Publications

Abstract

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

Abstract

Language resources can be divided into structural resources treating phonology, morphosyntax, semantics etc. and resources treating the social, demographic, ethnic, political context. A third type are meta-resources, like bibliographies, which provide access to the resources of the first two kinds. This poster will present the Glottolog/Langdoc project, a comprehensive bibliography providing web access to 180k bibliographical records to (mainly) low visibility resources from low-density languages. The resources are annotated for macro-area, content language, and document type and are available in XHTML and RDF.

Abstract

This article explores the expression of placement and removal events in Moroccan Arabic, particularly the semantic features of ‘putting’ and ‘taking’ verbs, classified in accordance with their combination with Goal and/or Source NPs. Moroccan Arabic verbs encode a variety of components of placement and removal events, including containment, attachment, features of the figure, and trajectory. Furthermore, accidental events are distinguished from deliberate events either by the inherent semantics of predicates or denoted syntactically. The postures of the Figures, in spite of some predicates distinguishing them, are typically not specified as they are in other languages, such as Dutch. Although Ground locations are frequently mentioned in both source-oriented and goal-oriented clauses, they are used more often in goal-oriented clauses.

Abstract

This paper offers a structural and semantic analysis of expressions of caused motion in Lowland Chontal of Oaxaca, an indigenous language of southern Mexico. The data were collected using a video stimulus designed to elicit a wide range of caused motion event descriptions. The most frequent event types in the corpus depict caused motion to and from relations of support and containment, fundamental notions in the de­scription of spatial relations between two entities and critical semantic components of the linguistic encoding of caused motion in this language. Formal features of verbal construction type and argument realization are examined by sorting event descriptions into semantic types of placement and removal, to and from support and to and from containment. Together with typological factors that shape the distribution of spatial semantics and referent expression, separate treatments of support and containment relations serve to clarify notable asymmetries in patterns of predicate type and argument realization.

Abstract

Frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) is a group of neurodegenerative conditions characterised by focal frontal and/or temporal lobe atrophy. Patients develop a range of cognitive and behavioural abnormalities, including prominent difficulties in comprehending and expressing emotions, with significant clinical and social consequences. Here we report a systematic prospective analysis of emotion processing in different input modalities in patients with FTLD. We examined recognition of happiness, sadness, fear and anger in facial expressions, non-verbal vocalisations and music in patients with FTLD and in healthy age matched controls. The FTLD group was significantly impaired in all modalities compared with controls, and this effect was most marked for music. Analysing each emotion separately, recognition of negative emotions was impaired in all three modalities in FTLD, and this effect was most marked for fear and anger. Recognition of happiness was deficient only with music. Our findings support the idea that FTLD causes impaired recognition of emotions across input channels, consistent with a common central representation of emotion concepts. Music may be a sensitive probe of emotional deficits in FTLD, perhaps because it requires a more abstract representation of emotion than do animate stimuli such as faces and voices.

Abstract

Gestures are meaningful movements of the body, the hands, and the face during communication,
which accompany the production of both spoken and signed utterances. Recent
research has shown that gestures are an integral part of language and that they contribute
semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic information to the linguistic utterance. Furthermore,
they reveal internal representations of the language user during communication in ways
that might not be encoded in the verbal part of the utterance. Firstly, this chapter summarizes
research on the role of gesture in spoken languages. Subsequently, it gives an overview
of how gestural components might manifest themselves in sign languages, that is,
in a situation in which both gesture and sign are expressed by the same articulators.
Current studies are discussed that address the question of whether gestural components are the same or different in the two language modalities from a semiotic as well as from a cognitive and processing viewpoint. Understanding the role of gesture in both sign and
spoken language contributes to our knowledge of the human language faculty as a multimodal communication system.

Abstract

What are the relations between linguistic encoding and gestural representations of events during online speaking? The few studies that have been conducted on this topic have yielded somewhat incompatible results with regard to whether and how gestural representations of events change with differences in the preferred semantic and syntactic encoding possibilities of languages. Here we provide large scale semantic, syntactic and temporal analyses of speech- gesture pairs that depict 10 different motion events from 20 Turkish and 20 English speakers. We find that the gestural representations of the same events differ across languages when they are encoded by different syntactic frames (i.e., verb-framed or satellite-framed). However, where there are similarities across languages, such as omission of a certain element of the event in the linguistic encoding, gestural representations also look similar and omit the same content. The results are discussed in terms of what gestures reveal about the influence of language specific encoding on on-line thinking patterns and the underlying interactions between speech and gesture during the speaking process.

