Publications

Displaying 1 - 100 of 137
  • 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.
  • Bardhan, N. P., & Weber, A. (2011). Listening to a novel foreign accent, with long lasting effects [Abstract]. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Program abstracts of the 162nd Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, 130(4), 2445.

    Abstract

    In conversation, listeners frequently encounter speakers with foreign accents. Previous research on foreign-accented speech has primarily examined the short-term effects of exposure and the relative ease that listeners have with adapting to an accent. The present study examines the stability of this adaptation, with seven full days between testing sessions. On both days, subjects performed a cross-modal priming task in which they heard several minutes of an unfamiliar accent of their native language: a form of Hebrewaccented Dutch in which long /i:/ was shortened to /I/. During this task on Day 1, recognition of accented forms was not facilitated, compared to that of canonical forms. A week later, when tested on new words, facilitatory priming occurred, comparable to that seen for canonically produced items tested in both sessions. These results suggest that accented forms can be learned from brief exposure and the stable effects of this can be seen a week later.
  • Bergmann, C., Boves, L., & Ten Bosch, L. (2011). Measuring word learning performance in computational models and infants. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Development and Learning, and Epigenetic Robotics. Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 24-27 Aug. 2011.

    Abstract

    In the present paper we investigate the effect of categorising raw behavioural data or computational model responses. In addition, the effect of averaging over stimuli from potentially different populations is assessed. To this end, we replicate studies on word learning and generalisation abilities using the ACORNS models. Our results show that discrete categories may obscure interesting phenomena in the continuous responses. For example, the finding that learning in the model saturates very early at a uniform high recognition accuracy only holds for categorical representations. Additionally, a large difference in the accuracy for individual words is obscured by averaging over all stimuli. Because different words behaved differently for different speakers, we could not identify a phonetic basis for the differences. Implications and new predictions for infant behaviour are discussed.
  • Bergmann, C., Boves, L., & Ten Bosch, L. (2011). Thresholding word activations for response scoring - Modelling psycholinguistic data. In Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association [Interspeech 2011] (pp. 769-772). ISCA.

    Abstract

    In the present paper we investigate the effect of categorising raw behavioural data or computational model responses. In addition, the effect of averaging over stimuli from potentially different populations is assessed. To this end, we replicate studies on word learning and generalisation abilities using the ACORNS models. Our results show that discrete
    categories may obscure interesting phenomena in the continuous
    responses. For example, the finding that learning in the model saturates very early at a uniform high recognition accuracy only holds for categorical representations. Additionally, a large difference in the accuracy for individual words is obscured
    by averaging over all stimuli. Because different words behaved
    differently for different speakers, we could not identify a phonetic
    basis for the differences. Implications and new predictions for
    infant behaviour are discussed.
  • Bohnemeyer, J. (2004). Argument and event structure in Yukatek verb classes. In J.-Y. Kim, & A. Werle (Eds.), Proceedings of The Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas. Amherst, Mass: GLSA.

    Abstract

    In Yukatek Maya, event types are lexicalized in verb roots and stems that fall into a number of different form classes on the basis of (a) patterns of aspect-mood marking and (b) priviledges of undergoing valence-changing operations. Of particular interest are the intransitive classes in the light of Perlmutter’s (1978) Unaccusativity hypothesis. In the spirit of Levin & Rappaport Hovav (1995) [L&RH], Van Valin (1990), Zaenen (1993), and others, this paper investigates whether (and to what extent) the association between formal predicate classes and event types is determined by argument structure features such as ‘agentivity’ and ‘control’ or features of lexical aspect such as ‘telicity’ and ‘durativity’. It is shown that mismatches between agentivity/control and telicity/durativity are even more extensive in Yukatek than they are in English (Abusch 1985; L&RH, Van Valin & LaPolla 1997), providing new evidence against Dowty’s (1979) reconstruction of Vendler’s (1967) ‘time schemata of verbs’ in terms of argument structure configurations. Moreover, contrary to what has been claimed in earlier studies of Yukatek (Krämer & Wunderlich 1999, Lucy 1994), neither agentivity/control nor telicity/durativity turn out to be good predictors of verb class membership. Instead, the patterns of aspect-mood marking prove to be sensitive only to the presence or absense of state change, in a way that supports the unified analysis of all verbs of gradual change proposed by Kennedy & Levin (2001). The presence or absence of ‘internal causation’ (L&RH) may motivate the semantic interpretation of transitivization operations. An explicit semantics for the valence-changing operations is proposed, based on Parsons’s (1990) Neo-Davidsonian approach.
  • Bottini, R., & Casasanto, D. (2011). Space and time in the child’s mind: Further evidence for a cross-dimensional asymmetry [Abstract]. In L. Carlson, C. Hölscher, & T. Shipley (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 3010). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Space and time appear to be related asymmetrically in the child’s mind: temporal representations depend on spatial representations more than vice versa, as predicted by space-time metaphors in language. In a study supporting this conclusion, spatial information interfered with children’s temporal judgments more than vice versa (Casasanto, Fotakopoulou, & Boroditsky, 2010, Cognitive Science). In this earlier study, however, spatial information was available to participants for more time than temporal information was (as is often the case when people observe natural events), suggesting a skeptical explanation for the observed effect. Here we conducted a stronger test of the hypothesized space-time asymmetry, controlling spatial and temporal aspects of the stimuli even more stringently than they are generally ’controlled’ in the natural world. Results replicated Casasanto and colleagues’, validating their finding of a robust representational asymmetry between space and time, and extending it to children (4-10 y.o.) who speak Dutch and Brazilian Portuguese.
  • Bowerman, M. (1996). Argument structure and learnability: Is a solution in sight? In J. Johnson, M. L. Juge, & J. L. Moxley (Eds.), Proceedings of the Twenty-second Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, February 16-19, 1996. General Session and Parasession on The Role of Learnability in Grammatical Theory (pp. 454-468). Berkeley Linguistics Society.
  • Brenner, D., Warner, N., Ernestus, M., & Tucker, B. V. (2011). Parsing the ambiguity of casual speech: “He was like” or “He’s like”? [Abstract]. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 129(4 Pt. 2), 2683.

