Publications

Abstract

In this work we perform multimodal detection and classification
of head movements from face to face video conversation data.
We have experimented with different models and feature sets
and provided some insight on the effect of independent features,
but also how their interaction can enhance a head movement
classifier. Used features include nose, neck and mid hip position
coordinates and their derivatives together with acoustic features,
namely, intensity and pitch of the speaker on focus. Results
show that when input features are sufficiently processed by in-
teracting with each other, a linear classifier can reach a similar
performance to a more complex non-linear neural model with
several hidden layers. Our best models achieve state-of-the-art
performance in the detection task, measured by macro-averaged
F1 score.

Abstract

The present paper assesses discourse-pragmatic factors as a potential explanation for the subject-object assymetry in early child language. It identifies a set of factors which characterize typical situations of informativeness (Greenfield & Smith, 1976), and uses these factors to identify informative arguments in data from four children aged 2;0 through 3;6 learning Inuktitut as a first language. In addition, it assesses the extent of the links between features of informativeness on one hand and lexical vs. null and subject vs. object arguments on the other. Results suggest that a pragmatics account of the subject-object asymmetry can be upheld to a greater extent than previous research indicates, and that several of the factors characterizing informativeness are good indicators of those arguments which tend to be omitted in early child language.

Abstract

Infants learn the meaning of words from accumulated experiences of real-time interactions with their caregivers. To study the effects of visual sensory input on word learning, we recorded infant's view of the world using head-mounted eye trackers during free-flowing play with a caregiver. While playing, infants were exposed to novel label-object mappings and later learning outcomes for these items were tested after the play session. In this study we use a classification based approach to link properties of infants' visual scenes during naturalistic labeling moments to their word learning outcomes. We find that a model which integrates both highly informative and ambiguous sensory evidence is a better fit to infants' individual learning outcomes than models where either type of evidence is taken alone, and that raw labeling frequency is unable to account for the word learning differences we observe. Here we demonstrate how a computational model, using only raw pixels taken from the egocentric scene image, can derive insights on human language learning.

Abstract

The Romance languages have a rich numeral system that includes cardinals—providing the bases on which the other types of numeral series are built—ordinals, fractions, collectives, approximatives, distributives, and multiplicatives. Latin plays a decisive and continued role in their formation, both as the language to which many numerals go back directly and as an ongoing source for lexemes and formatives. While the Latin numeral system was synthetic, with a distinct ending for each type of numeral, the Romance numerals often feature more than one (unevenly distributed) marker or structure per series, which feature varying degrees of inherited, borrowed, or innovative elements. Formal consistency is strongest in cardinals, followed by ordinals and then the other types of numeral, which also tend to be more analytic or periphrastic. From a morphological perspective, Romance numerals overall have moved away from the inherited syntheticity, but several series continue to be synthetic formations—at least in part—with morphological markers drawn from Latin that may have undergone functional change (e.g. distributive > ordinal > collective). The underlying syntax of Romance numerals is in line with the overall grammatical patterns of Romance languages, as reflected in the prevalence of word order (with arithmetical correlates), connectors, (partial) loss of agreement, and analyticity. Innovation is prominent in the formation of higher numerals with bases beyond ‘thousand’, of teens and decads in Romanian, and of vigesimals in numerous Romance varieties.

Abstract

Studies have shown that cross-linguistically, consonants at the left edge of higher-level prosodic boundaries tend to be more forcefully articulated than those at lower-level boundaries, a phenomenon known as domain-initial strengthening. This study tests whether similar effects occur in Turkish, using the Autosegmental-Metrical model proposed by Ipek & Jun [1, 2] as the basis for assessing boundary strength. Productions of /t/ and /d/ were elicited in four domain-initial prosodic positions corresponding to progressively higher-level boundaries: syllable, word, intermediate phrase, and Intonational Phrase. A fifth position, nuclear word, was included in order to better situate it within the prosodic hierarchy. Acoustic correlates of articulatory strength were measured, including closure duration for /d/ and /t/, as well as voice onset time and burst energy for /t/. Our results show that closure duration increases cumulatively from syllable to intermediate phrase, while voice onset time and burst energy are not influenced by boundary strength. These findings provide corroborating evidence for Ipek & Jun’s model, particularly for the distinction between word and intermediate phrase boundaries. Additionally, articulatory strength at the left edge of the nuclear word patterned closely with word-initial position, supporting the view that the nuclear word is not associated with a distinct phrasing domain

