Displaying 1 - 99 of 99
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Agirrezabal, M., Paggio, P., Navarretta, C., & Jongejan, B. (2023). Multimodal detection and classification of head movements in face-to-face conversations: Exploring models, features and their interaction. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (
Eds. ), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527200.Abstract
In this work we perform multimodal detection and classification
of head movements from face to face video conversation data.
We have experimented with different models and feature sets
and provided some insight on the effect of independent features,
but also how their interaction can enhance a head movement
classifier. Used features include nose, neck and mid hip position
coordinates and their derivatives together with acoustic features,
namely, intensity and pitch of the speaker on focus. Results
show that when input features are sufficiently processed by in-
teracting with each other, a linear classifier can reach a similar
performance to a more complex non-linear neural model with
several hidden layers. Our best models achieve state-of-the-art
performance in the detection task, measured by macro-averaged
F1 score. -
Allen, S. E. M. (1998). A discourse-pragmatic explanation for the subject-object asymmetry in early null arguments. In A. Sorace, C. Heycock, & R. Shillcock (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the GALA '97 Conference on Language Acquisition (pp. 10-15). Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press.Abstract
The present paper assesses discourse-pragmatic factors as a potential explanation for the subject-object assymetry in early child language. It identifies a set of factors which characterize typical situations of informativeness (Greenfield & Smith, 1976), and uses these factors to identify informative arguments in data from four children aged 2;0 through 3;6 learning Inuktitut as a first language. In addition, it assesses the extent of the links between features of informativeness on one hand and lexical vs. null and subject vs. object arguments on the other. Results suggest that a pragmatics account of the subject-object asymmetry can be upheld to a greater extent than previous research indicates, and that several of the factors characterizing informativeness are good indicators of those arguments which tend to be omitted in early child language. -
Amatuni, A., Schroer, S. E., Zhang, Y., Peters, R. E., Reza, M. A., Crandall, D., & Yu, C. (2021). In-the-moment visual information from the infant's egocentric view determines the success of infant word learning: A computational study. In T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021) (pp. 265-271). Vienna: Cognitive Science Society.Abstract
Infants learn the meaning of words from accumulated experiences of real-time interactions with their caregivers. To study the effects of visual sensory input on word learning, we recorded infant's view of the world using head-mounted eye trackers during free-flowing play with a caregiver. While playing, infants were exposed to novel label-object mappings and later learning outcomes for these items were tested after the play session. In this study we use a classification based approach to link properties of infants' visual scenes during naturalistic labeling moments to their word learning outcomes. We find that a model which integrates both highly informative and ambiguous sensory evidence is a better fit to infants' individual learning outcomes than models where either type of evidence is taken alone, and that raw labeling frequency is unable to account for the word learning differences we observe. Here we demonstrate how a computational model, using only raw pixels taken from the egocentric scene image, can derive insights on human language learning. -
Bavin, E. L., & Kidd, E. (2000). Learning new verbs: Beyond the input. In C. Davis, T. J. Van Gelder, & R. Wales (
Eds. ), Cognitive Science in Australia, 2000: Proceedings of the Fifth Biennial Conference of the Australasian Cognitive Science Society. -
Bodur, K., Branje, S., Peirolo, M., Tiscareno, I., & German, J. S. (2021). Domain-initial strengthening in Turkish: Acoustic cues to prosodic hierarchy in stop consonants. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2021 (pp. 1459-1463). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2021-2230.
Abstract
Studies have shown that cross-linguistically, consonants at the left edge of higher-level prosodic boundaries tend to be more forcefully articulated than those at lower-level boundaries, a phenomenon known as domain-initial strengthening. This study tests whether similar effects occur in Turkish, using the Autosegmental-Metrical model proposed by Ipek & Jun [1, 2] as the basis for assessing boundary strength. Productions of /t/ and /d/ were elicited in four domain-initial prosodic positions corresponding to progressively higher-level boundaries: syllable, word, intermediate phrase, and Intonational Phrase. A fifth position, nuclear word, was included in order to better situate it within the prosodic hierarchy. Acoustic correlates of articulatory strength were measured, including closure duration for /d/ and /t/, as well as voice onset time and burst energy for /t/. Our results show that closure duration increases cumulatively from syllable to intermediate phrase, while voice onset time and burst energy are not influenced by boundary strength. These findings provide corroborating evidence for Ipek & Jun’s model, particularly for the distinction between word and intermediate phrase boundaries. Additionally, articulatory strength at the left edge of the nuclear word patterned closely with word-initial position, supporting the view that the nuclear word is not associated with a distinct phrasing domain -
Caplan, S., Peng, M. Z., Zhang, Y., & Yu, C. (2023). Using an Egocentric Human Simulation Paradigm to quantify referential and semantic ambiguity in early word learning. In M. Goldwater, F. K. Anggoro, B. K. Hayes, & D. C. Ong (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2023) (pp. 1043-1049).Abstract
In order to understand early word learning we need to better understand and quantify properties of the input that young children receive. We extended the human simulation paradigm (HSP) using egocentric videos taken from infant head-mounted cameras. The videos were further annotated with gaze information indicating in-the-moment visual attention from the infant. Our new HSP prompted participants for two types of responses, thus differentiating referential from semantic ambiguity in the learning input. Consistent with findings on visual attention in word learning, we find a strongly bimodal distribution over HSP accuracy. Even in this open-ended task, most videos only lead to a small handful of common responses. What's more, referential ambiguity was the key bottleneck to performance: participants can nearly always recover the exact word that was said if they identify the correct referent. Finally, analysis shows that adult learners relied on particular, multimodal behavioral cues to infer those target referents. -
Chevrefils, L., Morgenstern, A., Beaupoil-Hourdel, P., Bedoin, D., Caët, S., Danet, C., Danino, C., De Pontonx, S., & Parisse, C. (2023). Coordinating eating and languaging: The choreography of speech, sign, gesture and action in family dinners. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (
Eds. ), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527183.Abstract
In this study, we analyze one French signing and one French speaking family’s interaction during dinner. The families composed of two parents and two children aged 3 to 11 were filmed with three cameras to capture all family members’ behaviors. The three videos per dinner were synchronized and coded on ELAN. We annotated all participants’ acting, and languaging.
Our quantitative analyses show how family members collaboratively manage multiple streams of activity through the embodied performances of dining and interacting. We uncover different profiles according to participants’ modality of expression and status (focusing on the mother and the younger child). The hearing participants’ co-activity management illustrates their monitoring of dining and conversing and how they progressively master the affordances of the visual and vocal channels to maintain the simultaneity of the two activities. The deaf mother skillfully manages to alternate smoothly between dining and interacting. The deaf younger child manifests how she is in the process of developing her skills to manage multi-activity. Our qualitative analyses focus on the ecology of visual-gestural and audio-vocal languaging in the context of co-activity according to language and participant. We open new perspectives on the management of gaze and body parts in multimodal languaging. -
Coopmans, C. W., De Hoop, H., Kaushik, K., Hagoort, P., & Martin, A. E. (2021). Structure-(in)dependent interpretation of phrases in humans and LSTMs. In Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL 2021) (pp. 459-463).
Abstract
In this study, we compared the performance of a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network to the behavior of human participants on a language task that requires hierarchically structured knowledge. We show that humans interpret ambiguous noun phrases, such as second blue ball, in line with their hierarchical constituent structure. LSTMs, instead, only do
so after unambiguous training, and they do not systematically generalize to novel items. Overall, the results of our simulations indicate that a model can behave hierarchically without relying on hierarchical constituent structure.Additional information
full text via ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst -
Crago, M. B., Allen, S. E. M., & Pesco, D. (1998). Issues of Complexity in Inuktitut and English Child Directed Speech. In Proceedings of the twenty-ninth Annual Stanford Child Language Research Forum (pp. 37-46).
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Cutler, A., Aslin, R. N., Gervain, J., & Nespor, M. (
Eds. ). (2021). Special issue in honor of Jacques Mehler, Cognition's founding editor [Special Issue]. Cognition, 213. -
Cutler, A., & Otake, T. (1998). Assimilation of place in Japanese and Dutch. In R. Mannell, & J. Robert-Ribes (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: vol. 5 (pp. 1751-1754). Sydney: ICLSP.Abstract
Assimilation of place of articulation across a nasal and a following stop consonant is obligatory in Japanese, but not in Dutch. In four experiments the processing of assimilated forms by speakers of Japanese and Dutch was compared, using a task in which listeners blended pseudo-word pairs such as ranga-serupa. An assimilated blend of this pair would be rampa, an unassimilated blend rangpa. Japanese listeners produced significantly more assimilated than unassimilated forms, both with pseudo-Japanese and pseudo-Dutch materials, while Dutch listeners produced significantly more unassimilated than assimilated forms in each materials set. This suggests that Japanese listeners, whose native-language phonology involves obligatory assimilation constraints, represent the assimilated nasals in nasal-stop sequences as unmarked for place of articulation, while Dutch listeners, who are accustomed to hearing unassimilated forms, represent the same nasal segments as marked for place of articulation. -
Cutler, A. (1998). How listeners find the right words. In Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Congress on Acoustics: Vol. 2 (pp. 1377-1380). Melville, NY: Acoustical Society of America.
