Publications

Abstract

This paper presents a meta-analysis of hemodynamic studies on passive auditory language processing. We assess the overlap of hemodynamic activation areas and activation maxima reported in experiments involving the presentation of sentences, words, pseudowords, or sublexical or non-linguistic auditory stimuli. Areas that have been reliably replicated are identified. The results of the meta-analysis are compared to electrophysiological, magnetencephalic (MEG), and clinical findings. It is concluded that auditory language input is processed in a left posterior frontal and bilateral temporal cortical network. Within this network, no processing leve l is related to a single cortical area. The temporal lobes seem to differ with respect to their involvement in post-lexical processing, in that the left temporal lobe has greater involvement than the right, and also in the degree of anatomical specialization for phonological, lexical, and sentence -level processing, with greater overlap on the right contrasting with a higher degree of differentiation on the left.

Abstract

Kun kuuntelemme puhetta tai luemme tekstiä, alamme välittömästi rakentaa koherenttia tulkintaa. Toisin kuin lukemisessa, puheen havaitsemisessa kuulija voi harvoin kontrolloida nopeutta, jolla hänelle puhutaan. Huolimatta hyvin nopeasta syötteestä - noin 4-7 tavua sekunnissa - ihmiset kykenevät tulkitsemaan puhetta hyvin vaivattomasti. Lauseen ymmärtämisen tutkimuksessa selvitetäänkin, miten tällainen nopea ja useimmiten vaivaton tulkintaprosessi tapahtuu, mitkä kognitiiviset prosessit osallistuvat reaaliaikaiseen tulkintaan ja millaista informaatiota missäkin vaiheessa prosessointia ihminen käyttää hyväkseen johdonmukaisen tulkinnan muodostamiseksi. Tämä kappale on katsaus lauseen ymmärtämisen prosesseihin ja niiden tutkimukseen. Käsittelemme lyhyesti prosessointimalleja, aikuisten ja lasten kielen suhdetta, lauseen sisäisten ja välisten viittaussuhteiden tulkintaa ja sensorisen ympäristön sekä motorisen toiminnan roolia lauseiden tulkintaprosessissa.

Abstract

We outline an algorithm capable of generating varied but natural sounding sequences of argument NPs in subordinate clauses of German, a semi-free word order language. In order to attain the right level of output flexibility, the algorithm considers (1) the relevant lexical properties of the head verb (not only transitivity type but also reflexivity, thematic relations expressed by the NPs, etc.), and (2) the animacy and definiteness values of the arguments, and their length. The relevant statistical data were extracted from the NEGRA–II treebank and from hand-coded features for animacy and definiteness. The algorithm maps the relevant properties onto “primary” versus “secondary” placement options in the generator. The algorithm is restricted in that it does not take into account linear order determinants related to the sentence’s information structure and its discourse context (e.g. contrastiveness). These factors may modulate the above preferences or license “tertiary” linear orders beyond the primary and secondary options considered here.

Abstract

No area in the study of human languages has a longer history and a higher practical signifi cance than lexicography. The advent of the computer has dramaticually changed this discipline in ways which go far beyond the digitisation of materials in combination with effi cient search tools, or the transfer of an existing dictionary onto the computer. They allow the stepwise elaboration of what is called here Digital Lexical Systems, i.e., computerized systems in which the underlying data - in form of an extendable corpus - and description of lexical properties on various levels can be effi ciently combined. This paper discusses the range of these possibilities and describes the present form of the German „Digital Lexical System of the Academy“, a project of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (www.dwds.de).

Abstract

Words are fundamental to reading and yet over a century of research has not masked the controversies around how words are recognized. We review some old and new research that disproves simple ideas such as words are read as wholes or are simply mapped directly to spoken language. We also review theory and research relevant to the question of sublexical influences in word recognition. We describe orthography and phonology, how they are related to each other and describe a series of new experiments on how these sources of information are processed. Tasks include lexical decision, perceptual identification, and naming. Dependent measures are reaction time, accuracy of performance, and a new measure, initial phoneme duration, that refers to the duration of the first phoneme when the target word is pronounced. Important factors in resolving the controversies include the realization that reading has multiple determinants, as well as evaluating the type of task, proper controls such as familiarity of the test items and accuracy of measurement of the response. We also address potential limitations with measures related to the mapping between orthography and phonology, and show that the existence of a sound-to-spelling consistency effect does not require interactive activation, but can be explained and predicted by a feedforward model, the Fuzzy logical model of perception.

Abstract

This paper reports the results of a study on the prosodic marking of broad and contrastive focus in three language varieties of which two are in contact: bilingual Peruvian Spanish, Quechua and Peninsular Spanish. An interactive communicative task revealed that the prosodic marking of contrastive focus was limited in all three language varieties. No systematic correspondence was observed between specific contour/accent types and focus, and the phonetic marking of contrastive focus was weak and restricted to phrase-final position. Interestingly, we identified two contours for bilingual Peruvian Spanish that were present in Quechua, but not in Peninsular Spanish, providing evidence for a prosodic transfer from Quechua to Spanish in Quechua-Spanish bilinguals.

