Publications

Displaying 1 - 34 of 34
  • Agirrezabal, M., Paggio, P., Navarretta, C., & Jongejan, B. (2023). Multimodal detection and classification of head movements in face-to-face conversations: Exploring models, features and their interaction. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (Eds.), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527200.

    Abstract

    In this work we perform multimodal detection and classification
    of head movements from face to face video conversation data.
    We have experimented with different models and feature sets
    and provided some insight on the effect of independent features,
    but also how their interaction can enhance a head movement
    classifier. Used features include nose, neck and mid hip position
    coordinates and their derivatives together with acoustic features,
    namely, intensity and pitch of the speaker on focus. Results
    show that when input features are sufficiently processed by in-
    teracting with each other, a linear classifier can reach a similar
    performance to a more complex non-linear neural model with
    several hidden layers. Our best models achieve state-of-the-art
    performance in the detection task, measured by macro-averaged
    F1 score.
  • Bowerman, M., de León, L., & Choi, S. (1995). Verbs, particles, and spatial semantics: Learning to talk about spatial actions in typologically different languages. In E. V. Clark (Ed.), Proceedings of the Twenty-seventh Annual Child Language Research Forum (pp. 101-110). Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information.
  • Caplan, S., Peng, M. Z., Zhang, Y., & Yu, C. (2023). Using an Egocentric Human Simulation Paradigm to quantify referential and semantic ambiguity in early word learning. In M. Goldwater, F. K. Anggoro, B. K. Hayes, & D. C. Ong (Eds.), Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2023) (pp. 1043-1049).

    Abstract

    In order to understand early word learning we need to better understand and quantify properties of the input that young children receive. We extended the human simulation paradigm (HSP) using egocentric videos taken from infant head-mounted cameras. The videos were further annotated with gaze information indicating in-the-moment visual attention from the infant. Our new HSP prompted participants for two types of responses, thus differentiating referential from semantic ambiguity in the learning input. Consistent with findings on visual attention in word learning, we find a strongly bimodal distribution over HSP accuracy. Even in this open-ended task, most videos only lead to a small handful of common responses. What's more, referential ambiguity was the key bottleneck to performance: participants can nearly always recover the exact word that was said if they identify the correct referent. Finally, analysis shows that adult learners relied on particular, multimodal behavioral cues to infer those target referents.
  • Chevrefils, L., Morgenstern, A., Beaupoil-Hourdel, P., Bedoin, D., Caët, S., Danet, C., Danino, C., De Pontonx, S., & Parisse, C. (2023). Coordinating eating and languaging: The choreography of speech, sign, gesture and action in family dinners. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (Eds.), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527183.

    Abstract

    In this study, we analyze one French signing and one French speaking family’s interaction during dinner. The families composed of two parents and two children aged 3 to 11 were filmed with three cameras to capture all family members’ behaviors. The three videos per dinner were synchronized and coded on ELAN. We annotated all participants’ acting, and languaging.
    Our quantitative analyses show how family members collaboratively manage multiple streams of activity through the embodied performances of dining and interacting. We uncover different profiles according to participants’ modality of expression and status (focusing on the mother and the younger child). The hearing participants’ co-activity management illustrates their monitoring of dining and conversing and how they progressively master the affordances of the visual and vocal channels to maintain the simultaneity of the two activities. The deaf mother skillfully manages to alternate smoothly between dining and interacting. The deaf younger child manifests how she is in the process of developing her skills to manage multi-activity. Our qualitative analyses focus on the ecology of visual-gestural and audio-vocal languaging in the context of co-activity according to language and participant. We open new perspectives on the management of gaze and body parts in multimodal languaging.
  • Cutler, A., & Chen, H.-C. (1995). Phonological similarity effects in Cantonese word recognition. In K. Elenius, & P. Branderud (Eds.), Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences: Vol. 1 (pp. 106-109). Stockholm: Stockholm University.

