Publications

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

This paper explores the semantics of the dative in Tashelhiyt, a Berber language from Morocco. After a brief morphosyntactic overview of the dative in this language, I identify a wide range of its semantic roles, including possessor, experiencer, distributive and unintending causer. I arrange these roles in a semantic map and propose semantic links between the roles such as metaphorisation and generalisation. In the light of the Tashelhiyt data, the paper also proposes additions to previous semantic maps of the dative (Haspelmath 1999, 2003) and to Kittilä’s 2005 typology of beneficiary coding.

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

This paper offers some thoughts on the question what effect language has on the understanding and hence behavior of a human being. It reviews some issues of linguistic relativity, known as the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,” suggesting that the culture we grow up in is reflected in the language and that our cognition (and our worldview) is shaped or colored by the conventions developed by our ancestors and peers. This raises questions for the degree of translatability, illustrated by the comparison of two poems by a Dutch poet who spent most of his life in the USA. Mutual understanding, I claim, is possible because we have the cognitive apparatus that allows us to enter different emic systems.

Abstract

To understand spoken words listeners have to cope with seemingly meaningless variability in the speech signal. Speakers vary, for example, their tone of voice (ToV) by changing speaking rate, pitch, vocal effort, and loudness. This variation is independent of "linguistic prosody" such as sentence intonation or speech rhythm. The variation due to ToV, however, is not random. Speakers use, for example, higher pitch when referring to small objects than when referring to large objects and importantly, adult listeners are able to use these non-lexical ToV cues to distinguish between the meanings of antonym pairs (e.g., big-small; Nygaard, Herold, & Namy, 2009). In the present study, we asked whether listeners infer the meaning of novel adjectives from ToV and subsequently interpret these adjectives according to the learned meaning even in the absence of ToV. Moreover, if listeners actually acquire these adjectival meanings, then they should generalize these word meanings to novel referents. ToV would thus be a semantic cue to lexical acquisition. This hypothesis was tested in an exposure-test paradigm with adult listeners. In the experiment listeners' eye movements to picture pairs were monitored. The picture pairs represented the endpoints of the adjectival dimensions big-small, hot-cold, and strong-weak (e.g., an elephant and an ant represented big-small). Four picture pairs per category were used. While viewing the pictures participants listened to lexically unconstraining sentences containing novel adjectives, for example, "Can you find the foppick one?" During exposure, the sentences were spoken in infant-directed speech with the intended adjectival meaning expressed by ToV. Word-meaning pairings were counterbalanced across participants. Each word was repeated eight times. Listeners had no explicit task. To guide listeners' attention to the relation between the words and pictures, three sets of filler trials were included that contained real English adjectives (e.g., full-empty). In the subsequent test phase participants heard the novel adjectives in neutral adult-directed ToV. Test sentences were recorded before the speaker was informed about intended word meanings. Participants had to choose which of two pictures on the screen the speaker referred to. Picture pairs that were presented during the exposure phase and four new picture pairs per category that varied along the critical dimensions were tested. During exposure listeners did not spontaneously direct their gaze to the intended referent at the first presentation. But as indicated by listener's fixation behavior, they quickly learned the relationship between ToV and word meaning over only two exposures. Importantly, during test participants consistently identified the intended referent object even in the absence of informative ToV. Learning was found for all three tested categories and did not depend on whether the picture pairs had been presented during exposure. Listeners thus use ToV not only to distinguish between antonym pairs but they are able to extract word meaning from ToV and assign this meaning to novel words. The newly learned word meanings can then be generalized to novel referents even in the absence of ToV cues. These findings suggest that ToV can be used as a semantic cue to lexical acquisition. References Nygaard, L. C., Herold, D. S., & Namy, L. L. (2009) The semantics of prosody: Acoustic and perceptual evidence of prosodic correlates to word meaning. Cognitive Science, 33. 127-146.

