Publications

Abstract

Reading is a cultural invention that needs to recruit cortical infrastructure that was not designed for it (cultural recycling of cortical maps). In the case of reading both visual cortex and networks for speech processing are recruited. Here I discuss current views on the neurobiological underpinnings of spoken language that deviate in a number of ways from the classical Wernicke-Lichtheim-Geschwind model. More areas than Broca’s and Wernicke’s region are involved in language. Moreover, a division along the axis of language production and language comprehension does not seem to be warranted. Instead, for central aspects of language processing neural infrastructure is shared between production and comprehension. Arguments are presented in favor of a dynamic network view, in which the functionality of a region is co-determined by the network of regions in which it is embedded at particular moments in time. Finally, core regions of language processing need to interact with other networks (e.g. the attentional networks and the ToM network) to establish full functionality of language and communication. The consequences of this architecture for reading are discussed.

Abstract

Until recently, the literature on common ground depicted its influence as a purely verbal phenomenon. We review current research on how common ground influences gesture. With informative exceptions, most experiments found that speakers used fewer gestures as well as fewer words in common ground contexts; i.e., the gesture/word ratio did not change. Common ground often led to more poorly articulated gestures, which parallels its effect on words. These findings support the principle of recipient design as well as more specific social functions such as grounding, the given-new contract, and Grice’s maxims. However, conceptual pacts or linking old with new information may maintain the original form. All together, these findings implicate gesture-speech ensembles rather than isolated effects on gestures alone.

Abstract

This chapter investigates the fit of genetic, phenotypic, and linguistic data to two well-known models of population history. The first of these models, termed the population fissions model, emphasizes population splitting, isolation, and independent evolution. It predicts that genetic and linguistic data will be perfectly tree-like. The second model, termed isolation by distance, emphasizes genetic exchange among geographically proximate populations. It predicts a monotonic decline in genetic similarity with increasing geographic distance. While these models are overly simplistic, deviations from them were expected to provide important insights into the population history of northern Island Melanesia. The chapter finds scant support for either model because the prehistory of the region has been so complex. Nonetheless, the genetic and linguistic data are consistent with an early radiation of proto-Papuan speakers into the region followed by a much later migration of Austronesian speaking peoples. While these groups subsequently experienced substantial genetic and cultural exchange, this exchange has been insufficient to erase this history of separate migrations.

Abstract

Neurocognitive studies of language production have provided sufficient evidence on both the spatial and the temporal patterns of brain activation to allow tentative and in some cases not so tentative conclusions about function-structure relationships. This chapter reports meta-analysis results that identify reliable activation areas for a range of word, sentence, and narrative production tasks both in the native language and a second language. Based on a theoretically motivated analysis of language production tasks it is possible to specify relationships between brain areas and functional processing components of language production that could not have been derived from the data provided by any single task.

Abstract

This paper compares the focus marking systems and the focus size that can be expressed by the different focus markings in four Mande and three Atlantic languages and varieties, namely: Bambara, Dyula, Kakabe, Soninke (Mande), Wolof, Jóola Foñy and Jóola Karon (Atlantic). All of these languages are known to mark focus morphosyntactically, rather than prosodically, as the more well-studied Germanic languages do. However, the Mande languages under discussion use only morphology, in the form of a particle that follows the focus, while the Atlantic ones use a more complex morphosyntactic system in which focus is marked by morphology in the verbal complex and movement of the focused term. It is shown that while there are some syntactic restrictions to how many different focus sizes can be marked in a distinct way, there is also a certain degree of arbitrariness as to which focus sizes are marked in the same way as each other.

