Publications

Abstract

Gestures are visuospatial events, meaning carriers, and social interactional phenomena. As such they constitute a particularly favourable area for investigating visual attention in a complex everyday situation under conditions of competitive processing. This chapter discusses visual attention to spontaneous gestures in human face-to-face interaction as explored with eye-tracking. Some basic fixation patterns are described, live and video-based settings are compared, and preliminary results on the relationship between fixations and information processing are outlined.

Abstract

This paper discusses how the gestural modality can contribute to our understanding of anaphoric linkage in learner varieties, focusing on gestural anaphoric linkage marking the introduction, maintenance, and shift of reference in story retellings by learners of French and Swedish. The comparison of gestural anaphoric linkage in native and non-native varieties reveals what appears to be a particular learner variety of gestural cohesion, which closely reflects the characteristics of anaphoric linkage in learners' speech. Specifically, particular forms co-occur with anaphoric gestures depending on the information organisation in discourse. The typical nominal over-marking of maintained referents or topic elements in speech is mirrored by gestural (over-)marking of the same items. The paper discusses two ways in which this finding may further the understanding of anaphoric over-explicitness of learner varieties. An addressee-based communicative perspective on anaphoric linkage highlights how over-marking in gesture and speech may be related to issues of hyper-clarity and ambiguity. An alternative speaker-based perspective is also explored in which anaphoric over-marking is seen as related to L2 speech planning.

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

This paper joins studies of linguistic variation (e.g. Labov 1972; Dubois & Horvath 2000) and discourse (e.g. Jaworski & Lawson 2005; Jaworski & Pritchard 2005; Thurlow & Jaworski 2010) that consider the intersection between language and tourism. By examining the language attitudes that tourists hold toward linguistic variability in their host community, we find that attitudes differ by context and with respect to tourists’ travel motivations. We suggest that these results are particularly likely in a context like Edinburgh, Scotland, where linguistic variation has an iconic link to place authenticity. We propose that the joint commodification of ‘intelligibility’ and ‘authenticity’ explains this variability. The results raise questions about how the commodity value of travel motivation and the associated context of language use influence language attitudes.

Abstract

This paper studies the robustness of exemplar effects in word comprehension by means of four long-term priming experiments with lexical decision tasks in Dutch. A prime and target represented the same word type and were presented with the same or different degree of reduction. In Experiment 1, participants heard only a small number of trials, a large proportion of repeated words, and stimuli produced by only one speaker. They recognized targets more quickly if these represented the same degree of reduction as their primes, which forms additional evidence for the exemplar effects reported in the literature. Similar effects were found for two speakers who differ in their pronunciations. In Experiment 2, with a smaller proportion of repeated words and more trials between prime and target, participants recognized targets preceded by primes with the same or a different degree of reduction equally quickly. Also, in Experiments 3 and 4, in which listeners were not exposed to one but two types of pronunciation variation (reduction degree and speaker voice), no exemplar effects arose. We conclude that the role of exemplars in speech comprehension during natural conversations, which typically involve several speakers and few repeated content words, may be smaller than previously assumed.

Abstract

What kinds of resources to languages have for describing location and position? For some languages, verbs have an important role to play in describing different kinds of situations (e.g., whether a bottle is standing or lying on the table). This task is designed to examine the use of positional verbs in locative constructions, with respect to the presence or absence of a human “positioner”. Participants are asked to describe video clips showing locative states that occur spontaneously, or because of active interference from a person. The task follows on from two earlier tools for the elicitation of static locative descriptions (BowPed and the Ameka picture book task). A number of additional variables (e.g. canonical v. non-canonical orientation of the figure) are also targeted in the stimuli set.

Abstract

Three eye-tracking experiments investigated the impact of the complexity of the visual environment on the likelihood of word-object mapping taking place at phonological, semantic and visual levels of representation during language-mediated visual search. Dutch participants heard spoken target words while looking at four objects embedded in displays of different complexity and indicated the presence or absence of the target object. During filler trials the target objects were present, but during experimental trials they were absent and the display contained various competitor objects. For example, given the target word “beaker”, the display contained a phonological (a beaver, bever), a shape (a bobbin, klos), a semantic (a fork, vork) competitor, and an unrelated distractor (an umbrella, paraplu). When objects were presented in simple four-object displays (Experiment 2), there were clear attentional biases to all three types of competitors replicating earlier research (Huettig and McQueen, 2007). When the objects were embedded in complex scenes including four human-like characters or four meaningless visual shapes (Experiments 1, 3), there were biases in looks to visual and semantic but not to phonological competitors. In both experiments, however, we observed evidence for inhibition in looks to phonological competitors, which suggests that the phonological forms of the objects nevertheless had been retrieved. These findings suggest that phonological word-object mapping is contingent upon the nature of the visual environment and add to a growing body of evidence that the nature of our visual surroundings induces particular modes of processing during language-mediated visual search.

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

Recent experimental evidence from cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience shows that reading acquisition has non-trivial consequences for cognitive processes other than reading per se. In the present chapter I present evidence from three areas of cognition: phonological processing, prediction in language processing, and visual search. These findings suggest that literacy on cognition influences are far-reaching. This implies that a good understanding of the dramatic impact of literacy acquisition on the human mind is an important prerequisite for successful education policy development and guidance of educational support.

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to discuss an inherent difficulty of PET (and fMRI) research in language production. On the one hand, language production presupposes some degree of freedom for the subject, on the other hand, interpretability of results presupposes restrictions of this freedom. This difficulty is reflected in the existing PET literature in some neglect of the general principle to design experiments in such a way that the results do not allow for alternative interpretations. It is argued that by narrowing down the scope of experiments a gain in interpretability can be achieved.

