Symbolic representation acquisition is the complex cognitive process consisting of learning to use a symbol to stand for something else. A variety of non-human animals can engage in symbolic representation learning. One particularly complex form of symbol representation is the associations between orthographic symbols and speech sounds, known as grapheme–phoneme correspondence. To date, there has been little evidence that animals can learn this form of symbolic representation. Here, we evaluated whether an Umbrella cockatoo (Cacatua alba) can learn letter-speech (...) correspondence using English words. The bird-participant was trained with phonics instruction and then tested on pairs of index cards while the experimenter spoke the word. The words were unknown to the bird and the experimenter was blinded to the correct card position. The cockatoo’s accuracy (M = 71%) was statistically significant. Further, we found a strong correlation between the bird’s word-identification success and the number of overlapping letters between words, where the more overlapping letters between words, the more likely the cockatoo answered incorrectly. Our results strongly suggest that parrots may have the ability to learn grapheme–phoneme correspondences. (shrink)

In this study, we examined the learning of new grapheme-phoneme correspondences in individuals with and without dyslexia. Additionally, we investigated the relation between grapheme-phoneme learning and measures of phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge and rapid automatized naming, with a focus on the unique joint variance of grapheme-phoneme learning to word and non-word reading achievement. Training of grapheme-phoneme associations consisted of a 20-min training program in which eight novel letters (Hebrew) needed to be (...) paired with speech sounds taken from the participant's native language (Dutch). Eighty-four third grade students, of whom 20 were diagnosed with dyslexia, participated in the training and testing. Our results indicate a reduced ability of dyslexic readers in applying newly learned grapheme-phoneme correspondences while reading words which consist of these novel letters. However, we did not observe a significant independent contribution of grapheme-phoneme learning to reading outcomes. Alternatively, results from the regression analysis indicate that failure to read may be due to differences in phonological and/or orthographic knowledge but not to differences in the grapheme-phoneme-conversion process itself. (shrink)

Pour les enfants issus de familles itinérantes et de voyageurs, le français est une langue-culture seconde, voire étrangère. Devant l’analphabétisme et l’illettrisme de masse, ainsi que le faible taux de scolarisation des EFIV, l’insertion socioculturelle des communautés désignées sous l’appellation administrative de « gens du voyage » est primordiale. Les langues-cultures des « gens du voyage » étant principalement de transmission orale, l’utilisation de gestes manuels et de comptines à gestes comme supports de l’enseignement/apprentissage du français semble particulièrement pertinent. Un (...) autre argument en faveur de l’utilisation de ces supports auprès d’EFIV est que la communication non-verbale fait partie intégrante du langage et qu’elle favoriserait la compréhension et la production langagière, notamment pour l’apprentissage de la prosodie et de la phonologie. Au vu de ces éléments, des comptines à gestes ont été créées afin de permettre l’enseignement/apprentissage de la perception et de la production des phonèmes du français, ainsi que la correspondance entre phonèmes et graphèmes. Ces supports pédagogiques ont été testés au sein de l’association Ballade auprès d’EFIV, et leur impact a été analysé afin de permettre une réévaluation des propositions didactiques. (shrink)

Humans can pronounce a nonword. Some researchers have interpreted this behavior as requiring a sequential mechanism by which a grapheme-phoneme correspondence rule is applied to each grapheme in turn. However, several parallel-distributed processing models in English have simulated human nonword reading accuracy without a sequential mechanism. Interestingly, the Japanese psycholinguistic literature went partly in the same direction, but it has since concluded that a sequential parsing mechanism is required to reproduce human nonword reading accuracy. In this study, (...) by manipulating the list composition, we demonstrated that past psycholinguistic studies in Japanese have overestimated human nonword reading accuracy. When the more fairly reevaluated human performance was targeted, a newly implemented Japanese PDP model simulated the target accuracy as well as the error patterns. These findings suggest that PDP models are a more parsimonious way of explaining reading across various languages. (shrink)

