Publications

Abstract

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of race and other forms of social categorization as approached through the discourse of the indigenous Chachi people of northwestern lowland Ecuador and their Afro-descendant neighbors. It combines the ethnographic methods of social anthropology with the methods of descriptive linguistics, letting social questions about racial formation guide linguistic inquiry. It provides new information about the largely unstudied indigenous South American language Cha’palaa, and connects that information about linguistic form to problems of the study of race and ethnicity in Latin America. Individual descriptive chapters address how the Cha’palaa number system is based on collectivity rather than plurality according to an animacy hierarchy that codes only human and human-like social collectivities, how a nominal set of ethnonyms linked to Chachi oral history become the recipients of collective marking as human collectivities, how those collectivities are co-referentially linked to speech participants through the deployment of the pronominal system, and how the multi-modal resource of gesture adds to these rich resources supplied by the spoken language for the expression of social realities like race. The final chapters address Chachi and Afrodescendant discourses in dialogue with each other and examine naturally occurring speech data to show how the linguistic forms described in previous chapters are used in social interaction. The central argument advances a position that takes the socially constructed status of race seriously and considers that for such constructions to exist as more abstract macro-categories they must be constituted by instances of social interaction, where elements of the social order are observable at the micro-level. In this way localized articulations of social categories become vehicles for the broader circulation of discourses structured by a history of racialized social inequality, revealing the extreme depth of racialization in human social conditioning. This dissertation represents a contribution to the field of linguistic anthropology as well as to descriptive linguistics of South American languages and to critical approaches to race and ethnicity in Latin America.

Abstract

Achieving linguistic proficiency requires identifying words from speech, and discovering the constraints that govern the way those words are used. In a recent study of non-adjacent dependency learning, Frost and Monaghan (2016) demonstrated that learners may perform these tasks together, using similar statistical processes - contrary to prior suggestions. However, in their study, non-adjacent dependencies were marked by phonological cues (plosive-continuant-plosive structure), which may have influenced learning. Here, we test the necessity of these cues by comparing learning across three conditions; fixed phonology, which contains these cues, varied phonology, which omits them, and shapes, which uses visual shape sequences to assess the generality of statistical processing for these tasks. Participants segmented the sequences and generalized the structure in both auditory conditions, but learning was best when phonological cues were present. Learning was around chance on both tasks for the visual shapes group, indicating statistical processing may critically differ across domains.

Abstract

Large-scale graph data in real-world applications is often not static but dynamic,
i. e., new nodes and edges appear over time. Current graph convolution approaches
are promising, especially, when all the graph’s nodes and edges are available dur-
ing training. When unseen nodes and edges are inserted after training, it is not
yet evaluated whether up-training or re-training from scratch is preferable. We
construct an experimental setup, in which we insert previously unseen nodes and
edges after training and conduct a limited amount of inference epochs. In this
setup, we compare adapting pretrained graph neural networks against retraining
from scratch. Our results show that pretrained models yield high accuracy scores
on the unseen nodes and that pretraining is preferable over retraining from scratch.
Our experiments represent a first step to evaluate and develop truly online variants
of graph neural networks.

Abstract

Large pretrained language models (PreLMs) are rev-olutionizing natural language processing across all benchmarks. However, their sheer size is prohibitive for small laboratories or for deployment on mobile devices. Approaches like pruning and distillation reduce the model size but typically retain the same model architecture. In contrast, we explore distilling PreLMs into a different, more efficient architecture, Continual Multiplication of Words (CMOW), which embeds each word as a matrix and uses matrix multiplication to encode sequences. We extend the CMOW architecture and its CMOW/CBOW-Hybrid variant with a bidirectional component for more expressive power, per-token representations for a general (task-agnostic) distillation during pretraining, and a two-sequence encoding scheme that facilitates downstream tasks on sentence pairs, such as sentence similarity and natural language inference. Our matrix-based bidirectional CMOW/CBOW-Hybrid model is competitive to DistilBERT on question similarity and recognizing textual entailment, but uses only half of the number of parameters and is three times faster in terms of inference speed. We match or exceed the scores of ELMo for all tasks of the GLUE benchmark except for the sentiment analysis task SST-2 and the linguistic acceptability task CoLA. However, compared to previous cross-architecture distillation approaches, we demonstrate a doubling of the scores on detecting linguistic acceptability. This shows that matrix-based embeddings can be used to distill large PreLM into competitive models and motivates further research in this direction.

