Publications

Displaying 201 - 231 of 231
  • Tsoukala, C., Frank, S. L., Van den Bosch, A., Kroff, J. V., & Broersma, M. (2020). Simulating Spanish-English code-switching: El modelo está generating code-switches. In E. Chersoni, C. Jacobs, Y. Oseki, L. Prévot, & E. Santus (Eds.), Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (pp. 20-29). Stroudsburg, PA, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).

    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.
  • Valtersson, E., & Torreira, F. (2014). Rising intonation in spontaneous French: How well can continuation statements and polar questions be distinguished? In N. Campbell, D. Gibbon, & D. Hirst (Eds.), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2014 (pp. 785-789).

    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.
  • Van den Heuvel, H., Oostdijk, N., Rowland, C. F., & Trilsbeek, P. (2020). The CLARIN Knowledge Centre for Atypical Communication Expertise. In N. Calzolari, F. Béchet, P. Blache, K. Choukri, C. Cieri, T. Declerck, S. Goggi, H. Isahara, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, H. Mazo, A. Moreno, J. Odijk, & S. Piperidis (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2020) (pp. 3312-3316). Marseille, France: European Language Resources Association.

    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.
  • Van Dooren, A., Tulling, M., Cournane, A., & Hacquard, V. (2019). Discovering modal polysemy: Lexical aspect might help. In M. Brown, & B. Dailey (Eds.), BUCLD 43: Proceedings of the 43rd annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 203-216). Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Van Dooren, A. (2020). The temporal perspective of epistemics in Dutch. In M. Franke, N. Kompa, M. Liu, J. L. Mueller, & J. Schwab (Eds.), Proceedings of Sinn Und Bedeutung 24 (pp. 143-160). Osnabrück: Osnabrück University.

    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.
  • Van Arkel, J., Woensdregt, M., Dingemanse, M., & Blokpoel, M. (2020). A simple repair mechanism can alleviate computational demands of pragmatic reasoning: simulations and complexity analysis. In R. Fernández, & T. Linzen (Eds.), Proceedings of the 24th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2020) (pp. 177-194). Stroudsburg, PA, USA: The Association for Computational Linguistics. doi:10.18653/v1/2020.conll-1.14.

    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.
  • Van Ooijen, B., Cutler, A., & Norris, D. (1991). Detection times for vowels versus consonants. In Eurospeech 91: Vol. 3 (pp. 1451-1454). Genova: Istituto Internazionale delle Comunicazioni.

    Abstract

    This paper reports two experiments with vowels and consonants as phoneme detection targets in real words. In the first experiment, two relatively distinct vowels were compared with two confusible stop consonants. Response times to the vowels were longer than to the consonants. Response times correlated negatively with target phoneme length. In the second, two relatively distinct vowels were compared with their corresponding semivowels. This time, the vowels were detected faster than the semivowels. We conclude that response time differences between vowels and stop consonants in this task may reflect differences between phoneme categories in the variability of tokens, both in the acoustic realisation of targets and in the' representation of targets by subjects.
  • Van Valin Jr., R. D. (1987). Aspects of the interaction of syntax and pragmatics: Discourse coreference mechanisms and the typology of grammatical systems. In M. Bertuccelli Papi, & J. Verschueren (Eds.), The pragmatic perspective: Selected papers from the 1985 International Pragmatics Conference (pp. 513-531). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Van Valin Jr., R. D. (1987). Pragmatics, island phenomena, and linguistic competence. In A. M. Farley, P. T. Farley, & K.-E. McCullough (Eds.), CLS 22. Papers from the parasession on pragmatics and grammatical theory (pp. 223-233). Chicago Linguistic Society.
  • Vernes, S. C. (2020). Understanding bat vocal learning to gain insight into speech and language. In A. Ravignani, C. Barbieri, M. Flaherty, Y. Jadoul, E. Lattenkamp, H. Little, M. Martins, K. Mudd, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference (Evolang13) (pp. 6). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences.
  • Vosse, T., & Kempen, G. (1991). A hybrid model of human sentence processing: Parsing right-branching, center-embedded and cross-serial dependencies. In M. Tomita (Ed.), Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Parsing Technologies.
  • Wagner, M. A., Broersma, M., McQueen, J. M., & Lemhöfer, K. (2019). Imitating speech in an unfamiliar language and an unfamiliar non-native accent in the native language. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 20195) (pp. 1362-1366). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

