Publications

Abstract

“Recognitional” words and constructions enshrine our systematic reliance on shared knowledge in dedicated morphological forms and usage patterns. For example, English has a large range of terms for use when a speaker cannot locate the word or name for something or someone (e.g., whatsit, what’s-his-name), but thinks that the interlocutor knows, or can easily work out, what the speaker is talking about. This task aims to identify and investigate these kinds of expressions in the research language, including their grammaticalised status, meaning, distribution, and productivity. The task consists of a questionnaire with examples of relevant hypothetical scenarios that can be used in eliciting the relevant terms. The researcher is then encouraged to pursue further questions in regard to these items.

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This task investigates the extensional meaning of body part terms, in particular the terms for the upper and lower limbs. Two questions are addressed, namely (i) are the boundaries of these body parts universal, guided by proposed universals of object recognition? (ii) How can we compare the extensional meanings of body part terms within and across different systems of nomenclature? Consultants receive booklets with line drawings of a body and are asked to colour in specific parts of the body.

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Demonstratives are typically described as encoding degrees of physical distance between the object referred to, and the speaker or addressee. For example, this in English is used to talk about things that are physically near the speaker, and that for things that are not. But is this how speakers really choose between these words in actual talk? This task aims to generate spontaneous language data concerning deixis, gesture, and demonstratives, and to investigate the significance of different factors (e.g., physical distance, attention) in demonstrative selection. In the presence of one consultant (the “memoriser”), sixteen colour chips are hidden under objects in a specified array. Another consultant enters the area and asks the memoriser to recount the locations of the chips. The task is designed to create a situation where the speaker genuinely attempts to manipulate the addressee’s attention on objects in the immediate physical space.

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In many languages the future is in front and the past behind, but in some cultures (like Aymara) the past is in front. Is it possible to find this mapping as an alternative conceptualization of time in other cultures? If so, what are the factors that affect its choice out of the set of available alternatives? In a paper and pencil task, participants placed future or past events either in front or behind a character (a schematic head viewed from above). A sample of 24 Islamic participants (whose language also places the future in front and the past behind) tended to locate the past event in the front box more often than Spanish participants. This result might be due to the greater cultural value assigned to tradition in Islamic culture. The same pattern was found in a sample of Spanish elders (N = 58), what may support that conclusion. Alternatively, the crucial factor may be the amount of attention paid to the past. In a final study, young Spanish adults (N = 200) who had just answered a set of questions about their past showed the past-in-front pattern, whereas questions about their future exacerbated the future-in-front pattern. Thus, the attentional explanation was supported: attended events are mapped to front space in agreement with the experiential connection between attending and seeing. When attention is paid to the past, it tends to occupy the front location in spite of available alternative mappings in the language-culture.

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This paper investigates the lexical semantics and relative distributions of verbs describing putting and taking events in Kuuk Thaayorre, a Pama-Nyungan language of Cape York (Australia). Thaayorre put/take verbs can be subcategorised according to whether they may combine with an NP encoding a goal, an NP encoding a source, or both. Goal NPs are far more frequent in natural discourse: initial analysis shows 85% of goal-oriented verb tokens to be accompanied by a goal NP, while only 31% of source-oriented verb tokens were accompanied by a source. This finding adds weight to Ikegami’s (1987) assertion of the conceptual primacy of goals over sources, reflected in a cross-linguistic dissymmetry whereby goal-marking is less marked and more widely used than source-marking.

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Print Friendly XML Gebre, Binyam Gebrekidan, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands, binyamgebrekidan.gebre [at] mpi.nl Wittenburg, Peter, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands, peter.wittenburg [at] mpi.nl Introduction Many gesture and sign language researchers manually annotate video recordings to systematically categorize, analyze and explain their observations. The number and kinds of annotations are so diverse and unpredictable that any attempt at developing non-adaptive automatic annotation systems is usually less effective. The trend in the literature has been to develop models that work for average users and for average scenarios. This approach has three main disadvantages. First, it is impossible to know beforehand all the patterns that could be of interest to all researchers. Second, it is practically impossible to find enough training examples for all patterns. Third, it is currently impossible to learn a model that is robustly applicable across all video quality-recording variations.

