Publications

Abstract

This study investigates the psycholinguistic process underlying triggered codeswitching – codeswitching facilitated by the occurrence of cognates – within the context of conversational dynamics. It confirms that, in natural bilingual speech, lexical selection of cognates can facilitate codeswitching by enhancing the activation of the non-selected language. Analyses of a large-scale corpus of Welsh–English conversational speech showed that 1) producing cognates facilitated codeswitching, 2) speakers who generally produced more cognates generally codeswitched more, even in clauses that did not contain cognates, 3) larger numbers of cognates in a clause increased the likelihood of codeswitching, 4) codeswitching temporarily remained facilitated after the production of cognates, and 5) hearing rather than producing cognates did not facilitate codeswitching. The findings confirm the validity of the proposed cognitive account of triggered codeswitching, and clarify the relation between the lexical activation of cognates and consecutive language choice, in accord with current insights in lexical processing.

Abstract

How are events framed in narrative? Speakers of English (a 'satellite-framed' language), when 'reading' Mercer Mayer's wordless picture book 'Frog, Where Are You?', find the story self-evident: a boy has a dog and a pet frog; the frog escapes and runs away; the boy and dog look for it across hill and dale, through woods and over a cliff, until they find it and return home with a baby frog child of the original pet frog. In Tzeltal, as spoken in a Mayan community in southern Mexico, the story is somewhat different, because the language structures event descriptions differently. Tzeltal is in part a 'verb-framed' language with a set of Path-encoding motion verbs, so that the bare bones of the Frog story can consist of verbs translating as 'go'/'pass by'/'ascend'/ 'descend'/ 'arrive'/'return'. But Tzeltal also has satellite-framing adverbials, grammaticized from the same set of motion verbs, which encode the direction of motion or the orientation of static arrays. Furthermore, motion is not generally encoded barebones, but vivid pictorial detail is provided by positional verbs which can describe the position of the Figure as an outcome of a motion event; motion and stasis are thereby combined in a single event description. (For example: jipot jawal "he has been thrown (by the deer) lying¬_face_upwards_spread-eagled". This paper compares the use of these three linguistic resources in frog narratives from 14 Tzeltal adults and 21 children, looks at their development in the narratives of children between the ages of 4-12, and considers the results in relation to those from Berman and Slobin's (1996) comparative study of adult and child Frog stories.

Abstract

As a turn-design strategy, repeating another has been described for English as a fairly restricted way of constructing a response, which, through re-saying what another speaker just said, is exploitable for claiming epistemic primacy, and thus avoided when a second speaker has no direct experience. Conversations in Mesoamerican languages present a challenge to the generality of this claim. This paper examines the epistemics of dialogic repetition in video-recordings of conversations in three Indigenous languages of Mexico: Tzeltal and Yucatec Maya, both spoken in southeastern Mexico, and Lachixío Zapotec, spoken in Oaxaca. We develop a typology of repetition in different sequential environments. We show that while the functions of repeats in Mesoamerica overlap with the range of repeat functions described for English, there is an additional epistemic environment in the Mesoamerican routine of repeating for affirmation: a responding speaker can repeat to affirm something introduced by another speaker of which s/he has no prior knowledge. We argue that, while dialogic repetition is a universally available turn-design strategy that makes epistemics potentially relevant, cross-cultural comparison reveals that cultural preferences intervene such that, in Mesoamerican conversations, repetition co-constructs knowledge as collective process over which no individual participant has final authority or ownership.

Abstract

When we use our hands to estimate the length of a stick in the Müller-Lyer illusion, we are highly susceptible to the illusion. But when we prepare to act on sticks under the same conditions, we are significantly less susceptible. Here, we asked whether people are susceptible to illusion when they use their hands not to act on objects but to describe them in spontaneous co-speech gestures or conventional sign languages of the deaf. Thirty-two English speakers and 13 American Sign Language signers used their hands to act on, estimate the length of, and describe sticks eliciting the Müller-Lyer illusion. For both gesture and sign, the magnitude of illusion in the description task was smaller than the magnitude of illusion in the estimation task and not different from the magnitude of illusion in the action task. The mechanisms responsible for producing gesture in speech and sign thus appear to operate not on percepts involved in estimation but on percepts derived from the way we act on objects.

Abstract

A major finding in studies of early vocabulary acquisition has been that children tend to learn a lot of nouns early but make do with relatively few verbs, among which semantically general-purpose verbs like do, make, get, have, give, come, go, and be play a prominent role. The preponderance of nouns is explained in terms of nouns labelling concrete objects beings “easier” to learn than verbs, which label relational categories. Nouns label “natural categories” observable in the world, verbs label more linguistically and culturally specific categories of events linking objects belonging to such natural categories (Gentner 1978, 1982; Clark 1993). This view has been challenged recently by data from children learning certain non-Indo-European languges like Korean, where children have an early verb explosion and verbs dominate in early child utterances. Children learning the Mayan language Tzeltal also acquire verbs early, prior to any noun explosion as measured by production. Verb types are roughly equivalent to noun types in children’s beginning production vocabulary and soon outnumber them. At the one-word stage children’s verbs mostly have the form of a root stripped of affixes, correctly segmented despite structural difficulties. Quite early (before the MLU 2.0 point) there is evidence of productivity of some grammatical markers (although they are not always present): the person-marking affixes cross-referencing core arguments, and the completive/incompletive aspectual distinctions. The Tzeltal facts argue against a natural-categories explanation for childre’s early vocabulary, in favor of a view emphasizing the early effects of language-specific properties of the input. They suggest that when and how a child acquires a “verb” category is centrally influenced by the structural properties of the input, and that the semantic structure of the language - where the referential load is concentrated - plays a fundamental role in addition to distributional facts.

Abstract

When Tzeltal children in the Mayan community of Tenejapa, in southern Mexico, begin speaking, their production vocabulary consists predominantly of verb roots, in contrast to the dominance of nouns in the initial vocabulary of first‐language learners of Indo‐European languages. This article proposes that a particular Tzeltal conversational feature—known in the Mayanist literature as "dialogic repetition"—provides a context that facilitates the early analysis and use of verbs. Although Tzeltal babies are not treated by adults as genuine interlocutors worthy of sustained interaction, dialogic repetition in the speech the children are exposed to may have an important role in revealing to them the structural properties of the language, as well as in socializing the collaborative style of verbal interaction adults favor in this community.

Abstract

The surge of research activity focussing on children's acquisition of verbs (e.g., Tomasello and Merriman 1996) addresses some fundamental questions: Just how variable across languages, and across individual children, is the process of verb learning? How specific are arguments to particular verbs in early child language? How does the grammatical category 'Verb' develop? The position of Universal Grammar, that a verb category is early, contrasts with that of Tomasello (1992), Pine and Lieven and their colleagues (1996, in press), and many others, that children develop a verb category slowly, gradually building up subcategorizations of verbs around pragmatic, syntactic, and semantic properties of the language they are exposed to. On this latter view, one would expect the language which the child is learning, the cultural milieu and the nature of the interactions in which the child is engaged, to influence the process of acquiring verb argument structures. This paper explores these issues by examining the development of argument representation in the Mayan language Tzeltal, in both its lexical and verbal cross-referencing forms, and analyzing the semantic and pragmatic factors influencing the form argument representation takes. Certain facts about Tzeltal (the ergative/ absolutive marking, the semantic specificity of transitive and positional verbs) are proposed to affect the representation of arguments. The first 500 multimorpheme combinations of 3 children (aged between 1;8 and 2;4) are examined. It is argued that there is no evidence of semantically light 'pathbreaking' verbs (Ninio 1996) leading the way into word combinations. There is early productivity of cross-referencing affixes marking A, S, and O arguments (although there are systematic omissions). The paper assesses the respective contributions of three kinds of factors to these results - structural (regular morphology), semantic (verb specificity) and pragmatic (the nature of Tzeltal conversational interaction).

