Publications

Abstract

Statistical learning plays a key role in language processing, e.g., for speech segmentation. Older adults have been reported to show less statistical learning on the basis of visual input than younger adults. Given age-related changes in perception and cognition, we investigated whether statistical learning is also impaired in the auditory modality in older compared to younger adults and whether individual learning ability is associated with measures of perceptual (i.e., hearing sensitivity) and cognitive functioning in both age groups. Thirty younger and thirty older adults performed an auditory artificial-grammar-learning task to assess their statistical learning ability. In younger adults, perceptual effort came at the cost of processing resources required for learning. Inhibitory control (as indexed by Stroop colornaming performance) did not predict auditory learning. Overall, younger and older adults showed the same amount of auditory learning, indicating that statistical learning ability is preserved over the adult life span.

Abstract

This paper studies the influence of adverse listening conditions on exemplar effects in priming experiments that do not instruct participants to use their episodic memories. We conducted two lexical decision experiments, in which a prime and a target represented the same word type and could be spoken by the same or a different speaker. In Experiment 1, participants listened to clear speech, and showed no exemplar effects: they recognised repetitions by the same speaker as quickly as different speaker repetitions. In Experiment 2, the stimuli contained noise, and exemplar effects did arise. Importantly, Experiment 1 elicited longer average RTs than Experiment 2, a result that contradicts the time-course hypothesis, according to which exemplars only play a role when processing is slow. Instead, our findings support the hypothesis that exemplar effects arise under adverse listening conditions, when participants are stimulated to use their episodic memories in addition to their mental lexicons.

Abstract

Natural sign languages and gestures are complex communicative systems that allow the incorporation of features of a referent into their structure. They differ, however, in that signs are more conventionalised because they consist of meaningless phonological parameters. There is some evidence that despite non-signers finding iconic signs more memorable they can have more difficulty at articulating their exact phonological components. In the present study, hearing non-signers took part in a sign repetition task in which they had to imitate as accurately as possible a set of iconic and arbitrary signs. Their renditions showed that iconic signs were articulated significantly less accurately than arbitrary signs. Participants were recalled six months later to take part in a sign generation task. In this task, participants were shown the English translation of the iconic signs they imitated six months prior. For each word, participants were asked to generate a sign (i.e., an iconic gesture). The handshapes produced in the sign repetition and sign generation tasks were compared to detect instances in which both renditions presented the same configuration. There was a significant correlation between articulation accuracy in the sign repetition task and handshape overlap. These results suggest some form of gestural interference in the production of iconic signs by hearing non-signers. We also suggest that in some instances non-signers may deploy their own conventionalised gesture when producing some iconic signs. These findings are interpreted as evidence that non-signers process iconic signs as gestures and that in production, only when sign and gesture have overlapping features will they be capable of producing the phonological components of signs accurately.

Abstract

In this paper we try to contribute to the body of knowledge about the acquisition of English epistemic modal verbs (e.g. Mary may/has to be at school). Semantically, these verbs encode possibility or necessity with respect to available evidence. Pragmatically, the use of epistemic modals often gives rise to scalar conversational inferences (Mary may be at school -> Mary doesn’t have to be at school). The acquisition of epistemic modals is challenging for children on both these levels. In this paper, we present findings from two studies which were conducted with 5-year-old children and adults. Our findings, unlike previous work, show that 5-yr-olds have mastered epistemic modal semantics, including the notions of necessity and possibility. However, they are still in the process of acquiring epistemic modal pragmatics.

Abstract

In everyday communication, people not only use speech but
also hand gestures to convey information. One intriguing
question in gesture research has been why gestures take the
specific form they do. Previous research has identified the
speaker-gesturer’s communicative intent as one factor
shaping the form of iconic gestures. Here we investigate
whether communicative intent also shapes the form of
pointing gestures. In an experimental setting, twenty-four
participants produced pointing gestures identifying a referent
for an addressee. The communicative intent of the speakergesturer
was manipulated by varying the informativeness of
the pointing gesture. A second independent variable was the
presence or absence of concurrent speech. As a function of their communicative intent and irrespective of the presence of speech, participants varied the durations of the stroke and the post-stroke hold-phase of their gesture. These findings add to our understanding of how the communicative context influences the form that a gesture takes.

Abstract

Comprehension of pointing gestures is fundamental to human communication. However, the neural mechanisms
that subserve the integration of pointing gestures and speech in visual contexts in comprehension
are unclear. Here we present the results of an fMRI study in which participants watched images of an
actor pointing at an object while they listened to her referential speech. The use of a mismatch paradigm
revealed that the semantic unication of pointing gesture and speech in a triadic context recruits left
inferior frontal gyrus. Complementing previous ndings, this suggests that left inferior frontal gyrus
semantically integrates information across modalities and semiotic domains.