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Automatic annotation of gesture strokes is important for many gesture and sign language researchers. The unpredictable diversity of human gestures and video recording conditions require that we adopt a more adaptive case-by-case annotation model. In this paper, we present a work-in progress annotation model that allows a user to a) track hands/face b) extract features c) distinguish strokes from non-strokes. The hands/face tracking is done with color matching algorithms and is initialized by the user. The initialization process is supported with immediate visual feedback. Sliders are also provided to support a user-friendly adjustment of skin color ranges. After successful initialization, features related to positions, orientations and speeds of tracked hands/face are extracted using unique identifiable features (corners) from a window of frames and are used for training a learning algorithm. Our preliminary results for stroke detection under non-ideal video conditions are promising and show the potential applicability of our methodology.

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Recognizing the speech acts in our interlocutors’ utterances is a crucial prerequisite for conversation. However, it is not a trivial task given that the form and content of utterances is frequently underspecified for this level of meaning. In the present study we investigate participants’ competence in categorizing speech acts in such action-underspecific sentences and explore the time-course of speech act inferencing using a self-paced reading paradigm. The results demonstrate that participants are able to categorize the speech acts with very high accuracy, based on limited context and without any prosodic information. Furthermore, the results show that the exact same sentence is processed differently depending on the speech act it performs, with reading times starting to differ already at the first word. These results indicate that participants are very good at “getting” the speech acts, opening up a new arena for experimental research on action recognition in conversation.

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This paper explores the linguistic encoding of placement and removal events in Swedish. Drawing on elicited spoken data, it provides a unified approach to caused motion descriptions. The results show uniform syntactic behaviour of placement and removal descriptions and a consistent asymmetry between placement and removal in the semantic specificity of verbs. The results also reveal three further semantic patterns, pertaining to the nature of the relationship between Figure and Ground, that appear to account for how these event types are characterised, viz. whether the Ground is represented by a body part of the Agent; whether the Figure is contained within the Ground; or whether it is supported by the Ground.

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Three groups of monolingual listeners, with Standard Chinese, Dutch and Hungarian as their native language, judged pairs of trisyllabic stimuli which differed only in their itch pattern. The segmental structure of the stimuli was made up by the experimenters and presented to subjects as being taken from a little-known language spoken on a South Pacific island. Pitch patterns consisted of a single rise-fall located on or near the second syllable. By and large, listeners selected the stimulus with the higher peak, the later eak, and the higher end rise as the one that signalled a question, regardless of language group. The result is argued to reflect innate, non-linguistic knowledge of the meaning of pitch variation, notably Ohala’s Frequency Code. A significant difference between groups is explained as due to the influence of the mother tongue.

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“The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” (Weiser 1991, S. 94). – Die Behauptung stammt aus einem vielzitierten Text von Mark Weiser, ehemals Chief Technology Officer am berühmten Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), wo nicht nur einige bedeutende computertechnische Innovationen ihren Ursprung hatten, sondern auch grundlegende anthropologische Einsichten zum Umgang mit technischen Artefakten gewonnen wurden.1 In einem populärwissenschaftlichen Artikel mit dem Titel „The Computer for the 21st Century” entwarf Weiser 1991 die Vision einer Zukunft, in der wir nicht mehr mit einem einzelnen PC an unserem Arbeitsplatz umgehen – vielmehr seien wir in jedem Raum umgeben von hunderten elektronischer Vorrichtungen, die untrennbar in Alltagsgegenstände eingebettet und daher in unserer materiellen Umwelt gleichsam „verschwunden“ sind. Dabei ging es Weiser nicht allein um das ubiquitäre Phänomen, das in der Medientheorie als „Transparenz der Medien“ bekannt ist2 oder in allgemeineren Theorien der Alltagserfahrung als eine selbstverständliche Verwobenheit des Menschen mit den Dingen, die uns in ihrem Sinn vertraut und praktisch „zuhanden“ sind.3 Darüber hinaus zielte Weisers Vision darauf, unsere bereits existierende Umwelt durch computerlesbare Daten zu erweitern und in die Operationen eines solchen allgegenwärtigen Netzwerks alltägliche Praktiken gleichsam lückenlos zu integrieren: In der Welt, die Weiser entwirft, öffnen sich Türen für denjenigen, der ein bestimmtes elektronisches Abzeichen trägt, begrüßen Räume Personen, die sie betreten, mit Namen, passen sich Computerterminals an die Präferenzen individueller Nutzer an usw. (Weiser 1991, S. 99).

