Publications

Displaying 1 - 100 of 161
  • Akita, K., & Dingemanse, M. (2019). Ideophones (Mimetics, Expressives). In Oxford Research Encyclopedia for Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.477.

    Abstract

    Ideophones, also termed “mimetics” or “expressives,” are marked words that depict sensory imagery. They are found in many of the world’s languages, and sizable lexical classes of ideophones are particularly well-documented in languages of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Ideophones are not limited to onomatopoeia like meow and smack, but cover a wide range of sensory domains, such as manner of motion (e.g., plisti plasta ‘splish-splash’ in Basque), texture (e.g., tsaklii ‘rough’ in Ewe), and psychological states (e.g., wakuwaku ‘excited’ in Japanese). Across languages, ideophones stand out as marked words due to special phonotactics, expressive morphology including certain types of reduplication, and relative syntactic independence, in addition to production features like prosodic foregrounding and common co-occurrence with iconic gestures.

    Three intertwined issues have been repeatedly debated in the century-long literature on ideophones. (a) Definition: Isolated descriptive traditions and cross-linguistic variation have sometimes obscured a typologically unified view of ideophones, but recent advances show the promise of a prototype definition of ideophones as conventionalised depictions in speech, with room for language-specific nuances. (b) Integration: The variable integration of ideophones across linguistic levels reveals an interaction between expressiveness and grammatical integration, and has important implications for how to conceive of dependencies between linguistic systems. (c) Iconicity: Ideophones form a natural laboratory for the study of iconic form-meaning associations in natural languages, and converging evidence from corpus and experimental studies suggests important developmental, evolutionary, and communicative advantages of ideophones.
  • Alhama, R. G., Siegelman, N., Frost, R., & Armstrong, B. C. (2019). The role of information in visual word recognition: A perceptually-constrained connectionist account. In A. Goel, C. Seifert, & C. Freksa (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2019) (pp. 83-89). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Proficient readers typically fixate near the center of a word, with a slight bias towards word onset. We explore a novel account of this phenomenon based on combining information-theory with visual perceptual constraints in a connectionist model of visual word recognition. This account posits that the amount of information-content available for word identification varies across fixation locations and across languages, thereby explaining the overall fixation location bias in different languages, making the novel prediction that certain words are more readily identified when fixating at an atypical fixation location, and predicting specific cross-linguistic differences. We tested these predictions across several simulations in English and Hebrew, and in a pilot behavioral experiment. Results confirmed that the bias to fixate closer to word onset aligns with maximizing information in the visual signal, that some words are more readily identified at atypical fixation locations, and that these effects vary to some degree across languages.
  • Allen, S. E. M. (1998). A discourse-pragmatic explanation for the subject-object asymmetry in early null arguments. In A. Sorace, C. Heycock, & R. Shillcock (Eds.), Proceedings of the GALA '97 Conference on Language Acquisition (pp. 10-15). Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press.

    Abstract

    The present paper assesses discourse-pragmatic factors as a potential explanation for the subject-object assymetry in early child language. It identifies a set of factors which characterize typical situations of informativeness (Greenfield & Smith, 1976), and uses these factors to identify informative arguments in data from four children aged 2;0 through 3;6 learning Inuktitut as a first language. In addition, it assesses the extent of the links between features of informativeness on one hand and lexical vs. null and subject vs. object arguments on the other. Results suggest that a pragmatics account of the subject-object asymmetry can be upheld to a greater extent than previous research indicates, and that several of the factors characterizing informativeness are good indicators of those arguments which tend to be omitted in early child language.
  • Amatuni, A., Schroer, S. E., Zhang, Y., Peters, R. E., Reza, M. A., Crandall, D., & Yu, C. (2021). In-the-moment visual information from the infant's egocentric view determines the success of infant word learning: A computational study. In T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (Eds.), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021) (pp. 265-271). Vienna: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Infants learn the meaning of words from accumulated experiences of real-time interactions with their caregivers. To study the effects of visual sensory input on word learning, we recorded infant's view of the world using head-mounted eye trackers during free-flowing play with a caregiver. While playing, infants were exposed to novel label-object mappings and later learning outcomes for these items were tested after the play session. In this study we use a classification based approach to link properties of infants' visual scenes during naturalistic labeling moments to their word learning outcomes. We find that a model which integrates both highly informative and ambiguous sensory evidence is a better fit to infants' individual learning outcomes than models where either type of evidence is taken alone, and that raw labeling frequency is unable to account for the word learning differences we observe. Here we demonstrate how a computational model, using only raw pixels taken from the egocentric scene image, can derive insights on human language learning.
  • Badimala, P., Mishra, C., Venkataramana, R. K. M., Bukhari, S. S., & Dengel, A. (2019). A Study of Various Text Augmentation Techniques for Relation Classification in Free Text. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods (pp. 360-367). Setúbal, Portugal: SciTePress Digital Library. doi:10.5220/0007311003600367.

    Abstract

    Data augmentation techniques have been widely used in visual recognition tasks as it is easy to generate new
    data by simple and straight forward image transformations. However, when it comes to text data augmen-
    tations, it is difficult to find appropriate transformation techniques which also preserve the contextual and
    grammatical structure of language texts. In this paper, we explore various text data augmentation techniques
    in text space and word embedding space. We study the effect of various augmented datasets on the efficiency
    of different deep learning models for relation classification in text.
  • Bauer, B. L. M. (2021). Formation of numerals in the romance languages. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.685.

    Abstract

    The Romance languages have a rich numeral system that includes cardinals—providing the bases on which the other types of numeral series are built—ordinals, fractions, collectives, approximatives, distributives, and multiplicatives. Latin plays a decisive and continued role in their formation, both as the language to which many numerals go back directly and as an ongoing source for lexemes and formatives. While the Latin numeral system was synthetic, with a distinct ending for each type of numeral, the Romance numerals often feature more than one (unevenly distributed) marker or structure per series, which feature varying degrees of inherited, borrowed, or innovative elements. Formal consistency is strongest in cardinals, followed by ordinals and then the other types of numeral, which also tend to be more analytic or periphrastic. From a morphological perspective, Romance numerals overall have moved away from the inherited syntheticity, but several series continue to be synthetic formations—at least in part—with morphological markers drawn from Latin that may have undergone functional change (e.g. distributive > ordinal > collective). The underlying syntax of Romance numerals is in line with the overall grammatical patterns of Romance languages, as reflected in the prevalence of word order (with arithmetical correlates), connectors, (partial) loss of agreement, and analyticity. Innovation is prominent in the formation of higher numerals with bases beyond ‘thousand’, of teens and decads in Romanian, and of vigesimals in numerous Romance varieties.
  • Becker, A., & Klein, W. (1984). Notes on the internal organization of a learner variety. In P. Auer, & A. Di Luzio (Eds.), Interpretive sociolinguistics (pp. 215-231). Tübingen: Narr.
  • Bentum, M., Ten Bosch, L., Van den Bosch, A., & Ernestus, M. (2019). Listening with great expectations: An investigation of word form anticipations in naturalistic speech. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2019 (pp. 2265-2269). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2019-2741.

    Abstract

    The event-related potential (ERP) component named phonological mismatch negativity (PMN) arises when listeners hear an unexpected word form in a spoken sentence [1]. The PMN is thought to reflect the mismatch between expected and perceived auditory speech input. In this paper, we use the PMN to test a central premise in the predictive coding framework [2], namely that the mismatch between prior expectations and sensory input is an important mechanism of perception. We test this with natural speech materials containing approximately 50,000 word tokens. The corresponding EEG-signal was recorded while participants (n = 48) listened to these materials. Following [3], we quantify the mismatch with two word probability distributions (WPD): a WPD based on preceding context, and a WPD that is additionally updated based on the incoming audio of the current word. We use the between-WPD cross entropy for each word in the utterances and show that a higher cross entropy correlates with a more negative PMN. Our results show that listeners anticipate auditory input while processing each word in naturalistic speech. Moreover, complementing previous research, we show that predictive language processing occurs across the whole probability spectrum.
  • Bentum, M., Ten Bosch, L., Van den Bosch, A., & Ernestus, M. (2019). Quantifying expectation modulation in human speech processing. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2019 (pp. 2270-2274). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2019-2685.

