Publications

Abstract

This corpus-based study shows that the presence and duration of schwa in Dutch word-initial syllables are affected by a word’s predictability and its morphological structure. Schwa is less reduced in words that are more predictable given the following word. In addition, schwa may be longer if the syllable forms a prefix, and in prefixes the duration of schwa is positively correlated with the frequency of the word relative to its stem. Our results suggest that the conditions which favor reduced realizations are more complex than one would expect on the basis of the current literature.

Abstract

Non-native (L2) speakers of English often experience difficulties in producing English interdental fricatives (e.g. the voiceless [θ]), and this leads to frequent substitutions of these fricatives (e.g. with [t], [s], and [f]). Differences in the choice of [θ]-substitutions across L2 speakers with different native (L1) language backgrounds have been extensively explored. However, even within one foreign accent, more than one substitution choice occurs, but this has been less systematically studied. Furthermore, little is known about whether the substitutions of voiceless [θ] are phonetically clear instances of [t], [s], and [f], as they are often labelled. In this study, we attempted a phonetic approach to examine language-specific preferences for [θ]-substitutions by carrying out acoustic measurements of L1 and L2 realizations of these sounds. To this end, we collected a corpus of spoken English with L1 speakers (UK-English), and Dutch and German L2 speakers. We show a) that the distribution of differential substitutions using identical materials differs between Dutch and German L2 speakers, b) that [t,s,f]-substitutes differ acoustically from intended [t,s,f], and c) that L2 productions of [θ] are acoustically comparable to L1 productions.

Abstract

Prediction in language has traditionally been studied using
simple designs in which neural responses to expected
and unexpected words are compared in a categorical
fashion. However, these designs have been contested
as being ‘prediction encouraging’, potentially exaggerating
the importance of prediction in language understanding.
A few recent studies have begun to address
these worries by using model-based approaches to probe
the effects of linguistic predictability in naturalistic stimuli
(e.g. continuous narrative). However, these studies
so far only looked at very local forms of prediction, using
models that take no more than the prior two words into
account when computing a word’s predictability. Here,
we extend this approach using a state-of-the-art neural
language model that can take roughly 500 times longer
linguistic contexts into account. Predictability estimates
fromthe neural network offer amuch better fit to EEG data
from subjects listening to naturalistic narrative than simpler
models, and reveal strong surprise responses akin to
the P200 and N400. These results show that predictability
effects in language are not a side-effect of simple designs,
and demonstrate the practical use of recent advances
in AI for the cognitive neuroscience of language.

Abstract

This special publication aims to build a renewed enthusiasm for collecting acquisition data across many languages, including those facing endangerment and loss. It presents a guide for documenting and describing child language and child-directed language in diverse languages and cultures, as well as a collection of acquisition sketches based on this guide. The guide is intended for anyone interested in working across child language and language documentation, including, for example, field linguists and language documenters, community language workers, child language researchers or graduate students.

Abstract

Most bioacoustics software is used to analyse the already collected acoustics data in batch, i.e., after the data-collecting phase of a scientific study. However, experiments based on animal training require immediate and precise reactions from the experimenter, and thus do not easily dovetail with a typical bioacoustics workflow. Bridging this methodological gap, we have developed a custom application to live-monitor the vocal development of harbour seals in a behavioural experiment. In each trial, the application records and automatically detects an animal's call, and immediately measures duration and acoustic measures such as intensity, fundamental frequency, or formant frequencies. It then displays a spectrogram of the recording and the acoustic measurements, allowing the experimenter to instantly evaluate whether or not to reinforce the animal's vocalisation. From a technical perspective, the rapid and easy development of this custom software was made possible by combining multiple open-source software projects. Here, we integrated the acoustic analyses from Parselmouth, a Python library for Praat, together with PyAudio and Matplotlib's recording and plotting functionality, into a custom graphical user interface created with PyQt. This flexible recombination of different open-source Python libraries allows the whole program to be written in a mere couple of hundred lines of code

Abstract

Speakers express word meaning through systematic but non-canonical acoustic variation of tone of voice (ToV), i.e., variation of speaking rate, pitch, vocal effort, or loudness. Words are, for example, pronounced at a higher pitch when referring to small than to big referents. In the present study, we examined whether listeners can use ToV to learn the meaning of novel adjectives (e.g., “blicket”). During training, participants heard sentences such as “Can you find the blicket one?” spoken with ToV representing hot-cold, strong-weak, and big-small. Participants’ eye movements to two simultaneously shown objects with properties representing the relevant two endpoints (e.g., an elephant and an ant for big-small) were monitored. Assignment of novel adjectives to endpoints was counterbalanced across participants. During test, participants heard the sentences spoken with a neutral ToV, while seeing old or novel picture pairs varying along the same dimensions (e.g., a truck and a car for big-small). Participants had to click on the adjective’s referent. As evident from eye movements, participants did not infer the intended meaning during first exposure, but learned the meaning with the help of ToV during training. At test listeners applied this knowledge to old and novel items even in the absence of informative ToV.

