Publications

Displaying 1 - 100 of 127
  • Anastasopoulos, A., Lekakou, M., Quer, J., Zimianiti, E., DeBenedetto, J., & Chiang, D. (2018). Part-of-speech tagging on an endangered language: a parallel Griko-Italian Resource. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2018) (pp. 2529-2539).

    Abstract

    Most work on part-of-speech (POS) tagging is focused on high resource languages, or examines low-resource and active learning settings through simulated studies. We evaluate POS tagging techniques on an actual endangered language, Griko. We present a resource that contains 114 narratives in Griko, along with sentence-level translations in Italian, and provides gold annotations for the test set. Based on a previously collected small corpus, we investigate several traditional methods, as well as methods that take advantage of monolingual data or project cross-lingual POS tags. We show that the combination of a semi-supervised method with cross-lingual transfer is more appropriate for this extremely challenging setting, with the best tagger achieving an accuracy of 72.9%. With an applied active learning scheme, which we use to collect sentence-level annotations over the test set, we achieve improvements of more than 21 percentage points
  • Arnhold, A., Vainio, M., Suni, A., & Järvikivi, J. (2010). Intonation of Finnish verbs. Speech Prosody 2010, 100054, 1-4. Retrieved from http://speechprosody2010.illinois.edu/papers/100054.pdf.

    Abstract

    A production experiment investigated the tonal shape of Finnish finite verbs in transitive sentences without narrow focus. Traditional descriptions of Finnish stating that non-focused finite verbs do not receive accents were only partly supported. Verbs were found to have a consistently smaller pitch range than words in other word classes, but their pitch contours were neither flat nor explainable by pure interpolation.
  • Auer, E., Wittenburg, P., Sloetjes, H., Schreer, O., Masneri, S., Schneider, D., & Tschöpel, S. (2010). Automatic annotation of media field recordings. In C. Sporleder, & K. Zervanou (Eds.), Proceedings of the ECAI 2010 Workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities (LaTeCH 2010) (pp. 31-34). Lisbon: University de Lisbon. Retrieved from http://ilk.uvt.nl/LaTeCH2010/.

    Abstract

    In the paper we describe a new attempt to come to automatic detectors processing real scene audio-video streams that can be used by researchers world-wide to speed up their annotation and analysis work. Typically these recordings are taken in field and experimental situations mostly with bad quality and only little corpora preventing to use standard stochastic pattern recognition techniques. Audio/video processing components are taken out of the expert lab and are integrated in easy-to-use interactive frameworks so that the researcher can easily start them with modified parameters and can check the usefulness of the created annotations. Finally a variety of detectors may have been used yielding a lattice of annotations. A flexible search engine allows finding combinations of patterns opening completely new analysis and theorization possibilities for the researchers who until were required to do all annotations manually and who did not have any help in pre-segmenting lengthy media recordings.
  • Auer, E., Russel, A., Sloetjes, H., Wittenburg, P., Schreer, O., Masnieri, S., Schneider, D., & Tschöpel, S. (2010). ELAN as flexible annotation framework for sound and image processing detectors. In N. Calzolari, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, J. Odjik, K. Choukri, S. Piperidis, M. Rosner, & D. Tapias (Eds.), Proceedings of the Seventh conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10) (pp. 890-893). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

    Abstract

    Annotation of digital recordings in humanities research still is, to a largeextend, a process that is performed manually. This paper describes the firstpattern recognition based software components developed in the AVATecH projectand their integration in the annotation tool ELAN. AVATecH (AdvancingVideo/Audio Technology in Humanities Research) is a project that involves twoMax Planck Institutes (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen,Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle) and two FraunhoferInstitutes (Fraunhofer-Institut für Intelligente Analyse- undInformationssysteme IAIS, Sankt Augustin, Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institute,Berlin) and that aims to develop and implement audio and video technology forsemi-automatic annotation of heterogeneous media collections as they occur inmultimedia based research. The highly diverse nature of the digital recordingsstored in the archives of both Max Planck Institutes, poses a huge challenge tomost of the existing pattern recognition solutions and is a motivation to makesuch technology available to researchers in the humanities.
  • Bardhan, N. P., Aslin, R., & Tanenhaus, M. (2010). Adults' self-directed learning of an artificial lexicon: The dynamics of neighborhood reorganization. In S. Ohlsson, & R. Catrambone (Eds.), Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 364-368). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
  • Bentz, C., Dediu, D., Verkerk, A., & Jäger, G. (2018). Language family trees reflect geography and demography beyond neutral drift. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, L. McCrohon, A. Ravignani, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG XII) (pp. 38-40). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.006.
  • Bergmann, C., Paulus, M., & Fikkert, J. (2010). A closer look at pronoun comprehension: Comparing different methods. In J. Costa, A. Castro, M. Lobo, & F. Pratas (Eds.), Language Acquisition and Development: Proceedings of GALA 2009 (pp. 53-61). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

    Abstract

    1. Introduction External input is necessary to acquire language. Consequently, the comprehension of various constituents of language, such as lexical items or syntactic and semantic structures should emerge at the same time as or even precede their production. However, in the case of pronouns this general assumption does not seem to hold. On the contrary, while children at the age of four use pronouns and reflexives appropriately during production (de Villiers, et al. 2006), a number of comprehension studies across different languages found chance performance in pronoun trials up to the age of seven, which co-occurs with a high level of accuracy in reflexive trials (for an overview see e.g. Conroy, et al. 2009; Elbourne 2005).
  • Bergmann, C., Gubian, M., & Boves, L. (2010). Modelling the effect of speaker familiarity and noise on infant word recognition. In Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association [Interspeech 2010] (pp. 2910-2913). ISCA.

    Abstract

    In the present paper we show that a general-purpose word learning model can simulate several important findings from recent experiments in language acquisition. Both the addition of background noise and varying the speaker have been found to influence infants’ performance during word recognition experiments. We were able to replicate this behaviour in our artificial word learning agent. We use the results to discuss both advantages and limitations of computational models of language acquisition.
  • Bottini, R., & Casasanto, D. (2010). Implicit spatial length modulates time estimates, but not vice versa. In S. Ohlsson, & R. Catrambone (Eds.), Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1348-1353). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Why do people accommodate to each other’s linguistic behavior? Studies of natural interactions (Giles, Taylor & Bourhis, 1973) suggest that speakers accommodate to achieve interactional goals, influencing what their interlocutor thinks or feels about them. But is this the only reason speakers accommodate? In real-world conversations, interactional motivations are ubiquitous, making it difficult to assess the extent to which they drive accommodation. Do speakers still accommodate even when interactional goals cannot be achieved, for instance, when their interlocutor cannot interpret their accommodation behavior? To find out, we asked participants to enter an immersive virtual reality (VR) environment and to converse with a virtual interlocutor. Participants accommodated to the speech rate of their virtual interlocutor even though he could not interpret their linguistic behavior, and thus accommodation could not possibly help them to achieve interactional goals. Results show that accommodation does not require explicit interactional goals, and suggest other social motivations for accommodation.
  • Brand, J., Monaghan, P., & Walker, P. (2018). Changing Signs: Testing How Sound-Symbolism Supports Early Word Learning. In C. Kalish, M. Rau, J. Zhu, & T. T. Rogers (Eds.), Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2018) (pp. 1398-1403). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Learning a language involves learning how to map specific forms onto their associated meanings. Such mappings can utilise arbitrariness and non-arbitrariness, yet, our understanding of how these two systems operate at different stages of vocabulary development is still not fully understood. The Sound-Symbolism Bootstrapping Hypothesis (SSBH) proposes that sound-symbolism is essential for word learning to commence, but empirical evidence of exactly how sound-symbolism influences language learning is still sparse. It may be the case that sound-symbolism supports acquisition of categories of meaning, or that it enables acquisition of individualized word meanings. In two Experiments where participants learned form-meaning mappings from either sound-symbolic or arbitrary languages, we demonstrate the changing roles of sound-symbolism and arbitrariness for different vocabulary sizes, showing that sound-symbolism provides an advantage for learning of broad categories, which may then transfer to support learning individual words, whereas an arbitrary language impedes acquisition of categories of sound to meaning.
  • Broeder, D., Kemps-Snijders, M., Van Uytvanck, D., Windhouwer, M., Withers, P., Wittenburg, P., & Zinn, C. (2010). A data category registry- and component-based metadata framework. In N. Calzolari, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, J. Odjik, K. Choukri, S. Piperidis, M. Rosner, & D. Tapias (Eds.), Proceedings of the Seventh conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10) (pp. 43-47). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

    Abstract

    We describe our computer-supported framework to overcome the rule of metadata schism. It combines the use of controlled vocabularies, managed by a data category registry, with a component-based approach, where the categories can be combined to yield complex metadata structures. A metadata scheme devised in this way will thus be grounded in its use of categories. Schema designers will profit from existing prefabricated larger building blocks, motivating re-use at a larger scale. The common base of any two metadata schemes within this framework will solve, at least to a good extent, the semantic interoperability problem, and consequently, further promote systematic use of metadata for existing resources and tools to be shared.
  • Broersma, M. (2010). Dutch listener's perception of Korean fortis, lenis, and aspirated stops: First exposure. In K. Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, M. Wrembel, & M. Kul (Eds.), Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on the Acquisition of Second Language Speech, New Sounds 2010, Poznań, Poland, 1-3 May 2010 (pp. 49-54).
  • Broersma, M. (2010). Korean lenis, fortis, and aspirated stops: Effect of place of articulation on acoustic realization. In Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2010), Makuhari, Japan. (pp. 941-944).

