Publications

Displaying 101 - 149 of 149
  • Melinger, A., Schulte im Walde, S., & Weber, A. (2006). Characterizing response types and revealing noun ambiguity in German association norms. In Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Trento: Association for Computational Linguistics.

    Abstract

    This paper presents an analysis of semantic association norms for German nouns. In contrast to prior studies, we not only collected associations elicited by written representations of target objects but also by their pictorial representations. In a first analysis, we identified systematic differences in the type and distribution of associate responses for the two presentation forms. In a second analysis, we applied a soft cluster analysis to the collected target-response pairs. We subsequently used the clustering to predict noun ambiguity and to discriminate senses in our target nouns.
  • Meyer, A. S., & Wheeldon, L. (Eds.). (2006). Language production across the life span [Special Issue]. Language and Cognitive Processes, 21(1-3).
  • Musgrave, S., & Cutfield, S. (2009). Language documentation and an Australian National Corpus. In M. Haugh, K. Burridge, J. Mulder, & P. Peters (Eds.), Selected proceedings of the 2008 HCSNet Workshop on Designing the Australian National Corpus: Mustering Languages (pp. 10-18). Somerville: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.

    Abstract

    Corpus linguistics and language documentation are usually considered separate subdisciplines within linguistics, having developed from different traditions and often operating on different scales, but the authors will suggest that there are commonalities to the two: both aim to represent language use in a community, and both are concerned with managing digital data. The authors propose that the development of the Australian National Corpus (AusNC) be guided by the experience of language documentation in the management of multimodal digital data and its annotation, and in ethical issues pertaining to making the data accessible. This would allow an AusNC that is distributed, multimodal, and multilingual, with holdings of text, audio, and video data distributed across multiple institutions; and including Indigenous, sign, and migrant community languages. An audit of language material held by Australian institutions and individuals is necessary to gauge the diversity and volume of possible content, and to inform common technical standards.
  • Nabrotzky, J., Ambrazaitis, G., Zellers, M., & House, D. (2023). Temporal alignment of manual gestures’ phase transitions with lexical and post-lexical accentual F0 peaks in spontaneous Swedish interaction. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (Eds.), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527194.

    Abstract

    Many studies investigating the temporal alignment of co-speech
    gestures to acoustic units in the speech signal find a close
    coupling of the gestural landmarks and pitch accents or the
    stressed syllable of pitch-accented words. In English, a pitch
    accent is anchored in the lexically stressed syllable. Hence, it is
    unclear whether it is the lexical phonological dimension of
    stress, or the phrase-level prominence that determines the
    details of speech-gesture synchronization. This paper explores
    the relation between gestural phase transitions and accentual F0
    peaks in Stockholm Swedish, which exhibits a lexical pitch
    accent distinction. When produced with phrase-level
    prominence, there are three different configurations of
    lexicality of F0 peaks and the status of the syllable it is aligned
    with. Through analyzing the alignment of the different F0 peaks
    with gestural onsets in spontaneous dyadic conversations, we
    aim to contribute to our understanding of the role of lexical
    prosodic phonology in the co-production of speech and gesture.
    The results, though limited by a small dataset, still suggest
    differences between the three types of peaks concerning which
    types of gesture phase onsets they tend to align with, and how
    well these landmarks align with each other, although these
    differences did not reach significance.
  • Nijland, L., & Janse, E. (Eds.). (2009). Auditory processing in speakers with acquired or developmental language disorders [Special Issue]. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 23(3).
  • Offenga, F., Broeder, D., Wittenburg, P., Ducret, J., & Romary, L. (2006). Metadata profile in the ISO data category registry. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006) (pp. 1866-1869).
  • Offrede, T., Mishra, C., Skantze, G., Fuchs, S., & Mooshammer, C. (2023). Do Humans Converge Phonetically When Talking to a Robot? In R. Skarnitzl, & J. Volin (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 3507-3511). Prague: GUARANT International.

    Abstract

    Phonetic convergence—i.e., adapting one’s speech
    towards that of an interlocutor—has been shown
    to occur in human-human conversations as well as
    human-machine interactions. Here, we investigate
    the hypothesis that human-to-robot convergence is
    influenced by the human’s perception of the robot
    and by the conversation’s topic. We conducted a
    within-subjects experiment in which 33 participants
    interacted with two robots differing in their eye gaze
    behavior—one looked constantly at the participant;
    the other produced gaze aversions, similarly to a
    human’s behavior. Additionally, the robot asked
    questions with increasing intimacy levels.
    We observed that the speakers tended to converge
    on F0 to the robots. However, this convergence
    to the robots was not modulated by how the
    speakers perceived them or by the topic’s intimacy.
    Interestingly, speakers produced lower F0 means
    when talking about more intimate topics. We
    discuss these findings in terms of current theories of
    conversational convergence.
  • Pacheco, A., Araújo, S., Faísca, L., Petersson, K. M., & Reis, A. (2009). Profiling dislexic children: Phonology and visual naming skills. In Abstracts presented at the International Neuropsychological Society, Finnish Neuropsychological Society, Joint Mid-Year Meeting July 29-August 1, 2009. Helsinki, Finland & Tallinn, Estonia (pp. 40). Retrieved from http://www.neuropsykologia.fi/ins2009/INS_MY09_Abstract.pdf.
  • Papafragou, A., & Ozturk, O. (2006). The acquisition of epistemic modality. In A. Botinis (Ed.), Proceedings of ITRW on Experimental Linguistics in ExLing-2006 (pp. 201-204). ISCA Archive.

