Publications

Abstract

To achieve true interoperability for valuable linguistic resources different levels of variation need to be addressed. ISO Technical Committee 37, Terminology and other language and content resources, is developing a Data Category Registry. This registry will provide a reusable set of data categories. A new implementation, dubbed ISOcat, of the registry is currently under construction. This paper shortly describes the new data model for data categories that will be introduced in this implementation. It goes on with a sketch of the standardization process. Completed data categories can be reused by the community. This is done by either making a selection of data categories using the ISOcat web interface, or by other tools which interact with the ISOcat system using one of its various Application Programming Interfaces. Linguistic resources that use data categories from the registry should include persistent references, e.g. in the metadata or schemata of the resource, which point back to their origin. These data category references can then be used to determine if two or more resources share common semantics, thus providing a level of interoperability close to the source data and a promising layer for semantic alignment on higher levels

Abstract

Language documentation involves linguistic analysis of the collected material, which is typically done manually. Automatic methods for language processing usually require large corpora. The method presented in this paper uses techniques from bioinformatics and contextual information to morphologically analyze raw text corpora. This paper presents initial results of the method when applied on a small Kilivila corpus.

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.

Abstract

The geographical region of Insular South East Asia and New Guinea is well-known as an
area of mega-biodiversity. Less well-known is the extreme linguistic diversity in this area:
over a quarter of the world’s 6,000 languages are spoken here. As small minority languages,
most of them will cease to be spoken in the coming few generations. The project described
here ensures the preservation of unique records of languages and the cultures encapsulated
by them in the region. The language resources were gathered by twenty linguists at,
or in collaboration with, Dutch universities over the last 40 years, and were compiled and
archived in collaboration with The Language Archive (TLA) at the Max Planck Institute in
Nijmegen. The resulting archive constitutes a collection ofmultimediamaterials and written
documents from 48 languages in Insular South East Asia and West New Guinea. At TLA,
the data was archived according to state-of-the-art standards (TLA holds the Data Seal of
Approval): the component metadata infrastructure CMDI was used; all metadata categories
as well as relevant units of annotation were linked to the ISO data category registry ISOcat.
This guaranteed proper integration of the language resources into the CLARIN framework.
Through the archive, future speaker communities and researchers will be able to extensively
search thematerials for answers to their own questions, even if they do not themselves know the language, and even if the language dies.

Abstract

This chapter explores the expression of placement (or Goal-oriented) and removal (or Source-oriented) events by speakers of Polish (a West Slavic language). Its aim is to investigate the hypothesis known as ‘Source/Goal asymmetry’ according to which languages tend to favor the expression of Goals (e.g., into, onto) and to encode them more systematically and in a more fine-grained way than Sources (e.g., from, out of). The study provides both evidence and counter-evidence for Source/Goal asymmetry. On the one hand, it shows that Polish speakers use a greater variety of verbs to convey Manner and/or mode of manipulation in the expression of placement, encoding such events in a more fine-grained manner than removal events. The expression of placement is also characterized by a greater variety of verb prefixes conveying Path and prepositional phrases (including prepositions and case markers) conveying Ground. On the other hand, the study reveals that Polish speakers attend to Sources as often as to Goals, revealing no evidence for an attentional bias toward the endpoints of events.

Abstract

Using real-time eye-movement measures, we asked how a fantastical discourse context competes with stored representations of semantic and world knowledge to influence children's and adults' moment-by-moment interpretation of a story. Seven-year- olds were less effective at bypassing stored semantic and world knowledge during real-time interpretation than adults. Nevertheless, an effect of discourse context on comprehension was still apparent.

Abstract

In different fields of the humanities annotations of multimodal resources are a necessary component of the research workflow. Examples include linguistics, psychology, anthropology, etc. However, creation of those annotations is a very laborious task, which can take 50 to 100 times the length of the annotated media, or more. This can be significantly improved by applying innovative audio and video processing algorithms, which analyze the recordings and provide automated annotations. This is the aim of the AVATecH project, which is a collaboration of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI) and the Fraunhofer institutes HHI and IAIS. In this paper we present a set of results of automated annotation together with an evaluation of their quality.

