Publications

Abstract

Word count estimation (WCE) from audio recordings has a number of applications, including quantifying the amount of speech that language-learning infants hear in their natural environments, as captured by daylong recordings made with devices worn by infants. To be applicable in a wide range of scenarios and also low-resource domains, WCE tools should be extremely robust against varying signal conditions and require minimal access to labeled training data in the target domain. For this purpose, earlier work has used automatic syllabification of speech, followed by a least-squares-mapping of syllables to word counts. This paper compares a number of previously proposed syllabifiers in the WCE task, including a supervised bi-directional long short-term memory (BLSTM) network that is trained on a language for which high quality syllable annotations are available (a “high resource language”), and reports how the alternative methods compare on different languages and signal conditions. We also explore additive noise and varying-channel data augmentation strategies for BLSTM training, and show how they improve performance in both matching and mismatching languages. Intriguingly, we also find that even though the BLSTM works on languages beyond its training data, the unsupervised algorithms can still outperform it in challenging signal conditions on novel languages.

Abstract

We suggest that it is now possible to conduct research on a topic which might be called evolutionary geophonetics. The main question is how the climate influences the evolution of language. This involves biological adaptations to the climate that may affect biases in production and perception; cultural evolutionary adaptations of the sounds of a language to climatic conditions; and influences of the climate on language diversity and contact. We discuss these ideas with special reference to a recent hypothesis that lexical tone is not adaptive in dry climates (Everett, Blasi & Roberts, 2015).

Abstract

Conversation analysis (CA) is an approach to the study of language and social interaction that puts at center stage its sequential development. The chain of initiating and responding actions that characterizes any interaction is a source of internal evidence for the meaning of social behavior as it exposes the understandings that participants themselves give of what one another is doing. Such an analysis requires the close and repeated inspection of audio and video recordings of naturally occurring interaction, supported by transcripts and other forms of annotation. Distributional regularities are complemented by a demonstration of participants' orientation to deviant behavior. CA has long maintained a constructive dialogue and reciprocal influence with linguistic anthropology. This includes a recent convergence on the cross-linguistic and cross-cultural study of social interaction.

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

For almost two decades, the poor performance observed with the so-called Director task has been interpreted as evidence of limited use of Theory of Mind in communication. Here we propose a probabilistic model of common ground in referential communication that derives three inferences from an utterance: what the speaker is talking about in a visual context, what she knows about the context, and what referential expressions she prefers. We tested our model by comparing its inferences with those made by human participants and found that it closely mirrors their judgments, whereas an alternative model compromising the hearer’s expectations of cooperativeness and efficiency reveals a worse fit to the human data. Rather than assuming that common ground is fixed in a given exchange and may or may not constrain reference resolution, we show how common ground can be inferred as part of the process of reference assignment.

Abstract

While there are many studies on information retrieval models using full-text, there are presently no comparison studies of full-text retrieval vs. retrieval only over the titles of documents. On the one hand, the full-text of documents like scientific papers is not always available due to, e.g., copyright policies of academic publishers. On the other hand, conducting a search based on titles alone has strong limitations. Titles are short and therefore may not contain enough information to yield satisfactory search results. In this paper, we compare different retrieval models regarding their search performance on the full-text vs. only titles of documents. We use different datasets, including the three digital library datasets: EconBiz, IREON, and PubMed. The results show that it is possible to build effective title-based retrieval models that provide competitive results comparable to full-text retrieval. The difference between the average evaluation results of the best title-based retrieval models is only 3% less than those of the best full-text-based retrieval models.

Abstract

In the language Duna (Trans New Guinea), egophoric distributional patterns are a pervasive characteristic of verbal morphology, but do not comprise a single coherent system. Many morphemes, including evidential markers and future time inflections, show strong tendencies to co-occur with ‘informant’ subjects (the speaker in a declarative, the addressee in an interrogative), or alternatively with non-informant subjects. The person sensitivity of the Duna forms is observable in frequency, speaker judgments of sayability, and subject implicatures. Egophoric and non-egophoric distributional patterns are motivated by the individual semantics of the morphemes, their perspective-taking properties, and logical and/or conventionalised expectations of how people experience and talk about events. Distributional tendencies can also be flouted, providing a resource for speakers to convey attitudes towards their own knowledge and experiences, or the knowledge and experiences of others.

