Publications

Abstract

This questionnaire is designed to explore how spatial relations are encoded in Australian language, but may be of interest to researchers further afield.

Abstract

This questionnaire is designed to explore how spatial relations are encoded in Australian language, but may be of interest to researchers further afield.

Abstract

These classic tasks can be used to explore spatial reference in field settings. They provide a language-independent metric for eliciting spatial language, using a “director-matcher” paradigm. The Man and Tree task deals with location on the horizontal plane with both featured (man) and non-featured (e.g., tree) objects. The Space Games depict various objects (e.g. bananas, lemons) and elicit spatial contrasts not obviously lexicalisable in English.

Abstract

Wearing the hat of a cognitive anthropologist rather than an historian, I will try to amplify the ideas of Renn’s cited above. I argue that a particular subclass of material objects, namely “cognitive artifacts,” involves a close coupling of mind and artifact that acts like a brain prosthesis. Simple cognitive artifacts are external objects that act as aids to internal
computation, and not all cultures have extended inventories of these. Cognitive artifacts in this sense (e.g., calculating or measuring devices) have clearly played a central role in the history of science. But the notion can be widened to take in less material externalizations of cognition, like writing and language itself. A critical question here is how and why this close coupling of internal computation and external device actually works, a rather neglected question to which I’ll suggest some answers.

Abstract

Large language models that exhibit instruction-following behaviour represent one of the biggest recent upheavals in conversational interfaces, a trend in large part fuelled by the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT, a proprietary large language model for text generation fine-tuned through reinforcement learning from human feedback (LLM+RLHF). We review the risks of relying on proprietary software and survey the first crop of open-source projects of comparable architecture and functionality. The main contribution of this paper is to show that openness is differentiated, and to offer scientific documentation of degrees of openness in this fast-moving field. We evaluate projects in terms of openness of code, training data, model weights, RLHF data, licensing, scientific documentation, and access methods. We find that while there is a fast-growing list of projects billing themselves as 'open source', many inherit undocumented data of dubious legality, few share the all-important instruction-tuning (a key site where human labour is involved), and careful scientific documentation is exceedingly rare. Degrees of openness are relevant to fairness and accountability at all points, from data collection and curation to model architecture, and from training and fine-tuning to release and deployment.

Abstract

Speech recognition systems are a key intermediary in voice-driven human-computer interaction. Although speech recognition works well for pristine monologic audio, real-life use cases in open-ended interactive settings still present many challenges. We argue that timing is mission-critical for dialogue systems, and evaluate 5 major commercial ASR systems for their conversational and multilingual support. We find that word error rates for natural conversational data in 6 languages remain abysmal, and that overlap remains a key challenge (study 1). This impacts especially the recognition of conversational words (study 2), and in turn has dire consequences for downstream intent recognition (study 3). Our findings help to evaluate the current state of conversational ASR, contribute towards multidimensional error analysis and evaluation, and identify phenomena that need most attention on the way to build robust interactive speech technologies.

Abstract

The results of a word-spotting experiment are presented in which Dutch listeners tried to spot different types of bisyllabic Dutch words embedded in different types of nonsense contexts. Embedded verbs were not reliably harder to spot than embedded nouns; this suggests that nouns and verbs are recognised via the same basic processes. Iambic words were no harder to spot than trochaic words, suggesting that trochaic words are not in principle easier to recognise than iambic words. Words were harder to spot in consonantal contexts (i.e., contexts which themselves could not be words) than in longer contexts which contained at least one vowel (i.e., contexts which, though not words, were possible words of Dutch). A control experiment showed that this difference was not due to acoustic differences between the words in each context. The results support the claim that spoken-word recognition is sensitive to the viability of sound sequences as possible words.

Abstract

This paper presents lexical statistics on the pattern of occurrence of words embedded in other words. We report the results of an analysis of 25000 words, varying in length from two to six syllables, extracted from a phonetically-coded English dictionary (The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English). Each syllable, and each string of syllables within each word was checked against the dictionary. Two analyses are presented: the first used a complete list of polysyllables, with look-up on the entire dictionary; the second used a sublist of content words, counting only embedded words which were themselves content words. The results have important implications for models of human speech recognition. The efficiency of these models depends, in different ways, on the number and location of words within words.

