Publications

Displaying 301 - 400 of 480
  • Mickan, A., McQueen, J. M., Brehm, L., & Lemhöfer, K. (2023). Individual differences in foreign language attrition: A 6-month longitudinal investigation after a study abroad. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 38(1), 11-39. doi:10.1080/23273798.2022.2074479.

    Abstract

    While recent laboratory studies suggest that the use of competing languages is a driving force in foreign language (FL) attrition (i.e. forgetting), research on “real” attriters has failed to demonstrate
    such a relationship. We addressed this issue in a large-scale longitudinal study, following German students throughout a study abroad in Spain and their first six months back in Germany. Monthly,
    percentage-based frequency of use measures enabled a fine-grained description of language use.
    L3 Spanish forgetting rates were indeed predicted by the quantity and quality of Spanish use, and
    correlated negatively with L1 German and positively with L2 English letter fluency. Attrition rates
    were furthermore influenced by prior Spanish proficiency, but not by motivation to maintain
    Spanish or non-verbal long-term memory capacity. Overall, this study highlights the importance
    of language use for FL retention and sheds light on the complex interplay between language
    use and other determinants of attrition.
  • Mishra, C., Offrede, T., Fuchs, S., Mooshammer, C., & Skantze, G. (2023). Does a robot’s gaze aversion affect human gaze aversion? Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 10: 1127626. doi:10.3389/frobt.2023.1127626.

    Abstract

    Gaze cues serve an important role in facilitating human conversations and are generally considered to be one of the most important non-verbal cues. Gaze cues are used to manage turn-taking, coordinate joint attention, regulate intimacy, and signal cognitive effort. In particular, it is well established that gaze aversion is used in conversations to avoid prolonged periods of mutual gaze. Given the numerous functions of gaze cues, there has been extensive work on modelling these cues in social robots. Researchers have also tried to identify the impact of robot gaze on human participants. However, the influence of robot gaze behavior on human gaze behavior has been less explored. We conducted a within-subjects user study (N = 33) to verify if a robot’s gaze aversion influenced human gaze aversion behavior. Our results show that participants tend to avert their gaze more when the robot keeps staring at them as compared to when the robot exhibits well-timed gaze aversions. We interpret our findings in terms of intimacy regulation: humans try to compensate for the robot’s lack of gaze aversion.
  • Mishra, C., Verdonschot, R. G., Hagoort, P., & Skantze, G. (2023). Real-time emotion generation in human-robot dialogue using large language models. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 10: 1271610. doi:10.3389/frobt.2023.1271610.

    Abstract

    Affective behaviors enable social robots to not only establish better connections with humans but also serve as a tool for the robots to express their internal states. It has been well established that emotions are important to signal understanding in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). This work aims to harness the power of Large Language Models (LLM) and proposes an approach to control the affective behavior of robots. By interpreting emotion appraisal as an Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) tasks, we used GPT-3.5 to predict the emotion of a robot’s turn in real-time, using the dialogue history of the ongoing conversation. The robot signaled the predicted emotion using facial expressions. The model was evaluated in a within-subjects user study (N = 47) where the model-driven emotion generation was compared against conditions where the robot did not display any emotions and where it displayed incongruent emotions. The participants interacted with the robot by playing a card sorting game that was specifically designed to evoke emotions. The results indicated that the emotions were reliably generated by the LLM and the participants were able to perceive the robot’s emotions. It was found that the robot expressing congruent model-driven facial emotion expressions were perceived to be significantly more human-like, emotionally appropriate, and elicit a more positive impression. Participants also scored significantly better in the card sorting game when the robot displayed congruent facial expressions. From a technical perspective, the study shows that LLMs can be used to control the affective behavior of robots reliably in real-time. Additionally, our results could be used in devising novel human-robot interactions, making robots more effective in roles where emotional interaction is important, such as therapy, companionship, or customer service.
  • Monaghan, P., Donnelly, S., Alcock, K., Bidgood, A., Cain, K., Durrant, S., Frost, R. L. A., Jago, L. S., Peter, M. S., Pine, J. M., Turnbull, H., & Rowland, C. F. (2023). Learning to generalise but not segment an artificial language at 17 months predicts children’s language skills 3 years later. Cognitive Psychology, 147: 101607. doi:10.1016/j.cogpsych.2023.101607.

    Abstract

    We investigated whether learning an artificial language at 17 months was predictive of children’s natural language vocabulary and grammar skills at 54 months. Children at 17 months listened to an artificial language containing non-adjacent dependencies, and were then tested on their learning to segment and to generalise the structure of the language. At 54 months, children were then tested on a range of standardised natural language tasks that assessed receptive and expressive vocabulary and grammar. A structural equation model demonstrated that learning the artificial language generalisation at 17 months predicted language abilities – a composite of vocabulary and grammar skills – at 54 months, whereas artificial language segmentation at 17 months did not predict language abilities at this age. Artificial language learning tasks – especially those that probe grammar learning – provide a valuable tool for uncovering the mechanisms driving children’s early language development.

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    supplementary data
  • Morison, L., Meffert, E., Stampfer, M., Steiner-Wilke, I., Vollmer, B., Schulze, K., Briggs, T., Braden, R., Vogel, A. P., Thompson-Lake, D., Patel, C., Blair, E., Goel, H., Turner, S., Moog, U., Riess, A., Liegeois, F., Koolen, D. A., Amor, D. J., Kleefstra, T. and 3 moreMorison, L., Meffert, E., Stampfer, M., Steiner-Wilke, I., Vollmer, B., Schulze, K., Briggs, T., Braden, R., Vogel, A. P., Thompson-Lake, D., Patel, C., Blair, E., Goel, H., Turner, S., Moog, U., Riess, A., Liegeois, F., Koolen, D. A., Amor, D. J., Kleefstra, T., Fisher, S. E., Zweier, C., & Morgan, A. T. (2023). In-depth characterisation of a cohort of individuals with missense and loss-of-function variants disrupting FOXP2. Journal of Medical Genetics, 60(6), 597-607. doi:10.1136/jmg-2022-108734.

    Abstract

    Background
    Heterozygous disruptions of FOXP2 were the first identified molecular cause for severe speech disorder; childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), yet few cases have been reported, limiting knowledge of the condition.

    Methods
    Here we phenotyped 29 individuals from 18 families with pathogenic FOXP2-only variants (13 loss-of-function, 5 missense variants; 14 males; aged 2 years to 62 years). Health and development (cognitive, motor, social domains) was examined, including speech and language outcomes with the first cross-linguistic analysis of English and German.

    Results
    Speech disorders were prevalent (24/26, 92%) and CAS was most common (23/26, 89%), with similar speech presentations across English and German. Speech was still impaired in adulthood and some speech sounds (e.g. ‘th’, ‘r’, ‘ch’, ‘j’) were never acquired. Language impairments (22/26, 85%) ranged from mild to severe. Comorbidities included feeding difficulties in infancy (10/27, 37%), fine (14/27, 52%) and gross (14/27, 52%) motor impairment, anxiety (6/28, 21%), depression (7/28, 25%), and sleep disturbance (11/15, 44%). Physical features were common (23/28, 82%) but with no consistent pattern. Cognition ranged from average to mildly impaired, and was incongruent with language ability; for example, seven participants with severe language disorder had average non-verbal cognition.

    Conclusions
    Although we identify increased prevalence of conditions like anxiety, depression and sleep disturbance, we confirm that the consequences of FOXP2 dysfunction remain relatively specific to speech disorder, as compared to other recently identified monogenic conditions associated with CAS. Thus, our findings reinforce that FOXP2 provides a valuable entrypoint for examining the neurobiological bases of speech disorder.
  • Moscoso del Prado Martín, F. (2003). Paradigmatic structures in morphological processing: Computational and cross-linguistic experimental studies. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen. doi:10.17617/2.58929.
  • Moscoso del Prado Martín, F., & Baayen, R. H. (2003). Using the structure found in time: Building real-scale orthographic and phonetic representations by accumulation of expectations. In H. Bowman, & C. Labiouse (Eds.), Connectionist Models of Cognition, Perception and Emotion: Proceedings of the Eighth Neural Computation and Psychology Workshop (pp. 263-272). Singapore: World Scientific.
  • Muhinyi, A., & Rowland, C. F. (2023). Contributions of abstract extratextual talk and interactive style to preschoolers’ vocabulary development. Journal of Child Language, 50(1), 198-213. doi:10.1017/S0305000921000696.

    Abstract

    Caregiver abstract talk during shared reading predicts preschool-age children’s vocabulary development. However, previous research has focused on level of abstraction with less consideration of the style of extratextual talk. Here, we investigated the relation between these two dimensions of extratextual talk, and their contributions to variance in children’s vocabulary skills. Caregiver level of abstraction was associated with an interactive reading style. Controlling for socioeconomic status and child age, high interactivity predicted children’s concurrent vocabulary skills whereas abstraction did not. Controlling for earlier vocabulary skills, neither dimension of the extratextual talk predicted later vocabulary. Theoretical and practical relevance are discussed.
  • Nabrotzky, J., Ambrazaitis, G., Zellers, M., & House, D. (2023). Temporal alignment of manual gestures’ phase transitions with lexical and post-lexical accentual F0 peaks in spontaneous Swedish interaction. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (Eds.), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527194.

    Abstract

    Many studies investigating the temporal alignment of co-speech
    gestures to acoustic units in the speech signal find a close
    coupling of the gestural landmarks and pitch accents or the
    stressed syllable of pitch-accented words. In English, a pitch
    accent is anchored in the lexically stressed syllable. Hence, it is
    unclear whether it is the lexical phonological dimension of
    stress, or the phrase-level prominence that determines the
    details of speech-gesture synchronization. This paper explores
    the relation between gestural phase transitions and accentual F0
    peaks in Stockholm Swedish, which exhibits a lexical pitch
    accent distinction. When produced with phrase-level
    prominence, there are three different configurations of
    lexicality of F0 peaks and the status of the syllable it is aligned
    with. Through analyzing the alignment of the different F0 peaks
    with gestural onsets in spontaneous dyadic conversations, we
    aim to contribute to our understanding of the role of lexical
    prosodic phonology in the co-production of speech and gesture.
    The results, though limited by a small dataset, still suggest
    differences between the three types of peaks concerning which
    types of gesture phase onsets they tend to align with, and how
    well these landmarks align with each other, although these
    differences did not reach significance.
  • Narasimhan, B. (2003). Motion events and the lexicon: The case of Hindi. Lingua, 113(2), 123-160. doi:10.1016/S0024-3841(02)00068-2.

    Abstract

    English, and a variety of Germanic languages, allow constructions such as the bottle floated into the cave , whereas languages such as Spanish, French, and Hindi are highly restricted in allowing manner of motion verbs to occur with path phrases. This typological observation has been accounted for in terms of the conflation of complex meaning in basic or derived verbs [Talmy, L., 1985. Lexicalization patterns: semantic structure in lexical forms. In: Shopen, T. (Ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description 3: Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 57–149; Levin, B., Rappaport-Hovav, M., 1995. Unaccusativity: At the Syntax–Lexical Semantics Interface. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA], or the presence of path “satellites” with special grammatical properties in the lexicon of languages such as English, which allow such phrasal combinations [cf. Talmy, L., 1985. Lexicalization patterns: semantic structure in lexical forms. In: Shopen, T. (Ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description 3: Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 57–149; Talmy, L., 1991. Path to realisation: via aspect and result. In: Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley Linguistics Society, Berkeley, pp. 480–520]. I use data from Hindi to show that there is little empirical support for the claim that the constraint on the phrasal combination is correlated with differences in verb meaning or the presence of satellites in the lexicon of a language. However, proposals which eschew lexicalization accounts for more general aspectual constraints on the manner verb + path phrase combination in Spanish-type languages (Aske, J., 1989. Path Predicates in English and Spanish: A Closer look. In: Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley Linguistics Society, Berkeley, pp. 1–14) cannot account for the full range of data in Hindi either. On the basis of these facts, I argue that an empirically adequate account can be formulated in terms of a general mapping constraint, formulated in terms of whether the lexical requirements of the verb strictly or weakly constrain its syntactic privileges of occurrence. In Hindi, path phrases can combine with manner of motion verbs only to the degree that they are compatible with the semantic profile of the verb. Path phrases in English, on the other hand, can extend the verb's “semantic profile” subject to certain constraints. I suggest that path phrases are licensed in English by the semantic requirements of the “construction” in which they appear rather than by the selectional requirements of the verb (Fillmore, C., Kay, P., O'Connor, M.C., 1988, Regularity and idiomaticity in grammatical constructions. Language 64, 501–538; Jackendoff, 1990, Semantic Structures. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA; Goldberg, 1995, Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London).
  • Nederstigt, U. (2003). Auch and noch in child and adult German. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Neijt, A., Schreuder, R., & Baayen, R. H. (2003). Verpleegsters, ambassadrices, and masseuses: Stratum differences in the comprehension of Dutch words with feminine agent suffixes. In L. Cornips, & P. Fikkert (Eds.), Linguistics in the Netherlands 2003. (pp. 117-127). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Norris, D., McQueen, J. M., & Cutler, A. (2003). Perceptual learning in speech. Cognitive Psychology, 47(2), 204-238. doi:10.1016/S0010-0285(03)00006-9.

