Publications

Abstract

Linguistic fieldwork is increasingly moving forward from the traditional model of lone fieldworker with a notebook to collaborative projects with key roles for native speakers and other experts and involving the use of different kinds of stimulus-based elicitation methods as well as extensive video documentation. Several cohorts of colleagues and students have been influenced by this inclusive and interdisciplinary view of linguistic fieldwork. We describe the challenges and benefits of doing multi-methods collaborative fieldwork. As linguistics inevitably moves into the direction of multiple methods, interdisciplinarity and team science, now is the time to reflect critically on how best to contribute to a cumulative science of language.

Abstract

The robustness and flexibility of human language is underpinned by a machinery of interactive repair. Repair is deeply intertwined with two core properties of human language: reflexivity (it can communicate about itself) and accountability (it is used to publicly enforce social norms). We review empirical and theoretical advances from across the cognitive sciences that mark interactive repair as a domain of pragmatic universals, a key place to study metacognition in interaction, and a system that enables collective computation. This provides novel insights on the role of repair in comparative cognition, language development and human-computer interaction. As an always-available fallback option and an infrastructure for negotiating social commitments, interactive repair is foundational to the resilience, complexity, and flexibility of human language.

Abstract

The past year has seen a steep rise in generative AI systems that claim to be open. But how open are they really? The question of what counts as open source in generative AI is poised to take on particular importance in light of the upcoming EU AI Act that regulates open source systems differently, creating an urgent need for practical openness assessment. Here we use an evidence-based framework that distinguishes 14 dimensions of openness, from training datasets to scientific and technical documentation and from licensing to access methods. Surveying over 45 generative AI systems (both text and text-to-image), we find that while the term open source is widely used, many models are `open weight' at best and many providers seek to evade scientific, legal and regulatory scrutiny by withholding information on training and fine-tuning data. We argue that openness in generative AI is necessarily composite (consisting of multiple elements) and gradient (coming in degrees), and point out the risk of relying on single features like access or licensing to declare models open or not. Evidence-based openness assessment can help foster a generative AI landscape in which models can be effectively regulated, model providers can be held accountable, scientists can scrutinise generative AI, and end users can make informed decisions.

Abstract

Measures of ‘humanness’, ‘coherence’ or ‘fluency’ are the mainstay of dialogue system evaluation, but they don’t target system capabilities and rarely offer actionable feedback. Reviewing recent work in this domain, we identify an opportunity for evaluation at the level of action sequences, rather than the more commonly targeted levels of whole conversations or single responses. We introduce interactive probes, an evaluation framework inspired by empirical work on social interaction that can help to systematically probe the capabilities of dialogue systems. We sketch some first probes in the domains of tellings and repair, two sequence types ubiquitous in human interaction and challenging for dialogue systems. We argue interactive probing can offer the requisite flexibility to keep up with developments in interactive language technologies and do justice to the open-endedness of action formation and ascription in interaction.

Abstract

Minimal expressions are at the heart of interaction: Interjections like "Huh?" and "Mhm" keep conversations flowing by establishing and reinforcing intersubjectivity among interlocutors. Crosslinguistic research has identified that similar interactional pressures can yield structurally similar words (e.g., to initiate repair across languages). While crosslinguistic comparisons that include signed languages remain uncommon, recent work has revealed similarities in discourse management strategies among signers and speakers that share much of their cultural background. This study contributes a crossmodal comparison of repair initiators and continuers in speakers of English and signers of British Sign Language (BSL). We combine qualitative and quantitative analyses of data from sixteen English speakers and sixteen BSL signers, resulting in the following: First, the interactional infrastructure drawn upon by speakers and signers overwhelmingly relies on behaviors of the head, face, and body; these are used alone or sometimes in combination with verbal elements (i.e., spoken words or manual signs), while verbal strategies alone are rare. Second, discourse management strategies are remarkably similar in form across the two languages: A held eye gaze or freeze-look is the predominant repair initiator and head nodding the main continuer. These results suggest a modality-agnostic preference for visual strategies that do not occupy the primary articulators, one that we propose is founded in recipiency; people maintain the flow of communication following principles of minimal effort and minimal interruption.

