Publications

Displaying 1 - 100 of 161
  • Aristar-Dry, H., Drude, S., Windhouwer, M., Gippert, J., & Nevskaya, I. (2012). „Rendering Endangered Lexicons Interoperable through Standards Harmonization”: The RELISH Project. In N. Calzolari (Ed.), Proceedings of LREC 2012: 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 766-770). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

    Abstract

    The RELISH project promotes language-oriented research by addressing a two-pronged problem: (1) the lack of harmonization between digital standards for lexical information in Europe and America, and (2) the lack of interoperability among existing lexicons of endangered languages, in particular those created with the Shoebox/Toolbox lexicon building software. The cooperation partners in the RELISH project are the University of Frankfurt (FRA), the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI Nijmegen), and Eastern Michigan University, the host of the Linguist List (ILIT). The project aims at harmonizing key European and American digital standards whose divergence has hitherto impeded international collaboration on language technology for resource creation and analysis, as well as web services for archive access. Focusing on several lexicons of endangered languages, the project will establish a unified way of referencing lexicon structure and linguistic concepts, and develop a procedure for migrating these heterogeneous lexicons to a standards-compliant format. Once developed, the procedure will be generalizable to the large store of lexical resources involved in the LEGO and DoBeS projects.
  • Bauer, B. L. M. (2012). Functions of nominal apposition in Vulgar and Late Latin: Change in progress? In F. Biville, M.-K. Lhommé, & D. Vallat (Eds.), Latin vulgaire – latin tardif IX (pp. 207-220). Lyon: Maison de l’Orient et de la Méditerranné.

    Abstract

    Analysis of the functions of nominal apposition in a number of Latin authors representing different periods, genres, and
    linguistic registers shows (1) that nominal apposition in Latin had a wide variety of functions; (2) that genre had some
    effect on functional use; (3) that change did not affect semantic fields as such; and (4) that with time the occurrence of
    apposition increasingly came to depend on the semantic field and within the semantic field on the individual lexical items.
    The ‘per-word’ treatment –also attested for the structural development of nominal apposition– underscores the specific
    characteristics of nominal apposition as a phenomenon at the cross-roads of syntax and derivational morphology
  • Benazzo, S., Flecken, M., & Soroli, E. (Eds.). (2012). Typological perspectives on language and thought: Thinking for speaking in L2. [Special Issue]. Language, Interaction and Acquisition, 3(2).
  • Berck, P., Bibiko, H.-J., Kemps-Snijders, M., Russel, A., & Wittenburg, P. (2006). Ontology-based language archive utilization. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006) (pp. 2295-2298).
  • Bergmann, C., Boves, L., & Ten Bosch, L. (2012). A model of the Headturn Preference Procedure: Linking cognitive processes to overt behaviour. In Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE Conference on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics (IEEE ICDL-EpiRob 2012), San Diego, CA.

    Abstract

    The study of first language acquisition still strongly relies on behavioural methods to measure underlying linguistic abilities. In the present paper, we closely examine and model one such method, the headturn preference procedure (HPP), which is widely used to measure infant speech segmentation and word recognition abilities Our model takes real speech as input, and only uses basic sensory processing and cognitive capabilities to simulate observable behaviour.We show that the familiarity effect found in many HPP experiments can be simulated without using the phonetic and phonological skills necessary for segmenting test sentences into words. The explicit modelling of the process that converts the result of the cognitive processing of the test sentences into observable behaviour uncovered two issues that can lead to null-results in HPP studies. Our simulations show that caution is needed in making inferences about underlying language skills from behaviour in HPP experiments. The simulations also generated questions that must be addressed in future HPP studies.
  • Bögels, S., Barr, D., Garrod, S., & Kessler, K. (2013). "Are we still talking about the same thing?" MEG reveals perspective-taking in response to pragmatic violations, but not in anticipation. In M. Knauff, N. Pauen, I. Sebanz, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2013) (pp. 215-220). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. Retrieved from http://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2013/papers/0066/index.html.

    Abstract

    The current study investigates whether mentalizing, or taking the perspective of your interlocutor, plays an essential role throughout a conversation or whether it is mostly used in reaction to misunderstandings. This study is the first to use a brain-imaging method, MEG, to answer this question. In a first phase of the experiment, MEG participants interacted "live" with a confederate who set naming precedents for certain pictures. In a later phase, these precedents were sometimes broken by a speaker who named the same picture in a different way. This could be done by the same speaker, who set the precedent, or by a different speaker. Source analysis of MEG data showed that in the 800 ms before the naming, when the picture was already on the screen, episodic memory and language areas were activated, but no mentalizing areas, suggesting that the speaker's naming intentions were not anticipated by the listener on the basis of shared experiences. Mentalizing areas only became activated after the same speaker had broken a precedent, which we interpret as a reaction to the violation of conversational pragmatics.
  • Bone, D., Ramanarayanan, V., Narayanan, S., Hoedemaker, R. S., & Gordon, P. C. (2013). Analyzing eye-voice coordination in rapid automatized naming. In F. Bimbot, C. Cerisara, G. Fougeron, L. Gravier, L. Lamel, F. Pelligrino, & P. Perrier (Eds.), INTERSPEECH-2013: 14thAnnual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 2425-2429). ISCA Archive. Retrieved from http://www.isca-speech.org/archive/interspeech_2013/i13_2425.html.

    Abstract

    Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) is a powerful tool for pre- dicting future reading skill. A person’s ability to quickly name symbols as they scan a table is related to higher-level reading proficiency in adults and is predictive of future literacy gains in children. However, noticeable differences are present in the strategies or patterns within groups having similar task comple- tion times. Thus, a further stratification of RAN dynamics may lead to better characterization and later intervention to support reading skill acquisition. In this work, we analyze the dynamics of the eyes, voice, and the coordination between the two during performance. It is shown that fast performers are more similar to each other than to slow performers in their patterns, but not vice versa. Further insights are provided about the patterns of more proficient subjects. For instance, fast performers tended to exhibit smoother behavior contours, suggesting a more sta- ble perception-production process.
  • Brandt, M., Nitschke, S., & Kidd, E. (2012). Experience and processing of relative clauses in German. In A. K. Biller, E. Y. Chung, & A. E. Kimball (Eds.), Proceedings of the 36th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 36) (pp. 87-100). Boston, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Broeder, D., Offenga, F., Wittenburg, P., Van de Kamp, P., Nathan, D., & Strömqvist, S. (2006). Technologies for a federation of language resource archive. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006) (pp. 2291-2294).
  • Broeder, D., Van Uytvanck, D., & Senft, G. (2012). Citing on-line language resources. In N. Calzolari (Ed.), Proceedings of LREC 2012: 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 1391-1394). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

    Abstract

    Although the possibility of referring or citing on-line data from publications is seen at least theoretically as an important means to provide immediate testable proof or simple illustration of a line of reasoning, the practice has not been wide-spread yet and no extensive experience has been gained about the possibilities and problems of referring to raw data-sets. This paper makes a case to investigate the possibility and need of persistent data visualization services that facilitate the inspection and evaluation of the cited data.
  • Broeder, D., Van Veenendaal, R., Nathan, D., & Strömqvist, S. (2006). A grid of language resource repositories. In Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing.
  • Broeder, D., Claus, A., Offenga, F., Skiba, R., Trilsbeek, P., & Wittenburg, P. (2006). LAMUS: The Language Archive Management and Upload System. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006) (pp. 2291-2294).
  • Broeder, D., Van Uytvanck, D., Gavrilidou, M., Trippel, T., & Windhouwer, M. (2012). Standardizing a component metadata infrastructure. In N. Calzolari (Ed.), Proceedings of LREC 2012: 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 1387-1390). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

    Abstract

    This paper describes the status of the standardization efforts of a Component Metadata approach for describing Language Resources with metadata. Different linguistic and Language & Technology communities as CLARIN, META-SHARE and NaLiDa use this component approach and see its standardization of as a matter for cooperation that has the possibility to create a large interoperable domain of joint metadata. Starting with an overview of the component metadata approach together with the related semantic interoperability tools and services as the ISOcat data category registry and the relation registry we explain the standardization plan and efforts for component metadata within ISO TC37/SC4. Finally, we present information about uptake and plans of the use of component metadata within the three mentioned linguistic and L&T communities.
  • Broersma, M. (2006). Nonnative listeners rely less on phonetic information for phonetic categorization than native listeners. In Variation, detail and representation: 10th Conference on Laboratory Phonology (pp. 109-110).
  • Broersma, M. (2006). Accident - execute: Increased activation in nonnative listening. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2006 (pp. 1519-1522).

