Publications

Abstract

The use of virtual reality (VR) as a methodological tool is
becoming increasingly popular in behavioural research due
to its seemingly limitless possibilities. This new method has
not been used frequently in the field of psycholinguistics,
however, possibly due to the assumption that humancomputer
interaction does not accurately reflect human-human
interaction. In the current study we compare participants’
language behaviour in a syntactic priming task with human
versus avatar partners. Our study shows comparable priming
effects between human and avatar partners (Human: 12.3%;
Avatar: 12.6% for passive sentences) suggesting that VR is a
valid platform for conducting language research and studying
dialogue interactions.

Abstract

In this paper, we show how acoustic variance within lexical tones in disyllabic Mandarin Chinese pseudowords affects discrimination abilities in both native and non-native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. Within-category acoustic variance did not hinder native speakers in discriminating between lexical tones, whereas it precludes Dutch native speakers from reaching native level performance. Furthermore, the influence of acoustic variance was not uniform but asymmetric, dependent on the presentation order of the lexical tones to be discriminated. An exploratory analysis using an active adaptive oddball paradigm was used to quantify the extent of the perceptual asymmetry. We discuss two possible mechanisms underlying this asymmetry and propose possible paradigms to investigate these mechanisms

Abstract

Co-speech gestures are an integral part of human face-to-face communication, but little is known about how pragmatic factors influence our comprehension of those gestures. The present study investigates how different types of recipients process iconic gestures in a triadic communicative situation. Participants (N = 32) took on the role of one of two recipients in a triad and were presented with 160 video clips of an actor speaking, or speaking and gesturing. Crucially, the actor’s eye gaze was manipulated in that she alternated her gaze between the two recipients. Participants thus perceived some messages in the role of addressed recipient and some in the role of unaddressed recipient. In these roles, participants were asked to make judgements concerning the speaker’s messages. Their reaction times showed that unaddressed recipients did comprehend speaker’s gestures differently to addressees. The findings are discussed with respect to automatic and controlled processes involved in gesture comprehension.

Abstract

Speakers express word meaning through systematic but non-canonical acoustic variation of tone of voice (ToV), i.e., variation of speaking rate, pitch, vocal effort, or loudness. Words are, for example, pronounced at a higher pitch when referring to small than to big referents. In the present study, we examined whether listeners can use ToV to learn the meaning of novel adjectives (e.g., “blicket”). During training, participants heard sentences such as “Can you find the blicket one?” spoken with ToV representing hot-cold, strong-weak, and big-small. Participants’ eye movements to two simultaneously shown objects with properties representing the relevant two endpoints (e.g., an elephant and an ant for big-small) were monitored. Assignment of novel adjectives to endpoints was counterbalanced across participants. During test, participants heard the sentences spoken with a neutral ToV, while seeing old or novel picture pairs varying along the same dimensions (e.g., a truck and a car for big-small). Participants had to click on the adjective’s referent. As evident from eye movements, participants did not infer the intended meaning during first exposure, but learned the meaning with the help of ToV during training. At test listeners applied this knowledge to old and novel items even in the absence of informative ToV.

Abstract

The present paper describes the development of the languagesindanger.eu interactive website as an example of including multimedia language resources to disseminate knowledge and create educational material on less-resourced languages. The website is a product of INNET (Innovative networking in infrastructure for endangered languages), European FP7 project. Its main functions can be summarized as related to the three following areas: (1) raising students' awareness of language endangerment and arouse their interest in linguistic diversity, language maintenance and language documentation; (2) informing both students and teachers about these topics and show ways how they can enlarge their knowledge further with a special emphasis on information about language archives; (3) helping teachers include these topics into their classes. The website has been localized into five language versions with the intention to be accessible to both scientific and non-scientific communities such as (primarily) secondary school teachers and students, beginning university students of linguistics, journalists, the interested public, and also members of speech communities who speak minority languages

Abstract

Human speakers often produce sentences incrementally. They can start speaking having in mind only a fragmentary idea of what they want to say, and while saying this they refine the contents underlying subsequent parts of the utterance. This capability imposes a number of constraints on the design of a syntactic processor. This paper explores these constraints and evaluates some recent computational sentence generators from the perspective of incremental production.

