Publications

Displaying 1 - 100 of 261
  • Abma, R., Breeuwsma, G., & Poletiek, F. H. (2001). Toetsen in het onderwijs. De Psycholoog, 36, 638-639.
  • Allen, S. E. M. (1998). Categories within the verb category: Learning the causative in Inuktitut. Linguistics, 36(4), 633-677.
  • Ameka, F. K. (2001). Ideophones and the nature of the adjective word class in Ewe. In F. K. E. Voeltz, & C. Kilian-Hatz (Eds.), Ideophones (pp. 25-48). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Ameka, F. K. (2001). Ewe. In J. Garry, & C. Rubino (Eds.), Facts about the world’s languages: An encyclopedia of the world's major languages past and present (pp. 207-213). New York: H.W. Wilson Press.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Bastiaansen, M. C. M., Böcker, K. B. E., Brunia, C. H. M., De Munck, J. C., & Spekreijse, H. (2001). Desynchronization during anticipatory attention for an upcoming stimulus: A comparative EEG/MEG study. Clinical Neurophysiology, 112, 393-403.

    Abstract

    Objectives: Our neurophysiological model of anticipatory behaviour (e.g. Acta Psychol 101 (1999) 213; Bastiaansen et al., 1999a) predicts an activation of (primary) sensory cortex during anticipatory attention for an upcoming stimulus. In this paper we attempt to demonstrate this by means of event-related desynchronization (ERD). Methods: Five subjects performed a time estimation task, and were informed about the quality of their time estimation by either visual or auditory stimuli providing Knowledge of Results (KR). EEG and MEG were recorded in separate sessions, and ERD was computed in the 8± 10 and 10±12 Hz frequency bands for both datasets. Results: Both in the EEG and the MEG we found an occipitally maximal ERD preceding the visual KR for all subjects. Preceding the auditory KR, no ERD was present in the EEG, whereas in the MEG we found an ERD over the temporal cortex in two of the 5 subjects. These subjects were also found to have higher levels of absolute power over temporal recording sites in the MEG than the other subjects, which we consider to be an indication of the presence of a `tau' rhythm (e.g. Neurosci Lett 222 (1997) 111). Conclusions: It is concluded that the results are in line with the predictions of our neurophysiological model.
  • Bastiaansen, M. C. M., & Brunia, C. H. M. (2001). Anticipatory attention: An event-related desynchronization approach. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 43, 91-107.

    Abstract

    This paper addresses the question of whether anticipatory attention - i.e. attention directed towards an upcoming stimulus in order to facilitate its processing - is realized at the neurophysiological level by a pre-stimulus desynchronization of the sensory cortex corresponding to the modality of the anticipated stimulus, reflecting then opening of a thalamocortical gate in the relevant sensory modality. It is argued that a technique called Event-Related Desynchronization (ERD) of rhythmic 10-Hz activity is well suited to study the thalamocortical processes that are thought to mediate anticipatory attention. In a series of experiments, ERD was computed on EEG and MEG data, recorded while subjects performed a time estimation task and were informed about the quality of their time estimation by stimuli providing Knowledge of Results (KR). The modality of the KR stimuli (auditory, visual, or somatosensory) was manipulated both within and between experiments. The results indicate to varying degrees that preceding the presentation of the KR stimuli, ERD is present over the sensory cortex, which corresponds to the modality of the KR stimulus. The general pattern of results supports the notion that a thalamocortical gating mechanism forms the neurophysiological basis of anticipatory attention. Furthermore, the results support the notion that Event-Related Potential(ERP) and ERD measures reflect fundamentally different neurophysiological processes.
  • 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.
  • Bock, K., Eberhard, K. M., Cutting, J. C., Meyer, A. S., & Schriefers, H. (2001). Some attractions of verb agreement. Cognitive Psychology, 43(2), 83-128. doi:10.1006/cogp.2001.0753.

    Abstract

    In English, words like scissors are grammatically plural but conceptually singular, while words like suds are both grammatically and conceptually plural. Words like army can be construed plurally, despite being grammatically singular. To explore whether and how congruence between grammatical and conceptual number affected the production of subject-verb number agreement in English, we elicited sentence completions for complex subject noun phrases like The advertisement for the scissors. In these phrases, singular subject nouns were followed by distractor words whose grammatical and conceptual numbers varied. The incidence of plural attraction (the use of plural verbs after plural distractors) increased only when distractors were grammatically plural, and revealed no influence from the distractors' number meanings. Companion experiments in Dutch offered converging support for this account and suggested that similar agreement processes operate in that language. The findings argue for a component of agreement that is sensitive primarily to the grammatical reflections of number. Together with other results, the evidence indicates that the implementation of agreement in languages like English and Dutch involves separable processes of number marking and number morphing, in which number meaning plays different parts.

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  • Bohnemeyer, J. (2001). Motionland films version 2: Referential communication task with motionland stimulus. In S. C. Levinson, & N. J. Enfield (Eds.), Manual for the field season 2001 (pp. 97-99). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.874623.

    Abstract

    How do languages express ideas of movement, and how do they package different components of moving, such as manner and path? This task supports detailed investigation of motion descriptions. The specific study goals are: (a) the coding of “via” grounds (i.e., ground objects which the figure moves along, over, around, through, past, etc.); (b) the coding of direction changes; (c) the spontaneous segmentation of complex motion scenarios; and (d) the gestural representation of motion paths. The stimulus set is 5 simple 3D animations (7-17 seconds long) that show a ball rolling through a landscape. The task is a director-matcher task for two participants. The director describes the path of the ball in each clip to the matcher, who is asked to trace the path with a pen in a 2D picture.