    Abstract

    Paper presented at The 161th Meeting Acoustical Society of America, Seattle, Washington, 23-27 May 2011. Reduction in casual speech can create ambiguity, e.g., “he was” can sound like “he’s.” Before quotative “like” “so she’s/she was like…”, it was found that there is little accurate acoustic information about the distinction in the signal. This work examines what types of information acoustics of the target itself, speech rate, coarticulation, and syntax/semantics listeners use to recognize such reduced function words. We compare perception studies presenting the targets auditorily with varying amounts of context, presenting the context without the targets, and a visual study presenting context in written form. Given primarily discourse information visual or auditory context only, subjects are strongly biased toward past, reflecting the use of quotative “like” for reporting past speech. However, if the target itself is presented, the direction of bias reverses, indicating that listeners favor acoustic information within the target which is reduced, sounding like the shorter, present form over almost any other source of information. Furthermore, when the target is presented auditorily with surrounding context, the bias shifts slightly toward the direction shown in the orthographic or auditory-no-target experiments. Thus, listeners prioritize acoustic information within the target when present, even if that information is misleading, but they also take discourse information into account.
  • Broeder, D., Brugman, H., Oostdijk, N., & Wittenburg, P. (2004). Towards Dynamic Corpora: Workshop on compiling and processing spoken corpora. In M. Lino, M. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa, & R. Silva (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004) (pp. 59-62). Paris: European Language Resource Association.
  • Broeder, D., Wittenburg, P., & Crasborn, O. (2004). Using Profiles for IMDI Metadata Creation. In M. Lino, M. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa, & R. Silva (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004) (pp. 1317-1320). Paris: European Language Resources Association.
  • Broeder, D., Declerck, T., Romary, L., Uneson, M., Strömqvist, S., & Wittenburg, P. (2004). A large metadata domain of language resources. In M. Lino, M. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa, & R. Silva (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004) (pp. 369-372). Paris: European Language Resources Association.
  • Broeder, D., Nava, M., & Declerck, T. (2004). INTERA - a Distributed Domain of Metadata Resources. In M. Lino, M. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa, & R. Silva (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Spoken Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004) (pp. 369-372). Paris: European Language Resources Association.
  • Broersma, M., & Kolkman, K. M. (2004). Lexical representation of non-native phonemes. In S. Kin, & M. J. Bae (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (Interspeech 2004-ICSLP) (pp. 1241-1244). Seoul: Sunjijn Printing Co.
  • Brookshire, G., & Casasanto, D. (2011). Motivation and motor action: Hemispheric specialization for motivation reverses with handedness. In L. Carlson, C. Holscher, & T. Shipley (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2610-2615). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
  • Brouwer, S., & Bradlow, A. R. (2011). The influence of noise on phonological competition during spoken word recognition. In W.-S. Lee, & E. Zee (Eds.), Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 2011 [ICPhS XVII] (pp. 364-367). Hong Kong: Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, City University of Hong Kong.

    Abstract

    Listeners’ interactions often take place in auditorily challenging conditions. We examined how noise affects phonological competition during spoken word recognition. In a visual-world experiment, which allows us to examine the timecourse of recognition, English participants listened to target words in quiet and in noise while they saw four pictures on the screen: a target (e.g. candle), an onset overlap competitor (e.g. candy), an offset overlap competitor (e.g. sandal), and a distractor. The results showed that, while all competitors were relatively quickly suppressed in quiet listening conditions, listeners experienced persistent competition in noise from the offset competitor but not from the onset competitor. This suggests that listeners’ phonological competitor activation persists for longer in noise than in quiet and that listeners are able to deactivate some unwanted competition when listening to speech in noise. The well-attested competition pattern in quiet was not replicated. Possible methodological explanations for this result are discussed.
  • Brugman, H., Crasborn, O., & Russel, A. (2004). Collaborative annotation of sign language data with Peer-to-Peer technology. In M. Lino, M. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa, & R. Silva (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Language Evaluation (LREC 2004) (pp. 213-216). Paris: European Language Resources Association.
  • Brugman, H., & Russel, A. (2004). Annotating Multi-media/Multi-modal resources with ELAN. In M. Lino, M. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa, & R. Silva (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Language Evaluation (LREC 2004) (pp. 2065-2068). Paris: European Language Resources Association.
  • Burenhult, N. (2004). Spatial deixis in Jahai. In S. Burusphat (Ed.), Papers from the 11th Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society 2001 (pp. 87-100). Arizona State University: Program for Southeast Asian Studies.
  • Carstensen, A., Khetarpal, N., Majid, A., & Regier, T. (2011). Universals and variation in spatial language and cognition: Evidence from Chichewa. In L. Carlson, C. Hölscher, & T. Shipley (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2315). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
  • Casasanto, D. (2011). Bodily relativity: The body-specificity of language and thought. In L. Carlson, C. Holscher, & T. Shipley (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1258-1259). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
  • Casasanto, D., & Lupyan, G. (2011). Ad hoc cognition [Abstract]. In L. Carlson, C. Hölscher, & T. F. Shipley (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 826). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    If concepts, categories, and word meanings are stable, how can people use them so flexibly? Here we explore a possible answer: maybe this stability is an illusion. Perhaps all concepts, categories, and word meanings (CC&Ms) are constructed ad hoc, each time we use them. On this proposal, all words are infinitely polysemous, all communication is ’good enough’, and no idea is ever the same twice. The details of people’s ad hoc CC&Ms are determined by the way retrieval cues interact with the physical, social, and linguistic context. We argue that even the most stable-seeming CC&Ms are instantiated via the same processes as those that are more obviously ad hoc, and vary (a) from one microsecond to the next within a given instantiation, (b) from one instantiation to the next within an individual, and (c) from person to person and group to group as a function of people’s experiential history. 826
  • Casasanto, D., & De Bruin, A. (2011). Word Up! Directed motor action improves word learning [Abstract]. In L. Carlson, C. Hölscher, & T. Shipley (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1902). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Can simple motor actions help people expand their vocabulary? Here we show that word learning depends on where students place their flash cards after studying them. In Experiment 1, participants learned the definitions of ”alien words” with positive or negative emotional valence. After studying each card, they placed it in one of two boxes (top or bottom), according to its valence. Participants who were instructed to place positive cards in the top box, consistent with Good is Up metaphors, scored about 10.
  • Casillas, M., & Amaral, P. (2011). Learning cues to category membership: Patterns in children’s acquisition of hedges. In C. Cathcart, I.-H. Chen, G. Finley, S. Kang, C. S. Sandy, & E. Stickles (Eds.), Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 37th Annual Meeting (pp. 33-45). Linguistic Society of America, eLanguage.