Abstract

The vocabularies of natural languages harbour many instances of iconicity, where words show a perceived resemblance between aspects of form and meaning. An open challenge in this domain is how to reconcile different operationalizations of iconicity and link them to an empirically grounded theory. Here we combine three ways of looking at iconicity using a set of 239 iconic words from 5 spoken languages (Japanese, Korean, Semai, Siwu and Ewe). Data on guessing accuracy serves as a baseline measure of probable iconicity and provides variation that we seek to explain and predict using structure-mapping theory and iconicity ratings. We systematically trace a range of cross-linguistically attested form-meaning correspondences in the dataset, yielding a word-level measure of cumulative iconicity that we find to be highly predictive of guessing accuracy. In a rating study, we collect iconicity judgments for all words from 78 participants. The ratings are well-predicted by our measure of cumulative iconicity and also correlate strongly with guessing accuracy, showing that rating tasks offer a scalable method to measure iconicity. Triangulating the measures reveals how structure-mapping can help open the black box of experimental measures of iconicity. While none of the methods is perfect, taken together they provide a well-rounded way to approach the meaning and measurement of iconicity in natural language vocabulary.

Abstract

We welcome Enfield and Zuckerman’s (E&Z’s) rich exposition on how people congregate around shared representations. Moorings are a useful addition to our tools for thinking about signs and their uses. As public fixtures to which actions, statuses, and experiences may be tied, moorings evoke Geertz’s (1973) webs of significance, Millikan’s (2005) public conventions, and Clark’s (2015) common ground, but they add to these accounts a focus on the sign and the promise of understanding in more detail how people come to share and calibrate experiences.

Abstract

Iconic words and signs are characterized by a perceived resemblance between aspects of their form and aspects of their meaning. For example, in English, iconic words include peep and crash, which mimic the sounds they denote, and wiggle and zigzag, which mimic motion. As a semiotic property of words and signs, iconicity has been demonstrated to play a role in word learning, language processing, and language evolution. This paper presents the results of a large-scale norming study for more than 14,000 English words conducted with over 1400 American English speakers. We demonstrate the utility of these ratings by replicating a number of existing findings showing that iconicity ratings are related to age of acquisition, sensory modality, semantic neighborhood density, structural markedness, and playfulness. We discuss possible use cases and limitations of the rating dataset, which is made publicly available.

Abstract

The notion that the form of a word bears an arbitrary relation to its meaning accounts only partly for the attested form to meaning correspondences in the world’s languages. Recent research suggests a more textured view of vocabulary structure, in which arbitrariness is complemented by iconicity (aspects of form resemble aspects of meaning) and systematicity (statistical regularities in forms predict function). Experimental evidence suggests these form to meaning correspondences serve different functions in language processing, development and communication: systematicity facilities category learning by means of phonological cues, iconicity facilitates word learning and communication by means of perceptuomotor analogies, and arbitrariness facilitates meaning individuation through distinctive forms. Processes of cultural evolution help explain how these competing motivations shape vocabulary structure.

Abstract

Informal paraphrases by native speaker consultants are crucial tools in linguistic fieldwork. When recorded, archived, and analysed, they offer rich data that can be mined for many purposes, from lexicography to semantic typology and from ethnography to the investigation of gesture and speech. This paper describes a procedure for the collection and analysis of folk definitions that are native (in the language under study rather than the language of analysis), informal (spoken rather than written), and multi-modal (preserving the integrity of gesture-speech composite utterances). The value of folk definitions is demonstrated using the case of ideophones, words that are notoriously hard to study using traditional elicitation methods. Three explanatory strategies used in a set of folk definitions of ideophones are examined: the offering of everyday contexts of use, the use of depictive gestures, and the use of sense relations as semantic anchoring points. Folk definitions help elucidate word meanings that are hard to capture, bring to light cultural background knowledge that often remains implicit, and take seriously the crucial involvement of native speaker consultants in linguistic fieldwork. They provide useful data for language documentation and are an essential element of any toolkit for linguistic and ethnographic field research.