    Abstract

    Dutch and English listeners’ perception of English words with partially overlapping onsets (e.g., accident- execute) was investigated. Partially overlapping words remained active longer for nonnative listeners, causing an increase of lexical competition in nonnative compared with native listening.
  • Broersma, M. (2012). Lexical representation of perceptually difficult second-language words [Abstract]. Program abstracts from the 164th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 132(3), 2053.

    Abstract

    This study investigates the lexical representation of second-language words that contain difficult to distinguish phonemes. Dutch and English listeners' perception of partially onset-overlapping word pairs like DAFFOdil-DEFIcit and minimal pairs like flash-flesh, was assessed with two cross-modal priming experiments, examining two stages of lexical processing: activation of intended and mismatching lexical representations (Exp.1) and competition between those lexical representations (Exp.2). Exp.1 shows that truncated primes like daffo- and defi- activated lexical representations of mismatching words (either deficit or daffodil) more for L2 than L1 listeners. Exp.2 shows that for minimal pairs, matching primes (prime: flash, target: FLASH) facilitated recognition of visual targets for L1 and L2 listeners alike, whereas mismatching primes (flesh, FLASH) inhibited recognition consistently for L1 listeners but only in a minority of cases for L2 listeners; in most cases, for them, primes facilitated recognition of both words equally strongly. Importantly, all listeners experienced a combination of facilitation and inhibition (and all items sometimes caused facilitation and sometimes inhibition). These results suggest that for all participants, some of the minimal pairs were represented with separate, native-like lexical representations, whereas other pairs were stored as homophones. The nature of the L2 lexical representations thus varied strongly even within listeners.
  • Brugman, H., Malaisé, V., & Gazendam, L. (2006). A web based general thesaurus browser to support indexing of television and radio programs. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006) (pp. 1488-1491).
  • Casillas, M., & Frank, M. C. (2012). Cues to turn boundary prediction in adults and preschoolers. In S. Brown-Schmidt, J. Ginzburg, & S. Larsson (Eds.), Proceedings of SemDial 2012 (SeineDial): The 16th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (pp. 61-69). Paris: Université Paris-Diderot.

    Abstract

    Conversational turns often proceed with very brief pauses between speakers. In order to maintain “no gap, no overlap” turntaking, we must be able to anticipate when an ongoing utterance will end, tracking the current speaker for upcoming points of potential floor exchange. The precise set of cues that listeners use for turn-end boundary anticipation is not yet established. We used an eyetracking paradigm to measure adults’ and children’s online turn processing as they watched videos of conversations in their native language (English) and a range of other languages they did not speak. Both adults and children anticipated speaker transitions effectively. In addition, we observed evidence of turn-boundary anticipation for questions even in languages that were unknown to participants, suggesting that listeners’ success in turn-end anticipation does not rely solely on lexical information.
  • Casillas, M., & Frank, M. C. (2013). The development of predictive processes in children’s discourse understanding. In M. Knauff, M. Pauen, N. Sebanz, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. (pp. 299-304). Austin,TX: Cognitive Society.

    Abstract

    We investigate children’s online predictive processing as it occurs naturally, in conversation. We showed 1–7 year-olds short videos of improvised conversation between puppets, controlling for available linguistic information through phonetic manipulation. Even one- and two-year-old children made accurate and spontaneous predictions about when a turn-switch would occur: they gazed at the upcoming speaker before they heard a response begin. This predictive skill relies on both lexical and prosodic information together, and is not tied to either type of information alone. We suggest that children integrate prosodic, lexical, and visual information to effectively predict upcoming linguistic material in conversation.
  • Chen, Y., & Braun, B. (2006). Prosodic realization in information structure categories in standard Chinese. In R. Hoffmann, & H. Mixdorff (Eds.), Speech Prosody 2006. Dresden: TUD Press.

    Abstract

    This paper investigates the prosodic realization of information
    structure categories in Standard Chinese. A number of proper
    names with different tonal combinations were elicited as a
    grammatical subject in five pragmatic contexts. Results show
    that both duration and F0 range of the tonal realizations were
    adjusted to signal the information structure categories (i.e.
    theme vs. rheme and background vs. focus). Rhemes
    consistently induced a longer duration and a more expanded F0
    range than themes. Focus, compared to background, generally
    induced lengthening and F0 range expansion (the presence and
    magnitude of which, however, are dependent on the tonal
    structure of the proper names). Within the rheme focus
    condition, corrective rheme focus induced more expanded F0
    range than normal rheme focus.
  • Chen, A. (2006). Variations in the marking of focus in child language. In Variation, detail and representation: 10th Conference on Laboratory Phonology (pp. 113-114).
  • Chen, A. (2006). Interface between information structure and intonation in Dutch wh-questions. In R. Hoffmann, & H. Mixdorff (Eds.), Speech Prosody 2006. Dresden: TUD Press.

    Abstract

    This study set out to investigate how accent placement is pragmatically governed in WH-questions. Central to this issue are questions such as whether the intonation of the WH-word depends on the information structure of the non-WH word part, whether topical constituents can be accented, and whether constituents in the non-WH word part can be non-topical and accented. Previous approaches, based either on carefully composed examples or on read speech, differ in their treatments of these questions and consequently make opposing claims on the intonation of WH-questions. We addressed these questions by examining a corpus of 90 naturally occurring WH-questions, selected from the Spoken Dutch Corpus. Results show that the intonation of the WH-word is related to the information structure of the non-WH word part. Further, topical constituents can get accented and the accents are not necessarily phonetically reduced. Additionally, certain adverbs, which have no topical relation to the presupposition of the WH-questions, also get accented. They appear to function as a device for enhancing speaker engagement.
  • Chu, M., & Kita, S. (2012). The nature of the beneficial role of spontaneous gesture in spatial problem solving [Abstract]. Cognitive Processing; Special Issue "ICSC 2012, the 5th International Conference on Spatial Cognition: Space and Embodied Cognition". Oral Presentations, 13(Suppl. 1), S39.

    Abstract

    Spontaneous gestures play an important role in spatial problem solving. We investigated the functional role and underlying mechanism of spontaneous gestures in spatial problem solving. In Experiment 1, 132 participants were required to solve a mental rotation task (see Figure 1) without speaking. Participants gestured more frequently in difficult trials than in easy trials. In Experiment 2, 66 new participants were given two identical sets of mental rotation tasks problems, as the one used in experiment 1. Participants who were encouraged to gesture in the first set of mental rotation task problemssolved more problems correctly than those who were allowed to gesture or those who were prohibited from gesturing both in the first set and in the second set in which all participants were prohibited from gesturing. The gestures produced by the gestureencouraged group and the gesture-allowed group were not qualitatively different. In Experiment 3, 32 new participants were first given a set of mental rotation problems and then a second set of nongesturing paper folding problems. The gesture-encouraged group solved more problems correctly in the first set of mental rotation problems and the second set of non-gesturing paper folding problems. We concluded that gesture improves spatial problem solving. Furthermore, gesture has a lasting beneficial effect even when gesture is not available and the beneficial effect is problem-general.We suggested that gesture enhances spatial problem solving by provide a rich sensori-motor representation of the physical world and pick up information that is less readily available to visuo-spatial processes.
  • Collins, J. (2012). The evolution of the Greenbergian word order correlations. In T. C. Scott-Phillips, M. Tamariz, E. A. Cartmill, & J. R. Hurford (Eds.), The evolution of language. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference (EVOLANG9) (pp. 72-79). Singapore: World Scientific.
  • Connell, L., Cai, Z. G., & Holler, J. (2012). Do you see what I'm singing? Visuospatial movement biases pitch perception. In N. Miyake, D. Peebles, & R. P. Cooper (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2012) (pp. 252-257). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    The nature of the connection between musical and spatial processing is controversial. While pitch may be described in spatial terms such as “high” or “low”, it is unclear whether pitch and space are associated but separate dimensions or whether they share representational and processing resources. In the present study, we asked participants to judge whether a target vocal note was the same as (or different from) a preceding cue note. Importantly, target trials were presented as video clips where a singer sometimes gestured upward or downward while singing that target note, thus providing an alternative, concurrent source of spatial information. Our results show that pitch discrimination was significantly biased by the spatial movement in gesture. These effects were eliminated by spatial memory load but preserved under verbal memory load conditions. Together, our findings suggest that pitch and space have a shared representation such that the mental representation of pitch is audiospatial in nature.
  • Crasborn, O., Sloetjes, H., Auer, E., & Wittenburg, P. (2006). Combining video and numeric data in the analysis of sign languages with the ELAN annotation software. In C. Vetoori (Ed.), Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign languages: Lexicographic matters and didactic scenarios (pp. 82-87). Paris: ELRA.

