Publications

Abstract

Humans are especially good at taking another’s perspective — representing what others might be thinking or experiencing. This “mentalizing” capacity is apparent in everyday human interactions and conversations. We investigated its neural basis using magnetoencephalography. We focused on whether mentalizing was engaged spontaneously and routinely to understand an utterance’s meaning or largely on-demand, to restore "common ground" when expectations were violated. Participants conversed with 1 of 2 confederate speakers and established tacit agreements about objects’ names. In a subsequent “test” phase, some of these agreements were violated by either the same or a different speaker. Our analysis of the neural processing of test phase utterances revealed recruitment of neural circuits associated with language (temporal cortex), episodic memory (e.g., medial temporal lobe), and mentalizing (temporo-parietal junction and ventro-medial prefrontal cortex). Theta oscillations (3 - 7 Hz) were modulated most prominently, and we observed phase coupling between functionally distinct neural circuits. The episodic memory and language circuits were recruited in anticipation of upcoming referring expressions, suggesting that context-sensitive predictions were spontaneously generated. In contrast, the mentalizing areas were recruited on-demand, as a means for detecting and resolving perceived pragmatic anomalies, with little evidence they were activated to make partner-specific predictions about upcoming linguistic utterances.

Abstract

In conversation, turn transitions between speakers often occur smoothly, usually within a time window of a few hundred milliseconds. It has been argued, on the basis of a button-press experiment [De Ruiter, J. P., Mitterer, H., & Enfield, N. J. (2006). Projecting the end of a speaker's turn: A cognitive cornerstone of conversation. Language, 82(3):515–535], that participants in conversation rely mainly on lexico-syntactic information when timing and producing their turns, and that they do not need to make use of intonational cues to achieve smooth transitions and avoid overlaps. In contrast to this view, but in line with previous observational studies, our results from a dialogue task and a button-press task involving questions and answers indicate that the identification of the end of intonational phrases is necessary for smooth turn-taking. In both tasks, participants never responded to questions (i.e., gave an answer or pressed a button to indicate a turn end) at turn-internal points of syntactic completion in the absence of an intonational phrase boundary. Moreover, in the button-press task, they often pressed the button at the same point of syntactic completion when the final word of an intonational phrase was cross-spliced at that location. Furthermore, truncated stimuli ending in a syntactic completion point but lacking an intonational phrase boundary led to significantly delayed button presses. In light of these results, we argue that earlier claims that intonation is not necessary for correct turn-end projection are misguided, and that research on turn-taking should continue to consider intonation as a source of turn-end cues along with other linguistic and communicative phenomena.

Abstract

A striking puzzle about language use in everyday conversation is that turn-taking latencies are usually very short, whereas planning language production takes much longer. This implies overlap between language comprehension and production processes, but the nature and extent of such overlap has never been studied directly. Combining an interactive quiz paradigm with EEG measurements in an innovative way, we show that production planning processes start as soon as possible, that is, within half a second after the answer to a question can be retrieved (up to several seconds before the end of the question). Localization of ERP data shows early activation even of brain areas related to late stages of production planning (e.g., syllabification). Finally, oscillation results suggest an attention switch from comprehension to production around the same time frame. This perspective from interactive language use throws new light on the performance characteristics that language competence involves.

Abstract

In conversation, negative responses to invitations, requests, offers, and the like are more likely to occur with a delay – conversation analysts talk of them as dispreferred. Here we examine the contrastive cognitive load ‘yes’ and ‘no’ responses make, either when relatively fast (300 ms after question offset) or delayed (1000 ms). Participants heard short dialogues contrasting in speed and valence of response while having their EEG recorded. We found that a fast ‘no’ evokes an N400-effect relative to a fast ‘yes’; however this contrast disappeared in the delayed responses. 'No' responses however elicited a late frontal positivity both if they were fast and if they were delayed. We interpret these results as follows: a fast ‘no’ evoked an N400 because an immediate response is expected to be positive – this effect disappears as the response time lengthens because now in ordinary conversation the probability of a ‘no’ has increased. However, regardless of the latency of response, a ‘no’ response is associated with a late positivity, since a negative response is always dispreferred. Together these results show that negative responses to social actions exact a higher cognitive load, but especially when least expected, in immediate response.

Abstract

This study addresses the question whether prosodic information can affect the choice for a syntactic analysis in auditory sentence processing. We manipulated the prosody (in the form of a prosodic break; PB) of locally ambiguous Dutch sentences to favor one of two interpretations. The experimental items contained two different types of so-called control verbs (subject and object control) in the matrix clause and were syntactically disambiguated by a transitive or by an intransitive verb. In Experiment 1, we established the default off-line preference of the items for a transitive or an intransitive disambiguating verb with a visual and an auditory fragment completion test. The results suggested that subject- and object-control verbs differently affect the syntactic structure that listeners expect. In Experiment 2, we investigated these two types of verbs separately in an on-line ERP study. Consistent with the literature, the PB elicited a closure positive shift. Furthermore, in subject-control items, an N400 effect for intransitive relative to transitive disambiguating verbs was found, both for sentences with and for sentences without a PB. This result suggests that the default preference for subject-control verbs goes in the same direction as the effect of the PB. In object-control items, an N400 effect for intransitive relative to transitive disambiguating verbs was found for sentences with a PB but no effect in the absence of a PB. This indicates that a PB can affect the syntactic analysis that listeners pursue.

