Publications

Displaying 1 - 93 of 93
  • Allen, S. E. M. (1997). Towards a discourse-pragmatic explanation for the subject-object asymmetry in early null arguments. In NET-Bulletin 1997 (pp. 1-16). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Instituut voor Functioneel Onderzoek van Taal en Taalgebruik (IFOTT).
  • Aristar-Dry, H., Drude, S., Windhouwer, M., Gippert, J., & Nevskaya, I. (2012). „Rendering Endangered Lexicons Interoperable through Standards Harmonization”: The RELISH Project. In N. Calzolari (Ed.), Proceedings of LREC 2012: 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 766-770). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

    Abstract

    The RELISH project promotes language-oriented research by addressing a two-pronged problem: (1) the lack of harmonization between digital standards for lexical information in Europe and America, and (2) the lack of interoperability among existing lexicons of endangered languages, in particular those created with the Shoebox/Toolbox lexicon building software. The cooperation partners in the RELISH project are the University of Frankfurt (FRA), the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI Nijmegen), and Eastern Michigan University, the host of the Linguist List (ILIT). The project aims at harmonizing key European and American digital standards whose divergence has hitherto impeded international collaboration on language technology for resource creation and analysis, as well as web services for archive access. Focusing on several lexicons of endangered languages, the project will establish a unified way of referencing lexicon structure and linguistic concepts, and develop a procedure for migrating these heterogeneous lexicons to a standards-compliant format. Once developed, the procedure will be generalizable to the large store of lexical resources involved in the LEGO and DoBeS projects.
  • Bauer, B. L. M. (1997). The adjective in Italic and Romance: Genetic or areal factors affecting word order patterns?”. In B. Palek (Ed.), Proceedings of LP'96: Typology: Prototypes, item orderings and universals (pp. 295-306). Prague: Charles University Press.
  • Bauer, B. L. M. (2012). Functions of nominal apposition in Vulgar and Late Latin: Change in progress? In F. Biville, M.-K. Lhommé, & D. Vallat (Eds.), Latin vulgaire – latin tardif IX (pp. 207-220). Lyon: Maison de l’Orient et de la Méditerranné.

    Abstract

    Analysis of the functions of nominal apposition in a number of Latin authors representing different periods, genres, and
    linguistic registers shows (1) that nominal apposition in Latin had a wide variety of functions; (2) that genre had some
    effect on functional use; (3) that change did not affect semantic fields as such; and (4) that with time the occurrence of
    apposition increasingly came to depend on the semantic field and within the semantic field on the individual lexical items.
    The ‘per-word’ treatment –also attested for the structural development of nominal apposition– underscores the specific
    characteristics of nominal apposition as a phenomenon at the cross-roads of syntax and derivational morphology
  • Benazzo, S., Flecken, M., & Soroli, E. (Eds.). (2012). Typological perspectives on language and thought: Thinking for speaking in L2. [Special Issue]. Language, Interaction and Acquisition, 3(2).
  • Bergmann, C., Boves, L., & Ten Bosch, L. (2012). A model of the Headturn Preference Procedure: Linking cognitive processes to overt behaviour. In Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE Conference on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics (IEEE ICDL-EpiRob 2012), San Diego, CA.

    Abstract

    The study of first language acquisition still strongly relies on behavioural methods to measure underlying linguistic abilities. In the present paper, we closely examine and model one such method, the headturn preference procedure (HPP), which is widely used to measure infant speech segmentation and word recognition abilities Our model takes real speech as input, and only uses basic sensory processing and cognitive capabilities to simulate observable behaviour.We show that the familiarity effect found in many HPP experiments can be simulated without using the phonetic and phonological skills necessary for segmenting test sentences into words. The explicit modelling of the process that converts the result of the cognitive processing of the test sentences into observable behaviour uncovered two issues that can lead to null-results in HPP studies. Our simulations show that caution is needed in making inferences about underlying language skills from behaviour in HPP experiments. The simulations also generated questions that must be addressed in future HPP studies.
  • Bohnemeyer, J. (1997). Yucatec Mayan Lexicalization Patterns in Time and Space. In M. Biemans, & J. van de Weijer (Eds.), Proceedings of the CLS opening of the academic year '97-'98. Tilburg, The Netherlands: University Center for Language Studies.
  • Böttner, M. (1997). Visiting some relatives of Peirce's. In 3rd International Seminar on The use of Relational Methods in Computer Science.

    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.
  • Brandt, M., Nitschke, S., & Kidd, E. (2012). Experience and processing of relative clauses in German. In A. K. Biller, E. Y. Chung, & A. E. Kimball (Eds.), Proceedings of the 36th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 36) (pp. 87-100). Boston, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Broeder, D., Van Uytvanck, D., & Senft, G. (2012). Citing on-line language resources. In N. Calzolari (Ed.), Proceedings of LREC 2012: 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 1391-1394). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

    Abstract

    Although the possibility of referring or citing on-line data from publications is seen at least theoretically as an important means to provide immediate testable proof or simple illustration of a line of reasoning, the practice has not been wide-spread yet and no extensive experience has been gained about the possibilities and problems of referring to raw data-sets. This paper makes a case to investigate the possibility and need of persistent data visualization services that facilitate the inspection and evaluation of the cited data.
  • Broeder, D., Van Uytvanck, D., Gavrilidou, M., Trippel, T., & Windhouwer, M. (2012). Standardizing a component metadata infrastructure. In N. Calzolari (Ed.), Proceedings of LREC 2012: 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 1387-1390). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

    Abstract

    This paper describes the status of the standardization efforts of a Component Metadata approach for describing Language Resources with metadata. Different linguistic and Language & Technology communities as CLARIN, META-SHARE and NaLiDa use this component approach and see its standardization of as a matter for cooperation that has the possibility to create a large interoperable domain of joint metadata. Starting with an overview of the component metadata approach together with the related semantic interoperability tools and services as the ISOcat data category registry and the relation registry we explain the standardization plan and efforts for component metadata within ISO TC37/SC4. Finally, we present information about uptake and plans of the use of component metadata within the three mentioned linguistic and L&T communities.
  • Broersma, M. (2012). Lexical representation of perceptually difficult second-language words [Abstract]. Program abstracts from the 164th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 132(3), 2053.

    Abstract

    This study investigates the lexical representation of second-language words that contain difficult to distinguish phonemes. Dutch and English listeners' perception of partially onset-overlapping word pairs like DAFFOdil-DEFIcit and minimal pairs like flash-flesh, was assessed with two cross-modal priming experiments, examining two stages of lexical processing: activation of intended and mismatching lexical representations (Exp.1) and competition between those lexical representations (Exp.2). Exp.1 shows that truncated primes like daffo- and defi- activated lexical representations of mismatching words (either deficit or daffodil) more for L2 than L1 listeners. Exp.2 shows that for minimal pairs, matching primes (prime: flash, target: FLASH) facilitated recognition of visual targets for L1 and L2 listeners alike, whereas mismatching primes (flesh, FLASH) inhibited recognition consistently for L1 listeners but only in a minority of cases for L2 listeners; in most cases, for them, primes facilitated recognition of both words equally strongly. Importantly, all listeners experienced a combination of facilitation and inhibition (and all items sometimes caused facilitation and sometimes inhibition). These results suggest that for all participants, some of the minimal pairs were represented with separate, native-like lexical representations, whereas other pairs were stored as homophones. The nature of the L2 lexical representations thus varied strongly even within listeners.
  • Casillas, M., & Frank, M. C. (2012). Cues to turn boundary prediction in adults and preschoolers. In S. Brown-Schmidt, J. Ginzburg, & S. Larsson (Eds.), Proceedings of SemDial 2012 (SeineDial): The 16th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (pp. 61-69). Paris: Université Paris-Diderot.

    Abstract

    Conversational turns often proceed with very brief pauses between speakers. In order to maintain “no gap, no overlap” turntaking, we must be able to anticipate when an ongoing utterance will end, tracking the current speaker for upcoming points of potential floor exchange. The precise set of cues that listeners use for turn-end boundary anticipation is not yet established. We used an eyetracking paradigm to measure adults’ and children’s online turn processing as they watched videos of conversations in their native language (English) and a range of other languages they did not speak. Both adults and children anticipated speaker transitions effectively. In addition, we observed evidence of turn-boundary anticipation for questions even in languages that were unknown to participants, suggesting that listeners’ success in turn-end anticipation does not rely solely on lexical information.
  • Chu, M., & Kita, S. (2012). The nature of the beneficial role of spontaneous gesture in spatial problem solving [Abstract]. Cognitive Processing; Special Issue "ICSC 2012, the 5th International Conference on Spatial Cognition: Space and Embodied Cognition". Oral Presentations, 13(Suppl. 1), S39.

