Publications

Displaying 301 - 400 of 1140
  • Friedlaender, J., Hunley, K., Dunn, M., Terrill, A., Lindström, E., Reesink, G., & Friedlaender, F. (2009). Linguistics more robust than genetics [Letter to the editor]. Science, 324, 464-465. doi:10.1126/science.324_464c.
  • Frost, R. L. A., Isbilen, E. S., Christiansen, M. H., & Monaghan, P. (2019). Testing the limits of non-adjacent dependency learning: Statistical segmentation and generalisation across domains. In A. K. Goel, C. M. Seifert, & C. Freksa (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2019) (pp. 1787-1793). Montreal, QB: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Achieving linguistic proficiency requires identifying words from speech, and discovering the constraints that govern the way those words are used. In a recent study of non-adjacent dependency learning, Frost and Monaghan (2016) demonstrated that learners may perform these tasks together, using similar statistical processes - contrary to prior suggestions. However, in their study, non-adjacent dependencies were marked by phonological cues (plosive-continuant-plosive structure), which may have influenced learning. Here, we test the necessity of these cues by comparing learning across three conditions; fixed phonology, which contains these cues, varied phonology, which omits them, and shapes, which uses visual shape sequences to assess the generality of statistical processing for these tasks. Participants segmented the sequences and generalized the structure in both auditory conditions, but learning was best when phonological cues were present. Learning was around chance on both tasks for the visual shapes group, indicating statistical processing may critically differ across domains.
  • Frost, R. L. A., Monaghan, P., & Christiansen, M. H. (2019). Mark my words: High frequency marker words impact early stages of language learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 45(10), 1883-1898. doi:10.1037/xlm0000683.

    Abstract

    High frequency words have been suggested to benefit both speech segmentation and grammatical categorization of the words around them. Despite utilizing similar information, these tasks are usually investigated separately in studies examining learning. We determined whether including high frequency words in continuous speech could support categorization when words are being segmented for the first time. We familiarized learners with continuous artificial speech comprising repetitions of target words, which were preceded by high-frequency marker words. Crucially, marker words distinguished targets into 2 distributionally defined categories. We measured learning with segmentation and categorization tests and compared performance against a control group that heard the artificial speech without these marker words (i.e., just the targets, with no cues for categorization). Participants segmented the target words from speech in both conditions, but critically when the marker words were present, they influenced acquisition of word-referent mappings in a subsequent transfer task, with participants demonstrating better early learning for mappings that were consistent (rather than inconsistent) with the distributional categories. We propose that high-frequency words may assist early grammatical categorization, while speech segmentation is still being learned.

    Additional information

    Supplemental Material
  • Gaby, A., & Faller, M. (2003). Reciprocity questionnaire. In N. J. Enfield (Ed.), Field research manual 2003, part I: Multimodal interaction, space, event representation (pp. 77-80). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.877641.

    Abstract

    This project is part of a collaborative project with the research group “Reciprocals across languages” led by Nick Evans. One goal of this project is to develop a typology of reciprocals. This questionnaire is designed to help field workers get an overview over the type of markers used in the expression of reciprocity in the language studied.
  • Galbiati, A., Verga, L., Giora, E., Zucconi, M., & Ferini-Strambi, L. (2019). The risk of neurodegeneration in REM sleep behavior disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 43, 37-46. doi:10.1016/j.smrv.2018.09.008.

    Abstract

    Several studies report an association between REM Sleep Behavior Disorder (RBD) and neurodegenerative diseases, in particular synucleinopathies. Interestingly, the onset of RBD precedes the development of neurodegeneration by several years. This review and meta-analysis aims to establish the rate of conversion of RBD into neurodegenerative diseases. Longitudinal studies were searched from the PubMed, Web of Science, and SCOPUS databases. Using random-effect modeling, we performed a meta-analysis on the rate of RBD conversions into neurodegeneration. Furthermore, we fitted a Kaplan-Meier analysis and compared the differences between survival curves of different diseases with log-rank tests. The risk for developing neurodegenerative diseases was 33.5% at five years follow-up, 82.4% at 10.5 years and 96.6% at 14 years. The average conversion rate was 31.95% after a mean duration of follow-up of 4.75 ± 2.43 years. The majority of RBD patients converted to Parkinson's Disease (43%), followed by Dementia with Lewy Bodies (25%). The estimated risk for RBD patients to develop a neurodegenerative disease over a long-term follow-up is more than 90%. Future studies should include control group for the evaluation of REM sleep without atonia as marker for neurodegeneration also in non-clinical population and target RBD as precursor of neurodegeneration to develop protective trials.
  • Galke, L., Vagliano, I., & Scherp, A. (2019). Can graph neural networks go „online“? An analysis of pretraining and inference. In Proceedings of the Representation Learning on Graphs and Manifolds: ICLR2019 Workshop.

    Abstract

    Large-scale graph data in real-world applications is often not static but dynamic,
    i. e., new nodes and edges appear over time. Current graph convolution approaches
    are promising, especially, when all the graph’s nodes and edges are available dur-
    ing training. When unseen nodes and edges are inserted after training, it is not
    yet evaluated whether up-training or re-training from scratch is preferable. We
    construct an experimental setup, in which we insert previously unseen nodes and
    edges after training and conduct a limited amount of inference epochs. In this
    setup, we compare adapting pretrained graph neural networks against retraining
    from scratch. Our results show that pretrained models yield high accuracy scores
    on the unseen nodes and that pretraining is preferable over retraining from scratch.
    Our experiments represent a first step to evaluate and develop truly online variants
    of graph neural networks.
  • Galke, L., Melnychuk, T., Seidlmayer, E., Trog, S., Foerstner, K., Schultz, C., & Tochtermann, K. (2019). Inductive learning of concept representations from library-scale bibliographic corpora. In K. David, K. Geihs, M. Lange, & G. Stumme (Eds.), Informatik 2019: 50 Jahre Gesellschaft für Informatik - Informatik für Gesellschaft (pp. 219-232). Bonn: Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. doi:10.18420/inf2019_26.
  • Ganushchak, L. Y., & Schiller, N. O. (2009). Speaking in one’s second language under time pressure: An ERP study on verbal self-monitoring in German-Dutch bilinguals. Psychophysiology, 46, 410-419. doi:10.1111/j.1469-8986.2008.00774.x.

    Abstract

    This study addresses how verbal self-monitoring and the Error-Related Negativity (ERN) are affected by time pressure
    when a task is performed in a second language as opposed to performance in the native language. German–Dutch
    bilinguals were required to perform a phoneme-monitoring task in Dutch with and without a time pressure manipulation.
    We obtained an ERN following verbal errors that showed an atypical increase in amplitude under time
    pressure. This finding is taken to suggest that under time pressure participants had more interference from their native
    language, which in turn led to a greater response conflict and thus enhancement of the amplitude of the ERN. This
    result demonstrates once more that the ERN is sensitive to psycholinguistic manipulations and suggests that the
    functioning of the verbal self-monitoring systemduring speaking is comparable to other performance monitoring, such
    as action monitoring.
  • Gao, Y., Zheng, L., Liu, X., Nichols, E. S., Zhang, M., Shang, L., Ding, G., Meng, Z., & Liu, L. (2019). First and second language reading difficulty among Chinese–English bilingual children: The prevalence and influences from demographic characteristics. Frontiers in Psychology, 10: 2544. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02544.

    Abstract

    Learning to read a second language (L2) can pose a great challenge for children who have already been struggling to read in their first language (L1). Moreover, it is not clear whether, to what extent, and under what circumstances L1 reading difficulty increases the risk of L2 reading difficulty. This study investigated Chinese (L1) and English (L2) reading skills in a large representative sample of 1,824 Chinese–English bilingual children in Grades 4 and 5 from both urban and rural schools in Beijing. We examined the prevalence of reading difficulty in Chinese only (poor Chinese readers, PC), English only (poor English readers, PE), and both Chinese and English (poor bilingual readers, PB) and calculated the co-occurrence, that is, the chances of becoming a poor reader in English given that the child was already a poor reader in Chinese. We then conducted a multinomial logistic regression analysis and compared the prevalence of PC, PE, and PB between children in Grade 4 versus Grade 5, in urban versus rural areas, and in boys versus girls. Results showed that compared to girls, boys demonstrated significantly higher risk of PC, PE, and PB. Meanwhile, compared to the 5th graders, the 4th graders demonstrated significantly higher risk of PC and PB. In addition, children enrolled in the urban schools were more likely to become better second language readers, thus leading to a concerning rural–urban gap in the prevalence of L2 reading difficulty. Finally, among these Chinese–English bilingual children, regardless of sex and school location, poor reading skill in Chinese significantly increased the risk of also being a poor English reader, with a considerable and stable co-occurrence of approximately 36%. In sum, this study suggests that despite striking differences between alphabetic and logographic writing systems, L1 reading difficulty still significantly increases the risk of L2 reading difficulty. This indicates the shared meta-linguistic skills in reading different writing systems and the importance of understanding the universality and the interdependent relationship of reading between different writing systems. Furthermore, the male disadvantage (in both L1 and L2) and the urban–rural gap (in L2) found in the prevalence of reading difficulty calls for special attention to disadvantaged populations in educational practice.
  • Gao, X., Dera, J., Nijhoff, A. D., & Willems, R. M. (2019). Is less readable liked better? The case of font readability in poetry appreciation. PLoS One, 14(12): e0225757. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0225757.

    Abstract

    Previous research shows conflicting findings for the effect of font readability on comprehension and memory for language. It has been found that—perhaps counterintuitively–a hard to read font can be beneficial for language comprehension, especially for difficult language. Here we test how font readability influences the subjective experience of poetry reading. In three experiments we tested the influence of poem difficulty and font readability on the subjective experience of poems. We specifically predicted that font readability would have opposite effects on the subjective experience of easy versus difficult poems. Participants read poems which could be more or less difficult in terms of conceptual or structural aspects, and which were presented in a font that was either easy or more difficult to read. Participants read existing poems and subsequently rated their subjective experience (measured through four dependent variables: overall liking, perceived flow of the poem, perceived topic clarity, and perceived structure). In line with previous literature we observed a Poem Difficulty x Font Readability interaction effect for subjective measures of poetry reading. We found that participants rated easy poems as nicer when presented in an easy to read font, as compared to when presented in a hard to read font. Despite the presence of the interaction effect, we did not observe the predicted opposite effect for more difficult poems. We conclude that font readability can influence reading of easy and more difficult poems differentially, with strongest effects for easy poems.

    Additional information

    https://osf.io/jwcqt/
  • Garcia, N., Lenkiewicz, P., Freire, M., & Monteiro, P. (2009). A new architecture for optical burst switching networks based on cooperative control. In Proceeding of the 8th IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (IEEE NCA09) (pp. 310-313).