Abstract

Repetition is one of the most basic operations on talk, often discussed for its iconic meanings. Ideophones are marked words that depict sensory imagery, often identified by their reduplicated forms. Yet not all reduplication is iconic, and not all ideophones are reduplicated. This paper discusses the semantics and pragmatics of repeated talk (repetition as well as reduplication), with special focus on the intersection of reduplicative processes and ideophonic words. Various formal features of ideophones suggest that it is fruitful to distinguish two modes of representation in language —description and depiction— along with cues like prosodic foregrounding that can steer listeners’ interpretation from one to the other. What is special about reduplication is that it can naturally partake in both of these modes of representation, which is why it is so common in ideophones as well as in other areas of grammar. Using evidence from Siwu, Korean, Semai and a range of other languages, this paper shows how the study of ideophones sheds light on the interpretation of repeated talk and can lead to a more holistic understanding of reduplicative phenomena in language.

Abstract

This special issue reports on a cross-linguistic study of other-initiated repair, a domain at the crossroads of language, mind, and social life. Other-initiated repair is part of a system of practices that people use to deal with problems of speaking, hearing and understanding. The contributions in this special issue describe the linguistic resources and interactional practices associated with other-initiated repair in ten different languages. Here we provide an overview of the research methods and the conceptual framework. The empirical base for the project consists of corpora of naturally occurring conversations, collected in fieldsites around the world. Methodologically, we combine qualitative analysis with a comparative-typological perspective, and we formulate principles for the cross-linguistic comparison of conversational structures. A key move, of broad relevance to pragmatic typology, is the recognition that formats for repair initiation form paradigm-like systems that are ultimately language-specific, and that comparison is best done at the level of the constitutive properties of these formats. These properties can be functional (concerning aspects of linguistic formatting) as well as sequential (concerning aspects of the interactional environment). We show how functional and sequential aspects of conversational structure can capture patterns of commonality and diversity in conversational structures within and across languages

Abstract

This article describes the interactional patterns and linguistic structures associated with other-initiated repair in Siwu, a Kwa language spoken in eastern Ghana. Other-initiated repair is the set of techniques used by people to deal with problems in speaking, hearing and understanding. Formats for repair initiation in Siwu exploit language-specific resources like question words and noun class morphology. At the same time, the basic structure of the system bears a strong similarity other-initiated repair in other languages. Practices described for Siwu thus are potentially of broader relevance to the study of other-initiated repair. This article documents how different prosodic realisations of repair initiators may index social actions and features of the speech event; how two distinct roles of repetition in repair initiators are kept apart by features of turn design; and what kinds of items can be treated as ‘dispensable’ in resayings. By charting how other-initiated repair uses local linguistic resources and yet is shaped by interactional needs that transcend particular languages, this study contributes to the growing field of pragmatic typology: the study of systems of language use and the principles that shape them

Abstract

There would be little adaptive value in a complex communication system like human language if there were no ways to detect and correct problems. A systematic comparison of conversation in a broad sample of the world’s languages reveals a universal system for the real-time resolution of frequent breakdowns in communication. In a sample of 12 languages of 8 language families of varied typological profiles we find a system of ‘other-initiated repair’, where the recipient of an unclear message can signal trouble and the sender can repair the original message. We find that this system is frequently used (on average about once per 1.4 minutes in any language), and that it has detailed common properties, contrary to assumptions of radical cultural variation. Unrelated languages share the same three functionally distinct types of repair initiator for signalling problems and use them in the same kinds of contexts. People prefer to choose the type that is the most specific possible, a principle that minimizes cost both for the sender being asked to fix the problem and for the dyad as a social unit. Disruption to the conversation is kept to a minimum, with the two-utterance repair sequence being on average no longer that the single utterance which is being fixed. The findings, controlled for historical relationships, situation types and other dependencies, reveal the fundamentally cooperative nature of human communication and offer support for the pragmatic universals hypothesis: while languages may vary in the organization of grammar and meaning, key systems of language use may be largely similar across cultural groups. They also provide a fresh perspective on controversies about the core properties of language, by revealing a common infrastructure for social interaction which may be the universal bedrock upon which linguistic diversity rests.

