Publications

Abstract

This work explores the linguistic encoding of reciprocal events in Jahai (Aslian, Mon-Khmer, Malay Peninsula) on the basis of linguistic descriptions of the video stimuli of the ‘Reciprocal constructions and situation type’ task (Evans et al. 2004). Reciprocal situation types find expression in three different constructions: distributive verb forms, reciprocal verb forms, and adjunct phrases containing a body part noun. Distributives represent the dominant strategy, reciprocal forms and body part adjuncts being highly restricted across event types and consultants. The distributive and reciprocal morphemes manifest intricate morphological processes typical of Aslian languages. The paper also addresses some analytical problems raised by the data, such as structural ambiguity and restrictions on derivation, as well as individual variation.

Abstract

This study presents an analysis of over 4000 tokens of words produced as variants with and without schwa in a French corpus of radio-broadcasted speech. In order to determine which of the many variables mentioned in the literature influence variant choice, 17 predictors were tested in the same analysis. Only five of these variables appeared to condition variant choice. The question of the processing stage, or locus, of this alternation process is also addressed in a comparison of the variables that predict variant choice with the variables that predict the acoustic duration of schwa in variants with schwa. Only two variables predicting variant choice also predict schwa duration. The limited overlap between the predictors for variant choice and for schwa duration, combined with the nature of these variables, suggest that the variants without schwa do not result from a phonetic process of reduction; that is, they are not the endpoint of gradient schwa shortening. Rather, these variants are generated early in the production process, either during phonological encoding or word-form retrieval. These results, based on naturally produced speech, provide a useful complement to on-line production experiments using artificial speech tasks.

Abstract

Infant research is often underpowered, undermining the robustness and replicability of our findings. Improving the reliability of infant studies offers a solution for increasing statistical power independent of sample size. Here, we discuss two senses of the term reliability in the context of infant research: reliable (large) effects and reliable measures. We examine the circumstances under which effects are strongest and measures are most reliable and use synthetic datasets to illustrate the relationship between effect size, measurement reliability, and statistical power. We then present six concrete solutions for more reliable infant research: (a) routinely estimating and reporting the effect size and measurement reliability of infant tasks, (b) selecting the best measurement tool, (c) developing better infant paradigms, (d) collecting more data points per infant, (e) excluding unreliable data from the analysis, and (f) conducting more sophisticated data analyses. Deeper consideration of measurement in infant research will improve our ability to study infant development.

Abstract

Cross-signing—the emergence of an interlanguage between users of different sign languages—offers a rare chance to examine the evolution of a natural communication system in real time. To provide an insight into this process, we analyse an annotated video corpus of 340 minutes of interaction between signers of different language backgrounds on their first meeting and after living with each other for several weeks. We focus on the evolution of shared color terms and examine the role of different selectional pressures, including frequency, content, coordination and interactional context. We show that attentional factors in interaction play a crucial role. This suggests that understanding meta-communication is critical for explaining the cultural evolution of linguistic systems.

Abstract

The influence of culture on cognitive development is well established for school age and older children. But almost nothing is known about how different parenting and socialization practices in different cultures affect infants' and young children's earliest emerging cognitive and social-cognitive skills. In the current monograph, we report a series of eight studies in which we systematically assessed the social-cognitive skills of 1- to 3-year-old children in three diverse cultural settings. One group of children was from a Western, middle-class cultural setting in rural Canada and the other two groups were from traditional, small-scale cultural settings in rural Peru and India. In a first group of studies, we assessed 1-year-old children's most basic social-cognitive skills for understanding the intentions and attention of others: imitation, helping, gaze following, and communicative pointing. Children's performance in these tasks was mostly similar across cultural settings. In a second group of studies, we assessed 1-year-old children's skills in participating in interactive episodes of collaboration and joint attention. Again in these studies the general finding was one of cross-cultural similarity. In a final pair of studies, we assessed 2- to 3-year-old children's skills within two symbolic systems (pretense and pictorial). Here we found that the Canadian children who had much more experience with such symbols showed skills at an earlier age. Our overall conclusion is that young children in all cultural settings get sufficient amounts of the right kinds of social experience to develop their most basic social-cognitive skills for interacting with others and participating in culture at around the same age. In contrast, children's acquisition of more culturally specific skills for use in practices involving artifacts and symbols is more dependent on specific learning experiences.

Abstract

Decreases in oscillatory alpha- and beta-band power have been consistently found in spoken-word production. These have been linked to both motor preparation and conceptual-lexical retrieval processes. However, the observed power decreases have a broad frequency range that spans two “classic” (sensorimotor) bands: alpha and beta. It remains unclear whether alpha- and beta-band power decreases contribute independently when a spoken word is planned. Using a re-analysis of existing magnetoencephalography data, we probed whether the effects in alpha and beta bands are spatially distinct. Participants read a sentence that was either constraining or non-constraining toward the final word, which was presented as a picture. In separate blocks participants had to name the picture or score its predictability via button press. Irregular-resampling auto-spectral analysis (IRASA) was used to isolate the oscillatory activity in the alpha and beta bands from the background 1-over-f spectrum. The sources of alpha- and beta-band oscillations were localized based on the participants’ individualized peak frequencies. For both tasks, alpha- and beta-power decreases overlapped in left posterior temporal and inferior parietal cortex, regions that have previously been associated with conceptual and lexical processes. The spatial distributions of the alpha and beta power effects were spatially similar in these regions to the extent we could assess it. By contrast, for left frontal regions, the spatial distributions differed between alpha and beta effects. Our results suggest that for conceptual-lexical retrieval, alpha and beta oscillations do not dissociate spatially and, thus, are distinct from the classical sensorimotor alpha and beta oscillations.

Abstract

Rapid response to danger holds an evolutionary advantage. In this positron emission tomography study, phobics were exposed to masked visual stimuli with timings that either allowed awareness or not of either phobic, fear-relevant (e.g., spiders to snake phobics), or neutral images. When the timing did not permit awareness, the amygdala responded to both phobic and fear-relevant stimuli. With time for more elaborate processing, phobic stimuli resulted in an addition of an affective processing network to the amygdala activity, whereas no activity was found in response to fear-relevant stimuli. Also, right prefrontal areas appeared deactivated, comparing aware phobic and fear-relevant conditions. Thus, a shift from top-down control to an affectively driven system optimized for speed was observed in phobic relative to fear-relevant aware processing.

Abstract

Language production involves a complex set of computations, from conceptualization to articulation, which are thought to engage cascading neural events in the language network. However, recent neuromagnetic evidence suggests simultaneous meaning-to-speech mapping in picture naming tasks, as indexed by early parallel activation of frontotemporal regions to lexical semantic, phonological, and articulatory information. Here we investigate the time course of word production, asking to what extent such “earliness” is a distinctive property of the associated spatiotemporal dynamics. Using MEG, we recorded the neural signals of 34 human subjects (26 males) overtly naming 134 images from four semantic object categories (animals, foods, tools, clothes). Within each category, we covaried word length, as quantified by the number of syllables contained in a word, and phonological neighborhood density to target lexical and post-lexical phonological/phonetic processes. Multivariate pattern analyses searchlights in sensor space distinguished the stimulus-locked spatiotemporal responses to object categories early on, from 150 to 250 ms after picture onset, whereas word length was decoded in left frontotemporal sensors at 250-350 ms, followed by the latency of phonological neighborhood density (350-450 ms). Our results suggest a progression of neural activity from posterior to anterior language regions for the semantic and phonological/phonetic computations preparing overt speech, thus supporting serial cascading models of word production

Abstract

Linguistic predictions may be generated from and evaluated against a representation of events and referents described in the discourse. Compatible with this idea, recent work shows that predictions about novel noun phrases include their definiteness. In the current follow-up study, we ask whether people engage similar prediction-related processes for definite and indefinite referents. This question is relevant for linguistic theories that imply a processing difference between definite and indefinite noun phrases, typically because definiteness is thought to require a uniquely identifiable referent in the discourse. We addressed this question in an event-related potential (ERP) study (N = 48) with preregistration of data acquisition, preprocessing, and Bayesian analysis. Participants read Dutch mini-stories with a definite or indefinite novel noun phrase (e.g., “het/een huis,” the/a house), wherein (in)definiteness of the article was either expected or unexpected and the noun was always strongly expected. Unexpected articles elicited enhanced N400s, but unexpectedly indefinite articles also elicited a positive ERP effect at frontal channels compared to expectedly indefinite articles. We tentatively link this effect to an antiuniqueness violation, which may force people to introduce a new referent over and above the already anticipated one. Interestingly, expectedly definite nouns elicited larger N400s than unexpectedly definite nouns (replicating a previous surprising finding) and indefinite nouns. Although the exact nature of these noun effects remains unknown, expectedly definite nouns may have triggered the strongest semantic activation because they alone refer to specific and concrete referents. In sum, results from both the articles and nouns clearly demonstrate that definiteness marking has a rapid effect on processing, counter to recent claims regarding definiteness processing.