Abstract

Speech contains pronounced amplitude modulations in the 1–9 Hz range, correlating with the syllabic rate of speech. Recent models of speech perception propose that this rhythmic nature of speech is central to speech recognition and has beneficial effects on language processing. Here, we investigated the contribution of amplitude modulations to the subjective impression listeners have of public speakers. The speech from US presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the three TV debates of 2016 was acoustically analyzed by means of modulation spectra. These indicated that Clinton’s speech had more pronounced amplitude modulations than Trump’s speech, particularly in the 1–9 Hz range. A subsequent perception experiment, with listeners rating the perceived charisma of (low-pass filtered versions of) Clinton’s and Trump’s speech, showed that more pronounced amplitude modulations (i.e., more ‘rhythmic’ speech) increased perceived charisma ratings. These outcomes highlight the important contribution of speech rhythm to charisma perception.

Abstract

This study explores how adults and children describe placement events (e.g., putting a book on a table) in a range of different languages (Finnish, English, German, Russian, Hindi, Tzeltal Maya, Spanish, and Turkish). Results show that the eight languages grammatically encode placement events in two main ways (Talmy, 1985, 1991), but further investigation reveals fine-grained crosslinguistic variation within each of the two groups. Children are sensitive to these finer-grained characteristics of the input language at an early age, but only when such features are perceptually salient. Our study demonstrates that a unitary notion of 'event' does not suffice to characterize complex but systematic patterns of event encoding crosslinguistically, and that children are sensitive to multiple influences, including the distributional properties of the target language, in constructing these patterns in their own speech.

Abstract

Reprinted from: Bowerman, M. (1990). Mapping thematic roles onto syntactic functions: Are children helped by innate linking rules? Linguistics, 28, 1253-1289.

Abstract

Within the ISLE Metadata Initiative (IMDI) project a user-friendly editor to enter metadata descriptions and a browser operating on the linked metadata descriptions were developed. Both tools support the usage of Controlled Vocabulary (CV) repositories by means of the specification of an URL where the formal CV definition data is available.

Abstract

The recent increase in the number and complexity of the language resources available on the Internet is followed by a similar increase of available tools for linguistic analysis. Ideally the user does not need to be confronted with the question in how to match tools with resources. If resource repositories and tool repositories offer adequate metadata information and a suitable exchange protocol is developed this matching process could be performed (semi-) automatically.

Abstract

Native speakers of Dutch with English as a second language and native speakers of English participated in an English lexical decision experiment. Phonemes in real words were replaced by others from which they are hard to distinguish for Dutch listeners. Non-native listeners judged the resulting near-words more often as a word than native listeners. This not only happened when the phonemes that were exchanged did not exist as separate phonemes in the native language Dutch, but also when phoneme pairs that do exist in Dutch were used in word-final position, where they are not distinctive in Dutch. In an English bimodal priming experiment with similar groups of participants, word pairs were used which differed in one phoneme. These phonemes were hard to distinguish for the non-native listeners. Whereas in native listening both words inhibited each other, in non-native listening presentation of one word led to unresolved competition between both words. The results suggest that inaccurate phoneme processing by non-native listeners leads to the activation of spurious lexical competitors.