Abstract

Digital processing of medical images has helped physicians and patients during past years by allowing examination and diagnosis on a very precise level. Nowadays possibly the biggest deal of support it can offer for modern healthcare is the use of high performance computing architectures to treat the huge amounts of data that can be collected by modern acquisition devices. This paper presents a parallel processing implementation of an image segmentation algorithm that operates on a computer cluster equipped with 10 processing units. Thanks to well-organized distribution of the workload we manage to significantly shorten the execution time of the developed algorithm and reach a performance gain very close to linear.

Abstract

Introduction Human spoken communication is multimodal, i.e. it encompasses both speech and gesture. Acoustic properties of voice, body movements, facial expression, etc. are an inherent and meaningful part of spoken interaction; they can provide attitudinal, grammatical and semantic information. In the recent years interest in audio-visual corpora has been rising rapidly as they enable investigation of different communicative modalities and provide more holistic view on communication (Kipp et al. 2009). Moreover, for some languages such corpora are the only available resource, as is the case for endangered languages for which no written resources exist.

Abstract

In this paper we describe audio and video processing algorithms that are developed in the scope of AVATecH project. The purpose of these algorithms is to shorten the time taken by manual annotation of audio and video recordings by extracting features from media files and creating semi-automated annotations. We show that the use of such supporting algorithms can shorten the annotation time to 30-50% of the time necessary to perform a fully manual annotation of the same kind.

Abstract

It is argued that the dominantly successive nature of language is largely mode-independent and holds equally for sign and for spoken language. A preliminary distinction is made between what is simultaneous or successive in the signal, and what is in the process; these need not coincide, and it is the successiveness of the process that is at stake. It is then discussed extensively for the word/sign level, and in a more preliminary fashion for the clause and discourse level that online processes are parallel in that they can simultaneously draw on various sources of knowledge (syntactic, semantic, pragmatic), but successive in that they can work at the interpretation of only one unit at a time. This seems to hold for both sign and spoken language. In the final section, conjectures are made about possible evolutionary explanations for these properties of language processing.

Abstract

This paper describes the linguistic treatment of placement events in the Rossel Island (Papua New Guinea) language Yélî Dnye. Yélî Dnye is unusual in treating PUT and TAKE events symmetrically with a remarkable consistency. In what follows, we first provide a brief background for the language, then describe the six core PUT/TAKE verbs that were drawn upon by Yélî Dnye speakers to describe the great majority of the PUT/TAKE stimuli clips, along with some of their grammatical properties. In Section 5 we describe alternative verbs usable in particular circumstances and give an indication of the basis for variability in responses across speakers. Section 6 presents some reasons why the Yélî verb pattern for expressing PUT and TAKE events is of broad interest.

Abstract

The essential insight of speech act theory was that when we use language, we perform actions—in a more modern parlance, core language use in interaction is a form of joint action. Over the last thirty years, speech acts have been relatively neglected in linguistic pragmatics, although important work has been done especially in conversation analysis. Here we review the core issues—the identifying characteristics, the degree of universality, the problem of multiple functions, and the puzzle of speech act recognition. Special attention is drawn to the role of conversation structure, probabilistic linguistic cues, and plan or sequence inference in speech act recognition, and to the centrality of deep recursive structures in sequences of speech acts in conversation

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

Previous research has shown that repeated interactions can cause iconicity in signals to reduce. However, data from several recent studies has shown the opposite trend: an increase in iconicity as the result of repeated interactions. Here, we discuss whether signals may become less or more iconic as a result of the modality used to produce them. We review several recent experimental results before presenting new data from multi-modal signals, where visual input creates audio feedback. Our results show that the growth in iconicity present in the audio information may come at a cost to iconicity in the visual information. Our results have implications for how we think about and measure iconicity in artificial signalling experiments. Further, we discuss how iconicity in real world speech may stem from auditory, kinetic or visual information, but iconicity in these different modalities may conflict.

