Target definition for shipwreck hunting.

The research described in the present article was implemented to define the locations of two World War II shipwrecks, the German raider Kormoran, and the Australian light cruiser HMAS Sydney. The paper describes the long and complex trail that led through inefficient oceanographic prediction to ambiguous historical prediction involving a single report and on to precise cognitive prediction based on nine reports from more than 70 survivors, a process that yielded a single target position or "mean" just 2.7 NM (nautical miles) from the wreck of Kormoran.

Fluency Profiling System: an automated system for analyzing the temporal properties of speech.

The temporal characteristics of speech can be captured by examining the distributions of the durations of measurable speech components, namely speech segment durations and pause durations. However, several barriers prevent the easy analysis of pause durations: The first problem is that natural speech is noisy, and although recording contrived speech minimizes this problem, it also discards diagnostic information about cognitive processes inherent in the longer pauses associated with natural speech. The second issue concerns setting the distribution threshold, and consists of the problem of appropriately classifying pause segments as either short pauses reflecting articulation or long pauses reflecting cognitive processing, while minimizing the overall classification error rate.

The effects of difficulty and gain versus loss on vocal physiology and acoustics.

To examine the basis of emotional changes to the voice, physiological and electroglottal measures were combined with acoustic speech analysis of 30 men performing a computer task in which they lost or gained points under two levels of difficulty. Predictions of the main effects of difficulty and reward on the voice were not borne out by the data. Instead, vocal changes depended largely on interactions between gain versus loss and difficulty.

Affective speech elicited with a computer game.

To determine the degree to which emotional changes in speech reflect factors other than arousal, such as valence, the authors used a computer game to induce natural emotional speech. Voice samples were elicited following game events that were either conducive or obstructive to the goal of winning and were accompanied by either pleasant or unpleasant sounds. Acoustic analysis of the speech recordings of 30 adolescents revealed that mean energy, fundamental-frequency level, utterance duration, and the proportion of an utterance that was voiced varied with goal conduciveness; spectral energy distribution depended on manipulations of pleasantness; and pitch dynamics depended on the interaction of pleasantness and goal conduciveness.

Implicit and Explicit Learning in Aged and Young Adults.

There is a wealth of evidence that learning ability declines with age. In almost all of the studies however, the performance measures employed are explicit, even though research has consistently indicated that aged adults have well preserved implicit learning ability. This suggests that under certain circumstances aged adults should be at no great learning disadvantage in comparison to young adults.

The effect of right cerebral hemisphere damage on collaborative planning in conversation: an analysis of intentional structure.

This study investigated the impact of right cerebral hemisphere damage on the capacity to take shared responsibility for the development of an intentional structure in conversation. Intentions are important determiners of both discourse structure and utterance meaning in context. Right-hemisphere damaged (RHD) individuals have been reported to have difficulty in the use of prosody as well as performing and appreciating the process of discourse tailoring which is dependent on recognizing speakers intentions.

The unbearable lightness of priming.

Repetition priming from text to isolated words has been difficult to observe. One explanation for this difficulty is that previous attempts to observe this type of priming have utilised conditions that normally reduce priming. Two experiments were conducted to evaluate this hypothesis.

A Web-accessible database of characteristics of the 1,945 basic Japanese kanji.

In 1981, the Japanese government published a list of the 1,945 basic Japanese kanji (Jooyoo Kanji-hyo), including specifications of pronunciation. This list was established as the standard for kanji usage in print. The database for 1,945 basic Japanese kanji provides 30 cells that explain in detail the various characteristics of kanji.

The relationship between prosody and breathing in spontaneous discourse.

This article is concerned with the role of prosody in discourse. Three experiments explored the relationship between inspiration, declination, and syntactic boundaries in normal and RHD participants. Fundamental frequency and intensity were measured at the beginning and end of breath units excised from conversational samples.