Publications

Displaying 201 - 300 of 313
  • Mitterer, H. (2008). How are words reduced in spontaneous speech? In A. Botonis (Ed.), Proceedings of ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop On Experimental Linguistics (pp. 165-168). Athens: University of Athens.

    Abstract

    Words are reduced in spontaneous speech. If reductions are constrained by functional (i.e., perception and production) constraints, they should not be arbitrary. This hypothesis was tested by examing the pronunciations of high- to mid-frequency words in a Dutch and a German spontaneous speech corpus. In logistic-regression models the "reduction likelihood" of a phoneme was predicted by fixed-effect predictors such as position within the word, word length, word frequency, and stress, as well as random effects such as phoneme identity and word. The models for Dutch and German show many communalities. This is in line with the assumption that similar functional constraints influence reductions in both languages.
  • Namjoshi, J., Tremblay, A., Broersma, M., Kim, S., & Cho, T. (2012). Influence of recent linguistic exposure on the segmentation of an unfamiliar language [Abstract]. Program abstracts from the 164th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 132(3), 1968.

    Abstract

    Studies have shown that listeners segmenting unfamiliar languages transfer native-language (L1) segmentation cues. These studies, however, conflated L1 and recent linguistic exposure. The present study investigates the relative influences of L1 and recent linguistic exposure on the use of prosodic cues for segmenting an artificial language (AL). Participants were L1-French listeners, high-proficiency L2-French L1-English listeners, and L1-English listeners without functional knowledge of French. The prosodic cue assessed was F0 rise, which is word-final in French, but in English tends to be word-initial. 30 participants heard a 20-minute AL speech stream with word-final boundaries marked by F0 rise, and decided in a subsequent listening task which of two words (without word-final F0 rise) had been heard in the speech stream. The analyses revealed a marginally significant effect of L1 (all listeners) and, importantly, a significant effect of recent linguistic exposure (L1-French and L2-French listeners): accuracy increased with decreasing time in the US since the listeners’ last significant (3+ months) stay in a French-speaking environment. Interestingly, no effect of L2 proficiency was found (L2-French listeners).
  • Narasimhan, B., Kopecka, A., Bowerman, M., Gullberg, M., & Majid, A. (2012). Putting and taking events: A crosslinguistic perspective. In A. Kopecka, & B. Narasimhan (Eds.), Events of putting and taking: A crosslinguistic perspective (pp. 1-18). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Narasimhan, B. (2012). Putting and Taking in Tamil and Hindi. In A. Kopecka, & B. Narasimhan (Eds.), Events of putting and taking: A crosslinguistic perspective (pp. 201-230). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Abstract

    Many languages have general or “light” verbs used by speakers to describe a wide range of situations owing to their relatively schematic meanings, e.g., the English verb do that can be used to describe many different kinds of actions, or the verb put that labels a range of types of placement of objects at locations. Such semantically bleached verbs often become grammaticalized and used to encode an extended (set of) meaning(s), e.g., Tamil veyyii ‘put/place’ is used to encode causative meaning in periphrastic causatives (e.g., okkara veyyii ‘make sit’, nikka veyyii ‘make stand’). But do general verbs in different languages have the same kinds of (schematic) meanings and extensional ranges? Or do they reveal different, perhaps even cross-cutting, ways of structuring the same semantic domain in different languages? These questions require detailed crosslinguistic investigation using comparable methods of eliciting data. The present study is a first step in this direction, and focuses on the use of general verbs to describe events of placement and removal in two South Asian languages, Hindi and Tamil.
  • Noordman, L. G., & Vonk, W. (1998). Discourse comprehension. In A. D. Friederici (Ed.), Language comprehension: a biological perspective (pp. 229-262). Berlin: Springer.

    Abstract

    The human language processor is conceived as a system that consists of several interrelated subsystems. Each subsystem performs a specific task in the complex process of language comprehension and production. A subsystem receives a particular input, performs certain specific operations on this input and yields a particular output. The subsystems can be characterized in terms of the transformations that relate the input representations to the output representations. An important issue in describing the language processing system is to identify the subsystems and to specify the relations between the subsystems. These relations can be conceived in two different ways. In one conception the subsystems are autonomous. They are related to each other only by the input-output channels. The operations in one subsystem are not affected by another system. The subsystems are modular, that is they are independent. In the other conception, the different subsystems influence each other. A subsystem affects the processes in another subsystem. In this conception there is an interaction between the subsystems.
  • Nordhoff, S., & Hammarström, H. (2012). Glottolog/Langdoc: Increasing the visibility of grey literature for low-density languages. In N. Calzolari (Ed.), Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation [LREC 2012], May 23-25, 2012 (pp. 3289-3294). [Paris]: ELRA.

    Abstract

    Language resources can be divided into structural resources treating phonology, morphosyntax, semantics etc. and resources treating the social, demographic, ethnic, political context. A third type are meta-resources, like bibliographies, which provide access to the resources of the first two kinds. This poster will present the Glottolog/Langdoc project, a comprehensive bibliography providing web access to 180k bibliographical records to (mainly) low visibility resources from low-density languages. The resources are annotated for macro-area, content language, and document type and are available in XHTML and RDF.
  • Nouaouri, N. (2012). The semantics of placement and removal predicates in Moroccan Arabic. In A. Kopecka, & B. Narasimhan (Eds.), Events of putting and taking: A crosslinguistic perspective (pp. 99-122). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Abstract

    This article explores the expression of placement and removal events in Moroccan Arabic, particularly the semantic features of ‘putting’ and ‘taking’ verbs, classified in accordance with their combination with Goal and/or Source NPs. Moroccan Arabic verbs encode a variety of components of placement and removal events, including containment, attachment, features of the figure, and trajectory. Furthermore, accidental events are distinguished from deliberate events either by the inherent semantics of predicates or denoted syntactically. The postures of the Figures, in spite of some predicates distinguishing them, are typically not specified as they are in other languages, such as Dutch. Although Ground locations are frequently mentioned in both source-oriented and goal-oriented clauses, they are used more often in goal-oriented clauses.
  • O’Connor, L. (2012). Take it up, down, and away: Encoding placement and removal in Lowland Chontal. In A. Kopecka, & B. Narasimhan (Eds.), Events of putting and taking: A crosslinguistic perspective (pp. 297-326). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Abstract

    This paper offers a structural and semantic analysis of expressions of caused motion in Lowland Chontal of Oaxaca, an indigenous language of southern Mexico. The data were collected using a video stimulus designed to elicit a wide range of caused motion event descriptions. The most frequent event types in the corpus depict caused motion to and from relations of support and containment, fundamental notions in the de­scription of spatial relations between two entities and critical semantic components of the linguistic encoding of caused motion in this language. Formal features of verbal construction type and argument realization are examined by sorting event descriptions into semantic types of placement and removal, to and from support and to and from containment. Together with typological factors that shape the distribution of spatial semantics and referent expression, separate treatments of support and containment relations serve to clarify notable asymmetries in patterns of predicate type and argument realization.
  • Ozturk, O., & Papafragou, A. (2008). Acquisition of evidentiality and source monitoring. In H. Chan, H. Jacob, & E. Kapia (Eds.), Proceedings from the 32nd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development [BUCLD 32] (pp. 368-377). Somerville, Mass.: Cascadilla Press.
  • Ozyurek, A. (1998). An analysis of the basic meaning of Turkish demonstratives in face-to-face conversational interaction. In S. Santi, I. Guaitella, C. Cave, & G. Konopczynski (Eds.), Oralite et gestualite: Communication multimodale, interaction: actes du colloque ORAGE 98 (pp. 609-614). Paris: L'Harmattan.
  • Ozyurek, A. (2012). Gesture. In R. Pfau, M. Steinbach, & B. Woll (Eds.), Sign language: An international handbook (pp. 626-646). Berlin: Mouton.