    Abstract

    The mismatch between top-down predicted and bottom-up perceptual input is an important mechanism of perception according to the predictive coding framework (Friston, [1]). In this paper we develop and validate a new information-theoretic measure that quantifies the mismatch between expected and observed auditory input during speech processing. We argue that such a mismatch measure is useful for the study of speech processing. To compute the mismatch measure, we use naturalistic speech materials containing approximately 50,000 word tokens. For each word token we first estimate the prior word probability distribution with the aid of statistical language modelling, and next use automatic speech recognition to update this word probability distribution based on the unfolding speech signal. We validate the mismatch measure with multiple analyses, and show that the auditory-based update improves the probability of the correct word and lowers the uncertainty of the word probability distribution. Based on these results, we argue that it is possible to explicitly estimate the mismatch between predicted and perceived speech input with the cross entropy between word expectations computed before and after an auditory update.
  • Bodur, K., Branje, S., Peirolo, M., Tiscareno, I., & German, J. S. (2021). Domain-initial strengthening in Turkish: Acoustic cues to prosodic hierarchy in stop consonants. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2021 (pp. 1459-1463). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2021-2230.

    Abstract

    Studies have shown that cross-linguistically, consonants at the left edge of higher-level prosodic boundaries tend to be more forcefully articulated than those at lower-level boundaries, a phenomenon known as domain-initial strengthening. This study tests whether similar effects occur in Turkish, using the Autosegmental-Metrical model proposed by Ipek & Jun [1, 2] as the basis for assessing boundary strength. Productions of /t/ and /d/ were elicited in four domain-initial prosodic positions corresponding to progressively higher-level boundaries: syllable, word, intermediate phrase, and Intonational Phrase. A fifth position, nuclear word, was included in order to better situate it within the prosodic hierarchy. Acoustic correlates of articulatory strength were measured, including closure duration for /d/ and /t/, as well as voice onset time and burst energy for /t/. Our results show that closure duration increases cumulatively from syllable to intermediate phrase, while voice onset time and burst energy are not influenced by boundary strength. These findings provide corroborating evidence for Ipek & Jun’s model, particularly for the distinction between word and intermediate phrase boundaries. Additionally, articulatory strength at the left edge of the nuclear word patterned closely with word-initial position, supporting the view that the nuclear word is not associated with a distinct phrasing domain
  • Bohnemeyer, J. (1998). Temporale Relatoren im Hispano-Yukatekischen Sprachkontakt. In A. Koechert, & T. Stolz (Eds.), Convergencia e Individualidad - Las lenguas Mayas entre hispanización e indigenismo (pp. 195-241). Hannover, Germany: Verlag für Ethnologie.
  • Bohnemeyer, J. (1998). Sententiale Topics im Yukatekischen. In Z. Dietmar (Ed.), Deskriptive Grammatik und allgemeiner Sprachvergleich (pp. 55-85). Tübingen, Germany: Max-Niemeyer-Verlag.
  • Bosker, H. R. (2021). The contribution of amplitude modulations in speech to perceived charisma. In B. Weiss, J. Trouvain, M. Barkat-Defradas, & J. J. Ohala (Eds.), Voice attractiveness: Prosody, phonology and phonetics (pp. 165-181). Singapore: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-981-15-6627-1_10.

    Abstract

    Speech contains pronounced amplitude modulations in the 1–9 Hz range, correlating with the syllabic rate of speech. Recent models of speech perception propose that this rhythmic nature of speech is central to speech recognition and has beneficial effects on language processing. Here, we investigated the contribution of amplitude modulations to the subjective impression listeners have of public speakers. The speech from US presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the three TV debates of 2016 was acoustically analyzed by means of modulation spectra. These indicated that Clinton’s speech had more pronounced amplitude modulations than Trump’s speech, particularly in the 1–9 Hz range. A subsequent perception experiment, with listeners rating the perceived charisma of (low-pass filtered versions of) Clinton’s and Trump’s speech, showed that more pronounced amplitude modulations (i.e., more ‘rhythmic’ speech) increased perceived charisma ratings. These outcomes highlight the important contribution of speech rhythm to charisma perception.
  • Brehm, L., Jackson, C. N., & Miller, K. L. (2019). Incremental interpretation in the first and second language. In M. Brown, & B. Dailey (Eds.), BUCLD 43: Proceedings of the 43rd annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 109-122). Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Brown, P. (1998). Early Tzeltal verbs: Argument structure and argument representation. In E. Clark (Ed.), Proceedings of the 29th Annual Stanford Child Language Research Forum (pp. 129-140). Stanford: CSLI Publications.

    Abstract

    The surge of research activity focussing on children's acquisition of verbs (e.g., Tomasello and Merriman 1996) addresses some fundamental questions: Just how variable across languages, and across individual children, is the process of verb learning? How specific are arguments to particular verbs in early child language? How does the grammatical category 'Verb' develop? The position of Universal Grammar, that a verb category is early, contrasts with that of Tomasello (1992), Pine and Lieven and their colleagues (1996, in press), and many others, that children develop a verb category slowly, gradually building up subcategorizations of verbs around pragmatic, syntactic, and semantic properties of the language they are exposed to. On this latter view, one would expect the language which the child is learning, the cultural milieu and the nature of the interactions in which the child is engaged, to influence the process of acquiring verb argument structures. This paper explores these issues by examining the development of argument representation in the Mayan language Tzeltal, in both its lexical and verbal cross-referencing forms, and analyzing the semantic and pragmatic factors influencing the form argument representation takes. Certain facts about Tzeltal (the ergative/ absolutive marking, the semantic specificity of transitive and positional verbs) are proposed to affect the representation of arguments. The first 500 multimorpheme combinations of 3 children (aged between 1;8 and 2;4) are examined. It is argued that there is no evidence of semantically light 'pathbreaking' verbs (Ninio 1996) leading the way into word combinations. There is early productivity of cross-referencing affixes marking A, S, and O arguments (although there are systematic omissions). The paper assesses the respective contributions of three kinds of factors to these results - structural (regular morphology), semantic (verb specificity) and pragmatic (the nature of Tzeltal conversational interaction).
  • Brown, P. (1998). How and why are women more polite: Some evidence from a Mayan community. In J. Coates (Ed.), Language and gender (pp. 81-99). Oxford: Blackwell.
  • Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1998). Politeness, introduction to the reissue: A review of recent work. In A. Kasher (Ed.), Pragmatics: Vol. 6 Grammar, psychology and sociology (pp. 488-554). London: Routledge.

    Abstract

    This article is a reprint of chapter 1, the introduction to Brown and Levinson, 1987, Politeness: Some universals in language usage (Cambridge University Press).
  • Bruggeman, L., & Cutler, A. (2019). The dynamics of lexical activation and competition in bilinguals’ first versus second language. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 20195) (pp. 1342-1346). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

    Abstract

    Speech input causes listeners to activate multiple
    candidate words which then compete with one
    another. These include onset competitors, that share a
    beginning (bumper, butter), but also, counterintuitively,
    rhyme competitors, sharing an ending
    (bumper, jumper). In L1, competition is typically
    stronger for onset than for rhyme. In L2, onset
    competition has been attested but rhyme competition
    has heretofore remained largely unexamined. We
    assessed L1 (Dutch) and L2 (English) word
    recognition by the same late-bilingual individuals. In
    each language, eye gaze was recorded as listeners
    heard sentences and viewed sets of drawings: three
    unrelated, one depicting an onset or rhyme competitor
    of a word in the input. Activation patterns revealed
    substantial onset competition but no significant
    rhyme competition in either L1 or L2. Rhyme
    competition may thus be a “luxury” feature of
    maximally efficient listening, to be abandoned when
    resources are scarcer, as in listening by late
    bilinguals, in either language.
  • Burenkova, O. V., & Fisher, S. E. (2019). Genetic insights into the neurobiology of speech and language. In E. Grigorenko, Y. Shtyrov, & P. McCardle (Eds.), All About Language: Science, Theory, and Practice. Baltimore, MD: Paul Brookes Publishing, Inc.
  • Coopmans, C. W., De Hoop, H., Kaushik, K., Hagoort, P., & Martin, A. E. (2021). Structure-(in)dependent interpretation of phrases in humans and LSTMs. In Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL 2021) (pp. 459-463).