Abstract

Mutations of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) gene are found at a relatively high frequency in glioma, with the most common being the de2-7 EGFR (or EGFRvIII). This mutation arises from an in-frame deletion of exons 2-7, which removes 267 amino acids from the extracellular domain of the receptor. Despite being unable to bind ligand, the de2-7 EGFR is constitutively active at a low level. Transfection of human glioma cells with the de2-7 EGFR has little effect in vitro, but when grown as tumor xenografts this mutated receptor imparts a dramatic growth advantage. We mapped the phosphorylation pattern of de2-7 EGFR, both in vivo and in vitro, using a panel of antibodies specific for different phosphorylated tyrosine residues. Phosphorylation of de2-7 EGFR was detected constitutively at all tyrosine sites surveyed in vitro and in vivo, including tyrosine 845, a known target in the wild-type EGFR for src kinase. There was a substantial upregulation of phosphorylation at every yrosine residue of the de2-7 EGFR when cells were grown in vivo compared to the receptor isolated from cells cultured in vitro. Upregulation of phosphorylation at tyrosine 845 could be stimulated in vitro by the addition of specific components of the ECM via an integrindependent mechanism. These observations may partially explain why the growth enhancement mediated by de2-7 EGFR is largely restricted to the in vivo environment

Abstract

This study investigates effects of prosodic factors (prominence, boundary) on coarticulatory Vnasalization in Australian English (AusE) in CVN and NVC in comparison to those in American English
(AmE). As in AmE, prominence was found to
lengthen N, but to reduce V-nasalization, enhancing N’s nasality and V’s orality, respectively (paradigmatic contrast enhancement). But the prominence effect in CVN was more robust than that in AmE. Again similar to findings in AmE, boundary
induced a reduction of N-duration and V-nasalization phrase-initially (syntagmatic contrast enhancement), and increased the nasality of both C and V phrasefinally.
But AusE showed some differences in terms
of the magnitude of V nasalization and N duration. The results suggest that the linguistic contrast enhancements underlie prosodic-structure modulation of coarticulatory V-nasalization in
comparable ways across dialects, while the fine phonetic detail indicates that the phonetics-prosody interplay is internalized in the individual dialect’s phonetic grammar.

Abstract

Sign language is a rich form of communication, uniquely conveying meaning through a combination of gestures, facial expressions, and body movements. Existing research in sign language generation has predominantly focused on text-to-sign pose generation, while speech-to-sign pose generation remains relatively underexplored. Speech-to-sign language generation models can facilitate effective communication between the deaf and hearing communities. In this paper, we propose an architecture that utilises prosodic information from speech audio and semantic context from text to generate sign pose sequences. In our approach, we adopt a multi-tasking strategy that involves an additional task of predicting Facial Action Units (FAUs). FAUs capture the intricate facial muscle movements that play a crucial role in conveying specific facial expressions during sign language generation. We train our models on an existing Indian Sign language dataset that contains sign language videos with audio and text translations. To evaluate our models, we report Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and Probability of Correct Keypoints (PCK) scores. We find that combining prosody and text as input, along with incorporating facial action unit prediction as an additional task, outperforms previous models in both DTW and PCK scores. We also discuss the challenges and limitations of speech-to-sign pose generation models to encourage future research in this domain. We release our models, results and code to foster reproducibility and encourage future research1.

Abstract

Human speakers often produce sentences incrementally. They can start speaking having in mind only a fragmentary idea of what they want to say, and while saying this they refine the contents underlying subsequent parts of the utterance. This capability imposes a number of constraints on the design of a syntactic processor. This paper explores these constraints and evaluates some recent computational sentence generators from the perspective of incremental production.

Abstract

This dissertation investigates two seemingly contradictory properties of the speech perception system. On the one hand, listeners are extremely sensitive to the fine phonetic details in the speech signal. These subtle acoustic cues can reduce the temporal ambiguity between words that show initial segmental overlap, and can guide lexical activation. On the other hand, comprehension does not seem to be hampered at all by the drastic reductions that typically occur in casual speech. Complete segments, and sometimes even complete syllables, may be missing, but comprehension is seemingly unaffected. This thesis aims at elucidating how words are represented and accessed in the mental lexicon, by investigating these contradictory phenomena for the domain of morphology

Abstract

We present a software module, the LAT Bridge, which enables bidirectionalcommunication between the annotation and exploration tools developed at the MaxPlanck Institute for Psycholinguistics as part of our Language ArchivingTechnology (LAT) tool suite. These existing annotation and exploration toolsenable the annotation, enrichment, exploration and archive management oflinguistic resources. The user community has expressed the desire to usedifferent combinations of LAT tools in conjunction with each other. The LATBridge is designed to cater for a number of basic data interaction scenariosbetween the LAT annotation and exploration tools. These interaction scenarios(e.g. bootstrapping a wordlist, searching for annotation examples or lexicalentries) have been identified in collaboration with researchers at ourinstitute.We had to take into account that the LAT tools for annotation and explorationrepresent a heterogeneous application scenario with desktop-installed andweb-based tools. Additionally, the LAT Bridge has to work in situations wherethe Internet is not available or only in an unreliable manner (i.e. with a slowconnection or with frequent interruptions). As a result, the LAT Bridge’sarchitecture supports both online and offline communication between the LATannotation and exploration tools.