Abstract

Languages with egophoric systems require their users to pay special attention to who knows what in the speech situation, providing formal marking of whether the speaker or addressee has personal knowledge of the event being discussed. Such systems have only recently come to be studied in cross-linguistic perspective. This chapter has two aims in regard to contributing to our understanding of egophoric marking. Firstly, it presents relevant data from a relatively under-described and endangered language, Kaluli (aka Bosavi), spoken in Papua New Guinea. Unusually, Kaluli tense inflections appear to show a mix of both egophoric and first vs non-first person-marking features, as well as other contrasts that are broadly relevant to a typology of egophoricity, such as special constructions for the expression of involuntary experience. Secondly, the chapter makes a preliminary foray into issues concerning egophoric marking and child language, drawing on a naturalistic corpus of child-caregiver interactions. Questions for future investigation raised by the Kaluli data concern, for example, the potentially challenging nature of mastering inflections that are sensitive to both person and speech act type, the possible role of question-answer pairs in children’s acquisition of egophoric morphology, and whether there are special features of epistemic access and authority that relate particularly to child-adult interactions.

Abstract

Fine-Tracker is a speech-based model of human speech
recognition. While previous work has shown that Fine-Tracker
is successful at modelling aspects of human spoken-word
recognition, its speech recognition performance is not
comparable to that of human performance, possibly due to
suboptimal intermediate articulatory feature (AF)
representations. This study investigates the effect of improved
AF representations, obtained using a state-of-the-art deep
convolutional network, on Fine-Tracker’s simulation and
recognition performance: Although the improved AF quality
resulted in improved speech recognition; it, surprisingly, did
not lead to an improvement in Fine-Tracker’s simulation power.

Abstract

This chapter describes how speakers access words from the mental lexicon. Lexical access is a crucial
component in the process of transforming thoughts into speech. Some theories consider lexical access to be
strictly serial and discrete, while others view this process as being cascading or even interactive, i.e. the different
sub-levels influence each other. We discuss some of the evidence in favour and against these viewpoints, and
also present arguments regarding the ongoing debate on how words are selected for production. Another important
issue concerns the access to morphologically complex words such as derived and inflected words, as well as
compounds. Are these accessed as whole entities from the mental lexicon or are the parts assembled online? This
chapter tries to provide an answer to that question as well.

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

This chapter describes neurolinguistic aspects of morphology, morphological theory, and especially morphological processing. It briefly mentions the main processing models in the literature and how they deal with morphological issues, i.e. full-listing models (all morphologically related words are listed separately in the lexicon and are processed individually), full-parsing or decompositional models (morphologically related words are not listed in the lexicon but are decomposed into their constituent morphemes, each of which is listed in the lexicon), and hybrid, so-called dual route, models (regular morphologically related words are decomposed, irregular words are listed). The chapter also summarizes some important findings from the literature that bear on neurolinguistic aspects of morphological processing, from both language comprehension and language production, taking into consideration neuropsychological patient studies as well as studies employing neuroimaging methods.

Abstract

Processing of semantic information in language comprehension has been suggested to be modulated by attentional resources. Consequently, cognitive load would be expected to reduce semantic priming, but studies have yielded inconsistent results. This study investigated whether cognitive load affects semantic activation in speech processing in older adults, and whether this is modulated by individual differences in cognitive and hearing abilities. Older adults participated in an auditory continuous lexical decision task in a low-load and high-load condition. The group analysis showed only a marginally significant reduction of semantic priming in the high-load condition compared to the low-load condition. The individual differences analysis showed that semantic priming was significantly reduced under increased load in participants with poorer attention-switching control. Hence, a resource-demanding secondary task may affect the integration of spoken words into a coherent semantic representation for listeners with poorer attentional skills.

Abstract

This article is reproduced from the previous edition, volume 22, pp. 14879–14882, © 2001, Elsevier Ltd.

Abstract

Speakers can adapt their speech and co-speech gestures for
addressees. Here, we investigate whether this ability is
modulated by age. Younger and older adults participated in a
comic narration task in which one participant (the speaker)
narrated six short comic stories to another participant (the
addressee). One half of each story was known to both participants, the other half only to the speaker. Younger but
not older speakers used more words and gestures when narrating novel story content as opposed to known content.
We discuss cognitive and pragmatic explanations of these findings and relate them to theories of gesture production.

