Publications

Abstract

The present study investigates the hand choice in iconic gestures that accompany speech. In 10 right-handed subjects gestures were elicited by verbal narration and by silent gestural demonstrations of animations with two moving objects. In both conditions, the left-hand was used as often as the right-hand to display iconic gestures. The choice of the right- or left-hands was determined by semantic aspects of the message. The influence of hemispheric language lateralization on the hand choice in co-speech gestures appeared to be minor. Instead, speaking seemed to induce a sequential organization of the iconic gestures.

Abstract

There is a wealth of evidence demonstrating that executive function (EF) abilities are positively associated with language development during the preschool years, such that children with good executive functions also have larger vocabularies. However, why this is the case remains to be discovered. In this study, we focused on the hypothesis that sentence processing abilities mediate the association between EF skills and receptive vocabulary knowledge, in that the speed of language acquisition is at least partially dependent on a child’s processing ability, which is itself dependent on executive control. We tested this hypothesis in longitudinal data from a cohort of 3- and 4-year-old children at three age points (37, 43, and 49 months). We found evidence, consistent with previous research, for a significant association between three EF skills (cognitive flexibility, working memory [as measured by the Backward Digit Span], and inhibition) and receptive vocabulary knowledge across this age range. However, only one of the tested sentence processing abilities (the ability to maintain multiple possible referents in mind) significantly mediated this relationship and only for one of the tested EFs (inhibition). The results suggest that children who are better able to inhibit incorrect responses are also better able to maintain multiple possible referents in mind while a sentence unfolds, a sophisticated sentence processing ability that may facilitate vocabulary learning from complex input.

Abstract

Normative ratings are a means to control for the effects of confounding variables in psycholinguistic experiments. This paper introduces a new dataset of normative ratings for Swedish encompassing 111 concrete nouns and the corresponding picture stimuli in the MultiPic database (Duñabeitia et al. 2017). The norms for name agreement, category typicality, age of acquisition and subjective frequency were collected using online surveys among native speakers of the Finland-Swedish variety of Swedish. The paper discusses the inter-correlations between these variables and compares them against available ratings for other languages. In doing so, the paper argues that ratings for age of acquisition and subjective frequency collected for other languages may be applied to psycholinguistic studies on Finland-Swedish, at least with respect to concrete and highly imageable nouns. In contrast, norms for name agreement should be collected from speakers of the same language variety as represented by the subjects in the actual experiments.

Abstract

Emotional words have consistently been shown to be processed differently than neutral words. However, few studies have examined individual variability in emotion word processing with longer, ecologically valid stimuli (beyond isolated words, sentences, or paragraphs). In the current study, we re-analysed eye-tracking data collected during story reading to reveal how individual differences in need for affect and narrative absorption impact the speed of emotion word reading. Word emotionality was indexed by affective-aesthetic potentials (AAP) calculated by a sentiment analysis tool. We found that individuals with higher levels of need for affect and narrative absorption read positive words more slowly. On the other hand, these individual differences did not influence the reading time of more negative words, suggesting that high need for affect and narrative absorption are characterised by a positivity bias only. In general, unlike most previous studies using more isolated emotion word stimuli, we observed a quadratic (U-shaped) effect of word emotionality on reading speed, such that both positive and negative words were processed more slowly than neutral words. Taken together, this study emphasises the importance of taking into account individual differences and task context when studying emotion word processing.

Abstract

The expansion of the cerebral cortex is one of the most distinctive changes in the evolution of the human brain. Cortical expansion and related increases in cortical folding may have contributed to emergence of our capacities for high-order cognitive abilities. Molecular analysis of humans, archaic hominins, and non-human primates has allowed identification of chromosomal regions showing evolutionary changes at different points of our phylogenetic history. In this study, we assessed the contributions of genomic annotations spanning 30 million years to human sulcal morphology measured via MRI in more than 18,000 participants from the UK Biobank. We found that variation within brain-expressed human gained enhancers, regulatory genetic elements that emerged since our last common ancestor with Old World monkeys, explained more trait heritability than expected for the left and right calloso-marginal posterior fissures and the right central sulcus. Intriguingly, these are sulci that have been previously linked to the evolution of locomotion in primates and later on bipedalism in our hominin ancestors.

Abstract

How can one conceive of the neuronal implementation of the processing model we proposed in our target article? In his commentary (Pulvermüller 1999, reprinted here in this issue), Pulvermüller makes various proposals concerning the underlying neural mechanisms and their potential localizations in the brain. These proposals demonstrate the compatibility of our processing model and current neuroscience. We add further evidence on details of localization based on a recent meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies of word production (Indefrey & Levelt 2000). We also express some minor disagreements with respect to Pulvermüller’s interpretation of the “lemma” notion, and concerning his neural modeling of phonological code retrieval. Branigan & Pickering discuss important aspects of syntactic encoding, which was not the topic of the target article. We discuss their well-taken proposal that multiple syntactic frames for a single verb lemma are represented as independent nodes, which can be shared with other verbs, such as accounting for syntactic priming in speech production. We also discuss how, in principle, the alternative multiple-frame-multiplelemma account can be tested empirically. The available evidence does not seem to support that account.

Abstract

During the second half of the 19th century, the psychology of language was invented as a discipline for the sole purpose of explaining the evolution of spoken language. These efforts culminated in Wilhelm Wundt’s monumental Die Sprache of 1900, which outlined the psychological mechanisms involved in producing utterances and considered how these mechanisms could have evolved. Wundt assumes that articulatory movements were originally rather arbitrary concomitants of larger, meaningful expressive bodily gestures. The sounds such articulations happened to produce slowly acquired the meaning of the gesture as a whole, ultimately making the gesture superfluous. Over a century later, gestural theories of language origins still abound. I argue that such theories are unlikely and wasteful, given the biological, neurological and genetic evidence.

Abstract

The order of acquisition of Dutch syllable types by first language learners is analyzed as following from an initial ranking and subsequent rerankings of constraints in an optimality theoretic grammar. Initially, structural constraints are all ranked above faithfulness constraints, leading to core syllable (CV) productions only. Subsequently, faithfulness gradually rises to the highest position in the ranking, allowing more and more marked syllable types to appear in production. Local conjunctions of Structural constraints allow for a more detailed analysis.