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.

Abstract

The human language processor is conceived as a system that consists of several interrelated subsystems. Each subsystem performs a specific task in the complex process of language comprehension and production. A subsystem receives a particular input, performs certain specific operations on this input and yields a particular output. The subsystems can be characterized in terms of the transformations that relate the input representations to the output representations. An important issue in describing the language processing system is to identify the subsystems and to specify the relations between the subsystems. These relations can be conceived in two different ways. In one conception the subsystems are autonomous. They are related to each other only by the input-output channels. The operations in one subsystem are not affected by another system. The subsystems are modular, that is they are independent. In the other conception, the different subsystems influence each other. A subsystem affects the processes in another subsystem. In this conception there is an interaction between the subsystems.

Abstract

We report two experiments in which vowels and steady-state consonants served as targets in a speeded detection task. In the first experiment, two vowels were compared with one voiced and once unvoiced fricative. Response times (RTs) to the vowels were longer than to the fricatives. The error rate was higher for the consonants. Consonants in word-final position produced the shortest RTs, For the vowels, RT correlated negatively with target duration. In the second experiment, the same two vowel targets were compared with two nasals. This time there was no significant difference in RTs, but the error rate was still significantly higher for the consonants. Error rate and length correlated negatively for the vowels only. We conclude that RT differences between phonemes are independent of vocalic or consonantal status. Instead, we argue that the process of phoneme detection reflects more finely grained differences in acoustic/articulatory structure within the phonemic repertoire.

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.

Abstract

Demonstrative terms (e.g., this and that) are key items in understanding how a language constructs and interprets spatial relationships. This in-depth questionnaire explores how demonstratives (and similar spatial deixis forms) function in the research language, covering such topics as their morphology and syntax, semantic dimensions, and co-occurring gesture practices. Questionnaire responses should ideally be based on natural, situated discourse as well as elicitation with consultants.

Abstract

What are the preferred ways to describe spatial relationships in different linguistic and cultural groups, and how does this interact with non-linguistic spatial awareness? This game was devised as an interactive supplement to several items that collect information on the encoding and understanding of spatial relationships, especially as relevant to “route descriptions”. This is a director-matcher task, where one consultant has access to stimulus materials that shows a “target” situation, and directs another consultant (who cannot see the target) to recreate this arrangement.

Abstract

The advent of psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic methodologies has provided new insights into theories of language acquisition. Sequential multilingualism is no exception, and some of the most recent work on the subject has incorporated a particular focus on language processing. This chapter surveys some of the work on the processing of lexical and morphosyntactic aspects of third or further languages, with different offline and online methodologies. We also discuss how, while increasingly sophisticated techniques and experimental designs have improved our understanding of third language acquisition and processing, simpler but clever designs can answer pressing questions in our theoretical debate. We provide examples of both sophistication and clever simplicity in experimental design, and argue that the field would benefit from incorporating a combination of both concepts into future work.

Abstract

The structural design features of human language emerge in the process of cultural evolution, shaping languages over the course of communication, learning, and transmission. What role does this leave biological evolution? This chapter highlights the biological bases and preconditions that underlie the particular type of prosocial behaviours and cognitive inference abilities that are required for languages to emerge via cultural evolution to begin with.

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.

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.

Abstract

This paper presents the complex system of classifiers in Kilivila, the language of the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea. After a brief introduction to the language and its speakers, the classifier system is briefly described with respect to the role of these formatives for the word formation of Kilivila numerals, adjectives, demonstratives and one form of an interrogative pronoun/adverb. Then the functions the classifier system fulfils with respect to concord, temporary classification, the unitizing of nominal expressions, nominalization, indication of plural, anaphoric reference as well as text and discourse coherence are discussed and illustrated. The paper ends with some language specific and cross-linguistic questions for further research.

