• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.43-51
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• 2013

English native listeners have a tendency to treat strong syllables in a speech stream as the potential initial syllables of new words, since the majority of lexical words in English have a word-initial stress. The current study investigates whether Korean (L1) - English (L2) late bilinguals perceive strong syllables in English continuous speech as word onsets, as English native listeners do. In Experiment 1, word-spotting was slower when the word-initial syllable was strong, indicating that Korean listeners do not perceive strong syllables as word onsets. Experiment 2 was conducted in order to avoid any possibilities that the results of Experiment 1 may be due to the strong-initial targets themselves used in Experiment 1 being slower to recognize than the weak-initial targets. We employed the gating paradigm in Experiment 2, and measured the Isolation Point (IP, the point at which participants correctly identify a word without subsequently changing their minds) and the Recognition Point (RP, the point at which participants correctly identify the target with 85% or greater confidence) for the targets excised from the non-words in the two conditions of Experiment 1. Both the mean IPs and the mean RPs were significantly earlier for the strong-initial targets, which means that the results of Experiment 1 reflect the difficulty of segmentation when the initial syllable of words was strong. These results are consistent with Kim & Nam (2011), indicating that strong syllables are not perceived as word onsets for Korean listeners and interfere with lexical segmentation in English running speech.

• Sleep Medicine and Psychophysiology
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.87-98
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• 1994

Objectives: To examine a defect in inhibitory gating of auditory evoked response in schizophrenics, to compare P3 latency and amplitude in negative and positive schizophrenics, and to assess the association of P3 with family history of the psychiatric disorders, electroconvulsive therapy, and clinical features. Methods: 54 schizophrenics(male 31, female 23) and 75 controls(male 33, female 42) were tested with event-related potential paradigm designed to elicit P3 response and Frankfurter Beschwerde Fragebogen. Results: In schizophrenics, the latency of P3 was significantly more delayed and the amplitude of P3 was significantly more reduced than in the controls. Significant differences in P3 latency and amplitude between negative and positive schizophrenics were not found. And significant difference in the P3 latency and amplitude between schizophrenics with family histories of psychiatric disorder and those without family histories of psychiatric disorder was not found also. The P3 latency and amplitude was not significantly related with electroconvulsive therapy and other clinical features such as age, duration of illness, onset of inllness, number of admission, and doses of antipsychotics etc. Conclusion: These results suggested that schizophrenics had a dysfunction in the process of selective attention and that P3 was not significantly related with family history of the psychiatric disorders, positive and negative symptoms, electro1convulsive therapy, and clinical features in schizophrenics.

• Korean Journal of Biological Psychiatry
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.153-160
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• 1999

Animal models can provide a useful tool for the study of some aspects of psychiatric disorders and their treatment. The four criteria for the evaluation of animal models of psychiatric disorders are as following : 1) similarity of inducing conditions 2) similarity of behavioral state 3) common underlying neurobiological mechanisms 4) reversal by clinically effective treatment techniques. Several animal models have been proposed for schizophrenia : phenylethylamine model, L-dopa model, hallucinogen model, cocaine model, amphetamine model, phencyclidine model, noradrenergic reward system lesion model, reticular stimulation model, social isolation model, conditioned avoidance reaction, catalepsy test, paw test, self-stimulation paradigms, latent inhibition paradigms, blocking paradigms, prepulse inhibition of the startle reflex, rodent interaction, social behavior in monkeys, hippocampal damage, high ambient pressure, and models using selective breeding. Among them, animals with bilateral lesion of the hippocampus may provide an adequate animal model for several symptoms of schizophrenia, and ketamine model can reproduce negative symptoms and cognitive deficits as well as positive symptoms of schizophrenia. In conclusion, no model of schizophrenia is entirely representative of the disease, and findings gleaned from model systems must be cautiously interpreted. Furthermore, the process of developing and validating animal models must work in concert with the process to identify reliable measures of human phenomenology.