    Abstract

    This study concerns individual differences in speech imitation ability and the role that lexical representations play in imitation. We examined 1) whether imitation of sounds in an unfamiliar language (L0) is related to imitation of sounds in an unfamiliar
    non-native accent in the speaker’s native language (L1) and 2) whether it is easier or harder to imitate speech when you know the words to be imitated. Fifty-nine native Dutch speakers imitated words with target vowels in Basque (/a/ and /e/) and Greekaccented
    Dutch (/i/ and /u/). Spectral and durational
    analyses of the target vowels revealed no relationship between the success of L0 and L1 imitation and no difference in performance between tasks (i.e., L1
    imitation was neither aided nor blocked by lexical knowledge about the correct pronunciation). The results suggest instead that the relationship of the vowels to native phonological categories plays a bigger role in imitation
  • Weber, A. (1998). Listening to nonnative language which violates native assimilation rules. In D. Duez (Ed.), Proceedings of the European Scientific Communication Association workshop: Sound patterns of Spontaneous Speech (pp. 101-104).

    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.
  • Weber, A., & Paris, G. (2004). The origin of the linguistic gender effect in spoken-word recognition: Evidence from non-native listening. In K. Forbus, D. Gentner, & T. Tegier (Eds.), Proceedings of the 26th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

    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.
  • Weber, A., & Mueller, K. (2004). Word order variation in German main clauses: A corpus analysis. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics.

