Publications

Abstract

Speech comprehension is resistant to acoustic distortion in the input, reflecting listeners' ability to adjust perceptual processes to match the speech input. This adjustment is reflected in improved comprehension of distorted speech with experience. For noise vocoding, a manipulation that removes spectral detail from speech, listeners' word report showed a significantly greater improvement over trials for listeners that heard clear speech presentations before rather than after hearing distorted speech (clear-then-distorted compared with distorted-then-clear feedback, in Experiment 1). This perceptual learning generalized to untrained words suggesting a sublexical locus for learning and was equivalent for word and nonword training stimuli (Experiment 2). These findings point to the crucial involvement of phonological short-term memory and top-down processes in the perceptual learning of noise-vocoded speech. Similar processes may facilitate comprehension of speech in an unfamiliar accent or following cochlear implantation.

Abstract

Two eyetracking experiments tested for activation of category coordinate and perceptually related concepts when speakers prepare the name of an object. Speakers saw four visual objects in a 2 × 2 array and identified and named a target picture on the basis of either category (e.g., "What is the name of the musical instrument?") or visual-form (e.g., "What is the name of the circular object?") instructions. There were more fixations on visual-form competitors and category coordinate competitors than on unrelated objects during name preparation, but the increased overt attention did not affect naming latencies. The data demonstrate that eye movements are a sensitive measure of the overlap between the conceptual (including visual-form) information that is accessed in preparation for word production and the conceptual knowledge associated with visual objects. Furthermore, these results suggest that semantic activation of competitor concepts does not necessarily affect lexical selection, contrary to the predictions of lexical-selection-by-competition accounts (e.g., Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999).

Abstract

Recent studies have detailed a remarkable degree of genetic and linguistic diversity in Northern Island Melanesia. Here we utilize that diversity to examine two models of genetic and linguistic coevolution. The first model predicts that genetic and linguistic correspondences formed following population splits and isolation at the time of early range expansions into the region. The second is analogous to the genetic model of isolation by distance, and it predicts that genetic and linguistic correspondences formed through continuing genetic and linguistic exchange between neighboring populations. We tested the predictions of the two models by comparing observed and simulated patterns of genetic variation, genetic and linguistic trees, and matrices of genetic, linguistic, and geographic distances. The data consist of 751 autosomal microsatellites and 108 structural linguistic features collected from 33 Northern Island Melanesian populations. The results of the tests indicate that linguistic and genetic exchange have erased any evidence of a splitting and isolation process that might have occurred early in the settlement history of the region. The correlation patterns are also inconsistent with the predictions of the isolation by distance coevolutionary process in the larger Northern Island Melanesian region, but there is strong evidence for the process in the rugged interior of the largest island in the region (New Britain). There we found some of the strongest recorded correlations between genetic, linguistic, and geographic distances. We also found that, throughout the region, linguistic features have generally been less likely to diffuse across population boundaries than genes. The results from our study, based on exceptionally fine-grained data, show that local genetic and linguistic exchange are likely to obscure evidence of the early history of a region, and that language barriers do not particularly hinder genetic exchange. In contrast, global patterns may emphasize more ancient demographic events, including population splits associated with the early colonization of major world regions.

Abstract

Time is a fundamental aspect of human cognition and action. All languages have developed rich means to express various facets of time, such as bare time spans, their position on the time line, or their duration. The articles in this volume give an overview of what we know about the neural and cognitive representations of time that speakers can draw on in language. Starting with an overview of the main devices used to encode time in natural language, such as lexical elements, tense and aspect, the research presented in this volume addresses the relationship between temporal language, culture, and thought, the relationship between verb aspect and mental simulations of events, the development of temporal concepts, time perception, the storage and retrieval of temporal information in autobiographical memory, and neural correlates of tense processing and sequence planning. The psychological and neurobiological findings presented here will provide important insights to inform and extend current studies of time in language and in language acquisition.