    Abstract

    This study demonstrates that listeners use lexical knowledge in perceptual learning of speech sounds. Dutch listeners first made lexical decisions on Dutch words and nonwords. The final fricative of 20 critical words had been replaced by an ambiguous sound, between [f] and [s]. One group of listeners heard ambiguous [f]-final words (e.g., [WI tlo?], from witlof, chicory) and unambiguous [s]-final words (e.g., naaldbos, pine forest). Another group heard the reverse (e.g., ambiguous [na:ldbo?], unambiguous witlof). Listeners who had heard [?] in [f]-final words were subsequently more likely to categorize ambiguous sounds on an [f]–[s] continuum as [f] than those who heard [?] in [s]-final words. Control conditions ruled out alternative explanations based on selective adaptation and contrast. Lexical information can thus be used to train categorization of speech. This use of lexical information differs from the on-line lexical feedback embodied in interactive models of speech perception. In contrast to on-line feedback, lexical feedback for learning is of benefit to spoken word recognition (e.g., in adapting to a newly encountered dialect).
  • Nota, N., Trujillo, J. P., & Holler, J. (2023). Specific facial signals associate with categories of social actions conveyed through questions. PLoS One, 18(7): e0288104. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0288104.

    Abstract

    The early recognition of fundamental social actions, like questions, is crucial for understanding the speaker’s intended message and planning a timely response in conversation. Questions themselves may express more than one social action category (e.g., an information request “What time is it?”, an invitation “Will you come to my party?” or a criticism “Are you crazy?”). Although human language use occurs predominantly in a multimodal context, prior research on social actions has mainly focused on the verbal modality. This study breaks new ground by investigating how conversational facial signals may map onto the expression of different types of social actions conveyed through questions. The distribution, timing, and temporal organization of facial signals across social actions was analysed in a rich corpus of naturalistic, dyadic face-to-face Dutch conversations. These social actions were: Information Requests, Understanding Checks, Self-Directed questions, Stance or Sentiment questions, Other-Initiated Repairs, Active Participation questions, questions for Structuring, Initiating or Maintaining Conversation, and Plans and Actions questions. This is the first study to reveal differences in distribution and timing of facial signals across different types of social actions. The findings raise the possibility that facial signals may facilitate social action recognition during language processing in multimodal face-to-face interaction.

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  • Nota, N., Trujillo, J. P., Jacobs, V., & Holler, J. (2023). Facilitating question identification through natural intensity eyebrow movements in virtual avatars. Scientific Reports, 13: 21295. doi:10.1038/s41598-023-48586-4.

    Abstract

    In conversation, recognizing social actions (similar to ‘speech acts’) early is important to quickly understand the speaker’s intended message and to provide a fast response. Fast turns are typical for fundamental social actions like questions, since a long gap can indicate a dispreferred response. In multimodal face-to-face interaction, visual signals may contribute to this fast dynamic. The face is an important source of visual signalling, and previous research found that prevalent facial signals such as eyebrow movements facilitate the rapid recognition of questions. We aimed to investigate whether early eyebrow movements with natural movement intensities facilitate question identification, and whether specific intensities are more helpful in detecting questions. Participants were instructed to view videos of avatars where the presence of eyebrow movements (eyebrow frown or raise vs. no eyebrow movement) was manipulated, and to indicate whether the utterance in the video was a question or statement. Results showed higher accuracies for questions with eyebrow frowns, and faster response times for questions with eyebrow frowns and eyebrow raises. No additional effect was observed for the specific movement intensity. This suggests that eyebrow movements that are representative of naturalistic multimodal behaviour facilitate question recognition.
  • Nota, N., Trujillo, J. P., & Holler, J. (2023). Conversational eyebrow frowns facilitate question identification: An online study using virtual avatars. Cognitive Science, 47(12): e13392. doi:10.1111/cogs.13392.

    Abstract

    Conversation is a time-pressured environment. Recognizing a social action (the ‘‘speech act,’’ such as a question requesting information) early is crucial in conversation to quickly understand the intended message and plan a timely response. Fast turns between interlocutors are especially relevant for responses to questions since a long gap may be meaningful by itself. Human language is multimodal, involving speech as well as visual signals from the body, including the face. But little is known about how conversational facial signals contribute to the communication of social actions. Some of the most prominent facial signals in conversation are eyebrow movements. Previous studies found links between eyebrow movements and questions, suggesting that these facial signals could contribute to the rapid recognition of questions. Therefore, we aimed to investigate whether early eyebrow movements (eyebrow frown or raise vs. no eyebrow movement) facilitate question identification. Participants were instructed to view videos of avatars where the presence of eyebrow movements accompanying questions was manipulated. Their task was to indicate whether the utterance was a question or a statement as accurately and quickly as possible. Data were collected using the online testing platform Gorilla. Results showed higher accuracies and faster response times for questions with eyebrow frowns, suggesting a facilitative role of eyebrow frowns for question identification. This means that facial signals can critically contribute to the communication of social actions in conversation by signaling social action-specific visual information and providing visual cues to speakers’ intentions.

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  • Nota, N. (2023). Talking faces: The contribution of conversational facial signals to language use and processing. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Nozais, V., Forkel, S. J., Petit, L., Talozzi, L., Corbetta, M., Thiebaut de Schotten, M., & Joliot, M. (2023). Atlasing white matter and grey matter joint contributions to resting-state networks in the human brain. Communications Biology, 6: 726. doi:10.1038/s42003-023-05107-3.

    Abstract

    Over the past two decades, the study of resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging has revealed that functional connectivity within and between networks is linked to cognitive states and pathologies. However, the white matter connections supporting this connectivity remain only partially described. We developed a method to jointly map the white and grey matter contributing to each resting-state network (RSN). Using the Human Connectome Project, we generated an atlas of 30 RSNs. The method also highlighted the overlap between networks, which revealed that most of the brain’s white matter (89%) is shared between multiple RSNs, with 16% shared by at least 7 RSNs. These overlaps, especially the existence of regions shared by numerous networks, suggest that white matter lesions in these areas might strongly impact the communication within networks. We provide an atlas and an open-source software to explore the joint contribution of white and grey matter to RSNs and facilitate the study of the impact of white matter damage to these networks. In a first application of the software with clinical data, we were able to link stroke patients and impacted RSNs, showing that their symptoms aligned well with the estimated functions of the networks.
  • Numssen, O., van der Burght, C. L., & Hartwigsen, G. (2023). Revisiting the focality of non-invasive brain stimulation - implications for studies of human cognition. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 149: 105154. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2023.105154.

    Abstract

    Non-invasive brain stimulation techniques are popular tools to investigate brain function in health and disease. Although transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is widely used in cognitive neuroscience research to probe causal structure-function relationships, studies often yield inconclusive results. To improve the effectiveness of TMS studies, we argue that the cognitive neuroscience community needs to revise the stimulation focality principle – the spatial resolution with which TMS can differentially stimulate cortical regions. In the motor domain, TMS can differentiate between cortical muscle representations of adjacent fingers. However, this high degree of spatial specificity cannot be obtained in all cortical regions due to the influences of cortical folding patterns on the TMS-induced electric field. The region-dependent focality of TMS should be assessed a priori to estimate the experimental feasibility. Post-hoc simulations allow modeling of the relationship between cortical stimulation exposure and behavioral modulation by integrating data across stimulation sites or subjects.

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  • Nyberg, L., Marklund, P., Persson, J., Cabeza, R., Forkstam, C., Petersson, K. M., & Ingvar, M. (2003). Common prefrontal activations during working memory, episodic memory, and semantic memory. Neuropsychologia, 41(3), 371-377. doi:10.1016/S0028-3932(02)00168-9.

    Abstract

    Regions of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) are typically activated in many different cognitive functions. In most studies, the focus has been on the role of specific PFC regions in specific cognitive domains, but more recently similarities in PFC activations across cognitive domains have been stressed. Such similarities may suggest that a region mediates a common function across a variety of cognitive tasks. In this study, we compared the activation patterns associated with tests of working memory, semantic memory and episodic memory. The results converged on a general involvement of four regions across memory tests. These were located in left frontopolar cortex, left mid-ventrolateral PFC, left mid-dorsolateral PFC and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. These findings provide evidence that some PFC regions are engaged during many different memory tests. The findings are discussed in relation to theories about the functional contribition of the PFC regions and the architecture of memory.
  • Nyberg, L., Sandblom, J., Jones, S., Stigsdotter Neely, A., Petersson, K. M., Ingvar, M., & Bäckman, L. (2003). Neural correlates of training-related memory improvement in adulthood and aging. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 100(23), 13728-13733. doi:10.1073/pnas.1735487100.

    Abstract

    Cognitive studies show that both younger and older adults can increase their memory performance after training in using a visuospatial mnemonic, although age-related memory deficits tend to be magnified rather than reduced after training. Little is known about the changes in functional brain activity that accompany training-induced memory enhancement, and whether age-related activity changes are associated with the size of training-related gains. Here, we demonstrate that younger adults show increased activity during memory encoding in occipito-parietal and frontal brain regions after learning the mnemonic. Older adults did not show increased frontal activity, and only those elderly persons who benefited from the mnemonic showed increased occipitoparietal activity. These findings suggest that age-related differences in cognitive reserve capacity may reflect both a frontal processing deficiency and a posterior production deficiency.
  • Offrede, T., Mishra, C., Skantze, G., Fuchs, S., & Mooshammer, C. (2023). Do Humans Converge Phonetically When Talking to a Robot? In R. Skarnitzl, & J. Volin (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 3507-3511). Prague: GUARANT International.

    Abstract

    Phonetic convergence—i.e., adapting one’s speech
    towards that of an interlocutor—has been shown
    to occur in human-human conversations as well as
    human-machine interactions. Here, we investigate
    the hypothesis that human-to-robot convergence is
    influenced by the human’s perception of the robot
    and by the conversation’s topic. We conducted a
    within-subjects experiment in which 33 participants
    interacted with two robots differing in their eye gaze
    behavior—one looked constantly at the participant;
    the other produced gaze aversions, similarly to a
    human’s behavior. Additionally, the robot asked
    questions with increasing intimacy levels.
    We observed that the speakers tended to converge
    on F0 to the robots. However, this convergence
    to the robots was not modulated by how the
    speakers perceived them or by the topic’s intimacy.
    Interestingly, speakers produced lower F0 means
    when talking about more intimate topics. We
    discuss these findings in terms of current theories of
    conversational convergence.
  • Ogdie, M. N., MacPhie, I. L., Minassian, S. L., Yang, M., Fisher, S. E., Francks, C., Cantor, R. M., McCracken, J. T., McGough, J. J., Nelson, S. F., Monaco, A. P., & Smalley, S. L. (2003). A genomewide scan for Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder in an extended sample: Suggestive linkage on 17p11. American Journal of Human Genetics, 72(5), 1268-1279. doi:10.1086/375139.

