Publications

Displaying 1 - 100 of 815
  • Yu, X. (2021). Foreign language learning in study-abroad and at-home contexts. PhD Thesis, Raboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • 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.
  • Ahluwalia, T. S., Prins, B. P., Abdollahi, M., Armstrong, N. J., Aslibekyan, S., Bain, L., Jefferis, B., Baumert, J., Beekman, M., Ben-Shlomo, Y., Bis, J. C., Mitchell, B. D., De Geus, E., Delgado, G. E., Marek, D., Eriksson, J., Kajantie, E., Kanoni, S., Kemp, J. P., Lu, C. and 106 moreAhluwalia, T. S., Prins, B. P., Abdollahi, M., Armstrong, N. J., Aslibekyan, S., Bain, L., Jefferis, B., Baumert, J., Beekman, M., Ben-Shlomo, Y., Bis, J. C., Mitchell, B. D., De Geus, E., Delgado, G. E., Marek, D., Eriksson, J., Kajantie, E., Kanoni, S., Kemp, J. P., Lu, C., Marioni, R. E., McLachlan, S., Milaneschi, Y., Nolte, I. M., Petrelis, A. M., Porcu, E., Sabater-Lleal, M., Naderi, E., Seppälä, I., Shah, T., Singhal, G., Standl, M., Teumer, A., Thalamuthu, A., Thiering, E., Trompet, S., Ballantyne, C. M., Benjamin, E. J., Casas, J. P., Toben, C., Dedoussis, G., Deelen, J., Durda, P., Engmann, J., Feitosa, M. F., Grallert, H., Hammarstedt, A., Harris, S. E., Homuth, G., Hottenga, J.-J., Jalkanen, S., Jamshidi, Y., Jawahar, M. C., Jess, T., Kivimaki, M., Kleber, M. E., Lahti, J., Liu, Y., Marques-Vidal, P., Mellström, D., Mooijaart, S. P., Müller-Nurasyid, M., Penninx, B., Revez, J. A., Rossing, P., Räikkönen, K., Sattar, N., Scharnagl, H., Sennblad, B., Silveira, A., St Pourcain, B., Timpson, N. J., Trollor, J., CHARGE Inflammation Working Group, Van Dongen, J., Van Heemst, D., Visvikis-Siest, S., Vollenweider, P., Völker, U., Waldenberger, M., Willemsen, G., Zabaneh, D., Morris, R. W., Arnett, D. K., Baune, B. T., Boomsma, D. I., Chang, Y.-P.-C., Deary, I. J., Deloukas, P., Eriksson, J. G., Evans, D. M., Ferreira, M. A., Gaunt, T., Gudnason, V., Hamsten, A., Heinrich, J., Hingorani, A., Humphries, S. E., Jukema, J. W., Koenig, W., Kumari, M., Kutalik, Z., Lawlor, D. A., Lehtimäki, T., März, W., Mather, K. A., Naitza, S., Nauck, M., Ohlsson, C., Price, J. F., Raitakari, O., Rice, K., Sachdev, P. S., Slagboom, E., Sørensen, T. I. A., Spector, T., Stacey, D., Stathopoulou, M. G., Tanaka, T., Wannamethee, S. G., Whincup, P., Rotter, J. I., Dehghan, A., Boerwinkle, E., Psaty, B. M., Snieder, H., & Alizadeh, B. Z. (2021). Genome-wide association study of circulating interleukin 6 levels identifies novel loci. Human Molecular Genetics, 5(1), 393-409. doi:10.1093/hmg/ddab023.

    Abstract

    Interleukin 6 (IL-6) is a multifunctional cytokine with both pro- and anti-inflammatory properties with a heritability estimate of up to 61%. The circulating levels of IL-6 in blood have been associated with an increased risk of complex disease pathogenesis. We conducted a two-staged, discovery and replication meta genome-wide association study (GWAS) of circulating serum IL-6 levels comprising up to 67 428 (ndiscovery = 52 654 and nreplication = 14 774) individuals of European ancestry. The inverse variance fixed effects based discovery meta-analysis, followed by replication led to the identification of two independent loci, IL1F10/IL1RN rs6734238 on chromosome (Chr) 2q14, (Pcombined = 1.8 × 10−11), HLA-DRB1/DRB5 rs660895 on Chr6p21 (Pcombined = 1.5 × 10−10) in the combined meta-analyses of all samples. We also replicated the IL6R rs4537545 locus on Chr1q21 (Pcombined = 1.2 × 10−122). Our study identifies novel loci for circulating IL-6 levels uncovering new immunological and inflammatory pathways that may influence IL-6 pathobiology.
  • Ahn, D., Ferreira, V. S., & Gollan, T. H. (2021). Selective activation of language specific structural representations: Evidence from extended picture-word interference. Journal of Memory and Language, 120: 104249. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2021.104249.

    Abstract

    How do bilingual speakers represent and use information that guides the assembly of the words into phrases and sentences (i.e., sentence structures) for languages that have different word orders? Cross-language syntactic priming effects provide mixed evidence on whether bilinguals access sentence structures from both languages even when speaking just one. Here, we compared English monolinguals, Korean-immersed Korean-English bilinguals, and English-immersed Korean-English bilinguals while they produced noun phrases (“the lemon below the lobster”), which have different word orders in English and Korean (the Korean translation word order is [lobster][below][lemon]). We examined when speakers plan each noun using an extended picture-word interference paradigm, by measuring articulation times for each word in the phrase with either the distractor word “apple” (which slows the planning of “lemon”) or “crab” (which slows the planning of “lobster”). Results suggest that for phrases that are different in linear word order across languages, bilinguals only access the sentence structure of the one language they are actively speaking at the time, even when switching languages between trials.
  • Allen, S. E. M. (1998). Categories within the verb category: Learning the causative in Inuktitut. Linguistics, 36(4), 633-677.
  • 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.
  • Allen, S., Ozyurek, A., Kita, S., Brown, A., Furman, R., Ishizuka, T., & Fujii, M. (2007). Language-specific and universal influences in children's syntactic packaging of manner and path: A comparison of English, Japanese, and Turkish. Cognition, 102, 16-48. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2005.12.006.

    Abstract

    Different languages map semantic elements of spatial relations onto different lexical and syntactic units. These crosslinguistic differences raise important questions for language development in terms of how this variation is learned by children. We investigated how Turkish-, English-, and Japanese-speaking children (mean age 3;8) package the semantic elements of Manner and Path onto syntactic units when both the Manner and the Path of the moving Figure occur simultaneously and are salient in the event depicted. Both universal and language-specific patterns were evident in our data. Children used the semantic-syntactic mappings preferred by adult speakers of their own languages, and even expressed subtle syntactic differences that encode different relations between Manner and Path in the same way as their adult counterparts (i.e., Manner causing vs. incidental to Path). However, not all types of semantics-syntax mappings were easy for children to learn (e.g., expressing Manner and Path elements in two verbal clauses). In such cases, Turkish- and Japanese-speaking children frequently used syntactic patterns that were not typical in the target language but were similar to patterns used by English-speaking children, suggesting some universal influence. Thus, both language-specific and universal tendencies guide the development of complex spatial expressions.
  • Amatuni, A., Schroer, S. E., Zhang, Y., Peters, R. E., Reza, M. A., Crandall, D., & Yu, C. (2021). In-the-moment visual information from the infant's egocentric view determines the success of infant word learning: A computational study. In T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (Eds.), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021) (pp. 265-271). Vienna: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Infants learn the meaning of words from accumulated experiences of real-time interactions with their caregivers. To study the effects of visual sensory input on word learning, we recorded infant's view of the world using head-mounted eye trackers during free-flowing play with a caregiver. While playing, infants were exposed to novel label-object mappings and later learning outcomes for these items were tested after the play session. In this study we use a classification based approach to link properties of infants' visual scenes during naturalistic labeling moments to their word learning outcomes. We find that a model which integrates both highly informative and ambiguous sensory evidence is a better fit to infants' individual learning outcomes than models where either type of evidence is taken alone, and that raw labeling frequency is unable to account for the word learning differences we observe. Here we demonstrate how a computational model, using only raw pixels taken from the egocentric scene image, can derive insights on human language learning.
  • Ameka, F. K. (2007). The coding of topological relations in verbs: The case of Likpe (SEkpEle). Linguistics, 45(5), 1065-1104. doi:10.1515/LING.2007.032.

    Abstract

    This article examines the grammar, use and meaning of fifteen verbs used in the Basic Locative Construction (BLC) of Likpe — a Ghana-Togo-Mountain language. The verbs fall into four semantic subclasses: (a) basic topological relations: t 'be.at', tk 'be.on', kpé 'be.in', and fi 'be.near'; (b) postural verbs: sí 'sit', ny 'stand', fáka 'hang', yóma 'hang', kps 'lean', fus 'squat', and labe 'lie'; (c) “distribution” verbs: kpó 'be spread, heaped,' and tí 'be covered'; and (d) “adhesion” verbs: má 'be griped, be fixed', mánkla 'be stuck to'. Likpe locative predications reflect an ontological commitment to the overall topological relation between Figure and Ground and are not focused just on the Figure or the Ground. Various factors determine the choice of “competing” verbs for particular scenarios: animacy, nonindividuation of the Figure, permanency of the configuration and the speaker's desire to be referentially precise or to present stereotypical information. It is demonstrated that in situations where there is a choice, speakers tend to use the more general verbs (stereotype information). The implications of this tendency for the development of a language from a multiverb language using several verbs (e.g., 15) in its BLC to using only a small-set of verbs in its BLC, just as some of Likpe's neighbors have done, are considered.
  • 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.
  • Ameka, F. K., & Essegbey, J. (2007). Cut and break verbs in Ewe and the causative alternation construction. Cognitive Linguistics, 18(2), 241-250. doi:10.1515/COG.2007.011.

