Publications

Abstract

This study investigates the effects of adult age and speaker abilities on articulatory precision for sibilant productions. Normal-hearing young adults with
better sibilant discrimination have been shown to produce greater spectral sibilant contrasts. As reduced auditory feedback may gradually impact on feedforward
commands, we investigate whether articulatory precision as indexed by spectral mean for [s] and [S] decreases with age, and more particularly with agerelated
hearing loss. Younger, middle-aged and older adults read aloud words starting with the sibilants [s] or [S]. Possible effects of cognitive, perceptual, linguistic and sociolinguistic background variables
on the sibilants’ acoustics were also investigated. Sibilant contrasts were less pronounced for male than female speakers. Most importantly, for the fricative
[s], the spectral mean was modulated by individual high-frequency hearing loss, but not age. These results underscore that even mild hearing loss already affects articulatory precision.

Abstract

This paper examines the language-specific aspect of the TIME PASSING IS MOTION metaphor and suggests that the temporal construal of time can be influenced by a person's second language. Ahrens and Huang (2002) have analyzed the source domain of MOTION for the TIME metaphor into two special cases. In the special case one, TIME PASSING is an object that moves towards an ego. For example, qimuokao kuai dao le "the final exam is approaching." In the special case two, TIME PASSING is a point (that a plural ego is attached to) that moves across a landscape. For example, women kuai dao qimuokao le "we are approaching the final exam." In addition, in English, the ego in the special case one faces the future while in Chinese, the ego faces the past. The current experiment hypothesizes that English influences the choice of the orientation of the ego in native Chinese speakers who speak English as the second language. 54 subjects are asked to switch the clock time one hour forward. Results show that native Chinese speakers living in the Chinese speaking country tend to move the clock one hour forward to the past (92%) while native Chinese speakers living in an English speaking country are less likely to do so (60%). This implies that the experience of English influences the conceptualization of time in Mandarin Chinese.

Abstract

A recurrently connected attractor neural network with a Hebbian learning rule is currently our best ANN analogy for a piece cortex. Functionally biological memory operates on a spectrum of time scales with regard to induction and retention, and it is modulated in complex ways by sub-cortical neuromodulatory systems. Moreover, biological memory networks are commonly believed to be highly distributed and engage many co-operating cortical areas. Here we focus on the temporal aspects of induction and retention of memory in a connectionist type attractor memory model of a piece of cortex. A continuous time, forgetful Bayesian-Hebbian learning rule is described and compared to the characteristics of LTP and LTD seen experimentally. More generally, an attractor network implementing this learning rule can operate as a long-term, intermediate-term, or short-term memory. Modulation of the print-now signal of the learning rule replicates some experimental memory phenomena, like e.g. the von Restorff effect.

Abstract

Research in body language with use of gesture recognition and speech analysis has gained much attention in the recent times, influencing disciplines related to image and speech processing.

This study aims to design the Media Query Language (MQL) (Lenkiewicz, et al. 2012) combined with the Linguistic Media Query Interface (LMQI) for Elan (Wittenburg, et al. 2006). The system integrated with the new achievements in audio-video recognition will allow querying media files with predefined gesture phases (or motion primitives) and speech characteristics as well as combinations of both. For the purpose of this work the predefined motions and speech characteristics are called patterns for atomic elements and actions for a sequence of patterns. The main assumption is that a user-customized library of patterns and actions and automated media annotation with LMQI will reduce annotation time, hence decreasing costs of creation of annotated corpora. Increase of the number of annotated data should influence the speed and number of possible research in disciplines in which human multimodal interaction is a subject of interest and where annotated corpora are required.

Abstract

Describes the history of the field in terms of its multidisciplinary "roots" so that readers from different disciplines can concentrate on, or selectively read, the corresponding chapters. * Explores the history of research on brain and language, making the book valuable for aphasiologists, communication scientists and neuroscientists of language. * Covers the history of linguistic approaches to psycholinguistics - making the book of interest to both theoretical and applied linguists. * Written by a scientist whose own contribution to the field has been seminal, resulting in a work that will be seen as the definitive of psycholinguistics, for many years to come How do we manage to speak and understand language? How do children acquire these skills and how does the brain support them?These psycholinguistic issues have been studied for more than two centuries. Though many Psycholinguists tend to consider their history as beginning with the Chomskyan "cognitive revolution" of the late 1950s/1960s, the history of empirical psycholinguistics actually goes back to the end of the 18th century. This is the first book to comprehensively treat this "pre-Chomskyan" history. It tells the fascinating history of the doctors, pedagogues, linguists and psychologists who created this discipline, looking at how they made their important discoveries about the language regions in the brain, about the high-speed accessing of words in speaking and listening, on the child's invention of syntax, on the disruption of language in aphasic patients and so much more. The book is both a history of ideas as well of the men and women whose intelligence, brilliant insights, fads, fallacies, cooperations, and rivalries created this discipline. Psycholinguistics has four historical roots, which, by the end of the 19th century, had merged. By then, the discipline, usually called the psychology of language, was established. The first root was comparative linguistics, which raised the issue of the psychological origins of language. The second root was the study of language in the brain, with Franz Gall as the pioneer and the Broca and Wernicke discoveries as major landmarks. The third root was the diary approach to child development, which emerged from Rousseau's Émile. The fourth root was the experimental laboratory approach to speech and language processing, which originated from Franciscus Donders' mental chronometry. Wilhelm Wundt unified these four approaches in his monumental Die Sprache of 1900. These four perspectives of psycholinguistics continued into the 20th century but in quite divergent frameworks. There was German consciousness and thought psychology, Swiss/French and Prague/Viennese structuralism, Russian and American behaviorism, and almost aggressive holism in aphasiology. As well as reviewing all these perspectives, the book looks at the deep disruption of the field during the Third Reich and its optimistic, multidisciplinary re-emergence during the 1950s with the mathematical theory of communication as a major impetus. A tour de force from one of the seminal figures in the field, this book will be essential reading for all linguists, psycholinguists, and psychologists with an interest in language. Readership: Linguists, psychologists, aphasiologists, communication scientists, cognitive (neuro-)scientists, whether professionals or graduate students. Historians of science