    Abstract

    Unlike most of the world's languages, Korean distinguishes three types of voiceless stops, namely lenis, fortis, and aspirated stops. All occur at three places of articulation. In previous work, acoustic measurements are mostly collapsed over the three places of articulation. This study therefore provides acoustic measurements of Korean lenis, fortis, and aspirated stops at all three places of articulation separately. Clear differences are found among the acoustic characteristics of the stops at the different places of articulation
  • Brookshire, G., Casasanto, D., & Ivry, R. (2010). Modulation of motor-meaning congruity effects for valenced words. In S. Ohlsson, & R. Catrambone (Eds.), Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2010) (pp. 1940-1945). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    We investigated the extent to which emotionally valenced words automatically cue spatio-motor representations. Participants made speeded button presses, moving their hand upward or downward while viewing words with positive or negative valence. Only the color of the words was relevant to the response; on target trials, there was no requirement to read the words or process their meaning. In Experiment 1, upward responses were faster for positive words, and downward for negative words. This effect was extinguished, however, when words were repeated. In Experiment 2, participants performed the same primary task with the addition of distractor trials. Distractors either oriented attention toward the words’ meaning or toward their color. Congruity effects were increased with orientation to meaning, but eliminated with orientation to color. When people read words with emotional valence, vertical spatio-motor representations are activated highly automatically, but this automaticity is modulated by repetition and by attentional orientation to the words’ form or meaning.
  • Brouwer, H., Fitz, H., & Hoeks, J. C. (2010). Modeling the noun phrase versus sentence coordination ambiguity in Dutch: Evidence from Surprisal Theory. In Proceedings of the 2010 Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, ACL 2010 (pp. 72-80). Association for Computational Linguistics.

    Abstract

    This paper investigates whether surprisal theory can account for differential processing difficulty in the NP-/S-coordination ambiguity in Dutch. Surprisal is estimated using a Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar (PCFG), which is induced from an automatically annotated corpus. We find that our lexicalized surprisal model can account for the reading time data from a classic experiment on this ambiguity by Frazier (1987). We argue that syntactic and lexical probabilities, as specified in a PCFG, are sufficient to account for what is commonly referred to as an NP-coordination preference.
  • Byun, K.-S., De Vos, C., Roberts, S. G., & Levinson, S. C. (2018). Interactive sequences modulate the selection of expressive forms in cross-signing. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, L. McCrohon, A. Ravignani, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG XII) (pp. 67-69). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.012.
  • Casasanto, D., & Bottini, R. (2010). Can mirror-reading reverse the flow of time? In S. Ohlsson, & R. Catrambone (Eds.), Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2010) (pp. 1342-1347). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Across cultures, people conceptualize time as if it flows along a horizontal timeline, but the direction of this implicit timeline is culture-specific: in cultures with left-to-right orthography (e.g., English-speaking cultures) time appears to flow rightward, but in cultures with right-to-left orthography (e.g., Arabic-speaking cultures) time flows leftward. Can orthography influence implicit time representations independent of other cultural and linguistic factors? Native Dutch speakers performed a space-time congruity task with the instructions and stimuli written in either standard Dutch or mirror-reversed Dutch. Participants in the Standard Dutch condition were fastest to judge past-oriented phrases by pressing the left button and future-oriented phrases by pressing the right button. Participants in the Mirror-Reversed Dutch condition showed the opposite pattern of reaction times, consistent with results found previously in native Arabic and Hebrew speakers. These results demonstrate a causal role for writing direction in shaping implicit mental representations of time.
  • Casasanto, D., & Bottini, R. (2010). Mirror-reading can reverse the flow of time [Abstract]. In Proceedings of the 16th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing [AMLaP 2010] (pp. 57). York: University of York.
  • Casasanto, D., & Jasmin, K. (2010). Good and bad in the hands of politicians: Spontaneous gestures during positive and negative speech [Abstract]. In Proceedings of the 16th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing [AMLaP 2010] (pp. 137). York: University of York.
  • Chen, A., & Destruel, E. (2010). Intonational encoding of focus in Toulousian French. Speech Prosody 2010, 100233, 1-4. Retrieved from http://speechprosody2010.illinois.edu/papers/100233.pdf.

    Abstract

    Previous studies on focus marking in French have shown that post-focus deaccentuation, phrasing and phonetic cues like peak height and duration are employed to encode narrow focus but tonal patterns appear to be irrelevant. These studies either examined Standard French or did not control for the regional varieties spoken by the speakers. The present study investigated the use of all these cues in expressing narrow focus in naturally spoken declarative sentences in Toulousian French. It was found that similar to Standard French, Toulousian French uses post-focus deaccentuation and phrasing to mark focus. Different from Standard French, Toulousian French does not use the phonetic cues but use tonal patterns to encode focus. Tonal patterns ending with H\% occur more frequently in the VPs when the subject is in focus but tonal patterns ending with L\% occur more frequently in the VPs when the object is in focus. Our study thus provides a first insight into the similarities and differences in focus marking between Toulousian French and Standard French.
  • Cristia, A., Ganesh, S., Casillas, M., & Ganapathy, S. (2018). Talker diarization in the wild: The case of child-centered daylong audio-recordings. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2018 (pp. 2583-2587). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2018-2078.

    Abstract

    Speaker diarization (answering 'who spoke when') is a widely researched subject within speech technology. Numerous experiments have been run on datasets built from broadcast news, meeting data, and call centers—the task sometimes appears close to being solved. Much less work has begun to tackle the hardest diarization task of all: spontaneous conversations in real-world settings. Such diarization would be particularly useful for studies of language acquisition, where researchers investigate the speech children produce and hear in their daily lives. In this paper, we study audio gathered with a recorder worn by small children as they went about their normal days. As a result, each child was exposed to different acoustic environments with a multitude of background noises and a varying number of adults and peers. The inconsistency of speech and noise within and across samples poses a challenging task for speaker diarization systems, which we tackled via retraining and data augmentation techniques. We further studied sources of structured variation across raw audio files, including the impact of speaker type distribution, proportion of speech from children, and child age on diarization performance. We discuss the extent to which these findings might generalize to other samples of speech in the wild.
  • Ip, M. H. K., & Cutler, A. (2018). Asymmetric efficiency of juncture perception in L1 and L2. In K. Klessa, J. Bachan, A. Wagner, M. Karpiński, & D. Śledziński (Eds.), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2018 (pp. 289-296). Baixas, France: ISCA. doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2018-59.

    Abstract

    In two experiments, Mandarin listeners resolved potential syntactic ambiguities in spoken utterances in (a) their native language (L1) and (b) English which they had learned as a second language (L2). A new disambiguation task was used, requiring speeded responses to select the correct meaning for structurally ambiguous sentences. Importantly, the ambiguities used in the study are identical in Mandarin and in English, and production data show that prosodic disambiguation of this type of ambiguity is also realised very similarly in the two languages. The perceptual results here showed however that listeners’ response patterns differed for L1 and L2, although there was a significant increase in similarity between the two response patterns with increasing exposure to the L2. Thus identical ambiguity and comparable disambiguation patterns in L1 and L2 do not lead to immediate application of the appropriate L1 listening strategy to L2; instead, it appears that such a strategy may have to be learned anew for the L2.
  • Ip, M. H. K., & Cutler, A. (2018). Cue equivalence in prosodic entrainment for focus detection. In J. Epps, J. Wolfe, J. Smith, & C. Jones (Eds.), Proceedings of the 17th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (pp. 153-156).

    Abstract

    Using a phoneme detection task, the present series of
    experiments examines whether listeners can entrain to
    different combinations of prosodic cues to predict where focus
    will fall in an utterance. The stimuli were recorded by four
    female native speakers of Australian English who happened to
    have used different prosodic cues to produce sentences with
    prosodic focus: a combination of duration cues, mean and
    maximum F0, F0 range, and longer pre-target interval before
    the focused word onset, only mean F0 cues, only pre-target
    interval, and only duration cues. Results revealed that listeners
    can entrain in almost every condition except for where
    duration was the only reliable cue. Our findings suggest that
    listeners are flexible in the cues they use for focus processing.
  • Cutler, A., El Aissati, A., Hanulikova, A., & McQueen, J. M. (2010). Effects on speech parsing of vowelless words in the phonology. In Abstracts of Laboratory Phonology 12 (pp. 115-116).
  • Cutler, A., Burchfield, L. A., & Antoniou, M. (2018). Factors affecting talker adaptation in a second language. In J. Epps, J. Wolfe, J. Smith, & C. Jones (Eds.), Proceedings of the 17th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (pp. 33-36).

    Abstract

    Listeners adapt rapidly to previously unheard talkers by
    adjusting phoneme categories using lexical knowledge, in a
    process termed lexically-guided perceptual learning. Although
    this is firmly established for listening in the native language
    (L1), perceptual flexibility in second languages (L2) is as yet
    less well understood. We report two experiments examining L1
    and L2 perceptual learning, the first in Mandarin-English late
    bilinguals, the second in Australian learners of Mandarin. Both
    studies showed stronger learning in L1; in L2, however,
    learning appeared for the English-L1 group but not for the
    Mandarin-L1 group. Phonological mapping differences from
    the L1 to the L2 are suggested as the reason for this result.
  • Cutler, A., Mitterer, H., Brouwer, S., & Tuinman, A. (2010). Phonological competition in casual speech. In Proceedings of DiSS-LPSS Joint Workshop 2010 (pp. 43-46).
  • Cutler, A., & Shanley, J. (2010). Validation of a training method for L2 continuous-speech segmentation. In Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2010), Makuhari, Japan (pp. 1844-1847).

