Publications

Abstract

We report three studies investigating children's and adults' comprehension of sentences containing the focus particle only. In Experiments 1 and 2, four groups of participants (6–7 years, 8–10 years, 11–12 years and adult) compared sentences with only in different syntactic positions against pictures that matched or mismatched events described by the sentence. Contrary to previous findings (Crain, S., Ni, W., & Conway, L. (1994). Learning, parsing and modularity. In C. Clifton, L. Frazier, & K. Rayner (Eds.), Perspectives on sentence processing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum; Philip, W., & Lynch, E. (1999). Felicity, relevance, and acquisition of the grammar of every and only. In S. C. Howell, S. A. Fish, & T. Keith-Lucas (Eds.), Proceedings of the 24th annual Boston University conference on language development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press) we found that young children predominantly made errors by failing to process contrast information rather than errors in which they failed to use syntactic information to restrict the scope of the particle. Experiment 3 replicated these findings with pre-schoolers.

Abstract

In the present PET study we explore some functional aspects of the interaction between attentional/control processes and learning/memory processes. The network of brain regions supporting recall of abstract designs were studied in a less practiced and in a well practiced state. The results indicate that automaticity, i.e., a decreased dependence on attentional and working memory resources, develops as a consequence of practice. This corresponds to the practice related decreases of activity in the prefrontal, anterior cingulate, and posterior parietal regions. In addition, the activity of the medial temporal regions decreased as a function of practice. This indicates an inverse relation between the strength of encoding and the activation of the MTL during retrieval. Furthermore, the pattern of practice related increases in the auditory, posterior insular-opercular extending into perisylvian supra marginal region, and the right mid occipito-temporal region, may reflect a lower degree of inhibitory attentional modulation of task irrelevant processing and more fully developed representations of the abstract designs, respectively. We also suggest that free recall is dependent on bilateral prefrontal processing, in particular non-automatic free recall. The present results cofirm previous functional neuroimaging studies of memory retrieval indicating that recall is subserved by a network of interacting brain regions. Furthermore, the results indicate that some components of the neural network subserving free recall may have a dynamic role and that there is a functional restructuring of the information processing networks during the learning process.

Abstract

Recent event-related FMRI studies indicate that the prefrontal (PFC) and the medial temporal lobe (MTL) regions are more active during effective encoding than during ineffective encoding. The within-subject design and the use of well-educated young college students in these studies makes it important to replicate these results in other study populations. In this PET study, we used an auditory word-pair association cued-recall paradigm and investigated a group of healthy upper middle-aged/older illiterate women. We observed a positive correlation between cued-recall success and the regional cerebral blood flow of the left inferior PFC (BA 47) and the MTLs. Specifically, we used the cuedrecall success as a covariate in a general linear model and the results confirmed that the left inferior PFC and the MTLare more active during effective encoding than during ineffective encoding. These effects were observed during encoding of both semantically and phonologically related word pairs, indicating that these effects are robust in the studied population, that is, reproducible within group. These results generalize the results of Brewer et al. (1998, Science 281, 1185– 1187) and Wagner et al. (1998, Science 281, 1188–1191) to an upper middle aged/older illiterate population. In addition, the present study indicates that effective relational encoding correlates positively with the activity of the anterior medial temporal lobe regions.

Abstract

In a within-subject design we investigated the levels-of-processing (LOP) effect using visual material in a behavioral and a corresponding PET study. In the behavioral study we characterize a generalized LOP effect, using pleasantness and graphical quality judgments in the encoding situation, with two types of visual material, figurative and nonfigurative line drawings. In the PET study we investigate the related pattern of brain activations along these two dimensions. The behavioral results indicate that instruction and material contribute independently to the level of recognition performance. Therefore the LOP effect appears to stem both from the relative relevance of the stimuli (encoding opportunity) and an altered processing of stimuli brought about by the explicit instruction (encoding mode). In the PET study, encoding of visual material under the pleasantness (deep) instruction yielded left lateralized frontoparietal and anterior temporal activations while surface-based perceptually oriented processing (shallow instruction) yielded right lateralized frontoparietal, posterior temporal, and occipitotemporal activations. The result that deep encoding was related to the left prefrontal cortex while shallow encoding was related to the right prefrontal cortex, holding the material constant, is not consistent with the HERA model. In addition, we suggest that the anterior medial superior frontal region is related to aspects of self-referential semantic processing and that the inferior parts of the anterior cingulate as well as the medial orbitofrontal cortex is related to affective processing, in this case pleasantness evaluation of the stimuli regardless of explicit semantic content. Finally, the left medial temporal lobe appears more actively engaged by elaborate meaning-based processing and the complex response pattern observed in different subregions of the MTL lends support to the suggestion that this region is functionally segregated.