    Abstract

    Spontaneous gestures play an important role in spatial problem solving. We investigated the functional role and underlying mechanism of spontaneous gestures in spatial problem solving. In Experiment 1, 132 participants were required to solve a mental rotation task (see Figure 1) without speaking. Participants gestured more frequently in difficult trials than in easy trials. In Experiment 2, 66 new participants were given two identical sets of mental rotation tasks problems, as the one used in experiment 1. Participants who were encouraged to gesture in the first set of mental rotation task problemssolved more problems correctly than those who were allowed to gesture or those who were prohibited from gesturing both in the first set and in the second set in which all participants were prohibited from gesturing. The gestures produced by the gestureencouraged group and the gesture-allowed group were not qualitatively different. In Experiment 3, 32 new participants were first given a set of mental rotation problems and then a second set of nongesturing paper folding problems. The gesture-encouraged group solved more problems correctly in the first set of mental rotation problems and the second set of non-gesturing paper folding problems. We concluded that gesture improves spatial problem solving. Furthermore, gesture has a lasting beneficial effect even when gesture is not available and the beneficial effect is problem-general.We suggested that gesture enhances spatial problem solving by provide a rich sensori-motor representation of the physical world and pick up information that is less readily available to visuo-spatial processes.
  • Collins, J. (2012). The evolution of the Greenbergian word order correlations. In T. C. Scott-Phillips, M. Tamariz, E. A. Cartmill, & J. R. Hurford (Eds.), The evolution of language. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference (EVOLANG9) (pp. 72-79). Singapore: World Scientific.
  • Connell, L., Cai, Z. G., & Holler, J. (2012). Do you see what I'm singing? Visuospatial movement biases pitch perception. In N. Miyake, D. Peebles, & R. P. Cooper (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2012) (pp. 252-257). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    The nature of the connection between musical and spatial processing is controversial. While pitch may be described in spatial terms such as “high” or “low”, it is unclear whether pitch and space are associated but separate dimensions or whether they share representational and processing resources. In the present study, we asked participants to judge whether a target vocal note was the same as (or different from) a preceding cue note. Importantly, target trials were presented as video clips where a singer sometimes gestured upward or downward while singing that target note, thus providing an alternative, concurrent source of spatial information. Our results show that pitch discrimination was significantly biased by the spatial movement in gesture. These effects were eliminated by spatial memory load but preserved under verbal memory load conditions. Together, our findings suggest that pitch and space have a shared representation such that the mental representation of pitch is audiospatial in nature.
  • Crago, M. B., & Allen, S. E. M. (1997). Linguistic and cultural aspects of simplicity and complexity in Inuktitut child directed speech. In E. Hughes, M. Hughes, & A. Greenhill (Eds.), Proceedings of the 21st annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 91-102).
  • Cristia, A., & Peperkamp, S. (2012). Generalizing without encoding specifics: Infants infer phonotactic patterns on sound classes. In A. K. Biller, E. Y. Chung, & A. E. Kimball (Eds.), Proceedings of the 36th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 36) (pp. 126-138). Somerville, Mass.: Cascadilla Press.

    Abstract

    publication expected April 2012
  • Cutler, A. (1994). How human speech recognition is affected by phonological diversity among languages. In R. Togneri (Ed.), Proceedings of the fifth Australian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology: Vol. 1 (pp. 285-288). Canberra: Australian Speech Science and Technology Association.

    Abstract

    Listeners process spoken language in ways which are adapted to the phonological structure of their native language. As a consequence, non-native speakers do not listen to a language in the same way as native speakers; moreover, listeners may use their native language listening procedures inappropriately with foreign input. With sufficient experience, however, it may be possible to inhibit this latter (counter-productive) behavior.
  • Cutler, A., & Young, D. (1994). Rhythmic structure of word blends in English. In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (pp. 1407-1410). Kobe: Acoustical Society of Japan.

    Abstract

    Word blends combine fragments from two words, either in speech errors or when a new word is created. Previous work has demonstrated that in Japanese, such blends preserve moraic structure; in English they do not. A similar effect of moraic structure is observed in perceptual research on segmentation of continuous speech in Japanese; English listeners, by contrast, exploit stress units in segmentation, suggesting that a general rhythmic constraint may underlie both findings. The present study examined whether mis parallel would also hold for word blends. In spontaneous English polysyllabic blends, the source words were significantly more likely to be split before a strong than before a weak (unstressed) syllable, i.e. to be split at a stress unit boundary. In an experiment in which listeners were asked to identify the source words of blends, significantly more correct detections resulted when splits had been made before strong syllables. Word blending, like speech segmentation, appears to be constrained by language rhythm.
  • Cutler, A., McQueen, J. M., Baayen, R. H., & Drexler, H. (1994). Words within words in a real-speech corpus. In R. Togneri (Ed.), Proceedings of the 5th Australian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology: Vol. 1 (pp. 362-367). Canberra: Australian Speech Science and Technology Association.

    Abstract

    In a 50,000-word corpus of spoken British English the occurrence of words embedded within other words is reported. Within-word embedding in this real speech sample is common, and analogous to the extent of embedding observed in the vocabulary. Imposition of a syllable boundary matching constraint reduces but by no means eliminates spurious embedding. Embedded words are most likely to overlap with the beginning of matrix words, and thus may pose serious problems for speech recognisers.
  • Defina, R., & Majid, A. (2012). Conceptual event units of putting and taking in two unrelated languages. In N. Miyake, D. Peebles, & R. Cooper (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2012) (pp. 1470-1475). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    People automatically chunk ongoing dynamic events into discrete units. This paper investigates whether linguistic structure is a factor in this process. We test the claim that describing an event with a serial verb construction will influence a speaker’s conceptual event structure. The grammar of Avatime (a Kwa language spoken in Ghana)requires its speakers to describe some, but not all, placement events using a serial verb construction which also encodes the preceding taking event. We tested Avatime and English speakers’ recognition memory for putting and taking events. Avatime speakers were more likely to falsely recognize putting and taking events from episodes associated with takeput serial verb constructions than from episodes associated with other constructions. English speakers showed no difference in false recognitions between episode types. This demonstrates that memory for episodes is related to the type of language used; and, moreover, across languages different conceptual representations are formed for the same physical episode, paralleling habitual linguistic practices
  • Dingemanse, M., Hammond, J., Stehouwer, H., Somasundaram, A., & Drude, S. (2012). A high speed transcription interface for annotating primary linguistic data. In Proceedings of 6th Workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities (pp. 7-12). Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.

    Abstract

    We present a new transcription mode for the annotation tool ELAN. This mode is designed to speed up the process of creating transcriptions of primary linguistic data (video and/or audio recordings of linguistic behaviour). We survey the basic transcription workflow of some commonly used tools (Transcriber, BlitzScribe, and ELAN) and describe how the new transcription interface improves on these existing implementations. We describe the design of the transcription interface and explore some further possibilities for improvement in the areas of segmentation and computational enrichment of annotations.
  • Dingemanse, M., & Majid, A. (2012). The semantic structure of sensory vocabulary in an African language. In N. Miyake, D. Peebles, & R. P. Cooper (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2012) (pp. 300-305). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    The widespread occurrence of ideophones, large classes of words specialized in evoking sensory imagery, is little known outside linguistics and anthropology. Ideophones are a common feature in many of the world’s languages but are underdeveloped in English and other Indo-European languages. Here we study the meanings of ideophones in Siwu (a Kwa language from Ghana) using a pile-sorting task. The goal was to uncover the underlying structure of the lexical space and to examine the claimed link between ideophones and perception. We found that Siwu ideophones are principally organized around fine-grained aspects of sensory perception, and map onto salient psychophysical dimensions identified in sensory science. The results ratify ideophones as dedicated sensory vocabulary and underline the relevance of ideophones for research on language and perception.
  • Dolscheid, S., Hunnius, S., Casasanto, D., & Majid, A. (2012). The sound of thickness: Prelinguistic infants' associations of space and pitch. In N. Miyake, D. Peebles, & R. P. Cooper (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2012) (pp. 306-311). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    People often talk about musical pitch in terms of spatial metaphors. In English, for instance, pitches can be high or low, whereas in other languages pitches are described as thick or thin. According to psychophysical studies, metaphors in language can also shape people’s nonlinguistic space-pitch representations. But does language establish mappings between space and pitch in the first place or does it modify preexisting associations? Here we tested 4-month-old Dutch infants’ sensitivity to height-pitch and thickness-pitch mappings in two preferential looking tasks. Dutch infants looked significantly longer at cross-modally congruent stimuli in both experiments, indicating that infants are sensitive to space-pitch associations prior to language. This early presence of space-pitch mappings suggests that these associations do not originate from language. Rather, language may build upon pre-existing mappings and change them gradually via some form of competitive associative learning.
  • Drude, S., Trilsbeek, P., & Broeder, D. (2012). Language Documentation and Digital Humanities: The (DoBeS) Language Archive. In J. C. Meister (Ed.), Digital Humanities 2012 Conference Abstracts. University of Hamburg, Germany; July 16–22, 2012 (pp. 169-173).

