Publications

Abstract

Does the naming of clocks always require conceptual preparation? To examine this question, speakers were presented with analog and digital clocks that had to be named in Dutch using either a relative (e.g., “quarter to four”) or an absolute (e.g., “three forty-five”) clock time expression format. Naming latencies showed evidence of conceptual preparation when speakers produced relative time expressions to analog and digital clocks, but not when they used absolute time expressions. These findings indicate that conceptual mediation is not always mandatory for telling time, but instead depends on clock time expression format, supporting a multiple-route account of Dutch clock time naming.

Abstract

In various applications of forensic phonetics the question arises as to how far aural-perceptual speaker recognition performance is reliable. Therefore, it is necessary to examine the relationship between speaker recognition results and human perception/production abilities like musicality or speech sensitivity. In this study, performance in a speaker recognition experiment and a speech sensitivity test are correlated. The results show a moderately significant positive correlation between the two tasks. Generally, performance in the speaker recognition task was better than in the speech sensitivity test. Professionals in speech and singing yielded a more homogeneous correlation than non-experts. Training in speech as well as choir-singing seems to have a positive effect on performance in speaker recognition. It may be concluded, firstly, that in cases where the reliability of voice line-up results or the credibility of a testimony have to be considered, the speech sensitivity test could be a useful indicator. Secondly, the speech sensitivity test might be integrated into the canon of possible procedures for the accreditation of forensic phoneticians. Both tests may also be used in combination.

Abstract

* Kristiansen, M., Deriziotis, P. These authors contributed equally to this work.* - The mechanism of cell death in prion disease is unknown but is associated with the production of a misfolded conformer of the prion protein. We report that disease-associated prion protein specifically inhibits the proteolytic β subunits of the 26S proteasome. Using reporter substrates, fluorogenic peptides, and an activity probe for the β subunits, this inhibitory effect was demonstrated in pure 26S proteasome and three different cell lines. By challenge with recombinant prion and other amyloidogenic proteins, we demonstrate that only the prion protein in a nonnative β sheet conformation inhibits the 26S proteasome at stoichiometric concentrations. Preincubation with an antibody specific for aggregation intermediates abrogates this inhibition, consistent with an oligomeric species mediating this effect. We also present evidence for a direct relationship between prion neuropathology and impairment of the ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS) in prion-infected UPS-reporter mice. Together, these data suggest a mechanism for intracellular neurotoxicity mediated by oligomers of misfolded prion protein.

Abstract

While the distribution of RNA polymerase II (PolII) in a variety of complex genomes is correlated with gene expression, the presence of PolII at a gene does not necessarily indicate active expression. Various patterns of PolII binding have been described genome wide; however, whether or not PolII binds at transcriptionally inactive sites remains uncertain. The two X chromosomes in female cells in mammals present an opportunity to examine each of the two alleles of a given locus in both active and inactive states, depending on which X chromosome is silenced by X chromosome inactivation. Here, we investigated PolII occupancy and expression of the associated genes across the active (Xa) and inactive (Xi) X chromosomes in human female cells to elucidate the relationship of gene expression and PolII binding. We find that, while PolII in the pseudoautosomal region occupies both chromosomes at similar levels, it is significantly biased toward the Xa throughout the rest of the chromosome. The general paucity of PolII on the Xi notwithstanding, detectable (albeit significantly reduced) binding can be observed, especially on the evolutionarily younger short arm of the X. PolII levels at genes that escape inactivation correlate with the levels of their expression; however, additional PolII sites can be found at apparently silenced regions, suggesting the possibility of a subset of genes on the Xi that are poised for expression. Consistent with this hypothesis, we show that a high proportion of genes associated with PolII-accessible sites, while silenced in GM12878, are expressed in other female cell lines.

Abstract

Only relatively recently have theories of speech production concerned themselves with the part idioms and other multi-word lexical items (MLIs) play in the processes of speech production. Two theories of speech production which attempt to account for the accessing of idioms in speech production are those of Cutting and Bock (1997) and superlemma theory (Sprenger, 2003; Sprenger, Levelt, & Kempen, 2006). Much of the data supporting theories of speech production comes either from time course experiments or from slips of the tongue (Bock & Levelt, 1994). The latter are of two kinds: experimentally induced (Baars, 1992) or naturally observed (Fromkin, 1980). Cutting and Bock use experimentally induced speech errors while Sprenger et al. use time course experiments. The missing data type that has a bearing on speech production involving MLIs is that of naturally occurring slips. In this study the impact of data taken from naturally observed slips involving English and Dutch MLIs are brought to bear on these theories. The data are taken initially from a corpus of just over 1000 naturally observed English slips involving MLIs (the Tuggy corpus). Our argument proceeds as follows. First we show that slips occur independent of whether or not there are MLIs involved. In other words, speech production proceeds in certain of its aspects as though there were no MLI present. We illustrate these slips from the Tuggy data. Second we investigate the predictions of superlemma theory. Superlemma theory (Sprenger et al., 2006) accounts for the selection of MLIs and how their properties enter processes of speech production. It predicts certain activation patterns dependent on a MLI being selected. Each such pattern might give rise to slips of the tongue. This set of predictions is tested against the Tuggy data. Each of the predicted activation patterns yields a significant number of slips. These findings are therefore compatible with a view of MLIs as single units in so far as their activation by lexical concepts goes. However, the theory also predicts that some slips are likely not to occur. We confirm that such slips are not present in the data. These findings are further corroborated by reference a second smaller dataset of slips involving Dutch MLIs (the Kempen corpus). We then use slips involving irreversible binomials to distinguish between the predictions of superlemma theory which are supported by slips involving irreversible binomials and the Cutting and Bock model's predictions for slips involving these MLIs which are not

Abstract

This study explores the effects of informational redundancy, as carried by a word's morphological paradigmatic structure, on acoustic duration in read aloud speech. The hypothesis that the more predictable a linguistic unit is, the less salient its realization, was tested on the basis of the acoustic duration of interfixes in Dutch compounds in two datasets: One for the interfix -s- (1155 tokens) and one for the interfix -e(n)- (742 tokens). Both datasets show that the more probable the interfix is, given the compound and its constituents, the longer it is realized. These findings run counter to the predictions of information-theoretical approaches and can be resolved by the Paradigmatic Signal Enhancement Hypothesis. This hypothesis argues that whenever selection of an element from alternatives is probabilistic, the element's duration is predicted by the amount of paradigmatic support for the element: The most likely alternative in the paradigm of selection is realized longer.

Abstract

This study addressed prosodic effects on the duration of and amount of glottal vibration in German word-initial fricatives /f, v, z/ in assimilatory and non-assimilatory devoicing contexts. Fricatives following /small schwa/ (non-assimilation context) were longer and were produced with less glottal vibration after higher prosodic boundaries, reflecting domain-initial prosodic strengthening. After /t/ (assimilation context), lenis fricatives (/v, z/) were produced with less glottal vibration than after /small schwa/, due to assimilatory devoicing. This devoicing was especially strong across lower prosodic boundaries, showing the influence of prosodic structure on sandhi processes. Reduction in glottal vibration made lenis fricatives more fortis-like (/f, s/). Importantly, fricative duration, another major cue to the fortis-lenis distinction, was affected by initial lengthening, but not by assimilation. Hence, at smaller boundaries, fricatives were more devoiced (more fortis-like), but also shorter (more lenis-like). As a consequence, the fortis and lenis fricatives remained acoustically distinct in all prosodic and segmental contexts. Overall, /z/ was devoiced to a greater extent than /v/. Since /z/ does not have a fortis counterpart in word-initial position, these findings suggest that phonotactic restrictions constrain phonetic processes. The present study illuminates a complex interaction of prosody, sandhi processes, and phonotactics, yielding systematic phonetic cues to prosodic structure and phonological distinctions.

Abstract

This study investigates the prosodic conditioning of phonetic details which are candidate cues to phonological contrasts. German /b, d, g, p, t, k/ were examined in three prosodic positions. Lenis plosives /b, d, g/ were produced with less glottal vibration at larger prosodic boundaries, whereas their VOT showed no effect of prosody. VOT of fortis plosives /p, t, k/ decreased at larger boundaries, as did their burst intensity maximum. Vowels (when measured from consonantal release) following fortis plosives and lenis velars were shorter after larger boundaries. Closure duration, which did not contribute to the fortis/lenis contrast, was heavily affected by prosody. These results support neither of the hitherto proposed accounts of prosodic strengthening (Uniform Strengthening and Feature Enhancement). We propose a different account, stating that the phonological identity of speech sounds remains stable not only within, but also across prosodic positions (contrast-over-prosody hypothesis). Domain-initial strengthening hardly diminishes the contrast between prosodically weak fortis and strong lenis plosives.

Abstract

Phase-locked evoked responses and event-related modulations of spontaneous rhythmic activity are the two main approaches used to quantify stimulus- or task-related changes in electrophysiological measures. The relationship between the two has beenwidely theorized upon but empirical research has been limited to the primary visual and sensorimotor cortex. However, both evoked responses and rhythms have been used as markers of neural activity in paradigms ranging from simple sensory to complex cognitive tasks.While some spatial agreement between the two phenomena has been observed, typically only one of the measures has been used in any given study, thus disallowing a direct evaluation of their exact spatiotemporal relationship. In this study, we sought to systematically clarify the connection between evoked responses and rhythmic activity. Using both measures, we identified the spatiotemporal patterns of task effects in three magnetoencephalography (MEG) data sets, all variants of a picture naming task. Evoked responses and rhythmic modulation yielded largely separate networks, with spatial overlap mainly in the sensorimotor and primary visual areas.Moreover, in the cortical regions thatwere identified with both measures the experimental effects they conveyed differed in terms of timing and function. Our results suggest that the two phenomena are largely detached and that both measures are needed for an accurate portrayal of brain activity.

