Publications

Displaying 301 - 390 of 390
  • Sekine, K. (2017). Gestural hesitation reveals children’s competence on multimodal communication: Emergence of disguised adaptor. In G. Gunzelmann, A. Howes, T. Tenbrink, & E. Davelaar (Eds.), Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2017) (pp. 3113-3118). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Speakers sometimes modify their gestures during the process of production into adaptors such as hair touching or eye scratching. Such disguised adaptors are evidence that the speaker can monitor their gestures. In this study, we investigated when and how disguised adaptors are first produced by children. Sixty elementary school children participated in this study (ten children in each age group; from 7 to 12 years old). They were instructed to watch a cartoon and retell it to their parents. The results showed that children did not produce disguised adaptors until the age of 8. The disguised adaptors accompany fluent speech until the children are 10 years old and accompany dysfluent speech until they reach 11 or 12 years of age. These results suggest that children start to monitor their gestures when they are 9 or 10 years old. Cognitive changes were considered as factors to influence emergence of disguised adaptors
  • Senft, G. (2004). Sprache, Kognition und Konzepte des Raumes in verschiedenen Kulturen - Zum Problem der Interdependenz sprachlicher und mentaler Strukturen. In L. Jäger (Ed.), Medialität und Mentalität (pp. 163-176). Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink.
  • Senft, G. (2004). What do we really know about serial verb constructions in Austronesian and Papuan languages? In I. Bril, & F. Ozanne-Rivierre (Eds.), Complex predicates in Oceanic languages (pp. 49-64). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Senft, G. (2004). Wosi tauwau topaisewa - songs about migrant workers from the Trobriand Islands. In A. Graumann (Ed.), Towards a dynamic theory of language. Festschrift for Wolfgang Wildgen on occasion of his 60th birthday (pp. 229-241). Bochum: Universitätsverlag Dr. N. Brockmeyer.
  • Senft, G. (2021). A very special letter. In T. Szczerbowski (Ed.), Language "as round as an orange".. In memory of Professor Krystyna Pisarkowa on the 90th anniversary of her birth (pp. 367). Krakow: Uniwersytetu Pedagogicznj.
  • Senft, G. (1991). Bakavilisi Biga - we can 'turn' the language - or: What happens to English words in Kilivila language? In W. Bahner, J. Schildt, & D. Viehwegger (Eds.), Proceedings of the XIVth International Congress of Linguists (pp. 1743-1746). Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
  • Senft, G. (1990). Apropos "the whole and its parts": Classificatory particles in Kilivila language. In W. A. Koch (Ed.), Das Ganze und seine Teile: The whole and its parts (pp. 142-176). Bochum: Brockmeyer.
  • Senft, G. (2017). "Control your emotions! If teasing provokes you, you've lost your face.." The Trobriand Islanders' control of their public display of emotions. In A. Storch (Ed.), Consensus and Dissent: Negotiating Emotion in the Public Space (pp. 59-80). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Abstract

    Kilivila, the Austronesian language of the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea, has a rich inventory of terms - nouns, verbs, adjectives and idiomatic phrases and expressions - to precisely refer to, and to differentiate emotions and inner feelings. This paper describes how the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea deal with the public display of emotions. Forms of emotion control in public encounters are discussed and explained on the basis of ritual communication which pervades the Trobrianders' verbal and non-verbal behaviour. Especially highlighted is the Trobrianders' metalinguistic concept of "biga sopa" with its important role for emotion control in encounters that may run the risk of escalating from argument and conflict to aggression and violence.
  • Senft, G. (1998). 'Noble Savages' and the 'Islands of Love': Trobriand Islanders in 'Popular Publications'. In J. Wassmann (Ed.), Pacific answers to Western hegemony: Cultural practices of identity construction (pp. 119-140). Oxford: Berg Publishers.
  • Senft, G. (2004). Aspects of spatial deixis in Kilivila. In G. Senft (Ed.), Deixis and demonstratives in Oceanic languages (pp. 59-80). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
  • Senft, G. (2004). Introduction. In G. Senft (Ed.), Deixis and demonstratives in Oceanic languages (pp. 1-13). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
  • Senft, G. (1991). Mahnreden auf den Trobriand Inseln: Eine Fallstudie. In D. Flader (Ed.), Verbale Interaktion: Studien zur Empirie und Methologie der Pragmatik (pp. 27-49). Stuttgart: Metzler.
  • Senft, G. (2017). Expressions for emotions - and inner feelings - in Kilivila, the language of the Trobriand Islanders: A descriptive and methodological critical essay. In N. Tersis, & P. Boyeldieu (Eds.), Le langage de l'emotion: Variations linguistiques et culturelles (pp. 349-376). Paris: Peeters.

    Abstract

    This paper reports on the results of my research on the lexical means Kilivila offers its speakers to refer to emotions and inner feelings. Data were elicited with 18 “Ekman’s faces” in which photos of the faces of one woman and two men illustrate the allegedly universal basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise) and with film stimuli staging standard emotions. The data are discussed on the basis of the following research questions: * How “effable” are they or do we observe ineffability – the difficulty of putting experiences into words – within the domain of emotions? * Do consultants agree with one another in how they name emotions? * Are facial expressions or situations better cues for labeling?
  • Senft, G. (2004). Participation and posture. In A. Majid (Ed.), Field Manual Volume 9 (pp. 80-82). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.506964.

    Abstract

    Human ethologists have shown that humans are both attracted to others and at the same time fear them. They refer to this kind of fear with the technical term ‘social fear’ and claim that “it is alleviated with personal acquaintance but remains a principle characteristic of interpersonal behaviour. As a result, we maintain various degrees of greater distance between ourselves and others depending on the amount of confidence we have in the other” (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989: 335). The goal of this task is to conduct exploratory, heuristic research to establish a new subproject that – based on a corpus of video data – will investigate various forms of human spatial behaviour cross-culturally.
  • Senft, G. (1991). Prolegomena to the pragmatics of "situational-intentional" varieties in Kilivila language. In J. Verschueren (Ed.), Levels of linguistic adaptation: Selected papers from the International Pragmatics Conference, Antwerp, August 1987 (pp. 235-248). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • Senft, G. (2017). The Coral Gardens are Losing Their Magic: The Social and Cultural Impact of Climate Change and Overpopulation for the Trobriand Islanders. In A. T. von Poser, & A. von Poser (Eds.), Facets of Fieldwork - Essay in Honor of Jürg Wassmann (pp. 57-68). Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter.

