“Did My Cat Just Hit On Me? An Adventure in Pet Translation“, a report in the New York Times on August 29, 2022, by Emily Anthes, tells about new attempts to build computer-based devices that will translate cats’ and dogs’ utterances into human speech. The report does not mention that these devices follow in the footsteps […]
The US Navy has obtained a patent (US patent #11082763, “Handheld acoustic hailing and disruption systems and methods”), here in the year 2021, for a device essentially the same as the invention that earned an Ig Nobel Prize in the year 2012 for a team of Japanese inventors. Unsound Invention, Anew New Scientist magazine reports […]
The biomedical race to understand and tame the COVID-19 virus proceeds rapidly, drop by drop. This new spittle study is the very latest addition to the literature: “Visualizing Speech-Generated Oral Fluid Droplets with Laser Light Scattering,” Philip Anfinrud, Valentyn Stadnytskyi, Christina E. Bax, and Adriaan Bax, New England Journal of Medicine, April 15, 2020. (Thanks […]
Looking at the clip above, did you spot any prominent non-verbal actions that might characterize ValleySpeak? A number of academic papers have examined the pronunciation aspects of so-called ValSpeak from California, few however, have focused on one of its characteristic features known as ‘Jaw Setting’ – in this case slack jaw, open mouth (see Fig. […]
“Whistled languages are a valuable heritage of human culture.” – explained a 2004 paper : ‘Bioacoustics of human whistled languages: an alternative approach to the cognitive processes of language’ (in : An. Acad. Bras. Ciênc. vol.76 no.2, June 2004). It was authored by Dr. Julien Meyer of the Laboratoire de Dynamique du Langage (DDL)-CNRS, Institut […]
What might you gain (or lose) by interrupting someone? The question has been experimentally examined by Professor Sally Dew Farley, of the Psychology department at the University of Baltimore, US. Experimental subjects who had been asked to discuss an article were systematically interrupted by confederates – revealing the following : • The Upside for […]
Humans mostly tend to ‘breathe out’ whilst speaking (or making other vocalisations). Mostly but not exclusively. So-called Ingressive Speech is quite prevalent worldwide – and not just amongst ventriloquists. Take for example, a Scottish male saying “Aye aye I ken” (“Yes, yes I know”). [.wav audio file here] http://www.ida.liu.se/~robek28/audio/ingressive-Eklund_JIPA_2008_Fig_7b_ingr-aye_egr-aye-i-ken_male.wav Robert Eklund, who is Associate Professor […]
Until not so long ago, if you wanted a public corpus of alcoholized German speech, you would have been up a creek, so to speak, without a corpus. That situation has changed — as we see (or hear) in this week’s Improbable Research podcast. SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free. This week, Marc Abrahams — with dramatic […]
“Discourse marker like (DML) is recognized as a highly stigmatized feature of American English, one with strong ideological ties to inarticulate, ‘Valley Girl’ speech. Previous work suggests that individual listeners form impressions that both reference and perpetuate DML’s status, as DML- containing speech is judged as friendlier and less intelligent than controls.” But what about […]
Collectors of alcoholized German speech, rejoice! A new corpus is available to you: “Alcohol Language Corpus. The first public corpus of alcoholized German speech,” Florian Schiel [pictured here], Christian Heinrich, and Sabine Barfüßer, Language Resources and Evaluation, 2011. The authors, at the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, explain: “The Alcohol Language Corpus (ALC) […]