Publications

Abstract

Listeners use lexical knowledge to adjust their prelexical representations of speech sounds in response to the idiosyncratic pronunciations of particular speakers. We used an exposure-test paradigm to investigate whether this type of perceptual learning transfers across syllabic positions. No significant learning effect was found in Experiment 1, where exposure sounds were onsets and test sounds were codas. Experiments 2-4 showed that there was no learning even when both exposure and test sounds were onsets. But a trend was found when exposure sounds were codas and test sounds were onsets (Experiment 5). This trend was smaller than the robust effect previously found for the coda-to-coda case. These findings suggest that knowledge about idiosyncratic pronunciations may be position specific: Knowledge about how a speaker produces sounds in one position, if it can be acquired at all, influences perception of sounds in that position more strongly than of sounds in another position.

Abstract

Words repeated in the same voice are better recognized than when they are repeated in a different voice. Such findings have been taken as evidence for the storage of talker-specific lexical episodes. But results on perceptual learning suggest that talker-specific adjustments concern sublexical representations. This study thus investigates whether voice-specific repetition effects in auditory lexical decision are lexical or sublexical. The same critical set of items in Block 2 were, depending on materials in Block 1, either same-voice or different-voice word repetitions, new words comprising re-orderings of phonemes used in the same voice in Block 1, or new words with previously unused phonemes. Results show a benefit for words repeated by the same talker, and a smaller benefit for words consisting of phonemes repeated by the same talker. Talker-specific information thus appears to influence word recognition at multiple representational levels.

Abstract

Listeners use suprasegmental auditory lexical stress information to resolve the competition words engage in during spoken-word recognition. The present study investigated whether (a) visual speech provides lexical stress information, and, more importantly, (b) whether this visual lexical stress information is used to resolve lexical competition. Dutch word pairs that differ in the lexical stress realization of their first two syllables, but not segmentally (e.g., 'OCtopus' and 'okTOber'; capitals marking primary stress) served as auditory-only, visual-only, and audiovisual speech primes. These primes either matched (e.g., 'OCto-'), mismatched (e.g., 'okTO-'), or were unrelated to (e.g., 'maCHI-') a subsequent printed target (octopus), which participants had to make a lexical decision to. To the degree that visual speech contains lexical stress information, lexical decisions to printed targets should be modulated through the addition of visual speech. Results show, however, no evidence for a role of visual lexical stress information in audiovisual spoken-word recognition.

Abstract

Adult-to-child interactions are often characterized by prosodically-exaggerated speech accompanied by visually captivating co-speech gestures. In a series of adult studies, we have shown that these gestures are linked in a sophisticated manner to the prosodic structure of adults' utterances. In the current study, we use the Preferential Looking Paradigm to demonstrate that two-year-olds can use the alignment of these gestures to speech to deduce the meaning of words.

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

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

The ”download first, then process paradigm” is still the predominant working method amongst the research community. The web-based paradigm, however, offers many advantages from a tool development and data management perspective as they allow a quick adaptation to changing research environments. Moreover, new ways of combining tools and data are increasingly becoming available and will eventually enable a true web-based workflow approach, thus challenging the ”download first, then process” paradigm. The necessary infrastructure for managing, exploring and enriching language resources via the Web will need to be delivered by projects like CLARIN and DARIAH

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a unifying approach to tackle data heterogeneity issues for lexica and related resources. We present LEXUS, our software that implements the Lexical Markup Framework (LMF) to uniformly describe and manage lexica of different structures. LEXUS also makes use of a central Data Category Registry (DCR) to address terminological issues with regard to linguistic concepts as well as the handling of working and object languages. Finally, we report on ViCoS, a LEXUS extension, providing support for the definition of arbitrary semantic relations between lexical entries or parts thereof.

