Publications

Abstract

We present the Retention and Recognition model (R&R), a probabilistic exemplar model that accounts for segmentation in Artificial Language Learning experiments. We show that R&R provides an excellent fit to human responses in three segmentation experiments with adults (Frank et al., 2010), outperforming existing models. Additionally, we analyze the results of the simulations and propose alternative explanations for the experimental findings.

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

Abstract

A production experiment investigated the tonal shape of Finnish finite verbs in transitive sentences without narrow focus. Traditional descriptions of Finnish stating that non-focused finite verbs do not receive accents were only partly supported. Verbs were found to have a consistently smaller pitch range than words in other word classes, but their pitch contours were neither flat nor explainable by pure interpolation.

Abstract

In the paper we describe a new attempt to come to automatic detectors processing real scene audio-video streams that can be used by researchers world-wide to speed up their annotation and analysis work. Typically these recordings are taken in field and experimental situations mostly with bad quality and only little corpora preventing to use standard stochastic pattern recognition techniques. Audio/video processing components are taken out of the expert lab and are integrated in easy-to-use interactive frameworks so that the researcher can easily start them with modified parameters and can check the usefulness of the created annotations. Finally a variety of detectors may have been used yielding a lattice of annotations. A flexible search engine allows finding combinations of patterns opening completely new analysis and theorization possibilities for the researchers who until were required to do all annotations manually and who did not have any help in pre-segmenting lengthy media recordings.

Abstract

Annotation of digital recordings in humanities research still is, to a largeextend, a process that is performed manually. This paper describes the firstpattern recognition based software components developed in the AVATecH projectand their integration in the annotation tool ELAN. AVATecH (AdvancingVideo/Audio Technology in Humanities Research) is a project that involves twoMax Planck Institutes (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen,Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle) and two FraunhoferInstitutes (Fraunhofer-Institut für Intelligente Analyse- undInformationssysteme IAIS, Sankt Augustin, Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institute,Berlin) and that aims to develop and implement audio and video technology forsemi-automatic annotation of heterogeneous media collections as they occur inmultimedia based research. The highly diverse nature of the digital recordingsstored in the archives of both Max Planck Institutes, poses a huge challenge tomost of the existing pattern recognition solutions and is a motivation to makesuch technology available to researchers in the humanities.

Abstract

The use of subject pronouns by bilingual speakers using both a pro-drop and a non-pro-drop language (e.g. Spanish heritage speakers in the USA) is a well-studied topic in research on cross-linguistic influence in language contact situations. Previous studies looking at bilinguals with different proficiency levels have yielded conflicting results on whether there is transfer from the non-pro-drop patterns to the pro-drop language. Additionally, previous research has focused on speech patterns only. In this paper, we study the two modalities of language, speech and gesture, and ask whether and how they reveal cross-linguistic influence on the use of subject pronouns in discourse. We focus on elicited narratives from heritage speakers of Turkish in the Netherlands, in both Turkish (pro-drop) and Dutch (non-pro-drop), as well as from monolingual control groups. The use of pronouns was not very common in monolingual Turkish narratives and was constrained by the pragmatic contexts, unlike in Dutch. Furthermore, Turkish pronouns were more likely to be accompanied by localized gestures than Dutch pronouns, presumably because pronouns in Turkish are pragmatically marked forms. We did not find any cross-linguistic influence in bilingual speech or gesture patterns, in line with studies (speech only) of highly proficient bilinguals. We therefore suggest that speech and gesture parallel each other not only in monolingual but also in bilingual production. Highly proficient heritage speakers who have been exposed to diverse linguistic and gestural patterns of each language from early on maintain monolingual patterns of pragmatic constraints on the use of pronouns multimodally.

Abstract

1. Introduction External input is necessary to acquire language. Consequently, the comprehension of various constituents of language, such as lexical items or syntactic and semantic structures should emerge at the same time as or even precede their production. However, in the case of pronouns this general assumption does not seem to hold. On the contrary, while children at the age of four use pronouns and reflexives appropriately during production (de Villiers, et al. 2006), a number of comprehension studies across different languages found chance performance in pronoun trials up to the age of seven, which co-occurs with a high level of accuracy in reflexive trials (for an overview see e.g. Conroy, et al. 2009; Elbourne 2005).

Abstract

In the present paper we show that a general-purpose word learning model can simulate several important findings from recent experiments in language acquisition. Both the addition of background noise and varying the speaker have been found to influence infants’ performance during word recognition experiments. We were able to replicate this behaviour in our artificial word learning agent. We use the results to discuss both advantages and limitations of computational models of language acquisition.

Abstract

Recent work has made available a number of standardized meta- analyses bearing on various aspects of infant language processing. We utilize data from two such meta-analyses (discrimination of vowel contrasts and word segmentation, i.e., recognition of word forms extracted from running speech) to assess whether the published body of empirical evidence supports a bottom-up versus a top-down theory of early phonological development by leveling the power of results from thousands of infants. We predicted that if infants can rely purely on auditory experience to develop their phonological categories, then vowel discrimination and word segmentation should develop in parallel, with the latter being potentially lagged compared to the former. However, if infants crucially rely on word form information to build their phonological categories, then development at the word level must precede the acquisition of native sound categories. Our results do not support the latter prediction. We discuss potential implications and limitations, most saliently that word forms are only one top-down level proposed to affect phonological development, with other proposals suggesting that top-down pressures emerge from lexical (i.e., word-meaning pairs) development. This investigation also highlights general procedures by which standardized meta-analyses may be reused to answer theoretical questions spanning across phenomena.