Abstract

Many theories hold that semantic variation in the world’s languages can be explained in terms of a universal conceptual space that is partitioned differently by different languages. Recent work has supported this view in the semantic domain of containers (Malt et al., 1999), and assumed it in the domain of spatial relations (Khetarpal et al., 2009), based in both cases on similarity judgments derived from pile-sorting of stimuli. Here, we reanalyze data from these two studies and find a more complex picture than these earlier studies suggested. In both cases we find that sorting is similar across speakers of different languages (in line with the earlier studies), but nonetheless reflects the sorter’s native language (in contrast with the earlier studies). We conclude that there are cross-culturally shared conceptual tendencies that can be revealed by pile-sorting, but that these tendencies may be modulated to some extent by language. We discuss the implications of these findings for accounts of semantic variation.

Abstract

The previous literature has suggested that the hand movement in co-speech gestures and signs consists of a series of phases with qualitatively different dynamic characteristics. In this paper, we propose a syntagmatic rule system for movement phases that applies to both co-speech gestures and signs. Descriptive criteria for the rule system were developed for the analysis video-recorded continuous production of signs and gesture. It involves segmenting a stream of body movement into phases and identifying different phase types. Two human coders used the criteria to analyze signs and cospeech gestures that are produced in natural discourse. It was found that the criteria yielded good inter-coder reliability. These criteria can be used for the technology of automatic recognition of signs and co-speech gestures in order to segment continuous production and identify the potentially meaningbearing phase.

Abstract

Previous studies on Cantonese Chinese showed that rising
question intonation contours on low-toned words lead to
frequent misperceptions of the tones. Here we explored the
processing consequences of this interaction between tone and
intonation by comparing the processing and identification of
monosyllabic critical words at the end of questions and
statements, using a tone identification task, and ERPs as an
online measure of speech comprehension. Experiment 1
yielded higher error rates for the identification of low tones at
the end of questions and a larger N400-P600 pattern, reflecting
processing difficulty and reanalysis, compared to other
conditions. In Experiment 2, we investigated the effect of
immediate lexical context on the tone by intonation interaction.
Increasing contextual constraints led to a reduction in errors
and the disappearance of the P600 effect. These results
indicate that there is an immediate interaction between tone,
intonation, and context in online speech comprehension. The
difference in performance and activation patterns between the
two experiments highlights the significance of context in
understanding a tone language, like Cantonese-Chinese.

Abstract

Interpreting the meaning of co-speech gesture often involves
identifying a gesture’s ‘lexical affiliate’, the word or phrase to
which it most closely relates (Schegloff 1984). Though there is
work within gesture studies that resists this simplex mapping of
meaning from speech to gesture (e.g. de Ruiter 2000; Kendon
2014; Parrill 2008), including an evolving body of literature on
recurrent gesture and gesture families (e.g. Fricke et al. 2014; Müller 2017), it is still the lexical affiliate model that is most ap-
parent in formal linguistic models of multimodal meaning(e.g.
Alahverdzhieva et al. 2017; Lascarides and Stone 2009; Puste-
jovsky and Krishnaswamy 2021; Schlenker 2020). In this work,
I argue that the lexical affiliate should be carefully reconsidered
in the further development of such models.
In place of the lexical affiliate, I suggest a further shift
toward a frame-based, action schematic approach to gestural
meaning in line with that proposed in, for example, Parrill and
Sweetser (2004) and Müller (2017). To demonstrate the utility
of this approach I present three types of compositional gesture
sequences which I call spatial contrast, spatial embedding, and
cooperative abstract deixis. All three rely on gestural context,
rather than gesture-speech alignment, to convey interactive (i.e.
pragmatic) meaning. The centrality of gestural context to ges-
ture meaning in these examples demonstrates the necessity of
developing a model of gestural meaning independent of its in-
tegration with speech.

