Publications

Abstract

The notion of relational grammar is extented to ternary relations and illustrated by a fragment of English. Some of Peirce's terms for ternary relations are shown to be incorrect and corrected.

Abstract

Reprint from: Bowerman, M. (1989). Learning a semantic system: What role do cognitive predispositions play? In M.L. Rice & R.L Schiefelbusch (Ed.), The teachability of language (pp. 133-169). Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes.

Abstract

Narrow focus refers to accent placement that forces one interpretation of a sentence, which is then often perceived contrastively. Narrow focus is formalised in terms of alternative sets, i.e. contextually or situationally salient alternatives. In this paper, we investigate whether this model is valid also in human utterance processing. We present an eye-tracking experiment to study listeners’ expectations (i.e. eye-movements) with respect to upcoming referents. Some of the objects contrast in colour with objects that were previously referred to, others do not; the objects are referred to with either a narrow focus on the colour adjective or with broad focus on the noun. Results show that narrow focus on the adjective increases early fixations to contrastive referents. Narrow focus hence activates alternative referents in human utterance processing

Abstract

This is an encyclopedia entry surveying research and theoretical approaches to politeness phenomena in language usage.

Abstract

How do children isolate the semantic package contained in verb roots in the Mayan language Tzeltal? One might imagine that the canonical CVC shape of roots characteristic of Mayan languages would make the job simple, but the root is normally preceded and followed by affixes which mask its identity. Pye (1983) demonstrated that, in Kiche' Mayan, prosodic salience overrides semantic salience, and children's first words in Kiche' are often composed of only the final (stressed) syllable constituted by the final consonant of the CVC root and a 'meaningless' termination suffix. Intonation thus plays a crucial role in early Kiche' morphological development. Tzeltal presents a rather different picture: The first words of children around the age of 1;6 are bare roots, children strip off all prefixes and suffixes which are obligatory in adult speech. They gradually add them, starting with the suffixes (which receive the main stress), but person prefixes are omitted in some contexts past a child's third birthday, and one obligatory aspectual prefix (x-) is systematically omitted by the four children in my longitudinal study even after they are four years old. Tzeltal children's first verbs generally show faultless isolation of the root. An account in terms of intonation or stress cannot explain this ability (the prefixes are not all syllables; the roots are not always stressed). This paper suggests that probable clues include the fact that the CVC root stays constant across contexts (with some exceptions) whereas the affixes vary, that there are some linguistic contexts where the root occurs without any prefixes (relatively frequent in the input), and that the Tzeltal discourse convention of responding by repeating with appropriate deictic alternation (e.g., "I see it." "Oh, you see it.") highlights the root.

Abstract

In this paper I take up the idea that human thinking is systematically biased in the direction of interactive thinking (E. Goody's anticipatory interactive planning), that is, that humans are peculiarly good at, and inordinately prone to, attributing intentions and goals to one other (as well as to non-humans), and that they routinely orient to presumptions about each other's intentions in what they say and do. I explore the implications of that idea for an understanding of politeness in interaction, taking as a starting point the Brown and Levinson (1987) model of politeness, which assumes interactive thinking, a notion implicit in the formulation of politeness as strategic orientation to face. Drawing on an analysis of the phenomenon of conventionalized ‘irony’ in Tzeltal, I emphasize that politeness does not inhere in linguistic form per se but is a matter of conveying a polite intention, and argue that Tzeltal irony provides a prime example of one way in which humans' highly-developed intellectual machinery for inferring alter's intentions is put to the service of social relationships.

Abstract

The present study set out to pin down the role of four pitch accents, fall (H*L), rise-fall (L*HL), rise (L*H), fall-rise (H*LH), as well as deaccentuation, in interpreting new vs. given information in British English by the eyetracking paradigm. The pitch accents in question were claimed to convey information status in theories of English intonational meaning. There is, however, no consensus on the postulated roles of these pitch accents. Results clearly show that pitch accent type can and does matter when interpreting information status. The effects can be reflected in the mean proportions of fixations to the competitor in a selected time window. These patterns are also present in proportions of fixations to the target but to a lesser extent. Interestingly, the effects of pitch accent types are also reflected in how fast the participants could adjust their decision as to which picture to move before the name of the picture was fully revealed. For example, when the competitor was a given entity, the proportion of fixations to the competitor increased initially in most accent conditions in the first as a result of subjects' bias towards a given entity, but started to decrease substantially earlier in the H*L condition than in the L*H and deaccentuation conditions.

