In scientific literature, noise and noise annoyance are almost inseparable. While different environmental noise sources can cause various responses, the most common reaction to noise is irritation....Show moreIn scientific literature, noise and noise annoyance are almost inseparable. While different environmental noise sources can cause various responses, the most common reaction to noise is irritation. Several studies have focused on one aspect of noise annoyance, such as attitudes or health. However, a comprehensive picture of factors contributing to noise annoyance is not drafted yet, so this study aims to fill that gap. The study was conducted remotely for ten consecutive days in the daily life of 32 participants. It consisted of two main tasks: (1) wearing an activity tracker and (2) submitting flyover events into the NLR study app. We hypothesised that healthy coping mechanisms would predict lower reported noise annoyance and that predictors of higher reported noise annoyance are more negative attitudes, prevalent unhealthy coping habits, perceived louder and higher-pitched flyovers, and perceived lengthier flyover events. The main questionnaires analysed in this study to test the hypotheses were the ICBEN 11-point scale, BriefCOPE and the attitude component from the NORAH study. Attitudes and coping mechanisms are not verified as predictors in this study. The results do imply that subjective volume, subjective pitch, and subjective duration of a flyover event are good predictors of reported noise annoyance. Further research is needed to explore how subjective volume, pitch, and exposure duration as intervention targets can help reduce aircraft noise disruptions in individuals that live in affected areas.Show less
This thesis covers a pilot study that examines whether Dutch infants can distinguish lexical tonal patterns in pseudowords. It is inspired by Sato et al.’s 'Development of Hemispheric...Show moreThis thesis covers a pilot study that examines whether Dutch infants can distinguish lexical tonal patterns in pseudowords. It is inspired by Sato et al.’s 'Development of Hemispheric Specialization for Lexical Pitch–Accent in Japanese Infants' (2010). Sato et al. found that Japanese infants can distinguish lexical tonal patterns in Japanese disyllabic words, and that they start processing these stimuli mostly in the left hemisphere (rather than bilaterally) as they get older in their first year of life, suggesting that Japanese infants perceive lexical pitch-accent as a lexical acoustic cue. Since Dutch does not use pitch-accent as a lexical cue, we would not expect Dutch infants to start processing tonal patterns in the left hemisphere as they get older within their first year. The first step to examining this expectation is carrying out a behavioural discrimination task to establish whether Dutch infants can distinguish lexical tonal patterns in pseudowords in the first place. Only then does it become fruitful to carry out a NIRS experiment like Sato et al. to investigate in what parts of the brain Dutch infants process lexical tonal patterns, and whether this differs as they get older. We found that Dutch infants do seem to be able to distinguish lexical tonal patterns in pseudowords. Though the sample size of this pilot is small, the effect that we found is of such significance that we expect to find it in the larger sample size of the official study as well, showing that Dutch infants can distinguish words on the basis of their tonal pattern. We therefore expect that performing a NIRS study like Sato et al. (2010) will be feasible.Show less
Introduction. Socially anxious individuals express fear or anxiety in circumstances in which others might judge them. It has been suggested that social anxiety affects various voice characteristics...Show moreIntroduction. Socially anxious individuals express fear or anxiety in circumstances in which others might judge them. It has been suggested that social anxiety affects various voice characteristics, such as pitch and speech intensity, however the relationship between social anxiety and speech patterns has rarely been examined in actual social interactions (face-to-face setting). This study aimed to investigate the relationship between social anxiety and speech patterns, operationalized as pitch and speech intensity; and further assess the influence of social partners’ gaze direction (direct versus averted gaze) on the relationship. Methods. Twenty-six females (Mage = 21) were engaged in a face-to-face getting-acquainted conversation with a female confederate. While in conversation, participants and confederate took turns discussing general topics. The confederate’s gaze direction (direct versus averted) was manipulated. Participants’ social anxiety levels were measured by the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale, and Tobii eye-tracking glasses recorded auditory data. Vocal pitch and speech intensity were extracted with PRAAT. Results. The results reveal a significant relationship between social anxiety and speech intensity, whereby high socially anxious individuals spoke more quietly. There was no association between social anxiety and pitch. Confederates’ gaze direction did not influence the relationship between social anxiety and speech patterns. Conclusion. The findings illustrate social anxiety’s effects on speech intensity, regardless of the influence of a social partner’s gaze direction. Moreover, the outcome implies that pitch might be sensitive and closely tied to various situational factors. This underlines the extent of social anxiety’s influence on various human facets and social settings.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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The current thesis investigates the preference of Dutch monolingual infants for infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS). Our study is a contribution to the ManyBabies 1...Show moreThe current thesis investigates the preference of Dutch monolingual infants for infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS). Our study is a contribution to the ManyBabies 1 project (Bergmann et al., 2018), which is the first large-scale replication project in infant research. We use the head-turn preference procedure and test all the infants at the age of 8-12 months with the stimuli in North American English. We hypothesize that the infants in the present study prefer IDS to ADS because of IDS exaggerated prosodic properties. The linguistic content of the stimuli is not available to the infants because the stimuli are in English, a language they have not been exposed to before. Moreover, we want to find out if there is any difference between younger (8-month-olds) and older infants (11-month-olds). Previous research has demonstrated that younger infants show a more reliable preference for IDS over ADS in comparison with older infants. We statistically analyze the results using a linear-mixed effects model because of its advantages such as taking into consideration random variables and dealing well with non-normal data.Show less
