Publications

Abstract

The essential insight of speech act theory was that when we use language, we perform actions—in a more modern parlance, core language use in interaction is a form of joint action. Over the last thirty years, speech acts have been relatively neglected in linguistic pragmatics, although important work has been done especially in conversation analysis. Here we review the core issues—the identifying characteristics, the degree of universality, the problem of multiple functions, and the puzzle of speech act recognition. Special attention is drawn to the role of conversation structure, probabilistic linguistic cues, and plan or sequence inference in speech act recognition, and to the centrality of deep recursive structures in sequences of speech acts in conversation

Abstract

Wearing the hat of a cognitive anthropologist rather than an historian, I will try to amplify the ideas of Renn’s cited above. I argue that a particular subclass of material objects, namely “cognitive artifacts,” involves a close coupling of mind and artifact that acts like a brain prosthesis. Simple cognitive artifacts are external objects that act as aids to internal
computation, and not all cultures have extended inventories of these. Cognitive artifacts in this sense (e.g., calculating or measuring devices) have clearly played a central role in the history of science. But the notion can be widened to take in less material externalizations of cognition, like writing and language itself. A critical question here is how and why this close coupling of internal computation and external device actually works, a rather neglected question to which I’ll suggest some answers.

Abstract

Large language models that exhibit instruction-following behaviour represent one of the biggest recent upheavals in conversational interfaces, a trend in large part fuelled by the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT, a proprietary large language model for text generation fine-tuned through reinforcement learning from human feedback (LLM+RLHF). We review the risks of relying on proprietary software and survey the first crop of open-source projects of comparable architecture and functionality. The main contribution of this paper is to show that openness is differentiated, and to offer scientific documentation of degrees of openness in this fast-moving field. We evaluate projects in terms of openness of code, training data, model weights, RLHF data, licensing, scientific documentation, and access methods. We find that while there is a fast-growing list of projects billing themselves as 'open source', many inherit undocumented data of dubious legality, few share the all-important instruction-tuning (a key site where human labour is involved), and careful scientific documentation is exceedingly rare. Degrees of openness are relevant to fairness and accountability at all points, from data collection and curation to model architecture, and from training and fine-tuning to release and deployment.

Abstract

Speech recognition systems are a key intermediary in voice-driven human-computer interaction. Although speech recognition works well for pristine monologic audio, real-life use cases in open-ended interactive settings still present many challenges. We argue that timing is mission-critical for dialogue systems, and evaluate 5 major commercial ASR systems for their conversational and multilingual support. We find that word error rates for natural conversational data in 6 languages remain abysmal, and that overlap remains a key challenge (study 1). This impacts especially the recognition of conversational words (study 2), and in turn has dire consequences for downstream intent recognition (study 3). Our findings help to evaluate the current state of conversational ASR, contribute towards multidimensional error analysis and evaluation, and identify phenomena that need most attention on the way to build robust interactive speech technologies.

Abstract

Previous research has shown that repeated interactions can cause iconicity in signals to reduce. However, data from several recent studies has shown the opposite trend: an increase in iconicity as the result of repeated interactions. Here, we discuss whether signals may become less or more iconic as a result of the modality used to produce them. We review several recent experimental results before presenting new data from multi-modal signals, where visual input creates audio feedback. Our results show that the growth in iconicity present in the audio information may come at a cost to iconicity in the visual information. Our results have implications for how we think about and measure iconicity in artificial signalling experiments. Further, we discuss how iconicity in real world speech may stem from auditory, kinetic or visual information, but iconicity in these different modalities may conflict.

Abstract

Synaesthesia is a condition in which stimulation of one sensory modality (e.g. hearing) causes additional experiences in a second, unstimulated modality (e.g. seeing colours). The goal of this task is to explore the types (and incidence) of synaesthesia in different cultures. Two simple tests can ascertain the existence of synaesthesia in your community.

Abstract

The project that we describe in this chapter has the theme ‘Language of the senses’. This theme is
based on the research of Asifa Majid and her team regarding the influence of language and culture on
sensory perception. The chapter consists of two sections. Section 2.1 describes how different sensory
perceptions are spoken of in different languages. Teachers can use this section as substantive preparation
before they launch this theme in the classroom. Section 2.2 describes how teachers can handle
this theme in accordance with the seven phases of inquiry-based learning. Chapter 1, in which the
general guideline of the seven phases is described, forms the basis for this. We therefore recommend
the use of chapter 1 as the starting point for the execution of a project in the classroom. This chapter
provides the thematic additions.