Abstract

Natural speech involves repair. These repairs are often highlighted through prosodic marking (Levelt & Cutler, 1983). Prosodic marking usually entails an increase in pitch, loudness, and/or duration that draws attention to the corrected word. While it is established that natural self-repairs typically elicit prosodic marking, the exact cause of this is unclear. This study investigates whether producing a prosodic marking emerges from an automatic correction process or has a communicative purpose. In the current study, we elicit corrections to test whether all self-corrections elicit prosodic marking. Participants carried out a picture-naming task in which they described two images presented on-screen. To prompt self-correction, the second image was altered in some cases, requiring participants to abandon their initial utterance and correct their description to match the new image. This manipulation was compared to a control condition in which only the orientation of the object would change, eliciting no self-correction while still presenting a visual change. We found that the replacement of the item did not elicit a prosodic marking, regardless of the type of change. Theoretical implications and research directions are discussed, in particular theories of prosodic planning.

Abstract

En este artículo se desarrolla un método automático de segmentación de fonemas no supervisado. Este método utiliza el algoritmo de agrupación de máximo margen [1] para realizar segmentación de fonemas sobre habla continua sin necesidad de información a priori para el entrenamiento del sistema.

Abstract

From an early age, people exhibit strong links between certain visual (e.g. size) and acoustic (e.g. duration) dimensions. Do people instinctively extend these crossmodal correspondences to vocalization? We examine the ability of congenitally deaf Chinese children and young adults (age M = 12.4 years, SD = 3.7 years) to generate iconic vocalizations to distinguish items with contrasting magnitude (e.g., big vs. small ball). Both deaf and hearing (M = 10.1 years, SD = 0.83 years) participants produced longer, louder vocalizations for greater magnitude items. However, only hearing participants used pitch—higher pitch for greater magnitude – which counters the hypothesized, innate size “frequency code”, but fits with Mandarin language and culture. Thus our results show that the translation of visible magnitude into the duration and intensity of vocalization transcends auditory experience, whereas the use of pitch appears more malleable to linguistic and cultural influence.

Abstract

Scholars have documented substantial classes of iconic vocabulary in many non-Indo-European languages. In comparison, Indo-European languages like English are assumed to be arbitrary outside of a small number of onomatopoeic words. In three experiments, we asked English speakers to rate the iconicity of words from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventory. We found English—contrary to common belief—exhibits iconicity that correlates with age of acquisition and differs across lexical classes. Words judged as most iconic are learned earlier, in accord with findings that iconic words are easier to learn. We also find that adjectives and verbs are more iconic than nouns, supporting the idea that iconicity provides an extra cue in learning more difficult abstract meanings. Our results provide new evidence for a relationship between iconicity and word learning and suggest iconicity may be a more pervasive property of spoken languages than previously thought.

Abstract

Recent FMRI studies indicate that language related brain regions are engaged in artificial grammar (AG) processing. In the present study we investigate the Reber grammar by means of formal analysis and network simulations. We outline a new method for describing the network dynamics and propose an approach to grammar extraction based on the state-space dynamics of the network. We conclude that statistical frequency-based and rule-based acquisition procedures can be viewed as complementary perspectives on grammar learning, and more generally, that classical cognitive models can be viewed as a special case of a dynamical systems perspective on information processing

Abstract

A fundamental ability of speakers is to
quickly retrieve words from long-term memory. According to a prominent theory, concepts activate multiple associated words, which enter into competition for selection. Previous electrophysiological studies have provided evidence for the activation of multiple alternative words, but did not identify brain responses refl ecting competition. We report a magnetoencephalography study examining the timing and neural substrates of lexical activation and competition. The degree of activation of competing words was
manipulated by presenting pictures (e.g., dog) simultaneously with distractor
words. The distractors were semantically related to the picture name (cat), unrelated (pin), or identical (dog). Semantic distractors are stronger competitors to the picture name, because they receive additional activation from the picture, whereas unrelated distractors do not. Picture naming times were longer with semantic than with unrelated and identical distractors. The patterns of phase-locked and non-phase-locked activity were distinct
but temporally overlapping. Phase-locked activity in left middle temporal
gyrus, peaking at 400 ms, was larger on unrelated than semantic and identical trials, suggesting differential effort in processing the alternative words activated by the picture-word stimuli. Non-phase-locked activity in the 4-10 Hz range between 400-650 ms in left superior frontal gyrus was larger on semantic than unrelated and identical trials, suggesting different
degrees of effort in resolving the competition among the alternatives
words, as refl ected in the naming times. These findings characterize distinct
patterns of brain activity associated with lexical activation and competition
respectively, and their temporal relation, supporting the theory that words are selected by competition.

Abstract

This study investigates whether the acoustic durations of derivational affixes in Dutch are affected by the frequency of the word they occur in. In a word naming experiment, subjects were presented with a large number of words containing one of the affixes ge-, ver-, ont, or -lijk. Their responses were recorded on DAT tapes, and the durations of the affixes were measured using Automatic Speech Recognition technology. To investigate whether frequency also affected durations when speech rate was high, the presentation rate of the stimuli was varied. The results show that a higher frequency of the word as a whole led to shorter acoustic realizations for all affixes. Furthermore, affixes became shorter as the presentation rate of the stimuli increased. There was no interaction between word frequency and presentation rate, suggesting that the frequency effect also applies in situations in which the speed of articulation is very high.