Abstract

Young children demonstrate the ability to make inferences about the preferences of other agents based on their choices. However, there exists no overarching account of what children are doing when they learn about preferences or how they use that knowledge. We use a rational model of preference learning, drawing on ideas from economics and computer science, to explain the behavior of children in several recent experiments. Specifically, we show how a simple econometric model can be extended to capture two- to four-year-olds’ use of statistical information in inferring preferences, and their generalization of these preferences.

Abstract

We examined how communicators can switch between speaker and listener role with such accurate timing. During conversations, the majority of role transitions happens with a gap or overlap of only a few hundred milliseconds. This suggests that listeners can predict when the turn of the current speaker is going to end. Our hypothesis is that listeners know when a turn ends because they know how it ends. Anticipating the last words of a turn can help the next speaker in predicting when the turn will end, and also in anticipating the content of the turn, so that an appropriate response can be prepared in advance. We used the stimuli material of an earlier experiment (De Ruiter, Mitterer & Enfield, 2006), in which subjects were listening to turns from natural conversations and had to press a button exactly when the turn they were listening to ended. In the present experiment, we investigated if the subjects can complete those turns when only an initial fragment of the turn is presented to them. We found that the subjects made better predictions about the last words of those turns that had more accurate responses in the earlier button press experiment.

Abstract

This Field Manual entry has been superceded by the 2009 version:
https://doi.org/10.17617/2.883570

Abstract

In this task we aim to find what the best exemplars or “focal colours” of each basic colour term is in our field languages. This is an important part of the evidence we need in order to understand the colour data collected using 'The Language of Vision I: Colour'. This task consists of an experiment where participants pick out the best exemplar for the colour terms in their language. The goal is to establish language specific focal colours.

Abstract

The project that we describe in this chapter has the theme ‘Language of the senses’. This theme is
based on the research of Asifa Majid and her team regarding the influence of language and culture on
sensory perception. The chapter consists of two sections. Section 2.1 describes how different sensory
perceptions are spoken of in different languages. Teachers can use this section as substantive preparation
before they launch this theme in the classroom. Section 2.2 describes how teachers can handle
this theme in accordance with the seven phases of inquiry-based learning. Chapter 1, in which the
general guideline of the seven phases is described, forms the basis for this. We therefore recommend
the use of chapter 1 as the starting point for the execution of a project in the classroom. This chapter
provides the thematic additions.

Abstract

Scholars disagree about the extent to which language can tell us
about conceptualisation of the world. Some believe that language
is a direct window onto concepts: Having a word ‘‘bird’’, ‘‘table’’ or
‘‘sour’’ presupposes the corresponding underlying concept, BIRD,
TABLE, SOUR. Others disagree. Words are thought to be uninformative,
or worse, misleading about our underlying conceptual representations;
after all, our mental worlds are full of ideas that we
struggle to express in language. How could this be so, argue sceptics,
if language were a direct window on our inner life? In this presentation,
I consider what language can tell us about the
conceptualisation of taste. By considering linguistic data from
twenty unrelated cultures – varying in subsistence mode (huntergatherer
to industrial), ecological zone (rainforest jungle to desert),
dwelling type (rural and urban), and so forth – I argue any single language is, indeed, impoverished about what it can reveal about
taste. But recurrent lexicalisation patterns across languages can
provide valuable insights about human taste experience. Moreover,
language patterning is part of the data that a good theory of taste
perception has to be answerable for. Taste researchers, therefore,
cannot ignore the crosslinguistic facts.

Abstract

Taal der zintuigen gaat over de invloed van taal en cultuur op zintuiglijke waarnemingen. Hoe omschrijf je wat je ziet, voelt, proeft of ruikt? In sommige culturen zijn er veel verschillende woorden voor kleur, in andere culturen juist weer heel weinig. Worden we geboren met deze verschillende kleurgroepen? En bepaalt hoe je ergens over praat ook wat je waarneemt?