Abstract
Languages contain tens of thousands of words, but these are constructed from a tiny handful of phonetic elements. Consequently, words resemble one another, or can be embedded within one another, a coup stick snot with standing. me process of spoken-word recognition by human listeners involves activation of multiple word candidates consistent with the input, and direct competition between activated candidate words. Further, human listeners are sensitive, at an early, prelexical, stage of speeeh processing, to constraints on what could potentially be a word of the language. -
Cutler, A., Treiman, R., & Van Ooijen, B. (1998). Orthografik inkoncistensy ephekts in foneme detektion? In R. Mannell, & J. Robert-Ribes (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 6 (pp. 2783-2786). Sydney: ICSLP.Abstract
The phoneme detection task is widely used in spoken word recognition research. Alphabetically literate participants, however, are more used to explicit representations of letters than of phonemes. The present study explored whether phoneme detection is sensitive to how target phonemes are, or may be, orthographically realised. Listeners detected the target sounds [b,m,t,f,s,k] in word-initial position in sequences of isolated English words. Response times were faster to the targets [b,m,t], which have consistent word-initial spelling, than to the targets [f,s,k], which are inconsistently spelled, but only when listeners’ attention was drawn to spelling by the presence in the experiment of many irregularly spelled fillers. Within the inconsistent targets [f,s,k], there was no significant difference between responses to targets in words with majority and minority spellings. We conclude that performance in the phoneme detection task is not necessarily sensitive to orthographic effects, but that salient orthographic manipulation can induce such sensitivity. -
Cutler, A., & Koster, M. (2000). Stress and lexical activation in Dutch. In B. Yuan, T. Huang, & X. Tang (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 1 (pp. 593-596). Beijing: China Military Friendship Publish.Abstract
Dutch listeners were slower to make judgements about the semantic relatedness between a spoken target word (e.g. atLEET, 'athlete') and a previously presented visual prime word (e.g. SPORT 'sport') when the spoken word was mis-stressed. The adverse effect of mis-stressing confirms the role of stress information in lexical recognition in Dutch. However, although the erroneous stress pattern was always initially compatible with a competing word (e.g. ATlas, 'atlas'), mis-stressed words did not produced high false alarm rates in unrelated pairs (e.g. SPORT - atLAS). This suggests that stress information did not completely rule out segmentally matching but suprasegmentally mismatching words, a finding consistent with spoken-word recognition models involving multiple activation and inter-word competition.Additional information
https://www.mpi.nl/world/persons/private/anne/ICSLP00.html -
Cutler, A., & Butterfield, S. (1986). The perceptual integrity of initial consonant clusters. In R. Lawrence (
Ed. ), Speech and Hearing: Proceedings of the Institute of Acoustics (pp. 31-36). Edinburgh: Institute of Acoustics. -
Cutler, A. (1998). The recognition of spoken words with variable representations. In D. Duez (
Ed. ), Proceedings of the ESCA Workshop on Sound Patterns of Spontaneous Speech (pp. 83-92). Aix-en-Provence: Université de Aix-en-Provence. -
Cutler, A., Norris, D., & McQueen, J. M. (2000). Tracking TRACE’s troubles. In A. Cutler, J. M. McQueen, & R. Zondervan (
Eds. ), Proceedings of SWAP (Workshop on Spoken Word Access Processes) (pp. 63-66). Nijmegen: Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics.Abstract
Simulations explored the inability of the TRACE model of spoken-word recognition to model the effects on human listening of acoustic-phonetic mismatches in word forms. The source of TRACE's failure lay not in its interactive connectivity, not in the presence of interword competition, and not in the use of phonemic representations, but in the need for continuously optimised interpretation of the input. When an analogue of TRACE was allowed to cycle to asymptote on every slice of input, an acceptable simulation of the subcategorical mismatch data was achieved. Even then, however, the simulation was not as close as that produced by the Merge model. -
Drozd, K. F. (1998). No as a determiner in child English: A summary of categorical evidence. In A. Sorace, C. Heycock, & R. Shillcock (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the Gala '97 Conference on Language Acquisition (pp. 34-39). Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press,.Abstract
This paper summarizes the results of a descriptive syntactic category analysis of child English no which reveals that young children use and represent no as a determiner and negatives like no pen as NPs, contra standard analyses. -
Enfield, N. J., & Evans, G. (2000). Transcription as standardisation: The problem of Tai languages. In S. Burusphat (
Ed. ), Proceedings: the International Conference on Tai Studies, July 29-31, 1998, (pp. 201-212). Bangkok, Thailand: Institute of Language and Culture for Rural Development, Mahidol University. -
Evans, N., Levinson, S. C., & Sterelny, K. (
Eds. ). (2021). Thematic issue on evolution of kinship systems [Special Issue]. Biological theory, 16. -
Eviatar, Z., & Huettig, F. (
Eds. ). (2021). Literacy and writing systems [Special Issue]. Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science. -
Falk, J. J., Zhang, Y., Scheutz, M., & Yu, C. (2021). Parents adaptively use anaphora during parent-child social interaction. In T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021) (pp. 1472-1478). Vienna: Cognitive Science Society.Abstract
Anaphora, a ubiquitous feature of natural language, poses a particular challenge to young children as they first learn language due to its referential ambiguity. In spite of this, parents and caregivers use anaphora frequently in child-directed speech, potentially presenting a risk to effective communication if children do not yet have the linguistic capabilities of resolving anaphora successfully. Through an eye-tracking study in a naturalistic free-play context, we examine the strategies that parents employ to calibrate their use of anaphora to their child's linguistic development level. We show that, in this way, parents are able to intuitively scaffold the complexity of their speech such that greater referential ambiguity does not hurt overall communication success. -
Ferré, G. (2023). Pragmatic gestures and prosody. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (
Eds. ), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527215.Abstract
The study presented here focuses on two pragmatic gestures:
the hand flip (Ferré, 2011), a gesture of the Palm Up Open
Hand/PUOH family (Müller, 2004) and the closed hand which
can be considered as the opposite kind of movement to the open-
ing of the hands present in the PUOH gesture. Whereas one of
the functions of the hand flip has been described as presenting
a new point in speech (Cienki, 2021), the closed hand gesture
has not yet been described in the literature to the best of our
knowledge. It can however be conceived of as having the oppo-
site function of announcing the end of a point in discourse. The
object of the present study is therefore to determine, with the
study of prosodic features, if the two gestures are found in the
same type of speech units and what their respective scope is.
Drawing from a corpus of three TED Talks in French the
prosodic characteristics of the speech that accompanies the two
gestures will be examined. The hypothesis developed in the
present paper is that their scope should be reflected in the
prosody of accompanying speech, especially pitch key, tone,
and relative pitch range. The prediction is that hand flips and
closing hand gestures are expected to be located at the periph-
ery of Intonation Phrases (IPs), Inter-Pausal Units (IPUs) or
more conversational Turn Constructional Units (TCUs), and are
likely to be co-occurrent with pauses in speech. But because of
the natural slope of intonation in speech, the speech that accom-
pany early gestures in Intonation Phrases should reveal different
features from the speech at the end of intonational units. Tones
should be different as well, considering the prosodic structure
of spoken French. -
Galke, L., Franke, B., Zielke, T., & Scherp, A. (2021). Lifelong learning of graph neural networks for open-world node classification. In Proceedings of the 2021 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN). Piscataway, NJ: IEEE. doi:10.1109/IJCNN52387.2021.9533412.