    Abstract

    In this paper we try to contribute to the body of knowledge about the acquisition of English epistemic modal verbs (e.g. Mary may/has to be at school). Semantically, these verbs encode possibility or necessity with respect to available evidence. Pragmatically, the use of epistemic modals often gives rise to scalar conversational inferences (Mary may be at school -> Mary doesn’t have to be at school). The acquisition of epistemic modals is challenging for children on both these levels. In this paper, we present findings from two studies which were conducted with 5-year-old children and adults. Our findings, unlike previous work, show that 5-yr-olds have mastered epistemic modal semantics, including the notions of necessity and possibility. However, they are still in the process of acquiring epistemic modal pragmatics.
  • Pereiro Estevan, Y., Wan, V., Scharenborg, O., & Gallardo Antolín, A. (2006). Segmentación de fonemas no supervisada basada en métodos kernel de máximo margen. In Proceedings of IV Jornadas en Tecnología del Habla.

    Abstract

    En este artículo se desarrolla un método automático de segmentación de fonemas no supervisado. Este método utiliza el algoritmo de agrupación de máximo margen [1] para realizar segmentación de fonemas sobre habla continua sin necesidad de información a priori para el entrenamiento del sistema.
  • Pluymaekers, M., Ernestus, M., Baayen, R. H., & Booij, G. (2006). The role of morphology in fine phonetic detail: The case of Dutch -igheid. In Variation, detail and representation: 10th Conference on Laboratory Phonology (pp. 53-54).
  • Pluymaekers, M., Ernestus, M., & Baayen, R. H. (2006). Effects of word frequency on the acoustic durations of affixes. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2006 (pp. 953-956). Pittsburgh: ICSLP.

    Abstract

    This study investigates whether the acoustic durations of derivational affixes in Dutch are affected by the frequency of the word they occur in. In a word naming experiment, subjects were presented with a large number of words containing one of the affixes ge-, ver-, ont, or -lijk. Their responses were recorded on DAT tapes, and the durations of the affixes were measured using Automatic Speech Recognition technology. To investigate whether frequency also affected durations when speech rate was high, the presentation rate of the stimuli was varied. The results show that a higher frequency of the word as a whole led to shorter acoustic realizations for all affixes. Furthermore, affixes became shorter as the presentation rate of the stimuli increased. There was no interaction between word frequency and presentation rate, suggesting that the frequency effect also applies in situations in which the speed of articulation is very high.
  • Poletiek, F. H., & Chater, N. (2006). Grammar induction profits from representative stimulus sampling. In R. Sun (Ed.), Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2006) (pp. 1968-1973). Austin, TX, USA: Cognitive Science Society.
  • Ringersma, J., Zinn, C., & Kemps-Snijders, M. (2009). LEXUS & ViCoS From lexical to conceptual spaces. In 1st International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC).

    Abstract

    LEXUS and ViCoS: from lexicon to conceptual spaces LEXUS is a web-based lexicon tool and the knowledge space software ViCoS is an extension of LEXUS, allowing users to create relations between objects in and across lexica. LEXUS and ViCoS are part of the Language Archiving Technology software, developed at the MPI for Psycholinguistics to archive and enrich linguistic resources collected in the framework of language documentation projects. LEXUS is of primary interest for language documentation, offering the possibility to not just create a digital dictionary, but additionally it allows the creation of multi-media encyclopedic lexica. ViCoS provides an interface between the lexical space and the ontological space. Its approach permits users to model a world of concepts and their interrelations based on categorization patterns made by the speech community. We describe the LEXUS and ViCoS functionalities using three cases from DoBeS language documentation projects: (1) Marquesan The Marquesan lexicon was initially created in Toolbox and imported into LEXUS using the Toolbox import functionality. The lexicon is enriched with multi-media to illustrate the meaning of the words in its cultural environment. Members of the speech community consider words as keys to access and describe relevant parts of their life and traditions. Their understanding of words is best described by the various associations they evoke rather than in terms of any formal theory of meaning. Using ViCoS a knowledge space of related concepts is being created. (2) Kola-Sámi Two lexica are being created in LEXUS: RuSaDic lexicon is a Russian-Kildin wordlist in which the entries are of relative limited structure and content. SaRuDiC is a more complex structured lexicon with much richer content, including multi-media fragments and derivations. Using ViCoS we have created a connection between the two lexica, so that speakers who are familiair with Russian and wish to revitalize their Kildin can enter the lexicon through the RuSaDic and from there approach the informative SaRuDic. Similary we will create relations from the two lexica to external open databases, like e.g. Álgu. (3) Beaver A speaker database including kinship relations has been created and the database has been imported into LEXUS. In the LEXUS views the relations for individual speakers are being displayed. Using ViCoS the relational information from the database will be extracted to form a kisnhip relation space with specific relation types, like e.g 'mother-of'. The whole set of relations from the database can be displayed in one ViCoS relation window, and zoom functionality is available.
  • Sander, J., Lieberman, A., & Rowland, C. F. (2023). Exploring joint attention in American Sign Language: The influence of sign familiarity. In M. Goldwater, F. K. Anggoro, B. K. Hayes, & D. C. Ong (Eds.), Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2023) (pp. 632-638).