    Abstract

    Overview Since the early nineties, the on-going dramatic loss of the world’s linguistic diversity has gained attention, first by the linguists and increasingly also by the general public. As a response, the new field of language documentation emerged from around 2000 on, starting with the funding initiative ‘Dokumentation Bedrohter Sprachen’ (DoBeS, funded by the Volkswagen foundation, Germany), soon to be followed by others such as the ‘Endangered Languages Documentation Programme’ (ELDP, at SOAS, London), or, in the USA, ‘Electronic Meta-structure for Endangered Languages Documentation’ (EMELD, led by the LinguistList) and ‘Documenting Endangered Languages’ (DEL, by the NSF). From its very beginning, the new field focused on digital technologies not only for recording in audio and video, but also for annotation, lexical databases, corpus building and archiving, among others. This development not just coincides but is intrinsically interconnected with the increasing focus on digital data, technology and methods in all sciences, in particular in the humanities.
  • Drude, S., Broeder, D., Trilsbeek, P., & Wittenburg, P. (2012). The Language Archive: A new hub for language resources. In N. Calzolari (Ed.), Proceedings of LREC 2012: 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 3264-3267). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

    Abstract

    This contribution presents “The Language Archive” (TLA), a new unit at the MPI for Psycholinguistics, discussing the current developments in management of scientific data, considering the need for new data research infrastructures. Although several initiatives worldwide in the realm of language resources aim at the integration, preservation and mobilization of research data, the state of such scientific data is still often problematic. Data are often not well organized and archived and not described by metadata ― even unique data such as field-work observational data on endangered languages is still mostly on perishable carriers. New data centres are needed that provide trusted, quality-reviewed, persistent services and suitable tools and that take legal and ethical issues seriously. The CLARIN initiative has established criteria for suitable centres. TLA is in a good position to be one of such centres. It is based on three essential pillars: (1) A data archive; (2) management, access and annotation tools; (3) archiving and software expertise for collaborative projects. The archive hosts mostly observational data on small languages worldwide and language acquisition data, but also data resulting from experiments
  • Eisner, F. (2012). Competition in the acoustic encoding of emotional speech. In L. McCrohon (Ed.), Five approaches to language evolution. Proceedings of the workshops of the 9th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (pp. 43-44). Tokyo: Evolang9 Organizing Committee.

    Abstract

    1. Introduction Speech conveys not only linguistic meaning but also paralinguistic information, such as features of the speaker’s social background, physiology, and emotional state. Linguistic and paralinguistic information is encoded in speech by using largely the same vocal apparatus and both are transmitted simultaneously in the acoustic signal, drawing on a limited set of acoustic cues. How this simultaneous encoding is achieved, how the different types of information are disentangled by the listener, and how much they interfere with one another is presently not well understood. Previous research has highlighted the importance of acoustic source and filter cues for emotion and linguistic encoding respectively, which may suggest that the two types of information are encoded independently of each other. However, those lines of investigation have been almost completely disconnected (Murray & Arnott, 1993).
  • Elbers, W., Broeder, D., & Van Uytvanck, D. (2012). Proper language resource centers. In N. Calzolari (Ed.), Proceedings of LREC 2012: 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 3260-3263). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

    Abstract

    Language resource centers allow researchers to reliably deposit their structured data together with associated meta data and run services operating on this deposited data. We are looking into possibilities to create long-term persistency of both the deposited data and the services operating on this data. Challenges, both technical and non-technical, that need to be solved are the need to replicate more than just the data, proper identification of the digital objects in a distributed environment by making use of persistent identifiers and the set-up of a proper authentication and authorization domain including the management of the authorization information on the digital objects. We acknowledge the investment that most language resource centers have made in their current infrastructure. Therefore one of the most important requirements is the loose coupling with existing infrastructures without the need to make many changes. This shift from a single language resource center into a federated environment of many language resource centers is discussed in the context of a real world center: The Language Archive supported by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
  • Fitch, W. T., Friederici, A. D., & Hagoort, P. (Eds.). (2012). Pattern perception and computational complexity [Special Issue]. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 367 (1598).
  • De la Fuente, J., Santiago, J., Roma, A., Dumitrache, C., & Casasanto, D. (2012). Facing the past: cognitive flexibility in the front-back mapping of time [Abstract]. Cognitive Processing; Special Issue "ICSC 2012, the 5th International Conference on Spatial Cognition: Space and Embodied Cognition". Poster Presentations, 13(Suppl. 1), S58.

    Abstract

    In many languages the future is in front and the past behind, but in some cultures (like Aymara) the past is in front. Is it possible to find this mapping as an alternative conceptualization of time in other cultures? If so, what are the factors that affect its choice out of the set of available alternatives? In a paper and pencil task, participants placed future or past events either in front or behind a character (a schematic head viewed from above). A sample of 24 Islamic participants (whose language also places the future in front and the past behind) tended to locate the past event in the front box more often than Spanish participants. This result might be due to the greater cultural value assigned to tradition in Islamic culture. The same pattern was found in a sample of Spanish elders (N = 58), what may support that conclusion. Alternatively, the crucial factor may be the amount of attention paid to the past. In a final study, young Spanish adults (N = 200) who had just answered a set of questions about their past showed the past-in-front pattern, whereas questions about their future exacerbated the future-in-front pattern. Thus, the attentional explanation was supported: attended events are mapped to front space in agreement with the experiential connection between attending and seeing. When attention is paid to the past, it tends to occupy the front location in spite of available alternative mappings in the language-culture.
  • Gebre, B. G., & Wittenburg, P. (2012). Adaptive automatic gesture stroke detection. In J. C. Meister (Ed.), Digital Humanities 2012 Conference Abstracts. University of Hamburg, Germany; July 16–22, 2012 (pp. 458-461).

    Abstract

    Print Friendly XML Gebre, Binyam Gebrekidan, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands, binyamgebrekidan.gebre [at] mpi.nl Wittenburg, Peter, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands, peter.wittenburg [at] mpi.nl Introduction Many gesture and sign language researchers manually annotate video recordings to systematically categorize, analyze and explain their observations. The number and kinds of annotations are so diverse and unpredictable that any attempt at developing non-adaptive automatic annotation systems is usually less effective. The trend in the literature has been to develop models that work for average users and for average scenarios. This approach has three main disadvantages. First, it is impossible to know beforehand all the patterns that could be of interest to all researchers. Second, it is practically impossible to find enough training examples for all patterns. Third, it is currently impossible to learn a model that is robustly applicable across all video quality-recording variations.
  • Gebre, B. G., Wittenburg, P., & Lenkiewicz, P. (2012). Towards automatic gesture stroke detection. In N. Calzolari (Ed.), Proceedings of LREC 2012: 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 231-235). European Language Resources Association.

    Abstract

    Automatic annotation of gesture strokes is important for many gesture and sign language researchers. The unpredictable diversity of human gestures and video recording conditions require that we adopt a more adaptive case-by-case annotation model. In this paper, we present a work-in progress annotation model that allows a user to a) track hands/face b) extract features c) distinguish strokes from non-strokes. The hands/face tracking is done with color matching algorithms and is initialized by the user. The initialization process is supported with immediate visual feedback. Sliders are also provided to support a user-friendly adjustment of skin color ranges. After successful initialization, features related to positions, orientations and speeds of tracked hands/face are extracted using unique identifiable features (corners) from a window of frames and are used for training a learning algorithm. Our preliminary results for stroke detection under non-ideal video conditions are promising and show the potential applicability of our methodology.
  • Gisladottir, R. S., Chwilla, D., Schriefers, H., & Levinson, S. C. (2012). Speech act recognition in conversation: Experimental evidence. In N. Miyake, D. Peebles, & R. P. Cooper (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2012) (pp. 1596-1601). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. Retrieved from http://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2012/papers/0282/index.html.

