Publications

Displaying 1 - 100 of 101
  • Adank, P., & McQueen, J. M. (2007). The effect of an unfamiliar regional accent on spoken-word comprehension. In J. Trouvain, & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2007) (pp. 1925-1928). Dudweiler: Pirrot.

    Abstract

    This study aimed first to determine whether there is a delay associated with processing words in an unfamiliar regional accent compared to words in a familiar regional accent, and second to establish whether short-term exposure to an unfamiliar accent affects the speed and accuracy of comprehension of words spoken in that accent. Listeners performed an animacy decision task for words spoken in their own and in an unfamiliar accent. Next, they were exposed to approximately 20 minutes of speech in one of these two accents. After exposure, they repeated the animacy decision task. Results showed a considerable delay in word processing for the unfamiliar accent, but no effect of short-term exposure.
  • Alhama, R. G., Siegelman, N., Frost, R., & Armstrong, B. C. (2019). The role of information in visual word recognition: A perceptually-constrained connectionist account. In A. Goel, C. Seifert, & C. Freksa (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2019) (pp. 83-89). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Proficient readers typically fixate near the center of a word, with a slight bias towards word onset. We explore a novel account of this phenomenon based on combining information-theory with visual perceptual constraints in a connectionist model of visual word recognition. This account posits that the amount of information-content available for word identification varies across fixation locations and across languages, thereby explaining the overall fixation location bias in different languages, making the novel prediction that certain words are more readily identified when fixating at an atypical fixation location, and predicting specific cross-linguistic differences. We tested these predictions across several simulations in English and Hebrew, and in a pilot behavioral experiment. Results confirmed that the bias to fixate closer to word onset aligns with maximizing information in the visual signal, that some words are more readily identified at atypical fixation locations, and that these effects vary to some degree across languages.
  • Andics, A., McQueen, J. M., & Van Turennout, M. (2007). Phonetic content influences voice discriminability. In J. Trouvain, & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2007) (pp. 1829-1832). Dudweiler: Pirrot.

    Abstract

    We present results from an experiment which shows that voice perception is influenced by the phonetic content of speech. Dutch listeners were presented with thirteen speakers pronouncing CVC words with systematically varying segmental content, and they had to discriminate the speakers’ voices. Results show that certain segments help listeners discriminate voices more than other segments do. Voice information can be extracted from every segmental position of a monosyllabic word and is processed rapidly. We also show that although relative discriminability within a closed set of voices appears to be a stable property of a voice, it is also influenced by segmental cues – that is, perceived uniqueness of a voice depends on what that voice says.
  • Badimala, P., Mishra, C., Venkataramana, R. K. M., Bukhari, S. S., & Dengel, A. (2019). A Study of Various Text Augmentation Techniques for Relation Classification in Free Text. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods (pp. 360-367). Setúbal, Portugal: SciTePress Digital Library. doi:10.5220/0007311003600367.

    Abstract

    Data augmentation techniques have been widely used in visual recognition tasks as it is easy to generate new
    data by simple and straight forward image transformations. However, when it comes to text data augmen-
    tations, it is difficult to find appropriate transformation techniques which also preserve the contextual and
    grammatical structure of language texts. In this paper, we explore various text data augmentation techniques
    in text space and word embedding space. We study the effect of various augmented datasets on the efficiency
    of different deep learning models for relation classification in text.
  • Bauer, B. L. M. (1999). Aspects of impersonal constructions in Late Latin. In H. Petersmann, & R. Kettelmann (Eds.), Latin vulgaire – latin tardif V (pp. 209-211). Heidelberg: Winter.
  • Bentum, M., Ten Bosch, L., Van den Bosch, A., & Ernestus, M. (2019). Listening with great expectations: An investigation of word form anticipations in naturalistic speech. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2019 (pp. 2265-2269). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2019-2741.

    Abstract

    The event-related potential (ERP) component named phonological mismatch negativity (PMN) arises when listeners hear an unexpected word form in a spoken sentence [1]. The PMN is thought to reflect the mismatch between expected and perceived auditory speech input. In this paper, we use the PMN to test a central premise in the predictive coding framework [2], namely that the mismatch between prior expectations and sensory input is an important mechanism of perception. We test this with natural speech materials containing approximately 50,000 word tokens. The corresponding EEG-signal was recorded while participants (n = 48) listened to these materials. Following [3], we quantify the mismatch with two word probability distributions (WPD): a WPD based on preceding context, and a WPD that is additionally updated based on the incoming audio of the current word. We use the between-WPD cross entropy for each word in the utterances and show that a higher cross entropy correlates with a more negative PMN. Our results show that listeners anticipate auditory input while processing each word in naturalistic speech. Moreover, complementing previous research, we show that predictive language processing occurs across the whole probability spectrum.
  • Bentum, M., Ten Bosch, L., Van den Bosch, A., & Ernestus, M. (2019). Quantifying expectation modulation in human speech processing. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2019 (pp. 2270-2274). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2019-2685.

    Abstract

    The mismatch between top-down predicted and bottom-up perceptual input is an important mechanism of perception according to the predictive coding framework (Friston, [1]). In this paper we develop and validate a new information-theoretic measure that quantifies the mismatch between expected and observed auditory input during speech processing. We argue that such a mismatch measure is useful for the study of speech processing. To compute the mismatch measure, we use naturalistic speech materials containing approximately 50,000 word tokens. For each word token we first estimate the prior word probability distribution with the aid of statistical language modelling, and next use automatic speech recognition to update this word probability distribution based on the unfolding speech signal. We validate the mismatch measure with multiple analyses, and show that the auditory-based update improves the probability of the correct word and lowers the uncertainty of the word probability distribution. Based on these results, we argue that it is possible to explicitly estimate the mismatch between predicted and perceived speech input with the cross entropy between word expectations computed before and after an auditory update.
  • Braun, B. (2007). Effects of dialect and context on the realisation of German prenuclear accents. In J. Trouvain, & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2007) (pp. 961-964). Dudweiler: Pirrot.

    Abstract

    We investigated whether alignment differences reported for Southern and Northern German speakers (Southerners align peaks in prenuclear accents later than Northerners) are carried over to the production of different functional categories such as contrast. To this end, the realisation of non-contrastive theme accents is compared with those in contrastive theme-rheme pairs such as ‘Sam rented a truck and Johanna rented a car.’
    We found that when producing this ‘double-contrast’, speakers mark contrast both phonetically by delaying and rising the peak of the theme accent (‘Johanna’) and/or phonologically by a change in rheme accent type (from high to falling ‘car’).
    The effect of dialect is complex: a) only in non-contrastive contexts produced with a high rheme accent Southerners align peaks later than Northerners; b) peak delay as a means to signal functional contrast is not used uniformly by the two varieties. Dialect clearly affects the realisation of prenuclear accents but its effect is conditioned by the pragmatic and intonational context.
  • Brehm, L., Jackson, C. N., & Miller, K. L. (2019). Incremental interpretation in the first and second language. In M. Brown, & B. Dailey (Eds.), BUCLD 43: Proceedings of the 43rd annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 109-122). Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Broersma, M. (2007). Why the 'president' does not excite the 'press: The limits of spurious lexical activation in L2 listening. In J. Trouvain, & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetics Sciences (ICPhS 2007) (pp. 1909-1912). Dudweiler: Pirrot.

    Abstract

    Two Cross-Modal Priming experiments assessed
    lexical activation of unintended words for
    nonnative (Dutch) and English native listeners.
    Stimuli mismatched words in final voicing, which
    in earlier studies caused spurious lexical activation
    for Dutch listeners. The stimuli were embedded in
    or cut out of a carrier (PRESident). The presence of
    a longer lexical competitor in the signal or as a
    possible continuation of it prevented spurious
    lexical activation of mismatching words (press).
  • Broersma, M., & Van de Ven, M. (2007). More flexible use of perceptual cues in nonnative than in native listening: Preceding vowel duration as a cue for final /v/-/f/. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium on the Acquisition of Second Language Speech (New Sounds 2007).

    Abstract

    Three 2AFC experiments investigated Dutch and English listeners’ use of preceding vowel duration for the English final /v/-/f/ contrast. Dutch listeners used vowel duration more flexibly than English listeners did: they could use vowel duration as accurately as native listeners, but were better at ignoring it when it was misleading.
  • Broersma, M. (2007). Kettle hinders cat, shadow does not hinder shed: Activation of 'almost embedded' words in nonnative listening. In H. van Hamme, & R. van Son (Eds.), Proceedings of Interspeech 2007 (pp. 1893-1896). Adelaide: Causal Productions.

    Abstract

    A Cross-Modal Priming experiment investigated Dutch
    listeners’ perception of English words. Target words were
    embedded in a carrier word (e.g., cat in catalogue) or ‘almost
    embedded’ in a carrier word except for a mismatch in the
    perceptually difficult /æ/-/ε/ contrast (e.g., cat in kettle).
    Previous results showed a bias towards perception of /ε/ over
    /æ/. The present study shows that presentation of carrier
    words either containing an /æ/ or an /ε/ led to long lasting
    inhibition of embedded or ‘almost embedded’ words with an
    /æ/, but not of words with an /ε/. Thus, both catalogue and
    kettle hindered recognition of cat, whereas neither schedule
    nor shadow hindered recognition of shed.
  • Bruggeman, L., & Cutler, A. (2019). The dynamics of lexical activation and competition in bilinguals’ first versus second language. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 20195) (pp. 1342-1346). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

    Abstract

    Speech input causes listeners to activate multiple
    candidate words which then compete with one
    another. These include onset competitors, that share a
    beginning (bumper, butter), but also, counterintuitively,
    rhyme competitors, sharing an ending
    (bumper, jumper). In L1, competition is typically
    stronger for onset than for rhyme. In L2, onset
    competition has been attested but rhyme competition
    has heretofore remained largely unexamined. We
    assessed L1 (Dutch) and L2 (English) word
    recognition by the same late-bilingual individuals. In
    each language, eye gaze was recorded as listeners
    heard sentences and viewed sets of drawings: three
    unrelated, one depicting an onset or rhyme competitor
    of a word in the input. Activation patterns revealed
    substantial onset competition but no significant
    rhyme competition in either L1 or L2. Rhyme
    competition may thus be a “luxury” feature of
    maximally efficient listening, to be abandoned when
    resources are scarcer, as in listening by late
    bilinguals, in either language.
  • Cablitz, G., Ringersma, J., & Kemps-Snijders, M. (2007). Visualizing endangered indigenous languages of French Polynesia with LEXUS. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference Information Visualization (IV07) (pp. 409-414). IEEE Computer Society.

