Human communication is highly adaptive: speakers continuously adjust how they speak, move, and look in response to changing communicative conditions. These adaptations are central to face-to-face interaction and are increasingly relevant for speech technologies that aim to operate in natural, interactive, and multimodal settings. While adaptive speech has been extensively studied within the articulatory and acoustic domains, spoken communication is fundamentally multimodal, raising the question of how visual and bodily cues participate in adaptive behaviour. Lindblom’s classic Hyper- and Hypo-articulation (H&H) Theory provides a principled account of adaptive speech production by framing variability as a trade-off between effort and intelligibility. However, how this adaptive logic extends beyond speech to multimodal communication remains insufficiently integrated across disciplines.This review synthesises research on speech and a range of visual and bodily signals to examine how multimodal behaviours contribute to adaptive communication. We first review evidence on how environmental, listener-related, and speaker-related constraints shape adaptive responses in speech. We then extend this analysis to multimodal communication, highlighting how speakers and listeners flexibly redistribute communicative effort across modalities in response to environmental, listener-related, and speaker-internal constraints.We argue that multimodal cues participate in the same adaptive optimisation described by the H&H Theory, and that adaptation emerges from dynamic trade-off across modalities rather than from speech alone. This multimodal reinterpretation of H&H has implications for speech technologies, including audiovisual speech, synthesis, and interactive systems.
This study investigates response time as a behavioral indicator related to listening effort (LE) for evaluating speech enhancement (SE) systems. English and Norwegian intelligibility matrix tests were conducted within a single-task paradigm that incorporated click-time recording (logging the precise time of all participant clicks), enabling simultaneous estimation of speech intelligibility and LE-related temporal behavior. Three temporal proxy measures for LE were examined—time per stimulus, reaction time, and word click time—across a broad range of input signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) and for both discriminative and generative enhancement approaches. Time per stimulus showed an inverted-U pattern across SNRs, whereas reaction time and word click time exhibited monotonic behavior, providing more directly interpretable metrics for comparative evaluation. Analyses of pairwise SNR comparisons revealed that increases in our LE-related temporal measures at higher SNRs precede measurable intelligibility declines, suggesting that these temporal metrics can be more sensitive than intelligibility in this regime. Overall, the proposed framework—where LE-related measurements remain unknown to participants—offers a comprehensive and nuanced behavioral tool for SE evaluation, complementing intelligibility particularly under realistic, moderate-to-high SNR conditions.
This paper explores how the 15-min city concept plays out in Greater Cairo by examining three neighbourhoods: Agouza, Madinaty, and Badya. To do so, it draws on a systematic approach that includes selecting case studies, identifying key service categories, extracting POI and street-network data, mapping service areas in ArcGIS, and presenting the results through service area analysis and thematic mapping. To complement this, accessibility was assessed through four measures: cumulative opportunities, land-use entropy, functional redundancy, and space syntax (integration) metrics.The findings show that access in Cairo depends not just on distance but also on the diversity of available services, the degree of proximity between services, and the way streets connect different areas. Cycling makes a clear difference in widening reach and reducing accessibility inequalities and fragmentation. The findings suggest that, in addition to clinics and schools, social anchors such as souqs, ahwa, and cultural places emerge as vital parts of daily urban life. The paper argues that in Cairo, the 15-min city concept, whether built from scratch or adapted to existing urban fabrics, should not be treated as a universal recipe but as a flexible framework. The concept is part of a longer lineage of planning ideals, adopted in the planning of several areas of Cairo, from the Garden City movement to New Urbanism. It should build on the city’s own urban vocabularies, shaped through layered urban planning and lived experiences, which continue to define how urban spaces and services are used and valued within the 15-min radius or beyond.
Fluorescent organic compounds are of great interest due to their wide range of applications based on their ability to absorb and emit light at longer wavelengths. Some important applications include optoelectronics, fluorescence imaging, tissue and in vivo imaging, and the detection of heavy metal ions. Therefore, the design and development of new compounds with photophysical properties remain challenging in the field of materials chemistry and molecular spectroscopy. In this work, a new series of 7-(2-oxopyrrolidin-1-yl)julolidine-1-one derivatives was synthesized to establish a structure-photophysical property relationship. The derivatives were obtained via an intramolecular cyclization reaction of a tetrahydroquinoline derivative using Eaton's reagent as the cyclizing agent. The compounds primarily exhibited a it-it* transition, and theoretical calculations using TD-DFT confirmed that this transition has a marked intramolecular charge-transfer character. In general, all the compounds showed pronounced solvatochromism, particularly in ethanol. Finally, the fluorescence quantum yields were high in dichloromethane (0.6-0.78). These results reveal the importance of the nature of the substituents in modulating the intensity of the absorption transitions.
Early-career researchers (ECRs) play a vital role in advancing macrophyte research, bringing fresh perspectives, collaborative skills, and innovative methods to the field. Across marine and freshwater realms, macrophytes function as ecosystem engineers and key indicators of ecosystem health, yet they are declining due to a plethora of threats. As those who will shape the future of the field, ECRs are well-positioned to identify existing knowledge gaps and future priorities for the field in macrophyte research in a creative, integrative, and sustainable manner (both for the ecosystems and the ECRs themselves). Here, we present a unified perspective informed by the results of an international survey of 147 ECRs, capturing how ECRs see the field of macrophyte research at present and envision its future, including priorities for the field and how to overcome systemic barriers that ECRs face. Across realms and regions, ECRs currently use classical methods (e.g., field work, statistics) to study a wide range of topics including biodiversity, biotic interactions, and anthropogenic impacts. Regardless of research topic, ECRs are aware that technological advances are reshaping how research is conducted but acknowledge that they are not a silver bullet. Such advances should be harnessed to complement classical approaches, particularly taxonomy and field work. However, ECRs face structural barriers, including job insecurity and funding constraints, that disproportionately impact researchers in resource-limited regions within an already underrepresented field. Addressing these barriers and strengthening science-society connections is essential for the field’s future, and requires collaborative, interdisciplinary, and innovative research grounded in a strong ecological foundation.
