Publications

Abstract

Current research on spoken language does not provide a consistent picture as to whether prosody, the melody and rhythm of speech, conveys a specific meaning. Perception studies show that English listeners assign meaning to prosodic patterns, and, for instance, associate some accents with contrast, whereas Dutch listeners behave more controversially. In two ERP studies we tested how Dutch listeners process words carrying two types of accents, which either provided new information (new information accents) or corrected information (corrective accents), both in single sentences (experiment 1) and after corrective and new information questions (experiment 2). In both experiments corrective accents elicited a sustained positivity as compared to new information accents, which started earlier in context than in single sentences. The positivity was not modulated by the nature of the preceding question, suggesting that the underlying neural mechanism likely reflects the construction of an interpretation to the accented word, either by identifying an alternative in context or by inferring it when no context is present. Our experimental results provide strong evidence for inferential processes related to prosodic contours in Dutch

Abstract

The article compares the integration of topic-related additive words at different stages of untutored L2 acquisition. Data stem from an ‘‘additive-elicitation task’’ that was designed in order to capture topic-related additive words in a context that is at the same time controlled for the underlying information structure and nondeviant from other kinds of narrative discourse. We relate the distinction between stressed and nonstressed forms of the German scope particles and adverbials auch ‘also’, noch ‘another’, wieder ‘again’, and immer noch ‘still’ to a uniform, information-structure-based principle: the stressed variants have scope over the topic information of the relevant utterances. It is then the common function of these additive words to express the additive link between the topic of the present utterance and some previous topic for which the same state of affairs is claimed to hold. This phenomenon has often been referred to as ‘‘contrastive topic,’’ but contrary to what this term suggests, these topic elements are by no means deviant from the default in coherent discourse. In the underlying information structure, the validity of some given state of affairs for the present topic must be under discussion. Topic-related additive words then express that the state of affairs indeed applies to this topic, their function therefore coming close to the function of assertion marking. While this functional correspondence goes along with the formal organization of the basic stages of untutored second-language acquisition, its expression brings linguistic constraints into conflict when the acquisition of finiteness pushes learners to reorganize their utterances according to target-language syntax.

Abstract

While speculations on form–meaning resemblances in language go back millennia, the experimental study of iconicity is only about a century old. Here we take stock of experimental work on iconicity and present a double special issue with a diverse set of new contributions. We contextualise the work by introducing a typology of approaches to iconicity in language. Some approaches construe iconicity as a discrete property that is either present or absent; others treat it as involving semiotic relationships that come in kinds; and yet others see it as a gradient substance that comes in degrees. We show the benefits and limitations that come with each of these construals and stress the importance of developing accounts that can fluently switch between them. With operationalisations of iconicity that are well defined yet flexible enough to deal with differences in tasks, modalities, and levels of analysis, experimental research on iconicity is well equipped to contribute to a comprehensive science of language.

Abstract

Resource-rational approaches offer much promise for understanding human cognition, especially if they can reach beyond the confines of individual minds. Language allows people to transcend individual resource limitations by augmenting computation and enabling distributed cognition. Interactive language use, an environment where social rational agents routinely deal with resource constraints together, offers a natural laboratory to test resource-rationality in the wild.

Abstract

When people talk, they recruit a wide range of expressive devices for interactional work, from sighs, sniffs, clicks, and whistles to other conduct that borders on the linguistic. These resources represent some of the more elusive yet no less powerful aspects of the interactional machinery as they are used in the management of turn and sequence and the marking of stance and affect. Phenomena long assumed to be beyond the purview of linguistic inquiry emerge as systematically deployed practices whose ambiguous degree of control and convention allows participants to carry out subtle interactional work without committing to specific words. While these resources have been characterised as non-lexical, non-verbal, or non-conventional, I propose they are unified in their liminality: they work well precisely because they equivocate between sound and speech. The empirical study of liminal signs shows the promise of sequential analysis for building a science of language on interactional foundations.

Abstract

Aktuelle Vorstellungen von Gehirn-zu-Gehirn-Schnittstellen versprechen, die Sprache zu umgehen. Aber wenn wir sie verfeinern, um ihr kollaboratives Potenzial voll auszuschöpfen, sehen wir Sprache — oder zumindest ein sprachähnliches Infrastruktur für Kommunika­tion und Koordination — durch die Hintertür wieder hereinkommen. Es wäre nicht das erste Mal, dass sich die Sprache neu erfindet.

Current conceptions of brain-to-brain interfaces attempt to bypass language. But when we refine them to more fully realise their collaborative potential we find language —or at least a language-like infrastructure for communication and coordination— slipping through the back door. It wouldn't be the first time that language reinvented itself.

Abstract

Words and phrases may differ in the extent to which they are susceptible to prosodic foregrounding and expressive morphology: their expressiveness. They may also differ in the degree to which they are integrated in the morphosyntactic structure of the utterance: their grammatical integration. We describe an inverse relation that holds across widely varied languages, such that more expressiveness goes together with less grammatical integration, and vice versa. We review typological evidence for this inverse relation in 10 languages, then quantify and explain it using Japanese corpus data. We do this by tracking ideophones —vivid sensory words also known as mimetics or expressives— across different morphosyntactic contexts and measuring their expressiveness in terms of intonation, phonation and expressive morphology. We find that as expressiveness increases, grammatical integration decreases. Using gesture as a measure independent of the speech signal, we find that the most expressive ideophones are most likely to come together with iconic gestures. We argue that the ultimate cause is the encounter of two distinct and partly incommensurable modes of representation: the gradient, iconic, depictive system represented by ideophones and iconic gestures and the discrete, arbitrary, descriptive system represented by ordinary words. The study shows how people combine modes of representation in speech and demonstrates the value of integrating description and depiction into the scientific vision of language.

Abstract

The notion that the form of a word bears an arbitrary relation to its meaning accounts only partly for the attested form to meaning correspondences in the world’s languages. Recent research suggests a more textured view of vocabulary structure, in which arbitrariness is complemented by iconicity (aspects of form resemble aspects of meaning) and systematicity (statistical regularities in forms predict function). Experimental evidence suggests these form to meaning correspondences serve different functions in language processing, development and communication: systematicity facilities category learning by means of phonological cues, iconicity facilitates word learning and communication by means of perceptuomotor analogies, and arbitrariness facilitates meaning individuation through distinctive forms. Processes of cultural evolution help explain how these competing motivations shape vocabulary structure.

Abstract

Repetition is one of the most basic operations on talk, often discussed for its iconic meanings. Ideophones are marked words that depict sensory imagery, often identified by their reduplicated forms. Yet not all reduplication is iconic, and not all ideophones are reduplicated. This paper discusses the semantics and pragmatics of repeated talk (repetition as well as reduplication), with special focus on the intersection of reduplicative processes and ideophonic words. Various formal features of ideophones suggest that it is fruitful to distinguish two modes of representation in language —description and depiction— along with cues like prosodic foregrounding that can steer listeners’ interpretation from one to the other. What is special about reduplication is that it can naturally partake in both of these modes of representation, which is why it is so common in ideophones as well as in other areas of grammar. Using evidence from Siwu, Korean, Semai and a range of other languages, this paper shows how the study of ideophones sheds light on the interpretation of repeated talk and can lead to a more holistic understanding of reduplicative phenomena in language.

Abstract

Ideophones are often described as words that are highly expressive and morphosyntactically marginal. A study of ideophones in everyday conversations in Siwu (Kwa, eastern Ghana) reveals a landscape of variation and change that sheds light on some larger questions in the morphosyntactic typology of ideophones. The article documents a trade-off between expressiveness and morphosyntactic integration, with high expressiveness linked to low integration and vice versa. It also describes a pathway for deideophonisation and finds that frequency of use is a factor that influences the degree to which ideophones can come to be more like ordinary words. The findings have implications for processes of (de)ideophonisation, ideophone borrowing, and ideophone typology. A key point is that the internal diversity we find in naturally occurring data, far from being mere noise, is patterned variation that can help us to get a handle on the factors shaping ideophone systems within and across languages.