Abstract

Music is a pervasive phenomenon in human culture, and musical
rhythm is virtually present in all musical traditions. Research
on the evolution and cognitive underpinnings of rhythm
can benefit from a number of approaches. We outline key concepts
and definitions, allowing fine-grained analysis of rhythmic
cognition in experimental studies. We advocate comparative
animal research as a useful approach to answer questions
about human music cognition and review experimental evidence
from different species. Finally, we suggest future directions
for research on the cognitive basis of rhythm. Apart from
research in semi-natural setups, possibly allowed by “drum set
for chimpanzees” prototypes presented here for the first time,
mathematical modeling and systematic use of circular statistics
may allow promising advances.

Abstract

The relationship between individual cognition and cultural phenomena at the society level can be transformed by cultural transmission (Kirby, Dowman, & Griffiths, 2007). Top-down models of this process have typically assumed that individuals only adopt a single linguistic trait. Recent extensions include ‘bilingual’ agents, able to adopt multiple linguistic traits (Burkett & Griffiths, 2010). However, bilingualism is more than variation within an individual: it involves the conditional use of variation with different interlocutors. That is, bilingualism is a property of a population that emerges from use. A bottom-up simulation is presented where learners are sensitive to the identity of other speakers. The simulation reveals that dynamic social structures are a key factor for the evolution of bilingualism in a population, a feature that was abstracted away in the top-down models. Top-down and bottom-up approaches may lead to different answers, but can work together to reveal and explore important features of the cultural transmission process.

Abstract

We suggest that it is now possible to conduct research on a topic which might be called evolutionary geophonetics. The main question is how the climate influences the evolution of language. This involves biological adaptations to the climate that may affect biases in production and perception; cultural evolutionary adaptations of the sounds of a language to climatic conditions; and influences of the climate on language diversity and contact. We discuss these ideas with special reference to a recent hypothesis that lexical tone is not adaptive in dry climates (Everett, Blasi & Roberts, 2015).

Abstract

It has been shown that when speakers produce hand gestures, addressees are attentive towards these gestures, using them to facilitate speech processing. Even relatively simple “beat” gestures are taken into account to help process aspects of speech such as prosodic prominence. In fact, recent evidence suggests that the timing of a beat gesture can influence spoken word recognition. Termed the manual McGurk Effect, Dutch participants, when presented with lexical stress minimal pair continua in Dutch, were biased to hear lexical stress on the syllable that coincided with a beat gesture. However, little is known about how this manual McGurk effect would surface in languages other than Dutch, with different acoustic cues to prominence, and variable gestures. Therefore, this study tests the effect in Spanish where lexical stress is arguably even more important, being a contrastive cue in the regular verb conjugation system. Results from 24 participants corroborate the effect in Spanish, namely that when given the same auditory stimulus, participants were biased to perceive lexical stress on the syllable that visually co-occurred with a beat gesture. These findings extend the manual McGurk effect to a different language, emphasizing the impact of gestures' timing on prosody perception and spoken word recognition.

Abstract

Recent research on multimodal language production has revealed that prominence in speech and gesture go hand-in-hand. Specifically, peaks in gesture (i.e., the apex) seem to closely coordinate with peaks in fundamental frequency (F0). The nature of this relationship may also be bi-directional, as it has also been shown that the production of gesture directly affects speech acoustics. However, most studies on the topic have largely focused on stress-based languages, where fundamental frequency has a prominence-lending function. Less work has been carried out on lexical tone languages such as Mandarin, where F0 is lexically distinctive. In this study, four native Mandarin speakers were asked to produce single monosyllabic CV words, taken from minimal lexical tone triplets (e.g., /pi1/, /pi2/, /pi3/), either with or without a beat gesture. Our analyses of the timing of the gestures showed that the gesture apex most stably occurred near vowel onset, with consonantal duration being the strongest predictor of apex placement. Acoustic analyses revealed that words produced with gesture showed raised F0 contours, greater intensity, and shorter durations. These findings further our understanding of gesture-speech alignment in typologically diverse languages, and add to the discussion about multimodal prominence.

Abstract

We investigated the relationship between visual experience and pragmatic development by testing the socio-communicative skills of a unique population: the Prakash children of India, who received treatment for congenital cataracts after years of visual deprivation. Using two different referential communication tasks, our study investigated Prakash' children ability to produce sufficiently informative referential expressions (e.g., ‘the green pear' or ‘the small plate') and pay attention to their interlocutor's face during the task (Experiment 1), as well as their ability to recognize a speaker's referential intent through non-verbal cues such as head turning and pointing (Experiment 2). Our results show that Prakash children have strong pragmatic skills, but do not look at their interlocutor's face as often as neurotypical children do. However, longitudinal analyses revealed an increase in face fixations, suggesting that over time, Prakash children come to utilize their improved visual skills for efficient referential communication.

Abstract

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

Abstract

Despite decades of study, we still know less than we would like about the association between joint attention (JA) and language acquisition. This is partly because of disagreements on how to operationalise JA. In this study, we examine the impact of applying two different, influential JA operationalisation schemes to the same dataset of child-caregiver interactions, to determine which yields a better fit to children's later vocabulary size. Two coding schemes— one defining JA in terms of gaze overlap and one in terms of social aspects of shared attention—were applied to video-recordings of dyadic naturalistic toy-play interactions (N=45). We found that JA was predictive of later production vocabulary when operationalised as shared focus (study 1), but also that its operationalisation as shared social awareness increased its predictive power (study 2). Our results emphasise the critical role of methodological choices in understanding how and why JA is associated with vocabulary size.

