Publications

Displaying 1 - 100 of 123
  • Alhama, R. G., Scha, R., & Zudema, W. (2015). How should we evaluate models of segmentation in artificial language learning? In N. A. Taatgen, M. K. van Vugt, J. P. Borst, & K. Mehlhorn (Eds.), Proceedings of ICCM 2015 (pp. 172-173). Groningen: University of Groningen.

    Abstract

    One of the challenges that infants have to solve when learn- ing their native language is to identify the words in a con- tinuous speech stream. Some of the experiments in Artificial Grammar Learning (Saffran, Newport, and Aslin (1996); Saf- fran, Aslin, and Newport (1996); Aslin, Saffran, and Newport (1998) and many more) investigate this ability. In these ex- periments, subjects are exposed to an artificial speech stream that contains certain regularities. Adult participants are typ- ically tested with 2-alternative Forced Choice Tests (2AFC) in which they have to choose between a word and another sequence (typically a partword, a sequence resulting from misplacing boundaries).
  • Allen, S. E. M. (1998). A discourse-pragmatic explanation for the subject-object asymmetry in early null arguments. In A. Sorace, C. Heycock, & R. Shillcock (Eds.), Proceedings of the GALA '97 Conference on Language Acquisition (pp. 10-15). Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press.

    Abstract

    The present paper assesses discourse-pragmatic factors as a potential explanation for the subject-object assymetry in early child language. It identifies a set of factors which characterize typical situations of informativeness (Greenfield & Smith, 1976), and uses these factors to identify informative arguments in data from four children aged 2;0 through 3;6 learning Inuktitut as a first language. In addition, it assesses the extent of the links between features of informativeness on one hand and lexical vs. null and subject vs. object arguments on the other. Results suggest that a pragmatics account of the subject-object asymmetry can be upheld to a greater extent than previous research indicates, and that several of the factors characterizing informativeness are good indicators of those arguments which tend to be omitted in early child language.
  • Anderson, P., Harandi, N. M., Moisik, S. R., Stavness, I., & Fels, S. (2015). A comprehensive 3D biomechanically-driven vocal tract model including inverse dynamics for speech research. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2015: The 16th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 2395-2399).

    Abstract

    We introduce a biomechanical model of oropharyngeal structures that adds the soft-palate, pharynx, and larynx to our previous models of jaw, skull, hyoid, tongue, and face in a unified model. The model includes a comprehensive description of the upper airway musculature, using point-to-point muscles that may either be embedded within the deformable structures or operate exter- nally. The airway is described by an air-tight mesh that fits and deforms with the surrounding articulators, which enables dynamic coupling to our articulatory speech synthesizer. We demonstrate that the biomechanics, in conjunction with the skinning, supports a range from physically realistic to simplified vocal tract geometries to investigate different approaches to aeroacoustic modeling of vocal tract. Furthermore, our model supports inverse modeling to support investigation of plausible muscle activation patterns to generate speech.
  • Bauer, B. L. M. (2015). Origins of the indefinite HOMO constructions. In G. Haverling (Ed.), Latin Linguistics in the Early 21st Century: Acts of the 16th International Colloquium on Latin Linguistics (pp. 542-553). Uppsala: Uppsala University.
  • Bohnemeyer, J. (2004). Argument and event structure in Yukatek verb classes. In J.-Y. Kim, & A. Werle (Eds.), Proceedings of The Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas. Amherst, Mass: GLSA.

    Abstract

    In Yukatek Maya, event types are lexicalized in verb roots and stems that fall into a number of different form classes on the basis of (a) patterns of aspect-mood marking and (b) priviledges of undergoing valence-changing operations. Of particular interest are the intransitive classes in the light of Perlmutter’s (1978) Unaccusativity hypothesis. In the spirit of Levin & Rappaport Hovav (1995) [L&RH], Van Valin (1990), Zaenen (1993), and others, this paper investigates whether (and to what extent) the association between formal predicate classes and event types is determined by argument structure features such as ‘agentivity’ and ‘control’ or features of lexical aspect such as ‘telicity’ and ‘durativity’. It is shown that mismatches between agentivity/control and telicity/durativity are even more extensive in Yukatek than they are in English (Abusch 1985; L&RH, Van Valin & LaPolla 1997), providing new evidence against Dowty’s (1979) reconstruction of Vendler’s (1967) ‘time schemata of verbs’ in terms of argument structure configurations. Moreover, contrary to what has been claimed in earlier studies of Yukatek (Krämer & Wunderlich 1999, Lucy 1994), neither agentivity/control nor telicity/durativity turn out to be good predictors of verb class membership. Instead, the patterns of aspect-mood marking prove to be sensitive only to the presence or absense of state change, in a way that supports the unified analysis of all verbs of gradual change proposed by Kennedy & Levin (2001). The presence or absence of ‘internal causation’ (L&RH) may motivate the semantic interpretation of transitivization operations. An explicit semantics for the valence-changing operations is proposed, based on Parsons’s (1990) Neo-Davidsonian approach.
  • Bosker, H. R., Tjiong, V., Quené, H., Sanders, T., & De Jong, N. H. (2015). Both native and non-native disfluencies trigger listeners' attention. In Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech: DISS 2015: An ICPhS Satellite Meeting. Edinburgh: DISS2015.

    Abstract

    Disfluencies, such as uh and uhm, are known to help the listener in speech comprehension. For instance, disfluencies may elicit prediction of less accessible referents and may trigger listeners’ attention to the following word. However, recent work suggests differential processing of disfluencies in native and non-native speech. The current study investigated whether the beneficial effects of disfluencies on listeners’ attention are modulated by the (non-)native identity of the speaker. Using the Change Detection Paradigm, we investigated listeners’ recall accuracy for words presented in disfluent and fluent contexts, in native and non-native speech. We observed beneficial effects of both native and non-native disfluencies on listeners’ recall accuracy, suggesting that native and non-native disfluencies trigger listeners’ attention in a similar fashion.
  • Bosker, H. R., & Reinisch, E. (2015). Normalization for speechrate in native and nonnative speech. In M. Wolters, J. Livingstone, B. Beattie, R. Smith, M. MacMahon, J. Stuart-Smith, & J. Scobbie (Eds.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congresses of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2015). London: International Phonetic Association.

    Abstract

    Speech perception involves a number of processes that deal with variation in the speech signal. One such process is normalization for speechrate: local temporal cues are perceived relative to the rate in the surrounding context. It is as yet unclear whether and how this perceptual effect interacts with higher level impressions of rate, such as a speaker’s nonnative identity. Nonnative speakers typically speak more slowly than natives, an experience that listeners take into account when explicitly judging the rate of nonnative speech. The present study investigated whether this is also reflected in implicit rate normalization. Results indicate that nonnative speech is implicitly perceived as faster than temporally-matched native speech, suggesting that the additional cognitive load of listening to an accent speeds up rate perception. Therefore, rate perception in speech is not dependent on syllable durations alone but also on the ease of processing of the temporal signal.
  • Bowerman, M. (1983). Hidden meanings: The role of covert conceptual structures in children's development of language. In D. Rogers, & J. A. Sloboda (Eds.), The acquisition of symbolic skills (pp. 445-470). New York: Plenum Press.
  • Brand, S., & Ernestus, M. (2015). Reduction of obstruent-liquid-schwa clusters in casual French. In Scottish consortium for ICPhS 2015, M. Wolters, J. Livingstone, B. Beattie, R. Smith, M. MacMahon, J. Stuart-Smith, & J. Scobbie (Eds.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2015). Glasgow: University of Glasgow.

