Haskins Laboratories

About: Haskins Laboratories is a facility organization based out in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Speech perception & Speech production. The organization has 637 authors who have published 1674 publications receiving 109899 citations.

A Cross-Language Study of Voicing in Initial Stops: Acoustical Measurements

Abstract: (1964). A Cross-Language Study of Voicing in Initial Stops: Acoustical Measurements. WORD: Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 384-422.

A theoretical model of phase transitions in human hand movements

Abstract: Earlier experimental studies by one of us (Kelso, 1981a, 1984) have shown that abrupt phase transitions occur in human hand movements under the influence of scalar changes in cycling frequency. Beyond a critical frequency the originally prepared out-of-phase, antisymmetric mode is replaced by a symmetrical, in-phase mode involving simultaneous activation of homologous muscle groups. Qualitavely, these phase transitions are analogous to gait shifts in animal locomotion as well as phenomena common to other physical and biological systems in which new “modes” or spatiotemporal patterns arise when the system is parametrically scaled beyond its equilibrium state (Haken, 1983). In this paper a theoretical model, using concepts central to the interdisciplinary field of synergetics and nonlinear oscillator theory, is developed, which reproduces (among other features) the dramatic change in coordinative pattern observed between the hands.

Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal About Thought.:

Abstract: The argument of this original and difficult book is that “gestures are an integral part of language as much as are words, phrases and sentences-gestures and language are one system” (p. 2) . Gestures are instantaneous, imagistic, analog, holistic expressions of the same thought that speech renders in hierarchical, linear, digital, analytic form. David McNeill credits Adam Kendon (1972, 1980) with discovering the link between, and essential unity of, speech sounds and gestural movements; his own work elaborates this insight at the higher linguistic levels of semantics and pragmatics. The topic of the book, then, is gestures that accompany speech, the left-hand end of what McNeill calls “ K e n h i ’ s coiitiiiiiiim: Gesticulation + Language-like gestures + Pantomimes 3 Emblems + Sign languages” (p. 37). The continuum ranges from the informal, spontaneous, idiosyncratic movements of the hands and arms that often accompany speech, to the socially-regulated, standardized, linguistic forms of a sign language, with its arbitrary (non-iconic) lexicon. Between these poles the obligatory presence of speech declines and the linguistic properties of gestures increase. “Language-like gestures” are grammatically integrated into an utterance, as when a speaker, asked about the weather on his vacation, replies: “Well, it was [oscillating hand gesture]”, where the “so-so” gesture replaces an adjectival predicate. “Pantomime” conveys its full meaning in silence or, at most, with inarticulate onomatopoeia; also, in pantomime, sequences of gestures can form a unit, as they can in a sign language, but cannot in gesticulation. “Emblems” conform to standards of wellformedness, a language-like property that gesticulation and pantomime lack: in England, the palm-front V-sign is Churchill’s “Victory!”, the palm-back V-sign is a sexual insult. (For an amusing cross-class confusion in emblem dialects, see Collett, Marsh, and O’Shaughnessy, 1979, p. 229, where Margaret Thatcher appears in an Associated Press Photo, making the palm-back V-sign at a moment of electoral triumph.) The contrast between the two ends of Kendon’s continuum, between spontaneous gesture and conventional sign, epitomizes McNeill’s notion of the process by which an utterance evolves in a speaker’s mind. Spontaneous gesture reveals the primitive stage of an utterance, global, unsegmented, non-hierarchical, from which its conventional representation in speech unfolds: hierarchical, segmented, linear. The inner symbols of the primitive stage are private, idiosyncratic, closed to social influence; the end stage is public, grammatical, socially regulated. McNeill supposes that the primitive

Articulatory phonology: an overview.

Abstract: An overview of the basic ideas of articulatory phonology is presented, along with selected examples of phonological patterning for which the approach seems to provide a particularly insightful account. In articulatory phonology, the basic units of phonological contrast are gestures, which are also abstract characterizations of articulatory events, each with an intrinsic time or duration. Utterances are modeled as organized patterns (constellations) of gestures, in which gestural units may overlap in time. The phonological structures defined in this way provide a set of articulatorily based natural classes. Moreover, the patterns of overlapping organization can be used to specify important aspects of the phonological structure of particular languages, and to account, in a coherent and general way, for a variety of different types of phonological variation. Such variation includes allophonic variation and fluent speech alternations, as well as ‘coarticulation’ and speech errors. Finally, it is suggested that the gestural approach clarifies our understanding of phonological development, by positing that prelinguistic units of action are harnessed into (gestural) phonological structures through differentiation and coordination.