Abstract

We investigated the time course of sentence formulation in Tagalog, a verb-initial language in which the verb obligatorily agrees with one of its arguments. Eye-tracked participants described pictures of transitive events. Fixations to the two characters in the events were compared across sentences differing in agreement marking and post-verbal word order. Fixation patterns show evidence for two temporally dissociated phases in Tagalog sentence production. The first, driven by verb agreement, involves early linking of concepts to syntactic functions; the second, driven by word order, involves incremental lexical encoding of these concepts. These results suggest that even the earliest stages of sentence formulation may be guided by a language's grammatical structure.

Abstract

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

Abstract

A series of experiment tested Ekman’s (1992) hypothesis that there are a set of positive basic emotions that are expressed using vocal para-linguistic sounds, e.g. laughter and cheers. The proposed categories investigated were amusement, contentment, pleasure, relief and triumph. Behavioural testing using a forced-choice task indicated that participants were able to reliably recognize vocal expressions of the proposed emotions. A cross-cultural study in the preliterate Himba culture in Namibia confirmed that these categories are also recognized across cultures. A recognition test of acoustically manipulated emotional vocalizations established that the recognition of different emotions utilizes different vocal cues, and that these in turn differ from the cues used when comprehending speech. In a study using fMRI we found that relative to a signal correlated noise baseline, the paralinguistic expressions of emotion activated bilateral superior temporal gyri and sulci, lateral and anterior to primary auditory cortex, which is consistent with the processing of non linguistic vocal cues in the auditory ‘what’ pathway. Notably amusement was associated with greater activation extending into both temporal poles and amygdale and insular cortex. Overall, these results support the claim that ‘happiness’ can be fractionated into amusement, pleasure, relief and triumph.

Abstract

The ultimate goal of our research is to develop a computational model of human speech recognition that is able to capture the effects of fine-grained acoustic variation on speech recognition behaviour. As part of this work we are investigating automatic feature classifiers that are able to create reliable and accurate transcriptions of the articulatory behaviour encoded in the acoustic speech signal. In the experiments reported here, we compared support vector machines (SVMs) with multilayer perceptrons (MLPs). MLPs have been widely (and rather successfully) used for the task of multi-value articulatory feature classification, while (to the best of our knowledge) SVMs have not. This paper compares the performances of the two classifiers and analyses the results in order to better understand the articulatory representations. It was found that the MLPs outperformed the SVMs, but it is concluded that both classifiers exhibit similar behaviour in terms of patterns of errors.

Abstract

Older listeners with high-frequency hearing loss rely more on intensity for categorisation of /s/ than normal-hearing older listeners. This study addresses the question whether this increased reliance comes about immediately when the need
arises, i.e., in the face of a spectrally-degraded signal. A phonetic categorisation task was carried out using intensitymodulated fricatives in a clean and a low-pass filtered condition with two younger and two older listener groups.
When high-frequency information was removed from the speech signal, younger listeners started using intensity as a cue. The older adults on the other hand, when presented with the low-pass filtered speech, did not rely on intensity differences for fricative identification. These results suggest that the reliance on intensity shown by the older hearingimpaired adults may have been acquired only gradually with
longer exposure to a degraded speech signal.

Abstract

This paper addresses the issue of large-vocabulary recognition in a specific word class. We propose a two-pass strategy in which only major cities are explicitly represented in the first stage lexicon. An unknown word model encoded as a phone loop is used to detect OOV city names (referred to as rare city names). After which SpeM, a tool that can extract words and word-initial cohorts from phone graphs on the basis of a large fallback lexicon, provides an N-best list of promising city names on the basis of the phone sequences generated in the first stage. This N-best list is then inserted into the second stage lexicon for a subsequent recognition pass. Experiments were conducted on a set of spontaneous telephone-quality utterances each containing one rare city name. We tested the size of the N-best list and three types of language models (LMs). The experiments showed that SpeM was able to include nearly 85% of the correct city names into an N-best list of 3000 city names when a unigram LM, which also boosted the unigram scores of a city name in a given state, was used.

Abstract

The current version of the psycholinguistic model of human word recognition Shortlist suffers from two unrealistic constraints. First, the input of Shortlist must consist of a single string of phoneme symbols. Second, the current version of the search in Shortlist makes it difficult to deal with insertions and deletions in the input phoneme string. This research attempts to fully automatically derive a phoneme string from the acoustic signal that is as close as possible to the number of phonemes in the lexical representation of the word. We optimised an Automatic Phone Recogniser (APR) using two approaches, viz. varying the value of the mismatch parameter and optimising the APR output strings on the output of Shortlist. The approaches show that it will be very difficult to satisfy the input requirements of the present version of Shortlist with a phoneme string generated by an APR.

Abstract

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

Abstract

In this paper, we illustrate the close parallels between the research fields of human speech recognition (HSR) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) using a computational model of human word recognition, SpeM, which was built using techniques from ASR. We show that ASR has proven to be useful for improving models of HSR by relieving them of some of their shortcomings. However, in order to build an integrated computational model of all aspects of HSR, a lot of issues remain to be resolved. In this process, ASR algorithms and techniques definitely can play an important role.

