Displaying 1 - 100 of 132
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Akamine, S., Ghaleb, E., Rasenberg, M., Fernandez, R., Meyer, A. S., & Özyürek, A. (2024). Speakers align both their gestures and words not only to establish but also to maintain reference to create shared labels for novel objects in interaction. In L. K. Samuelson, S. L. Frank, A. Mackey, & E. Hazeltine (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) (pp. 2435-2442).Abstract
When we communicate with others, we often repeat aspects of each other's communicative behavior such as sentence structures and words. Such behavioral alignment has been mostly studied for speech or text. Yet, language use is mostly multimodal, flexibly using speech and gestures to convey messages. Here, we explore the use of alignment in speech (words) and co-speech gestures (iconic gestures) in a referential communication task aimed at finding labels for novel objects in interaction. In particular, we investigate how people flexibly use lexical and gestural alignment to create shared labels for novel objects and whether alignment in speech and gesture are related over time. The present study shows that interlocutors establish shared labels multimodally, and alignment in words and iconic gestures are used throughout the interaction. We also show that the amount of lexical alignment positively associates with the amount of gestural alignment over time, suggesting a close relationship between alignment in the vocal and manual modalities.Additional information
link to eScholarship -
Allerhand, M., Butterfield, S., Cutler, A., & Patterson, R. (1992). Assessing syllable strength via an auditory model. In Proceedings of the Institute of Acoustics: Vol. 14 Part 6 (pp. 297-304). St. Albans, Herts: Institute of Acoustics.
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Bardhan, N. P., & Weber, A. (2011). Listening to a novel foreign accent, with long lasting effects [Abstract]. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Program abstracts of the 162nd Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, 130(4), 2445.
Abstract
In conversation, listeners frequently encounter speakers with foreign accents. Previous research on foreign-accented speech has primarily examined the short-term effects of exposure and the relative ease that listeners have with adapting to an accent. The present study examines the stability of this adaptation, with seven full days between testing sessions. On both days, subjects performed a cross-modal priming task in which they heard several minutes of an unfamiliar accent of their native language: a form of Hebrewaccented Dutch in which long /i:/ was shortened to /I/. During this task on Day 1, recognition of accented forms was not facilitated, compared to that of canonical forms. A week later, when tested on new words, facilitatory priming occurred, comparable to that seen for canonically produced items tested in both sessions. These results suggest that accented forms can be learned from brief exposure and the stable effects of this can be seen a week later. -
Bavin, E. L., & Kidd, E. (2000). Learning new verbs: Beyond the input. In C. Davis, T. J. Van Gelder, & R. Wales (
Eds. ), Cognitive Science in Australia, 2000: Proceedings of the Fifth Biennial Conference of the Australasian Cognitive Science Society. -
Ben-Ami, S., Shukla, Vishakha, V., Gupta, P., Shah, P., Ralekar, C., Ganesh, S., Gilad-Gutnick, S., Rubio-Fernández, P., & Sinha, P. (2024). Form perception as a bridge to real-world functional proficiency. In L. K. Samuelson, S. L. Frank, M. Toneva, A. Mackey, & E. Hazeltine (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) (pp. 6094-6102).Abstract
Recognizing the limitations of standard vision assessments in capturing the real-world capabilities of individuals with low vision, we investigated the potential of the Seguin Form Board Test (SFBT), a widely-used intelligence assessment employing a visuo-haptic shape-fitting task, as an estimator of vision's practical utility. We present findings from 23 children from India, who underwent treatment for congenital bilateral dense cataracts, and 21 control participants. To assess the development of functional visual ability, we conducted the SFBT and the standard measure of visual acuity, before and longitudinally after treatment. We observed a dissociation in the development of shape-fitting and visual acuity. Improvements of patients' shape-fitting preceded enhancements in their visual acuity after surgery and emerged even with acuity worse than that of control participants. Our findings highlight the importance of incorporating multi-modal and cognitive aspects into evaluations of visual proficiency in low-vision conditions, to better reflect vision's impact on daily activities.Additional information
link to eScholarship -
Bergmann, C., Boves, L., & Ten Bosch, L. (2011). Measuring word learning performance in computational models and infants. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Development and Learning, and Epigenetic Robotics. Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 24-27 Aug. 2011.
Abstract
In the present paper we investigate the effect of categorising raw behavioural data or computational model responses. In addition, the effect of averaging over stimuli from potentially different populations is assessed. To this end, we replicate studies on word learning and generalisation abilities using the ACORNS models. Our results show that discrete categories may obscure interesting phenomena in the continuous responses. For example, the finding that learning in the model saturates very early at a uniform high recognition accuracy only holds for categorical representations. Additionally, a large difference in the accuracy for individual words is obscured by averaging over all stimuli. Because different words behaved differently for different speakers, we could not identify a phonetic basis for the differences. Implications and new predictions for infant behaviour are discussed. -
Bergmann, C., Boves, L., & Ten Bosch, L. (2011). Thresholding word activations for response scoring - Modelling psycholinguistic data. In Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association [Interspeech 2011] (pp. 769-772). ISCA.
Abstract
In the present paper we investigate the effect of categorising raw behavioural data or computational model responses. In addition, the effect of averaging over stimuli from potentially different populations is assessed. To this end, we replicate studies on word learning and generalisation abilities using the ACORNS models. Our results show that discrete
categories may obscure interesting phenomena in the continuous
responses. For example, the finding that learning in the model saturates very early at a uniform high recognition accuracy only holds for categorical representations. Additionally, a large difference in the accuracy for individual words is obscured
by averaging over all stimuli. Because different words behaved
differently for different speakers, we could not identify a phonetic
basis for the differences. Implications and new predictions for
infant behaviour are discussed.Additional information
https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/interspeech_2011/i11_0769.html -
Bottini, R., & Casasanto, D. (2011). Space and time in the child’s mind: Further evidence for a cross-dimensional asymmetry [Abstract]. In L. Carlson, C. Hölscher, & T. Shipley (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 3010). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.Abstract
Space and time appear to be related asymmetrically in the child’s mind: temporal representations depend on spatial representations more than vice versa, as predicted by space-time metaphors in language. In a study supporting this conclusion, spatial information interfered with children’s temporal judgments more than vice versa (Casasanto, Fotakopoulou, & Boroditsky, 2010, Cognitive Science). In this earlier study, however, spatial information was available to participants for more time than temporal information was (as is often the case when people observe natural events), suggesting a skeptical explanation for the observed effect. Here we conducted a stronger test of the hypothesized space-time asymmetry, controlling spatial and temporal aspects of the stimuli even more stringently than they are generally ’controlled’ in the natural world. Results replicated Casasanto and colleagues’, validating their finding of a robust representational asymmetry between space and time, and extending it to children (4-10 y.o.) who speak Dutch and Brazilian Portuguese. -
Brenner, D., Warner, N., Ernestus, M., & Tucker, B. V. (2011). Parsing the ambiguity of casual speech: “He was like” or “He’s like”? [Abstract]. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 129(4 Pt. 2), 2683.
