Publications

Abstract

Human speech can be comprehended using only auditory information from the talker's voice. However, comprehension is improved if the talker's face is visible, especially if the auditory information is degraded as occurs in noisy environments or with hearing loss. We explored the neural substrates of audiovisual speech perception using electrocorticography, direct recording of neural activity using electrodes implanted on the cortical surface. We observed a double dissociation in the responses to audiovisual speech with clear and noisy auditory component within the superior temporal gyrus (STG), a region long known to be important for speech perception. Anterior STG showed greater neural activity to audiovisual speech with clear auditory component, whereas posterior STG showed similar or greater neural activity to audiovisual speech in which the speech was replaced with speech-like noise. A distinct border between the two response patterns was observed, demarcated by a landmark corresponding to the posterior margin of Heschl's gyrus. To further investigate the computational roles of both regions, we considered Bayesian models of multisensory integration, which predict that combining the independent sources of information available from different modalities should reduce variability in the neural responses. We tested this prediction by measuring the variability of the neural responses to single audiovisual words. Posterior STG showed smaller variability than anterior STG during presentation of audiovisual speech with noisy auditory component. Taken together, these results suggest that posterior STG but not anterior STG is important for multisensory integration of noisy auditory and visual speech.

Abstract

The way adults express manner and path components of a motion event varies across typologically different languages both in speech and cospeech gestures, showing that language specificity in event encoding influences gesture. The authors tracked when and how this multimodal cross-linguistic variation develops in children learning Turkish and English, 2 typologically distinct languages. They found that children learn to speak in language-specific ways from age 3 onward (i.e., English speakers used 1 clause and Turkish speakers used 2 clauses to express manner and path). In contrast, English- and Turkish-speaking children’s gestures looked similar at ages 3 and 5 (i.e., separate gestures for manner and path), differing from each other only at age 9 and in adulthood (i.e., English speakers used 1 gesture, but Turkish speakers used separate gestures for manner and path). The authors argue that this pattern of the development of cospeech gestures reflects a gradual shift to language-specific representations during speaking and shows that looking at speech alone may not be sufficient to understand the full process of language acquisition.

Abstract

Most research focuses function of gesture independent of its link to the speech it accompanies and the coexpressive functions it has together with speech. This chapter instead approaches gesture in relation to its communicative function in relation to speech, and demonstrates how it is shaped by the linguistic encoding of a speaker’s message. Drawing on crosslinguistic research with adults and children as well as bilinguals on iconic/pointing gesture production it shows that the specific language speakers use modulates the rate and the shape of the iconic gesture production of the same events. The findings challenge the claims aiming to understand gesture’s function for “thinking only” in adults and during development.

Abstract

Background: Growing evidence for overlap in the syntactic processing of language and music in non-brain-damaged individuals leads to the question of whether aphasic individuals with grammatical comprehension problems in language also have problems processing structural relations in music.

Aims: The current study sought to test musical syntactic processing in individuals with Broca's aphasia and grammatical comprehension deficits, using both explicit and implicit tasks.

Methods & Procedures: Two experiments were conducted. In the first experiment 12 individuals with Broca's aphasia (and 14 matched controls) were tested for their sensitivity to grammatical and semantic relations in sentences, and for their sensitivity to musical syntactic (harmonic) relations in chord sequences. An explicit task (acceptability judgement of novel sequences) was used. The second experiment, with 9 individuals with Broca's aphasia (and 12 matched controls), probed musical syntactic processing using an implicit task (harmonic priming).

Outcomes & Results: In both experiments the aphasic group showed impaired processing of musical syntactic relations. Control experiments indicated that this could not be attributed to low-level problems with the perception of pitch patterns or with auditory short-term memory for tones.

Conclusions: The results suggest that musical syntactic processing in agrammatic aphasia deserves systematic investigation, and that such studies could help probe the nature of the processing deficits underlying linguistic agrammatism. Methodological suggestions are offered for future work in this little-explored area.

Abstract

"Event realisation" refers to the normal final state of the affected entity of an activity described by a verb. For example, the sentence John killed the mosquito entails that the mosquito is afterwards dead – this is the full realisation of a killing event. By contrast, a sentence such as John hit the mosquito does not entail the mosquito’s death (even though we might assume this to be a likely result). In using a certain verb, which features of event realisation are entailed and which are just likely? This questionnaire supports cross-linguistic exploration of event realisation for a range of event types.

Abstract

In everyday communication speakers often refer in speech and/or gesture to objects in their immediate environment, thereby shifting their addressee's attention to an intended referent. The neurobiological infrastructure involved in the comprehension of such basic multimodal communicative acts remains unclear. In an event-related fMRI study, we presented participants with pictures of a speaker and two objects while they concurrently listened to her speech. In each picture, one of the objects was singled out, either through the speaker's index-finger pointing gesture or through a visual cue that made the object perceptually more salient in the absence of gesture. A mismatch (compared to a match) between speech and the object singled out by the speaker's pointing gesture led to enhanced activation in left IFG and bilateral pMTG, showing the importance of these areas in conceptual matching between speech and referent. Moreover, a match (compared to a mismatch) between speech and the object made salient through a visual cue led to enhanced activation in the mentalizing system, arguably reflecting an attempt to converge on a jointly attended referent in the absence of pointing. These findings shed new light on the neurobiological underpinnings of the core communicative process of comprehending a speaker's multimodal referential act and stress the power of pointing as an important natural device to link speech to objects.

Abstract

Gesture-first theories of language origins often raise two unsubstantiated arguments against vocal origins. First, they argue that great ape vocal behavior is highly constrained, limited to a fixed, species-typical repertoire of reflexive calls. Second, they argue that vocalizations lack any significant potential to ground meaning through iconicity, or resemblance between form and meaning. This paper reviews the considerable evidence that debunks these two “myths”. Accumulating evidence shows that the great apes exercise voluntary control over their vocal behavior, including their breathing, larynx, and supralaryngeal articulators. They are also able to learn new vocal behaviors, and even show some rudimentary ability for vocal imitation. In addition, an abundance of research demonstrates that the vocal modality affords rich potential for iconicity. People can understand iconicity in sound symbolism, and they can produce iconic vocalizations to communicate a diverse range of meanings. Thus, two of the primary arguments against vocal origins theories are not tenable. As an alternative, the paper concludes that the origins of language – going as far back as our last common ancestor with great apes – are rooted in iconicity in both gesture and vocalization.

Abstract

Great apes and siamangs—but not humans—possess laryngeal air sacs, suggesting that they were lost over hominin evolution. The absence of air sacs in humans may hold clues to speech evolution, but little is known about their functions in extant apes. We investigated whether gorillas use their air sacs to produce the staccato ‘growling’ of the silverback chest beat display. This hypothesis was formulated after viewing a nature documentary showing a display by a silverback western gorilla (Kingo). As Kingo growls, the video shows distinctive vibrations in his chest and throat under which the air sacs extend. We also investigated whether other similarly staccato vocalizations—the whinny, sex whinny, and copulation grunt—might also involve the air sacs. To examine these hypotheses, we collected an opportunistic sample of video and audio evidence from research records and another documentary of Kingo’s group, and from videos of other gorillas found on YouTube. Analysis shows that the four vocalizations are each emitted in rapid pulses of a similar frequency (8–16 pulses per second), and limited visual evidence indicates that they may all occur with upper torso vibrations. Future research should determine how consistently the vibrations co-occur with the vocalizations, whether they are synchronized, and their precise location and timing. Our findings fit with the hypothesis that apes—especially, but not exclusively males—use their air sacs for vocalizations and displays related to size exaggeration for sex and territory. Thus changes in social structure, mating, and sexual dimorphism might have led to the obsolescence of the air sacs and their loss in hominin evolution.

Abstract

This paper examines the use of iconic words in early conversations between children and caregivers. The longitudinal data include a span of six observations of 35 children-parent dyads in the same semi-structured activity. Our findings show that children’s speech initially has a high proportion of iconic words, and over time, these words become diluted by an increase of arbitrary words. Parents’ speech is also initially high in iconic words, with a decrease in the proportion of iconic words over time – in this case driven by the use of fewer iconic words. The level and development of iconicity are related to individual differences in the children’s cognitive skills. Our findings fit with the hypothesis that iconicity facilitates early word learning and may play an important role in learning to produce new words.

