Bidirectional clear speech perception benefit for native and high-proficiency non-native talkers and listeners: intelligibility and accentedness

This study investigated how native language background interacts with speaking style adaptations in determining levels of speech intelligibility. The aim was to explore whether native and high proficiency non-native listeners benefit similarly from native and non-native clear speech adjustments. The sentence-in-noise perception results revealed that fluent non-native listeners gained a large clear speech benefit from native clear speech modifications. Furthermore, proficient non-native talkers in this study implemented conversational-to-clear speaking style modifications in their second language (L2) that resulted in significant intelligibility gain for both native and non-native listeners. The results of the accentedness ratings obtained for native and non-native conversational and clear speech sentences showed that while intelligibility was improved, the presence of foreign accent remained constant in both speaking styles. This suggests that objective intelligibility and subjective accentedness are two independent dimensions of non-native speech. Overall, these results provide strong evidence that greater experience in L2 processing leads to improved intelligibility in both production and perception domains. These results also demonstrated that speaking style adaptations along with less signal distortion can contribute significantly towards successful native and non-native interactions.     

Case Influence Analysis in Bayesian Inference

Abstract

We demonstrate how case influence analysis, commonly used in regression, can be applied to Bayesian hierarchical models. Draws from the joint posterior distribution of parameters are importance weighted to reflect the effect of deleting each observation in turn; the ensuing changes in the posterior distribution of each parameter are displayed graphically. The procedure is particularly useful when drawing a sample from the posterior distribution requires extensive calculations (as with a Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampler). The structure of hierarchical models, and other models with local dependence, makes the importance weights inexpensive to calculate with little additional programming. Some new alternative weighting schemes are described that extend the range of problems in which reweighting can be used to assess influence. Applications to a growth curve model and a complex hierarchical model for opinion data are described. Our focus on case influence on parameters is complementary to other work that measures influence by distances between posterior or predictive distributions.     

Approximate Hermitian–Einstein connections on principal bundles over a compact Riemann surface

Let $X$ be a compact connected Riemann surface and $G$ a connected reductive complex affine algebraic group. Given a holomorphic principal $G$ -bundle $E_G$ over $X$ , we construct a $C^\infty $ Hermitian structure on $E_G$ together with a $1$ -parameter family of $C^\infty $ automorphisms $\{F_t\}_{t\in \mathbb R }$ of the principal $G$ -bundle $E_G$ with the following property: Let $\nabla ^t$ be the connection on $E_G$ corresponding to the Hermitian structure and the new holomorphic structure on $E_G$ constructed using $F_t$ from the original holomorphic structure. As $t\rightarrow -\infty $ , the connection $\nabla ^t$ converges in $C^\infty $ Fréchet topology to the connection on $E_G$ given by the Hermitian–Einstein connection on the polystable principal bundle associated to $E_G$ . In particular, as $t\rightarrow -\infty $ , the curvature of $\nabla ^t$ converges in $C^\infty $ Fréchet topology to the curvature of the connection on $E_G$ given by the Hermitian–Einstein connection on the polystable principal bundle associated to $E_G$ . The family $\{F_t\}_{t\in \mathbb R }$ is constructed by generalizing the method of [6]. Given a holomorphic vector bundle $E$ on $X$ , in [6] a $1$ -parameter family of $C^\infty $ automorphisms of $E$ is constructed such that as $t\rightarrow -\infty $ , the curvature converges, in $C^0$ topology, to the curvature of the Hermitian–Einstein connection of the associated graded bundle.     

Morse theory, Higgs fields, and Yang–Mills–Higgs functionals

In this mostly expository paper we describe applications of Morse theory to moduli spaces of Higgs bundles. The moduli spaces are finite-dimensional analytic varieties but they arise as quotients of infinite-dimensional spaces. There are natural functions for Morse theory on both the infinite-dimensional spaces and the finite-dimensional quotients. The first comes from the Yang?CMills?CHiggs energy, while the second is provided by the Hitchin function. After describing what Higgs bundles are, we explore these functions and how they may be used to extract topological information about the moduli spaces.     

Elastic scattering of20Ne on24Mg

High spin states in⁸⁵Rb and⁸⁵Sr were populated in the reactions⁷⁶Ge(¹²C,p2n) and⁷⁶Ge(¹²C,3n), respectively. The lifetimes of twelve states were measured via the recoil distance Doppler shift technique. The positive parity bands in both nuclei associated with theg _9/2 orbit exhibit decrasingE2 strengths for increasing spin value marking the onset of multiparticle excitation.     

Homotopy groups of moduli spaces of representations

We calculate certain homotopy groups of the moduli spaces for representations of a compact oriented surface in the Lie groups and . Our approach relies on the interpretation of these representations in terms of Higgs bundles and uses Bott-Morse theory on the corresponding moduli spaces.