Abstract

This special issue reports on a cross-linguistic study of other-initiated repair, a domain at the crossroads of language, mind, and social life. Other-initiated repair is part of a system of practices that people use to deal with problems of speaking, hearing and understanding. The contributions in this special issue describe the linguistic resources and interactional practices associated with other-initiated repair in ten different languages. Here we provide an overview of the research methods and the conceptual framework. The empirical base for the project consists of corpora of naturally occurring conversations, collected in fieldsites around the world. Methodologically, we combine qualitative analysis with a comparative-typological perspective, and we formulate principles for the cross-linguistic comparison of conversational structures. A key move, of broad relevance to pragmatic typology, is the recognition that formats for repair initiation form paradigm-like systems that are ultimately language-specific, and that comparison is best done at the level of the constitutive properties of these formats. These properties can be functional (concerning aspects of linguistic formatting) as well as sequential (concerning aspects of the interactional environment). We show how functional and sequential aspects of conversational structure can capture patterns of commonality and diversity in conversational structures within and across languages

Abstract

This article describes the interactional patterns and linguistic structures associated with other-initiated repair in Siwu, a Kwa language spoken in eastern Ghana. Other-initiated repair is the set of techniques used by people to deal with problems in speaking, hearing and understanding. Formats for repair initiation in Siwu exploit language-specific resources like question words and noun class morphology. At the same time, the basic structure of the system bears a strong similarity other-initiated repair in other languages. Practices described for Siwu thus are potentially of broader relevance to the study of other-initiated repair. This article documents how different prosodic realisations of repair initiators may index social actions and features of the speech event; how two distinct roles of repetition in repair initiators are kept apart by features of turn design; and what kinds of items can be treated as ‘dispensable’ in resayings. By charting how other-initiated repair uses local linguistic resources and yet is shaped by interactional needs that transcend particular languages, this study contributes to the growing field of pragmatic typology: the study of systems of language use and the principles that shape them

Abstract

People often begin stories in conversation by referring to person, time, and place. We study story beginnings in three societies and find place reference is recurrently used to (i) set the stage, foreshadowing the type of story and the kind of response due, and to (ii) make the story cohere, anchoring elements of the developing story. Recipients orient to these interactional affordances of place reference by responding in ways that attend to the relevance of place for the story and by requesting clarification when references are incongruent or noticeably absent. The findings are based on 108 story beginnings in three unrelated languages: Cha’palaa, a Barbacoan language of Ecuador; Northern Italian, a Romance language of Italy; and Siwu, a Kwa language of Ghana. The commonalities suggest we have identified generic affordances of place reference, and that storytelling in conversation offers a robust sequential environment for systematic comparative research on conversational structures.

Abstract

Words like ‘waddle’, ‘flop’ and ‘zigzag’ combine playful connotations with iconic form-meaning resemblances. Here we propose that structural markedness may be a common factor underlying perceptions of playfulness and iconicity. Using collected and estimated lexical ratings covering a total of over 70,000 English words, we assess the robustness of this assocation. We identify cues of phonotactic complexity that covary with funniness and iconicity ratings and that, we propose, serve as metacommunicative signals to draw attention to words as playful and performative. To assess the generalisability of the findings we develop a method to estimate lexical ratings from distributional semantics and apply it to a dataset 20 times the size of the original set of human ratings. The method can be used more generally to extend coverage of lexical ratings. We find that it reliably reproduces correlations between funniness and iconicity as well as cues of structural markedness, though it also amplifies biases present in the human ratings. Our study shows that the playful and the poetic are part of the very texture of the lexicon.

Abstract

There would be little adaptive value in a complex communication system like human language if there were no ways to detect and correct problems. A systematic comparison of conversation in a broad sample of the world’s languages reveals a universal system for the real-time resolution of frequent breakdowns in communication. In a sample of 12 languages of 8 language families of varied typological profiles we find a system of ‘other-initiated repair’, where the recipient of an unclear message can signal trouble and the sender can repair the original message. We find that this system is frequently used (on average about once per 1.4 minutes in any language), and that it has detailed common properties, contrary to assumptions of radical cultural variation. Unrelated languages share the same three functionally distinct types of repair initiator for signalling problems and use them in the same kinds of contexts. People prefer to choose the type that is the most specific possible, a principle that minimizes cost both for the sender being asked to fix the problem and for the dyad as a social unit. Disruption to the conversation is kept to a minimum, with the two-utterance repair sequence being on average no longer that the single utterance which is being fixed. The findings, controlled for historical relationships, situation types and other dependencies, reveal the fundamentally cooperative nature of human communication and offer support for the pragmatic universals hypothesis: while languages may vary in the organization of grammar and meaning, key systems of language use may be largely similar across cultural groups. They also provide a fresh perspective on controversies about the core properties of language, by revealing a common infrastructure for social interaction which may be the universal bedrock upon which linguistic diversity rests.

Abstract

To what extent are links between musical pitch and space universal, and to what extent are they shaped by
language? There is contradictory evidence in support of both universality and linguistic relativity presently,
leaving the question open. To address this, speakers of Dutch who talk about pitch in terms of spatial height and
speakers of Turkish who use a thickness metaphor were tested in simple nonlinguistic space-pitch association
tasks. Both groups showed evidence of a thickness-pitch association, but differed significantly in their heightpitch
associations, suggesting the latter may be more susceptible to language. When participants had to match
pitches to spatial stimuli where height and thickness were opposed (i.e., a thick line high in space vs. a thin line
low in space), Dutch and Turkish differed in their relative preferences. Whereas Turkish participants predominantly
opted for a thickness-pitch interpretation—even if this meant a reversal of height-pitch
mappings—Dutch participants favored a height-pitch interpretation more often. These findings provide new
evidence that speakers of different languages vary in their space-pitch associations, while at the same time
showing such associations are not equally susceptible to linguistic influences. Some space-pitch (i.e., heightpitch)
associations are more malleable than others (i.e., thickness-pitch).

Abstract

Some languages describe musical pitch in terms of spatial height; others in terms of thickness. Differences in pitch metaphors also shape adults’ nonlinguistic space-pitch representations. At the same time, 4-month-old infants have both types of space-pitch mappings available. This tension between prelinguistic space-pitch associations and their subsequent linguistic mediation raises questions about the acquisition of space-pitch metaphors. To address this issue, 5-year-old Dutch children were tested on their linguistic knowledge of pitch metaphors, and nonlinguistic space-pitch associations. Our results suggest 5-year-olds understand height-pitch metaphors in a reversed fashion (high pitch = low). Children displayed good comprehension of a thickness-pitch metaphor, despite its absence in Dutch. In nonlinguistic tasks, however, children did not show consistent space-pitch associations. Overall, pitch representations do not seem to be influenced by linguistic metaphors in 5-year-olds, suggesting that effects of language on musical pitch arise rather late during development.

Abstract

Research on infants’ online lexical processing by Fernald, Perfors, and Marchman (2006) revealed substantial individual differences that are related to vocabulary development, such that infants with better lexical processing efficiency show greater vocabulary growth across time. Although it is clear that individual differences in lexical processing efficiency exist and are meaningful, the theoretical nature of lexical processing efficiency and its relation to vocabulary size is less clear. In the current study, we asked two questions: (a) Is lexical processing efficiency better conceptualized as a central processing capacity or as an emergent capacity reflecting a collection of word-specific capacities? and (b) Is there evidence for a causal role for lexical processing efficiency in early vocabulary development? In the study, 120 infants were tested on a measure of lexical processing at 18, 21, and 24 months, and their vocabulary was measured via parent report. Structural equation modeling of the 18-month time point data revealed that both theoretical constructs represented in the first question above (a) fit the data. A set of regression analyses on the longitudinal data revealed little evidence for a causal effect of lexical processing on vocabulary but revealed a significant effect of vocabulary size on lexical processing efficiency early in development. Overall, the results suggest that lexical processing efficiency is a stable construct in infancy that may reflect the structure of the developing lexicon.

Abstract

Responding to similarity, difference, and relative magnitude (SDM) is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom. However, humans seem unique in the ability to represent relative magnitude (‘more’/‘less’) and similarity (‘same’/‘different’) as abstract relations that take arguments (e.g., greater-than (x,y)). While many models use structured relational representations of magnitude and similarity, little progress has been made on how these representations arise. Models that developuse these representations assume access to computations of similarity and magnitude a priori, either encoded as features or as output of evaluation operators. We detail a mechanism for producing invariant responses to “same”, “different”, “more”, and “less” which can be exploited to compute similarity and magnitude as an evaluation operator. Using DORA (Doumas, Hummel, & Sandhofer, 2008), these invariant responses can serve be used to learn structured relational representations of relative magnitude and similarity from pixel images of simple shapes

Abstract

Humans readily generalize, applying prior knowledge to novel situations and stimuli. Advances in machine learning have begun to approximate and even surpass human performance, but these systems struggle to generalize what they have learned to untrained situations. We present a model based on wellestablished neurocomputational principles that demonstrates human-level generalisation. This model is trained to play one video game (Breakout) and performs one-shot generalisation to a new game (Pong) with different characteristics. The model
generalizes because it learns structured representations that are functionally symbolic (viz., a role-filler binding calculus) from unstructured training data. It does so without feedback, and without requiring that structured representations are specified a priori. Specifically, the model uses neural co-activation to discover which characteristics of the input are invariant and to learn relational predicates, and oscillatory regularities in network firing to bind predicates to arguments. To our knowledge,
this is the first demonstration of human-like generalisation in a machine system that does not assume structured representa-
tions to begin with.

