Publications

Displaying 101 - 151 of 151
  • Ostarek, M. (2018). Envisioning language: An exploration of perceptual processes in language comprehension. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Ouni, S., Cohen, M. M., Young, K., & Jesse, A. (2003). Internationalization of a talking head. In M. Sole, D. Recasens, & J. Romero (Eds.), Proceedings of 15th International Congress of Phonetics Sciences (pp. 2569-2572). Barcelona: Casual Productions.

    Abstract

    In this paper we describe a general scheme for internationalization of our talking head, Baldi, to speak other languages. We describe the modular structure of the auditory/visual synthesis software. As an example, we have created a synthetic Arabic talker, which is evaluated using a noisy word recognition task comparing this talker with a natural one.
  • Ozyurek, A. (1998). An analysis of the basic meaning of Turkish demonstratives in face-to-face conversational interaction. In S. Santi, I. Guaitella, C. Cave, & G. Konopczynski (Eds.), Oralite et gestualite: Communication multimodale, interaction: actes du colloque ORAGE 98 (pp. 609-614). Paris: L'Harmattan.
  • Pallier, C., Cutler, A., & Sebastian-Galles, N. (1997). Prosodic structure and phonetic processing: A cross-linguistic study. In Proceedings of EUROSPEECH 97 (pp. 2131-2134). Grenoble, France: ESCA.

    Abstract

    Dutch and Spanish differ in how predictable the stress pattern is as a function of the segmental content: it is correlated with syllable weight in Dutch but not in Spanish. In the present study, two experiments were run to compare the abilities of Dutch and Spanish speakers to separately process segmental and stress information. It was predicted that the Spanish speakers would have more difficulty focusing on the segments and ignoring the stress pattern than the Dutch speakers. The task was a speeded classification task on CVCV syllables, with blocks of trials in which the stress pattern could vary versus blocks in which it was fixed. First, we found interference due to stress variability in both languages, suggesting that the processing of segmental information cannot be performed independently of stress. Second, the effect was larger for Spanish than for Dutch, suggesting that that the degree of interference from stress variation may be partially mitigated by the predictability of stress placement in the language.
  • Räsänen, O., Seshadri, S., & Casillas, M. (2018). Comparison of syllabification algorithms and training strategies for robust word count estimation across different languages and recording conditions. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2018 (pp. 1200-1204). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2018-1047.

    Abstract

    Word count estimation (WCE) from audio recordings has a number of applications, including quantifying the amount of speech that language-learning infants hear in their natural environments, as captured by daylong recordings made with devices worn by infants. To be applicable in a wide range of scenarios and also low-resource domains, WCE tools should be extremely robust against varying signal conditions and require minimal access to labeled training data in the target domain. For this purpose, earlier work has used automatic syllabification of speech, followed by a least-squares-mapping of syllables to word counts. This paper compares a number of previously proposed syllabifiers in the WCE task, including a supervised bi-directional long short-term memory (BLSTM) network that is trained on a language for which high quality syllable annotations are available (a “high resource language”), and reports how the alternative methods compare on different languages and signal conditions. We also explore additive noise and varying-channel data augmentation strategies for BLSTM training, and show how they improve performance in both matching and mismatching languages. Intriguingly, we also find that even though the BLSTM works on languages beyond its training data, the unsupervised algorithms can still outperform it in challenging signal conditions on novel languages.
  • Ravignani, A., Garcia, M., Gross, S., de Reus, K., Hoeksema, N., Rubio-Garcia, A., & de Boer, B. (2018). Pinnipeds have something to say about speech and rhythm. 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. 399-401). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.095.
  • Raviv, L., Meyer, A. S., & Lev-Ari, S. (2018). The role of community size in the emergence of linguistic structure. 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. 402-404). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.096.
  • Rubio-Fernández, P., & Jara-Ettinger, J. (2018). Joint inferences of speakers’ beliefs and referents based on how they speak. 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. 991-996). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    For almost two decades, the poor performance observed with the so-called Director task has been interpreted as evidence of limited use of Theory of Mind in communication. Here we propose a probabilistic model of common ground in referential communication that derives three inferences from an utterance: what the speaker is talking about in a visual context, what she knows about the context, and what referential expressions she prefers. We tested our model by comparing its inferences with those made by human participants and found that it closely mirrors their judgments, whereas an alternative model compromising the hearer’s expectations of cooperativeness and efficiency reveals a worse fit to the human data. Rather than assuming that common ground is fixed in a given exchange and may or may not constrain reference resolution, we show how common ground can be inferred as part of the process of reference assignment.
  • Rubio-Fernández, P., Breheny, R., & Lee, M. W. (2003). Context-independent information in concepts: An investigation of the notion of ‘core features’. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2003). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
  • De Ruiter, J. P. (1998). Gesture and speech production. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen. doi:10.17617/2.2057686.
  • Saleh, A., Beck, T., Galke, L., & Scherp, A. (2018). Performance comparison of ad-hoc retrieval models over full-text vs. titles of documents. In M. Dobreva, A. Hinze, & M. Žumer (Eds.), Maturity and Innovation in Digital Libraries: 20th International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries, ICADL 2018, Hamilton, New Zealand, November 19-22, 2018, Proceedings (pp. 290-303). Cham, Switzerland: Springer.