Abstract

This paper is an abridged version (in Dutch) of an in-press article by the same author (Kempen, G. (2008/9). Clausal coordination and coordinate ellipsis in a model of the speaker. To be published in: Linguistics). The two papers present a psycholinguistically inspired approach to the syntax of clause-level coordination and coordinate ellipsis. It departs from the assumption that coordinations are structurally similar to so-called appropriateness repairs Ñ an important type of self-repairs in spontaneous speech. Coordinate structures and appropriateness repairs can both be viewed as ÒupdateÓ con-structions. Updating is defined as a special sentence production mode that efficiently revises or augments existing sentential structure in response to modifications in the speakerÕs communicative intention. This perspective is shown to offer an empirically satisfactory and theoretically parsimonious account of two prominent types of coordinate ellipsis, in particular Forward Conjunction Reduction (FCR) and Gapping (including Long-Distance Gapping and Subgapping). They are analyzed as different manifestations of Òincremental updatingÓ Ñ efficient updating of only part of the existing sentential structure. Based on empirical data from Dutch and German, novel treatments are proposed for both types of clausal coordinate ellipsis. Two other forms of coordinate ellipsis Ñ SGF (ÒSubject Gap in Finite clauses with fronted verbÓ), and Backward Conjunction Reduction (BCR; also known as Right Node Raising or RNR) Ñ are shown to be incompatible with the notion of incremental updating. Alternative theoretical interpretations of these phenomena are proposed. The four types of clausal coordinate ellipsis Ñ SGF, Gapping, FCR and BCR Ñ are argued to originate in four different stages of sentence production: Intending (i.e. preparing the communicative intention), Conceptualization, Grammatical Encoding, and Phonological Encoding, respectively.

Abstract

In a paper entitled “Against markedness (and what to replace it with)”, Haspelmath argues “that the term ‘markedness’ is superfluous”, and that frequency asymmetries often explain structural (un)markedness asymmetries (Haspelmath 2006). We investigate whether this argument applies to Object and Verb orders in main (VO, marked) and subordinate (OV, unmarked) clauses of spoken and written German and Dutch, using English (without VO/OV alternation) as control. Frequency counts from six treebanks (three languages, two output modalities) do not support Haspelmath’s proposal. However, they reveal an unexpected phenomenon, most prominently in spoken Dutch and German: a small set of extremely high-frequent finite verbs with unspecific meanings populates main clauses much more densely than subordinate clauses. We suggest these verbs accelerate the start-up of grammatical encoding, thus facilitating sentence-initial output fluency

Abstract

Language development is driven by multiple factors involving both the individual child and the environments that surround the child. The chapters in this volume highlight several such factors as potential contributors to developmental change, including factors that examine the role of immediate social environment (i.e., parent SES, parent and sibling input, peer interaction) and factors that focus on the child’s own cognitive and social development, such as the acquisition of theory of mind, event knowledge, and memory. The discussion of the different factors is presented largely from a crosslinguistic framework, using a multimodal perspective (speech, gesture, sign). The book celebrates the scholarly contributions of Prof. Ayhan Aksu-Koç – a pioneer in the study of crosslinguistic variation in language acquisition, particularly in the domain of evidentiality and theory of mind. This book will serve as an important resource for researchers in the field of developmental psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics across the globe

Abstract

The geographical region of Insular South East Asia and New Guinea is well-known as an
area of mega-biodiversity. Less well-known is the extreme linguistic diversity in this area:
over a quarter of the world’s 6,000 languages are spoken here. As small minority languages,
most of them will cease to be spoken in the coming few generations. The project described
here ensures the preservation of unique records of languages and the cultures encapsulated
by them in the region. The language resources were gathered by twenty linguists at,
or in collaboration with, Dutch universities over the last 40 years, and were compiled and
archived in collaboration with The Language Archive (TLA) at the Max Planck Institute in
Nijmegen. The resulting archive constitutes a collection ofmultimediamaterials and written
documents from 48 languages in Insular South East Asia and West New Guinea. At TLA,
the data was archived according to state-of-the-art standards (TLA holds the Data Seal of
Approval): the component metadata infrastructure CMDI was used; all metadata categories
as well as relevant units of annotation were linked to the ISO data category registry ISOcat.
This guaranteed proper integration of the language resources into the CLARIN framework.
Through the archive, future speaker communities and researchers will be able to extensively
search thematerials for answers to their own questions, even if they do not themselves know the language, and even if the language dies.

