrast. The results suggest that a tonal SRT is not likely to discriminate between tonal and non-tonal languages within a typologically varied group, because of the effects of specific properties of their tone systems. Future research should therefore address the first hypothesis with participants from otherwise similar tonal and non-tonal varieties of the same language, where results from a tonal SRT may make a useful contribution to the typological debate on word prosody. (shrink)

Background: Studies on autistic strengths are often focused on what they reveal about autistic intelligence and, in some cases, exceptional and atypical reasoning abilities. An emerging research trend has demonstrated how interests and strengths often evident in autism can be harnessed in interventions to promote the well-being, adaptive, academic and professional success of autistic people. However, abilities in certain domains may be accompanied by major limitations in others, as well as psychiatric and behavioral issues, which may challenge their inclusion in (...) support programs. Objectives: To provide an in-depth, pragmatic, real-life example of the psychological and psychiatric management of interests and strengths in an autistic adolescent. Method: An autistic teenager, C.A., with above-average calendar calculation and musical abilities, received psychiatric, neuropsychological, and language standardized and clinical assessments, combined with a measurement of his musical and calendar calculation abilities. C.A. and his parents then received psychiatric and psychological support over a 14-month period, targeting their perceptions of C.A.’s interests, strengths, and co-occurring difficulties. Results: C.A. had a verbal IQ within the intellectual disability range and a non-verbal IQ in the low mean range. Modest calendar calculation, absolute pitch, and matrix abilities coexisted with severe receptive and expressive language disorder. The discrepancy between his abilities in areas of strengths and his limitations in other domains led to anxiety, frustration, and sometimes behavioral issues. Displacing the focus from academic performance to interests, as well as promoting the use of his strengths to develop new skills independently of their short-term adaptive benefits yielded positive effects on C.A.’s self-assessment, quality of life, and behavior at follow up. Discussion: The appealing idea that abilities mostly found in autistic people, such as calendar calculation, can be directly harnessed into academic achievement and lead to paid employment may have detrimental effects, especially when such abilities are modest and associated with other limitations. These abilities should be primarily used to maximize well-being and quality of life, independently of their short-term adaptive function, which may or may not be positive. (shrink)

According to proponents of the generalized magnitude system proposal (GMS), SNARC-like effects index spatial mappings of magnitude and provide crucial evidence for the existence of a GMS. Casasanto and Pitt (2019) have argued that these effects, instead, reflect mappings of ordinality, which people compute on the basis of differences among stimuli that vary either qualitatively (e.g., musical pitches) or quantitatively (e.g., dots of different sizes). In response to our paper, Prpic et al. (2021) argued that both magnitude and ordinality play (...) a role in SNARC-like effects. Here, we address each of their arguments and conclude that magnitude is relevant to these effects only insofar as it serves as a basis for ordinality. For this reason and others, SNARC or SNARC-like effects cannot provide evidence for the putative generalized magnitude system. (shrink)

Angus Fletcher pitches his book to general readers. Though it consists of literary criticism, it is designed as a psychological self-help manual-literature as therapy. Fletcher's thera­peutic program is presented as an alternative to the kind of literary Darwinism that iden­tifies human nature as the basis for literature. He acknowledges the existence of human nature but aims at transcending it by promoting an Aquarian ethos of harmony and un­derstanding. He has some gifts of style, but the dominant voice in his stylistic (...) blend is that of the shill hawking a patent medicine. He presents himself as a modern sage who reveals an ancient but long-lost technique for using literature to boost happiness and well-being. Each of his 25 chapters identifies a distinct literary technique and uses popularized neuro­science to describe its supposedly beneficial psychological effects. Fletcher’s chains of rea­soning are habitually tenuous, and his exposition is littered with factual errors that betray ignorance of the books, genres, and periods he discusses. Despite its shortcomings, Fletch­er’s book has received encomiums from prestigious researchers, including the psychologist Martin Seligman and the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. In evaluating Fletcher’s rhetor­ical style, analytic categories, Aquarian ethos, historical self-narrative, pattern of reasoning, and literary scholarship, this review essay reaches a more negative judgment about the value of his book. As an alternative to Fletcher’s book, I recommend a few evolutionary literary works for general readers. (shrink)

