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Metaphor is, at root, a problem of knowing. It can serve a crucial role in the development of knowing, both for an individual and for a community. It is a powerful vehicle for recasting identity, for apprehending structure in novel ways. While metaphor can serve this role in perception and in action, its linguistic forms are especially powerful. Since language can be a powerful means for promoting changes in knowing, commitments on epistemic issues are as important for a theory of language as they are for theories of perception and action. Traditional views of metaphor have focused on the sentences that occasion metaphoric thought. Analyses are typically directed at determining the formal properties by which a metaphoric sentence may be identified, and explaining how the meaning of the sentence is related to its form.

Study Objectives. To review the labels of United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved drugs to identify those that contain pharmacogenomic biomarker information, and to collect prevalence information on the use of those drugs for which pharmacogenomic information is included in the drug labeling. Design. Retrospective analysis. Data Sources. The Physicians' Desk Reference Web site, Drugs@FDA Web site, and manufacturers' Web sites were used to identify drug labels containing pharmacogenomic information, and the prescription claims database of a large pharmacy benefits manager (insuring > 55 million individuals in the United States) was used to obtain drug utilization data. Measurements and Main Results. Pharmacogenomic biomarkers were defined, FDA-approved drug labels containing this information were identified, and utilization of these drugs was determined. Of 1200 drug labels reviewed for the years 1945–2005, 121 drug labels contained pharmacogenomic information based on a key word search and follow-up screening. Of those, 69 labels referred to human genomic biomarkers, and 52 referred to microbial genomic biomarkers. Of the labels referring to human biomarkers, 43 (62%) pertained to polymorphisms in cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzyme metabolism, with CYP2D6 being most common. Of 36.1 million patients whose prescriptions were processed by a large pharmacy benefits manager in 2006, about 8.8 million (24.3%) received one or more drugs with human genomic biomarker information in the drug label. Conclusion. Nearly one fourth of all outpatients received one or more drugs that have pharmacogenomic information in the label for that drug. The incorporation and appropriate use of pharmacogenomic information in drug labels should be tested for its ability to improve drug use and safety in the United States.

Research in auditory perception has tended to emphasize the detection and processing of sound elements with quasi-stable spectral structure, such as tones, formants, and bursts of noise. In the spectral domain, these elements are distinguished by frequency peak or range, bandwidth, and amplitude. In the temporal domain, acoustic analysis has often focused on the durations of sound elements, the intervals and phase relations between them, and the influence of these on pitch and loudness perception, temporal acuity, masking, and localization. The auditory system has often been approached as an analyzer of essentially time-constant functions of frequency, amplitude, and duration, on the assumption that complex auditory percepts are compositions over sound elements having those properties, with certain temporal inter

To test the effect of linguistic experience on the perception of a cue that is known to be effective in distinguishing between [r] and [l] in English, 21 Japanese and 39 American adults were tested on discrimination of a set of synthetic speech-like stimuli. The 13 “speech” stimuli in this set varied in the initial stationary frequency of the third formant (F3) and its subsequent transition into the vowel over a range sufficient to produce the perception of [r a] and [l a] for American subjects and to produce [r a] (which is not in phonemic contrast to [l a ]) for Japanese subjects. Discrimination tests of a comparable set of stimuli consisting of the isolated F3 components provided a “nonspeech” control. For Americans, the discrimination of the speech stimuli was nearly categorical, i.e., comparison pairs which were identified as different phonemes were discriminated with high accuracy, while pairs which were identified as the same phoneme were discriminated relatively poorly. In comparison, discrimination of speech stimuli by Japanese subjects was only slightly better than chance for all comparison pairs. Performance on nonspeech stimuli, however, was virtually identical for Japanese and American subjects; both groups showed highly accurate discrimination of all comparison pairs. These results suggest that the effect of linguistic experience is specific to perception in the “speech mode.”

Subjects judged the similarities among a set of American English vowels (/i,I,q,1,v,a,c,o,0,u/) presented in isolation or in a /dVd/ consonantal frame. Individual differences scaling was employed to analyze these similarities data for each of the conditions separately and for the two conditions combined. In all cases, perceptual dimensions corresponding to the advancement, height, and tenseness vowel features were recovered. Given the determinacy of individual differences scaling, this finding is taken to provide strong evidence for the perceptual significance of those features. The perceptual dimensions are considered in relation to various acoustic parameters of the stimuli employed in this study. They are also considered in relation to perceptual dimensions that have been observed in other vowel scaling studies.