    Abstract

    Two lexical decision experiments in Cantonese are described in which the recognition of spoken target words as a function of phonological similarity to a preceding prime is investigated. Phonological similaritv in first syllables produced inhibition, while similarity in second syllables led to facilitation. Differences between syllables in tonal and segmental structure had generally similar effects.
  • Cutler, A. (1980). Productivity in word formation. In J. Kreiman, & A. E. Ojeda (Eds.), Papers from the Sixteenth Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society (pp. 45-51). Chicago, Ill.: CLS.
  • Cutler, A. (1995). Universal and Language-Specific in the Development of Speech. Biology International, (Special Issue 33).
  • Ferré, G. (2023). Pragmatic gestures and prosody. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (Eds.), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527215.

    Abstract

    The study presented here focuses on two pragmatic gestures:
    the hand flip (Ferré, 2011), a gesture of the Palm Up Open
    Hand/PUOH family (Müller, 2004) and the closed hand which
    can be considered as the opposite kind of movement to the open-
    ing of the hands present in the PUOH gesture. Whereas one of
    the functions of the hand flip has been described as presenting
    a new point in speech (Cienki, 2021), the closed hand gesture
    has not yet been described in the literature to the best of our
    knowledge. It can however be conceived of as having the oppo-
    site function of announcing the end of a point in discourse. The
    object of the present study is therefore to determine, with the
    study of prosodic features, if the two gestures are found in the
    same type of speech units and what their respective scope is.
    Drawing from a corpus of three TED Talks in French the
    prosodic characteristics of the speech that accompanies the two
    gestures will be examined. The hypothesis developed in the
    present paper is that their scope should be reflected in the
    prosody of accompanying speech, especially pitch key, tone,
    and relative pitch range. The prediction is that hand flips and
    closing hand gestures are expected to be located at the periph-
    ery of Intonation Phrases (IPs), Inter-Pausal Units (IPUs) or
    more conversational Turn Constructional Units (TCUs), and are
    likely to be co-occurrent with pauses in speech. But because of
    the natural slope of intonation in speech, the speech that accom-
    pany early gestures in Intonation Phrases should reveal different
    features from the speech at the end of intonational units. Tones
    should be different as well, considering the prosodic structure
    of spoken French.
  • Green, K., Osei-Cobbina, C., Perlman, M., & Kita, S. (2023). Infants can create different types of iconic gestures, with and without parental scaffolding. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (Eds.), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527188.

    Abstract

    Despite the early emergence of pointing, children are generally not documented to produce iconic gestures until later in development. Although research has described this developmental trajectory and the types of iconic gestures that emerge first, there has been limited focus on iconic gestures within interactional contexts. This study identified the first 10 iconic gestures produced by five monolingual English-speaking children in a naturalistic longitudinal video corpus and analysed the interactional contexts. We found children produced their first iconic gesture between 12 and 20 months and that gestural types varied. Although 34% of gestures could have been imitated or derived from adult or child actions in the preceding context, the majority were produced independently of any observed model. In these cases, adults often led the interaction in a direction where iconic gesture was an appropriate response. Overall, we find infants can represent a referent symbolically and possess a greater capacity for innovation than previously assumed. In order to develop our understanding of how children learn to produce iconic gestures, it is important to consider the immediate interactional context. Conducting naturalistic corpus analyses could be a more ecologically valid approach to understanding how children learn to produce iconic gestures in real life contexts.
  • Hamilton, A., & Holler, J. (Eds.). (2023). Face2face: Advancing the science of social interaction [Special Issue]. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences. Retrieved from https://royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/2023/378/1875.

    Abstract

    Face to face interaction is fundamental to human sociality but is very complex to study in a scientific fashion. This theme issue brings together cutting-edge approaches to the study of face-to-face interaction and showcases how we can make progress in this area. Researchers are now studying interaction in adult conversation, parent-child relationships, neurodiverse groups, interactions with virtual agents and various animal species. The theme issue reveals how new paradigms are leading to more ecologically grounded and comprehensive insights into what social interaction is. Scientific advances in this area can lead to improvements in education and therapy, better understanding of neurodiversity and more engaging artificial agents
  • Hellwig, B., Allen, S. E. M., Davidson, L., Defina, R., Kelly, B. F., & Kidd, E. (Eds.). (2023). The acquisition sketch project [Special Issue]. Language Documentation and Conservation Special Publication, 28.