Abstract

This study investigates how Mandarin-speaking children interpret state-change verbs. In Mandarin, state-change is typically encoded with resultative verb compounds (RVCs), in which the first verb (V1) specifies an action and the second (V2) a result, for example, zhai-xia 'pick-descend' (= pick, pick off/down). Unlike English state-change verb such as pick, smash, mix and fill, the action verb (V1) may imply a state-change but it does not entail it; the state-change is specified by the additional result verb (V2). Previous studies have shown that children learning English and German tend to neglect the state-change meaning in monomorphemic state-change verbs like mix and fill (Gentner, 1978; Gropen et al, 1991) and verb-particle constructions like abplücken 'pick off' (Wittek, 1999, 2000) - they do not realize that this meaning is entailed. This study examines how Mandarin-speaking children interpret resultative verb compounds and the first verb of an RVC. Four groups of Mandarin-speaking children (mean ages 2;6, 3;6, 4;6, 6;1) and an adult group participated in a judgment task. The results show that Mandarin-speaking children know from a very young age that RVCs entail a state-change; ironically, however, they make a mistake that is just the opposite to that made by the learners of English and German: they often incorrectly interpret the action verb (V1) of an RVC as if it, in itself, also entails a state-change, even though it does not. This result suggests that children do not have a uniform strategy for interpreting verb meaning, but are influenced by the language-specific lexicalization patterns they encounter in their language.

Abstract

Listeners process spoken language in ways which are adapted to the phonological structure of their native language. As a consequence, non-native speakers do not listen to a language in the same way as native speakers; moreover, listeners may use their native language listening procedures inappropriately with foreign input. With sufficient experience, however, it may be possible to inhibit this latter (counter-productive) behavior.

Abstract

Two lexical decision experiments in Cantonese are described in which the recognition of spoken target words as a function of phonological similarity to a preceding prime is investigated. Phonological similaritv in first syllables produced inhibition, while similarity in second syllables led to facilitation. Differences between syllables in tonal and segmental structure had generally similar effects.

Abstract

This chapter highlights that most language behavior consists of speaking and listening. The chapter also reveals differences and similarities between speaking and listening. The laboratory study of word production raises formidable problems; ensuring that a particular word is produced may subvert the spontaneous production process. Word production is investigated via slips and tip-of-the-tongue (TOT), primarily via instances of processing failure and via the technique of via the picture-naming task. The methodology of word production is explained in the chapter. The chapter also explains the phenomenon of interaction between various stages of word production and the process of speech recognition. In this context, it explores the difference between sound and meaning and examines whether or not the comparisons are appropriate between the processes of recognition and production of spoken words. It also describes the similarities and differences in the structure of the recognition and production systems. Finally, the chapter highlights the common issues in recognition and production research, which include the nuances of frequency of occurrence, morphological structure, and phonological structure.

Abstract

Word blends combine fragments from two words, either in speech errors or when a new word is created. Previous work has demonstrated that in Japanese, such blends preserve moraic structure; in English they do not. A similar effect of moraic structure is observed in perceptual research on segmentation of continuous speech in Japanese; English listeners, by contrast, exploit stress units in segmentation, suggesting that a general rhythmic constraint may underlie both findings. The present study examined whether mis parallel would also hold for word blends. In spontaneous English polysyllabic blends, the source words were significantly more likely to be split before a strong than before a weak (unstressed) syllable, i.e. to be split at a stress unit boundary. In an experiment in which listeners were asked to identify the source words of blends, significantly more correct detections resulted when splits had been made before strong syllables. Word blending, like speech segmentation, appears to be constrained by language rhythm.

Abstract

In a 50,000-word corpus of spoken British English the occurrence of words embedded within other words is reported. Within-word embedding in this real speech sample is common, and analogous to the extent of embedding observed in the vocabulary. Imposition of a syllable boundary matching constraint reduces but by no means eliminates spurious embedding. Embedded words are most likely to overlap with the beginning of matrix words, and thus may pose serious problems for speech recognisers.

Abstract

Different linguistic structures allow us to highlight distinct aspects of a situation. The aim of this survey is to investigate similarities and differences in the expression of situations or events as “stative” (maintaining a state), “inchoative” (adopting a state) and “agentive” (causing something to be in a state). The questionnaire focuses on the encoding of stative, inchoative and agentive possibilities for the translation equivalents of a set of English verbs.

Abstract

Expressions of human activities and states are a rich area for cross-linguistic comparison. Some languages of the world treat human posture verbs (e.g., sit, lie, kneel) as a special class of predicates, with distinct formal properties. This survey examines lexical, semantic and grammatical patterns for posture verbs, with special reference to contrasts between “stative” (maintaining a posture), “inchoative” (adopting a posture), and “agentive” (causing something to adopt a posture) constructions. The enquiry is thematically linked to the more general questionnaire 'Intransitive Predicate Form Class Survey'.

