Publications

Abstract

For native (L1) English readers, masked presentations of past-tense verb primes (e.g., fell and looked) produce faster lexical decision latencies to their present-tense targets (e.g., FALL and LOOK) than orthographically related (e.g., fill and loose) or unrelated (e.g., master and bank) primes. This facilitation observed with morphologically related prime-target pairs (morphological priming) is generally taken as evidence for strong connections based on morphological relationships in the L1 lexicon. It is unclear, however, if similar, morphologically based, connections develop in non-native (L2) lexicons. Several earlier studies with L2 English readers have reported mixed results. The present experiments examine whether past-tense verb primes (both regular and irregular verbs) significantly facilitate target lexical decisions for Japanese-English bilinguals beyond any facilitation provided by prime-target orthographic similarity. Overall, past-tense verb primes facilitated lexical decisions to their present-tense targets relative to both orthographically related and unrelated primes. Replicating previous masked priming experiments with L2 readers, orthographically related primes also facilitated target recognition relative to unrelated primes, confirming that orthographic similarity facilitates L2 target recognition. The additional facilitation from past-tense verb primes beyond that provided by orthographic primes suggests that, in the L2 English lexicon, connections based on morphological relationships develop in a way that is similar to how they develop in the L1 English lexicon even though the connections and processing of lower level, lexical/orthographic information may differ. Further analyses involving L2 proficiency revealed that as L2 proficiency increased, orthographic facilitation was reduced, indicating that there is a decrease in the fuzziness in orthographic representations in the L2 lexicon with increased proficiency.

Abstract

Words which are expected to contain the same surface string of segments may, under identical prosodic circumstances, sometimes be realized with slight differences in duration. Some researchers have attributed such effects to differences in the words’ underlying forms (incomplete neutralization), while others have suggested orthographic influence and extremely careful speech as the cause. In this paper, we demonstrate such sub-phonemic durational differences in Dutch, a language which some past research has found not to have such effects. Past literature has also shown that listeners can often make use of incomplete neutralization to distinguish apparent homophones. We extend perceptual investigations of this topic, and show that listeners can perceive even durational differences which are not consistently observed in production. We further show that a difference which is primarily orthographic rather than underlying can also create such durational differences. We conclude that a wide variety of factors, in addition to underlying form, can induce speakers to produce slight durational differences which listeners can also use in perception.

Abstract

This paper investigates the production and perception of epenthetic stops at syllable boundaries in Dutch and compares the experimental data with lexical statistics for Dutch and English. This extends past work on epenthesis in coda position [1]. The current work is particularly informative regarding the question of phonotactic constraints’ influence on parsing of speech variability.

Abstract

This paper presents articulatory data on the production of /l/ in various environments in Dutch, and shows that the direction of movement of the tongue dorsum varies across environments. This makes it impossible to measure tongue position at the peak of the dorsal gesture. We argue for an alternative method in such cases: measurement of position of one articulator at a time point defined by the gesture of another. We present new data measured this way which confirms a previous finding on the articulation of Dutch /l/.

Abstract

An event-related brain potential experiment was carried out to investigate on-line thematic role assignment during sentence–picture matching in patients with Broca's aphasia. Subjects were presented with a picture that was followed by an auditory sentence. The sentence either matched the picture or mismatched the visual information depicted. Sentences differed in complexity, and ranged from simple active semantically irreversible sentences to passive semantically reversible sentences. ERPs were recorded while subjects were engaged in sentence–picture matching. In addition, reaction time and accuracy were measured. Three groups of subjects were tested: Broca patients (N = 10), non-aphasic patients with a right hemisphere (RH) lesion (N = 8), and healthy aged-matched controls (N = 15). The results of this study showed that, in neurologically unimpaired individuals, thematic role assignment in the context of visual information was an immediate process. This in contrast to patients with Broca's aphasia who demonstrated no signs of on-line sensitivity to the picture–sentence mismatches. The syntactic contribution to the thematic role assignment process seemed to be diminished given the reduction and even absence of P600 effects. Nevertheless, Broca patients showed some off-line behavioral sensitivity to the sentence–picture mismatches. The long response latencies of Broca's aphasics make it likely that off-line response strategies were used.