    Abstract

    This paper describes hardware and software that can be used for the phonetic study of sign languages. The field of sign language phonetics is characterised, and the hardware that is currently in use is described. The paper focuses on the software that was developed to enable the recording of finger and hand movement data, and the additions to the ELAN annotation software that facilitate the further visualisation and analysis of the data.
  • Cristia, A., & Peperkamp, S. (2012). Generalizing without encoding specifics: Infants infer phonotactic patterns on sound classes. In A. K. Biller, E. Y. Chung, & A. E. Kimball (Eds.), Proceedings of the 36th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 36) (pp. 126-138). Somerville, Mass.: Cascadilla Press.

    Abstract

    publication expected April 2012
  • Cutler, A., Kim, J., & Otake, T. (2006). On the limits of L1 influence on non-L1 listening: Evidence from Japanese perception of Korean. In P. Warren, & C. I. Watson (Eds.), Proceedings of the 11th Australian International Conference on Speech Science & Technology (pp. 106-111).

    Abstract

    Language-specific procedures which are efficient for listening to the L1 may be applied to non-native spoken input, often to the detriment of successful listening. However, such misapplications of L1-based listening do not always happen. We propose, based on the results from two experiments in which Japanese listeners detected target sequences in spoken Korean, that an L1 procedure is only triggered if requisite L1 features are present in the input.
  • Cutler, A., & Pasveer, D. (2006). Explaining cross-linguistic differences in effects of lexical stress on spoken-word recognition. In R. Hoffmann, & H. Mixdorff (Eds.), Speech Prosody 2006. Dresden: TUD press.

    Abstract

    Experiments have revealed differences across languages in listeners’ use of stress information in recognising spoken words. Previous comparisons of the vocabulary of Spanish and English had suggested that the explanation of this asymmetry might lie in the extent to which considering stress in spokenword recognition allows rejection of unwanted competition from words embedded in other words. This hypothesis was tested on the vocabularies of Dutch and German, for which word recognition results resemble those from Spanish more than those from English. The vocabulary statistics likewise revealed that in each language, the reduction of embeddings resulting from taking stress into account is more similar to the reduction achieved in Spanish than in English.
  • Cutler, A., Eisner, F., McQueen, J. M., & Norris, D. (2006). Coping with speaker-related variation via abstract phonemic categories. In Variation, detail and representation: 10th Conference on Laboratory Phonology (pp. 31-32).
  • Cutler, A., & Bruggeman, L. (2013). Vocabulary structure and spoken-word recognition: Evidence from French reveals the source of embedding asymmetry. In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH: 14th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 2812-2816).

    Abstract

    Vocabularies contain hundreds of thousands of words built from only a handful of phonemes, so that inevitably longer words tend to contain shorter ones. In many languages (but not all) such embedded words occur more often word-initially than word-finally, and this asymmetry, if present, has farreaching consequences for spoken-word recognition. Prior research had ascribed the asymmetry to suffixing or to effects of stress (in particular, final syllables containing the vowel schwa). Analyses of the standard French vocabulary here reveal an effect of suffixing, as predicted by this account, and further analyses of an artificial variety of French reveal that extensive final schwa has an independent and additive effect in promoting the embedding asymmetry.
  • Dediu, D. (2006). Mostly out of Africa, but what did the others have to say? In A. Cangelosi, A. D. Smith, & K. Smith (Eds.), The evolution of language: proceedings of the 6th International Conference (EVOLANG6) (pp. 59-66). World Scientific.

    Abstract

    The Recent Out-of-Africa human evolutionary model seems to be generally accepted. This impression is very prevalent outside palaeoanthropological circles (including studies of language evolution), but proves to be unwarranted. This paper offers a short review of the main challenges facing ROA and concludes that alternative models based on the concept of metapopulation must be also considered. The implications of such a model for language evolution and diversity are briefly reviewed.
  • Defina, R., & Majid, A. (2012). Conceptual event units of putting and taking in two unrelated languages. In N. Miyake, D. Peebles, & R. Cooper (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2012) (pp. 1470-1475). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    People automatically chunk ongoing dynamic events into discrete units. This paper investigates whether linguistic structure is a factor in this process. We test the claim that describing an event with a serial verb construction will influence a speaker’s conceptual event structure. The grammar of Avatime (a Kwa language spoken in Ghana)requires its speakers to describe some, but not all, placement events using a serial verb construction which also encodes the preceding taking event. We tested Avatime and English speakers’ recognition memory for putting and taking events. Avatime speakers were more likely to falsely recognize putting and taking events from episodes associated with takeput serial verb constructions than from episodes associated with other constructions. English speakers showed no difference in false recognitions between episode types. This demonstrates that memory for episodes is related to the type of language used; and, moreover, across languages different conceptual representations are formed for the same physical episode, paralleling habitual linguistic practices
  • Dimitriadis, A., Kemps-Snijders, M., Wittenburg, P., Everaert, M., & Levinson, S. C. (2006). Towards a linguist's workbench supporting eScience methods. In Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing.
  • Dingemanse, M., Hammond, J., Stehouwer, H., Somasundaram, A., & Drude, S. (2012). A high speed transcription interface for annotating primary linguistic data. In Proceedings of 6th Workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities (pp. 7-12). Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.

    Abstract

    We present a new transcription mode for the annotation tool ELAN. This mode is designed to speed up the process of creating transcriptions of primary linguistic data (video and/or audio recordings of linguistic behaviour). We survey the basic transcription workflow of some commonly used tools (Transcriber, BlitzScribe, and ELAN) and describe how the new transcription interface improves on these existing implementations. We describe the design of the transcription interface and explore some further possibilities for improvement in the areas of segmentation and computational enrichment of annotations.
  • Dingemanse, M., & Majid, A. (2012). The semantic structure of sensory vocabulary in an African language. In N. Miyake, D. Peebles, & R. P. Cooper (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2012) (pp. 300-305). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    The widespread occurrence of ideophones, large classes of words specialized in evoking sensory imagery, is little known outside linguistics and anthropology. Ideophones are a common feature in many of the world’s languages but are underdeveloped in English and other Indo-European languages. Here we study the meanings of ideophones in Siwu (a Kwa language from Ghana) using a pile-sorting task. The goal was to uncover the underlying structure of the lexical space and to examine the claimed link between ideophones and perception. We found that Siwu ideophones are principally organized around fine-grained aspects of sensory perception, and map onto salient psychophysical dimensions identified in sensory science. The results ratify ideophones as dedicated sensory vocabulary and underline the relevance of ideophones for research on language and perception.
  • Dolscheid, S., Graver, C., & Casasanto, D. (2013). Spatial congruity effects reveal metaphors, not markedness. In M. Knauff, M. Pauen, N. Sebanz, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2013) (pp. 2213-2218). Austin,TX: Cognitive Science Society. Retrieved from http://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2013/papers/0405/index.html.