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

Verb learning is important for young children. While most
previous research has focused on linguistic and conceptual
challenges in early verb learning (e.g. Gentner, 1982, 2006),
the present paper examined early verb learning at the
attentional level and quantified the input for early verb learning
by measuring verb-action co-occurrence statistics in parent-
child interaction from the learner’s perspective. To do so, we
used head-mounted eye tracking to record fine-grained
multimodal behaviors during parent-infant joint play, and
analyzed parent speech, parent and infant action, and infant
attention at the moments when parents produced verb labels.
Our results show great variability across different action verbs,
in terms of frequency of verb utterances, frequency of
corresponding actions related to verb meanings, and infants’
attention to verbs and actions, which provide new insights on
why some verbs are harder to learn than others.

Abstract

Continuous Bag of Words (CBOW) is a powerful text embedding method. Due to its strong capabilities to encode word content, CBOW embeddings perform well on a wide range of downstream tasks while being efficient to compute. However, CBOW is not capable of capturing the word order. The reason is that the computation of CBOW's word embeddings is commutative, i.e., embeddings of XYZ and ZYX are the same. In order to address this shortcoming, we propose a
learning algorithm for the Continuous Matrix Space Model, which we call Continual Multiplication of Words (CMOW). Our algorithm is an adaptation of word2vec, so that it can be trained on large quantities of unlabeled text. We empirically show that CMOW better captures linguistic properties, but it is inferior to CBOW in memorizing word content. Motivated by these findings, we propose a hybrid model that combines the strengths of CBOW and CMOW. Our results show that the hybrid CBOW-CMOW-model retains CBOW's strong ability to memorize word content while at the same time substantially improving its ability to encode other linguistic information by 8%. As a result, the hybrid also performs better on 8 out of 11 supervised downstream tasks with an average improvement of 1.2%.

Abstract

The human body is unique: it is both an object of perception and the source of human experience. Its universality makes it a perfect resource for asking questions about how cognition, brain and typology relate to one another. For example, we can ask how speakers of different languages segment and categorize the human body. A dominant view is that body parts are “given” by visual perceptual discontinuities, and that words are merely labels for these visually determined parts (e.g., Andersen, 1978; Brown, 1976; Lakoff, 1987). However, there are problems with this view. First it ignores other perceptual information, such as somatosensory and motoric representations. By looking at the neural representations of sesnsory representations, we can test how much of the categorization of the human body can be done through perception alone. Second, we can look at language typology to see how much universality and variation there is in body-part categories. A comparison of a range of typologically, genetically and areally diverse languages shows that the perceptual view has only limited applicability (Majid, Enfield & van Staden, in press). For example, using a “coloring-in” task, where speakers of seven different languages were given a line drawing of a human body and asked to color in various body parts, Majid & van Staden (in prep) show that languages vary substantially in body part segmentation. For example, Jahai (Mon-Khmer) makes a lexical distinction between upper arm, lower arm, and hand, but Lavukaleve (Papuan Isolate) has just one word to refer to arm, hand, and leg. This shows that body part categorization is not a straightforward mapping of words to visually determined perceptual parts.

Abstract

Many studies in cognitive science address how people categorize objects, but there has been comparatively little research on event categorization. This study investigated the categorization of events involving material destruction, such as “cutting” and “breaking”. Speakers of 28 typologically, genetically, and areally diverse languages described events shown in a set of video-clips. There was considerable cross-linguistic agreement in the dimensions along which the events were distinguished, but there was variation in the number of categories and the placement of their boundaries.

Abstract

Studies have claimed that blind people’s spatial representations are different from sighted people, and blind people display superior auditory processing. Due to the nature of auditory and haptic information, it has been proposed that blind people have spatial representations that are more sequential than sighted people. Even the temporary loss of sight—such as through blindfolding—can affect spatial representations, but not much research has been done on this topic. We compared blindfolded and sighted people’s linguistic spatial expressions and non-linguistic localization accuracy to test how blindfolding affects the representation of path in auditory motion events. We found that blindfolded people were as good as sighted people when localizing simple sounds, but they outperformed sighted people when localizing auditory motion events. Blindfolded people’s path related speech also included more sequential, and less holistic elements. Our results indicate that even temporary loss of sight influences spatial representations of auditory motion events

Abstract

Lombard speech, speech produced in noise, is acoustically different from speech produced in quiet (plain speech) in several ways, including having a higher and wider F0 range (pitch). Extensive research on native Lombard speech does not consider that non-natives experience a higher cognitive load while producing
speech and that the native language may influence the non-native speech. We investigated pitch range in plain and Lombard speech in native and non-natives.
Dutch and American-English speakers read contrastive question-answer pairs in quiet and in noise in English, while the Dutch also read Dutch sentence pairs. We found that Lombard speech is characterized by a wider pitch range than plain speech, for all speakers (native English, non-native English, and native Dutch).
This shows that non-natives also widen their pitch range in Lombard speech. In sentences with early-focus, we see the same increase in pitch range when going from plain to Lombard speech in native and non-native English, but a smaller increase in native Dutch. In sentences with late-focus, we see the biggest increase for the native English, followed by non-native English and then native Dutch. Together these results indicate an effect of the native language on non-native Lombard speech.