Abstract

In Yukatek Maya, event types are lexicalized in verb roots and stems that fall into a number of different form classes on the basis of (a) patterns of aspect-mood marking and (b) priviledges of undergoing valence-changing operations. Of particular interest are the intransitive classes in the light of Perlmutter’s (1978) Unaccusativity hypothesis. In the spirit of Levin & Rappaport Hovav (1995) [L&RH], Van Valin (1990), Zaenen (1993), and others, this paper investigates whether (and to what extent) the association between formal predicate classes and event types is determined by argument structure features such as ‘agentivity’ and ‘control’ or features of lexical aspect such as ‘telicity’ and ‘durativity’. It is shown that mismatches between agentivity/control and telicity/durativity are even more extensive in Yukatek than they are in English (Abusch 1985; L&RH, Van Valin & LaPolla 1997), providing new evidence against Dowty’s (1979) reconstruction of Vendler’s (1967) ‘time schemata of verbs’ in terms of argument structure configurations. Moreover, contrary to what has been claimed in earlier studies of Yukatek (Krämer & Wunderlich 1999, Lucy 1994), neither agentivity/control nor telicity/durativity turn out to be good predictors of verb class membership. Instead, the patterns of aspect-mood marking prove to be sensitive only to the presence or absense of state change, in a way that supports the unified analysis of all verbs of gradual change proposed by Kennedy & Levin (2001). The presence or absence of ‘internal causation’ (L&RH) may motivate the semantic interpretation of transitivization operations. An explicit semantics for the valence-changing operations is proposed, based on Parsons’s (1990) Neo-Davidsonian approach.

Abstract

Landscape terms reflect the relationship between geographic reality and human cognition. Are ‘mountains’, ‘rivers, ‘lakes’ and the like universally recognised in languages as naturally salient objects to be named? The landscape subproject is concerned with the interrelation between language, cognition and geography. Specifically, it investigates issues relating to how landforms are categorised cross-linguistically as well as the characteristics of place naming.

Abstract

Alphabetic orthographies show more or less ambiguous relations between spelling and sound patterns. In transparent orthographies, like Italian, the pronunciation can be predicted from the spelling and vice versa. Opaque orthographies, like English, often display unpredictable spelling–sound correspondences. In this paper we present a computational analysis of word-initial bi-directional spelling–sound correspondences for Dutch, English, French, German, and Hungarian, stated in entropy values for various grain sizes. This allows us to position the five languages on the continuum from opaque to transparent orthographies, both in spelling-to-sound and sound-to-spelling directions. The analysis is based on metrics derived from information theory, and therefore independent of any specific theory of visual word recognition as well as of any specific theoretical approach of orthography.

Abstract

Hierarchical predictive coding has been identified as a possible unifying principle of brain function, and recent work in cognitive neuroscience has examined how it may be affected by age–related changes. Using language comprehension as a test case, the present study aimed to dissociate age-related changes in prediction generation versus internal model adaptation following a prediction error. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were measured in a group of older adults (60–81 years; n = 40) as they read sentences of the form “The opposite of black is white/yellow/nice.” Replicating previous work in young adults, results showed a target-related P300 for the expected antonym (“white”; an effect assumed to reflect a prediction match), and a graded N400 effect for the two incongruous conditions (i.e. a larger N400 amplitude for the incongruous continuation not related to the expected antonym, “nice,” versus the incongruous associated condition, “yellow”). These effects were followed by a late positivity, again with a larger amplitude in the incongruous non-associated versus incongruous associated condition. Analyses using linear mixed-effects models showed that the target-related P300 effect and the N400 effect for the incongruous non-associated condition were both modulated by age, thus suggesting that age-related changes affect both prediction generation and model adaptation. However, effects of age were outweighed by the interindividual variability of ERP responses, as reflected in the high proportion of variance captured by the inclusion of by-condition random slopes for participants and items. We thus argue that – at both a neurophysiological and a functional level – the notion of general differences between language processing in young and older adults may only be of limited use, and that future research should seek to better understand the causes of interindividual variability in the ERP responses of older adults and its relation to cognitive performance.

Abstract

Disfluencies, such as uh and uhm, are known to help the listener in speech comprehension. For instance, disfluencies may elicit prediction of less accessible referents and may trigger listeners’ attention to the following word. However, recent work suggests differential processing of disfluencies in native and non-native speech. The current study investigated whether the beneficial effects of disfluencies on listeners’ attention are modulated by the (non-)native identity of the speaker. Using the Change Detection Paradigm, we investigated listeners’ recall accuracy for words presented in disfluent and fluent contexts, in native and non-native speech. We observed beneficial effects of both native and non-native disfluencies on listeners’ recall accuracy, suggesting that native and non-native disfluencies trigger listeners’ attention in a similar fashion.

Abstract

Speech perception involves a number of processes that deal with variation in the speech signal. One such process is normalization for speechrate: local temporal cues are perceived relative to the rate in the surrounding context. It is as yet unclear whether and how this perceptual effect interacts with higher level impressions of rate, such as a speaker’s nonnative identity. Nonnative speakers typically speak more slowly than natives, an experience that listeners take into account when explicitly judging the rate of nonnative speech. The present study investigated whether this is also reflected in implicit rate normalization. Results indicate that nonnative speech is implicitly perceived as faster than temporally-matched native speech, suggesting that the additional cognitive load of listening to an accent speeds up rate perception. Therefore, rate perception in speech is not dependent on syllable durations alone but also on the ease of processing of the temporal signal.