    Abstract

    This paper deals with the dramatic environmental, social and cultural changes on the Trobriand Islands which I experienced during 16 long- and short-term fieldtrips from 1982 to 2012. I first report on the climate change I experienced there over the years and provide a survey about the demographic changes on the Trobriand Islands – highlighting the situation in Tauwema, my village of residence on Kaile’una Island. Finally I report on the social and cultural impact these dramatic changes have for the Trobriand Islanders and their culture.
  • Senft, G. (2019). Rituelle Kommunikation. In F. Liedtke, & A. Tuchen (Eds.), Handbuch Pragmatik (pp. 423-430). Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler. doi:10.1007/978-3-476-04624-6_41.

    Abstract

    Die Sprachwissenschaft hat den Begriff und das Konzept ›Rituelle Kommunikation‹ von der vergleichenden Verhaltensforschung übernommen. Humanethologen unterscheiden eine Reihe von sogenannten ›Ausdrucksbewegungen‹, die in der Mimik, der Gestik, der Personaldistanz (Proxemik) und der Körperhaltung (Kinesik) zum Ausdruck kommen. Viele dieser Ausdrucksbewegungen haben sich zu spezifischen Signalen entwickelt. Ethologen definieren Ritualisierung als Veränderung von Verhaltensweisen im Dienst der Signalbildung. Die zu Signalen ritualisierten Verhaltensweisen sind Rituale. Im Prinzip kann jede Verhaltensweise zu einem Signal werden, entweder im Laufe der Evolution oder durch Konventionen, die in einer bestimmten Gemeinschaft gültig sind, die solche Signale kulturell entwickelt hat und die von ihren Mitgliedern tradiert und gelernt werden.
  • Senft, G. (1998). Zeichenkonzeptionen in Ozeanien. In R. Posner, T. Robering, & T.. Sebeok (Eds.), Semiotics: A handbook on the sign-theoretic foundations of nature and culture (Vol. 2) (pp. 1971-1976). Berlin: de Gruyter.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1986). Anaphora resolution. In T. Myers, K. Brown, & B. McGonigle (Eds.), Reasoning and discourse processes (pp. 187-207). London: Academic Press.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (2004). How the cognitive revolution passed linguistics by. In F. Brisard (Ed.), Language and revolution: Language and time. (pp. 63-77). Antwerpen: Universiteit van Antwerpen.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1991). Formalism and ecologism in linguistics. In E. Feldbusch, R. Pogarell, & C. Weiss (Eds.), Neue Fragen der Linguistik: Akten des 25. Linguistischen Kolloquiums, Paderborn 1990. Band 1: Bestand und Entwicklung (pp. 73-88). Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1991). Modale klokkenhuizen. In M. Klein (Ed.), Nieuwe eskapades in de neerlandistiek: Opstellen van vrienden voor M.C. van den Toorn bij zijn afscheid als hoogleraar Nederlandse taalkunde aan de Katholieke Universiteit te Nijmegen (pp. 202-236). Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1966). Het probleem van de woorddefinitie. In Handelingen van het 29ste Nederlands Filologencongres (pp. 103-108).
  • Seuren, P. A. M., & Mufwene, S. S. (Eds.). (1990). Issues in Creole lingusitics [Special Issue]. Linguistics, 28(4).
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1991). Notes on noun phrases and quantification. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Current Issues in Computational Linguistics (pp. 19-44). Penang, Malaysia: Universiti Sains Malaysia.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1991). The definition of serial verbs. In F. Byrne, & T. Huebner (Eds.), Development and structures of Creole languages: Essays in honor of Derek Bickerton (pp. 193-205). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Seuren, P. A. M., & Wekker, H. (1986). Semantic transparency as a factor in Creole genesis. In P. Muysken, & N. Smith (Eds.), Substrata versus universals in Creole genesis: Papers from the Amsterdam Creole Workshop, April 1985 (pp. 57-70). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1990). Serial verb constructions. In B. D. Joseph, & A. M. Zwicky (Eds.), When verbs collide: Papers from the 1990 Ohio State Mini-Conference on Serial Verbs (pp. 14-33). Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University, Department of Linguistics.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1991). Präsuppositionen. In A. Von Stechow, & D. Wunderlich (Eds.), Semantik: Ein internationales Handbuch der zeitgenössischen Forschung (pp. 286-318). Berlin: De Gruyter.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1991). What makes a text untranslatable? In H. M. N. Noor Ein, & H. S. Atiah (Eds.), Pragmatik Penterjemahan: Prinsip, Amalan dan Penilaian Menuju ke Abad 21 ("The Pragmatics of Translation: Principles, Practice and Evaluation Moving towards the 21st Century") (pp. 19-27). Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1998). Towards a discourse-semantic account of donkey anaphora. In S. Botley, & T. McEnery (Eds.), New Approaches to Discourse Anaphora: Proceedings of the Second Colloquium on Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution (DAARC2) (pp. 212-220). Lancaster: Universiy Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language, Lancaster University.
  • Shatzman, K. B. (2004). Segmenting ambiguous phrases using phoneme duration. In S. Kin, & M. J. Bae (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (Interspeech 2004-ICSLP) (pp. 329-332). Seoul: Sunjijn Printing Co.