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    2001_Motionland_films_v2.zip
  • Bohnemeyer, J., Eisenbeiss, S., & Narasimhan, B. (2001). Event triads. In S. C. Levinson, & N. J. Enfield (Eds.), Manual for the field season 2001 (pp. 100-114). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.874630.

    Abstract

    Judgments we make about how similar or different events are to each other can reveal the features we find useful in classifying the world. This task is designed to investigate how speakers of different languages classify events, and to examine how linguistic and gestural encoding relates to non-linguistic classification. Specifically, the task investigates whether speakers judge two events to be similar on the basis of (a) the path versus manner of motion, (b) sub-events versus larger complex events, (c) participant identity versus event identity, and (d) different participant roles. In the task, participants are asked to make similarity judgments concerning sets of 2D animation clips.
  • Bohnemeyer, J. (2001). A questionnaire on event integration. In S. C. Levinson, & N. J. Enfield (Eds.), Manual for the field season 2001 (pp. 177-184). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
  • Bohnemeyer, J., Bowerman, M., & Brown, P. (2001). Cut and break clips. In S. C. Levinson, & N. J. Enfield (Eds.), Manual for the field season 2001 (pp. 90-96). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.874626.

    Abstract

    How do different languages treat a particular semantic domain? It has already been established that languages have widely varied words for talking about “cutting” and “breaking” things: for example, English has a very general verb break, but K’iche’ Maya has many different ‘break’ verbs that are used for different kinds of objects (e.g., brittle, flexible, long). The aim of this task is to map out cross-linguistic lexicalisation patterns in the cutting/breaking domain. The stimuli comprise 61 short video clips that show one or two actors breaking various objects (sticks, carrots, pieces of cloth or string, etc.) using various instruments (a knife, a hammer, an axe, their hands, etc.), or situations in which various kinds of objects break spontaneously. The clips are used to elicit descriptions of actors’ actions and the state changes that the objects undergo.

    Additional information

    2001_Cut_and_break_clips.zip
  • 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.
  • Bohnemeyer, J. (2001). Toponym questionnaire. In S. C. Levinson, & N. J. Enfield (Eds.), Manual for the field season 2001 (pp. 55-61). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.874620.

    Abstract

    Place-names (toponyms) are at the intersection of spatial language, culture, and cognition. This questionnaire prepares the researcher to answer three overarching questions: how to formally identify place-names in the research language (i.e. according to morphological and syntactic criteria); what places place-names are employed to refer to (e.g. human settlements, landscape sites); and how places are semantically construed for this purpose. The questionnaire can in principle be answered using an existing database. However, additional elicitation with language consultants is recommended.
  • 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. (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. (1975). Cross linguistic similarities at two stages of syntactic development. In E. Lenneberg, & E. Lenneberg (Eds.), Foundations of language development: A multidisciplinary approach (pp. 267-282). New York: Academic Press.
  • Bowerman, M. (1975). Commentary on L. Bloom, P. Lightbown, & L. Hood, “Structure and variation in child language”. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 40(2), 80-90. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1165986.
  • 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.
  • 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., & Choi, S. (2001). Shaping meanings for language: Universal and language-specific in the acquisition of semantic categories. In M. Bowerman, & S. C. Levinson (Eds.), Language acquisition and conceptual development (pp. 475-511). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Broersma, M., & De Bot, K. (2001). De triggertheorie voor codewisseling: De oorspronkelijke en een aangepaste versie (‘The trigger theory for codeswitching: The original and an adjusted version’). Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen, 65(1), 41-54.
  • 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, 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. (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. (2001). Learning to talk about motion UP and DOWN in Tzeltal: Is there a language-specific bias for verb learning? In M. Bowerman, & S. C. Levinson (Eds.), Language acquisition and conceptual development (pp. 512-543). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Abstract

    The spatial vocabulary of the Mayan language Tzeltal is dominated by an Absolute system of spatial reckoning, whereby an "uphill/downhill" coordinate abstracted from the lay of the land is used to reckon spatial relationships on the horizontal in both small-scale and long distance space. This system is used in lieu of a Front/Back/Left/Right system which does not exist in this language. The spatial vocabulary dedicated to this system (which I refer to in general as the UP/DOWN vocabulary) includes intransitive motion verbs (roughly translatable as "ascend"/"descend"), their transitivized counterparts ("make it ascend/descend"), directional adverbs ("uphillwards"/"downhillwards"), and possessed relational nouns ("uphill/downhill in relation to it"). This same vocabulary applies to spatial relations on the vertical axis. Two seemingly contradictory observations about children's early meanings for the spatial verbs dedicated to this system motivate the proposal put forward in this paper. On the one hand, Tzeltal children's UP/DOWN vocabulary shows very early sensitivity to the semantic structure of the language they are learning: the meanings for these verbs are from the first usages attached to the slope of the land, and to particular places; there is no evidence of an initial preference for the vertical meaning. On the other hand, children's meanings remain for a long time too specific, and errors of interpretation/production (using the verbs to mean 'local slope of land' rather than 'overall N/S slope of land direction) are evident in verbal productions of some children as late as age 7 or 8. The proposal is made that the highly specific nature of Tzeltal verbs at the basic level influences the children's hypotheses about what kinds of meanings verbs can have.
  • 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. (2001). Repetition. In K. Duranti (Ed.), Key terms in language and culture (pp. 219-222). Oxford: Blackwell.

