Publications

Abstract

This paper presents research findings on manual gestures
associated with negation in Indonesian, utilizing data sourced
from talk shows available on YouTube. The study reveals that
Indonesian speakers employ six recurrent negation gestures,
which have been observed in various languages worldwide.
This suggests that gestures exhibiting a stable form-meaning
relationship and recurring frequently in relation to negation are
prevalent around the globe, although their distribution may
differ across cultures and languages. Furthermore, the paper
demonstrates that negation gestures are not strictly tied to
verbal negation. Overall, the aim of this paper is to contribute
to a deeper understanding of the conventional usage and cross-
linguistic distribution of recurrent gestures.

Abstract

The effect of literacy on phonological processing has been described in terms of a virus that “infects all speech processing” (Frith, 1998). Empirical data has established that literacy leads to changes to the way in which phonological information is processed. Harm & Seidenberg (1999) demonstrated that a connectionist network trained to map between English orthographic and phonological representations display’s more componential phonological processing than a network trained only to stably represent the phonological forms of words. Within this study we use a similar model yet manipulate the transparency of orthographic-to-phonological mappings. We observe that networks trained on a transparent orthography are better at restoring phonetic features and phonemes. However, networks trained on non-transparent orthographies are more likely to restore corrupted phonological segments with legal, coarser linguistic units (e.g. onset, coda). Our study therefore provides an explicit description of how differences in orthographic transparency can lead to varying strains and symptoms of the ‘literacy virus’.

Abstract

When processing language, the cognitive system has access to information from a range of modalities (e.g. auditory, visual) to support language processing. Language mediated visual attention studies have shown sensitivity of the listener to phonological, visual, and semantic similarity when processing a word. In a computational model of language mediated visual attention, that models spoken word processing as the parallel integration of information from phonological, semantic and visual processing streams, we simulate such effects of competition within modalities. Our simulations raised untested predictions about stronger and earlier effects of visual and semantic similarity compared to phonological similarity around the rhyme of the word. Two visual world studies confirmed these predictions. The model and behavioral studies suggest that, during spoken word comprehension, multimodal information can be recruited rapidly to constrain lexical selection to the extent that phonological rhyme information may exert little influence on this process.

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

This study focuses on embodied uses of recognitional
demonstratives. While multimodal conversation analytic
studies have shown how gesture and speech interact in the
elaboration of exophoric references, little attention has been
given to the multimodal configuration of other types of
referential actions. Based on a video-recorded corpus of
professional meetings held in French, this qualitative study
shows that a subtype of deictic references, namely recognitional
references, are frequently associated with iconic gestures, thus
challenging the traditional distinction between exophoric and
endophoric uses of deixis.

Abstract

Developmental studies show that it takes longer for
children learning spoken languages to acquire viewpointdependent
spatial relations (e.g., left-right, front-behind),
compared to ones that are not viewpoint-dependent (e.g.,
in, on, under). The current study investigates how
children learn to express viewpoint-dependent relations
in a sign language where depicted spatial relations can be
communicated in an analogue manner in the space in
front of the body or by using body-anchored signs (e.g.,
tapping the right and left hand/arm to mean left and
right). Our results indicate that the visual-spatial
modality might have a facilitating effect on learning to
express these spatial relations (especially in encoding of
left-right) in a sign language (i.e., Turkish Sign
Language) compared to a spoken language (i.e.,
Turkish).

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 addresses the question how to compare reaction times computed by a computational model of speech comprehension with observed reaction times by participants. The question is based on the observation that reaction time sequences substantially differ per participant, which raises the issue of how exactly the model is to be assessed. Part of the variation in reaction time sequences is caused by the so-called local speed: the current reaction time correlates to some extent with a number of previous reaction times, due to slowly varying variations in attention, fatigue etc. This paper proposes a method, based on time series analysis, to filter the observed reaction times in order to separate the local speed effects. Results show that after such filtering the between-participant correlations increase as well as the average correlation between participant and model increases. The presented technique provides insights into relevant aspects that are to be taken into account when comparing reaction time sequences