Abstract

Lombard speech, speech produced in noise, is
typically produced with a higher fundamental
frequency (F0, pitch) compared to speech in quiet. This paper examined the potential differences in native and non-native Lombard speech by analyzing median pitch in sentences with early- or late-focus produced in quiet and noise. We found an increase in pitch in late-focus sentences in noise for Dutch speakers in both English and Dutch, and for American-English speakers in English. These results
show that non-native speakers produce Lombard speech, despite their higher cognitive load. For the early-focus sentences, we found a difference between the Dutch and the American-English speakers. Whereas the Dutch showed an increased F0 in noise
in English and Dutch, the American-English speakers did not in English. Together, these results suggest that some acoustic characteristics of Lombard speech, such as pitch, may be language-specific, potentially
resulting in the native language influencing the non-native Lombard speech.

Abstract

Grice in pragmatics and Levelt in psycholinguistics have proposed models of human communication where the starting point of communicative action is an individual intention. This assumption, though, has to face serious objections with regard to the alleged existence of explicit representations of the communicative goals to be pursued. Here evidence is surveyed which shows that in fact speaking may ordinarily be a quite automatic activity prompted by contextual cues and driven by behavioural schemata abstracted away from social regularities. On the one hand, this means that there could exist no intentions in the sense of explicit representations of communicative goals, following from deliberate reasoning and triggering the communicative action. On the other hand, however, there are reasons to allow for a weaker notion of intention than this, according to which communication is an intentional affair, after all. Communicative action is said to be intentional in this weaker sense to the extent that it is subject to a double mechanism of control, with respect both to present-directed and future-directed intentions.

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 thesis addressed the spoken production of complex numerals for time and space. The production of complex numerical expressions like those involved in telling time (e.g., 'quarter to four') or producing house numbers (e.g., 'two hundred forty-five') has been almost completely ignored. Yet, adult speakers produce such expressions on a regular basis in everyday communication. Thus, no theory on numerical cognition or speech production is complete without an account of the production of multi-morphemic utterances such as complex numeral expressions. The main question of this thesis is which particular speech planning levels are involved in the naming and reading of complex numerals for time and space. More specifically, this issue was investigated by examining different modes of response (clock times versus house numbers), alternative input formats (Arabic digit versus alphabetic format; analog versus digital clock displays), and different expression types (relative 'quarter to four' versus absolute 'three forty-five' time expressions).

Abstract

Humans learn language by interaction with their environment and listening to other humans. It should also be possible for computational models to learn language directly from speech but so far most approaches require text. We improve on existing neural network approaches to create visually grounded embeddings for spoken utterances. Using a combination of a multi-layer GRU, importance sampling, cyclic learning rates, ensembling and vectorial self-attention our results show a remarkable increase in image-caption retrieval performance over previous work. Furthermore, we investigate which layers in the model learn to recognise words in the input. We find that deeper network layers are better at encoding word presence, although the final layer has slightly lower performance. This shows that our visually grounded sentence encoder learns to recognise words from the input even though it is not explicitly trained for word recognition.

Abstract

The anterior lordosis of the cervical spine is thought
to contribute to pitch (fo) production by influencing
cricoid rotation as a function of larynx height. This
study examines the matter of inter-individual
variation in cervical spine shape and whether this has
an influence on how fo is produced along increasing
or decreasing scales, using the ArtiVarK dataset,
which contains real-time MRI pitch production data.
We find that the cervical spine actively participates in
fo production, but the amount of displacement
depends on individual shape. In general, anterior
spine motion (tending toward cervical lordosis)
occurs for low fo, while posterior movement (tending
towards cervical kyphosis) occurs for high fo.

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

In order to study the cognitive processes underlying speech comprehension, neuro-physiological measures (e.g., EEG and MEG), or behavioural measures (e.g., reaction times and response accuracy) can be applied. Compared to behavioural measures, EEG signals can provide a more fine-grained and complementary view of the processes that take place during the unfolding of an auditory stimulus.

EEG signals are often analysed after having chosen specific time windows, which are usually based on the temporal structure of ERP components expected to be sensitive to the experimental manipulation. However, as the timing of ERP components may vary between experiments, trials, and participants, such a-priori defined analysis time windows may significantly hamper the exploratory power of the analysis of components of interest. In this paper, we explore a wide-window analysis method applied to EEG signals collected in an auditory repetition priming experiment.

This approach is based on a bank of temporal filters arranged along the time axis in combination with linear mixed effects modelling. Crucially, it permits a temporal decomposition of effects in a single comprehensive statistical model which captures the entire EEG trace.

