Publications

Displaying 1 - 100 of 209
  • Adank, P., & McQueen, J. M. (2007). The effect of an unfamiliar regional accent on spoken-word comprehension. In J. Trouvain, & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2007) (pp. 1925-1928). Dudweiler: Pirrot.

    Abstract

    This study aimed first to determine whether there is a delay associated with processing words in an unfamiliar regional accent compared to words in a familiar regional accent, and second to establish whether short-term exposure to an unfamiliar accent affects the speed and accuracy of comprehension of words spoken in that accent. Listeners performed an animacy decision task for words spoken in their own and in an unfamiliar accent. Next, they were exposed to approximately 20 minutes of speech in one of these two accents. After exposure, they repeated the animacy decision task. Results showed a considerable delay in word processing for the unfamiliar accent, but no effect of short-term exposure.
  • Alhama, R. G., Scha, R., & Zuidema, W. (2014). Rule learning in humans and animals. In E. A. Cartmill, S. Roberts, H. Lyn, & H. Cornish (Eds.), The evolution of language: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference (EVOLANG 10) (pp. 371-372). Singapore: World Scientific.
  • Alhama, R. G., & Zuidema, W. (2017). Segmentation as Retention and Recognition: the R&R model. In G. Gunzelmann, A. Howes, T. Tenbrink, & E. Davelaar (Eds.), Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2017) (pp. 1531-1536). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    We present the Retention and Recognition model (R&R), a probabilistic exemplar model that accounts for segmentation in Artificial Language Learning experiments. We show that R&R provides an excellent fit to human responses in three segmentation experiments with adults (Frank et al., 2010), outperforming existing models. Additionally, we analyze the results of the simulations and propose alternative explanations for the experimental findings.
  • 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.
  • Ameka, F. K., & Levinson, S. C. (Eds.). (2007). The typology and semantics of locative predication: Posturals, positionals and other beasts [Special Issue]. Linguistics, 45(5).

    Abstract

    This special issue is devoted to a relatively neglected topic in linguistics, namely the verbal component of locative statements. English tends, of course, to use a simple copula in utterances like “The cup is on the table”, but many languages, perhaps as many as half of the world's languages, have a set of alternate verbs, or alternate verbal affixes, which contrast in this slot. Often these are classificatory verbs of ‘sitting’, ‘standing’ and ‘lying’. For this reason, perhaps, Aristotle listed position among his basic (“noncomposite”) categories.
  • Andics, A., McQueen, J. M., & Van Turennout, M. (2007). Phonetic content influences voice discriminability. In J. Trouvain, & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2007) (pp. 1829-1832). Dudweiler: Pirrot.

    Abstract

    We present results from an experiment which shows that voice perception is influenced by the phonetic content of speech. Dutch listeners were presented with thirteen speakers pronouncing CVC words with systematically varying segmental content, and they had to discriminate the speakers’ voices. Results show that certain segments help listeners discriminate voices more than other segments do. Voice information can be extracted from every segmental position of a monosyllabic word and is processed rapidly. We also show that although relative discriminability within a closed set of voices appears to be a stable property of a voice, it is also influenced by segmental cues – that is, perceived uniqueness of a voice depends on what that voice says.
  • Azar, Z., Backus, A., & Ozyurek, A. (2017). Highly proficient bilinguals maintain language-specific pragmatic constraints on pronouns: Evidence from speech and gesture. In G. Gunzelmann, A. Howes, T. Tenbrink, & E. Davelaar (Eds.), Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2017) (pp. 81-86). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    The use of subject pronouns by bilingual speakers using both a pro-drop and a non-pro-drop language (e.g. Spanish heritage speakers in the USA) is a well-studied topic in research on cross-linguistic influence in language contact situations. Previous studies looking at bilinguals with different proficiency levels have yielded conflicting results on whether there is transfer from the non-pro-drop patterns to the pro-drop language. Additionally, previous research has focused on speech patterns only. In this paper, we study the two modalities of language, speech and gesture, and ask whether and how they reveal cross-linguistic influence on the use of subject pronouns in discourse. We focus on elicited narratives from heritage speakers of Turkish in the Netherlands, in both Turkish (pro-drop) and Dutch (non-pro-drop), as well as from monolingual control groups. The use of pronouns was not very common in monolingual Turkish narratives and was constrained by the pragmatic contexts, unlike in Dutch. Furthermore, Turkish pronouns were more likely to be accompanied by localized gestures than Dutch pronouns, presumably because pronouns in Turkish are pragmatically marked forms. We did not find any cross-linguistic influence in bilingual speech or gesture patterns, in line with studies (speech only) of highly proficient bilinguals. We therefore suggest that speech and gesture parallel each other not only in monolingual but also in bilingual production. Highly proficient heritage speakers who have been exposed to diverse linguistic and gestural patterns of each language from early on maintain monolingual patterns of pragmatic constraints on the use of pronouns multimodally.
  • Bauer, B. L. M. (2014). Indefinite HOMO in the Gospels of the Vulgata. In P. Molinell, P. Cuzzoli, & C. Fedriani (Eds.), Latin vulgaire – latin tardif X (pp. 415-435). Bergamo: Bergamo University Press.
  • Bavin, E. L., & Kidd, E. (2000). Learning new verbs: Beyond the input. In C. Davis, T. J. Van Gelder, & R. Wales (Eds.), Cognitive Science in Australia, 2000: Proceedings of the Fifth Biennial Conference of the Australasian Cognitive Science Society.
  • Bergmann, C., Ten Bosch, L., & Boves, L. (2014). A computational model of the headturn preference procedure: Design, challenges, and insights. In J. Mayor, & P. Gomez (Eds.), Computational Models of Cognitive Processes (pp. 125-136). World Scientific. doi:10.1142/9789814458849_0010.

    Abstract

    The Headturn Preference Procedure (HPP) is a frequently used method (e.g., Jusczyk & Aslin; and subsequent studies) to investigate linguistic abilities in infants. In this paradigm infants are usually first familiarised with words and then tested for a listening preference for passages containing those words in comparison to unrelated passages. Listening preference is defined as the time an infant spends attending to those passages with his or her head turned towards a flashing light and the speech stimuli. The knowledge and abilities inferred from the results of HPP studies have been used to reason about and formally model early linguistic skills and language acquisition. However, the actual cause of infants' behaviour in HPP experiments has been subject to numerous assumptions as there are no means to directly tap into cognitive processes. To make these assumptions explicit, and more crucially, to understand how infants' behaviour emerges if only general learning mechanisms are assumed, we introduce a computational model of the HPP. Simulations with the computational HPP model show that the difference in infant behaviour between familiarised and unfamiliar words in passages can be explained by a general learning mechanism and that many assumptions underlying the HPP are not necessarily warranted. We discuss the implications for conventional interpretations of the outcomes of HPP experiments.
  • Bergmann, C., Tsuji, S., & Cristia, A. (2017). Top-down versus bottom-up theories of phonological acquisition: A big data approach. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2017 (pp. 2103-2107).

    Abstract

    Recent work has made available a number of standardized meta- analyses bearing on various aspects of infant language processing. We utilize data from two such meta-analyses (discrimination of vowel contrasts and word segmentation, i.e., recognition of word forms extracted from running speech) to assess whether the published body of empirical evidence supports a bottom-up versus a top-down theory of early phonological development by leveling the power of results from thousands of infants. We predicted that if infants can rely purely on auditory experience to develop their phonological categories, then vowel discrimination and word segmentation should develop in parallel, with the latter being potentially lagged compared to the former. However, if infants crucially rely on word form information to build their phonological categories, then development at the word level must precede the acquisition of native sound categories. Our results do not support the latter prediction. We discuss potential implications and limitations, most saliently that word forms are only one top-down level proposed to affect phonological development, with other proposals suggesting that top-down pressures emerge from lexical (i.e., word-meaning pairs) development. This investigation also highlights general procedures by which standardized meta-analyses may be reused to answer theoretical questions spanning across phenomena.

    Additional information

    Scripts and data
  • Black, A., & Bergmann, C. (2017). Quantifying infants' statistical word segmentation: A meta-analysis. In G. Gunzelmann, A. Howes, T. Tenbrink, & E. Davelaar (Eds.), Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 124-129). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Theories of language acquisition and perceptual learning increasingly rely on statistical learning mechanisms. The current meta-analysis aims to clarify the robustness of this capacity in infancy within the word segmentation literature. Our analysis reveals a significant, small effect size for conceptual replications of Saffran, Aslin, & Newport (1996), and a nonsignificant effect across all studies that incorporate transitional probabilities to segment words. In both conceptual replications and the broader literature, however, statistical learning is moderated by whether stimuli are naturally produced or synthesized. These findings invite deeper questions about the complex factors that influence statistical learning, and the role of statistical learning in language acquisition.
  • Blasi, D. E., Christiansen, M. H., Wichmann, S., Hammarström, H., & Stadler, P. F. (2014). Sound symbolism and the origins of language. In E. A. Cartmill, S. Roberts, H. Lyn, & H. Cornish (Eds.), The evolution of language: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference (EVOLANG 10) (pp. 391-392). Singapore: World Scientific.
  • Bocanegra, B. R., Poletiek, F. H., & Zwaan, R. A. (2014). Asymmetrical feature binding across language and perception. In Proceedings of the 7th annual Conference on Embodied and Situated Language Processing (ESLP 2014).
  • Bosker, H. R., & Kösem, A. (2017). An entrained rhythm's frequency, not phase, influences temporal sampling of speech. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2017 (pp. 2416-2420). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2017-73.