Abstract

Taal der zintuigen gaat over de invloed van taal en cultuur op zintuiglijke waarnemingen. Hoe omschrijf je wat je ziet, voelt, proeft of ruikt? In sommige culturen zijn er veel verschillende woorden voor kleur, in andere culturen juist weer heel weinig. Worden we geboren met deze verschillende kleurgroepen? En bepaalt hoe je ergens over praat ook wat je waarneemt?

Abstract

Speech rate is known to modulate perception of temporally ambiguous speech sounds. For instance, a vowel may be perceived as short when the immediate speech context is slow, but as long when the context is fast. Yet, effects of long-term tracking of speech rate are largely unexplored. Two experiments tested whether long-term tracking of rate influences perception of the temporal Dutch vowel contrast /ɑ/-/a:/. In Experiment 1, one low-rate group listened to 'neutral' rate speech from talker A and to slow speech from talker B. Another high-rate group was exposed to the same neutral speech from A, but to fast speech from B. Between-group comparison of the 'neutral' trials revealed that the low-rate group reported a higher proportion of /a:/ in A's 'neutral' speech, indicating that A sounded faster when B was slow. Experiment 2 tested whether one's own speech rate also contributes to effects of long-term tracking of rate. Here, talker B's speech was replaced by playback of participants' own fast or slow speech. No evidence was found that one's own voice affected perception of talker A in larger speech contexts. These results carry implications for our understanding of the mechanisms involved in rate-dependent speech perception and of dialogue.

Abstract

The goal of the presented study was to investigate the use of coarticulatory vowel nasalization in lexical access by native speakers of American English. In particular, we compare the use of coart culatory place of articulation cues to that of coarticulatory vowel nasalization. Previous research on lexical access has shown that listeners use cues to the place of articulation of a postvocalic stop in the preceding vowel. However, vowel nasalization as cue to an upcoming nasal consonant has been argued to be a more complex phenomenon. In order to establish whether coarticulatory vowel nasalization aides in the process of lexical access in the same way as place of articulation cues do, we conducted two perception experiments: an off-line 2AFC discrimination task and an on-line eyetracking study using the visual world paradigm. The results of our study suggest that listeners are indeed able to use vowel nasalization in similar ways to place of articulation information, and that both types of cues aide in lexical access.

Abstract

The results of a word-spotting experiment are presented in which Dutch listeners tried to spot different types of bisyllabic Dutch words embedded in different types of nonsense contexts. Embedded verbs were not reliably harder to spot than embedded nouns; this suggests that nouns and verbs are recognised via the same basic processes. Iambic words were no harder to spot than trochaic words, suggesting that trochaic words are not in principle easier to recognise than iambic words. Words were harder to spot in consonantal contexts (i.e., contexts which themselves could not be words) than in longer contexts which contained at least one vowel (i.e., contexts which, though not words, were possible words of Dutch). A control experiment showed that this difference was not due to acoustic differences between the words in each context. The results support the claim that spoken-word recognition is sensitive to the viability of sound sequences as possible words.

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of semantic association norms for German nouns. In contrast to prior studies, we not only collected associations elicited by written representations of target objects but also by their pictorial representations. In a first analysis, we identified systematic differences in the type and distribution of associate responses for the two presentation forms. In a second analysis, we applied a soft cluster analysis to the collected target-response pairs. We subsequently used the clustering to predict noun ambiguity and to discriminate senses in our target nouns.

Abstract

The goal of speech perception is understanding a speaker's message. To achieve this, listeners must recognize the words that comprise a spoken utterance. This in turn implies distinguishing these words from other minimally different words (e.g., word from bird, etc.), and this involves making phonemic distinctions. The article summarizes research on the perception of phonemic distinctions, on how listeners cope with the continuity and variability of speech signals, and on how phonemic information is mapped onto the representations of words. Particular attention is paid to theories of speech perception and word recognition.

Abstract

Learning how words refer to aspects of the environment is a complex task, but one that is supported by numerous cues within the environment which constrain the possibilities for matching words to their intended referents. In this paper we tested the predictions of a computational model of multiple cue integration for word learning, that predicted variation in the presence of cues provides an optimal learning situation. In a cross-situational learning task with adult participants, we varied the reliability of presence of distributional, prosodic, and gestural cues. We found that the best learning occurred when cues were often present, but not always. The effect of variability increased the salience of individual cues for the learner, but resulted in robust learning that was not vulnerable to individual cues’ presence or absence. Thus, variability of multiple cues in the language-learning environment provided the optimal circumstances for word learning.