    Abstract

    This is a reprint of the Brown 1999 article.
  • Brown, P. (2001). Politeness and language. In N. Smelser, & P. Baltes (Eds.), International encyclopedia of the social and behavioral sciences (pp. 11620-11624). Oxford: Elsevier Sciences.

    Abstract

    This is an encyclopedia entry surveying research and theoretical approaches to politeness phenomena in language usage.
  • 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. (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.
  • Castro-Caldas, A., Petersson, K. M., Reis, A., Stone-Elander, S., & Ingvar, M. (1998). The illiterate brain: Learning to read and write during childhood influences the functional organization of the adult brain. Brain, 121, 1053-1063. doi:10.1093/brain/121.6.1053.

    Abstract

    Learning a specific skill during childhood may partly determine the functional organization of the adult brain. This hypothesis led us to study oral language processing in illiterate subjects who, for social reasons, had never entered school and had no knowledge of reading or writing. In a brain activation study using PET and statistical parametric mapping, we compared word and pseudoword repetition in literate and illiterate subjects. Our study confirms behavioural evidence of different phonological processing in illiterate subjects. During repetition of real words, the two groups performed similarly and activated similar areas of the brain. In contrast, illiterate subjects had more difficulty repeating pseudowords correctly and did not activate the same neural structures as literates. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that learning the written form of language (orthography) interacts with the function of oral language. Our results indicate that learning to read and write during childhood influences the functional organization of the adult human brain.
  • Chwilla, D., Hagoort, P., & Brown, C. M. (1998). The mechanism underlying backward priming in a lexical decision task: Spreading activation versus semantic matching. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 51A(3), 531-560. doi:10.1080/713755773.

    Abstract

    Koriat (1981) demonstrated that an association from the target to a preceding prime, in the absence of an association from the prime to the target, facilitates lexical decision and referred to this effect as "backward priming". Backward priming is of relevance, because it can provide information about the mechanism underlying semantic priming effects. Following Neely (1991), we distinguish three mechanisms of priming: spreading activation, expectancy, and semantic matching/integration. The goal was to determine which of these mechanisms causes backward priming, by assessing effects of backward priming on a language-relevant ERP component, the N400, and reaction time (RT). Based on previous work, we propose that the N400 priming effect reflects expectancy and semantic matching/integration, but in contrast with RT does not reflect spreading activation. Experiment 1 shows a backward priming effect that is qualitatively similar for the N400 and RT in a lexical decision task. This effect was not modulated by an ISI manipulation. Experiment 2 clarifies that the N400 backward priming effect reflects genuine changes in N400 amplitude and cannot be ascribed to other factors. We will argue that these backward priming effects cannot be due to expectancy but are best accounted for in terms of semantic matching/integration.
  • Clahsen, H., Eisenbeiss, S., Hadler, M., & Sonnenstuhl, I. (2001). The Mental Representation of Inflected Words: An Experimental Study of Adjectives and Verbs in German. Language, 77(3), 510-534. doi:10.1353/lan.2001.0140.

    Abstract

    The authors investigate how morphological relationships between inflected word forms are represented in the mental lexicon, focusing on paradigmatic relations between regularly inflected word forms and relationships between different stem forms of the same lexeme. We present results from a series of psycholinguistic experiments investigating German adjectives (which are inflected for case, number, and gender) and the so-called strong verbs of German, which have different stem forms when inflected for person, number, tense, or mood. Evidence from three lexical-decision experiments indicates that regular affixes are stripped off from their stems for processing purposes. It will be shown that this holds for both unmarked and marked stem forms. Another set of experiments revealed priming effects between different paradigmatically related affixes and between different stem forms of the same lexeme. We will show that associative models of inflection do not capture these findings, and we explain our results in terms of combinatorial models of inflection in which regular affixes are represented in inflectional paradigms and stem variants are represented in structured lexical entries. We will also argue that the morphosyntactic features of stems and affixes form abstract underspecified entries. The experimental results indicate that the human language processor makes use of these representations.

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  • Costa, A., Cutler, A., & Sebastian-Galles, N. (1998). Effects of phoneme repertoire on phoneme decision. Perception and Psychophysics, 60, 1022-1031.