    Abstract

    Recognizing the speech acts in our interlocutors’ utterances is a crucial prerequisite for conversation. However, it is not a trivial task given that the form and content of utterances is frequently underspecified for this level of meaning. In the present study we investigate participants’ competence in categorizing speech acts in such action-underspecific sentences and explore the time-course of speech act inferencing using a self-paced reading paradigm. The results demonstrate that participants are able to categorize the speech acts with very high accuracy, based on limited context and without any prosodic information. Furthermore, the results show that the exact same sentence is processed differently depending on the speech act it performs, with reading times starting to differ already at the first word. These results indicate that participants are very good at “getting” the speech acts, opening up a new arena for experimental research on action recognition in conversation.
  • Le Guen, O. (2012). Socializing with the supernatural: The place of supernatural entities in Yucatec Maya daily life and socialization. In P. Nondédéo, & A. Breton (Eds.), Maya daily lives: Proceedings of the 13th European Maya Conference (pp. 151-170). Markt Schwaben: Verlag Anton Saurwein.
  • Habscheid, S., & Klein, W. (Eds.). (2012). Dinge und Maschinen in der Kommunikation [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 42(168).

    Abstract

    “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” (Weiser 1991, S. 94). – Die Behauptung stammt aus einem vielzitierten Text von Mark Weiser, ehemals Chief Technology Officer am berühmten Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), wo nicht nur einige bedeutende computertechnische Innovationen ihren Ursprung hatten, sondern auch grundlegende anthropologische Einsichten zum Umgang mit technischen Artefakten gewonnen wurden.1 In einem populärwissenschaftlichen Artikel mit dem Titel „The Computer for the 21st Century” entwarf Weiser 1991 die Vision einer Zukunft, in der wir nicht mehr mit einem einzelnen PC an unserem Arbeitsplatz umgehen – vielmehr seien wir in jedem Raum umgeben von hunderten elektronischer Vorrichtungen, die untrennbar in Alltagsgegenstände eingebettet und daher in unserer materiellen Umwelt gleichsam „verschwunden“ sind. Dabei ging es Weiser nicht allein um das ubiquitäre Phänomen, das in der Medientheorie als „Transparenz der Medien“ bekannt ist2 oder in allgemeineren Theorien der Alltagserfahrung als eine selbstverständliche Verwobenheit des Menschen mit den Dingen, die uns in ihrem Sinn vertraut und praktisch „zuhanden“ sind.3 Darüber hinaus zielte Weisers Vision darauf, unsere bereits existierende Umwelt durch computerlesbare Daten zu erweitern und in die Operationen eines solchen allgegenwärtigen Netzwerks alltägliche Praktiken gleichsam lückenlos zu integrieren: In der Welt, die Weiser entwirft, öffnen sich Türen für denjenigen, der ein bestimmtes elektronisches Abzeichen trägt, begrüßen Räume Personen, die sie betreten, mit Namen, passen sich Computerterminals an die Präferenzen individueller Nutzer an usw. (Weiser 1991, S. 99).
  • Haderlein, T., Moers, C., Möbius, B., & Nöth, E. (2012). Automatic rating of hoarseness by text-based cepstral and prosodic evaluation. In P. Sojka, A. Horák, I. Kopecek, & K. Pala (Eds.), Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue (TSD 2012) (pp. 573-580). Heidelberg: Springer.

    Abstract

    The standard for the analysis of distorted voices is perceptual rating of read-out texts or spontaneous speech. Automatic voice evaluation, however, is usually done on stable sections of sustained vowels. In this paper, text-based and established vowel-based analysis are compared with respect to their ability to measure hoarseness and its subclasses. 73 hoarse patients (48.3±16.8 years) uttered the vowel /e/ and read the German version of the text “The North Wind and the Sun”. Five speech therapists and physicians rated roughness, breathiness, and hoarseness according to the German RBH evaluation scheme. The best human-machine correlations were obtained for measures based on the Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPP; up to |r | = 0.73). Support Vector Regression (SVR) on CPP-based measures and prosodic features improved the results further to r ≈0.8 and confirmed that automatic voice evaluation should be performed on a text recording.
  • Hammarström, H., & van den Heuvel, W. (Eds.). (2012). On the history, contact & classification of Papuan languages [Special Issue]. Language & Linguistics in Melanesia, 2012. Retrieved from http://www.langlxmelanesia.com/specialissues.htm.
  • Hanique, I., & Ernestus, M. (2012). The processes underlying two frequent casual speech phenomena in Dutch: A production experiment. In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2012: 13th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 2011-2014).

    Abstract

    This study investigated whether a shadowing task can provide insights in the nature of reduction processes that are typical of casual speech. We focused on the shortening and presence versus absence of schwa and /t/ in Dutch past participles. Results showed that the absence of these segments was affected by the same variables as their shortening, suggesting that absence mostly resulted from extreme gradient shortening. This contrasts with results based on recordings of spontaneous conversations. We hypothesize that this difference is due to non-casual fast speech elicited by a shadowing task.
  • Holler, J., Kelly, S., Hagoort, P., & Ozyurek, A. (2012). When gestures catch the eye: The influence of gaze direction on co-speech gesture comprehension in triadic communication. In N. Miyake, D. Peebles, & R. P. Cooper (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2012) (pp. 467-472). Austin, TX: Cognitive Society. Retrieved from http://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2012/papers/0092/index.html.

    Abstract

    Co-speech gestures are an integral part of human face-to-face communication, but little is known about how pragmatic factors influence our comprehension of those gestures. The present study investigates how different types of recipients process iconic gestures in a triadic communicative situation. Participants (N = 32) took on the role of one of two recipients in a triad and were presented with 160 video clips of an actor speaking, or speaking and gesturing. Crucially, the actor’s eye gaze was manipulated in that she alternated her gaze between the two recipients. Participants thus perceived some messages in the role of addressed recipient and some in the role of unaddressed recipient. In these roles, participants were asked to make judgements concerning the speaker’s messages. Their reaction times showed that unaddressed recipients did comprehend speaker’s gestures differently to addressees. The findings are discussed with respect to automatic and controlled processes involved in gesture comprehension.
  • Kempen, G. (1997). De ontdubbelde taalgebruiker: Maken taalproductie en taalperceptie gebruik van één en dezelfde syntactische processor? [Abstract]. In 6e Winter Congres NvP. Programma and abstracts (pp. 31-32). Nederlandse Vereniging voor Psychonomie.
  • Kempen, G., Kooij, A., & Van Leeuwen, T. (1997). Do skilled readers exploit inflectional spelling cues that do not mirror pronunciation? An eye movement study of morpho-syntactic parsing in Dutch. In Abstracts of the Orthography Workshop "What spelling changes". Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
  • Kempen, G. (1994). Innovative language checking software for Dutch. In J. Van Gent, & E. Peeters (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2e Dag van het Document (pp. 99-100). Delft: TNO Technisch Physische Dienst.
  • Kempen, G. (1994). The unification space: A hybrid model of human syntactic processing [Abstract]. In Cuny 1994 - The 7th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. March 17-19, 1994. CUNY Graduate Center, New York.
  • Kempen, G., & Dijkstra, A. (1994). Toward an integrated system for grammar, writing and spelling instruction. In L. Appelo, & F. De Jong (Eds.), Computer-Assisted Language Learning: Proceedings of the Seventh Twente Workshop on Language Technology (pp. 41-46). Enschede: University of Twente.
  • Klein, W., & Dittmar, N. (Eds.). (1994). Interkulturelle Kommunikation [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (93).
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (1997). Technologischer Wandel in den Philologien [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (106).
  • Koster, M., & Cutler, A. (1997). Segmental and suprasegmental contributions to spoken-word recognition in Dutch. In Proceedings of EUROSPEECH 97 (pp. 2167-2170). Grenoble, France: ESCA.