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

In a famous paper Harvey Sacks (1974) argued that the sequential properties of greeting conventions, as well as those governing the flow of information, mean that 'everyone has to lie'. In this paper I show this dictum to be equally true in the Tzeltal Mayan community of Tenejapa, in southern Mexico, but for somewhat different reasons. The phenomenon of interest is the practice of routine fearsome threats to small children. Based on a longitudinal corpus of videotaped and tape-recorded naturally-occurring interaction between caregivers and children in five Tzeltal families, the study examines sequences of Tzeltal caregivers' speech aimed at controlling the children's behaviour and analyzes the children's developing pragmatic skills in handling such controlling utterances, from prelinguistic infants to age five and over. Infants in this society are considered to be vulnerable, easily scared or shocked into losing their 'souls', and therefore at all costs to be protected and hidden from outsiders and other dangers. Nonetheless, the chief form of control (aside from physically removing a child from danger) is to threaten, saying things like "Don't do that, or I'll take you to the clinic for an injection," These overt scare-threats - rarely actually realized - lead Tzeltal children by the age of 2;6 to 3;0 to the understanding that speech does not necessarily convey true propositions, and to a sensitivity to the underlying motivations for utterances distinct from their literal meaning. By age 4;0 children perform the same role to their younger siblings;they also begin to use more subtle non-true (e.g. ironic) utterances. The caretaker practice described here is related to adult norms of social lying, to the sociocultural context of constraints on information flow, social control through gossip, and the different notion of 'truth' that arises in the context of non-verifiability characteristic of a small-scale nonliterate society.

Abstract

This paper surveys the concept of culture as used in recent work in cognitive science, assessing the very different (and sometimes minimal) role 'culture' plays in different branches and schools of linguistics: generative approaches, descriptive/comparative linguistics, typology, cognitive linguistics, semantics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, linguistic and cognitive anthropology. The paper then describes research on one specific topic, spatial language and conceptualization, describes a methodology for studying it cross-linguistically and cross-culturally. Finally, it considers the implications of results in this area for how we can fruitfully conceptualize 'culture', arguing for an approach which shifts back and forth between individual mind and collective representations, between universals and particulars, and ties 'culture' to our biological roots.

Abstract

This is a German translation of Brown 1980, How and why are women more polite: Some evidence from a Mayan community.

Abstract

In this paper I take up the idea that human thinking is systematically biased in the direction of interactive thinking (E. Goody's anticipatory interactive planning), that is, that humans are peculiarly good at, and inordinately prone to, attributing intentions and goals to one other (as well as to non-humans), and that they routinely orient to presumptions about each other's intentions in what they say and do. I explore the implications of that idea for an understanding of politeness in interaction, taking as a starting point the Brown and Levinson (1987) model of politeness, which assumes interactive thinking, a notion implicit in the formulation of politeness as strategic orientation to face. Drawing on an analysis of the phenomenon of conventionalized ‘irony’ in Tzeltal, I emphasize that politeness does not inhere in linguistic form per se but is a matter of conveying a polite intention, and argue that Tzeltal irony provides a prime example of one way in which humans' highly-developed intellectual machinery for inferring alter's intentions is put to the service of social relationships.

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

For multimodal annotations an exhaustive encoding system for gestures was developed to facilitate research. The structural requirements of multimodal annotations were analyzed to develop an Abstract Corpus Model which is the basis for a powerful annotation and exploitation tool for multimedia recordings and the definition of the XML-based EUDICO Annotation Format. Finally, a metadata-based data management environment has been setup to facilitate resource discovery and especially corpus management. Bt means of an appropriate digitization policy and their online availability researchers have been able to build up a large corpus covering gesture and sign language data.

Abstract

This chapter provides an introduction to the handbook. It succintly overviews the key questions in the field of L3/Ln acquisition and summarizes the scope of all the chapters included. The chapter ends by raising some outstanding questions that the field needs to address.

Abstract

In order to understand early word learning we need to better understand and quantify properties of the input that young children receive. We extended the human simulation paradigm (HSP) using egocentric videos taken from infant head-mounted cameras. The videos were further annotated with gaze information indicating in-the-moment visual attention from the infant. Our new HSP prompted participants for two types of responses, thus differentiating referential from semantic ambiguity in the learning input. Consistent with findings on visual attention in word learning, we find a strongly bimodal distribution over HSP accuracy. Even in this open-ended task, most videos only lead to a small handful of common responses. What's more, referential ambiguity was the key bottleneck to performance: participants can nearly always recover the exact word that was said if they identify the correct referent. Finally, analysis shows that adult learners relied on particular, multimodal behavioral cues to infer those target referents.

