Displaying 1 - 100 of 1385
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Aarts, E. (2009). Resisting temptation: The role of the anterior cingulate cortex in adjusting cognitive control. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
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Acheson, D. J., & MacDonald, M. C. (2009). Twisting tongues and memories: Explorations of the relationship between language production and verbal working memory. Journal of Memory and Language, 60(3), 329-350. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2008.12.002.
Abstract
Many accounts of working memory posit specialized storage mechanisms for the maintenance of serial order. We explore an alternative, that maintenance is achieved through temporary activation in the language production architecture. Four experiments examined the extent to which the phonological similarity effect can be explained as a sublexical speech error. Phonologically similar nonword stimuli were ordered to create tongue twister or control materials used in four tasks: reading aloud, immediate spoken recall, immediate typed recall, and serial recognition. Dependent measures from working memory (recall accuracy) and language production (speech errors) fields were used. Even though lists were identical except for item order, robust effects of tongue twisters were observed. Speech error analyses showed that errors were better described as phoneme rather than item ordering errors. The distribution of speech errors was comparable across all experiments and exhibited syllable-position effects, suggesting an important role for production processes. Implications for working memory and language production are discussed. -
Acheson, D. J., & MacDonald, M. C. (2009). Verbal working memory and language production: Common approaches to the serial ordering of verbal information. Psychological Bulletin, 135(1), 50-68. doi:10.1037/a0014411.
Abstract
Verbal working memory (WM) tasks typically involve the language production architecture for recall; however, language production processes have had a minimal role in theorizing about WM. A framework for understanding verbal WM results is presented here. In this framework, domain-specific mechanisms for serial ordering in verbal WM are provided by the language production architecture, in which positional, lexical, and phonological similarity constraints are highly similar to those identified in the WM literature. These behavioral similarities are paralleled in computational modeling of serial ordering in both fields. The role of long-term learning in serial ordering performance is emphasized, in contrast to some models of verbal WM. Classic WM findings are discussed in terms of the language production architecture. The integration of principles from both fields illuminates the maintenance and ordering mechanisms for verbal information. -
Adank, P., Smits, R., & Van Hout, R. (2004). A comparison of vowel normalization procedures for language variation research. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 116(5), 3099-3109. doi:10.1121/1.1795335.
Abstract
An evaluation of vowel normalization procedures for the purpose of studying language variation is presented. The procedures were compared on how effectively they (a) preserve phonemic information, (b) preserve information about the talker's regional background (or sociolinguistic information), and (c) minimize anatomical/physiological variation in acoustic representations of vowels. Recordings were made for 80 female talkers and 80 male talkers of Dutch. These talkers were stratified according to their gender and regional background. The normalization procedures were applied to measurements of the fundamental frequency and the first three formant frequencies for a large set of vowel tokens. The normalization procedures were evaluated through statistical pattern analysis. The results show that normalization procedures that use information across multiple vowels ("vowel-extrinsic" information) to normalize a single vowel token performed better than those that include only information contained in the vowel token itself ("vowel-intrinsic" information). Furthermore, the results show that normalization procedures that operate on individual formants performed better than those that use information across multiple formants (e.g., "formant-extrinsic" F2-F1). -
Adank, P., Van Hout, R., & Smits, R. (2004). An acoustic description of the vowels of Northern and Southern Standard Dutch. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 116(3), 1729-1738. doi:10.1121/1.1779271.
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Adank, P., & Janse, E. (2009). Perceptual learning of time-compressed and natural fast speech. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 126(5), 2649-2659. doi:10.1121/1.3216914.
Abstract
Speakers vary their speech rate considerably during a conversation, and listeners are able to quickly adapt to these variations in speech rate. Adaptation to fast speech rates is usually measured using artificially time-compressed speech. This study examined adaptation to two types of fast speech: artificially time-compressed speech and natural fast speech. Listeners performed a speeded sentence verification task on three series of sentences: normal-speed sentences, time-compressed sentences, and natural fast sentences. Listeners were divided into two groups to evaluate the possibility of transfer of learning between the time-compressed and natural fast conditions. The first group verified the natural fast before the time-compressed sentences, while the second verified the time-compressed before the natural fast sentences. The results showed transfer of learning when the time-compressed sentences preceded the natural fast sentences, but not when natural fast sentences preceded the time-compressed sentences. The results are discussed in the framework of theories on perceptual learning. Second, listeners show adaptation to the natural fast sentences, but performance for this type of fast speech does not improve to the level of time-compressed sentences. -
Allen, G. L., & Haun, D. B. M. (2004). Proximity and precision in spatial memory. In G. Allen (
Ed. ), Human spatial memory: Remembering where (pp. 41-63). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. -
Allen, S. E. M. (1998). Categories within the verb category: Learning the causative in Inuktitut. Linguistics, 36(4), 633-677.
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Allen, S. E. M. (1998). A discourse-pragmatic explanation for the subject-object asymmetry in early null arguments. In A. Sorace, C. Heycock, & R. Shillcock (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the GALA '97 Conference on Language Acquisition (pp. 10-15). Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press.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. -
Allen, G. L., Kirasic, K. C., Rashotte, M. A., & Haun, D. B. M. (2004). Aging and path integration skill: Kinesthetic and vestibular contributions to wayfinding. Perception & Psychophysics, 66(1), 170-179.
Abstract
In a triangle completion task designed to assess path integration skill, younger and older adults performed
similarly after being led, while blindfolded, along the route segments on foot, which provided both kinesthetic and vestibular information about the outbound path. In contrast, older adults’ performance was impaired, relative to that of younger adults, after they were conveyed, while blindfolded,
along the route segments in a wheelchair, which limited them principally to vestibular information.
Correlational evidence suggested that cognitive resources were significant factors in accounting for age-related decline in path integration performance. -
Ambridge, B., Pine, J. M., Rowland, C. F., Jones, R. L., & Clark, V. (2009). A Semantics-Based Approach to the “no negative evidence” problem. Cognitive Science, 33(7), 1301-1316. doi:10.1111/j.1551-6709.2009.01055.x.