Abstract

Preparing words in speech production is normally a fast and accurate process. We generate them two or three per second in fluent conversation; and overtly naming a clear picture of an object can easily be initiated within 600 msec after picture onset. The underlying process, however, is exceedingly complex. The theory reviewed in this target article analyzes this process as staged and feedforward. After a first stage of conceptual preparation, word generation proceeds through lexical selection, morphological and phonological encoding, phonetic encoding, and articulation itself. In addition, the speaker exerts some degree of output control, by monitoring of self-produced internal and overt speech. The core of the theory, ranging from lexical selection to the initiation of phonetic encoding, is captured in a computational model, called WEAVER + +. Both the theory and the computational model have been developed in interaction with reaction time experiments, particularly in picture naming or related word production paradigms, with the aim of accounting. for the real-time processing in normal word production. A comprehensive review of theory, model, and experiments is presented. The model can handle some of the main observations in the domain of speech errors (the major empirical domain for most other theories of lexical access), and the theory opens new ways of approaching the cerebral organization of speech production by way of high-temporal-resolution imaging.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to relate a psycholinguistic processing model of picture naming to the dynamics of cortical activation during picture naming. The activation was recorded from eight Dutch subjects with a whole-head neuromagnetometer. The processing model, based on extensive naming latency studies, is a stage model. In preparing a picture's name, the speaker performs a chain of specific operations. They are, in this order, computing the visual percept, activating an appropriate lexical concept, selecting the target word from the mental lexicon, phonological encoding, phonetic encoding, and initiation of articulation. The time windows for each of these operations are reasonably well known and could be related to the peak activity of dipole sources in the individual magnetic response patterns. The analyses showed a clear progression over these time windows from early occipital activation, via parietal and temporal to frontal activation. The major specific findings were that (1) a region in the left posterior temporal lobe, agreeing with the location of Wernicke's area, showed prominent activation starting about 200 msec after picture onset and peaking at about 350 msec, (i.e., within the stage of phonological encoding), and (2) a consistent activation was found in the right parietal cortex, peaking at about 230 msec after picture onset, thus preceding and partly overlapping with the left temporal response. An interpretation in terms of the management of visual attention is proposed.

Abstract

Research on spoken word production has been approached from two angles. In one research tradition, the analysis of spontaneous or induced speech errors led to models that can account for speech error distributions. In another tradition, the measurement of picture naming latencies led to chronometric models accounting for distributions of reaction times in word production. Both kinds of models are, however, dealing with the same underlying processes: (1) the speaker’s selection of a word that is semantically and syntactically appropriate; (2) the retrieval of the word’s phonological properties; (3) the rapid syllabification of the word in context; and (4) the preparation of the corresponding articulatory gestures. Models of both traditions explain these processes in terms of activation spreading through a localist, symbolic network. By and large, they share the main levels of representation: conceptual/semantic, syntactic, phonological and phonetic. They differ in various details, such as the amount of cascading and feedback in the network. These research traditions have begun to merge in recent years, leading to highly constructive experimentation. Currently, they are like two similar knives honing each other. A single pair of scissors is in the making.

Abstract

This commentary discusses whether abstract metrical frames are stored. For stress-assigning languages (e.g., Dutch and English), which have a dominant stress pattern, metrical frames are stored only for words that deviate from the default stress pattern. The majority of the words in these languages are produced without retrieving any independent syllabic or metrical frame.

Abstract

In their comment, Dell and O'Seaghdha (1991) adduced any effect on phonological probes for semantic alternatives to the activation of these probes in the lexical network. We argue that that interpretation is false and, in addition, that the model still cannot account for our data. Furthermore, and different from Dell and O'seaghda, we adduce semantic rebound to the lemma level, where it is so substantial that it should have shown up in our data. Finally, we question the function of feedback in a lexical network (other than eliciting speech errors) and discuss Dell's (1988) notion of a unified production-comprehension system.

Abstract

Speakers tend to repeat materials from previous talk. This tendency is experimentally established and manipulated in various question-answering situations. It is shown that a question's surface form can affect the format of the answer given, even if this form has little semantic or conversational consequence, as in the pair Q: (At) what time do you close. A: “(At)five o'clock.” Answerers tend to match the utterance to the prepositional (nonprepositional) form of the question. This “correspondence effect” may diminish or disappear when, following the question, additional verbal material is presented to the answerer. The experiments show that neither the articulatory buffer nor long-term memory is normally involved in this retention of recent speech. Retaining recent speech in working memory may fulfill a variety of functions for speaker and listener, among them the correct production and interpretation of surface anaphora. Reusing recent materials may, moreover, be more economical than regenerating speech anew from a semantic base, and thus contribute to fluency. But the realization of this strategy requires a production system in which linguistic formulation can take place relatively independent of, and parallel to, conceptual planning.

Abstract

The core issue in the 19-century sources of psycholinguistics was the question, "Where does language come from?'' This genetic perspective unified the study of the ontogenesis, the phylogenesis, the microgenesis, and to some extent the neurogenesis of language. This paper makes the point that this original perspective is still a valid and attractive one. It is exemplified by a discussion of the genesis of spoken words.

Abstract

This is a translation of Levinson and Brown (1994).

Abstract

Most approaches to spatial language have assumed that the simplest spatial notions are (after Piaget) topological and universal (containment, contiguity, proximity, support, represented as semantic primitives suchas IN, ON, UNDER, etc.). These concepts would be coded directly in language, above all in small closed classes suchas adpositions—thus providing a striking example of semantic categories as language-specific projections of universal conceptual notions. This idea, if correct, should have as a consequence that the semantic categories instantiated in spatial adpositions should be essentially uniform crosslinguistically. This article attempts to verify this possibility by comparing the semantics of spatial adpositions in nine unrelated languages, with the help of a standard elicitation procedure, thus producing a preliminary semantic typology of spatial adpositional systems. The differences between the languages turn out to be so significant as to be incompatible withstronger versions of the UNIVERSAL CONCEPTUAL CATEGORIES hypothesis. Rather, the language-specific spatial adposition meanings seem to emerge as compact subsets of an underlying semantic space, withcertain areas being statistical ATTRACTORS or FOCI. Moreover, a comparison of systems withdifferent degrees of complexity suggests the possibility of positing implicational hierarchies for spatial adpositions. But such hierarchies need to be treated as successive divisions of semantic space, as in recent treatments of basic color terms. This type of analysis appears to be a promising approachfor future work in semantic typology.

Abstract

Philosophers, psychologists, and linguists have argued that spatial conception is pivotal to cognition in general, providing a general, egocentric, and universal framework for cognition as well as metaphors for conceptualizing many other domains. But in an aboriginal community in Northern Queensland, a system of cardinal directions informs not only language, but also memory for arbitrary spatial arrays and directions. This work suggests that fundamental cognitive parameters, like the system of coding spatial locations, can vary cross-culturally, in line with the language spoken by a community. This opens up the prospect of a fruitful dialogue between anthropology and the cognitive sciences on the complex interaction between cultural and universal factors in the constitution of mind.

Abstract

In an earlier article (Levinson, 1987b), I raised the possibility that a Gricean theory of implicature might provide a systematic partial reduction of the Binding Conditions; the briefest of outlines is given in Section 2.1 below but the argumentation will be found in the earlier article. In this article I want, first, to show how that account might be further justified and extended, but then to introduce a radical alternative. This alternative uses the same pragmatic framework, but gives an account better adjusted to some languages. Finally, I shall attempt to show that both accounts can be combined by taking a diachronic perspective. The attraction of the combined account is that, suddenly, many facts about long-range reflexives and their associated logophoricity fall into place.