    Abstract

    This paper presents a new architecture for optical burst switched networks where the control plane of the network functions in a cooperative manner. Each node interprets the data conveyed by the control packet and forwards it to the next nodes, making the control plane of the network distribute the relevant information to all the nodes in the network. A cooperation transmission tree is used, thus allowing all the nodes to store the information related to the traffic management in the network, and enabling better network resource planning at each node. A model of this network architecture is proposed, and its performance is evaluated.
  • Garcia, R., Roeser, J., & Höhle, B. (2019). Thematic role assignment in the L1 acquisition of Tagalog: Use of word order and morphosyntactic markers. Language Acquisition, 26(3), 235-261. doi:10.1080/10489223.2018.1525613.

    Abstract

    It is a common finding across languages that young children have problems in understanding patient-initial sentences. We used Tagalog, a verb-initial language with a reliable voice-marking system and highly frequent patient voice constructions, to test the predictions of several accounts that have been proposed to explain this difficulty: the frequency account, the Competition Model, and the incremental processing account. Study 1 presents an analysis of Tagalog child-directed speech, which showed that the dominant argument order is agent-before-patient and that morphosyntactic markers are highly valid cues to thematic role assignment. In Study 2, we used a combined self-paced listening and picture verification task to test how Tagalog-speaking adults and 5- and 7-year-old children process reversible transitive sentences. Results showed that adults performed well in all conditions, while children’s accuracy and listening times for the first noun phrase indicated more difficulty in interpreting patient-initial sentences in the agent voice compared to the patient voice. The patient voice advantage is partly explained by both the frequency account and incremental processing account.
  • Garrido, L., Eisner, F., McGettigan, C., Stewart, L., Sauter, D., Hanley, J. R., Schweinberger, S. R., Warren, J. D., & Duchaine, B. (2009). Developmental phonagnosia: A selective deficit of vocal identity recognition. Neuropsychologia, 47(1), 123-131. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2008.08.003.

    Abstract

    Phonagnosia, the inability to recognize familiar voices, has been studied in brain-damaged patients but no cases due to developmental problems have been reported. Here we describe the case of KH, a 60-year-old active professional woman who reports that she has always experienced severe voice recognition difficulties. Her hearing abilities are normal, and an MRI scan showed no evidence of brain damage in regions associated with voice or auditory perception. To better understand her condition and to assess models of voice and high-level auditory processing, we tested KH on behavioural tasks measuring voice recognition, recognition of vocal emotions, face recognition, speech perception, and processing of environmental sounds and music. KH was impaired on tasks requiring the recognition of famous voices and the learning and recognition of new voices. In contrast, she performed well on nearly all other tasks. Her case is the first report of developmental phonagnosia, and the results suggest that the recognition of a speaker’s vocal identity depends on separable mechanisms from those used to recognize other information from the voice or non-vocal auditory stimuli.
  • Gazendam, L., Wartena, C., Malaise, V., Schreiber, G., De Jong, A., & Brugman, H. (2009). Automatic annotation suggestions for audiovisual archives: Evaluation aspects. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 34(2/3), 172-188. doi:10.1179/174327909X441090.

    Abstract

    In the context of large and ever growing archives, generating annotation suggestions automatically from textual resources related to the documents to be archived is an interesting option in theory. It could save a lot of work in the time consuming and expensive task of manual annotation and it could help cataloguers attain a higher inter-annotator agreement. However, some questions arise in practice: what is the quality of the automatically produced annotations? How do they compare with manual annotations and with the requirements for annotation that were defined in the archive? If different from the manual annotations, are the automatic annotations wrong? In the CHOICE project, partially hosted at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, the Dutch public archive for audiovisual broadcasts, we automatically generate annotation suggestions for cataloguers. In this paper, we define three types of evaluation of these annotation suggestions: (1) a classic and strict evaluation measure expressing the overlap between automatically generated keywords and the manual annotations, (2) a loosened evaluation measure for which semantically very similar annotations are also considered as relevant matches, and (3) an in-use evaluation of the usefulness of manual versus automatic annotations in the context of serendipitous browsing. During serendipitous browsing, the annotations (manual or automatic) are used to retrieve and visualize semantically related documents.
  • Gehrig, J., Michalareas, G., Forster, M.-T., Lei, J., Hok, P., Laufs, H., Senft, C., Seifert, V., Schoffelen, J.-M., Hanslmayr, H., & Kell, C. A. (2019). Low-frequency oscillations code speech during verbal working memory. The Journal of Neuroscience, 39(33), 6498-6512. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0018-19.2019.

    Abstract

    The way the human brain represents speech in memory is still unknown. An obvious characteristic of speech is its evolvement over time.
    During speech processing, neural oscillations are modulated by the temporal properties of the acoustic speech signal, but also acquired
    knowledge on the temporal structure of language influences speech perception-related brain activity. This suggests that speech could be
    represented in the temporal domain, a form of representation that the brain also uses to encode autobiographic memories. Empirical
    evidence for such a memory code is lacking. We investigated the nature of speech memory representations using direct cortical recordings
    in the left perisylvian cortex during delayed sentence reproduction in female and male patients undergoing awake tumor surgery.
    Our results reveal that the brain endogenously represents speech in the temporal domain. Temporal pattern similarity analyses revealed
    that the phase of frontotemporal low-frequency oscillations, primarily in the beta range, represents sentence identity in working memory.
    The positive relationship between beta power during working memory and task performance suggests that working memory
    representations benefit from increased phase separation.
  • Gentner, D., & Bowerman, M. (2009). Why some spatial semantic categories are harder to learn than others: The typological prevalence hypothesis. 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. 465-480). New York: Psychology Press.
  • Gialluisi, A., Andlauer, T. F. M., Mirza-Schreiber, N., Moll, K., Becker, J., Hoffmann, P., Ludwig, K. U., Czamara, D., St Pourcain, B., Brandler, W., Honbolygó, F., Tóth, D., Csépe, V., Huguet, G., Morris, A. P., Hulslander, J., Willcutt, E. G., DeFries, J. C., Olson, R. K., Smith, S. D. and 25 moreGialluisi, A., Andlauer, T. F. M., Mirza-Schreiber, N., Moll, K., Becker, J., Hoffmann, P., Ludwig, K. U., Czamara, D., St Pourcain, B., Brandler, W., Honbolygó, F., Tóth, D., Csépe, V., Huguet, G., Morris, A. P., Hulslander, J., Willcutt, E. G., DeFries, J. C., Olson, R. K., Smith, S. D., Pennington, B. F., Vaessen, A., Maurer, U., Lyytinen, H., Peyrard-Janvid, M., Leppänen, P. H. T., Brandeis, D., Bonte, M., Stein, J. F., Talcott, J. B., Fauchereau, F., Wilcke, A., Francks, C., Bourgeron, T., Monaco, A. P., Ramus, F., Landerl, K., Kere, J., Scerri, T. S., Paracchini, S., Fisher, S. E., Schumacher, J., Nöthen, M. M., Müller-Myhsok, B., & Schulte-Körne, G. (2019). Genome-wide association scan identifies new variants associated with a cognitive predictor of dyslexia. Translational Psychiatry, 9(1): 77. doi:10.1038/s41398-019-0402-0.

    Abstract

    Developmental dyslexia (DD) is one of the most prevalent learning disorders, with high impact on school and psychosocial development and high comorbidity with conditions like attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), depression, and anxiety. DD is characterized by deficits in different cognitive skills, including word reading, spelling, rapid naming, and phonology. To investigate the genetic basis of DD, we conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of these skills within one of the largest studies available, including nine cohorts of reading-impaired and typically developing children of European ancestry (N = 2562–3468). We observed a genome-wide significant effect (p < 1 × 10−8) on rapid automatized naming of letters (RANlet) for variants on 18q12.2, within MIR924HG (micro-RNA 924 host gene; rs17663182 p = 4.73 × 10−9), and a suggestive association on 8q12.3 within NKAIN3 (encoding a cation transporter; rs16928927, p = 2.25 × 10−8). rs17663182 (18q12.2) also showed genome-wide significant multivariate associations with RAN measures (p = 1.15 × 10−8) and with all the cognitive traits tested (p = 3.07 × 10−8), suggesting (relational) pleiotropic effects of this variant. A polygenic risk score (PRS) analysis revealed significant genetic overlaps of some of the DD-related traits with educational attainment (EDUyears) and ADHD. Reading and spelling abilities were positively associated with EDUyears (p ~ [10−5–10−7]) and negatively associated with ADHD PRS (p ~ [10−8−10−17]). This corroborates a long-standing hypothesis on the partly shared genetic etiology of DD and ADHD, at the genome-wide level. Our findings suggest new candidate DD susceptibility genes and provide new insights into the genetics of dyslexia and its comorbities.
  • Giering, E., Tinbergen, M., & Verbunt, A. (2009). Research Report 2007 | 2008. Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
  • Gisselgard, J., Petersson, K. M., Baddeley, A., & Ingvar, M. (2003). The irrelevant speech effect: A PET study. Neuropsychologia, 41, 1899-1911. doi:10.1016/S0028-3932(03)00122-2.

    Abstract

    Positron emission tomography (PET) was performed in normal volunteers during a serial recall task under the influence of irrelevant speech comprising both single item repetition and multi-item sequences. An interaction approach was used to identify brain areas specifically related to the irrelevant speech effect. We interpreted activations as compensatory recruitment of complementary working memory processing, and decreased activity in terms of suppression of task relevant areas invoked by the irrelevant speech. The interaction between the distractors and working memory revealed a significant effect in the left, and to a lesser extent in the right, superior temporal region, indicating that initial phonological processing was relatively suppressed. Additional areas of decreased activity were observed in an a priori defined cortical network related to verbalworking memory, incorporating the bilateral superior temporal and inferior/middle frontal corticesn extending into Broca’s area on the left. We also observed a weak activation in the left inferior parietal cortex, a region suggested to reflect the phonological store, the subcomponent where the interference is assumed to take place. The results suggest that the irrelevant speech effect is correlated with and thus tentatively may be explained in terms of a suppression of components of the verbal working memory network as outlined. The results can be interpreted in terms of inhibitory top–down attentional mechanisms attenuating the influence of the irrelevant speech, although additional studies are clearly necessary to more fully characterize the nature of this phenomenon and its theoretical implications for existing short-term memory models
  • Glaser, B., & Holmans, P. (2009). Comparison of methods for combining case-control and family-based association studies. Human Heredity, 68(2), 106-116. doi:10.1159/000212503.

    Abstract

    OBJECTIVES: Combining the analysis of family-based samples with unrelated individuals can enhance the power of genetic association studies. Various combined analysis techniques have been recently developed; as yet, there have been no comparisons of their power, or robustness to confounding factors. We investigated empirically the power of up to six combined methods using simulated samples of trios and unrelated cases/controls (TDTCC), trios and unrelated controls (TDTC), and affected sibpairs with parents and unrelated cases/controls (ASPFCC). METHODS: We simulated multiplicative, dominant and recessive models with varying risk parameters in single samples. Additionally, we studied false-positive rates and investigated, if possible, the coverage of the true genetic effect (TDTCC). RESULTS/CONCLUSIONS: Under the TDTCC design, we identified four approaches with equivalent power and false-positive rates. Combined statistics were more powerful than single-sample statistics or a pooled chi(2)-statistic when risk parameters were similar in single samples. Adding parental information to the CC part of the joint likelihood increased the power of generalised logistic regression under the TDTC but not the TDTCC scenario. Formal testing of differences between risk parameters in subsamples was the most sensitive approach to avoid confounding in combined analysis. Non-parametric analysis based on Monte-Carlo testing showed the highest power for ASPFCC samples.
  • Glock, P., Raum, B., Heermann, T., Kretschmer, S., Schweizer, J., Mücksch, J., Alagöz, G., & Schwille, P. (2019). Stationary patterns in a two-protein reaction-diffusion system. ACS Synthetic Biology, 8(1), 148-157. doi:10.1021/acssynbio.8b00415.