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.

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.

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.

Abstract

“Dimensional expressions” single out and describe one symmetric axis of a 1D, 2D, or 3D object (e.g., The road is long). “Bloxes” is an interactive, object-matching task that elicits descriptions of dimensional contrasts between simple geometrical objects (rectangular blocks, rectangular boxes, and cylinders). The aim is to explore the linguistic encoding of dimensions, focusing on features of axis, orientation, flatness/solidity, size and shape. See also 'Suggestions for field research on dimensional expressions' (https://doi.org/10.17617/2.3003382).

Abstract

The aim of this task is to explore the linguistic expression of “dimensions” — e.g., the height, width or depth — of objects in the world around us. In a dimensional expression, one symmetric axis of a 1D, 2D, or 3D object is singled out and described (e.g., That man is tall). Dimensional expressions in different languages show a range of different combinatorial and extensional uses. This document guides the researcher through some spatial situations where contrastive features of dimensional expressions are likely to be observable.

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.

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.

Abstract

Dutch words with certain final consonant clusters are subject to optional schwa epenthesis. The present research aimed at investigating how Dutch listeners deal with this type of phonological variation. By means of syllable monitoring experiments, it was investigated whether Dutch listeners process words with epenthetic schwa (e.g., ’balluk’) as bisyllabic words or rather as monosyllabic words. Real words (e.g., ’balk’, ’balluk’) and pseudowords (e.g., ’golk’, ’golluk’) were compared, to examine effects of lexical representation. No difference was found between monitoring times for BAL targets in ’balluk’ carriers as compared to ’balk’ carriers. This suggests that words with epenthetic schwa are not processed as bisyllabic words. The effects for the pseudo-words paralleled those for the real words, which suggests that they are not due to lexical representation but rather to the application of phonological rules.

Abstract

This chapter explores grammatical gender as a linguistic phenomenon. First, I define gender in terms of agreement, and look at the parts of speech that can take gender agreement. Because it relates to assumptions underlying much psycholinguistic gender research, I also examine the reasons why gender systems are thought to emerge, change, and disappear. Then, I describe the gender system of Dutch. The frequent confusion about the number of genders in Dutch will be resolved by looking at the history of the system, and the role of pronominal reference therein. In addition, I report on three lexical- statistical analyses of the distribution of genders in the language. After having dealt with Dutch, I look at whether the genders of Dutch and other languages are more or less randomly assigned, or whether there is some system to it. In contrast to what many people think, regularities do indeed exist. Native speakers could in principle exploit such regularities to compute rather than memorize gender, at least in part. Although this should be taken into account as a possibility, I will also argue that it is by no means a necessary implication.

Abstract

Language- and speech-related disorders are among the most frequent consequences of developmental and acquired pathologies. While classical approaches to the study of these disorders typically employed the lesion method to unveil one-to-one correspondence between locations, the extent of the brain damage, and corresponding symptoms, recent advances advocate the use of online methods of investigation. For example, the use of electrophysiology or magnetoencephalography—especially when combined with anatomical measures—allows for in vivo tracking of real-time language and speech events, and thus represents a particularly promising venue for future research targeting rehabilitative interventions. In this chapter, we provide a comprehensive overview of language and speech pathologies arising from cortical and/or subcortical damage, and their corresponding neurophysiological and pathological symptoms. Building upon the reviewed evidence and literature, we aim at providing a description of how the neurophysiology of the language network changes as a result of brain damage. We will conclude by summarizing the evidence presented in this chapter, while suggesting directions for future research.

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.

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.

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.

Abstract

A new psycholinguistically motivated and neural network based model of human word recognition is presented. In contrast to earlier models it uses real speech as input. At the word layer acoustical and temporal information is stored by sequences of connected sensory neurons which pass on sensor potentials to a word neuron. In experiments with a small lexicon which includes groups of very similar word forms, the model meets high standards with respect to word recognition and simulates a number of wellknown psycholinguistical effects.