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

In face-to-face conversation, recipients might use the bodily movements of the speaker (e.g. gestures) to facilitate language processing. It has been suggested that one way through which this facilitation may happen is prediction. However, for this to be possible, gestures would need to precede speech, and it is unclear whether this is true during natural conversation.
In a corpus of Dutch conversations, we annotated hand gestures that represent semantic information and occurred during questions, and the word(s) which corresponded most closely to the gesturally depicted meaning. Thus, we tested whether representational gestures temporally precede their lexical affiliates. Further, to see whether preceding gestures may indeed facilitate language processing, we asked whether the gesture-speech asynchrony predicts the response time to the question the gesture is part of.
Gestures and their strokes (most meaningful movement component) indeed preceded the corresponding lexical information, thus demonstrating their predictive potential. However, while questions with gestures got faster responses than questions without, there was no evidence that questions with larger gesture-speech asynchronies get faster responses. These results suggest that gestures indeed have the potential to facilitate predictive language processing, but further analyses on larger datasets are needed to test for links between asynchrony and processing advantages.

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

Tone languages are often reported to make use of utterancelevel intonation as well as of lexical tone. We test the alternative hypotheses that a) the coexistence of lexical tone and utterance-level intonation in tone languages results in a diminished functional load for intonation, and b) that lexical tone and intonation can coexist in tone languages without undermining each other’s functional load in a substantial way. In order to do this, we collected data from two large typological databases, and performed mixed-effects and phylogenetic regression analyses controlling for genealogical and areal factors to estimate the probability of a language exhibiting grammatical devices for encoding polar questions given its status as a tonal or an intonation-only language. Our analyses indicate that, while both tone and intonational languages tend to develop grammatical devices for marking polar questions above chance level, tone languages do this at a significantly higher frequency, with estimated probabilities ranging between 0.88 and .98. This statistical bias provides cross-linguistic empirical support to the view that the use of tonal features to mark lexical contrasts leads to a diminished functional load for utterance-level intonation.

Abstract

We investigate the realization and discrimination of lexical stress contrasts in pitch-unaccented words in phrase-medial position in Spanish, a context in which intonational pitch accents are frequently absent. Results from production and perception experiments show that in this context durational and intensity cues to stress are produced by speakers and used by listeners above chance level. However, due to substantial amounts of phonetic overlap between stress categories in production, and of numerous errors in the identification of stress categories in perception, we suggest that, in the absence of intonational cues, Spanish speakers engaged in online language use must rely on contextual information in order to distinguish stress contrasts.

Abstract

Measuring the quality of metadata is only possible by assessing the quality of the underlying schema and the metadata instance. We propose some factors that are measurable automatically for metadata according to the CMD framework, taking into account the variability of schemas that can be defined in this framework. The factors include among others the number of elements, the (re-)use of reusable components, the number of filled in elements. The resulting score can serve as an indicator of the overall quality of the CMD instance, used for feedback to metadata providers or to provide an overview of the overall quality of metadata within a reposi-tory. The score is independent of specific schemas and generalizable. An overall assessment of harvested metadata is provided in form of statistical summaries and the distribution, based on a corpus of harvested metadata. The score is implemented in XQuery and can be used in tools, editors and repositories

Abstract

Multilingual speakers are able to switch from
one language to the other (“code-switch”) be-
tween or within sentences. Because the under-
lying cognitive mechanisms are not well un-
derstood, in this study we use computational
cognitive modeling to shed light on the pro-
cess of code-switching. We employed the
Bilingual Dual-path model, a Recurrent Neu-
ral Network of bilingual sentence production
(Tsoukala et al., 2017) and simulated sentence
production in simultaneous Spanish-English
bilinguals. Our first goal was to investigate
whether the model would code-switch with-
out being exposed to code-switched training
input. The model indeed produced code-
switches even without any exposure to such
input and the patterns of code-switches are
in line with earlier linguistic work (Poplack,
1980). The second goal of this study was to
investigate an auxiliary phrase asymmetry that
exists in Spanish-English code-switched pro-
duction. Using this cognitive model, we ex-
amined a possible cause for this asymmetry.
To our knowledge, this is the first computa-
tional cognitive model that aims to simulate
code-switched sentence production.