Abstract
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as the standard method for numerous tasks on graph-structured data such as node classification. However, real-world graphs are often evolving over time and even new classes may arise. We model these challenges as an instance of lifelong learning, in which a learner faces a sequence of tasks and may take over knowledge acquired in past tasks. Such knowledge may be stored explicitly as historic data or implicitly within model parameters. In this work, we systematically analyze the influence of implicit and explicit knowledge. Therefore, we present an incremental training method for lifelong learning on graphs and introduce a new measure based on k-neighborhood time differences to address variances in the historic data. We apply our training method to five representative GNN architectures and evaluate them on three new lifelong node classification datasets. Our results show that no more than 50% of the GNN's receptive field is necessary to retain at least 95% accuracy compared to training over the complete history of the graph data. Furthermore, our experiments confirm that implicit knowledge becomes more important when fewer explicit knowledge is available. -
Galke, L., Seidlmayer, E., Lüdemann, G., Langnickel, L., Melnychuk, T., Förstner, K. U., Tochtermann, K., & Schultz, C. (2021). COVID-19++: A citation-aware Covid-19 dataset for the analysis of research dynamics. In Y. Chen, H. Ludwig, Y. Tu, U. Fayyad, X. Zhu, X. Hu, S. Byna, X. Liu, J. Zhang, S. Pan, V. Papalexakis, J. Wang, A. Cuzzocrea, & C. Ordonez (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (pp. 4350-4355). Piscataway, NJ: IEEE.Abstract
COVID-19 research datasets are crucial for analyzing research dynamics. Most collections of COVID-19 research items do not to include cited works and do not have annotations
from a controlled vocabulary. Starting with ZB MED KE data on COVID-19, which comprises CORD-19, we assemble a new dataset that includes cited work and MeSH annotations for all records. Furthermore, we conduct experiments on the analysis of research dynamics, in which we investigate predicting links in a co-annotation graph created on the basis of the new dataset. Surprisingly, we find that simple heuristic methods are better at
predicting future links than more sophisticated approaches such as graph neural networks. -
Gamba, M., Raimondi, T., De Gregorio, C., Valente, D., Carugati, F., Cristiano, W., Ferrario, V., Torti, V., Favaro, L., Friard, O., Giacoma, C., & Ravignani, A. (2023). Rhythmic categories across primate vocal displays. In A. Astolfi, F. Asdrubali, & L. Shtrepi (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 10th Convention of the European Acoustics Association Forum Acusticum 2023 (pp. 3971-3974). Torino: European Acoustics Association.Abstract
The last few years have revealed that several species may share the building blocks of Musicality with humans. The recognition of these building blocks (e.g., rhythm, frequency variation) was a necessary impetus for a new round of studies investigating rhythmic variation in animal vocal displays. Singing primates are a small group of primate species that produce modulated songs ranging from tens to thousands of vocal units. Previous studies showed that the indri, the only singing lemur, is currently the only known species that perform duet and choruses showing multiple rhythmic categories, as seen in human music. Rhythmic categories occur when temporal intervals between note onsets are not uniformly distributed, and rhythms with a small integer ratio between these intervals are typical of human music. Besides indris, white-handed gibbons and three crested gibbon species showed a prominent rhythmic category corresponding to a single small integer ratio, isochrony. This study reviews previous evidence on the co-occurrence of rhythmic categories in primates and focuses on the prospects for a comparative, multimodal study of rhythmicity in this clade. -
Green, K., Osei-Cobbina, C., Perlman, M., & Kita, S. (2023). Infants can create different types of iconic gestures, with and without parental scaffolding. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (
Eds. ), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527188.Abstract
Despite the early emergence of pointing, children are generally not documented to produce iconic gestures until later in development. Although research has described this developmental trajectory and the types of iconic gestures that emerge first, there has been limited focus on iconic gestures within interactional contexts. This study identified the first 10 iconic gestures produced by five monolingual English-speaking children in a naturalistic longitudinal video corpus and analysed the interactional contexts. We found children produced their first iconic gesture between 12 and 20 months and that gestural types varied. Although 34% of gestures could have been imitated or derived from adult or child actions in the preceding context, the majority were produced independently of any observed model. In these cases, adults often led the interaction in a direction where iconic gesture was an appropriate response. Overall, we find infants can represent a referent symbolically and possess a greater capacity for innovation than previously assumed. In order to develop our understanding of how children learn to produce iconic gestures, it is important to consider the immediate interactional context. Conducting naturalistic corpus analyses could be a more ecologically valid approach to understanding how children learn to produce iconic gestures in real life contexts. -
Greenfield, M. D., Honing, H., Kotz, S. A., & Ravignani, A. (
Eds. ). (2021). Synchrony and rhythm interaction: From the brain to behavioural ecology [Special Issue]. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences, 376. -
Gussenhoven, C., & Chen, A. (2000). Universal and language-specific effects in the perception of question intonation. In B. Yuan, T. Huang, & X. Tang (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP) (pp. 91-94). Beijing: China Military Friendship Publish.Abstract
Three groups of monolingual listeners, with Standard Chinese, Dutch and Hungarian as their native language, judged pairs of trisyllabic stimuli which differed only in their itch pattern. The segmental structure of the stimuli was made up by the experimenters and presented to subjects as being taken from a little-known language spoken on a South Pacific island. Pitch patterns consisted of a single rise-fall located on or near the second syllable. By and large, listeners selected the stimulus with the higher peak, the later eak, and the higher end rise as the one that signalled a question, regardless of language group. The result is argued to reflect innate, non-linguistic knowledge of the meaning of pitch variation, notably Ohala’s Frequency Code. A significant difference between groups is explained as due to the influence of the mother tongue. -
Gussenhoven, C., & Chen, A. (2000). Universal and language-specific effects in the perception of question intonation. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP) (pp. 91-94).
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Hamilton, A., & Holler, J. (
Eds. ). (2023). Face2face: Advancing the science of social interaction [Special Issue]. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences. Retrieved from https://royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/2023/378/1875.Abstract
Face to face interaction is fundamental to human sociality but is very complex to study in a scientific fashion. This theme issue brings together cutting-edge approaches to the study of face-to-face interaction and showcases how we can make progress in this area. Researchers are now studying interaction in adult conversation, parent-child relationships, neurodiverse groups, interactions with virtual agents and various animal species. The theme issue reveals how new paradigms are leading to more ecologically grounded and comprehensive insights into what social interaction is. Scientific advances in this area can lead to improvements in education and therapy, better understanding of neurodiversity and more engaging artificial agents -
Harbusch, K., & Kempen, G. (2000). Complexity of linear order computation in Performance Grammar, TAG and HPSG. In Proceedings of Fifth International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms (TAG+5) (pp. 101-106).
Abstract
This paper investigates the time and space complexity of word order computation in the psycholinguistically motivated grammar formalism of Performance Grammar (PG). In PG, the first stage of syntax assembly yields an unordered tree ('mobile') consisting of a hierarchy of lexical frames (lexically anchored elementary trees). Associated with each lexica l frame is a linearizer—a Finite-State Automaton that locally computes the left-to-right order of the branches of the frame. Linearization takes place after the promotion component may have raised certain constituents (e.g. Wh- or focused phrases) into the domain of lexical frames higher up in the syntactic mobile. We show that the worst-case time and space complexity of analyzing input strings of length n is O(n5) and O(n4), respectively. This result compares favorably with the time complexity of word-order computations in Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG). A comparison with Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) reveals that PG yields a more declarative linearization method, provided that the FSA is rewritten as an equivalent regular expression. -
Harmon, Z., Barak, L., Shafto, P., Edwards, J., & Feldman, N. H. (2021). Making heads or tails of it: A competition–compensation account of morphological deficits in language impairment. In T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021) (pp. 1872-1878). Vienna: Cognitive Science Society.Abstract
Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) regularly use the base form of verbs (e.g., dance) instead of inflected forms (e.g., danced). We propose an account of this behavior in which children with DLD have difficulty processing novel inflected verbs in their input. This leads the inflected form to face stronger competition from alternatives. Competition is resolved by the production of a more accessible alternative with high semantic overlap with the inflected form: in English, the bare form. We test our account computationally by training a nonparametric Bayesian model that infers the productivity of the inflectional suffix (-ed). We systematically vary the number of novel types of inflected verbs in the input to simulate the input as processed by children with and without DLD. Modeling results are consistent with our hypothesis, suggesting that children’s inconsistent use of inflectional morphemes could stem from inferences they make on the basis of impoverished data. -
Hellwig, B., Allen, S. E. M., Davidson, L., Defina, R., Kelly, B. F., & Kidd, E. (
Eds. ). (2023). The acquisition sketch project [Special Issue]. Language Documentation and Conservation Special Publication, 28.Abstract
This special publication aims to build a renewed enthusiasm for collecting acquisition data across many languages, including those facing endangerment and loss. It presents a guide for documenting and describing child language and child-directed language in diverse languages and cultures, as well as a collection of acquisition sketches based on this guide. The guide is intended for anyone interested in working across child language and language documentation, including, for example, field linguists and language documenters, community language workers, child language researchers or graduate students. -
Hintz, F., Voeten, C. C., McQueen, J. M., & Scharenborg, O. (2021). The effects of onset and offset masking on the time course of non-native spoken-word recognition in noise. In T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021) (pp. 133-139). Vienna: Cognitive Science Society.Abstract
Using the visual-word paradigm, the present study investigated the effects of word onset and offset masking on the time course of non-native spoken-word recognition in the presence of background noise. In two experiments, Dutch non-native listeners heard English target words, preceded by carrier sentences that were noise-free (Experiment 1) or contained intermittent noise (Experiment 2). Target words were either onset- or offset-masked or not masked at all. Results showed that onset masking delayed target word recognition more than offset masking did, suggesting that – similar to natives – non-native listeners strongly rely on word onset information during word recognition in noise.Additional information
Link to Preprint on BioRxiv -
Jadoul, Y., Düngen, D., & Ravignani, A. (2023). Live-tracking acoustic parameters in animal behavioural experiments: Interactive bioacoustics with parselmouth. In A. Astolfi, F. Asdrubali, & L. Shtrepi (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 10th Convention of the European Acoustics Association Forum Acusticum 2023 (pp. 4675-4678). Torino: European Acoustics Association.Abstract
Most bioacoustics software is used to analyse the already collected acoustics data in batch, i.e., after the data-collecting phase of a scientific study. However, experiments based on animal training require immediate and precise reactions from the experimenter, and thus do not easily dovetail with a typical bioacoustics workflow. Bridging this methodological gap, we have developed a custom application to live-monitor the vocal development of harbour seals in a behavioural experiment. In each trial, the application records and automatically detects an animal's call, and immediately measures duration and acoustic measures such as intensity, fundamental frequency, or formant frequencies. It then displays a spectrogram of the recording and the acoustic measurements, allowing the experimenter to instantly evaluate whether or not to reinforce the animal's vocalisation. From a technical perspective, the rapid and easy development of this custom software was made possible by combining multiple open-source software projects. Here, we integrated the acoustic analyses from Parselmouth, a Python library for Praat, together with PyAudio and Matplotlib's recording and plotting functionality, into a custom graphical user interface created with PyQt. This flexible recombination of different open-source Python libraries allows the whole program to be written in a mere couple of hundred lines of code -
Janse, E., Sennema, A., & Slis, A. (2000). Fast speech timing in Dutch: The durational correlates of lexical stress and pitch accent. In Proceedings of the VIth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Vol. III (pp. 251-254).