    Abstract

    In three experiments, listeners detected vowel or consonant targets in lists of CV syllables constructed from five vowels and five consonants. Responses were faster in a predictable context (e.g., listening for a vowel target in a list of syllables all beginning with the same consonant) than in an unpredictable context (e.g., listening for a vowel target in a list of syllables beginning with different consonants). In Experiment 1, the listeners’ native language was Dutch, in which vowel and consonant repertoires are similar in size. The difference between predictable and unpredictable contexts was comparable for vowel and consonant targets. In Experiments 2 and 3, the listeners’ native language was Spanish, which has four times as many consonants as vowels; here effects of an unpredictable consonant context on vowel detection were significantly greater than effects of an unpredictable vowel context on consonant detection. This finding suggests that listeners’ processing of phonemes takes into account the constitution of their language’s phonemic repertoire and the implications that this has for contextual variability.
  • Crago, M. B., & Allen, S. E. M. (1998). Acquiring Inuktitut. In O. L. Taylor, & L. Leonard (Eds.), Language Acquisition Across North America: Cross-Cultural And Cross-Linguistic Perspectives (pp. 245-279). San Diego, CA, USA: Singular Publishing Group, Inc.
  • Crago, M. B., Chen, C., Genesee, F., & Allen, S. E. M. (1998). Power and deference. Journal for a Just and Caring Education, 4(1), 78-95.
  • Cutler, A. (1981). Degrees of transparency in word formation. Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 26, 73-77.
  • Cutler, A. (2001). Entries on: Acquisition of language by non-human primates; bilingualism; compound (linguistic); development of language-specific phonology; gender (linguistic); grammar; infant speech perception; language; lexicon; morphology; motor theory of speech perception; perception of second languages; phoneme; phonological store; phonology; prosody; sign language; slips of the tongue; speech perception; speech production; stress (linguistic); syntax; word recognition; words. In P. Winn (Ed.), Dictionary of biological psychology. London: Routledge.
  • Cutler, A. (1981). Making up materials is a confounded nuisance, or: Will we able to run any psycholinguistic experiments at all in 1990? Cognition, 10, 65-70. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(81)90026-3.
  • Cutler, A. (2001). Listening to a second language through the ears of a first. Interpreting, 5, 1-23.
  • Cutler, A., & Darwin, C. J. (1981). Phoneme-monitoring reaction time and preceding prosody: Effects of stop closure duration and of fundamental frequency. Perception and Psychophysics, 29, 217-224. Retrieved from http://www.psychonomic.org/search/view.cgi?id=12660.

    Abstract

    In an earlier study, it was shown that listeners can use prosodic cues that predict where sentence stress will fall; phoneme-monitoring RTs are faster when the preceding prosody indicates that the word bearing the target will be stressed. Two experiments which further investigate this effect are described. In the first, it is shown that the duration of the closure preceding the release of the target stop consonant burst does not affect the RT advantage for stressed words. In the second, it is shown that fundamental frequency variation is not a necessary component of the prosodic variation that produces the predicted-stress effect. It is argued that sentence processing involves a very flexible use of prosodic information.
  • Cutler, A. (1998). Prosodic structure and word recognition. In A. D. Friederici (Ed.), Language comprehension: A biological perspective (pp. 41-70). Heidelberg: Springer.
  • Cutler, A. (1981). The cognitive reality of suprasegmental phonology. In T. Myers, J. Laver, & J. Anderson (Eds.), The cognitive representation of speech (pp. 399-400). Amsterdam: North-Holland.
  • Cutler, A. (1981). The reliability of speech error data. Linguistics, 19, 561-582.
  • Cutler, A., McQueen, J. M., Norris, D., & Somejuan, A. (2001). The roll of the silly ball. In E. Dupoux (Ed.), Language, brain and cognitive development: Essays in honor of Jacques Mehler (pp. 181-194). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Cutler, A., & Van Donselaar, W. (2001). Voornaam is not a homophone: Lexical prosody and lexical access in Dutch. Language and Speech, 44, 171-195. doi:10.1177/00238309010440020301.

    Abstract

    Four experiments examined Dutch listeners’ use of suprasegmental information in spoken-word recognition. Isolated syllables excised from minimal stress pairs such as VOORnaam/voorNAAM could be reliably assigned to their source words. In lexical decision, no priming was observed from one member of minimal stress pairs to the other, suggesting that the pairs’ segmental ambiguity was removed by suprasegmental information.Words embedded in nonsense strings were harder to detect if the nonsense string itself formed the beginning of a competing word, but a suprasegmental mismatch to the competing word significantly reduced this inhibition. The same nonsense strings facilitated recognition of the longer words of which they constituted the beginning, butagain the facilitation was significantly reduced by suprasegmental mismatch. Together these results indicate that Dutch listeners effectively exploit suprasegmental cues in recognizing spoken words. Nonetheless, suprasegmental mismatch appears to be somewhat less effective in constraining activation than segmental mismatch.
  • Cutler, A., & Fay, D. (1975). You have a Dictionary in your Head, not a Thesaurus. Texas Linguistic Forum, 1, 27-40.
  • Damian, M. F., Vigliocco, G., & Levelt, W. J. M. (2001). Effects of semantic context in the naming of pictures and words. Cognition, 81, B77-B86. doi:10.1016/S0010-0277(01)00135-4.

    Abstract

    Two experiments investigated whether lexical retrieval for speaking can be characterized as a competitive process by assessing the effects of semantic context on picture and word naming in German. In Experiment 1 we demonstrated that pictures are named slower in the context of same-category items than in the context of items from various semantic categories, replicating findings by Kroll and Stewart (Journal of Memory and Language, 33 (1994) 149). In Experiment 2 we used words instead of pictures. Participants either named the words in the context of same- or different-category items, or produced the words together with their corresponding determiner. While in the former condition words were named faster in the context of samecategory items than of different-category items, the opposite pattern was obtained for the latter condition. These findings confirm the claim that the interfering effect of semantic context reflects competition in the retrieval of lexical entries in speaking.
  • Dimroth, C. (1998). Indiquer la portée en allemand L2: Une étude longitudinale de l'acquisition des particules de portée. AILE (Acquisition et Interaction en Langue étrangère), 11, 11-34.
  • Dittmar, N., & Klein, W. (1975). Untersuchungen zum Pidgin-Deutsch spanischer und italienischer Arbeiter in der Bundesrepublik: Ein Arbeitsbericht. In A. Wierlacher (Ed.), Jahrbuch Deutsch als Fremdsprache (pp. 170-194). Heidelberg: Groos.
  • Dobel, C., Pulvermüller, F., Härle, M., Cohen, R., Köbbel, P., Schönle, P. W., & Rockstroh, B. (2001). Syntactic and semantic processing in the healthy and aphasic human brain. Experimental Brain Research, 140(1), 77-85. doi:10.1007/s002210100794.