Abstract

If concepts, categories, and word meanings are stable, how can people use them so flexibly? Here we explore a possible answer: maybe this stability is an illusion. Perhaps all concepts, categories, and word meanings (CC&Ms) are constructed ad hoc, each time we use them. On this proposal, all words are infinitely polysemous, all communication is ’good enough’, and no idea is ever the same twice. The details of people’s ad hoc CC&Ms are determined by the way retrieval cues interact with the physical, social, and linguistic context. We argue that even the most stable-seeming CC&Ms are instantiated via the same processes as those that are more obviously ad hoc, and vary (a) from one microsecond to the next within a given instantiation, (b) from one instantiation to the next within an individual, and (c) from person to person and group to group as a function of people’s experiential history. 826

Abstract

Do people with different kinds of bodies think differently? According to the bodyspecificity hypothesis (Casasanto 2009), they should. In this article, I review evidence that right- and left-handers, who perform actions in systematically different ways, use correspondingly different areas of the brain for imagining actions and representing the meanings of action verbs. Beyond concrete actions, the way people use their hands also influences the way they represent abstract ideas with positive and negative emotional valence like “goodness,” “honesty,” and “intelligence,” and how they communicate about them in spontaneous speech and gesture. Changing how people use their right and left hands can cause them to think differently, suggesting that motoric differences between right- and left-handers are not merely correlated with cognitive differences. Body-specific patterns of motor experience shape the way we think, communicate, and make decisions

Abstract

Right- and left-handers implicitly associate positive ideas like "goodness"and "honesty"more strongly with their dominant side
of space, the side on which they can act more fluently, and negative ideas more strongly with their nondominant side. Here we show that right-handers’ tendency to associate "good" with "right" and "bad" with "left" can be reversed as a result of both
long- and short-term changes in motor fluency. Among patients who were right-handed prior to unilateral stroke, those with disabled left hands associated "good" with "right," but those with disabled right hands associated "good" with "left,"as natural left-handers do. A similar pattern was found in healthy right-handers whose right or left hand was temporarily handicapped in the laboratory. Even a few minutes of acting more fluently with the left hand can change right-handers’ implicit associations between space and emotional valence, causing a reversal of their usual judgments. Motor experience plays a causal role in shaping abstract thought.

Abstract

Can simple motor actions help people expand their vocabulary? Here we show that word learning depends on where students place their flash cards after studying them. In Experiment 1, participants learned the definitions of ”alien words” with positive or negative emotional valence. After studying each card, they placed it in one of two boxes (top or bottom), according to its valence. Participants who were instructed to place positive cards in the top box, consistent with Good is Up metaphors, scored about 10.

Abstract

When we think of children acquiring language, we often think of their acquisition of linguistic structure as separate from their acquisition of knowledge about the world. But it is clear that in the process of learning about language, children consult what they know about the world; and that in learning about the world, children use linguistic cues to discover how items are related to one another. This interaction between the acquisition of linguistic structure and the acquisition of category structure is especially clear in word learning.

Abstract

Learning a specific skill during childhood may partly determine the functional organization of the adult brain. This hypothesis led us to study oral language processing in illiterate subjects who, for social reasons, had never entered school and had no knowledge of reading or writing. In a brain activation study using PET and statistical parametric mapping, we compared word and pseudoword repetition in literate and illiterate subjects. Our study confirms behavioural evidence of different phonological processing in illiterate subjects. During repetition of real words, the two groups performed similarly and activated similar areas of the brain. In contrast, illiterate subjects had more difficulty repeating pseudowords correctly and did not activate the same neural structures as literates. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that learning the written form of language (orthography) interacts with the function of oral language. Our results indicate that learning to read and write during childhood influences the functional organization of the adult human brain.

Abstract

Background: Functional neuroimaging supports the hypothesis that auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) in schizophrenia result from altered functional connectivity between perisylvian language regions, although the extent to which AVH are also associated with an altered tract anatomy is less clear.

Methods: Twenty-eight patients with schizophrenia subdivided into 17 subjects with a history of AVH and 11 without a history of hallucinations and 59 age- and IQ-matched healthy controls were recruited. The number of streamlines, fractional anisotropy (FA), and mean diffusivity were measured along the length of the arcuate fasciculus and its medial and lateral components.

Results: Patients with schizophrenia had bilateral reduction of FA relative to controls in the arcuate fasciculi (p < .001). Virtual dissection of the subcomponents of the arcuate fasciculi revealed that these reductions were specific to connections between posterior temporal and anterior regions in the inferior frontal and parietal lobe. Also, compared with controls, the reduction in FA of these tracts was highest, and bilateral, in patients with AVH, but in patients without AVH, this reduction was reported only on the left.

Conclusions: These findings point toward a supraregional network model of AVH in schizophrenia. They support the hypothesis that there may be selective vulnerability of specific anatomical connections to posterior temporal regions in schizophrenia and that extensive bilateral damage is associated with a greater vulnerability to AVH. If confirmed by further studies, these findings may advance our understanding of the anatomical factors that are protective against AVH and predictive of a treatment response.

Abstract

Bock et al. (1992) found that the binding of animacy features onto grammatical roles is susceptible to priming in sentence production. Moreover, this effect did not interact with structural priming. This finding supports an account according to which syntactic representations are insensitive to the consistency of animacy-to-structure mapping. This account has contributed greatly to the development of syntactic processing theories in language production. However, this study has never been directly replicated and the few related studies showed mixed results. A meta-analysis of these studies failed to replicate the findings of Bock et al. (1992). Therefore, we conducted a well-powered replication (n = 496) that followed the original study as closely as possible. We found an effect of structural priming and an animacy priming effect, replicating Bock et al.’s findings. In addition, we replicated Bock et al.’s (1992) observed null interaction between structural priming and animacy binding, which suggests that syntactic representations are indeed independent of semantic information about animacy.

Abstract

Background: Eukaryotic cells possess a complex network of RNA machineries which function in RNA-processing and cellular regulation which includes transcription, translation, silencing, editing and epigenetic control. Studies of model organisms have shown that many ncRNAs of the RNA-infrastructure are highly conserved, but little is known from non-model protists. In this study we have conducted a genome-scale survey of medium-length ncRNAs from the protozoan parasites Giardia intestinalis and Trichomonas vaginalis. Results: We have identified the previously ‘missing’ Giardia RNase MRP RNA, which is a key ribozyme involved in pre-rRNA processing. We have also uncovered 18 new H/ACA box snoRNAs, expanding our knowledge of the H/ ACA family of snoRNAs. Conclusions: Results indicate that Giardia intestinalis and Trichomonas vaginalis, like their distant multicellular relatives, contain a rich infrastructure of RNA-based processing. From here we can investigate the evolution of RNA processing networks in eukaryotes.

