Publications

Abstract

This questionnaire is designed to explore how spatial relations are encoded in Australian language, but may be of interest to researchers further afield.

Abstract

This questionnaire is designed to explore how spatial relations are encoded in Australian language, but may be of interest to researchers further afield.

Abstract

Since the core matrix for language use is interaction, the main job of language
is not to express propositions or abstract meanings, but to deliver actions.
For in order to respond in interaction we have to ascribe to the prior turn
a primary ‘action’ – variously thought of as an ‘illocution’, ‘speech act’, ‘move’,
etc. – to which we then respond. The analysis of interaction also relies heavily
on attributing actions to turns, so that, e.g., sequences can be characterized in
terms of actions and responses. Yet the process of action ascription remains way
understudied. We don’t know much about how it is done, when it is done, nor even
what kind of inventory of possible actions might exist, or the degree to which they
are culturally variable.
The study of action ascription remains perhaps the primary unfulfilled task in
the study of language use, and it needs to be tackled from conversationanalytic,
psycholinguistic, cross-linguistic and anthropological perspectives.
In this talk I try to take stock of what we know, and derive a set of goals for and
constraints on an adequate theory. Such a theory is likely to employ, I will suggest,
a top-down plus bottom-up account of action perception, and a multi-level notion
of action which may resolve some of the puzzles that have repeatedly arisen.

Abstract

Given the diversity of languages, it is unlikely that the human capacity for language resides in rich universal syntactic machinery. More likely, it resides centrally in the capacity for vocal learning combined with a distinctive ethology for communicative interaction, which together (no doubt with other capacities) make diverse languages learnable. This chapter focuses on face-to-face communication, which is characterized by the mapping of sounds and multimodal signals onto speech acts and which can be deeply recursively embedded in interaction structure, suggesting an interactive origin for complex syntax. These actions are recognized through Gricean intention recognition, which is a kind of “ mirroring” or simulation distinct from the classic mirror neuron system. The multimodality of conversational interaction makes evident the involvement of body, hand, and mouth, where the burden on these can be shifted, as in the use of speech and gesture, or hands and face in sign languages. Such shifts having taken place during the course of human evolution. All this suggests a slightly different approach to the mystery of music, whose origins should also be sought in joint action, albeit with a shift from turn-taking to simultaneous expression, and with an affective quality that may tap ancient sources residual in primate vocalization. The deep connection of language to music can best be seen in the only universal form of music, namely song.

Abstract

These classic tasks can be used to explore spatial reference in field settings. They provide a language-independent metric for eliciting spatial language, using a “director-matcher” paradigm. The Man and Tree task deals with location on the horizontal plane with both featured (man) and non-featured (e.g., tree) objects. The Space Games depict various objects (e.g. bananas, lemons) and elicit spatial contrasts not obviously lexicalisable in English.

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

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

Recent eye-tracking research has revealed that spoken language can guide eye gaze very rapidly (and closely time-locked to the unfolding speech) toward referents in the visual world. We discuss whether, and to what extent, such language-mediated eye movements are automatic rather than subject to conscious and controlled decision-making. We consider whether language-mediated eye movements adhere to four main criteria of automatic behavior, namely, whether they are fast and efficient, unintentional, unconscious, and overlearned (i.e., arrived at through extensive practice). Current evidence indicates that language-driven oculomotor behavior is fast but not necessarily always efficient. It seems largely unintentional though there is also some evidence that participants can actively use the information in working memory to avoid distraction in search. Language-mediated eye movements appear to be for the most part unconscious and have all the hallmarks of an overlearned behavior. These data are suggestive of automatic mechanisms linking language to potentially referred-to visual objects, but more comprehensive and rigorous testing of this hypothesis is needed.

Abstract

Effekte linguisticher Typologie auf die Sprach-entwicklung. In G. Plehn (Ed.), Jahrbuch der Max-Planck Gesellsch

Abstract

Although humans are the ultimate “natural language generators”, the area of psycholinguistic modeling has been somewhat underrepresented in recent approaches to Natural Language Generation in computer science. To draw attention to the area and illustrate its potential relevance to Natural Language Generation, I provide an overview of recent work on psycholinguistic modeling of language production together with some key empirical findings, state-of-the-art experimental techniques, and their historical roots. The techniques include analyses of speech-error corpora, chronometric analyses, eyetracking, and neuroimaging.
The overview is built around the issue of cognitive control in natural language generation, concentrating on the production of single words, which is an essential ingredient of the generation of larger utterances. Most of the work exploited the fact that human speakers are good but not perfect at resisting temptation, which has provided some critical clues about the nature of the underlying system.