    Abstract

    This study investigated pronunciation variants of word-final obstruent-liquid-schwa (OLS) clusters in casual French and the variables predicting the absence of the phonemes in these clusters. In a dataset of 291 noun tokens extracted from a corpus of casual conversations, we observed that in 80.7% of the tokens, at least one phoneme was absent and that in no less than 15.5% the whole cluster was absent (e.g., /mis/ for ministre). Importantly, the probability of a phoneme being absent was higher if the following phoneme was absent as well. These data show that reduction can affect several phonemes at once and is not restricted to just a handful of (function) words. Moreover, our results demonstrate that the absence of each single phoneme is affected by the speaker's tendency to increase ease of articulation and to adapt a word's pronunciation variant to the time available.
  • Broeder, D., Brugman, H., Oostdijk, N., & Wittenburg, P. (2004). Towards Dynamic Corpora: Workshop on compiling and processing spoken corpora. In M. Lino, M. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa, & R. Silva (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004) (pp. 59-62). Paris: European Language Resource Association.
  • Broeder, D., Wittenburg, P., & Crasborn, O. (2004). Using Profiles for IMDI Metadata Creation. In M. Lino, M. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa, & R. Silva (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004) (pp. 1317-1320). Paris: European Language Resources Association.
  • Broeder, D., Declerck, T., Romary, L., Uneson, M., Strömqvist, S., & Wittenburg, P. (2004). A large metadata domain of language resources. In M. Lino, M. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa, & R. Silva (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004) (pp. 369-372). Paris: European Language Resources Association.
  • Broeder, D., Nava, M., & Declerck, T. (2004). INTERA - a Distributed Domain of Metadata Resources. In M. Lino, M. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa, & R. Silva (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Spoken Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004) (pp. 369-372). Paris: European Language Resources Association.
  • Broersma, M., & Kolkman, K. M. (2004). Lexical representation of non-native phonemes. In S. Kin, & M. J. Bae (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (Interspeech 2004-ICSLP) (pp. 1241-1244). Seoul: Sunjijn Printing Co.
  • Brouwer, S., & Bradlow, A. R. (2015). The effect of target-background synchronicity on speech-in-speech recognition. In Scottish consortium for ICPhS 2015, M. Wolters, J. Livingstone, B. Beattie, R. Smith, M. MacMahon, J. Stuart-Smith, & J. Scobbie (Eds.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2015). Glasgow: University of Glasgow.

    Abstract

    The aim of the present study was to investigate whether speech-in-speech recognition is affected by variation in the target-background timing relationship. Specifically, we examined whether within trial synchronous or asynchronous onset and offset of the target and background speech influenced speech-in-speech recognition. Native English listeners were presented with English target sentences in the presence of English or Dutch background speech. Importantly, only the short-term temporal context –in terms of onset and offset synchrony or asynchrony of the target and background speech– varied across conditions. Participants’ task was to repeat back the English target sentences. The results showed an effect of synchronicity for English-in-English but not for English-in-Dutch recognition, indicating that familiarity with the English background lead in the asynchronous English-in-English condition might have attracted attention towards the English background. Overall, this study demonstrated that speech-in-speech recognition is sensitive to the target-background timing relationship, revealing an important role for variation in the local context of the target-background relationship as it extends beyond the limits of the time-frame of the to-be-recognized target sentence.
  • Bruggeman, L., & Janse, E. (2015). Older listeners' decreased flexibility in adjusting to changes in speech signal reliability. In M. Wolters, J. Linvingstone, B. Beattie, M. MacMahon, J. Stuart-Smith, & J. Scobbie (Eds.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2015). London: International Phonetic Association.

    Abstract

    Under noise or speech reductions, young adult listeners flexibly adjust the parameters of lexical activation and competition to allow for speech signal unreliability. Consequently, mismatches in the input are treated more leniently such that lexical candidates are not immediately deactivated. Using eyetracking, we assessed whether this modulation of recognition dynamics also occurs for older listeners. Dutch participants (aged 60+) heard Dutch sentences containing a critical word while viewing displays of four line drawings. The name of one picture shared either onset or rhyme with the critical word (i.e., was a phonological competitor). Sentences were either clear and noise-free, or had several phonemes replaced by bursts of noise. A larger preference for onset competitors than for rhyme competitors was observed in both clear and noise conditions; performance did not alter across condition. This suggests that dynamic adjustment of spoken-word recognition parameters in response to noise is less available to older listeners.
  • Brugman, H., Crasborn, O., & Russel, A. (2004). Collaborative annotation of sign language data with Peer-to-Peer technology. In M. Lino, M. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa, & R. Silva (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Language Evaluation (LREC 2004) (pp. 213-216). Paris: European Language Resources Association.
  • Brugman, H., & Russel, A. (2004). Annotating Multi-media/Multi-modal resources with ELAN. In M. Lino, M. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa, & R. Silva (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Language Evaluation (LREC 2004) (pp. 2065-2068). Paris: European Language Resources Association.
  • Burenhult, N. (2004). Spatial deixis in Jahai. In S. Burusphat (Ed.), Papers from the 11th Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society 2001 (pp. 87-100). Arizona State University: Program for Southeast Asian Studies.
  • Butterfield, S., & Cutler, A. (1988). Segmentation errors by human listeners: Evidence for a prosodic segmentation strategy. In W. Ainsworth, & J. Holmes (Eds.), Proceedings of SPEECH ’88: Seventh Symposium of the Federation of Acoustic Societies of Europe: Vol. 3 (pp. 827-833). Edinburgh: Institute of Acoustics.
  • Casillas, M., De Vos, C., Crasborn, O., & Levinson, S. C. (2015). The perception of stroke-to-stroke turn boundaries in signed conversation. In D. C. Noelle, R. Dale, A. S. Warlaumont, J. Yoshimi, T. Matlock, C. D. Jennings, & P. R. Maglio (Eds.), Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2015) (pp. 315-320). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Speaker transitions in conversation are often brief, with minimal vocal overlap. Signed languages appear to defy this pattern with frequent, long spans of simultaneous signing. But recent evidence suggests that turn boundaries in signed language may only include the content-bearing parts of the turn (from the first stroke to the last), and not all turn-related movement (from first preparation to final retraction). We tested whether signers were able to anticipate “stroke-to-stroke” turn boundaries with only minimal conversational context. We found that, indeed, signers anticipated turn boundaries at the ends of turn-final strokes. Signers often responded early, especially when the turn was long or contained multiple possible end points. Early responses for long turns were especially apparent for interrogatives—long interrogative turns showed much greater anticipation compared to short ones.
  • Cho, T., & McQueen, J. M. (2004). Phonotactics vs. phonetic cues in native and non-native listening: Dutch and Korean listeners' perception of Dutch and English. In S. Kin, & M. J. Bae (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (Interspeech 2004-ICSLP) (pp. 1301-1304). Seoul: Sunjijn Printing Co.

    Abstract

    We investigated how listeners of two unrelated languages, Dutch and Korean, process phonotactically legitimate and illegitimate sounds spoken in Dutch and American English. To Dutch listeners, unreleased word-final stops are phonotactically illegal because word-final stops in Dutch are generally released in isolation, but to Korean listeners, released final stops are illegal because word-final stops are never released in Korean. Two phoneme monitoring experiments showed a phonotactic effect: Dutch listeners detected released stops more rapidly than unreleased stops whereas the reverse was true for Korean listeners. Korean listeners with English stimuli detected released stops more accurately than unreleased stops, however, suggesting that acoustic-phonetic cues associated with released stops improve detection accuracy. We propose that in non-native speech perception, phonotactic legitimacy in the native language speeds up phoneme recognition, the richness of acousticphonetic cues improves listening accuracy, and familiarity with the non-native language modulates the relative influence of these two factors.
  • Cho, T., & Johnson, E. K. (2004). Acoustic correlates of phrase-internal lexical boundaries in Dutch. In S. Kin, & M. J. Bae (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (Interspeech 2004-ICSLP) (pp. 1297-1300). Seoul: Sunjin Printing Co.