Abstract

To achieve true interoperability for valuable linguistic resources different levels of variation need to be addressed. ISO Technical Committee 37, Terminology and other language and content resources, is developing a Data Category Registry. This registry will provide a reusable set of data categories. A new implementation, dubbed ISOcat, of the registry is currently under construction. This paper shortly describes the new data model for data categories that will be introduced in this implementation. It goes on with a sketch of the standardization process. Completed data categories can be reused by the community. This is done by either making a selection of data categories using the ISOcat web interface, or by other tools which interact with the ISOcat system using one of its various Application Programming Interfaces. Linguistic resources that use data categories from the registry should include persistent references, e.g. in the metadata or schemata of the resource, which point back to their origin. These data category references can then be used to determine if two or more resources share common semantics, thus providing a level of interoperability close to the source data and a promising layer for semantic alignment on higher levels

Abstract

A central question in the psycholinguistic study of multilingualism is how syntax is shared across languages. We implement a model to investigate whether error-based implicit learning can provide an account of cross-language structural priming. The model is based on the Dual-path model of
sentence-production (Chang, 2002). We implement our model using the Bilingual version of Dual-path (Tsoukala, Frank, & Broersma, 2017). We answer two main questions: (1) Can structural priming of active and passive constructions occur between English and Spanish in a bilingual version of the Dual-
path model? (2) Does cross-language priming differ quantitatively from within-language priming in this model? Our results show that cross-language priming does occur in the model. This finding adds to the viability of implicit learning as an account of structural priming in general and cross-language
structural priming specifically. Furthermore, we find that the within-language priming effect is somewhat stronger than the cross-language effect. In the context of mixed results from
behavioral studies, we interpret the latter finding as an indication that the difference between cross-language and within-
language priming is small and difficult to detect statistically.

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

The present study investigates the influence of prosodic structure on the fine-grained phonetic details of German plosives which also cue the phonological fortis-lenis contrast. Closure durations were found to be longer at higher prosodic boundaries. There was also less glottal vibration in lenis plosives at higher prosodic boundaries. Voice onset time in lenis plosives was not affected by prosody. In contrast, for the fortis plosives VOT decreased at higher boundaries, as did the maximal intensity of the release. These results demonstrate that the effects of prosody on different phonetic cues can go into opposite directions, but are overall constrained by the need to maintain phonological contrasts. While prosodic effects on some cues are compatible with a ‘fortition’ account of prosodic strengthening or with a general feature enhancement explanation, the effects on others enhance paradigmatic contrasts only within a given prosodic position.

Abstract

In this study, we explored methods for linking Chinese and English sense inventories using two opposing approaches: creating links (1) bottom-up: by starting at the finer-grained sense level then proceeding to the verb subcategorization frames and (2) top-down: by starting directly with the more coarse-grained frame levels. The sense inventories for linking include pre-existing corpora, such as English Propbank (Palmer, Gildea, and Kingsbury, 2005), Chinese Propbank (Xue and Palmer, 2004) and English WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998) and newly created corpora, the English and Chinese Sense Inventories from DARPA-GALE OntoNotes. In the linking task, we selected a group of highly frequent and polysemous communication verbs, including say, ask, talk, and speak in English, and shuo, biao-shi, jiang, and wen in Chinese. We found that with the bottom-up method, although speakers of both languages agreed on the links between senses, the subcategorization frames of the corresponding senses did not match consistently. With the top-down method, if the verb frames match in both languages, their senses line up more quickly to each other. The results indicate that the top-down method is more promising in linking English and Chinese sense inventories.

Abstract

Mental imagery is a cognitive process crucial to human reasoning. Numerous studies have characterized specific
instances of this cognitive ability, as evoked by visual imagery (VI) or motor imagery (MI) tasks. However, it
remains unclear which neural resources are shared between VI and MI, and which are exclusively related to MI.
To address this issue, we have used fMRI to measure human brain activity during performance of VI and MI
tasks. Crucially, we have modulated the imagery process by manipulating the degree of mental rotation necessary
to solve the tasks. We focused our analysis on changes in neural signal as a function of the degree of mental
rotation in each task.

