Publications

Abstract

The authors discuss the issue of how visual orienting, selective stimulus processing, and vocal response planning are related in Stroop-like tasks. The evidence suggests that visual orienting is dependent on both visual processing and verbal response planning. They also discuss the issue of selective perceptual processing in Stroop-like tasks. The evidence suggests that space-based and object-based attention lead to a Trojan horse effect in the classic Stroop task, which can be moderated by increasing the spatial distance between colour and word and by making colour and word part of different objects. Reducing the presentation duration of the colour-word stimulus or the duration of either the colour or word dimension reduces Stroop interference. This paradoxical finding was correctly simulated by the WEAVER++ model. Finally, the authors discuss evidence on the neural correlates of executive attention, in particular, the ACC. The evidence suggests that the ACC plays a role in regulation itself rather than only signalling the need for regulation.

Abstract

This paper deals with the Shawi nominalizing suffixes -su’~-ru’~-nu’ ‘general nominalizer’, -napi/-te’/-tun‘performer/agent nominalizer’, -pi’‘patient nominalizer’, and -nan ‘instrument nominalizer’. The goal of this article is to provide a description of nominalization in Shawi. Throughout this paper I apply the Generalized Scale Model (GSM) (Malchukov, 2006) to Shawi verbal nominalizations, with the intention of presenting a formal representation that will provide a basis for future areal and typological studies of nominalization. In addition, I dialogue with Shibatani’s model to see how the loss or gain of categories correlates with the lexical or grammatical nature of nominalizations. strong nominalization in Shawi correlates with lexical nominalization, whereas weak nominalizations correlate with grammatical nominalization. A typology which takes into account the productivity of the nominalizers is also discussed.

Abstract

One of the most conspicuous ways in which people distribute agency among each other is by asking another for help. Natural languages give people a range of forms to do this, the distinctions among which have consequences for how agency is distributed. Forms such as imperatives (e.g. ‘pass the salt’) and recurrent types of interrogatives (e.g. ‘can you pass the salt?’) designate another person as the doer of the action. In contrast to this, impersonal deontic statements (e.g. ‘it is necessary to get the salt’) express the need for an action without tying it to any particular individual. This can generate interactions in which the identity of the doer must be sorted out among participants, allowing us to observe the distribution of agency in vivo. The case of impersonal deontic statements demonstrates the importance of grammar as a resource for managing human action and sociality.

Abstract

The use of the imperative for requesting has been mostly explained on the basis of estimations of social distance, relative power, and entitlement. More recent research, however, has identified other selection factors to do with the functional and sequential relation of the action requested to the trajectory of the ongoing interaction. In everyday activities among family and friends, the imperative is typically warranted by an earlier commitment of the requestee to a joint project or shared goal which the action requested contributes to. The chapter argues this to be the primary use of the imperative for requesting in Italian informal interaction, and distinguishes it from other uses of the imperative that do not conform to the predominant pattern. These other uses are of two kinds: (i) secondary, that is, less frequent and formally marked imperatives that still orient to social-interactional conditions supporting an expectation of compliance, and (ii) deviant, where the imperative is selected in deliberate violation of the social-interactional conditions that normally support it, attracting special attention and accomplishing more than just requesting. This study extends prior findings on the functional distribution of imperative requests and makes a point of relating and classifying distinct uses of a same form of action, offering new insights into more general aspects of language use such as markedness and normativity.

Abstract

The present paper looks at semantic interference and gender congruency effects during bilingual picture-word naming. According to Costa, Miozzo & Caramazza (1999), only the activation from lexical nodes within a language is considered during lexical selection. If this is accurate, these findings should uphold with respect to semantic and gender/determiner effects even though the distractors are in another language. In the present study three effects were found, (1) a main effect of language, (2) semantic effects for both target language and non-target language distractors, and (3) gender congruency effects for targets with target-language distractors only. These findings are at odds with the language-specific proposal of Costa et al. (1999). Implications of these findings are discussed.