Abstract

Human communication displays a striking contrast between the diversity of languages and the universality of the principles underlying their use in conversation. Despite the importance of this interactional base, it is not obvious that it heavily imprints the structure of languages. However, a deep-time perspective suggests that early hominin communication was gestural, in line with all the other Hominidae. This gestural phase of early language development seems to have left its traces in the way in which spatial concepts, implemented in the hippocampus, provide organizing principles at the heart of grammar.

Abstract

This article argues for a gradient approach to word order, which treats word order preferences, both within and across languages, as a continuous variable. Word order variability should be regarded as a basic assumption, rather than as something exceptional. Although this approach follows naturally from the emergentist usage-based view of language, we argue that it can be beneficial for all frameworks and linguistic domains, including language acquisition, processing, typology, language contact, language evolution and change, and formal approaches. Gradient approaches have been very fruitful in some domains, such as language processing, but their potential is not fully realized yet. This may be due to practical reasons. We discuss the most pressing methodological challenges in corpus-based and experimental research of word order and propose some practical solutions.

Abstract

There remains some debate about whether beta power effects observed during sentence comprehension reflect ongoing syntactic unification operations (beta-syntax hypothesis), or instead reflect maintenance or updating of the sentence-level representation (beta-maintenance hypothesis). In this study, we used magnetoencephalography to investigate beta power neural dynamics while participants read relative clause sentences that were initially ambiguous between a subject- or an object-relative reading. An additional condition included a grammatical violation at the disambiguation point in the relative clause sentences. The beta-maintenance hypothesis predicts a decrease in beta power at the disambiguation point for unexpected (and less preferred) object-relative clause sentences and grammatical violations, as both signal a need to update the sentence-level representation. While the beta-syntax hypothesis also predicts a beta power decrease for grammatical violations due to a disruption of syntactic unification operations, it instead predicts an increase in beta power for the object-relative clause condition because syntactic unification at the point of disambiguation becomes more demanding. We observed decreased beta power for both the agreement violation and object-relative clause conditions in typical left hemisphere language regions, which provides compelling support for the beta-maintenance hypothesis. Mid-frontal theta power effects were also present for grammatical violations and object-relative clause sentences, suggesting that violations and unexpected sentence interpretations are registered as conflicts by the brain's domain-general error detection system.

Abstract

For shared book reading to be effective for language development, the adult and child need to be highly engaged. The current paper adopted a mixed-methods approach to investigate caregiver’s language-boosting behaviours and children’s engagement during shared book reading. The results revealed there were more instances of joint attention and caregiver’s use of prompts during moments of higher engagement. However, instances of most language-boosting behaviours were similar across episodes of higher and lower engagement. Qualitative analysis assessing the link between children’s engagement and caregiver’s use of speech acts, revealed that speech acts do seem to contribute to high engagement, in combination with other aspects of the interaction.

Abstract

Infants point for various motives. Classically, one such motive is declarative, to share attention and interest with adults to events. Recently, some researchers have questioned whether infants have this motivation. In the current study, an adult reacted to 12-month-olds' pointing in different ways, and infants' responses were observed. Results showed that when the adult shared attention and interest (i.e. alternated gaze and emoted), infants pointed more frequently across trials and tended to prolong each point – presumably to prolong the satisfying interaction. However, when the adult emoted to the infant alone or looked only to the event, infants pointed less across trials and repeated points more within trials – presumably in an attempt to establish joint attention. Results suggest that 12-month-olds point declaratively and understand that others have psychological states that can be directed and shared.

Abstract

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and reading disability (RD) are common highly heritable disorders of childhood, which frequently co-occur. Data from twin and family studies suggest that this overlap is, in part, due to shared genetic underpinnings. Here, we report the first genome-wide linkage analysis of measures of reading ability in children with ADHD, using a sample of 233 affected sibling pairs who previously participated in a genome-wide scan for susceptibility loci in ADHD. Quantitative trait locus (QTL) analysis of a composite reading factor defined from three highly correlated reading measures identified suggestive linkage (multipoint maximum lod score, MLS>2.2) in four chromosomal regions. Two regions (16p, 17q) overlap those implicated by our previous genome-wide scan for ADHD in the same sample: one region (2p) provides replication for an RD susceptibility locus, and one region (10q) falls approximately 35 cM from a modestly highlighted region in an independent genome-wide scan of siblings with ADHD. Investigation of an individual reading measure of Reading Recognition supported linkage to putative RD susceptibility regions on chromosome 8p (MLS=2.4) and 15q (MLS=1.38). Thus, the data support the existence of genetic factors that have pleiotropic effects on ADHD and reading ability--as suggested by shared linkages on 16p, 17q and possibly 10q--but also those that appear to be unique to reading--as indicated by linkages on 2p, 8p and 15q that coincide with those previously found in studies of RD. Our study also suggests that reading measures may represent useful phenotypes in ADHD research. The eventual identification of genes underlying these unique and shared linkages may increase our understanding of ADHD, RD and the relationship between the two.

Abstract

The intergenerational stability of auditory symbolic systems, such as music, is thought to rely on brain processes that allow the faithful transmission of complex sounds. Little is known about the functional and structural aspects of the human brain which support this ability, with a few studies pointing to the bilateral organization of auditory networks as a putative neural substrate. Here, we further tested this hypothesis by examining the role of left–right neuroanatomical asymmetries between auditory cortices. We collected neuroanatomical images from a large sample of participants (nonmusicians) and analyzed them with Freesurfer’s surface-based morphometry method. Weeks after scanning, the same individuals participated in a laboratory experiment that simulated music transmission: the signaling games. We found that high accuracy in the intergenerational transmission of an artificial tone system was associated with reduced rightward asymmetry of cortical thickness in Heschl’s sulcus. Our study suggests that the high-fidelity copying of melodic material may rely on the extent to which computational neuronal resources are distributed across hemispheres. Our data further support the role of interhemispheric brain organization in the cultural transmission and evolution of auditory symbolic systems.

Abstract

The posterior medial parietal cortex and the left prefrontal cortex have both been implicated in the recollection of past episodes. In order to clarify their functional significance, we performed this functional magnetic resonance imaging study, which employed event-related source memory and item recognition retrieval of words paired with corresponding imagined or viewed pictures. Our results suggest that episodic source memory is related to a functional network including the posterior precuneus and the left lateral prefrontal cortex. This network is activated during explicit retrieval of imagined pictures and results from the retrieval of item-context associations. This suggests that previously imagined pictures provide a context with which encoded words can be more strongly associated.