    Abstract

    This special publication aims to build a renewed enthusiasm for collecting acquisition data across many languages, including those facing endangerment and loss. It presents a guide for documenting and describing child language and child-directed language in diverse languages and cultures, as well as a collection of acquisition sketches based on this guide. The guide is intended for anyone interested in working across child language and language documentation, including, for example, field linguists and language documenters, community language workers, child language researchers or graduate students.
  • Jordanoska, I., Kocher, A., & Bendezú-Araujo, R. (Eds.). (2023). Marking the truth: A cross-linguistic approach to verum [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft, 42(3).
  • Kanakanti, M., Singh, S., & Shrivastava, M. (2023). MultiFacet: A multi-tasking framework for speech-to-sign language generation. In E. André, M. Chetouani, D. Vaufreydaz, G. Lucas, T. Schultz, L.-P. Morency, & A. Vinciarelli (Eds.), ICMI '23 Companion: Companion Publication of the 25th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (pp. 205-213). New York: ACM. doi:10.1145/3610661.3616550.

    Abstract

    Sign language is a rich form of communication, uniquely conveying meaning through a combination of gestures, facial expressions, and body movements. Existing research in sign language generation has predominantly focused on text-to-sign pose generation, while speech-to-sign pose generation remains relatively underexplored. Speech-to-sign language generation models can facilitate effective communication between the deaf and hearing communities. In this paper, we propose an architecture that utilises prosodic information from speech audio and semantic context from text to generate sign pose sequences. In our approach, we adopt a multi-tasking strategy that involves an additional task of predicting Facial Action Units (FAUs). FAUs capture the intricate facial muscle movements that play a crucial role in conveying specific facial expressions during sign language generation. We train our models on an existing Indian Sign language dataset that contains sign language videos with audio and text translations. To evaluate our models, we report Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and Probability of Correct Keypoints (PCK) scores. We find that combining prosody and text as input, along with incorporating facial action unit prediction as an additional task, outperforms previous models in both DTW and PCK scores. We also discuss the challenges and limitations of speech-to-sign pose generation models to encourage future research in this domain. We release our models, results and code to foster reproducibility and encourage future research1.
  • Klein, W. (1995). A simplest analysis of the English tense-aspect system. In W. Riehle, & H. Keiper (Eds.), Proceedings of the Anglistentag 1994 (pp. 139-151). Tübingen: Niemeyer.
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (1995). Epoche [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (100).
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (1980). Argumentation [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (38/39).
  • Laparle, S. (2023). Moving past the lexical affiliate with a frame-based analysis of gesture meaning. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (Eds.), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527218.