    Abstract

    Patterns formed by reaction-diffusion mechanisms are crucial for the development or sustenance of most organisms in nature. Patterns include dynamic waves, but are more often found as static distributions, such as animal skin patterns. Yet, a simplistic biological model system to reproduce and quantitatively investigate static reaction-diffusion patterns has been missing so far. Here, we demonstrate that the Escherichia coli MM system, known for its oscillatory behavior between the cell poles, is under certain conditions capable of transitioning to quasi-stationary protein distributions on membranes closely resembling Turing patterns. We systematically titrated both proteins, MinD and MinE, and found that removing all purification tags and linkers from the N-terminus of MinE was critical for static patterns to occur. At small bulk heights, dynamic patterns dominate, such as in rod-shaped microcompartments. We see implications of this work for studying pattern formation in general, but also for creating artificial gradients as downstream cues in synthetic biology applications.
  • De Goede, D., Shapiro, L. P., Wester, F., Swinney, D. A., & Bastiaanse, Y. R. M. (2009). The time course of verb processing in Dutch sentences. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 38(3), 181-199. doi:10.1007/s10936-009-9117-3.

    Abstract

    The verb has traditionally been characterized as the central element in a sentence. Nevertheless, the exact role of the verb during the actual ongoing comprehension of a sentence as it unfolds in time remains largely unknown. This paper reports the results of two Cross-Modal Lexical Priming (CMLP) experiments detailing the pattern of verb priming during on-line processing of Dutch sentences. Results are contrasted with data from a third CMLP experiment on priming of nouns in similar sentences. It is demonstrated that the meaning of a matrix verb remains active throughout the entire matrix clause, while this is not the case for the meaning of a subject head noun. Activation of the meaning of the verb only dissipates upon encountering a clear signal as to the start of a new clause.
  • Goldin-Meadow, S., Ozyurek, A., Sancar, B., & Mylander, C. (2009). Making language around the globe: A cross-linguistic study of homesign in the United States, China, and Turkey. 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. 27-39). New York: Psychology Press.
  • Goldin-Meadow, S., Gentner, D., Ozyurek, A., & Gurcanli, O. (2009). Spatial language supports spatial cognition: Evidence from deaf homesigners [abstract]. Cognitive Processing, 10(Suppl. 2), S133-S134.
  • Goldrick, M., McClain, R., Cibelli, E., Adi, Y., Gustafson, E., Moers, C., & Keshet, J. (2019). The influence of lexical selection disruptions on articulation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 45(6), 1107-1141. doi:10.1037/xlm0000633.

    Abstract

    Interactive models of language production predict that it should be possible to observe long-distance interactions; effects that arise at one level of processing influence multiple subsequent stages of representation and processing. We examine the hypothesis that disruptions arising in nonform-based levels of planning—specifically, lexical selection—should modulate articulatory processing. A novel automatic phonetic analysis method was used to examine productions in a paradigm yielding both general disruptions to formulation processes and, more specifically, overt errors during lexical selection. This analysis method allowed us to examine articulatory disruptions at multiple levels of analysis, from whole words to individual segments. Baseline performance by young adults was contrasted with young speakers’ performance under time pressure (which previous work has argued increases interaction between planning and articulation) and performance by older adults (who may have difficulties inhibiting nontarget representations, leading to heightened interactive effects). The results revealed the presence of interactive effects. Our new analysis techniques revealed these effects were strongest in initial portions of responses, suggesting that speech is initiated as soon as the first segment has been planned. Interactive effects did not increase under response pressure, suggesting interaction between planning and articulation is relatively fixed. Unexpectedly, lexical selection disruptions appeared to yield some degree of facilitation in articulatory processing (possibly reflecting semantic facilitation of target retrieval) and older adults showed weaker, not stronger interactive effects (possibly reflecting weakened connections between lexical and form-level representations).
  • Goldrick, M., Brehm, L., Pyeong Whan, C., & Smolensky, P. (2019). Transient blend states and discrete agreement-driven errors in sentence production. In G. J. Snover, M. Nelson, B. O'Connor, & J. Pater (Eds.), Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL 2019) (pp. 375-376). doi:10.7275/n0b2-5305.
  • Goncharova, M. V., & Klenova, A. V. (2019). Siberian crane chick calls reflect their thermal state. Bioacoustics, 28, 115-128. doi:10.1080/09524622.2017.1399827.

    Abstract

    Chicks can convey information about their needs with calls. But it is still unknown if there are any universal need indicators in chick vocalizations. Previous studies have shown that in some species vocal activity and/or temporal-frequency variables of calls are related to the chick state, whereas other studies did not confirm it. Here, we tested experimentally whether vocal activity and temporal-frequency variables of calls change with cooling. We studied 10 human-raised
    Siberian crane (Grus leucogeranus) chicks at 3–15 days of age. We found that the cooled chicks produced calls higher in fundamental
    frequency and power variables, longer in duration and at a higher calling rate than in the control chicks. However, we did not find
    significant changes in level of entropy and occurrence of non-linear phenomena in chick calls recorded during the experimental cooling. We suggest that the level of vocal activity is a universal indicator of need for warmth in precocial and semi-precocial birds (e.g. cranes), but not in altricial ones. We also assume that coding of needs via temporal-frequency variables of calls is typical in species whose adults could not confuse their chicks with other chicks. Siberian cranes stay on separate territories during their breeding season, so parents do not need to check individuality of their offspring in the home area. In this case, all call characteristics are available for other purposes and serve to communicate chicks’ vital needs.
  • Goriot, C. (2019). Early-English education works no miracles: Cognitive and linguistic development in mainstream, early-English, and bilingual primary-school pupils in the Netherlands. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Goudbeek, M., Swingley, D., & Smits, R. (2009). Supervised and unsupervised learning of multidimensional acoustic categories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 35, 1913-1933. doi:10.1037/a0015781.

    Abstract

    Learning to recognize the contrasts of a language-specific phonemic repertoire can be viewed as forming categories in a multidimensional psychophysical space. Research on the learning of distributionally defined visual categories has shown that categories defined over I dimension are easy to learn and that learning multidimensional categories is more difficult but tractable under specific task conditions. In 2 experiments, adult participants learned either a unidimensional ora multidimensional category distinction with or without supervision (feedback) during learning. The unidimensional distinctions were readily learned and supervision proved beneficial, especially in maintaining category learning beyond the learning phase. Learning the multidimensional category distinction proved to be much more difficult and supervision was not nearly as beneficial as with unidimensionally defined categories. Maintaining a learned multidimensional category distinction was only possible when the distributional information (hat identified the categories remained present throughout the testing phase. We conclude that listeners are sensitive to both trial-by-trial feedback and the distributional information in the stimuli. Even given limited exposure, listeners learned to use 2 relevant dimensions. albeit with considerable difficulty.
  • Graham, S. A., Jégouzo, S. A. F., Yan, S., Powlesland, A. S., Brady, J. P., Taylor, M. E., & Drickamer, K. (2009). Prolectin, a glycan-binding receptor on dividing B cells in germinal centers. The Journal of Biological Chemistry, 284, 18537-18544. doi:10.1074/jbc.M109.012807.

    Abstract

    Prolectin, a previously undescribed glycan-binding receptor, has been identified by re-screening of the human genome for genes encoding proteins containing potential C-type carbohydrate-recognition domains. Glycan array analysis revealed that the carbohydrate-recognition domain in the extracellular domain of the receptor binds glycans with terminal α-linked mannose or fucose residues. Prolectin expressed in fibroblasts is found at the cell surface, but unlike many glycan-binding receptors it does not mediate endocytosis of a neoglycoprotein ligand. However, compared with other known glycan-binding receptors, the receptor contains an unusually large intracellular domain that consists of multiple sequence motifs, including phosphorylated tyrosine residues, that allow it to interact with signaling molecules such as Grb2. Immunohistochemistry has been used to demonstrate that prolectin is expressed on a specialized population of proliferating B cells in germinal centers. Thus, this novel receptor has the potential to function in carbohydrate-mediated communication between cells in the germinal center.
  • Gray, R., & Jordan, F. (2000). Language trees support the express-train sequence of Austronesian expansion. Nature, 405, 1052-1055. doi:10.1038/35016575.

    Abstract

    Languages, like molecules, document evolutionary history. Darwin(1) observed that evolutionary change in languages greatly resembled the processes of biological evolution: inheritance from a common ancestor and convergent evolution operate in both. Despite many suggestions(2-4), few attempts have been made to apply the phylogenetic methods used in biology to linguistic data. Here we report a parsimony analysis of a large language data set. We use this analysis to test competing hypotheses - the "express-train''(5) and the "entangled-bank''(6,7) models - for the colonization of the Pacific by Austronesian-speaking peoples. The parsimony analysis of a matrix of 77 Austronesian languages with 5,185 lexical items produced a single most-parsimonious tree. The express-train model was converted into an ordered geographical character and mapped onto the language tree. We found that the topology of the language tree was highly compatible with the express-train model.
  • Gretsch, P. (2003). Omission impossible?: Topic and Focus in Focal Ellipsis. In K. Schwabe, & S. Winkler (Eds.), The Interfaces: Deriving and interpreting omitted structures (pp. 341-365). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • Grey, S., Schubel, L. C., McQueen, J. M., & Van Hell, J. G. (2019). Processing foreign-accented speech in a second language: Evidence from ERPs during sentence comprehension in bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 22(5), 912-929. doi:10.1017/S1366728918000937.

    Abstract

    This study examined electrophysiological correlates of sentence comprehension of native-accented and foreign-accented
    speech in a second language (L2), for sentences produced in a foreign accent different from that associated with the listeners’
    L1. Bilingual speaker-listeners process different accents in their L2 conversations, but the effects on real-time L2 sentence
    comprehension are unknown. Dutch–English bilinguals listened to native American-English accented sentences and foreign
    (and for them unfamiliarly-accented) Chinese-English accented sentences while EEG was recorded. Behavioral sentence
    comprehension was highly accurate for both native-accented and foreign-accented sentences. ERPs showed different patterns
    for L2 grammar and semantic processing of native- and foreign-accented speech. For grammar, only native-accented speech
    elicited an Nref. For semantics, both native- and foreign-accented speech elicited an N400 effect, but with a delayed onset
    across both accent conditions. These findings suggest that the way listeners comprehend native- and foreign-accented
    sentences in their L2 depends on their familiarity with the accent.
  • Griffin, Z. M., & Bock, K. (2000). What the eyes say about speaking. Psychological Science, 11(4), 274-279. doi:10.1111/1467-9280.00255.

