Publications

Abstract

In German, word-initial lax fricatives may be produced with substantially reduced glottal vibration after voiceless obstruents. This assimilation occurs more frequently and to a larger extent across prosodic word boundaries than across phrase boundaries. Assimilatory devoicing makes the fricatives more similar to their tense counterparts and could thus hinder word recognition. The present study investigates how listeners cope with assimilatory devoicing. Results of a cross-modal priming experiment indicate that listeners compensate for assimilation in appropriate contexts. Prosodic structure moderates compensation for assimilation: Compensation occurs especially after phrase boundaries, where devoiced fricatives are sufficiently long to be confused with their tense counterparts.

Abstract

Prosodic structure has long been known to constrain phonological processes [1]. More recently, it has also been recognized as a source of fine-grained phonetic variation of speech sounds. In particular, segments in domain-initial position undergo prosodic strengthening [2, 3], which also implies more resistance to coarticulation in higher prosodic domains [5]. The present study investigates the combined effects of prosodic strengthening and assimilatory devoicing on word-initial fricatives in German, the functional implication of both processes for cues to the fortis-lenis contrast, and the influence of prosodic structure on listeners’ compensation for assimilation. Results indicate that 1. Prosodic structure modulates duration and the degree of assimilatory devoicing, 2. Phonological contrasts are maintained by speakers, but differ in phonetic detail across prosodic domains, and 3. Compensation for assimilation in perception is moderated by prosodic structure and lexical constraints.

Abstract

Mental imagery is a cognitive process crucial to human reasoning. Numerous studies have characterized specific
instances of this cognitive ability, as evoked by visual imagery (VI) or motor imagery (MI) tasks. However, it
remains unclear which neural resources are shared between VI and MI, and which are exclusively related to MI.
To address this issue, we have used fMRI to measure human brain activity during performance of VI and MI
tasks. Crucially, we have modulated the imagery process by manipulating the degree of mental rotation necessary
to solve the tasks. We focused our analysis on changes in neural signal as a function of the degree of mental
rotation in each task.

Abstract

In this paper we report on four experiments in which we attempted to prime the stress position of Dutch bisyllabic target nouns. These nouns, picture names, had stress on either the first or the second syllable. Auditory prime words had either the same stress as the target or a different stress (e.g., WORtel – MOtor vs. koSTUUM – MOtor; capital letters indicate stressed syllables in prime – target pairs). Furthermore, half of the prime words were semantically related, the other half were unrelated. In none of the experiments a stress priming effect was found. This could mean that stress is not stored in the lexicon. An additional finding was that targets with initial stress had a faster response than targets with a final stress. We hypothesize that bisyllabic words with final stress take longer to be encoded because this stress pattern is irregular with respect to the lexical distribution of bisyllabic stress patterns, even though it can be regular in terms of the metrical stress rules of Dutch.

Abstract

Presentation of the official opening of the Jerome Bruner Library, January 8th, 2020

Abstract

Languages differ in the degree of semantic flexibility of their syntactic roles. For example, Eng-
lish and Indonesian are considered more flexible with regard to the semantics of subjects,
whereas German and Japanese are less flexible. In Hawkins’ classification, more flexible lan-
guages are said to have a loose fit, and less flexible ones are those that have a tight fit. This
classification has been based on manual inspection of example sentences. The present paper
proposes a new, quantitative approach to deriving the measures of looseness and tightness from
corpora. We use corpora of online news from the Leipzig Corpora Collection in thirty typolog-
ically and genealogically diverse languages and parse them syntactically with the help of the
Universal Dependencies annotation software. Next, we compute Mutual Information scores for
each language using the matrices of lexical lemmas and four syntactic dependencies (intransi-
tive subjects, transitive subject, objects and obliques). The new approach allows us not only to
reproduce the results of previous investigations, but also to extend the typology to new lan-
guages. We also demonstrate that verb-final languages tend to have a tighter relationship be-
tween lexemes and syntactic roles, which helps language users to recognize thematic roles early
during comprehension.