    Abstract

    In this study, we compared the performance of a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network to the behavior of human participants on a language task that requires hierarchically structured knowledge. We show that humans interpret ambiguous noun phrases, such as second blue ball, in line with their hierarchical constituent structure. LSTMs, instead, only do
    so after unambiguous training, and they do not systematically generalize to novel items. Overall, the results of our simulations indicate that a model can behave hierarchically without relying on hierarchical constituent structure.
  • Crago, M. B., & Allen, S. E. M. (1998). Acquiring Inuktitut. In O. L. Taylor, & L. Leonard (Eds.), Language Acquisition Across North America: Cross-Cultural And Cross-Linguistic Perspectives (pp. 245-279). San Diego, CA, USA: Singular Publishing Group, Inc.
  • Crago, M. B., Allen, S. E. M., & Pesco, D. (1998). Issues of Complexity in Inuktitut and English Child Directed Speech. In Proceedings of the twenty-ninth Annual Stanford Child Language Research Forum (pp. 37-46).
  • Cutler, A., Burchfield, A., & Antoniou, M. (2019). A criterial interlocutor tally for successful talker adaptation? In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 20195) (pp. 1485-1489). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

    Abstract

    Part of the remarkable efficiency of listening is
    accommodation to unfamiliar talkers’ specific
    pronunciations by retuning of phonemic intercategory
    boundaries. Such retuning occurs in second
    (L2) as well as first language (L1); however, recent
    research with emigrés revealed successful adaptation
    in the environmental L2 but, unprecedentedly, not in
    L1 despite continuing L1 use. A possible explanation
    involving relative exposure to novel talkers is here
    tested in heritage language users with Mandarin as
    family L1 and English as environmental language. In
    English, exposure to an ambiguous sound in
    disambiguating word contexts prompted the expected
    adjustment of phonemic boundaries in subsequent
    categorisation. However, no adjustment occurred in
    Mandarin, again despite regular use. Participants
    reported highly asymmetric interlocutor counts in the
    two languages. We conclude that successful retuning
    ability requires regular exposure to novel talkers in
    the language in question, a criterion not met for the
    emigrés’ or for these heritage users’ L1.
  • Cutler, A., & Jesse, A. (2021). Word stress in speech perception. In J. S. Pardo, L. C. Nygaard, & D. B. Pisoni (Eds.), The handbook of speech perception (2nd ed., pp. 239-265). Chichester: Wiley.
  • Cutler, A., & Otake, T. (1998). Assimilation of place in Japanese and Dutch. In R. Mannell, & J. Robert-Ribes (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: vol. 5 (pp. 1751-1754). Sydney: ICLSP.

    Abstract

    Assimilation of place of articulation across a nasal and a following stop consonant is obligatory in Japanese, but not in Dutch. In four experiments the processing of assimilated forms by speakers of Japanese and Dutch was compared, using a task in which listeners blended pseudo-word pairs such as ranga-serupa. An assimilated blend of this pair would be rampa, an unassimilated blend rangpa. Japanese listeners produced significantly more assimilated than unassimilated forms, both with pseudo-Japanese and pseudo-Dutch materials, while Dutch listeners produced significantly more unassimilated than assimilated forms in each materials set. This suggests that Japanese listeners, whose native-language phonology involves obligatory assimilation constraints, represent the assimilated nasals in nasal-stop sequences as unmarked for place of articulation, while Dutch listeners, who are accustomed to hearing unassimilated forms, represent the same nasal segments as marked for place of articulation.
  • Cutler, A. (1998). How listeners find the right words. In Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Congress on Acoustics: Vol. 2 (pp. 1377-1380). Melville, NY: Acoustical Society of America.

    Abstract

    Languages contain tens of thousands of words, but these are constructed from a tiny handful of phonetic elements. Consequently, words resemble one another, or can be embedded within one another, a coup stick snot with standing. me process of spoken-word recognition by human listeners involves activation of multiple word candidates consistent with the input, and direct competition between activated candidate words. Further, human listeners are sensitive, at an early, prelexical, stage of speeeh processing, to constraints on what could potentially be a word of the language.
  • Cutler, A., Treiman, R., & Van Ooijen, B. (1998). Orthografik inkoncistensy ephekts in foneme detektion? In R. Mannell, & J. Robert-Ribes (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 6 (pp. 2783-2786). Sydney: ICSLP.

    Abstract

    The phoneme detection task is widely used in spoken word recognition research. Alphabetically literate participants, however, are more used to explicit representations of letters than of phonemes. The present study explored whether phoneme detection is sensitive to how target phonemes are, or may be, orthographically realised. Listeners detected the target sounds [b,m,t,f,s,k] in word-initial position in sequences of isolated English words. Response times were faster to the targets [b,m,t], which have consistent word-initial spelling, than to the targets [f,s,k], which are inconsistently spelled, but only when listeners’ attention was drawn to spelling by the presence in the experiment of many irregularly spelled fillers. Within the inconsistent targets [f,s,k], there was no significant difference between responses to targets in words with majority and minority spellings. We conclude that performance in the phoneme detection task is not necessarily sensitive to orthographic effects, but that salient orthographic manipulation can induce such sensitivity.
  • Cutler, A. (1998). Prosodic structure and word recognition. In A. D. Friederici (Ed.), Language comprehension: A biological perspective (pp. 41-70). Heidelberg: Springer.
  • Cutler, A. (1984). Stress and accent in language production and understanding. In D. Gibbon, & H. Richter (Eds.), Intonation, accent and rhythm: Studies in discourse phonology (pp. 77-90). Berlin: de Gruyter.
  • Cutler, A. (1998). The recognition of spoken words with variable representations. In D. Duez (Ed.), Proceedings of the ESCA Workshop on Sound Patterns of Spontaneous Speech (pp. 83-92). Aix-en-Provence: Université de Aix-en-Provence.
  • Cutler, A., & Clifton Jr., C. (1984). The use of prosodic information in word recognition. In H. Bouma, & D. Bouwhuis (Eds.), Attention and Performance X: Control of Language Processes (pp. 183-196). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
  • Cutler, A., & Clifton, Jr., C. (1984). The use of prosodic information in word recognition. In H. Bouma, & D. G. Bouwhuis (Eds.), Attention and performance X: Control of language processes (pp. 183-196). London: Erlbaum.

    Abstract

    In languages with variable stress placement, lexical stress patterns can convey information about word identity. The experiments reported here address the question of whether lexical stress information can be used in word recognition. The results allow the following conclusions: 1. Prior information as to the number of syllables and lexical stress patterns of words and nonwords does not facilitate lexical decision responses (Experiment 1). 2. The strong correspondences between grammatical category membership and stress pattern in bisyllabic English words (strong-weak stress being associated primarily with nouns, weak-strong with verbs) are not exploited in the recognition of isolated words (Experiment 2). 3. When a change in lexical stress also involves a change in vowel quality, i.e., a segmental as well as a suprasegmental alteration, effects on word recognition are greater when no segmental correlates of suprasegmental changes are involved (Experiments 2 and 3). 4. Despite the above finding, when all other factors are controlled, lexical stress information per se can indeed be shown to play a part in word-recognition process (Experiment 3).
  • Devanna, P., Dediu, D., & Vernes, S. C. (2019). The Genetics of Language: From complex genes to complex communication. In S.-A. Rueschemeyer, & M. G. Gaskell (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics (2nd ed., pp. 865-898). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Abstract

    This chapter discusses the genetic foundations of the human capacity for language. It reviews the molecular structure of the genome and the complex molecular mechanisms that allow genetic information to influence multiple levels of biology. It goes on to describe the active regulation of genes and their formation of complex genetic pathways that in turn control the cellular environment and function. At each of these levels, examples of genes and genetic variants that may influence the human capacity for language are given. Finally, it discusses the value of using animal models to understand the genetic underpinnings of speech and language. From this chapter will emerge the complexity of the genome in action and the multidisciplinary efforts that are currently made to bridge the gap between genetics and language.
  • Dideriksen, C., Fusaroli, R., Tylén, K., Dingemanse, M., & Christiansen, M. H. (2019). Contextualizing Conversational Strategies: Backchannel, Repair and Linguistic Alignment in Spontaneous and Task-Oriented Conversations. In A. K. Goel, C. M. Seifert, & C. Freksa (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2019) (pp. 261-267). Montreal, QB: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Do interlocutors adjust their conversational strategies to the specific contextual demands of a given situation? Prior studies have yielded conflicting results, making it unclear how strategies vary with demands. We combine insights from qualitative and quantitative approaches in a within-participant experimental design involving two different contexts: spontaneously occurring conversations (SOC) and task-oriented conversations (TOC). We systematically assess backchanneling, other-repair and linguistic alignment. We find that SOC exhibit a higher number of backchannels, a reduced and more generic repair format and higher rates of lexical and syntactic alignment. TOC are characterized by a high number of specific repairs and a lower rate of lexical and syntactic alignment. However, when alignment occurs, more linguistic forms are aligned. The findings show that conversational strategies adapt to specific contextual demands.
  • Dieuleveut, A., Van Dooren, A., Cournane, A., & Hacquard, V. (2019). Acquiring the force of modals: Sig you guess what sig means? In M. Brown, & B. Dailey (Eds.), BUCLD 43: Proceedings of the 43rd annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 189-202). Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Dingemanse, M. (2019). 'Ideophone' as a comparative concept. In K. Akita, & P. Pardeshi (Eds.), Ideophones, Mimetics, and Expressives (pp. 13-33). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi:10.1075/ill.16.02din.