Abstract

We present a software module, the LAT Bridge, which enables bidirectionalcommunication between the annotation and exploration tools developed at the MaxPlanck Institute for Psycholinguistics as part of our Language ArchivingTechnology (LAT) tool suite. These existing annotation and exploration toolsenable the annotation, enrichment, exploration and archive management oflinguistic resources. The user community has expressed the desire to usedifferent combinations of LAT tools in conjunction with each other. The LATBridge is designed to cater for a number of basic data interaction scenariosbetween the LAT annotation and exploration tools. These interaction scenarios(e.g. bootstrapping a wordlist, searching for annotation examples or lexicalentries) have been identified in collaboration with researchers at ourinstitute.We had to take into account that the LAT tools for annotation and explorationrepresent a heterogeneous application scenario with desktop-installed andweb-based tools. Additionally, the LAT Bridge has to work in situations wherethe Internet is not available or only in an unreliable manner (i.e. with a slowconnection or with frequent interruptions). As a result, the LAT Bridge’sarchitecture supports both online and offline communication between the LATannotation and exploration tools.

Abstract

Many theories hold that semantic variation in the world’s languages can be explained in terms of a universal conceptual space that is partitioned differently by different languages. Recent work has supported this view in the semantic domain of containers (Malt et al., 1999), and assumed it in the domain of spatial relations (Khetarpal et al., 2009), based in both cases on similarity judgments derived from pile-sorting of stimuli. Here, we reanalyze data from these two studies and find a more complex picture than these earlier studies suggested. In both cases we find that sorting is similar across speakers of different languages (in line with the earlier studies), but nonetheless reflects the sorter’s native language (in contrast with the earlier studies). We conclude that there are cross-culturally shared conceptual tendencies that can be revealed by pile-sorting, but that these tendencies may be modulated to some extent by language. We discuss the implications of these findings for accounts of semantic variation.

Abstract

The previous literature has suggested that the hand movement in co-speech gestures and signs consists of a series of phases with qualitatively different dynamic characteristics. In this paper, we propose a syntagmatic rule system for movement phases that applies to both co-speech gestures and signs. Descriptive criteria for the rule system were developed for the analysis video-recorded continuous production of signs and gesture. It involves segmenting a stream of body movement into phases and identifying different phase types. Two human coders used the criteria to analyze signs and cospeech gestures that are produced in natural discourse. It was found that the criteria yielded good inter-coder reliability. These criteria can be used for the technology of automatic recognition of signs and co-speech gestures in order to segment continuous production and identify the potentially meaningbearing phase.

Abstract

The VALID Data Archive is an open multimedia data archive (under construction) with data from speakers suffering from language impairments. We report on a pilot project in the CLARIN-NL framework in which five data resources were curated. For all data sets concerned, written informed consent from the participants or their caretakers has been obtained. All materials were anonymized. The audio files were converted into wav (linear PCM) files and the transcriptions into CHAT or ELAN format. Research data that consisted of test, SPSS and Excel files were documented and converted into CSV files. All data sets obtained appropriate CMDI metadata files. A new CMDI metadata profile for this type of data resources was established and care was taken that ISOcat metadata categories were used to optimize interoperability. After curation all data are deposited at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Nijmegen where persistent identifiers are linked to all resources. The content of the transcriptions in CHAT and plain text format can be searched with the TROVA search engine

Abstract

Words can be distinguished by segmental differences or by suprasegmental differences or both. Studies from English suggest that suprasegmentals play little role in human spoken-word recognition; English stress, however, is nearly always unambiguously coded in segmental structure (vowel quality); this relationship is less close in Dutch. The present study directly compared the effects of segmental and suprasegmental mispronunciation on word recognition in Dutch. There was a strong effect of suprasegmental mispronunciation, suggesting that Dutch listeners do exploit suprasegmental information in word recognition. Previous findings indicating the effects of mis-stressing for Dutch differ with stress position were replicated only when segmental change was involved, suggesting that this is an effect of segmental rather than suprasegmental processing.

Abstract

Previous studies on Cantonese Chinese showed that rising
question intonation contours on low-toned words lead to
frequent misperceptions of the tones. Here we explored the
processing consequences of this interaction between tone and
intonation by comparing the processing and identification of
monosyllabic critical words at the end of questions and
statements, using a tone identification task, and ERPs as an
online measure of speech comprehension. Experiment 1
yielded higher error rates for the identification of low tones at
the end of questions and a larger N400-P600 pattern, reflecting
processing difficulty and reanalysis, compared to other
conditions. In Experiment 2, we investigated the effect of
immediate lexical context on the tone by intonation interaction.
Increasing contextual constraints led to a reduction in errors
and the disappearance of the P600 effect. These results
indicate that there is an immediate interaction between tone,
intonation, and context in online speech comprehension. The
difference in performance and activation patterns between the
two experiments highlights the significance of context in
understanding a tone language, like Cantonese-Chinese.

Abstract

In different fields of the humanities annotations of multimodal resources are a necessary component of the research workflow. Examples include linguistics, psychology, anthropology, etc. However, creation of those annotations is a very laborious task, which can take 50 to 100 times the length of the annotated media, or more. This can be significantly improved by applying innovative audio and video processing algorithms, which analyze the recordings and provide automated annotations. This is the aim of the AVATecH project, which is a collaboration of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI) and the Fraunhofer institutes HHI and IAIS. In this paper we present a set of results of automated annotation together with an evaluation of their quality.