    Abstract

    Brain oscillations have been shown to track the slow amplitude fluctuations in speech during comprehension. Moreover, there is evidence that these stimulus-induced cortical rhythms may persist even after the driving stimulus has ceased. However, how exactly this neural entrainment shapes speech perception remains debated. This behavioral study investigated whether and how the frequency and phase of an entrained rhythm would influence the temporal sampling of subsequent speech. In two behavioral experiments, participants were presented with slow and fast isochronous tone sequences, followed by Dutch target words ambiguous between as /ɑs/ “ash” (with a short vowel) and aas /a:s/ “bait” (with a long vowel). Target words were presented at various phases of the entrained rhythm. Both experiments revealed effects of the frequency of the tone sequence on target word perception: fast sequences biased listeners to more long /a:s/ responses. However, no evidence for phase effects could be discerned. These findings show that an entrained rhythm’s frequency, but not phase, influences the temporal sampling of subsequent speech. These outcomes are compatible with theories suggesting that sensory timing is evaluated relative to entrained frequency. Furthermore, they suggest that phase tracking of (syllabic) rhythms by theta oscillations plays a limited role in speech parsing.
  • Bosker, H. R. (2017). The role of temporal amplitude modulations in the political arena: Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2017 (pp. 2228-2232). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2017-142.

    Abstract

    Speech is an acoustic signal with inherent amplitude modulations in the 1-9 Hz range. Recent models of speech perception propose that this rhythmic nature of speech is central to speech recognition. Moreover, rhythmic amplitude modulations have been shown to have beneficial effects on language processing and the subjective impression listeners have of the speaker. This study investigated the role of amplitude modulations in the political arena by comparing the speech produced by Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the three presidential debates of 2016. Inspection of the modulation spectra, revealing the spectral content of the two speakers’ amplitude envelopes after matching for overall intensity, showed considerably greater power in Clinton’s modulation spectra (compared to Trump’s) across the three debates, particularly in the 1-9 Hz range. The findings suggest that Clinton’s speech had a more pronounced temporal envelope with rhythmic amplitude modulations below 9 Hz, with a preference for modulations around 3 Hz. This may be taken as evidence for a more structured temporal organization of syllables in Clinton’s speech, potentially due to more frequent use of preplanned utterances. Outcomes are interpreted in light of the potential beneficial effects of a rhythmic temporal envelope on intelligibility and speaker perception.
  • Braun, B. (2007). Effects of dialect and context on the realisation of German prenuclear accents. In J. Trouvain, & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2007) (pp. 961-964). Dudweiler: Pirrot.

    Abstract

    We investigated whether alignment differences reported for Southern and Northern German speakers (Southerners align peaks in prenuclear accents later than Northerners) are carried over to the production of different functional categories such as contrast. To this end, the realisation of non-contrastive theme accents is compared with those in contrastive theme-rheme pairs such as ‘Sam rented a truck and Johanna rented a car.’
    We found that when producing this ‘double-contrast’, speakers mark contrast both phonetically by delaying and rising the peak of the theme accent (‘Johanna’) and/or phonologically by a change in rheme accent type (from high to falling ‘car’).
    The effect of dialect is complex: a) only in non-contrastive contexts produced with a high rheme accent Southerners align peaks later than Northerners; b) peak delay as a means to signal functional contrast is not used uniformly by the two varieties. Dialect clearly affects the realisation of prenuclear accents but its effect is conditioned by the pragmatic and intonational context.
  • Broeder, D., Schuurman, I., & Windhouwer, M. (2014). Experiences with the ISOcat Data Category Registry. In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, T. Declerck, H. Loftsson, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, A. Moreno, J. Odijk, & S. Piperidis (Eds.), Proceedings of LREC 2014: 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 4565-4568).
  • Broersma, M. (2007). Why the 'president' does not excite the 'press: The limits of spurious lexical activation in L2 listening. In J. Trouvain, & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetics Sciences (ICPhS 2007) (pp. 1909-1912). Dudweiler: Pirrot.

    Abstract

    Two Cross-Modal Priming experiments assessed
    lexical activation of unintended words for
    nonnative (Dutch) and English native listeners.
    Stimuli mismatched words in final voicing, which
    in earlier studies caused spurious lexical activation
    for Dutch listeners. The stimuli were embedded in
    or cut out of a carrier (PRESident). The presence of
    a longer lexical competitor in the signal or as a
    possible continuation of it prevented spurious
    lexical activation of mismatching words (press).
  • Broersma, M., & Van de Ven, M. (2007). More flexible use of perceptual cues in nonnative than in native listening: Preceding vowel duration as a cue for final /v/-/f/. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium on the Acquisition of Second Language Speech (New Sounds 2007).

    Abstract

    Three 2AFC experiments investigated Dutch and English listeners’ use of preceding vowel duration for the English final /v/-/f/ contrast. Dutch listeners used vowel duration more flexibly than English listeners did: they could use vowel duration as accurately as native listeners, but were better at ignoring it when it was misleading.
  • Broersma, M. (2007). Kettle hinders cat, shadow does not hinder shed: Activation of 'almost embedded' words in nonnative listening. In H. van Hamme, & R. van Son (Eds.), Proceedings of Interspeech 2007 (pp. 1893-1896). Adelaide: Causal Productions.

    Abstract

    A Cross-Modal Priming experiment investigated Dutch
    listeners’ perception of English words. Target words were
    embedded in a carrier word (e.g., cat in catalogue) or ‘almost
    embedded’ in a carrier word except for a mismatch in the
    perceptually difficult /æ/-/ε/ contrast (e.g., cat in kettle).
    Previous results showed a bias towards perception of /ε/ over
    /æ/. The present study shows that presentation of carrier
    words either containing an /æ/ or an /ε/ led to long lasting
    inhibition of embedded or ‘almost embedded’ words with an
    /æ/, but not of words with an /ε/. Thus, both catalogue and
    kettle hindered recognition of cat, whereas neither schedule
    nor shadow hindered recognition of shed.
  • Burchfield, L. A., Luk, S.-.-H.-K., Antoniou, M., & Cutler, A. (2017). Lexically guided perceptual learning in Mandarin Chinese. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2017 (pp. 576-580). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2017-618.

    Abstract

    Lexically guided perceptual learni ng refers to the use of lexical knowledge to retune sp eech categories and thereby adapt to a novel talker’s pronunciation. This adaptation has been extensively documented, but primarily for segmental-based learning in English and Dutch. In languages with lexical tone, such as Mandarin Chinese, tonal categories can also be retuned in this way, but segmental category retuning had not been studied. We report two experiment s in which Mandarin Chinese listeners were exposed to an ambiguous mixture of [f] and [s] in lexical contexts favoring an interpretation as either [f] or [s]. Listeners were subsequently more likely to identify sounds along a continuum between [f] and [s], and to interpret minimal word pairs, in a manner consistent with this exposure. Thus lexically guided perceptual learning of segmental categories had indeed taken place, consistent with suggestions that such learning may be a universally available adaptation process
  • Cablitz, G., Ringersma, J., & Kemps-Snijders, M. (2007). Visualizing endangered indigenous languages of French Polynesia with LEXUS. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference Information Visualization (IV07) (pp. 409-414). IEEE Computer Society.

    Abstract

    This paper reports on the first results of the DOBES project ‘Towards a multimedia dictionary of the Marquesan and Tuamotuan languages of French Polynesia’. Within the framework of this project we are building a digital multimedia encyclopedic lexicon of the endangered Marquesan and Tuamotuan languages using a new tool, LEXUS. LEXUS is a web-based lexicon tool, targeted at linguists involved in language documentation. LEXUS offers the possibility to visualize language. It provides functionalities to include audio, video and still images to the lexical entries of the dictionary, as well as relational linking for the creation of a semantic network knowledge base. Further activities aim at the development of (1) an improved user interface in close cooperation with the speech community and (2) a collaborative workspace functionality which will allow the speech community to actively participate in the creation of lexica.
  • Casillas, M., Bergelson, E., Warlaumont, A. S., Cristia, A., Soderstrom, M., VanDam, M., & Sloetjes, H. (2017). A New Workflow for Semi-automatized Annotations: Tests with Long-Form Naturalistic Recordings of Childrens Language Environments. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2017 (pp. 2098-2102). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2017-1418.

    Abstract

    Interoperable annotation formats are fundamental to the utility, expansion, and sustainability of collective data repositories.In language development research, shared annotation schemes have been critical to facilitating the transition from raw acoustic data to searchable, structured corpora. Current schemes typically require comprehensive and manual annotation of utterance boundaries and orthographic speech content, with an additional, optional range of tags of interest. These schemes have been enormously successful for datasets on the scale of dozens of recording hours but are untenable for long-format recording corpora, which routinely contain hundreds to thousands of audio hours. Long-format corpora would benefit greatly from (semi-)automated analyses, both on the earliest steps of annotation—voice activity detection, utterance segmentation, and speaker diarization—as well as later steps—e.g., classification-based codes such as child-vs-adult-directed speech, and speech recognition to produce phonetic/orthographic representations. We present an annotation workflow specifically designed for long-format corpora which can be tailored by individual researchers and which interfaces with the current dominant scheme for short-format recordings. The workflow allows semi-automated annotation and analyses at higher linguistic levels. We give one example of how the workflow has been successfully implemented in a large cross-database project.
  • Casillas, M., Amatuni, A., Seidl, A., Soderstrom, M., Warlaumont, A., & Bergelson, E. (2017). What do Babies hear? Analyses of Child- and Adult-Directed Speech. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2017 (pp. 2093-2097). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2017-1409.