Abstract

Physiological data from a range of human populations living in different environments can provide valuable information for testing evolutionary hypotheses about human adaptation. By taking into account the effects of population history, phylogenetic comparative methods can help us determine whether variation results from selection due to particular environmental variables. These selective forces could even be due to cultural traits-which means that gene-culture co-evolution may be occurring. In this paper, we outline two examples of the use of these approaches to test adaptive hypotheses that explain global variation in two physiological traits: the first is lactose digestion capacity in adults, and the second is population sex-ratio at birth. We show that lower than average sex ratio at birth is associated with high fertility, and argue that global variation in sex ratio at birth has evolved as a response to the high physiological costs of producing boys in high fertility populations.

Abstract

The time course of spoken word recognition depends largely on the frequencies of a word and its competitors, or neighbors (similar-sounding words). However, variability in natural lexicons makes systematic analysis of frequency and neighbor similarity difficult. Artificial lexicons were used to achieve precise control over word frequency and phonological similarity. Eye tracking provided time course measures of lexical activation and competition (during spoken instructions to perform visually guided tasks) both during and after word learning, as a function of word frequency, neighbor type, and neighbor frequency. Apparent shifts from holistic to incremental competitor effects were observed in adults and neural network simulations, suggesting such shifts reflect general properties of learning rather than changes in the nature of lexical representations.

Abstract

Nyelv és/vagy evolúció: Lehetséges-e a nyelv evolúciós magyarázata? [Derek Bickerton: Nyelv és evolúció] (Magyari Lilla); Történelmi olvasókönyv az agyról [Charles G. Gross: Agy, látás, emlékezet. Mesék az idegtudomány történetéből] (Garab Edit Anna); Művészet vagy tudomány [Margitay Tihamér: Az érvelés mestersége. Érvelések elemzése, értékelése és kritikája] (Zemplén Gábor); Tényleg ésszerűek vagyunk? [Herbert Simon: Az ésszerűség szerepe az emberi életben] (Kardos Péter); Nemi különbségek a megismerésben [Doreen Kimura: Női agy, férfi agy]. (Hahn Noémi);

Abstract

Frames of reference are coordinate systems used to compute and specify the location of objects with respect to other objects. These have long been thought of as innate concepts, built into our neurocognition. However, recent work shows that the use of such frames in language, cognition and gesture varies crossculturally, and that children can acquire different systems with comparable ease. We argue that language can play a significant role in structuring, or restructuring, a domain as fundamental as spatial cognition. This suggests we need to rethink the relation between the neurocognitive underpinnings of spatial cognition and the concepts we use in everyday thinking, and, more generally, to work out how to account for cross-cultural cognitive diversity in core cognitive domains.

Abstract

Mental simulation is an important aspect of narrative reading. In a previous study, we found that gaze durations are differentially impacted by different kinds of mental simulation. Motor simulation, perceptual simulation, and mentalizing as elicited by literary short stories influenced eye movements in distinguishable ways (Mak & Willems, 2019). In the current study, we investigated the existence of a common neural locus for these different kinds of simulation. We additionally investigated whether individual differences during reading, as indexed by the eye movements, are reflected in domain-specific activations in the brain. We found a variety of brain areas activated by simulation-eliciting content, both modality-specific brain areas and a general simulation area. Individual variation in percent signal change in activated areas was related to measures of story appreciation as well as personal characteristics (i.e., transportability, perspective taking). Taken together, these findings suggest that mental simulation is supported by both domain-specific processes grounded in previous experiences, and by the neural mechanisms that underlie higher-order language processing (e.g., situation model building, event indexing, integration).

Abstract

The human experience is shaped by information from different perceptual channels, but it is still debated whether and how differential experience influences language use. To address this, we compared congenitally blind, blindfolded, and sighted people's descriptions of the same motion events experienced auditorily by all participants (i.e., via sound alone) and conveyed in speech and gesture. Comparison of blind and sighted participants to blindfolded participants helped us disentangle the effects of a lifetime experience of being blind versus the task-specific effects of experiencing a motion event by sound alone. Compared to sighted people, blind people's speech focused more on path and less on manner of motion, and encoded paths in a more segmented fashion using more landmarks and path verbs. Gestures followed the speech, such that blind people pointed to landmarks more and depicted manner less than sighted people. This suggests that visual experience affects how people express spatial events in the multimodal language and that blindness may enhance sensitivity to paths of motion due to changes in event construal. These findings have implications for the claims that language processes are deeply rooted in our sensory experiences.

Abstract

Each sensory modality has different affordances: vision has higher spatial acuity than audition, whereas audition has better temporal acuity. This may have consequences for the encoding of events and its subsequent multimodal language production—an issue that has received relatively little attention to date. In this study, we compared motion events presented as audio-only, visual-only, or multimodal (visual + audio) input and measured speech and co-speech gesture depicting path and manner of motion in Turkish. Input modality affected speech production. Speakers with audio-only input produced more path descriptions and fewer manner descriptions in speech compared to speakers who received visual input. In contrast, the type and frequency of gestures did not change across conditions. Path-only gestures dominated throughout. Our results suggest that while speech is more susceptible to auditory vs. visual input in encoding aspects of motion events, gesture is less sensitive to such differences.

Abstract

We investigated cross-modal influences between speech and sign in hearing bimodal bilinguals, proficient in a spoken and a sign language, and its consequences on visual attention during message preparation using eye-tracking. We focused on spatial expressions in which sign languages, unlike spoken languages, have a modality-driven preference to mention grounds (big objects) prior to figures (smaller objects). We compared hearing bimodal bilinguals’ spatial expressions and visual attention in Dutch and Dutch Sign Language (N = 18) to those of their hearing non-signing (N = 20) and deaf signing peers (N = 18). In speech, hearing bimodal bilinguals expressed more ground-first descriptions and fixated grounds more than hearing non-signers, showing influence from sign. In sign, they used as many ground-first descriptions as deaf signers and fixated grounds equally often, demonstrating no influence from speech. Cross-linguistic influence of word order preference and visual attention in hearing bimodal bilinguals appears to be one-directional modulated by modality-driven differences.

Abstract

The human capacity for acquiring speech and language must derive, at least in part, from the genome. In 2001, a study described the first case of a gene, FOXP2, which is thought to be implicated in our ability to acquire spoken language. In the present article, we discuss how this gene was discovered, what it might do, how it relates to other genes, and what it could tell us about the nature of speech and language development. We explain how FOXP2 could, without being specific to the brain or to our own species, still provide an invaluable entry-point into understanding the genetic cascades and neural pathways that contribute to our capacity for speech and language.

Abstract

Replication of linkage results for complex traits has been exceedingly difficult, owing in part to the inability to measure the precise underlying phenotype, small sample sizes, genetic heterogeneity, and statistical methods employed in analysis. Often, in any particular study, multiple correlated traits have been collected, yet these have been analyzed independently or, at most, in bivariate analyses. Theoretical arguments suggest that full multivariate analysis of all available traits should offer more power to detect linkage; however, this has not yet been evaluated on a genomewide scale. Here, we conduct multivariate genomewide analyses of quantitative-trait loci that influence reading- and language-related measures in families affected with developmental dyslexia. The results of these analyses are substantially clearer than those of previous univariate analyses of the same data set, helping to resolve a number of key issues. These outcomes highlight the relevance of multivariate analysis for complex disorders for dissection of linkage results in correlated traits. The approach employed here may aid positional cloning of susceptibility genes in a wide spectrum of complex traits.