    Abstract

    A syntactic and a semantic task were per-formed by German-speaking healthy subjects and apha-sics with lesions in the dominant left hemisphere. In both
    tasks, pictures of objects were presented that had to be classified by pressing buttons. The classification was into grammatical gender in the syntactic task (masculine or feminine gender?) and into semantic category in the se-
    mantic task (man- or nature made?). Behavioral data revealed a significant Group by Task interaction, with
    aphasics showing most pronounced problems with syn-
    tax. Brain event-related potentials 300–600 ms following picture onset showed different task-dependent laterality
    patterns in the two groups. In controls, the syntax task
    induced a left-lateralized negative ERP, whereas the semantic task produced more symmetric responses over the hemispheres. The opposite was the case in the patients, where, paradoxically, stronger laterality of physio-logical brain responses emerged in the semantic task than in the syntactic task. We interpret these data based on neuro-psycholinguistic models of word processing and current theories about the roles of the hemispheres in language recovery.
  • Drude, S. (2001). Entschlüsselung einer unbekannten Indianersprache: Ein Projekt zur Dokumentation der bedrohten brasilianischen Indianersprache Awetí. Fundiert: Das Wissenschaftsmagazin der Freien Universität Berlin, 2, 112-121. Retrieved from http://www.elfenbeinturm.net/archiv/2001/lust3.html.

    Abstract

    Die Awetí sind ein kleiner Indianerstamm in Zentralbrasilien, der bislang nur wenig Kontakt mit Weißen hatte. Im Zuge eines Programms der Volkswagenstiftung zur Dokumentation bedrohter Sprachen wird unser Autor die Awetí erneut besuchen und berichtet als „jüngerer Bruder des Häuptlings“ über seine Bemühungen, die Sprache der Awetí für künftige Generationen festzuhalten.
  • Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I., Senft, B., & Senft, G. (1998). Trobriander (Ost-Neuguinea, Trobriand Inseln, Kaile'una) Fadenspiele 'ninikula'. In Ethnologie - Humanethologische Begleitpublikationen von I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt und Mitarbeitern. Sammelband I, 1985-1987. Göttingen: Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film.
  • Enfield, N. J., Levinson, S. C., & Meira, S. (2001). Recognitional deixis. In S. C. Levinson, & N. J. Enfield (Eds.), Manual for the field season 2001 (pp. 78-81). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.874641.

    Abstract

    “Recognitional” words and constructions enshrine our systematic reliance on shared knowledge in dedicated morphological forms and usage patterns. For example, English has a large range of terms for use when a speaker cannot locate the word or name for something or someone (e.g., whatsit, what’s-his-name), but thinks that the interlocutor knows, or can easily work out, what the speaker is talking about. This task aims to identify and investigate these kinds of expressions in the research language, including their grammaticalised status, meaning, distribution, and productivity. The task consists of a questionnaire with examples of relevant hypothetical scenarios that can be used in eliciting the relevant terms. The researcher is then encouraged to pursue further questions in regard to these items.
  • Enfield, N. J. (2001). Body. In S. C. Levinson, & N. J. Enfield (Eds.), Manual for the field season 2001 (pp. 62-77). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.874633.

    Abstract

    This task investigates the extensional meaning of body part terms, in particular the terms for the upper and lower limbs. Two questions are addressed, namely (i) are the boundaries of these body parts universal, guided by proposed universals of object recognition? (ii) How can we compare the extensional meanings of body part terms within and across different systems of nomenclature? Consultants receive booklets with line drawings of a body and are asked to colour in specific parts of the body.
  • Enfield, N. J. (2001). ‘Lip-pointing’: A discussion of form and function with reference to data from Laos. Gesture, 1(2), 185-211. doi:10.1075/gest.1.2.06enf.

    Abstract

    ‘Lip-pointing’ is a widespread but little-documented form of deictic gesture, which may involve not just protruding one or both lips, but also raising the head, sticking out the chin, lifting the eyebrows, among other things. This paper discusses form and function of lip-pointing with reference to a set of examples collected on video in Laos. There are various parameters with respect to which the conventional form of a lip-pointing gesture may vary. There is also a range of ways in which lip-pointing gestures can be coordinated with other kinds of deictic gesture such as various forms of hand pointing. The attested coordinating/sequencing possibilities can be related to specific functional properties of lip-pointing among Lao speakers, particularly in the context of other forms of deictic gesture, which have different functional properties. It is argued that the ‘vector’ of lip-pointing is in fact defined by gaze, and that the lip-pointing action itself (like other kinds of ‘pointing’ involving the head area) is a ‘gaze-switch’, i.e. it indicates that the speaker is now pointing out something with his or her gaze. Finally, I consider the position of lip-pointing in the broader deictic gesture system of Lao speakers, firstly as a ‘lower register’ form, and secondly as a form of deictic gesture which may contrast with forms of hand pointing.
  • Enfield, N. J., & Bohnemeyer, J. (2001). Hidden colour-chips task: Demonstratives, attention, and interaction. In S. C. Levinson, & N. J. Enfield (Eds.), Manual for the field season 2001 (pp. 21-28). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.874636.

