Publications

Displaying 301 - 333 of 333
  • Tourtouri, E. N., Delogu, F., & Crocker, M. W. (2015). ERP indices of situated reference in visual contexts. In D. Noelle, R. Dale, A. Warlaumont, J. Yoshimi, T. Matlock, C. D. Jennings, & P. P. Maglio (Eds.), Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2015) (pp. 2422-2427). Austin: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Violations of the maxims of Quantity occur when utterances provide more (over-specified) or less (under-specified) information than strictly required for referent identification. While behavioural datasuggest that under-specified expressions lead to comprehension difficulty and communicative failure, there is no consensus as to whether over-specified expressions are also detrimental to comprehension. In this study we shed light on this debate, providing neurophysiological evidence supporting the view that extra information facilitates comprehension. We further present novel evidence that referential failure due to under-specification is qualitatively different from explicit cases of referential failure, when no matching referential candidate is available in the context.
  • Trilsbeek, P., Broeder, D., Elbers, W., & Moreira, A. (2015). A sustainable archiving software solution for The Language Archive. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC).
  • Tsoukala, C., Frank, S. L., Van den Bosch, A., Kroff, J. V., & Broersma, M. (2020). Simulating Spanish-English code-switching: El modelo está generating code-switches. In E. Chersoni, C. Jacobs, Y. Oseki, L. Prévot, & E. Santus (Eds.), Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (pp. 20-29). Stroudsburg, PA, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).

    Abstract

    Multilingual speakers are able to switch from
    one language to the other (“code-switch”) be-
    tween or within sentences. Because the under-
    lying cognitive mechanisms are not well un-
    derstood, in this study we use computational
    cognitive modeling to shed light on the pro-
    cess of code-switching. We employed the
    Bilingual Dual-path model, a Recurrent Neu-
    ral Network of bilingual sentence production
    (Tsoukala et al., 2017) and simulated sentence
    production in simultaneous Spanish-English
    bilinguals. Our first goal was to investigate
    whether the model would code-switch with-
    out being exposed to code-switched training
    input. The model indeed produced code-
    switches even without any exposure to such
    input and the patterns of code-switches are
    in line with earlier linguistic work (Poplack,
    1980). The second goal of this study was to
    investigate an auxiliary phrase asymmetry that
    exists in Spanish-English code-switched pro-
    duction. Using this cognitive model, we ex-
    amined a possible cause for this asymmetry.
    To our knowledge, this is the first computa-
    tional cognitive model that aims to simulate
    code-switched sentence production.
  • Tuinman, A. (2006). Overcompensation of /t/ reduction in Dutch by German/Dutch bilinguals. In Variation, detail and representation: 10th Conference on Laboratory Phonology (pp. 101-102).
  • Udden, J., & Schoffelen, J.-M. (2015). Mother of all Unification Studies (MOUS). In A. E. Konopka (Ed.), Research Report 2013 | 2014 (pp. 21-22). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.2236748.
  • Van Staden, M., Bowerman, M., & Verhelst, M. (2006). Some properties of spatial description in Dutch. In S. C. Levinson, & D. Wilkins (Eds.), Grammars of Space (pp. 475-511). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Van den Heuvel, H., Oostdijk, N., Rowland, C. F., & Trilsbeek, P. (2020). The CLARIN Knowledge Centre for Atypical Communication Expertise. In N. Calzolari, F. Béchet, P. Blache, K. Choukri, C. Cieri, T. Declerck, S. Goggi, H. Isahara, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, H. Mazo, A. Moreno, J. Odijk, & S. Piperidis (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2020) (pp. 3312-3316). Marseille, France: European Language Resources Association.