Abstract

Reading and language abilities are critical for educational achievement and success in adulthood. Variation in these traits is highly heritable, but the underlying genetic architecture is largely undiscovered. Genetic studies of reading and language skills traditionally focus on children with developmental disorders; however, much larger unselected adult samples are available, increasing power to identify associations with specific genetic variants of small effect size. We introduce an Australian adult population cohort (41.7–73.2 years of age, N = 1505) in which we obtained data using validated measures of several aspects of reading and language abilities. We performed genetic association analysis for a reading and spelling composite score, nonword reading (assessing phonological processing: a core component in learning to read), phonetic spelling, self-reported reading impairment and nonword repetition (a marker of language ability). Given the limited power in a sample of this size (~80% power to find a minimum effect size of 0.005), we focused on analyzing candidate genes that have been associated with dyslexia and developmental speech and language disorders in prior studies. In gene-based tests, FOXP2, a gene implicated in speech/language disorders, was associated with nonword repetition (p < .001), phonetic spelling (p = .002) and the reading and spelling composite score (p < .001). Gene-set analyses of candidate dyslexia and speech/language disorder genes were not significant. These findings contribute to the assessment of genetic associations in reading and language disorders, crucial for understanding their etiology and informing intervention strategies, and validate the approach of using unselected adult samples for gene discovery in language and reading.

Abstract

Most objects have well-defined affordances. Investigating perception of affordances of objects that were not created for a specific purpose would provide insight into how affordances are perceived. In addition, comparison of perception of affordances for such objects across different exploratory modalities (visual vs. haptic) would offer a strong test of the lawfulness of information about affordances (i.e., the invariance of such information over transformation). Along these lines, “feelies”— objects created by Gibson with no obvious function and unlike any common object—could shed light on the processes underlying affordance perception. This study showed that when observers reported potential uses for feelies, modality significantly influenced what kind of affordances were perceived. Specifically, visual exploration resulted in more noun labels (e.g., “toy”) than haptic exploration which resulted in more verb labels (i.e., “throw”). These results suggested that overlapping, but distinct classes of action possibilities are perceivable using vision and haptics. Semantic network analyses revealed that visual exploration resulted in object-oriented responses focused on object identification, whereas haptic exploration resulted in action-oriented responses. Cluster analyses confirmed these results. Affordance labels produced in the visual condition were more consistent, used fewer descriptors, were less diverse, but more novel than in the haptic condition.

Abstract

Native listeners benefit from both visible speech and iconic gestures to enhance degraded speech comprehension (Drijvers & Ozyürek, 2017). We tested how highly proficient non-native listeners benefit from these visual articulators compared to native listeners. We presented videos of an actress uttering a verb in clear, moderately, or severely degraded speech, while her lips were blurred, visible, or visible and accompanied by a gesture. Our results revealed that unlike native listeners, non-native listeners were less likely to benefit from the combined enhancement of visible speech and gestures, especially since the benefit from visible speech was minimal when the signal quality was not sufficient.

Abstract

Research into sound-symbolism has shown that people can
consistently associate certain pseudo-words with certain referents;
for instance, pseudo-words with rounded vowels and
sonorant consonants are linked to round shapes, while pseudowords
with unrounded vowels and obstruents (with a noncontinuous
airflow), are associated with sharp shapes. Such
sound-symbolic associations have been proposed to arise from
cross-modal abstraction processes. Here we assess the link between
sound-symbolism and cross-modal abstraction by testing
dyslexic individuals’ ability to make sound-symbolic associations.
Dyslexic individuals are known to have deficiencies
in cross-modal processing. We find that dyslexic individuals
are impaired in their ability to make sound-symbolic associations
relative to the controls. Our results shed light on the cognitive
underpinnings of sound-symbolism by providing novel
evidence for the role —and disruptability— of cross-modal abstraction
processes in sound-symbolic eects.

Abstract

Purpose This study investigated whether and to what extent iconic co-speech gestures contribute to information from visible speech to enhance degraded speech comprehension at different levels of noise-vocoding. Previous studies of the contributions of these 2 visual articulators to speech comprehension have only been performed separately.

Method Twenty participants watched videos of an actress uttering an action verb and completed a free-recall task. The videos were presented in 3 speech conditions (2-band noise-vocoding, 6-band noise-vocoding, clear), 3 multimodal conditions (speech + lips blurred, speech + visible speech, speech + visible speech + gesture), and 2 visual-only conditions (visible speech, visible speech + gesture).

Results Accuracy levels were higher when both visual articulators were present compared with 1 or none. The enhancement effects of (a) visible speech, (b) gestural information on top of visible speech, and (c) both visible speech and iconic gestures were larger in 6-band than 2-band noise-vocoding or visual-only conditions. Gestural enhancement in 2-band noise-vocoding did not differ from gestural enhancement in visual-only conditions.

Abstract

The cortical regions of the brain traditionally associated with the comprehension of language are Wernicke's area and Broca's area. However, recent evidence suggests that other brain regions might also be involved in this complex process. This paper describes the opportunity to evaluate a large number of brain-injured patients to determine which lesioned brain areas might affect language comprehension. Sixty-four chronic left hemisphere stroke patients were evaluated on 11 subtests of the Curtiss–Yamada Comprehensive Language Evaluation – Receptive (CYCLE-R; Curtiss, S., & Yamada, J. (1988). Curtiss–Yamada Comprehensive Language Evaluation. Unpublished test, UCLA). Eight right hemisphere stroke patients and 15 neurologically normal older controls also participated. Patients were required to select a single line drawing from an array of three or four choices that best depicted the content of an auditorily-presented sentence. Patients' lesions obtained from structural neuroimaging were reconstructed onto templates and entered into a voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM; Bates, E., Wilson, S., Saygin, A. P., Dick, F., Sereno, M., Knight, R. T., & Dronkers, N. F. (2003). Voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping. Nature Neuroscience, 6(5), 448–450.) analysis along with the behavioral data. VLSM is a brain–behavior mapping technique that evaluates the relationships between areas of injury and behavioral performance in all patients on a voxel-by-voxel basis, similar to the analysis of functional neuroimaging data. Results indicated that lesions to five left hemisphere brain regions affected performance on the CYCLE-R, including the posterior middle temporal gyrus and underlying white matter, the anterior superior temporal gyrus, the superior temporal sulcus and angular gyrus, mid-frontal cortex in Brodmann's area 46, and Brodmann's area 47 of the inferior frontal gyrus. Lesions to Broca's and Wernicke's areas were not found to significantly alter language comprehension on this particular measure. Further analysis suggested that the middle temporal gyrus may be more important for comprehension at the word level, while the other regions may play a greater role at the level of the sentence. These results are consistent with those seen in recent functional neuroimaging studies and offer complementary data in the effort to understand the brain areas underlying language comprehension.

Abstract

This paper summarizes the results of a descriptive syntactic category analysis of child English no which reveals that young children use and represent no as a determiner and negatives like no pen as NPs, contra standard analyses.

Abstract

Previous studies examined various factors influencing voice recognition and learning with mixed results. The present study investigates the separate and combined contribution of these various speaker-, stimulus-, and listener-related factors to voice recognition. Dutch listeners, with arguably incomplete phonological and lexical knowledge in the target language, English, learned to recognize the voice of four native English speakers, speaking in English, during four-day training. Training was successful and listeners' accuracy was shown to be influenced by the acoustic characteristics of speakers and the sound composition of the words used in the training, but not by lexical frequency of the words, nor the lexical knowledge of the listeners or their phonological aptitude. Although not conclusive, listeners with a lower working memory capacity seemed to be slower in learning voices than listeners with a higher working memory capacity. The results reveal that speaker-related, listener-related, and stimulus-related factors accumulate in voice recognition, while lexical information turns out not to play a role in successful voice learning and recognition. This implies that voice recognition operates at the prelexical processing level.

Abstract

Previous research revealed remarkable flexibility of native and non-native listeners’ perceptual system, i.e., native and non-native phonetic category boundaries can be quickly recalibrated in the face of ambiguous input.
The present study investigates the limitations of the flexibility of the non-native perceptual system. In two lexically-guided perceptual learning experiments, Dutch listeners were exposed to a short story in English, where either all /l/ or all /ɹ/ sounds were replaced by an ambiguous [l/ɹ] sound. In the first experiment, the story was presented in clean, while in the second experiment, intermittent noise was added to the story, although never on the critical words. Lexically-guided perceptual learning was only observed in the clean condition. It is argued that the introduction of intermittent noise reduced the reliability of the evidence of hearing a particular word, which in turn blocked retuning of the phonetic categories.