    Abstract

    Child-directed speech is argued to facilitate language development, and is found cross-linguistically and cross-culturally to varying degrees. However, previous research has generally focused on short samples of child-caregiver interaction, often in the lab or with experimenters present. We test the generalizability of this phenomenon with an initial descriptive analysis of the speech heard by young children in a large, unique collection of naturalistic, daylong home recordings. Trained annotators coded automatically-detected adult speech 'utterances' from 61 homes across 4 North American cities, gathered from children (age 2-24 months) wearing audio recorders during a typical day. Coders marked the speaker gender (male/female) and intended addressee (child/adult), yielding 10,886 addressee and gender tags from 2,523 minutes of audio (cf. HB-CHAAC Interspeech ComParE challenge; Schuller et al., in press). Automated speaker-diarization (LENA) incorrectly gender-tagged 30% of male adult utterances, compared to manually-coded consensus. Furthermore, we find effects of SES and gender on child-directed and overall speech, increasing child-directed speech with child age, and interactions of speaker gender, child gender, and child age: female caretakers increased their child-directed speech more with age than male caretakers did, but only for male infants. Implications for language acquisition and existing classification algorithms are discussed.
  • Chen, A., & Fikkert, P. (2007). Intonation of early two-word utterances in Dutch. In J. Trouvain, & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2007) (pp. 315-320). Dudweiler: Pirrot.

    Abstract

    We analysed intonation contours of two-word utterances from three monolingual Dutch children aged between 1;4 and 2;1 in the autosegmentalmetrical framework. Our data show that children have mastered the inventory of the boundary tones and nuclear pitch accent types (except for L*HL and L*!HL) at the 160-word level, and the set of nondownstepped pre-nuclear pitch accents (except for L*) at the 230-word level, contra previous claims on the mastery of adult-like intonation contours before or at the onset of first words. Further, there is evidence that intonational development is correlated with an increase in vocabulary size. Moreover, we found that children show a preference for falling contours, as predicted on the basis of universal production mechanisms. In addition, the utterances are mostly spoken with both words accented independent of semantic relations expressed and information status of each word across developmental stages, contra prior work. Our study suggests a number of topics for further research.
  • Chen, A. (2007). Intonational realisation of topic and focus by Dutch-acquiring 4- to 5-year-olds. In J. Trouvain, & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2007) (pp. 1553-1556). Dudweiler: Pirott.

    Abstract

    This study examined how Dutch-acquiring 4- to 5-year-olds use different pitch accent types and deaccentuation to mark topic and focus at the sentence level and how they differ from adults. The topic and focus were non-contrastive and realised as full noun phrases. It was found that children realise topic and focus similarly frequently with H*L, whereas adults use H*L noticeably more frequently in focus than in topic in sentence-initial position and nearly only in focus in sentence-final position. Further, children frequently realise the topic with an accent, whereas adults mostly deaccent the sentence-final topic and use H*L and H* to realise the sentence-initial topic because of rhythmic motivation. These results show that 4- and 5-year-olds have not acquired H*L as the typical focus accent and deaccentuation as the typical topic intonation yet. Possibly, frequent use of H*L in sentence-initial topic in adult Dutch has made it difficult to extract the functions of H*L and deaccentuation from the input.
  • Chen, A. (2014). Production-comprehension (A)Symmetry: Individual differences in the acquisition of prosodic focus-marking. In N. Campbell, D. Gibbon, & D. Hirst (Eds.), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2014 (pp. 423-427).

    Abstract

    Previous work based on different groups of children has shown that four- to five-year-old children are similar to adults in both producing and comprehending the focus-toaccentuation mapping in Dutch, contra the alleged productionprecedes- comprehension asymmetry in earlier studies. In the current study, we addressed the question of whether there are individual differences in the production-comprehension (a)symmetricity. To this end, we examined the use of prosody in focus marking in production and the processing of focusrelated prosody in online language comprehension in the same group of 4- to 5-year-olds. We have found that the relationship between comprehension and production can be rather diverse at an individual level. This result suggests some degree of independence in learning to use prosody to mark focus in production and learning to process focus-related prosodic information in online language comprehension, and implies influences of other linguistic and non-linguistic factors on the production-comprehension (a)symmetricity
  • Chen, A., Chen, A., Kager, R., & Wong, P. (2014). Rises and falls in Dutch and Mandarin Chinese. In C. Gussenhoven, Y. Chen, & D. Dediu (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Language (pp. 83-86).

    Abstract

    Despite of the different functions of pitch in tone and nontone languages, rises and falls are common pitch patterns across different languages. In the current study, we ask what is the language specific phonetic realization of rises and falls. Chinese and Dutch speakers participated in a production experiment. We used contexts composed for conveying specific communicative purposes to elicit rises and falls. We measured both tonal alignment and tonal scaling for both patterns. For the alignment measurements, we found language specific patterns for the rises, but for falls. For rises, both peak and valley were aligned later among Chinese speakers compared to Dutch speakers. For all the scaling measurements (maximum pitch, minimum pitch, and pitch range), no language specific patterns were found for either the rises or the falls
  • Clark, N., & Perlman, M. (2014). Breath, vocal, and supralaryngeal flexibility in a human-reared gorilla. In B. De Boer, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of Evolang X, Workshop on Signals, Speech, and Signs (pp. 11-15).

    Abstract

    “Gesture-first” theories dismiss ancestral great apes’ vocalization as a substrate for language evolution based on the claim that extant apes exhibit minimal learning and volitional control of vocalization. Contrary to this claim, we present data of novel learned and voluntarily controlled vocal behaviors produced by a human-fostered gorilla (G. gorilla gorilla). These behaviors demonstrate varying degrees of flexibility in the vocal apparatus (including diaphragm, lungs, larynx, and supralaryngeal articulators), and are predominantly performed in coordination with manual behaviors and gestures. Instead of a gesture-first theory, we suggest that these findings support multimodal theories of language evolution in which vocal and gestural forms are coordinated and supplement one another
  • 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).
  • Crasborn, O., & Sloetjes, H. (2014). Improving the exploitation of linguistic annotations in ELAN. In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, T. Declerck, H. Loftsson, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, A. Moreno, J. Odijk, & S. Piperidis (Eds.), Proceedings of LREC 2014: 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 3604-3608).

    Abstract

    This paper discusses some improvements in recent and planned versions of the multimodal annotation tool ELAN, which are targeted at improving the usability of annotated files. Increased support for multilingual documents is provided, by allowing for multilingual vocabularies and by specifying a language per document, annotation layer (tier) or annotation. In addition, improvements in the search possibilities and the display of the results have been implemented, which are especially relevant in the interpretation of the results of complex multi-tier searches.
  • Crasborn, O., Hulsbosch, M., Lampen, L., & Sloetjes, H. (2014). New multilayer concordance functions in ELAN and TROVA. In Proceedings of the Tilburg Gesture Research Meeting [TiGeR 2013].

    Abstract

    Collocations generated by concordancers are a standard instrument in the exploitation of text corpora for the analysis of language use. Multimodal corpora show similar types of patterns, activities that frequently occur together, but there is no tool that offers facilities for visualising such patterns. Examples include timing of eye contact with respect to speech, and the alignment of activities of the two hands in signed languages. This paper describes recent enhancements to the standard CLARIN tools ELAN and TROVA for multimodal annotation to address these needs: first of all the query and concordancing functions were improved, and secondly the tools now generate visualisations of multilayer collocations that allow for intuitive explorations and analyses of multimodal data. This will provide a boost to the linguistic fields of gesture and sign language studies, as it will improve the exploitation of multimodal corpora.
  • 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. (2017). Converging evidence for abstract phonological knowledge in speech processing. In G. Gunzelmann, A. Howes, T. Tenbrink, & E. Davelaar (Eds.), Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2017) (pp. 1447-1448). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    The perceptual processing of speech is a constant interplay of multiple competing albeit convergent processes: acoustic input vs. higher-level representations, universal mechanisms vs. language-specific, veridical traces of speech experience vs. construction and activation of abstract representations. The present summary concerns the third of these issues. The ability to generalise across experience and to deal with resulting abstractions is the hallmark of human cognition, visible even in early infancy. In speech processing, abstract representations play a necessary role in both production and perception. New sorts of evidence are now informing our understanding of the breadth of this role.
  • Cutler, A., Wales, R., Cooper, N., & Janssen, J. (2007). Dutch listeners' use of suprasegmental cues to English stress. In J. Trouvain, & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetics Sciences (ICPhS 2007) (pp. 1913-1916). Dudweiler: Pirrot.

    Abstract

    Dutch listeners outperform native listeners in identifying syllable stress in English. This is because lexical stress is more useful in recognition of spoken words of Dutch than of English, so that Dutch listeners pay greater attention to stress in general. We examined Dutch listeners’ use of the acoustic correlates of English stress. Primary- and secondary-stressed syllables differ significantly on acoustic measures, and some differences, in F0 especially, correlate with data of earlier listening experiments. The correlations found in the Dutch responses were not paralleled in data from native listeners. Thus the acoustic cues which distinguish English primary versus secondary stress are better exploited by Dutch than by native listeners.
  • Ip, M. H. K., & Cutler, A. (2017). Intonation facilitates prediction of focus even in the presence of lexical tones. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2017 (pp. 1218-1222). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2017-264.

