Looking upon the beautiful stalactites and stalagmites, rivulets, majestic natural domes and arches within this enormous cave of Bulgaria, it is easy to see why various human populations chose Devetashka as their home for tens of thousands of years.
Facial motion capture – the same technology used to develop realistic
computer graphics in video games and movies – has been used to identify
differences between children with childhood apraxia of speech and those
with other types of speech disorders, finds a new study by NYU’s
Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.
“In our study, we see evidence of a movement deficit in children with
apraxia of speech, but more importantly, aspects of their speech
movements look different from children with other speech disorders,”
said study author Maria Grigos,
associate professor in the Department of Communicative Sciences and
Disorders at NYU Steinhardt. The study, coauthored by Aviva Moss and
Ying Lu of NYU Steinhardt, is published in the August issue of the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.
Childhood apraxia of speech is a complex speech impairment in which
children have difficulty planning and making accurate movements to
create speech sounds. Children with apraxia of speech often are delayed
in developing speech, have atypical speech patterns, and make slow
progress in speech therapy.
Movement tracking technology has emerged as a useful tool in studying
motor speech disorders, including apraxia. Tiny reflective markers are
placed on the face, and using the motion capture technology, researchers
can quantify facial movements by measuring how the lips and jaw move.
Beyond simply listening to speech sounds, measuring motor deficits with
facial movement tracking adds a layer of understanding to measuring
speech sounds.
“This research enables us to look at the movement patterns used to
produce a word in relation to the way that word is perceived. Including
the perceptual component is key because as clinicians, we rely heavily
on the judgments we make when listening to children speak. One of our
aims was to determine if we could identify differences in how the lips
and jaw move even when speech is perceived to be accurate by the
listener,” Grigos said.
Grigos and her colleagues sought to understand if by measuring facial
movements, children with apraxia of speech can be distinguished from
children with other types of speech impairment. The researchers examined
the lip and jaw movement of 33 children, ages three to seven, during
speech tasks. Three groups were studied: 11 children with childhood
apraxia of speech, 11 children with other speech impairments, and 11
children without speech impairments.
The children were asked to repeat one, two, and three syllable words
while the motion capture technology tracked jaw, lower lip, and upper
lip movements. The researchers looked at metrics including the timing,
speed, and variability of the movement, as well as how far the lips and
jaw moved during speech. They only analyzed words that they perceived to
be pronounced accurately.
Using the movement tracking technology, the researchers were able to
pick up subtle differences that the ear couldn’t hear. The most notable
finding was that children with childhood apraxia of speech produced lip
and jaw movements that varied more than the other two groups of
children.
“Variability can be viewed in two ways: it can indicate that there is
flexibility to achieve the speech goal, or it might reflect a lack of
control,” Grigos said. “We’re still trying to identify the source of
such variability and whether speech movement variability would decrease
over the course of intervention involving intense practice.’”
The researchers also found that the timing of the movement was longer
in both speech impaired groups, meaning that the two groups took longer
to produce words than typically developing children.
Interestingly, when the children were asked to repeat three syllable
words, the most difficult of the speech tasks, the two groups with
speech impairments handled the words differently in terms of movement
duration and variability, with more deficits seen in the apraxia group.
“Children with apraxia don’t improve quickly with treatment. Our
findings suggest that the motor deficits seen in children with apraxia
may contribute to their slow progress in treatment and difficulty
generalizing newly acquired speech skills to untrained tasks,” Grigos
said.
The study provides evidence that movement variability – as measured
by facial motion capture – distinguishes children with childhood apraxia
of speech from children with other speech disorders, and children
respond differently to linguistic challenges depending on their speech
impairment.
"Chloe (my little sister): So jedi are like sheep?
Me: …what?
Chloe: Jedi. They’re like sheep.
Me: How are they like sheep?
Chloe: Because you say like 1 sheep but also 2 sheep. So it’s 1 jedi and 2 jedi, not jedis.
Me: Ohh, then yes."
[There’s a] frequently misunderstood construction that linguists refer to as the “habitual be.” When speakers of standard American English hear the statement “He be reading,” they generally take it to mean “He is reading.” But that’s not what it means to a speaker of Black English, for whom “He is reading” refers to what the reader is doing at this moment. “He be reading” refers to what he does habitually, whether or not he’s doing it right now.