Abstract

Cognitive neuroscience approaches the brain as a cognitive system: a system that functionally is conceptualized in terms of information processing. We outline some aspects of this concept and consider a physical system to be an information processing device when a subclass of its physical states can be viewed as representational/cognitive and transitions between these can be conceptualized as a process operating on these states by implementing operations on the corresponding representational structures. We identify a generic and fundamental problem in cognition: sequentially organized structured processing. Structured sequence processing provides the brain, in an essential sense, with its processing logic. In an approach addressing this problem, we illustrate how to integrate levels of analysis within a framework of adaptive dynamical systems. We note that the dynamical system framework lends itself to a description of asynchronous event-driven devices, which is likely to be important in cognition because the brain appears to be an asynchronous processing system. We use the human language faculty and natural language processing as a concrete example through out.

Abstract

Cognates share their form and meaning across languages: “winter” in English means the same as “winter” in Dutch. Research has shown that bilinguals process cognates more quickly than words that exist in one language only (e.g. “ant” in English). This finding is taken as strong evidence for the claim that bilinguals have one integrated lexicon and that lexical access is language non-selective. Two English lexical decision experiments with Dutch–English bilinguals investigated whether the cognate facilitation effect is influenced by stimulus list composition. In Experiment 1, the ‘standard’ version, which included only cognates, English control words and regular non-words, showed significant cognate facilitation (31 ms). In contrast, the ‘mixed’ version, which also included interlingual homographs, pseudohomophones (instead of regular non-words) and Dutch-only words, showed a significantly different profile: a non-significant disadvantage for the cognates (8 ms). Experiment 2 examined the specific impact of these three additional stimuli types and found that only the inclusion of Dutch words significantly reduced the cognate facilitation effect. Additional exploratory analyses revealed that, when the preceding trial was a Dutch word, cognates were recognised up to 50 ms more slowly than English controls. We suggest that when participants must respond ‘no’ to non-target language words, competition arises between the ‘yes’- and ‘no’-responses associated with the two interpretations of a cognate, which (partially) cancels out the facilitation that is a result of the cognate's shared form and meaning. We conclude that the cognate facilitation effect is a real effect that originates in the lexicon, but that cognates can be subject to competition effects outside the lexicon.

Abstract

A key challenge for cognitive neuroscience is to decipher the representational schemes of the brain. A recent class of decoding algorithms for fMRI data, stimulus-feature-based encoding models, is becoming increasingly popular for inferring the dimensions of neural representational spaces from stimulus-feature spaces. We argue that such inferences are not always valid, because decoding can occur even if the neural representational space and the stimulus-feature space use different representational schemes. This can happen when there is a systematic mapping between them. In a simulation, we successfully decoded the binary representation of numbers from their decimal features. Since binary and decimal number systems use different representations, we cannot conclude that the binary representation encodes decimal features. The same argument applies to the decoding of neural patterns from stimulus-feature spaces and we urge caution in inferring the nature of the neural code from such methods. We discuss ways to overcome these inferential limitations.

Abstract

We observe a tension in the target article as it stresses an integrated gesture-speech system that can nevertheless consist of contradictory representational states, which are reflected by mismatches in gesture and speech or sign. Beyond problems of coherence, this prevents furthering our understanding of gesture-related learning. As a possible antidote, we invite a more dynamically embodied perspective to the stage.

Abstract

A classic discussion about visual imagery is whether it affords reinterpretation, like discovering two interpretations in the duck/rabbit illustration. Recent findings converge on reinterpretation being possible in visual imagery, suggesting functional equivalence with pictorial representations. However, it is unclear whether such reinterpretations are necessarily a visual-pictorial achievement. To assess this, 68 participants were briefly presented 2-d ambiguous figures. One figure was presented visually, the other via manual touch alone. Afterwards participants mentally rotated the memorized figures as to discover a novel interpretation. A portion (20.6%) of the participants detected a novel interpretation in visual imagery, replicating previous research. Strikingly, 23.6% of participants were able to reinterpret figures they had only felt. That reinterpretation truly involved haptic processes was further supported, as some participants performed co-thought gestures on an imagined figure during retrieval. These results are promising for further development of an Enactivist approach to imagination.

Abstract

A patient who already had Wernick's aphasia due to a left temporal lobe lesion suffered a severe deterioration specifically of auditory language comprehension, subsequent to right temporal lobe infarction. A detailed comparison of his new condition with his language status before the second stroke revealed that the newly acquired deficit was limited to tasks related to auditory input. Further investigations demonstrated a speech perceptual disorder, which we analysed as due to deficits both at the level of general auditory processes and at the level of phonetic analysis. We discuss some arguments related to hemisphere specialization of phonetic processing and to the disconnection explanation of word deafness that support the hypothesis of word deafness being generally caused by mixed deficits.

Abstract

Randomization performance was studied using the "Mental Dice Task" in 20 patients with aphasia (APH) and 101 elderly normal control subjects (NC). The produced sequences were compared to 100 computer-generated pseudorandom sequences with respect to 7 measures of sequential bias. The performance of APH differed significantly from NC participants, according to all but one measure, i.e. Turning Point Index (points of change between ascending and descending sequences). NC participants differed significantly from the computer generated sequences, according to all measures of randomness. Finally, APH differed significantly from the computer simulator, according to all measures but mean Repetition Gap score (gap between a digit and its reoccurrence). Despite the heterogeneity of our APH group, there were no significant differences in randomization performance between patients with different language impairments. All the APH displayed a distinct performance profile, with more response stereotypy, counting tendencies, and inhibition problems, as hypothesised, while at the same time responding more randomly than NC by showing less of a cycling strategy and more number repetitions.

Abstract

This article takes an interdisciplinary route towards explaining the complex history of Hai//om culture and language. We begin this article with a short review of ideas relating to 'origins' and historical reconstructions as they are currently played out among Khoekhoe groups in Namibia, in particular with regard to the Hai//om. We then take a comparative look at parts of the kinship system and the tonology of ≠Âkhoe Hai//om and other variants of Khoekhoe. With regard to the kinship and naming system, we see patterns that show similarities with Nama and Damara on the one hand but also with 'San' groups on the other hand. With regard to tonology, new data from three northern Khoekoe varieties shows similarities as well as differences with Standard Namibian Khoekhoe and Ju and Tuu varieties. The historical scenarios that might explain these facts suggest different centres of innovations and opposite directions of diffusion. The anthropological and linguistic data demonstrates that only a fine-grained and multi-layered approach that goes far beyond any simplistic dichotomies can do justice to the Hai//om riddle.

Abstract

This editorial serves a number of purposes. First, it aims at summarizing and discussing 33 accepted contributions to the special issue “The evolution of rhythm cognition: Timing in music and speech.” The major focus of the issue is the cognitive neuroscience of rhythm, intended as a neurobehavioral trait undergoing an evolutionary process. Second, this editorial provides the interested reader with a guide to navigate the interdisciplinary contributions to this special issue. For this purpose, we have compiled Table 1, where methods, topics, and study species are summarized and related across contributions. Third, we also briefly highlight research relevant to the evolution of rhythm that has appeared in other journals while this special issue was compiled. Altogether, this editorial constitutes a summary of rhythm research in music and speech spanning two years, from mid-2015 until mid-2017

Abstract

Vocal communication is a crucial aspect of animal behavior. The mechanism which most mammals use to vocalize relies on three anatomical components. First, air overpressure is generated inside the lower vocal tract. Second, as the airstream goes through the glottis, sound is produced via vocal fold vibration. Third, this sound is further filtered by the geometry and length of the upper vocal tract. Evidence from mammalian anatomy and bioacoustics suggests that some of these three components may covary with an animal’s body size. The framework provided by acoustic allometry suggests that, because vocal tract length (VTL) is more strongly constrained by the growth of the body than vocal fold length (VFL), VTL generates more reliable acoustic cues to an animal’s size. This hypothesis is often tested acoustically but rarely anatomically, especially in pinnipeds. Here, we test the anatomical bases of the acoustic allometry hypothesis in harbor seal pups Phoca vitulina. We dissected and measured vocal tract, vocal folds, and other anatomical features of 15 harbor seals post-mortem. We found that, while VTL correlates with body size, VFL does not. This suggests that, while body growth puts anatomical constraints on how vocalizations are filtered by harbor seals’ vocal tract, no such constraints appear to exist on vocal folds, at least during puppyhood. It is particularly interesting to find anatomical constraints on harbor seals’ vocal tracts, the same anatomical region partially enabling pups to produce individually distinctive vocalizations.