Abstract

Corpus linguistics and language documentation are usually considered separate subdisciplines within linguistics, having developed from different traditions and often operating on different scales, but the authors will suggest that there are commonalities to the two: both aim to represent language use in a community, and both are concerned with managing digital data. The authors propose that the development of the Australian National Corpus (AusNC) be guided by the experience of language documentation in the management of multimodal digital data and its annotation, and in ethical issues pertaining to making the data accessible. This would allow an AusNC that is distributed, multimodal, and multilingual, with holdings of text, audio, and video data distributed across multiple institutions; and including Indigenous, sign, and migrant community languages. An audit of language material held by Australian institutions and individuals is necessary to gauge the diversity and volume of possible content, and to inform common technical standards.

Abstract

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

Abstract

The present study examines young children's uses of semantically specific and general relational containment terms (e.g. in, enter) in Hindi and Tzeltal, and the extent to which their usage patterns are influenced by input frequency. We hypothesize that if children have a preference for relational terms that are semantically specific, this will be reflected in early acquisition of more semantically specific expressions and underextension of semantically general ones, regardless of the distributional patterns of use of these terms in the input. Our findings however show a strong role for input frequency in guiding children's patterns of use of containment terms in the two languages. Yet language-specific lexicalization patterns play a role as well, since object-specific containment verbs are used as early as the semantically general 'enter' verb by children acquiring Tzeltal.

Abstract

The human language processor is conceived as a system that consists of several interrelated subsystems. Each subsystem performs a specific task in the complex process of language comprehension and production. A subsystem receives a particular input, performs certain specific operations on this input and yields a particular output. The subsystems can be characterized in terms of the transformations that relate the input representations to the output representations. An important issue in describing the language processing system is to identify the subsystems and to specify the relations between the subsystems. These relations can be conceived in two different ways. In one conception the subsystems are autonomous. They are related to each other only by the input-output channels. The operations in one subsystem are not affected by another system. The subsystems are modular, that is they are independent. In the other conception, the different subsystems influence each other. A subsystem affects the processes in another subsystem. In this conception there is an interaction between the subsystems.

Abstract

This paper describes recent experimental evidence which shows that models of spoken word recognition must incorporate both inhibition between competing lexical candidates and a sensitivity to metrical cues to lexical segmentation. A new version of the Shortlist [1][2] model incorporating the Metrical Segmentation Strategy [3] provides a detailed simulation of the data.

Abstract

Phonetic convergence—i.e., adapting one’s speech
towards that of an interlocutor—has been shown
to occur in human-human conversations as well as
human-machine interactions. Here, we investigate
the hypothesis that human-to-robot convergence is
influenced by the human’s perception of the robot
and by the conversation’s topic. We conducted a
within-subjects experiment in which 33 participants
interacted with two robots differing in their eye gaze
behavior—one looked constantly at the participant;
the other produced gaze aversions, similarly to a
human’s behavior. Additionally, the robot asked
questions with increasing intimacy levels.
We observed that the speakers tended to converge
on F0 to the robots. However, this convergence
to the robots was not modulated by how the
speakers perceived them or by the topic’s intimacy.
Interestingly, speakers produced lower F0 means
when talking about more intimate topics. We
discuss these findings in terms of current theories of
conversational convergence.

Abstract

Sign languages stand out in that there is high prevalence of
conventionalised linguistic forms that map directly to their
referent (i.e., iconic). Hearing adults show low performance
when asked to guess the meaning of iconic signs suggesting
that their iconic features are largely inaccessible to them.
However, it has not been investigated whether speakers’
gestures, which also share the property of iconicity, may
assist non-signers in guessing the meaning of signs. Results
from a pantomime generation task (Study 1) show that
speakers’ gestures exhibit a high degree of systematicity, and
share different degrees of form overlap with signs (full,
partial, and no overlap). Study 2 shows that signs with full
and partial overlap are more accurately guessed and are
assigned higher iconicity ratings than signs with no overlap.
Deaf and hearing adults converge in their iconic depictions
for some concepts due to the shared conceptual knowledge
and manual-visual modality.

Abstract

Most research focuses function of gesture independent of its link to the speech it accompanies and the coexpressive functions it has together with speech. This chapter instead approaches gesture in relation to its communicative function in relation to speech, and demonstrates how it is shaped by the linguistic encoding of a speaker’s message. Drawing on crosslinguistic research with adults and children as well as bilinguals on iconic/pointing gesture production it shows that the specific language speakers use modulates the rate and the shape of the iconic gesture production of the same events. The findings challenge the claims aiming to understand gesture’s function for “thinking only” in adults and during development.