Abstract

Digital processing of medical images has helped physicians and patients during past years by allowing examination and diagnosis on a very precise level. Nowadays possibly the biggest deal of support it can offer for modern healthcare is the use of high performance computing architectures to treat the huge amounts of data that can be collected by modern acquisition devices. This paper presents a parallel processing implementation of an image segmentation algorithm that operates on a computer cluster equipped with 10 processing units. Thanks to well-organized distribution of the workload we manage to significantly shorten the execution time of the developed algorithm and reach a performance gain very close to linear.

Abstract

In this paper we report on four experiments in which we attempted to prime the stress position of Dutch bisyllabic target nouns. These nouns, picture names, had stress on either the first or the second syllable. Auditory prime words had either the same stress as the target or a different stress (e.g., WORtel – MOtor vs. koSTUUM – MOtor; capital letters indicate stressed syllables in prime – target pairs). Furthermore, half of the prime words were semantically related, the other half were unrelated. In none of the experiments a stress priming effect was found. This could mean that stress is not stored in the lexicon. An additional finding was that targets with initial stress had a faster response than targets with a final stress. We hypothesize that bisyllabic words with final stress take longer to be encoded because this stress pattern is irregular with respect to the lexical distribution of bisyllabic stress patterns, even though it can be regular in terms of the metrical stress rules of Dutch.

Abstract

Languages differ in the degree of semantic flexibility of their syntactic roles. For example, Eng-
lish and Indonesian are considered more flexible with regard to the semantics of subjects,
whereas German and Japanese are less flexible. In Hawkins’ classification, more flexible lan-
guages are said to have a loose fit, and less flexible ones are those that have a tight fit. This
classification has been based on manual inspection of example sentences. The present paper
proposes a new, quantitative approach to deriving the measures of looseness and tightness from
corpora. We use corpora of online news from the Leipzig Corpora Collection in thirty typolog-
ically and genealogically diverse languages and parse them syntactically with the help of the
Universal Dependencies annotation software. Next, we compute Mutual Information scores for
each language using the matrices of lexical lemmas and four syntactic dependencies (intransi-
tive subjects, transitive subject, objects and obliques). The new approach allows us not only to
reproduce the results of previous investigations, but also to extend the typology to new lan-
guages. We also demonstrate that verb-final languages tend to have a tighter relationship be-
tween lexemes and syntactic roles, which helps language users to recognize thematic roles early
during comprehension.

Abstract

Young children demonstrate the ability to make inferences about the preferences of other agents based on their choices. However, there exists no overarching account of what children are doing when they learn about preferences or how they use that knowledge. We use a rational model of preference learning, drawing on ideas from economics and computer science, to explain the behavior of children in several recent experiments. Specifically, we show how a simple econometric model can be extended to capture two- to four-year-olds’ use of statistical information in inferring preferences, and their generalization of these preferences.

Abstract

Children learn language from the speech in their home environment. Recent work shows that more infant-directed speech
(IDS) leads to stronger lexical development. But what makes IDS a particularly useful learning signal? Here, we expand on an attention-based account first proposed by Räsänen et al. (2018): that prosodic modifications make IDS less predictable, and thus more interesting. First, we reproduce the critical finding from Räsänen et al.: that lab-recorded IDS pitch is less predictable compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). Next, we show that this result generalizes to the home language environment, finding that IDS in daylong recordings is also less predictable than ADS but that this pattern is much less robust than for IDS recorded in the lab. These results link experimental work on attention and prosodic modifications of IDS to real-world language-learning environments, highlighting some challenges of scaling up analyses of IDS to larger datasets that better capture children’s actual input.