Abstract
Previous studies have shown that children retreat from argument-structure overgeneralization errors (e.g., *Don’t giggle me) by inferring that frequently encountered verbs are unlikely to be grammatical in unattested constructions, and by making use of syntax-semantics correspondences (e.g., verbs denoting internally caused actions such as giggling cannot normally be used causatively). The present study tested a new account based on a unitary learning mechanism that combines both of these processes. Seventy-two participants (ages 5–6, 9–10, and adults) rated overgeneralization errors with higher (*The funny man’s joke giggled Bart) and lower (*The funny man giggled Bart) degrees of direct external causation. The errors with more-direct causation were rated as less unacceptable than those with less-direct causation. This finding is consistent with the new account, under which children acquire—in an incremental and probabilistic fashion—the meaning of particular constructions (e.g., transitive causative = direct external causation) and particular verbs, rejecting generalizations where the incompatibility between the two is too great. -
Ambridge, B., Rowland, C. F., Theakston, A. L., & Tomasello, M. (2006). Comparing different accounts of inversion errors in children's non-subject wh-questions: ‘What experimental data can tell us?’. Journal of Child Language, 33(3), 519-557. doi:10.1017/S0305000906007513.
Abstract
This study investigated different accounts of children's acquisition of non-subject wh-questions. Questions using each of 4 wh-words (what, who, how and why), and 3 auxiliaries (BE, DO and CAN) in 3sg and 3pl form were elicited from 28 children aged 3;6–4;6. Rates of non-inversion error (Who she is hitting?) were found not to differ by wh-word, auxiliary or number alone, but by lexical auxiliary subtype and by wh-word+lexical auxiliary combination. This finding counts against simple rule-based accounts of question acquisition that include no role for the lexical subtype of the auxiliary, and suggests that children may initially acquire wh-word+lexical auxiliary combinations from the input. For DO questions, auxiliary-doubling errors (What does she does like?) were also observed, although previous research has found that such errors are virtually non-existent for positive questions. Possible reasons for this discrepancy are discussed. -
Ambridge, B., & Rowland, C. F. (2009). Predicting children's errors with negative questions: Testing a schema-combination account. Cognitive Linguistics, 20(2), 225-266. doi:10.1515/COGL.2009.014.
Abstract
Positive and negative what, why and yes/no questions with the 3sg auxiliaries can and does were elicited from 50 children aged 3;3–4;3. In support of the constructivist “schema-combination” account, only children who produced a particular positive question type correctly (e.g., What does she want?) produced a characteristic “auxiliary-doubling” error (e.g., *What does she doesn't want?) for the corresponding negative question type. This suggests that these errors are formed by superimposing a positive question frame (e.g., What does THING PROCESS?) and an inappropriate negative frame (e.g., She doesn't PROCESS) learned from declarative utterances. In addition, a significant correlation between input frequency and correct production was observed for 11 of the 12 lexical frames (e.g., What does THING PROCESS?), although some negative question types showed higher rates of error than one might expect based on input frequency alone. Implications for constructivist and generativist theories of question-acquisition are discussed. -
Ameka, F. K., Dench, A., & Evans, N. (
Eds. ). (2006). Catching language: The standing challenge of grammar writing. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Abstract
Descriptive grammars are our main vehicle for documenting and analysing the linguistic structure of the world's 6,000 languages. They bring together, in one place, a coherent treatment of how the whole language works, and therefore form the primary source of information on a given language, consulted by a wide range of users: areal specialists, typologists, theoreticians of any part of language (syntax, morphology, phonology, historical linguistics etc.), and members of the speech communities concerned. The writing of a descriptive grammar is a major intellectual challenge, that calls on the grammarian to balance a respect for the language's distinctive genius with an awareness of how other languages work, to combine rigour with readability, to depict structural regularities while respecting a corpus of real material, and to represent something of the native speaker's competence while recognising the variation inherent in any speech community. Despite a recent surge of awareness of the need to document little-known languages, there is no book that focusses on the manifold issues that face the author of a descriptive grammar. This volume brings together contributors who approach the problem from a range of angles. Most have written descriptive grammars themselves, but others represent different types of reader. Among the topics they address are: overall issues of grammar design, the complementary roles of outsider and native speaker grammarians, the balance between grammar and lexicon, cross-linguistic comparability, the role of explanation in grammatical description, the interplay of theory and a range of fieldwork methods in language description, the challenges of describing languages in their cultural and historical context, and the tensions between linguistic particularity, established practice of particular schools of linguistic description and the need for a universally commensurable analytic framework. This book will renew the field of grammaticography, addressing a multiple readership of descriptive linguists, typologists, and formal linguists, by bringing together a range of distinguished practitioners from around the world to address these questions. -
Ameka, F. K. (1987). A comparative analysis of linguistic routines in two languages: English and Ewe. Journal of Pragmatics, 11(3), 299-326. doi:10.1016/0378-2166(87)90135-4.
Abstract
It is very widely acknowledged that linguistic routines are not only embodiments of the sociocultural values of speech communities that use them, but their knowledge and appropriate use also form an essential part of a speaker's communicative/pragmatic competence. Despite this, many studies concentrate more on describing the use of routines rather than explaining the socio-cultural aspects of their meaning and the way they affect their use. It is the contention of this paper that there is the need to go beyond descriptions to explanations and explications of the use and meaning of routines that are culturally and socially revealing. This view is illustrated by a comparative analysis of functionally equivalent formulaic expressions in English and Ewe. The similarities are noted and the differences explained in terms of the socio-cultural traditions associated with the respective languages. It is argued that insights gained from such studies are valuable for crosscultural understanding and communication as well as for second language pedagogy. -
Ameka, F. K. (2009). Access rituals in West Africa: An ethnopragmatic perspective. In G. Senft, & E. B. Basso (
Eds. ), Ritual communication (pp. 127-151). Oxford: Berg. -
Ameka, F. K. (1990). [Review of Robert Burchfield (ed.) Studies in lexicography]. Studies in Language, 14(2), 479-489.
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Ameka, F. K. (1989). [Review of The case for lexicase: An outline of lexicase grammatical theory by Stanley Starosta]. Studies in Language, 13(2), 506-518.
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Ameka, F. K. (2006). Ewe serial verb constructions in their grammatical context. In A. Y. Aikhenvald, & R. M. W. Dixon (
Eds. ), Serial verb constructions: A cross-linguistic typology (pp. 124-143). Oxford: Oxford University Press. -
Ameka, F. K. (2006). Elements of the grammar of space in Ewe. In S. C. Levinson, & D. P. Wilkins (
Eds. ), Grammars of space: Explorations in cognitive diversity (pp. 359-399). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. -
Ameka, F. K., & Breedveld, A. (2004). Areal cultural scripts for social interaction in West African communities. Intercultural Pragmatics, 1(2), 167-187. doi:10.1515/iprg.2004.1.2.167.