Abstract

Dutch and Spanish differ in how predictable the stress pattern is as a function of the segmental content: it is correlated with syllable weight in Dutch but not in Spanish. In the present study, two experiments were run to compare the abilities of Dutch and Spanish speakers to separately process segmental and stress information. It was predicted that the Spanish speakers would have more difficulty focusing on the segments and ignoring the stress pattern than the Dutch speakers. The task was a speeded classification task on CVCV syllables, with blocks of trials in which the stress pattern could vary versus blocks in which it was fixed. First, we found interference due to stress variability in both languages, suggesting that the processing of segmental information cannot be performed independently of stress. Second, the effect was larger for Spanish than for Dutch, suggesting that that the degree of interference from stress variation may be partially mitigated by the predictability of stress placement in the language.

Abstract

In this paper we try to contribute to the body of knowledge about the acquisition of English epistemic modal verbs (e.g. Mary may/has to be at school). Semantically, these verbs encode possibility or necessity with respect to available evidence. Pragmatically, the use of epistemic modals often gives rise to scalar conversational inferences (Mary may be at school -> Mary doesn’t have to be at school). The acquisition of epistemic modals is challenging for children on both these levels. In this paper, we present findings from two studies which were conducted with 5-year-old children and adults. Our findings, unlike previous work, show that 5-yr-olds have mastered epistemic modal semantics, including the notions of necessity and possibility. However, they are still in the process of acquiring epistemic modal pragmatics.

Abstract

The advent of psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic methodologies has provided new insights into theories of language acquisition. Sequential multilingualism is no exception, and some of the most recent work on the subject has incorporated a particular focus on language processing. This chapter surveys some of the work on the processing of lexical and morphosyntactic aspects of third or further languages, with different offline and online methodologies. We also discuss how, while increasingly sophisticated techniques and experimental designs have improved our understanding of third language acquisition and processing, simpler but clever designs can answer pressing questions in our theoretical debate. We provide examples of both sophistication and clever simplicity in experimental design, and argue that the field would benefit from incorporating a combination of both concepts into future work.

Abstract

En este artículo se desarrolla un método automático de segmentación de fonemas no supervisado. Este método utiliza el algoritmo de agrupación de máximo margen [1] para realizar segmentación de fonemas sobre habla continua sin necesidad de información a priori para el entrenamiento del sistema.

Abstract

This paper examines the use of iconic words in early conversations between children and caregivers. The longitudinal data include a span of six observations of 35 children-parent dyads in the same semi-structured activity. Our findings show that children’s speech initially has a high proportion of iconic words, and over time, these words become diluted by an increase of arbitrary words. Parents’ speech is also initially high in iconic words, with a decrease in the proportion of iconic words over time – in this case driven by the use of fewer iconic words. The level and development of iconicity are related to individual differences in the children’s cognitive skills. Our findings fit with the hypothesis that iconicity facilitates early word learning and may play an important role in learning to produce new words.

Abstract

Literacy and education represent essential aspects of contemporary society and subserve important aspects of socialization and cultural transmission. The study of illiterate subjects represents one approach to investigate the interactions between neurobiological and cultural factors in cognitive development, individual learning, and their influence on the functional organization of the brain. In this chapter we review some recent cognitive, neuroanatomic, and functional neuroimaging results indicating that formal education influences important aspects of the human brain. Taken together this provides strong support for the idea that the brain is modulated by literacy and formal education, which in turn change the brains capacity to interact with its environment, including the individual's contemporary culture. In other words, the individual is able to participate in, interact with, and actively contribute to the process of cultural transmission in new ways through acquired cognitive skills.

Abstract

This study investigates whether the acoustic durations of derivational affixes in Dutch are affected by the frequency of the word they occur in. In a word naming experiment, subjects were presented with a large number of words containing one of the affixes ge-, ver-, ont, or -lijk. Their responses were recorded on DAT tapes, and the durations of the affixes were measured using Automatic Speech Recognition technology. To investigate whether frequency also affected durations when speech rate was high, the presentation rate of the stimuli was varied. The results show that a higher frequency of the word as a whole led to shorter acoustic realizations for all affixes. Furthermore, affixes became shorter as the presentation rate of the stimuli increased. There was no interaction between word frequency and presentation rate, suggesting that the frequency effect also applies in situations in which the speed of articulation is very high.