    Abstract

    This paper reports on the first results of the DOBES project ‘Towards a multimedia dictionary of the Marquesan and Tuamotuan languages of French Polynesia’. Within the framework of this project we are building a digital multimedia encyclopedic lexicon of the endangered Marquesan and Tuamotuan languages using a new tool, LEXUS. LEXUS is a web-based lexicon tool, targeted at linguists involved in language documentation. LEXUS offers the possibility to visualize language. It provides functionalities to include audio, video and still images to the lexical entries of the dictionary, as well as relational linking for the creation of a semantic network knowledge base. Further activities aim at the development of (1) an improved user interface in close cooperation with the speech community and (2) a collaborative workspace functionality which will allow the speech community to actively participate in the creation of lexica.
  • Chen, A., & Fikkert, P. (2007). Intonation of early two-word utterances in Dutch. In J. Trouvain, & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2007) (pp. 315-320). Dudweiler: Pirrot.

    Abstract

    We analysed intonation contours of two-word utterances from three monolingual Dutch children aged between 1;4 and 2;1 in the autosegmentalmetrical framework. Our data show that children have mastered the inventory of the boundary tones and nuclear pitch accent types (except for L*HL and L*!HL) at the 160-word level, and the set of nondownstepped pre-nuclear pitch accents (except for L*) at the 230-word level, contra previous claims on the mastery of adult-like intonation contours before or at the onset of first words. Further, there is evidence that intonational development is correlated with an increase in vocabulary size. Moreover, we found that children show a preference for falling contours, as predicted on the basis of universal production mechanisms. In addition, the utterances are mostly spoken with both words accented independent of semantic relations expressed and information status of each word across developmental stages, contra prior work. Our study suggests a number of topics for further research.
  • Chen, A. (2007). Intonational realisation of topic and focus by Dutch-acquiring 4- to 5-year-olds. In J. Trouvain, & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2007) (pp. 1553-1556). Dudweiler: Pirott.

    Abstract

    This study examined how Dutch-acquiring 4- to 5-year-olds use different pitch accent types and deaccentuation to mark topic and focus at the sentence level and how they differ from adults. The topic and focus were non-contrastive and realised as full noun phrases. It was found that children realise topic and focus similarly frequently with H*L, whereas adults use H*L noticeably more frequently in focus than in topic in sentence-initial position and nearly only in focus in sentence-final position. Further, children frequently realise the topic with an accent, whereas adults mostly deaccent the sentence-final topic and use H*L and H* to realise the sentence-initial topic because of rhythmic motivation. These results show that 4- and 5-year-olds have not acquired H*L as the typical focus accent and deaccentuation as the typical topic intonation yet. Possibly, frequent use of H*L in sentence-initial topic in adult Dutch has made it difficult to extract the functions of H*L and deaccentuation from the input.
  • Cutler, A., Burchfield, A., & Antoniou, M. (2019). A criterial interlocutor tally for successful talker adaptation? In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 20195) (pp. 1485-1489). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

    Abstract

    Part of the remarkable efficiency of listening is
    accommodation to unfamiliar talkers’ specific
    pronunciations by retuning of phonemic intercategory
    boundaries. Such retuning occurs in second
    (L2) as well as first language (L1); however, recent
    research with emigrés revealed successful adaptation
    in the environmental L2 but, unprecedentedly, not in
    L1 despite continuing L1 use. A possible explanation
    involving relative exposure to novel talkers is here
    tested in heritage language users with Mandarin as
    family L1 and English as environmental language. In
    English, exposure to an ambiguous sound in
    disambiguating word contexts prompted the expected
    adjustment of phonemic boundaries in subsequent
    categorisation. However, no adjustment occurred in
    Mandarin, again despite regular use. Participants
    reported highly asymmetric interlocutor counts in the
    two languages. We conclude that successful retuning
    ability requires regular exposure to novel talkers in
    the language in question, a criterion not met for the
    emigrés’ or for these heritage users’ L1.
  • Cutler, A., Wales, R., Cooper, N., & Janssen, J. (2007). Dutch listeners' use of suprasegmental cues to English stress. In J. Trouvain, & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetics Sciences (ICPhS 2007) (pp. 1913-1916). Dudweiler: Pirrot.

    Abstract

    Dutch listeners outperform native listeners in identifying syllable stress in English. This is because lexical stress is more useful in recognition of spoken words of Dutch than of English, so that Dutch listeners pay greater attention to stress in general. We examined Dutch listeners’ use of the acoustic correlates of English stress. Primary- and secondary-stressed syllables differ significantly on acoustic measures, and some differences, in F0 especially, correlate with data of earlier listening experiments. The correlations found in the Dutch responses were not paralleled in data from native listeners. Thus the acoustic cues which distinguish English primary versus secondary stress are better exploited by Dutch than by native listeners.
  • Cutler, A., & Weber, A. (2007). Listening experience and phonetic-to-lexical mapping in L2. In J. Trouvain, & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2007) (pp. 43-48). Dudweiler: Pirrot.

    Abstract

    In contrast to initial L1 vocabularies, which of necessity depend largely on heard exemplars, L2 vocabulary construction can draw on a variety of knowledge sources. This can lead to richer stored knowledge about the phonology of the L2 than the listener's prelexical phonetic processing capacity can support, and thus to mismatch between the level of detail required for accurate lexical mapping and the level of detail delivered by the prelexical processor. Experiments on spoken word recognition in L2 have shown that phonetic contrasts which are not reliably perceived are represented in the lexicon nonetheless. This lexical representation of contrast must be based on abstract knowledge, not on veridical representation of heard exemplars. New experiments confirm that provision of abstract knowledge (in the form of spelling) can induce lexical representation of a contrast which is not reliably perceived; but also that experience (in the form of frequency of occurrence) modulates the mismatch of phonetic and lexical processing. We conclude that a correct account of word recognition in L2 (as indeed in L1) requires consideration of both abstract and episodic information.
  • Cutler, A., Cooke, M., Garcia-Lecumberri, M. L., & Pasveer, D. (2007). L2 consonant identification in noise: Cross-language comparisons. In H. van Hamme, & R. van Son (Eds.), Proceedings of Interspeech 2007 (pp. 1585-1588). Adelaide: Causal productions.

    Abstract

    The difficulty of listening to speech in noise is exacerbated when the speech is in the listener’s L2 rather than L1. In this study, Spanish and Dutch users of English as an L2 identified American English consonants in a constant intervocalic context. Their performance was compared with that of L1 (British English) listeners, under quiet conditions and when the speech was masked by speech from another talker or by noise. Masking affected performance more for the Spanish listeners than for the L1 listeners, but not for the Dutch listeners, whose performance was worse than the L1 case to about the same degree in all conditions. There were, however,large differences in the pattern of results across individual consonants, which were consistent with differences in how consonants are identified in the respective L1s.
  • Cutler, A., Van Ooijen, B., & Norris, D. (1999). Vowels, consonants, and lexical activation. In J. Ohala, Y. Hasegawa, M. Ohala, D. Granville, & A. Bailey (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences: Vol. 3 (pp. 2053-2056). Berkeley: University of California.

    Abstract

    Two lexical decision studies examined the effects of single-phoneme mismatches on lexical activation in spoken-word recognition. One study was carried out in English, and involved spoken primes and visually presented lexical decision targets. The other study was carried out in Dutch, and primes and targets were both presented auditorily. Facilitation was found only for spoken targets preceded immediately by spoken primes; no facilitation occurred when targets were presented visually, or when intervening input occurred between prime and target. The effects of vowel mismatches and consonant mismatches were equivalent.
  • Dideriksen, C., Fusaroli, R., Tylén, K., Dingemanse, M., & Christiansen, M. H. (2019). Contextualizing Conversational Strategies: Backchannel, Repair and Linguistic Alignment in Spontaneous and Task-Oriented Conversations. In A. K. Goel, C. M. Seifert, & C. Freksa (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2019) (pp. 261-267). Montreal, QB: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Do interlocutors adjust their conversational strategies to the specific contextual demands of a given situation? Prior studies have yielded conflicting results, making it unclear how strategies vary with demands. We combine insights from qualitative and quantitative approaches in a within-participant experimental design involving two different contexts: spontaneously occurring conversations (SOC) and task-oriented conversations (TOC). We systematically assess backchanneling, other-repair and linguistic alignment. We find that SOC exhibit a higher number of backchannels, a reduced and more generic repair format and higher rates of lexical and syntactic alignment. TOC are characterized by a high number of specific repairs and a lower rate of lexical and syntactic alignment. However, when alignment occurs, more linguistic forms are aligned. The findings show that conversational strategies adapt to specific contextual demands.
  • Dieuleveut, A., Van Dooren, A., Cournane, A., & Hacquard, V. (2019). Acquiring the force of modals: Sig you guess what sig means? In M. Brown, & B. Dailey (Eds.), BUCLD 43: Proceedings of the 43rd annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 189-202). Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Eijk, L., Ernestus, M., & Schriefers, H. (2019). Alignment of pitch and articulation rate. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 20195) (pp. 2690-2694). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

    Abstract

    Previous studies have shown that speakers align their speech to each other at multiple linguistic levels. This study investigates whether alignment is mostly the result of priming from the immediately preceding
    speech materials, focussing on pitch and articulation rate (AR). Native Dutch speakers completed sentences, first by themselves (pre-test), then in alternation with Confederate 1 (Round 1), with Confederate 2 (Round 2), with Confederate 1 again
    (Round 3), and lastly by themselves again (post-test). Results indicate that participants aligned to the confederates and that this alignment lasted during the post-test. The confederates’ directly preceding sentences were not good predictors for the participants’ pitch and AR. Overall, the results indicate that alignment is more of a global effect than a local priming effect.
  • Ernestus, M., & Baayen, R. H. (2007). The comprehension of acoustically reduced morphologically complex words: The roles of deletion, duration, and frequency of occurence. In J. Trouvain, & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhs 2007) (pp. 773-776). Dudweiler: Pirrot.