Abstract

This is a reprint of the Brown and Levinson 2000 article.

Abstract

This paper compares some features of the interactional details of a Tenejapan (Mexico) court case with the features of social interaction characteristic of ordinary, casual encounters in this society. It is suggested that courtroom behaviour in Tenejapa is a very special form of interaction, in a context that uniquely allows for direct face-to-face confrontation in a society where a premium is placed on interactional restraint. Courtroom speech in Tenejapa directly contraverts norms and conventions that operate in other contexts, and women’s conventionalized polite ‘ways of putting things’ are here used sarcastically to be impolite. Thus, in this society, gender operates across contexts as a ‘master status’, but with gender meanings transformed in the different contexts: forms associated with superficial cooperation and agreement being used to emphasize lack of cooperation, disagreement, and hostility. The implications of this Tenejapan phenomenon for our understanding of the nature of relations between language and gender are explored.

Abstract

This task has two parts: (i) video-taped elicitation of the range of possibilities for referring to persons and places, and (ii) observations of (first) references to persons and places in video-taped natural interaction. The goal of this task is to establish the repertoires of referential terms (and other practices) used for referring to persons and to places in particular languages and cultures, and provide examples of situated use of these kinds of referential practices in natural conversation. This data will form the basis for cross-language comparison, and for formulating hypotheses about general principles underlying the deployment of such referential terms in natural language usage.

Abstract

Interaction, for all that it has an ethological base, is culturally constituted, and how new social members are enculturated into the interactional practices of the society is of critical interest to our understanding of interaction – how much is learned, how variable is it across cultures – as well as to our understanding of the role of culture in children’s social-cognitive development. The goal of this task is to document the nature of caregiver infant interaction in different cultures, especially during the critical age of 9-15 months when children come to have an understanding of others’ intentions. This is of interest to all students of interaction; it does not require specialist knowledge of children.

Abstract

This is a Spanish translation of Brown 1997.

Abstract

This article is a reprint of chapter 1, the introduction to Brown and Levinson, 1987, Politeness: Some universals in language usage (Cambridge University Press).

Abstract

As a rule, listening is easier in first (L1) than second languages (L2); difficult L2 listening can challenge even highly proficient users. We here examine one particular listening function, adaptation to novel talkers, in such a high-proficiency population: Dutch emigrants to Australia, predominantly using English outside the family, but all also retaining L1 proficiency. Using lexically-guided perceptual learning (Norris, McQueen & Cutler, 2003), we investigated these listeners’ adaptation to an ambiguous speech sound, in parallel experiments in both their L1 and their L2. A control study established that perceptual learning outcomes were unaffected by the procedural measures required for this double comparison. The emigrants showed equivalent proficiency in tests in both languages, robust perceptual adaptation in their L2, English, but no adaptation in L1. We propose that adaptation to novel talkers is a language-specific skill requiring regular novel practice; a limited set of known (family) interlocutors cannot meet this requirement.

Abstract

Book reading shows large individual variability and correlates with better language ability and more empathy. This makes reading exposure an interesting variable to study. Research in English suggests that an author recognition test is the most reliable objective assessment of reading frequency. In this article, we describe the efforts we made to build and test a Dutch author recognition test (DART for older participants and DART_R for younger participants). Our data show that the test is reliable and valid, both in the Netherlands and in Belgium (split-half reliability over .9 with university students, significant correlations with language abilities) and can be used with a young, non-university population. The test is free to use for research purposes.

Abstract

Acquisition and processing of written and spoken language is an impressive cognitive accomplishment considering the complexity of the tasks. While only humans seem to have evolved to the fullest extent the capacity that underpins these remarkable feats of development and civilization, the exact nature of such capacity has been subject to ongoing research. In this chapter, we focus on language competence and what makes it unique among the communication systems of different species. We then elaborate on the classical debate between nativist and environmentalist accounts of language acquisition, with reference to evidence for and against the critical period hypothesis. After introducing the regularity embedded in different languages and particularly in drastically different orthographies, we present behavioral and neurophysiological evidence for the sensitivity to systematic mapping between orthography and phonology. Because learning to read is to master such mapping, we assume that the ability to use statistical learning to appreciate the dependency among items would contribute to literacy acquisition. Empirical results from behavioral and neuroimaging experiments conducted in our and other laboratories provide support for the close link between statistical learning and literacy acquisition in native and foreign language. Such findings highlight the significance of domain-general statistical learning to domain-specific language acquisition, and point to an important direction for theories and practices of language education.

Abstract

Neighbours have been found to influence each other’s behaviour (contagion effect). However, little is known about the influence on sport club membership. This while increasing interest has risen for the social role of sport clubs. Sport clubs could bring people from different backgrounds together. A mixed composition is a key element in this social role. Individual characteristics are strong predictors of sport club membership. Western high educated men are more likely to be members. In contrast to people with a non-Western migration background. The neighbourhood is a more fixed meeting place, which provides unique opportunities for people from different backgrounds to interact. This study aims to gain more insight into the influence of neighbours on sport club membership. This research looks especially at the composition of neighbour’s migration background, since they tend to be more or less likely to be members and therefore could encourage of inhibit each other. A population database including the only registry data of all Dutch inhabitants was merged with data of 11 sport unions. The results show a cross-level effect of neighbours on sport club membership. We find a contagion effect of neighbours’ migration background; having a larger proportion of neighbours with a migration background from a non-Western country reduces the odds, as expected. However, this contagion effect was not found for people with a Moroccan or Turkish background.

Abstract

In individuals with synaesthesia specific sensory stimulation leads to unusual concurrent perceptions in the same or a different modality. Recent studies have demonstrated a high co-occurrence between synaesthesia and autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a condition also characterized by altered perception. A potentially shared characteristic of synaesthesia and ASD is a bias towards local (detail-focussed) perception. We investigated whether a bias towards local perception is indeed shared between synaesthesia and ASD. In a neurotypical population, we studied the relation between the degree of autistic traits (measured by the AQ) and the degree of grapheme-colour synaesthesia (measured by a consistency task), as well as whether both are related to a local bias in tasks assessing local/global visual perception. A positive correlation between total AQ scores and the degree of synaesthesia was found. Our study extends previous studies that found a high ASD-synaesthesia co-occurrence in clinical populations. Consistent with the hypothesized local perceptual bias in ASD, scores on the AQ-attention to detail subscale were related to increased performance on an Embedded Figures Task (EFT), and we found evidence for a relation to reduced susceptibility to visual illusions. We found no relation between autistic traits and local visual perception in a motion coherence task (MCT). Also, no relation between synaesthesia and local visual perception was found, although a reduced susceptibility to visual illusions resembled the results obtained for AQ-atttention to detail subscale. A suggested explanation for the absence of a relationship between the degree of synaesthesia and a local bias is that a possible local bias might be more pronounced in supra-threshold synaesthetes (compared to neurotypicals).