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The standard for the analysis of distorted voices is perceptual rating of read-out texts or spontaneous speech. Automatic voice evaluation, however, is usually done on stable sections of sustained vowels. In this paper, text-based and established vowel-based analysis are compared with respect to their ability to measure hoarseness and its subclasses. 73 hoarse patients (48.3±16.8 years) uttered the vowel /e/ and read the German version of the text “The North Wind and the Sun”. Five speech therapists and physicians rated roughness, breathiness, and hoarseness according to the German RBH evaluation scheme. The best human-machine correlations were obtained for measures based on the Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPP; up to |r | = 0.73). Support Vector Regression (SVR) on CPP-based measures and prosodic features improved the results further to r ≈0.8 and confirmed that automatic voice evaluation should be performed on a text recording.

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We review data and hypotheses dealing with the mental representations for perceived and produced speech that infants build and use over the course of learning a language. In the early stages of speech perception and vocal production, before the emergence of a receptive or a productive lexicon, the dominant picture emerging from the literature suggests rather non-analytic representations based on units of the size of the syllable: Young children seem to parse speech into syllable-sized units in spite of their ability to detect sound equivalence based on shared phonetic features. Once a productive lexicon has emerged, word form representations are initially rather underspecified phonetically but gradually become more specified with lexical growth, up to the phoneme level. The situation is different for the receptive lexicon, in which phonetic specification for consonants and vowels seem to follow different developmental paths. Consonants in stressed syllables are somewhat well specified already at the first signs of a receptive lexicon, and become even better specified with lexical growth. Vowels seem to follow a different developmental path, with increasing flexibility throughout lexical development. Thus, children come to exhibit a consonant vowel asymmetry in lexical representations, which is clear in adult representations.

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Originally published in Diachronica 27:2 (2010) One attempt at explaining why some language families are large (while others are small) is the hypothesis that the families that are now large became large because their ancestral speakers had a technological advantage, most often agriculture. Variants of this idea are referred to as the Language Farming Dispersal Hypothesis. Previously, detailed language family studies have uncovered various supporting examples and counterexamples to this idea. In the present paper I weigh the evidence from ALL attested language families. For each family, I use the number of member languages as a measure of cardinal size, member language coordinates to measure geospatial size and ethnographic evidence to assess subsistence status. This data shows that, although agricultural families tend to be larger in cardinal size, their size is hardly due to the simple presence of farming. If farming were responsible for language family expansions, we would expect a greater east-west geospatial spread of large families than is actually observed. The data, however, is compatible with weaker versions of the farming dispersal hypothesis as well with models where large families acquire farming because of their size, rather than the other way around.

Abstract

This study investigated whether a shadowing task can provide insights in the nature of reduction processes that are typical of casual speech. We focused on the shortening and presence versus absence of schwa and /t/ in Dutch past participles. Results showed that the absence of these segments was affected by the same variables as their shortening, suggesting that absence mostly resulted from extreme gradient shortening. This contrasts with results based on recordings of spontaneous conversations. We hypothesize that this difference is due to non-casual fast speech elicited by a shadowing task.

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This paper investigates the time and space complexity of word order computation in the psycholinguistically motivated grammar formalism of Performance Grammar (PG). In PG, the first stage of syntax assembly yields an unordered tree ('mobile') consisting of a hierarchy of lexical frames (lexically anchored elementary trees). Associated with each lexica l frame is a linearizer—a Finite-State Automaton that locally computes the left-to-right order of the branches of the frame. Linearization takes place after the promotion component may have raised certain constituents (e.g. Wh- or focused phrases) into the domain of lexical frames higher up in the syntactic mobile. We show that the worst-case time and space complexity of analyzing input strings of length n is O(n5) and O(n4), respectively. This result compares favorably with the time complexity of word-order computations in Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG). A comparison with Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) reveals that PG yields a more declarative linearization method, provided that the FSA is rewritten as an equivalent regular expression.