Together with language, music is perhaps the most distinctive behavioral trait of the human species. Different hypotheses have been proposed to explain why only humans perform music and how this ability might have evolved in our species. In this paper, we advance a new model of music evolution that builds on the self-domestication view of human evolution, according to which the human phenotype is, at least in part, the outcome of a process similar to domestication in other mammals, triggered by (...) the reduction in reactive aggression responses to environmental changes. We specifically argue that self-domestication can account for some of the cognitive changes, and particularly for the behaviors conducive to the complexification of music through a cultural mechanism. We hypothesize four stages in the evolution of music under self-domestication forces: (1) collective protomusic; (2) private, timbre-oriented music; (3) small-group, pitch-oriented music; and (4) collective, tonally organized music. This line of development encompasses the worldwide diversity of music types and genres and parallels what has been hypothesized for languages. Overall, music diversity might have emerged in a gradual fashion under the effects of the enhanced cultural niche construction as shaped by the progressive decrease in reactive (i.e., impulsive, triggered by fear or anger) aggression and the increase in proactive (i.e., premeditated, goal-directed) aggression. (shrink)

Recent experiments have shown that people iconically modulate their prosody corresponding with the meaning of their utterance. This article reports findings from a story reading task that expands the investigation of iconic prosody to abstract meanings in addition to concrete ones. Participants read stories that contrasted along concrete and abstract semantic dimensions of speed and size. Participants read fast stories at a faster rate than slow stories, and big stories with a lower pitch than small stories. The effect (...) of speed was distributed across the stories, including portions that were identical across stories, whereas the size effect was localized to size-related words. Overall, these findings enrich the documentation of iconicity in spoken language and bear on our understanding of the relationship between gesture and speech. (shrink)

Why do humans make music? Theories of the evolution of musicality have focused mainly on the value of music for specific adaptive contexts such as mate selection, parental care, coalition signaling, and group cohesion. Synthesizing and extending previous proposals, we argue that social bonding is an overarching function that unifies all of these theories, and that musicality enabled social bonding at larger scales than grooming and other bonding mechanisms available in ancestral primate societies. We combine cross-disciplinary evidence from archeology, anthropology, (...) biology, musicology, psychology, and neuroscience into a unified framework that accounts for the biological and cultural evolution of music. We argue that the evolution of musicality involves gene–culture coevolution, through which proto-musical behaviors that initially arose and spread as cultural inventions had feedback effects on biological evolution because of their impact on social bonding. We emphasize the deep links between production, perception, prediction, and social reward arising from repetition, synchronization, and harmonization of rhythms and pitches, and summarize empirical evidence for these links at the levels of brain networks, physiological mechanisms, and behaviors across cultures and across species. Finally, we address potential criticisms and make testable predictions for future research, including neurobiological bases of musicality and relationships between human music, language, animal song, and other domains. The music and social bonding hypothesis provides the most comprehensive theory to date of the biological and cultural evolution of music. (shrink)

Mental body-representations are highly plastic and can be modified after brief exposure to unexpected sensory feedback. While the role of vision, touch and proprioception in shaping body-representations has been highlighted by many studies, the auditory influences on mental body-representations remain poorly understood. Changes in body-representations by the manipulation of natural sounds produced when one's body impacts on surfaces have recently been evidenced. But will these changes also occur with non-naturalistic sounds, which provide no information about the impact produced by or (...) on the body? Drawing on the well-documented capacity of dynamic changes in pitch to elicit impressions of motion along the vertical plane and of changes in object size, we asked participants to pull on their right index fingertip with their left hand while they were presented with brief sounds of rising, falling or constant pitches, and in the absence of visual information of their hands. Results show an "auditory Pinocchio" effect, with participants feeling and estimating their finger to be longer after the rising pitch condition. These results provide the first evidence that sounds that are not indicative of veridical movement, such as non-naturalistic sounds, can induce a Pinocchio-like change in body-representation when arbitrarily paired with a bodily action. (shrink)

