Publications

Displaying 101 - 132 of 132
  • Senft, B., & Senft, G. (2018). Growing up on the Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea - Childhood and educational ideologies in Tauwema. Amsterdam: Benjamins. doi:10.1075/clu.21.

    Abstract

    This volume deals with the children’s socialization on the Trobriands. After a survey of ethnographic studies on childhood, the book zooms in on indigenous ideas of conception and birth-giving, the children’s early development, their integration into playgroups, their games and their education within their `own little community’ until they reach the age of seven years. During this time children enjoy much autonomy and independence. Attempts of parental education are confined to a minimum. However, parents use subtle means to raise their children. Educational ideologies are manifest in narratives and in speeches addressed to children. They provide guidelines for their integration into the Trobrianders’ “balanced society” which is characterized by cooperation and competition. It does not allow individual accumulation of wealth – surplus property gained has to be redistributed – but it values the fame acquired by individuals in competitive rituals. Fame is not regarded as threatening the balance of their society.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1982). De spelling van het Sranan: Een diskussie en een voorstel. Nijmegen: Masusa.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1985). Discourse semantics. Oxford: Blackwell.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1973). Generative Semantik: Semantische syntax. Düsseldorf: Schwann Verlag.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (2018). Semantic syntax (2nd rev. ed.). Leiden: Brill.

    Abstract

    This book presents a detailed formal machinery for the conversion of the Semantic Analyses (SAs) of sentences into surface structures of English, French, German, Dutch, and to some extent Turkish. The SAs are propositional structures consisting of a predicate and one, two or three argument terms, some of which can themselves be propositional structures. The surface structures are specified up to, but not including, the morphology. The book is thus an implementation of the programme formulated first by Albert Sechehaye (1870-1946) and then, independently, by James McCawley (1938-1999) in the school of Generative Semantics. It is the first, and so far the only formally precise and empirically motivated machinery in existence converting meaning representations into sentences of natural languages.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1982). Riorientamenti metodologici nello studio della variabilità linguistica. In D. Gambarara, & A. D'Atri (Eds.), Ideologia, filosofia e linguistica: Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Rende (CS) 15-17 Settembre 1978 ( (pp. 499-515). Roma: Bulzoni.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (2018). Saussure and Sechehaye: A study in the history of linguistics and the foundations of language. Leiden: Brill.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1973). Predicate raising and dative in French and Sundry languages. Trier: L.A.U.T. (Linguistic Agency University of Trier).
  • 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.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1998). Western linguistics: An historical introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.
  • Sidnell, J., & Stivers, T. (Eds.). (2005). Multimodal Interaction [Special Issue]. Semiotica, 156.
  • Skiba, R. (1998). Fachsprachenforschung in wissenschaftstheoretischer Perspektive. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.
  • Sotaro, K., & Dickey, L. W. (Eds.). (1998). Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics: Annual report 1998. Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
  • Speed, L., & Majid, A. (2018). Music and odor in harmony: A case of music-odor synaesthesia. In C. Kalish, M. Rau, J. Zhu, & T. T. Rogers (Eds.), Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2018) (pp. 2527-2532). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    We report an individual with music-odor synaesthesia who experiences automatic and vivid odor sensations when she hears music. S’s odor associations were recorded on two days, and compared with those of two control participants. Overall, S produced longer descriptions, and her associations were of multiple odors at once, in comparison to controls who typically reported a single odor. Although odor associations were qualitatively different between S and controls, ratings of the consistency of their descriptions did not differ. This demonstrates that crossmodal associations between music and odor exist in non-synaesthetes too. We also found that S is better at discriminating between odors than control participants, and is more likely to experience emotion, memories and evaluations triggered by odors, demonstrating the broader impact of her synaesthesia.

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  • Sprenger, S. A., & Van Rijn, H. (2005). Clock time naming: Complexities of a simple task. In B. G. Bara, L. Barsalou, & M. Bucciarelli (Eds.), Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2062-2067).
  • Ten Bosch, L., Ernestus, M., & Boves, L. (2018). Analyzing reaction time sequences from human participants in auditory experiments. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2018 (pp. 971-975). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2018-1728.