    Abstract

    Children’s ability to share attention with another social partner (i.e., joint attention) has been found to support language development. Despite the large amount of research examining the effects of joint attention on language in hearing population, little is known about how deaf children learning sign languages achieve joint attention with their caregivers during natural social interaction and how caregivers provide and scaffold learning opportunities for their children. The present study investigates the properties and timing of joint attention surrounding familiar and novel naming events and their relationship to children’s vocabulary. Naturalistic play sessions of caretaker-child-dyads using American Sign Language were analyzed in regards to naming events of either familiar or novel object labeling events and the surrounding joint attention events. We observed that most naming events took place in the context of a successful joint attention event and that sign familiarity was related to the timing of naming events within the joint attention events. Our results suggest that caregivers are highly sensitive to their child’s visual attention in interactions and modulate joint attention differently in the context of naming events of familiar vs. novel object labels.
  • Sauter, D., Eisner, F., Ekman, P., & Scott, S. K. (2009). Universal vocal signals of emotion. In N. Taatgen, & H. Van Rijn (Eds.), Proceedings of the 31st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2009) (pp. 2251-2255). Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Emotional signals allow for the sharing of important information with conspecifics, for example to warn them of danger. Humans use a range of different cues to communicate to others how they feel, including facial, vocal, and gestural signals. Although much is known about facial expressions of emotion, less research has focused on affect in the voice. We compare British listeners to individuals from remote Namibian villages who have had no exposure to Western culture, and examine recognition of non-verbal emotional vocalizations, such as screams and laughs. We show that a number of emotions can be universally recognized from non-verbal vocal signals. In addition we demonstrate the specificity of this pattern, with a set of additional emotions only recognized within, but not across these cultural groups. Our findings indicate that a small set of primarily negative emotions have evolved signals across several modalities, while most positive emotions are communicated with culture-specific signals.
  • Scharenborg, O., Wan, V., & Moore, R. K. (2006). Capturing fine-phonetic variation in speech through automatic classification of articulatory features. In Speech Recognition and Intrinsic Variation Workshop [SRIV2006] (pp. 77-82). ISCA Archive.

    Abstract

    The ultimate goal of our research is to develop a computational model of human speech recognition that is able to capture the effects of fine-grained acoustic variation on speech recognition behaviour. As part of this work we are investigating automatic feature classifiers that are able to create reliable and accurate transcriptions of the articulatory behaviour encoded in the acoustic speech signal. In the experiments reported here, we compared support vector machines (SVMs) with multilayer perceptrons (MLPs). MLPs have been widely (and rather successfully) used for the task of multi-value articulatory feature classification, while (to the best of our knowledge) SVMs have not. This paper compares the performances of the two classifiers and analyses the results in order to better understand the articulatory representations. It was found that the MLPs outperformed the SVMs, but it is concluded that both classifiers exhibit similar behaviour in terms of patterns of errors.
  • Scharenborg, O., & Okolowski, S. (2009). Lexical embedding in spoken Dutch. In INTERSPEECH 2009 - 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 1879-1882). ISCA Archive.

    Abstract

    A stretch of speech is often consistent with multiple words, e.g., the sequence /hæm/ is consistent with ‘ham’ but also with the first syllable of ‘hamster’, resulting in temporary ambiguity. However, to what degree does this lexical embedding occur? Analyses on two corpora of spoken Dutch showed that 11.9%-19.5% of polysyllabic word tokens have word-initial embedding, while 4.1%-7.5% of monosyllabic word tokens can appear word-initially embedded. This is much lower than suggested by an analysis of a large dictionary of Dutch. Speech processing thus appears to be simpler than one might expect on the basis of statistics on a dictionary.
  • Scharenborg, O. (2009). Using durational cues in a computational model of spoken-word recognition. In INTERSPEECH 2009 - 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 1675-1678). ISCA Archive.