    Abstract

    Gestures are meaningful movements of the body, the hands, and the face during communication,
    which accompany the production of both spoken and signed utterances. Recent
    research has shown that gestures are an integral part of language and that they contribute
    semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic information to the linguistic utterance. Furthermore,
    they reveal internal representations of the language user during communication in ways
    that might not be encoded in the verbal part of the utterance. Firstly, this chapter summarizes
    research on the role of gesture in spoken languages. Subsequently, it gives an overview
    of how gestural components might manifest themselves in sign languages, that is,
    in a situation in which both gesture and sign are expressed by the same articulators.
    Current studies are discussed that address the question of whether gestural components are the same or different in the two language modalities from a semiotic as well as from a cognitive and processing viewpoint. Understanding the role of gesture in both sign and
    spoken language contributes to our knowledge of the human language faculty as a multimodal communication system.
  • Peeters, D., Vanlangendonck, F., & Willems, R. M. (2012). Bestaat er een talenknobbel? Over taal in ons brein. In M. Boogaard, & M. Jansen (Eds.), Alles wat je altijd al had willen weten over taal: De taalcanon (pp. 41-43). Amsterdam: Meulenhoff.

    Abstract

    Wanneer iemand goed is in het spreken van meerdere talen, wordt wel gezegd dat zo iemand een talenknobbel heeft. Iedereen weet dat dat niet letterlijk bedoeld is: iemand met een talenknobbel herkennen we niet aan een grote bult op zijn hoofd. Toch dacht men vroeger wel degelijk dat mensen een letterlijke talenknobbel konden ontwikkelen. Een goed ontwikkeld taalvermogen zou gepaard gaan met het groeien van het hersengebied dat hiervoor verantwoordelijk was. Dit deel van het brein zou zelfs zo groot kunnen worden dat het van binnenuit tegen de schedel drukte, met name rond de ogen. Nu weten we wel beter. Maar waar in het brein bevindt de taal zich dan wel precies?
  • Perniss, P. M., & Ozyurek, A. (2008). Representations of action, motion and location in sign space: A comparison of German (DGS) and Turkish (TID) sign language narratives. In J. Quer (Ed.), Signs of the time: Selected papers from TISLR 8 (pp. 353-376). Seedorf: Signum Press.
  • Perniss, P. M., & Zeshan, U. (2008). Possessive and existential constructions in Kata Kolok (Bali). In Possessive and existential constructions in sign languages. Nijmegen: Ishara Press.
  • Perniss, P. M., & Zeshan, U. (2008). Possessive and existential constructions: Introduction and overview. In Possessive and existential constructions in sign languages (pp. 1-31). Nijmegen: Ishara Press.
  • Perniss, P. M. (2012). Use of sign space. In R. Pfau, M. Steinbach, & B. Woll (Eds.), Sign Language: an International Handbook (pp. 412-431). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

    Abstract

    This chapter focuses on the semantic and pragmatic uses of space. The questions addressed concern how sign space (i.e. the area of space in front of the signer’s body) is used for meaning construction, how locations in sign space are associated with discourse referents, and how signers choose to structure sign space for their communicative intents. The chapter gives an overview of linguistic analyses of the use of space, starting with the distinction between syntactic and topographic uses of space and the different types of signs that function to establish referent-location associations, and moving to analyses based on mental spaces and conceptual blending theories. Semantic-pragmatic conventions for organizing sign space are discussed, as well as spatial devices notable in the visual-spatial modality (particularly, classifier predicates and signing perspective), which influence and determine the way meaning is created in sign space. Finally, the special role of simultaneity in sign languages is discussed, focusing on the semantic and discourse-pragmatic functions of simultaneous constructions.
  • Petersen, J. H. (2012). How to put and take in Kalasha. In A. Kopecka, & B. Narasimhan (Eds.), Events of putting and taking: A crosslinguistic perspective (pp. 349-366). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Abstract

    In Kalasha, an Indo-Aryan language spoken in Northwest Pakistan, the linguistic encoding of ‘put’ and ‘take’ events reveals a symmetry between lexical ‘put’ and ‘take’ verbs that implies ‘placement on’ and ‘removal from’ a supporting surface. As regards ‘placement in’ and ‘removal from’ an enclosure, the data reveal a lexical asymmetry as ‘take’ verbs display a larger degree of linguistic elaboration of the Figure-Ground relation and the type of caused motion than ‘put’ verbs. When considering syntactic patterns, more instances of asymmetry between these two event types show up. The analysis presented here supports the proposal that an asymmetry exists in the encoding of goals versus sources as suggested in Nam (2004) and Ikegami (1987), but it calls into question the statement put forward by Regier and Zheng (2007) that endpoints (goals) are more finely differentiated semantically than starting points (sources).
  • Petersson, K. M. (2008). On cognition, structured sequence processing, and adaptive dynamical systems. American Institute of Physics Conference Proceedings, 1060(1), 195-200.

    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.
  • Poellmann, K., McQueen, J. M., & Mitterer, H. (2012). How talker-adaptation helps listeners recognize reduced word-forms [Abstract]. Program abstracts from the 164th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 132(3), 2053.

    Abstract

    Two eye-tracking experiments tested whether native listeners can adapt
    to reductions in casual Dutch speech. Listeners were exposed to segmental
    ([b] > [m]), syllabic (full-vowel-deletion), or no reductions. In a subsequent
    test phase, all three listener groups were tested on how efficiently they could
    recognize both types of reduced words. In the first Experiment’s exposure
    phase, the (un)reduced target words were predictable. The segmental reductions
    were completely consistent (i.e., involved the same input sequences).
    Learning about them was found to be pattern-specific and generalized in the
    test phase to new reduced /b/-words. The syllabic reductions were not consistent
    (i.e., involved variable input sequences). Learning about them was
    weak and not pattern-specific. Experiment 2 examined effects of word repetition
    and predictability. The (un-)reduced test words appeared in the exposure
    phase and were not predictable. There was no evidence of learning for
    the segmental reductions, probably because they were not predictable during
    exposure. But there was word-specific learning for the vowel-deleted words.
    The results suggest that learning about reductions is pattern-specific and
    generalizes to new words if the input is consistent and predictable. With
    variable input, there is more likely to be adaptation to a general speaking
    style and word-specific learning.
  • Puccini, D., Hassemer, M., Salomo, D., & Liszkowski, U. (2012). The type of shared activity shapes caregiver and infant communication [Reprint]. In J.-M. Colletta, & M. Guidetti (Eds.), Gesture and multimodal development (pp. 157-174). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Abstract