Abstract

Research on the evolution of human speech and phonology benefits from the comparative approach: structural, spectral, and temporal features can be extracted and compared across species in an attempt to reconstruct the evolutionary history of human speech. Here we focus on analytical tools to measure and compare temporal structure in human speech and animal vocalizations. We introduce the reader to a range of statistical methods usable, on the one hand, to quantify rhythmic complexity in single vocalizations, and on the other hand, to compare rhythmic structure between multiple vocalizations. These methods include: time series analysis, distributional measures, variability metrics, Fourier transform, auto- and cross-correlation, phase portraits, and circular statistics. Using computer-generated data, we apply a range of techniques, walking the reader through the necessary software and its functions. We describe which techniques are most appropriate to test particular hypotheses on rhythmic structure, and provide possible interpretations of the tests. These techniques can be equally well applied to find rhythmic structure in gesture, movement, and any other behavior developing over time, when the research focus lies on its temporal structure. This introduction to quantitative techniques for rhythm and timing analysis will hopefully spur additional comparative research, and will produce comparable results across all disciplines working on the evolution of speech, ultimately advancing the field.

Abstract

Isochrony is crucial to the rhythm of human music. Some neural, behavioral and anatomical traits underlying rhythm perception and production are shared with a broad range of species. These may either have a common evolutionary origin, or have evolved into similar traits under different evolutionary pressures. Other traits underlying rhythm are rare across species, only found in humans and few other animals. Isochrony, or stable periodicity, is common to most human music, but isochronous behaviors are also found in many species. It appears paradoxical that humans are particularly good at producing and perceiving isochronous patterns, although this ability does not conceivably confer any evolutionary advantage to modern humans. This article will attempt to solve this conundrum. To this end, we define the concept of isochrony from the present functional perspective of physiology, cognitive neuroscience, signal processing, and interactive behavior, and review available evidence on isochrony in the signals of humans and other animals. We then attempt to resolve the paradox of isochrony by expanding an evolutionary hypothesis about the function that isochronous behavior may have had in early hominids. Finally, we propose avenues for empirical research to examine this hypothesis and to understand the evolutionary origin of isochrony in general.

Abstract

STRUCTURE IN MUSICAL RHYTHM CAN BE MEASURED using a number of analytical techniques. While some techniques—like circular statistics or grammar induction—rely on strong top-down assumptions, assumption-free techniques can only provide limited insights on higher-order rhythmic structure. I suggest that research in music perception and performance can benefit from systematically adopting phase space plots, a visualization technique originally developed in mathematical physics that overcomes the aforementioned limitations. By jointly plotting adjacent interonset intervals (IOI), the motivic rhythmic structure of musical phrases, if present, is visualized geometrically without making any a priori assumptions concerning isochrony, beat induction, or metrical hierarchies. I provide visual examples and describe how particular features of rhythmic patterns correspond to geometrical shapes in phase space plots. I argue that research on music perception and systematic musicology stands to benefit from this descriptive tool, particularly in comparative analyses of rhythm production. Phase space plots can be employed as an initial assumption-free diagnostic to find higher order structures (i.e., beyond distributional regularities) before proceeding to more specific, theory-driven analyses.

Abstract

According to dual-route models of morphological processing, regular inflected words can be retrieved as whole-word forms or decomposed into morphemes. Baayen, Dijkstra, and Schreuder [(1997). Singulars and plurals in Dutch: Evidence for a parallel dual-route model. Journal of AQ2 Memory and Language, 37, 94–117. doi:10.1006/jmla.1997.2509] proposed a ¶ dual-route model according to which plurals of singular-dominant words (e.g. “brides”) are decomposed, while plurals of plural-dominant words (e.g. “peas”) are accessed as whole-word units. We report two lexical-decision experiments investigating how plural processing is influenced by participants’ age (a proxy for experience with word forms) and morphological complexity of the language (German versus Dutch). For both Dutch participant groups and older German participants, we replicated the interaction between number and dominance reported by Baayen and colleagues. Younger German participants showed a main effect of number, indicating access of all plurals via decomposition. Access to stored forms seems to depend on morphological richness and experience with word forms. The data pattern fits neither full-decomposition nor full-storage models, but is compatible with dual-route models

Abstract

Dutch listeners' looks to printed words were tracked while they listened to instructions to click with their mouse on one of them. When presented with targets from word pairs where the first two syllables were segmentally identical but differed in stress location, listeners used stress information to recognize the target before segmental information disambiguated the words. Furthermore, the amount of lexical competition was influenced by the presence or absence of word-initial stress.

Abstract

Segmental as well as suprasegmental information is used by Dutch listeners to recognize words. The time-course of the effect of suprasegmental stress information on spoken-word recognition was investigated in a previous study, in which we tracked Dutch listeners' looks to arrays of four printed words as they listened to spoken sentences. Each target was displayed along with a competitor that did not differ segmentally in its first two syllables but differed in stress placement (e.g., 'CENtimeter' and 'sentiMENT'). The listeners' eye-movements showed that stress information is used to recognize the target before distinct segmental information is available. Here, we examine the role of durational information in this effect. Two experiments showed that initial-syllable duration, as a cue to lexical stress, is not interpreted dependent on the speaking rate of the preceding carrier sentence. This still held when other stress cues like pitch and amplitude were removed. Rather, the speaking rate of the preceding carrier affected the speed of word recognition globally, even though the rate of the target itself was not altered. Stress information modulated lexical competition, but did so independently of the rate of the preceding carrier, even if duration was the only stress cue present.

Abstract

This study investigates whether advanced second language (L2) learners of a nonnull subject language (Dutch) are influenced by their null subject first language (L1) (Turkish) in their offline and online resolution of subject pronouns in L2 discourse. To tease apart potential L1 effects from possible general L2 processing effects, we also tested a group of German L2 learners of Dutch who were predicted to perform like the native Dutch speakers. The two L2 groups differed in their offline interpretations of subject pronouns. The Turkish L2 learners exhibited a L1 influence, because approximately half the time they interpreted Dutch subject pronouns as they would overt pronouns in Turkish, whereas the German L2 learners performed like the Dutch controls, interpreting pronouns as coreferential with the current discourse topic. This L1 effect was not in evidence in eye-tracking data, however. Instead, the L2 learners patterned together, showing an online processing disadvantage when two potential antecedents for the pronoun were grammatically available in the discourse. This processing disadvantage was in evidence irrespective of the properties of the learners' L1 or their final interpretation of the pronoun. Therefore, the results of this study indicate both an effect of the L1 on the L2 in offline resolution and a general L2 processing effect in online subject pronoun resolution.

Abstract

This paper outlines a first attempt to model the special constraints that arise in language processing in conversation, and to explore the implications such functional considerations may have on language typology and language change. In particular, we focus on processing pressures imposed by conversational turn-taking and their consequences for the cultural evolution of the structural properties of language. We present an agent-based model of cultural evolution where agents take turns at talk in conversation. When the start of planning for the next turn is constrained by the position of the verb, the stable distribution of dominant word orders across languages evolves to match the actual distribution reasonably well. We suggest that the interface of cognition and interaction should be a more central part of the story of language evolution.