Abstract

The Neolithic is a key period in the history of the European settlement. Although archaeological and present-day genetic data suggest several hypotheses regarding the human migration patterns at this period, validation of these hypotheses with the use of ancient genetic data has been limited. In this context, we studied DNA extracted from 53 individuals buried in a necropolis used by a French local community 5,000 y ago. The relatively good DNA preservation of the samples allowed us to obtain autosomal, Y-chromosomal, and/or mtDNA data for 29 of the 53 samples studied. From these datasets, we established close parental relationships within the necropolis and determined maternal and paternal lineages as well as the absence of an allele associated with lactase persistence, probably carried by Neolithic cultures of central Europe. Our study provides an integrative view of the genetic past in southern France at the end of the Neolithic period. Furthermore, the Y-haplotype lineages characterized and the study of their current repartition in European populations confirm a greater influence of the Mediterranean than the Central European route in the peopling of southern Europe during the Neolithic transition.

Abstract

The impact of the Neolithic dispersal on the western European populations is subject to continuing debate. To trace and date genetic lineages potentially brought during this transition and so understand the origin of the gene pool of current populations, we studied DNA extracted from human remains excavated in a Spanish funeral cave dating from the beginning of the fifth millennium B.C. Thanks to a “multimarkers” approach based on the analysis of mitochondrial and nuclear DNA (autosomes and Y-chromosome), we obtained information on the early Neolithic funeral practices and on the biogeographical origin of the inhumed individuals. No close kinship was detected. Maternal haplogroups found are consistent with pre-Neolithic settlement, whereas the Y-chromosomal analyses permitted confirmation of the existence in Spain approximately 7,000 y ago of two haplogroups previously associated with the Neolithic transition: G2a and E1b1b1a1b. These results are highly consistent with those previously found in Neolithic individuals from French Late Neolithic individuals, indicating a surprising temporal genetic homogeneity in these groups. The high frequency of G2a in Neolithic samples in western Europe could suggest, furthermore, that the role of men during Neolithic dispersal could be greater than currently estimated.

Abstract

A theoretical debate in artificial grammar learning (AGL) regards the learnability of hierarchical structures. Recent studies using an AnBn grammar draw conflicting conclusions (Bahlmann and Friederici, 2006, De Vries et al., 2008). We argue that 2 conditions crucially affect learning AnBn structures: sufficient exposure to zero-level-of-embedding (0-LoE) exemplars and a staged-input. In 2 AGL experiments, learning was observed only when the training set was staged and contained 0-LoE exemplars. Our results might help understanding how natural complex structures are learned from exemplars.

Abstract

Force-distance measurements have been used to examine differences in the interaction of the dendritic cell glycan-binding receptor DC-SIGN and the closely related endothelial cell receptor DC-SIGNR (L-SIGN) with membranes bearing glycan ligands. The results demonstrate that upon binding to membrane-anchored ligand, DC-SIGNR undergoes a conformational change similar to that previously observed for DC-SIGN. The results also validate a model for the extracellular domain of DC-SIGNR derived from crystallographic studies. Force measurements were performed with DC-SIGNR variants that differ in the length of the neck that result from genetic polymorphisms, which encode different numbers of the 23-amino acid repeat sequences that constitute the neck. The findings are consistent with an elongated, relatively rigid structure of the neck repeat observed in crystals. In addition, differences in the lengths of DC-SIGN and DC-SIGNR extracellular domains with equivalent numbers of neck repeats support a model in which the different dispositions of the carbohydrate-recognition domains in DC-SIGN and DC-SIGNR result from variations in the sequences of the necks.

Abstract

The temporal dynamics of processing morphologically complex words was investigated by recording event-related brain potentials (ERPs) when native Finnish-speakers performed a visual lexical decision task. Behaviorally, there is evidence that recognition of inflected nouns elicits a processing cost (i.e., longer reaction times and higher error rates) in comparison to matched monomorphemic words. We aimed to reveal whether the processing cost stems from decomposition at the early visual word form level or from recomposition at the later semantic–syntactic level. The ERPs showed no early effects for morphology, but revealed an interaction with word frequency at a late N400-type component, as well as a late positive component that was larger for inflected words. These results suggest that the processing cost stems mainly from the semantic–syntactic level. We also studied the features of the morphological decomposition route by investigating the recognition of pseudowords carrying real morphemes. The results showed no differences between inflected vs. uninflected pseudowords with a false stem, but differences in relation to those with a real stem, suggesting that a recognizable stem is needed to initiate the decomposition route.

Abstract

The order of acquisition of Dutch syllable types by first language learners is analyzed as following from an initial ranking and subsequent rerankings of constraints in an optimality theoretic grammar. Initially, structural constraints are all ranked above faithfulness constraints, leading to core syllable (CV) productions only. Subsequently, faithfulness gradually rises to the highest position in the ranking, allowing more and more marked syllable types to appear in production. Local conjunctions of Structural constraints allow for a more detailed analysis.

Abstract

Preparing words in speech production is normally a fast and accurate process. We generate them two or three per second in fluent conversation; and overtly naming a clear picture of an object can easily be initiated within 600 msec after picture onset. The underlying process, however, is exceedingly complex. The theory reviewed in this target article analyzes this process as staged and feedforward. After a first stage of conceptual preparation, word generation proceeds through lexical selection, morphological and phonological encoding, phonetic encoding, and articulation itself. In addition, the speaker exerts some degree of output control, by monitoring of self-produced internal and overt speech. The core of the theory, ranging from lexical selection to the initiation of phonetic encoding, is captured in a computational model, called WEAVER + +. Both the theory and the computational model have been developed in interaction with reaction time experiments, particularly in picture naming or related word production paradigms, with the aim of accounting. for the real-time processing in normal word production. A comprehensive review of theory, model, and experiments is presented. The model can handle some of the main observations in the domain of speech errors (the major empirical domain for most other theories of lexical access), and the theory opens new ways of approaching the cerebral organization of speech production by way of high-temporal-resolution imaging.

Abstract

This paper introduces a special issue of Cognition on lexical access in speech production. Over the last quarter century, the psycholinguistic study of speaking, and in particular of accessing words in speech, received a major new impetus from the analysis of speech errors, dysfluencies and hesitations, from aphasiology, and from new paradigms in reaction time research. The emerging theoretical picture partitions the accessing process into two subprocesses, the selection of an appropriate lexical item (a “lemma”) from the mental lexicon, and the phonological encoding of that item, that is, the computation of a phonetic program for the item in the context of utterance. These two theoretical domains are successively introduced by outlining some core issues that have been or still have to be addressed. The final section discusses the controversial question whether phonological encoding can affect lexical selection. This partitioning is also followed in this special issue as a whole. There are, first, four papers on lexical selection, then three papers on phonological encoding, and finally one on the interaction between selection and phonological encoding.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to relate a psycholinguistic processing model of picture naming to the dynamics of cortical activation during picture naming. The activation was recorded from eight Dutch subjects with a whole-head neuromagnetometer. The processing model, based on extensive naming latency studies, is a stage model. In preparing a picture's name, the speaker performs a chain of specific operations. They are, in this order, computing the visual percept, activating an appropriate lexical concept, selecting the target word from the mental lexicon, phonological encoding, phonetic encoding, and initiation of articulation. The time windows for each of these operations are reasonably well known and could be related to the peak activity of dipole sources in the individual magnetic response patterns. The analyses showed a clear progression over these time windows from early occipital activation, via parietal and temporal to frontal activation. The major specific findings were that (1) a region in the left posterior temporal lobe, agreeing with the location of Wernicke's area, showed prominent activation starting about 200 msec after picture onset and peaking at about 350 msec, (i.e., within the stage of phonological encoding), and (2) a consistent activation was found in the right parietal cortex, peaking at about 230 msec after picture onset, thus preceding and partly overlapping with the left temporal response. An interpretation in terms of the management of visual attention is proposed.

Abstract

Research on spoken word production has been approached from two angles. In one research tradition, the analysis of spontaneous or induced speech errors led to models that can account for speech error distributions. In another tradition, the measurement of picture naming latencies led to chronometric models accounting for distributions of reaction times in word production. Both kinds of models are, however, dealing with the same underlying processes: (1) the speaker’s selection of a word that is semantically and syntactically appropriate; (2) the retrieval of the word’s phonological properties; (3) the rapid syllabification of the word in context; and (4) the preparation of the corresponding articulatory gestures. Models of both traditions explain these processes in terms of activation spreading through a localist, symbolic network. By and large, they share the main levels of representation: conceptual/semantic, syntactic, phonological and phonetic. They differ in various details, such as the amount of cascading and feedback in the network. These research traditions have begun to merge in recent years, leading to highly constructive experimentation. Currently, they are like two similar knives honing each other. A single pair of scissors is in the making.

Abstract

This commentary discusses whether abstract metrical frames are stored. For stress-assigning languages (e.g., Dutch and English), which have a dominant stress pattern, metrical frames are stored only for words that deviate from the default stress pattern. The majority of the words in these languages are produced without retrieving any independent syllabic or metrical frame.