Abstract
Ways of interacting and not interacting in human societies have social, cognitive and cultural dimensions. These various aspects may be reflected in particular in relation to “taboos”. They reflect the ways of thinking and the values of a society. They are recognized as part of the communicative competence of the speakers and are learned in socialization. Some salient taboos are likely to be named in the language of the relevant society, others may not have a name. Interactional taboos can be specific to a cultural linguistic group or they may be shared across different communities that belong to a ‘speech area’ (Hymes 1972). In this article we describe a number of unnamed norms of communicative conduct which are widespread in West Africa such as the taboos on the use of the left hand in social interaction and on the use of personal names in adult address, and the widespread preference for the use of intermediaries for serious communication. We also examine a named avoidance (yaage) behavior specific to the Fulbe, a nomadic cattle-herding group spread from West Africa across the Sahel as far as Sudan. We show how tacit knowledge about these taboos and other interactive norms can be captured using the cultural scripts methodology. -
Ameka, F. K. (2004). Grammar and cultural practices: The grammaticalization of triadic communication in West African languages. The Journal of West African Languages, 30(2), 5-28.
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Ameka, F. K., & Wilkins, D. P. (2006). Interjections. In J.-O. Ostman, & J. Verschueren (
Eds. ), Handbook of pragmatics (pp. 1-22). Amsterdam: Benjamins. -
Ameka, F. K. (2006). Grammars in contact in the Volta Basin (West Africa): On contact induced grammatical change in Likpe. In A. Y. Aikhenvald, & R. M. W. Dixon (
Eds. ), Grammars in contact: A crosslinguistic typology (pp. 114-142). Oxford: Oxford University Press. -
Ameka, F. K. (2009). Likpe. In G. J. Dimmendaal (
Ed. ), Coding participant marking: Construction types in twelve African languages (pp. 239-280). Amsterdam: Benjamins. -
Ameka, F. K. (2006). Interjections. In K. Brown (
Ed. ), Encyclopedia of language & linguistics (2nd ed., pp. 743-746). Oxford: Elsevier. -
Ameka, F. K. (1991). Ewe: Its grammatical constructions and illocutionary devices. PhD Thesis, Australian National University, Canberra.
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Ameka, F. K. (1998). Particules énonciatives en Ewe. Faits de langues, 6(11/12), 179-204.
Abstract
Particles are little words that speakers use to signal the illocutionary force of utterances and/or express their attitude towards elements of the communicative situation, e.g. the addresses. This paper presents an overview of the classification, meaning and use of utterance particles in Ewe. It argues that they constitute a grammatical word class on functional and distributional grounds. The paper calls for a cross-cultural investigation of particles, especially in Africa, where they have been neglected for far too long. -
Ameka, F. K. (2006). Real descriptions: Reflections on native speaker and non-native speaker descriptions of a language. In F. K. Ameka, A. Dench, & N. Evans (
Eds. ), Catching language: The standing challenge of grammar writing (pp. 69-112). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. -
Ameka, F. K. (2009). Verb extensions in Likpe (Sɛkpɛlé). Journal of West African Languages, 36(1/2), 139-157.
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Araújo, S., Faísca, L., Petersson, K. M., & Reis, A. (2009). Cognitive profiles in Portuguese children with dyslexia. In Abstracts presented at the International Neuropsychological Society, Finnish Neuropsychological Society, Joint Mid-Year Meeting July 29-August 1, 2009. Helsinki, Finland & Tallinn, Estonia (pp. 23). Retrieved from http://www.neuropsykologia.fi/ins2009/INS_MY09_Abstract.pdf.
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Araújo, S., Faísca, L., Petersson, K. M., & Reis, A. (2009). Visual processing factors contribute to object naming difficulties in dyslexic readers. In Abstracts presented at the International Neuropsychological Society, Finnish Neuropsychological Society, Joint Mid-Year Meeting July 29-August 1, 2009. Helsinki, Finland & Tallinn, Estonia (pp. 39). Retrieved from http://www.neuropsykologia.fi/ins2009/INS_MY09_Abstract.pdf.
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Avelino, H., Coon, J., & Norcliffe, E. (
Eds. ). (2009). New perspectives in Mayan linguistics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Working Papers in Linguistics. -
Baayen, R. H., Feldman, L. B., & Schreuder, R. (2006). Morphological influences on the recognition of monosyllabic monomorphemic words. Journal of Memory and Language, 55(2), 290-313. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2006.03.008.
Abstract
Balota et al. [Balota, D., Cortese, M., Sergent-Marshall, S., Spieler, D., & Yap, M. (2004). Visual word recognition for single-syllable words. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 133, 283–316] studied lexical processing in word naming and lexical decision using hierarchical multiple regression techniques for a large data set of monosyllabic, morphologically simple words. The present study supplements their work by making use of more flexible regression techniques that are better suited for dealing with collinearity and non-linearity, and by documenting the contributions of several variables that they did not take into account. In particular, we included measures of morphological connectivity, as well as a new frequency count, the frequency of a word in speech rather than in writing. The morphological measures emerged as strong predictors in visual lexical decision, but not in naming, providing evidence for the importance of morphological connectivity even for the recognition of morphologically simple words. Spoken frequency was predictive not only for naming but also for visual lexical decision. In addition, it co-determined subjective frequency estimates and norms for age of acquisition. Finally, we show that frequency predominantly reflects conceptual familiarity rather than familiarity with a word’s form. -
Baayen, H., & Lieber, R. (1991). Productivity and English derivation: A corpus-based study. Linguistics, 29(5), 801-843. doi:10.1515/ling.1991.29.5.801.
Abstract
The notion of productivity is one which is central to the study of morphology.
It is a notion about which linguists frequently have intuitions. But it is a notion which still
remains somewhat problematic in the
literature on generative morphology some
15 years after Aronoff raised the issue in his (1976) monograph. In this paper we will review some of the definitions and measures of productivity discussed in the generative and pregenerative literature.
We will adopt the definition of productivity suggested by Schultink (1961) and propose
a number of statistical measures of productivity whose results, when
applied to a fixed corpus, accord nicely with our intuitive estimates of productivity, and which shed light on the quantitative weight of linguistic restrictions on word formation rules. Part of our
purpose here is also a very
simple one: to make
available a substantial
set of empirical data concerning
the productivity of
some of the major derivational
affixes of English.Files private
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Baggio, G. (2009). Semantics and the electrophysiology of meaning: Tense, aspect, event structure. PhD Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen.