Abstract

A key challenge for cognitive neuroscience is to decipher the representational schemes of the brain. A recent class of decoding algorithms for fMRI data, stimulus-feature-based encoding models, is becoming increasingly popular for inferring the dimensions of neural representational spaces from stimulus-feature spaces. We argue that such inferences are not always valid, because decoding can occur even if the neural representational space and the stimulus-feature space use different representational schemes. This can happen when there is a systematic mapping between them. In a simulation, we successfully decoded the binary representation of numbers from their decimal features. Since binary and decimal number systems use different representations, we cannot conclude that the binary representation encodes decimal features. The same argument applies to the decoding of neural patterns from stimulus-feature spaces and we urge caution in inferring the nature of the neural code from such methods. We discuss ways to overcome these inferential limitations.

Abstract

A classic discussion about visual imagery is whether it affords reinterpretation, like discovering two interpretations in the duck/rabbit illustration. Recent findings converge on reinterpretation being possible in visual imagery, suggesting functional equivalence with pictorial representations. However, it is unclear whether such reinterpretations are necessarily a visual-pictorial achievement. To assess this, 68 participants were briefly presented 2-d ambiguous figures. One figure was presented visually, the other via manual touch alone. Afterwards participants mentally rotated the memorized figures as to discover a novel interpretation. A portion (20.6%) of the participants detected a novel interpretation in visual imagery, replicating previous research. Strikingly, 23.6% of participants were able to reinterpret figures they had only felt. That reinterpretation truly involved haptic processes was further supported, as some participants performed co-thought gestures on an imagined figure during retrieval. These results are promising for further development of an Enactivist approach to imagination.

Abstract

It has long been hypothesised that the human faculty to acquire a language is in some way encoded in our genetic program. However, only recently has genetic evidence been available to begin to substantiate the presumed genetic basis of language. Here we review the first data from molecular genetic studies showing association between gene variants and language disorders (specific language impairment, speech sound disorder, developmental dyslexia), we discuss the biological function of these genes, and we further speculate on the more general question of how the human genome builds a brain that can learn a language.

Abstract

The structural design features of human language emerge in the process of cultural evolution, shaping languages over the course of communication, learning, and transmission. What role does this leave biological evolution? This chapter highlights the biological bases and preconditions that underlie the particular type of prosocial behaviours and cognitive inference abilities that are required for languages to emerge via cultural evolution to begin with.

Abstract

LEXUS and ViCoS: from lexicon to conceptual spaces LEXUS is a web-based lexicon tool and the knowledge space software ViCoS is an extension of LEXUS, allowing users to create relations between objects in and across lexica. LEXUS and ViCoS are part of the Language Archiving Technology software, developed at the MPI for Psycholinguistics to archive and enrich linguistic resources collected in the framework of language documentation projects. LEXUS is of primary interest for language documentation, offering the possibility to not just create a digital dictionary, but additionally it allows the creation of multi-media encyclopedic lexica. ViCoS provides an interface between the lexical space and the ontological space. Its approach permits users to model a world of concepts and their interrelations based on categorization patterns made by the speech community. We describe the LEXUS and ViCoS functionalities using three cases from DoBeS language documentation projects: (1) Marquesan The Marquesan lexicon was initially created in Toolbox and imported into LEXUS using the Toolbox import functionality. The lexicon is enriched with multi-media to illustrate the meaning of the words in its cultural environment. Members of the speech community consider words as keys to access and describe relevant parts of their life and traditions. Their understanding of words is best described by the various associations they evoke rather than in terms of any formal theory of meaning. Using ViCoS a knowledge space of related concepts is being created. (2) Kola-Sámi Two lexica are being created in LEXUS: RuSaDic lexicon is a Russian-Kildin wordlist in which the entries are of relative limited structure and content. SaRuDiC is a more complex structured lexicon with much richer content, including multi-media fragments and derivations. Using ViCoS we have created a connection between the two lexica, so that speakers who are familiair with Russian and wish to revitalize their Kildin can enter the lexicon through the RuSaDic and from there approach the informative SaRuDic. Similary we will create relations from the two lexica to external open databases, like e.g. Álgu. (3) Beaver A speaker database including kinship relations has been created and the database has been imported into LEXUS. In the LEXUS views the relations for individual speakers are being displayed. Using ViCoS the relational information from the database will be extracted to form a kisnhip relation space with specific relation types, like e.g 'mother-of'. The whole set of relations from the database can be displayed in one ViCoS relation window, and zoom functionality is available.