Abstract

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Background: The Gaze “Machinery” Gaze “Machinery” in Social Interaction Future Directions

Abstract

Listeners’ signals of recipiency, such as “Mm-hm” or “uh-huh” in English, are the most elementary or minimal “conversational turns” possible. Minimal, because apart from acknowledging recipiency and inviting the speaker to continue with his/her next turn, they do not add any new information to the discourse of the conversation. The goal of this project is to gather cross cultural information on listeners’ feedback behaviour during conversation. Listeners in a conversation usually provide short signals that indicate to the speaker that they are still “with the speaker”. These signals could be verbal (like for instance “mm hm” in English or “hm hm” in Dutch) or nonverbal (visual), like nodding. Often, these signals are produced in overlap with the speaker’s vocalisation. If listeners do not produce these signals, speakers often invite them explicitly (e.g. “are you still there?” in a telephone conversation). Our goal is to investigate what kind of signals are used by listeners of different languages to signal “recipiency” to the speaker.

Abstract

In this chapter we present material on the acquisition of ergative marking on noun phrases in three languages of Papua New Guinea: Kaluli, Ku Waru, and Duna. The expression of ergativity in all the languages is broadly similar, but sensitive to language-specific features, and this pattern of similarity and difference is reflected in the available acquisition data. Children acquire adult-like ergative marking at about the same pace, reaching similar levels of mastery by 3;00 despite considerable differences in morphological complexity of ergative marking among the languages. What may be more important – as a factor in accounting for the relative uniformity of acquisition in this respect – are the similarities in patterns of interactional scaffolding that emerge from a comparison of the three cases.

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

Human ethologists have shown that humans are both attracted to others and at the same time fear them. They refer to this kind of fear with the technical term ‘social fear’ and claim that “it is alleviated with personal acquaintance but remains a principle characteristic of interpersonal behaviour. As a result, we maintain various degrees of greater distance between ourselves and others depending on the amount of confidence we have in the other” (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989: 335). The goal of this task is to conduct exploratory, heuristic research to establish a new subproject that – based on a corpus of video data – will investigate various forms of human spatial behaviour cross-culturally.

Abstract

This project aims to investigate how speakers of various languages in indigenous cultures verbally reason about moral issues. The ways in which a solution for a moral problem is found, phrased and justified will be taken as the basis for researching reasoning processes that manifest themselves verbally in the speakers’ arguments put forward to solve a number of moral problems which will be presented to them in the form of unfinished story plots or scenarios that ask for a solution. The plots chosen attempt to present common problems in human society and human behaviour. They should function to elicit moral discussion and/or moral arguments in groups of consultants of at least three persons.

Abstract

When people request information, they have a variety of means for eliciting the information. In English two of the primary resources for eliciting information include asking questions, making statements about their interlocutor (thereby generating confirmation or revision). But within these types there are a variety of ways that these information elicitors can be designed. The goal of this task is to examine how different languages seek and provide information, the extent to which syntax vs prosodic resources are used (e.g., in questions), and the extent to which the design of information seeking actions and their responses display a structural preference to promote social solidarity.

Abstract

In sign languages, where space is often used to talk about space, expressions of spatial relations (e.g., ON, IN, UNDER, BEHIND) may rely on analogue mappings of real space onto signing space. In contrast, spoken languages express space in mostly categorical ways (e.g. adpositions). This raises interesting questions about the role of language modality in the acquisition of expressions of spatial relations. However, whether and to what extent modality influences the acquisition of spatial language is controversial – mostly due to the lack of direct comparisons of Deaf children to Deaf adults and to age-matched hearing children in similar tasks. Furthermore, the previous studies have taken English as the only model for spoken language development of spatial relations.
Therefore, we present a balanced study in which spatial expressions by deaf and hearing children in two different age-matched groups (preschool children and school-age children) are systematically compared, as well as compared to the spatial expressions of adults. All participants performed the same tasks, describing angular (LEFT, RIGHT, FRONT, BEHIND) and non-angular spatial configurations (IN, ON, UNDER) of different objects (e.g. apple in box; car behind box).
The analysis of the descriptions with non-angular spatial relations does not show an effect of modality on the development of
locative expressions in TİD and Turkish. However, preliminary results of the analysis of expressions of angular spatial relations suggest that signers provide angular information in their spatial descriptions
more frequently than Turkish speakers in all three age groups, and thus showing a potentially different developmental pattern in this domain. Implications of the findings with regard to the development of relations in spatial language and cognition will be discussed.

Abstract

A forum devoted to the relationship between music and language begins with an implicit assumption: There is at least one common principle that is central to all human musical systems and all languages, but that is not characteristic of (most) other domains. Why else should these two categories be paired together for analysis? We propose that one candidate for a common principle is their structure. In this chapter, we explore the nature of that structure—and its consequences for psychological and neurological processing mechanisms—within and across these two domains.