    Abstract

    When we think of children acquiring language, we often think of their acquisition of linguistic structure as separate from their acquisition of knowledge about the world. But it is clear that in the process of learning about language, children consult what they know about the world; and that in learning about the world, children use linguistic cues to discover how items are related to one another. This interaction between the acquisition of linguistic structure and the acquisition of category structure is especially clear in word learning.
  • Chen, A. (2011). What’s in a rise: Evidence for an off-ramp analysis of Dutch Intonation. In W.-S. Lee, & E. Zee (Eds.), Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 2011 [ICPhS XVII] (pp. 448-451). Hong Kong: Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, City University of Hong Kong.

    Abstract

    Pitch accents are analysed differently in an onramp analysis (i.e. ToBI) and an off-ramp analysis (e.g. Transcription of Dutch intonation - ToDI), two competing approaches in the Autosegmental Metrical tradition. A case in point is pre-final high rise. A pre-final rise is analysed as H* in ToBI but is phonologically ambiguous between H* or H*L (a (rise-)fall) in ToDI. This is because in ToDI, the L tone of a pre-final H*L can be realised in the following unaccented words and both H* and H*L can show up as a high rise in the accented word. To find out whether there is a two-way phonological contrast in pre-final high rises in Dutch, we examined the distribution of phonologically ambiguous high rises (H*(L)) and their phonetic realisation in different information structural conditions (topic vs. focus), compared to phonologically unambiguous H* and H*L. Results showed that there is indeed a H*L vs. H* contrast in prefinal high rises in Dutch and that H*L is realised as H*(L) when sonorant material is limited in the accented word. These findings provide new evidence for an off-ramp analysis of Dutch intonation and have far-reaching implications for analysis of intonation across languages.
  • Cho, T., & McQueen, J. M. (2004). Phonotactics vs. phonetic cues in native and non-native listening: Dutch and Korean listeners' perception of Dutch and English. In S. Kin, & M. J. Bae (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (Interspeech 2004-ICSLP) (pp. 1301-1304). Seoul: Sunjijn Printing Co.

    Abstract

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

    Abstract

    The aim of this study was to determine if Dutch speakers reliably signal phrase-internal lexical boundaries, and if so, how. Six speakers recorded 4 pairs of phonemically identical strong-weak-strong (SWS) strings with matching syllable boundaries but mismatching intended word boundaries (e.g. reis # pastei versus reispas # tij, or more broadly C1V2(C)#C2V2(C)C3V3(C) vs. C1V2(C)C2V2(C)#C3V3(C)). An Analysis of Variance revealed 3 acoustic parameters that were significantly greater in S#WS items (C2 DURATION, RIME1 DURATION, C3 BURST AMPLITUDE) and 5 parameters that were significantly greater in the SW#S items (C2 VOT, C3 DURATION, RIME2 DURATION, RIME3 DURATION, and V2 AMPLITUDE). Additionally, center of gravity measurements suggested that the [s] to [t] coarticulation was greater in reis # pa[st]ei versus reispa[s] # [t]ij. Finally, a Logistic Regression Analysis revealed that the 3 parameters (RIME1 DURATION, RIME2 DURATION, and C3 DURATION) contributed most reliably to a S#WS versus SW#S classification.
  • Cooper, N., & Cutler, A. (2004). Perception of non-native phonemes in noise. In S. Kin, & M. J. Bae (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (Interspeech 2004-ICSLP) (pp. 469-472). Seoul: Sunjijn Printing Co.

    Abstract

    We report an investigation of the perception of American English phonemes by Dutch listeners proficient in English. Listeners identified either the consonant or the vowel in most possible English CV and VC syllables. The syllables were embedded in multispeaker babble at three signal-to-noise ratios (16 dB, 8 dB, and 0 dB). Effects of signal-to-noise ratio on vowel and consonant identification are discussed as a function of syllable position and of relationship to the native phoneme inventory. Comparison of the results with previously reported data from native listeners reveals that noise affected the responding of native and non-native listeners similarly.
  • Crago, M. B., Allen, S. E. M., & Pesco, D. (1998). Issues of Complexity in Inuktitut and English Child Directed Speech. In Proceedings of the twenty-ninth Annual Stanford Child Language Research Forum (pp. 37-46).
  • Cutler, A., Norris, D., & Sebastián-Gallés, N. (2004). Phonemic repertoire and similarity within the vocabulary. In S. Kin, & M. J. Bae (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (Interspeech 2004-ICSLP) (pp. 65-68). Seoul: Sunjijn Printing Co.

    Abstract

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

    Abstract

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

    Abstract

    Languages contain tens of thousands of words, but these are constructed from a tiny handful of phonetic elements. Consequently, words resemble one another, or can be embedded within one another, a coup stick snot with standing. me process of spoken-word recognition by human listeners involves activation of multiple word candidates consistent with the input, and direct competition between activated candidate words. Further, human listeners are sensitive, at an early, prelexical, stage of speeeh processing, to constraints on what could potentially be a word of the language.
  • Cutler, A., Andics, A., & Fang, Z. (2011). Inter-dependent categorization of voices and segments. In W.-S. Lee, & E. Zee (Eds.), Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences [ICPhS 2011] (pp. 552-555). Hong Kong: Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, City University of Hong Kong.

    Abstract

    Listeners performed speeded two-alternative choice between two unfamiliar and relatively similar voices or between two phonetically close segments, in VC syllables. For each decision type (segment, voice), the non-target dimension (voice, segment) either was constant, or varied across four alternatives. Responses were always slower when a non-target dimension varied than when it did not, but the effect of phonetic variation on voice identity decision was stronger than that of voice variation on phonetic identity decision. Cues to voice and segment identity in speech are processed inter-dependently, but hard categorization decisions about voices draw on, and are hence sensitive to, segmental information.
  • Cutler, A., Treiman, R., & Van Ooijen, B. (1998). Orthografik inkoncistensy ephekts in foneme detektion? In R. Mannell, & J. Robert-Ribes (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 6 (pp. 2783-2786). Sydney: ICSLP.