Abstract

1 Introduction In spoken sentence processing, listeners do not wait till the end of a sentence to decipher what message is conveyed. Rather, they make predictions on the most plausible interpretation at every possible point in the auditory signal on the basis of all kinds of linguistic information (e.g., Eberhard et al. 1995; Alman and Kamide 1999, 2007). Intonation is one such kind of linguistic information that is efficiently used in spoken sentence processing. The evidence comes primarily from recent work on online reference resolution conducted in the visual-world eyetracking paradigm (e.g., Tanenhaus et al. 1995). In this paradigm, listeners are shown a visual scene containing a number of objects and listen to one or two short sentences about the scene. They are asked to either inspect the visual scene while listening or to carry out the action depicted in the sentence(s) (e.g., 'Touch the blue square'). Listeners' eye movements directed to each object in the scene are monitored and time-locked to pre-defined time points in the auditory stimulus. Their predictions on the upcoming referent and sources for the predictions in the auditory signal are examined by analysing fixations to the relevant objects in the visual scene before the acoustic information on the referent is available

Abstract

This study examines the perception of paralinguistic intonational meanings deriving from Ohala’s Frequency Code (Experiment 1) and Gussenhoven’s Effort Code (Experiment 2) in British English and Dutch. Native speakers of British English and Dutch listened to a number of stimuli in their native language and judged each stimulus on four semantic scales deriving from these two codes: SELF-CONFIDENT versus NOT SELF-CONFIDENT, FRIENDLY versus NOT FRIENDLY (Frequency Code); SURPRISED versus NOT SURPRISED, and EMPHATIC versus NOT EMPHATIC (Effort Code). The stimuli, which were lexically equivalent across the two languages, differed in pitch contour, pitch register and pitch span in Experiment 1, and in pitch register, peak height, peak alignment and end pitch in Experiment 2. Contrary to the traditional view that the paralinguistic usage of intonation is similar across languages, it was found that British English and Dutch listeners differed considerably in the perception of “confident,” “friendly,” “emphatic,” and “surprised.” The present findings support a theory of paralinguistic meaning based on the universality of biological codes, which however acknowledges a languagespecific component in the implementation of these codes.

Abstract

This paper reports a perceptual study using a semantically motivated identification task in which we investigated the nature of two pairs of intonational contrasts in English: (1) normal High accent vs. emphatic High accent; (2) early peak alignment vs. late peak alignment. Unlike previous inquiries, the present study employs an on-line method using the Reaction Time measurement, in addition to the measurement of response frequencies. Regarding the peak height continuum, the mean RTs are shortest for within-category identification but longest for across-category identification. As for the peak alignment contrast, no identification boundary emerges and the mean RTs only reflect a difference between peaks aligned with the vowel onset and peaks aligned elsewhere. We conclude that the peak height contrast is discrete but the previously claimed discreteness of the peak alignment contrast is not borne out.

Abstract

This paper gives an overview of recent studies on the use of phonological cues (accent placement and choice of accent type) to mark focus in Dutch-speaking children aged between 1;9 and 8;10. It is argued that learning to use phonological cues to mark focus is a gradual process. In the light of the findings in these studies, a first proposal is put forward on the developmental path to adult-like phonological focus-marking in Dutch.

Abstract

Pitch accents are analysed differently in an onramp analysis (i.e. ToBI) and an off-ramp analysis (e.g. Transcription of Dutch intonation - ToDI), two competing approaches in the Autosegmental Metrical tradition. A case in point is pre-final high rise. A pre-final rise is analysed as H* in ToBI but is phonologically ambiguous between H* or H*L (a (rise-)fall) in ToDI. This is because in ToDI, the L tone of a pre-final H*L can be realised in the following unaccented words and both H* and H*L can show up as a high rise in the accented word. To find out whether there is a two-way phonological contrast in pre-final high rises in Dutch, we examined the distribution of phonologically ambiguous high rises (H*(L)) and their phonetic realisation in different information structural conditions (topic vs. focus), compared to phonologically unambiguous H* and H*L. Results showed that there is indeed a H*L vs. H* contrast in prefinal high rises in Dutch and that H*L is realised as H*(L) when sonorant material is limited in the accented word. These findings provide new evidence for an off-ramp analysis of Dutch intonation and have far-reaching implications for analysis of intonation across languages.

Abstract

This study examined how four- to five-year-olds and seven- to eight-year-olds used intonation (accent placement and accent type) to encode topic and focus in Dutch. Naturally spoken declarative sentences with either sentence-initial topic and sentence-final focus or sentence-initial focus and sentence-final topic were elicited via a picture-matching game. Results showed that the four- to five-year-olds were adult-like in topic-marking, but were not yet fully adult-like in focus-marking, in particular, in the use of accent type in sentence-final focus (i.e. showing no preference for H*L). Between age five and seven, the use of accent type was further developed. In contrast to the four- to five-year-olds, the seven- to eight-year-olds showed a preference for H*L in sentence-final focus. Furthermore, they used accent type to distinguish sentence-initial focus from sentence-initial topic in addition to phonetic cues.

Abstract

The current study presents an agent-based model which simulates the innovation and
competition among lexical items in cases of language contact. It is inspired by relatively
recent historical cases in which the linguistic ecology and sociohistorical context are highly complex. Pidgin and creole genesis offers an opportunity to obtain linguistic facts, social dynamics, and historical demography in a highly segregated society. This provides a solid ground for researching the interaction of populations with different pre-existing language systems, and how different factors contribute to the genesis of the lexicon of a newly generated mixed language. We take into consideration the population dynamics and structures, as well as a distribution of word frequencies related to language use, in order to study how social factors may affect the developmental trajectory of languages. Focusing on the case of Sranan in Suriname, our study shows that it is possible to account for the
composition of its core lexicon in relation to different social groups, contact patterns, and
large population movements.

Abstract

We investigated how listeners of two unrelated languages, Dutch and Korean, process phonotactically legitimate and illegitimate sounds spoken in Dutch and American English. To Dutch listeners, unreleased word-final stops are phonotactically illegal because word-final stops in Dutch are generally released in isolation, but to Korean listeners, released final stops are illegal because word-final stops are never released in Korean. Two phoneme monitoring experiments showed a phonotactic effect: Dutch listeners detected released stops more rapidly than unreleased stops whereas the reverse was true for Korean listeners. Korean listeners with English stimuli detected released stops more accurately than unreleased stops, however, suggesting that acoustic-phonetic cues associated with released stops improve detection accuracy. We propose that in non-native speech perception, phonotactic legitimacy in the native language speeds up phoneme recognition, the richness of acousticphonetic cues improves listening accuracy, and familiarity with the non-native language modulates the relative influence of these two factors.

Abstract

The goal of this study is to examine how the degree of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation varies as a function of prosodic factors such as nuclear-pitch accent (accented vs. unaccented), level of prosodic boundary (Prosodic Word vs. Intermediate Phrase vs. Intonational Phrase), and position-in-prosodic-domain (initial vs. final). It is hypothesized that vowels in prosodically stronger locations (e.g., in accented syllables and at a higher prosodic boundary) are not only coarticulated less with their neighboring vowels, but they also exert a stronger influence on their neighbors. Measurements of tongue position for English /a i/ over time were obtained with Carsten’s electromagnetic articulography. Results showed that vowels in prosodically stronger locations are coarticulated less with neighboring vowels, but do not exert a stronger influence on the articulation of neighboring vowels. An examination of the relationship between coarticulation and duration revealed that (a) accent-induced coarticulatory variation cannot be attributed to a duration factor and (b) some of the data with respect to boundary effects may be accounted for by the duration factor. This suggests that to the extent that prosodically conditioned coarticulatory variation is duration-independent, there is no absolute causal relationship from duration to coarticulation. It is proposed that prosodically conditioned V-to-V coarticulatory reduction is another type of strengthening that occurs in prosodically strong locations. The prosodically driven coarticulatory patterning is taken to be part of the phonetic signatures of the hierarchically nested structure of prosody.