Abstract

This article presents electrophysiological data on on-line syntactic processing during auditory sentence comprehension in patients with Broca's aphasia. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from the scalp while subjects listened to sentences that were either syntactically correct or contained violations of subject-verb agreement. Three groups of subjects were tested: Broca patients (n = 10), nonaphasic patients with a right-hemisphere (RH) lesion (n = 5), and healthy agedmatched controls (n = 12). The healthy, control subjects showed a P600/SPS effect as response to the agreement violations. The nonaphasic patients with an RH lesion showed essentially the same pattern. The overall group of Broca patients did not show this sensitivity. However, the sensitivity was modulated by the severity of the syntactic comprehension impairment. The largest deviation from the standard P600/SPS effect was found in the patients with the relatively more severe syntactic comprehension impairment. In addition, ERPs to tones in a classical tone oddball paradigm were also recorded. Similar to the normal control subjects and RH patients, the group of Broca patients showed a P300 effect in the tone oddball condition. This indicates that aphasia in itself does not lead to a general reduction in all cognitive ERP effects. It was concluded that deviations from the standard P600/SPS effect in the Broca patients reflected difficulties with on-line maintaining of number information across clausal boundaries for establishing subject-verb agreement.

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that spoken-language processing is inhibited by violation of obligatory regressive assimilation. Weber (2001) replicated this inhibitory effect in a phoneme-monitoring study examining regressive place assimilation of nasals, but found facilitation for violation of progressive assimilation. German listeners detected the velar fricative [x] more quickly when fricative assimilation was violated (e.g., *[bIxt] or *[blInx@n]) than when no violation occurred (e.g., [baxt] or [blu:x@n]). It was argued that a combination of two factors caused facilitation:(1) progressive assimilation creates different restrictions for the monitoring target than regressive assimilation does, and (2) the sequences violating assimilation (e.g., *[Ix]) are novel for German listeners and therefore facilitate fricative detection (novel popout). The present study tested progressive assimilation violation in non-novel sequences using the palatal fricative [C]. Stimuli either violated fricative assimilation (e.g., *[ba:C@l ]) or did not (e.g., [bi: C@l ]). This manipulation does not create novel sequences: sequences like *[a:C] can occur across word boundaries, while *[Ix] cannot. No facilitation was found. However, violation also did not significantly inhibit processing. The results confirm that facilitation depends on the combination of progressive assimilation with novelty of the sequence.

Abstract

This study investigated the perception of American English phonemes by native listeners. Listeners identified either the consonant or the vowel in all possible English CV and VC syllables. The syllables were embedded in multispeaker babble at three signal-to-noise ratios (0 dB, 8 dB, and 16 dB). Effects of syllable position, signal-to-noise ratio, and articulatory features on vowel and consonant identification are discussed. The results constitute the largest source of data that is currently available on phoneme confusion patterns of American English phonemes by native listeners.

Abstract

This study investigated the perception of American English phonemes by native listeners. Listeners identified either the consonant or the vowel in all possible English CV and VC syllables. The syllables were embedded in multispeaker babble at three signalto-noise ratios (0 dB, 8 dB, and 16 dB). Effects of syllable position, signal-to-noise ratio, and articulatory features on vowel and consonant identification are discussed. The results constitute the largest source of data that is currently available on phoneme confusion patterns of American English phonemes by native listeners.

Abstract

Four eye-tracking experiments examined lexical competition in non-native spoken-word recognition. Dutch listeners hearing English fixated longer on distractor pictures with names containing vowels that Dutch listeners are likely to confuse with vowels in a target picture name (pencil, given target panda) than on less confusable distractors (beetle, given target bottle). English listeners showed no such viewing time difference. The confusability was asymmetric: given pencil as target, panda did not distract more than distinct competitors. Distractors with Dutch names phonologically related to English target names (deksel, ‘lid,’ given target desk) also received longer fixations than distractors with phonologically unrelated names. Again, English listeners showed no differential effect. With the materials translated into Dutch, Dutch listeners showed no activation of the English words (desk, given target deksel). The results motivate two conclusions: native phonemic categories capture second-language input even when stored representations maintain a second-language distinction; and lexical competition is greater for non-native than for native listeners.

Abstract

Recent studies using phoneme detection tasks have shown that spoken-language processing is neither facilitated nor interfered with by optional assimilation, but is inhibited by violation of obligatory assimilation. Interpretation of these results depends on an assessment of their generality, specifically, whether they also obtain when listeners are processing nonnative language. Two separate experiments are presented in which native listeners of German and native listeners of Dutch had to detect a target fricative in legal monosyllabic Dutch nonwords. All of the nonwords were correct realisations in standard Dutch. For German listeners, however, half of the nonwords contained phoneme strings which violate the German fricative assimilation rule. Whereas the Dutch listeners showed no significant effects, German listeners detected the target fricative faster when the German fricative assimilation was violated than when no violation occurred. The results might suggest that violation of assimilation rules does not have to make processing more difficult per se.