Abstract

The recognition of emotions of disgust, anger and fear have been shown to be significantly impaired in Huntington’s disease (eg,Sprengelmeyer et al, 1997, 2006; Gray et al, 1997; Milders et al, 2003,Montagne et al, 2006; Johnson et al, 2007; De Gelder et al, 2008). The relative impairment of these emotions might have implied a recognition impairment specific to negative emotions. Could the asymmetric recognition deficits be due not to the complexity of the emotion but rather reflect the complexity of the task? In the current study, 15 Huntington’s patients and 16 control subjects were presented with negative and positive non-speech emotional vocalisations that were to be identified as anger, fear, sadness, disgust, achievement, pleasure and amusement in a forced-choice paradigm. This experiment more accurately matched the negative emotions with positive emotions in a homogeneous modality. The resulting dually impaired ability of Huntington’s patients to identify negative and positive non-speech emotional vocalisations correctly provides evidence for an overall emotional recognition deficit in the disease. These results indicate that previous findings of a specificity in emotional recognition deficits might instead be due to the limitations of the visual modality. Previous experiments may have found an effect of emotional specificy due to the presence of a single positive emotion, happiness, in the midst of multiple negative emotions. In contrast with the previous literature, the study presented here points to a global deficit in the recognition of emotional sounds.

Abstract

he present study investigated the referential communication skills of children with imaginary companions (ICs). Twenty-two children with ICs aged between 4 and 6 years were compared to 22 children without ICs (NICs). The children were matched for age, gender, birth order, number of siblings, and parental education. All children completed the Test of Referential Commu- nication (Camaioni, Ercolani & Lloyd, 1995). The results showed that the children with ICs performed better than the children without ICs on the speaker component of the task. In particular, the IC children were better able to identify a specific referen t to their interlocutor than were the NIC children. Furthermore, the IC children described less redundant features of the target picture than did the NIC children. The children did not differ in the listening comprehension component of the task. Overall, the results suggest that the IC children had a better understanding of their interlocutor’s information requirements in convers ation. The role of pretend play in the development of communicative competence is discussed in light of these results.

Abstract

Premature termination codon (PTC) mutations in the ATP-Binding Cassette, Sub-Family A, Member 7 gene (ABCA7) have recently been identified as intermediate-to-high penetrant risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer’s disease (LOAD). High variability, however, is observed in downstream ABCA7 mRNA and protein expression, disease penetrance, and onset age, indicative of unknown modifying factors. Here, we investigated the prevalence and disease penetrance of ABCA7 PTC mutations in a large early onset AD (EOAD)—control cohort, and examined the effect on transcript level with comprehensive third-generation long-read sequencing. We characterized the ABCA7 coding sequence with next-generation sequencing in 928 EOAD patients and 980 matched control individuals. With MetaSKAT rare variant association analysis, we observed a fivefold enrichment (p = 0.0004) of PTC mutations in EOAD patients (3%) versus controls (0.6%). Ten novel PTC mutations were only observed in patients, and PTC mutation carriers in general had an increased familial AD load. In addition, we observed nominal risk reducing trends for three common coding variants. Seven PTC mutations were further analyzed using targeted long-read cDNA sequencing on an Oxford Nanopore MinION platform. PTC-containing transcripts for each investigated PTC mutation were observed at varying proportion (5–41% of the total read count), implying incomplete nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD). Furthermore, we distinguished and phased several previously unknown alternative splicing events (up to 30% of transcripts). In conjunction with PTC mutations, several of these novel ABCA7 isoforms have the potential to rescue deleterious PTC effects. In conclusion, ABCA7 PTC mutations play a substantial role in EOAD, warranting genetic screening of ABCA7 in genetically unexplained patients. Long-read cDNA sequencing revealed both varying degrees of NMD and transcript-modifying events, which may influence ABCA7 dosage, disease severity, and may create opportunities for therapeutic interventions in AD. © 2017, The Author(s).

Abstract

In this article we provide a preliminary description and analysis of the most common ergative
constructions in Shawi, a Kawapanan language spoken in Northwestern Amazonia. We offer a
comparison with its sister language, Shiwilu, for which an optional ergativity-marking pattern has
been claimed (Valenzuela, 2008, 2011). There is not enough evidence, however, to claim the exact
same for Shawi. Ergativity in the language is driven by mere syntactic motivations. One of the
most common constituent orders in the language where the ergative marker is obligatory is OAV.
We close the article with a tentative proposal on the passive origins of OAV ergative constructions
in the language, via a by-phrase-like incorporation, and eventual grammaticalisation, resorting
to the formal syntactic theory known as Semantic Syntax (Seuren, 1996).

Abstract

Despite strong evidence for prediction during language comprehension, the underlying
mechanisms, and the extent to which they are specific to language, remain unclear. Re-analysing
an event-related potentials study, we examined responses in the time-frequency domain to
expected and unexpected (but plausible) words in strongly and weakly constraining sentences,
and found results similar to those reported in nonverbal domains. Relative to expected words,
unexpected words elicited an increase in the theta band (4–7 Hz) in strongly constraining
contexts, suggesting the involvement of control processes to deal with the consequences of
having a prediction disconfirmed. Prior to critical word onset, strongly constraining sentences
exhibited a decrease in the alpha band (8–12 Hz) relative to weakly constraining sentences,
suggesting that comprehenders can take advantage of predictive sentence contexts to prepare
for the input. The results suggest that the brain recruits domain-general preparation and control
mechanisms when making and assessing predictions during sentence comprehension

Abstract

Speakers usually begin to speak while only part of the utterance has been planned. Earlier work has shown that speech planning processes are reflected in speakers’ eye movements as they describe visually presented objects. However, to-be-named objects can be processed to some extent before they have been fixated upon, presumably because attention can be allocated to objects covertly, without moving the eyes. The present study investigated whether EEG could track speakers’ covert attention allocation as they produced short utterances to describe pairs of objects (e.g., “dog and chair”). The processing difficulty of each object was varied by presenting it in upright orientation (easy) or in upside down orientation (difficult). Background squares flickered at different frequencies in order to elicit steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs). The N2pc component, associated with the focusing of attention on an item, was detectable not only prior to speech onset, but also during speaking. The time course of the N2pc showed that attention shifted to each object in the order of mention prior to speech onset. Furthermore, greater processing difficulty increased the time speakers spent attending to each object. This demonstrates that the N2pc can track covert attention allocation in a naming task. In addition, an effect of processing difficulty at around 200–350 ms after stimulus onset revealed early attention allocation to the second to-be-named object. The flickering backgrounds elicited SSVEPs, but SSVEP amplitude was not influenced by processing difficulty. These results help complete the picture of the coordination of visual information uptake and motor output during speaking.

Abstract

Background: Human communication occurs through both verbal and visual/motoric modalities. Simultaneous
conversational speech and gesture occurs across all cultures and age groups. When verbal communication is
compromised, more of the communicative load can be transferred to the gesture modality. Although people with
aphasia produce meaning-laden gestures, the communicative value of these has not been adequately investigated.
Aims: To investigate the communicative effectiveness of pantomime gesture produced spontaneously by individuals
with aphasia during conversational discourse.
Methods & Procedures: Sixty-seven undergraduate students wrote down the messages conveyed by 11 people with
aphasia that produced pantomime while engaged in conversational discourse. Students were presented with a
speech-only, a gesture-only and a combined speech and gesture condition and guessed messages in both a free
description and a multiple-choice task.
Outcomes & Results: As hypothesized, listener comprehension was more accurate in the combined pantomime
gesture and speech condition as compared with the gesture- or speech-only conditions. Participants achieved
greater accuracy in the multiple-choice task as compared with the free-description task, but only in the gestureonly
condition. The communicative effectiveness of the pantomime gestures increased as the fluency of the
participants with aphasia decreased.
Conclusions&Implications: These results indicate that when pantomime gesture was presented with aphasic speech,
the combination had strong communicative effectiveness. Future studies could investigate how pantomimes can
be integrated into interventions for people with aphasia, particularly emphasizing elicitation of pantomimes in as
natural a context as possible and highlighting the opportunity for efficient message repair.