Abstract

A fundamental problem in the study of learning is that learning-related changes may be confounded by nonspecific time effects. There are several strategies for handling this problem. This problem may be of greater significance in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) compared to positron emission tomography (PET). Using the general linear model, we describe, compare, and discuss two approaches for separating learning-related from nonspecific time effects. The first approach makes assumptions on the general behavior of nonspecific effects and explicitly models these effects, i.e., nonspecific time effects are incorporated as a linear or nonlinear confounding covariate in the statistical model. The second strategy makes no a priori assumption concerning the form of nonspecific time effects, but implicitly controls for nonspecific effects using an interaction approach, i.e., learning effects are assessed with an interaction contrast. The two approaches depend on specific assumptions and have specific limitations. With certain experimental designs, both approaches may be used and the results compared, lending particular support to effects that are independent of the method used. A third and perhaps better approach that sometimes may be practically unfeasible is to use a completely temporally balanced experimental design. The choice of approach may be of particular importance when learning related effects are studied with fMRI.

Abstract

The objective of this study was to investigate the central processing of dynamic mechanical allodynia in patients with mononeuropathy. Regional cerebral bloodflow, as an indicator of neuronal activity, was measured with positron emission tomography. Paired comparisons were made between three different states; rest, allodynia during brushing the painful skin area, and brushing of the homologous contralateral area. Bilateral activations were observed in the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) and the secondary somatosensory cortex (S2) during allodynia compared to rest. The S1 activation contralateral to the site of the stimulus was more expressed during allodynia than during innocuous touch. Significant activations of the contralateral posterior parietal cortex, the periaqueductal gray (PAG), the thalamus bilaterally and motor areas were also observed in the allodynic state compared to both non-allodynic states. In the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) there was only a suggested activation when the allodynic state was compared with the non-allodynic states. In order to account for the individual variability in the intensity of allodynia and ongoing spontaneous pain, rCBF was regressed on the individually reported pain intensity, and significant covariations were observed in the ACC and the right anterior insula. Significantly decreased regional blood flow was observed bilaterally in the medial and lateral temporal lobe as well as in the occipital and posterior cingulate cortices when the allodynic state was compared to the non-painful conditions. This finding is consistent with previous studies suggesting attentional modulation and a central coping strategy for known and expected painful stimuli. Involvement of the medial pain system has previously been reported in patients with mononeuropathy during ongoing spontaneous pain. This study reveals a bilateral activation of the lateral pain system as well as involvement of the medial pain system during dynamic mechanical allodynia in patients with mononeuropathy.

Abstract

This study investigated characteristics of motor cortex activation and response generation in Parkinson's disease with measures of electrocortical activity (lateralized readiness potential [LRP]), electromyographic activity (EMG), and isometric force in a noise-compatibility task. When presented with stimuli consisting of incompatible target and distracter elements asking for responses of opposite hands, patients were less able than control subjects to suppress activation of the motor cortex controlling the wrong response hand. This was manifested in the pattern of reaction times and in an incorrect lateralization of the LRP. Onset latency and rise time of the LRP did not differ between patients and control subjects, but EMG and response force developed more slowly in patients. Moreover, in patients but not in control subjects, the rate of development of EMG and response force decreased as reaction time increased. We hypothesize that this dissociation between electrocortical activity and peripheral measures in Parkinson's disease is the result of changes in motor cortex function that alter the relation between signal-related and movement-related neural activity in the motor cortex. In the LRP, this altered balance may obscure an abnormal development of movement-related neural activity.

Abstract

A patient who already had Wernick's aphasia due to a left temporal lobe lesion suffered a severe deterioration specifically of auditory language comprehension, subsequent to right temporal lobe infarction. A detailed comparison of his new condition with his language status before the second stroke revealed that the newly acquired deficit was limited to tasks related to auditory input. Further investigations demonstrated a speech perceptual disorder, which we analysed as due to deficits both at the level of general auditory processes and at the level of phonetic analysis. We discuss some arguments related to hemisphere specialization of phonetic processing and to the disconnection explanation of word deafness that support the hypothesis of word deafness being generally caused by mixed deficits.