    Abstract

    Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD [MIM 143465]) is a common, highly heritable neurobehavioral disorder of childhood onset, characterized by hyperactivity, impulsivity, and/or inattention. As part of an ongoing study of the genetic etiology of ADHD, we have performed a genomewide linkage scan in 204 nuclear families comprising 853 individuals and 270 affected sibling pairs (ASPs). Previously, we reported genomewide linkage analysis of a “first wave” of these families composed of 126 ASPs. A follow-up investigation of one region on 16p yielded significant linkage in an extended sample. The current study extends the original sample of 126 ASPs to 270 ASPs and provides linkage analyses of the entire sample, using polymorphic microsatellite markers that define an ∼10-cM map across the genome. Maximum LOD score (MLS) analysis identified suggestive linkage for 17p11 (MLS=2.98) and four nominal regions with MLS values >1.0, including 5p13, 6q14, 11q25, and 20q13. These data, taken together with the fine mapping on 16p13, suggest two regions as highly likely to harbor risk genes for ADHD: 16p13 and 17p11. Interestingly, both regions, as well as 5p13, have been highlighted in genomewide scans for autism.
  • Oliveira‑Stahl, G., Farboud, S., Sterling, M. L., Heckman, J. J., Van Raalte, B., Lenferink, D., Van der Stam, A., Smeets, C. J. L. M., Fisher, S. E., & Englitz, B. (2023). High-precision spatial analysis of mouse courtship vocalization behavior reveals sex and strain differences. Scientific Reports, 13: 5219. doi:10.1038/s41598-023-31554-3.

    Abstract

    Mice display a wide repertoire of vocalizations that varies with sex, strain, and context. Especially during social interaction, including sexually motivated dyadic interaction, mice emit sequences of ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) of high complexity. As animals of both sexes vocalize, a reliable attribution of USVs to their emitter is essential. The state-of-the-art in sound localization for USVs in 2D allows spatial localization at a resolution of multiple centimeters. However, animals interact at closer ranges, e.g. snout-to-snout. Hence, improved algorithms are required to reliably assign USVs. We present a novel algorithm, SLIM (Sound Localization via Intersecting Manifolds), that achieves a 2–3-fold improvement in accuracy (13.1–14.3 mm) using only 4 microphones and extends to many microphones and localization in 3D. This accuracy allows reliable assignment of 84.3% of all USVs in our dataset. We apply SLIM to courtship interactions between adult C57Bl/6J wildtype mice and those carrying a heterozygous Foxp2 variant (R552H). The improved spatial accuracy reveals that vocalization behavior is dependent on the spatial relation between the interacting mice. Female mice vocalized more in close snout-to-snout interaction while male mice vocalized more when the male snout was in close proximity to the female's ano-genital region. Further, we find that the acoustic properties of the ultrasonic vocalizations (duration, Wiener Entropy, and sound level) are dependent on the spatial relation between the interacting mice as well as on the genotype. In conclusion, the improved attribution of vocalizations to their emitters provides a foundation for better understanding social vocal behaviors.

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  • Oostdijk, N., & Broeder, D. (2003). The Spoken Dutch Corpus and its exploitation environment. In A. Abeille, S. Hansen-Schirra, & H. Uszkoreit (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on linguistically interpreted corpora (LINC-03) (pp. 93-101).
  • Otake, T., & Cutler, A. (2003). Evidence against "units of perception". In S. Shohov (Ed.), Advances in psychology research (pp. 57-82). Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science.
  • Ouni, S., Cohen, M. M., Young, K., & Jesse, A. (2003). Internationalization of a talking head. In M. Sole, D. Recasens, & J. Romero (Eds.), Proceedings of 15th International Congress of Phonetics Sciences (pp. 2569-2572). Barcelona: Casual Productions.

    Abstract

    In this paper we describe a general scheme for internationalization of our talking head, Baldi, to speak other languages. We describe the modular structure of the auditory/visual synthesis software. As an example, we have created a synthetic Arabic talker, which is evaluated using a noisy word recognition task comparing this talker with a natural one.
  • Özer, D., Karadöller, D. Z., Özyürek, A., & Göksun, T. (2023). Gestures cued by demonstratives in speech guide listeners' visual attention during spatial language comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 152(9), 2623-2635. doi:10.1037/xge0001402.

    Abstract

    Gestures help speakers and listeners during communication and thinking, particularly for visual-spatial information. Speakers tend to use gestures to complement the accompanying spoken deictic constructions, such as demonstratives, when communicating spatial information (e.g., saying “The candle is here” and gesturing to the right side to express that the candle is on the speaker's right). Visual information conveyed by gestures enhances listeners’ comprehension. Whether and how listeners allocate overt visual attention to gestures in different speech contexts is mostly unknown. We asked if (a) listeners gazed at gestures more when they complement demonstratives in speech (“here”) compared to when they express redundant information to speech (e.g., “right”) and (b) gazing at gestures related to listeners’ information uptake from those gestures. We demonstrated that listeners fixated gestures more when they expressed complementary than redundant information in the accompanying speech. Moreover, overt visual attention to gestures did not predict listeners’ comprehension. These results suggest that the heightened communicative value of gestures as signaled by external cues, such as demonstratives, guides listeners’ visual attention to gestures. However, overt visual attention does not seem to be necessary to extract the cued information from the multimodal message.
  • Papoutsi*, C., Zimianiti*, E., Bosker, H. R., & Frost, R. L. A. (2023). Statistical learning at a virtual cocktail party. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. Advance online publication. doi:10.3758/s13423-023-02384-1.

    Abstract

    * These two authors contributed equally to this study
    Statistical learning – the ability to extract distributional regularities from input – is suggested to be key to language acquisition. Yet, evidence for the human capacity for statistical learning comes mainly from studies conducted in carefully controlled settings without auditory distraction. While such conditions permit careful examination of learning, they do not reflect the naturalistic language learning experience, which is replete with auditory distraction – including competing talkers. Here, we examine how statistical language learning proceeds in a virtual cocktail party environment, where the to-be-learned input is presented alongside a competing speech stream with its own distributional regularities. During exposure, participants in the Dual Talker group concurrently heard two novel languages, one produced by a female talker and one by a male talker, with each talker virtually positioned at opposite sides of the listener (left/right) using binaural acoustic manipulations. Selective attention was manipulated by instructing participants to attend to only one of the two talkers. At test, participants were asked to distinguish words from part-words for both the attended and the unattended languages. Results indicated that participants’ accuracy was significantly higher for trials from the attended vs. unattended
    language. Further, the performance of this Dual Talker group was no different compared to a control group who heard only one language from a single talker (Single Talker group). We thus conclude that statistical learning is modulated by selective attention, being relatively robust against the additional cognitive load provided by competing speech, emphasizing its efficiency in naturalistic language learning situations.

    Additional information

    supplementary file
  • Parlatini, V., Itahashi, T., Lee, Y., Liu, S., Nguyen, T. T., Aoki, Y. Y., Forkel, S. J., Catani, M., Rubia, K., Zhou, J. H., Murphy, D. G., & Cortese, S. (2023). White matter alterations in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): a systematic review of 129 diffusion imaging studies with meta-analysis. Molecular Psychiatry, 28, 4098-4123. doi:10.1038/s41380-023-02173-1.

    Abstract

    Aberrant anatomical brain connections in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are reported inconsistently across
    diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) studies. Based on a pre-registered protocol (Prospero: CRD42021259192), we searched PubMed,
    Ovid, and Web of Knowledge until 26/03/2022 to conduct a systematic review of DWI studies. We performed a quality assessment
    based on imaging acquisition, preprocessing, and analysis. Using signed differential mapping, we meta-analyzed a subset of the
    retrieved studies amenable to quantitative evidence synthesis, i.e., tract-based spatial statistics (TBSS) studies, in individuals of any
    age and, separately, in children, adults, and high-quality datasets. Finally, we conducted meta-regressions to test the effect of age,
    sex, and medication-naïvety. We included 129 studies (6739 ADHD participants and 6476 controls), of which 25 TBSS studies
    provided peak coordinates for case-control differences in fractional anisotropy (FA)(32 datasets) and 18 in mean diffusivity (MD)(23
    datasets). The systematic review highlighted white matter alterations (especially reduced FA) in projection, commissural and
    association pathways of individuals with ADHD, which were associated with symptom severity and cognitive deficits. The meta-
    analysis showed a consistent reduced FA in the splenium and body of the corpus callosum, extending to the cingulum. Lower FA
    was related to older age, and case-control differences did not survive in the pediatric meta-analysis. About 68% of studies were of
    low quality, mainly due to acquisitions with non-isotropic voxels or lack of motion correction; and the sensitivity analysis in high-
    quality datasets yielded no significant results. Findings suggest prominent alterations in posterior interhemispheric connections
    subserving cognitive and motor functions affected in ADHD, although these might be influenced by non-optimal acquisition
    parameters/preprocessing. Absence of findings in children may be related to the late development of callosal fibers, which may
    enhance case-control differences in adulthood. Clinicodemographic and methodological differences were major barriers to
    consistency and comparability among studies, and should be addressed in future investigations.
  • Passmore, S., Barth, W., Greenhill, S. J., Quinn, K., Sheard, C., Argyriou, P., Birchall, J., Bowern, C., Calladine, J., Deb, A., Diederen, A., Metsäranta, N. P., Araujo, L. H., Schembri, R., Hickey-Hall, J., Honkola, T., Mitchell, A., Poole, L., Rácz, P. M., Roberts, S. G. and 4 morePassmore, S., Barth, W., Greenhill, S. J., Quinn, K., Sheard, C., Argyriou, P., Birchall, J., Bowern, C., Calladine, J., Deb, A., Diederen, A., Metsäranta, N. P., Araujo, L. H., Schembri, R., Hickey-Hall, J., Honkola, T., Mitchell, A., Poole, L., Rácz, P. M., Roberts, S. G., Ross, R. M., Thomas-Colquhoun, E., Evans, N., & Jordan, F. M. (2023). Kinbank: A global database of kinship terminology. PLOS ONE, 18: e0283218. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0283218.

    Abstract

    For a single species, human kinship organization is both remarkably diverse and strikingly organized. Kinship terminology is the structured vocabulary used to classify, refer to, and address relatives and family. Diversity in kinship terminology has been analyzed by anthropologists for over 150 years, although recurrent patterning across cultures remains incompletely explained. Despite the wealth of kinship data in the anthropological record, comparative studies of kinship terminology are hindered by data accessibility. Here we present Kinbank, a new database of 210,903 kinterms from a global sample of 1,229 spoken languages. Using open-access and transparent data provenance, Kinbank offers an extensible resource for kinship terminology, enabling researchers to explore the rich diversity of human family organization and to test longstanding hypotheses about the origins and drivers of recurrent patterns. We illustrate our contribution with two examples. We demonstrate strong gender bias in the phonological structure of parent terms across 1,022 languages, and we show that there is no evidence for a coevolutionary relationship between cross-cousin marriage and bifurcate-merging terminology in Bantu languages. Analysing kinship data is notoriously challenging; Kinbank aims to eliminate data accessibility issues from that challenge and provide a platform to build an interdisciplinary understanding of kinship.

    Additional information

    Supporting Information
  • Paterson, K. B., Liversedge, S. P., Rowland, C. F., & Filik, R. (2003). Children's comprehension of sentences with focus particles. Cognition, 89(3), 263-294. doi:10.1016/S0010-0277(03)00126-4.

    Abstract

    We report three studies investigating children's and adults' comprehension of sentences containing the focus particle only. In Experiments 1 and 2, four groups of participants (6–7 years, 8–10 years, 11–12 years and adult) compared sentences with only in different syntactic positions against pictures that matched or mismatched events described by the sentence. Contrary to previous findings (Crain, S., Ni, W., & Conway, L. (1994). Learning, parsing and modularity. In C. Clifton, L. Frazier, & K. Rayner (Eds.), Perspectives on sentence processing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum; Philip, W., & Lynch, E. (1999). Felicity, relevance, and acquisition of the grammar of every and only. In S. C. Howell, S. A. Fish, & T. Keith-Lucas (Eds.), Proceedings of the 24th annual Boston University conference on language development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press) we found that young children predominantly made errors by failing to process contrast information rather than errors in which they failed to use syntactic information to restrict the scope of the particle. Experiment 3 replicated these findings with pre-schoolers.
  • Paulat, N. S., Storer, J. M., Moreno-Santillán, D. D., Osmanski, A. B., Sullivan, K. A. M., Grimshaw, J. R., Korstian, J., Halsey, M., Garcia, C. J., Crookshanks, C., Roberts, J., Smit, A. F. A., Hubley, R., Rosen, J., Teeling, E. C., Vernes, S. C., Myers, E., Pippel, M., Brown, T., Hiller, M. and 5 morePaulat, N. S., Storer, J. M., Moreno-Santillán, D. D., Osmanski, A. B., Sullivan, K. A. M., Grimshaw, J. R., Korstian, J., Halsey, M., Garcia, C. J., Crookshanks, C., Roberts, J., Smit, A. F. A., Hubley, R., Rosen, J., Teeling, E. C., Vernes, S. C., Myers, E., Pippel, M., Brown, T., Hiller, M., Zoonomia Consortium, Rojas, D., Dávalos, L. M., Lindblad-Toh, K., Karlsson, E. K., & Ray, D. A. (2023). Chiropterans are a hotspot for horizontal transfer of DNA transposons in mammalia. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 40(5): msad092. doi:10.1093/molbev/msad092.