Abstract

The field of infancy research faces a difficult challenge: some questions require samples that are simply too large for any one lab to recruit and test. ManyBabies aims to address this problem by forming large-scale collaborations on key theoretical questions in developmental science, while promoting the uptake of Open Science practices. Here, we look back on the first project completed under the ManyBabies umbrella – ManyBabies 1 – which tested the development of infant-directed speech preference. Our goal is to share the lessons learned over the course of the project and to articulate our vision for the role of large-scale collaborations in the field. First, we consider the decisions made in scaling up experimental research for a collaboration involving 100+ researchers and 70+ labs. Next, we discuss successes and challenges over the course of the project, including: protocol design and implementation, data analysis, organizational structures and collaborative workflows, securing funding, and encouraging broad participation in the project. Finally, we discuss the benefits we see both in ongoing ManyBabies projects and in future large-scale collaborations in general, with a particular eye towards developing best practices and increasing growth and diversity in infancy research and psychological science in general. Throughout the paper, we include first-hand narrative experiences, in order to illustrate the perspectives of researchers playing different roles within the project. While this project focused on the unique challenges of infant research, many of the insights we gained can be applied to large-scale collaborations across the broader field of psychology.

Abstract

From the earliest months of life, infants prefer listening to and learn better from infant-directed speech (IDS) than adult-directed speech (ADS). Yet, IDS differs within communities, across languages, and across cultures, both in form and in prevalence. This large-scale, multi-site study used the diversity of bilingual infant experiences to explore the impact of different types of linguistic experience on infants’ IDS preference. As part of the multi-lab ManyBabies project, we compared lab-matched samples of 333 bilingual and 385 monolingual infants’ preference for North-American English IDS (cf. ManyBabies Consortium, in press (MB1)), tested in 17 labs in 7 countries. Those infants were tested in two age groups: 6–9 months (the younger sample) and 12–15 months (the older sample). We found that bilingual and monolingual infants both preferred IDS to ADS, and did not differ in terms of the overall magnitude of this preference. However, amongst bilingual infants who were acquiring North-American English (NAE) as a native language, greater exposure to NAE was associated with a stronger IDS preference, extending the previous finding from MB1 that monolinguals learning NAE as a native language showed a stronger preference than infants unexposed to NAE. Together, our findings indicate that IDS preference likely makes a similar contribution to monolingual and bilingual development, and that infants are exquisitely sensitive to the nature and frequency of different types of language input in their early environments.

Abstract

Rapid response to danger holds an evolutionary advantage. In this positron emission tomography study, phobics were exposed to masked visual stimuli with timings that either allowed awareness or not of either phobic, fear-relevant (e.g., spiders to snake phobics), or neutral images. When the timing did not permit awareness, the amygdala responded to both phobic and fear-relevant stimuli. With time for more elaborate processing, phobic stimuli resulted in an addition of an affective processing network to the amygdala activity, whereas no activity was found in response to fear-relevant stimuli. Also, right prefrontal areas appeared deactivated, comparing aware phobic and fear-relevant conditions. Thus, a shift from top-down control to an affectively driven system optimized for speed was observed in phobic relative to fear-relevant aware processing.

Abstract

A class of semantic theories defines concepts in terms of statistical distributions of lexical items, basing meaning on vectors of word co-occurrence frequencies. A different approach emphasizes abstract hierarchical taxonomic relationships among concepts. However, the functional relevance of these different accounts and how they capture information-encoding of meaning in the brain still remains elusive.

We investigated to what extent distributional and taxonomic models explained word-elicited neural responses using cross-validated representational similarity analysis (RSA) of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and novel model comparisons.

Our findings show that the brain encodes both types of semantic similarities, but in distinct cortical regions. Posterior middle temporal regions reflected word links based on hierarchical taxonomies, along with the action-relatedness of the semantic word categories. In contrast, distributional semantics best predicted the representational patterns in left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG, BA 47). Both representations coexisted in angular gyrus supporting semantic binding and integration. These results reveal that neuronal networks with distinct cortical distributions across higher-order association cortex encode different representational properties of word meanings. Taxonomy may shape long-term lexical-semantic representations in memory consistently with sensorimotor details of semantic categories, whilst distributional knowledge in the LIFG (BA 47) enable semantic combinatorics in the context of language use.

Our approach helps to elucidate the nature of semantic representations essential for understanding human language.

Abstract

Dyslexia is a common heritable developmental disorder involving impaired reading abilities. Its genetic underpinnings are thought to be complex and heterogeneous, involving common and rare genetic variation. Multigenerational families segregating apparent monogenic forms of language-related disorders can provide useful entrypoints into biological pathways. In the present study, we performed a genome-wide linkage scan in a three-generational family in which dyslexia affects 14 of its 30 members and seems to be transmitted with an autosomal dominant pattern of inheritance. We identified a locus on chromosome 7q21.11 which cosegregated with dyslexia status, with the exception of two cases of phenocopy (LOD = 2.83). Whole-genome sequencing of key individuals enabled the assessment of coding and noncoding variation in the family. Two rare single-nucleotide variants (rs144517871 and rs143835534) within the first intron of the SEMA3C gene cosegregated with the 7q21.11 risk haplotype. In silico characterization of these two variants predicted effects on gene regulation, which we functionally validated for rs144517871 in human cell lines using luciferase reporter assays. SEMA3C encodes a secreted protein that acts as a guidance cue in several processes, including cortical neuronal migration and cellular polarization. We hypothesize that these intronic variants could have a cis-regulatory effect on SEMA3C expression, making a contribution to dyslexia susceptibility in this family.

Abstract

Previous studies have suggested that altered asymmetry of the planum temporale (PT) is associated with neurodevelopmental disorders, including dyslexia, schizophrenia, and autism. Shared genetic factors have been suggested to link PT asymmetry to these disorders. In a dataset of unrelated subjects from the general population (UK Biobank, N= 18,057), we found that PT volume asymmetry had a significant heritability of roughly 14%. In genome-wide association analysis, two loci were significantly associated with PT asymmetry, including a coding polymorphism within the gene ITIH5 that is predicted to affect the protein’s function and to be deleterious (rs41298373, P=2.01×10−15), and a locus that affects the expression of the genes BOK and DTYMK (rs7420166, P=7.54×10-10). DTYMK showed left-right asymmetry of mRNA expression in post mortem PT tissue. Cortex-wide mapping of these SNP effects revealed influences on asymmetry that went somewhat beyond the PT. Using publicly available genome-wide association statistics from large-scale studies, we saw no significant genetic correlations of PT asymmetry with autism spectrum disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, schizophrenia, educational attainment or intelligence. Of the top two individual loci associated with PT asymmetry, rs41298373 showed a tentative association with intelligence (unadjusted P=0.025), while the locus at BOK/DTYMK showed tentative association with educational attainment (unadjusted Ps<0.05). These findings provide novel insights into the genetic contributions to human brain asymmetry, but do not support a substantial polygenic association of PT asymmetry with cognitive variation and mental disorders, as far as can be discerned with current sample sizes.

Abstract

Research into recurrent, highly conventionalized “formulaic” sequences has shown a processing advantage compared to “novel” (non-formulaic) language. Studies of individual types of formulaic sequence often acknowledge the contribution of specific factors, but little work exists to compare the processing of different types of phrases with fundamentally different properties. We use eye-tracking to compare the processing of three types of formulaic phrases—idioms, binomials, and collocations—and consider whether overall frequency can explain the advantage for all three, relative to control phrases. Results show an advantage, as evidenced through shorter reading times, for all three types. While overall phrase frequency contributes much of the processing advantage, different types of phrase do show additional effects according to the specific properties that are relevant to each type: frequency, familiarity, and decomposability for idioms; predictability and semantic association for binomials; and mutual information for collocations. We discuss how the results contribute to our understanding of the representation and processing of multiword lexical units more broadly.