Abstract

The extreme case of perceptual similarity is indiscriminability, as when two second‐language phonemes map to a single native category. An example is the English had‐head vowel contrast for Dutch listeners; Dutch has just one such central vowel, transcribed [E]. We examine whether the failure to discriminate in phonetic categorization implies indiscriminability in other—e.g., lexical—processing. Eyetracking experiments show that Dutch‐native listeners instructed in English to ‘‘click on the panda’’ look (significantly more than native listeners) at a pictured pencil, suggesting that pan‐ activates their lexical representation of pencil. The reverse, however, is not the case: ‘‘click on the pencil’’ does not induce looks to a panda, suggesting that pen‐ does not activate panda in the lexicon. Thus prelexically undiscriminated second‐language distinctions can nevertheless be maintained in stored lexical representations. The problem of mapping a resulting unitary input to two distinct categories in lexical representations is solved by allowing input to activate only one second‐language category. For Dutch listeners to English, this is English [E], as a result of which no vowels in the signal ever map to words containing [ae]. We suggest that the choice of category is here motivated by a more abstract, phonemic, metric of similarity.

Abstract

Two eye-tracking experiments examined linguistic gender effects in non-native spoken-word recognition. French participants, who knew German well, followed spoken instructions in German to click on pictures on a computer screen (e.g., Wo befindet sich die Perle, “where is the pearl”) while their eye movements were monitored. The name of the target picture was preceded by a gender-marked article in the instructions. When a target and a competitor picture (with phonologically similar names) were of the same gender in both German and French, French participants fixated competitor pictures more than unrelated pictures. However, when target and competitor were of the same gender in German but of different gender in French, early fixations to the competitor picture were reduced. Competitor activation in the non-native language was seemingly constrained by native gender information. German listeners showed no such viewing time difference. The results speak against a form-based account of the linguistic gender effect. They rather support the notion that the effect originates from the grammatical level of language processing.

Abstract

In a visual-world study, we examined spoken-wordrecognition in Spanish. Spanish listeners followed spoken instructions to click on pictures while their eye movements were monitored. When instructed to click on the picture of a door (puerta), they experienced interference from the picture of a pig (p u e r c o ). The same interference from phonologically related items was observed when the displays contained printed names or a combination of pictures with their names printed underneath, although the effect was strongest for displays with printed names. Implications of the finding that the interference effect can be induced with standard pictorial displays as well as with orthographic displays are discussed.

Abstract

In this paper, we present empirical data from a corpus study on the linear order of subjects and objects in German main clauses. The aim was to establish the validity of three well-known ordering constraints: given complements tend to occur before new complements, definite before indefinite, and pronoun before full noun phrase complements. Frequencies of occurrences were derived for subject-first and object-first sentences from the German Negra corpus. While all three constraints held on subject-first sentences, results for object-first sentences varied. Our findings suggest an influence of grammatical functions on the ordering of verb complements.

Abstract

Three experiments were designed to examine the effect on picture naming of the prior production of a word related in phonological form. In Experiment 1, the latency to produce Dutch words in response to pictures (e.g., hoed , hat) was longer following the production of a form-related word (e.g., hond , dog) in response to a definition on a preceding trial, than when the preceding definition elicited an unrelated word (e.g., kerk , church). Experiment 2 demonstrated that the inhibitory effect disappears when one unrelated word is produced intervening prime and target productions (e.g., hond-kerk-hoed ). The size of the inhibitory effect was not significantly affected by the frequency of the prime words or the target picture names. In Experiment 3, facilitation was observed for word pairs that shared offset segments (e.g., kurk-jurk , cork-dress), whereas inhibition was observed for shared onset segments (e.g., bloed-bloem , blood-flower). However, no priming was observed for prime and target words with shared phonemes but no mismatching segments (e.g., oom-boom , uncle-tree; hex-hexs , fence-witch). These findings are consistent with a process of phoneme competition during phonological encoding.

Abstract

Recordings of calls may be used to assess population structure for acoustic species. This can be particularly effective if there are identity calls, produced nearly exclusively by just one population segment. The identity call method, IDcall, classifies calls into types using contaminated mixture models, and then clusters repertoires of calls into identity clades (potential population segments) using identity calls that are characteristic of the repertoires in each identity clade. We show how to calculate the Bayesian posterior probabilities that each repertoire is a member of each identity clade, and display this information as a stacked bar graph. This methodology (IDcallPP) is introduced using the output of IDcall but could easily be adapted to estimate posterior probabilities of clade membership when acoustic clades are delineated using other methods. This output is similar to that of the STRUCTURE software which uses molecular genetic data to assess population structure and has become a standard in conservation genetics. The technique introduced here should be a valuable asset to those who use acoustic data to address evolution, ecology, or conservation, and creates a methodological and conceptual bridge between geneticists and acousticians who aim to assess population structure.

