Publications

Abstract

Reproduced with permission of Blackwell Publishing from: Levinson, S. C. (2004) 'Deixis'. In: Horn, L.R. and Ward, G. (Eds.) The Handbook of Pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 100-121

Abstract

Reprinted with permission of The MIT Press from Levinson (2000) Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature, pp. 112-118, 116-167, 170-173, 177-180. MIT Press

Abstract

Yélî Dnye has two discernable dedicated constructions for reciprocal marking. The first and main construction uses a dedicated reciprocal pronoun numo, somewhat like English each other. We can recognise two subconstructions. First, the ‘numo-construction’, where the reciprocal pronoun is a patient of the verb, and where the invariant pronoun numo is obligatorily incorporated, triggering intransitivisation (e.g. A-NPs become absolutive). This subconstruction has complexities, for example in the punctual aspect only, the verb is inflected like a transitive, but with enclitics mismatching actual person/number. In the second variant or subconstruction, the ‘noko-construction’, the same reciprocal pronoun (sometimes case-marked as noko) occurs but now in oblique positions with either transitive or intransitive verbs. The reciprocal element here has some peculiar binding properties. Finally, the second independent construction is a dedicated periphrastic (or woni…woni) construction, glossing ‘the one did X to the other, and the other did X to the one’. It is one of the rare cross-serial dependencies that show that natural languages cannot be modelled by context-free phrase-structure grammars. Finally, the usage of these two distinct constructions is discussed.

Abstract

Reprint from Stephen C. Levinson, ‘Three Levels of Meaning’, in Frank Palmer (ed.), Grammar and Meaning: Essays in Honor of Sir John Lyons (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 90–115

Abstract

Changing Prospects for Universals in Pragmatics
The term PRAGMATICS has come to denote the study of general principles of language use. It is usually understood to contrast with SEMANTICS, the study of encoded meaning, and also, by some authors, to contrast with SOCIOLINGUISTICS
and the ethnography of speaking, which are more concerned with local sociocultural practices. Given that pragmaticists come from disciplines as varied as philosophy, sociology,
linguistics, communication studies, psychology, and anthropology, it is not surprising that definitions of pragmatics vary. Nevertheless, most authors agree on a list of topics
that come under the rubric, including DEIXIS, PRESUPPOSITION,
implicature (see CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE), SPEECH-ACTS, and conversational organization (see CONVERSATIONAL ANALYSIS). Here, we can use this extensional definition as a starting point (Levinson 1988; Huang 2007).

Abstract

Recent research suggests that 12-month-old infants in German cultural settings have the motive of sharing their attention to and interest in various events with a social interlocutor. To do so, these preverbal infants predominantly use the pointing gesture (in this case the extended arm with or without extended index finger) as a means to direct another person’s attention. This task systematically investigates different types of motives underlying infants’ pointing. The occurrence of a protodeclarative (as opposed to protoimperative) motive is of particular interest because it requires an understanding of the recipient’s psychological states, such as attention and interest, that can be directed and accessed.

Abstract

The human body is unique: it is both an object of perception and the source of human experience. Its universality makes it a perfect resource for asking questions about how cognition, brain and typology relate to one another. For example, we can ask how speakers of different languages segment and categorize the human body. A dominant view is that body parts are “given” by visual perceptual discontinuities, and that words are merely labels for these visually determined parts (e.g., Andersen, 1978; Brown, 1976; Lakoff, 1987). However, there are problems with this view. First it ignores other perceptual information, such as somatosensory and motoric representations. By looking at the neural representations of sesnsory representations, we can test how much of the categorization of the human body can be done through perception alone. Second, we can look at language typology to see how much universality and variation there is in body-part categories. A comparison of a range of typologically, genetically and areally diverse languages shows that the perceptual view has only limited applicability (Majid, Enfield & van Staden, in press). For example, using a “coloring-in” task, where speakers of seven different languages were given a line drawing of a human body and asked to color in various body parts, Majid & van Staden (in prep) show that languages vary substantially in body part segmentation. For example, Jahai (Mon-Khmer) makes a lexical distinction between upper arm, lower arm, and hand, but Lavukaleve (Papuan Isolate) has just one word to refer to arm, hand, and leg. This shows that body part categorization is not a straightforward mapping of words to visually determined perceptual parts.