    Abstract

    The phoneme detection task is widely used in spoken word recognition research. Alphabetically literate participants, however, are more used to explicit representations of letters than of phonemes. The present study explored whether phoneme detection is sensitive to how target phonemes are, or may be, orthographically realised. Listeners detected the target sounds [b,m,t,f,s,k] in word-initial position in sequences of isolated English words. Response times were faster to the targets [b,m,t], which have consistent word-initial spelling, than to the targets [f,s,k], which are inconsistently spelled, but only when listeners’ attention was drawn to spelling by the presence in the experiment of many irregularly spelled fillers. Within the inconsistent targets [f,s,k], there was no significant difference between responses to targets in words with majority and minority spellings. We conclude that performance in the phoneme detection task is not necessarily sensitive to orthographic effects, but that salient orthographic manipulation can induce such sensitivity.
  • Cutler, A. (1996). The comparative study of spoken-language processing. In H. T. Bunnell (Ed.), Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 1 (pp. 1). New York: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

    Abstract

    Psycholinguists are saddled with a paradox. Their aim is to construct a model of human language processing, which will hold equally well for the processing of any language, but this aim cannot be achieved just by doing experiments in any language. They have to compare processing of many languages, and actively search for effects which are specific to a single language, even though a model which is itself specific to a single language is really the last thing they want.
  • Cutler, A., & Otake, T. (1996). The processing of word prosody in Japanese. In P. McCormack, & A. Russell (Eds.), Proceedings of the 6th Australian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (pp. 599-604). Canberra: Australian Speech Science and Technology Association.
  • Cutler, A. (1998). The recognition of spoken words with variable representations. In D. Duez (Ed.), Proceedings of the ESCA Workshop on Sound Patterns of Spontaneous Speech (pp. 83-92). Aix-en-Provence: Université de Aix-en-Provence.
  • Dalli, A., Tablan, V., Bontcheva, K., Wilks, Y., Broeder, D., Brugman, H., & Wittenburg, P. (2004). Web services architecture for language resources. In M. Lino, M. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa, & R. Silva (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC2004) (pp. 365-368). Paris: ELRA - European Language Resources Association.
  • Dijkstra, N., & Fikkert, P. (2011). Universal constraints on the discrimination of Place of Articulation? Asymmetries in the discrimination of 'paan' and 'taan' by 6-month-old Dutch infants. In N. Danis, K. Mesh, & H. Sung (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Volume 1 (pp. 170-182). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Dolscheid, S., Shayan, S., Majid, A., & Casasanto, D. (2011). The thickness of musical pitch: Psychophysical evidence for the Whorfian hypothesis. In L. Carlson, C. Hölscher, & T. Shipley (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 537-542). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
  • Drexler, H., Verbunt, A., & Wittenburg, P. (1996). Max Planck Electronic Information Desk. In B. den Brinker, J. Beek, A. Hollander, & R. Nieuwboer (Eds.), Zesde workshop computers in de psychologie: Programma en uitgebreide samenvattingen (pp. 64-66). Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, IFKB.
  • Drozd, K. F. (1998). No as a determiner in child English: A summary of categorical evidence. In A. Sorace, C. Heycock, & R. Shillcock (Eds.), Proceedings of the Gala '97 Conference on Language Acquisition (pp. 34-39). Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press,.

    Abstract

    This paper summarizes the results of a descriptive syntactic category analysis of child English no which reveals that young children use and represent no as a determiner and negatives like no pen as NPs, contra standard analyses.
  • Enfield, N. J. (2004). Areal grammaticalisation of postverbal 'acquire' in mainland Southeast Asia. In S. Burusphat (Ed.), Proceedings of the 11th Southeast Asia Linguistics Society Meeting (pp. 275-296). Arizona State University: Tempe.
  • Ernestus, M., & Warner, N. (Eds.). (2011). Speech reduction [Special Issue]. Journal of Phonetics, 39(SI).
  • Fikkert, P., & Chen, A. (2011). The role of word-stress and intonation in word recognition in Dutch 14- and 24-month-olds. In N. Danis, K. Mesh, & H. Sung (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 222-232). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Fitz, H. (2011). A liquid-state model of variability effects in learning nonadjacent dependencies. In L. Carlson, C. Hölscher, & T. Shipley (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 897-902). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Language acquisition involves learning nonadjacent dependencies that can obtain between words in a sentence. Several artificial grammar learning studies have shown that the ability of adults and children to detect dependencies between A and B in frames AXB is influenced by the amount of variation in the X element. This paper presents a model of statistical learning which displays similar behavior on this task and generalizes in a human-like way. The model was also used to predict human behavior for increased distance and more variation in dependencies. We compare our model-based approach with the standard invariance account of the variability effect.
  • Floyd, S., & Bruil, M. (2011). Interactional functions as part of the grammar: The suffix –ba in Cha’palaa. In P. K. Austin, O. Bond, D. Nathan, & L. Marten (Eds.), Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Language Description and Theory (pp. 91-100). London: SOAS.
  • Floyd, S. (2004). Purismo lingüístico y realidad local: ¿Quichua puro o puro quichuañol? In Proceedings of the Conference on Indigenous Languages of Latin America (CILLA)-I.
  • De La Fuente, J., Casasanto, D., Román, A., & Santiago, J. (2011). Searching for cultural influences on the body-specific association of preferred hand and emotional valence. In L. Carlson, C. Holscher, & T. Shipley (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2616-2620). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
  • Hammarström, H. (2011). Automatic annotation of bibliographical references for descriptive language materials. In P. Forner, J. Kekäläinen, M. Lalmas, & M. De Rijke (Eds.), Multilingual and multimodal information access evaluation. Second International Conference of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2011, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, September 19-22, 2011; Proceedings (pp. 62-73). Berlin: Springer.

    Abstract

    The present paper considers the problem of annotating bibliographical references with labels/classes, given training data of references already annotated with labels. The problem is an instance of document categorization where the documents are short and written in a wide variety of languages. The skewed distributions of title words and labels calls for special carefulness when choosing a Machine Learning approach. The present paper describes how to induce Disjunctive Normal Form formulae (DNFs), which have several advantages over Decision Trees. The approach is evaluated on a large real-world collection of bibliographical references.
  • Hanique, I., & Ernestus, M. (2011). Final /t/ reduction in Dutch past-participles: The role of word predictability and morphological decomposability. In Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2011), Florence, Italy (pp. 2849-2852).

    Abstract

    This corpus study demonstrates that the realization of wordfinal /t/ in Dutch past-participles in various speech styles is affected by a word’s predictability and paradigmatic relative frequency. In particular, /t/s are shorter and more often absent if the two preceding words are more predictable. In addition, /t/s, especially in irregular verbs, are more reduced, the lower the verb’s lemma frequency relative to the past-participle’s frequency. Both effects are more pronounced in more spontaneous speech. These findings are expected if speech planning plays an important role in speech reduction. Index Terms: pronunciation variation, acoustic reduction, corpus research, word predictability, morphological decomposability
  • Hartsuiker, R. J., Huettig, F., & Olivers, C. N. (Eds.). (2011). Visual search and visual world: Interactions among visual attention, language, and working memory [Special Issue]. Acta Psychologica, 137(2). doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2011.01.005.
  • Holler, J., Tutton, M., & Wilkin, K. (2011). Co-speech gestures in the process of meaning coordination. In Proceedings of the 2nd GESPIN - Gesture & Speech in Interaction Conference, Bielefeld, 5-7 Sep 2011.