Abstract

The objectives of this article are to characterize the performance and to discuss the performance differences between literate and illiterate participants in a well-defined study population.We describe the participant-selection procedure used to investigate this population. Three groups with similar sociocultural backgrounds living in a relatively homogeneous fishing community in southern Portugal were characterized in terms of socioeconomic and sociocultural background variables and compared on a simple neuropsychological test battery; specifically, a literate group with more than 4 years of education (n = 9), a literate group with 4 years of education (n = 26), and an illiterate group (n = 31) were included in this study.We compare and discuss our results with other similar studies on the effects of literacy and illiteracy. The results indicate that naming and identification of real objects, verbal fluency using ecologically relevant semantic criteria, verbal memory, and orientation are not affected by literacy or level of formal education. In contrast, verbal working memory assessed with digit span, verbal abstraction, long-term semantic memory, and calculation (i.e., multiplication) are significantly affected by the level of literacy. We indicate that it is possible, with proper participant-selection procedures, to exclude general cognitive impairment and to control important sociocultural factors that potentially could introduce bias when studying the specific effects of literacy and level of formal education on cognitive brain function.

Abstract

Is there a relation between socioeconomic factors and aphasia severity and recovery? Connor, Obler, Tocco, Fitzpatrick, and Albert (2001) describe correlations between the educational level and socioeconomic status of aphasic subjects with aphasia severity and subsequent recovery. As stated in the introduction by Connor et al. (2001), studies of the influence of educational level and literacy (or illiteracy) on aphasia severity have yielded conflicting results, while no significant link between socioeconomic status and aphasia severity and recovery has been established. In this brief note, we will comment on their findings and conclusions, beginning first with a brief review of literacy and aphasia research, and complexities encountered in these fields of investigation. This serves as a general background to our specific comments on Connor et al. (2001), which will be focusing on methodological issues and the importance of taking normative values in consideration when subjects with different socio-cultural or socio-economic backgrounds are assessed.

Abstract

Four form-preparation experiments investigated whether aspects of phonological encoding processes and representations are shared between languages in bilingual speakers. The participants were Dutch--English bilinguals. Experiment 1 showed that the basic rightward incrementality revealed in studies for the first language is also observed for second-language words. In Experiments 2 and 3, speakers were given words to produce that did or did not share onset segments, and that came or did not come from different languages. It was found that when onsets were shared among the response words, those onsets were prepared, even when the words came from different languages. Experiment 4 showed that preparation requires prior knowledge of the segments and that knowledge about their phonological features yields no effect. These results suggest that both first- and second-language words are phonologically planned through the same serial order mechanism and that the representations of segments common to the languages are shared.

Abstract

This article presents a new account of the color-word Stroop phenomenon ( J. R. Stroop, 1935) based on an implemented model of word production, WEAVER++ ( W. J. M. Levelt, A. Roelofs, & A. S. Meyer, 1999b; A. Roelofs, 1992, 1997c). Stroop effects are claimed to arise from processing interactions within the language-production architecture and explicit goal-referenced control. WEAVER++ successfully simulates 16 classic data sets, mostly taken from the review by C. M. MacLeod (1991), including incongruency, congruency, reverse-Stroop, response-set, semantic-gradient, time-course, stimulus, spatial, multiple-task, manual, bilingual, training, age, and pathological effects. Three new experiments tested the account against alternative explanations. It is shown that WEAVER++ offers a more satisfactory account of the data than other models.

