No abstract

Discrimination and identification of emotions in human voice was studied in normal controls and in 4 groups of brain-damaged subjects, subdivided along the right/left and anterior/posterior dimensions. Results showed a failure of right-brain-damaged patients, the right posterior group being significantly worse than all the other groups. Qualitative differences emerged as well: both a conceptual and an acoustic deficit seem to contribute to right posterior patient performance.

Patterns of linguopalatal contact during the production of intervocalic /t/ in different vowel contexts were examined by means of electropalatography, in order to assess the degree of dependency between tongue tip/blade and tongue body, the relative strength of anticipatory and carryover effects and their temporal extent. Results show that the coupling between tip and body of the tongue is rather loose: constraints imposed on tongue body by consonant production are described qualitatively and quantitatively. Carryover effects are stronger and more systematic than anticipatory effects: both can extend across the consonant. Results also indicate that coarticulatory effects depend on the identity of the vowel held constant and, to a lesser extent, on stress position. Some hypotheses are presented concerning articulatory goals and strategies in /VtV/ productions.

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A speaker independent bimodal phonetic classification experiment regarding the Italian plosive consonants is described. The phonetic classification scheme is based on a feed forward recurrent back-propagation neural network working on audio and visual information. The speech signal is processed by an auditory model producing spectral-like parameters, while the visual signal is processed by a specialized hardware, called ELITE, computing lip and jaw kinematics parameters.