Children learning to read in two different orthographic systems are exposed to cross-linguistic interferences. We explored the effects of school and grade on phonological activation during a visual word recognition task. Elementary school children from Spain completed a lexical decision task in English. The task included real words and pseudohomophones following Spanish or English phonological rules. Using the mouse-tracking paradigm, we analyzed errors, reaction times, and computer mouse movements. Children in the bilingual school performed better than children in the monolingual (...) school. Children in higher grades performed better than children in lower grades. The interference effect of Spanish phonology was weak and became weaker in higher grades. Spanish children differentiate between first and second language grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences since early on in the educational process. In 6th grade, children from the bilingual school responded better to words and Spanish pseudohomophones, while children from the monolingual school were less distracted by the English pseudohomophones. Children in the bilingual school had stronger inhibition of Spanish phonology and stronger activation of English phonology. Instructional method plays an important role on the processing strategies Spanish children rely on when reading in English. School and grade influence the link between orthographic and phonological representations. (shrink)

Grapheme-color synesthetes experience color, not physically present, when viewing symbols. Synesthetes cannot remember learning these associations. Must synesthetic percepts be formed during a sensitive period? Can they form later and be consistent? What determines their nature? We tested grapheme-color synesthete, MC2, before, during and after she studied Hindi abroad. We investigated whether novel graphemes elicited synesthetic percepts, changed with familiarity, and/or benefited from phonemic information. MC2 reported color percepts to novel Devanagari and Hebrew graphemes. MC2 monitored these percepts (...) over 6 months in a Hindi-speaking environment. MC2 and synesthete DN, reported synesthetic percepts for Armenian graphemes, or Cyrillic graphemes + phonemes over time. Synesthetes, not controls, reported color percepts for novel graphemes that gained consistency over time. Phonemic information did not enhance consistency. Thus, synesthetes can form and consolidate percepts to novel graphemes as adults. These percepts may depend on pre-existing grapheme-color relationships but they can flexibly shift with familiarity. (shrink)

Iconic words are supposed to exhibit imitative relationships between their linguistic forms and their referents. Many studies have worked to pinpoint sound-to-meaning correspondences for ideophones from different languages. The correspondence patterns show similarities across languages, but what makes such language-specific correspondences universal, as iconicity claims to be, remains unclear. This could be due to a lack of consensus on how to describe and test the perceptuo-motor affordances that make an iconic word feel imitative to speakers. We created and (...) analysed a database of 1,860 ideophones across 13 languages, and found that seven articulatory features, physiologically accessible to all spoken language users, pattern according to semantic features of ideophones. Our findings pave the way for future research to utilize articulatory properties as a means to test and explain how iconicity is encoded in spoken language. The perspective taken here fits in with ongoing research of embodiment, motivation, and iconicity research, three major strands of research within Cognitive Linguistics. The results support that there is a degree of unity between the concepts of imitative communication and the spoken forms through cross-domain mappings, which involve physical articulatory movement. (shrink)

The article considers the nature of descriptive statements and the ontological status of descriptive constructs in linguistics, taking the example of a phoneme of English. It is argued that descriptive statements should be seen as expressions of the content of descriptive models or as hypotheses. Furthermore, it is argued that descriptive models and constructs in linguistics have a purely explanatory function in relation to speech events and without ontological commitment to corresponding entities in the real world.

Studies of linguistic synaesthesias in English have shown a range of fine-grained language mechanisms governing the associations between colours on the one hand, and graphemes, phonemes and words on the other. However, virtually nothing is known about how synaesthetic colouring might operate in non-alphabetic systems. The current study shows how synaesthetic speakers of Mandarin Chinese come to colour the logographic units of their language. Both native and non-native Chinese speakers experienced synaesthetic colours for characters, and for words spelled in the (...) Chinese spelling systems of Pinyin and Bopomo. We assessed the influences of lexical tone and Pinyin/Bopomo spelling and showed that synaesthetic colours are assigned to Chinese words in a non-random fashion. Our data show that Chinese-speaking synaesthetes with very different native languages can exhibit both differences and similarities in the ways in which they come to colour their Chinese words. (shrink)