    Abstract

    To study the time course of sentence formulation, we monitored the eye movements of speakers as they described simple events. The similarity between speakers' initial eye movements and those of observers performing a nonverbal event-comprehension task suggested that response-relevant information was rapidly extracted from scenes, allowing speakers to select grammatical subjects based on comprehended events rather than salience. When speaking extemporaneously, speakers began fixating pictured elements less than a second before naming them within their descriptions, a finding consistent with incremental lexical encoding. Eye movements anticipated the order of mention despite changes in picture orientation, in who-did-what-to-whom, and in sentence structure. The results support Wundt's theory of sentence production.

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  • Grove, J., Ripke, S., Als, T. D., Mattheisen, M., Walters, R., Won, H., Pallesen, J., Agerbo, E., Andreassen, O. A., Anney, R., Belliveau, R., Bettella, F., Buxbaum, J. D., Bybjerg-Grauholm, J., Bækved-Hansen, M., Cerrato, F., Chambert, K., Christensen, J. H., Churchhouse, C., Dellenvall, K. and 55 moreGrove, J., Ripke, S., Als, T. D., Mattheisen, M., Walters, R., Won, H., Pallesen, J., Agerbo, E., Andreassen, O. A., Anney, R., Belliveau, R., Bettella, F., Buxbaum, J. D., Bybjerg-Grauholm, J., Bækved-Hansen, M., Cerrato, F., Chambert, K., Christensen, J. H., Churchhouse, C., Dellenvall, K., Demontis, D., De Rubeis, S., Devlin, B., Djurovic, S., Dumont, A., Goldstein, J., Hansen, C. S., Hauberg, M. E., Hollegaard, M. V., Hope, S., Howrigan, D. P., Huang, H., Hultman, C., Klei, L., Maller, J., Martin, J., Martin, A. R., Moran, J., Nyegaard, M., Nærland, T., Palmer, D. S., Palotie, A., Pedersen, C. B., Pedersen, M. G., Poterba, T., Poulsen, J. B., St Pourcain, B., Qvist, P., Rehnström, K., Reichenberg, A., Reichert, J., Robinson, E. B., Roeder, K., Roussos, P., Saemundsen, E., Sandin, S., Satterstrom, F. K., Smith, G. D., Stefansson, H., Stefansson, K., Steinberg, S., Stevens, C., Sullivan, P. F., Turley, P., Walters, G. B., Xu, X., Autism Spectrum Disorders Working Group of The Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, BUPGEN, Major Depressive Disorder Working Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, Me Research Team, Geschwind, D., Nordentoft, M., Hougaard, D. M., Werge, T., Mors, O., Mortensen, P. B., Neale, B. M., Daly, M. J., & Børglum, A. D. (2019). Identification of common genetic risk variants for autism spectrum disorder. Nature Genetics, 51, 431-444. doi:10.1038/s41588-019-0344-8.

    Abstract

    Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a highly heritable and heterogeneous group of neurodevelopmental phenotypes diagnosed in more than 1% of children. Common genetic variants contribute substantially to ASD susceptibility, but to date no individual variants have been robustly associated with ASD. With a marked sample-size increase from a unique Danish population resource, we report a genome-wide association meta-analysis of 18,381 individuals with ASD and 27,969 controls that identified five genome-wide-significant loci. Leveraging GWAS results from three phenotypes with significantly overlapping genetic architectures (schizophrenia, major depression, and educational attainment), we identified seven additional loci shared with other traits at equally strict significance levels. Dissecting the polygenic architecture, we found both quantitative and qualitative polygenic heterogeneity across ASD subtypes. These results highlight biological insights, particularly relating to neuronal function and corticogenesis, and establish that GWAS performed at scale will be much more productive in the near term in ASD.

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  • Gubian, M., Torreira, F., Strik, H., & Boves, L. (2009). Functional data analysis as a tool for analyzing speech dynamics a case study on the French word c'était. In Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2009) (pp. 2199-2202).

    Abstract

    In this paper we introduce Functional Data Analysis (FDA) as a tool for analyzing dynamic transitions in speech signals. FDA makes it possible to perform statistical analyses of sets of mathematical functions in the same way as classical multivariate analysis treats scalar measurement data. We illustrate the use of FDA with a reduction phenomenon affecting the French word c'était /setε/ 'it was', which can be reduced to [stε] in conversational speech. FDA reveals that the dynamics of the transition from [s] to [t] in fully reduced cases may still be different from the dynamics of [s] - [t] transitions in underlying /st/ clusters such as in the word stage.
  • Le Guen, O. (2009). Geocentric gestural deixis among Yucatecan Maya (Quintana Roo, México). In 18th IACCP Book of Selected Congress Papers (pp. 123-136). Athens, Greece: Pedio Books Publishing.
  • Le Guen, O. (2003). Quand les morts reviennent, réflexion sur l'ancestralité chez les Mayas des Basses Terres. Journal de la Société des Américanistes, 89(2), 171-205.

    Abstract

    When the dead come home… Remarks on ancestor worship among the Lowland Mayas. In Amerindian ethnographical literature, ancestor worship is often mentioned but evidence of its existence is lacking. This article will try to demonstrate that some Lowland Maya do worship ancestors ; it will use precise criteria taken from ethnological studies of societies where ancestor worship is common, compared to maya beliefs and practices. The All Souls’ Day, or hanal pixan, seems to be the most significant manifestation of this cult. Our approach will be comparative, through time – using colonial and ethnographical data of the twentieth century, and space – contemplating uses and beliefs of two maya groups, the Yucatec and the Lacandon Maya.
  • Le Guen, O. (2009). The ethnography of emotions: A field worker's guide. In A. Majid (Ed.), Field manual volume 12 (pp. 31-34). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.446076.

    Abstract

    The goal of this task is to investigate cross-cultural emotion categories in language and thought. This entry is designed to provide researchers with some guidelines to describe the emotional repertoire of a community from an emic perspective. The first objective is to offer ethnographic tools and a questionnaire in order to understand the semantics of emotional terms and the local conception of emotions. The second objective is to identify the local display rules of emotions in communicative interactions.
  • Guest, O., Kanayet, F. J., & Love, B. C. (2019). Gerrymandering and computational redistricting. Journal of Computational Social Science, 2, 119-131. doi:10.1007/s42001-019-00053-9.

    Abstract

    Partisan gerrymandering poses a threat to democracy. Moreover, the complexity of the districting task may exceed human capacities. One potential solution is using computational models to automate the districting process by optimizing objective and open criteria, such as how spatially compact districts are. We formulated one such model that minimised pairwise distance between voters within a district. Using US Census Bureau data, we confirmed our prediction that the difference in compactness between the computed and actual districts would be greatest for states that are large and, therefore, difficult for humans to properly district given their limited capacities. The computed solutions highlighted differences in how humans and machines solve this task with machine solutions more fully optimised and displaying emergent properties not evident in human solutions. These results suggest a division of labour in which humans debate and formulate districting criteria whereas machines optimise the criteria to draw the district boundaries. We discuss how criteria can be expanded beyond notions of compactness to include other factors, such as respecting municipal boundaries, historic communities, and relevant legislation.
  • Gullberg, M., & Kita, S. (2009). Attention to speech-accompanying gestures: Eye movements and information uptake. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 33(4), 251-277. doi:10.1007/s10919-009-0073-2.

    Abstract

    There is growing evidence that addressees in interaction integrate the semantic information conveyed by speakers’ gestures. Little is known, however, about whether and how addressees’ attention to gestures and the integration of gestural information can be modulated. This study examines the influence of a social factor (speakers’ gaze to their own gestures), and two physical factors (the gesture’s location in gesture space and gestural holds) on addressees’ overt visual attention to gestures (direct fixations of gestures) and their uptake of gestural information. It also examines the relationship between gaze and uptake. The results indicate that addressees’ overt visual attention to gestures is affected both by speakers’ gaze and holds but for different reasons, whereas location in space plays no role. Addressees’ uptake of gesture information is only influenced by speakers’ gaze. There is little evidence of a direct relationship between addressees’ direct fixations of gestures and their uptake.
  • Gullberg, M. (2003). Eye movements and gestures in human face-to-face interaction. In J. Hyönä, R. Radach, & H. Deubel (Eds.), The mind's eyes: Cognitive and applied aspects of eye movements (pp. 685-703). Oxford: Elsevier.

    Abstract

    Gestures are visuospatial events, meaning carriers, and social interactional phenomena. As such they constitute a particularly favourable area for investigating visual attention in a complex everyday situation under conditions of competitive processing. This chapter discusses visual attention to spontaneous gestures in human face-to-face interaction as explored with eye-tracking. Some basic fixation patterns are described, live and video-based settings are compared, and preliminary results on the relationship between fixations and information processing are outlined.
  • Gullberg, M., & Kita, S. (2003). Das Beachten von Gesten: Eine Studie zu Blickverhalten und Integration gestisch ausgedrückter Informationen. In Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (Ed.), Jahrbuch der Max Planck Gesellschaft 2003 (pp. 949-953). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
  • Gullberg, M. (2003). Gestures, referents, and anaphoric linkage in learner varieties. In C. Dimroth, & M. Starren (Eds.), Information structure, linguistic structure and the dynamics of language acquisition. (pp. 311-328). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Abstract

    This paper discusses how the gestural modality can contribute to our understanding of anaphoric linkage in learner varieties, focusing on gestural anaphoric linkage marking the introduction, maintenance, and shift of reference in story retellings by learners of French and Swedish. The comparison of gestural anaphoric linkage in native and non-native varieties reveals what appears to be a particular learner variety of gestural cohesion, which closely reflects the characteristics of anaphoric linkage in learners' speech. Specifically, particular forms co-occur with anaphoric gestures depending on the information organisation in discourse. The typical nominal over-marking of maintained referents or topic elements in speech is mirrored by gestural (over-)marking of the same items. The paper discusses two ways in which this finding may further the understanding of anaphoric over-explicitness of learner varieties. An addressee-based communicative perspective on anaphoric linkage highlights how over-marking in gesture and speech may be related to issues of hyper-clarity and ambiguity. An alternative speaker-based perspective is also explored in which anaphoric over-marking is seen as related to L2 speech planning.
  • Gullberg, M. (2009). Gestures and the development of semantic representations in first and second language acquisition. Acquisition et Interaction en Langue Etrangère..Languages, Interaction, and Acquisition (former AILE), 1, 117-139.

    Abstract

    This paper argues that speech-associated gestures can usefully inform studies exploring development of meaning in first and second language acquisition. The example domain is caused motion or placement meaning (putting a cup on a table) where acquisition problems have been observed and where adult native gesture use reflects crosslinguistically different placement verb semantics. Against this background, the paper summarises three studies examining the development of semantic representations in Dutch children acquiring Dutch, and adult learners’ acquiring Dutch and French placement verbs. Overall, gestures change systematically with semantic development both in children and adults and (1) reveal what semantic elements are included in current semantic representations, whether target-like or not, and (2) highlight developmental shifts in those representations. There is little evidence that gestures chiefly act as a support channel. Instead, the data support the theoretical notion that speech and gesture form an integrated system, opening new possibilities for studying the processes of acquisition.
  • Gullberg, M. (2009). Reconstructing verb meaning in a second language: How English speakers of L2 Dutch talk and gesture about placement. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 7, 221-245. doi:10.1075/arcl.7.09gul.