Abstract

A aquisição da leitura decorre ao longo de diversas etapas, desde o momento em que a criança inicia o contacto com o alfabeto até ao momento em que se torna um leitor competente, apto a ler correcta e fluentemente. Compreender a evolução desta competência através de uma análise da diferenciação do peso de variáveis preditoras da leitura possibilita teorizar sobre os mecanismos cognitivos envolvidos nas diferentes fases de desenvolvimento da leitura. Realizámos um estudo transversal com 568 alunos do segundo ao quarto ano do primeiro ciclo do Ensino Básico, em que se avaliou o impacto de capacidades de processamento fonológico, nomeação rápida, conhecimento letra-som e vocabulário, bem como de capacidades cognitivas mais gerais (inteligência não-verbal e memória de trabalho), na exactidão e velocidade da leitura. De uma forma geral, os resultados mostraram que, apesar da consciência fonológica permanecer como o preditor mais importante da exactidão e fluência da leitura, o seu peso decresce à medida que a escolaridade aumenta. Observou-se também que, à medida que o contributo da consciência fonológica para a explicação da velocidade de leitura diminuía, aumentava o contributo de outras variáveis mais associadas ao automatismo e reconhecimento lexical, tais como a nomeação rápida e o vocabulário. Em suma, podemos dizer que ao longo da escolaridade se observa uma alteração dinâmica dos processos cognitivos subjacentes à leitura, o que sugere que a criança evolui de uma estratégia de leitura ancorada em processamentos sub-lexicais, e como tal mais dependente de processamentos fonológicos, para uma estratégia baseada no reconhecimento ortográfico das palavras.

Abstract

The acquisition of second language (L2) syntax has been central to the study of L2 acquisition, but recently there has been an interest in how learners apply their L2 syntactic knowledge to the input in real-time comprehension. Investigating L2 learners’ moment-by-moment syntactic analysis during listening or reading of sentence as it unfolds — their parsing of the input — is important, because language learning involves both the acquisition of knowledge and the ability to use it in real time. Using methods employed in monolingual processing research, investigations often focus on the processing of temporary syntactic ambiguities and structural dependencies. Investigating ambiguities involves examining parsing decisions at points in a sentence where there is a syntactic choice and this can offer insights into the nature of the parsing mechanism, and in particular, its processing preferences. Studying the establishment of syntactic dependencies at the critical point in the input allows for an investigation of how and when different kinds of information (e.g., syntactic, semantic, pragmatic) are put to use in real-time interpretation. Within an L2 context, further questions are of interest and familiar from traditional L2 acquisition research. Specifically, how native-like are the parsing procedures that L2 learners apply when processing the L2 input? What is the role of the learner’s first language (L1)? And, what are the effects of individual factors such as age, proficiency/dominance and working memory on L2 parsing? In the current paper I will provide an overview of the findings of some experimental research designed to investigate these questions.

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

The current study reports specific cases in which a positive transfer of perceptual ability from the music domain to the language domain occurs. We tested whether musical training enhances discrimination and identification performance of L2 speech sounds (timing features, nasal consonants and vowels). Native Dutch and Japanese speakers with different musical training experience, matched for their estimated verbal IQ, participated in the experiments. Results indicated that musical training strongly increases one’s ability to perceive timing information in speech signals. We also found a benefit of musical training on discrimination performance for a subset of the tested vowel contrasts.

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

Despite differences in language, culture, and ecology, some human characteristics are similar in people all over the world, while other features vary from one group to the next. These similarities and differences can inform arguments about what aspects of the human mind are part of our shared biological heritage and which are predominantly products of culture and language. I will present data from a cross-cultural project investigating the recognition of non-verbal vocalizations of emotions, such as screams and laughs, across two highly different cultural groups. English participants were compared to individuals from remote, culturally isolated Namibian villages. Vocalizations communicating the so-called “basic emotions” (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise) were bidirectionally recognised. In contrast, a set of additional positive emotions was only recognised within, but not across, cultural boundaries. These results indicate that a number of primarily negative emotions are associated with vocalizations that can be recognised across cultures, while at least some positive emotions are communicated with culture-specific signals. I will discuss these findings in the context of accounts of emotions at differing levels of analysis, with an emphasis on the often-neglected positive emotions.