Abstract

The idea that presupposition triggers have different intrinsic properties has gradually made its way into the literature on presuppositions and become a current assumption in most approaches. The distinctions mentioned in the different works have been based on introspective data, which seem, indeed, very suggestive. In this paper, we take a different look at some of these distinctions by using a simple experimental approach based on judgment of naturalness about sentences in various contexts. We show that the alleged difference between weak (or soft) and strong (or hard) triggers is not as clear as one may wish and that the claim that they belong to different lexical classes of triggers is probably much too strong.

Abstract

The psychological process of translating semantic into syntactic structures has dynamic properties such as the following. (1) The speaker is able to start pronouncing an utterance before having worked out the semantic content he wishes to express. Selection of semantic content and construction of syntactic form proceed partially in parallel. (2) The human sentence generator takes as input not only a specification of semantic content but also some indication of desired syntactic shape. Such indications, if present, do not complicate the generation process but make it easier. (3) Certain regularities of speech errors suggest a two-stage generation process. Stage I constructs the “syntactic skeleton” of an utterance; stage II provides the skeleton with morpho- honological information. An outline is given of the type of grammar which is used by a sentence generation system embodying these characteristics. The system is being implemented on a computer.

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

[Seven one-page psycholinguistic sketches]

Abstract

Gesture is an integral part of face-to-face communication, and provides a rich area for cross-cultural comparison. “Locally-anchored spatial gestures” are gestures that are roughly oriented to the actual geographical direction of referents. For example, such gestures may point to a location or a thing, trace the shape of a path, or indicate the direction of a particular area. The goal of this task is to elicit locally-anchored spatial gestures across different cultures. The task follows an interview format, where one participant prompts another to talk in detail about a specific area that the main speaker knows well. The data can be used for additional purposes such as the investigation of demonstratives.

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

Unter allen Disziplinen, die sich mit der Erforschung der Sprache befassen, ist die Lexikografie die älteste und die für die Allgemeinheit wichtigste. Die ältesten, noch sehr einfachen Wörterbücher finden sich auf 4000 Jahre alten Tontafeln, und wenn sich heute in einem Haushalt überhaupt ein Buch findet, dann ist es wahrscheinlich ein Wörterbuch. In den letzten zwanzig Jahren ist die kommerzielle wie die von öffentlich finanzierten Forschungsstätten betriebene Lexikografie jedoch in einer ernsthafte Krise geraten. Die großen Wörterbuchverlage haben die Arbeit an umfassenden Wörterbüchern weitestgehend eingestellt, weil sie kaum noch gekauft werden; die Akademien geraten mit ihren Langzeitvorhaben in massive Zeit- und Finanzprobleme. Wenn wir nicht auf die umfassende Beschreibung des deutschen Wortschatzes in all einer Vielfalt und seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung verzichten wollen, müssen ganz neue Wege gegangen werden: Wörterbücher im traditionellen Sinne müssen durch digitale lexikalische Systeme ersetzt werden, die das vorhandene lexikalische Wissen integrieren, es schrittweise systematisch ausbauen, eigene Recherchen in verlässlichen Corpora ermöglichen und von jedermann frei über das Internet nutzbar sind.

Abstract

Speakers of English habitually encode motion events using manner-of-motion verbs (e.g., spin, roll, slide) whereas Spanish speakers rely on path-of-motion verbs (e.g., enter, exit, approach). Here, we ask whether the language-specific verb representations used in encoding motion events induce different modes of “thinking-for-speaking” in Spanish–English bilinguals. That is, assuming that the verb encodes the most salient information in the clause, do bilinguals find the path of motion to be more salient than manner of motion if they had previously described the motion event using Spanish versus English? In our study, Spanish–English bilinguals described a set of target motion events in either English or Spanish and then participated in a nonlinguistic similarity judgment task in which they viewed the target motion events individually (e.g., a ball rolling into a cave) followed by two variants a “same-path” variant such as a ball sliding into a cave or a “same-manner” variant such as a ball rolling away from a cave). Participants had to select one of the two variants that they judged to be more similar to the target event: The event that shared the same path of motion as the target versus the one that shared the same manner of motion. Our findings show that bilingual speakers were more likely to classify two motion events as being similar if they shared the same path of motion and if they had previously described the target motion events in Spanish versus in English. Our study provides further evidence for the “thinking-for-speaking” hypothesis by demonstrating that bilingual speakers can flexibly shift between language-specific construals of the same event “on-the-fly.”

Abstract

Originally published in Cognition International Journal of Cognitive Science, Volume 42, Numbers 1-3, 1992 This paper introduces a special issue of Cognition 011 lexical access in speech production. Over the last quarter century, the psycholinguistic study of speaking, and in particular of accessing words in speech, received a major new impetus from the analysis of speech errors, dysfluencies and hesMions, from aphasiology, and from new paradigms in reaction time research. The emerging theoretical picture partitions the accessing process into two subprocesses, the selection of an appropriate lexical item (and "lemma") from the mental lexicon, and the phonological encoding of that item, that is, the computation of a phonetic program for the item in the context of utterance These two theoretical domains are successively introduced by outlining some core issues that have been or still have to be addressed. The final section discusses the controversial question whether phonological encoding can affect lexical selection. This partitioning is also followed in this special issue as a whole. There are, first, four papers on lexical selection, then three papers on phonological encoding, and finally one on the interaction between selection and phonological encoding.

Abstract

The topic of this paper is the way in which speakers order information in discourse. I will refer to this issue with the term "linearization", and will begin with two types of general remarks. The first one concerns the scope and relevance of the problem with reference to some existing literature. The second set of general remarks will be about the place of linearization in a theory of the speaker. The following, and main part of this paper, will be a summary report of research of linearization in a limited, but well-defined domain of discourse, namely the description of spatial networks.