    Abstract

    This study examines to what extent English speakers of L2 Dutch reconstruct the meanings of placement verbs when moving from a general L1 verb of caused motion (put) to two specific caused posture verbs (zetten/leggen ‘set/lay’) in the L2 and whether the existence of low-frequency cognate forms in the L1 (set/lay) alleviates the reconstruction problem. Evidence from speech and gesture indicates that English speakers have difficulties with the specific verbs in L2 Dutch, initially looking for means to express general caused motion in L1-like fashion through over-generalisation. The gesture data further show that targetlike forms are often used to convey L1-like meaning. However, the differentiated use of zetten for vertical placement and dummy verbs (gaan ‘go’ and doen ‘do’) and intransitive posture verbs (zitten/staan/liggen ‘sit, stand, lie’) for horizontal placement, and a positive correlation between appropriate verb use and target-like gesturing suggest a beginning sensitivity to the semantic parameters of the L2 verbs and possible reconstruction.
  • Gullberg, M., Indefrey, P., & Muysken, P. (2009). Research techniques for the study of code-switching. In B. E. Bullock, & J. A. Toribio (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook on linguistic code-switching (pp. 21-39). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Abstract

    The aim of this chapter is to provide researchers with a tool kit of semi-experimental and experimental techniques for studying code-switching. It presents an overview of the current off-line and on-line research techniques, ranging from analyses of published bilingual texts of spontaneous conversations, to tightly controlled experiments. A multi-task approach used for studying code-switched sentence production in Papiamento-Dutch bilinguals is also exemplified.
  • Gullberg, M. (2009). Why gestures are relevant to the bilingual mental lexicon. In A. Pavlenko (Ed.), The bilingual mental lexicon: Interdisciplinary approaches (pp. 161-184). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

    Abstract

    Gestures, the symbolic movements speakers perform while they speak, are systematically related to speech and language in non-trivial ways. This chapter presents an overview of what gestures can and cannot tell us about the monolingual and the bilingual mental lexicon. Gesture analysis opens for a broader view of the mental lexicon, targeting the interface between conceptual, semantic and syntactic aspects of event construal, and offers new possibilities for examining how languages co-exist and interact in bilinguals beyond the level of surface forms. The first section of this chapter gives a brief introduction to gesture studies and outlines the current views on the relationship between gesture, speech, and language. The second section targets the key questions for the study of the monolingual and bilingual lexicon, and illustrates the methods employed for addressing these questions. It further exemplifies systematic cross-linguistic patterns in gestural behaviour in monolingual and bilingual contexts. The final section discusses some implications of an expanded view of the multilingual lexicon that includes gesture, and outlines directions for future inquiry.

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  • Gunz, P., Tilot, A. K., Wittfeld, K., Teumer, A., Shapland, C. Y., Van Erp, T. G. M., Dannemann, M., Vernot, B., Neubauer, S., Guadalupe, T., Fernandez, G., Brunner, H., Enard, W., Fallon, J., Hosten, N., Völker, U., Profico, A., Di Vincenzo, F., Manzi, G., Kelso, J. and 7 moreGunz, P., Tilot, A. K., Wittfeld, K., Teumer, A., Shapland, C. Y., Van Erp, T. G. M., Dannemann, M., Vernot, B., Neubauer, S., Guadalupe, T., Fernandez, G., Brunner, H., Enard, W., Fallon, J., Hosten, N., Völker, U., Profico, A., Di Vincenzo, F., Manzi, G., Kelso, J., St Pourcain, B., Hublin, J.-J., Franke, B., Pääbo, S., Macciardi, F., Grabe, H. J., & Fisher, S. E. (2019). Neandertal introgression sheds light on modern human endocranial globularity. Current Biology, 29(1), 120-127. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2018.10.065.

    Abstract

    One of the features that distinguishes modern humans from our extinct relatives
    and ancestors is a globular shape of the braincase [1-4]. As the endocranium
    closely mirrors the outer shape of the brain, these differences might reflect
    altered neural architecture [4,5]. However, in the absence of fossil brain tissue the
    underlying neuroanatomical changes as well as their genetic bases remain
    elusive. To better understand the biological foundations of modern human
    endocranial shape, we turn to our closest extinct relatives, the Neandertals.
    Interbreeding between modern humans and Neandertals has resulted in
    introgressed fragments of Neandertal DNA in the genomes of present-day non-
    Africans [6,7]. Based on shape analyses of fossil skull endocasts, we derive a
    measure of endocranial globularity from structural magnetic resonance imaging
    (MRI) scans of thousands of modern humans, and study the effects of
    introgressed fragments of Neandertal DNA on this phenotype. We find that
    Neandertal alleles on chromosomes 1 and 18 are associated with reduced
    endocranial globularity. These alleles influence expression of two nearby genes,
    UBR4 and PHLPP1, which are involved in neurogenesis and myelination,
    respectively. Our findings show how integration of fossil skull data with archaic
    genomics and neuroimaging can suggest developmental mechanisms that may
    contribute to the unique modern human endocranial shape.

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  • Gussenhoven, C., & Chen, A. (2000). Universal and language-specific effects in the perception of question intonation. In B. Yuan, T. Huang, & X. Tang (Eds.), Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP) (pp. 91-94). Beijing: China Military Friendship Publish.

    Abstract

    Three groups of monolingual listeners, with Standard Chinese, Dutch and Hungarian as their native language, judged pairs of trisyllabic stimuli which differed only in their itch pattern. The segmental structure of the stimuli was made up by the experimenters and presented to subjects as being taken from a little-known language spoken on a South Pacific island. Pitch patterns consisted of a single rise-fall located on or near the second syllable. By and large, listeners selected the stimulus with the higher peak, the later eak, and the higher end rise as the one that signalled a question, regardless of language group. The result is argued to reflect innate, non-linguistic knowledge of the meaning of pitch variation, notably Ohala’s Frequency Code. A significant difference between groups is explained as due to the influence of the mother tongue.
  • Gussenhoven, C., & Chen, A. (2000). Universal and language-specific effects in the perception of question intonation. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP) (pp. 91-94).
  • Hagoort, P., Wassenaar, M., & Brown, C. M. (2003). Syntax-related ERP-effects in Dutch. Cognitive Brain Research, 16(1), 38-50. doi:10.1016/S0926-6410(02)00208-2.

    Abstract

    In two studies subjects were required to read Dutch sentences that in some cases contained a syntactic violation, in other cases a semantic violation. All syntactic violations were word category violations. The design excluded differential contributions of expectancy to influence the syntactic violation effects. The syntactic violations elicited an Anterior Negativity between 300 and 500 ms. This negativity was bilateral and had a frontal distribution. Over posterior sites the same violations elicited a P600/SPS starting at about 600 ms. The semantic violations elicited an N400 effect. The topographic distribution of the AN was more frontal than the distribution of the classical N400 effect, indicating that the underlying generators of the AN and the N400 are, at least to a certain extent, non-overlapping. Experiment 2 partly replicated the design of Experiment 1, but with differences in rate of presentation and in the distribution of items over subjects, and without semantic violations. The word category violations resulted in the same effects as were observed in Experiment 1, showing that they were independent of some of the specific parameters of Experiment 1. The discussion presents a tentative account of the functional differences in the triggering conditions of the AN and the P600/SPS.
  • Hagoort, P., Wassenaar, M., & Brown, C. M. (2003). Real-time semantic compensation in patients with agrammatic comprehension: Electrophysiological evidence for multiple-route plasticity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 100(7), 4340-4345. doi:10.1073/pnas.0230613100.

    Abstract

    To understand spoken language requires that the brain provides rapid access to different kinds of knowledge, including the sounds and meanings of words, and syntax. Syntax specifies constraints on combining words in a grammatically well formed manner. Agrammatic patients are deficient in their ability to use these constraints, due to a lesion in the perisylvian area of the languagedominant hemisphere. We report a study on real-time auditory sentence processing in agrammatic comprehenders, examining
    their ability to accommodate damage to the language system. We recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in agrammatic comprehenders, nonagrammatic aphasics, and age-matched controls. When listening to sentences with grammatical violations, the agrammatic aphasics did not show the same syntax-related ERP effect as the two other subject groups. Instead, the waveforms of the agrammatic aphasics were dominated by a meaning-related ERP effect, presumably reflecting their attempts to achieve understanding by the use of semantic constraints. These data demonstrate that although agrammatic aphasics are impaired in their ability to exploit syntactic information in real time, they can reduce the consequences of a syntactic deficit by exploiting a semantic route. They thus provide evidence for the compensation of a syntactic deficit by a stronger reliance on another route in mapping
    sound onto meaning. This is a form of plasticity that we refer to as multiple-route plasticity.
  • Hagoort, P. (2000). De toekomstige eeuw der cognitieve neurowetenschap [inaugural lecture]. Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen.

    Abstract

    Rede uitgesproken op 12 mei 2000 bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van hoogleraar in de neuropsychologie aan de Faculteit Sociale Wetenschappen KUN.
  • Hagoort, P. (2009). The fractionation of spoken language understanding by measuring electrical and magnetic brain signals. In B. C. J. Moore, L. K. Tyler, & W. Marslen-Wilson (Eds.), The perception of speech: From sound to meaning (pp. 223-248). New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Hagoort, P., & Brown, C. M. (2000). ERP effects of listening to speech compared to reading: the P600/SPS to syntactic violations in spoken sentences and rapid serial visual presentation. Neuropsychologia, 38, 1531-1549.

    Abstract

    In this study, event-related brain potential ffects of speech processing are obtained and compared to similar effects in sentence reading. In two experiments sentences were presented that contained three different types of grammatical violations. In one experiment sentences were presented word by word at a rate of four words per second. The grammatical violations elicited a Syntactic Positive Shift (P600/SPS), 500 ms after the onset of the word that rendered the sentence ungrammatical. The P600/SPS consisted of two phases, an early phase with a relatively equal anterior-posterior distribution and a later phase with a strong posterior distribution. We interpret the first phase as an indication of structural integration complexity, and the second phase as an indication of failing parsing operations and/or an attempt at reanalysis. In the second experiment the same syntactic violations were presented in sentences spoken at a normal rate and with normal intonation. These violations elicited a P600/SPS with the same onset as was observed for the reading of these sentences. In addition two of the three violations showed a preceding frontal negativity, most clearly over the left hemisphere.
  • Hagoort, P., & Brown, C. M. (2000). ERP effects of listening to speech: semantic ERP effects. Neuropsychologia, 38, 1518-1530.