Through computational modeling, here we examine whether visual and task characteristics of writing systems alone can account for lateralization differences in visual word recognition between different languages without assuming influence from left hemisphere (LH) lateralized language processes. We apply a hemispheric processing model of face recognition to visual word recognition; the model implements a theory of hemispheric asymmetry in perception that posits low spatial frequency biases in the right hemisphere and high spatial frequency (HSF) biases in the LH. We show (...) two factors that can influence lateralization: (a) Visual similarity among words: The more similar the words in the lexicon look visually, the more HSF/LH processing is required to distinguish them, and (b) Requirement to decompose words into graphemes for grapheme-phoneme mapping: Alphabetic reading (involving grapheme-phoneme conversion) requires more HSF/LH processing than logographic reading (no grapheme-phoneme mapping). These factors may explain the difference in lateralization between English and Chinese orthographic processing. (shrink)

Developmental dyslexia is considered to be most effectively addressed with preventive phonics-based interventions, including grapheme-phoneme coupling and blending exercises. These intervention types require intact speech perception abilities, given their large focus on exercises with auditorily presented phonemes. Yet some children with dyslexia experience problems in this domain due to a poorer sensitivity to rise times, i.e., rhythmic acoustic cues present in the speech envelope. As a result, the often subtle speech perception problems could potentially constrain an optimal response (...) to phonics-based interventions in at-risk children. The current study therefore aimed to extend existing research by examining the presence of potential speech perception deficits in pre-readers at cognitive risk for dyslexia when compared to typically developing peers and to explore the added value of a preventive auditory intervention for at-risk pre-readers, targeting rise time sensitivity, on speech perception and other reading-related skills. To obtain the first research objective, we longitudinally compared speech-in-noise perception between 28 5-year-old pre-readers with and 30 peers without a cognitive risk for dyslexia during the second half of the third year of kindergarten. The second research objective was addressed by exploring growth in speech perception and other reading-related skills in an independent sample of 62 at-risk 5-year-old pre-readers who all combined a 12-week preventive phonics-based intervention with an auditory story listening intervention. In half of the sample, story recordings contained artificially enhanced rise times, while in the other half, stories remained unprocessed. Results revealed a slower speech-in-noise perception growth in the at-risk compared to the non-at-risk group, due to an emerged deficit at the end of kindergarten. Concerning the auditory intervention effects, both intervention groups showed equal growth in speech-in-noise perception and other reading-related skills, suggesting no boost of envelope-enhanced story listening on top of the effect of combining GraphoGame-Flemish with listening to unprocessed stories. These findings thus provide evidence for a link between speech perception problems and dyslexia, yet do not support the potential of the auditory intervention in its current form. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore the effect of musical expertise on whistled word perception by naive listeners. In whistled words of nontonal languages, vowels are transposed to relatively stable pitches, while consonants are translated into pitch movements or interruptions. Previous behavioral studies have demonstrated that naive listeners can categorize isolated consonants, vowels, and words well over chance. Here, we take an interest in the effect of musical experience on words while focusing on specific phonemes within the context of the word. (...) We consider the role of phoneme position and type and compare the way in which these whistled consonants and vowels contribute to word recognition. Musical experience shows a significant and increasing advantage according to the musical level achieved, which, when further specified according to vowels and consonants, shows stronger advantages for vowels over consonants for all participants with musical experience, and advantages for high‐level musicians over nonmusicians for both consonants and vowels. By specifying high‐level musician skill according to one's musical instrument expertise (piano, violin, flute, or singing), and comparing these instrument groups to expert users of whistled speech, we observe instrument‐specific profiles in the answer patterns. The differentiation of such profiles underlines a resounding advantage for expert whistlers, as well as the role of instrument specificity when considering skills transferred from music to speech. These profiles also highlight differences in phoneme correspondence rates due to the context of the word, especially impacting “acute” consonants (/s/ and /t/), and highlighting the robustness of /i/ and /o/. (shrink)

