Showing papers on "Phrase published in 1974"

Educational Technology and the Learning Process

Abstract: T he phrase "educational technology" carries differe t meanings to different people. Both of its major meanings were recognized by the Commission on Instructional Technology in its report entitled "To Improve Learning" (1970). I have always favored the second meaning identified in that report, namely, a body of technical knowledge about the systematic design and conduct of education, based upon scientific research (Gagne', 1968). Obviously, though, any such systematic approach to education, and more specifically to instruction, must include a consideration of the functions to be performed by media-that is, by what are called "the things of learning" (Armsey and Dahl, 1973).

Development of Phrase and Clause Boundary Reading in Children.

Abstract: EXPLORED THE ABILITY to decode phrases and clauses, using children at 3 developmental levels to determine the effects of syntactic structure on the eye-voice span. It was shown that even though younger readers have shorter spans, they also attempt to complete syntactic units. Study of the effect of syntactic structure on the reading of children of various age groups revealed critical information about the development of higher-order unit processing. The results obtained indicated that the type of syntactic unit (noun or verb phrase) influenced the eye-voice spans of younger readers. Supportive evidence is presented that the unit of decoding may be the clause rather than the phrase.

Indexing and Automatic Significance Analysis.

Abstract: Intellectual indexing proceeds on three levels: The selection of phrases occurring in the document text (sequential indexing), the posting of specific phrases from the text to generic descriptors (generic indexing), and the choice of descriptors which are implicit to the document text (symbolic indexing). Automation has been attempted on all three levels: by concordance and autoposting. Here an algorithm is proposed to solve the problem of sequential indexing which does not use any grammatical or semantic analysis, but follows the principle of emulating human judgement by evaluation of machine-recognizable attributes of structured word assemblies (text). The algorithm is based on producing “text cuts” of a few words in length and ordering them alphabetically. Afterwards, every “text cut” which appears with a certain limit frequency or above is considered significant (by human standards). The algorithm has been applied to a text body of about 220,000 words from the NASA bibliographic file and an “established” dictionary of significant terms has been created by this algorithm. As any phrase not occurring in the established dictionary is not suppressed, but posted to a floating dictionary, from which it may, if usage increases above the limit frequency, be transferred to the established dictionary, the algorithm presents a tool for the creation and maintenance of a “self-adaptive” data base of text information.

Selectivity for distortions and words in speech perception.

Abstract: An attempt was made to determine the role of two types of perceptual selectivity in speech perception: (1) selection of a set of acoustical features characterizing one word in a small vocabulary, specially listened for; (2) selection of various acoustical distortions through which the speech stimuli as a whole were passed. Two experiments directed at the first possibility failed to demonstrate tuning, although the selective listening instructions had been obeyed, as indicated by response biases on words listened for. Three subsequent experiments employed various distortions of speech and a redundant carrier phrase in the same distortion or undistorted. All three succeeded in showing higher intelligibility on words where the carrier phrase was also distorted. However, these effects corresponded to differences of only 5–10 per cent correct. They cannot explain active voluntary attention to an expected message, nor the exclusion of one of two competing messages. Rather they reflect autonomous processes of normalization and a perceptual filling out of deficient stimuli. The results are interpreted as favouring passive theories of speech perception at the word level, and the basic types of selective process involved in each type of finding are discussed.

Some Cryptograms in the Aramaic Incantation Bowls

Abstract: for the second-to-last (g), and so through the entire twenty-two letters.5 For example, the phrase sq mw in text 8:6 becomes hd mw, "one is his name," 6 if the athbash formula is utilized to decipher an otherwise meaningless word. And it is clear that in at least three different texts (9:2;7 54:4;8 and 55:59) the word ms must be understood as athbash spelling of the divine name yh.lo Another scribal device used for secret writing is apparent in text 42,11 line 6 of which

Temporal interactions within a phrase and sentence context.