Abstract

Speakers tend to repeat materials from previous talk. This tendency is experimentally established and manipulated in various question-answering situations. It is shown that a question's surface form can affect the format of the answer given, even if this form has little semantic or conversational consequence, as in the pair Q: (At) what time do you close. A: “(At)five o'clock.” Answerers tend to match the utterance to the prepositional (nonprepositional) form of the question. This “correspondence effect” may diminish or disappear when, following the question, additional verbal material is presented to the answerer. The experiments show that neither the articulatory buffer nor long-term memory is normally involved in this retention of recent speech. Retaining recent speech in working memory may fulfill a variety of functions for speaker and listener, among them the correct production and interpretation of surface anaphora. Reusing recent materials may, moreover, be more economical than regenerating speech anew from a semantic base, and thus contribute to fluency. But the realization of this strategy requires a production system in which linguistic formulation can take place relatively independent of, and parallel to, conceptual planning.

Abstract

In his paper, MacKay reviews his Node Structure theory of error detection, but precedes it with a critical discussion of the Perceptual Loop theory of self-monitoring proposed in Levelt (1983, 1989). The present commentary is concerned with this latter critique and shows that there are more than casual problems with MacKay’s argumentation.

Abstract

The core issue in the 19-century sources of psycholinguistics was the question, "Where does language come from?'' This genetic perspective unified the study of the ontogenesis, the phylogenesis, the microgenesis, and to some extent the neurogenesis of language. This paper makes the point that this original perspective is still a valid and attractive one. It is exemplified by a discussion of the genesis of spoken words.

Abstract

The paper explores verbs of cutting and breaking (C&B, hereafter) in Yeli Dnye, the Papuan language of Rossel Island. The Yeli Dnye verbs covering the C&B domain do not divide it in the expected way, with verbs focusing on special instruments and manners of action on the one hand, and verbs focusing on the resultant state on the other. Instead, just three transitive verbs and their intransitive counterparts cover most of the domain, and they are all based on 'exotic' distinctions in mode of severance[--]coherent severance with the grain vs. against the grain, and incoherent severance (regardless of grain).

Abstract

Philosophers, psychologists, and linguists have argued that spatial conception is pivotal to cognition in general, providing a general, egocentric, and universal framework for cognition as well as metaphors for conceptualizing many other domains. But in an aboriginal community in Northern Queensland, a system of cardinal directions informs not only language, but also memory for arbitrary spatial arrays and directions. This work suggests that fundamental cognitive parameters, like the system of coding spatial locations, can vary cross-culturally, in line with the language spoken by a community. This opens up the prospect of a fruitful dialogue between anthropology and the cognitive sciences on the complex interaction between cultural and universal factors in the constitution of mind.

Abstract

Polish translation of Levinson, S. C. (1998). Studying spatial conceptualization across cultures: Anthropology and cognitive science. Ethos, 26(1), 7-24. doi:10.1525/eth.1998.26.1.7

Abstract

1. Introduction We claim that making sense of the typological diversity of languages demands a historical/evolutionary approach.We are pleased that the target paper (Dunn et al. 2011a) has served to bring discussion of this claim into prominence, and are grateful that leading typologists have taken the time to respond (commentaries denoted by boldface). It is unfortunate though that a number of the commentaries in this issue of LT show significant misunderstandings of our paper. Donohue thinks we were out to show the stability of typological features, but that was not our target at all (although related methods can be used to do that: see, e.g., Greenhill et al. 2010a, Dediu 2011a). Plank seems to think we were arguing against universals of any type, but our target was in fact just the implicational universals of word order that have been the bread and butter of typology. He also seems to think we ignore diachrony, whereas in fact the method introduces diachrony centrally into typological reasoning, thereby potentially revolutionising typology (see Cysouw’s commentary). Levy & Daumé think we were testing for lineage-specificity, whereas that was in fact an outcome (the main finding) of our testing for correlated evolution. Dryer thinks we must account for the distribution of language types around the world, but that was not our aim: our aim was to test the causal connection between linguistic variables by taking the perspective of language evolution (diversification and change). Longobardi & Roberts seem to think we set out to extract family trees from syntactic features, but our goal was in fact to use trees based on lexical cognates and hang reconstructed syntactic states on each node of these trees, thereby reconstructing the processes of language change.

Abstract

Educational tools claiming to use “right-brain techniques” are increasingly shaping school curricula. By implying a strong scientific basis, such approaches appeal to educators who rightly believe that knowledge of the brain should guide curriculum development. However, the notion of hemisphericity (idea that people are “left-brained” or “right-brained”) is a neuromyth that was debunked in the scientific literature 25 years ago. This article challenges the validity of “right-brain” teaching, highlighting the fact that neuroscientific research does not support its claims. Providing teachers with a basic understanding of neuroscience research as part of teacher training would enable more effective evaluation of brain-based claims and facilitate the adoption of tools validated by rigorous independent research rather than programs based on pseudoscience.

Abstract

Little is known about the origins of the pointing gesture. We sought to gain insight into its emergence by investigating individual differences in the pointing of 12-month-old infants in two ways. First, we looked at differences in the communicative and interactional uses of pointing and asked how different hand shapes relate to point frequency, accompanying vocalizations, and mothers’ pointing. Second, we looked at differences in social-cognitive skills of point comprehension and imitation and tested whether these were related to infants’ own pointing. Infants’ and mothers’ spontaneous pointing correlated with one another, as did infants’ point production and comprehension. In particular, infants’ index-finger pointing had a profile different from simple whole-hand pointing. It was more frequent, it was more often accompanied by vocalizations, and it correlated more strongly with comprehension of pointing (especially to occluded referents). We conclude that whole-hand and index-finger pointing differ qualitatively and suggest that it is index-finger pointing that first embodies infants’ understanding of communicative intentions.

Abstract

We investigated two main components of infant declarative pointing, reference and attitude, in two experiments with a total of 106 preverbal infants at 1;0. When an experimenter (E) responded to the declarative pointing of these infants by attending to an incorrect referent (with positive attitude), infants repeated pointing within trials to redirect E’s attention, showing an understanding of E’s reference and active message repair. In contrast, when E identified infants’ referent correctly but displayed a disinterested attitude, infants did not repeat pointing within trials and pointed overall in fewer trials, showing an understanding of E’s unenthusiastic attitude about the referent. When E attended to infants’ intended referent AND shared interest in it, infants were most satisfied, showing no message repair within trials and pointing overall in more trials. These results suggest that by twelve months of age infant declarative pointing is a full communicative act aimed at sharing with others both attention to a referent and a specific attitude about that referent.

Abstract

There is currently controversy over the nature of 1-year-olds' social-cognitive understanding and motives. In this study we investigated whether 12-month-old infants point for others with an understanding of their knowledge states and with a prosocial motive for sharing experiences with them. Declarative pointing was elicited in four conditions created by crossing two factors: an adult partner (1) was already attending to the target event or not, and (2) emoted positively or neutrally. Pointing was also coded after the event had ceased. The findings suggest that 12-month-olds point to inform others of events they do not know about, that they point to share an attitude about mutually attended events others already know about, and that they can point (already prelinguistically) to absent referents. These findings provide strong support for a mentalistic and prosocial interpretation of infants' prelinguistic communication

Abstract

Sociocultural theories of development posit that higher cognitive functions emerge through socially mediated processes, in particular through language. However, theories of human communication posit that language itself is based on higher social cognitive skills and cooperative motivations. Prelinguistic communication is a test case to this puzzle. In the current review, I first present recent and new findings of a research program on prelinguistic infants’ ommunication skills. This research provides empirical evidence for a rich social cognitive and motivational basis of human communication before language. Next, I discuss the emergence of these foundational skills. By considering all three lines of development, and by drawing on new findings from phylogenetic and cross-cultural comparisons, this article discusses the possibility that the cognitive foundations of prelinguistic communication are, in turn, mediated by social interactional input and shared experiences.

Abstract

A growing body of theoretical and empirical research has examined cultural transmission and adaptive cultural behaviour at the individual, within-group level. However, relatively few studies have tried to examine proximate transmission or test ultimate adaptive hypotheses about behavioural or cultural diversity at a between-societies macro-level. In both the history of anthropology and in present-day work, a common approach to examining adaptive behaviour at the macro-level has been through correlating various cultural traits with features of ecology. We discuss some difficulties with simple ecological associations, and then review cultural phylogenetic studies that have attempted to go beyond correlations to understand the underlying cultural evolutionary processes. We conclude with an example of a phylogenetically controlled approach to understanding proximate transmission pathways in Austronesian cultural diversity.

Abstract

This special issue of Cognitive Linguistics explores the linguistic encoding of events of cutting and breaking. In this article we first introduce the project on which it is based by motivating the selection of this conceptual domain, presenting the methods of data collection used by all the investigators, and characterizing the language sample. We then present a new approach to examining crosslinguistic similarities and differences in semantic categorization. Applying statistical modeling to the descriptions of cutting and breaking events elicited from speakers of all the languages, we show that although there is crosslinguistic variation in the number of distinctions made and in the placement of category boundaries, these differences take place within a strongly constrained semantic space: across languages, there is a surprising degree of consensus on the partitioning of events in this domain. In closing, we compare our statistical approach with more conventional semantic analyses, and show how...

Abstract

There is little consensus regarding the circumstances in which people spontaneously generate causal inferences, and in particular whether they generate inferences about the causal antecedents or the causal consequences of events. We tested whether people systematically infer causal antecedents or causal consequences to minimal social scenarios by using a continuation methodology. People overwhelmingly produced causal antecedent continuations for descriptions of interpersonal events (John hugged Mary), but causal consequence continuations to descriptions of transfer events (John gave a book to Mary). This demonstrates that there is no global cognitive style, but rather inference generation is crucially tied to the input. Further studies examined the role of event unusualness, number of participators, and verb-type on the likelihood of producing a causal antecedent or causal consequence inference. We conclude that inferences are critically guided by the specific verb used.