    Abstract

    This chapter makes the case for ‘ideophone’ as a comparative concept: a notion that captures a recurrent typological pattern and provides a template for understanding language-specific phenomena that prove similar. It revises an earlier definition to account for the observation that ideophones typically form an open lexical class, and uses insights from canonical typology to explore the larger typological space. According to the resulting definition, a canonical ideophone is a member of an open lexical class of marked words that depict sensory imagery. The five elements of this definition can be seen as dimensions that together generate a possibility space to characterise cross-linguistic diversity in depictive means of expression. This approach allows for the systematic comparative treatment of ideophones and ideophone-like phenomena. Some phenomena in the larger typological space are discussed to demonstrate the utility of the approach: phonaesthemes in European languages, specialised semantic classes in West-Chadic, diachronic diversions in Aslian, and depicting constructions in signed languages.
  • Drozd, K. F. (1998). No as a determiner in child English: A summary of categorical evidence. In A. Sorace, C. Heycock, & R. Shillcock (Eds.), Proceedings of the Gala '97 Conference on Language Acquisition (pp. 34-39). Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press,.

    Abstract

    This paper summarizes the results of a descriptive syntactic category analysis of child English no which reveals that young children use and represent no as a determiner and negatives like no pen as NPs, contra standard analyses.
  • Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I., Senft, B., & Senft, G. (1998). Trobriander (Ost-Neuguinea, Trobriand Inseln, Kaile'una) Fadenspiele 'ninikula'. In Ethnologie - Humanethologische Begleitpublikationen von I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt und Mitarbeitern. Sammelband I, 1985-1987. Göttingen: Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film.
  • Eijk, L., Ernestus, M., & Schriefers, H. (2019). Alignment of pitch and articulation rate. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 20195) (pp. 2690-2694). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

    Abstract

    Previous studies have shown that speakers align their speech to each other at multiple linguistic levels. This study investigates whether alignment is mostly the result of priming from the immediately preceding
    speech materials, focussing on pitch and articulation rate (AR). Native Dutch speakers completed sentences, first by themselves (pre-test), then in alternation with Confederate 1 (Round 1), with Confederate 2 (Round 2), with Confederate 1 again
    (Round 3), and lastly by themselves again (post-test). Results indicate that participants aligned to the confederates and that this alignment lasted during the post-test. The confederates’ directly preceding sentences were not good predictors for the participants’ pitch and AR. Overall, the results indicate that alignment is more of a global effect than a local priming effect.
  • Erard, M. (2019). Language aptitude: Insights from hyperpolyglots. In Z. Wen, P. Skehan, A. Biedroń, S. Li, & R. L. Sparks (Eds.), Language aptitude: Advancing theory, testing, research and practice (pp. 153-167). Abingdon, UK: Taylor & Francis.

    Abstract

    Over the decades, high-intensity language learners scattered over the globe referred to as “hyperpolyglots” have undertaken a natural experiment into the limits of learning and acquiring proficiencies in multiple languages. This chapter details several ways in which hyperpolyglots are relevant to research on aptitude. First, historical hyperpolyglots Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti, Emil Krebs, Elihu Burritt, and Lomb Kató are described in terms of how they viewed their own exceptional outcomes. Next, I draw on results from an online survey with 390 individuals to explore how contemporary hyperpolyglots consider the explanatory value of aptitude. Third, the challenges involved in studying the genetic basis of hyperpolyglottism (and by extension of language aptitude) are discussed. This mosaic of data is meant to inform the direction of future aptitude research that takes hyperpolyglots, one type of exceptional language learner and user, into account.
  • Falk, J. J., Zhang, Y., Scheutz, M., & Yu, C. (2021). Parents adaptively use anaphora during parent-child social interaction. In T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (Eds.), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021) (pp. 1472-1478). Vienna: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Anaphora, a ubiquitous feature of natural language, poses a particular challenge to young children as they first learn language due to its referential ambiguity. In spite of this, parents and caregivers use anaphora frequently in child-directed speech, potentially presenting a risk to effective communication if children do not yet have the linguistic capabilities of resolving anaphora successfully. Through an eye-tracking study in a naturalistic free-play context, we examine the strategies that parents employ to calibrate their use of anaphora to their child's linguistic development level. We show that, in this way, parents are able to intuitively scaffold the complexity of their speech such that greater referential ambiguity does not hurt overall communication success.
  • Felker, E. R., Ernestus, M., & Broersma, M. (2019). Evaluating dictation task measures for the study of speech perception. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2019) (pp. 383-387). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

    Abstract

    This paper shows that the dictation task, a well-
    known testing instrument in language education, has
    untapped potential as a research tool for studying
    speech perception. We describe how transcriptions
    can be scored on measures of lexical, orthographic,
    phonological, and semantic similarity to target
    phrases to provide comprehensive information about
    accuracy at different processing levels. The former
    three measures are automatically extractable,
    increasing objectivity, and the middle two are
    gradient, providing finer-grained information than
    traditionally used. We evaluate the measures in an
    English dictation task featuring phonetically reduced
    continuous speech. Whereas the lexical and
    orthographic measures emphasize listeners’ word
    identification difficulties, the phonological measure
    demonstrates that listeners can often still recover
    phonological features, and the semantic measure
    captures their ability to get the gist of the utterances.
    Correlational analyses and a discussion of practical
    and theoretical considerations show that combining
    multiple measures improves the dictation task’s
    utility as a research tool.
  • Felker, E. R., Ernestus, M., & Broersma, M. (2019). Lexically guided perceptual learning of a vowel shift in an interactive L2 listening context. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2019 (pp. 3123-3127). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2019-1414.

    Abstract

    Lexically guided perceptual learning has traditionally been studied with ambiguous consonant sounds to which native listeners are exposed in a purely receptive listening context. To extend previous research, we investigate whether lexically guided learning applies to a vowel shift encountered by non-native listeners in an interactive dialogue. Dutch participants played a two-player game in English in either a control condition, which contained no evidence for a vowel shift, or a lexically constraining condition, in which onscreen lexical information required them to re-interpret their interlocutor’s /ɪ/ pronunciations as representing /ε/. A phonetic categorization pre-test and post-test were used to assess whether the game shifted listeners’ phonemic boundaries such that more of the /ε/-/ɪ/ continuum came to be perceived as /ε/. Both listener groups showed an overall post-test shift toward /ɪ/, suggesting that vowel perception may be sensitive to directional biases related to properties of the speaker’s vowel space. Importantly, listeners in the lexically constraining condition made relatively more post-test /ε/ responses than the control group, thereby exhibiting an effect of lexically guided adaptation. The results thus demonstrate that non-native listeners can adjust their phonemic boundaries on the basis of lexical information to accommodate a vowel shift learned in interactive conversation.
  • Fisher, S. E. (2019). Key issues and future directions: Genes and language. In P. Hagoort (Ed.), Human language: From genes and brain to behavior (pp. 609-620). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Francks, C. (2019). The genetic bases of brain lateralization. In P. Hagoort (Ed.), Human language: From genes and brain to behavior (pp. 595-608). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Frank, S. L., Monaghan, P., & Tsoukala, C. (2019). Neural network models of language acquisition and processing. In P. Hagoort (Ed.), Human language: From genes and brain to behavior (pp. 277-293). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Frost, R. L. A., Isbilen, E. S., Christiansen, M. H., & Monaghan, P. (2019). Testing the limits of non-adjacent dependency learning: Statistical segmentation and generalisation across domains. In A. K. Goel, C. M. Seifert, & C. Freksa (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2019) (pp. 1787-1793). Montreal, QB: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Achieving linguistic proficiency requires identifying words from speech, and discovering the constraints that govern the way those words are used. In a recent study of non-adjacent dependency learning, Frost and Monaghan (2016) demonstrated that learners may perform these tasks together, using similar statistical processes - contrary to prior suggestions. However, in their study, non-adjacent dependencies were marked by phonological cues (plosive-continuant-plosive structure), which may have influenced learning. Here, we test the necessity of these cues by comparing learning across three conditions; fixed phonology, which contains these cues, varied phonology, which omits them, and shapes, which uses visual shape sequences to assess the generality of statistical processing for these tasks. Participants segmented the sequences and generalized the structure in both auditory conditions, but learning was best when phonological cues were present. Learning was around chance on both tasks for the visual shapes group, indicating statistical processing may critically differ across domains.
  • Frost, R. L. A., & Casillas, M. (2021). Investigating statistical learning of nonadjacent dependencies: Running statistical learning tasks in non-WEIRD populations. In SAGE Research Methods Cases. doi:10.4135/9781529759181.

