Publications

Abstract

Recent experimental evidence from cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience shows that reading acquisition has non-trivial consequences for cognitive processes other than reading per se. In the present chapter I present evidence from three areas of cognition: phonological processing, prediction in language processing, and visual search. These findings suggest that literacy on cognition influences are far-reaching. This implies that a good understanding of the dramatic impact of literacy acquisition on the human mind is an important prerequisite for successful education policy development and guidance of educational support.

Abstract

The idea that presupposition triggers have different intrinsic properties has gradually made its way into the literature on presuppositions and become a current assumption in most approaches. The distinctions mentioned in the different works have been based on introspective data, which seem, indeed, very suggestive. In this paper, we take a different look at some of these distinctions by using a simple experimental approach based on judgment of naturalness about sentences in various contexts. We show that the alleged difference between weak (or soft) and strong (or hard) triggers is not as clear as one may wish and that the claim that they belong to different lexical classes of triggers is probably much too strong.

Abstract

A wealth of studies has shown that more proficient monolingual speakers are better at predicting upcoming information during language comprehension. Similarly, prediction skills of adult second language (L2) speakers in their L2 have also been argued to be modulated by their L2 proficiency. How exactly language proficiency and prediction are linked, however, is yet to be systematically investigated. One group of language users which has the potential to provide invaluable insights into this link is bilingual children. In this paper, we compare bilingual children’s prediction skills with those of monolingual children and adult L2 speakers, and show how investigating bilingual children’s prediction skills may contribute to our understanding of how predictive processing works.

Abstract

The psychological process of translating semantic into syntactic structures has dynamic properties such as the following. (1) The speaker is able to start pronouncing an utterance before having worked out the semantic content he wishes to express. Selection of semantic content and construction of syntactic form proceed partially in parallel. (2) The human sentence generator takes as input not only a specification of semantic content but also some indication of desired syntactic shape. Such indications, if present, do not complicate the generation process but make it easier. (3) Certain regularities of speech errors suggest a two-stage generation process. Stage I constructs the “syntactic skeleton” of an utterance; stage II provides the skeleton with morpho- honological information. An outline is given of the type of grammar which is used by a sentence generation system embodying these characteristics. The system is being implemented on a computer.

Abstract

Requesting and offering are closely related, insofar as they are activities associated with someone’s need for assistance. It has been supposed (e.g., Schegloff 2007) that requests and offers are not equivalent actions – specifically that offers are preferred actions and requests are dispreferred. We review the evidence for this claim across a corpus of requests and offers and demonstrate that the empirical evidence does not support the claim for a putative preference for offers over requests. Further consideration of the often symbiotic relationships between requesting and offering, particularly in face-to-face interactions, reveals a more complex picture of the ways in which people recruit others to help, or in which others are mobilized to help.

Abstract

Gesture is an integral part of face-to-face communication, and provides a rich area for cross-cultural comparison. “Locally-anchored spatial gestures” are gestures that are roughly oriented to the actual geographical direction of referents. For example, such gestures may point to a location or a thing, trace the shape of a path, or indicate the direction of a particular area. The goal of this task is to elicit locally-anchored spatial gestures across different cultures. The task follows an interview format, where one participant prompts another to talk in detail about a specific area that the main speaker knows well. The data can be used for additional purposes such as the investigation of demonstratives.

Abstract

Unter allen Disziplinen, die sich mit der Erforschung der Sprache befassen, ist die Lexikografie die älteste und die für die Allgemeinheit wichtigste. Die ältesten, noch sehr einfachen Wörterbücher finden sich auf 4000 Jahre alten Tontafeln, und wenn sich heute in einem Haushalt überhaupt ein Buch findet, dann ist es wahrscheinlich ein Wörterbuch. In den letzten zwanzig Jahren ist die kommerzielle wie die von öffentlich finanzierten Forschungsstätten betriebene Lexikografie jedoch in einer ernsthafte Krise geraten. Die großen Wörterbuchverlage haben die Arbeit an umfassenden Wörterbüchern weitestgehend eingestellt, weil sie kaum noch gekauft werden; die Akademien geraten mit ihren Langzeitvorhaben in massive Zeit- und Finanzprobleme. Wenn wir nicht auf die umfassende Beschreibung des deutschen Wortschatzes in all einer Vielfalt und seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung verzichten wollen, müssen ganz neue Wege gegangen werden: Wörterbücher im traditionellen Sinne müssen durch digitale lexikalische Systeme ersetzt werden, die das vorhandene lexikalische Wissen integrieren, es schrittweise systematisch ausbauen, eigene Recherchen in verlässlichen Corpora ermöglichen und von jedermann frei über das Internet nutzbar sind.

