Publications

Abstract

In this study it is argued that scope, as a property of scope‐creating operators, is a real and important element in the semantico‐grammatical description of languages. The notion of scope is illustrated and, as far as possible, defined. A first idea is given of the ‘grammar of scope’, which defines the relation between scope in the logically structured semantic analysis (SA) of sentences on the one hand and surface structure on the other. Evidence is adduced showing that peripheral preposition phrases (PPPs) in the surface structure of sentences represent scope‐creating operators in SA, and that external datives fall into this category: they are scope‐creating PPPs. It follows that, in English and Dutch, the internal dative (I gave John a book) and the external dative (I gave a book to John) are not simple syntactic variants expressing the same meaning. Instead, internal datives are an integral part of the argument structure of the matrix predicate, whereas external datives represent scope‐creating operators in SA. In the Romance languages, the (non‐pronominal) external dative has been re‐analysed as an argument type dative, but this has not happened in English and Dutch, which have many verbs that only allow for an external dative (e.g. donate, reveal). When both datives are allowed, there are systematic semantic differences, including scope differences.

Abstract

ndividual talkers may use various strategies to enrich their speech while speaking in noise (i.e., Lombard speech) to improve their intelligibility. The resulting acoustic-phonetic changes in Lombard speech vary amongst different speakers, but it is unclear what causes these talker differences, and what impact these differences have on intelligibility. This study investigates the potential role of articulatory control in talkers’ Lombard speech enrichment success. Seventy-eight speakers read out sentences in both their habitual style and in a condition where they were instructed to speak clearly while hearing loud speech-shaped noise. A diadochokinetic (DDK) speech task that requires speakers to repetitively produce word or non-word sequences as accurately and as rapidly as possible, was used to quantify their articulatory control. Individuals’ predicted intelligibility in both speaking styles (presented at -5 dB SNR) was measured using an acoustic glimpse-based metric: the High-Energy Glimpse Proportion (HEGP). Speakers’ HEGP scores show a clear effect of speaking condition (better HEGP scores in the Lombard than habitual condition), but no simple effect of articulatory control on HEGP, nor an interaction between speaking condition and articulatory control. This indicates that individuals’ speech enrichment success as measured by the HEGP metric was not predicted by DDK performance.

Abstract

Size analysis can be an important part of heap consumption analysis. This paper is a part of ongoing work about typing support for checking output-on-input size dependencies for function definitions in a strict functional language. A significant restriction for our earlier results is that inner data structures (e.g. in a list of lists) all must have the same size. Here, we make a big step forwards by overcoming this limitation via the introduction of higher-order size annotations such that variate sizes of inner data structures can be expressed. In this way the analysis becomes applicable for general, polymorphic nested lists.

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.

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.

Abstract

The effect of literacy on phonological processing has been described in terms of a virus that “infects all speech processing” (Frith, 1998). Empirical data has established that literacy leads to changes to the way in which phonological information is processed. Harm & Seidenberg (1999) demonstrated that a connectionist network trained to map between English orthographic and phonological representations display’s more componential phonological processing than a network trained only to stably represent the phonological forms of words. Within this study we use a similar model yet manipulate the transparency of orthographic-to-phonological mappings. We observe that networks trained on a transparent orthography are better at restoring phonetic features and phonemes. However, networks trained on non-transparent orthographies are more likely to restore corrupted phonological segments with legal, coarser linguistic units (e.g. onset, coda). Our study therefore provides an explicit description of how differences in orthographic transparency can lead to varying strains and symptoms of the ‘literacy virus’.

Abstract

When processing language, the cognitive system has access to information from a range of modalities (e.g. auditory, visual) to support language processing. Language mediated visual attention studies have shown sensitivity of the listener to phonological, visual, and semantic similarity when processing a word. In a computational model of language mediated visual attention, that models spoken word processing as the parallel integration of information from phonological, semantic and visual processing streams, we simulate such effects of competition within modalities. Our simulations raised untested predictions about stronger and earlier effects of visual and semantic similarity compared to phonological similarity around the rhyme of the word. Two visual world studies confirmed these predictions. The model and behavioral studies suggest that, during spoken word comprehension, multimodal information can be recruited rapidly to constrain lexical selection to the extent that phonological rhyme information may exert little influence on this process.

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.