Abstract

Adaptation to altered auditory feedback has been shown to induce subsequent shifts in perception. However, it is uncertain whether these perceptual changes may generalize to other speech sounds. In this experiment, we tested whether exposing the production of a vowel to altered auditory feedback affects perceptual categorization of a consonant distinction. In two sessions, participants produced CVC words containing the vowel /i/, while intermittently categorizing stimuli drawn from a continuum between "see" and "she." In the first session feedback was unaltered, while in the second session the formants of the vowel were shifted 20% towards /u/. Adaptation to the altered vowel was found to reduce the proportion of perceived /S/ stimuli. We suggest that this reflects an alteration to the sensorimotor mapping that is shared between vowels and consonants.

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

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

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 paper reports on the results of my research on the lexical means Kilivila offers its speakers to refer to emotions and inner feelings. Data were elicited with 18 “Ekman’s faces” in which photos of the faces of one woman and two men illustrate the allegedly universal basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise) and with film stimuli staging standard emotions. The data are discussed on the basis of the following research questions: * How “effable” are they or do we observe ineffability – the difficulty of putting experiences into words – within the domain of emotions? * Do consultants agree with one another in how they name emotions? * Are facial expressions or situations better cues for labeling?

Abstract

This paper deals with the dramatic environmental, social and cultural changes on the Trobriand Islands which I experienced during 16 long- and short-term fieldtrips from 1982 to 2012. I first report on the climate change I experienced there over the years and provide a survey about the demographic changes on the Trobriand Islands – highlighting the situation in Tauwema, my village of residence on Kaile’una Island. Finally I report on the social and cultural impact these dramatic changes have for the Trobriand Islanders and their culture.

Abstract

Bronislaw Malinowski – based on his experience during his field research on the Trobriand Islands – pointed out that language is first and foremost a tool for creating social bonds. It is a mode of behavior and the meaning of an utterance is constituted by its pragmatic function. Malinowski’s ideas finally led to the formation of the subdiscipline “anthropological linguistics”. This paper presents three observations of the Trobrianders’ attitude to their language Kilivila and their language use in social interactions. They illustrate that whoever wants to successfully research the role of language, culture and cognition in social interaction must be on ‘common ground’ with the researched community.

Abstract

As I have already pointed out elsewhere (Senft 2008; 2010; 2014), the Gricean conversational maxims of Quality – “Try to make your contribution one that is true” – and Manner “Be perspicuous”, specifically “Avoid obscurity of expression” and “Avoid ambiguity” (Grice 1967; 1975; 1978) – are not observed by the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea, neither in forms of their ritualized communication nor in forms and ways of everyday conversation and other ordinary verbal interactions. The speakers of the Austronesian language Kilivila metalinguistically differentiate eight specific non-diatopical registers which I have called “situational-intentional” varieties. One of these varieties is called “biga sopa”. This label can be glossed as “joking or lying speech, indirect speech, speech which is not vouched for”. The biga sopa constitutes the default register of Trobriand discourse and conversation. This contribution to the workshop on philosophy and pragmatics presents the Trobriand Islanders’ indigenous typology of non-diatopical registers, especially elaborating on the concept of sopa, describing its features, discussing its functions and illustrating its use within Trobriand society. It will be shown that the Gricean maxims of quality and manner are irrelevant for and thus not observed by the speakers of Kilivila. On the basis of the presented findings the Gricean maxims and especially Grice’s claim that his theory of conversational implicature is “universal in application” is critically discussed from a general anthropological-linguistic point of view.

Abstract

Previous fNIRS studies have suggested that adult-child cooperation is accompanied by increased inter-brain synchrony. However, its reflection in the electrophysiological synchrony remains unclear. In this study, we designed a naturalistic and well-controlled adult-child interaction paradigm using a tangram solving video game, and recorded dual-EEG from child and adult dyads during cooperative and individual conditions. By calculating the directed inter-brain connectivity in the theta and alpha bands, we found that the inter-brain frontal network was more densely connected and stronger in strength during the cooperative than the individual condition when the adult was watching the child playing. Moreover, the inter-brain network across different dyads shared more common information flows from the player to the observer during cooperation, but was more individually different in solo play. The results suggest an enhancement in inter-brain EEG interactions during adult-child cooperation. However, the enhancement was evident in all cooperative cases but partly depended on the role of participants.