    Abstract

    This study uses a classical referential communication task to
    investigate the role of co-speech gestures in the process of
    coordination. The study manipulates both the common ground between the interlocutors, as well as the visibility of the gestures they use. The findings show that co-speech gestures are an integral part of the referential utterances speakers
    produced with regard to both initial references as well as repeated references, and that the availability of gestures appears to impact on interlocutors’ referential oordination. The results are discussed with regard to past research on
    common ground as well as theories of gesture production.
  • Janzen, G., & Weststeijn, C. (2004). Neural representation of object location and route direction: An fMRI study. NeuroImage, 22(Supplement 1), e634-e635.
  • Janzen, G., & Van Turennout, M. (2004). Neuronale Markierung navigationsrelevanter Objekte im räumlichen Gedächtnis: Ein fMRT Experiment. In D. Kerzel (Ed.), Beiträge zur 46. Tagung experimentell arbeitender Psychologen (pp. 125-125). Lengerich: Pabst Science Publishers.
  • Jasmin, K., & Casasanto, D. (2011). The QWERTY effect: How stereo-typing shapes the mental lexicon. In L. Carlson, C. Holscher, & T. Shipley (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
  • Jesse, A., & Mitterer, H. (2011). Pointing gestures do not influence the perception of lexical stress. In Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2011), Florence, Italy (pp. 2445-2448).

    Abstract

    We investigated whether seeing a pointing gesture influences the perceived lexical stress. A pitch contour continuum between the Dutch words “CAnon” (‘canon’) and “kaNON” (‘cannon’) was presented along with a pointing gesture during the first or the second syllable. Pointing gestures following natural recordings but not Gaussian functions influenced stress perception (Experiment 1 and 2), especially when auditory context preceded (Experiment 2). This was not replicated in Experiment 3. Natural pointing gestures failed to affect the categorization of a pitch peak timing continuum (Experiment 4). There is thus no convincing evidence that seeing a pointing gesture influences lexical stress perception.
  • Johns, T. G., Perera, R. M., Vitali, A. A., Vernes, S. C., & Scott, A. (2004). Phosphorylation of a glioma-specific mutation of the EGFR [Abstract]. Neuro-Oncology, 6, 317.

    Abstract

    Mutations of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) gene are found at a relatively high frequency in glioma, with the most common being the de2-7 EGFR (or EGFRvIII). This mutation arises from an in-frame deletion of exons 2-7, which removes 267 amino acids from the extracellular domain of the receptor. Despite being unable to bind ligand, the de2-7 EGFR is constitutively active at a low level. Transfection of human glioma cells with the de2-7 EGFR has little effect in vitro, but when grown as tumor xenografts this mutated receptor imparts a dramatic growth advantage. We mapped the phosphorylation pattern of de2-7 EGFR, both in vivo and in vitro, using a panel of antibodies specific for different phosphorylated tyrosine residues. Phosphorylation of de2-7 EGFR was detected constitutively at all tyrosine sites surveyed in vitro and in vivo, including tyrosine 845, a known target in the wild-type EGFR for src kinase. There was a substantial upregulation of phosphorylation at every yrosine residue of the de2-7 EGFR when cells were grown in vivo compared to the receptor isolated from cells cultured in vitro. Upregulation of phosphorylation at tyrosine 845 could be stimulated in vitro by the addition of specific components of the ECM via an integrindependent mechanism. These observations may partially explain why the growth enhancement mediated by de2-7 EGFR is largely restricted to the in vivo environment
  • Kempen, G., & Harbusch, K. (1998). A 'tree adjoining' grammar without adjoining: The case of scrambling in German. In Fourth International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Frameworks (TAG+4).
  • Kempen, G., & Harbusch, K. (2004). How flexible is constituent order in the midfield of German subordinate clauses? A corpus study revealing unexpected rigidity. In S. Kepser, & M. Reis (Eds.), Pre-Proceedings of the International Conference on Linguistic Evidence (pp. 81-85). Tübingen: Niemeyer.
  • Kempen, G. (2004). Interactive visualization of syntactic structure assembly for grammar-intensive first- and second-language instruction. In R. Delmonte, P. Delcloque, & S. Tonelli (Eds.), Proceedings of InSTIL/ICALL2004 Symposium on NLP and speech technologies in advanced language learning systems (pp. 183-186). Venice: University of Venice.
  • Kempen, G., & Harbusch, K. (2004). How flexible is constituent order in the midfield of German subordinate clauses?: A corpus study revealing unexpected rigidity. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Linguistic Evidence (pp. 81-85). Tübingen: University of Tübingen.
  • Kempen, G. (2004). Human grammatical coding: Shared structure formation resources for grammatical encoding and decoding. In Cuny 2004 - The 17th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. March 25-27, 2004. University of Maryland (pp. 66).
  • Kempen, G. (1996). Human language technology can modernize writing and grammar instruction. In COLING '96 Proceedings of the 16th conference on Computational linguistics - Volume 2 (pp. 1005-1006). Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.
  • Kempen, G., & Janssen, S. (1996). Omspellen: Reuze(n)karwei of peule(n)schil? In H. Croll, & J. Creutzberg (Eds.), Proceedings of the 5e Dag van het Document (pp. 143-146). Projectbureau Croll en Creutzberg.
  • Kita, S., van Gijn, I., & van der Hulst, H. (1998). Movement phases in signs and co-speech gestures, and their transcription by human coders. In Gesture and Sign-Language in Human-Computer Interaction (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence - LNCS Subseries, Vol. 1371) (pp. 23-35). Berlin, Germany: Springer-Verlag.