    Abstract

    In English and Dutch, listeners entrain to prosodic contours to predict where focus will fall in an utterance. However, is this strategy universally available, even in languages with different phonological systems? In a phoneme detection experiment, we examined whether prosodic entrainment is also found in Mandarin Chinese, a tone language, where in principle the use of pitch for lexical identity may take precedence over the use of pitch cues to salience. Consistent with the results from Germanic languages, response times were facilitated when preceding intonation predicted accent on the target-bearing word. Acoustic analyses revealed greater F0 range in the preceding intonation of the predicted-accent sentences. These findings have implications for how universal and language-specific mechanisms interact in the processing of salience.
  • Cutler, A., & Weber, A. (2007). Listening experience and phonetic-to-lexical mapping in L2. In J. Trouvain, & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2007) (pp. 43-48). Dudweiler: Pirrot.

    Abstract

    In contrast to initial L1 vocabularies, which of necessity depend largely on heard exemplars, L2 vocabulary construction can draw on a variety of knowledge sources. This can lead to richer stored knowledge about the phonology of the L2 than the listener's prelexical phonetic processing capacity can support, and thus to mismatch between the level of detail required for accurate lexical mapping and the level of detail delivered by the prelexical processor. Experiments on spoken word recognition in L2 have shown that phonetic contrasts which are not reliably perceived are represented in the lexicon nonetheless. This lexical representation of contrast must be based on abstract knowledge, not on veridical representation of heard exemplars. New experiments confirm that provision of abstract knowledge (in the form of spelling) can induce lexical representation of a contrast which is not reliably perceived; but also that experience (in the form of frequency of occurrence) modulates the mismatch of phonetic and lexical processing. We conclude that a correct account of word recognition in L2 (as indeed in L1) requires consideration of both abstract and episodic information.
  • Cutler, A., Cooke, M., Garcia-Lecumberri, M. L., & Pasveer, D. (2007). L2 consonant identification in noise: Cross-language comparisons. In H. van Hamme, & R. van Son (Eds.), Proceedings of Interspeech 2007 (pp. 1585-1588). Adelaide: Causal productions.

    Abstract

    The difficulty of listening to speech in noise is exacerbated when the speech is in the listener’s L2 rather than L1. In this study, Spanish and Dutch users of English as an L2 identified American English consonants in a constant intervocalic context. Their performance was compared with that of L1 (British English) listeners, under quiet conditions and when the speech was masked by speech from another talker or by noise. Masking affected performance more for the Spanish listeners than for the L1 listeners, but not for the Dutch listeners, whose performance was worse than the L1 case to about the same degree in all conditions. There were, however,large differences in the pattern of results across individual consonants, which were consistent with differences in how consonants are identified in the respective L1s.
  • Cutler, A. (1998). How listeners find the right words. In Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Congress on Acoustics: Vol. 2 (pp. 1377-1380). Melville, NY: Acoustical Society of America.

    Abstract

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

    Abstract

    The phoneme detection task is widely used in spoken word recognition research. Alphabetically literate participants, however, are more used to explicit representations of letters than of phonemes. The present study explored whether phoneme detection is sensitive to how target phonemes are, or may be, orthographically realised. Listeners detected the target sounds [b,m,t,f,s,k] in word-initial position in sequences of isolated English words. Response times were faster to the targets [b,m,t], which have consistent word-initial spelling, than to the targets [f,s,k], which are inconsistently spelled, but only when listeners’ attention was drawn to spelling by the presence in the experiment of many irregularly spelled fillers. Within the inconsistent targets [f,s,k], there was no significant difference between responses to targets in words with majority and minority spellings. We conclude that performance in the phoneme detection task is not necessarily sensitive to orthographic effects, but that salient orthographic manipulation can induce such sensitivity.
  • Cutler, A., & Koster, M. (2000). Stress and lexical activation in Dutch. In B. Yuan, T. Huang, & X. Tang (Eds.), Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 1 (pp. 593-596). Beijing: China Military Friendship Publish.

    Abstract

    Dutch listeners were slower to make judgements about the semantic relatedness between a spoken target word (e.g. atLEET, 'athlete') and a previously presented visual prime word (e.g. SPORT 'sport') when the spoken word was mis-stressed. The adverse effect of mis-stressing confirms the role of stress information in lexical recognition in Dutch. However, although the erroneous stress pattern was always initially compatible with a competing word (e.g. ATlas, 'atlas'), mis-stressed words did not produced high false alarm rates in unrelated pairs (e.g. SPORT - atLAS). This suggests that stress information did not completely rule out segmentally matching but suprasegmentally mismatching words, a finding consistent with spoken-word recognition models involving multiple activation and inter-word competition.
  • Cutler, A. (1998). The recognition of spoken words with variable representations. In D. Duez (Ed.), Proceedings of the ESCA Workshop on Sound Patterns of Spontaneous Speech (pp. 83-92). Aix-en-Provence: Université de Aix-en-Provence.
  • Cutler, A., Norris, D., & McQueen, J. M. (2000). Tracking TRACE’s troubles. In A. Cutler, J. M. McQueen, & R. Zondervan (Eds.), Proceedings of SWAP (Workshop on Spoken Word Access Processes) (pp. 63-66). Nijmegen: Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics.

    Abstract

    Simulations explored the inability of the TRACE model of spoken-word recognition to model the effects on human listening of acoustic-phonetic mismatches in word forms. The source of TRACE's failure lay not in its interactive connectivity, not in the presence of interword competition, and not in the use of phonemic representations, but in the need for continuously optimised interpretation of the input. When an analogue of TRACE was allowed to cycle to asymptote on every slice of input, an acceptable simulation of the subcategorical mismatch data was achieved. Even then, however, the simulation was not as close as that produced by the Merge model.
  • Dediu, D., & Levinson, S. C. (2014). Language and speech are old: A review of the evidence and consequences for modern linguistic diversity. In E. A. Cartmill, S. G. Roberts, H. Lyn, & H. Cornish (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference (pp. 421-422). Singapore: World Scientific.
  • Dingemanse, M., Torreira, F., & Enfield, N. J. (2014). Conversational infrastructure and the convergent evolution of linguistic items. In E. A. Cartmill, S. G. Roberts, H. Lyn, & H. Cornish (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference (pp. 425-426). Singapore: World Scientific.
  • Dingemanse, M., Verhoef, T., & Roberts, S. G. (2014). The role of iconicity in the cultural evolution of communicative signals. In B. De Boer, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of Evolang X, Workshop on Signals, Speech, and Signs (pp. 11-15).
  • Dolscheid, S., Willems, R. M., Hagoort, P., & Casasanto, D. (2014). The relation of space and musical pitch in the brain. In P. Bello, M. Guarini, M. McShane, & B. Scassellati (Eds.), Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2014) (pp. 421-426). Austin, Tx: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Numerous experiments show that space and musical pitch are
    closely linked in people's minds. However, the exact nature of
    space-pitch associations and their neuronal underpinnings are
    not well understood. In an fMRI experiment we investigated
    different types of spatial representations that may underlie
    musical pitch. Participants judged stimuli that varied in
    spatial height in both the visual and tactile modalities, as well
    as auditory stimuli that varied in pitch height. In order to
    distinguish between unimodal and multimodal spatial bases of
    musical pitch, we examined whether pitch activations were
    present in modality-specific (visual or tactile) versus
    multimodal (visual and tactile) regions active during spatial
    height processing. Judgments of musical pitch were found to
    activate unimodal visual areas, suggesting that space-pitch
    associations may involve modality-specific spatial
    representations, supporting a key assumption of embodied
    theories of metaphorical mental representation.
  • Doumas, L. A. A., Hamer, A., Puebla, G., & Martin, A. E. (2017). A theory of the detection and learning of structured representations of similarity and relative magnitude. In G. Gunzelmann, A. Howes, T. Tenbrink, & E. Davelaar (Eds.), Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2017) (pp. 1955-1960). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Responding to similarity, difference, and relative magnitude (SDM) is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom. However, humans seem unique in the ability to represent relative magnitude (‘more’/‘less’) and similarity (‘same’/‘different’) as abstract relations that take arguments (e.g., greater-than (x,y)). While many models use structured relational representations of magnitude and similarity, little progress has been made on how these representations arise. Models that developuse these representations assume access to computations of similarity and magnitude a priori, either encoded as features or as output of evaluation operators. We detail a mechanism for producing invariant responses to “same”, “different”, “more”, and “less” which can be exploited to compute similarity and magnitude as an evaluation operator. Using DORA (Doumas, Hummel, & Sandhofer, 2008), these invariant responses can serve be used to learn structured relational representations of relative magnitude and similarity from pixel images of simple shapes
  • 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. (2014). Phoneme category retuning in a non-native language. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2014: 15th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 553-557).