Abstract

La ciencia moderna nace de la conjunción entre postulados teóricos y el desarrollo de una infraestructura tecnológica que permite observar los hechos de manera adecuada, realizar experimentos y verificar las hipótesis. Desde Galileo, ciencia y tecnología han avanzado conjuntamente. En el mundo occidental, la ciencia ha evolucionado desde pro-puestas puramente especulativas (basadas en postulados apriorísticos) hasta el uso de métodos experimentales y estadísticos para explicar mejor nuestras observaciones. La tecnología se hermana con la ciencia facilitando al investigador una aproximación adecuada a los hechos que pretende explicar. Así, Galileo, para observar los cuerpos celestes, mejoró el utillaje óptico, lo que le permitió un acercamiento más preciso al objeto de estudio y, en consecuencia, unos fundamentos más sólidos para su propuesta teórica. De modo similar, actualmente el desarrollo tecnológico digital ha posibilitado la extracción masiva de datos y el análisis estadístico de éstos para verificar las hipótesis de partida: la lingüística no ha podido dar el paso desde la pura especulación hacia el análisis estadístico de los hechos hasta la aparición de las tecnologías digitales.

Abstract

Speech rate is known to modulate perception of temporally ambiguous speech sounds. For instance, a vowel may be perceived as short when the immediate speech context is slow, but as long when the context is fast. Yet, effects of long-term tracking of speech rate are largely unexplored. Two experiments tested whether long-term tracking of rate influences perception of the temporal Dutch vowel contrast /ɑ/-/a:/. In Experiment 1, one low-rate group listened to 'neutral' rate speech from talker A and to slow speech from talker B. Another high-rate group was exposed to the same neutral speech from A, but to fast speech from B. Between-group comparison of the 'neutral' trials revealed that the low-rate group reported a higher proportion of /a:/ in A's 'neutral' speech, indicating that A sounded faster when B was slow. Experiment 2 tested whether one's own speech rate also contributes to effects of long-term tracking of rate. Here, talker B's speech was replaced by playback of participants' own fast or slow speech. No evidence was found that one's own voice affected perception of talker A in larger speech contexts. These results carry implications for our understanding of the mechanisms involved in rate-dependent speech perception and of dialogue.

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.

Abstract

Words are reduced in spontaneous speech. If reductions are constrained by functional (i.e., perception and production) constraints, they should not be arbitrary. This hypothesis was tested by examing the pronunciations of high- to mid-frequency words in a Dutch and a German spontaneous speech corpus. In logistic-regression models the "reduction likelihood" of a phoneme was predicted by fixed-effect predictors such as position within the word, word length, word frequency, and stress, as well as random effects such as phoneme identity and word. The models for Dutch and German show many communalities. This is in line with the assumption that similar functional constraints influence reductions in both languages.

Abstract

Learning how words refer to aspects of the environment is a complex task, but one that is supported by numerous cues within the environment which constrain the possibilities for matching words to their intended referents. In this paper we tested the predictions of a computational model of multiple cue integration for word learning, that predicted variation in the presence of cues provides an optimal learning situation. In a cross-situational learning task with adult participants, we varied the reliability of presence of distributional, prosodic, and gestural cues. We found that the best learning occurred when cues were often present, but not always. The effect of variability increased the salience of individual cues for the learner, but resulted in robust learning that was not vulnerable to individual cues’ presence or absence. Thus, variability of multiple cues in the language-learning environment provided the optimal circumstances for word learning.

Abstract

Studies have shown that listeners segmenting unfamiliar languages transfer native-language (L1) segmentation cues. These studies, however, conflated L1 and recent linguistic exposure. The present study investigates the relative influences of L1 and recent linguistic exposure on the use of prosodic cues for segmenting an artificial language (AL). Participants were L1-French listeners, high-proficiency L2-French L1-English listeners, and L1-English listeners without functional knowledge of French. The prosodic cue assessed was F0 rise, which is word-final in French, but in English tends to be word-initial. 30 participants heard a 20-minute AL speech stream with word-final boundaries marked by F0 rise, and decided in a subsequent listening task which of two words (without word-final F0 rise) had been heard in the speech stream. The analyses revealed a marginally significant effect of L1 (all listeners) and, importantly, a significant effect of recent linguistic exposure (L1-French and L2-French listeners): accuracy increased with decreasing time in the US since the listeners’ last significant (3+ months) stay in a French-speaking environment. Interestingly, no effect of L2 proficiency was found (L2-French listeners).