Abstract

How are space and time represented in the human mind? Here we evaluate two theoretical proposals, one suggesting a symmetric relationship between space and time (ATOM theory) and the other an asymmetric relationship (metaphor theory). In Experiment 1, Dutch-speakers saw 7-letter nouns that named concrete objects of various spatial lengths (tr. pencil, bench, footpath) and estimated how much time they remained on the screen. In Experiment 2, participants saw nouns naming temporal events of various durations (tr. blink, party, season) and estimated the words’ spatial length. Nouns that named short objects were judged to remain on the screen for a shorter time, and nouns that named longer objects to remain for a longer time. By contrast, variations in the duration of the event nouns’ referents had no effect on judgments of the words’ spatial length. This asymmetric pattern of cross-dimensional interference supports metaphor theory and challenges ATOM.

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.

Abstract

The notion of relational grammar is extented to ternary relations and illustrated by a fragment of English. Some of Peirce's terms for ternary relations are shown to be incorrect and corrected.

Abstract

This study explores how adults and children describe placement events (e.g., putting a book on a table) in a range of different languages (Finnish, English, German, Russian, Hindi, Tzeltal Maya, Spanish, and Turkish). Results show that the eight languages grammatically encode placement events in two main ways (Talmy, 1985, 1991), but further investigation reveals fine-grained crosslinguistic variation within each of the two groups. Children are sensitive to these finer-grained characteristics of the input language at an early age, but only when such features are perceptually salient. Our study demonstrates that a unitary notion of 'event' does not suffice to characterize complex but systematic patterns of event encoding crosslinguistically, and that children are sensitive to multiple influences, including the distributional properties of the target language, in constructing these patterns in their own speech.

Abstract

Attempts to explain children's grammatical development often assume a close initial match between units of meaning and units of form; for example, agents are said to map to sentence-subjects and actions to verbs. The meanings themselves, according to this view, are not influenced by language, but reflect children's universal non-linguistic way of understanding the world. This paper argues that, contrary to this position, meaning as it is expressed in children's early sentences is, from the beginning, organized on the basis of experience with the grammar and lexicon of a particular language. As a case in point, children learning English and Korean are shown to express meanings having to do with directed motion according to language-specific principles of semantic and grammatical structuring from the earliest stages of word combination.

Abstract

Reprinted from: Bowerman, M. (1990). Mapping thematic roles onto syntactic functions: Are children helped by innate linking rules? Linguistics, 28, 1253-1289.

Abstract

How similar are the event concepts encoded by different languages? So far, few event domains have been investigated in any detail. The PUT project extends the systematic cross-linguistic exploration of event categorisation to a new domain, that of placement events (putting things in places and removing them from places). The goal of this task is to explore cross-linguistic universality and variability in the semantic categorisation of placement events (e.g., ‘putting a cup on the table’).

Abstract

Reprinted from: Bowerman, M. (1981). The child's expression of meaning: Expanding relationships among lexicon, syntax, and morphology. In H. Winitz (Ed.), Native language and foreign language acquisition (pp. 172 189). New York: New York Academy of Sciences.

Abstract

Reprinted from Bowerman, M. (1973). Structural relationships in children's utterances: Semantic or syntactic? In T. Moore (Ed.), Cognitive development and the acquisition of language (pp. 197 213). New York: Academic Press

Abstract

Selected spontaneous errors of word choice made between the ages of about 2 and 5 by 2 children whose language development has been followed longitudinally were analyzed for clues to semantic development. The errors involved the children's occasional replacement of a contextually required word by a semantically similar word after weeks or months of using both words appropriately. Because the errors were not present from the beginning and because correct usage prevailed most of the time, the errors cannot be explained by existing accounts of semantic development, which ascribe children's word-choice errors to initial linguistic immaturity. A plausible alternative account likens the errors to adult "slips of the tongue" in which the speaker, in the process of constructing a sentence to express a given meaning, chooses incorrectly among competing semantically related words. Interpreted in this way, the errors indicate that the process of drawing words into structured semantic systems based on shared meaning components begins much earlier than experimental studies have suggested. They also provide evidence for certain differences between children and adults in the planning and monitoring of speech.

Abstract

To clarify whether the neural pathways concerning color processing are the same for natural objects, for artifacts objects and for non-sense objects we examined functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) responses during a covert naming task including the factors color (color vs. black&white (B&W)) and stimulus type (natural vs. artifacts vs. non-sense objects). Our results indicate that the superior parietal lobule and precuneus (BA 7) bilaterally, the right hippocampus and the right fusifom gyrus (V4) make part of a network responsible for color processing both for natural and artifacts objects, but not for non-sense objects. The recognition of non-sense colored objects compared to the recognition of color objects activated the posterior cingulate/precuneus (BA 7/23/31), suggesting that color attribute induces the mental operation of trying to associate a non-sense composition with a familiar objects. When color objects (both natural and artifacts) were contrasted with color nonobjects we observed activations in the right parahippocampal gyrus (BA 35/36), the superior parietal lobule (BA 7) bilaterally, the left inferior middle temporal region (BA 20/21) and the inferior and superior frontal regions (BA 10/11/47). These additional activations suggest that colored objects recruit brain regions that are related to visual semantic information/retrieval and brain regions related to visuo-spatial processing. Overall, the results suggest that color information is an attribute that improve object recognition (based on behavioral results) and activate a specific neural network related to visual semantic information that is more extensive than for B&W objects during object recognition