Abstract

Psycholinguistic studies of metaphor processing must control their stimuli not just for word frequency but also for the frequency with which a term is used metaphorically. Thus, we consider the task of metaphor frequency estimation, which predicts how often target words will be used metaphorically. We develop metaphor classifiers which represent metaphorical domains through Latent Dirichlet Allocation, and apply these classifiers to the target words, aggregating their decisions to estimate the metaphorical frequencies. Training on only 400 sentences, our models are able to achieve 61.3 % accuracy on metaphor classification and 77.8 % accuracy on HIGH vs. LOW metaphorical frequency estimation.

Abstract

Theories of language acquisition and perceptual learning increasingly rely on statistical learning mechanisms. The current meta-analysis aims to clarify the robustness of this capacity in infancy within the word segmentation literature. Our analysis reveals a significant, small effect size for conceptual replications of Saffran, Aslin, & Newport (1996), and a nonsignificant effect across all studies that incorporate transitional probabilities to segment words. In both conceptual replications and the broader literature, however, statistical learning is moderated by whether stimuli are naturally produced or synthesized. These findings invite deeper questions about the complex factors that influence statistical learning, and the role of statistical learning in language acquisition.

Abstract

Brain oscillations have been shown to track the slow amplitude fluctuations in speech during comprehension. Moreover, there is evidence that these stimulus-induced cortical rhythms may persist even after the driving stimulus has ceased. However, how exactly this neural entrainment shapes speech perception remains debated. This behavioral study investigated whether and how the frequency and phase of an entrained rhythm would influence the temporal sampling of subsequent speech. In two behavioral experiments, participants were presented with slow and fast isochronous tone sequences, followed by Dutch target words ambiguous between as /ɑs/ “ash” (with a short vowel) and aas /a:s/ “bait” (with a long vowel). Target words were presented at various phases of the entrained rhythm. Both experiments revealed effects of the frequency of the tone sequence on target word perception: fast sequences biased listeners to more long /a:s/ responses. However, no evidence for phase effects could be discerned. These findings show that an entrained rhythm’s frequency, but not phase, influences the temporal sampling of subsequent speech. These outcomes are compatible with theories suggesting that sensory timing is evaluated relative to entrained frequency. Furthermore, they suggest that phase tracking of (syllabic) rhythms by theta oscillations plays a limited role in speech parsing.

Abstract

Speech is an acoustic signal with inherent amplitude modulations in the 1-9 Hz range. Recent models of speech perception propose that this rhythmic nature of speech is central to speech recognition. Moreover, rhythmic amplitude modulations have been shown to have beneficial effects on language processing and the subjective impression listeners have of the speaker. This study investigated the role of amplitude modulations in the political arena by comparing the speech produced by Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the three presidential debates of 2016. Inspection of the modulation spectra, revealing the spectral content of the two speakers’ amplitude envelopes after matching for overall intensity, showed considerably greater power in Clinton’s modulation spectra (compared to Trump’s) across the three debates, particularly in the 1-9 Hz range. The findings suggest that Clinton’s speech had a more pronounced temporal envelope with rhythmic amplitude modulations below 9 Hz, with a preference for modulations around 3 Hz. This may be taken as evidence for a more structured temporal organization of syllables in Clinton’s speech, potentially due to more frequent use of preplanned utterances. Outcomes are interpreted in light of the potential beneficial effects of a rhythmic temporal envelope on intelligibility and speaker perception.

Abstract

Why do people accommodate to each other’s linguistic behavior? Studies of natural interactions (Giles, Taylor & Bourhis, 1973) suggest that speakers accommodate to achieve interactional goals, influencing what their interlocutor thinks or feels about them. But is this the only reason speakers accommodate? In real-world conversations, interactional motivations are ubiquitous, making it difficult to assess the extent to which they drive accommodation. Do speakers still accommodate even when interactional goals cannot be achieved, for instance, when their interlocutor cannot interpret their accommodation behavior? To find out, we asked participants to enter an immersive virtual reality (VR) environment and to converse with a virtual interlocutor. Participants accommodated to the speech rate of their virtual interlocutor even though he could not interpret their linguistic behavior, and thus accommodation could not possibly help them to achieve interactional goals. Results show that accommodation does not require explicit interactional goals, and suggest other social motivations for accommodation.

Abstract

The notion of relational grammar is extented to ternary relations and illustrated by a fragment of English. Some of Peirce's terms for ternary relations are shown to be incorrect and corrected.

Abstract

This paper introduces the EU-FP7 project CLARIN, a joint effort of over 150 institutions in Europe, aimed at the creation of a sustainable language resources and technology infrastructure for the humanities and social sciences research community. The paper briefly introduces the vision behind the project and how it relates to speech research with a focus on the contributions that CLARIN can and will make to research in spoken language processing.

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.

Abstract

We describe our computer-supported framework to overcome the rule of metadata schism. It combines the use of controlled vocabularies, managed by a data category registry, with a component-based approach, where the categories can be combined to yield complex metadata structures. A metadata scheme devised in this way will thus be grounded in its use of categories. Schema designers will profit from existing prefabricated larger building blocks, motivating re-use at a larger scale. The common base of any two metadata schemes within this framework will solve, at least to a good extent, the semantic interoperability problem, and consequently, further promote systematic use of metadata for existing resources and tools to be shared.

