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Recent studies of the acoustic correlates of various prosodic elements in American English, such as prominence (in the form of phrase-level pitch accents and word-level lexical stress) and boundaries (in the form of boundary-marking tones), have begun to clarify the nature of the acoustic cues to different types and levels of these prosodic markers. This study focuses on the importance of contr...

While the English fricatives /s/ and /S/ can be welldifferentiated by the centroid frequency of the frication noise alone, the Japanese fricatives /s/ and /C/ cannot be. Measures of perceived spectral peak frequency and shape developed for stop bursts were adapted to describe sibilant fricative contrasts in Englishand Japanese-speaking adults and children. These measures captured both the cross...

This paper proposes a guideline for writing MCQ items for our domain which promotes the use of Multiple Alternative Choice (MAC) items. This guideline is derived from one of the guidelines from the Taxonomy of item-writing guidelines reviewed by Haladyna et al, 2002. The new guideline is tested by delivering two sets of MCQ test items to a representative sample of candidates from the domain. On...

The study compared the aberrance detection powers of the BW person-fit indices with other group-based indices (SCI, MCI, NCI, and Wc&Bs) and item response theory based (IRT-based) indices (OUTFITz, INFITz, ECI2z, ECI4z, and lz). Four kinds of comparative conditions, including content category (CC), types of aberrance (AT), severity of aberrance (AS), and the ratios of aberrant persons (AP), wer...

Why do languages share structural properties? The functionalist tradition has argued that languages have evolved to suit the needs of their users. By what means functional pressures may come to shape grammar over time, however, remains unknown. Functional pressures could affect adults’ production; or they could operate during language learning. To date, these possibilities have remained largely...

English provides several distinct mechanisms by which verbs may be nominalized, as illustrated in (1-2). The form electing in (1a) is sometimes termed the “verbal” gerund, while the perfectly homophonous form in (1b) is termed the “nominal” gerund. Nominal gerunds in English are distinguished from verbal gerunds syntactically, by their inability to assign objective case to an object (hence the ...

Ke Deng, Akira Tsuda, Satoshi Horiuchi, Terumi Matsuda Institute of Comparative Studies of International Cultures and Socities, Kurume University, Kurume, Japan Department of Psychology, Kurume University, Kurume, Japan Health Sciences University of Hokkaido, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Tokyo, Japan Graduate School of Psychology, Kurume University, Kurume, Japan Email: sztouka@y...

Epistemologists have argued that there are three basic sources of belief: perception, testimony and inference. These three belief sources correspond directly to the way in which many languages mark statements morphologically for sources of evidence for the statements (evidentiality). In this paper, we connect generalizations from the fields of epistemology and evidentiality. We also introduce a...