Abstract

Gene duplication events can drive evolution by providing genetic material for new gene functions, and they create opportunities for diverse developmental strategies to emerge between species. To study the contribution of duplicated genes to human early development, we examined the evolution and function of NANOGP1, a tandem duplicate of the transcription factor NANOG. We found that NANOGP1 and NANOG have overlapping but distinct expression profiles, with high NANOGP1 expression restricted to early epiblast cells and naïve-state pluripotent stem cells. Sequence analysis and epitope-tagging revealed that NANOGP1 is protein coding with an intact homeobox domain. The duplication that created NANOGP1 occurred earlier in primate evolution than previously thought and has been retained only in great apes, whereas Old World monkeys have disabled the gene in different ways, including homeodomain point mutations. NANOGP1 is a strong inducer of naïve pluripotency; however, unlike NANOG, it is not required to maintain the undifferentiated status of human naïve pluripotent cells. By retaining expression, sequence and partial functional conservation with its ancestral copy, NANOGP1 exemplifies how gene duplication and subfunctionalisation can contribute to transcription factor activity in human pluripotency and development.

Abstract

We present a protocol to study naturalistic human communication using dual-EEG and audio-visual recordings. We describe preparatory steps for data collection including setup preparation, experiment design, and piloting. We then describe the data collection process in detail which consists of participant recruitment, experiment room preparation, and data collection. We also outline the kinds of research questions that can be addressed with the current protocol, including several analysis possibilities, from conversational to advanced time-frequency analyses.
For complete details on the use and execution of this protocol, please refer to Drijvers and Holler (2022).

Abstract

Individual differences in cognitive abilities are ubiquitous across the spectrum of proficient language users. Although speakers differ with regard to their memory capacity, ability for inhibiting distraction, and ability to shift between different processing levels, comprehension is generally successful. However, this does not mean it is identical across individuals; listeners and readers may rely on different processing strategies to exploit distributional information in the service of efficient understanding. In the following psycholinguistic reading experiment, we investigate potential sources of individual differences in the processing of co-occurring words. Participants read modifier-noun bigrams like absolute silence in a self-paced reading task. Backward transition probability (BTP) between the two lexemes was used to quantify the prominence of the bigram as a whole in comparison to the frequency of its parts. Of five individual difference measures (processing speed, verbal working memory, cognitive inhibition, global-local scope shifting, and personality), two proved to be significantly associated with the effect of BTP on reading times. Participants who could inhibit a distracting global environment in order to more efficiently retrieve a single part and those that preferred the local level in the shifting task showed greater effects of the co-occurrence probability of the parts. We conclude that some participants are more likely to retrieve bigrams via their parts and their co-occurrence statistics whereas others more readily retrieve the two words together as a single chunked unit.

Abstract

Iconicity in language is receiving increased attention from many fields, but our understanding of iconicity is only as good as the measures we use to quantify it. We collected iconicity measures for 304 Japanese words from English-speaking participants, using rating and guessing tasks. The words included ideophones (structurally marked depictive words) along with regular lexical items from similar semantic domains (e.g., fuwafuwa ‘fluffy’, jawarakai ‘soft’). The two measures correlated, speaking to their validity. However, ideophones received consistently higher iconicity ratings than other items, even when guessed at the same accuracies, suggesting the rating task is more sensitive to cues like structural markedness that frame words as iconic. These cues did not always guide participants to the meanings of ideophones in the guessing task, but they did make them more confident in their guesses, even when they were wrong. Consistently poor guessing results reflect the role different experiences play in shaping construals of iconicity. Using multiple measures in tandem allows us to explore the interplay between iconicity and these external factors. To facilitate this, we introduce a reproducible workflow for creating rating and guessing tasks from standardised wordlists, while also making improvements to the robustness, sensitivity and discriminability of previous approaches.

Abstract

Magnuson, McMurray, Tanenhaus, and Aslin [Cogn. Sci. 27 (2003) 285] suggest that they have evidence of lexical feedback in speech perception, and that this evidence thus challenges the purely feedforward Merge model [Behav. Brain Sci. 23 (2000) 299]. This evidence is open to an alternative explanation, however, one which preserves the assumption in Merge that there is no lexical-prelexical feedback during on-line speech processing. This explanation invokes the distinction between perceptual processing that occurs in the short term, as an utterance is heard, and processing that occurs over the longer term, for perceptual learning.

Abstract

Spoken word recognition consists of two major component processes. First, at the prelexical stage, an abstract description of the utterance is generated from the information in the speech signal. Second, at the lexical stage, this description is used to activate all the words stored in the mental lexicon which match the input. These multiple candidate words then compete with each other. We review evidence which suggests that positive (match) and negative (mismatch) information of both a segmental and a suprasegmental nature is used to constrain this activation and competition process. We then ask whether, in addition to the necessary influence of the prelexical stage on the lexical stage, there is also feedback from the lexicon to the prelexical level. In two phonetic categorization experiments, Dutch listeners were asked to label both syllable-initial and syllable-final ambiguous fricatives (e.g., sounds ranging from [f] to [s]) in the word–nonword series maf–mas, and the nonword–word series jaf–jas. They tended to label the sounds in a lexically consistent manner (i.e., consistent with the word endpoints of the series). These lexical effects became smaller in listeners’ slower responses, even when the listeners were put under pressure to respond as fast as possible. Our results challenge models of spoken word recognition in which feedback modulates the prelexical analysis of the component sounds of a word whenever that word is heard

Abstract

In 5 experiments, listeners heard words and nonwords, some cross-spliced so that they contained acoustic-phonetic mismatches. Performance was worse on mismatching than on matching items. Words cross-spliced with words and words cross-spliced with nonwords produced parallel results. However, in lexical decision and 1 of 3 phonetic decision experiments, performance on nonwords cross-spliced with words was poorer than on nonwords cross-spliced with nonwords. A gating study confirmed that there were misleading coarticulatory cues in the cross-spliced items; a sixth experiment showed that the earlier results were not due to interitem differences in the strength of these cues. Three models of phonetic decision making (the Race model, the TRACE model, and a postlexical model) did not explain the data. A new bottom-up model is outlined that accounts for the findings in terms of lexical involvement at a dedicated decision-making stage.

Abstract

Luthra, Peraza-Santiago, Beeson, Saltzman, Crinnion, and Magnuson (2021) present data from the lexically mediated compensation for coarticulation paradigm that they claim provides conclusive evidence in favor of top-down processing in speech perception. We argue here that this evidence does not support that conclusion. The findings are open to alternative explanations, and we give data in support of one of them (that there is an acoustic confound in the materials). Lexically mediated compensation for coarticulation thus remains elusive, while prior data from the paradigm instead challenge the idea that there is top-down processing in online speech recognition.