Abstract

The dominantly inherited cerebellar ataxias are a heterogeneous group of neurodegenerative disorders caused by Purkinje cell loss in the cerebellum. Recently, we identified loss-of-function mutations in the KCND3 gene as the cause of spinocerebellar ataxia type 19/22 (SCA19/22), revealing a previously unknown role for the voltage-gated potassium channel, Kv4.3, in Purkinje cell survival. However, how mutant Kv4.3 affects wild-type Kv4.3 channel functioning remains unknown. We provide evidence that SCA19/22-mutant Kv4.3 exerts a dominant negative effect on the trafficking and surface expression of wild-type Kv4.3 in the absence of its regulatory subunit, KChIP2. Notably, this dominant negative effect can be rescued by the presence of KChIP2. We also found that all SCA19/22-mutant subunits either suppress wild-type Kv4.3 current amplitude or alter channel gating in a dominant manner. Our findings suggest that altered Kv4.3 channel localization and/or functioning resulting from SCA19/22 mutations may lead to Purkinje cell loss, neurodegeneration and ataxia.

Abstract

This paper examines the Papuan languages of Island Melanesia, with a view to considering their typological similarities and differences. The East Papuan languages are thought to be the descendants of the languages spoken by the original inhabitants of Island Melanesia, who arrived in the area up to 50,000 years ago. The Oceanic Austronesian languages are thought to have come into the area with the Lapita peoples 3,500 years ago. With this historical backdrop in view, our paper seeks to investigate the linguistic relationships between the scattered Papuan languages of Island Melanesia. To do this, we survey various structural features, including syntactic patterns such as constituent order in clauses and noun phrases and other features of clause structure, paradigmatic structures of pronouns, and the structure of verbal morphology. In particular, we seek to discern similarities between the languages that might call for closer investigation, with a view to establishing genetic relatedness between some or all of the languages. In addition, in examining structural relationships between languages, we aim to discover whether it is possible to distinguish between original Papuan elements and diffused Austronesian elements of these languages. As this is a vast task, our paper aims merely to lay the groundwork for investigation into these and related questions.

Abstract

We report the results of a large-scale (N=1571) experiment to investigate whether spoken words can emerge from the process of repeated imitation. Participants played a version of the children’s game “Telephone”. The first generation was asked to imitate recognizable environmental sounds (e.g., glass breaking, water splashing); subsequent generations imitated the imitators for a total of 8 generations. We then examined whether the vocal imitations became more stable and word-like, retained a resemblance to the original sound, and became more suitable as learned category labels. The results showed (1) the imitations became progressively more word-like, (2) even after 8 generations, they could be matched above chance to the environmental sound that motivated them, and (3) imitations from later generations were more effective as learned category labels. These results show how repeated imitation can create progressively more word-like forms while retaining a semblance of iconicity.

Abstract

Although previous work on viewpoint techniques has shown that viewpoint is ubiquitous in narrative discourse, approaches to identify and analyze the linguistic manifestations of viewpoint are currently scattered over different disciplines and dominated by qualitative methods. This article presents the ViewPoint Identification Procedure (VPIP), the first systematic method for the lexical identification of markers of perceptual, cognitive and emotional viewpoint in narrative discourse. Use of this step-wise procedure is facilitated by a large appendix of Dutch viewpoint markers. After the introduction of the procedure and discussion of some special cases, we demonstrate its application by discussing three types of narrative excerpts: a literary narrative, a news narrative, and an oral narrative. Applying the identification procedure to the full news narrative, we show that the VPIP can be reliably used to detect viewpoint markers in long stretches of narrative discourse. As such, the systematic identification of viewpoint has the potential to benefit both established viewpoint scholars and researchers from other fields interested in the analytical and experimental study of narrative and viewpoint. Such experimental studies could complement qualitative studies, ultimately advancing our theoretical understanding of the relation between the linguistic presentation and cognitive processing of viewpoint. Suggestions for elaboration of the VPIP, particularly in the realm of pragmatic viewpoint marking, are formulated in the final part of the paper.

Abstract

Visual reaction times to target pictures after naming events are an informative measurement in language acquisition research, because gaze shifts measured in looking-while-listening paradigms are an indicator of infants’ lexical speed of processing. This measure is very useful, as it can be applied from a young age onwards and has been linked to later language development. However, to obtain valid reaction times, the infant is required to switch the fixation of their eyes from a distractor to a target object. This means that usually at least half the trials have to be discarded—those where the participant is already fixating the target at the onset of the target word—so that no reaction time can be measured. With few trials, reliability suffers, which is especially problematic when studying individual differences. In order to solve this problem, we developed a gaze-triggered looking-while-listening paradigm. The trials do not differ from the original paradigm apart from the fact that the target object is chosen depending on the infant’s eye fixation before naming. The object the infant is looking at becomes the distractor and the other object is used as the target, requiring a fixation switch, and thus providing a reaction time. We tested our paradigm with forty-three 18-month-old infants, comparing the results to those from the original paradigm. The Gaze-triggered paradigm yielded more valid reaction time trials, as anticipated. The results of a ranked correlation between the conditions confirmed that the manipulated paradigm measures the same concept as the original paradigm.

Abstract

During silent problem solving, hand gestures arise that have no communicative intent. The role of such co-thought gestures in
cognition has been understudied in cognitive research as compared to co-speech gestures. We investigated whether gesticulation
during silent problem solving supported subsequent performance in a Tower of Hanoi problem-solving task, in relation
to visual working-memory capacity and task complexity. Seventy-six participants were assigned to either an instructed gesture
condition or a condition that allowed them to gesture, but without explicit instructions to do so. This resulted in three
gesture groups: (1) non-gesturing; (2) spontaneous gesturing; (3) instructed gesturing. In line with the embedded/extended
cognition perspective on gesture, gesturing benefited complex problem-solving performance for participants with a lower
visual working-memory capacity, but not for participants with a lower spatial working-memory capacity.

Abstract

Purpose

In healthy speakers, the more frequent and probable a word is in its context, the shorter the word tends to be. This study investigated whether these probabilistic effects were similarly sized for speakers with dysarthria of different severities.
Method

Fifty-six speakers of New Zealand English (42 speakers with dysarthria and 14 healthy speakers) were recorded reading the Grandfather Passage. Measurements of word duration, frequency, and transitional word probability were taken.
Results

As hypothesized, words with a higher frequency and probability tended to be shorter in duration. There was also a significant interaction between word frequency and speech severity. This indicated that the more severe the dysarthria, the smaller the effects of word frequency on speakers' word durations. Transitional word probability also interacted with speech severity, but did not account for significant unique variance in the full model.
Conclusions

These results suggest that, as the severity of dysarthria increases, the duration of words is less affected by probabilistic variables. These findings may be due to reductions in the control and execution of muscle movement exhibited by speakers with dysarthria.

Abstract

Familial hemiplegic migraine type 1 (FHM1) is a
rare monogenic subtype of migraine with aura caused by mutations
in CACNA1A that encodes the α1A subunit of voltagegated
CaV2.1 calcium channels. Transgenic knock-in mice
that carry the human FHM1 R192Q missense mutation
(‘FHM1 R192Q mice’) exhibit an increased susceptibility to
cortical spreading depression (CSD), the mechanism underlying
migraine aura. Here, we analysed gene expression profiles
from isolated cortical tissue of FHM1 R192Q mice 24 h after
experimentally induced CSD in order to identify molecular
pathways affected by CSD. Gene expression profiles were
generated using deep serial analysis of gene expression sequencing.
Our data reveal a signature of inflammatory signalling
upon CSD in the cortex of both mutant and wild-type
mice. However, only in the brains of FHM1 R192Q mice
specific genes are up-regulated in response to CSD that are
implicated in interferon-related inflammatory signalling. Our
findings show that CSD modulates inflammatory processes in
both wild-type and mutant brains, but that an additional
unique inflammatory signature becomes expressed after
CSD in a relevant mouse model of migraine.

