The perceptual text is the one described by means of sense organs and having specific cohesion tools which include among others lexis belonging to the perception modus, so called introductory predicates indicating specific perception acts, synesthetic expressions, the observer as well as spatial and locative syntactems. Text architectonics is determined by the change of the speaker’s position (observer, perceiver), his transition within the text time and space.

The noise perceiving issue is very subjective and depends on several factors, such as: the living environment in which each person has grown and developed, the education they have received, the culture in which their life principles have formed and, last but not least, the social and financial status. Therefore, in order to establish effective actions in multiple directions when it comes to any urban noise analysis, it is very important to know the perception and the subjective reactions of the individuals involved. The paper respects this idea, presenting the results of a sociological study on urban noise, applied in the city of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. The intention was to capture the reactions of the permanent residents of the city, but also of the people in transit, as well as to analyse the changes that occurred as result of the implementation of the Environmental Noise Directive (European Commission). The study shows that 75.2% of the respondents consider that the noise in the city has increased in the last ten years and 58% of them have rated the noise as level 4 or 5 on a five point scale. Information related to noise maps and actions taken to reduce community noise has no sufficient dissemination. There is also a medium to low reaction of the population in correlation to the declared noise annoyance.

The performance of binaural processing may be disturbed in the presence of hearing loss, especially of sensorineural type. To assess the impact of hearing loss on speech perception in noise regarding binaural processing, series of speech recognition measurements in controlled laboratory conditions were carried out. The spatial conditions were simulated using dummy head recordings played back on headphones. The Intelligibility Level Difference (ILD) was determined by measuring the change in the speech reception thresholds (SRT) between two configurations of a masking signal source (N) and a speech source (S), namely the S0N90 condition (where numbers stand for angles in horizontal plane) and the co-located condition (S0N0). To disentangle the head shadow effect (better ear effect) from binaural processing in the brain, the difference between binaural and monaural S0N90 condition (so-called Binaural Intelligibility Level Difference, BILD) value was calculated.

Measurements were performed with a control group of normal-hearing listeners and a group of sensorineural hearing-impaired subjects. In all conditions performance of the hearing-impaired listeners was significantly lower than normal-hearing ones, resulting in higher SRT values (3 dB difference in the S0N0 configuration, 7.6 dB in S0N90 and 5 dB in monaural S0N90). The SRT improvement due to the spatial separation of target and masking signal (ILD) was also higher in the control group (8.1 dB) than in hearing-impaired listeners (3.5 dB). Moreover, a significant deterioration of the binaural processing described by BILD was found in people with sensorineural deficits. This parameter for normal-hearing listeners reached a value of 3 to 6 dB (4.6 dB on average) and decreased more than two times in the hearing-impaired group to 1.9 dB on average (with a deviation of 1.4 dB). These findings could not be explained by individual average hearing threshold (standard in audiological diagnostics) only. The outcomes indicate that there is a contribution of suprathershold deficits and it may be useful to consider binaural SRT measurements in noise in addition to the pure tone audiometry resulting in better diagnostics and hearing aid fitting.

The paper presents the characteristics of the attitude that students have towards electric cars and the significance of distinguished attitude elements in creating interest in the purchase of such vehicles. Electric cars are the new type of vehicles that have an electric motor and use the electricity stored in batteries. They are introduced to the market, but for various reasons the volume of sales is not high. So far, it is not sufficiently known how electric vehicles are assessed by Poles. The presented research is an attempt to know what the attitude towards this type of vehicle. The attitude model tested in this research includes three areas: knowledge about them, emotions that they evoke and potential behaviors. The participants were students of Rzeszów University of Technology – a group of young people who are potential consumers of new technologies. The obtained results indicate that electric cars are rather unknown. At the same time, they arouse great interest and their image is very positive. The attitude characteristics towards this type of vehicle is supplemented by perceived limitations: too high of a purchase price, lack of sufficient information about them and unsatisfactory technical parameters, mainly the long time needed to recharge the battery and the insufficiently long distance with one recharge. The interest in the purchase is dependent on positive emotions, and the lack of sufficient information is an obstacle in thinking about buying such a vehicle. Understanding the attitudes of Polish students towards electric cars can be helpful in adapting information about such cars to potential customers, which in turn may affect the level of interest and sales volume.

Semi-structured individual in-depth interviews were conducted to explore and compare which social norms with regard to the debt-incurring process are important to Poles with various experiences of indebtedness. Thematic analysis within a constructionist framework identified the social norms important in the borrowing process for Poles and revealed, as expected, a number of differences between people with various indebtedness experiences. Model borrowers have a significantly different approach to debt than unreliable debtors and non-borrowers. Model borrowers seem to be oblivious to the negative sides of loans as well as indicate fewer reasons for justifying not repaying obligations than others. For unreliable debtors, loans are a quick way to solve financial problems. They borrow money out of necessity rather than to finance any larger, long-term investments and have their own private rules for borrowing. Non-borrowers, although aware of borrowers’ higher standard of living, emphasize that debt is associated with permanent stress and psychological burden. Model borrowers, unlike the others, declare that in their immediate vicinity are only those who use and pay their loans in a timely manner.

The paper investigates the interdependence between the perceptual identification of the vocalic quality of six isolated Polish vowels traditionally defined by the spectral envelope and the fundamental frequency F0. The stimuli used in the listening experiments were natural female and male voices, which were modified by changing the F0 values in the ±1 octave range. The results were then compared with the outcome of the experiments on fully synthetic voices. Despite the differences in the generation of the investigated stimuli and their technical quality, consistent results were obtained. They confirmed the findings that in the perceptual identification of vowels of key importance is not only the position of the formants on the F1 × F2 plane but also their relationship to F0, the connection between the formants and the harmonics and other factors. The paper presents, in quantitative terms, all possible kinds of perceptual shifts of Polish vowels from one phonetic category to another in the function of voice pitch. An additional perceptual experiment was also conducted to check a broader range of F0 changes and their impact on the identification of vowels in CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) structures. A mismatch between the formants and the glottal tone value can lead to a change in phonetic category.