    For the beginning language learner, communicative input is not based on linguistic codes alone. This study investigated two extralinguistic factors which are important for infants’ language development: the type of ongoing shared activity and non-verbal, deictic gestures. The natural interactions of 39 caregivers and their 12-month-old infants were recorded in two semi-natural contexts: a free play situation based on action and manipulation of objects, and a situation based on regard of objects, broadly analogous to an exhibit. Results show that the type of shared activity structures both caregivers’ language usage and caregivers’ and infants’ gesture usage. Further, there is a specific pattern with regard to how caregivers integrate speech with particular deictic gesture types. The findings demonstrate a pervasive influence of shared activities on human communication, even before language has emerged. The type of shared activity and caregivers’ systematic integration of specific forms of deictic gestures with language provide infants with a multimodal scaffold for a usage-based acquisition of language.
  • Rakoczy, H., & Haun, D. B. M. (2012). Vor- und nichtsprachliche Kognition. In W. Schneider, & U. Lindenberger (Eds.), Entwicklungspsychologie. 7. vollständig überarbeitete Auflage (pp. 337-362). Weinheim: Beltz Verlag.
  • Rapold, C. J. (2012). The encoding of placement and removal events in ǂAkhoe Haiǁom. In A. Kopecka, & B. Narasimhan (Eds.), Events of putting and taking: A crosslinguistic perspective (pp. 79-98). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Abstract

    This paper explores the semantics of placement and removal verbs in Ākhoe Hai om based on event descriptions elicited with a set of video stimuli. After a brief sketch of the morphosyntax of placement/removal constructions in Ākhoe Haiom, four situation types are identified semantically that cover both placement and removal events. The language exhibits a clear tendency to make more fine-grained semantic distinctions in placement verbs, as opposed to semantically more general removal verbs.
  • Ravignani, A., & Fitch, W. T. (2012). Sonification of experimental parameters as a new method for efficient coding of behavior. In A. Spink, F. Grieco, O. E. Krips, L. W. S. Loijens, L. P. P. J. Noldus, & P. H. Zimmerman (Eds.), Measuring Behavior 2012, 8th International Conference on Methods and Techniques in Behavioral Research (pp. 376-379).

    Abstract

    Cognitive research is often focused on experimental condition-driven reactions. Ethological studies frequently
    rely on the observation of naturally occurring specific behaviors. In both cases, subjects are filmed during the
    study, so that afterwards behaviors can be coded on video. Coding should typically be blind to experimental
    conditions, but often requires more information than that present on video. We introduce a method for blindcoding
    of behavioral videos that takes care of both issues via three main innovations. First, of particular
    significance for playback studies, it allows creation of a “soundtrack” of the study, that is, a track composed of
    synthesized sounds representing different aspects of the experimental conditions, or other events, over time.
    Second, it facilitates coding behavior using this audio track, together with the possibly muted original video.
    This enables coding blindly to conditions as required, but not ignoring other relevant events. Third, our method
    makes use of freely available, multi-platform software, including scripts we developed.
  • Razafindrazaka, H., & Brucato, N. (2008). Esclavage et diaspora Africaine. In É. Crubézy, J. Braga, & G. Larrouy (Eds.), Anthropobiologie: Évolution humaine (pp. 326-328). Issy-les-Moulineaux: Elsevier Masson.
  • Razafindrazaka, H., Brucato, N., & Mazières, S. (2008). Les Noirs marrons. In É. Crubézy, J. Braga, & G. Larrouy (Eds.), Anthropobiologie: Évolution humaine (pp. 319-320). Issy-les-Moulineaux: Elsevier Masson.
  • Reinisch, E., Jesse, A., & McQueen, J. M. (2008). The strength of stress-related lexical competition depends on the presence of first-syllable stress. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2008 (pp. 1954-1954).

    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.
  • Reinisch, E., Jesse, A., & McQueen, J. M. (2008). Lexical stress information modulates the time-course of spoken-word recognition. In Proceedings of Acoustics' 08 (pp. 3183-3188).

    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.
  • Roberts, L. (2008). Processing temporal constraints and some implications for the investigation of second language sentence processing and acquisition. Commentary on Baggio. In P. Indefrey, & M. Gullberg (Eds.), Time to speak: Cognitive and neural prerequisites for time in language (pp. 57-61). Oxford: Blackwell.
  • Roberts, L. (2012). Sentence and discourse processing in second language comprehension. In C. A. Chapelle (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. Chicester: Wiley-Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal1063.

    Abstract

    n applied linguistics (AL), researchers have always been concerned with second language (L2) learners' knowledge of the target language (TL), investigating the development of TL grammar, vocabulary, and phonology, for instance.
  • Robotham, L., Trinkler, I., & Sauter, D. (2008). The power of positives: Evidence for an overall emotional recognition deficit in Huntington's disease [Abstract]. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 79, A12.

    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.
  • De Ruiter, L. E. (2008). How useful are polynomials for analyzing intonation? In Proceedings of Interspeech 2008 (pp. 785-789).

    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.
  • De Ruiter, J. P., Noordzij, M. L., Newman-Norlund, S., Newman-Norlund, R., Hagoort, P., Levinson, S. C., & Toni, I. (2012). Exploring the cognitive infrastructure of communication. In B. Galantucci, & S. Garrod (Eds.), Experimental Semiotics: Studies on the emergence and evolution of human communication (pp. 51-78). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Abstract

    Human communication is often thought about in terms of transmitted messages in a conventional code like a language. But communication requires a specialized interactive intelligence. Senders have to be able to perform recipient design, while receivers need to be able to do intention recognition, knowing that recipient design has taken place. To study this interactive intelligence in the lab, we developed a new task that taps directly into the underlying abilities to communicate in the absence of a conventional code. We show that subjects are remarkably successful communicators under these conditions, especially when senders get feedback from receivers. Signaling is accomplished by the manner in which an instrumental action is performed, such that instrumentally dysfunctional components of an action are used to convey communicative intentions. The findings have important implications for the nature of the human communicative infrastructure, and the task opens up a line of experimentation on human communication.

    Files private

    Request files
  • Sauter, D., Eisner, F., Rosen, S., & Scott, S. K. (2008). The role of source and filter cues in emotion recognition in speech [Abstract]. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 123, 3739-3740.

    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.
  • Sauter, D. (2008). The time-course of emotional voice processing [Abstract]. Neurocase, 14, 455-455.

    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.
  • Scharenborg, O., & Cooke, M. P. (2008). Comparing human and machine recognition performance on a VCV corpus. In ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop (ITRW) on "Speech Analysis and Processing for Knowledge Discovery".

    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.
  • Scharenborg, O., Witteman, M. J., & Weber, A. (2012). Computational modelling of the recognition of foreign-accented speech. In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2012: 13th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 882 -885).

    Abstract

    In foreign-accented speech, pronunciation typically deviates from the canonical form to some degree. For native listeners, it has been shown that word recognition is more difficult for strongly-accented words than for less strongly-accented words. Furthermore recognition of strongly-accented words becomes easier with additional exposure to the foreign accent. In this paper, listeners’ behaviour was simulated with Fine-tracker, a computational model of word recognition that uses real speech as input. The simulations showed that, in line with human listeners, 1) Fine-Tracker’s recognition outcome is modulated by the degree of accentedness and 2) it improves slightly after brief exposure with the accent. On the level of individual words, however, Fine-tracker failed to correctly simulate listeners’ behaviour, possibly due to differences in overall familiarity with the chosen accent (German-accented Dutch) between human listeners and Fine-Tracker.
  • Scharenborg, O. (2008). Modelling fine-phonetic detail in a computational model of word recognition. In INTERSPEECH 2008 - 9th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 1473-1476). ISCA Archive.

    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.
  • Scharenborg, O., & Janse, E. (2012). Hearing loss and the use of acoustic cues in phonetic categorisation of fricatives. In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2012: 13th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 1458-1461).