Abstract

Bodily mimicry often makes the mimickee have more positive feelings about the mimicker. Yet, little is known about the causes of mimicry’s social effects. When people mimic each other’s bodily movements face to face, they can either adopt a mirrorwise perspective (moving in the same absolute direction) or an anatomical perspective (moving in the same direction relative to their own bodies). Mirrorwise mimicry maximizes visuo-spatial similarity between the mimicker and mimickee, whereas anatomical mimicry maximizes the similarity in the states of their motor systems. To compare the social consequences of visuo-spatial and motoric similarity, we asked participants to converse with an embodied virtual agent (VIRTUO), who mimicked their head movements either mirrorwise, anatomically, or not at all. Compared to participants who were not mimicked, those who were mimicked mirrorwise tended to rate VIRTUO more positively, but those who were mimicked anatomically rated him more negatively. During face-to-face conversation, mirrorwise and anatomical mimicry have opposite social consequences. Results suggest that visuo-spatial similarity between mimicker and mimickee, not similarity in motor system activity, gives rise to the positive social effects of bodily mimicry.

Abstract

Daylong at-home audio recordings from 10 Tseltal Mayan children (0;2–3;0; Southern Mexico) were analyzed for how often children engaged in verbal interaction with others and whether their speech environment changed with age, time of day, household size, and number of speakers present. Children were infrequently directly spoken to, with most directed speech coming from adults, and no increase with age. Most directed speech came in the mornings, and interactional peaks contained nearly four times the baseline rate of directed speech. Coarse indicators of children's language development (babbling, first words, first word combinations) suggest that Tseltal children manage to extract the linguistic information they need despite minimal directed speech. Multiple proposals for how they might do so are discussed.

Abstract

The rate at which young children are directly spoken to varies due to many factors, including (a) caregiver ideas about children as conversational partners and (b) the organization of everyday life. Prior work suggests cross-cultural variation in rates of child-directed speech is due to the former factor, but has been fraught with confounds in comparing postindustrial and subsistence farming communities. We investigate the daylong language environments of children (0;0–3;0) on Rossel Island, Papua New Guinea, a small-scale traditional community where prior ethnographic study demonstrated contingency-seeking child interaction styles. In fact, children were infrequently directly addressed and linguistic input rate was primarily affected by situational factors, though children’s vocalization maturity showed no developmental delay. We compare the input characteristics between this community and a Tseltal Mayan one in which near-parallel methods produced comparable results, then briefly discuss the models and mechanisms for learning best supported by our findings.

Abstract

How do children learn to map linguistic forms onto their intended meanings? This chapter begins with an introduction to some theoretical and analytical tools used to study communicative acts. It then turns to communicative act development in spoken and signed language acquisition, including both the early scaffolding and production of communicative acts (both non-verbal and verbal) as well as their later links to linguistic development and Theory of Mind. The chapter wraps up by linking research on communicative act development to the acquisition of conversational skills, cross-linguistic and individual differences in communicative experience during development, and human evolution. Along the way, it also poses a few open questions for future research in this domain.

Abstract

Learning a specific skill during childhood may partly determine the functional organization of the adult brain. This hypothesis led us to study oral language processing in illiterate subjects who, for social reasons, had never entered school and had no knowledge of reading or writing. In a brain activation study using PET and statistical parametric mapping, we compared word and pseudoword repetition in literate and illiterate subjects. Our study confirms behavioural evidence of different phonological processing in illiterate subjects. During repetition of real words, the two groups performed similarly and activated similar areas of the brain. In contrast, illiterate subjects had more difficulty repeating pseudowords correctly and did not activate the same neural structures as literates. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that learning the written form of language (orthography) interacts with the function of oral language. Our results indicate that learning to read and write during childhood influences the functional organization of the adult human brain.

Abstract

Members of the Tre2/Bub2/Cdc16 (TBC), lysin motif (LysM), domain catalytic (TLDc) protein family are associated with multiple neurodevelopmental disorders, although their exact roles in disease remain unclear. For example, nuclear receptor coactivator 7 (NCOA7) has been associated with autism, although almost nothing is known regarding the mode-of-action of this TLDc protein in the nervous system. Here we investigated the molecular function of NCOA7 in neurons and generated a novel mouse model to determine the consequences of deleting this locus in vivo. We show that NCOA7 interacts with the cytoplasmic domain of the vacuolar (V)-ATPase in the brain and demonstrate that this protein is required for normal assembly and activity of this critical proton pump. Neurons lacking Ncoa7 exhibit altered development alongside defective lysosomal formation and function; accordingly, Ncoa7 deletion animals exhibited abnormal neuronal patterning defects and a reduced expression of lysosomal markers. Furthermore, behavioural assessment revealed anxiety and social defects in mice lacking Ncoa7. In summary, we demonstrate that NCOA7 is an important V-ATPase regulatory protein in the brain, modulating lysosomal function, neuronal connectivity and behaviour; thus our study reveals a molecular mechanism controlling endolysosomal homeostasis that is essential for neurodevelopment.

Abstract

Eye gaze is a ubiquitous cue in child-caregiver interactions and infants are highly attentive to eye gaze from very early on. However, the question of why infants show gaze-sensitive behavior, and what role this sensitivity to gaze plays in their language development, is not yet well-understood. To gain a better understanding of the role of eye gaze in infants’ language learning, we conducted a broad systematic review of the developmental literature for all studies that investigate the role of eye gaze in infants’ language development. Across 77 peer-reviewed articles containing data from typically-developing human infants (0-24 months) in the domain of language development we identified two broad themes. The first tracked the effect of eye gaze on four developmental domains: (1) vocabulary development, (2) word-object mapping, (3) object processing, and (4) speech processing. Overall, there is considerable evidence that infants learn more about objects and are more likely to form word-object mappings in the presence of eye gaze cues, both of which are necessary for learning words. In addition, there is good evidence for longitudinal relationships between infants’ gaze following abilities and later receptive and expressive vocabulary. However, many domains (e.g. speech processing) are understudied; further work is needed to decide whether gaze effects are specific to tasks such as word-object mapping, or whether they reflect a general learning enhancement mechanism. The second theme explored the reasons why eye gaze might be facilitative for learning, addressing the question of whether eye gaze is treated by infants as a specialized socio-cognitive cue. We concluded that the balance of evidence supports the idea that eye gaze facilitates infants’ learning by enhancing their arousal, memory and attentional capacities to a greater extent than other low-level attentional cues. However, as yet, there are too few studies that directly compare the effect of eye gaze cues and non-social, attentional cues for strong conclusions to be drawn. We also suggest there might be a developmental effect, with eye gaze, over the course of the first two years of life, developing into a truly ostensive cue that enhances language learning across the board.

Abstract

Emergentist approaches to language acquisition identify a core role for language-specific experience and give primacy to other factors like function and domain-general learning mechanisms in syntactic development. This directly contrasts with a nativist structurally oriented approach, which predicts that grammatical development is guided by Universal Grammar and that structural factors constrain acquisition. Cantonese relative clauses (RCs) offer a good opportunity to test these perspectives because its typologically rare properties decouple the roles of frequency and complexity in subject- and object-RCs in a way not possible in European languages. Specifically, Cantonese object RCs of the classifier type are frequently attested in children’s linguistic experience and are isomorphic to frequent and early-acquired simple SVO transitive clauses, but according to formal grammatical analyses Cantonese subject RCs are computationally less demanding to process. Thus, the two opposing theories make different predictions: the emergentist approach predicts a specific preference for object RCs of the classifier type, whereas the structurally oriented approach predicts a subject advantage. In the current study we revisited this issue. Eighty-seven monolingual Cantonese children aged between 3;2 and 3;11 (Mage: 3;6) participated in an elicited production task designed to elicit production of subject- and object- RCs. The children were very young and most of them produced only noun phrases when RCs were elicited. Those (nine children) who did produce RCs produced overwhelmingly more object RCs than subject RCs, even when animacy cues were controlled. The majority of object RCs produced were the frequent classifier-type RCs. The findings concur with our hypothesis from the emergentist perspectives that input frequency and formal and functional similarity to known structures guide acquisition.