Abstract

Wanneer iemand goed is in het spreken van meerdere talen, wordt wel gezegd dat zo iemand een talenknobbel heeft. Iedereen weet dat dat niet letterlijk bedoeld is: iemand met een talenknobbel herkennen we niet aan een grote bult op zijn hoofd. Toch dacht men vroeger wel degelijk dat mensen een letterlijke talenknobbel konden ontwikkelen. Een goed ontwikkeld taalvermogen zou gepaard gaan met het groeien van het hersengebied dat hiervoor verantwoordelijk was. Dit deel van het brein zou zelfs zo groot kunnen worden dat het van binnenuit tegen de schedel drukte, met name rond de ogen. Nu weten we wel beter. Maar waar in het brein bevindt de taal zich dan wel precies?

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the semantic and pragmatic uses of space. The questions addressed concern how sign space (i.e. the area of space in front of the signer’s body) is used for meaning construction, how locations in sign space are associated with discourse referents, and how signers choose to structure sign space for their communicative intents. The chapter gives an overview of linguistic analyses of the use of space, starting with the distinction between syntactic and topographic uses of space and the different types of signs that function to establish referent-location associations, and moving to analyses based on mental spaces and conceptual blending theories. Semantic-pragmatic conventions for organizing sign space are discussed, as well as spatial devices notable in the visual-spatial modality (particularly, classifier predicates and signing perspective), which influence and determine the way meaning is created in sign space. Finally, the special role of simultaneity in sign languages is discussed, focusing on the semantic and discourse-pragmatic functions of simultaneous constructions.

Abstract

In Kalasha, an Indo-Aryan language spoken in Northwest Pakistan, the linguistic encoding of ‘put’ and ‘take’ events reveals a symmetry between lexical ‘put’ and ‘take’ verbs that implies ‘placement on’ and ‘removal from’ a supporting surface. As regards ‘placement in’ and ‘removal from’ an enclosure, the data reveal a lexical asymmetry as ‘take’ verbs display a larger degree of linguistic elaboration of the Figure-Ground relation and the type of caused motion than ‘put’ verbs. When considering syntactic patterns, more instances of asymmetry between these two event types show up. The analysis presented here supports the proposal that an asymmetry exists in the encoding of goals versus sources as suggested in Nam (2004) and Ikegami (1987), but it calls into question the statement put forward by Regier and Zheng (2007) that endpoints (goals) are more finely differentiated semantically than starting points (sources).

Abstract

Two eye-tracking experiments tested whether native listeners can adapt
to reductions in casual Dutch speech. Listeners were exposed to segmental
([b] > [m]), syllabic (full-vowel-deletion), or no reductions. In a subsequent
test phase, all three listener groups were tested on how efficiently they could
recognize both types of reduced words. In the first Experiment’s exposure
phase, the (un)reduced target words were predictable. The segmental reductions
were completely consistent (i.e., involved the same input sequences).
Learning about them was found to be pattern-specific and generalized in the
test phase to new reduced /b/-words. The syllabic reductions were not consistent
(i.e., involved variable input sequences). Learning about them was
weak and not pattern-specific. Experiment 2 examined effects of word repetition
and predictability. The (un-)reduced test words appeared in the exposure
phase and were not predictable. There was no evidence of learning for
the segmental reductions, probably because they were not predictable during
exposure. But there was word-specific learning for the vowel-deleted words.
The results suggest that learning about reductions is pattern-specific and
generalizes to new words if the input is consistent and predictable. With
variable input, there is more likely to be adaptation to a general speaking
style and word-specific learning.

Abstract

For the beginning language learner, communicative input is not based on linguistic codes alone. This study investigated two extralinguistic factors which are important for infants’ language development: the type of ongoing shared activity and non-verbal, deictic gestures. The natural interactions of 39 caregivers and their 12-month-old infants were recorded in two semi-natural contexts: a free play situation based on action and manipulation of objects, and a situation based on regard of objects, broadly analogous to an exhibit. Results show that the type of shared activity structures both caregivers’ language usage and caregivers’ and infants’ gesture usage. Further, there is a specific pattern with regard to how caregivers integrate speech with particular deictic gesture types. The findings demonstrate a pervasive influence of shared activities on human communication, even before language has emerged. The type of shared activity and caregivers’ systematic integration of specific forms of deictic gestures with language provide infants with a multimodal scaffold for a usage-based acquisition of language.

Abstract

This paper compares the acquisition of verb morphology in five Mayan languages, using a comparative method based on historical linguistics to establish precise equivalences between linguistic categories in the five languages. Earlier work on the acquisition of these languages, based on examination of longitudinal samples of naturally-occuring child language, established that in some of the languages (Tzeltal, Tzotzil) bare roots were the predominant forms for children’s early verbs, but in three other languages (Yukatek, K’iche’, Q’anjobal) unanalyzed portions of the final part of the verb were more likely. That is, children acquiring different Mayan languages initially produce different parts of the adult verb forms. In this paper we analyse the structures of verbs in caregiver speech to these same children, using samples from two-year-old children and their caregivers, and assess the degree to which features of the input might account for the children’s early verb forms in these five Mayan languages. We found that the frequency with which adults produce verbal roots at the extreme right of words and sentences influences the frequency with which children produce bare verb roots in their early verb expressions, while production of verb roots at the extreme left does not, suggesting that the children ignore the extreme left of verbs and sentences when extracting verb roots.