    Abstract

    Spatial congruity effects have often been interpreted as evidence for metaphorical thinking, but an alternative markedness-based account challenges this view. In two experiments, we directly compared metaphor and markedness explanations for spatial congruity effects, using musical pitch as a testbed. English speakers who talk about pitch in terms of spatial height were tested in speeded space-pitch compatibility tasks. To determine whether space-pitch congruency effects could be elicited by any marked spatial continuum, participants were asked to classify high- and low-frequency pitches as 'high' and 'low' or as 'front' and 'back' (both pairs of terms constitute cases of marked continuums). We found congruency effects in high/low conditions but not in front/back conditions, indicating that markedness is not sufficient to account for congruity effects (Experiment 1). A second experiment showed that congruency effects were specific to spatial words that cued a vertical schema (tall/short), and that congruity effects were not an artifact of polysemy (e.g., 'high' referring both to space and pitch). Together, these results suggest that congruency effects reveal metaphorical uses of spatial schemas, not markedness effects.
  • Dolscheid, S., Hunnius, S., Casasanto, D., & Majid, A. (2012). The sound of thickness: Prelinguistic infants' associations of space and pitch. In N. Miyake, D. Peebles, & R. P. Cooper (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2012) (pp. 306-311). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    People often talk about musical pitch in terms of spatial metaphors. In English, for instance, pitches can be high or low, whereas in other languages pitches are described as thick or thin. According to psychophysical studies, metaphors in language can also shape people’s nonlinguistic space-pitch representations. But does language establish mappings between space and pitch in the first place or does it modify preexisting associations? Here we tested 4-month-old Dutch infants’ sensitivity to height-pitch and thickness-pitch mappings in two preferential looking tasks. Dutch infants looked significantly longer at cross-modally congruent stimuli in both experiments, indicating that infants are sensitive to space-pitch associations prior to language. This early presence of space-pitch mappings suggests that these associations do not originate from language. Rather, language may build upon pre-existing mappings and change them gradually via some form of competitive associative learning.
  • Drude, S., Trilsbeek, P., & Broeder, D. (2012). Language Documentation and Digital Humanities: The (DoBeS) Language Archive. In J. C. Meister (Ed.), Digital Humanities 2012 Conference Abstracts. University of Hamburg, Germany; July 16–22, 2012 (pp. 169-173).

    Abstract

    Overview Since the early nineties, the on-going dramatic loss of the world’s linguistic diversity has gained attention, first by the linguists and increasingly also by the general public. As a response, the new field of language documentation emerged from around 2000 on, starting with the funding initiative ‘Dokumentation Bedrohter Sprachen’ (DoBeS, funded by the Volkswagen foundation, Germany), soon to be followed by others such as the ‘Endangered Languages Documentation Programme’ (ELDP, at SOAS, London), or, in the USA, ‘Electronic Meta-structure for Endangered Languages Documentation’ (EMELD, led by the LinguistList) and ‘Documenting Endangered Languages’ (DEL, by the NSF). From its very beginning, the new field focused on digital technologies not only for recording in audio and video, but also for annotation, lexical databases, corpus building and archiving, among others. This development not just coincides but is intrinsically interconnected with the increasing focus on digital data, technology and methods in all sciences, in particular in the humanities.
  • Drude, S., Broeder, D., Trilsbeek, P., & Wittenburg, P. (2012). The Language Archive: A new hub for language resources. In N. Calzolari (Ed.), Proceedings of LREC 2012: 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 3264-3267). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

    Abstract

    This contribution presents “The Language Archive” (TLA), a new unit at the MPI for Psycholinguistics, discussing the current developments in management of scientific data, considering the need for new data research infrastructures. Although several initiatives worldwide in the realm of language resources aim at the integration, preservation and mobilization of research data, the state of such scientific data is still often problematic. Data are often not well organized and archived and not described by metadata ― even unique data such as field-work observational data on endangered languages is still mostly on perishable carriers. New data centres are needed that provide trusted, quality-reviewed, persistent services and suitable tools and that take legal and ethical issues seriously. The CLARIN initiative has established criteria for suitable centres. TLA is in a good position to be one of such centres. It is based on three essential pillars: (1) A data archive; (2) management, access and annotation tools; (3) archiving and software expertise for collaborative projects. The archive hosts mostly observational data on small languages worldwide and language acquisition data, but also data resulting from experiments
  • Durco, M., & Windhouwer, M. (2013). Semantic Mapping in CLARIN Component Metadata. In Proceedings of MTSR 2013, the 7th Metadata and Semantics Research Conference (pp. 163-168). New York: Springer.

    Abstract

    In recent years, large scale initiatives like CLARIN set out to overcome the notorious heterogeneity of metadata formats in the domain of language resource. The CLARIN Component Metadata Infrastructure established means for flexible resouce descriptions for the domain of language resources. The Data Category Registry ISOcat and the accompanying Relation Registry foster semantic interoperability within the growing heterogeneous collection of metadata records. This paper describes the CMD Infrastructure focusing on the facilities for semantic mapping, and gives also an overview of the current status in the joint component metadata domain.
  • Eisner, F. (2012). Competition in the acoustic encoding of emotional speech. In L. McCrohon (Ed.), Five approaches to language evolution. Proceedings of the workshops of the 9th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (pp. 43-44). Tokyo: Evolang9 Organizing Committee.

    Abstract

    1. Introduction Speech conveys not only linguistic meaning but also paralinguistic information, such as features of the speaker’s social background, physiology, and emotional state. Linguistic and paralinguistic information is encoded in speech by using largely the same vocal apparatus and both are transmitted simultaneously in the acoustic signal, drawing on a limited set of acoustic cues. How this simultaneous encoding is achieved, how the different types of information are disentangled by the listener, and how much they interfere with one another is presently not well understood. Previous research has highlighted the importance of acoustic source and filter cues for emotion and linguistic encoding respectively, which may suggest that the two types of information are encoded independently of each other. However, those lines of investigation have been almost completely disconnected (Murray & Arnott, 1993).
  • Elbers, W., Broeder, D., & Van Uytvanck, D. (2012). Proper language resource centers. In N. Calzolari (Ed.), Proceedings of LREC 2012: 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 3260-3263). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

    Abstract

    Language resource centers allow researchers to reliably deposit their structured data together with associated meta data and run services operating on this deposited data. We are looking into possibilities to create long-term persistency of both the deposited data and the services operating on this data. Challenges, both technical and non-technical, that need to be solved are the need to replicate more than just the data, proper identification of the digital objects in a distributed environment by making use of persistent identifiers and the set-up of a proper authentication and authorization domain including the management of the authorization information on the digital objects. We acknowledge the investment that most language resource centers have made in their current infrastructure. Therefore one of the most important requirements is the loose coupling with existing infrastructures without the need to make many changes. This shift from a single language resource center into a federated environment of many language resource centers is discussed in the context of a real world center: The Language Archive supported by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
  • Enfield, N. J. (2006). Social consequences of common ground. In N. J. Enfield, & S. C. Levinson (Eds.), Roots of human sociality: Culture, cognition and interaction (pp. 399-430). Oxford: Berg.
  • Enfield, N. J., & Levinson, S. C. (2006). Introduction: Human sociality as a new interdisciplinary field. In N. J. Enfield, & S. C. Levinson (Eds.), Roots of human sociality: Culture, cognition and interaction (pp. 1-35). Oxford: Berg.
  • Fitch, W. T., Friederici, A. D., & Hagoort, P. (Eds.). (2012). Pattern perception and computational complexity [Special Issue]. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 367 (1598).
  • Flecken, M., & Gerwien, J. (2013). Grammatical aspect modulates event duration estimations: findings from Dutch. In M. Knauff, M. Pauen, N. Sebanz, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2013) (pp. 2309-2314). Austin,TX: Cognitive Science Society.
  • Floyd, S. (2006). The cash value of style in the Andean market. In E.-X. Lee, K. M. Markman, V. Newdick, & T. Sakuma (Eds.), SALSA 13: Texas Linguistic Forum vol. 49. Austin, TX: Texas Linguistics Forum.