    Abstract

    Words can be distinguished by segmental differences or by suprasegmental differences or both. Studies from English suggest that suprasegmentals play little role in human spoken-word recognition; English stress, however, is nearly always unambiguously coded in segmental structure (vowel quality); this relationship is less close in Dutch. The present study directly compared the effects of segmental and suprasegmental mispronunciation on word recognition in Dutch. There was a strong effect of suprasegmental mispronunciation, suggesting that Dutch listeners do exploit suprasegmental information in word recognition. Previous findings indicating the effects of mis-stressing for Dutch differ with stress position were replicated only when segmental change was involved, suggesting that this is an effect of segmental rather than suprasegmental processing.
  • Lenkiewicz, P., Auer, E., Schreer, O., Masneri, S., Schneider, D., & Tschöpe, S. (2012). AVATecH ― automated annotation through audio and video analysis. In N. Calzolari (Ed.), Proceedings of LREC 2012: 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 209-214). European Language Resources Association.

    Abstract

    In different fields of the humanities annotations of multimodal resources are a necessary component of the research workflow. Examples include linguistics, psychology, anthropology, etc. However, creation of those annotations is a very laborious task, which can take 50 to 100 times the length of the annotated media, or more. This can be significantly improved by applying innovative audio and video processing algorithms, which analyze the recordings and provide automated annotations. This is the aim of the AVATecH project, which is a collaboration of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI) and the Fraunhofer institutes HHI and IAIS. In this paper we present a set of results of automated annotation together with an evaluation of their quality.
  • Lenkiewicz, A., Lis, M., & Lenkiewicz, P. (2012). Linguistic concepts described with Media Query Language for automated annotation. In J. C. Meiser (Ed.), Digital Humanities 2012 Conference Abstracts. University of Hamburg, Germany; July 16–22, 2012 (pp. 477-479).

    Abstract

    Introduction Human spoken communication is multimodal, i.e. it encompasses both speech and gesture. Acoustic properties of voice, body movements, facial expression, etc. are an inherent and meaningful part of spoken interaction; they can provide attitudinal, grammatical and semantic information. In the recent years interest in audio-visual corpora has been rising rapidly as they enable investigation of different communicative modalities and provide more holistic view on communication (Kipp et al. 2009). Moreover, for some languages such corpora are the only available resource, as is the case for endangered languages for which no written resources exist.
  • Lenkiewicz, P., Van Uytvanck, D., Wittenburg, P., & Drude, S. (2012). Towards automated annotation of audio and video recordings by application of advanced web-services. In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2012: 13th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 1880-1883).

    Abstract

    In this paper we describe audio and video processing algorithms that are developed in the scope of AVATecH project. The purpose of these algorithms is to shorten the time taken by manual annotation of audio and video recordings by extracting features from media files and creating semi-automated annotations. We show that the use of such supporting algorithms can shorten the annotation time to 30-50% of the time necessary to perform a fully manual annotation of the same kind.
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1994). On the skill of speaking: How do we access words? In Proceedings ICSLP 94 (pp. 2253-2258). Yokohama: The Acoustical Society of Japan.
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1994). Onder woorden brengen: Beschouwingen over het spreekproces. In Haarlemse voordrachten: voordrachten gehouden in de Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen te Haarlem. Haarlem: Hollandsche maatschappij der wetenschappen.
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1994). What can a theory of normal speaking contribute to AAC? In ISAAC '94 Conference Book and Proceedings. Hoensbroek: IRV.
  • Levinson, S. C., & Haviland, J. B. (Eds.). (1994). Space in Mayan languages [Special Issue]. Linguistics, 32(4/5).
  • Majid, A. (2012). Taste in twenty cultures [Abstract]. Abstracts from the XXIth Congress of European Chemoreception Research Organization, ECRO-2011. Publ. in Chemical Senses, 37(3), A10.

    Abstract

    Scholars disagree about the extent to which language can tell us
    about conceptualisation of the world. Some believe that language
    is a direct window onto concepts: Having a word ‘‘bird’’, ‘‘table’’ or
    ‘‘sour’’ presupposes the corresponding underlying concept, BIRD,
    TABLE, SOUR. Others disagree. Words are thought to be uninformative,
    or worse, misleading about our underlying conceptual representations;
    after all, our mental worlds are full of ideas that we
    struggle to express in language. How could this be so, argue sceptics,
    if language were a direct window on our inner life? In this presentation,
    I consider what language can tell us about the
    conceptualisation of taste. By considering linguistic data from
    twenty unrelated cultures – varying in subsistence mode (huntergatherer
    to industrial), ecological zone (rainforest jungle to desert),
    dwelling type (rural and urban), and so forth – I argue any single language is, indeed, impoverished about what it can reveal about
    taste. But recurrent lexicalisation patterns across languages can
    provide valuable insights about human taste experience. Moreover,
    language patterning is part of the data that a good theory of taste
    perception has to be answerable for. Taste researchers, therefore,
    cannot ignore the crosslinguistic facts.
  • Majid, A., Boroditsky, L., & Gaby, A. (Eds.). (2012). Time in terms of space [Research topic] [Special Issue]. Frontiers in cultural psychology. Retrieved from http://www.frontiersin.org/cultural_psychology/researchtopics/Time_in_terms_of_space/755.

    Abstract

    This Research Topic explores the question: what is the relationship between representations of time and space in cultures around the world? This question touches on the broader issue of how humans come to represent and reason about abstract entities – things we cannot see or touch. Time is a particularly opportune domain to investigate this topic. Across cultures, people use spatial representations for time, for example in graphs, time-lines, clocks, sundials, hourglasses, and calendars. In language, time is also heavily related to space, with spatial terms often used to describe the order and duration of events. In English, for example, we might move a meeting forward, push a deadline back, attend a long concert or go on a short break. People also make consistent spatial gestures when talking about time, and appear to spontaneously invoke spatial representations when processing temporal language. A large body of evidence suggests a close correspondence between temporal and spatial language and thought. However, the ways that people spatialize time can differ dramatically across languages and cultures. This research topic identifies and explores some of the sources of this variation, including patterns in spatial thinking, patterns in metaphor, gesture and other cultural systems. This Research Topic explores how speakers of different languages talk about time and space and how they think about these domains, outside of language. The Research Topic invites papers exploring the following issues: 1. Do the linguistic representations of space and time share the same lexical and morphosyntactic resources? 2. To what extent does the conceptualization of time follow the conceptualization of space?
  • Mitterer, H. (Ed.). (2012). Ecological aspects of speech perception [Research topic] [Special Issue]. Frontiers in Cognition.

    Abstract

    Our knowledge of speech perception is largely based on experiments conducted with carefully recorded clear speech presented under good listening conditions to undistracted listeners - a near-ideal situation, in other words. But the reality poses a set of different challenges. First of all, listeners may need to divide their attention between speech comprehension and another task (e.g., driving). Outside the laboratory, the speech signal is often slurred by less than careful pronunciation and the listener has to deal with background noise. Moreover, in a globalized world, listeners need to understand speech in more than their native language. Relatedly, the speakers we listen to often have a different language background so we have to deal with a foreign or regional accent we are not familiar with. Finally, outside the laboratory, speech perception is not an end in itself, but rather a mean to contribute to a conversation. Listeners do not only need to understand the speech they are hearing, they also need to use this information to plan and time their own responses. For this special topic, we invite papers that address any of these ecological aspects of speech perception.
  • Namjoshi, J., Tremblay, A., Broersma, M., Kim, S., & Cho, T. (2012). Influence of recent linguistic exposure on the segmentation of an unfamiliar language [Abstract]. Program abstracts from the 164th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 132(3), 1968.

    Abstract

    Studies have shown that listeners segmenting unfamiliar languages transfer native-language (L1) segmentation cues. These studies, however, conflated L1 and recent linguistic exposure. The present study investigates the relative influences of L1 and recent linguistic exposure on the use of prosodic cues for segmenting an artificial language (AL). Participants were L1-French listeners, high-proficiency L2-French L1-English listeners, and L1-English listeners without functional knowledge of French. The prosodic cue assessed was F0 rise, which is word-final in French, but in English tends to be word-initial. 30 participants heard a 20-minute AL speech stream with word-final boundaries marked by F0 rise, and decided in a subsequent listening task which of two words (without word-final F0 rise) had been heard in the speech stream. The analyses revealed a marginally significant effect of L1 (all listeners) and, importantly, a significant effect of recent linguistic exposure (L1-French and L2-French listeners): accuracy increased with decreasing time in the US since the listeners’ last significant (3+ months) stay in a French-speaking environment. Interestingly, no effect of L2 proficiency was found (L2-French listeners).
  • Nordhoff, S., & Hammarström, H. (2012). Glottolog/Langdoc: Increasing the visibility of grey literature for low-density languages. In N. Calzolari (Ed.), Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation [LREC 2012], May 23-25, 2012 (pp. 3289-3294). [Paris]: ELRA.