    Abstract

    Horizontal transfer of transposable elements (TEs) is an important mechanism contributing to genetic diversity and innovation. Bats (order Chiroptera) have repeatedly been shown to experience horizontal transfer of TEs at what appears to be a high rate compared with other mammals. We investigated the occurrence of horizontally transferred (HT) DNA transposons involving bats. We found over 200 putative HT elements within bats; 16 transposons were shared across distantly related mammalian clades, and 2 other elements were shared with a fish and two lizard species. Our results indicate that bats are a hotspot for horizontal transfer of DNA transposons. These events broadly coincide with the diversification of several bat clades, supporting the hypothesis that DNA transposon invasions have contributed to genetic diversification of bats.

    Additional information

    supplemental methods supplemental tables
  • Pender, R., Fearon, P., St Pourcain, B., Heron, J., & Mandy, W. (2023). Developmental trajectories of autistic social traits in the general population. Psychological Medicine, 53(3), 814-822. doi:10.1017/S0033291721002166.

    Abstract

    Background

    Autistic people show diverse trajectories of autistic traits over time, a phenomenon labelled ‘chronogeneity’. For example, some show a decrease in symptoms, whilst others experience an intensification of difficulties. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a dimensional condition, representing one end of a trait continuum that extends throughout the population. To date, no studies have investigated chronogeneity across the full range of autistic traits. We investigated the nature and clinical significance of autism trait chronogeneity in a large, general population sample.
    Methods

    Autistic social/communication traits (ASTs) were measured in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children using the Social and Communication Disorders Checklist (SCDC) at ages 7, 10, 13 and 16 (N = 9744). We used Growth Mixture Modelling (GMM) to identify groups defined by their AST trajectories. Measures of ASD diagnosis, sex, IQ and mental health (internalising and externalising) were used to investigate external validity of the derived trajectory groups.
    Results

    The selected GMM model identified four AST trajectory groups: (i) Persistent High (2.3% of sample), (ii) Persistent Low (83.5%), (iii) Increasing (7.3%) and (iv) Decreasing (6.9%) trajectories. The Increasing group, in which females were a slight majority (53.2%), showed dramatic increases in SCDC scores during adolescence, accompanied by escalating internalising and externalising difficulties. Two-thirds (63.6%) of the Decreasing group were male.
    Conclusions

    Clinicians should note that for some young people autism-trait-like social difficulties first emerge during adolescence accompanied by problems with mood, anxiety, conduct and attention. A converse, majority-male group shows decreasing social difficulties during adolescence.
  • Pereira Soares, S. M., Chaouch-Orozco, A., & González Alonso, J. (2023). Innovations and challenges in acquisition and processing methodologies for L3/Ln. In J. Cabrelli, A. Chaouch-Orozco, J. González Alonso, S. M. Pereira Soares, E. Puig-Mayenco, & J. Rothman (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of third language acquisition (pp. 661-682). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108957823.026.

    Abstract

    The advent of psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic methodologies has provided new insights into theories of language acquisition. Sequential multilingualism is no exception, and some of the most recent work on the subject has incorporated a particular focus on language processing. This chapter surveys some of the work on the processing of lexical and morphosyntactic aspects of third or further languages, with different offline and online methodologies. We also discuss how, while increasingly sophisticated techniques and experimental designs have improved our understanding of third language acquisition and processing, simpler but clever designs can answer pressing questions in our theoretical debate. We provide examples of both sophistication and clever simplicity in experimental design, and argue that the field would benefit from incorporating a combination of both concepts into future work.
  • Petersson, K. M., Sandblom, J., Elfgren, C., & Ingvar, M. (2003). Instruction-specific brain activations during episodic encoding: A generalized level of processing effect. Neuroimage, 20, 1795-1810. doi:10.1016/S1053-8119(03)00414-2.

    Abstract

    In a within-subject design we investigated the levels-of-processing (LOP) effect using visual material in a behavioral and a corresponding PET study. In the behavioral study we characterize a generalized LOP effect, using pleasantness and graphical quality judgments in the encoding situation, with two types of visual material, figurative and nonfigurative line drawings. In the PET study we investigate the related pattern of brain activations along these two dimensions. The behavioral results indicate that instruction and material contribute independently to the level of recognition performance. Therefore the LOP effect appears to stem both from the relative relevance of the stimuli (encoding opportunity) and an altered processing of stimuli brought about by the explicit instruction (encoding mode). In the PET study, encoding of visual material under the pleasantness (deep) instruction yielded left lateralized frontoparietal and anterior temporal activations while surface-based perceptually oriented processing (shallow instruction) yielded right lateralized frontoparietal, posterior temporal, and occipitotemporal activations. The result that deep encoding was related to the left prefrontal cortex while shallow encoding was related to the right prefrontal cortex, holding the material constant, is not consistent with the HERA model. In addition, we suggest that the anterior medial superior frontal region is related to aspects of self-referential semantic processing and that the inferior parts of the anterior cingulate as well as the medial orbitofrontal cortex is related to affective processing, in this case pleasantness evaluation of the stimuli regardless of explicit semantic content. Finally, the left medial temporal lobe appears more actively engaged by elaborate meaning-based processing and the complex response pattern observed in different subregions of the MTL lends support to the suggestion that this region is functionally segregated.
  • Piai, V., & Eikelboom, D. (2023). Brain areas critical for picture naming: A systematic review and meta-analysis of lesion-symptom mapping studies. Neurobiology of Language, 4(2), 280-296. doi:10.1162/nol_a_00097.

    Abstract

    Lesion-symptom mapping (LSM) studies have revealed brain areas critical for naming, typically finding significant associations between damage to left temporal, inferior parietal, and inferior fontal regions and impoverished naming performance. However, specific subregions found in the available literature vary. Hence, the aim of this study was to perform a systematic review and meta-analysis of published lesion-based findings, obtained from studies with unique cohorts investigating brain areas critical for accuracy in naming in stroke patients at least 1 month post-onset. An anatomic likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis of these LSM studies was performed. Ten papers entered the ALE meta-analysis, with similar lesion coverage over left temporal and left inferior frontal areas. This small number is a major limitation of the present study. Clusters were found in left anterior temporal lobe, posterior temporal lobe extending into inferior parietal areas, in line with the arcuate fasciculus, and in pre- and postcentral gyri and middle frontal gyrus. No clusters were found in left inferior frontal gyrus. These results were further substantiated by examining five naming studies that investigated performance beyond global accuracy, corroborating the ALE meta-analysis results. The present review and meta-analysis highlight the involvement of left temporal and inferior parietal cortices in naming, and of mid to posterior portions of the temporal lobe in particular in conceptual-lexical retrieval for speaking.

    Additional information

    data
  • Quaresima, A., Fitz, H., Duarte, R., Van den Broek, D., Hagoort, P., & Petersson, K. M. (2023). The Tripod neuron: A minimal structural reduction of the dendritic tree. The Journal of Physiology, 601(15), 3007-3437. doi:10.1113/JP283399.

    Abstract

    Neuron models with explicit dendritic dynamics have shed light on mechanisms for coincidence detection, pathway selection and temporal filtering. However, it is still unclear which morphological and physiological features are required to capture these phenomena. In this work, we introduce the Tripod neuron model and propose a minimal structural reduction of the dendritic tree that is able to reproduce these computations. The Tripod is a three-compartment model consisting of two segregated passive dendrites and a somatic compartment modelled as an adaptive, exponential integrate-and-fire neuron. It incorporates dendritic geometry, membrane physiology and receptor dynamics as measured in human pyramidal cells. We characterize the response of the Tripod to glutamatergic and GABAergic inputs and identify parameters that support supra-linear integration, coincidence-detection and pathway-specific gating through shunting inhibition. Following NMDA spikes, the Tripod neuron generates plateau potentials whose duration depends on the dendritic length and the strength of synaptic input. When fitted with distal compartments, the Tripod encodes previous activity into a dendritic depolarized state. This dendritic memory allows the neuron to perform temporal binding, and we show that it solves transition and sequence detection tasks on which a single-compartment model fails. Thus, the Tripod can account for dendritic computations previously explained only with more detailed neuron models or neural networks. Due to its simplicity, the Tripod neuron can be used efficiently in simulations of larger cortical circuits.
  • Raghavan, R., Raviv, L., & Peeters, D. (2023). What's your point? Insights from virtual reality on the relation between intention and action in the production of pointing gestures. Cognition, 240: 105581. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105581.

    Abstract

    Human communication involves the process of translating intentions into communicative actions. But how exactly do our intentions surface in the visible communicative behavior we display? Here we focus on pointing gestures, a fundamental building block of everyday communication, and investigate whether and how different types of underlying intent modulate the kinematics of the pointing hand and the brain activity preceding the gestural movement. In a dynamic virtual reality environment, participants pointed at a referent to either share attention with their addressee, inform their addressee, or get their addressee to perform an action. Behaviorally, it was observed that these different underlying intentions modulated how long participants kept their arm and finger still, both prior to starting the movement and when keeping their pointing hand in apex position. In early planning stages, a neurophysiological distinction was observed between a gesture that is used to share attitudes and knowledge with another person versus a gesture that mainly uses that person as a means to perform an action. Together, these findings suggest that our intentions influence our actions from the earliest neurophysiological planning stages to the kinematic endpoint of the movement itself.
  • Raimondi, T., Di Panfilo, G., Pasquali, M., Zarantonello, M., Favaro, L., Savini, T., Gamba, M., & Ravignani, A. (2023). Isochrony and rhythmic interaction in ape duetting. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 290: 20222244. doi:10.1098/rspb.2022.2244.

    Abstract

    How did rhythm originate in humans, and other species? One cross-cultural universal, frequently found in human music, is isochrony: when note onsets repeat regularly like the ticking of a clock. Another universal consists in synchrony (e.g. when individuals coordinate their notes so that they are sung at the same time). An approach to biomusicology focuses on similarities and differences across species, trying to build phylogenies of musical traits. Here we test for the presence of, and a link between, isochrony and synchrony in a non-human animal. We focus on the songs of one of the few singing primates, the lar gibbon (Hylobates lar), extracting temporal features from their solo songs and duets. We show that another ape exhibits one rhythmic feature at the core of human musicality: isochrony. We show that an enhanced call rate overall boosts isochrony, suggesting that respiratory physiological constraints play a role in determining the song's rhythmic structure. However, call rate alone cannot explain the flexible isochrony we witness. Isochrony is plastic and modulated depending on the context of emission: gibbons are more isochronous when duetting than singing solo. We present evidence for rhythmic interaction: we find statistical causality between one individual's note onsets and the co-singer's onsets, and a higher than chance degree of synchrony in the duets. Finally, we find a sex-specific trade-off between individual isochrony and synchrony. Gibbon's plasticity for isochrony and rhythmic overlap may suggest a potential shared selective pressure for interactive vocal displays in singing primates. This pressure may have convergently shaped human and gibbon musicality while acting on a common neural primate substrate. Beyond humans, singing primates are promising models to understand how music and, specifically, a sense of rhythm originated in the primate phylogeny.
  • Rasenberg, M. (2023). Mutual understanding from a multimodal and interactional perspective. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Rasenberg, M., Amha, A., Coler, M., van Koppen, M., van Miltenburg, E., de Rijk, L., Stommel, W., & Dingemanse, M. (2023). Reimagining language: Towards a better understanding of language by including our interactions with non-humans. Linguistics in the Netherlands, 40, 309-317. doi:10.1075/avt.00095.ras.