Abstract

Turn-taking in conversation is a cognitively demanding process that proceeds rapidly due to interlocutors utilizing a range of cues
to aid prediction. In the present study we set out to test recent claims that content question words (also called wh-words) sound similar within languages as an adaptation to help listeners predict
that a question is about to be asked. We test whether upcoming questions can be predicted based on the first phoneme of a turn and the prior context. We analyze the Switchboard corpus of English
by means of a decision tree to test whether /w/ and /h/ are good statistical cues of upcoming questions in conversation. Based on the results, we perform a controlled experiment to test whether
people really use these cues to recognize questions. In both studies
we show that both the initial phoneme and the sequential context help predict questions. This contributes converging evidence that elements of languages adapt to pragmatic pressures applied during
conversation.

Abstract

Speakers adapt their speech and gestures in various ways for their audience. We investigated further whether they use
ostensive signals (eye gaze, ostensive speech (e.g. like this, this) or a combination of both) in relation to their gestures
when talking to different addressees, i.e., to another adult or a child in a multimodal demonstration task. While adults used
more eye gaze towards their gestures with other adults than with children, they were more likely to use combined
ostensive signals for children than for adults. Thus speakers mark the communicative relevance of their gestures with different types of ostensive signals and by taking different types of addressees into account.

Abstract

Previous research [9] suggests that Dutch learners of (British) English are not able to express sarcasm prosodically in their L2. The present study investigates whether explicit training on the prosodic markers of sarcasm in English can improve learners’ realisation of sarcasm. Sarcastic speech was elicited in short simulated telephone conversations between Dutch advanced learners of English and a native British English-speaking ‘friend’ in two sessions, fourteen days apart. Between the two sessions, participants were trained by means of (1) a presentation, (2) directed independent practice, and (3) evaluation of participants’ production and individual feedback in small groups. L1 British English-speaking raters subsequently evaluated the degree of sarcastic sounding in the participants’ responses on a five-point scale. It was found that significantly higher sarcasm ratings were given to L2 learners’ production obtained after the training than that obtained before the training; explicit training on prosody has a positive effect on learners’ production of sarcasm.

Abstract

Traditional psycholinguistic studies take place in controlled experimental labs and typically involve testing undergraduate psychology or linguistics students. Investigating psycholinguistics in this manner calls into question the external validity of findings, that is, the extent to which research findings generalize across languages and cultures, as well as ecologically valid settings. Here we consider three ways in which psycholinguistics can be taken out of the lab. First, researchers can conduct cross-cultural fieldwork in diverse languages and cultures. Second, they can conduct online experiments or experiments in institutionalized public spaces (e.g., museums) to obtain large, diverse participant samples. And, third, researchers can perform studies in more ecologically valid settings, to increase the real-world generalizability of findings. By moving away from the traditional lab setting, psycholinguists can enrich their understanding of language use in all its rich and diverse contexts.

Abstract

We report an individual with music-odor synaesthesia who experiences automatic and vivid odor sensations when she hears music. S’s odor associations were recorded on two days, and compared with those of two control participants. Overall, S produced longer descriptions, and her associations were of multiple odors at once, in comparison to controls who typically reported a single odor. Although odor associations were qualitatively different between S and controls, ratings of the consistency of their descriptions did not differ. This demonstrates that crossmodal associations between music and odor exist in non-synaesthetes too. We also found that S is better at discriminating between odors than control participants, and is more likely to experience emotion, memories and evaluations triggered by odors, demonstrating the broader impact of her synaesthesia.

Abstract

One of the most pressing issues in dis-
continuous constituency transition-based
parsing is that the relevant information for
parsing decisions could be located in any
part of the stack or the buffer. In this pa-
per, we propose a solution to this prob-
lem by replacing the structured percep-
tron model with a recursive neural model
that computes a global representation of
the configuration, therefore allowing even
the most remote parts of the configura-
tion to influence the parsing decisions. We
also provide a detailed analysis of how
this representation should be built out of
sub-representations of its core elements
(words, trees and stack). Additionally, we
investigate how different types of swap or-
acles influence the results. Our model is
the first neural discontinuous constituency
parser, and it outperforms all the previ-
ously published models on three out of
four datasets while on the fourth it obtains
second place by a tiny difference.