In this article, I am starting with a question which many years ago was at the center of the debate on structuralism. Are structures to be found in the object or in the subject ? If we take one of the famous analyses by Jakobson, we ascertain that as long as attention is brought to bear on the graphemic or phonological elements, or on rhymes and accents, then the objectivity of the examination is incontestable. The absolute or relative computation of (...) phonemes or groups of phonemes and the specification of their place in the text are independent of the critic's subjectivity. Subjectivity begins to impose itself when categories like "abstract" and "concrete" or "metaphor" and "symbol" are introduced, and even more so when these categories are grouped into classes the denomination of which does not have its basis in the data offered by the text but in nomenclative schemata developed by the critic . Cesare Segre, director of the Institute of Romance Philology at the University of Pavia and president of the International Association of Semiotic Studies, is coeditor of the journals Strumenti Critici and Medioevo Romanza and the series Critica e Filologia. His principal works of linguistic and semiotic criticism are Lingua, stile e società, Esperienze ariosteche, Semiotics and Literary Criticism , I metodi attuali della critica in Italia , La tradizione della Chanson de Roland, and Le strutture e il tempo . His editions of old Italian and French texts are Fornival's Li bestiaires d'Amours, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Giamboni's Libro de' Vizi e delle Virtudi, and the Chanson de Roland. "Narrative Structures and Literary History" originally appeared in Strumenti Critici . His contribution to Critical Inquiry, "Culture and Modeling Systems," appeared in Spring 1978. Rebecca West's previous contribution to Critical Inquiry was the translation of Guilio Carlo Argan's "Ideology and Iconology". (shrink)

The name theory has largely been discarded in the literature on quotation. In this paper, I resurrect the theory under the heading of the natural name theory. According to the natural name theory, a pure quotation is a natural, rather than an arbitrary, name of a linguistic item. As with other natural names, like onomatopoeia, pure quotations resemble their referents. I argue that this observation allows us to deflate the arguments traditionally thought to undermine the name theory. Then I argue (...) for the “multiplicity thesis,” that pure quotations name a wide variety of linguistic items, such as expression types, graphemes, spellings, phonemes, pronunciations, meanings, and senses. Then I show that while the natural name theory easily accommodates the multiplicity thesis, none of the major, viable alternatives to it likewise do. (shrink)

Debates concerning the types of representations that aid reading acquisition have often been influenced by the relationship between measures of early phonological awareness (the ability to process speech sounds) and later reading ability. Here, a complementary approach is explored, analyzing how the functional utility of different representational units, such as whole words, bodies (letters representing the vowel and final consonants of a syllable), and graphemes (letters representing a phoneme) may change as the number of words that can be read (...) gradually increases. Utility is measured by applying a Simplicity Principle to the problem of mapping from print to sound; that is, assuming that the “best” representational units for reading are those which allow the mapping from print to sounds to be encoded as efficiently as possible. Results indicate that when only a small number of words are read whole-word representations are most useful, whereas when many words can be read graphemic representations have the highest utility. (shrink)

In the 1970's Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida participated in a published debate over the nature of philosophical discourse. The question of the possibility of univocal discourse in philosophy drives the published debate. I provide a commentary on this debate and situate it in a broader confrontation over the nature of language in general. Ricoeur sees language as the discursive event which aims at the communication of univocal meaning. I show that the discursive event, for Ricoeur, happens in the present, (...) and that presentness implies singularity and wholeness. In contrast, Derrida holds that the unavoidable use of iterable forms of phonemes and graphemes, what Derrida calls traces or traits, can always threaten communication by producing an irreducible metaphoricity. I show that the primary characteristic of iterability is absence or nonpresence and that nonpresence implies plurality and differentiality . ;Yet, the confrontation between Ricoeur and Derrida is not a simple opposition between event and iterability, between univocity and metaphoricity. Ricoeur always asserts that language possesses a type of iterability or repeatability and a type of metaphoricity or plurivocity. I show, however, that, for Ricoeur, repeatability designates repeatability of meaning and it always functions teleologically. It always aims at unity, identity and univocity. For Derrida, iterability designates not simply repeatability of meaning but repeatability of linguistic forms, from which meaning is inseparable. Iterability never functions teleologically. It is the essential possibility of deviation from any normative precedent, from any unity, from any identity, from any univocity. ;I conclude by taking up two points which Derrida makes throughout his writings. First, Derrida shows the absolute necessity of the externalization of meaning in iterable linguistic forms. Second, a linguistic form is not strictly or identically repeatable. I argue that these two points are undeniable. Thus I conclude that Ricoeur's attempt to assure a certain type of philosophical univocity, his attempt to revitalize metaphysics, the very project which animates perhaps all of Ricoeur's hermeneutical philosophy, cannot succeed. (shrink)

A spelling model which has evolved in the parallel universe of spelling research resonates with Frost's reading model. Like reading, spelling cannot be based solely on phonology or orthography, but should accommodate all linguistic facets. The cognitive domain of spelling does not take place at the level of single grapheme or phoneme or syllable, but rather, at the lexical level.