    Abstract

    What is language and who or what can be said to have it? In this essay we consider this question in the context of interactions with non-humans, specifically: animals and computers. While perhaps an odd pairing at first glance, here we argue that these domains can offer contrasting perspectives through which we can explore and reimagine language. The interactions between humans and animals, as well as between humans and computers, reveal both the essence and the boundaries of language: from examining the role of sequence and contingency in human-animal interaction, to unravelling the challenges of natural interactions with “smart” speakers and language models. By bringing together disparate fields around foundational questions, we push the boundaries of linguistic inquiry and uncover new insights into what language is and how it functions in diverse non-humanexclusive contexts.
  • Rasing, N. B., Van de Geest-Buit, W., Chan, O. Y. A., Mul, K., Lanser, A., Erasmus, C. E., Groothuis, J. T., Holler, J., Ingels, K. J. A. O., Post, B., Siemann, I., & Voermans, N. C. (2023). Psychosocial functioning in patients with altered facial expression: A scoping review in five neurological diseases. Disability and Rehabilitation. Advance online publication. doi:10.1080/09638288.2023.2259310.

    Abstract

    Purpose

    To perform a scoping review to investigate the psychosocial impact of having an altered facial expression in five neurological diseases.
    Methods

    A systematic literature search was performed. Studies were on Bell’s palsy, facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD), Moebius syndrome, myotonic dystrophy type 1, or Parkinson’s disease patients; had a focus on altered facial expression; and had any form of psychosocial outcome measure. Data extraction focused on psychosocial outcomes.
    Results

    Bell’s palsy, myotonic dystrophy type 1, and Parkinson’s disease patients more often experienced some degree of psychosocial distress than healthy controls. In FSHD, facial weakness negatively influenced communication and was experienced as a burden. The psychosocial distress applied especially to women (Bell’s palsy and Parkinson’s disease), and patients with more severely altered facial expression (Bell’s palsy), but not for Moebius syndrome patients. Furthermore, Parkinson’s disease patients with more pronounced hypomimia were perceived more negatively by observers. Various strategies were reported to compensate for altered facial expression.
    Conclusions

    This review showed that patients with altered facial expression in four of five included neurological diseases had reduced psychosocial functioning. Future research recommendations include studies on observers’ judgements of patients during social interactions and on the effectiveness of compensation strategies in enhancing psychosocial functioning.
    Implications for rehabilitation

    Negative effects of altered facial expression on psychosocial functioning are common and more abundant in women and in more severely affected patients with various neurological disorders.

    Health care professionals should be alert to psychosocial distress in patients with altered facial expression.

    Learning of compensatory strategies could be a beneficial therapy for patients with psychosocial distress due to an altered facial expression.
  • Ravignani, A., & Herbst, C. T. (2023). Voices in the ocean: Toothed whales evolved a third way of making sounds similar to that of land mammals and birds. Science, 379(6635), 881-882. doi:10.1126/science.adg5256.
  • Raviv, L., & Kirby, S. (2023). Self domestication and the cultural evolution of language. In J. J. Tehrani, J. Kendal, & R. Kendal (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198869252.013.60.

    Abstract

    The structural design features of human language emerge in the process of cultural evolution, shaping languages over the course of communication, learning, and transmission. What role does this leave biological evolution? This chapter highlights the biological bases and preconditions that underlie the particular type of prosocial behaviours and cognitive inference abilities that are required for languages to emerge via cultural evolution to begin with.
  • Raviv, L., Jacobson, S. L., Plotnik, J. M., Bowman, J., Lynch, V., & Benítez-Burraco, A. (2023). Elephants as an animal model for self-domestication. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 120(15): e2208607120. doi:10.1073/pnas.2208607120.

    Abstract

    Humans are unique in their sophisticated culture and societal structures, their complex languages, and their extensive tool use. According to the human self-domestication hypothesis, this unique set of traits may be the result of an evolutionary process of self-induced domestication, in which humans evolved to be less aggressive and more cooperative. However, the only other species that has been argued to be self-domesticated besides humans so far is bonobos, resulting in a narrow scope for investigating this theory limited to the primate order. Here, we propose an animal model for studying self-domestication: the elephant. First, we support our hypothesis with an extensive cross-species comparison, which suggests that elephants indeed exhibit many of the features associated with self-domestication (e.g., reduced aggression, increased prosociality, extended juvenile period, increased playfulness, socially regulated cortisol levels, and complex vocal behavior). Next, we present genetic evidence to reinforce our proposal, showing that genes positively selected in elephants are enriched in pathways associated with domestication traits and include several candidate genes previously associated with domestication. We also discuss several explanations for what may have triggered a self-domestication process in the elephant lineage. Our findings support the idea that elephants, like humans and bonobos, may be self-domesticated. Since the most recent common ancestor of humans and elephants is likely the most recent common ancestor of all placental mammals, our findings have important implications for convergent evolution beyond the primate taxa, and constitute an important advance toward understanding how and why self-domestication shaped humans’ unique cultural niche.

    Additional information

    supporting information
  • Reis, A., Guerreiro, M., & Petersson, K. M. (2003). A sociodemographic and neuropsychological characterization of an illiterate population. Applied Neuropsychology, 10, 191-204. doi:10.1207/s15324826an1004_1.

    Abstract

    The objectives of this article are to characterize the performance and to discuss the performance differences between literate and illiterate participants in a well-defined study population.We describe the participant-selection procedure used to investigate this population. Three groups with similar sociocultural backgrounds living in a relatively homogeneous fishing community in southern Portugal were characterized in terms of socioeconomic and sociocultural background variables and compared on a simple neuropsychological test battery; specifically, a literate group with more than 4 years of education (n = 9), a literate group with 4 years of education (n = 26), and an illiterate group (n = 31) were included in this study.We compare and discuss our results with other similar studies on the effects of literacy and illiteracy. The results indicate that naming and identification of real objects, verbal fluency using ecologically relevant semantic criteria, verbal memory, and orientation are not affected by literacy or level of formal education. In contrast, verbal working memory assessed with digit span, verbal abstraction, long-term semantic memory, and calculation (i.e., multiplication) are significantly affected by the level of literacy. We indicate that it is possible, with proper participant-selection procedures, to exclude general cognitive impairment and to control important sociocultural factors that potentially could introduce bias when studying the specific effects of literacy and level of formal education on cognitive brain function.
  • Reis, A., & Petersson, K. M. (2003). Educational level, socioeconomic status and aphasia research: A comment on Connor et al. (2001)- Effect of socioeconomic status on aphasia severity and recovery. Brain and Language, 87, 449-452. doi:10.1016/S0093-934X(03)00140-8.

    Abstract

    Is there a relation between socioeconomic factors and aphasia severity and recovery? Connor, Obler, Tocco, Fitzpatrick, and Albert (2001) describe correlations between the educational level and socioeconomic status of aphasic subjects with aphasia severity and subsequent recovery. As stated in the introduction by Connor et al. (2001), studies of the influence of educational level and literacy (or illiteracy) on aphasia severity have yielded conflicting results, while no significant link between socioeconomic status and aphasia severity and recovery has been established. In this brief note, we will comment on their findings and conclusions, beginning first with a brief review of literacy and aphasia research, and complexities encountered in these fields of investigation. This serves as a general background to our specific comments on Connor et al. (2001), which will be focusing on methodological issues and the importance of taking normative values in consideration when subjects with different socio-cultural or socio-economic backgrounds are assessed.
  • Roe, J. M., Vidal-Piñeiro, D., Amlien, I. K., Pan, M., Sneve, M. H., Thiebaut de Schotten, M., Friedrich, P., Sha, Z., Francks, C., Eilertsen, E. M., Wang, Y., Walhovd, K. B., Fjell, A. M., & Westerhausen, R. (2023). Tracing the development and lifespan change of population-level structural asymmetry in the cerebral cortex. eLife, 12: e84685. doi:10.7554/eLife.84685.

    Abstract

    Cortical asymmetry is a ubiquitous feature of brain organization that is altered in neurodevelopmental disorders and aging. Achieving consensus on cortical asymmetries in humans is necessary to uncover the genetic-developmental mechanisms that shape them and factors moderating cortical lateralization. Here, we delineate population-level asymmetry in cortical thickness and surface area vertex-wise in 7 datasets and chart asymmetry trajectories across life (4-89 years; observations = 3937; 70% longitudinal). We reveal asymmetry interrelationships, heritability, and test associations in UK Biobank (N=∼37,500). Cortical asymmetry was robust across datasets. Whereas areal asymmetry is predominantly stable across life, thickness asymmetry grows in development and declines in aging. Areal asymmetry correlates in specific regions, whereas thickness asymmetry is globally interrelated across cortex and suggests high directional variability in global thickness lateralization. Areal asymmetry is moderately heritable (max h2SNP ∼19%), and phenotypic correlations are reflected by high genetic correlations, whereas heritability of thickness asymmetry is low. Finally, we detected an asymmetry association with cognition and confirm recently-reported handedness links. Results suggest areal asymmetry is developmentally stable and arises in early life, whereas developmental changes in thickness asymmetry may lead to directional variability of global thickness lateralization. Our results bear enough reproducibility to serve as a standard for future brain asymmetry studies.

    Additional information

    link to preprint supplementary files
  • Roelofs, A. (2003). Shared phonological encoding processes and representations of languages in bilingual speakers. Language and Cognitive Processes, 18(2), 175-204. doi:10.1080/01690960143000515.

    Abstract

    Four form-preparation experiments investigated whether aspects of phonological encoding processes and representations are shared between languages in bilingual speakers. The participants were Dutch--English bilinguals. Experiment 1 showed that the basic rightward incrementality revealed in studies for the first language is also observed for second-language words. In Experiments 2 and 3, speakers were given words to produce that did or did not share onset segments, and that came or did not come from different languages. It was found that when onsets were shared among the response words, those onsets were prepared, even when the words came from different languages. Experiment 4 showed that preparation requires prior knowledge of the segments and that knowledge about their phonological features yields no effect. These results suggest that both first- and second-language words are phonologically planned through the same serial order mechanism and that the representations of segments common to the languages are shared.
  • Roelofs, A. (2003). Goal-referenced selection of verbal action: Modeling attentional control in the Stroop task. Psychological Review, 110(1), 88-125.

    Abstract

    This article presents a new account of the color-word Stroop phenomenon ( J. R. Stroop, 1935) based on an implemented model of word production, WEAVER++ ( W. J. M. Levelt, A. Roelofs, & A. S. Meyer, 1999b; A. Roelofs, 1992, 1997c). Stroop effects are claimed to arise from processing interactions within the language-production architecture and explicit goal-referenced control. WEAVER++ successfully simulates 16 classic data sets, mostly taken from the review by C. M. MacLeod (1991), including incongruency, congruency, reverse-Stroop, response-set, semantic-gradient, time-course, stimulus, spatial, multiple-task, manual, bilingual, training, age, and pathological effects. Three new experiments tested the account against alternative explanations. It is shown that WEAVER++ offers a more satisfactory account of the data than other models.
  • Roelofs, A. (2003). Modeling the relation between the production and recognition of spoken word forms. In N. O. Schiller, & A. S. Meyer (Eds.), Phonetics and phonology in language comprehension and production: Differences and similarities (pp. 115-158). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Rossi, E., Pereira Soares, S. M., Prystauka, Y., Nakamura, M., & Rothman, J. (2023). Riding the (brain) waves! Using neural oscillations to inform bilingualism research. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 26(1), 202-215. doi:10.1017/S1366728922000451.

    Abstract

    The study of the brains’ oscillatory activity has been a standard technique to gain insights into human neurocognition for a relatively long time. However, as a complementary analysis to ERPs, only very recently has it been utilized to study bilingualism and its neural underpinnings. Here, we provide a theoretical and methodological starter for scientists in the (psycho)linguistics and neurocognition of bilingualism field(s) to understand the bases and applications of this analytical tool. Towards this goal, we provide a description of the characteristics of the human neural (and its oscillatory) signal, followed by an in-depth description of various types of EEG oscillatory analyses, supplemented by figures and relevant examples. We then utilize the scant, yet emergent, literature on neural oscillations and bilingualism to highlight the potential of how analyzing neural oscillations can advance our understanding of the (psycho)linguistic and neurocognitive understanding of bilingualism.
  • Rossi, G., Dingemanse, M., Floyd, S., Baranova, J., Blythe, J., Kendrick, K. H., Zinken, J., & Enfield, N. J. (2023). Shared cross-cultural principles underlie human prosocial behavior at the smallest scale. Scientific Reports, 13: 6057. doi:10.1038/s41598-023-30580-5.