    Abstract

    This study addresses the roles of segment deletion, durational reduction, and frequency of use in the comprehension of morphologically complex words. We report two auditory lexical decision experiments with reduced and unreduced prefixed Dutch words. We found that segment deletions as such delayed comprehension. Simultaneously, however, longer durations of the different parts of the words appeared to increase lexical competition, either from the word’s stem (Experiment 1) or from the word’s morphological continuation forms (Experiment 2). Increased lexical competition slowed down especially the comprehension of low frequency words, which shows that speakers do not try to meet listeners’ needs when they reduce especially high frequency words.
  • Felker, E. R., Ernestus, M., & Broersma, M. (2019). Evaluating dictation task measures for the study of speech perception. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2019) (pp. 383-387). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

    Abstract

    This paper shows that the dictation task, a well-
    known testing instrument in language education, has
    untapped potential as a research tool for studying
    speech perception. We describe how transcriptions
    can be scored on measures of lexical, orthographic,
    phonological, and semantic similarity to target
    phrases to provide comprehensive information about
    accuracy at different processing levels. The former
    three measures are automatically extractable,
    increasing objectivity, and the middle two are
    gradient, providing finer-grained information than
    traditionally used. We evaluate the measures in an
    English dictation task featuring phonetically reduced
    continuous speech. Whereas the lexical and
    orthographic measures emphasize listeners’ word
    identification difficulties, the phonological measure
    demonstrates that listeners can often still recover
    phonological features, and the semantic measure
    captures their ability to get the gist of the utterances.
    Correlational analyses and a discussion of practical
    and theoretical considerations show that combining
    multiple measures improves the dictation task’s
    utility as a research tool.
  • Felker, E. R., Ernestus, M., & Broersma, M. (2019). Lexically guided perceptual learning of a vowel shift in an interactive L2 listening context. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2019 (pp. 3123-3127). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2019-1414.

    Abstract

    Lexically guided perceptual learning has traditionally been studied with ambiguous consonant sounds to which native listeners are exposed in a purely receptive listening context. To extend previous research, we investigate whether lexically guided learning applies to a vowel shift encountered by non-native listeners in an interactive dialogue. Dutch participants played a two-player game in English in either a control condition, which contained no evidence for a vowel shift, or a lexically constraining condition, in which onscreen lexical information required them to re-interpret their interlocutor’s /ɪ/ pronunciations as representing /ε/. A phonetic categorization pre-test and post-test were used to assess whether the game shifted listeners’ phonemic boundaries such that more of the /ε/-/ɪ/ continuum came to be perceived as /ε/. Both listener groups showed an overall post-test shift toward /ɪ/, suggesting that vowel perception may be sensitive to directional biases related to properties of the speaker’s vowel space. Importantly, listeners in the lexically constraining condition made relatively more post-test /ε/ responses than the control group, thereby exhibiting an effect of lexically guided adaptation. The results thus demonstrate that non-native listeners can adjust their phonemic boundaries on the basis of lexical information to accommodate a vowel shift learned in interactive conversation.
  • Frost, R. L. A., Isbilen, E. S., Christiansen, M. H., & Monaghan, P. (2019). Testing the limits of non-adjacent dependency learning: Statistical segmentation and generalisation across domains. In A. K. Goel, C. M. Seifert, & C. Freksa (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2019) (pp. 1787-1793). Montreal, QB: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Achieving linguistic proficiency requires identifying words from speech, and discovering the constraints that govern the way those words are used. In a recent study of non-adjacent dependency learning, Frost and Monaghan (2016) demonstrated that learners may perform these tasks together, using similar statistical processes - contrary to prior suggestions. However, in their study, non-adjacent dependencies were marked by phonological cues (plosive-continuant-plosive structure), which may have influenced learning. Here, we test the necessity of these cues by comparing learning across three conditions; fixed phonology, which contains these cues, varied phonology, which omits them, and shapes, which uses visual shape sequences to assess the generality of statistical processing for these tasks. Participants segmented the sequences and generalized the structure in both auditory conditions, but learning was best when phonological cues were present. Learning was around chance on both tasks for the visual shapes group, indicating statistical processing may critically differ across domains.
  • Galke, L., Vagliano, I., & Scherp, A. (2019). Can graph neural networks go „online“? An analysis of pretraining and inference. In Proceedings of the Representation Learning on Graphs and Manifolds: ICLR2019 Workshop.

    Abstract

    Large-scale graph data in real-world applications is often not static but dynamic,
    i. e., new nodes and edges appear over time. Current graph convolution approaches
    are promising, especially, when all the graph’s nodes and edges are available dur-
    ing training. When unseen nodes and edges are inserted after training, it is not
    yet evaluated whether up-training or re-training from scratch is preferable. We
    construct an experimental setup, in which we insert previously unseen nodes and
    edges after training and conduct a limited amount of inference epochs. In this
    setup, we compare adapting pretrained graph neural networks against retraining
    from scratch. Our results show that pretrained models yield high accuracy scores
    on the unseen nodes and that pretraining is preferable over retraining from scratch.
    Our experiments represent a first step to evaluate and develop truly online variants
    of graph neural networks.
  • Galke, L., Melnychuk, T., Seidlmayer, E., Trog, S., Foerstner, K., Schultz, C., & Tochtermann, K. (2019). Inductive learning of concept representations from library-scale bibliographic corpora. In K. David, K. Geihs, M. Lange, & G. Stumme (Eds.), Informatik 2019: 50 Jahre Gesellschaft für Informatik - Informatik für Gesellschaft (pp. 219-232). Bonn: Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. doi:10.18420/inf2019_26.
  • Goldrick, M., Brehm, L., Pyeong Whan, C., & Smolensky, P. (2019). Transient blend states and discrete agreement-driven errors in sentence production. In G. J. Snover, M. Nelson, B. O'Connor, & J. Pater (Eds.), Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL 2019) (pp. 375-376). doi:10.7275/n0b2-5305.
  • Goudbeek, M., Swingley, D., & Kluender, K. R. (2007). The limits of multidimensional category learning. In H. van Hamme, & R. van Son (Eds.), Proceedings of Interspeech 2007 (pp. 2325-2328). Adelaide: Causal Productions.

    Abstract

    Distributional learning is almost certainly involved in the human acquisition of phonetic categories. Because speech is inherently a multidimensional signal, learning phonetic categories entails multidimensional learning. Yet previous studies of auditory category learning have shown poor maintenance of learned multidimensional categories. Two experiments explored ways to improve maintenance: by increasing the costs associated with applying a unidimensional strategy; by providing additional information about the category structures; and by giving explicit instructions on how to categorize. Only with explicit instructions were categorization strategies maintained in a maintenance phase without supervision or distributional information.
  • Gürcanli, Ö., Nakipoglu Demiralp, M., & Ozyurek, A. (2007). Shared information and argument omission in Turkish. In H. Caunt-Nulton, S. Kulatilake, & I. Woo (Eds.), Proceedings of the 31st Annual Boston University Conference on Language Developement (pp. 267-273). Somerville, Mass: Cascadilla Press.
  • Hahn, L. E., Ten Buuren, M., De Nijs, M., Snijders, T. M., & Fikkert, P. (2019). Acquiring novel words in a second language through mutual play with child songs - The Noplica Energy Center. In L. Nijs, H. Van Regenmortel, & C. Arculus (Eds.), MERYC19 Counterpoints of the senses: Bodily experiences in musical learning (pp. 78-87). Ghent, Belgium: EuNet MERYC 2019.

    Abstract

    Child songs are a great source for linguistic learning. Here we explore whether children can acquire novel words in a second language by playing a game featuring child songs in a playhouse. We present data from three studies that serve as scientific proof for the functionality of one game of the playhouse: the Energy Center. For this game, three hand-bikes were mounted on a panel. When children start moving the hand-bikes, child songs start playing simultaneously. Once the children produce enough energy with the hand-bikes, the songs are additionally accompanied with the sounds of musical instruments. In our studies, children executed a picture-selection task to evaluate whether they acquired new vocabulary from the songs presented during the game. Two of our studies were run in the field, one at a Dutch and one at an Indian pre-school. The third study features data from a more controlled laboratory setting. Our results partly confirm that the Energy Center is a successful means to support vocabulary acquisition in a second language. More research with larger sample sizes and longer access to the Energy Center is needed to evaluate the overall functionality of the game. Based on informal observations at our test sites, however, we are certain that children do pick up linguistic content from the songs during play, as many of the children repeat words and phrases from songs they heard. We will pick up upon these promising observations during future studies
  • Harbusch, K., & Kempen, G. (2007). Clausal coordinate ellipsis in German: The TIGER treebank as a source of evidence. In J. Nivre, H. J. Kaalep, M. Kadri, & M. Koit (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics (NODALIDA 2007) (pp. 81-88). Tartu: University of Tartu.

    Abstract

    Syntactic parsers and generators need highquality grammars of coordination and coordinate ellipsis—structures that occur very frequently but are much less well understood theoretically than many other domains of grammar. Modern grammars of coordinate ellipsis are based nearly exclusively on linguistic judgments (intuitions). The extent to which grammar rules based on this type of empirical evidence generate all and only the structures in text corpora, is unknown. As part of a project on the development of a grammar and a generator for coordinate ellipsis in German, we undertook an extensive exploration of the TIGER treebank—a syntactically annotated corpus of about 50,000 newspaper sentences. We report (1) frequency data for the various patterns of coordinate ellipsis, and (2) several rarely (but regularly) occurring ‘fringe deviations’ from the intuition-based rules for several ellipsis types. This information can help improve parser and generator performance.
  • Harbusch, K., Breugel, C., Koch, U., & Kempen, G. (2007). Interactive sentence combining and paraphrasing in support of integrated writing and grammar instruction: A new application area for natural language sentence generators. In S. Busemann (Ed.), Proceedings of the 11th Euopean Workshop in Natural Language Generation (ENLG07) (pp. 65-68). ACL Anthology.