Abstract

Evolution and changes of all modern languages is a wellknown fact. However, recently it is reaching dynamics never seen before, which results in loss of the vast amount of information encoded in every language. In order to preserve such rich heritage, and to carry out linguistic research, properly annotated recordings of world languages are necessary. Since creating those annotations is a very laborious task, reaching times 100 longer than the length of the annotated media, innovative video processing algorithms are needed, in order to improve the efficiency and quality of annotation process. This is the scope of the AVATecH project presented in this article

Abstract

Introduction Human spoken communication is multimodal, i.e. it encompasses both speech and gesture. Acoustic properties of voice, body movements, facial expression, etc. are an inherent and meaningful part of spoken interaction; they can provide attitudinal, grammatical and semantic information. In the recent years interest in audio-visual corpora has been rising rapidly as they enable investigation of different communicative modalities and provide more holistic view on communication (Kipp et al. 2009). Moreover, for some languages such corpora are the only available resource, as is the case for endangered languages for which no written resources exist.

Abstract

In this paper we describe audio and video processing algorithms that are developed in the scope of AVATecH project. The purpose of these algorithms is to shorten the time taken by manual annotation of audio and video recordings by extracting features from media files and creating semi-automated annotations. We show that the use of such supporting algorithms can shorten the annotation time to 30-50% of the time necessary to perform a fully manual annotation of the same kind.

Abstract

People's language is shaped by the input from the environment. The environment, however, offers a range of linguistic inputs that differ in their reliability. We test whether listeners accordingly weigh input from sources that differ in reliability differently. Using a perceptual learning paradigm, we show that listeners adjust their representations according to linguistic input provided by native but not by non-native speakers. This is despite the fact that listeners are able to learn the characteristics of the speech of both speakers. These results provide evidence for a disassociation between adaptation to the characteristic of specific speakers and adjustment of linguistic representations in general based on these learned characteristics. This study also has implications for theories of language change. In particular, it cast doubts on the hypothesis that a large proportion of non-native speakers in a community can bring about linguistic changes

Abstract

This study investigates prosodic marking of focus in Bai, a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in the Southwest of China, by adopting a semi-spontaneous experimental approach. Our data show that Bai speakers increase the duration of the focused constituent and reduce the duration of the post-focus constituent to encode focus. However, duration is not used in Bai to distinguish focus types differing in size and contrastivity. Further, pitch plays no role in signaling focus and differentiating focus types. The results thus suggest that Bai uses prosody to mark focus, but to a lesser extent, compared to Mandarin Chinese, with which Bai has been in close contact for centuries, and Cantonese, to which Bai is similar in the tonal system, although Bai is similar to Cantonese in its reliance on duration in prosodic focus marking.

Abstract

Scholars disagree about the extent to which language can tell us
about conceptualisation of the world. Some believe that language
is a direct window onto concepts: Having a word ‘‘bird’’, ‘‘table’’ or
‘‘sour’’ presupposes the corresponding underlying concept, BIRD,
TABLE, SOUR. Others disagree. Words are thought to be uninformative,
or worse, misleading about our underlying conceptual representations;
after all, our mental worlds are full of ideas that we
struggle to express in language. How could this be so, argue sceptics,
if language were a direct window on our inner life? In this presentation,
I consider what language can tell us about the
conceptualisation of taste. By considering linguistic data from
twenty unrelated cultures – varying in subsistence mode (huntergatherer
to industrial), ecological zone (rainforest jungle to desert),
dwelling type (rural and urban), and so forth – I argue any single language is, indeed, impoverished about what it can reveal about
taste. But recurrent lexicalisation patterns across languages can
provide valuable insights about human taste experience. Moreover,
language patterning is part of the data that a good theory of taste
perception has to be answerable for. Taste researchers, therefore,
cannot ignore the crosslinguistic facts.

Abstract

This Research Topic explores the question: what is the relationship between representations of time and space in cultures around the world? This question touches on the broader issue of how humans come to represent and reason about abstract entities – things we cannot see or touch. Time is a particularly opportune domain to investigate this topic. Across cultures, people use spatial representations for time, for example in graphs, time-lines, clocks, sundials, hourglasses, and calendars. In language, time is also heavily related to space, with spatial terms often used to describe the order and duration of events. In English, for example, we might move a meeting forward, push a deadline back, attend a long concert or go on a short break. People also make consistent spatial gestures when talking about time, and appear to spontaneously invoke spatial representations when processing temporal language. A large body of evidence suggests a close correspondence between temporal and spatial language and thought. However, the ways that people spatialize time can differ dramatically across languages and cultures. This research topic identifies and explores some of the sources of this variation, including patterns in spatial thinking, patterns in metaphor, gesture and other cultural systems. This Research Topic explores how speakers of different languages talk about time and space and how they think about these domains, outside of language. The Research Topic invites papers exploring the following issues: 1. Do the linguistic representations of space and time share the same lexical and morphosyntactic resources? 2. To what extent does the conceptualization of time follow the conceptualization of space?