Abstract

We examined how communicators can switch between speaker and listener role with such accurate timing. During conversations, the majority of role transitions happens with a gap or overlap of only a few hundred milliseconds. This suggests that listeners can predict when the turn of the current speaker is going to end. Our hypothesis is that listeners know when a turn ends because they know how it ends. Anticipating the last words of a turn can help the next speaker in predicting when the turn will end, and also in anticipating the content of the turn, so that an appropriate response can be prepared in advance. We used the stimuli material of an earlier experiment (De Ruiter, Mitterer & Enfield, 2006), in which subjects were listening to turns from natural conversations and had to press a button exactly when the turn they were listening to ended. In the present experiment, we investigated if the subjects can complete those turns when only an initial fragment of the turn is presented to them. We found that the subjects made better predictions about the last words of those turns that had more accurate responses in the earlier button press experiment.

Abstract

Lexical stress is realised similarly in English, German, and
Dutch. On a suprasegmental level, stressed syllables tend to be
longer and more acoustically salient than unstressed syllables;
segmentally, vowels in unstressed syllables are often reduced.
The frequency of unreduced unstressed syllables (where only
the suprasegmental cues indicate lack of stress) however,
differs across the languages. The present studies test whether
listener behaviour is affected by these vocabulary differences,
by investigating German listeners’ use of suprasegmental cues
to lexical stress in German and English word recognition. In a
forced-choice identification task, German listeners correctly
assigned single-syllable fragments (e.g., Kon-) to one of two
words differing in stress (KONto, konZEPT). Thus, German
listeners can exploit suprasegmental information for
identifying words. German listeners also performed above
chance in a similar task in English (with, e.g., DIver, diVERT),
i.e., their sensitivity to these cues also transferred to a nonnative
language. An English listener group, in contrast, failed
in the English fragment task. These findings mirror vocabulary
patterns: German has more words with unreduced unstressed
syllables than English does.

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

This special issue of Cognitive Linguistics explores the linguistic encoding of events of cutting and breaking. In this article we first introduce the project on which it is based by motivating the selection of this conceptual domain, presenting the methods of data collection used by all the investigators, and characterizing the language sample. We then present a new approach to examining crosslinguistic similarities and differences in semantic categorization. Applying statistical modeling to the descriptions of cutting and breaking events elicited from speakers of all the languages, we show that although there is crosslinguistic variation in the number of distinctions made and in the placement of category boundaries, these differences take place within a strongly constrained semantic space: across languages, there is a surprising degree of consensus on the partitioning of events in this domain. In closing, we compare our statistical approach with more conventional semantic analyses, and show how an extensional semantic typological approach like the one illustrated here can help illuminate the intensional distinctions made by languages.

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

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

Listeners use lexical knowledge to judge what speech sounds they heard. I investigated whether such lexical influences are truly top-down or just reflect a merging of perceptual and lexical constraints. This is achieved by testing whether the lexically determined identity of a phone exerts the appropriate context effects on surrounding phones. The current investigations focuses on compensation for coarticulation in vowel-fricative sequences, where the presence of a rounded vowel (/y/ rather than /i/) leads fricatives to be perceived as /s/ rather than //. This results was consistently found in all three experiments. A vowel was also more likely to be perceived as rounded /y/ if that lead listeners to be perceive words rather than nonwords (Dutch: meny, English id. vs. meni nonword). This lexical influence on the perception of the vowel had, however, no consistent influence on the perception of following fricative.

Abstract

We investigated perception of words with reduced word-final /t/ using an adapted eyetracking paradigm. Dutch listeners followed spoken instructions to click on printed words which were accompanied on a computer screen by simple shapes (e.g., a circle). Targets were either above or next to their shapes, and the shapes uniquely identified the targets when the spoken forms were ambiguous between words with or without final /t/ (e.g., bult, bump, vs. bul, diploma). Analysis of listeners’ eye-movements revealed, in contrast to earlier results, that listeners use the following segmental context when compensating for /t/-reduction. Reflecting that /t/-reduction is more likely to occur before bilabials, listeners were more likely to look at the /t/-final words if the next word’s first segment was bilabial. This result supports models of speech perception in which prelexical phonological processes use segmental context to modulate word recognition.