Abstract

Typologies are critical tools for linguists, but typologies, like grammars, are known to leak. This book addresses the question of typological overlap from the perspective of a single language. In Lowland Chontal of Oaxaca, a language of southern Mexico, change events are expressed with three types of predicates, and each predicate type corresponds to a different language type in the well-known typology of lexicalization patterns established by Talmy and elaborated by others. O’Connor evaluates the predictive powers of the typology by examining the consequences of each predicate type in a variety of contexts, using data from narrative discourse, stimulus response, and elicitation. This is the first de­tailed look at the lexical and grammatical resources of the verbal system in Chontal and their relation to semantics of change. The analysis of how and why Chontal speakers choose among these verbal resources to achieve particular communicative and social goals serves both as a documentation of an endangered language and a theoretical contribution towards a typology of language use.

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

Japanese listeners detected Japanese words embedded at the end of nonsense sequences (e.g., kaba 'hippopotamus' in gyachikaba). When the final portion of the preceding context together with the initial portion of the word (e.g., here, the sequence chika) was compatible with many lexical competitors, recognition of the embedded word was more difficult than when such a sequence was compatible with few competitors. This clear effect of competition, established here for preceding context in Japanese, joins similar demonstrations, in other languages and for following contexts, to underline that the functional architecture of the human spoken-word recognition system is a universal one.

Abstract

-* indicates shared first authorship -
The present study investigated the effects of selective attention on the processing of morphosyntactic errors in unattended parts of speech. Two groups of German native (L1) speakers participated in the present study. Participants listened to sentences in which irregular verbs were manipulated in three different conditions (correct, incorrect but attested ablaut pattern, incorrect and crosslinguistically unattested ablaut pattern). In order to track fast dynamic neural reactions to the stimuli, electroencephalography was used. After each sentence, participants in Experiment 1 performed a semantic judgement task, which deliberately distracted the participants from the syntactic manipulations and directed their attention to the semantic content of the sentence. In Experiment 2, participants carried out a syntactic judgement task, which put their attention on the critical stimuli. The use of two different attentional tasks allowed for investigating the impact of selective attention on speech processing and whether morphosyntactic processing steps are performed automatically. In Experiment 2, the incorrect attested condition elicited a larger N400 component compared to the correct condition, whereas in Experiment 1 no differences between conditions were found. These results suggest that the processing of morphosyntactic violations in irregular verbs is not entirely automatic but seems to be strongly affected by selective attention.

Abstract

Cognates and interlingual homographs are words that exist in multiple languages. Cognates, like “wolf” in Dutch and English, also carry the same meaning. Interlingual homographs do not: the word “angel” in English refers to a spiritual being, but in Dutch to the sting of a bee. The six experiments included in this thesis examined how these words are represented in the bilingual mental lexicon. Experiment 1 and 2 investigated the issue of task effects on the processing of cognates. Bilinguals often process cognates more quickly than single-language control words (like “carrot”, which exists in English but not Dutch). These experiments showed that the size of this cognate facilitation effect depends on the other types of stimuli included in the task. These task effects were most likely due to response competition, indicating that cognates are subject to processes of facilitation and inhibition both within the lexicon and at the level of decision making. Experiment 3 and 4 examined whether seeing a cognate or interlingual homograph in one’s native language affects subsequent processing in one’s second language. This method was used to determine whether non-identical cognates share a form representation. These experiments were inconclusive: they revealed no effect of cross-lingual long-term priming. Most likely this was because a lexical decision task was used to probe an effect that is largely semantic in nature. Given these caveats to using lexical decision tasks, two final experiments used a semantic relatedness task instead. Both experiments revealed evidence for an interlingual homograph inhibition effect but no cognate facilitation effect. Furthermore, the second experiment found evidence for a small effect of cross-lingual long-term priming. After comparing these findings to the monolingual literature on semantic ambiguity resolution, this thesis concludes that it is necessary to explore the viability of a distributed connectionist account of the bilingual mental lexicon.

Abstract

Spontaneously occurring speech is often seamlessly accompanied by hand gestures. Detailed
observations of video data suggest that speech and gesture are tightly synchronized in time,
consistent with a dynamic interplay between body and mind. However, spontaneous gesturespeech
synchrony has rarely been objectively quantified beyond analyses of video data, which
do not allow for identification of kinematic properties of gestures. Consequently, the point in
gesture which is held to couple with speech, the so-called moment of “maximum effort”, has
been variably equated with the peak velocity, peak acceleration, peak deceleration, or the onset
of the gesture. In the current exploratory report, we provide novel evidence from motiontracking
and acoustic data that peak velocity is closely aligned, and shortly leads, the peak pitch
(F0) of speech