Abstract

Many languages have general or “light” verbs used by speakers to describe a wide range of situations owing to their relatively schematic meanings, e.g., the English verb do that can be used to describe many different kinds of actions, or the verb put that labels a range of types of placement of objects at locations. Such semantically bleached verbs often become grammaticalized and used to encode an extended (set of) meaning(s), e.g., Tamil veyyii ‘put/place’ is used to encode causative meaning in periphrastic causatives (e.g., okkara veyyii ‘make sit’, nikka veyyii ‘make stand’). But do general verbs in different languages have the same kinds of (schematic) meanings and extensional ranges? Or do they reveal different, perhaps even cross-cutting, ways of structuring the same semantic domain in different languages? These questions require detailed crosslinguistic investigation using comparable methods of eliciting data. The present study is a first step in this direction, and focuses on the use of general verbs to describe events of placement and removal in two South Asian languages, Hindi and Tamil.

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

Language resources can be divided into structural resources treating phonology, morphosyntax, semantics etc. and resources treating the social, demographic, ethnic, political context. A third type are meta-resources, like bibliographies, which provide access to the resources of the first two kinds. This poster will present the Glottolog/Langdoc project, a comprehensive bibliography providing web access to 180k bibliographical records to (mainly) low visibility resources from low-density languages. The resources are annotated for macro-area, content language, and document type and are available in XHTML and RDF.

Abstract

This article explores the expression of placement and removal events in Moroccan Arabic, particularly the semantic features of ‘putting’ and ‘taking’ verbs, classified in accordance with their combination with Goal and/or Source NPs. Moroccan Arabic verbs encode a variety of components of placement and removal events, including containment, attachment, features of the figure, and trajectory. Furthermore, accidental events are distinguished from deliberate events either by the inherent semantics of predicates or denoted syntactically. The postures of the Figures, in spite of some predicates distinguishing them, are typically not specified as they are in other languages, such as Dutch. Although Ground locations are frequently mentioned in both source-oriented and goal-oriented clauses, they are used more often in goal-oriented clauses.

Abstract

This paper offers a structural and semantic analysis of expressions of caused motion in Lowland Chontal of Oaxaca, an indigenous language of southern Mexico. The data were collected using a video stimulus designed to elicit a wide range of caused motion event descriptions. The most frequent event types in the corpus depict caused motion to and from relations of support and containment, fundamental notions in the de­scription of spatial relations between two entities and critical semantic components of the linguistic encoding of caused motion in this language. Formal features of verbal construction type and argument realization are examined by sorting event descriptions into semantic types of placement and removal, to and from support and to and from containment. Together with typological factors that shape the distribution of spatial semantics and referent expression, separate treatments of support and containment relations serve to clarify notable asymmetries in patterns of predicate type and argument realization.

Abstract

Sign languages stand out in that there is high prevalence of
conventionalised linguistic forms that map directly to their
referent (i.e., iconic). Hearing adults show low performance
when asked to guess the meaning of iconic signs suggesting
that their iconic features are largely inaccessible to them.
However, it has not been investigated whether speakers’
gestures, which also share the property of iconicity, may
assist non-signers in guessing the meaning of signs. Results
from a pantomime generation task (Study 1) show that
speakers’ gestures exhibit a high degree of systematicity, and
share different degrees of form overlap with signs (full,
partial, and no overlap). Study 2 shows that signs with full
and partial overlap are more accurately guessed and are
assigned higher iconicity ratings than signs with no overlap.
Deaf and hearing adults converge in their iconic depictions
for some concepts due to the shared conceptual knowledge
and manual-visual modality.

Abstract

Most research focuses function of gesture independent of its link to the speech it accompanies and the coexpressive functions it has together with speech. This chapter instead approaches gesture in relation to its communicative function in relation to speech, and demonstrates how it is shaped by the linguistic encoding of a speaker’s message. Drawing on crosslinguistic research with adults and children as well as bilinguals on iconic/pointing gesture production it shows that the specific language speakers use modulates the rate and the shape of the iconic gesture production of the same events. The findings challenge the claims aiming to understand gesture’s function for “thinking only” in adults and during development.

