On the perception of similarity among talkers.

A listener who recognizes a talker notices characteristic attributes of the talker's speech despite the novelty of each utterance. Accounts of talker perception have often presumed that consistent aspects of an individual's speech, termed indexical properties, are ascribable to a talker's unique anatomy or consistent vocal posture distinct from acoustic correlates of phonetic contrasts. Accordingly, the perception of a talker is acknowledged to occur independently of the perception of a linguistic message.

Conjunctival melanoma arising from diffuse primary acquired melanosis in a young black woman.

Purpose: To report a case of conjunctival melanoma arising from diffuse primary acquired melanosis (PAM) with atypia in a young black woman in the context of previously published cases of this lesion in blacks.

Methods: Retrospective case report with literature review. The number and percentage of conjunctival melanomas occurring in black patients were determined from case series in which race was specified, published from 1950 to the present.

Analysis and analogy in the perception of vowels.

In two experiments, we investigated the creation of conceptual analogies to a contrast between vowels. An ordering procedure was used to determine the reliability of simple sensory and abstract analogies to vowel contrasts composed by naive volunteers. The results indicate that test subjects compose stable and consistent analogies to a meaningless segmental linguistic contrast, some invoking simple and complex relational properties.