Abstract

In order to clarify whether the influence of color knowledge information in object recognition depends on the presence of the appropriate surface color, we designed a name—object verification task. The relationship between color and shape information provided by the name and by the object photo was manipulated in order to assess color interference independently of shape interference. We tested three different versions for each object: typically colored, black and white, and nontypically colored. The response times on the nonmatching trials were used to measure the interference between the name and the photo. We predicted that the more similar the name and the photo are, the longer it would take to respond. Overall, the color similarity effect disappeared in the black-and-white and nontypical color conditions, suggesting that the influence of color knowledge on object recognition depends on the presence of the appropriate surface color information.

Abstract

This study investigated pronunciation variants of word-final obstruent-liquid-schwa (OLS) clusters in casual French and the variables predicting the absence of the phonemes in these clusters. In a dataset of 291 noun tokens extracted from a corpus of casual conversations, we observed that in 80.7% of the tokens, at least one phoneme was absent and that in no less than 15.5% the whole cluster was absent (e.g., /mis/ for ministre). Importantly, the probability of a phoneme being absent was higher if the following phoneme was absent as well. These data show that reduction can affect several phonemes at once and is not restricted to just a handful of (function) words. Moreover, our results demonstrate that the absence of each single phoneme is affected by the speaker's tendency to increase ease of articulation and to adapt a word's pronunciation variant to the time available.

Abstract

It has been fifty years since Levelt’s monograph On Binocular Rivalry (1965) was published, but its four propositions that describe the relation between stimulus strength and the phenomenology of binocular rivalry remain a benchmark for theorists and experimentalists even today. In this review, we will revisit the original conception of the four propositions and the scientific landscape in which this happened. We will also provide a brief update concerning distributions of dominance durations, another aspect of Levelt’s monograph that has maintained a prominent presence in the field. In a critical evaluation of Levelt’s propositions against current knowledge of binocular rivalry we will then demonstrate that the original propositions are not completely compatible with what is known today, but that they can, in a straightforward way, be modified to encapsulate the progress that has been made over the past fifty years. The resulting modified, propositions are shown to apply to a broad range of bistable perceptual phenomena, not just binocular rivalry, and they allow important inferences about the underlying neural systems. We argue that these inferences reflect canonical neural properties that play a role in visual perception in general, and we discuss ways in which future research can build on the work reviewed here to attain a better understanding of these properties

Abstract

The adverb now in English (nu in Dutch) can draw listeners’ attention to an upcoming contrast (e.g., ‘Put X in Y. Now put X in Z’). In Dutch, but not English, the position of this sequential adverb may disambiguate which constituent is contrasted. We investigated whether and how the intonational realization of now/nu is varied to signal different scopes and whether it interacts with word order. Three contrast conditions (contrast in object, location, or both) were produced by eight Dutch and eight English speakers. Results showed no consistent use of word order for scope disambiguation in Dutch. Importantly, independent of language, an unaccented now/nu signaled a contrasting object while an accented now/nu signaled a contrast in the location. Since these intonational patterns were independent of word order, we interpreted the results in the framework of grammatical saliency: now/nu appears to be unmarked when the contrast lies in a salient constituent (the object) but marked with a prominent rise when a less salient constituent is contrasted (the location).

Abstract

Sentences with a contrastive intonation contour are usually produced when the speaker entertains alternatives to the accented words. However, such contrastive sentences are frequently produced without making the alternatives explicit for the listener. In two cross-modal associative priming experiments we tested in Dutch whether such contextual alternatives become available to listeners upon hearing a sentence with a contrastive intonation contour compared with a sentence with a non-contrastive one. The first experiment tested the recognition of contrastive associates (contextual alternatives to the sentence-final primes), the second one the recognition of non-contrastive associates (generic associates which are not alternatives). Results showed that contrastive associates were facilitated when the primes occurred in sentences with a contrastive intonation contour but not in sentences with a non-contrastive intonation. Non-contrastive associates were weakly facilitated independent of intonation. Possibly, contrastive contours trigger an accommodation mechanism by which listeners retrieve the contrast available for the speaker.

Abstract

Sentences with a contrastive intonation contour are usually produced when the speaker entertains alternatives to the accented words. However, such contrastive sentences are frequently produced without making the alternatives explicit for the listener. In two cross-modal associative priming experiments we tested in Dutch whether such contextual alternatives become available to listeners upon hearing a sentence with a contrastive intonation contour compared with a sentence with a non-contrastive one. The first experiment tested the recognition of contrastive associates (contextual alternatives to the sentence-final primes), the second one the recognition of non-contrastive associates (generic associates which are not alternatives). Results showed that contrastive associates were facilitated when the primes occurred in sentences with a contrastive intonation contour but not in sentences with a non-contrastive intonation. Non-contrastive associates were weakly facilitated independent of intonation. Possibly, contrastive contours trigger an accommodation mechanism by which listeners retrieve the contrast available for the speaker.

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.