    Abstract

    Evidence that listeners use durational cues to help resolve temporarily ambiguous speech input has accumulated over the past few years. In this paper, we investigate whether durational cues are also beneficial for word recognition in a computational model of spoken-word recognition. Two sets of simulations were carried out using the acoustic signal as input. The simulations showed that the computational model, like humans, takes benefit from durational cues during word recognition, and uses these to disambiguate the speech signal. These results thus provide support for the theory that durational cues play a role in spoken-word recognition.
  • Schuppler, B., Van Dommelen, W., Koreman, J., & Ernestus, M. (2009). Word-final [t]-deletion: An analysis on the segmental and sub-segmental level. In Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2009) (pp. 2275-2278). Causal Productions Pty Ltd.

    Abstract

    This paper presents a study on the reduction of word-final [t]s in conversational standard Dutch. Based on a large amount of tokens annotated on the segmental level, we show that the bigram frequency and the segmental context are the main predictors for the absence of [t]s. In a second study, we present an analysis of the detailed acoustic properties of word-final [t]s and we show that bigram frequency and context also play a role on the subsegmental level. This paper extends research on the realization of /t/ in spontaneous speech and shows the importance of incorporating sub-segmental properties in models of speech.
  • Scott, S., & Sauter, D. (2006). Non-verbal expressions of emotion - acoustics, valence, and cross cultural factors. In Third International Conference on Speech Prosody 2006. ISCA.

    Abstract

    This presentation will address aspects of the expression of emotion in non-verbal vocal behaviour, specifically attempting to determine the roles of both positive and negative emotions, their acoustic bases, and the extent to which these are recognized in non-Western cultures.
  • Sekine, K., & Kajikawa, T. (2023). Does the spatial distribution of a speaker's gaze and gesture impact on a listener's comprehension of discourse? In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (Eds.), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527208.

    Abstract

    This study investigated the impact of a speaker's gaze direction
    on a listener's comprehension of discourse. Previous research
    suggests that hand gestures play a role in referent allocation,
    enabling listeners to better understand the discourse. The
    current study aims to determine whether the speaker's gaze
    direction has a similar effect on reference resolution as co-
    speech gestures. Thirty native Japanese speakers participated in
    the study and were assigned to one of three conditions:
    congruent, incongruent, or speech-only. Participants watched
    36 videos of an actor narrating a story consisting of three
    sentences with two protagonists. The speaker consistently
    used hand gestures to allocate one protagonist to the lower right
    and the other to the lower left space, while directing her gaze to
    either space of the target person (congruent), the other person
    (incongruent), or no particular space (speech-only). Participants
    were required to verbally answer a question about the target
    protagonist involved in an accidental event as quickly as
    possible. Results indicate that participants in the congruent
    condition exhibited faster reaction times than those in the
    incongruent condition, although the difference was not
    significant. These findings suggest that the speaker's gaze
    direction is not enough to facilitate a listener's comprehension
    of discourse.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1975). Autonomous syntax and prelexical rules. In S. De Vriendt, J. Dierickx, & M. Wilmet (Eds.), Grammaire générative et psychomécanique du langage: actes du colloque organisé par le Centre d'études linguistiques et littéraires de la Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Bruxelles, 29-31 mai 1974 (pp. 89-98). Paris: Didier.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1975). Logic and language. In S. De Vriendt, J. Dierickx, & M. Wilmet (Eds.), Grammaire générative et psychomécanique du langage: actes du colloque organisé par le Centre d'études linguistiques et littéraires de la Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Bruxelles, 29-31 mai 1974 (pp. 84-87). Paris: Didier.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (2009). Logical systems and natural logical intuitions. In Current issues in unity and diversity of languages: Collection of the papers selected from the CIL 18, held at Korea University in Seoul on July 21-26, 2008. http://www.cil18.org (pp. 53-60).

    Abstract

    The present paper is part of a large research programme investigating the nature and properties of the predicate logic inherent in natural language. The general hypothesis is that natural speakers start off with a basic-natural logic, based on natural cognitive functions, including the basic-natural way of dealing with plural objects. As culture spreads, functional pressure leads to greater generalization and mathematical correctness, yielding ever more refined systems until the apogee of standard modern predicate logic. Four systems of predicate calculus are considered: Basic-Natural Predicate Calculus (BNPC), Aritsotelian-Abelardian Predicate Calculus (AAPC), Aritsotelian-Boethian Predicate Calculus (ABPC), also known as the classic Square of Opposition, and Standard Modern Predicate Calculus (SMPC). (ABPC is logically faulty owing to its Undue Existential Import (UEI), but that fault is repaired by the addition of a presuppositional component to the logic.) All four systems are checked against seven natural logical intuitions. It appears that BNPC scores best (five out of seven), followed by ABPC (three out of seven). AAPC and SMPC finish ex aequo with two out of seven.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1985). Predicate raising and semantic transparency in Mauritian Creole. In N. Boretzky, W. Enninger, & T. Stolz (Eds.), Akten des 2. Essener Kolloquiums über "Kreolsprachen und Sprachkontakte", 29-30 Nov. 1985 (pp. 203-229). Bochum: Brockmeyer.
  • Severijnen, G. G. A., Bosker, H. R., & McQueen, J. M. (2023). Syllable rate drives rate normalization, but is not the only factor. In R. Skarnitzl, & J. Volín (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2023) (pp. 56-60). Prague: Guarant International.