    Abstract

    Recognising continuous speech in a second language is often unexpectedly difficult, as the operation of segmenting speech is so attuned to native-language structure. We report the initial steps in development of a novel training method for second-language listening, focusing on speech segmentation and employing a task designed for studying this: word-spotting. Listeners detect real words in sequences consisting of a word plus a minimal context. The present validation study shows that learners from varying non-English backgrounds successfully perform a version of this task in English, and display appropriate sensitivity to structural factors that also affect segmentation by native English listeners.
  • Delgado, T., Ravignani, A., Verhoef, T., Thompson, B., Grossi, T., & Kirby, S. (2018). Cultural transmission of melodic and rhythmic universals: Four experiments and a model. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, L. McCrohon, A. Ravignani, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG XII) (pp. 89-91). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.019.
  • Dolscheid, S., Shayan, S., Ozturk, O., Majid, A., & Casasanto, D. (2010). Language shapes mental representations of musical pitch: Implications for metaphorical language processing [Abstract]. In Proceedings of the 16th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing [AMLaP 2010] (pp. 137). York: University of York.

    Abstract

    Speakers often use spatial metaphors to talk about musical pitch (e.g., a low note, a high soprano). Previous experiments suggest that English speakers also think about pitches as high or low in space, even when theyʼre not using language or musical notation (Casasanto, 2010). Do metaphors in language merely reflect pre-existing associations between space and pitch, or might language also shape these non-linguistic metaphorical mappings? To investigate the role of language in pitch tepresentation, we conducted a pair of non-linguistic spacepitch interference experiments in speakers of two languages that use different spatial metaphors. Dutch speakers usually describe pitches as ʻhighʼ (hoog) and ʻlowʼ (laag). Farsi speakers, however, often describe high-frequency pitches as ʻthinʼ (naazok) and low-frequency pitches as ʻthickʼ (koloft). Do Dutch and Farsi speakers mentally represent pitch differently? To find out, we asked participants to reproduce musical pitches that they heard in the presence of irrelevant spatial information (i.e., lines that varied either in height or in thickness). For the Height Interference experiment, horizontal lines bisected a vertical reference line at one of nine different locations. For the Thickness Interference experiment, a vertical line appeared in the middle of the screen in one of nine thicknesses. In each experiment, the nine different lines were crossed with nine different pitches ranging from C4 to G#4 in semitone increments, to produce 81 distinct trials. If Dutch and Farsi speakers mentally represent pitch the way they talk about it, using different kinds of spatial representations, they should show contrasting patterns of cross-dimensional interference: Dutch speakersʼ pitch estimates should be more strongly affected by irrelevant height information, and Farsi speakersʼ by irrelevant thickness information. As predicted, Dutch speakersʼ pitch estimates were significantly modulated by spatial height but not by thickness. Conversely, Farsi speakersʼ pitch estimates were modulated by spatial thickness but not by height (2x2 ANOVA on normalized slopes of the effect of space on pitch: F(1,71)=17,15 p<.001). To determine whether language plays a causal role in shaping pitch representations, we conducted a training experiment. Native Dutch speakers learned to use Farsi-like metaphors, describing pitch relationships in terms of thickness (e.g., a cello sounds ʻthickerʼ than a flute). After training, Dutch speakers showed a significant effect of Thickness interference in the non-linguistic pitch reproduction task, similar to native Farsi speakers: on average, pitches accompanied by thicker lines were reproduced as lower in pitch (effect of thickness on pitch: r=-.22, p=.002). By conducting psychophysical tasks, we tested the ʻWhorfianʼ question without using words. Yet, results also inform theories of metaphorical language processing. According to psycholinguistic theories (e.g., Bowdle & Gentner, 2005), highly conventional metaphors are processed without any active mapping from the source to the target domain (e.g., from space to pitch). Our data, however, suggest that when people use verbal metaphors they activate a corresponding non-linguistic mapping from either height or thickness to pitch, strengthening this association at the expense of competing associations. As a result, people who use different metaphors in their native languages form correspondingly different representations of musical pitch. Casasanto, D. (2010). Space for Thinking. In Language, Cognition and Space: State of the art and new directions. V. Evans & P. Chilton (Eds.), 453-478, London: Equinox Publishing. Bowdle, B. & Gentner, D. (2005). The career of metaphor. Psychological Review, 112, 193-216.
  • Duarte, R., Uhlmann, M., Van den Broek, D., Fitz, H., Petersson, K. M., & Morrison, A. (2018). Encoding symbolic sequences with spiking neural reservoirs. In Proceedings of the 2018 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN). doi:10.1109/IJCNN.2018.8489114.

    Abstract

    Biologically inspired spiking networks are an important tool to study the nature of computation and cognition in neural systems. In this work, we investigate the representational capacity of spiking networks engaged in an identity mapping task. We compare two schemes for encoding symbolic input, one in which input is injected as a direct current and one where input is delivered as a spatio-temporal spike pattern. We test the ability of networks to discriminate their input as a function of the number of distinct input symbols. We also compare performance using either membrane potentials or filtered spike trains as state variable. Furthermore, we investigate how the circuit behavior depends on the balance between excitation and inhibition, and the degree of synchrony and regularity in its internal dynamics. Finally, we compare different linear methods of decoding population activity onto desired target labels. Overall, our results suggest that even this simple mapping task is strongly influenced by design choices on input encoding, state-variables, circuit characteristics and decoding methods, and these factors can interact in complex ways. This work highlights the importance of constraining computational network models of behavior by available neurobiological evidence.
  • Eisner, F., Weber, A., & Melinger, A. (2010). Generalization of learning in pre-lexical adjustments to word-final devoicing [Abstract]. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 128, 2323.

    Abstract

    Pre-lexical representations of speech sounds have been to shown to change dynamically through a mechanism of lexically driven learning. [Norris et al. (2003).] Here we investigated whether this type of learning occurs in native British English (BE) listeners for a word-final stop contrast which is commonly de-voiced in Dutch-accented English. Specifically, this study asked whether the change in pre-lexical representation also encodes information about the position of the critical sound within a word. After exposure to a native Dutch speaker's productions of de-voiced stops in word-final position (but not in any other positions), BE listeners showed evidence of perceptual learning in a subsequent cross-modal priming task, where auditory primes with voiceless final stops (e.g., [si:t], “seat”) facilitated recognition of visual targets with voiced final stops (e.g., “seed”). This learning generalized to test pairs where the critical contrast was in word-initial position, e.g., auditory primes such as [taun] (“town”), facilitated recognition of visual targets like “down”. Control listeners, who had not heard any stops by the speaker during exposure, showed no learning effects. The results suggest that under these exposure conditions, word position is not encoded in the pre-lexical adjustment to the accented phoneme contras
  • Ergin, R., Senghas, A., Jackendoff, R., & Gleitman, L. (2018). Structural cues for symmetry, asymmetry, and non-symmetry in Central Taurus Sign Language. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, L. McCrohon, A. Ravignani, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG XII) (pp. 104-106). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.025.
  • Fitz, H. (2010). Statistical learning of complex questions. In S. Ohlsson, & R. Catrambone (Eds.), Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2692-2698). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    The problem of auxiliary fronting in complex polar questions occupies a prominent position within the nature versus nurture controversy in language acquisition. We employ a model of statistical learning which uses sequential and semantic information to produce utterances from a bag of words. This linear learner is capable of generating grammatical questions without exposure to these structures in its training environment. We also demonstrate that the model performs superior to n-gram learners on this task. Implications for nativist theories of language acquisition are discussed.
  • Furman, R., Ozyurek, A., & Küntay, A. C. (2010). Early language-specificity in Turkish children's caused motion event expressions in speech and gesture. In K. Franich, K. M. Iserman, & L. L. Keil (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Boston University Conference on Language Development. Volume 1 (pp. 126-137). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Galke, L., Gerstenkorn, G., & Scherp, A. (2018). A case study of closed-domain response suggestion with limited training data. In M. Elloumi, M. Granitzer, A. Hameurlain, C. Seifert, B. Stein, A. Min Tjoa, & R. Wagner (Eds.), Database and Expert Systems Applications: DEXA 2018 International Workshops, BDMICS, BIOKDD, and TIR, Regensburg, Germany, September 3–6, 2018, Proceedings (pp. 218-229). Cham, Switzerland: Springer.

    Abstract

    We analyze the problem of response suggestion in a closed domain along a real-world scenario of a digital library. We present a text-processing pipeline to generate question-answer pairs from chat transcripts. On this limited amount of training data, we compare retrieval-based, conditioned-generation, and dedicated representation learning approaches for response suggestion. Our results show that retrieval-based methods that strive to find similar, known contexts are preferable over parametric approaches from the conditioned-generation family, when the training data is limited. We, however, identify a specific representation learning approach that is competitive to the retrieval-based approaches despite the training data limitation.
  • Galke, L., Mai, F., & Vagliano, I. (2018). Multi-modal adversarial autoencoders for recommendations of citations and subject labels. In T. Mitrovic, J. Zhang, L. Chen, & D. Chin (Eds.), UMAP '18: Proceedings of the 26th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (pp. 197-205). New York: ACM. doi:10.1145/3209219.3209236.

    Abstract

    We present multi-modal adversarial autoencoders for recommendation and evaluate them on two different tasks: citation recommendation and subject label recommendation. We analyze the effects of adversarial regularization, sparsity, and different input modalities. By conducting 408 experiments, we show that adversarial regularization consistently improves the performance of autoencoders for recommendation. We demonstrate, however, that the two tasks differ in the semantics of item co-occurrence in the sense that item co-occurrence resembles relatedness in case of citations, yet implies diversity in case of subject labels. Our results reveal that supplying the partial item set as input is only helpful, when item co-occurrence resembles relatedness. When facing a new recommendation task it is therefore crucial to consider the semantics of item co-occurrence for the choice of an appropriate model.
  • Goudbeek, M., & Broersma, M. (2010). The Demo/Kemo corpus: A principled approach to the study of cross-cultural differences in the vocal expression and perception of emotion. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2010) (pp. 2211-2215). Paris: ELRA.