Abstract

Linguistic skills are primarily tuned to the proper conduct of conversation. The innate ability to converse has provided species with a capacity to share moods, attitudes, and information of almost any kind, to assemble knowledge and skills, to plan coordinated action, to educate its offspring, in short, to create and transmit culture. In conversation the interlocutors are involved in negotiating meaning. Speaking is most complex cognitive-motor skill. It involves the conception of an intention, the selection of information whose expression will make that intention recognizable, the selection of appropriate words, the construction of a syntactic framework, the retrieval of the words’ sound forms, and the computation of an articulatory plan for each word and for the utterance as a whole. The question where communicative intentions come from is a psychodynamic question rather than a psycholinguistic one. Speaking is a form of social action, and it is in the context of action that intentions, goals, and subgoals develop.

Abstract

PdR Press publications in cognition ; 1

Abstract

The purpose of this book is to provide some indication of the scope of linguistic pragmatics. First the historical origin of the term pragmatics will be briefly summarized, in order to indicate some usages of the term that are divergent from the usage in this book. We will review some definitions of the field, which, while being less than fully statisfactory, will at least serve to indicate the rough scope of linguistic pragmatics. Thirdly, some reasons for the current interest in the field will be explained, while a final section illustrates some basic kinds of pragmatic phenomena. In passing, some analytical notions that are useful background will be introduced.

Abstract

This chapter explicates the requirement in person–reference for balancing demands for recognition, minimalization, explicitness and indirection. This is illustrated with reference to data from repair of failures of person–reference within a particular linguistic/cultural context, namely casual interaction among Rossel Islanders. Rossel Island (PNG) offers a ‘natural experiment’ for studying aspects of person reference, because of a number of special properties: 1. It is a closed universe of 4000 souls, sharing one kinship network, so in principle anyone could be recognizable from a reference. As a result no (complex) descriptions (cf. ‘ the author of Waverly’) are employed. 2. Names, however, are never uniquely referring, since they are drawn from a fixed pool. They are only used for about 25% of initial references, another 25% of initial references being done by kinship triangulation (‘that man’s father–in–law’). Nearly 50% of initial references are semantically underspecified or vague (e.g. ‘that girl’). 3. There are systematic motivations for oblique reference, e.g. kinship–based taboos and other constraints, which partly account for the underspecified references. The ‘natural experiment’ thus reveals some gneral lessons about how person–reference requires optimizing multiple conflicting constraints. Comparison with Sacks and Schegloff’s (1979) treatment of English person reference suggests a way to tease apart the universal and the culturally–particular.

Abstract

When we speak, we mean more than we say. In this book, the author explains some general processes that underlie presumptions in communication. This is the first extended discussion of preferred interpretation in language understanding, integrating much of the best research in linguistic pragmatics from the last two decades. Levinson outlines a theory of presumptive meanings, or preferred interpretations, governing the use of language, building on the idea of implicature developed by the philosopher H. P. Grice. Some of the indirect information carried by speech is presumed by default because it is carried by general principles, rather than inferred from specific assumptions about intention and context. Levinson examines this class of general pragmatic inferences in detail, showing how they apply to a wide range of linguistic constructions. This approach has radical consequences for how we think about language and communication.