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Bailey, A., Hervas, A., Matthews, N., Palferman, S., Wallace, S., Aubin, A., Michelotti, J., Wainhouse, C., Papanikolaou, K., Rutter, M., Maestrini, E., Marlow, A., Weeks, D. E., Lamb, J., Francks, C., Kearsley, G., Scudder, P., Monaco, A. P., Baird, G., Cox, A. and 46 moreBailey, A., Hervas, A., Matthews, N., Palferman, S., Wallace, S., Aubin, A., Michelotti, J., Wainhouse, C., Papanikolaou, K., Rutter, M., Maestrini, E., Marlow, A., Weeks, D. E., Lamb, J., Francks, C., Kearsley, G., Scudder, P., Monaco, A. P., Baird, G., Cox, A., Cockerill, H., Nuffield, F., Le Couteur, A., Berney, T., Cooper, H., Kelly, T., Green, J., Whittaker, J., Gilchrist, A., Bolton, P., Schönewald, A., Daker, M., Ogilvie, C., Docherty, Z., Deans, Z., Bolton, B., Packer, R., Poustka, F., Rühl, D., Schmötzer, G., Bölte, S., Klauck, S. M., Spieler, A., Poustka., A., Van Engeland, H., Kemner, C., De Jonge, M., Den Hartog, I., Lord, C., Cook, E., Leventhal, B., Volkmar, F., Pauls, D., Klin, A., Smalley, S., Fombonne, E., Rogé, B., Tauber, M., Arti-Vartayan, E., Fremolle-Kruck., J., Pederson, L., Haracopos, D., Brondum-Nielsen, K., & Cotterill, R. (1998). A full genome screen for autism with evidence for linkage to a region on chromosome 7q. International Molecular Genetic Study of Autism Consortium. Human Molecular Genetics, 7(3), 571-578. doi:10.1093/hmg/7.3.571.
Abstract
Autism is characterized by impairments in reciprocal social interaction and communication, and restricted and sterotyped patterns of interests and activities. Developmental difficulties are apparent before 3 years of age and there is evidence for strong genetic influences most likely involving more than one susceptibility gene. A two-stage genome search for susceptibility loci in autism was performed on 87 affected sib pairs plus 12 non-sib affected relative-pairs, from a total of 99 families identified by an international consortium. Regions on six chromosomes (4, 7, 10, 16, 19 and 22) were identified which generated a multipoint maximum lod score (MLS) > 1. A region on chromosome 7q was the most significant with an MLS of 3.55 near markers D7S530 and D7S684 in the subset of 56 UK affected sib-pair families, and an MLS of 2.53 in all 87 affected sib-pair families. An area on chromosome 16p near the telomere was the next most significant, with an MLS of 1.97 in the UK families, and 1.51 in all families. These results are an important step towards identifying genes predisposing to autism; establishing their general applicability requires further study. -
Basso, E. B., & Senft, G. (2009). Introduction. In G. Senft, & E. B. Basso (
Eds. ), Ritual communication (pp. 1-19). Oxford: Berg. -
Bastiaanse, R., De Goede, D., & Love, T. (2009). Auditory sentence processing: An introduction. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 38(3), 177-179. doi:10.1007/s10936-009-9109-3.
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Bastiaansen, M. C. M., & Hagoort, P. (2006). Oscillatory neuronal dynamics during language comprehension. In C. Neuper, & W. Klimesch (
Eds. ), Event-related dynamics of brain oscillations (pp. 179-196). Amsterdam: Elsevier.Abstract
Language comprehension involves two basic operations: the retrieval of lexical information (such as phonologic, syntactic, and semantic information) from long-term memory, and the unification of this information into a coherent representation of the overall utterance. Neuroimaging studies using hemo¬dynamic measures such as PET and fMRI have provided detailed information on which areas of the brain are involved in these language-related memory and unification operations. However, much less is known about the dynamics of the brain's language network. This chapter presents a literature review of the oscillatory neuronal dynamics of EEG and MEG data that can be observed during language comprehen¬sion tasks. From a detailed review of this (rapidly growing) literature the following picture emerges: memory retrieval operations are mostly accompanied by increased neuronal synchronization in the theta frequency range (4-7 Hz). Unification operations, in contrast, induce high-frequency neuronal synchro¬nization in the beta (12-30 Hz) and gamma (above 30 Hz) frequency bands. A desynchronization in the (upper) alpha frequency band is found for those studies that use secondary tasks, and seems to correspond with attentional processes, and with the behavioral consequences of the language comprehension process. We conclude that it is possible to capture the dynamics of the brain's language network by a careful analysis of the event-related changes in power and coherence of EEG and MEG data in a wide range of frequencies, in combination with subtle experimental manipulations in a range of language comprehension tasks. It appears then that neuronal synchrony is a mechanism by which the brain integrates the different types of information about language (such as phonological, orthographic, semantic, and syntactic infor¬mation) represented in different brain areas. -
Bauer, B. L. M. (2004). Vigesimal numerals in Romance: An Indo-European perspective. General Linguistics, 41, 21-46.
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Bauer, B. L. M. (2006). ‘Synthetic’ vs. ‘analytic’ in Romance: The importance of varieties. In R. Gess, & D. Arteaga (
Eds. ), Historical Romance linguistics: Retrospective and perspectives (pp. 287-304). Amsterdam: Benjamins. -
Bauer, B. L. M. (1994). [Review of the book Du latin aux langues romanes ed. by Maria Iliescu and Dan Slusanski]. Studies in Language, 18(2), 502-509. doi:10.1075/sl.18.2.08bau.
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Bauer, B. L. M. (2004). [Review of the book Pre-Indo-European by Winfred P. Lehmann]. Journal of Indo-European Studies, 32, 146-155.
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Bauer, B. L. M. (1998). Impersonal verbs in Italic. Their development from an Indo-European perspective. Journal of Indo-European Studies, 26, 91-120.
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Bauer, B. L. M. (1987). L’évolution des structures morphologiques et syntaxiques du latin au français. Travaux de linguistique, 14-15, 95-107.
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Bauer, B. L. M. (1998). Language loss in Gaul: Socio-historical and linguistic factors in language conflict. Southwest Journal of Linguistics, 15, 23-44.
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Bauer, B. L. M. (2009). Residues as an aid in internal reconstruction. In J. E. Rasmussen, & T. Olander (
Eds. ), Internal reconstruction in Indo-European: Methods, results, and problems (pp. 17-31). Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. -
Bauer, B. L. M. (1994). The development of Latin absolute constructions: From stative to transitive structures. General Linguistics, 18, 64-83.
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Bauer, B. L. M. (2009). Strategies of definiteness in Latin: Implications for early Indo-European. In V. Bubenik, J. Hewson, & S. Rose (
Eds. ), Grammatical change in Indo-European languages: Papers presented at the workshop on Indo-European Linguistics at the XVIIIth International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Montreal, 2007 (pp. 71-87). Amsterdam: Benjamins. -
Bauer, B. L. M. (2009). Word order. In P. Baldi, & P. Cuzzolin (
Eds. ), New Perspectives on Historical Latin Syntax: Vol 1: Syntax of the Sentence (pp. 241-316). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Files private
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Baumann, H., Dirksmeyer, R., & Wittenburg, P. (2004). Long-term archiving. Language Archive Newsletter, 1(2), 3-3.
