Word length and lexical activation: Longer is better.

Many models of spoken word recognition posit the existence of lexical and sublexical representations, with excitatory and inhibitory mechanisms used to affect the activation levels of such representations. Bottom-up evidence provides excitatory input, and inhibition from phonetically similar representations leads to lexical competition. In such a system, long words should produce stronger lexical activation than short words, for 2 reasons: Long words provide more bottom-up evidence than short words, and short words are subject to greater inhibition due to the existence of more similar words. Four experiments provide evidence for this view. In addition, reaction-time-based partitioning of the data shows that long words generate greater activation that is available both earlier and for a longer time than is the case for short words. As a result, lexical influences on phoneme identification are extremely robust for long words but are quite fragile and condition-dependent for short words. Models of word recognition must consider words of all lengths to capture the true dynamics of lexical activation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Tracking the mind during reading: The influence of past, present, and future words on fixation durations.

Reading requires the orchestration of visual, attentional, language-related, and oculomotor processing constraints. This study replicates previous effects of frequency, predictability, and length of fixated words on fixation durations in natural reading and demonstrates new effects of these variables related to 144 sentences. Such evidence for distributed processing of words across fixation durations challenges psycholinguistic immediacy-of-processing and eye-mind assumptions. Most of the time the mind processes several words in parallel at different perceptual and cognitive levels. Eye movements can help to unravel these processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Automatic conversion from lexical words to prosodic words for mandarin text-to-speech system

In real speech, not like lexical words (LWs), prosodic words (PWs) are basic rhythmic units. The naturalness of a Text-to-Speech (TTS) system is directly influenced by the segmentation of the PWs. Most of the PWs are the combination of several LWs. In this paper, three Lexical Combination Models are proposed to combine LWs into PWs, including a Directed Acyclic Graph Model, a Segmentation Model and a Markov Model (MM). To cope with the situation where some long LWs should be segmented into two or more PWs, a Lexical Split Model (LSM) is applied to the long LWs. Experimental results prove that relatively constant results with various training data can be obtained from a MM. The Transformation-Based Error Driven Learning (TBED) algorithm, for its high performance of individual property, is applied in combination with the MM to improve the precision of PW segmentation. Experiments show that among the three proposed models, the MM combined with TBED and LSM, leads to the best performance, in which a precision of 93.00% and a recall of 93.23% are achieved. The perception test indicates that by using PWs as the lowest prosodic units a speech sounds more natural and acceptable than by using LWs. This paper is supported by NSFC Project (60503071); 973 Natural Basic Research Program of China (2004CB318102); Postdoctor Science Foundation of P. R. China (20070420275).     

一个用户接口管理系统

本文介绍了一个用户接口管理系统NUUIMS的设计和实现.重点叙述了该系统基于规范化目标用户接口模型的设计思想,系统组成及描述方法.文章也讨论了使用NUUIMS设计而成的用户接口的特点.     

"Interactive use of lexical information in speech perception": Correction to Connine and Clifton.

Reports an error in "Interactive use of lexical information in speech perception" by Cynthia M. Connine and Charles Clifton (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1987[May], Vol 13[2], 291-299). In the aforementioned article, Figures 1 and 2 were inadvertently transposed. The figure on p. 294 is actually Figure 2, and the figure on p. 296 is actually Figure 1. The captions are correct as they stand. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 1987-23984-001.) Two experiments are reported that demonstrate contextual effects on identification of speech voicing continua. Experiment 1 demonstrated the infuence of lexical knowledge on identification of ambiguous tokens from word–nonword and nonword–word continua. Reaction times for word and nonword responses showed a word advantage only for ambiguous stimulus tokens (at the category boundary); no word advantage was found for clear stimuli (at the continua endpoints). Experiment 2 demonstrated an effect of a postperceptual variable, monetary payoff, on nonword–nonword continua. Identification responses were influenced by monetary payoff, but reaction times for bias-consistent and bias-inconsistent responses did not differ at the category boundary. An advantage for bias-consistent responses was evident at the continua endpoints. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Minimum PAPR Code for OFDM Systems

In this letter, a block code that minimizes the peak‐to‐average power ratio (PAPR) of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals is proposed. It is shown that peak envelope power is invariant to cyclic shift and codeword inversion. The systematic encoding rule for the proposed code is composed of searching for a seed codeword, shifting the register elements, and determining codeword inversion. This eliminates the look‐up table for one‐to‐one correspondence between the source and the coded data. Computer simulation confirms that OFDM systems with the proposed code always have the minimum PAPR.     

The mirror effect and mixture signal detection theory.

The mirror effect for word frequency refers to the finding that low-frequency words have higher hit rates and lower false alarm rates than high-frequency words. This result is typically interpreted in terms of conventional signal detection theory (SDT), in which case it indicates that the order of the underlying old item distributions mirrors the order of the new item distributions. However, when viewed in terms of a mixture version of SDT, the order of hits and false alarms does not necessarily imply the same order in the underlying distributions because of possible effects of mixing. A reversal in underlying distributions did not appear for fits of mixture SDT models to data from 4 experiments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The time course of spoken word learning and recognition: Studies with artificial lexicons.

The time course of spoken word recognition depends largely on the frequencies of a word and its competitors, or neighbors (similar-sounding words). However, variability in natural lexicons makes systematic analysis of frequency and neighbor similarity difficult. Artificial lexicons were used to achieve precise control over word frequency and phonological similarity. Eye tracking provided time course measures of lexical activation and competition (during spoken instructions to perform visually guided tasks) both during and after word learning, as a function of word frequency, neighbor type, and neighbor frequency. Apparent shifts from holistic to incremental competitor effects were observed in adults and neural network simulations, suggesting such shifts reflect general properties of learning rather than changes in the nature of lexical representations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

尺度目标识别中的若干技术问题

从工程应用的角度阐述了现代鱼雷常用的尺度目标识别原理，讨论了影响识别距离的若干因素和措施，提出了小尺度模拟靶通过亮点延时算法以弥补尺度不足及其试验技术，试验结果表明，该方法可以获得良好效果。     

利用Excel表格进行供暖系统计算

利用Excel表格进行供暖工程设计计算，可以减少工作量，提高工作效率。介绍了房间热负荷和供暖管道水力计算方法。