Abstract

This paper explores the semantics of placement and removal verbs in Ākhoe Hai om based on event descriptions elicited with a set of video stimuli. After a brief sketch of the morphosyntax of placement/removal constructions in Ākhoe Haiom, four situation types are identified semantically that cover both placement and removal events. The language exhibits a clear tendency to make more fine-grained semantic distinctions in placement verbs, as opposed to semantically more general removal verbs.

Abstract

Cognitive research is often focused on experimental condition-driven reactions. Ethological studies frequently
rely on the observation of naturally occurring specific behaviors. In both cases, subjects are filmed during the
study, so that afterwards behaviors can be coded on video. Coding should typically be blind to experimental
conditions, but often requires more information than that present on video. We introduce a method for blindcoding
of behavioral videos that takes care of both issues via three main innovations. First, of particular
significance for playback studies, it allows creation of a “soundtrack” of the study, that is, a track composed of
synthesized sounds representing different aspects of the experimental conditions, or other events, over time.
Second, it facilitates coding behavior using this audio track, together with the possibly muted original video.
This enables coding blindly to conditions as required, but not ignoring other relevant events. Third, our method
makes use of freely available, multi-platform software, including scripts we developed.

Abstract

This paper reports on the development of a flexible web based lexicon tool, LEXUS. LEXUS is targeted at linguists involved in language documentation (of endangered languages). It allows the creation of lexica within the structure of the proposed ISO LMF standard and uses the proposed concept naming conventions from the ISO data categories, thus enabling interoperability, search and merging. LEXUS also offers the possibility to visualize language, since it provides functionalities to include audio, video and still images to the lexicon. With LEXUS it is possible to create semantic network knowledge bases, using typed relations. The LEXUS tool is free for use. Index Terms: lexicon, web based application, endangered languages, language documentation.

Abstract

n applied linguistics (AL), researchers have always been concerned with second language (L2) learners' knowledge of the target language (TL), investigating the development of TL grammar, vocabulary, and phonology, for instance.

Abstract

Although humans are the ultimate “natural language generators”, the area of psycholinguistic modeling has been somewhat underrepresented in recent approaches to Natural Language Generation in computer science. To draw attention to the area and illustrate its potential relevance to Natural Language Generation, I provide an overview of recent work on psycholinguistic modeling of language production together with some key empirical findings, state-of-the-art experimental techniques, and their historical roots. The techniques include analyses of speech-error corpora, chronometric analyses, eyetracking, and neuroimaging.
The overview is built around the issue of cognitive control in natural language generation, concentrating on the production of single words, which is an essential ingredient of the generation of larger utterances. Most of the work exploited the fact that human speakers are good but not perfect at resisting temptation, which has provided some critical clues about the nature of the underlying system.

Abstract

The authors discuss the issue of how visual orienting, selective stimulus processing, and vocal response planning are related in Stroop-like tasks. The evidence suggests that visual orienting is dependent on both visual processing and verbal response planning. They also discuss the issue of selective perceptual processing in Stroop-like tasks. The evidence suggests that space-based and object-based attention lead to a Trojan horse effect in the classic Stroop task, which can be moderated by increasing the spatial distance between colour and word and by making colour and word part of different objects. Reducing the presentation duration of the colour-word stimulus or the duration of either the colour or word dimension reduces Stroop interference. This paradoxical finding was correctly simulated by the WEAVER++ model. Finally, the authors discuss evidence on the neural correlates of executive attention, in particular, the ACC. The evidence suggests that the ACC plays a role in regulation itself rather than only signalling the need for regulation.