Abstract

To assess the reality of phonological features in language processing (vs. language description), one needs to specify the distinctive claims of distinctive-feature theory. Two of the more farreaching claims are compositionality and generalizability. I will argue that there is some evidence for the first and evidence against the second claim from a recent behavioral paradigm. Highlighting the contribution of a behavioral paradigm also counterpoints the use of brain measures as the only way to elucidate what is "real for the brain". The contributions of the speakers exemplify how brain measures can help us to understand the reality of phonological features in language processing. The evidence is, however, not convincing for a) the claim for underspecification of phonological features—which has to deal with counterevidence from behavioral as well as brain measures—, and b) the claim of position independence of phonological features.

Abstract

Words are reduced in spontaneous speech. If reductions are constrained by functional (i.e., perception and production) constraints, they should not be arbitrary. This hypothesis was tested by examing the pronunciations of high- to mid-frequency words in a Dutch and a German spontaneous speech corpus. In logistic-regression models the "reduction likelihood" of a phoneme was predicted by fixed-effect predictors such as position within the word, word length, word frequency, and stress, as well as random effects such as phoneme identity and word. The models for Dutch and German show many communalities. This is in line with the assumption that similar functional constraints influence reductions in both languages.

Abstract

This issue investigates the linguistic encoding of events with three or more participants from the perspectives of language typology and acquisition. Such “multiple-participant events” include (but are not limited to) any scenario involving at least three participants, typically encoded using transactional verbs like 'give' and 'show', placement verbs like 'put', and benefactive and applicative constructions like 'do (something for someone)', among others. There is considerable crosslinguistic and withinlanguage variation in how the participants (the Agent, Causer, Theme, Goal, Recipient, or Experiencer) and the subevents involved in multipleparticipant situations are encoded, both at the lexical and the constructional levels

Abstract

Frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) is a group of neurodegenerative conditions characterised by focal frontal and/or temporal lobe atrophy. Patients develop a range of cognitive and behavioural abnormalities, including prominent difficulties in comprehending and expressing emotions, with significant clinical and social consequences. Here we report a systematic prospective analysis of emotion processing in different input modalities in patients with FTLD. We examined recognition of happiness, sadness, fear and anger in facial expressions, non-verbal vocalisations and music in patients with FTLD and in healthy age matched controls. The FTLD group was significantly impaired in all modalities compared with controls, and this effect was most marked for music. Analysing each emotion separately, recognition of negative emotions was impaired in all three modalities in FTLD, and this effect was most marked for fear and anger. Recognition of happiness was deficient only with music. Our findings support the idea that FTLD causes impaired recognition of emotions across input channels, consistent with a common central representation of emotion concepts. Music may be a sensitive probe of emotional deficits in FTLD, perhaps because it requires a more abstract representation of emotion than do animate stimuli such as faces and voices.

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.

Abstract

Automating robot behavior in a specific situation is an active area of research. There are several approaches available in the literature of robotics to cater for the automatic behavior of a robot. However, when it comes to humanoids or human-robot interaction in general, the area has been less explored. In this paper, a pseudo-randomization approach has been introduced to automatize the gestures and facial expressions of an interactive humanoid robot called ROBIN based on its mental state. A significant number of gestures and facial expressions have been implemented to allow the robot more options to perform a relevant action or reaction based on visual stimuli. There is a display of noticeable differences in the behaviour of the robot for the same stimuli perceived from an interaction partner. This slight autonomous behavioural change in the robot clearly shows a notion of automation in behaviour. The results from experimental scenarios and human-centered evaluation of the system help validate the approach.

Abstract

Cognitive neuroscience approaches the brain as a cognitive system: a system that functionally is conceptualized in terms of information processing. We outline some aspects of this concept and consider a physical system to be an information processing device when a subclass of its physical states can be viewed as representational/cognitive and transitions between these can be conceptualized as a process operating on these states by implementing operations on the corresponding representational structures. We identify a generic and fundamental problem in cognition: sequentially organized structured processing. Structured sequence processing provides the brain, in an essential sense, with its processing logic. In an approach addressing this problem, we illustrate how to integrate levels of analysis within a framework of adaptive dynamical systems. We note that the dynamical system framework lends itself to a description of asynchronous event-driven devices, which is likely to be important in cognition because the brain appears to be an asynchronous processing system. We use the human language faculty and natural language processing as a concrete example through out.