    Abstract

    The previous literature has suggested that the hand movement in co-speech gestures and signs consists of a series of phases with qualitatively different dynamic characteristics. In this paper, we propose a syntagmatic rule system for movement phases that applies to both co-speech gestures and signs. Descriptive criteria for the rule system were developed for the analysis video-recorded continuous production of signs and gesture. It involves segmenting a stream of body movement into phases and identifying different phase types. Two human coders used the criteria to analyze signs and cospeech gestures that are produced in natural discourse. It was found that the criteria yielded good inter-coder reliability. These criteria can be used for the technology of automatic recognition of signs and co-speech gestures in order to segment continuous production and identify the potentially meaningbearing phase.
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (2004). Philologie auf neuen Wegen [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 136.
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (2004). Universitas [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik (LiLi), 134.
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (1998). Kaleidoskop [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (112).
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (1975). Sprache ausländischer Arbeiter [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (18).
  • Klein, W., & Schlieben-Lange, B. (Eds.). (1996). Sprache und Subjektivität I [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (101).
  • Klein, W., & Schlieben-Lange, B. (Eds.). (1996). Sprache und Subjektivität II [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (102).
  • Klein, W., & Meibauer, J. (Eds.). (2011). Spracherwerb und Kinderliteratur [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 162.
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (1996). Zweitspracherwerb [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (104).
  • Kuijpers, C., Van Donselaar, W., & Cutler, A. (1996). Phonological variation: Epenthesis and deletion of schwa in Dutch. In H. T. Bunnell (Ed.), Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 1 (pp. 94-97). New York: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

    Abstract

    Two types of phonological variation in Dutch, resulting from optional rules, are schwa epenthesis and schwa deletion. In a lexical decision experiment it was investigated whether the phonological variants were processed similarly to the standard forms. It was found that the two types of variation patterned differently. Words with schwa epenthesis were processed faster and more accurately than the standard forms, whereas words with schwa deletion led to less fast and less accurate responses. The results are discussed in relation to the role of consonant-vowel alternations in speech processing and the perceptual integrity of onset clusters.
  • Lai, V. T., Hagoort, P., & Casasanto, D. (2011). Affective and non-affective meaning in words and pictures. In L. Carlson, C. Holscher, & T. Shipley (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 390-395). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
  • Lenkiewicz, P., Wittenburg, P., Schreer, O., Masneri, S., Schneider, D., & Tschöpel, S. (2011). Application of audio and video processing methods for language research. In Proceedings of the conference Supporting Digital Humanities 2011 [SDH 2011], Copenhagen, Denmark, November 17-18, 2011.

    Abstract

    Annotations of media recordings are the grounds for linguistic research. Since creating those annotations is a very laborious task, reaching 100 times longer than the length of the annotated media, innovative audio and video processing algorithms are needed, in order to improve the efficiency and quality of annotation process. The AVATecH project, started by the Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI) and the Fraunhofer institutes HHI and IAIS, aims at significantly speeding up the process of creating annotations of audio-visual data for humanities research. In order for this to be achieved a range of state-of-the-art audio and video pattern recognition algorithms have been developed and integrated into widely used ELAN annotation tool. To address the problem of heterogeneous annotation tasks and recordings we provide modular components extended by adaptation and feedback mechanisms to achieve competitive annotation quality within significantly less annotation time.
  • Lenkiewicz, P., Wittenburg, P., Gebre, B. G., Lenkiewicz, A., Schreer, O., & Masneri, S. (2011). Application of video processing methods for linguistic research. In Z. Vetulani (Ed.), Human language technologies as a challenge for computer science and linguistics. Proceedings of the 5th Language and Technology Conference (LTC 2011), November 25-27, 2011, Poznań, Poland (pp. 561-564).

    Abstract

    Evolution and changes of all modern languages is a well-known fact. However, recently it is reaching dynamics never seen before, which results in loss of the vast amount of information encoded in every language. In order to preserve such heritage, properly annotated recordings of world languages are necessary. Since creating those annotations is a very laborious task, reaching times 100 longer than the length of the annotated media, innovative video processing algorithms are needed, in order to improve the efficiency and quality of annotation process.
  • Lenkiewicz, P., Pereira, M., Freire, M., & Fernandes, J. (2011). Extended whole mesh deformation model: Full 3D processing. In Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (pp. 1633-1636).

    Abstract

    Processing medical data has always been an interesting field that has shown the need for effective image segmentation methods. Modern medical image segmentation solutions are focused on 3D image volumes, which originate at advanced acquisition devices. Operating on such data in a 3D envi- ronment is essential in order to take the full advantage of the available information. In this paper we present an extended version of our 3D image segmentation and reconstruction model that belongs to the family of Deformable Models and is capable of processing large image volumes in competitive times and in fully 3D environment, offering a big level of automation of the process and a high precision of results. It is also capable of handling topology changes and offers a very good scalability on multi-processing unit architectures. We present a description of the model and show its capabilities in the field of medical image processing.
  • Levelt, W. J. M., & Plomp, R. (1962). Musical consonance and critical bandwidth. In Proceedings of the 4th International Congress Acoustics (pp. 55-55).
  • Levelt, W. J. M., & Flores d'Arcais, G. B. (1975). Some psychologists' reactions to the Symposium of Dynamic Aspects of Speech Perception. In A. Cohen, & S. Nooteboom (Eds.), Structure and process in speech perception (pp. 345-351). Berlin: Springer.
  • Majid, A., Van Staden, M., & Enfield, N. J. (2004). The human body in cognition, brain, and typology. In K. Hovie (Ed.), Forum Handbook, 4th International Forum on Language, Brain, and Cognition - Cognition, Brain, and Typology: Toward a Synthesis (pp. 31-35). Sendai: Tohoku University.

    Abstract

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

    Abstract

    Many studies in cognitive science address how people categorize objects, but there has been comparatively little research on event categorization. This study investigated the categorization of events involving material destruction, such as “cutting” and “breaking”. Speakers of 28 typologically, genetically, and areally diverse languages described events shown in a set of video-clips. There was considerable cross-linguistic agreement in the dimensions along which the events were distinguished, but there was variation in the number of categories and the placement of their boundaries.
  • Majid, A., & Levinson, S. C. (Eds.). (2011). The senses in language and culture [Special Issue]. The Senses & Society, 6(1).
  • Majid, A., & Levinson, S. C. (2011). The language of perception across cultures [Abstract]. Abstracts of the XXth Congress of European Chemoreception Research Organization, ECRO-2010. Publ. in Chemical Senses, 36(1), E7-E8.