Abstract
Paper presented at The 161th Meeting Acoustical Society of America, Seattle, Washington, 23-27 May 2011. Reduction in casual speech can create ambiguity, e.g., “he was” can sound like “he’s.” Before quotative “like” “so she’s/she was like…”, it was found that there is little accurate acoustic information about the distinction in the signal. This work examines what types of information acoustics of the target itself, speech rate, coarticulation, and syntax/semantics listeners use to recognize such reduced function words. We compare perception studies presenting the targets auditorily with varying amounts of context, presenting the context without the targets, and a visual study presenting context in written form. Given primarily discourse information visual or auditory context only, subjects are strongly biased toward past, reflecting the use of quotative “like” for reporting past speech. However, if the target itself is presented, the direction of bias reverses, indicating that listeners favor acoustic information within the target which is reduced, sounding like the shorter, present form over almost any other source of information. Furthermore, when the target is presented auditorily with surrounding context, the bias shifts slightly toward the direction shown in the orthographic or auditory-no-target experiments. Thus, listeners prioritize acoustic information within the target when present, even if that information is misleading, but they also take discourse information into account. -
Brookshire, G., & Casasanto, D. (2011). Motivation and motor action: Hemispheric specialization for motivation reverses with handedness. In L. Carlson, C. Holscher, & T. Shipley (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2610-2615). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. -
Brouwer, S., & Bradlow, A. R. (2011). The influence of noise on phonological competition during spoken word recognition. In W.-S. Lee, & E. Zee (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 2011 [ICPhS XVII] (pp. 364-367). Hong Kong: Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, City University of Hong Kong.Abstract
Listeners’ interactions often take place in auditorily challenging conditions. We examined how noise affects phonological competition during spoken word recognition. In a visual-world experiment, which allows us to examine the timecourse of recognition, English participants listened to target words in quiet and in noise while they saw four pictures on the screen: a target (e.g. candle), an onset overlap competitor (e.g. candy), an offset overlap competitor (e.g. sandal), and a distractor. The results showed that, while all competitors were relatively quickly suppressed in quiet listening conditions, listeners experienced persistent competition in noise from the offset competitor but not from the onset competitor. This suggests that listeners’ phonological competitor activation persists for longer in noise than in quiet and that listeners are able to deactivate some unwanted competition when listening to speech in noise. The well-attested competition pattern in quiet was not replicated. Possible methodological explanations for this result are discussed. -
Carstensen, A., Khetarpal, N., Majid, A., & Regier, T. (2011). Universals and variation in spatial language and cognition: Evidence from Chichewa. In L. Carlson, C. Hölscher, & T. Shipley (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2315). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. -
Casasanto, D. (2011). Bodily relativity: The body-specificity of language and thought. In L. Carlson, C. Holscher, & T. Shipley (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1258-1259). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. -
Casasanto, D., & Lupyan, G. (2011). Ad hoc cognition [Abstract]. In L. Carlson, C. Hölscher, & T. F. Shipley (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 826). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.Abstract
If concepts, categories, and word meanings are stable, how can people use them so flexibly? Here we explore a possible answer: maybe this stability is an illusion. Perhaps all concepts, categories, and word meanings (CC&Ms) are constructed ad hoc, each time we use them. On this proposal, all words are infinitely polysemous, all communication is ’good enough’, and no idea is ever the same twice. The details of people’s ad hoc CC&Ms are determined by the way retrieval cues interact with the physical, social, and linguistic context. We argue that even the most stable-seeming CC&Ms are instantiated via the same processes as those that are more obviously ad hoc, and vary (a) from one microsecond to the next within a given instantiation, (b) from one instantiation to the next within an individual, and (c) from person to person and group to group as a function of people’s experiential history. 826 -
Casasanto, D., & De Bruin, A. (2011). Word Up! Directed motor action improves word learning [Abstract]. In L. Carlson, C. Hölscher, & T. Shipley (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1902). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.Abstract
Can simple motor actions help people expand their vocabulary? Here we show that word learning depends on where students place their flash cards after studying them. In Experiment 1, participants learned the definitions of ”alien words” with positive or negative emotional valence. After studying each card, they placed it in one of two boxes (top or bottom), according to its valence. Participants who were instructed to place positive cards in the top box, consistent with Good is Up metaphors, scored about 10. -
Casillas, M., & Amaral, P. (2011). Learning cues to category membership: Patterns in children’s acquisition of hedges. In C. Cathcart, I.-H. Chen, G. Finley, S. Kang, C. S. Sandy, & E. Stickles (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 37th Annual Meeting (pp. 33-45). Linguistic Society of America, eLanguage.Abstract
When we think of children acquiring language, we often think of their acquisition of linguistic structure as separate from their acquisition of knowledge about the world. But it is clear that in the process of learning about language, children consult what they know about the world; and that in learning about the world, children use linguistic cues to discover how items are related to one another. This interaction between the acquisition of linguistic structure and the acquisition of category structure is especially clear in word learning. -
Chen, A. (2011). What’s in a rise: Evidence for an off-ramp analysis of Dutch Intonation. In W.-S. Lee, & E. Zee (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 2011 [ICPhS XVII] (pp. 448-451). Hong Kong: Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, City University of Hong Kong.Abstract
Pitch accents are analysed differently in an onramp analysis (i.e. ToBI) and an off-ramp analysis (e.g. Transcription of Dutch intonation - ToDI), two competing approaches in the Autosegmental Metrical tradition. A case in point is pre-final high rise. A pre-final rise is analysed as H* in ToBI but is phonologically ambiguous between H* or H*L (a (rise-)fall) in ToDI. This is because in ToDI, the L tone of a pre-final H*L can be realised in the following unaccented words and both H* and H*L can show up as a high rise in the accented word. To find out whether there is a two-way phonological contrast in pre-final high rises in Dutch, we examined the distribution of phonologically ambiguous high rises (H*(L)) and their phonetic realisation in different information structural conditions (topic vs. focus), compared to phonologically unambiguous H* and H*L. Results showed that there is indeed a H*L vs. H* contrast in prefinal high rises in Dutch and that H*L is realised as H*(L) when sonorant material is limited in the accented word. These findings provide new evidence for an off-ramp analysis of Dutch intonation and have far-reaching implications for analysis of intonation across languages. -
Cheung, C.-Y., Kirby, S., & Raviv, L. (2024). The role of gender, social bias and personality traits in shaping linguistic accommodation: An experimental approach. In J. Nölle, L. Raviv, K. E. Graham, S. Hartmann, Y. Jadoul, M. Josserand, T. Matzinger, K. Mudd, M. Pleyer, A. Slonimska, & S. Wacewicz (
Eds. ), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference (EVOLANG XV) (pp. 80-82). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences. doi:10.17617/2.3587960. -
Cos, F., Bujok, R., & Bosker, H. R. (2024). Test-retest reliability of audiovisual lexical stress perception after >1.5 years. In Y. Chen, A. Chen, & A. Arvaniti (
Eds. ), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2024 (pp. 871-875). doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2024-176.Abstract
In natural communication, we typically both see and hear our conversation partner. Speech comprehension thus requires the integration of auditory and visual information from the speech signal. This is for instance evidenced by the Manual McGurk effect, where the perception of lexical stress is biased towards the syllable that has a beat gesture aligned to it. However, there is considerable individual variation in how heavily gestural timing is weighed as a cue to stress. To assess within-individualconsistency, this study investigated the test-retest reliability of the Manual McGurk effect. We reran an earlier Manual McGurk experiment with the same participants, over 1.5 years later. At the group level, we successfully replicated the Manual McGurk effect with a similar effect size. However, a correlation of the by-participant effect sizes in the two identical experiments indicated that there was only a weak correlation between both tests, suggesting that the weighing of gestural information in the perception of lexical stress is stable at the group level, but less so in individuals. Findings are discussed in comparison to other measures of audiovisual integration in speech perception. Index Terms: Audiovisual integration, beat gestures, lexical stress, test-retest reliability -
Cutler, A., Andics, A., & Fang, Z. (2011). Inter-dependent categorization of voices and segments. In W.-S. Lee, & E. Zee (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences [ICPhS 2011] (pp. 552-555). Hong Kong: Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, City University of Hong Kong.Abstract
Listeners performed speeded two-alternative choice between two unfamiliar and relatively similar voices or between two phonetically close segments, in VC syllables. For each decision type (segment, voice), the non-target dimension (voice, segment) either was constant, or varied across four alternatives. Responses were always slower when a non-target dimension varied than when it did not, but the effect of phonetic variation on voice identity decision was stronger than that of voice variation on phonetic identity decision. Cues to voice and segment identity in speech are processed inter-dependently, but hard categorization decisions about voices draw on, and are hence sensitive to, segmental information. -
Cutler, A., Kearns, R., Norris, D., & Scott, D. (1992). Listeners’ responses to extraneous signals coincident with English and French speech. In J. Pittam (
Ed. ), Proceedings of the 4th Australian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (pp. 666-671). Canberra: Australian Speech Science and Technology Association.Abstract
English and French listeners performed two tasks - click location and speeded click detection - with both English and French sentences, closely matched for syntactic and phonological structure. Clicks were located more accurately in open- than in closed-class words in both English and French; they were detected more rapidly in open- than in closed-class words in English, but not in French. The two listener groups produced the same pattern of responses, suggesting that higher-level linguistic processing was not involved in these tasks. -
Cutler, A., & Koster, M. (2000). Stress and lexical activation in Dutch. In B. Yuan, T. Huang, & X. Tang (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 1 (pp. 593-596). Beijing: China Military Friendship Publish.Abstract