Abstract

Many studies suggest that emotional signals can be recognized across cultures and modalities. But to what extent are these signals innate and to what extent are they learned? This study investigated whether auditory learning is necessary for the production of recognizable emotional vocalizations by examining the vocalizations produced by people born deaf. Recordings were made of eight congenitally deaf Dutch individuals, who produced non-verbal vocalizations of a range of negative and positive emotions. Perception was examined in a forced-choice task with hearing Dutch listeners (n = 25). Considerable variability was found across emotions, suggesting that auditory learning is more important for the acquisition of certain types of vocalizations than for others. In particular, achievement and surprise sounds were relatively poorly recognized. In contrast, amusement and disgust vocalizations were well recognized, suggesting that for some emotions, recognizable vocalizations can develop without any auditory learning. The implications of these results for models of emotional communication are discussed, and other routes of social learning available to the deaf individuals are considered.

Abstract

Vocalizations like screams and laughs are used to communicate affective states, but what acoustic cues in these signals require vocal learning and which ones are innate? This study investigated the role of auditory learning in the production of non-verbal emotional vocalizations by examining the vocalizations produced by people born deaf. Recordings were made of congenitally deaf Dutch individuals and matched hearing controls, who produced non-verbal vocalizations of a range of negative and positive emotions. Perception was examined in a forced-choice task with hearing Dutch listeners (n = 25), and judgments were analyzed together with acoustic cues, including envelope, pitch, and spectral measures. Considerable variability was found across emotions and acoustic cues, and the two types of information were related for a sub-set of the emotion categories. These results suggest that auditory learning is less important for the acquisition of certain types of vocalizations than for others (particularly amusement and relief), and they also point to a less central role for auditory learning of some acoustic features in affective non-verbal vocalizations. The implications of these results for models of vocal emotional communication are discussed.

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

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

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

This paper presents a study on the acoustic sub-segmental properties of word-final /t/ in conversational standard Dutch and how these properties contribute to whether humans and an ASR system classify the /t/ as acoustically present or absent. In general, humans and the ASR system use the same cues (presence of a constriction, a burst, and alveolar frication), but the ASR system is also less sensitive to fine cues (weak bursts, smoothly starting friction) than human listeners and misled by the presence of glottal vibration. These data inform the further development of models of human and automatic speech processing.

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

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

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

1. Introduction 2. A generative grammar as an algorithm 3. The semantic component 4. Bibliography 1. Introduction Throughout the 20th century up to the present day grammar and semantics have been uneasy bedfellows. A look at the historical background will make it clear how this curious situation came about. 20th-century linguistics has been characterized by an almost exclusive concern with the structure of words, word groups and sentences. This concern was reinforced, especially on the American side of the Atlantic, by the sudden rise and subsequent dominance of behaviorism during the 1920s. It started in psychology but quickly permeated all the human sciences, including linguistics, until the early 1960s, when it collapsed as suddenly as it had arisen.

Abstract

Presupposition is a semantic device built into natural language to make sentences fit for use in certain contexts but not in others. A sentence carrying a presupposition thus evokes a context in which that presupposition is fulfilled. The study of presupposition was triggered by the behavior of natural language negation, which tends to preserve presuppositions either as invited inferences or as entailments. As the role of discourse became more apparent in semantics, presupposition began to be seen increasingly as a discourse-semantic phenomenon with consequences for the logic of language.

Abstract

The property of presuppositions to be sometimes preserved through embeddings, albeit often in a weakened form, is called projection. The projection problem consists in formulating the conditions under which the presuppositions of an embedded clause (a) are kept as presuppositions of the superordinate structure, or (b) remain as an invited inference that can be overruled by context, or (c) are canceled. Over the past 25 years it has been recognized that the projection problem is to be solved in the context of a wider theory of presupposition and discourse incrementation.

Abstract

Logic was discovered by Aristotle when he saw that the semantic behavior of the negation word not is different in sentences with a definite and in those with a quantified subject term. Until the early 20th century, logic remained firmly language-based, but for the past century it has been mainly a tool in the hands of mathematicians, which has meant an alienation from linguistic reality. With the help of new techniques, it is now possible to revert to the logic of language, which is seen as based on a semantic analysis of the logical words (constants) involved. This new perspective, combined with much improved insights into the semantically defined discourse dependency of natural language sentences, leads to a novel and more functionally oriented approach to logic and to a reappraisal of traditional predicate calculus, whose main fault, undue existential import, evaporates when discourse dependency, in particular the presuppositional aspect, is brought into play. Traditional predicate calculus is seen to have a much greater logical power and a much greater functionality than modern predicate calculus. There is also full isomorphism, neglected in modern logic, between traditional predicate calculus and propositional calculus, which raises the question of any possible deeper causes.