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Beattie, G. W., Cutler, A., & Pearson, M. (1982). Why is Mrs Thatcher interrupted so often? [Letters to Nature]. Nature, 300, 744-747. doi:10.1038/300744a0.
Abstract
If a conversation is to proceed smoothly, the participants have to take turns to speak. Studies of conversation have shown that there are signals which speakers give to inform listeners that they are willing to hand over the conversational turn1−4. Some of these signals are part of the text (for example, completion of syntactic segments), some are non-verbal (such as completion of a gesture), but most are carried by the pitch, timing and intensity pattern of the speech; for example, both pitch and loudness tend to drop particularly low at the end of a speaker's turn. When one speaker interrupts another, the two can be said to be disputing who has the turn. Interruptions can occur because one participant tries to dominate or disrupt the conversation. But it could also be the case that mistakes occur in the way these subtle turn-yielding signals are transmitted and received. We demonstrate here that many interruptions in an interview with Mrs Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister, occur at points where independent judges agree that her turn appears to have finished. It is suggested that she is unconsciously displaying turn-yielding cues at certain inappropriate points. The turn-yielding cues responsible are identified. -
Behnke, K. (1998). The acquisition of phonetic categories in young infants: A self-organising artificial neural network approach. PhD Thesis, University of Twente, Enschede. doi:10.17617/2.2057688.
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Benazzo, S., Dimroth, C., Perdue, C., & Watorek, M. (2004). Le rôle des particules additives dans la construction de la cohésion discursive en langue maternelle et en langue étrangère. Langages, 155, 76-106.
Abstract
We compare the use of additive particles such as aussi ('also'), encore ('again, still'), and their 'translation équivalents', in a narrative task based on a séries of piclures performed by groups of children aged 4 years, 7 years and 10 years using their first language (L1 French, German, Polish), and by adult Polish and German learners of French as a second language (L2). From the cross-sectional analysis we propose developmental patterns which show remarkable similarities for ail types of learner, but which stem from différent determining factors. For the children, the patterns can best be explained by the development of their capacity to use available items in appropriate discourse contexts; for the adults, the limitations of their linguistic répertoire at différent levels of achievement détermines the possibility of incorporating thèse items into their utterance structure. Fïnally, we discuss to what extent thèse gênerai tendencies are influenced by the specificities of the différent languages used. -
Bercelli, F., Viaro, M., & Rossano, F. (2004). Attività in alcuni generi di psicoterapia. Rivista di psicolinguistica applicata, IV (2/3), 111-127. doi:10.1400/19208.
Abstract
The main aim of our paper is to contribute to the outline of a general inventory of activities in psychotherapy, as a step towards a description of overall conversational organizations of diff erent therapeutic approaches. From the perspective of Conversation Analysis, we describe some activities commonly occurrring in a corpus of sessions conducted by cognitive and relational-systemic therapists. Two activities appear to be basic: (a) inquiry: therapists elicit information from patients on their problems and circumstances; (b) reworking: therapists say something designed as an elaboration of what patients have previously said, or as something that can be grounded on it; and patients are induced to confi rm/disprove and contribute to the elaboration. Furthermore, we describe other activities, which turn out to be auxiliary to the basic ones: storytelling, procedural arrangement, recalling, noticing, teaching. We fi nally show some ways in which these activities can be integrated through conversational interaction. -
Berck, P., Bibiko, H.-J., Kemps-Snijders, M., Russel, A., & Wittenburg, P. (2006). Ontology-based language archive utilization. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006) (pp. 2295-2298).
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Bethard, S., Lai, V. T., & Martin, J. (2009). Topic model analysis of metaphor frequency for psycholinguistic stimuli. In Proceedings of the NAACL HLT Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity, Boulder, Colorado, June 4, 2009 (pp. 9-16). Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.
Abstract
Psycholinguistic studies of metaphor processing must control their stimuli not just for word frequency but also for the frequency with which a term is used metaphorically. Thus, we consider the task of metaphor frequency estimation, which predicts how often target words will be used metaphorically. We develop metaphor classifiers which represent metaphorical domains through Latent Dirichlet Allocation, and apply these classifiers to the target words, aggregating their decisions to estimate the metaphorical frequencies. Training on only 400 sentences, our models are able to achieve 61.3 % accuracy on metaphor classification and 77.8 % accuracy on HIGH vs. LOW metaphorical frequency estimation. -
Bickel, B. (1991). Der Hang zur Exzentrik - Annäherungen an das kognitive Modell der Relativkonstruktion. In W. Bisang, & P. Rinderknecht (
Eds. ), Von Europa bis Ozeanien - von der Antinomie zum Relativsatz (pp. 15-37). Zurich, Switzerland: Seminar für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft der Universität. -
Bickel, B. (1994). In the vestibule of meaning: Transivity inversion as a morphological phenomenon. Studies in Language, 19(1), 73-127.
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De Bleser, R., Willmes, K., Graetz, P., & Hagoort, P. (1991). De Akense Afasie Test. Logopedie en Foniatrie, 63, 207-217.
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Blomert, L., & Hagoort, P. (1987). Neurobiologische en neuropsychologische aspecten van dyslexie. In J. Hamers, & A. Van der Leij (
Eds. ), Dyslexie 87 (pp. 35-44). Lisse: Swets and Zeitlinger. -
Bock, K., Butterfield, S., Cutler, A., Cutting, J. C., Eberhard, K. M., & Humphreys, K. R. (2006). Number agreement in British and American English: Disagreeing to agree collectively. Language, 82(1), 64-113.
Abstract
British andAmerican speakers exhibit different verb number agreement patterns when sentence subjects have collective headnouns. From linguistic andpsycholinguistic accounts of how agreement is implemented, three alternative hypotheses can be derived to explain these differences. The hypotheses involve variations in the representation of notional number, disparities in how notional andgrammatical number are used, and inequalities in the grammatical number specifications of collective nouns. We carriedout a series of corpus analyses, production experiments, andnorming studies to test these hypotheses. The results converge to suggest that British and American speakers are equally sensitive to variations in notional number andimplement subjectverb agreement in much the same way, but are likely to differ in the lexical specifications of number for collectives. The findings support a psycholinguistic theory that explains verb and pronoun agreement within a parallel architecture of lexical andsyntactic formulation. -
Bock, K., & Levelt, W. J. M. (1994). Language production: Grammatical encoding. In M. A. Gernsbacher (
Ed. ), Handbook of Psycholinguistics (pp. 945-984). San Diego,: Academic Press. -
Bod, R., Fitz, H., & Zuidema, W. (2006). On the structural ambiguity in natural language that the neural architecture cannot deal with [Commentary]. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29, 71-72. doi:10.1017/S0140525X06239025.