    Abstract

    Demonstratives are typically described as encoding degrees of physical distance between the object referred to, and the speaker or addressee. For example, this in English is used to talk about things that are physically near the speaker, and that for things that are not. But is this how speakers really choose between these words in actual talk? This task aims to generate spontaneous language data concerning deixis, gesture, and demonstratives, and to investigate the significance of different factors (e.g., physical distance, attention) in demonstrative selection. In the presence of one consultant (the “memoriser”), sixteen colour chips are hidden under objects in a specified array. Another consultant enters the area and asks the memoriser to recount the locations of the chips. The task is designed to create a situation where the speaker genuinely attempts to manipulate the addressee’s attention on objects in the immediate physical space.
  • Enfield, N. J. (2001). Linguistic evidence for a Lao perspective on facial expression of emotion. In J. Harkins, & A. Wierzbicka (Eds.), Emotions in crosslinguistic perspective (pp. 149-166). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Enfield, N. J. (2001). On genetic and areal linguistics in Mainland South-East Asia: Parallel polyfunctionality of ‘acquire’. In A. Y. Aikhenvald, & R. M. Dixon (Eds.), Areal diffusion and genetic inheritance: Problems in comparative linguistics (pp. 255-290). Oxford University Press.
  • Enfield, N. J. (2001). Remarks on John Haiman, 1999. ‘Auxiliation in Khmer: the case of baan.’ Studies in Language 23:1. Studies in Language, 25(1), 115-124. doi:10.1075/sl.25.1.05enf.
  • Enfield, N. J., & Dunn, M. (2001). Supplements to the Wilkins 1999 demonstrative questionnaire. In S. C. Levinson, & N. J. Enfield (Eds.), Manual for the field season 2001 (pp. 82-84). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.874638.
  • Fernald, A., McRoberts, G. W., & Swingley, D. (2001). Infants' developing competence in recognizing and understanding words in fluent speech. In J. Weissenborn, & B. Höhle (Eds.), Approaches to Bootstrapping: Phonological, lexical, syntactic and neurophysiological aspects of early language acquisition. Volume 1 (pp. 97-123). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Fernald, A., Swingley, D., & Pinto, J. P. (2001). When half a word is enough: infants can recognize spoken words using partial phonetic information. Child Development, 72, 1003-1015. doi:10.1111/1467-8624.00331.

    Abstract

    Adults process speech incrementally, rapidly identifying spoken words on the basis of initial phonetic information sufficient to distinguish them from alternatives. In this study, infants in the second year also made use of word-initial information to understand fluent speech. The time course of comprehension was examined by tracking infants' eye movements as they looked at pictures in response to familiar spoken words, presented both as whole words in intact form and as partial words in which only the first 300 ms of the word was heard. In Experiment 1, 21-month-old infants (N = 32) recognized partial words as quickly and reliably as they recognized whole words; in Experiment 2, these findings were replicated with 18-month-old infants (N = 32). Combining the data from both experiments, efficiency in spoken word recognition was examined in relation to level of lexical development. Infants with more than 100 words in their productive vocabulary were more accurate in identifying familiar words than were infants with less than 60 words. Grouped by response speed, infants with faster mean reaction times were more accurate in word recognition and also had larger productive vocabularies than infants with slower response latencies. These results show that infants in the second year are capable of incremental speech processing even before entering the vocabulary spurt, and that lexical growth is associated with increased speed and efficiency in understanding spoken language.
  • Fisher, S. E., Vargha-Khadem, F., Watkins, K. E., Monaco, A. P., & Pembrey, M. E. (1998). Localisation of a gene implicated in a severe speech and language disorder. Nature Genetics, 18, 168 -170. doi:10.1038/ng0298-168.

    Abstract

    Between 2 and 5% of children who are otherwise unimpaired have significant difficulties in acquiring expressive and/or receptive language, despite adequate intelligence and opportunity. While twin studies indicate a significant role for genetic factors in developmental disorders of speech and language, the majority of families segregating such disorders show complex patterns of inheritance, and are thus not amenable for conventional linkage analysis. A rare exception is the KE family, a large three-generation pedigree in which approximately half of the members are affected with a severe speech and language disorder which appears to be transmitted as an autosomal dominant monogenic trait. This family has been widely publicised as suffering primarily from a defect in the use of grammatical suffixation rules, thus supposedly supporting the existence of genes specific to grammar. The phenotype, however, is broader in nature, with virtually every aspect of grammar and of language affected. In addition, affected members have a severe orofacial dyspraxia, and their speech is largely incomprehensible to the naive listener. We initiated a genome-wide search for linkage in the KE family and have identified a region on chromosome 7 which co-segregates with the speech and language disorder (maximum lod score = 6.62 at theta = 0.0), confirming autosomal dominant inheritance with full penetrance. Further analysis of microsatellites from within the region enabled us to fine map the locus responsible (designated SPCH1) to a 5.6-cM interval in 7q31, thus providing an important step towards its identification. Isolation of SPCH1 may offer the first insight into the molecular genetics of the developmental process that culminates in speech and language.
  • Fisher, S. E., & Smith, S. (2001). Progress towards the identification of genes influencing developmental dyslexia. In A. Fawcett (Ed.), Dyslexia: Theory and good practice (pp. 39-64). London: Whurr.
  • Fodor, J. A., & Cutler, A. (1981). Semantic focus and sentence comprehension. Cognition, 7, 49-59. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(79)90010-6.