Abstract
n this study we investigated the durational correlates of lexical stress and pitch accent at normal and fast speech rate in Dutch. Previous literature on English shows that durations of lexically unstressed vowels are reduced more than stressed vowels when speakers increase their speech rate. We found that the same holds for Dutch, irrespective of whether the unstressed vowel is schwa or a "full" vowel. In the same line, we expected that vowels in words without a pitch accent would be shortened relatively more than vowels in words with a pitch accent. This was not the case: if anything, the accented vowels were shortened relatively more than the unaccented vowels. We conclude that duration is an important cue for lexical stress, but not for pitch accent. -
Janse, E. (2000). Intelligibility of time-compressed speech: Three ways of time-compression. In Proceedings of the VIth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, vol. III (pp. 786-789).
Abstract
Studies on fast speech have shown that word-level timing of fast speech differs from that of normal rate speech in that unstressed syllables are shortened more than stressed syllables as speech rate increases. An earlier experiment showed that the intelligibility of time-compressed speech could not be improved by making its temporal organisation closer to natural fast speech. To test the hypothesis that segmental intelligibility is more important than prosodic timing in listening to timecompressed speech, the intelligibility of bisyllabic words was tested in three time-compression conditions: either stressed and unstressed syllable were compressed to the same degree, or the stressed syllable was compressed more than the unstressed syllable, or the reverse. As was found before, imitating wordlevel timing of fast speech did not improve intelligibility over linear compression. However, the results did not confirm the hypothesis either: there was no difference in intelligibility between the three compression conditions. We conclude that segmental intelligibility plays an important role, but further research is necessary to decide between the contributions of prosody and segmental intelligibility to the word-level intelligibility of time-compressed speech. -
Johnson, E. K., Jusczyk, P. W., Cutler, A., & Norris, D. (2000). The development of word recognition: The use of the possible-word constraint by 12-month-olds. In L. Gleitman, & A. Joshi (
Eds. ), Proceedings of CogSci 2000 (pp. 1034). London: Erlbaum. -
Jordanoska, I., Kocher, A., & Bendezú-Araujo, R. (
Eds. ). (2023). Marking the truth: A cross-linguistic approach to verum [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft, 42(3). -
Kanakanti, M., Singh, S., & Shrivastava, M. (2023). MultiFacet: A multi-tasking framework for speech-to-sign language generation. In E. André, M. Chetouani, D. Vaufreydaz, G. Lucas, T. Schultz, L.-P. Morency, & A. Vinciarelli (
Eds. ), ICMI '23 Companion: Companion Publication of the 25th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (pp. 205-213). New York: ACM. doi:10.1145/3610661.3616550.Abstract
Sign language is a rich form of communication, uniquely conveying meaning through a combination of gestures, facial expressions, and body movements. Existing research in sign language generation has predominantly focused on text-to-sign pose generation, while speech-to-sign pose generation remains relatively underexplored. Speech-to-sign language generation models can facilitate effective communication between the deaf and hearing communities. In this paper, we propose an architecture that utilises prosodic information from speech audio and semantic context from text to generate sign pose sequences. In our approach, we adopt a multi-tasking strategy that involves an additional task of predicting Facial Action Units (FAUs). FAUs capture the intricate facial muscle movements that play a crucial role in conveying specific facial expressions during sign language generation. We train our models on an existing Indian Sign language dataset that contains sign language videos with audio and text translations. To evaluate our models, we report Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and Probability of Correct Keypoints (PCK) scores. We find that combining prosody and text as input, along with incorporating facial action unit prediction as an additional task, outperforms previous models in both DTW and PCK scores. We also discuss the challenges and limitations of speech-to-sign pose generation models to encourage future research in this domain. We release our models, results and code to foster reproducibility and encourage future research1. -
Karadöller, D. Z., Sumer, B., Ünal, E., & Ozyurek, A. (2021). Spatial language use predicts spatial memory of children: Evidence from sign, speech, and speech-plus-gesture. In T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021) (pp. 672-678). Vienna: Cognitive Science Society.Abstract
There is a strong relation between children’s exposure to
spatial terms and their later memory accuracy. In the current
study, we tested whether the production of spatial terms by
children themselves predicts memory accuracy and whether
and how language modality of these encodings modulates
memory accuracy differently. Hearing child speakers of
Turkish and deaf child signers of Turkish Sign Language
described pictures of objects in various spatial relations to each
other and later tested for their memory accuracy of these
pictures in a surprise memory task. We found that having
described the spatial relation between the objects predicted
better memory accuracy. However, the modality of these
descriptions in sign, speech, or speech-plus-gesture did not
reveal differences in memory accuracy. We discuss the
implications of these findings for the relation between spatial
language, memory, and the modality of encoding. -
Kempen, G., & Harbusch, K. (1998). A 'tree adjoining' grammar without adjoining: The case of scrambling in German. In Fourth International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Frameworks (TAG+4).
-
Kempen, G., & Hoenkamp, E. (1982). Incremental sentence generation: Implications for the structure of a syntactic processor. In J. Horecký (
Ed. ), COLING 82. Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Prague, July 5-10, 1982 (pp. 151-156). Amsterdam: North-Holland.Abstract
Human speakers often produce sentences incrementally. They can start speaking having in mind only a fragmentary idea of what they want to say, and while saying this they refine the contents underlying subsequent parts of the utterance. This capability imposes a number of constraints on the design of a syntactic processor. This paper explores these constraints and evaluates some recent computational sentence generators from the perspective of incremental production. -
Kita, S., van Gijn, I., & van der Hulst, H. (1998). Movement phases in signs and co-speech gestures, and their transcription by human coders. In Gesture and Sign-Language in Human-Computer Interaction (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence - LNCS Subseries, Vol. 1371) (pp. 23-35). Berlin, Germany: Springer-Verlag.
Abstract
The previous literature has suggested that the hand movement in co-speech gestures and signs consists of a series of phases with qualitatively different dynamic characteristics. In this paper, we propose a syntagmatic rule system for movement phases that applies to both co-speech gestures and signs. Descriptive criteria for the rule system were developed for the analysis video-recorded continuous production of signs and gesture. It involves segmenting a stream of body movement into phases and identifying different phase types. Two human coders used the criteria to analyze signs and cospeech gestures that are produced in natural discourse. It was found that the criteria yielded good inter-coder reliability. These criteria can be used for the technology of automatic recognition of signs and co-speech gestures in order to segment continuous production and identify the potentially meaningbearing phase. -
Klein, W. (2000). Changing concepts of the nature-nurture debate. In R. Hide, J. Mittelstrass, & W. Singer (
Eds. ), Changing concepts of nature at the turn of the millenium: Proceedings plenary session of the Pontifical academy of sciences, 26-29 October 1998 (pp. 289-299). Vatican City: Pontificia Academia Scientiarum. -
Klein, W. (
Ed. ). (1998). Kaleidoskop [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (112). -
Klein, W. (
Ed. ). (2000). Sprache des Rechts [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (118). -
Klein, W. (
Ed. ). (1986). Sprachverfall [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (62). -
Klein, W. (
Ed. ). (1982). Zweitspracherwerb [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (45). -
Koutamanis, E., Kootstra, G. J., Dijkstra, T., & Unsworth., S. (2021). Lexical priming as evidence for language-nonselective access in the simultaneous bilingual child's lexicon. In D. Dionne, & L.-A. Vidal Covas (
Eds. ), BUCLD 45: Proceedings of the 45th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 413-430). Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. -
Kreuzer, H. (
Ed. ). (1971). Methodische Perspektiven [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (1/2). -
Lansner, A., Sandberg, A., Petersson, K. M., & Ingvar, M. (2000). On forgetful attractor network memories. In H. Malmgren, M. Borga, & L. Niklasson (
Eds. ), Artificial neural networks in medicine and biology: Proceedings of the ANNIMAB-1 Conference, Göteborg, Sweden, 13-16 May 2000 (pp. 54-62). Heidelberg: Springer Verlag.Abstract
A recurrently connected attractor neural network with a Hebbian learning rule is currently our best ANN analogy for a piece cortex. Functionally biological memory operates on a spectrum of time scales with regard to induction and retention, and it is modulated in complex ways by sub-cortical neuromodulatory systems. Moreover, biological memory networks are commonly believed to be highly distributed and engage many co-operating cortical areas. Here we focus on the temporal aspects of induction and retention of memory in a connectionist type attractor memory model of a piece of cortex. A continuous time, forgetful Bayesian-Hebbian learning rule is described and compared to the characteristics of LTP and LTD seen experimentally. More generally, an attractor network implementing this learning rule can operate as a long-term, intermediate-term, or short-term memory. Modulation of the print-now signal of the learning rule replicates some experimental memory phenomena, like e.g. the von Restorff effect. -
Laparle, S. (2023). Moving past the lexical affiliate with a frame-based analysis of gesture meaning. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (
Eds. ), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527218.Abstract
Interpreting the meaning of co-speech gesture often involves
identifying a gesture’s ‘lexical affiliate’, the word or phrase to
which it most closely relates (Schegloff 1984). Though there is
work within gesture studies that resists this simplex mapping of
meaning from speech to gesture (e.g. de Ruiter 2000; Kendon
2014; Parrill 2008), including an evolving body of literature on
recurrent gesture and gesture families (e.g. Fricke et al. 2014; Müller 2017), it is still the lexical affiliate model that is most ap-
parent in formal linguistic models of multimodal meaning(e.g.