Abstract

Within the ISLE Metadata Initiative (IMDI) project a user-friendly editor to enter metadata descriptions and a browser operating on the linked metadata descriptions were developed. Both tools support the usage of Controlled Vocabulary (CV) repositories by means of the specification of an URL where the formal CV definition data is available.

Abstract

The recent increase in the number and complexity of the language resources available on the Internet is followed by a similar increase of available tools for linguistic analysis. Ideally the user does not need to be confronted with the question in how to match tools with resources. If resource repositories and tool repositories offer adequate metadata information and a suitable exchange protocol is developed this matching process could be performed (semi-) automatically.

Abstract

Native speakers of Dutch with English as a second language and native speakers of English participated in an English lexical decision experiment. Phonemes in real words were replaced by others from which they are hard to distinguish for Dutch listeners. Non-native listeners judged the resulting near-words more often as a word than native listeners. This not only happened when the phonemes that were exchanged did not exist as separate phonemes in the native language Dutch, but also when phoneme pairs that do exist in Dutch were used in word-final position, where they are not distinctive in Dutch. In an English bimodal priming experiment with similar groups of participants, word pairs were used which differed in one phoneme. These phonemes were hard to distinguish for the non-native listeners. Whereas in native listening both words inhibited each other, in non-native listening presentation of one word led to unresolved competition between both words. The results suggest that inaccurate phoneme processing by non-native listeners leads to the activation of spurious lexical competitors.

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

Abstract

This paper shows that the effect of different types of noise on recognition of different phonemes by native versus non-native listeners is highly variable, even within classes of phonemes with the same manner or place of articulation. In a phoneme identification experiment, English and Dutch listeners heard all 24 English consonants in VCV stimuli in quiet and in three types of noise: competing talker, speech-shaped noise, and modulated speech-shaped noise (all with SNRs of −6 dB). Differential effects of noise type for English and Dutch listeners were found for eight consonants (/p t k g m n ŋ r/) but not for the other 16 consonants. For those eight consonants, effects were again highly variable: each noise type hindered non-native listeners more than native listeners for some of the target sounds, but none of the noise types did so for all of the target sounds, not even for phonemes with the same manner or place of articulation. The results imply that the noise types employed will strongly affect the outcomes of any study of native and non-native speech perception in noise.

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.

Abstract

This study examined whether listeners align to reduced speech. Participants were asked to shadow sentences from a casual speech corpus containing canonical and reduced targets. Participants' productions showed alignment: durations of canonical targets were longer than durations of reduced targets; and participants often imitated the segment types (canonical versus reduced) in both targets. The effect sizes were similar to previous work on alignment. In addition, shadowed productions were overall longer in duration than the original stimuli and this effect was larger for reduced than canonical targets. A possible explanation for this finding is that listeners reconstruct canonical forms from reduced forms.

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.

Abstract

The aim of the present study was to investigate whether speech-in-speech recognition is affected by variation in the target-background timing relationship. Specifically, we examined whether within trial synchronous or asynchronous onset and offset of the target and background speech influenced speech-in-speech recognition. Native English listeners were presented with English target sentences in the presence of English or Dutch background speech. Importantly, only the short-term temporal context –in terms of onset and offset synchrony or asynchrony of the target and background speech– varied across conditions. Participants’ task was to repeat back the English target sentences. The results showed an effect of synchronicity for English-in-English but not for English-in-Dutch recognition, indicating that familiarity with the English background lead in the asynchronous English-in-English condition might have attracted attention towards the English background. Overall, this study demonstrated that speech-in-speech recognition is sensitive to the target-background timing relationship, revealing an important role for variation in the local context of the target-background relationship as it extends beyond the limits of the time-frame of the to-be-recognized target sentence.

Abstract

This study examined the temporal dynamics of spoken word recognition in noise and background speech. In two visual-world experiments, English participants listened to target words while looking at four pictures on the screen: a target (e.g. candle), an onset competitor (e.g. candy), a rhyme competitor (e.g. sandal), and an unrelated distractor (e.g. lemon). Target words were presented in quiet, mixed with broadband noise, or mixed with background speech. Results showed that lexical competition changes throughout the observation window as a function of what is presented in the background. These findings suggest that, rather than being strictly sequential, stream segregation and lexical competition interact during spoken word recognition

Abstract

How are events framed in narrative? Speakers of English (a 'satellite-framed' language), when 'reading' Mercer Mayer's wordless picture book 'Frog, Where Are You?', find the story self-evident: a boy has a dog and a pet frog; the frog escapes and runs away; the boy and dog look for it across hill and dale, through woods and over a cliff, until they find it and return home with a baby frog child of the original pet frog. In Tzeltal, as spoken in a Mayan community in southern Mexico, the story is somewhat different, because the language structures event descriptions differently. Tzeltal is in part a 'verb-framed' language with a set of Path-encoding motion verbs, so that the bare bones of the Frog story can consist of verbs translating as 'go'/'pass by'/'ascend'/ 'descend'/ 'arrive'/'return'. But Tzeltal also has satellite-framing adverbials, grammaticized from the same set of motion verbs, which encode the direction of motion or the orientation of static arrays. Furthermore, motion is not generally encoded barebones, but vivid pictorial detail is provided by positional verbs which can describe the position of the Figure as an outcome of a motion event; motion and stasis are thereby combined in a single event description. (For example: jipot jawal "he has been thrown (by the deer) lying¬_face_upwards_spread-eagled". This paper compares the use of these three linguistic resources in frog narratives from 14 Tzeltal adults and 21 children, looks at their development in the narratives of children between the ages of 4-12, and considers the results in relation to those from Berman and Slobin's (1996) comparative study of adult and child Frog stories.

