Immediate and Distracted Imitation in Second-Language Speech: Unreleased Plosives in English

The paper investigates immediate and distracted imitation in second-language speech using unreleased plosives. Unreleased plosives are fairly frequently found in English sequences of two stops. Polish, on the other hand, is characterised by a significant rate of releases in such sequences. This cross-linguistic difference served as material to look into how and to what extent non-native properties of sounds can be produced in immediate and distracted imitation. Thirteen native speakers of Polish first read and then imitated sequences of words with two stops straddling the word boundary. Stimuli for imitation had no release of the first stop. The results revealed that (1) a non-native feature such as the lack of the release burst can be imitated; (2) distracting imitation impedes imitative performance; (3) the type of a sequence interacts with the magnitude of an imitative effec

Decision by sampling

We present a theory of decision by sampling (DbS) in which, in contrast with traditional models, there are no underlying psychoeconomic scales. Instead, we assume that an attribute’s subjective value is constructed from a series of binary, ordinal comparisons to a sample of attribute values drawn from memory and is its rank within the sample. We assume that the sample reflects both the immediate distribution of attribute values from the current decision’s context and also the background, real-world distribution of attribute values. DbS accounts for concave utility functions; losses looming larger than gains; hyperbolic temporal discounting; and the overestimation of small probabilities and the underestimation of large probabilities

Chinese Wines and Foreign Urns: Making Objects of Lyric

A 2016-2017 William Prize for best essay in East Asian Studies was awarded to Ryan Matthew Hintzman (Silliman College \u2717) for his essay submitted to the Department of Comparative Literature, Chinese Wines and Foreign Urns: Making Objects of Lyric.” (Edward Kamens, Sumitomo Professor of Japanese Studies, advisor.) Ryan Hintzman’s essay, Chinese Wines and Foreign Urns: Making Objects of Lyric is a work of awe-inspiring erudition, vision, and ambition. Ranging far and wide among traditional and more recent theories of the lyric and moving boldly from 8th century poems in Japanese to 19th and 20th century poems in English, Hintzman articulates a distinctive notion of lyric (concerned with the poem’s self-knowing of its past and future, and its materiality or “thingness”) that is largely derived from readings of Romantic and post-Romantic poets (i.e. de Man\u27s work), but in a way that opens up new possibilities for reading premodern works and actually clarifies or extends the critical problems posed by Romantic/modernist texts. This is a profound accomplishment. This essay is as much about where its author has been as it is about where he—and literary studies at large—might go from here. Hintzman is both respectful of and dissatisfied with his forebears, as any possessor of a fertile critical mind should be. He will certainly go forward to pursue more readings and re-readings that will further complicate his conception of “how the poem works,” what it makes, what it does, and particularly with respect to the uta, the Japanese poem. I know of no more intelligent and compelling readings of the poems from the Man’yōshū than those presented by Hintzman in this essay (by a long shot). If his readings of Crane, Keats, Shelley, and Yeats stand as tall and strong as do his treatments of these very old and much worked-over Japanese poems, he will have shown a truly remarkable capacity that few scholars of any generation have been able to manage

Recognizing Speech in a Novel Accent: The Motor Theory of Speech Perception Reframed

The motor theory of speech perception holds that we perceive the speech of another in terms of a motor representation of that speech. However, when we have learned to recognize a foreign accent, it seems plausible that recognition of a word rarely involves reconstruction of the speech gestures of the speaker rather than the listener. To better assess the motor theory and this observation, we proceed in three stages. Part 1 places the motor theory of speech perception in a larger framework based on our earlier models of the adaptive formation of mirror neurons for grasping, and for viewing extensions of that mirror system as part of a larger system for neuro-linguistic processing, augmented by the present consideration of recognizing speech in a novel accent. Part 2 then offers a novel computational model of how a listener comes to understand the speech of someone speaking the listener's native language with a foreign accent. The core tenet of the model is that the listener uses hypotheses about the word the speaker is currently uttering to update probabilities linking the sound produced by the speaker to phonemes in the native language repertoire of the listener. This, on average, improves the recognition of later words. This model is neutral regarding the nature of the representations it uses (motor vs. auditory). It serve as a reference point for the discussion in Part 3, which proposes a dual-stream neuro-linguistic architecture to revisits claims for and against the motor theory of speech perception and the relevance of mirror neurons, and extracts some implications for the reframing of the motor theory