    Abstract

    The results of an eye-tracking experiment are presented in which Dutch listeners' eye movements were monitored as they heard sentences and saw four pictured objects. Participants were instructed to click on the object mentioned in the sentence. In the critical sentences, a stop-initial target (e.g., "pot") was preceded by an [s], thus causing ambiguity regarding whether the sentence refers to a stop-initial or a cluster-initial word (e.g., "spot"). Participants made fewer fixations to the target pictures when the stop and the preceding [s] were cross-spliced from the cluster-initial word than when they were spliced from a different token of the sentence containing the stop-initial word. Acoustic analyses showed that the two versions differed in various measures, but only one of these - the duration of the [s] - correlated with the perceptual effect. Thus, in this context, the [s] duration information is an important factor guiding word recognition.
  • Shen, C., & Janse, E. (2019). Articulatory control in speech production. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2019) (pp. 2533-2537). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.
  • Shen, C., Cooke, M., & Janse, E. (2019). Individual articulatory control in speech enrichment. In M. Ochmann, M. Vorländer, & J. Fels (Eds.), Proceedings of the 23rd International Congress on Acoustics (pp. 5726-5730). Berlin: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Akustik.

    Abstract

    ndividual talkers may use various strategies to enrich their speech while speaking in noise (i.e., Lombard speech) to improve their intelligibility. The resulting acoustic-phonetic changes in Lombard speech vary amongst different speakers, but it is unclear what causes these talker differences, and what impact these differences have on intelligibility. This study investigates the potential role of articulatory control in talkers’ Lombard speech enrichment success. Seventy-eight speakers read out sentences in both their habitual style and in a condition where they were instructed to speak clearly while hearing loud speech-shaped noise. A diadochokinetic (DDK) speech task that requires speakers to repetitively produce word or non-word sequences as accurately and as rapidly as possible, was used to quantify their articulatory control. Individuals’ predicted intelligibility in both speaking styles (presented at -5 dB SNR) was measured using an acoustic glimpse-based metric: the High-Energy Glimpse Proportion (HEGP). Speakers’ HEGP scores show a clear effect of speaking condition (better HEGP scores in the Lombard than habitual condition), but no simple effect of articulatory control on HEGP, nor an interaction between speaking condition and articulatory control. This indicates that individuals’ speech enrichment success as measured by the HEGP metric was not predicted by DDK performance.
  • Li, Y., Wu, S., Shi, S., Tong, S., Zhang, Y., & Guo, X. (2021). Enhanced inter-brain connectivity between children and adults during cooperation: a dual EEG study. In 43RD ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE IEEE ENGINEERING IN MEDICINE & BIOLOGY SOCIETY (EMBC) (pp. 6289-6292). doi:10.1109/EMBC46164.2021.9630330.

    Abstract

    Previous fNIRS studies have suggested that adult-child cooperation is accompanied by increased inter-brain synchrony. However, its reflection in the electrophysiological synchrony remains unclear. In this study, we designed a naturalistic and well-controlled adult-child interaction paradigm using a tangram solving video game, and recorded dual-EEG from child and adult dyads during cooperative and individual conditions. By calculating the directed inter-brain connectivity in the theta and alpha bands, we found that the inter-brain frontal network was more densely connected and stronger in strength during the cooperative than the individual condition when the adult was watching the child playing. Moreover, the inter-brain network across different dyads shared more common information flows from the player to the observer during cooperation, but was more individually different in solo play. The results suggest an enhancement in inter-brain EEG interactions during adult-child cooperation. However, the enhancement was evident in all cooperative cases but partly depended on the role of participants.
  • Sjerps, M. J., & Chang, E. F. (2019). The cortical processing of speech sounds in the temporal lobe. In P. Hagoort (Ed.), Human language: From genes and brain to behavior (pp. 361-379). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Skiba, R. (2004). Revitalisierung bedrohter Sprachen - Ein Ernstfall für die Sprachdidaktik. In H. W. Hess (Ed.), Didaktische Reflexionen "Berliner Didaktik" und Deutsch als Fremdsprache heute (pp. 251-262). Berlin: Staufenburg.
  • Skiba, R. (1991). Eine Datenbank für Deutsch als Zweitsprache Materialien: Zum Einsatz von PC-Software bei Planung von Zweitsprachenunterricht. In H. Barkowski, & G. Hoff (Eds.), Berlin interkulturell: Ergebnisse einer Berliner Konferenz zu Migration und Pädagogik. (pp. 131-140). Berlin: Colloquium.
  • Skiba, R. (1990). Steinbruch-Datenbanken: Materialien für „Deutsch als Zweitsprache für Kinder und Jugendliche" und „Deutsch als Fachsprache". In Lehr- und Lernmittel-Datenbanken für den Fremdsprachenunterricht (pp. 15-20). Zürich: Eurocentres - Learning Service.
  • Slonimska, A., & Roberts, S. G. (2017). A case for systematic sound symbolism in pragmatics:The role of the first phoneme in question prediction in context. In G. Gunzelmann, A. Howes, T. Tenbrink, & E. Davelaar (Eds.), Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2017) (pp. 1090-1095). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Turn-taking in conversation is a cognitively demanding process that proceeds rapidly due to interlocutors utilizing a range of cues
    to aid prediction. In the present study we set out to test recent claims that content question words (also called wh-words) sound similar within languages as an adaptation to help listeners predict
    that a question is about to be asked. We test whether upcoming questions can be predicted based on the first phoneme of a turn and the prior context. We analyze the Switchboard corpus of English
    by means of a decision tree to test whether /w/ and /h/ are good statistical cues of upcoming questions in conversation. Based on the results, we perform a controlled experiment to test whether
    people really use these cues to recognize questions. In both studies
    we show that both the initial phoneme and the sequential context help predict questions. This contributes converging evidence that elements of languages adapt to pragmatic pressures applied during
    conversation.
  • De Smedt, K., & Kempen, G. (1990). Discontinuous constituency in Segment Grammar. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Discontinuous Constituency. Tilburg: University of Brabant.
  • De Smedt, K., & Kempen, G. (1991). Segment Grammar: A formalism for incremental sentence generation. In C. Paris, W. Swartout, & W. Mann (Eds.), Natural language generation and computational linguistics (pp. 329-349). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

    Abstract

    Incremental sentence generation imposes special constraints on the representation of the grammar and the design of the formulator (the module which is responsible for constructing the syntactic and morphological structure). In the model of natural speech production presented here, a formalism called Segment Grammar is used for the representation of linguistic knowledge. We give a definition of this formalism and present a formulator design which relies on it. Next, we present an object- oriented implementation of Segment Grammar. Finally, we compare Segment Grammar with other formalisms.
  • Stanojevic, M., & Alhama, R. G. (2017). Neural discontinuous constituency parsing. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (pp. 1666-1676). Association for Computational Linguistics.