    Abstract

    This paper presents the Demo / Kemo corpus of Dutch and Korean emotional speech. The corpus has been specifically developed for the purpose of cross-linguistic comparison, and is more balanced than any similar corpus available so far: a) it contains expressions by both Dutch and Korean actors as well as judgments by both Dutch and Korean listeners; b) the same elicitation technique and recording procedure was used for recordings of both languages; c) the same nonsense sentence, which was constructed to be permissible in both languages, was used for recordings of both languages; and d) the emotions present in the corpus are balanced in terms of valence, arousal, and dominance. The corpus contains a comparatively large number of emotions (eight) uttered by a large number of speakers (eight Dutch and eight Korean). The counterbalanced nature of the corpus will enable a stricter investigation of language-specific versus universal aspects of emotional expression than was possible so far. Furthermore, given the carefully controlled phonetic content of the expressions, it allows for analysis of the role of specific phonetic features in emotional expression in Dutch and Korean.
  • Gubian, M., Bergmann, C., & Boves, L. (2010). Investigating word learning processes in an artificial agent. In Proceedings of the IXth IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL). Ann Arbor, MI, 18-21 Aug. 2010 (pp. 178 -184). IEEE.

    Abstract

    Researchers in human language processing and acquisition are making an increasing use of computational models. Computer simulations provide a valuable platform to reproduce hypothesised learning mechanisms that are otherwise very difficult, if not impossible, to verify on human subjects. However, computational models come with problems and risks. It is difficult to (automatically) extract essential information about the developing internal representations from a set of simulation runs, and often researchers limit themselves to analysing learning curves based on empirical recognition accuracy through time. The associated risk is to erroneously deem a specific learning behaviour as generalisable to human learners, while it could also be a mere consequence (artifact) of the implementation of the artificial learner or of the input coding scheme. In this paper a set of simulation runs taken from the ACORNS project is investigated. First a look `inside the box' of the learner is provided by employing novel quantitative methods for analysing changing structures in large data sets. Then, the obtained findings are discussed in the perspective of their ecological validity in the field of child language acquisition.
  • Gullberg, M., & Indefrey, P. (Eds.). (2010). The earliest stages of language learning [Special Issue]. Language Learning, 60(Supplement s2).
  • Hanique, I., Schuppler, B., & Ernestus, M. (2010). Morphological and predictability effects on schwa reduction: The case of Dutch word-initial syllables. In Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2010), Makuhari, Japan (pp. 933-936).

    Abstract

    This corpus-based study shows that the presence and duration of schwa in Dutch word-initial syllables are affected by a word’s predictability and its morphological structure. Schwa is less reduced in words that are more predictable given the following word. In addition, schwa may be longer if the syllable forms a prefix, and in prefixes the duration of schwa is positively correlated with the frequency of the word relative to its stem. Our results suggest that the conditions which favor reduced realizations are more complex than one would expect on the basis of the current literature.
  • Hanulikova, A., & Weber, A. (2010). Production of English interdental fricatives by Dutch, German, and English speakers. In K. Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, M. Wrembel, & M. Kul (Eds.), Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on the Acquisition of Second Language Speech, New Sounds 2010, Poznań, Poland, 1-3 May 2010 (pp. 173-178). Poznan: Adam Mickiewicz University.

    Abstract

    Non-native (L2) speakers of English often experience difficulties in producing English interdental fricatives (e.g. the voiceless [θ]), and this leads to frequent substitutions of these fricatives (e.g. with [t], [s], and [f]). Differences in the choice of [θ]-substitutions across L2 speakers with different native (L1) language backgrounds have been extensively explored. However, even within one foreign accent, more than one substitution choice occurs, but this has been less systematically studied. Furthermore, little is known about whether the substitutions of voiceless [θ] are phonetically clear instances of [t], [s], and [f], as they are often labelled. In this study, we attempted a phonetic approach to examine language-specific preferences for [θ]-substitutions by carrying out acoustic measurements of L1 and L2 realizations of these sounds. To this end, we collected a corpus of spoken English with L1 speakers (UK-English), and Dutch and German L2 speakers. We show a) that the distribution of differential substitutions using identical materials differs between Dutch and German L2 speakers, b) that [t,s,f]-substitutes differ acoustically from intended [t,s,f], and c) that L2 productions of [θ] are acoustically comparable to L1 productions.
  • Hopman, E., Thompson, B., Austerweil, J., & Lupyan, G. (2018). Predictors of L2 word learning accuracy: A big data investigation. In C. Kalish, M. Rau, J. Zhu, & T. T. Rogers (Eds.), Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2018) (pp. 513-518). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    What makes some words harder to learn than others in a second language? Although some robust factors have been identified based on small scale experimental studies, many relevant factors are difficult to study in such experiments due to the amount of data necessary to test them. Here, we investigate what factors affect the ease of learning of a word in a second language using a large data set of users learning English as a second language through the Duolingo mobile app. In a regression analysis, we test and confirm the well-studied effect of cognate status on word learning accuracy. Furthermore, we find significant effects for both cross-linguistic semantic alignment and English semantic density, two novel predictors derived from large scale distributional models of lexical semantics. Finally, we provide data on several other psycholinguistically plausible word level predictors. We conclude with a discussion of the limits, benefits and future research potential of using big data for investigating second language learning.
  • Huettig, F., Kolinsky, R., & Lachmann, T. (Eds.). (2018). The effects of literacy on cognition and brain functioning [Special Issue]. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 33(3).
  • Isbilen, E., Frost, R. L. A., Monaghan, P., & Christiansen, M. (2018). Bridging artificial and natural language learning: Comparing processing- and reflection-based measures of learning. In C. Kalish, M. Rau, J. Zhu, & T. T. Rogers (Eds.), Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2018) (pp. 1856-1861). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    A common assumption in the cognitive sciences is that artificial and natural language learning rely on shared mechanisms. However, attempts to bridge the two have yielded ambiguous results. We suggest that an empirical disconnect between the computations employed during learning and the methods employed at test may explain these mixed results. Further, we propose statistically-based chunking as a potential computational link between artificial and natural language learning. We compare the acquisition of non-adjacent dependencies to that of natural language structure using two types of tasks: reflection-based 2AFC measures, and processing-based recall measures, the latter being more computationally analogous to the processes used during language acquisition. Our results demonstrate that task-type significantly influences the correlations observed between artificial and natural language acquisition, with reflection-based and processing-based measures correlating within – but not across – task-type. These findings have fundamental implications for artificial-to-natural language comparisons, both methodologically and theoretically.
  • Janssen, R., Moisik, S. R., & Dediu, D. (2018). Agent model reveals the influence of vocal tract anatomy on speech during ontogeny and glossogeny. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, L. McCrohon, A. Ravignani, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG XII) (pp. 171-174). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.042.
  • Jasmin, K., & Casasanto, D. (2010). Stereotyping: How the QWERTY keyboard shapes the mental lexicon [Abstract]. In Proceedings of the 16th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing [AMLaP 2010] (pp. 159). York: University of York.
  • Jesse, A., Reinisch, E., & Nygaard, L. C. (2010). Learning of adjectival word meaning through tone of voice [Abstract]. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 128, 2475.

    Abstract

    Speakers express word meaning through systematic but non-canonical acoustic variation of tone of voice (ToV), i.e., variation of speaking rate, pitch, vocal effort, or loudness. Words are, for example, pronounced at a higher pitch when referring to small than to big referents. In the present study, we examined whether listeners can use ToV to learn the meaning of novel adjectives (e.g., “blicket”). During training, participants heard sentences such as “Can you find the blicket one?” spoken with ToV representing hot-cold, strong-weak, and big-small. Participants’ eye movements to two simultaneously shown objects with properties representing the relevant two endpoints (e.g., an elephant and an ant for big-small) were monitored. Assignment of novel adjectives to endpoints was counterbalanced across participants. During test, participants heard the sentences spoken with a neutral ToV, while seeing old or novel picture pairs varying along the same dimensions (e.g., a truck and a car for big-small). Participants had to click on the adjective’s referent. As evident from eye movements, participants did not infer the intended meaning during first exposure, but learned the meaning with the help of ToV during training. At test listeners applied this knowledge to old and novel items even in the absence of informative ToV.
  • Junge, C., Hagoort, P., Kooijman, V., & Cutler, A. (2010). Brain potentials for word segmentation at seven months predict later language development. In K. Franich, K. M. Iserman, & L. L. Keil (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Volume 1 (pp. 209-220). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Junge, C., Cutler, A., & Hagoort, P. (2010). Ability to segment words from speech as a precursor of later language development: Insights from electrophysiological responses in the infant brain. In M. Burgess, J. Davey, C. Don, & T. McMinn (Eds.), Proceedings of 20th International Congress on Acoustics, ICA 2010. Incorporating Proceedings of the 2010 annual conference of the Australian Acoustical Society (pp. 3727-3732). Australian Acoustical Society, NSW Division.
  • Kanero, J., Franko, I., Oranç, C., Uluşahin, O., Koskulu, S., Adigüzel, Z., Küntay, A. C., & Göksun, T. (2018). Who can benefit from robots? Effects of individual differences in robot-assisted language learning. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL-EpiRob) (pp. 212-217). Piscataway, NJ, USA: IEEE.