Abstract

For many traits, males show greater variability than females, with possible implications for understanding sex differences in health and disease. Here, the ENIGMA (Enhancing Neuro Imaging Genetics through Meta‐Analysis) Consortium presents the largest‐ever mega‐analysis of sex differences in variability of brain structure, based on international data spanning nine decades of life. Subcortical volumes, cortical surface area and cortical thickness were assessed in MRI data of 16,683 healthy individuals 1‐90 years old (47% females). We observed significant patterns of greater male than female between‐subject variance for all subcortical volumetric measures, all cortical surface area measures, and 60% of cortical thickness measures. This pattern was stable across the lifespan for 50% of the subcortical structures, 70% of the regional area measures, and nearly all regions for thickness. Our findings that these sex differences are present in childhood implicate early life genetic or gene‐environment interaction mechanisms. The findings highlight the importance of individual differences within the sexes, that may underpin sex‐specific vulnerability to disorders.

Abstract

When we want to describe a path through space, but do not share a common perceptual field with a conversation partner, language has to work doubly hard. This task investigates how people communicate the navigation of space in the absence of shared visual cues, as well as collecting data on motion verbs and the roles of symmetry and landmarks in route description. Two speakers (separated by a curtain or other barrier) are each given a model of a landscape, and one participant describes standard routes through this landscape for the other to match.

Abstract

The encoding of apparently ‘simple’ movement concepts such as ‘COME’ and ‘GO’ can differ widely across languages (e.g., in regard to specifying direction of motion relative to the speaker). This questionnaire is used to identify the range of use of basic motion verbs in a language, and investigate semantic parameters that are involved in high frequency ‘COME’ and ‘GO’-like terms.

Abstract

Pointing gestures are recognised to be a primary manifestation of human social cognition and communicative capacity. The goal of this task is to collect empirical descriptions of pointing practices in different cultural settings.

Abstract

Although generally studied in isolation, language and action often co-occur in everyday life. Here we investigated one particular form of simultaneous language and action, namely speech and gestures that speakers use in everyday communication. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we identified the neural networks involved in the integration of semantic information from speech and gestures. Verbal and/or gestural content could be integrated easily or less easily with the content of the preceding part of speech. Premotor areas involved in action observation (Brodmann area [BA] 6) were found to be specifically modulated by action information "mismatching" to a language context. Importantly, an increase in integration load of both verbal and gestural information into prior speech context activated Broca's area and adjacent cortex (BA 45/47). A classical language area, Broca's area, is not only recruited for language-internal processing but also when action observation is integrated with speech. These findings provide direct evidence that action and language processing share a high-level neural integration system.

Abstract

Co-speech gestures embody a form of manual action that is tightly coupled to the language system. As such, the co-occurrence of speech and co-speech gestures is an excellent example of the interplay between language and action. There are, however, other ways in which language and action can be thought of as closely related. In this paper we will give an overview of studies in cognitive neuroscience that examine the neural underpinnings of links between language and action. Topics include neurocognitive studies of motor representations of speech sounds, action-related language, sign language and co-speech gestures. It will be concluded that there is strong evidence on the interaction between speech and gestures in the brain. This interaction however shares general properties with other domains in which there is interplay between language and action.

Abstract

Purpose:This study investigated to what extent iconic co-speech gestures helpword intelligibility in sentence context in two different linguistic maskers (nativevs. foreign). It was hypothesized that sentence recognition improves with thepresence of iconic co-speech gestures and with foreign compared to nativebabble.Method:Thirty-two native Dutch participants performed a Dutch word recogni-tion task in context in which they were presented with videos in which anactress uttered short Dutch sentences (e.g.,Ze begint te openen,“She starts toopen”). Participants were presented with a total of six audiovisual conditions: nobackground noise (i.e., clear condition) without gesture, no background noise withgesture, French babble without gesture, French babble with gesture, Dutch bab-ble without gesture, and Dutch babble with gesture; and they were asked to typedown what was said by the Dutch actress. The accurate identification of theaction verbs at the end of the target sentences was measured.Results:The results demonstrated that performance on the task was better inthe gesture compared to the nongesture conditions (i.e., gesture enhancementeffect). In addition, performance was better in French babble than in Dutchbabble.Conclusions:Listeners benefit from iconic co-speech gestures during commu-nication and from foreign background speech compared to native. Theseinsights into multimodal communication may be valuable to everyone whoengages in multimodal communication and especially to a public who oftenworks in public places where competing speech is present in the background.

Abstract

Lexica play an important role in every linguistic discipline. We are confronted with many types of lexica. Depending on the type of lexicon and the language we are currently faced with a large variety of structures from very simple tables to complex graphs, as was indicated by a recent overview of structures found in dictionaries from field linguistics and language engineering. It is important to assess these differences and aim at the integration of lexical resources in order to improve lexicon creation, exchange and reuse. This paper describes the first step towards the integration of existing structures and standards into a flexible abstract model.