    Abstract

    How are the senses structured by the languages we speak, the cultures we inhabit? To what extent is the encoding of perceptual experiences in languages a matter of how the mind/brain is ―wired-up‖ and to what extent is it a question of local cultural preoccupation? The ―Language of Perception‖ project tests the hypothesis that some perceptual domains may be more ―ineffable‖ – i.e. difficult or impossible to put into words – than others. While cognitive scientists have assumed that proximate senses (olfaction, taste, touch) are more ineffable than distal senses (vision, hearing), anthropologists have illustrated the exquisite variation and elaboration the senses achieve in different cultural milieus. The project is designed to test whether the proximate senses are universally ineffable – suggesting an architectural constraint on cognition – or whether they are just accidentally so in Indo-European languages, so expanding the role of cultural interests and preoccupations. To address this question, a standardized set of stimuli of color patches, geometric shapes, simple sounds, tactile textures, smells and tastes have been used to elicit descriptions from speakers of more than twenty languages—including three sign languages. The languages are typologically, genetically and geographically diverse, representing a wide-range of cultures. The communities sampled vary in subsistence modes (hunter-gatherer to industrial), ecological zones (rainforest jungle to desert), dwelling types (rural and urban), and various other parameters. We examine how codable the different sensory modalities are by comparing how consistent speakers are in how they describe the materials in each modality. Our current analyses suggest that taste may, in fact, be the most codable sensorial domain across languages. Moreover, we have identified exquisite elaboration in the olfactory domains in some cultural settings, contrary to some contemporary predictions within the cognitive sciences. These results suggest that differential codability may be at least partly the result of cultural preoccupation. This shows that the senses are not just physiological phenomena but are constructed through linguistic, cultural and social practices.
  • Malt, B. C., Ameel, E., Gennari, S., Imai, M., Saji, N., & Majid, A. (2011). Do words reveal concepts? In L. Carlson, C. Hölscher, & T. Shipley (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 519-524). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    To study concepts, cognitive scientists must first identify some. The prevailing assumption is that they are revealed by words such as triangle, table, and robin. But languages vary dramatically in how they carve up the world by name. Either ordinary concepts must be heavily language-dependent or names cannot be a direct route to concepts. We asked English, Dutch, Spanish, and Japanese speakers to name videos of human locomotion and judge their similarities. We investigated what name inventories and scaling solutions on name similarity and on physical similarity for the groups individually and together suggest about the underlying concepts. Aggregated naming and similarity solutions converged on results distinct from the answers suggested by the word inventories and scaling solutions of any single language. Words such as triangle, table, and robin can help identify the conceptual space of a domain, but they do not directly reveal units of knowledge usefully considered 'concepts'.
  • de Marneffe, M.-C., Tomlinson, J. J., Tice, M., & Sumner, M. (2011). The interaction of lexical frequency and phonetic variation in the perception of accented speech. In L. Carlson, C. Hölscher, & T. Shipley (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 3575-3580). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    How listeners understand spoken words despite massive variation in the speech signal is a central issue for linguistic theory. A recent focus on lexical frequency and specificity has proved fruitful in accounting for this phenomenon. Speech perception, though, is a multi-faceted process and likely incorporates a number of mechanisms to map a variable signal to meaning. We examine a well-established language use factor — lexical frequency — and how this factor is integrated with phonetic variability during the perception of accented speech. We show that an integrated perspective highlights a low-level perceptual mechanism that accounts for the perception of accented speech absent native contrasts, while shedding light on the use of interactive language factors in the perception of spoken words.
  • Matsuo, A. (2004). Young children's understanding of ongoing vs. completion in present and perfective participles. In J. v. Kampen, & S. Baauw (Eds.), Proceedings of GALA 2003 (pp. 305-316). Utrecht: Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics (LOT).
  • McQueen, J. M., & Cutler, A. (1998). Spotting (different kinds of) words in (different kinds of) context. In R. Mannell, & J. Robert-Ribes (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 6 (pp. 2791-2794). Sydney: ICSLP.

    Abstract

    The results of a word-spotting experiment are presented in which Dutch listeners tried to spot different types of bisyllabic Dutch words embedded in different types of nonsense contexts. Embedded verbs were not reliably harder to spot than embedded nouns; this suggests that nouns and verbs are recognised via the same basic processes. Iambic words were no harder to spot than trochaic words, suggesting that trochaic words are not in principle easier to recognise than iambic words. Words were harder to spot in consonantal contexts (i.e., contexts which themselves could not be words) than in longer contexts which contained at least one vowel (i.e., contexts which, though not words, were possible words of Dutch). A control experiment showed that this difference was not due to acoustic differences between the words in each context. The results support the claim that spoken-word recognition is sensitive to the viability of sound sequences as possible words.
  • Mitterer, H. (2011). Social accountability influences phonetic alignment. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Program abstracts of the 162nd Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, 130(4), 2442.

    Abstract

    Speakers tend to take over the articulatory habits of their interlocutors [e.g., Pardo, JASA (2006)]. This phonetic alignment could be the consequence of either a social mechanism or a direct and automatic link between speech perception and production. The latter assumes that social variables should have little influence on phonetic alignment. To test that participants were engaged in a "cloze task" (i.e., Stimulus: "In fantasy movies, silver bullets are used to kill ..." Response: "werewolves") with either one or four interlocutors. Given findings with the Asch-conformity paradigm in social psychology, multiple consistent speakers should exert a stronger force on the participant to align. To control the speech style of the interlocutors, their questions and answers were pre-recorded in either a formal or a casual speech style. The stimuli's speech style was then manipulated between participants and was consistent throughout the experiment for a given participant. Surprisingly, participants aligned less with the speech style if there were multiple interlocutors. This may reflect a "diffusion of responsibility:" Participants may find it more important to align when they interact with only one person than with a larger group.
  • Nordhoff, S., & Hammarström, H. (2011). Glottolog/Langdoc: Defining dialects, languages, and language families as collections of resources. Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Linked Science 2011 (LISC2011), Bonn, Germany, October 24, 2011.

    Abstract

    This paper describes the Glottolog/Langdoc project, an at- tempt to provide near-total bibliographical coverage of descriptive re- sources to the world's languages. Every reference is treated as a resource, as is every \languoid"[1]. References are linked to the languoids which they describe, and languoids are linked to the references described by them. Family relations between languoids are modeled in SKOS, as are relations across dierent classications of the same languages. This setup allows the representation of languoids as collections of references, render- ing the question of the denition of entities like `Scots', `West-Germanic' or `Indo-European' more empirical.
  • Ozyurek, A. (1998). An analysis of the basic meaning of Turkish demonstratives in face-to-face conversational interaction. In S. Santi, I. Guaitella, C. Cave, & G. Konopczynski (Eds.), Oralite et gestualite: Communication multimodale, interaction: actes du colloque ORAGE 98 (pp. 609-614). Paris: L'Harmattan.
  • Perniss, P. M., Zwitserlood, I., & Ozyurek, A. (2011). Does space structure spatial language? Linguistic encoding of space in sign languages. In L. Carlson, C. Holscher, & T. Shipley (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1595-1600). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
  • Poellmann, K., McQueen, J. M., & Mitterer, H. (2011). The time course of perceptual learning. In W.-S. Lee, & E. Zee (Eds.), Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 2011 [ICPhS XVII] (pp. 1618-1621). Hong Kong: Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, City University of Hong Kong.