Abstract

Are the semantic categories of very closely related languages the same? We present a new methodology for addressing this question. Speakers of English, German, Dutch and Swedish described a set of video clips depicting cutting and breaking events. The verbs elicited were then subjected to cluster analysis, which groups scenes together based on similarity (determined by shared verbs). Using this technique, we find that there are surprising differences among the languages in the number of categories, their exact boundaries, and the relationship of the terms to one another[--]all of which is circumscribed by a common semantic space.

Abstract

Multiple social science disciplines have converged on the senses in recent years, where formerly the domain of perception was the preserve of psychology. Linguistics, or Language, however, seems to have an ambivalent role in this undertaking. On the one hand, Language with a capital L (language as a general human capacity) is part of the problem. It was the prior focus on language (text) that led to the disregard of the senses. On the other hand, it is language (with a small "l", a particular tongue) that offers key insights into how other peoples onceptualize the senses. In this article, we argue that a systematic cross-cultural approach can reveal fundamental truths about the precise connections between language and the senses. Recurring failures to adequately describe the sensorium across specific languages reveal the intrinsic limits of Language. But the converse does not hold. Failures of expressibility in one language need not hold any implications for the Language faculty per se, and indeed can enlighten us about the possible experiential worlds available to human experience.

Abstract

Cultures are built on social exchange. Most languages have dedicated grammatical machinery for expressing this. To demonstrate that statistical methods can also be applied to grammatical meaning, we here ask whether the underlying meanings of these grammatical constructions are based on shared common concepts. To explore this, we designed video stimuli of reciprocated actions (e.g. ‘giving to each other’) and symmetrical states (e.g. ‘sitting next to each other’), and with the help of a team of linguists collected responses from 20 languages around the world. Statistical analyses revealed that many languages do, in fact, share a common conceptual core for reciprocal meanings but that this is not a universally expressed concept. The recurrent pattern of conceptual packaging found across languages is compatible with the view that there is a shared non-linguistic understanding of reciprocation. But, nevertheless, there are considerable differences between languages in the exact extensional patterns, highlighting that even in the domain of grammar semantics is highly language-specific.

Abstract

Common activations in prefrontal cortex (PFC) during episodic and semantic long-term memory (LTM) tasks have been hypothesized to reflect functional overlap in terms of working memory (WM) and cognitive control. To evaluate a WM account of LTM-general activations, the present study took into consideration that cognitive task performance depends on the dynamic operation of multiple component processes, some of which are stimulus-synchronous and transient in nature; and some that are engaged throughout a task in a sustained fashion. PFC and WM may be implicated in both of these temporally independent components. To elucidate these possibilities we employed mixed blocked/event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) procedures to assess the extent to which sustained or transient activation patterns overlapped across tasks indexing episodic and semantic LTM, attention (ATT), and WM. Within PFC, ventrolateral and medial areas exhibited sustained activity across all tasks, whereas more anterior regions including right frontopolar cortex were commonly engaged in sustained processing during the three memory tasks. These findings do not support a WM account of sustained frontal responses during LTM tasks, but instead suggest that the pattern that was common to all tasks reflects general attentional set/vigilance, and that the shared WM-LTM pattern mediates control processes related to upholding task set. Transient responses during the three memory tasks were assessed relative to ATT to isolate item-specific mnemonic processes and were found to be largely distinct from sustained effects. Task-specific effects were observed for each memory task. In addition, a common item response for all memory tasks involved left dorsolateral PFC (DLPFC). The latter response might be seen as reflecting WM processes during LTM retrieval. Thus, our findings suggest that a WM account of shared PFC recruitment in LTM tasks holds for common transient item-related responses rather than sustained state-related responses that are better seen as reflecting more general attentional/control processes.

Abstract

Language comprehension requires recovering meaning from linguistic form, even when the mapping between the two is indirect. A canonical example is ellipsis, the omission of information that is subsequently understood without being overtly pronounced. Comprehension of ellipsis requires retrieval of an antecedent from memory, without prior prediction, a property which enables the study of retrieval in situ ( Martin and McElree, 2008 and Martin and McElree, 2009). Sluicing, or inflectional-phrase ellipsis, in the presence of a conjunction, presents a test case where a competing antecedent position is syntactically licensed, in contrast with most cases of nonadjacent dependency, including verb–phrase ellipsis. We present speed–accuracy tradeoff and eye-movement data inconsistent with the hypothesis that retrieval is accomplished via a syntactically guided search, a particular variant of search not examined in past research. The observed timecourse profiles are consistent with the hypothesis that antecedents are retrieved via a cue-dependent direct-access mechanism susceptible to general memory variables.

Abstract

Abstract Background: Archaeologists and anthropologists have long recognized that different cultural complexes may have distinct descent histories, but they have lacked analytical techniques capable of easily identifying such incongruence. Here, we show how Bayesian phylogenetic analysis can be used to identify incongruent cultural histories. We employ the approach to investigate Iranian tribal textile traditions. Methods: We used Bayes factor comparisons in a phylogenetic framework to test two models of cultural evolution: the hierarchically integrated system hypothesis and the multiple coherent units hypothesis. In the hierarchically integrated system hypothesis, a core tradition of characters evolves through descent with modification and characters peripheral to the core are exchanged among contemporaneous populations. In the multiple coherent units hypothesis, a core tradition does not exist. Rather, there are several cultural units consisting of sets of characters that have different histories of descent. Results: For the Iranian textiles, the Bayesian phylogenetic analyses supported the multiple coherent units hypothesis over the hierarchically integrated system hypothesis. Our analyses suggest that pile-weave designs represent a distinct cultural unit that has a different phylogenetic history compared to other textile characters. Conclusions: The results from the Iranian textiles are consistent with the available ethnographic evidence, which suggests that the commercial rug market has influenced pile-rug designs but not the techniques or designs incorporated in the other textiles produced by the tribes. We anticipate that Bayesian phylogenetic tests for inferring cultural units will be of great value for researchers interested in studying the evolution of cultural traits including language, behavior, and material culture.

Abstract

This study investigated links between working memory and speech processing systems. We used delayed pseudoword repetition in fMRI to investigate the neural correlates of sublexical structure in phonological working memory (pWM). We orthogonally varied the number of syllables and consonant clusters in auditory pseudowords and measured the neural responses to these manipulations under conditions of covert rehearsal (Experiment 1). A left-dominant network of temporal and motor cortex showed increased activity for longer items, with motor cortex only showing greater activity concomitant with adding consonant clusters. An individual-differences analysis revealed a significant positive relationship between activity in the angular gyrus and the hippocampus, and accuracy on pseudoword repetition. As models of pWM stipulate that its neural correlates should be activated during both perception and production/rehearsal [Buchsbaum, B. R., & D'Esposito, M. The search for the phonological store: From loop to convolution. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20, 762-778, 2008; Jacquemot, C., & Scott, S. K. What is the relationship between phonological short-term memory and speech processing? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, 480-486, 2006; Baddeley, A. D., & Hitch, G. Working memory. In G. H. Bower (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation: Advances in research and theory (Vol. 8, pp. 47-89). New York: Academic Press, 1974], we further assessed the effects of the two factors in a separate passive listening experiment (Experiment 2). In this experiment, the effect of the number of syllables was concentrated in posterior-medial regions of the supratemporal plane bilaterally, although there was no evidence of a significant response to added clusters. Taken together, the results identify the planum temporale as a key region in pWM; within this region, representations are likely to take the form of auditory or audiomotor -templates- or -chunks- at the level of the syllable [Papoutsi, M., de Zwart, J. A., Jansma, J. M., Pickering, M. J., Bednar, J. A., & Horwitz, B. From phonemes to articulatory codes: an fMRI study of the role of Broca's area in speech production. Cerebral Cortex, 19, 2156-2165, 2009; Warren, J. E., Wise, R. J. S., & Warren, J. D. Sounds do-able: auditory-motor transformations and the posterior temporal plane. Trends in Neurosciences, 28, 636-643, 2005; Griffiths, T. D., & Warren, J. D. The planum temporale as a computational hub. Trends in Neurosciences, 25, 348-353, 2002], whereas more lateral structures on the STG may deal with phonetic analysis of the auditory input [Hickok, G. The functional neuroanatomy of language. Physics of Life Reviews, 6, 121-143, 2009].

Abstract

Eye movements of Dutch participants were tracked as they looked at arrays of four words on a computer screen and followed spoken instructions (e.g., "Klik op het woord buffel": Click on the word buffalo). The arrays included the target (e.g., buffel), a phonological competitor (e.g., buffer, buffer), and two unrelated distractors. Targets were monosyllabic or bisyllabic, and competitors mismatched targets only on either their onset or offset phoneme and only by one distinctive feature. Participants looked at competitors more than at distractors, but this effect was much stronger for offset-mismatch than onset-mismatch competitors. Fixations to competitors started to decrease as soon as phonetic evidence disfavouring those competitors could influence behaviour. These results confirm that listeners continuously update their interpretation of words as the evidence in the speech signal unfolds and hence establish the viability of the methodology of using eye movements to arrays of printed words to track spoken-word recognition.

Abstract

In 5 experiments, listeners heard words and nonwords, some cross-spliced so that they contained acoustic-phonetic mismatches. Performance was worse on mismatching than on matching items. Words cross-spliced with words and words cross-spliced with nonwords produced parallel results. However, in lexical decision and 1 of 3 phonetic decision experiments, performance on nonwords cross-spliced with words was poorer than on nonwords cross-spliced with nonwords. A gating study confirmed that there were misleading coarticulatory cues in the cross-spliced items; a sixth experiment showed that the earlier results were not due to interitem differences in the strength of these cues. Three models of phonetic decision making (the Race model, the TRACE model, and a postlexical model) did not explain the data. A new bottom-up model is outlined that accounts for the findings in terms of lexical involvement at a dedicated decision-making stage.

