Publications

Displaying 1 - 100 of 158
  • Adank, P., Smits, R., & Van Hout, R. (2003). Modeling perceived vowel height, advancement, and rounding. In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2003) (pp. 647-650). Adelaide: Causal Productions.
  • Alhama, R. G., Siegelman, N., Frost, R., & Armstrong, B. C. (2019). The role of information in visual word recognition: A perceptually-constrained connectionist account. In A. Goel, C. Seifert, & C. Freksa (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2019) (pp. 83-89). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Proficient readers typically fixate near the center of a word, with a slight bias towards word onset. We explore a novel account of this phenomenon based on combining information-theory with visual perceptual constraints in a connectionist model of visual word recognition. This account posits that the amount of information-content available for word identification varies across fixation locations and across languages, thereby explaining the overall fixation location bias in different languages, making the novel prediction that certain words are more readily identified when fixating at an atypical fixation location, and predicting specific cross-linguistic differences. We tested these predictions across several simulations in English and Hebrew, and in a pilot behavioral experiment. Results confirmed that the bias to fixate closer to word onset aligns with maximizing information in the visual signal, that some words are more readily identified at atypical fixation locations, and that these effects vary to some degree across languages.
  • Anastasopoulos, A., Lekakou, M., Quer, J., Zimianiti, E., DeBenedetto, J., & Chiang, D. (2018). Part-of-speech tagging on an endangered language: a parallel Griko-Italian Resource. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2018) (pp. 2529-2539).

    Abstract

    Most work on part-of-speech (POS) tagging is focused on high resource languages, or examines low-resource and active learning settings through simulated studies. We evaluate POS tagging techniques on an actual endangered language, Griko. We present a resource that contains 114 narratives in Griko, along with sentence-level translations in Italian, and provides gold annotations for the test set. Based on a previously collected small corpus, we investigate several traditional methods, as well as methods that take advantage of monolingual data or project cross-lingual POS tags. We show that the combination of a semi-supervised method with cross-lingual transfer is more appropriate for this extremely challenging setting, with the best tagger achieving an accuracy of 72.9%. With an applied active learning scheme, which we use to collect sentence-level annotations over the test set, we achieve improvements of more than 21 percentage points
  • Badimala, P., Mishra, C., Venkataramana, R. K. M., Bukhari, S. S., & Dengel, A. (2019). A Study of Various Text Augmentation Techniques for Relation Classification in Free Text. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods (pp. 360-367). Setúbal, Portugal: SciTePress Digital Library. doi:10.5220/0007311003600367.

    Abstract

    Data augmentation techniques have been widely used in visual recognition tasks as it is easy to generate new
    data by simple and straight forward image transformations. However, when it comes to text data augmen-
    tations, it is difficult to find appropriate transformation techniques which also preserve the contextual and
    grammatical structure of language texts. In this paper, we explore various text data augmentation techniques
    in text space and word embedding space. We study the effect of various augmented datasets on the efficiency
    of different deep learning models for relation classification in text.
  • Bauer, B. L. M. (2003). The adverbial formation in mente in Vulgar and Late Latin: A problem in grammaticalization. In H. Solin, M. Leiwo, & H. Hallo-aho (Eds.), Latin vulgaire, latin tardif VI (pp. 439-457). Hildesheim: Olms.
  • Bentum, M., Ten Bosch, L., Van den Bosch, A., & Ernestus, M. (2019). Listening with great expectations: An investigation of word form anticipations in naturalistic speech. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2019 (pp. 2265-2269). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2019-2741.

    Abstract

    The event-related potential (ERP) component named phonological mismatch negativity (PMN) arises when listeners hear an unexpected word form in a spoken sentence [1]. The PMN is thought to reflect the mismatch between expected and perceived auditory speech input. In this paper, we use the PMN to test a central premise in the predictive coding framework [2], namely that the mismatch between prior expectations and sensory input is an important mechanism of perception. We test this with natural speech materials containing approximately 50,000 word tokens. The corresponding EEG-signal was recorded while participants (n = 48) listened to these materials. Following [3], we quantify the mismatch with two word probability distributions (WPD): a WPD based on preceding context, and a WPD that is additionally updated based on the incoming audio of the current word. We use the between-WPD cross entropy for each word in the utterances and show that a higher cross entropy correlates with a more negative PMN. Our results show that listeners anticipate auditory input while processing each word in naturalistic speech. Moreover, complementing previous research, we show that predictive language processing occurs across the whole probability spectrum.
  • Bentum, M., Ten Bosch, L., Van den Bosch, A., & Ernestus, M. (2019). Quantifying expectation modulation in human speech processing. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2019 (pp. 2270-2274). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2019-2685.

    Abstract

    The mismatch between top-down predicted and bottom-up perceptual input is an important mechanism of perception according to the predictive coding framework (Friston, [1]). In this paper we develop and validate a new information-theoretic measure that quantifies the mismatch between expected and observed auditory input during speech processing. We argue that such a mismatch measure is useful for the study of speech processing. To compute the mismatch measure, we use naturalistic speech materials containing approximately 50,000 word tokens. For each word token we first estimate the prior word probability distribution with the aid of statistical language modelling, and next use automatic speech recognition to update this word probability distribution based on the unfolding speech signal. We validate the mismatch measure with multiple analyses, and show that the auditory-based update improves the probability of the correct word and lowers the uncertainty of the word probability distribution. Based on these results, we argue that it is possible to explicitly estimate the mismatch between predicted and perceived speech input with the cross entropy between word expectations computed before and after an auditory update.
  • Bentz, C., Dediu, D., Verkerk, A., & Jäger, G. (2018). Language family trees reflect geography and demography beyond neutral drift. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, L. McCrohon, A. Ravignani, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG XII) (pp. 38-40). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.006.
  • Bögels, S., Barr, D., Garrod, S., & Kessler, K. (2013). "Are we still talking about the same thing?" MEG reveals perspective-taking in response to pragmatic violations, but not in anticipation. In M. Knauff, N. Pauen, I. Sebanz, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2013) (pp. 215-220). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. Retrieved from http://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2013/papers/0066/index.html.

    Abstract

    The current study investigates whether mentalizing, or taking the perspective of your interlocutor, plays an essential role throughout a conversation or whether it is mostly used in reaction to misunderstandings. This study is the first to use a brain-imaging method, MEG, to answer this question. In a first phase of the experiment, MEG participants interacted "live" with a confederate who set naming precedents for certain pictures. In a later phase, these precedents were sometimes broken by a speaker who named the same picture in a different way. This could be done by the same speaker, who set the precedent, or by a different speaker. Source analysis of MEG data showed that in the 800 ms before the naming, when the picture was already on the screen, episodic memory and language areas were activated, but no mentalizing areas, suggesting that the speaker's naming intentions were not anticipated by the listener on the basis of shared experiences. Mentalizing areas only became activated after the same speaker had broken a precedent, which we interpret as a reaction to the violation of conversational pragmatics.
  • Bone, D., Ramanarayanan, V., Narayanan, S., Hoedemaker, R. S., & Gordon, P. C. (2013). Analyzing eye-voice coordination in rapid automatized naming. In F. Bimbot, C. Cerisara, G. Fougeron, L. Gravier, L. Lamel, F. Pelligrino, & P. Perrier (Eds.), INTERSPEECH-2013: 14thAnnual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 2425-2429). ISCA Archive. Retrieved from http://www.isca-speech.org/archive/interspeech_2013/i13_2425.html.

    Abstract

    Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) is a powerful tool for pre- dicting future reading skill. A person’s ability to quickly name symbols as they scan a table is related to higher-level reading proficiency in adults and is predictive of future literacy gains in children. However, noticeable differences are present in the strategies or patterns within groups having similar task comple- tion times. Thus, a further stratification of RAN dynamics may lead to better characterization and later intervention to support reading skill acquisition. In this work, we analyze the dynamics of the eyes, voice, and the coordination between the two during performance. It is shown that fast performers are more similar to each other than to slow performers in their patterns, but not vice versa. Further insights are provided about the patterns of more proficient subjects. For instance, fast performers tended to exhibit smoother behavior contours, suggesting a more sta- ble perception-production process.
  • Brand, J., Monaghan, P., & Walker, P. (2018). Changing Signs: Testing How Sound-Symbolism Supports Early Word Learning. In C. Kalish, M. Rau, J. Zhu, & T. T. Rogers (Eds.), Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2018) (pp. 1398-1403). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Learning a language involves learning how to map specific forms onto their associated meanings. Such mappings can utilise arbitrariness and non-arbitrariness, yet, our understanding of how these two systems operate at different stages of vocabulary development is still not fully understood. The Sound-Symbolism Bootstrapping Hypothesis (SSBH) proposes that sound-symbolism is essential for word learning to commence, but empirical evidence of exactly how sound-symbolism influences language learning is still sparse. It may be the case that sound-symbolism supports acquisition of categories of meaning, or that it enables acquisition of individualized word meanings. In two Experiments where participants learned form-meaning mappings from either sound-symbolic or arbitrary languages, we demonstrate the changing roles of sound-symbolism and arbitrariness for different vocabulary sizes, showing that sound-symbolism provides an advantage for learning of broad categories, which may then transfer to support learning individual words, whereas an arbitrary language impedes acquisition of categories of sound to meaning.
  • Brehm, L., Jackson, C. N., & Miller, K. L. (2019). Incremental interpretation in the first and second language. In M. Brown, & B. Dailey (Eds.), BUCLD 43: Proceedings of the 43rd annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 109-122). Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Bruggeman, L., & Cutler, A. (2019). The dynamics of lexical activation and competition in bilinguals’ first versus second language. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 20195) (pp. 1342-1346). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

    Abstract

    Speech input causes listeners to activate multiple
    candidate words which then compete with one
    another. These include onset competitors, that share a
    beginning (bumper, butter), but also, counterintuitively,
    rhyme competitors, sharing an ending
    (bumper, jumper). In L1, competition is typically
    stronger for onset than for rhyme. In L2, onset
    competition has been attested but rhyme competition
    has heretofore remained largely unexamined. We
    assessed L1 (Dutch) and L2 (English) word
    recognition by the same late-bilingual individuals. In
    each language, eye gaze was recorded as listeners
    heard sentences and viewed sets of drawings: three
    unrelated, one depicting an onset or rhyme competitor
    of a word in the input. Activation patterns revealed
    substantial onset competition but no significant
    rhyme competition in either L1 or L2. Rhyme
    competition may thus be a “luxury” feature of
    maximally efficient listening, to be abandoned when
    resources are scarcer, as in listening by late
    bilinguals, in either language.
  • Byun, K.-S., De Vos, C., Roberts, S. G., & Levinson, S. C. (2018). Interactive sequences modulate the selection of expressive forms in cross-signing. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, L. McCrohon, A. Ravignani, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG XII) (pp. 67-69). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.012.
  • Casillas, M., & Frank, M. C. (2013). The development of predictive processes in children’s discourse understanding. In M. Knauff, M. Pauen, N. Sebanz, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. (pp. 299-304). Austin,TX: Cognitive Society.