    Abstract

    While there are many studies on information retrieval models using full-text, there are presently no comparison studies of full-text retrieval vs. retrieval only over the titles of documents. On the one hand, the full-text of documents like scientific papers is not always available due to, e.g., copyright policies of academic publishers. On the other hand, conducting a search based on titles alone has strong limitations. Titles are short and therefore may not contain enough information to yield satisfactory search results. In this paper, we compare different retrieval models regarding their search performance on the full-text vs. only titles of documents. We use different datasets, including the three digital library datasets: EconBiz, IREON, and PubMed. The results show that it is possible to build effective title-based retrieval models that provide competitive results comparable to full-text retrieval. The difference between the average evaluation results of the best title-based retrieval models is only 3% less than those of the best full-text-based retrieval models.
  • Scharenborg, O., & Merkx, D. (2018). The role of articulatory feature representation quality in a computational model of human spoken-word recognition. In Proceedings of the Machine Learning in Speech and Language Processing Workshop (MLSLP 2018).

    Abstract

    Fine-Tracker is a speech-based model of human speech
    recognition. While previous work has shown that Fine-Tracker
    is successful at modelling aspects of human spoken-word
    recognition, its speech recognition performance is not
    comparable to that of human performance, possibly due to
    suboptimal intermediate articulatory feature (AF)
    representations. This study investigates the effect of improved
    AF representations, obtained using a state-of-the-art deep
    convolutional network, on Fine-Tracker’s simulation and
    recognition performance: Although the improved AF quality
    resulted in improved speech recognition; it, surprisingly, did
    not lead to an improvement in Fine-Tracker’s simulation power.
  • Scharenborg, O., McQueen, J. M., Ten Bosch, L., & Norris, D. (2003). Modelling human speech recognition using automatic speech recognition paradigms in SpeM. In Proceedings of Eurospeech 2003 (pp. 2097-2100). Adelaide: Causal Productions.

    Abstract

    We have recently developed a new model of human speech recognition, based on automatic speech recognition techniques [1]. The present paper has two goals. First, we show that the new model performs well in the recognition of lexically ambiguous input. These demonstrations suggest that the model is able to operate in the same optimal way as human listeners. Second, we discuss how to relate the behaviour of a recogniser, designed to discover the optimum path through a word lattice, to data from human listening experiments. We argue that this requires a metric that combines both path-based and word-based measures of recognition performance. The combined metric varies continuously as the input speech signal unfolds over time.
  • Scharenborg, O., ten Bosch, L., & Boves, L. (2003). Recognising 'real-life' speech with SpeM: A speech-based computational model of human speech recognition. In Eurospeech 2003 (pp. 2285-2288).