Abstract

On the basis of evidence from studies of the naming and reading of numerals, Ferrand (1999) argued that the naming of objects is slower than reading their names, due to a greater response uncertainty in naming than in reading, rather than to an obligatory conceptual preparation for naming, but not for reading. We manipulated the need for conceptual preparation, while keeping response uncertainty constant in the naming and reading of complex numerals. In Experiment 1, participants named three-digit Arabic numerals either as house numbers or clock times. House number naming latencies were determined mostly by morphophonological factors, such as morpheme frequency and the number of phonemes, whereas clock time naming latencies revealed an additional conceptual involvement. In Experiment 2, the numerals were presented in alphabetic format and had to be read aloud. Reading latencies were determined mostly by morphophonological factors in both modes. These results suggest that conceptual preparation, rather than response uncertainty, is responsible for the difference between naming and reading latencies.

Abstract

This study investigates how speakers of Dutch compute and produce relative time expressions. Naming digital clocks (e.g., 2:45, say ‘‘quarter to three’’) requires conceptual operations on the minute and hour information for the correct relative time expression. The interplay of these conceptual operations was investigated using a repetition priming paradigm. Participants named analog clocks (the primes) directly before naming digital clocks (the targets). The targets referred to the hour (e.g., 2:00), half past the hour (e.g., 2:30), or the coming hour (e.g., 2:45). The primes differed from the target in one or two hour and in five or ten minutes. Digital clock naming latencies were shorter with a five- than with a ten-min difference between prime and target, but the difference in hour had no effect. Moreover, the distance in minutes had only an effect for half past the hour and the coming hour, but not for the hour. These findings suggest that conceptual facilitation occurs when conceptual transformations are shared between prime and target in telling time.

Abstract

This paper aims to determine whether iconic tracing gestures produced while speaking constitute part of the speaker’s communicative intention. We used a picture description task in which speakers must communicate the spatial and color information of each picture to an interlocutor. By establishing the necessary minimal content of an intended message, we determined whether speech produced with concurrent gestures is less explicit than speech without gestures. We argue that a gesture must be communicatively intended if it expresses necessary information that was nevertheless omitted from speech. We found that speakers who produced iconic gestures representing spatial relations omitted more required spatial information from their descriptions than speakers who did not gesture. These results provide evidence that speakers intend these gestures to communicate. The results have implications for the cognitive architectures that underlie the production of gesture and speech.

Abstract

Scientific convergence is a phenomenon where the distance between hitherto distinct scientific fields narrows and the fields gradually overlap over time. It is creating important potential for research, development, and innovation. Although scientific convergence is crucial for the development of radically new technology, the identification of emerging scientific convergence is particularly difficult since the underlying knowledge flows are rather fuzzy and unstable in the early convergence stage. Nevertheless, novel scientific publications emerging at the intersection of different knowledge fields may reflect convergence processes. Thus, in this article, we exploit the growing number of research and digital libraries providing bibliographic metadata to propose an automated analysis of science dynamics. We utilize and adapt machine-learning methods (DeepWalk) to automatically learn a similarity measure between scientific fields from graphs constructed on bibliographic metadata. With a time-based perspective, we apply our approach to analyze the trajectories of evolving similarities between scientific fields. We validate the learned similarity measure by evaluating it within the well-explored case of cholesterol-lowering ingredients in which scientific convergence between the distinct scientific fields of nutrition and pharmaceuticals has partially taken place. Our results confirm that the similarity trajectories learned by our approach resemble the expected behavior, indicating that our approach may allow researchers and practitioners to detect and predict scientific convergence early.

Abstract

Spatial memory deficits are core features of aging-related changes in cognitive abilities. The neural correlates of these deficits are largely unknown. In the present study, we investigated the neural underpinnings of age-related differences in spatial memory by functional MRI using a navigational memory task with route encoding and route recognition conditions. We investigated 20 healthy young (18 - 29 years old) and 20 healthy old adults (53 - 78 years old) in a random effects analysis. Old subjects showed slightly poorer performance than young subjects. Compared to the control condition, route encoding and route recognition showed activation of the dorsal and ventral visual processing streams and the frontal eye fields in both groups of subjects. Compared to old adults, young subjects showed during route encoding stronger activations in the dorsal and the ventral visual processing stream (supramarginal gyrus and posterior fusiform/parahippocampal areas). In addition, young subjects showed weaker anterior parahippocampal activity during route recognition compared to the old group. In contrast, old compared to young subjects showed less suppressed activity in the left perisylvian region and the anterior cingulate cortex during route encoding. Our findings suggest that agerelated navigational memory deficits might be caused by less effective route encoding based on reduced posterior fusiform/parahippocampal and parietal functionality combined with diminished inhibition of perisylvian and anterior cingulate cortices correlated with less effective suppression of task-irrelevant information. In contrast, age differences in neural correlates of route recognition seem to be rather subtle. Old subjects might show a diminished familiarity signal during route recognition in the anterior parahippocampal region.

Abstract

According to Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer (1999) speakers generate the phonological and phonetic representations of successive syllables of a word in sequence and only begin to speak after having fully planned at least one complete phonological word. Therefore, speech onset latencies should be longer for long than for short words. We tested this prediction in four experiments in which Dutch participants named or categorized objects with monosyllabic or disyllabic names. Experiment 1 yielded a length effect on production latencies when objects with long and short names were tested in separate blocks, but not when they were mixed. Experiment 2 showed that the length effect was not due to a difference in the ease of object recognition. Experiment 3 replicated the results of Experiment 1 using a within-participants design. In Experiment 4, the long and short target words appeared in a phrasal context. In addition to the speech onset latencies, we obtained the viewing times for the target objects, which have been shown to depend on the time necessary to plan the form of the target names. We found word length effects for both dependent variables, but only when objects with short and long names were presented in separate blocks. We argue that in pure and mixed blocks speakers used different response deadlines, which they tried to meet by either generating the motor programs for one syllable or for all syllables of the word before speech onset. Computer simulations using WEAVER++ support this view.

Abstract

Earlier work has shown that speakers naming several objects usually look at each of them before naming them (e.g., Meyer, Sleiderink, & Levelt, 1998). In the present study, participants saw pictures and described them in utterances such as "The chair next to the cross is brown", where the colour of the first object was mentioned after another object had been mentioned. In Experiment 1, we examined whether the speakers would look at the first object (the chair) only once, before naming the object, or twice (before naming the object and before naming its colour). In Experiment 2, we examined whether speakers about to name the colour of the object would look at the object region again when the colour or the entire object had been removed while they were looking elsewhere. We found that speakers usually looked at the target object again before naming its colour, even when the colour was not displayed any more. Speakers were much less likely to fixate upon the target region when the object had been removed from view. We propose that the object contours may serve as a memory cue supporting the retrieval of the associated colour information. The results show that a speaker's eye movements in a picture description task, far from being random, depend on the available visual information and the content and structure of the planned utterance.