Abstract

Many studies in cognitive science address how people categorize objects, but there has been comparatively little research on event categorization. This study investigated the categorization of events involving material destruction, such as “cutting” and “breaking”. Speakers of 28 typologically, genetically, and areally diverse languages described events shown in a set of video-clips. There was considerable cross-linguistic agreement in the dimensions along which the events were distinguished, but there was variation in the number of categories and the placement of their boundaries.

Abstract

There are three main strands of research which have investigated people’s intuitive knowledge of objects in motion. (1) Knowledge of the trajectories of objects in motion; (2) knowledge of the causes of motion; and (3) the categorisation of motion as to whether it has been produced by something animate or inanimate. We provide a brief introduction to each of these areas. We then point to some linguistic and cultural differences which may have consequences for people’s knowledge of objects in motion. Finally, we describe two experimental tasks and an ethnographic task that will allow us to collect data in order to establish whether, indeed, there are interesting cross-linguistic/cross-cultural differences in lay theories of objects in motion.

Abstract

How similar are reciprocal constructions in the semantic parameters they encode? We investigate this question by using an extensional approach, which examines similarity of meaning by examining how constructions are applied over a set of 64 videoclips depicting reciprocal events (Evans et al. 2004). We apply statistical modelling to descriptions from speakers of 20 languages elicited using the videoclips. We show that there are substantial differences in meaning between constructions of different languages.

Abstract

How are the senses structured by the languages we speak, the cultures we inhabit? To what extent is the encoding of perceptual experiences in languages a matter of how the mind/brain is ―wired-up‖ and to what extent is it a question of local cultural preoccupation? The ―Language of Perception‖ project tests the hypothesis that some perceptual domains may be more ―ineffable‖ – i.e. difficult or impossible to put into words – than others. While cognitive scientists have assumed that proximate senses (olfaction, taste, touch) are more ineffable than distal senses (vision, hearing), anthropologists have illustrated the exquisite variation and elaboration the senses achieve in different cultural milieus. The project is designed to test whether the proximate senses are universally ineffable – suggesting an architectural constraint on cognition – or whether they are just accidentally so in Indo-European languages, so expanding the role of cultural interests and preoccupations. To address this question, a standardized set of stimuli of color patches, geometric shapes, simple sounds, tactile textures, smells and tastes have been used to elicit descriptions from speakers of more than twenty languages—including three sign languages. The languages are typologically, genetically and geographically diverse, representing a wide-range of cultures. The communities sampled vary in subsistence modes (hunter-gatherer to industrial), ecological zones (rainforest jungle to desert), dwelling types (rural and urban), and various other parameters. We examine how codable the different sensory modalities are by comparing how consistent speakers are in how they describe the materials in each modality. Our current analyses suggest that taste may, in fact, be the most codable sensorial domain across languages. Moreover, we have identified exquisite elaboration in the olfactory domains in some cultural settings, contrary to some contemporary predictions within the cognitive sciences. These results suggest that differential codability may be at least partly the result of cultural preoccupation. This shows that the senses are not just physiological phenomena but are constructed through linguistic, cultural and social practices.

Abstract

To study concepts, cognitive scientists must first identify some. The prevailing assumption is that they are revealed by words such as triangle, table, and robin. But languages vary dramatically in how they carve up the world by name. Either ordinary concepts must be heavily language-dependent or names cannot be a direct route to concepts. We asked English, Dutch, Spanish, and Japanese speakers to name videos of human locomotion and judge their similarities. We investigated what name inventories and scaling solutions on name similarity and on physical similarity for the groups individually and together suggest about the underlying concepts. Aggregated naming and similarity solutions converged on results distinct from the answers suggested by the word inventories and scaling solutions of any single language. Words such as triangle, table, and robin can help identify the conceptual space of a domain, but they do not directly reveal units of knowledge usefully considered 'concepts'.