Abstract

Rhythm is a fundamental feature characterizing communicative displays, and recent studies showed that primate songs encompass categorical rhythms falling on small integer ratios observed in humans. We individually assessed the presence and sexual dimorphism of rhythmic categories, analyzing songs emitted by 39 wild indris. Considering the intervals between the units given during each song, we extracted 13556 interval ratios and found three peaks (at around 0.33, 0.47, and 0.70). Two peaks indicated rhythmic categories corresponding to small integer ratios (1:1, 2:1). All individuals showed a peak at 0.70, and
most showed those at 0.47 and 0.33. In addition, we found sex differences in the peak at 0.47 only, with males showing lower values than females. This work investigates the presence of individual rhythmic categories in a non-human species; further research may highlight the significance of rhythmicity and untie selective pressures that guided its evolution across species, including humans.

Abstract

This paper presents the Demo / Kemo corpus of Dutch and Korean emotional speech. The corpus has been specifically developed for the purpose of cross-linguistic comparison, and is more balanced than any similar corpus available so far: a) it contains expressions by both Dutch and Korean actors as well as judgments by both Dutch and Korean listeners; b) the same elicitation technique and recording procedure was used for recordings of both languages; c) the same nonsense sentence, which was constructed to be permissible in both languages, was used for recordings of both languages; and d) the emotions present in the corpus are balanced in terms of valence, arousal, and dominance. The corpus contains a comparatively large number of emotions (eight) uttered by a large number of speakers (eight Dutch and eight Korean). The counterbalanced nature of the corpus will enable a stricter investigation of language-specific versus universal aspects of emotional expression than was possible so far. Furthermore, given the carefully controlled phonetic content of the expressions, it allows for analysis of the role of specific phonetic features in emotional expression in Dutch and Korean.

Abstract

Researchers in human language processing and acquisition are making an increasing use of computational models. Computer simulations provide a valuable platform to reproduce hypothesised learning mechanisms that are otherwise very difficult, if not impossible, to verify on human subjects. However, computational models come with problems and risks. It is difficult to (automatically) extract essential information about the developing internal representations from a set of simulation runs, and often researchers limit themselves to analysing learning curves based on empirical recognition accuracy through time. The associated risk is to erroneously deem a specific learning behaviour as generalisable to human learners, while it could also be a mere consequence (artifact) of the implementation of the artificial learner or of the input coding scheme. In this paper a set of simulation runs taken from the ACORNS project is investigated. First a look `inside the box' of the learner is provided by employing novel quantitative methods for analysing changing structures in large data sets. Then, the obtained findings are discussed in the perspective of their ecological validity in the field of child language acquisition.

Abstract

Child songs are a great source for linguistic learning. Here we explore whether children can acquire novel words in a second language by playing a game featuring child songs in a playhouse. We present data from three studies that serve as scientific proof for the functionality of one game of the playhouse: the Energy Center. For this game, three hand-bikes were mounted on a panel. When children start moving the hand-bikes, child songs start playing simultaneously. Once the children produce enough energy with the hand-bikes, the songs are additionally accompanied with the sounds of musical instruments. In our studies, children executed a picture-selection task to evaluate whether they acquired new vocabulary from the songs presented during the game. Two of our studies were run in the field, one at a Dutch and one at an Indian pre-school. The third study features data from a more controlled laboratory setting. Our results partly confirm that the Energy Center is a successful means to support vocabulary acquisition in a second language. More research with larger sample sizes and longer access to the Energy Center is needed to evaluate the overall functionality of the game. Based on informal observations at our test sites, however, we are certain that children do pick up linguistic content from the songs during play, as many of the children repeat words and phrases from songs they heard. We will pick up upon these promising observations during future studies