Dutch listeners were slower to make judgements about the semantic relatedness between a spoken target word (e.g. atLEET, 'athlete') and a previously presented visual prime word (e.g. SPORT 'sport') when the spoken word was mis-stressed. The adverse effect of mis-stressing confirms the role of stress information in lexical recognition in Dutch. However, although the erroneous stress pattern was always initially compatible with a competing word (e.g. ATlas, 'atlas'), mis-stressed words did not produced high false alarm rates in unrelated pairs (e.g. SPORT - atLAS). This suggests that stress information did not completely rule out segmentally matching but suprasegmentally mismatching words, a finding consistent with spoken-word recognition models involving multiple activation and inter-word competition.Additional information
https://www.mpi.nl/world/persons/private/anne/ICSLP00.html -
Cutler, A., & Robinson, T. (1992). Response time as a metric for comparison of speech recognition by humans and machines. In J. Ohala, T. Neary, & B. Derwing (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 1 (pp. 189-192). Alberta: University of Alberta.Abstract
The performance of automatic speech recognition systems is usually assessed in terms of error rate. Human speech recognition produces few errors, but relative difficulty of processing can be assessed via response time techniques. We report the construction of a measure analogous to response time in a machine recognition system. This measure may be compared directly with human response times. We conducted a trial comparison of this type at the phoneme level, including both tense and lax vowels and a variety of consonant classes. The results suggested similarities between human and machine processing in the case of consonants, but differences in the case of vowels. -
Cutler, A., Norris, D., & McQueen, J. M. (2000). Tracking TRACE’s troubles. In A. Cutler, J. M. McQueen, & R. Zondervan (
Eds. ), Proceedings of SWAP (Workshop on Spoken Word Access Processes) (pp. 63-66). Nijmegen: Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics.Abstract
Simulations explored the inability of the TRACE model of spoken-word recognition to model the effects on human listening of acoustic-phonetic mismatches in word forms. The source of TRACE's failure lay not in its interactive connectivity, not in the presence of interword competition, and not in the use of phonemic representations, but in the need for continuously optimised interpretation of the input. When an analogue of TRACE was allowed to cycle to asymptote on every slice of input, an acceptable simulation of the subcategorical mismatch data was achieved. Even then, however, the simulation was not as close as that produced by the Merge model. -
Dang, A., Raviv, L., & Galke, L. (2024). Testing the linguistic niche hypothesis in large with a multilingual Wug test. In J. Nölle, L. Raviv, K. E. Graham, S. Hartmann, Y. Jadoul, M. Josserand, T. Matzinger, K. Mudd, M. Pleyer, A. Slonimska, & S. Wacewicz (
Eds. ), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference (EVOLANG XV) (pp. 91-93). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences. -
Dijkstra, N., & Fikkert, P. (2011). Universal constraints on the discrimination of Place of Articulation? Asymmetries in the discrimination of 'paan' and 'taan' by 6-month-old Dutch infants. In N. Danis, K. Mesh, & H. Sung (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 35th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Volume 1 (pp. 170-182). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. -
Dolscheid, S., Shayan, S., Majid, A., & Casasanto, D. (2011). The thickness of musical pitch: Psychophysical evidence for the Whorfian hypothesis. In L. Carlson, C. Hölscher, & T. Shipley (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 537-542). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. -
Dona, L., & Schouwstra, M. (2024). Balancing regularization and variation: The roles of priming and motivatedness. In J. Nölle, L. Raviv, K. E. Graham, S. Hartmann, Y. Jadoul, M. Josserand, T. Matzinger, K. Mudd, M. Pleyer, A. Slonimska, & S. Wacewicz (
Eds. ), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference (EVOLANG XV) (pp. 130-133). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences. -
Enfield, N. J., & Evans, G. (2000). Transcription as standardisation: The problem of Tai languages. In S. Burusphat (
Ed. ), Proceedings: the International Conference on Tai Studies, July 29-31, 1998, (pp. 201-212). Bangkok, Thailand: Institute of Language and Culture for Rural Development, Mahidol University. -
Ernestus, M., & Warner, N. (
Eds. ). (2011). Speech reduction [Special Issue]. Journal of Phonetics, 39(SI). -
Fikkert, P., & Chen, A. (2011). The role of word-stress and intonation in word recognition in Dutch 14- and 24-month-olds. In N. Danis, K. Mesh, & H. Sung (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 35th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 222-232). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. -
Fitz, H. (2011). A liquid-state model of variability effects in learning nonadjacent dependencies. In L. Carlson, C. Hölscher, & T. Shipley (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 897-902). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.Abstract
Language acquisition involves learning nonadjacent dependencies that can obtain between words in a sentence. Several artificial grammar learning studies have shown that the ability of adults and children to detect dependencies between A and B in frames AXB is influenced by the amount of variation in the X element. This paper presents a model of statistical learning which displays similar behavior on this task and generalizes in a human-like way. The model was also used to predict human behavior for increased distance and more variation in dependencies. We compare our model-based approach with the standard invariance account of the variability effect. -
Floyd, S., & Bruil, M. (2011). Interactional functions as part of the grammar: The suffix –ba in Cha’palaa. In P. K. Austin, O. Bond, D. Nathan, & L. Marten (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Language Description and Theory (pp. 91-100). London: SOAS. -
De La Fuente, J., Casasanto, D., Román, A., & Santiago, J. (2011). Searching for cultural influences on the body-specific association of preferred hand and emotional valence. In L. Carlson, C. Holscher, & T. Shipley (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2616-2620). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. -
Galke, L., Ram, Y., & Raviv, L. (2024). Learning pressures and inductive biases in emergent communication: Parallels between humans and deep neural networks. In J. Nölle, L. Raviv, K. E. Graham, S. Hartmann, Y. Jadoul, M. Josserand, T. Matzinger, K. Mudd, M. Pleyer, A. Slonimska, & S. Wacewicz (
Eds. ), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference (EVOLANG XV) (pp. 197-201). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences. -
Ghaleb, E., Rasenberg, M., Pouw, W., Toni, I., Holler, J., Özyürek, A., & Fernandez, R. (2024). Analysing cross-speaker convergence through the lens of automatically detected shared linguistic constructions. In L. K. Samuelson, S. L. Frank, A. Mackey, & E. Hazeltine (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) (pp. 1717-1723).Abstract
Conversation requires a substantial amount of coordination between dialogue participants, from managing turn taking to negotiating mutual understanding. Part of this coordination effort surfaces as the reuse of linguistic behaviour across speakers, a process often referred to as alignment. While the presence of linguistic alignment is well documented in the literature, several questions remain open, including the extent to which patterns of reuse across speakers have an impact on the emergence of labelling conventions for novel referents. In this study, we put forward a methodology for automatically detecting shared lemmatised constructions---expressions with a common lexical core used by both speakers within a dialogue---and apply it to a referential communication corpus where participants aim to identify novel objects for which no established labels exist. Our analyses uncover the usage patterns of shared constructions in interaction and reveal that features such as their frequency and the amount of different constructions used for a referent are associated with the degree of object labelling convergence the participants exhibit after social interaction. More generally, the present study shows that automatically detected shared constructions offer a useful level of analysis to investigate the dynamics of reference negotiation in dialogue.Additional information
link to eScholarship -
Ghaleb, E., Burenko, I., Rasenberg, M., Pouw, W., Uhrig, P., Holler, J., Toni, I., Ozyurek, A., & Fernandez, R. (2024). Cospeech gesture detection through multi-phase sequence labeling. In Proceedings of IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV 2024) (pp. 4007-4015).
Abstract
Gestures are integral components of face-to-face communication. They unfold over time, often following predictable movement phases of preparation, stroke, and re-
traction. Yet, the prevalent approach to automatic gesture detection treats the problem as binary classification, classifying a segment as either containing a gesture or not, thus failing to capture its inherently sequential and contextual nature. To address this, we introduce a novel framework that reframes the task as a multi-phase sequence labeling problem rather than binary classification. Our model processes sequences of skeletal movements over time windows, uses Transformer encoders to learn contextual embeddings, and leverages Conditional Random Fields to perform sequence labeling. We evaluate our proposal on a large dataset of diverse co-speech gestures in task-oriented face-to-face dialogues. The results consistently demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms strong baseline models in detecting gesture strokes. Furthermore, applying Transformer encoders to learn contextual embeddings from movement sequences substantially improves gesture unit detection. These results highlight our framework’s capacity to capture the fine-grained dynamics of co-speech gesture phases, paving the way for more nuanced and accurate gesture detection and analysis. -
Grosseck, O., Perlman, M., Ortega, G., & Raviv, L. (2024). The iconic affordances of gesture and vocalization in emerging languages in the lab. In J. Nölle, L. Raviv, K. E. Graham, S. Hartmann, Y. Jadoul, M. Josserand, T. Matzinger, K. Mudd, M. Pleyer, A. Slonimska, & S. Wacewicz (
Eds. ), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference (EVOLANG XV) (pp. 223-225). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences. -
Gussenhoven, C., & Chen, A. (2000). Universal and language-specific effects in the perception of question intonation. In B. Yuan, T. Huang, & X. Tang (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP) (pp. 91-94). Beijing: China Military Friendship Publish.Abstract
Three groups of monolingual listeners, with Standard Chinese, Dutch and Hungarian as their native language, judged pairs of trisyllabic stimuli which differed only in their itch pattern. The segmental structure of the stimuli was made up by the experimenters and presented to subjects as being taken from a little-known language spoken on a South Pacific island. Pitch patterns consisted of a single rise-fall located on or near the second syllable. By and large, listeners selected the stimulus with the higher peak, the later eak, and the higher end rise as the one that signalled a question, regardless of language group. The result is argued to reflect innate, non-linguistic knowledge of the meaning of pitch variation, notably Ohala’s Frequency Code. A significant difference between groups is explained as due to the influence of the mother tongue. -
Gussenhoven, C., & Chen, A. (2000). Universal and language-specific effects in the perception of question intonation. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP) (pp. 91-94).