Abstract

To understand spoken words listeners have to cope with seemingly meaningless variability in the speech signal. Speakers vary, for example, their tone of voice (ToV) by changing speaking rate, pitch, vocal effort, and loudness. This variation is independent of "linguistic prosody" such as sentence intonation or speech rhythm. The variation due to ToV, however, is not random. Speakers use, for example, higher pitch when referring to small objects than when referring to large objects and importantly, adult listeners are able to use these non-lexical ToV cues to distinguish between the meanings of antonym pairs (e.g., big-small; Nygaard, Herold, & Namy, 2009). In the present study, we asked whether listeners infer the meaning of novel adjectives from ToV and subsequently interpret these adjectives according to the learned meaning even in the absence of ToV. Moreover, if listeners actually acquire these adjectival meanings, then they should generalize these word meanings to novel referents. ToV would thus be a semantic cue to lexical acquisition. This hypothesis was tested in an exposure-test paradigm with adult listeners. In the experiment listeners' eye movements to picture pairs were monitored. The picture pairs represented the endpoints of the adjectival dimensions big-small, hot-cold, and strong-weak (e.g., an elephant and an ant represented big-small). Four picture pairs per category were used. While viewing the pictures participants listened to lexically unconstraining sentences containing novel adjectives, for example, "Can you find the foppick one?" During exposure, the sentences were spoken in infant-directed speech with the intended adjectival meaning expressed by ToV. Word-meaning pairings were counterbalanced across participants. Each word was repeated eight times. Listeners had no explicit task. To guide listeners' attention to the relation between the words and pictures, three sets of filler trials were included that contained real English adjectives (e.g., full-empty). In the subsequent test phase participants heard the novel adjectives in neutral adult-directed ToV. Test sentences were recorded before the speaker was informed about intended word meanings. Participants had to choose which of two pictures on the screen the speaker referred to. Picture pairs that were presented during the exposure phase and four new picture pairs per category that varied along the critical dimensions were tested. During exposure listeners did not spontaneously direct their gaze to the intended referent at the first presentation. But as indicated by listener's fixation behavior, they quickly learned the relationship between ToV and word meaning over only two exposures. Importantly, during test participants consistently identified the intended referent object even in the absence of informative ToV. Learning was found for all three tested categories and did not depend on whether the picture pairs had been presented during exposure. Listeners thus use ToV not only to distinguish between antonym pairs but they are able to extract word meaning from ToV and assign this meaning to novel words. The newly learned word meanings can then be generalized to novel referents even in the absence of ToV cues. These findings suggest that ToV can be used as a semantic cue to lexical acquisition. References Nygaard, L. C., Herold, D. S., & Namy, L. L. (2009) The semantics of prosody: Acoustic and perceptual evidence of prosodic correlates to word meaning. Cognitive Science, 33. 127-146.

Abstract

A aquisição da leitura decorre ao longo de diversas etapas, desde o momento em que a criança inicia o contacto com o alfabeto até ao momento em que se torna um leitor competente, apto a ler correcta e fluentemente. Compreender a evolução desta competência através de uma análise da diferenciação do peso de variáveis preditoras da leitura possibilita teorizar sobre os mecanismos cognitivos envolvidos nas diferentes fases de desenvolvimento da leitura. Realizámos um estudo transversal com 568 alunos do segundo ao quarto ano do primeiro ciclo do Ensino Básico, em que se avaliou o impacto de capacidades de processamento fonológico, nomeação rápida, conhecimento letra-som e vocabulário, bem como de capacidades cognitivas mais gerais (inteligência não-verbal e memória de trabalho), na exactidão e velocidade da leitura. De uma forma geral, os resultados mostraram que, apesar da consciência fonológica permanecer como o preditor mais importante da exactidão e fluência da leitura, o seu peso decresce à medida que a escolaridade aumenta. Observou-se também que, à medida que o contributo da consciência fonológica para a explicação da velocidade de leitura diminuía, aumentava o contributo de outras variáveis mais associadas ao automatismo e reconhecimento lexical, tais como a nomeação rápida e o vocabulário. Em suma, podemos dizer que ao longo da escolaridade se observa uma alteração dinâmica dos processos cognitivos subjacentes à leitura, o que sugere que a criança evolui de uma estratégia de leitura ancorada em processamentos sub-lexicais, e como tal mais dependente de processamentos fonológicos, para uma estratégia baseada no reconhecimento ortográfico das palavras.

Abstract

Thematic roles such as Agent and Instrument have a long-standing place in theories of event representation. Nonetheless, the structure of these categories has been difficult to determine. We investigated how instrumental events, such as someone slicing bread with a knife, are categorized in English. Speakers described a variety of typical and atypical instrumental events, and we determined the similarity structure of their descriptions using correspondence analysis. We found that events where the instrument is an extension of an intentional agent were most likely to elicit similar language, highlighting the importance of agency in structuring instrumental categories.