Determinants of synesthetic color choice for Japanese phonetic characters were studied in six Japanese synesthetes. The study used Hiragana and Katakana characters, which represent the same set of syllables although their visual forms are dissimilar. From a palette of 138 colors, synesthetes selected a color corresponding to each character. Results revealed that synesthetic color choices for Hiragana characters and those for their Katakana counterparts were remarkably consistent, indicating that color selection depended on character-related sounds and not visual form. This Hiragana–Katakana (...) invariance cannot be regarded as the same phenomenon as letter case invariance, usually reported for English grapheme-color synesthesia, because Hiragana and Katakana characters have different identities whereas upper and lower case letters have the same identity. This involvement of phonology suggests that cross-activation between an inducer brain region and that of the concurrent area in grapheme-color synesthesia is mediated by higher order cortical processing areas. (shrink)

This commentary starts with a simplified Cartesian vector space of the tristimulus theory of color. This vector space is then further simplified so that bitstrings are used to represent the vector space. The Commission Internationale de l'Eclairage (CIE) diagram is shown to follow directly and simply from this vector space. The Berlin & Kay results are shown to agree quite well with the vector space and the two-dimensional version of it, especially if the dimensions are normalized to take into account (...) the sensitivity of the eye to the different wavelengths comprising color. There is asymmetry with respect to the colors and a similar asymmetry in vocalic phonemes; these effects can be explained in terms of physiology. The (in)famous problem of the color channels is given a unified treatment at various levels. An eight-valued color algebra is created, with addition and multiplication corresponding to additive and subtractive blending of colors. Finally, it is shown that the discrete Hamming metric for colors has a natural toroidal topology. (shrink)

In attempting to answer the question posed by this book's title, Giorgio Agamben does not address the idea of philosophy itself. Rather, he turns to the apparently most insignificant of its components: the phonemes, letters, syllables, and words that come together to make up the phrases and ideas of philosophical discourse. A summa, of sorts, of Agamben's thought, the book consists of five essays on five emblematic topics: the Voice, the Sayable, the Demand, the Proem, and the Muse. In keeping (...) with the author's trademark methodology, each essay weaves together archaeological and theoretical investigations: to a patient reconstruction of how the concept of language was invented there corresponds an attempt to restore thought to its place within the voice; to an unusual interpretation of the Platonic Idea corresponds a lucid analysis of the relationship between philosophy and science, and of the crisis that both are undergoing today. In the end, there is no universal answer to what is an impossible or inexhaustible question, and philosophical writing—a problem Agamben has never ceased to grapple with—assumes the form of a prelude to a work that must remain unwritten. (shrink)

The article presents the results of the phonemic-graphemic analysis of the proscription entries from 15th century, which come from the book of city Jauer and were written down in the Silesian dialect of the Early New High German. Due to the analysis it could be proved, the text contains the standard Early New High German features as well as the dialectal structures and the sound changes, which are characteristic for the Silesian dialect. All the results of the exploration are supported (...) with with the appropriate examples. (shrink)

The notion of sound symbolism receives increasing interest in psycholinguistics. Recent research – including empirical effects of affective phonological iconicity on language processing (Adelman et al., 2018; Conrad et al., 2022) – suggested language codes affective meaning at a basic phonological level using specific phonemes as sublexical markers of emotion. Here, in a series of 8 rating-experiments, we investigate the sensitivity of language users to assumed affectively-iconic systematic distribution patterns of phonemes across the German vocabulary:After computing sublexical-affective-values (SAV) concerning valence (...) and arousal for the entire German phoneme inventory according to occurrences of syllabic onsets, nuclei and codas in a large-scale affective normative lexical database, we constructed pseudoword material differing in SAV to test for subjective affective impressions.Results support affective iconicity as affective ratings mirrored sound-to-meaning correspondences in the lexical database. Varying SAV of otherwise semantically meaningless pseudowords altered affective impressions: Higher arousal was consistently assigned to pseudowords made of syllabic constituents more often used in high-arousal words – contrasted by less straightforward effects of valence SAV. Further disentangling specific differential effects of the two highly-related affective dimensions valence and arousal, our data clearly suggest arousal, rather than valence, as the relevant dimension driving affective iconicity effects. (shrink)