    Abstract

    The aim of this study was to determine if Dutch speakers reliably signal phrase-internal lexical boundaries, and if so, how. Six speakers recorded 4 pairs of phonemically identical strong-weak-strong (SWS) strings with matching syllable boundaries but mismatching intended word boundaries (e.g. reis # pastei versus reispas # tij, or more broadly C1V2(C)#C2V2(C)C3V3(C) vs. C1V2(C)C2V2(C)#C3V3(C)). An Analysis of Variance revealed 3 acoustic parameters that were significantly greater in S#WS items (C2 DURATION, RIME1 DURATION, C3 BURST AMPLITUDE) and 5 parameters that were significantly greater in the SW#S items (C2 VOT, C3 DURATION, RIME2 DURATION, RIME3 DURATION, and V2 AMPLITUDE). Additionally, center of gravity measurements suggested that the [s] to [t] coarticulation was greater in reis # pa[st]ei versus reispa[s] # [t]ij. Finally, a Logistic Regression Analysis revealed that the 3 parameters (RIME1 DURATION, RIME2 DURATION, and C3 DURATION) contributed most reliably to a S#WS versus SW#S classification.
  • Choi, J., Broersma, M., & Cutler, A. (2015). Enhanced processing of a lost language: Linguistic knowledge or linguistic skill? In Proceedings of Interspeech 2015: 16th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 3110-3114).

    Abstract

    Same-different discrimination judgments for pairs of Korean stop consonants, or of Japanese syllables differing in phonetic segment length, were made by adult Korean adoptees in the Netherlands, by matched Dutch controls, and Korean controls. The adoptees did not outdo either control group on either task, although the same individuals had performed significantly better than matched controls on an identification learning task. This suggests that early exposure to multiple phonetic systems does not specifically improve acoustic-phonetic skills; rather, enhanced performance suggests retained language knowledge.
  • Cooper, N., & Cutler, A. (2004). Perception of non-native phonemes in noise. In S. Kin, & M. J. Bae (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (Interspeech 2004-ICSLP) (pp. 469-472). Seoul: Sunjijn Printing Co.

    Abstract

    We report an investigation of the perception of American English phonemes by Dutch listeners proficient in English. Listeners identified either the consonant or the vowel in most possible English CV and VC syllables. The syllables were embedded in multispeaker babble at three signal-to-noise ratios (16 dB, 8 dB, and 0 dB). Effects of signal-to-noise ratio on vowel and consonant identification are discussed as a function of syllable position and of relationship to the native phoneme inventory. Comparison of the results with previously reported data from native listeners reveals that noise affected the responding of native and non-native listeners similarly.
  • Coridun, S., Ernestus, M., & Ten Bosch, L. (2015). Learning pronunciation variants in a second language: Orthographic effects. In Scottish consortium for ICPhS 2015, M. Wolters, J. Livingstone, B. Beattie, R. Smith, M. MacMahon, J. Stuart-Smith, & J. Scobbie (Eds.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2015). Glasgow: University of Glasgow.

    Abstract

    The present study investigated the effect of orthography on the learning and subsequent processing of pronunciation variants in a second language. Dutch learners of French learned reduced pronunciation variants that result from schwa-zero alternation in French (e.g., reduced /ʃnij/ from chenille 'caterpillar'). Half of the participants additionally learnt the words' spellings, which correspond more closely to the full variants with schwa. On the following day, participants performed an auditory lexical decision task, in which they heard half of the words in their reduced variants, and the other half in their full variants. Participants who had exclusively learnt the auditory forms performed significantly worse on full variants than participants who had also learnt the spellings. This shows that learners integrate phonological and orthographic information to process pronunciation variants. There was no difference between both groups in their performances on reduced variants, suggesting that the exposure to spelling does not impede learners' processing of these variants.
  • Crago, M. B., Allen, S. E. M., & Pesco, D. (1998). Issues of Complexity in Inuktitut and English Child Directed Speech. In Proceedings of the twenty-ninth Annual Stanford Child Language Research Forum (pp. 37-46).
  • Croijmans, I., & Majid, A. (2015). Odor naming is difficult, even for wine and coffee experts. In D. C. Noelle, R. Dale, A. S. Warlaumont, J. Yoshimi, T. Matlock, C. D. Jennings, & P. P. Maglio (Eds.), Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2015) (pp. 483-488). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. Retrieved from https://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2015/papers/0092/index.html.

    Abstract

    Odor naming is difficult for people, but recent cross-cultural research suggests this difficulty is culture-specific. Jahai speakers (hunter-gatherers from the Malay Peninsula) name odors as consistently as colors, and much better than English speakers (Majid & Burenhult, 2014). In Jahai the linguistic advantage for smells correlates with a cultural interest in odors. Here we ask whether sub-cultures in the West with odor expertise also show superior odor naming. We tested wine and coffee experts (who have specialized odor training) in an odor naming task. Both wine and coffee experts were no more accurate or consistent than novices when naming odors. Although there were small differences in naming strategies, experts and non-experts alike relied overwhelmingly on source-based descriptions. So the specific language experts speak continues to constrain their ability to express odors. This suggests expertise alone is not sufficient to overcome the limits of language in the domain of smell.
  • Cutler, A., Norris, D., & Sebastián-Gallés, N. (2004). Phonemic repertoire and similarity within the vocabulary. In S. Kin, & M. J. Bae (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (Interspeech 2004-ICSLP) (pp. 65-68). Seoul: Sunjijn Printing Co.

    Abstract

    Language-specific differences in the size and distribution of the phonemic repertoire can have implications for the task facing listeners in recognising spoken words. A language with more phonemes will allow shorter words and reduced embedding of short words within longer ones, decreasing the potential for spurious lexical competitors to be activated by speech signals. We demonstrate that this is the case via comparative analyses of the vocabularies of English and Spanish. A language which uses suprasegmental as well as segmental contrasts, however, can substantially reduce the extent of spurious embedding.
  • Cutler, A., & Otake, T. (1998). Assimilation of place in Japanese and Dutch. In R. Mannell, & J. Robert-Ribes (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: vol. 5 (pp. 1751-1754). Sydney: ICLSP.

    Abstract

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

    Abstract

    Languages contain tens of thousands of words, but these are constructed from a tiny handful of phonetic elements. Consequently, words resemble one another, or can be embedded within one another, a coup stick snot with standing. me process of spoken-word recognition by human listeners involves activation of multiple word candidates consistent with the input, and direct competition between activated candidate words. Further, human listeners are sensitive, at an early, prelexical, stage of speeeh processing, to constraints on what could potentially be a word of the language.
  • Cutler, A., & Butterfield, S. (1989). Natural speech cues to word segmentation under difficult listening conditions. In J. Tubach, & J. Mariani (Eds.), Proceedings of Eurospeech 89: European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology: Vol. 2 (pp. 372-375). Edinburgh: CEP Consultants.

    Abstract

    One of a listener's major tasks in understanding continuous speech is segmenting the speech signal into separate words. When listening conditions are difficult, speakers can help listeners by deliberately speaking more clearly. In three experiments, we examined how word boundaries are produced in deliberately clear speech. We found that speakers do indeed attempt to mark word boundaries; moreover, they differentiate between word boundaries in a way which suggests they are sensitive to listener needs. Application of heuristic segmentation strategies makes word boundaries before strong syllables easiest for listeners to perceive; but under difficult listening conditions speakers pay more attention to marking word boundaries before weak syllables, i.e. they mark those boundaries which are otherwise particularly hard to perceive.
  • Cutler, A., Treiman, R., & Van Ooijen, B. (1998). Orthografik inkoncistensy ephekts in foneme detektion? In R. Mannell, & J. Robert-Ribes (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 6 (pp. 2783-2786). Sydney: ICSLP.