Abstract

In this paper, I will argue that although the study of multimodal interaction offers exciting new prospects for Human Computer Interaction and human-human communication research, language is the primary form of communication, even in multimodal systems. I will support this claim with theoretical and empirical arguments, mainly drawn from human-human communication research, and will discuss the implications for multimodal communication research and Human-Computer Interaction.

Abstract

The current study reports specific cases in which a positive transfer of perceptual ability from the music domain to the language domain occurs. We tested whether musical training enhances discrimination and identification performance of L2 speech sounds (timing features, nasal consonants and vowels). Native Dutch and Japanese speakers with different musical training experience, matched for their estimated verbal IQ, participated in the experiments. Results indicated that musical training strongly increases one’s ability to perceive timing information in speech signals. We also found a benefit of musical training on discrimination performance for a subset of the tested vowel contrasts.

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

Most of the study of basic emotion expressions has focused on facial expressions and little work has been done to specifically investigate happiness, the only positive of the basic emotions (Ekman & Friesen, 1971). However, a theoretical suggestion has been made that happiness could be broken down into discrete positive emotions, which each fulfil the criteria of basic emotions, and that these would be expressed vocally (Ekman, 1992). To empirically test this hypothesis, 20 participants categorised 80 paralinguistic sounds using the labels achievement, amusement, contentment, pleasure and relief. The results suggest that achievement, amusement and relief are perceived as distinct categories, which subjects accurately identify. In contrast, the categories of contentment and pleasure were systematically confused with other responses, although performance was still well above chance levels. These findings are initial evidence that the positive emotions engage distinct vocal expressions and may be considered to be distinct emotion categories.

Abstract

Despite differences in language, culture, and ecology, some human characteristics are similar in people all over the world, while other features vary from one group to the next. These similarities and differences can inform arguments about what aspects of the human mind are part of our shared biological heritage and which are predominantly products of culture and language. I will present data from a cross-cultural project investigating the recognition of non-verbal vocalizations of emotions, such as screams and laughs, across two highly different cultural groups. English participants were compared to individuals from remote, culturally isolated Namibian villages. Vocalizations communicating the so-called “basic emotions” (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise) were bidirectionally recognised. In contrast, a set of additional positive emotions was only recognised within, but not across, cultural boundaries. These results indicate that a number of primarily negative emotions are associated with vocalizations that can be recognised across cultures, while at least some positive emotions are communicated with culture-specific signals. I will discuss these findings in the context of accounts of emotions at differing levels of analysis, with an emphasis on the often-neglected positive emotions.

Abstract

Many studies suggest that emotional signals can be recognized across cultures and modalities. But to what extent are these signals innate and to what extent are they learned? This study investigated whether auditory learning is necessary for the production of recognizable emotional vocalizations by examining the vocalizations produced by people born deaf. Recordings were made of eight congenitally deaf Dutch individuals, who produced non-verbal vocalizations of a range of negative and positive emotions. Perception was examined in a forced-choice task with hearing Dutch listeners (n = 25). Considerable variability was found across emotions, suggesting that auditory learning is more important for the acquisition of certain types of vocalizations than for others. In particular, achievement and surprise sounds were relatively poorly recognized. In contrast, amusement and disgust vocalizations were well recognized, suggesting that for some emotions, recognizable vocalizations can develop without any auditory learning. The implications of these results for models of emotional communication are discussed, and other routes of social learning available to the deaf individuals are considered.

Abstract

Vocalizations like screams and laughs are used to communicate affective states, but what acoustic cues in these signals require vocal learning and which ones are innate? This study investigated the role of auditory learning in the production of non-verbal emotional vocalizations by examining the vocalizations produced by people born deaf. Recordings were made of congenitally deaf Dutch individuals and matched hearing controls, who produced non-verbal vocalizations of a range of negative and positive emotions. Perception was examined in a forced-choice task with hearing Dutch listeners (n = 25), and judgments were analyzed together with acoustic cues, including envelope, pitch, and spectral measures. Considerable variability was found across emotions and acoustic cues, and the two types of information were related for a sub-set of the emotion categories. These results suggest that auditory learning is less important for the acquisition of certain types of vocalizations than for others (particularly amusement and relief), and they also point to a less central role for auditory learning of some acoustic features in affective non-verbal vocalizations. The implications of these results for models of vocal emotional communication are discussed.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the ability of SpeM, our recognition system based on the combination of an automatic phone recogniser and a wordsearch module, to determine as early as possible during the word recognition process whether a word is likely to be recognised correctly (this we refer to as ‘on-line’ early word recognition). We present two measures that can be used to predict whether a word is correctly recognised: the Bayesian word activation and the amount of available (acoustic) information for a word. SpeM was tested on 1,463 polysyllabic words in 885 continuous speech utterances. The investigated predictors indicated that a word activation that is 1) high (but not too high) and 2) based on more phones is more reliable to predict the correctness of a word than a similarly high value based on a small number of phones or a lower value of the word activation.