    Abstract

    Prosociality and cooperation are key to what makes us human. But different cultural norms can shape our evolved capacities for interaction, leading to differences in social relations. How people share resources has been found to vary across cultures, particularly when stakes are high and when interactions are anonymous. Here we examine prosocial behavior among familiars (both kin and non-kin) in eight cultures on five continents, using video recordings of spontaneous requests for immediate, low-cost assistance (e.g., to pass a utensil). We find that, at the smallest scale of human interaction, prosocial behavior follows cross-culturally shared principles: requests for assistance are very frequent and mostly successful; and when people decline to give help, they normally give a reason. Although there are differences in the rates at which such requests are ignored, or require verbal acceptance, cultural variation is limited, pointing to a common foundation for everyday cooperation around the world.
  • Rowland, C. F., Pine, J. M., Lieven, E. V., & Theakston, A. L. (2003). Determinants of acquisition order in wh-questions: Re-evaluating the role of caregiver speech. Journal of Child Language, 30(3), 609-635. doi:10.1017/S0305000903005695.

    Abstract

    Accounts that specify semantic and/or syntactic complexity as the primary determinant of the order in which children acquire particular words or grammatical constructions have been highly influential in the literature on question acquisition. One explanation of wh-question acquisition in particular suggests that the order in which English speaking children acquire wh-questions is determined by two interlocking linguistic factors; the syntactic function of the wh-word that heads the question and the semantic generality (or ‘lightness’) of the main verb (Bloom, Merkin & Wootten, 1982; Bloom, 1991). Another more recent view, however, is that acquisition is influenced by the relative frequency with which children hear particular wh-words and verbs in their input (e.g. Rowland & Pine, 2000). In the present study over 300 hours of naturalistic data from twelve two- to three-year-old children and their mothers were analysed in order to assess the relative contribution of complexity and input frequency to wh-question acquisition. The analyses revealed, first, that the acquisition order of wh-questions could be predicted successfully from the frequency with which particular wh-words and verbs occurred in the children's input and, second, that syntactic and semantic complexity did not reliably predict acquisition once input frequency was taken into account. These results suggest that the relationship between acquisition and complexity may be a by-product of the high correlation between complexity and the frequency with which mothers use particular wh-words and verbs. We interpret the results in terms of a constructivist view of language acquisition.
  • Rowland, C. F., & Pine, J. M. (2003). The development of inversion in wh-questions: a reply to Van Valin. Journal of Child Language, 30(1), 197-212. doi:10.1017/S0305000902005445.

    Abstract

    Van Valin (Journal of Child Language29, 2002, 161–75) presents a critique of Rowland & Pine (Journal of Child Language27, 2000, 157–81) and argues that the wh-question data from Adam (in Brown, A first language, Cambridge, MA, 1973) cannot be explained in terms of input frequencies as we suggest. Instead, he suggests that the data can be more successfully accounted for in terms of Role and Reference Grammar. In this note we re-examine the pattern of inversion and uninversion in Adam's wh-questions and argue that the RRG explanation cannot account for some of the developmental facts it was designed to explain.
  • Rubio-Fernández, P., Breheny, R., & Lee, M. W. (2003). Context-independent information in concepts: An investigation of the notion of ‘core features’. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2003). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
  • De Ruiter, J. P., Rossignol, S., Vuurpijl, L., Cunningham, D. W., & Levelt, W. J. M. (2003). SLOT: A research platform for investigating multimodal communication. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 35(3), 408-419.

    Abstract

    In this article, we present the spatial logistics task (SLOT) platform for investigating multimodal communication between 2 human participants. Presented are the SLOT communication task and the software and hardware that has been developed to run SLOT experiments and record the participants’ multimodal behavior. SLOT offers a high level of flexibility in varying the context of the communication and is particularly useful in studies of the relationship between pen gestures and speech. We illustrate the use of the SLOT platform by discussing the results of some early experiments. The first is an experiment on negotiation with a one-way mirror between the participants, and the second is an exploratory study of automatic recognition of spontaneous pen gestures. The results of these studies demonstrate the usefulness of the SLOT platform for conducting multimodal communication research in both human– human and human–computer interactions.
  • De Ruiter, J. P. (2003). The function of hand gesture in spoken conversation. In M. Bickenbach, A. Klappert, & H. Pompe (Eds.), Manus Loquens: Medium der Geste, Gesten der Medien (pp. 338-347). Cologne: DuMont.
  • De Ruiter, J. P. (2003). A quantitative model of Störung. In A. Kümmel, & E. Schüttpelz (Eds.), Signale der Störung (pp. 67-81). München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag.
  • Rutz, C., Bronstein, M., Raskin, A., Vernes, S. C., Zacarian, K., & Blasi, D. E. (2023). Using machine learning to decode animal communication. Science, 381(6654), 152-155. doi:10.1126/science.adg7314.

    Abstract

    The past few years have seen a surge of interest in using machine learning (ML) methods for studying the behavior of nonhuman animals (hereafter “animals”) (1). A topic that has attracted particular attention is the decoding of animal communication systems using deep learning and other approaches (2). Now is the time to tackle challenges concerning data availability, model validation, and research ethics, and to embrace opportunities for building collaborations across disciplines and initiatives.
  • Ryskin, R., & Nieuwland, M. S. (2023). Prediction during language comprehension: What is next? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 27(11), 1032-1052. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2023.08.003.

    Abstract

    Prediction is often regarded as an integral aspect of incremental language comprehension, but little is known about the cognitive architectures and mechanisms that support it. We review studies showing that listeners and readers use all manner of contextual information to generate multifaceted predictions about upcoming input. The nature of these predictions may vary between individuals owing to differences in language experience, among other factors. We then turn to unresolved questions which may guide the search for the underlying mechanisms. (i) Is prediction essential to language processing or an optional strategy? (ii) Are predictions generated from within the language system or by domain-general processes? (iii) What is the relationship between prediction and memory? (iv) Does prediction in comprehension require simulation via the production system? We discuss promising directions for making progress in answering these questions and for developing a mechanistic understanding of prediction in language.
  • Sajovic, J., Meglič, A., Corradi, Z., Khan, M., Maver, A., Vidmar, M. J., Hawlina, M., Cremers, F. P. M., & Fakin, A. (2023). ABCA4Variant c.5714+5G> A in trans with null alleles results in primary RPE damage. Investigative Opthalmology & Visual Science, 64(12): 33. doi:10.1167/iovs.64.12.33.

    Abstract

    Purpose: To determine the disease pathogenesis associated with the frequent ABCA4 variant c.5714+5G>A (p.[=,Glu1863Leufs*33]).

    Methods: Patient-derived photoreceptor precursor cells were generated to analyze the effect of c.5714+5G>A on splicing and perform a quantitative analysis of c.5714+5G>A products. Patients with c.5714+5G>A in trans with a null allele (i.e., c.5714+5G>A patients; n = 7) were compared with patients with two null alleles (i.e., double null patients; n = 11); with a special attention to the degree of RPE atrophy (area of definitely decreased autofluorescence and the degree of photoreceptor impairment (outer nuclear layer thickness and pattern electroretinography amplitude).

    Results: RT-PCR of mRNA from patient-derived photoreceptor precursor cells showed exon 40 and exon 39/40 deletion products, as well as the normal transcript. Quantification of products showed 52.4% normal and 47.6% mutant ABCA4 mRNA. Clinically, c.5714+5G>A patients displayed significantly better structural and functional preservation of photoreceptors (thicker outer nuclear layer, presence of tubulations, higher pattern electroretinography amplitude) than double null patients with similar degrees of RPE loss, whereas double null patients exhibited signs of extensive photoreceptor ,damage even in the areas with preserved RPE.

    Conclusions: The prototypical STGD1 sequence of events of primary RPE and secondary photoreceptor damage is congruous with c.5714+5G>A, but not the double null genotype, which implies different and genotype-dependent disease mechanisms. We hypothesize that the relative photoreceptor sparing in c.5714+5G>A patients results from the remaining function of the ABCA4 transporter originating from the normally spliced product, possibly by decreasing the direct bisretinoid toxicity on photoreceptor membranes.
  • Salverda, A. P., Dahan, D., & McQueen, J. M. (2003). The role of prosodic boundaries in the resolution of lexical embedding in speech comprehension. Cognition, 90(1), 51-89. doi:10.1016/S0010-0277(03)00139-2.

    Abstract

    Participants' eye movements were monitored as they heard sentences and saw four pictured objects on a computer screen. Participants were instructed to click on the object mentioned in the sentence. There were more transitory fixations to pictures representing monosyllabic words (e.g. ham) when the first syllable of the target word (e.g. hamster) had been replaced by a recording of the monosyllabic word than when it came from a different recording of the target word. This demonstrates that a phonemically identical sequence can contain cues that modulate its lexical interpretation. This effect was governed by the duration of the sequence, rather than by its origin (i.e. which type of word it came from). The longer the sequence, the more monosyllabic-word interpretations it generated. We argue that cues to lexical-embedding disambiguation, such as segmental lengthening, result from the realization of a prosodic boundary that often but not always follows monosyllabic words, and that lexical candidates whose word boundaries are aligned with prosodic boundaries are favored in the word-recognition process.
  • Sander, J., Lieberman, A., & Rowland, C. F. (2023). Exploring joint attention in American Sign Language: The influence of sign familiarity. In M. Goldwater, F. K. Anggoro, B. K. Hayes, & D. C. Ong (Eds.), Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2023) (pp. 632-638).

    Abstract

    Children’s ability to share attention with another social partner (i.e., joint attention) has been found to support language development. Despite the large amount of research examining the effects of joint attention on language in hearing population, little is known about how deaf children learning sign languages achieve joint attention with their caregivers during natural social interaction and how caregivers provide and scaffold learning opportunities for their children. The present study investigates the properties and timing of joint attention surrounding familiar and novel naming events and their relationship to children’s vocabulary. Naturalistic play sessions of caretaker-child-dyads using American Sign Language were analyzed in regards to naming events of either familiar or novel object labeling events and the surrounding joint attention events. We observed that most naming events took place in the context of a successful joint attention event and that sign familiarity was related to the timing of naming events within the joint attention events. Our results suggest that caregivers are highly sensitive to their child’s visual attention in interactions and modulate joint attention differently in the context of naming events of familiar vs. novel object labels.
  • Scharenborg, O., ten Bosch, L., Boves, L., & Norris, D. (2003). Bridging automatic speech recognition and psycholinguistics: Extending Shortlist to an end-to-end model of human speech recognition [Letter to the editor]. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 114, 3032-3035. doi:10.1121/1.1624065.

    Abstract

    This letter evaluates potential benefits of combining human speech recognition ~HSR! and automatic speech recognition by building a joint model of an automatic phone recognizer ~APR! and a computational model of HSR, viz., Shortlist @Norris, Cognition 52, 189–234 ~1994!#. Experiments based on ‘‘real-life’’ speech highlight critical limitations posed by some of the simplifying assumptions made in models of human speech recognition. These limitations could be overcome by avoiding hard phone decisions at the output side of the APR, and by using a match between the input and the internal lexicon that flexibly copes with deviations from canonical phonemic representations.
  • Scharenborg, O., Ten Bosch, L., & Boves, L. (2003). ‘Early recognition’ of words in continuous speech. Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding, 2003 IEEE Workshop, 61-66. doi:10.1109/ASRU.2003.1318404.

    Abstract

    In this paper, we present an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system based on the combination of an automatic phone recogniser and a computational model of human speech recognition – SpeM – that is capable of computing ‘word activations’ during the recognition process, in addition to doing normal speech recognition, a task in which conventional ASR architectures only provide output after the end of an utterance. We explain the notion of word activation and show that it can be used for ‘early recognition’, i.e. recognising a word before the end of the word is available. Our ASR system was tested on 992 continuous speech utterances, each containing at least one target word: a city name of at least two syllables. The results show that early recognition was obtained for 72.8% of the target words that were recognised correctly. Also, it is shown that word activation can be used as an effective confidence measure.
  • Scharenborg, O., McQueen, J. M., Ten Bosch, L., & Norris, D. (2003). Modelling human speech recognition using automatic speech recognition paradigms in SpeM. In Proceedings of Eurospeech 2003 (pp. 2097-2100). Adelaide: Causal Productions.

