The teaching of a foreign language to adultsvery often lacks appropriate assistance for thelearning of pronunciation. Insights into thelearning processes are necessary in order to beable to design a special learning programme.The project aims at investigating theseprocesses for university students engaged inbeginner level courses of German in Swedenand of Swedish in the German speakingcountries in the context of multiple languagelearning. Both languages are linguisticallyclosely related to each other, especially wherephonology is concerned. A typical foreignaccent very often hampers smoothcommunication. Therefore minimizing theforeign accent appears to be a challenge,especially when these two kindred languagesare concerned.The project research will be carried out asa longitudinal study. Various kinds of speechmaterial will be recorded at certain intervals,digitalized and collected in the database MiFA,analysed and labelled for cross searching. Ourresults will add new knowledge and insightsinto the learning of pronunciation of twokindred languages in the context of multiplelanguage learning. A large quantity of data willallow for a quantitative evaluation of differenthypotheses, foremost the role of the first andthe second language.
In the production of Swedish, vowel quantity is known to be realized in the vowel, but also affects duration of a postvocalic consonant. The goal of this study is to examine the use of postvocalic consonant duration as a perceptual cue to vowel quantity. Listeners' responses and reaction times were recorded for synthesized materials in which the vowel spectra and duration were kept constant and the postvocalic consonant duration was adjusted. Results show no indication that listeners actively used the duration of a postvocalic consonant to identify vowel quantity. These findings suggest that adjustments in postvocalic consonant duration in Swedish productions may be temporal artifacts of the preceding vowel quantity rather than reflecting linguistically relevant information.
This study deals with the thesis that conceivability implies possibility. Confronted with alleged counterexamples to this thesis, some philosophers have turned to what may be called “idealized” or “more demanding” notions of conceivability. I argue that in turning to such notions, they have made the thesis useless to limited beings like us for attaining modal knowledge. However, in refusing to identify conceivability with demanding or idealized notions, we cannot maintain that conceivability always implies possibility. Essentially, there are two ways to proceed: to view conceivability as a mere guide to possibility, or to argue that the conceivability thesis is a local truth, i.e., a truth with respect to a certain class of statements. I defend the latter alternative. This class of statements employs concepts with respect to which doubt concerning the conceivability thesis is to be regarded as general skepticism, not as skepticism relating to the conceivability thesis itself.
I proceed by outlining an interpretation of strict possibility—i.e., the kind of possibility that I take the conceivability thesis to be about—according to which modal truths depend essentially on conceptual relations, as opposed to obtaining purely in virtue of properties of things themselves. Given this account, on which both ideal conceivability and strict possibility have a conceptual ground, I argue that these notions are not only coextensional but relate to one and the same property of statements. I further argue that the impossible is unimaginable, but that it is conceivable in the sense that one can misdescribe the contents of imagination.
Humans have the ability to recognize other humans by voice alone. This is important both socially and for the robustness of speech perception. This Thesis contains a set of eight studies that investigates how different factors impact on speaker recognition and how these factors can help explain how listeners perceive and evaluate speaker identity. The first study is a review paper overviewing emotion decoding and encoding research. The second study compares the relative importance of the emotional tone in the voice and the emotional content of the message. A mismatch between these was shown to impact upon decoding speed. The third study investigates the factor dialect in speaker recognition and shows, using a bidialectal speaker as the target voice to control all other variables, that the dominance of dialect cannot be overcome. The fourth paper investigates if imitated stage dialects are as perceptually dominant as natural dialects. It was found that a professional actor could disguise his voice successfully by imitating a dialect, yet that a listener's proficiency in a language or accent can reduce susceptibility to a dialect imitation. Papers five to seven focus on automatic techniques for speaker separation. Paper five shows that a method developed for Australian English diphthongs produced comparable results with a Swedish glide + vowel transition. The sixth and seventh papers investigate a speaker separation technique developed for American English. It was found that the technique could be used to separate Swedish speakers and that it is robust against professional imitations. Paper eight investigates how age and hearing impact upon earwitness reliability. This study shows that a senior citizen with corrected hearing can be as reliable an earwitness as a younger adult with no hearing problem, but suggests that a witness' general cognitive skill deterioration needs to be considered when assessing a senior citizen's earwitness evidence. On the basis of the studies a model of speaker recognition is presented, based on the face recognition model by V. Bruce and Young (1986; British Journal of Psychology, 77, pp. 305 - 327) and the voice recognition model by Belin, Fecteau and Bédard (2004; TRENDS in Cognitive Science, 8, pp. 129 - 134). The merged and modified model handles both familiar and unfamiliar voices. The findings presented in this Thesis, in particular the findings of the individual papers in Part II, have implications for criminal cases in which speaker recognition forms a part. The findings feed directly into the growing body of forensic phonetic and forensic linguistic research.
This chapter focuses on the detection of emotion in speech and the impact that using technology to automate emotion detection would have within the legal system. The current states of the art for studies of perception and acoustics are described, and a number of implications for legal contexts are provided. We discuss, inter alia, assessment of emotion in others, witness credibility, forensic investigation, and training of law enforcement officers.