Abstract

Like Einstein's general theory of relativity is concerned with explaining the basics of an observable experience – i.e., gravity – most people take for granted that Chomsky's theory of generative grammar (GG) is concerned with the basic nature of language. This chapter highlights a mere subset of central constructs in GG, showing how they have featured prominently and thus shaped formal linguistic studies in multilingualism. Because multilingualism includes a wide range of nonmonolingual populations, the constructs are divided across child bilingualism and adult third language for greater coverage. In the case of the former, the chapter examines how poverty of the stimulus has been investigated. Using the nascent field of L3/Ln acquisition as the backdrop, it discusses how the GG constructs of I-language versus E-language sit at the core of debates regarding the very notion of what linguistic transfer and mental representations should be taken to be.

Abstract

Speakers of English habitually encode motion events using manner-of-motion verbs (e.g., spin, roll, slide) whereas Spanish speakers rely on path-of-motion verbs (e.g., enter, exit, approach). Here, we ask whether the language-specific verb representations used in encoding motion events induce different modes of “thinking-for-speaking” in Spanish–English bilinguals. That is, assuming that the verb encodes the most salient information in the clause, do bilinguals find the path of motion to be more salient than manner of motion if they had previously described the motion event using Spanish versus English? In our study, Spanish–English bilinguals described a set of target motion events in either English or Spanish and then participated in a nonlinguistic similarity judgment task in which they viewed the target motion events individually (e.g., a ball rolling into a cave) followed by two variants a “same-path” variant such as a ball sliding into a cave or a “same-manner” variant such as a ball rolling away from a cave). Participants had to select one of the two variants that they judged to be more similar to the target event: The event that shared the same path of motion as the target versus the one that shared the same manner of motion. Our findings show that bilingual speakers were more likely to classify two motion events as being similar if they shared the same path of motion and if they had previously described the target motion events in Spanish versus in English. Our study provides further evidence for the “thinking-for-speaking” hypothesis by demonstrating that bilingual speakers can flexibly shift between language-specific construals of the same event “on-the-fly.”

Abstract

How do languages express ideas of movement, and how do they package different components of this domain, such as manner and path of motion? This task uses one large set of stimuli to gain knowledge of certain key aspects of motion verb meanings in the target language, and expands the investigation beyond simple verbs (e.g., go) to include the semantics of motion predications complete with adjuncts (e.g., go across something). Consultants are asked to view and briefly describe 96 animations of a few seconds each. The task is designed to get linguistic elicitations of motion predications under contrastive comparison with other animations in the same set. Unlike earlier tasks, the stimuli focus on inanimate moving items or “figures” (in this case, a ball).

Abstract

Demonstratives (e.g., words such as this and that in English) pivot on relationships between the item being talked about, and features of the speech act situation (e.g., where the speaker and addressee are standing or looking). However, they are only rarely investigated multi-modally, in natural language contexts. This task is designed to build a video corpus of cross-linguistically comparable discourse data for the study of “deixis in action”, while simultaneously supporting the investigation of joint attention as a factor in speaker selection of demonstratives. In the task, two or more speakers are asked to discuss and evaluate a group of similar items (e.g., examples of local handicrafts, tools, produce) that are placed within a relatively defined space (e.g., on a table). The task can additionally provide material for comparison of pointing gesture practices.

Abstract

This entry contains: 1. An invitation to think about to what extent the grammar of space and time share lexical and morphosyntactic resources − the suggestions here are only prompts, since it would take a long questionnaire to fully explore this; 2. A suggestion about how to collect gestural data that might show us to what extent the spatial and temporal domains, have a psychological continuity. This is really the goal − but you need to do the linguistic work first or in addition. The goal of this task is to explore the extent to which time is conceptualised on a spatial basis.