    Abstract

    The phoneme detection task is widely used in spoken word recognition research. Alphabetically literate participants, however, are more used to explicit representations of letters than of phonemes. The present study explored whether phoneme detection is sensitive to how target phonemes are, or may be, orthographically realised. Listeners detected the target sounds [b,m,t,f,s,k] in word-initial position in sequences of isolated English words. Response times were faster to the targets [b,m,t], which have consistent word-initial spelling, than to the targets [f,s,k], which are inconsistently spelled, but only when listeners’ attention was drawn to spelling by the presence in the experiment of many irregularly spelled fillers. Within the inconsistent targets [f,s,k], there was no significant difference between responses to targets in words with majority and minority spellings. We conclude that performance in the phoneme detection task is not necessarily sensitive to orthographic effects, but that salient orthographic manipulation can induce such sensitivity.
  • Cutler, A. (1983). Semantics, syntax and sentence accent. In M. Van den Broecke, & A. Cohen (Eds.), Proceedings of the Tenth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 85-91). Dordrecht: Foris.
  • Cutler, A. (1998). The recognition of spoken words with variable representations. In D. Duez (Ed.), Proceedings of the ESCA Workshop on Sound Patterns of Spontaneous Speech (pp. 83-92). Aix-en-Provence: Université de Aix-en-Provence.
  • Dalli, A., Tablan, V., Bontcheva, K., Wilks, Y., Broeder, D., Brugman, H., & Wittenburg, P. (2004). Web services architecture for language resources. In M. Lino, M. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa, & R. Silva (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC2004) (pp. 365-368). Paris: ELRA - European Language Resources Association.
  • Dietrich, W., & Drude, S. (Eds.). (2015). Variation in Tupi languages: Genealogy, language change, and typology [Special Issue]. Boletim do Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi:Ciencias Humanas, 10(2).
  • Dolscheid, S., Hunnius, S., & Majid, A. (2015). When high pitches sound low: Children's acquisition of space-pitch metaphors. In D. C. Noelle, R. Dale, A. S. Warlaumont, J. Yoshimi, T. Matlock, C. D. Jennings, & P. P. Maglio (Eds.), Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2015) (pp. 584-598). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. Retrieved from https://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2015/papers/0109/index.html.

    Abstract

    Some languages describe musical pitch in terms of spatial height; others in terms of thickness. Differences in pitch metaphors also shape adults’ nonlinguistic space-pitch representations. At the same time, 4-month-old infants have both types of space-pitch mappings available. This tension between prelinguistic space-pitch associations and their subsequent linguistic mediation raises questions about the acquisition of space-pitch metaphors. To address this issue, 5-year-old Dutch children were tested on their linguistic knowledge of pitch metaphors, and nonlinguistic space-pitch associations. Our results suggest 5-year-olds understand height-pitch metaphors in a reversed fashion (high pitch = low). Children displayed good comprehension of a thickness-pitch metaphor, despite its absence in Dutch. In nonlinguistic tasks, however, children did not show consistent space-pitch associations. Overall, pitch representations do not seem to be influenced by linguistic metaphors in 5-year-olds, suggesting that effects of language on musical pitch arise rather late during development.
  • Drijvers, L., Zaadnoordijk, L., & Dingemanse, M. (2015). Sound-symbolism is disrupted in dyslexia: Implications for the role of cross-modal abstraction processes. In D. Noelle, R. Dale, A. S. Warlaumont, J. Yoshimi, T. Matlock, C. D. Jennings, & P. P. Maglio (Eds.), Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2015) (pp. 602-607). Austin, Tx: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Research into sound-symbolism has shown that people can
    consistently associate certain pseudo-words with certain referents;
    for instance, pseudo-words with rounded vowels and
    sonorant consonants are linked to round shapes, while pseudowords
    with unrounded vowels and obstruents (with a noncontinuous
    airflow), are associated with sharp shapes. Such
    sound-symbolic associations have been proposed to arise from
    cross-modal abstraction processes. Here we assess the link between
    sound-symbolism and cross-modal abstraction by testing
    dyslexic individuals’ ability to make sound-symbolic associations.
    Dyslexic individuals are known to have deficiencies
    in cross-modal processing. We find that dyslexic individuals
    are impaired in their ability to make sound-symbolic associations
    relative to the controls. Our results shed light on the cognitive
    underpinnings of sound-symbolism by providing novel
    evidence for the role —and disruptability— of cross-modal abstraction
    processes in sound-symbolic eects.
  • Drozd, K. F. (1998). No as a determiner in child English: A summary of categorical evidence. In A. Sorace, C. Heycock, & R. Shillcock (Eds.), Proceedings of the Gala '97 Conference on Language Acquisition (pp. 34-39). Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press,.

    Abstract

    This paper summarizes the results of a descriptive syntactic category analysis of child English no which reveals that young children use and represent no as a determiner and negatives like no pen as NPs, contra standard analyses.
  • Drozdova, P., Van Hout, R., & Scharenborg, O. (2015). The effect of non-nativeness and background noise on lexical retuning. In Scottish consortium for ICPhS 2015, M. Wolters, J. Livingstone, B. Beattie, R. Smith, M. MacMahon, J. Stuart-Smith, & J. Scobbie (Eds.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2015). Glasgow: University of Glasgow.

    Abstract

    Previous research revealed remarkable flexibility of native and non-native listeners’ perceptual system, i.e., native and non-native phonetic category boundaries can be quickly recalibrated in the face of ambiguous input.
    The present study investigates the limitations of the flexibility of the non-native perceptual system. In two lexically-guided perceptual learning experiments, Dutch listeners were exposed to a short story in English, where either all /l/ or all /ɹ/ sounds were replaced by an ambiguous [l/ɹ] sound. In the first experiment, the story was presented in clean, while in the second experiment, intermittent noise was added to the story, although never on the critical words. Lexically-guided perceptual learning was only observed in the clean condition. It is argued that the introduction of intermittent noise reduced the reliability of the evidence of hearing a particular word, which in turn blocked retuning of the phonetic categories.
  • Enfield, N. J. (2004). Areal grammaticalisation of postverbal 'acquire' in mainland Southeast Asia. In S. Burusphat (Ed.), Proceedings of the 11th Southeast Asia Linguistics Society Meeting (pp. 275-296). Arizona State University: Tempe.
  • Esling, J. H., Benner, A., & Moisik, S. R. (2015). Laryngeal articulatory function and speech origins. In H. Little (Ed.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2015) Satellite Event: The Evolution of Phonetic Capabilities: Causes constraints, consequences (pp. 2-7). Glasgow: ICPhS.

    Abstract

    The larynx is the essential articulatory mechanism that primes the vocal tract. Far from being only a glottal source of voicing, the complex laryngeal mechanism entrains the ontogenetic acquisition of speech and, through coarticulatory coupling, guides the production of oral sounds in the infant vocal tract. As such, it is not possible to speculate as to the origins of the speaking modality in humans without considering the fundamental role played by the laryngeal articulatory mechanism. The Laryngeal Articulator Model, which divides the vocal tract into a laryngeal component and an oral component, serves as a basis for describing early infant speech and for positing how speech sounds evolving in various hominids may be related phonetically. To this end, we offer some suggestions for how the evolution and development of vocal tract anatomy fit with our infant speech acquisition data and discuss the implications this has for explaining phonetic learning and for interpreting the biological evolution of the human vocal tract in relation to speech and speech acquisition.
  • Floyd, S. (2004). Purismo lingüístico y realidad local: ¿Quichua puro o puro quichuañol? In Proceedings of the Conference on Indigenous Languages of Latin America (CILLA)-I.
  • Franken, M. K., McQueen, J. M., Hagoort, P., & Acheson, D. J. (2015). Assessing the link between speech perception and production through individual differences. In Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Glasgow: the University of Glasgow.

    Abstract

    This study aims to test a prediction of recent
    theoretical frameworks in speech motor control: if speech production targets are specified in auditory
    terms, people with better auditory acuity should have more precise speech targets.
    To investigate this, we had participants perform speech perception and production tasks in a counterbalanced order. To assess speech perception acuity, we used an adaptive speech discrimination
    task. To assess variability in speech production, participants performed a pseudo-word reading task; formant values were measured for each recording.
    We predicted that speech production variability to correlate inversely with discrimination performance.
    The results suggest that people do vary in their production and perceptual abilities, and that better discriminators have more distinctive vowel production targets, confirming our prediction. This
    study highlights the importance of individual
    differences in the study of speech motor control, and sheds light on speech production-perception interaction.
  • Hammarström, H. (2015). Glottolog: A free, online, comprehensive bibliography of the world's languages. In E. Kuzmin (Ed.), Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Linguistic and Cultural Diversity in Cyberspace (pp. 183-188). Moscow: UNESCO.
  • Harmon, Z., & Kapatsinski, V. (2015). Studying the dynamics of lexical access using disfluencies. In R. Lickley, & R. Eklund (Eds.), Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech (DiSS 2015) (pp. 41-44).