    Abstract

    We investigate children’s online predictive processing as it occurs naturally, in conversation. We showed 1–7 year-olds short videos of improvised conversation between puppets, controlling for available linguistic information through phonetic manipulation. Even one- and two-year-old children made accurate and spontaneous predictions about when a turn-switch would occur: they gazed at the upcoming speaker before they heard a response begin. This predictive skill relies on both lexical and prosodic information together, and is not tied to either type of information alone. We suggest that children integrate prosodic, lexical, and visual information to effectively predict upcoming linguistic material in conversation.
  • Chen, A. (2003). Language dependence in continuation intonation. In M. Solé, D. Recasens, & J. Romero (Eds.), Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS.) (pp. 1069-1072). Rundle Mall, SA, Austr.: Causal Productions Pty.
  • Chen, A. (2003). Reaction time as an indicator to discrete intonational contrasts in English. In Proceedings of Eurospeech 2003 (pp. 97-100).

    Abstract

    This paper reports a perceptual study using a semantically motivated identification task in which we investigated the nature of two pairs of intonational contrasts in English: (1) normal High accent vs. emphatic High accent; (2) early peak alignment vs. late peak alignment. Unlike previous inquiries, the present study employs an on-line method using the Reaction Time measurement, in addition to the measurement of response frequencies. Regarding the peak height continuum, the mean RTs are shortest for within-category identification but longest for across-category identification. As for the peak alignment contrast, no identification boundary emerges and the mean RTs only reflect a difference between peaks aligned with the vowel onset and peaks aligned elsewhere. We conclude that the peak height contrast is discrete but the previously claimed discreteness of the peak alignment contrast is not borne out.
  • Cho, T. (2003). Lexical stress, phrasal accent and prosodic boundaries in the realization of domain-initial stops in Dutch. In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhs 2003) (pp. 2657-2660). Adelaide: Causal Productions.

    Abstract

    This study examines the effects of prosodic boundaries, lexical stress, and phrasal accent on the acoustic realization of stops (/t, d/) in Dutch, with special attention paid to language-specificity in the phonetics-prosody interface. The results obtained from various acoustic measures show systematic phonetic variations in the production of /t d/ as a function of prosodic position, which may be interpreted as being due to prosodicallyconditioned articulatory strengthening. Shorter VOTs were found for the voiceless stop /t/ in prosodically stronger locations (as opposed to longer VOTs in this position in English). The results suggest that prosodically-driven phonetic realization is bounded by a language-specific phonological feature system.
  • Cristia, A., Ganesh, S., Casillas, M., & Ganapathy, S. (2018). Talker diarization in the wild: The case of child-centered daylong audio-recordings. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2018 (pp. 2583-2587). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2018-2078.

    Abstract

    Speaker diarization (answering 'who spoke when') is a widely researched subject within speech technology. Numerous experiments have been run on datasets built from broadcast news, meeting data, and call centers—the task sometimes appears close to being solved. Much less work has begun to tackle the hardest diarization task of all: spontaneous conversations in real-world settings. Such diarization would be particularly useful for studies of language acquisition, where researchers investigate the speech children produce and hear in their daily lives. In this paper, we study audio gathered with a recorder worn by small children as they went about their normal days. As a result, each child was exposed to different acoustic environments with a multitude of background noises and a varying number of adults and peers. The inconsistency of speech and noise within and across samples poses a challenging task for speaker diarization systems, which we tackled via retraining and data augmentation techniques. We further studied sources of structured variation across raw audio files, including the impact of speaker type distribution, proportion of speech from children, and child age on diarization performance. We discuss the extent to which these findings might generalize to other samples of speech in the wild.
  • Cutler, A., Murty, L., & Otake, T. (2003). Rhythmic similarity effects in non-native listening? In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (PCPhS 2003) (pp. 329-332). Adelaide: Causal Productions.

    Abstract

    Listeners rely on native-language rhythm in segmenting speech; in different languages, stress-, syllable- or mora-based rhythm is exploited. This language-specificity affects listening to non- native speech, if native procedures are applied even though inefficient for the non-native language. However, speakers of two languages with similar rhythmic interpretation should segment their own and the other language similarly. This was observed to date only for related languages (English-Dutch; French-Spanish). We now report experiments in which Japanese listeners heard Telugu, a Dravidian language unrelated to Japanese, and Telugu listeners heard Japanese. In both cases detection of target sequences in speech was harder when target boundaries mismatched mora boundaries, exactly the pattern that Japanese listeners earlier exhibited with Japanese and other languages. These results suggest that Telugu and Japanese listeners use similar procedures in segmenting speech, and support the idea that languages fall into rhythmic classes, with aspects of phonological structure affecting listeners' speech segmentation.
  • Cutler, A., Burchfield, A., & Antoniou, M. (2019). A criterial interlocutor tally for successful talker adaptation? In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 20195) (pp. 1485-1489). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

    Abstract

    Part of the remarkable efficiency of listening is
    accommodation to unfamiliar talkers’ specific
    pronunciations by retuning of phonemic intercategory
    boundaries. Such retuning occurs in second
    (L2) as well as first language (L1); however, recent
    research with emigrés revealed successful adaptation
    in the environmental L2 but, unprecedentedly, not in
    L1 despite continuing L1 use. A possible explanation
    involving relative exposure to novel talkers is here
    tested in heritage language users with Mandarin as
    family L1 and English as environmental language. In
    English, exposure to an ambiguous sound in
    disambiguating word contexts prompted the expected
    adjustment of phonemic boundaries in subsequent
    categorisation. However, no adjustment occurred in
    Mandarin, again despite regular use. Participants
    reported highly asymmetric interlocutor counts in the
    two languages. We conclude that successful retuning
    ability requires regular exposure to novel talkers in
    the language in question, a criterion not met for the
    emigrés’ or for these heritage users’ L1.
  • Ip, M. H. K., & Cutler, A. (2018). Asymmetric efficiency of juncture perception in L1 and L2. In K. Klessa, J. Bachan, A. Wagner, M. Karpiński, & D. Śledziński (Eds.), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2018 (pp. 289-296). Baixas, France: ISCA. doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2018-59.

    Abstract

    In two experiments, Mandarin listeners resolved potential syntactic ambiguities in spoken utterances in (a) their native language (L1) and (b) English which they had learned as a second language (L2). A new disambiguation task was used, requiring speeded responses to select the correct meaning for structurally ambiguous sentences. Importantly, the ambiguities used in the study are identical in Mandarin and in English, and production data show that prosodic disambiguation of this type of ambiguity is also realised very similarly in the two languages. The perceptual results here showed however that listeners’ response patterns differed for L1 and L2, although there was a significant increase in similarity between the two response patterns with increasing exposure to the L2. Thus identical ambiguity and comparable disambiguation patterns in L1 and L2 do not lead to immediate application of the appropriate L1 listening strategy to L2; instead, it appears that such a strategy may have to be learned anew for the L2.
  • Ip, M. H. K., & Cutler, A. (2018). Cue equivalence in prosodic entrainment for focus detection. In J. Epps, J. Wolfe, J. Smith, & C. Jones (Eds.), Proceedings of the 17th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (pp. 153-156).

    Abstract

    Using a phoneme detection task, the present series of
    experiments examines whether listeners can entrain to
    different combinations of prosodic cues to predict where focus
    will fall in an utterance. The stimuli were recorded by four
    female native speakers of Australian English who happened to
    have used different prosodic cues to produce sentences with
    prosodic focus: a combination of duration cues, mean and
    maximum F0, F0 range, and longer pre-target interval before
    the focused word onset, only mean F0 cues, only pre-target
    interval, and only duration cues. Results revealed that listeners
    can entrain in almost every condition except for where
    duration was the only reliable cue. Our findings suggest that
    listeners are flexible in the cues they use for focus processing.
  • Cutler, A., Burchfield, L. A., & Antoniou, M. (2018). Factors affecting talker adaptation in a second language. In J. Epps, J. Wolfe, J. Smith, & C. Jones (Eds.), Proceedings of the 17th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (pp. 33-36).

    Abstract

    Listeners adapt rapidly to previously unheard talkers by
    adjusting phoneme categories using lexical knowledge, in a
    process termed lexically-guided perceptual learning. Although
    this is firmly established for listening in the native language
    (L1), perceptual flexibility in second languages (L2) is as yet
    less well understood. We report two experiments examining L1
    and L2 perceptual learning, the first in Mandarin-English late
    bilinguals, the second in Australian learners of Mandarin. Both
    studies showed stronger learning in L1; in L2, however,
    learning appeared for the English-L1 group but not for the
    Mandarin-L1 group. Phonological mapping differences from
    the L1 to the L2 are suggested as the reason for this result.
  • Cutler, A., & Bruggeman, L. (2013). Vocabulary structure and spoken-word recognition: Evidence from French reveals the source of embedding asymmetry. In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH: 14th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 2812-2816).

