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

As knowing a foreign language becomes a necessity in the modern world, a large portion of
the population is faced with the challenge of learning a language in a classroom. This, in turn,
presents a unique set of difficulties. Acquiring a language with limited and artificial exposure makes
learning new information and vocabulary particularly difficult. The purpose of this thesis is to help us
understand how we can compensate—at least partially—for these difficulties by presenting
information in a way that aids learning. In particular, I focused on variables that affect semantic
richness—meaning the amount and variability of information associated with a word. Some factors
that affect semantic richness are intrinsic to the word and others pertain to that word’s relationship
with other items and information. This latter group depends on the context around the to-be-
learned items rather than the words themselves. These variables are easier to manipulate than
intrinsic qualities, making them more accessible tools for teaching and understanding learning. I
focused on two factors: emotionality of the surrounding semantic context and contextual diversity.
Publication 1 (Frances, de Bruin, et al., 2020b) focused on content learning in a foreign
language and whether the emotionality—positive or neutral—of the semantic context surrounding
key information aided its learning. This built on prior research that showed a reduction in
emotionality in a foreign language. Participants were taught information embedded in either
positive or neutral semantic contexts in either their native or foreign language. When they were
then tested on these embedded facts, participants’ performance decreased in the foreign language.
But, more importantly, they remembered better the information from the positive than the neutral
semantic contexts.
In Publication 2 (Frances, de Bruin, et al., 2020a), I focused on how emotionality affected
vocabulary learning. I taught participants the names of novel items described either in positive or
neutral terms in either their native or foreign language. Participants were then asked to recall and
recognize the object's name—when cued with its image. The effects of language varied with the
difficulty of the task—appearing in recall but not recognition tasks. Most importantly, learning the
words in a positive context improved learning, particularly of the association between the image of
the object and its name.
In Publication 3 (Frances, Martin, et al., 2020), I explored the effects of contextual
diversity—namely, the number of texts a word appears in—on native and foreign language word
learning. Participants read several texts that had novel pseudowords. The total number of
encounters with the novel words was held constant, but they appeared in 1, 2, 4, or 8 texts in either
their native or foreign language. Increasing contextual diversity—i.e., the number of texts a word
appeared in—improved recall and recognition, as well as the ability to match the word with its
meaning. Using a foreign language only affected performance when participants had to quickly
identify the meaning of the word.
Overall, I found that the tested contextual factors related to semantic richness—i.e.,
emotionality of the semantic context and contextual diversity—can be manipulated to improve
learning in a foreign language. Using positive emotionality not only improved learning in the foreign
language, but it did so to the same extent as in the native language. On a theoretical level, this
suggests that the reduction in emotionality in a foreign language is not ubiquitous and might relate
to the way in which that language as learned.
The third article shows an experimental manipulation of contextual diversity and how this
can affect learning of a lexical item, even if the amount of information known about the item is kept
constant. As in the case of emotionality, the effects of contextual diversity were also the same
between languages. Although deducing words from context is dependent on vocabulary size, this
does not seem to hinder the benefits of contextual diversity in the foreign language.
Finally, as a whole, the articles contained in this compendium provide evidence that some
aspects of semantic richness can be manipulated contextually to improve learning and memory. In
addition, the effects of these factors seem to be independent of language status—meaning, native
or foreign—when learning new content. This suggests that learning in a foreign and a native
language is not as different as I initially hypothesized, allowing us to take advantage of native
language learning tools in the foreign language, as well.

Abstract

Language acquisition is complex. However, one thing that has been suggested to help learning is the way that information is distributed throughout language; co-occurrences among particular items (e.g., syllables and words) have been shown to help learners discover the words that a language contains and figure out how those words are used. Humans’ ability to draw on this information—“statistical learning”—has been demonstrated across a broad range of studies. However, evidence from non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies is critically lacking, which limits theorizing on the universality of this skill. We extended work on statistical language learning to a new, non-WEIRD linguistic population: speakers of Yélî Dnye, who live on a remote island off mainland Papua New Guinea (Rossel Island). We performed a replication of an existing statistical learning study, training adults on an artificial language with statistically defined words, then examining what they had learnt using a two-alternative forced-choice test. Crucially, we implemented several key amendments to the original study to ensure the replication was suitable for remote field-site testing with speakers of Yélî Dnye. We made critical changes to the stimuli and materials (to test speakers of Yélî Dnye, rather than English), the instructions (we re-worked these significantly, and added practice tasks to optimize participants’ understanding), and the study format (shifting from a lab-based to a portable tablet-based setup). We discuss the requirement for acute sensitivity to linguistic, cultural, and environmental factors when adapting studies to test new populations.