    Abstract

    Faced with planning problems related to lexical access, speakers take advantage of a major function of disfluencies: buying time. It is reasonable, then, to expect that the structure of disfluencies sheds light on the mechanisms underlying lexical access. Using data from the Switchboard Corpus, we investigated the effect of semantic competition during lexical access on repetition disfluencies. We hypothesized that the more time the speaker needs to access the following unit, the longer the repetition. We examined the repetitions preceding verbs and nouns and tested predictors influencing the accessibility of these items. Results suggest that speed of lexical access negatively correlates with the length of repetition and that the main determinants of lexical access speed differ for verbs and nouns. Longer disfluencies before verbs appear to be due to significant paradigmatic competition from semantically similar verbs. For nouns, they occur when the noun is relatively unpredictable given the preceding context.
  • Janssen, R., Moisik, S. R., & Dediu, D. (2015). Bézier modelling and high accuracy curve fitting to capture hard palate variation. In Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2015). Glasgow, UK: University of Glasgow.

    Abstract

    The human hard palate shows between-subject variation
    that is known to influence articulatory strategies.
    In order to link such variation to human speech, we
    are conducting a cross-sectional MRI study on multiple
    populations. A model based on Bezier curves
    using only three parameters was fitted to hard palate
    MRI tracings using evolutionary computation. The
    fits produced consistently yield high accuracies. For
    future research, this new method may be used to classify
    our MRI data on ethnic origins using e.g., cluster
    analyses. Furthermore, we may integrate our model
    into three-dimensional representations of the vocal
    tract in order to investigate its effect on acoustics and
    cultural transmission.
  • Janzen, G., & Weststeijn, C. (2004). Neural representation of object location and route direction: An fMRI study. NeuroImage, 22(Supplement 1), e634-e635.
  • Janzen, G., & Van Turennout, M. (2004). Neuronale Markierung navigationsrelevanter Objekte im räumlichen Gedächtnis: Ein fMRT Experiment. In D. Kerzel (Ed.), Beiträge zur 46. Tagung experimentell arbeitender Psychologen (pp. 125-125). Lengerich: Pabst Science Publishers.
  • Johns, T. G., Perera, R. M., Vitali, A. A., Vernes, S. C., & Scott, A. (2004). Phosphorylation of a glioma-specific mutation of the EGFR [Abstract]. Neuro-Oncology, 6, 317.

    Abstract

    Mutations of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) gene are found at a relatively high frequency in glioma, with the most common being the de2-7 EGFR (or EGFRvIII). This mutation arises from an in-frame deletion of exons 2-7, which removes 267 amino acids from the extracellular domain of the receptor. Despite being unable to bind ligand, the de2-7 EGFR is constitutively active at a low level. Transfection of human glioma cells with the de2-7 EGFR has little effect in vitro, but when grown as tumor xenografts this mutated receptor imparts a dramatic growth advantage. We mapped the phosphorylation pattern of de2-7 EGFR, both in vivo and in vitro, using a panel of antibodies specific for different phosphorylated tyrosine residues. Phosphorylation of de2-7 EGFR was detected constitutively at all tyrosine sites surveyed in vitro and in vivo, including tyrosine 845, a known target in the wild-type EGFR for src kinase. There was a substantial upregulation of phosphorylation at every yrosine residue of the de2-7 EGFR when cells were grown in vivo compared to the receptor isolated from cells cultured in vitro. Upregulation of phosphorylation at tyrosine 845 could be stimulated in vitro by the addition of specific components of the ECM via an integrindependent mechanism. These observations may partially explain why the growth enhancement mediated by de2-7 EGFR is largely restricted to the in vivo environment
  • Kempen, G. (1988). De netwerker: Spin in het web of rat in een doolhof? In SURF in theorie en praktijk: Van personal tot supercomputer (pp. 59-61). Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers.
  • Kempen, G., & Harbusch, K. (1998). A 'tree adjoining' grammar without adjoining: The case of scrambling in German. In Fourth International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Frameworks (TAG+4).
  • Kempen, G., & Harbusch, K. (2004). How flexible is constituent order in the midfield of German subordinate clauses? A corpus study revealing unexpected rigidity. In S. Kepser, & M. Reis (Eds.), Pre-Proceedings of the International Conference on Linguistic Evidence (pp. 81-85). Tübingen: Niemeyer.
  • Kempen, G. (2004). Interactive visualization of syntactic structure assembly for grammar-intensive first- and second-language instruction. In R. Delmonte, P. Delcloque, & S. Tonelli (Eds.), Proceedings of InSTIL/ICALL2004 Symposium on NLP and speech technologies in advanced language learning systems (pp. 183-186). Venice: University of Venice.
  • Kempen, G., & Harbusch, K. (2004). How flexible is constituent order in the midfield of German subordinate clauses?: A corpus study revealing unexpected rigidity. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Linguistic Evidence (pp. 81-85). Tübingen: University of Tübingen.
  • Kempen, G. (2004). Human grammatical coding: Shared structure formation resources for grammatical encoding and decoding. In Cuny 2004 - The 17th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. March 25-27, 2004. University of Maryland (pp. 66).
  • Kita, S., van Gijn, I., & van der Hulst, H. (1998). Movement phases in signs and co-speech gestures, and their transcription by human coders. In Gesture and Sign-Language in Human-Computer Interaction (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence - LNCS Subseries, Vol. 1371) (pp. 23-35). Berlin, Germany: Springer-Verlag.

    Abstract

    The previous literature has suggested that the hand movement in co-speech gestures and signs consists of a series of phases with qualitatively different dynamic characteristics. In this paper, we propose a syntagmatic rule system for movement phases that applies to both co-speech gestures and signs. Descriptive criteria for the rule system were developed for the analysis video-recorded continuous production of signs and gesture. It involves segmenting a stream of body movement into phases and identifying different phase types. Two human coders used the criteria to analyze signs and cospeech gestures that are produced in natural discourse. It was found that the criteria yielded good inter-coder reliability. These criteria can be used for the technology of automatic recognition of signs and co-speech gestures in order to segment continuous production and identify the potentially meaningbearing phase.
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (2004). Philologie auf neuen Wegen [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 136.
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (2004). Universitas [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik (LiLi), 134.
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (1989). Kindersprache [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (73).
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (1983). Intonation [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (49).
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (1998). Kaleidoskop [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (112).
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (1975). Sprache ausländischer Arbeiter [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (18).
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (1988). Sprache Kranker [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (69).
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (1985). Schriftlichkeit [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (59).
  • Koch, X., & Janse, E. (2015). Effects of age and hearing loss on articulatory precision for sibilants. In M. Wolters, J. Livingstone, B. Beattie, R. Smith, M. MacMahon, J. Stuart-Smith, & J. Scobbie (Eds.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2015). London: International Phonetic Association.

