Publications

Abstract

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

Abstract

Automating robot behavior in a specific situation is an active area of research. There are several approaches available in the literature of robotics to cater for the automatic behavior of a robot. However, when it comes to humanoids or human-robot interaction in general, the area has been less explored. In this paper, a pseudo-randomization approach has been introduced to automatize the gestures and facial expressions of an interactive humanoid robot called ROBIN based on its mental state. A significant number of gestures and facial expressions have been implemented to allow the robot more options to perform a relevant action or reaction based on visual stimuli. There is a display of noticeable differences in the behaviour of the robot for the same stimuli perceived from an interaction partner. This slight autonomous behavioural change in the robot clearly shows a notion of automation in behaviour. The results from experimental scenarios and human-centered evaluation of the system help validate the approach.

Abstract

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

Abstract

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

Abstract

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

Abstract

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 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

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

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

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

The current version of the psycholinguistic model of human word recognition Shortlist suffers from two unrealistic constraints. First, the input of Shortlist must consist of a single string of phoneme symbols. Second, the current version of the search in Shortlist makes it difficult to deal with insertions and deletions in the input phoneme string. This research attempts to fully automatically derive a phoneme string from the acoustic signal that is as close as possible to the number of phonemes in the lexical representation of the word. We optimised an Automatic Phone Recogniser (APR) using two approaches, viz. varying the value of the mismatch parameter and optimising the APR output strings on the output of Shortlist. The approaches show that it will be very difficult to satisfy the input requirements of the present version of Shortlist with a phoneme string generated by an APR.

Abstract

Due to pronunciation variation, many insertions and deletions of phones occur in spontaneous speech. The psycholinguistic model of human speech recognition Shortlist is not well able to deal with phone insertions and deletions and is therefore not well suited for dealing with real-life input. The research presented in this paper explains how Shortlist can benefit from pronunciation variation modelling in dealing with real-life input. Pronunciation variation was modelled by including variants into the lexicon of Shortlist. A series of experiments was carried out to find the optimal acoustic model set for transcribing the training material that was used as basis for the generation of the variants. The Shortlist experiments clearly showed that Shortlist benefits from pronunciation variation modelling. However, the performance of Shortlist stays far behind the performance of other, more conventional speech recognisers.

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

The time course of metrical encoding, i.e. stress, during speech production is investigated. In a first experiment, participants were presented with pictures whose bisyllabic Dutch names had initial or final stress (KAno 'canoe' vs. kaNON 'cannon'; capital letters indicate stressed syllables). Picture names were matched for frequency and object recognition latencies. When participants were asked to judge whether picture names had stress on the first or second syllable, they showed significantly faster decision times for initially stressed targets than for targets with final stress. Experiment 2 replicated this effect with trisyllabic picture names (faster RTs for penultimate stress than for ultimate stress). In our view, these results reflect the incremental phonological encoding process. Wheeldon and Levelt (1995) found that segmental encoding is a process running from the beginning to the end of words. Here, we present evidence that the metrical pattern of words, i.e. stress, is also encoded incrementally.

Abstract

The representative corpus SYN2000 in the Czech National Corpus (CNK) project containing 100 million word forms taken from different types of texts. I have tried to determine the extent and depth of the linguistic material in the corpus. First, I chose the adjectives indicating the basic colors of the spectrum and other parts of speech (names and adverbs) derived from these adjectives. An analysis of three examples - black, white and red - shows the extent of the linguistic wealth and diversity we are looking at: because of size limitations, no existing dictionary is capable of embracing all analyzed nuances. Currently, we can only hope that the next dictionary of contemporary Czech, built on the basis of the Czech National Corpus, will be electronic. Without the size limitations, we would be able us to include many of the fine nuances of language

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

Due to its numerous bibliometric entries of scholarly articles and connected information Wikidata can serve as an open and rich
source for deep scientometrical analyses. However, there are currently certain limitations: While 31.5% of all Wikidata entries represent scientific articles, only 8.9% are entries describing a person and the number
of entries researcher is accordingly even lower. Another issue is the frequent absence of established relations between the scholarly article item and the author item although the author is already listed in Wikidata.
To fill this gap and to improve the content of Wikidata in general, we established a workflow for matching authors and scholarly publications by integrating data from the ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) database. By this approach we were able to extend Wikidata by more than 12k author-publication relations and the method can be
transferred to other enrichments based on ORCID data. This is extension is beneficial for Wikidata users performing bibliometrical analyses or using such metadata for other purposes.

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

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

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

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

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

No idea is older in the history of linguistics than the thought that there is, somehow hidden underneath the surface of sentences, a form or a structure which provides a semantic analysis and lays bare their logical structure. In Plato’s Cratylus the theory was proposed, deriving from Heraclitus’ theory of explanatory underlying structure in physical nature, that words contain within themselves bits of syntactic structure giving their meanings. The Stoics held the same view and maintained moreover that every sentence has an underlying logical structure, which for them was the Aristotelian subject- predicate form. They even proposed transformational processes to derive the surface from the deep structure. The idea of a semantically analytic logical form underlying the sentences of every language kept reappearing in various guises at various times. Quite recently it re-emerged under the name of generative semantics.

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

This paper describes ongoing research aiming at the description of variation in speech as represented by asynchronous articulatory features. We will first illustrate how distances in the articulatory feature space can be used for event detection along speech trajectories in this space. The temporal structure imposed by the cosine distance in articulatory feature space coincides to a large extent with the manual segmentation on phone level. The analysis also indicates that the articulatory feature representation provides better such alignments than the MFCC representation does. Secondly, we will present first results that indicate that articulatory features can be used to probe for acoustic differences in the onsets of Dutch singulars and plurals.