Abstract

Whether the brain’s speech-production system is also involved in speech comprehension is a topic of much debate. Research has focused on whether motor areas are involved in listening, but overlap between speaking and listening might occur not only at primary sensory and motor levels, but also at linguistic levels (where semantic, lexical, and syntactic processes occur). Using functional MRI adaptation during speech comprehension and production, we found that the brain areas involved in semantic, lexical, and syntactic processing are mostly the same for speaking and for listening. Effects of primary processing load (indicative of sensory and motor processes) overlapped in auditory cortex and left inferior frontal cortex, but not in motor cortex, where processing load affected activity only in speaking. These results indicate that the linguistic parts of the language system are used for both speaking and listening, but that the motor system does not seem to provide a crucial contribution to listening.

Abstract

Three hypotheses for effects of age of acquisition (AoA) in lexical processing are compared: the cumulative frequency hypothesis (frequency and AoA both influence the number of encounters with a word, which influences processing speed), the semantic hypothesis (early-acquired words are processed faster because they are more central in the semantic network), and the neural network model (early-acquired words are faster because they are acquired when a network has maximum plasticity). In a regression study of lexical decision (LD) and semantic categorization (SC) in Italian and Dutch, contrary to the cumulative frequency hypothesis, AoA coefficients were larger than frequency coefficients, and, contrary to the semantic hypothesis, the effect of AoA was not larger in SC than in LD. The neural network model was supported.

Abstract

PTEN Hamartoma Tumour Syndrome (PHTS) includes Cowden syndrome (CS), Bannayan-Riley-Ruvalcaba syndrome (BRRS), and other conditions resulting from germline mutation of the PTEN tumour suppressor gene. Although macrocephaly, presumably due to megencephaly, is found in both CS and BRRS, the prevalence and degree have not been formally assessed in PHTS. We evaluated head size in a prospective nested series of 181 patients found to have pathogenic germline PTEN mutations. Clinical data including occipital-frontal circumference (OFC) measurement were requested for all participants. Macrocephaly was present in 94% of 161 evaluable PHTS individuals. In patients ≤18 years, mean OFC was +4.89 standard deviations (SD) above the population mean with no difference between genders (P=0.7). Among patients >18 years, average OFC was 60.0 cm in females and 62.8 cm in males (P<0.0001). To systematically determine whether macrocephaly was due to megencephaly, we examined PtenM3M4 missense mutant mice generated and maintained on mixed backgrounds. Mice were killed at various ages, brains were dissected out and weighed. Average brain weight for PtenM3M4 homozygous mice (N=15) was 1.02 g compared with 0.57 g for heterozygous mice (N=29) and 0.49 g for wild-type littermates (N=24) (P<0.0001). Macrocephaly, secondary to megencephaly, is an important component of PHTS and more prevalent than previously appreciated. Patients with PHTS have increased risks for breast and thyroid cancers, and early diagnosis is key to initiating timely screening to reduce patient morbidity and mortality. Clinicians should consider germline PTEN testing at an early point in the diagnostic work-up for patients with extreme macrocephaly.

Abstract

In four experiments, participants named target pictures that were accompanied by distractor pictures with phonologically related or unrelated names. Across experiments, the type of phonological relationship between the targets and the related distractors was varied: They were homophones (e.g., bat [animal/baseball]), or they shared word-initial segments (e.g., dog-doll) or word-final segments (e.g., ball-wall). The participants either named the objects after an extensive familiarization and practice phase or without any familiarization or practice. In all of the experiments, the mean target-naming latency was shorter in the related than in the unrelated condition, demonstrating that the phonological form of the name of the distractor picture became activated. These results are best explained within a cascaded model of lexical access—that is, under the assumption that the recognition of an object leads to the activation of its name.

Abstract

In a visual search experiment, participants had to decide whether or not a target object was present in a four-object search array. One of these objects could be a semantically related competitor (e.g., shirt for the target trousers) or a conceptually unrelated object with the same name as the target-for example, bat (baseball) for the target bat (animal). In the control condition, the related competitor was replaced by an unrelated object. The participants' response latencies and eye movements demonstrated that the two types of related competitors had similar effects: Competitors attracted the participants' visual attention and thereby delayed positive and negative decisions. The results imply that semantic and name information associated with the objects becomes rapidly available and affects the allocation of visual attention.

Abstract

Phonological encoding in language production can be defined as a set of processes generating utterance forms on the basis of semantic and syntactic information. Most evidence about these processes stems from analyses of sound errors. In section 1 of this paper, certain important results of these analyses are reviewed. Two prominent models of phonological encoding, which are mainly based on speech error evidence, are discussed in section 2. In section 3, limitations of speech error analyses are discussed, and it is argued that detailed and comprehensive models of phonological encoding cannot be derived solely on the basis of error analyses. As is argued in section 4, a new research strategy is required. Instead of using the properties of errors to draw inferences about the generation of correct word forms, future research should directly investigate the normal process of phonological encoding.

Abstract

The production and interpretation of pronouns involves the identification of a mental referent and, in connected speech or text, a discourse antecedent. One of the few overt signals of the relationship between a pronoun and its antecedent is agreement in features such as number and grammatical gender. To examine how speakers create these signals, two experiments tested conceptual, lexical. and morphophonological accounts of pronoun production in Dutch. The experiments employed sentence completion and continuation tasks with materials containing noun phrases that conflicted or agreed in grammatical gender. The noun phrases served as the antecedents for demonstrative pronouns tin Experiment 1) and relative pronouns tin Experiment 2) that required gender marking. Gender errors were used to assess the nature of the processes that established the link between pronouns and antecedents. There were more gender errors when candidate antecedents conflicted in grammatical gender, counter to the predictions of a pure conceptual hypothesis. Gender marking on candidate antecedents did not change the magnitude of this interference effect, counter to the predictions of an overt-morphology hypothesis. Mirroring previous findings about pronoun comprehension, the results suggest that speakers of gender-marking languages call on specific linguistic information about antecedents in order to select pronouns and that the information consists of specifications of grammatical gender associated with the lemmas of words.

Abstract

Tip-of-the-tongue states may represent the momentary unavailability of an otherwise accessible word or the weak activation of an otherwise inaccessible word. In three experiments designed to address these alternative views, subjects attempted to retrieve rare target words from their definitions. The definitions were followed by cues that were related to the targets in sound, by cues that were related in meaning, and by cues that were not related to the targets. Experiment 1 found that compared with unrelated cues, related cue words that were presented immediately after target definitions helped rather than hindered lexical retrieval, and that sound cues were more effective retrieval aids than meaning cues. Experiment 2 replicated these results when cues were presented after an initial target-retrieval attempt. These findings reverse a previous one (Jones, 1989) that was reproduced in Experiment 3 and shown to stem from a small group of unusually difficult target definitions.

Abstract

Griffin [Griffin, Z. M. (2003). A reversed length effect in coordinating the preparation and articulation of words in speaking. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 10, 603-609.] found that speakers naming object pairs spent more time before utterance onset looking at the second object when the first object name was short than when it was long. She proposed that this reversed length effect arose because the speakers' decision when to initiate an utterance was based, in part, on their estimate of the spoken duration of the first object name and the time available during its articulation to plan the second object name. In Experiment I of the present study, participants named object pairs. They spent more time looking at the first object when its name was monosyllabic than when it was trisyllabic, and, as in Griffin's study, the average gaze-speech lag (the time between the end of the gaze to the first object and onset of its name, which corresponds closely to the pre-speech inspection time for the second object) showed a reversed length effect. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that this effect was not due to a trade-off between the time speakers spent looking at the first and second object before speech onset. Experiment 4 yielded a reversed length effect when the second object was replaced by a symbol (x or +), which the participants had to categorise. We propose a novel account of the reversed length effect, which links it to the incremental nature of phonological encoding and articulatory planning rather than the speaker's estimate of the length of the first object name.

Abstract

Eye movements have been shown to reflect word recognition and language comprehension processes occurring during reading and auditory language comprehension. The present study examines whether the eye movements speakers make during object naming similarly reflect speech planning processes. In Experiment 1, speakers named object pairs saying, for instance, 'scooter and hat'. The objects were presented as ordinary line drawings or with partly dele:ed contours and had high or low frequency names. Contour type and frequency both significantly affected the mean naming latencies and the mean time spent looking at the objects. The frequency effects disappeared in Experiment 2, in which the participants categorized the objects instead of naming them. This suggests that the frequency effects of Experiment 1 arose during lexical retrieval. We conclude that eye movements during object naming indeed reflect linguistic planning processes and that the speakers' decision to move their eyes from one object to the next is contingent upon the retrieval of the phonological form of the object names.

Abstract

Past studies have found that, in adults, the acoustic properties of sound signals (such as fast versus slow temporal features) differentially activate the left and right hemispheres, and some have hypothesized that left-lateralization for speech processing may follow from left-lateralization to rapidly changing signals. Here, we tested whether newborns’ brains show some evidence of signal-specific lateralization responses using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and auditory stimuli that elicits lateralized responses in adults, composed of segments that vary in duration and spectral diversity. We found significantly greater bilateral responses of oxygenated hemoglobin (oxy-Hb) in the temporal areas for stimuli with a minimum segment duration of 21 ms, than stimuli with a minimum segment duration of 667 ms. However, we found no evidence for hemispheric asymmetries dependent on the stimulus characteristics. We hypothesize that acoustic-based functional brain asymmetries may develop throughout early infancy, and discuss their possible relationship with brain asymmetries for language.