    Abstract

    This study investigates the effects of adult age and speaker abilities on articulatory precision for sibilant productions. Normal-hearing young adults with
    better sibilant discrimination have been shown to produce greater spectral sibilant contrasts. As reduced auditory feedback may gradually impact on feedforward
    commands, we investigate whether articulatory precision as indexed by spectral mean for [s] and [S] decreases with age, and more particularly with agerelated
    hearing loss. Younger, middle-aged and older adults read aloud words starting with the sibilants [s] or [S]. Possible effects of cognitive, perceptual, linguistic and sociolinguistic background variables
    on the sibilants’ acoustics were also investigated. Sibilant contrasts were less pronounced for male than female speakers. Most importantly, for the fricative
    [s], the spectral mean was modulated by individual high-frequency hearing loss, but not age. These results underscore that even mild hearing loss already affects articulatory precision.
  • Levelt, W. J. M., & Plomp, R. (1962). Musical consonance and critical bandwidth. In Proceedings of the 4th International Congress Acoustics (pp. 55-55).
  • Levelt, W. J. M., & Flores d'Arcais, G. B. (1975). Some psychologists' reactions to the Symposium of Dynamic Aspects of Speech Perception. In A. Cohen, & S. Nooteboom (Eds.), Structure and process in speech perception (pp. 345-351). Berlin: Springer.
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1983). The speaker's organization of discourse. In Proceedings of the XIIIth International Congress of Linguists (pp. 278-290).
  • Little, H., Eryılmaz, K., & de Boer, B. (2015). A new artificial sign-space proxy for investigating the emergence of structure and categories in speech. In The Scottish Consortium for ICPhS 2015 (Ed.), The proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. (ICPhS 2015).
  • Little, H., Eryılmaz, K., & de Boer, B. (2015). Linguistic modality affects the creation of structure and iconicity in signals. In D. C. Noelle, R. Dale, A. S. Warlaumont, J. Yoshimi, T. Matlock, C. Jennings, & P. Maglio (Eds.), The 37th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2015) (pp. 1392-1398). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Different linguistic modalities (speech or sign) offer different levels at which signals can iconically represent the world. One hypothesis argues that this iconicity has an effect on how linguistic structure emerges. However, exactly how and why these effects might come about is in need of empirical investigation. In this contribution, we present a signal creation experiment in which both the signalling space and the meaning space are manipulated so that different levels and types of iconicity are available between the signals and meanings. Signals are produced using an infrared sensor that detects the hand position of participants to generate auditory feedback. We find evidence that iconicity may be maladaptive for the discrimination of created signals. Further, we implemented Hidden Markov Models to characterise the structure within signals, which was also used to inform a metric for iconicity.
  • Majid, A., Van Staden, M., & Enfield, N. J. (2004). The human body in cognition, brain, and typology. In K. Hovie (Ed.), Forum Handbook, 4th International Forum on Language, Brain, and Cognition - Cognition, Brain, and Typology: Toward a Synthesis (pp. 31-35). Sendai: Tohoku University.

    Abstract

    The human body is unique: it is both an object of perception and the source of human experience. Its universality makes it a perfect resource for asking questions about how cognition, brain and typology relate to one another. For example, we can ask how speakers of different languages segment and categorize the human body. A dominant view is that body parts are “given” by visual perceptual discontinuities, and that words are merely labels for these visually determined parts (e.g., Andersen, 1978; Brown, 1976; Lakoff, 1987). However, there are problems with this view. First it ignores other perceptual information, such as somatosensory and motoric representations. By looking at the neural representations of sesnsory representations, we can test how much of the categorization of the human body can be done through perception alone. Second, we can look at language typology to see how much universality and variation there is in body-part categories. A comparison of a range of typologically, genetically and areally diverse languages shows that the perceptual view has only limited applicability (Majid, Enfield & van Staden, in press). For example, using a “coloring-in” task, where speakers of seven different languages were given a line drawing of a human body and asked to color in various body parts, Majid & van Staden (in prep) show that languages vary substantially in body part segmentation. For example, Jahai (Mon-Khmer) makes a lexical distinction between upper arm, lower arm, and hand, but Lavukaleve (Papuan Isolate) has just one word to refer to arm, hand, and leg. This shows that body part categorization is not a straightforward mapping of words to visually determined perceptual parts.
  • Majid, A., Van Staden, M., Boster, J. S., & Bowerman, M. (2004). Event categorization: A cross-linguistic perspective. In K. Forbus, D. Gentner, & T. Tegier (Eds.), Proceedings of the 26th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 885-890). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

    Abstract

    Many studies in cognitive science address how people categorize objects, but there has been comparatively little research on event categorization. This study investigated the categorization of events involving material destruction, such as “cutting” and “breaking”. Speakers of 28 typologically, genetically, and areally diverse languages described events shown in a set of video-clips. There was considerable cross-linguistic agreement in the dimensions along which the events were distinguished, but there was variation in the number of categories and the placement of their boundaries.
  • Majid, A., Jordan, F., & Dunn, M. (Eds.). (2015). Semantic systems in closely related languages [Special Issue]. Language Sciences, 49.
  • Matsuo, A. (2004). Young children's understanding of ongoing vs. completion in present and perfective participles. In J. v. Kampen, & S. Baauw (Eds.), Proceedings of GALA 2003 (pp. 305-316). Utrecht: Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics (LOT).
  • McQueen, J. M., & Cutler, A. (1998). Spotting (different kinds of) words in (different kinds of) context. In R. Mannell, & J. Robert-Ribes (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 6 (pp. 2791-2794). Sydney: ICSLP.

    Abstract

    The results of a word-spotting experiment are presented in which Dutch listeners tried to spot different types of bisyllabic Dutch words embedded in different types of nonsense contexts. Embedded verbs were not reliably harder to spot than embedded nouns; this suggests that nouns and verbs are recognised via the same basic processes. Iambic words were no harder to spot than trochaic words, suggesting that trochaic words are not in principle easier to recognise than iambic words. Words were harder to spot in consonantal contexts (i.e., contexts which themselves could not be words) than in longer contexts which contained at least one vowel (i.e., contexts which, though not words, were possible words of Dutch). A control experiment showed that this difference was not due to acoustic differences between the words in each context. The results support the claim that spoken-word recognition is sensitive to the viability of sound sequences as possible words.
  • Moers, C., Janse, E., & Meyer, A. S. (2015). Probabilistic reduction in reading aloud: A comparison of younger and older adults. In M. Wolters, J. Livingstone, B. Beattie, R. Smith, M. MacMahon, J. Stuart-Smith, & J. Scobbie (Eds.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2015). London: International Phonetics Association.

    Abstract

    Frequent and predictable words are generally pronounced with less effort and are therefore acoustically more reduced than less frequent or unpredictable words. Local predictability can be operationalised by Transitional Probability (TP), which indicates how likely a word is to occur given its immediate context. We investigated whether and how probabilistic reduction effects on word durations change with adult age when reading aloud content words embedded in sentences. The results showed equally large frequency effects on verb and noun durations for both younger (Mage = 20 years) and older (Mage = 68 years) adults. Backward TP also affected word duration for younger and older adults alike. ForwardTP, however, had no significant effect on word duration in either age group. Our results resemble earlier findings of more robust BackwardTP effects compared to ForwardTP effects. Furthermore, unlike often reported decline in predictive processing with aging, probabilistic reduction effects remain stable across adulthood.
  • Moisik, S. R., & Dediu, D. (2015). Anatomical biasing and clicks: Preliminary biomechanical modelling. In H. Little (Ed.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2015) Satellite Event: The Evolution of Phonetic Capabilities: Causes constraints, consequences (pp. 8-13). Glasgow: ICPhS.

    Abstract

    It has been observed by several researchers that the Khoisan palate tends to lack a prominent alveolar ridge. A preliminary biomechanical model of click production was created to examine if these sounds might be subject to an anatomical bias associated with alveolar ridge size. Results suggest the bias is plausible, taking the form of decreased articulatory effort and improved volume change characteristics, however, further modelling and experimental research is required to solidify the claim.
  • Morano, L., Ernestus, M., & Ten Bosch, L. (2015). Schwa reduction in low-proficiency L2 speakers: Learning and generalization. In Scottish consortium for ICPhS, M. Wolters, J. Livingstone, B. Beattie, R. Smith, M. MacMahon, J. Stuart-Smith, & J. Scobbie (Eds.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2015). Glasgow: University of Glasgow.