Abstract

The ECHO proposal aims to bring to life the cultural heritage of Europe, through internet technology that encourages collaboration across the Humanities disciplines which interpret it – at the same time making all this scholarship accessible to the citizens of Europe. An essential part of the cultural heritage of Europe is the diverse set of languages used on the continent, in their historical, literary and spoken forms. Amongst these are the ‘hidden languages’ used by minorities but of wide interest to the general public. We take the 18 Sign Languages of the EEC – the natural languages of the deaf - as an example. Little comparative information about these is available, despite their special scientific importance, the widespread public interest and the policy implications. We propose a research project on these languages based on placing fully annotated digitized moving images of each of these languages on the internet. This requires significant development of multi-media technology which would allow distributed annotation of a central corpus, together with the development of special search techniques. The technology would have widespread application to all cultural performances recorded as sound plus moving images. Such a project captures in microcosm the essence of the ECHO proposal: cultural heritage is nothing without the humanities research which contextualizes and gives it comparative assessment; by marrying information technology to humanities research, we can bring these materials to a wider public while simultaneously boosting Europe as a research area.

Abstract

As for 'Locally-anchored spatial gestures task, version 2', a major goal of this task is to elicit locally-anchored spatial gestures across different cultures. “Locally-anchored spatial gestures” are gestures that are roughly oriented to the actual geographical direction of referents. Rather than set up an interview situation, this task involves recording informal, animated narrative delivered to a native-speaker interlocutor. Locally-anchored gestures produced in such narrative are roughly comparable to those collected in the interview task. The data collected can also be used to investigate a wide range of other topics.

Abstract

There has been a recent spate of work on recursion as a central design feature of language and specifically of syntax. This short report points out that there is little evidence that unlimited recursion, understood as centre embedding, is typical of natural language syntax. Nevertheless, embedded pragmatic construals seem available in every language. Further, much deeper centre embedding can be found in dialogue or conversation structure than can be found in syntax. Existing accounts for the ‘performance’ limitations on centre embedding are thus thrown in doubt. Dialogue materials suggest that centre embedding is perhaps a core part of the human interaction system and is for some reason much more highly restricted in syntax than in other aspects of cognition

Abstract

The lexicon is central to the concerns of disparate disciplines and has correspondingly elicited conflicting proposals about some of its foundational properties. Some suppose that word meanings and their associated concepts are largely universal, while others note that local cultural interests infiltrate every category in the lexicon. This chapter reviews research in two semantic domains—perception and the body—in order to illustrate crosslinguistic similarities and differences in semantic fields. Data is considered from a wide array of languages, especially those from small-scale indigenous communities which are often overlooked. In every lexical field we find considerable variation across cultures, raising the question of where this variation comes from. Is it the result of different ecological or environmental niches, cultural practices, or accidents of historical pasts? Current evidence suggests that diverse pressures differentially shape lexical fields.

Abstract

Readers experience a number of sensations during reading. They do
not – or do not only – process words and sentences in a detached, abstract
manner. Instead they “perceive” what they read about. They see descriptions of
scenery, feel what characters feel, and hear the sounds in a story. These sensa-
tions tend to be grouped under the umbrella terms “mental simulation” and
“mental imagery.” This chapter provides an overview of empirical research on
the role of mental simulation during literary reading. Our chapter also discusses
what mental simulation is and how it relates to mental imagery. Moreover, it
explores how mental simulation plays a role in leading models of literary read-
ing and investigates under what circumstances mental simulation occurs dur-
ing literature reading. Finally, the effect of mental simulation on the literary
reader’s experience is discussed, and suggestions and unresolved issues in this
field are formulated.

Abstract

Concepts are so fundamental to human cognition that Fodor declared the heart of a cognitive science to be its theory of concepts. To study concepts, though, cognitive scientists need to be able to identify some. The prevailing assumption has been that they are revealed by words such as triangle, table, and robin. But languages vary dramatically in how they carve up the world with names. Either ordinary concepts must be heavily language dependent, or names cannot be a direct route to concepts. We asked speakers of English, Dutch, Spanish, and Japanese to name a set of 36 video clips of human locomotion and to judge the similarities among them. We investigated what name inventories, name extensions, scaling solutions on name similarity, and scaling solutions on nonlinguistic similarity from the groups, individually and together, suggest about the underlying concepts. Aggregated naming data and similarity solutions converged on results distinct from individual languages.