Abstract

One of the most conspicuous ways in which people distribute agency among each other is by asking another for help. Natural languages give people a range of forms to do this, the distinctions among which have consequences for how agency is distributed. Forms such as imperatives (e.g. ‘pass the salt’) and recurrent types of interrogatives (e.g. ‘can you pass the salt?’) designate another person as the doer of the action. In contrast to this, impersonal deontic statements (e.g. ‘it is necessary to get the salt’) express the need for an action without tying it to any particular individual. This can generate interactions in which the identity of the doer must be sorted out among participants, allowing us to observe the distribution of agency in vivo. The case of impersonal deontic statements demonstrates the importance of grammar as a resource for managing human action and sociality.

Abstract

The use of the imperative for requesting has been mostly explained on the basis of estimations of social distance, relative power, and entitlement. More recent research, however, has identified other selection factors to do with the functional and sequential relation of the action requested to the trajectory of the ongoing interaction. In everyday activities among family and friends, the imperative is typically warranted by an earlier commitment of the requestee to a joint project or shared goal which the action requested contributes to. The chapter argues this to be the primary use of the imperative for requesting in Italian informal interaction, and distinguishes it from other uses of the imperative that do not conform to the predominant pattern. These other uses are of two kinds: (i) secondary, that is, less frequent and formally marked imperatives that still orient to social-interactional conditions supporting an expectation of compliance, and (ii) deviant, where the imperative is selected in deliberate violation of the social-interactional conditions that normally support it, attracting special attention and accomplishing more than just requesting. This study extends prior findings on the functional distribution of imperative requests and makes a point of relating and classifying distinct uses of a same form of action, offering new insights into more general aspects of language use such as markedness and normativity.

Abstract

Computer science offers a large set of tools for prototyping, writing, running, testing, validating, sharing and reproducing results; however, computational science lags behind. In the best case, authors may provide their source code as a compressed archive and they may feel confident their research is reproducible. But this is not exactly true. James Buckheit and David Donoho proposed more than two decades ago that an article about computational results is advertising, not scholarship. The actual scholarship is the full software environment, code, and data that produced the result. This implies new workflows, in particular in peer-reviews. Existing journals have been slow to adapt: source codes are rarely requested and are hardly ever actually executed to check that they produce the results advertised in the article. ReScience is a peer-reviewed journal that targets computational research and encourages the explicit replication of already published research, promoting new and open-source implementations in order to ensure that the original research can be replicated from its description. To achieve this goal, the whole publishing chain is radically different from other traditional scientific journals. ReScience resides on GitHub where each new implementation of a computational study is made available together with comments, explanations, and software tests.

Abstract

Remembering complex, multidimensional information typically requires strategic memory retrieval, during which information is structured, for instance by spatial- or temporal associations. Although brain regions involved in strategic memory retrieval in general have been identified, differences in retrieval operations related to distinct retrieval strategies are not well-understood. Thus, our aim was to identify brain regions whose activity is differentially involved in spatial-associative and temporal-associative retrieval. First, we showed that our behavioral paradigm probing memory for a set of object-location associations promoted the use of a spatial-associative structure following an encoding condition that provided multiple associations to neighboring objects (spatial-associative condition) and the use of a temporal- associative structure following another study condition that provided predominantly temporal associations between sequentially presented items (temporal-associative condition). Next, we used an adapted version of this paradigm for functional MRI, where we contrasted brain activity related to the recall of object-location associations that were either encoded in the spatial- or the temporal-associative condition. In addition to brain regions generally involved in recall, we found that activity in higher-order visual regions, including the fusiform gyrus, the lingual gyrus, and the cuneus, was relatively enhanced when subjects used a spatial-associative structure for retrieval. In contrast, activity in the globus pallidus and the thalamus was relatively enhanced when subjects used a temporal-associative structure for retrieval. In conclusion, we provide evidence for differential involvement of these brain regions related to different types of strategic memory retrieval and the neural structures described play a role in either spatial-associative or temporal-associative memory retrieval.

Abstract

In developmental psycholinguistics, we have, for many years,
been generating and testing theories that propose both descriptions of
adult representations and explanations of how those representations
develop. We have learnt that restricting ourselves to any one
methodology yields only incomplete data about the nature of linguistic
representations. We argue that we need a multi-method approach to the
study of representation.

Abstract

It has been generally assumed in the Theory of Mind literature of the past 30 years that young children fail standard false-belief tasks because they attribute their own knowledge to the protagonist (what Leslie and colleagues called a “true-belief default”). Contrary to the traditional view, we have recently proposed that the children's bias is task induced. This alternative view was supported by studies showing that 3 year olds are able to pass a false-belief task that allows them to focus on the protagonist, without drawing their attention to the target object in the test phase. For a more accurate comparison of these two accounts, the present study tested the true-belief default with adults. Four experiments measuring eye movements and response inhibition revealed that (a) adults do not have an automatic tendency to respond to the false-belief question according to their own knowledge and (b) the true-belief response need not be inhibited in order to correctly predict the protagonist's actions. The positive results observed in the control conditions confirm the accuracy of the various measures used. I conclude that the results of this study undermine the true-belief default view and those models that posit mechanisms of response inhibition in false-belief reasoning. Alternatively, the present study with adults and recent studies with children suggest that participants' focus of attention in false-belief tasks may be key to their performance.

Abstract

In standard Theory of Mind tasks, such as the Sally-Anne, children have to predict the behaviour of a mistaken character, which requires attributing the character a false belief. Hundreds of developmental studies in the last 30 years have shown that children under 4 fail standard false-belief tasks. However, recent studies have revealed that bilingual children and adults outperform their monolingual peers in this type of tasks. Bilinguals’ better performance in false-belief tasks has generally been interpreted as a result of their better inhibitory control; that is, bilinguals are allegedly better than monolinguals at inhibiting the erroneous response to the false-belief question. In this review, I challenge the received view and argue instead that bilinguals’ better false-belief performance results from more effective attention management. This challenge ties in with two independent lines of research: on the one hand, recent studies on the role of attentional processes in false-belief tasks with monolingual children and adults; and on the other, current research on bilinguals’ performance in different Executive Function tasks. The review closes with an exploratory discussion of further benefits of bilingual cognition to Theory of Mind development and pragmatics, which may be independent from Executive Function.

Abstract

Categorisation models of metaphor interpretation are based on the premiss that categorisation statements (e.g., ‘Wilma is a nurse’) and comparison statements (e.g., ‘Betty is like a nurse’) are fundamentally different types of assertion. Against this assumption, we argue that the difference is merely a quantitative one: ‘x is a y’ unilaterally entails ‘x is like a y’, and therefore the latter is merely weaker than the former. Moreover, if ‘x is like a y’ licenses the inference that x is not a y, then that inference is a scalar implicature. We defend these claims partly on theoretical grounds and partly on the basis of experimental evidence. A suite of experiments indicates both that ‘x is a y’ unilaterally entails that x is like a y, and that in several respects the non-y inference behaves exactly as one should expect from a scalar implicature. We discuss the implications of our view of categorisation and comparison statements for categorisation models of metaphor interpretation.

Abstract

Over two decades, the director task has increasingly been employed as a test of the use of Theory of Mind in communication, first in psycholinguistics and more recently in social cognition research. A new version of this task was designed to test two independent hypotheses. First, optimal performance in the director task, as established by the standard metrics of interference, is possible by using selective attention alone, and not necessarily Theory of Mind. Second, pragmatic measures of Theory-of-Mind use can reveal that people actively represent the director’s mental states, contrary to recent claims that they only use domain-general cognitive processes to perform this task. The results of this study support both hypotheses and provide a new interactive paradigm to reliably test Theory-of-Mind use in referential communication.