Abstract

Recent research suggests that 12-month-old infants in German cultural settings have the motive of sharing their attention to and interest in various events with a social interlocutor. To do so, these preverbal infants predominantly use the pointing gesture (in this case the extended arm with or without extended index finger) as a means to direct another person’s attention. This task systematically investigates different types of motives underlying infants’ pointing. The occurrence of a protodeclarative (as opposed to protoimperative) motive is of particular interest because it requires an understanding of the recipient’s psychological states, such as attention and interest, that can be directed and accessed.

Abstract

Children learn language from the speech in their home environment. Recent work shows that more infant-directed speech
(IDS) leads to stronger lexical development. But what makes IDS a particularly useful learning signal? Here, we expand on an attention-based account first proposed by Räsänen et al. (2018): that prosodic modifications make IDS less predictable, and thus more interesting. First, we reproduce the critical finding from Räsänen et al.: that lab-recorded IDS pitch is less predictable compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). Next, we show that this result generalizes to the home language environment, finding that IDS in daylong recordings is also less predictable than ADS but that this pattern is much less robust than for IDS recorded in the lab. These results link experimental work on attention and prosodic modifications of IDS to real-world language-learning environments, highlighting some challenges of scaling up analyses of IDS to larger datasets that better capture children’s actual input.

Abstract

Lexical stress is realised similarly in English, German, and
Dutch. On a suprasegmental level, stressed syllables tend to be
longer and more acoustically salient than unstressed syllables;
segmentally, vowels in unstressed syllables are often reduced.
The frequency of unreduced unstressed syllables (where only
the suprasegmental cues indicate lack of stress) however,
differs across the languages. The present studies test whether
listener behaviour is affected by these vocabulary differences,
by investigating German listeners’ use of suprasegmental cues
to lexical stress in German and English word recognition. In a
forced-choice identification task, German listeners correctly
assigned single-syllable fragments (e.g., Kon-) to one of two
words differing in stress (KONto, konZEPT). Thus, German
listeners can exploit suprasegmental information for
identifying words. German listeners also performed above
chance in a similar task in English (with, e.g., DIver, diVERT),
i.e., their sensitivity to these cues also transferred to a nonnative
language. An English listener group, in contrast, failed
in the English fragment task. These findings mirror vocabulary
patterns: German has more words with unreduced unstressed
syllables than English does.

Abstract

There are three main strands of research which have investigated people’s intuitive knowledge of objects in motion. (1) Knowledge of the trajectories of objects in motion; (2) knowledge of the causes of motion; and (3) the categorisation of motion as to whether it has been produced by something animate or inanimate. We provide a brief introduction to each of these areas. We then point to some linguistic and cultural differences which may have consequences for people’s knowledge of objects in motion. Finally, we describe two experimental tasks and an ethnographic task that will allow us to collect data in order to establish whether, indeed, there are interesting cross-linguistic/cross-cultural differences in lay theories of objects in motion.

Abstract

This chapter outlines a Bayesian model of spoken-word recognition and reviews how
prosody is part of that model. The review focuses on the information that assists the lis­
tener in recognizing the prosodic structure of an utterance and on how spoken-word
recognition is also constrained by prior knowledge about prosodic structure. Recognition
is argued to be a process of perceptual inference that ensures that listening is robust to
variability in the speech signal. In essence, the listener makes inferences about the seg­
mental content of each utterance, about its prosodic structure (simultaneously at differ­
ent levels in the prosodic hierarchy), and about the words it contains, and uses these in­
ferences to form an utterance interpretation. Four characteristics of the proposed
prosody-enriched recognition model are discussed: parallel uptake of different informa­
tion types, high contextual dependency, adaptive processing, and phonological abstrac­
tion. The next steps that should be taken to develop the model are also discussed.