Abstract

Due to pronunciation variation, many insertions and deletions of phones occur in spontaneous speech. The psycholinguistic model of human speech recognition Shortlist is not well able to deal with phone insertions and deletions and is therefore not well suited for dealing with real-life input. The research presented in this paper explains how Shortlist can benefit from pronunciation variation modelling in dealing with real-life input. Pronunciation variation was modelled by including variants into the lexicon of Shortlist. A series of experiments was carried out to find the optimal acoustic model set for transcribing the training material that was used as basis for the generation of the variants. The Shortlist experiments clearly showed that Shortlist benefits from pronunciation variation modelling. However, the performance of Shortlist stays far behind the performance of other, more conventional speech recognisers.

Abstract

The time course of metrical encoding, i.e. stress, during speech production is investigated. In a first experiment, participants were presented with pictures whose bisyllabic Dutch names had initial or final stress (KAno 'canoe' vs. kaNON 'cannon'; capital letters indicate stressed syllables). Picture names were matched for frequency and object recognition latencies. When participants were asked to judge whether picture names had stress on the first or second syllable, they showed significantly faster decision times for initially stressed targets than for targets with final stress. Experiment 2 replicated this effect with trisyllabic picture names (faster RTs for penultimate stress than for ultimate stress). In our view, these results reflect the incremental phonological encoding process. Wheeldon and Levelt (1995) found that segmental encoding is a process running from the beginning to the end of words. Here, we present evidence that the metrical pattern of words, i.e. stress, is also encoded incrementally.

Abstract

Processing of semantic information in language comprehension has been suggested to be modulated by attentional resources. Consequently, cognitive load would be expected to reduce semantic priming, but studies have yielded inconsistent results. This study investigated whether cognitive load affects semantic activation in speech processing in older adults, and whether this is modulated by individual differences in cognitive and hearing abilities. Older adults participated in an auditory continuous lexical decision task in a low-load and high-load condition. The group analysis showed only a marginally significant reduction of semantic priming in the high-load condition compared to the low-load condition. The individual differences analysis showed that semantic priming was significantly reduced under increased load in participants with poorer attention-switching control. Hence, a resource-demanding secondary task may affect the integration of spoken words into a coherent semantic representation for listeners with poorer attentional skills.

Abstract

The representative corpus SYN2000 in the Czech National Corpus (CNK) project containing 100 million word forms taken from different types of texts. I have tried to determine the extent and depth of the linguistic material in the corpus. First, I chose the adjectives indicating the basic colors of the spectrum and other parts of speech (names and adverbs) derived from these adjectives. An analysis of three examples - black, white and red - shows the extent of the linguistic wealth and diversity we are looking at: because of size limitations, no existing dictionary is capable of embracing all analyzed nuances. Currently, we can only hope that the next dictionary of contemporary Czech, built on the basis of the Czech National Corpus, will be electronic. Without the size limitations, we would be able us to include many of the fine nuances of language

Abstract

Speakers can adapt their speech and co-speech gestures for
addressees. Here, we investigate whether this ability is
modulated by age. Younger and older adults participated in a
comic narration task in which one participant (the speaker)
narrated six short comic stories to another participant (the
addressee). One half of each story was known to both participants, the other half only to the speaker. Younger but
not older speakers used more words and gestures when narrating novel story content as opposed to known content.
We discuss cognitive and pragmatic explanations of these findings and relate them to theories of gesture production.

Abstract

Adaptation to altered auditory feedback has been shown to induce subsequent shifts in perception. However, it is uncertain whether these perceptual changes may generalize to other speech sounds. In this experiment, we tested whether exposing the production of a vowel to altered auditory feedback affects perceptual categorization of a consonant distinction. In two sessions, participants produced CVC words containing the vowel /i/, while intermittently categorizing stimuli drawn from a continuum between "see" and "she." In the first session feedback was unaltered, while in the second session the formants of the vowel were shifted 20% towards /u/. Adaptation to the altered vowel was found to reduce the proportion of perceived /S/ stimuli. We suggest that this reflects an alteration to the sensorimotor mapping that is shared between vowels and consonants.

Abstract

Joint attention has long been accepted as constituting a privileged circumstance in which word learning prospers. Consequently research has investigated the role that maternal responsiveness to infant attention plays in predicting language outcomes. However there has been a recent expansion in research implicating similar predictive effects from individual differences in infant behaviours. Emerging from the foundations of such work comes an interesting question: do the relative contributions of the mother and infant to joint attention episodes impact upon language learning? In an attempt to address this, two joint attention behaviours were assessed as predictors of vocabulary attainment (as measured by OCDI Production Scores). These predictors were: mothers encouraging attention to an object given their infant was already attending to an object (maternal follow-in); and infants looking to an object given their mothers encouragement of attention to an object (infant follow-in). In a sample of 14-month old children (N=36) we compared the predictive power of these maternal and infant follow-in variables on concurrent and later language performance. Results using Growth Curve Analysis provided evidence that while both maternal follow-in and infant follow-in variables contributed to production scores, infant follow-in was a stronger predictor. Consequently it does appear to matter whose final contribution establishes joint attention episodes. Infants who more often follow-in into their mothers’ encouragement of attention have larger, and faster growing vocabularies between 14 and 18-months of age.