Abstract

Dutch listeners' looks to printed words were tracked while they listened to instructions to click with their mouse on one of them. When presented with targets from word pairs where the first two syllables were segmentally identical but differed in stress location, listeners used stress information to recognize the target before segmental information disambiguated the words. Furthermore, the amount of lexical competition was influenced by the presence or absence of word-initial stress.

Abstract

Segmental as well as suprasegmental information is used by Dutch listeners to recognize words. The time-course of the effect of suprasegmental stress information on spoken-word recognition was investigated in a previous study, in which we tracked Dutch listeners' looks to arrays of four printed words as they listened to spoken sentences. Each target was displayed along with a competitor that did not differ segmentally in its first two syllables but differed in stress placement (e.g., 'CENtimeter' and 'sentiMENT'). The listeners' eye-movements showed that stress information is used to recognize the target before distinct segmental information is available. Here, we examine the role of durational information in this effect. Two experiments showed that initial-syllable duration, as a cue to lexical stress, is not interpreted dependent on the speaking rate of the preceding carrier sentence. This still held when other stress cues like pitch and amplitude were removed. Rather, the speaking rate of the preceding carrier affected the speed of word recognition globally, even though the rate of the target itself was not altered. Stress information modulated lexical competition, but did so independently of the rate of the preceding carrier, even if duration was the only stress cue present.

Abstract

This paper reports on the development of a flexible web based lexicon tool, LEXUS. LEXUS is targeted at linguists involved in language documentation (of endangered languages). It allows the creation of lexica within the structure of the proposed ISO LMF standard and uses the proposed concept naming conventions from the ISO data categories, thus enabling interoperability, search and merging. LEXUS also offers the possibility to visualize language, since it provides functionalities to include audio, video and still images to the lexicon. With LEXUS it is possible to create semantic network knowledge bases, using typed relations. The LEXUS tool is free for use. Index Terms: lexicon, web based application, endangered languages, language documentation.

Abstract

The recognition of emotions of disgust, anger and fear have been shown to be significantly impaired in Huntington’s disease (eg,Sprengelmeyer et al, 1997, 2006; Gray et al, 1997; Milders et al, 2003,Montagne et al, 2006; Johnson et al, 2007; De Gelder et al, 2008). The relative impairment of these emotions might have implied a recognition impairment specific to negative emotions. Could the asymmetric recognition deficits be due not to the complexity of the emotion but rather reflect the complexity of the task? In the current study, 15 Huntington’s patients and 16 control subjects were presented with negative and positive non-speech emotional vocalisations that were to be identified as anger, fear, sadness, disgust, achievement, pleasure and amusement in a forced-choice paradigm. This experiment more accurately matched the negative emotions with positive emotions in a homogeneous modality. The resulting dually impaired ability of Huntington’s patients to identify negative and positive non-speech emotional vocalisations correctly provides evidence for an overall emotional recognition deficit in the disease. These results indicate that previous findings of a specificity in emotional recognition deficits might instead be due to the limitations of the visual modality. Previous experiments may have found an effect of emotional specificy due to the presence of a single positive emotion, happiness, in the midst of multiple negative emotions. In contrast with the previous literature, the study presented here points to a global deficit in the recognition of emotional sounds.