Abstract

Relatively little work has examined the function of gaze in interaction. Previous research has mainly addressed issues such as next speaker selection (e.g. Lerner 2003) or engagement and disengagement in the conversation (Goodwin 1981). It has looked for gaze behavior in relation to the roles participants are enacting locally, (e.g., speaker or hearer) and in relation to the unit “turn” in the turn taking system (Goodwin 1980, 1981; Kendon 1967). In his seminal work Kendon (1967) claimed that “there is a very clear and quite consistent pattern, namely, that [the speaker] tends to look away as he begins a long utterance, and in many cases somewhat in advance of it; and that he looks up at his interlocutor as the end of the long utterance approaches, usually during the last phase, and he continues to look thereafter.” Goodwin (Goodwin 1980) introducing the listener into the picture proposed the following two rules: Rule1: A speaker should obtain the gaze of his recipient during the course of a turn of talk. Rule2: a recipient should be gazing at the speaker when the speaker is gazing at the hearer. Rossano’s work (2005) has suggested the possibility of a different level of order for gaze in interaction: the sequential level. In particular he found that gaze withdrawal after sustained mutual gaze tends to occur at sequence possible completion and if both participants withdraw the sequence is complete. By sequence here we refer to a unit that is structured around the notion of adjacency pair. The latter refers to two turns uttered by different speakers orderly organized (first part and second part) and pair type related (greeting-greeting, question-answer). These two turns are related by conditional relevance (Schegloff 1968) that is to say that the first part requires the production of the second and the absence of the latter is noticeable and accountable. Question-anwers are very typical examples of adjacency pairs. In this paper we compare the use of gaze in question-answer sequences in three different populations: Italians, speakers of Mayan Tzeltal (Mexico) and speakers of Yeli Ndye (Russel Island, Papua New Guinea). Relying mainly on dyadic interactions and ordinary conversation we will provide a comparison of the occurrence of gaze in each turn (to compare with the claims of Goodwin and Kendon) and we will describe whether gaze has any effect on the other participant response and whether it persists also during the answer. The three languages and cultures that will be compared here belong to three different continents and have been previously described as potentially following opposite rules: for speakers of Italian and Yeli Ndye unproblematic and preferred engagement of mutual gaze while for speakers of Tzeltal strong mutual gaze avoidance. This paper tries to provide an accurate description of their gaze behavior in this specific type of sequential conversation.

Abstract

One of the most conspicuous ways in which people distribute agency among each other is by asking another for help. Natural languages give people a range of forms to do this, the distinctions among which have consequences for how agency is distributed. Forms such as imperatives (e.g. ‘pass the salt’) and recurrent types of interrogatives (e.g. ‘can you pass the salt?’) designate another person as the doer of the action. In contrast to this, impersonal deontic statements (e.g. ‘it is necessary to get the salt’) express the need for an action without tying it to any particular individual. This can generate interactions in which the identity of the doer must be sorted out among participants, allowing us to observe the distribution of agency in vivo. The case of impersonal deontic statements demonstrates the importance of grammar as a resource for managing human action and sociality.

Abstract

The use of the imperative for requesting has been mostly explained on the basis of estimations of social distance, relative power, and entitlement. More recent research, however, has identified other selection factors to do with the functional and sequential relation of the action requested to the trajectory of the ongoing interaction. In everyday activities among family and friends, the imperative is typically warranted by an earlier commitment of the requestee to a joint project or shared goal which the action requested contributes to. The chapter argues this to be the primary use of the imperative for requesting in Italian informal interaction, and distinguishes it from other uses of the imperative that do not conform to the predominant pattern. These other uses are of two kinds: (i) secondary, that is, less frequent and formally marked imperatives that still orient to social-interactional conditions supporting an expectation of compliance, and (ii) deviant, where the imperative is selected in deliberate violation of the social-interactional conditions that normally support it, attracting special attention and accomplishing more than just requesting. This study extends prior findings on the functional distribution of imperative requests and makes a point of relating and classifying distinct uses of a same form of action, offering new insights into more general aspects of language use such as markedness and normativity.

Abstract

Little is known about cultural differences in interactional practices with infants. The goal of this task is to document the nature and emergence of caregiver-infant interaction/ communication in different cultures. There are two tasks: Task 1 – a brief documentation about the culture under investigation with respect to infant-caregiver interaction and parental beliefs. Task 2 – the “decorated room”, a task designed to elicit infant and caregiver.