    Abstract

    It has been suggested that some individuals may benefit more from social robots than do others. Using second
    language (L2) as an example, the present study examined how individual differences in attitudes toward robots and personality
    traits may be related to learning outcomes. Preliminary results with 24 Turkish-speaking adults suggest that negative attitudes
    toward robots, more specifically thoughts and anxiety about the negative social impact that robots may have on the society,
    predicted how well adults learned L2 words from a social robot. The possible implications of the findings as well as future directions are also discussed
  • Kemps-Snijders, M., Koller, T., Sloetjes, H., & Verweij, H. (2010). LAT bridge: Bridging tools for annotation and exploration of rich linguistic data. In N. Calzolari, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, J. Odjik, K. Choukri, S. Piperidis, M. Rosner, & D. Tapias (Eds.), Proceedings of the Seventh conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10) (pp. 2648-2651). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

    Abstract

    We present a software module, the LAT Bridge, which enables bidirectionalcommunication between the annotation and exploration tools developed at the MaxPlanck Institute for Psycholinguistics as part of our Language ArchivingTechnology (LAT) tool suite. These existing annotation and exploration toolsenable the annotation, enrichment, exploration and archive management oflinguistic resources. The user community has expressed the desire to usedifferent combinations of LAT tools in conjunction with each other. The LATBridge is designed to cater for a number of basic data interaction scenariosbetween the LAT annotation and exploration tools. These interaction scenarios(e.g. bootstrapping a wordlist, searching for annotation examples or lexicalentries) have been identified in collaboration with researchers at ourinstitute.We had to take into account that the LAT tools for annotation and explorationrepresent a heterogeneous application scenario with desktop-installed andweb-based tools. Additionally, the LAT Bridge has to work in situations wherethe Internet is not available or only in an unreliable manner (i.e. with a slowconnection or with frequent interruptions). As a result, the LAT Bridge’sarchitecture supports both online and offline communication between the LATannotation and exploration tools.
  • Khetarpal, N., Majid, A., Malt, B. C., Sloman, S., & Regier, T. (2010). Similarity judgments reflect both language and cross-language tendencies: Evidence from two semantic domains. In S. Ohlsson, & R. Catrambone (Eds.), Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 358-363). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Many theories hold that semantic variation in the world’s languages can be explained in terms of a universal conceptual space that is partitioned differently by different languages. Recent work has supported this view in the semantic domain of containers (Malt et al., 1999), and assumed it in the domain of spatial relations (Khetarpal et al., 2009), based in both cases on similarity judgments derived from pile-sorting of stimuli. Here, we reanalyze data from these two studies and find a more complex picture than these earlier studies suggested. In both cases we find that sorting is similar across speakers of different languages (in line with the earlier studies), but nonetheless reflects the sorter’s native language (in contrast with the earlier studies). We conclude that there are cross-culturally shared conceptual tendencies that can be revealed by pile-sorting, but that these tendencies may be modulated to some extent by language. We discuss the implications of these findings for accounts of semantic variation.
  • Kita, S., Ozyurek, A., Allen, S., & Ishizuka, T. (2010). Early links between iconic gestures and sound symbolic words: Evidence for multimodal protolanguage. In A. D. Smith, M. Schouwstra, B. de Boer, & K. Smith (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th International conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG 8) (pp. 429-430). Singapore: World Scientific.
  • Klein, W., & Winkler, S. (Eds.). (2010). Ambiguität [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 40(158).
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (1976). Psycholinguistik [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (23/24).
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (1975). Sprache ausländischer Arbeiter [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (18).
  • Kung, C., Chwilla, D. J., Gussenhoven, C., Bögels, S., & Schriefers, H. (2010). What did you say just now, bitterness or wife? An ERP study on the interaction between tone, intonation and context in Cantonese Chinese. In Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2010 (pp. 1-4).

    Abstract

    Previous studies on Cantonese Chinese showed that rising
    question intonation contours on low-toned words lead to
    frequent misperceptions of the tones. Here we explored the
    processing consequences of this interaction between tone and
    intonation by comparing the processing and identification of
    monosyllabic critical words at the end of questions and
    statements, using a tone identification task, and ERPs as an
    online measure of speech comprehension. Experiment 1
    yielded higher error rates for the identification of low tones at
    the end of questions and a larger N400-P600 pattern, reflecting
    processing difficulty and reanalysis, compared to other
    conditions. In Experiment 2, we investigated the effect of
    immediate lexical context on the tone by intonation interaction.
    Increasing contextual constraints led to a reduction in errors
    and the disappearance of the P600 effect. These results
    indicate that there is an immediate interaction between tone,
    intonation, and context in online speech comprehension. The
    difference in performance and activation patterns between the
    two experiments highlights the significance of context in
    understanding a tone language, like Cantonese-Chinese.
  • Lai, J., & Poletiek, F. H. (2010). The impact of starting small on the learnability of recursion. In S. Ohlsson, & R. Catrambone (Eds.), Proceedings of the 32rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2010) (pp. 1387-1392). Austin, TX, USA: Cognitive Science Society.
  • Lattenkamp, E. Z., Vernes, S. C., & Wiegrebe, L. (2018). Mammalian models for the study of vocal learning: A new paradigm in bats. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, L. McCrohon, A. Ravignani, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG XII) (pp. 235-237). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.056.
  • Lauscher, A., Eckert, K., Galke, L., Scherp, A., Rizvi, S. T. R., Ahmed, S., Dengel, A., Zumstein, P., & Klein, A. (2018). Linked open citation database: Enabling libraries to contribute to an open and interconnected citation graph. In J. Chen, M. A. Gonçalves, J. M. Allen, E. A. Fox, M.-Y. Kan, & V. Petras (Eds.), JCDL '18: Proceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE on Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (pp. 109-118). New York: ACM. doi:10.1145/3197026.3197050.

    Abstract

    Citations play a crucial role in the scientific discourse, in information retrieval, and in bibliometrics. Many initiatives are currently promoting the idea of having free and open citation data. Creation of citation data, however, is not part of the cataloging workflow in libraries nowadays.
    In this paper, we present our project Linked Open Citation Database, in which we design distributed processes and a system infrastructure based on linked data technology. The goal is to show that efficiently cataloging citations in libraries using a semi-automatic approach is possible. We specifically describe the current state of the workflow and its implementation. We show that we could significantly improve the automatic reference extraction that is crucial for the subsequent data curation. We further give insights on the curation and linking process and provide evaluation results that not only direct the further development of the project, but also allow us to discuss its overall feasibility.
  • Lecumberri, M. L. G., Cooke, M., & Cutler, A. (Eds.). (2010). Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions [Special Issue]. Speech Communication, 52(11/12).
  • Lefever, E., Hendrickx, I., Croijmans, I., Van den Bosch, A., & Majid, A. (2018). Discovering the language of wine reviews: A text mining account. In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, C. Cieri, T. Declerck, S. Goggi, K. Hasida, H. Isahara, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, H. Mazo, A. Moreno, J. Odijk, S. Piperidis, & T. Tokunaga (Eds.), Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018) (pp. 3297-3302). Paris: LREC.

    Abstract

    It is widely held that smells and flavors are impossible to put into words. In this paper we test this claim by seeking predictive patterns in wine reviews, which ostensibly aim to provide guides to perceptual content. Wine reviews have previously been critiqued as random and meaningless. We collected an English corpus of wine reviews with their structured metadata, and applied machine learning techniques to automatically predict the wine's color, grape variety, and country of origin. To train the three supervised classifiers, three different information sources were incorporated: lexical bag-of-words features, domain-specific terminology features, and semantic word embedding features. In addition, using regression analysis we investigated basic review properties, i.e., review length, average word length, and their relationship to the scalar values of price and review score. Our results show that wine experts do share a common vocabulary to describe wines and they use this in a consistent way, which makes it possible to automatically predict wine characteristics based on the review text alone. This means that odors and flavors may be more expressible in language than typically acknowledged.
  • Levelt, W. J. M., & Flores d'Arcais, G. B. (1975). Some psychologists' reactions to the Symposium of Dynamic Aspects of Speech Perception. In A. Cohen, & S. Nooteboom (Eds.), Structure and process in speech perception (pp. 345-351). Berlin: Springer.
  • Lopopolo, A., Frank, S. L., Van den Bosch, A., Nijhof, A., & Willems, R. M. (2018). The Narrative Brain Dataset (NBD), an fMRI dataset for the study of natural language processing in the brain. In B. Devereux, E. Shutova, & C.-R. Huang (Eds.), Proceedings of LREC 2018 Workshop "Linguistic and Neuro-Cognitive Resources (LiNCR) (pp. 8-11). Paris: LREC.

    Abstract

    We present the Narrative Brain Dataset, an fMRI dataset that was collected during spoken presentation of short excerpts of three
    stories in Dutch. Together with the brain imaging data, the dataset contains the written versions of the stimulation texts. The texts are
    accompanied with stochastic (perplexity and entropy) and semantic computational linguistic measures. The richness and unconstrained
    nature of the data allows the study of language processing in the brain in a more naturalistic setting than is common for fMRI studies.
    We hope that by making NBD available we serve the double purpose of providing useful neural data to researchers interested in natural
    language processing in the brain and to further stimulate data sharing in the field of neuroscience of language.
  • Lupyan, G., Wendorf, A., Berscia, L. M., & Paul, J. (2018). Core knowledge or language-augmented cognition? The case of geometric reasoning. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, L. McCrohon, A. Ravignani, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG XII) (pp. 252-254). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.062.
  • Mai, F., Galke, L., & Scherp, A. (2018). Using deep learning for title-based semantic subject indexing to reach competitive performance to full-text. In J. Chen, M. A. Gonçalves, J. M. Allen, E. A. Fox, M.-Y. Kan, & V. Petras (Eds.), JCDL '18: Proceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE on Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (pp. 169-178). New York: ACM.