Abstract

Models are a flourishing and indispensable area of research in language evolution. Here we
highlight critical issues in using and interpreting models, and suggest viable approaches. First,
contrasting models can explain the same data and similar modelling techniques can lead to
diverging conclusions. This should act as a reminder to use the extreme malleability of
modelling parsimoniously when interpreting results. Second, quantitative techniques similar to
those used in modelling language evolution have proven themselves inadequate in other
disciplines. Cross-disciplinary fertilization is crucial to avoid mistakes which have previously
occurred in other areas. Finally, experimental validation is necessary both to sharpen models'
hypotheses, and to support their conclusions. Our belief is that models should be interpreted as
quantitative demonstrations of logical possibilities, rather than as direct sources of evidence.
Only an integration of theoretical principles, quantitative proofs and empirical validation can
allow research in the evolution of language to progress.

Abstract

This volume is dedicated to exploring the crossroads where complex sentences and information management – more specifically information structure (IS) and reference tracking (RT) – come together. Complex sentences are a highly relevant but understudied domain for studying notions of IS and RT. On the one hand, a complex sentence can be studied as a mini-unit of discourse consisting of two or more elements describing events, situations, or processes, with its own internal information-structural and referential organisation. On the other hand, complex sentences can be studied as parts of larger discourse structures, such as narratives or conversations, in terms of how their information-structural characteristics relate to this wider context.We first focus on the interrelatedness of IS and RT (Section 1) and then define and discuss the notion of complex sentences and their subtypes in Section 2. Section 3 surveys issues of IS in complex sentences, while Section 4 focuses on RT in complex sentences. Sections 5 and 6 briefly consider IS and RT in a wider discourse context. Section 5 discusses the interaction between IS, RT, and other discourse factors, and Section 6 focuses on ways in which a specific RT system, switch reference, can function as an RT device beyond the sentence.

Abstract

Information structure is a subfield of linguistic research dealing with the ways speakers encode instructions to the hearer on how to process the message relative to their temporary mental states. To this end, sentences are segmented into parts conveying known and yet-unknown information, usually labeled ‘topic’ and ‘focus.’ Many languages have developed specialized grammatical and lexical means of indicating this segmentation.

Abstract

No island effects are observable in Tundra Yukaghir questions, which are possible in virtually all syntactic environments. It is argued that this feature of Tundra Yukaghir relates to its capability of explicitly marking focus domains. If a question word occurs in a syntactic island, the whole island is morphologically treated as a focus domain. In order to take scope and function as question markers, question words must remain within the focus domain, i.e. in the island clause. This syntactic configuration is reflected in the semantics of question islands, which are used to inquire about the identity of the whole island, not merely the denotation of the question word.

Abstract

In this paper, we present two attempts to replicate a widely-cited but never fully published experiment in which German and Spanish speakers were asked to associate adjectives with nouns of masculine and feminine grammati-cal gender (Boroditsky et al. 2003). The researchers claim that speakers associ-ated more stereotypically female adjectives with grammatically feminine nouns and more stereotypically male adjectives with grammatically masculine nouns. We were not able to replicate the results either in a word association task or in an analogous primed lexical decision task. This suggests that the results of the original experiment were either an artifact of some non-documented aspect of the experimental procedure or a statistical fluke. The question whether speakers assign sex-based interpretations to grammatical gender categories at all cannot be answered definitively, as the results in the published literature vary consider-ably. However, our experiments show that if such an effect exists, it is not strong enough to be measured indirectly via the priming of adjectives by nouns.

Abstract

The human language processor is conceived as a system that consists of several interrelated subsystems. Each subsystem performs a specific task in the complex process of language comprehension and production. A subsystem receives a particular input, performs certain specific operations on this input and yields a particular output. The subsystems can be characterized in terms of the transformations that relate the input representations to the output representations. An important issue in describing the language processing system is to identify the subsystems and to specify the relations between the subsystems. These relations can be conceived in two different ways. In one conception the subsystems are autonomous. They are related to each other only by the input-output channels. The operations in one subsystem are not affected by another system. The subsystems are modular, that is they are independent. In the other conception, the different subsystems influence each other. A subsystem affects the processes in another subsystem. In this conception there is an interaction between the subsystems.