    Abstract

    Language resources can be divided into structural resources treating phonology, morphosyntax, semantics etc. and resources treating the social, demographic, ethnic, political context. A third type are meta-resources, like bibliographies, which provide access to the resources of the first two kinds. This poster will present the Glottolog/Langdoc project, a comprehensive bibliography providing web access to 180k bibliographical records to (mainly) low visibility resources from low-density languages. The resources are annotated for macro-area, content language, and document type and are available in XHTML and RDF.
  • Norris, D., McQueen, J. M., & Cutler, A. (1994). Competition and segmentation in spoken word recognition. In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 1 (pp. 401-404). Yokohama: PACIFICO.

    Abstract

    This paper describes recent experimental evidence which shows that models of spoken word recognition must incorporate both inhibition between competing lexical candidates and a sensitivity to metrical cues to lexical segmentation. A new version of the Shortlist [1][2] model incorporating the Metrical Segmentation Strategy [3] provides a detailed simulation of the data.
  • Ozyurek, A. (1994). How children talk about a conversation. In K. Beals, J. Denton, R. Knippen, L. Melnar, H. Suzuki, & E. Zeinfeld (Eds.), Papers from the Thirtieth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society: Main Session (pp. 309-319). Chicago, Ill: Chicago Linguistic Society.
  • Ozyurek, A. (1994). How children talk about conversations: Development of roles and voices. In E. V. Clark (Ed.), Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Child Language Research Forum (pp. 197-206). Stanford: CSLI Publications.
  • Pallier, C., Cutler, A., & Sebastian-Galles, N. (1997). Prosodic structure and phonetic processing: A cross-linguistic study. In Proceedings of EUROSPEECH 97 (pp. 2131-2134). Grenoble, France: ESCA.

    Abstract

    Dutch and Spanish differ in how predictable the stress pattern is as a function of the segmental content: it is correlated with syllable weight in Dutch but not in Spanish. In the present study, two experiments were run to compare the abilities of Dutch and Spanish speakers to separately process segmental and stress information. It was predicted that the Spanish speakers would have more difficulty focusing on the segments and ignoring the stress pattern than the Dutch speakers. The task was a speeded classification task on CVCV syllables, with blocks of trials in which the stress pattern could vary versus blocks in which it was fixed. First, we found interference due to stress variability in both languages, suggesting that the processing of segmental information cannot be performed independently of stress. Second, the effect was larger for Spanish than for Dutch, suggesting that that the degree of interference from stress variation may be partially mitigated by the predictability of stress placement in the language.
  • Poellmann, K., McQueen, J. M., & Mitterer, H. (2012). How talker-adaptation helps listeners recognize reduced word-forms [Abstract]. Program abstracts from the 164th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 132(3), 2053.

    Abstract

    Two eye-tracking experiments tested whether native listeners can adapt
    to reductions in casual Dutch speech. Listeners were exposed to segmental
    ([b] > [m]), syllabic (full-vowel-deletion), or no reductions. In a subsequent
    test phase, all three listener groups were tested on how efficiently they could
    recognize both types of reduced words. In the first Experiment’s exposure
    phase, the (un)reduced target words were predictable. The segmental reductions
    were completely consistent (i.e., involved the same input sequences).
    Learning about them was found to be pattern-specific and generalized in the
    test phase to new reduced /b/-words. The syllabic reductions were not consistent
    (i.e., involved variable input sequences). Learning about them was
    weak and not pattern-specific. Experiment 2 examined effects of word repetition
    and predictability. The (un-)reduced test words appeared in the exposure
    phase and were not predictable. There was no evidence of learning for
    the segmental reductions, probably because they were not predictable during
    exposure. But there was word-specific learning for the vowel-deleted words.
    The results suggest that learning about reductions is pattern-specific and
    generalizes to new words if the input is consistent and predictable. With
    variable input, there is more likely to be adaptation to a general speaking
    style and word-specific learning.
  • Ravignani, A., & Fitch, W. T. (2012). Sonification of experimental parameters as a new method for efficient coding of behavior. In A. Spink, F. Grieco, O. E. Krips, L. W. S. Loijens, L. P. P. J. Noldus, & P. H. Zimmerman (Eds.), Measuring Behavior 2012, 8th International Conference on Methods and Techniques in Behavioral Research (pp. 376-379).

    Abstract

    Cognitive research is often focused on experimental condition-driven reactions. Ethological studies frequently
    rely on the observation of naturally occurring specific behaviors. In both cases, subjects are filmed during the
    study, so that afterwards behaviors can be coded on video. Coding should typically be blind to experimental
    conditions, but often requires more information than that present on video. We introduce a method for blindcoding
    of behavioral videos that takes care of both issues via three main innovations. First, of particular
    significance for playback studies, it allows creation of a “soundtrack” of the study, that is, a track composed of
    synthesized sounds representing different aspects of the experimental conditions, or other events, over time.
    Second, it facilitates coding behavior using this audio track, together with the possibly muted original video.
    This enables coding blindly to conditions as required, but not ignoring other relevant events. Third, our method
    makes use of freely available, multi-platform software, including scripts we developed.
  • Roberts, L., & Meyer, A. S. (Eds.). (2012). Individual differences in second language acquisition [Special Issue]. Language Learning, 62(Supplement S2).
  • Scharenborg, O., Witteman, M. J., & Weber, A. (2012). Computational modelling of the recognition of foreign-accented speech. In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2012: 13th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 882 -885).

    Abstract

    In foreign-accented speech, pronunciation typically deviates from the canonical form to some degree. For native listeners, it has been shown that word recognition is more difficult for strongly-accented words than for less strongly-accented words. Furthermore recognition of strongly-accented words becomes easier with additional exposure to the foreign accent. In this paper, listeners’ behaviour was simulated with Fine-tracker, a computational model of word recognition that uses real speech as input. The simulations showed that, in line with human listeners, 1) Fine-Tracker’s recognition outcome is modulated by the degree of accentedness and 2) it improves slightly after brief exposure with the accent. On the level of individual words, however, Fine-tracker failed to correctly simulate listeners’ behaviour, possibly due to differences in overall familiarity with the chosen accent (German-accented Dutch) between human listeners and Fine-Tracker.
  • Scharenborg, O., & Janse, E. (2012). Hearing loss and the use of acoustic cues in phonetic categorisation of fricatives. In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2012: 13th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 1458-1461).

    Abstract

    Aging often affects sensitivity to the higher frequencies, which results in the loss of sensitivity to phonetic detail in speech. Hearing loss may therefore interfere with the categorisation of two consonants that have most information to differentiate between them in those higher frequencies and less in the lower frequencies, e.g., /f/ and /s/. We investigate two acoustic cues, i.e., formant transitions and fricative intensity, that older listeners might use to differentiate between /f/ and /s/. The results of two phonetic categorisation tasks on 38 older listeners (aged 60+) with varying degrees of hearing loss indicate that older listeners seem to use formant transitions as a cue to distinguish /s/ from /f/. Moreover, this ability is not impacted by hearing loss. On the other hand, listeners with increased hearing loss seem to rely more on intensity for fricative identification. Thus, progressive hearing loss may lead to gradual changes in perceptual cue weighting.
  • Scharenborg, O., Janse, E., & Weber, A. (2012). Perceptual learning of /f/-/s/ by older listeners. In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2012: 13th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 398-401).