Alahverdzhieva et al. 2017; Lascarides and Stone 2009; Puste-
jovsky and Krishnaswamy 2021; Schlenker 2020). In this work,
I argue that the lexical affiliate should be carefully reconsidered
in the further development of such models.
In place of the lexical affiliate, I suggest a further shift
toward a frame-based, action schematic approach to gestural
meaning in line with that proposed in, for example, Parrill and
Sweetser (2004) and Müller (2017). To demonstrate the utility
of this approach I present three types of compositional gesture
sequences which I call spatial contrast, spatial embedding, and
cooperative abstract deixis. All three rely on gestural context,
rather than gesture-speech alignment, to convey interactive (i.e.
pragmatic) meaning. The centrality of gestural context to ges-
ture meaning in these examples demonstrates the necessity of
developing a model of gestural meaning independent of its in-
tegration with speech. -
Levinson, S. C. (2000). Language as nature and language as art. In J. Mittelstrass, & W. Singer (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the Symposium on ‘Changing concepts of nature and the turn of the Millennium (pp. 257-287). Vatican City: Pontificae Academiae Scientiarium Scripta Varia. -
Levinson, S. C. (2000). H.P. Grice on location on Rossel Island. In S. S. Chang, L. Liaw, & J. Ruppenhofer (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society (pp. 210-224). Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistic Society. -
Levshina, N., & Moran, S. (
Eds. ). (2021). Efficiency in human languages: Corpus evidence for universal principles [Special Issue]. Linguistics Vanguard, 7(s3). -
Levshina, N. (2023). Testing communicative and learning biases in a causal model of language evolution:A study of cues to Subject and Object. In M. Degano, T. Roberts, G. Sbardolini, & M. Schouwstra (
Eds. ), The Proceedings of the 23rd Amsterdam Colloquium (pp. 383-387). Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam. -
Liesenfeld, A., Lopez, A., & Dingemanse, M. (2023). Opening up ChatGPT: Tracking Openness, Transparency, and Accountability in Instruction-Tuned Text Generators. In CUI '23: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces. doi:10.1145/3571884.3604316.
Abstract
Large language models that exhibit instruction-following behaviour represent one of the biggest recent upheavals in conversational interfaces, a trend in large part fuelled by the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT, a proprietary large language model for text generation fine-tuned through reinforcement learning from human feedback (LLM+RLHF). We review the risks of relying on proprietary software and survey the first crop of open-source projects of comparable architecture and functionality. The main contribution of this paper is to show that openness is differentiated, and to offer scientific documentation of degrees of openness in this fast-moving field. We evaluate projects in terms of openness of code, training data, model weights, RLHF data, licensing, scientific documentation, and access methods. We find that while there is a fast-growing list of projects billing themselves as 'open source', many inherit undocumented data of dubious legality, few share the all-important instruction-tuning (a key site where human labour is involved), and careful scientific documentation is exceedingly rare. Degrees of openness are relevant to fairness and accountability at all points, from data collection and curation to model architecture, and from training and fine-tuning to release and deployment.
-
Liesenfeld, A., Lopez, A., & Dingemanse, M. (2023). The timing bottleneck: Why timing and overlap are mission-critical for conversational user interfaces, speech recognition and dialogue systems. In Proceedings of the 24rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDial 2023). doi:10.18653/v1/2023.sigdial-1.45.
Abstract
Speech recognition systems are a key intermediary in voice-driven human-computer interaction. Although speech recognition works well for pristine monologic audio, real-life use cases in open-ended interactive settings still present many challenges. We argue that timing is mission-critical for dialogue systems, and evaluate 5 major commercial ASR systems for their conversational and multilingual support. We find that word error rates for natural conversational data in 6 languages remain abysmal, and that overlap remains a key challenge (study 1). This impacts especially the recognition of conversational words (study 2), and in turn has dire consequences for downstream intent recognition (study 3). Our findings help to evaluate the current state of conversational ASR, contribute towards multidimensional error analysis and evaluation, and identify phenomena that need most attention on the way to build robust interactive speech technologies. -
Mamus, E., Speed, L. J., Ozyurek, A., & Majid, A. (2021). Sensory modality of input influences encoding of motion events in speech but not co-speech gestures. In T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021) (pp. 376-382). Vienna: Cognitive Science Society.Abstract
Visual and auditory channels have different affordances and
this is mirrored in what information is available for linguistic
encoding. The visual channel has high spatial acuity, whereas
the auditory channel has better temporal acuity. These
differences may lead to different conceptualizations of events
and affect multimodal language production. Previous studies of
motion events typically present visual input to elicit speech and
gesture. The present study compared events presented as audio-
only, visual-only, or multimodal (visual+audio) input and
assessed speech and co-speech gesture for path and manner of
motion in Turkish. Speakers with audio-only input mentioned
path more and manner less in verbal descriptions, compared to
speakers who had visual input. There was no difference in the
type or frequency of gestures across conditions, and gestures
were dominated by path-only gestures. This suggests that input
modality influences speakers’ encoding of path and manner of
motion events in speech, but not in co-speech gestures. -
McQueen, J. M., & Cutler, A. (1998). Spotting (different kinds of) words in (different kinds of) context. In R. Mannell, & J. Robert-Ribes (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 6 (pp. 2791-2794). Sydney: ICSLP.Abstract
The results of a word-spotting experiment are presented in which Dutch listeners tried to spot different types of bisyllabic Dutch words embedded in different types of nonsense contexts. Embedded verbs were not reliably harder to spot than embedded nouns; this suggests that nouns and verbs are recognised via the same basic processes. Iambic words were no harder to spot than trochaic words, suggesting that trochaic words are not in principle easier to recognise than iambic words. Words were harder to spot in consonantal contexts (i.e., contexts which themselves could not be words) than in longer contexts which contained at least one vowel (i.e., contexts which, though not words, were possible words of Dutch). A control experiment showed that this difference was not due to acoustic differences between the words in each context. The results support the claim that spoken-word recognition is sensitive to the viability of sound sequences as possible words. -
McQueen, J. M., Cutler, A., & Norris, D. (2000). Positive and negative influences of the lexicon on phonemic decision-making. In B. Yuan, T. Huang, & X. Tang (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 3 (pp. 778-781). Beijing: China Military Friendship Publish.Abstract
Lexical knowledge influences how human listeners make decisions about speech sounds. Positive lexical effects (faster responses to target sounds in words than in nonwords) are robust across several laboratory tasks, while negative effects (slower responses to targets in more word-like nonwords than in less word-like nonwords) have been found in phonetic decision tasks but not phoneme monitoring tasks. The present experiments tested whether negative lexical effects are therefore a task-specific consequence of the forced choice required in phonetic decision. We compared phoneme monitoring and phonetic decision performance using the same Dutch materials in each task. In both experiments there were positive lexical effects, but no negative lexical effects. We observe that in all studies showing negative lexical effects, the materials were made by cross-splicing, which meant that they contained perceptual evidence supporting the lexically-consistent phonemes. Lexical knowledge seems to influence phonemic decision-making only when there is evidence for the lexically-consistent phoneme in the speech signal. -
McQueen, J. M., Cutler, A., & Norris, D. (2000). Why Merge really is autonomous and parsimonious. In A. Cutler, J. M. McQueen, & R. Zondervan (
Eds. ), Proceedings of SWAP (Workshop on Spoken Word Access Processes) (pp. 47-50). Nijmegen: Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics.Abstract
We briefly describe the Merge model of phonemic decision-making, and, in the light of general arguments about the possible role of feedback in spoken-word recognition, defend Merge's feedforward structure. Merge not only accounts adequately for the data, without invoking feedback connections, but does so in a parsimonious manner. -
Merkx, D., & Frank, S. L. (2021). Human sentence processing: Recurrence or attention? In E. Chersoni, N. Hollenstein, C. Jacobs, Y. Oseki, L. Prévot, & E. Santus (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL 2021) (pp. 12-22). Stroudsburg, PA, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). doi:10.18653/v1/2021.cmcl-1.2.Abstract
Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have long been an architecture of interest for computational models of human sentence processing. The recently introduced Transformer architecture outperforms RNNs on many natural language processing tasks but little is known about its ability to model human language processing. We compare Transformer- and RNN-based language models’ ability to account for measures of human reading effort. Our analysis shows Transformers to outperform RNNs in explaining self-paced reading times and neural activity during reading English sentences, challenging the widely held idea that human sentence processing involves recurrent and immediate processing and provides evidence for cue-based retrieval. -
Merkx, D., Frank, S. L., & Ernestus, M. (2021). Semantic sentence similarity: Size does not always matter. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2021 (pp. 4393-4397). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2021-1464.