This paper examines the interaction between the emotion indicated by the content of an utternance and the emotion indicated by the acoustic of an utterance, and considers whether a speaker can hide their emotional state by acting an emotion even though being semantically honest. Three female and two male speakers of Swedish were recorded saying the sentences “Jag har vunnit en miljon pa° lotto” (I have won a million on the lottery), “Det finns böcker i bokhyllan” (There are books on the bookshelf) and “Min mamma har just dött” (my mother just died) as if they were happy, neutral (indifferent), angry or sad. Thirty-nine experimental participants (19 female and 20 male) heard 60 randomly selected stimuli randomly coupled with the question “Do you consider this speaker to be emotionally X?”, where X could be angry, happy, neutral or sad. They were asked to respond yes or no; the listeners’ responses and reaction times were collected. The results show that semantic cues to emotion play little role in the decoding process. Only when there are few specific acoustic cues to an emotion do semantic cues come into play. However, longer reaction times for the stimuli containing mismatched acoustic and semantic cues indicate that the semantic cues to emotion are processed even if they impact little on the perceived emotion.
The ability to identify the dialect spoken by an individual by voice alone has beenwidely investigated for many languages. The studies suggest a large degree of individualvariation in dialect recognition ability and that factors such as perceptualdistance and competence in the language interact with this variation. Trained listenershave also been shown to be unstable in their judgements of dialect. In the studypresented here naïve listeners attending a trade fair in Umeå were asked to selectbetween eight given dialects when identifying two dialects. The test environment wasnoisey. The level of the background noise changed with the flow of people and activitiesassociated with the trade fair. The noisy environment did not appear to affectthe listeners responses.
An account of the widely accepted but vague idea that all humans have equal value is sketched. The essay evolves from a concept of inherent value as distinct from final, instrumental, and preconditional value. There is no supervenience base to inherent human value, it is argued. Still, it can be characterized, namely in terms of being worth loving. An account can also be given of its constitution, which would be by the agape-like love of an ideal observer faced with human beings in their wholeness. And its function as a master value of ethics can be analyzed; this is shown to depend on an essential bond with the value of human life
I critique Peter Singer's view that equality across species is a natural extension of equality. Singer presents one minor and two major arguments. The first major argument is that equality across species is implied by the traditional principle of equality. The second is that it follows from a conception that is behind the principle of equality, namely the moral ”point of view of the universe”. The minor argument is a theory of the altruistic character and expanding circles of ethics.
Starting from a dream where the author found himself in the middle of the Holocaust, this paper works out a distinction between two regions of morality: Morality of the Light and Morality of the Dark. The two regions complement each other, like in the Taoist symbol of yin and yang. Morality of the Light is that of moral agents, whereas Morality of the Dark is morality of non-moral agents, being non-rational, non-moral or non-agents. People victimized by the Nazi death-camps exemplify the latter region. Ethicists have hitherto largely ignored this region. Its methodology has similarities with that of art and religion rather than with scientific methodology.
A challenging theme for reflection after the Holocaust is victimhood. There is a presumed but rather unexplored connection between victimhood and intrinsic evil. This essay wants to contribute to the clarification of the concept of being a victim, with special regard to intrinsic evil. Current notions turn out to be impregnated with religious, legalistic and moralistic connotations that express non-victim perspectives. The essay proposes that the concept of being a victim should be interpreted from a victim perspective, which would yield a concept that makes victimhood a possibly universal intrinsic evil. Such a concept, it is suggested, should focus on severe injury in combination with drastically reduced agency in respect to the injury in question.
This essay disputes the attempt to reduce value to normative reason for fitting reactions, the so-called buck-passing account of value, mainly founded on Thomas Scanlon’s work. Using Scanlon’s contractual ethics as example it argues that the assumption of non-reducible value is defensible when morally structuring superior values are considered, namely superordinate values and what is called a ‘master value’. Since the point of the metaphor of buck-passing is to indicate the responsible dealer in a game, the buck would seem rightly to belong to the latter in the “game” of ethics.
Even though respect for integrity is hailed in several authoritative legal and ethical documents, and is typically presented as a complement to respect for autonomy, it is largely neglected in many leading works in ethics. Is such neglect warranted, or does it express a prejudice? This article argues that the latter is the case, and that this is due to misplaced conceptual concerns. It offers some proposals as regards the conceptualization of integrity in social ethics in general and in biomedical ethics in particular. Five main directions of interpretation of ‘integrity’ are discerned and shown to be relevant for different areas of biomedical ethics. The defense of respect for integrity is served by a softening of principlism and by greater attention to context among the initial critics of this principle.
The so called ‘buck-passing account of value’ claims to offer an account to the effect that the value, or goodness, of things is amenable to the existence of some natural properties giving us reason for certain pro-reactions. This essay argues that we hardly can accept that. The offer is obscure already when we consider the relation assumed in BPA to obtain between value and reason-giving. Once the various forms of this relation are distinguished BPA appears implausible or not more than a research program. As to the much debated ‘wrong kind of reason argument’ that Wlodek Rabinowicz and Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen have developed, it is shown to be a trap for buck-passers.