Abstract

Gestures are meaningful movements of the body, the hands, and the face during communication,
which accompany the production of both spoken and signed utterances. Recent
research has shown that gestures are an integral part of language and that they contribute
semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic information to the linguistic utterance. Furthermore,
they reveal internal representations of the language user during communication in ways
that might not be encoded in the verbal part of the utterance. Firstly, this chapter summarizes
research on the role of gesture in spoken languages. Subsequently, it gives an overview
of how gestural components might manifest themselves in sign languages, that is,
in a situation in which both gesture and sign are expressed by the same articulators.
Current studies are discussed that address the question of whether gestural components are the same or different in the two language modalities from a semiotic as well as from a cognitive and processing viewpoint. Understanding the role of gesture in both sign and
spoken language contributes to our knowledge of the human language faculty as a multimodal communication system.

Abstract

Wanneer iemand goed is in het spreken van meerdere talen, wordt wel gezegd dat zo iemand een talenknobbel heeft. Iedereen weet dat dat niet letterlijk bedoeld is: iemand met een talenknobbel herkennen we niet aan een grote bult op zijn hoofd. Toch dacht men vroeger wel degelijk dat mensen een letterlijke talenknobbel konden ontwikkelen. Een goed ontwikkeld taalvermogen zou gepaard gaan met het groeien van het hersengebied dat hiervoor verantwoordelijk was. Dit deel van het brein zou zelfs zo groot kunnen worden dat het van binnenuit tegen de schedel drukte, met name rond de ogen. Nu weten we wel beter. Maar waar in het brein bevindt de taal zich dan wel precies?

Abstract

This paper examines the use of iconic words in early conversations between children and caregivers. The longitudinal data include a span of six observations of 35 children-parent dyads in the same semi-structured activity. Our findings show that children’s speech initially has a high proportion of iconic words, and over time, these words become diluted by an increase of arbitrary words. Parents’ speech is also initially high in iconic words, with a decrease in the proportion of iconic words over time – in this case driven by the use of fewer iconic words. The level and development of iconicity are related to individual differences in the children’s cognitive skills. Our findings fit with the hypothesis that iconicity facilitates early word learning and may play an important role in learning to produce new words.

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the semantic and pragmatic uses of space. The questions addressed concern how sign space (i.e. the area of space in front of the signer’s body) is used for meaning construction, how locations in sign space are associated with discourse referents, and how signers choose to structure sign space for their communicative intents. The chapter gives an overview of linguistic analyses of the use of space, starting with the distinction between syntactic and topographic uses of space and the different types of signs that function to establish referent-location associations, and moving to analyses based on mental spaces and conceptual blending theories. Semantic-pragmatic conventions for organizing sign space are discussed, as well as spatial devices notable in the visual-spatial modality (particularly, classifier predicates and signing perspective), which influence and determine the way meaning is created in sign space. Finally, the special role of simultaneity in sign languages is discussed, focusing on the semantic and discourse-pragmatic functions of simultaneous constructions.

Abstract

In Kalasha, an Indo-Aryan language spoken in Northwest Pakistan, the linguistic encoding of ‘put’ and ‘take’ events reveals a symmetry between lexical ‘put’ and ‘take’ verbs that implies ‘placement on’ and ‘removal from’ a supporting surface. As regards ‘placement in’ and ‘removal from’ an enclosure, the data reveal a lexical asymmetry as ‘take’ verbs display a larger degree of linguistic elaboration of the Figure-Ground relation and the type of caused motion than ‘put’ verbs. When considering syntactic patterns, more instances of asymmetry between these two event types show up. The analysis presented here supports the proposal that an asymmetry exists in the encoding of goals versus sources as suggested in Nam (2004) and Ikegami (1987), but it calls into question the statement put forward by Regier and Zheng (2007) that endpoints (goals) are more finely differentiated semantically than starting points (sources).