Abstract

The current study examines, for the first time, the viewpoint preferences of signing children in expressing spatial relations that require imposing a viewpoint (left-right, front-behind). We elicited spatial descriptions from deaf children (4–9 years of age) acquiring Turkish Sign Language (TİD) natively from their deaf parents and from adult native signers of TİD. Adults produced these spatial descriptions from their own viewpoint and from that of their addressee depending on whether the objects were located on the lateral or the sagittal axis. TİD-acquiring children, on the other hand, described all spatial configurations from their own viewpoint. Differences were also found between children and adults in the type of linguistic devices and how they are used to express such spatial relations.

Abstract

Motivated form-meaning mappings are pervasive in sign languages, and iconicity has recently been shown to facilitate sign learning from early on. This study investigated the role of iconicity for language acquisition in Turkish Sign Language (TID). Participants were 43 signing children (aged 10 to 45 months) of deaf parents. Sign production ability was recorded using the adapted version of MacArthur Bates Communicative Developmental Inventory (CDI) consisting of 500 items for TID. Iconicity and familiarity ratings for a subset of 104 signs were available. Our results revealed that the iconicity of a sign was positively correlated with the percentage of children producing a sign and that iconicity significantly predicted the percentage of children producing a sign, independent of familiarity or phonological complexity. Our results are consistent with previous findings on sign language acquisition and provide further support for the facilitating effect of iconic form-meaning mappings in sign learning.

Abstract

Sequences of reaction times (RT) produced by participants in an experiment are not only influenced by the stimuli, but by many other factors as well, including fatigue, attention, experience, IQ, handedness, etc. These confounding factors result in longterm effects (such as a participant’s overall reaction capability) and in short- and medium-time fluctuations in RTs (often referred to as ‘local speed effects’). Because stimuli are usually presented in a random sequence different for each participant, local speed effects affect the underlying ‘true’ RTs of specific trials in different ways across participants. To be able to focus statistical analysis on the effects of the cognitive process under study, it is necessary to reduce the effect of confounding factors as much as possible. In this paper we propose and compare techniques and criteria for doing so, with focus on reducing (‘filtering’) the local speed effects. We show that filtering matters substantially for the significance analyses of predictors in linear mixed effect regression models. The performance of filtering is assessed by the average between-participant correlation between filtered RT sequences and by Akaike’s Information Criterion, an important measure of the goodness-of-fit of linear mixed effect regression models.

Abstract

This paper presents DIANA, a new computational model of human speech processing. It is the first model that simulates the complete processing chain from the on-line processing of an acoustic signal to the execution of a response, including reaction times. Moreover it assumes minimal modularity. DIANA consists of three components. The activation component computes a probabilistic match between the input acoustic signal and representations in DIANA’s lexicon, resulting in a list of word hypotheses changing over time as the input unfolds. The decision component operates on this list and selects a word as soon as sufficient evidence is available. Finally, the execution component accounts for the time to execute a behavioral action. We show that DIANA well simulates the average participant in a word recognition experiment.

Abstract

DIANA is an end-to-end computational model of speech processing, which takes as input the speech signal, and provides as output the orthographic transcription of the stimulus, a word/non-word judgment and the associated estimated reaction time. So far, the model has only been tested for Dutch. In this paper, we extend DIANA such that it can also process North American English. The model is tested by having it simulate human participants in a large scale North American English lexical decision experiment. The simulations show that DIANA can adequately approximate the reaction times of an average participant (r = 0.45). In addition, they indicate that DIANA does not yet adequately model the cognitive processes that take place after stimulus offset.

Abstract

The recent advent of deep learning techniques in speech tech-nology and in particular in automatic speech recognition hasyielded substantial performance improvements. This suggeststhat deep neural networks (DNNs) are able to capture structurein speech data that older methods for acoustic modeling, suchas Gaussian Mixture Models and shallow neural networks failto uncover. In image recognition it is possible to link repre-sentations on the first couple of layers in DNNs to structuralproperties of images, and to representations on early layers inthe visual cortex. This raises the question whether it is possi-ble to accomplish a similar feat with representations on DNNlayers when processing speech input. In this paper we presentthree different experiments in which we attempt to untanglehow DNNs encode speech signals, and to relate these repre-sentations to phonetic knowledge, with the aim to advance con-ventional phonetic concepts and to choose the topology of aDNNs more efficiently. Two experiments investigate represen-tations formed by auto-encoders. A third experiment investi-gates representations on convolutional layers that treat speechspectrograms as if they were images. The results lay the basisfor future experiments with recursive networks.