    Abstract

    Vocabularies contain hundreds of thousands of words built from only a handful of phonemes, so that inevitably longer words tend to contain shorter ones. In many languages (but not all) such embedded words occur more often word-initially than word-finally, and this asymmetry, if present, has farreaching consequences for spoken-word recognition. Prior research had ascribed the asymmetry to suffixing or to effects of stress (in particular, final syllables containing the vowel schwa). Analyses of the standard French vocabulary here reveal an effect of suffixing, as predicted by this account, and further analyses of an artificial variety of French reveal that extensive final schwa has an independent and additive effect in promoting the embedding asymmetry.
  • Declerck, T., Cunningham, H., Saggion, H., Kuper, J., Reidsma, D., & Wittenburg, P. (2003). MUMIS - Advanced information extraction for multimedia indexing and searching digital media - Processing for multimedia interactive services. 4th European Workshop on Image Analysis for Multimedia Interactive Services (WIAMIS), 553-556.
  • Delgado, T., Ravignani, A., Verhoef, T., Thompson, B., Grossi, T., & Kirby, S. (2018). Cultural transmission of melodic and rhythmic universals: Four experiments and a model. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, L. McCrohon, A. Ravignani, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG XII) (pp. 89-91). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.019.
  • Dideriksen, C., Fusaroli, R., Tylén, K., Dingemanse, M., & Christiansen, M. H. (2019). Contextualizing Conversational Strategies: Backchannel, Repair and Linguistic Alignment in Spontaneous and Task-Oriented Conversations. In A. K. Goel, C. M. Seifert, & C. Freksa (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2019) (pp. 261-267). Montreal, QB: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Do interlocutors adjust their conversational strategies to the specific contextual demands of a given situation? Prior studies have yielded conflicting results, making it unclear how strategies vary with demands. We combine insights from qualitative and quantitative approaches in a within-participant experimental design involving two different contexts: spontaneously occurring conversations (SOC) and task-oriented conversations (TOC). We systematically assess backchanneling, other-repair and linguistic alignment. We find that SOC exhibit a higher number of backchannels, a reduced and more generic repair format and higher rates of lexical and syntactic alignment. TOC are characterized by a high number of specific repairs and a lower rate of lexical and syntactic alignment. However, when alignment occurs, more linguistic forms are aligned. The findings show that conversational strategies adapt to specific contextual demands.
  • Dieuleveut, A., Van Dooren, A., Cournane, A., & Hacquard, V. (2019). Acquiring the force of modals: Sig you guess what sig means? In M. Brown, & B. Dailey (Eds.), BUCLD 43: Proceedings of the 43rd annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 189-202). Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Dolscheid, S., Graver, C., & Casasanto, D. (2013). Spatial congruity effects reveal metaphors, not markedness. In M. Knauff, M. Pauen, N. Sebanz, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2013) (pp. 2213-2218). Austin,TX: Cognitive Science Society. Retrieved from http://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2013/papers/0405/index.html.

    Abstract

    Spatial congruity effects have often been interpreted as evidence for metaphorical thinking, but an alternative markedness-based account challenges this view. In two experiments, we directly compared metaphor and markedness explanations for spatial congruity effects, using musical pitch as a testbed. English speakers who talk about pitch in terms of spatial height were tested in speeded space-pitch compatibility tasks. To determine whether space-pitch congruency effects could be elicited by any marked spatial continuum, participants were asked to classify high- and low-frequency pitches as 'high' and 'low' or as 'front' and 'back' (both pairs of terms constitute cases of marked continuums). We found congruency effects in high/low conditions but not in front/back conditions, indicating that markedness is not sufficient to account for congruity effects (Experiment 1). A second experiment showed that congruency effects were specific to spatial words that cued a vertical schema (tall/short), and that congruity effects were not an artifact of polysemy (e.g., 'high' referring both to space and pitch). Together, these results suggest that congruency effects reveal metaphorical uses of spatial schemas, not markedness effects.
  • Drude, S. (2003). Advanced glossing: A language documentation format and its implementation with Shoebox. In Proceedings of the 2002 International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2002). Paris: ELRA.

    Abstract

    This paper presents Advanced Glossing, a proposal for a general glossing format designed for language documentation, and a specific setup for the Shoebox-program that implements Advanced Glossing to a large extent. Advanced Glossing (AG) goes beyond the traditional Interlinear Morphemic Translation, keeping syntactic and morphological information apart from each other in separate glossing tables. AG provides specific lines for different kinds of annotation – phonetic, phonological, orthographical, prosodic, categorial, structural, relational, and semantic, and it allows for gradual and successive, incomplete, and partial filling in case that some information may be irrelevant, unknown or uncertain. The implementation of AG in Shoebox sets up several databases. Each documented text is represented as a file of syntactic glossings. The morphological glossings are kept in a separate database. As an additional feature interaction with lexical databases is possible. The implementation makes use of the interlinearizing automatism provided by Shoebox, thus obtaining the table format for the alignment of lines in cells, and for semi-automatic filling-in of information in glossing tables which has been extracted from databases
  • Drude, S. (2003). Digitizing and annotating texts and field recordings in the Awetí project. In Proceedings of the EMELD Language Digitization Project Conference 2003. Workshop on Digitizing and Annotating Text and Field Recordings, LSA Institute, Michigan State University, July 11th -13th.

    Abstract

    Digitizing and annotating texts and field recordings Given that several initiatives worldwide currently explore the new field of documentation of endangered languages, the E-MELD project proposes to survey and unite procedures, techniques and results in order to achieve its main goal, ''the formulation and promulgation of best practice in linguistic markup of texts and lexicons''. In this context, this year's workshop deals with the processing of recorded texts. I assume the most valuable contribution I could make to the workshop is to show the procedures and methods used in the Awetí Language Documentation Project. The procedures applied in the Awetí Project are not necessarily representative of all the projects in the DOBES program, and they may very well fall short in several respects of being best practice, but I hope they might provide a good and concrete starting point for comparison, criticism and further discussion. The procedures to be exposed include: * taping with digital devices, * digitizing (preliminarily in the field, later definitely by the TIDEL-team at the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen), * segmenting and transcribing, using the transcriber computer program, * translating (on paper, or while transcribing), * adding more specific annotation, using the Shoebox program, * converting the annotation to the ELAN-format developed by the TIDEL-team, and doing annotation with ELAN. Focus will be on the different types of annotation. Especially, I will present, justify and discuss Advanced Glossing, a text annotation format developed by H.-H. Lieb and myself designed for language documentation. It will be shown how Advanced Glossing can be applied using the Shoebox program. The Shoebox setup used in the Awetí Project will be shown in greater detail, including lexical databases and semi-automatic interaction between different database types (jumping, interlinearization). ( Freie Universität Berlin and Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, with funding from the Volkswagen Foundation.)
  • Duarte, R., Uhlmann, M., Van den Broek, D., Fitz, H., Petersson, K. M., & Morrison, A. (2018). Encoding symbolic sequences with spiking neural reservoirs. In Proceedings of the 2018 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN). doi:10.1109/IJCNN.2018.8489114.

    Abstract

    Biologically inspired spiking networks are an important tool to study the nature of computation and cognition in neural systems. In this work, we investigate the representational capacity of spiking networks engaged in an identity mapping task. We compare two schemes for encoding symbolic input, one in which input is injected as a direct current and one where input is delivered as a spatio-temporal spike pattern. We test the ability of networks to discriminate their input as a function of the number of distinct input symbols. We also compare performance using either membrane potentials or filtered spike trains as state variable. Furthermore, we investigate how the circuit behavior depends on the balance between excitation and inhibition, and the degree of synchrony and regularity in its internal dynamics. Finally, we compare different linear methods of decoding population activity onto desired target labels. Overall, our results suggest that even this simple mapping task is strongly influenced by design choices on input encoding, state-variables, circuit characteristics and decoding methods, and these factors can interact in complex ways. This work highlights the importance of constraining computational network models of behavior by available neurobiological evidence.
  • Duffield, N., & Matsuo, A. (2003). Factoring out the parallelism effect in ellipsis: An interactional approach? In J. Chilar, A. Franklin, D. Keizer, & I. Kimbara (Eds.), Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS) (pp. 591-603). Chicago: Chicago Linguistics Society.

    Abstract

    Traditionally, there have been three standard assumptions made about the Parallelism Effect on VP-ellipsis, namely that the effect is categorical, that it applies asymmetrically and that it is uniquely due to syntactic factors. Based on the results of a series of experiments involving online and offline tasks, it will be argued that the Parallelism Effect is instead noncategorical and interactional. The factors investigated include construction type, conceptual and morpho-syntactic recoverability, finiteness and anaphor type (to test VP-anaphora). The results show that parallelism is gradient rather than categorical, effects both VP-ellipsis and anaphora, and is influenced by both structural and non-structural factors.
  • Durco, M., & Windhouwer, M. (2013). Semantic Mapping in CLARIN Component Metadata. In Proceedings of MTSR 2013, the 7th Metadata and Semantics Research Conference (pp. 163-168). New York: Springer.