Abstract

Accounts that specify semantic and/or syntactic complexity as the primary determinant of the order in which children acquire particular words or grammatical constructions have been highly influential in the literature on question acquisition. One explanation of wh-question acquisition in particular suggests that the order in which English speaking children acquire wh-questions is determined by two interlocking linguistic factors; the syntactic function of the wh-word that heads the question and the semantic generality (or ‘lightness’) of the main verb (Bloom, Merkin & Wootten, 1982; Bloom, 1991). Another more recent view, however, is that acquisition is influenced by the relative frequency with which children hear particular wh-words and verbs in their input (e.g. Rowland & Pine, 2000). In the present study over 300 hours of naturalistic data from twelve two- to three-year-old children and their mothers were analysed in order to assess the relative contribution of complexity and input frequency to wh-question acquisition. The analyses revealed, first, that the acquisition order of wh-questions could be predicted successfully from the frequency with which particular wh-words and verbs occurred in the children's input and, second, that syntactic and semantic complexity did not reliably predict acquisition once input frequency was taken into account. These results suggest that the relationship between acquisition and complexity may be a by-product of the high correlation between complexity and the frequency with which mothers use particular wh-words and verbs. We interpret the results in terms of a constructivist view of language acquisition.

Abstract

Van Valin (Journal of Child Language29, 2002, 161–75) presents a critique of Rowland & Pine (Journal of Child Language27, 2000, 157–81) and argues that the wh-question data from Adam (in Brown, A first language, Cambridge, MA, 1973) cannot be explained in terms of input frequencies as we suggest. Instead, he suggests that the data can be more successfully accounted for in terms of Role and Reference Grammar. In this note we re-examine the pattern of inversion and uninversion in Adam's wh-questions and argue that the RRG explanation cannot account for some of the developmental facts it was designed to explain.

Abstract

In this article, we present the spatial logistics task (SLOT) platform for investigating multimodal communication between 2 human participants. Presented are the SLOT communication task and the software and hardware that has been developed to run SLOT experiments and record the participants’ multimodal behavior. SLOT offers a high level of flexibility in varying the context of the communication and is particularly useful in studies of the relationship between pen gestures and speech. We illustrate the use of the SLOT platform by discussing the results of some early experiments. The first is an experiment on negotiation with a one-way mirror between the participants, and the second is an exploratory study of automatic recognition of spontaneous pen gestures. The results of these studies demonstrate the usefulness of the SLOT platform for conducting multimodal communication research in both human– human and human–computer interactions.

Abstract

Participants' eye movements were monitored as they heard sentences and saw four pictured objects on a computer screen. Participants were instructed to click on the object mentioned in the sentence. There were more transitory fixations to pictures representing monosyllabic words (e.g. ham) when the first syllable of the target word (e.g. hamster) had been replaced by a recording of the monosyllabic word than when it came from a different recording of the target word. This demonstrates that a phonemically identical sequence can contain cues that modulate its lexical interpretation. This effect was governed by the duration of the sequence, rather than by its origin (i.e. which type of word it came from). The longer the sequence, the more monosyllabic-word interpretations it generated. We argue that cues to lexical-embedding disambiguation, such as segmental lengthening, result from the realization of a prosodic boundary that often but not always follows monosyllabic words, and that lexical candidates whose word boundaries are aligned with prosodic boundaries are favored in the word-recognition process.

Abstract

This letter evaluates potential benefits of combining human speech recognition ~HSR! and automatic speech recognition by building a joint model of an automatic phone recognizer ~APR! and a computational model of HSR, viz., Shortlist @Norris, Cognition 52, 189–234 ~1994!#. Experiments based on ‘‘real-life’’ speech highlight critical limitations posed by some of the simplifying assumptions made in models of human speech recognition. These limitations could be overcome by avoiding hard phone decisions at the output side of the APR, and by using a match between the input and the internal lexicon that flexibly copes with deviations from canonical phonemic representations.

Abstract

In this paper, we present an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system based on the combination of an automatic phone recogniser and a computational model of human speech recognition – SpeM – that is capable of computing ‘word activations’ during the recognition process, in addition to doing normal speech recognition, a task in which conventional ASR architectures only provide output after the end of an utterance. We explain the notion of word activation and show that it can be used for ‘early recognition’, i.e. recognising a word before the end of the word is available. Our ASR system was tested on 992 continuous speech utterances, each containing at least one target word: a city name of at least two syllables. The results show that early recognition was obtained for 72.8% of the target words that were recognised correctly. Also, it is shown that word activation can be used as an effective confidence measure.

Abstract

We have recently developed a new model of human speech recognition, based on automatic speech recognition techniques [1]. The present paper has two goals. First, we show that the new model performs well in the recognition of lexically ambiguous input. These demonstrations suggest that the model is able to operate in the same optimal way as human listeners. Second, we discuss how to relate the behaviour of a recogniser, designed to discover the optimum path through a word lattice, to data from human listening experiments. We argue that this requires a metric that combines both path-based and word-based measures of recognition performance. The combined metric varies continuously as the input speech signal unfolds over time.