    Abstract

    One of the most pressing issues in dis-
    continuous constituency transition-based
    parsing is that the relevant information for
    parsing decisions could be located in any
    part of the stack or the buffer. In this pa-
    per, we propose a solution to this prob-
    lem by replacing the structured percep-
    tron model with a recursive neural model
    that computes a global representation of
    the configuration, therefore allowing even
    the most remote parts of the configura-
    tion to influence the parsing decisions. We
    also provide a detailed analysis of how
    this representation should be built out of
    sub-representations of its core elements
    (words, trees and stack). Additionally, we
    investigate how different types of swap or-
    acles influence the results. Our model is
    the first neural discontinuous constituency
    parser, and it outperforms all the previ-
    ously published models on three out of
    four datasets while on the fourth it obtains
    second place by a tiny difference.

    Additional information

    http://aclweb.org/anthology/D17-1174
  • Stivers, T. (2004). Question sequences in interaction. In A. Majid (Ed.), Field Manual Volume 9 (pp. 45-47). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.506967.

    Abstract

    When people request information, they have a variety of means for eliciting the information. In English two of the primary resources for eliciting information include asking questions, making statements about their interlocutor (thereby generating confirmation or revision). But within these types there are a variety of ways that these information elicitors can be designed. The goal of this task is to examine how different languages seek and provide information, the extent to which syntax vs prosodic resources are used (e.g., in questions), and the extent to which the design of information seeking actions and their responses display a structural preference to promote social solidarity.
  • Stolker, C. J. J. M., & Poletiek, F. H. (1998). Smartengeld - Wat zijn we eigenlijk aan het doen? Naar een juridische en psychologische evaluatie. In F. Stadermann (Ed.), Bewijs en letselschade (pp. 71-86). Lelystad, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Vermande.
  • Sumer, B., Perniss, P. M., & Ozyurek, A. (2017). A first study on the development of spatial viewpoint in sign language acquisition: The case of Turkish Sign Language. In F. N. Ketrez, A. C. Kuntay, S. Ozcalıskan, & A. Ozyurek (Eds.), Social Environment and Cognition in Language Development: Studies in Honor of Ayhan Aksu-Koc (pp. 223-240). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi:10.1075/tilar.21.14sum.

    Abstract

    The current study examines, for the first time, the viewpoint preferences of signing children in expressing spatial relations that require imposing a viewpoint (left-right, front-behind). We elicited spatial descriptions from deaf children (4–9 years of age) acquiring Turkish Sign Language (TİD) natively from their deaf parents and from adult native signers of TİD. Adults produced these spatial descriptions from their own viewpoint and from that of their addressee depending on whether the objects were located on the lateral or the sagittal axis. TİD-acquiring children, on the other hand, described all spatial configurations from their own viewpoint. Differences were also found between children and adults in the type of linguistic devices and how they are used to express such spatial relations.
  • Sumer, B., Grabitz, C., & Küntay, A. (2017). Early produced signs are iconic: Evidence from Turkish Sign Language. In G. Gunzelmann, A. Howes, T. Tenbrink, & E. Davelaar (Eds.), Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2017) (pp. 3273-3278). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Motivated form-meaning mappings are pervasive in sign languages, and iconicity has recently been shown to facilitate sign learning from early on. This study investigated the role of iconicity for language acquisition in Turkish Sign Language (TID). Participants were 43 signing children (aged 10 to 45 months) of deaf parents. Sign production ability was recorded using the adapted version of MacArthur Bates Communicative Developmental Inventory (CDI) consisting of 500 items for TID. Iconicity and familiarity ratings for a subset of 104 signs were available. Our results revealed that the iconicity of a sign was positively correlated with the percentage of children producing a sign and that iconicity significantly predicted the percentage of children producing a sign, independent of familiarity or phonological complexity. Our results are consistent with previous findings on sign language acquisition and provide further support for the facilitating effect of iconic form-meaning mappings in sign learning.
  • Suppes, P., Böttner, M., & Liang, L. (1998). Machine Learning of Physics Word Problems: A Preliminary Report. In A. Aliseda, R. van Glabbeek, & D. Westerståhl (Eds.), Computing Natural Language (pp. 141-154). Stanford, CA, USA: CSLI Publications.
  • Takashima, A., & Bakker, I. (2017). Memory consolidation. In H.-J. Schmid (Ed.), Entrenchment and the Psychology of Language Learning: How We Reorganize and Adapt Linguistic Knowledge (pp. 177-200). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
  • Ten Bosch, L., Oostdijk, N., & De Ruiter, J. P. (2004). Turn-taking in social talk dialogues: Temporal, formal and functional aspects. In 9th International Conference Speech and Computer (SPECOM'2004) (pp. 454-461).

    Abstract

    This paper presents a quantitative analysis of the
    turn-taking mechanism evidenced in 93 telephone
    dialogues that were taken from the 9-million-word
    Spoken Dutch Corpus. While the first part of the paper
    focuses on the temporal phenomena of turn taking, such
    as durations of pauses and overlaps of turns in the
    dialogues, the second part explores the discoursefunctional
    aspects of utterances in a subset of 8
    dialogues that were annotated especially for this
    purpose. The results show that speakers adapt their turntaking
    behaviour to the interlocutor’s behaviour.
    Furthermore, the results indicate that male-male dialogs
    show a higher proportion of overlapping turns than
    female-female dialogues.
  • Ten Bosch, L., Mulder, K., & Boves, L. (2019). Phase synchronization between EEG signals as a function of differences between stimuli characteristics. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2019 (pp. 1213-1217). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2019-2443.