    Abstract

    Ewe verbs covering the cutting and breaking domain divide into four morpho-syntactic classes that can be ranked according to agentivity. We demonstrate that the highly non-agentive break verbs participate in the causative-inchoative alternation while the highly agentive cut verbs do not, as expected from Guerssel et al.'s (1985) hypothesis. However, four verbs tso 'cut with precision', 'cut', 'snap-off', and dze 'split', are used transitively when an instrument is required for the severance to be effected, and intransitively when not. We reject a lexicalist analysis that would postulate polysemy for these verbs and argue for a construction approach.
  • Ameka, F. K., & Levinson, S. C. (2007). Introduction-The typology and semantics of locative predicates: Posturals, positionals and other beasts. Linguistics, 45(5), 847-872. doi:10.1515/LING.2007.025.

    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.
  • Ameka, F. K. (2007). Grammatical borrowing in Likpe (Sɛkpɛlé). In Y. Matras, & J. Sakel (Eds.), Grammatical borrowing in cross-linguistic perspective (pp. 107-122). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Ameka, F. K. (1998). Particules énonciatives en Ewe. Faits de langues, 6(11/12), 179-204.

    Abstract

    Particles are little words that speakers use to signal the illocutionary force of utterances and/or express their attitude towards elements of the communicative situation, e.g. the addresses. This paper presents an overview of the classification, meaning and use of utterance particles in Ewe. It argues that they constitute a grammatical word class on functional and distributional grounds. The paper calls for a cross-cultural investigation of particles, especially in Africa, where they have been neglected for far too long.
  • Ameka, F. K., & Dorvlo, K. (2007). The Ewe language. Verba Africana series - Video documentation and Digital Materials, 1.
  • 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.
  • Araújo, S., Huettig, F., & Meyer, A. S. (2021). What underlies the deficit in rapid automatized naming (RAN) in adults with dyslexia? Evidence from eye movements. Scientific Studies of Reading, 25(6), 534-549. doi:10.1080/10888438.2020.1867863.

    Abstract

    This eye-tracking study explored how phonological encoding and speech production planning for successive words are coordinated in adult readers with dyslexia (N = 22) and control readers (N = 25) during rapid automatized naming (RAN). Using an object-RAN task, we orthogonally manipulated the word-form frequency and phonological neighborhood density of the object names and assessed the effects on speech and eye movements and their temporal coordination. In both groups, there was a significant interaction between word frequency and neighborhood density: shorter fixations for dense than for sparse neighborhoods were observed for low-, but not for high-frequency words. This finding does not suggest a specific difficulty in lexical phonological access in dyslexia. However, in readers with dyslexia only, these lexical effects percolated to the late processing stages, indicated by longer offset eye-speech lags. We close by discussing potential reasons for this finding, including suboptimal specification of phonological representations and deficits in attention control or in multi-item coordination.
  • Armeni, K. (2021). On model-based neurobiology of language comprehension: Neural oscillations, processing memory, and prediction. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Arunkumar, M., Van Paridon, J., Ostarek, M., & Huettig, F. (2021). Do illiterates have illusions? A conceptual (non)replication of Luria (1976). Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science, 5, 143-158. doi:10.1007/s41809-021-00080-x.

    Abstract

    Luria (1976) famously observed that people who never learnt to read and write do not perceive visual illusions. We conducted a conceptual replication of the Luria study of the effect of literacy on the processing of visual illusions. We designed two carefully controlled experiments with 161 participants with varying literacy levels ranging from complete illiterates to high literates in Chennai, India. Accuracy and reaction time in the identification of two types of visual shape and color illusions and the identification of appropriate control images were measured. Separate statistical analyses of Experiments 1 and 2 as well as pooled analyses of both experiments do not provide any support for the notion that literacy effects the perception of visual illusions. Our large sample, carefully controlled study strongly suggests that literacy does not meaningfully affect the identification of visual illusions and raises some questions about other reports about cultural effects on illusion perception.
  • Atlas, J. D., & Levinson, S. C. (1981). It-clefts, informativeness and logical form: Radical pragmatics (revised standard version). In P. Cole (Ed.), Radical pragmatics (pp. 1-62). New York: Academic Press.
  • Baayen, R. H. (2007). Storage and computation in the mental lexicon. In G. Jarema, & G. Libben (Eds.), The mental lexicon: Core perspectives (pp. 81-104). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
  • Baayen, H., Levelt, W. J. M., Schreuder, R., & Ernestus, M. (2007). Paradigmatic structure in speech production. Proceedings from the Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 43(1), 1-29.

    Abstract

    The main goal of the present study is to trace the consequences of local and global markedness for the processing of singular and plural nouns. Decompositional models such as proposed by (Pinker (1997); Pinker (1999)) and (Levelt et al. (1999)) predict a lexeme frequency effect and no effects of the frequencies of the singular and the plural forms. Experiments 1 and 4 reveal the expected lexeme frequency effect. Furthermore, in these experiments there are no clear independent effects of the frequencies of the inflected forms. However, the effects of Entropy and Relative Entropy that emerge from these experiments show that in production knowledge of the probabilities of the individual inflected forms do play a role, albeit indirectly. These entropy effects bear witness to the importance of paradigmatic organization of inflected forms in the mental lexicon, both at the level of individual lexemes (Entropy) and at the general level of the class of nouns (Relative Entropy).
  • Bailey, A., Hervas, A., Matthews, N., Palferman, S., Wallace, S., Aubin, A., Michelotti, J., Wainhouse, C., Papanikolaou, K., Rutter, M., Maestrini, E., Marlow, A., Weeks, D. E., Lamb, J., Francks, C., Kearsley, G., Scudder, P., Monaco, A. P., Baird, G., Cox, A. and 46 moreBailey, A., Hervas, A., Matthews, N., Palferman, S., Wallace, S., Aubin, A., Michelotti, J., Wainhouse, C., Papanikolaou, K., Rutter, M., Maestrini, E., Marlow, A., Weeks, D. E., Lamb, J., Francks, C., Kearsley, G., Scudder, P., Monaco, A. P., Baird, G., Cox, A., Cockerill, H., Nuffield, F., Le Couteur, A., Berney, T., Cooper, H., Kelly, T., Green, J., Whittaker, J., Gilchrist, A., Bolton, P., Schönewald, A., Daker, M., Ogilvie, C., Docherty, Z., Deans, Z., Bolton, B., Packer, R., Poustka, F., Rühl, D., Schmötzer, G., Bölte, S., Klauck, S. M., Spieler, A., Poustka., A., Van Engeland, H., Kemner, C., De Jonge, M., Den Hartog, I., Lord, C., Cook, E., Leventhal, B., Volkmar, F., Pauls, D., Klin, A., Smalley, S., Fombonne, E., Rogé, B., Tauber, M., Arti-Vartayan, E., Fremolle-Kruck., J., Pederson, L., Haracopos, D., Brondum-Nielsen, K., & Cotterill, R. (1998). A full genome screen for autism with evidence for linkage to a region on chromosome 7q. International Molecular Genetic Study of Autism Consortium. Human Molecular Genetics, 7(3), 571-578. doi:10.1093/hmg/7.3.571.

    Abstract

    Autism is characterized by impairments in reciprocal social interaction and communication, and restricted and sterotyped patterns of interests and activities. Developmental difficulties are apparent before 3 years of age and there is evidence for strong genetic influences most likely involving more than one susceptibility gene. A two-stage genome search for susceptibility loci in autism was performed on 87 affected sib pairs plus 12 non-sib affected relative-pairs, from a total of 99 families identified by an international consortium. Regions on six chromosomes (4, 7, 10, 16, 19 and 22) were identified which generated a multipoint maximum lod score (MLS) > 1. A region on chromosome 7q was the most significant with an MLS of 3.55 near markers D7S530 and D7S684 in the subset of 56 UK affected sib-pair families, and an MLS of 2.53 in all 87 affected sib-pair families. An area on chromosome 16p near the telomere was the next most significant, with an MLS of 1.97 in the UK families, and 1.51 in all families. These results are an important step towards identifying genes predisposing to autism; establishing their general applicability requires further study.
  • Bakker-Marshall, I., Takashima, A., Fernandez, C. B., Janzen, G., McQueen, J. M., & Van Hell, J. G. (2021). Overlapping and distinct neural networks supporting novel word learning in bilinguals and monolinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 24(3), 524-536. doi:10.1017/S1366728920000589.

    Abstract

    This study investigated how bilingual experience alters neural mechanisms supporting novel word learning. We hypothesised that novel words elicit increased semantic activation in the larger bilingual lexicon, potentially stimulating stronger memory integration than in monolinguals. English monolinguals and Spanish–English bilinguals were trained on two sets of written Swahili–English word pairs, one set on each of two consecutive days, and performed a recognition task in the MRI-scanner. Lexical integration was measured through visual primed lexical decision. Surprisingly, no group difference emerged in explicit word memory, and priming occurred only in the monolingual group. This difference in lexical integration may indicate an increased need for slow neocortical interleaving of old and new information in the denser bilingual lexicon. The fMRI data were consistent with increased use of cognitive control networks in monolinguals and of articulatory motor processes in bilinguals, providing further evidence for experience-induced neural changes: monolinguals and bilinguals reached largely comparable behavioural performance levels in novel word learning, but did so by recruiting partially overlapping but non-identical neural systems to acquire novel words.
  • Barlas, P., Kyriakou, K., Guest, O., Kleanthous, S., & Otterbacher, J. (2021). To "see" is to stereotype: Image tagging algorithms, gender recognition, and the accuracy-fairness trade-off. Proceedings of the ACM on Human Computer Interaction, 4(CSCW3): 32. doi:10.1145/3432931.