Abstract

Previous work found that single-session focused attention meditation (FAM) enhanced motor sequence learning through increased cognitive control as a mechanistic action, although electrophysiological correlates of sequence learning performance following FAM were not investigated. We measured the persistent frontal N2 event-related potential (ERP) that is closely related to cognitive control processes and its ability to predict behavioural measures. Twenty-nine participants were randomised to one of three conditions reflecting the level of FAM experienced prior to a serial reaction time task (SRTT): 21 sessions of FAM (FAM21, N = 12), a single FAM session (FAM1, N = 9) or no preceding FAM control (Control, N = 8). Continuous 64-channel EEG were recorded during SRTT and N2 amplitudes for correct trials were extracted. Component amplitude, regions of interests, and behavioural outcomes were compared using mixed effects regression models between groups. FAM21 exhibited faster reaction time performances in majority of the learning blocks compared to FAM1 and Control. FAM21 also demonstrated a significantly more pronounced N2 over majority of anterior and central regions of interests during SRTT compared to the other groups. When N2 amplitudes were modelled against general learning performance, FAM21 showed the greatest rate of amplitude decline over anterior and central regions. The combined results suggest that FAM training provided greater cognitive control enhancement for improved general performance, and less pronounced effects for sequence-specific learning performance compared to the other groups. Importantly, FAM training facilitates dynamic modulation of cognitive control: lower levels of general learning performance was supported by greater levels of activation, whilst higher levels of general learning exhibited less activation.

Abstract

This study examines the perception of paralinguistic intonational meanings deriving from Ohala’s Frequency Code (Experiment 1) and Gussenhoven’s Effort Code (Experiment 2) in British English and Dutch. Native speakers of British English and Dutch listened to a number of stimuli in their native language and judged each stimulus on four semantic scales deriving from these two codes: SELF-CONFIDENT versus NOT SELF-CONFIDENT, FRIENDLY versus NOT FRIENDLY (Frequency Code); SURPRISED versus NOT SURPRISED, and EMPHATIC versus NOT EMPHATIC (Effort Code). The stimuli, which were lexically equivalent across the two languages, differed in pitch contour, pitch register and pitch span in Experiment 1, and in pitch register, peak height, peak alignment and end pitch in Experiment 2. Contrary to the traditional view that the paralinguistic usage of intonation is similar across languages, it was found that British English and Dutch listeners differed considerably in the perception of “confident,” “friendly,” “emphatic,” and “surprised.” The present findings support a theory of paralinguistic meaning based on the universality of biological codes, which however acknowledges a languagespecific component in the implementation of these codes.

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.

Abstract

The goal of this study is to examine how the degree of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation varies as a function of prosodic factors such as nuclear-pitch accent (accented vs. unaccented), level of prosodic boundary (Prosodic Word vs. Intermediate Phrase vs. Intonational Phrase), and position-in-prosodic-domain (initial vs. final). It is hypothesized that vowels in prosodically stronger locations (e.g., in accented syllables and at a higher prosodic boundary) are not only coarticulated less with their neighboring vowels, but they also exert a stronger influence on their neighbors. Measurements of tongue position for English /a i/ over time were obtained with Carsten’s electromagnetic articulography. Results showed that vowels in prosodically stronger locations are coarticulated less with neighboring vowels, but do not exert a stronger influence on the articulation of neighboring vowels. An examination of the relationship between coarticulation and duration revealed that (a) accent-induced coarticulatory variation cannot be attributed to a duration factor and (b) some of the data with respect to boundary effects may be accounted for by the duration factor. This suggests that to the extent that prosodically conditioned coarticulatory variation is duration-independent, there is no absolute causal relationship from duration to coarticulation. It is proposed that prosodically conditioned V-to-V coarticulatory reduction is another type of strengthening that occurs in prosodically strong locations. The prosodically driven coarticulatory patterning is taken to be part of the phonetic signatures of the hierarchically nested structure of prosody.

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.

Abstract

The fluent production of speech is a very complex human skill. It requires the coordination of several articulatory subsystems. The instructions that lead articulatory movements to execution are the result of the interplay of speech production levels that operate above the articulatory network. During the process of word-form encoding, the groundwork for the articulatory programs is prepared which then serve the articulators as basic units. This thesis investigated whether or not syllables form the basis for the articulatory programs and in particular whether or not these syllable programs are stored, separate from the store of the lexical word-forms. It is assumed that syllable units are stored in a so-called 'mental syllabary'. The main goal of this thesis was to find evidence of the syllable playing a functionally important role in speech production and for the assumption that syllables are stored units. In a variant of the implicit priming paradigm, it was investigated whether information about the syllabic structure of a target word facilitates the preparation (advanced planning) of a to-be-produced utterance. These experiments yielded evidence for the functionally important role of syllables in speech production. In a subsequent row of experiments, it could be demonstrated that the production of syllables is sensitive to frequency. Syllable frequency effects provide strong evidence for the notion of a mental syllabary because only stored units are likely to exhibit frequency effects. In a last study, effects of syllable preparation and syllable frequency were investigated in a combined study to disentangle the two effects. The results of this last experiment converged with those reported for the other experiments and added further support to the claim that syllables play a core functional role in speech production and are stored in a mental syllabary.

Abstract

Models of speech production assume that syllables play a functional role in the process of word-form encoding in speech production. In this study, we investigate this claim and specifically provide evidence about the level at which syllables come into play. We report two studies using an odd-man-out variant of the implicit priming paradigm to examine the role of the syllable during the process of word formation. Our results show that this modified version of the implicit priming paradigm can trace the emergence of syllabic structure during spoken word generation. Comparing these results to prior syllable priming studies, we conclude that syllables emerge at the interface between phonological and phonetic encoding. The results are discussed in terms of the WEAVER++ model of lexical access.

Abstract

Koriat (1981) demonstrated that an association from the target to a preceding prime, in the absence of an association from the prime to the target, facilitates lexical decision and referred to this effect as "backward priming". Backward priming is of relevance, because it can provide information about the mechanism underlying semantic priming effects. Following Neely (1991), we distinguish three mechanisms of priming: spreading activation, expectancy, and semantic matching/integration. The goal was to determine which of these mechanisms causes backward priming, by assessing effects of backward priming on a language-relevant ERP component, the N400, and reaction time (RT). Based on previous work, we propose that the N400 priming effect reflects expectancy and semantic matching/integration, but in contrast with RT does not reflect spreading activation. Experiment 1 shows a backward priming effect that is qualitatively similar for the N400 and RT in a lexical decision task. This effect was not modulated by an ISI manipulation. Experiment 2 clarifies that the N400 backward priming effect reflects genuine changes in N400 amplitude and cannot be ascribed to other factors. We will argue that these backward priming effects cannot be due to expectancy but are best accounted for in terms of semantic matching/integration.