Abstract

How listeners understand spoken words despite massive variation in the speech signal is a central issue for linguistic theory. A recent focus on lexical frequency and specificity has proved fruitful in accounting for this phenomenon. Speech perception, though, is a multi-faceted process and likely incorporates a number of mechanisms to map a variable signal to meaning. We examine a well-established language use factor — lexical frequency — and how this factor is integrated with phonetic variability during the perception of accented speech. We show that an integrated perspective highlights a low-level perceptual mechanism that accounts for the perception of accented speech absent native contrasts, while shedding light on the use of interactive language factors in the perception of spoken words.

Abstract

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

Abstract

Speakers tend to take over the articulatory habits of their interlocutors [e.g., Pardo, JASA (2006)]. This phonetic alignment could be the consequence of either a social mechanism or a direct and automatic link between speech perception and production. The latter assumes that social variables should have little influence on phonetic alignment. To test that participants were engaged in a "cloze task" (i.e., Stimulus: "In fantasy movies, silver bullets are used to kill ..." Response: "werewolves") with either one or four interlocutors. Given findings with the Asch-conformity paradigm in social psychology, multiple consistent speakers should exert a stronger force on the participant to align. To control the speech style of the interlocutors, their questions and answers were pre-recorded in either a formal or a casual speech style. The stimuli's speech style was then manipulated between participants and was consistent throughout the experiment for a given participant. Surprisingly, participants aligned less with the speech style if there were multiple interlocutors. This may reflect a "diffusion of responsibility:" Participants may find it more important to align when they interact with only one person than with a larger group.

Abstract

Effekte linguisticher Typologie auf die Sprach-entwicklung. In G. Plehn (Ed.), Jahrbuch der Max-Planck Gesellsch

Abstract

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

Abstract

This paper describes the Glottolog/Langdoc project, an at- tempt to provide near-total bibliographical coverage of descriptive re- sources to the world's languages. Every reference is treated as a resource, as is every \languoid"[1]. References are linked to the languoids which they describe, and languoids are linked to the references described by them. Family relations between languoids are modeled in SKOS, as are relations across dierent classications of the same languages. This setup allows the representation of languoids as collections of references, render- ing the question of the denition of entities like `Scots', `West-Germanic' or `Indo-European' more empirical.

Abstract

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

Abstract

In this paper we describe a general scheme for internationalization of our talking head, Baldi, to speak other languages. We describe the modular structure of the auditory/visual synthesis software. As an example, we have created a synthetic Arabic talker, which is evaluated using a noisy word recognition task comparing this talker with a natural one.

Abstract

Neste artigo fazemos uma revisão breve de investigações actuais com técnicas comportamentais e de neuroimagem funcional sobre a aprendizagem de uma linguagem artificial em crianças e adultos. Na secção final, discutimos uma possível associação entre dislexia e aprendizagem implícita. Resultados recentes sugerem que a presença de um défice ao nível da aprendizagem implícita pode contribuir para as dificuldades de leitura e escrita observadas em indivíduos disléxicos.

Abstract

Two groups of participants were trained to perceive an ambiguous sound [s/f] as either /s/ or /f/ based on lexical bias: One group heard the ambiguous fricative in /s/-final words, the other in /f/-final words. This kind of exposure leads to a recalibration of the /s/-/f/ contrast [e.g., 4]. In order to investigate when and how this recalibration emerges, test trials were interspersed among training and filler trials. The learning effect needed at least 10 clear training items to arise. Its emergence seemed to occur in a rather step-wise fashion. Learning did not improve much after it first appeared. It is likely, however, that the early test trials attracted participants' attention and therefore may have interfered with the learning process.

Abstract

This paper identifies four reciprocal construction types in Khoekhoe (Central Khoisan). After a brief description of the morphosyntax of each construction, semantic factors governing their choice are explored. Besides lexical semantics, the number of participants, timing of symmetric subevents, and symmetric conceptualisation are shown to account for the distribution of the four partially competing reciprocal constructions.

Abstract

An exposure-test paradigm was used to examine whether Dutch listeners can adapt their perception to non-canonical marking of lexical stress in Hungarian-accented Dutch. During exposure, one group of listeners heard only words with correct initial stress, while another group also heard examples of unstressed initial syllables that were marked by high pitch, a possible stress cue in Dutch. Subsequently, listeners’ eye movements to target-competitor pairs with segmental overlap but different stress patterns were tracked while hearing Hungarian-accented Dutch. Listeners who had heard non-canonically produced words previously distinguished target-competitor pairs faster than listeners who had only been exposed to canonical forms before. This suggests that listeners can adapt quickly to speaker-specific realizations of non-canonical lexical stress.