Abstract

This paper presents a new interdisciplinary methodology for the
analysis of future conceptualisations in big messy media data.
More specifically, it focuses on the depictions of post-Covid
futures by RT during the pandemic, i.e. on data which are of
interest not just from the perspective of academic research but
also of policy engagement. The methodology has been
developed to support the scaling up of fine-grained data-driven
analysis of discourse utterances larger than individual lexical
units which are centred around ‘will’ + the infinitive. It relies
on the true integration of manual analytical and computational
methods and tools in researching three modalities – textual,
prosodic1, and gestural. The paper describes the process of
building a computational infrastructure for the collection and
processing of video data, which aims to empower the manual
analysis. It also shows how manual analysis can motivate the
development of computational tools. The paper presents
individual computational tools to demonstrate how the
combination of human and machine approaches to analysis can
reveal new manifestations of cohesion between gesture and
prosody. To illustrate the latter, the paper shows how the
boundaries of prosodic units can work to help determine the
boundaries of gestural units for future conceptualisations.

Abstract

Over the course of a conversation, interlocutors sound more and more like each other in a process called convergence. However, the automaticity and grain size of convergence are not well established. This study therefore examined whether female native Dutch speakers converge to large yet sub-phonemic shifts in the F2 of the vowel /e/. Participants first performed a short reading task to establish baseline F2s for the vowel /e/, then shadowed 120 target words (alongside 360 fillers) which contained one instance of a manipulated vowel /e/ where the F2 had been shifted down to that of the vowel /ø/. Consistent exposure to large (sub-phonemic) downward shifts in F2 did not result in convergence. The results raise issues for theories which view convergence as a product of automatic integration between perception and production.

Abstract

This study investigates whether a clear distinction can be made between the prosody of continuation statements and polar questions in conversational French, which are both typically produced with final rising intonation. We show that the two utterance types can be distinguished over chance level by several pitch, duration, and intensity cues. However, given the substantial amount of phonetic overlap and the nature of the observed differences between the two utterance types (i.e. overall F0 scaling, final intensity drop and degree of final lengthening), we propose that variability in the phonetic detail of intonation rises in French is due to the effects of interactional factors (e.g. turn-taking context, type of speech act) rather than to the existence of two distinct rising intonation contour types in this language.

Abstract

This paper introduces a new CLARIN Knowledge Center which is the K-Centre for Atypical Communication Expertise (ACE for short) which has been established at the Centre for Language and Speech Technology (CLST) at Radboud University. Atypical communication is an umbrella term used here to denote language use by second language learners, people with language disorders or those suffering from language disabilities, but also more broadly by bilinguals and users of sign languages. It involves multiple modalities (text, speech, sign, gesture) and encompasses different developmental stages. ACE closely collaborates with The Language Archive (TLA) at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in order to safeguard GDPR-compliant data storage and access. We explain the mission of ACE and show its potential on a number of showcases and a use case.

Abstract

A series of experiments is conducted on naïve native speakers of Dutch and English to study the scope relation between tense and epistemic modality. The results are consistent with the claim that epistemics scope over tense (Stowell 2004, Hacquard 2006, a.o.), and challenge recent research that states that epistemics can, or must, scope under tense (von Fintel and Gillies 2007, Rullmann & Matthewson 2018): Dutch and English participants in a Truth Value Judgment Task judge sentences to be false when the past tense forms of the modals have to and moeten 'have to' are used to make an epistemic claim that held at a time before speech time, and true when they are used to make an epistemic claim that holds at speech time. Moreover, English participants in an Acceptability Judgment Task judge sentences to be infelicitous when the same past tense form of have to is used to make an epistemic claim that held at a time before speech time. Besides these general patterns, the results show variation within and across the two languages, which leads to interesting new questions about the interaction between tense and (epistemic) modality.