Abstract
We argue that van der Velde's & de Kamps's model does not solve the binding problem but merely shifts the burden of constructing appropriate neural representations of sentence structure to unexplained preprocessing of the linguistic input. As a consequence, their model is not able to explain how various neural representations can be assigned to sentences that are structurally ambiguous. -
Bohnemeyer, J. (2004). Argument and event structure in Yukatek verb classes. In J.-Y. Kim, & A. Werle (
Eds. ), Proceedings of The Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas. Amherst, Mass: GLSA.Abstract
In Yukatek Maya, event types are lexicalized in verb roots and stems that fall into a number of different form classes on the basis of (a) patterns of aspect-mood marking and (b) priviledges of undergoing valence-changing operations. Of particular interest are the intransitive classes in the light of Perlmutter’s (1978) Unaccusativity hypothesis. In the spirit of Levin & Rappaport Hovav (1995) [L&RH], Van Valin (1990), Zaenen (1993), and others, this paper investigates whether (and to what extent) the association between formal predicate classes and event types is determined by argument structure features such as ‘agentivity’ and ‘control’ or features of lexical aspect such as ‘telicity’ and ‘durativity’. It is shown that mismatches between agentivity/control and telicity/durativity are even more extensive in Yukatek than they are in English (Abusch 1985; L&RH, Van Valin & LaPolla 1997), providing new evidence against Dowty’s (1979) reconstruction of Vendler’s (1967) ‘time schemata of verbs’ in terms of argument structure configurations. Moreover, contrary to what has been claimed in earlier studies of Yukatek (Krämer & Wunderlich 1999, Lucy 1994), neither agentivity/control nor telicity/durativity turn out to be good predictors of verb class membership. Instead, the patterns of aspect-mood marking prove to be sensitive only to the presence or absense of state change, in a way that supports the unified analysis of all verbs of gradual change proposed by Kennedy & Levin (2001). The presence or absence of ‘internal causation’ (L&RH) may motivate the semantic interpretation of transitivization operations. An explicit semantics for the valence-changing operations is proposed, based on Parsons’s (1990) Neo-Davidsonian approach. -
Bohnemeyer, J., Burenhult, N., Enfield, N. J., & Levinson, S. C. (2004). Landscape terms and place names elicitation guide. In A. Majid (
Ed. ), Field Manual Volume 9 (pp. 75-79). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.492904.Abstract
Landscape terms reflect the relationship between geographic reality and human cognition. Are ‘mountains’, ‘rivers, ‘lakes’ and the like universally recognised in languages as naturally salient objects to be named? The landscape subproject is concerned with the interrelation between language, cognition and geography. Specifically, it investigates issues relating to how landforms are categorised cross-linguistically as well as the characteristics of place naming. -
Bohnemeyer, J. (1998). Temporale Relatoren im Hispano-Yukatekischen Sprachkontakt. In A. Koechert, & T. Stolz (
Eds. ), Convergencia e Individualidad - Las lenguas Mayas entre hispanización e indigenismo (pp. 195-241). Hannover, Germany: Verlag für Ethnologie. -
Bohnemeyer, J. (1998). Sententiale Topics im Yukatekischen. In Z. Dietmar (
Ed. ), Deskriptive Grammatik und allgemeiner Sprachvergleich (pp. 55-85). Tübingen, Germany: Max-Niemeyer-Verlag.Files private
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Borgwaldt, S. R., Hellwig, F. M., & De Groot, A. M. B. (2004). Word-initial entropy in five langauges: Letter to sound, and sound to letter. Written Language & Literacy, 7(2), 165-184.
Abstract
Alphabetic orthographies show more or less ambiguous relations between spelling and sound patterns. In transparent orthographies, like Italian, the pronunciation can be predicted from the spelling and vice versa. Opaque orthographies, like English, often display unpredictable spelling–sound correspondences. In this paper we present a computational analysis of word-initial bi-directional spelling–sound correspondences for Dutch, English, French, German, and Hungarian, stated in entropy values for various grain sizes. This allows us to position the five languages on the continuum from opaque to transparent orthographies, both in spelling-to-sound and sound-to-spelling directions. The analysis is based on metrics derived from information theory, and therefore independent of any specific theory of visual word recognition as well as of any specific theoretical approach of orthography. -
De Bot, K., Broersma, M., & Isurin, L. (2009). Sources of triggering in code-switching. In L. Isurin, D. Winford, & K. De Bot (
Eds. ), Multidisciplinary approaches to code switching (pp. 103-128). Amsterdam: Benjamins. -
Böttner, M. (1998). A collective extension of relational grammar. Logic Journal of the IGPL, 6(2), 175-793. doi:10.1093/jigpal/6.2.175.
Abstract
Relational grammar was proposed in Suppes (1976) as a semantical grammar for natural language. Fragments considered so far are restricted to distributive notions. In this article, relational grammar is extended to collective notions. -
Bouman, M. A., & Levelt, W. J. M. (1994). Werner E. Reichardt: Levensbericht. In H. W. Pleket (
Ed. ), Levensberichten en herdenkingen 1993 (pp. 75-80). Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen. -
Boves, L., Carlson, R., Hinrichs, E., House, D., Krauwer, S., Lemnitzer, L., Vainio, M., & Wittenburg, P. (2009). Resources for speech research: Present and future infrastructure needs. In Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2009) (pp. 1803-1806).
Abstract
This paper introduces the EU-FP7 project CLARIN, a joint effort of over 150 institutions in Europe, aimed at the creation of a sustainable language resources and technology infrastructure for the humanities and social sciences research community. The paper briefly introduces the vision behind the project and how it relates to speech research with a focus on the contributions that CLARIN can and will make to research in spoken language processing. -
Bowerman, M. (1987). Commentary: Mechanisms of language acquisition. In B. MacWhinney (
Ed. ), Mechanisms of language acquisition (pp. 443-466). Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum. -
Bowerman, M. (1994). From universal to language-specific in early grammatical development. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 346, 34-45. doi:10.1098/rstb.1994.0126.