Abstract

Listeners can flexibly retune category boundaries of their native language to adapt to non-canonically produced phonemes. This only occurs, however, if the pronunciation peculiarities can be attributed to stable and not transient speaker-specific characteristics. Listening to someone speaking a second language, listeners could attribute non-canonical pronunciations either to the speaker or to the fact that she is modifying her categories in the second language. We investigated whether, following exposure to Dutch-accented English, Dutch listeners show effects of category retuning during test where they hear the same speaker speaking her native language, Dutch. Exposure was a lexical-decision task where either word-final [f] or [s] was replaced by an ambiguous sound. At test listeners categorized minimal word pairs ending in sounds along an [f]-[s] continuum. Following exposure to English words, Dutch listeners showed boundary shifts of a similar magnitude as following exposure to the same phoneme variants in their native language. This suggests that production patterns in a second language are deemed a stable characteristic. A second experiment suggests that category retuning also occurs when listeners are exposed to and tested with a native speaker of their second language. Listeners thus retune phoneme boundaries across languages.

Abstract

A aquisição de competências de leitura e de escrita pode ser vista como um processo formal de transmissão cultural, onde interagem factores neurobiológicos e culturais. O treino sistemático exigido pela aprendizagem da leitura e da escrita poderá produzir mudanças quantitativas e qualitativas tanto a nível cognitivo como ao nível da organização do cérebro. Estudar sujeitos iletrados e letrados representa, assim, uma oportunidade para investigar efeitos de uma aprendizagem específica no desenvolvimento cognitivo e suas bases cerebrais. Neste trabalho, revemos um conjunto de investigações comportamentais e com métodos de imagem cerebral que indicam que a literacia tem um impacto nas nossas funções cognitivas e na organização cerebral. Mais especificamente, discutiremos diferenças entre letrados e iletrados para domínios cognitivos verbais e não-verbais, sugestivas de que a arquitectura cognitiva é formatada, em parte, pela aprendizagem da leitura e da escrita. Os dados de neuroimagem funcionais e estruturais são também indicadores que a aquisição de uma ortografia alfabética interfere nos processos de organização e lateralização das funções cognitivas.

Abstract

This paper describes the syntax and semantics of reciprocity in the Central dialect of Rotokas, a non-Austronesian (Papuan) language spoken in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea. In Central Rotokas, there are three main reciprocal construction types, which differ formally according to where the reflexive/reciprocal marker (ora-) occurs in the clause: on the verb, on a pronominal argument or adjunct, or on a body part noun. The choice of construction type is determined by two considerations: the valency of the verb (i.e., whether it has one or two core arguments) and whether the reciprocal action is performed on a body part. The construction types are compatible with a wide range of the logical subtypes of reciprocity (strong, melee, chaining, etc.).

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

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

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

The current study reports the enhancing effect of a high variability training procedure in the learning of a Japanese geminate-singleton fricative contrast. Dutch natives took part in a five-day training procedure in which they identified geminate and singleton variants of the Japanese fricative /s/. They heard either many repetitions of a limited set of words recorded by a single speaker (simple training) or fewer repetitions of a more variable set of words recorded by multiple speakers (variable training). Pre-post identification evaluations and a transfer test indicated clear benefits of the variable training.

Abstract

The use of word order and intonation to mark focus in child speech has received some attention. However, past work usually examined each device separately or only compared the realizations of focused vs. non-focused constituents. This paper investigates the interaction between word order and intonation in the marking of different focus types in 4- to 5-year old German-speaking children and an adult control group. An answer-reconstruction task was used to elicit syntactic (word order) and intonational focus marking of subject and objects (locus of focus) in three focus types (broad, narrow, and contrastive focus). The results indicate that both children and adults used intonation to distinguish broad from contrastive focus but they differed in the marking of narrow focus. Further, both groups preferred intonation to word order as device for focus marking. But children showed an early sensitivity for the impact of focus type and focus location on word order variation and on phonetic means to mark focus.