    Abstract

    This paper introduces a new CLARIN Knowledge Center which is the K-Centre for Atypical Communication Expertise (ACE for short) which has been established at the Centre for Language and Speech Technology (CLST) at Radboud University. Atypical communication is an umbrella term used here to denote language use by second language learners, people with language disorders or those suffering from language disabilities, but also more broadly by bilinguals and users of sign languages. It involves multiple modalities (text, speech, sign, gesture) and encompasses different developmental stages. ACE closely collaborates with The Language Archive (TLA) at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in order to safeguard GDPR-compliant data storage and access. We explain the mission of ACE and show its potential on a number of showcases and a use case.
  • Van Dooren, A. (2020). The temporal perspective of epistemics in Dutch. In M. Franke, N. Kompa, M. Liu, J. L. Mueller, & J. Schwab (Eds.), Proceedings of Sinn Und Bedeutung 24 (pp. 143-160). Osnabrück: Osnabrück University.

    Abstract

    A series of experiments is conducted on naïve native speakers of Dutch and English to study the scope relation between tense and epistemic modality. The results are consistent with the claim that epistemics scope over tense (Stowell 2004, Hacquard 2006, a.o.), and challenge recent research that states that epistemics can, or must, scope under tense (von Fintel and Gillies 2007, Rullmann & Matthewson 2018): Dutch and English participants in a Truth Value Judgment Task judge sentences to be false when the past tense forms of the modals have to and moeten 'have to' are used to make an epistemic claim that held at a time before speech time, and true when they are used to make an epistemic claim that holds at speech time. Moreover, English participants in an Acceptability Judgment Task judge sentences to be infelicitous when the same past tense form of have to is used to make an epistemic claim that held at a time before speech time. Besides these general patterns, the results show variation within and across the two languages, which leads to interesting new questions about the interaction between tense and (epistemic) modality.
  • Van Arkel, J., Woensdregt, M., Dingemanse, M., & Blokpoel, M. (2020). A simple repair mechanism can alleviate computational demands of pragmatic reasoning: simulations and complexity analysis. In R. Fernández, & T. Linzen (Eds.), Proceedings of the 24th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2020) (pp. 177-194). Stroudsburg, PA, USA: The Association for Computational Linguistics. doi:10.18653/v1/2020.conll-1.14.

    Abstract

    How can people communicate successfully while keeping resource costs low in the face of ambiguity? We present a principled theoretical analysis comparing two strategies for disambiguation in communication: (i) pragmatic reasoning, where communicators reason about each other, and (ii) other-initiated repair, where communicators signal and resolve trouble interactively. Using agent-based simulations and computational complexity analyses, we compare the efficiency of these strategies in terms of communicative success, computation cost and interaction cost. We show that agents with a simple repair mechanism can increase efficiency, compared to pragmatic agents, by reducing their computational burden at the cost of longer interactions. We also find that efficiency is highly contingent on the mechanism, highlighting the importance of explicit formalisation and computational rigour.
  • Van Valin Jr., R. D. (1987). Aspects of the interaction of syntax and pragmatics: Discourse coreference mechanisms and the typology of grammatical systems. In M. Bertuccelli Papi, & J. Verschueren (Eds.), The pragmatic perspective: Selected papers from the 1985 International Pragmatics Conference (pp. 513-531). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Van den Bos, E. J., & Poletiek, F. H. (2006). Implicit artificial grammar learning in adults and children. In R. Sun (Ed.), Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2006) (pp. 2619). Austin, TX, USA: Cognitive Science Society.
  • Van Geenhoven, V. (1998). On the Argument Structure of some Noun Incorporating Verbs in West Greenlandic. In M. Butt, & W. Geuder (Eds.), The Projection of Arguments - Lexical and Compositional Factors (pp. 225-263). Stanford, CA, USA: CSLI Publications.
  • Van Valin Jr., R. D. (1998). The acquisition of WH-questions and the mechanisms of language acquisition. In M. Tomasello (Ed.), The new psychology of language: Cognitive and functional approaches to language structure (pp. 221-249). Mahwah, New Jersey: Erlbaum.
  • Van Heugten, M., Bergmann, C., & Cristia, A. (2015). The Effects of Talker Voice and Accent on Young Children's Speech Perception. In S. Fuchs, D. Pape, C. Petrone, & P. Perrier (Eds.), Individual Differences in Speech Production and Perception (pp. 57-88). Bern: Peter Lang.