Abstract
This study addresses the question whether visually grounded speech recognition (VGS) models learn to capture sentence semantics without access to any prior linguistic knowledge. We produce synthetic and natural spoken versions of a well known semantic textual similarity database and show that our VGS model produces embeddings that correlate well with human semantic similarity judgements. Our results show that a model trained on a small image-caption database outperforms two models trained on much larger databases, indicating that database size is not all that matters. We also investigate the importance of having multiple captions per image and find that this is indeed helpful even if the total number of images is lower, suggesting that paraphrasing is a valuable learning signal. While the general trend in the field is to create ever larger datasets to train models on, our findings indicate other characteristics of the database can just as important. -
Mudd, K., Lutzenberger, H., De Vos, C., & De Boer, B. (2021). Social structure and lexical uniformity: A case study of gender differences in the Kata Kolok community. In T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021) (pp. 2692-2698). Vienna: Cognitive Science Society.Abstract
Language emergence is characterized by a high degree of lex-
ical variation. It has been suggested that the speed at which
lexical conventionalization occurs depends partially on social
structure. In large communities, individuals receive input from
many sources, creating a pressure for lexical convergence.
In small, insular communities, individuals can remember id-
iolects and share common ground with interlocuters, allow-
ing these communities to retain a high degree of lexical vari-
ation. We look at lexical variation in Kata Kolok, a sign lan-
guage which emerged six generations ago in a Balinese vil-
lage, where women tend to have more tightly-knit social net-
works than men. We test if there are differing degrees of lexical
uniformity between women and men by reanalyzing a picture
description task in Kata Kolok. We find that women’s produc-
tions exhibit less lexical uniformity than men’s. One possible
explanation of this finding is that women’s more tightly-knit
social networks allow for remembering idiolects, alleviating
the pressure for lexical convergence, but social network data
from the Kata Kolok community is needed to support this ex-
planation. -
Nabrotzky, J., Ambrazaitis, G., Zellers, M., & House, D. (2023). Temporal alignment of manual gestures’ phase transitions with lexical and post-lexical accentual F0 peaks in spontaneous Swedish interaction. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (
Eds. ), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527194.Abstract
Many studies investigating the temporal alignment of co-speech
gestures to acoustic units in the speech signal find a close
coupling of the gestural landmarks and pitch accents or the
stressed syllable of pitch-accented words. In English, a pitch
accent is anchored in the lexically stressed syllable. Hence, it is
unclear whether it is the lexical phonological dimension of
stress, or the phrase-level prominence that determines the
details of speech-gesture synchronization. This paper explores
the relation between gestural phase transitions and accentual F0
peaks in Stockholm Swedish, which exhibits a lexical pitch
accent distinction. When produced with phrase-level
prominence, there are three different configurations of
lexicality of F0 peaks and the status of the syllable it is aligned
with. Through analyzing the alignment of the different F0 peaks
with gestural onsets in spontaneous dyadic conversations, we
aim to contribute to our understanding of the role of lexical
prosodic phonology in the co-production of speech and gesture.
The results, though limited by a small dataset, still suggest
differences between the three types of peaks concerning which
types of gesture phase onsets they tend to align with, and how
well these landmarks align with each other, although these
differences did not reach significance. -
Norris, D., Cutler, A., McQueen, J. M., Butterfield, S., & Kearns, R. K. (2000). Language-universal constraints on the segmentation of English. In A. Cutler, J. M. McQueen, & R. Zondervan (
Eds. ), Proceedings of SWAP (Workshop on Spoken Word Access Processes) (pp. 43-46). Nijmegen: Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics.Abstract
Two word-spotting experiments are reported that examine whether the Possible-Word Constraint (PWC) [1] is a language-specific or language-universal strategy for the segmentation of continuous speech. The PWC disfavours parses which leave an impossible residue between the end of a candidate word and a known boundary. The experiments examined cases where the residue was either a CV syllable with a lax vowel, or a CVC syllable with a schwa. Although neither syllable context is a possible word in English, word-spotting in both contexts was easier than with a context consisting of a single consonant. The PWC appears to be language-universal rather than language-specific. -
Norris, D., Cutler, A., & McQueen, J. M. (2000). The optimal architecture for simulating spoken-word recognition. In C. Davis, T. Van Gelder, & R. Wales (
Eds. ), Cognitive Science in Australia, 2000: Proceedings of the Fifth Biennial Conference of the Australasian Cognitive Science Society. Adelaide: Causal Productions.Abstract
Simulations explored the inability of the TRACE model of spoken-word recognition to model the effects on human listening of subcategorical mismatch in word forms. The source of TRACE's failure lay not in interactive connectivity, not in the presence of inter-word competition, and not in the use of phonemic representations, but in the need for continuously optimised interpretation of the input. When an analogue of TRACE was allowed to cycle to asymptote on every slice of input, an acceptable simulation of the subcategorical mismatch data was achieved. Even then, however, the simulation was not as close as that produced by the Merge model, which has inter-word competition, phonemic representations and continuous optimisation (but no interactive connectivity). -
Offrede, T., Mishra, C., Skantze, G., Fuchs, S., & Mooshammer, C. (2023). Do Humans Converge Phonetically When Talking to a Robot? In R. Skarnitzl, & J. Volin (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 3507-3511). Prague: GUARANT International.Abstract
Phonetic convergence—i.e., adapting one’s speech
towards that of an interlocutor—has been shown
to occur in human-human conversations as well as
human-machine interactions. Here, we investigate
the hypothesis that human-to-robot convergence is
influenced by the human’s perception of the robot
and by the conversation’s topic. We conducted a
within-subjects experiment in which 33 participants
interacted with two robots differing in their eye gaze
behavior—one looked constantly at the participant;
the other produced gaze aversions, similarly to a
human’s behavior. Additionally, the robot asked
questions with increasing intimacy levels.
We observed that the speakers tended to converge
on F0 to the robots. However, this convergence
to the robots was not modulated by how the
speakers perceived them or by the topic’s intimacy.
Interestingly, speakers produced lower F0 means
when talking about more intimate topics. We
discuss these findings in terms of current theories of
conversational convergence. -
Otake, T., & Cutler, A. (2000). A set of Japanese word cohorts rated for relative familiarity. In B. Yuan, T. Huang, & X. Tang (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing: Vol. 3 (pp. 766-769). Beijing: China Military Friendship Publish.Abstract
A database is presented of relative familiarity ratings for 24 sets of Japanese words, each set comprising words overlapping in the initial portions. These ratings are useful for the generation of material sets for research in the recognition of spoken words. -
Ozyurek, A. (1998). An analysis of the basic meaning of Turkish demonstratives in face-to-face conversational interaction. In S. Santi, I. Guaitella, C. Cave, & G. Konopczynski (
Eds. ), Oralite et gestualite: Communication multimodale, interaction: actes du colloque ORAGE 98 (pp. 609-614). Paris: L'Harmattan. -
Ozyurek, A., & Ozcaliskan, S. (2000). How do children learn to conflate manner and path in their speech and gestures? Differences in English and Turkish. In E. V. Clark (
Ed. ), The proceedings of the Thirtieth Child Language Research Forum (pp. 77-85). Stanford: CSLI Publications. -
Pouw, W., Wit, J., Bögels, S., Rasenberg, M., Milivojevic, B., & Ozyurek, A. (2021). Semantically related gestures move alike: Towards a distributional semantics of gesture kinematics. In V. G. Duffy (
Ed. ), Digital human modeling and applications in health, safety, ergonomics and risk management. human body, motion and behavior:12th International Conference, DHM 2021, Held as Part of the 23rd HCI International Conference, HCII 2021 (pp. 269-287). Berlin: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-77817-0_20. -
Sander, J., Lieberman, A., & Rowland, C. F. (2023). Exploring joint attention in American Sign Language: The influence of sign familiarity. In M. Goldwater, F. K. Anggoro, B. K. Hayes, & D. C. Ong (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2023) (pp. 632-638).Abstract
Children’s ability to share attention with another social partner (i.e., joint attention) has been found to support language development. Despite the large amount of research examining the effects of joint attention on language in hearing population, little is known about how deaf children learning sign languages achieve joint attention with their caregivers during natural social interaction and how caregivers provide and scaffold learning opportunities for their children. The present study investigates the properties and timing of joint attention surrounding familiar and novel naming events and their relationship to children’s vocabulary. Naturalistic play sessions of caretaker-child-dyads using American Sign Language were analyzed in regards to naming events of either familiar or novel object labeling events and the surrounding joint attention events. We observed that most naming events took place in the context of a successful joint attention event and that sign familiarity was related to the timing of naming events within the joint attention events. Our results suggest that caregivers are highly sensitive to their child’s visual attention in interactions and modulate joint attention differently in the context of naming events of familiar vs. novel object labels. -
Scharenborg, O., Bouwman, G., & Boves, L. (2000). Connected digit recognition with class specific word models. In Proceedings of the COST249 Workshop on Voice Operated Telecom Services workshop (pp. 71-74).