    Abstract

    Machine-learned computer vision algorithms for tagging images are increasingly used by developers and researchers, having become popularized as easy-to-use "cognitive services." Yet these tools struggle with gender recognition, particularly when processing images of women, people of color and non-binary individuals. Socio-technical researchers have cited data bias as a key problem; training datasets often over-represent images of people and contexts that convey social stereotypes. The social psychology literature explains that people learn social stereotypes, in part, by observing others in particular roles and contexts, and can inadvertently learn to associate gender with scenes, occupations and activities. Thus, we study the extent to which image tagging algorithms mimic this phenomenon. We design a controlled experiment, to examine the interdependence between algorithmic recognition of context and the depicted person's gender. In the spirit of auditing to understand machine behaviors, we create a highly controlled dataset of people images, imposed on gender-stereotyped backgrounds. Our methodology is reproducible and our code publicly available. Evaluating five proprietary algorithms, we find that in three, gender inference is hindered when a background is introduced. Of the two that "see" both backgrounds and gender, it is the one whose output is most consistent with human stereotyping processes that is superior in recognizing gender. We discuss the accuracy--fairness trade-off, as well as the importance of auditing black boxes in better understanding this double-edged sword.
  • Bartolozzi, F., Jongman, S. R., & Meyer, A. S. (2021). Concurrent speech planning does not eliminate repetition priming from spoken words: Evidence from linguistic dual-tasking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 47(3), 466-480. doi:10.1037/xlm0000944.

    Abstract

    In conversation, production and comprehension processes may overlap, causing interference. In 3 experiments, we investigated whether repetition priming can work as a supporting device, reducing costs associated with linguistic dual-tasking. Experiment 1 established the rate of decay of repetition priming from spoken words to picture naming for primes embedded in sentences. Experiments 2 and 3 investigated whether the rate of decay was faster when participants comprehended the prime while planning to name unrelated pictures. In all experiments, the primed picture followed the sentences featuring the prime on the same trial, or 10 or 50 trials later. The results of the 3 experiments were strikingly similar: robust repetition priming was observed when the primed picture followed the prime sentence. Thus, repetition priming was observed even when the primes were processed while the participants prepared an unrelated spoken utterance. Priming might, therefore, support utterance planning in conversation, where speakers routinely listen while planning their utterances.

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  • Bauer, B. L. M. (2021). Formation of numerals in the romance languages. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.685.

    Abstract

    The Romance languages have a rich numeral system that includes cardinals—providing the bases on which the other types of numeral series are built—ordinals, fractions, collectives, approximatives, distributives, and multiplicatives. Latin plays a decisive and continued role in their formation, both as the language to which many numerals go back directly and as an ongoing source for lexemes and formatives. While the Latin numeral system was synthetic, with a distinct ending for each type of numeral, the Romance numerals often feature more than one (unevenly distributed) marker or structure per series, which feature varying degrees of inherited, borrowed, or innovative elements. Formal consistency is strongest in cardinals, followed by ordinals and then the other types of numeral, which also tend to be more analytic or periphrastic. From a morphological perspective, Romance numerals overall have moved away from the inherited syntheticity, but several series continue to be synthetic formations—at least in part—with morphological markers drawn from Latin that may have undergone functional change (e.g. distributive > ordinal > collective). The underlying syntax of Romance numerals is in line with the overall grammatical patterns of Romance languages, as reflected in the prevalence of word order (with arithmetical correlates), connectors, (partial) loss of agreement, and analyticity. Innovation is prominent in the formation of higher numerals with bases beyond ‘thousand’, of teens and decads in Romanian, and of vigesimals in numerous Romance varieties.
  • Bauer, B. L. M. (1998). Impersonal verbs in Italic. Their development from an Indo-European perspective. Journal of Indo-European Studies, 26, 91-120.
  • Bauer, B. L. M. (1998). Language loss in Gaul: Socio-historical and linguistic factors in language conflict. Southwest Journal of Linguistics, 15, 23-44.
  • Bauer, B. L. M. (2007). Report on the XVIth International Conference on Historical Linguistic. General Linguistics, 43, 145-149.
  • Bauer, B. L. M. (2007). The definite article in Indo-European: Emergence of a new grammatical category? In E. Stark, E. Leiss, & W. Abraham (Eds.), Nominal determination: Typology, context constraints, and historical emergence (pp. 103-139). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Behnke, K. (1998). The acquisition of phonetic categories in young infants: A self-organising artificial neural network approach. PhD Thesis, University of Twente, Enschede. doi:10.17617/2.2057688.
  • Belke, E., & Meyer, A. S. (2007). Single and multiple object naming in healthy ageing. Language and Cognitive Processes, 22, 1178-1211. doi:10.1080/01690960701461541.

    Abstract

    We compared the performance of young (college-aged) and older (50+years) speakers in a single object and a multiple object naming task and assessed their susceptibility to semantic and phonological context effects when producing words amidst semantically or phonologically similar or dissimilar words. In single object naming, there were no performance differences between the age groups. In multiple object naming, we observed significant age-related slowing, expressed in longer gazes to the objects and slower speech. In addition, the direction of the phonological context effects differed for the two groups. The results of a supplementary experiment showed that young speakers, when adopting a slow speech rate, coordinated their eye movements and speech differently from the older speakers. Our results imply that age-related slowing in connected speech is not a direct consequence of a slowing of lexical retrieval processes. Instead, older speakers might allocate more processing capacity to speech monitoring processes, which would slow down their concurrent speech planning processes

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  • Benetti, S., Zonca, J., Ferrari, A., Rezk, M., Rabini, G., & Collignon, O. (2021). Visual motion processing recruits regions selective for auditory motion in early deaf individuals. NeuroImage, 230: 117816. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2021.117816.

    Abstract

    In early deaf individuals, the auditory deprived temporal brain regions become engaged in visual processing. In our study we tested further the hypothesis that intrinsic functional specialization guides the expression of cross-modal responses in the deprived auditory cortex. We used functional MRI to characterize the brain response to horizontal, radial and stochastic visual motion in early deaf and hearing individuals matched for the use of oral or sign language. Visual motion showed enhanced response in the ‘deaf’ mid-lateral planum temporale, a region selective to auditory motion as demonstrated by a separate auditory motion localizer in hearing people. Moreover, multivariate pattern analysis revealed that this reorganized temporal region showed enhanced decoding of motion categories in the deaf group, while visual motion-selective region hMT+/V5 showed reduced decoding when compared to hearing people. Dynamic Causal Modelling revealed that the ‘deaf’ motion-selective temporal region shows a specific increase of its functional interactions with hMT+/V5 and is now part of a large-scale visual motion selective network. In addition, we observed preferential responses to radial, compared to horizontal, visual motion in the ‘deaf’ right superior temporal cortex region that also show preferential response to approaching/receding sounds in the hearing brain. Overall, our results suggest that the early experience of auditory deprivation interacts with intrinsic constraints and triggers a large-scale reallocation of computational load between auditory and visual brain regions that typically support the multisensory processing of motion information.

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  • Bentum, M. (2021). Listening with great expectations: A study of predictive natural speech processing. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Bidgood, A., Pine, J., Rowland, C. F., Sala, G., Freudenthal, D., & Ambridge, B. (2021). Verb argument structure overgeneralisations for the English intransitive and transitive constructions: Grammaticality judgments and production priming. Language and Cognition, 13(3), 397-437. doi:10.1017/langcog.2021.8.

    Abstract

    We used a multi-method approach to investigate how children avoid (or retreat from) argument structure overgeneralisation errors (e.g., *You giggled me). Experiment 1 investigated how semantic and statistical constraints (preemption and entrenchment) influence children’s and adults’ judgments of the grammatical acceptability of 120 verbs in transitive and intransitive sentences. Experiment 2 used syntactic priming to elicit overgeneralisation errors from children (aged 5–6) to investigate whether the same constraints operate in production. For judgments, the data showed effects of preemption, entrenchment, and semantics for all ages. For production, only an effect of preemption was observed, and only for transitivisation errors with intransitive-only verbs (e.g., *The man laughed the girl). We conclude that preemption, entrenchment, and semantic effects are real, but are obscured by particular features of the present production task.

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    supplementary material
  • Bien, H. (2007). On the production of morphologically complex words with special attention to effects of frequency. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
  • Birhane, A., & Guest, O. (2021). Towards decolonising computational sciences. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, 29(2), 60-73. doi:10.7146/kkf.v29i2.124899.