    Abstract

    The neural processing of speech leads to specific patterns in the brain which can be measured as, e.g., EEG signals. When properly aligned with the speech input and averaged over many tokens, the Event Related Potential (ERP) signal is able to differentiate specific contrasts between speech signals. Well-known effects relate to the difference between expected and unexpected words, in particular in the N400, while effects in N100 and P200 are related to attention and acoustic onset effects. Most EEG studies deal with the amplitude of EEG signals over time, sidestepping the effect of phase and phase synchronization. This paper investigates the relation between phase in the EEG signals measured in an auditory lexical decision task by Dutch participants listening to full and reduced English word forms. We show that phase synchronization takes place across stimulus conditions, and that the so-called circular variance is narrowly related to the type of contrast between stimuli.
  • Ten Bosch, L., Oostdijk, N., & De Ruiter, J. P. (2004). Durational aspects of turn-taking in spontaneous face-to-face and telephone dialogues. In P. Sojka, I. Kopecek, & K. Pala (Eds.), Text, Speech and Dialogue: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference TSD 2004 (pp. 563-570). Heidelberg: Springer.

    Abstract

    On the basis of two-speaker spontaneous conversations, it is shown that the distributions of both pauses and speech-overlaps of telephone and faceto-face dialogues have different statistical properties. Pauses in a face-to-face
    dialogue last up to 4 times longer than pauses in telephone conversations in functionally comparable conditions. There is a high correlation (0.88 or larger) between the average pause duration for the two speakers across face-to-face
    dialogues and telephone dialogues. The data provided form a first quantitative analysis of the complex turn-taking mechanism evidenced in the dialogues available in the 9-million-word Spoken Dutch Corpus.
  • Ten Bosch, L., Boves, L., & Ernestus, M. (2017). The recognition of compounds: A computational account. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2017 (pp. 1158-1162). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2017-1048.

    Abstract

    This paper investigates the processes in comprehending spoken noun-noun compounds, using data from the BALDEY database. BALDEY contains lexicality judgments and reaction times (RTs) for Dutch stimuli for which also linguistic information is included. Two different approaches are combined. The first is based on regression by Dynamic Survival Analysis, which models decisions and RTs as a consequence of the fact that a cumulative density function exceeds some threshold. The parameters of that function are estimated from the observed RT data. The second approach is based on DIANA, a process-oriented computational model of human word comprehension, which simulates the comprehension process with the acoustic stimulus as input. DIANA gives the identity and the number of the word candidates that are activated at each 10 ms time step.

    Both approaches show how the processes involved in comprehending compounds change during a stimulus. Survival Analysis shows that the impact of word duration varies during the course of a stimulus. The density of word and non-word hypotheses in DIANA shows a corresponding pattern with different regimes. We show how the approaches complement each other, and discuss additional ways in which data and process models can be combined.
  • Ter Bekke, M., Ozyurek, A., & Ünal, E. (2019). Speaking but not gesturing predicts motion event memory within and across languages. In A. Goel, C. Seifert, & C. Freksa (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2019) (pp. 2940-2946). Montreal, QB: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    In everyday life, people see, describe and remember motion events. We tested whether the type of motion event information (path or manner) encoded in speech and gesture predicts which information is remembered and if this varies across speakers of typologically different languages. We focus on intransitive motion events (e.g., a woman running to a tree) that are described differently in speech and co-speech gesture across languages, based on how these languages typologically encode manner and path information (Kita & Özyürek, 2003; Talmy, 1985). Speakers of Dutch (n = 19) and Turkish (n = 22) watched and described motion events. With a surprise (i.e. unexpected) recognition memory task, memory for manner and path components of these events was measured. Neither Dutch nor Turkish speakers’ memory for manner went above chance levels. However, we found a positive relation between path speech and path change detection: participants who described the path during encoding were more accurate at detecting changes to the path of an event during the memory task. In addition, the relation between path speech and path memory changed with native language: for Dutch speakers encoding path in speech was related to improved path memory, but for Turkish speakers no such relation existed. For both languages, co-speech gesture did not predict memory speakers. We discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of the relations between speech, gesture, type of encoding in language and memory.
  • Terrill, A. (2004). Coordination in Lavukaleve. In M. Haspelmath (Ed.), Coordinating Constructions. (pp. 427-443). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • Thomaz, A. L., Lieven, E., Cakmak, M., Chai, J. Y., Garrod, S., Gray, W. D., Levinson, S. C., Paiva, A., & Russwinkel, N. (2019). Interaction for task instruction and learning. In K. A. Gluck, & J. E. Laird (Eds.), Interactive task learning: Humans, robots, and agents acquiring new tasks through natural interactions (pp. 91-110). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Troncoso Ruiz, A., Ernestus, M., & Broersma, M. (2019). Learning to produce difficult L2 vowels: The effects of awareness-rasing, exposure and feedback. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2019) (pp. 1094-1098). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.
  • Trujillo, J. P., Levinson, S. C., & Holler, J. (2021). Visual information in computer-mediated interaction matters: Investigating the association between the availability of gesture and turn transition timing in conversation. In M. Kurosu (Ed.), Human-Computer Interaction. Design and User Experience Case Studies. HCII 2021 (pp. 643-657). Cham: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-78468-3_44.

    Abstract

    Natural human interaction involves the fast-paced exchange of speaker turns. Crucially, if a next speaker waited with planning their turn until the current speaker was finished, language production models would predict much longer turn transition times than what we observe. Next speakers must therefore prepare their turn in parallel to listening. Visual signals likely play a role in this process, for example by helping the next speaker to process the ongoing utterance and thus prepare an appropriately-timed response.

    To understand how visual signals contribute to the timing of turn-taking, and to move beyond the mostly qualitative studies of gesture in conversation, we examined unconstrained, computer-mediated conversations between 20 pairs of participants while systematically manipulating speaker visibility. Using motion tracking and manual gesture annotation, we assessed 1) how visibility affected the timing of turn transitions, and 2) whether use of co-speech gestures and 3) the communicative kinematic features of these gestures were associated with changes in turn transition timing.