Abstract

Cognitive neuroscience approaches the brain as a cognitive system: a system that functionally is conceptualized in terms of information processing. We outline some aspects of this concept and consider a physical system to be an information processing device when a subclass of its physical states can be viewed as representational/cognitive and transitions between these can be conceptualized as a process operating on these states by implementing operations on the corresponding representational structures. We identify a generic and fundamental problem in cognition: sequentially organized structured processing. Structured sequence processing provides the brain, in an essential sense, with its processing logic. In an approach addressing this problem, we illustrate how to integrate levels of analysis within a framework of adaptive dynamical systems. We note that the dynamical system framework lends itself to a description of asynchronous event-driven devices, which is likely to be important in cognition because the brain appears to be an asynchronous processing system. We use the human language faculty and natural language processing as a concrete example through out.

Abstract

Two eye-tracking experiments tested whether native listeners can adapt
to reductions in casual Dutch speech. Listeners were exposed to segmental
([b] > [m]), syllabic (full-vowel-deletion), or no reductions. In a subsequent
test phase, all three listener groups were tested on how efficiently they could
recognize both types of reduced words. In the first Experiment’s exposure
phase, the (un)reduced target words were predictable. The segmental reductions
were completely consistent (i.e., involved the same input sequences).
Learning about them was found to be pattern-specific and generalized in the
test phase to new reduced /b/-words. The syllabic reductions were not consistent
(i.e., involved variable input sequences). Learning about them was
weak and not pattern-specific. Experiment 2 examined effects of word repetition
and predictability. The (un-)reduced test words appeared in the exposure
phase and were not predictable. There was no evidence of learning for
the segmental reductions, probably because they were not predictable during
exposure. But there was word-specific learning for the vowel-deleted words.
The results suggest that learning about reductions is pattern-specific and
generalizes to new words if the input is consistent and predictable. With
variable input, there is more likely to be adaptation to a general speaking
style and word-specific learning.

Abstract

A key challenge for cognitive neuroscience is to decipher the representational schemes of the brain. A recent class of decoding algorithms for fMRI data, stimulus-feature-based encoding models, is becoming increasingly popular for inferring the dimensions of neural representational spaces from stimulus-feature spaces. We argue that such inferences are not always valid, because decoding can occur even if the neural representational space and the stimulus-feature space use different representational schemes. This can happen when there is a systematic mapping between them. In a simulation, we successfully decoded the binary representation of numbers from their decimal features. Since binary and decimal number systems use different representations, we cannot conclude that the binary representation encodes decimal features. The same argument applies to the decoding of neural patterns from stimulus-feature spaces and we urge caution in inferring the nature of the neural code from such methods. We discuss ways to overcome these inferential limitations.

Abstract

A classic discussion about visual imagery is whether it affords reinterpretation, like discovering two interpretations in the duck/rabbit illustration. Recent findings converge on reinterpretation being possible in visual imagery, suggesting functional equivalence with pictorial representations. However, it is unclear whether such reinterpretations are necessarily a visual-pictorial achievement. To assess this, 68 participants were briefly presented 2-d ambiguous figures. One figure was presented visually, the other via manual touch alone. Afterwards participants mentally rotated the memorized figures as to discover a novel interpretation. A portion (20.6%) of the participants detected a novel interpretation in visual imagery, replicating previous research. Strikingly, 23.6% of participants were able to reinterpret figures they had only felt. That reinterpretation truly involved haptic processes was further supported, as some participants performed co-thought gestures on an imagined figure during retrieval. These results are promising for further development of an Enactivist approach to imagination.

Abstract

For the beginning language learner, communicative input is not based on linguistic codes alone. This study investigated two extralinguistic factors which are important for infants’ language development: the type of ongoing shared activity and non-verbal, deictic gestures. The natural interactions of 39 caregivers and their 12-month-old infants were recorded in two semi-natural contexts: a free play situation based on action and manipulation of objects, and a situation based on regard of objects, broadly analogous to an exhibit. Results show that the type of shared activity structures both caregivers’ language usage and caregivers’ and infants’ gesture usage. Further, there is a specific pattern with regard to how caregivers integrate speech with particular deictic gesture types. The findings demonstrate a pervasive influence of shared activities on human communication, even before language has emerged. The type of shared activity and caregivers’ systematic integration of specific forms of deictic gestures with language provide infants with a multimodal scaffold for a usage-based acquisition of language.