    Abstract

    Young listeners can quickly modify their interpretation of a speech sound when a talker produces the sound ambiguously. Young Dutch listeners rely mainly on the higher frequencies to distinguish between /f/ and /s/, but these higher frequencies are particularly vulnerable to age-related hearing loss. We therefore tested whether older Dutch listeners can show perceptual retuning given an ambiguous pronunciation in between /f/ and /s/. Results of a lexically-guided perceptual learning experiment showed that older Dutch listeners are still able to learn non-standard pronunciations of /f/ and /s/. Possibly, the older listeners have learned to rely on other acoustic cues, such as formant transitions, to distinguish between /f/ and /s/. However, the size and duration of the perceptual effect is influenced by hearing loss, with listeners with poorer hearing showing a smaller and a shorter-lived learning effect.
  • Schiller, N. O., Van Lieshout, P. H. H. M., Meyer, A. S., & Levelt, W. J. M. (1997). Is the syllable an articulatory unit in speech production? Evidence from an Emma study. In P. Wille (Ed.), Fortschritte der Akustik: Plenarvorträge und Fachbeiträge der 23. Deutschen Jahrestagung für Akustik (DAGA 97) (pp. 605-606). Oldenburg: DEGA.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1994). The computational lexicon: All lexical content is predicate. In Z. Yusoff (Ed.), Proceedings of the International Conference on Linguistic Applications 26-28 July 1994 (pp. 211-216). Penang: Universiti Sains Malaysia, Unit Terjemahan Melalui Komputer (UTMK).
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1994). Translation relations in semantic syntax. In G. Bouma, & G. Van Noord (Eds.), CLIN IV: Papers from the Fourth CLIN Meeting (pp. 149-162). Groningen: Vakgroep Alfa-informatica, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.
  • Sjerps, M. J., McQueen, J. M., & Mitterer, H. (2012). Extrinsic normalization for vocal tracts depends on the signal, not on attention. In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2012: 13th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 394-397).

    Abstract

    When perceiving vowels, listeners adjust to speaker-specific vocal-tract characteristics (such as F1) through "extrinsic vowel normalization". This effect is observed as a shift in the location of categorization boundaries of vowel continua. Similar effects have been found with non-speech. Non-speech materials, however, have consistently led to smaller effect-sizes, perhaps because of a lack of attention to non-speech. The present study investigated this possibility. Non-speech materials that had previously been shown to elicit reduced normalization effects were tested again, with the addition of an attention manipulation. The results show that increased attention does not lead to increased normalization effects, suggesting that vowel normalization is mainly determined by bottom-up signal characteristics.
  • Sloetjes, H., & Somasundaram, A. (2012). ELAN development, keeping pace with communities' needs. In N. Calzolari (Ed.), Proceedings of LREC 2012: 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 219-223). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

    Abstract

    ELAN is a versatile multimedia annotation tool that is being developed at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. About a decade ago it emerged out of a number of corpus tools and utilities and it has been extended ever since. This paper focuses on the efforts made to ensure that the application keeps up with the growing needs of that era in linguistics and multimodality research; growing needs in terms of length and resolution of recordings, the number of recordings made and transcribed and the number of levels of annotation per transcription.
  • Stehouwer, H., Durco, M., Auer, E., & Broeder, D. (2012). Federated search: Towards a common search infrastructure. In N. Calzolari (Ed.), Proceedings of LREC 2012: 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 3255-3259). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

    Abstract

    Within scientific institutes there exist many language resources. These resources are often quite specialized and relatively unknown. The current infrastructural initiatives try to tackle this issue by collecting metadata about the resources and establishing centers with stable repositories to ensure the availability of the resources. It would be beneficial if the researcher could, by means of a simple query, determine which resources and which centers contain information useful to his or her research, or even work on a set of distributed resources as a virtual corpus. In this article we propose an architecture for a distributed search environment allowing researchers to perform searches in a set of distributed language resources.
  • Sumer, B., Zwitserlood, I., Perniss, P. M., & Ozyurek, A. (2012). Development of locative expressions by Turkish deaf and hearing children: Are there modality effects? In A. K. Biller, E. Y. Chung, & A. E. Kimball (Eds.), Proceedings of the 36th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 36) (pp. 568-580). Boston: Cascadilla Press.
  • Svantesson, J.-O., Burenhult, N., Holmer, A., Karlsson, A., & Lundström, H. (Eds.). (2012). Humanities of the lesser-known: New directions in the description, documentation and typology of endangered languages and musics [Special Issue]. Language Documentation and Description, 10.
  • Ten Bosch, L., & Scharenborg, O. (2012). Modeling cue trading in human word recognition. In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2012: 13th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 2003-2006).

    Abstract

    Classical phonetic studies have shown that acoustic-articulatory cues can be interchanged without affecting the resulting phoneme percept (‘cue trading’). Cue trading has so far mainly been investigated in the context of phoneme identification. In this study, we investigate cue trading in word recognition, because words are the units of speech through which we communicate. This paper aims to provide a method to quantify cue trading effects by using a computational model of human word recognition. This model takes the acoustic signal as input and represents speech using articulatory feature streams. Importantly, it allows cue trading and underspecification. Its set-up is inspired by the functionality of Fine-Tracker, a recent computational model of human word recognition. This approach makes it possible, for the first time, to quantify cue trading in terms of a trade-off between features and to investigate cue trading in the context of a word recognition task.
  • Turco, G., & Gubian, M. (2012). L1 Prosodic transfer and priming effects: A quantitative study on semi-spontaneous dialogues. In Q. Ma, H. Ding, & D. Hirst (Eds.), Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Speech Prosody (pp. 386-389). International Speech Communication Association (ISCA).

    Abstract

    This paper represents a pilot investigation of primed accentuation patterns produced by advanced Dutch speakers of Italian as a second language (L2). Contrastive accent patterns within prepositional phrases were elicited in a semispontaneous dialogue entertained with a confederate native speaker of Italian. The aim of the analysis was to compare learner’s contrastive accentual configurations induced by the confederate speaker’s prime against those produced by Italian and Dutch natives in the same testing conditions. F0 and speech rate data were analysed by applying powerful datadriven techniques available in the Functional Data Analysis statistical framework. Results reveal different accentual configurations in L1 and L2 Italian in response to the confederate’s prime. We conclude that learner’s accentual patterns mirror those ones produced by their L1 control group (prosodic-transfer hypothesis) although the hypothesis of a transient priming effect on learners’ choice of contrastive patterns cannot be completely ruled out.
  • Van de Weijer, J. (1997). Language input to a prelingual infant. In A. Sorace, C. Heycock, & R. Shillcock (Eds.), Proceedings of the GALA '97 conference on language acquisition (pp. 290-293). Edinburgh University Press.

    Abstract

    Pitch, intonation, and speech rate were analyzed in a collection of everyday speech heard by one Dutch infant between the ages of six and nine months. Components of each of these variables were measured in the speech of three adult speakers (mother, father, baby-sitter) when they addressed the infant, and when they addressed another adult. The results are in line with previously reported findings which are usually based on laboratory or prearranged settings: infant-directed speech in a natural setting exhibits more pitch variation, a larger number of simple intonation contours, and slower speech rate than does adult-directed speech.
  • Van Heuven, V. J., Haan, J., Janse, E., & Van der Torre, E. J. (1997). Perceptual identification of sentence type and the time-distribution of prosodic interrogativity markers in Dutch. In Proceedings of the ESCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Intonation: Theory, Models and Applications, Athens, Greece, 1997 (pp. 317-320).

    Abstract

    Dutch distinguishes at least four sentence types: statements and questions, the latter type being subdivided into wh-questions (beginning with a question word), yes/no-questions (with inversion of subject and finite), and declarative questions (lexico-syntactically identical to statement). Acoustically, each of these (sub)types was found to have clearly distinct global F0-patterns, as well as a characteristic distribution of final rises [1,2]. The present paper explores the separate contribution of parameters of global downtrend and size of accent-lending pitch movements versus aspects of the terminal rise to the human identification of the four sentence (sub)types, at various positions in the time-course of the utterance. The results show that interrogativity in Dutch can be identified at an early point in the utterance. However, wh-questions are not distinct from statements.
  • Van Uytvanck, D., Stehouwer, H., & Lampen, L. (2012). Semantic metadata mapping in practice: The Virtual Language Observatory. In N. Calzolari (Ed.), Proceedings of LREC 2012: 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 1029-1034). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

    Abstract

    In this paper we present the Virtual Language Observatory (VLO), a metadata-based portal for language resources. It is completely based on the Component Metadata (CMDI) and ISOcat standards. This approach allows for the use of heterogeneous metadata schemas while maintaining the semantic compatibility. We describe the metadata harvesting process, based on OAI-PMH, and the conversion from several formats (OLAC, IMDI and the CLARIN LRT inventory) to their CMDI counterpart profiles. Then we focus on some post-processing steps to polish the harvested records. Next, the ingestion of the CMDI files into the VLO facet browser is described. We also include an overview of the changes since the first version of the VLO, based on user feedback from the CLARIN community. Finally there is an overview of additional ideas and improvements for future versions of the VLO.
  • Viebahn, M. C., Ernestus, M., & McQueen, J. M. (2012). Co-occurrence of reduced word forms in natural speech. In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2012: 13th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 2019-2022).