Abstract

Languages vary typologically in their lexicalization of Path of motion (Talmy 1991). Furthermore, lexicalization patterns are argued to affect syntactic packaging at the level of the clause (e.g. Slobin 1996b) and tend to transfer from a first (L1) to a second language (L2) in second language acquisition (e.g. Cadierno 2004). From this crosslinguistic and developmental evidence, typological preferences for Path expression appear highly robust features of a first language. The current study examines the extent to which preferences for Path encoding really are as enduring as they seem by investigating (1) whether Japanese follows patterns identified for other verb-framed languages like Spanish, and (2) whether patterns established in one’s first language can change after acquisition of a second language. L1 performance of native speakers of Japanese with intermediate-level knowledge of English was compared to that of monolingual speakers of Japanese and English. Results showed that monolingual Japanese speakers followed basic lexicalization patterns typical of other verb-framed languages, but with different realizations of Path packaging within the clause. Moreover, non-monolingual Japanese speakers displayed both English- and Japanese-like patterns for lexicalization with significantly more Path information per clause than either group of monolinguals. Implications for typology and second language acquisition are discussed.

Abstract

A study is presented on the effects of discourse–semantic and lexical–syntactic information during spoken sentence processing. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were registered while subjects listened to discourses that ended in a sentence with a temporary syntactic ambiguity. The prior discourse–semantic information biased toward one analysis of the temporary ambiguity, whereas the lexical-syntactic information allowed only for the alternative analysis. The ERP results show that discourse–semantic information can momentarily take precedence over syntactic information, even if this violates grammatical gender agreement rules.

Abstract

This is an encyclopedia entry surveying anthropological approaches to cognition and culture.

Abstract

Two experiments are reported that provide evidence on task-induced effects during
visual lexical processing in a primetarget semantic priming paradigm. The research focuses on target expectancy effects by manipulating the proportion of semantically related and unrelated word pairs. In Experiment 1, a lexical decision task was used and reaction times (RTs) and event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were obtained. In Experiment 2, subjects silently read the stimuli, without any additional task demands, and ERPs were recorded. The RT and ERP results of Experiment 1 demonstrate that an expectancy mechanism contributed to the priming effect when a high proportion of related word pairs was presented. The ERP results of Experiment 2 show that in the absence of extraneous task requirements, an expectancy mechanism is not active. However, a standard ERP semantic priming effect was obtained in Experiment 2. The combined results show that priming effects due to relatedness proportion are induced by task demands and are not a standard aspect of online lexical processing.

Abstract

How are events framed in narrative? Speakers of English (a 'satellite-framed' language), when 'reading' Mercer Mayer's wordless picture book 'Frog, Where Are You?', find the story self-evident: a boy has a dog and a pet frog; the frog escapes and runs away; the boy and dog look for it across hill and dale, through woods and over a cliff, until they find it and return home with a baby frog child of the original pet frog. In Tzeltal, as spoken in a Mayan community in southern Mexico, the story is somewhat different, because the language structures event descriptions differently. Tzeltal is in part a 'verb-framed' language with a set of Path-encoding motion verbs, so that the bare bones of the Frog story can consist of verbs translating as 'go'/'pass by'/'ascend'/ 'descend'/ 'arrive'/'return'. But Tzeltal also has satellite-framing adverbials, grammaticized from the same set of motion verbs, which encode the direction of motion or the orientation of static arrays. Furthermore, vivid pictorial detail is provided by positional verbs which can describe the position of the Figure as an outcome of a motion event; motion and stasis are thereby combined in a single event description. (For example:  jipot jawal "he has been thrown (by the deer) lying­_face_upwards_spread-eagled". This paper compares the use of these three linguistic resources in Frog Story narratives from  Tzeltal adults and children, looks at their development in the narratives of children, and considers the results in relation to those from Berman and Slobin's (1996) comparative study of adult and child Frog stories.

Abstract

In a famous paper Harvey Sacks (1974) argued that the sequential properties of greeting conventions, as well as those governing the flow of information, mean that 'everyone has to lie'. In this paper I show this dictum to be equally true in the Tzeltal Mayan community of Tenejapa, in southern Mexico, but for somewhat different reasons. The phenomenon of interest is the practice of routine fearsome threats to small children. Based on a longitudinal corpus of videotaped and tape-recorded naturally-occurring interaction between caregivers and children in five Tzeltal families, the study examines sequences of Tzeltal caregivers' speech aimed at controlling the children's behaviour and analyzes the children's developing pragmatic skills in handling such controlling utterances, from prelinguistic infants to age five and over. Infants in this society are considered to be vulnerable, easily scared or shocked into losing their 'souls', and therefore at all costs to be protected and hidden from outsiders and other dangers. Nonetheless, the chief form of control (aside from physically removing a child from danger) is to threaten, saying things like "Don't do that, or I'll take you to the clinic for an injection," These overt scare-threats - rarely actually realized - lead Tzeltal children by the age of 2;6 to 3;0 to the understanding that speech does not necessarily convey true propositions, and to a sensitivity to the underlying motivations for utterances distinct from their literal meaning. By age 4;0 children perform the same role to their younger siblings;they also begin to use more subtle non-true (e.g. ironic) utterances. The caretaker practice described here is related to adult norms of social lying, to the sociocultural context of constraints on information flow, social control through gossip, and the different notion of 'truth' that arises in the context of non-verifiability characteristic of a small-scale nonliterate society.