Abstract

Based on the conversation analysts’ insights into the various forms of third person reference in English, this paper first presents the inventory of forms Kilivila, the Austronesian language of the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea, offers its speakers for making such references. To illustrate such references to third persons in talk-in-interaction in Kilivila, a case study on gossiping is presented in the second part of the paper. This case study shows that ambiguous anaphoric references to two first mentioned third persons turn out to not only exceed and even violate the frame of a clearly defined situational-intentional variety of Kilivila that is constituted by the genre “gossip”, but also that these references are extremely dangerous for speakers in the Trobriand Islanders’ society. I illustrate how this culturally dangerous situation escalates and how other participants of the group of gossiping men try to “repair” this violation of the frame of a culturally defined and metalinguistically labelled “way of speaking”. The paper ends with some general remarks on how the understanding of forms of person reference in a language is dependent on the culture specific context in which they are produced.

Abstract

One of the central aims of the "Cognitive Anthropology Research Group" (since 1998 the "Department of Language and Cognition of the MPI for Psycholinguistics") is to research the relationship between language, culture and cognition and the conceptualization of space in various languages and cultures. Ever since its foundation in 1991 the group has been developing methods to elicit cross-culturally and cross-linguistically comparable data for this research project. After a brief summary of the central considerations that served as guidelines for the developing of these elicitation devices, this paper first presents a broad selection of the "space games" developed and used for data elicitation in the groups' various fieldsites so far. The paper then discusses the advantages and shortcomings of these data elicitation devices. Finally, it is argued that methodologists developing such devices find themselves in a position somewhere between Scylla and Charybdis - at least, if they take the requirement seriously that the elicited data should be comparable not only cross-culturally but also cross-linguistically.

Abstract

Kilivila, the Austronesian language of the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea, has a rich inventory of terms - nouns, verbs, adjectives and idiomatic phrases and expressions - to precisely refer to, and to differentiate emotions and inner feelings. This paper describes how the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea deal with the public display of emotions. Forms of emotion control in public encounters are discussed and explained on the basis of ritual communication which pervades the Trobrianders' verbal and non-verbal behaviour. Especially highlighted is the Trobrianders' metalinguistic concept of "biga sopa" with its important role for emotion control in encounters that may run the risk of escalating from argument and conflict to aggression and violence.

Abstract

This paper describes how the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea used to construct their big seagoing masawa canoes and how they used to make their sails, what forms of different knowledge and expertise they needed to do this during various stages of the construction processes, how this knowledge was socially distributed, and the social implications of all the joint communal activities that were necessary until a new canoe could be launched. Then it tries to answer the question why the complex distributed knowledge of how to make a masawa has been gradually getting lost in most of the village communities on the Trobriand Islands; and finally it outlines and discusses the implications of this loss for the Trobriand Islanders' culture, for their social construction of reality, and for their indigenous cognitive capacities.

Abstract

Arbeitet man als muttersprachlicher Sprecher des Deutschen mit Corpora gesprochener oder geschriebener deutscher Sprache, dann reflektiert man in aller Regel nur selten über die Vielzahl von kulturspezifischen Informationen, die in solchen Texten kodifiziert sind – vor allem, wenn es sich bei diesen Daten um Texte aus der Gegenwart handelt. In den meisten Fällen hat man nämlich keinerlei Probleme mit dem in den Daten präsupponierten und als allgemein bekannt erachteten Hintergrundswissen. Betrachtet man dagegen Daten in Corpora, die andere – vor allem nicht-indoeuropäische – Sprachen dokumentieren, dann wird einem schnell bewußt, wieviel an kulturspezifischem Wissen nötig ist, um diese Daten adäquat zu verstehen. In meinem Vortrag illustriere ich diese Beobachtung an einem Beispiel aus meinem Corpus des Kilivila, der austronesischen Sprache der Trobriand-Insulaner von Papua-Neuguinea. Anhand eines kurzen Auschnitts einer insgesamt etwa 26 Minuten dauernden Dokumentation, worüber und wie sechs Trobriander miteinander tratschen und klatschen, zeige ich, was ein Hörer oder Leser eines solchen kurzen Daten-Ausschnitts wissen muß, um nicht nur dem Gespräch überhaupt folgen zu können, sondern auch um zu verstehen, was dabei abläuft und wieso ein auf den ersten Blick absolut alltägliches Gespräch plötzlich für einen Trobriander ungeheuer an Brisanz und Bedeutung gewinnt. Vor dem Hintergrund dieses Beispiels weise ich dann zum Schluß meines Beitrags darauf hin, wie unbedingt nötig und erforderlich es ist, in allen Corpora bei der Erschließung und Kommentierung von Datenmaterialien durch sogenannte Metadaten solche kulturspezifischen Informationen explizit zu machen.