Recent research on body and head positions has shown that postural changes may induce varying degrees of changes on acoustic speech signals and articulatory gestures. While the preservation of formant profiles across different postures is suitably accounted for by the two-tube model and perturbation theory, it remains unclear whether it is resulted from the accommodation of tongue postures. Specifically, whether the tongue accommodates the changes in head angle to maintain the target acoustics is yet to be determined. The present study (...) examines vowel acoustics and their correspondence with the articulatory maneuvers of the tongue, including both tongue postures and movements of the tongue center, across different head angles. The results show that vowel acoustics, including pitch and formants, are largely unaffected by upward or downward tilting of the head. These preserved acoustics may be attributed to the lingual gestures that compensate for the effects of gravity. Our results also reveal that the tongue postures in response to head movements appear to be vowel-dependent, and the tongue center may serve as an underlying drive that covariates with the head angle changes. These results imply a close relationship between vowel acoustics and tongue postures as well as a target-oriented strategy for different head angles. (shrink)

Abstract:After a decade of intensive debate, stakeholder ideas have come to exert a significant influence on academic management thinking, but normative stakeholder theory itself appears to be in considerable disarray. This paper attempts to untangle the confusion and to prepare the ground for a more productive approach to the normative stakeholder problem. The paper identifies three distinct kinds of normative stakeholder theory and three different levels of claim that can be made by such theories, and uses this classification to argue (...) that stakeholder theorists have consistently pitched their sights either too high or too low to engage effectively with the rival shareholder theory. To the extent that they have their sights too high they have also undermined their own position by sacrificing credibility and introducing major problems of derivation. (shrink)

Similar to visual perception, auditory perception also has a clearly described “pop-out” effect, where an element with some extra feature is easier to detect among elements without an extra feature. This phenomenon is better known as auditory perceptual asymmetry. We investigated such asymmetry between shorter or longer duration, and level or falling of pitch of linguistic stimuli that carry a meaning in one language, but not in another. For the mismatch negativity experiment, we created four different types of (...) stimuli by modifying the duration of the first vowel [ɑ] and pitch contour of the stimuli words. The stimuli were synthesized from Estonian words and follow the Estonian language three-way quantity system, which incorporates tonal features together with temporal patterns. This made the meaning of the word dependent on the combination of both features and allows us to compare the relative contribution of duration and pitch contour in discrimination of language stimuli in the brain via MMN generation. The participants of the experiment were 12 Russian native speakers with little or no experience in Estonian and living in Estonia short-term, and 12 Estonian native speakers. We found that participants’ perception of the linguistic stimuli differed not only according to the physical features but also according to their native language, confirming that the meaning of the word interferes with the early automatic processing of phonological features. The GAMM and ANOVA analysis of the reversed design results showed that the deviant with longer duration among shorter standards elicited a MMN response with greater amplitude than the short deviant among long standards, while changes in pitch contour produced neither strong MMN nor asymmetry. Thus, we demonstrate the effect of language background on asymmetric perception of linguistic stimuli that aligns with those of previous studies, and contributes to the growing body of knowledge supporting auditory perceptual asymmetry. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Tolle, LegeCommencement Address at the Dominican House of Studies, May 13, 2022Michael RootTolle, lege. Tolle, lege. "Take up, read." Few such simple words have had such a crucial impact on the history of Christian theology. In the summer of 386, Augustine of Hippo was a torn man. He had come to believe the Gospel, but he could not bring himself to break with sinful habits, habits so ingrained he (...) called them "necessities." His soul was torn between two wills within him, he said, each pointing in a different direction. Nothing seemed able to be able to break the interior logjam. He says that he willed that he would will the good, but not with a complete will, and so he remained paralyzed. After hearing a friend and mentor describe the conversion of Victorinus, a famous Roman teacher of rhetoric, and another friend speak of the monastic retreat of St. Anthony, the spiritual conflict within Augustine reached a fever pitch and he retreated to a corner of the garden in the house he was staying at. Suddenly, from over the wall, he heard a child chanting the words tolle, lege: "take up, read." He could not think of any childhood rhyme or chant that involved those words—they must be a sign from God. So, he rushed over to where a copy of St. Paul's letters was lying, opened it, and read at random. His eye fell on Romans 13:13: "Let us conduct ourselves becomingly as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy." As he himself puts in his Confessions: "No further wished I to read, nor was there need to do so. Instantly, in truth, at the end of this sentence, as if before a peaceful light streaming into my heart, all the dark shadows of doubt fled away" (8.12.29). [End Page 9]You who are graduating are now coming to the end of a process that has involved a great deal of taking up and reading. I trust that the taking up and reading has not been to cure you of reveling and drunkenness, not to mention the rest of St. Paul's list, but rather to form you, most immediately within the discipline of theology and for many of you, within the vocation of the priesthood and the Dominican Order. Some of what you have taken up and read has, I hope, been inspiring. I hope that at least on occasion you felt as if a peaceful light was streaming into your hearts. Some of what you read, I would guess, you found mind-numbingly boring. But it is all part of the process.Of course you did more than just take up and read. You thought about what you were reading. You compared it with other things you had read. You related it to your own experience. You discussed it with other students. You wrote about it in papers and on exams. The medieval university master had three tasks: legere, disputare, praedicare—read, dispute, and (in this context) present. You have done much the same thing—reading, arguing, presenting.Reading with this kind of attention does not leave us unaffected. We do not just learn new information; we come to inhabit a different world, with a different landscape and a different population. It makes a difference whether one's effective world includes only places like Washington, New York, and Elizabeth, New Jersey, or also Jerusalem, the old Jerusalem and the new Jerusalem, the North Africa of Augustine, and the Paris of Thomas Aquinas. The person whose imaginative world is mostly populated by characters from Friends and Game of Thrones will be a different sort of person from the one whose imaginative world includes Abraham, David, St. Paul, Dominic, and Alyosha Karamazov. It is as much an exaggeration to say you are what you read as to say you are what you eat. But at least for some of us (and if you are graduating from Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception, you are probably in this group), at least some of what we read changes not only what we... (shrink)