Abstract

Two groups of listeners with Dutch and British English language backgrounds judged Dutch and British English utterances, respectively, which varied in the intonation contour on the scales EMPHATIC vs. NOT EMPHATIC and SURPRISED vs. NOT SURPRISED, two meanings derived from the Effort Code. The stimuli, which differed in sentence mode but were otherwise lexically equivalent, were varied in peak height, peak alignment, end pitch, and overall register. In both languages, there are positive correlations between peak height and degree of emphasis, between peak height and degree of surprise, between peak alignment and degree of surprise, and between pitch register and degree of surprise. However, in all these cases, Dutch stimuli lead to larger perceived meaning differences than the British English stimuli. This difference in the extent to which increased pitch height triggers increases in perceived emphasis and surprise is argued to be due to the difference in the standard pitch ranges between Dutch and British English. In addition, we found a positive correlation between pitch register and the degree of emphasis in Dutch, but a negative correlation in British English. This is an unexpected difference, which illustrates a case of ambiguity in the meaning of pitch.

Abstract

In this study, we analyze one French signing and one French speaking family’s interaction during dinner. The families composed of two parents and two children aged 3 to 11 were filmed with three cameras to capture all family members’ behaviors. The three videos per dinner were synchronized and coded on ELAN. We annotated all participants’ acting, and languaging.
Our quantitative analyses show how family members collaboratively manage multiple streams of activity through the embodied performances of dining and interacting. We uncover different profiles according to participants’ modality of expression and status (focusing on the mother and the younger child). The hearing participants’ co-activity management illustrates their monitoring of dining and conversing and how they progressively master the affordances of the visual and vocal channels to maintain the simultaneity of the two activities. The deaf mother skillfully manages to alternate smoothly between dining and interacting. The deaf younger child manifests how she is in the process of developing her skills to manage multi-activity. Our qualitative analyses focus on the ecology of visual-gestural and audio-vocal languaging in the context of co-activity according to language and participant. We open new perspectives on the management of gaze and body parts in multimodal languaging.

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

During dialog, interlocutors take turns at speaking with little gap or overlap between their contributions. But language production in monolog is comparatively slow. Theories of dialog tend to agree that interlocutors manage these timing demands by planning a response early, before the current speaker reaches the end of their turn. In the first half of this chapter, I review experimental research supporting these theories. But this research also suggests that planning a response early, while simultaneously comprehending, is difficult. Does response planning need to be this difficult during dialog? In other words, is early-planning always necessary? In the second half of this chapter, I discuss research that suggests the answer to this question is no. In particular, corpora of natural conversation demonstrate that speakers do not directly respond to the immediately preceding utterance of their partner—instead, they continue an utterance they produced earlier. This parallel talk likely occurs because speakers are highly incremental and plan only part of their utterance before speaking, leading to pauses, hesitations, and disfluencies. As a result, speakers do not need to engage in extensive advance planning. Thus, laboratory studies do not provide a full picture of language production in dialog, and further research using naturalistic tasks is needed.

Abstract

Most psycholinguistic studies on morphological processing have examined the role of morphological structure in the visual modality. This chapter discusses morphological processing in the auditory modality, which is an area of research that has only recently received more attention. It first discusses why results in the visual modality cannot straightforwardly be applied to the processing of spoken words, stressing the importance of acknowledging potential modality effects. It then gives a brief overview of the existing research on the role of morphology in the auditory modality, for which an increasing number of studies report that listeners show sensitivity to morphological structure. Finally, the chapter highlights insights gained by looking at morphological processing not only in reading, but also in listening, and it discusses directions for future research

Abstract

Speech segmentation procedures may differ in speakers of different languages. Earlier work based on French speakers listening to French words suggested that the syllable functions as a segmentation unit in speech processing. However, while French has relatively regular and clearly bounded syllables, other languages, such as English, do not. No trace of syllabifying segmentation was found in English listeners listening to English words, French words, or nonsense words. French listeners, however, showed evidence of syllabification even when they were listening to English words. We conclude that alternative segmentation routines are available to the human language processor. In some cases speech segmentation may involve the operation of more than one procedure.