Abstract

The results of a word-spotting experiment are presented in which Dutch listeners tried to spot different types of bisyllabic Dutch words embedded in different types of nonsense contexts. Embedded verbs were not reliably harder to spot than embedded nouns; this suggests that nouns and verbs are recognised via the same basic processes. Iambic words were no harder to spot than trochaic words, suggesting that trochaic words are not in principle easier to recognise than iambic words. Words were harder to spot in consonantal contexts (i.e., contexts which themselves could not be words) than in longer contexts which contained at least one vowel (i.e., contexts which, though not words, were possible words of Dutch). A control experiment showed that this difference was not due to acoustic differences between the words in each context. The results support the claim that spoken-word recognition is sensitive to the viability of sound sequences as possible words.

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of semantic association norms for German nouns. In contrast to prior studies, we not only collected associations elicited by written representations of target objects but also by their pictorial representations. In a first analysis, we identified systematic differences in the type and distribution of associate responses for the two presentation forms. In a second analysis, we applied a soft cluster analysis to the collected target-response pairs. We subsequently used the clustering to predict noun ambiguity and to discriminate senses in our target nouns.

Abstract

The goal of speech perception is understanding a speaker's message. To achieve this, listeners must recognize the words that comprise a spoken utterance. This in turn implies distinguishing these words from other minimally different words (e.g., word from bird, etc.), and this involves making phonemic distinctions. The article summarizes research on the perception of phonemic distinctions, on how listeners cope with the continuity and variability of speech signals, and on how phonemic information is mapped onto the representations of words. Particular attention is paid to theories of speech perception and word recognition.

Abstract

The human language processor is conceived as a system that consists of several interrelated subsystems. Each subsystem performs a specific task in the complex process of language comprehension and production. A subsystem receives a particular input, performs certain specific operations on this input and yields a particular output. The subsystems can be characterized in terms of the transformations that relate the input representations to the output representations. An important issue in describing the language processing system is to identify the subsystems and to specify the relations between the subsystems. These relations can be conceived in two different ways. In one conception the subsystems are autonomous. They are related to each other only by the input-output channels. The operations in one subsystem are not affected by another system. The subsystems are modular, that is they are independent. In the other conception, the different subsystems influence each other. A subsystem affects the processes in another subsystem. In this conception there is an interaction between the subsystems.

Abstract

In this paper we describe a general scheme for internationalization of our talking head, Baldi, to speak other languages. We describe the modular structure of the auditory/visual synthesis software. As an example, we have created a synthetic Arabic talker, which is evaluated using a noisy word recognition task comparing this talker with a natural one.

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

Automating robot behavior in a specific situation is an active area of research. There are several approaches available in the literature of robotics to cater for the automatic behavior of a robot. However, when it comes to humanoids or human-robot interaction in general, the area has been less explored. In this paper, a pseudo-randomization approach has been introduced to automatize the gestures and facial expressions of an interactive humanoid robot called ROBIN based on its mental state. A significant number of gestures and facial expressions have been implemented to allow the robot more options to perform a relevant action or reaction based on visual stimuli. There is a display of noticeable differences in the behaviour of the robot for the same stimuli perceived from an interaction partner. This slight autonomous behavioural change in the robot clearly shows a notion of automation in behaviour. The results from experimental scenarios and human-centered evaluation of the system help validate the approach.

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

Literacy and education represent essential aspects of contemporary society and subserve important aspects of socialization and cultural transmission. The study of illiterate subjects represents one approach to investigate the interactions between neurobiological and cultural factors in cognitive development, individual learning, and their influence on the functional organization of the brain. In this chapter we review some recent cognitive, neuroanatomic, and functional neuroimaging results indicating that formal education influences important aspects of the human brain. Taken together this provides strong support for the idea that the brain is modulated by literacy and formal education, which in turn change the brains capacity to interact with its environment, including the individual's contemporary culture. In other words, the individual is able to participate in, interact with, and actively contribute to the process of cultural transmission in new ways through acquired cognitive skills.