    Abstract

    For (semi-)automated subject indexing systems in digital libraries, it is often more practical to use metadata such as the title of a publication instead of the full-text or the abstract. Therefore, it is desirable to have good text mining and text classification algorithms that operate well already on the title of a publication. So far, the classification performance on titles is not competitive with the performance on the full-texts if the same number of training samples is used for training. However, it is much easier to obtain title data in large quantities and to use it for training than full-text data. In this paper, we investigate the question how models obtained from training on increasing amounts of title training data compare to models from training on a constant number of full-texts. We evaluate this question on a large-scale dataset from the medical domain (PubMed) and from economics (EconBiz). In these datasets, the titles and annotations of millions of publications are available, and they outnumber the available full-texts by a factor of 20 and 15, respectively. To exploit these large amounts of data to their full potential, we develop three strong deep learning classifiers and evaluate their performance on the two datasets. The results are promising. On the EconBiz dataset, all three classifiers outperform their full-text counterparts by a large margin. The best title-based classifier outperforms the best full-text method by 9.4%. On the PubMed dataset, the best title-based method almost reaches the performance of the best full-text classifier, with a difference of only 2.9%.
  • Mazzone, M., & Campisi, E. (2010). Embodiment, metafore, comunicazione. In G. P. Storari, & E. Gola (Eds.), Forme e formalizzazioni. Atti del XVI congresso nazionale. Cagliari: CUEC.
  • Mazzone, M., & Campisi, E. (2010). Are there communicative intentions? In L. A. Pérez Miranda, & A. I. Madariaga (Eds.), Advances in cognitive science. IWCogSc-10. Proceedings of the ILCLI International Workshop on Cognitive Science Workshop on Cognitive Science (pp. 307-322). Bilbao, Spain: The University of the Basque Country.

    Abstract

    Grice in pragmatics and Levelt in psycholinguistics have proposed models of human communication where the starting point of communicative action is an individual intention. This assumption, though, has to face serious objections with regard to the alleged existence of explicit representations of the communicative goals to be pursued. Here evidence is surveyed which shows that in fact speaking may ordinarily be a quite automatic activity prompted by contextual cues and driven by behavioural schemata abstracted away from social regularities. On the one hand, this means that there could exist no intentions in the sense of explicit representations of communicative goals, following from deliberate reasoning and triggering the communicative action. On the other hand, however, there are reasons to allow for a weaker notion of intention than this, according to which communication is an intentional affair, after all. Communicative action is said to be intentional in this weaker sense to the extent that it is subject to a double mechanism of control, with respect both to present-directed and future-directed intentions.
  • Merkx, D., & Scharenborg, O. (2018). Articulatory feature classification using convolutional neural networks. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2018 (pp. 2142-2146). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2018-2275.

    Abstract

    The ultimate goal of our research is to improve an existing speech-based computational model of human speech recognition on the task of simulating the role of fine-grained phonetic information in human speech processing. As part of this work we are investigating articulatory feature classifiers that are able to create reliable and accurate transcriptions of the articulatory behaviour encoded in the acoustic speech signal. Articulatory feature (AF) modelling of speech has received a considerable amount of attention in automatic speech recognition research. Different approaches have been used to build AF classifiers, most notably multi-layer perceptrons. Recently, deep neural networks have been applied to the task of AF classification. This paper aims to improve AF classification by investigating two different approaches: 1) investigating the usefulness of a deep Convolutional neural network (CNN) for AF classification; 2) integrating the Mel filtering operation into the CNN architecture. The results showed a remarkable improvement in classification accuracy of the CNNs over state-of-the-art AF classification results for Dutch, most notably in the minority classes. Integrating the Mel filtering operation into the CNN architecture did not further improve classification performance.
  • Micklos, A., Macuch Silva, V., & Fay, N. (2018). The prevalence of repair in studies of language evolution. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, L. McCrohon, A. Ravignani, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG XII) (pp. 316-318). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.075.
  • Mulder, K., Ten Bosch, L., & Boves, L. (2018). Analyzing EEG Signals in Auditory Speech Comprehension Using Temporal Response Functions and Generalized Additive Models. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2018 (pp. 1452-1456). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2018-1676.

    Abstract

    Analyzing EEG signals recorded while participants are listening to continuous speech with the purpose of testing linguistic hypotheses is complicated by the fact that the signals simultaneously reflect exogenous acoustic excitation and endogenous linguistic processing. This makes it difficult to trace subtle differences that occur in mid-sentence position. We apply an analysis based on multivariate temporal response functions to uncover subtle mid-sentence effects. This approach is based on a per-stimulus estimate of the response of the neural system to speech input. Analyzing EEG signals predicted on the basis of the response functions might then bring to light conditionspecific differences in the filtered signals. We validate this approach by means of an analysis of EEG signals recorded with isolated word stimuli. Then, we apply the validated method to the analysis of the responses to the same words in the middle of meaningful sentences.
  • Munro, R., Bethard, S., Kuperman, V., Lai, V. T., Melnick, R., Potts, C., Schnoebelen, T., & Tily, H. (2010). Crowdsourcing and language studies: The new generation of linguistic data. In Workshop on Creating Speech and Language Data with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Proceedings of the Workshop (pp. 122-130). Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.
  • Otake, T., McQueen, J. M., & Cutler, A. (2010). Competition in the perception of spoken Japanese words. In Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2010), Makuhari, Japan (pp. 114-117).

    Abstract

    Japanese listeners detected Japanese words embedded at the end of nonsense sequences (e.g., kaba 'hippopotamus' in gyachikaba). When the final portion of the preceding context together with the initial portion of the word (e.g., here, the sequence chika) was compatible with many lexical competitors, recognition of the embedded word was more difficult than when such a sequence was compatible with few competitors. This clear effect of competition, established here for preceding context in Japanese, joins similar demonstrations, in other languages and for following contexts, to underline that the functional architecture of the human spoken-word recognition system is a universal one.
  • Ozyurek, A. (2010). The role of iconic gestures in production and comprehension of language: Evidence from brain and behavior. In S. Kopp, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.), Gesture in embodied communication and human-computer interaction: 8th International Gesture Workshop, GW 2009, Bielefeld, Germany, February 25-27 2009. Revised selected papers (pp. 1-10). Berlin: Springer.
  • Räsänen, O., Seshadri, S., & Casillas, M. (2018). Comparison of syllabification algorithms and training strategies for robust word count estimation across different languages and recording conditions. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2018 (pp. 1200-1204). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2018-1047.

    Abstract

    Word count estimation (WCE) from audio recordings has a number of applications, including quantifying the amount of speech that language-learning infants hear in their natural environments, as captured by daylong recordings made with devices worn by infants. To be applicable in a wide range of scenarios and also low-resource domains, WCE tools should be extremely robust against varying signal conditions and require minimal access to labeled training data in the target domain. For this purpose, earlier work has used automatic syllabification of speech, followed by a least-squares-mapping of syllables to word counts. This paper compares a number of previously proposed syllabifiers in the WCE task, including a supervised bi-directional long short-term memory (BLSTM) network that is trained on a language for which high quality syllable annotations are available (a “high resource language”), and reports how the alternative methods compare on different languages and signal conditions. We also explore additive noise and varying-channel data augmentation strategies for BLSTM training, and show how they improve performance in both matching and mismatching languages. Intriguingly, we also find that even though the BLSTM works on languages beyond its training data, the unsupervised algorithms can still outperform it in challenging signal conditions on novel languages.
  • Ravignani, A., Garcia, M., Gross, S., de Reus, K., Hoeksema, N., Rubio-Garcia, A., & de Boer, B. (2018). Pinnipeds have something to say about speech and rhythm. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, L. McCrohon, A. Ravignani, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG XII) (pp. 399-401). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.095.
  • Raviv, L., Meyer, A. S., & Lev-Ari, S. (2018). The role of community size in the emergence of linguistic structure. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, L. McCrohon, A. Ravignani, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG XII) (pp. 402-404). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.096.
  • Reinisch, E., Jesse, A., & Nygaard, L. C. (2010). Tone of voice helps learning the meaning of novel adjectives [Abstract]. In Proceedings of the 16th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing [AMLaP 2010] (pp. 114). York: University of York.

    Abstract

    To understand spoken words listeners have to cope with seemingly meaningless variability in the speech signal. Speakers vary, for example, their tone of voice (ToV) by changing speaking rate, pitch, vocal effort, and loudness. This variation is independent of "linguistic prosody" such as sentence intonation or speech rhythm. The variation due to ToV, however, is not random. Speakers use, for example, higher pitch when referring to small objects than when referring to large objects and importantly, adult listeners are able to use these non-lexical ToV cues to distinguish between the meanings of antonym pairs (e.g., big-small; Nygaard, Herold, & Namy, 2009). In the present study, we asked whether listeners infer the meaning of novel adjectives from ToV and subsequently interpret these adjectives according to the learned meaning even in the absence of ToV. Moreover, if listeners actually acquire these adjectival meanings, then they should generalize these word meanings to novel referents. ToV would thus be a semantic cue to lexical acquisition. This hypothesis was tested in an exposure-test paradigm with adult listeners. In the experiment listeners' eye movements to picture pairs were monitored. The picture pairs represented the endpoints of the adjectival dimensions big-small, hot-cold, and strong-weak (e.g., an elephant and an ant represented big-small). Four picture pairs per category were used. While viewing the pictures participants listened to lexically unconstraining sentences containing novel adjectives, for example, "Can you find the foppick one?" During exposure, the sentences were spoken in infant-directed speech with the intended adjectival meaning expressed by ToV. Word-meaning pairings were counterbalanced across participants. Each word was repeated eight times. Listeners had no explicit task. To guide listeners' attention to the relation between the words and pictures, three sets of filler trials were included that contained real English adjectives (e.g., full-empty). In the subsequent test phase participants heard the novel adjectives in neutral adult-directed ToV. Test sentences were recorded before the speaker was informed about intended word meanings. Participants had to choose which of two pictures on the screen the speaker referred to. Picture pairs that were presented during the exposure phase and four new picture pairs per category that varied along the critical dimensions were tested. During exposure listeners did not spontaneously direct their gaze to the intended referent at the first presentation. But as indicated by listener's fixation behavior, they quickly learned the relationship between ToV and word meaning over only two exposures. Importantly, during test participants consistently identified the intended referent object even in the absence of informative ToV. Learning was found for all three tested categories and did not depend on whether the picture pairs had been presented during exposure. Listeners thus use ToV not only to distinguish between antonym pairs but they are able to extract word meaning from ToV and assign this meaning to novel words. The newly learned word meanings can then be generalized to novel referents even in the absence of ToV cues. These findings suggest that ToV can be used as a semantic cue to lexical acquisition. References Nygaard, L. C., Herold, D. S., & Namy, L. L. (2009) The semantics of prosody: Acoustic and perceptual evidence of prosodic correlates to word meaning. Cognitive Science, 33. 127-146.
  • Reis, A., Faísca, L., Castro, S.-L., & Petersson, K. M. (2010). Preditores da leitura ao longo da escolaridade: Um estudo com alunos do 1 ciclo do ensino básico. In Actas do VII simpósio nacional de investigação em psicologia (pp. 3117-3132).