Abstract

This paper investigates the processes in comprehending spoken noun-noun compounds, using data from the BALDEY database. BALDEY contains lexicality judgments and reaction times (RTs) for Dutch stimuli for which also linguistic information is included. Two different approaches are combined. The first is based on regression by Dynamic Survival Analysis, which models decisions and RTs as a consequence of the fact that a cumulative density function exceeds some threshold. The parameters of that function are estimated from the observed RT data. The second approach is based on DIANA, a process-oriented computational model of human word comprehension, which simulates the comprehension process with the acoustic stimulus as input. DIANA gives the identity and the number of the word candidates that are activated at each 10 ms time step.

Both approaches show how the processes involved in comprehending compounds change during a stimulus. Survival Analysis shows that the impact of word duration varies during the course of a stimulus. The density of word and non-word hypotheses in DIANA shows a corresponding pattern with different regimes. We show how the approaches complement each other, and discuss additional ways in which data and process models can be combined.

Abstract

Apraxia of Speech (AOS) is a motor speech disorder whose precise nature is still poorly understood. A recent behavioural experiment featuring a noise masking paradigm suggests that AOS reflects a disruption of feedforward control, whereas feedback control is spared and plays a more prominent role in achieving and maintaining segmental contrasts [10]. In the present study, we set out to validate the interpretation of AOS as a feedforward impairment by means of a series of computational simulations with the DIVA model [6, 7] mimicking the behavioural experiment. Simulation results showed a larger reduction in vowel spacing and a smaller vowel dispersion in the masking condition compared to the no-masking condition for the simulated feedforward deficit, whereas the other groups showed an opposite pattern. These results mimic the patterns observed in the human data, corroborating the notion that AOS can be conceptualized as a deficit in feedforward control

Abstract

We estimate lexical Concreteness for millions of words across 77 languages. Using a simple regression framework, we combine vector-based models of lexical semantics with experimental norms of Concreteness in English and Dutch. By applying techniques to align vector-based semantics across distinct languages, we compute and release Concreteness estimates at scale in numerous languages for which experimental norms are not currently available. This paper lays out the technique and its efficacy. Although this is a difficult dataset to evaluate immediately, Concreteness estimates computed from English correlate with Dutch experimental norms at $\rho$ = .75 in the vocabulary at large, increasing to $\rho$ = .8 among Nouns. Our predictions also recapitulate attested relationships with word frequency. The approach we describe can be readily applied to numerous lexical measures beyond Concreteness

Abstract

Do all languages convey semantic knowledge in the same way? If language simply mirrors the structure of the world, the answer should be a qualified “yes”. If, however, languages impose structure as much as reflecting it, then even ostensibly the “same” word in different languages may mean quite different things. We provide a first pass at a large-scale quantification of cross-linguistic semantic alignment of approximately 1000 meanings in 55 languages. We find that the translation equivalents in some domains (e.g., Time, Quantity, and Kinship) exhibit high alignment across languages while the structure of other domains (e.g., Politics, Food, Emotions, and Animals) exhibits substantial cross-linguistic variability. Our measure of semantic alignment correlates with known phylogenetic distances between languages: more phylogenetically distant languages have less semantic alignment. We also find semantic alignment to correlate with cultural distances between societies speaking the languages, suggesting a rich co-adaptation of language and culture even in domains of experience that appear most constrained by the natural world

Abstract

This article describes how the tonal elements of two common Spanish intonation contours –the falling statement and the low-rising-falling request– align with the segmental string in broad-focus utterances differing in number of prosodic words. Using an imitation-and-completion task, we show that (i) the last stressed syllable of the utterance, traditionally viewed as carrying the ‘nuclear’ accent, associates with either a high or a low tonal element depending on phrase length (ii) that certain tonal elements can be realized or omitted depending on the availability of specific metrical positions in their intonational phrase, and (iii) that the high tonal element of the request contour associates with either a stressed syllable or an intonational phrase edge depending on phrase length. On the basis of these facts, and in contrast to previous descriptions of Spanish intonation relying on obligatory and constant nuclear contours (e.g., L* L% for all neutral statements), we argue for a less constrained intonational morphology involving tonal units linked to the segmental string via contour-specific principles.

Abstract

Violations of the maxims of Quantity occur when utterances provide more (over-specified) or less (under-specified) information than strictly required for referent identification. While behavioural datasuggest that under-specified expressions lead to comprehension difficulty and communicative failure, there is no consensus as to whether over-specified expressions are also detrimental to comprehension. In this study we shed light on this debate, providing neurophysiological evidence supporting the view that extra information facilitates comprehension. We further present novel evidence that referential failure due to under-specification is qualitatively different from explicit cases of referential failure, when no matching referential candidate is available in the context.