Abstract

Two Siberian languages, Tundra Nenets and Tundra Yukaghir, do not obey strong island constraints in questioning: any sub-constituent of a relative or adverbial clause can be questioned. We argue that this has to do with how focusing works in these languages. The focused sub-constituent remains in situ, but there is abundant morphosyntactic evidence that the focus feature is passed up to the head of the clause. The result is the formation of a complex focus structure in which both the head and non head daughter are overtly marked as focus, and they are interpreted as a pairwise list such that the focus background is applicable to this list, but not to other alternative lists

Abstract

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

Abstract

The results of a word-spotting experiment are presented in which Dutch listeners tried to spot different types of bisyllabic Dutch words embedded in different types of nonsense contexts. Embedded verbs were not reliably harder to spot than embedded nouns; this suggests that nouns and verbs are recognised via the same basic processes. Iambic words were no harder to spot than trochaic words, suggesting that trochaic words are not in principle easier to recognise than iambic words. Words were harder to spot in consonantal contexts (i.e., contexts which themselves could not be words) than in longer contexts which contained at least one vowel (i.e., contexts which, though not words, were possible words of Dutch). A control experiment showed that this difference was not due to acoustic differences between the words in each context. The results support the claim that spoken-word recognition is sensitive to the viability of sound sequences as possible words.

Abstract

Our knowledge of speech perception is largely based on experiments conducted with carefully recorded clear speech presented under good listening conditions to undistracted listeners - a near-ideal situation, in other words. But the reality poses a set of different challenges. First of all, listeners may need to divide their attention between speech comprehension and another task (e.g., driving). Outside the laboratory, the speech signal is often slurred by less than careful pronunciation and the listener has to deal with background noise. Moreover, in a globalized world, listeners need to understand speech in more than their native language. Relatedly, the speakers we listen to often have a different language background so we have to deal with a foreign or regional accent we are not familiar with. Finally, outside the laboratory, speech perception is not an end in itself, but rather a mean to contribute to a conversation. Listeners do not only need to understand the speech they are hearing, they also need to use this information to plan and time their own responses. For this special topic, we invite papers that address any of these ecological aspects of speech perception.

Abstract

This paper describes the pilot study of phonetic segmentation applied to Nijmegen Corpus of Casual Czech (NCCCz). This corpus contains informal speech of strong spontaneous nature which influences the character of produced speech at various levels. This work is the part of wider research related to the analysis of pronunciation reduction in such informal speech. We present the analysis of the accuracy of phonetic segmentation when canonical or reduced pronunciation is used. The achieved accuracy of realized phonetic segmentation provides information about general accuracy of proper acoustic modelling which is supposed to be applied in spontaneous speech recognition. As a byproduct of presented spontaneous speech segmentation, this paper also describes the created lexicon with canonical pronunciations of words in NCCCz, a tool supporting pronunciation check of lexicon items, and finally also a minidatabase of selected utterances from NCCCz manually labelled on phonetic level suitable for evaluation purposes

Abstract

Studies have shown that listeners segmenting unfamiliar languages transfer native-language (L1) segmentation cues. These studies, however, conflated L1 and recent linguistic exposure. The present study investigates the relative influences of L1 and recent linguistic exposure on the use of prosodic cues for segmenting an artificial language (AL). Participants were L1-French listeners, high-proficiency L2-French L1-English listeners, and L1-English listeners without functional knowledge of French. The prosodic cue assessed was F0 rise, which is word-final in French, but in English tends to be word-initial. 30 participants heard a 20-minute AL speech stream with word-final boundaries marked by F0 rise, and decided in a subsequent listening task which of two words (without word-final F0 rise) had been heard in the speech stream. The analyses revealed a marginally significant effect of L1 (all listeners) and, importantly, a significant effect of recent linguistic exposure (L1-French and L2-French listeners): accuracy increased with decreasing time in the US since the listeners’ last significant (3+ months) stay in a French-speaking environment. Interestingly, no effect of L2 proficiency was found (L2-French listeners).

Abstract

Language resources can be divided into structural resources treating phonology, morphosyntax, semantics etc. and resources treating the social, demographic, ethnic, political context. A third type are meta-resources, like bibliographies, which provide access to the resources of the first two kinds. This poster will present the Glottolog/Langdoc project, a comprehensive bibliography providing web access to 180k bibliographical records to (mainly) low visibility resources from low-density languages. The resources are annotated for macro-area, content language, and document type and are available in XHTML and RDF.