Abstract

Children’s ability to share attention with another social partner (i.e., joint attention) has been found to support language development. Despite the large amount of research examining the effects of joint attention on language in hearing population, little is known about how deaf children learning sign languages achieve joint attention with their caregivers during natural social interaction and how caregivers provide and scaffold learning opportunities for their children. The present study investigates the properties and timing of joint attention surrounding familiar and novel naming events and their relationship to children’s vocabulary. Naturalistic play sessions of caretaker-child-dyads using American Sign Language were analyzed in regards to naming events of either familiar or novel object labeling events and the surrounding joint attention events. We observed that most naming events took place in the context of a successful joint attention event and that sign familiarity was related to the timing of naming events within the joint attention events. Our results suggest that caregivers are highly sensitive to their child’s visual attention in interactions and modulate joint attention differently in the context of naming events of familiar vs. novel object labels.

Abstract

The goal of this task is to investigate emotional categories across linguistic and cultural boundaries. There are three core tasks. In order to conduct this task you will need emotional vocalisation stimuli on your computer and you must translate the scenarios at the end of this entry into your local language.

Abstract

Emotional signals allow for the sharing of important information with conspecifics, for example to warn them of danger. Humans use a range of different cues to communicate to others how they feel, including facial, vocal, and gestural signals. Although much is known about facial expressions of emotion, less research has focused on affect in the voice. We compare British listeners to individuals from remote Namibian villages who have had no exposure to Western culture, and examine recognition of non-verbal emotional vocalizations, such as screams and laughs. We show that a number of emotions can be universally recognized from non-verbal vocal signals. In addition we demonstrate the specificity of this pattern, with a set of additional emotions only recognized within, but not across these cultural groups. Our findings indicate that a small set of primarily negative emotions have evolved signals across several modalities, while most positive emotions are communicated with culture-specific signals.

Abstract

The ultimate goal of our research is to develop a computational model of human speech recognition that is able to capture the effects of fine-grained acoustic variation on speech recognition behaviour. As part of this work we are investigating automatic feature classifiers that are able to create reliable and accurate transcriptions of the articulatory behaviour encoded in the acoustic speech signal. In the experiments reported here, we compared support vector machines (SVMs) with multilayer perceptrons (MLPs). MLPs have been widely (and rather successfully) used for the task of multi-value articulatory feature classification, while (to the best of our knowledge) SVMs have not. This paper compares the performances of the two classifiers and analyses the results in order to better understand the articulatory representations. It was found that the MLPs outperformed the SVMs, but it is concluded that both classifiers exhibit similar behaviour in terms of patterns of errors.

Abstract

A stretch of speech is often consistent with multiple words, e.g., the sequence /hæm/ is consistent with ‘ham’ but also with the first syllable of ‘hamster’, resulting in temporary ambiguity. However, to what degree does this lexical embedding occur? Analyses on two corpora of spoken Dutch showed that 11.9%-19.5% of polysyllabic word tokens have word-initial embedding, while 4.1%-7.5% of monosyllabic word tokens can appear word-initially embedded. This is much lower than suggested by an analysis of a large dictionary of Dutch. Speech processing thus appears to be simpler than one might expect on the basis of statistics on a dictionary.

Abstract

Evidence that listeners use durational cues to help resolve temporarily ambiguous speech input has accumulated over the past few years. In this paper, we investigate whether durational cues are also beneficial for word recognition in a computational model of spoken-word recognition. Two sets of simulations were carried out using the acoustic signal as input. The simulations showed that the computational model, like humans, takes benefit from durational cues during word recognition, and uses these to disambiguate the speech signal. These results thus provide support for the theory that durational cues play a role in spoken-word recognition.

Abstract

The present paper looks at semantic interference and gender congruency effects during bilingual picture-word naming. According to Costa, Miozzo & Caramazza (1999), only the activation from lexical nodes within a language is considered during lexical selection. If this is accurate, these findings should uphold with respect to semantic and gender/determiner effects even though the distractors are in another language. In the present study three effects were found, (1) a main effect of language, (2) semantic effects for both target language and non-target language distractors, and (3) gender congruency effects for targets with target-language distractors only. These findings are at odds with the language-specific proposal of Costa et al. (1999). Implications of these findings are discussed.