    Abstract

    In recent years, large scale initiatives like CLARIN set out to overcome the notorious heterogeneity of metadata formats in the domain of language resource. The CLARIN Component Metadata Infrastructure established means for flexible resouce descriptions for the domain of language resources. The Data Category Registry ISOcat and the accompanying Relation Registry foster semantic interoperability within the growing heterogeneous collection of metadata records. This paper describes the CMD Infrastructure focusing on the facilities for semantic mapping, and gives also an overview of the current status in the joint component metadata domain.
  • Eijk, L., Ernestus, M., & Schriefers, H. (2019). Alignment of pitch and articulation rate. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 20195) (pp. 2690-2694). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

    Abstract

    Previous studies have shown that speakers align their speech to each other at multiple linguistic levels. This study investigates whether alignment is mostly the result of priming from the immediately preceding
    speech materials, focussing on pitch and articulation rate (AR). Native Dutch speakers completed sentences, first by themselves (pre-test), then in alternation with Confederate 1 (Round 1), with Confederate 2 (Round 2), with Confederate 1 again
    (Round 3), and lastly by themselves again (post-test). Results indicate that participants aligned to the confederates and that this alignment lasted during the post-test. The confederates’ directly preceding sentences were not good predictors for the participants’ pitch and AR. Overall, the results indicate that alignment is more of a global effect than a local priming effect.
  • Ergin, R., Senghas, A., Jackendoff, R., & Gleitman, L. (2018). Structural cues for symmetry, asymmetry, and non-symmetry in Central Taurus Sign Language. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, L. McCrohon, A. Ravignani, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG XII) (pp. 104-106). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.025.
  • Felker, E. R., Ernestus, M., & Broersma, M. (2019). Evaluating dictation task measures for the study of speech perception. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2019) (pp. 383-387). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

    Abstract

    This paper shows that the dictation task, a well-
    known testing instrument in language education, has
    untapped potential as a research tool for studying
    speech perception. We describe how transcriptions
    can be scored on measures of lexical, orthographic,
    phonological, and semantic similarity to target
    phrases to provide comprehensive information about
    accuracy at different processing levels. The former
    three measures are automatically extractable,
    increasing objectivity, and the middle two are
    gradient, providing finer-grained information than
    traditionally used. We evaluate the measures in an
    English dictation task featuring phonetically reduced
    continuous speech. Whereas the lexical and
    orthographic measures emphasize listeners’ word
    identification difficulties, the phonological measure
    demonstrates that listeners can often still recover
    phonological features, and the semantic measure
    captures their ability to get the gist of the utterances.
    Correlational analyses and a discussion of practical
    and theoretical considerations show that combining
    multiple measures improves the dictation task’s
    utility as a research tool.
  • Felker, E. R., Ernestus, M., & Broersma, M. (2019). Lexically guided perceptual learning of a vowel shift in an interactive L2 listening context. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2019 (pp. 3123-3127). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2019-1414.

    Abstract

    Lexically guided perceptual learning has traditionally been studied with ambiguous consonant sounds to which native listeners are exposed in a purely receptive listening context. To extend previous research, we investigate whether lexically guided learning applies to a vowel shift encountered by non-native listeners in an interactive dialogue. Dutch participants played a two-player game in English in either a control condition, which contained no evidence for a vowel shift, or a lexically constraining condition, in which onscreen lexical information required them to re-interpret their interlocutor’s /ɪ/ pronunciations as representing /ε/. A phonetic categorization pre-test and post-test were used to assess whether the game shifted listeners’ phonemic boundaries such that more of the /ε/-/ɪ/ continuum came to be perceived as /ε/. Both listener groups showed an overall post-test shift toward /ɪ/, suggesting that vowel perception may be sensitive to directional biases related to properties of the speaker’s vowel space. Importantly, listeners in the lexically constraining condition made relatively more post-test /ε/ responses than the control group, thereby exhibiting an effect of lexically guided adaptation. The results thus demonstrate that non-native listeners can adjust their phonemic boundaries on the basis of lexical information to accommodate a vowel shift learned in interactive conversation.
  • Fisher, S. E., & Tilot, A. K. (Eds.). (2019). Bridging senses: Novel insights from synaesthesia [Special Issue]. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences, 374.
  • Flecken, M., & Gerwien, J. (2013). Grammatical aspect modulates event duration estimations: findings from Dutch. In M. Knauff, M. Pauen, N. Sebanz, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2013) (pp. 2309-2314). Austin,TX: Cognitive Science Society.
  • Frost, R. L. A., Isbilen, E. S., Christiansen, M. H., & Monaghan, P. (2019). Testing the limits of non-adjacent dependency learning: Statistical segmentation and generalisation across domains. In A. K. Goel, C. M. Seifert, & C. Freksa (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2019) (pp. 1787-1793). Montreal, QB: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Achieving linguistic proficiency requires identifying words from speech, and discovering the constraints that govern the way those words are used. In a recent study of non-adjacent dependency learning, Frost and Monaghan (2016) demonstrated that learners may perform these tasks together, using similar statistical processes - contrary to prior suggestions. However, in their study, non-adjacent dependencies were marked by phonological cues (plosive-continuant-plosive structure), which may have influenced learning. Here, we test the necessity of these cues by comparing learning across three conditions; fixed phonology, which contains these cues, varied phonology, which omits them, and shapes, which uses visual shape sequences to assess the generality of statistical processing for these tasks. Participants segmented the sequences and generalized the structure in both auditory conditions, but learning was best when phonological cues were present. Learning was around chance on both tasks for the visual shapes group, indicating statistical processing may critically differ across domains.
  • Galke, L., Gerstenkorn, G., & Scherp, A. (2018). A case study of closed-domain response suggestion with limited training data. In M. Elloumi, M. Granitzer, A. Hameurlain, C. Seifert, B. Stein, A. Min Tjoa, & R. Wagner (Eds.), Database and Expert Systems Applications: DEXA 2018 International Workshops, BDMICS, BIOKDD, and TIR, Regensburg, Germany, September 3–6, 2018, Proceedings (pp. 218-229). Cham, Switzerland: Springer.

    Abstract

    We analyze the problem of response suggestion in a closed domain along a real-world scenario of a digital library. We present a text-processing pipeline to generate question-answer pairs from chat transcripts. On this limited amount of training data, we compare retrieval-based, conditioned-generation, and dedicated representation learning approaches for response suggestion. Our results show that retrieval-based methods that strive to find similar, known contexts are preferable over parametric approaches from the conditioned-generation family, when the training data is limited. We, however, identify a specific representation learning approach that is competitive to the retrieval-based approaches despite the training data limitation.
  • Galke, L., Vagliano, I., & Scherp, A. (2019). Can graph neural networks go „online“? An analysis of pretraining and inference. In Proceedings of the Representation Learning on Graphs and Manifolds: ICLR2019 Workshop.

    Abstract

    Large-scale graph data in real-world applications is often not static but dynamic,
    i. e., new nodes and edges appear over time. Current graph convolution approaches
    are promising, especially, when all the graph’s nodes and edges are available dur-
    ing training. When unseen nodes and edges are inserted after training, it is not
    yet evaluated whether up-training or re-training from scratch is preferable. We
    construct an experimental setup, in which we insert previously unseen nodes and
    edges after training and conduct a limited amount of inference epochs. In this
    setup, we compare adapting pretrained graph neural networks against retraining
    from scratch. Our results show that pretrained models yield high accuracy scores
    on the unseen nodes and that pretraining is preferable over retraining from scratch.
    Our experiments represent a first step to evaluate and develop truly online variants
    of graph neural networks.
  • Galke, L., Melnychuk, T., Seidlmayer, E., Trog, S., Foerstner, K., Schultz, C., & Tochtermann, K. (2019). Inductive learning of concept representations from library-scale bibliographic corpora. In K. David, K. Geihs, M. Lange, & G. Stumme (Eds.), Informatik 2019: 50 Jahre Gesellschaft für Informatik - Informatik für Gesellschaft (pp. 219-232). Bonn: Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. doi:10.18420/inf2019_26.
  • Galke, L., Mai, F., & Vagliano, I. (2018). Multi-modal adversarial autoencoders for recommendations of citations and subject labels. In T. Mitrovic, J. Zhang, L. Chen, & D. Chin (Eds.), UMAP '18: Proceedings of the 26th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (pp. 197-205). New York: ACM. doi:10.1145/3209219.3209236.

    Abstract

    We present multi-modal adversarial autoencoders for recommendation and evaluate them on two different tasks: citation recommendation and subject label recommendation. We analyze the effects of adversarial regularization, sparsity, and different input modalities. By conducting 408 experiments, we show that adversarial regularization consistently improves the performance of autoencoders for recommendation. We demonstrate, however, that the two tasks differ in the semantics of item co-occurrence in the sense that item co-occurrence resembles relatedness in case of citations, yet implies diversity in case of subject labels. Our results reveal that supplying the partial item set as input is only helpful, when item co-occurrence resembles relatedness. When facing a new recommendation task it is therefore crucial to consider the semantics of item co-occurrence for the choice of an appropriate model.
  • Gebre, B. G., Wittenburg, P., & Heskes, T. (2013). Automatic sign language identification. In Proceeding of the 20th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) (pp. 2626-2630).

    Abstract

    We propose a Random-Forest based sign language identification system. The system uses low-level visual features and is based on the hypothesis that sign languages have varying distributions of phonemes (hand-shapes, locations and movements). We evaluated the system on two sign languages -- British SL and Greek SL, both taken from a publicly available corpus, called Dicta Sign Corpus. Achieved average F1 scores are about 95% - indicating that sign languages can be identified with high accuracy using only low-level visual features.
  • Gebre, B. G., Wittenburg, P., & Heskes, T. (2013). Automatic signer diarization - the mover is the signer approach. In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW), 2013 IEEE Conference on (pp. 283-287). doi:10.1109/CVPRW.2013.49.

    Abstract

    We present a vision-based method for signer diarization -- the task of automatically determining "who signed when?" in a video. This task has similar motivations and applications as speaker diarization but has received little attention in the literature. In this paper, we motivate the problem and propose a method for solving it. The method is based on the hypothesis that signers make more movements than their interlocutors. Experiments on four videos (a total of 1.4 hours and each consisting of two signers) show the applicability of the method. The best diarization error rate (DER) obtained is 0.16.
  • Gebre, B. G., Zampieri, M., Wittenburg, P., & Heskes, T. (2013). Improving Native Language Identification with TF-IDF weighting. In Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (pp. 216-223).