Abstract

In this paper, I will give an overview of some well-studied multimodal signals that humans produce while they communicate with other humans, and discuss the implications of those studies for HCI. I will first discuss a conceptual framework that allows us to distinguish between functional and sensory modalities. This distinction is important, as there are multiple functional modalities using the same sensory modality (e.g., facial expression and eye-gaze in the visual modality). A second theoretically important issue is redundancy. Some signals appear to be redundant with a signal in another modality, whereas others give new information or even appear to give conflicting information (see e.g., the work of Susan Goldin-Meadows on speech accompanying gestures). I will argue that multimodal signals are never truly redundant. First, many gestures that appear at first sight to express the same meaning as the accompanying speech generally provide extra (analog) information about manner, path, etc. Second, the simple fact that the same information is expressed in more than one modality is itself a communicative signal. Armed with this conceptual background, I will then proceed to give an overview of some multimodalsignals that have been investigated in human-human research, and the level of understanding we have of the meaning of those signals. The latter issue is especially important for potential implementations of these signals in artificial agents. First, I will discuss pointing gestures. I will address the issue of the timing of pointing gestures relative to the speech it is supposed to support, the mutual dependency between pointing gestures and speech, and discuss the existence of alternative ways of pointing from other cultures. The most frequent form of pointing that does not involve the index finger is a cultural practice called lip-pointing which employs two visual functional modalities, mouth-shape and eye-gaze, simultaneously for pointing. Next, I will address the issue of eye-gaze. A classical study by Kendon (1967) claims that there is a systematic relationship between eye-gaze (at the interlocutor) and turn-taking states. Research at our institute has shown that this relationship is weaker than has often been assumed. If the dialogue setting contains a visible object that is relevant to the dialogue (e.g., a map), the rate of eye-gaze-at-other drops dramatically and its relationship to turn taking disappears completely. The implications for machine generated eye-gaze are discussed. Finally, I will explore a theoretical debate regarding spontaneous gestures. It has often been claimed that the class of gestures that is called iconic by McNeill (1992) are a “window into the mind”. That is, they are claimed to give the researcher (or even the interlocutor) a direct view into the speaker’s thought, without being obscured by the complex transformation that take place when transforming a thought into a verbal utterance. I will argue that this is an illusion. Gestures can be shown to be specifically designed such that the listener can be expected to interpret them. Although the transformations carried out to express a thought in gesture are indeed (partly) different from the corresponding transformations for speech, they are a) complex, and b) severely understudied. This obviously has consequences both for the gesture research agenda, and for the generation of iconic gestures by machines.

Abstract

In this paper, I will argue that although the study of multimodal interaction offers exciting new prospects for Human Computer Interaction and human-human communication research, language is the primary form of communication, even in multimodal systems. I will support this claim with theoretical and empirical arguments, mainly drawn from human-human communication research, and will discuss the implications for multimodal communication research and Human-Computer Interaction.

Abstract

Human communication is often thought about in terms of transmitted messages in a conventional code like a language. But communication requires a specialized interactive intelligence. Senders have to be able to perform recipient design, while receivers need to be able to do intention recognition, knowing that recipient design has taken place. To study this interactive intelligence in the lab, we developed a new task that taps directly into the underlying abilities to communicate in the absence of a conventional code. We show that subjects are remarkably successful communicators under these conditions, especially when senders get feedback from receivers. Signaling is accomplished by the manner in which an instrumental action is performed, such that instrumentally dysfunctional components of an action are used to convey communicative intentions. The findings have important implications for the nature of the human communicative infrastructure, and the task opens up a line of experimentation on human communication.

Abstract

Listeners’ signals of recipiency, such as “Mm-hm” or “uh-huh” in English, are the most elementary or minimal “conversational turns” possible. Minimal, because apart from acknowledging recipiency and inviting the speaker to continue with his/her next turn, they do not add any new information to the discourse of the conversation. The goal of this project is to gather cross cultural information on listeners’ feedback behaviour during conversation. Listeners in a conversation usually provide short signals that indicate to the speaker that they are still “with the speaker”. These signals could be verbal (like for instance “mm hm” in English or “hm hm” in Dutch) or nonverbal (visual), like nodding. Often, these signals are produced in overlap with the speaker’s vocalisation. If listeners do not produce these signals, speakers often invite them explicitly (e.g. “are you still there?” in a telephone conversation). Our goal is to investigate what kind of signals are used by listeners of different languages to signal “recipiency” to the speaker.

Abstract

Most of the study of basic emotion expressions has focused on facial expressions and little work has been done to specifically investigate happiness, the only positive of the basic emotions (Ekman & Friesen, 1971). However, a theoretical suggestion has been made that happiness could be broken down into discrete positive emotions, which each fulfil the criteria of basic emotions, and that these would be expressed vocally (Ekman, 1992). To empirically test this hypothesis, 20 participants categorised 80 paralinguistic sounds using the labels achievement, amusement, contentment, pleasure and relief. The results suggest that achievement, amusement and relief are perceived as distinct categories, which subjects accurately identify. In contrast, the categories of contentment and pleasure were systematically confused with other responses, although performance was still well above chance levels. These findings are initial evidence that the positive emotions engage distinct vocal expressions and may be considered to be distinct emotion categories.