Abstract

Early studies investigating sign language acquisition claimed
that signs whose structures are motivated by the form of their
referent (iconic) are not favoured in language development.
However, recent work has shown that the first signs in deaf
children’s lexicon are iconic. In this paper we go a step
further and ask whether different types of iconicity modulate
learning sign-referent links. Results from a picture description
task indicate that children and adults used signs with two
possible variants differentially. While children signing to
adults favoured variants that map onto actions associated with
a referent (action signs), adults signing to another adult
produced variants that map onto objects’ perceptual features
(perceptual signs). Parents interacting with children used
more action variants than signers in adult-adult interactions.
These results are in line with claims that language
development is tightly linked to motor experience and that
iconicity can be a communicative strategy in parental input.

Abstract

Japanese listeners detected Japanese words embedded at the end of nonsense sequences (e.g., kaba 'hippopotamus' in gyachikaba). When the final portion of the preceding context together with the initial portion of the word (e.g., here, the sequence chika) was compatible with many lexical competitors, recognition of the embedded word was more difficult than when such a sequence was compatible with few competitors. This clear effect of competition, established here for preceding context in Japanese, joins similar demonstrations, in other languages and for following contexts, to underline that the functional architecture of the human spoken-word recognition system is a universal one.

Abstract

Dutch and Spanish differ in how predictable the stress pattern is as a function of the segmental content: it is correlated with syllable weight in Dutch but not in Spanish. In the present study, two experiments were run to compare the abilities of Dutch and Spanish speakers to separately process segmental and stress information. It was predicted that the Spanish speakers would have more difficulty focusing on the segments and ignoring the stress pattern than the Dutch speakers. The task was a speeded classification task on CVCV syllables, with blocks of trials in which the stress pattern could vary versus blocks in which it was fixed. First, we found interference due to stress variability in both languages, suggesting that the processing of segmental information cannot be performed independently of stress. Second, the effect was larger for Spanish than for Dutch, suggesting that that the degree of interference from stress variation may be partially mitigated by the predictability of stress placement in the language.

Abstract

Iconic gestures are hypothesized to be c rucial to the evolution of language. Yet the important question of whether apes produce iconic gestures is the subject of considerable debate. This paper presents the current state of research on iconicity in ape gesture. In particular, it describes some of the empirical evidence suggesting that apes produce three different kinds of iconic gestures; it compares the iconicity hypothesis to other major hypotheses of ape gesture; and finally, it offers some directions for future ape gesture research

Abstract

Two eye-tracking experiments tested whether native listeners can adapt
to reductions in casual Dutch speech. Listeners were exposed to segmental
([b] > [m]), syllabic (full-vowel-deletion), or no reductions. In a subsequent
test phase, all three listener groups were tested on how efficiently they could
recognize both types of reduced words. In the first Experiment’s exposure
phase, the (un)reduced target words were predictable. The segmental reductions
were completely consistent (i.e., involved the same input sequences).
Learning about them was found to be pattern-specific and generalized in the
test phase to new reduced /b/-words. The syllabic reductions were not consistent
(i.e., involved variable input sequences). Learning about them was
weak and not pattern-specific. Experiment 2 examined effects of word repetition
and predictability. The (un-)reduced test words appeared in the exposure
phase and were not predictable. There was no evidence of learning for
the segmental reductions, probably because they were not predictable during
exposure. But there was word-specific learning for the vowel-deleted words.
The results suggest that learning about reductions is pattern-specific and
generalizes to new words if the input is consistent and predictable. With
variable input, there is more likely to be adaptation to a general speaking
style and word-specific learning.

Abstract

Cognitive research is often focused on experimental condition-driven reactions. Ethological studies frequently
rely on the observation of naturally occurring specific behaviors. In both cases, subjects are filmed during the
study, so that afterwards behaviors can be coded on video. Coding should typically be blind to experimental
conditions, but often requires more information than that present on video. We introduce a method for blindcoding
of behavioral videos that takes care of both issues via three main innovations. First, of particular
significance for playback studies, it allows creation of a “soundtrack” of the study, that is, a track composed of
synthesized sounds representing different aspects of the experimental conditions, or other events, over time.
Second, it facilitates coding behavior using this audio track, together with the possibly muted original video.
This enables coding blindly to conditions as required, but not ignoring other relevant events. Third, our method
makes use of freely available, multi-platform software, including scripts we developed.