In Homer’s account of the adventurous journey of Odysseus, the song of the sirens was so appealing and tempting that it lured sailors to their deaths. Warned by the goddess Kirke, Odysseus overcame the trap by plugging his crew’s ears with wax. An archaeo-acoustical research expedition undertaken by members of Humboldt University Berlin made sound propagation experiments at the supposedly historical scene at the Galli Islands where it’s said that the sirens originally sung. At the site we broadcasted both synthetic (...) signals and natural voices via loudspeakers in the direction Odysseus most probably should have approached the Siren’s island. Subjective listening as well as objective acoustic analysis of the recorded signals revealed evidence for a combination of site-specific acoustic effects, which may explain the nature and origin of the song of the sirens in Homer. The local arrangement of the three islands deforms the acoustic signals by amplification and by changes in timbre. Two female singers from the Berlin State Opera were asked to sing differently pitched musical intervals to be tested in the Li Galli environment. The experiment evinced that the first overtones would be merged by the echo of the rocks; yet when singing pure thirds and less consonant intervals, which yield higher orders in the overtone series, the voices appear recognisable as being two. As a result, and particularly because Homer stresses the number of exactly two sirens several times, the evidence of our research supports the musicological theory for a rather early existence of enharmonic tunings and most prominently a two-part polyphonic singing of Greek songs. Given that the rocky formation of the Galli Islands most likely didn’t change during the geological tick of just 2,700 years, we conclude that there has been a real acoustic basis for the myth reported by Homer and that a “song of the Sirens”, most probably based on natural voices, was transformed by the particular acoustic conditions of the landscape in such a way that signals were amplified and sent out in one concrete direction. Based on these results, we continue to discuss further leading acoustic theories that offer new insights into the mythology and which were essential to motivate our expedition in the first place. After all, the question remains open what kind of beings the first emitters of the song might have been. (shrink)

In the wake of the 1980 CSCE follow-up meeting US human rights objectives should be defined contextually so as to include besides the traditional human rights ingredients, i.e. the right to personal integrity, civil and politica! liberties, such values as peace, national security, nuclear non-proliferation, economie growth and redistribution. To this effect, the US should stress more a proper «world order» as its ultimate policy goal. Doing so would provide it at once with the flexibility needed in the international (...) forum and with the credibility needed on the domestic scene, in order to achieve some visible results. A high-pitched declaratory policy in favor of human rights leads to ineffectiveness with Communist nations and to arbitrary pressures on authoritarian countries which somehow rely on US assistance.Thus, the US should proceed contextually on the basis of a more balanced «human rights» concept. (shrink)