    Abstract

    We have recently developed a new model of human speech recognition, based on automatic speech recognition techniques [1]. The present paper has two goals. First, we show that the new model performs well in the recognition of lexically ambiguous input. These demonstrations suggest that the model is able to operate in the same optimal way as human listeners. Second, we discuss how to relate the behaviour of a recogniser, designed to discover the optimum path through a word lattice, to data from human listening experiments. We argue that this requires a metric that combines both path-based and word-based measures of recognition performance. The combined metric varies continuously as the input speech signal unfolds over time.
  • Scharenborg, O., ten Bosch, L., & Boves, L. (2003). Recognising 'real-life' speech with SpeM: A speech-based computational model of human speech recognition. In Eurospeech 2003 (pp. 2285-2288).

    Abstract

    In this paper, we present a novel computational model of human speech recognition – called SpeM – based on the theory underlying Shortlist. We will show that SpeM, in combination with an automatic phone recogniser (APR), is able to simulate the human speech recognition process from the acoustic signal to the ultimate recognition of words. This joint model takes an acoustic speech file as input and calculates the activation flows of candidate words on the basis of the degree of fit of the candidate words with the input. Experiments showed that SpeM outperforms Shortlist on the recognition of ‘real-life’ input. Furthermore, SpeM performs only slightly worse than an off-the-shelf full-blown automatic speech recogniser in which all words are equally probable, while it provides a transparent computationally elegant paradigm for modelling word activations in human word recognition.
  • Scheibel, M., & Indefrey, P. (2023). Top-down enhanced object recognition in blocking and priming paradigms. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 49(3), 327-354. doi:10.1037/xhp0001094.

    Abstract

    Previous studies have demonstrated that context manipulations by semantic blocking and category priming can, under particular design conditions, give rise to semantic facilitation effects. The interpretation of semantic facilitation effects is controversial in the word production literature; perceptual accounts propose that contextually facilitated object recognition may underlie facilitation effects. The present study tested this notion. We investigated the difficulty of object recognition in a semantic blocking and a category priming task. We presented all pictures in gradually de-blurring image sequences and measured the de-blurring level that first allowed for correct object naming as an indicator of the perceptual demands of object recognition. Based on object recognition models assuming a temporal progression from coarse- to fine-grained visual processing, we reasoned that the lower the required level of detail, the more efficient the recognition processes. The results demonstrate that categorically related contexts reduce the level of visual detail required for object naming compared to unrelated contexts, with this effect being most pronounced for shape-distinctive objects and in contexts providing explicit category cues. We propose a top-down explanation based on target predictability of the observed effects. Implications of the recognition effects based on target predictability for the interpretation of context effects observed in latencies are discussed.

    Additional information

    Stimuli, Ratings, Analysis codes
  • Scherz, M. D., Schmidt, R., Brown, J. L., Glos, J., Lattenkamp, E. Z., Rakotomalala, Z., Rakotoarison, A., Rakotonindrina, R. T., Randriamalala, O., Raselimanana, A. P., Rasolonjatovo, S. M., Ratsoavina, F. M., Razafindraibe, J. H., Glaw, F., & Vences, M. (2023). Repeated divergence of amphibians and reptiles across an elevational gradient in northern Madagascar. Ecology and Evolution, 13(3): e9914. doi:10.1002/ece3.9914.

    Abstract

    How environmental factors shape patterns of biotic diversity in tropical ecosystems is an active field of research, but studies examining the possibility of ecological speciation in terrestrial tropical ecosystems are scarce. We use the isolated rainforest herpetofauna on the Montagne d'Ambre (Amber Mountain) massif in northern Madagascar as a model to explore elevational divergence at the level of populations and communities. Based on intensive sampling and DNA barcoding of amphibians and reptiles along a transect ranging from ca. 470–1470 m above sea level (a.s.l.), we assessed a main peak in species richness at an elevation of ca. 1000 m a.s.l. with 41 species. The proportion of local endemics was highest (about 1/3) at elevations >1100 m a.s.l. Two species of chameleons (Brookesia tuberculata, Calumma linotum) and two species of frogs (Mantidactylus bellyi, M. ambony) studied in depth by newly developed microsatellite markers showed genetic divergence up the slope of the mountain, some quite strong, others very weak, but in each case with genetic breaks between 1100 and 1270 m a.s.l. Genetic clusters were found in transect sections significantly differing in bioclimate and herpetological community composition. A decrease in body size was detected in several species with increasing elevation. The studied rainforest amphibians and reptiles show concordant population genetic differentiation across elevation along with morphological and niche differentiation. Whether this parapatric or microallopatric differentiation will suffice for the completion of speciation is, however, unclear, and available phylogeographic evidence rather suggests that a complex interplay between ecological and allopatric divergence processes is involved in generating the extraordinary species diversity of Madagascar's biota. Our study reveals concordant patterns of diversification among main elevational bands, but suggests that these adaptational processes are only part of the complex of processes leading to species formation, among which geographical isolation is probably also important.

    Additional information

    supplementary materials
  • Schijven, D., Postema, M., Fukunaga, M., Matsumoto, J., Miura, K., De Zwarte, S. M., Van Haren, N. E. M., Cahn, W., Hulshoff Pol, H. E., Kahn, R. S., Ayesa-Arriola, R., Ortiz-García de la Foz, V., Tordesillas-Gutierrez, D., Vázquez-Bourgon, J., Crespo-Facorro, B., Alnæs, D., Dahl, A., Westlye, L. T., Agartz, I., Andreassen, O. A. and 129 moreSchijven, D., Postema, M., Fukunaga, M., Matsumoto, J., Miura, K., De Zwarte, S. M., Van Haren, N. E. M., Cahn, W., Hulshoff Pol, H. E., Kahn, R. S., Ayesa-Arriola, R., Ortiz-García de la Foz, V., Tordesillas-Gutierrez, D., Vázquez-Bourgon, J., Crespo-Facorro, B., Alnæs, D., Dahl, A., Westlye, L. T., Agartz, I., Andreassen, O. A., Jönsson, E. G., Kochunov, P., Bruggemann, J. M., Catts, S. V., Michie, P. T., Mowry, B. J., Quidé, Y., Rasser, P. E., Schall, U., Scott, R. J., Carr, V. J., Green, M. J., Henskens, F. A., Loughland, C. M., Pantelis, C., Weickert, C. S., Weickert, T. W., De Haan, L., Brosch, K., Pfarr, J.-K., Ringwald, K. G., Stein, F., Jansen, A., Kircher, T. T., Nenadić, I., Krämer, B., Gruber, O., Satterthwaite, T. D., Bustillo, J., Mathalon, D. H., Preda, A., Calhoun, V. D., Ford, J. M., Potkin, S. G., Chen, J., Tan, Y., Wang, Z., Xiang, H., Fan, F., Bernardoni, F., Ehrlich, S., Fuentes-Claramonte, P., Garcia-Leon, M. A., Guerrero-Pedraza, A., Salvador, R., Sarró, S., Pomarol-Clotet, E., Ciullo, V., Piras, F., Vecchio, D., Banaj, N., Spalletta, G., Michielse, S., Van Amelsvoort, T., Dickie, E. W., Voineskos, A. N., Sim, K., Ciufolini, S., Dazzan, P., Murray, R. M., Kim, W.-S., Chung, Y.-C., Andreou, C., Schmidt, A., Borgwardt, S., McIntosh, A. M., Whalley, H. C., Lawrie, S. M., Du Plessis, S., Luckhoff, H. K., Scheffler, F., Emsley, R., Grotegerd, D., Lencer, R., Dannlowski, U., Edmond, J. T., Rootes-Murdy, K., Stephen, J. M., Mayer, A. R., Antonucci, L. A., Fazio, L., Pergola, G., Bertolino, A., Díaz-Caneja, C. M., Janssen, J., Lois, N. G., Arango, C., Tomyshev, A. S., Lebedeva, I., Cervenka, S., Sellgren, C. M., Georgiadis, F., Kirschner, M., Kaiser, S., Hajek, T., Skoch, A., Spaniel, F., Kim, M., Kwak, Y. B., Oh, S., Kwon, J. S., James, A., Bakker, G., Knöchel, C., Stäblein, M., Oertel, V., Uhlmann, A., Howells, F. M., Stein, D. J., Temmingh, H. S., Diaz-Zuluaga, A. M., Pineda-Zapata, J. A., López-Jaramillo, C., Homan, S., Ji, E., Surbeck, W., Homan, P., Fisher, S. E., Franke, B., Glahn, D. C., Gur, R. C., Hashimoto, R., Jahanshad, N., Luders, E., Medland, S. E., Thompson, P. M., Turner, J. A., Van Erp, T. G., & Francks, C. (2023). Large-scale analysis of structural brain asymmetries in schizophrenia via the ENIGMA consortium. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 120(14): e2213880120. doi:10.1073/pnas.2213880120.

    Abstract

    Left–right asymmetry is an important organizing feature of the healthy brain that may be altered in schizophrenia, but most studies have used relatively small samples and heterogeneous approaches, resulting in equivocal findings. We carried out the largest case–control study of structural brain asymmetries in schizophrenia, with MRI data from 5,080 affected individuals and 6,015 controls across 46 datasets, using a single image analysis protocol. Asymmetry indexes were calculated for global and regional cortical thickness, surface area, and subcortical volume measures. Differences of asymmetry were calculated between affected individuals and controls per dataset, and effect sizes were meta-analyzed across datasets. Small average case–control differences were observed for thickness asymmetries of the rostral anterior cingulate and the middle temporal gyrus, both driven by thinner left-hemispheric cortices in schizophrenia. Analyses of these asymmetries with respect to the use of antipsychotic medication and other clinical variables did not show any significant associations. Assessment of age- and sex-specific effects revealed a stronger average leftward asymmetry of pallidum volume between older cases and controls. Case–control differences in a multivariate context were assessed in a subset of the data (N = 2,029), which revealed that 7% of the variance across all structural asymmetries was explained by case–control status. Subtle case–control differences of brain macrostructural asymmetry may reflect differences at the molecular, cytoarchitectonic, or circuit levels that have functional relevance for the disorder. Reduced left middle temporal cortical thickness is consistent with altered left-hemisphere language network organization in schizophrenia.

    Additional information

    Supporting Information link to preprint
  • Schiller, N. O., & Meyer, A. S. (Eds.). (2003). Phonetics and phonology in language comprehension and production. Differences and similarities. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Schiller, N. O., Münte, T. F., Horemans, I., & Jansma, B. M. (2003). The influence of semantic and phonological factors on syntactic decisions: An event-related brain potential study. Psychophysiology, 40(6), 869-877. doi:10.1111/1469-8986.00105.

    Abstract

    During language production and comprehension, information about a word's syntactic properties is sometimes needed. While the decision about the grammatical gender of a word requires access to syntactic knowledge, it has also been hypothesized that semantic (i.e., biological gender) or phonological information (i.e., sound regularities) may influence this decision. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured while native speakers of German processed written words that were or were not semantically and/or phonologically marked for gender. Behavioral and ERP results showed that participants were faster in making a gender decision when words were semantically and/or phonologically gender marked than when this was not the case, although the phonological effects were less clear. In conclusion, our data provide evidence that even though participants performed a grammatical gender decision, this task can be influenced by semantic and phonological factors.
  • Schiller, N. O., Bles, M., & Jansma, B. M. (2003). Tracking the time course of phonological encoding in speech production: An event-related brain potential study on internal monitoring. Cognitive Brain Research, 17(3), 819-831. doi:10.1016/S0926-6410(03)00204-0.

    Abstract

    This study investigated the time course of phonological encoding during speech production planning. Previous research has shown that conceptual/semantic information precedes syntactic information in the planning of speech production and that syntactic information is available earlier than phonological information. Here, we studied the relative time courses of the two different processes within phonological encoding, i.e. metrical encoding and syllabification. According to one prominent theory of language production, metrical encoding involves the retrieval of the stress pattern of a word, while syllabification is carried out to construct the syllabic structure of a word. However, the relative timing of these two processes is underspecified in the theory. We employed an implicit picture naming task and recorded event-related brain potentials to obtain fine-grained temporal information about metrical encoding and syllabification. Results revealed that both tasks generated effects that fall within the time window of phonological encoding. However, there was no timing difference between the two effects, suggesting that they occur approximately at the same time.
  • Schiller, N. O., & Caramazza, A. (2003). Grammatical feature selection in noun phrase production: Evidence from German and Dutch. Journal of Memory and Language, 48(1), 169-194. doi:10.1016/S0749-596X(02)00508-9.