Abstract

The aim of this study was to determine if Dutch speakers reliably signal phrase-internal lexical boundaries, and if so, how. Six speakers recorded 4 pairs of phonemically identical strong-weak-strong (SWS) strings with matching syllable boundaries but mismatching intended word boundaries (e.g. reis # pastei versus reispas # tij, or more broadly C1V2(C)#C2V2(C)C3V3(C) vs. C1V2(C)C2V2(C)#C3V3(C)). An Analysis of Variance revealed 3 acoustic parameters that were significantly greater in S#WS items (C2 DURATION, RIME1 DURATION, C3 BURST AMPLITUDE) and 5 parameters that were significantly greater in the SW#S items (C2 VOT, C3 DURATION, RIME2 DURATION, RIME3 DURATION, and V2 AMPLITUDE). Additionally, center of gravity measurements suggested that the [s] to [t] coarticulation was greater in reis # pa[st]ei versus reispa[s] # [t]ij. Finally, a Logistic Regression Analysis revealed that the 3 parameters (RIME1 DURATION, RIME2 DURATION, and C3 DURATION) contributed most reliably to a S#WS versus SW#S classification.

Abstract

This study examines the effects of prosodic boundaries, lexical stress, and phrasal accent on the acoustic realization of stops (/t, d/) in Dutch, with special attention paid to language-specificity in the phonetics-prosody interface. The results obtained from various acoustic measures show systematic phonetic variations in the production of /t d/ as a function of prosodic position, which may be interpreted as being due to prosodicallyconditioned articulatory strengthening. Shorter VOTs were found for the voiceless stop /t/ in prosodically stronger locations (as opposed to longer VOTs in this position in English). The results suggest that prosodically-driven phonetic realization is bounded by a language-specific phonological feature system.

Abstract

Two experiments examined whether perceptual recovery from Korean consonant-cluster simplification is based on language-specific phonological knowledge. In tri-consonantal C1C2C3 sequences such as /lkt/ and /lpt/ in Seoul Korean, either C1 or C2 can be completely deleted. Seoul Koreans monitored for C2 targets (/p/ or / k/, deleted or preserved) in the second word of a two-word phrase with an underlying /l/-C2-/t/ sequence. In Experiment 1 the target-bearing words had contextual lexical-semantic support. Listeners recovered deleted targets as fast and as accurately as preserved targets with both Word and Intonational Phrase (IP) boundaries between the two words. In Experiment 2, contexts were low-pass filtered. Listeners were still able to recover deleted targets as well as preserved targets in IP-boundary contexts, but better with physically-present targets than with deleted targets in Word-boundary contexts. This suggests that the benefit of having target acoustic-phonetic information emerges only when higher-order (contextual and phrase-boundary) information is not available. The strikingly efficient recovery of deleted phonemes with neither acoustic-phonetic cues nor contextual support demonstrates that language-specific phonological knowledge, rather than language-universal perceptual processes which rely on fine-grained phonetic details, is employed when the listener perceives the results of a continuous-speech process in which reduction is phonetically complete.

Abstract

English and Korean differ in how they lexicalize the components of motionevents. English characteristically conflates Motion with Manner, Cause, or Deixis, and expresses Path separately. Korean, in contrast, conflates Motion with Path and elements of Figure and Ground in transitive clauses for caused Motion, but conflates motion with Deixis and spells out Path and Manner separately in intransitive clauses for spontaneous motion. Children learningEnglish and Korean show sensitivity to language-specific patterns in the way they talk about motion from as early as 17–20 months. For example, learners of English quickly generalize their earliest spatial words — Path particles like up, down, and in — to both spontaneous and caused changes of location and, for up and down, to posture changes, while learners of Korean keep words for spontaneous and caused motion strictly separate and use different words for vertical changes of location and posture changes. These findings challenge the widespread view that children initially map spatial words directly to nonlinguistic spatial concepts, and suggest that they are influenced by the semantic organization of their language virtually from the beginning. We discuss how input and cognition may interact in the early phases of learning to talk about space.

Abstract

The fluent production of speech is a very complex human skill. It requires the coordination of several articulatory subsystems. The instructions that lead articulatory movements to execution are the result of the interplay of speech production levels that operate above the articulatory network. During the process of word-form encoding, the groundwork for the articulatory programs is prepared which then serve the articulators as basic units. This thesis investigated whether or not syllables form the basis for the articulatory programs and in particular whether or not these syllable programs are stored, separate from the store of the lexical word-forms. It is assumed that syllable units are stored in a so-called 'mental syllabary'. The main goal of this thesis was to find evidence of the syllable playing a functionally important role in speech production and for the assumption that syllables are stored units. In a variant of the implicit priming paradigm, it was investigated whether information about the syllabic structure of a target word facilitates the preparation (advanced planning) of a to-be-produced utterance. These experiments yielded evidence for the functionally important role of syllables in speech production. In a subsequent row of experiments, it could be demonstrated that the production of syllables is sensitive to frequency. Syllable frequency effects provide strong evidence for the notion of a mental syllabary because only stored units are likely to exhibit frequency effects. In a last study, effects of syllable preparation and syllable frequency were investigated in a combined study to disentangle the two effects. The results of this last experiment converged with those reported for the other experiments and added further support to the claim that syllables play a core functional role in speech production and are stored in a mental syllabary.

Abstract

Models of speech production assume that syllables play a functional role in the process of word-form encoding in speech production. In this study, we investigate this claim and specifically provide evidence about the level at which syllables come into play. We report two studies using an odd-man-out variant of the implicit priming paradigm to examine the role of the syllable during the process of word formation. Our results show that this modified version of the implicit priming paradigm can trace the emergence of syllabic structure during spoken word generation. Comparing these results to prior syllable priming studies, we conclude that syllables emerge at the interface between phonological and phonetic encoding. The results are discussed in terms of the WEAVER++ model of lexical access.

Abstract

We investigated the role of syllables during speech planning in English by measuring syllable-frequency effects. So far, syllable-frequency effects in English have not been reported. English has poorly defined syllable boundaries, and thus the syllable might not function as a prominent unit in English speech production. Speakers produced either monosyllabic (Experiment 1) or disyllabic (Experiment 2–4) pseudowords as quickly as possible in response to symbolic cues. Monosyllabic targets consisted of either high- or low-frequency syllables, whereas disyllabic items contained either a 1st or 2nd syllable that was frequency-manipulated. Significant syllable-frequency effects were found in all experiments. Whereas previous findings for disyllables in Dutch and Spanish—languages with relatively clear syllable boundaries—showed effects of a frequency manipulation on 1st but not 2nd syllables, in our study English speakers were sensitive to the frequency of both syllables. We interpret this sensitivity as an indication that the production of English has more extensive planning scopes at the interface of phonetic encoding and articulation.

Abstract

Lateralization is a fundamental characteristic of many behaviors and the organization of the brain, and atypical lateralization has been suggested to be linked to various brain-related disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. Right-handedness is one of the most prominent markers of human behavioural lateralization, yet its neurobiological basis remains to be determined. Here, we present a large-scale analysis of handedness, as measured by self-reported direction of hand preference, and its variability related to brain structural and functional organization in the UK Biobank (N = 36,024). A multivariate machine learning approach with multi-modalities of brain imaging data was adopted, to reveal how well brain imaging features could predict individual's handedness (i.e., right-handedness vs. non-right-handedness) and further identify the top brain signatures that contributed to the prediction. Overall, the results showed a good prediction performance, with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) score of up to 0.72, driven largely by resting-state functional measures. Virtual lesion analysis and large-scale decoding analysis suggested that the brain networks with the highest importance in the prediction showed functional relevance to hand movement and several higher-level cognitive functions including language, arithmetic, and social interaction. Genetic analyses of contributions of common DNA polymorphisms to the imaging-derived handedness prediction score showed a significant heritability (h2=7.55%, p <0.001) that was similar to and slightly higher than that for the behavioural measure itself (h2=6.74%, p <0.001). The genetic correlation between the two was high (rg=0.71), suggesting that the imaging-derived score could be used as a surrogate in genetic studies where the behavioural measure is not available. This large-scale study using multimodal brain imaging and multivariate machine learning has shed new light on the neural correlates of human handedness.

Abstract

People spontaneously produce gestures when they solve problems or explain their solutions to a problem. In this chapter, we will review and discuss evidence on the role of representational gestures in problem solving. The focus will be on our recent experiments (Chu & Kita, 2008), in which we used Shepard-Metzler type of mental rotation tasks to investigate how spontaneous gestures revealed the development of problem solving strategy over the course of the experiment and what role gesture played in the development process. We found that when solving novel problems regarding the physical world, adults go through similar symbolic distancing (Werner & Kaplan, 1963) and internalization (Piaget, 1968) processes as those that occur during young children’s cognitive development and gesture facilitates such processes.