Abstract
This work focuses on efficient use of the training material by selecting the optimal set of model topologies. We do this by training multiple word models of each word class, based on a subclassification according to a priori knowledge of the training material. We will examine classification criteria with respect to duration of the word, gender of the speaker, position of the word in the utterance, pauses in the vicinity of the word, and combinations of these. Comparative experiments were carried out on a corpus consisting of Dutch spoken connected digit strings and isolated digits, which are recorded in a wide variety of acoustic conditions. The results show, that classification based on gender of the speaker, position of the digit in the string, pauses in the vicinity of the training tokens, and models based on a combination of these criteria perform significantly better than the set with single models per digit. -
Scott, D. R., & Cutler, A. (1982). Segmental cues to syntactic structure. In Proceedings of the Institute of Acoustics 'Spectral Analysis and its Use in Underwater Acoustics' (pp. E3.1-E3.4). London: Institute of Acoustics.
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Sekine, K., & Kajikawa, T. (2023). Does the spatial distribution of a speaker's gaze and gesture impact on a listener's comprehension of discourse? In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (
Eds. ), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527208.Abstract
This study investigated the impact of a speaker's gaze direction
on a listener's comprehension of discourse. Previous research
suggests that hand gestures play a role in referent allocation,
enabling listeners to better understand the discourse. The
current study aims to determine whether the speaker's gaze
direction has a similar effect on reference resolution as co-
speech gestures. Thirty native Japanese speakers participated in
the study and were assigned to one of three conditions:
congruent, incongruent, or speech-only. Participants watched
36 videos of an actor narrating a story consisting of three
sentences with two protagonists. The speaker consistently
used hand gestures to allocate one protagonist to the lower right
and the other to the lower left space, while directing her gaze to
either space of the target person (congruent), the other person
(incongruent), or no particular space (speech-only). Participants
were required to verbally answer a question about the target
protagonist involved in an accidental event as quickly as
possible. Results indicate that participants in the congruent
condition exhibited faster reaction times than those in the
incongruent condition, although the difference was not
significant. These findings suggest that the speaker's gaze
direction is not enough to facilitate a listener's comprehension
of discourse. -
Senft, G. (2000). COME and GO in Kilivila. In B. Palmer, & P. Geraghty (
Eds. ), SICOL. Proceedings of the second international conference on Oceanic linguistics: Volume 2, Historical and descriptive studies (pp. 105-136). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. -
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. -
Seuren, P. A. M. (1982). Riorientamenti metodologici nello studio della variabilità linguistica. In D. Gambarara, & A. D'Atri (
Eds. ), Ideologia, filosofia e linguistica: Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Rende (CS) 15-17 Settembre 1978 ( (pp. 499-515). Roma: Bulzoni. -
Severijnen, G. G. A., Bosker, H. R., & McQueen, J. M. (2023). Syllable rate drives rate normalization, but is not the only factor. In R. Skarnitzl, & J. Volín (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2023) (pp. 56-60). Prague: Guarant International.Abstract
Speech is perceived relative to the speech rate in the context. It is unclear, however, what information listeners use to compute speech rate. The present study examines whether listeners use the number of
syllables per unit time (i.e., syllable rate) as a measure of speech rate, as indexed by subsequent vowel perception. We ran two rate-normalization experiments in which participants heard duration-matched word lists that contained either monosyllabic
vs. bisyllabic words (Experiment 1), or monosyllabic vs. trisyllabic pseudowords (Experiment 2). The participants’ task was to categorize an /ɑ-aː/ continuum that followed the word lists. The monosyllabic condition was perceived as slower (i.e., fewer /aː/ responses) than the bisyllabic and
trisyllabic condition. However, no difference was observed between bisyllabic and trisyllabic contexts. Therefore, while syllable rate is used in perceiving speech rate, other factors, such as fast speech processes, mean F0, and intensity, must also influence rate normalization. -
Li, Y., Wu, S., Shi, S., Tong, S., Zhang, Y., & Guo, X. (2021). Enhanced inter-brain connectivity between children and adults during cooperation: a dual EEG study. In 43RD ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE IEEE ENGINEERING IN MEDICINE & BIOLOGY SOCIETY (EMBC) (pp. 6289-6292). doi:10.1109/EMBC46164.2021.9630330.
Abstract
Previous fNIRS studies have suggested that adult-child cooperation is accompanied by increased inter-brain synchrony. However, its reflection in the electrophysiological synchrony remains unclear. In this study, we designed a naturalistic and well-controlled adult-child interaction paradigm using a tangram solving video game, and recorded dual-EEG from child and adult dyads during cooperative and individual conditions. By calculating the directed inter-brain connectivity in the theta and alpha bands, we found that the inter-brain frontal network was more densely connected and stronger in strength during the cooperative than the individual condition when the adult was watching the child playing. Moreover, the inter-brain network across different dyads shared more common information flows from the player to the observer during cooperation, but was more individually different in solo play. The results suggest an enhancement in inter-brain EEG interactions during adult-child cooperation. However, the enhancement was evident in all cooperative cases but partly depended on the role of participants. -
Siahaan, P., & Wijaya Rajeg, G. P. (2023). Multimodal language use in Indonesian: Recurrent gestures associated with negation. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (
Eds. ), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527196.Abstract
This paper presents research findings on manual gestures
associated with negation in Indonesian, utilizing data sourced
from talk shows available on YouTube. The study reveals that
Indonesian speakers employ six recurrent negation gestures,
which have been observed in various languages worldwide.
This suggests that gestures exhibiting a stable form-meaning
relationship and recurring frequently in relation to negation are
prevalent around the globe, although their distribution may
differ across cultures and languages. Furthermore, the paper
demonstrates that negation gestures are not strictly tied to
verbal negation. Overall, the aim of this paper is to contribute
to a deeper understanding of the conventional usage and cross-
linguistic distribution of recurrent gestures. -
Stern, G. (2023). On embodied use of recognitional demonstratives. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (
Eds. ), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527204.Abstract
This study focuses on embodied uses of recognitional
demonstratives. While multimodal conversation analytic
studies have shown how gesture and speech interact in the
elaboration of exophoric references, little attention has been
given to the multimodal configuration of other types of
referential actions. Based on a video-recorded corpus of
professional meetings held in French, this qualitative study
shows that a subtype of deictic references, namely recognitional
references, are frequently associated with iconic gestures, thus
challenging the traditional distinction between exophoric and
endophoric uses of deixis. -
Uhrig, P., Payne, E., Pavlova, I., Burenko, I., Dykes, N., Baltazani, M., Burrows, E., Hale, S., Torr, P., & Wilson, A. (2023). Studying time conceptualisation via speech, prosody, and hand gesture: Interweaving manual and computational methods of analysis. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (
Eds. ), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527220.Abstract
This paper presents a new interdisciplinary methodology for the
analysis of future conceptualisations in big messy media data.