    Abstract

    This paper presents a corpus study that investigates the co-occurrence of reduced word forms in natural speech. We extracted Dutch past participles from three different speech registers and investigated the influence of several predictor variables on the presence and duration of schwas in prefixes and /t/s in suffixes. Our results suggest that reduced word forms tend to co-occur even if we partial out the effect of speech rate. The implications of our findings for episodic and abstractionist models of lexical representation are discussed.
  • Warner, N. L., McQueen, J. M., Liu, P. Z., Hoffmann, M., & Cutler, A. (2012). Timing of perception for all English diphones [Abstract]. Program abstracts from the 164th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 132(3), 1967.

    Abstract

    Information in speech does not unfold discretely over time; perceptual cues are gradient and overlapped. However, this varies greatly across segments and environments: listeners cannot identify the affricate in /ptS/ until the frication, but information about the vowel in /li/ begins early. Unlike most prior studies, which have concentrated on subsets of language sounds, this study tests perception of every English segment in every phonetic environment, sampling perceptual identification at six points in time (13,470 stimuli/listener; 20 listeners). Results show that information about consonants after another segment is most localized for affricates (almost entirely in the release), and most gradual for voiced stops. In comparison to stressed vowels, unstressed vowels have less information spreading to
    neighboring segments and are less well identified. Indeed, many vowels,
    especially lax ones, are poorly identified even by the end of the following segment. This may partly reflect listeners’ familiarity with English vowels’ dialectal variability. Diphthongs and diphthongal tense vowels show the most sudden improvement in identification, similar to affricates among the consonants, suggesting that information about segments defined by acoustic change is highly localized. This large dataset provides insights into speech perception and data for probabilistic modeling of spoken word recognition.
  • Windhouwer, M., Broeder, D., & Van Uytvanck, D. (2012). A CMD core model for CLARIN web services. In Proceedings of LREC 2012: 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 41-48).

    Abstract

    In the CLARIN infrastructure various national projects have started initiatives to allow users of the infrastructure to create chains or workflows of web services. The Component Metadata (CMD) core model for web services described in this paper tries to align the metadata descriptions of these various initiatives. This should allow chaining/workflow engines to find matching and invoke services. The paper describes the landscape of web services architectures and the state of the national initiatives. Based on this a CMD core model for CLARIN is proposed, which, within some limits, can be adapted to the specific needs of an initiative by the standard facilities of CMD. The paper closes with the current state and usage of the model and a look into the future.
  • Windhouwer, M. (2012). RELcat: a Relation Registry for ISOcat data categories. In N. Calzolari (Ed.), Proceedings of LREC 2012: 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 3661-3664). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

    Abstract

    The ISOcat Data Category Registry contains basically a flat and easily extensible list of data category specifications. To foster reuse and standardization only very shallow relationships among data categories are stored in the registry. However, to assist crosswalks, possibly based on personal views, between various (application) domains and to overcome possible proliferation of data categories more types of ontological relationships need to be specified. RELcat is a first prototype of a Relation Registry, which allows storing arbitrary relationships. These relationships can reflect the personal view of one linguist or a larger community. The basis of the registry is a relation type taxonomy that can easily be extended. This allows on one hand to load existing sets of relations specified in, for example, an OWL (2) ontology or SKOS taxonomy. And on the other hand allows algorithms that query the registry to traverse the stored semantic network to remain ignorant of the original source vocabulary. This paper describes first experiences with RELcat and explains some initial design decisions.
  • Windhouwer, M. (2012). Towards standardized descriptions of linguistic features: ISOcat and procedures for using common data categories. In J. Jancsary (Ed.), Proceedings of the Conference on Natural Language Processing 2012, (SFLR 2012 workshop), September 19-21, 2012, Vienna (pp. 494). Vienna: Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Artificial Intelligende (ÖGAI).

    Abstract

    Automatic Language Identification of written texts is a well-established area of research in Computational Linguistics. State-of-the-art algorithms often rely on n-gram character models to identify the correct language of texts, with good results seen for European languages. In this paper we propose the use of a character n-gram model and a word n-gram language model for the automatic classification of two written varieties of Portuguese: European and Brazilian. Results reached 0.998 for accuracy using character 4-grams.
  • Withers, P. (2012). Metadata management with Arbil. In V. Arranz, D. Broeder, B. Gaiffe, M. Gavrilidou, & M. Monachini (Eds.), Proceedings of LREC 2012: 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 72-75). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

    Abstract

    Arbil is an application designed to create and manage metadata for research data and to arrange this data into a structure appropriate for archiving. The metadata is displayed in tables, which allows an overview of the metadata and the ability to populate and update many metadata sections in bulk. Both IMDI and Clarin metadata formats are supported and Arbil has been designed as a local application so that it can also be used offline, for instance in remote field sites. The metadata can be entered in any order or at any stage that the user is able; once the metadata and its data are ready for archiving and an Internet connection is available it can be exported from Arbil and in the case of IMDI it can then be transferred to the main archive via LAMUS (archive management and upload system).
  • Wittenburg, P., Lenkiewicz, P., Auer, E., Gebre, B. G., Lenkiewicz, A., & Drude, S. (2012). AV Processing in eHumanities - a paradigm shift. In J. C. Meister (Ed.), Digital Humanities 2012 Conference Abstracts. University of Hamburg, Germany; July 16–22, 2012 (pp. 538-541).

    Abstract

    Introduction Speech research saw a dramatic change in paradigm in the 90-ies. While earlier the discussion was dominated by a phoneticians’ approach who knew about phenomena in the speech signal, the situation completely changed after stochastic machinery such as Hidden Markov Models [1] and Artificial Neural Networks [2] had been introduced. Speech processing was now dominated by a purely mathematic approach that basically ignored all existing knowledge about the speech production process and the perception mechanisms. The key was now to construct a large enough training set that would allow identifying the many free parameters of such stochastic engines. In case that the training set is representative and the annotations of the training sets are widely ‘correct’ we could assume to get a satisfyingly functioning recognizer. While the success of knowledge-based systems such as Hearsay II [3] was limited, the statistically based approach led to great improvements in recognition rates and to industrial applications.
  • Wnuk, E., & Majid, A. (2012). Olfaction in a hunter-gatherer society: Insights from language and culture. In N. Miyake, D. Peebles, & R. P. Cooper (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2012) (pp. 1155-1160). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    According to a widely-held view among various scholars, olfaction is inferior to other human senses. It is also believed by many that languages do not have words for describing smells. Data collected among the Maniq, a small population of nomadic foragers in southern Thailand, challenge the above claims and point to a great linguistic and cultural elaboration of odor. This article presents evidence of the importance of olfaction in indigenous rituals and beliefs, as well as in the lexicon. The results demonstrate the richness and complexity of the domain of smell in Maniq society and thereby challenge the universal paucity of olfactory terms and insignificance of olfaction for humans.
  • Zampieri, M., & Gebre, B. G. (2012). Automatic identification of language varieties: The case of Portuguese. In J. Jancsary (Ed.), Proceedings of the Conference on Natural Language Processing 2012, September 19-21, 2012, Vienna (pp. 233-237). Vienna: Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Artificial Intelligende (ÖGAI).

    Abstract

    Automatic Language Identification of written texts is a well-established area of research in Computational Linguistics. State-of-the-art algorithms often rely on n-gram character models to identify the correct language of texts, with good results seen for European languages. In this paper we propose the use of a character n-gram model and a word n-gram language model for the automatic classification of two written varieties of Portuguese: European and Brazilian. Results reached 0.998 for accuracy using character 4-grams.
  • Zampieri, M., Gebre, B. G., & Diwersy, S. (2012). Classifying pluricentric languages: Extending the monolingual model. In Proceedings of SLTC 2012. The Fourth Swedish Language Technology Conference. Lund, October 24-26, 2012 (pp. 79-80). Lund University.

    Abstract

    This study presents a new language identification model for pluricentric languages that uses n-gram language models at the character and word level. The model is evaluated in two steps. The first step consists of the identification of two varieties of Spanish (Argentina and Spain) and two varieties of French (Quebec and France) evaluated independently in binary classification schemes. The second step integrates these language models in a six-class classification with two Portuguese varieties.

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