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Hammarström, H. (2011). Automatic annotation of bibliographical references for descriptive language materials. In P. Forner, J. Kekäläinen, M. Lalmas, & M. De Rijke (
Eds. ), Multilingual and multimodal information access evaluation. Second International Conference of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2011, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, September 19-22, 2011; Proceedings (pp. 62-73). Berlin: Springer.Abstract
The present paper considers the problem of annotating bibliographical references with labels/classes, given training data of references already annotated with labels. The problem is an instance of document categorization where the documents are short and written in a wide variety of languages. The skewed distributions of title words and labels calls for special carefulness when choosing a Machine Learning approach. The present paper describes how to induce Disjunctive Normal Form formulae (DNFs), which have several advantages over Decision Trees. The approach is evaluated on a large real-world collection of bibliographical references. -
Hanique, I., & Ernestus, M. (2011). Final /t/ reduction in Dutch past-participles: The role of word predictability and morphological decomposability. In Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2011), Florence, Italy (pp. 2849-2852).
Abstract
This corpus study demonstrates that the realization of wordfinal /t/ in Dutch past-participles in various speech styles is affected by a word’s predictability and paradigmatic relative frequency. In particular, /t/s are shorter and more often absent if the two preceding words are more predictable. In addition, /t/s, especially in irregular verbs, are more reduced, the lower the verb’s lemma frequency relative to the past-participle’s frequency. Both effects are more pronounced in more spontaneous speech. These findings are expected if speech planning plays an important role in speech reduction. Index Terms: pronunciation variation, acoustic reduction, corpus research, word predictability, morphological decomposability -
Harbusch, K., & Kempen, G. (2000). Complexity of linear order computation in Performance Grammar, TAG and HPSG. In Proceedings of Fifth International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms (TAG+5) (pp. 101-106).
Abstract
This paper investigates the time and space complexity of word order computation in the psycholinguistically motivated grammar formalism of Performance Grammar (PG). In PG, the first stage of syntax assembly yields an unordered tree ('mobile') consisting of a hierarchy of lexical frames (lexically anchored elementary trees). Associated with each lexica l frame is a linearizer—a Finite-State Automaton that locally computes the left-to-right order of the branches of the frame. Linearization takes place after the promotion component may have raised certain constituents (e.g. Wh- or focused phrases) into the domain of lexical frames higher up in the syntactic mobile. We show that the worst-case time and space complexity of analyzing input strings of length n is O(n5) and O(n4), respectively. This result compares favorably with the time complexity of word-order computations in Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG). A comparison with Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) reveals that PG yields a more declarative linearization method, provided that the FSA is rewritten as an equivalent regular expression. -
Hartsuiker, R. J., Huettig, F., & Olivers, C. N. (
Eds. ). (2011). Visual search and visual world: Interactions among visual attention, language, and working memory [Special Issue]. Acta Psychologica, 137(2). doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2011.01.005.Additional information
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00016918 -
Hintz, F., & Meyer, A. S. (
Eds. ). (2024). Individual differences in language skills [Special Issue]. Journal of Cognition, 7(1). -
Holler, J., Tutton, M., & Wilkin, K. (2011). Co-speech gestures in the process of meaning coordination. In Proceedings of the 2nd GESPIN - Gesture & Speech in Interaction Conference, Bielefeld, 5-7 Sep 2011.
Abstract
This study uses a classical referential communication task to
investigate the role of co-speech gestures in the process of
coordination. The study manipulates both the common ground between the interlocutors, as well as the visibility of the gestures they use. The findings show that co-speech gestures are an integral part of the referential utterances speakers
produced with regard to both initial references as well as repeated references, and that the availability of gestures appears to impact on interlocutors’ referential oordination. The results are discussed with regard to past research on
common ground as well as theories of gesture production. -
Janse, E., Sennema, A., & Slis, A. (2000). Fast speech timing in Dutch: The durational correlates of lexical stress and pitch accent. In Proceedings of the VIth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Vol. III (pp. 251-254).
Abstract
n this study we investigated the durational correlates of lexical stress and pitch accent at normal and fast speech rate in Dutch. Previous literature on English shows that durations of lexically unstressed vowels are reduced more than stressed vowels when speakers increase their speech rate. We found that the same holds for Dutch, irrespective of whether the unstressed vowel is schwa or a "full" vowel. In the same line, we expected that vowels in words without a pitch accent would be shortened relatively more than vowels in words with a pitch accent. This was not the case: if anything, the accented vowels were shortened relatively more than the unaccented vowels. We conclude that duration is an important cue for lexical stress, but not for pitch accent. -
Janse, E. (2000). Intelligibility of time-compressed speech: Three ways of time-compression. In Proceedings of the VIth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, vol. III (pp. 786-789).
Abstract
Studies on fast speech have shown that word-level timing of fast speech differs from that of normal rate speech in that unstressed syllables are shortened more than stressed syllables as speech rate increases. An earlier experiment showed that the intelligibility of time-compressed speech could not be improved by making its temporal organisation closer to natural fast speech. To test the hypothesis that segmental intelligibility is more important than prosodic timing in listening to timecompressed speech, the intelligibility of bisyllabic words was tested in three time-compression conditions: either stressed and unstressed syllable were compressed to the same degree, or the stressed syllable was compressed more than the unstressed syllable, or the reverse. As was found before, imitating wordlevel timing of fast speech did not improve intelligibility over linear compression. However, the results did not confirm the hypothesis either: there was no difference in intelligibility between the three compression conditions. We conclude that segmental intelligibility plays an important role, but further research is necessary to decide between the contributions of prosody and segmental intelligibility to the word-level intelligibility of time-compressed speech. -
Jasmin, K., & Casasanto, D. (2011). The QWERTY effect: How stereo-typing shapes the mental lexicon. In L. Carlson, C. Holscher, & T. Shipley (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. -
Jesse, A., & Mitterer, H. (2011). Pointing gestures do not influence the perception of lexical stress. In Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2011), Florence, Italy (pp. 2445-2448).