    Abstract

    Aging often affects sensitivity to the higher frequencies, which results in the loss of sensitivity to phonetic detail in speech. Hearing loss may therefore interfere with the categorisation of two consonants that have most information to differentiate between them in those higher frequencies and less in the lower frequencies, e.g., /f/ and /s/. We investigate two acoustic cues, i.e., formant transitions and fricative intensity, that older listeners might use to differentiate between /f/ and /s/. The results of two phonetic categorisation tasks on 38 older listeners (aged 60+) with varying degrees of hearing loss indicate that older listeners seem to use formant transitions as a cue to distinguish /s/ from /f/. Moreover, this ability is not impacted by hearing loss. On the other hand, listeners with increased hearing loss seem to rely more on intensity for fricative identification. Thus, progressive hearing loss may lead to gradual changes in perceptual cue weighting.
  • Scharenborg, O., Janse, E., & Weber, A. (2012). Perceptual learning of /f/-/s/ by older listeners. In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2012: 13th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 398-401).

    Abstract

    Young listeners can quickly modify their interpretation of a speech sound when a talker produces the sound ambiguously. Young Dutch listeners rely mainly on the higher frequencies to distinguish between /f/ and /s/, but these higher frequencies are particularly vulnerable to age-related hearing loss. We therefore tested whether older Dutch listeners can show perceptual retuning given an ambiguous pronunciation in between /f/ and /s/. Results of a lexically-guided perceptual learning experiment showed that older Dutch listeners are still able to learn non-standard pronunciations of /f/ and /s/. Possibly, the older listeners have learned to rely on other acoustic cues, such as formant transitions, to distinguish between /f/ and /s/. However, the size and duration of the perceptual effect is influenced by hearing loss, with listeners with poorer hearing showing a smaller and a shorter-lived learning effect.
  • Schimke, S., Verhagen, J., & Turco, G. (2012). The different role of additive and negative particles in the development of finiteness in early adult L2 German and L2 Dutch. In M. Watorek, S. Benazzo, & M. Hickmann (Eds.), Comparative perspectives on language acquisition: A tribute to Clive Perdue (pp. 73-91). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
  • Schmidt, T., Duncan, S., Ehmer, O., Hoyt, J., Kipp, M., Loehr, D., Magnusson, M., Rose, T., & Sloetjes, H. (2008). An exchange format for multimodal annotations. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008).

    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
  • Schmiedtova, B., & Flecken, M. (2008). The role of aspectual distinctions in event encoding: Implications for second language acquisition. In S. Müller-de Knop, & T. Mortelmans (Eds.), Pedagogical grammar (pp. 357-384). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Schuppler, B., Ernestus, M., Scharenborg, O., & Boves, L. (2008). Preparing a corpus of Dutch spontaneous dialogues for automatic phonetic analysis. In INTERSPEECH 2008 - 9th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 1638-1641). ISCA Archive.

    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.
  • Senft, G. (2008). The teaching of Tokunupei. In J. Kommers, & E. Venbrux (Eds.), Cultural styles of knowledge transmission: Essays in honour of Ad Borsboom (pp. 139-144). Amsterdam: Aksant.

    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.
  • Senft, G. (2008). Zur Bedeutung der Sprache für die Feldforschung. In B. Beer (Ed.), Methoden und Techniken der Feldforschung (pp. 103-118). Berlin: Reimer.
  • Senft, G. (2012). Das Erlernen von Fremdsprachen als Voraussetzung für erfolgreiche Feldforschung. In J. Kruse, S. Bethmann, D. Niermann, & C. Schmieder (Eds.), Qualitative Interviewforschung in und mit fremden Sprachen: Eine Einführung in Theorie und Praxis (pp. 121-135). Weinheim: Beltz Juventa.
  • Senft, G. (1998). 'Noble Savages' and the 'Islands of Love': Trobriand Islanders in 'Popular Publications'. In J. Wassmann (Ed.), Pacific answers to Western hegemony: Cultural practices of identity construction (pp. 119-140). Oxford: Berg Publishers.
  • Senft, G. (2012). 67 Wörter + 1 Foto für Roland Posner. In E. Fricke, & M. Voss (Eds.), 68 Zeichen für Roland Posner - Ein semiotisches Mosaik / 68 signs for Roland Posner - A semiotic mosaic (pp. 473-474). Tübingen: Stauffenberg Verlag.
  • Senft, G. (2008). Event conceptualization and event report in serial verb constructions in Kilivila: Towards a new approach to research and old phenomenon. In G. Senft (Ed.), Serial verb constructions in Austronesian and Papuan languages (pp. 203-230). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics Publishers.
  • Senft, G. (2008). Introduction. In G. Senft (Ed.), Serial verb constructions in Austronesian and Papuan languages (pp. 1-15). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics Publishers.
  • Senft, G. (2012). Ethnolinguistik. In B. Beer, & H. Fischer (Eds.), Ethnologie - Einführung und Überblick. 7. überarbeitete und erweiterte Auflage (pp. 271-286). Berlin: Reimer.
  • Senft, G. (2012). Referring to colour and taste in Kilivila: Stability and change in two lexical domains of sensual perception. In A. C. Schalley (Ed.), Practical theories and empirical practice (pp. 71-98). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Abstract

    This chapter first compares data collected on Kilivila colour terms in 1983 with data collected in 2008. The Kilivila lexicon has changed from a typical stage IIIb into a stage VII colour term lexicon (Berlin and Kay 1969). The chapter then compares data on the Kilivila taste vocabulary collected in 1982/83 with data collected in 2008. No substantial change was found. Finally the chapter compares the 2008 results on taste terms with a paper on the taste vocabulary of the Torres Strait Islanders published in 1904 by Charles S. Myers. Kilivila provides evidence that traditional terms used for talking about colour and terms used to refer to tastes have remained relatively stable over time.
  • Senft, G. (1998). Zeichenkonzeptionen in Ozeanien. In R. Posner, T. Robering, & T.. Sebeok (Eds.), Semiotics: A handbook on the sign-theoretic foundations of nature and culture (Vol. 2) (pp. 1971-1976). Berlin: de Gruyter.
  • Senghas, A., Kita, S., & Ozyurek, A. (2008). Children creating core properties of language: Evidence from an emerging sign language in Nicaragua. In K. A. Lindgren, D. DeLuca, & D. J. Napoli (Eds.), Signs and Voices: Deaf Culture, Identity, Language, and Arts. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (2012). Does a leaking O-corner save the square? In J.-Y. Béziau, & D. Jacquette (Eds.), Around and beyond the square of opposition (pp. 129-138). Basel: Springer.

    Abstract

    It has been known at least since Abelard (12th century) that the classic Square of Opposition suffers from so-called undue existential import (UEI) in that this system of predicate logic collapses when the class denoted by the restrictor predicate is empty. It is usually thought that this mistake was made by Aristotle himself, but it has now become clear that this is not so: Aristotle did not have the Conversions but only one-way entailments, which ‘saves’ the Square. The error of UEI was introduced by his later commentators, especially Apuleius and Boethius. Abelard restored Aristotle’s original logic. After Abelard, some 14th- and 15th-century philosophers (mainly Buridan and Ockham) meant to save the Square by declaring the O-corner true when the restrictor class is empty. This ‘leaking O-corner analysis’, or LOCA, was taken up again around 1950 by some American philosopher-logicians, who now have a fairly large following. LOCA does indeed save the Square from logical disaster, but modern analysis shows that this makes it impossible to give a uniform semantic definition of the quantifiers, which thus become ambiguous—an intolerable state of affairs in logic. Klima (Ars Artium, Essays in Philosophical Semantics, Medieval and Modern, Institute of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, 1988) and Parsons (in Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.standford.edu/entries/square/, 2006; Logica Univers. 2:3–11, 2008) have tried to circumvent this problem by introducing a ‘zero’ element into the ontology, standing for non-existing entities and yielding falsity when used for variable substitution. LOCA, both without and with the zero element, is critically discussed and rejected on internal logical and external ontological grounds.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (2008). Apollonius Dyscolus en de semantische syntaxis. In J. van Driel, & T. Janssen (Eds.), Ontheven aan de tijd: Linguistisch-historische studies voor Jan Noordegraaf bij zijn zestigste verjaardag (pp. 15-24). Amsterdam: Stichting Neerlandistiek VU Amsterdam.