    Abstract

    In this study, event-related brain potential effects of speech processing are obtained and compared to similar effects insentence reading. In two experiments spoken sentences were presented with semantic violations in sentence-signal or mid-sentence positions. For these violations N400 effects were obtained that were very similar to N400 effects obtained in reading. However, the N400 effects in speech were preceded by an earlier negativity (N250). This negativity is not commonly observed with written input. The early effect is explained as a manifestation of a mismatch between the word forms expected on the basis of the context, and the actual cohort of activated word candidates that is generated on the basis of the speech signal.
  • Hagoort, P. (2003). De verloving tussen neurowetenschap en psychologie. In K. Hilberdink (Ed.), Interdisciplinariteit in de geesteswetenschappen (pp. 73-81). Amsterdam: KNAW.
  • Hagoort, P. (2003). Die einzigartige, grösstenteils aber unbewusste Fähigkeit der Menschen zu sprachlicher Kommunikation. In G. Kaiser (Ed.), Jahrbuch 2002-2003 / Wissenschaftszentrum Nordrhein-Westfalen (pp. 33-46). Düsseldorf: Wissenschaftszentrum Nordrhein-Westfalen.
  • Hagoort, P. (2003). Functional brain imaging. In W. J. Frawley (Ed.), International encyclopedia of linguistics (pp. 142-145). New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Hagoort, P. (2003). How the brain solves the binding problem for language: A neurocomputational model of syntactic processing. NeuroImage, 20(suppl. 1), S18-S29. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2003.09.013.

    Abstract

    Syntax is one of the components in the architecture of language processing that allows the listener/reader to bind single-word information into a unified interpretation of multiword utterances. This paper discusses ERP effects that have been observed in relation to syntactic processing. The fact that these effects differ from the semantic N400 indicates that the brain honors the distinction between semantic and syntactic binding operations. Two models of syntactic processing attempt to account for syntax-related ERP effects. One type of model is serial, with a first phase that is purely syntactic in nature (syntax-first model). The other type of model is parallel and assumes that information immediately guides the interpretation process once it becomes available. This is referred to as the immediacy model. ERP evidence is presented in support of the latter model. Next, an explicit computational model is proposed to explain the ERP data. This Unification Model assumes that syntactic frames are stored in memory and retrieved on the basis of the spoken or written word form input. The syntactic frames associated with the individual lexical items are unified by a dynamic binding process into a structural representation that spans the whole utterance. On the basis of a meta-analysis of imaging studies on syntax, it is argued that the left posterior inferior frontal cortex is involved in binding syntactic frames together, whereas the left superior temporal cortex is involved in retrieval of the syntactic frames stored in memory. Lesion data that support the involvement of this left frontotemporal network in syntactic processing are discussed.
  • Hagoort, P. (2003). Interplay between syntax and semantics during sentence comprehension: ERP effects of combining syntactic and semantic violations. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 15(6), 883-899. doi:10.1162/089892903322370807.

    Abstract

    This study investigated the effects of combined semantic and syntactic violations in relation to the effects of single semantic and single syntactic violations on language-related event-related brain potential (ERP) effects (N400 and P600/ SPS). Syntactic violations consisted of a mismatch in grammatical gender or number features of the definite article and the noun in sentence-internal or sentence-final noun phrases (NPs). Semantic violations consisted of semantically implausible adjective–noun combinations in the same NPs. Combined syntactic and semantic violations were a summation of these two respective violation types. ERPs were recorded while subjects read the sentences with the different types of violations and the correct control sentences. ERP effects were computed relative to ERPs elicited by the sentence-internal or sentence-final nouns. The size of the N400 effect to the semantic violation was increased by an additional syntactic violation (the syntactic boost). In contrast, the size of the P600/ SPS to the syntactic violation was not affected by an additional semantic violation. This suggests that in the absence of syntactic ambiguity, the assignment of syntactic structure is independent of semantic context. However, semantic integration is influenced by syntactic processing. In the sentence-final position, additional global processing consequences were obtained as a result of earlier violations in the sentence. The resulting increase in the N400 amplitude to sentence-final words was independent of the nature of the violation. A speeded anomaly detection task revealed that it takes substantially longer to detect semantic than syntactic anomalies. These results are discussed in relation to the latency and processing characteristics of the N400 and P600/SPS effects. Overall, the results reveal an asymmetry in the interplay between syntax and semantics during on-line sentence comprehension.
  • Hagoort, P. (Ed.). (2019). Human language: From genes and brains to behavior. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Hagoort, P., & Beckmann, C. F. (2019). Key issues and future directions: The neural architecture for language. In P. Hagoort (Ed.), Human language: From genes and brains to behavior (pp. 527-532). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Hagoort, P. (2019). Introduction. In P. Hagoort (Ed.), Human language: From genes and brains to behavior (pp. 1-6). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Hagoort, P. (2009). Reflections on the neurobiology of syntax. In D. Bickerton, & E. Szathmáry (Eds.), Biological foundations and origin of syntax (pp. 279-296). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Abstract

    This contribution focuses on the neural infrastructure for parsing and syntactic encoding. From an anatomical point of view, it is argued that Broca's area is an ill-conceived notion. Functionally, Broca's area and adjacent cortex (together Broca's complex) are relevant for language, but not exclusively for this domain of cognition. Its role can be characterized as providing the necessary infrastructure for unification (syntactic and semantic). A general proposal, but with required level of computational detail, is discussed to account for the distribution of labor between different components of the language network in the brain.Arguments are provided for the immediacy principle, which denies a privileged status for syntax in sentence processing. The temporal profile of event-related brain potential (ERP) is suggested to require predictive processing. Finally, since, next to speed, diversity is a hallmark of human languages, the language readiness of the brain might not depend on a universal, dedicated neural machinery for syntax, but rather on a shaping of the neural infrastructure of more general cognitive systems (e.g., memory, unification) in a direction that made it optimally suited for the purpose of communication through language.
  • Hagoort, P., Baggio, G., & Willems, R. M. (2009). Semantic unification. In M. S. Gazzaniga (Ed.), The cognitive neurosciences, 4th ed. (pp. 819-836). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Abstract

    Language and communication are about the exchange of meaning. A key feature of understanding and producing language is the construction of complex meaning from more elementary semantic building blocks. The functional characteristics of this semantic unification process are revealed by studies using event related brain potentials. These studies have found that word meaning is assembled into compound meaning in not more than 500 ms. World knowledge, information about the speaker, co-occurring visual input and discourse all have an immediate impact on semantic unification, and trigger similar electrophysiological responses as sentence-internal semantic information. Neuroimaging studies show that a network of brain areas, including the left inferior frontal gyrus, the left superior/middle temporal cortex, the left inferior parietal cortex and, to a lesser extent their right hemisphere homologues are recruited to perform semantic unification.
  • Hagoort, P. (2009). Taalontwikkeling: Meer dan woorden alleen. In M. Evenblij (Ed.), Brein in beeld: Beeldvorming bij heersenonderzoek (pp. 53-57). Den Haag: Stichting Bio-Wetenschappen en Maatschappij.
  • Hagoort, P., & Levelt, W. J. M. (2009). The speaking brain. Science, 326(5951), 372-373. doi:10.1126/science.1181675.

    Abstract

    How does intention to speak become the action of speaking? It involves the generation of a preverbal message that is tailored to the requirements of a particular language, and through a series of steps, the message is transformed into a linear sequence of speech sounds (1, 2). These steps include retrieving different kinds of information from memory (semantic, syntactic, and phonological), and combining them into larger structures, a process called unification. Despite general agreement about the steps that connect intention to articulation, there is no consensus about their temporal profile or the role of feedback from later steps (3, 4). In addition, since the discovery by the French physician Pierre Paul Broca (in 1865) of the role of the left inferior frontal cortex in speaking, relatively little progress has been made in understanding the neural infrastructure that supports speech production (5). One reason is that the characteristics of natural language are uniquely human, and thus the neurobiology of language lacks an adequate animal model. But on page 445 of this issue, Sahin et al. (6) demonstrate, by recording neuronal activity in the human brain, that different kinds of linguistic information are indeed sequentially processed within Broca's area.
  • Hagoort, P. (2019). The meaning making mechanism(s) behind the eyes and between the ears. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences, 375: 20190301. doi:10.1098/rstb.2019.0301.

    Abstract

    In this contribution, the following four questions are discussed: (i) where is meaning?; (ii) what is meaning?; (iii) what is the meaning of mechanism?; (iv) what are the mechanisms of meaning? I will argue that meanings are in the head. Meanings have multiple facets, but minimally one needs to make a distinction between single word meanings (lexical meaning) and the meanings of multi-word utterances. The latter ones cannot be retrieved from memory, but need to be constructed on the fly. A mechanistic account of the meaning-making mind requires an analysis at both a functional and a neural level, the reason being that these levels are causally interdependent. I will show that an analysis exclusively focusing on patterns of brain activation lacks explanatory power. Finally, I shall present an initial sketch of how the dynamic interaction between temporo-parietal areas and inferior frontal cortex might instantiate the interpretation of linguistic utterances in the context of a multimodal setting and ongoing discourse information.
  • Hagoort, P. (2019). The neurobiology of language beyond single word processing. Science, 366(6461), 55-58. doi:10.1126/science.aax0289.

    Abstract

    In this Review, I propose a multiple-network view for the neurobiological basis of distinctly human language skills. A much more complex picture of interacting brain areas emerges than in the classical neurobiological model of language. This is because using language is more than single-word processing, and much goes on beyond the information given in the acoustic or orthographic tokens that enter primary sensory cortices. This requires the involvement of multiple networks with functionally nonoverlapping contributions

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  • Hagoort, P. (2000). What we shall know only tomorrow. Brain and Language, 71, 89-92. doi:10.1006/brln.1999.2221.
  • Hahn, L. E., Ten Buuren, M., De Nijs, M., Snijders, T. M., & Fikkert, P. (2019). Acquiring novel words in a second language through mutual play with child songs - The Noplica Energy Center. In L. Nijs, H. Van Regenmortel, & C. Arculus (Eds.), MERYC19 Counterpoints of the senses: Bodily experiences in musical learning (pp. 78-87). Ghent, Belgium: EuNet MERYC 2019.

    Abstract

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

    Abstract

    This chapter aims to provide an updated list of all Bantu languages known at present and to provide individual pointers to further information on the inventory. The area division has some correlation with what are perceived genealogical relations between Bantu languages, but they are not defined as such and do not change whenever there is an update in our understanding of genealogical relations. Given the popularity of Guthrie codes in Bantu linguistics, our listing also features a complete mapping to Guthrie codes. The language inventory listed excludes sign languages used in the Bantu area, speech registers, pidgins, drummed/whistled languages and urban youth languages. Pointers to such languages in the Bantu area are included in the continent-wide overview in Hammarstrom. The most important alternative names, subvarieties and spelling variants are given for each language, though such lists are necessarily incomplete and reflect some degree of arbitrary selection.
  • Hammond, J. (2009). The grammar of nouns and verbs in Whitesands, an oceanic language of Southern Vanuatu. Master Thesis, University of Sydney, Sydney.