Abstract

To understand the underlying principles of categorisation and classification of sensory input semantic analyses must be based on both language and culture. The senses are not only physiological phenomena, but they are also linguistic, cultural, and social. The goal of this task is to explore and describe sociocultural patterns relating language of perception, ideologies of perception, and perceptual practice in our speech communities.

Abstract

This chapter explores what L2 learners' gestures reveal about L2 grammar. The focus is on learners’ difficulties with maintaining reference in discourse caused by their incomplete mastery of pronouns. The study highlights the systematic parallels between properties of L2 speech and gesture, and the parallel effects of grammatical development in both modalities. The validity of a communicative account of interlanguage grammar in this domain is tested by taking the cohesive properties of the gesture-speech ensemble into account. Specifically, I investigate whether learners use gestures to compensate for and to license over-explicit reference in speech. The results rule out a communicative account for the spoken variety of maintained reference. In contrast, cohesive gestures are found to be multi-functional. While the presence of cohesive gestures is not communicatively motivated, their spatial realisation is. It is suggested that gestures are exploited as a grammatical communication strategy to disambiguate speech wherever possible, but that they may also be doing speaker-internal work. The methodological importance of considering L2 gestures when studying grammar is also discussed.

Abstract

Gestures, the symbolic movements speakers perform while they speak, are systematically related to speech and language at multiple levels, and reflect cognitive and linguistic activities in non-trivial ways. This chapter presents an overview of what gestures can tell us about the processes of second language acquisition. It focuses on two key aspects, (a) gestures and the developing language system and (b) gestures and learning, and discusses some implications of an expanded view of language acquisition that takes gestures into account.

Abstract

Beim Sprechen und beim Sprachverstehen findet man die Wortbedeutung im Gedächtnis auf und kombiniert sie zu größeren Einheiten (Unifikation). Solche Unifikations-Operationen laufen auf unterschiedlichen Ebenen der Sprachverarbeitung ab. In diesem Beitrag wird ein Rahmen vorgeschlagen, in dem psycholinguistische Modelle mit neurobiologischer Sprachbetrachtung in Verbindung gebracht werden. Diesem Vorschlag zufolge spielt der linke inferiore frontale Gyrus (LIFG) eine bedeutende Rolle bei der Unifi kation

Abstract

This paper follows the changing fortunes of Chomsky’s search for a pedigree in the history of Western thought during the late 1960s. Having achieved a unique position of supremacy in the theory of syntax and having exploited that position far beyond the narrow circles of professional syntacticians, he felt the need to shore up his theory with the authority of history. It is shown that this attempt, resulting mainly in his Cartesian Linguistics of 1966, was widely, and rightly, judged to be a radical failure, even though it led to a sudden revival of interest in the history of linguistics. Ironically, the very upswing in historical studies caused by Cartesian Linguistics ended up showing that the real pedigree belongs to Generative Semantics, developed by the same ‘angry young men’ Chomsky was so bent on destroying.

Abstract

This paper reports on an on-going project designed to collect comparable corpus data on child language and child-directed language in under-researched languages. Despite a long history of cross-linguistic research, there is a severe empirical bias within language acquisition research: Data is available for less than 2% of the world's languages, heavily skewed towards the larger and better-described languages. As a result, theories of language development tend to be grounded in a non-representative sample, and we know little about the acquisition of typologically-diverse languages from different families, regions, or sociocultural contexts. It is very likely that the reasons are to be found in the forbidding methodological challenges of constructing child language corpora under fieldwork conditions with their strict requirements on participant selection, sampling intervals, and amounts of data. There is thus an urgent need for proposals that facilitate and encourage language acquisition research across a wide variety of languages. Adopting a language documentation perspective, we illustrate an approach that combines the construction of manageable corpora of natural interaction with and between children with a sketch description of the corpus data – resulting in a set of comparable corpora and comparable sketches that form the basis for cross-linguistic comparisons.