    Abstract

    This paper examines code and style shifting during sales transactions based on two market case studies from highland Ecuador. Bringing together ideas of linguistic economy with work on stylistic variation and ethnohistorical research on Andean markets, I study bartering, market calls and sales pitches to show how sellers create stylistic performances distinguished by contrasts of code, register and poetic features. The interaction of the symbolic value of language with the economic values of the market presents a place to examine the relationship between discourse and the material world.
  • De la Fuente, J., Santiago, J., Roma, A., Dumitrache, C., & Casasanto, D. (2012). Facing the past: cognitive flexibility in the front-back mapping of time [Abstract]. Cognitive Processing; Special Issue "ICSC 2012, the 5th International Conference on Spatial Cognition: Space and Embodied Cognition". Poster Presentations, 13(Suppl. 1), S58.

    Abstract

    In many languages the future is in front and the past behind, but in some cultures (like Aymara) the past is in front. Is it possible to find this mapping as an alternative conceptualization of time in other cultures? If so, what are the factors that affect its choice out of the set of available alternatives? In a paper and pencil task, participants placed future or past events either in front or behind a character (a schematic head viewed from above). A sample of 24 Islamic participants (whose language also places the future in front and the past behind) tended to locate the past event in the front box more often than Spanish participants. This result might be due to the greater cultural value assigned to tradition in Islamic culture. The same pattern was found in a sample of Spanish elders (N = 58), what may support that conclusion. Alternatively, the crucial factor may be the amount of attention paid to the past. In a final study, young Spanish adults (N = 200) who had just answered a set of questions about their past showed the past-in-front pattern, whereas questions about their future exacerbated the future-in-front pattern. Thus, the attentional explanation was supported: attended events are mapped to front space in agreement with the experiential connection between attending and seeing. When attention is paid to the past, it tends to occupy the front location in spite of available alternative mappings in the language-culture.
  • Furman, R., Ozyurek, A., & Allen, S. E. M. (2006). Learning to express causal events across languages: What do speech and gesture patterns reveal? In D. Bamman, T. Magnitskaia, & C. Zaller (Eds.), Proceedings of the 30th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 190-201). Somerville, Mass: Cascadilla Press.
  • Gazendam, L., Malaisé, V., Schreiber, G., & Brugman, H. (2006). Deriving semantic annotations of an audiovisual program from contextual texts. In First International Workshop on Semantic Web Annotations for Multimedia (SWAMM 2006).

    Abstract

    The aim of this paper is to explore whether indexing terms for an audiovisual program can be derived from contextual texts automatically. For this we apply natural-language processing techniques to contextual texts of two Dutch TV-programs. We use a Dutch domain thesaurus to derive possible metadata. This possible metadata is ranked by an algorithm which uses the relations of the thesaurus. We evaluate the results by comparing them to human made descriptions.
  • Gebre, B. G., Wittenburg, P., & Heskes, T. (2013). Automatic sign language identification. In Proceeding of the 20th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) (pp. 2626-2630).

    Abstract

    We propose a Random-Forest based sign language identification system. The system uses low-level visual features and is based on the hypothesis that sign languages have varying distributions of phonemes (hand-shapes, locations and movements). We evaluated the system on two sign languages -- British SL and Greek SL, both taken from a publicly available corpus, called Dicta Sign Corpus. Achieved average F1 scores are about 95% - indicating that sign languages can be identified with high accuracy using only low-level visual features.
  • Gebre, B. G., Wittenburg, P., & Heskes, T. (2013). Automatic signer diarization - the mover is the signer approach. In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW), 2013 IEEE Conference on (pp. 283-287). doi:10.1109/CVPRW.2013.49.

    Abstract

    We present a vision-based method for signer diarization -- the task of automatically determining "who signed when?" in a video. This task has similar motivations and applications as speaker diarization but has received little attention in the literature. In this paper, we motivate the problem and propose a method for solving it. The method is based on the hypothesis that signers make more movements than their interlocutors. Experiments on four videos (a total of 1.4 hours and each consisting of two signers) show the applicability of the method. The best diarization error rate (DER) obtained is 0.16.
  • Gebre, B. G., & Wittenburg, P. (2012). Adaptive automatic gesture stroke detection. In J. C. Meister (Ed.), Digital Humanities 2012 Conference Abstracts. University of Hamburg, Germany; July 16–22, 2012 (pp. 458-461).

    Abstract

    Print Friendly XML Gebre, Binyam Gebrekidan, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands, binyamgebrekidan.gebre [at] mpi.nl Wittenburg, Peter, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands, peter.wittenburg [at] mpi.nl Introduction Many gesture and sign language researchers manually annotate video recordings to systematically categorize, analyze and explain their observations. The number and kinds of annotations are so diverse and unpredictable that any attempt at developing non-adaptive automatic annotation systems is usually less effective. The trend in the literature has been to develop models that work for average users and for average scenarios. This approach has three main disadvantages. First, it is impossible to know beforehand all the patterns that could be of interest to all researchers. Second, it is practically impossible to find enough training examples for all patterns. Third, it is currently impossible to learn a model that is robustly applicable across all video quality-recording variations.
  • Gebre, B. G., Zampieri, M., Wittenburg, P., & Heskes, T. (2013). Improving Native Language Identification with TF-IDF weighting. In Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (pp. 216-223).

    Abstract

    This paper presents a Native Language Identification (NLI) system based on TF-IDF weighting schemes and using linear classifiers - support vector machines, logistic regressions and perceptrons. The system was one of the participants of the 2013 NLI Shared Task in the closed-training track, achieving 0.814 overall accuracy for a set of 11 native languages. This accuracy was only 2.2 percentage points lower than the winner's performance. Furthermore, with subsequent evaluations using 10-fold cross-validation (as given by the organizers) on the combined training and development data, the best average accuracy obtained is 0.8455 and the features that contributed to this accuracy are the TF-IDF of the combined unigrams and bigrams of words.
  • Gebre, B. G., Wittenburg, P., & Heskes, T. (2013). The gesturer is the speaker. In Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2013) (pp. 3751-3755).

    Abstract

    We present and solve the speaker diarization problem in a novel way. We hypothesize that the gesturer is the speaker and that identifying the gesturer can be taken as identifying the active speaker. We provide evidence in support of the hypothesis from gesture literature and audio-visual synchrony studies. We also present a vision-only diarization algorithm that relies on gestures (i.e. upper body movements). Experiments carried out on 8.9 hours of a publicly available dataset (the AMI meeting data) show that diarization error rates as low as 15% can be achieved.
  • Gebre, B. G., Wittenburg, P., & Lenkiewicz, P. (2012). Towards automatic gesture stroke detection. In N. Calzolari (Ed.), Proceedings of LREC 2012: 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 231-235). European Language Resources Association.

    Abstract

    Automatic annotation of gesture strokes is important for many gesture and sign language researchers. The unpredictable diversity of human gestures and video recording conditions require that we adopt a more adaptive case-by-case annotation model. In this paper, we present a work-in progress annotation model that allows a user to a) track hands/face b) extract features c) distinguish strokes from non-strokes. The hands/face tracking is done with color matching algorithms and is initialized by the user. The initialization process is supported with immediate visual feedback. Sliders are also provided to support a user-friendly adjustment of skin color ranges. After successful initialization, features related to positions, orientations and speeds of tracked hands/face are extracted using unique identifiable features (corners) from a window of frames and are used for training a learning algorithm. Our preliminary results for stroke detection under non-ideal video conditions are promising and show the potential applicability of our methodology.
  • Gijssels, T., Bottini, R., Rueschemeyer, S.-A., & Casasanto, D. (2013). Space and time in the parietal cortex: fMRI Evidence for a meural asymmetry. In M. Knauff, M. Pauen, N. Sebanz, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2013) (pp. 495-500). Austin,TX: Cognitive Science Society. Retrieved from http://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2013/papers/0113/index.html.

