Léo Varnet @leovarnet@qoto.org

Cette année j’ai accueilli Elsa Cahay, étudiante en arts appliqués à l’#EPSAA, qui a visité le labo, discuté avec des doctorant.e.s et post-docs, etc… Elle a résumé son séjour sous la forme d’un petit livret vulgarisé que voici : https://mycore.core-cloud.net/index.php/s/JSxNBc5Lpi1eqPC

Très content de ma petite slide d’introduction au problème de la segmentation. (Pour celles et ceux que ça intéresse, voici le lien vers l’article #psycholinguistique de référence pour ce genre d’homophonies : https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01690960601076472) @psycholinguistics

A very topical excerpt from Merton’s Paradigm for the sociology of knowledge (1945):

With increasing social conflict, differences in the values, attitudes, and modes of thought of groups develop to the point where the orientation which these groups previously had in common is overshadowed by incompatible differences. Not only do there develop distinct universes of discourse, but the existence of any one universe challenges the validity and legitimacy of the others. The coexistence of these conflicting perspectives and interpretations within the same society leads to an active and reciprocal distrust between groups. Within a context of distrust, one no longer inquires into the content of beliefs and assertions to determine whether they are valid or not, one no longer confronts the assertions with relevant evidence, but introduces an entirely new question: how does it happen that these views are maintained? Thought becomes functionalized; it is interpreted in terms of its psychological or economic or social or racial sources and functions. In general, this type of functionalizing occurs when statements are doubted, when they appear so palpably implausible or absurd or biased that one need no longer examine the evidence for or against the statement but only the grounds for its being asserted at all. Such alien statements are “explained by” or “imputed to” special interests, unwitting motives, distorted perspectives, social position, and so on. In folk thought, this involves reciprocal attacks on the integrity of opponents; in more systematic thought, it leads to reciprocal ideological analyses. On both levels, it feeds upon and nourishes collective insecurities.

Un petit résumé en français d’une étude psycholinguistique du langage inclusif menée en collaboration avec Elsa Spinelli. Nous avons mesuré expérimentalement l’efficacité de deux formes d’écriture inclusive pour contrer le biais vers le masculin. Pour en savoir plus : http://dbao.leo-varnet.fr/2023/10/10/langage-inclusif-pour-le-cerveau-le-neutre-nest-pas-neutre/

I finished reading @lakens ‘s book “Improving Your Statistical Inferences” (freely available here: https://lakens.github.io/statistical_inferences/ #OpenAccess). I originally read it because I was interested in the chapters on effect size and power analysis, but I learned a lot about #stats in general.
As an example, here’s something I never realized about p-values:
“When there is no true effect, and test assumptions are met, p-values for a t-test are uniformly distributed. This means that every p-value is equally likely to be observed when the null hypothesis is true. In other words, when there is no true effect, a p-value of 0.08 is just as likely as a p-value of 0.98. I remember thinking this was very counterintuitive when I first learned about uniform p-value distributions (well after completing my PhD). But it makes sense that p-values are uniformly distributed when we think about the goal to guarantee that when H0 is true, alpha % of the p-values should fall below the alpha level. If we set alpha to 0.01, 1% of the observed p-values should fall below 0.01, and if we set alpha to 0.12, 12% of the observed p-values should fall below 0.12. This can only happen if p-values are uniformly distributed when the null hypothesis is true” (https://lakens.github.io/statistical_inferences/01-pvalue.html#sec-whichpexpect)

Very proud to be a coauthor on this paper by Nihaad Paraouty, Dan Sanes et al. in Nature Communications “Sensory cortex plasticity supports auditory social learning” (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41641-8 ). We used an ingenious protocol to study social learning in the absence of any visual cue, in Mongolian gerbils. #Learning @psychology @neuroscience @nature #auditory #openaccess #SocialLearning

On the other hand contracted double forms (“un·e enfant”) are more effective in promoting gender balance, as they explicitely reintroduce grammatical gender markers associated with the feminine gender. (6/7)

There are two main strategies to counteract gender biases in language: neutralization (using gender-unmarked forms such as “l’enfant” in French) or re-feminization (contracted double forms such as “un·e enfant”). Here, we explored the relative efficiency of these strategies. (3/7)
@linguistics #EcritureInclusive #GenderFair #GenderNeutral