Abstract

This corpus-based study shows that the presence and duration of schwa in Dutch word-initial syllables are affected by a word’s predictability and its morphological structure. Schwa is less reduced in words that are more predictable given the following word. In addition, schwa may be longer if the syllable forms a prefix, and in prefixes the duration of schwa is positively correlated with the frequency of the word relative to its stem. Our results suggest that the conditions which favor reduced realizations are more complex than one would expect on the basis of the current literature.

Abstract

Non-native (L2) speakers of English often experience difficulties in producing English interdental fricatives (e.g. the voiceless [θ]), and this leads to frequent substitutions of these fricatives (e.g. with [t], [s], and [f]). Differences in the choice of [θ]-substitutions across L2 speakers with different native (L1) language backgrounds have been extensively explored. However, even within one foreign accent, more than one substitution choice occurs, but this has been less systematically studied. Furthermore, little is known about whether the substitutions of voiceless [θ] are phonetically clear instances of [t], [s], and [f], as they are often labelled. In this study, we attempted a phonetic approach to examine language-specific preferences for [θ]-substitutions by carrying out acoustic measurements of L1 and L2 realizations of these sounds. To this end, we collected a corpus of spoken English with L1 speakers (UK-English), and Dutch and German L2 speakers. We show a) that the distribution of differential substitutions using identical materials differs between Dutch and German L2 speakers, b) that [t,s,f]-substitutes differ acoustically from intended [t,s,f], and c) that L2 productions of [θ] are acoustically comparable to L1 productions.

Abstract

Prediction in language has traditionally been studied using
simple designs in which neural responses to expected
and unexpected words are compared in a categorical
fashion. However, these designs have been contested
as being ‘prediction encouraging’, potentially exaggerating
the importance of prediction in language understanding.
A few recent studies have begun to address
these worries by using model-based approaches to probe
the effects of linguistic predictability in naturalistic stimuli
(e.g. continuous narrative). However, these studies
so far only looked at very local forms of prediction, using
models that take no more than the prior two words into
account when computing a word’s predictability. Here,
we extend this approach using a state-of-the-art neural
language model that can take roughly 500 times longer
linguistic contexts into account. Predictability estimates
fromthe neural network offer amuch better fit to EEG data
from subjects listening to naturalistic narrative than simpler
models, and reveal strong surprise responses akin to
the P200 and N400. These results show that predictability
effects in language are not a side-effect of simple designs,
and demonstrate the practical use of recent advances
in AI for the cognitive neuroscience of language.

Abstract

Humans differ greatly in their ability to use language. Contemporary psycholinguistic theories assume that individual differences in language skills arise from variability in linguistic experience and in general cognitive skills. While much previous research has tested the involvement of select verbal and non-verbal variables in select domains of linguistic processing, comprehensive characterizations of the relationships among the skills underlying language use are rare. We contribute to such a research program by re-analyzing a publicly available set of data from 112 young adults tested on 35 behavioral tests. The tests assessed nine key constructs reflecting linguistic processing skills, linguistic experience and general cognitive skills. Correlation and hierarchical clustering analyses of the test scores showed that most of the tests assumed to measure the same construct correlated moderately to strongly and largely clustered together. Furthermore, the results suggest important roles of processing speed in comprehension, and of linguistic experience in production.