Abstract

The Possible Word Constraint is a proposed mechanism whereby listeners avoid recognising words spuriously embedded in other words. It applies to words leaving a vowelless residue between their edge and the nearest known word or syllable boundary. The present study tests the usefulness of this constraint via lexical statistics of both English and Dutch. The analyses demonstrate that the constraint removes a clear majority of embedded words in speech, and thus can contribute significantly to the efficiency of human speech recognition

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

A distinction between strong and weak vowels can be drawn on the basis of vowel quality, of stress, or of both factors. An experiment was conducted in which sets of contextually matched word-intial vowels ranging from clearly strong to clearly weak were cross-spliced, and the naturalness of the resulting words was rated by listeners. The ratings showed that in general cross-spliced words were only significantly less acceptable than unspliced words when schwa was not involved; this supports a categorical distinction based on vowel quality.

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

Two lexical decision experiments in Cantonese are described in which the recognition of spoken target words as a function of phonological similarity to a preceding prime is investigated. Phonological similaritv in first syllables produced inhibition, while similarity in second syllables led to facilitation. Differences between syllables in tonal and segmental structure had generally similar effects.

Abstract

Speakers and listeners have a shared goal: to communicate. The processes of speech perception and of speech production interact in many ways under the constraints of this communicative goal; such interaction is as characteristic of prosodic processing as of the processing of other aspects of linguistic structure. Two of the major uses of prosodic information in situations of communication are to encode salience and segmentation, and these themes unite the contributions to the symposium introduced by the present review.

Abstract

This chapter highlights that most language behavior consists of speaking and listening. The chapter also reveals differences and similarities between speaking and listening. The laboratory study of word production raises formidable problems; ensuring that a particular word is produced may subvert the spontaneous production process. Word production is investigated via slips and tip-of-the-tongue (TOT), primarily via instances of processing failure and via the technique of via the picture-naming task. The methodology of word production is explained in the chapter. The chapter also explains the phenomenon of interaction between various stages of word production and the process of speech recognition. In this context, it explores the difference between sound and meaning and examines whether or not the comparisons are appropriate between the processes of recognition and production of spoken words. It also describes the similarities and differences in the structure of the recognition and production systems. Finally, the chapter highlights the common issues in recognition and production research, which include the nuances of frequency of occurrence, morphological structure, and phonological structure.

Abstract

Different linguistic structures allow us to highlight distinct aspects of a situation. The aim of this survey is to investigate similarities and differences in the expression of situations or events as “stative” (maintaining a state), “inchoative” (adopting a state) and “agentive” (causing something to be in a state). The questionnaire focuses on the encoding of stative, inchoative and agentive possibilities for the translation equivalents of a set of English verbs.

Abstract

Expressions of human activities and states are a rich area for cross-linguistic comparison. Some languages of the world treat human posture verbs (e.g., sit, lie, kneel) as a special class of predicates, with distinct formal properties. This survey examines lexical, semantic and grammatical patterns for posture verbs, with special reference to contrasts between “stative” (maintaining a posture), “inchoative” (adopting a posture), and “agentive” (causing something to adopt a posture) constructions. The enquiry is thematically linked to the more general questionnaire 'Intransitive Predicate Form Class Survey'.

Abstract

Many of the world’s languages feature an open lexical class of ideophones, words whose marked forms and sensory meanings invite iconic associations. Ideophones (also known as mimetics or expressives) are well-known from languages in Asia, Africa and the Americas, where they often form a class on the same order of magnitude as other major word classes and take up a considerable functional load as modifying expressions or predicates. Across languages, commonalities in the morphosyntactic behaviour of ideophones can be related to their nature and origin as vocal depictions. At the same time there is ample room for linguistic diversity, raising the need for fine-grained grammatical description of ideophone systems. As vocal depictions, ideophones often form a distinct lexical stratum seemingly conjured out of thin air; but as conventionalized words, they inevitably grow roots in local linguistic systems, showing relations to adverbs, adjectives, verbs and other linguistic resources devoted to modification and predication