Abstract

The increasing quantity and complexity of language resources leads to new management problems for those that collect and those that need to preserve them. At the same time the desire to make these resources available on the Internet demands an efficient way characterizing their properties to allow discovery and re-use. The use of metadata is seen as a solution for both these problems. However, the question is what specific requirements there are for the specific domain and if these are met by existing frameworks. Any possible solution should be evaluated with respect to its merit for solving the domain specific problems but also with respect to its future embedding in “global” metadata frameworks as part of the Semantic Web activities.

Abstract

The evolution of basic color terms in language is claimed to be stimulated by technological development, involving technological control of color or exposure to artificially colored objects. Accordingly, technologically “simple” non-industrialized societies are expected to have poor lexicalization of color, i.e., only rudimentary lexica of 2, 3 or 4 basic color terms, with unnamed gaps in the color space. While it may indeed be the case that technology stimulates lexical growth of color terms, it is sometimes considered a sine qua non for color salience and lexicalization. We provide novel evidence that this overlooks the role of the natural environment, and people's engagement with the environment, in the evolution of color vocabulary. We introduce the Maniq—nomadic hunter-gatherers with no color technology, but who have a basic color lexicon of 6 or 7 terms, thus of the same order as large languages like Vietnamese and Hausa, and who routinely talk about color. We examine color language in Maniq and compare it to available data in other languages to demonstrate it has remarkably high consensual color term usage, on a par with English, and high coding efficiency. This shows colors can matter even for non-industrialized societies, suggesting technology is not necessary for color language. Instead, factors such as perceptual prominence of color in natural environments, its practical usefulness across communicative contexts, and symbolic importance can all stimulate elaboration of color language.

Abstract

Demonstratives—simple referential devices like this and that—are linguistic universals, but their meaning varies cross-linguistically. In languages like English and Italian, demonstratives are thought to encode the referent’s distance from the producer (e.g., that one means “the one far away from me”),
while in others, like Portuguese and Spanish, they encode relative distance from both producer and receiver (e.g., aquel means “the one far away from both of us”). Here we propose that demonstratives are also sensitive to the receiver’s focus of attention, hence requiring a deeper form of social cognition
than previously thought. We provide initial empirical and computational evidence for this idea, suggesting that producers use
demonstratives to redirect the receiver’s attention towards the intended referent, rather than only to indicate its physical distance.

Abstract

Brain processing depends on the interactions between neuronal groups. Those interactions are governed by the pattern of anatomical connections and by yet unknown mechanisms that modulate the effective strength of a given connection. We found that the mutual influence among neuronal groups depends on the phase relation between rhythmic activities within the groups. Phase relations supporting interactions between the groups preceded those interactions by a few milliseconds, consistent with a mechanistic role. These effects were specific in time, frequency, and space, and we therefore propose that the pattern of synchronization flexibly determines the pattern of neuronal interactions.

Abstract

Words typically form the basis of psycholinguistic and computational linguistic studies about sentence processing. However, recent evidence shows the basic units during reading, i.e., the items in the mental lexicon, are not always words, but could also be sub-word and supra-word units. To recognize these units, human readers require a cognitive mechanism to learn and detect them. In this paper, we assume eye fixations during reading reveal the locations of the cognitive units, and that the cognitive units are analogous with the text units discovered by unsupervised segmentation models. We predict eye fixations by model-segmented units on both English and Dutch text. The results show the model-segmented units predict eye fixations better than word units. This finding suggests that the predictive performance of model-segmented units indicates their plausibility as cognitive units. The Less-is-Better (LiB) model, which finds the units that minimize both long-term and working memory load, offers advantages both in terms of prediction score and efficiency among alternative models. Our results also suggest that modeling the least-effort principle for the management of long-term and working memory can lead to inferring cognitive units. Overall, the study supports the theory that the mental lexicon stores not only words but also smaller and larger units, suggests that fixation locations during reading depend on these units, and shows that unsupervised segmentation models can discover these units.

Abstract

In the absence of explicitly marked cues to word boundaries, listeners tend to segment spoken English at the onset of strong syllables. This may suggest that under difficult listening conditions, speech should be easier to recognize where strong syllables are word-initial. We report two experiments in which listeners were presented with sentences which had been time-compressed to make listening difficult. The first study contrasted sentences in which all content words began with strong syllables with sentences in which all content words began with weak syllables. The intelligibility of the two groups of sentences did not differ significantly. Apparent rhythmic effects in the results prompted a second experiment; however, no significant effects of systematic rhythmic manipulation were observed. In both experiments, the strongest predictor of intelligibility was the rated plausibility of the sentences. We conclude that listeners' recognition responses to time-compressed speech may be strongly subject to experiential bias; effects of rhythmic structure are most likely to show up also as bias effects.