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

Mutations of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) gene are found at a relatively high frequency in glioma, with the most common being the de2-7 EGFR (or EGFRvIII). This mutation arises from an in-frame deletion of exons 2-7, which removes 267 amino acids from the extracellular domain of the receptor. Despite being unable to bind ligand, the de2-7 EGFR is constitutively active at a low level. Transfection of human glioma cells with the de2-7 EGFR has little effect in vitro, but when grown as tumor xenografts this mutated receptor imparts a dramatic growth advantage. We mapped the phosphorylation pattern of de2-7 EGFR, both in vivo and in vitro, using a panel of antibodies specific for different phosphorylated tyrosine residues. Phosphorylation of de2-7 EGFR was detected constitutively at all tyrosine sites surveyed in vitro and in vivo, including tyrosine 845, a known target in the wild-type EGFR for src kinase. There was a substantial upregulation of phosphorylation at every yrosine residue of the de2-7 EGFR when cells were grown in vivo compared to the receptor isolated from cells cultured in vitro. Upregulation of phosphorylation at tyrosine 845 could be stimulated in vitro by the addition of specific components of the ECM via an integrindependent mechanism. These observations may partially explain why the growth enhancement mediated by de2-7 EGFR is largely restricted to the in vivo environment

Abstract

This study investigates effects of prosodic factors (prominence, boundary) on coarticulatory Vnasalization in Australian English (AusE) in CVN and NVC in comparison to those in American English
(AmE). As in AmE, prominence was found to
lengthen N, but to reduce V-nasalization, enhancing N’s nasality and V’s orality, respectively (paradigmatic contrast enhancement). But the prominence effect in CVN was more robust than that in AmE. Again similar to findings in AmE, boundary
induced a reduction of N-duration and V-nasalization phrase-initially (syntagmatic contrast enhancement), and increased the nasality of both C and V phrasefinally.
But AusE showed some differences in terms
of the magnitude of V nasalization and N duration. The results suggest that the linguistic contrast enhancements underlie prosodic-structure modulation of coarticulatory V-nasalization in
comparable ways across dialects, while the fine phonetic detail indicates that the phonetics-prosody interplay is internalized in the individual dialect’s phonetic grammar.

Abstract

This dissertation investigates two seemingly contradictory properties of the speech perception system. On the one hand, listeners are extremely sensitive to the fine phonetic details in the speech signal. These subtle acoustic cues can reduce the temporal ambiguity between words that show initial segmental overlap, and can guide lexical activation. On the other hand, comprehension does not seem to be hampered at all by the drastic reductions that typically occur in casual speech. Complete segments, and sometimes even complete syllables, may be missing, but comprehension is seemingly unaffected. This thesis aims at elucidating how words are represented and accessed in the mental lexicon, by investigating these contradictory phenomena for the domain of morphology

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

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

Mental imagery is a cognitive process crucial to human reasoning. Numerous studies have characterized specific
instances of this cognitive ability, as evoked by visual imagery (VI) or motor imagery (MI) tasks. However, it
remains unclear which neural resources are shared between VI and MI, and which are exclusively related to MI.
To address this issue, we have used fMRI to measure human brain activity during performance of VI and MI
tasks. Crucially, we have modulated the imagery process by manipulating the degree of mental rotation necessary
to solve the tasks. We focused our analysis on changes in neural signal as a function of the degree of mental
rotation in each task.

Abstract

In this paper we report on four experiments in which we attempted to prime the stress position of Dutch bisyllabic target nouns. These nouns, picture names, had stress on either the first or the second syllable. Auditory prime words had either the same stress as the target or a different stress (e.g., WORtel – MOtor vs. koSTUUM – MOtor; capital letters indicate stressed syllables in prime – target pairs). Furthermore, half of the prime words were semantically related, the other half were unrelated. In none of the experiments a stress priming effect was found. This could mean that stress is not stored in the lexicon. An additional finding was that targets with initial stress had a faster response than targets with a final stress. We hypothesize that bisyllabic words with final stress take longer to be encoded because this stress pattern is irregular with respect to the lexical distribution of bisyllabic stress patterns, even though it can be regular in terms of the metrical stress rules of Dutch.