    Abstract

    This article places the debate between Chomskyan autonomous syntax and Generative Semantics in the context of the first beginnings of syntactic theory set out in Perì suntáxeõs ('On syntax') by Apollonius Dyscolus (second century CE). It shows that, theoretically speaking, the Apollonian concept of syntax implied an algorithmically organized system of composition rules with lexico-semantic, not a sound-based, input, unlike Apollonius's strictly sound-based postulated rule systems for the composition of phonemes into syllables and of syllables into words. This meaning-based notion of syntax persisted essentially unchanged (though refined by Sanctius during the sixteenth century) until the 1930s, when structuralism began to take the notion of algorithmically organized rule systems for the generation of sentences seriously. This meant a break with the Apollonian meaning-based approach to syntax. The Generative Semantics movement, which arose during the 1960s but was nipped in the bud, implied a return to the tradition, though with much improved formal underpinnings.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1998). Towards a discourse-semantic account of donkey anaphora. In S. Botley, & T. McEnery (Eds.), New Approaches to Discourse Anaphora: Proceedings of the Second Colloquium on Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution (DAARC2) (pp. 212-220). Lancaster: Universiy Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language, Lancaster University.
  • Sjerps, M. J., McQueen, J. M., & Mitterer, H. (2012). Extrinsic normalization for vocal tracts depends on the signal, not on attention. In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2012: 13th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 394-397).

    Abstract

    When perceiving vowels, listeners adjust to speaker-specific vocal-tract characteristics (such as F1) through "extrinsic vowel normalization". This effect is observed as a shift in the location of categorization boundaries of vowel continua. Similar effects have been found with non-speech. Non-speech materials, however, have consistently led to smaller effect-sizes, perhaps because of a lack of attention to non-speech. The present study investigated this possibility. Non-speech materials that had previously been shown to elicit reduced normalization effects were tested again, with the addition of an attention manipulation. The results show that increased attention does not lead to increased normalization effects, suggesting that vowel normalization is mainly determined by bottom-up signal characteristics.
  • Skiba, R. (2008). Korpora in de Zweitspracherwerbsforschung: Internetzugang zu Daten des ungesteuerten Zweitspracherwerbs. In B. Ahrenholz, U. Bredel, W. Klein, M. Rost-Roth, & R. Skiba (Eds.), Empirische Forschung und Theoriebildung: Beiträge aus Soziolinguistik, Gesprochene-Sprache- und Zweitspracherwerbsforschung: Festschrift für Norbert Dittmar (pp. 21-30). Frankfurt am Main: Lang.
  • Skiba, R., Dittmar, N., & Bressem, J. (2008). Planning, collecting, exploring and archiving longitudinal L2 data: Experiences from the P-MoLL project. In L. Ortega, & H. Byrnes (Eds.), The longitudinal study of advanced L2 capacities (pp. 73-88). New York/London: Routledge.
  • Sloetjes, H., & Somasundaram, A. (2012). ELAN development, keeping pace with communities' needs. In N. Calzolari (Ed.), Proceedings of LREC 2012: 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 219-223). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

    Abstract

    ELAN is a versatile multimedia annotation tool that is being developed at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. About a decade ago it emerged out of a number of corpus tools and utilities and it has been extended ever since. This paper focuses on the efforts made to ensure that the application keeps up with the growing needs of that era in linguistics and multimodality research; growing needs in terms of length and resolution of recordings, the number of recordings made and transcribed and the number of levels of annotation per transcription.
  • Sloetjes, H., & Wittenburg, P. (2008). Annotation by category - ELAN and ISO DCR. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008).

    Abstract

    The Data Category Registry is one of the ISO initiatives towards the establishment of standards for Language Resource management, creation and coding. Successful application of the DCR depends on the availability of tools that can interact with it. This paper describes the first steps that have been taken to provide users of the multimedia annotation tool ELAN, with the means to create references from tiers and annotations to data categories defined in the ISO Data Category Registry. It first gives a brief description of the capabilities of ELAN and the structure of the documents it creates. After a concise overview of the goals and current state of the ISO DCR infrastructure, a description is given of how the preliminary connectivity with the DCR is implemented in ELAN
  • De Sousa, H. (2008). The development of echo-subject markers in Southern Vanuatu. In T. J. Curnow (Ed.), Selected papers from the 2007 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society. Australian Linguistic Society.

    Abstract

    One of the defining features of the Southern Vanuatu language family is the echo-subject (ES) marker (Lynch 2001: 177-178). Canonically, an ES marker indicates that the subject of the clause is coreferential with the subject of the preceding clause. This paper begins with a survey of the various ES systems found in Southern Vanuatu. Two prominent differences amongst the ES systems are: a) the level of obligatoriness of the ES marker; and b) the level of grammatical integration between an ES clauses and the preceding clause. The variation found amongst the ES systems reveals a clear path of grammaticalisation from the VP coordinator *ma in Proto–Southern Vanuatu to the various types of ES marker in contemporary Southern Vanuatu languages
  • Stehouwer, H., Durco, M., Auer, E., & Broeder, D. (2012). Federated search: Towards a common search infrastructure. In N. Calzolari (Ed.), Proceedings of LREC 2012: 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 3255-3259). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

    Abstract

    Within scientific institutes there exist many language resources. These resources are often quite specialized and relatively unknown. The current infrastructural initiatives try to tackle this issue by collecting metadata about the resources and establishing centers with stable repositories to ensure the availability of the resources. It would be beneficial if the researcher could, by means of a simple query, determine which resources and which centers contain information useful to his or her research, or even work on a set of distributed resources as a virtual corpus. In this article we propose an architecture for a distributed search environment allowing researchers to perform searches in a set of distributed language resources.
  • Stehouwer, H., & Van den Bosch, A. (2008). Putting the t where it belongs: Solving a confusion problem in Dutch. In S. Verberne, H. Van Halteren, & P.-A. Coppen (Eds.), Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands 2007: Selected Papers from the 18th CLIN Meeting (pp. 21-36). Utrecht: LOT.