    Abstract

    This paper presents a Native Language Identification (NLI) system based on TF-IDF weighting schemes and using linear classifiers - support vector machines, logistic regressions and perceptrons. The system was one of the participants of the 2013 NLI Shared Task in the closed-training track, achieving 0.814 overall accuracy for a set of 11 native languages. This accuracy was only 2.2 percentage points lower than the winner's performance. Furthermore, with subsequent evaluations using 10-fold cross-validation (as given by the organizers) on the combined training and development data, the best average accuracy obtained is 0.8455 and the features that contributed to this accuracy are the TF-IDF of the combined unigrams and bigrams of words.
  • Gebre, B. G., Wittenburg, P., & Heskes, T. (2013). The gesturer is the speaker. In Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2013) (pp. 3751-3755).

    Abstract

    We present and solve the speaker diarization problem in a novel way. We hypothesize that the gesturer is the speaker and that identifying the gesturer can be taken as identifying the active speaker. We provide evidence in support of the hypothesis from gesture literature and audio-visual synchrony studies. We also present a vision-only diarization algorithm that relies on gestures (i.e. upper body movements). Experiments carried out on 8.9 hours of a publicly available dataset (the AMI meeting data) show that diarization error rates as low as 15% can be achieved.
  • Gijssels, T., Bottini, R., Rueschemeyer, S.-A., & Casasanto, D. (2013). Space and time in the parietal cortex: fMRI Evidence for a meural asymmetry. In M. Knauff, M. Pauen, N. Sebanz, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2013) (pp. 495-500). Austin,TX: Cognitive Science Society. Retrieved from http://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2013/papers/0113/index.html.

    Abstract

    How are space and time related in the brain? This study contrasts two proposals that make different predictions about the interaction between spatial and temporal magnitudes. Whereas ATOM implies that space and time are symmetrically related, Metaphor Theory claims they are asymmetrically related. Here we investigated whether space and time activate the same neural structures in the inferior parietal cortex (IPC) and whether the activation is symmetric or asymmetric across domains. We measured participants’ neural activity while they made temporal and spatial judgments on the same visual stimuli. The behavioral results replicated earlier observations of a space-time asymmetry: Temporal judgments were more strongly influenced by irrelevant spatial information than vice versa. The BOLD fMRI data indicated that space and time activated overlapping clusters in the IPC and that, consistent with Metaphor Theory, this activation was asymmetric: The shared region of IPC was activated more strongly during temporal judgments than during spatial judgments. We consider three possible interpretations of this neural asymmetry, based on 3 possible functions of IPC.
  • Goldrick, M., Brehm, L., Pyeong Whan, C., & Smolensky, P. (2019). Transient blend states and discrete agreement-driven errors in sentence production. In G. J. Snover, M. Nelson, B. O'Connor, & J. Pater (Eds.), Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL 2019) (pp. 375-376). doi:10.7275/n0b2-5305.
  • Gussenhoven, C., & Zhou, W. (2013). Revisiting pitch slope and height effects on perceived duration. In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2013: 14th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 1365-1369).

    Abstract

    The shape of pitch contours has been shown to have an effect on the perceived duration of vowels. For instance, vowels with high level pitch and vowels with falling contours sound longer than vowels with low level pitch. Depending on whether the
    comparison is between level pitches or between level and dynamic contours, these findings have been interpreted in two ways. For inter-level comparisons, where the duration results are the reverse of production results, a hypercorrection strategy in production has been proposed [1]. By contrast, for comparisons between level pitches and dynamic contours, the
    longer production data for dynamic contours have been held responsible. We report an experiment with Dutch and Chinese listeners which aimed to show that production data and perception data are each other’s opposites for high, low, falling and rising contours. We explain the results, which are consistent with earlier findings, in terms of the compensatory listening strategy of [2], arguing that the perception effects are due to a perceptual compensation of articulatory strategies and
    constraints, rather than that differences in production compensate for psycho-acoustic perception effects.
  • Hahn, L. E., Ten Buuren, M., De Nijs, M., Snijders, T. M., & Fikkert, P. (2019). Acquiring novel words in a second language through mutual play with child songs - The Noplica Energy Center. In L. Nijs, H. Van Regenmortel, & C. Arculus (Eds.), MERYC19 Counterpoints of the senses: Bodily experiences in musical learning (pp. 78-87). Ghent, Belgium: EuNet MERYC 2019.

    Abstract

    Child songs are a great source for linguistic learning. Here we explore whether children can acquire novel words in a second language by playing a game featuring child songs in a playhouse. We present data from three studies that serve as scientific proof for the functionality of one game of the playhouse: the Energy Center. For this game, three hand-bikes were mounted on a panel. When children start moving the hand-bikes, child songs start playing simultaneously. Once the children produce enough energy with the hand-bikes, the songs are additionally accompanied with the sounds of musical instruments. In our studies, children executed a picture-selection task to evaluate whether they acquired new vocabulary from the songs presented during the game. Two of our studies were run in the field, one at a Dutch and one at an Indian pre-school. The third study features data from a more controlled laboratory setting. Our results partly confirm that the Energy Center is a successful means to support vocabulary acquisition in a second language. More research with larger sample sizes and longer access to the Energy Center is needed to evaluate the overall functionality of the game. Based on informal observations at our test sites, however, we are certain that children do pick up linguistic content from the songs during play, as many of the children repeat words and phrases from songs they heard. We will pick up upon these promising observations during future studies
  • Heilbron, M., Ehinger, B., Hagoort, P., & De Lange, F. P. (2019). Tracking naturalistic linguistic predictions with deep neural language models. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience (pp. 424-427). doi:10.32470/CCN.2019.1096-0.

    Abstract

    Prediction in language has traditionally been studied using
    simple designs in which neural responses to expected
    and unexpected words are compared in a categorical
    fashion. However, these designs have been contested
    as being ‘prediction encouraging’, potentially exaggerating
    the importance of prediction in language understanding.
    A few recent studies have begun to address
    these worries by using model-based approaches to probe
    the effects of linguistic predictability in naturalistic stimuli
    (e.g. continuous narrative). However, these studies
    so far only looked at very local forms of prediction, using
    models that take no more than the prior two words into
    account when computing a word’s predictability. Here,
    we extend this approach using a state-of-the-art neural
    language model that can take roughly 500 times longer
    linguistic contexts into account. Predictability estimates
    fromthe neural network offer amuch better fit to EEG data
    from subjects listening to naturalistic narrative than simpler
    models, and reveal strong surprise responses akin to
    the P200 and N400. These results show that predictability
    effects in language are not a side-effect of simple designs,
    and demonstrate the practical use of recent advances
    in AI for the cognitive neuroscience of language.
  • Holler, J., Schubotz, L., Kelly, S., Schuetze, M., Hagoort, P., & Ozyurek, A. (2013). Here's not looking at you, kid! Unaddressed recipients benefit from co-speech gestures when speech processing suffers. In M. Knauff, M. Pauen, I. Sebanz, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2013) (pp. 2560-2565). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. Retrieved from http://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2013/papers/0463/index.html.

    Abstract

    In human face-to-face communication, language comprehension is a multi-modal, situated activity. However, little is known about how we combine information from these different modalities, and how perceived communicative intentions, often signaled through visual signals, such as eye
    gaze, may influence this processing. We address this question by simulating a triadic communication context in which a
    speaker alternated her gaze between two different recipients. Participants thus viewed speech-only or speech+gesture
    object-related utterances when being addressed (direct gaze) or unaddressed (averted gaze). Two object images followed
    each message and participants’ task was to choose the object that matched the message. Unaddressed recipients responded significantly slower than addressees for speech-only
    utterances. However, perceiving the same speech accompanied by gestures sped them up to a level identical to
    that of addressees. That is, when speech processing suffers due to not being addressed, gesture processing remains intact and enhances the comprehension of a speaker’s message
  • Hopman, E., Thompson, B., Austerweil, J., & Lupyan, G. (2018). Predictors of L2 word learning accuracy: A big data investigation. In C. Kalish, M. Rau, J. Zhu, & T. T. Rogers (Eds.), Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2018) (pp. 513-518). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    What makes some words harder to learn than others in a second language? Although some robust factors have been identified based on small scale experimental studies, many relevant factors are difficult to study in such experiments due to the amount of data necessary to test them. Here, we investigate what factors affect the ease of learning of a word in a second language using a large data set of users learning English as a second language through the Duolingo mobile app. In a regression analysis, we test and confirm the well-studied effect of cognate status on word learning accuracy. Furthermore, we find significant effects for both cross-linguistic semantic alignment and English semantic density, two novel predictors derived from large scale distributional models of lexical semantics. Finally, we provide data on several other psycholinguistically plausible word level predictors. We conclude with a discussion of the limits, benefits and future research potential of using big data for investigating second language learning.
  • Huettig, F., Kolinsky, R., & Lachmann, T. (Eds.). (2018). The effects of literacy on cognition and brain functioning [Special Issue]. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 33(3).
  • Irvine, L., Roberts, S. G., & Kirby, S. (2013). A robustness approach to theory building: A case study of language evolution. In M. Knauff, M. Pauen, N. Sebanz, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2013) (pp. 2614-2619). Retrieved from http://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2013/papers/0472/index.html.