    Abstract

    This article sets out our perspective on how to begin the journey of decolonising computational fi elds, such as data and cognitive sciences. We see this struggle as requiring two basic steps: a) realisation that the present-day system has inherited, and still enacts, hostile, conservative, and oppressive behaviours and principles towards women of colour; and b) rejection of the idea that centring individual people is a solution to system-level problems. The longer we ignore these two steps, the more “our” academic system maintains its toxic structure, excludes, and harms Black women and other minoritised groups. This also keeps the door open to discredited pseudoscience, like eugenics and physiognomy. We propose that grappling with our fi elds’ histories and heritage holds the key to avoiding mistakes of the past. In contrast to, for example, initiatives such as “diversity boards”, which can be harmful because they superfi cially appear reformatory but nonetheless center whiteness and maintain the status quo. Building on the work of many women of colour, we hope to advance the dialogue required to build both a grass-roots and a top-down re-imagining of computational sciences — including but not limited to psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, computer science, data science, statistics, machine learning, and artifi cial intelligence. We aspire to progress away from
    these fi elds’ stagnant, sexist, and racist shared past into an ecosystem that welcomes and nurtures
    demographically diverse researchers and ideas that critically challenge the status quo.
  • Bluijs, S., Dera, J., & Peeters, D. (2021). Waarom digitale literatuur in het literatuuronderwijs thuishoort. Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, 137(2), 150-163. doi:10.5117/TNTL2021.2.003.BLUI.
  • Bodur, K., Branje, S., Peirolo, M., Tiscareno, I., & German, J. S. (2021). Domain-initial strengthening in Turkish: Acoustic cues to prosodic hierarchy in stop consonants. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2021 (pp. 1459-1463). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2021-2230.

    Abstract

    Studies have shown that cross-linguistically, consonants at the left edge of higher-level prosodic boundaries tend to be more forcefully articulated than those at lower-level boundaries, a phenomenon known as domain-initial strengthening. This study tests whether similar effects occur in Turkish, using the Autosegmental-Metrical model proposed by Ipek & Jun [1, 2] as the basis for assessing boundary strength. Productions of /t/ and /d/ were elicited in four domain-initial prosodic positions corresponding to progressively higher-level boundaries: syllable, word, intermediate phrase, and Intonational Phrase. A fifth position, nuclear word, was included in order to better situate it within the prosodic hierarchy. Acoustic correlates of articulatory strength were measured, including closure duration for /d/ and /t/, as well as voice onset time and burst energy for /t/. Our results show that closure duration increases cumulatively from syllable to intermediate phrase, while voice onset time and burst energy are not influenced by boundary strength. These findings provide corroborating evidence for Ipek & Jun’s model, particularly for the distinction between word and intermediate phrase boundaries. Additionally, articulatory strength at the left edge of the nuclear word patterned closely with word-initial position, supporting the view that the nuclear word is not associated with a distinct phrasing domain
  • Bögels, S., & Torreira, F. (2021). Turn-end estimation in conversational turn-taking: The roles of context and prosody. Discourse Processes, 58(10), 903-924. doi:10.1080/0163853X.2021.1986664.

    Abstract

    This study investigated the role of contextual and prosodic information in turn-end estimation by means of a button-press task. We presented participants with turns extracted from a corpus of telephone calls visually (i.e., in transcribed form, word-by-word) and auditorily, and asked them to anticipate turn ends by pressing a button. The availability of the previous conversational context was generally helpful for turn-end estimation in short turns only, and more clearly so in the visual task than in the auditory task. To investigate the role of prosody, we examined whether participants in the auditory task pressed the button close to turn-medial points likely to constitute turn ends based on lexico-syntactic information alone. We observed that the vast majority of such button presses occurred in the presence of an intonational boundary rather than in its absence. These results are consistent with the view that prosodic cues in the proximity of turn ends play a relevant role in turn-end estimation.
  • Bohnemeyer, J., & Brown, P. (2007). Standing divided: Dispositional verbs and locative predications in two Mayan languages. Linguistics, 45(5), 1105-1151. doi:0.1515/LING.2007.033.

    Abstract

    The Mayan languages Tzeltal and Yucatec have large form classes of “dispositional” roots which lexicalize spatial properties such as orientation, support/suspension/blockage of motion, and configurations of parts of an entity with respect to other parts. But speakers of the two languages deploy this common lexical resource quite differently. The roots are used in both languages to convey dispositional information (e.g., answering “how” questions), but Tzeltal speakers also use them in canonical locative descriptions (e.g., answering “where” questions), whereas Yucatec speakers only use dispositionals in locative predications when prompted by the context to focus on dispositional properties. We describe the constructions used in locative and dispositional descriptions in response to two different picture stimuli sets. Evidence against the proposal that Tzeltal uses dispositionals to compensate for its single, semantically generic preposition (Brown 1994; Grinevald 2006) comes from the finding that Tzeltal speakers use relational spatial nominals in the “Ground phrase” — the expression of the place at which an entity is located — about as frequently as Yucatec speakers. We consider several alternative hypotheses, including a possible larger typological difference that leads Tzeltal speakers, but not Yucatec speakers, to prefer “theme-specific” verbs not just in locative predications, but in any predication involving a theme argument.
  • Bohnemeyer, J., Enfield, N. J., Essegbey, J., Ibarretxe-Antuñano, I., Kita, S., Lüpke, F., & Ameka, F. K. (2007). Principles of event segmentation in language: The case of motion events. Language, 83(3), 495-532. doi:10.1353/lan.2007.0116.

    Abstract

    We examine universals and crosslinguistic variation in constraints on event segmentation. Previous typological studies have focused on segmentation into syntactic (Pawley 1987) or intonational units (Givón 1991). We argue that the correlation between such units and semantic/conceptual event representations is language-specific. As an alternative, we introduce the MACRO-EVENT PROPERTY (MEP): a construction has the MEP if it packages event representations such that temporal operators necessarily have scope over all subevents. A case study on the segmentation of motion events into macro-event expressions in eighteen genetically and typologically diverse languages has produced evidence of two types of design principles that impact motion-event segmentation: language-specific lexicalization patterns and universal constraints on form-to-meaning mapping.
  • Bohnemeyer, J. (1998). Temporale Relatoren im Hispano-Yukatekischen Sprachkontakt. In A. Koechert, & T. Stolz (Eds.), Convergencia e Individualidad - Las lenguas Mayas entre hispanización e indigenismo (pp. 195-241). Hannover, Germany: Verlag für Ethnologie.
  • Bohnemeyer, J. (1998). Sententiale Topics im Yukatekischen. In Z. Dietmar (Ed.), Deskriptive Grammatik und allgemeiner Sprachvergleich (pp. 55-85). Tübingen, Germany: Max-Niemeyer-Verlag.
  • Boroditsky, L., Gaby, A., & Levinson, S. C. (2007). Time in space. In A. Majid (Ed.), Field manual volume 10 (pp. 59-80). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.468721.

    Abstract

    This Field Manual entry has been superceded by the 2008 version: https://doi.org/10.17617/2.492932

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  • Bosker, H. R. (2021). Using fuzzy string matching for automated assessment of listener transcripts in speech intelligibility studies. Behavior Research Methods, 53(5), 1945-1953. doi:10.3758/s13428-021-01542-4.

    Abstract

    Many studies of speech perception assess the intelligibility of spoken sentence stimuli by means
    of transcription tasks (‘type out what you hear’). The intelligibility of a given stimulus is then often
    expressed in terms of percentage of words correctly reported from the target sentence. Yet scoring
    the participants’ raw responses for words correctly identified from the target sentence is a time-
    consuming task, and hence resource-intensive. Moreover, there is no consensus among speech
    scientists about what specific protocol to use for the human scoring, limiting the reliability of
    human scores. The present paper evaluates various forms of fuzzy string matching between
    participants’ responses and target sentences, as automated metrics of listener transcript accuracy.
    We demonstrate that one particular metric, the Token Sort Ratio, is a consistent, highly efficient,
    and accurate metric for automated assessment of listener transcripts, as evidenced by high
    correlations with human-generated scores (best correlation: r = 0.940) and a strong relationship to
    acoustic markers of speech intelligibility. Thus, fuzzy string matching provides a practical tool for
    assessment of listener transcript accuracy in large-scale speech intelligibility studies. See
    https://tokensortratio.netlify.app for an online implementation.
  • Bosker, H. R., Badaya, E., & Corley, M. (2021). Discourse markers activate their, like, cohort competitors. Discourse Processes, 58(9), 837-851. doi:10.1080/0163853X.2021.1924000.

    Abstract

    Speech in everyday conversations is riddled with discourse markers (DMs), such as well, you know, and like. However, in many lab-based studies of speech comprehension, such DMs are typically absent from the carefully articulated and highly controlled speech stimuli. As such, little is known about how these DMs influence online word recognition. The present study specifically investigated the online processing of DM like and how it influences the activation of words in the mental lexicon. We specifically targeted the cohort competitor (CC) effect in the Visual World Paradigm: Upon hearing spoken instructions to “pick up the beaker,” human listeners also typically fixate—next to the target object—referents that overlap phonologically with the target word (cohort competitors such as beetle; CCs). However, several studies have argued that CC effects are constrained by syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and discourse constraints. Therefore, the present study investigated whether DM like influences online word recognition by activating its cohort competitors (e.g., lightbulb). In an eye-tracking experiment using the Visual World Paradigm, we demonstrate that when participants heard spoken instructions such as “Now press the button for the, like … unicycle,” they showed anticipatory looks to the CC referent (lightbulb)well before hearing the target. This CC effect was sustained for a relatively long period of time, even despite hearing disambiguating information (i.e., the /k/ in like). Analysis of the reaction times also showed that participants were significantly faster to select CC targets (lightbulb) when preceded by DM like. These findings suggest that seemingly trivial DMs, such as like, activate their CCs, impacting online word recognition. Thus, we advocate a more holistic perspective on spoken language comprehension in naturalistic communication, including the processing of DMs.
  • Bosker, H. R., & Peeters, D. (2021). Beat gestures influence which speech sounds you hear. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 288: 20202419. doi:10.1098/rspb.2020.2419.

