FALL 2000
This information effective for Fall 2000.
Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.
Instructor: Avril Thorne
Fall 2000
What is personality, does it change, and what is it "good" for? This course is relevant for anyone who is interested understanding the development of persons, relationships, and lives. We will consider majortheories of personality and their associated methods, as well as practical applications to work,school, and family life. Students will take personality tests, consider how to construct adocumentary of a life, and carry out mini-research projects in groups. Readings include Dan McAdams' third edition of the textbook "The Person" along with supplementary articles. There will be two midterms,a final exam, and a research paper.
Instructor(s): Dom Massaro
Fall 2000
This new course, to be taught to about 20 advanced undergraduates annually, describes empirical and theoretical research concerned with how individuals understand language. Language understanding involves many different levels and stages of information processing and perceivers use many different sources of information (acoustic, visual, gestural, phonetic, prosodic, syntactic, semantic, and contextual) to impose meaning on the spoken input.
This seminar offered in the fall quarter will cover all aspects of speech, focusing on those domains of primary interest to the students taking the seminar. There is an exciting time for speech research and impressive developments are occurring on many fronts, ranging from speech synthesis to developmental acquisition of speech. Topics include speech production, articulatory characteristics of speech, acoustic characteristics of speech, speech perception, speech synthesis, development of speech production and perception, speech perception by nonhumans (machines and other animals), speech in human/machine interfaces, speech translation, and substitutes for speech.
Under the guidance of the instructor and a teaching assistant, students will learn to use a general purpose speech toolkit, which runs on a PC and has been developed in several research laboratories (see http://mambo.ucsc.edu/psl/pslfan.html and http://cslu.cse.ogi.edu). Tutorials on various aspects of the toolkit are given at http://mambo.ucsc.edu/psl/tools/tutorial.html and http://cslu.cse.ogi.edu/toolkit/docs/2.0/apps/rad/tutorials/index.html. The course will also make use of video conferencing and internet facilities to connect with other instructors, students, and researchers who are also using these tools in various projects.
The Speech Toolkit, for example, allows the student to control and manipulate auditory speech and the speech movements of an animated face. These two modalities can be controlled independently of one another to assess how each individually and the two together influence speech perception. The data analysis modules allow the assessment of confusion matrices as well as tests of quantitative models of performance. Students will use these modules and others in a hands-on computer lab to design, implement, carry out, and analyze experiments in face-to-face language processing for both in-class collaborations and homework assignments.
This course will require student engagement and initiative. Student involvement will be essential to the success of the course. Students will be expected to become expert toolkit users, as well as learning the intricacies of speech science and computer animation.
The user-friendly nature of the speech toolkit makes speech science accessible and engaging to students while simultaneously allowing them to master quite difficult material.
The plan is to have students pursue a specific focus throughout the quarter to develop expertise in a particular domain. Students will make a class presentation and develop some prototype demonstrations or experiments using the speech toolkit.
Relevant readings will be chosen from the extant literature.