Abstract

The essential insight of speech act theory was that when we use language, we perform actions—in a more modern parlance, core language use in interaction is a form of joint action. Over the last thirty years, speech acts have been relatively neglected in linguistic pragmatics, although important work has been done especially in conversation analysis. Here we review the core issues—the identifying characteristics, the degree of universality, the problem of multiple functions, and the puzzle of speech act recognition. Special attention is drawn to the role of conversation structure, probabilistic linguistic cues, and plan or sequence inference in speech act recognition, and to the centrality of deep recursive structures in sequences of speech acts in conversation

Abstract

Wearing the hat of a cognitive anthropologist rather than an historian, I will try to amplify the ideas of Renn’s cited above. I argue that a particular subclass of material objects, namely “cognitive artifacts,” involves a close coupling of mind and artifact that acts like a brain prosthesis. Simple cognitive artifacts are external objects that act as aids to internal
computation, and not all cultures have extended inventories of these. Cognitive artifacts in this sense (e.g., calculating or measuring devices) have clearly played a central role in the history of science. But the notion can be widened to take in less material externalizations of cognition, like writing and language itself. A critical question here is how and why this close coupling of internal computation and external device actually works, a rather neglected question to which I’ll suggest some answers.

Abstract

All living beings try to save effort, and humans are no exception. This groundbreaking book shows how we save time and energy during communication by unconsciously making efficient choices in grammar, lexicon and phonology. It presents a new theory of 'communicative efficiency', the idea that language is designed to be as efficient as possible, as a system of communication. The new framework accounts for the diverse manifestations of communicative efficiency across a typologically broad range of languages, using various corpus-based and statistical approaches to explain speakers' bias towards efficiency. The author's unique interdisciplinary expertise allows her to provide rich evidence from a broad range of language sciences. She integrates diverse insights from over a hundred years of research into this comprehensible new theory, which she presents step-by-step in clear and accessible language. It is essential reading for language scientists, cognitive scientists and anyone interested in language use and communication.

Abstract

Word classes play a central role in corpus linguistics under the name of parts of speech (POS). Many popular corpora are provided with POS tags. This chapter gives examples of popular tagsets and discusses the methods of automatic tagging. It also considers bottom-up approaches to POS induction, which are particularly important for the ‘poverty of stimulus’ debate in language acquisition research. The choice of optimal POS tagging involves many difficult decisions, which are related to the level of granularity, redundancy at different levels of corpus annotation, cross-linguistic applicability, language-specific descriptive adequacy, and dealing with fuzzy boundaries between POS. The chapter also discusses the problem of flexible word classes and demonstrates how corpus data with POS tags and syntactic dependencies can be used to quantify the level of flexibility in a language.

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of the Papuan and the Oceanic languages (a branch of Austronesian) in Northern Island Melanesia, as well as phenomena arising through contact between these groups. It shows how linguistics can contribute to the understanding of the history of languages and speakers, and what the findings of those methods have been. The location of the homeland of speakers of Proto-Oceanic is indicated (in northeast New Britain); many facets of the lives of those speakers are shown; and the patterns of their subsequent spread across Island Melanesia and beyond into Remote Oceania are indicated, followed by a second wave overlaying the first into New Guinea and as far as halfway through the Solomon Islands. Regarding the Papuan languages of this region, at least some are older than the 6,000-10,000 ceiling of the Comparative Method, and their relations are explored with the aid of a database of 125 non-lexical structural features. The results reflect archipelago-based clustering with the Central Solomons Papuan languages forming a clade either with the Bismarcks or with Bougainville languages. Papuan languages in Bougainville are less influenced by Oceanic languages than those in the Bismarcks and the Solomons. The chapter considers a variety of scenarios to account for their findings, concluding that the results are compatible with multiple pre-Oceanic waves of arrivals into the area after initial settlement.

Abstract

This paper investigates infant pointing at 12 months. Three recent experimental studies from our lab are reported and contrasted with existing accounts on infant communicative and social-cognitive abilities. The new results show that infant pointing at 12 months already is a communicative act which involves the intentional transmission of information to share interest with, or provide information for other persons. It is argued that infant pointing is an inherently social and cooperative act which is used to share psychological relations between interlocutors and environment, repairs misunderstandings in proto-conversational turn-taking, and helps others by providing information. Infant pointing builds on an understanding of others as persons with attentional states and attitudes. Findings do not support lean accounts on early infant pointing which posit that it is initially non-communicative, does not serve the function of indicating, or is purely self-centered. It is suggested to investigate the emergence of reference and the motivation to jointly engage with others also before pointing has emerged.