More specifically, it focuses on the depictions of post-Covid
futures by RT during the pandemic, i.e. on data which are of
interest not just from the perspective of academic research but
also of policy engagement. The methodology has been
developed to support the scaling up of fine-grained data-driven
analysis of discourse utterances larger than individual lexical
units which are centred around ‘will’ + the infinitive. It relies
on the true integration of manual analytical and computational
methods and tools in researching three modalities – textual,
prosodic1, and gestural. The paper describes the process of
building a computational infrastructure for the collection and
processing of video data, which aims to empower the manual
analysis. It also shows how manual analysis can motivate the
development of computational tools. The paper presents
individual computational tools to demonstrate how the
combination of human and machine approaches to analysis can
reveal new manifestations of cohesion between gesture and
prosody. To illustrate the latter, the paper shows how the
boundaries of prosodic units can work to help determine the
boundaries of gestural units for future conceptualisations. -
Uluşahin, O., Bosker, H. R., McQueen, J. M., & Meyer, A. S. (2023). No evidence for convergence to sub-phonemic F2 shifts in shadowing. In R. Skarnitzl, & J. Volín (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2023) (pp. 96-100). Prague: Guarant International.Abstract
Over the course of a conversation, interlocutors sound more and more like each other in a process called convergence. However, the automaticity and grain size of convergence are not well established. This study therefore examined whether female native Dutch speakers converge to large yet sub-phonemic shifts in the F2 of the vowel /e/. Participants first performed a short reading task to establish baseline F2s for the vowel /e/, then shadowed 120 target words (alongside 360 fillers) which contained one instance of a manipulated vowel /e/ where the F2 had been shifted down to that of the vowel /ø/. Consistent exposure to large (sub-phonemic) downward shifts in F2 did not result in convergence. The results raise issues for theories which view convergence as a product of automatic integration between perception and production. -
Van Valin Jr., R. D. (2000). Focus structure or abstract syntax? A role and reference grammar account of some ‘abstract’ syntactic phenomena. In Z. Estrada Fernández, & I. Barreras Aguilar (
Eds. ), Memorias del V Encuentro Internacional de Lingüística en el Noroeste: (2 v.) Estudios morfosintácticos (pp. 39-62). Hermosillo: Editorial Unison. -
Vernes, S. C., Janik, V. M., Fitch, W. T., & Slater, P. J. B. (
Eds. ). (2021). Vocal learning in animals and humans [Special Issue]. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences, 376. -
Vogel, C., Koutsombogera, M., Murat, A. C., Khosrobeigi, Z., & Ma, X. (2023). Gestural linguistic context vectors encode gesture meaning. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (
Eds. ), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527176.Abstract
Linguistic context vectors are adapted for measuring the linguistic contexts that accompany gestures and comparable co-linguistic behaviours. Focusing on gestural semiotic types, it is demonstrated that gestural linguistic context vectors carry information associated with gesture. It is suggested that these may be used to approximate gesture meaning in a similar manner to the approximation of word meaning by context vectors. -
Weber, A. (1998). Listening to nonnative language which violates native assimilation rules. In D. Duez (
Ed. ), Proceedings of the European Scientific Communication Association workshop: Sound patterns of Spontaneous Speech (pp. 101-104).Abstract
Recent studies using phoneme detection tasks have shown that spoken-language processing is neither facilitated nor interfered with by optional assimilation, but is inhibited by violation of obligatory assimilation. Interpretation of these results depends on an assessment of their generality, specifically, whether they also obtain when listeners are processing nonnative language. Two separate experiments are presented in which native listeners of German and native listeners of Dutch had to detect a target fricative in legal monosyllabic Dutch nonwords. All of the nonwords were correct realisations in standard Dutch. For German listeners, however, half of the nonwords contained phoneme strings which violate the German fricative assimilation rule. Whereas the Dutch listeners showed no significant effects, German listeners detected the target fricative faster when the German fricative assimilation was violated than when no violation occurred. The results might suggest that violation of assimilation rules does not have to make processing more difficult per se. -
Weber, A. (2000). Phonotactic and acoustic cues for word segmentation in English. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 2000) (pp. 782-785).
Abstract
This study investigates the influence of both phonotactic and acoustic cues on the segmentation of spoken English. Listeners detected embedded English words in nonsense sequences (word spotting). Words aligned with phonotactic boundaries were easier to detect than words without such alignment. Acoustic cues to boundaries could also have signaled word boundaries, especially when word onsets lacked phonotactic alignment. However, only one of several durational boundary cues showed a marginally significant correlation with response times (RTs). The results suggest that word segmentation in English is influenced primarily by phonotactic constraints and only secondarily by acoustic aspects of the speech signal. -
Weber, A. (2000). The role of phonotactics in the segmentation of native and non-native continuous speech. In A. Cutler, J. M. McQueen, & R. Zondervan (
Eds. ), Proceedings of SWAP, Workshop on Spoken Word Access Processes. Nijmegen: MPI for Psycholinguistics.Abstract
Previous research has shown that listeners make use of their knowledge of phonotactic constraints to segment speech into individual words. The present study investigates the influence of phonotactics when segmenting a non-native language. German and English listeners detected embedded English words in nonsense sequences. German listeners also had knowledge of English, but English listeners had no knowledge of German. Word onsets were either aligned with a syllable boundary or not, according to the phonotactics of the two languages. Words aligned with either German or English phonotactic boundaries were easier for German listeners to detect than words without such alignment. Responses of English listeners were influenced primarily by English phonotactic alignment. The results suggest that both native and non-native phonotactic constraints influence lexical segmentation of a non-native, but familiar, language. -
Wittek, A. (1998). Learning verb meaning via adverbial modification: Change-of-state verbs in German and the adverb "wieder" again. In A. Greenhill, M. Hughes, H. Littlefield, & H. Walsh (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 779-790). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. -
Witteman, J., Karaseva, E., Schiller, N. O., & McQueen, J. M. (2023). What does successful L2 vowel acquisition depend on? A conceptual replication. In R. Skarnitzl, & J. Volín (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2023) (pp. 928-931). Prague: Guarant International.Abstract
It has been suggested that individual variation in vowel compactness of the native language (L1) and the distance between L1 vowels and vowels in the second language (L2) predict successful L2 vowel acquisition. Moreover, general articulatory skills have been proposed to account for variation in vowel compactness. In the present work, we conceptually replicate a previous study to test these hypotheses with a large sample size, a new language pair and a
new vowel pair. We find evidence that individual variation in L1 vowel compactness has opposing effects for two different vowels. We do not find evidence that individual variation in L1 compactness
is explained by general articulatory skills. We conclude that the results found previously might be specific to sub-groups of L2 learners and/or specific sub-sets of vowel pairs. -
Zhang, Y., Ding, R., Frassinelli, D., Tuomainen, J., Klavinskis-Whiting, S., & Vigliocco, G. (2021). Electrophysiological signatures of second language multimodal comprehension. In T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021) (pp. 2971-2977). Vienna: Cognitive Science Society.Abstract
Language is multimodal: non-linguistic cues, such as prosody,
gestures and mouth movements, are always present in face-to-
face communication and interact to support processing. In this
paper, we ask whether and how multimodal cues affect L2
processing by recording EEG for highly proficient bilinguals
when watching naturalistic materials. For each word, we
quantified surprisal and the informativeness of prosody,
gestures, and mouth movements. We found that each cue
modulates the N400: prosodic accentuation, meaningful
gestures, and informative mouth movements all reduce N400.
Further, effects of meaningful gestures but not mouth
informativeness are enhanced by prosodic accentuation,
whereas effects of mouth are enhanced by meaningful gestures
but reduced by beat gestures. Compared with L1, L2
participants benefit less from cues and their interactions, except
for meaningful gestures and mouth movements. Thus, in real-
world language comprehension, L2 comprehenders use
multimodal cues just as L1 speakers albeit to a lesser extent. -
Zhang, Y., Amatuni, A., Cain, E., Wang, X., Crandall, D., & Yu, C. (2021). Human learners integrate visual and linguistic information cross-situational verb learning. In T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021) (pp. 2267-2273). Vienna: Cognitive Science Society.Abstract
Learning verbs is challenging because it is difficult to infer the precise meaning of a verb when there are a multitude of relations that one can derive from a single event. To study this verb learning challenge, we used children's egocentric view collected from naturalistic toy-play interaction as learning materials and investigated how visual and linguistic information provided in individual naming moments as well as cross-situational information provided from multiple learning moments can help learners resolve this mapping problem using the Human Simulation Paradigm. Our results show that learners benefit from seeing children's egocentric views compared to third-person observations. In addition, linguistic information can help learners identify the correct verb meaning by eliminating possible meanings that do not belong to the linguistic category. Learners are also able to integrate visual and linguistic information both within and across learning situations to reduce the ambiguity in the space of possible verb meanings. -
Zimianiti, E., Dimitrakopoulou, M., & Tsangalidis, A. (2021). Τhematic roles in dementia: The case of psychological verbs. In A. Botinis (
Ed. ), ExLing 2021: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference of Experimental Linguistics (pp. 269-272). Athens, Greece: ExLing Society.Abstract
This study investigates the difficulty of people with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), mild and moderate Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in the production and comprehension of psychological verbs, as thematic realization may involve both the canonical and non-canonical realization of arguments. More specifically, we aim to examine whether there is a deficit in the mapping of syntactic and semantic representations in psych-predicates regarding Greek-speaking individuals with MCI and AD, and whether the linguistic abilities associated with θ-role assignment decrease as the disease progresses. Moreover, given the decline of cognitive abilities in people with MCI and AD, we explore the effects of components of memory (Semantic, Episodic, and Working Memory) on the assignment of thematic roles in constructions with psychological verbs.
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