    Abstract

    The potential of sentence generators as engines in Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning and teaching (ICALL) software has hardly been explored. We sketch the prototype of COMPASS, a system that supports integrated writing and grammar curricula for 10 to 14 year old elementary or secondary schoolers. The system enables first- or second-language teachers to design controlled writing exercises, in particular of the “sentence combining” variety. The system includes facilities for error diagnosis and on-line feedback. Syntactic structures built by students or system can be displayed as easily understood phrase-structure or dependency trees, adapted to the student’s level of grammatical knowledge. The heart of the system is a specially designed generator capable of lexically guided sentence generation, of generating syntactic paraphrases, and displaying syntactic structures visually.
  • Heilbron, M., Ehinger, B., Hagoort, P., & De Lange, F. P. (2019). Tracking naturalistic linguistic predictions with deep neural language models. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience (pp. 424-427). doi:10.32470/CCN.2019.1096-0.

    Abstract

    Prediction in language has traditionally been studied using
    simple designs in which neural responses to expected
    and unexpected words are compared in a categorical
    fashion. However, these designs have been contested
    as being ‘prediction encouraging’, potentially exaggerating
    the importance of prediction in language understanding.
    A few recent studies have begun to address
    these worries by using model-based approaches to probe
    the effects of linguistic predictability in naturalistic stimuli
    (e.g. continuous narrative). However, these studies
    so far only looked at very local forms of prediction, using
    models that take no more than the prior two words into
    account when computing a word’s predictability. Here,
    we extend this approach using a state-of-the-art neural
    language model that can take roughly 500 times longer
    linguistic contexts into account. Predictability estimates
    fromthe neural network offer amuch better fit to EEG data
    from subjects listening to naturalistic narrative than simpler
    models, and reveal strong surprise responses akin to
    the P200 and N400. These results show that predictability
    effects in language are not a side-effect of simple designs,
    and demonstrate the practical use of recent advances
    in AI for the cognitive neuroscience of language.
  • Herbst, L. E. (2007). German 5-year-olds' intonational marking of information status. In J. Trouvain, & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2007) (pp. 1557-1560). Dudweiler: Pirrot.

    Abstract

    This paper reports on findings from an elicited production task with German 5-year-old children, investigating their use of intonation to mark information status of discourse referents. In line with findings for adults, new referents were preferably marked by H* and L+H*; textually given referents were mainly deaccented. Accessible referents (whose first mentions were less recent) were mostly accented, and predominantly also realised with H* and L+H*, showing children’s sensitivity to recency of mention. No evidence for the consistent use of a special ‘accessibility accent’ H+L* (as has been proposed for adult German) was found.
  • Holler, J., & Geoffrey, B. (2007). Gesture use in social interaction: how speakers' gestures can reflect listeners' thinking. In L. Mondada (Ed.), On-line Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the International Society of Gesture Studies, Lyon, France 15-18 June 2005.
  • Isaac, A., Zinn, C., Matthezing, H., Van de Meij, H., Schlobach, S., & Wang, S. (2007). The value of usage scenarios for thesaurus alignment in cultural heritage context. In Proceedings of the ISWC 2007 workshop in cultural heritage on the semantic web.

    Abstract

    Thesaurus alignment is important for efficient access to heterogeneous Cultural Heritage data. Current ontology alignment techniques provide solutions, but with limited value in practice, because the requirements from usage scenarios are rarely taken in account. In this paper, we start from particular requirements for book re-indexing and investigate possible ways of developing, deploying and evaluating thesaurus alignment techniques in this context. We then compare different aspects of this scenario with others from a more general perspective.
  • Janse, E., Van der Werff, M., & Quené, H. (2007). Listening to fast speech: Aging and sentence context. In J. Trouvain, & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2007) (pp. 681-684). Dudweiler: Pirrot.

    Abstract

    In this study we investigated to what extent a meaningful sentence context facilitates spoken word processing in young and older listeners if listening is made taxing by time-compressing the speech. Even though elderly listeners have been shown to benefit more from sentence context in difficult listening conditions than young listeners, time compression of speech may interfere with semantic comprehension, particularly in older listeners because of cognitive slowing. The results of a target detection experiment showed that, unlike young listeners who showed facilitation by context at both rates, elderly listeners showed context facilitation at the intermediate, but not at the fastest rate. This suggests that semantic interpretation lags behind target identification.
  • Janse, E., & Quené, H. (1999). On the suitability of the cross-modal semantic priming task. In Proceedings of the XIVth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 1937-1940).
  • Jesse, A., & McQueen, J. M. (2007). Prelexical adjustments to speaker idiosyncracies: Are they position-specific? In H. van Hamme, & R. van Son (Eds.), Proceedings of Interspeech 2007 (pp. 1597-1600). Adelaide: Causal Productions.

    Abstract

    Listeners use lexical knowledge to adjust their prelexical representations of speech sounds in response to the idiosyncratic pronunciations of particular speakers. We used an exposure-test paradigm to investigate whether this type of perceptual learning transfers across syllabic positions. No significant learning effect was found in Experiment 1, where exposure sounds were onsets and test sounds were codas. Experiments 2-4 showed that there was no learning even when both exposure and test sounds were onsets. But a trend was found when exposure sounds were codas and test sounds were onsets (Experiment 5). This trend was smaller than the robust effect previously found for the coda-to-coda case. These findings suggest that knowledge about idiosyncratic pronunciations may be position specific: Knowledge about how a speaker produces sounds in one position, if it can be acquired at all, influences perception of sounds in that position more strongly than of sounds in another position.
  • Jesse, A., McQueen, J. M., & Page, M. (2007). The locus of talker-specific effects in spoken-word recognition. In J. Trouvain, & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2007) (pp. 1921-1924). Dudweiler: Pirrot.

    Abstract

    Words repeated in the same voice are better recognized than when they are repeated in a different voice. Such findings have been taken as evidence for the storage of talker-specific lexical episodes. But results on perceptual learning suggest that talker-specific adjustments concern sublexical representations. This study thus investigates whether voice-specific repetition effects in auditory lexical decision are lexical or sublexical. The same critical set of items in Block 2 were, depending on materials in Block 1, either same-voice or different-voice word repetitions, new words comprising re-orderings of phonemes used in the same voice in Block 1, or new words with previously unused phonemes. Results show a benefit for words repeated by the same talker, and a smaller benefit for words consisting of phonemes repeated by the same talker. Talker-specific information thus appears to influence word recognition at multiple representational levels.
  • Jesse, A., & McQueen, J. M. (2007). Visual lexical stress information in audiovisual spoken-word recognition. In J. Vroomen, M. Swerts, & E. Krahmer (Eds.), Proceedings of the International Conference on Auditory-Visual Speech Processing 2007 (pp. 162-166). Tilburg: University of Tilburg.

    Abstract

    Listeners use suprasegmental auditory lexical stress information to resolve the competition words engage in during spoken-word recognition. The present study investigated whether (a) visual speech provides lexical stress information, and, more importantly, (b) whether this visual lexical stress information is used to resolve lexical competition. Dutch word pairs that differ in the lexical stress realization of their first two syllables, but not segmentally (e.g., 'OCtopus' and 'okTOber'; capitals marking primary stress) served as auditory-only, visual-only, and audiovisual speech primes. These primes either matched (e.g., 'OCto-'), mismatched (e.g., 'okTO-'), or were unrelated to (e.g., 'maCHI-') a subsequent printed target (octopus), which participants had to make a lexical decision to. To the degree that visual speech contains lexical stress information, lexical decisions to printed targets should be modulated through the addition of visual speech. Results show, however, no evidence for a role of visual lexical stress information in audiovisual spoken-word recognition.
  • Joo, H., Jang, J., Kim, S., Cho, T., & Cutler, A. (2019). Prosodic structural effects on coarticulatory vowel nasalization in Australian English in comparison to American English. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 20195) (pp. 835-839). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

    Abstract

    This study investigates effects of prosodic factors (prominence, boundary) on coarticulatory Vnasalization in Australian English (AusE) in CVN and NVC in comparison to those in American English
    (AmE). As in AmE, prominence was found to
    lengthen N, but to reduce V-nasalization, enhancing N’s nasality and V’s orality, respectively (paradigmatic contrast enhancement). But the prominence effect in CVN was more robust than that in AmE. Again similar to findings in AmE, boundary
    induced a reduction of N-duration and V-nasalization phrase-initially (syntagmatic contrast enhancement), and increased the nasality of both C and V phrasefinally.
    But AusE showed some differences in terms
    of the magnitude of V nasalization and N duration. The results suggest that the linguistic contrast enhancements underlie prosodic-structure modulation of coarticulatory V-nasalization in
    comparable ways across dialects, while the fine phonetic detail indicates that the phonetics-prosody interplay is internalized in the individual dialect’s phonetic grammar.
  • Khemlani, S., Leslie, S.-J., Glucksberg, S., & Rubio-Fernández, P. (2007). Do ducks lay eggs? How people interpret generic assertions. In D. S. McNamara, & J. G. Trafton (Eds.), Proceedings of the 29th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2007). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
  • Kuzla, C., & Ernestus, M. (2007). Prosodic conditioning of phonetic detail of German plosives. In J. Trouvain, & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2007) (pp. 461-464). Dudweiler: Pirrot.

    Abstract

    The present study investigates the influence of prosodic structure on the fine-grained phonetic details of German plosives which also cue the phonological fortis-lenis contrast. Closure durations were found to be longer at higher prosodic boundaries. There was also less glottal vibration in lenis plosives at higher prosodic boundaries. Voice onset time in lenis plosives was not affected by prosody. In contrast, for the fortis plosives VOT decreased at higher boundaries, as did the maximal intensity of the release. These results demonstrate that the effects of prosody on different phonetic cues can go into opposite directions, but are overall constrained by the need to maintain phonological contrasts. While prosodic effects on some cues are compatible with a ‘fortition’ account of prosodic strengthening or with a general feature enhancement explanation, the effects on others enhance paradigmatic contrasts only within a given prosodic position.
  • Lai, V. T., Chang, M., Duffield, C., Hwang, J., Xue, N., & Palmer, M. (2007). Defining a methodology for mapping Chinese and English sense inventories. In Proceedings of the 8th Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop 2007 (CLSW 2007). The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, May 21-23 (pp. 59-65).