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate the extent to which the process of lexical interpretation is context dependent. It has been uncontroversially agreed in psycholinguistics that interpretation is always affected by sentential context. The major debate in lexical processing research has revolved around the question of whether initial semantic activation is context sensitive or rather exhaustive, that is, whether the effect of context occurs before or only after the information associated to a concept has been accessed from the mental lexicon. However, within post-lexical access processes, the question of whether the selection of a word's meaning components is guided exclusively by contextual relevance, or whether certain meaning components might be selected context independently, has not been such an important focus of research. I have investigated this question in the two experiments reported in this paper and, moreover, have analysed the role that context-independent information in concepts might play in word interpretation. This analysis differs from previous studies on lexical processing in that it places experimental work in the context of a theoretical model of lexical pragmatics.

Abstract

Universal Grammar (UG) is indeed evolutionarily implausible. But if languages are just “adapted” to a large primate brain, it is hard to see why other primates do not have complex languages. The answer is that humans have evolved a specialized and uniquely human cognitive architecture, whose main function is to compute mappings between arbitrary signals and communicative intentions. This underlies the development of language in the human species.

Abstract

This paper presents the first application of polynomial modeling as a means for validating phonological pitch accent labels to German data. It is compared to traditional phonetic analysis (measuring minima, maxima, alignment). The traditional method fares better in classification, but results are comparable in statistical accent pair testing. Robustness tests show that pitch correction is necessary in both cases. The approaches are discussed in terms of their practicability, applicability to other domains of research and interpretability of their results.

Abstract

Understanding of evidentials is incomplete without consideration of their behaviour in interrogative contexts. We discuss key formal, semantic, and pragmatic features of cross-linguistic variation concerning the use of evidential markers in interrogative clauses. Cross-linguistic data suggest that an exclusively speaker-centric view of evidentiality is not sufficient to explain the semantics of information source marking, as in many languages it is typical for evidentials in questions to represent addressee perspective. Comparison of evidentiality and the related phenomenon of egophoricity emphasises how knowledge-based linguistic systems reflect attention to the way knowledge is distributed among participants in the speech situation

Abstract

The voice system of Tagalog has been proposed to be symmetrical in the sense that there are no morphologically unmarked voice forms. This stands in contrast to asymmetrical voice systems which exhibit unmarked and marked voices (e.g., active and passive in German). This paper investigates the psycholinguistic processing consequences of the symmetrical and asymmetrical nature of the Tagalog and German voice systems by analyzing changes in cognitive load during sentence production. Tagalog and German native speakers' pupil diameters were recorded while they produced sentences with different voice markings. Growth curve analyses of the shape of task-evoked pupillary responses revealed that processing load changes were similar for different voices in the symmetrical voice system of Tagalog. By contrast, actives and passives in the asymmetrical voice system of German exhibited different patterns of processing load changes during sentence production. This is interpreted as supporting the notion of symmetry in the Tagalog voice system. Mental effort during sentence planning changes in different ways in the two languages because the grammatical architecture of their voice systems is different. Additionally, an anti-Patient bias in sentence production was found in Tagalog: cognitive load increased at the same time and at the same rate but was maintained for a longer time when the patient argument was the subject, as compared to agent subjects. This indicates that while both voices in Tagalog afford similar planning operations, linking patients to the subject function is more effortful. This anti-Patient bias in production adds converging evidence to “subject preferences” reported in the sentence comprehension literature.

Abstract

Theories of incremental sentence production make different assumptions about when speakers encode information about described events and when verbs are selected, accordingly. An eye tracking experiment on German testing the predictions from linear and hierarchical incrementality about the timing of event encoding and verb planning is reported. In the experiment, participants described depictions of two-participant events with sentences that differed in voice and word order. Verb-medial active sentences and actives and passives with sentence-final verbs were compared. Linear incrementality predicts that sentences with verbs placed early differ from verb-final sentences because verbs are assumed to only be planned shortly before they are articulated. By contrast, hierarchical incrementality assumes that speakers start planning with relational encoding of the event. A weak version of hierarchical incrementality assumes that only the action is encoded at the outset of formulation and selection of lexical verbs only occurs shortly before they are articulated, leading to the prediction of different fixation patterns for verb-medial and verb-final sentences. A strong version of hierarchical incrementality predicts no differences between verb-medial and verb-final sentences because it assumes that verbs are always lexically selected early in the formulation process. Based on growth curve analyses of fixations to agent and patient characters in the described pictures, and the influence of character humanness and the lack of an influence of the visual salience of characters on speakers' choice of active or passive voice, the current results suggest that while verb planning does not necessarily occur early during formulation, speakers of German always create an event representation early

Abstract

In the context of the source-filter theory of speech, it is well established that intelligibility is heavily reliant on information carried by the filter, that is, spectral cues (e.g., Faulkner et al., 2001; Shannon et al., 1995). However, the extraction of other types of information in the speech signal, such as emotion and identity, is less well understood. In this study we investigated the extent to which emotion recognition in speech depends on filterdependent cues, using a forced-choice emotion identification task at ten levels of noise-vocoding ranging between one and 32 channels. In addition, participants performed a speech intelligibility task with the same stimuli. Our results indicate that compared to speech intelligibility, emotion recognition relies less on spectral information and more on cues typically signaled by source variations, such as voice pitch, voice quality, and intensity. We suggest that, while the reliance on spectral dynamics is likely a unique aspect of human speech, greater phylogenetic continuity across species may be found in the communication of affect in vocalizations.

Abstract

Research using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) has demonstrated an early differential effect in fronto-central regions when processing emotional, as compared to affectively neutral facial stimuli (e.g., Eimer & Holmes, 2002). In this talk, data demonstrating a similar effect in the auditory domain will be presented. ERPs were recorded in a one-back task where participants had to identify immediate repetitions of emotion category, such as a fearful sound followed by another fearful sound. The stimulus set consisted of non-verbal emotional vocalisations communicating positive and negative sounds, as well as neutral baseline conditions. Similarly to the facial domain, fear sounds as compared to acoustically controlled neutral sounds, elicited a frontally distributed positivity with an onset latency of about 150 ms after stimulus onset. These data suggest the existence of a rapid multi-modal frontocentral mechanism discriminating emotional from non-emotional human signals.

Abstract

Listeners outperform ASR systems in every speech recognition task. However, what is not clear is where this human advantage originates. This paper investigates the role of acoustic feature representations. We test four (MFCCs, PLPs, Mel Filterbanks, Rate Maps) acoustic representations, with and without ‘pitch’ information, using the same backend. The results are compared with listener results at the level of articulatory feature classification. While no acoustic feature representation reached the levels of human performance, both MFCCs and Rate maps achieved good scores, with Rate maps nearing human performance on the classification of voicing. Comparing the results on the most difficult articulatory features to classify showed similarities between the humans and the SVMs: e.g., ‘dental’ was by far the least well identified by both groups. Overall, adding pitch information seemed to hamper classification performance.

Abstract

There is now considerable evidence that fine-grained acoustic-phonetic detail in the speech signal helps listeners to segment a speech signal into syllables and words. In this paper, we compare two computational models of word recognition on their ability to capture and use this finephonetic detail during speech recognition. One model, SpeM, is phoneme-based, whereas the other, newly developed Fine- Tracker, is based on articulatory features. Simulations dealt with modelling the ability of listeners to distinguish short words (e.g., ‘ham’) from the longer words in which they are embedded (e.g., ‘hamster’). The simulations with Fine- Tracker showed that it was, like human listeners, able to distinguish between short words from the longer words in which they are embedded. This suggests that it is possible to extract this fine-phonetic detail from the speech signal and use it during word recognition.

Abstract

We used simultaneously recorded EEG and fMRI to investigate in which areas the BOLD signal correlates with frontal theta power changes, while subjects were quietly lying resting in the scanner with their eyes open. To obtain a reliable estimate of frontal theta power we applied ICA on band-pass filtered (2–9 Hz) EEG data. For each subject we selected the component that best matched the mid-frontal scalp topography associated with the frontal theta rhythm. We applied a time-frequency analysis on this component and used the time course of the frequency bin with the highest overall power to form a regressor that modeled spontaneous fluctuations in frontal theta power. No significant positive BOLD correlations with this regressor were observed. Extensive negative correlations were observed in the areas that together form the default mode network. We conclude that frontal theta activity can be seen as an EEG index of default mode network activity.