Abstract

Cluster headache is a relatively rare headache disorder, typically characterized by multiple daily, short-lasting attacks of excruciating, unilateral (peri-)orbital or temporal pain associated with autonomic symptoms and restlessness. To better understand the pathophysiology of cluster headache, we used RNA sequencing to identify differentially expressed genes and pathways in whole blood of patients with episodic (n = 19) or chronic (n = 20) cluster headache in comparison with headache-free controls (n = 20). Gene expression data were analysed by gene and by module of co-expressed genes with particular attention to previously implicated disease pathways including hypocretin dysregulation. Only moderate gene expression differences were identified and no associations were found with previously reported pathogenic mechanisms. At the level of functional gene sets, associations were observed for genes involved in several brain-related mechanisms such as GABA receptor function and voltage-gated channels. In addition, genes and modules of co-expressed genes showed a role for intracellular signalling cascades, mitochondria and inflammation. Although larger study samples may be required to identify the full range of involved pathways, these results indicate a role for mitochondria, intracellular signalling and inflammation in cluster headache

Abstract

We conducted four experiments to investigate the specificity of perceptual adjustments made to unusual speech sounds. Dutch listeners heard a female talker produce an ambiguous fricative [?] (between [f] and [s]) in [f]- or [s]-biased lexical contexts. Listeners with [f]-biased exposure (e.g., [witlo?]; from witlof, “chicory”; witlos is meaningless) subsequently categorized more sounds on an [εf]–[εs] continuum as [f] than did listeners with [s]-biased exposure. This occurred when the continuum was based on the exposure talker's speech (Experiment 1), and when the same test fricatives appeared after vowels spoken by novel female and male talkers (Experiments 1 and 2). When the continuum was made entirely from a novel talker's speech, there was no exposure effect (Experiment 3) unless fricatives from that talker had been spliced into the exposure talker's speech during exposure (Experiment 4). We conclude that perceptual learning about idiosyncratic speech is applied at a segmental level and is, under these exposure conditions, talker specific.

Abstract

Predictions of our sensory environment facilitate perception across domains. During speech perception, formal and temporal predictions may be made for phonotactic probability and syllable stress patterns, respectively, contributing to the efficient processing of speech input. The current experiment employed a passive EEG oddball paradigm to probe the neurophysiological processes underlying temporal and formal predictions simultaneously. The component of interest, the mismatch negativity (MMN), is considered a marker for experience-dependent change detection, where its timing and amplitude are indicative of the perceptual system’s sensitivity to presented stimuli. We hypothesized that more predictable stimuli (i.e. high phonotactic probability and first syllable stress) would facilitate change detection, indexed by shorter peak latencies or greater peak amplitudes of the MMN. This hypothesis was confirmed for phonotactic probability: high phonotactic probability deviants elicited an earlier MMN than low phonotactic probability deviants. We do not observe a significant modulation of the MMN to variations in syllable stress. Our findings confirm that speech perception is shaped by formal and temporal predictability. This paradigm may be useful to investigate the contribution of implicit processing of statistical regularities during (a)typical language development.

Abstract

Language is a uniquely human trait likely to have been a prerequisite for the development of human culture. The ability to develop articulate speech relies on capabilities, such as fine control of the larynx and mouth, that are absent in chimpanzees and other great apes. FOXP2 is the first gene relevant to the human ability to develop language. A point mutation in FOXP2 co-segregates with a disorder in a family in which half of the members have severe articulation difficulties accompanied by linguistic and grammatical impairment. This gene is disrupted by translocation in an unrelated individual who has a similar disorder. Thus, two functional copies of FOXP2 seem to be required for acquisition of normal spoken language. We sequenced the complementary DNAs that encode the FOXP2 protein in the chimpanzee, gorilla, orang-utan, rhesus macaque and mouse, and compared them with the human cDNA. We also investigated intraspecific variation of the human FOXP2 gene. Here we show that human FOXP2 contains changes in amino-acid coding and a pattern of nucleotide polymorphism, which strongly suggest that this gene has been the target of selection during recent human evolution.

Abstract

Investigation of the emotions entails reference to words and expressions conventionally used for the description of emotion experience. Important methodological issues arise for emotion researchers, and the issues are of similarly central concern in linguistic semantics more generally. I argue that superficial and/or inconsistent description of linguistic meaning can have seriously misleading results. This paper is firstly a critique of standards in emotion research for its tendency to underrate and ill-understand linguistic semantics. It is secondly a critique of standards in some approaches to linguistic semantics itself. Two major problems occur. The first is failure to distinguish between conceptually distinct meanings of single words, neglecting the well-established fact that a single phonological string can signify more than one conceptual category (i.e., that words can be polysemous). The second error involves failure to distinguish between two kinds of secondary uses of words: (1) those which are truly active “online” extensions, and (2) those which are conventionalised secondary meanings and not active (qua “extensions”) at all. These semantic considerations are crucial to conclusions one may draw about cognition and conceptualisation based on linguistic evidence.

Abstract

Central to cultural, social, and conceptual life are cognitive arti-facts, the perceptible structures which populate our world and mediate our navigation of it, complementing, enhancing, and altering available affordances for the problem-solving challenges of everyday life. Much work in this domain has concentrated on technological artifacts, especially manual tools and devices and the conceptual and communicative tools of literacy and diagrams. Recent research on hand gestures and other bodily movements which occur during speech shows that the human body serves a number of the functions of "cognitive technologies," affording the special cognitive advantages claimed to be associated exclusively with enduring (e.g., printed or drawn) diagrammatic representations. The issue is explored with reference to extensive data from video-recorded interviews with speakers of Lao in Vientiane, Laos, which show integration of verbal descriptions with complex spatial representations akin to diagrams. The study has implications both for research on cognitive artifacts (namely, that the body is a visuospatial representational resource not to be overlooked) and for research on ethnogenealogical knowledge (namely, that hand gestures reveal speakers' conceptualizations of kinship structure which are of a different nature to and not necessarily retrievable from the accompanying linguistic code).

Abstract

This article argues that it is not possible to establish distinctions between 'Lao', 'Thai', and 'Isan' as seperate languages or dialects by appealing to objective criteria. 'Lao', 'Thai', and 'Isan' are conceived linguistics varieties, and the ground-level reality reveals a great deal of variation, much of it not coinciding with the geographical boundaries of the 'Laos', 'Isan', and 'non-Isan Thailand' areas. Those who promote 'Lao', 'Thai', and/or 'Isan' as distinct linguistic varieties have subjective (e.g. political and/or sentimental) reasons for doing so. Objective linguistic criteria are not sufficient

Abstract

Anthropologists and linguists have long been aware that the body is explicitly referred to in conventional description of emotion in languages around the world. There is abundant linguistic data showing expression of emotions in terms of their imagined ‘locus’ in the physical body. The most important methodological issue in the study of emotions is language, for the ways people talk give us access to ‘folk descriptions’ of the emotions. ‘Technical terminology’, whether based on English or otherwise, is not excluded from this ‘folk’ status. It may appear to be safely ‘scientific’ and thus culturally neutral, but in fact it is not: technical English is a variety of English and reflects, to some extent, culture-specific ways of thinking (and categorising) associated with the English language. People — as researchers studying other people, or as people in real-life social association — cannot directly access the emotional experience of others, and language is the usual mode of ‘packaging’ one’s experience so it may be accessible to others. Careful description of linguistic data from as broad as possible a cross-linguistic base is thus an important part of emotion research. All people experience biological events and processes associated with certain thoughts (or, as psychologists say, ‘appraisals’), but there is more to ‘emotion’ than just these physiological phenomena. Speakers of some languages talk about their emotional experiences as if they are located in some internal organ such as ‘the liver’, yet they cannot localise feeling in this physical organ. This phenomenon needs to be understood better, and one of the problems is finding a method of comparison that allows us to compare descriptions from different languages which show apparently great formal and semantic variation. Some simple concepts including feel and body are universal or near-universal, and as such are good candidates for terms of description which may help to eradicate confusion and exoticism from cross-linguistic comparison and semantic typology. Semantic analysis reveals great variation in concepts of emotion across languages and cultures — but such analysis requires a sound and well-founded methodology. While leaving room for different approaches to the task, we suggest that such a methodology can be based on empirically established linguistic universal (or near-universal) concepts, and on ‘cognitive scenarios’ articulated in terms of these concepts. Also, we warn against the danger of exoticism involved in taking all body part references ‘literally’. Above all, we argue that what is needed is a combination of empirical cross-linguistic investigations and a theoretical and methodological awareness, recognising the impossibility of exploring other people’s emotions without keeping language in focus: both as an object and as a tool of study.

Abstract

How are language, thought, and reality related? Interdisciplinary research on this question over the past two decades has made significant progress. Most of the work has been Neo-Whorfian in two senses: One, it has been driven by research questions that were articulated most explicitly and most famously by the linguistic anthropologist Benjamin Lee Whorf, and two, it has limited the scope of inquiry to Whorf's narrow interpretations of the key terms “language,” “thought,” and “reality.” This article first reviews some of the ideas and results of Neo-Whorfian work, concentrating on the special role of linguistic categorization in heuristic decision making. It then considers new and potential directions in work on linguistic relativity, taken broadly to mean the ways in which the perspective offered by a given language can affect thought (or mind) and reality. New lines of work must reconsider the idea of linguistic relativity by exploring the range of available interpretations of the key terms: in particular, “language” beyond reference, “thought” beyond nonsocial processing, and “reality” beyond brute, nonsocial facts.