Abstract

How can people communicate successfully while keeping resource costs low in the face of ambiguity? We present a principled theoretical analysis comparing two strategies for disambiguation in communication: (i) pragmatic reasoning, where communicators reason about each other, and (ii) other-initiated repair, where communicators signal and resolve trouble interactively. Using agent-based simulations and computational complexity analyses, we compare the efficiency of these strategies in terms of communicative success, computation cost and interaction cost. We show that agents with a simple repair mechanism can increase efficiency, compared to pragmatic agents, by reducing their computational burden at the cost of longer interactions. We also find that efficiency is highly contingent on the mechanism, highlighting the importance of explicit formalisation and computational rigour.

Abstract

Linguistic context vectors are adapted for measuring the linguistic contexts that accompany gestures and comparable co-linguistic behaviours. Focusing on gestural semiotic types, it is demonstrated that gestural linguistic context vectors carry information associated with gesture. It is suggested that these may be used to approximate gesture meaning in a similar manner to the approximation of word meaning by context vectors.

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

It has been suggested that individual variation in vowel compactness of the native language (L1) and the distance between L1 vowels and vowels in the second language (L2) predict successful L2 vowel acquisition. Moreover, general articulatory skills have been proposed to account for variation in vowel compactness. In the present work, we conceptually replicate a previous study to test these hypotheses with a large sample size, a new language pair and a
new vowel pair. We find evidence that individual variation in L1 vowel compactness has opposing effects for two different vowels. We do not find evidence that individual variation in L1 compactness
is explained by general articulatory skills. We conclude that the results found previously might be specific to sub-groups of L2 learners and/or specific sub-sets of vowel pairs.

Abstract

The terminology Community of Practice has long standardized data categories in the framework of ISO TC 37. ISO 12620:2009 specifies the data model and procedures for a Data Category Registry (DCR), which has been implemented by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics as the ISOcat DCR. The DCR has been used by not only ISO TC 37, but also by the CLARIN research infra-structure. This paper describes how the needs of these communities have started to diverge and the process of segueing from a DCR to a Data Concept Registry in order to meet the needs of both communities.

Abstract

Language users process utterances by segmenting them into many cognitive units, which vary in their sizes and linguistic levels. Although we can do such unitization/segmentation easily, its cognitive mechanism is still not clear. This paper proposes an unsupervised model, Less-is-Better (LiB), to simulate the human cognitive process with respect to language unitization/segmentation. LiB follows the principle of least effort and aims to build a lexicon which minimizes the number of unit tokens (alleviating the effort of analysis) and number of unit types (alleviating the effort of storage) at the same time on any given corpus. LiB’s workflow is inspired by empirical cognitive phenomena. The design makes the mechanism of LiB cognitively plausible and the computational requirement light-weight. The lexicon generated by LiB performs the best among different types of lexicons (e.g. ground-truth words) both from an information-theoretical view and a cognitive view, which suggests that the LiB lexicon may be a plausible proxy of the mental lexicon.

Abstract

This study investigates how Mandarin Chinese speaking children and adults use prosody to mark focus in spontaneous speech. SVO sentences were elicited from 4- and 8-year-olds and adults in a game setting. Sentence-medial verbs were acoustically analysed for both duration and pitch range in different focus conditions. We have found that like the adults, the 8-year-olds used both duration and pitch range to distinguish focus from non-focus. The 4-year-olds used only duration to distinguish focus from non-focus, unlike the adults and 8-year-olds. None of the three groups of speakers distinguished contrastive focus from non-contrastive focus using pitch range or duration. Regarding the distinction between narrow focus from broad focus, the 4- and 8-year-olds used both pitch range and duration for this purpose, while the adults used only duration

Abstract

This study investigates how Mandarin Chinese speaking children use prosody to distinguish focus from non-focus, and focus types differing in size of constituent and contrastivity. SVO sentences were elicited from four- and eight-year-olds in a game setting. Sentence-medial verbs were acoustically analysed for both duration and pitch range in different focus conditions. The children started to use duration to differentiate focus from non-focus at the age of four. But their use of pitch range varied with age and depended on non-focus conditions (pre- vs. postfocus) and the lexical tones of the verbs. Further, the children in both age groups used pitch range but not duration to differentiate narrow focus from broad focus, and they did not differentiate contrastive narrow focus from non-contrastive narrow focus using duration or pitch range. The results indicated that Chinese children acquire the prosodic means (duration and pitch range) of marking focus in stages, and their acquisition of these two means appear to be early, compared to children speaking an intonation language, for example, Dutch.