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel computational model of human speech recognition – called SpeM – based on the theory underlying Shortlist. We will show that SpeM, in combination with an automatic phone recogniser (APR), is able to simulate the human speech recognition process from the acoustic signal to the ultimate recognition of words. This joint model takes an acoustic speech file as input and calculates the activation flows of candidate words on the basis of the degree of fit of the candidate words with the input. Experiments showed that SpeM outperforms Shortlist on the recognition of ‘real-life’ input. Furthermore, SpeM performs only slightly worse than an off-the-shelf full-blown automatic speech recogniser in which all words are equally probable, while it provides a transparent computationally elegant paradigm for modelling word activations in human word recognition.

Abstract

During language production and comprehension, information about a word's syntactic properties is sometimes needed. While the decision about the grammatical gender of a word requires access to syntactic knowledge, it has also been hypothesized that semantic (i.e., biological gender) or phonological information (i.e., sound regularities) may influence this decision. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured while native speakers of German processed written words that were or were not semantically and/or phonologically marked for gender. Behavioral and ERP results showed that participants were faster in making a gender decision when words were semantically and/or phonologically gender marked than when this was not the case, although the phonological effects were less clear. In conclusion, our data provide evidence that even though participants performed a grammatical gender decision, this task can be influenced by semantic and phonological factors.

Abstract

This study investigated the time course of phonological encoding during speech production planning. Previous research has shown that conceptual/semantic information precedes syntactic information in the planning of speech production and that syntactic information is available earlier than phonological information. Here, we studied the relative time courses of the two different processes within phonological encoding, i.e. metrical encoding and syllabification. According to one prominent theory of language production, metrical encoding involves the retrieval of the stress pattern of a word, while syllabification is carried out to construct the syllabic structure of a word. However, the relative timing of these two processes is underspecified in the theory. We employed an implicit picture naming task and recorded event-related brain potentials to obtain fine-grained temporal information about metrical encoding and syllabification. Results revealed that both tasks generated effects that fall within the time window of phonological encoding. However, there was no timing difference between the two effects, suggesting that they occur approximately at the same time.

Abstract

In this study, we investigated grammatical feature selection during noun phrase production in German and Dutch. More specifically, we studied the conditions under which different grammatical genders select either the same or different determiners or suffixes. Pictures of one or two objects paired with a gender-congruent or a gender-incongruent distractor word were presented. Participants named the pictures using a singular or plural noun phrase with the appropriate determiner and/or adjective in German or Dutch. Significant effects of gender congruency were only obtained in the singular condition where the selection of determiners is governed by the target’s gender, but not in the plural condition where the determiner is identical for all genders. When different suffixes were to be selected in the gender-incongruent condition, no gender congruency effect was obtained. The results suggest that the so-called gender congruency effect is really a determiner congruency effect. The overall pattern of results is interpreted as indicating that grammatical feature selection is an automatic consequence of lexical node selection and therefore not subject to interference from other grammatical features. This implies that lexical node and grammatical feature selection operate with distinct principles.

Abstract

This study investigated the encoding of metrical information during speech production in Dutch. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to judge whether bisyllabic picture names had initial or final stress. Results showed significantly faster decision times for initially stressed targets (e.g., LEpel 'spoon') than for targets with final stress (e.g., liBEL 'dragon fly'; capital letters indicate stressed syllables) and revealed that the monitoring latencies are not a function of the picture naming or object recognition latencies to the same pictures. Experiments 2 and 3 replicated the outcome of the first experiment with bi- and trisyllabic picture names. These results demonstrate that metrical information of words is encoded rightward incrementally during phonological encoding in speech production. The results of these experiments are in line with Levelt's model of phonological encoding.