Abstract

Effekte linguisticher Typologie auf die Sprach-entwicklung. In G. Plehn (Ed.), Jahrbuch der Max-Planck Gesellsch

Abstract

Can studying left- and right-handers inform us about cognition? In this chapter, we give an overview of research showing that studying left- and right-handers is informative for understanding the way the brain is organized (i.e., lateralized), as there appear to be differences between left- and right-handers in this respect, but also on the behavioral level handedness studies can provide new insights. According to theories of embodied cognition, our body can influence cognition. Given that left- and right-handers use their bodies differently, this might reflect their performance on an array of cognitive tasks. Indeed, handedness can have an influence on, for instance, what side of space we judge as more positive, the way we gesture, how we remember things, and how we learn new words. Laterality research can, therefore, provide valuable information as to how we act and why

Abstract

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

Abstract

This paper explores the semantics of the dative in Tashelhiyt, a Berber language from Morocco. After a brief morphosyntactic overview of the dative in this language, I identify a wide range of its semantic roles, including possessor, experiencer, distributive and unintending causer. I arrange these roles in a semantic map and propose semantic links between the roles such as metaphorisation and generalisation. In the light of the Tashelhiyt data, the paper also proposes additions to previous semantic maps of the dative (Haspelmath 1999, 2003) and to Kittilä’s 2005 typology of beneficiary coding.

Abstract

This paper offers some thoughts on the question what effect language has on the understanding and hence behavior of a human being. It reviews some issues of linguistic relativity, known as the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,” suggesting that the culture we grow up in is reflected in the language and that our cognition (and our worldview) is shaped or colored by the conventions developed by our ancestors and peers. This raises questions for the degree of translatability, illustrated by the comparison of two poems by a Dutch poet who spent most of his life in the USA. Mutual understanding, I claim, is possible because we have the cognitive apparatus that allows us to enter different emic systems.

Abstract

The acquisition of second language (L2) syntax has been central to the study of L2 acquisition, but recently there has been an interest in how learners apply their L2 syntactic knowledge to the input in real-time comprehension. Investigating L2 learners’ moment-by-moment syntactic analysis during listening or reading of sentence as it unfolds — their parsing of the input — is important, because language learning involves both the acquisition of knowledge and the ability to use it in real time. Using methods employed in monolingual processing research, investigations often focus on the processing of temporary syntactic ambiguities and structural dependencies. Investigating ambiguities involves examining parsing decisions at points in a sentence where there is a syntactic choice and this can offer insights into the nature of the parsing mechanism, and in particular, its processing preferences. Studying the establishment of syntactic dependencies at the critical point in the input allows for an investigation of how and when different kinds of information (e.g., syntactic, semantic, pragmatic) are put to use in real-time interpretation. Within an L2 context, further questions are of interest and familiar from traditional L2 acquisition research. Specifically, how native-like are the parsing procedures that L2 learners apply when processing the L2 input? What is the role of the learner’s first language (L1)? And, what are the effects of individual factors such as age, proficiency/dominance and working memory on L2 parsing? In the current paper I will provide an overview of the findings of some experimental research designed to investigate these questions.

Abstract

Although humans are the ultimate “natural language generators”, the area of psycholinguistic modeling has been somewhat underrepresented in recent approaches to Natural Language Generation in computer science. To draw attention to the area and illustrate its potential relevance to Natural Language Generation, I provide an overview of recent work on psycholinguistic modeling of language production together with some key empirical findings, state-of-the-art experimental techniques, and their historical roots. The techniques include analyses of speech-error corpora, chronometric analyses, eyetracking, and neuroimaging.
The overview is built around the issue of cognitive control in natural language generation, concentrating on the production of single words, which is an essential ingredient of the generation of larger utterances. Most of the work exploited the fact that human speakers are good but not perfect at resisting temptation, which has provided some critical clues about the nature of the underlying system.

Abstract

Listeners’ signals of recipiency, such as “Mm-hm” or “uh-huh” in English, are the most elementary or minimal “conversational turns” possible. Minimal, because apart from acknowledging recipiency and inviting the speaker to continue with his/her next turn, they do not add any new information to the discourse of the conversation. The goal of this project is to gather cross cultural information on listeners’ feedback behaviour during conversation. Listeners in a conversation usually provide short signals that indicate to the speaker that they are still “with the speaker”. These signals could be verbal (like for instance “mm hm” in English or “hm hm” in Dutch) or nonverbal (visual), like nodding. Often, these signals are produced in overlap with the speaker’s vocalisation. If listeners do not produce these signals, speakers often invite them explicitly (e.g. “are you still there?” in a telephone conversation). Our goal is to investigate what kind of signals are used by listeners of different languages to signal “recipiency” to the speaker.

Abstract

This paper describes how the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea used to construct their big seagoing masawa canoes and how they used to make their sails, what forms of different knowledge and expertise they needed to do this during various stages of the construction processes, how this knowledge was socially distributed, and the social implications of all the joint communal activities that were necessary until a new canoe could be launched. Then it tries to answer the question why the complex distributed knowledge of how to make a masawa has been gradually getting lost in most of the village communities on the Trobriand Islands; and finally it outlines and discusses the implications of this loss for the Trobriand Islanders' culture, for their social construction of reality, and for their indigenous cognitive capacities.

Abstract

Human ethologists have shown that humans are both attracted to others and at the same time fear them. They refer to this kind of fear with the technical term ‘social fear’ and claim that “it is alleviated with personal acquaintance but remains a principle characteristic of interpersonal behaviour. As a result, we maintain various degrees of greater distance between ourselves and others depending on the amount of confidence we have in the other” (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989: 335). The goal of this task is to conduct exploratory, heuristic research to establish a new subproject that – based on a corpus of video data – will investigate various forms of human spatial behaviour cross-culturally.