Abstract

Response tokens (also known as backchannels, continuers, or feedback) are a frequent feature of human interaction, where they serve to display understanding and streamline turn-taking. We propose a bottom-up method to study responsive behaviour across 16 languages (8 language families). We use sequential context and recurrence of turns formats to identify candidate response tokens in a language-agnostic way across diverse conversational corpora. We then use UMAP clustering directly on speech signals to represent structure and variation. We find that (i) written orthographic annotations underrepresent the attested variation, (ii) distinctions between formats can be gradient rather than discrete, (iii) most languages appear to make available a broad distinction between a minimal nasal format `mm' and a fuller `yeah’-like format. Charting this aspect of human interaction contributes to our understanding of interactional infrastructure across languages and can inform the design of speech technologies.

Abstract

We present an analysis pipeline and best practice guidelines for building and curating corpora of everyday conversation in diverse languages. Surveying language documentation corpora and other resources that cover 67 languages and varieties from 28 phyla, we describe the compilation and curation process, specify minimal properties of a unified format for interactional data, and develop methods for quality control that take into account turn-taking and timing. Two case studies show the broad utility of conversational data for (i) charting human interactional infrastructure and (ii) tracing challenges and opportunities for current ASR solutions. Linguistically diverse conversational corpora can provide new insights for the language sciences and stronger empirical foundations for language technology.

Abstract

Verb learning is important for young children. While most
previous research has focused on linguistic and conceptual
challenges in early verb learning (e.g. Gentner, 1982, 2006),
the present paper examined early verb learning at the
attentional level and quantified the input for early verb learning
by measuring verb-action co-occurrence statistics in parent-
child interaction from the learner’s perspective. To do so, we
used head-mounted eye tracking to record fine-grained
multimodal behaviors during parent-infant joint play, and
analyzed parent speech, parent and infant action, and infant
attention at the moments when parents produced verb labels.
Our results show great variability across different action verbs,
in terms of frequency of verb utterances, frequency of
corresponding actions related to verb meanings, and infants’
attention to verbs and actions, which provide new insights on
why some verbs are harder to learn than others.

Abstract

Continuous Bag of Words (CBOW) is a powerful text embedding method. Due to its strong capabilities to encode word content, CBOW embeddings perform well on a wide range of downstream tasks while being efficient to compute. However, CBOW is not capable of capturing the word order. The reason is that the computation of CBOW's word embeddings is commutative, i.e., embeddings of XYZ and ZYX are the same. In order to address this shortcoming, we propose a
learning algorithm for the Continuous Matrix Space Model, which we call Continual Multiplication of Words (CMOW). Our algorithm is an adaptation of word2vec, so that it can be trained on large quantities of unlabeled text. We empirically show that CMOW better captures linguistic properties, but it is inferior to CBOW in memorizing word content. Motivated by these findings, we propose a hybrid model that combines the strengths of CBOW and CMOW. Our results show that the hybrid CBOW-CMOW-model retains CBOW's strong ability to memorize word content while at the same time substantially improving its ability to encode other linguistic information by 8%. As a result, the hybrid also performs better on 8 out of 11 supervised downstream tasks with an average improvement of 1.2%.

Abstract

The human body is unique: it is both an object of perception and the source of human experience. Its universality makes it a perfect resource for asking questions about how cognition, brain and typology relate to one another. For example, we can ask how speakers of different languages segment and categorize the human body. A dominant view is that body parts are “given” by visual perceptual discontinuities, and that words are merely labels for these visually determined parts (e.g., Andersen, 1978; Brown, 1976; Lakoff, 1987). However, there are problems with this view. First it ignores other perceptual information, such as somatosensory and motoric representations. By looking at the neural representations of sesnsory representations, we can test how much of the categorization of the human body can be done through perception alone. Second, we can look at language typology to see how much universality and variation there is in body-part categories. A comparison of a range of typologically, genetically and areally diverse languages shows that the perceptual view has only limited applicability (Majid, Enfield & van Staden, in press). For example, using a “coloring-in” task, where speakers of seven different languages were given a line drawing of a human body and asked to color in various body parts, Majid & van Staden (in prep) show that languages vary substantially in body part segmentation. For example, Jahai (Mon-Khmer) makes a lexical distinction between upper arm, lower arm, and hand, but Lavukaleve (Papuan Isolate) has just one word to refer to arm, hand, and leg. This shows that body part categorization is not a straightforward mapping of words to visually determined perceptual parts.