    Abstract

    A common Dutch writing error is to confuse a word ending in -d with a neighbor word ending in -dt. In this paper we describe the development of a machine-learning-based disambiguator that can determine which word ending is appropriate, on the basis of its local context. We develop alternative disambiguators, varying between a single monolithic classifier and having multiple confusable experts disambiguate between confusable pairs. Disambiguation accuracy of the best developed disambiguators exceeds 99%; when we apply these disambiguators to an external test set of collected errors, our detection strategy correctly identifies up to 79% of the errors.
  • Stivers, T., & Rossano, F. (2012). Mobilizing response in interaction: A compositional view of questions. In J. P. De Ruiter (Ed.), Questions: Formal, functional and interactional perspectives (pp. 58-80). New York: Cambridge University Press.
  • Stivers, T. (2012). Language socialization in children’s medical encounters. In A. Duranti, E. Ochs, & B. Schieffelin (Eds.), The handbook of language socialization (pp. 247-268). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

    Abstract

    Research on child language socialization has its roots in understanding the ways that adults and other caregivers interact with children in mundane social life and how these practices might enculturate the child into local communicative norms and ways of thinking ( Brown 1998 ; Clancy 1999 ; Danziger 1971 ; de León 1998 ; Garrett and Baquedano-López 2002 ; Heath 1983 ; Ochs and Schieffelin 1983, 1984 ). A second primary area of interest has been the effect of different socialization practices on more formal educational settings ( Heath 1983 ; Howard 2004 ; Michaels 1981 ; Moore 2006 , this volume; Philips 1983 ; Rogoff et al. 2003 ). However, as discussed in other contributions to this volume, language socialization extends into many other facets of life. Just as being a member of a cultural group or being a student requires socialization into the associated rights and obligations, so too does the role of medical patient or client. For instance, patients must understand how to explain their problems ( Halkowski 2006 ; Heritage and Robinson 2006 ); what information they should know about their bodies, their treatment, their life, and their medical history; and where to look during examinations ( Heath 1986 ), to name but a few of the norm-governed aspects of medical interaction. Physicians play an important role in a child's socialization into the patient role by providing
  • Stolker, C. J. J. M., & Poletiek, F. H. (1998). Smartengeld - Wat zijn we eigenlijk aan het doen? Naar een juridische en psychologische evaluatie. In F. Stadermann (Ed.), Bewijs en letselschade (pp. 71-86). Lelystad, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Vermande.
  • Sumer, B., Zwitserlood, I., Perniss, P. M., & Ozyurek, A. (2012). Development of locative expressions by Turkish deaf and hearing children: Are there modality effects? In A. K. Biller, E. Y. Chung, & A. E. Kimball (Eds.), Proceedings of the 36th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 36) (pp. 568-580). Boston: Cascadilla Press.
  • Suppes, P., Böttner, M., & Liang, L. (1998). Machine Learning of Physics Word Problems: A Preliminary Report. In A. Aliseda, R. van Glabbeek, & D. Westerståhl (Eds.), Computing Natural Language (pp. 141-154). Stanford, CA, USA: CSLI Publications.
  • Ten Bosch, L., & Scharenborg, O. (2012). Modeling cue trading in human word recognition. In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2012: 13th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 2003-2006).

    Abstract

    Classical phonetic studies have shown that acoustic-articulatory cues can be interchanged without affecting the resulting phoneme percept (‘cue trading’). Cue trading has so far mainly been investigated in the context of phoneme identification. In this study, we investigate cue trading in word recognition, because words are the units of speech through which we communicate. This paper aims to provide a method to quantify cue trading effects by using a computational model of human word recognition. This model takes the acoustic signal as input and represents speech using articulatory feature streams. Importantly, it allows cue trading and underspecification. Its set-up is inspired by the functionality of Fine-Tracker, a recent computational model of human word recognition. This approach makes it possible, for the first time, to quantify cue trading in terms of a trade-off between features and to investigate cue trading in the context of a word recognition task.
  • Trilsbeek, P., Broeder, D., Van Valkenhoef, T., & Wittenburg, P. (2008). A grid of regional language archives. In C. Calzolari (Ed.), Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008) (pp. 1474-1477). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

    Abstract

    About two years ago, the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, started an initiative to install regional language archives in various places around the world, particularly in places where a large number of endangered languages exist and are being documented. These digital archives make use of the LAT archiving framework [1] that the MPI has developed
    over the past nine years. This framework consists of a number of web-based tools for depositing, organizing and utilizing linguistic resources in a digital archive. The regional archives are in principle autonomous archives, but they can decide to share metadata descriptions and language resources with the MPI archive in Nijmegen and become part of a grid of linked LAT archives. By doing so, they will also take advantage of the long-term preservation strategy of the MPI archive. This paper describes the reasoning
    behind this initiative and how in practice such an archive is set up.
  • Turco, G., & Gubian, M. (2012). L1 Prosodic transfer and priming effects: A quantitative study on semi-spontaneous dialogues. In Q. Ma, H. Ding, & D. Hirst (Eds.), Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Speech Prosody (pp. 386-389). International Speech Communication Association (ISCA).

    Abstract

    This paper represents a pilot investigation of primed accentuation patterns produced by advanced Dutch speakers of Italian as a second language (L2). Contrastive accent patterns within prepositional phrases were elicited in a semispontaneous dialogue entertained with a confederate native speaker of Italian. The aim of the analysis was to compare learner’s contrastive accentual configurations induced by the confederate speaker’s prime against those produced by Italian and Dutch natives in the same testing conditions. F0 and speech rate data were analysed by applying powerful datadriven techniques available in the Functional Data Analysis statistical framework. Results reveal different accentual configurations in L1 and L2 Italian in response to the confederate’s prime. We conclude that learner’s accentual patterns mirror those ones produced by their L1 control group (prosodic-transfer hypothesis) although the hypothesis of a transient priming effect on learners’ choice of contrastive patterns cannot be completely ruled out.
  • Van Valin Jr., R. D., & Guerrero, L. (2012). De sujetos, pivotes y controladores: El argumento sintácticamente privilegiado. In R. Marial, L. Guerrero, & C. González Vergara (Eds.), El funcionalismo en la teoría lingüística: La gramática del papel y la referencia (pp. 247-267). Madrid: Akal.

    Abstract

    Translated and expanded version of 'Privileged syntactic arguments, pivots and controllers
  • Van Uytvanck, D., Dukers, A., Ringersma, J., & Trilsbeek, P. (2008). Language-sites: Accessing and presenting language resources via geographic information systems. In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, J. Odijk, S. Piperidis, & D. Tapias (Eds.), Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008). Paris: European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

    Abstract

    The emerging area of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has proven to add an interesting dimension to many research projects. Within the language-sites initiative we have brought together a broad range of links to digital language corpora and resources. Via Google Earth's visually appealing 3D-interface users can spin the globe, zoom into an area they are interested in and access directly the relevant language resources. This paper focuses on several ways of relating the map and the online data (lexica, annotations, multimedia recordings, etc.). Furthermore, we discuss some of the implementation choices that have been made, including future challenges. In addition, we show how scholars (both linguists and anthropologists) are using GIS tools to fulfill their specific research needs by making use of practical examples. This illustrates how both scientists and the general public can benefit from geography-based access to digital language data
  • Van Geenhoven, V. (1998). On the Argument Structure of some Noun Incorporating Verbs in West Greenlandic. In M. Butt, & W. Geuder (Eds.), The Projection of Arguments - Lexical and Compositional Factors (pp. 225-263). Stanford, CA, USA: CSLI Publications.
  • Van Valin Jr., R. D. (1998). The acquisition of WH-questions and the mechanisms of language acquisition. In M. Tomasello (Ed.), The new psychology of language: Cognitive and functional approaches to language structure (pp. 221-249). Mahwah, New Jersey: Erlbaum.
  • Van Berkum, J. J. A. (2012). The electrophysiology of discourse and conversation. In M. J. Spivey, K. McRae, & M. F. Joanisse (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of psycholinguistics (pp. 589-614). New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Abstract