    Abstract

    Models of cognitive processes often include simplifications, idealisations, and fictionalisations, so how should we learn about cognitive processes from such models? Particularly in cognitive science, when many features of the target system are unknown, it is not always clear which simplifications, idealisations, and so on, are appropriate for a research question, and which are highly misleading. Here we use a case-study from studies of language evolution, and ideas from philosophy of science, to illustrate a robustness approach to learning from models. Robust properties are those that arise across a range of models, simulations and experiments, and can be used to identify key causal structures in the models, and the phenomenon, under investigation. For example, in studies of language evolution, the emergence of compositional structure is a robust property across models, simulations and experiments of cultural transmission, but only under pressures for learnability and expressivity. This arguably illustrates the principles underlying real cases of language evolution. We provide an outline of the robustness approach, including its limitations, and suggest that this methodology can be productively used throughout cognitive science. Perhaps of most importance, it suggests that different modelling frameworks should be used as tools to identify the abstract properties of a system, rather than being definitive expressions of theories.
  • Isbilen, E., Frost, R. L. A., Monaghan, P., & Christiansen, M. (2018). Bridging artificial and natural language learning: Comparing processing- and reflection-based measures of learning. In C. Kalish, M. Rau, J. Zhu, & T. T. Rogers (Eds.), Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2018) (pp. 1856-1861). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    A common assumption in the cognitive sciences is that artificial and natural language learning rely on shared mechanisms. However, attempts to bridge the two have yielded ambiguous results. We suggest that an empirical disconnect between the computations employed during learning and the methods employed at test may explain these mixed results. Further, we propose statistically-based chunking as a potential computational link between artificial and natural language learning. We compare the acquisition of non-adjacent dependencies to that of natural language structure using two types of tasks: reflection-based 2AFC measures, and processing-based recall measures, the latter being more computationally analogous to the processes used during language acquisition. Our results demonstrate that task-type significantly influences the correlations observed between artificial and natural language acquisition, with reflection-based and processing-based measures correlating within – but not across – task-type. These findings have fundamental implications for artificial-to-natural language comparisons, both methodologically and theoretically.
  • Janse, E. (2003). Word perception in natural-fast and artificially time-compressed speech. In M. SolÉ, D. Recasens, & J. Romero (Eds.), Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences (pp. 3001-3004).
  • Janssen, R., Moisik, S. R., & Dediu, D. (2018). Agent model reveals the influence of vocal tract anatomy on speech during ontogeny and glossogeny. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, L. McCrohon, A. Ravignani, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG XII) (pp. 171-174). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.042.
  • Johnson, E. K. (2003). Speaker intent influences infants' segmentation of potentially ambiguous utterances. In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (PCPhS 2003) (pp. 1995-1998). Adelaide: Causal Productions.
  • De Jong, N. H., & Bosker, H. R. (2013). Choosing a threshold for silent pauses to measure second language fluency. In R. Eklund (Ed.), Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech (DiSS) (pp. 17-20).

    Abstract

    Second language (L2) research often involves analyses of acoustic measures of fluency. The studies investigating fluency, however, have been difficult to compare because the measures of fluency that were used differed widely. One of the differences between studies concerns the lower cut-off point for silent pauses, which has been set anywhere between 100 ms and 1000 ms. The goal of this paper is to find an optimal cut-off point. We calculate acoustic measures of fluency using different pause thresholds and then relate these measures to a measure of L2 proficiency and to ratings on fluency.
  • Joo, H., Jang, J., Kim, S., Cho, T., & Cutler, A. (2019). Prosodic structural effects on coarticulatory vowel nasalization in Australian English in comparison to American English. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 20195) (pp. 835-839). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

    Abstract

    This study investigates effects of prosodic factors (prominence, boundary) on coarticulatory Vnasalization in Australian English (AusE) in CVN and NVC in comparison to those in American English
    (AmE). As in AmE, prominence was found to
    lengthen N, but to reduce V-nasalization, enhancing N’s nasality and V’s orality, respectively (paradigmatic contrast enhancement). But the prominence effect in CVN was more robust than that in AmE. Again similar to findings in AmE, boundary
    induced a reduction of N-duration and V-nasalization phrase-initially (syntagmatic contrast enhancement), and increased the nasality of both C and V phrasefinally.
    But AusE showed some differences in terms
    of the magnitude of V nasalization and N duration. The results suggest that the linguistic contrast enhancements underlie prosodic-structure modulation of coarticulatory V-nasalization in
    comparable ways across dialects, while the fine phonetic detail indicates that the phonetics-prosody interplay is internalized in the individual dialect’s phonetic grammar.
  • Kanero, J., Franko, I., Oranç, C., Uluşahin, O., Koskulu, S., Adigüzel, Z., Küntay, A. C., & Göksun, T. (2018). Who can benefit from robots? Effects of individual differences in robot-assisted language learning. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL-EpiRob) (pp. 212-217). Piscataway, NJ, USA: IEEE.

    Abstract

    It has been suggested that some individuals may benefit more from social robots than do others. Using second
    language (L2) as an example, the present study examined how individual differences in attitudes toward robots and personality
    traits may be related to learning outcomes. Preliminary results with 24 Turkish-speaking adults suggest that negative attitudes
    toward robots, more specifically thoughts and anxiety about the negative social impact that robots may have on the society,
    predicted how well adults learned L2 words from a social robot. The possible implications of the findings as well as future directions are also discussed
  • Kempen, G., & Harbusch, K. (2003). A corpus study into word order variation in German subordinate clauses: Animacy affects linearization independently of function assignment. In Proceedings of AMLaP 2003 (pp. 153-154). Glasgow: Glasgow University.
  • Khetarpal, N., Neveu, G., Majid, A., Michael, L., & Regier, T. (2013). Spatial terms across languages support near-optimal communication: Evidence from Peruvian Amazonia, and computational analyses. In M. Knauff, M. Pauen, N. Sebanz, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 764-769). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. Retrieved from http://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2013/papers/0158/index.html.

    Abstract

    Why do languages have the categories they do? It has been argued that spatial terms in the world’s languages reflect categories that support highly informative communication, and that this accounts for the spatial categories found across languages. However, this proposal has been tested against only nine languages, and in a limited fashion. Here, we consider two new languages: Maijɨki, an under-documented language of Peruvian Amazonia, and English. We analyze spatial data from these two new languages and the original nine, using thorough and theoretically targeted computational tests. The results support the hypothesis that spatial terms across dissimilar languages enable near-optimally informative communication, over an influential competing hypothesis
  • Klein, W., & Franceschini, R. (Eds.). (2003). Einfache Sprache [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 131.
  • Klein, W. (2013). L'effettivo declino e la crescita potenziale della lessicografia tedesca. In N. Maraschio, D. De Martiono, & G. Stanchina (Eds.), L'italiano dei vocabolari: Atti di La piazza delle lingue 2012 (pp. 11-20). Firenze: Accademia della Crusca.
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (1984). Textverständlichkeit - Textverstehen [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (55).
  • Kuzla, C. (2003). Prosodically-conditioned variation in the realization of domain-final stops and voicing assimilation of domain-initial fricatives in German. In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2003) (pp. 2829-2832). Adelaide: Causal Productions.
  • De Lange, F. P., Hagoort, P., & Toni, I. (2003). Differential fronto-parietal contributions to visual and motor imagery. NeuroImage, 19(2), e2094-e2095.

    Abstract

    Mental imagery is a cognitive process crucial to human reasoning. Numerous studies have characterized specific
    instances of this cognitive ability, as evoked by visual imagery (VI) or motor imagery (MI) tasks. However, it
    remains unclear which neural resources are shared between VI and MI, and which are exclusively related to MI.
    To address this issue, we have used fMRI to measure human brain activity during performance of VI and MI
    tasks. Crucially, we have modulated the imagery process by manipulating the degree of mental rotation necessary
    to solve the tasks. We focused our analysis on changes in neural signal as a function of the degree of mental
    rotation in each task.
  • Lattenkamp, E. Z., Vernes, S. C., & Wiegrebe, L. (2018). Mammalian models for the study of vocal learning: A new paradigm in bats. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, L. McCrohon, A. Ravignani, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG XII) (pp. 235-237). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.056.
  • Lauscher, A., Eckert, K., Galke, L., Scherp, A., Rizvi, S. T. R., Ahmed, S., Dengel, A., Zumstein, P., & Klein, A. (2018). Linked open citation database: Enabling libraries to contribute to an open and interconnected citation graph. In J. Chen, M. A. Gonçalves, J. M. Allen, E. A. Fox, M.-Y. Kan, & V. Petras (Eds.), JCDL '18: Proceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE on Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (pp. 109-118). New York: ACM. doi:10.1145/3197026.3197050.

    Abstract

    Citations play a crucial role in the scientific discourse, in information retrieval, and in bibliometrics. Many initiatives are currently promoting the idea of having free and open citation data. Creation of citation data, however, is not part of the cataloging workflow in libraries nowadays.
    In this paper, we present our project Linked Open Citation Database, in which we design distributed processes and a system infrastructure based on linked data technology. The goal is to show that efficiently cataloging citations in libraries using a semi-automatic approach is possible. We specifically describe the current state of the workflow and its implementation. We show that we could significantly improve the automatic reference extraction that is crucial for the subsequent data curation. We further give insights on the curation and linking process and provide evaluation results that not only direct the further development of the project, but also allow us to discuss its overall feasibility.
  • Lefever, E., Hendrickx, I., Croijmans, I., Van den Bosch, A., & Majid, A. (2018). Discovering the language of wine reviews: A text mining account. In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, C. Cieri, T. Declerck, S. Goggi, K. Hasida, H. Isahara, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, H. Mazo, A. Moreno, J. Odijk, S. Piperidis, & T. Tokunaga (Eds.), Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018) (pp. 3297-3302). Paris: LREC.

    Abstract

    It is widely held that smells and flavors are impossible to put into words. In this paper we test this claim by seeking predictive patterns in wine reviews, which ostensibly aim to provide guides to perceptual content. Wine reviews have previously been critiqued as random and meaningless. We collected an English corpus of wine reviews with their structured metadata, and applied machine learning techniques to automatically predict the wine's color, grape variety, and country of origin. To train the three supervised classifiers, three different information sources were incorporated: lexical bag-of-words features, domain-specific terminology features, and semantic word embedding features. In addition, using regression analysis we investigated basic review properties, i.e., review length, average word length, and their relationship to the scalar values of price and review score. Our results show that wine experts do share a common vocabulary to describe wines and they use this in a consistent way, which makes it possible to automatically predict wine characteristics based on the review text alone. This means that odors and flavors may be more expressible in language than typically acknowledged.
  • Lenkiewicz, A., & Drude, S. (2013). Automatic annotation of linguistic 2D and Kinect recordings with the Media Query Language for Elan. In Proceedings of Digital Humanities 2013 (pp. 276-278).