Abstract

Listeners can make perceptual adjustments to phoneme categories in response to a talker who consistently produces a specific phoneme ambiguously. We investigate here whether this type of perceptual learning is also used to adapt to regional accent differences. Listeners were exposed to words produced by a Flemish talker whose realization of [x℄or [h℄ was ambiguous (producing [x℄like [h℄is a property of the West-Flanders regional accent). Before and after exposure they categorized a [x℄-[h℄continuum. For both Dutch and Flemish listeners there was no shift of the categorization boundary after exposure to ambiguous sounds in [x℄- or [h℄-biasing contexts. The absence of a lexically-driven learning effect for this contrast may be because [h℄is strongly influenced by coarticulation. As is not stable across contexts, it may be futile to adapt its representation when new realizations are heard

Abstract

Developmental studies show that it takes longer for
children learning spoken languages to acquire viewpointdependent
spatial relations (e.g., left-right, front-behind),
compared to ones that are not viewpoint-dependent (e.g.,
in, on, under). The current study investigates how
children learn to express viewpoint-dependent relations
in a sign language where depicted spatial relations can be
communicated in an analogue manner in the space in
front of the body or by using body-anchored signs (e.g.,
tapping the right and left hand/arm to mean left and
right). Our results indicate that the visual-spatial
modality might have a facilitating effect on learning to
express these spatial relations (especially in encoding of
left-right) in a sign language (i.e., Turkish Sign
Language) compared to a spoken language (i.e.,
Turkish).

Abstract

The neural processing of speech leads to specific patterns in the brain which can be measured as, e.g., EEG signals. When properly aligned with the speech input and averaged over many tokens, the Event Related Potential (ERP) signal is able to differentiate specific contrasts between speech signals. Well-known effects relate to the difference between expected and unexpected words, in particular in the N400, while effects in N100 and P200 are related to attention and acoustic onset effects. Most EEG studies deal with the amplitude of EEG signals over time, sidestepping the effect of phase and phase synchronization. This paper investigates the relation between phase in the EEG signals measured in an auditory lexical decision task by Dutch participants listening to full and reduced English word forms. We show that phase synchronization takes place across stimulus conditions, and that the so-called circular variance is narrowly related to the type of contrast between stimuli.

Abstract

This paper addresses the question how to compare reaction times computed by a computational model of speech comprehension with observed reaction times by participants. The question is based on the observation that reaction time sequences substantially differ per participant, which raises the issue of how exactly the model is to be assessed. Part of the variation in reaction time sequences is caused by the so-called local speed: the current reaction time correlates to some extent with a number of previous reaction times, due to slowly varying variations in attention, fatigue etc. This paper proposes a method, based on time series analysis, to filter the observed reaction times in order to separate the local speed effects. Results show that after such filtering the between-participant correlations increase as well as the average correlation between participant and model increases. The presented technique provides insights into relevant aspects that are to be taken into account when comparing reaction time sequences

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.

Abstract

In everyday life, people see, describe and remember motion events. We tested whether the type of motion event information (path or manner) encoded in speech and gesture predicts which information is remembered and if this varies across speakers of typologically different languages. We focus on intransitive motion events (e.g., a woman running to a tree) that are described differently in speech and co-speech gesture across languages, based on how these languages typologically encode manner and path information (Kita & Özyürek, 2003; Talmy, 1985). Speakers of Dutch (n = 19) and Turkish (n = 22) watched and described motion events. With a surprise (i.e. unexpected) recognition memory task, memory for manner and path components of these events was measured. Neither Dutch nor Turkish speakers’ memory for manner went above chance levels. However, we found a positive relation between path speech and path change detection: participants who described the path during encoding were more accurate at detecting changes to the path of an event during the memory task. In addition, the relation between path speech and path memory changed with native language: for Dutch speakers encoding path in speech was related to improved path memory, but for Turkish speakers no such relation existed. For both languages, co-speech gesture did not predict memory speakers. We discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of the relations between speech, gesture, type of encoding in language and memory.

Abstract

Tone languages are often reported to make use of utterancelevel intonation as well as of lexical tone. We test the alternative hypotheses that a) the coexistence of lexical tone and utterance-level intonation in tone languages results in a diminished functional load for intonation, and b) that lexical tone and intonation can coexist in tone languages without undermining each other’s functional load in a substantial way. In order to do this, we collected data from two large typological databases, and performed mixed-effects and phylogenetic regression analyses controlling for genealogical and areal factors to estimate the probability of a language exhibiting grammatical devices for encoding polar questions given its status as a tonal or an intonation-only language. Our analyses indicate that, while both tone and intonational languages tend to develop grammatical devices for marking polar questions above chance level, tone languages do this at a significantly higher frequency, with estimated probabilities ranging between 0.88 and .98. This statistical bias provides cross-linguistic empirical support to the view that the use of tonal features to mark lexical contrasts leads to a diminished functional load for utterance-level intonation.