    Abstract

    In this paper, we present a novel computational model of human speech recognition – called SpeM – based on the theory underlying Shortlist. We will show that SpeM, in combination with an automatic phone recogniser (APR), is able to simulate the human speech recognition process from the acoustic signal to the ultimate recognition of words. This joint model takes an acoustic speech file as input and calculates the activation flows of candidate words on the basis of the degree of fit of the candidate words with the input. Experiments showed that SpeM outperforms Shortlist on the recognition of ‘real-life’ input. Furthermore, SpeM performs only slightly worse than an off-the-shelf full-blown automatic speech recogniser in which all words are equally probable, while it provides a transparent computationally elegant paradigm for modelling word activations in human word recognition.
  • Schiller, N. O. (1997). The role of the syllable in speech production: Evidence from lexical statistics, metalinguistics, masked priming, and electromagnetic midsagittal articulography. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen. doi:10.17617/2.2057707.
  • Schiller, N. O. (2003). Metrical stress in speech production: A time course study. In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2003) (pp. 451-454). Adelaide: Causal Productions.

    Abstract

    This study investigated the encoding of metrical information during speech production in Dutch. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to judge whether bisyllabic picture names had initial or final stress. Results showed significantly faster decision times for initially stressed targets (e.g., LEpel 'spoon') than for targets with final stress (e.g., liBEL 'dragon fly'; capital letters indicate stressed syllables) and revealed that the monitoring latencies are not a function of the picture naming or object recognition latencies to the same pictures. Experiments 2 and 3 replicated the outcome of the first experiment with bi- and trisyllabic picture names. These results demonstrate that metrical information of words is encoded rightward incrementally during phonological encoding in speech production. The results of these experiments are in line with Levelt's model of phonological encoding.
  • Schiller, N. O., Van Lieshout, P. H. H. M., Meyer, A. S., & Levelt, W. J. M. (1997). Is the syllable an articulatory unit in speech production? Evidence from an Emma study. In P. Wille (Ed.), Fortschritte der Akustik: Plenarvorträge und Fachbeiträge der 23. Deutschen Jahrestagung für Akustik (DAGA 97) (pp. 605-606). Oldenburg: DEGA.
  • Schmitt, B. M. (1997). Lexical access in the production of ellipsis and pronouns. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen. doi:10.17617/2.2057702.
  • Scott, D. R., & Cutler, A. (1982). Segmental cues to syntactic structure. In Proceedings of the Institute of Acoustics 'Spectral Analysis and its Use in Underwater Acoustics' (pp. E3.1-E3.4). London: Institute of Acoustics.
  • Seidl, A., & Johnson, E. K. (2003). Position and vowel quality effects in infant's segmentation of vowel-initial words. In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2003) (pp. 2233-2236). Adelaide: Causal Productions.
  • Senft, G. (1991). Bakavilisi Biga - we can 'turn' the language - or: What happens to English words in Kilivila language? In W. Bahner, J. Schildt, & D. Viehwegger (Eds.), Proceedings of the XIVth International Congress of Linguists (pp. 1743-1746). Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1991). Notes on noun phrases and quantification. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Current Issues in Computational Linguistics (pp. 19-44). Penang, Malaysia: Universiti Sains Malaysia.
  • 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. (1991). What makes a text untranslatable? In H. M. N. Noor Ein, & H. S. Atiah (Eds.), Pragmatik Penterjemahan: Prinsip, Amalan dan Penilaian Menuju ke Abad 21 ("The Pragmatics of Translation: Principles, Practice and Evaluation Moving towards the 21st Century") (pp. 19-27). Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1980). Variabele competentie: Linguïstiek en sociolinguïstiek anno 1980. In Handelingen van het 36e Nederlands Filologencongres: Gehouden te Groningen op woensdag 9, donderdag 10 en vrijdag 11 April 1980 (pp. 41-56). Amsterdam: Holland University Press.
  • Shi, R., Werker, J., & Cutler, A. (2003). Function words in early speech perception. In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 3009-3012).