Abstract

In situated communication, reference to an entity in the shared visual context can be established using eitheranexpression that conveys precise (minimally specified) or redundant (over-specified) information. There is, however, along-lasting debate in psycholinguistics concerningwhether the latter hinders referential processing. We present evidence from an eyetrackingexperiment recordingfixations as well asthe Index of Cognitive Activity –a novel measure of cognitive workload –supporting the view that over-specifications facilitate processing. We further present originalevidence that, above and beyond the effect of specificity,referring expressions thatuniformly reduce referential entropyalso benefitprocessing

Abstract

Natural human interaction involves the fast-paced exchange of speaker turns. Crucially, if a next speaker waited with planning their turn until the current speaker was finished, language production models would predict much longer turn transition times than what we observe. Next speakers must therefore prepare their turn in parallel to listening. Visual signals likely play a role in this process, for example by helping the next speaker to process the ongoing utterance and thus prepare an appropriately-timed response.

To understand how visual signals contribute to the timing of turn-taking, and to move beyond the mostly qualitative studies of gesture in conversation, we examined unconstrained, computer-mediated conversations between 20 pairs of participants while systematically manipulating speaker visibility. Using motion tracking and manual gesture annotation, we assessed 1) how visibility affected the timing of turn transitions, and 2) whether use of co-speech gestures and 3) the communicative kinematic features of these gestures were associated with changes in turn transition timing.

We found that 1) decreased visibility was associated with less tightly timed turn transitions, and 2) the presence of gestures was associated with more tightly timed turn transitions across visibility conditions. Finally, 3) structural and salient kinematics contributed to gesture’s facilitatory effect on turn transition times.

Our findings suggest that speaker visibility--and especially the presence and kinematic form of gestures--during conversation contributes to the temporal coordination of conversational turns in computer-mediated settings. Furthermore, our study demonstrates that it is possible to use naturalistic conversation and still obtain controlled results.

Abstract

Even advanced Spanish speakers of second language English tend to confuse the pronouns ‘he’ and ‘she’, often without even noticing their mistake (Lahoz, 1991). A study by AntónMéndez (2010) has indicated that a possible reason for this error is the fact that Spanish is a pro-drop language. In order to test this hypothesis, we used an extension of Dual-path (Chang, 2002), a computational cognitive model of sentence production, to simulate two models of bilingual speech production of second language English. One model had Spanish (ES) as a native language, whereas the other learned a Spanish-like language that used the pronoun at all times (non-pro-drop Spanish, NPD_ES). When tested on L2 English sentences, the bilingual pro-drop Spanish model produced significantly more gender pronoun errors, confirming that pronoun dropping could indeed be responsible for the gender confusion in natural language use as well.

Abstract

The artificial grammar learning (AGL) paradigm enables systematic investigation of the acquisition of linguistically relevant structures. It is a paradigm of interest for language processing research, interfacing with theoretical linguistics, and for comparative research on language acquisition and evolution. This chapter presents a key for understanding major variants of the paradigm. An unbiased summary of neuroimaging findings of AGL is presented, using meta-analytic methods, pointing to the crucial involvement of the bilateral frontal operculum and regions in the right lateral hemisphere. Against a background of robust posterior temporal cortex involvement in processing complex syntax, the evidence for involvement of the posterior temporal cortex in AGL is reviewed. Infant AGL studies testing for neural substrates are reviewed, covering the acquisition of adjacent and non-adjacent dependencies as well as algebraic rules. The language acquisition data suggest that comparisons of learnability of complex grammars performed with adults may now also be possible with children.

Abstract

The task of automatic playlist continuation is generating a list of recommended tracks that can be added to an existing playlist. By suggesting appropriate tracks, i. e., songs to add to a playlist, a recommender system can increase the user engagement by making playlist creation easier, as well as extending listening beyond the end of current playlist. The ACM Recommender Systems Challenge 2018 focuses on such task. Spotify released a dataset of playlists, which includes a large number of playlists and associated track listings. Given a set of playlists from which a number of tracks have been withheld, the goal is predicting the missing tracks in those playlists. We participated in the challenge as the team Unconscious Bias and, in this paper, we present our approach. We extend adversarial autoencoders to the problem of automatic playlist continuation. We show how multiple input modalities, such as the playlist titles as well as track titles, artists and albums, can be incorporated in the playlist continuation task.