    Abstract

    This paper investigated the learnability and generalizability of French schwa alternation by Dutch low-proficiency second language learners. We trained 40 participants on 24 new schwa words by exposing them equally often to the reduced and full forms of these words. We then assessed participants' accuracy and reaction times to these newly learnt words as well as 24 previously encountered schwa words with an auditory lexical decision task. Our results show learning of the new words in both forms. This suggests that lack of exposure is probably the main cause of learners' difficulties with reduced forms. Nevertheless, the full forms were slightly better recognized than the reduced ones, possibly due to phonetic and phonological properties of the reduced forms. We also observed no generalization to previously encountered words, suggesting that our participants stored both of the learnt word forms and did not create a rule that applies to all schwa words.
  • Mulder, K., Brekelmans, G., & Ernestus, M. (2015). The processing of schwa reduced cognates and noncognates in non-native listeners of English. In Scottish consortium for ICPhS, M. Wolters, J. Livingstone, B. Beattie, R. Smith, M. MacMahon, J. Stuart-Smith, & J. Scobbie (Eds.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2015). Glasgow: University of Glasgow.

    Abstract

    In speech, words are often reduced rather than fully pronounced (e.g., (/ˈsʌmri/ for /ˈsʌməri/, summary). Non-native listeners may have problems in processing these reduced forms, because they have encountered them less often. This paper addresses the question whether this also holds for highly proficient non-natives and for words with similar forms and meanings in the non-natives' mother tongue (i.e., cognates). In an English auditory lexical decision task, natives and highly proficient Dutch non-natives of English listened to cognates and non-cognates that were presented in full or without their post-stress schwa. The data show that highly proficient learners are affected by reduction as much as native speakers. Nevertheless, the two listener groups appear to process reduced forms differently, because non-natives produce more errors on reduced cognates than on non-cognates. While listening to reduced forms, non-natives appear to be hindered by the co-activated lexical representations of cognate forms in their native language.
  • Neger, T. M., Rietveld, T., & Janse, E. (2015). Adult age effects in auditory statistical learning. In M. Wolters, J. Livingstone, B. Beattie, R. Smith, M. MacMahon, J. Stuart-Smith, & J. Scobbie (Eds.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2015). London: International Phonetic Association.

    Abstract

    Statistical learning plays a key role in language processing, e.g., for speech segmentation. Older adults have been reported to show less statistical learning on the basis of visual input than younger adults. Given age-related changes in perception and cognition, we investigated whether statistical learning is also impaired in the auditory modality in older compared to younger adults and whether individual learning ability is associated with measures of perceptual (i.e., hearing sensitivity) and cognitive functioning in both age groups. Thirty younger and thirty older adults performed an auditory artificial-grammar-learning task to assess their statistical learning ability. In younger adults, perceptual effort came at the cost of processing resources required for learning. Inhibitory control (as indexed by Stroop colornaming performance) did not predict auditory learning. Overall, younger and older adults showed the same amount of auditory learning, indicating that statistical learning ability is preserved over the adult life span.
  • Nijveld, A., Ten Bosch, L., & Ernestus, M. (2015). Exemplar effects arise in a lexical decision task, but only under adverse listening conditions. In Scottish consortium for ICPhS, M. Wolters, J. Livingstone, B. Beattie, R. Smith, M. MacMahon, J. Stuart-Smith, & J. Scobbie (Eds.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2015). Glasgow: University of Glasgow.

    Abstract

    This paper studies the influence of adverse listening conditions on exemplar effects in priming experiments that do not instruct participants to use their episodic memories. We conducted two lexical decision experiments, in which a prime and a target represented the same word type and could be spoken by the same or a different speaker. In Experiment 1, participants listened to clear speech, and showed no exemplar effects: they recognised repetitions by the same speaker as quickly as different speaker repetitions. In Experiment 2, the stimuli contained noise, and exemplar effects did arise. Importantly, Experiment 1 elicited longer average RTs than Experiment 2, a result that contradicts the time-course hypothesis, according to which exemplars only play a role when processing is slow. Instead, our findings support the hypothesis that exemplar effects arise under adverse listening conditions, when participants are stimulated to use their episodic memories in addition to their mental lexicons.
  • Ozyurek, A. (1998). An analysis of the basic meaning of Turkish demonstratives in face-to-face conversational interaction. In S. Santi, I. Guaitella, C. Cave, & G. Konopczynski (Eds.), Oralite et gestualite: Communication multimodale, interaction: actes du colloque ORAGE 98 (pp. 609-614). Paris: L'Harmattan.
  • Peeters, D., Snijders, T. M., Hagoort, P., & Ozyurek, A. (2015). The role of left inferior frontal Gyrus in the integration of point- ing gestures and speech. In G. Ferré, & M. Tutton (Eds.), Proceedings of the4th GESPIN - Gesture & Speech in Interaction Conference. Nantes: Université de Nantes.

    Abstract

    Comprehension of pointing gestures is fundamental to human communication. However, the neural mechanisms
    that subserve the integration of pointing gestures and speech in visual contexts in comprehension
    are unclear. Here we present the results of an fMRI study in which participants watched images of an
    actor pointing at an object while they listened to her referential speech. The use of a mismatch paradigm
    revealed that the semantic unication of pointing gesture and speech in a triadic context recruits left
    inferior frontal gyrus. Complementing previous ndings, this suggests that left inferior frontal gyrus
    semantically integrates information across modalities and semiotic domains.
  • Perlman, M., Paul, J., & Lupyan, G. (2015). Congenitally deaf children generate iconic vocalizations to communicate magnitude. In D. C. Noelle, R. Dale, A. S. Warlaumont, J. Yoshimi, T. Matlock, C. D. Jennings, & P. R. Maglio (Eds.), Proceedings of the 37th Annual Cognitive Science Society Meeting (CogSci 2015) (pp. 315-320). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    From an early age, people exhibit strong links between certain visual (e.g. size) and acoustic (e.g. duration) dimensions. Do people instinctively extend these crossmodal correspondences to vocalization? We examine the ability of congenitally deaf Chinese children and young adults (age M = 12.4 years, SD = 3.7 years) to generate iconic vocalizations to distinguish items with contrasting magnitude (e.g., big vs. small ball). Both deaf and hearing (M = 10.1 years, SD = 0.83 years) participants produced longer, louder vocalizations for greater magnitude items. However, only hearing participants used pitch—higher pitch for greater magnitude – which counters the hypothesized, innate size “frequency code”, but fits with Mandarin language and culture. Thus our results show that the translation of visible magnitude into the duration and intensity of vocalization transcends auditory experience, whereas the use of pitch appears more malleable to linguistic and cultural influence.
  • Perniss, P. M., Ozyurek, A., & Morgan, G. (Eds.). (2015). The influence of the visual modality on language structure and conventionalization: Insights from sign language and gesture [Special Issue]. Topics in Cognitive Science, 7(1). doi:10.1111/tops.12113.
  • Perry, L., Perlman, M., & Lupyan, G. (2015). Iconicity in English vocabulary and its relation to toddlers’ word learning. In D. C. Noelle, R. Dale, A. S. Warlaumont, J. Yoshimi, T. Matlock, C. D. Jennings, & P. R. Maglio (Eds.), Proceedings of the 37th Annual Cognitive Science Society Meeting (CogSci 2015) (pp. 315-320). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Scholars have documented substantial classes of iconic vocabulary in many non-Indo-European languages. In comparison, Indo-European languages like English are assumed to be arbitrary outside of a small number of onomatopoeic words. In three experiments, we asked English speakers to rate the iconicity of words from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventory. We found English—contrary to common belief—exhibits iconicity that correlates with age of acquisition and differs across lexical classes. Words judged as most iconic are learned earlier, in accord with findings that iconic words are easier to learn. We also find that adjectives and verbs are more iconic than nouns, supporting the idea that iconicity provides an extra cue in learning more difficult abstract meanings. Our results provide new evidence for a relationship between iconicity and word learning and suggest iconicity may be a more pervasive property of spoken languages than previously thought.
  • Roberts, S. G., Everett, C., & Blasi, D. (2015). Exploring potential climate effects on the evolution of human sound systems. In H. Little (Ed.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences [ICPhS 2015] Satellite Event: The Evolution of Phonetic Capabilities: Causes constraints, consequences (pp. 14-19). Glasgow: ICPHS.