Abstract

We investigate the realization and discrimination of lexical stress contrasts in pitch-unaccented words in phrase-medial position in Spanish, a context in which intonational pitch accents are frequently absent. Results from production and perception experiments show that in this context durational and intensity cues to stress are produced by speakers and used by listeners above chance level. However, due to substantial amounts of phonetic overlap between stress categories in production, and of numerous errors in the identification of stress categories in perception, we suggest that, in the absence of intonational cues, Spanish speakers engaged in online language use must rely on contextual information in order to distinguish stress contrasts.

Abstract

Measuring the quality of metadata is only possible by assessing the quality of the underlying schema and the metadata instance. We propose some factors that are measurable automatically for metadata according to the CMD framework, taking into account the variability of schemas that can be defined in this framework. The factors include among others the number of elements, the (re-)use of reusable components, the number of filled in elements. The resulting score can serve as an indicator of the overall quality of the CMD instance, used for feedback to metadata providers or to provide an overview of the overall quality of metadata within a reposi-tory. The score is independent of specific schemas and generalizable. An overall assessment of harvested metadata is provided in form of statistical summaries and the distribution, based on a corpus of harvested metadata. The score is implemented in XQuery and can be used in tools, editors and repositories

Abstract

We investigated whether non-native listeners can exploit phonetic detail in recognizing potentially ambiguous utterances, as native listeners can [6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. Due to the phenomenon of intrusive /r/, the English phrase extra ice may sound like extra rice. A production study indicates that the intrusive /r/ can be distinguished from the onset /r/ in rice, as it is phonetically weaker. In two cross-modal identity priming studies, however, we found no conclusive evidence that Dutch learners of English are able to make use of this difference. Instead, auditory primes such as extra rice and extra ice with onset and intrusive /r/s activate both types of targets such as ice and rice. This supports the notion of spurious lexical activation in L2 perception.

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.

Abstract

This study investigates whether a clear distinction can be made between the prosody of continuation statements and polar questions in conversational French, which are both typically produced with final rising intonation. We show that the two utterance types can be distinguished over chance level by several pitch, duration, and intensity cues. However, given the substantial amount of phonetic overlap and the nature of the observed differences between the two utterance types (i.e. overall F0 scaling, final intensity drop and degree of final lengthening), we propose that variability in the phonetic detail of intonation rises in French is due to the effects of interactional factors (e.g. turn-taking context, type of speech act) rather than to the existence of two distinct rising intonation contour types in this language.

Abstract

The present study compared the role of metrical stress in comprehension and production of three-year-old children with a familial risk of dyslexia with that of normally developing children. A visual fixation task with stress (mis-)matches in bisyllabic words, as well as a non-word repetition task with bisyllabic targets were presented to the control and at-risk children. Results show that the at-risk group is less sensitive to stress mismatches in word recognition than the control group. Correct production of metrical stress patterns did not differ significantly between the groups, but the percentages of phonemes produced correctly were lower for the at-risk than the control group. The findings indicate that processing of metrical stress patterns is not impaired in at-risk children, but that the at-risk group cannot exploit metrical stress in word recognition

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.

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.

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.

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.

Abstract

This study concerns individual differences in speech imitation ability and the role that lexical representations play in imitation. We examined 1) whether imitation of sounds in an unfamiliar language (L0) is related to imitation of sounds in an unfamiliar
non-native accent in the speaker’s native language (L1) and 2) whether it is easier or harder to imitate speech when you know the words to be imitated. Fifty-nine native Dutch speakers imitated words with target vowels in Basque (/a/ and /e/) and Greekaccented
Dutch (/i/ and /u/). Spectral and durational
analyses of the target vowels revealed no relationship between the success of L0 and L1 imitation and no difference in performance between tasks (i.e., L1
imitation was neither aided nor blocked by lexical knowledge about the correct pronunciation). The results suggest instead that the relationship of the vowels to native phonological categories plays a bigger role in imitation

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.

Abstract

In a visual-world study, we examined spoken-wordrecognition in Spanish. Spanish listeners followed spoken instructions to click on pictures while their eye movements were monitored. When instructed to click on the picture of a door (puerta), they experienced interference from the picture of a pig (p u e r c o ). The same interference from phonologically related items was observed when the displays contained printed names or a combination of pictures with their names printed underneath, although the effect was strongest for displays with printed names. Implications of the finding that the interference effect can be induced with standard pictorial displays as well as with orthographic displays are discussed.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Abstract