    We found that 1) decreased visibility was associated with less tightly timed turn transitions, and 2) the presence of gestures was associated with more tightly timed turn transitions across visibility conditions. Finally, 3) structural and salient kinematics contributed to gesture’s facilitatory effect on turn transition times.

    Our findings suggest that speaker visibility--and especially the presence and kinematic form of gestures--during conversation contributes to the temporal coordination of conversational turns in computer-mediated settings. Furthermore, our study demonstrates that it is possible to use naturalistic conversation and still obtain controlled results.
  • Tsoukala, C., Frank, S. L., & Broersma, M. (2017). “He's pregnant": Simulating the confusing case of gender pronoun errors in L2 English. In Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2017) (pp. 3392-3397). Austin, TX, USA: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Even advanced Spanish speakers of second language English tend to confuse the pronouns ‘he’ and ‘she’, often without even noticing their mistake (Lahoz, 1991). A study by AntónMéndez (2010) has indicated that a possible reason for this error is the fact that Spanish is a pro-drop language. In order to test this hypothesis, we used an extension of Dual-path (Chang, 2002), a computational cognitive model of sentence production, to simulate two models of bilingual speech production of second language English. One model had Spanish (ES) as a native language, whereas the other learned a Spanish-like language that used the pronoun at all times (non-pro-drop Spanish, NPD_ES). When tested on L2 English sentences, the bilingual pro-drop Spanish model produced significantly more gender pronoun errors, confirming that pronoun dropping could indeed be responsible for the gender confusion in natural language use as well.
  • Van Dooren, A., Tulling, M., Cournane, A., & Hacquard, V. (2019). Discovering modal polysemy: Lexical aspect might help. In M. Brown, & B. Dailey (Eds.), BUCLD 43: Proceedings of the 43rd annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 203-216). Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Van Dooren, A., Dieuleveut, A., Cournane, A., & Hacquard, V. (2017). Learning what must and can must and can mean. In A. Cremers, T. Van Gessel, & F. Roelofsen (Eds.), Proceedings of the 21st Amsterdam Colloquium (pp. 225-234). Amsterdam: ILLC.

    Abstract

    This corpus study investigates how children figure out that functional modals
    like must can express various flavors of modality. We examine how modality is
    expressed in speech to and by children, and find that the way speakers use
    modals may obscure their polysemy. Yet, children eventually figure it out. Our
    results suggest that some do before age 3. We show that while root and
    epistemic flavors are not equally well-represented in the input, there are robust
    correlations between flavor and aspect, which learners could exploit to discover
    modal polysemy.
  • Van Dooren, A. (2017). Dutch must more structure. In A. Lamont, & K. Tetzloff (Eds.), NELS 47: Proceedings of the Forty-Seventh Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (pp. 165-175). Amherst: GLSA.
  • Van Ooijen, B., Cutler, A., & Norris, D. (1991). Detection times for vowels versus consonants. In Eurospeech 91: Vol. 3 (pp. 1451-1454). Genova: Istituto Internazionale delle Comunicazioni.

    Abstract

    This paper reports two experiments with vowels and consonants as phoneme detection targets in real words. In the first experiment, two relatively distinct vowels were compared with two confusible stop consonants. Response times to the vowels were longer than to the consonants. Response times correlated negatively with target phoneme length. In the second, two relatively distinct vowels were compared with their corresponding semivowels. This time, the vowels were detected faster than the semivowels. We conclude that response time differences between vowels and stop consonants in this task may reflect differences between phoneme categories in the variability of tokens, both in the acoustic realisation of targets and in the' representation of targets by subjects.
  • Van Berkum, J. J. A., & Nieuwland, M. S. (2019). A cognitive neuroscience perspective on language comprehension in context. In P. Hagoort (Ed.), Human language: From genes and brain to behavior (pp. 429-442). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Van Gijn, R., Hammarström, H., Van de Kerke, S., Krasnoukhova, O., & Muysken, P. (2017). Linguistic Areas, Linguistic Convergence and River Systems in South America. In R. Hickey (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics (pp. 964-996). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781107279872.034.
  • Van Geenhoven, V. (1998). On the Argument Structure of some Noun Incorporating Verbs in West Greenlandic. In M. Butt, & W. Geuder (Eds.), The Projection of Arguments - Lexical and Compositional Factors (pp. 225-263). Stanford, CA, USA: CSLI Publications.
  • Van Valin Jr., R. D. (1998). The acquisition of WH-questions and the mechanisms of language acquisition. In M. Tomasello (Ed.), The new psychology of language: Cognitive and functional approaches to language structure (pp. 221-249). Mahwah, New Jersey: Erlbaum.
  • Van Berkum, J. J. A. (2004). Sentence comprehension in a wider discourse: Can we use ERPs to keep track of things? In M. Carreiras, Jr., & C. Clifton (Eds.), The on-line study of sentence comprehension: eyetracking, ERPs and beyond (pp. 229-270). New York: Psychology Press.
  • Vernes, S. C., Janik, V. M., Fitch, W. T., & Slater, P. J. B. (Eds.). (2021). Vocal learning in animals and humans [Special Issue]. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences, 376.
  • Vernes, S. C. (2019). Neuromolecular approaches to the study of language. In P. Hagoort (Ed.), Human language: From genes and brain to behavior (pp. 577-593). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Von Stutterheim, C., & Klein, W. (2004). Die Gesetze des Geistes sind metrisch: Hölderlin und die Sprachproduktion. In H. Schwarz (Ed.), Fenster zur Welt: Deutsch als Fremdsprachenphilologie (pp. 439-460). München: Iudicium.
  • Vosse, T., & Kempen, G. (1991). A hybrid model of human sentence processing: Parsing right-branching, center-embedded and cross-serial dependencies. In M. Tomita (Ed.), Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Parsing Technologies.
  • Wagner, M. A., Broersma, M., McQueen, J. M., & Lemhöfer, K. (2019). Imitating speech in an unfamiliar language and an unfamiliar non-native accent in the native language. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 20195) (pp. 1362-1366). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

    Abstract

    This study concerns individual differences in speech imitation ability and the role that lexical representations play in imitation. We examined 1) whether imitation of sounds in an unfamiliar language (L0) is related to imitation of sounds in an unfamiliar
    non-native accent in the speaker’s native language (L1) and 2) whether it is easier or harder to imitate speech when you know the words to be imitated. Fifty-nine native Dutch speakers imitated words with target vowels in Basque (/a/ and /e/) and Greekaccented
    Dutch (/i/ and /u/). Spectral and durational
    analyses of the target vowels revealed no relationship between the success of L0 and L1 imitation and no difference in performance between tasks (i.e., L1
    imitation was neither aided nor blocked by lexical knowledge about the correct pronunciation). The results suggest instead that the relationship of the vowels to native phonological categories plays a bigger role in imitation
  • Weber, A. (1998). Listening to nonnative language which violates native assimilation rules. In D. Duez (Ed.), Proceedings of the European Scientific Communication Association workshop: Sound patterns of Spontaneous Speech (pp. 101-104).