Abstract

Time is a fundamental aspect of human cognition and action. All languages have developed rich means to express various facets of time, such as bare time spans, their position on the time line, or their duration. The articles in this volume give an overview of what we know about the neural and cognitive representations of time that speakers can draw on in language. Starting with an overview of the main devices used to encode time in natural language, such as lexical elements, tense and aspect, the research presented in this volume addresses the relationship between temporal language, culture, and thought, the relationship between verb aspect and mental simulations of events, the development of temporal concepts, time perception, the storage and retrieval of temporal information in autobiographical memory, and neural correlates of tense processing and sequence planning. The psychological and neurobiological findings presented here will provide important insights to inform and extend current studies of time in language and in language acquisition.

Abstract

Clahsen's characterization of nondefault inflection as based exclusively on lexical entries does not capture the full range of empirical data on German inflection. In the verb system differential effects of lexical frequency seem to be input-related rather than affecting morphological production. In the noun system, the generalization properties of -n and -e plurals exceed mere analogy-based productivity.

Abstract

Thesaurus alignment plays an important role in realising efficient access to heterogeneous Cultural Heritage data. Current ontology alignment techniques, however, provide only limited value for such access as they consider little if any requirements from realistic use cases or application scenarios. In this paper, we focus on two real-world scenarios in a library context: thesaurus merging and book re-indexing. We identify their particular requirements and describe our approach of deploying and evaluating thesaurus alignment techniques in this context. We have applied our approach for the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative, and report on the performance evaluation of participants’ tools wrt. the application scenario at hand. It shows that evaluations of tools requires significant effort, but when done carefully, brings many benefits.

Abstract

Two studies were carried out to investigate the effects of presentation of primes showing partial (word-initial) or full overlap on processing of spoken target words. The first study investigated whether time compression would interfere with lexical processing so as to elicit aphasic-like performance in non-brain-damaged subjects. The second study was designed to compare effects of item overlap and item repetition in aphasic patients of different diagnostic types. Time compression did not interfere with lexical deactivation for the non-brain-damaged subjects. Furthermore, all aphasic patients showed immediate inhibition of co-activated candidates. These combined results show that deactivation is a fast process. Repetition effects, however, seem to arise only at the longer term in aphasic patients. Importantly, poor performance on diagnostic verbal STM tasks was shown to be related to lexical decision performance in both overlap and repetition conditions, which suggests a common underlying deficit.

Abstract

Landmarks play an important role in successful navigation. To successfully find your way around an environment, navigationally relevant information needs to be stored and become available at later moments in time. Evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies shows that the human parahippocampal gyrus encodes the navigational relevance of landmarks. In the present event-related fMRI experiment, we investigated memory consolidation of navigationally relevant landmarks in the medial temporal lobe after route learning. Sixteen right-handed volunteers viewed two film sequences through a virtual museum with objects placed at locations relevant (decision points) or irrelevant (nondecision points) for navigation. To investigate consolidation effects, one film sequence was seen in the evening before scanning, the other one was seen the following morning, directly before scanning. Event-related fMRI data were acquired during an object recognition task. Participants decided whether they had seen the objects in the previously shown films. After scanning, participants answered standardized questions about their navigational skills, and were divided into groups of good and bad navigators, based on their scores. An effect of memory consolidation was obtained in the hippocampus: Objects that were seen the evening before scanning (remote objects) elicited more activity than objects seen directly before scanning (recent objects). This increase in activity in bilateral hippocampus for remote objects was observed in good navigators only. In addition, a spatial-specific effect of memory consolidation for navigationally relevant objects was observed in the parahippocampal gyrus. Remote decision point objects induced increased activity as compared with recent decision point objects, again in good navigators only. The results provide initial evidence for a connection between memory consolidation and navigational ability that can provide a basis for successful navigation.