    Abstract

    Sequences of reaction times (RT) produced by participants in an experiment are not only influenced by the stimuli, but by many other factors as well, including fatigue, attention, experience, IQ, handedness, etc. These confounding factors result in longterm effects (such as a participant’s overall reaction capability) and in short- and medium-time fluctuations in RTs (often referred to as ‘local speed effects’). Because stimuli are usually presented in a random sequence different for each participant, local speed effects affect the underlying ‘true’ RTs of specific trials in different ways across participants. To be able to focus statistical analysis on the effects of the cognitive process under study, it is necessary to reduce the effect of confounding factors as much as possible. In this paper we propose and compare techniques and criteria for doing so, with focus on reducing (‘filtering’) the local speed effects. We show that filtering matters substantially for the significance analyses of predictors in linear mixed effect regression models. The performance of filtering is assessed by the average between-participant correlation between filtered RT sequences and by Akaike’s Information Criterion, an important measure of the goodness-of-fit of linear mixed effect regression models.
  • ten Bosch, L., & Scharenborg, O. (2005). ASR decoding in a computational model of human word recognition. In Interspeech'2005 - Eurospeech, 9th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (pp. 1241-1244). ISCA Archive.

    Abstract

    This paper investigates the interaction between acoustic scores and symbolic mismatch penalties in multi-pass speech decoding techniques that are based on the creation of a segment graph followed by a lexical search. The interaction between acoustic and symbolic mismatches determines to a large extent the structure of the search space of these multipass approaches. The background of this study is a recently developed computational model of human word recognition, called SpeM. SpeM is able to simulate human word recognition data and is built as a multi-pass speech decoder. Here, we focus on unravelling the structure of the search space that is used in SpeM and similar decoding strategies. Finally, we elaborate on the close relation between distances in this search space, and distance measures in search spaces that are based on a combination of acoustic and phonetic features.
  • Ten Bosch, L., & Boves, L. (2018). Information encoding by deep neural networks: what can we learn? In Proceedings of Interspeech 2018 (pp. 1457-1461). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2018-1896.

    Abstract

    The recent advent of deep learning techniques in speech tech-nology and in particular in automatic speech recognition hasyielded substantial performance improvements. This suggeststhat deep neural networks (DNNs) are able to capture structurein speech data that older methods for acoustic modeling, suchas Gaussian Mixture Models and shallow neural networks failto uncover. In image recognition it is possible to link repre-sentations on the first couple of layers in DNNs to structuralproperties of images, and to representations on early layers inthe visual cortex. This raises the question whether it is possi-ble to accomplish a similar feat with representations on DNNlayers when processing speech input. In this paper we presentthree different experiments in which we attempt to untanglehow DNNs encode speech signals, and to relate these repre-sentations to phonetic knowledge, with the aim to advance con-ventional phonetic concepts and to choose the topology of aDNNs more efficiently. Two experiments investigate represen-tations formed by auto-encoders. A third experiment investi-gates representations on convolutional layers that treat speechspectrograms as if they were images. The results lay the basisfor future experiments with recursive networks.
  • Terrill, A. (1998). Biri. München: Lincom Europa.