    Abstract

    Previous studies have demonstrated that native listeners
    modify their interpretation of a speech sound when a talker
    produces an ambiguous sound in order to quickly tune into a
    speaker, but there is hardly any evidence that non-native
    listeners employ a similar mechanism when encountering
    ambiguous pronunciations. So far, one study demonstrated
    this lexically-guided perceptual learning effect for nonnatives,
    using phoneme categories similar in the native
    language of the listeners and the non-native language of the
    stimulus materials. The present study investigates the question
    whether phoneme category retuning is possible in a nonnative
    language for a contrast, /l/-/r/, which is phonetically
    differently embedded in the native (Dutch) and nonnative
    (English) languages involved. Listening experiments indeed
    showed a lexically-guided perceptual learning effect.
    Assuming that Dutch listeners have different phoneme
    categories for the native Dutch and non-native English /r/, as
    marked differences between the languages exist for /r/, these
    results, for the first time, seem to suggest that listeners are not
    only able to retune their native phoneme categories but also
    their non-native phoneme categories to include ambiguous
    pronunciations.
  • Edmiston, P., Perlman, M., & Lupyan, G. (2017). Creating words from iterated vocal imitation. In G. Gunzelman, A. Howes, T. Tenbrink, & E. Davelaar (Eds.), Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2017) (pp. 331-336). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    We report the results of a large-scale (N=1571) experiment to investigate whether spoken words can emerge from the process of repeated imitation. Participants played a version of the children’s game “Telephone”. The first generation was asked to imitate recognizable environmental sounds (e.g., glass breaking, water splashing); subsequent generations imitated the imitators for a total of 8 generations. We then examined whether the vocal imitations became more stable and word-like, retained a resemblance to the original sound, and became more suitable as learned category labels. The results showed (1) the imitations became progressively more word-like, (2) even after 8 generations, they could be matched above chance to the environmental sound that motivated them, and (3) imitations from later generations were more effective as learned category labels. These results show how repeated imitation can create progressively more word-like forms while retaining a semblance of iconicity.
  • Enfield, N. J., & Evans, G. (2000). Transcription as standardisation: The problem of Tai languages. In S. Burusphat (Ed.), Proceedings: the International Conference on Tai Studies, July 29-31, 1998, (pp. 201-212). Bangkok, Thailand: Institute of Language and Culture for Rural Development, Mahidol University.
  • Ernestus, M., & Baayen, R. H. (2007). The comprehension of acoustically reduced morphologically complex words: The roles of deletion, duration, and frequency of occurence. In J. Trouvain, & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhs 2007) (pp. 773-776). Dudweiler: Pirrot.

    Abstract

    This study addresses the roles of segment deletion, durational reduction, and frequency of use in the comprehension of morphologically complex words. We report two auditory lexical decision experiments with reduced and unreduced prefixed Dutch words. We found that segment deletions as such delayed comprehension. Simultaneously, however, longer durations of the different parts of the words appeared to increase lexical competition, either from the word’s stem (Experiment 1) or from the word’s morphological continuation forms (Experiment 2). Increased lexical competition slowed down especially the comprehension of low frequency words, which shows that speakers do not try to meet listeners’ needs when they reduce especially high frequency words.
  • Ernestus, M., Kočková-Amortová, L., & Pollak, P. (2014). The Nijmegen corpus of casual Czech. In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, T. Declerck, H. Loftsson, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, A. Moreno, J. Odijk, & S. Piperidis (Eds.), Proceedings of LREC 2014: 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 365-370).

    Abstract

    This article introduces a new speech corpus, the Nijmegen Corpus of Casual Czech (NCCCz), which contains more than 30 hours of high-quality recordings of casual conversations in Common Czech, among ten groups of three male and ten groups of three female friends. All speakers were native speakers of Czech, raised in Prague or in the region of Central Bohemia, and were between 19 and 26 years old. Every group of speakers consisted of one confederate, who was instructed to keep the conversations lively, and two speakers naive to the purposes of the recordings. The naive speakers were engaged in conversations for approximately 90 minutes, while the confederate joined them for approximately the last 72 minutes. The corpus was orthographically annotated by experienced transcribers and this orthographic transcription was aligned with the speech signal. In addition, the conversations were videotaped. This corpus can form the basis for all types of research on casual conversations in Czech, including phonetic research and research on how to improve automatic speech recognition. The corpus will be freely available
  • Filippi, P. (2014). Linguistic animals: understanding language through a comparative approach. In E. A. Cartmill, S. Roberts, H. Lyn, & H. Crnish (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference (pp. 74-81). doi:10.1142/9789814603638_0082.

    Abstract

    With the aim to clarify the definition of humans as “linguistic animals”, in the present paper I functionally distinguish three types of language competences: i) language as a general biological tool for communication, ii) “perceptual syntax”, iii) propositional language. Following this terminological distinction, I review pivotal findings on animals' communication systems, which constitute useful evidence for the investigation of the nature of three core components of humans' faculty of language: semantics, syntax, and theory of mind. In fact, despite the capacity to process and share utterances with an open-ended structure is uniquely human, some isolated components of our linguistic competence are in common with nonhuman animals. Therefore, as I argue in the present paper, the investigation of animals' communicative competence provide crucial insights into the range of cognitive constraints underlying humans' ability of language, enabling at the same time the analysis of its phylogenetic path as well as of the selective pressures that have led to its emergence.
  • Filippi, P., Gingras, B., & Fitch, W. T. (2014). The effect of pitch enhancement on spoken language acquisition. In E. A. Cartmill, S. Roberts, H. Lyn, & H. Crnish (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference (pp. 437-438). doi:10.1142/9789814603638_0082.

    Abstract

    The aim of this study is to investigate the word-learning phenomenon utilizing a new model that integrates three processes: a) extracting a word out of a continuous sounds sequence, b) inducing referential meanings, c) mapping a word onto its intended referent, with the possibility to extend the acquired word over a potentially infinite sets of objects of the same semantic category, and over not-previously-heard utterances. Previous work has examined the role of statistical learning and/or of prosody in each of these processes separately. In order to examine the multilayered word-learning task, we integrate these two strands of investigation into a single approach. We have conducted the study on adults and included six different experimental conditions, each including specific perceptual manipulations of the signal. In condition 1, the only cue to word-meaning mapping was the co-occurrence between words and referents (“statistical cue”). This cue was present in all the conditions. In condition 2, we added infant-directed-speech (IDS) typical pitch enhancement as a marker of the target word and of the statistical cue. In condition 3 we placed IDS typical pitch enhancement on random words of the utterances, i.e. inconsistently matching the statistical cue. In conditions 4, 5 and 6 we manipulated respectively duration, a non-prosodic acoustic cue and a visual cue as markers of the target word and of the statistical cue. Systematic comparisons between learning performance in condition 1 with the other conditions revealed that the word-learning process is facilitated only when pitch prominence consistently marks the target word and the statistical cue…
  • Francisco, A. A., Jesse, A., Groen, M. a., & McQueen, J. M. (2014). Audiovisual temporal sensitivity in typical and dyslexic adult readers. In Proceedings of the 15th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH 2014) (pp. 2575-2579).

    Abstract

    Reading is an audiovisual process that requires the learning of systematic links between graphemes and phonemes. It is thus possible that reading impairments reflect an audiovisual processing deficit. In this study, we compared audiovisual processing in adults with developmental dyslexia and adults without reading difficulties. We focused on differences in cross-modal temporal sensitivity both for speech and for non-speech events. When compared to adults without reading difficulties, adults with developmental dyslexia presented a wider temporal window in which unsynchronized speech events were perceived as synchronized. No differences were found between groups for the non-speech events. These results suggests a deficit in dyslexia in the perception of cross-modal temporal synchrony for speech events.
  • Franken, M. K., Eisner, F., Schoffelen, J.-M., Acheson, D. J., Hagoort, P., & McQueen, J. M. (2017). Audiovisual recalibration of vowel categories. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2017 (pp. 655-658). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2017-122.

    Abstract

    One of the most daunting tasks of a listener is to map a
    continuous auditory stream onto known speech sound
    categories and lexical items. A major issue with this mapping
    problem is the variability in the acoustic realizations of sound
    categories, both within and across speakers. Past research has
    suggested listeners may use visual information (e.g., lipreading)
    to calibrate these speech categories to the current
    speaker. Previous studies have focused on audiovisual
    recalibration of consonant categories. The present study
    explores whether vowel categorization, which is known to show
    less sharply defined category boundaries, also benefit from
    visual cues.
    Participants were exposed to videos of a speaker
    pronouncing one out of two vowels, paired with audio that was
    ambiguous between the two vowels. After exposure, it was
    found that participants had recalibrated their vowel categories.
    In addition, individual variability in audiovisual recalibration is
    discussed. It is suggested that listeners’ category sharpness may
    be related to the weight they assign to visual information in
    audiovisual speech perception. Specifically, listeners with less
    sharp categories assign more weight to visual information
    during audiovisual speech recognition.
  • Fusaroli, R., Tylén, K., Garly, K., Steensig, J., Christiansen, M. H., & Dingemanse, M. (2017). Measures and mechanisms of common ground: Backchannels, conversational repair, and interactive alignment in free and task-oriented social interactions. In G. Gunzelmann, A. Howes, T. Tenbrink, & E. Davelaar (Eds.), Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2017) (pp. 2055-2060). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    A crucial aspect of everyday conversational interactions is our ability to establish and maintain common ground. Understanding the relevant mechanisms involved in such social coordination remains an important challenge for cognitive science. While common ground is often discussed in very general terms, different contexts of interaction are likely to afford different coordination mechanisms. In this paper, we investigate the presence and relation of three mechanisms of social coordination – backchannels, interactive alignment and conversational repair – across free and task-oriented conversations. We find significant differences: task-oriented conversations involve higher presence of repair – restricted offers in particular – and backchannel, as well as a reduced level of lexical and syntactic alignment. We find that restricted repair is associated with lexical alignment and open repair with backchannels. Our findings highlight the need to explicitly assess several mechanisms at once and to investigate diverse activities to understand their role and relations.
  • Galke, L., Mai, F., Schelten, A., Brunch, D., & Scherp, A. (2017). Using titles vs. full-text as source for automated semantic document annotation. In O. Corcho, K. Janowicz, G. Rizz, I. Tiddi, & D. Garijo (Eds.), Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP 2017). New York: ACM.