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

Each clause and phrase boundary necessarily aligns with a word boundary. Thus, infants’ attention to the edges of clauses and phrases may help them learn some of the language-specific cues defining word boundaries. Attention to prosodically wellformed clauses and phrases may also help infants begin to extract information important for learning the grammatical structure of their language. Despite the potentially important role that the perception of large prosodic units may play in early language acquisition, there has been little work investigating the extraction of these units from fluent speech by infants learning languages other than English. We report 2 experiments investigating Dutch learners’ clause segmentation abilities.In these studies, Dutch-learning 6-month-olds readily extract clauses from speech. However, Dutch learners differ from English learners in that they seem to be more reliant on pauses to detect clause boundaries. Two closely related explanations for this finding are considered, both of which stem from the acoustic differences in clause boundary realizations in Dutch versus English.

Abstract

We present an overview of several corpus studies we carried out into the frequencies of argument NP orderings in the midfield of subordinate and main clauses of German. Comparing the corpus frequencies with grammaticality ratings published by Keller’s (2000), we observe a “grammaticality–frequency gap”: Quite a few argument orderings with zero corpus frequency are nevertheless assigned medium–range grammaticality ratings. We propose an explanation in terms of a two-factor theory. First, we hypothesize that the grammatical induction component needs a sufficient number of exposures to a syntactic pattern to incorporate it into its repertoire of more or less stable rules of grammar. Moderately to highly frequent argument NP orderings are likely have attained this status, but not their zero-frequency counterparts. This is why the latter argument sequences cannot be produced by the grammatical encoder and are absent from the corpora. Secondly, we assumed that an extraneous (nonlinguistic) judgment process biases the ratings of moderately grammatical linear order patterns: Confronted with such structures, the informants produce their own “ideal delivery” variant of the to-be-rated target sentence and evaluate the similarity between the two versions. A high similarity score yielded by this judgment then exerts a positive bias on the grammaticality rating—a score that should not be mistaken for an authentic grammaticality rating. We conclude that, at least in the linearization domain studied here, the goal of gaining a clear view of the internal grammar of language users is best served by a combined strategy in which grammar rules are founded on structures that elicit moderate to high grammaticality ratings and attain at least moderate usage frequencies.

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

Two Event-Related Potential (ERP) studies contrast the processing of locally ambiguous sentences in the visual and the auditory modality. These sentences are disambiguated by a lexical element. Before this element appears in a sentence, the sentence can also be disambiguated by a boundary marker: a comma in the visual modality, or a prosodic break in the auditory modality. Previous studies have shown that a specific ERP component, the Closure Positive Shift (CPS), can be elicited by these markers. The results of the present studies show that both the comma and the prosodic break disambiguate the ambiguous sentences before the critical lexical element, despite the fact that a clear CPS is only found in the auditory modality. Comma and prosodic break thus have parallel functions irrespective of whether they do or do not elicit a CPS.

Abstract

Functional imaging studies have demonstrated involvement of the anterior temporal cortex in sentence comprehension. It is unclear, however, whether the anterior temporal cortex is essential for this function.We studied two aspects of sentence comprehension, namely syntactic and prosodic comprehension in temporal lobe epilepsy patients who were candidates for resection of the anterior temporal lobe. Methods: Temporal lobe epilepsy patients (n = 32) with normal (left) language dominance were tested on syntactic and prosodic comprehension before and after removal of the anterior temporal cortex. The prosodic comprehension test was also compared with performance of healthy control subjects (n = 47) before surgery. Results: Overall, temporal lobe epilepsy patients did not differ from healthy controls in syntactic and prosodic comprehension before surgery. They did perform less well on an affective prosody task. Post-operative testing revealed that syntactic and prosodic comprehension did not change after removal of the anterior temporal cortex. Discussion: The unchanged performance on syntactic and prosodic comprehension after removal of the anterior temporal cortex suggests that this area is not indispensable for sentence comprehension functions in temporal epilepsy patients. Potential implications for the postulated role of the anterior temporal lobe in the healthy brain are discussed.