    Abstract

    In this study, we explored methods for linking Chinese and English sense inventories using two opposing approaches: creating links (1) bottom-up: by starting at the finer-grained sense level then proceeding to the verb subcategorization frames and (2) top-down: by starting directly with the more coarse-grained frame levels. The sense inventories for linking include pre-existing corpora, such as English Propbank (Palmer, Gildea, and Kingsbury, 2005), Chinese Propbank (Xue and Palmer, 2004) and English WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998) and newly created corpora, the English and Chinese Sense Inventories from DARPA-GALE OntoNotes. In the linking task, we selected a group of highly frequent and polysemous communication verbs, including say, ask, talk, and speak in English, and shuo, biao-shi, jiang, and wen in Chinese. We found that with the bottom-up method, although speakers of both languages agreed on the links between senses, the subcategorization frames of the corresponding senses did not match consistently. With the top-down method, if the verb frames match in both languages, their senses line up more quickly to each other. The results indicate that the top-down method is more promising in linking English and Chinese sense inventories.
  • Levelt, W. J. M., & Flores d'Arcais, G. B. (1975). Some psychologists' reactions to the Symposium of Dynamic Aspects of Speech Perception. In A. Cohen, & S. Nooteboom (Eds.), Structure and process in speech perception (pp. 345-351). Berlin: Springer.
  • Liu, S., & Zhang, Y. (2019). Why some verbs are harder to learn than others – A micro-level analysis of everyday learning contexts for early verb learning. In A. K. Goel, C. M. Seifert, & C. Freksa (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2019) (pp. 2173-2178). Montreal, QB: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Verb learning is important for young children. While most
    previous research has focused on linguistic and conceptual
    challenges in early verb learning (e.g. Gentner, 1982, 2006),
    the present paper examined early verb learning at the
    attentional level and quantified the input for early verb learning
    by measuring verb-action co-occurrence statistics in parent-
    child interaction from the learner’s perspective. To do so, we
    used head-mounted eye tracking to record fine-grained
    multimodal behaviors during parent-infant joint play, and
    analyzed parent speech, parent and infant action, and infant
    attention at the moments when parents produced verb labels.
    Our results show great variability across different action verbs,
    in terms of frequency of verb utterances, frequency of
    corresponding actions related to verb meanings, and infants’
    attention to verbs and actions, which provide new insights on
    why some verbs are harder to learn than others.
  • Mai, F., Galke, L., & Scherp, A. (2019). CBOW is not all you need: Combining CBOW with the compositional matrix space model. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2019). OpenReview.net.

    Abstract

    Continuous Bag of Words (CBOW) is a powerful text embedding method. Due to its strong capabilities to encode word content, CBOW embeddings perform well on a wide range of downstream tasks while being efficient to compute. However, CBOW is not capable of capturing the word order. The reason is that the computation of CBOW's word embeddings is commutative, i.e., embeddings of XYZ and ZYX are the same. In order to address this shortcoming, we propose a
    learning algorithm for the Continuous Matrix Space Model, which we call Continual Multiplication of Words (CMOW). Our algorithm is an adaptation of word2vec, so that it can be trained on large quantities of unlabeled text. We empirically show that CMOW better captures linguistic properties, but it is inferior to CBOW in memorizing word content. Motivated by these findings, we propose a hybrid model that combines the strengths of CBOW and CMOW. Our results show that the hybrid CBOW-CMOW-model retains CBOW's strong ability to memorize word content while at the same time substantially improving its ability to encode other linguistic information by 8%. As a result, the hybrid also performs better on 8 out of 11 supervised downstream tasks with an average improvement of 1.2%.
  • Malaisé, V., Gazendam, L., & Brugman, H. (2007). Disambiguating automatic semantic annotation based on a thesaurus structure. In Proceedings of TALN 2007.
  • Mamus, E., Rissman, L., Majid, A., & Ozyurek, A. (2019). Effects of blindfolding on verbal and gestural expression of path in auditory motion events. In A. K. Goel, C. M. Seifert, & C. C. Freksa (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2019) (pp. 2275-2281). Montreal, QB: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Studies have claimed that blind people’s spatial representations are different from sighted people, and blind people display superior auditory processing. Due to the nature of auditory and haptic information, it has been proposed that blind people have spatial representations that are more sequential than sighted people. Even the temporary loss of sight—such as through blindfolding—can affect spatial representations, but not much research has been done on this topic. We compared blindfolded and sighted people’s linguistic spatial expressions and non-linguistic localization accuracy to test how blindfolding affects the representation of path in auditory motion events. We found that blindfolded people were as good as sighted people when localizing simple sounds, but they outperformed sighted people when localizing auditory motion events. Blindfolded people’s path related speech also included more sequential, and less holistic elements. Our results indicate that even temporary loss of sight influences spatial representations of auditory motion events
  • Marcoux, K., & Ernestus, M. (2019). Differences between native and non-native Lombard speech in terms of pitch range. In M. Ochmann, M. Vorländer, & J. Fels (Eds.), Proceedings of the ICA 2019 and EAA Euroregio. 23rd International Congress on Acoustics, integrating 4th EAA Euroregio 2019 (pp. 5713-5720). Berlin: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Akustik.

    Abstract

    Lombard speech, speech produced in noise, is acoustically different from speech produced in quiet (plain speech) in several ways, including having a higher and wider F0 range (pitch). Extensive research on native Lombard speech does not consider that non-natives experience a higher cognitive load while producing
    speech and that the native language may influence the non-native speech. We investigated pitch range in plain and Lombard speech in native and non-natives.
    Dutch and American-English speakers read contrastive question-answer pairs in quiet and in noise in English, while the Dutch also read Dutch sentence pairs. We found that Lombard speech is characterized by a wider pitch range than plain speech, for all speakers (native English, non-native English, and native Dutch).
    This shows that non-natives also widen their pitch range in Lombard speech. In sentences with early-focus, we see the same increase in pitch range when going from plain to Lombard speech in native and non-native English, but a smaller increase in native Dutch. In sentences with late-focus, we see the biggest increase for the native English, followed by non-native English and then native Dutch. Together these results indicate an effect of the native language on non-native Lombard speech.
  • Marcoux, K., & Ernestus, M. (2019). Pitch in native and non-native Lombard speech. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2019) (pp. 2605-2609). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

    Abstract

    Lombard speech, speech produced in noise, is
    typically produced with a higher fundamental
    frequency (F0, pitch) compared to speech in quiet. This paper examined the potential differences in native and non-native Lombard speech by analyzing median pitch in sentences with early- or late-focus produced in quiet and noise. We found an increase in pitch in late-focus sentences in noise for Dutch speakers in both English and Dutch, and for American-English speakers in English. These results
    show that non-native speakers produce Lombard speech, despite their higher cognitive load. For the early-focus sentences, we found a difference between the Dutch and the American-English speakers. Whereas the Dutch showed an increased F0 in noise
    in English and Dutch, the American-English speakers did not in English. Together, these results suggest that some acoustic characteristics of Lombard speech, such as pitch, may be language-specific, potentially
    resulting in the native language influencing the non-native Lombard speech.
  • Merkx, D., Frank, S., & Ernestus, M. (2019). Language learning using speech to image retrieval. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2019 (pp. 1841-1845). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2019-3067.

    Abstract

    Humans learn language by interaction with their environment and listening to other humans. It should also be possible for computational models to learn language directly from speech but so far most approaches require text. We improve on existing neural network approaches to create visually grounded embeddings for spoken utterances. Using a combination of a multi-layer GRU, importance sampling, cyclic learning rates, ensembling and vectorial self-attention our results show a remarkable increase in image-caption retrieval performance over previous work. Furthermore, we investigate which layers in the model learn to recognise words in the input. We find that deeper network layers are better at encoding word presence, although the final layer has slightly lower performance. This shows that our visually grounded sentence encoder learns to recognise words from the input even though it is not explicitly trained for word recognition.
  • Mitterer, H. (2007). Top-down effects on compensation for coarticulation are not replicable. In H. van Hamme, & R. van Son (Eds.), Proceedings of Interspeech 2007 (pp. 1601-1604). Adelaide: Causal Productions.

    Abstract

    Listeners use lexical knowledge to judge what speech sounds they heard. I investigated whether such lexical influences are truly top-down or just reflect a merging of perceptual and lexical constraints. This is achieved by testing whether the lexically determined identity of a phone exerts the appropriate context effects on surrounding phones. The current investigations focuses on compensation for coarticulation in vowel-fricative sequences, where the presence of a rounded vowel (/y/ rather than /i/) leads fricatives to be perceived as /s/ rather than //. This results was consistently found in all three experiments. A vowel was also more likely to be perceived as rounded /y/ if that lead listeners to be perceive words rather than nonwords (Dutch: meny, English id. vs. meni nonword). This lexical influence on the perception of the vowel had, however, no consistent influence on the perception of following fricative.
  • Mitterer, H., & McQueen, J. M. (2007). Tracking perception of pronunciation variation by tracking looks to printed words: The case of word-final /t/. In J. Trouvain, & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2007) (pp. 1929-1932). Dudweiler: Pirrot.

    Abstract

    We investigated perception of words with reduced word-final /t/ using an adapted eyetracking paradigm. Dutch listeners followed spoken instructions to click on printed words which were accompanied on a computer screen by simple shapes (e.g., a circle). Targets were either above or next to their shapes, and the shapes uniquely identified the targets when the spoken forms were ambiguous between words with or without final /t/ (e.g., bult, bump, vs. bul, diploma). Analysis of listeners’ eye-movements revealed, in contrast to earlier results, that listeners use the following segmental context when compensating for /t/-reduction. Reflecting that /t/-reduction is more likely to occur before bilabials, listeners were more likely to look at the /t/-final words if the next word’s first segment was bilabial. This result supports models of speech perception in which prelexical phonological processes use segmental context to modulate word recognition.
  • Mitterer, H. (2007). Behavior reflects the (degree of) reality of phonological features in the brain as well. In J. Trouvain, & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2007) (pp. 127-130). Dudweiler: Pirrot.