Abstract
Attempts to explain children's grammatical development often assume a close initial match between units of meaning and units of form; for example, agents are said to map to sentence-subjects and actions to verbs. The meanings themselves, according to this view, are not influenced by language, but reflect children's universal non-linguistic way of understanding the world. This paper argues that, contrary to this position, meaning as it is expressed in children's early sentences is, from the beginning, organized on the basis of experience with the grammar and lexicon of a particular language. As a case in point, children learning English and Korean are shown to express meanings having to do with direct motion according to language-specific principles of semantic and grammatical structuring from the earliest stages of word combination -
Bowerman, M. (2004). From universal to language-specific in early grammatical development [Reprint]. In K. Trott, S. Dobbinson, & P. Griffiths (
Eds. ), The child language reader (pp. 131-146). London: Routledge.Abstract
Attempts to explain children's grammatical development often assume a close initial match between units of meaning and units of form; for example, agents are said to map to sentence-subjects and actions to verbs. The meanings themselves, according to this view, are not influenced by language, but reflect children's universal non-linguistic way of understanding the world. This paper argues that, contrary to this position, meaning as it is expressed in children's early sentences is, from the beginning, organized on the basis of experience with the grammar and lexicon of a particular language. As a case in point, children learning English and Korean are shown to express meanings having to do with directed motion according to language-specific principles of semantic and grammatical structuring from the earliest stages of word combination. -
Bowerman, M. (1990). Mapping thematic roles onto syntactic functions: Are children helped by innate linking rules? Linguistics, 28, 1253-1290. doi:10.1515/ling.1990.28.6.1253.
Abstract
In recent theorizing about language acquisition, children have often been credited with innate knowledge of rules that link thematic roles such as agent and patient to syntactic functions such as subject and direct object. These rules form the basis for the hypothesis that phrase-structure rules are established through 'semantic bootstrapping', and they are also invoked to explain the acquisition of verb subcategorization frames (for example, Pinker 1984). This study examines two versions of the hypothesis that linking rules are innate, pitting them against the alternative hypothesis that linking patterns are learned (as proposed, for example, by Foley and Van Valin 1984). The first version specifies linking rules through paired thematicsyntactic role hierarchies, and the second characterizes them as a function of verb semantic structure. When predictions of the two approaches are drawn out and tested against longitudinal spontaneous speech data from two children learning English, no support is found for the hypothesis that knowledge of linking is innate; ironically, in fact, the children had more trouble with verbs that should be easy to link than with those that should be more difficult. In contrast, the hypothesis that linking rules are learned is supported: at a relatively advanced age, the children began to produce errors that are best interpreted as overregularizations of a statistically predominant linking pattern to which they had become sensitive through linguistic experience. -
Bowerman, M., & Eling, P. (1983). Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics: Annual Report nr. 4 1983. Nijmegen: MPI for Psycholinguistics.
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Bowerman, M., & Meyer, A. (1991). Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics: Annual Report Nr.12 1991. Nijmegen: MPI for Psycholinguistics.
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Bowerman, M. (1989). Learning a semantic system: What role do cognitive predispositions play? In M. L. Rice, & R. L. Schiefelbusch (
Eds. ), The teachability of language (pp. 133-169). Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes. -
Bowerman, M. (1994). Learning a semantic system: What role do cognitive predispositions play? [Reprint]. In P. Bloom (
Ed. ), Language acquisition: Core readings (pp. 329-363). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Abstract
Reprint from: Bowerman, M. (1989). Learning a semantic system: What role do cognitive predispositions play? In M.L. Rice & R.L Schiefelbusch (Ed.), The teachability of language (pp. 133-169). Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes. -
Bowerman, M. (1983). Hidden meanings: The role of covert conceptual structures in children's development of language. In D. Rogers, & J. A. Sloboda (
Eds. ), The acquisition of symbolic skills (pp. 445-470). New York: Plenum Press. -
Bowerman, M. (1983). How do children avoid constructing an overly general grammar in the absence of feedback about what is not a sentence? Papers and Reports on Child Language Development, 22, 23-35.
Abstract
The theory that language acquisition is guided and constrained by inborn linguistic knowledge is assessed. Specifically, the "no negative evidence" view, the belief that linguistic theory should be restricted in such a way that the grammars it allows can be learned by children on the basis of positive evidence only, is explored. Child language data are cited in order to investigate influential innatist approaches to language acquisition. Baker's view that children are innately constrained in significant ways with respect to language acquisition is evaluated. Evidence indicates that children persistently make overgeneralizations of the sort that violate the constrained view of language acquisition. Since children eventually do develop correct adult grammar, they must have other mechanisms for cutting back on these overgeneralizations. Thus, any hypothesized constraints cannot be justified on grounds that without them the child would end up with overly general grammar. It is necessary to explicate the mechanisms by which children eliminate their tendency toward overgeneralization. -
Bowerman, M. (2009). Introduction (Part IV: Language and cognition: Universals and typological comparisons). In J. Guo, E. Lieven, N. Budwig, S. Ervin-Tripp, K. Nakamura, & S. Ozcaliskan (
Eds. ), Crosslinguistic approaches to the psychology of language: Research in the tradition of Dan Isaac Slobin (pp. 443-449). -
Bowerman, M., & Perdue, C. (1990). Introduction to the special issue. Linguistics, 28(6), 1131-1133. doi:10.1515/ling.1990.28.6.1131.
Abstract
This thematic issue contains 11 papers first presented at a conference on The Structure of the Simple Clause in Language Acquisition', held at the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen from November 9-13, 1987. The issue concentrates on first-language acquisition. Papers on developmental dysphasia. creolization, and adult language acquisition were also presented at the conference and are being published elsewhere. -
Bowerman, M. (1982). Evaluating competing linguistic models with language acquisition data: Implications of developmental errors with causative verbs. Quaderni di semantica, 3, 5-66.
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Bowerman, M., Gullberg, M., Majid, A., & Narasimhan, B. (2004). Put project: The cross-linguistic encoding of placement events. In A. Majid (
Ed. ), Field Manual Volume 9 (pp. 10-24). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. doi:10.17617/2.492916.Abstract
How similar are the event concepts encoded by different languages? So far, few event domains have been investigated in any detail. The PUT project extends the systematic cross-linguistic exploration of event categorisation to a new domain, that of placement events (putting things in places and removing them from places). The goal of this task is to explore cross-linguistic universality and variability in the semantic categorisation of placement events (e.g., ‘putting a cup on the table’).Additional information
2004_Put_project_video_stimuli.zip -
Bowerman, M. (1982). Reorganizational processes in lexical and syntactic development. In E. Wanner, & L. Gleitman (
Eds. ), Language acquisition: The state of the art (pp. 319-346). New York: Academic Press. -
Bowerman, M. (1979). The acquisition of complex sentences. In M. Garman, & P. Fletcher (
Eds. ), Studies in language acquisition (pp. 285-305). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. -
Li, P., & Bowerman, M. (1998). The acquisition of lexical and grammatical aspect in Chinese. First Language, 18, 311-350. doi:10.1177/014272379801805404.
