Publications

Abstract

Recent years have seen a revolution in our knowledge of how children learn to think and speak. In this volume, leading scholars from these rapidly evolving fields of research examine the relationship between child language acquisition and cognitive development. At first sight, advances in the two areas seem to have moved in opposing directions: the study of language acquisition has been especially concerned with diversity, explaining how children learn languages of widely different types, while the study of cognitive development has focused on uniformity, clarifying how children build on fundamental, presumably universal concepts. This book brings these two vital strands of investigation into close dialogue, suggesting a synthesis in which the process of language acquisition may interact with early cognitive development. It provides empirical contributions based on a variety of languages, populations and ages, and theoretical discussions that cut across the disciplines of psychology, linguistics and anthropology.

Abstract

Two groups of listeners, with Dutch and British English as their native language judged stimuli in Dutch and British English, respectively, on the scales CONFIDENT vs. NOT CONFIDENT and FRIENDLY vs. NOT FRIENDLY, two meanings derived from Ohala's universal Frequency Code. The stimuli, which were lexically equivalent, were varied in pitch contour and pitch range. In both languages, the perceived degree of confidence decreases and that of friendliness increases when the pitch range is raised, as predicted by the Frequency Code. However, at identical pitch ranges, British English is perceived as more confident and more friendly than Dutch. We argue that this difference in degree of the use of the Frequency Code is due to the difference in the standard pitch ranges of Dutch and British English.

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

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

Abstract

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

Essays van psychologen en linguı̈sten over de relatie hersens-computers.

Abstract

The results of a study on perceptual learning are reported. Dutch subjects made lexical decisions on a list of words and nonwords. Embedded in the list were either [f]- or [s]-final words in which the final fricative had been replaced by an ambiguous sound, midway between [f] and [s]. One group of listeners heard ambiguous [f]- final Dutch words like [kara?] (based on karaf, carafe) and unambiguous [s]-final words (e.g., karkas, carcase). A second group heard the reverse (e.g., ambiguous [karka?] and unambiguous karaf). After this training phase, listeners labelled ambiguous fricatives on an [f]- [s] continuum. The subjects who had heard [?] in [f]- final words categorised these fricatives as [f] reliably more often than those who had heard [?] in [s]-final words. These results suggest that speech recognition is dynamic: the system adjusts to the constraints of each particular listening situation. The lexicon can provide this adjustment process with a training signal.

Abstract

The central issues in the study of speech recognition by human listeners (HSR) and of automatic speech recognition (ASR) are clearly comparable; nevertheless the research communities that concern themselves with ASR and HSR are largely distinct. This paper compares the research objectives of the two fields, and attempts to draw informative lessons from one to the other.

Abstract

Current models of spoken-word recognition assume automatic activation of multiple candidate words fully or partially compatible with the speech input. We propose that listeners make use of this concurrent activation in word play such as punning. Distortion in punning should ideally involve no more than a minimal contrastive deviation between two words, namely a phoneme. Moreover, we propose that this metric of similarity does not presuppose phonemic awareness on the part of the punster. We support these claims with an analysis of modern and traditional puns in Japanese (in which phonemic awareness in language users is not encouraged by alphabetic orthography). For both data sets, the results support the predictions. Punning draws on basic processes of spokenword recognition, common across languages.

Abstract

So far most attempts to automate Directory Assistance services focused on private listings, because it is not known precisely how callers will refer to a business listings. The research described in this paper, carried out in the SMADA project, tries to fill this gap. The aim of the research is to model the expressions people use when referring to a business listing by means of rules, in order to automatically create a vocabulary, which can be part of an automated DA service. In this paper a rule-base procedure is proposed, which derives rules from the expressions people use. These rules are then used to automatically create expressions from directory listings. Two categories of businesses, viz. hospitals and the hotel and catering industry, are used to explain this procedure. Results for these two categories are used to discuss the problem of the over- and undergeneration of expressions.

Abstract

Translation of the first four chapters of Western linguistics: An historical introduction (1998)

Abstract

This paper reports two experiments with vowels and consonants as phoneme detection targets in real words. In the first experiment, two relatively distinct vowels were compared with two confusible stop consonants. Response times to the vowels were longer than to the consonants. Response times correlated negatively with target phoneme length. In the second, two relatively distinct vowels were compared with their corresponding semivowels. This time, the vowels were detected faster than the semivowels. We conclude that response time differences between vowels and stop consonants in this task may reflect differences between phoneme categories in the variability of tokens, both in the acoustic realisation of targets and in the' representation of targets by subjects.

Abstract

Rede uitgesproken bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van hoogleraar in de Psycholinguïstiek aan de Faculteit der Letteren van de Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen op vrijdag 18 mei 2001

Abstract

Articulatory data are used to address the question of whether Dutch schwa insertion is a phonological or a phonetic process. By investigating tongue tip raising and dorsal lowering, we show that /l/ when it appears before inserted schwa is a light /l/, just as /l/ before an underlying schwa is, and unlike the dark /l/ before a consonant in non-insertion productions of the same words. The fact that inserted schwa can condition the light/dark /l/ alternation shows that schwa insertion involves the phonological insertion of a segment rather than phonetic adjustments to articulations.