Abstract

L'A. étudie les corrélations entre structure syntaxique et fonction pragmatique dans les alternances de voix en akatek, une langue maya appartenant au sous-groupe Q'anjob'ala. Les alternances pragmatiques de voix sont les mécanismes par lesquels les langues encodent les différents degrés de topicalité des deux principaux participants d'un événement sémantiquement transitif, l'agent et le patient. A l'aide d'une analyse quantitative, l'A. évalue la topicalité de ces participants et identifie les structures syntaxiques permettant d'exprimer les quatre principales fonctions de voix en akatek : active-directe, inverse, passive et antipassive

Abstract

In sentence comprehension, the parser in many languages has the option to use both the morphological form of a noun and its lexical representation when evaluating agreement. The additional step of consulting the lexicon incurs processing costs, and an important question is whether the parser takes that step even when the formal cues alone are sufficiently reliable to evaluate agreement. Our study addressed this question using electrophysiology in Zulu, a language where both grammatical gender and number features are reliably expressed formally by noun class prefixes, but only gender features are lexically specified. We observed reduced, more topographically focal LAN, and more frontally distributed alpha/beta power effects for gender compared to number agreement violations. These differences provide evidence that for gender mismatches, even though the formal cues are reliable, the parser nevertheless takes the additional step of consulting the noun's lexical representation, a step which is not available for number.

Abstract

This article provides a first overview of some striking grammatical structures in Türk Idotscedilaret Dili (Turkish Sign Language, TID), the sign language used by the Deaf community in Turkey. The data are described with a typological perspective in mind, focusing on aspects of TID grammar that are typologically unusual across sign languages. After giving an overview of the historical, sociolinguistic and educational background of TID and the language community using this sign language, five domains of TID grammar are investigated in detail. These include a movement derivation signalling completive aspect, three types of nonmanual negation — headshake, backward head tilt, and puffed cheeks — and their distribution, cliticization of the negator NOT to a preceding predicate host sign, an honorific whole-entity classifier used to refer to humans, and a question particle, its history and current status in the language. A final evaluation points out the significance of these data for sign language research and looks at perspectives for a deeper understanding of the language and its history.

Abstract

This article reports on results from a broad crosslinguistic study based on data from thirty-five signed languages around the world. The study is the first of its kind, and the typological generalizations presented here cover the domain of interrogative structures as they appear across a wide range of geographically and genetically distinct signed languages. Manual and nonmanual ways of marking basic types of questions in signed languages are investigated. As a result, it becomes clear that the range of crosslinguistic variation is extensive for some subparameters, such as the structure of question-word paradigms, while other parameters, such as the use of nonmanual expressions in questions, show more similarities across signed languages. Finally, it is instructive to compare the findings from signed language typology to relevant data from spoken languages at a more abstract, crossmodality level.

Abstract

This article presents a typology of negative constructions across a substantial number of sign languages from around the globe. After situating the topic within the wider context of linguistic typology, the main negation strategies found across sign languages are described. Nonmanual negation includes the use of head movements and facial expressions for negation and is of great importance in sign languages as well as particularly interesting from a typological point of view. As far as manual signs are concerned, independent negative particles represent the dominant strategy, but there are also instances of irregular negation in most sign languages. Irregular negatives may take the form of suppletion, cliticisation, affixing, or internal modification of a sign. The results of the study lead to interesting generalisations about similarities and differences between negatives in signed and spoken languages.

Abstract

This study aimed to examine the locus of age of acquisition (AoA) and word frequency (WF) effects in Chinese spoken picture naming, using a picture–word interference task. We conducted four experiments manipulating the properties of picture names (AoA in Experiments 1 and 2, while controlling WF; and WF in Experiments 3 and 4, while controlling AoA), and the relations between distractors and targets (semantic or phonological relatedness). Both Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated AoA effects in picture naming; pictures of early acquired concepts were named faster than those acquired later. There was an interaction between AoA and semantic relatedness, but not between AoA and phonological relatedness, suggesting localisation of AoA effects at the stage of lexical access in picture naming. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrated WF effects: pictures of high-frequency concepts were named faster than those of low-frequency concepts. WF interacted with both phonological and semantic relatedness, suggesting localisation of WF effects at multiple levels of picture naming, including lexical access and phonological encoding. Our findings show that AoA and WF effects exist in Chinese spoken word production and may arise at related processes of lexical selection.