Abstract

Kun kuuntelemme puhetta tai luemme tekstiä, alamme välittömästi rakentaa koherenttia tulkintaa. Toisin kuin lukemisessa, puheen havaitsemisessa kuulija voi harvoin kontrolloida nopeutta, jolla hänelle puhutaan. Huolimatta hyvin nopeasta syötteestä - noin 4-7 tavua sekunnissa - ihmiset kykenevät tulkitsemaan puhetta hyvin vaivattomasti. Lauseen ymmärtämisen tutkimuksessa selvitetäänkin, miten tällainen nopea ja useimmiten vaivaton tulkintaprosessi tapahtuu, mitkä kognitiiviset prosessit osallistuvat reaaliaikaiseen tulkintaan ja millaista informaatiota missäkin vaiheessa prosessointia ihminen käyttää hyväkseen johdonmukaisen tulkinnan muodostamiseksi. Tämä kappale on katsaus lauseen ymmärtämisen prosesseihin ja niiden tutkimukseen. Käsittelemme lyhyesti prosessointimalleja, aikuisten ja lasten kielen suhdetta, lauseen sisäisten ja välisten viittaussuhteiden tulkintaa ja sensorisen ympäristön sekä motorisen toiminnan roolia lauseiden tulkintaprosessissa.

Abstract

In face-to-face communication, information from the face as well as from the voice contributes to the identification of spoken words. This dissertation investigates the time-course of the evaluation and integration of visual and auditory speech in audiovisual word identification. A large-scale audiovisual gating study extends previous research on this topic by (1) using a set of words that includes all possible initial consonants in English in three vowel contexts, (2) tracking the information processing for individual words not only across modalities, but also over time, and (3) testing quantitative models of the time-course of multimodal word recognition. There was an advantage in accuracy for audiovisual speech over auditory-only and visual-only speech. Auditory performance was, however, close to ceiling while performance on visual-only trials was near the floor of the scale, but well above chance. Visual information was used at all gates to identify the presented words. Information theoretic feature analyses of the confusion matrices revealed that the auditory signal is highly informative about voicing, manner, frication, duration, and place of articulation. Visual speech is mostly informative about place of articulation, but also about frication and duration. The auditory signal provides more information about the place of articulation for back consonants, whereas the visual signal provides more information for the labial consonants. The data were sufficient to discriminate between models of audiovisual word recognition. The Fuzzy Logical Model of Perception (FLMP; Massaro, 1998) gave a better account of the confusion matrix data than additive models of perception. A dynamic version of the FLMP was expanded to account for the evaluation and integration of information over time. This dynamic FLMP provided a better description of the data than dynamic additive competitor models. The present study builds a good foundation to investigate the role of the complex interplay between stimulus information and the structure of the lexicon. It provides an important step in building a formal representation of a lexical dynamic FLMP that can account not only for the time-course of speech information and its perceptual processing, but also for lexical influences.

Abstract

A wealth of studies has shown that more proficient monolingual speakers are better at predicting upcoming information during language comprehension. Similarly, prediction skills of adult second language (L2) speakers in their L2 have also been argued to be modulated by their L2 proficiency. How exactly language proficiency and prediction are linked, however, is yet to be systematically investigated. One group of language users which has the potential to provide invaluable insights into this link is bilingual children. In this paper, we compare bilingual children’s prediction skills with those of monolingual children and adult L2 speakers, and show how investigating bilingual children’s prediction skills may contribute to our understanding of how predictive processing works.