    Abstract

    Whitesands is an under-described language of southern Vanuatu, and this thesis presents Whitesands-specific data based on primary in-situ field research. The thesis addresses the distinction of noun and verb word classes in the language. It claims that current linguistic syntax theory cannot account for the argument structure of canonical object-denoting roots. It is shown that there are distinct lexical noun and verb classes in Whitesands but this is only a weak dichotomy. Stronger is the NP and VP distinction, and this is achieved by employing a new theoretical approach that proposes functional categories and their selection of complements as crucial tests of distinction. This approach contrasts with previous analyses of parts of speech in Oceanic languages and cross-linguistically. It ultimately explains many of the syntactic phenomena seen in the language family, including the above argument assignment dilemma, the alienable possession of nouns with classifiers and also the nominalisation processes.
  • Han, J.-I., & Verdonschot, R. G. (2019). Spoken-word production in Korean: A non-word masked priming and phonological Stroop task investigation. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 72(4), 901-912. doi:10.1177/1747021818770989.

    Abstract

    Speech production studies have shown that phonological unit initially used to fill the metrical frame during phonological encoding is language specific, that is, a phoneme for English and Dutch, an atonal syllable for Mandarin Chinese, and a mora for Japanese. However, only a few studies chronometrically investigated speech production in Korean, and they obtained mixed results. Korean is particularly interesting as there might be both phonemic and syllabic influences during phonological encoding. The purpose of this study is to further examine the initial phonological preparation unit in Korean, employing a masked priming task (Experiment 1) and a phonological Stroop task (Experiment 2). The results showed that significant onset (and onset-plus, that is, consonant-vowel [CV]) effects were found in both experiments, but there was no compelling evidence for a prominent role for the syllable. When the prime words were presented in three different forms related to the targets, namely, without any change, with re-syllabified codas, and with nasalised codas, there were no significant differences in facilitation among the three forms. Alternatively, it is also possible that participants may not have had sufficient time to process the primes up to the point that re-syllabification or nasalisation could have been carried out. In addition, the results of a Stroop task demonstrated that the onset phoneme effect was not driven by any orthographic influence. These findings suggest that the onset segment and not the syllable is the initial (or proximate) phonological unit used in the segment-to-frame encoding process during speech planning in Korean.

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    stimuli for experiment 1 and 2
  • Hanulikova, A., & Davidson, D. (2009). Inflectional entropy in Slovak. In J. Levicka, & R. Garabik (Eds.), Slovko 2009, NLP, Corpus Linguistics, Corpus Based Grammar Research (pp. 145-151). Bratislava, Slovakia: Slovak Academy of Sciences.
  • Hanulikova, A. (2009). Lexical segmentation in Slovak and German. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.

    Abstract

    All humans are equipped with perceptual and articulatory mechanisms which (in healthy humans) allow them to learn to perceive and produce speech. One basic question in psycholinguistics is whether humans share similar underlying processing mechanisms for all languages, or whether these are fundamentally different due to the diversity of languages and speakers. This book provides a cross-linguistic examination of speech comprehension by investigating word recognition in users of different languages. The focus is on how listeners segment the quasi-continuous stream of sounds that they hear into a sequence of discrete words, and how a universal segmentation principle, the Possible Word Constraint, applies in the recognition of Slovak and German.
  • Hanulikova, A., & Weber, A. (2009). Experience with foreign accent influences non-native (L2) word recognition: The case of th-substitutions [Abstract]. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 125(4), 2762-2762.
  • Hanulikova, A. (2009). The role of syllabification in the lexical segmentation of German and Slovak. In S. Fuchs, H. Loevenbruck, D. Pape, & P. Perrier (Eds.), Some aspects of speech and the brain (pp. 331-361). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

    Abstract

    Two experiments were carried out to examine the syllable affiliation of intervocalic consonant clusters and their effects on speech segmentation in two different languages. In a syllable reversal task, Slovak and German speakers divided bisyllabic non-words that were presented aurally into two parts, starting with the second syllable. Following the maximal onset principle, intervocalic consonants should be maximally assigned to the onset of the following syllable in conformity with language-specific restrictions, e.g., /du.gru/, /zu.kro:/ (dot indicates a syllable boundary). According to German phonology, syllables require branching rhymes (hence, /zuk.ro:/). In Slovak, both /du.gru/ and /dug.ru/ are possible syllabifications. Experiment 1 showed that German speakers more often closed the first syllable (/zuk.ro:/), following the requirement for a branching rhyme. In Experiment 2, Slovak speakers showed no clear preference; the first syllable was either closed (/dug.ru/) or open (/du.gru/). Correlation analyses on previously conducted word-spotting studies (Hanulíková, in press, 2008) suggest that speech segmentation is unaffected by these syllabification preferences.
  • Harbusch, K., & Kempen, G. (2000). Complexity of linear order computation in Performance Grammar, TAG and HPSG. In Proceedings of Fifth International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms (TAG+5) (pp. 101-106).

    Abstract

    This paper investigates the time and space complexity of word order computation in the psycholinguistically motivated grammar formalism of Performance Grammar (PG). In PG, the first stage of syntax assembly yields an unordered tree ('mobile') consisting of a hierarchy of lexical frames (lexically anchored elementary trees). Associated with each lexica l frame is a linearizer—a Finite-State Automaton that locally computes the left-to-right order of the branches of the frame. Linearization takes place after the promotion component may have raised certain constituents (e.g. Wh- or focused phrases) into the domain of lexical frames higher up in the syntactic mobile. We show that the worst-case time and space complexity of analyzing input strings of length n is O(n5) and O(n4), respectively. This result compares favorably with the time complexity of word-order computations in Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG). A comparison with Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) reveals that PG yields a more declarative linearization method, provided that the FSA is rewritten as an equivalent regular expression.
  • Harbusch, K., & Kempen, G. (2009). Clausal coordinate ellipsis and its varieties in spoken German: A study with the TüBa-D/S Treebank of the VERBMOBIL corpus. In M. Passarotti, A. Przepiórkowski, S. Raynaud, & F. Van Eynde (Eds.), Proceedings of the The Eighth International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (pp. 83-94). Milano: EDUCatt.
  • Harbusch, K., & Kempen, G. (2009). Generating clausal coordinate ellipsis multilingually: A uniform approach based on postediting. In 12th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation: Proceedings of the Workshop (pp. 138-145). The Association for Computational Linguistics.

    Abstract

    Present-day sentence generators are often in-capable of producing a wide variety of well-formed elliptical versions of coordinated clauses, in particular, of combined elliptical phenomena (Gapping, Forward and Back-ward Conjunction Reduction, etc.). The ap-plicability of the various types of clausal co-ordinate ellipsis (CCE) presupposes detailed comparisons of the syntactic properties of the coordinated clauses. These nonlocal comparisons argue against approaches based on local rules that treat CCE structures as special cases of clausal coordination. We advocate an alternative approach where CCE rules take the form of postediting rules ap-plicable to nonelliptical structures. The ad-vantage is not only a higher level of modu-larity but also applicability to languages be-longing to different language families. We describe a language-neutral module (called Elleipo; implemented in JAVA) that gener-ates as output all major CCE versions of co-ordinated clauses. Elleipo takes as input linearly ordered nonelliptical coordinated clauses annotated with lexical identity and coreferentiality relationships between words and word groups in the conjuncts. We dem-onstrate the feasibility of a single set of postediting rules that attains multilingual coverage.
  • Harmon, Z., Idemaru, K., & Kapatsinski, V. (2019). Learning mechanisms in cue reweighting. Cognition, 189, 76-88. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2019.03.011.

    Abstract

    Feedback has been shown to be effective in shifting attention across perceptual cues to a phonological contrast in speech perception (Francis, Baldwin & Nusbaum, 2000). However, the learning mechanisms behind this process remain obscure. We compare the predictions of supervised error-driven learning (Rescorla & Wagner, 1972) and reinforcement learning (Sutton & Barto, 1998) using computational simulations. Supervised learning predicts downweighting of an informative cue when the learner receives evidence that it is no longer informative. In contrast, reinforcement learning suggests that a reduction in cue weight requires positive evidence for the informativeness of an alternative cue. Experimental evidence supports the latter prediction, implicating reinforcement learning as the mechanism behind the effect of feedback on cue weighting in speech perception. Native English listeners were exposed to either bimodal or unimodal VOT distributions spanning the unaspirated/aspirated boundary (bear/pear). VOT is the primary cue to initial stop voicing in English. However, lexical feedback in training indicated that VOT was no longer predictive of voicing. Reduction in the weight of VOT was observed only when participants could use an alternative cue, F0, to predict voicing. Frequency distributions had no effect on learning. Overall, the results suggest that attention shifting in learning the phonetic cues to phonological categories is accomplished using simple reinforcement learning principles that also guide the choice of actions in other domains.
  • Harneit, A., Braun, U., Geiger, L. S., Zang, Z., Hakobjan, M., Van Donkelaar, M. M. J., Schweiger, J. I., Schwarz, K., Gan, G., Erk, S., Heinz, A., Romanczuk‐Seiferth, N., Witt, S., Rietschel, M., Walter, H., Franke, B., Meyer‐Lindenberg, A., & Tost, H. (2019). MAOA-VNTR genotype affects structural and functional connectivity in distributed brain networks. Human Brain Mapping, 40(18), 5202-5212. doi:10.1002/hbm.24766.

    Abstract

    Previous studies have linked the low expression variant of a variable number of tandem repeat polymorphism in the monoamine oxidase A gene (MAOA‐L) to the risk for impulsivity and aggression, brain developmental abnormalities, altered cortico‐limbic circuit function, and an exaggerated neural serotonergic tone. However, the neurobiological effects of this variant on human brain network architecture are incompletely understood. We studied healthy individuals and used multimodal neuroimaging (sample size range: 219–284 across modalities) and network‐based statistics (NBS) to probe the specificity of MAOA‐L‐related connectomic alterations to cortical‐limbic circuits and the emotion processing domain. We assessed the spatial distribution of affected links across several neuroimaging tasks and data modalities to identify potential alterations in network architecture. Our results revealed a distributed network of node links with a significantly increased connectivity in MAOA‐L carriers compared to the carriers of the high expression (H) variant. The hyperconnectivity phenotype primarily consisted of between‐lobe (“anisocoupled”) network links and showed a pronounced involvement of frontal‐temporal connections. Hyperconnectivity was observed across functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of implicit emotion processing (pFWE = .037), resting‐state fMRI (pFWE = .022), and diffusion tensor imaging (pFWE = .044) data, while no effects were seen in fMRI data of another cognitive domain, that is, spatial working memory (pFWE = .540). These observations are in line with prior research on the MAOA‐L variant and complement these existing data by novel insights into the specificity and spatial distribution of the neurogenetic effects. Our work highlights the value of multimodal network connectomic approaches for imaging genetics.
  • Haun, D. B. M. (2003). What's so special about spatial cognition. De Psychonoom, 18, 3-4.
  • Haun, D. B. M., & Waller, D. (2003). Alignment task. In N. J. Enfield (Ed.), Field research manual 2003, part I: Multimodal interaction, space, event representation (pp. 39-48). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
  • Haun, D. B. M., & Call, J. (2009). Great apes’ capacities to recognize relational similarity. Cognition, 110, 147-159. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2008.10.012.