Abstract

Co-thought gestures are hand movements produced in silent, noncommunicative, problem-solving situations. In the study, we investigated whether and how such gestures enhance performance in spatial visualization tasks such as a mental rotation task and a paper folding task. We found that participants gestured more often when they had difficulties solving mental rotation problems Experiment 1). The gesture-encouraged group solved more mental rotation problems correctly than did the gesture-allowed and gesture-prohibited groups (Experiment 2). Gestures produced by the gesture-encouraged group enhanced performance in the very trials in which they were produced Experiments 2 & 3). Furthermore, gesture frequency decreased as the participants in the gesture-encouraged group solved more problems (Experiments 2 & 3). In addition, the advantage of the gesture-encouraged group persisted into subsequent spatial visualization problems in which gesturing was prohibited: another mental rotation block (Experiment 2) and a newly introduced paper folding task (Experiment 3). The results indicate that when people have difficulty in solving spatial visualization problems, they spontaneously produce gestures to help them, and gestures can indeed improve performance. As they solve more problems, the spatial computation supported by gestures becomes internalized, and the gesture frequency decreases. The benefit of gestures persists even in subsequent spatial visualization problems in which gesture is prohibited. Moreover, the beneficial effect of gesturing can be generalized to a different spatial visualization task when two tasks require similar spatial transformation processes. We conclude that gestures enhance performance on spatial visualization tasks by improving the internal computation of spatial transformations.

Abstract

Koriat (1981) demonstrated that an association from the target to a preceding prime, in the absence of an association from the prime to the target, facilitates lexical decision and referred to this effect as "backward priming". Backward priming is of relevance, because it can provide information about the mechanism underlying semantic priming effects. Following Neely (1991), we distinguish three mechanisms of priming: spreading activation, expectancy, and semantic matching/integration. The goal was to determine which of these mechanisms causes backward priming, by assessing effects of backward priming on a language-relevant ERP component, the N400, and reaction time (RT). Based on previous work, we propose that the N400 priming effect reflects expectancy and semantic matching/integration, but in contrast with RT does not reflect spreading activation. Experiment 1 shows a backward priming effect that is qualitatively similar for the N400 and RT in a lexical decision task. This effect was not modulated by an ISI manipulation. Experiment 2 clarifies that the N400 backward priming effect reflects genuine changes in N400 amplitude and cannot be ascribed to other factors. We will argue that these backward priming effects cannot be due to expectancy but are best accounted for in terms of semantic matching/integration.

Abstract

Methods
The present study provides a systematic analysis of co-speech gestures which spontaneously accompany the description of actions in a group of PD patients (N = 23, Hoehn and Yahr Stage III or less) and age-matched healthy controls (N = 22). The analysis considers different co-speech gesture types, using established classification schemes from the field of gesture research. The analysis focuses on the rate of these gestures as well as on their qualitative nature. In doing so, the analysis attempts to overcome several methodological shortcomings of research in this area.
Results
Contrary to expectation, gesture rate was not significantly affected in our patient group, with relatively mild PD. This indicates that co-speech gestures could compensate for speech problems. However, while gesture rate seems unaffected, the qualitative precision of gestures representing actions was significantly reduced.
Conclusions
This study demonstrates the feasibility of carrying out fine-grained, detailed analyses of gestures in PD and offers insights into an as yet neglected facet of communication in patients with PD. Based on the present findings, an important next step is the closer investigation of the qualitative changes in gesture (including different communicative situations) and an analysis of the heterogeneity in co-speech gesture production in PD.

Abstract

Speakers design communication for their audience, providing more information in both speech and gesture when their listener is naive to the topic. We test whether the hippocampal declarative memory system contributes to multimodal audience design. The hippocampus, while traditionally linked to episodic and relational memory, has also been linked to the ability to imagine the mental states of others and use language flexibly. We examined the speech and gesture use of four patients with hippocampal amnesia when describing how to complete everyday tasks (e.g., how to tie a shoe) to an imagined child listener and an adult listener. Although patients with amnesia did not increase their total number of words and instructional steps for the child listener, they did produce representational gestures at significantly higher rates for the imagined child compared to the adult listener. They also gestured at similar frequencies to neurotypical peers, suggesting that hand gesture can be a meaningful communicative resource, even in the case of severe declarative memory impairment. We discuss the contributions of multiple memory systems to multimodal audience design and the potential of gesture to act as a window into the social cognitive processes of individuals with neurologic disorders.

Abstract

We report the results of a cross-cultural investigation of person-body reasoning in the United Kingdom and northern Brazilian Amazon (Marajo´ Island). The study provides evidence that directly bears upon divergent theoretical claims in cognitive psychology and anthropology, respectively, on the cognitive origins and cross-cultural incidence of mind-body dualism. In a novel reasoning task, we found that participants across the two sample populations parsed a wide range of capacities similarly in terms of the capacities’ perceived anchoring to bodily function. Patterns of reasoning concerning the respective roles of physical and biological properties in sustaining various capacities did vary between sample populations, however. Further, the data challenge prior ad-hoc categorizations in the empirical literature on the developmental origins of and cognitive constraints on psycho-physical reasoning (e.g., in afterlife concepts). We suggest cross-culturally validated categories of ‘‘Body Dependent’’ and ‘‘Body Independent’’ items for future developmental and cross-cultural research in this emerging area.

Abstract

Summary Non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) have been implicated in the epigenetic marking of many genes. Short regulatory ncRNAs, including miRNAs, siRNAs, piRNAs and snoRNAs as well as long ncRNAs such as Xist and Air are discussed in light of recent research of mechanisms regulating chromatin marking and RNA editing. The topic is expanding rapidly so we will concentrate on examples to highlight the main mechanisms, including simple mechanisms where complementary binding affect methylation or RNA sites. However, other examples especially with the long ncRNAs highlight very complex regulatory systems with multiple layers of ncRNA control.

Abstract

We report an investigation of the perception of American English phonemes by Dutch listeners proficient in English. Listeners identified either the consonant or the vowel in most possible English CV and VC syllables. The syllables were embedded in multispeaker babble at three signal-to-noise ratios (16 dB, 8 dB, and 0 dB). Effects of signal-to-noise ratio on vowel and consonant identification are discussed as a function of syllable position and of relationship to the native phoneme inventory. Comparison of the results with previously reported data from native listeners reveals that noise affected the responding of native and non-native listeners similarly.

Abstract

It has long been recognised that phrases and sentences are organised hierarchically, but many computational models of language treat them as sequences of words without computing constituent structure. Against this background, we conducted two experiments which showed that participants interpret ambiguous noun phrases, such as second blue ball, in terms of their abstract hierarchical structure rather than their linear surface order. When a neural network model was tested on this task, it could simulate such “hierarchical” behaviour. However, when we changed the training data such that they were not entirely unambiguous anymore, the model stopped generalising in a human-like way. It did not systematically generalise to novel items, and when it was trained on ambiguous trials, it strongly favoured the linear interpretation. We argue that these models should be endowed with a bias to make generalisations over hierarchical structure in order to be cognitively adequate models of human language.

Abstract

Recent research has established that cortical activity “tracks” the presentation rate of syntactic phrases in continuous speech, even though phrases are abstract units that do not have direct correlates in the acoustic signal. We investigated whether cortical tracking of phrase structures is modulated by the extent to which these structures compositionally determine meaning. To this end, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG) of 38 native speakers who listened to naturally spoken Dutch stimuli in different conditions, which parametrically modulated the degree to which syntactic structure and lexical semantics determine sentence meaning. Tracking was quantified through mutual information between the EEG data and either the speech envelopes or abstract annotations of syntax, all of which were filtered in the frequency band corresponding to the presentation rate of phrases (1.1–2.1 Hz). Overall, these mutual information analyses showed stronger tracking of phrases in regular sentences than in stimuli whose lexical-syntactic content is reduced, but no consistent differences in tracking between sentences and stimuli that contain a combination of syntactic structure and lexical content. While there were no effects of compositional meaning on the degree of phrase-structure tracking, analyses of event-related potentials elicited by sentence-final words did reveal meaning-induced differences between conditions. Our findings suggest that cortical tracking of structure in sentences indexes the internal generation of this structure, a process that is modulated by the properties of its input, but not by the compositional interpretation of its output.