Many studies revealed a link between temporal information processing (TIP) in a millisecond range and speech perception. Previous studies indicated a dysfunction in TIP accompanied by deficient phonemic hearing in children with specific language impairment (SLI). In this study we concentrate in SLI on phonetic identification, using the voice-onset-time (VOT) phenomenon in which TIP is built-in. VOT is crucial for speech perception, as stop consonants (like /t/ vs. /d/) may be distinguished by an acoustic difference in time between the onsets (...) of the consonant (stop release burst) and the following vibration of vocal folds (voicing). In healthy subjects two categories (voiced and unvoiced) are determined using VOT task. The present study aimed at verifying whether children with SLI indicate a similar pattern of phonetic identification as their healthy peers and whether the intervention based on TIP results in improved performance on the VOT task. Children aged from 5 to 8 years ( n = 47) were assigned into two groups: normal children without any language disability (NC, n = 20), and children with SLI ( n = 27). In the latter group participants were randomly classified into two treatment subgroups, i.e., experimental temporal training (EG, n = 14) and control non-temporal training (CG, n = 13). The analyzed indicators of phonetic identification were: (1) the boundary location (α) determined as the VOT value corresponding to 50% voicing/unvoicing distinctions; (2) ranges of voiced/unvoiced categories; (3) the slope of identification curve (β) reflecting the identification correctness; (4) percent of voiced distinctions within the applied VOT spectrum. The results indicated similar α values and similar ranges of voiced/unvoiced categories between SLI and NC. However, β in SLI was significantly higher than that in NC. After the intervention, the significant improvement of β was observed only in EG. They achieved the level of performance comparable to that observed in NC. The training-related improvement in CG was non-significant. Furthermore, only in EG the β values in post-test correlated with measures of TIP as well as with phonemic hearing obtained in our previous studies. These findings provide another evidence that TIP is omnipresent in language communication and reflected not only in phonemic hearing but also in phonetic identification. (shrink)

The picture-word interference paradigm has been used to investigate the time course of processes involved in word retrieval, but is challenging to implement online due to dependence on measurements of vocal reaction time. We performed a series of four experiments to examine picture-word interference and facilitation effects in a form of covert picture naming, with and without gamification. A target picture was accompanied by an audio word distractor that was either unrelated, phonologically-related, associatively-related, or categorically-related to the picture. Participants were (...) instructed to judge whether the name of the target picture ended in the phoneme assigned to the block by pressing corresponding keys as quickly and accurately as possible. Experiments 1 and 2 successfully replicated categorical interference and phonological facilitation effects at different optimal stimulus-onset-asynchronies between words and pictures. Experiment 3 demonstrated that a key gamification feature motivated faster speed at the expense of accuracy in the gamified vs. experimental format of the task. Experiment 4 adopted the optimal SOAs and verified that the gamification reveals expected interference and facilitation effects despite the speed-accuracy tradeoff. These studies confirmed that categorical interference occurs earlier than phonological facilitation, while both processes are independent from articulation and inherent to word retrieval itself. The covert PWI paradigm and its gamification have methodological value for neuroimaging studies in which articulatory artifacts obscure word retrieval processes, and may be developed into potential online word-finding assessments that can reveal word retrieval difficulties with greater sensitivity. (shrink)

Certain nonwords, like maluma and takete, are associated with roundness and sharpness, respectively. However, this has typically been demonstrated using explicit tasks. We investigated whether this association would be detectable using a more implicit measure—a sequential priming task. We began with a replication of the standard Maluma/Takete effect before examining whether round and sharp nonword primes facilitated the categorization of congruent shapes. We found modest evidence of a priming effect in response accuracy. We next examined whether nonword primes affected categorization (...) of ambiguous shapes, using visual and auditory primes. We found that ambiguous shapes were categorized as round more often following the presentation of a round nonword. This suggests that phonemes may activate related shape information which then affects the processing of shapes, and that this association emerges even when participants are not explicitly searching for it. (shrink)