    Abstract

    Three experiments examined whether infants recognise functors in phrases, and whether their representations of functors are phonetically well specified. Eight- and 13- month-old English infants heard monosyllabic lexical words preceded by real functors (e.g., the, his) versus nonsense functors (e.g., kuh); the latter were minimally modified segmentally (but not prosodically) from real functors. Lexical words were constant across conditions; thus recognition of functors would appear as longer listening time to sequences with real functors. Eightmonth- olds' listening times to sequences with real versus nonsense functors did not significantly differ, suggesting that they did not recognise real functors, or functor representations lacked phonetic specification. However, 13-month-olds listened significantly longer to sequences with real functors. Thus, somewhere between 8 and 13 months of age infants learn familiar functors and represent them with segmental detail. We propose that accumulated frequency of functors in input in general passes a critical threshold during this time.
  • Shitova, N. (2018). Electrophysiology of competition and adjustment in word and phrase production. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Sikora, K. (2018). Executive control in language production by adults and children with and without language impairment. PhD Thesis, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

    Abstract

    The present study examined how the updating, inhibiting, and shifting abilities underlying executive control influence spoken noun-phrase production. Previous studies provided evidence that updating and inhibiting, but not shifting, influence picture naming response time (RT). However, little is known about the role of executive control in more complex forms of language production like generating phrases. We assessed noun-phrase production using picture description and a picture-word interference procedure. We measured picture description RT to assess length, distractor, and switch effects, which were assumed to reflect, respectively, the updating, inhibiting, and shifting abilities of adult participants. Moreover, for each participant we obtained scores on executive control tasks that measured verbal and nonverbal updating, nonverbal inhibiting, and nonverbal shifting. We found that both verbal and nonverbal updating scores correlated with the overall mean picture description RTs. Furthermore, the length effect in the RTs correlated with verbal but not nonverbal updating scores, while the distractor effect correlated with inhibiting scores. We did not find a correlation between the switch effect in the mean RTs and the shifting scores. However, the shifting scores correlated with the switch effect in the normal part of the underlying RT distribution. These results suggest that updating, inhibiting, and shifting each influence the speed of phrase production, thereby demonstrating a contribution of all three executive control abilities to language production.

    Additional information

    full text via Radboud Repository
  • 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.

    Additional information

    link to conference website
  • Sprenger, S. A. (2003). Fixed expressions and the production of idioms. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen. doi:10.17617/2.57562.
  • Stoehr, A. (2018). Speech production, perception, and input of simultaneous bilingual preschoolers: Evidence from voice onset time. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • 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., & 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.
  • 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
  • Tromp, J. (2018). Indirect request comprehension in different contexts. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • 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 Turennout, M. (1997). The electrophysiology of speaking: Investigations on the time course of semantic, syntactic, and phonological processing. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen. doi:10.17617/2.2057711.
  • Van Ooijen, B., Cutler, A., & Norris, D. (1991). Detection times for vowels versus consonants. In Eurospeech 91: Vol. 3 (pp. 1451-1454). Genova: Istituto Internazionale delle Comunicazioni.

    Abstract

    This paper reports two experiments with vowels and consonants as phoneme detection targets in real words. In the first experiment, two relatively distinct vowels were compared with two confusible stop consonants. Response times to the vowels were longer than to the consonants. Response times correlated negatively with target phoneme length. In the second, two relatively distinct vowels were compared with their corresponding semivowels. This time, the vowels were detected faster than the semivowels. We conclude that response time differences between vowels and stop consonants in this task may reflect differences between phoneme categories in the variability of tokens, both in the acoustic realisation of targets and in the' representation of targets by subjects.
  • Van de Weijer, J. (1997). Language input to a prelingual infant. In A. Sorace, C. Heycock, & R. Shillcock (Eds.), Proceedings of the GALA '97 conference on language acquisition (pp. 290-293). Edinburgh University Press.

    Abstract

    Pitch, intonation, and speech rate were analyzed in a collection of everyday speech heard by one Dutch infant between the ages of six and nine months. Components of each of these variables were measured in the speech of three adult speakers (mother, father, baby-sitter) when they addressed the infant, and when they addressed another adult. The results are in line with previously reported findings which are usually based on laboratory or prearranged settings: infant-directed speech in a natural setting exhibits more pitch variation, a larger number of simple intonation contours, and slower speech rate than does adult-directed speech.
  • Van Heuven, V. J., Haan, J., Janse, E., & Van der Torre, E. J. (1997). Perceptual identification of sentence type and the time-distribution of prosodic interrogativity markers in Dutch. In Proceedings of the ESCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Intonation: Theory, Models and Applications, Athens, Greece, 1997 (pp. 317-320).