Abstract

The INTERSPEECH 2017 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge addresses three different problems for the first time in research competition under well-defined conditions: In the Addressee sub-challenge, it has to be determined whether speech produced by an adult is directed towards another adult or towards a child; in the Cold sub-challenge, speech under cold has to be told apart from ‘healthy’ speech; and in the Snoring subchallenge, four different types of snoring have to be classified. In this paper, we describe these sub-challenges, their conditions, and the baseline feature extraction and classifiers, which include data-learnt feature representations by end-to-end learning with convolutional and recurrent neural networks, and bag-of-audiowords for the first time in the challenge series

Abstract

This paper presents a study on the reduction of word-final [t]s in conversational standard Dutch. Based on a large amount of tokens annotated on the segmental level, we show that the bigram frequency and the segmental context are the main predictors for the absence of [t]s. In a second study, we present an analysis of the detailed acoustic properties of word-final [t]s and we show that bigram frequency and context also play a role on the subsegmental level. This paper extends research on the realization of /t/ in spontaneous speech and shows the importance of incorporating sub-segmental properties in models of speech.

Abstract

Humans express emotional information in their facial expressions and body movements, as well as in their voice. In this chapter we consider the neural processing of a specific kind of vocal expressions, non-verbal emotional vocalizations e.g. laughs and sobs. We outline evidence, from patient studies and functional imaging studies, for both emotion specific and more general processing of emotional information in the voice. We relate these findings to evidence for both basic and dimensional accounts of the representations of emotion. We describe in detail an fMRI study of positive and negative non-verbal expressions of emotion, which revealed that prefrontal areas involved in the control of oro-facial movements were also sensitive to different kinds of vocal emotional information.

Abstract

This presentation will address aspects of the expression of emotion in non-verbal vocal behaviour, specifically attempting to determine the roles of both positive and negative emotions, their acoustic bases, and the extent to which these are recognized in non-Western cultures.

Abstract

Speakers sometimes modify their gestures during the process of production into adaptors such as hair touching or eye scratching. Such disguised adaptors are evidence that the speaker can monitor their gestures. In this study, we investigated when and how disguised adaptors are first produced by children. Sixty elementary school children participated in this study (ten children in each age group; from 7 to 12 years old). They were instructed to watch a cartoon and retell it to their parents. The results showed that children did not produce disguised adaptors until the age of 8. The disguised adaptors accompany fluent speech until the children are 10 years old and accompany dysfluent speech until they reach 11 or 12 years of age. These results suggest that children start to monitor their gestures when they are 9 or 10 years old. Cognitive changes were considered as factors to influence emergence of disguised adaptors

Abstract

This study investigated the impact of a speaker's gaze direction
on a listener's comprehension of discourse. Previous research
suggests that hand gestures play a role in referent allocation,
enabling listeners to better understand the discourse. The
current study aims to determine whether the speaker's gaze
direction has a similar effect on reference resolution as co-
speech gestures. Thirty native Japanese speakers participated in
the study and were assigned to one of three conditions:
congruent, incongruent, or speech-only. Participants watched
36 videos of an actor narrating a story consisting of three
sentences with two protagonists. The speaker consistently
used hand gestures to allocate one protagonist to the lower right
and the other to the lower left space, while directing her gaze to
either space of the target person (congruent), the other person
(incongruent), or no particular space (speech-only). Participants
were required to verbally answer a question about the target
protagonist involved in an accidental event as quickly as
possible. Results indicate that participants in the congruent
condition exhibited faster reaction times than those in the
incongruent condition, although the difference was not
significant. These findings suggest that the speaker's gaze
direction is not enough to facilitate a listener's comprehension
of discourse.

Abstract

This paper presents preliminary remarks on some of the central linguistic means speakers of Kilivila use in expressing their conceptions of space and for referring to objects, persons, and events in space . After a brief characterisation of the language and its speakers, I sketch how specific topological relations are encoded, how motion events are described, and what frames of spatial reference are preferred in what contexts for what means and ends.

Abstract

Kilivila, the Austronesian language of the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea, has a rich inventory of terms - nouns, verbs, adjectives and idiomatic phrases and expressions - to precisely refer to, and to differentiate emotions and inner feelings. This paper describes how the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea deal with the public display of emotions. Forms of emotion control in public encounters are discussed and explained on the basis of ritual communication which pervades the Trobrianders' verbal and non-verbal behaviour. Especially highlighted is the Trobrianders' metalinguistic concept of "biga sopa" with its important role for emotion control in encounters that may run the risk of escalating from argument and conflict to aggression and violence.

Abstract

This article provides a brief introduction into field research, its aims, its methods and the various phases of fieldwork.