    Abstract

    Research in body language with use of gesture recognition and speech analysis has gained much attention in the recent times, influencing disciplines related to image and speech processing.

    This study aims to design the Media Query Language (MQL) (Lenkiewicz, et al. 2012) combined with the Linguistic Media Query Interface (LMQI) for Elan (Wittenburg, et al. 2006). The system integrated with the new achievements in audio-video recognition will allow querying media files with predefined gesture phases (or motion primitives) and speech characteristics as well as combinations of both. For the purpose of this work the predefined motions and speech characteristics are called patterns for atomic elements and actions for a sequence of patterns. The main assumption is that a user-customized library of patterns and actions and automated media annotation with LMQI will reduce annotation time, hence decreasing costs of creation of annotated corpora. Increase of the number of annotated data should influence the speed and number of possible research in disciplines in which human multimodal interaction is a subject of interest and where annotated corpora are required.
  • Levelt, C. C., Fikkert, P., & Schiller, N. O. (2003). Metrical priming in speech production. In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2003) (pp. 2481-2485). Adelaide: Causal Productions.

    Abstract

    In this paper we report on four experiments in which we attempted to prime the stress position of Dutch bisyllabic target nouns. These nouns, picture names, had stress on either the first or the second syllable. Auditory prime words had either the same stress as the target or a different stress (e.g., WORtel – MOtor vs. koSTUUM – MOtor; capital letters indicate stressed syllables in prime – target pairs). Furthermore, half of the prime words were semantically related, the other half were unrelated. In none of the experiments a stress priming effect was found. This could mean that stress is not stored in the lexicon. An additional finding was that targets with initial stress had a faster response than targets with a final stress. We hypothesize that bisyllabic words with final stress take longer to be encoded because this stress pattern is irregular with respect to the lexical distribution of bisyllabic stress patterns, even though it can be regular in terms of the metrical stress rules of Dutch.
  • Levelt, W. J. M., & Plomp, R. (1962). Musical consonance and critical bandwidth. In Proceedings of the 4th International Congress Acoustics (pp. 55-55).
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1984). Spontaneous self-repairs in speech: Processes and representations. In M. P. R. Van den Broecke, & A. Cohen (Eds.), Proceedings of the 10th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 105-117). Dordrecht: Foris.
  • Liu, S., & Zhang, Y. (2019). Why some verbs are harder to learn than others – A micro-level analysis of everyday learning contexts for early verb learning. In A. K. Goel, C. M. Seifert, & C. Freksa (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2019) (pp. 2173-2178). Montreal, QB: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Verb learning is important for young children. While most
    previous research has focused on linguistic and conceptual
    challenges in early verb learning (e.g. Gentner, 1982, 2006),
    the present paper examined early verb learning at the
    attentional level and quantified the input for early verb learning
    by measuring verb-action co-occurrence statistics in parent-
    child interaction from the learner’s perspective. To do so, we
    used head-mounted eye tracking to record fine-grained
    multimodal behaviors during parent-infant joint play, and
    analyzed parent speech, parent and infant action, and infant
    attention at the moments when parents produced verb labels.
    Our results show great variability across different action verbs,
    in terms of frequency of verb utterances, frequency of
    corresponding actions related to verb meanings, and infants’
    attention to verbs and actions, which provide new insights on
    why some verbs are harder to learn than others.
  • Lopopolo, A., Frank, S. L., Van den Bosch, A., Nijhof, A., & Willems, R. M. (2018). The Narrative Brain Dataset (NBD), an fMRI dataset for the study of natural language processing in the brain. In B. Devereux, E. Shutova, & C.-R. Huang (Eds.), Proceedings of LREC 2018 Workshop "Linguistic and Neuro-Cognitive Resources (LiNCR) (pp. 8-11). Paris: LREC.

    Abstract

    We present the Narrative Brain Dataset, an fMRI dataset that was collected during spoken presentation of short excerpts of three
    stories in Dutch. Together with the brain imaging data, the dataset contains the written versions of the stimulation texts. The texts are
    accompanied with stochastic (perplexity and entropy) and semantic computational linguistic measures. The richness and unconstrained
    nature of the data allows the study of language processing in the brain in a more naturalistic setting than is common for fMRI studies.
    We hope that by making NBD available we serve the double purpose of providing useful neural data to researchers interested in natural
    language processing in the brain and to further stimulate data sharing in the field of neuroscience of language.
  • Lupyan, G., Wendorf, A., Berscia, L. M., & Paul, J. (2018). Core knowledge or language-augmented cognition? The case of geometric reasoning. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, L. McCrohon, A. Ravignani, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG XII) (pp. 252-254). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.062.
  • Mai, F., Galke, L., & Scherp, A. (2019). CBOW is not all you need: Combining CBOW with the compositional matrix space model. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2019). OpenReview.net.

    Abstract

    Continuous Bag of Words (CBOW) is a powerful text embedding method. Due to its strong capabilities to encode word content, CBOW embeddings perform well on a wide range of downstream tasks while being efficient to compute. However, CBOW is not capable of capturing the word order. The reason is that the computation of CBOW's word embeddings is commutative, i.e., embeddings of XYZ and ZYX are the same. In order to address this shortcoming, we propose a
    learning algorithm for the Continuous Matrix Space Model, which we call Continual Multiplication of Words (CMOW). Our algorithm is an adaptation of word2vec, so that it can be trained on large quantities of unlabeled text. We empirically show that CMOW better captures linguistic properties, but it is inferior to CBOW in memorizing word content. Motivated by these findings, we propose a hybrid model that combines the strengths of CBOW and CMOW. Our results show that the hybrid CBOW-CMOW-model retains CBOW's strong ability to memorize word content while at the same time substantially improving its ability to encode other linguistic information by 8%. As a result, the hybrid also performs better on 8 out of 11 supervised downstream tasks with an average improvement of 1.2%.
  • Mai, F., Galke, L., & Scherp, A. (2018). Using deep learning for title-based semantic subject indexing to reach competitive performance to full-text. In J. Chen, M. A. Gonçalves, J. M. Allen, E. A. Fox, M.-Y. Kan, & V. Petras (Eds.), JCDL '18: Proceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE on Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (pp. 169-178). New York: ACM.

    Abstract

    For (semi-)automated subject indexing systems in digital libraries, it is often more practical to use metadata such as the title of a publication instead of the full-text or the abstract. Therefore, it is desirable to have good text mining and text classification algorithms that operate well already on the title of a publication. So far, the classification performance on titles is not competitive with the performance on the full-texts if the same number of training samples is used for training. However, it is much easier to obtain title data in large quantities and to use it for training than full-text data. In this paper, we investigate the question how models obtained from training on increasing amounts of title training data compare to models from training on a constant number of full-texts. We evaluate this question on a large-scale dataset from the medical domain (PubMed) and from economics (EconBiz). In these datasets, the titles and annotations of millions of publications are available, and they outnumber the available full-texts by a factor of 20 and 15, respectively. To exploit these large amounts of data to their full potential, we develop three strong deep learning classifiers and evaluate their performance on the two datasets. The results are promising. On the EconBiz dataset, all three classifiers outperform their full-text counterparts by a large margin. The best title-based classifier outperforms the best full-text method by 9.4%. On the PubMed dataset, the best title-based method almost reaches the performance of the best full-text classifier, with a difference of only 2.9%.
  • Majid, A. (2013). Olfactory language and cognition. In M. Knauff, M. Pauen, N. Sebanz, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2013) (pp. 68). Austin,TX: Cognitive Science Society. Retrieved from http://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2013/papers/0025/index.html.

    Abstract

    Since the cognitive revolution, a widely held assumption has been that—whereas content may vary across cultures—cognitive processes would be universal, especially those on the more basic levels. Even if scholars do not fully subscribe to this assumption, they often conceptualize, or tend to investigate, cognition as if it were universal (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). The insight that universality must not be presupposed but scrutinized is now gaining ground, and cognitive diversity has become one of the hot (and controversial) topics in the field (Norenzayan & Heine, 2005). We argue that, for scrutinizing the cultural dimension of cognition, taking an anthropological perspective is invaluable, not only for the task itself, but for attenuating the home-field disadvantages that are inescapably linked to cross-cultural research (Medin, Bennis, & Chandler, 2010).
  • Mamus, E., Rissman, L., Majid, A., & Ozyurek, A. (2019). Effects of blindfolding on verbal and gestural expression of path in auditory motion events. In A. K. Goel, C. M. Seifert, & C. C. Freksa (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2019) (pp. 2275-2281). Montreal, QB: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Studies have claimed that blind people’s spatial representations are different from sighted people, and blind people display superior auditory processing. Due to the nature of auditory and haptic information, it has been proposed that blind people have spatial representations that are more sequential than sighted people. Even the temporary loss of sight—such as through blindfolding—can affect spatial representations, but not much research has been done on this topic. We compared blindfolded and sighted people’s linguistic spatial expressions and non-linguistic localization accuracy to test how blindfolding affects the representation of path in auditory motion events. We found that blindfolded people were as good as sighted people when localizing simple sounds, but they outperformed sighted people when localizing auditory motion events. Blindfolded people’s path related speech also included more sequential, and less holistic elements. Our results indicate that even temporary loss of sight influences spatial representations of auditory motion events
  • Marcoux, K., & Ernestus, M. (2019). Differences between native and non-native Lombard speech in terms of pitch range. In M. Ochmann, M. Vorländer, & J. Fels (Eds.), Proceedings of the ICA 2019 and EAA Euroregio. 23rd International Congress on Acoustics, integrating 4th EAA Euroregio 2019 (pp. 5713-5720). Berlin: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Akustik.