    Abstract

    To assess the reality of phonological features in language processing (vs. language description), one needs to specify the distinctive claims of distinctive-feature theory. Two of the more farreaching claims are compositionality and generalizability. I will argue that there is some evidence for the first and evidence against the second claim from a recent behavioral paradigm. Highlighting the contribution of a behavioral paradigm also counterpoints the use of brain measures as the only way to elucidate what is "real for the brain". The contributions of the speakers exemplify how brain measures can help us to understand the reality of phonological features in language processing. The evidence is, however, not convincing for a) the claim for underspecification of phonological features—which has to deal with counterevidence from behavioral as well as brain measures—, and b) the claim of position independence of phonological features.
  • Moisik, S. R., Zhi Yun, D. P., & Dediu, D. (2019). Active adjustment of the cervical spine during pitch production compensates for shape: The ArtiVarK study. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 20195) (pp. 864-868). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

    Abstract

    The anterior lordosis of the cervical spine is thought
    to contribute to pitch (fo) production by influencing
    cricoid rotation as a function of larynx height. This
    study examines the matter of inter-individual
    variation in cervical spine shape and whether this has
    an influence on how fo is produced along increasing
    or decreasing scales, using the ArtiVarK dataset,
    which contains real-time MRI pitch production data.
    We find that the cervical spine actively participates in
    fo production, but the amount of displacement
    depends on individual shape. In general, anterior
    spine motion (tending toward cervical lordosis)
    occurs for low fo, while posterior movement (tending
    towards cervical kyphosis) occurs for high fo.
  • Nijveld, A., Ten Bosch, L., & Ernestus, M. (2019). ERP signal analysis with temporal resolution using a time window bank. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2019 (pp. 1208-1212). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2019-2729.

    Abstract

    In order to study the cognitive processes underlying speech comprehension, neuro-physiological measures (e.g., EEG and MEG), or behavioural measures (e.g., reaction times and response accuracy) can be applied. Compared to behavioural measures, EEG signals can provide a more fine-grained and complementary view of the processes that take place during the unfolding of an auditory stimulus.

    EEG signals are often analysed after having chosen specific time windows, which are usually based on the temporal structure of ERP components expected to be sensitive to the experimental manipulation. However, as the timing of ERP components may vary between experiments, trials, and participants, such a-priori defined analysis time windows may significantly hamper the exploratory power of the analysis of components of interest. In this paper, we explore a wide-window analysis method applied to EEG signals collected in an auditory repetition priming experiment.

    This approach is based on a bank of temporal filters arranged along the time axis in combination with linear mixed effects modelling. Crucially, it permits a temporal decomposition of effects in a single comprehensive statistical model which captures the entire EEG trace.
  • Omar, R., Henley, S. M., Hailstone, J. C., Sauter, D., Scott, S. K., Fox, N. C., Rossor, M. N., & Warren, J. D. (2007). Recognition of emotions in faces, voices and music in frontotemporal lobar regeneration [Abstract]. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 78(9), 1014.

    Abstract

    Frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) is a group of neurodegenerative conditions characterised by focal frontal and/or temporal lobe atrophy. Patients develop a range of cognitive and behavioural abnormalities, including prominent difficulties in comprehending and expressing emotions, with significant clinical and social consequences. Here we report a systematic prospective analysis of emotion processing in different input modalities in patients with FTLD. We examined recognition of happiness, sadness, fear and anger in facial expressions, non-verbal vocalisations and music in patients with FTLD and in healthy age matched controls. The FTLD group was significantly impaired in all modalities compared with controls, and this effect was most marked for music. Analysing each emotion separately, recognition of negative emotions was impaired in all three modalities in FTLD, and this effect was most marked for fear and anger. Recognition of happiness was deficient only with music. Our findings support the idea that FTLD causes impaired recognition of emotions across input channels, consistent with a common central representation of emotion concepts. Music may be a sensitive probe of emotional deficits in FTLD, perhaps because it requires a more abstract representation of emotion than do animate stimuli such as faces and voices.
  • Ozyurek, A., & Kita, S. (1999). Expressing manner and path in English and Turkish: Differences in speech, gesture, and conceptualization. In M. Hahn, & S. C. Stoness (Eds.), Proceedings of the Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 507-512). London: Erlbaum.
  • Papafragou, A., & Ozturk, O. (2007). Children's acquisition of modality. In Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America (GALANA 2) (pp. 320-327). Somerville, Mass.: Cascadilla Press.
  • Papafragou, A. (2007). On the acquisition of modality. In T. Scheffler, & L. Mayol (Eds.), Penn Working Papers in Linguistics. Proceedings of the 30th Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium (pp. 281-293). Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania.
  • Parhammer*, S. I., Ebersberg*, M., Tippmann*, J., Stärk*, K., Opitz, A., Hinger, B., & Rossi, S. (2019). The influence of distraction on speech processing: How selective is selective attention? In Proceedings of Interspeech 2019 (pp. 3093-3097). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2019-2699.

    Abstract

    -* indicates shared first authorship -
    The present study investigated the effects of selective attention on the processing of morphosyntactic errors in unattended parts of speech. Two groups of German native (L1) speakers participated in the present study. Participants listened to sentences in which irregular verbs were manipulated in three different conditions (correct, incorrect but attested ablaut pattern, incorrect and crosslinguistically unattested ablaut pattern). In order to track fast dynamic neural reactions to the stimuli, electroencephalography was used. After each sentence, participants in Experiment 1 performed a semantic judgement task, which deliberately distracted the participants from the syntactic manipulations and directed their attention to the semantic content of the sentence. In Experiment 2, participants carried out a syntactic judgement task, which put their attention on the critical stimuli. The use of two different attentional tasks allowed for investigating the impact of selective attention on speech processing and whether morphosyntactic processing steps are performed automatically. In Experiment 2, the incorrect attested condition elicited a larger N400 component compared to the correct condition, whereas in Experiment 1 no differences between conditions were found. These results suggest that the processing of morphosyntactic violations in irregular verbs is not entirely automatic but seems to be strongly affected by selective attention.
  • Pouw, W., Paxton, A., Harrison, S. J., & Dixon, J. A. (2019). Acoustic specification of upper limb movement in voicing. In A. Grimminger (Ed.), Proceedings of the 6th Gesture and Speech in Interaction – GESPIN 6 (pp. 68-74). Paderborn: Universitaetsbibliothek Paderborn. doi:10.17619/UNIPB/1-812.
  • Pouw, W., & Dixon, J. A. (2019). Quantifying gesture-speech synchrony. In A. Grimminger (Ed.), Proceedings of the 6th Gesture and Speech in Interaction – GESPIN 6 (pp. 75-80). Paderborn: Universitaetsbibliothek Paderborn. doi:10.17619/UNIPB/1-812.

    Abstract

    Spontaneously occurring speech is often seamlessly accompanied by hand gestures. Detailed
    observations of video data suggest that speech and gesture are tightly synchronized in time,
    consistent with a dynamic interplay between body and mind. However, spontaneous gesturespeech
    synchrony has rarely been objectively quantified beyond analyses of video data, which
    do not allow for identification of kinematic properties of gestures. Consequently, the point in
    gesture which is held to couple with speech, the so-called moment of “maximum effort”, has
    been variably equated with the peak velocity, peak acceleration, peak deceleration, or the onset
    of the gesture. In the current exploratory report, we provide novel evidence from motiontracking
    and acoustic data that peak velocity is closely aligned, and shortly leads, the peak pitch
    (F0) of speech

    Additional information

    https://osf.io/9843h/
  • Rapold, C. J. (2007). From demonstratives to verb agreement in Benchnon: A diachronic perspective. In A. Amha, M. Mous, & G. Savà (Eds.), Omotic and Cushitic studies: Papers from the Fourth Cushitic Omotic Conference, Leiden, 10-12 April 2003 (pp. 69-88). Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe.
  • Ringersma, J., & Kemps-Snijders, M. (2007). Creating multimedia dictionaries of endangered languages using LEXUS. In H. van Hamme, & R. van Son (Eds.), Proceedings of Interspeech 2007 (pp. 65-68). Baixas, France: ISCA-Int.Speech Communication Assoc.

    Abstract

    This paper reports on the development of a flexible web based lexicon tool, LEXUS. LEXUS is targeted at linguists involved in language documentation (of endangered languages). It allows the creation of lexica within the structure of the proposed ISO LMF standard and uses the proposed concept naming conventions from the ISO data categories, thus enabling interoperability, search and merging. LEXUS also offers the possibility to visualize language, since it provides functionalities to include audio, video and still images to the lexicon. With LEXUS it is possible to create semantic network knowledge bases, using typed relations. The LEXUS tool is free for use. Index Terms: lexicon, web based application, endangered languages, language documentation.
  • Rissman, L., & Majid, A. (2019). Agency drives category structure in instrumental events. In A. K. Goel, C. M. Seifert, & C. Freksa (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2019) (pp. 2661-2667). Montreal, QB: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Thematic roles such as Agent and Instrument have a long-standing place in theories of event representation. Nonetheless, the structure of these categories has been difficult to determine. We investigated how instrumental events, such as someone slicing bread with a knife, are categorized in English. Speakers described a variety of typical and atypical instrumental events, and we determined the similarity structure of their descriptions using correspondence analysis. We found that events where the instrument is an extension of an intentional agent were most likely to elicit similar language, highlighting the importance of agency in structuring instrumental categories.
  • De Ruiter, J. P. (2007). Some multimodal signals in humans. In I. Van de Sluis, M. Theune, E. Reiter, & E. Krahmer (Eds.), Proceedings of the Workshop on Multimodal Output Generation (MOG 2007) (pp. 141-148).