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

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

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This paper examines how placement and removal events are lexicalised and conceptualised in Basque and Peninsular Spanish. After a brief description of the main linguistic devices employed for the coding of these types of events, the paper discusses how speakers of the two languages choose to talk about these events. Finally, the paper focuses on two aspects that seem to be crucial in the description of these events (1) the role of force dynamics: both languages distinguish between different degrees of force, causality, and intentionality, and (2) the influence of the verb-framed lexicalisation pattern. Data come from six Basque and ten Peninsular Spanish native speakers.

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This chapter reviews the findings of 58 word production experiments using different tasks and neuroimaging techniques. The reported cerebral activation sites are coded in a common anatomic reference system. Based on a functional model of language production, the different word production tasks are analyzed in terms of their processing components. This approach allows a distinction between the core process of word production and preceding task-specific processes (lead-in processes) such as visual or auditory stimulus recognition. The core process of word production is subserved by a left-lateralized perisylvian/thalamic language production network. Within this network there seems to be functional specialization for the processing stages of word production. In addition, this chapter includes a discussion of the available evidence on syntactic production, self-monitoring, and the time course of word production.

Abstract

Spanish can use dative as well as non-dative strategies to encode Possessors, Human Sources, Interestees (datives of interest) and Experiencers. In Dutch this optionality is virtually absent, restricting dative encoding mainly to the Recipient of a ditransitive. The present study examines whether this may lead to instability of the non-prototypical dative constructions in the Spanish of Dutch-Spanish bilinguals. Elicited data of 12 Chilean heritage informants from the Netherlands were analyzed. Whereas the evidence on the stability of dative Experiencers was not conclusive, the results indicate that the use of prototypical datives, dative External Possessors, dative Human Sources and datives of interest is fairly stable in bilinguals, except for those with limited childhood exposure to Spanish. It is argued that the consistent preference for non-dative strategies of this group was primarily attributable to instability of the dative clitic, which affected all constructions, even the encoding of prototypical indirect objects

Abstract

This study explores the expression of Source and Goal in describing placement and removal events in adult Japanese. Although placement and removal events a priori represent symmetry regarding the orientation of motion, their (c)overt expressions actually exhibit multiple asymmetries at various structural levels. The results show that the expression of the Source is less frequent than the expression of the Goal, but, if expressed, morphosyntactically more complex, suggesting that ‘taking’ events are more complex than ‘putting’ events in their construal. It is stressed that finer linguistic analysis is necessary before explaining linguistic asymmetries in terms of non-linguistic foundations of spatial language.

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n this study we investigated the durational correlates of lexical stress and pitch accent at normal and fast speech rate in Dutch. Previous literature on English shows that durations of lexically unstressed vowels are reduced more than stressed vowels when speakers increase their speech rate. We found that the same holds for Dutch, irrespective of whether the unstressed vowel is schwa or a "full" vowel. In the same line, we expected that vowels in words without a pitch accent would be shortened relatively more than vowels in words with a pitch accent. This was not the case: if anything, the accented vowels were shortened relatively more than the unaccented vowels. We conclude that duration is an important cue for lexical stress, but not for pitch accent.

Abstract

Studies on fast speech have shown that word-level timing of fast speech differs from that of normal rate speech in that unstressed syllables are shortened more than stressed syllables as speech rate increases. An earlier experiment showed that the intelligibility of time-compressed speech could not be improved by making its temporal organisation closer to natural fast speech. To test the hypothesis that segmental intelligibility is more important than prosodic timing in listening to timecompressed speech, the intelligibility of bisyllabic words was tested in three time-compression conditions: either stressed and unstressed syllable were compressed to the same degree, or the stressed syllable was compressed more than the unstressed syllable, or the reverse. As was found before, imitating wordlevel timing of fast speech did not improve intelligibility over linear compression. However, the results did not confirm the hypothesis either: there was no difference in intelligibility between the three compression conditions. We conclude that segmental intelligibility plays an important role, but further research is necessary to decide between the contributions of prosody and segmental intelligibility to the word-level intelligibility of time-compressed speech.