    Abstract

    Speech is perceived relative to the speech rate in the context. It is unclear, however, what information listeners use to compute speech rate. The present study examines whether listeners use the number of
    syllables per unit time (i.e., syllable rate) as a measure of speech rate, as indexed by subsequent vowel perception. We ran two rate-normalization experiments in which participants heard duration-matched word lists that contained either monosyllabic
    vs. bisyllabic words (Experiment 1), or monosyllabic vs. trisyllabic pseudowords (Experiment 2). The participants’ task was to categorize an /ɑ-aː/ continuum that followed the word lists. The monosyllabic condition was perceived as slower (i.e., fewer /aː/ responses) than the bisyllabic and
    trisyllabic condition. However, no difference was observed between bisyllabic and trisyllabic contexts. Therefore, while syllable rate is used in perceiving speech rate, other factors, such as fast speech processes, mean F0, and intensity, must also influence rate normalization.
  • Siahaan, P., & Wijaya Rajeg, G. P. (2023). Multimodal language use in Indonesian: Recurrent gestures associated with negation. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (Eds.), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527196.

    Abstract

    This paper presents research findings on manual gestures
    associated with negation in Indonesian, utilizing data sourced
    from talk shows available on YouTube. The study reveals that
    Indonesian speakers employ six recurrent negation gestures,
    which have been observed in various languages worldwide.
    This suggests that gestures exhibiting a stable form-meaning
    relationship and recurring frequently in relation to negation are
    prevalent around the globe, although their distribution may
    differ across cultures and languages. Furthermore, the paper
    demonstrates that negation gestures are not strictly tied to
    verbal negation. Overall, the aim of this paper is to contribute
    to a deeper understanding of the conventional usage and cross-
    linguistic distribution of recurrent gestures.
  • Stehouwer, H., & van Zaanen, M. (2009). Language models for contextual error detection and correction. In Proceedings of the EACL 2009 Workshop on Computational Linguistic Aspects of Grammatical Inference (pp. 41-48). Association for Computational Linguistics.

    Abstract

    The problem of identifying and correcting confusibles, i.e. context-sensitive spelling errors, in text is typically tackled using specifically trained machine learning classifiers. For each different set of confusibles, a specific classifier is trained and tuned. In this research, we investigate a more generic approach to context-sensitive confusible correction. Instead of using specific classifiers, we use one generic classifier based on a language model. This measures the likelihood of sentences with different possible solutions of a confusible in place. The advantage of this approach is that all confusible sets are handled by a single model. Preliminary results show that the performance of the generic classifier approach is only slightly worse that that of the specific classifier approach
  • Stehouwer, H., & Van Zaanen, M. (2009). Token merging in language model-based confusible disambiguation. In T. Calders, K. Tuyls, & M. Pechenizkiy (Eds.), Proceedings of the 21st Benelux Conference on Artificial Intelligence (pp. 241-248).

    Abstract

    In the context of confusible disambiguation (spelling correction that requires context), the synchronous back-off strategy combined with traditional n-gram language models performs well. However, when alternatives consist of a different number of tokens, this classification technique cannot be applied directly, because the computation of the probabilities is skewed. Previous work already showed that probabilities based on different order n-grams should not be compared directly. In this article, we propose new probability metrics in which the size of the n is varied according to the number of tokens of the confusible alternative. This requires access to n-grams of variable length. Results show that the synchronous back-off method is extremely robust. We discuss the use of suffix trees as a technique to store variable length n-gram information efficiently.
  • Stern, G. (2023). On embodied use of recognitional demonstratives. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (Eds.), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527204.

    Abstract

    This study focuses on embodied uses of recognitional
    demonstratives. While multimodal conversation analytic
    studies have shown how gesture and speech interact in the
    elaboration of exophoric references, little attention has been
    given to the multimodal configuration of other types of
    referential actions. Based on a video-recorded corpus of
    professional meetings held in French, this qualitative study
    shows that a subtype of deictic references, namely recognitional
    references, are frequently associated with iconic gestures, thus
    challenging the traditional distinction between exophoric and
    endophoric uses of deixis.
  • Ten Bosch, L., Baayen, R. H., & Ernestus, M. (2006). On speech variation and word type differentiation by articulatory feature representations. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2006 (pp. 2230-2233).