Abstract

This presentation will address aspects of the expression of emotion in non-verbal vocal behaviour, specifically attempting to determine the roles of both positive and negative emotions, their acoustic bases, and the extent to which these are recognized in non-Western cultures.

Abstract

Previous studies have indicated that vocal and facial expressions of the ‘basic’ emotions share aspects of processing. Thus amygdala damage compromises the perception of fear and anger from the face and from the voice. In the current study we tested the hypothesis that there exist positive basic emotions, expressed mainly in the voice (Ekman, 1992). Vocal stimuli were produced to express the specific positive emotions of amusement, achievement, pleasure, contentment and relief.

Abstract

The results of an eye-tracking experiment are presented in which Dutch listeners' eye movements were monitored as they heard sentences and saw four pictured objects. Participants were instructed to click on the object mentioned in the sentence. In the critical sentences, a stop-initial target (e.g., "pot") was preceded by an [s], thus causing ambiguity regarding whether the sentence refers to a stop-initial or a cluster-initial word (e.g., "spot"). Participants made fewer fixations to the target pictures when the stop and the preceding [s] were cross-spliced from the cluster-initial word than when they were spliced from a different token of the sentence containing the stop-initial word. Acoustic analyses showed that the two versions differed in various measures, but only one of these - the duration of the [s] - correlated with the perceptual effect. Thus, in this context, the [s] duration information is an important factor guiding word recognition.

Abstract

Speakers adapt their speech and gestures in various ways for their audience. We investigated further whether they use
ostensive signals (eye gaze, ostensive speech (e.g. like this, this) or a combination of both) in relation to their gestures
when talking to different addressees, i.e., to another adult or a child in a multimodal demonstration task. While adults used
more eye gaze towards their gestures with other adults than with children, they were more likely to use combined
ostensive signals for children than for adults. Thus speakers mark the communicative relevance of their gestures with different types of ostensive signals and by taking different types of addressees into account.

Abstract

Recent empirical evidence suggests that language-mediated eye gaze is partly determined by level of formal literacy training. Huettig, Singh and Mishra (2011) showed that high-literate individuals' eye gaze was closely time locked to phonological overlap between a spoken target word and items presented in a visual display. In contrast, low-literate individuals' eye gaze was not related to phonological overlap, but was instead strongly influenced by semantic relationships between items. Our present study tests the hypothesis that this behavior is an emergent property of an increased ability to extract phonological structure from the speech signal, as in the case of high-literates, with low-literates more reliant on more coarse grained structure. This hypothesis was tested using a neural network model, that integrates linguistic information extracted from the speech signal with visual and semantic information within a central resource. We demonstrate that contrasts in fixation behavior similar to those observed between high and low literates emerge when models are trained on speech signals of contrasting granularity.

Abstract

Previous research [9] suggests that Dutch learners of (British) English are not able to express sarcasm prosodically in their L2. The present study investigates whether explicit training on the prosodic markers of sarcasm in English can improve learners’ realisation of sarcasm. Sarcastic speech was elicited in short simulated telephone conversations between Dutch advanced learners of English and a native British English-speaking ‘friend’ in two sessions, fourteen days apart. Between the two sessions, participants were trained by means of (1) a presentation, (2) directed independent practice, and (3) evaluation of participants’ production and individual feedback in small groups. L1 British English-speaking raters subsequently evaluated the degree of sarcastic sounding in the participants’ responses on a five-point scale. It was found that significantly higher sarcasm ratings were given to L2 learners’ production obtained after the training than that obtained before the training; explicit training on prosody has a positive effect on learners’ production of sarcasm.

Abstract

This paper describes ongoing research aiming at the description of variation in speech as represented by asynchronous articulatory features. We will first illustrate how distances in the articulatory feature space can be used for event detection along speech trajectories in this space. The temporal structure imposed by the cosine distance in articulatory feature space coincides to a large extent with the manual segmentation on phone level. The analysis also indicates that the articulatory feature representation provides better such alignments than the MFCC representation does. Secondly, we will present first results that indicate that articulatory features can be used to probe for acoustic differences in the onsets of Dutch singulars and plurals.

Abstract

This paper presents a quantitative analysis of the
turn-taking mechanism evidenced in 93 telephone
dialogues that were taken from the 9-million-word
Spoken Dutch Corpus. While the first part of the paper
focuses on the temporal phenomena of turn taking, such
as durations of pauses and overlaps of turns in the
dialogues, the second part explores the discoursefunctional
aspects of utterances in a subset of 8
dialogues that were annotated especially for this
purpose. The results show that speakers adapt their turntaking
behaviour to the interlocutor’s behaviour.
Furthermore, the results indicate that male-male dialogs
show a higher proportion of overlapping turns than
female-female dialogues.

Abstract

This paper builds on previous work that aims at unraveling the structure of the speech signal by means of using probabilistic representations. The context of this work is a multi-pass speech recognition system in which a phone lattice is created and used as a basis for a lexical search in which symbolic mismatches are allowed at certain costs. The focus is on the optimization of the costs of phone insertions, deletions and substitutions that are used in the lexical decoding pass. Two optimization approaches are presented, one related to a multi-pass computational model for human speech recognition, the other based on a decoding in which Bayes’ risks are minimized. In the final section, the advantages of these optimization methods are discussed and compared.