    Abstract

    Beat gestures—spontaneously produced biphasic movements of the hand—
    are among the most frequently encountered co-speech gestures in human
    communication. They are closely temporally aligned to the prosodic charac-
    teristics of the speech signal, typically occurring on lexically stressed
    syllables. Despite their prevalence across speakers of the world’s languages,
    how beat gestures impact spoken word recognition is unclear. Can these
    simple ‘flicks of the hand’ influence speech perception? Across a range
    of experiments, we demonstrate that beat gestures influence the explicit
    and implicit perception of lexical stress (e.g. distinguishing OBject from
    obJECT), and in turn can influence what vowels listeners hear. Thus, we pro-
    vide converging evidence for a manual McGurk effect: relatively simple and
    widely occurring hand movements influence which speech sounds we hear

    Additional information

    example stimuli and experimental data
  • Bosker, H. R. (2021). The contribution of amplitude modulations in speech to perceived charisma. In B. Weiss, J. Trouvain, M. Barkat-Defradas, & J. J. Ohala (Eds.), Voice attractiveness: Prosody, phonology and phonetics (pp. 165-181). Singapore: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-981-15-6627-1_10.

    Abstract

    Speech contains pronounced amplitude modulations in the 1–9 Hz range, correlating with the syllabic rate of speech. Recent models of speech perception propose that this rhythmic nature of speech is central to speech recognition and has beneficial effects on language processing. Here, we investigated the contribution of amplitude modulations to the subjective impression listeners have of public speakers. The speech from US presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the three TV debates of 2016 was acoustically analyzed by means of modulation spectra. These indicated that Clinton’s speech had more pronounced amplitude modulations than Trump’s speech, particularly in the 1–9 Hz range. A subsequent perception experiment, with listeners rating the perceived charisma of (low-pass filtered versions of) Clinton’s and Trump’s speech, showed that more pronounced amplitude modulations (i.e., more ‘rhythmic’ speech) increased perceived charisma ratings. These outcomes highlight the important contribution of speech rhythm to charisma perception.
  • Böttner, M. (1998). A collective extension of relational grammar. Logic Journal of the IGPL, 6(2), 175-793. doi:10.1093/jigpal/6.2.175.

    Abstract

    Relational grammar was proposed in Suppes (1976) as a semantical grammar for natural language. Fragments considered so far are restricted to distributive notions. In this article, relational grammar is extended to collective notions.
  • Bowerman, M., & Choi, S. (2007). Space under construction: Language-specific spatial categorization in first language acquisition [Reprint]. In V. Evans, B. K. Bergen, & J. Zinken (Eds.), The cognitive linguistic reader (pp. 849-879). London: Equinox Publishing.

    Abstract

    Reprinted from Bowerman, M. & Choi, S. (2003). Space under construction: Language-specific spatial categorization in first language acquisition. In D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow (Eds.), Language in Mind (pp. 387-427). Cambridge: MIT Press.
  • Bowerman, M. (1981). Beyond communicative adequacy: From piecemeal knowledge to an integrated system in the child's acquisition of language. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development, 20, 1-24.

    Abstract

    This study investigates the onset at periodic intervals in the age range of about two to five years of various kinds of recurrent and systematic errors in word choice and/or syntactic structure. Acquisitional processes and their implications are outlined. Sections address: (1) the kinds of processes that can be inferred to underlie errors ("late errors") that do not set in until after a period of correct usage; (2) the currently dominant model of how linguistic forms, meaning, and communication are interrelated in the acquisition of language; (3) challenging problems for this model; (4) a suggestion that the notion of "meaning" in language must be reconceptualized before the problems can be solved; and (5) evidence from several types of late errors that supports the arguments. The error types discussed show the ways in which the relationship between form and meanings can change in the course of language development. These changes occur after the child would ordinarily already be credited with having "acquired" the forms in question. This indicates that achieving fluent, productive use of a form and achieving adult-like knowledge of its structure are not necessarily isomorphic.
  • Bowerman, M. (1974). Early development of concepts underlying language. In R. Schiefelbusch, & L. Lloyd (Eds.), Language perspectives: Acquisition, retardation, and intervention (pp. 191-209). Baltimore: University Park Press.
  • Bowerman, M. (1976). Commentary on M.D.S. Braine, “Children's first word combinations”. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 41(1), 98-104. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1165959.
  • Bowerman, M. (2007). Containment, support, and beyond: Constructing topological spatial categories in first language acquisition. In M. Aurnague, M. Hickmann, & L. Vieu (Eds.), The categorization of spatial entities in language and cognition (pp. 177-203). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Abstract

    Among children’s earliest spatial words are topological forms like ‘in’ and ‘on’. Although these forms name spatial relationships, they also presuppose a classification of ground objects into entities such as “containers” and “surfaces”; hence their relevance for a volume on “spatial entities”. Traditionally, researchers have assumed that semantic categories of space are universal, reflecting a human way of nonlinguistically perceiving and cognizing space. But, as this chapter discusses, spatial categories in fact differ strikingly across languages, and children begin to home in on language-specific classifications extremely early, before age two. Learners do not, it seems, draw only on purely nonlinguistic spatial concepts; they can also actively construct spatial categories on the basis of the linguistic input. Evidence is drawn primarily from research on children learning Korean vs. English.
  • Bowerman, M., & Choi, S. (2007). Kształtowanie znaczeń dla języka: Zjawiska uniwersalne i charakterystyczne dla danego języka w przyswajaniu kategorii semantycznych odnoszących się do przestrzeni [Reprint]. In B. Bokus, & G. W. Shugar (Eds.), Psychologia języka dziecka (pp. 386-424). Gdansk: Wydawnictwo Psychologiczne.

    Abstract

    Reprinted from: Bowerman, M. & Choi, S. (2001). Shaping meanings for language: Universal and language specific in the acquisition of spatial semantic categories. In M. Bowerman & S.L. Levinson (Eds.), Language acquisition and conceptual development (pp. 475-511). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Bowerman, M. (1981). Language development. In H. Triandis, & A. Heron (Eds.), Handbook of cross cultural psychology, Vol. 4: Developmental Psychology (pp. 93-185). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
  • Bowerman, M. (1976). Le relazioni strutturali nel linguaggio infantile: sintattiche o semantiche? [Reprint]. In F. Antinucci, & C. Castelfranchi (Eds.), Psicolinguistica: Percezione, memoria e apprendimento del linguaggio (pp. 303-321). Bologna: Il Mulino.

    Abstract

    Reprinted from Bowerman, M. (1973). Structural relationships in children's utterances: Semantic or syntactic? In T. Moore (Ed.), Cognitive development and the acquisition of language (pp. 197 213). New York: Academic Press
  • Bowerman, M. (1974). Learning the structure of causative verbs: A study in the relationship of cognitive, semantic, and syntactic development. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development, 8, 142-178.
  • Li, P., & Bowerman, M. (1998). The acquisition of lexical and grammatical aspect in Chinese. First Language, 18, 311-350. doi:10.1177/014272379801805404.

    Abstract

    This study reports three experiments on how children learning Mandarin Chinese comprehend and use aspect markers. These experiments examine the role of lexical aspect in children's acquisition of grammatical aspect. Results provide converging evidence for children's early sensitivity to (1) the association between atelic verbs and the imperfective aspect markers zai, -zhe, and -ne, and (2) the association between telic verbs and the perfective aspect marker -le. Children did not show a sensitivity in their use or understanding of aspect markers to the difference between stative and activity verbs or between semelfactive and activity verbs. These results are consistent with Slobin's (1985) basic child grammar hypothesis that the contrast between process and result is important in children's early acquisition of temporal morphology. In contrast, they are inconsistent with Bickerton's (1981, 1984) language bioprogram hypothesis that the distinctions between state and process and between punctual and nonpunctual are preprogrammed into language learners. We suggest new ways of looking at the results in the light of recent probabilistic hypotheses that emphasize the role of input, prototypes and connectionist representations.
  • Bowerman, M. (1981). The child's expression of meaning: Expanding relationships among lexicon, syntax, and morphology. In H. Winitz (Ed.), Native language and foreign language acquisition (pp. 172-189). New York: New York Academy of Sciences.
  • Bowerman, M. (1976). Semantic factors in the acquisition of rules for word use and sentence construction. In D. Morehead, & A. Morehead (Eds.), Directions in normal and deficient language development (pp. 99-179). Baltimore: University Park Press.
  • Braden, R. O., Amor, D. J., Fisher, S. E., Mei, C., Myers, C. T., Mefford, H., Gill, D., Srivastava, S., Swanson, L. C., Goel, H., Scheffer, I. E., & Morgan, A. T. (2021). Severe speech impairment is a distinguishing feature of FOXP1-related disorder. Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology, 63(12), 1417-1426. doi:10.1111/dmcn.14955.

    Abstract

    Aim
    To delineate the speech and language phenotype of a cohort of individuals with FOXP1-related disorder.

    Method
    We administered a standardized test battery to examine speech and oral motor function, receptive and expressive language, non-verbal cognition, and adaptive behaviour. Clinical history and cognitive assessments were analysed together with speech and language findings.

    Results
    Twenty-nine patients (17 females, 12 males; mean age 9y 6mo; median age 8y [range 2y 7mo–33y]; SD 6y 5mo) with pathogenic FOXP1 variants (14 truncating, three missense, three splice site, one in-frame deletion, eight cytogenic deletions; 28 out of 29 were de novo variants) were studied. All had atypical speech, with 21 being verbal and eight minimally verbal. All verbal patients had dysarthric and apraxic features, with phonological deficits in most (14 out of 16). Language scores were low overall. In the 21 individuals who carried truncating or splice site variants and small deletions, expressive abilities were relatively preserved compared with comprehension.