The ability to distinguish between an individual's own actions and those of another person is a requirement for successful joint action, particularly in domains such as group music making where precise interpersonal coordination ensures perceptual overlap in the effects of co-performers' actions. We tested the hypothesis that such coordination benefits from simultaneous integration and segregation of information about ‘self’ and ‘other’ in an experiment using a musical joint action paradigm. Sixteen pairs of individuals with little or no musical training performed (...) a dyadic synchronization task on a pair of electronic music boxes. The relationship between pitches produced by paired participants (same vs. different) and the relationship between movement frequencies required to trigger synchronous tones (congruent vs. incongruent) were varied in a repeated measures design. The results indicate that interpersonal coordination was most accurate when sounds were different in pitch but movement frequency was congruent. Under other conditions, participants often drifted apart, resulting in poor coordination, especially with same sounds and incongruent movements across co-performers. These findings suggest that interpersonal coordination was facilitated when simultaneous self-other integration and segregation occurred across sensory modalities in an asymmetrical manner where pitch relations favoured segregation via auditory streaming while movement congruence favoured integration via visuo-motor coupling. Such self-other representational balance may enable co-performers to maintain autonomous control while attending, anticipating, and adapting to each other's timing when joint action requires precise temporal coordination. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Breath of Fresh Air:Or, Why the Body is Not Embodied1Tim Ingold (bio)One of the more irritating affectations of much recent writing in the humanities and social sciences is the habit of inserting the word "embodied" in front of the topic in question, as though by doing so the specter of binary thinking could be magically exorcised. Almost anything, it seems, can be embodied–the mind, consciousness, experience, knowledge, skills, (...) practices, the self, meaning. If there is one thing that cannot be embodied, however, it is the body itself. At first glance, the phrase "embodied body" looks like a simple case of tautology, of saying the same thing twice. "How can a body not be embodied?" you will protest. "It's the embodiment that makes it a body!" But on second thought, the matter is not so straightforward. For if the body is the predicate of a process of embodiment–if it comes after embodiment, so to speak–then all the other things we claim can be entered into the process must come before it. Thus, the dualism of mind and body, to take just one example, is still there, just as categorical as it ever was, but it no longer equates to a schism between ideal and material worlds. It is, rather, a matter of separating what is poured into the funnel of embodiment from what is extruded at the other end of it. It is a division between what goes in, and what comes out. Only things that go in can be embodied. The body, since it comes out of the process, cannot.A body, however, if it is to remain alive, has to breathe. Does it make sense, then, to regard breathing as a practice of embodiment, or to add breath to the list of things that can be embodied? That a body breathes goes without saying; that breath is thereby embodied is another matter entirely. Fundamental to breathing is the rhythmic alternation of air going in, and air coming out. Perhaps there's a sense in which breath is embodied on the inhalation, as air is drawn into the oxygenating process essential to bodily metabolism. But the release of air on the exhalation seems like the reverse, since it serves to expel gases–principally carbon dioxide–which in concentration would be lethal. If your body absorbs as you breathe in, it exudes as you breathe out. Embodiment, then, catches only half the picture, minus its complement of vaporization. Likewise, with [End Page 100] the body itself we have only half of the living being: the fleshy part. The other, gaseous part is normally invisible, though under certain conditions it can be seen, for example in a room full of smokers, in which everyone is wreathed in a haze, or when it is very cold, causing the warm, humid air issuing from the lungs to condense into a little cloud. As vaporization appears to be the complement of embodiment, so the cloud, whether of tobacco smoke or condensed moisture, seems to complement the body made up of flesh and blood.In the Western world there is a long tradition of prioritizing body over breath. This is consistent with an ontology of naturalism that tends to put the being of things before their becoming, as though everything there is had already precipitated out into bodies of one form or another, which have then to be set in motion in order to have the effects they do. Among many so-called Indigenous peoples, however, most especially those credited by anthropological observers with an ontology of animism, this priority is reversed. For them the vital complement of the living being wafts in smoke and resonates in song, whereas the bodily complement is but an ephemeral, almost ghostly appearance.2 Although a comparison of Western and animic ontologies might appear to lend support to the thesis of complementarity, pitching western naturalists into a world of bodies and indigenous animists into a world of vapors–both demi-worlds which, if only they could be combined, would make a perfect whole–I shall argue, to the contrary, that with a focus on breath and breathing, the division between the... (shrink)