    Abstract

    A aquisição da leitura decorre ao longo de diversas etapas, desde o momento em que a criança inicia o contacto com o alfabeto até ao momento em que se torna um leitor competente, apto a ler correcta e fluentemente. Compreender a evolução desta competência através de uma análise da diferenciação do peso de variáveis preditoras da leitura possibilita teorizar sobre os mecanismos cognitivos envolvidos nas diferentes fases de desenvolvimento da leitura. Realizámos um estudo transversal com 568 alunos do segundo ao quarto ano do primeiro ciclo do Ensino Básico, em que se avaliou o impacto de capacidades de processamento fonológico, nomeação rápida, conhecimento letra-som e vocabulário, bem como de capacidades cognitivas mais gerais (inteligência não-verbal e memória de trabalho), na exactidão e velocidade da leitura. De uma forma geral, os resultados mostraram que, apesar da consciência fonológica permanecer como o preditor mais importante da exactidão e fluência da leitura, o seu peso decresce à medida que a escolaridade aumenta. Observou-se também que, à medida que o contributo da consciência fonológica para a explicação da velocidade de leitura diminuía, aumentava o contributo de outras variáveis mais associadas ao automatismo e reconhecimento lexical, tais como a nomeação rápida e o vocabulário. Em suma, podemos dizer que ao longo da escolaridade se observa uma alteração dinâmica dos processos cognitivos subjacentes à leitura, o que sugere que a criança evolui de uma estratégia de leitura ancorada em processamentos sub-lexicais, e como tal mais dependente de processamentos fonológicos, para uma estratégia baseada no reconhecimento ortográfico das palavras.
  • Rossi, G. (2010). Interactive written discourse: Pragmatic aspects of SMS communication. In G. Garzone, P. Catenaccio, & C. Degano (Eds.), Diachronic perspectives on genres in specialized communication. Conference Proceedings (pp. 135-138). Milano: CUEM.
  • Rubio-Fernández, P., & Jara-Ettinger, J. (2018). Joint inferences of speakers’ beliefs and referents based on how they speak. In C. Kalish, M. Rau, J. Zhu, & T. T. Rogers (Eds.), Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2018) (pp. 991-996). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    For almost two decades, the poor performance observed with the so-called Director task has been interpreted as evidence of limited use of Theory of Mind in communication. Here we propose a probabilistic model of common ground in referential communication that derives three inferences from an utterance: what the speaker is talking about in a visual context, what she knows about the context, and what referential expressions she prefers. We tested our model by comparing its inferences with those made by human participants and found that it closely mirrors their judgments, whereas an alternative model compromising the hearer’s expectations of cooperativeness and efficiency reveals a worse fit to the human data. Rather than assuming that common ground is fixed in a given exchange and may or may not constrain reference resolution, we show how common ground can be inferred as part of the process of reference assignment.
  • Sadakata, M., Van der Zanden, L., & Sekiyama, K. (2010). Influence of musical training on perception of L2 speech. In Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2010), Makuhari, Japan (pp. 118-121).

    Abstract

    The current study reports specific cases in which a positive transfer of perceptual ability from the music domain to the language domain occurs. We tested whether musical training enhances discrimination and identification performance of L2 speech sounds (timing features, nasal consonants and vowels). Native Dutch and Japanese speakers with different musical training experience, matched for their estimated verbal IQ, participated in the experiments. Results indicated that musical training strongly increases one’s ability to perceive timing information in speech signals. We also found a benefit of musical training on discrimination performance for a subset of the tested vowel contrasts.
  • Saleh, A., Beck, T., Galke, L., & Scherp, A. (2018). Performance comparison of ad-hoc retrieval models over full-text vs. titles of documents. In M. Dobreva, A. Hinze, & M. Žumer (Eds.), Maturity and Innovation in Digital Libraries: 20th International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries, ICADL 2018, Hamilton, New Zealand, November 19-22, 2018, Proceedings (pp. 290-303). Cham, Switzerland: Springer.

    Abstract

    While there are many studies on information retrieval models using full-text, there are presently no comparison studies of full-text retrieval vs. retrieval only over the titles of documents. On the one hand, the full-text of documents like scientific papers is not always available due to, e.g., copyright policies of academic publishers. On the other hand, conducting a search based on titles alone has strong limitations. Titles are short and therefore may not contain enough information to yield satisfactory search results. In this paper, we compare different retrieval models regarding their search performance on the full-text vs. only titles of documents. We use different datasets, including the three digital library datasets: EconBiz, IREON, and PubMed. The results show that it is possible to build effective title-based retrieval models that provide competitive results comparable to full-text retrieval. The difference between the average evaluation results of the best title-based retrieval models is only 3% less than those of the best full-text-based retrieval models.
  • Sauter, D. (2010). Non-verbal emotional vocalizations across cultures [Abstract]. In E. Zimmermann, & E. Altenmüller (Eds.), Evolution of emotional communication: From sounds in nonhuman mammals to speech and music in man (pp. 15). Hannover: University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover.

    Abstract

    Despite differences in language, culture, and ecology, some human characteristics are similar in people all over the world, while other features vary from one group to the next. These similarities and differences can inform arguments about what aspects of the human mind are part of our shared biological heritage and which are predominantly products of culture and language. I will present data from a cross-cultural project investigating the recognition of non-verbal vocalizations of emotions, such as screams and laughs, across two highly different cultural groups. English participants were compared to individuals from remote, culturally isolated Namibian villages. Vocalizations communicating the so-called “basic emotions” (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise) were bidirectionally recognised. In contrast, a set of additional positive emotions was only recognised within, but not across, cultural boundaries. These results indicate that a number of primarily negative emotions are associated with vocalizations that can be recognised across cultures, while at least some positive emotions are communicated with culture-specific signals. I will discuss these findings in the context of accounts of emotions at differing levels of analysis, with an emphasis on the often-neglected positive emotions.
  • Sauter, D., Crasborn, O., & Haun, D. B. M. (2010). The role of perceptual learning in emotional vocalizations [Abstract]. In C. Douilliez, & C. Humez (Eds.), Third European Conference on Emotion 2010. Proceedings (pp. 39-39). Lille: Université de Lille.

    Abstract

    Many studies suggest that emotional signals can be recognized across cultures and modalities. But to what extent are these signals innate and to what extent are they learned? This study investigated whether auditory learning is necessary for the production of recognizable emotional vocalizations by examining the vocalizations produced by people born deaf. Recordings were made of eight congenitally deaf Dutch individuals, who produced non-verbal vocalizations of a range of negative and positive emotions. Perception was examined in a forced-choice task with hearing Dutch listeners (n = 25). Considerable variability was found across emotions, suggesting that auditory learning is more important for the acquisition of certain types of vocalizations than for others. In particular, achievement and surprise sounds were relatively poorly recognized. In contrast, amusement and disgust vocalizations were well recognized, suggesting that for some emotions, recognizable vocalizations can develop without any auditory learning. The implications of these results for models of emotional communication are discussed, and other routes of social learning available to the deaf individuals are considered.
  • Sauter, D., Crasborn, O., & Haun, D. B. M. (2010). The role of perceptual learning in emotional vocalizations [Abstract]. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 128, 2476.

    Abstract

    Vocalizations like screams and laughs are used to communicate affective states, but what acoustic cues in these signals require vocal learning and which ones are innate? This study investigated the role of auditory learning in the production of non-verbal emotional vocalizations by examining the vocalizations produced by people born deaf. Recordings were made of congenitally deaf Dutch individuals and matched hearing controls, who produced non-verbal vocalizations of a range of negative and positive emotions. Perception was examined in a forced-choice task with hearing Dutch listeners (n = 25), and judgments were analyzed together with acoustic cues, including envelope, pitch, and spectral measures. Considerable variability was found across emotions and acoustic cues, and the two types of information were related for a sub-set of the emotion categories. These results suggest that auditory learning is less important for the acquisition of certain types of vocalizations than for others (particularly amusement and relief), and they also point to a less central role for auditory learning of some acoustic features in affective non-verbal vocalizations. The implications of these results for models of vocal emotional communication are discussed.
  • Scharenborg, O., & Merkx, D. (2018). The role of articulatory feature representation quality in a computational model of human spoken-word recognition. In Proceedings of the Machine Learning in Speech and Language Processing Workshop (MLSLP 2018).