Abstract

Picture book reading is a common word-learning context from which parents repeatedly name objects to their child and it has been found to facilitate early word learning. To learn the correct word-object mappings in a book-reading context, infants need to be able to link what they see with what they hear. However, given multiple objects on every book page, it is not clear how infants direct their attention to objects named by parents. The aim of the current study is to examine how infants mechanistically discover the correct word-object mappings during book reading in real time. We used head-mounted eye-tracking during parent-infant picture book reading and measured the infant's moment-by-moment visual attention to the named referent. We also examined how gesture cues provided by both the child and the parent may influence infants' attention to the named target. We found that although parents provided many object labels during book reading, infants were not able to attend to the named objects easily. However, their abilities to follow and use gestures to direct the other social partner’s attention increase the chance of looking at the named target during parent naming.

Abstract

Background: The current study aims to investigate the association between the presence of a sibling and early childhood development (ECD). (2) Methods: Data were obtained from a large-scale population-based cohort in Shanghai. Children were followed from three to six years old. Based on birth order, the sample was divided into four groups: single child, younger child, elder child, and single-elder transfer (transfer from single-child to elder-child). Psychosocial well-being and school readiness were assessed with the total difficulties score from the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) and the overall development score from the early Human Capability Index (eHCI), respectively. A multilevel model was conducted to evaluate the main effect of each sibling group and the group × age interaction effect on psychosocial well-being and school readiness. (3) Results: Across all measures, children in the younger child group presented with lower psychosocial problems (β = −0.96, 95% CI: −1.44, −0.48, p < 0.001) and higher school readiness scores (β = 1.56, 95% CI: 0.61, 2.51, p = 0.001). No significant difference, or marginally significant difference, was found between the elder group and the single-child group. Compared to the single-child group, the single-elder transfer group presented with slower development on both psychosocial well-being (Age × Group: β = 0.37, 95% CI: 0.18, 0.56, p < 0.001) and school readiness (Age × Group: β = −0.75, 95% CI: −1.10, −0.40, p < 0.001). The sibling-ECD effects did not differ between children from families of low versus high socioeconomic status. (4) Conclusion: The current study suggested the presence of a sibling was not associated with worse development outcomes in general. Rather, children with an elder sibling are more likely to present with better ECD.

Abstract

Importance: Screen time has become an integral part of children's daily lives. Nevertheless, the developmental consequences of screen exposure in young children remain unclear.

Objective: To investigate the screen time trajectory from 6 to 72 months of age and its association with children's development at age 72 months in a prospective birth cohort.

Design, setting, and participants: Women in Shanghai, China, who were at 34 to 36 gestational weeks and had an expected delivery date between May 2012 and July 2013 were recruited for this cohort study. Their children were followed up at 6, 9, 12, 18, 24, 36, 48, and 72 months of age. Children's screen time was classified into 3 groups at age 6 months: continued low (ie, stable amount of screen time), late increasing (ie, sharp increase in screen time at age 36 months), and early increasing (ie, large amount of screen time in early stages that remained stable after age 36 months). Cognitive development was assessed by specially trained research staff in a research clinic. Of 262 eligible mother-offspring pairs, 152 dyads had complete data regarding all variables of interest and were included in the analyses. Data were analyzed from September 2019 to November 2021.

Exposures: Mothers reported screen times of children at 6, 9, 12, 18, 24, 36, 48, and 72 months of age.

Main outcomes and measures: The cognitive development of children was evaluated using the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, 4th edition, at age 72 months. Social-emotional development was measured by the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, which was completed by the child's mother. The study described demographic characteristics, maternal mental health, child's temperament at age 6 months, and mental development at age 12 months by subgroups clustered by a group-based trajectory model. Group difference was examined by analysis of variance.

Results: A total of 152 mother-offspring dyads were included in this study, including 77 girls (50.7%) and 75 boys (49.3%) (mean [SD] age of the mothers was 29.7 [3.3] years). Children's screen time trajectory from age 6 to 72 months was classified into 3 groups: continued low (110 [72.4%]), late increasing (17 [11.2%]), and early increasing (25 [16.4%]). Compared with the continued low group, the late increasing group had lower scores on the Full-Scale Intelligence Quotient (β coefficient, -8.23; 95% CI, -15.16 to -1.30; P < .05) and the General Ability Index (β coefficient, -6.42; 95% CI, -13.70 to 0.86; P = .08); the early increasing group presented with lower scores on the Full-Scale Intelligence Quotient (β coefficient, -6.68; 95% CI, -12.35 to -1.02; P < .05) and the Cognitive Proficiency Index (β coefficient, -10.56; 95% CI, -17.23 to -3.90; P < .01) and a higher total difficulties score (β coefficient, 2.62; 95% CI, 0.49-4.76; P < .05).