Abstract

Speakers can use pronouns when their conceptual referents are accessible from the preceding discourse, as in 'The flower is red. It turns blue'. Theories of language production agree that in order to produce a noun semantic, syntactic, and phonological information must be accessed. However, little is known about lexical access to pronouns. In this paper, we propose a model of pronoun access in German. Since the forms of German pronouns depend on the grammatical gender of the nouns they replace, the model claims that speakers must access the syntactic representation of the replaced noun (its lemma) to select a pronoun. In two experiments using the lexical decision during naming paradigm [Levelt, W.J.M., Schriefers, H., Vorberg, D., Meyer, A.S., Pechmann, T., Havinga, J., 1991a. The time course of lexical access in speech production: a study of picture naming. Psychological Review 98, 122-142], we investigated whether lemma access automatically entails the activation of the corresponding word form or whether a word form is only activated when the noun itself is produced, but not when it is replaced by a pronoun. Experiment 1 showed that during pronoun production the phonological form of the replaced noun is activated. Experiment 2 demonstrated that this phonological activation was not a residual of the use of the noun in the preceding sentence. Thus, when a pronoun is produced, the lemma and the phonological form of the replaced noun become reactivated.

Abstract

The basic idea behind this task is to find out how languages encode basic shape distinctions such as dimensionality, axial geometry, relative size, etc. More specifically, we want to find out (i) which formal means are used cross linguistically to encode basic shape distinctions, and (ii) which are the semantic distinctions that are made in this domain. In languages with many shape-classifiers, these distinctions are encoded (at least partially) in classifiers. In other languages, positional verbs, descriptive modifiers, such as “flat”, “round”, or nouns such as “cube”, “ball”, etc. might be the preferred means. In this context, we also want to investigate what other “grammatical work” shapeencoding expressions possibly do in a given language, e.g. unitization of mass nouns, or anaphoric uses of shape-encoding classifiers, etc. This task further seeks to determine the role of shape-related parameters which underlie the design of objects in the semantics of the system under investigation.

Abstract

Visiting the Trobriand Islands is advertised as being the highlight of a trip for tourists to Papua New Guinea who want, and can afford, to experience this 'ultimate adventure' with 'expeditionary cruises aboard the luxurious Melanesian Discoverer. The advertisements also promise that the tourists can 'meet the friendly people' and 'observe their unique culture, dances, and art'. During my research in Kaibola and Nuwebila, two neighbouring villages on the northern tip of Kiriwina Island, I studied and analysed the encounters of tourists with Trobriand Islanders, who sing and dance for the Europeans. The analyses of the islanders' tourist performances are based on Erving Goffman's now classic study The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which was first published in 1959. In this study Goffmann analyses the structures of social encounters from the perspective of the dramatic performance. The situational context within which the encounter between tourists and Trobriand Islanders takes place frames the tourists as the audience and the Trobriand Islanders as a team of performers. The inherent structure of the parts of the overall performance presented in the two villages can be summarized - within the framework of Goffman's approach - in analogy with the structure of drama. We find parts that constitute the 'exposition', the 'complication', and the 'resolution' of a drama; we even observe an equivalent to the importance of the 'Second Act Curtain' in modern drama theory. Deeper analyses of this encounter show that the motives of the performers and their 'art of impression management' are to control the impression their audience receives in this encounter situation. This analysis reveals that the Trobriand Islanders sell their customers the expected images of what Malinowski (1929) once termed the '...Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia' in a staged 'illusion'. With the conscious realization of the part they as performers play in this encounter, the Trobriand Islanders are in a position that is superior to that of their audience. Their merchandise or commodity is 'not real', as it is sold 'out of its true cultural context'. It is staged - and thus cannot be taken by any customer whatsoever because it (re)presents just an 'illusion'. The Trobriand Islanders know that neither they nor the core aspects of their culture will suffer any damage within a tourist encounter that is defined by the structure and the kind of their performance. Their pride and self-confidence enable them to bring their superior position into play in their dealings with tourists. With their indigenous humour, they even use this encounter for ridiculing their visitors. It turns out that the encounter is another manifestation of the Trobriand Islanders' self-consciousness, self-confidence, and pride with which they manage to protect core aspects of their cultural identity, while at the same time using and 'selling' parts of their culture as a kind of commodity to tourists.

Abstract

This project aims to investigate how speakers of various languages in indigenous cultures verbally reason about moral issues. The ways in which a solution for a moral problem is found, phrased and justified will be taken as the basis for researching reasoning processes that manifest themselves verbally in the speakers’ arguments put forward to solve a number of moral problems which will be presented to them in the form of unfinished story plots or scenarios that ask for a solution. The plots chosen attempt to present common problems in human society and human behaviour. They should function to elicit moral discussion and/or moral arguments in groups of consultants of at least three persons.