Abstract

Unlike most of the world's languages, Korean distinguishes three types of voiceless stops, namely lenis, fortis, and aspirated stops. All occur at three places of articulation. In previous work, acoustic measurements are mostly collapsed over the three places of articulation. This study therefore provides acoustic measurements of Korean lenis, fortis, and aspirated stops at all three places of articulation separately. Clear differences are found among the acoustic characteristics of the stops at the different places of articulation

Abstract

We investigated the extent to which emotionally valenced words automatically cue spatio-motor representations. Participants made speeded button presses, moving their hand upward or downward while viewing words with positive or negative valence. Only the color of the words was relevant to the response; on target trials, there was no requirement to read the words or process their meaning. In Experiment 1, upward responses were faster for positive words, and downward for negative words. This effect was extinguished, however, when words were repeated. In Experiment 2, participants performed the same primary task with the addition of distractor trials. Distractors either oriented attention toward the words’ meaning or toward their color. Congruity effects were increased with orientation to meaning, but eliminated with orientation to color. When people read words with emotional valence, vertical spatio-motor representations are activated highly automatically, but this automaticity is modulated by repetition and by attentional orientation to the words’ form or meaning.

Abstract

This paper investigates whether surprisal theory can account for differential processing difficulty in the NP-/S-coordination ambiguity in Dutch. Surprisal is estimated using a Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar (PCFG), which is induced from an automatically annotated corpus. We find that our lexicalized surprisal model can account for the reading time data from a classic experiment on this ambiguity by Frazier (1987). We argue that syntactic and lexical probabilities, as specified in a PCFG, are sufficient to account for what is commonly referred to as an NP-coordination preference.

Abstract

Lexically guided perceptual learni ng refers to the use of lexical knowledge to retune sp eech categories and thereby adapt to a novel talker’s pronunciation. This adaptation has been extensively documented, but primarily for segmental-based learning in English and Dutch. In languages with lexical tone, such as Mandarin Chinese, tonal categories can also be retuned in this way, but segmental category retuning had not been studied. We report two experiment s in which Mandarin Chinese listeners were exposed to an ambiguous mixture of [f] and [s] in lexical contexts favoring an interpretation as either [f] or [s]. Listeners were subsequently more likely to identify sounds along a continuum between [f] and [s], and to interpret minimal word pairs, in a manner consistent with this exposure. Thus lexically guided perceptual learning of segmental categories had indeed taken place, consistent with suggestions that such learning may be a universally available adaptation process

Abstract

Large auditory-visual (AV) speech corpora are the grist of modern research in speech science, but no such corpus exists for Australian English. This is unfortunate, for speech science is the brains behind speech technology and applications such as text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis, automatic speech recognition (ASR), speaker recognition and forensic identification, talking heads, and hearing prostheses. Advances in these research areas in Australia require a large corpus of Australian English. Here the authors describe a blueprint for building the Big Australian Speech Corpus (the Big ASC), a corpus of over 1,100 speakers from urban and rural Australia, including speakers of non-indigenous, indigenous, ethnocultural, and disordered forms of Australian English, each of whom would be sampled on three occasions in a range of speech tasks designed by the researchers who would be using the corpus.

Abstract

According to theories of embodied cognition, understanding a verb like throw involves unconsciously simulating the action throwing, using areas of the brain that support motor planning. If understanding action words involves mentally simulating our own actions, then the neurocognitive representation of word meanings should differ for people with different kinds of bodies, who perform actions in systematically different ways. In a test of the body-specificity hypothesis (Casasanto, 2009), we used fMRI to compare premotor activity correlated with action verb understanding in right- and left-handers. Right-handers preferentially activated left premotor cortex during lexical decision on manual action verbs (compared with non-manual action verbs), whereas left-handers preferentially activated right premotor areas. This finding helps refine theories of embodied semantics, suggesting that implicit mental simulation during language processing is body-specific: Right and left-handers, who perform actions differently, use correspondingly different areas of the brain for representing action verb meanings.

Abstract

Across cultures, people conceptualize time as if it flows along a horizontal timeline, but the direction of this implicit timeline is culture-specific: in cultures with left-to-right orthography (e.g., English-speaking cultures) time appears to flow rightward, but in cultures with right-to-left orthography (e.g., Arabic-speaking cultures) time flows leftward. Can orthography influence implicit time representations independent of other cultural and linguistic factors? Native Dutch speakers performed a space-time congruity task with the instructions and stimuli written in either standard Dutch or mirror-reversed Dutch. Participants in the Standard Dutch condition were fastest to judge past-oriented phrases by pressing the left button and future-oriented phrases by pressing the right button. Participants in the Mirror-Reversed Dutch condition showed the opposite pattern of reaction times, consistent with results found previously in native Arabic and Hebrew speakers. These results demonstrate a causal role for writing direction in shaping implicit mental representations of time.

Abstract

What is the relationship between motor action and emotion? Here we investigated whether people associate good things more strongly with the dominant side of their bodies, and bad things with the non-dominant side. To find out, we analyzed spontaneous gestures during speech expressing ideas with positive or negative emotional valence (e.g., freedom, pain, compassion). Samples of speech and gesture were drawn from the 2004 and 2008 US presidential debates, which involved two left-handers (Obama, McCain) and two right-handers (Kerry, Bush). Results showed a strong association between the valence of spoken clauses and the hands used to make spontaneous co-speech gestures. In right-handed candidates, right-hand gestures were more strongly associated with positive-valence clauses, and left-hand gestures with negative-valence clauses. Left-handed candidates showed the opposite pattern. Right- and left-handers implicitly associated positive valence more strongly with their dominant hand: the hand they can use more fluently. These results support the body-specificity hypothesis, (Casasanto, 2009), and suggest a perceptuomotor basis for even our most abstract ideas.