Abstract

Different linguistic modalities (speech or sign) offer different levels at which signals can iconically represent the world. One hypothesis argues that this iconicity has an effect on how linguistic structure emerges. However, exactly how and why these effects might come about is in need of empirical investigation. In this contribution, we present a signal creation experiment in which both the signalling space and the meaning space are manipulated so that different levels and types of iconicity are available between the signals and meanings. Signals are produced using an infrared sensor that detects the hand position of participants to generate auditory feedback. We find evidence that iconicity may be maladaptive for the discrimination of created signals. Further, we implemented Hidden Markov Models to characterise the structure within signals, which was also used to inform a metric for iconicity.

Abstract

Since the cognitive revolution, a widely held assumption has been that—whereas content may vary across cultures—cognitive processes would be universal, especially those on the more basic levels. Even if scholars do not fully subscribe to this assumption, they often conceptualize, or tend to investigate, cognition as if it were universal (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). The insight that universality must not be presupposed but scrutinized is now gaining ground, and cognitive diversity has become one of the hot (and controversial) topics in the field (Norenzayan & Heine, 2005). We argue that, for scrutinizing the cultural dimension of cognition, taking an anthropological perspective is invaluable, not only for the task itself, but for attenuating the home-field disadvantages that are inescapably linked to cross-cultural research (Medin, Bennis, & Chandler, 2010).

Abstract

Lexical knowledge influences how human listeners make decisions about speech sounds. Positive lexical effects (faster responses to target sounds in words than in nonwords) are robust across several laboratory tasks, while negative effects (slower responses to targets in more word-like nonwords than in less word-like nonwords) have been found in phonetic decision tasks but not phoneme monitoring tasks. The present experiments tested whether negative lexical effects are therefore a task-specific consequence of the forced choice required in phonetic decision. We compared phoneme monitoring and phonetic decision performance using the same Dutch materials in each task. In both experiments there were positive lexical effects, but no negative lexical effects. We observe that in all studies showing negative lexical effects, the materials were made by cross-splicing, which meant that they contained perceptual evidence supporting the lexically-consistent phonemes. Lexical knowledge seems to influence phonemic decision-making only when there is evidence for the lexically-consistent phoneme in the speech signal.

Abstract

We briefly describe the Merge model of phonemic decision-making, and, in the light of general arguments about the possible role of feedback in spoken-word recognition, defend Merge's feedforward structure. Merge not only accounts adequately for the data, without invoking feedback connections, but does so in a parsimonious manner.

Abstract

Most current theories of lexical access in speech production are designed to capture the behaviour of young adults - typically college students. However, young adults represent a minority of the world's speakers. For theories of speech production, the question arises of how the young adults' speech develops out of the quite different speech observed in children and adolescents and how the speech of young adults evolves into the speech observed in older persons. Though a model of adult speech production need not include a detailed account language development, it should be compatible with current knowledge about the development of language across the lifespan. In this sense, theories of young adults' speech production may be constrained by theories and findings concerning the development of language with age. Conversely, any model of language acquisition or language change in older adults should, of course, be compatible with existing theories of the "ideal" speech found in young speakers. For this SpecialIssue we elicited papers on the development of speech production in childhood, adult speech production, and changes in speech production in older adults. The structure of the Special Issue is roughly chronological, focusing in turn on the language production of children (papers by Behrens; Goffman, Heisler & Chakraborty; Vousden & Maylor), young adults (papers by Roelofs; Schiller, Jansma, Peters & Levelt; Finocchiaro & Caramazza; Hartsuiker & Barkhuysen; Bonin, Malardier, Meot & Fayol) and older adults (papers by Mortensen, Meyer & Humphreys; Spieler & Griffin; Altmann & Kemper). We hope that the work compiled here will encourage researchers in any of these areas to consider the theories and findings in the neighbouring fields.

Abstract

Frequent and predictable words are generally pronounced with less effort and are therefore acoustically more reduced than less frequent or unpredictable words. Local predictability can be operationalised by Transitional Probability (TP), which indicates how likely a word is to occur given its immediate context. We investigated whether and how probabilistic reduction effects on word durations change with adult age when reading aloud content words embedded in sentences. The results showed equally large frequency effects on verb and noun durations for both younger (Mage = 20 years) and older (Mage = 68 years) adults. Backward TP also affected word duration for younger and older adults alike. ForwardTP, however, had no significant effect on word duration in either age group. Our results resemble earlier findings of more robust BackwardTP effects compared to ForwardTP effects. Furthermore, unlike often reported decline in predictive processing with aging, probabilistic reduction effects remain stable across adulthood.

Abstract

It has been observed by several researchers that the Khoisan palate tends to lack a prominent alveolar ridge. A preliminary biomechanical model of click production was created to examine if these sounds might be subject to an anatomical bias associated with alveolar ridge size. Results suggest the bias is plausible, taking the form of decreased articulatory effort and improved volume change characteristics, however, further modelling and experimental research is required to solidify the claim.

Abstract

This paper investigated the learnability and generalizability of French schwa alternation by Dutch low-proficiency second language learners. We trained 40 participants on 24 new schwa words by exposing them equally often to the reduced and full forms of these words. We then assessed participants' accuracy and reaction times to these newly learnt words as well as 24 previously encountered schwa words with an auditory lexical decision task. Our results show learning of the new words in both forms. This suggests that lack of exposure is probably the main cause of learners' difficulties with reduced forms. Nevertheless, the full forms were slightly better recognized than the reduced ones, possibly due to phonetic and phonological properties of the reduced forms. We also observed no generalization to previously encountered words, suggesting that our participants stored both of the learnt word forms and did not create a rule that applies to all schwa words.