Abstract
We investigated whether seeing a pointing gesture influences the perceived lexical stress. A pitch contour continuum between the Dutch words “CAnon” (‘canon’) and “kaNON” (‘cannon’) was presented along with a pointing gesture during the first or the second syllable. Pointing gestures following natural recordings but not Gaussian functions influenced stress perception (Experiment 1 and 2), especially when auditory context preceded (Experiment 2). This was not replicated in Experiment 3. Natural pointing gestures failed to affect the categorization of a pitch peak timing continuum (Experiment 4). There is thus no convincing evidence that seeing a pointing gesture influences lexical stress perception. -
Johnson, E. K., Jusczyk, P. W., Cutler, A., & Norris, D. (2000). The development of word recognition: The use of the possible-word constraint by 12-month-olds. In L. Gleitman, & A. Joshi (
Eds. ), Proceedings of CogSci 2000 (pp. 1034). London: Erlbaum. -
Joshi, A., Mohanty, R., Kanakanti, M., Mangla, A., Choudhary, S., Barbate, M., & Modi, A. (2024). iSign: A benchmark for Indian Sign Language processing. In L.-W. Ku, A. Martins, & V. Srikumar (
Eds. ), Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024 (pp. 10827-10844). Bangkok, Thailand: Association for Computational Linguistics.Abstract
Indian Sign Language has limited resources for developing machine learning and data-driven approaches for automated language processing. Though text/audio-based language processing techniques have shown colossal research interest and tremendous improvements in the last few years, Sign Languages still need to catch up due to the need for more resources. To bridge this gap, in this work, we propose iSign: a benchmark for Indian Sign Language (ISL) Processing. We make three primary contributions to this work. First, we release one of the largest ISL-English datasets with more than video-sentence/phrase pairs. To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest sign language dataset available for ISL. Second, we propose multiple NLP-specific tasks (including SignVideo2Text, SignPose2Text, Text2Pose, Word Prediction, and Sign Semantics) and benchmark them with the baseline models for easier access to the research community. Third, we provide detailed insights into the proposed benchmarks with a few linguistic insights into the working of ISL. We streamline the evaluation of Sign Language processing, addressing the gaps in the NLP research community for Sign Languages. We release the dataset, tasks and models via the following website: https://exploration-lab.github.io/iSign/
Additional information
dataset, tasks, models -
Josserand, M., Pellegrino, F., Grosseck, O., Dediu, D., & Raviv, L. (2024). Adapting to individual differences: An experimental study of variation in language evolution. In J. Nölle, L. Raviv, K. E. Graham, S. Hartmann, Y. Jadoul, M. Josserand, T. Matzinger, K. Mudd, M. Pleyer, A. Slonimska, & S. Wacewicz (
Eds. ), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference (EVOLANG XV) (pp. 286-289). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences. -
Klein, W. (2000). Changing concepts of the nature-nurture debate. In R. Hide, J. Mittelstrass, & W. Singer (
Eds. ), Changing concepts of nature at the turn of the millenium: Proceedings plenary session of the Pontifical academy of sciences, 26-29 October 1998 (pp. 289-299). Vatican City: Pontificia Academia Scientiarum. -
Klein, W. (
Ed. ). (1992). Textlinguistik [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (86). -
Klein, W. (
Ed. ). (2000). Sprache des Rechts [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (118). -
Klein, W., & Meibauer, J. (
Eds. ). (2011). Spracherwerb und Kinderliteratur [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 162. -
Lai, V. T., Hagoort, P., & Casasanto, D. (2011). Affective and non-affective meaning in words and pictures. In L. Carlson, C. Holscher, & T. Shipley (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 390-395). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. -
Lammertink, I., De Heer Kloots, M., Bazioni, M., & Raviv, L. (2024). Learnability effects in children: Are more structured languages easier to learn? In J. Nölle, L. Raviv, K. E. Graham, S. Hartmann, Y. Jadoul, M. Josserand, T. Matzinger, K. Mudd, M. Pleyer, A. Slonimska, & S. Wacewicz (
Eds. ), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference (EVOLANG XV) (pp. 320-323). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences. -
Lansner, A., Sandberg, A., Petersson, K. M., & Ingvar, M. (2000). On forgetful attractor network memories. In H. Malmgren, M. Borga, & L. Niklasson (
Eds. ), Artificial neural networks in medicine and biology: Proceedings of the ANNIMAB-1 Conference, Göteborg, Sweden, 13-16 May 2000 (pp. 54-62). Heidelberg: Springer Verlag.Abstract
A recurrently connected attractor neural network with a Hebbian learning rule is currently our best ANN analogy for a piece cortex. Functionally biological memory operates on a spectrum of time scales with regard to induction and retention, and it is modulated in complex ways by sub-cortical neuromodulatory systems. Moreover, biological memory networks are commonly believed to be highly distributed and engage many co-operating cortical areas. Here we focus on the temporal aspects of induction and retention of memory in a connectionist type attractor memory model of a piece of cortex. A continuous time, forgetful Bayesian-Hebbian learning rule is described and compared to the characteristics of LTP and LTD seen experimentally. More generally, an attractor network implementing this learning rule can operate as a long-term, intermediate-term, or short-term memory. Modulation of the print-now signal of the learning rule replicates some experimental memory phenomena, like e.g. the von Restorff effect. -
Lenkiewicz, P., Wittenburg, P., Schreer, O., Masneri, S., Schneider, D., & Tschöpel, S. (2011). Application of audio and video processing methods for language research. In Proceedings of the conference Supporting Digital Humanities 2011 [SDH 2011], Copenhagen, Denmark, November 17-18, 2011.
Abstract
Annotations of media recordings are the grounds for linguistic research. Since creating those annotations is a very laborious task, reaching 100 times longer than the length of the annotated media, innovative audio and video processing algorithms are needed, in order to improve the efficiency and quality of annotation process. The AVATecH project, started by the Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI) and the Fraunhofer institutes HHI and IAIS, aims at significantly speeding up the process of creating annotations of audio-visual data for humanities research. In order for this to be achieved a range of state-of-the-art audio and video pattern recognition algorithms have been developed and integrated into widely used ELAN annotation tool. To address the problem of heterogeneous annotation tasks and recordings we provide modular components extended by adaptation and feedback mechanisms to achieve competitive annotation quality within significantly less annotation time. -
Lenkiewicz, P., Wittenburg, P., Gebre, B. G., Lenkiewicz, A., Schreer, O., & Masneri, S. (2011). Application of video processing methods for linguistic research. In Z. Vetulani (
Ed. ), Human language technologies as a challenge for computer science and linguistics. Proceedings of the 5th Language and Technology Conference (LTC 2011), November 25-27, 2011, Poznań, Poland (pp. 561-564).Abstract
Evolution and changes of all modern languages is a well-known fact. However, recently it is reaching dynamics never seen before, which results in loss of the vast amount of information encoded in every language. In order to preserve such heritage, properly annotated recordings of world languages are necessary. Since creating those annotations is a very laborious task, reaching times 100 longer than the length of the annotated media, innovative video processing algorithms are needed, in order to improve the efficiency and quality of annotation process. -
Lenkiewicz, P., Pereira, M., Freire, M., & Fernandes, J. (2011). Extended whole mesh deformation model: Full 3D processing. In Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (pp. 1633-1636).
Abstract
Processing medical data has always been an interesting field that has shown the need for effective image segmentation methods. Modern medical image segmentation solutions are focused on 3D image volumes, which originate at advanced acquisition devices. Operating on such data in a 3D envi- ronment is essential in order to take the full advantage of the available information. In this paper we present an extended version of our 3D image segmentation and reconstruction model that belongs to the family of Deformable Models and is capable of processing large image volumes in competitive times and in fully 3D environment, offering a big level of automation of the process and a high precision of results. It is also capable of handling topology changes and offers a very good scalability on multi-processing unit architectures. We present a description of the model and show its capabilities in the field of medical image processing. -
De León, L., & Levinson, S. C. (
Eds. ). (1992). Space in Mesoamerican languages [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung, 45(6). -
Levinson, S. C. (2000). Language as nature and language as art. In J. Mittelstrass, & W. Singer (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the Symposium on ‘Changing concepts of nature and the turn of the Millennium (pp. 257-287). Vatican City: Pontificae Academiae Scientiarium Scripta Varia. -
Levinson, S. C. (2000). H.P. Grice on location on Rossel Island. In S. S. Chang, L. Liaw, & J. Ruppenhofer (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society (pp. 210-224). Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistic Society. -
Liesenfeld, A., & Dingemanse, M. (2024). Rethinking open source generative AI: open-washing and the EU AI Act. In The 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’24) (pp. 1774-1784). ACM.
Abstract
The past year has seen a steep rise in generative AI systems that claim to be open. But how open are they really? The question of what counts as open source in generative AI is poised to take on particular importance in light of the upcoming EU AI Act that regulates open source systems differently, creating an urgent need for practical openness assessment. Here we use an evidence-based framework that distinguishes 14 dimensions of openness, from training datasets to scientific and technical documentation and from licensing to access methods. Surveying over 45 generative AI systems (both text and text-to-image), we find that while the term open source is widely used, many models are `open weight' at best and many providers seek to evade scientific, legal and regulatory scrutiny by withholding information on training and fine-tuning data. We argue that openness in generative AI is necessarily composite (consisting of multiple elements) and gradient (coming in degrees), and point out the risk of relying on single features like access or licensing to declare models open or not. Evidence-based openness assessment can help foster a generative AI landscape in which models can be effectively regulated, model providers can be held accountable, scientists can scrutinise generative AI, and end users can make informed decisions. -
Long, M., & Rubio-Fernandez, P. (2024). Beyond typicality: Lexical category affects the use and processing of color words. In L. K. Samuelson, S. L. Frank, M. Toneva, A. Mackey, & E. Hazeltine (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) (pp. 4925-4930).Abstract
Speakers and listeners show an informativity bias in the use and interpretation of color modifiers. For example, speakers use color more often when referring to objects that vary in color than to objects with a prototypical color. Likewise, listeners look away from objects with prototypical colors upon hearing that color mentioned. Here we test whether speakers and listeners account for another factor related to informativity: the strength of the association between lexical categories and color. Our results demonstrate that speakers and listeners' choices are indeed influenced by this factor; as such, it should be integrated into current pragmatic theories of informativity and computational models of color reference.Additional information
link to eScholarship -
Lupyan, G., & Raviv, L. (2024). A cautionary note on sociodemographic predictors of linguistic complexity: Different measures and different analyses lead to different conclusions. In J. Nölle, L. Raviv, K. E. Graham, S. Hartmann, Y. Jadoul, M. Josserand, T. Matzinger, K. Mudd, M. Pleyer, A. Slonimska, & S. Wacewicz (
Eds. ), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference (EVOLANG XV) (pp. 345-348). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences. -
Majid, A., & Levinson, S. C. (
Eds. ). (2011). The senses in language and culture [Special Issue]. The Senses & Society, 6(1). -
Majid, A., & Levinson, S. C. (2011). The language of perception across cultures [Abstract]. Abstracts of the XXth Congress of European Chemoreception Research Organization, ECRO-2010. Publ. in Chemical Senses, 36(1), E7-E8.