    Abstract

    In this paper, I will give an overview of some well-studied multimodal signals that humans produce while they communicate with other humans, and discuss the implications of those studies for HCI. I will first discuss a conceptual framework that allows us to distinguish between functional and sensory modalities. This distinction is important, as there are multiple functional modalities using the same sensory modality (e.g., facial expression and eye-gaze in the visual modality). A second theoretically important issue is redundancy. Some signals appear to be redundant with a signal in another modality, whereas others give new information or even appear to give conflicting information (see e.g., the work of Susan Goldin-Meadows on speech accompanying gestures). I will argue that multimodal signals are never truly redundant. First, many gestures that appear at first sight to express the same meaning as the accompanying speech generally provide extra (analog) information about manner, path, etc. Second, the simple fact that the same information is expressed in more than one modality is itself a communicative signal. Armed with this conceptual background, I will then proceed to give an overview of some multimodalsignals that have been investigated in human-human research, and the level of understanding we have of the meaning of those signals. The latter issue is especially important for potential implementations of these signals in artificial agents. First, I will discuss pointing gestures. I will address the issue of the timing of pointing gestures relative to the speech it is supposed to support, the mutual dependency between pointing gestures and speech, and discuss the existence of alternative ways of pointing from other cultures. The most frequent form of pointing that does not involve the index finger is a cultural practice called lip-pointing which employs two visual functional modalities, mouth-shape and eye-gaze, simultaneously for pointing. Next, I will address the issue of eye-gaze. A classical study by Kendon (1967) claims that there is a systematic relationship between eye-gaze (at the interlocutor) and turn-taking states. Research at our institute has shown that this relationship is weaker than has often been assumed. If the dialogue setting contains a visible object that is relevant to the dialogue (e.g., a map), the rate of eye-gaze-at-other drops dramatically and its relationship to turn taking disappears completely. The implications for machine generated eye-gaze are discussed. Finally, I will explore a theoretical debate regarding spontaneous gestures. It has often been claimed that the class of gestures that is called iconic by McNeill (1992) are a “window into the mind”. That is, they are claimed to give the researcher (or even the interlocutor) a direct view into the speaker’s thought, without being obscured by the complex transformation that take place when transforming a thought into a verbal utterance. I will argue that this is an illusion. Gestures can be shown to be specifically designed such that the listener can be expected to interpret them. Although the transformations carried out to express a thought in gesture are indeed (partly) different from the corresponding transformations for speech, they are a) complex, and b) severely understudied. This obviously has consequences both for the gesture research agenda, and for the generation of iconic gestures by machines.
  • De Ruiter, J. P., & Enfield, N. J. (2007). The BIC model: A blueprint for the communicator. In C. Stephanidis (Ed.), Universal access in Human-Computer Interaction: Applications and services (pp. 251-258). Berlin: Springer.
  • Scharenborg, O., Ernestus, M., & Wan, V. (2007). Segmentation of speech: Child's play? In H. van Hamme, & R. van Son (Eds.), Proceedings of Interspeech 2007 (pp. 1953-1956). Adelaide: Causal Productions.

    Abstract

    The difficulty of the task of segmenting a speech signal into its words is immediately clear when listening to a foreign language; it is much harder to segment the signal into its words, since the words of the language are unknown. Infants are faced with the same task when learning their first language. This study provides a better understanding of the task that infants face while learning their native language. We employed an automatic algorithm on the task of speech segmentation without prior knowledge of the labels of the phonemes. An analysis of the boundaries erroneously placed inside a phoneme showed that the algorithm consistently placed additional boundaries in phonemes in which acoustic changes occur. These acoustic changes may be as great as the transition from the closure to the burst of a plosive or as subtle as the formant transitions in low or back vowels. Moreover, we found that glottal vibration may attenuate the relevance of acoustic changes within obstruents. An interesting question for further research is how infants learn to overcome the natural tendency to segment these ‘dynamic’ phonemes.
  • Scharenborg, O., & Wan, V. (2007). Can unquantised articulatory feature continuums be modelled? In INTERSPEECH 2007 - 8th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 2473-2476). ISCA Archive.

    Abstract

    Articulatory feature (AF) modelling of speech has received a considerable amount of attention in automatic speech recognition research. Although termed ‘articulatory’, previous definitions make certain assumptions that are invalid, for instance, that articulators ‘hop’ from one fixed position to the next. In this paper, we studied two methods, based on support vector classification (SVC) and regression (SVR), in which the articulation continuum is modelled without being restricted to using discrete AF value classes. A comparison with a baseline system trained on quantised values of the articulation continuum showed that both SVC and SVR outperform the baseline for two of the three investigated AFs, with improvements up to 5.6% absolute.
  • Scheu, O., & Zinn, C. (2007). How did the e-learning session go? The student inspector. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Education (AIED 2007). Amsterdam: IOS Press.

    Abstract

    Good teachers know their students, and exploit this knowledge to adapt or optimise their instruction. Traditional teachers know their students because they interact with them face-to-face in classroom or one-to-one tutoring sessions. In these settings, they can build student models, i.e., by exploiting the multi-faceted nature of human-human communication. In distance-learning contexts, teacher and student have to cope with the lack of such direct interaction, and this must have detrimental effects for both teacher and student. In a past study we have analysed teacher requirements for tracking student actions in computer-mediated settings. Given the results of this study, we have devised and implemented a tool that allows teachers to keep track of their learners'interaction in e-learning systems. We present the tool's functionality and user interfaces, and an evaluation of its usability.
  • Schoenmakers, G.-J., & De Swart, P. (2019). Adverbial hurdles in Dutch scrambling. In A. Gattnar, R. Hörnig, M. Störzer, & S. Featherston (Eds.), Proceedings of Linguistic Evidence 2018: Experimental Data Drives Linguistic Theory (pp. 124-145). Tübingen: University of Tübingen.

    Abstract

    This paper addresses the role of the adverb in Dutch direct object scrambling constructions. We report four experiments in which we investigate whether the structural position and the scope sensitivity of the adverb affect acceptability judgments of scrambling constructions and native speakers' tendency to scramble definite objects. We conclude that the type of adverb plays a key role in Dutch word ordering preferences.
  • Schuerman, W. L., McQueen, J. M., & Meyer, A. S. (2019). Speaker statistical averageness modulates word recognition in adverse listening conditions. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 20195) (pp. 1203-1207). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

    Abstract

    We tested whether statistical averageness (SA) at the level of the individual speaker could predict a speaker’s intelligibility. 28 female and 21 male speakers of Dutch were recorded producing 336 sentences,
    each containing two target nouns. Recordings were compared to those of all other same-sex speakers using dynamic time warping (DTW). For each sentence, the DTW distance constituted a metric
    of phonetic distance from one speaker to all other speakers. SA comprised the average of these distances. Later, the same participants performed a word recognition task on the target nouns in the same sentences, under three degraded listening conditions. In all three conditions, accuracy increased with SA. This held even when participants listened to their own utterances. These findings suggest that listeners process speech with respect to the statistical
    properties of the language spoken in their community, rather than using their own speech as a reference
  • Schulte im Walde, S., Melinger, A., Roth, M., & Weber, A. (2007). An empirical characterization of response types in German association norms. In Proceedings of the GLDV workshop on lexical-semantic and ontological resources.
  • Seidlmayer, E., Galke, L., Melnychuk, T., Schultz, C., Tochtermann, K., & Förstner, K. U. (2019). Take it personally - A Python library for data enrichment for infometrical applications. In M. Alam, R. Usbeck, T. Pellegrini, H. Sack, & Y. Sure-Vetter (Eds.), Proceedings of the Posters and Demo Track of the 15th International Conference on Semantic Systems co-located with 15th International Conference on Semantic Systems (SEMANTiCS 2019).

    Abstract

    Like every other social sphere, science is influenced by individual characteristics of researchers. However, for investigations on scientific networks, only little data about the social background of researchers, e.g. social origin, gender, affiliation etc., is available.
    This paper introduces ”Take it personally - TIP”, a conceptual model and library currently under development, which aims to support the
    semantic enrichment of publication databases with semantically related background information which resides elsewhere in the (semantic) web, such as Wikidata.
    The supplementary information enriches the original information in the publication databases and thus facilitates the creation of complex scientific knowledge graphs. Such enrichment helps to improve the scientometric analysis of scientific publications as they can also take social backgrounds of researchers into account and to understand social structure in research communities.
  • Seijdel, N., Sakmakidis, N., De Haan, E. H. F., Bohte, S. M., & Scholte, H. S. (2019). Implicit scene segmentation in deeper convolutional neural networks. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience (pp. 1059-1062). doi:10.32470/CCN.2019.1149-0.

    Abstract

    Feedforward deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) are matching and even surpassing human performance on object recognition. This performance suggests that activation of a loose collection of image
    features could support the recognition of natural object categories, without dedicated systems to solve specific visual subtasks. Recent findings in humans however, suggest that while feedforward activity may suffice for
    sparse scenes with isolated objects, additional visual operations ('routines') that aid the recognition process (e.g. segmentation or grouping) are needed for more complex scenes. Linking human visual processing to
    performance of DCNNs with increasing depth, we here explored if, how, and when object information is differentiated from the backgrounds they appear on. To this end, we controlled the information in both objects
    and backgrounds, as well as the relationship between them by adding noise, manipulating background congruence and systematically occluding parts of the image. Results indicated less distinction between object- and background features for more shallow networks. For those networks, we observed a benefit of training on segmented objects (as compared to unsegmented objects). Overall, deeper networks trained on natural
    (unsegmented) scenes seem to perform implicit 'segmentation' of the objects from their background, possibly by improved selection of relevant features.
  • Senft, G. (2007). Language, culture and cognition: Frames of spatial reference and why we need ontologies of space [Abstract]. In A. G. Cohn, C. Freksa, & B. Bebel (Eds.), Spatial cognition: Specialization and integration (pp. 12).

    Abstract

    One of the many results of the "Space" research project conducted at the MPI for Psycholinguistics is that there are three "Frames of spatial Reference" (FoRs), the relative, the intrinsic and the absolute FoR. Cross-linguistic research showed that speakers who prefer one FoR in verbal spatial references rely on a comparable coding system for memorizing spatial configurations and for making inferences with respect to these spatial configurations in non-verbal problem solving. Moreover, research results also revealed that in some languages these verbal FoRs also influence gestural behavior. These results document the close interrelationship between language, culture and cognition in the domain "Space". The proper description of these interrelationships in the spatial domain requires language and culture specific ontologies.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1975). Autonomous syntax and prelexical rules. In S. De Vriendt, J. Dierickx, & M. Wilmet (Eds.), Grammaire générative et psychomécanique du langage: actes du colloque organisé par le Centre d'études linguistiques et littéraires de la Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Bruxelles, 29-31 mai 1974 (pp. 89-98). Paris: Didier.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1975). Logic and language. In S. De Vriendt, J. Dierickx, & M. Wilmet (Eds.), Grammaire générative et psychomécanique du langage: actes du colloque organisé par le Centre d'études linguistiques et littéraires de la Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Bruxelles, 29-31 mai 1974 (pp. 84-87). Paris: Didier.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1971). Qualche osservazione sulla frase durativa e iterativa in italiano. In M. Medici, & R. Simone (Eds.), Grammatica trasformazionale italiana (pp. 209-224). Roma: Bulzoni.
  • Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., & Cutler, A. (1999). The prosody of speech error corrections revisited. In J. Ohala, Y. Hasegawa, M. Ohala, D. Granville, & A. Bailey (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences: Vol. 2 (pp. 1483-1486). Berkely: University of California.