Abstract

The difficulty of the task of segmenting a speech signal into its words is immediately clear when listening to a foreign language; it is much harder to segment the signal into its words, since the words of the language are unknown. Infants are faced with the same task when learning their first language. This study provides a better understanding of the task that infants face while learning their native language. We employed an automatic algorithm on the task of speech segmentation without prior knowledge of the labels of the phonemes. An analysis of the boundaries erroneously placed inside a phoneme showed that the algorithm consistently placed additional boundaries in phonemes in which acoustic changes occur. These acoustic changes may be as great as the transition from the closure to the burst of a plosive or as subtle as the formant transitions in low or back vowels. Moreover, we found that glottal vibration may attenuate the relevance of acoustic changes within obstruents. An interesting question for further research is how infants learn to overcome the natural tendency to segment these ‘dynamic’ phonemes.

Abstract

Articulatory feature (AF) modelling of speech has received a considerable amount of attention in automatic speech recognition research. Although termed ‘articulatory’, previous definitions make certain assumptions that are invalid, for instance, that articulators ‘hop’ from one fixed position to the next. In this paper, we studied two methods, based on support vector classification (SVC) and regression (SVR), in which the articulation continuum is modelled without being restricted to using discrete AF value classes. A comparison with a baseline system trained on quantised values of the articulation continuum showed that both SVC and SVR outperform the baseline for two of the three investigated AFs, with improvements up to 5.6% absolute.

Abstract

In foreign-accented speech, pronunciation typically deviates from the canonical form to some degree. For native listeners, it has been shown that word recognition is more difficult for strongly-accented words than for less strongly-accented words. Furthermore recognition of strongly-accented words becomes easier with additional exposure to the foreign accent. In this paper, listeners’ behaviour was simulated with Fine-tracker, a computational model of word recognition that uses real speech as input. The simulations showed that, in line with human listeners, 1) Fine-Tracker’s recognition outcome is modulated by the degree of accentedness and 2) it improves slightly after brief exposure with the accent. On the level of individual words, however, Fine-tracker failed to correctly simulate listeners’ behaviour, possibly due to differences in overall familiarity with the chosen accent (German-accented Dutch) between human listeners and Fine-Tracker.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the ability of SpeM, our recognition system based on the combination of an automatic phone recogniser and a wordsearch module, to determine as early as possible during the word recognition process whether a word is likely to be recognised correctly (this we refer to as ‘on-line’ early word recognition). We present two measures that can be used to predict whether a word is correctly recognised: the Bayesian word activation and the amount of available (acoustic) information for a word. SpeM was tested on 1,463 polysyllabic words in 885 continuous speech utterances. The investigated predictors indicated that a word activation that is 1) high (but not too high) and 2) based on more phones is more reliable to predict the correctness of a word than a similarly high value based on a small number of phones or a lower value of the word activation.

Abstract

Aging often affects sensitivity to the higher frequencies, which results in the loss of sensitivity to phonetic detail in speech. Hearing loss may therefore interfere with the categorisation of two consonants that have most information to differentiate between them in those higher frequencies and less in the lower frequencies, e.g., /f/ and /s/. We investigate two acoustic cues, i.e., formant transitions and fricative intensity, that older listeners might use to differentiate between /f/ and /s/. The results of two phonetic categorisation tasks on 38 older listeners (aged 60+) with varying degrees of hearing loss indicate that older listeners seem to use formant transitions as a cue to distinguish /s/ from /f/. Moreover, this ability is not impacted by hearing loss. On the other hand, listeners with increased hearing loss seem to rely more on intensity for fricative identification. Thus, progressive hearing loss may lead to gradual changes in perceptual cue weighting.

Abstract

Young listeners can quickly modify their interpretation of a speech sound when a talker produces the sound ambiguously. Young Dutch listeners rely mainly on the higher frequencies to distinguish between /f/ and /s/, but these higher frequencies are particularly vulnerable to age-related hearing loss. We therefore tested whether older Dutch listeners can show perceptual retuning given an ambiguous pronunciation in between /f/ and /s/. Results of a lexically-guided perceptual learning experiment showed that older Dutch listeners are still able to learn non-standard pronunciations of /f/ and /s/. Possibly, the older listeners have learned to rely on other acoustic cues, such as formant transitions, to distinguish between /f/ and /s/. However, the size and duration of the perceptual effect is influenced by hearing loss, with listeners with poorer hearing showing a smaller and a shorter-lived learning effect.

Abstract

Good teachers know their students, and exploit this knowledge to adapt or optimise their instruction. Traditional teachers know their students because they interact with them face-to-face in classroom or one-to-one tutoring sessions. In these settings, they can build student models, i.e., by exploiting the multi-faceted nature of human-human communication. In distance-learning contexts, teacher and student have to cope with the lack of such direct interaction, and this must have detrimental effects for both teacher and student. In a past study we have analysed teacher requirements for tracking student actions in computer-mediated settings. Given the results of this study, we have devised and implemented a tool that allows teachers to keep track of their learners'interaction in e-learning systems. We present the tool's functionality and user interfaces, and an evaluation of its usability.