Abstract

During the past ten years, research using Near-infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) to study the developing brain has provided groundbreaking evidence of brain functions in infants. This paper presents a theoretically oriented review of this wealth of evidence, summarizing recent NIRS data on language processing, without neglecting other neuroimaging or behavioral studies in infancy and adulthood. We review three competing classes of hypotheses (i.e. signal-driven, domain-driven, and learning biases hypotheses) regarding the causes of hemispheric specialization for speech processing. We assess the fit between each of these hypotheses and neuroimaging evidence in speech perception and show that none of the three hypotheses can account for the entire set of observations on its own. However, we argue that they provide a good fit when combined within a developmental perspective. According to our proposed scenario, lateralization for language emerges out of the interaction between pre-existing left–right biases in generic auditory processing (signal-driven hypothesis), and a left-hemisphere predominance of particular learning mechanisms (learning-biases hypothesis). As a result of this completed developmental process, the native language is represented in the left hemisphere predominantly. The integrated scenario enables to link infant and adult data, and points to many empirical avenues that need to be explored more systematically.

Abstract

There is a growing consensus that the mental lexicon contains both abstract and word-specific acoustic information. To investigate their relative importance for word recognition, we tested to what extent perceptual learning is word specific or generalizable to other words. In an exposure phase, participants were divided into two groups; each group was semantically biased to interpret an ambiguous Mandarin tone contour as either tone1 or tone2. In a subsequent test phase, the perception of ambiguous contours was dependent on the exposure phase: Participants who heard ambiguous contours as tone1 during exposure were more likely to perceive ambiguous contours as tone1 than participants who heard ambiguous contours as tone2 during exposure. This learning effect was only slightly larger for previously encountered than for not previously encountered words. The results speak for an architecture with prelexical analysis of phonological categories to achieve both lexical access and episodic storage of exemplars.

Abstract

Recognizing phonetically reduced forms is a huge challenge for spoken-word recognition. Phonetic reductions not only occur often, but also come in a variety of forms. The paper investigates how two similar forms of reductions – /t/-reduction and nasal place assimilation in Dutch – can eventually be recognized, focusing on the role of following phonological context. Previous research indicated that listeners take the following phonological context into account when compensating for /t/-reduction and nasal place assimilation. The current paper shows that these context effects arise in early perceptual processes for the perception of assimilated forms, but at a later stage of processing for the perception of /t/-reduced forms. This shows first that the recognition of apparently similarly reduced words may rely on different processing mechanisms and, second, that searching for dissociations over tasks is a promising research strategy to investigate how reduced forms are recognized.

Abstract

Four visual-world experiments, in which listeners heard spoken words and saw printed words, compared an optimal-perception account with the theory of phonological underspecification. This theory argues that default phonological features are not specified in the mental lexicon, leading to asymmetric lexical matching: Mismatching input ("pin") activates lexical entries with underspecified coronal stops ('tin'), but lexical entries with specified labial stops ('pin') are not activated by mismatching input ("tin"). The eye-tracking data failed to show such a pattern. Although words that were phonologically similar to the spoken target attracted more looks than unrelated distractors, this effect was symmetric in Experiment 1 with minimal pairs ("tin"- "pin") and in Experiments 2 and 3 with words with an onset overlap ("peacock" - "teacake"). Experiment 4 revealed that /t/-initial words were looked at more frequently if the spoken input mismatched only in terms of place than if it mismatched in place and voice, contrary to the assumption that /t/ is unspecified for place and voice. These results show that speech perception uses signal-driven information to the fullest, as predicted by an optimal perception account.

Abstract

Specific language impairment (SLI) is defined as an inability to develop appropriate language skills without explanatory medical conditions, low intelligence or lack of opportunity. Previously, a genome scan of 98 families affected by SLI was completed by the SLI Consortium, resulting in the identification of two quantitative trait loci (QTL) on chromosomes 16q (SLI1) and 19q (SLI2). This was followed by a replication of both regions in an additional 86 families. Both these studies applied linkage methods to one phenotypic trait at a time. However, investigations have suggested that simultaneous analysis of several traits may offer more power. The current study therefore applied a multivariate variance-components approach to the SLI Consortium dataset using additional phenotypic data. A multivariate genome scan was completed and supported the importance of the SLI1 and SLI2 loci, whilst highlighting a possible novel QTL on chromosome 10. Further investigation implied that the effect of SLI1 on non-word repetition was equally as strong on reading and spelling phenotypes. In contrast, SLI2 appeared to have influences on a selection of expressive and receptive language phenotypes in addition to non-word repetition, but did not show linkage to literacy phenotypes.

Abstract

This study assessed, in a sample of 98 adult native speakers of Dutch, how their lexical skills and their speaking proficiency varied as a function of their age and level of education and profession (EP). Participants, categorized in terms of their age (18–35, 36–50, and 51–76 years old) and the level of their EP (low versus high), were tested on their lexical knowledge, lexical fluency, and lexical memory, and they performed four speaking tasks, differing in genre and formality. Speaking performance was rated in terms of communicative adequacy and in terms of number of words, number of T-units, words per T-unit, content words per T-unit, hesitations per T-unit, and grammatical errors per T-unit. Increasing age affected lexical knowledge positively but lexical fluency and memory negatively. High EP positively affected lexical knowledge and memory but EP did not affect lexical fluency. Communicative adequacy of the responses in the speaking tasks was positively affected by high EP but was not affected by age. It is concluded that, given the large variability in native speakers’ language knowledge and skills, studies investigating the question of whether second-language learners can reach native levels of proficiency, should take native-speaker variability into account.

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Smoking behaviors, including heaviness of smoking and smoking cessation, are known to be under a degree of genetic influence. The enzyme catechol O-methyltransferase (COMT) is of relevance in studies of smoking behavior and smoking cessation due to its presence in dopaminergic brain regions. While the COMT gene is therefore one of the more promising candidate genes for smoking behavior, some inconsistencies have begun to emerge. METHODS: We explored whether the rs4680 A (Met) allele of the COMT gene predicts increased heaviness of smoking and reduced likelihood of smoking cessation in a large population-based cohort of pregnant women. We further conducted a meta-analysis of published data from community samples investigating the association of this polymorphism with heaviness of smoking and smoking status. RESULTS: In our primary sample, the A (Met) allele was associated with increased heaviness of smoking before pregnancy but not with the odds of continuing to smoke in pregnancy either in the first trimester or in the third trimester. Meta-analysis also indicated modest evidence of association of the A (Met) allele with increased heaviness of smoking but not with persistent smoking. CONCLUSIONS: Our data suggest a weak association between COMT genotype and heaviness of smoking, which is supported by our meta-analysis. However, it should be noted that the strength of evidence for this association was modest. Neither our primary data nor our meta-analysis support an association between COMT genotype and smoking cessation. Therefore, COMT remains a plausible candidate gene for smoking behavior phenotypes, in particular, heaviness of smoking.

Abstract

Listeners rely on native-language rhythm in segmenting speech; in different languages, stress-, syllable- or mora-based rhythm is exploited. The rhythmic similarity hypothesis holds that where two languages have similar rhythm, listeners of each language should segment their own and the other language similarly. Such similarity in listening was previously observed only for related languages (English-Dutch; French-Spanish). We now report three experiments in which speakers of Telugu, a Dravidian language unrelated to Japanese but similar to it in crucial aspects of rhythmic structure, heard speech in Japanese and in their own language, and Japanese listeners heard Telugu. For the Telugu listeners, detection of target sequences in Japanese speech was harder when target boundaries mismatched mora boundaries, exactly the pattern that Japanese listeners earlier exhibited with Japanese and other languages. The same results appeared when Japanese listeners heard Telugu speech containing only codas permissible in Japanese. Telugu listeners' results with Telugu speech were mixed, but the overall pattern revealed correspondences between the response patterns of the two listener groups, as predicted by the rhythmic similarity hypothesis. Telugu and Japanese listeners appear to command similar procedures for speech segmentation, further bolstering the proposal that aspects of language phonological structure affect listeners' speech segmentation.

Abstract

Tamil and Hindi verbs of cutting, breaking, and tearing are shown to have a high degree of overlap in their extensions. However, there are also differences in the lexicalization patterns of these verbs in the two languages with regard to their category boundaries, and the number of verb types that are available to make finer-grained distinctions. Moreover, differences in the extensional ranges of corresponding verbs in the two languages can be motivated in terms of the properties of the instrument and the theme object.

Abstract

This introduction to a special issue of the journal Linguistics sketches the challenges that multiple-participant events pose for linguistic and psycholinguistic theories, and summarizes the articles in the volume.

Abstract

We investigate how Tamil- and Dutch-speaking adults and 4- to 5-year-old children use caused posture verbs (‘lay/stand a bottle on a table’) to label placement events in which objects are oriented vertically or horizontally. Tamil caused posture verbs consist of morphemes that individually label the causal and result subevents (nikka veyyii ‘make stand’; paDka veyyii ‘make lie’), occurring in situational and discourse contexts where object orientation is at issue. Dutch caused posture verbs are less semantically transparent: they are monomorphemic (zetten ‘set/stand’; leggen ‘lay’), often occurring in contexts where factors other than object orientation determine use. Caused posture verbs occur rarely in corpora of Tamil input, whereas in Dutch input, they are used frequently. Elicited production data reveal that Tamil four-year-olds use infrequent placement verbs appropriately whereas Dutch children use high-frequency placement verbs inappropriately even at age five. Semantic transparency exerts a stronger influence than input frequency in constraining children’s verb meaning acquisition.