The present study is the first attempt at examining the perception and evaluation of 10 internationally known political and religious leaders’ English pronunciation. 40 Polish students’ assessed their speech samples in terms of the degree of foreign accentedness, comprehensibility and acceptability. We examine whether the following factors affect the assessors’ judgements: their personal attitude to the speakers, the students’ level of English proficiency and the genetic proximity between between the speakers’ and the listeners’ L1s combined with the raters’ familiarity with foreign accents of English. It is demonstrated that the listeners’ attitude to the speakers has no impact on the ratings of the samples’ comprehensibility and accentedness, but plays an important role in their evaluations of acceptability. The participants’ level of English proficiency is crucial for their assessment of comprehensibility, but not accentedness and acceptability. Finally, the genetic proximity between the involved languages and the listeners’ familiarity with varieties of foreign-accented English are shown to be relevant for all the presented accent jugdements.

Becoming more and more a multidisciplinary domain of study, the development of research in second language acquisition, and even more visibly in multilingualism, has moved away from its sole focus on cognitive aspects to social-affective dimensions. Consequently, research in these areas makes more extensive use of research methodology characteristic of social sciences. The focus on identity brings together issues of social context and the construction of one’s identity through negotiation of who we are, how we relate to the outside world and how we position ourselves in relation to others (Pavlenko 2001). Language is the main tool in this construction/ negotiation through the acquisition/learning and use of multiple languages. In relation to the development of one’s multilingual identity, the major distinction has to be made between acquiring a language in its natural context (the case of one’s mother tongue or immigration) and learning it in formal contexts. Block (2014) believes that the issue of identity can only be studied in a natural environment of language acquisition, and not in a formal instruction context. This article aims to confi rm or reject the above belief, based on evidence from various studies of bi- and multiple language users and how they perceive their identities and their relation to the languages in their possession. It includes a pilot study of trilingual language learners and their understanding of how the individual languages they know (L1, L2, L3) build their identities and the way they enrich, impoverish or challenge who they see themselves to have been by birth (Gabryś-Barker 2018). The issues discussed relate to external (other people, situations, contexts) and internal identity-building factors (individual affectivity, personality features).

The head-related transfer function (HRTF) is dependent on the position of the sound source (both direction and distance) and is also affected by individual anatomical parameters. Individualized HRTFs have been shown to affect the perception of sound direction, but have not been considered in distance perception. This work aims to discover, by means of psychoacoustic experiments for a virtual reproduction system through a pair of in-ear headphones, the effect of individualized HRTF on auditory distance perception for a nearby sound source. The individualized HRTFs of six subjects and the non-individualized HRTFs of a mannequin at seven distances between 0.2 and 1.0 m and five lateral azimuths between 45X and 135X in the horizontal plane were processed with white noise to generate binaural signals. Further, the individualized and non-individualized HRTFs were used in the auditory distance perception experiments. Results of distance perception show that the variance of distance perception results among subjects is significant, the reason could be the stimuli are lack of dynamic cue and early reflections, or the auditory difference of distance perception among subjects. However, via the analyses of mean slope of perceptual distance and correlation between the perceptual and real distance, we find that the individualized HRTF cue has insignificant influence on distance perception.

The distinction between primary and secondary qualities, most famously outlined by Galileo, and subsequently supported, inter alia, by Descartes and by Locke, has widely been considered one of the crucial factors in the development of modern idealism. In its contemporary form, the distinction identifies some of the perceived properties as mental phenomena due to their content and structural dependence on the mind. However, this account of the primary/secondary distinction is largely different from its original version developed by the above-mentioned philosophers, within whose work the mental being of the perceived qualities was demonstrated objectively, from the conceptually-derived nature of matter, and not subjectively, by referring to the mind’s participation in the cognitive process. It was only at the next stage of the early modern subjectivisation of sense perception, best exemplified by such philosophers as Arnold Geulincx and Richard Burthogge, that the creative role played by the mind in sensation and, consequently, the mind-dependency of the sensible qualities was recognised – a turn influenced by the reinterpretation of Aristotelian philosophy offered by Jacopo Zabarella and the Paduan school, as well as by anti-Aristotelianism of the kind developed in Netherlands. Furthermore, the two different approaches to the primary/ secondary distinction can be linked with two main types of post-Cartesian idealism, i.e. Berkeleian and Kantian – a claim for which illustrative evidence from British philosophy, namely from Berkeley’s and Burthogge’s respective theories, can be drawn.

Quality evaluation is very important for haptic rendering. In this paper, an objective evaluation method for a haptic rendering system based on haptic perception features is proposed. In the method, the haptic rendering process is compared to the real world perception process in a simple standardized procedure based on feature extraction and data analysis. A complete evaluation process for a simple haptic rendering task of pressing a virtual spring is presented as an example to explain the method in detail. Compared with the traditional objective method based on error statistics, the method is more concerned about the consistency of human subjective feelings rather than physical parameters, which makes the evaluation process more consistent with the haptic perception mechanism. The results of comparative analysis show that the method presented in this paper is simple, gives reliable results reflecting the consistency with subjective feeling and has a better discrimination ability for different kinds of devices and algorithms compared with the traditional evaluation methods.