    Abstract

    This paper describes ongoing research aiming at the description of variation in speech as represented by asynchronous articulatory features. We will first illustrate how distances in the articulatory feature space can be used for event detection along speech trajectories in this space. The temporal structure imposed by the cosine distance in articulatory feature space coincides to a large extent with the manual segmentation on phone level. The analysis also indicates that the articulatory feature representation provides better such alignments than the MFCC representation does. Secondly, we will present first results that indicate that articulatory features can be used to probe for acoustic differences in the onsets of Dutch singulars and plurals.
  • ten Bosch, L., Hämäläinen, A., Scharenborg, O., & Boves, L. (2006). Acoustic scores and symbolic mismatch penalties in phone lattices. In Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing [ICASSP 2006]. IEEE.

    Abstract

    This paper builds on previous work that aims at unraveling the structure of the speech signal by means of using probabilistic representations. The context of this work is a multi-pass speech recognition system in which a phone lattice is created and used as a basis for a lexical search in which symbolic mismatches are allowed at certain costs. The focus is on the optimization of the costs of phone insertions, deletions and substitutions that are used in the lexical decoding pass. Two optimization approaches are presented, one related to a multi-pass computational model for human speech recognition, the other based on a decoding in which Bayes’ risks are minimized. In the final section, the advantages of these optimization methods are discussed and compared.
  • Torreira, F., & Ernestus, M. (2009). Probabilistic effects on French [t] duration. In Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2009) (pp. 448-451). Causal Productions Pty Ltd.

    Abstract

    The present study shows that [t] consonants are affected by probabilistic factors in a syllable-timed language as French, and in spontaneous as well as in journalistic speech. Study 1 showed a word bigram frequency effect in spontaneous French, but its exact nature depended on the corpus on which the probabilistic measures were based. Study 2 investigated journalistic speech and showed an effect of the joint frequency of the test word and its following word. We discuss the possibility that these probabilistic effects are due to the speaker’s planning of upcoming words, and to the speaker’s adaptation to the listener’s needs.
  • Tuinman, A. (2006). Overcompensation of /t/ reduction in Dutch by German/Dutch bilinguals. In Variation, detail and representation: 10th Conference on Laboratory Phonology (pp. 101-102).
  • Uddén, J., Araújo, S., Forkstam, C., Ingvar, M., Hagoort, P., & Petersson, K. M. (2009). A matter of time: Implicit acquisition of recursive sequence structures. In N. Taatgen, & H. Van Rijn (Eds.), Proceedings of the Thirty-First Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2444-2449).

    Abstract

    A dominant hypothesis in empirical research on the evolution of language is the following: the fundamental difference between animal and human communication systems is captured by the distinction between regular and more complex non-regular grammars. Studies reporting successful artificial grammar learning of nested recursive structures and imaging studies of the same have methodological shortcomings since they typically allow explicit problem solving strategies and this has been shown to account for the learning effect in subsequent behavioral studies. The present study overcomes these shortcomings by using subtle violations of agreement structure in a preference classification task. In contrast to the studies conducted so far, we use an implicit learning paradigm, allowing the time needed for both abstraction processes and consolidation to take place. Our results demonstrate robust implicit learning of recursively embedded structures (context-free grammar) and recursive structures with cross-dependencies (context-sensitive grammar) in an artificial grammar learning task spanning 9 days. Keywords: Implicit artificial grammar learning; centre embedded; cross-dependency; implicit learning; context-sensitive grammar; context-free grammar; regular grammar; non-regular grammar
  • Uhrig, P., Payne, E., Pavlova, I., Burenko, I., Dykes, N., Baltazani, M., Burrows, E., Hale, S., Torr, P., & Wilson, A. (2023). Studying time conceptualisation via speech, prosody, and hand gesture: Interweaving manual and computational methods of analysis. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (Eds.), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527220.

    Abstract

    This paper presents a new interdisciplinary methodology for the
    analysis of future conceptualisations in big messy media data.
    More specifically, it focuses on the depictions of post-Covid
    futures by RT during the pandemic, i.e. on data which are of
    interest not just from the perspective of academic research but
    also of policy engagement. The methodology has been
    developed to support the scaling up of fine-grained data-driven
    analysis of discourse utterances larger than individual lexical
    units which are centred around ‘will’ + the infinitive. It relies
    on the true integration of manual analytical and computational
    methods and tools in researching three modalities – textual,
    prosodic1, and gestural. The paper describes the process of
    building a computational infrastructure for the collection and
    processing of video data, which aims to empower the manual
    analysis. It also shows how manual analysis can motivate the
    development of computational tools. The paper presents
    individual computational tools to demonstrate how the
    combination of human and machine approaches to analysis can
    reveal new manifestations of cohesion between gesture and
    prosody. To illustrate the latter, the paper shows how the
    boundaries of prosodic units can work to help determine the
    boundaries of gestural units for future conceptualisations.
  • Uluşahin, O., Bosker, H. R., McQueen, J. M., & Meyer, A. S. (2023). No evidence for convergence to sub-phonemic F2 shifts in shadowing. In R. Skarnitzl, & J. Volín (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2023) (pp. 96-100). Prague: Guarant International.