    Interpretation
    FOXP1-related disorder is characterized by a complex speech and language phenotype with prominent dysarthria, broader motor planning and programming deficits, and linguistic-based phonological errors. Diagnosis of the speech phenotype associated with FOXP1-related dysfunction will inform early targeted therapy.

    Additional information

    figure S1 table S1
  • Bramão, I., Mendonça, A., Faísca, L., Ingvar, M., Petersson, K. M., & Reis, A. (2007). The impact of reading and writing skills on a visuo-motor integration task: A comparison between illiterate and literate subjects. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 13(2), 359-364. doi:10.1017/S1355617707070440.

    Abstract

    Previous studies have shown a significant association between reading skills and the performance on visuo-motor tasks. In order to clarify whether reading and writing skills modulate non-linguistic domains, we investigated the performance of two literacy groups on a visuo-motor integration task with non-linguistic stimuli. Twenty-one illiterate participants and twenty matched literate controls were included in the experiment. Subjects were instructed to use the right or the left index finger to point to and touch a randomly presented target on the right or left side of a touch screen. The results showed that the literate subjects were significantly faster in detecting and touching targets on the left compared to the right side of the screen. In contrast, the presentation side did not affect the performance of the illiterate group. These results lend support to the idea that having acquired reading and writing skills, and thus a preferred left-to-right reading direction, influences visual scanning. (JINS, 2007, 13, 359–364
  • Brand, S., & Ernestus, M. (2021). Reduction of word-final obstruent-liquid-schwa clusters in Parisian French. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 17(1), 249-285. doi:10.1515/cllt-2017-0067.

    Abstract

    This corpus study investigated pronunciation variants of word-final obstruent-liquid-schwa (OLS) clusters in nouns in casual Parisian French. Results showed that at least one phoneme was absent in 80.7% of the 291 noun tokens in the dataset, and that the whole cluster was absent (e.g., [mis] for ministre) in no less than 15.5% of the tokens. We demonstrate that phonemes are not always completely absent, but that they may leave traces on neighbouring phonemes. Further, the clusters display undocumented voice assimilation patterns. Statistical modelling showed that a phoneme is most likely to be absent if the following phoneme is also absent. The durations of the phonemes are conditioned particularly by the position of the word in the prosodic phrase. We argue, on the basis of three different types of evidence, that in French word-final OLS clusters, the absence of obstruents is mainly due to gradient reduction processes, whereas the absence of schwa and liquids may also be due to categorical deletion processes.
  • 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.
  • De Bree, E., Janse, E., & Van de Zande, A. M. (2007). Stress assignment in aphasia: Word and non-word reading and non-word repetition. Brain and Language, 103, 264-275. doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2007.07.003.

    Abstract

    This paper investigates stress assignment in Dutch aphasic patients in non-word repetition, as well as in real-word and non-word reading. Performance on the non-word reading task was similar for the aphasic patients and the control group, as mainly regular stress was assigned to the targets. However, there were group differences on the real-word reading and non-word repetition tasks. Unlike the non-brain-damaged group, the patients showed a strong regularization tendency in their repetition of irregular patterns. The patients’ stress error patterns suggest an impairment in retention or retrieval of targets with irregular stress patterns. Limited verbal short-term memory is proposed as a possible underlying cause for the stress difficulties.
  • Brehm, L., & Meyer, A. S. (2021). Planning when to say: Dissociating cue use in utterance initiation using cross-validation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 150(9), 1772-1799. doi:10.1037/xge0001012.

    Abstract

    In conversation, turns follow each other with minimal gaps. To achieve this, speakers must launch their utterances shortly before the predicted end of the partner’s turn. We examined the relative importance of cues to partner utterance content and partner utterance length for launching coordinated speech. In three experiments, Dutch adult participants had to produce prepared utterances (e.g., vier, “four”) immediately after a recording of a confederate’s utterance (zeven, “seven”). To assess the role of corepresenting content versus attending to speech cues in launching coordinated utterances, we varied whether the participant could see the stimulus being named by the confederate, the confederate prompt’s length, and whether within a block of trials, the confederate prompt’s length was predictable. We measured how these factors affected the gap between turns and the participants’ allocation of visual attention while preparing to speak. Using a machine-learning technique, model selection by k-fold cross-validation, we found that gaps were most strongly predicted by cues from the confederate speech signal, though some benefit was also conferred by seeing the confederate’s stimulus. This shows that, at least in a simple laboratory task, speakers rely more on cues in the partner’s speech than corepresentation of their utterance content.
  • Brehm, L., Jackson, C. N., & Miller, K. L. (2021). Probabilistic online processing of sentence anomalies. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 36(8), 959-983. doi:10.1080/23273798.2021.1900579.

    Abstract

    Listeners can successfully interpret the intended meaning of an utterance even when it contains errors or other unexpected anomalies. The present work combines an online measure of attention to sentence referents (visual world eye-tracking) with offline judgments of sentence meaning to disclose how the interpretation of anomalous sentences unfolds over time in order to explore mechanisms of non-literal processing. We use a metalinguistic judgment in Experiment 1 and an elicited imitation task in Experiment 2. In both experiments, we focus on one morphosyntactic anomaly (Subject-verb agreement; The key to the cabinets literally *were … ) and one semantic anomaly (Without; Lulu went to the gym without her hat ?off) and show that non-literal referents to each are considered upon hearing the anomalous region of the sentence. This shows that listeners understand anomalies by overwriting or adding to an initial interpretation and that this occurs incrementally and adaptively as the sentence unfolds.
  • Bresnan, J., Cueni, A., Nikitina, T., & Baayen, R. H. (2007). Predicting the dative alternation. In G. Bouma, I. Kraemer, & J. Zwarts (Eds.), Cognitive foundations of interpretation (pp. 69-94). Amsterdam: KNAW.

    Abstract

    Theoretical linguists have traditionally relied on linguistic intuitions such as grammaticality judgments for their data. But the massive growth of computer-readable texts and recordings, the availability of cheaper, more powerful computers and software, and the development of new probabilistic models for language have now made the spontaneous use of language in natural settings a rich and easily accessible alternative source of data. Surprisingly, many linguists believe that such ‘usage data’ are irrelevant to the theory of grammar. Four problems are repeatedly brought up in the critiques of usage data— 1. correlated factors seeming to support reductive theories, 2. pooled data invalidating grammatical inference, 3. syntactic choices reducing to lexical biases, and 4. cross-corpus differences undermining corpus studies. Presenting a case study of work on the English dative alternation, we show first,that linguistic intuitions of grammaticality are deeply flawed and seriously underestimate the space of grammatical possibility, and second, that the four problems in the critique of usage data are empirical issues that can be resolved by using modern statistical theory and modelling strategies widely used in other fields. The new models allow linguistic theory to solve more difficult problems than it has in the past, and to build convergent projects with psychology, computer science, and allied fields of cognitive science.
  • 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.
  • Brown, P. (2007). Principles of person reference in Tzeltal conversation. In N. Enfield, & T. Stivers (Eds.), Person reference in interaction: Linguistic, cultural, and social perspectives (pp. 172-202). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Abstract

    This paper focuses on ‘minimality’ in initial references to persons in the Mayan language Tzeltal, spoken in southern Mexico. Inspection of initial person-referring expressions in 25 Tzeltal videotaped conversations reveals that, in this language, if speaker and/or recipient are related through ‘kinship’ to the referent, a kin term (or other relational term like ‘namesake’) is the default option for initial reference to persons. Additionally, further specification via names and/or geographical location (of home base) is also often used to home in on the referent (e.g. ‘your-cousin Alonzo’, ‘our mother’s brother behind the mountain’). And often (~ 70 cases in the data examined) initial references to persons combine more than one referring expression, for example: ‘this old man my brother-in-law old man Antonio here in the pines’, or ‘the father of that brother-in-law of yours the father-in-law of your elder-sister Xmaruch’. Seen in the light of Schegloff’s (1979, 1996) two basic preferences for referring to persons in conversation: (i.) for a recognitional form and (ii.) for a minimal form, these Tzeltal person-referring expressions seem to be relatively elaborated. This paper examines the sequential contexts where such combinations appear, and proposes a third preference operative in Tzeltal (and possibly in other kinship-term-based systems) for associating the referent as closely as possible to the participants.
  • Brown, P., Sicoli, M. A., & Le Guen, O. (2021). Cross-speaker repetition and epistemic stance in Tzeltal, Yucatec, and Zapotec conversations. Journal of Pragmatics, 183, 256-272. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2021.07.005.

    Abstract

    As a turn-design strategy, repeating another has been described for English as a fairly restricted way of constructing a response, which, through re-saying what another speaker just said, is exploitable for claiming epistemic primacy, and thus avoided when a second speaker has no direct experience. Conversations in Mesoamerican languages present a challenge to the generality of this claim. This paper examines the epistemics of dialogic repetition in video-recordings of conversations in three Indigenous languages of Mexico: Tzeltal and Yucatec Maya, both spoken in southeastern Mexico, and Lachixío Zapotec, spoken in Oaxaca. We develop a typology of repetition in different sequential environments. We show that while the functions of repeats in Mesoamerica overlap with the range of repeat functions described for English, there is an additional epistemic environment in the Mesoamerican routine of repeating for affirmation: a responding speaker can repeat to affirm something introduced by another speaker of which s/he has no prior knowledge. We argue that, while dialogic repetition is a universally available turn-design strategy that makes epistemics potentially relevant, cross-cultural comparison reveals that cultural preferences intervene such that, in Mesoamerican conversations, repetition co-constructs knowledge as collective process over which no individual participant has final authority or ownership.