    Introduction: What’s happening in the brains of two people having a conversation? One reasonable guess is that in the fMRI scanner we’d see most of their brains light up. Another is that their EEG will be a total mess, reflecting dozens of interacting neuronal systems. Conversation recruits all of the basic language systems reviewed in this book. It also heavily taxes cognitive systems more likely to be found in handbooks of memory, attention and control, or social cognition (Brownell & Friedman, 2001). With most conversations going beyond the single utterance, for instance, they place a heavy load on episodic memory, as well as on the systems that allow us to reallocate cognitive resources to meet the demands of a dynamically changing situation. Furthermore, conversation is a deeply social and collaborative enterprise (Clark, 1996; this volume), in which interlocutors have to keep track of each others state of mind and coordinate on such things as taking turns, establishing common ground, and the goals of the conversation.
  • Van Valin Jr., R. D. (2012). Some issues in the linking between syntax and semantics in relative clauses. In B. Comrie, & Z. Estrada-Fernández (Eds.), Relative Clauses in languages of the Americas: A typological overview (pp. 47-64). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Abstract

    Relative clauses present an interesting challenge for theories of the syntaxsemantics interface, because one element functions simultaneously in the matrix and relative clauses. The exact nature of the challenge depends on whether the relative clause is externally-headed or internallyheaded. Standard analyses of relative clauses are grounded in the analysis of Englishtype externally-headed constructions involving a relative pronoun, e.g. The horse which the man bought was a good horse, despite its typological rarity, and such accounts typically involve movement rules, both overt and covert, and phonologically null elements. The analysis of internally-headed relative clauses often involves the positing of an abstract structure including a null external head, with covert movement of the internal head to that position. The purpose of this paper is to show that the essential features of both types of relative clause can be captured in a syntactic theory that eschews movement rules and phonologically null elements, Role and Reference Grammar. It will be argued that a single set of linking principles can handle the syntax-to-semantics linking for both types. Keywords: Externally-headed relative clauses; internally-headed relative clauses; Role and Reference Grammar; linking syntax and semantics
  • Van Valin Jr., R. D. (2008). Some remarks on universal grammar. In J. Guo, E. Lieven, N. Budwig, S. Ervin-Tripp, K. Nakamura, & S. Ozcaliskan (Eds.), Crosslinguistic approaches to the psychology of language: Research in the tradition of Dan Isaac Slobin (pp. 311-320). New York: Psychology Press.
  • Van Valin Jr., R. D. (2008). RPs and the nature of lexical and syntactic categories in role and reference grammar. In R. D. Van Valin Jr. (Ed.), Investigations of the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface (pp. 161-178). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Van Uytvanck, D., Stehouwer, H., & Lampen, L. (2012). Semantic metadata mapping in practice: The Virtual Language Observatory. In N. Calzolari (Ed.), Proceedings of LREC 2012: 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 1029-1034). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

    Abstract

    In this paper we present the Virtual Language Observatory (VLO), a metadata-based portal for language resources. It is completely based on the Component Metadata (CMDI) and ISOcat standards. This approach allows for the use of heterogeneous metadata schemas while maintaining the semantic compatibility. We describe the metadata harvesting process, based on OAI-PMH, and the conversion from several formats (OLAC, IMDI and the CLARIN LRT inventory) to their CMDI counterpart profiles. Then we focus on some post-processing steps to polish the harvested records. Next, the ingestion of the CMDI files into the VLO facet browser is described. We also include an overview of the changes since the first version of the VLO, based on user feedback from the CLARIN community. Finally there is an overview of additional ideas and improvements for future versions of the VLO.
  • Váradi, T., Wittenburg, P., Krauwer, S., Wynne, M., & Koskenniemi, K. (2008). CLARIN: Common language resources and technology infrastructure. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008).

    Abstract

    This paper gives an overview of the CLARIN project [1], which aims to create a research infrastructure that makes language resources and technology (LRT) available and readily usable to scholars of all disciplines, in particular the humanities and social sciences (HSS).
  • Verkerk, A., & Lestrade, S. (2008). The encoding of adjectives. In M. Van Koppen, & B. Botma (Eds.), Linguistics in the Netherlands 2008 (pp. 157-168). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Abstract

    In this paper, we will give a unified account of the cross-linguistic variation in the encoding of adjectives in predicative and attributive constructions. Languages may differ in the encoding strategy of adjectives in the predicative domain (Stassen 1997), and sometimes change this strategy in the attributive domain (Verkerk 2007). We will show that the interaction of two principles, that of faithfulness to the semantic class of a lexical root and that of faithfulness to discourse functions, can account for all attested variation in the encoding of adjectives.
  • Viebahn, M. C., Ernestus, M., & McQueen, J. M. (2012). Co-occurrence of reduced word forms in natural speech. In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2012: 13th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 2019-2022).

    Abstract

    This paper presents a corpus study that investigates the co-occurrence of reduced word forms in natural speech. We extracted Dutch past participles from three different speech registers and investigated the influence of several predictor variables on the presence and duration of schwas in prefixes and /t/s in suffixes. Our results suggest that reduced word forms tend to co-occur even if we partial out the effect of speech rate. The implications of our findings for episodic and abstractionist models of lexical representation are discussed.
  • De Vos, C., & Zeshan, U. (2012). Introduction: Demographic, sociocultural, and linguistic variation across rural signing communities. In U. Zeshan, & C. de Vos (Eds.), Sign languages in village communities: Anthropological and linguistic insights (pp. 2-23). Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.
  • De Vos, C. (2012). Kata Kolok: An updated sociolinguistic profile. In U. Zeshan (Ed.), Sign languages in village communities: Anthropological and linguistic insights (pp. 381-386). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • De Vos, C. (2012). The Kata Kolok perfective in child signing: Coordination of manual and non-manual components. In U. Zeshan, & C. De Vos (Eds.), Sign languages in village communities: Anthropological and linguistic insights (pp. 127-152). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Vosse, T. G., & Kempen, G. (2008). Parsing verb-final clauses in German: Garden-path and ERP effects modeled by a parallel dynamic parser. In B. Love, K. McRae, & V. Sloutsky (Eds.), Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference on the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 261-266). Washington: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Experimental sentence comprehension studies have shown that superficially similar German clauses with verb-final word order elicit very different garden-path and ERP effects. We show that a computer implementation of the Unification Space parser (Vosse & Kempen, 2000) in the form of a localist-connectionist network can model the observed differences, at least qualitatively. The model embodies a parallel dynamic parser that, in contrast with existing models, does not distinguish between consecutive first-pass and reanalysis stages, and does not use semantic or thematic roles. It does use structural frequency data and animacy information.
  • Warner, N. L., McQueen, J. M., Liu, P. Z., Hoffmann, M., & Cutler, A. (2012). Timing of perception for all English diphones [Abstract]. Program abstracts from the 164th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 132(3), 1967.

    Abstract

    Information in speech does not unfold discretely over time; perceptual cues are gradient and overlapped. However, this varies greatly across segments and environments: listeners cannot identify the affricate in /ptS/ until the frication, but information about the vowel in /li/ begins early. Unlike most prior studies, which have concentrated on subsets of language sounds, this study tests perception of every English segment in every phonetic environment, sampling perceptual identification at six points in time (13,470 stimuli/listener; 20 listeners). Results show that information about consonants after another segment is most localized for affricates (almost entirely in the release), and most gradual for voiced stops. In comparison to stressed vowels, unstressed vowels have less information spreading to
    neighboring segments and are less well identified. Indeed, many vowels,
    especially lax ones, are poorly identified even by the end of the following segment. This may partly reflect listeners’ familiarity with English vowels’ dialectal variability. Diphthongs and diphthongal tense vowels show the most sudden improvement in identification, similar to affricates among the consonants, suggesting that information about segments defined by acoustic change is highly localized. This large dataset provides insights into speech perception and data for probabilistic modeling of spoken word recognition.
  • Weber, A., & Melinger, A. (2008). Name dominance in spoken word recognition is (not) modulated by expectations: Evidence from synonyms. In A. Botinis (Ed.), Proceedings of ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop On Experimental Linguistics (ExLing 2008) (pp. 225-228). Athens: University of Athens.