Abstract

The present article reports on an investigation of one child's acquisition of the multiple senses of the preposition with from 2;0–4;0. Two competing claims regarding children's early representation and subsequent acquisition of with were investigated. The “multiple meanings” hypothesis predicts that children form individual form-meaning pairings for with as separate lexical entries. The “monosemy approach” (McKercher 2001) claims that children apply a unitary meaning by abstracting core features early in acquisition. The child's (“Brian”) speech and his input were coded according to eight distinguishable senses of with. The results showed that Brian first acquired the senses that were most frequent in the input (accompaniment, attribute, and instrument). Less common senses took much longer to emerge. A detailed analysis of the input showed that a variety of clues are available that potentially enable the child to distinguish among high frequency senses. The acquisition data suggested that the child initially applied a restricted one-to-one form-meaning mapping for with, which is argued to reflect the spatial properties of the preposition. On the basis of these results it is argued that neither the monosemy nor the multiple meanings approach can fully explain the data, but that the results are best explained by a combination of word learning principles and children's ability to categorize the contextual properties of each sense's use in the ambient language.

Abstract

Hartshorne and Ullman (2006) presented naturalistic language data from 25 children (15 boys, 10 girls) and showed that girls produced more past tense overregularization errors than did boys. In particular, girls were more likely to overregularize irregular verbs whose stems share phonological similarities with regular verbs. It was argued that the result supported the Declarative/Procedural model of language, a neuropsychological analogue of the dual-route approach to language. In the current study we present experimental data that are inconsistent with these naturalistic data. Eighty children (40 males, 40 females) aged 5;0–6;9 completed a past tense elicitation task, a test of declarative memory, and a test of non-verbal intelligence. The results revealed no sex differences on any of the measures. Instead, the best predictors of overregularization rates were item-level features of the test verbs. We discuss the results within the context of dual versus single route debate on past tense acquisition

Abstract

To segment continuous speech into its component words, listeners make use of language rhythm; because rhythm differs across languages, so do the segmentation procedures which listeners use. For each of stress-, syllable-and mora-based rhythmic structure, perceptual experiments have led to the discovery of corresponding segmentation procedures. In the case of mora-based rhythm, similar segmentation has been demonstrated in the otherwise unrelated languages Japanese and Telugu; segmentation based on syllable rhythm, however, has been previously demonstrated only for European languages from the Romance family. We here report two target detection experiments in which Korean listeners, presented with speech in Korean and in French, displayed patterns of segmentation like those previously observed in analogous experiments with French listeners. The Korean listeners' accuracy in detecting word-initial target fragments in either language was significantly higher when the fragments corresponded exactly to a syllable in the input than when the fragments were smaller or larger than a syllable. We conclude that Korean and French listeners can call on similar procedures for segmenting speech, and we further propose that perceptual tests of speech segmentation provide a valuable accompaniment to acoustic analyses for establishing languages' rhythmic class membership.

Abstract

There are two core phenomena which any empirical investigation of beauty must account for: the existence of aesthetical experience, and the enormous variability of this experience across times, cultures, people. Hence, it would seem a hopeless enterprise to determine ‘the very nature’ of beauty, and in fact, none of the many attempts from the Antiquity to present days found general acceptance. But what we should be able to investigate and understand is how properties of people, for example their varying cultural experiences, are correlated with the properties of objects which we evaluate. Beauty is neither only in the eye of the observer nor only in the objects which it sees - it is in the way in which specific observers see specific objects.

Abstract

In the first, critical part of this study, a small sample of simple German sentences with their empirically determined pitch contours is used to demonstrate the incorrectness of numerous currently hold views of German sentence intonation. In the second, more constructive part, several interrogative sentence types are analysed and an attempt is made to show that intonation, besides other functions, indicates the permantently changing 'thematic score' in on-going discourse as well as certain validity claims.