    Abstract

    Within the first few years of life, children acquire many of the building blocks of their native language. This not only involves knowledge about the linguistic structure of spoken language, but also knowledge about the way in which this linguistic structure surfaces in their speech input. In this chapter, we review how infants and toddlers cope with differences between speakers and accents. Within the context of milestones in early speech perception, we examine how voice and accent characteristics are integrated during language processing, looking closely at the advantages and disadvantages of speaker and accent familiarity, surface-level deviation between two utterances, variability in the input, and prior speaker exposure. We conclude that although deviation from the child’s standard can complicate speech perception early in life, young listeners can overcome these additional challenges. This suggests that early spoken language processing is flexible and adaptive to the listening situation at hand.
  • Van Valin Jr., R. D. (2006). Some universals of verb semantics. In R. Mairal, & J. Gil (Eds.), Linguistic universals (pp. 155-178). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Van Valin Jr., R. D. (2006). Semantic macroroles and language processing. In I. Bornkessel, M. Schlesewsky, B. Comrie, & A. Friederici (Eds.), Semantic role universals and argument linking: Theoretical, typological and psycho-/neurolinguistic perspectives (pp. 263-302). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Van Valin Jr., R. D. (1987). Pragmatics, island phenomena, and linguistic competence. In A. M. Farley, P. T. Farley, & K.-E. McCullough (Eds.), CLS 22. Papers from the parasession on pragmatics and grammatical theory (pp. 223-233). Chicago Linguistic Society.
  • Verhoef, T., Roberts, S. G., & Dingemanse, M. (2015). Emergence of systematic iconicity: Transmission, interaction and analogy. In D. Noelle, R. Dale, A. S. Warlaumont, J. Yoshimi, T. Matlock, C. D. Jennings, & P. P. Maglio (Eds.), Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2015) (pp. 2481-2486). Austin, Tx: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Languages combine arbitrary and iconic signals. How do iconic signals emerge and when do they persist? We present an experimental study of the role of iconicity in the emergence of structure in an artificial language. Using an iterated communication game in which we control the signalling medium as well as the meaning space, we study the evolution of communicative signals in transmission chains. This sheds light on how affordances of the communication medium shape and constrain the mappability and transmissibility of form-meaning pairs. We find that iconic signals can form the building blocks for wider compositional patterns
  • Vernes, S. C. (2020). Understanding bat vocal learning to gain insight into speech and language. In A. Ravignani, C. Barbieri, M. Flaherty, Y. Jadoul, E. Lattenkamp, H. Little, M. Martins, K. Mudd, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference (Evolang13) (pp. 6). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences.
  • Wanrooij, K., De Vos, J., & Boersma, P. (2015). Distributional vowel training may not be effective for Dutch adults. In Scottish consortium for ICPhS 2015, M. Wolters, J. Livingstone, B. Beattie, R. Smith, M. MacMahon, J. Stuart-Smith, & J. Scobbie (Eds.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2015). Glasgow: University of Glasgow.

    Abstract

    Distributional vowel training for adults has been reported as “effective” for Spanish and Bulgarian learners of Dutch vowels, in studies using a behavioural task. A recent study did not yield a similar clear learning effect for Dutch learners of the English vowel contrast /æ/~/ε/, as measured with event-related potentials (ERPs). The present study aimed to examine the possibility that the latter result was related to the method. As in the ERP study, we tested whether distributional training improved Dutch adult learners’ perception of English /æ/~/ε/. However, we measured behaviour instead of ERPs, in a design identical to that used in the previous studies with Spanish learners. The results do not support an effect of distributional training and thus “replicate” the ERP study. We conclude that it remains unclear whether distributional vowel training is effective for Dutch adults.
  • Weber, A. (1998). Listening to nonnative language which violates native assimilation rules. In D. Duez (Ed.), Proceedings of the European Scientific Communication Association workshop: Sound patterns of Spontaneous Speech (pp. 101-104).