Abstract
How are the senses structured by the languages we speak, the cultures we inhabit? To what extent is the encoding of perceptual experiences in languages a matter of how the mind/brain is ―wired-up‖ and to what extent is it a question of local cultural preoccupation? The ―Language of Perception‖ project tests the hypothesis that some perceptual domains may be more ―ineffable‖ – i.e. difficult or impossible to put into words – than others. While cognitive scientists have assumed that proximate senses (olfaction, taste, touch) are more ineffable than distal senses (vision, hearing), anthropologists have illustrated the exquisite variation and elaboration the senses achieve in different cultural milieus. The project is designed to test whether the proximate senses are universally ineffable – suggesting an architectural constraint on cognition – or whether they are just accidentally so in Indo-European languages, so expanding the role of cultural interests and preoccupations. To address this question, a standardized set of stimuli of color patches, geometric shapes, simple sounds, tactile textures, smells and tastes have been used to elicit descriptions from speakers of more than twenty languages—including three sign languages. The languages are typologically, genetically and geographically diverse, representing a wide-range of cultures. The communities sampled vary in subsistence modes (hunter-gatherer to industrial), ecological zones (rainforest jungle to desert), dwelling types (rural and urban), and various other parameters. We examine how codable the different sensory modalities are by comparing how consistent speakers are in how they describe the materials in each modality. Our current analyses suggest that taste may, in fact, be the most codable sensorial domain across languages. Moreover, we have identified exquisite elaboration in the olfactory domains in some cultural settings, contrary to some contemporary predictions within the cognitive sciences. These results suggest that differential codability may be at least partly the result of cultural preoccupation. This shows that the senses are not just physiological phenomena but are constructed through linguistic, cultural and social practices. -
Malt, B. C., Ameel, E., Gennari, S., Imai, M., Saji, N., & Majid, A. (2011). Do words reveal concepts? In L. Carlson, C. Hölscher, & T. Shipley (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 519-524). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.Abstract
To study concepts, cognitive scientists must first identify some. The prevailing assumption is that they are revealed by words such as triangle, table, and robin. But languages vary dramatically in how they carve up the world by name. Either ordinary concepts must be heavily language-dependent or names cannot be a direct route to concepts. We asked English, Dutch, Spanish, and Japanese speakers to name videos of human locomotion and judge their similarities. We investigated what name inventories and scaling solutions on name similarity and on physical similarity for the groups individually and together suggest about the underlying concepts. Aggregated naming and similarity solutions converged on results distinct from the answers suggested by the word inventories and scaling solutions of any single language. Words such as triangle, table, and robin can help identify the conceptual space of a domain, but they do not directly reveal units of knowledge usefully considered 'concepts'. -
de Marneffe, M.-C., Tomlinson, J. J., Tice, M., & Sumner, M. (2011). The interaction of lexical frequency and phonetic variation in the perception of accented speech. In L. Carlson, C. Hölscher, & T. Shipley (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 3575-3580). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.Abstract
How listeners understand spoken words despite massive variation in the speech signal is a central issue for linguistic theory. A recent focus on lexical frequency and specificity has proved fruitful in accounting for this phenomenon. Speech perception, though, is a multi-faceted process and likely incorporates a number of mechanisms to map a variable signal to meaning. We examine a well-established language use factor — lexical frequency — and how this factor is integrated with phonetic variability during the perception of accented speech. We show that an integrated perspective highlights a low-level perceptual mechanism that accounts for the perception of accented speech absent native contrasts, while shedding light on the use of interactive language factors in the perception of spoken words. -
Matteo, M., & Bosker, H. R. (2024). How to test gesture-speech integration in ten minutes. In Y. Chen, A. Chen, & A. Arvaniti (
Eds. ), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2024 (pp. 737-741). doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2024-149.Abstract
Human conversations are inherently multimodal, including auditory speech, visual articulatory cues, and hand gestures. Recent studies demonstrated that the timing of a simple up-and-down hand movement, known as a beat gesture, can affect speech perception. A beat gesture falling on the first syllable of a disyllabic word induces a bias to perceive a strong-weak stress pattern (i.e., “CONtent”), while a beat gesture falling on the second syllable combined with the same acoustics biases towards a weak-strong stress pattern (“conTENT”). This effect, termed the “manual McGurk effect”, has been studied in both in-lab and online studies, employing standard experimental sessions lasting approximately forty minutes. The present work tests whether the manual McGurk effect can be observed in an online short version (“mini-test”) of the original paradigm, lasting only ten minutes. Additionally, we employ two different response modalities, namely a two-alternative forced choice and a visual analog scale. A significant manual McGurk effect was observed with both response modalities. Overall, the present study demonstrates the feasibility of employing a ten-minute manual McGurk mini-test to obtain a measure of gesture-speech integration. As such, it may lend itself for inclusion in large-scale test batteries that aim to quantify individual variation in language processing. -
McQueen, J. M., Cutler, A., & Norris, D. (2000). Positive and negative influences of the lexicon on phonemic decision-making. In B. Yuan, T. Huang, & X. Tang (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 3 (pp. 778-781). Beijing: China Military Friendship Publish.Abstract
Lexical knowledge influences how human listeners make decisions about speech sounds. Positive lexical effects (faster responses to target sounds in words than in nonwords) are robust across several laboratory tasks, while negative effects (slower responses to targets in more word-like nonwords than in less word-like nonwords) have been found in phonetic decision tasks but not phoneme monitoring tasks. The present experiments tested whether negative lexical effects are therefore a task-specific consequence of the forced choice required in phonetic decision. We compared phoneme monitoring and phonetic decision performance using the same Dutch materials in each task. In both experiments there were positive lexical effects, but no negative lexical effects. We observe that in all studies showing negative lexical effects, the materials were made by cross-splicing, which meant that they contained perceptual evidence supporting the lexically-consistent phonemes. Lexical knowledge seems to influence phonemic decision-making only when there is evidence for the lexically-consistent phoneme in the speech signal. -
McQueen, J. M., Cutler, A., & Norris, D. (2000). Why Merge really is autonomous and parsimonious. In A. Cutler, J. M. McQueen, & R. Zondervan (
Eds. ), Proceedings of SWAP (Workshop on Spoken Word Access Processes) (pp. 47-50). Nijmegen: Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics.Abstract
We briefly describe the Merge model of phonemic decision-making, and, in the light of general arguments about the possible role of feedback in spoken-word recognition, defend Merge's feedforward structure. Merge not only accounts adequately for the data, without invoking feedback connections, but does so in a parsimonious manner. -
McQueen, J. M., & Cutler, A. (1992). Words within words: Lexical statistics and lexical access. In J. Ohala, T. Neary, & B. Derwing (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 1 (pp. 221-224). Alberta: University of Alberta.Abstract
This paper presents lexical statistics on the pattern of occurrence of words embedded in other words. We report the results of an analysis of 25000 words, varying in length from two to six syllables, extracted from a phonetically-coded English dictionary (The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English). Each syllable, and each string of syllables within each word was checked against the dictionary. Two analyses are presented: the first used a complete list of polysyllables, with look-up on the entire dictionary; the second used a sublist of content words, counting only embedded words which were themselves content words. The results have important implications for models of human speech recognition. The efficiency of these models depends, in different ways, on the number and location of words within words. -
Mishra, C., Nandanwar, A., & Mishra, S. (2024). HRI in Indian education: Challenges opportunities. In H. Admoni, D. Szafir, W. Johal, & A. Sandygulova (
Eds. ), Designing an introductory HRI course (workshop at HRI 2024). ArXiv. doi:10.48550/arXiv.2403.12223.Abstract
With the recent advancements in the field of robotics and the increased focus on having general-purpose robots widely available to the general public, it has become increasingly necessary to pursue research into Human-robot interaction (HRI). While there have been a lot of works discussing frameworks for teaching HRI in educational institutions with a few institutions already offering courses to students, a consensus on the course content still eludes the field. In this work, we highlight a few challenges and opportunities while designing an HRI course from an Indian perspective. These topics warrant further deliberations as they have a direct impact on the design of HRI courses and wider implications for the entire field. -
Mitterer, H. (2011). Social accountability influences phonetic alignment. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Program abstracts of the 162nd Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, 130(4), 2442.