A habituation account of change detection in same/different judgments

We investigated the basis of change detection in a short-term priming task. In two experiments, participants were asked to indicate whether or not a target word was the same as a previously presented cue. Data from an experiment measuring magnetoencephalography failed to find different patterns for “same” and “different” responses, consistent with the claim that both arise from a common neural source, with response magnitude defining the difference between immediate novelty versus familiarity. In a behavioral experiment, we tested and confirmed the predictions of a habituation account of these judgments by comparing conditions in which the target, the cue, or neither was primed by its presentation in the previous trial. As predicted, cue-primed trials had faster response times, and target-primed trials had slower response times relative to the neither-primed baseline. These results were obtained irrespective of response repetition and stimulus–response contingencies. The behavioral and brain activity data support the view that detection of change drives performance in these tasks and that the underlying mechanism is neuronal habituation

Stochastic accumulation of feature information in perception and memory

It is now well established that the time course of perceptual processing influences the first second or so of performance in a wide variety of cognitive tasks. Over the last20 years, there has been a shift from modeling the speed at which a display is processed, to modeling the speed at which different features of the display are perceived and formalizing how this perceptual information is used in decision making. The first of these models(Lamberts, 1995) was implemented to fit the time course of performance in a speeded perceptual categorization task and assumed a simple stochastic accumulation of feature information. Subsequently, similar approaches have been used to model performance in a range of cognitive tasks including identification, absolute identification, perceptual matching, recognition, visual search, and word processing, again assuming a simple stochastic accumulation of feature information from both the stimulus and representations held in memory. These models are typically fit to data from signal-to-respond experiments whereby the effects of stimulus exposure duration on performance are examined, but response times (RTs) and RT distributions have also been modeled. In this article, we review this approach and explore the insights it has provided about the interplay between perceptual processing, memory retrieval, and decision making in a variety of tasks. In so doing, we highlight how such approaches can continue to usefully contribute to our understanding of cognition

Spontaneous and deliberate future thinking: A dual process account

© 2019 Springer Nature.This is the final published version of an article published in Psychological Research, licensed under a Creative Commons Attri-bution 4.0 International License. Available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-019-01262-7.In this article, we address an apparent paradox in the literature on mental time travel and mind-wandering: How is it possible that future thinking is both constructive, yet often experienced as occurring spontaneously? We identify and describe two ‘routes’ whereby episodic future thoughts are brought to consciousness, with each of the ‘routes’ being associated with separable cognitive processes and functions. Voluntary future thinking relies on controlled, deliberate and slow cognitive processing. The other, termed involuntary or spontaneous future thinking, relies on automatic processes that allows ‘fully-fledged’ episodic future thoughts to freely come to mind, often triggered by internal or external cues. To unravel the paradox, we propose that the majority of spontaneous future thoughts are ‘pre-made’ (i.e., each spontaneous future thought is a re-iteration of a previously constructed future event), and therefore based on simple, well-understood, memory processes. We also propose that the pre-made hypothesis explains why spontaneous future thoughts occur rapidly, are similar to involuntary memories, and predominantly about upcoming tasks and goals. We also raise the possibility that spontaneous future thinking is the default mode of imagining the future. This dual process approach complements and extends standard theoretical approaches that emphasise constructive simulation, and outlines novel opportunities for researchers examining voluntary and spontaneous forms of future thinking.Peer reviewe

Film Music and Wind Band Repertoire: The Opinions of High School Band Directors

A Plan B paper submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Music in music education, March 2004. Committee names: Judith A. Kritzmire, Mark Whitlock, Daniel G. Lipori. This item has been modified from the original to remove the signature page present.Selecting appropriate repertoire seems to be an issue of ongoing interest among wind band directors. Since the curriculum of a wind ensemble is largely determined by the repertoire, one can make the argument that choosing the music to be performed may be the most important decision that the conductor can make. Although symphonic film music and film music arrangements for these ensembles are readily available, few studies appear to exist regarding the role of film music within the wind band repertoire. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to determine the opinions of high school band directors regarding their use of film music arrangements in their concert programs throughout the regular school year. The subjects for this investigation were high school band directors from three north midwestern states. A questionnaire was sent to approximately 500 high school band directors in Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin. The subjects were asked to provide their opinions regarding appropriate venues for film music performance, the quality of film music transcriptions or arrangements for wind band and the influence of film music and film composers on wind band composers and compositions. The respondents were also given the opportunity to offer general opinions about the general topic of film music and wind band repertoire. The results of this study showed that there is agreement among subjects that a “Non-Pops” concert is an appropriate venue for film music performance while a music contest or festival is not an appropriate venue for film music performance. The results also showed that the directors believed that film music arrangements are of high quality and that this music has artistic value in addition to popular appeal. Very few respondents reported that they program film music more today than they did five to eight years ago. Most of the directors would like to see some of the older film scores arranged for the wind band and that film music has influence wind band compositions. Based on the results of this study, it is recommended that there be more professional discussion about film music transcriptions/arrangements for the wind band. More discussion may lead to a recognition of high quality film music music that could be programmed on a regular basis. It is also recommended that if film music is programmed, the arrangement’s musical value rather than short term popularity should be a selection factor