Abstract: Recent timing control research has shown that when a smaller linguistic segment within a repeated utterance is produced either shorter or longer than its average duration, the resulting deviation constitutes a timing error that is temporally compensated by the remaining segments in the utterance. In the present study, timing errors and the extent to which they are compensated define different levels of temporal interaction. Temporal interactions were studied within a phrase spoken in isolation and within the same phrase spoken in a sentence context. Preliminary data from four adult male speakers of American English suggest that there is no basic or single unit of speech timing and that a correct model of timing is likely to have both “chaining” and “preplanning” features.

The psychological concept of "losing move" in a game of perfect information.

Abstract: From a game-theoretic standpoint, in any two-person game of perfect information, each position is won, lost, or drawn, and a move is to be considered an error only when it transfers the game from a more favorable to a less favorable state. A psychological concept of error is quite different, in that it must take into account the fallibility of the players as information processing systems. This paper introduces a psychological concept of error in such games based on the distinction between “obvious” and “problematic” moves, and proposes a formalism for this concept that appears to capture, at least to a first approximation, the notion of “losing move” as that phrase is actually used by players in games like chess.

Durational Relations between Connected Text, List Sentences, and Carrier Sentences

Abstract: For experimental convenience, it is customary in speech studies to use lists of independent short sentences, or of words substituted into a repeated carrier phrase. Little is known, however, about the degree to which such .material is or is not representative of continuous text. This paper reports a comparison of temporal effects in three forms of material. Two speakers read first a list of 86 test sentences, disordered and mixed with irrelevant sentences; then a list of 252 words taken from the test sentences and embedded in the carrier phrase “say — instead”; and finally, the test sentences in their original form, a coherent narrative. Measurements of the data show that the durations of whole sentences and of individual content words average 7% longer in listed sentences than in connected text. Words in the carrier sentence range from the same duration to twice as long as those in continuous text, with an average increase of 45% or 140 msec. The report presents details of these differences at the phoneme and word levels, and attempts to interpret them in terms of pause, intonation, and stress changes and at higher levels of structure.

On the Semantics of Certain English Phrasal Verbs and Their Rendering into Spanish.

Abstract: In an interesting essay in praise of the wealth of idioms in the English language, Logan Pearsall Smith devoted his attention to the question of phrasal verbs.1 One of the English language's most striking idiosyncrasies, Smith wrote, is its use of prepositions. He gathered a large number of idioms and arranged them thematically (i.e., nautical idioms, agricultural ones, etc.). He concluded that phrasal verbs, those which combine with a preposition to yield a phrase, are prime examples of what Jespersen had approvingly called the analytic genius of English, a characteristic which produced a greater "sup pleness of expression" than that found in synthetic or agglutinative languages. Smith thought that the majority of phrasal verbs "render their meanings into terms of bodily sensation" (p. 250). In this study I would like to discuss a number of phrasal verbs from the standpoint of their semantics. I will give some idea of how diverse the translations into Spanish may be when a phrasal verb family has many members. I would like particularly to emphasize some phrasal verbs in English whose meaning is idiomatic, i.e., cannot be rendered by a literal translation into Spanish. A phrasal verb such as 'break down' (as in "The treasurer broke down the figures for us into an item-by-item list"), although figurative in nature, poses no real difficulties for analysis. Although the treasurer did not actually break anything, the correct meaning of the phrasal verb is easily arrived at from the literal meaning of the verb together with the spatial sense of the preposition. A phrasal verb such as 'run down,' when it means 'to pursue and capture,' on the other hand, departs rather more from this pattern, in that the force of the preposition is not spatial but terminative. Based on the idiomatic meaning of this phrasal, the English noun 'run-down' (a summary, resum?), has a meaning with hardly any vestige of the literal. Before examining some phrasal verbs in English, another matter needs comment: is the "preposition" involved truly a preposition or is it an adverb? Discussing this question, Bergan Evans and Cornelia Evans were at some pains to distinguish between the two.2 A phrasal verb such as 'come through,' ought to be analyzed as a verb plus a preposition when "the word is followed by an object," as in "it came through the window." However, when the phrasal stands alone ("When the situation is difficult, he always comes through"), or whenever the object cannot be interposed between the verb and the preposi tion / adverb (as in *"It came the window through"), the word is to be considered an adverb. In other examples, the authors' distinctions are, it seems