Abstract

Background: The concept of fluency is widely used to dichotomously classify aphasia syndromes in both research and clinical practice. Despite its ubiquity, reliability of fluency measurement is reduced due to its multi-dimensional nature and the variety of methods used to measure it.
Aims: The primary aim of the study was to determine what factors contribute to judgements of fluency in aphasia, identifying methodological and linguistic sources of disagreement.
Methods & Procedures: We compared fluency classifications generated according to fluency scores on the revised Western Aphasia Battery (WAB-R) to clinical impressions of fluency for 254 English-speaking people with aphasia (PwA) from the AphasiaBank database. To determine what contributed to fluency classifications, we examined syndrome diagnoses and measured the predictive strength of 18 spontaneous speech variables extracted from retellings of the Cinderella story. The variables were selected to represent three dimensions predicted to underlie fluency: grammatical competence, lexical retrieval, and the facility of speech production.
Outcomes & Results: WAB-R fluency classifications agreed with 83% of clinician classifications, although agreement was much greater for fluent than nonfluent classifications. The majority of mismatches were diagnosed with anomic or conduction aphasia by the WAB-R but Broca's aphasia by clinicians. Modifying the WAB-R scale improved the extent to which WAB-R fluency categories matched clinical impressions. Fluency classifications were predicted by a combination of variables, including aspects of grammaticality, lexical retrieval and speech production. However, fluency classification by WAB-R was largely predicted by severity, whereas the presence or absence of apraxia of speech was the largest predictor of fluency classifications by clinicians.
Conclusions: Fluency judgements according to WAB-R scoring and those according to clinical impression showed some common influences, but also some differences that contributed to mismatches in fluency categorization. We propose that, rather than using dichotomous fluency categories, which can mask sources of disagreement, fluency should be explicitly identified relative to the underlying deficits (word-finding, grammatical formulation, speech production, or a combination) contributing to each individual PwA's fluency profile. Identifying what contributes to fluency disruptions is likely to generate more reliable diagnoses and provide more concrete guidance regarding therapy, avenues we are pursuing in ongoing research.

Abstract

When people talk, they gesture. Gesture is a fundamental component of language that contributes meaningful and unique information to a spoken message and reflects the speaker's underlying knowledge and experiences. Theoretical perspectives of speech and gesture propose that they share a common conceptual origin and have a tightly integrated relationship, overlapping in time, meaning, and function to enrich the communicative context. We review a robust literature from the field of psychology documenting the benefits of gesture for communication for both speakers and listeners, as well as its important cognitive functions for organizing spoken language, and facilitating problem-solving, learning, and memory. Despite this evidence, gesture has been relatively understudied in populations with neurogenic communication disorders. While few studies have examined the rehabilitative potential of gesture in these populations, others have ignored gesture entirely or even discouraged its use. We review the literature characterizing gesture production and its role in intervention for people with aphasia, as well as describe the much sparser literature on gesture in cognitive communication disorders including right hemisphere damage, traumatic brain injury, and Alzheimer's disease. The neuroanatomical and behavioral profiles of these patient populations provide a unique opportunity to test theories of the relationship of speech and gesture and advance our understanding of their neural correlates. This review highlights several gaps in the field of communication disorders which may serve as a bridge for applying the psychological literature of gesture to the study of language disorders. Such future work would benefit from considering theoretical perspectives of gesture and using more rigorous and quantitative empirical methods in its approaches. We discuss implications for leveraging gesture to explore its untapped potential in understanding and rehabilitating neurogenic communication disorders.

Abstract

Previous research has shown significant effects of race and accent on children’s developing social preferences. Accounts of the primacy of accent biases in the evolution and ontogeny of discriminant cooperation have been proposed, but lack systematic cross-cultural investigation. We report three controlled studies conducted with 5−10 year old children across four towns in the Brazilian Amazon, selected for their variation in racial and accent homogeneity/heterogeneity. Study 1 investigated participants’ (N = 289) decisions about friendship and sharing across color-contrasted pairs of target individuals: Black-White, Black-Pardo (Brown), Pardo-White. Study 2 (N = 283) investigated effects of both color and accent (Local vs Non-Local) on friendship and sharing decisions. Overall, there was a significant bias toward the lighter colored individual. A significant preference for local accent mitigates but does not override the color bias, except in the site characterized by both racial and accent heterogeneity. Results also vary by participant age and color. Study 3 (N = 235) reports results of an accent discrimination task that shows an overall increase in accuracy with age. The research suggests that cooperative preferences based on accent and race develop differently in response to locally relevant parameters of racial and linguistic variation.

Abstract

Congenital anomalies of the kidney and urinary tract (CAKUT) constitute one of the most frequent birth defects and represent the most common cause of chronic kidney disease in the first three decades of life. Despite the discovery of dozens of monogenic causes of CAKUT, most pathogenic pathways remain elusive. We performed whole-exome sequencing (WES) in 551 individuals with CAKUT and identified a heterozygous de novo stop-gain variant in ZMYM2 in two different families with CAKUT. Through collaboration, we identified in total 14 different heterozygous loss-of-function mutations in ZMYM2 in 15 unrelated families. Most mutations occurred de novo, indicating possible interference with reproductive function. Human disease features are replicated in X. tropicalis larvae with morpholino knockdowns, in which expression of truncated ZMYM2 proteins, based on individual mutations, failed to rescue renal and craniofacial defects. Moreover, heterozygous Zmym2-deficient mice recapitulated features of CAKUT with high penetrance. The ZMYM2 protein is a component of a transcriptional corepressor complex recently linked to the silencing of developmentally regulated endogenous retrovirus elements. Using protein-protein interaction assays, we show that ZMYM2 interacts with additional epigenetic silencing complexes, as well as confirming that it binds to FOXP1, a transcription factor that has also been linked to CAKUT. In summary, our findings establish that loss-of-function mutations of ZMYM2, and potentially that of other proteins in its interactome, as causes of human CAKUT, offering new routes for studying the pathogenesis of the disorder.

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.

Abstract

Incremental comprehension of head-final constructions can reveal structural attachment preferences for ambiguous phrases. This study investigates
how temporarily ambiguous PPs are processed in Dutch verb-final constructions. In De aannemer heeft op het dakterras bespaard/gewerkt ‘The
contractor has on the roof terrace saved/worked’, the PP is locally ambiguous between attachment as argument and as adjunct. This ambiguity is
resolved by the sentence-final verb. In a self-paced reading task, we manipulated the argument/adjunct status of the PP, and its position relative to the
verb. While we found no reading-time differences between argument and
adjunct PPs, we did find that transitive verbs, for which the PP is an argument, were read more slowly than intransitive verbs, for which the PP is an adjunct. We suggest that Dutch parsers have a preference for adjunct attachment of preverbal PPs, and discuss our findings in terms of incremental
parsing models that aim to minimize costly reanalysis.

Abstract

In this study, we compared the performance of a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network to the behavior of human participants on a language task that requires hierarchically structured knowledge. We show that humans interpret ambiguous noun phrases, such as second blue ball, in line with their hierarchical constituent structure. LSTMs, instead, only do
so after unambiguous training, and they do not systematically generalize to novel items. Overall, the results of our simulations indicate that a model can behave hierarchically without relying on hierarchical constituent structure.