    Abstract

    Language acquisition is complex. However, one thing that has been suggested to help learning is the way that information is distributed throughout language; co-occurrences among particular items (e.g., syllables and words) have been shown to help learners discover the words that a language contains and figure out how those words are used. Humans’ ability to draw on this information—“statistical learning”—has been demonstrated across a broad range of studies. However, evidence from non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies is critically lacking, which limits theorizing on the universality of this skill. We extended work on statistical language learning to a new, non-WEIRD linguistic population: speakers of Yélî Dnye, who live on a remote island off mainland Papua New Guinea (Rossel Island). We performed a replication of an existing statistical learning study, training adults on an artificial language with statistically defined words, then examining what they had learnt using a two-alternative forced-choice test. Crucially, we implemented several key amendments to the original study to ensure the replication was suitable for remote field-site testing with speakers of Yélî Dnye. We made critical changes to the stimuli and materials (to test speakers of Yélî Dnye, rather than English), the instructions (we re-worked these significantly, and added practice tasks to optimize participants’ understanding), and the study format (shifting from a lab-based to a portable tablet-based setup). We discuss the requirement for acute sensitivity to linguistic, cultural, and environmental factors when adapting studies to test new populations.

  • Galke, L., Franke, B., Zielke, T., & Scherp, A. (2021). Lifelong learning of graph neural networks for open-world node classification. In Proceedings of the 2021 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN). Piscataway, NJ: IEEE. doi:10.1109/IJCNN52387.2021.9533412.

    Abstract

    Graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as the standard method for numerous tasks on graph-structured data such as node classification. However, real-world graphs are often evolving over time and even new classes may arise. We model these challenges as an instance of lifelong learning, in which a learner faces a sequence of tasks and may take over knowledge acquired in past tasks. Such knowledge may be stored explicitly as historic data or implicitly within model parameters. In this work, we systematically analyze the influence of implicit and explicit knowledge. Therefore, we present an incremental training method for lifelong learning on graphs and introduce a new measure based on k-neighborhood time differences to address variances in the historic data. We apply our training method to five representative GNN architectures and evaluate them on three new lifelong node classification datasets. Our results show that no more than 50% of the GNN's receptive field is necessary to retain at least 95% accuracy compared to training over the complete history of the graph data. Furthermore, our experiments confirm that implicit knowledge becomes more important when fewer explicit knowledge is available.
  • Galke, L., Vagliano, I., & Scherp, A. (2019). Can graph neural networks go „online“? An analysis of pretraining and inference. In Proceedings of the Representation Learning on Graphs and Manifolds: ICLR2019 Workshop.

    Abstract

    Large-scale graph data in real-world applications is often not static but dynamic,
    i. e., new nodes and edges appear over time. Current graph convolution approaches
    are promising, especially, when all the graph’s nodes and edges are available dur-
    ing training. When unseen nodes and edges are inserted after training, it is not
    yet evaluated whether up-training or re-training from scratch is preferable. We
    construct an experimental setup, in which we insert previously unseen nodes and
    edges after training and conduct a limited amount of inference epochs. In this
    setup, we compare adapting pretrained graph neural networks against retraining
    from scratch. Our results show that pretrained models yield high accuracy scores
    on the unseen nodes and that pretraining is preferable over retraining from scratch.
    Our experiments represent a first step to evaluate and develop truly online variants
    of graph neural networks.
  • Galke, L., Seidlmayer, E., Lüdemann, G., Langnickel, L., Melnychuk, T., Förstner, K. U., Tochtermann, K., & Schultz, C. (2021). COVID-19++: A citation-aware Covid-19 dataset for the analysis of research dynamics. In Y. Chen, H. Ludwig, Y. Tu, U. Fayyad, X. Zhu, X. Hu, S. Byna, X. Liu, J. Zhang, S. Pan, V. Papalexakis, J. Wang, A. Cuzzocrea, & C. Ordonez (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (pp. 4350-4355). Piscataway, NJ: IEEE.

    Abstract

    COVID-19 research datasets are crucial for analyzing research dynamics. Most collections of COVID-19 research items do not to include cited works and do not have annotations
    from a controlled vocabulary. Starting with ZB MED KE data on COVID-19, which comprises CORD-19, we assemble a new dataset that includes cited work and MeSH annotations for all records. Furthermore, we conduct experiments on the analysis of research dynamics, in which we investigate predicting links in a co-annotation graph created on the basis of the new dataset. Surprisingly, we find that simple heuristic methods are better at
    predicting future links than more sophisticated approaches such as graph neural networks.
  • Galke, L., Melnychuk, T., Seidlmayer, E., Trog, S., Foerstner, K., Schultz, C., & Tochtermann, K. (2019). Inductive learning of concept representations from library-scale bibliographic corpora. In K. David, K. Geihs, M. Lange, & G. Stumme (Eds.), Informatik 2019: 50 Jahre Gesellschaft für Informatik - Informatik für Gesellschaft (pp. 219-232). Bonn: Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. doi:10.18420/inf2019_26.
  • Goldrick, M., Brehm, L., Pyeong Whan, C., & Smolensky, P. (2019). Transient blend states and discrete agreement-driven errors in sentence production. In G. J. Snover, M. Nelson, B. O'Connor, & J. Pater (Eds.), Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL 2019) (pp. 375-376). doi:10.7275/n0b2-5305.
  • Hagoort, P., & Beckmann, C. F. (2019). Key issues and future directions: The neural architecture for language. In P. Hagoort (Ed.), Human language: From genes and brains to behavior (pp. 527-532). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Hagoort, P. (2019). Introduction. In P. Hagoort (Ed.), Human language: From genes and brains to behavior (pp. 1-6). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Hagoort, P. (1998). The shadows of lexical meaning in patients with semantic impairments. In B. Stemmer, & H. Whitaker (Eds.), Handbook of neurolinguistics (pp. 235-248). New York: Academic Press.
  • Hahn, L. E., Ten Buuren, M., De Nijs, M., Snijders, T. M., & Fikkert, P. (2019). Acquiring novel words in a second language through mutual play with child songs - The Noplica Energy Center. In L. Nijs, H. Van Regenmortel, & C. Arculus (Eds.), MERYC19 Counterpoints of the senses: Bodily experiences in musical learning (pp. 78-87). Ghent, Belgium: EuNet MERYC 2019.

    Abstract

    Child songs are a great source for linguistic learning. Here we explore whether children can acquire novel words in a second language by playing a game featuring child songs in a playhouse. We present data from three studies that serve as scientific proof for the functionality of one game of the playhouse: the Energy Center. For this game, three hand-bikes were mounted on a panel. When children start moving the hand-bikes, child songs start playing simultaneously. Once the children produce enough energy with the hand-bikes, the songs are additionally accompanied with the sounds of musical instruments. In our studies, children executed a picture-selection task to evaluate whether they acquired new vocabulary from the songs presented during the game. Two of our studies were run in the field, one at a Dutch and one at an Indian pre-school. The third study features data from a more controlled laboratory setting. Our results partly confirm that the Energy Center is a successful means to support vocabulary acquisition in a second language. More research with larger sample sizes and longer access to the Energy Center is needed to evaluate the overall functionality of the game. Based on informal observations at our test sites, however, we are certain that children do pick up linguistic content from the songs during play, as many of the children repeat words and phrases from songs they heard. We will pick up upon these promising observations during future studies
  • Hammarström, H. (2019). An inventory of Bantu languages. In M. Van de Velde, K. Bostoen, D. Nurse, & G. Philippson (Eds.), The Bantu languages (2nd). London: Routledge.