Abstract

Previous studies have indicated that vocal and facial expressions of the ‘basic’ emotions share aspects of processing. Thus amygdala damage compromises the perception of fear and anger from the face and from the voice. In the current study we tested the hypothesis that there exist positive basic emotions, expressed mainly in the voice (Ekman, 1992). Vocal stimuli were produced to express the specific positive emotions of amusement, achievement, pleasure, contentment and relief.

Abstract

Based on the conversation analysts’ insights into the various forms of third person reference in English, this paper first presents the inventory of forms Kilivila, the Austronesian language of the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea, offers its speakers for making such references. To illustrate such references to third persons in talk-in-interaction in Kilivila, a case study on gossiping is presented in the second part of the paper. This case study shows that ambiguous anaphoric references to two first mentioned third persons turn out to not only exceed and even violate the frame of a clearly defined situational-intentional variety of Kilivila that is constituted by the genre “gossip”, but also that these references are extremely dangerous for speakers in the Trobriand Islanders’ society. I illustrate how this culturally dangerous situation escalates and how other participants of the group of gossiping men try to “repair” this violation of the frame of a culturally defined and metalinguistically labelled “way of speaking”. The paper ends with some general remarks on how the understanding of forms of person reference in a language is dependent on the culture specific context in which they are produced.

Abstract

One of the central aims of the "Cognitive Anthropology Research Group" (since 1998 the "Department of Language and Cognition of the MPI for Psycholinguistics") is to research the relationship between language, culture and cognition and the conceptualization of space in various languages and cultures. Ever since its foundation in 1991 the group has been developing methods to elicit cross-culturally and cross-linguistically comparable data for this research project. After a brief summary of the central considerations that served as guidelines for the developing of these elicitation devices, this paper first presents a broad selection of the "space games" developed and used for data elicitation in the groups' various fieldsites so far. The paper then discusses the advantages and shortcomings of these data elicitation devices. Finally, it is argued that methodologists developing such devices find themselves in a position somewhere between Scylla and Charybdis - at least, if they take the requirement seriously that the elicited data should be comparable not only cross-culturally but also cross-linguistically.

Abstract

Arbeitet man als muttersprachlicher Sprecher des Deutschen mit Corpora gesprochener oder geschriebener deutscher Sprache, dann reflektiert man in aller Regel nur selten über die Vielzahl von kulturspezifischen Informationen, die in solchen Texten kodifiziert sind – vor allem, wenn es sich bei diesen Daten um Texte aus der Gegenwart handelt. In den meisten Fällen hat man nämlich keinerlei Probleme mit dem in den Daten präsupponierten und als allgemein bekannt erachteten Hintergrundswissen. Betrachtet man dagegen Daten in Corpora, die andere – vor allem nicht-indoeuropäische – Sprachen dokumentieren, dann wird einem schnell bewußt, wieviel an kulturspezifischem Wissen nötig ist, um diese Daten adäquat zu verstehen. In meinem Vortrag illustriere ich diese Beobachtung an einem Beispiel aus meinem Corpus des Kilivila, der austronesischen Sprache der Trobriand-Insulaner von Papua-Neuguinea. Anhand eines kurzen Auschnitts einer insgesamt etwa 26 Minuten dauernden Dokumentation, worüber und wie sechs Trobriander miteinander tratschen und klatschen, zeige ich, was ein Hörer oder Leser eines solchen kurzen Daten-Ausschnitts wissen muß, um nicht nur dem Gespräch überhaupt folgen zu können, sondern auch um zu verstehen, was dabei abläuft und wieso ein auf den ersten Blick absolut alltägliches Gespräch plötzlich für einen Trobriander ungeheuer an Brisanz und Bedeutung gewinnt. Vor dem Hintergrund dieses Beispiels weise ich dann zum Schluß meines Beitrags darauf hin, wie unbedingt nötig und erforderlich es ist, in allen Corpora bei der Erschließung und Kommentierung von Datenmaterialien durch sogenannte Metadaten solche kulturspezifischen Informationen explizit zu machen.

Abstract

One of the many results of the "Space" research project conducted at the MPI for Psycholinguistics is that there are three "Frames of spatial Reference" (FoRs), the relative, the intrinsic and the absolute FoR. Cross-linguistic research showed that speakers who prefer one FoR in verbal spatial references rely on a comparable coding system for memorizing spatial configurations and for making inferences with respect to these spatial configurations in non-verbal problem solving. Moreover, research results also revealed that in some languages these verbal FoRs also influence gestural behavior. These results document the close interrelationship between language, culture and cognition in the domain "Space". The proper description of these interrelationships in the spatial domain requires language and culture specific ontologies.