    Abstract

    In this study, we investigated grammatical feature selection during noun phrase production in German and Dutch. More specifically, we studied the conditions under which different grammatical genders select either the same or different determiners or suffixes. Pictures of one or two objects paired with a gender-congruent or a gender-incongruent distractor word were presented. Participants named the pictures using a singular or plural noun phrase with the appropriate determiner and/or adjective in German or Dutch. Significant effects of gender congruency were only obtained in the singular condition where the selection of determiners is governed by the target’s gender, but not in the plural condition where the determiner is identical for all genders. When different suffixes were to be selected in the gender-incongruent condition, no gender congruency effect was obtained. The results suggest that the so-called gender congruency effect is really a determiner congruency effect. The overall pattern of results is interpreted as indicating that grammatical feature selection is an automatic consequence of lexical node selection and therefore not subject to interference from other grammatical features. This implies that lexical node and grammatical feature selection operate with distinct principles.
  • Schiller, N. O. (2003). Metrical stress in speech production: A time course study. In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2003) (pp. 451-454). Adelaide: Causal Productions.

    Abstract

    This study investigated the encoding of metrical information during speech production in Dutch. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to judge whether bisyllabic picture names had initial or final stress. Results showed significantly faster decision times for initially stressed targets (e.g., LEpel 'spoon') than for targets with final stress (e.g., liBEL 'dragon fly'; capital letters indicate stressed syllables) and revealed that the monitoring latencies are not a function of the picture naming or object recognition latencies to the same pictures. Experiments 2 and 3 replicated the outcome of the first experiment with bi- and trisyllabic picture names. These results demonstrate that metrical information of words is encoded rightward incrementally during phonological encoding in speech production. The results of these experiments are in line with Levelt's model of phonological encoding.
  • Schiller, N. O., & Meyer, A. S. (2003). Introduction to the relation between speech comprehension and production. In N. O. Schiller, & A. S. Meyer (Eds.), Phonetics and phonology in language comprehension and production: Differences and similarities (pp. 1-8). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Schmiedtová, B. (2003). The use of aspect in Czech L2. In D. Bittner, & N. Gagarina (Eds.), ZAS Papers in Linguistics (pp. 177-194). Berlin: Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft.
  • Schmiedtová, B. (2003). Aspekt und Tempus im Deutschen und Tschechischen: Eine vergleichende Studie. In S. Höhne (Ed.), Germanistisches Jahrbuch Tschechien - Slowakei: Schwerpunkt Sprachwissenschaft (pp. 185-216). Praha: Lidové noviny.
  • Schreuder, R., Burani, C., & Baayen, R. H. (2003). Parsing and semantic opacity. In E. M. Assink, & D. Sandra (Eds.), Reading complex words (pp. 159-189). Dordrecht: Kluwer.
  • Seidl, A., & Johnson, E. K. (2003). Position and vowel quality effects in infant's segmentation of vowel-initial words. In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2003) (pp. 2233-2236). Adelaide: Causal Productions.
  • Seifart, F. (2003). Encoding shape: Formal means and semantic distinctions. In N. J. Enfield (Ed.), Field research manual 2003, part I: Multimodal interaction, space, event representation (pp. 57-59). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.877660.

    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.
  • Seifart, F. (2003). Marqueurs de classe généraux et spécifiques en Miraña. Faits de Langues, 21, 121-132.
  • Seijdel, N., Marshall, T. R., & Drijvers, L. (2023). Rapid invisible frequency tagging (RIFT): A promising technique to study neural and cognitive processing using naturalistic paradigms. Cerebral Cortex, 33(5), 1626-1629. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhac160.

    Abstract

    Frequency tagging has been successfully used to investigate selective stimulus processing in electroencephalography (EEG) or magnetoencephalography (MEG) studies. Recently, new projectors have been developed that allow for frequency tagging at higher frequencies (>60 Hz). This technique, rapid invisible frequency tagging (RIFT), provides two crucial advantages over low-frequency tagging as (i) it leaves low-frequency oscillations unperturbed, and thus open for investigation, and ii) it can render the tagging invisible, resulting in more naturalistic paradigms and a lack of participant awareness. The development of this technique has far-reaching implications as oscillations involved in cognitive processes can be investigated, and potentially manipulated, in a more naturalistic manner.
  • Sekine, K., & Kajikawa, T. (2023). Does the spatial distribution of a speaker's gaze and gesture impact on a listener's comprehension of discourse? In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (Eds.), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527208.

    Abstract

    This study investigated the impact of a speaker's gaze direction
    on a listener's comprehension of discourse. Previous research
    suggests that hand gestures play a role in referent allocation,
    enabling listeners to better understand the discourse. The
    current study aims to determine whether the speaker's gaze
    direction has a similar effect on reference resolution as co-
    speech gestures. Thirty native Japanese speakers participated in
    the study and were assigned to one of three conditions:
    congruent, incongruent, or speech-only. Participants watched
    36 videos of an actor narrating a story consisting of three
    sentences with two protagonists. The speaker consistently
    used hand gestures to allocate one protagonist to the lower right
    and the other to the lower left space, while directing her gaze to
    either space of the target person (congruent), the other person
    (incongruent), or no particular space (speech-only). Participants
    were required to verbally answer a question about the target
    protagonist involved in an accidental event as quickly as
    possible. Results indicate that participants in the congruent
    condition exhibited faster reaction times than those in the
    incongruent condition, although the difference was not
    significant. These findings suggest that the speaker's gaze
    direction is not enough to facilitate a listener's comprehension
    of discourse.
  • Senft, G. (2003). Wosi Milamala: Weisen von Liebe und Tod auf den Trobriand Inseln. In I. Bobrowski (Ed.), Anabasis: Prace Ofiarowane Professor Krystynie Pisarkowej (pp. 289-295). Kraków: LEXIS.
  • Senft, G. (2003). Zur Bedeutung der Sprache für die Feldforschung. In B. Beer (Ed.), Methoden und Techniken der Feldforschung (pp. 55-70). Berlin: Reimer.
  • Senft, G. (2003). Ethnographic Methods. In W. Deutsch, T. Hermann, & G. Rickheit (Eds.), Psycholinguistik - Ein internationales Handbuch [Psycholinguistics - An International Handbook] (pp. 106-114). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
  • Senft, G. (2003). Ethnolinguistik. In B. Beer, & H. Fischer (Eds.), Ethnologie: Einführung und Überblick. 5. Aufl., Neufassung (pp. 255-270). Berlin: Reimer.
  • Senft, G. (2003). [Review of the book Representing space in Oceania: Culture in language and mind ed. by Giovanni Bennardo]. Journal of the Polynesian Society, 112, 169-171.
  • Senft, G. (2003). Reasoning in language. In N. J. Enfield (Ed.), Field research manual 2003, part I: Multimodal interaction, space, event representation (pp. 28-30). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.877663.

    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.
  • Senft, G. (2023). The system of classifiers in Kilivila - The role of these formatives and their functions. In M. Allassonnière-Tang, & M. Kilarski (Eds.), Nominal Classification in Asia and Oceania. Functional and diachronic perspectives (pp. 10-29). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi:10.1075/cilt.362.02sen.

    Abstract

    This paper presents the complex system of classifiers in Kilivila, the language of the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea. After a brief introduction to the language and its speakers, the classifier system is briefly described with respect to the role of these formatives for the word formation of Kilivila numerals, adjectives, demonstratives and one form of an interrogative pronoun/adverb. Then the functions the classifier system fulfils with respect to concord, temporary classification, the unitizing of nominal expressions, nominalization, indication of plural, anaphoric reference as well as text and discourse coherence are discussed and illustrated. The paper ends with some language specific and cross-linguistic questions for further research.
  • Senghas, A., Ozyurek, A., & Kita, S. (2003). Encoding motion events in an emerging sign language: From Nicaraguan gestures to Nicaraguan signs. In A. E. Baker, B. van den Bogaerde, & O. A. Crasborn (Eds.), Crosslinguistic perspectives in sign language research (pp. 119-130). Hamburg: Signum Press.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (2003). Verb clusters and branching directionality in German and Dutch. In P. A. M. Seuren, & G. Kempen (Eds.), Verb Constructions in German and Dutch (pp. 247-296). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • Seuren, P. A. M., & Kempen, G. (Eds.). (2003). Verb constructions in German and Dutch. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (2023). A refutation of positivism in philosophy of mind: Thinking, reality, and language. London: Routledge.

    Abstract

    This book argues that positivism, though now the dominant paradigm for both the natural and the human sciences, is intrinsically unfit for the latter. In particular, it is unfit for linguistics and cognitive science, where it is ultimately self-destructive, since it fails to account for causality, while the mind, the primary object of research of the human sciences, cannot be understood unless considered to be an autonomous causal force. 

    Author Pieter Albertus Maria Seuren, who died shortly after this manuscript was finished and after a remarkable career, reviews the history of this issue since the seventeenth century. He focuses on Descartes, Leibniz, British Empiricism and Kant, arguing that neither cognition nor language can be adequately accounted for unless the mind is given its full due. This implies that a distinction must be made—following Alexius Meinong, but against Russell and Quine—between actual and virtual reality. The latter is a product of the causally active mind and a necessary ingredient for the setting up of mental models, without which neither cognition nor language can function. Mental models are coherent sets of propositions, and can be wholly or partially true or false. Positivism rules out mental models, blocking any serious semantics and thereby reducing both language and cognition to caricatures of themselves. Seuren presents a causal theory of meaning, linking up language with cognition and solving the old question of what meaning actually amounts to.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (2003). Logic, language and thought. In H. J. Ribeiro (Ed.), Encontro nacional de filosofia analítica. (pp. 259-276). Coimbra, Portugal: Faculdade de Letras.
  • Severijnen, G. G. A., Di Dona, G., Bosker, H. R., & McQueen, J. M. (2023). Tracking talker-specific cues to lexical stress: Evidence from perceptual learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 49(4), 549-565. doi:10.1037/xhp0001105.

    Abstract

    When recognizing spoken words, listeners are confronted by variability in the speech signal caused by talker differences. Previous research has focused on segmental talker variability; less is known about how suprasegmental variability is handled. Here we investigated the use of perceptual learning to deal with between-talker differences in lexical stress. Two groups of participants heard Dutch minimal stress pairs (e.g., VOORnaam vs. voorNAAM, “first name” vs. “respectable”) spoken by two male talkers. Group 1 heard Talker 1 use only F0 to signal stress (intensity and duration values were ambiguous), while Talker 2 used only intensity (F0 and duration were ambiguous). Group 2 heard the reverse talker-cue mappings. After training, participants were tested on words from both talkers containing conflicting stress cues (“mixed items”; e.g., one spoken by Talker 1 with F0 signaling initial stress and intensity signaling final stress). We found that listeners used previously learned information about which talker used which cue to interpret the mixed items. For example, the mixed item described above tended to be interpreted as having initial stress by Group 1 but as having final stress by Group 2. This demonstrates that listeners learn how individual talkers signal stress and use that knowledge in spoken-word recognition.
  • Severijnen, G. G. A., Bosker, H. R., & McQueen, J. M. (2023). Syllable rate drives rate normalization, but is not the only factor. In R. Skarnitzl, & J. Volín (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2023) (pp. 56-60). Prague: Guarant International.

    Abstract

    Speech is perceived relative to the speech rate in the context. It is unclear, however, what information listeners use to compute speech rate. The present study examines whether listeners use the number of
    syllables per unit time (i.e., syllable rate) as a measure of speech rate, as indexed by subsequent vowel perception. We ran two rate-normalization experiments in which participants heard duration-matched word lists that contained either monosyllabic
    vs. bisyllabic words (Experiment 1), or monosyllabic vs. trisyllabic pseudowords (Experiment 2). The participants’ task was to categorize an /ɑ-aː/ continuum that followed the word lists. The monosyllabic condition was perceived as slower (i.e., fewer /aː/ responses) than the bisyllabic and
    trisyllabic condition. However, no difference was observed between bisyllabic and trisyllabic contexts. Therefore, while syllable rate is used in perceiving speech rate, other factors, such as fast speech processes, mean F0, and intensity, must also influence rate normalization.

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