Abstract

In this paper, I will give an overview of some well-studied multimodal signals that humans produce while they communicate with other humans, and discuss the implications of those studies for HCI. I will first discuss a conceptual framework that allows us to distinguish between functional and sensory modalities. This distinction is important, as there are multiple functional modalities using the same sensory modality (e.g., facial expression and eye-gaze in the visual modality). A second theoretically important issue is redundancy. Some signals appear to be redundant with a signal in another modality, whereas others give new information or even appear to give conflicting information (see e.g., the work of Susan Goldin-Meadows on speech accompanying gestures). I will argue that multimodal signals are never truly redundant. First, many gestures that appear at first sight to express the same meaning as the accompanying speech generally provide extra (analog) information about manner, path, etc. Second, the simple fact that the same information is expressed in more than one modality is itself a communicative signal. Armed with this conceptual background, I will then proceed to give an overview of some multimodalsignals that have been investigated in human-human research, and the level of understanding we have of the meaning of those signals. The latter issue is especially important for potential implementations of these signals in artificial agents. First, I will discuss pointing gestures. I will address the issue of the timing of pointing gestures relative to the speech it is supposed to support, the mutual dependency between pointing gestures and speech, and discuss the existence of alternative ways of pointing from other cultures. The most frequent form of pointing that does not involve the index finger is a cultural practice called lip-pointing which employs two visual functional modalities, mouth-shape and eye-gaze, simultaneously for pointing. Next, I will address the issue of eye-gaze. A classical study by Kendon (1967) claims that there is a systematic relationship between eye-gaze (at the interlocutor) and turn-taking states. Research at our institute has shown that this relationship is weaker than has often been assumed. If the dialogue setting contains a visible object that is relevant to the dialogue (e.g., a map), the rate of eye-gaze-at-other drops dramatically and its relationship to turn taking disappears completely. The implications for machine generated eye-gaze are discussed. Finally, I will explore a theoretical debate regarding spontaneous gestures. It has often been claimed that the class of gestures that is called iconic by McNeill (1992) are a “window into the mind”. That is, they are claimed to give the researcher (or even the interlocutor) a direct view into the speaker’s thought, without being obscured by the complex transformation that take place when transforming a thought into a verbal utterance. I will argue that this is an illusion. Gestures can be shown to be specifically designed such that the listener can be expected to interpret them. Although the transformations carried out to express a thought in gesture are indeed (partly) different from the corresponding transformations for speech, they are a) complex, and b) severely understudied. This obviously has consequences both for the gesture research agenda, and for the generation of iconic gestures by machines.

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

This paper presents the first application of polynomial modeling as a means for validating phonological pitch accent labels to German data. It is compared to traditional phonetic analysis (measuring minima, maxima, alignment). The traditional method fares better in classification, but results are comparable in statistical accent pair testing. Robustness tests show that pitch correction is necessary in both cases. The approaches are discussed in terms of their practicability, applicability to other domains of research and interpretability of their results.

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

In the context of the source-filter theory of speech, it is well established that intelligibility is heavily reliant on information carried by the filter, that is, spectral cues (e.g., Faulkner et al., 2001; Shannon et al., 1995). However, the extraction of other types of information in the speech signal, such as emotion and identity, is less well understood. In this study we investigated the extent to which emotion recognition in speech depends on filterdependent cues, using a forced-choice emotion identification task at ten levels of noise-vocoding ranging between one and 32 channels. In addition, participants performed a speech intelligibility task with the same stimuli. Our results indicate that compared to speech intelligibility, emotion recognition relies less on spectral information and more on cues typically signaled by source variations, such as voice pitch, voice quality, and intensity. We suggest that, while the reliance on spectral dynamics is likely a unique aspect of human speech, greater phylogenetic continuity across species may be found in the communication of affect in vocalizations.

Abstract

Research using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) has demonstrated an early differential effect in fronto-central regions when processing emotional, as compared to affectively neutral facial stimuli (e.g., Eimer & Holmes, 2002). In this talk, data demonstrating a similar effect in the auditory domain will be presented. ERPs were recorded in a one-back task where participants had to identify immediate repetitions of emotion category, such as a fearful sound followed by another fearful sound. The stimulus set consisted of non-verbal emotional vocalisations communicating positive and negative sounds, as well as neutral baseline conditions. Similarly to the facial domain, fear sounds as compared to acoustically controlled neutral sounds, elicited a frontally distributed positivity with an onset latency of about 150 ms after stimulus onset. These data suggest the existence of a rapid multi-modal frontocentral mechanism discriminating emotional from non-emotional human signals.