Conclusions and relevance: This cohort study found that excessive screen time in early years was associated with poor cognitive and social-emotional development. This finding may be helpful in encouraging awareness among parents of the importance of onset and duration of children's screen time.

Abstract

Genome-wide association studies using thousands to hundreds of thousands of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers and region-wide association studies using a dense panel of SNPs are already in use to identify disease susceptibility genes and to predict disease risk in individuals. Because these tasks become increasingly important, three different data sets were provided for the Genetic Analysis Workshop 15, thus allowing examination of various novel and existing data mining methods for both classification and identification of disease susceptibility genes, gene by gene or gene by environment interaction. The approach most often applied in this presentation group was random forests because of its simplicity, elegance, and robustness. It was used for prediction and for screening for interesting SNPs in a first step. The logistic tree with unbiased selection approach appeared to be an interesting alternative to efficiently select interesting SNPs. Machine learning, specifically ensemble methods, might be useful as pre-screening tools for large-scale association studies because they can be less prone to overfitting, can be less computer processor time intensive, can easily include pair-wise and higher-order interactions compared with standard statistical approaches and can also have a high capability for classification. However, improved implementations that are able to deal with hundreds of thousands of SNPs at a time are required.

Abstract

This paper constitutes a research proposal based on Rousse-Malpalt’s
(2019) dissertation, which extensively examines the effectiveness of the
Accelerative Integrated Method (AIM) in second language (L2) learning.
Although it has been found that AIM is a greatly effective method in comparison with non-implicit teaching methods, the reasons behind its success and effectiveness are yet unknown. As Semantic Memory (SM) is the component of memory responsible for the conceptualization and storage of knowledge, this paper sets to propose an investigation of its role in the learning process of AIM and provide with insights as to why the embodied experience of learning with AIM is more effective than others. The tasks proposed for administration take into account the factors of gestures being related to a learner’s memorization process and Semantic Memory. Lastly, this paper provides with a future research idea about the learning mechanisms of sign languages in people with hearing deficits and healthy population, aiming to indicate which brain mechanisms benefit from the teaching method of AIM and reveal important brain functions for SLA via AIM.

Abstract

The interplay between categorical and continuous aspects of the speech signal remains central and yet controversial in the fields of phonetics and phonology. The division between phonological abstractions and phonetic variations has been particularly relevant to the unraveling of diverse communicative functions of pitch in the domain of prosody. Pitch influences vocal communication in two major but fundamentally different ways, and lexical and intonational tones exquisitely capture these functions. Lexical tone contrasts convey lexical meanings as well as derivational meanings at the word level and are grammatically encoded as discrete structures. Intonational tones, on the other hand, signal post-lexical meanings at the phrasal level and typically allow gradient pragmatic variations. Since categorical and gradient uses of pitch are ubiquitous and closely intertwined in their physiological and psychological processes, further research is warranted for a more detailed understanding of their structural and functional characterisations. This Research Topic addresses this matter from a wide range of perspectives, including first and second language acquisition, speech production and perception, structural and functional diversity, and working with distinct languages and experimental measures. In the following, we provide a short overview of the contributions submitted to this topic

Abstract

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

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that components in a set of simple signs in Nederlandse Gebarentaal (also called Sign Language of the Netherlands; henceforth: NGT), i.e. hand configuration (including orientation), movement and place of articulation, can also have morphological status. Evidence for this is provided by: firstly, the fact that handshape, orientation, movement and place of articulation show regular meaningful patterns in signs, which patterns also occur in newly formed signs, and secondly, the gradual change of formerly noninflecting predicates into inflectional predicates. The morphological complexity of signs can best be accounted for in autosegmental morphological templates.

Abstract

Although in many respects sign languages have a similar structure to that of spoken languages, the different modalities in which both types of languages are expressed cause differences in structure as well. One of the most striking differences between spoken and sign languages is the influence of the interface between grammar and PF on the surface form of utterances. Spoken language words and phrases are in general characterized by sequential strings of sounds, morphemes and words, while in sign languages we find that many phonemes, morphemes, and even words are expressed simultaneously. A linguistic model should be able to account for the structures that occur in both spoken and sign languages. In this paper, I will discuss the morphological/ morphosyntactic structure of signs in Nederlandse Gebarentaal (Sign Language of the Netherlands, henceforth NGT), with special focus on the components ‘place of articulation’ and ‘handshape’. I will focus on their multiple functions in the grammar of NGT and argue that the framework of Distributed Morphology (DM), which accounts for word formation in spoken languages, is also suited to account for the formation of structures in sign languages. First I will introduce the phonological and morphological structure of NGT signs. Then, I will briefly outline the major characteristics of the DM framework. Finally, I will account for signs that have the same surface form but have a different morphological structure by means of that framework.