Abstract

This handbook chapter summarizes some of the problems of nominal classification in language, presents and illustrates the various systems or techniques of nominal classification, and points out why nominal classification is one of the most interesting topics in Cognitive Linguistics.

Abstract

This paper reports on the results of my research on the lexical means Kilivila offers its speakers to refer to emotions and inner feelings. Data were elicited with 18 “Ekman’s faces” in which photos of the faces of one woman and two men illustrate the allegedly universal basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise) and with film stimuli staging standard emotions. The data are discussed on the basis of the following research questions: * How “effable” are they or do we observe ineffability – the difficulty of putting experiences into words – within the domain of emotions? * Do consultants agree with one another in how they name emotions? * Are facial expressions or situations better cues for labeling?

Abstract

This paper deals with the dramatic environmental, social and cultural changes on the Trobriand Islands which I experienced during 16 long- and short-term fieldtrips from 1982 to 2012. I first report on the climate change I experienced there over the years and provide a survey about the demographic changes on the Trobriand Islands – highlighting the situation in Tauwema, my village of residence on Kaile’una Island. Finally I report on the social and cultural impact these dramatic changes have for the Trobriand Islanders and their culture.

Abstract

Die Sprachwissenschaft hat den Begriff und das Konzept ›Rituelle Kommunikation‹ von der vergleichenden Verhaltensforschung übernommen. Humanethologen unterscheiden eine Reihe von sogenannten ›Ausdrucksbewegungen‹, die in der Mimik, der Gestik, der Personaldistanz (Proxemik) und der Körperhaltung (Kinesik) zum Ausdruck kommen. Viele dieser Ausdrucksbewegungen haben sich zu spezifischen Signalen entwickelt. Ethologen definieren Ritualisierung als Veränderung von Verhaltensweisen im Dienst der Signalbildung. Die zu Signalen ritualisierten Verhaltensweisen sind Rituale. Im Prinzip kann jede Verhaltensweise zu einem Signal werden, entweder im Laufe der Evolution oder durch Konventionen, die in einer bestimmten Gemeinschaft gültig sind, die solche Signale kulturell entwickelt hat und die von ihren Mitgliedern tradiert und gelernt werden.

Abstract

This entry takes an interdisciplinary approach to linguistic pragmatics. It discusses how the meaning of utterances can only be understood in relation to overall cultural, social, and interpersonal contexts, as well as to culture-specific conventions and the speech events in which they are embedded. The entry discusses core issues of pragmatics such as speech act theory, conversational implicature, deixis, gesture, interaction strategies, ritual communication, phatic communion, linguistic relativity, ethnography of speaking, ethnomethodology, and conversation analysis. It takes a transdisciplinary view of the field, showing that linguistic pragmatics has its predecessors in other disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, ethology, ethnology, and sociology.

Abstract

Computational models can reflect the complexity of human behaviour by implementing multiple constraints within their architecture, and/or by taking into account the variety and richness of the environment to which the human is responding. We explore the second alternative in a model of word recognition that learns to map spoken words to visual and semantic representations of the words’ concepts. Critically, we employ a phonological representation utilising coarse-coding of the auditory stream, to mimic early stages of language development that are not dependent on individual phonemes to be isolated in the input, which may be a consequence of literacy development. The model was tested at different stages during training, and was able to simulate key behavioural features of word recognition in children: a developing effect of semantic information as a consequence of language learning, and a small but earlier effect of phonological information on word processing. We additionally tested the role of visual information in word processing, generating predictions for behavioural studies, showing that visual information could have a larger effect than semantics on children’s performance, but that again this affects recognition later in word processing than phonological information. The model also provides further predictions for performance of a mature word recognition system in the absence of fine-coding of phonology, such as in adults who have low literacy skills. The model demonstrated that such phonological effects may be reduced but are still evident even when multiple distractors from various modalities are present in the listener’s environment. The model demonstrates that complexity in word recognition can emerge from a simple associative system responding to the interactions between multiple sources of information in the language learner’s environment.