    Abstract

    Over the course of a conversation, interlocutors sound more and more like each other in a process called convergence. However, the automaticity and grain size of convergence are not well established. This study therefore examined whether female native Dutch speakers converge to large yet sub-phonemic shifts in the F2 of the vowel /e/. Participants first performed a short reading task to establish baseline F2s for the vowel /e/, then shadowed 120 target words (alongside 360 fillers) which contained one instance of a manipulated vowel /e/ where the F2 had been shifted down to that of the vowel /ø/. Consistent exposure to large (sub-phonemic) downward shifts in F2 did not result in convergence. The results raise issues for theories which view convergence as a product of automatic integration between perception and production.
  • Vainio, M., Suni, A., Raitio, T., Nurminen, J., Järvikivi, J., & Alku, P. (2009). New method for delexicalization and its application to prosodic tagging for text-to-speech synthesis. In Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2009) (pp. 1703-1706).

    Abstract

    This paper describes a new flexible delexicalization method based on glottal excited parametric speech synthesis scheme. The system utilizes inverse filtered glottal flow and all-pole modelling of the vocal tract. The method provides a possibility to retain and manipulate all relevant prosodic features of any kind of speech. Most importantly, the features include voice quality, which has not been properly modeled in earlier delexicalization methods. The functionality of the new method was tested in a prosodic tagging experiment aimed at providing word prominence data for a text-to-speech synthesis system. The experiment confirmed the usefulness of the method and further corroborated earlier evidence that linguistic factors influence the perception of prosodic prominence.
  • Van Berkum, J. J. A. (2009). Does the N400 directly reflect compositional sense-making? Psychophysiology, Special Issue: Society for Psychophysiological Research Abstracts for the Forty-Ninth Annual Meeting, 46(Suppl. 1), s2.

    Abstract

    A not uncommon assumption in psycholinguistics is that the N400 directly indexes high-level semantic integration, the compositional, word-driven construction of sentence- and discourse-level meaning in some language-relevant unification space. The various discourse- and speaker-dependent modulations of the N400 uncovered by us and others are often taken to support this 'compositional integration' position. In my talk, I will argue that these N400 modulations are probably better interpreted as only indirectly reflecting compositional sense-making. The account that I will advance for these N400 effects is a variant of the classic Kutas and Federmeier (2002, TICS) memory retrieval account in which context effects on the word-elicited N400 are taken to reflect contextual priming of LTM access. It differs from the latter in making more explicit that the contextual cues that prime access to a word's meaning in LTM can range from very simple (e.g., a single concept) to very complex ones (e.g., a structured representation of the current discourse). Furthermore, it incorporates the possibility, suggested by recent N400 findings, that semantic retrieval can also be intensified in response to certain ‘relevance signals’, such as strong value-relevance, or a marked delivery (linguistic focus, uncommon choice of words, etc). In all, the perspective I'll draw is that in the context of discourse-level language processing, N400 effects reflect an 'overlay of technologies', with the construction of discourse-level representations riding on top of more ancient sense-making technology.
  • Van den Bos, E. J., & Poletiek, F. H. (2006). Implicit artificial grammar learning in adults and children. In R. Sun (Ed.), Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2006) (pp. 2619). Austin, TX, USA: Cognitive Science Society.
  • Van de Ven, M., Tucker, B. V., & Ernestus, M. (2009). Semantic context effects in the recognition of acoustically unreduced and reduced words. In Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 1867-1870). Causal Productions Pty Ltd.

    Abstract

    Listeners require context to understand the casual pronunciation variants of words that are typical of spontaneous speech (Ernestus et al., 2002). The present study reports two auditory lexical decision experiments, investigating listeners' use of semantic contextual information in the comprehension of unreduced and reduced words. We found a strong semantic priming effect for low frequency unreduced words, whereas there was no such effect for reduced words. Word frequency was facilitatory for all words. These results show that semantic context is relevant especially for the comprehension of unreduced words, which is unexpected given the listener driven explanation of reduction in spontaneous speech.
  • Vogel, C., Koutsombogera, M., Murat, A. C., Khosrobeigi, Z., & Ma, X. (2023). Gestural linguistic context vectors encode gesture meaning. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (Eds.), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527176.

    Abstract

    Linguistic context vectors are adapted for measuring the linguistic contexts that accompany gestures and comparable co-linguistic behaviours. Focusing on gestural semiotic types, it is demonstrated that gestural linguistic context vectors carry information associated with gesture. It is suggested that these may be used to approximate gesture meaning in a similar manner to the approximation of word meaning by context vectors.
  • Weber, A. (2009). The role of linguistic experience in lexical recognition [Abstract]. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 125, 2759.