Abstract

An inference is defined as the information that is not expressed explicitly by the text but is derived on the basis of the understander's knowledge and is encoded in the mental representation of the text. Inferencing is considered as a central component in discourse understanding. Experimental methods to detect inferences, established findings, and some developments are reviewed. Attention is paid to the relation between inference processes and the brain.

Abstract

To what extent are the planning processes involved in producing sentences fine-tuned to grammatical properties of specific languages? In this chapter we survey the small body of cross-linguistic research that bears on this question, focusing in particular on recent evidence from eye-tracking studies. Because eye-tracking methods provide a very fine-grained temporal measure of how conceptual and linguistic planning unfold in real time, they serve as an important complement to standard psycholinguistic methods. Moreover, the advent of portable eye-trackers in recent years has, for the first time, allowed eye-tracking techniques to be used with language populations that are located far away from university laboratories. This has created the exciting opportunity to extend the typological base of vision-based psycholinguistic research and address key questions in language production with new language comparisons.

Abstract

This chapter describes topic management in the Papuan language Usan. The notion of ‘topic’ is defined by its pre-theoretical meaning ‘what someone’s speech is about’. This notion cannot be restricted to simple clausal or sentential constructions, but requires the wider context of long stretches of natural text. The tracking of a topic is examined in its relationship to clause combining mechanisms. Coordinating clause chaining with its switch reference mechanism is contrasted with subordinating strategies called ‘domain-creating’ constructions. These different strategies are identified by language-specific signals, such as intonation and morphosyntactic cues like nominalizations and scope of negation and other modalities.

Abstract

Recent research suggests that the evolution of language is affected by the inductive biases of its learners. I suggest that there is an implicit assumption that one of these biases is to expect a single linguistic system in the input. Given the prevalence of bilingual cultures, this may not be a valid abstraction. This is illustrated by demonstrating that the ‘minimal naming game’ model, in which a shared lexicon evolves in a population of agents, includes an implicit mutual exclusivity bias. Since recent research suggests that children raised in bilingual cultures do not exhibit mutual exclusivity, the individual learning algorithm of the agents is not as abstract as it appears to be. A modification of this model demonstrates that communicative success can be achieved without mutual exclusivity. It is concluded that complex cultural phenomena, such as bilingualism, do not necessarily result from complex individual learning mechanisms. Rather, the cultural process itself can bring about this complexity.

Abstract

Matsuzawa (2012) presented work at Evolang demonstrating the working memory abilities of chimpanzees. (Inoue & Matsuzawa, 2007) found that chimpanzees can correctly remember the location of 9 randomly arranged numerals displayed for 210ms - shorter than an average human eye saccade. Humans, however, perform poorly at this task. Matsuzawa suggests a semantic link hypothesis: while chimps have good visual, eidetic memory, humans are good at symbolic associations. The extra information in the semantic, linguistic links that humans possess increase the load on working memory and make this task difficult for them. We were interested to see if a wider search could find humans that matched the performance of the chimpanzees. We created an online version of the experiment and challenged people to play. We also attempted to run a non-semantic version of the task to see if this made the task easier. We found that, while humans can perform better than Inoue and Matsuzawa (2007) suggest, chimpanzees can perform better still. We also found no evidence to support the semantic link hypothesis.

Abstract

Conversation analysis (CA) is an approach to the study of language and social interaction that puts at center stage its sequential development. The chain of initiating and responding actions that characterizes any interaction is a source of internal evidence for the meaning of social behavior as it exposes the understandings that participants themselves give of what one another is doing. Such an analysis requires the close and repeated inspection of audio and video recordings of naturally occurring interaction, supported by transcripts and other forms of annotation. Distributional regularities are complemented by a demonstration of participants' orientation to deviant behavior. CA has long maintained a constructive dialogue and reciprocal influence with linguistic anthropology. This includes a recent convergence on the cross-linguistic and cross-cultural study of social interaction.