Abstract

What is the relationship between space and time in the human mind? Studies in adults show an asymmetric relationship between mental representations of these basic dimensions of experience: representations of time depend on space more than representations of space depend on time. Here we investigated the relationship between space and time in the developing mind. Native Greek-speaking children (N=99) watched movies of two animals traveling along parallel paths for different distances or durations and judged the spatial and temporal aspects of these events (e.g., Which animal went for a longer time, or a longer distance?) Results showed a reliable cross-dimensional asymmetry: for the same stimuli, spatial information influenced temporal judgments more than temporal information influenced spatial judgments. This pattern was robust to variations in the age of the participants and the type of language used to elicit responses. This finding demonstrates a continuity between space-time representations in children and adults, and informs theories of analog magnitude representation.

Abstract

Interoperable annotation formats are fundamental to the utility, expansion, and sustainability of collective data repositories.In language development research, shared annotation schemes have been critical to facilitating the transition from raw acoustic data to searchable, structured corpora. Current schemes typically require comprehensive and manual annotation of utterance boundaries and orthographic speech content, with an additional, optional range of tags of interest. These schemes have been enormously successful for datasets on the scale of dozens of recording hours but are untenable for long-format recording corpora, which routinely contain hundreds to thousands of audio hours. Long-format corpora would benefit greatly from (semi-)automated analyses, both on the earliest steps of annotation—voice activity detection, utterance segmentation, and speaker diarization—as well as later steps—e.g., classification-based codes such as child-vs-adult-directed speech, and speech recognition to produce phonetic/orthographic representations. We present an annotation workflow specifically designed for long-format corpora which can be tailored by individual researchers and which interfaces with the current dominant scheme for short-format recordings. The workflow allows semi-automated annotation and analyses at higher linguistic levels. We give one example of how the workflow has been successfully implemented in a large cross-database project.

Abstract

Child-directed speech is argued to facilitate language development, and is found cross-linguistically and cross-culturally to varying degrees. However, previous research has generally focused on short samples of child-caregiver interaction, often in the lab or with experimenters present. We test the generalizability of this phenomenon with an initial descriptive analysis of the speech heard by young children in a large, unique collection of naturalistic, daylong home recordings. Trained annotators coded automatically-detected adult speech 'utterances' from 61 homes across 4 North American cities, gathered from children (age 2-24 months) wearing audio recorders during a typical day. Coders marked the speaker gender (male/female) and intended addressee (child/adult), yielding 10,886 addressee and gender tags from 2,523 minutes of audio (cf. HB-CHAAC Interspeech ComParE challenge; Schuller et al., in press). Automated speaker-diarization (LENA) incorrectly gender-tagged 30% of male adult utterances, compared to manually-coded consensus. Furthermore, we find effects of SES and gender on child-directed and overall speech, increasing child-directed speech with child age, and interactions of speaker gender, child gender, and child age: female caretakers increased their child-directed speech more with age than male caretakers did, but only for male infants. Implications for language acquisition and existing classification algorithms are discussed.

Abstract

In this paper we explore the feasibility of artificial (formal) grammar recognition (AGR) using spiking neural networks. A biologically inspired minicolumn architecture is designed as the basic computational unit. A network topography is defined based on the minicolumn architecture, here referred to as nodes, connected with excitatory and inhibitory connections. Nodes in the network represent unique internal states of the grammar’s finite state machine (FSM). Future work to improve the performance of the networks is discussed. The modeling framework developed can be used by neurophysiological research to implement network layouts and compare simulated performance characteristics to actual subject performance.

Abstract

Previous studies on focus marking in French have shown that post-focus deaccentuation, phrasing and phonetic cues like peak height and duration are employed to encode narrow focus but tonal patterns appear to be irrelevant. These studies either examined Standard French or did not control for the regional varieties spoken by the speakers. The present study investigated the use of all these cues in expressing narrow focus in naturally spoken declarative sentences in Toulousian French. It was found that similar to Standard French, Toulousian French uses post-focus deaccentuation and phrasing to mark focus. Different from Standard French, Toulousian French does not use the phonetic cues but use tonal patterns to encode focus. Tonal patterns ending with H\% occur more frequently in the VPs when the subject is in focus but tonal patterns ending with L\% occur more frequently in the VPs when the object is in focus. Our study thus provides a first insight into the similarities and differences in focus marking between Toulousian French and Standard French.

Abstract

When we speak, we spontaneously produce gestures (co-speech gestures). Co-speech gestures and speech production are closely interlinked. However, the exact nature of the link is still under debate. To addressed the question that whether co-speech gestures originate from the speech production system or from a system independent of the speech production, the present study examined the relationship between co-speech and co-thought gestures. Co-thought gestures, produced during silent thinking without speaking, presumably originate from a system independent of the speech production processes. We found a positive correlation between the production frequency of co-thought and co-speech gestures, regardless the communicative function that co-speech gestures might serve. Therefore, we suggest that co-speech gestures and co-thought gestures originate from a common system that is independent of the speech production processes

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.

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.

Abstract

The perceptual processing of speech is a constant interplay of multiple competing albeit convergent processes: acoustic input vs. higher-level representations, universal mechanisms vs. language-specific, veridical traces of speech experience vs. construction and activation of abstract representations. The present summary concerns the third of these issues. The ability to generalise across experience and to deal with resulting abstractions is the hallmark of human cognition, visible even in early infancy. In speech processing, abstract representations play a necessary role in both production and perception. New sorts of evidence are now informing our understanding of the breadth of this role.

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.

