Publications

Abstract

Recent eye-tracking research has revealed that spoken language can guide eye gaze very rapidly (and closely time-locked to the unfolding speech) toward referents in the visual world. We discuss whether, and to what extent, such language-mediated eye movements are automatic rather than subject to conscious and controlled decision-making. We consider whether language-mediated eye movements adhere to four main criteria of automatic behavior, namely, whether they are fast and efficient, unintentional, unconscious, and overlearned (i.e., arrived at through extensive practice). Current evidence indicates that language-driven oculomotor behavior is fast but not necessarily always efficient. It seems largely unintentional though there is also some evidence that participants can actively use the information in working memory to avoid distraction in search. Language-mediated eye movements appear to be for the most part unconscious and have all the hallmarks of an overlearned behavior. These data are suggestive of automatic mechanisms linking language to potentially referred-to visual objects, but more comprehensive and rigorous testing of this hypothesis is needed.

Abstract

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

Abstract

Our bodily experiences play an important role in the way that we think and speak. Abstract language is, however, difficult to reconcile with this body-centred view, unless we appreciate the role metaphors play. To explore the role of the senses across semantic domains, we focus on perception metaphors, and examine their realisation across diverse languages, methods, and approaches. To what extent do mappings in perception metaphor adhere to predictions based on our biological propensities; and to what extent is there space for cross-linguistic and cross-cultural variation? We find that while some metaphors have widespread commonality, there is more diversity attested than should be comfortable for universalist accounts.

Abstract

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

Abstract

Language production involves the retrieval of information from memory, the planning of an articulatory program, and executive control and self-monitoring. These processes can be related to the domains of long-term memory, motor control, and executive control. Here, we argue that studying neuronal oscillations provides an important opportunity to understand how general neuronal computational principles support language production, also helping elucidate relationships between language and other domains of cognition. For each relevant domain, we provide a brief review of the findings in the literature with respect to neuronal oscillations. Then, we show how similar patterns are found in the domain of language production, both through review of previous literature and novel findings. We conclude that neurophysiological mechanisms, as reflected in modulations of neuronal oscillations, may act as a fundamental basis for bringing together and enriching the fields of language and cognition.

Abstract

Although humans are the ultimate “natural language generators”, the area of psycholinguistic modeling has been somewhat underrepresented in recent approaches to Natural Language Generation in computer science. To draw attention to the area and illustrate its potential relevance to Natural Language Generation, I provide an overview of recent work on psycholinguistic modeling of language production together with some key empirical findings, state-of-the-art experimental techniques, and their historical roots. The techniques include analyses of speech-error corpora, chronometric analyses, eyetracking, and neuroimaging.
The overview is built around the issue of cognitive control in natural language generation, concentrating on the production of single words, which is an essential ingredient of the generation of larger utterances. Most of the work exploited the fact that human speakers are good but not perfect at resisting temptation, which has provided some critical clues about the nature of the underlying system.

Abstract

This paper deals with the Shawi nominalizing suffixes -su’~-ru’~-nu’ ‘general nominalizer’, -napi/-te’/-tun‘performer/agent nominalizer’, -pi’‘patient nominalizer’, and -nan ‘instrument nominalizer’. The goal of this article is to provide a description of nominalization in Shawi. Throughout this paper I apply the Generalized Scale Model (GSM) (Malchukov, 2006) to Shawi verbal nominalizations, with the intention of presenting a formal representation that will provide a basis for future areal and typological studies of nominalization. In addition, I dialogue with Shibatani’s model to see how the loss or gain of categories correlates with the lexical or grammatical nature of nominalizations. strong nominalization in Shawi correlates with lexical nominalization, whereas weak nominalizations correlate with grammatical nominalization. A typology which takes into account the productivity of the nominalizers is also discussed.

Abstract

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Background: The Gaze “Machinery” Gaze “Machinery” in Social Interaction Future Directions

Abstract

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

Abstract

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

Abstract

Listeners’ signals of recipiency, such as “Mm-hm” or “uh-huh” in English, are the most elementary or minimal “conversational turns” possible. Minimal, because apart from acknowledging recipiency and inviting the speaker to continue with his/her next turn, they do not add any new information to the discourse of the conversation. The goal of this project is to gather cross cultural information on listeners’ feedback behaviour during conversation. Listeners in a conversation usually provide short signals that indicate to the speaker that they are still “with the speaker”. These signals could be verbal (like for instance “mm hm” in English or “hm hm” in Dutch) or nonverbal (visual), like nodding. Often, these signals are produced in overlap with the speaker’s vocalisation. If listeners do not produce these signals, speakers often invite them explicitly (e.g. “are you still there?” in a telephone conversation). Our goal is to investigate what kind of signals are used by listeners of different languages to signal “recipiency” to the speaker.