    Abstract

    Lexical recognition is typically slower in L2 than in L1. Part of the difficulty comes from a not precise enough processing of L2 phonemes. Consequently, L2 listeners fail to eliminate candidate words that L1 listeners can exclude from competing for recognition. For instance, the inability to distinguish /r/ from /l/ in rocket and locker makes for Japanese listeners both words possible candidates when hearing their onset (e.g., Cutler, Weber, and Otake, 2006). The L2 disadvantage can, however, be dispelled: For L2 listeners, but not L1 listeners, L2 speech from a non-native talker with the same language background is known to be as intelligible as L2 speech from a native talker (e.g., Bent and Bradlow, 2003). A reason for this may be that L2 listeners have ample experience with segmental deviations that are characteristic for their own accent. On this account, only phonemic deviations that are typical for the listeners’ own accent will cause spurious lexical activation in L2 listening (e.g., English magic pronounced as megic for Dutch listeners). In this talk, I will present evidence from cross-modal priming studies with a variety of L2 listener groups, showing how the processing of phonemic deviations is accent-specific but withstands fine phonetic differences.
  • Widlok, T. (2006). Two ways of looking at a Mangetti grove. In A. Takada (Ed.), Proceedings of the workshop: Landscape and society (pp. 11-16). Kyoto: 21st Century Center of Excellence Program.
  • Witteman, J., Karaseva, E., Schiller, N. O., & McQueen, J. M. (2023). What does successful L2 vowel acquisition depend on? A conceptual replication. In R. Skarnitzl, & J. Volín (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2023) (pp. 928-931). Prague: Guarant International.

    Abstract

    It has been suggested that individual variation in vowel compactness of the native language (L1) and the distance between L1 vowels and vowels in the second language (L2) predict successful L2 vowel acquisition. Moreover, general articulatory skills have been proposed to account for variation in vowel compactness. In the present work, we conceptually replicate a previous study to test these hypotheses with a large sample size, a new language pair and a
    new vowel pair. We find evidence that individual variation in L1 vowel compactness has opposing effects for two different vowels. We do not find evidence that individual variation in L1 compactness
    is explained by general articulatory skills. We conclude that the results found previously might be specific to sub-groups of L2 learners and/or specific sub-sets of vowel pairs.
  • Wittenburg, P., Brugman, H., Russel, A., Klassmann, A., & Sloetjes, H. (2006). ELAN: a professional framework for multimodality research. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006) (pp. 1556-1559).

    Abstract

    Utilization of computer tools in linguistic research has gained importance with the maturation of media frameworks for the handling of digital audio and video. The increased use of these tools in gesture, sign language and multimodal interaction studies has led to stronger requirements on the flexibility, the efficiency and in particular the time accuracy of annotation tools. This paper describes the efforts made to make ELAN a tool that meets these requirements, with special attention to the developments in the area of time accuracy. In subsequent sections an overview will be given of other enhancements in the latest versions of ELAN, that make it a useful tool in multimodality research.
  • Wittenburg, P., Broeder, D., Klein, W., Levinson, S. C., & Romary, L. (2006). Foundations of modern language resource archives. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006) (pp. 625-628).

    Abstract

    A number of serious reasons will convince an increasing amount of researchers to store their relevant material in centers which we will call "language resource archives". They combine the duty of taking care of long-term preservation as well as the task to give access to their material to different user groups. Access here is meant in the sense that an active interaction with the data will be made possible to support the integration of new data, new versions or commentaries of all sort. Modern Language Resource Archives will have to adhere to a number of basic principles to fulfill all requirements and they will have to be involved in federations to create joint language resource domains making it even more simple for the researchers to access the data. This paper makes an attempt to formulate the essential pillars language resource archives have to adhere to.
  • Xiao, M., Kong, X., Liu, J., & Ning, J. (2009). TMBF: Bloom filter algorithms of time-dependent multi bit-strings for incremental set. In Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Ultra Modern Telecommunications & Workshops.

    Abstract

    Set is widely used as a kind of basic data structure. However, when it is used for large scale data set the cost of storage, search and transport is overhead. The bloom filter uses a fixed size bit string to represent elements in a static set, which can reduce storage space and search cost that is a fixed constant. The time-space efficiency is achieved at the cost of a small probability of false positive in membership query. However, for many applications the space savings and locating time constantly outweigh this drawback. Dynamic bloom filter (DBF) can support concisely representation and approximate membership queries of dynamic set instead of static set. It has been proved that DBF not only possess the advantage of standard bloom filter, but also has better features when dealing with dynamic set. This paper proposes a time-dependent multiple bit-strings bloom filter (TMBF) which roots in the DBF and targets on dynamic incremental set. TMBF uses multiple bit-strings in time order to present a dynamic increasing set and uses backward searching to test whether an element is in a set. Based on the system logs from a real P2P file sharing system, the evaluation shows a 20% reduction in searching cost compared to DBF.

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