Abstract

Subjects named pictures while hearing distractor words that shared word-initial or word-final segments with the picture names or were unrelated to the picture names. The relative timing of distractor and picture presentation was varied. Compared with unrelated distractors, both types of related distractors facilitated picture naming under certain timing conditions. Begin-related distractors facilitated the naming responses if the shared segments began 150 ms before, at, or 150 ms after picture onset. By contrast, end-related distractors only facilitated the responses if the shared segments began at or 150 ms after picture onset. The results suggest that the phonological encoding of the beginning of a word is initiated before the encoding of its end.

Abstract

The production and interpretation of pronouns involves the identification of a mental referent and, in connected speech or text, a discourse antecedent. One of the few overt signals of the relationship between a pronoun and its antecedent is agreement in features such as number and grammatical gender. To examine how speakers create these signals, two experiments tested conceptual, lexical. and morphophonological accounts of pronoun production in Dutch. The experiments employed sentence completion and continuation tasks with materials containing noun phrases that conflicted or agreed in grammatical gender. The noun phrases served as the antecedents for demonstrative pronouns tin Experiment 1) and relative pronouns tin Experiment 2) that required gender marking. Gender errors were used to assess the nature of the processes that established the link between pronouns and antecedents. There were more gender errors when candidate antecedents conflicted in grammatical gender, counter to the predictions of a pure conceptual hypothesis. Gender marking on candidate antecedents did not change the magnitude of this interference effect, counter to the predictions of an overt-morphology hypothesis. Mirroring previous findings about pronoun comprehension, the results suggest that speakers of gender-marking languages call on specific linguistic information about antecedents in order to select pronouns and that the information consists of specifications of grammatical gender associated with the lemmas of words.

Abstract

Eight experiments were carried out investigating whether different parts of a syllable must be phonologically encoded in a specific order or whether they can be encoded in any order. A speech production task was used in which the subjects in each test trial had to utter one out of three or five response words as quickly as possible. In the so-called homogeneous condition these words were related in form, while in the heterogeneous condition they were unrelated in form. For monosyllabic response words shorter reaction times were obtained in the homogeneous than in the heterogeneous condition when the words had the same onset, but not when they had the same rhyme. Similarly, for disyllabic response words, the reaction times were shorter in the homogeneous than in the heterogeneous condition when the words shared only the onset of the first syllable, but not when they shared only its rhyme. Furthermore, a stronger facilitatory effect was observed when the words had the entire first syllable in common than when they only shared the onset, or the onset and the nucleus, but not the coda of the first syllable. These results suggest that syllables are phonologically encoded in two ordered steps, the first of which is dedicated to the onset and the second to the rhyme.

Abstract

Eye movements have been shown to reflect word recognition and language comprehension processes occurring during reading and auditory language comprehension. The present study examines whether the eye movements speakers make during object naming similarly reflect speech planning processes. In Experiment 1, speakers named object pairs saying, for instance, 'scooter and hat'. The objects were presented as ordinary line drawings or with partly dele:ed contours and had high or low frequency names. Contour type and frequency both significantly affected the mean naming latencies and the mean time spent looking at the objects. The frequency effects disappeared in Experiment 2, in which the participants categorized the objects instead of naming them. This suggests that the frequency effects of Experiment 1 arose during lexical retrieval. We conclude that eye movements during object naming indeed reflect linguistic planning processes and that the speakers' decision to move their eyes from one object to the next is contingent upon the retrieval of the phonological form of the object names.

Abstract

Turn-taking in everyday conversation is fast, with median latencies in corpora of conversational speech often reported to be under 300 ms. This seems like magic, given that experimental research on speech planning has shown that speakers need much more time to plan and produce even the shortest of utterances. This paper reviews how language scientists have combined linguistic analyses of conversations and experimental work to understand the skill of swift turn-taking and proposes a tentative solution to the riddle of fast turn-taking.

Abstract

While recent laboratory studies suggest that the use of competing languages is a driving force in foreign language (FL) attrition (i.e. forgetting), research on “real” attriters has failed to demonstrate
such a relationship. We addressed this issue in a large-scale longitudinal study, following German students throughout a study abroad in Spain and their first six months back in Germany. Monthly,
percentage-based frequency of use measures enabled a fine-grained description of language use.
L3 Spanish forgetting rates were indeed predicted by the quantity and quality of Spanish use, and
correlated negatively with L1 German and positively with L2 English letter fluency. Attrition rates
were furthermore influenced by prior Spanish proficiency, but not by motivation to maintain
Spanish or non-verbal long-term memory capacity. Overall, this study highlights the importance
of language use for FL retention and sheds light on the complex interplay between language
use and other determinants of attrition.

Abstract

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

Abstract

Affective behaviors enable social robots to not only establish better connections with humans but also serve as a tool for the robots to express their internal states. It has been well established that emotions are important to signal understanding in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). This work aims to harness the power of Large Language Models (LLM) and proposes an approach to control the affective behavior of robots. By interpreting emotion appraisal as an Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) tasks, we used GPT-3.5 to predict the emotion of a robot’s turn in real-time, using the dialogue history of the ongoing conversation. The robot signaled the predicted emotion using facial expressions. The model was evaluated in a within-subjects user study (N = 47) where the model-driven emotion generation was compared against conditions where the robot did not display any emotions and where it displayed incongruent emotions. The participants interacted with the robot by playing a card sorting game that was specifically designed to evoke emotions. The results indicated that the emotions were reliably generated by the LLM and the participants were able to perceive the robot’s emotions. It was found that the robot expressing congruent model-driven facial emotion expressions were perceived to be significantly more human-like, emotionally appropriate, and elicit a more positive impression. Participants also scored significantly better in the card sorting game when the robot displayed congruent facial expressions. From a technical perspective, the study shows that LLMs can be used to control the affective behavior of robots reliably in real-time. Additionally, our results could be used in devising novel human-robot interactions, making robots more effective in roles where emotional interaction is important, such as therapy, companionship, or customer service.

Abstract

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

Abstract

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

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

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

Conclusions
Although we identify increased prevalence of conditions like anxiety, depression and sleep disturbance, we confirm that the consequences of FOXP2 dysfunction remain relatively specific to speech disorder, as compared to other recently identified monogenic conditions associated with CAS. Thus, our findings reinforce that FOXP2 provides a valuable entrypoint for examining the neurobiological bases of speech disorder.

Abstract

In this study we introduce an information-theoretical formulation of the emergence of type- and token-based effects in morphological processing. We describe a probabilistic measure of the informational complexity of a word, its information residual, which encompasses the combined influences of the amount of information contained by the target word and the amount of information carried by its nested morphological paradigms. By means of re-analyses of previously published data on Dutch words we show that the information residual outperforms the combination of traditional token- and type-based counts in predicting response latencies in visual lexical decision, and at the same time provides a parsimonious account of inflectional, derivational, and compounding processes.