Abstract

In this chapter we present material on the acquisition of ergative marking on noun phrases in three languages of Papua New Guinea: Kaluli, Ku Waru, and Duna. The expression of ergativity in all the languages is broadly similar, but sensitive to language-specific features, and this pattern of similarity and difference is reflected in the available acquisition data. Children acquire adult-like ergative marking at about the same pace, reaching similar levels of mastery by 3;00 despite considerable differences in morphological complexity of ergative marking among the languages. What may be more important – as a factor in accounting for the relative uniformity of acquisition in this respect – are the similarities in patterns of interactional scaffolding that emerge from a comparison of the three cases.

Abstract

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

Abstract

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

Abstract

Kilivila, the Austronesian language of the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea, has a rich inventory of terms - nouns, verbs, adjectives and idiomatic phrases and expressions - to precisely refer to, and to differentiate emotions and inner feelings. This paper describes how the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea deal with the public display of emotions. Forms of emotion control in public encounters are discussed and explained on the basis of ritual communication which pervades the Trobrianders' verbal and non-verbal behaviour. Especially highlighted is the Trobrianders' metalinguistic concept of "biga sopa" with its important role for emotion control in encounters that may run the risk of escalating from argument and conflict to aggression and violence.

Abstract

This paper reports on the results of my research on the lexical means Kilivila offers its speakers to refer to emotions and inner feelings. Data were elicited with 18 “Ekman’s faces” in which photos of the faces of one woman and two men illustrate the allegedly universal basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise) and with film stimuli staging standard emotions. The data are discussed on the basis of the following research questions: * How “effable” are they or do we observe ineffability – the difficulty of putting experiences into words – within the domain of emotions? * Do consultants agree with one another in how they name emotions? * Are facial expressions or situations better cues for labeling?

Abstract

Human ethologists have shown that humans are both attracted to others and at the same time fear them. They refer to this kind of fear with the technical term ‘social fear’ and claim that “it is alleviated with personal acquaintance but remains a principle characteristic of interpersonal behaviour. As a result, we maintain various degrees of greater distance between ourselves and others depending on the amount of confidence we have in the other” (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989: 335). The goal of this task is to conduct exploratory, heuristic research to establish a new subproject that – based on a corpus of video data – will investigate various forms of human spatial behaviour cross-culturally.

Abstract

This project aims to investigate how speakers of various languages in indigenous cultures verbally reason about moral issues. The ways in which a solution for a moral problem is found, phrased and justified will be taken as the basis for researching reasoning processes that manifest themselves verbally in the speakers’ arguments put forward to solve a number of moral problems which will be presented to them in the form of unfinished story plots or scenarios that ask for a solution. The plots chosen attempt to present common problems in human society and human behaviour. They should function to elicit moral discussion and/or moral arguments in groups of consultants of at least three persons.

Abstract

This paper deals with the dramatic environmental, social and cultural changes on the Trobriand Islands which I experienced during 16 long- and short-term fieldtrips from 1982 to 2012. I first report on the climate change I experienced there over the years and provide a survey about the demographic changes on the Trobriand Islands – highlighting the situation in Tauwema, my village of residence on Kaile’una Island. Finally I report on the social and cultural impact these dramatic changes have for the Trobriand Islanders and their culture.

Abstract

Die Sprachwissenschaft hat den Begriff und das Konzept ›Rituelle Kommunikation‹ von der vergleichenden Verhaltensforschung übernommen. Humanethologen unterscheiden eine Reihe von sogenannten ›Ausdrucksbewegungen‹, die in der Mimik, der Gestik, der Personaldistanz (Proxemik) und der Körperhaltung (Kinesik) zum Ausdruck kommen. Viele dieser Ausdrucksbewegungen haben sich zu spezifischen Signalen entwickelt. Ethologen definieren Ritualisierung als Veränderung von Verhaltensweisen im Dienst der Signalbildung. Die zu Signalen ritualisierten Verhaltensweisen sind Rituale. Im Prinzip kann jede Verhaltensweise zu einem Signal werden, entweder im Laufe der Evolution oder durch Konventionen, die in einer bestimmten Gemeinschaft gültig sind, die solche Signale kulturell entwickelt hat und die von ihren Mitgliedern tradiert und gelernt werden.

Abstract

Incremental sentence generation imposes special constraints on the representation of the grammar and the design of the formulator (the module which is responsible for constructing the syntactic and morphological structure). In the model of natural speech production presented here, a formalism called Segment Grammar is used for the representation of linguistic knowledge. We give a definition of this formalism and present a formulator design which relies on it. Next, we present an object- oriented implementation of Segment Grammar. Finally, we compare Segment Grammar with other formalisms.