Abstract

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

Abstract

A aquisição da leitura decorre ao longo de diversas etapas, desde o momento em que a criança inicia o contacto com o alfabeto até ao momento em que se torna um leitor competente, apto a ler correcta e fluentemente. Compreender a evolução desta competência através de uma análise da diferenciação do peso de variáveis preditoras da leitura possibilita teorizar sobre os mecanismos cognitivos envolvidos nas diferentes fases de desenvolvimento da leitura. Realizámos um estudo transversal com 568 alunos do segundo ao quarto ano do primeiro ciclo do Ensino Básico, em que se avaliou o impacto de capacidades de processamento fonológico, nomeação rápida, conhecimento letra-som e vocabulário, bem como de capacidades cognitivas mais gerais (inteligência não-verbal e memória de trabalho), na exactidão e velocidade da leitura. De uma forma geral, os resultados mostraram que, apesar da consciência fonológica permanecer como o preditor mais importante da exactidão e fluência da leitura, o seu peso decresce à medida que a escolaridade aumenta. Observou-se também que, à medida que o contributo da consciência fonológica para a explicação da velocidade de leitura diminuía, aumentava o contributo de outras variáveis mais associadas ao automatismo e reconhecimento lexical, tais como a nomeação rápida e o vocabulário. Em suma, podemos dizer que ao longo da escolaridade se observa uma alteração dinâmica dos processos cognitivos subjacentes à leitura, o que sugere que a criança evolui de uma estratégia de leitura ancorada em processamentos sub-lexicais, e como tal mais dependente de processamentos fonológicos, para uma estratégia baseada no reconhecimento ortográfico das palavras.

Abstract

Dediu and Levinson (2013) argue that Neandertals had essentially modern language and speech, and that they were in genetic contact with the ancestors of modern humans during our dispersal out of Africa. This raises the possibility of cultural and linguistic contact between the two human lineages. If such contact did occur, then it might have influenced the cultural evolution of the languages. Since the genetic traces of contact with Neandertals are limited to the populations outside of Africa, Dediu & Levinson predict that there may be structural differences between the present-day languages derived from languages in contact with Neanderthals, and those derived from languages that were not influenced by such contact. Since the signature of such deep contact might reside in patterns of features, they suggested that machine learning methods may be able to detect these differences. This paper attempts to test this hypothesis and to estimate particular linguistic features that are potential candidates for carrying a signature of Neandertal languages.

Abstract

Complex communication can take place in a range of modalities such as auditory, visual, and tactile modalities. In a very general way, the modality that individuals use is constrained by their biological biases (humans cannot use magnetic fields directly to communicate to each other). The majority of natural languages have a large audible component. However, since humans can learn sign languages just as easily, it’s not clear to what extent the prevalence of spoken languages is due to biological biases, the social environment or cultural inheritance. This paper suggests that we can explore the relative contribution of these factors by modelling the spontaneous emergence of sign languages that are shared by the deaf and hearing members of relatively isolated communities. Such shared signing communities have arisen in enclaves around the world and may provide useful insights by demonstrating how languages evolve as the deaf proportion of its members has strong biases towards the visual language modality. In this paper we describe a model of cultural evolution in two modalities, combining aspects that are thought to impact the emergence of sign languages in a more general evolutionary framework. The model can be used to explore hypotheses about how sign languages emerge.

Abstract

Models of cultural evolution demonstrate that the link between individual biases and population- level phenomena can be obscured by the process of cultural transmission (Kirby, Dowman, & Griffiths, 2007). However, recent extensions to these models predict that linguistic diversity will not emerge and that learners should evolve to expect little linguistic variation in their input (Smith & Thompson, 2012). We demonstrate that this result derives from assumptions that privilege certain kinds of social interaction by exploring a range of alternative social models. We find several evolutionary routes to linguistic diversity, and show that social interaction not only influences the kinds of biases which could evolve to support language, but also the effects those biases have on a linguistic system. Given the same starting situation, the evolution of biases for language learning and the distribution of linguistic variation are affected by the kinds of social interaction that a population privileges.

Abstract

The current study reports specific cases in which a positive transfer of perceptual ability from the music domain to the language domain occurs. We tested whether musical training enhances discrimination and identification performance of L2 speech sounds (timing features, nasal consonants and vowels). Native Dutch and Japanese speakers with different musical training experience, matched for their estimated verbal IQ, participated in the experiments. Results indicated that musical training strongly increases one’s ability to perceive timing information in speech signals. We also found a benefit of musical training on discrimination performance for a subset of the tested vowel contrasts.