Abstract

We present an overview of several corpus studies we carried out into the frequencies of argument NP orderings in the midfield of subordinate and main clauses of German. Comparing the corpus frequencies with grammaticality ratings published by Keller’s (2000), we observe a “grammaticality–frequency gap”: Quite a few argument orderings with zero corpus frequency are nevertheless assigned medium–range grammaticality ratings. We propose an explanation in terms of a two-factor theory. First, we hypothesize that the grammatical induction component needs a sufficient number of exposures to a syntactic pattern to incorporate it into its repertoire of more or less stable rules of grammar. Moderately to highly frequent argument NP orderings are likely have attained this status, but not their zero-frequency counterparts. This is why the latter argument sequences cannot be produced by the grammatical encoder and are absent from the corpora. Secondly, we assumed that an extraneous (nonlinguistic) judgment process biases the ratings of moderately grammatical linear order patterns: Confronted with such structures, the informants produce their own “ideal delivery” variant of the to-be-rated target sentence and evaluate the similarity between the two versions. A high similarity score yielded by this judgment then exerts a positive bias on the grammaticality rating—a score that should not be mistaken for an authentic grammaticality rating. We conclude that, at least in the linearization domain studied here, the goal of gaining a clear view of the internal grammar of language users is best served by a combined strategy in which grammar rules are founded on structures that elicit moderate to high grammaticality ratings and attain at least moderate usage frequencies.

Abstract

No area in the study of human languages has a longer history and a higher practical signifi cance than lexicography. The advent of the computer has dramaticually changed this discipline in ways which go far beyond the digitisation of materials in combination with effi cient search tools, or the transfer of an existing dictionary onto the computer. They allow the stepwise elaboration of what is called here Digital Lexical Systems, i.e., computerized systems in which the underlying data - in form of an extendable corpus - and description of lexical properties on various levels can be effi ciently combined. This paper discusses the range of these possibilities and describes the present form of the German „Digital Lexical System of the Academy“, a project of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (www.dwds.de).

Abstract

Like Einstein's general theory of relativity is concerned with explaining the basics of an observable experience – i.e., gravity – most people take for granted that Chomsky's theory of generative grammar (GG) is concerned with the basic nature of language. This chapter highlights a mere subset of central constructs in GG, showing how they have featured prominently and thus shaped formal linguistic studies in multilingualism. Because multilingualism includes a wide range of nonmonolingual populations, the constructs are divided across child bilingualism and adult third language for greater coverage. In the case of the former, the chapter examines how poverty of the stimulus has been investigated. Using the nascent field of L3/Ln acquisition as the backdrop, it discusses how the GG constructs of I-language versus E-language sit at the core of debates regarding the very notion of what linguistic transfer and mental representations should be taken to be.

Abstract

This entry contains: 1. An invitation to think about to what extent the grammar of space and time share lexical and morphosyntactic resources − the suggestions here are only prompts, since it would take a long questionnaire to fully explore this; 2. A suggestion about how to collect gestural data that might show us to what extent the spatial and temporal domains, have a psychological continuity. This is really the goal − but you need to do the linguistic work first or in addition. The goal of this task is to explore the extent to which time is conceptualised on a spatial basis.

Abstract

This Field Manual entry has been superceded by the 2009 version:
https://doi.org/10.17617/2.883570

Abstract

In this task we aim to find what the best exemplars or “focal colours” of each basic colour term is in our field languages. This is an important part of the evidence we need in order to understand the colour data collected using 'The Language of Vision I: Colour'. This task consists of an experiment where participants pick out the best exemplar for the colour terms in their language. The goal is to establish language specific focal colours.

Abstract

Readers experience a number of sensations during reading. They do
not – or do not only – process words and sentences in a detached, abstract
manner. Instead they “perceive” what they read about. They see descriptions of
scenery, feel what characters feel, and hear the sounds in a story. These sensa-
tions tend to be grouped under the umbrella terms “mental simulation” and
“mental imagery.” This chapter provides an overview of empirical research on
the role of mental simulation during literary reading. Our chapter also discusses
what mental simulation is and how it relates to mental imagery. Moreover, it
explores how mental simulation plays a role in leading models of literary read-
ing and investigates under what circumstances mental simulation occurs dur-
ing literature reading. Finally, the effect of mental simulation on the literary
reader’s experience is discussed, and suggestions and unresolved issues in this
field are formulated.

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.