    Abstract

    This work presents a salvage grammar of the Biri language of Eastern Central Queensland, a Pama-Nyungan language belonging to the large Maric subgroup. As the language is no longer used, the grammatical description is based on old written sources and on recordings made by linguists in the 1960s and 1970s. Biri is in many ways typical of the Pama-Nyungan languages of Southern Queensland. It has split case marking systems, marking nouns according to an ergative/absolutive system and pronouns according to a nominative/accusative system. Unusually for its area, Biri also has bound pronouns on its verb, cross-referencing the person, number and case of core participants. As far as it is possible, the grammatical discussion is ‘theory neutral’. The first four chapters deal with the phonology, morphology, and syntax of the language. The last two chapters contain a substantial discussion of Biri’s place in the Pama-Nyungan family. In chapter 6 the numerous dialects of the Biri language are discussed. In chapter 7 the close linguistic relationship between Biri and the surrounding languages is examined.
  • Thompson, B., & Lupyan, G. (2018). Automatic estimation of lexical concreteness in 77 languages. In C. Kalish, M. Rau, J. Zhu, & T. T. Rogers (Eds.), Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2018) (pp. 1122-1127). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    We estimate lexical Concreteness for millions of words across 77 languages. Using a simple regression framework, we combine vector-based models of lexical semantics with experimental norms of Concreteness in English and Dutch. By applying techniques to align vector-based semantics across distinct languages, we compute and release Concreteness estimates at scale in numerous languages for which experimental norms are not currently available. This paper lays out the technique and its efficacy. Although this is a difficult dataset to evaluate immediately, Concreteness estimates computed from English correlate with Dutch experimental norms at $\rho$ = .75 in the vocabulary at large, increasing to $\rho$ = .8 among Nouns. Our predictions also recapitulate attested relationships with word frequency. The approach we describe can be readily applied to numerous lexical measures beyond Concreteness
  • Thompson, B., Roberts, S., & Lupyan, G. (2018). Quantifying semantic similarity across languages. In C. Kalish, M. Rau, J. Zhu, & T. T. Rogers (Eds.), Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2018) (pp. 2551-2556). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Do all languages convey semantic knowledge in the same way? If language simply mirrors the structure of the world, the answer should be a qualified “yes”. If, however, languages impose structure as much as reflecting it, then even ostensibly the “same” word in different languages may mean quite different things. We provide a first pass at a large-scale quantification of cross-linguistic semantic alignment of approximately 1000 meanings in 55 languages. We find that the translation equivalents in some domains (e.g., Time, Quantity, and Kinship) exhibit high alignment across languages while the structure of other domains (e.g., Politics, Food, Emotions, and Animals) exhibits substantial cross-linguistic variability. Our measure of semantic alignment correlates with known phylogenetic distances between languages: more phylogenetically distant languages have less semantic alignment. We also find semantic alignment to correlate with cultural distances between societies speaking the languages, suggesting a rich co-adaptation of language and culture even in domains of experience that appear most constrained by the natural world
  • Tourtouri, E. N., Delogu, F., & Crocker, M. W. (2018). Specificity and entropy reduction in situated referential processing. In G. Gunzelmann, A. Howes, T. Tenbrink, & E. Davelaar (Eds.), Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2017) (pp. 3356-3361). Austin: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    In situated communication, reference to an entity in the shared visual context can be established using eitheranexpression that conveys precise (minimally specified) or redundant (over-specified) information. There is, however, along-lasting debate in psycholinguistics concerningwhether the latter hinders referential processing. We present evidence from an eyetrackingexperiment recordingfixations as well asthe Index of Cognitive Activity –a novel measure of cognitive workload –supporting the view that over-specifications facilitate processing. We further present originalevidence that, above and beyond the effect of specificity,referring expressions thatuniformly reduce referential entropyalso benefitprocessing
  • Vagliano, I., Galke, L., Mai, F., & Scherp, A. (2018). Using adversarial autoencoders for multi-modal automatic playlist continuation. In C.-W. Chen, P. Lamere, M. Schedl, & H. Zamani (Eds.), RecSys Challenge '18: Proceedings of the ACM Recommender Systems Challenge 2018 (pp. 5.1-5.6). New York: ACM. doi:10.1145/3267471.3267476.

    Abstract

    The task of automatic playlist continuation is generating a list of recommended tracks that can be added to an existing playlist. By suggesting appropriate tracks, i. e., songs to add to a playlist, a recommender system can increase the user engagement by making playlist creation easier, as well as extending listening beyond the end of current playlist. The ACM Recommender Systems Challenge 2018 focuses on such task. Spotify released a dataset of playlists, which includes a large number of playlists and associated track listings. Given a set of playlists from which a number of tracks have been withheld, the goal is predicting the missing tracks in those playlists. We participated in the challenge as the team Unconscious Bias and, in this paper, we present our approach. We extend adversarial autoencoders to the problem of automatic playlist continuation. We show how multiple input modalities, such as the playlist titles as well as track titles, artists and albums, can be incorporated in the playlist continuation task.
  • Van Valin Jr., R. D. (2005). Exploring the syntax-semantics interface. Cambridge University Press.