Abstract

In English and Dutch, listeners entrain to prosodic contours to predict where focus will fall in an utterance. However, is this strategy universally available, even in languages with different phonological systems? In a phoneme detection experiment, we examined whether prosodic entrainment is also found in Mandarin Chinese, a tone language, where in principle the use of pitch for lexical identity may take precedence over the use of pitch cues to salience. Consistent with the results from Germanic languages, response times were facilitated when preceding intonation predicted accent on the target-bearing word. Acoustic analyses revealed greater F0 range in the preceding intonation of the predicted-accent sentences. These findings have implications for how universal and language-specific mechanisms interact in the processing of salience.

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.

Abstract

Two phoneme goodness rating experiments addressed the role of orthographic knowledge in the evaluation of speech sounds. Ratings for the best tokens of /s/ were higher in words spelled with S (e.g., bless) than in words where /s/ was spelled with C (e.g., voice). This difference did not appear for analogous nonwords for which every lexical neighbour had either S or C spelling (pless, floice). Models of phonemic processing incorporating obligatory influence of lexical information in phonemic processing cannot explain this dissociation; the data are consistent with models in which phonemic decisions are not subject to necessary top-down lexical influence.

Abstract

Dutch listeners were slower to make judgements about the semantic relatedness between a spoken target word (e.g. atLEET, 'athlete') and a previously presented visual prime word (e.g. SPORT 'sport') when the spoken word was mis-stressed. The adverse effect of mis-stressing confirms the role of stress information in lexical recognition in Dutch. However, although the erroneous stress pattern was always initially compatible with a competing word (e.g. ATlas, 'atlas'), mis-stressed words did not produced high false alarm rates in unrelated pairs (e.g. SPORT - atLAS). This suggests that stress information did not completely rule out segmentally matching but suprasegmentally mismatching words, a finding consistent with spoken-word recognition models involving multiple activation and inter-word competition.

Abstract

Simulations explored the inability of the TRACE model of spoken-word recognition to model the effects on human listening of acoustic-phonetic mismatches in word forms. The source of TRACE's failure lay not in its interactive connectivity, not in the presence of interword competition, and not in the use of phonemic representations, but in the need for continuously optimised interpretation of the input. When an analogue of TRACE was allowed to cycle to asymptote on every slice of input, an acceptable simulation of the subcategorical mismatch data was achieved. Even then, however, the simulation was not as close as that produced by the Merge model.

Abstract

Recognising continuous speech in a second language is often unexpectedly difficult, as the operation of segmenting speech is so attuned to native-language structure. We report the initial steps in development of a novel training method for second-language listening, focusing on speech segmentation and employing a task designed for studying this: word-spotting. Listeners detect real words in sequences consisting of a word plus a minimal context. The present validation study shows that learners from varying non-English backgrounds successfully perform a version of this task in English, and display appropriate sensitivity to structural factors that also affect segmentation by native English listeners.

Abstract

In a production experiment on Bulgarian that was based on a previous study on Dutch [1], we investigated the role of prosody when linguistic and extra-linguistic information coincide or contradict. Speakers described abnormally colored fruits in conditions where contrastive focus and discourse relations were varied. We found that the coincidence of contrast and abnormality enhances accentuation in Bulgarian as it did in Dutch. Surprisingly, when both factors are in conflict, the prosodic prominence of abnormality often overruled focus accentuation in both Bulgarian and Dutch, though the languages also show marked differences.

Abstract

Speakers often use spatial metaphors to talk about musical pitch (e.g., a low note, a high soprano). Previous experiments suggest that English speakers also think about pitches as high or low in space, even when theyʼre not using language or musical notation (Casasanto, 2010). Do metaphors in language merely reflect pre-existing associations between space and pitch, or might language also shape these non-linguistic metaphorical mappings? To investigate the role of language in pitch tepresentation, we conducted a pair of non-linguistic spacepitch interference experiments in speakers of two languages that use different spatial metaphors. Dutch speakers usually describe pitches as ʻhighʼ (hoog) and ʻlowʼ (laag). Farsi speakers, however, often describe high-frequency pitches as ʻthinʼ (naazok) and low-frequency pitches as ʻthickʼ (koloft). Do Dutch and Farsi speakers mentally represent pitch differently? To find out, we asked participants to reproduce musical pitches that they heard in the presence of irrelevant spatial information (i.e., lines that varied either in height or in thickness). For the Height Interference experiment, horizontal lines bisected a vertical reference line at one of nine different locations. For the Thickness Interference experiment, a vertical line appeared in the middle of the screen in one of nine thicknesses. In each experiment, the nine different lines were crossed with nine different pitches ranging from C4 to G#4 in semitone increments, to produce 81 distinct trials. If Dutch and Farsi speakers mentally represent pitch the way they talk about it, using different kinds of spatial representations, they should show contrasting patterns of cross-dimensional interference: Dutch speakersʼ pitch estimates should be more strongly affected by irrelevant height information, and Farsi speakersʼ by irrelevant thickness information. As predicted, Dutch speakersʼ pitch estimates were significantly modulated by spatial height but not by thickness. Conversely, Farsi speakersʼ pitch estimates were modulated by spatial thickness but not by height (2x2 ANOVA on normalized slopes of the effect of space on pitch: F(1,71)=17,15 p<.001). To determine whether language plays a causal role in shaping pitch representations, we conducted a training experiment. Native Dutch speakers learned to use Farsi-like metaphors, describing pitch relationships in terms of thickness (e.g., a cello sounds ʻthickerʼ than a flute). After training, Dutch speakers showed a significant effect of Thickness interference in the non-linguistic pitch reproduction task, similar to native Farsi speakers: on average, pitches accompanied by thicker lines were reproduced as lower in pitch (effect of thickness on pitch: r=-.22, p=.002). By conducting psychophysical tasks, we tested the ʻWhorfianʼ question without using words. Yet, results also inform theories of metaphorical language processing. According to psycholinguistic theories (e.g., Bowdle & Gentner, 2005), highly conventional metaphors are processed without any active mapping from the source to the target domain (e.g., from space to pitch). Our data, however, suggest that when people use verbal metaphors they activate a corresponding non-linguistic mapping from either height or thickness to pitch, strengthening this association at the expense of competing associations. As a result, people who use different metaphors in their native languages form correspondingly different representations of musical pitch. Casasanto, D. (2010). Space for Thinking. In Language, Cognition and Space: State of the art and new directions. V. Evans & P. Chilton (Eds.), 453-478, London: Equinox Publishing. Bowdle, B. & Gentner, D. (2005). The career of metaphor. Psychological Review, 112, 193-216.