    Abstract

    Dutch distinguishes at least four sentence types: statements and questions, the latter type being subdivided into wh-questions (beginning with a question word), yes/no-questions (with inversion of subject and finite), and declarative questions (lexico-syntactically identical to statement). Acoustically, each of these (sub)types was found to have clearly distinct global F0-patterns, as well as a characteristic distribution of final rises [1,2]. The present paper explores the separate contribution of parameters of global downtrend and size of accent-lending pitch movements versus aspects of the terminal rise to the human identification of the four sentence (sub)types, at various positions in the time-course of the utterance. The results show that interrogativity in Dutch can be identified at an early point in the utterance. However, wh-questions are not distinct from statements.
  • 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.
  • Vosse, T., & Kempen, G. (1991). A hybrid model of human sentence processing: Parsing right-branching, center-embedded and cross-serial dependencies. In M. Tomita (Ed.), Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Parsing Technologies.
  • Wagner, A., & Braun, A. (2003). Is voice quality language-dependent? Acoustic analyses based on speakers of three different languages. In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2003) (pp. 651-654). Adelaide: Causal Productions.
  • Weber, A., & Smits, R. (2003). Consonant and vowel confusion patterns by American English listeners. In M. J. Solé, D. Recasens, & J. Romero (Eds.), Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences.

    Abstract

    This study investigated the perception of American English phonemes by native listeners. Listeners identified either the consonant or the vowel in all possible English CV and VC syllables. The syllables were embedded in multispeaker babble at three signal-to-noise ratios (0 dB, 8 dB, and 16 dB). Effects of syllable position, signal-to-noise ratio, and articulatory features on vowel and consonant identification are discussed. The results constitute the largest source of data that is currently available on phoneme confusion patterns of American English phonemes by native listeners.
  • Weber, A., & Smits, R. (2003). Consonant and vowel confusion patterns by American English listeners. In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2003) (pp. 1437-1440). Adelaide: Causal Productions.

    Abstract

    This study investigated the perception of American English phonemes by native listeners. Listeners identified either the consonant or the vowel in all possible English CV and VC syllables. The syllables were embedded in multispeaker babble at three signalto-noise ratios (0 dB, 8 dB, and 16 dB). Effects of syllable position, signal-to-noise ratio, and articulatory features on vowel and consonant identification are discussed. The results constitute the largest source of data that is currently available on phoneme confusion patterns of American English phonemes by native listeners.
  • 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.
  • Zwitserlood, I. (2003). Classifying hand configurations in Nederlandse Gebarentaal (Sign Language of the Netherlands). PhD Thesis, LOT, Utrecht. Retrieved from http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/dissertations/2003-0717-122837/UUindex.html.

    Abstract

    This study investigates the morphological and morphosyntactic characteristics of hand configurations in signs, particularly in Nederlandse Gebarentaal (NGT). The literature on sign languages in general acknowledges that hand configurations can function as morphemes, more specifically as classifiers , in a subset of signs: verbs expressing the motion, location, and existence of referents (VELMs). These verbs are considered the output of productive sign formation processes. In contrast, other signs in which similar hand configurations appear ( iconic or motivated signs) have been considered to be lexicalized signs, not involving productive processes. This research report shows that meaningful hand configurations have (at least) two very different functions in the grammar of NGT (and presumably in other sign languages, too). First, they are agreement markers on VELMs, and hence are functional elements. Second, they are roots in motivated signs, and thus lexical elements. The latter signs are analysed as root compounds and are formed from various roots by productive processes. The similarities in surface form and differences in morphosyntactic characteristics observed in comparison of VELMs and root compounds are attributed to their different structures and to the sign language interface between grammar and phonetic form

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