    Abstract

    We suggest that it is now possible to conduct research on a topic which might be called evolutionary geophonetics. The main question is how the climate influences the evolution of language. This involves biological adaptations to the climate that may affect biases in production and perception; cultural evolutionary adaptations of the sounds of a language to climatic conditions; and influences of the climate on language diversity and contact. We discuss these ideas with special reference to a recent hypothesis that lexical tone is not adaptive in dry climates (Everett, Blasi & Roberts, 2015).
  • De Ruiter, J. P. (2004). On the primacy of language in multimodal communication. In Workshop Proceedings on Multimodal Corpora: Models of Human Behaviour for the Specification and Evaluation of Multimodal Input and Output Interfaces.(LREC2004) (pp. 38-41). Paris: ELRA - European Language Resources Association (CD-ROM).

    Abstract

    In this paper, I will argue that although the study of multimodal interaction offers exciting new prospects for Human Computer Interaction and human-human communication research, language is the primary form of communication, even in multimodal systems. I will support this claim with theoretical and empirical arguments, mainly drawn from human-human communication research, and will discuss the implications for multimodal communication research and Human-Computer Interaction.
  • San Roque, L., & Bergvist, H. (Eds.). (2015). Epistemic marking in typological perspective [Special Issue]. STUF -Language typology and universals, 68(2).
  • Sauter, D., Scott, S., & Calder, A. (2004). Categorisation of vocally expressed positive emotion: A first step towards basic positive emotions? [Abstract]. Proceedings of the British Psychological Society, 12, 111.

    Abstract

    Most of the study of basic emotion expressions has focused on facial expressions and little work has been done to specifically investigate happiness, the only positive of the basic emotions (Ekman & Friesen, 1971). However, a theoretical suggestion has been made that happiness could be broken down into discrete positive emotions, which each fulfil the criteria of basic emotions, and that these would be expressed vocally (Ekman, 1992). To empirically test this hypothesis, 20 participants categorised 80 paralinguistic sounds using the labels achievement, amusement, contentment, pleasure and relief. The results suggest that achievement, amusement and relief are perceived as distinct categories, which subjects accurately identify. In contrast, the categories of contentment and pleasure were systematically confused with other responses, although performance was still well above chance levels. These findings are initial evidence that the positive emotions engage distinct vocal expressions and may be considered to be distinct emotion categories.
  • Scharenborg, O., Boves, L., & Ten Bosch, L. (2004). ‘On-line early recognition’ of polysyllabic words in continuous speech. In S. Cassidy, F. Cox, R. Mannell, & P. Sallyanne (Eds.), Proceedings of the Tenth Australian International Conference on Speech Science & Technology (pp. 387-392). Canberra: Australian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

    Abstract

    In this paper, we investigate the ability of SpeM, our recognition system based on the combination of an automatic phone recogniser and a wordsearch module, to determine as early as possible during the word recognition process whether a word is likely to be recognised correctly (this we refer to as ‘on-line’ early word recognition). We present two measures that can be used to predict whether a word is correctly recognised: the Bayesian word activation and the amount of available (acoustic) information for a word. SpeM was tested on 1,463 polysyllabic words in 885 continuous speech utterances. The investigated predictors indicated that a word activation that is 1) high (but not too high) and 2) based on more phones is more reliable to predict the correctness of a word than a similarly high value based on a small number of phones or a lower value of the word activation.
  • Schmidt, J., Scharenborg, O., & Janse, E. (2015). Semantic processing of spoken words under cognitive load in older listeners. In M. Wolters, J. Livingstone, B. Beattie, R. Smith, M. MacMahon, J. Stuart-Smith, & J. Scobbie (Eds.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2015). London: International Phonetic Association.

    Abstract

    Processing of semantic information in language comprehension has been suggested to be modulated by attentional resources. Consequently, cognitive load would be expected to reduce semantic priming, but studies have yielded inconsistent results. This study investigated whether cognitive load affects semantic activation in speech processing in older adults, and whether this is modulated by individual differences in cognitive and hearing abilities. Older adults participated in an auditory continuous lexical decision task in a low-load and high-load condition. The group analysis showed only a marginally significant reduction of semantic priming in the high-load condition compared to the low-load condition. The individual differences analysis showed that semantic priming was significantly reduced under increased load in participants with poorer attention-switching control. Hence, a resource-demanding secondary task may affect the integration of spoken words into a coherent semantic representation for listeners with poorer attentional skills.
  • Schubotz, L., Holler, J., & Ozyurek, A. (2015). Age-related differences in multi-modal audience design: Young, but not old speakers, adapt speech and gestures to their addressee's knowledge. In G. Ferré, & M. Tutton (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th GESPIN - Gesture & Speech in Interaction Conference (pp. 211-216). Nantes: Université of Nantes.

    Abstract

    Speakers can adapt their speech and co-speech gestures for
    addressees. Here, we investigate whether this ability is
    modulated by age. Younger and older adults participated in a
    comic narration task in which one participant (the speaker)
    narrated six short comic stories to another participant (the
    addressee). One half of each story was known to both participants, the other half only to the speaker. Younger but
    not older speakers used more words and gestures when narrating novel story content as opposed to known content.
    We discuss cognitive and pragmatic explanations of these findings and relate them to theories of gesture production.
  • Schuerman, W. L., Nagarajan, S., & Houde, J. (2015). Changes in consonant perception driven by adaptation of vowel production to altered auditory feedback. In M. Wolters, J. Livingstone, B. Beattie, R. Smith, M. MacMahon, J. Stuart-Smith, & J. Scobbie (Eds.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congresses of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2015). London: International Phonetic Association.

    Abstract

    Adaptation to altered auditory feedback has been shown to induce subsequent shifts in perception. However, it is uncertain whether these perceptual changes may generalize to other speech sounds. In this experiment, we tested whether exposing the production of a vowel to altered auditory feedback affects perceptual categorization of a consonant distinction. In two sessions, participants produced CVC words containing the vowel /i/, while intermittently categorizing stimuli drawn from a continuum between "see" and "she." In the first session feedback was unaltered, while in the second session the formants of the vowel were shifted 20% towards /u/. Adaptation to the altered vowel was found to reduce the proportion of perceived /S/ stimuli. We suggest that this reflects an alteration to the sensorimotor mapping that is shared between vowels and consonants.
  • Scott, S., & Sauter, D. (2004). Vocal expressions of emotion and positive and negative basic emotions [Abstract]. Proceedings of the British Psychological Society, 12, 156.

    Abstract

    Previous studies have indicated that vocal and facial expressions of the ‘basic’ emotions share aspects of processing. Thus amygdala damage compromises the perception of fear and anger from the face and from the voice. In the current study we tested the hypothesis that there exist positive basic emotions, expressed mainly in the voice (Ekman, 1992). Vocal stimuli were produced to express the specific positive emotions of amusement, achievement, pleasure, contentment and relief.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1975). Autonomous syntax and prelexical rules. In S. De Vriendt, J. Dierickx, & M. Wilmet (Eds.), Grammaire générative et psychomécanique du langage: actes du colloque organisé par le Centre d'études linguistiques et littéraires de la Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Bruxelles, 29-31 mai 1974 (pp. 89-98). Paris: Didier.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1975). Logic and language. In S. De Vriendt, J. Dierickx, & M. Wilmet (Eds.), Grammaire générative et psychomécanique du langage: actes du colloque organisé par le Centre d'études linguistiques et littéraires de la Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Bruxelles, 29-31 mai 1974 (pp. 84-87). Paris: Didier.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1985). Predicate raising and semantic transparency in Mauritian Creole. In N. Boretzky, W. Enninger, & T. Stolz (Eds.), Akten des 2. Essener Kolloquiums über "Kreolsprachen und Sprachkontakte", 29-30 Nov. 1985 (pp. 203-229). Bochum: Brockmeyer.

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