    Abstract

    Recent studies using phoneme detection tasks have shown that spoken-language processing is neither facilitated nor interfered with by optional assimilation, but is inhibited by violation of obligatory assimilation. Interpretation of these results depends on an assessment of their generality, specifically, whether they also obtain when listeners are processing nonnative language. Two separate experiments are presented in which native listeners of German and native listeners of Dutch had to detect a target fricative in legal monosyllabic Dutch nonwords. All of the nonwords were correct realisations in standard Dutch. For German listeners, however, half of the nonwords contained phoneme strings which violate the German fricative assimilation rule. Whereas the Dutch listeners showed no significant effects, German listeners detected the target fricative faster when the German fricative assimilation was violated than when no violation occurred. The results might suggest that violation of assimilation rules does not have to make processing more difficult per se.
  • Widlok, T. (2006). Two ways of looking at a Mangetti grove. In A. Takada (Ed.), Proceedings of the workshop: Landscape and society (pp. 11-16). Kyoto: 21st Century Center of Excellence Program.
  • Willems, R. M. (2015). Cognitive neuroscience of natural language use: Introduction. In Cognitive neuroscience of natural language use (pp. 1-7). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Wittek, A. (1998). Learning verb meaning via adverbial modification: Change-of-state verbs in German and the adverb "wieder" again. In A. Greenhill, M. Hughes, H. Littlefield, & H. Walsh (Eds.), Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 779-790). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Wittenburg, P., Brugman, H., Russel, A., Klassmann, A., & Sloetjes, H. (2006). ELAN: a professional framework for multimodality research. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006) (pp. 1556-1559).

    Abstract

    Utilization of computer tools in linguistic research has gained importance with the maturation of media frameworks for the handling of digital audio and video. The increased use of these tools in gesture, sign language and multimodal interaction studies has led to stronger requirements on the flexibility, the efficiency and in particular the time accuracy of annotation tools. This paper describes the efforts made to make ELAN a tool that meets these requirements, with special attention to the developments in the area of time accuracy. In subsequent sections an overview will be given of other enhancements in the latest versions of ELAN, that make it a useful tool in multimodality research.
  • Wittenburg, P., Broeder, D., Klein, W., Levinson, S. C., & Romary, L. (2006). Foundations of modern language resource archives. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006) (pp. 625-628).

    Abstract

    A number of serious reasons will convince an increasing amount of researchers to store their relevant material in centers which we will call "language resource archives". They combine the duty of taking care of long-term preservation as well as the task to give access to their material to different user groups. Access here is meant in the sense that an active interaction with the data will be made possible to support the integration of new data, new versions or commentaries of all sort. Modern Language Resource Archives will have to adhere to a number of basic principles to fulfill all requirements and they will have to be involved in federations to create joint language resource domains making it even more simple for the researchers to access the data. This paper makes an attempt to formulate the essential pillars language resource archives have to adhere to.
  • Woensdregt, M., & Dingemanse, M. (2020). Other-initiated repair can facilitate the emergence of compositional language. In A. Ravignani, C. Barbieri, M. Flaherty, Y. Jadoul, E. Lattenkamp, H. Little, M. Martins, K. Mudd, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference (Evolang13) (pp. 474-476). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences.
  • Yang, J., Van den Bosch, A., & Frank, S. L. (2020). Less is Better: A cognitively inspired unsupervised model for language segmentation. In M. Zock, E. Chersoni, A. Lenci, & E. Santus (Eds.), Proceedings of the Workshop on the Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon ( 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics) (pp. 33-45). Stroudsburg: Association for Computational Linguistics.

    Abstract

    Language users process utterances by segmenting them into many cognitive units, which vary in their sizes and linguistic levels. Although we can do such unitization/segmentation easily, its cognitive mechanism is still not clear. This paper proposes an unsupervised model, Less-is-Better (LiB), to simulate the human cognitive process with respect to language unitization/segmentation. LiB follows the principle of least effort and aims to build a lexicon which minimizes the number of unit tokens (alleviating the effort of analysis) and number of unit types (alleviating the effort of storage) at the same time on any given corpus. LiB’s workflow is inspired by empirical cognitive phenomena. The design makes the mechanism of LiB cognitively plausible and the computational requirement light-weight. The lexicon generated by LiB performs the best among different types of lexicons (e.g. ground-truth words) both from an information-theoretical view and a cognitive view, which suggests that the LiB lexicon may be a plausible proxy of the mental lexicon.