Abstract

Many studies in cognitive science address how people categorize objects, but there has been comparatively little research on event categorization. This study investigated the categorization of events involving material destruction, such as “cutting” and “breaking”. Speakers of 28 typologically, genetically, and areally diverse languages described events shown in a set of video-clips. There was considerable cross-linguistic agreement in the dimensions along which the events were distinguished, but there was variation in the number of categories and the placement of their boundaries.

Abstract

Studies have claimed that blind people’s spatial representations are different from sighted people, and blind people display superior auditory processing. Due to the nature of auditory and haptic information, it has been proposed that blind people have spatial representations that are more sequential than sighted people. Even the temporary loss of sight—such as through blindfolding—can affect spatial representations, but not much research has been done on this topic. We compared blindfolded and sighted people’s linguistic spatial expressions and non-linguistic localization accuracy to test how blindfolding affects the representation of path in auditory motion events. We found that blindfolded people were as good as sighted people when localizing simple sounds, but they outperformed sighted people when localizing auditory motion events. Blindfolded people’s path related speech also included more sequential, and less holistic elements. Our results indicate that even temporary loss of sight influences spatial representations of auditory motion events

Abstract

Lombard speech, speech produced in noise, is acoustically different from speech produced in quiet (plain speech) in several ways, including having a higher and wider F0 range (pitch). Extensive research on native Lombard speech does not consider that non-natives experience a higher cognitive load while producing
speech and that the native language may influence the non-native speech. We investigated pitch range in plain and Lombard speech in native and non-natives.
Dutch and American-English speakers read contrastive question-answer pairs in quiet and in noise in English, while the Dutch also read Dutch sentence pairs. We found that Lombard speech is characterized by a wider pitch range than plain speech, for all speakers (native English, non-native English, and native Dutch).
This shows that non-natives also widen their pitch range in Lombard speech. In sentences with early-focus, we see the same increase in pitch range when going from plain to Lombard speech in native and non-native English, but a smaller increase in native Dutch. In sentences with late-focus, we see the biggest increase for the native English, followed by non-native English and then native Dutch. Together these results indicate an effect of the native language on non-native Lombard speech.

Abstract

Lombard speech, speech produced in noise, is
typically produced with a higher fundamental
frequency (F0, pitch) compared to speech in quiet. This paper examined the potential differences in native and non-native Lombard speech by analyzing median pitch in sentences with early- or late-focus produced in quiet and noise. We found an increase in pitch in late-focus sentences in noise for Dutch speakers in both English and Dutch, and for American-English speakers in English. These results
show that non-native speakers produce Lombard speech, despite their higher cognitive load. For the early-focus sentences, we found a difference between the Dutch and the American-English speakers. Whereas the Dutch showed an increased F0 in noise
in English and Dutch, the American-English speakers did not in English. Together, these results suggest that some acoustic characteristics of Lombard speech, such as pitch, may be language-specific, potentially
resulting in the native language influencing the non-native Lombard speech.

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

This thesis addressed the spoken production of complex numerals for time and space. The production of complex numerical expressions like those involved in telling time (e.g., 'quarter to four') or producing house numbers (e.g., 'two hundred forty-five') has been almost completely ignored. Yet, adult speakers produce such expressions on a regular basis in everyday communication. Thus, no theory on numerical cognition or speech production is complete without an account of the production of multi-morphemic utterances such as complex numeral expressions. The main question of this thesis is which particular speech planning levels are involved in the naming and reading of complex numerals for time and space. More specifically, this issue was investigated by examining different modes of response (clock times versus house numbers), alternative input formats (Arabic digit versus alphabetic format; analog versus digital clock displays), and different expression types (relative 'quarter to four' versus absolute 'three forty-five' time expressions).