Abstract

No class of words has better claims to universality than interjections. At the same time, no category has more variable content than this one, traditionally the catch-all basket for linguistic items that bear a complicated relation to sentential syntax. Interjections are a mirror reflecting methodological and theoretical assumptions more than a coherent linguistic category that affords unitary treatment. This chapter focuses on linguistic items that typically function as free-standing utterances, and on some of the conceptual, methodological, and theoretical questions generated by such items. A key move is to study these items in the setting of conversational sequences, rather than from the “flatland” of sequential syntax. This makes visible how some of the most frequent interjections streamline everyday language use and scaffold complex language. Approaching interjections in terms of their sequential positions and interactional functions has the potential to reveal and explain patterns of universality and diversity in interjections.

Abstract

How do neural oscillations support human audiovisual language and communication? Considering the rhythmic nature of audiovisual language, in which stimuli from different sensory modalities unfold over time, neural oscillations represent an ideal candidate to investigate how audiovisual language is processed in the brain. Modulations of oscillatory phase and power are thought to support audiovisual language and communication in multiple ways. Neural oscillations synchronize by tracking external rhythmic stimuli or by re-setting their phase to presentation of relevant stimuli, resulting in perceptual benefits. In particular, synchronized neural oscillations have been shown to subserve the processing and the integration of auditory speech, visual speech, and hand gestures. Furthermore, synchronized oscillatory modulations have been studied and reported between brains during social interaction, suggesting that their contribution to audiovisual communication goes beyond the processing of single stimuli and applies to natural, face-to-face communication.

There are still some outstanding questions that need to be answered to reach a better understanding of the neural processes supporting audiovisual language and communication. In particular, it is not entirely clear yet how the multitude of signals encountered during audiovisual communication are combined into a coherent percept and how this is affected during real-world dyadic interactions. In order to address these outstanding questions, it is fundamental to consider language as a multimodal phenomenon, involving the processing of multiple stimuli unfolding at different rhythms over time, and to study language in its natural context: social interaction. Other outstanding questions could be addressed by implementing novel techniques (such as rapid invisible frequency tagging, dual-electroencephalography, or multi-brain stimulation) and analysis methods (e.g., using temporal response functions) to better understand the relationship between oscillatory dynamics and efficient audiovisual communication.

Abstract

This paper summarizes the results of a descriptive syntactic category analysis of child English no which reveals that young children use and represent no as a determiner and negatives like no pen as NPs, contra standard analyses.

Abstract

Acquiring a second language (L2) requires newly learned information to be integrated with existing knowledge. It has been proposed that several memory systems work together to enable this process of rapidly encoding new information and then slowly incorporating it with existing knowledge, such that it is consolidated and integrated into the language network without catastrophic interference. This chapter focuses on consolidation of L2 vocabulary. First, the complementary learning systems model is outlined, along with the model’s predictions regarding lexical consolidation. Next, word learning studies in first language (L1) that investigate the factors playing a role in consolidation, and the neural mechanisms underlying this, are reviewed. Using the L1 memory consolidation literature as background, the chapter then presents what is currently known about memory consolidation in L2 word learning. Finally, considering what is already known about L1 but not about L2, future research investigating memory consolidation in L2 neurocognition is proposed.

Abstract

Anaphora, a ubiquitous feature of natural language, poses a particular challenge to young children as they first learn language due to its referential ambiguity. In spite of this, parents and caregivers use anaphora frequently in child-directed speech, potentially presenting a risk to effective communication if children do not yet have the linguistic capabilities of resolving anaphora successfully. Through an eye-tracking study in a naturalistic free-play context, we examine the strategies that parents employ to calibrate their use of anaphora to their child's linguistic development level. We show that, in this way, parents are able to intuitively scaffold the complexity of their speech such that greater referential ambiguity does not hurt overall communication success.