Abstract

This handbook chapter summarizes some of the problems of nominal classification in language, presents and illustrates the various systems or techniques of nominal classification, and points out why nominal classification is one of the most interesting topics in Cognitive Linguistics.

Abstract

Human ethologists have shown that humans are both attracted to others and at the same time fear them. They refer to this kind of fear with the technical term ‘social fear’ and claim that “it is alleviated with personal acquaintance but remains a principle characteristic of interpersonal behaviour. As a result, we maintain various degrees of greater distance between ourselves and others depending on the amount of confidence we have in the other” (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989: 335). The goal of this task is to conduct exploratory, heuristic research to establish a new subproject that – based on a corpus of video data – will investigate various forms of human spatial behaviour cross-culturally.

Abstract

This chapter first compares data collected on Kilivila colour terms in 1983 with data collected in 2008. The Kilivila lexicon has changed from a typical stage IIIb into a stage VII colour term lexicon (Berlin and Kay 1969). The chapter then compares data on the Kilivila taste vocabulary collected in 1982/83 with data collected in 2008. No substantial change was found. Finally the chapter compares the 2008 results on taste terms with a paper on the taste vocabulary of the Torres Strait Islanders published in 1904 by Charles S. Myers. Kilivila provides evidence that traditional terms used for talking about colour and terms used to refer to tastes have remained relatively stable over time.

Abstract

It has been known at least since Abelard (12th century) that the classic Square of Opposition suffers from so-called undue existential import (UEI) in that this system of predicate logic collapses when the class denoted by the restrictor predicate is empty. It is usually thought that this mistake was made by Aristotle himself, but it has now become clear that this is not so: Aristotle did not have the Conversions but only one-way entailments, which ‘saves’ the Square. The error of UEI was introduced by his later commentators, especially Apuleius and Boethius. Abelard restored Aristotle’s original logic. After Abelard, some 14th- and 15th-century philosophers (mainly Buridan and Ockham) meant to save the Square by declaring the O-corner true when the restrictor class is empty. This ‘leaking O-corner analysis’, or LOCA, was taken up again around 1950 by some American philosopher-logicians, who now have a fairly large following. LOCA does indeed save the Square from logical disaster, but modern analysis shows that this makes it impossible to give a uniform semantic definition of the quantifiers, which thus become ambiguous—an intolerable state of affairs in logic. Klima (Ars Artium, Essays in Philosophical Semantics, Medieval and Modern, Institute of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, 1988) and Parsons (in Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.standford.edu/entries/square/, 2006; Logica Univers. 2:3–11, 2008) have tried to circumvent this problem by introducing a ‘zero’ element into the ontology, standing for non-existing entities and yielding falsity when used for variable substitution. LOCA, both without and with the zero element, is critically discussed and rejected on internal logical and external ontological grounds.

Abstract

The results of an eye-tracking experiment are presented in which Dutch listeners' eye movements were monitored as they heard sentences and saw four pictured objects. Participants were instructed to click on the object mentioned in the sentence. In the critical sentences, a stop-initial target (e.g., "pot") was preceded by an [s], thus causing ambiguity regarding whether the sentence refers to a stop-initial or a cluster-initial word (e.g., "spot"). Participants made fewer fixations to the target pictures when the stop and the preceding [s] were cross-spliced from the cluster-initial word than when they were spliced from a different token of the sentence containing the stop-initial word. Acoustic analyses showed that the two versions differed in various measures, but only one of these - the duration of the [s] - correlated with the perceptual effect. Thus, in this context, the [s] duration information is an important factor guiding word recognition.

Abstract

When perceiving vowels, listeners adjust to speaker-specific vocal-tract characteristics (such as F1) through "extrinsic vowel normalization". This effect is observed as a shift in the location of categorization boundaries of vowel continua. Similar effects have been found with non-speech. Non-speech materials, however, have consistently led to smaller effect-sizes, perhaps because of a lack of attention to non-speech. The present study investigated this possibility. Non-speech materials that had previously been shown to elicit reduced normalization effects were tested again, with the addition of an attention manipulation. The results show that increased attention does not lead to increased normalization effects, suggesting that vowel normalization is mainly determined by bottom-up signal characteristics.

Abstract

ELAN is a versatile multimedia annotation tool that is being developed at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. About a decade ago it emerged out of a number of corpus tools and utilities and it has been extended ever since. This paper focuses on the efforts made to ensure that the application keeps up with the growing needs of that era in linguistics and multimodality research; growing needs in terms of length and resolution of recordings, the number of recordings made and transcribed and the number of levels of annotation per transcription.