Abstract

Responding to similarity, difference, and relative magnitude (SDM) is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom. However, humans seem unique in the ability to represent relative magnitude (‘more’/‘less’) and similarity (‘same’/‘different’) as abstract relations that take arguments (e.g., greater-than (x,y)). While many models use structured relational representations of magnitude and similarity, little progress has been made on how these representations arise. Models that developuse these representations assume access to computations of similarity and magnitude a priori, either encoded as features or as output of evaluation operators. We detail a mechanism for producing invariant responses to “same”, “different”, “more”, and “less” which can be exploited to compute similarity and magnitude as an evaluation operator. Using DORA (Doumas, Hummel, & Sandhofer, 2008), these invariant responses can serve be used to learn structured relational representations of relative magnitude and similarity from pixel images of simple shapes

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.

Abstract

We report the results of a large-scale (N=1571) experiment to investigate whether spoken words can emerge from the process of repeated imitation. Participants played a version of the children’s game “Telephone”. The first generation was asked to imitate recognizable environmental sounds (e.g., glass breaking, water splashing); subsequent generations imitated the imitators for a total of 8 generations. We then examined whether the vocal imitations became more stable and word-like, retained a resemblance to the original sound, and became more suitable as learned category labels. The results showed (1) the imitations became progressively more word-like, (2) even after 8 generations, they could be matched above chance to the environmental sound that motivated them, and (3) imitations from later generations were more effective as learned category labels. These results show how repeated imitation can create progressively more word-like forms while retaining a semblance of iconicity.

Abstract

Pre-lexical representations of speech sounds have been to shown to change dynamically through a mechanism of lexically driven learning. [Norris et al. (2003).] Here we investigated whether this type of learning occurs in native British English (BE) listeners for a word-final stop contrast which is commonly de-voiced in Dutch-accented English. Specifically, this study asked whether the change in pre-lexical representation also encodes information about the position of the critical sound within a word. After exposure to a native Dutch speaker's productions of de-voiced stops in word-final position (but not in any other positions), BE listeners showed evidence of perceptual learning in a subsequent cross-modal priming task, where auditory primes with voiceless final stops (e.g., [si:t], “seat”) facilitated recognition of visual targets with voiced final stops (e.g., “seed”). This learning generalized to test pairs where the critical contrast was in word-initial position, e.g., auditory primes such as [taun] (“town”), facilitated recognition of visual targets like “down”. Control listeners, who had not heard any stops by the speaker during exposure, showed no learning effects. The results suggest that under these exposure conditions, word position is not encoded in the pre-lexical adjustment to the accented phoneme contras

Abstract

This paper investigates how listeners process regular pronunciation variants, resulting from simple general reduction processes. Study 1 shows that when listeners are presented with new words, they store the pronunciation variants presented to them, whether these are unreduced or reduced. Listeners thus store information on word-specific pronunciation variation. Study 2 suggests that if participants are presented with regularly reduced pronunciations, they also reconstruct and store the corresponding unreduced pronunciations. These unreduced pronunciations apparently have special status. Together the results support hybrid models of speech processing, assuming roles for both exemplars and abstract representations.

Abstract

The problem of auxiliary fronting in complex polar questions occupies a prominent position within the nature versus nurture controversy in language acquisition. We employ a model of statistical learning which uses sequential and semantic information to produce utterances from a bag of words. This linear learner is capable of generating grammatical questions without exposure to these structures in its training environment. We also demonstrate that the model performs superior to n-gram learners on this task. Implications for nativist theories of language acquisition are discussed.

Abstract

We present a neural-symbolic learning model of sentence production which displays strong semantic systematicity and recursive productivity. Using this model, we provide evidence for the data-driven learnability of complex yes/no- questions.

Abstract

Los idiomas sudamericanas tienen una diversidad de sistemas numéricos, desde sistemas con solamente dos o tres términos en algunos idiomas amazónicos hasta sistemas con numerales extendiendo a miles. Una mirada al sistema del idioma cha’palaa de Ecuador demuestra rasgos de base-2, base-5, base-10 y base-20, ligados a diferentes etapas de cambio, desarrollo y contacto lingüístico. Conocer estas etapas nos permite proponer algunas correlaciones con lo que conocemos de la historia de contactos culturales en la región. The South American languages have diverse types of numeral systems, from systems of just two or three terms in some Amazonian languages to systems extending into the thousands. A look a the system of the Cha'palaa language of Ecuador demonstrates base-2, base-5, base-10 and base-20 features, linked to different stages of change, development and language contact. Learning about these stages permits up to propose some correlations between them and what we know about the history of cultural contact in the region.