    Abstract

    A corpus of digitized speech errors is used to compare the prosody of correction patterns for word-level vs. sound-level errors. Results for both peak F0 and perceived prosodic markedness confirm that speakers are more likely to mark corrections of word-level errors than corrections of sound-level errors, and that errors ambiguous between word-level and soundlevel (such as boat for moat) show correction patterns like those for sound level errors. This finding increases the plausibility of the claim that word-sound-ambiguous errors arise at the same level of processing as sound errors that do not form words.
  • Shen, C., & Janse, E. (2019). Articulatory control in speech production. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2019) (pp. 2533-2537). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.
  • Shen, C., Cooke, M., & Janse, E. (2019). Individual articulatory control in speech enrichment. In M. Ochmann, M. Vorländer, & J. Fels (Eds.), Proceedings of the 23rd International Congress on Acoustics (pp. 5726-5730). Berlin: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Akustik.

    Abstract

    ndividual talkers may use various strategies to enrich their speech while speaking in noise (i.e., Lombard speech) to improve their intelligibility. The resulting acoustic-phonetic changes in Lombard speech vary amongst different speakers, but it is unclear what causes these talker differences, and what impact these differences have on intelligibility. This study investigates the potential role of articulatory control in talkers’ Lombard speech enrichment success. Seventy-eight speakers read out sentences in both their habitual style and in a condition where they were instructed to speak clearly while hearing loud speech-shaped noise. A diadochokinetic (DDK) speech task that requires speakers to repetitively produce word or non-word sequences as accurately and as rapidly as possible, was used to quantify their articulatory control. Individuals’ predicted intelligibility in both speaking styles (presented at -5 dB SNR) was measured using an acoustic glimpse-based metric: the High-Energy Glimpse Proportion (HEGP). Speakers’ HEGP scores show a clear effect of speaking condition (better HEGP scores in the Lombard than habitual condition), but no simple effect of articulatory control on HEGP, nor an interaction between speaking condition and articulatory control. This indicates that individuals’ speech enrichment success as measured by the HEGP metric was not predicted by DDK performance.
  • Stevens, M. A., McQueen, J. M., & Hartsuiker, R. J. (2007). No lexically-driven perceptual adjustments of the [x]-[h] boundary. In J. Trouvain, & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2007) (pp. 1897-1900). Dudweiler: Pirrot.

    Abstract

    Listeners can make perceptual adjustments to phoneme categories in response to a talker who consistently produces a specific phoneme ambiguously. We investigate here whether this type of perceptual learning is also used to adapt to regional accent differences. Listeners were exposed to words produced by a Flemish talker whose realization of [x℄or [h℄ was ambiguous (producing [x℄like [h℄is a property of the West-Flanders regional accent). Before and after exposure they categorized a [x℄-[h℄continuum. For both Dutch and Flemish listeners there was no shift of the categorization boundary after exposure to ambiguous sounds in [x℄- or [h℄-biasing contexts. The absence of a lexically-driven learning effect for this contrast may be because [h℄is strongly influenced by coarticulation. As is not stable across contexts, it may be futile to adapt its representation when new realizations are heard
  • Ten Bosch, L., Mulder, K., & Boves, L. (2019). Phase synchronization between EEG signals as a function of differences between stimuli characteristics. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2019 (pp. 1213-1217). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2019-2443.

    Abstract

    The neural processing of speech leads to specific patterns in the brain which can be measured as, e.g., EEG signals. When properly aligned with the speech input and averaged over many tokens, the Event Related Potential (ERP) signal is able to differentiate specific contrasts between speech signals. Well-known effects relate to the difference between expected and unexpected words, in particular in the N400, while effects in N100 and P200 are related to attention and acoustic onset effects. Most EEG studies deal with the amplitude of EEG signals over time, sidestepping the effect of phase and phase synchronization. This paper investigates the relation between phase in the EEG signals measured in an auditory lexical decision task by Dutch participants listening to full and reduced English word forms. We show that phase synchronization takes place across stimulus conditions, and that the so-called circular variance is narrowly related to the type of contrast between stimuli.
  • Ter Bekke, M., Ozyurek, A., & Ünal, E. (2019). Speaking but not gesturing predicts motion event memory within and across languages. In A. Goel, C. Seifert, & C. Freksa (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2019) (pp. 2940-2946). Montreal, QB: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    In everyday life, people see, describe and remember motion events. We tested whether the type of motion event information (path or manner) encoded in speech and gesture predicts which information is remembered and if this varies across speakers of typologically different languages. We focus on intransitive motion events (e.g., a woman running to a tree) that are described differently in speech and co-speech gesture across languages, based on how these languages typologically encode manner and path information (Kita & Özyürek, 2003; Talmy, 1985). Speakers of Dutch (n = 19) and Turkish (n = 22) watched and described motion events. With a surprise (i.e. unexpected) recognition memory task, memory for manner and path components of these events was measured. Neither Dutch nor Turkish speakers’ memory for manner went above chance levels. However, we found a positive relation between path speech and path change detection: participants who described the path during encoding were more accurate at detecting changes to the path of an event during the memory task. In addition, the relation between path speech and path memory changed with native language: for Dutch speakers encoding path in speech was related to improved path memory, but for Turkish speakers no such relation existed. For both languages, co-speech gesture did not predict memory speakers. We discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of the relations between speech, gesture, type of encoding in language and memory.
  • Troncoso Ruiz, A., Ernestus, M., & Broersma, M. (2019). Learning to produce difficult L2 vowels: The effects of awareness-rasing, exposure and feedback. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2019) (pp. 1094-1098). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.
  • Tuinman, A., Mitterer, H., & Cutler, A. (2007). Speakers differentiate English intrusive and onset /r/, but L2 listeners do not. In J. Trouvain, & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2007) (pp. 1905-1908). Dudweiler: Pirrot.

    Abstract

    We investigated whether non-native listeners can exploit phonetic detail in recognizing potentially ambiguous utterances, as native listeners can [6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. Due to the phenomenon of intrusive /r/, the English phrase extra ice may sound like extra rice. A production study indicates that the intrusive /r/ can be distinguished from the onset /r/ in rice, as it is phonetically weaker. In two cross-modal identity priming studies, however, we found no conclusive evidence that Dutch learners of English are able to make use of this difference. Instead, auditory primes such as extra rice and extra ice with onset and intrusive /r/s activate both types of targets such as ice and rice. This supports the notion of spurious lexical activation in L2 perception.
  • Van Alphen, P. M., De Bree, E., Fikkert, P., & Wijnen, F. (2007). The role of metrical stress in comprehension and production of Dutch children at risk of dyslexia. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2007 (pp. 2313-2316). Adelaide: Causal Productions.

    Abstract

    The present study compared the role of metrical stress in comprehension and production of three-year-old children with a familial risk of dyslexia with that of normally developing children. A visual fixation task with stress (mis-)matches in bisyllabic words, as well as a non-word repetition task with bisyllabic targets were presented to the control and at-risk children. Results show that the at-risk group is less sensitive to stress mismatches in word recognition than the control group. Correct production of metrical stress patterns did not differ significantly between the groups, but the percentages of phonemes produced correctly were lower for the at-risk than the control group. The findings indicate that processing of metrical stress patterns is not impaired in at-risk children, but that the at-risk group cannot exploit metrical stress in word recognition
  • Van Dooren, A., Tulling, M., Cournane, A., & Hacquard, V. (2019). Discovering modal polysemy: Lexical aspect might help. In M. Brown, & B. Dailey (Eds.), BUCLD 43: Proceedings of the 43rd annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 203-216). Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Van Geenhoven, V. (1999). A before-&-after picture of when-, before-, and after-clauses. In T. Matthews, & D. Strolovitch (Eds.), Proceedings of the 9th Semantics and Linguistic Theory Conference (pp. 283-315). Ithaca, NY, USA: Cornell University.
  • Wagner, M. A., Broersma, M., McQueen, J. M., & Lemhöfer, K. (2019). Imitating speech in an unfamiliar language and an unfamiliar non-native accent in the native language. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain, & P. Warren (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 20195) (pp. 1362-1366). Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.

    Abstract

    This study concerns individual differences in speech imitation ability and the role that lexical representations play in imitation. We examined 1) whether imitation of sounds in an unfamiliar language (L0) is related to imitation of sounds in an unfamiliar
    non-native accent in the speaker’s native language (L1) and 2) whether it is easier or harder to imitate speech when you know the words to be imitated. Fifty-nine native Dutch speakers imitated words with target vowels in Basque (/a/ and /e/) and Greekaccented
    Dutch (/i/ and /u/). Spectral and durational
    analyses of the target vowels revealed no relationship between the success of L0 and L1 imitation and no difference in performance between tasks (i.e., L1
    imitation was neither aided nor blocked by lexical knowledge about the correct pronunciation). The results suggest instead that the relationship of the vowels to native phonological categories plays a bigger role in imitation
  • Walsh Dickey, L. (1999). Syllable count and Tzeltal segmental allomorphy. In J. Rennison, & K. Kühnhammer (Eds.), Phonologica 1996. Proceedings of the 8th International Phonology Meeting (pp. 323-334). Holland Academic Graphics.

    Abstract

    Tzeltal, a Mayan language spoken in southern Mexico, exhibits allo-morphy of an unusual type. The vowel quality of the perfective suffix is determined by the number of syllables in the stem to which it is attaching. This paper presents previously unpublished data of this allomorphy and demonstrates that a syllable-count analysis of the phenomenon is the proper one. This finding is put in a more general context of segment-prosody interaction in allomorphy.
  • Weber, A., Melinger, A., & Lara Tapia, L. (2007). The mapping of phonetic information to lexical presentations in Spanish: Evidence from eye movements. In J. Trouvain, & W. J. Barry (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2007) (pp. 1941-1944). Dudweiler: Pirrot.

    Abstract

    In a visual-world study, we examined spoken-wordrecognition in Spanish. Spanish listeners followed spoken instructions to click on pictures while their eye movements were monitored. When instructed to click on the picture of a door (puerta), they experienced interference from the picture of a pig (p u e r c o ). The same interference from phonologically related items was observed when the displays contained printed names or a combination of pictures with their names printed underneath, although the effect was strongest for displays with printed names. Implications of the finding that the interference effect can be induced with standard pictorial displays as well as with orthographic displays are discussed.

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