    Abstract

    We conduct the first systematic comparison of automated semantic
    annotation based on either the full-text or only on the title metadata
    of documents. Apart from the prominent text classification baselines
    kNN and SVM, we also compare recent techniques of Learning
    to Rank and neural networks and revisit the traditional methods
    logistic regression, Rocchio, and Naive Bayes. Across three of our
    four datasets, the performance of the classifications using only titles
    reaches over 90% of the quality compared to the performance when
    using the full-text.
  • Galke, L., Saleh, A., & Scherp, A. (2017). Word embeddings for practical information retrieval. In M. Eibl, & M. Gaedke (Eds.), INFORMATIK 2017 (pp. 2155-2167). Bonn: Gesellschaft für Informatik. doi:10.18420/in2017_215.

    Abstract

    We assess the suitability of word embeddings for practical information retrieval scenarios. Thus, we assume that users issue ad-hoc short queries where we return the first twenty retrieved documents after applying a boolean matching operation between the query and the documents. We compare the performance of several techniques that leverage word embeddings in the retrieval models to compute the similarity between the query and the documents, namely word centroid similarity, paragraph vectors, Word Mover’s distance, as well as our novel inverse document frequency (IDF) re-weighted word centroid similarity. We evaluate the performance using the ranking metrics mean average precision, mean reciprocal rank, and normalized discounted cumulative gain. Additionally, we inspect the retrieval models’ sensitivity to document length by using either only the title or the full-text of the documents for the retrieval task. We conclude that word centroid similarity is the best competitor to state-of-the-art retrieval models. It can be further improved by re-weighting the word frequencies with IDF before aggregating the respective word vectors of the embedding. The proposed cosine similarity of IDF re-weighted word vectors is competitive to the TF-IDF baseline and even outperforms it in case of the news domain with a relative percentage of 15%.
  • Ganushchak, L. Y., & Acheson, D. J. (Eds.). (2014). What's to be learned from speaking aloud? - Advances in the neurophysiological measurement of overt language production. [Research topic] [Special Issue]. Frontiers in Language Sciences. Retrieved from http://www.frontiersin.org/Language_Sciences/researchtopics/What_s_to_be_Learned_from_Spea/1671.

    Abstract

    Researchers have long avoided neurophysiological experiments of overt speech production due to the suspicion that artifacts caused by muscle activity may lead to a bad signal-to-noise ratio in the measurements. However, the need to actually produce speech may influence earlier processing and qualitatively change speech production processes and what we can infer from neurophysiological measures thereof. Recently, however, overt speech has been successfully investigated using EEG, MEG, and fMRI. The aim of this Research Topic is to draw together recent research on the neurophysiological basis of language production, with the aim of developing and extending theoretical accounts of the language production process. In this Research Topic of Frontiers in Language Sciences, we invite both experimental and review papers, as well as those about the latest methods in acquisition and analysis of overt language production data. All aspects of language production are welcome: i.e., from conceptualization to articulation during native as well as multilingual language production. Focus should be placed on using the neurophysiological data to inform questions about the processing stages of language production. In addition, emphasis should be placed on the extent to which the identified components of the electrophysiological signal (e.g., ERP/ERF, neuronal oscillations, etc.), brain areas or networks are related to language comprehension and other cognitive domains. By bringing together electrophysiological and neuroimaging evidence on language production mechanisms, a more complete picture of the locus of language production processes and their temporal and neurophysiological signatures will emerge.
  • Gebre, B. G., Wittenburg, P., Heskes, T., & Drude, S. (2014). Motion history images for online speaker/signer diarization. In Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) (pp. 1537-1541). Piscataway, NJ: IEEE.

    Abstract

    We present a solution to the problem of online speaker/signer diarization - the task of determining "who spoke/signed when?". Our solution is based on the idea that gestural activity (hands and body movement) is highly correlated with uttering activity. This correlation is necessarily true for sign languages and mostly true for spoken languages. The novel part of our solution is the use of motion history images (MHI) as a likelihood measure for probabilistically detecting uttering activities. MHI is an efficient representation of where and how motion occurred for a fixed period of time. We conducted experiments on 4.9 hours of a publicly available dataset (the AMI meeting data) and 1.4 hours of sign language dataset (Kata Kolok data). The best performance obtained is 15.70% for sign language and 31.90% for spoken language (measurements are in DER). These results show that our solution is applicable in real-world applications like video conferences.

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  • Gebre, B. G., Wittenburg, P., Drude, S., Huijbregts, M., & Heskes, T. (2014). Speaker diarization using gesture and speech. In H. Li, & P. Ching (Eds.), Proceedings of Interspeech 2014: 15th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 582-586).

    Abstract

    We demonstrate how the problem of speaker diarization can be solved using both gesture and speaker parametric models. The novelty of our solution is that we approach the speaker diarization problem as a speaker recognition problem after learning speaker models from speech samples corresponding to gestures (the occurrence of gestures indicates the presence of speech and the location of gestures indicates the identity of the speaker). This new approach offers many advantages: comparable state-of-the-art performance, faster computation and more adaptability. In our implementation, parametric models are used to model speakers' voice and their gestures: more specifically, Gaussian mixture models are used to model the voice characteristics of each person and all persons, and gamma distributions are used to model gestural activity based on features extracted from Motion History Images. Tests on 4.24 hours of the AMI meeting data show that our solution makes DER score improvements of 19% on speech-only segments and 4% on all segments including silence (the comparison is with the AMI system).
  • Gebre, B. G., Crasborn, O., Wittenburg, P., Drude, S., & Heskes, T. (2014). Unsupervised feature learning for visual sign language identification. In Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Vol 2 (pp. 370-376). Redhook, NY: Curran Proceedings.

    Abstract

    Prior research on language identification focused primarily on text and speech. In this paper, we focus on the visual modality and present a method for identifying sign languages solely from short video samples. The method is trained on unlabelled video data (unsupervised feature learning) and using these features, it is trained to discriminate between six sign languages (supervised learning). We ran experiments on video samples involving 30 signers (running for a total of 6 hours). Using leave-one-signer-out cross-validation, our evaluation on short video samples shows an average best accuracy of 84%. Given that sign languages are under-resourced, unsupervised feature learning techniques are the right tools and our results indicate that this is realistic for sign language identification.
  • Gentzsch, W., Lecarpentier, D., & Wittenburg, P. (2014). Big data in science and the EUDAT project. In Proceeding of the 2014 Annual SRII Global Conference.
  • Goudbeek, M., Swingley, D., & Kluender, K. R. (2007). The limits of multidimensional category learning. In H. van Hamme, & R. van Son (Eds.), Proceedings of Interspeech 2007 (pp. 2325-2328). Adelaide: Causal Productions.

    Abstract

    Distributional learning is almost certainly involved in the human acquisition of phonetic categories. Because speech is inherently a multidimensional signal, learning phonetic categories entails multidimensional learning. Yet previous studies of auditory category learning have shown poor maintenance of learned multidimensional categories. Two experiments explored ways to improve maintenance: by increasing the costs associated with applying a unidimensional strategy; by providing additional information about the category structures; and by giving explicit instructions on how to categorize. Only with explicit instructions were categorization strategies maintained in a maintenance phase without supervision or distributional information.
  • Guerra, E., Huettig, F., & Knoeferle, P. (2014). Assessing the time course of the influence of featural, distributional and spatial representations during reading. In P. Bello, M. Guarini, M. McShane, & B. Scassellati (Eds.), Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2014) (pp. 2309-2314). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. Retrieved from https://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2014/papers/402/.

    Abstract

    What does semantic similarity between two concepts mean? How could we measure it? The way in which semantic similarity is calculated might differ depending on the theoretical notion of semantic representation. In an eye-tracking reading experiment, we investigated whether two widely used semantic similarity measures (based on featural or distributional representations) have distinctive effects on sentence reading times. In other words, we explored whether these measures of semantic similarity differ qualitatively. In addition, we examined whether visually perceived spatial distance interacts with either or both of these measures. Our results showed that the effect of featural and distributional representations on reading times can differ both in direction and in its time course. Moreover, both featural and distributional information interacted with spatial distance, yet in different sentence regions and reading measures. We conclude that featural and distributional representations are distinct components of semantic representation.
  • Guerra, E., & Knoeferle, P. (2014). Spatial distance modulates reading times for sentences about social relations: evidence from eye tracking. In P. Bello, M. Guarini, M. McShane, & B. Scassellati (Eds.), Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2014) (pp. 2315-2320). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. Retrieved from https://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2014/papers/403/.

    Abstract

    Recent evidence from eye tracking during reading showed that non-referential spatial distance presented in a visual context can modulate semantic interpretation of similarity relations rapidly and incrementally. In two eye-tracking reading experiments we extended these findings in two important ways; first, we examined whether other semantic domains (social relations) could also be rapidly influenced by spatial distance during sentence comprehension. Second, we aimed to further specify how abstract language is co-indexed with spatial information by varying the syntactic structure of sentences between experiments. Spatial distance rapidly modulated reading times as a function of the social relation expressed by a sentence. Moreover, our findings suggest that abstract language can be co-indexed as soon as critical information becomes available for the reader.
  • Gürcanli, Ö., Nakipoglu Demiralp, M., & Ozyurek, A. (2007). Shared information and argument omission in Turkish. In H. Caunt-Nulton, S. Kulatilake, & I. Woo (Eds.), Proceedings of the 31st Annual Boston University Conference on Language Developement (pp. 267-273). Somerville, Mass: Cascadilla Press.
  • 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).
  • 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. (2007). Clausal coordinate ellipsis in German: The TIGER treebank as a source of evidence. In J. Nivre, H. J. Kaalep, M. Kadri, & M. Koit (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics (NODALIDA 2007) (pp. 81-88). Tartu: University of Tartu.