    Abstract

    This chapter aims to provide an updated list of all Bantu languages known at present and to provide individual pointers to further information on the inventory. The area division has some correlation with what are perceived genealogical relations between Bantu languages, but they are not defined as such and do not change whenever there is an update in our understanding of genealogical relations. Given the popularity of Guthrie codes in Bantu linguistics, our listing also features a complete mapping to Guthrie codes. The language inventory listed excludes sign languages used in the Bantu area, speech registers, pidgins, drummed/whistled languages and urban youth languages. Pointers to such languages in the Bantu area are included in the continent-wide overview in Hammarstrom. The most important alternative names, subvarieties and spelling variants are given for each language, though such lists are necessarily incomplete and reflect some degree of arbitrary selection.
  • Harmon, Z., Barak, L., Shafto, P., Edwards, J., & Feldman, N. H. (2021). Making heads or tails of it: A competition–compensation account of morphological deficits in language impairment. In T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (Eds.), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021) (pp. 1872-1878). Vienna: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) regularly use the base form of verbs (e.g., dance) instead of inflected forms (e.g., danced). We propose an account of this behavior in which children with DLD have difficulty processing novel inflected verbs in their input. This leads the inflected form to face stronger competition from alternatives. Competition is resolved by the production of a more accessible alternative with high semantic overlap with the inflected form: in English, the bare form. We test our account computationally by training a nonparametric Bayesian model that infers the productivity of the inflectional suffix (-ed). We systematically vary the number of novel types of inflected verbs in the input to simulate the input as processed by children with and without DLD. Modeling results are consistent with our hypothesis, suggesting that children’s inconsistent use of inflectional morphemes could stem from inferences they make on the basis of impoverished data.
  • Heilbron, M., Ehinger, B., Hagoort, P., & De Lange, F. P. (2019). Tracking naturalistic linguistic predictions with deep neural language models. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience (pp. 424-427). doi:10.32470/CCN.2019.1096-0.

    Abstract

    Prediction in language has traditionally been studied using
    simple designs in which neural responses to expected
    and unexpected words are compared in a categorical
    fashion. However, these designs have been contested
    as being ‘prediction encouraging’, potentially exaggerating
    the importance of prediction in language understanding.
    A few recent studies have begun to address
    these worries by using model-based approaches to probe
    the effects of linguistic predictability in naturalistic stimuli
    (e.g. continuous narrative). However, these studies
    so far only looked at very local forms of prediction, using
    models that take no more than the prior two words into
    account when computing a word’s predictability. Here,
    we extend this approach using a state-of-the-art neural
    language model that can take roughly 500 times longer
    linguistic contexts into account. Predictability estimates
    fromthe neural network offer amuch better fit to EEG data
    from subjects listening to naturalistic narrative than simpler
    models, and reveal strong surprise responses akin to
    the P200 and N400. These results show that predictability
    effects in language are not a side-effect of simple designs,
    and demonstrate the practical use of recent advances
    in AI for the cognitive neuroscience of language.
  • Hellwig, B., Defina, R., Kidd, E., Allen, S. E. M., Davidson, L., & Kelly, B. F. (2021). Child language documentation: The sketch acquisition project. In G. Haig, S. Schnell, & F. Seifart (Eds.), Doing corpus-based typology with spoken language data: State of the art (pp. 29-58). Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai'i Press.

    Abstract

    This paper reports on an on-going project designed to collect comparable corpus data on child language and child-directed language in under-researched languages. Despite a long history of cross-linguistic research, there is a severe empirical bias within language acquisition research: Data is available for less than 2% of the world's languages, heavily skewed towards the larger and better-described languages. As a result, theories of language development tend to be grounded in a non-representative sample, and we know little about the acquisition of typologically-diverse languages from different families, regions, or sociocultural contexts. It is very likely that the reasons are to be found in the forbidding methodological challenges of constructing child language corpora under fieldwork conditions with their strict requirements on participant selection, sampling intervals, and amounts of data. There is thus an urgent need for proposals that facilitate and encourage language acquisition research across a wide variety of languages. Adopting a language documentation perspective, we illustrate an approach that combines the construction of manageable corpora of natural interaction with and between children with a sketch description of the corpus data – resulting in a set of comparable corpora and comparable sketches that form the basis for cross-linguistic comparisons.
  • Hintz, F., Voeten, C. C., McQueen, J. M., & Scharenborg, O. (2021). The effects of onset and offset masking on the time course of non-native spoken-word recognition in noise. In T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (Eds.), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021) (pp. 133-139). Vienna: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Using the visual-word paradigm, the present study investigated the effects of word onset and offset masking on the time course of non-native spoken-word recognition in the presence of background noise. In two experiments, Dutch non-native listeners heard English target words, preceded by carrier sentences that were noise-free (Experiment 1) or contained intermittent noise (Experiment 2). Target words were either onset- or offset-masked or not masked at all. Results showed that onset masking delayed target word recognition more than offset masking did, suggesting that – similar to natives – non-native listeners strongly rely on word onset information during word recognition in noise.

    Additional information

    Link to Preprint on BioRxiv
  • Joo, H., Jang, J., Kim, S., Cho, T., & Cutler, A. (2019). Prosodic structural effects on coarticulatory vowel nasalization in Australian English in comparison to American English. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 20195) (pp. 835-839). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

    Abstract

    This study investigates effects of prosodic factors (prominence, boundary) on coarticulatory Vnasalization in Australian English (AusE) in CVN and NVC in comparison to those in American English
    (AmE). As in AmE, prominence was found to
    lengthen N, but to reduce V-nasalization, enhancing N’s nasality and V’s orality, respectively (paradigmatic contrast enhancement). But the prominence effect in CVN was more robust than that in AmE. Again similar to findings in AmE, boundary
    induced a reduction of N-duration and V-nasalization phrase-initially (syntagmatic contrast enhancement), and increased the nasality of both C and V phrasefinally.
    But AusE showed some differences in terms
    of the magnitude of V nasalization and N duration. The results suggest that the linguistic contrast enhancements underlie prosodic-structure modulation of coarticulatory V-nasalization in
    comparable ways across dialects, while the fine phonetic detail indicates that the phonetics-prosody interplay is internalized in the individual dialect’s phonetic grammar.
  • Jordens, P. (1998). Defaultformen des Präteritums. Zum Erwerb der Vergangenheitsmorphologie im Niederlänidischen. In H. Wegener (Ed.), Eine zweite Sprache lernen (pp. 61-88). Tübingen, Germany: Verlag Gunter Narr.
  • Karaca, F., Brouwer, S., Unsworth, S., & Huettig, F. (2021). Prediction in bilingual children: The missing piece of the puzzle. In E. Kaan, & T. Grüter (Eds.), Prediction in Second Language Processing and Learning (pp. 116-137). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Abstract

    A wealth of studies has shown that more proficient monolingual speakers are better at predicting upcoming information during language comprehension. Similarly, prediction skills of adult second language (L2) speakers in their L2 have also been argued to be modulated by their L2 proficiency. How exactly language proficiency and prediction are linked, however, is yet to be systematically investigated. One group of language users which has the potential to provide invaluable insights into this link is bilingual children. In this paper, we compare bilingual children’s prediction skills with those of monolingual children and adult L2 speakers, and show how investigating bilingual children’s prediction skills may contribute to our understanding of how predictive processing works.
  • Karadöller, D. Z., Sumer, B., Ünal, E., & Ozyurek, A. (2021). Spatial language use predicts spatial memory of children: Evidence from sign, speech, and speech-plus-gesture. In T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (Eds.), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021) (pp. 672-678). Vienna: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    There is a strong relation between children’s exposure to
    spatial terms and their later memory accuracy. In the current
    study, we tested whether the production of spatial terms by
    children themselves predicts memory accuracy and whether
    and how language modality of these encodings modulates
    memory accuracy differently. Hearing child speakers of
    Turkish and deaf child signers of Turkish Sign Language
    described pictures of objects in various spatial relations to each
    other and later tested for their memory accuracy of these
    pictures in a surprise memory task. We found that having
    described the spatial relation between the objects predicted
    better memory accuracy. However, the modality of these
    descriptions in sign, speech, or speech-plus-gesture did not
    reveal differences in memory accuracy. We discuss the
    implications of these findings for the relation between spatial
    language, memory, and the modality of encoding.
  • Kempen, G., & Harbusch, K. (1998). A 'tree adjoining' grammar without adjoining: The case of scrambling in German. In Fourth International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Frameworks (TAG+4).
  • Kempen, G. (1998). Sentence parsing. In A. D. Friederici (Ed.), Language comprehension: A biological perspective (pp. 213-228). Berlin: Springer.
  • Kita, S., van Gijn, I., & van der Hulst, H. (1998). Movement phases in signs and co-speech gestures, and their transcription by human coders. In Gesture and Sign-Language in Human-Computer Interaction (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence - LNCS Subseries, Vol. 1371) (pp. 23-35). Berlin, Germany: Springer-Verlag.