Abstract

This paper presents DIANA, a new computational model of human speech processing. It is the first model that simulates the complete processing chain from the on-line processing of an acoustic signal to the execution of a response, including reaction times. Moreover it assumes minimal modularity. DIANA consists of three components. The activation component computes a probabilistic match between the input acoustic signal and representations in DIANA’s lexicon, resulting in a list of word hypotheses changing over time as the input unfolds. The decision component operates on this list and selects a word as soon as sufficient evidence is available. Finally, the execution component accounts for the time to execute a behavioral action. We show that DIANA well simulates the average participant in a word recognition experiment.

Abstract

DIANA is an end-to-end computational model of speech processing, which takes as input the speech signal, and provides as output the orthographic transcription of the stimulus, a word/non-word judgment and the associated estimated reaction time. So far, the model has only been tested for Dutch. In this paper, we extend DIANA such that it can also process North American English. The model is tested by having it simulate human participants in a large scale North American English lexical decision experiment. The simulations show that DIANA can adequately approximate the reaction times of an average participant (r = 0.45). In addition, they indicate that DIANA does not yet adequately model the cognitive processes that take place after stimulus offset.

Abstract

This paper investigates the interaction between acoustic scores and symbolic mismatch penalties in multi-pass speech decoding techniques that are based on the creation of a segment graph followed by a lexical search. The interaction between acoustic and symbolic mismatches determines to a large extent the structure of the search space of these multipass approaches. The background of this study is a recently developed computational model of human word recognition, called SpeM. SpeM is able to simulate human word recognition data and is built as a multi-pass speech decoder. Here, we focus on unravelling the structure of the search space that is used in SpeM and similar decoding strategies. Finally, we elaborate on the close relation between distances in this search space, and distance measures in search spaces that are based on a combination of acoustic and phonetic features.

Abstract

On the basis of two-speaker spontaneous conversations, it is shown that the distributions of both pauses and speech-overlaps of telephone and faceto-face dialogues have different statistical properties. Pauses in a face-to-face
dialogue last up to 4 times longer than pauses in telephone conversations in functionally comparable conditions. There is a high correlation (0.88 or larger) between the average pause duration for the two speakers across face-to-face
dialogues and telephone dialogues. The data provided form a first quantitative analysis of the complex turn-taking mechanism evidenced in the dialogues available in the 9-million-word Spoken Dutch Corpus.

Abstract

This paper describes a computational model of speech comprehension that takes the acoustic signal as input and predicts reaction times as observed in an auditory lexical decision task. By doing so, we explore a new generation of end-to-end computational models that are able to simulate the behaviour of human subjects participating in a psycholinguistic experiment. So far, nearly all computational models of speech comprehension do not start from the speech signal itself, but from abstract representations of the speech signal, while the few existing models that do start from the acoustic signal cannot directly model reaction times as obtained in comprehension experiments. The main functional components in our model are the perception stage, which is compatible with the psycholinguistic model Shortlist B and is implemented with techniques from automatic speech recognition, and the decision stage, which is based on the linear ballistic accumulation decision model. We successfully tested our model against data from 20 participants performing a largescale auditory lexical decision experiment. Analyses show that the model is a good predictor for the average judgment and reaction time for each word.

Abstract

Apraxia of Speech (AOS) is a motor speech disorder whose precise nature is still poorly understood. A recent behavioural experiment featuring a noise masking paradigm suggests that AOS reflects a disruption of feedforward control, whereas feedback control is spared and plays a more prominent role in achieving and maintaining segmental contrasts [10]. In the present study, we set out to validate the interpretation of AOS as a feedforward impairment by means of a series of computational simulations with the DIVA model [6, 7] mimicking the behavioural experiment. Simulation results showed a larger reduction in vowel spacing and a smaller vowel dispersion in the masking condition compared to the no-masking condition for the simulated feedforward deficit, whereas the other groups showed an opposite pattern. These results mimic the patterns observed in the human data, corroborating the notion that AOS can be conceptualized as a deficit in feedforward control

Abstract

We are often in a bilingual situation (e.g., overhearing a conversation in the train). We investigated whether first (L1) and second language (L2) phonologies are automatically activated. A masked priming paradigm was used, with Russian words as targets and either Russian or English words as primes. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while Russian (L1) – English (L2) bilinguals read aloud L1 target words (e.g. РЕЙС /reis/ ‘fl ight’) primed with either L1 (e.g. РАНА /rana/ ‘wound’) or L2 words (e.g. PACK). Target words were read faster when they were preceded by phonologically related L1 primes but not by orthographically related L2 primes. ERPs showed orthographic priming in the 125-200 ms time window. Thus, both L1 and L2 phonologies are simultaneously activated during L1 reading. The results provide support for non-selective models of bilingual reading, which assume automatic activation of the non-target language phonology even when it is not required by the task.