Abstract

This corpus study investigates how children figure out that functional modals
like must can express various flavors of modality. We examine how modality is
expressed in speech to and by children, and find that the way speakers use
modals may obscure their polysemy. Yet, children eventually figure it out. Our
results suggest that some do before age 3. We show that while root and
epistemic flavors are not equally well-represented in the input, there are robust
correlations between flavor and aspect, which learners could exploit to discover
modal polysemy.

Abstract

Within the first few years of life, children acquire many of the building blocks of their native language. This not only involves knowledge about the linguistic structure of spoken language, but also knowledge about the way in which this linguistic structure surfaces in their speech input. In this chapter, we review how infants and toddlers cope with differences between speakers and accents. Within the context of milestones in early speech perception, we examine how voice and accent characteristics are integrated during language processing, looking closely at the advantages and disadvantages of speaker and accent familiarity, surface-level deviation between two utterances, variability in the input, and prior speaker exposure. We conclude that although deviation from the child’s standard can complicate speech perception early in life, young listeners can overcome these additional challenges. This suggests that early spoken language processing is flexible and adaptive to the listening situation at hand.

Abstract

Languages combine arbitrary and iconic signals. How do iconic signals emerge and when do they persist? We present an experimental study of the role of iconicity in the emergence of structure in an artificial language. Using an iterated communication game in which we control the signalling medium as well as the meaning space, we study the evolution of communicative signals in transmission chains. This sheds light on how affordances of the communication medium shape and constrain the mappability and transmissibility of form-meaning pairs. We find that iconic signals can form the building blocks for wider compositional patterns

Abstract

Before infants become mature speakers of their native language, they must acquire a robust word-recognition system which allows them to strike the balance between allowing some variation (mood, voice, accent) and recognizing variability that potentially changes meaning (e.g. cat vs hat). The current meta-analysis quantifies how the latter, termed mispronunciation sensitivity, changes over infants’ first three years, testing competing predictions of mainstream language acquisition theories. Our results show that infants were sensitive to mispronunciations, but accepted them as labels for target objects. Interestingly, and in contrast to predictions of mainstream theories, mispronunciation sensitivity was not modulated by infant age, suggesting that a sufficiently flexible understanding of native language phonology is in place at a young age.

Abstract

Distributional vowel training for adults has been reported as “effective” for Spanish and Bulgarian learners of Dutch vowels, in studies using a behavioural task. A recent study did not yield a similar clear learning effect for Dutch learners of the English vowel contrast /æ/~/ε/, as measured with event-related potentials (ERPs). The present study aimed to examine the possibility that the latter result was related to the method. As in the ERP study, we tested whether distributional training improved Dutch adult learners’ perception of English /æ/~/ε/. However, we measured behaviour instead of ERPs, in a design identical to that used in the previous studies with Spanish learners. The results do not support an effect of distributional training and thus “replicate” the ERP study. We conclude that it remains unclear whether distributional vowel training is effective for Dutch adults.

Abstract

Recent studies using phoneme detection tasks have shown that spoken-language processing is neither facilitated nor interfered with by optional assimilation, but is inhibited by violation of obligatory assimilation. Interpretation of these results depends on an assessment of their generality, specifically, whether they also obtain when listeners are processing nonnative language. Two separate experiments are presented in which native listeners of German and native listeners of Dutch had to detect a target fricative in legal monosyllabic Dutch nonwords. All of the nonwords were correct realisations in standard Dutch. For German listeners, however, half of the nonwords contained phoneme strings which violate the German fricative assimilation rule. Whereas the Dutch listeners showed no significant effects, German listeners detected the target fricative faster when the German fricative assimilation was violated than when no violation occurred. The results might suggest that violation of assimilation rules does not have to make processing more difficult per se.

Abstract

Field data are drawn from a particular speech community at a certain place and time. The intent of this survey is to enrich understanding of the various socio-cultural contexts in which linguistic and “cognitive” data may have been collected, so that we can explore the role which societal, cultural and contextual factors may play in this material. The questionnaire gives guidelines concerning types of ethnographic information that are important to cross-cultural and cross-linguistic enquiry, and will be especially useful to researchers who do not have specialised training in anthropology.