Abstract

In this paper, we show that both token and type-based effects in lexical processing can result from a single, token-based, system, and therefore, do not necessarily reflect different levels of processing. We report three Simple Recurrent Networks modeling Dutch past-tense formation. These networks show token-based frequency effects and type-based analogical effects closely matching the behavior of human participants when producing past-tense forms for both existing verbs and pseudo-verbs. The third network covers the full vocabulary of Dutch, without imposing predefined linguistic structure on the input or output words.

Abstract

Finnish has a very productive morphology in which a stem can give rise to several thousand words. This study presents a visual lexical decision experiment addressing the processing consequences of the huge productivity of Finnish morphology. The authors observed that in Finnish words with larger morphological families elicited shorter response latencies. However, in contrast to Dutch and Hebrew, it is not the complete morphological family of a complex Finnish word that codetermines response latencies but only the subset of words directly derived from the complex word itself. Comparisons with parallel experiments using translation equivalents in Dutch and Hebrew showed substantial cross-language predictivity of family size between Finnish and Dutch but not between Finnish and Hebrew, reflecting the different ways in which the Hebrew and Finnish morphological systems contribute to the semantic organization of concepts in the mental lexicon.

Abstract

Caregiver abstract talk during shared reading predicts preschool-age children’s vocabulary development. However, previous research has focused on level of abstraction with less consideration of the style of extratextual talk. Here, we investigated the relation between these two dimensions of extratextual talk, and their contributions to variance in children’s vocabulary skills. Caregiver level of abstraction was associated with an interactive reading style. Controlling for socioeconomic status and child age, high interactivity predicted children’s concurrent vocabulary skills whereas abstraction did not. Controlling for earlier vocabulary skills, neither dimension of the extratextual talk predicted later vocabulary. Theoretical and practical relevance are discussed.

Abstract

We describe the phenomenon of schwa-deletion in Hindi and how it is handled in the pronunciation component of a multilingual concatenative text-to-speech system. Each of the consonants in written Hindi is associated with an “inherent” schwa vowel which is not represented in the orthography. For instance, the Hindi word pronounced as [namak] (’salt’) is represented in the orthography using the consonantal characters for [n], [m], and [k]. Two main factors complicate the issue of schwa pronunciation in Hindi. First, not every schwa following a consonant is pronounced within the word. Second, in multimorphemic words, the presence of a morpheme boundary can block schwa deletion where it might otherwise occur. We propose a model for schwa-deletion which combines a general purpose schwa-deletion rule proposed in the linguistics literature (Ohala, 1983), with additional morphological analysis necessitated by the high frequency of compounds in our database. The system is implemented in the framework of finite-state transducer technology.

Abstract

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

Abstract

Specific language impairment (SLI) is defined as an unexplained failure to acquire normal language skills despite adequate intelligence and opportunity. We have reported elsewhere a full-genome scan in 98 nuclear families affected by this disorder, with the use of three quantitative traits of language ability (the expressive and receptive tests of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals and a test of nonsense word repetition). This screen implicated two quantitative trait loci, one on chromosome 16q (SLI1) and a second on chromosome 19q (SLI2). However, a second independent genome screen performed by another group, with the use of parametric linkage analyses in extended pedigrees, found little evidence for the involvement of either of these regions in SLI. To investigate these loci further, we have collected a second sample, consisting of 86 families (367 individuals, 174 independent sib pairs), all with probands whose language skills are ⩾1.5 SD below the mean for their age. Haseman-Elston linkage analysis resulted in a maximum LOD score (MLS) of 2.84 on chromosome 16 and an MLS of 2.31 on chromosome 19, both of which represent significant linkage at the 2% level. Amalgamation of the wave 2 sample with the cohort used for the genome screen generated a total of 184 families (840 individuals, 393 independent sib pairs). Analysis of linkage within this pooled group strengthened the evidence for linkage at SLI1 and yielded a highly significant LOD score (MLS = 7.46, interval empirical P<.0004). Furthermore, linkage at the same locus was also demonstrated to three reading-related measures (basic reading [MLS = 1.49], spelling [MLS = 2.67], and reading comprehension [MLS = 1.99] subtests of the Wechsler Objectives Reading Dimensions).

Abstract

The reading process depends both on the text and on the reader. When we read a text, propositions in the current input are matched to propositions in the memory representation of the previous discourse but also to knowledge structures in long‐term memory. Therefore, memory‐based text processing refers both to the bottom‐up processing of the text and to the top‐down activation of the reader's knowledge. In this article, we focus on the role of cognitive structures in the reader's knowledge. We argue that causality is an important category in structuring human knowledge and that this property has consequences for text processing. Some research is discussed that illustrates that the more the information in the text reflects causal categories, the more easily the information is processed.

Abstract

This study demonstrates that listeners use lexical knowledge in perceptual learning of speech sounds. Dutch listeners first made lexical decisions on Dutch words and nonwords. The final fricative of 20 critical words had been replaced by an ambiguous sound, between [f] and [s]. One group of listeners heard ambiguous [f]-final words (e.g., [WI tlo?], from witlof, chicory) and unambiguous [s]-final words (e.g., naaldbos, pine forest). Another group heard the reverse (e.g., ambiguous [na:ldbo?], unambiguous witlof). Listeners who had heard [?] in [f]-final words were subsequently more likely to categorize ambiguous sounds on an [f]–[s] continuum as [f] than those who heard [?] in [s]-final words. Control conditions ruled out alternative explanations based on selective adaptation and contrast. Lexical information can thus be used to train categorization of speech. This use of lexical information differs from the on-line lexical feedback embodied in interactive models of speech perception. In contrast to on-line feedback, lexical feedback for learning is of benefit to spoken word recognition (e.g., in adapting to a newly encountered dialect).

Abstract

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

Abstract

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

Abstract

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

Abstract

Over the past two decades, the study of resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging has revealed that functional connectivity within and between networks is linked to cognitive states and pathologies. However, the white matter connections supporting this connectivity remain only partially described. We developed a method to jointly map the white and grey matter contributing to each resting-state network (RSN). Using the Human Connectome Project, we generated an atlas of 30 RSNs. The method also highlighted the overlap between networks, which revealed that most of the brain’s white matter (89%) is shared between multiple RSNs, with 16% shared by at least 7 RSNs. These overlaps, especially the existence of regions shared by numerous networks, suggest that white matter lesions in these areas might strongly impact the communication within networks. We provide an atlas and an open-source software to explore the joint contribution of white and grey matter to RSNs and facilitate the study of the impact of white matter damage to these networks. In a first application of the software with clinical data, we were able to link stroke patients and impacted RSNs, showing that their symptoms aligned well with the estimated functions of the networks.

Abstract

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