Oscar, anyone?

[jargon_dudette]

hello guys. I'm back. I got busy with my master's classes so i was unable to visit for quite a long time. Which by the way is stupid of me, because i forgot how useful this site can be. But it's never too late, right?
I'm now taking Descriptive Linguistics and I was given the task of reporting phonology. My professor told me to include the 'oscar'. and I have not a single idea of what an oscar is. can you enlighten me, please? and what websites/links can you recommend for research purposes?

thanks a bunch

[Anglika]

Hi, Jargon, good to see you back.

The Oscars are the awards made by the American Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences:

OSCAR.com - 80th Annual Academy Awards - Homepage
Welcome to The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

[Soup]

My professor told me to include the 'oscar'. and I have not a single idea of what an oscar is. can you enlighten me, please? and what websites/links can you recommend for research purposes?

It's an acronym of sorts: the OSCillator-based Associative Recall (OSCAR) model of serial-order and phonological production (Brown et al. 2000; Vousden et al. 2000). In other words, it's an oscillator-based model of the sequencing of phonemes in speech production.

OSCAR works by associating item vectors (phoneme representations) and phonological context vectors (PCVs) in a Hebbian associative memory. The PCVs are inspired by oscillating signals in the brain, and have an important hierarchical self-similarity pattern, described below. As the PCVs are iteratively presented to the associative memory, the original item vectors are recalled and become available for production. The self-similarity pattern generated by the oscillators, when combined with noise, generates patterns of errors that previously required the use of syllable frames.

In OSCAR, there are 30 oscillators in two ... Read more here...