Is metaphor a late acquisition, or is it a process that is active throughout development? Recent research provides misleading answers.

It is commonly assumed that a listener identifies an unknown talker's vowels in terms of the relation between their acoustic structure and that of other vowels produced by the same talker: the listener “normalizes” the variant acoustic signals on the basis of information about their source (vocal‐tract characteristics). In order to measure the vowel ambiguity attributable to talker differences, we compared identification of nine vowels in /p—vowel—p/ environment produced by a single talker with the same vowels produced by 15 talkers (men, women, children) who differed widely in vocal‐tract sizes and characteristic fundamental frequency. Mean error rates were 9% and 17%, respectively. Acoustic differences attributable to talker accounted for fewer than half of the perceptual errors. Lieberman [Am. Anthropologist (1972)] has proposed that the point vowels, /i, a, u/, are the “primary calibrating signals” by which the listener determines the size of the talker's vocal tract and normalizes the acoustic signal. In a second study, one group of listeners received each test word preceded by syllables containing /i, a, u/ and another group heard the test words preceded by nonpoint vowels /I, ae, Λ/. There was no significant overall reduction in errors of vowel identification for words preceded either by point vowels or by nonpoint vowels. Although perception of certain vowels improved when preceding syllables were present, perception of other vowels deteriorated.

The theoretical problems posed by metaphoric comprehension are discussed in the context of experiments on prompted recall. Listeners heard sentences of the form “Topic is (like) Vehicle.” In most cases, a statement of the implicit resemblance (the “ground”) was very effective in prompting recall of its related metaphor. This result could not be attributed to the activation, transfer, or additive combination of pre-existing properties of the topic and vehicle terms or to pre-existing associations between grounds and sentence terms. It is argued that the vehicle domain guides a novel schematization of the topic domain, that the perceived resemblance is a higher-order relation among entities (both explicit and implicit) in each domain, and that this abstract relation constitutes the “functional memory unit.” Prompted recall may begin with recognition of this previously experienced relation.

The identifiability of isolated vowels (/V/) was compared to that of vowels in consonantal context (/pVp/) when subjects performed a monitoring task. On successive blocks of trials in a test series, the subjects listened for instances of one or another of nine monophthongal vowels (/i,I,q,1,v,a,c,U,u/) and identified each test item as being an instance or not. On average, resulting false alarm errors occurred significantly less often in the /pVp/ condition, consistent with the previous finding that vowel perception may be aided by consonantal context. This beneficial effect of context was found to be restricted to the class of open vowels, however, with perception of the close vowels being somewhat hindered by context. The error data for misses also showed an interaction between context and vowel height. Various accounts of the interaction are considered.

Previous studies comparing the perception of isolated vowels with that of vowels produced in some consonantal context have generally focused on similarities and differences in the average performance of subjects in the two conditions. In this investigation, we wanted to look carefully at individual differences in vowel perception both within and between these conditions. We did so with the aid of a nonmetric individual differences scaling procedure developed by Takane et al. [Psychometrika 42, 7–67 (1977)]. The variance common to all subjects (in the two conditions combined) was modeled in a single multidimensional space, and the individual differences were represented as weights (or saliences) that each subject attached to the dimensions of the space. The data were similarity judgments collected (with the method of triadic comparisons) for a set of isolated vowels and for a set of vowels in context recorded by the same talker. The perceptual space had three dimensions. The first of these corresponded clo...

We have previously reported that an individual differences scaling comparison of the perception of isolated vowels and the perception of vowels in a consonantal environment (/dVd/) indicated the following: vowels are processed in a more linguistically appropriate way when they occur in consonantal context [B. Rakerd and R. R. Verbrugge, J. Acoust, Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 71, S76 (1982)]. In the present investigation, the method of that earlier experiment was extended to a study of vowel memory. Subjects were asked to make similarity judgments about their memories of (a) isolated vowels, or (b) vowels in /dVd/ consonantal context, and the resulting similarities matrices were submitted to nonmetric individual differences scaling. The scaling analysis indicated (1) that vowel memory, like vowel perception, is to a measurable degree organized around the features of advancement, height, and tenseness; and (2) that the previously reported perceptual influence of consonantal context is largely to be explained in terms...