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  • Brown, A. R., Pouw, W., Brentari, D., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2021). People are less susceptible to illusion when they use their hands to communicate rather than estimate. Psychological Science, 32, 1227-1237. doi:10.1177/0956797621991552.

    Abstract

    When we use our hands to estimate the length of a stick in the Müller-Lyer illusion, we are highly susceptible to the illusion. But when we prepare to act on sticks under the same conditions, we are significantly less susceptible. Here, we asked whether people are susceptible to illusion when they use their hands not to act on objects but to describe them in spontaneous co-speech gestures or conventional sign languages of the deaf. Thirty-two English speakers and 13 American Sign Language signers used their hands to act on, estimate the length of, and describe sticks eliciting the Müller-Lyer illusion. For both gesture and sign, the magnitude of illusion in the description task was smaller than the magnitude of illusion in the estimation task and not different from the magnitude of illusion in the action task. The mechanisms responsible for producing gesture in speech and sign thus appear to operate not on percepts involved in estimation but on percepts derived from the way we act on objects.

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  • Brown, P. (1998). Children's first verbs in Tzeltal: Evidence for an early verb category. Linguistics, 36(4), 713-753.

    Abstract

    A major finding in studies of early vocabulary acquisition has been that children tend to learn a lot of nouns early but make do with relatively few verbs, among which semantically general-purpose verbs like do, make, get, have, give, come, go, and be play a prominent role. The preponderance of nouns is explained in terms of nouns labelling concrete objects beings “easier” to learn than verbs, which label relational categories. Nouns label “natural categories” observable in the world, verbs label more linguistically and culturally specific categories of events linking objects belonging to such natural categories (Gentner 1978, 1982; Clark 1993). This view has been challenged recently by data from children learning certain non-Indo-European languges like Korean, where children have an early verb explosion and verbs dominate in early child utterances. Children learning the Mayan language Tzeltal also acquire verbs early, prior to any noun explosion as measured by production. Verb types are roughly equivalent to noun types in children’s beginning production vocabulary and soon outnumber them. At the one-word stage children’s verbs mostly have the form of a root stripped of affixes, correctly segmented despite structural difficulties. Quite early (before the MLU 2.0 point) there is evidence of productivity of some grammatical markers (although they are not always present): the person-marking affixes cross-referencing core arguments, and the completive/incompletive aspectual distinctions. The Tzeltal facts argue against a natural-categories explanation for childre’s early vocabulary, in favor of a view emphasizing the early effects of language-specific properties of the input. They suggest that when and how a child acquires a “verb” category is centrally influenced by the structural properties of the input, and that the semantic structure of the language - where the referential load is concentrated - plays a fundamental role in addition to distributional facts.
  • Brown, P., Macintyre, M., Morpeth, R., & Prendergast, S. (1981). A daughter: A thing to be given away. In Cambridge Women's Studies Group (Ed.), Women in society: Interdisciplinary essays (pp. 127-145). London: Virago.
  • Brown, P. (1998). Conversational structure and language acquisition: The role of repetition in Tzeltal adult and child speech. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 8(2), 197-221. doi:10.1525/jlin.1998.8.2.197.

    Abstract

    When Tzeltal children in the Mayan community of Tenejapa, in southern Mexico, begin speaking, their production vocabulary consists predominantly of verb roots, in contrast to the dominance of nouns in the initial vocabulary of first‐language learners of Indo‐European languages. This article proposes that a particular Tzeltal conversational feature—known in the Mayanist literature as "dialogic repetition"—provides a context that facilitates the early analysis and use of verbs. Although Tzeltal babies are not treated by adults as genuine interlocutors worthy of sustained interaction, dialogic repetition in the speech the children are exposed to may have an important role in revealing to them the structural properties of the language, as well as in socializing the collaborative style of verbal interaction adults favor in this community.
  • Brown, P. (1998). Early Tzeltal verbs: Argument structure and argument representation. In E. Clark (Ed.), Proceedings of the 29th Annual Stanford Child Language Research Forum (pp. 129-140). Stanford: CSLI Publications.

    Abstract

    The surge of research activity focussing on children's acquisition of verbs (e.g., Tomasello and Merriman 1996) addresses some fundamental questions: Just how variable across languages, and across individual children, is the process of verb learning? How specific are arguments to particular verbs in early child language? How does the grammatical category 'Verb' develop? The position of Universal Grammar, that a verb category is early, contrasts with that of Tomasello (1992), Pine and Lieven and their colleagues (1996, in press), and many others, that children develop a verb category slowly, gradually building up subcategorizations of verbs around pragmatic, syntactic, and semantic properties of the language they are exposed to. On this latter view, one would expect the language which the child is learning, the cultural milieu and the nature of the interactions in which the child is engaged, to influence the process of acquiring verb argument structures. This paper explores these issues by examining the development of argument representation in the Mayan language Tzeltal, in both its lexical and verbal cross-referencing forms, and analyzing the semantic and pragmatic factors influencing the form argument representation takes. Certain facts about Tzeltal (the ergative/ absolutive marking, the semantic specificity of transitive and positional verbs) are proposed to affect the representation of arguments. The first 500 multimorpheme combinations of 3 children (aged between 1;8 and 2;4) are examined. It is argued that there is no evidence of semantically light 'pathbreaking' verbs (Ninio 1996) leading the way into word combinations. There is early productivity of cross-referencing affixes marking A, S, and O arguments (although there are systematic omissions). The paper assesses the respective contributions of three kinds of factors to these results - structural (regular morphology), semantic (verb specificity) and pragmatic (the nature of Tzeltal conversational interaction).
  • Brown, A. (2007). Crosslinguistic influence in first and second languages: Convergence in speech and gesture. PhD Thesis, Boston University, Boston.

    Abstract

    Research on second language acquisition typically focuses on how a first language (L1) influences a second language (L2) in different linguistic domains and across modalities. This dissertation, in contrast, explores interactions between languages in the mind of a language learner by asking 1) can an emerging L2 influence an established L1? 2) if so, how is such influence realized? 3) are there parallel influences of the L1 on the L2? These questions were investigated for the expression of Manner (e.g. climb, roll) and Path (e.g. up, down) of motion, areas where substantial crosslinguistic differences exist in speech and co-speech gesture. Japanese and English are typologically distinct in this domain; therefore, narrative descriptions of four motion events were elicited from monolingual Japanese speakers (n=16), monolingual English speakers (n=13), and native Japanese speakers with intermediate knowledge of English (narratives elicited in both their L1 and L2, n=28). Ways in which Path and Manner were expressed at the lexical, syntactic, and gestural levels were analyzed in monolingual and non-monolingual production. Results suggest mutual crosslinguistic influences. In their L1, native Japanese speakers with knowledge of English displayed both Japanese- and English-like use of morphosyntactic elements to express Path and Manner (i.e. a combination of verbs and other constructions). Consequently, non-monolingual L1 discourse contained significantly more Path expressions per clause, with significantly greater mention of Goal of motion than monolingual Japanese and English discourse. Furthermore, the gestures of non-monolingual speakers diverged from their monolingual counterparts with differences in depiction of Manner and gesture perspective (character versus observer). Importantly, non-monolingual production in the L1 was not ungrammatical, but simply reflected altered preferences. As for L2 production, many effects of L1 influence were seen, crucially in areas parallel to those described above. Overall, production by native Japanese speakers who knew English differed from that of monolingual Japanese and English speakers. But L1 and L2 production within non-monolingual individuals was similar. These findings imply a convergence of L1-L2 linguistic systems within the mind of a language learner. Theoretical and methodological implications for SLA research and language assessment with respect to the 'native speaker standard language' are discussed.
  • Brown, P. (2007). Culture-specific influences on semantic development Acquiring the Tzeltal 'benefactive' construction. In B. Pfeiler (Ed.), Learning indigenous languages: Child language acquisition in Mesoamerica (pp. 119-154). Mouton de Gruyter: Berlin.

    Abstract

    Three-place predicates are an important locus for examining how children acquire argument structure and how this process is influenced by the typology of the language they are learning as well as by culturally-specific semantic categories. From a typological perspective, there is reason to expect children to have some trouble expressing three-participant events, given the considerable variation across languages in how these are linguistically coded. Verbs of transfer (‘give’, ‘receive’, etc.) are often considered to be the verbs which canonically appear with three arguments (e.g., Slobin 1985, Gleitman 1990). Yet in the Mayan language Tzeltal, verbs other than transfer verbs appear routinely in the ditransitive construction. Although the three participants are rarely all overtly expressed as NPs, this construction ensures that the ‘recipient’ or or ‘affectee’ participant is overtly marked on the verb. Tzeltal children’s early acquisition of this construction (well before the age of 3;0) shows that they are sensitive to its abstract constructional meaning of ‘affected’ third participant: they do not go initially for ‘transfer’ meanings but are attuned to benefactive or malefactive uses despite the predominance of the verb ‘give’ in the input with this construction. This poses a challenge to acquisition theories (Goldberg 2001, Ninio 1999) that see construction meaning arising from the meaning of the verb most frequently used in a construction.
  • Brown, P. (2007). 'She had just cut/broken off her head': Cutting and breaking verbs in Tzeltal. Cognitive Linguistics, 18(2), 319-330. doi:10.1515/COG.2007.019.