Abstract

The study presented here focuses on two pragmatic gestures:
the hand flip (Ferré, 2011), a gesture of the Palm Up Open
Hand/PUOH family (Müller, 2004) and the closed hand which
can be considered as the opposite kind of movement to the open-
ing of the hands present in the PUOH gesture. Whereas one of
the functions of the hand flip has been described as presenting
a new point in speech (Cienki, 2021), the closed hand gesture
has not yet been described in the literature to the best of our
knowledge. It can however be conceived of as having the oppo-
site function of announcing the end of a point in discourse. The
object of the present study is therefore to determine, with the
study of prosodic features, if the two gestures are found in the
same type of speech units and what their respective scope is.
Drawing from a corpus of three TED Talks in French the
prosodic characteristics of the speech that accompanies the two
gestures will be examined. The hypothesis developed in the
present paper is that their scope should be reflected in the
prosody of accompanying speech, especially pitch key, tone,
and relative pitch range. The prediction is that hand flips and
closing hand gestures are expected to be located at the periph-
ery of Intonation Phrases (IPs), Inter-Pausal Units (IPUs) or
more conversational Turn Constructional Units (TCUs), and are
likely to be co-occurrent with pauses in speech. But because of
the natural slope of intonation in speech, the speech that accom-
pany early gestures in Intonation Phrases should reveal different
features from the speech at the end of intonational units. Tones
should be different as well, considering the prosodic structure
of spoken French.

Abstract

This chapter highlights the research in isolating genetic factors underlying specific language impairment (SLI), or developmental dysphasia, which exploits newly developed genotyping technology, novel statistical methodology, and DNA sequence data generated by the Human Genome Project. The author begins with an overview of results from family, twin, and adoption studies supporting genetic involvement and then goes on to outline progress in a number of genetic mapping efforts that have been recently completed or are currently under way. It has been possible for genetic researchers to pinpoint the specific mutation responsible for some speech and language disorders, providing an example of how the availability of human genomic sequence data can greatly accelerate the pace of disease gene discovery. Finally, the author discusses future prospects on how molecular genetics may offer new insight into the etiology underlying speech and language disorders, leading to improvements in diagnosis and treatment.

Abstract

Language acquisition is complex. However, one thing that has been suggested to help learning is the way that information is distributed throughout language; co-occurrences among particular items (e.g., syllables and words) have been shown to help learners discover the words that a language contains and figure out how those words are used. Humans’ ability to draw on this information—“statistical learning”—has been demonstrated across a broad range of studies. However, evidence from non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies is critically lacking, which limits theorizing on the universality of this skill. We extended work on statistical language learning to a new, non-WEIRD linguistic population: speakers of Yélî Dnye, who live on a remote island off mainland Papua New Guinea (Rossel Island). We performed a replication of an existing statistical learning study, training adults on an artificial language with statistically defined words, then examining what they had learnt using a two-alternative forced-choice test. Crucially, we implemented several key amendments to the original study to ensure the replication was suitable for remote field-site testing with speakers of Yélî Dnye. We made critical changes to the stimuli and materials (to test speakers of Yélî Dnye, rather than English), the instructions (we re-worked these significantly, and added practice tasks to optimize participants’ understanding), and the study format (shifting from a lab-based to a portable tablet-based setup). We discuss the requirement for acute sensitivity to linguistic, cultural, and environmental factors when adapting studies to test new populations.

Abstract

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as the standard method for numerous tasks on graph-structured data such as node classification. However, real-world graphs are often evolving over time and even new classes may arise. We model these challenges as an instance of lifelong learning, in which a learner faces a sequence of tasks and may take over knowledge acquired in past tasks. Such knowledge may be stored explicitly as historic data or implicitly within model parameters. In this work, we systematically analyze the influence of implicit and explicit knowledge. Therefore, we present an incremental training method for lifelong learning on graphs and introduce a new measure based on k-neighborhood time differences to address variances in the historic data. We apply our training method to five representative GNN architectures and evaluate them on three new lifelong node classification datasets. Our results show that no more than 50% of the GNN's receptive field is necessary to retain at least 95% accuracy compared to training over the complete history of the graph data. Furthermore, our experiments confirm that implicit knowledge becomes more important when fewer explicit knowledge is available.