Abstract

This article describes the interactional patterns and linguistic structures associated with otherinitiated repair, as observed in a corpus of video-recorded conversation in the Lao language (a Southwestern Tai language spoken in Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia). The article reports findings specific to the Lao language from the comparative project that is the topic of this special issue. While the scope is general to the overall pattern of other-initiated repair as a set of practices and a system of semiotic resources, special attention is given to (1) the range of repair operations that are elicited by open other-initiators of repair in Lao, especially the subtle changes made when problem turns are repeated, and (2) the use of phrase-final particles—a characteristic feature of Lao grammar—in the marking of both other-initiations of repair and repair solution turns

Abstract

This article addresses the recognition of reduced word forms, which are frequent in casual speech. We describe two experiments on Dutch showing that listeners only recognize highly reduced forms well when these forms are presented in their full context and that the probability that a listener recognizes a word form in limited context is strongly correlated with the degree of reduction of the form. Moreover, we show that the effect of degree of reduction can only partly be interpreted as the effect of the intelligibility of the acoustic signal, which is negatively correlated with degree of reduction. We discuss the consequences of our findings for models of spoken word recognition and especially for the role that storage plays in these models.

Abstract

In an auditory lexical decision experiment, 5,541 spoken content words and pseudo-words were presented to 20 native speakers of Dutch. The words vary in phonological makeup and in number of syllables and stress pattern, and are further representative of the native Dutch vocabulary in that most are morphologically complex, comprising two stems or one stem plus derivational and inflectional suffixes, with inflections representing both regular and irregular paradigms; the pseudo-words were matched in these respects to the real words. The BALDEY data file includes response times and accuracy rates, with for each item morphological information plus phonological and acoustic information derived from automatic phonemic segmentation of the stimuli. Two initial analyses illustrate how this data set can be used. First, we discuss several measures of the point at which a word has no further neighbors, and compare the degree to which each measure predicts our lexical decision response outcomes. Second, we investigate how well four different measures of frequency of occurrence (from written corpora, spoken corpora, subtitles and frequency ratings by 70 participants) predict the same outcomes. These analyses motivate general conclusions about the auditory lexical decision task. The (publicly available) BALDEY database lends itself to many further analyses.

Abstract

Words are often pronounced with fewer segments in casual conversations than in formal speech. Previous research has shown that foreign language learners and beginning second language learners experience problems processing reduced speech. We examined whether this also holds for advanced second language learners. We designed a dictation task in Dutch consisting of sentences spliced from casual conversations and an unreduced counterpart of this task, with the same sentences carefully articulated by the same speaker. Advanced second language learners of Dutch produced substantially more transcription errors for the reduced than for the unreduced sentences. These errors made the sentences incomprehensible or led to non-intended meanings. The learners often did not rely on the semantic and syntactic information in the sentence or on the subsegmental cues to overcome the reductions. Hence, advanced second language learners also appear to suffer from the reduced pronunciation variants of words that are abundant in everyday conversations

Abstract

This paper discusses four experiments on Dutch which show that distinctive phonological features differ in their relevance for word recognition. The relevance of a feature for word recognition depends on its phonological stability, that is, the extent to which that feature is generally realized in accordance with its lexical specification in the relevant word position. If one feature value is uninformative, all values of that feature are less relevant for word recognition, with the least informative feature being the least relevant. Features differ in their relevance both in spoken and written word recognition, though the differences are more pronounced in auditory lexical decision than in self-paced reading.

Abstract

Previous research has shown that the production of morphologically complex words in isolation is affected by the properties of morphologically, phonologically, or semantically similar words stored in the mental lexicon. We report five experiments with Dutch speakers that show that reading an inflectional word form in its linguistic context is also affected by analogical sets of formally similar words. Using the self-paced reading technique, we show in Experiments 1-3 that an incorrectly spelled suffix delays readers less if the incorrect spelling is in line with the spelling of verbal suffixes in other inflectional forms of the same verb. In Experiments 4 and 5, our use of the self-paced reading technique shows that formally similar words with different stems affect the reading of incorrect suffixal allomorphs on a given stem. These intra- and interparadigmatic effects in reading may be due to online processes or to the storage of incorrect forms resulting from analogical effects in production.

Abstract

This study addresses the question to what extent the production of regular past tense forms in Dutch is a¤ected by analogical processes. We report an experiment in which native speakers of Dutch listened to existing regular verbs over headphones, and had to indicate which of the past tense allomorphs, te or de, was appropriate for these verbs. According to generative analyses, the choice between the two su‰xes is completely regular and governed by the underlying [voice]-specification of the stem-final segment. In this approach, no analogical e¤ects are expected. In connectionist and analogical approaches, by contrast, the phonological similarity structure in the lexicon is expected to a¤ect lexical processing. Our experimental results support the latter approach: all participants created more nonstandard past tense forms, produced more inconsistency errors, and responded more slowly for verbs with stronger analogical support for the nonstandard form.

Abstract

This study investigates how the comprehension of casual speech in foreign languages is affected by the phonotactic constraints in the listener’s native language. Non-native listeners of English with different native languages heard short English phrases produced by native speakers of English or Spanish and they indicated whether these phrases included can or can’t. Native Mandarin listeners especially tended to interpret can’t as can. We interpret this result as a direct effect of the ban on word-final /nt/ in Mandarin. Both the native Mandarin and the native Spanish listeners did not take full advantage of the subsegmental information in the speech signal cueing reduced can’t. This finding is probably an indirect effect of the phonotactic constraints in their native languages: these listeners have difficulties interpreting the subsegmental cues because these cues do not occur or have different functions in their native languages. Dutch resembles English in the phonotactic constraints relevant to the comprehension of can’t, and native Dutch listeners showed similar patterns in their comprehension of native and non-native English to native English listeners. This result supports our conclusion that the major patterns in the comprehension results are driven by the phonotactic constraints in the listeners’ native languages.

Abstract

This article presents two studies investigating how the situation in which speech is uttered affects the frequency with which words are reduced. Study 1 is based on the Spoken Dutch Corpus, which consists of 15 components, nearly all representing a different speech situation. This study shows that the components differ in how often ten semantically weak words are highly reduced. The differences are especially large between the components with scripted and unscripted speech. Within the component group of unscripted speech, the formality of the situation shows an effect. Study 2 investigated segment reduction in a shadowing experiment in which participants repeated Dutch carefully and casually articulated sentences. Prefixal schwa and suffixal /t/ were absent in participants' responses to both sentences types as often as in formal interviews. If a segment was absent, this appeared to be mostly due to extreme co-articulation, unlike in speech produced in less formal situations. Speakers thus adapted more to the formal situation of the experiment than to the stimuli to be shadowed. We conclude that speech situation affects the occurrence of reduced word pronunciation variants, which should be accounted for by psycholinguistic models of speech production and comprehension

Abstract

In evolutionary linguistics, experiments using artificial signal spaces are being used to investigate the emergence of speech structure. These signal spaces need to be continuous, non-discretised spaces from which discrete units and patterns can emerge. They need to be dissimilar from - but comparable with - the vocal-tract, in order to minimise interference from pre-existing linguistic knowledge, while informing us about language. This is a hard balance to strike. This article outlines a new approach which uses the Leap Motion, an infra-red controller which can convert manual movement in 3d space into sound. The signal space using this approach is more flexible than signal spaces in previous attempts. Further, output data using this approach is simpler to arrange and analyse. The experimental interface was built using free, and mostly open source libraries in Python. We provide our source code for other researchers as open source.

Abstract

The larynx is the essential articulatory mechanism that primes the vocal tract. Far from being only a glottal source of voicing, the complex laryngeal mechanism entrains the ontogenetic acquisition of speech and, through coarticulatory coupling, guides the production of oral sounds in the infant vocal tract. As such, it is not possible to speculate as to the origins of the speaking modality in humans without considering the fundamental role played by the laryngeal articulatory mechanism. The Laryngeal Articulator Model, which divides the vocal tract into a laryngeal component and an oral component, serves as a basis for describing early infant speech and for positing how speech sounds evolving in various hominids may be related phonetically. To this end, we offer some suggestions for how the evolution and development of vocal tract anatomy fit with our infant speech acquisition data and discuss the implications this has for explaining phonetic learning and for interpreting the biological evolution of the human vocal tract in relation to speech and speech acquisition.

Abstract

Infants infer social and pragmatic intentions underlying attention-directing gestures, but the basis on which infants make these inferences is not well understood. Previous studies suggest that infants rely on information from preceding shared action contexts and joint perceptual scenes. Here, we tested whether 12-month-olds use information from act-accompanying cues, in particular prosody and hand shape, to guide their pragmatic understanding. In Experiment 1, caregivers directed infants’ attention to an object to request it, share interest in it, or inform them about a hidden aspect. Caregivers used distinct prosodic and gestural patterns to express each pragmatic intention. Experiment 2 was identical except that experimenters provided identical lexical information across conditions and used three sets of trained prosodic and gestural patterns. In all conditions, the joint perceptual scenes and preceding shared action contexts were identical. In both experiments, infants reacted appropriately to the adults’ intentions by attending to the object mostly in the sharing interest condition, offering the object mostly in the imperative condition, and searching for the referent mostly in the informing condition. Infants’ ability to comprehend pragmatic intentions based on prosody and gesture shape expands infants’ communicative understanding from common activities to novel situations for which shared background knowledge is missing.