    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.
  • Wilson, J. J., & Little, H. (2014). Emerging languages in Esoteric and Exoteric Niches: evidence from Rural Sign Languages. In Ways to Potolanguage 3 book of abstracts (pp. 54-55).
  • Windhouwer, M., Petro, J., & Shayan, S. (2014). RELISH LMF: Unlocking the full power of the lexical markup framework. In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, T. Declerck, H. Loftsson, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, A. Moreno, J. Odijk, & S. Piperidis (Eds.), Proceedings of LREC 2014: 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 1032-1037).
  • Wittek, A. (1998). Learning verb meaning via adverbial modification: Change-of-state verbs in German and the adverb "wieder" again. In A. Greenhill, M. Hughes, H. Littlefield, & H. Walsh (Eds.), Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 779-790). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Wittenburg, P. (2004). The IMDI metadata concept. In S. F. Ferreira (Ed.), Workingmaterial on Building the LR&E Roadmap: Joint COCOSDA and ICCWLRE Meeting, (LREC2004). Paris: ELRA - European Language Resources Association.
  • Wittenburg, P., Brugman, H., Broeder, D., & Russel, A. (2004). XML-based language archiving. In Workshop Proceedings on XML-based Richly Annotaded Corpora (LREC2004) (pp. 63-69). Paris: ELRA - European Language Resources Association.
  • Wittenburg, P., Gulrajani, G., Broeder, D., & Uneson, M. (2004). Cross-disciplinary integration of metadata descriptions. In M. Lino, M. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa, & R. Silva (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC2004) (pp. 113-116). Paris: ELRA - European Language Resources Association.
  • Wittenburg, P., Johnson, H., Buchhorn, M., Brugman, H., & Broeder, D. (2004). Architecture for distributed language resource management and archiving. In M. Lino, M. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa, & R. Silva (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC2004) (pp. 361-364). Paris: ELRA - European Language Resources Association.
  • Woensdregt, M., & Dingemanse, M. (2020). Other-initiated repair can facilitate the emergence of compositional language. In A. Ravignani, C. Barbieri, M. Flaherty, Y. Jadoul, E. Lattenkamp, H. Little, M. Martins, K. Mudd, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference (Evolang13) (pp. 474-476). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences.
  • Wolf, M. C., Smith, A. C., Meyer, A. S., & Rowland, C. F. (2019). Modality effects in vocabulary acquisition. In A. K. Goel, C. M. Seifert, & C. Freksa (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2019) (pp. 1212-1218). Montreal, QB: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    It is unknown whether modality affects the efficiency with which humans learn novel word forms and their meanings, with previous studies reporting both written and auditory advantages. The current study implements controls whose absence in previous work likely offers explanation for such contradictory findings. In two novel word learning experiments, participants were trained and tested on pseudoword - novel object pairs, with controls on: modality of test, modality of meaning, duration of exposure and transparency of word form. In both experiments word forms were presented in either their written or spoken form, each paired with a pictorial meaning (novel object). Following a 20-minute filler task, participants were tested on their ability to identify the picture-word form pairs on which they were trained. A between subjects design generated four participant groups per experiment 1) written training, written test; 2) written training, spoken test; 3) spoken training, written test; 4) spoken training, spoken test. In Experiment 1 the written stimulus was presented for a time period equal to the duration of the spoken form. Results showed that when the duration of exposure was equal, participants displayed a written training benefit. Given words can be read faster than the time taken for the spoken form to unfold, in Experiment 2 the written form was presented for 300 ms, sufficient time to read the word yet 65% shorter than the duration of the spoken form. No modality effect was observed under these conditions, when exposure to the word form was equivalent. These results demonstrate, at least for proficient readers, that when exposure to the word form is controlled across modalities the efficiency with which word form-meaning associations are learnt does not differ. Our results therefore suggest that, although we typically begin as aural-only word learners, we ultimately converge on developing learning mechanisms that learn equally efficiently from both written and spoken materials.
  • Wright, S. E., Windhouwer, M., Schuurman, I., & Broeder, D. (2014). Segueing from a Data Category Registry to a Data Concept Registry. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Terminology and Knowledge Engineering (TKE 2014).

    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.
  • Yang, J., Van den Bosch, A., & Frank, S. L. (2020). Less is Better: A cognitively inspired unsupervised model for language segmentation. In M. Zock, E. Chersoni, A. Lenci, & E. Santus (Eds.), Proceedings of the Workshop on the Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon ( 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics) (pp. 33-45). Stroudsburg: Association for Computational Linguistics.

    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.

    Additional information

    full text via ACL website
  • Yang, A., & Chen, A. (2014). Prosodic focus marking in child and adult Mandarin Chinese. In C. Gussenhoven, Y. Chen, & D. Dediu (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Language (pp. 54-58).

    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
  • Yang, A., & Chen, A. (2014). Prosodic focus-marking in Chinese four- and eight-year-olds. In N. Campbell, D. Gibbon, & D. Hirst (Eds.), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2014 (pp. 713-717).

    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.
  • Zampieri, M., & Gebre, B. G. (2014). VarClass: An open-source language identification tool for language varieties. In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, T. Declerck, H. Loftsson, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, A. Moreno, J. Odijk, & S. Piperidis (Eds.), Proceedings of LREC 2014: 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 3305-3308).

    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
  • Zhang, Y., Amatuni, A., Crain, E., & Yu, C. (2020). Seeking meaning: Examining a cross-situational solution to learn action verbs using human simulation paradigm. In S. Denison, M. Mack, Y. Xu, & B. C. Armstrong (Eds.), Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2020) (pp. 2854-2860). Montreal, QB: Cognitive Science Society.

    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.
  • Zhou, W., & Broersma, M. (2014). Perception of birth language tone contrasts by adopted Chinese children. In C. Gussenhoven, Y. Chen, & D. Dediu (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Language (pp. 63-66).

    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

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