Abstract

This paper explores the semantics of placement and removal verbs in Ākhoe Hai om based on event descriptions elicited with a set of video stimuli. After a brief sketch of the morphosyntax of placement/removal constructions in Ākhoe Haiom, four situation types are identified semantically that cover both placement and removal events. The language exhibits a clear tendency to make more fine-grained semantic distinctions in placement verbs, as opposed to semantically more general removal verbs.

Abstract

Cognitive research is often focused on experimental condition-driven reactions. Ethological studies frequently
rely on the observation of naturally occurring specific behaviors. In both cases, subjects are filmed during the
study, so that afterwards behaviors can be coded on video. Coding should typically be blind to experimental
conditions, but often requires more information than that present on video. We introduce a method for blindcoding
of behavioral videos that takes care of both issues via three main innovations. First, of particular
significance for playback studies, it allows creation of a “soundtrack” of the study, that is, a track composed of
synthesized sounds representing different aspects of the experimental conditions, or other events, over time.
Second, it facilitates coding behavior using this audio track, together with the possibly muted original video.
This enables coding blindly to conditions as required, but not ignoring other relevant events. Third, our method
makes use of freely available, multi-platform software, including scripts we developed.

Abstract

Dutch listeners' looks to printed words were tracked while they listened to instructions to click with their mouse on one of them. When presented with targets from word pairs where the first two syllables were segmentally identical but differed in stress location, listeners used stress information to recognize the target before segmental information disambiguated the words. Furthermore, the amount of lexical competition was influenced by the presence or absence of word-initial stress.

Abstract

Segmental as well as suprasegmental information is used by Dutch listeners to recognize words. The time-course of the effect of suprasegmental stress information on spoken-word recognition was investigated in a previous study, in which we tracked Dutch listeners' looks to arrays of four printed words as they listened to spoken sentences. Each target was displayed along with a competitor that did not differ segmentally in its first two syllables but differed in stress placement (e.g., 'CENtimeter' and 'sentiMENT'). The listeners' eye-movements showed that stress information is used to recognize the target before distinct segmental information is available. Here, we examine the role of durational information in this effect. Two experiments showed that initial-syllable duration, as a cue to lexical stress, is not interpreted dependent on the speaking rate of the preceding carrier sentence. This still held when other stress cues like pitch and amplitude were removed. Rather, the speaking rate of the preceding carrier affected the speed of word recognition globally, even though the rate of the target itself was not altered. Stress information modulated lexical competition, but did so independently of the rate of the preceding carrier, even if duration was the only stress cue present.

Abstract

n applied linguistics (AL), researchers have always been concerned with second language (L2) learners' knowledge of the target language (TL), investigating the development of TL grammar, vocabulary, and phonology, for instance.

Abstract

The recognition of emotions of disgust, anger and fear have been shown to be significantly impaired in Huntington’s disease (eg,Sprengelmeyer et al, 1997, 2006; Gray et al, 1997; Milders et al, 2003,Montagne et al, 2006; Johnson et al, 2007; De Gelder et al, 2008). The relative impairment of these emotions might have implied a recognition impairment specific to negative emotions. Could the asymmetric recognition deficits be due not to the complexity of the emotion but rather reflect the complexity of the task? In the current study, 15 Huntington’s patients and 16 control subjects were presented with negative and positive non-speech emotional vocalisations that were to be identified as anger, fear, sadness, disgust, achievement, pleasure and amusement in a forced-choice paradigm. This experiment more accurately matched the negative emotions with positive emotions in a homogeneous modality. The resulting dually impaired ability of Huntington’s patients to identify negative and positive non-speech emotional vocalisations correctly provides evidence for an overall emotional recognition deficit in the disease. These results indicate that previous findings of a specificity in emotional recognition deficits might instead be due to the limitations of the visual modality. Previous experiments may have found an effect of emotional specificy due to the presence of a single positive emotion, happiness, in the midst of multiple negative emotions. In contrast with the previous literature, the study presented here points to a global deficit in the recognition of emotional sounds.