    Abstract

    Two German eye-tracking experiments tested whether top-down expectations interact with acoustically-driven word-recognition processes. Competitor objects with two synonymous names were paired with target objects whose names shared word onsets with either the dominant or the non-dominant name of the competitor. Non-dominant names of competitor objects were either introduced before the test session or not. Eye-movements were monitored while participants heard instructions to click on target objects. Results demonstrate dominant and non-dominant competitor names were considered for recognition, regardless of top-down expectations, though dominant names were always activated more strongly.
  • Weber, A. (1998). Listening to nonnative language which violates native assimilation rules. In D. Duez (Ed.), Proceedings of the European Scientific Communication Association workshop: Sound patterns of Spontaneous Speech (pp. 101-104).

    Abstract

    Recent studies using phoneme detection tasks have shown that spoken-language processing is neither facilitated nor interfered with by optional assimilation, but is inhibited by violation of obligatory assimilation. Interpretation of these results depends on an assessment of their generality, specifically, whether they also obtain when listeners are processing nonnative language. Two separate experiments are presented in which native listeners of German and native listeners of Dutch had to detect a target fricative in legal monosyllabic Dutch nonwords. All of the nonwords were correct realisations in standard Dutch. For German listeners, however, half of the nonwords contained phoneme strings which violate the German fricative assimilation rule. Whereas the Dutch listeners showed no significant effects, German listeners detected the target fricative faster when the German fricative assimilation was violated than when no violation occurred. The results might suggest that violation of assimilation rules does not have to make processing more difficult per se.
  • Weber, A., & Broersma, M. (2012). Spoken word recognition in second language acquisition. In C. A. Chapelle (Ed.), The encyclopedia of applied linguistics. Bognor Regis: Wiley-Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal1104.

    Abstract

    In order to decode the message of a speaker, listeners have to recognize individual words in the speaker's utterance.
  • Weber, A. (2008). What eye movements can tell us about spoken-language processing: A psycholinguistic survey. In C. M. Riehl (Ed.), Was ist linguistische Evidenz: Kolloquium des Zentrums Sprachenvielfalt und Mehrsprachigkeit, November 2006 (pp. 57-68). Aachen: Shaker.
  • Weber, A. (2008). What the eyes can tell us about spoken-language comprehension [Abstract]. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 124, 2474-2474.

    Abstract

    Lexical recognition is typically slower in L2 than in L1. Part of the difficulty comes from a not precise enough processing of L2 phonemes. Consequently, L2 listeners fail to eliminate candidate words that L1 listeners can exclude from competing for recognition. For instance, the inability to distinguish /r/ from /l/ in rocket and locker makes for Japanese listeners both words possible candidates when hearing their onset (e.g., Cutler, Weber, and Otake, 2006). The L2 disadvantage can, however, be dispelled: For L2 listeners, but not L1 listeners, L2 speech from a non-native talker with the same language background is known to be as intelligible as L2 speech from a native talker (e.g., Bent and Bradlow, 2003). A reason for this may be that L2 listeners have ample experience with segmental deviations that are characteristic for their own accent. On this account, only phonemic deviations that are typical for the listeners’ own accent will cause spurious lexical activation in L2 listening (e.g., English magic pronounced as megic for Dutch listeners). In this talk, I will present evidence from cross-modal priming studies with a variety of L2 listener groups, showing how the processing of phonemic deviations is accent-specific but withstands fine phonetic differences.
  • Widlok, T., Rapold, C. J., & Hoymann, G. (2008). Multimedia analysis in documentation projects: Kinship, interrogatives and reciprocals in ǂAkhoe Haiǁom. In K. D. Harrison, D. S. Rood, & A. Dwyer (Eds.), Lessons from documented endangered languages (pp. 355-370). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Abstract

    This contribution emphasizes the role of multimedia data not only for archiving languages but also for creating opportunities for innovative analyses. In the case at hand, video material was collected as part of the documentation of Akhoe Haiom, a Khoisan language spoken in northern Namibia. The multimedia documentation project brought together linguistic and anthropological work to highlight connections between specialized domains, namely kinship terminology, interrogatives and reciprocals. These connections would have gone unnoticed or undocumented in more conventional modes of language description. It is suggested that such an approach may be particularly appropriate for the documentation of endangered languages since it directs the focus of attention away from isolated traits of languages towards more complex practices of communication that are also frequently threatened with extinction.
  • Widlok, T. (2008). The dilemmas of walking: A comparative view. In T. Ingold, & J. L. Vergunst (Eds.), Ways of walking: Ethnography and practice on foot (pp. 51-66). Aldershot: Ashgate.
  • Windhouwer, M., Broeder, D., & Van Uytvanck, D. (2012). A CMD core model for CLARIN web services. In Proceedings of LREC 2012: 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 41-48).

    Abstract

    In the CLARIN infrastructure various national projects have started initiatives to allow users of the infrastructure to create chains or workflows of web services. The Component Metadata (CMD) core model for web services described in this paper tries to align the metadata descriptions of these various initiatives. This should allow chaining/workflow engines to find matching and invoke services. The paper describes the landscape of web services architectures and the state of the national initiatives. Based on this a CMD core model for CLARIN is proposed, which, within some limits, can be adapted to the specific needs of an initiative by the standard facilities of CMD. The paper closes with the current state and usage of the model and a look into the future.
  • Windhouwer, M., & Wright, S. E. (2012). Linking to linguistic data categories in ISOcat. In C. Chiarcos, S. Nordhoff, & S. Hellmann (Eds.), Linked data in linguistics: Representing and connecting language data and language metadata (pp. 99-107). Berlin: Springer.

    Abstract

    ISO Technical Committee 37, Terminology and other language and content resources, established an ISO 12620:2009 based Data Category Registry (DCR), called ISOcat (see http://www.isocat.org), to foster semantic interoperability of linguistic resources. However, this goal can only be met if the data categories are reused by a wide variety of linguistic resource types. A resource indicates its usage of data categories by linking to them. The small DC Reference XML vocabulary is used to embed links to data categories in XML documents. The link is established by an URI, which servers as the Persistent IDentifier (PID) of a data category. This paper discusses the efforts to mimic the same approach for RDF-based resources. It also introduces the RDF quad store based Relation Registry RELcat, which enables ontological relationships between data categories not supported by ISOcat and thus adds an extra level of linguistic knowledge.
  • Windhouwer, M. (2012). RELcat: a Relation Registry for ISOcat data categories. In N. Calzolari (Ed.), Proceedings of LREC 2012: 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 3661-3664). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

    Abstract

    The ISOcat Data Category Registry contains basically a flat and easily extensible list of data category specifications. To foster reuse and standardization only very shallow relationships among data categories are stored in the registry. However, to assist crosswalks, possibly based on personal views, between various (application) domains and to overcome possible proliferation of data categories more types of ontological relationships need to be specified. RELcat is a first prototype of a Relation Registry, which allows storing arbitrary relationships. These relationships can reflect the personal view of one linguist or a larger community. The basis of the registry is a relation type taxonomy that can easily be extended. This allows on one hand to load existing sets of relations specified in, for example, an OWL (2) ontology or SKOS taxonomy. And on the other hand allows algorithms that query the registry to traverse the stored semantic network to remain ignorant of the original source vocabulary. This paper describes first experiences with RELcat and explains some initial design decisions.

Share this page