    Abstract

    Reaction time to detect a phoneme target in a sentence was found to be faster when the word in which the target occurred formed part of the semantic focus of the sentence. Focus was determined by asking a question before the sentence; that part of the sentence which comprised the answer to the sentence was assumed to be focussed. This procedure made it possible to vary position offocus within the sentence while holding all acoustic aspects of the sentence itself constant. It is argued that sentence understanding is facilitated by rapid identification of focussed information. Since focussed words are usually accented, it is further argued that the active search for accented words demonstrated in previous research should be interpreted as a search for semantic focus.
  • Fransson, P., Merboldt, K.-D., Ingvar, M., Petersson, K. M., & Frahm, J. (2001). Functional MRI with reduced susceptibility artifact: High-resolution mapping of episodic memory encoding. Neuroreport, 12, 1415-1420.

    Abstract

    Visual episodic memory encoding was investigated using echoplanar magnetic resonance imaging at 2.0 x 2.0 mm2 resolution and 1.0 mm section thickness, which allows for functional mapping of hippocampal, parahippocampal, and ventral occipital regions with reduced magnetic susceptibility artifact. The memory task was based on 54 image pairs each consisting of a complex visual scene and the face of one of six different photographers. A second group of subjects viewed the same set of images without memory instruction as well as a reversing checkerboard. Apart from visual activation in occipital cortical areas, episodic memory encoding revealed consistent activation in the parahippocampal gyrus but not in the hippocampus proper. This ®nding was most prominently evidenced in sagittal maps covering the right hippocampal formation. Mean activated volumes were 432±293 µl and 259±179 µl for intentional memory encoding and non-instructed viewing, respectively. In contrast, the checkerboard paradigm elicited pure visual activation without parahippocampal involvement.
  • Garnham, A., Shillcock, R. C., Brown, G. D. A., Mill, A. I. D., & Cutler, A. (1981). Slips of the tongue in the London-Lund corpus of spontaneous conversation. Linguistics, 19, 805-817.
  • Ghatan, P. H., Hsieh, J. C., Petersson, K. M., Stone-Elander, S., & Ingvar, M. (1998). Coexistence of attention-based facilitation and inhibition in the human cortex. NeuroImage, 7, 23-29.

    Abstract

    A key function of attention is to select an appropriate subset of available information by facilitation of attended processes and/or inhibition of irrelevant processing. Functional imaging studies, using positron emission tomography, have during different experimental tasks revealed decreased neuronal activity in areas that process input from unattended sensory modalities. It has been hypothesized that these decreases reflect a selective inhibitory modulation of nonrelevant cortical processing. In this study we addressed this question using a continuous arithmetical task with and without concomitant disturbing auditory input (task-irrelevant speech). During the arithmetical task, irrelevant speech did not affect task-performance but yielded decreased activity in the auditory and midcingulate cortices and increased activity in the left posterior parietal cortex. This pattern of modulation is consistent with a top down inhibitory modulation of a nonattended input to the auditory cortex and a coexisting, attention-based facilitation of taskrelevant processing in higher order cortices. These findings suggest that task-related decreases in cortical activity may be of functional importance in the understanding of both attentional mechanisms and taskrelated information processing.
  • Gullberg, M., & Holmqvist, K. (2001). Eye tracking and the perception of gestures in face-to-face interaction vs on screen. In C. Cavé, I. Guaïtella, & S. Santi (Eds.), Oralité et gestualité (2001) (pp. 381-384). Paris, France: Editions Harmattan.
  • Hagoort, P. (1981). Sociale wetenschappen op het kruispunt van binnenweg en heirbaan: de ontwikkeling van sociale wetenschappen in het interbellum. Grafiet, (1), 14-71.
  • Hagoort, P., & Ramsey, N. (2001). De gereedschapskist van de cognitieve neurowetenschap. In F. Wijnen, & F. Verstraten (Eds.), Het brein te kijk (pp. 39-67). Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger.
  • Hagoort, P. (1998). De electrofysiologie van taal: Wat hersenpotentialen vertellen over het menselijk taalvermogen. Neuropraxis, 2, 223-229.
  • Hagoort, P. (1998). De spreker als sprinter. Psychologie, 17, 48-49.
  • Hagoort, P. (2001). De verbeelding aan de macht: Hoe het menselijk taalvermogen zichtbaar wordt in de (beeld) analyse van hersenactiviteit. In J. Joosse (Ed.), Biologie en psychologie: Naar vruchtbare kruisbestuivingen (pp. 41-60). Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen.
  • Hagoort, P. (1998). Hersenen en taal in onderzoek en praktijk. Neuropraxis, 6, 204-205.
  • Hagoort, P. (1998). The shadows of lexical meaning in patients with semantic impairments. In B. Stemmer, & H. Whitaker (Eds.), Handbook of neurolinguistics (pp. 235-248). New York: Academic Press.
  • Hellwig, F. M., & Lüpke, F. (2001). Caused positions. In S. C. Levinson, & N. J. Enfield (Eds.), Manual for the field season 2001 (pp. 126-128). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.874644.