Abstract

All disciplines depend on language; but two of them also have language as an object – literary studies and linguistics. Their objectives are not the same – but they are sufficiently similar to invite close cooperation. This is not what we find; in fact, the development of research over the last decades has led to a relationship which is, in the typical case, characterised by friendly, and sometimes less friendly, ignorance and indifference. This article discusses some of the reasons for this development, and it suggests some conditions under which both sides would benefit from more cooperation.

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between the acoustic duration of phonemic sequences and their frequencies of occurrence. The data were obtained from large (sub)corpora of spontaneous speech in Dutch, English, German, and Italian. Acoustic duration of an n-phone is shown to codetermine the n-phone's frequency of use, such that languages preferentially use diphones and triphones that are neither very long nor very short. The observed distributions are well approximated by a theoretical function that quantifies the concurrent action of the self-regulatory processes of minimization of articulatory effort and minimization of perception effort

Abstract

How humans understand the intention of others’ actions remains controversial. Some authors have suggested that intentions are recognized by means of a motor simulation of the observed action with the mirror-neuron system [1–3]. Others emphasize that intention recognition is an inferential process, often called ‘‘mentalizing’’ or employing a ‘‘theory of mind,’’ which activates areas well outside the motor system [4–6]. Here, we assessed the contribution of brain regions involved in motor simulation and mentalizing for understanding action intentions via functional brain imaging. Results show that the inferior frontal gyrus (part of the mirror-neuron system) processes the intentionality of an observed action on the basis of the visual properties of the action, irrespective of whether the subject paid attention to the intention or not. Conversely, brain areas that are part of a ‘‘mentalizing’’ network become active when subjects reflect about the intentionality of an observed action, but they are largely insensitive to the visual properties of the observed action. This supports the hypothesis that motor simulation and mentalizing have distinct but complementary functions for the recognition of others’ intentions.

Abstract

Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is a disabling disorder, characterized by persistent or relapsing fatigue. Recent studies have detected a decrease in cortical grey matter volume in patients with CFS, but it is unclear whether this cerebral atrophy constitutes a cause or a consequence of the disease. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is an effective behavioural intervention for CFS, which combines a rehabilitative approach of a graded increase in physical activity with a psychological approach that addresses thoughts and beliefs about CFS which may impair recovery. Here, we test the hypothesis that cerebral atrophy may be a reversible state that can ameliorate with successful CBT. We have quantified cerebral structural changes in 22 CFS patients that underwent CBT and 22 healthy control participants. At baseline, CFS patients had significantly lower grey matter volume than healthy control participants. CBT intervention led to a significant improvement in health status, physical activity and cognitive performance. Crucially, CFS patients showed a significant increase in grey matter volume, localized in the lateral prefrontal cortex. This change in cerebral volume was related to improvements in cognitive speed in the CFS patients. Our findings indicate that the cerebral atrophy associated with CFS is partially reversed after effective CBT. This result provides an example of macroscopic cortical plasticity in the adult human brain, demonstrating a surprisingly dynamic relation between behavioural state and cerebral anatomy. Furthermore, our results reveal a possible neurobiological substrate of psychotherapeutic treatment.

Abstract

Kanazawa (2007) proposes the ‘evolutionary psychological imagination’ (p.7) as an authoritative framework for understanding complex social and public issues. As a case study of this approach, Kanazawa addresses acts of international terrorism, specifically suicide bombings committed by Muslim men. It is proposed that a comprehensive explanation of such acts can be gained from taking an evolutionary perspective armed with only three points of cultural knowledge: 1. Muslims are exceptionally polygynous, 2. Muslim men believe they will gain reproductive access to 72 virgins if they die as a martyr and 3. Muslim men have limited access to pornography, which might otherwise relieve the tension built up from intra-sexual competition. We agree with Kanazawa that evolutionary models of human behaviour can contribute to our understanding of even the most complex social issues. However, Kanazawa’s case study, of what he refers to as ‘World War III’, rests on a flawed theoretical argument, lacks empirical backing, and holds little in the way of explanatory power.