Abstract

There are two tasks for conducting systematic observation of child-caregiver joint attention interactions. Task 1 – a “decorated room” designed to elicit infant and caregiver pointing. Task 2 – videotaped interviews about infant pointing behaviour. The goal of this task is to document the ontogenetic emergence of referential communication in caregiver infant interaction in different cultures, during the critical age of 8-15 months when children come to understand and share others’ intentions. This is of interest to all students of interaction and human communication; it does not require specialist knowledge of children.

Abstract

The project that we describe in this chapter has the theme ‘Language of the senses’. This theme is
based on the research of Asifa Majid and her team regarding the influence of language and culture on
sensory perception. The chapter consists of two sections. Section 2.1 describes how different sensory
perceptions are spoken of in different languages. Teachers can use this section as substantive preparation
before they launch this theme in the classroom. Section 2.2 describes how teachers can handle
this theme in accordance with the seven phases of inquiry-based learning. Chapter 1, in which the
general guideline of the seven phases is described, forms the basis for this. We therefore recommend
the use of chapter 1 as the starting point for the execution of a project in the classroom. This chapter
provides the thematic additions.

Abstract

Taal der zintuigen gaat over de invloed van taal en cultuur op zintuiglijke waarnemingen. Hoe omschrijf je wat je ziet, voelt, proeft of ruikt? In sommige culturen zijn er veel verschillende woorden voor kleur, in andere culturen juist weer heel weinig. Worden we geboren met deze verschillende kleurgroepen? En bepaalt hoe je ergens over praat ook wat je waarneemt?

Abstract

In most of our everyday conversations, we not only hear but also see each other talk. Our understanding of speech benefits from having the speaker's face present. This finding immediately necessitates the question of how the information from the different perceptual sources is used to reach the best overall decision. This need for processing of multiple sources of information also exists in auditory speech perception, however. Audiovisual speech simply shifts the focus from intramodal to intermodal sources but does not necessitate a qualitatively different form of processing. It is essential that a model of speech perception operationalizes the concept of processing multiple sources of information so that quantitative predictions can be made. This chapter gives an overview of the main research questions and findings unique to audiovisual speech perception and word recognition research as well as what general questions about speech perception and cognition the research in this field can answer. The main theoretical approaches to explain integration and audiovisual speech perception are introduced and critically discussed. The chapter also provides an overview of the role of visual speech as a language learning tool in multimodal training.

Abstract

Words are fundamental to reading and yet over a century of research has not masked the controversies around how words are recognized. We review some old and new research that disproves simple ideas such as words are read as wholes or are simply mapped directly to spoken language. We also review theory and research relevant to the question of sublexical influences in word recognition. We describe orthography and phonology, how they are related to each other and describe a series of new experiments on how these sources of information are processed. Tasks include lexical decision, perceptual identification, and naming. Dependent measures are reaction time, accuracy of performance, and a new measure, initial phoneme duration, that refers to the duration of the first phoneme when the target word is pronounced. Important factors in resolving the controversies include the realization that reading has multiple determinants, as well as evaluating the type of task, proper controls such as familiarity of the test items and accuracy of measurement of the response. We also address potential limitations with measures related to the mapping between orthography and phonology, and show that the existence of a sound-to-spelling consistency effect does not require interactive activation, but can be explained and predicted by a feedforward model, the Fuzzy logical model of perception.

Abstract

This chapter is a review of the literature in experimental psycholinguistics on spoken word recognition. It is organized around eight questions. 1. Why are psycholinguists interested in spoken word recognition? 2. What information in the speech signal is used in word recognition? 3. Where are the words in the continuous speech stream? 4. Which words did the speaker intend? 5. When, as the speech signal unfolds over time, are the phonological forms of words recognized? 6. How are words recognized? 7. Whither spoken word recognition? 8. Who are the researchers in the field?