    Abstract

    What kinds of resources to languages have for describing location and position? For some languages, verbs have an important role to play in describing different kinds of situations (e.g., whether a bottle is standing or lying on the table). This task is designed to examine the use of positional verbs in locative constructions, with respect to the presence or absence of a human “positioner”. Participants are asked to describe video clips showing locative states that occur spontaneously, or because of active interference from a person. The task follows on from two earlier tools for the elicitation of static locative descriptions (BowPed and the Ameka picture book task). A number of additional variables (e.g. canonical v. non-canonical orientation of the figure) are also targeted in the stimuli set.

    Additional information

    2001_Caused_positions.zip
  • Indefrey, P., Brown, C. M., Hellwig, F. M., Amunts, K., Herzog, H., Seitz, R. J., & Hagoort, P. (2001). A neural correlate of syntactic encoding during speech production. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 98, 5933-5936. doi:10.1073/pnas.101118098.

    Abstract

    Spoken language is one of the most compact and structured ways to convey information. The linguistic ability to structure individual words into larger sentence units permits speakers to express a nearly unlimited range of meanings. This ability is rooted in speakers’ knowledge of syntax and in the corresponding process of syntactic encoding. Syntactic encoding is highly automatized, operates largely outside of conscious awareness, and overlaps closely in time with several other processes of language production. With the use of positron emission tomography we investigated the cortical activations during spoken language production that are related to the syntactic encoding process. In the paradigm of restrictive scene description, utterances varying in complexity of syntactic encoding were elicited. Results provided evidence that the left Rolandic operculum, caudally adjacent to Broca’s area, is involved in both sentence-level and local (phrase-level) syntactic encoding during speaking.
  • Indefrey, P. (1998). De neurale architectuur van taal: Welke hersengebieden zijn betrokken bij het spreken. Neuropraxis, 2(6), 230-237.
  • Indefrey, P., Gruber, O., Brown, C. M., Hagoort, P., Posse, S., & Kleinschmidt, A. (1998). Lexicality and not syllable frequency determine lateralized premotor activation during the pronunciation of word-like stimuli: An fMRI study. NeuroImage, 7, S4.
  • Indefrey, P., Hagoort, P., Herzog, H., Seitz, R. J., & Brown, C. M. (2001). Syntactic processing in left prefrontal cortex is independent of lexical meaning. Neuroimage, 14, 546-555. doi:10.1006/nimg.2001.0867.

    Abstract

    In language comprehension a syntactic representation is built up even when the input is semantically uninterpretable. We report data on brain activation during syntactic processing, from an experiment on the detection of grammatical errors in meaningless sentences. The experimental paradigm was such that the syntactic processing was distinguished from other cognitive and linguistic functions. The data reveal that in syntactic error detection an area of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, adjacent to Broca’s area, is specifically involved in the syntactic processing aspects, whereas other prefrontal areas subserve general error detection processes.
  • Jordan, F., & Gray, R. D. (2001). Comment on Terrell, Kelly and Rainbird. Current Anthropology, 42(1), 114-115.
  • Jordens, P. (1998). Defaultformen des Präteritums. Zum Erwerb der Vergangenheitsmorphologie im Niederlänidischen. In H. Wegener (Ed.), Eine zweite Sprache lernen (pp. 61-88). Tübingen, Germany: Verlag Gunter Narr.
  • Kempen, G. (1981). De architectuur van het spreken. TTT: Interdisciplinair Tijdschrift voor Taal & Tekstwetenschap, 1, 110-123.
  • Kempen, G. (1975). De taalgebruiker in de mens: Schets van zijn bouw en funktie, toepassingen op moedertaal en vreemde taal verwerving. Forum der Letteren, 16, 132-158.
  • Kempen, G. (1998). Comparing and explaining the trajectories of first and second language acquisition: In search of the right mix of psychological and linguistic factors [Commentory]. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1, 29-30. doi:10.1017/S1366728998000066.

    Abstract

    When you compare the behavior of two different age groups which are trying to master the same sensori-motor or cognitive skill, you are likely to discover varying learning routes: different stages, different intervals between stages, or even different orderings of stages. Such heterogeneous learning trajectories may be caused by at least six different types of factors: (1) Initial state: the kinds and levels of skills the learners have available at the onset of the learning episode. (2) Learning mechanisms: rule-based, inductive, connectionist, parameter setting, and so on. (3) Input and feedback characteristics: learning stimuli, information about success and failure. (4) Information processing mechanisms: capacity limitations, attentional biases, response preferences. (5) Energetic variables: motivation, emotional reactions. (6) Final state: the fine-structure of kinds and levels of subskills at the end of the learning episode. This applies to language acquisition as well. First and second language learners probably differ on all six factors. Nevertheless, the debate between advocates and opponents of the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis concerning L1 and L2 acquisition have looked almost exclusively at the first two factors. Those who believe that L1 learners have access to Universal Grammar whereas L2 learners rely on language processing strategies, postulate different learning mechanisms (UG parameter setting in L1, more general inductive strategies in L2 learning). Pienemann opposes this view and, based on his Processability Theory, argues that L1 and L2 learners start out from different initial states: they come to the grammar learning task with different structural hypotheses (SOV versus SVO as basic word order of German).
  • Kempen, G., & Van Wijk, C. (1981). Leren formuleren: Hoe uit opstellen een objektieve index voor formuleervaardigheid afgeleid kan worden. Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing, 3, 32-44.
  • Kempen, G., & Fokkema, S. (1981). Ten geleide. Nederlands Tijdschrift voor de Psychologie en haar Grensgebieden, 36, 345-346.

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