Abstract

Research into sound-symbolism has shown that people can
consistently associate certain pseudo-words with certain referents;
for instance, pseudo-words with rounded vowels and
sonorant consonants are linked to round shapes, while pseudowords
with unrounded vowels and obstruents (with a noncontinuous
airflow), are associated with sharp shapes. Such
sound-symbolic associations have been proposed to arise from
cross-modal abstraction processes. Here we assess the link between
sound-symbolism and cross-modal abstraction by testing
dyslexic individuals’ ability to make sound-symbolic associations.
Dyslexic individuals are known to have deficiencies
in cross-modal processing. We find that dyslexic individuals
are impaired in their ability to make sound-symbolic associations
relative to the controls. Our results shed light on the cognitive
underpinnings of sound-symbolism by providing novel
evidence for the role —and disruptability— of cross-modal abstraction
processes in sound-symbolic eects.

Abstract

This review covers experimental approaches to sound-symbolism—from infants to adults, and from Sapir’s foundational studies to twenty-first century product naming. It synthesizes recent behavioral, developmental, and neuroimaging work into a systematic overview of the cross-modal correspondences that underpin iconic links between form and meaning. It also identifies open questions and opportunities, showing how the future course of experimental iconicity research can benefit from an integrated interdisciplinary perspective. Combining insights from psychology and neuroscience with evidence from natural languages provides us with opportunities for the experimental investigation of the role of sound-symbolism in language learning, language processing, and communication. The review finishes by describing how hypothesis-testing and model-building will help contribute to a cumulative science of sound-symbolism in human language.

Abstract

To what extent does perceptual language reflect universals of experience and cognition, and to what extent is it shaped by particular cultural preoccupations? This paper investigates the universality~relativity of perceptual language by examining the use of basic perception terms in spontaneous conversation across 13 diverse languages and cultures. We analyze the frequency of perception words to test two universalist hypotheses: that sight is always a dominant sense, and that the relative ranking of the senses will be the same across different cultures. We find that references to sight outstrip references to the other senses, suggesting a pan-human preoccupation with visual phenomena. However, the relative frequency of the other senses was found to vary cross-linguistically. Cultural relativity was conspicuous as exemplified by the high ranking of smell in Semai, an Aslian language. Together these results suggest a place for both universal constraints and cultural shaping of the language of perception.

Abstract

Languages combine arbitrary and iconic signals. How do iconic signals emerge and when do they persist? We present an experimental study of the role of iconicity in the emergence of structure in an artificial language. Using an iterated communication game in which we control the signalling medium as well as the meaning space, we study the evolution of communicative signals in transmission chains. This sheds light on how affordances of the communication medium shape and constrain the mappability and transmissibility of form-meaning pairs. We find that iconic signals can form the building blocks for wider compositional patterns

Abstract

This paper addresses the question why body-part terms are so often used to talk about other things than body parts. It is argued that the strategy of falling back on stable common ground to maximize the chances of successful communication is the driving force behind the selective advantage of body-part terms. The many different ways in which languages may implement this universal strategy suggest that, in order to properly understand the privileged role of the body in the evolution of linguistic signs, we have to look beyond the body to language in its socio-cultural context. A theory which acknowledges the interacting influences of stable common ground and diversified cultural practices on the evolution of linguistic signs will offer the most explanatory power for both universal patterns and language-specific variation.