Abstract

COVID-19 research datasets are crucial for analyzing research dynamics. Most collections of COVID-19 research items do not to include cited works and do not have annotations
from a controlled vocabulary. Starting with ZB MED KE data on COVID-19, which comprises CORD-19, we assemble a new dataset that includes cited work and MeSH annotations for all records. Furthermore, we conduct experiments on the analysis of research dynamics, in which we investigate predicting links in a co-annotation graph created on the basis of the new dataset. Surprisingly, we find that simple heuristic methods are better at
predicting future links than more sophisticated approaches such as graph neural networks.

Abstract

The last few years have revealed that several species may share the building blocks of Musicality with humans. The recognition of these building blocks (e.g., rhythm, frequency variation) was a necessary impetus for a new round of studies investigating rhythmic variation in animal vocal displays. Singing primates are a small group of primate species that produce modulated songs ranging from tens to thousands of vocal units. Previous studies showed that the indri, the only singing lemur, is currently the only known species that perform duet and choruses showing multiple rhythmic categories, as seen in human music. Rhythmic categories occur when temporal intervals between note onsets are not uniformly distributed, and rhythms with a small integer ratio between these intervals are typical of human music. Besides indris, white-handed gibbons and three crested gibbon species showed a prominent rhythmic category corresponding to a single small integer ratio, isochrony. This study reviews previous evidence on the co-occurrence of rhythmic categories in primates and focuses on the prospects for a comparative, multimodal study of rhythmicity in this clade.

Abstract

Despite the early emergence of pointing, children are generally not documented to produce iconic gestures until later in development. Although research has described this developmental trajectory and the types of iconic gestures that emerge first, there has been limited focus on iconic gestures within interactional contexts. This study identified the first 10 iconic gestures produced by five monolingual English-speaking children in a naturalistic longitudinal video corpus and analysed the interactional contexts. We found children produced their first iconic gesture between 12 and 20 months and that gestural types varied. Although 34% of gestures could have been imitated or derived from adult or child actions in the preceding context, the majority were produced independently of any observed model. In these cases, adults often led the interaction in a direction where iconic gesture was an appropriate response. Overall, we find infants can represent a referent symbolically and possess a greater capacity for innovation than previously assumed. In order to develop our understanding of how children learn to produce iconic gestures, it is important to consider the immediate interactional context. Conducting naturalistic corpus analyses could be a more ecologically valid approach to understanding how children learn to produce iconic gestures in real life contexts.

Abstract

Trumai, a genetically isolated language spoken in Brazil (Xingu reserve), is an example of an endangered language. Although the Trumai population consists of more than 100 individuals, only 51 people speak the language. The oral traditions are progressively dying. Given the current scenario, the documentation of this language and its cultural aspects is of great importance. In the framework of the DoBeS program (Documentation of Endangered Languages), the project "Documentation of Trumai" has selected and organized a collection of Trumai texts, with a multi-media representation of the corpus. Several kinds of information and data types are being included in the archive of the language: texts with audio and video recordings; written texts from educational materials; drawings; photos; songs; annotations in different formats; lexicon; field notes; results from scientific studies of the language (sound system, sketch grammar, comparative studies with other Xinguan languages), etc. All materials are integrated into the IMDI-Browser, a specialized tool for presenting and searching for linguistic data. This paper explores the processing phases and the results of the Trumai project taking into consideration the issue of how to combine the needs and wishes of field linguistics (content and research aspects) and the needs of archiving (structure and workflow aspects) in a well-organized corpus.

Abstract

A prototypical lexicon tool was implemented which was intended to allow researchers to collaboratively create lexicons of endangered languages. Increasingly often researchers documenting or analyzing a language work at different locations. Lexicons that evolve through continuous interaction between the collaborators can only be efficiently produced when it can be accessed and manipulated via the Internet. The SHAWEL tool was developed to address these needs; it makes use of a thin Java client and a central database solution.