Abstract

Within scientific institutes there exist many language resources. These resources are often quite specialized and relatively unknown. The current infrastructural initiatives try to tackle this issue by collecting metadata about the resources and establishing centers with stable repositories to ensure the availability of the resources. It would be beneficial if the researcher could, by means of a simple query, determine which resources and which centers contain information useful to his or her research, or even work on a set of distributed resources as a virtual corpus. In this article we propose an architecture for a distributed search environment allowing researchers to perform searches in a set of distributed language resources.

Abstract

Listeners can make perceptual adjustments to phoneme categories in response to a talker who consistently produces a specific phoneme ambiguously. We investigate here whether this type of perceptual learning is also used to adapt to regional accent differences. Listeners were exposed to words produced by a Flemish talker whose realization of [x℄or [h℄ was ambiguous (producing [x℄like [h℄is a property of the West-Flanders regional accent). Before and after exposure they categorized a [x℄-[h℄continuum. For both Dutch and Flemish listeners there was no shift of the categorization boundary after exposure to ambiguous sounds in [x℄- or [h℄-biasing contexts. The absence of a lexically-driven learning effect for this contrast may be because [h℄is strongly influenced by coarticulation. As is not stable across contexts, it may be futile to adapt its representation when new realizations are heard

Abstract

Research on child language socialization has its roots in understanding the ways that adults and other caregivers interact with children in mundane social life and how these practices might enculturate the child into local communicative norms and ways of thinking ( Brown 1998 ; Clancy 1999 ; Danziger 1971 ; de León 1998 ; Garrett and Baquedano-López 2002 ; Heath 1983 ; Ochs and Schieffelin 1983, 1984 ). A second primary area of interest has been the effect of different socialization practices on more formal educational settings ( Heath 1983 ; Howard 2004 ; Michaels 1981 ; Moore 2006 , this volume; Philips 1983 ; Rogoff et al. 2003 ). However, as discussed in other contributions to this volume, language socialization extends into many other facets of life. Just as being a member of a cultural group or being a student requires socialization into the associated rights and obligations, so too does the role of medical patient or client. For instance, patients must understand how to explain their problems ( Halkowski 2006 ; Heritage and Robinson 2006 ); what information they should know about their bodies, their treatment, their life, and their medical history; and where to look during examinations ( Heath 1986 ), to name but a few of the norm-governed aspects of medical interaction. Physicians play an important role in a child's socialization into the patient role by providing

Abstract

When people request information, they have a variety of means for eliciting the information. In English two of the primary resources for eliciting information include asking questions, making statements about their interlocutor (thereby generating confirmation or revision). But within these types there are a variety of ways that these information elicitors can be designed. The goal of this task is to examine how different languages seek and provide information, the extent to which syntax vs prosodic resources are used (e.g., in questions), and the extent to which the design of information seeking actions and their responses display a structural preference to promote social solidarity.

Abstract

This paper presents a quantitative analysis of the
turn-taking mechanism evidenced in 93 telephone
dialogues that were taken from the 9-million-word
Spoken Dutch Corpus. While the first part of the paper
focuses on the temporal phenomena of turn taking, such
as durations of pauses and overlaps of turns in the
dialogues, the second part explores the discoursefunctional
aspects of utterances in a subset of 8
dialogues that were annotated especially for this
purpose. The results show that speakers adapt their turntaking
behaviour to the interlocutor’s behaviour.
Furthermore, the results indicate that male-male dialogs
show a higher proportion of overlapping turns than
female-female dialogues.

Abstract

On the basis of two-speaker spontaneous conversations, it is shown that the distributions of both pauses and speech-overlaps of telephone and faceto-face dialogues have different statistical properties. Pauses in a face-to-face
dialogue last up to 4 times longer than pauses in telephone conversations in functionally comparable conditions. There is a high correlation (0.88 or larger) between the average pause duration for the two speakers across face-to-face
dialogues and telephone dialogues. The data provided form a first quantitative analysis of the complex turn-taking mechanism evidenced in the dialogues available in the 9-million-word Spoken Dutch Corpus.

Abstract

Classical phonetic studies have shown that acoustic-articulatory cues can be interchanged without affecting the resulting phoneme percept (‘cue trading’). Cue trading has so far mainly been investigated in the context of phoneme identification. In this study, we investigate cue trading in word recognition, because words are the units of speech through which we communicate. This paper aims to provide a method to quantify cue trading effects by using a computational model of human word recognition. This model takes the acoustic signal as input and represents speech using articulatory feature streams. Importantly, it allows cue trading and underspecification. Its set-up is inspired by the functionality of Fine-Tracker, a recent computational model of human word recognition. This approach makes it possible, for the first time, to quantify cue trading in terms of a trade-off between features and to investigate cue trading in the context of a word recognition task.