    Abstract

    Syntactic parsers and generators need highquality grammars of coordination and coordinate ellipsis—structures that occur very frequently but are much less well understood theoretically than many other domains of grammar. Modern grammars of coordinate ellipsis are based nearly exclusively on linguistic judgments (intuitions). The extent to which grammar rules based on this type of empirical evidence generate all and only the structures in text corpora, is unknown. As part of a project on the development of a grammar and a generator for coordinate ellipsis in German, we undertook an extensive exploration of the TIGER treebank—a syntactically annotated corpus of about 50,000 newspaper sentences. We report (1) frequency data for the various patterns of coordinate ellipsis, and (2) several rarely (but regularly) occurring ‘fringe deviations’ from the intuition-based rules for several ellipsis types. This information can help improve parser and generator performance.
  • Harbusch, K., Breugel, C., Koch, U., & Kempen, G. (2007). Interactive sentence combining and paraphrasing in support of integrated writing and grammar instruction: A new application area for natural language sentence generators. In S. Busemann (Ed.), Proceedings of the 11th Euopean Workshop in Natural Language Generation (ENLG07) (pp. 65-68). ACL Anthology.

    Abstract

    The potential of sentence generators as engines in Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning and teaching (ICALL) software has hardly been explored. We sketch the prototype of COMPASS, a system that supports integrated writing and grammar curricula for 10 to 14 year old elementary or secondary schoolers. The system enables first- or second-language teachers to design controlled writing exercises, in particular of the “sentence combining” variety. The system includes facilities for error diagnosis and on-line feedback. Syntactic structures built by students or system can be displayed as easily understood phrase-structure or dependency trees, adapted to the student’s level of grammatical knowledge. The heart of the system is a specially designed generator capable of lexically guided sentence generation, of generating syntactic paraphrases, and displaying syntactic structures visually.
  • Herbst, L. E. (2007). German 5-year-olds' intonational marking of information status. In J. Trouvain, & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2007) (pp. 1557-1560). Dudweiler: Pirrot.

    Abstract

    This paper reports on findings from an elicited production task with German 5-year-old children, investigating their use of intonation to mark information status of discourse referents. In line with findings for adults, new referents were preferably marked by H* and L+H*; textually given referents were mainly deaccented. Accessible referents (whose first mentions were less recent) were mostly accented, and predominantly also realised with H* and L+H*, showing children’s sensitivity to recency of mention. No evidence for the consistent use of a special ‘accessibility accent’ H+L* (as has been proposed for adult German) was found.
  • Heyselaar, E., Hagoort, P., & Segaert, K. (2014). In dialogue with an avatar, syntax production is identical compared to dialogue with a human partner. In P. Bello, M. Guarini, M. McShane, & B. Scassellati (Eds.), Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2014) (pp. 2351-2356). Austin, Tx: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    The use of virtual reality (VR) as a methodological tool is
    becoming increasingly popular in behavioural research due
    to its seemingly limitless possibilities. This new method has
    not been used frequently in the field of psycholinguistics,
    however, possibly due to the assumption that humancomputer
    interaction does not accurately reflect human-human
    interaction. In the current study we compare participants’
    language behaviour in a syntactic priming task with human
    versus avatar partners. Our study shows comparable priming
    effects between human and avatar partners (Human: 12.3%;
    Avatar: 12.6% for passive sentences) suggesting that VR is a
    valid platform for conducting language research and studying
    dialogue interactions.
  • Hoffmann, C. W. G., Sadakata, M., Chen, A., Desain, P., & McQueen, J. M. (2014). Within-category variance and lexical tone discrimination in native and non-native speakers. In C. Gussenhoven, Y. Chen, & D. Dediu (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Language (pp. 45-49). Nijmegen: Radboud University Nijmegen.

    Abstract

    In this paper, we show how acoustic variance within lexical tones in disyllabic Mandarin Chinese pseudowords affects discrimination abilities in both native and non-native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. Within-category acoustic variance did not hinder native speakers in discriminating between lexical tones, whereas it precludes Dutch native speakers from reaching native level performance. Furthermore, the influence of acoustic variance was not uniform but asymmetric, dependent on the presentation order of the lexical tones to be discriminated. An exploratory analysis using an active adaptive oddball paradigm was used to quantify the extent of the perceptual asymmetry. We discuss two possible mechanisms underlying this asymmetry and propose possible paradigms to investigate these mechanisms
  • Holler, J., & Geoffrey, B. (2007). Gesture use in social interaction: how speakers' gestures can reflect listeners' thinking. In L. Mondada (Ed.), On-line Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the International Society of Gesture Studies, Lyon, France 15-18 June 2005.
  • Isaac, A., Zinn, C., Matthezing, H., Van de Meij, H., Schlobach, S., & Wang, S. (2007). The value of usage scenarios for thesaurus alignment in cultural heritage context. In Proceedings of the ISWC 2007 workshop in cultural heritage on the semantic web.

    Abstract

    Thesaurus alignment is important for efficient access to heterogeneous Cultural Heritage data. Current ontology alignment techniques provide solutions, but with limited value in practice, because the requirements from usage scenarios are rarely taken in account. In this paper, we start from particular requirements for book re-indexing and investigate possible ways of developing, deploying and evaluating thesaurus alignment techniques in this context. We then compare different aspects of this scenario with others from a more general perspective.
  • Isbilen, E. S., McCauley, S. M., Kidd, E., & Christiansen, M. H. (2017). Testing statistical learning implicitly: A novel chunk-based measure of statistical learning. In G. Gunzelmann, A. Howes, T. Tenbrink, & E. Davelaar (Eds.), Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2017) (pp. 564-569). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Attempts to connect individual differences in statistical learning with broader aspects of cognition have received considerable attention, but have yielded mixed results. A possible explanation is that statistical learning is typically tested using the two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) task. As a meta-cognitive task relying on explicit familiarity judgments, 2AFC may not accurately capture implicitly formed statistical computations. In this paper, we adapt the classic serial-recall memory paradigm to implicitly test statistical learning in a statistically-induced chunking recall (SICR) task. We hypothesized that artificial language exposure would lead subjects to chunk recurring statistical patterns, facilitating recall of words from the input. Experiment 1 demonstrates that SICR offers more fine-grained insights into individual differences in statistical learning than 2AFC. Experiment 2 shows that SICR has higher test-retest reliability than that reported for 2AFC. Thus, SICR offers a more sensitive measure of individual differences, suggesting that basic chunking abilities may explain statistical learning.
  • Janse, E., Van der Werff, M., & Quené, H. (2007). Listening to fast speech: Aging and sentence context. In J. Trouvain, & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2007) (pp. 681-684). Dudweiler: Pirrot.

    Abstract

    In this study we investigated to what extent a meaningful sentence context facilitates spoken word processing in young and older listeners if listening is made taxing by time-compressing the speech. Even though elderly listeners have been shown to benefit more from sentence context in difficult listening conditions than young listeners, time compression of speech may interfere with semantic comprehension, particularly in older listeners because of cognitive slowing. The results of a target detection experiment showed that, unlike young listeners who showed facilitation by context at both rates, elderly listeners showed context facilitation at the intermediate, but not at the fastest rate. This suggests that semantic interpretation lags behind target identification.
  • Janse, E., Sennema, A., & Slis, A. (2000). Fast speech timing in Dutch: The durational correlates of lexical stress and pitch accent. In Proceedings of the VIth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Vol. III (pp. 251-254).

    Abstract

    n this study we investigated the durational correlates of lexical stress and pitch accent at normal and fast speech rate in Dutch. Previous literature on English shows that durations of lexically unstressed vowels are reduced more than stressed vowels when speakers increase their speech rate. We found that the same holds for Dutch, irrespective of whether the unstressed vowel is schwa or a "full" vowel. In the same line, we expected that vowels in words without a pitch accent would be shortened relatively more than vowels in words with a pitch accent. This was not the case: if anything, the accented vowels were shortened relatively more than the unaccented vowels. We conclude that duration is an important cue for lexical stress, but not for pitch accent.
  • Janse, E. (2000). Intelligibility of time-compressed speech: Three ways of time-compression. In Proceedings of the VIth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, vol. III (pp. 786-789).

    Abstract

    Studies on fast speech have shown that word-level timing of fast speech differs from that of normal rate speech in that unstressed syllables are shortened more than stressed syllables as speech rate increases. An earlier experiment showed that the intelligibility of time-compressed speech could not be improved by making its temporal organisation closer to natural fast speech. To test the hypothesis that segmental intelligibility is more important than prosodic timing in listening to timecompressed speech, the intelligibility of bisyllabic words was tested in three time-compression conditions: either stressed and unstressed syllable were compressed to the same degree, or the stressed syllable was compressed more than the unstressed syllable, or the reverse. As was found before, imitating wordlevel timing of fast speech did not improve intelligibility over linear compression. However, the results did not confirm the hypothesis either: there was no difference in intelligibility between the three compression conditions. We conclude that segmental intelligibility plays an important role, but further research is necessary to decide between the contributions of prosody and segmental intelligibility to the word-level intelligibility of time-compressed speech.
  • Jesse, A., & McQueen, J. M. (2007). Prelexical adjustments to speaker idiosyncracies: Are they position-specific? In H. van Hamme, & R. van Son (Eds.), Proceedings of Interspeech 2007 (pp. 1597-1600). Adelaide: Causal Productions.