Abstract

The present paper looks at semantic interference and gender congruency effects during bilingual picture-word naming. According to Costa, Miozzo & Caramazza (1999), only the activation from lexical nodes within a language is considered during lexical selection. If this is accurate, these findings should uphold with respect to semantic and gender/determiner effects even though the distractors are in another language. In the present study three effects were found, (1) a main effect of language, (2) semantic effects for both target language and non-target language distractors, and (3) gender congruency effects for targets with target-language distractors only. These findings are at odds with the language-specific proposal of Costa et al. (1999). Implications of these findings are discussed.

Abstract

Cette étude traite de la question de savoir s’il y a une relation entre les équivalents des particules additives ‘aussi’ et ‘de nouveau’ portant sur le topique et la finitude dans la variété des apprenants turcophones du néerlandais et de l’allemand. Dans les données obtenues avec une tâche contrôlée, nous observons que la finitude est moins fréquemment marquée dans les énoncés contenant ces particules que les énoncés comparables qui ne contiennent pas ces particules. Ceci est vrai pour le marquage de la finitude sur les verbes lexicaux ainsi que pour la présence de verbes conjugués sans contenu lexical comme la copule. De plus, nous montrons que les particules peuvent précéder le verbe conjugué dans la langue des apprenants. Ces résultats peuvent être expliqués par la similarité fonctionnelle entre la finitude et les particules portant sur le topique.

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a joint effort of a group of multimodality researchers and tool developers to improve the interoperability between several tools used for the annotation of multimodality. We propose a multimodal annotation exchange format, based on the annotation graph formalism, which is supported by import and export routines in the respective tools

Abstract

The brain’s remarkable capacity for language requires bidirectional interactions between functionally specialized brain regions. We used magnetoencephalography to investigate interregional interactions in the brain network for language while 102 participants were reading sentences. Using Granger causality analysis, we identified inferior frontal cortex and anterior temporal regions to receive widespread input and middle temporal regions to send widespread output. This fits well with the notion that these regions play a central role in language processing. Characterization of the functional topology of this network, using data-driven matrix factorization, which allowed for partitioning into a set of subnetworks, revealed directed connections at distinct frequencies of interaction. Connections originating from temporal regions peaked at alpha frequency, whereas connections originating from frontal and parietal regions peaked at beta frequency. These findings indicate that the information flow between language-relevant brain areas, which is required for linguistic processing, may depend on the contributions of distinct brain rhythms

Abstract

Rhythmic synchronization likely subserves interactions among neuronal groups. One of the best studied rhythmic synchronization phenomena in the human nervous system is the beta-band (15-30 Hz) synchronization in the motor system. In this study, we imaged structures across the human brain that are synchronized to the motor system's beta rhythm. We recorded whole-head magnetoencephalograms (MEG) and electromyograms (EMG) of left/right extensor carpi radialis muscle during left/right wrist extension. We analyzed coherence, on the one hand between the EMG and neuronal sources in the brain, and on the other hand between different brain sources, using a spatial filtering approach. Cortico-muscular coherence analysis revealed a spatial maximum of coherence to the muscle in motor cortex contralateral to the muscle in accordance with earlier findings. Moreover, by applying a two-dipole source model, we unveiled significantly coherent clusters of voxels in the ipsilateral cerebellar hemisphere and ipsilateral cerebral motor regions. The spatial pattern of coherence to the right and left arm EMG was roughly mirror reversed across the midline, in agreement with known physiology. Subsequently, we analyzed the brain-wide pattern of beta-band coherence to the motor cortex contralateral to the contracting muscle. This analysis did not reveal any convincing pattern. Because the prior cortico-muscular analysis had demonstrated the expected pattern in our data, this negative finding demonstrates a current limitation of the applied method for cortico-cortical coherence analysis. We conclude that during an isometric muscle contraction, several distributed brain regions form a brain-wide beta-band network for motor control.

Abstract

This study investigates the roles of phonetic analogy and lexical frequency in an ongoing sound change, the devoicing of fricatives in Dutch, which occurs mainly in the Netherlands and to a lesser degree in Flanders. In the experiment, Dutch and Flemish students read two variants of 98 words: the standard and a nonstandard form with the incorrect voice value of the fricative. Dutch students chose the non-standard forms with devoiced fricatives more often than Flemish students. Moreover, devoicing, though a gradual process, appeared lexically diffused, affecting first the words that are low in frequency and phonetically similar to words with voiceless fricatives.

Abstract

The acoustic realization of speech is constrained by the physical mechanisms by which it is produced. Yet for speech perception, the degree to which listeners utilize experience derived from speech production has long been debated. In the present study, we examined how sensorimotor adaptation during production may affect perception, and how this relationship may be reflected in early vs. late electrophysiological responses. Participants first performed a baseline speech production task, followed by a vowel categorization task during which EEG responses were recorded. In a subsequent speech production task, half the participants received shifted auditory feedback, leading most to alter their articulations. This was followed by a second, post-training vowel categorization task. We compared changes in vowel production to both behavioral and electrophysiological changes in vowel perception. No differences in phonetic categorization were observed between groups receiving altered or unaltered feedback. However, exploratory analyses revealed correlations between vocal motor behavior and phonetic categorization. EEG analyses revealed correlations between vocal motor behavior and cortical responses in both early and late time windows. These results suggest that participants' recent production behavior influenced subsequent vowel perception. We suggest that the change in perception can be best characterized as a mapping of acoustics onto articulation

Abstract

A given speech sound will be realized differently depending on the context in which it is produced. Listeners have been found to compensate perceptually for these coarticulatory effects, yet it is unclear to what extent this effect depends on actual production experience. In this study, whether changes in motor-to-sound mappings induced by adaptation to altered auditory feedback can affect perceptual compensation for coarticulation is investigated. Specifically, whether altering how the vowel [i] is produced can affect the categorization of a stimulus continuum between an alveolar and a palatal fricative whose interpretation is dependent on vocalic context is tested. It was found that participants could be sorted into three groups based on whether they tended to oppose the direction of the shifted auditory feedback, to follow it, or a mixture of the two, and that these articulatory responses, not the shifted feedback the participants heard, correlated with changes in perception. These results indicate that sensorimotor adaptation to altered feedback can affect the perception of unaltered yet coarticulatorily-dependent speech sounds, suggesting a modulatory role of sensorimotor experience on speech perception

Abstract

The INTERSPEECH 2017 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge addresses three different problems for the first time in research competition under well-defined conditions: In the Addressee sub-challenge, it has to be determined whether speech produced by an adult is directed towards another adult or towards a child; in the Cold sub-challenge, speech under cold has to be told apart from ‘healthy’ speech; and in the Snoring subchallenge, four different types of snoring have to be classified. In this paper, we describe these sub-challenges, their conditions, and the baseline feature extraction and classifiers, which include data-learnt feature representations by end-to-end learning with convolutional and recurrent neural networks, and bag-of-audiowords for the first time in the challenge series

Abstract

This article presents a study to distinguish and quantify the various types of semantic associations provided by humans, to investigate their properties, and to discuss the impact that our analyses may have on NLP tasks. Specifically, we concentrate on two issues related to word properties and word relations: (1) We address the task of modelling word meaning by empirical features in data-intensive lexical semantics. Relying on large-scale corpus-based resources, we identify the contextual categories and functions that are activated by the associates and therefore contribute to the salient meaning components of individual words and across words. As a result, we discuss conceptual roles and present evidence for the usefulness of co-occurrence information in distributional descriptions. (2) We assume that semantic associates provide a means to investigate the range of semantic relations between words and contexts, and we provide insight into which types of semantic relations are treated as important or salient by the speakers of the language.