    Abstract

    Two groups of participants were trained to perceive an ambiguous sound [s/f] as either /s/ or /f/ based on lexical bias: One group heard the ambiguous fricative in /s/-final words, the other in /f/-final words. This kind of exposure leads to a recalibration of the /s/-/f/ contrast [e.g., 4]. In order to investigate when and how this recalibration emerges, test trials were interspersed among training and filler trials. The learning effect needed at least 10 clear training items to arise. Its emergence seemed to occur in a rather step-wise fashion. Learning did not improve much after it first appeared. It is likely, however, that the early test trials attracted participants' attention and therefore may have interfered with the learning process.
  • Regier, T., Khetarpal, N., & Majid, A. (2011). Inferring conceptual structure from cross-language data. In L. Carlson, C. Hölscher, & T. Shipley (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1488). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
  • Reinisch, E., & Weber, A. (2011). Adapting to lexical stress in a foreign accent. In W.-S. Lee, & E. Zee (Eds.), Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 2011 [ICPhS XVII] (pp. 1678-1681). Hong Kong: Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, City University of Hong Kong.

    Abstract

    An exposure-test paradigm was used to examine whether Dutch listeners can adapt their perception to non-canonical marking of lexical stress in Hungarian-accented Dutch. During exposure, one group of listeners heard only words with correct initial stress, while another group also heard examples of unstressed initial syllables that were marked by high pitch, a possible stress cue in Dutch. Subsequently, listeners’ eye movements to target-competitor pairs with segmental overlap but different stress patterns were tracked while hearing Hungarian-accented Dutch. Listeners who had heard non-canonically produced words previously distinguished target-competitor pairs faster than listeners who had only been exposed to canonical forms before. This suggests that listeners can adapt quickly to speaker-specific realizations of non-canonical lexical stress.
  • Reinisch, E., Weber, A., & Mitterer, H. (2011). Listeners retune phoneme boundaries across languages [Abstract]. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Program abstracts of the 162nd Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, 130(4), 2572-2572.

    Abstract

    Listeners can flexibly retune category boundaries of their native language to adapt to non-canonically produced phonemes. This only occurs, however, if the pronunciation peculiarities can be attributed to stable and not transient speaker-specific characteristics. Listening to someone speaking a second language, listeners could attribute non-canonical pronunciations either to the speaker or to the fact that she is modifying her categories in the second language. We investigated whether, following exposure to Dutch-accented English, Dutch listeners show effects of category retuning during test where they hear the same speaker speaking her native language, Dutch. Exposure was a lexical-decision task where either word-final [f] or [s] was replaced by an ambiguous sound. At test listeners categorized minimal word pairs ending in sounds along an [f]-[s] continuum. Following exposure to English words, Dutch listeners showed boundary shifts of a similar magnitude as following exposure to the same phoneme variants in their native language. This suggests that production patterns in a second language are deemed a stable characteristic. A second experiment suggests that category retuning also occurs when listeners are exposed to and tested with a native speaker of their second language. Listeners thus retune phoneme boundaries across languages.
  • De Ruiter, J. P. (2004). On the primacy of language in multimodal communication. In Workshop Proceedings on Multimodal Corpora: Models of Human Behaviour for the Specification and Evaluation of Multimodal Input and Output Interfaces.(LREC2004) (pp. 38-41). Paris: ELRA - European Language Resources Association (CD-ROM).

    Abstract

    In this paper, I will argue that although the study of multimodal interaction offers exciting new prospects for Human Computer Interaction and human-human communication research, language is the primary form of communication, even in multimodal systems. I will support this claim with theoretical and empirical arguments, mainly drawn from human-human communication research, and will discuss the implications for multimodal communication research and Human-Computer Interaction.
  • Sadakata, M., & McQueen, J. M. (2011). The role of variability in non-native perceptual learning of a Japanese geminate-singleton fricative contrast. In Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2011), Florence, Italy (pp. 873-876).

    Abstract

    The current study reports the enhancing effect of a high variability training procedure in the learning of a Japanese geminate-singleton fricative contrast. Dutch natives took part in a five-day training procedure in which they identified geminate and singleton variants of the Japanese fricative /s/. They heard either many repetitions of a limited set of words recorded by a single speaker (simple training) or fewer repetitions of a more variable set of words recorded by multiple speakers (variable training). Pre-post identification evaluations and a transfer test indicated clear benefits of the variable training.
  • Sauermann, A., Höhle, B., Chen, A., & Järvikivi, J. (2011). Intonational marking of focus in different word orders in German children. In M. B. Washburn, K. McKinney-Bock, E. Varis, & A. Sawyer (Eds.), Proceedings of the 28th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (pp. 313-322). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.

    Abstract

    The use of word order and intonation to mark focus in child speech has received some attention. However, past work usually examined each device separately or only compared the realizations of focused vs. non-focused constituents. This paper investigates the interaction between word order and intonation in the marking of different focus types in 4- to 5-year old German-speaking children and an adult control group. An answer-reconstruction task was used to elicit syntactic (word order) and intonational focus marking of subject and objects (locus of focus) in three focus types (broad, narrow, and contrastive focus). The results indicate that both children and adults used intonation to distinguish broad from contrastive focus but they differed in the marking of narrow focus. Further, both groups preferred intonation to word order as device for focus marking. But children showed an early sensitivity for the impact of focus type and focus location on word order variation and on phonetic means to mark focus.
  • Sauter, D., Scott, S., & Calder, A. (2004). Categorisation of vocally expressed positive emotion: A first step towards basic positive emotions? [Abstract]. Proceedings of the British Psychological Society, 12, 111.

    Abstract

    Most of the study of basic emotion expressions has focused on facial expressions and little work has been done to specifically investigate happiness, the only positive of the basic emotions (Ekman & Friesen, 1971). However, a theoretical suggestion has been made that happiness could be broken down into discrete positive emotions, which each fulfil the criteria of basic emotions, and that these would be expressed vocally (Ekman, 1992). To empirically test this hypothesis, 20 participants categorised 80 paralinguistic sounds using the labels achievement, amusement, contentment, pleasure and relief. The results suggest that achievement, amusement and relief are perceived as distinct categories, which subjects accurately identify. In contrast, the categories of contentment and pleasure were systematically confused with other responses, although performance was still well above chance levels. These findings are initial evidence that the positive emotions engage distinct vocal expressions and may be considered to be distinct emotion categories.

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