Abstract

We summarize a number of findings in laryngology demonstrating that perturbations of phonation, including increased jitter and shimmer, are associated with desiccated ambient air. We predict that, given the relative imprecision of vocal fold vibration in desiccated versus humid contexts, arid and cold ecologies should be less amenable, when contrasted to warm and humid ecologies, to the development of languages with phonemic tone, especially complex tone. This prediction is supported by data from two large independently coded databases representing 3,700+ languages. Languages with complex tonality have generally not developed in very cold or otherwise desiccated climates, in accordance with the physiologically based predictions. The predicted global geographic–linguistic association is shown to operate within continents, within major language families, and across language isolates. Our results offer evidence that human sound systems are influenced by environmental factors.

Abstract

Decades of research have established that the content of language (e.g. lexical characteristics of words) predicts eye movements during reading. Here we investigate whether there exist individual differences in ‘stable’ eye movement patterns during narrative reading. We computed Euclidean distances from correlations between gaze durations time courses (word level) across 102 participants who each read three literary narratives in Dutch. The resulting distance matrices were compared between narratives using a Mantel test. The results show that correlations between the scaling matrices of different narratives are relatively weak (r ≤ .11) when missing data points are ignored. However, when including these data points as zero durations (i.e. skipped words), we found significant correlations between stories (r > .51). Word skipping was significantly positively associated with print exposure but not with self-rated attention and story-world absorption, suggesting that more experienced readers are more likely to skip words, and do so in a comparable fashion. We interpret this finding as suggesting that word skipping might be a stable individual eye movement pattern.

Abstract

Error-based theories of language acquisition suggest that children, like adults, continuously make and evaluate predictions in order to reach an adult-like state of language use. However, while these theories have become extremely influential, their central claim - that unpredictable
input leads to higher rates of lasting change in linguistic representations – has scarcely been
tested. We designed a prime surprisal-based intervention study to assess this claim.
As predicted, both 5- to 6-year-old children (n=72) and adults (n=72) showed a pre- to post-test shift towards producing the dative syntactic structure they were exposed to in surprising sentences. The effect was significant in both age groups together, and in the child group separately when participants with ceiling performance in the pre-test were excluded. Secondary
predictions were not upheld: we found no verb-based learning effects and there was only reliable evidence for immediate prime surprisal effects in the adult, but not in the child group. To our knowledge this is the first published study demonstrating enhanced learning rates for the same syntactic structure when it appeared in surprising as opposed to predictable contexts, thus
providing crucial support for error-based theories of language acquisition.

Abstract

The impact of language impairment on the clinical assessment of patients suffering from disorders of consciousness (DOC) is unknown or underestimated, and may mask the presence of conscious behavior. In a group of DOC patients (n=11; time post-injury range:5-252 months), we investigated the main neural functional and structural underpinnings of linguistic processing, and their relationship with the behavioral measures of the auditory function, using the Coma Recovery Scale-Revised (CRS-R). We assessed the integrity of the brainstem auditory pathways, of the left superior temporal gyrus and arcuate fasciculus, the neural activity elicited by passive listening of an auditory language task and the mean hemispheric glucose metabolism.
Our results support the hypothesis of a relationship between the level of preservation of the investigated structures/functions and the CRS-R auditory subscale scores.
Moreover, our findings indicate that patients in minimally conscious state minus (MCS-): 1) when presenting the \emph{auditory startle} (at the CRS-R auditory subscale) might be aphasic in the receptive domain, being severely impaired in the core language structures/functions; 2) when presenting the \emph{localization to sound} might retain language processing, being almost intact or intact in the core language structures/functions. Despite the small group of investigated patients, our findings provide a grounding of the clinical measures of the CRS-R auditory subscale in the integrity of the underlying auditory structures/functions. Future studies are needed to confirm our results that might have important consequences for the clinical practice.

Abstract

Writing over a century ago, Darwin hypothesized that vocal expression of emotion dates back to our earliest terrestrial ancestors. If this hypothesis is true, we should expect to find cross-species acoustic universals in emotional vocalizations. Studies suggest that acoustic attributes of aroused vocalizations are shared across many mammalian species, and that humans can use these attributes to infer emotional content. But do these acoustic attributes extend to non-mammalian vertebrates? In this study, we asked human participants to judge the emotional content of vocalizations of nine vertebrate species representing three different biological classes—Amphibia, Reptilia (non-aves and aves) and Mammalia. We found that humans are able to identify higher levels of arousal in vocalizations across all species. This result was consistent across different language groups (English, German and Mandarin native speakers), suggesting that this ability is biologically rooted in humans. Our findings indicate that humans use multiple acoustic parameters to infer relative arousal in vocalizations for each species, but mainly rely on fundamental frequency and spectral centre of gravity to identify higher arousal vocalizations across species. These results suggest that fundamental mechanisms of vocal emotional expression are shared among vertebrates and could represent a homologous signalling system.

Abstract

The ability to identify emotional arousal in heterospecific vocalizations may facilitate behaviors that increase survival opportunities. Crucially, this ability may orient inter-species interactions, particularly between humans and other species. Research shows that humans identify emotional arousal in vocalizations across multiple species, such as cats, dogs, and piglets. However, no previous study has addressed humans' ability to identify emotional arousal in silver foxes. Here, we adopted low-and high-arousal calls emitted by three strains of silver fox-Tame, Aggressive, and Unselected-in response to human approach. Tame and Aggressive foxes are genetically selected for friendly and attacking behaviors toward humans, respectively. Unselected foxes show aggressive and fearful behaviors toward humans. These three strains show similar levels of emotional arousal, but different levels of emotional valence in relation to humans. This emotional information is reflected in the acoustic features of the calls. Our data suggest that humans can identify high-arousal calls of Aggressive and Unselected foxes, but not of Tame foxes. Further analyses revealed that, although within each strain different acoustic parameters affect human accuracy in identifying high-arousal calls, spectral center of gravity, harmonic-to-noise ratio, and F0 best predict humans' ability to discriminate high-arousal calls across all strains. Furthermore, we identified in spectral center of gravity and F0 the best predictors for humans' absolute ratings of arousal in each call. Implications for research on the adaptive value of inter-specific eavesdropping are discussed.

Abstract

Humans typically combine linguistic and nonlinguistic information to comprehend emotions. We adopted an emotion identification Stroop task to investigate how different channels interact in emotion communication. In experiment 1, synonyms of “happy” and “sad” were spoken with happy and sad prosody. Participants had more difficulty ignoring prosody than ignoring verbal content. In experiment 2, synonyms of “happy” and “sad” were spoken with happy and sad prosody, while happy or sad faces were displayed. Accuracy was lower when two channels expressed an emotion that was incongruent with the channel participants had to focus on, compared with the cross-channel congruence condition. When participants were required to focus on verbal content, accuracy was significantly lower also when prosody was incongruent with verbal content and face. This suggests that prosody biases emotional verbal content processing, even when conflicting with verbal content and face simultaneously. Implications for multimodal communication and language evolution studies are discussed.

Abstract

We investigated the effects of word order and prosody on word learning in school-age children. Third graders viewed photographs belonging to one of three semantic categories while hearing four-word nonsense utterances containing a target word. In the control condition, all words had the same pitch and, across trials, the position of the target word was varied systematically within each utterance. The only cue to word–meaning mapping was the co-occurrence of target words and referents. This cue was present in all conditions. In the Utterance-final condition, the target word always occurred in utterance-final position, and at the same fundamental frequency as all the other words of the utterance. In the Pitch peak condition, the position of the target word was varied systematically within each utterance across trials, and produced with pitch contrasts typical of infant-directed speech (IDS). In the Pitch peak + Utterance-final condition, the target word always occurred in utterance-final position, and was marked with a pitch contrast typical of IDS. Word learning occurred in all conditions except the control condition. Moreover, learning performance was significantly higher than that observed with simple co-occurrence (control condition) only for the Pitch peak + Utterance-final condition. We conclude that, for school-age children, the combination of words' utterance-final alignment and pitch enhancement boosts word learning.