D'Jaris Coles, a doctoral student in the communication disorders department, and a member of the African-American English research team, gives the hypothetical example of Billy, a well-behaved kid who doesn’t usually get into fights. One day he encounters some special provocation and starts scuffling with a classmate in the school yard. “It would be correct to say that Billy fights,” Coles explains, “but he don’t be fighting.”
Janice Jackson, another team member who is also working on a Ph.D. in communication disorders, conducted an experiment using pictures of Sesame Street characters to test children’s comprehension of the “habitual be” construction. She showed the kids a picture in which Cookie Monster is sick in bed with no cookies while Elmo stands nearby eating cookies. When she asked, “Who be eating cookies?” white kids tended to point to Elmo while black kids chose Cookie Monster. “But,” Jackson relates, “when I asked, ‘Who is eating cookies?’ the black kids understood that it was Elmo and that it was not the same. That was an important piece of information.” Because those children had grown up with a language whose verb forms differentiate habitual action from currently occuring action (Gaelic also features such a distinction, in addition to a number of West African languages), they were able even at the age of five or six to distinguish between the two.
The Sesame Street study is now a classic in “habitual be” research: here’s the article that it comes from (paywalled, but you can read the abstract and first few pages).
Anonymous asked: Hi! I am doing Linguistics at uni currently, and I'm having trouble with acoustic phonetics. Do you have advice on how to determine what kind of laryngeal contrast a language has?
Hello, it’s likley that your classes have ended since you wrote this, but I’ll share my tips and tricks in case you continue with your studies, or for others who may have similar problems.
Laryngeals offer a bit of a challenge to budding phoneticians (and experienced ones too!). Also known as glotals, they are made far back in the vocal tract. This mean that you can’t really see any of the articulatory moving. With
sounds made using the palate or alveolar you can generally get up close
and look at where the tongue is placed.
There are two different things that you might be confused by - you might be confusing them with sounds made in other parts of the vocal tract (e.g. you might confuse them with pharyngeals made a bit further up the tract) or you might be confusing different features of the different laryngeal sounds.
You can use an audio illustrated IPA to help you practice hearing the differences (here is one from internationalphoneticalphabet.org, and another from UVic in Canada). You can hear that the pharyngeals have more involve frication against articulators, so it sounds less ‘clean’ (I’m sure there are more technical ways to talk about these things, but creating your own vocabulary can be helpful too).
If you are working with speakers of the language, as with every other distinction try and find minimally different pairs. This will indicate there is a distinction there, and help you train your ear to it.
Remember you can use tricks that are useful for other distinctions too - try replicate a sound while holding a finger to your larynx. If you get a buzzing then you are voicing the sound. Feel whether you’re using pharyngeal articulation or not using a similar technique.
By popular demand (and a hurried email to our web administrators at ANU), PapuaWeb is back online. If you haven’t previously looked at this site, do take a moment to check it out: http://www.papuaweb.org/ It’s a no-frills but document-rich site developed by Mike Cookson on behalf of UNIPA, UNCEN and the ANU, and features maps, photos, legislation, 1000s of documents, bibliographic essays, and Terry Hays’ remarkable bibliography of New Guinea - all searchable through Google, of course. —Chris Ballard
PapuaWeb is an information network for students, researchers, development workers, community leaders, government agencies and others working on issues relevant to Papua, Indonesia (formerly Irian Jaya). The University of Papua, Cenderawasih University and the Australian National University, the project hosts, welcome contributions of research materials to enhance the resources of this website.
PapuaWeb adalah jaringan informasi untuk kalangan peneliti, konsultan, pemimpin rakyat, kalangan pemerintah, dll yang menaruh perhatian pada Papua, Indonesia. Universitas Papua, Unversitas Cenderawasih dan Australian National University sebagai pengelola Papuaweb, menerima kontribusi dalam bentuk hasil-hasil penelitian untuk mengembangkan situs ini.
The nutshell version: MultiLing Keyboard for Android, IPAChartApp or Unicoder Lite for iOS. Also note that if all you need is common accented characters, you can generally hold down the relevant letter on your default keyboard (e.g. longpress on a to get áäâàåã). Further instructions and reviews below.
a colourful guide to using Russian cases, as requested by an anon
click the tiles to expand them, or resent me if you’re on the mobile app!
please take note that this is adapted from masterrussian.com, which shows how to form cases in Russian, and this might have the odd mistake (if you notice one, please let me know!)
