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Kim Kirsner

Publications and source records attributed to Kim Kirsner.

6 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2005

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. The results suggest that a single arousal dimension does not adequately characterize a number of emotion-related vocal changes, lending weight to multidimensional theories of emotional response patterning.

Acoustics↗
PubMed2002

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. The results revealed evidence of declination of intensity in all samples measured. However, resetting of fundamental frequency was observed only in the samples of normal participants and then only when a breath coincided with the beginning of a sentence. The results suggest that resetting and declination play separate roles in discourse parsing.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

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. Experiment 1 involved participants being presented with words in isolation and in text passages. The words were then presented again in a lexical decision test. Results indicated that priming occurred as a result of exposure to both isolated words and words in text, although priming was greater in the word-word condition. Experiment 2 investigated whether priming occurred in a lexical decision test on words that had been read prior to the test in Milan Kundera's novel "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." There was some evidence that participants who had read the book recently were faster at lexical decision to words from the book than participants who had not read the book. The two experiments therefore indicate that priming can occur from text to isolated words, although it is smaller in magnitude to that observed from word to word. Reasons for this difference, as suggested by Kirsner and Speelman (J. Exp. Psychol.: Learn. Mem. Cogn. 22 (1996) 563) model of repetition priming, are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

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. Means, standard deviations, distributions, and information related to previous research concerning these kanji are provided in this paper. The database is saved as a Microsoft Excel 2000 file for Windows. This kanji database is accessible on the Web site of the Oxford Text Archive, Oxford University (http://ota.ahds.ac.uk). Using this database, researchers and educators will be able to conduct planned experiments and organize classroom instruction on the basis of the known characteristics of selected kanji.

Computer Graphics↗
PubMedDate not supplied

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. Audio taped samples of naturalistic conversations between RHD individuals and normal speakers were analysed. Text-level discourse processing analyses involved measures of global discourse structure and self-monitoring accuracy. Prosodic analyses included fundamental frequency (F0) resetting, pause durations and inter-turn intervals. The results revealed that speakers with right cerebral hemisphere damage do not, first, use prosody to alert listeners to changes in discourse structure, and, second, assume equal responsibility for the development and maintenance discourse structure.

Adult↗