Abstract

We lezen en horen dagelijks duizenden woorden zonder dat het ons enige moeite lijkt te kosten. Toch speelt zich in ons brein ondertussen een complex mentaal proces af, waarbij tal van andere woorden dan het aangeboden woord, ook actief worden. Dit gebeurt met name wanneer die andere woorden overeenkomen met de feitelijk aangeboden woorden in spelling, uitspraak of betekenis. Deze activatie als gevolg van gelijkenis strekt zich zelfs uit tot andere talen: ook daarin worden gelijkende woorden actief. Waar liggen de grenzen van dit activatieproces? Activeer je bij het verwerken van het Engelse woord 'steam' ook het Nederlandse woord 'stram'(een zogenaamd 'buurwoord)? En activeer je bij 'clock' zowel 'clockwork' als 'klokhuis' ( twee morfolologische familieleden uit verschillende talen)? Kimberley Mulder onderzocht hoe het leesproces van Nederlands-Engelse tweetaligen wordt beïnvloed door zulke relaties. In meerdere experimentele studies vond ze dat tweetaligen niet alleen morfologische familieleden en orthografische buren activeren uit de taal waarin ze op dat moment lezen, maar ook uit de andere taal die ze kennen. Het lezen van een woord beperkt zich dus geenszins tot wat je eigenlijk ziet, maar activeert een heel netwerk van woorden in je brein.

Abstract

In speech, words are often reduced rather than fully pronounced (e.g., (/ˈsʌmri/ for /ˈsʌməri/, summary). Non-native listeners may have problems in processing these reduced forms, because they have encountered them less often. This paper addresses the question whether this also holds for highly proficient non-natives and for words with similar forms and meanings in the non-natives' mother tongue (i.e., cognates). In an English auditory lexical decision task, natives and highly proficient Dutch non-natives of English listened to cognates and non-cognates that were presented in full or without their post-stress schwa. The data show that highly proficient learners are affected by reduction as much as native speakers. Nevertheless, the two listener groups appear to process reduced forms differently, because non-natives produce more errors on reduced cognates than on non-cognates. While listening to reduced forms, non-natives appear to be hindered by the co-activated lexical representations of cognate forms in their native language.

Abstract

Statistical learning plays a key role in language processing, e.g., for speech segmentation. Older adults have been reported to show less statistical learning on the basis of visual input than younger adults. Given age-related changes in perception and cognition, we investigated whether statistical learning is also impaired in the auditory modality in older compared to younger adults and whether individual learning ability is associated with measures of perceptual (i.e., hearing sensitivity) and cognitive functioning in both age groups. Thirty younger and thirty older adults performed an auditory artificial-grammar-learning task to assess their statistical learning ability. In younger adults, perceptual effort came at the cost of processing resources required for learning. Inhibitory control (as indexed by Stroop colornaming performance) did not predict auditory learning. Overall, younger and older adults showed the same amount of auditory learning, indicating that statistical learning ability is preserved over the adult life span.

Abstract

This paper studies the influence of adverse listening conditions on exemplar effects in priming experiments that do not instruct participants to use their episodic memories. We conducted two lexical decision experiments, in which a prime and a target represented the same word type and could be spoken by the same or a different speaker. In Experiment 1, participants listened to clear speech, and showed no exemplar effects: they recognised repetitions by the same speaker as quickly as different speaker repetitions. In Experiment 2, the stimuli contained noise, and exemplar effects did arise. Importantly, Experiment 1 elicited longer average RTs than Experiment 2, a result that contradicts the time-course hypothesis, according to which exemplars only play a role when processing is slow. Instead, our findings support the hypothesis that exemplar effects arise under adverse listening conditions, when participants are stimulated to use their episodic memories in addition to their mental lexicons.

Abstract

Two word-spotting experiments are reported that examine whether the Possible-Word Constraint (PWC) [1] is a language-specific or language-universal strategy for the segmentation of continuous speech. The PWC disfavours parses which leave an impossible residue between the end of a candidate word and a known boundary. The experiments examined cases where the residue was either a CV syllable with a lax vowel, or a CVC syllable with a schwa. Although neither syllable context is a possible word in English, word-spotting in both contexts was easier than with a context consisting of a single consonant. The PWC appears to be language-universal rather than language-specific.

Abstract

Simulations explored the inability of the TRACE model of spoken-word recognition to model the effects on human listening of subcategorical mismatch in word forms. The source of TRACE's failure lay not in interactive connectivity, not in the presence of inter-word competition, and not in the use of phonemic representations, but in the need for continuously optimised interpretation of the input. When an analogue of TRACE was allowed to cycle to asymptote on every slice of input, an acceptable simulation of the subcategorical mismatch data was achieved. Even then, however, the simulation was not as close as that produced by the Merge model, which has inter-word competition, phonemic representations and continuous optimisation (but no interactive connectivity).

Abstract

The phonological system of a sign language comprises meaningless sub-lexical units that define the structure of a sign. A number of studies have examined how learners of a sign language as a first language (L1) acquire these components. However, little is understood about the mechanism by which hearing adults develop visual phonological categories when learning a sign language as a second language (L2). Developmental studies have shown that sign complexity and iconicity, the clear mapping between the form of a sign and its referent, shape in different ways the order of emergence of a visual phonology. The aim of the present dissertation was to investigate how these two factors affect the development of a visual phonology in hearing adults learning a sign language as L2. The empirical data gathered in this dissertation confirms that sign structure and iconicity are important factors that determine L2 phonological development. Non-signers perform better at discriminating the contrastive features of phonologically simple signs than signs with multiple elements. Handshape was the parameter most difficult to learn, followed by movement, then orientation and finally location which is the same order of acquisition reported in L1 sign acquisition. In addition, the ability to access the iconic properties of signs had a detrimental effect in phonological development because iconic signs were consistently articulated less accurately than arbitrary signs. Participants tended to retain the iconic elements of signs but disregarded their exact phonetic structure. Further, non-signers appeared to process iconic signs as iconic gestures at least at the early stages of sign language acquisition. The empirical data presented in this dissertation suggest that non-signers exploit their gestural system as scaffolding of the new manual linguistic system and that sign L2 phonological development is strongly influenced by the structural complexity of a sign and its degree of iconicity.