    Abstract

    How are space and time related in the brain? This study contrasts two proposals that make different predictions about the interaction between spatial and temporal magnitudes. Whereas ATOM implies that space and time are symmetrically related, Metaphor Theory claims they are asymmetrically related. Here we investigated whether space and time activate the same neural structures in the inferior parietal cortex (IPC) and whether the activation is symmetric or asymmetric across domains. We measured participants’ neural activity while they made temporal and spatial judgments on the same visual stimuli. The behavioral results replicated earlier observations of a space-time asymmetry: Temporal judgments were more strongly influenced by irrelevant spatial information than vice versa. The BOLD fMRI data indicated that space and time activated overlapping clusters in the IPC and that, consistent with Metaphor Theory, this activation was asymmetric: The shared region of IPC was activated more strongly during temporal judgments than during spatial judgments. We consider three possible interpretations of this neural asymmetry, based on 3 possible functions of IPC.
  • Gisladottir, R. S., Chwilla, D., Schriefers, H., & Levinson, S. C. (2012). Speech act recognition in conversation: Experimental evidence. In N. Miyake, D. Peebles, & R. P. Cooper (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2012) (pp. 1596-1601). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. Retrieved from http://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2012/papers/0282/index.html.

    Abstract

    Recognizing the speech acts in our interlocutors’ utterances is a crucial prerequisite for conversation. However, it is not a trivial task given that the form and content of utterances is frequently underspecified for this level of meaning. In the present study we investigate participants’ competence in categorizing speech acts in such action-underspecific sentences and explore the time-course of speech act inferencing using a self-paced reading paradigm. The results demonstrate that participants are able to categorize the speech acts with very high accuracy, based on limited context and without any prosodic information. Furthermore, the results show that the exact same sentence is processed differently depending on the speech act it performs, with reading times starting to differ already at the first word. These results indicate that participants are very good at “getting” the speech acts, opening up a new arena for experimental research on action recognition in conversation.
  • Goudbeek, M., & Swingley, D. (2006). Saliency effects in distributional learning. In Proceedings of the 11th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (pp. 478-482). Auckland: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association.

    Abstract

    Acquiring the sounds of a language involves learning to recognize distributional patterns present in the input. We show that among adult learners, this distributional learning of auditory categories (which are conceived of here as probability density functions in a multidimensional space) is constrained by the salience of the dimensions that form the axes of this perceptual space. Only with a particular ratio of variation in the perceptual dimensions was category learning driven by the distributional properties of the input.
  • Le Guen, O. (2012). Socializing with the supernatural: The place of supernatural entities in Yucatec Maya daily life and socialization. In P. Nondédéo, & A. Breton (Eds.), Maya daily lives: Proceedings of the 13th European Maya Conference (pp. 151-170). Markt Schwaben: Verlag Anton Saurwein.
  • Gullberg, M., & Indefrey, P. (Eds.). (2006). The cognitive neuroscience of second language acquisition [Special Issue]. Language Learning, 56(suppl. 1).
  • Gullberg, M. (Ed.). (2006). Gestures and second language acquisition [Special Issue]. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 44(2).
  • Gussenhoven, C., & Zhou, W. (2013). Revisiting pitch slope and height effects on perceived duration. In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2013: 14th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 1365-1369).

    Abstract

    The shape of pitch contours has been shown to have an effect on the perceived duration of vowels. For instance, vowels with high level pitch and vowels with falling contours sound longer than vowels with low level pitch. Depending on whether the
    comparison is between level pitches or between level and dynamic contours, these findings have been interpreted in two ways. For inter-level comparisons, where the duration results are the reverse of production results, a hypercorrection strategy in production has been proposed [1]. By contrast, for comparisons between level pitches and dynamic contours, the
    longer production data for dynamic contours have been held responsible. We report an experiment with Dutch and Chinese listeners which aimed to show that production data and perception data are each other’s opposites for high, low, falling and rising contours. We explain the results, which are consistent with earlier findings, in terms of the compensatory listening strategy of [2], arguing that the perception effects are due to a perceptual compensation of articulatory strategies and
    constraints, rather than that differences in production compensate for psycho-acoustic perception effects.
  • Habscheid, S., & Klein, W. (Eds.). (2012). Dinge und Maschinen in der Kommunikation [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 42(168).

    Abstract

    “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” (Weiser 1991, S. 94). – Die Behauptung stammt aus einem vielzitierten Text von Mark Weiser, ehemals Chief Technology Officer am berühmten Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), wo nicht nur einige bedeutende computertechnische Innovationen ihren Ursprung hatten, sondern auch grundlegende anthropologische Einsichten zum Umgang mit technischen Artefakten gewonnen wurden.1 In einem populärwissenschaftlichen Artikel mit dem Titel „The Computer for the 21st Century” entwarf Weiser 1991 die Vision einer Zukunft, in der wir nicht mehr mit einem einzelnen PC an unserem Arbeitsplatz umgehen – vielmehr seien wir in jedem Raum umgeben von hunderten elektronischer Vorrichtungen, die untrennbar in Alltagsgegenstände eingebettet und daher in unserer materiellen Umwelt gleichsam „verschwunden“ sind. Dabei ging es Weiser nicht allein um das ubiquitäre Phänomen, das in der Medientheorie als „Transparenz der Medien“ bekannt ist2 oder in allgemeineren Theorien der Alltagserfahrung als eine selbstverständliche Verwobenheit des Menschen mit den Dingen, die uns in ihrem Sinn vertraut und praktisch „zuhanden“ sind.3 Darüber hinaus zielte Weisers Vision darauf, unsere bereits existierende Umwelt durch computerlesbare Daten zu erweitern und in die Operationen eines solchen allgegenwärtigen Netzwerks alltägliche Praktiken gleichsam lückenlos zu integrieren: In der Welt, die Weiser entwirft, öffnen sich Türen für denjenigen, der ein bestimmtes elektronisches Abzeichen trägt, begrüßen Räume Personen, die sie betreten, mit Namen, passen sich Computerterminals an die Präferenzen individueller Nutzer an usw. (Weiser 1991, S. 99).
  • Haderlein, T., Moers, C., Möbius, B., & Nöth, E. (2012). Automatic rating of hoarseness by text-based cepstral and prosodic evaluation. In P. Sojka, A. Horák, I. Kopecek, & K. Pala (Eds.), Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue (TSD 2012) (pp. 573-580). Heidelberg: Springer.

    Abstract

    The standard for the analysis of distorted voices is perceptual rating of read-out texts or spontaneous speech. Automatic voice evaluation, however, is usually done on stable sections of sustained vowels. In this paper, text-based and established vowel-based analysis are compared with respect to their ability to measure hoarseness and its subclasses. 73 hoarse patients (48.3±16.8 years) uttered the vowel /e/ and read the German version of the text “The North Wind and the Sun”. Five speech therapists and physicians rated roughness, breathiness, and hoarseness according to the German RBH evaluation scheme. The best human-machine correlations were obtained for measures based on the Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPP; up to |r | = 0.73). Support Vector Regression (SVR) on CPP-based measures and prosodic features improved the results further to r ≈0.8 and confirmed that automatic voice evaluation should be performed on a text recording.
  • Hammarström, H., & van den Heuvel, W. (Eds.). (2012). On the history, contact & classification of Papuan languages [Special Issue]. Language & Linguistics in Melanesia, 2012. Retrieved from http://www.langlxmelanesia.com/specialissues.htm.
  • Hanique, I., & Ernestus, M. (2012). The processes underlying two frequent casual speech phenomena in Dutch: A production experiment. In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2012: 13th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 2011-2014).

    Abstract

    This study investigated whether a shadowing task can provide insights in the nature of reduction processes that are typical of casual speech. We focused on the shortening and presence versus absence of schwa and /t/ in Dutch past participles. Results showed that the absence of these segments was affected by the same variables as their shortening, suggesting that absence mostly resulted from extreme gradient shortening. This contrasts with results based on recordings of spontaneous conversations. We hypothesize that this difference is due to non-casual fast speech elicited by a shadowing task.
  • Harbusch, K., & Kempen, G. (2006). ELLEIPO: A module that computes coordinative ellipsis for language generators that don't. In Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL-2006) (pp. 115-118).