Abstract

Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a common heritable disorder with a childhood onset. Molecular genetic studies of ADHD have previously focused on examining the roles of specific candidate genes, primarily those involved in dopaminergic pathways. We have performed the first systematic genomewide linkage scan for loci influencing ADHD in 126 affected sib pairs, using a ∼10-cM grid of microsatellite markers. Allele-sharing linkage methods enabled us to exclude any loci with a λs of ⩾3 from 96% of the genome and those with a λs of ⩾2.5 from 91%, indicating that there is unlikely to be a major gene involved in ADHD susceptibility in our sample. Under a strict diagnostic scheme we could exclude all screened regions of the X chromosome for a locus-specific λs of ⩾2 in brother-brother pairs, demonstrating that the excess of affected males with ADHD is probably not attributable to a major X-linked effect. Qualitative trait maximum LOD score analyses pointed to a number of chromosomal sites that may contain genetic risk factors of moderate effect. None exceeded genomewide significance thresholds, but LOD scores were >1.5 for regions on 5p12, 10q26, 12q23, and 16p13. Quantitative-trait analysis of ADHD symptom counts implicated a region on 12p13 (maximum LOD 2.6) that also yielded a LOD >1 when qualitative methods were used. A survey of regions containing 36 genes that have been proposed as candidates for ADHD indicated that 29 of these genes, including DRD4 and DAT1, could be excluded for a λs of 2. Only three of the candidates—DRD5, 5HTT, and CALCYON—coincided with sites of positive linkage identified by our screen. Two of the regions highlighted in the present study, 2q24 and 16p13, coincided with the top linkage peaks reported by a recent genome-scan study of autistic sib pairs.

Abstract

Developmental dyslexia, a specific impairment of reading ability despite adequate intelligence and educational opportunity, is one of the most frequent childhood disorders. Since the first documented cases at the beginning of the last century, it has become increasingly apparent that the reading problems of people with dyslexia form part of a heritable neurobiological syndrome. As for most cognitive and behavioural traits, phenotypic definition is fraught with difficulties and the genetic basis is complex, making the isolation of genetic risk factors a formidable challenge. Against such a background, it is notable that several recent studies have reported the localization of genes that influence dyslexia and other language-related traits. These investigations exploit novel research approaches that are relevant to many areas of human neurogenetics.

Abstract

Developmental disorders affecting speech and language are highly heritable, but very little is currently understood about the neuromolecular mechanisms that underlie these traits. Integration of data from diverse research areas, including linguistics, neuropsychology, neuroimaging, genetics, molecular neuroscience, developmental biology, and evolutionary anthropology, is becoming essential for unraveling the relevant pathways. Recent studies of the FOXP2 gene provide a case in point. Mutation of FOXP2 causes a rare form of speech and language disorder, and the gene appears to be a crucial regulator of embryonic development for several tissues. Molecular investigations of the central nervous system indicate that the gene may be involved in establishing and maintaining connectivity of corticostriatal and olivocerebellar circuits in mammals. Notably, it has been shown that FOXP2 was subject to positive selection in recent human evolution. Consideration of findings from multiple levels of analysis demonstrates that FOXP2 cannot be characterized as “the gene for speech,” but rather as one critical piece of a complex puzzle. This story gives a flavor of what is to come in this field and indicates that anyone expecting simple explanations of etiology or evolution should be prepared for some intriguing surprises.

Abstract

Theories addressing the biological basis of language must be built on
an appreciation of the ways that molecular and neurobiological substrates
can contribute to aspects of human cognition. Here, we lay out
the principles by which a genome could potentially encode the necessary
information to produce a language-ready brain. We describe
what genes are; how they are regulated; and how they affect the formation,
function, and plasticity of neuronal circuits. At each step,
we give examples of molecules implicated in pathways that are important
for speech and language. Finally, we discuss technological advances
in genomics that are revealing considerable genotypic variation in
the human population, from rare mutations to common polymorphisms,
with the potential to relate this variation to natural variability
in speech and language skills. Moving forward, an interdisciplinary
approach to the language sciences, integrating genetics, neurobiology,
psychology, and linguistics, will be essential for a complete understanding
of our unique human capacities.

Abstract

Developmental dyslexia is defined as a specific and significant impairment in reading ability that cannot be explained by deficits in intelligence, learning opportunity, motivation or sensory acuity. It is one of the most frequently diagnosed disorders in childhood, representing a major educational and social problem. It is well established that dyslexia is a significantly heritable trait with a neurobiological basis. The etiological mechanisms remain elusive, however, despite being the focus of intensive multidisciplinary research. All attempts to map quantitative-trait loci (QTLs) influencing dyslexia susceptibility have targeted specific chromosomal regions, so that inferences regarding genetic etiology have been made on the basis of very limited information. Here we present the first two complete QTL-based genome-wide scans for this trait, in large samples of families from the United Kingdom and United States. Using single-point analysis, linkage to marker D18S53 was independently identified as being one of the most significant results of the genome in each scan (P< or =0.0004 for single word-reading ability in each family sample). Multipoint analysis gave increased evidence of 18p11.2 linkage for single-word reading, yielding top empirical P values of 0.00001 (UK) and 0.0004 (US). Measures related to phonological and orthographic processing also showed linkage at this locus. We replicated linkage to 18p11.2 in a third independent sample of families (from the UK), in which the strongest evidence came from a phoneme-awareness measure (most significant P value=0.00004). A combined analysis of all UK families confirmed that this newly discovered 18p QTL is probably a general risk factor for dyslexia, influencing several reading-related processes. This is the first report of QTL-based genome-wide scanning for a human cognitive trait.

Abstract

Between 2 and 5% of children who are otherwise unimpaired have significant difficulties in acquiring expressive and/or receptive language, despite adequate intelligence and opportunity. While twin studies indicate a significant role for genetic factors in developmental disorders of speech and language, the majority of families segregating such disorders show complex patterns of inheritance, and are thus not amenable for conventional linkage analysis. A rare exception is the KE family, a large three-generation pedigree in which approximately half of the members are affected with a severe speech and language disorder which appears to be transmitted as an autosomal dominant monogenic trait. This family has been widely publicised as suffering primarily from a defect in the use of grammatical suffixation rules, thus supposedly supporting the existence of genes specific to grammar. The phenotype, however, is broader in nature, with virtually every aspect of grammar and of language affected. In addition, affected members have a severe orofacial dyspraxia, and their speech is largely incomprehensible to the naive listener. We initiated a genome-wide search for linkage in the KE family and have identified a region on chromosome 7 which co-segregates with the speech and language disorder (maximum lod score = 6.62 at theta = 0.0), confirming autosomal dominant inheritance with full penetrance. Further analysis of microsatellites from within the region enabled us to fine map the locus responsible (designated SPCH1) to a 5.6-cM interval in 7q31, thus providing an important step towards its identification. Isolation of SPCH1 may offer the first insight into the molecular genetics of the developmental process that culminates in speech and language.

Abstract

The post-genomic era is an exciting time for researchers interested in the biology of speech and language. Substantive advances in molecular methodologies have opened up entire vistas of investigation that were not previously possible, or in some cases even imagined. Speculations concerning the origins of human cognitive traits are being transformed into empirically addressable questions, generating specific hypotheses that can be explicitly tested using data collected from both the natural world and experimental settings. In this article, I discuss a number of promising lines of research in this area. For example, the field has begun to identify genes implicated in speech and language skills, including not just disorders but also the normal range of abilities. Such genes provide powerful entry points for gaining insights into neural bases and evolutionary origins, using sophisticated experimental tools from molecular neuroscience and developmental neurobiology. At the same time, sequencing of ancient hominin genomes is giving us an unprecedented view of the molecular genetic changes that have occurred during the evolution of our species. Synthesis of data from these complementary sources offers an opportunity to robustly evaluate alternative accounts of language evolution. Of course, this endeavour remains challenging on many fronts, as I also highlight in the article. Nonetheless, such an integrated approach holds great potential for untangling the complexities of the capacities that make us human.

Abstract

Learning to talk is one of the most important milestones in human development, but we still have only a limited understanding of the way in which the process occurs. It normally takes just a few years to go from babbling newborn to fluent communicator. During this period, the child learns to produce a rich array of speech sounds through intricate control of articulatory muscles, assembles a vocabulary comprising thousands of words, and deduces the complicated structural rules that permit construction of meaningful sentences. All of this (and more) is achieved with little conscious effort.

Abstract

This article provides clarification regarding ‘the what’ and ‘the why’ of mental imagery use in dance. It proposes that mental images are invoked across sensory modalities and often combine internal and external perspectives. The content of images ranges from ‘direct’ body oriented simulations along a continuum employing analogous mapping through ‘semi-direct’ literal similarities to abstract metaphors. The reasons for employing imagery are diverse and often overlapping, affecting physical, affective (psychological) and cognitive domains. This paper argues that when dance uses imagery, it is mapping aspects of the world to the body via analogy. Such mapping informs and changes our understanding of both our bodies and the world. In this way, mental imagery use in dance is fundamentally a process of embodied cognition