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

The order of acquisition of Dutch syllable types by first language learners is analyzed as following from an initial ranking and subsequent rerankings of constraints in an optimality theoretic grammar. Initially, structural constraints are all ranked above faithfulness constraints, leading to core syllable (CV) productions only. Subsequently, faithfulness gradually rises to the highest position in the ranking, allowing more and more marked syllable types to appear in production. Local conjunctions of Structural constraints allow for a more detailed analysis.

Abstract

Preparing words in speech production is normally a fast and accurate process. We generate them two or three per second in fluent conversation; and overtly naming a clear picture of an object can easily be initiated within 600 msec after picture onset. The underlying process, however, is exceedingly complex. The theory reviewed in this target article analyzes this process as staged and feedforward. After a first stage of conceptual preparation, word generation proceeds through lexical selection, morphological and phonological encoding, phonetic encoding, and articulation itself. In addition, the speaker exerts some degree of output control, by monitoring of self-produced internal and overt speech. The core of the theory, ranging from lexical selection to the initiation of phonetic encoding, is captured in a computational model, called WEAVER + +. Both the theory and the computational model have been developed in interaction with reaction time experiments, particularly in picture naming or related word production paradigms, with the aim of accounting. for the real-time processing in normal word production. A comprehensive review of theory, model, and experiments is presented. The model can handle some of the main observations in the domain of speech errors (the major empirical domain for most other theories of lexical access), and the theory opens new ways of approaching the cerebral organization of speech production by way of high-temporal-resolution imaging.

Abstract

Contains: Vol. 1 An introduction to the theory of formal languages and automata Vol. 2 Applications in linguistic theory Vol. 3 Psycholinguistic applications

Abstract

Research on spoken word production has been approached from two angles. In one research tradition, the analysis of spontaneous or induced speech errors led to models that can account for speech error distributions. In another tradition, the measurement of picture naming latencies led to chronometric models accounting for distributions of reaction times in word production. Both kinds of models are, however, dealing with the same underlying processes: (1) the speaker’s selection of a word that is semantically and syntactically appropriate; (2) the retrieval of the word’s phonological properties; (3) the rapid syllabification of the word in context; and (4) the preparation of the corresponding articulatory gestures. Models of both traditions explain these processes in terms of activation spreading through a localist, symbolic network. By and large, they share the main levels of representation: conceptual/semantic, syntactic, phonological and phonetic. They differ in various details, such as the amount of cascading and feedback in the network. These research traditions have begun to merge in recent years, leading to highly constructive experimentation. Currently, they are like two similar knives honing each other. A single pair of scissors is in the making.

Abstract

The topic of this paper is the way in which speakers order information in discourse. I will refer to this issue with the term "linearization", and will begin with two types of general remarks. The first one concerns the scope and relevance of the problem with reference to some existing literature. The second set of general remarks will be about the place of linearization in a theory of the speaker. The following, and main part of this paper, will be a summary report of research of linearization in a limited, but well-defined domain of discourse, namely the description of spatial networks.

Abstract

Speakers tend to repeat materials from previous talk. This tendency is experimentally established and manipulated in various question-answering situations. It is shown that a question's surface form can affect the format of the answer given, even if this form has little semantic or conversational consequence, as in the pair Q: (At) what time do you close. A: “(At)five o'clock.” Answerers tend to match the utterance to the prepositional (nonprepositional) form of the question. This “correspondence effect” may diminish or disappear when, following the question, additional verbal material is presented to the answerer. The experiments show that neither the articulatory buffer nor long-term memory is normally involved in this retention of recent speech. Retaining recent speech in working memory may fulfill a variety of functions for speaker and listener, among them the correct production and interpretation of surface anaphora. Reusing recent materials may, moreover, be more economical than regenerating speech anew from a semantic base, and thus contribute to fluency. But the realization of this strategy requires a production system in which linguistic formulation can take place relatively independent of, and parallel to, conceptual planning.