    Abstract

    Language is a system of communication in which grammatical structures function to express meaning in context. While all languages can achieve the same basic communicative ends, they each use different means to achieve them, particularly in the divergent ways that syntax, semantics and pragmatics interact across languages. This book looks in detail at how structure, meaning, and communicative function interact in human languages. Working within the framework of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), Van Valin proposes a set of rules, called the ‘linking algorithm’, which relates syntactic and semantic representations to each other, with discourse-pragmatics playing a role in the linking. Using this model, he discusses the full range of grammatical phenomena, including the structures of simple and complex sentences, verb and argument structure, voice, reflexivization and extraction restrictions. Clearly written and comprehensive, this book will be welcomed by all those working on the interface between syntax, semantics and pragmatics.
  • Vernes, S. C. (2018). Vocal learning in bats: From genes to behaviour. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, L. McCrohon, A. Ravignani, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG XII) (pp. 516-518). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.128.
  • Von Holzen, K., & Bergmann, C. (2018). A Meta-Analysis of Infants’ Mispronunciation Sensitivity Development. In C. Kalish, M. Rau, J. Zhu, & T. T. Rogers (Eds.), Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2018) (pp. 1159-1164). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Before infants become mature speakers of their native language, they must acquire a robust word-recognition system which allows them to strike the balance between allowing some variation (mood, voice, accent) and recognizing variability that potentially changes meaning (e.g. cat vs hat). The current meta-analysis quantifies how the latter, termed mispronunciation sensitivity, changes over infants’ first three years, testing competing predictions of mainstream language acquisition theories. Our results show that infants were sensitive to mispronunciations, but accepted them as labels for target objects. Interestingly, and in contrast to predictions of mainstream theories, mispronunciation sensitivity was not modulated by infant age, suggesting that a sufficiently flexible understanding of native language phonology is in place at a young age.
  • De Vos, C. (2005). Cataphoric pronoun resolution (Unpublished bachelor thesis). Nijmegen: Department of Linguistics, Radboud University.

    Abstract

    Processing of cataphoric coreferential relationships.
  • Weber, A. (1998). Listening to nonnative language which violates native assimilation rules. In D. Duez (Ed.), Proceedings of the European Scientific Communication Association workshop: Sound patterns of Spontaneous Speech (pp. 101-104).

    Abstract

    Recent studies using phoneme detection tasks have shown that spoken-language processing is neither facilitated nor interfered with by optional assimilation, but is inhibited by violation of obligatory assimilation. Interpretation of these results depends on an assessment of their generality, specifically, whether they also obtain when listeners are processing nonnative language. Two separate experiments are presented in which native listeners of German and native listeners of Dutch had to detect a target fricative in legal monosyllabic Dutch nonwords. All of the nonwords were correct realisations in standard Dutch. For German listeners, however, half of the nonwords contained phoneme strings which violate the German fricative assimilation rule. Whereas the Dutch listeners showed no significant effects, German listeners detected the target fricative faster when the German fricative assimilation was violated than when no violation occurred. The results might suggest that violation of assimilation rules does not have to make processing more difficult per se.
  • Wittek, A. (1998). Learning verb meaning via adverbial modification: Change-of-state verbs in German and the adverb "wieder" again. In A. Greenhill, M. Hughes, H. Littlefield, & H. Walsh (Eds.), Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 779-790). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Wohlgemuth, J., & Dirksmeyer, T. (Eds.). (2005). Bedrohte Vielfalt. Aspekte des Sprach(en)tods – Aspects of language death. Berlin: Weißensee.

    Abstract

    About 5,000 languages are spoken in the world today. More than half of them have less than 10,000 speakers, a quarter of them even fewer than 1,000. The majority of these “small” languages will not live to see the end of this century; some estimates predict that no more than a dozen languages will still be spoken by the turn of the next millennium. This collection of papers approaches the subject of language extinction through five major topics: general aspects of language death, case studies, endangered subsystems, language protection and revitalization, language ecology. In 24 articles, the authors address the causes, manifestations, and consequences of language endangerment and extinction as well as the linguistic and social changes associated with it, drawing examples from a large number of languages.
  • Zeshan, U., & Panda, S. (2005). Professional course in Indian sign language. Mumbai: Ali Yavar Jung National Institute for the Hearing Handicapped.

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