Articulatory and Acoustic Correlates of Contrastive Focus in Congenitally Blind Adults and Sighted Adults
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: The role of vision in speech representation was investigated in congenitally blind speakers and sighted speakers by studying the correlates of contrastive focus, a prosodic condition in which phonemic contrasts are enhanced. It has been reported that the lips (visible articulators) are less involved in implementing the rounding feature for blind speakers. If the weight of visible gestures in speech representation is reduced in blind speakers, they should show different strategies to mark focus-induced prominence. METHOD: Nine congenitally blind French speakers and 9 sighted French speakers were recorded while uttering sentences in neutral and contrastive focus conditions. Internal lip area, upper lip protrusion, and acoustic values (formants, fundamental frequency, duration, and intensity) were measured. RESULTS: In the acoustic domain, both groups signaled focus by using comparable values of fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration. Formant values in sighted speakers were more affected by the prosodic condition. In the articulatory domain, sighted speakers significantly altered lip geometry in the contrastive focus condition compared with the neutral condition, whereas blind speakers did not. CONCLUSION: These results suggest that implementation of prosodic focus is affected by congenital visual deprivation. The authors discuss how these findings can be interpreted in the framework of the perception-for-action-control theory.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".