    Additional information

    full text via ACL website
  • Zeshan, U. (2006). Sign language of the world. In K. Brown (Ed.), Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (vol. 11) (pp. 358-365). Amsterdam: Elsevier.

    Abstract

    Although sign language-using communities exist in all areas of the world, few sign languages have been documented in detail. Sign languages occur in a variety of sociocultural contexts, ranging from sign languages used in closed village communities to officially recognized national sign languages. They may be grouped into language families on historical grounds or may participate in various language contact situations. Systematic cross-linguistic comparison reveals both significant structural similarities and important typological differences between sign languages. Focusing on information from non-Western countries, this article provides an overview of the sign languages of the world.
  • Zhang, Y., Amatuni, A., Crain, E., & Yu, C. (2020). Seeking meaning: Examining a cross-situational solution to learn action verbs using human simulation paradigm. In S. Denison, M. Mack, Y. Xu, & B. C. Armstrong (Eds.), Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2020) (pp. 2854-2860). Montreal, QB: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    To acquire the meaning of a verb, language learners not only need to find the correct mapping between a specific verb and an action or event in the world, but also infer the underlying relational meaning that the verb encodes. Most verb naming instances in naturalistic contexts are highly ambiguous as many possible actions can be embedded in the same scenario and many possible verbs can be used to describe those actions. To understand whether learners can find the correct verb meaning from referentially ambiguous learning situations, we conducted three experiments using the Human Simulation Paradigm with adult learners. Our results suggest that although finding the right verb meaning from one learning instance is hard, there is a statistical solution to this problem. When provided with multiple verb learning instances all referring to the same verb, learners are able to aggregate information across situations and gradually converge to the correct semantic space. Even in cases where they may not guess the exact target verb, they can still discover the right meaning by guessing a similar verb that is semantically close to the ground truth.
  • Zhang, Y., Yurovsky, D., & Yu, C. (2015). Statistical word learning is a continuous process: Evidence from the human simulation paradigm. In D. Noelle, R. Dale, A. Warlaumont, J. Yoshimi, T. Matlock, C. D. Jennings, & P. P. Maglio (Eds.), Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2015) (pp. 2422-2427). Austin: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    In the word-learning domain, both adults and young children are able to find the correct referent of a word from highly ambiguous contexts that involve many words and objects by computing distributional statistics across the co-occurrences of words and referents at multiple naming moments (Yu & Smith, 2007; Smith & Yu, 2008). However, there is still debate regarding how learners accumulate distributional information to learn object labels in natural learning environments, and what underlying learning mechanism learners are most likely to adopt. Using the Human Simulation Paradigm (Gillette, Gleitman, Gleitman & Lederer, 1999), we found that participants’ learning performance gradually improved and that their ability to remember and carry over partial knowledge from past learning instances facilitated subsequent learning. These results support the statistical learning model that word learning is a continuous process.
  • Zinken, J., Rossi, G., & Reddy, V. (2020). Doing more than expected: Thanking recognizes another's agency in providing assistance. In C. Taleghani-Nikazm, E. Betz, & P. Golato (Eds.), Mobilizing others: Grammar and lexis within larger activities (pp. 253-278). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Abstract

    In informal interaction, speakers rarely thank a person who has complied with a request. Examining data from British English, German, Italian, Polish, and Telugu, we ask when speakers do thank after compliance. The results show that thanking treats the other’s assistance as going beyond what could be taken for granted in the circumstances. Coupled with the rareness of thanking after requests, this suggests that cooperation is to a great extent governed by expectations of helpfulness, which can be long-standing, or built over the course of a particular interaction. The higher frequency of thanking in some languages (such as English or Italian) suggests that cultures differ in the importance they place on recognizing the other’s agency in doing as requested.
  • Zwitserlood, I., & Van Gijn, I. (2006). Agreement phenomena in Sign Language of the Netherlands. In P. Ackema (Ed.), Arguments and Agreement (pp. 195-229). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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