Abstract

In a 2x2 event-related FMRI study we find support for the idea that the inferior frontal cortex, centered on Broca’s region and its homologue, is involved in constructive unification operations during the structure-building process in parsing for comprehension. Tentatively, we provide evidence for a role of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex centered on BA 9/46 in the control component of the language system. Finally, the left temporo-parietal cortex, in the vicinity of Wernicke’s region, supports the interaction between the syntax of gender agreement and sentence-level semantics.

Abstract

Human implicit learning can be investigated with implicit artificial grammar learning, a simple model for aspects of natural language acquisition. In this paper we investigate the remaining effect of modality transfer in syntactic classification of an acquired grammatical sequence structure after implicit grammar acquisition. Participants practiced either on acoustically presented syllable sequences or visually presented consonant letter sequences. During classification we independently manipulated the statistical frequency-based and rule-based characteristics of the classification stimuli. Participants performed reliably above chance on the within modality classification task although more so for those working on syllable sequence acquisition. These subjects were also the only group that kept a significant performance level in transfer classification. We speculate that this finding is of particular relevance in consideration of an ecological validity in the input signal in the use of artificial grammar learning and in language learning paradigms at large.

Abstract

One of the most daunting tasks of a listener is to map a
continuous auditory stream onto known speech sound
categories and lexical items. A major issue with this mapping
problem is the variability in the acoustic realizations of sound
categories, both within and across speakers. Past research has
suggested listeners may use visual information (e.g., lipreading)
to calibrate these speech categories to the current
speaker. Previous studies have focused on audiovisual
recalibration of consonant categories. The present study
explores whether vowel categorization, which is known to show
less sharply defined category boundaries, also benefit from
visual cues.
Participants were exposed to videos of a speaker
pronouncing one out of two vowels, paired with audio that was
ambiguous between the two vowels. After exposure, it was
found that participants had recalibrated their vowel categories.
In addition, individual variability in audiovisual recalibration is
discussed. It is suggested that listeners’ category sharpness may
be related to the weight they assign to visual information in
audiovisual speech perception. Specifically, listeners with less
sharp categories assign more weight to visual information
during audiovisual speech recognition.

Abstract

A crucial aspect of everyday conversational interactions is our ability to establish and maintain common ground. Understanding the relevant mechanisms involved in such social coordination remains an important challenge for cognitive science. While common ground is often discussed in very general terms, different contexts of interaction are likely to afford different coordination mechanisms. In this paper, we investigate the presence and relation of three mechanisms of social coordination – backchannels, interactive alignment and conversational repair – across free and task-oriented conversations. We find significant differences: task-oriented conversations involve higher presence of repair – restricted offers in particular – and backchannel, as well as a reduced level of lexical and syntactic alignment. We find that restricted repair is associated with lexical alignment and open repair with backchannels. Our findings highlight the need to explicitly assess several mechanisms at once and to investigate diverse activities to understand their role and relations.

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.

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.

Abstract

We conduct the first systematic comparison of automated semantic
annotation based on either the full-text or only on the title metadata
of documents. Apart from the prominent text classification baselines
kNN and SVM, we also compare recent techniques of Learning
to Rank and neural networks and revisit the traditional methods
logistic regression, Rocchio, and Naive Bayes. Across three of our
four datasets, the performance of the classifications using only titles
reaches over 90% of the quality compared to the performance when
using the full-text.

Abstract

We assess the suitability of word embeddings for practical information retrieval scenarios. Thus, we assume that users issue ad-hoc short queries where we return the first twenty retrieved documents after applying a boolean matching operation between the query and the documents. We compare the performance of several techniques that leverage word embeddings in the retrieval models to compute the similarity between the query and the documents, namely word centroid similarity, paragraph vectors, Word Mover’s distance, as well as our novel inverse document frequency (IDF) re-weighted word centroid similarity. We evaluate the performance using the ranking metrics mean average precision, mean reciprocal rank, and normalized discounted cumulative gain. Additionally, we inspect the retrieval models’ sensitivity to document length by using either only the title or the full-text of the documents for the retrieval task. We conclude that word centroid similarity is the best competitor to state-of-the-art retrieval models. It can be further improved by re-weighting the word frequencies with IDF before aggregating the respective word vectors of the embedding. The proposed cosine similarity of IDF re-weighted word vectors is competitive to the TF-IDF baseline and even outperforms it in case of the news domain with a relative percentage of 15%.

Abstract

This paper presents a new architecture for optical burst switched networks where the control plane of the network functions in a cooperative manner. Each node interprets the data conveyed by the control packet and forwards it to the next nodes, making the control plane of the network distribute the relevant information to all the nodes in the network. A cooperation transmission tree is used, thus allowing all the nodes to store the information related to the traffic management in the network, and enabling better network resource planning at each node. A model of this network architecture is proposed, and its performance is evaluated.

Abstract

This paper presents the Demo / Kemo corpus of Dutch and Korean emotional speech. The corpus has been specifically developed for the purpose of cross-linguistic comparison, and is more balanced than any similar corpus available so far: a) it contains expressions by both Dutch and Korean actors as well as judgments by both Dutch and Korean listeners; b) the same elicitation technique and recording procedure was used for recordings of both languages; c) the same nonsense sentence, which was constructed to be permissible in both languages, was used for recordings of both languages; and d) the emotions present in the corpus are balanced in terms of valence, arousal, and dominance. The corpus contains a comparatively large number of emotions (eight) uttered by a large number of speakers (eight Dutch and eight Korean). The counterbalanced nature of the corpus will enable a stricter investigation of language-specific versus universal aspects of emotional expression than was possible so far. Furthermore, given the carefully controlled phonetic content of the expressions, it allows for analysis of the role of specific phonetic features in emotional expression in Dutch and Korean.