    Abstract

    Interpreting the meaning of co-speech gesture often involves
    identifying a gesture’s ‘lexical affiliate’, the word or phrase to
    which it most closely relates (Schegloff 1984). Though there is
    work within gesture studies that resists this simplex mapping of
    meaning from speech to gesture (e.g. de Ruiter 2000; Kendon
    2014; Parrill 2008), including an evolving body of literature on
    recurrent gesture and gesture families (e.g. Fricke et al. 2014; Müller 2017), it is still the lexical affiliate model that is most ap-
    parent in formal linguistic models of multimodal meaning(e.g.
    Alahverdzhieva et al. 2017; Lascarides and Stone 2009; Puste-
    jovsky and Krishnaswamy 2021; Schlenker 2020). In this work,
    I argue that the lexical affiliate should be carefully reconsidered
    in the further development of such models.
    In place of the lexical affiliate, I suggest a further shift
    toward a frame-based, action schematic approach to gestural
    meaning in line with that proposed in, for example, Parrill and
    Sweetser (2004) and Müller (2017). To demonstrate the utility
    of this approach I present three types of compositional gesture
    sequences which I call spatial contrast, spatial embedding, and
    cooperative abstract deixis. All three rely on gestural context,
    rather than gesture-speech alignment, to convey interactive (i.e.
    pragmatic) meaning. The centrality of gestural context to ges-
    ture meaning in these examples demonstrates the necessity of
    developing a model of gestural meaning independent of its in-
    tegration with speech.
  • Levelt, W. J. M., & Plomp, R. (1962). Musical consonance and critical bandwidth. In Proceedings of the 4th International Congress Acoustics (pp. 55-55).
  • Levshina, N. (2023). Testing communicative and learning biases in a causal model of language evolution:A study of cues to Subject and Object. In M. Degano, T. Roberts, G. Sbardolini, & M. Schouwstra (Eds.), The Proceedings of the 23rd Amsterdam Colloquium (pp. 383-387). Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam.
  • Liesenfeld, A., Lopez, A., & Dingemanse, M. (2023). Opening up ChatGPT: Tracking Openness, Transparency, and Accountability in Instruction-Tuned Text Generators. In CUI '23: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces. doi:10.1145/3571884.3604316.

    Abstract

    Large language models that exhibit instruction-following behaviour represent one of the biggest recent upheavals in conversational interfaces, a trend in large part fuelled by the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT, a proprietary large language model for text generation fine-tuned through reinforcement learning from human feedback (LLM+RLHF). We review the risks of relying on proprietary software and survey the first crop of open-source projects of comparable architecture and functionality. The main contribution of this paper is to show that openness is differentiated, and to offer scientific documentation of degrees of openness in this fast-moving field. We evaluate projects in terms of openness of code, training data, model weights, RLHF data, licensing, scientific documentation, and access methods. We find that while there is a fast-growing list of projects billing themselves as 'open source', many inherit undocumented data of dubious legality, few share the all-important instruction-tuning (a key site where human labour is involved), and careful scientific documentation is exceedingly rare. Degrees of openness are relevant to fairness and accountability at all points, from data collection and curation to model architecture, and from training and fine-tuning to release and deployment.
  • Liesenfeld, A., Lopez, A., & Dingemanse, M. (2023). The timing bottleneck: Why timing and overlap are mission-critical for conversational user interfaces, speech recognition and dialogue systems. In Proceedings of the 24rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDial 2023). doi:10.18653/v1/2023.sigdial-1.45.

    Abstract

    Speech recognition systems are a key intermediary in voice-driven human-computer interaction. Although speech recognition works well for pristine monologic audio, real-life use cases in open-ended interactive settings still present many challenges. We argue that timing is mission-critical for dialogue systems, and evaluate 5 major commercial ASR systems for their conversational and multilingual support. We find that word error rates for natural conversational data in 6 languages remain abysmal, and that overlap remains a key challenge (study 1). This impacts especially the recognition of conversational words (study 2), and in turn has dire consequences for downstream intent recognition (study 3). Our findings help to evaluate the current state of conversational ASR, contribute towards multidimensional error analysis and evaluation, and identify phenomena that need most attention on the way to build robust interactive speech technologies.
  • Nabrotzky, J., Ambrazaitis, G., Zellers, M., & House, D. (2023). Temporal alignment of manual gestures’ phase transitions with lexical and post-lexical accentual F0 peaks in spontaneous Swedish interaction. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (Eds.), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527194.