    Abstract

    Recent studies using phoneme detection tasks have shown that spoken-language processing is neither facilitated nor interfered with by optional assimilation, but is inhibited by violation of obligatory assimilation. Interpretation of these results depends on an assessment of their generality, specifically, whether they also obtain when listeners are processing nonnative language. Two separate experiments are presented in which native listeners of German and native listeners of Dutch had to detect a target fricative in legal monosyllabic Dutch nonwords. All of the nonwords were correct realisations in standard Dutch. For German listeners, however, half of the nonwords contained phoneme strings which violate the German fricative assimilation rule. Whereas the Dutch listeners showed no significant effects, German listeners detected the target fricative faster when the German fricative assimilation was violated than when no violation occurred. The results might suggest that violation of assimilation rules does not have to make processing more difficult per se.
  • Weber, A., & Paris, G. (2004). The origin of the linguistic gender effect in spoken-word recognition: Evidence from non-native listening. In K. Forbus, D. Gentner, & T. Tegier (Eds.), Proceedings of the 26th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

    Abstract

    Two eye-tracking experiments examined linguistic gender effects in non-native spoken-word recognition. French participants, who knew German well, followed spoken instructions in German to click on pictures on a computer screen (e.g., Wo befindet sich die Perle, “where is the pearl”) while their eye movements were monitored. The name of the target picture was preceded by a gender-marked article in the instructions. When a target and a competitor picture (with phonologically similar names) were of the same gender in both German and French, French participants fixated competitor pictures more than unrelated pictures. However, when target and competitor were of the same gender in German but of different gender in French, early fixations to the competitor picture were reduced. Competitor activation in the non-native language was seemingly constrained by native gender information. German listeners showed no such viewing time difference. The results speak against a form-based account of the linguistic gender effect. They rather support the notion that the effect originates from the grammatical level of language processing.
  • Weber, A., & Mueller, K. (2004). Word order variation in German main clauses: A corpus analysis. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics.

    Abstract

    In this paper, we present empirical data from a corpus study on the linear order of subjects and objects in German main clauses. The aim was to establish the validity of three well-known ordering constraints: given complements tend to occur before new complements, definite before indefinite, and pronoun before full noun phrase complements. Frequencies of occurrences were derived for subject-first and object-first sentences from the German Negra corpus. While all three constraints held on subject-first sentences, results for object-first sentences varied. Our findings suggest an influence of grammatical functions on the ordering of verb complements.
  • Weissenborn, J. (1986). Learning how to become an interlocutor. The verbal negotiation of common frames of reference and actions in dyads of 7–14 year old children. In J. Cook-Gumperz, W. A. Corsaro, & J. Streeck (Eds.), Children's worlds and children's language (pp. 377-404). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Wittek, A. (1998). Learning verb meaning via adverbial modification: Change-of-state verbs in German and the adverb "wieder" again. In A. Greenhill, M. Hughes, H. Littlefield, & H. Walsh (Eds.), Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 779-790). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Wittenburg, P. (2004). The IMDI metadata concept. In S. F. Ferreira (Ed.), Workingmaterial on Building the LR&E Roadmap: Joint COCOSDA and ICCWLRE Meeting, (LREC2004). Paris: ELRA - European Language Resources Association.
  • Wittenburg, P., Brugman, H., Broeder, D., & Russel, A. (2004). XML-based language archiving. In Workshop Proceedings on XML-based Richly Annotaded Corpora (LREC2004) (pp. 63-69). Paris: ELRA - European Language Resources Association.
  • Wittenburg, P., Gulrajani, G., Broeder, D., & Uneson, M. (2004). Cross-disciplinary integration of metadata descriptions. In M. Lino, M. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa, & R. Silva (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC2004) (pp. 113-116). Paris: ELRA - European Language Resources Association.
  • Wittenburg, P., Johnson, H., Buchhorn, M., Brugman, H., & Broeder, D. (2004). Architecture for distributed language resource management and archiving. In M. Lino, M. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa, & R. Silva (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC2004) (pp. 361-364). Paris: ELRA - European Language Resources Association.
  • Wolf, M. C., Smith, A. C., Meyer, A. S., & Rowland, C. F. (2019). Modality effects in vocabulary acquisition. In A. K. Goel, C. M. Seifert, & C. Freksa (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2019) (pp. 1212-1218). Montreal, QB: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    It is unknown whether modality affects the efficiency with which humans learn novel word forms and their meanings, with previous studies reporting both written and auditory advantages. The current study implements controls whose absence in previous work likely offers explanation for such contradictory findings. In two novel word learning experiments, participants were trained and tested on pseudoword - novel object pairs, with controls on: modality of test, modality of meaning, duration of exposure and transparency of word form. In both experiments word forms were presented in either their written or spoken form, each paired with a pictorial meaning (novel object). Following a 20-minute filler task, participants were tested on their ability to identify the picture-word form pairs on which they were trained. A between subjects design generated four participant groups per experiment 1) written training, written test; 2) written training, spoken test; 3) spoken training, written test; 4) spoken training, spoken test. In Experiment 1 the written stimulus was presented for a time period equal to the duration of the spoken form. Results showed that when the duration of exposure was equal, participants displayed a written training benefit. Given words can be read faster than the time taken for the spoken form to unfold, in Experiment 2 the written form was presented for 300 ms, sufficient time to read the word yet 65% shorter than the duration of the spoken form. No modality effect was observed under these conditions, when exposure to the word form was equivalent. These results demonstrate, at least for proficient readers, that when exposure to the word form is controlled across modalities the efficiency with which word form-meaning associations are learnt does not differ. Our results therefore suggest that, although we typically begin as aural-only word learners, we ultimately converge on developing learning mechanisms that learn equally efficiently from both written and spoken materials.
  • Zhang, Y., Ding, R., Frassinelli, D., Tuomainen, J., Klavinskis-Whiting, S., & Vigliocco, G. (2021). Electrophysiological signatures of second language multimodal comprehension. In T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (Eds.), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021) (pp. 2971-2977). Vienna: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Language is multimodal: non-linguistic cues, such as prosody,
    gestures and mouth movements, are always present in face-to-
    face communication and interact to support processing. In this
    paper, we ask whether and how multimodal cues affect L2
    processing by recording EEG for highly proficient bilinguals
    when watching naturalistic materials. For each word, we
    quantified surprisal and the informativeness of prosody,
    gestures, and mouth movements. We found that each cue
    modulates the N400: prosodic accentuation, meaningful
    gestures, and informative mouth movements all reduce N400.
    Further, effects of meaningful gestures but not mouth
    informativeness are enhanced by prosodic accentuation,
    whereas effects of mouth are enhanced by meaningful gestures
    but reduced by beat gestures. Compared with L1, L2
    participants benefit less from cues and their interactions, except
    for meaningful gestures and mouth movements. Thus, in real-
    world language comprehension, L2 comprehenders use
    multimodal cues just as L1 speakers albeit to a lesser extent.
  • Zhang, Y., & Yu, C. (2017). How misleading cues influence referential uncertainty in statistical cross-situational learning. In M. LaMendola, & J. Scott (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 41) (pp. 820-833). Boston, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Zhang, Y., Amatuni, A., Cain, E., Wang, X., Crandall, D., & Yu, C. (2021). Human learners integrate visual and linguistic information cross-situational verb learning. In T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (Eds.), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021) (pp. 2267-2273). Vienna: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Learning verbs is challenging because it is difficult to infer the precise meaning of a verb when there are a multitude of relations that one can derive from a single event. To study this verb learning challenge, we used children's egocentric view collected from naturalistic toy-play interaction as learning materials and investigated how visual and linguistic information provided in individual naming moments as well as cross-situational information provided from multiple learning moments can help learners resolve this mapping problem using the Human Simulation Paradigm. Our results show that learners benefit from seeing children's egocentric views compared to third-person observations. In addition, linguistic information can help learners identify the correct verb meaning by eliminating possible meanings that do not belong to the linguistic category. Learners are also able to integrate visual and linguistic information both within and across learning situations to reduce the ambiguity in the space of possible verb meanings.
  • Zhang, Y., Chen, C.-h., & Yu, C. (2019). Mechanisms of cross-situational learning: Behavioral and computational evidence. In Advances in Child Development and Behavior; vol. 56 (pp. 37-63).