    Abstract

    Many current sentence generators lack the ability to compute elliptical versions of coordinated clauses in accordance with the rules for Gapping, Forward and Backward Conjunction Reduction, and SGF (Subject Gap in clauses with Finite/ Fronted verb). We describe a module (implemented in JAVA, with German and Dutch as target languages) that takes non-elliptical coordinated clauses as input and returns all reduced versions licensed by coordinative ellipsis. It is loosely based on a new psycholinguistic theory of coordinative ellipsis proposed by Kempen. In this theory, coordinative ellipsis is not supposed to result from the application of declarative grammar rules for clause formation but from a procedural component that interacts with the sentence generator and may block the overt expression of certain constituents.
  • Harbusch, K., Kempen, G., Van Breugel, C., & Koch, U. (2006). A generation-oriented workbench for performance grammar: Capturing linear order variability in German and Dutch. In Proceedings of the 4th International Natural Language Generation Conference (pp. 9-11).

    Abstract

    We describe a generation-oriented workbench for the Performance Grammar (PG) formalism, highlighting the treatment of certain word order and movement constraints in Dutch and German. PG enables a simple and uniform treatment of a heterogeneous collection of linear order phenomena in the domain of verb constructions (variably known as Cross-serial Dependencies, Verb Raising, Clause Union, Extraposition, Third Construction, Particle Hopping, etc.). The central data structures enabling this feature are clausal “topologies”: one-dimensional arrays associated with clauses, whose cells (“slots”) provide landing sites for the constituents of the clause. Movement operations are enabled by unification of lateral slots of topologies at adjacent levels of the clause hierarchy. The PGW generator assists the grammar developer in testing whether the implemented syntactic knowledge allows all and only the well-formed permutations of constituents.
  • Herbst, L. E. (2006). The influence of language dominance on bilingual VOT: A case study. In Proceedings of the 4th University of Cambridge Postgraduate Conference on Language Research (CamLing 2006) (pp. 91-98). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Abstract

    Longitudinally collected VOT data from an early English-Italian bilingual who became increasingly English-dominant was analyzed. Stops in English were always produced with significantly longer VOT than in Italian. However, the speaker did not show any significant change in the VOT production in either language over time, despite the clear dominance of English in his every day language use later in his life. The results indicate that – unlike L2 learners – early bilinguals may remain unaffected by language use with respect to phonetic realization.
  • Holler, J., & Stevens, R. (2006). How speakers represent size information in referential communication for knowing and unknowing recipients. In D. Schlangen, & R. Fernandez (Eds.), Brandial '06 Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, Potsdam, Germany, September 11-13.
  • Holler, J., Schubotz, L., Kelly, S., Schuetze, M., Hagoort, P., & Ozyurek, A. (2013). Here's not looking at you, kid! Unaddressed recipients benefit from co-speech gestures when speech processing suffers. In M. Knauff, M. Pauen, I. Sebanz, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2013) (pp. 2560-2565). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. Retrieved from http://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2013/papers/0463/index.html.

    Abstract

    In human face-to-face communication, language comprehension is a multi-modal, situated activity. However, little is known about how we combine information from these different modalities, and how perceived communicative intentions, often signaled through visual signals, such as eye
    gaze, may influence this processing. We address this question by simulating a triadic communication context in which a
    speaker alternated her gaze between two different recipients. Participants thus viewed speech-only or speech+gesture
    object-related utterances when being addressed (direct gaze) or unaddressed (averted gaze). Two object images followed
    each message and participants’ task was to choose the object that matched the message. Unaddressed recipients responded significantly slower than addressees for speech-only
    utterances. However, perceiving the same speech accompanied by gestures sped them up to a level identical to
    that of addressees. That is, when speech processing suffers due to not being addressed, gesture processing remains intact and enhances the comprehension of a speaker’s message
  • Holler, J., Kelly, S., Hagoort, P., & Ozyurek, A. (2012). When gestures catch the eye: The influence of gaze direction on co-speech gesture comprehension in triadic communication. In N. Miyake, D. Peebles, & R. P. Cooper (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2012) (pp. 467-472). Austin, TX: Cognitive Society. Retrieved from http://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2012/papers/0092/index.html.

    Abstract

    Co-speech gestures are an integral part of human face-to-face communication, but little is known about how pragmatic factors influence our comprehension of those gestures. The present study investigates how different types of recipients process iconic gestures in a triadic communicative situation. Participants (N = 32) took on the role of one of two recipients in a triad and were presented with 160 video clips of an actor speaking, or speaking and gesturing. Crucially, the actor’s eye gaze was manipulated in that she alternated her gaze between the two recipients. Participants thus perceived some messages in the role of addressed recipient and some in the role of unaddressed recipient. In these roles, participants were asked to make judgements concerning the speaker’s messages. Their reaction times showed that unaddressed recipients did comprehend speaker’s gestures differently to addressees. The findings are discussed with respect to automatic and controlled processes involved in gesture comprehension.
  • Irvine, L., Roberts, S. G., & Kirby, S. (2013). A robustness approach to theory building: A case study of language evolution. In M. Knauff, M. Pauen, N. Sebanz, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2013) (pp. 2614-2619). Retrieved from http://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2013/papers/0472/index.html.

    Abstract

    Models of cognitive processes often include simplifications, idealisations, and fictionalisations, so how should we learn about cognitive processes from such models? Particularly in cognitive science, when many features of the target system are unknown, it is not always clear which simplifications, idealisations, and so on, are appropriate for a research question, and which are highly misleading. Here we use a case-study from studies of language evolution, and ideas from philosophy of science, to illustrate a robustness approach to learning from models. Robust properties are those that arise across a range of models, simulations and experiments, and can be used to identify key causal structures in the models, and the phenomenon, under investigation. For example, in studies of language evolution, the emergence of compositional structure is a robust property across models, simulations and experiments of cultural transmission, but only under pressures for learnability and expressivity. This arguably illustrates the principles underlying real cases of language evolution. We provide an outline of the robustness approach, including its limitations, and suggest that this methodology can be productively used throughout cognitive science. Perhaps of most importance, it suggests that different modelling frameworks should be used as tools to identify the abstract properties of a system, rather than being definitive expressions of theories.
  • De Jong, N. H., & Bosker, H. R. (2013). Choosing a threshold for silent pauses to measure second language fluency. In R. Eklund (Ed.), Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech (DiSS) (pp. 17-20).

    Abstract

    Second language (L2) research often involves analyses of acoustic measures of fluency. The studies investigating fluency, however, have been difficult to compare because the measures of fluency that were used differed widely. One of the differences between studies concerns the lower cut-off point for silent pauses, which has been set anywhere between 100 ms and 1000 ms. The goal of this paper is to find an optimal cut-off point. We calculate acoustic measures of fluency using different pause thresholds and then relate these measures to a measure of L2 proficiency and to ratings on fluency.
  • Kemps-Snijders, M., Ducret, J., Romary, L., & Wittenburg, P. (2006). An API for accessing the data category registry. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006) (pp. 2299-2302).
  • Kemps-Snijders, M., Nederhof, M.-J., & Wittenburg, P. (2006). LEXUS, a web-based tool for manipulating lexical resources. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006) (pp. 1862-1865).
  • Khetarpal, N., Neveu, G., Majid, A., Michael, L., & Regier, T. (2013). Spatial terms across languages support near-optimal communication: Evidence from Peruvian Amazonia, and computational analyses. In M. Knauff, M. Pauen, N. Sebanz, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 764-769). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. Retrieved from http://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2013/papers/0158/index.html.