Abstract

In an event-related fMRI study, we examined the cortical networks involved in establishing reference during language comprehension. We compared BOLD responses to sentences containing referentially ambiguous pronouns (e.g., “Ronald told Frank that he…”), referentially failing pronouns (e.g., “Rose told Emily that he…”) or coherent pronouns. Referential ambiguity selectively recruited medial prefrontal regions, suggesting that readers engaged in problem-solving to select a unique referent from the discourse model. Referential failure elicited activation increases in brain regions associated with morpho-syntactic processing, and, for those readers who took failing pronouns to refer to unmentioned entities, additional regions associated with elaborative inferencing were observed. The networks activated by these two referential problems did not overlap with the network activated by a standard semantic anomaly. Instead, we observed a double dissociation, in that the systems activated by semantic anomaly are deactivated by referential ambiguity, and vice versa. This inverse coupling may reflect the dynamic recruitment of semantic and episodic processing to resolve semantically or referentially problematic situations. More generally, our findings suggest that neurocognitive accounts of language comprehension need to address not just how we parse a sentence and combine individual word meanings, but also how we determine who's who and what's what during language comprehension.

Abstract

In this event-related brain potentials (ERPs) study, we explored the possibility to selectively track referential ambiguity during spoken discourse comprehension. Earlier ERP research has shown that referentially ambiguous nouns (e.g., “the girl” in a two-girl context) elicit a frontal, sustained negative shift relative to unambiguous control words. In the current study, we examined whether this ERP effect reflects “deep” situation model ambiguity or “superficial” textbase ambiguity. We contrasted these different interpretations by investigating whether a discourse-level semantic manipulation that prevents referential ambiguity also averts the elicitation of a referentially induced ERP effect. We compared ERPs elicited by nouns that were referentially nonambiguous but were associated with two discourse entities (e.g., “the girl” with two girls introduced in the context, but one of which has died or left the scene), with referentially ambiguous and nonambiguous control words. Although temporally referentially ambiguous nouns elicited a frontal negative shift compared to control words, the “double bound” but referentially nonambiguous nouns did not. These results suggest that it is possible to selectively track referential ambiguity with ERPs at the level that is most relevant to discourse comprehension, the situation model.

Abstract

Research using the intermodal preferential looking paradigm (IPLP) has consistently shown that English-learning children aged 2 can associate transitive argument structure with causal events. However, studies using the same methodology investigating 2-year-old children’s knowledge of the conjoined agent intransitive and semantic role assignment have reported inconsistent findings. The aim of the present study was to establish at what age English-learning children have verb-general knowledge of both transitive and intransitive argument structure using a new method: the forced-choice pointing paradigm. The results suggest that young 2-year-olds can associate transitive structures with causal (or externally caused) events and can use transitive structure to assign agent and patient roles correctly. However, the children were unable to associate the conjoined agent intransitive with noncausal events until aged 3;4. The results confirm the pattern from previous IPLP studies and indicate that children may develop the ability to comprehend different aspects of argument structure at different ages. The implications for theories of language acquisition and the nature of the language acquisition mechanism are discussed.

Abstract

The reading process depends both on the text and on the reader. When we read a text, propositions in the current input are matched to propositions in the memory representation of the previous discourse but also to knowledge structures in long‐term memory. Therefore, memory‐based text processing refers both to the bottom‐up processing of the text and to the top‐down activation of the reader's knowledge. In this article, we focus on the role of cognitive structures in the reader's knowledge. We argue that causality is an important category in structuring human knowledge and that this property has consequences for text processing. Some research is discussed that illustrates that the more the information in the text reflects causal categories, the more easily the information is processed.

Abstract

Present approaches to the semantics of the German prepositions auf an and unter draw on two propositions: First, that spatial prepositions in general specify a region in the surrounding of the relatum object. Second, that in the case of auf an and unter, these regions are to be defined with concepts like the vertical and/or the topological surfa¬ce (the whole surrounding exterior of an object). The present paper argues that the first proposition is right and that the second is wrong. That is, while it is true that prepositions specify regions, the regions specified by auf, an and unter should rather be defined in terms of everyday concepts like SURFACE, SIDE and UNDERSIDE. This idea is suggested by the fact that auf an and unter refer to different regions in different kinds of relatum objects, and that these regions are the same as the regions called surfaces, sides and undersides. Furthermore, reading and usage preferences of auf an and unter can be explained by a corresponding salience of the surfaces, sides and undersides of the relatum objects in question. All in all, therefore, a close look at the use of auf an and unter with different classes of relatum objects reveals problems for a semantic approach that draws on concepts like the vertical, while it suggests mea¬nings of these prepositions that refer to the surface, side and underside of an object.

Abstract

Memorializes Martin D. S. Braine, whose research on child language acquisition and on both child and adult thinking and reasoning had a major influence on modern cognitive psychology. Addressing meaning as well as position, Braine argued that children start acquiring language by learning narrow-scope positional formulas that map components of meaning to positions in the utterance. These proposals were critical in starting discussions of the possible universality of the pivot-grammar stage and of the role of syntax, semantics,and pragmatics in children's early grammar and were pivotal to the rise of approaches in which cognitive development in language acquisition is stressed.

Abstract

Typological descriptions of understudied languages reveal intriguing crosslinguistic variation in descriptions of events of object separation and destruction. In Lowland Chontal of Oaxaca, verbs of cutting and breaking lexicalize event perspectives that range from the common to the quite unusual, from the tearing of cloth to the snapping apart on the cross-grain of yarn. This paper describes the semantic and syntactic criteria that characterize three verb classes in this semantic domain, examines patterns of event construal, and takes a look at likely changes in these event descriptions from the perspective of endangered language recovery.

Abstract

Despite growing clinical and neurobiological interest in the brain mechanisms that process emotion in music, these mechanisms remain incompletely understood. Patients with frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) frequently exhibit clinical syndromes that illustrate the effects of breakdown in emotional and social functioning. Here we investigated the neuroanatomical substrate for recognition of musical emotion in a cohort of 26 patients with FTLD (16 with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia, bvFTD, 10 with semantic dementia, SemD) using voxel-based morphometry. On neuropsychological evaluation, patients with FTLD showed deficient recognition of canonical emotions (happiness, sadness, anger and fear) from music as well as faces and voices compared with healthy control subjects. Impaired recognition of emotions from music was specifically associated with grey matter loss in a distributed cerebral network including insula, orbitofrontal cortex, anterior cingulate and medial prefrontal cortex, anterior temporal and more posterior temporal and parietal cortices, amygdala and the subcortical mesolimbic system. This network constitutes an essential brain substrate for recognition of musical emotion that overlaps with brain regions previously implicated in coding emotional value, behavioural context, conceptual knowledge and theory of mind. Musical emotion recognition may probe the interface of these processes, delineating a profile of brain damage that is essential for the abstraction of complex social emotions.

Abstract

This paper describes FieldTrip, an open source software package that we developed for the analysis of MEG, EEG, and other electrophysiological data. The software is implemented as a MATLAB toolbox and includes a complete set of consistent and user-friendly high-level functions that allow experimental neuroscientists to analyze experimental data. It includes algorithms for simple and advanced analysis, such as time-frequency analysis using multitapers, source reconstruction using dipoles, distributed sources and beamformers, connectivity analysis, and nonparametric statistical permutation tests at the channel and source level. The implementation as toolbox allows the user to perform elaborate and structured analyses of large data sets using the MATLAB command line and batch scripting. Furthermore, users and developers can easily extend the functionality and implement new algorithms. The modular design facilitates the reuse in other software packages.

Abstract

Evidence for the etiology of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) has consistently pointed to a strong genetic component complicated by substantial locus heterogeneity1, 2. We sequenced the exomes of 20 individuals with sporadic ASD (cases) and their parents, reasoning that these families would be enriched for de novo mutations of major effect. We identified 21 de novo mutations, 11 of which were protein altering. Protein-altering mutations were significantly enriched for changes at highly conserved residues. We identified potentially causative de novo events in 4 out of 20 probands, particularly among more severely affected individuals, in FOXP1, GRIN2B, SCN1A and LAMC3. In the FOXP1 mutation carrier, we also observed a rare inherited CNTNAP2 missense variant, and we provide functional support for a multi-hit model for disease risk3. Our results show that trio-based exome sequencing is a powerful approach for identifying new candidate genes for ASDs and suggest that de novo mutations may contribute substantially to the genetic etiology of ASDs.

Abstract

Two recent studies (Coulson et al., 1998;Osterhout et al., 1996)examined the
relationship between the event-related brain potential (ERP) responses to linguistic syntactic anomalies (P600/SPS) and domain-general unexpected events (P300). Coulson et al. concluded that these responses are highly similar, whereas Osterhout et al. concluded that they are distinct. In this comment, we evaluate the relativemerits of these claims. We conclude that the available evidence indicates that the ERP response to syntactic anomalies is at least partially distinct from the ERP response to unexpected anomalies that do not involve a grammatical violation

Abstract

Two experiments examined the processing of Tokyo Japanese pitchaccent distinctions by native speakers of Japanese from two accentlessvariety areas. In both experiments, listeners were presented with Tokyo Japanese speech materials used in an earlier study with Tokyo Japanese listeners, who clearly exploited the pitch-accent information in spokenword recognition. In the "rst experiment, listeners judged from which of two words, di!ering in accentual structure, isolated syllables had been extracted. Both new groups were, overall, as successful at this task as Tokyo Japanese speakers had been, but their response patterns differed from those of the Tokyo Japanese, for instance in that a bias towards H judgments in the Tokyo Japanese responses was weakened in the present groups' responses. In a second experiment, listeners heard word fragments and guessed what the words were; in this task, the speakers from accentless areas again performed significantly above chance, but their responses showed less sensitivity to the information in the input, and greater bias towards vocabulary distribution frequencies, than had been observed with the Tokyo Japanese listeners. The results suggest that experience with a local accentless dialect affects the processing of accent for word recognition in Tokyo Japanese, even for listeners with extensive exposure to Tokyo Japanese.