Abstract

Natural sign languages and gestures are complex communicative systems that allow the incorporation of features of a referent into their structure. They differ, however, in that signs are more conventionalised because they consist of meaningless phonological parameters. There is some evidence that despite non-signers finding iconic signs more memorable they can have more difficulty at articulating their exact phonological components. In the present study, hearing non-signers took part in a sign repetition task in which they had to imitate as accurately as possible a set of iconic and arbitrary signs. Their renditions showed that iconic signs were articulated significantly less accurately than arbitrary signs. Participants were recalled six months later to take part in a sign generation task. In this task, participants were shown the English translation of the iconic signs they imitated six months prior. For each word, participants were asked to generate a sign (i.e., an iconic gesture). The handshapes produced in the sign repetition and sign generation tasks were compared to detect instances in which both renditions presented the same configuration. There was a significant correlation between articulation accuracy in the sign repetition task and handshape overlap. These results suggest some form of gestural interference in the production of iconic signs by hearing non-signers. We also suggest that in some instances non-signers may deploy their own conventionalised gesture when producing some iconic signs. These findings are interpreted as evidence that non-signers process iconic signs as gestures and that in production, only when sign and gesture have overlapping features will they be capable of producing the phonological components of signs accurately.

Abstract

A database is presented of relative familiarity ratings for 24 sets of Japanese words, each set comprising words overlapping in the initial portions. These ratings are useful for the generation of material sets for research in the recognition of spoken words.

Abstract

In everyday communication, people not only use speech but
also hand gestures to convey information. One intriguing
question in gesture research has been why gestures take the
specific form they do. Previous research has identified the
speaker-gesturer’s communicative intent as one factor
shaping the form of iconic gestures. Here we investigate
whether communicative intent also shapes the form of
pointing gestures. In an experimental setting, twenty-four
participants produced pointing gestures identifying a referent
for an addressee. The communicative intent of the speakergesturer
was manipulated by varying the informativeness of
the pointing gesture. A second independent variable was the
presence or absence of concurrent speech. As a function of their communicative intent and irrespective of the presence of speech, participants varied the durations of the stroke and the post-stroke hold-phase of their gesture. These findings add to our understanding of how the communicative context influences the form that a gesture takes.

Abstract

Comprehension of pointing gestures is fundamental to human communication. However, the neural mechanisms
that subserve the integration of pointing gestures and speech in visual contexts in comprehension
are unclear. Here we present the results of an fMRI study in which participants watched images of an
actor pointing at an object while they listened to her referential speech. The use of a mismatch paradigm
revealed that the semantic unication of pointing gesture and speech in a triadic context recruits left
inferior frontal gyrus. Complementing previous ndings, this suggests that left inferior frontal gyrus
semantically integrates information across modalities and semiotic domains.

Abstract

From an early age, people exhibit strong links between certain visual (e.g. size) and acoustic (e.g. duration) dimensions. Do people instinctively extend these crossmodal correspondences to vocalization? We examine the ability of congenitally deaf Chinese children and young adults (age M = 12.4 years, SD = 3.7 years) to generate iconic vocalizations to distinguish items with contrasting magnitude (e.g., big vs. small ball). Both deaf and hearing (M = 10.1 years, SD = 0.83 years) participants produced longer, louder vocalizations for greater magnitude items. However, only hearing participants used pitch—higher pitch for greater magnitude – which counters the hypothesized, innate size “frequency code”, but fits with Mandarin language and culture. Thus our results show that the translation of visible magnitude into the duration and intensity of vocalization transcends auditory experience, whereas the use of pitch appears more malleable to linguistic and cultural influence.

Abstract

Scholars have documented substantial classes of iconic vocabulary in many non-Indo-European languages. In comparison, Indo-European languages like English are assumed to be arbitrary outside of a small number of onomatopoeic words. In three experiments, we asked English speakers to rate the iconicity of words from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventory. We found English—contrary to common belief—exhibits iconicity that correlates with age of acquisition and differs across lexical classes. Words judged as most iconic are learned earlier, in accord with findings that iconic words are easier to learn. We also find that adjectives and verbs are more iconic than nouns, supporting the idea that iconicity provides an extra cue in learning more difficult abstract meanings. Our results provide new evidence for a relationship between iconicity and word learning and suggest iconicity may be a more pervasive property of spoken languages than previously thought.

Abstract

Recent FMRI studies indicate that language related brain regions are engaged in artificial grammar (AG) processing. In the present study we investigate the Reber grammar by means of formal analysis and network simulations. We outline a new method for describing the network dynamics and propose an approach to grammar extraction based on the state-space dynamics of the network. We conclude that statistical frequency-based and rule-based acquisition procedures can be viewed as complementary perspectives on grammar learning, and more generally, that classical cognitive models can be viewed as a special case of a dynamical systems perspective on information processing

Abstract

A fundamental ability of speakers is to
quickly retrieve words from long-term memory. According to a prominent theory, concepts activate multiple associated words, which enter into competition for selection. Previous electrophysiological studies have provided evidence for the activation of multiple alternative words, but did not identify brain responses refl ecting competition. We report a magnetoencephalography study examining the timing and neural substrates of lexical activation and competition. The degree of activation of competing words was
manipulated by presenting pictures (e.g., dog) simultaneously with distractor
words. The distractors were semantically related to the picture name (cat), unrelated (pin), or identical (dog). Semantic distractors are stronger competitors to the picture name, because they receive additional activation from the picture, whereas unrelated distractors do not. Picture naming times were longer with semantic than with unrelated and identical distractors. The patterns of phase-locked and non-phase-locked activity were distinct
but temporally overlapping. Phase-locked activity in left middle temporal
gyrus, peaking at 400 ms, was larger on unrelated than semantic and identical trials, suggesting differential effort in processing the alternative words activated by the picture-word stimuli. Non-phase-locked activity in the 4-10 Hz range between 400-650 ms in left superior frontal gyrus was larger on semantic than unrelated and identical trials, suggesting different
degrees of effort in resolving the competition among the alternatives
words, as refl ected in the naming times. These findings characterize distinct
patterns of brain activity associated with lexical activation and competition
respectively, and their temporal relation, supporting the theory that words are selected by competition.