Abstract

A corpus of digitized speech errors is used to compare the prosody of correction patterns for word-level vs. sound-level errors. Results for both peak F0 and perceived prosodic markedness confirm that speakers are more likely to mark corrections of word-level errors than corrections of sound-level errors, and that errors ambiguous between word-level and soundlevel (such as boat for moat) show correction patterns like those for sound level errors. This finding increases the plausibility of the claim that word-sound-ambiguous errors arise at the same level of processing as sound errors that do not form words.

Abstract

Three experiments examined whether infants recognise functors in phrases, and whether their representations of functors are phonetically well specified. Eight- and 13- month-old English infants heard monosyllabic lexical words preceded by real functors (e.g., the, his) versus nonsense functors (e.g., kuh); the latter were minimally modified segmentally (but not prosodically) from real functors. Lexical words were constant across conditions; thus recognition of functors would appear as longer listening time to sequences with real functors. Eightmonth- olds' listening times to sequences with real versus nonsense functors did not significantly differ, suggesting that they did not recognise real functors, or functor representations lacked phonetic specification. However, 13-month-olds listened significantly longer to sequences with real functors. Thus, somewhere between 8 and 13 months of age infants learn familiar functors and represent them with segmental detail. We propose that accumulated frequency of functors in input in general passes a critical threshold during this time.

Abstract

Incremental sentence generation imposes special constraints on the representation of the grammar and the design of the formulator (the module which is responsible for constructing the syntactic and morphological structure). In the model of natural speech production presented here, a formalism called Segment Grammar is used for the representation of linguistic knowledge. We give a definition of this formalism and present a formulator design which relies on it. Next, we present an object- oriented implementation of Segment Grammar. Finally, we compare Segment Grammar with other formalisms.

Abstract

We present the results of a large-scale study on speech perception, assessing the number and type of perceptual hypotheses which listeners entertain about possible phoneme sequences in their language. Dutch listeners were asked to identify gated fragments of all 1179 diphones of Dutch, providing a total of 488 520 phoneme categorizations. The results manifest orderly uptake of acoustic information in the signal. Differences across phonemes in the rate at which fully correct recognition was achieved arose as a result of whether or not potential confusions could occur with other phonemes of the language ~long with short vowels, affricates with their initial components, etc.!. These data can be used to improve models of how acoustic phonetic information is mapped onto the mental lexicon during speech comprehension.

Abstract

We present results from cross-modal priming experiments on German participles and noun plurals. The experiments produced parallel results for both inflectional systems. Regular inflection exhibits full priming whereas irregularly inflected word forms show only partial priming: after hearing regularly inflected words (-t participles and -s plurals), lexical decision times on morphologically related word forms (presented visually) were similar to reaction times for a base-line condition in which prime and target were identical, but significantly shorter than in a control condition where prime and target were unrelated. In contrast, prior presentation of irregular words (-n participles and -er plurals) led to significantly longer response times on morphologically related word forms than the prior presentation of the target itself. Hence, there are clear priming differences between regularly and irregularly inflected German words. We compare the findings on German with experimental results on regular and irregular inflection in English and Italian, and discuss theoretical implications for single versus dual-mechanism models of inflection.

Abstract

Spoken language comprehension requires rapid integration of information from multiple linguistic sources. In the present study we addressed the temporal aspects of this integration process by focusing on the time course of the selection of the appropriate meaning of lexical ambiguities (“bank”) in sentence contexts. Successful selection of the contextually appropriate meaning of the ambiguous word is dependent upon the rapid binding of the contextual information in the sentence to the appropriate meaning of the ambiguity. We used the N400 to identify the time course of this binding process. The N400 was measured to target words that followed three types of context sentences. In the concordant context, the sentence biased the meaning of the sentence-final ambiguous word so that it was related to the target. In the discordant context, the sentence context biased the meaning so that it was not related to the target. In the unrelated control condition, the sentences ended in an unambiguous noun that was unrelated to the target. Half of the concordant sentences biased the dominant meaning, and the other half biased the subordinate meaning of the sentence-final ambiguous words. The ISI between onset of the target word and offset of the sentence-final word of the context sentence was 100 ms in one version of the experiment, and 1250 ms in the second version. We found that (i) the lexically dominant meaning is always partly activated, independent of context, (ii) initially both dominant and subordinate meaning are (partly) activated, which suggests that contextual and lexical factors both contribute to sentence interpretation without context completely overriding lexical information, and (iii) strong lexical influences remain present for a relatively long period of time.