Abstract

In this paper we introduce Functional Data Analysis (FDA) as a tool for analyzing dynamic transitions in speech signals. FDA makes it possible to perform statistical analyses of sets of mathematical functions in the same way as classical multivariate analysis treats scalar measurement data. We illustrate the use of FDA with a reduction phenomenon affecting the French word c'était /setε/ 'it was', which can be reduced to [stε] in conversational speech. FDA reveals that the dynamics of the transition from [s] to [t] in fully reduced cases may still be different from the dynamics of [s] - [t] transitions in underlying /st/ clusters such as in the word stage.

Abstract

Researchers in human language processing and acquisition are making an increasing use of computational models. Computer simulations provide a valuable platform to reproduce hypothesised learning mechanisms that are otherwise very difficult, if not impossible, to verify on human subjects. However, computational models come with problems and risks. It is difficult to (automatically) extract essential information about the developing internal representations from a set of simulation runs, and often researchers limit themselves to analysing learning curves based on empirical recognition accuracy through time. The associated risk is to erroneously deem a specific learning behaviour as generalisable to human learners, while it could also be a mere consequence (artifact) of the implementation of the artificial learner or of the input coding scheme. In this paper a set of simulation runs taken from the ACORNS project is investigated. First a look `inside the box' of the learner is provided by employing novel quantitative methods for analysing changing structures in large data sets. Then, the obtained findings are discussed in the perspective of their ecological validity in the field of child language acquisition.

Abstract

Three groups of monolingual listeners, with Standard Chinese, Dutch and Hungarian as their native language, judged pairs of trisyllabic stimuli which differed only in their itch pattern. The segmental structure of the stimuli was made up by the experimenters and presented to subjects as being taken from a little-known language spoken on a South Pacific island. Pitch patterns consisted of a single rise-fall located on or near the second syllable. By and large, listeners selected the stimulus with the higher peak, the later eak, and the higher end rise as the one that signalled a question, regardless of language group. The result is argued to reflect innate, non-linguistic knowledge of the meaning of pitch variation, notably Ohala’s Frequency Code. A significant difference between groups is explained as due to the influence of the mother tongue.

Abstract

This corpus-based study shows that the presence and duration of schwa in Dutch word-initial syllables are affected by a word’s predictability and its morphological structure. Schwa is less reduced in words that are more predictable given the following word. In addition, schwa may be longer if the syllable forms a prefix, and in prefixes the duration of schwa is positively correlated with the frequency of the word relative to its stem. Our results suggest that the conditions which favor reduced realizations are more complex than one would expect on the basis of the current literature.

Abstract

Non-native (L2) speakers of English often experience difficulties in producing English interdental fricatives (e.g. the voiceless [θ]), and this leads to frequent substitutions of these fricatives (e.g. with [t], [s], and [f]). Differences in the choice of [θ]-substitutions across L2 speakers with different native (L1) language backgrounds have been extensively explored. However, even within one foreign accent, more than one substitution choice occurs, but this has been less systematically studied. Furthermore, little is known about whether the substitutions of voiceless [θ] are phonetically clear instances of [t], [s], and [f], as they are often labelled. In this study, we attempted a phonetic approach to examine language-specific preferences for [θ]-substitutions by carrying out acoustic measurements of L1 and L2 realizations of these sounds. To this end, we collected a corpus of spoken English with L1 speakers (UK-English), and Dutch and German L2 speakers. We show a) that the distribution of differential substitutions using identical materials differs between Dutch and German L2 speakers, b) that [t,s,f]-substitutes differ acoustically from intended [t,s,f], and c) that L2 productions of [θ] are acoustically comparable to L1 productions.

Abstract

This paper investigates the time and space complexity of word order computation in the psycholinguistically motivated grammar formalism of Performance Grammar (PG). In PG, the first stage of syntax assembly yields an unordered tree ('mobile') consisting of a hierarchy of lexical frames (lexically anchored elementary trees). Associated with each lexica l frame is a linearizer—a Finite-State Automaton that locally computes the left-to-right order of the branches of the frame. Linearization takes place after the promotion component may have raised certain constituents (e.g. Wh- or focused phrases) into the domain of lexical frames higher up in the syntactic mobile. We show that the worst-case time and space complexity of analyzing input strings of length n is O(n5) and O(n4), respectively. This result compares favorably with the time complexity of word-order computations in Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG). A comparison with Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) reveals that PG yields a more declarative linearization method, provided that the FSA is rewritten as an equivalent regular expression.

Abstract

Present-day sentence generators are often in-capable of producing a wide variety of well-formed elliptical versions of coordinated clauses, in particular, of combined elliptical phenomena (Gapping, Forward and Back-ward Conjunction Reduction, etc.). The ap-plicability of the various types of clausal co-ordinate ellipsis (CCE) presupposes detailed comparisons of the syntactic properties of the coordinated clauses. These nonlocal comparisons argue against approaches based on local rules that treat CCE structures as special cases of clausal coordination. We advocate an alternative approach where CCE rules take the form of postediting rules ap-plicable to nonelliptical structures. The ad-vantage is not only a higher level of modu-larity but also applicability to languages be-longing to different language families. We describe a language-neutral module (called Elleipo; implemented in JAVA) that gener-ates as output all major CCE versions of co-ordinated clauses. Elleipo takes as input linearly ordered nonelliptical coordinated clauses annotated with lexical identity and coreferentiality relationships between words and word groups in the conjuncts. We dem-onstrate the feasibility of a single set of postediting rules that attains multilingual coverage.

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.