Abstract

A discourse context provides a reader with a great deal of information that can provide constraints for further language processing, at several different levels. In this experiment we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to explore whether discourse-generated contextual constraints are based on the precise message of the discourse or, more `loosely', on the scenario suggested by one or more content words in the text. Participants read constraining stories whose precise message rendered a particular word highly predictable ("The manager thought that the board of directors should assemble to discuss the issue. He planned a...[meeting]") as well as non-constraining control stories that were only biasing in virtue of the scenario suggested by some of the words ("The manager thought that the board of directors need not assemble to discuss the issue. He planned a..."). Coherent words that were inconsistent with the message-level expectation raised in a constraining discourse (e.g., "session" instead of "meeting") elicited a classic centroparietal N400 effect. However, when the same words were only inconsistent with the scenario loosely suggested by earlier words in the text, they elicited a different negativity around 400 ms, with a more anterior, left-lateralized maximum. The fact that the discourse-dependent N400 effect cannot be reduced to scenario-mediated priming reveals that it reflects the rapid use of precise message-level constraints in comprehension. At the same time, the left-lateralized negativity in non-constraining stories suggests that, at least in the absence of strong message-level constraints, scenario-mediated priming does also rapidly affect comprehension.

Abstract

Background Recently several studies have shown that people use contextual information to make predictions about the rest of the sentence or story as the text unfolds. Using event related potentials (ERPs) we tested whether these on-line predictions are based on a message-based representation of the discourse or on simple automatic activation by individual words. Subjects heard short stories that were highly constraining for one specific noun, or stories that were not specifically predictive but contained the same prime words as the predictive stories. To test whether listeners make specific predictions critical nouns were preceded by an adjective that was inflected according to, or in contrast with, the gender of the expected noun. Results When the message of the preceding discourse was predictive, adjectives with an unexpected gender-inflection evoked a negative deflection over right-frontal electrodes between 300 and 600 ms. This effect was not present in the prime control context, indicating that the prediction mismatch does not hinge on word-based priming but is based on the actual message of the discourse. Conclusions When listening to a constraining discourse people rapidly make very specific predictions about the remainder of the story, as the story unfolds. These predictions are not simply based on word-based automatic activation, but take into account the actual message of the discourse.

Abstract

The archaeological site of Sagalassos is located in Southwest Turkey, in the western part of the Taurus mountain range. Human occupation of its territory is attested from the late 12th millennium BP up to the 13th century AD. By analysing the mtDNA variation in 85 skeletons from Sagalassos dated to the 11th–13th century AD, this study attempts to reconstruct the genetic signature potentially left in this region of Anatolia by the many civilizations, which succeeded one another over the centuries until the mid-Byzantine period (13th century BC). Authentic ancient DNA data were determined from the control region and some SNPs in the coding region of the mtDNA in 53 individuals. Comparative analyses with up to 157 modern populations allowed us to reconstruct the origin of the mid-Byzantine people still dwelling in dispersed hamlets in Sagalassos, and to detect the maternal contribution of their potential ancestors. By integrating the genetic data with historical and archaeological information, we were able to attest in Sagalassos a significant maternal genetic signature of Balkan/Greek populations, as well as ancient Persians and populations from the Italian peninsula. Some contribution from the Levant has been also detected, whereas no contribution from Central Asian population could be ascertained.

Abstract

Disagreement exists about how speakers monitor their internal speech. Production-based accounts assume that self-monitoring mechanisms exist within the production system, whereas comprehension-based accounts assume that monitoring is achieved through the speech comprehension system. Comprehension-based accounts predict perception-specific effects, like the perceptual uniqueness-point effect, in the monitoring of internal speech. We ran an extensive experiment testing this prediction using internal phoneme monitoring and picture naming tasks. Our results show an effect of the perceptual uniqueness point of a word in internal phoneme monitoring in the absence of such an effect in picture naming. These results support comprehension-based accounts of the monitoring of internal speech.

Abstract

During language comprehension, listeners use the global semantic representation from previous sentence or discourse context to immediately integrate the meaning of each upcoming word into the unfolding message-level representation. Here we investigate whether communicative gestures that often spontaneously co-occur with speech are processed in a similar fashion and integrated to previous sentence context in the same way as lexical meaning. Event-related potentials were measured while subjects listened to spoken sentences with a critical verb (e.g., knock), which was accompanied by an iconic co-speech gesture (i.e., KNOCK). Verbal and/or gestural semantic content matched or mismatched the content of the preceding part of the sentence. Despite the difference in the modality and in the specificity of meaning conveyed by spoken words and gestures, the latency, amplitude, and topographical distribution of both word and gesture mismatches are found to be similar, indicating that the brain integrates both types of information simultaneously. This provides evidence for the claim that neural processing in language comprehension involves the simultaneous incorporation of information coming from a broader domain of cognition than only verbal semantics. The neural evidence for similar integration of information from speech and gesture emphasizes the tight interconnection between speech and co-speech gestures.

Abstract

Background Thirty-two common variants associated with body mass index (BMI) have been identified in genome-wide association studies, explaining ∼1.45% of BMI variation in general population cohorts. We performed a genome-wide association study in a sample of young adults enriched for extremely overweight individuals. We aimed to identify new loci associated with BMI and to ascertain whether using an extreme sampling design would identify the variants known to be associated with BMI in general populations. Methodology/Principal Findings From two large Danish cohorts we selected all extremely overweight young men and women (n = 2,633), and equal numbers of population-based controls (n = 2,740, drawn randomly from the same populations as the extremes, representing ∼212,000 individuals). We followed up novel (at the time of the study) association signals (p<}0.001) from the discovery cohort in a genome-wide study of 5,846 Europeans, before attempting to replicate the most strongly associated 28 SNPs in an independent sample of Danish individuals (n = 20,917) and a population-based cohort of 15-year-old British adolescents (n = 2,418). Our discovery analysis identified SNPs at three loci known to be associated with BMI with genome-wide confidence (P{<}5×10−8; FTO, MC4R and FAIM2). We also found strong evidence of association at the known TMEM18, GNPDA2, SEC16B, TFAP2B, SH2B1 and KCTD15 loci (p{<}0.001), and nominal association (p{<0.05) at a further 8 loci known to be associated with BMI. However, meta-analyses of our discovery and replication cohorts identified no novel associations. Significance Our results indicate that the detectable genetic variation associated with extreme overweight is very similar to that previously found for general BMI. This suggests that population-based study designs with enriched sampling of individuals with the extreme phenotype may be an efficient method for identifying common variants that influence quantitative traits and a valid alternative to genotyping all individuals in large population-based studies, which may require tens of thousands of subjects to achieve similar power.

Abstract

In this paper we follow two beginning learners of English, Andrea and Santo, over a period of 2 years as they develop means to structure the declarative utterances they produce in various production tasks, and then we look at the following problem: In the early stages of acquisition, both learners develop a common learner variety; during these stages, we see a picture of two learner varieties developing similar regularities determined by the minimal requirements of the tasks we examine. Andrea subsequently develops further morphosyntactic means to achieve greater cohesion in his discourse. But Santo does not. Although we can identify contexts where the grammaticalization of Andrea's production allows him to go beyond the initial constraints of his variety, it is much more difficult to ascertain why Santo, faced with the same constraints in the same contexts, does not follow this path. Some lines of investigation into this problem are then suggested.

Abstract

Maximum margin clustering (MMC) is a relatively new and promising kernel method. In this paper, we apply MMC to the task of unsupervised speech segmentation. We present three automatic speech segmentation methods based on MMC, which are tested on TIMIT and evaluated on the level of phoneme boundary detection. The results show that MMC is highly competitive with existing unsupervised methods for the automatic detection of phoneme boundaries. Furthermore, initial analyses show that MMC is a promising method for the automatic detection of sub-phonetic information in the speech signal.

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the expression of spatial relationships in German Sign Language (Deutsche Gebärdensprache, DGS). The analysis focuses on linguistic expression in the spatial domain in two types of discourse: static scene description (location) and event narratives (location and motion). Its primary theoretical objectives are to characterize the structure of locative descriptions in DGS; to explain the use of frames of reference and perspective in the expression of location and motion; to clarify the interrelationship between the systems of frames of reference, signing perspective, and classifier predicates; and to characterize the interplay between iconicity principles, on the one hand, and grammatical and discourse constraints, on the other hand, in the use of these spatial devices. In more general terms, the dissertation provides a usage-based account of iconic mapping in the visual-spatial modality. The use of space in sign language expression is widely assumed to be guided by iconic principles, which are furthermore assumed to hold in the same way across sign languages. Thus, there has been little expectation of variation between sign languages in the spatial domain in the use of spatial devices. Consequently, perhaps, there has been little systematic investigation of linguistic expression in the spatial domain in individual sign languages, and less investigation of spatial language in extended signed discourse. This dissertation provides an investigation of spatial expressions in DGS by investigating the impact of different constraints on iconicity in sign language structure. The analyses have important implications for our understanding of the role of iconicity in the visual-spatial modality, the possible language-specific variation within the spatial domain in the visual-spatial modality, the structure of spatial language in both natural language modalities, and the relationship between spatial language and cognition