Abstract

Visual narratives make use of various means to convey referential and co-referential meaning, so comprehenders
must recognize that different depictions across sequential images represent the same character(s). In this study,
we investigated how the order in which different types of panels in visual sequences are presented affects how
the unfolding narrative is comprehended. Participants viewed short comic strips while their electroencephalo-
gram (EEG) was recorded. We analyzed evoked and induced EEG activity elicited by both full panels (showing a
full character) and refiner panels (showing only a zoom of that full panel), and took into account whether they
preceded or followed the panel to which they were co-referentially related (i.e., were cataphoric or anaphoric).
We found that full panels elicited both larger N300 amplitude and increased gamma-band power compared to
refiner panels. Anaphoric panels elicited a sustained negativity compared to cataphoric panels, which appeared
to be sensitive to the referential status of the anaphoric panel. In the time-frequency domain, anaphoric panels
elicited reduced 8–12 Hz alpha power and increased 45–65 Hz gamma-band power compared to cataphoric
panels. These findings are consistent with models in which the processes involved in visual narrative compre-
hension partially overlap with those in language comprehension.

Abstract

Comprehenders often predict what they are going to hear. But do they make the best predictions possible? We addressed this question in three visual-world eye-tracking experiments by asking when comprehenders consider perspective. Male and female participants listened to male and female speakers producing sentences (e.g., I would like to wear the nice…) about stereotypically masculine (target: tie; distractor: drill) and feminine (target: dress, distractor: hairdryer) objects. In all three experiments, participants rapidly predicted semantic associates of the verb. But participants also predicted consistently – that is, consistent with their beliefs about what the speaker would ultimately say. They predicted consistently from the speaker’s perspective in Experiment 1, their own perspective in Experiment 2, and the character’s perspective in Experiment 3. This consistent effect occurred later than the associative effect. We conclude that comprehenders consider perspective when predicting, but not from the earliest moments of prediction, consistent with a two-stage account.

Abstract

Corpus analyses have shown that turn-taking in conversation is much faster than laboratory studies of speech planning would predict. To explain fast turn-taking, Levinson and Torreira (2015) proposed that speakers are highly proactive: They begin to plan a response to their interlocutor's turn as soon as they have understood its gist, and launch this planned response when the turn-end is imminent. Thus, fast turn-taking is possible because speakers use the time while their partner is talking to plan their own utterance. In the present study, we asked how much time upcoming speakers actually have to plan their utterances. Following earlier psycholinguistic work, we used transcripts of spoken conversations in Dutch, German, and English. These transcripts consisted of segments, which are continuous stretches of speech by one speaker. In the psycholinguistic and phonetic literature, such segments have often been used as proxies for turns. We found that in all three corpora, large proportions of the segments comprised of only one or two words, which on our estimate does not give the next speaker enough time to fully plan a response. Further analyses showed that speakers indeed often did not respond to the immediately preceding segment of their partner, but continued an earlier segment of their own. More generally, our findings suggest that speech segments derived from transcribed corpora do not necessarily correspond to turns, and the gaps between speech segments therefore only provide limited information about the planning and timing of turns.

Abstract

In three experiments, listeners detected vowel or consonant targets in lists of CV syllables constructed from five vowels and five consonants. Responses were faster in a predictable context (e.g., listening for a vowel target in a list of syllables all beginning with the same consonant) than in an unpredictable context (e.g., listening for a vowel target in a list of syllables beginning with different consonants). In Experiment 1, the listeners’ native language was Dutch, in which vowel and consonant repertoires are similar in size. The difference between predictable and unpredictable contexts was comparable for vowel and consonant targets. In Experiments 2 and 3, the listeners’ native language was Spanish, which has four times as many consonants as vowels; here effects of an unpredictable consonant context on vowel detection were significantly greater than effects of an unpredictable vowel context on consonant detection. This finding suggests that listeners’ processing of phonemes takes into account the constitution of their language’s phonemic repertoire and the implications that this has for contextual variability.

Abstract

The issue addressed in this study is whether propositional integration and world-knowledge inference can be distinguished as separate processes during the comprehension of Dutch omdat (because) sentences. “Propositional integration” refers to the process by which the reader establishes the type of relation between two clauses or sentences. “World-knowledge inference” refers to the process of deriving the general causal relation and checking it against the reader's world knowledge. An eye-tracking experiment showed that the presence of the conjunction speeds up the processing of the words immediately following the conjunction, and slows down the processing of the sentence final words in comparison to the absence of the conjunction. A second, subject-paced reading experiment replicated the reading time findings, and the results of a verification task confirmed that the effect at the end of the sentence was due to inferential processing. The findings evidence integrative processing and inferential processing, respectively.

Abstract

Several theoretical accounts have been proposed with respect to the issue how quickly the implicit causality verb bias affects the understanding of sentences such as “John beat Pete at the tennis match, because he had played very well”. They can be considered as instances of two viewpoints: the focusing and the integration account. The focusing account claims that the bias should be manifest soon after the verb has been processed, whereas the integration account claims that the interpretation is deferred until disambiguating information is encountered. Up to now, this issue has remained unresolved because materials or methods have failed to address it conclusively. We conducted two experiments that exploited the visual world paradigm and ambiguous pronouns in subordinate because clauses. The first experiment presented implicit causality sentences with the task to resolve the ambiguous pronoun. To exclude strategic processing, in the second experiment, the task was to answer simple comprehension questions and only a minority of the sentences contained implicit causality verbs. In both experiments, the implicit causality of the verb had an effect before the disambiguating information was available. This result supported the focusing account.

Abstract

Symbolic play has long been considered a beneficial context for development. According to Cultural Learning theory, one reason for this is that symbolically-infused dialogical interactions constitute a zone of proximal development. However, the dynamics of caregiver-child interactions during symbolic play are still not fully understood. In the current study, we investigated informational exchange between fifty-two 24-month-old infants and their primary caregivers during symbolic play and a comparable, non-symbolic, functional play context. We coded over 11,000 utterances for whether participants had superior, equivalent, or inferior knowledge concerning the current conversational topic. Results showed that children were significantly more knowledgeable speakers and recipients in symbolic play, whereas the opposite was the case for caregivers, who were more knowledgeable in functional play. The results suggest that, despite its potential conceptual complexity, symbolic play may scaffold development because it facilitates infants’ communicative success by promoting them to ‘co-constructors of meaning’.

Abstract

The question of whether lexical decomposition is driven by semantic transparency in the lexical processing of morphologically complex words, such as compounds, remains controversial. Prior research on compound processing has predominantly examined visual processing. Focusing instead on spoken word word recognition, the present study examined the processing of auditorily presented English compounds that were semantically transparent (e.g., farmyard) or partially opaque with an opaque head (e.g., airline) or opaque modifier (e.g., pothole). Three auditory primed lexical decision experiments were run to examine to what extent constituent priming effects are affected by the semantic transparency of a compound and whether semantic transparency affects the processing of heads and modifiers equally. The results showed priming effects for both modifiers and heads regardless of their semantic transparency, indicating that individual constituents are accessed in transparent as well as opaque compounds. In addition, the results showed smaller priming effects for semantically opaque heads compared with matched transparent compounds with the same head. These findings suggest that semantically opaque heads induce an increased processing cost, which may result from the need to suppress the meaning of the head in favor of the meaning of the opaque compound.