Abstract

The use of language is a fundamental component of much of our day-to-day life. Language often co-occurs with other activities with which it must be coordinated. This raises the question of whether the cognitive processes involved in planning spoken utterances and in understanding them are autonomous or whether they are affected by, and perhaps affect, non-linguistic cognitive processes, with which they might share processing resources. This question is the central concern of Automaticity and Control in Language Processing. The chapters address key issues concerning the relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic processes, including: * How can the degree of automaticity of a component be defined? * Which linguistic processes are truly automatic, and which require processing capacity? * Through which mechanisms can control processes affect linguistic performance? How might these mechanisms be represented in the brain? * How do limitations in working memory and executive control capacity affect linguistic performance and language re-learning in persons with brain damage? This important collection from leading international researchers will be of great interest to researchers and students in the area.

Abstract

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

Abstract

The human language processor is conceived as a system that consists of several interrelated subsystems. Each subsystem performs a specific task in the complex process of language comprehension and production. A subsystem receives a particular input, performs certain specific operations on this input and yields a particular output. The subsystems can be characterized in terms of the transformations that relate the input representations to the output representations. An important issue in describing the language processing system is to identify the subsystems and to specify the relations between the subsystems. These relations can be conceived in two different ways. In one conception the subsystems are autonomous. They are related to each other only by the input-output channels. The operations in one subsystem are not affected by another system. The subsystems are modular, that is they are independent. In the other conception, the different subsystems influence each other. A subsystem affects the processes in another subsystem. In this conception there is an interaction between the subsystems.

Abstract

Typologies are critical tools for linguists, but typologies, like grammars, are known to leak. This book addresses the question of typological overlap from the perspective of a single language. In Lowland Chontal of Oaxaca, a language of southern Mexico, change events are expressed with three types of predicates, and each predicate type corresponds to a different language type in the well-known typology of lexicalization patterns established by Talmy and elaborated by others. O’Connor evaluates the predictive powers of the typology by examining the consequences of each predicate type in a variety of contexts, using data from narrative discourse, stimulus response, and elicitation. This is the first de­tailed look at the lexical and grammatical resources of the verbal system in Chontal and their relation to semantics of change. The analysis of how and why Chontal speakers choose among these verbal resources to achieve particular communicative and social goals serves both as a documentation of an endangered language and a theoretical contribution towards a typology of language use.

Abstract

Most research focuses function of gesture independent of its link to the speech it accompanies and the coexpressive functions it has together with speech. This chapter instead approaches gesture in relation to its communicative function in relation to speech, and demonstrates how it is shaped by the linguistic encoding of a speaker’s message. Drawing on crosslinguistic research with adults and children as well as bilinguals on iconic/pointing gesture production it shows that the specific language speakers use modulates the rate and the shape of the iconic gesture production of the same events. The findings challenge the claims aiming to understand gesture’s function for “thinking only” in adults and during development.

Abstract

What are the relations between linguistic encoding and gestural representations of events during online speaking? The few studies that have been conducted on this topic have yielded somewhat incompatible results with regard to whether and how gestural representations of events change with differences in the preferred semantic and syntactic encoding possibilities of languages. Here we provide large scale semantic, syntactic and temporal analyses of speech- gesture pairs that depict 10 different motion events from 20 Turkish and 20 English speakers. We find that the gestural representations of the same events differ across languages when they are encoded by different syntactic frames (i.e., verb-framed or satellite-framed). However, where there are similarities across languages, such as omission of a certain element of the event in the linguistic encoding, gestural representations also look similar and omit the same content. The results are discussed in terms of what gestures reveal about the influence of language specific encoding on on-line thinking patterns and the underlying interactions between speech and gesture during the speaking process.