Abstract

When people request information, they have a variety of means for eliciting the information. In English two of the primary resources for eliciting information include asking questions, making statements about their interlocutor (thereby generating confirmation or revision). But within these types there are a variety of ways that these information elicitors can be designed. The goal of this task is to examine how different languages seek and provide information, the extent to which syntax vs prosodic resources are used (e.g., in questions), and the extent to which the design of information seeking actions and their responses display a structural preference to promote social solidarity.

Abstract

The current study examines, for the first time, the viewpoint preferences of signing children in expressing spatial relations that require imposing a viewpoint (left-right, front-behind). We elicited spatial descriptions from deaf children (4–9 years of age) acquiring Turkish Sign Language (TİD) natively from their deaf parents and from adult native signers of TİD. Adults produced these spatial descriptions from their own viewpoint and from that of their addressee depending on whether the objects were located on the lateral or the sagittal axis. TİD-acquiring children, on the other hand, described all spatial configurations from their own viewpoint. Differences were also found between children and adults in the type of linguistic devices and how they are used to express such spatial relations.

Abstract

In sign languages, where space is often used to talk about space, expressions of spatial relations (e.g., ON, IN, UNDER, BEHIND) may rely on analogue mappings of real space onto signing space. In contrast, spoken languages express space in mostly categorical ways (e.g. adpositions). This raises interesting questions about the role of language modality in the acquisition of expressions of spatial relations. However, whether and to what extent modality influences the acquisition of spatial language is controversial – mostly due to the lack of direct comparisons of Deaf children to Deaf adults and to age-matched hearing children in similar tasks. Furthermore, the previous studies have taken English as the only model for spoken language development of spatial relations.
Therefore, we present a balanced study in which spatial expressions by deaf and hearing children in two different age-matched groups (preschool children and school-age children) are systematically compared, as well as compared to the spatial expressions of adults. All participants performed the same tasks, describing angular (LEFT, RIGHT, FRONT, BEHIND) and non-angular spatial configurations (IN, ON, UNDER) of different objects (e.g. apple in box; car behind box).
The analysis of the descriptions with non-angular spatial relations does not show an effect of modality on the development of
locative expressions in TİD and Turkish. However, preliminary results of the analysis of expressions of angular spatial relations suggest that signers provide angular information in their spatial descriptions
more frequently than Turkish speakers in all three age groups, and thus showing a potentially different developmental pattern in this domain. Implications of the findings with regard to the development of relations in spatial language and cognition will be discussed.

Abstract

A forum devoted to the relationship between music and language begins with an implicit assumption: There is at least one common principle that is central to all human musical systems and all languages, but that is not characteristic of (most) other domains. Why else should these two categories be paired together for analysis? We propose that one candidate for a common principle is their structure. In this chapter, we explore the nature of that structure—and its consequences for psychological and neurological processing mechanisms—within and across these two domains.

Abstract

This Field Manual entry has been superceded by the published version: Van Staden, M., & Majid, A. (2006). Body colouring task. Language Sciences, 28(2-3), 158-161. doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2005.11.004.

Abstract

In her path-breaking 1986 paper, Johanna Nichols proposed a typological contrast between head-marking and dependent-marking languages. Nichols argues that even though the syntactic relations between the head and its dependents are the same in both types of language, the syntactic “bond” between them is not the same; in dependent-marking languages it is one of government, whereas in head-marking languages it is one of apposition. This distinction raises an important question for linguistic theory: How can this contrast – government versus apposition – which can show up in all of the major phrasal types in a language, be captured? The purpose of this paper is to explore the various approaches that have been taken in an attempt to capture the difference between head-marked and dependent-marked syntax in different linguistic theories. The basic problem that head-marking languages pose for syntactic theory will be presented, and then generative approaches will be discussed. The analysis of head-marked structure in Role and Reference Grammar will be presented

Abstract

Disorders of speech and language are highly heritable, providing strong
support for a genetic basis. However, the underlying genetic architecture is complex,
involving multiple risk factors. This chapter begins by discussing genetic loci associated
with common multifactorial language-related impairments and goes on to
detail the only gene (known as FOXP2) to be directly implicated in a rare monogenic
speech and language disorder. Although FOXP2 was initially uncovered in
humans, model systems have been invaluable in progressing our understanding of
the function of this gene and its associated pathways in language-related areas of the
brain. Research in species from mouse to songbird has revealed effects of this gene
on relevant behaviours including acquisition of motor skills and learned vocalisations
and demonstrated a role for Foxp2 in neuronal connectivity and signalling,
particularly in the striatum. Animal models have also facilitated the identification of
wider neurogenetic networks thought to be involved in language development and
disorder and allowed the investigation of new candidate genes for disorders involving
language, such as CNTNAP2 and FOXP1. Ongoing work in animal models promises
to yield new insights into the genetic and neural mechanisms underlying human
speech and language