Abstract
This study reports three experiments on how children learning Mandarin Chinese comprehend and use aspect markers. These experiments examine the role of lexical aspect in children's acquisition of grammatical aspect. Results provide converging evidence for children's early sensitivity to (1) the association between atelic verbs and the imperfective aspect markers zai, -zhe, and -ne, and (2) the association between telic verbs and the perfective aspect marker -le. Children did not show a sensitivity in their use or understanding of aspect markers to the difference between stative and activity verbs or between semelfactive and activity verbs. These results are consistent with Slobin's (1985) basic child grammar hypothesis that the contrast between process and result is important in children's early acquisition of temporal morphology. In contrast, they are inconsistent with Bickerton's (1981, 1984) language bioprogram hypothesis that the distinctions between state and process and between punctual and nonpunctual are preprogrammed into language learners. We suggest new ways of looking at the results in the light of recent probabilistic hypotheses that emphasize the role of input, prototypes and connectionist representations. -
Bowerman, M. (1982). Starting to talk worse: Clues to language acquisition from children's late speech errors. In S. Strauss (
Ed. ), U shaped behavioral growth (pp. 101-145). New York: Academic Press. -
Bowerman, M., & Perdue, C. (
Eds. ). (1990). The structure of the simple clause in language acquisition [Special Issue]. Linguistics, 28(6). -
Bramão, I., Faísca, L., Forkstam, C., Inácio, K., Petersson, K. M., & Reis, A. (2009). Interaction between perceptual color and color knowledge information in object recognition: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence. In Abstracts presented at the International Neuropsychological Society, Finnish Neuropsychological Society, Joint Mid-Year Meeting July 29-August 1, 2009. Helsinki, Finland & Tallinn, Estonia (pp. 39). Retrieved from http://www.neuropsykologia.fi/ins2009/INS_MY09_Abstract.pdf.
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Brandt, S., Kidd, E., Lieven, E., & Tomasello, M. (2009). The discourse bases of relativization: An investigation of young German and English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses. Cognitive Linguistics, 20(3), 539-570. doi:10.1515/COGL.2009.024.
Abstract
In numerous comprehension studies, across different languages, children have performed worse on object relatives (e.g., the dog that the cat chased) than on subject relatives (e.g., the dog that chased the cat). One possible reason for this is that the test sentences did not exactly match the kinds of object relatives that children typically experience. Adults and children usually hear and produce object relatives with inanimate heads and pronominal subjects (e.g., the car that we bought last year) (cf. Kidd et al., Language and Cognitive Processes 22: 860–897, 2007). We tested young 3-year old German- and English-speaking children with a referential selection task. Children from both language groups performed best in the condition where the experimenter described inanimate referents with object relatives that contained pronominal subjects (e.g., Can you give me the sweater that he bought?). Importantly, when the object relatives met the constraints identified in spoken discourse, children understood them as well as subject relatives, or even better. These results speak against a purely structural explanation for children's difficulty with object relatives as observed in previous studies, but rather support the usage-based account, according to which discourse function and experience with language shape the representation of linguistic structures. -
Braun, B. (2006). Phonetics and phonology of thematic contrast in German. Language and Speech, 49(4), 451-493.
Abstract
It is acknowledged that contrast plays an important role in understanding discourse and information structure. While it is commonly assumed that contrast can be marked by intonation only, our understanding of the intonational realization of contrast is limited. For German there is mainly introspective evidence that the rising theme accent (or topic accent) is realized differently when signaling contrast than when not. In this article, the acoustic basis for the reported impressionistic differences is investigated in terms of the scaling (height) and alignment (positioning) of tonal targets.
Subjects read target sentences in a contrastive and a noncontrastive context (Experiment 1). Prosodic annotation revealed that thematic accents were not realized with different accent types in the two contexts but acoustic comparison showed that themes in contrastive context exhibited a higher and later peak. The alignment and scaling of accents can hence be controlled in a linguistically meaningful way, which has implications for intonational phonology. In Experiment 2, nonlinguists' perception of a subset of the production data was assessed. They had to choose whether, in a contrastive context, the presumed contrastive or noncontrastive realization of a sentence was more appropriate. For some sentence pairs only, subjects had a clear preference. For Experiment 3, a group of linguists annotated the thematic accents of the contrastive and noncontrastive versions of the same data as used in Experiment 2. There was considerable disagreement in labels, but different accent types were consistently used when the two versions differed strongly in F0 excursion. Although themes in contrastive contexts were clearly produced differently than themes in noncontrastive contexts, this difference is not easily perceived or annotated. -
Braun, B., Kochanski, G., Grabe, E., & Rosner, B. S. (2006). Evidence for attractors in English intonation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 119(6), 4006-4015. doi:10.1121/1.2195267.
Abstract
Although the pitch of the human voice is continuously variable, some linguists contend that intonation in speech is restricted to a small, limited set of patterns. This claim is tested by asking subjects to mimic a block of 100 randomly generated intonation contours and then to imitate themselves in several successive sessions. The produced f0 contours gradually converge towards a limited set of distinct, previously recognized basic English intonation patterns. These patterns are "attractors" in the space of possible intonation English contours. The convergence does not occur immediately. Seven of the ten participants show continued convergence toward their attractors after the first iteration. Subjects retain and use information beyond phonological contrasts, suggesting that intonational phonology is not a complete description of their mental representation of intonation. -
Broeder, D., Offenga, F., Wittenburg, P., Van de Kamp, P., Nathan, D., & Strömqvist, S. (2006). Technologies for a federation of language resource archive. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006) (pp. 2291-2294).
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Broeder, D., & Wittenburg, P. (2006). The IMDI metadata framework, its current application and future direction. International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, 1(2), 119-132. doi:10.1504/IJMSO.2006.011008.
Abstract
The IMDI Framework offers next to a suitable set of metadata descriptors for language resources, a set of tools and an infrastructure to use these. This paper gives an overview of all these aspects and at the end describes the intentions and hopes for ensuring the interoperability of the IMDI framework within more general ones in development. An evaluation of the current state of the IMDI Framework is presented with an analysis of the benefits and more problematic issues. Finally we describe work on issues of long-term stability for IMDI by linking up to the work done within the ISO TC37/SC4 subcommittee (TC37/SC4). -
Broeder, D., Brugman, H., Oostdijk, N., & Wittenburg, P. (2004). Towards Dynamic Corpora: Workshop on compiling and processing spoken corpora. In M. Lino, M. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa, & R. Silva (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004) (pp. 59-62). Paris: European Language Resource Association.
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