Abstract

This is a reprint of the Brown and Levinson 2000 article.

Abstract

This paper surveys the concept of culture as used in recent work in cognitive science, assessing the very different (and sometimes minimal) role 'culture' plays in different branches and schools of linguistics: generative approaches, descriptive/comparative linguistics, typology, cognitive linguistics, semantics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, linguistic and cognitive anthropology. The paper then describes research on one specific topic, spatial language and conceptualization, describes a methodology for studying it cross-linguistically and cross-culturally. Finally, it considers the implications of results in this area for how we can fruitfully conceptualize 'culture', arguing for an approach which shifts back and forth between individual mind and collective representations, between universals and particulars, and ties 'culture' to our biological roots.

Abstract

This task has two parts: (i) video-taped elicitation of the range of possibilities for referring to persons and places, and (ii) observations of (first) references to persons and places in video-taped natural interaction. The goal of this task is to establish the repertoires of referential terms (and other practices) used for referring to persons and to places in particular languages and cultures, and provide examples of situated use of these kinds of referential practices in natural conversation. This data will form the basis for cross-language comparison, and for formulating hypotheses about general principles underlying the deployment of such referential terms in natural language usage.

Abstract

Interaction, for all that it has an ethological base, is culturally constituted, and how new social members are enculturated into the interactional practices of the society is of critical interest to our understanding of interaction – how much is learned, how variable is it across cultures – as well as to our understanding of the role of culture in children’s social-cognitive development. The goal of this task is to document the nature of caregiver infant interaction in different cultures, especially during the critical age of 9-15 months when children come to have an understanding of others’ intentions. This is of interest to all students of interaction; it does not require specialist knowledge of children.

Abstract

How do children isolate the semantic package contained in verb roots in the Mayan language Tzeltal? One might imagine that the canonical CVC shape of roots characteristic of Mayan languages would make the job simple, but the root is normally preceded and followed by affixes which mask its identity. Pye (1983) demonstrated that, in Kiche' Mayan, prosodic salience overrides semantic salience, and children's first words in Kiche' are often composed of only the final (stressed) syllable constituted by the final consonant of the CVC root and a 'meaningless' termination suffix. Intonation thus plays a crucial role in early Kiche' morphological development. Tzeltal presents a rather different picture: The first words of children around the age of 1;6 are bare roots, children strip off all prefixes and suffixes which are obligatory in adult speech. They gradually add them, starting with the suffixes (which receive the main stress), but person prefixes are omitted in some contexts past a child's third birthday, and one obligatory aspectual prefix (x-) is systematically omitted by the four children in my longitudinal study even after they are four years old. Tzeltal children's first verbs generally show faultless isolation of the root. An account in terms of intonation or stress cannot explain this ability (the prefixes are not all syllables; the roots are not always stressed). This paper suggests that probable clues include the fact that the CVC root stays constant across contexts (with some exceptions) whereas the affixes vary, that there are some linguistic contexts where the root occurs without any prefixes (relatively frequent in the input), and that the Tzeltal discourse convention of responding by repeating with appropriate deictic alternation (e.g., "I see it." "Oh, you see it.") highlights the root.

Abstract

This paper reports the results of a study of Tzeltal questions and their responses, based on a collection of 419 question/response sequences drawn from video recordings of ‘maximally casual’ naturally occurring face-to-face interactions in a Tzeltal (Mayan) community. I describe the lexical and grammatical resources for formulating content and polar questions in Tzeltal, the different kinds of social actions that questions can be used to perform and their relative frequency in the data, and the characteristic properties of responses to questions. This is part of a large-scale comparative study of questions in 10 different languages, and we find that Tzeltal is like most others in making much more use of polar than of content questions, and in the strong tendency for confirming answers to polar questions. Tzeltal is however unusual in three respects: in the comparatively minimal use of gaze to select next speaker, in the frequency with which answers take the form of repeats, and in the complete absence of visible-only responses (e.g., nods or head-shakes). There are also some language-specific properties of question–answer sequences that reveal cultural shaping of sequencing in conversation.

Abstract

This is a Spanish translation of Brown 2002, 'Everyone has to lie in Tzeltal'. Translated by B. E. Alvaraz Klein

Abstract

This study is about the principles for constructing polite speech. We describe and account for some remarkable parallelisms in the linguistic construction of utterances with which people express themselves in different languges and cultures. A motive for these parallels is isolated - politeness, broadly defined to include both polite friendliness and polite formality - and a universal model is constructed outlining the abstract principles underlying polite usages. This is based on the detailed study of three unrelated languages and cultures: the Tamil of south India, the Tzeltal spoken by Mayan Indians in Chiapas, Mexico, and the English of the USA and England, supplemented by examples from other cultures. Of general interest is the point that underneaath the apparent diversity of polite behaviour in different societies lie some general pan-human principles of social interaction, and the model of politenss provides a tool for analysing the quality of social relations in any society.

