LINGUIST List 15.2450

Fri Sep 3 2004

FYI: ELRA News; Update on Fitch & Hauser

Editor for this issue: Ann Sawyer <sawyerlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Magali Jeanmaire, ELRA News
2. Mark Liberman, Update on Fitch & Hauser

********************************************************** 
ELRA - Language Resources Catalogue - Update
********************************************************* 

We are happy to announce that new speech databases are 
available in our catalogue.

You will find below their short descriptions. Please visit our
on-line catalogue to get more detailed information: www.elda.fr and
www.elra.info. 

*** S0164 BAS GEO1 ***

The BAS GEO1 database contains the recordings of location names in
Germany, Austria and Switzerland, together with their pronunciation
coded in SAMPA. Future updates will be distributed to all users
automatically.

*** S0165 MICROAES ***

MICROAES is a Spanish microphone database, which comprises the
recordings from 300 different speakers (a total of 30 hours of
speech). Each speaker recorded a corpus of 450 paragraphs in a quiet
environment. The database includes an orthographic and lexical
transcription, with a few details that represent audible acoustic
events (speech and non speech) present in the corresponding waveform
files. The lexicon has more than 7400 words with the corresponding
pronunciation information in SAMPA.

ELRA / ELDA

55-57, rue Brillat-Savarin
75013 Paris FRANCE
Tel: (+33) 1 43 13 33 33 / Fax: (+33) 1 43 13 33 30
URL: http://www.elra.info or http://www.elda.fr

LREC 2004 conference: www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2004/
LangTech forum: http://www.lang-tech.org

Those interested in Fitch & Hauser's paper, "Computational
Constraints on Syntactic Processing in a Nonhuman Primate" (Science,
Vol 303, Issue 5656, 377-380, 16 January 2004), will also be
interested in a paper by Perruchet & Rey, "Does the mastery of
center-embedded linguistic structures distinguish humans from nonhuman
primates?" (forthcoming in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review).

Perruchet & Rey's answer is "no", based on new experiments that cast
doubt on Fitch & Hauser's interpretation of their results for
humans. You can find a summary, with links to a full version of their
paper, at
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001399.html