Abstract

Music is a pervasive phenomenon in human culture, and musical
rhythm is virtually present in all musical traditions. Research
on the evolution and cognitive underpinnings of rhythm
can benefit from a number of approaches. We outline key concepts
and definitions, allowing fine-grained analysis of rhythmic
cognition in experimental studies. We advocate comparative
animal research as a useful approach to answer questions
about human music cognition and review experimental evidence
from different species. Finally, we suggest future directions
for research on the cognitive basis of rhythm. Apart from
research in semi-natural setups, possibly allowed by “drum set
for chimpanzees” prototypes presented here for the first time,
mathematical modeling and systematic use of circular statistics
may allow promising advances.

Abstract

The relationship between individual cognition and cultural phenomena at the society level can be transformed by cultural transmission (Kirby, Dowman, & Griffiths, 2007). Top-down models of this process have typically assumed that individuals only adopt a single linguistic trait. Recent extensions include ‘bilingual’ agents, able to adopt multiple linguistic traits (Burkett & Griffiths, 2010). However, bilingualism is more than variation within an individual: it involves the conditional use of variation with different interlocutors. That is, bilingualism is a property of a population that emerges from use. A bottom-up simulation is presented where learners are sensitive to the identity of other speakers. The simulation reveals that dynamic social structures are a key factor for the evolution of bilingualism in a population, a feature that was abstracted away in the top-down models. Top-down and bottom-up approaches may lead to different answers, but can work together to reveal and explore important features of the cultural transmission process.

Abstract

We suggest that it is now possible to conduct research on a topic which might be called evolutionary geophonetics. The main question is how the climate influences the evolution of language. This involves biological adaptations to the climate that may affect biases in production and perception; cultural evolutionary adaptations of the sounds of a language to climatic conditions; and influences of the climate on language diversity and contact. We discuss these ideas with special reference to a recent hypothesis that lexical tone is not adaptive in dry climates (Everett, Blasi & Roberts, 2015).

Abstract

People across the world make requests every day. We constantly rely on others to get by in the small and big practicalities of everyday life, be it getting the salt, moving a sofa, or cooking a meal. It has long been noticed that when we ask others for help we use a wide range of forms drawing on various resources afforded by our language and body. To get another to pass the salt, for example, we may say ‘Pass the salt’, or ask ‘Can you pass me the salt?’, or simply point to the salt. What do different forms of requesting give us? The short answer is that they allow us to manage different social relations. But what kind of relations? While prior research has mostly emphasised the role of long-term asymmetries like people’s social distance and relative power, this thesis puts at centre stage social relations and dimensions emerging in the moment-by-moment flow of everyday interaction. These include how easy or hard the action requested is to anticipate for the requestee, whether the action requested contributes to a joint project or serves an individual one, whether the requestee may be unwilling to do it, and how obvious or equivocal it is that a certain person or another should be involved in the action. The study focuses on requests made in everyday informal interactions among speakers of Italian. It involves over 500 instances of requests sampled from a diverse corpus of video recordings, and draws on methods from conversation analysis, linguistics and multimodal analysis. A qualitative analysis of the data is supported by quantitative measures of the distribution of linguistic and interactional features, and by the use of inferential statistics to test the generalizability of some of the patterns observed. The thesis aims to contribute to our understanding of both language and social interaction by showing that forms of requesting constitute a system, organised by a set of recurrent social-interactional concerns.

Abstract

Recent studies of wh-question acquisition have tended to come from the nativist side of the language acquisition debate with little input from a constructivist perspective. The present work was designed to redress the balance, first by presenting a detailed description of young children's wh-question acquisition data, second, by providing detailed critiques of two nativist theories of wh- question acquisition, and third, by presenting a preliminary account of young children's wh-question development from a constructivist perspective. Analyses of the data from twelve 2 to 3 year old children collected over a year and of data from an older child (Adam from the Brown corpus, 1973) are described and three conclusions are drawn. First it is argued that the data suggest that children's knowledge of how to form wh-questions builds up gradually as they learn how to combine lexical items such as wh-words and auxiliaries in specific ways. Second, it is concluded that two nativist theories of grammatical development (Radford, 1990, 1992, 1995, 1996, Valian, Lasser & Mandelbaum, 1992) fail to account successfully for the wh-question data produced by the children. Third, it is asserted that the lexically-specific nature of children's early wh-questions is compatible with a lexical constructivist view of development, which proposes that the language learning mechanism learns by picking up high frequency lexical patterns from the input. The implications of these conclusions for theories of language development and future research are discussed.

Abstract

The research presented in this dissertation examined the influence of prosodically-conditioned detail on the recognition of spoken words. The main finding is that subphonemic information in the speech signal that is conditioned by constituent-level prosodic structure can affect lexical processing systematically. It was shown that such information, as indicated by and estimated from the lengthening of speech sounds in the vicinity of prosodic boundaries, can help listeners to distinguish onset-embedded words (e.g. 'ham') from longer words that have this word embedded at their onset (e.g. 'hamster'). Furthermore, it was shown that variation in the realization of a spoken word that is associated with its position in the prosodic structure of an utterance can effect lexical processing. The pattern of competitor activation associated with the recognition of a monosyllabic spoken word in utterance-final position, where the realization of the word is strongly affected by the utterance boundary, is different from that associated with the recognition of the same word in utterance-medial position, where the realization of the word is less strongly affected by the following prosodic-word boundary. Taken together, the findings attest to the extraordinary sensitivity of the spoken-word recogntion system by demonstrating the relevance for lexical processing of very fine-grained phonetic detail conditioned by prosodic structure.