Abstract

Demonstratives are key items in understanding how a language constructs and interprets spatial relationships. They are also multi-functional, with applications to non-spatial deictic fields such as time, perception, person and discourse, and uses in anaphora and affect marking. This item consists of an overview of theoretical distinctions in demonstrative systems, followed by a set of practical queries and elicitation suggestions for demonstratives in “table top” space, wider spatial fields, and naturalistic data.

Abstract

This paper describes the descriptive landscape and seascape terminology of an isolate language, Yélî Dnye, spoken on a remote island off Papua New Guinea. The terminology reveals an ontology of landscape terms fundamentally mismatching that in European languages, and in current GIS applications. These landscape terms, and a rich set of seascape terms, provide the ontological basis for toponyms across subdomains. Considering what motivates landscape categorization, three factors are considered: perceptual salience, human affordance and use, and cultural ideas. The data show that cultural ideas and practices are the major categorizing force: they directly impact the ecology with environmental artifacts, construct religious ideas which play a major role in the use of the environment and its naming, and provide abstract cultural templates which organize large portions of vocabulary across subdomains.

Abstract

The world’s languages encode a diverse range of topological relations. However, cross-linguistic investigation suggests that the relations IN, AT and ON are especially fundamental to the grammaticised expression of space. The purpose of this questionnaire is to collect information about adpositions, case markers, and spatial nominals that are involved in the expression of core IN/AT/ON meanings. The task explores the more general parts of a language’s topological system, with a view to testing certain hypotheses about the packaging of spatial concepts. The questionnaire consists of target translation sentences that focus on a number of dimensions including animacy, caused location and motion.

Abstract

Languages differ widely in terms of how they encode the fundamental concepts of location and position. For some languages, verbs have an important role to play in describing situations (e.g., whether a bottle is standing or lying on the table); for others, verbs are not used in describing location at all. This item outlines certain hypotheses concerning four “types” of languages: those that have verbless basic locatives; those that use a single verb; those that have several verbs available to express location; and those that use positional verbs. The document was originally published as an appendix to the 'Picture series for positional verbs' (https://doi.org/10.17617/2.2573831).

Abstract

Chinese translation of the 2003 publication.

Abstract

This entry contains: 1. An invitation to think about to what extent the grammar of space and time share lexical and morphosyntactic resources − the suggestions here are only prompts, since it would take a long questionnaire to fully explore this; 2. A suggestion about how to collect gestural data that might show us to what extent the spatial and temporal domains, have a psychological continuity. This is really the goal − but you need to do the linguistic work first or in addition. The goal of this task is to explore the extent to which time is conceptualised on a spatial basis.

Abstract

In the current study we investigated whether 12-month-old infants gesture appropriately for knowledgeable versus ignorant partners, in order to provide them with needed information. In two experiments we found that in response to a searching adult, 12-month-olds pointed more often to an object whose location the adult did not know and thus needed information to find (she had not seen it fall down just previously) than to an object whose location she knew and thus did not need information to find (she had watched it fall down just previously). These results demonstrate that, in contrast to classic views of infant communication, infants’ early pointing at 12 months is already premised on an understanding of others’ knowledge and ignorance, along with a prosocial motive to help others by providing needed information.

Abstract

This paper investigates the social-cognitive and motivational complexities underlying prelinguistic infants' gestural communication. With regard to deictic referential gestures, new and recent experimental evidence shows that infant pointing is a complex communicative act based on social-cognitive skills and cooperative motives. With regard to infant representational gestures, findings suggest the need to re-interpret these gestures as initially non-symbolic gestural social acts. Based on the available empirical evidence, the paper argues that deictic referential communication emerges as a foundation of human communication first in gestures, already before language. Representational symbolic communication, instead, emerges as a transformation of deictic communication first in the vocal modality and, perhaps, in gestures through non-symbolic, socially situated routines.

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

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.