    Abstract

    The previous literature has suggested that the hand movement in co-speech gestures and signs consists of a series of phases with qualitatively different dynamic characteristics. In this paper, we propose a syntagmatic rule system for movement phases that applies to both co-speech gestures and signs. Descriptive criteria for the rule system were developed for the analysis video-recorded continuous production of signs and gesture. It involves segmenting a stream of body movement into phases and identifying different phase types. Two human coders used the criteria to analyze signs and cospeech gestures that are produced in natural discourse. It was found that the criteria yielded good inter-coder reliability. These criteria can be used for the technology of automatic recognition of signs and co-speech gestures in order to segment continuous production and identify the potentially meaningbearing phase.
  • Klein, W. (2021). Das „Heidelberger Forschungsprojekt Pidgin-Deutsch “und die Folgen. In B. Ahrenholz, & M. Rost-Roth (Eds.), Ein Blick zurück nach vorn: Frühe deutsche Forschung zu Zweitspracherwerb, Migration, Mehrsprachigkeit und zweitsprachbezogener Sprachdidaktik sowie ihre Bedeutung heute (pp. 50-95). Berlin: De Gruyter.
  • Klein, W. (1984). Bühler Ellipse. In C. F. Graumann, & T. Herrmann (Eds.), Karl Bühlers Axiomatik: Fünfzig Jahre Axiomatik der Sprachwissenschaften (pp. 117-141). Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
  • Klein, W. (1998). Ein Blick zurück auf die Varietätengrammatik. In U. Ammon, K. Mattheier, & P. Nelde (Eds.), Sociolinguistica: Internationales Jahrbuch für europäische Soziolinguistik (pp. 22-38). Tübingen: Niemeyer.
  • Klein, W. (1998). Assertion and finiteness. In N. Dittmar, & Z. Penner (Eds.), Issues in the theory of language acquisition: Essays in honor of Jürgen Weissenborn (pp. 225-245). Bern: Peter Lang.
  • Klein, W. (1967). Einführende Bibliographie zu "Mathematik und Dichtung". In H. Kreuzer, & R. Gunzenhäuser (Eds.), Mathematik und Dichtung (pp. 347-359). München: Nymphenburger.
  • Klein, W., & Vater, H. (1998). The perfect in English and German. In L. Kulikov, & H. Vater (Eds.), Typology of verbal categories: Papers presented to Vladimir Nedjalkov on the occasion of his 70th birthday (pp. 215-235). Tübingen: Niemeyer.
  • Koutamanis, E., Kootstra, G. J., Dijkstra, T., & Unsworth., S. (2021). Lexical priming as evidence for language-nonselective access in the simultaneous bilingual child's lexicon. In D. Dionne, & L.-A. Vidal Covas (Eds.), BUCLD 45: Proceedings of the 45th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 413-430). Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Kuijpers, C. T., Coolen, R., Houston, D., & Cutler, A. (1998). Using the head-turning technique to explore cross-linguistic performance differences. In C. Rovee-Collier, L. Lipsitt, & H. Hayne (Eds.), Advances in infancy research: Vol. 12 (pp. 205-220). Stamford: Ablex.
  • Kupisch, T., Pereira Soares, S. M., Puig-Mayenco, E., & Rothman, J. (2021). Multilingualism and Chomsky's Generative Grammar. In N. Allott (Ed.), A companion to Chomsky (pp. 232-242). doi:10.1002/9781119598732.ch15.

    Abstract

    Like Einstein's general theory of relativity is concerned with explaining the basics of an observable experience – i.e., gravity – most people take for granted that Chomsky's theory of generative grammar (GG) is concerned with the basic nature of language. This chapter highlights a mere subset of central constructs in GG, showing how they have featured prominently and thus shaped formal linguistic studies in multilingualism. Because multilingualism includes a wide range of nonmonolingual populations, the constructs are divided across child bilingualism and adult third language for greater coverage. In the case of the former, the chapter examines how poverty of the stimulus has been investigated. Using the nascent field of L3/Ln acquisition as the backdrop, it discusses how the GG constructs of I-language versus E-language sit at the core of debates regarding the very notion of what linguistic transfer and mental representations should be taken to be.
  • Lev-Ari, S. (2019). The influence of social network properties on language processing and use. In M. S. Vitevitch (Ed.), Network Science in Cognitive Psychology (pp. 10-29). New York, NY: Routledge.

    Abstract

    Language is a social phenomenon. The author learns, processes, and uses it in social contexts. In other words, the social environment shapes the linguistic knowledge and use of the knowledge. To a degree, this is trivial. A child exposed to Japanese will become fluent in Japanese, whereas a child exposed to only Spanish will not understand Japanese but will master the sounds, vocabulary, and grammar of Spanish. Language is a structured system. Sounds and words do not occur randomly but are characterized by regularities. Learners are sensitive to these regularities and exploit them when learning language. People differ in the sizes of their social networks. Some people tend to interact with only a few people, whereas others might interact with a wide range of people. This is reflected in people’s holiday greeting habits: some people might send cards to only a few people, whereas other would send greeting cards to more than 350 people.
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1984). Geesteswetenschappelijke theorie als kompas voor de gangbare mening. In S. Dresden, & D. Van de Kaa (Eds.), Wetenschap ten goede en ten kwade (pp. 42-52). Amsterdam: North Holland.
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1962). Motion breaking and the perception of causality. In A. Michotte (Ed.), Causalité, permanence et réalité phénoménales: Etudes de psychologie expérimentale (pp. 244-258). Louvain: Publications Universitaires.
  • Levelt, W. J. M., & Plomp, R. (1962). Musical consonance and critical bandwidth. In Proceedings of the 4th International Congress Acoustics (pp. 55-55).
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1984). Some perceptual limitations on talking about space. In A. J. Van Doorn, W. A. Van de Grind, & J. J. Koenderink (Eds.), Limits in perception (pp. 323-358). Utrecht: VNU Science Press.
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1984). Spontaneous self-repairs in speech: Processes and representations. In M. P. R. Van den Broecke, & A. Cohen (Eds.), Proceedings of the 10th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 105-117). Dordrecht: Foris.
  • Levinson, S. C. (1998). Deixis. In J. L. Mey (Ed.), Concise encyclopedia of pragmatics (pp. 200-204). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
  • Levinson, S. C. (1998). Minimization and conversational inference. In A. Kasher (Ed.), Pragmatics: Vol. 4 Presupposition, implicature and indirect speech acts (pp. 545-612). London: Routledge.
  • Levinson, S. C., & Toni, I. (2019). Key issues and future directions: Interactional foundations of language. In P. Hagoort (Ed.), Human language: From genes and brain to behavior (pp. 257-261). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Levinson, S. C. (2019). Interactional foundations of language: The interaction engine hypothesis. In P. Hagoort (Ed.), Human language: From genes and brain to behavior (pp. 189-200). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Levinson, S. C. (2019). Natural forms of purposeful interaction among humans: What makes interaction effective? In K. A. Gluck, & J. E. Laird (Eds.), Interactive task learning: Humans, robots, and agents acquiring new tasks through natural interactions (pp. 111-126). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Levshina, N. (2021). Conditional inference trees and random forests. In M. Paquot, & T. Gries (Eds.), Practical Handbook of Corpus Linguistics (pp. 611-643). New York: Springer.
  • Liu, S., & Zhang, Y. (2019). Why some verbs are harder to learn than others – A micro-level analysis of everyday learning contexts for early verb learning. In A. K. Goel, C. M. Seifert, & C. Freksa (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2019) (pp. 2173-2178). Montreal, QB: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Verb learning is important for young children. While most
    previous research has focused on linguistic and conceptual
    challenges in early verb learning (e.g. Gentner, 1982, 2006),
    the present paper examined early verb learning at the
    attentional level and quantified the input for early verb learning
    by measuring verb-action co-occurrence statistics in parent-
    child interaction from the learner’s perspective. To do so, we
    used head-mounted eye tracking to record fine-grained
    multimodal behaviors during parent-infant joint play, and
    analyzed parent speech, parent and infant action, and infant
    attention at the moments when parents produced verb labels.
    Our results show great variability across different action verbs,
    in terms of frequency of verb utterances, frequency of
    corresponding actions related to verb meanings, and infants’
    attention to verbs and actions, which provide new insights on
    why some verbs are harder to learn than others.
  • Mai, F., Galke, L., & Scherp, A. (2019). CBOW is not all you need: Combining CBOW with the compositional matrix space model. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2019). OpenReview.net.