Abstract

Previous studies on the processing of ambiguous pronominal reference have led to contradictory results: some suggested that ambiguity may hinder processing (Stewart, Holler, & Kidd, 2007), while others showed an ambiguity advantage (Grant, Sloggett, & Dillon, 2020) similar to what has been reported for structural ambiguities. This study provides a conceptual replication of Stewart et al. (2007, Experiment 1), to examine whether the discrepancy in earlier results is caused by the processing depth that participants engage in (cf. Swets, Desmet, Clifton, & Ferreira, 2008). We present the results from a word-by-word self-paced reading experiment with Dutch sentences that contained a personal pronoun in an embedded clause that was either ambiguous or disambiguated through gender features. Depth of processing of the embedded clause was manipulated through offline comprehension questions. The results showed that the difference in reading times for ambiguous versus unambiguous sentences depends on the processing depth: a significant ambiguity penalty was found under deep processing but not under shallow processing. No significant ambiguity advantage was found, regardless of processing depth. This replicates the results in Stewart et al. (2007) using a different methodology and a larger sample size for appropriate statistical power. These findings provide further evidence that ambiguous pronominal reference resolution is a flexible process, such that the way in which ambiguous sentences are processed depends on the depth of processing of the relevant information. Theoretical and methodological implications of these findings are discussed.

Abstract

How can data be used to check theories’ explanatory adequacy? The two traditional and most widespread approaches use single studies and non-systematic narrative reviews to evaluate theories’ explanatory adequacy; more
recently, large-scale replications entered the picture. We argue here that none of these approaches fits in with
cumulative science tenets. We propose instead Community-Augmented Meta-Analyses (CAMAs), which, like metaanalyses and systematic reviews, are built using all available data; like meta-analyses but not systematic reviews, can
rely on sound statistical practices to model methodological effects; and like no other approach, are broad-scoped,
cumulative and open. We explain how CAMAs entail a conceptual shift from meta-analyses and systematic reviews, a
shift that is useful when evaluating theories’ explanatory adequacy. We then provide step-by-step recommendations
for how to implement this approach – and what it means when one cannot. This leads us to conclude that CAMAs
highlight areas of uncertainty better than alternative approaches that bring data to bear on theory evaluation, and
can trigger a much needed shift towards a cumulative mindset with respect to both theory and data, leading us to
do and view experiments and narrative reviews differently.

Abstract

A current theoretical view proposes that infants converge on the speech categories of their native language by attending to frequency distributions that occur in the acoustic input. To date, the only empirical support for this statistical learning hypothesis comes from studies where a single, salient dimension was manipulated. Additional evidence is sought here, by introducing a less salient pair of categories supported by multiple cues. We exposed English-learning infants to a multi-cue bidimensional grid ranging between retroflex and alveolopalatal sibilants in prevocalic position. This contrast is substantially more difficult according to previous cross-linguistic and perceptual research, and its perception is driven by cues in both the consonantal and the following vowel portions. Infants heard one of two distributions (flat, or with two peaks), and were tested with sounds varying along only one dimension. Infants' responses differed depending on the familiarization distribution, and their performance was equally good for the vocalic and the frication dimension, lending some support to the statistical hypothesis even in this harder learning situation. However, learning was restricted to the retroflex category, and a control experiment showed that lack of learning for the alveolopalatal category was not due to the presence of a competing category. Thus, these results contribute fundamental evidence on the extent and limitations of the statistical hypothesis as an explanation for infants' perceptual tuning.

Abstract

Within the debate on the mechanisms underlying infants’ perceptual acquisition, one hypothesis proposes that infants’ perception is directly affected by the acoustic implementation of sound categories in the speech they hear. In consonance with this view, the present study shows that individual variation in fine-grained, subphonemic aspects of the acoustic realization of /s/ in caregivers’ speech predicts infants’ discrimination of this sound from the highly similar /∫/, suggesting that learning based on acoustic cue distributions may indeed drive natural phonological acquisition.

Abstract

Adults' phonotactic learning is affected by perceptual biases. One such bias concerns learning of constraints affecting groups of sounds: all else being equal, learning constraints affecting a natural class (a set of sounds sharing some phonetic characteristic) is easier than learning a constraint affecting an arbitrary set of sounds. This perceptual bias could be a given, for example, the result of innately guided learning; alternatively, it could be due to human learners’ experience with sounds. Using artificial grammars, we investigated whether such a bias arises in development, or whether it is present as soon as infants can learn phonotactics. Seven-month-old English-learning infants fail to generalize a phonotactic pattern involving fricatives and nasals, which does not form a coherent phonetic group, but succeed with the natural class of oral and nasal stops. In this paper, we report an experiment that explored whether those results also follow in a cohort of 4-month-olds. Unlike the older infants, 4-month-olds were able to generalize both groups, suggesting that the perceptual bias that makes phonotactic constraints on natural classes easier to learn is likely the effect of experience.

Abstract

Features serve two main functions in the phonology of languages: they encode the distinction between pairs of contrastive phonemes (distinctive function); and they delimit sets of sounds that participate in phonological processes and patterns (classificatory function). We summarize evidence from a variety of experimental paradigms bearing on the functional relevance of phonological features. This research shows that while young infants may use abstract phonological features to learn sound patterns, this ability becomes more constrained with development and experience. Furthermore, given the lack of overlap between the ability to learn a pair of words differing in a single feature and the ability to learn sound patterns based on features, we argue for the separation of the distinctive and the classificatory function.

Abstract

The mother-offspring bond is one of the strongest and most essential social bonds. Following is a detailed behavioral report of a female chimpanzee two days after her 16-month-old infant died, on the first day that the mother is observed to create distance between her and the corpse. A series of repeated approaches and retreats to and from the body are documented, along with detailed accounts of behaviors directed toward the dead infant by the mother and other group members. The behavior of the mother toward her dead infant not only highlights the maternal contribution to the mother-infant relationship but also elucidates the opportunities chimpanzees have to learn about the sensory cues associated with death, and the implications of death for the social environment.

Abstract

Idiomatic expressions like hit the road or turn the tables are known to be problematic for L2 learners, but research indicates that learning L2 idiomatic language is important. Relatively few studies, most of them focusing on English idioms, have investigated how L2 idioms are actually acquired and how this process is affected by important idiom properties like transparency (the degree to which the figurative meaning of an idiom can be inferred from its literal analysis) and cross-language overlap (the degree to which L2 idioms correspond to L1 idioms). The present study employed a specially designed CALL system to investigate the effects of intensity of practice and the reading modality on learning Dutch L2 idioms, as well as the impact of idiom transparency and cross-language overlap. The results show that CALL practice with a focus on meaning and form is effective for learning L2 idioms and that the degree of practice needed depends on the properties of the idioms. L2 learners can achieve or even exceed native-like performance. Practicing reading idioms aloud does not lead to significantly higher performance than reading idioms silently.These findings have theoretical implications as they show that differences between native speakers and L2 learners are due to differences in exposure, rather than to different underlying acquisition mechanisms. For teaching practice, this study indicates that a properly designed CALL system is an effective and an ecologically sound environment for learning L2 idioms, a generally unattended area in L2 classes, and that teaching priorities should be based on degree of transparency and cross-language overlap of L2 idioms.

Abstract

Language-specific differences in the size and distribution of the phonemic repertoire can have implications for the task facing listeners in recognising spoken words. A language with more phonemes will allow shorter words and reduced embedding of short words within longer ones, decreasing the potential for spurious lexical competitors to be activated by speech signals. We demonstrate that this is the case via comparative analyses of the vocabularies of English and Spanish. A language which uses suprasegmental as well as segmental contrasts, however, can substantially reduce the extent of spurious embedding.

Abstract

Listeners rely on native-language rhythm in segmenting speech; in different languages, stress-, syllable- or mora-based rhythm is exploited. This language-specificity affects listening to non- native speech, if native procedures are applied even though inefficient for the non-native language. However, speakers of two languages with similar rhythmic interpretation should segment their own and the other language similarly. This was observed to date only for related languages (English-Dutch; French-Spanish). We now report experiments in which Japanese listeners heard Telugu, a Dravidian language unrelated to Japanese, and Telugu listeners heard Japanese. In both cases detection of target sequences in speech was harder when target boundaries mismatched mora boundaries, exactly the pattern that Japanese listeners earlier exhibited with Japanese and other languages. These results suggest that Telugu and Japanese listeners use similar procedures in segmenting speech, and support the idea that languages fall into rhythmic classes, with aspects of phonological structure affecting listeners' speech segmentation.