It is unknown whether modality affects the efficiency with which humans learn novel word forms and their meanings, with previous studies reporting both written and auditory advantages. The current study implements controls whose absence in previous work likely offers explanation for such contradictory findings. In two novel word learning experiments, participants were trained and tested on pseudoword - novel object pairs, with controls on: modality of test, modality of meaning, duration of exposure and transparency of word form. In both experiments word forms were presented in either their written or spoken form, each paired with a pictorial meaning (novel object). Following a 20-minute filler task, participants were tested on their ability to identify the picture-word form pairs on which they were trained. A between subjects design generated four participant groups per experiment 1) written training, written test; 2) written training, spoken test; 3) spoken training, written test; 4) spoken training, spoken test. In Experiment 1 the written stimulus was presented for a time period equal to the duration of the spoken form. Results showed that when the duration of exposure was equal, participants displayed a written training benefit. Given words can be read faster than the time taken for the spoken form to unfold, in Experiment 2 the written form was presented for 300 ms, sufficient time to read the word yet 65% shorter than the duration of the spoken form. No modality effect was observed under these conditions, when exposure to the word form was equivalent. These results demonstrate, at least for proficient readers, that when exposure to the word form is controlled across modalities the efficiency with which word form-meaning associations are learnt does not differ. Our results therefore suggest that, although we typically begin as aural-only word learners, we ultimately converge on developing learning mechanisms that learn equally efficiently from both written and spoken materials.

Abstract

The terminology Community of Practice has long standardized data categories in the framework of ISO TC 37. ISO 12620:2009 specifies the data model and procedures for a Data Category Registry (DCR), which has been implemented by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics as the ISOcat DCR. The DCR has been used by not only ISO TC 37, but also by the CLARIN research infra-structure. This paper describes how the needs of these communities have started to diverge and the process of segueing from a DCR to a Data Concept Registry in order to meet the needs of both communities.

Abstract

This study investigates how Mandarin Chinese speaking children and adults use prosody to mark focus in spontaneous speech. SVO sentences were elicited from 4- and 8-year-olds and adults in a game setting. Sentence-medial verbs were acoustically analysed for both duration and pitch range in different focus conditions. We have found that like the adults, the 8-year-olds used both duration and pitch range to distinguish focus from non-focus. The 4-year-olds used only duration to distinguish focus from non-focus, unlike the adults and 8-year-olds. None of the three groups of speakers distinguished contrastive focus from non-contrastive focus using pitch range or duration. Regarding the distinction between narrow focus from broad focus, the 4- and 8-year-olds used both pitch range and duration for this purpose, while the adults used only duration

Abstract

This study investigates how Mandarin Chinese speaking children use prosody to distinguish focus from non-focus, and focus types differing in size of constituent and contrastivity. SVO sentences were elicited from four- and eight-year-olds in a game setting. Sentence-medial verbs were acoustically analysed for both duration and pitch range in different focus conditions. The children started to use duration to differentiate focus from non-focus at the age of four. But their use of pitch range varied with age and depended on non-focus conditions (pre- vs. postfocus) and the lexical tones of the verbs. Further, the children in both age groups used pitch range but not duration to differentiate narrow focus from broad focus, and they did not differentiate contrastive narrow focus from non-contrastive narrow focus using duration or pitch range. The results indicated that Chinese children acquire the prosodic means (duration and pitch range) of marking focus in stages, and their acquisition of these two means appear to be early, compared to children speaking an intonation language, for example, Dutch.

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.

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.

Abstract

This paper presents VarClass, an open-source tool for language identification available both to be downloaded as well as through a graphical user-friendly interface. The main difference of VarClass in comparison to other state-of-the-art language identification tools is its focus on language varieties. General purpose language identification tools do not take language varieties into account and our work aims to fill this gap. VarClass currently contains language models for over 27 languages in which 10 of them are language varieties. We report an average performance of over 90.5% accuracy in a challenging dataset. More language models will be included in the upcoming months

Abstract

The present study investigates how long after adoption adoptees forget the phonology of their birth language. Chinese children who were adopted by Dutch families were tested on the perception of birth language tone contrasts before, during, and after perceptual training. Experiment 1 investigated Cantonese tone 2 (High-Rising) and tone 5 (Low-Rising), and Experiment 2 investigated Mandarin tone 2 (High-Rising) and tone 3 (Low-Dipping). In both experiments, participants were adoptees and non-adopted Dutch controls. Results of both experiments show that the tone contrasts were very difficult to perceive for the adoptees, and that adoptees were not better at perceiving the tone contrasts than their non-adopted Dutch peers, before or after training. This demonstrates that forgetting took place relatively soon after adoption, and that the re-exposure that the adoptees were presented with did not lead to an improvement greater than that of the Dutch control participants. Thus, the findings confirm what has been anecdotally reported by adoptees and their parents, but what had not been empirically tested before, namely that birth language forgetting occurs very soon after adoption