Abstract

We investigated the time course of sentence formulation in Tagalog, a verb-initial language in which the verb obligatorily agrees with one of its arguments. Eye-tracked participants described pictures of transitive events. Fixations to the two characters in the events were compared across sentences differing in agreement marking and post-verbal word order. Fixation patterns show evidence for two temporally dissociated phases in Tagalog sentence production. The first, driven by verb agreement, involves early linking of concepts to syntactic functions; the second, driven by word order, involves incremental lexical encoding of these concepts. These results suggest that even the earliest stages of sentence formulation may be guided by a language's grammatical structure.

Abstract

A series of experiment tested Ekman’s (1992) hypothesis that there are a set of positive basic emotions that are expressed using vocal para-linguistic sounds, e.g. laughter and cheers. The proposed categories investigated were amusement, contentment, pleasure, relief and triumph. Behavioural testing using a forced-choice task indicated that participants were able to reliably recognize vocal expressions of the proposed emotions. A cross-cultural study in the preliterate Himba culture in Namibia confirmed that these categories are also recognized across cultures. A recognition test of acoustically manipulated emotional vocalizations established that the recognition of different emotions utilizes different vocal cues, and that these in turn differ from the cues used when comprehending speech. In a study using fMRI we found that relative to a signal correlated noise baseline, the paralinguistic expressions of emotion activated bilateral superior temporal gyri and sulci, lateral and anterior to primary auditory cortex, which is consistent with the processing of non linguistic vocal cues in the auditory ‘what’ pathway. Notably amusement was associated with greater activation extending into both temporal poles and amygdale and insular cortex. Overall, these results support the claim that ‘happiness’ can be fractionated into amusement, pleasure, relief and triumph.

Abstract

Older listeners with high-frequency hearing loss rely more on intensity for categorisation of /s/ than normal-hearing older listeners. This study addresses the question whether this increased reliance comes about immediately when the need
arises, i.e., in the face of a spectrally-degraded signal. A phonetic categorisation task was carried out using intensitymodulated fricatives in a clean and a low-pass filtered condition with two younger and two older listener groups.
When high-frequency information was removed from the speech signal, younger listeners started using intensity as a cue. The older adults on the other hand, when presented with the low-pass filtered speech, did not rely on intensity differences for fricative identification. These results suggest that the reliance on intensity shown by the older hearingimpaired adults may have been acquired only gradually with
longer exposure to a degraded speech signal.

Abstract

This paper addresses the issue of large-vocabulary recognition in a specific word class. We propose a two-pass strategy in which only major cities are explicitly represented in the first stage lexicon. An unknown word model encoded as a phone loop is used to detect OOV city names (referred to as rare city names). After which SpeM, a tool that can extract words and word-initial cohorts from phone graphs on the basis of a large fallback lexicon, provides an N-best list of promising city names on the basis of the phone sequences generated in the first stage. This N-best list is then inserted into the second stage lexicon for a subsequent recognition pass. Experiments were conducted on a set of spontaneous telephone-quality utterances each containing one rare city name. We tested the size of the N-best list and three types of language models (LMs). The experiments showed that SpeM was able to include nearly 85% of the correct city names into an N-best list of 3000 city names when a unigram LM, which also boosted the unigram scores of a city name in a given state, was used.

Abstract

This work focuses on efficient use of the training material by selecting the optimal set of model topologies. We do this by training multiple word models of each word class, based on a subclassification according to a priori knowledge of the training material. We will examine classification criteria with respect to duration of the word, gender of the speaker, position of the word in the utterance, pauses in the vicinity of the word, and combinations of these. Comparative experiments were carried out on a corpus consisting of Dutch spoken connected digit strings and isolated digits, which are recorded in a wide variety of acoustic conditions. The results show, that classification based on gender of the speaker, position of the digit in the string, pauses in the vicinity of the training tokens, and models based on a combination of these criteria perform significantly better than the set with single models per digit.

Abstract

RU Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, 16 september 2005

Abstract

In this paper, we illustrate the close parallels between the research fields of human speech recognition (HSR) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) using a computational model of human word recognition, SpeM, which was built using techniques from ASR. We show that ASR has proven to be useful for improving models of HSR by relieving them of some of their shortcomings. However, in order to build an integrated computational model of all aspects of HSR, a lot of issues remain to be resolved. In this process, ASR algorithms and techniques definitely can play an important role.

Abstract

Processing of semantic information in language comprehension has been suggested to be modulated by attentional resources. Consequently, cognitive load would be expected to reduce semantic priming, but studies have yielded inconsistent results. This study investigated whether cognitive load affects semantic activation in speech processing in older adults, and whether this is modulated by individual differences in cognitive and hearing abilities. Older adults participated in an auditory continuous lexical decision task in a low-load and high-load condition. The group analysis showed only a marginally significant reduction of semantic priming in the high-load condition compared to the low-load condition. The individual differences analysis showed that semantic priming was significantly reduced under increased load in participants with poorer attention-switching control. Hence, a resource-demanding secondary task may affect the integration of spoken words into a coherent semantic representation for listeners with poorer attentional skills.

Abstract

Speakers can adapt their speech and co-speech gestures for
addressees. Here, we investigate whether this ability is
modulated by age. Younger and older adults participated in a
comic narration task in which one participant (the speaker)
narrated six short comic stories to another participant (the
addressee). One half of each story was known to both participants, the other half only to the speaker. Younger but
not older speakers used more words and gestures when narrating novel story content as opposed to known content.
We discuss cognitive and pragmatic explanations of these findings and relate them to theories of gesture production.