Abstract

The difficulty of the task of segmenting a speech signal into its words is immediately clear when listening to a foreign language; it is much harder to segment the signal into its words, since the words of the language are unknown. Infants are faced with the same task when learning their first language. This study provides a better understanding of the task that infants face while learning their native language. We employed an automatic algorithm on the task of speech segmentation without prior knowledge of the labels of the phonemes. An analysis of the boundaries erroneously placed inside a phoneme showed that the algorithm consistently placed additional boundaries in phonemes in which acoustic changes occur. These acoustic changes may be as great as the transition from the closure to the burst of a plosive or as subtle as the formant transitions in low or back vowels. Moreover, we found that glottal vibration may attenuate the relevance of acoustic changes within obstruents. An interesting question for further research is how infants learn to overcome the natural tendency to segment these ‘dynamic’ phonemes.

Abstract

Articulatory feature (AF) modelling of speech has received a considerable amount of attention in automatic speech recognition research. Although termed ‘articulatory’, previous definitions make certain assumptions that are invalid, for instance, that articulators ‘hop’ from one fixed position to the next. In this paper, we studied two methods, based on support vector classification (SVC) and regression (SVR), in which the articulation continuum is modelled without being restricted to using discrete AF value classes. A comparison with a baseline system trained on quantised values of the articulation continuum showed that both SVC and SVR outperform the baseline for two of the three investigated AFs, with improvements up to 5.6% absolute.

Abstract

Listeners outperform ASR systems in every speech recognition task. However, what is not clear is where this human advantage originates. This paper investigates the role of acoustic feature representations. We test four (MFCCs, PLPs, Mel Filterbanks, Rate Maps) acoustic representations, with and without ‘pitch’ information, using the same backend. The results are compared with listener results at the level of articulatory feature classification. While no acoustic feature representation reached the levels of human performance, both MFCCs and Rate maps achieved good scores, with Rate maps nearing human performance on the classification of voicing. Comparing the results on the most difficult articulatory features to classify showed similarities between the humans and the SVMs: e.g., ‘dental’ was by far the least well identified by both groups. Overall, adding pitch information seemed to hamper classification performance.

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.

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.

Abstract

There is now considerable evidence that fine-grained acoustic-phonetic detail in the speech signal helps listeners to segment a speech signal into syllables and words. In this paper, we compare two computational models of word recognition on their ability to capture and use this finephonetic detail during speech recognition. One model, SpeM, is phoneme-based, whereas the other, newly developed Fine- Tracker, is based on articulatory features. Simulations dealt with modelling the ability of listeners to distinguish short words (e.g., ‘ham’) from the longer words in which they are embedded (e.g., ‘hamster’). The simulations with Fine- Tracker showed that it was, like human listeners, able to distinguish between short words from the longer words in which they are embedded. This suggests that it is possible to extract this fine-phonetic detail from the speech signal and use it during word recognition.

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.

Abstract

Good teachers know their students, and exploit this knowledge to adapt or optimise their instruction. Traditional teachers know their students because they interact with them face-to-face in classroom or one-to-one tutoring sessions. In these settings, they can build student models, i.e., by exploiting the multi-faceted nature of human-human communication. In distance-learning contexts, teacher and student have to cope with the lack of such direct interaction, and this must have detrimental effects for both teacher and student. In a past study we have analysed teacher requirements for tracking student actions in computer-mediated settings. Given the results of this study, we have devised and implemented a tool that allows teachers to keep track of their learners'interaction in e-learning systems. We present the tool's functionality and user interfaces, and an evaluation of its usability.

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.

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a joint effort of a group of multimodality researchers and tool developers to improve the interoperability between several tools used for the annotation of multimodality. We propose a multimodal annotation exchange format, based on the annotation graph formalism, which is supported by import and export routines in the respective tools