Abstract
Speakers tend to take over the articulatory habits of their interlocutors [e.g., Pardo, JASA (2006)]. This phonetic alignment could be the consequence of either a social mechanism or a direct and automatic link between speech perception and production. The latter assumes that social variables should have little influence on phonetic alignment. To test that participants were engaged in a "cloze task" (i.e., Stimulus: "In fantasy movies, silver bullets are used to kill ..." Response: "werewolves") with either one or four interlocutors. Given findings with the Asch-conformity paradigm in social psychology, multiple consistent speakers should exert a stronger force on the participant to align. To control the speech style of the interlocutors, their questions and answers were pre-recorded in either a formal or a casual speech style. The stimuli's speech style was then manipulated between participants and was consistent throughout the experiment for a given participant. Surprisingly, participants aligned less with the speech style if there were multiple interlocutors. This may reflect a "diffusion of responsibility:" Participants may find it more important to align when they interact with only one person than with a larger group. -
Motiekaitytė, K., Grosseck, O., Wolf, L., Bosker, H. R., Peeters, D., Perlman, M., Ortega, G., & Raviv, L. (2024). Iconicity and compositionality in emerging vocal communication systems: a Virtual Reality approach. In J. Nölle, L. Raviv, K. E. Graham, S. Hartmann, Y. Jadoul, M. Josserand, T. Matzinger, K. Mudd, M. Pleyer, A. Slonimska, & S. Wacewicz (
Eds. ), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference (EVOLANG XV) (pp. 387-389). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences. -
Nordhoff, S., & Hammarström, H. (2011). Glottolog/Langdoc: Defining dialects, languages, and language families as collections of resources. Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Linked Science 2011 (LISC2011), Bonn, Germany, October 24, 2011.
Abstract
This paper describes the Glottolog/Langdoc project, an at- tempt to provide near-total bibliographical coverage of descriptive re- sources to the world's languages. Every reference is treated as a resource, as is every \languoid"[1]. References are linked to the languoids which they describe, and languoids are linked to the references described by them. Family relations between languoids are modeled in SKOS, as are relations across dierent classications of the same languages. This setup allows the representation of languoids as collections of references, render- ing the question of the denition of entities like `Scots', `West-Germanic' or `Indo-European' more empirical. -
Norris, D., Cutler, A., McQueen, J. M., Butterfield, S., & Kearns, R. K. (2000). Language-universal constraints on the segmentation of English. In A. Cutler, J. M. McQueen, & R. Zondervan (
Eds. ), Proceedings of SWAP (Workshop on Spoken Word Access Processes) (pp. 43-46). Nijmegen: Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics.Abstract
Two word-spotting experiments are reported that examine whether the Possible-Word Constraint (PWC) [1] is a language-specific or language-universal strategy for the segmentation of continuous speech. The PWC disfavours parses which leave an impossible residue between the end of a candidate word and a known boundary. The experiments examined cases where the residue was either a CV syllable with a lax vowel, or a CVC syllable with a schwa. Although neither syllable context is a possible word in English, word-spotting in both contexts was easier than with a context consisting of a single consonant. The PWC appears to be language-universal rather than language-specific. -
Norris, D., Van Ooijen, B., & Cutler, A. (1992). Speeded detection of vowels and steady-state consonants. In J. Ohala, T. Neary, & B. Derwing (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Spoken Language Processing; Vol. 2 (pp. 1055-1058). Alberta: University of Alberta.Abstract
We report two experiments in which vowels and steady-state consonants served as targets in a speeded detection task. In the first experiment, two vowels were compared with one voiced and once unvoiced fricative. Response times (RTs) to the vowels were longer than to the fricatives. The error rate was higher for the consonants. Consonants in word-final position produced the shortest RTs, For the vowels, RT correlated negatively with target duration. In the second experiment, the same two vowel targets were compared with two nasals. This time there was no significant difference in RTs, but the error rate was still significantly higher for the consonants. Error rate and length correlated negatively for the vowels only. We conclude that RT differences between phonemes are independent of vocalic or consonantal status. Instead, we argue that the process of phoneme detection reflects more finely grained differences in acoustic/articulatory structure within the phonemic repertoire. -
Norris, D., Cutler, A., & McQueen, J. M. (2000). The optimal architecture for simulating spoken-word recognition. In C. Davis, T. Van Gelder, & R. Wales (
Eds. ), Cognitive Science in Australia, 2000: Proceedings of the Fifth Biennial Conference of the Australasian Cognitive Science Society. Adelaide: Causal Productions.Abstract
Simulations explored the inability of the TRACE model of spoken-word recognition to model the effects on human listening of subcategorical mismatch in word forms. The source of TRACE's failure lay not in interactive connectivity, not in the presence of inter-word competition, and not in the use of phonemic representations, but in the need for continuously optimised interpretation of the input. When an analogue of TRACE was allowed to cycle to asymptote on every slice of input, an acceptable simulation of the subcategorical mismatch data was achieved. Even then, however, the simulation was not as close as that produced by the Merge model, which has inter-word competition, phonemic representations and continuous optimisation (but no interactive connectivity). -
Otake, T., & Cutler, A. (2000). A set of Japanese word cohorts rated for relative familiarity. In B. Yuan, T. Huang, & X. Tang (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 3 (pp. 766-769). Beijing: China Military Friendship Publish.Abstract
A database is presented of relative familiarity ratings for 24 sets of Japanese words, each set comprising words overlapping in the initial portions. These ratings are useful for the generation of material sets for research in the recognition of spoken words. -
Ozyurek, A., & Ozcaliskan, S. (2000). How do children learn to conflate manner and path in their speech and gestures? Differences in English and Turkish. In E. V. Clark (
Ed. ), The proceedings of the Thirtieth Child Language Research Forum (pp. 77-85). Stanford: CSLI Publications. -
Peirolo, M., Meyer, A. S., & Frances, C. (2024). Investigating the causes of prosodic marking in self-repairs: An automatic process? In Y. Chen, A. Chen, & A. Arvaniti (
Eds. ), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2024 (pp. 1080-1084). doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2024-218.Abstract
Natural speech involves repair. These repairs are often highlighted through prosodic marking (Levelt & Cutler, 1983). Prosodic marking usually entails an increase in pitch, loudness, and/or duration that draws attention to the corrected word. While it is established that natural self-repairs typically elicit prosodic marking, the exact cause of this is unclear. This study investigates whether producing a prosodic marking emerges from an automatic correction process or has a communicative purpose. In the current study, we elicit corrections to test whether all self-corrections elicit prosodic marking. Participants carried out a picture-naming task in which they described two images presented on-screen. To prompt self-correction, the second image was altered in some cases, requiring participants to abandon their initial utterance and correct their description to match the new image. This manipulation was compared to a control condition in which only the orientation of the object would change, eliciting no self-correction while still presenting a visual change. We found that the replacement of the item did not elicit a prosodic marking, regardless of the type of change. Theoretical implications and research directions are discussed, in particular theories of prosodic planning. -
Perniss, P. M., Zwitserlood, I., & Ozyurek, A. (2011). Does space structure spatial language? Linguistic encoding of space in sign languages. In L. Carlson, C. Holscher, & T. Shipley (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1595-1600). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. -
Poellmann, K., McQueen, J. M., & Mitterer, H. (2011). The time course of perceptual learning. In W.-S. Lee, & E. Zee (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 2011 [ICPhS XVII] (pp. 1618-1621). Hong Kong: Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, City University of Hong Kong.Abstract
Two groups of participants were trained to perceive an ambiguous sound [s/f] as either /s/ or /f/ based on lexical bias: One group heard the ambiguous fricative in /s/-final words, the other in /f/-final words. This kind of exposure leads to a recalibration of the /s/-/f/ contrast [e.g., 4]. In order to investigate when and how this recalibration emerges, test trials were interspersed among training and filler trials. The learning effect needed at least 10 clear training items to arise. Its emergence seemed to occur in a rather step-wise fashion. Learning did not improve much after it first appeared. It is likely, however, that the early test trials attracted participants' attention and therefore may have interfered with the learning process. -
Regier, T., Khetarpal, N., & Majid, A. (2011). Inferring conceptual structure from cross-language data. In L. Carlson, C. Hölscher, & T. Shipley (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1488). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. -
Reinisch, E., & Weber, A. (2011). Adapting to lexical stress in a foreign accent. In W.-S. Lee, & E. Zee (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 2011 [ICPhS XVII] (pp. 1678-1681). Hong Kong: Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, City University of Hong Kong.Abstract
An exposure-test paradigm was used to examine whether Dutch listeners can adapt their perception to non-canonical marking of lexical stress in Hungarian-accented Dutch. During exposure, one group of listeners heard only words with correct initial stress, while another group also heard examples of unstressed initial syllables that were marked by high pitch, a possible stress cue in Dutch. Subsequently, listeners’ eye movements to target-competitor pairs with segmental overlap but different stress patterns were tracked while hearing Hungarian-accented Dutch. Listeners who had heard non-canonically produced words previously distinguished target-competitor pairs faster than listeners who had only been exposed to canonical forms before. This suggests that listeners can adapt quickly to speaker-specific realizations of non-canonical lexical stress. -
Reinisch, E., Weber, A., & Mitterer, H. (2011). Listeners retune phoneme boundaries across languages [Abstract]. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Program abstracts of the 162nd Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, 130(4), 2572-2572.