    Abstract

    Word learning happens in everyday contexts with many words and many potential referents for those words in view at the same time. It is challenging for young learners to find the correct referent upon hearing an unknown word at the moment. This problem of referential uncertainty has been deemed as the crux of early word learning (Quine, 1960). Recent empirical and computational studies have found support for a statistical solution to the problem termed cross-situational learning. Cross-situational learning allows learners to acquire word meanings across multiple exposures, despite each individual exposure is referentially uncertain. Recent empirical research shows that infants, children and adults rely on cross-situational learning to learn new words (Smith & Yu, 2008; Suanda, Mugwanya, & Namy, 2014; Yu & Smith, 2007). However, researchers have found evidence supporting two very different theoretical accounts of learning mechanisms: Hypothesis Testing (Gleitman, Cassidy, Nappa, Papafragou, & Trueswell, 2005; Markman, 1992) and Associative Learning (Frank, Goodman, & Tenenbaum, 2009; Yu & Smith, 2007). Hypothesis Testing is generally characterized as a form of learning in which a coherent hypothesis regarding a specific word-object mapping is formed often in conceptually constrained ways. The hypothesis will then be either accepted or rejected with additional evidence. However, proponents of the Associative Learning framework often characterize learning as aggregating information over time through implicit associative mechanisms. A learner acquires the meaning of a word when the association between the word and the referent becomes relatively strong. In this chapter, we consider these two psychological theories in the context of cross-situational word-referent learning. By reviewing recent empirical and cognitive modeling studies, our goal is to deepen our understanding of the underlying word learning mechanisms by examining and comparing the two theoretical learning accounts.
  • Zimianiti, E., Dimitrakopoulou, M., & Tsangalidis, A. (2021). Τhematic roles in dementia: The case of psychological verbs. In A. Botinis (Ed.), ExLing 2021: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference of Experimental Linguistics (pp. 269-272). Athens, Greece: ExLing Society.

    Abstract

    This study investigates the difficulty of people with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), mild and moderate Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in the production and comprehension of psychological verbs, as thematic realization may involve both the canonical and non-canonical realization of arguments. More specifically, we aim to examine whether there is a deficit in the mapping of syntactic and semantic representations in psych-predicates regarding Greek-speaking individuals with MCI and AD, and whether the linguistic abilities associated with θ-role assignment decrease as the disease progresses. Moreover, given the decline of cognitive abilities in people with MCI and AD, we explore the effects of components of memory (Semantic, Episodic, and Working Memory) on the assignment of thematic roles in constructions with psychological verbs.
  • De Zubicaray, G., & Fisher, S. E. (Eds.). (2017). Genes, brain and language [Special Issue]. Brain and Language, 172.
  • Zuidema, W., & Fitz, H. (2019). Key issues and future directions: Models of human language and speech processing. In P. Hagoort (Ed.), Human language: From genes and brain to behavior (pp. 353-358). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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