    Abstract

    Lombard speech, speech produced in noise, is acoustically different from speech produced in quiet (plain speech) in several ways, including having a higher and wider F0 range (pitch). Extensive research on native Lombard speech does not consider that non-natives experience a higher cognitive load while producing
    speech and that the native language may influence the non-native speech. We investigated pitch range in plain and Lombard speech in native and non-natives.
    Dutch and American-English speakers read contrastive question-answer pairs in quiet and in noise in English, while the Dutch also read Dutch sentence pairs. We found that Lombard speech is characterized by a wider pitch range than plain speech, for all speakers (native English, non-native English, and native Dutch).
    This shows that non-natives also widen their pitch range in Lombard speech. In sentences with early-focus, we see the same increase in pitch range when going from plain to Lombard speech in native and non-native English, but a smaller increase in native Dutch. In sentences with late-focus, we see the biggest increase for the native English, followed by non-native English and then native Dutch. Together these results indicate an effect of the native language on non-native Lombard speech.
  • Marcoux, K., & Ernestus, M. (2019). Pitch in native and non-native Lombard speech. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2019) (pp. 2605-2609). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

    Abstract

    Lombard speech, speech produced in noise, is
    typically produced with a higher fundamental
    frequency (F0, pitch) compared to speech in quiet. This paper examined the potential differences in native and non-native Lombard speech by analyzing median pitch in sentences with early- or late-focus produced in quiet and noise. We found an increase in pitch in late-focus sentences in noise for Dutch speakers in both English and Dutch, and for American-English speakers in English. These results
    show that non-native speakers produce Lombard speech, despite their higher cognitive load. For the early-focus sentences, we found a difference between the Dutch and the American-English speakers. Whereas the Dutch showed an increased F0 in noise
    in English and Dutch, the American-English speakers did not in English. Together, these results suggest that some acoustic characteristics of Lombard speech, such as pitch, may be language-specific, potentially
    resulting in the native language influencing the non-native Lombard speech.
  • McQueen, J. M., & Cho, T. (2003). The use of domain-initial strengthening in segmentation of continuous English speech. In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2003) (pp. 2993-2996). Adelaide: Causal Productions.
  • Meeuwissen, M., Roelofs, A., & Levelt, W. J. M. (2003). Naming analog clocks conceptually facilitates naming digital clocks. In Proceedings of XIII Conference of the European Society of Cognitive Psychology (ESCOP 2003) (pp. 271-271).
  • Merkx, D., Frank, S., & Ernestus, M. (2019). Language learning using speech to image retrieval. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2019 (pp. 1841-1845). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2019-3067.

    Abstract

    Humans learn language by interaction with their environment and listening to other humans. It should also be possible for computational models to learn language directly from speech but so far most approaches require text. We improve on existing neural network approaches to create visually grounded embeddings for spoken utterances. Using a combination of a multi-layer GRU, importance sampling, cyclic learning rates, ensembling and vectorial self-attention our results show a remarkable increase in image-caption retrieval performance over previous work. Furthermore, we investigate which layers in the model learn to recognise words in the input. We find that deeper network layers are better at encoding word presence, although the final layer has slightly lower performance. This shows that our visually grounded sentence encoder learns to recognise words from the input even though it is not explicitly trained for word recognition.
  • Merkx, D., & Scharenborg, O. (2018). Articulatory feature classification using convolutional neural networks. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2018 (pp. 2142-2146). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2018-2275.

    Abstract

    The ultimate goal of our research is to improve an existing speech-based computational model of human speech recognition on the task of simulating the role of fine-grained phonetic information in human speech processing. As part of this work we are investigating articulatory feature classifiers that are able to create reliable and accurate transcriptions of the articulatory behaviour encoded in the acoustic speech signal. Articulatory feature (AF) modelling of speech has received a considerable amount of attention in automatic speech recognition research. Different approaches have been used to build AF classifiers, most notably multi-layer perceptrons. Recently, deep neural networks have been applied to the task of AF classification. This paper aims to improve AF classification by investigating two different approaches: 1) investigating the usefulness of a deep Convolutional neural network (CNN) for AF classification; 2) integrating the Mel filtering operation into the CNN architecture. The results showed a remarkable improvement in classification accuracy of the CNNs over state-of-the-art AF classification results for Dutch, most notably in the minority classes. Integrating the Mel filtering operation into the CNN architecture did not further improve classification performance.
  • Micklos, A., Macuch Silva, V., & Fay, N. (2018). The prevalence of repair in studies of language evolution. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, L. McCrohon, A. Ravignani, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG XII) (pp. 316-318). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.075.
  • Moisik, S. R., Zhi Yun, D. P., & Dediu, D. (2019). Active adjustment of the cervical spine during pitch production compensates for shape: The ArtiVarK study. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 20195) (pp. 864-868). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

    Abstract

    The anterior lordosis of the cervical spine is thought
    to contribute to pitch (fo) production by influencing
    cricoid rotation as a function of larynx height. This
    study examines the matter of inter-individual
    variation in cervical spine shape and whether this has
    an influence on how fo is produced along increasing
    or decreasing scales, using the ArtiVarK dataset,
    which contains real-time MRI pitch production data.
    We find that the cervical spine actively participates in
    fo production, but the amount of displacement
    depends on individual shape. In general, anterior
    spine motion (tending toward cervical lordosis)
    occurs for low fo, while posterior movement (tending
    towards cervical kyphosis) occurs for high fo.
  • Moscoso del Prado Martín, F., & Baayen, R. H. (2003). Using the structure found in time: Building real-scale orthographic and phonetic representations by accumulation of expectations. In H. Bowman, & C. Labiouse (Eds.), Connectionist Models of Cognition, Perception and Emotion: Proceedings of the Eighth Neural Computation and Psychology Workshop (pp. 263-272). Singapore: World Scientific.
  • Mulder, K., Ten Bosch, L., & Boves, L. (2018). Analyzing EEG Signals in Auditory Speech Comprehension Using Temporal Response Functions and Generalized Additive Models. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2018 (pp. 1452-1456). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2018-1676.

    Abstract

    Analyzing EEG signals recorded while participants are listening to continuous speech with the purpose of testing linguistic hypotheses is complicated by the fact that the signals simultaneously reflect exogenous acoustic excitation and endogenous linguistic processing. This makes it difficult to trace subtle differences that occur in mid-sentence position. We apply an analysis based on multivariate temporal response functions to uncover subtle mid-sentence effects. This approach is based on a per-stimulus estimate of the response of the neural system to speech input. Analyzing EEG signals predicted on the basis of the response functions might then bring to light conditionspecific differences in the filtered signals. We validate this approach by means of an analysis of EEG signals recorded with isolated word stimuli. Then, we apply the validated method to the analysis of the responses to the same words in the middle of meaningful sentences.
  • Nijveld, A., Ten Bosch, L., & Ernestus, M. (2019). ERP signal analysis with temporal resolution using a time window bank. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2019 (pp. 1208-1212). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2019-2729.

    Abstract

    In order to study the cognitive processes underlying speech comprehension, neuro-physiological measures (e.g., EEG and MEG), or behavioural measures (e.g., reaction times and response accuracy) can be applied. Compared to behavioural measures, EEG signals can provide a more fine-grained and complementary view of the processes that take place during the unfolding of an auditory stimulus.

    EEG signals are often analysed after having chosen specific time windows, which are usually based on the temporal structure of ERP components expected to be sensitive to the experimental manipulation. However, as the timing of ERP components may vary between experiments, trials, and participants, such a-priori defined analysis time windows may significantly hamper the exploratory power of the analysis of components of interest. In this paper, we explore a wide-window analysis method applied to EEG signals collected in an auditory repetition priming experiment.

    This approach is based on a bank of temporal filters arranged along the time axis in combination with linear mixed effects modelling. Crucially, it permits a temporal decomposition of effects in a single comprehensive statistical model which captures the entire EEG trace.
  • Oostdijk, N., & Broeder, D. (2003). The Spoken Dutch Corpus and its exploitation environment. In A. Abeille, S. Hansen-Schirra, & H. Uszkoreit (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on linguistically interpreted corpora (LINC-03) (pp. 93-101).
  • Ortega, G., & Ozyurek, A. (2013). Gesture-sign interface in hearing non-signers' first exposure to sign. In Proceedings of the Tilburg Gesture Research Meeting [TiGeR 2013].

    Abstract

    Natural sign languages and gestures are complex communicative systems that allow the incorporation of features of a referent into their structure. They differ, however, in that signs are more conventionalised because they consist of meaningless phonological parameters. There is some evidence that despite non-signers finding iconic signs more memorable they can have more difficulty at articulating their exact phonological components. In the present study, hearing non-signers took part in a sign repetition task in which they had to imitate as accurately as possible a set of iconic and arbitrary signs. Their renditions showed that iconic signs were articulated significantly less accurately than arbitrary signs. Participants were recalled six months later to take part in a sign generation task. In this task, participants were shown the English translation of the iconic signs they imitated six months prior. For each word, participants were asked to generate a sign (i.e., an iconic gesture). The handshapes produced in the sign repetition and sign generation tasks were compared to detect instances in which both renditions presented the same configuration. There was a significant correlation between articulation accuracy in the sign repetition task and handshape overlap. These results suggest some form of gestural interference in the production of iconic signs by hearing non-signers. We also suggest that in some instances non-signers may deploy their own conventionalised gesture when producing some iconic signs. These findings are interpreted as evidence that non-signers process iconic signs as gestures and that in production, only when sign and gesture have overlapping features will they be capable of producing the phonological components of signs accurately.

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