The brain is a complex biological structure, which works like a machine; or perhaps it is the machine that works like a brain? Two artists, Greg Dunn and Nicolas Baier approach the subject of the brain in different ways, yet both are able to portray the beauty and complexity of one of our most important organs.
With a PhD in neuroscience, Dunn has seen the inner working of the brain under a microscope many times. Working with neurons, he began to see patterns which inspired him to become an artist. Painting these neurons “in the sumi-e (ink wash painting) style”, Dunn used as few brushstrokes as possible to mimic the intricacy of the neurons. Soon, the patterns became more fluid, not exact replicas of the neuron patterns Dunn witnessed under his microscope, but almost ‘new’ neurons, ones which could only be seen on paper, rather than under a microscope.
Artist Nicolas Baier takes his inspiration more from the function of the brain as a memory holder. His works “Engrams (the world of ideas)” (2013) and “Neurones” (2013) play with the “complexity of the living reticular system compared to the rigidity of computer servers”, juxtaposing a computer system-like sculpture with an image manipulated to look like neurons within the same exhibition space. Baier’s work “questions access to the knowledge of reality and the very complex transmission of knowledge” and also what impact this knowledge structure has on our memories and brain function.
Two artists, working in various mediums, but both creating art that makes us think!
A team of biologists has identified a set of nerve cells in desert locusts that bring about ‘gang-like’ gregarious behaviour when they are forced into a crowd.
Dr Swidbert Ott from the University of Leicester’s Department of Biology, working with Dr Steve Rogers at the University of Sydney, Australia, has published a study that reveals how newly identified nerve cells in locusts produce the neurochemical serotonin to initiate changes in their behaviour and lifestyle.
The findings demonstrate the importance of individual history for understanding how brain chemicals control behaviour, which may apply more broadly to humans also.
Locusts are normally shy, solitary animals that actively avoid the company of other locusts. But when they are forced into contact with other locusts, they undergo a radical change in behaviour – they enter a ‘bolder’ gregarious state where they are attracted to the company of other locusts. This is the critical first step towards the formation of the notorious locust swarms.
Dr Ott said: “Locusts only have a small number of nerve cells that can synthesise serotonin. Now we have found that of these, a very select few respond specifically when a locust is first forced to be with other locusts. Within an hour, they produce more serotonin.
“It is these few cells that we think are responsible for the transformation of a loner into a gang member. In the long run, however, many of the other serotonin-cells also change, albeit towards making less serotonin.”
When a locust is first forced into contact with other locusts, a specific set of nerve cells that produce the neurochemical serotonin is responsible for reconfiguring its behaviour so that the previously solitary locust becomes a member of the gang, which is known as ‘gregarious’ behaviour.
An entirely different set of its serotonin-producing nerve cells is then affected by life in the group in the long run.
Dr Ott added: “The key to our success was to look in locusts that have just become gregarious and that had never met another locust until an hour earlier. If we had looked only in solitary locusts and in locusts that had a life-long history of living in crowds, we would have missed the nerve cells that are the key players in the transformation.
“There is an important lesson here for understanding the mechanisms that drive changes in social behaviour in general, both in locusts and in humans. We have shown how important it is to look at what happens when a new social behaviour is first set up, not just at the long-term outcome.
“Research in insects can give us deep insights into how brains work in general, including our own.”
Studies have previously shown that the change from solitary to gregarious behaviour is caused by serotonin.
The new study, which was funded by the Leverhulme Trust, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and the Royal Society, has identified the individual serotonin-producing nerve cells that are responsible for the switch from solitary to gregarious behaviour.
The scientists used a fluorescent stain that reveals the serotonin-producing nerve cells under the microscope. This allowed them to measure the amount of serotonin in individual nerve cells — the brighter a nerve cell lights up, the more serotonin it contains. The newly identified cells were much brighter in locusts that had just been forcedly crowded with other locusts. Moreover, the same cells were also brighter in locusts that had their hind legs tickled by the researchers for an hour — which is sufficient to make the locusts behave gregariously.
Serotonin has important roles in the brains of all animals that include the regulation of moods and social interactions.
In humans, there are strong links between changes in serotonin and mental disorders such as depression and anxiety.