Abstract

This article describes how the tonal elements of two common Spanish intonation contours –the falling statement and the low-rising-falling request– align with the segmental string in broad-focus utterances differing in number of prosodic words. Using an imitation-and-completion task, we show that (i) the last stressed syllable of the utterance, traditionally viewed as carrying the ‘nuclear’ accent, associates with either a high or a low tonal element depending on phrase length (ii) that certain tonal elements can be realized or omitted depending on the availability of specific metrical positions in their intonational phrase, and (iii) that the high tonal element of the request contour associates with either a stressed syllable or an intonational phrase edge depending on phrase length. On the basis of these facts, and in contrast to previous descriptions of Spanish intonation relying on obligatory and constant nuclear contours (e.g., L* L% for all neutral statements), we argue for a less constrained intonational morphology involving tonal units linked to the segmental string via contour-specific principles.

Abstract

Violations of the maxims of Quantity occur when utterances provide more (over-specified) or less (under-specified) information than strictly required for referent identification. While behavioural datasuggest that under-specified expressions lead to comprehension difficulty and communicative failure, there is no consensus as to whether over-specified expressions are also detrimental to comprehension. In this study we shed light on this debate, providing neurophysiological evidence supporting the view that extra information facilitates comprehension. We further present novel evidence that referential failure due to under-specification is qualitatively different from explicit cases of referential failure, when no matching referential candidate is available in the context.

Abstract

The human brain deals with the infinite variability of speech through multiple mechanisms. Some of them rely solely on information in the speech input (i.e., signal-driven) whereas some rely on linguistic or real-world knowledge (i.e., knowledge-driven). Many signal-driven perceptual processes rely on the enhancement of acoustic differences between incoming speech sounds, producing contrastive adjustments. For instance, when an ambiguous voiceless fricative is preceded by a high fundamental frequency (f0) sentence, the fricative is perceived as having lower a spectral center of gravity (CoG). However, it is not clear whether knowledge of a talker’s typical f0 can lead to similar contrastive effects. This study investigated a possible talker f0 effect on fricative CoG perception. In the exposure phase, two groups of participants (N=16 each) heard the same talker at high or low f0 for 20 minutes. Later, in the test phase, participants rated fixed-f0 /?ɔk/ tokens as being /sɔk/ (i.e., high CoG) or /ʃɔk/ (i.e., low CoG), where /?/ represents a fricative from a 5-step /s/-/ʃ/ continuum. Surprisingly, the data revealed the opposite of our contrastive hypothesis, whereby hearing high f0 instead biased perception towards high CoG. Thus, we demonstrated that talker f0 information affects fricative CoG perception.

Abstract

Contrastive pitch accents can mark sentence elements occupying parallel roles. In “Mary kissed John, not Peter”, a pitch accent on Mary or John cues the implied syntactic role of Peter. Van der Burght, Friederici, Goucha, and Hartwigsen (2021) showed that listeners can build expectations concerning syntactic and semantic properties of upcoming words, derived from pitch accent information they heard previously. To further explore these expectations, we attempted a partial replication of the original German study in Dutch. In the experimental sentences “Yesterday, the police officer arrested the thief, not the inspector/murderer”, a pitch accent on subject or object cued the subject/object role of the ellipsis clause. Contrasting elements were additionally cued by the thematic role typicality of the nouns. Participants listened to sentences in which the ellipsis clause was omitted and selected the most plausible sentence-final noun (presented visually) via button press. Replicating the original study results, listeners based their sentence-final preference on the pitch accent information available in the sentence. However, as in the original study, individual differences between listeners were found, with some following prosodic information and others relying on a structural bias. The results complement the literature on ellipsis resolution and on interindividual variability in cue weighting.

Abstract

Languages combine arbitrary and iconic signals. How do iconic signals emerge and when do they persist? We present an experimental study of the role of iconicity in the emergence of structure in an artificial language. Using an iterated communication game in which we control the signalling medium as well as the meaning space, we study the evolution of communicative signals in transmission chains. This sheds light on how affordances of the communication medium shape and constrain the mappability and transmissibility of form-meaning pairs. We find that iconic signals can form the building blocks for wider compositional patterns

Abstract

Distributional vowel training for adults has been reported as “effective” for Spanish and Bulgarian learners of Dutch vowels, in studies using a behavioural task. A recent study did not yield a similar clear learning effect for Dutch learners of the English vowel contrast /æ/~/ε/, as measured with event-related potentials (ERPs). The present study aimed to examine the possibility that the latter result was related to the method. As in the ERP study, we tested whether distributional training improved Dutch adult learners’ perception of English /æ/~/ε/. However, we measured behaviour instead of ERPs, in a design identical to that used in the previous studies with Spanish learners. The results do not support an effect of distributional training and thus “replicate” the ERP study. We conclude that it remains unclear whether distributional vowel training is effective for Dutch adults.

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

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

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 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

Utilization of computer tools in linguistic research has gained importance with the maturation of media frameworks for the handling of digital audio and video. The increased use of these tools in gesture, sign language and multimodal interaction studies has led to stronger requirements on the flexibility, the efficiency and in particular the time accuracy of annotation tools. This paper describes the efforts made to make ELAN a tool that meets these requirements, with special attention to the developments in the area of time accuracy. In subsequent sections an overview will be given of other enhancements in the latest versions of ELAN, that make it a useful tool in multimodality research.

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.