Abstract

A key challenge in understanding stories and conversations is the comprehension of ‘anaphora’, words that refer back to previously mentioned words or concepts (‘antecedents’). In psycholinguistic theories, anaphor comprehension involves the initial activation of the antecedent and its subsequent integration into the unfolding representation of the narrated event. A recent proposal suggests that these processes draw upon the brain’s recognition memory and language networks, respectively, and may be dissociable in patterns of neural oscillatory synchronization (Nieuwland & Martin, 2017). We addressed this proposal in an electroencephalogram (EEG) study with pre-registered data acquisition and analyses, using event-related potentials (ERPs) and neural oscillations. Dutch participants read two-sentence mini stories containing proper names, which were repeated or new (ease of activation) and semantically coherent or incoherent with the preceding discourse (ease of integration). Repeated names elicited lower N400 and Late Positive Component amplitude than new names, and also an increase in theta-band (4-7 Hz) synchronization, which was largest around 240-450 ms after name onset. Discourse-coherent names elicited an increase in gamma-band (60-80 Hz) synchronization compared to discourse-incoherent names. This effect was largest around 690-1000 ms after name onset and exploratory beamformer analysis suggested a left frontal source. We argue that the initial activation and subsequent discourse-level integration of referents can be dissociated with event-related EEG activity, and are associated with respectively theta- and gamma-band activity. These findings further establish the link between memory and language through neural oscillations.

Abstract

During conversation, interlocutors often produce their utterances with little overlap or gap between their turns. But what mechanism underlies this striking ability to time articulation appropriately? In 2 verbal yes/no question-answering experiments, we investigated whether listeners use the speech rate of questions to time articulation of their answers. In Experiment 1, we orthogonally manipulated the speech rate of the context (e.g., Do you have a . . .) and final word (e.g., dog?) of questions using time-compression, so that each component was spoken at the natural rate or twice as a fast. Listeners responded earlier when the context was speeded rather than natural, suggesting they used the speaker’s context rate to time answer articulation. Additionally, listeners responded earlier when the speaker’s final syllable was speeded than natural, regardless of context rate, suggesting they adjusted the timing of articulation after listening to a single syllable produced at a different rate. We replicated this final word effect in Experiment 2, which also showed that our speech rate manipulation did not influence the timing of response preparation. Together, these findings suggest listeners use speech rate information to time articulation when answering questions

Abstract

Listeners quickly learn to understand speech that has been distorted, and this process is enhanced when comprehension is constrained by higher-level knowledge. In three experiments, we investigated whether this knowledge enhances comprehension of distorted speech because it allows listeners to predict (1) the meaning of the distorted utterance, or (2) the lower-level wordforms. Participants listened to question-answer sequences, in which questions were clearly-spoken but answers were noise-vocoded. Comprehension (Experiment 1) and learning (Experiment 2) were enhanced when listeners could use the question to predict the semantics of the distorted answer, but were not enhanced by predictions of answer form. Form predictions enhanced comprehension only when questions and answers were significantly separated by time and intervening linguistic material (Experiment 3). Together, these results suggest that high-level semantic predictions enhance comprehension and learning, with form predictions playing only a minimal role.

Abstract

In three experiments, listeners detected vowel or consonant targets in lists of CV syllables constructed from five vowels and five consonants. Responses were faster in a predictable context (e.g., listening for a vowel target in a list of syllables all beginning with the same consonant) than in an unpredictable context (e.g., listening for a vowel target in a list of syllables beginning with different consonants). In Experiment 1, the listeners’ native language was Dutch, in which vowel and consonant repertoires are similar in size. The difference between predictable and unpredictable contexts was comparable for vowel and consonant targets. In Experiments 2 and 3, the listeners’ native language was Spanish, which has four times as many consonants as vowels; here effects of an unpredictable consonant context on vowel detection were significantly greater than effects of an unpredictable vowel context on consonant detection. This finding suggests that listeners’ processing of phonemes takes into account the constitution of their language’s phonemic repertoire and the implications that this has for contextual variability.

Abstract

In this study we test the hypothesis that symbolic play represents a fertile context for language acquisition because its inherent ambiguity elicits communicative behaviours that positively influence development. Infant-caregiver dyads (N = 54) participated in two 20-minute play sessions six months apart (Time 1 = 18 months, Time 2 = 24 months). During each session the dyads played with two sets of toys that elicited either symbolic or functional play. The sessions were transcribed and coded for several features of dyadic interaction and speech; infants’ linguistic proficiency was measured via parental report. The two play contexts resulted in different communicative and linguistic behaviour. Notably, the symbolic play condition resulted in significantly greater conversational turn-taking than functional play, and also resulted in the greater use of questions and mimetics in infant-directed speech (IDS). In contrast, caregivers used more imperative clauses in functional play. Regression analyses showed that unique properties of symbolic play (i.e., turn-taking, yes-no questions, mimetics) positively predicted children’s language proficiency, whereas unique features of functional play (i.e., imperatives in IDS) negatively predicted proficiency. The results provide evidence in support of the hypothesis that symbolic play is a fertile context for language development, driven by the need to negotiate meaning.

Abstract

Recent constituent priming experiments show that Dutch and German prefixed verbs prime their stem, regardless of semantic transparency (e.g. Smolka et al. [(2014). ‘Verstehen’ (‘understand’) primes ‘stehen’ (‘stand’): Morphological structure overrides semantic compositionality in the lexical representation of German complex verbs. Journal of Memory and Language, 72, 16–36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2013.12.002]). We examine whether the processing of opaque verbs (e.g. herhalen “repeat”) involves the retrieval of only the whole-word meaning, or whether the lexical-semantic meaning of the stem (halen as “take/get”) is retrieved as well. We report the results of an auditory semantic priming experiment with Dutch prefixed verbs, testing whether the recognition of a semantic associate to the stem (BRENGEN “bring”) is facilitated by the presentation of an opaque prefixed verb. In contrast to prior visual studies, significant facilitation after semantically opaque primes is found, which suggests that the lexical-semantic meaning of stems in opaque words is retrieved. We examine the implications that these findings have for auditory word recognition, and for the way in which different types of meanings are represented and processed.

Abstract

A basic question for the study of the mental lexicon is whether there are morphological representations and processes that are independent of phonology and semantics. According to a prominent tradition, morphological relatedness requires semantic transparency: semantically transparent words are related in meaning to their stems, while semantically opaque words are not. This study examines the question of morphological relatedness using intra-modal auditory priming by Dutch prefixed verbs. The key conditions involve semantically transparent prefixed primes (e.g., aanbieden ‘offer’, with the stem bieden, also ‘offer’) and opaque primes (e.g., verbieden ‘forbid’). Results show robust facilitation for both transparent and opaque pairs; phonological (Experiment 1) and semantic (Experiment 2) controls rule out the possibility that these other types of relatedness are responsible for the observed priming effects. The finding of facilitation with opaque primes suggests that morphological processing is independent of semantic and phonological representations. Accordingly, the results are incompatible with theories that make semantic overlap a necessary condition for relatedness, and favor theories in which words may be related in ways that do not require shared meaning. The general discussion considers several specific proposals along these lines, and compares and contrasts questions about morphological relatedness of the type found here with the different but related question of whether there is morphological decomposition of complex forms or not.