Abstract

Speaking begins with the formulation of an intended preverbal message and linguistic encoding of this information. The transition from thought to speech occurs incrementally, with cascading planning at subsequent levels of production. In this article, we aim to specify the mechanisms that support incremental message preparation. We contrast two hypotheses about the mechanisms responsible for incorporating message-level information into a linguistic plan. According to the Initial Preparation view, messages can be encoded as fluent utterances if all information is ready before speaking begins. By contrast, on the Continuous Incrementality view, messages can be continually prepared and updated throughout the production process, allowing for fluent production even if new information is added to the message while speaking is underway. Testing these hypotheses, eye-tracked speakers in two experiments produced unscripted, conjoined noun phrases with modifiers. Both experiments showed that new message elements can be incrementally incorporated into the utterance even after articulation begins, consistent with a Continuous Incrementality view of message planning, in which messages percolate to linguistic encoding immediately as that information becomes available in the mind of the speaker. We conclude by discussing the functional role of incremental message planning in conversational speech and the situations in which this continuous incremental planning would be most likely to be observed

Abstract

Genes of the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) have recently been shown to have neuronal functions in the thalamus and hippocampus. Common genetic variants in the Human Leukocyte Antigens (HLA) region, human homologue of the MHC locus, are associated with small effects on susceptibility to schizophrenia, while volumetric changes of the thalamus and hippocampus have also been linked to schizophrenia. We therefore investigated whether common variants of the HLA would affect volumetric variation of the thalamus and hippocampus. We analyzed thalamus and hippocampus volumes, as measured using structural magnetic resonance imaging, in 1.265 healthy participants. These participants had also been genotyped using genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) arrays. We imputed genotypes for single nucleotide polymorphisms at high density across the HLA locus, as well as HLA allotypes and HLA amino acids, by use of a reference population dataset that was specifically targeted to the HLA region. We detected a significant association of the SNP rs17194174 with thalamus volume (nominal P=0.0000017, corrected P=0.0039), as well as additional SNPs within the same region of linkage disequilibrium. This effect was largely lateralized to the left thalamus and is localized within a genomic region previously associated with schizophrenia. The associated SNPs are also clustered within a potential regulatory element, and a region of linkage disequilibrium that spans genes expressed in the thalamus, including HLA-A. Our data indicate that genetic variation within the HLA region influences the volume and asymmetry of the human thalamus. The molecular mechanisms underlying this association may relate to HLA influences on susceptibility to schizophrenia

Abstract

Background Retracing the genetic histories of the descendant populations of the Slave Trade (16th-19th centuries) is particularly challenging due to the diversity of African ethnic groups involved and the different hybridisation processes with Europeans and Amerindians, which have blurred their original genetic inheritances. The Noir Marron in French Guiana are the direct descendants of maroons who escaped from Dutch plantations in the current day Surinam. They represent an original ethnic group with a highly blended culture. Uniparental markers (mtDNA and NRY) coupled with HTLV-1 sequences (env and LTR) were studied to establish the genetic relationships linking them to African American and African populations. Results All genetic systems presented a high conservation of the African gene pool (African ancestry: mtDNA = 99.3%; NRY = 97.6%; HTLV-1 env = 20/23; HTLV-1 LTR = 6/8). Neither founder effect nor genetic drift was detected and the genetic diversity is within a range commonly observed in Africa. Higher genetic similarities were observed with the populations inhabiting the Bight of Benin (from Ivory Coast to Benin). Other ancestries were identified but they presented an interesting sex-bias. Whilst male origins spread throughout the north of the bight (from Benin to Senegal), female origins were spread throughout the south (from the Ivory Coast to Angola). Conclusions The Noir Marron are unique in having conserved their African genetic ancestry, despite major cultural exchanges with Amerindians and Europeans through inhabiting the same region for four centuries. Their maroon identity and the important number of slaves deported in this region have maintained the original African diversity. All these characteristics permit to identify a major origin located in the former region of the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin; regions highly impacted by slavery, from which goes a sex-biased longitudinal gradient of ancestry.

Abstract

Under noise or speech reductions, young adult listeners flexibly adjust the parameters of lexical activation and competition to allow for speech signal unreliability. Consequently, mismatches in the input are treated more leniently such that lexical candidates are not immediately deactivated. Using eyetracking, we assessed whether this modulation of recognition dynamics also occurs for older listeners. Dutch participants (aged 60+) heard Dutch sentences containing a critical word while viewing displays of four line drawings. The name of one picture shared either onset or rhyme with the critical word (i.e., was a phonological competitor). Sentences were either clear and noise-free, or had several phonemes replaced by bursts of noise. A larger preference for onset competitors than for rhyme competitors was observed in both clear and noise conditions; performance did not alter across condition. This suggests that dynamic adjustment of spoken-word recognition parameters in response to noise is less available to older listeners.

Abstract

For multimodal annotations an exhaustive encoding system for gestures was developed to facilitate research. The structural requirements of multimodal annotations were analyzed to develop an Abstract Corpus Model which is the basis for a powerful annotation and exploitation tool for multimedia recordings and the definition of the XML-based EUDICO Annotation Format. Finally, a metadata-based data management environment has been setup to facilitate resource discovery and especially corpus management. Bt means of an appropriate digitization policy and their online availability researchers have been able to build up a large corpus covering gesture and sign language data.