Prosodic Aids to Speech Recognition: 5. A Summary of Results to Date

Abstract: : Prosodic features are used to detect boundaries between phrases, then stressed syllables are located within each phrase, and a partial distinctive features analysis is done within stressed syllables. Experiments showed that listeners' perceptions of stressed syllables were quite consistent, and corresponded closely to the locations of stressed syllables obtained from prosodic features. Analysis of phonetic recognition results by several research groups showed that automatic phone categorization is much more accurate in stressed syllables. Studies sho Studies showed that stressed vowels in several recorded texts tended to be roughly equally spaced in time, but the number of intervening unstressed syllables had a much more prominent effect on interstress interval than might have been expected from published hypotheses. Prosodic features appear to be potentially useful for providing cues to sentence type, syntactic bracketing, occurrences of coordination and subordination, and specific semantic structures. Preliminary studies of some sentences that gave problems to speech understanding systems showed that prosodies do differ in yes/ no questions versus commands, and that ambiguous syntactic structures can be disambiguated from prosodic patterns. A set of speech texts have been designed for careful analysis of the effects on prosodic patterns due to various contrasts in syntactic structure, semantics, stress patterns, and phonetic sequences.

Under Thirty in the Third World

Abstract: During the 1960s in the United States the phrase "Over 30" came to be used as a symbol of the Youth Movement. It indicated the fact that a major dividing line was perceived to exist between older people who were thought to favor the established status quo and the younger ones who were severely and actively critical of the world in which they were growing up. The phrase was one among many factors which drew attention to people in their 20's. The attention was multifaceted and was concerned with the social, psychological, historical, economic, philosophical as well as political aspects of the events which took place in these years. For those interested in the psychological aspects, it seemed that many young people were profoundly discontented and disillusioned, that among them the use of potentially harmful drugs was greatly increasing, that many flocked to encounter groups and mystic cults in search of relief from self-doubt and as an outlet for self-expression, and further that they contributed a vast portion to the rising crime index. Inevitably questions were raised about mental health. Are the young actually more troubled and more troubling than the older? Are the rates of emotional problems actually increasing among people in their 2Ws? Has psychiatry neglected the post-adolescent phase and failed to see that rather regularly it is a

Some Results on Speaker Verification Using Amplitude Spectra

Abstract: Verification is based upon the similarity of six spectral/time matrices located within a test phrase with corresponding matrices defined during training. Each matrix is 0.1 sec long and is precisely located by scanning the test phrase for a best match with the reference matrix. Evaluation was performed over a data set including 50 “known” speakers and 70 “casual impostors.” Twenty percent female speakers were used. Five different phrases (including “We were away a year ago”) were collected in each session. Known speakers gave 100 sessions; impostors, 20. Data collection spanned 3.5 months. The first 50 sessions of each known speaker's data were used for training, the last 50 for test; 0.6% of the phrases yielded unusable data. When this happened, a substitute phrase from that session was used (two substitutions allowed, maximum). All impostor acceptance rates were determined for 2% true speaker rejection. A single fixed threshold was used for all speakers. Impostor acceptance rates were 2.5% for one phras...

Prosodic Contours for Auxiliary Phrases

Abstract: The prosodic contours of the auxiliary phrase of sentences was systematically varied to examine the hypothesis that when the segmental articulation in grammatical units is not made clearly, the information load of these units must be conveyed by syntactic and semantic structure which is partially manifested in the prosodic contour. The syntax of auxiliary phrases is tightly constrained in English, and this syntactic structure is mapped onto the prosodic contour in a preditable way. The prosodic effect of negatives (“He should not have gone”), which appear to be inherently contrastive, is also predictable.