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

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

We have recently developed a new model of human speech recognition, based on automatic speech recognition techniques [1]. The present paper has two goals. First, we show that the new model performs well in the recognition of lexically ambiguous input. These demonstrations suggest that the model is able to operate in the same optimal way as human listeners. Second, we discuss how to relate the behaviour of a recogniser, designed to discover the optimum path through a word lattice, to data from human listening experiments. We argue that this requires a metric that combines both path-based and word-based measures of recognition performance. The combined metric varies continuously as the input speech signal unfolds over time.

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel computational model of human speech recognition – called SpeM – based on the theory underlying Shortlist. We will show that SpeM, in combination with an automatic phone recogniser (APR), is able to simulate the human speech recognition process from the acoustic signal to the ultimate recognition of words. This joint model takes an acoustic speech file as input and calculates the activation flows of candidate words on the basis of the degree of fit of the candidate words with the input. Experiments showed that SpeM outperforms Shortlist on the recognition of ‘real-life’ input. Furthermore, SpeM performs only slightly worse than an off-the-shelf full-blown automatic speech recogniser in which all words are equally probable, while it provides a transparent computationally elegant paradigm for modelling word activations in human word recognition.

Abstract

This study investigated the encoding of metrical information during speech production in Dutch. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to judge whether bisyllabic picture names had initial or final stress. Results showed significantly faster decision times for initially stressed targets (e.g., LEpel 'spoon') than for targets with final stress (e.g., liBEL 'dragon fly'; capital letters indicate stressed syllables) and revealed that the monitoring latencies are not a function of the picture naming or object recognition latencies to the same pictures. Experiments 2 and 3 replicated the outcome of the first experiment with bi- and trisyllabic picture names. These results demonstrate that metrical information of words is encoded rightward incrementally during phonological encoding in speech production. The results of these experiments are in line with Levelt's model of phonological encoding.

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

Due to its numerous bibliometric entries of scholarly articles and connected information Wikidata can serve as an open and rich
source for deep scientometrical analyses. However, there are currently certain limitations: While 31.5% of all Wikidata entries represent scientific articles, only 8.9% are entries describing a person and the number
of entries researcher is accordingly even lower. Another issue is the frequent absence of established relations between the scholarly article item and the author item although the author is already listed in Wikidata.
To fill this gap and to improve the content of Wikidata in general, we established a workflow for matching authors and scholarly publications by integrating data from the ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) database. By this approach we were able to extend Wikidata by more than 12k author-publication relations and the method can be
transferred to other enrichments based on ORCID data. This is extension is beneficial for Wikidata users performing bibliometrical analyses or using such metadata for other purposes.

Abstract

The basic idea behind this task is to find out how languages encode basic shape distinctions such as dimensionality, axial geometry, relative size, etc. More specifically, we want to find out (i) which formal means are used cross linguistically to encode basic shape distinctions, and (ii) which are the semantic distinctions that are made in this domain. In languages with many shape-classifiers, these distinctions are encoded (at least partially) in classifiers. In other languages, positional verbs, descriptive modifiers, such as “flat”, “round”, or nouns such as “cube”, “ball”, etc. might be the preferred means. In this context, we also want to investigate what other “grammatical work” shapeencoding expressions possibly do in a given language, e.g. unitization of mass nouns, or anaphoric uses of shape-encoding classifiers, etc. This task further seeks to determine the role of shape-related parameters which underlie the design of objects in the semantics of the system under investigation.

Abstract

This paper presents preliminary remarks on some of the central linguistic means speakers of Kilivila use in expressing their conceptions of space and for referring to objects, persons, and events in space . After a brief characterisation of the language and its speakers, I sketch how specific topological relations are encoded, how motion events are described, and what frames of spatial reference are preferred in what contexts for what means and ends.