Abstract

This paper presents the steps needed to make a corpus of Dutch spontaneous dialogues accessible for automatic phonetic research aimed at increasing our understanding of reduction phenomena and the role of fine phonetic detail. Since the corpus was not created with automatic processing in mind, it needed to be reshaped. The first part of this paper describes the actions needed for this reshaping in some detail. The second part reports the results of a preliminary analysis of the reduction phenomena in the corpus. For this purpose a phonemic transcription of the corpus was created by means of a forced alignment, first with a lexicon of canonical pronunciations and then with multiple pronunciation variants per word. In this study pronunciation variants were generated by applying a large set of phonetic processes that have been implicated in reduction to the canonical pronunciations of the words. This relatively straightforward procedure allows us to produce plausible pronunciation variants and to verify and extend the results of previous reduction studies reported in the literature.

Abstract

The topic of word classes remains curiously under-represented in the sign language literature due to many theoretical and methodological problems in sign linguistics. This article focuses on language-specific classifications of signs into word classes in two different sign languages: German Sign Language and Kata Kolok, the sign language of a village community in Bali. The article discusses semantic and structural criteria for identifying word classes in the target sign languages. On the basis of a data set of signs, these criteria are systematically tested out as a first step towards an inductive classification of signs. Approaches and analyses relating to the problem of word classes in linguistic typology are used for shedding new light on the issue of word class distinctions in sign languages

Abstract

Recent research in speech production has shown that syntactic structure is reflected in segmental phonology--the application of certain phonological rules of English (e.g., palatalization and alveolar flapping) is inhibited across phrase boundaries. We examined whether such segmental effects can be used in speech perception as cues to syntactic structure, and the relation between the use of these segmental features as syntactic markers in production and perception. Speakers of American English (a dialect in which the above segmental effects occur) could indeed use the segmental cues in syntax perception; speakers of British English (in which the effects do not occur) were unable to make use of them, while speakers of British English who were long-term residents of the United States showed intermediate performance.

Abstract

Previous research has shown that the weighting of, or attention to, acoustic cues at the level of the segment changes over the course of development (Nittrouer & Miller, 1997; Nittrouer, Manning & Meyer, 1993). In this paper we examined changes over the course of development in weighting of acoustic cues at the suprasegmental level. Specifically, we tested English-learning 4-month-olds’ performance on a clause segmentation task when each of three acoustic cues to clausal units was neutralized and contrasted it with performance on a Baseline condition where no cues were manipulated. Comparison with the reported performance of 6-month-olds on the same task (Seidl, 2007) reveals that 4-month-olds weight prosodic cues to clausal boundaries differently than 6-month-olds, relying more heavily on all three correlates of clausal boundaries (pause, pitch and vowel duration) than 6-month-olds do, who rely primarily on pitch. We interpret this as evidence that 4-month-olds use a holistic processing strategy, while 6-month-olds may already be able to attend separately to isolated cues in the input stream and may, furthermore, be able to exploit a language-specific cue weighting. Thus, in a way similar to that in other cognitive domains, infants begin as holistic auditory scene processors and are only later able to process individual auditory cues.

Abstract

This paper addresses a set of issues related to language documentation that are not often explicitly dealt with in academic publications, yet are highly important for the development and success of this new discipline. These issues include embedding language documentation in the socio-political context not only at the community level but also at the national level, the ethical and technical challenges of digital language archives, and the importance of regional and international cooperation among documentation activities. These issues play a major role in the initiative to set up a network of regional language archives in three South American countries, which this paper reports on. Local archives for data on endangered languages have recently been set up in Iquitos (Peru), Buenos Aires (Argentina), and in various locations in Brazil. An important feature of these is that they provide fast and secure access to linguistic and cultural data for local researchers and the language communities. They also make data safer by allowing for regular update procedures within the network.

Abstract

Previous studies of the development of gestures have examined gestures in infants. In recent years, together with the rise of interest in spontaneous gestures accompanied by speech, research on spontaneous gestures in preschool-age children has increased. But little has been reported in terms of systematic developmental changes in children's spontaneous gestures, especially with respect to preschool-age children. The present paper surveys domestic and international research on the development of spontaneous gestures in preschoolers. When gestures seen in infants and preschool-age and older children were categorized, it was found that spontaneous gestures begin to appear together with speech semantically and temporarily by the end of the one-word period; during this same period, gestures that were seen earlier gradually decrease. It is suggested that the development of spontaneous gestures relates to a sentence level, not to a vocabulary level. Based on growth point theory (McNeill, 1992), it is also argued that spontaneous gestures develop with “thinking for speaking” and symbol ability.

Abstract

Speakers sometimes modify their gestures during the process of production into adaptors such as hair touching or eye scratching. Such disguised adaptors are evidence that the speaker can monitor their gestures. In this study, we investigated when and how disguised adaptors are first produced by children. Sixty elementary school children participated in this study (ten children in each age group; from 7 to 12 years old). They were instructed to watch a cartoon and retell it to their parents. The results showed that children did not produce disguised adaptors until the age of 8. The disguised adaptors accompany fluent speech until the children are 10 years old and accompany dysfluent speech until they reach 11 or 12 years of age. These results suggest that children start to monitor their gestures when they are 9 or 10 years old. Cognitive changes were considered as factors to influence emergence of disguised adaptors

Abstract

This study examined spatial story representations created by speaker's cohesive gestures. Participants were presented with three-sentence discourse with two protagonists. In the first and second sentences, gestures consistently located the two protagonists in the gesture space: one to the right and the other to the left. The third sentence (without gestures) referred to one of the protagonists, and the participants responded with one of the two keys to indicate the relevant protagonist. The response keys were either spatially congruent or incongruent with the gesturally established locations for the two participants. Though the cohesive gestures did not provide any clue for the correct response, they influenced performance: the reaction time in the congruent condition was faster than that in the incongruent condition. Thus, cohesive gestures automatically establish spatial story representations and the spatial story representations remain activated in a subsequent sentence without any gesture.

Abstract

This volume of new work explores the nature of verb serialisation in a range of languages from the Pacific region – both Austronesian and non-Austronesian. Serial verbs can be described linguistically as a sequence of verbs which behave as a single complex predicate. A particular focus of this book is the detailed examination given by most authors to the relationship of such uniclausal linguistic structures with the real world notion of eventhood. The book also makes a valuable addition to the description and analysis of serial verb constructions from the Pacific, a region which has generally been under-represented in cross-linguistic discussions of verb serialisation.

Abstract

The Gricean maxim of Quality “Try to make your contribution one that is true” and his maxim of Manner “Be perspicuous” are not observed in Kilivila, the Austronesian language of the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea. Speakers of Kilivila metalinguistically differentiate registers of their language. One of these varieties is called biga sopa. This label can be glossed as “joking or lying speech, indirect speech, speech which is not vouched for.” The biga sopa constitutes the default register of Trobriand discourse. This article describes the concept of sopa, presents its features, and discusses and illustrates its functions and use within Trobriand society. The article ends with a discussion of the relevance of Gricean maxims for the research of everyday verbal interaction in Kilivila and a general criticism of these maxims, especially from an anthropological linguistic perspective. [Trobriand Islanders, Gricean maxims, varieties of Kilivila, Kilivila sopa, un-plain speaking]

Abstract

The paper describes how the documentation of a popular song of the adolescents of Tauwema in 1982 lead to the collection of the myth of Imdeduya and Yolina, one of the most important myths of the Trobriand Islands. When I returned to my fieldsite in 1989 Tokunupei, one of my best consultants in Tauwema, remembered my interest in the myth and provided me with further information on this topic. Tokunupei's teachings open up an important access to Trobriand eschatology.

Abstract

This paper provides a brief survey on various absolute frames of spatial reference that can be observed in a number of Austronesian languages – with an emphasis on languages of the Oceanic subgroup. It is based on research of conceptions of space and systems of spatial reference that was initiated by the “space project” of the Cognitive Anthropology Research Group (now the Department of Language and Cognition) at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and by my anthology “Referring to Space” (Senft 1997a; see Keller 2002: 250). The examples illustrating these different absolute frames of spatial reference reveal once more that earlier generalizations within the domain of “SPACE” were strongly biased by research on Indo-European languages; they also reveal how complex some of these absolute frames of spatial reference found in these languages are. The paper ends with a summary of Wegener’s (2002) preliminary typology of these absolute frames of spatial reference.