Abstract

Virtual objects are objects thought up by a thinking individual. Although 20th-century philosophy has tried to ban them from ontology, they make it impossible to account for the truth of sentences such as Apollo was worshipped in the island of Delos, in which a property is assigned to the nonexisting, virtual entity Apollo. Such facts are the reason why virtual objects are slowly being recognized again.

Abstract

Aristotle's importance in the professional study of language consists first of all in the fact that he demythologized language and made it an object of rational investigation. In the context of his theory of truth as correspondence, he also provided the first semantic analysis of propositions in that he distinguished two main constituents, the predicate, which expresses a property, and the remainder of the proposition, referring to a substance to which the property is assigned. That assignment is either true or false. Later, the ‘remainder’ was called subject term, and the Aristotelian predicate was identified with the verb in the sentence. The Aristotelian predicate, however, is more like what is now called the ‘comment,’ whereas his remainder corresponds to the topic. Aristotle, furthermore, defined nouns and verbs as word classes. In addition, he introduced the term ‘case’ for paradigmatic morphological variation.

Abstract

Some predicates are ‘factive’ in that they induce the presupposition that what is said in their subordinate that clause is true.

Abstract

The term ‘donkey sentences’ derives from the medieval philosopher Walter Burleigh, whose example sentences contain mention of donkeys. The modern philosopher Peter Geach rediscovered Burleigh's sentences and the associated problem. The problem is that natural language anaphoric pronouns are sometimes used in a way that cannot be accounted for in terms of modern predicate calculus. The solution lies in establishing a separate category of anaphoric pronouns that refer via the intermediary of a contextually given antecedent, possibly an existentially quantified expression.

Abstract

A discourse domain D is a form of middle-term memory for the storage of the information embodied in the discourse at hand. The information carried by a new utterance u is added to D (u is incremented to D). The processes involved and the specific structure of D are a matter of ongoing research.

Abstract

Discourse semantics (DSx) is based on the fact that the interpretation of uttered sentences is dependent on and co-determined by the information stored in a specialized middle-term cognitive memory called discourse domain (D). DSx studies the structure and dynamics of Ds and the conditions to be fulfilled by D for proper interpretation. It does so in the light of the truth-conditional criteria for semantics, with an emphasis on intensionality phenomena. It requires the assumption of virtual entities and virtual facts. Any model-theoretic interpretation holds between discourse structures and pre-established verification domains.

Abstract

Aristotle's importance in the professional study of language consists first of all in the fact that he demythologized language and made it an object of rational investigation. In the context of his theory of truth as correspondence, he also provided the first semantic analysis of propositions in that he distinguished two main constituents, the predicate, which expresses a property, and the remainder of the proposition, referring to a substance to which the property is assigned. That assignment is either true or false. Later, the ‘remainder’ was called subject term, and the Aristotelian predicate was identified with the verb in the sentence. The Aristotelian predicate, however, is more like what is now called the ‘comment,’ whereas his remainder corresponds to the topic. Aristotle, furthermore, defined nouns and verbs as word classes. In addition, he introduced the term ‘case’ for paradigmatic morphological variation.

Abstract

There is a growing awareness among theoretical linguists and philosophers of language that the linguistic definition of lexical meanings, which must be learned when one learns a language, underdetermines not only full utterance interpretation but also sentence meaning. The missing information must be provided by cognition – that is, either general encyclopedic or specific situational knowledge. This fact crucially shows the basic insufficiency of current standard model-theoretic semantics as a paradigm for the analysis and description of linguistic meaning.

Abstract

The lexical conditions, also known as satisfaction conditions, of a predicate P are the conditions that must be satisfied by the term referents of P for P applied to these term referents to yield a true sentence. In view of presupposition theory it makes sense to distinguish two categories of lexical conditions, the preconditions that must be satisfied for the sentence to be usable in any given discourse, and the update conditions which must be satisfied for the sentence to yield truth.

Abstract

The widely prevailing view that standard bivalent logic is the only possible sound logical system, imposed by metaphysical necessity, has been shattered by the development of multivalent logics during the 20th century. It is now clear that standard bivalent logic is merely the minimal representative of a wide variety of viable logics with any number of truth values. These viable logics can be subdivided into families. In this article, the Kleene family and the PPCn family are subjected to special examination, as they appear to be most relevant for the study of the logical properties of human language.