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The configuration of a spatial layout has a substantial effect on the acquisition and the representation of the environment. In four experiments, we investigated navigation difficulties arising at oblique angled intersections. In the first three studies we investigated specific arrow-fork configurations. In dependence on the branch subjects use to enter the intersection different decision latencies and numbers of errors arise. If subjects see the intersection as a fork, it is more difficult to find the correct way as if it is seen as an arrow. In a fourth study we investigated different heuristics people use while making a detour around a barrier. Detour behaviour varies with the perspective. If subjects learn and navigate through the maze in a field perspective they use a heuristic of preferring right angled paths. If they have a view from above and acquire their knowledge in an observer perspective they use oblique angled paths more often.

Abstract

It is an important feature of the human sentence production system that semantic and syntactic processes may overlap in time and do not proceed strictly serially. That is, the process of building the syntactic form of an utterance does not always wait until the complete semantic content for that utterance has been decided upon. On the contrary, speakers will often start pronouncing the first words of a sentence while still working on further details of its semantic content. An important advantage is memory economy. Semantic and syntactic fragments do not have to occupy working memory until complete semantic and syntactic structures for an utterance have been computed. Instead, each semantic and syntactic fragment is processed as soon as possible and is kept in working memory for a minimum period of time. This raises the question of how the sentence production system can maintain syntactic coherence across syntactic fragments. Presumably there are processes of "syntactic bookkeeping" which (1) store in working memory those syntactic properties of a fragmentary sentence which are needed to eliminate ungrammatical continuations, and (2) check whether a prospective continuation is indeed compatible with the sentence constructed so far. In reaction time experiments where subjects described, under time pressure, simple static pictures of an action performed by an actor, the second aspect of syntactic bookkeeping could be demonstrated. This evidence is used for modelling bookkeeping processes as part of a computational sentence generator which aims at simulating the syntactic operations people carry out during spontaneous speech.

Abstract

Language documentation involves linguistic analysis of the collected material, which is typically done manually. Automatic methods for language processing usually require large corpora. The method presented in this paper uses techniques from bioinformatics and contextual information to morphologically analyze raw text corpora. This paper presents initial results of the method when applied on a small Kilivila corpus.

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

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

This chapter explores the expression of placement (or Goal-oriented) and removal (or Source-oriented) events by speakers of Polish (a West Slavic language). Its aim is to investigate the hypothesis known as ‘Source/Goal asymmetry’ according to which languages tend to favor the expression of Goals (e.g., into, onto) and to encode them more systematically and in a more fine-grained way than Sources (e.g., from, out of). The study provides both evidence and counter-evidence for Source/Goal asymmetry. On the one hand, it shows that Polish speakers use a greater variety of verbs to convey Manner and/or mode of manipulation in the expression of placement, encoding such events in a more fine-grained manner than removal events. The expression of placement is also characterized by a greater variety of verb prefixes conveying Path and prepositional phrases (including prepositions and case markers) conveying Ground. On the other hand, the study reveals that Polish speakers attend to Sources as often as to Goals, revealing no evidence for an attentional bias toward the endpoints of events.

Abstract

A recurrently connected attractor neural network with a Hebbian learning rule is currently our best ANN analogy for a piece cortex. Functionally biological memory operates on a spectrum of time scales with regard to induction and retention, and it is modulated in complex ways by sub-cortical neuromodulatory systems. Moreover, biological memory networks are commonly believed to be highly distributed and engage many co-operating cortical areas. Here we focus on the temporal aspects of induction and retention of memory in a connectionist type attractor memory model of a piece of cortex. A continuous time, forgetful Bayesian-Hebbian learning rule is described and compared to the characteristics of LTP and LTD seen experimentally. More generally, an attractor network implementing this learning rule can operate as a long-term, intermediate-term, or short-term memory. Modulation of the print-now signal of the learning rule replicates some experimental memory phenomena, like e.g. the von Restorff effect.

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

Abstract

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

Abstract

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