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

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

We have recently developed a new model of human speech recognition, based on automatic speech recognition techniques [1]. The present paper has two goals. First, we show that the new model performs well in the recognition of lexically ambiguous input. These demonstrations suggest that the model is able to operate in the same optimal way as human listeners. Second, we discuss how to relate the behaviour of a recogniser, designed to discover the optimum path through a word lattice, to data from human listening experiments. We argue that this requires a metric that combines both path-based and word-based measures of recognition performance. The combined metric varies continuously as the input speech signal unfolds over time.

Abstract

Previous research on lexically-guided perceptual learning has focussed on contrasts that differ primarily in local cues, such as plosive and fricative contrasts. The present research had two aims: to investigate whether perceptual learning occurs for a contrast with non-local cues, the /l/-/r/ contrast, and to establish whether STRAIGHT can be used to create ambiguous sounds on an /l/-/r/ continuum. Listening experiments showed lexically-guided learning about the /l/-/r/ contrast. Listeners can thus tune in to unusual speech sounds characterised by non-local cues. Moreover, STRAIGHT can be used to create stimuli for perceptual learning experiments, opening up new research possibilities. Index Terms: perceptual learning, morphing, liquids, human word recognition, STRAIGHT.

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel computational model of human speech recognition – called SpeM – based on the theory underlying Shortlist. We will show that SpeM, in combination with an automatic phone recogniser (APR), is able to simulate the human speech recognition process from the acoustic signal to the ultimate recognition of words. This joint model takes an acoustic speech file as input and calculates the activation flows of candidate words on the basis of the degree of fit of the candidate words with the input. Experiments showed that SpeM outperforms Shortlist on the recognition of ‘real-life’ input. Furthermore, SpeM performs only slightly worse than an off-the-shelf full-blown automatic speech recogniser in which all words are equally probable, while it provides a transparent computationally elegant paradigm for modelling word activations in human word recognition.

Abstract

This study investigated the encoding of metrical information during speech production in Dutch. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to judge whether bisyllabic picture names had initial or final stress. Results showed significantly faster decision times for initially stressed targets (e.g., LEpel 'spoon') than for targets with final stress (e.g., liBEL 'dragon fly'; capital letters indicate stressed syllables) and revealed that the monitoring latencies are not a function of the picture naming or object recognition latencies to the same pictures. Experiments 2 and 3 replicated the outcome of the first experiment with bi- and trisyllabic picture names. These results demonstrate that metrical information of words is encoded rightward incrementally during phonological encoding in speech production. The results of these experiments are in line with Levelt's model of phonological encoding.

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

The basic idea behind this task is to find out how languages encode basic shape distinctions such as dimensionality, axial geometry, relative size, etc. More specifically, we want to find out (i) which formal means are used cross linguistically to encode basic shape distinctions, and (ii) which are the semantic distinctions that are made in this domain. In languages with many shape-classifiers, these distinctions are encoded (at least partially) in classifiers. In other languages, positional verbs, descriptive modifiers, such as “flat”, “round”, or nouns such as “cube”, “ball”, etc. might be the preferred means. In this context, we also want to investigate what other “grammatical work” shapeencoding expressions possibly do in a given language, e.g. unitization of mass nouns, or anaphoric uses of shape-encoding classifiers, etc. This task further seeks to determine the role of shape-related parameters which underlie the design of objects in the semantics of the system under investigation.

Abstract

This research investigated developmental changes in children’s representations of large-scale environments as reflected in spontaneous gestures and speech produced during route descriptions Four-, five-, and six-year-olds (N = 122) described the route from their nursery school to their own homes. Analysis of the children’s gestures showed that some 5- and 6-year-olds produced gestures that represented survey mapping, and they were categorized as a survey group. Children who did not produce such gestures were categorized as a route group. A comparison of the two groups revealed no significant differences in speech indices, with the exception that the survey group showed significantly fewer right/left terms. As for gesture, the survey group produced more gestures than the route group. These results imply that an initial form of survey-map representation is acquired beginning at late preschool age.