Abstract

In the previous decade, dozens of studies involving thousands of children across several research disciplines have made use of a combined daylong audio-recorder and automated algorithmic analysis called the LENAⓇ system, which aims to assess children’s language environment. While the system’s prevalence in the language acquisition domain is steadily growing, there are only scattered validation efforts on only some of its key characteristics. Here, we assess the LENAⓇ system’s accuracy across all of its key measures: speaker classification, Child Vocalization Counts (CVC), Conversational Turn Counts (CTC), and Adult Word Counts (AWC). Our assessment is based on manual annotation of clips that have been randomly or periodically sampled out of daylong recordings, collected from (a) populations similar to the system’s original training data (North American English-learning children aged 3-36 months), (b) children learning another dialect of English (UK), and (c) slightly older children growing up in a different linguistic and socio-cultural setting (Tsimane’ learners in rural Bolivia). We find reasonably high accuracy in some measures (AWC, CVC), with more problematic levels of performance in others (CTC, precision of male adults and other children). Statistical analyses do not support the view that performance is worse for children who are dissimilar from the LENAⓇ original training set. Whether LENAⓇ results are accurate enough for a given research, educational, or clinical application depends largely on the specifics at hand. We therefore conclude with a set of recommendations to help researchers make this determination for their goals.

Abstract

Talking about odors and flavors is difficult for most people, yet experts appear to be able to convey critical information about wines in their reviews. This seems to be a contradiction, and wine expert descriptions are frequently received with criticism. Here, we propose a method for probing the language of wine reviews, and thus offer a means to enhance current vocabularies, and as a by-product question the general assumption that wine reviews are gibberish. By means of two different quantitative analyses—support vector machines for classification and Termhood analysis—on a corpus of online wine reviews, we tested whether wine reviews are written in a consistent manner, and thus may be considered informative; and whether reviews feature domain-specific language. First, a classification paradigm was trained on wine reviews from one set of authors for which the color, grape variety, and origin of a wine were known, and subsequently tested on data from a new author. This analysis revealed that, regardless of individual differences in vocabulary preferences, color and grape variety were predicted with high accuracy. Second, using Termhood as a measure of how words are used in wine reviews in a domain-specific manner compared to other genres in English, a list of 146 wine-specific terms was uncovered. These words were compared to existing lists of wine vocabulary that are currently used to train experts. Some overlap was observed, but there were also gaps revealed in the extant lists, suggesting these lists could be improved by our automatic analysis.

Abstract

Alpha-band oscillatory activity is involved in modulating memory and attention. However, few studies have investigated individual differences in oscillatory activity during the encoding of emotional memory, particularly in sleep paradigms where sleep is thought to play an active role in memory consolidation. The current study aimed to address the question of whether individual alpha frequency (IAF) modulates the consolidation of declarative memory across periods of sleep and wake. 22 participants aged 18 – 41 years (mean age = 25.77) viewed 120 emotionally valenced images (positive, negative, neutral) and completed a baseline memory task before a 2hr afternoon sleep opportunity and an equivalent period of wake. Following the sleep and wake conditions, participants were required to distinguish between 120 learned (target) images and 120 new (distractor) images. This method allowed us to delineate the role of different oscillatory components of sleep and wake states in the emotional modulation of memory. Linear mixed-effects models revealed interactions between IAF, rapid eye movement sleep theta power, and slow-wave sleep slow oscillatory density on memory outcomes. These results highlight the importance of individual factors in the EEG in modulating oscillatory-related memory consolidation and subsequent behavioural outcomes and test predictions proposed by models of sleep-based memory consolidation.

Abstract

Handedness has been extensively studied because of its relationship with language and the over-representation of left-handers in some neurodevelopmental disorders. Using data from the UK Biobank, 23andMe and the International Handedness Consortium, we conducted a genome-wide association meta-analysis of handedness (N = 1,766,671). We found 41 loci associated (P < 5 × 10−8) with left-handedness and 7 associated with ambidexterity. Tissue-enrichment analysis implicated the CNS in the aetiology of handedness. Pathways including regulation of microtubules and brain morphology were also highlighted. We found suggestive positive genetic correlations between left-handedness and neuropsychiatric traits, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Furthermore, the genetic correlation between left-handedness and ambidexterity is low (rG = 0.26), which implies that these traits are largely influenced by different genetic mechanisms. Our findings suggest that handedness is highly polygenic and that the genetic variants that predispose to left-handedness may underlie part of the association with some psychiatric disorders.

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.

Abstract

Native American English and non-native(Dutch)listeners identified either the consonant or the vowel in all possible American English CV and VC syllables. The syllables were embedded in multispeaker babble at three signal-to-noise ratios(0, 8, and 16 dB). The phoneme identification
performance of the non-native listeners was less accurate than that of the native listeners. All listeners were adversely affected by noise. With these isolated syllables, initial segments were harder to identify than final segments. Crucially, the effects of language background and noise did not interact; the performance asymmetry between the native and non-native groups was not significantly different across signal-to-noise ratios. It is concluded that the frequently reported disproportionate difficulty of non-native listening under disadvantageous conditions is not due to a disproportionate increase in phoneme misidentifications.

Abstract

The retiring academic may look back upon, inter alia, years of conference attendance. Speech error researchers are uniquely fortunate because they can collect data in any situation involving communication; accordingly, the retiring speech error researcher will have collected data at those conferences. We here address the issue of whether error data collected in situations involving conviviality (such as at conferences) is representative of error data in general. Our approach involved a comparison, across three levels of linguistic processing, between a specially constructed Conviviality Sample and the largest existing source of speech error data, the newly available Fromkin Speech Error Database. The results indicate that there are grounds for regarding the data in the Conviviality Sample as a better than average reflection of the true population of all errors committed. These findings encourage us to recommend further data collection in collaboration with like-minded colleagues.

Abstract

In English and Dutch, listeners entrain to prosodic contours to predict where focus will fall in an utterance. Here, we ask whether this strategy is universally available, even in languages with very different phonological systems (e.g., tone versus non-tone languages). In a phoneme detection experiment, we examined whether prosodic entrainment also occurs in Mandarin Chinese, a tone language, where the use of various suprasegmental cues to lexical identity may take precedence over their use in salience. Consistent with the results from Germanic languages, response times were facilitated when preceding intonation predicted high stress on the target-bearing word, and the lexical tone of the target word (i.e., rising versus falling) did not affect the Mandarin listeners' response. Further, the extent to which prosodic entrainment was used to detect the target phoneme was the same in both English and Mandarin listeners. Nevertheless, native Mandarin speakers did not adopt an entrainment strategy when the sentences were presented in English, consistent with the suggestion that L2 listening may be strained by additional functional load from prosodic processing. These findings have implications for how universal and language-specific mechanisms interact in the perception of focus structure in everyday discourse.

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.

Abstract

One of a listener’s major tasks in understanding continuous speech in segmenting the speech signal into separate words. When listening conditions are difficult, speakers can help listeners by deliberately clear speech. We found that speakers do indeed attempt to makr word boundaries; moreover, they differentiate between word boundaries in a way which suggest they are sensitive to listener needs. Application of heuristic segmentation strategies makes word boundaries before strong syllables easiest for listeners to perceive; but under difficult listening conditions speakers pay more attention to marking word boundaries before weak syllables, i.e. they mark those boundaries which are otherwise particularly hard to perceive.

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.

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.

Abstract

It is a widely held belief that women talk more than men; but experimental evidence has suggested that this belief is mistaken. The present study investigated whether listener bias contributes to this mistake. Dialogues were recorded in mixed-sex and single-sex versions, and male and female listeners judged the proportions of talk contributed to the dialogues by each participant. Female contributions to mixed-sex dialogues were rated as greater than male contributions by both male and female listeners. Female contributions were more likely to be overestimated when they were speaking a dialogue part perceived as probably female than when they were speaking a dialogue part perceived as probably male. It is suggested that the misestimates are due to a complex of factors that may involve both perceptual effects such as misjudgment of rates of speech and sociological effects such as attitudes to social roles and perception of power relations.