Abstract

This paper builds on previous work that aims at unraveling the structure of the speech signal by means of using probabilistic representations. The context of this work is a multi-pass speech recognition system in which a phone lattice is created and used as a basis for a lexical search in which symbolic mismatches are allowed at certain costs. The focus is on the optimization of the costs of phone insertions, deletions and substitutions that are used in the lexical decoding pass. Two optimization approaches are presented, one related to a multi-pass computational model for human speech recognition, the other based on a decoding in which Bayes’ risks are minimized. In the final section, the advantages of these optimization methods are discussed and compared.

Abstract

In face-to-face conversation, recipients might use the bodily movements of the speaker (e.g. gestures) to facilitate language processing. It has been suggested that one way through which this facilitation may happen is prediction. However, for this to be possible, gestures would need to precede speech, and it is unclear whether this is true during natural conversation.
In a corpus of Dutch conversations, we annotated hand gestures that represent semantic information and occurred during questions, and the word(s) which corresponded most closely to the gesturally depicted meaning. Thus, we tested whether representational gestures temporally precede their lexical affiliates. Further, to see whether preceding gestures may indeed facilitate language processing, we asked whether the gesture-speech asynchrony predicts the response time to the question the gesture is part of.
Gestures and their strokes (most meaningful movement component) indeed preceded the corresponding lexical information, thus demonstrating their predictive potential. However, while questions with gestures got faster responses than questions without, there was no evidence that questions with larger gesture-speech asynchronies get faster responses. These results suggest that gestures indeed have the potential to facilitate predictive language processing, but further analyses on larger datasets are needed to test for links between asynchrony and processing advantages.

Abstract

The Papuan languages of the central Solomon Islands are a negatively defined areal grouping: They are those four or possibly five languages in the central Solomon Islands that do not belong to the Austronesian family. Bilua (Vella Lavella), Touo (Rendova), Lavukaleve (Russell Islands), Savosavo (Savo Island) and possibly Kazukuru (New Georgia) have been identified as non-Austronesian since the early 20th century. However, their affiliations both to each other and to other languages still remain a mystery. Heterogeneous and until recently largely undescribed, they present an interesting departure from what is known both of Austronesian languages in the region and of the Papuan languages of the mainland of New Guinea.

Abstract

This chapter describes the challenges that modern digital language archives are faced with. One essential aspect of such an archive is to have a rich metadata catalog such that the archived resources can be easily discovered. The challenge of the archive is to obtain these rich metadata descriptions from the depositors without creating too much overhead for them. The rapid changes in storage technology, file formats and encoding standards make it difficult to build a long-lasting repository, therefore archives need to be set up in such a way that a straightforward and automated migration process to newer technology is possible whenever certain technology becomes obsolete. Other problems arise from the fact that there are many different groups of users of the archive, each of them with their own specific expectations and demands. Often conflicts exist between the requirements for different purposes of the archive, e.g. between long-term preservation of the data versus direct access to the resources via the web. The task of the archive is to come up with a technical solution that works well for most usage scenarios.

Abstract

Multilingual speakers are able to switch from
one language to the other (“code-switch”) be-
tween or within sentences. Because the under-
lying cognitive mechanisms are not well un-
derstood, in this study we use computational
cognitive modeling to shed light on the pro-
cess of code-switching. We employed the
Bilingual Dual-path model, a Recurrent Neu-
ral Network of bilingual sentence production
(Tsoukala et al., 2017) and simulated sentence
production in simultaneous Spanish-English
bilinguals. Our first goal was to investigate
whether the model would code-switch with-
out being exposed to code-switched training
input. The model indeed produced code-
switches even without any exposure to such
input and the patterns of code-switches are
in line with earlier linguistic work (Poplack,
1980). The second goal of this study was to
investigate an auxiliary phrase asymmetry that
exists in Spanish-English code-switched pro-
duction. Using this cognitive model, we ex-
amined a possible cause for this asymmetry.
To our knowledge, this is the first computa-
tional cognitive model that aims to simulate
code-switched sentence production.

Abstract

We investigated whether non-native listeners can exploit phonetic detail in recognizing potentially ambiguous utterances, as native listeners can [6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. Due to the phenomenon of intrusive /r/, the English phrase extra ice may sound like extra rice. A production study indicates that the intrusive /r/ can be distinguished from the onset /r/ in rice, as it is phonetically weaker. In two cross-modal identity priming studies, however, we found no conclusive evidence that Dutch learners of English are able to make use of this difference. Instead, auditory primes such as extra rice and extra ice with onset and intrusive /r/s activate both types of targets such as ice and rice. This supports the notion of spurious lexical activation in L2 perception.

Abstract

Prevoicing is the presence of vocal fold vibration during the closure of initial voiced plosives (negative VOT). The presence or absence of prevoicing is generally used to describe the voicing distinction in Dutch initial plosives. However, a phonetic study showed that prevoicing is frequently absent in Dutch. This article discusses the role of prevoicing in the production and perception of Dutch plosives. Furthermore, two cross-modal priming experiments are presented that examined the effect of prevoicing variation on word recognition. Both experiments showed no difference between primes with 12, 6 or 0 periods of prevoicing, even though a third experiment indicated that listeners could discriminate these words. These results are discussed in light of another priming experiment that did show an effect of the absence of prevoicing, but only when primes had a voiceless word competitor. Phonetic detail appears to influence lexical access only when it helps to distinguish between lexical candidates.