Abstract

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

Abstract

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

Abstract

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

Abstract

In foreign-accented speech, pronunciation typically deviates from the canonical form to some degree. For native listeners, it has been shown that word recognition is more difficult for strongly-accented words than for less strongly-accented words. Furthermore recognition of strongly-accented words becomes easier with additional exposure to the foreign accent. In this paper, listeners’ behaviour was simulated with Fine-tracker, a computational model of word recognition that uses real speech as input. The simulations showed that, in line with human listeners, 1) Fine-Tracker’s recognition outcome is modulated by the degree of accentedness and 2) it improves slightly after brief exposure with the accent. On the level of individual words, however, Fine-tracker failed to correctly simulate listeners’ behaviour, possibly due to differences in overall familiarity with the chosen accent (German-accented Dutch) between human listeners and Fine-Tracker.

Abstract

Aging often affects sensitivity to the higher frequencies, which results in the loss of sensitivity to phonetic detail in speech. Hearing loss may therefore interfere with the categorisation of two consonants that have most information to differentiate between them in those higher frequencies and less in the lower frequencies, e.g., /f/ and /s/. We investigate two acoustic cues, i.e., formant transitions and fricative intensity, that older listeners might use to differentiate between /f/ and /s/. The results of two phonetic categorisation tasks on 38 older listeners (aged 60+) with varying degrees of hearing loss indicate that older listeners seem to use formant transitions as a cue to distinguish /s/ from /f/. Moreover, this ability is not impacted by hearing loss. On the other hand, listeners with increased hearing loss seem to rely more on intensity for fricative identification. Thus, progressive hearing loss may lead to gradual changes in perceptual cue weighting.

Abstract

Young listeners can quickly modify their interpretation of a speech sound when a talker produces the sound ambiguously. Young Dutch listeners rely mainly on the higher frequencies to distinguish between /f/ and /s/, but these higher frequencies are particularly vulnerable to age-related hearing loss. We therefore tested whether older Dutch listeners can show perceptual retuning given an ambiguous pronunciation in between /f/ and /s/. Results of a lexically-guided perceptual learning experiment showed that older Dutch listeners are still able to learn non-standard pronunciations of /f/ and /s/. Possibly, the older listeners have learned to rely on other acoustic cues, such as formant transitions, to distinguish between /f/ and /s/. However, the size and duration of the perceptual effect is influenced by hearing loss, with listeners with poorer hearing showing a smaller and a shorter-lived learning effect.

Abstract

This study investigates whether age and/or hearing loss influence the perception of the emotion dimensions arousal (calm vs. aroused) and valence (positive vs. negative attitude) in conversational speech fragments. Specifically, this study focuses on the relationship between participants' ratings of affective speech and acoustic parameters known to be associated with arousal and valence (mean F0, intensity, and articulation rate). Ten normal-hearing younger and ten older adults with varying hearing loss were tested on two rating tasks. Stimuli consisted of short sentences taken from a corpus of conversational affective speech. In both rating tasks, participants estimated the value of the emotion dimension at hand using a 5-point scale. For arousal, higher intensity was generally associated with higher arousal in both age groups. Compared to younger participants, older participants rated the utterances as less aroused, and showed a smaller effect of intensity on their arousal ratings. For valence, higher mean F0 was associated with more negative ratings in both age groups. Generally, age group differences in rating affective utterances may not relate to age group differences in hearing loss, but rather to other differences between the age groups, as older participants' rating patterns were not associated with their individual hearing loss.

Abstract

This paper presents a study on the acoustic sub-segmental properties of word-final /t/ in conversational standard Dutch and how these properties contribute to whether humans and an ASR system classify the /t/ as acoustically present or absent. In general, humans and the ASR system use the same cues (presence of a constriction, a burst, and alveolar frication), but the ASR system is also less sensitive to fine cues (weak bursts, smoothly starting friction) than human listeners and misled by the presence of glottal vibration. These data inform the further development of models of human and automatic speech processing.

Abstract

In this study it is argued that scope, as a property of scope‐creating operators, is a real and important element in the semantico‐grammatical description of languages. The notion of scope is illustrated and, as far as possible, defined. A first idea is given of the ‘grammar of scope’, which defines the relation between scope in the logically structured semantic analysis (SA) of sentences on the one hand and surface structure on the other. Evidence is adduced showing that peripheral preposition phrases (PPPs) in the surface structure of sentences represent scope‐creating operators in SA, and that external datives fall into this category: they are scope‐creating PPPs. It follows that, in English and Dutch, the internal dative (I gave John a book) and the external dative (I gave a book to John) are not simple syntactic variants expressing the same meaning. Instead, internal datives are an integral part of the argument structure of the matrix predicate, whereas external datives represent scope‐creating operators in SA. In the Romance languages, the (non‐pronominal) external dative has been re‐analysed as an argument type dative, but this has not happened in English and Dutch, which have many verbs that only allow for an external dative (e.g. donate, reveal). When both datives are allowed, there are systematic semantic differences, including scope differences.