    Abstract

    Listeners use lexical knowledge to adjust their prelexical representations of speech sounds in response to the idiosyncratic pronunciations of particular speakers. We used an exposure-test paradigm to investigate whether this type of perceptual learning transfers across syllabic positions. No significant learning effect was found in Experiment 1, where exposure sounds were onsets and test sounds were codas. Experiments 2-4 showed that there was no learning even when both exposure and test sounds were onsets. But a trend was found when exposure sounds were codas and test sounds were onsets (Experiment 5). This trend was smaller than the robust effect previously found for the coda-to-coda case. These findings suggest that knowledge about idiosyncratic pronunciations may be position specific: Knowledge about how a speaker produces sounds in one position, if it can be acquired at all, influences perception of sounds in that position more strongly than of sounds in another position.
  • Jesse, A., McQueen, J. M., & Page, M. (2007). The locus of talker-specific effects in spoken-word recognition. In J. Trouvain, & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2007) (pp. 1921-1924). Dudweiler: Pirrot.

    Abstract

    Words repeated in the same voice are better recognized than when they are repeated in a different voice. Such findings have been taken as evidence for the storage of talker-specific lexical episodes. But results on perceptual learning suggest that talker-specific adjustments concern sublexical representations. This study thus investigates whether voice-specific repetition effects in auditory lexical decision are lexical or sublexical. The same critical set of items in Block 2 were, depending on materials in Block 1, either same-voice or different-voice word repetitions, new words comprising re-orderings of phonemes used in the same voice in Block 1, or new words with previously unused phonemes. Results show a benefit for words repeated by the same talker, and a smaller benefit for words consisting of phonemes repeated by the same talker. Talker-specific information thus appears to influence word recognition at multiple representational levels.
  • Jesse, A., & McQueen, J. M. (2007). Visual lexical stress information in audiovisual spoken-word recognition. In J. Vroomen, M. Swerts, & E. Krahmer (Eds.), Proceedings of the International Conference on Auditory-Visual Speech Processing 2007 (pp. 162-166). Tilburg: University of Tilburg.

    Abstract

    Listeners use suprasegmental auditory lexical stress information to resolve the competition words engage in during spoken-word recognition. The present study investigated whether (a) visual speech provides lexical stress information, and, more importantly, (b) whether this visual lexical stress information is used to resolve lexical competition. Dutch word pairs that differ in the lexical stress realization of their first two syllables, but not segmentally (e.g., 'OCtopus' and 'okTOber'; capitals marking primary stress) served as auditory-only, visual-only, and audiovisual speech primes. These primes either matched (e.g., 'OCto-'), mismatched (e.g., 'okTO-'), or were unrelated to (e.g., 'maCHI-') a subsequent printed target (octopus), which participants had to make a lexical decision to. To the degree that visual speech contains lexical stress information, lexical decisions to printed targets should be modulated through the addition of visual speech. Results show, however, no evidence for a role of visual lexical stress information in audiovisual spoken-word recognition.
  • Johnson, E. K., Jusczyk, P. W., Cutler, A., & Norris, D. (2000). The development of word recognition: The use of the possible-word constraint by 12-month-olds. In L. Gleitman, & A. Joshi (Eds.), Proceedings of CogSci 2000 (pp. 1034). London: Erlbaum.
  • Jung, D., Klessa, K., Duray, Z., Oszkó, B., Sipos, M., Szeverényi, S., Várnai, Z., Trilsbeek, P., & Váradi, T. (2014). Languagesindanger.eu - Including multimedia language resources to disseminate knowledge and create educational material on less-resourced languages. In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, T. Declerck, H. Loftsson, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, A. Moreno, J. Odijk, & S. Piperidis (Eds.), Proceedings of LREC 2014: 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 530-535).

    Abstract

    The present paper describes the development of the languagesindanger.eu interactive website as an example of including multimedia language resources to disseminate knowledge and create educational material on less-resourced languages. The website is a product of INNET (Innovative networking in infrastructure for endangered languages), European FP7 project. Its main functions can be summarized as related to the three following areas: (1) raising students' awareness of language endangerment and arouse their interest in linguistic diversity, language maintenance and language documentation; (2) informing both students and teachers about these topics and show ways how they can enlarge their knowledge further with a special emphasis on information about language archives; (3) helping teachers include these topics into their classes. The website has been localized into five language versions with the intention to be accessible to both scientific and non-scientific communities such as (primarily) secondary school teachers and students, beginning university students of linguistics, journalists, the interested public, and also members of speech communities who speak minority languages
  • Kapatsinski, V., & Harmon, Z. (2017). A Hebbian account of entrenchment and (over)-extension in language learning. In G. Gunzelmann, A. Howes, T. Tenbrink, & E. Davelaar (Eds.), Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2017) (pp. 2366-2371). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    In production, frequently used words are preferentially extended to new, though related meanings. In comprehension, frequent exposure to a word instead makes the learner confident that all of the word’s legitimate uses have been experienced, resulting in an entrenched form-meaning mapping between the word and its experienced meaning(s). This results in a perception-production dissociation, where the forms speakers are most likely to map onto a novel meaning are precisely the forms that they believe can never be used that way. At first glance, this result challenges the idea of bidirectional form-meaning mappings, assumed by all current approaches to linguistic theory. In this paper, we show that bidirectional form-meaning mappings are not in fact challenged by this production-perception dissociation. We show that the production-perception dissociation is expected even if learners of the lexicon acquire simple symmetrical form-meaning associations through simple Hebbian learning.
  • Karadöller, D. Z., Sumer, B., & Ozyurek, A. (2017). Effects of delayed language exposure on spatial language acquisition by signing children and adults. In G. Gunzelmann, A. Howes, T. Tenbrink, & E. Davelaar (Eds.), Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2017) (pp. 2372-2376). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Deaf children born to hearing parents are exposed to language input quite late, which has long-lasting effects on language production. Previous studies with deaf individuals mostly focused on linguistic expressions of motion events, which have several event components. We do not know if similar effects emerge in simple events such as descriptions of spatial configurations of objects. Moreover, previous data mainly come from late adult signers. There is not much known about language development of late signing children soon after learning sign language. We compared simple event descriptions of late signers of Turkish Sign Language (adults, children) to age-matched native signers. Our results indicate that while late signers in both age groups are native-like in frequency of expressing a relational encoding, they lag behind native signers in using morphologically complex linguistic forms compared to other simple forms. Late signing children perform similar to adults and thus showed no development over time.
  • Kelly, S. D., & Ozyurek, A. (Eds.). (2007). Gesture, language, and brain [Special Issue]. Brain and Language, 101(3).
  • Kember, H., Grohe, A.-.-K., Zahner, K., Braun, B., Weber, A., & Cutler, A. (2017). Similar prosodic structure perceived differently in German and English. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2017 (pp. 1388-1392). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2017-544.

    Abstract

    English and German have similar prosody, but their speakers realize some pitch falls (not rises) in subtly different ways. We here test for asymmetry in perception. An ABX discrimination task requiring F0 slope or duration judgements on isolated vowels revealed no cross-language difference in duration or F0 fall discrimination, but discrimination of rises (realized similarly in each language) was less accurate for English than for German listeners. This unexpected finding may reflect greater sensitivity to rising patterns by German listeners, or reduced sensitivity by English listeners as a result of extensive exposure to phrase-final rises (“uptalk”) in their language
  • 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., & Hoenkamp, E. (1982). Incremental sentence generation: Implications for the structure of a syntactic processor. In J. Horecký (Ed.), COLING 82. Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Prague, July 5-10, 1982 (pp. 151-156). Amsterdam: North-Holland.

    Abstract

    Human speakers often produce sentences incrementally. They can start speaking having in mind only a fragmentary idea of what they want to say, and while saying this they refine the contents underlying subsequent parts of the utterance. This capability imposes a number of constraints on the design of a syntactic processor. This paper explores these constraints and evaluates some recent computational sentence generators from the perspective of incremental production.
  • Khemlani, S., Leslie, S.-J., Glucksberg, S., & Rubio-Fernández, P. (2007). Do ducks lay eggs? How people interpret generic assertions. In D. S. McNamara, & J. G. Trafton (Eds.), Proceedings of the 29th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2007). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
  • 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.
  • Klatter-Folmer, J., Van Hout, R., Van den Heuvel, H., Fikkert, P., Baker, A., De Jong, J., Wijnen, F., Sanders, E., & Trilsbeek, P. (2014). Vulnerability in acquisition, language impairments in Dutch: Creating a VALID data archive. In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, T. Declerck, H. Loftsson, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, A. Moreno, J. Odijk, & S. Piperidis (Eds.), Proceedings of LREC 2014: 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 357-364).

    Abstract

    The VALID Data Archive is an open multimedia data archive (under construction) with data from speakers suffering from language impairments. We report on a pilot project in the CLARIN-NL framework in which five data resources were curated. For all data sets concerned, written informed consent from the participants or their caretakers has been obtained. All materials were anonymized. The audio files were converted into wav (linear PCM) files and the transcriptions into CHAT or ELAN format. Research data that consisted of test, SPSS and Excel files were documented and converted into CSV files. All data sets obtained appropriate CMDI metadata files. A new CMDI metadata profile for this type of data resources was established and care was taken that ISOcat metadata categories were used to optimize interoperability. After curation all data are deposited at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Nijmegen where persistent identifiers are linked to all resources. The content of the transcriptions in CHAT and plain text format can be searched with the TROVA search engine
  • Klein, W., & Von Stutterheim, C. (Eds.). (2007). Sprachliche Perspektivierung [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 145.

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