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Biomedical subjects

J A Sereno

Publications and source records attributed to J A Sereno.

11 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1999

Hemispheric differences in grammatical class.

Although a number of studies have examined lexical asymmetries in hemispheric processing, few have systematically investigated differences between nouns and verbs. Lateralization effects of grammatical class were examined by presenting nouns and verbs of both high and low frequency to either the right or left visual field. Results from both a noun/verb categorization and a lexical decision task revealed a significant visual field by grammatical class interaction. Further analyses revealed that verbs were processed faster in the left compared to the right hemisphere, while there was no hemispheric advantage for the processing of nouns. The present study provides new evidence for the role of grammatical class in lexical processing.

Brain↗
PubMed1999

Training American listeners to perceive Mandarin tones.

Auditory training has been shown to be effective in the identification of non-native segmental distinctions. In this study, it was investigated whether such training is applicable to the acquisition of non-native suprasegmental contrasts, i.c., Mandarin tones. Using the high-variability paradigm, eight American learners of Mandarin were trained in eight sessions during the course of two weeks to identify the four tones in natural words produced by native Mandarin talkers. The trainees' identification accuracy revealed an average 21% increase from the pretest to the post-test, and the improvement gained in training was generalized to new stimuli (18% increase) and to new talkers and stimuli (25% increase). Moreover, the six-month retention test showed that the improvement was retained long after training by an average 21% increase from the pretest. The results are discussed in terms of non-native suprasegmental perceptual modification, and the analogies between L2 acquisition processes at the segmental and suprasegmental levels.

Adult↗
PubMed1997

Processing of English inflectional morphology.

The present paper explores the representation of inflectional morphology in the English lexicon. There has been a long-standing debate about how these inflectional relationships might be involved during on-line processing. Inflected forms may be derived from an uninflected base form by rule application; by contrast, both regular and irregular inflection may be treated in the same way, with morphological patterns emerging from mappings between base and inflected forms. The present series of experiments investigated these issues using a lexical decision task. The first experiment showed that response latencies to nouns were significantly shorter than those to verbs. A possible explanation for these results can be found in differences in inflectional structure between English nouns and verbs. Namely, the relative frequency of uninflected compared with inflected forms is greater for nouns than for verbs. Two additional experiments compared noun stimuli with different inflectional structures. In all cases, differences in response latencies were predicted by the frequency of the surface form, whether uninflected or inflected. The pattern of results lends support for a unitary associative system for processing regular inflection of nouns in English and argues against the view that regular inflected plurals are derived by rule from a single, uninflected lexical entry.

Humans↗
PubMed1993

[McIndoe operation in a case of vaginal agenesis. Considerations on the subject].

Congenital absence of the vagina depends on partial or complete failure of Müllerian duct development. The ovaries develop normally and the fimbrial ends of the tubes are vestigial but there is no uterus, cervix or vagina. The urinary and genital systems and some skeletal portions developing from Müllerian ducts are so closely linked embryologically that congenital abnormality of kidney and bones is said to accompany genital defects in approximately 20% of cases. Several surgical techniques have been proposed but the gynecologist can have sufficient experience to choose the most suitable treatment according to the pecularities of each case. McIndoe Operation offers the best possible result opening a space between the ureta and the rectum and placing within in a large penile shaped mold draped with a split skin graft. This operation can result in a vagina that looks and feels absolutely normal but the most discouraging however is the time required for the completion of the whole treatment. There are several photos illustrating the procedure.

Female↗
PubMed1987

Acoustic analyses and perceptual data on anticipatory labial coarticulation in adults and children.

The present study investigated anticipatory labial coarticulation in the speech of adults and children. CV syllables, composed of [s], [t], and [d] before [i] and [u], were produced by four adult speakers and eight child speakers aged 3-7 years. Each stimulus was computer edited to include only the aperiodic portion of fricative-vowel and stop-vowel syllables. LPC spectra were then computed for each excised segment. Analyses of the effect of the following vowel on the spectral peak associated with the second formant frequency and on the characteristic spectral prominence for each consonant were performed. Perceptual data were obtained by presenting the aperiodic consonantal segments to subjects who were instructed to identify the following vowel as [i] or [u]. Both the acoustic and the perceptual data show strong coarticulatory effects for the adults and comparable, although less consistent, coarticulation in the speech stimuli of the children. The results are discussed in terms of the articulatory and perceptual aspects of coarticulation in language learning.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

The acoustic vowel space of modern Greek and German.

The spectral characteristics of vowels in Modern Greek and German were examined. Four speakers of Modern Greek and three speakers of German produced four repetitions of words containing each vowel of their native language. Measurements of the fundamental frequency and the first three formats were made for each vowel token. These measurements were then transformed into log frequency ratios and plotted as points in the three-dimensional auditory-perceptual space proposed by Miller (1989). Each vowel token was thus represented by one point, and the points corresponding to each vowel category were enclosed in three-dimensional target zones. For the present corpus, these zones differentiate the five vowels of Modern Greek with 100% accuracy, and the fourteen vowels of German with 94% accuracy. Implications for the distribution of common vowels across languages as a function of vowel density are discussed.

Auditory Perception↗
PubMedDate not supplied

The phonological representation of [voice] in speech perception.

This paper examines to what extent phonological representations affect word identification. The contrast under investigation involves the interaction between voicing and vowel length in Dutch. Dutch has underlying contrasts both in obstruent voicing and in vowel length. The voicing contrast is neutralized on the surface in syllable-final position. Also, both long and short vowels are lengthened by some 25 msec when followed by medial voiced obstruents. The present study investigated whether this vowel length cue influenced listeners when hearing stimuli with ambiguous vowel duration in an identical, neutralized consonantal context in which the underlying representation of the obstruent following the vowel differed in voicing. A vowel length continuum ([at] to [a:t]) was created and appended to initial consonants to make two pairs of real words. Each pair differed in vowel length with opposite underlying final consonant representations: /zat/-/za:d/, and /stad/-/sta:t/. Our question was whether the vowel category boundaries would be different in pairs like /zat/-/za:d/ as compared to /stad/-/sta:t/. Although the underlying consonant is either voiced or voiceless, the surface word-final consonant for both pairs of stimuli is always voiceless ([t]). If the listener uses a surface representation with a voiceless consonant to recognize the words, there should be no difference in categorization of the vowel-length continua. The results of a vowel categorization task, however, showed a significant difference in the location of the phoneme boundaries between the two continua, suggesting that listeners' perception seems to be guided by the underlying phonological representation of words.

Auditory Perception↗