Abstract

Native American English and non-native(Dutch)listeners identified either the consonant or the vowel in all possible American English CV and VC syllables. The syllables were embedded in multispeaker babble at three signal-to-noise ratios(0, 8, and 16 dB). The phoneme identification
performance of the non-native listeners was less accurate than that of the native listeners. All listeners were adversely affected by noise. With these isolated syllables, initial segments were harder to identify than final segments. Crucially, the effects of language background and noise did not interact; the performance asymmetry between the native and non-native groups was not significantly different across signal-to-noise ratios. It is concluded that the frequently reported disproportionate difficulty of non-native listening under disadvantageous conditions is not due to a disproportionate increase in phoneme misidentifications.

Abstract

The retiring academic may look back upon, inter alia, years of conference attendance. Speech error researchers are uniquely fortunate because they can collect data in any situation involving communication; accordingly, the retiring speech error researcher will have collected data at those conferences. We here address the issue of whether error data collected in situations involving conviviality (such as at conferences) is representative of error data in general. Our approach involved a comparison, across three levels of linguistic processing, between a specially constructed Conviviality Sample and the largest existing source of speech error data, the newly available Fromkin Speech Error Database. The results indicate that there are grounds for regarding the data in the Conviviality Sample as a better than average reflection of the true population of all errors committed. These findings encourage us to recommend further data collection in collaboration with like-minded colleagues.

Abstract

How do speakers of languages with different intonation systems produce and perceive prosodic junctures in sentences with identical structural ambiguity? Native speakers of English and of Mandarin produced potentially ambiguous sentences with a prosodic juncture either earlier in the utterance (e.g., “He gave her # dog biscuits,” “他给她#狗饼干 ”), or later (e.g., “He gave her dog # biscuits,” “他给她狗 #饼干 ”). These productiondata showed that prosodic disambiguation is realised very similarly in the two languages, despite some differences in the degree to which individual juncture cues (e.g., pausing) were favoured. In perception experiments with a new disambiguation task, requiring speeded responses to select the correct meaning for structurally ambiguous sentences, language differences in disambiguation response time appeared: Mandarin speakers correctly disambiguated sentences with earlier juncture faster than those with later juncture, while English speakers showed the reverse. Mandarin-speakers with L2 English did not show their native-language response time pattern when they heard the English ambiguous sentences. Thus even with identical structural ambiguity and identically cued production, prosodic juncture perception across languages can differ.

Abstract

Assimilation of place of articulation across a nasal and a following stop consonant is obligatory in Japanese, but not in Dutch. In four experiments the processing of assimilated forms by speakers of Japanese and Dutch was compared, using a task in which listeners blended pseudo-word pairs such as ranga-serupa. An assimilated blend of this pair would be rampa, an unassimilated blend rangpa. Japanese listeners produced significantly more assimilated than unassimilated forms, both with pseudo-Japanese and pseudo-Dutch materials, while Dutch listeners produced significantly more unassimilated than assimilated forms in each materials set. This suggests that Japanese listeners, whose native-language phonology involves obligatory assimilation constraints, represent the assimilated nasals in nasal-stop sequences as unmarked for place of articulation, while Dutch listeners, who are accustomed to hearing unassimilated forms, represent the same nasal segments as marked for place of articulation.

Abstract

The lexicon, considered as a component of the process of recognizing speech, is a device that accepts a sound image as input and outputs meaning. Lexical access is the process of formulating an appropriate input and mapping it onto an entry in the lexicon's store of sound images matched with their meanings. This chapter addresses the problems of auditory lexical access from continuous speech. The central argument to be proposed is that utterance prosody plays a crucial role in the access process. Continuous listening faces problems that are not present in visual recognition (reading) or in noncontinuous recognition (understanding isolated words). Aspects of utterance prosody offer a solution to these particular problems.

Abstract

A distinction between strong and weak vowels can be drawn on the basis of vowel quality, of stress, or of both factors. An experiment was conducted in which sets of contextually matched word-intial vowels ranging from clearly strong to clearly weak were cross-spliced, and the naturalness of the resulting words was rated by listeners. The ratings showed that in general cross-spliced words were only significantly less acceptable than unspliced words when schwa was not involved; this supports a categorical distinction based on vowel quality.

Abstract

Languages differ in the constitution of their phonemic repertoire and in the relative distinctiveness of phonemes within the repertoire. In the present study, we asked whether such differences constrain spoken-word recognition, via two word reconstruction experiments, in which listeners turned non-words into real words by changing single sounds. The experiments were carried out in Dutch (which has a relatively balanced vowel-consonant ratio and many similar vowels) and in Spanish (which has many more consonants than vowels and high distinctiveness among the vowels). Both Dutch and Spanish listeners responded significantly faster and more accurately when required to change vowels as opposed to consonants; when allowed to change any phoneme, they more often altered vowels than consonants. Vowel information thus appears to constrain lexical selection less tightly (allow more potential candidates) than does consonant information, independent of language-specific phoneme repertoire and of relative distinctiveness of vowels.

Abstract

Spraak is continu, er zijn geen betrouwbare signalen waardoor de luisteraar weet waar het ene woord eindigt en het volgende begint. Voor volwassen luisteraars is het segmenteren van gesproken taal in afzonderlijke woorden dus niet onproblematisch, maar voor een kind dat nog geen woordenschat bezit, vormt de continuïteit van spraak een nog grotere uitdaging. Desalniettemin produceren de meeste kinderen hun eerste herkenbare woorden rond het begin van het tweede levensjaar. Aan deze vroege spraakproducties gaat een formidabele perceptuele prestatie vooraf. Tijdens het eerste levensjaar - met name gedurende de tweede helft - ontwikkelt de spraakperceptie zich van een algemeen fonetisch discriminatievermogen tot een selectieve gevoeligheid voor de fonologische contrasten die in de moedertaal voorkomen. Recent onderzoek heeft verder aangetoond dat kinderen, lang voordat ze ook maar een enkel woord kunnen zeggen, in staat zijn woorden die kenmerkend zijn voor hun moedertaal te onderscheiden van woorden die dat niet zijn. Bovendien kunnen ze woorden die eerst in isolatie werden aangeboden herkennen in een continue spraakcontext. Het dagelijkse taalaanbod aan een kind van deze leeftijd maakt het in zekere zin niet gemakkelijk, bijvoorbeeld doordat de meeste woorden niet in isolatie voorkomen. Toch wordt het kind ook wel houvast geboden, onder andere doordat het woordgebruik beperkt is.

Abstract

Because stress can occur in any position within an Eglish word, lexical prosody could serve as a minimal distinguishing feature between pairs of words. However, most pairs of English words with stress pattern opposition also differ vocalically: OBject an obJECT, CONtent and content have different vowels in their first syllables an well as different stress patters. To test whether prosodic information is made use in auditory word recognition independently of segmental phonetic information, it is necessary to examine pairs like FORbear – forBEAR of TRUSty – trusTEE, semantically unrelated words which echbit stress pattern opposition but no segmental difference. In a cross-modal priming task, such words produce the priming effects characteristic of homophones, indicating that lexical prosody is not used in the same was as segmental structure to constrain lexical access.

Abstract

Listeners process spoken language in ways which are adapted to the phonological structure of their native language. As a consequence, non-native speakers do not listen to a language in the same way as native speakers; moreover, listeners may use their native language listening procedures inappropriately with foreign input. With sufficient experience, however, it may be possible to inhibit this latter (counter-productive) behavior.

Abstract

Languages contain tens of thousands of words, but these are constructed from a tiny handful of phonetic elements. Consequently, words resemble one another, or can be embedded within one another, a coup stick snot with standing. me process of spoken-word recognition by human listeners involves activation of multiple word candidates consistent with the input, and direct competition between activated candidate words. Further, human listeners are sensitive, at an early, prelexical, stage of speeeh processing, to constraints on what could potentially be a word of the language.