Abstract

Spontal-N is a corpus of spontaneous, interactional Norwegian. To our knowledge, it is the first corpus of Norwegian in which the majority of speakers have spent significant parts of their lives in Sweden, and in which the recorded speech displays varying degrees of interference from Swedish. The corpus consists of studio quality audio- and video-recordings of four 30-minute free conversations between acquaintances, and a manual orthographic transcription of the entire material. On basis of the orthographic transcriptions, we automatically annotated approximately 50 percent of the material on the phoneme level, by means of a forced alignment between the acoustic signal and pronunciations listed in a dictionary. Approximately seven percent of the automatic transcription was manually corrected. Taking the manual correction as a gold standard, we evaluated several sources of pronunciation variants for the automatic transcription. Spontal-N is intended as a general purpose speech resource that is also suitable for investigating phonetic detail.

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

This paper presents the Kachna corpus of spontaneous speech, in which ten Czech and ten Norwegian speakers were recorded both in their native language and in English. The dialogues are elicited using a picture replication task that requires active cooperation and interaction of speakers by asking them to produce a drawing as close to the original as possible. The corpus is appropriate for the study of interactional features and speech reduction phenomena across native and second languages. The combination of productions in non-native English and in speakers’ native language is advantageous for investigation of L2 issues while providing a L1 behaviour reference from all the speakers. The corpus consists of 20 dialogues comprising 12 hours 53 minutes of recording, and was collected in 2008. Preparation of the transcriptions, including a manual orthographic transcription and an automatically generated phonetic transcription, is currently in progress. The phonetic transcriptions are automatically generated by aligning acoustic models with the speech signal on the basis of the orthographic transcriptions and a dictionary of pronunciation variants compiled for the relevant language. Upon completion the corpus will be made available via the European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

Abstract

Why do people accommodate to each other’s linguistic behavior? Studies of natural interactions (Giles, Taylor & Bourhis, 1973) suggest that speakers accommodate to achieve interactional goals, influencing what their interlocutor thinks or feels about them. But is this the only reason speakers accommodate? In real-world conversations, interactional motivations are ubiquitous, making it difficult to assess the extent to which they drive accommodation. Do speakers still accommodate even when interactional goals cannot be achieved, for instance, when their interlocutor cannot interpret their accommodation behavior? To find out, we asked participants to enter an immersive virtual reality (VR) environment and to converse with a virtual interlocutor. Participants accommodated to the speech rate of their virtual interlocutor even though he could not interpret their linguistic behavior, and thus accommodation could not possibly help them to achieve interactional goals. Results show that accommodation does not require explicit interactional goals, and suggest other social motivations for accommodation.

Abstract

In this article, we propose the use of suffix arrays to efficiently implement n-gram language models with practically unlimited size n. This approach, which is used with synchronous back-off, allows us to distinguish between alternative sequences using large contexts. We also show that we can build this kind of models with additional information for each symbol, such as part-of-speech tags and dependency information. The approach can also be viewed as a collection of virtual k-testable automata. Once built, we can directly access the results of any k-testable automaton generated from the input training data. Synchronous back- off automatically identies the k-testable automaton with the largest feasible k. We have used this approach in several classification tasks.

Abstract

Finding regularities in large data sets requires implementations of systems that are efficient in both time and space requirements. Here, we describe a newly developed system that exploits the internal structure of the enhanced suffixarray to find significant patterns in a large collection of sequences. The system searches exhaustively for all significantly compressing patterns where patterns may consist of symbols and skips or wildcards. We demonstrate a possible application of the system by detecting interesting patterns in a Dutch and an English corpus.

Abstract

In this article, we propose the use of suffix arrays to implement n-gram language models with practically unlimited size n. These unbounded n-grams are called 1-grams. This approach allows us to use large contexts efficiently to distinguish between different alternative sequences while applying synchronous back-off. From a practical point of view, the approach has been applied within the context of spelling confusibles, verb and noun agreement and prenominal adjective ordering. These initial experiments show promising results and we relate the performance to the size of the n-grams used for disambiguation.