Iconicity is a fundamental property of spoken and signed languages. However, quantitative analysis of sound-meaning association in Chinese has not been extensively developed, and little is known about the impact of sound symbolism in children’s literature. As sound symbolism is supposed to be a universal cognitive phenomenon, this research seeks to investigate whether iconic structures of Mandarin are embodied in native Chinese speakers’ language experience. The paper describes a case study of Chinese storybooks with the goal of testing whether phonosemantic (...) association is prominent between name sounds and character features. A quantitative method was used to investigate the distribution of different phonological units in character denomination depending on their physical and emotional traits. The results show that phonemes and syllable combination patterns are closely related to perceivable character features. By comparing schematic mapping in Chinese with other languages, the study illuminates a cross-linguistic tendency in addition to a Chinese-specific iconic relation between sound and meaning. (shrink)

Throughout the long history of Classic Maya hieroglyphs, a logosyllabic writing system used from the late first millennium BCE through the mid-second millennium CE in southern Mesoamerica, the most commonly recorded phonetic value was the syllable u (/ʔu/). With over a dozen different u hieroglyphs, Classic Maya scribes had more options for recording /ʔu/ than any other syllable or logograph. Cognitive approaches to writing systems typically attribute graphemic variation (i.e., alternation between signs with equivalent linguistic value) to semantic differences like (...) animacy or to non-linguistic factors like identity. Distribution of Classic Maya u hieroglyphs, however, suggests that morphosyntactic context influenced which grapheme scribes wrote and when. This case suggests that scribal knowledge of Classic Maya hieroglyphs included ideas about writing's relationship to language. It also highlights the cognitive relevance of morphosyntax for a writing system's users as they differentiate among graphic signs with identical linguistic denotation. (shrink)

In three experiments, we examined priming effects where primes were formed by transposing the first and last phoneme of tri‐phonemic target words (e.g., /byt/ as a prime for /tyb/). Auditory lexical decisions were found not to be sensitive to this transposed‐phoneme priming manipulation in long‐term priming (Experiment 1), with primes and targets presented in two separated blocks of stimuli and with unrelated primes used as control condition (/mul/‐/tyb/), while a long‐term repetition priming effect was observed (/tyb/‐/tyb/). However, a (...) clear transposed‐phoneme priming effect was found in two short‐term priming experiments (Experiments 2 and 3), with primes and targets presented in close temporal succession. The transposed‐phoneme priming effect was found when unrelated prime‐target pairs (/mul/‐/tyb/) were used as control and more important when prime‐target pairs sharing the medial vowel (/pys/‐/tyb/) served as control condition, thus indicating that the effect is not due to vocalic overlap. Finally, in Experiment 3, a transposed‐phoneme priming effect was found when primes sharing the medial vowel plus one consonant in an incorrect position with the targets (/byl/‐/tyb/) served as control condition, and this condition did not differ significantly from the vowel‐only condition. Altogether, these results provide further evidence for a role for position‐independent phonemes in spoken word recognition, such that a phoneme at a given position in a word also provides evidence for the presence of words that contain that phoneme at a different position. (shrink)

Grapheme-colour synaesthesia is a perceptual experience where graphemes, letters or words evoke a specific colour, which are experienced either as spatially coincident with the grapheme inducer (projector sub-type) or elsewhere, perhaps without a definite spatial location (associator sub-type). Here, we address the question of whether synaesthesia can be rapidly produced using a hypnotic colour suggestion to examine the possibility of ‘hypnotic synaesthesia’, i.e. subjectively experienced colour hallucinations similar to those experienced by projector synaesthetes. We assess the efficacy of (...) this intervention using an “embedded figures” test, in which participants are required to detect a shape (e.g., a square) composed of local graphemic elements. For grapheme-colour synaesthetes, better performance on the task has been linked to a higher proportion of graphemes perceived as coloured. We found no performance benefits on this test when using a hypnotic suggestion, as compared to a no-suggestion control condition. The same result was found when participants were separated according to the degree to which they were susceptible to the suggestion (number of coloured trials perceived). However, we found a relationship between accuracy and subjective reports of colour in those participants who reported a large proportion of coloured trials: trials in which the embedded figure was accurately recognised (relative to trials in which it was not) were associated with reports of more intense colours occupying a greater spatial extent. Collectively, this implies that hypnotic colour was only perceived after shape detection rather than aiding in shape detection via colour-based perceptual grouping. The results suggest that hypnotically induced colours are not directly comparable to synaesthetic ones. (shrink)