Abstract

Adaptation to altered auditory feedback has been shown to induce subsequent shifts in perception. However, it is uncertain whether these perceptual changes may generalize to other speech sounds. In this experiment, we tested whether exposing the production of a vowel to altered auditory feedback affects perceptual categorization of a consonant distinction. In two sessions, participants produced CVC words containing the vowel /i/, while intermittently categorizing stimuli drawn from a continuum between "see" and "she." In the first session feedback was unaltered, while in the second session the formants of the vowel were shifted 20% towards /u/. Adaptation to the altered vowel was found to reduce the proportion of perceived /S/ stimuli. We suggest that this reflects an alteration to the sensorimotor mapping that is shared between vowels and consonants.

Abstract

Joint attention has long been accepted as constituting a privileged circumstance in which word learning prospers. Consequently research has investigated the role that maternal responsiveness to infant attention plays in predicting language outcomes. However there has been a recent expansion in research implicating similar predictive effects from individual differences in infant behaviours. Emerging from the foundations of such work comes an interesting question: do the relative contributions of the mother and infant to joint attention episodes impact upon language learning? In an attempt to address this, two joint attention behaviours were assessed as predictors of vocabulary attainment (as measured by OCDI Production Scores). These predictors were: mothers encouraging attention to an object given their infant was already attending to an object (maternal follow-in); and infants looking to an object given their mothers encouragement of attention to an object (infant follow-in). In a sample of 14-month old children (N=36) we compared the predictive power of these maternal and infant follow-in variables on concurrent and later language performance. Results using Growth Curve Analysis provided evidence that while both maternal follow-in and infant follow-in variables contributed to production scores, infant follow-in was a stronger predictor. Consequently it does appear to matter whose final contribution establishes joint attention episodes. Infants who more often follow-in into their mothers’ encouragement of attention have larger, and faster growing vocabularies between 14 and 18-months of age.

Abstract

Miraña, an endangered Witotoan language spoken in the Colombian Amazon region, has an inventory of over 60 noun class markers, most of which denote the shape of nominal referents. Class markers in this language are ubiquitous in their uses for derivational purposes in nouns and for agreement marking in virtually all other nominal expressions, such as pronouns, numerals, demonstratives, and relative clauses, as well as in verbs. This study provides a comprehensive analysis of this system by giving equal attention to its morphosyntactic, semantic, and discourse-pragmatic properties. The particular properties of this system raise issues in a number of ongoing theoretical discussions, in particular the typology of systems of nominal classification and the typology of reference tracking.

Abstract

This volume presents 22 tales from the Trobriand Islands told by children (boys between the age of 5 and 9 years) and adults. The monograph is motivated not only by the anthropological linguistic aim to present a broad and quite unique collection of tales with the thematic approach to illustrate which topics and themes constitute the content of the stories, but also by the psycholinguistic and textlinguistic questions of how children acquire linearization and other narrative strategies, how they develop them and how they use them to structure these texts in an adult-like way. The tales are presented in morpheme-interlinear transcriptions with first textlinguistic analyses and cultural background information necessary to fully understand them. A summarizing comparative analysis of the texts from a psycholinguistic, anthropological linguistic and philological point of view discusses the underlying schemata of the stories, the means narrators use to structure them, their structural complexity and their cultural specificity. The e-book is made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

Abstract

Speakers adapt their speech and gestures in various ways for their audience. We investigated further whether they use
ostensive signals (eye gaze, ostensive speech (e.g. like this, this) or a combination of both) in relation to their gestures
when talking to different addressees, i.e., to another adult or a child in a multimodal demonstration task. While adults used
more eye gaze towards their gestures with other adults than with children, they were more likely to use combined
ostensive signals for children than for adults. Thus speakers mark the communicative relevance of their gestures with different types of ostensive signals and by taking different types of addressees into account.

Abstract

Recent empirical evidence suggests that language-mediated eye gaze is partly determined by level of formal literacy training. Huettig, Singh and Mishra (2011) showed that high-literate individuals' eye gaze was closely time locked to phonological overlap between a spoken target word and items presented in a visual display. In contrast, low-literate individuals' eye gaze was not related to phonological overlap, but was instead strongly influenced by semantic relationships between items. Our present study tests the hypothesis that this behavior is an emergent property of an increased ability to extract phonological structure from the speech signal, as in the case of high-literates, with low-literates more reliant on more coarse grained structure. This hypothesis was tested using a neural network model, that integrates linguistic information extracted from the speech signal with visual and semantic information within a central resource. We demonstrate that contrasts in fixation behavior similar to those observed between high and low literates emerge when models are trained on speech signals of contrasting granularity.

Abstract

Previous research [9] suggests that Dutch learners of (British) English are not able to express sarcasm prosodically in their L2. The present study investigates whether explicit training on the prosodic markers of sarcasm in English can improve learners’ realisation of sarcasm. Sarcastic speech was elicited in short simulated telephone conversations between Dutch advanced learners of English and a native British English-speaking ‘friend’ in two sessions, fourteen days apart. Between the two sessions, participants were trained by means of (1) a presentation, (2) directed independent practice, and (3) evaluation of participants’ production and individual feedback in small groups. L1 British English-speaking raters subsequently evaluated the degree of sarcastic sounding in the participants’ responses on a five-point scale. It was found that significantly higher sarcasm ratings were given to L2 learners’ production obtained after the training than that obtained before the training; explicit training on prosody has a positive effect on learners’ production of sarcasm.