Abstract

The current study examines, for the first time, the viewpoint preferences of signing children in expressing spatial relations that require imposing a viewpoint (left-right, front-behind). We elicited spatial descriptions from deaf children (4–9 years of age) acquiring Turkish Sign Language (TİD) natively from their deaf parents and from adult native signers of TİD. Adults produced these spatial descriptions from their own viewpoint and from that of their addressee depending on whether the objects were located on the lateral or the sagittal axis. TİD-acquiring children, on the other hand, described all spatial configurations from their own viewpoint. Differences were also found between children and adults in the type of linguistic devices and how they are used to express such spatial relations.

Abstract

Previous studies show that children do not become adult-like in learning to set the scene and introduce referents in their narrations until 9 years of age and even beyond. However, they investigated spoken languages, thus we do not know much about how these skills are acquired in sign languages, where events are expressed in visually similar ways to the real world events, unlike in spoken languages. The results of the current study demonstrate that deaf children (3;5–9;10 years) acquiring Turkish Sign Language, and hearing children (3;8–9;11 years) acquiring spoken Turkish both acquire scene-setting and referent introduction skills at similar ages. Thus the modality of the language being acquired does not have facilitating or hindering effects in the development of these skills.

Abstract

This chapter describes the challenges that modern digital language archives are faced with. One essential aspect of such an archive is to have a rich metadata catalog such that the archived resources can be easily discovered. The challenge of the archive is to obtain these rich metadata descriptions from the depositors without creating too much overhead for them. The rapid changes in storage technology, file formats and encoding standards make it difficult to build a long-lasting repository, therefore archives need to be set up in such a way that a straightforward and automated migration process to newer technology is possible whenever certain technology becomes obsolete. Other problems arise from the fact that there are many different groups of users of the archive, each of them with their own specific expectations and demands. Often conflicts exist between the requirements for different purposes of the archive, e.g. between long-term preservation of the data versus direct access to the resources via the web. The task of the archive is to come up with a technical solution that works well for most usage scenarios.

Abstract

Prevoicing is the presence of vocal fold vibration during the closure of initial voiced plosives (negative VOT). The presence or absence of prevoicing is generally used to describe the voicing distinction in Dutch initial plosives. However, a phonetic study showed that prevoicing is frequently absent in Dutch. This article discusses the role of prevoicing in the production and perception of Dutch plosives. Furthermore, two cross-modal priming experiments are presented that examined the effect of prevoicing variation on word recognition. Both experiments showed no difference between primes with 12, 6 or 0 periods of prevoicing, even though a third experiment indicated that listeners could discriminate these words. These results are discussed in light of another priming experiment that did show an effect of the absence of prevoicing, but only when primes had a voiceless word competitor. Phonetic detail appears to influence lexical access only when it helps to distinguish between lexical candidates.

Abstract

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

Abstract

Word learning happens in everyday contexts with many words and many potential referents for those words in view at the same time. It is challenging for young learners to find the correct referent upon hearing an unknown word at the moment. This problem of referential uncertainty has been deemed as the crux of early word learning (Quine, 1960). Recent empirical and computational studies have found support for a statistical solution to the problem termed cross-situational learning. Cross-situational learning allows learners to acquire word meanings across multiple exposures, despite each individual exposure is referentially uncertain. Recent empirical research shows that infants, children and adults rely on cross-situational learning to learn new words (Smith & Yu, 2008; Suanda, Mugwanya, & Namy, 2014; Yu & Smith, 2007). However, researchers have found evidence supporting two very different theoretical accounts of learning mechanisms: Hypothesis Testing (Gleitman, Cassidy, Nappa, Papafragou, & Trueswell, 2005; Markman, 1992) and Associative Learning (Frank, Goodman, & Tenenbaum, 2009; Yu & Smith, 2007). Hypothesis Testing is generally characterized as a form of learning in which a coherent hypothesis regarding a specific word-object mapping is formed often in conceptually constrained ways. The hypothesis will then be either accepted or rejected with additional evidence. However, proponents of the Associative Learning framework often characterize learning as aggregating information over time through implicit associative mechanisms. A learner acquires the meaning of a word when the association between the word and the referent becomes relatively strong. In this chapter, we consider these two psychological theories in the context of cross-situational word-referent learning. By reviewing recent empirical and cognitive modeling studies, our goal is to deepen our understanding of the underlying word learning mechanisms by examining and comparing the two theoretical learning accounts.