Abstract

Size analysis can be an important part of heap consumption analysis. This paper is a part of ongoing work about typing support for checking output-on-input size dependencies for function definitions in a strict functional language. A significant restriction for our earlier results is that inner data structures (e.g. in a list of lists) all must have the same size. Here, we make a big step forwards by overcoming this limitation via the introduction of higher-order size annotations such that variate sizes of inner data structures can be expressed. In this way the analysis becomes applicable for general, polymorphic nested lists.

Abstract

Spontal-N is a corpus of spontaneous, interactional Norwegian. To our knowledge, it is the first corpus of Norwegian in which the majority of speakers have spent significant parts of their lives in Sweden, and in which the recorded speech displays varying degrees of interference from Swedish. The corpus consists of studio quality audio- and video-recordings of four 30-minute free conversations between acquaintances, and a manual orthographic transcription of the entire material. On basis of the orthographic transcriptions, we automatically annotated approximately 50 percent of the material on the phoneme level, by means of a forced alignment between the acoustic signal and pronunciations listed in a dictionary. Approximately seven percent of the automatic transcription was manually corrected. Taking the manual correction as a gold standard, we evaluated several sources of pronunciation variants for the automatic transcription. Spontal-N is intended as a general purpose speech resource that is also suitable for investigating phonetic detail.

Abstract

When perceiving vowels, listeners adjust to speaker-specific vocal-tract characteristics (such as F1) through "extrinsic vowel normalization". This effect is observed as a shift in the location of categorization boundaries of vowel continua. Similar effects have been found with non-speech. Non-speech materials, however, have consistently led to smaller effect-sizes, perhaps because of a lack of attention to non-speech. The present study investigated this possibility. Non-speech materials that had previously been shown to elicit reduced normalization effects were tested again, with the addition of an attention manipulation. The results show that increased attention does not lead to increased normalization effects, suggesting that vowel normalization is mainly determined by bottom-up signal characteristics.

Abstract

ELAN is a versatile multimedia annotation tool that is being developed at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. About a decade ago it emerged out of a number of corpus tools and utilities and it has been extended ever since. This paper focuses on the efforts made to ensure that the application keeps up with the growing needs of that era in linguistics and multimodality research; growing needs in terms of length and resolution of recordings, the number of recordings made and transcribed and the number of levels of annotation per transcription.

Abstract

The effect of literacy on phonological processing has been described in terms of a virus that “infects all speech processing” (Frith, 1998). Empirical data has established that literacy leads to changes to the way in which phonological information is processed. Harm & Seidenberg (1999) demonstrated that a connectionist network trained to map between English orthographic and phonological representations display’s more componential phonological processing than a network trained only to stably represent the phonological forms of words. Within this study we use a similar model yet manipulate the transparency of orthographic-to-phonological mappings. We observe that networks trained on a transparent orthography are better at restoring phonetic features and phonemes. However, networks trained on non-transparent orthographies are more likely to restore corrupted phonological segments with legal, coarser linguistic units (e.g. onset, coda). Our study therefore provides an explicit description of how differences in orthographic transparency can lead to varying strains and symptoms of the ‘literacy virus’.

Abstract

When processing language, the cognitive system has access to information from a range of modalities (e.g. auditory, visual) to support language processing. Language mediated visual attention studies have shown sensitivity of the listener to phonological, visual, and semantic similarity when processing a word. In a computational model of language mediated visual attention, that models spoken word processing as the parallel integration of information from phonological, semantic and visual processing streams, we simulate such effects of competition within modalities. Our simulations raised untested predictions about stronger and earlier effects of visual and semantic similarity compared to phonological similarity around the rhyme of the word. Two visual world studies confirmed these predictions. The model and behavioral studies suggest that, during spoken word comprehension, multimodal information can be recruited rapidly to constrain lexical selection to the extent that phonological rhyme information may exert little influence on this process.

Abstract

This paper presents the Kachna corpus of spontaneous speech, in which ten Czech and ten Norwegian speakers were recorded both in their native language and in English. The dialogues are elicited using a picture replication task that requires active cooperation and interaction of speakers by asking them to produce a drawing as close to the original as possible. The corpus is appropriate for the study of interactional features and speech reduction phenomena across native and second languages. The combination of productions in non-native English and in speakers’ native language is advantageous for investigation of L2 issues while providing a L1 behaviour reference from all the speakers. The corpus consists of 20 dialogues comprising 12 hours 53 minutes of recording, and was collected in 2008. Preparation of the transcriptions, including a manual orthographic transcription and an automatically generated phonetic transcription, is currently in progress. The phonetic transcriptions are automatically generated by aligning acoustic models with the speech signal on the basis of the orthographic transcriptions and a dictionary of pronunciation variants compiled for the relevant language. Upon completion the corpus will be made available via the European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

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.