    Abstract

    Fine-Tracker is a speech-based model of human speech
    recognition. While previous work has shown that Fine-Tracker
    is successful at modelling aspects of human spoken-word
    recognition, its speech recognition performance is not
    comparable to that of human performance, possibly due to
    suboptimal intermediate articulatory feature (AF)
    representations. This study investigates the effect of improved
    AF representations, obtained using a state-of-the-art deep
    convolutional network, on Fine-Tracker’s simulation and
    recognition performance: Although the improved AF quality
    resulted in improved speech recognition; it, surprisingly, did
    not lead to an improvement in Fine-Tracker’s simulation power.
  • Schuppler, B., Ernestus, M., Van Dommelen, W., & Koreman, J. (2010). Predicting human perception and ASR classification of word-final [t] by its acoustic sub-segmental properties. In Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2010), Makuhari, Japan (pp. 2466-2469).

    Abstract

    This paper presents a study on the acoustic sub-segmental properties of word-final /t/ in conversational standard Dutch and how these properties contribute to whether humans and an ASR system classify the /t/ as acoustically present or absent. In general, humans and the ASR system use the same cues (presence of a constriction, a burst, and alveolar frication), but the ASR system is also less sensitive to fine cues (weak bursts, smoothly starting friction) than human listeners and misled by the presence of glottal vibration. These data inform the further development of models of human and automatic speech processing.
  • Senghas, A., Ozyurek, A., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2010). The evolution of segmentation and sequencing: Evidence from homesign and Nicaraguan Sign Language. In A. D. Smith, M. Schouwstra, B. de Boer, & K. Smith (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th International conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG 8) (pp. 279-289). Singapore: World Scientific.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1975). Autonomous syntax and prelexical rules. In S. De Vriendt, J. Dierickx, & M. Wilmet (Eds.), Grammaire générative et psychomécanique du langage: actes du colloque organisé par le Centre d'études linguistiques et littéraires de la Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Bruxelles, 29-31 mai 1974 (pp. 89-98). Paris: Didier.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1975). Logic and language. In S. De Vriendt, J. Dierickx, & M. Wilmet (Eds.), Grammaire générative et psychomécanique du langage: actes du colloque organisé par le Centre d'études linguistiques et littéraires de la Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Bruxelles, 29-31 mai 1974 (pp. 84-87). Paris: Didier.
  • Sikveland, A., Öttl, A., Amdal, I., Ernestus, M., Svendsen, T., & Edlund, J. (2010). Spontal-N: A Corpus of Interactional Spoken Norwegian. In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, J. Odijk, S. Piperidis, & D. Tapias (Eds.), Proceedings of the Seventh conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10) (pp. 2986-2991). Paris: European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

    Abstract

    Spontal-N is a corpus of spontaneous, interactional Norwegian. To our knowledge, it is the first corpus of Norwegian in which the majority of speakers have spent significant parts of their lives in Sweden, and in which the recorded speech displays varying degrees of interference from Swedish. The corpus consists of studio quality audio- and video-recordings of four 30-minute free conversations between acquaintances, and a manual orthographic transcription of the entire material. On basis of the orthographic transcriptions, we automatically annotated approximately 50 percent of the material on the phoneme level, by means of a forced alignment between the acoustic signal and pronunciations listed in a dictionary. Approximately seven percent of the automatic transcription was manually corrected. Taking the manual correction as a gold standard, we evaluated several sources of pronunciation variants for the automatic transcription. Spontal-N is intended as a general purpose speech resource that is also suitable for investigating phonetic detail.
  • Simon, E., Escudero, P., & Broersma, M. (2010). Learning minimally different words in a third language: L2 proficiency as a crucial predictor of accuracy in an L3 word learning task. In K. Diubalska-Kolaczyk, M. Wrembel, & M. Kul (Eds.), Proceedings of the Sixth International Symposium on the Acquisition of Second Language Speech (New Sounds 2010).
  • Speed, L., & Majid, A. (2018). Music and odor in harmony: A case of music-odor synaesthesia. In C. Kalish, M. Rau, J. Zhu, & T. T. Rogers (Eds.), Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2018) (pp. 2527-2532). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    We report an individual with music-odor synaesthesia who experiences automatic and vivid odor sensations when she hears music. S’s odor associations were recorded on two days, and compared with those of two control participants. Overall, S produced longer descriptions, and her associations were of multiple odors at once, in comparison to controls who typically reported a single odor. Although odor associations were qualitatively different between S and controls, ratings of the consistency of their descriptions did not differ. This demonstrates that crossmodal associations between music and odor exist in non-synaesthetes too. We also found that S is better at discriminating between odors than control participants, and is more likely to experience emotion, memories and evaluations triggered by odors, demonstrating the broader impact of her synaesthesia.

    Additional information

    link to conference website
  • Spilková, H., Brenner, D., Öttl, A., Vondřička, P., Van Dommelen, W., & Ernestus, M. (2010). The Kachna L1/L2 picture replication corpus. In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, J. Odijk, S. Piperidis, & D. Tapias (Eds.), Proceedings of the Seventh conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10) (pp. 2432-2436). Paris: European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

    Abstract

    This paper presents the Kachna corpus of spontaneous speech, in which ten Czech and ten Norwegian speakers were recorded both in their native language and in English. The dialogues are elicited using a picture replication task that requires active cooperation and interaction of speakers by asking them to produce a drawing as close to the original as possible. The corpus is appropriate for the study of interactional features and speech reduction phenomena across native and second languages. The combination of productions in non-native English and in speakers’ native language is advantageous for investigation of L2 issues while providing a L1 behaviour reference from all the speakers. The corpus consists of 20 dialogues comprising 12 hours 53 minutes of recording, and was collected in 2008. Preparation of the transcriptions, including a manual orthographic transcription and an automatically generated phonetic transcription, is currently in progress. The phonetic transcriptions are automatically generated by aligning acoustic models with the speech signal on the basis of the orthographic transcriptions and a dictionary of pronunciation variants compiled for the relevant language. Upon completion the corpus will be made available via the European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
  • Staum Casasanto, L., Jasmin, K., & Casasanto, D. (2010). Virtually accommodating: Speech rate accommodation to a virtual interlocutor. In S. Ohlsson, & R. Catrambone (Eds.), Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 127-132). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Why do people accommodate to each other’s linguistic behavior? Studies of natural interactions (Giles, Taylor & Bourhis, 1973) suggest that speakers accommodate to achieve interactional goals, influencing what their interlocutor thinks or feels about them. But is this the only reason speakers accommodate? In real-world conversations, interactional motivations are ubiquitous, making it difficult to assess the extent to which they drive accommodation. Do speakers still accommodate even when interactional goals cannot be achieved, for instance, when their interlocutor cannot interpret their accommodation behavior? To find out, we asked participants to enter an immersive virtual reality (VR) environment and to converse with a virtual interlocutor. Participants accommodated to the speech rate of their virtual interlocutor even though he could not interpret their linguistic behavior, and thus accommodation could not possibly help them to achieve interactional goals. Results show that accommodation does not require explicit interactional goals, and suggest other social motivations for accommodation.
  • Stehouwer, H., & van Zaanen, M. (2010). Enhanced suffix arrays as language models: Virtual k-testable languages. In J. M. Sempere, & P. García (Eds.), Grammatical inference: Theoretical results and applications 10th International Colloquium, ICGI 2010, Valencia, Spain, September 13-16, 2010. Proceedings (pp. 305-308). Berlin: Springer.

    Abstract

    In this article, we propose the use of suffix arrays to efficiently implement n-gram language models with practically unlimited size n. This approach, which is used with synchronous back-off, allows us to distinguish between alternative sequences using large contexts. We also show that we can build this kind of models with additional information for each symbol, such as part-of-speech tags and dependency information. The approach can also be viewed as a collection of virtual k-testable automata. Once built, we can directly access the results of any k-testable automaton generated from the input training data. Synchronous back- off automatically identies the k-testable automaton with the largest feasible k. We have used this approach in several classification tasks.
  • Stehouwer, H., & Van Zaanen, M. (2010). Finding patterns in strings using suffix arrays. In M. Ganzha, & M. Paprzycki (Eds.), Proceedings of the International Multiconference on Computer Science and Information Technology, October 18–20, 2010. Wisła, Poland (pp. 505-511). IEEE.

    Abstract

    Finding regularities in large data sets requires implementations of systems that are efficient in both time and space requirements. Here, we describe a newly developed system that exploits the internal structure of the enhanced suffixarray to find significant patterns in a large collection of sequences. The system searches exhaustively for all significantly compressing patterns where patterns may consist of symbols and skips or wildcards. We demonstrate a possible application of the system by detecting interesting patterns in a Dutch and an English corpus.
  • Stehouwer, H., & van Zaanen, M. (2010). Using suffix arrays as language models: Scaling the n-gram. In Proceedings of the 22st Benelux Conference on Artificial Intelligence (BNAIC 2010), October 25-26, 2010.

    Abstract

    In this article, we propose the use of suffix arrays to implement n-gram language models with practically unlimited size n. These unbounded n-grams are called 1-grams. This approach allows us to use large contexts efficiently to distinguish between different alternative sequences while applying synchronous back-off. From a practical point of view, the approach has been applied within the context of spelling confusibles, verb and noun agreement and prenominal adjective ordering. These initial experiments show promising results and we relate the performance to the size of the n-grams used for disambiguation.
  • Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., & Levinson, S. C. (Eds.). (2010). Question-response sequences in conversation across ten languages [Special Issue]. Journal of Pragmatics, 42(10). doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2010.04.001.

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