Abstract

This paper presents VarClass, an open-source tool for language identification available both to be downloaded as well as through a graphical user-friendly interface. The main difference of VarClass in comparison to other state-of-the-art language identification tools is its focus on language varieties. General purpose language identification tools do not take language varieties into account and our work aims to fill this gap. VarClass currently contains language models for over 27 languages in which 10 of them are language varieties. We report an average performance of over 90.5% accuracy in a challenging dataset. More language models will be included in the upcoming months

Abstract

To acquire the meaning of a verb, language learners not only need to find the correct mapping between a specific verb and an action or event in the world, but also infer the underlying relational meaning that the verb encodes. Most verb naming instances in naturalistic contexts are highly ambiguous as many possible actions can be embedded in the same scenario and many possible verbs can be used to describe those actions. To understand whether learners can find the correct verb meaning from referentially ambiguous learning situations, we conducted three experiments using the Human Simulation Paradigm with adult learners. Our results suggest that although finding the right verb meaning from one learning instance is hard, there is a statistical solution to this problem. When provided with multiple verb learning instances all referring to the same verb, learners are able to aggregate information across situations and gradually converge to the correct semantic space. Even in cases where they may not guess the exact target verb, they can still discover the right meaning by guessing a similar verb that is semantically close to the ground truth.

Abstract

The present study investigates how long after adoption adoptees forget the phonology of their birth language. Chinese children who were adopted by Dutch families were tested on the perception of birth language tone contrasts before, during, and after perceptual training. Experiment 1 investigated Cantonese tone 2 (High-Rising) and tone 5 (Low-Rising), and Experiment 2 investigated Mandarin tone 2 (High-Rising) and tone 3 (Low-Dipping). In both experiments, participants were adoptees and non-adopted Dutch controls. Results of both experiments show that the tone contrasts were very difficult to perceive for the adoptees, and that adoptees were not better at perceiving the tone contrasts than their non-adopted Dutch peers, before or after training. This demonstrates that forgetting took place relatively soon after adoption, and that the re-exposure that the adoptees were presented with did not lead to an improvement greater than that of the Dutch control participants. Thus, the findings confirm what has been anecdotally reported by adoptees and their parents, but what had not been empirically tested before, namely that birth language forgetting occurs very soon after adoption

Abstract

Psycholinguistic research has typically portrayed speech production as a relatively automatic process. This is because when errors are made, they occur as seldom as one in every thousand words we utter. However, it has long been recognised that we need some form of control over what we are currently saying and what we plan to say. This capacity to both monitor our inner speech and self-correct our speech output has often been assumed to be a property of the language comprehension system. More recently, it has been demonstrated that speech production benefits from interfacing with more general cognitive processes such as selective attention, short-term memory (STM) and online response monitoring to resolve potential conflict and successfully produce the output of a verbal plan. The conditions and levels of representation according to which these more general planning, monitoring and control processes are engaged during speech production remain poorly understood. Moreover, there remains a paucity of information about their neural substrates, despite some of the first evidence of more general monitoring having come from electrophysiological studies of error related negativities (ERNs). While aphasic speech errors continue to be a rich source of information, there has been comparatively little research focus on instances of speech repair. The purpose of this Frontiers Research Topic is to provide a forum for researchers to contribute investigations employing behavioural, neuropsychological, electrophysiological, neuroimaging and virtual lesioning techniques. In addition, while the focus of the research topic is on novel findings, we welcome submission of computational simulations, review articles and methods papers.