Abstract
Listeners can flexibly retune category boundaries of their native language to adapt to non-canonically produced phonemes. This only occurs, however, if the pronunciation peculiarities can be attributed to stable and not transient speaker-specific characteristics. Listening to someone speaking a second language, listeners could attribute non-canonical pronunciations either to the speaker or to the fact that she is modifying her categories in the second language. We investigated whether, following exposure to Dutch-accented English, Dutch listeners show effects of category retuning during test where they hear the same speaker speaking her native language, Dutch. Exposure was a lexical-decision task where either word-final [f] or [s] was replaced by an ambiguous sound. At test listeners categorized minimal word pairs ending in sounds along an [f]-[s] continuum. Following exposure to English words, Dutch listeners showed boundary shifts of a similar magnitude as following exposure to the same phoneme variants in their native language. This suggests that production patterns in a second language are deemed a stable characteristic. A second experiment suggests that category retuning also occurs when listeners are exposed to and tested with a native speaker of their second language. Listeners thus retune phoneme boundaries across languages. -
de Reus, K., Benítez-Burraco, A., Hersh, T. A., Groot, N., Lambert, M. L., Slocombe, K. E., Vernes, S. C., & Raviv, L. (2024). Self-domestication traits in vocal learning mammals. In J. Nölle, L. Raviv, K. E. Graham, S. Hartmann, Y. Jadoul, M. Josserand, T. Matzinger, K. Mudd, M. Pleyer, A. Slonimska, & S. Wacewicz (
Eds. ), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference (EVOLANG XV) (pp. 105-108). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences. -
Rohrer, P. L., Bujok, R., Van Maastricht, L., & Bosker, H. R. (2024). The timing of beat gestures affects lexical stress perception in Spanish. In Y. Chen, A. Chen, & A. Arvaniti (
Eds. ), Proceedings Speech Prosody 2024 (pp. 702-706). doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2024-142.Abstract
It has been shown that when speakers produce hand gestures, addressees are attentive towards these gestures, using them to facilitate speech processing. Even relatively simple “beat” gestures are taken into account to help process aspects of speech such as prosodic prominence. In fact, recent evidence suggests that the timing of a beat gesture can influence spoken word recognition. Termed the manual McGurk Effect, Dutch participants, when presented with lexical stress minimal pair continua in Dutch, were biased to hear lexical stress on the syllable that coincided with a beat gesture. However, little is known about how this manual McGurk effect would surface in languages other than Dutch, with different acoustic cues to prominence, and variable gestures. Therefore, this study tests the effect in Spanish where lexical stress is arguably even more important, being a contrastive cue in the regular verb conjugation system. Results from 24 participants corroborate the effect in Spanish, namely that when given the same auditory stimulus, participants were biased to perceive lexical stress on the syllable that visually co-occurred with a beat gesture. These findings extend the manual McGurk effect to a different language, emphasizing the impact of gestures' timing on prosody perception and spoken word recognition. -
Rohrer, P. L., Hong, Y., & Bosker, H. R. (2024). Gestures time to vowel onset and change the acoustics of the word in Mandarin. In Y. Chen, A. Chen, & A. Arvaniti (
Eds. ), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2024 (pp. 866-870). doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2024-175.Abstract
Recent research on multimodal language production has revealed that prominence in speech and gesture go hand-in-hand. Specifically, peaks in gesture (i.e., the apex) seem to closely coordinate with peaks in fundamental frequency (F0). The nature of this relationship may also be bi-directional, as it has also been shown that the production of gesture directly affects speech acoustics. However, most studies on the topic have largely focused on stress-based languages, where fundamental frequency has a prominence-lending function. Less work has been carried out on lexical tone languages such as Mandarin, where F0 is lexically distinctive. In this study, four native Mandarin speakers were asked to produce single monosyllabic CV words, taken from minimal lexical tone triplets (e.g., /pi1/, /pi2/, /pi3/), either with or without a beat gesture. Our analyses of the timing of the gestures showed that the gesture apex most stably occurred near vowel onset, with consonantal duration being the strongest predictor of apex placement. Acoustic analyses revealed that words produced with gesture showed raised F0 contours, greater intensity, and shorter durations. These findings further our understanding of gesture-speech alignment in typologically diverse languages, and add to the discussion about multimodal prominence. -
Ronderos, C. R., Zhang, Y., & Rubio-Fernandez, P. (2024). Weighted parameters in demonstrative use: The case of Spanish teens and adults. In L. K. Samuelson, S. L. Frank, M. Toneva, A. Mackey, & E. Hazeltine (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) (pp. 3279-3286).Additional information
link to eScholarship -
Rubio-Fernandez, P., Long, M., Shukla, V., Bhatia, V., Mahapatra, A., Ralekar, C., Ben-Ami, S., & Sinha, P. (2024). Multimodal communication in newly sighted children: An investigation of the relation between visual experience and pragmatic development. In L. K. Samuelson, S. L. Frank, M. Toneva, A. Mackey, & E. Hazeltine (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) (pp. 2560-2567).Abstract
We investigated the relationship between visual experience and pragmatic development by testing the socio-communicative skills of a unique population: the Prakash children of India, who received treatment for congenital cataracts after years of visual deprivation. Using two different referential communication tasks, our study investigated Prakash' children ability to produce sufficiently informative referential expressions (e.g., ‘the green pear' or ‘the small plate') and pay attention to their interlocutor's face during the task (Experiment 1), as well as their ability to recognize a speaker's referential intent through non-verbal cues such as head turning and pointing (Experiment 2). Our results show that Prakash children have strong pragmatic skills, but do not look at their interlocutor's face as often as neurotypical children do. However, longitudinal analyses revealed an increase in face fixations, suggesting that over time, Prakash children come to utilize their improved visual skills for efficient referential communication.Additional information
link to eScholarship -
Sadakata, M., & McQueen, J. M. (2011). The role of variability in non-native perceptual learning of a Japanese geminate-singleton fricative contrast. In Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2011), Florence, Italy (pp. 873-876).
Abstract
The current study reports the enhancing effect of a high variability training procedure in the learning of a Japanese geminate-singleton fricative contrast. Dutch natives took part in a five-day training procedure in which they identified geminate and singleton variants of the Japanese fricative /s/. They heard either many repetitions of a limited set of words recorded by a single speaker (simple training) or fewer repetitions of a more variable set of words recorded by multiple speakers (variable training). Pre-post identification evaluations and a transfer test indicated clear benefits of the variable training. -
Sander, J., Çetinçelik, M., Zhang, Y., Rowland, C. F., & Harmon, Z. (2024). Why does joint attention predict vocabulary acquisition? The answer depends on what coding scheme you use. In L. K. Samuelson, S. L. Frank, M. Toneva, A. Mackey, & E. Hazeltine (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) (pp. 1607-1613).Abstract
Despite decades of study, we still know less than we would like about the association between joint attention (JA) and language acquisition. This is partly because of disagreements on how to operationalise JA. In this study, we examine the impact of applying two different, influential JA operationalisation schemes to the same dataset of child-caregiver interactions, to determine which yields a better fit to children's later vocabulary size. Two coding schemes— one defining JA in terms of gaze overlap and one in terms of social aspects of shared attention—were applied to video-recordings of dyadic naturalistic toy-play interactions (N=45). We found that JA was predictive of later production vocabulary when operationalised as shared focus (study 1), but also that its operationalisation as shared social awareness increased its predictive power (study 2). Our results emphasise the critical role of methodological choices in understanding how and why JA is associated with vocabulary size. -
Sauermann, A., Höhle, B., Chen, A., & Järvikivi, J. (2011). Intonational marking of focus in different word orders in German children. In M. B. Washburn, K. McKinney-Bock, E. Varis, & A. Sawyer (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 28th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (pp. 313-322). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Abstract
The use of word order and intonation to mark focus in child speech has received some attention. However, past work usually examined each device separately or only compared the realizations of focused vs. non-focused constituents. This paper investigates the interaction between word order and intonation in the marking of different focus types in 4- to 5-year old German-speaking children and an adult control group. An answer-reconstruction task was used to elicit syntactic (word order) and intonational focus marking of subject and objects (locus of focus) in three focus types (broad, narrow, and contrastive focus). The results indicate that both children and adults used intonation to distinguish broad from contrastive focus but they differed in the marking of narrow focus. Further, both groups preferred intonation to word order as device for focus marking. But children showed an early sensitivity for the impact of focus type and focus location on word order variation and on phonetic means to mark focus.
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