Abstract

Although infants show remarkable sensitivity to linguistically relevant phonetic variation in speech, young children sometimes appear not to make use of this sensitivity. Here, children's knowledge of the sound-forms of familiar words was assessed using a visual fixation task. Dutch 19-month-olds were shown pairs of pictures and heard correct pronunciations and mispronunciations of familiar words naming one of the pictures. Mispronunciations were word-initial in Experiment 1 and word-medial in Experiment 2, and in both experiments involved substituting one segment with [d] (a common sound in Dutch) or [g] (a rare sound). In both experiments, word recognition performance was better for correct pronunciations than for mispronunciations involving either substituted consonant. These effects did not depend upon children's knowledge of lexical or nonlexical phonological neighbors of the tested words. The results indicate the encoding of phonetic detail in words at 19 months.

Abstract

Two experiments examined the nature of access, storage, and comprehension of idiomatic phrases. In both studies a Phrase Classification Task was utilized. In this, reaction times to determine whether or not word strings constituted acceptable English phrases were measured. Classification times were significantly faster to idiom than to matched control phrases. This effect held under conditions involving different categories of idioms, different transitional probabilities among words in the phrases, and different levels of awareness of the presence of idioms in the materials. The data support a Lexical Representation Hypothesis for the processing of idioms.

Abstract

The murine homologue of the human chloride channel gene, CLCN5, defects in which are responsible for Dent disease, has been cloned and characterized. We isolated the entire coding region of mouse Clcn5 cDNA and approximately 45 kb of genomic sequence embracing the gene. To study its transcriptional control, the 5' upstream sequences of the mouse Clcn5 gene were cloned into a luciferase reporter vector. Deletion analysis of 1.5 kb of the 5' flanking sequence defined an active promoter region within 128 bp of the putative transcription start site, which is associated with a TATA motif but lacks a CAAT consensus. Within this sequence, there is a motif with homology to a purine-rich sequence responsible for the kidney-specific promoter activity of the rat CLC-K1 gene, another member of the chloride-channel gene family expressed in kidney. An enhancer element that confers a 10- to 20-fold increase in the promoter activity of the mouse Clcn5 gene was found within the first intron. The organization of the human CLCN5 and mouse Clcn5 gene structures is highly conserved, and the sequence of the murine protein is 98% similar to that of human, with its highest expression seen in the kidney. This study thus provides the first identification of the transcriptional control region of, and the basis for an understanding of the regulatory mechanism that controls, this kidney-specific, chloride-channel gene.

Abstract

This paper presents electrophysiological data on the on-line processing of open- and closed-class words in patients with Broca’s aphasia with agrammatic comprehension. Event-related brain potentials were recorded from the scalp when Broca patients and nonaphasic control subjects were visually presented with a story in which the words appeared one at a time on the screen. Separate waveforms were computed for open- and closed-class words. The non-aphasic control subjects showed clear differences between the processing of open- and closed-class words in an early (210-375 ms) and a late (400-700 ms) time-window.The early electrophysiological differences reflect the first manifestation of the availability of word-category information from the mental lexicon. The late differences presumably relate to post-lexical semantic and syntactic processing. In contrast to the control subjects, the Broca patients showed no early vocabulary class effect and only a limited late effect. The results suggest that an important factor in the agrammatic comprehension deficit of Broca’s aphasics is a delayed and/or incomplete availability of word-class information.

Abstract

This paper discusses the development of an orthography for the Touo language (Solomon Islands). Various orthographies have been proposed for this language in the past, and the paper discusses why they are perceived by the community to have failed. Current opinion about orthography development within the Touo-speaking community is divided along religious, political, and geographical grounds; and the development of a successful orthography must take into account a variety of opinions. The paper examines the social, historical, and linguistic obstacles that have hitherto prevented the development of an accepted Touo orthography, and presents a new proposal which has thus far gained acceptance with community leaders. The fundamental issue is that creating an orthography for a language takes place in a social, political, and historical context; and for an orthography to be acceptable for the speakers of a language, all these factors must be taken into account.