Abstract

Presenting a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of theoretical and descriptive research in the field, The Handbook of Conversation Analysis brings together contributions by leading international experts to provide an invaluable information resource and reference for scholars of social interaction across the areas of conversation analysis, discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, interpersonal communication, discursive psychology and sociolinguistics. Ideal as an introduction to the field for upper level undergraduates and as an in-depth review of the latest developments for graduate level students and established scholars Five sections outline the history and theory, methods, fundamental concepts, and core contexts in the study of conversation, as well as topics central to conversation analysis Written by international conversation analysis experts, the book covers a wide range of topics and disciplines, from reviewing underlying structures of conversation, to describing conversation analysis' relationship to anthropology, communication, linguistics, psychology, and sociology

Abstract

This paper presents DIANA, a new computational model of human speech processing. It is the first model that simulates the complete processing chain from the on-line processing of an acoustic signal to the execution of a response, including reaction times. Moreover it assumes minimal modularity. DIANA consists of three components. The activation component computes a probabilistic match between the input acoustic signal and representations in DIANA’s lexicon, resulting in a list of word hypotheses changing over time as the input unfolds. The decision component operates on this list and selects a word as soon as sufficient evidence is available. Finally, the execution component accounts for the time to execute a behavioral action. We show that DIANA well simulates the average participant in a word recognition experiment.

Abstract

DIANA is an end-to-end computational model of speech processing, which takes as input the speech signal, and provides as output the orthographic transcription of the stimulus, a word/non-word judgment and the associated estimated reaction time. So far, the model has only been tested for Dutch. In this paper, we extend DIANA such that it can also process North American English. The model is tested by having it simulate human participants in a large scale North American English lexical decision experiment. The simulations show that DIANA can adequately approximate the reaction times of an average participant (r = 0.45). In addition, they indicate that DIANA does not yet adequately model the cognitive processes that take place after stimulus offset.

Abstract

This paper investigates the interaction between acoustic scores and symbolic mismatch penalties in multi-pass speech decoding techniques that are based on the creation of a segment graph followed by a lexical search. The interaction between acoustic and symbolic mismatches determines to a large extent the structure of the search space of these multipass approaches. The background of this study is a recently developed computational model of human word recognition, called SpeM. SpeM is able to simulate human word recognition data and is built as a multi-pass speech decoder. Here, we focus on unravelling the structure of the search space that is used in SpeM and similar decoding strategies. Finally, we elaborate on the close relation between distances in this search space, and distance measures in search spaces that are based on a combination of acoustic and phonetic features.

Abstract

This paper describes a computational model of speech comprehension that takes the acoustic signal as input and predicts reaction times as observed in an auditory lexical decision task. By doing so, we explore a new generation of end-to-end computational models that are able to simulate the behaviour of human subjects participating in a psycholinguistic experiment. So far, nearly all computational models of speech comprehension do not start from the speech signal itself, but from abstract representations of the speech signal, while the few existing models that do start from the acoustic signal cannot directly model reaction times as obtained in comprehension experiments. The main functional components in our model are the perception stage, which is compatible with the psycholinguistic model Shortlist B and is implemented with techniques from automatic speech recognition, and the decision stage, which is based on the linear ballistic accumulation decision model. We successfully tested our model against data from 20 participants performing a largescale auditory lexical decision experiment. Analyses show that the model is a good predictor for the average judgment and reaction time for each word.

Abstract

Apraxia of Speech (AOS) is a motor speech disorder whose precise nature is still poorly understood. A recent behavioural experiment featuring a noise masking paradigm suggests that AOS reflects a disruption of feedforward control, whereas feedback control is spared and plays a more prominent role in achieving and maintaining segmental contrasts [10]. In the present study, we set out to validate the interpretation of AOS as a feedforward impairment by means of a series of computational simulations with the DIVA model [6, 7] mimicking the behavioural experiment. Simulation results showed a larger reduction in vowel spacing and a smaller vowel dispersion in the masking condition compared to the no-masking condition for the simulated feedforward deficit, whereas the other groups showed an opposite pattern. These results mimic the patterns observed in the human data, corroborating the notion that AOS can be conceptualized as a deficit in feedforward control

Abstract

We are often in a bilingual situation (e.g., overhearing a conversation in the train). We investigated whether first (L1) and second language (L2) phonologies are automatically activated. A masked priming paradigm was used, with Russian words as targets and either Russian or English words as primes. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while Russian (L1) – English (L2) bilinguals read aloud L1 target words (e.g. РЕЙС /reis/ ‘fl ight’) primed with either L1 (e.g. РАНА /rana/ ‘wound’) or L2 words (e.g. PACK). Target words were read faster when they were preceded by phonologically related L1 primes but not by orthographically related L2 primes. ERPs showed orthographic priming in the 125-200 ms time window. Thus, both L1 and L2 phonologies are simultaneously activated during L1 reading. The results provide support for non-selective models of bilingual reading, which assume automatic activation of the non-target language phonology even when it is not required by the task.

Abstract

This article describes how the tonal elements of two common Spanish intonation contours –the falling statement and the low-rising-falling request– align with the segmental string in broad-focus utterances differing in number of prosodic words. Using an imitation-and-completion task, we show that (i) the last stressed syllable of the utterance, traditionally viewed as carrying the ‘nuclear’ accent, associates with either a high or a low tonal element depending on phrase length (ii) that certain tonal elements can be realized or omitted depending on the availability of specific metrical positions in their intonational phrase, and (iii) that the high tonal element of the request contour associates with either a stressed syllable or an intonational phrase edge depending on phrase length. On the basis of these facts, and in contrast to previous descriptions of Spanish intonation relying on obligatory and constant nuclear contours (e.g., L* L% for all neutral statements), we argue for a less constrained intonational morphology involving tonal units linked to the segmental string via contour-specific principles.

Abstract

Violations of the maxims of Quantity occur when utterances provide more (over-specified) or less (under-specified) information than strictly required for referent identification. While behavioural datasuggest that under-specified expressions lead to comprehension difficulty and communicative failure, there is no consensus as to whether over-specified expressions are also detrimental to comprehension. In this study we shed light on this debate, providing neurophysiological evidence supporting the view that extra information facilitates comprehension. We further present novel evidence that referential failure due to under-specification is qualitatively different from explicit cases of referential failure, when no matching referential candidate is available in the context.