    Abstract

    Many studies investigating the temporal alignment of co-speech
    gestures to acoustic units in the speech signal find a close
    coupling of the gestural landmarks and pitch accents or the
    stressed syllable of pitch-accented words. In English, a pitch
    accent is anchored in the lexically stressed syllable. Hence, it is
    unclear whether it is the lexical phonological dimension of
    stress, or the phrase-level prominence that determines the
    details of speech-gesture synchronization. This paper explores
    the relation between gestural phase transitions and accentual F0
    peaks in Stockholm Swedish, which exhibits a lexical pitch
    accent distinction. When produced with phrase-level
    prominence, there are three different configurations of
    lexicality of F0 peaks and the status of the syllable it is aligned
    with. Through analyzing the alignment of the different F0 peaks
    with gestural onsets in spontaneous dyadic conversations, we
    aim to contribute to our understanding of the role of lexical
    prosodic phonology in the co-production of speech and gesture.
    The results, though limited by a small dataset, still suggest
    differences between the three types of peaks concerning which
    types of gesture phase onsets they tend to align with, and how
    well these landmarks align with each other, although these
    differences did not reach significance.
  • Offrede, T., Mishra, C., Skantze, G., Fuchs, S., & Mooshammer, C. (2023). Do Humans Converge Phonetically When Talking to a Robot? In R. Skarnitzl, & J. Volin (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 3507-3511). Prague: GUARANT International.

    Abstract

    Phonetic convergence—i.e., adapting one’s speech
    towards that of an interlocutor—has been shown
    to occur in human-human conversations as well as
    human-machine interactions. Here, we investigate
    the hypothesis that human-to-robot convergence is
    influenced by the human’s perception of the robot
    and by the conversation’s topic. We conducted a
    within-subjects experiment in which 33 participants
    interacted with two robots differing in their eye gaze
    behavior—one looked constantly at the participant;
    the other produced gaze aversions, similarly to a
    human’s behavior. Additionally, the robot asked
    questions with increasing intimacy levels.
    We observed that the speakers tended to converge
    on F0 to the robots. However, this convergence
    to the robots was not modulated by how the
    speakers perceived them or by the topic’s intimacy.
    Interestingly, speakers produced lower F0 means
    when talking about more intimate topics. We
    discuss these findings in terms of current theories of
    conversational convergence.
  • Otake, T., Davis, S. M., & Cutler, A. (1995). Listeners’ representations of within-word structure: A cross-linguistic and cross-dialectal investigation. In J. Pardo (Ed.), Proceedings of EUROSPEECH 95: Vol. 3 (pp. 1703-1706). Madrid: European Speech Communication Association.

    Abstract

    Japanese, British English and American English listeners were presented with spoken words in their native language, and asked to mark on a written transcript of each word the first natural division point in the word. The results showed clear and strong patterns of consensus, indicating that listeners have available to them conscious representations of within-word structure. Orthography did not play a strongly deciding role in the results. The patterns of response were at variance with results from on-line studies of speech segmentation, suggesting that the present task taps not those representations used in on-line listening, but levels of representation which may involve much richer knowledge of word-internal structure.
  • Sander, J., Lieberman, A., & Rowland, C. F. (2023). Exploring joint attention in American Sign Language: The influence of sign familiarity. In M. Goldwater, F. K. Anggoro, B. K. Hayes, & D. C. Ong (Eds.), Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2023) (pp. 632-638).

    Abstract

    Children’s ability to share attention with another social partner (i.e., joint attention) has been found to support language development. Despite the large amount of research examining the effects of joint attention on language in hearing population, little is known about how deaf children learning sign languages achieve joint attention with their caregivers during natural social interaction and how caregivers provide and scaffold learning opportunities for their children. The present study investigates the properties and timing of joint attention surrounding familiar and novel naming events and their relationship to children’s vocabulary. Naturalistic play sessions of caretaker-child-dyads using American Sign Language were analyzed in regards to naming events of either familiar or novel object labeling events and the surrounding joint attention events. We observed that most naming events took place in the context of a successful joint attention event and that sign familiarity was related to the timing of naming events within the joint attention events. Our results suggest that caregivers are highly sensitive to their child’s visual attention in interactions and modulate joint attention differently in the context of naming events of familiar vs. novel object labels.
  • Sekine, K., & Kajikawa, T. (2023). Does the spatial distribution of a speaker's gaze and gesture impact on a listener's comprehension of discourse? In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (Eds.), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527208.