…we were able to measure the typical prosody interpreted as “c’est l’ami” vs. the one interpreted as “c’est la mie”. This is our main result. In a nutshell, the fundamental frequency and duration of the initial vowel (“a”) determine if you will hear the sound as one word (“l’ami”) or two (“la mie”). And this works with other pairs of words too! (4/X)

To reveal this acoustic difference (or “segmentation cue”), we simply generated many new utterances with a random prosody and had participants to categorize them as “c’est l’ami” or “c’est la mie”. Then, by relating the exact prosody in each trial and the corresponding response of the observer… (3/X)

Yesterday Géraldine Carranante presented our ongoing project to the #fa2023 conference. In short, we apply #ReverseCorrelation to the #auditory modality to uncover the #acoustic cues used during #SpeechPerception. More info here: https://qoto.org/web/statuses/110575198775228972 #acoustics #psychoacoustics #psycholinguistics

First talk from our group at #fa2023: Alejandro Osses presented our work on tone-in-noise detection and auditory models, and the freely available #OpenSource #MATLAB toolbox for running revcorr experiments. More info in my previous thread https://qoto.org/web/statuses/110945379680107330 #acoustics #auditory #psychoacoustics

Yesterday I was visiting the museum of cinema in #Torino. I was amazed to discover that Camille Flammarion was using the magic lantern during his scientific conferences:

“In 1866 I started using limelight projection devices in my astronomy lectures: their bright images were an effective complement every to illustrate astronomic principles… We started by projecting the 30 images from my publication The Wonders of the Heavens which were the entire content of my illustrated conferences.”

… the first PowerPoint presentation in human history!

@academicchatter #academicchatter #fa2023 #academia

Et pour conclure en beauté : un chapitre sur “perception et réalité”. La réalité est-elle une construction de notre cerveau ? Est-ce que, au final, tout serait subjectif ? https://mycore.core-cloud.net/index.php/s/rmyrlGdiCwnDa3T

On passe ensuite à la #psycholinguistique, et plus précisément la phonétique expérimentale. Où l’on découvre que la perception des sons de parole est loin d’être aussi simple qu’on pourrait le penser intuitivement. https://mycore.core-cloud.net/index.php/s/DBC9jpRjN28EXfO

Ensuite on attaque le gros morceau ! La #psychoacoustique hard-core cherche à comprendre comment les humains perçoivent la hauteur, la puissance et le timbre d’un son. https://mycore.core-cloud.net/index.php/s/2iRUATKlQ6mlwzr

Puis une digression sur la physiologie du système auditif humain, depuis la périphérie jusqu’au cortex, et sa modélisation. https://mycore.core-cloud.net/index.php/s/P2xKa2VWUzshJa9

D’abord les bases de la psychophysique : comment approcher scientifiquement la question de la perception humaine et, plus pragmatiquement, comment construire une bonne expérience de psychoac qui donne une mesure valide ? https://mycore.core-cloud.net/index.php/s/gVcfOFs1SKphOv2

Comme avant chaque rentrée j’ai mis à jour mon cours de #Psychoacoustique et #Perception pour @lemansuniv… et surtout les illustrations ! Tout est disponible sur mon site http://dbao.leo-varnet.fr/enseignements/ ! Petit aperçu des chapitres ⬇️
@psycholinguistics @cognition @cogsci #psycholinguistique #psycholinguistics #Psychoacoustics #audition

In this conference paper for #ForumAcousticum #FA2023 we replicate Ahumada's seminal experiment from 1975 on tone-in-noise perception using our own #OpenSource fastACI toolbox (https://github.com/aosses-tue/fastACI), and we analyze the data obtained by an artificial listener from the (also #OpenSource) Auditory Modeling Toolbox on the task. It's very satisfactory to have a network of interconnected toolboxes working together... And of course all analyses can be reproduced easily using the commands listed in the article. You can even run the experiment on yourself to replicate Ahumada's original results! #replication #OpenCode #Auditory #Psychoacoustics
https://hal.science/hal-04186363v1/document