Before the end of the first year of life, infants begin to lose the ability to perceive distinctions between sounds that are not phonemic in their native language. It is typically assumed that this developmental change reflects the construction of language-specific phoneme categories, but how these categories are learned largely remains a mystery. Peperkamp, Le Calvez, Nadal, and Dupoux (2006) present an algorithm that can discover phonemes using the distributions of allophones as well as the phonetic properties of the (...) allophones and their contexts. We show that a third type of information source, the occurrence of pairs of minimally differing word forms in speech heard by the infant, is also useful for learning phonemic categories and is in fact more reliable than purely distributional information in data containing a large number of allophones. In our model, learners build an approximation of the lexicon consisting of the high-frequency n-grams present in their speech input, allowing them to take advantage of top-down lexical information without needing to learn words. This may explain how infants have already begun to exhibit sensitivity to phonemic categories before they have a large receptive lexicon. (shrink)

Researchers have long suspected that grapheme-color synaesthesia is useful, but research on its utility has so far focused primarily on episodic memory and perceptual discrimination. Here we ask whether it can be harnessed during rule-based Category learning. Participants learned through trial and error to classify grapheme pairs that were organized into categories on the basis of their associated synaesthetic colors. The performance of synaesthetes was similar to non-synaesthetes viewing graphemes that were physically colored in the same way. Specifically, (...) synaesthetes learned to categorize stimuli effectively, they were able to transfer this learning to novel stimuli, and they falsely recognized grapheme-pair foils, all like non-synaesthetes viewing colored graphemes. These findings demonstrate that synaesthesia can be exploited when learning the kind of material taught in many classroom settings. (shrink)

Vowel phonemes are a part of any acoustic speech signal. Vowel sounds occur in speech more frequently and with higher energy. Therefore, vowel phoneme can be used to extract different amounts of speaker discriminative information in situations where acoustic information is noise corrupted. This article presents an approach to identify a speaker using the vowel sound segmented out from words spoken by the speaker. The work uses a combined self-organizing map - and probabilistic neural network -based approach to segment (...) the vowel phoneme. The segmented vowel is later used to identify the speaker of the word by matching the patterns with a learning vector quantization -based code book. The LVQ code book is prepared by taking features of clean vowel phonemes uttered by the male and female speakers to be identified. The proposed work formulates a framework for the design of a speaker-recognition model of the Assamese language, which is spoken by ∼3 million people in the Northeast Indian state of Assam. The experimental results show that the segmentation success rates obtained using a SOM-based technique provides an increase of at least 7% compared with the discrete wavelet transform-based technique. This increase contributes to the improvement in overall performance of speaker identification by ∼3% compared with earlier related works. (shrink)

The last couple of years have seen a rapid growth of interest in the study of crossmodal correspondences – the tendency for our brains to preferentially associate certain features or dimensions of stimuli across the senses. By now, robust empirical evidence supports the existence of numerous crossmodal correspondences, affecting people’s performance across a wide range of psychological tasks – in everything from the redundant target effect paradigm through to studies of the Implicit Association Test, and from speeded discrimination/classification (...) tasks through to unspeeded spatial localisation and temporal order judgment tasks. However, one question that has yet to receive a satisfactory answer is whether crossmodal correspondences automatically affect people’s performance , as opposed to reflecting more of a strategic, or top-down, phenomenon. Here, we review the latest research on the topic of crossmodal correspondences to have addressed this issue. We argue that answering the question will require researchers to be more precise in terms of defining what exactly automaticity entails. Furthermore, one’s answer to the automaticity question may also hinge on the answer to a second question: Namely, whether crossmodal correspondences are all ‘of a kind’, or whether instead there may be several different kinds of crossmodal mapping . Different answers to the automaticity question may then be revealed depending on the type of correspondence under consideration. We make a number of suggestions for future research that might help to determine just how automatic crossmodal correspondences really are. (shrink)

Casey O’Callaghan has argued that rather than hearing meanings, we hear phonemes. In this note I argue that valuable though they are in an account of speech perception – depending on how we define ‘hearing’ – phonemes either don’t explain enough or they go too far. So, they are not the right tool for his criticism of the semantic perceptual account (SPA).