    Abstract

    This paper describes the lexical resources for expressing events of cutting and breaking (C&B hereafter) in the Mayan language Tzeltal. This notional set of verbs is not a class in any grammatical sense; C&B verbs are formally undistinguishable from many other transitive state-change verbs. But they nicely reveal the characteristic specificity of Tzeltal verb semantics: C&B actions are finely differentiated according to the spatial and textural properties of the theme object, with no superordinate term meaning 'either cut in general' or 'break in general'. The paper characterizes the semantics of these verbs and shows that in the great majority of cases it does not predict their argument structure.
  • Brown, P. (1998). [Review of the book by A.J. Wootton, Interaction and the development of mind]. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4(4), 816-817.
  • Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (2007). Gesichtsbedrohende Akte [reprint: Face-threatening acts, 1987]. In S. K. Herrmann, S. Kraemer, & H. Kuch (Eds.), Verletzende Worte: Die Grammatik sprachlicher Missachtung (pp. 59-88). Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.

    Abstract

    This article is a reprint of parts of chapters 2 and 3 from Brown and Levinson (1987) discussing the concept of 'Face Threatening Acts'.
  • Brown, P. (1998). La identificación de las raíces verbales en Tzeltal (Maya): Cómo lo hacen los niños? Función, 17-18, 121-146.

    Abstract

    This is a Spanish translation of Brown 1997.
  • Brown, P. (1998). How and why are women more polite: Some evidence from a Mayan community. In J. Coates (Ed.), Language and gender (pp. 81-99). Oxford: Blackwell.
  • Brown, P., & Jordanova, L. (1981). Oppressive dichotomies: The nature/culture debate. In Cambridge Women's Studies Group (Ed.), Women in society: Interdisciplinary essays (pp. 224-241). London: Virago.
  • Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1998). Politeness, introduction to the reissue: A review of recent work. In A. Kasher (Ed.), Pragmatics: Vol. 6 Grammar, psychology and sociology (pp. 488-554). London: Routledge.

    Abstract

    This article is a reprint of chapter 1, the introduction to Brown and Levinson, 1987, Politeness: Some universals in language usage (Cambridge University Press).
  • Brown, P. (1976). Women and politeness: A new perspective on language and society. Reviews in Anthropology, 3, 240-249.
  • Brown, P. (1981). Universals and particulars in the position of women. In Cambridge Women's Studies Group (Ed.), Women in society: Interdisciplinary essays (pp. 242-256). London: Virago.
  • Burgers, N., Ettema, D. F., Hooimeijer, P., & Barendse, M. T. (2021). The effects of neighbours on sport club membership. European Journal for Sport and Society, 18(4), 310-325. doi:10.1080/16138171.2020.1840710.

    Abstract

    Neighbours have been found to influence each other’s behaviour (contagion effect). However, little is known about the influence on sport club membership. This while increasing interest has risen for the social role of sport clubs. Sport clubs could bring people from different backgrounds together. A mixed composition is a key element in this social role. Individual characteristics are strong predictors of sport club membership. Western high educated men are more likely to be members. In contrast to people with a non-Western migration background. The neighbourhood is a more fixed meeting place, which provides unique opportunities for people from different backgrounds to interact. This study aims to gain more insight into the influence of neighbours on sport club membership. This research looks especially at the composition of neighbour’s migration background, since they tend to be more or less likely to be members and therefore could encourage of inhibit each other. A population database including the only registry data of all Dutch inhabitants was merged with data of 11 sport unions. The results show a cross-level effect of neighbours on sport club membership. We find a contagion effect of neighbours’ migration background; having a larger proportion of neighbours with a migration background from a non-Western country reduces the odds, as expected. However, this contagion effect was not found for people with a Moroccan or Turkish background.
  • Byers-Heinlein, K., Tsui, A. S. M., Bergmann, C., Black, A. K., Brown, A., Carbajal, M. J., Durrant, S., Fennell, C. T., Fiévet, A.-C., Frank, M. C., Gampe, A., Gervain, J., Gonzalez-Gomez, N., Hamlin, J. K., Havron, N., Hernik, M., Kerr, S., Killam, H., Klassen, K., Kosie, J. and 18 moreByers-Heinlein, K., Tsui, A. S. M., Bergmann, C., Black, A. K., Brown, A., Carbajal, M. J., Durrant, S., Fennell, C. T., Fiévet, A.-C., Frank, M. C., Gampe, A., Gervain, J., Gonzalez-Gomez, N., Hamlin, J. K., Havron, N., Hernik, M., Kerr, S., Killam, H., Klassen, K., Kosie, J., Kovács, Á. M., Lew-Williams, C., Liu, L., Mani, N., Marino, C., Mastroberardino, M., Mateu, V., Noble, C., Orena, A. J., Polka, L., Potter, C. E., Schreiner, M., Singh, L., Soderstrom, M., Sundara, M., Waddell, C., Werker, J. F., & Wermelinger, S. (2021). A multilab study of bilingual infants: Exploring the preference for infant-directed speech. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 4(1), 1-30. doi:10.1177/2515245920974622.

    Abstract

    From the earliest months of life, infants prefer listening to and learn better from infant-directed speech (IDS) than adult-directed speech (ADS). Yet, IDS differs within communities, across languages, and across cultures, both in form and in prevalence. This large-scale, multi-site study used the diversity of bilingual infant experiences to explore the impact of different types of linguistic experience on infants’ IDS preference. As part of the multi-lab ManyBabies project, we compared lab-matched samples of 333 bilingual and 385 monolingual infants’ preference for North-American English IDS (cf. ManyBabies Consortium, in press (MB1)), tested in 17 labs in 7 countries. Those infants were tested in two age groups: 6–9 months (the younger sample) and 12–15 months (the older sample). We found that bilingual and monolingual infants both preferred IDS to ADS, and did not differ in terms of the overall magnitude of this preference. However, amongst bilingual infants who were acquiring North-American English (NAE) as a native language, greater exposure to NAE was associated with a stronger IDS preference, extending the previous finding from MB1 that monolinguals learning NAE as a native language showed a stronger preference than infants unexposed to NAE. Together, our findings indicate that IDS preference likely makes a similar contribution to monolingual and bilingual development, and that infants are exquisitely sensitive to the nature and frequency of different types of language input in their early environments.
  • Byun, K.-S. (2007). Becoming friends with Korean Sign Language. Cheonan: Chungnam Association of the Deaf.
  • 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.
  • Cambridge Women's Studies Group, & Brown, P. (Eds.). (1981). Women in society: Interdisciplinary essays. London: Virago.
  • Cameron-Faulkner, T., & Kidd, E. (2007). I'm are what I'm are: The acquisition of first-person singular present BE. Cognitive Linguistics, 18(1), 1-22. doi:10.1515/COG.2007.001.

    Abstract

    The present study investigates the development of am in the speech of one English-speaking child, Scarlett (aged 4;6–5;6). We show that am is infrequent in the speech addressed to children; the acquisition of this form of BE presents a unique insight into the processes underlying language development because children have little evidence regarding its correct use. Scarlett produced a pervasive error where she overextended are to first-person singular contexts where am was required (e.g., I'm are trying, When are I'm finished?). Am gradually emerged in her speech on what appears to be a construction-specific basis. The findings of the study are used in support of a usage-based, constructivisit approach to language development.
  • Carota, F., Nili, H., Pulvermüller, F., & Kriegeskorte, N. (2021). Distinct fronto-temporal substrates of distributional and taxonomic similarity among words: Evidence from RSA of BOLD signals. NeuroImage, 224: 117408. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.117408.

    Abstract

    A class of semantic theories defines concepts in terms of statistical distributions of lexical items, basing meaning on vectors of word co-occurrence frequencies. A different approach emphasizes abstract hierarchical taxonomic relationships among concepts. However, the functional relevance of these different accounts and how they capture information-encoding of meaning in the brain still remains elusive.

    We investigated to what extent distributional and taxonomic models explained word-elicited neural responses using cross-validated representational similarity analysis (RSA) of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and novel model comparisons.

    Our findings show that the brain encodes both types of semantic similarities, but in distinct cortical regions. Posterior middle temporal regions reflected word links based on hierarchical taxonomies, along with the action-relatedness of the semantic word categories. In contrast, distributional semantics best predicted the representational patterns in left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG, BA 47). Both representations coexisted in angular gyrus supporting semantic binding and integration. These results reveal that neuronal networks with distinct cortical distributions across higher-order association cortex encode different representational properties of word meanings. Taxonomy may shape long-term lexical-semantic representations in memory consistently with sensorimotor details of semantic categories, whilst distributional knowledge in the LIFG (BA 47) enable semantic combinatorics in the context of language use.

    Our approach helps to elucidate the nature of semantic representations essential for understanding human language.
  • Carota, F. (2007). Collaborative use of contrastive markers Contextual and co-textual implications. In A. Fetzer (Ed.), Context and Appropriateness: Micro meets macro (pp. 235-260). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

    Abstract

    The study presented in this paper examines the context-dependence and
    dialogue functions of the contrastive markers of Italian ma (but),
    invece (instead), mentre (while) and per (nevertheless) within
    task-oriented dialogues.
    Corpus data evidence their sensitivity to a acognitive interpersonal
    context, conceived as a common ground. Such a cognitive state - shared
    by co-participants through the coordinative process of grounding -
    interacts with the global dialogue structure, which is cognitively
    shaped by ``meta-negotiating{''} and grounding the dialogue topic.
    Locally, the relation between the current dialogue structural units and
    the global dialogue topic is said to be specified by information
    structure, in particular intra-utterance themes.
    It is argued that contrastive markers re-orient the co-participants'
    cognitive states towards grounding ungrounded topical aspects to be
    meta-negotiated. They offer a collaborative context-updating strategy,
    tracking the status of common ground during dialogue topic management.

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