    Abstract

    This study investigated the impact of a speaker's gaze direction
    on a listener's comprehension of discourse. Previous research
    suggests that hand gestures play a role in referent allocation,
    enabling listeners to better understand the discourse. The
    current study aims to determine whether the speaker's gaze
    direction has a similar effect on reference resolution as co-
    speech gestures. Thirty native Japanese speakers participated in
    the study and were assigned to one of three conditions:
    congruent, incongruent, or speech-only. Participants watched
    36 videos of an actor narrating a story consisting of three
    sentences with two protagonists. The speaker consistently
    used hand gestures to allocate one protagonist to the lower right
    and the other to the lower left space, while directing her gaze to
    either space of the target person (congruent), the other person
    (incongruent), or no particular space (speech-only). Participants
    were required to verbally answer a question about the target
    protagonist involved in an accidental event as quickly as
    possible. Results indicate that participants in the congruent
    condition exhibited faster reaction times than those in the
    incongruent condition, although the difference was not
    significant. These findings suggest that the speaker's gaze
    direction is not enough to facilitate a listener's comprehension
    of discourse.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1980). Variabele competentie: Linguïstiek en sociolinguïstiek anno 1980. In Handelingen van het 36e Nederlands Filologencongres: Gehouden te Groningen op woensdag 9, donderdag 10 en vrijdag 11 April 1980 (pp. 41-56). Amsterdam: Holland University Press.
  • Severijnen, G. G. A., Bosker, H. R., & McQueen, J. M. (2023). Syllable rate drives rate normalization, but is not the only factor. In R. Skarnitzl, & J. Volín (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2023) (pp. 56-60). Prague: Guarant International.

    Abstract

    Speech is perceived relative to the speech rate in the context. It is unclear, however, what information listeners use to compute speech rate. The present study examines whether listeners use the number of
    syllables per unit time (i.e., syllable rate) as a measure of speech rate, as indexed by subsequent vowel perception. We ran two rate-normalization experiments in which participants heard duration-matched word lists that contained either monosyllabic
    vs. bisyllabic words (Experiment 1), or monosyllabic vs. trisyllabic pseudowords (Experiment 2). The participants’ task was to categorize an /ɑ-aː/ continuum that followed the word lists. The monosyllabic condition was perceived as slower (i.e., fewer /aː/ responses) than the bisyllabic and
    trisyllabic condition. However, no difference was observed between bisyllabic and trisyllabic contexts. Therefore, while syllable rate is used in perceiving speech rate, other factors, such as fast speech processes, mean F0, and intensity, must also influence rate normalization.
  • Siahaan, P., & Wijaya Rajeg, G. P. (2023). Multimodal language use in Indonesian: Recurrent gestures associated with negation. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (Eds.), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527196.

    Abstract

    This paper presents research findings on manual gestures
    associated with negation in Indonesian, utilizing data sourced
    from talk shows available on YouTube. The study reveals that
    Indonesian speakers employ six recurrent negation gestures,
    which have been observed in various languages worldwide.
    This suggests that gestures exhibiting a stable form-meaning
    relationship and recurring frequently in relation to negation are
    prevalent around the globe, although their distribution may
    differ across cultures and languages. Furthermore, the paper
    demonstrates that negation gestures are not strictly tied to
    verbal negation. Overall, the aim of this paper is to contribute
    to a deeper understanding of the conventional usage and cross-
    linguistic distribution of recurrent gestures.
  • Stern, G. (2023). On embodied use of recognitional demonstratives. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (Eds.), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527204.