    Abstract

    Continuous Bag of Words (CBOW) is a powerful text embedding method. Due to its strong capabilities to encode word content, CBOW embeddings perform well on a wide range of downstream tasks while being efficient to compute. However, CBOW is not capable of capturing the word order. The reason is that the computation of CBOW's word embeddings is commutative, i.e., embeddings of XYZ and ZYX are the same. In order to address this shortcoming, we propose a
    learning algorithm for the Continuous Matrix Space Model, which we call Continual Multiplication of Words (CMOW). Our algorithm is an adaptation of word2vec, so that it can be trained on large quantities of unlabeled text. We empirically show that CMOW better captures linguistic properties, but it is inferior to CBOW in memorizing word content. Motivated by these findings, we propose a hybrid model that combines the strengths of CBOW and CMOW. Our results show that the hybrid CBOW-CMOW-model retains CBOW's strong ability to memorize word content while at the same time substantially improving its ability to encode other linguistic information by 8%. As a result, the hybrid also performs better on 8 out of 11 supervised downstream tasks with an average improvement of 1.2%.
  • Majid, A. (2019). Preface. In L. J. Speed, C. O'Meara, L. San Roque, & A. Majid (Eds.), Perception Metaphors (pp. vii-viii). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Mak, M., & Willems, R. M. (2021). Mental simulation during literary reading. In D. Kuiken, & A. M. Jacobs (Eds.), Handbook of empirical literary studies (pp. 63-84). Berlin: De Gruyter.

    Abstract

    Readers experience a number of sensations during reading. They do
    not – or do not only – process words and sentences in a detached, abstract
    manner. Instead they “perceive” what they read about. They see descriptions of
    scenery, feel what characters feel, and hear the sounds in a story. These sensa-
    tions tend to be grouped under the umbrella terms “mental simulation” and
    “mental imagery.” This chapter provides an overview of empirical research on
    the role of mental simulation during literary reading. Our chapter also discusses
    what mental simulation is and how it relates to mental imagery. Moreover, it
    explores how mental simulation plays a role in leading models of literary read-
    ing and investigates under what circumstances mental simulation occurs dur-
    ing literature reading. Finally, the effect of mental simulation on the literary
    reader’s experience is discussed, and suggestions and unresolved issues in this
    field are formulated.
  • Mamus, E., Speed, L. J., Ozyurek, A., & Majid, A. (2021). Sensory modality of input influences encoding of motion events in speech but not co-speech gestures. In T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (Eds.), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021) (pp. 376-382). Vienna: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Visual and auditory channels have different affordances and
    this is mirrored in what information is available for linguistic
    encoding. The visual channel has high spatial acuity, whereas
    the auditory channel has better temporal acuity. These
    differences may lead to different conceptualizations of events
    and affect multimodal language production. Previous studies of
    motion events typically present visual input to elicit speech and
    gesture. The present study compared events presented as audio-
    only, visual-only, or multimodal (visual+audio) input and
    assessed speech and co-speech gesture for path and manner of
    motion in Turkish. Speakers with audio-only input mentioned
    path more and manner less in verbal descriptions, compared to
    speakers who had visual input. There was no difference in the
    type or frequency of gestures across conditions, and gestures
    were dominated by path-only gestures. This suggests that input
    modality influences speakers’ encoding of path and manner of
    motion events in speech, but not in co-speech gestures.
  • Mamus, E., Rissman, L., Majid, A., & Ozyurek, A. (2019). Effects of blindfolding on verbal and gestural expression of path in auditory motion events. In A. K. Goel, C. M. Seifert, & C. C. Freksa (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2019) (pp. 2275-2281). Montreal, QB: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Studies have claimed that blind people’s spatial representations are different from sighted people, and blind people display superior auditory processing. Due to the nature of auditory and haptic information, it has been proposed that blind people have spatial representations that are more sequential than sighted people. Even the temporary loss of sight—such as through blindfolding—can affect spatial representations, but not much research has been done on this topic. We compared blindfolded and sighted people’s linguistic spatial expressions and non-linguistic localization accuracy to test how blindfolding affects the representation of path in auditory motion events. We found that blindfolded people were as good as sighted people when localizing simple sounds, but they outperformed sighted people when localizing auditory motion events. Blindfolded people’s path related speech also included more sequential, and less holistic elements. Our results indicate that even temporary loss of sight influences spatial representations of auditory motion events
  • Marcoux, K., & Ernestus, M. (2019). Differences between native and non-native Lombard speech in terms of pitch range. In M. Ochmann, M. Vorländer, & J. Fels (Eds.), Proceedings of the ICA 2019 and EAA Euroregio. 23rd International Congress on Acoustics, integrating 4th EAA Euroregio 2019 (pp. 5713-5720). Berlin: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Akustik.

    Abstract

    Lombard speech, speech produced in noise, is acoustically different from speech produced in quiet (plain speech) in several ways, including having a higher and wider F0 range (pitch). Extensive research on native Lombard speech does not consider that non-natives experience a higher cognitive load while producing
    speech and that the native language may influence the non-native speech. We investigated pitch range in plain and Lombard speech in native and non-natives.
    Dutch and American-English speakers read contrastive question-answer pairs in quiet and in noise in English, while the Dutch also read Dutch sentence pairs. We found that Lombard speech is characterized by a wider pitch range than plain speech, for all speakers (native English, non-native English, and native Dutch).
    This shows that non-natives also widen their pitch range in Lombard speech. In sentences with early-focus, we see the same increase in pitch range when going from plain to Lombard speech in native and non-native English, but a smaller increase in native Dutch. In sentences with late-focus, we see the biggest increase for the native English, followed by non-native English and then native Dutch. Together these results indicate an effect of the native language on non-native Lombard speech.
  • Marcoux, K., & Ernestus, M. (2019). Pitch in native and non-native Lombard speech. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2019) (pp. 2605-2609). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

    Abstract

    Lombard speech, speech produced in noise, is
    typically produced with a higher fundamental
    frequency (F0, pitch) compared to speech in quiet. This paper examined the potential differences in native and non-native Lombard speech by analyzing median pitch in sentences with early- or late-focus produced in quiet and noise. We found an increase in pitch in late-focus sentences in noise for Dutch speakers in both English and Dutch, and for American-English speakers in English. These results
    show that non-native speakers produce Lombard speech, despite their higher cognitive load. For the early-focus sentences, we found a difference between the Dutch and the American-English speakers. Whereas the Dutch showed an increased F0 in noise
    in English and Dutch, the American-English speakers did not in English. Together, these results suggest that some acoustic characteristics of Lombard speech, such as pitch, may be language-specific, potentially
    resulting in the native language influencing the non-native Lombard speech.
  • McDonough, L., Choi, S., Bowerman, M., & Mandler, J. M. (1998). The use of preferential looking as a measure of semantic development. In C. Rovee-Collier, L. P. Lipsitt, & H. Hayne (Eds.), Advances in Infancy Research. Volume 12. (pp. 336-354). Stamford, CT: Ablex Publishing.
  • McQueen, J. M., & Cutler, A. (1998). Morphology in word recognition. In A. M. Zwicky, & A. Spencer (Eds.), The handbook of morphology (pp. 406-427). Oxford: Blackwell.

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