    Abstract

    Recognizing relational similarity relies on the ability to understand that defining object properties might not lie in the objects individually, but in the relations of the properties of various object to each other. This aptitude is highly relevant for many important human skills such as language, reasoning, categorization and understanding analogy and metaphor. In the current study, we investigated the ability to recognize relational similarities by testing five species of great apes, including human children in a spatial task. We found that all species performed better if related elements are connected by logico-causal as opposed to non-causal relations. Further, we find that only children above 4 years of age, bonobos and chimpanzees, unlike younger children, gorillas and orangutans display some mastery of reasoning by non-causal relational similarity. We conclude that recognizing relational similarity is not in its entirety unique to the human species. The lack of a capability for language does not prohibit recognition of simple relational similarities. The data are discussed in the light of the phylogenetic tree of relatedness of the great apes.
  • Haun, D. B. M. (2003). Path integration. In N. J. Enfield (Ed.), Field research manual 2003, part I: Multimodal interaction, space, event representation (pp. 33-38). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.877644.
  • Haun, D. B. M. (2003). Spatial updating. In N. J. Enfield (Ed.), Field research manual 2003, part I: Multimodal interaction, space, event representation (pp. 49-56). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
  • Haun, D. B. M., & Rapold, C. J. (2009). Variation in memory for body movements across cultures. Current Biology, 19(23), R1068-R1069. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.10.041.

    Abstract

    There has been considerable controversy over the existence of cognitive differences across human cultures: some claim that human cognition is essentially universal [1,2], others that it reflects cultural specificities [3,4]. One domain of interest has been spatial cognition [5,6]. Despite the global universality of physical space, cultures vary as to how space is coded in their language. Some, for example, do not use egocentric ‘left, right, front, back’ constructions to code spatial relations, instead using allocentric notions like ‘north, south, east, west’ [4,6]: “The spoon is north of the bowl!” Whether or not spatial cognition also varies across cultures remains a contested question [7,8]. Here we investigate whether memory for movements of one's own body differs between cultures with contrastive strategies for coding spatial relations. Our results show that the ways in which we memorize movements of our own body differ in line with culture-specific preferences for how to conceive of spatial relations.
  • Havik, E., Roberts, L., Van Hout, R., Schreuder, R., & Haverkort, M. (2009). Processing subject-object ambiguities in L2 Dutch: A self-paced reading study with German L2 learners of Dutch. Language Learning, 59(1), 73-112. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9922.2009.00501.x.

    Abstract

    The results of two self-paced reading experiments are reported, which investigated the on-line processing of subject-object ambiguities in Dutch relative clause constructions like Dat is de vrouw die de meisjes heeft/hebben gezien by German advanced second language (L2) learners of Dutch. Native speakers of both Dutch and German have been shown to have a preference for a subject versus an object reading of such temporarily ambiguous sentences, and so we provided an ideal opportunity for the transfer of first language (L1) processing preferences to take place. We also investigated whether the participants' working memory span would affect their processing of the experimental items. The results suggest that processing decisions may be affected by working memory when task demands are high and in this case, the high working memory span learners patterned like the native speakers of lower working memory. However, when reading for comprehension alone, and when only structural information was available to guide parsing decisions, working memory span had no effect on the L2 learners' on-line processing, and this differed from the native speakers' even though the L1 and the L2 are highly comparable.
  • Haworth, S., Shapland, C. Y., Hayward, C., Prins, B. P., Felix, J. F., Medina-Gomez, C., Rivadeneira, F., Wang, C., Ahluwalia, T. S., Vrijheid, M., Guxens, M., Sunyer, J., Tachmazidou, I., Walter, K., Iotchkova, V., Jackson, A., Cleal, L., Huffmann, J., Min, J. L., Sass, L. and 15 moreHaworth, S., Shapland, C. Y., Hayward, C., Prins, B. P., Felix, J. F., Medina-Gomez, C., Rivadeneira, F., Wang, C., Ahluwalia, T. S., Vrijheid, M., Guxens, M., Sunyer, J., Tachmazidou, I., Walter, K., Iotchkova, V., Jackson, A., Cleal, L., Huffmann, J., Min, J. L., Sass, L., Timmers, P. R. H. J., UK10K consortium, Davey Smith, G., Fisher, S. E., Wilson, J. F., Cole, T. J., Fernandez-Orth, D., Bønnelykke, K., Bisgaard, H., Pennell, C. E., Jaddoe, V. W. V., Dedoussis, G., Timpson, N. J., Zeggini, E., Vitart, V., & St Pourcain, B. (2019). Low-frequency variation in TP53 has large effects on head circumference and intracranial volume. Nature Communications, 10: 357. doi:10.1038/s41467-018-07863-x.

    Abstract

    Cranial growth and development is a complex process which affects the closely related traits of head circumference (HC) and intracranial volume (ICV). The underlying genetic influences affecting these traits during the transition from childhood to adulthood are little understood, but might include both age-specific genetic influences and low-frequency genetic variation. To understand these influences, we model the developmental genetic architecture of HC, showing this is genetically stable and correlated with genetic determinants of ICV. Investigating up to 46,000 children and adults of European descent, we identify association with final HC and/or final ICV+HC at 9 novel common and low-frequency loci, illustrating that genetic variation from a wide allele frequency spectrum contributes to cranial growth. The largest effects are reported for low-frequency variants within TP53, with 0.5 cm wider heads in increaser-allele carriers versus non-carriers during mid-childhood, suggesting a previously unrecognized role of TP53 transcripts in human cranial development.

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    Supplementary Information
  • Hayano, K. (2003). Self-presentation as a face-threatening act: A comparative study of self-oriented topic introduction in English and Japanese. Veritas, 24, 45-58.
  • Heilbron, M., Ehinger, B., Hagoort, P., & De Lange, F. P. (2019). Tracking naturalistic linguistic predictions with deep neural language models. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience (pp. 424-427). doi:10.32470/CCN.2019.1096-0.

    Abstract

    Prediction in language has traditionally been studied using
    simple designs in which neural responses to expected
    and unexpected words are compared in a categorical
    fashion. However, these designs have been contested
    as being ‘prediction encouraging’, potentially exaggerating
    the importance of prediction in language understanding.
    A few recent studies have begun to address
    these worries by using model-based approaches to probe
    the effects of linguistic predictability in naturalistic stimuli
    (e.g. continuous narrative). However, these studies
    so far only looked at very local forms of prediction, using
    models that take no more than the prior two words into
    account when computing a word’s predictability. Here,
    we extend this approach using a state-of-the-art neural
    language model that can take roughly 500 times longer
    linguistic contexts into account. Predictability estimates
    fromthe neural network offer amuch better fit to EEG data
    from subjects listening to naturalistic narrative than simpler
    models, and reveal strong surprise responses akin to
    the P200 and N400. These results show that predictability
    effects in language are not a side-effect of simple designs,
    and demonstrate the practical use of recent advances
    in AI for the cognitive neuroscience of language.
  • Hellwig, B. (2003). The grammatical coding of postural semantics in Goemai (a West Chadic language of Nigeria). PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen. doi:10.17617/2.58463.
  • Hendriks, L., Witteman, M. J., Frietman, L. C. G., Westerhof, G., Van Baaren, R. B., Engels, R. C. M. E., & Dijksterhuis, A. J. (2009). Imitation can reduce malnutrition in residents in assisted living facilities [Letter to the editor]. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 571(1), 187-188. doi:10.1111/j.1532-5415.2009.02074.x.
  • Hervais-Adelman, A., Kumar, U., Mishra, R. K., Tripathi, V. N., Guleria, A., Singh, J. P., Eisner, F., & Huettig, F. (2019). Learning to read recycles visual cortical networks without destruction. Science Advances, 5(9): eaax0262. doi:10.1126/sciadv.aax0262.

    Abstract

    Learning to read is associated with the appearance of an orthographically sensitive brain region known as the visual word form area. It has been claimed that development of this area proceeds by impinging upon territory otherwise available for the processing of culturally relevant stimuli such as faces and houses. In a large-scale functional magnetic resonance imaging study of a group of individuals of varying degrees of literacy (from completely illiterate to highly literate), we examined cortical responses to orthographic and nonorthographic visual stimuli. We found that literacy enhances responses to other visual input in early visual areas and enhances representational similarity between text and faces, without reducing the extent of response to nonorthographic input. Thus, acquisition of literacy in childhood recycles existing object representation mechanisms but without destructive competition.

    Additional information

    aax0262_SM.pdf
  • Heyselaar, E., & Segaert, K. (2019). Memory encoding of syntactic information involves domain-general attentional resources. Evidence from dual-task studies. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 72(6), 1285-1296. doi:10.1177/1747021818801249.

    Abstract

    We investigate the type of attention (domain-general or language-specific) used during
    syntactic processing. We focus on syntactic priming: In this task, participants listen to a
    sentence that describes a picture (prime sentence), followed by a picture the participants need
    to describe (target sentence). We measure the proportion of times participants use the
    syntactic structure they heard in the prime sentence to describe the current target sentence as a
    measure of syntactic processing. Participants simultaneously conducted a motion-object
    tracking (MOT) task, a task commonly used to tax domain-general attentional resources. We
    manipulated the number of objects the participant had to track; we thus measured
    participants’ ability to process syntax while their attention is not-, slightly-, or overly-taxed.
    Performance in the MOT task was significantly worse when conducted as a dual-task
    compared to as a single task. We observed an inverted U-shaped curve on priming magnitude
    when conducting the MOT task concurrently with prime sentences (i.e., memory encoding),
    but no effect when conducted with target sentences (i.e., memory retrieval). Our results
    illustrate how, during the encoding of syntactic information, domain-general attention
    differentially affects syntactic processing, whereas during the retrieval of syntactic
    information domain-general attention does not influence syntactic processing
  • Hoedemaker, R. S., & Meyer, A. S. (2019). Planning and coordination of utterances in a joint naming task. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 45(4), 732-752. doi:10.1037/xlm0000603.

    Abstract

    Dialogue requires speakers to coordinate. According to the model of dialogue as joint action, interlocutors achieve this coordination by corepresenting their own and each other’s task share in a functionally equivalent manner. In two experiments, we investigated this corepresentation account using an interactive joint naming task in which pairs of participants took turns naming sets of objects on a shared display. Speaker A named the first, or the first and third object, and Speaker B named the second object. In control conditions, Speaker A named one, two, or all three objects and Speaker B remained silent. We recorded the timing of the speakers’ utterances and Speaker A’s eye movements. Interturn pause durations indicated that the speakers effectively coordinated their utterances in time. Speaker A’s speech onset latencies depended on the number of objects they named, but were unaffected by Speaker B’s naming task. This suggests speakers were not fully incorporating their partner’s task into their own speech planning. Moreover, Speaker A’s eye movements indicated that they were much less likely to attend to objects their partner named than to objects they named themselves. When speakers did inspect their partner’s objects, viewing times were too short to suggest that speakers were retrieving these object names as if they were planning to name the objects themselves. These results indicate that speakers prioritized planning their own responses over attending to their interlocutor’s task and suggest that effective coordination can be achieved without full corepresentation of the partner’s task.

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