Abstract

Under what circumstances do languages die? Why has their “mortality rate” increased dramatically in the recent past? What “causes of death” can be identified for historical cases, to what extent are these generalizable, and how can they be captured in an explanatory theory? In pursuing these questions, it becomes apparent that in typical cases of language death various causes tend to interact in multiple ways. Speakers’ attitudes towards their language play a critical role in all of this. Existing categorial taxonomies do not succeed in modeling the complex relationships between these factors. Therefore, an alternative, dimensional approach is called for to more adequately address (and counter) the causes of language death in a given scenario.

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the neural correlates of syntactic classification of an acquired grammatical sequence structure in an event-related FMRI study. During acquisition, participants were engaged in an implicit short-term memory task without performance feedback. We manipulated the statistical frequency-based and rule-based characteristics of the classification stimuli independently in order to investigate their role in artificial grammar acquisition. The participants performed reliably above chance on the classification task. We observed a partly overlapping corticostriatal processing network activated by both manipulations including inferior prefrontal, cingulate, inferior parietal regions, and the caudate nucleus. More specifically, the left inferior frontal BA 45 and the caudate nucleus were sensitive to syntactic violations and endorsement, respectively. In contrast, these structures were insensitive to the frequency-based manipulation.

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to discuss an inherent difficulty of PET (and fMRI) research in language production. On the one hand, language production presupposes some degree of freedom for the subject, on the other hand, interpretability of results presupposes restrictions of this freedom. This difficulty is reflected in the existing PET literature in some neglect of the general principle to design experiments in such a way that the results do not allow for alternative interpretations. It is argued that by narrowing down the scope of experiments a gain in interpretability can be achieved.

Abstract

This study investigates the time-course of information processing in both visual as well as in the auditory speech as used for word identification in face-to-face communication. It extends the limited previous research on this topic and provides a valuable database for future research in audiovisual speech perception. An evaluation of models of speech perception by ear and eye in their ability to account for the audiovisual gating data shows a superior role of the fuzzy logical model of perception (FLMP) [1] over additive models of perception. A new dynamic version of the FLMP seems to be a promising model to account for the complex interplay of perceptual and cognitive information in audiovisual spoken word recognition.

Abstract

Mutations of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) gene are found at a relatively high frequency in glioma, with the most common being the de2-7 EGFR (or EGFRvIII). This mutation arises from an in-frame deletion of exons 2–7, which removes 267 amino acids from the extracellular domain of the receptor. Despite being unable to bind ligand, the de2-7 EGFR is constitutively active at a low level. Transfection of human glioma cells with the de2-7 EGFR has little effect in vitro, but when grown as tumor xenografts this mutated receptor imparts a dramatic growth advantage. We have now mapped the phosphorylation pattern of de2-7 EGFR, both in vivo and in vitro, using a panel of antibodies unique to the different phosphorylated tyrosine residues. Phosphorylation of de2-7 EGFR was detected constitutively at all tyrosine sites surveyed both in vitro and in vivo, including tyrosine 845, a known target in the wild-type EGFR for src kinase. There was a substantial upregulation of phosphorylation at every tyrosine residue of the de2-7 EGFR when cells were grown in vivo compared to the receptor isolated from cells cultured in vitro. Upregulation of phosphorylation could be mimicked in vitro by the addition of specifi c components of the ECM such as collagen via an integrin-dependent mechanism. Since this increase in in vivo phosphorylation enhances de2-7 EGFR signaling, this observation explains why the growth enhancement mediated by de2-7 EGFR is largely restricted to the in vivo environment. In a second set of experiments we analyzed the interaction between EGFRvIII and ErbB2. Co-expression of these proteins in NR6 cells, a mouse fi broblast line devoid of ErbB family members, dramatically enhanced in vivo tumorigenicity of these cells compared to cells expressing either protein alone. Detailed analysis of these xenografts demonstrated that EGFRvIII could heterodimerize and transphosphorylate the ErbB2. Since both EGFRvIII and ErbB2 are commonly expressed at gliomas, this data suggests that the co-expression of these two proteins may enhance glioma tumorigenicity.

Abstract

Day-to-day interpretations of “space” are enmeshed in specific cultural and linguistic practices. For example, many cultures have an association between vertical height and social standing; more powerful people may be placed literally higher than others at social gatherings, and be spoken of as having higher status. This questionnaire is a guide for exploring relationships between space, language, and social structure. The goal is to better understand how space is organised in the focus community, and to investigate the extent to which space is used as a model for reproducing social forms.

Abstract

Human speakers often produce sentences incrementally. They can start speaking having in mind only a fragmentary idea of what they want to say, and while saying this they refine the contents underlying subsequent parts of the utterance. This capability imposes a number of constraints on the design of a syntactic processor. This paper explores these constraints and evaluates some recent computational sentence generators from the perspective of incremental production.

Abstract

[Seven one-page psycholinguistic sketches]