    Abstract

    This study focuses on embodied uses of recognitional
    demonstratives. While multimodal conversation analytic
    studies have shown how gesture and speech interact in the
    elaboration of exophoric references, little attention has been
    given to the multimodal configuration of other types of
    referential actions. Based on a video-recorded corpus of
    professional meetings held in French, this qualitative study
    shows that a subtype of deictic references, namely recognitional
    references, are frequently associated with iconic gestures, thus
    challenging the traditional distinction between exophoric and
    endophoric uses of deixis.
  • Uhrig, P., Payne, E., Pavlova, I., Burenko, I., Dykes, N., Baltazani, M., Burrows, E., Hale, S., Torr, P., & Wilson, A. (2023). Studying time conceptualisation via speech, prosody, and hand gesture: Interweaving manual and computational methods of analysis. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (Eds.), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527220.

    Abstract

    This paper presents a new interdisciplinary methodology for the
    analysis of future conceptualisations in big messy media data.
    More specifically, it focuses on the depictions of post-Covid
    futures by RT during the pandemic, i.e. on data which are of
    interest not just from the perspective of academic research but
    also of policy engagement. The methodology has been
    developed to support the scaling up of fine-grained data-driven
    analysis of discourse utterances larger than individual lexical
    units which are centred around ‘will’ + the infinitive. It relies
    on the true integration of manual analytical and computational
    methods and tools in researching three modalities – textual,
    prosodic1, and gestural. The paper describes the process of
    building a computational infrastructure for the collection and
    processing of video data, which aims to empower the manual
    analysis. It also shows how manual analysis can motivate the
    development of computational tools. The paper presents
    individual computational tools to demonstrate how the
    combination of human and machine approaches to analysis can
    reveal new manifestations of cohesion between gesture and
    prosody. To illustrate the latter, the paper shows how the
    boundaries of prosodic units can work to help determine the
    boundaries of gestural units for future conceptualisations.
  • Uluşahin, O., Bosker, H. R., McQueen, J. M., & Meyer, A. S. (2023). No evidence for convergence to sub-phonemic F2 shifts in shadowing. In R. Skarnitzl, & J. Volín (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2023) (pp. 96-100). Prague: Guarant International.

    Abstract

    Over the course of a conversation, interlocutors sound more and more like each other in a process called convergence. However, the automaticity and grain size of convergence are not well established. This study therefore examined whether female native Dutch speakers converge to large yet sub-phonemic shifts in the F2 of the vowel /e/. Participants first performed a short reading task to establish baseline F2s for the vowel /e/, then shadowed 120 target words (alongside 360 fillers) which contained one instance of a manipulated vowel /e/ where the F2 had been shifted down to that of the vowel /ø/. Consistent exposure to large (sub-phonemic) downward shifts in F2 did not result in convergence. The results raise issues for theories which view convergence as a product of automatic integration between perception and production.
  • Vogel, C., Koutsombogera, M., Murat, A. C., Khosrobeigi, Z., & Ma, X. (2023). Gestural linguistic context vectors encode gesture meaning. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (Eds.), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527176.

    Abstract

    Linguistic context vectors are adapted for measuring the linguistic contexts that accompany gestures and comparable co-linguistic behaviours. Focusing on gestural semiotic types, it is demonstrated that gestural linguistic context vectors carry information associated with gesture. It is suggested that these may be used to approximate gesture meaning in a similar manner to the approximation of word meaning by context vectors.
  • Witteman, J., Karaseva, E., Schiller, N. O., & McQueen, J. M. (2023). What does successful L2 vowel acquisition depend on? A conceptual replication. In R. Skarnitzl, & J. Volín (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2023) (pp. 928-931). Prague: Guarant International.

    Abstract

    It has been suggested that individual variation in vowel compactness of the native language (L1) and the distance between L1 vowels and vowels in the second language (L2) predict successful L2 vowel acquisition. Moreover, general articulatory skills have been proposed to account for variation in vowel compactness. In the present work, we conceptually replicate a previous study to test these hypotheses with a large sample size, a new language pair and a
    new vowel pair. We find evidence that individual variation in L1 vowel compactness has opposing effects for two different vowels. We do not find evidence that individual variation in L1 compactness
    is explained by general articulatory skills. We conclude that the results found previously might be specific to sub-groups of L2 learners and/or specific sub-sets of vowel pairs.

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