    Abstract

    Why do languages have the categories they do? It has been argued that spatial terms in the world’s languages reflect categories that support highly informative communication, and that this accounts for the spatial categories found across languages. However, this proposal has been tested against only nine languages, and in a limited fashion. Here, we consider two new languages: Maijɨki, an under-documented language of Peruvian Amazonia, and English. We analyze spatial data from these two new languages and the original nine, using thorough and theoretically targeted computational tests. The results support the hypothesis that spatial terms across dissimilar languages enable near-optimally informative communication, over an influential competing hypothesis
  • Klassmann, A., Offenga, F., Broeder, D., Skiba, R., & Wittenburg, P. (2006). Comparison of resource discovery methods. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006) (pp. 113-116).
  • Klein, W. (2013). L'effettivo declino e la crescita potenziale della lessicografia tedesca. In N. Maraschio, D. De Martiono, & G. Stanchina (Eds.), L'italiano dei vocabolari: Atti di La piazza delle lingue 2012 (pp. 11-20). Firenze: Accademia della Crusca.
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (1975). Sprache ausländischer Arbeiter [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (18).
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (1985). Schriftlichkeit [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (59).
  • Kuzla, C., Mitterer, H., Ernestus, M., & Cutler, A. (2006). Perceptual compensation for voice assimilation of German fricatives. In P. Warren, & I. Watson (Eds.), Proceedings of the 11th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (pp. 394-399).

    Abstract

    In German, word-initial lax fricatives may be produced with substantially reduced glottal vibration after voiceless obstruents. This assimilation occurs more frequently and to a larger extent across prosodic word boundaries than across phrase boundaries. Assimilatory devoicing makes the fricatives more similar to their tense counterparts and could thus hinder word recognition. The present study investigates how listeners cope with assimilatory devoicing. Results of a cross-modal priming experiment indicate that listeners compensate for assimilation in appropriate contexts. Prosodic structure moderates compensation for assimilation: Compensation occurs especially after phrase boundaries, where devoiced fricatives are sufficiently long to be confused with their tense counterparts.
  • Kuzla, C., Ernestus, M., & Mitterer, H. (2006). Prosodic structure affects the production and perception of voice-assimilated German fricatives. In R. Hoffmann, & H. Mixdorff (Eds.), Speech prosody 2006. Dresden: TUD Press.

    Abstract

    Prosodic structure has long been known to constrain phonological processes [1]. More recently, it has also been recognized as a source of fine-grained phonetic variation of speech sounds. In particular, segments in domain-initial position undergo prosodic strengthening [2, 3], which also implies more resistance to coarticulation in higher prosodic domains [5]. The present study investigates the combined effects of prosodic strengthening and assimilatory devoicing on word-initial fricatives in German, the functional implication of both processes for cues to the fortis-lenis contrast, and the influence of prosodic structure on listeners’ compensation for assimilation. Results indicate that 1. Prosodic structure modulates duration and the degree of assimilatory devoicing, 2. Phonological contrasts are maintained by speakers, but differ in phonetic detail across prosodic domains, and 3. Compensation for assimilation in perception is moderated by prosodic structure and lexical constraints.
  • Kuzla, C., Mitterer, H., & Ernestus, M. (2006). Compensation for assimilatory devoicing and prosodic structure in German fricative perception. In Variation, detail and representation: 10th Conference on Laboratory Phonology (pp. 43-44).
  • Lenkiewicz, A., & Drude, S. (2013). Automatic annotation of linguistic 2D and Kinect recordings with the Media Query Language for Elan. In Proceedings of Digital Humanities 2013 (pp. 276-278).

    Abstract

    Research in body language with use of gesture recognition and speech analysis has gained much attention in the recent times, influencing disciplines related to image and speech processing.

    This study aims to design the Media Query Language (MQL) (Lenkiewicz, et al. 2012) combined with the Linguistic Media Query Interface (LMQI) for Elan (Wittenburg, et al. 2006). The system integrated with the new achievements in audio-video recognition will allow querying media files with predefined gesture phases (or motion primitives) and speech characteristics as well as combinations of both. For the purpose of this work the predefined motions and speech characteristics are called patterns for atomic elements and actions for a sequence of patterns. The main assumption is that a user-customized library of patterns and actions and automated media annotation with LMQI will reduce annotation time, hence decreasing costs of creation of annotated corpora. Increase of the number of annotated data should influence the speed and number of possible research in disciplines in which human multimodal interaction is a subject of interest and where annotated corpora are required.
  • Lenkiewicz, P., Auer, E., Schreer, O., Masneri, S., Schneider, D., & Tschöpe, S. (2012). AVATecH ― automated annotation through audio and video analysis. In N. Calzolari (Ed.), Proceedings of LREC 2012: 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 209-214). European Language Resources Association.

    Abstract

    In different fields of the humanities annotations of multimodal resources are a necessary component of the research workflow. Examples include linguistics, psychology, anthropology, etc. However, creation of those annotations is a very laborious task, which can take 50 to 100 times the length of the annotated media, or more. This can be significantly improved by applying innovative audio and video processing algorithms, which analyze the recordings and provide automated annotations. This is the aim of the AVATecH project, which is a collaboration of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI) and the Fraunhofer institutes HHI and IAIS. In this paper we present a set of results of automated annotation together with an evaluation of their quality.
  • Lenkiewicz, A., Lis, M., & Lenkiewicz, P. (2012). Linguistic concepts described with Media Query Language for automated annotation. In J. C. Meiser (Ed.), Digital Humanities 2012 Conference Abstracts. University of Hamburg, Germany; July 16–22, 2012 (pp. 477-479).

    Abstract

    Introduction Human spoken communication is multimodal, i.e. it encompasses both speech and gesture. Acoustic properties of voice, body movements, facial expression, etc. are an inherent and meaningful part of spoken interaction; they can provide attitudinal, grammatical and semantic information. In the recent years interest in audio-visual corpora has been rising rapidly as they enable investigation of different communicative modalities and provide more holistic view on communication (Kipp et al. 2009). Moreover, for some languages such corpora are the only available resource, as is the case for endangered languages for which no written resources exist.
  • Lenkiewicz, P., Van Uytvanck, D., Wittenburg, P., & Drude, S. (2012). Towards automated annotation of audio and video recordings by application of advanced web-services. In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2012: 13th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 1880-1883).

    Abstract

    In this paper we describe audio and video processing algorithms that are developed in the scope of AVATecH project. The purpose of these algorithms is to shorten the time taken by manual annotation of audio and video recordings by extracting features from media files and creating semi-automated annotations. We show that the use of such supporting algorithms can shorten the annotation time to 30-50% of the time necessary to perform a fully manual annotation of the same kind.
  • 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.
  • Levinson, S. C. (2006). On the human "interaction engine". In N. J. Enfield, & S. C. Levinson (Eds.), Roots of human sociality: Culture, cognition and interaction (pp. 39-69). Oxford: Berg.
  • Majid, A., Enfield, N. J., & Van Staden, M. (Eds.). (2006). Parts of the body: Cross-linguistic categorisation [Special Issue]. Language Sciences, 28(2-3).
  • Majid, A. (2013). Olfactory language and cognition. In M. Knauff, M. Pauen, N. Sebanz, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2013) (pp. 68). Austin,TX: Cognitive Science Society. Retrieved from http://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2013/papers/0025/index.html.

    Abstract

    Since the cognitive revolution, a widely held assumption has been that—whereas content may vary across cultures—cognitive processes would be universal, especially those on the more basic levels. Even if scholars do not fully subscribe to this assumption, they often conceptualize, or tend to investigate, cognition as if it were universal (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). The insight that universality must not be presupposed but scrutinized is now gaining ground, and cognitive diversity has become one of the hot (and controversial) topics in the field (Norenzayan & Heine, 2005). We argue that, for scrutinizing the cultural dimension of cognition, taking an anthropological perspective is invaluable, not only for the task itself, but for attenuating the home-field disadvantages that are inescapably linked to cross-cultural research (Medin, Bennis, & Chandler, 2010).
  • Majid, A. (2012). Taste in twenty cultures [Abstract]. Abstracts from the XXIth Congress of European Chemoreception Research Organization, ECRO-2011. Publ. in Chemical Senses, 37(3), A10.

    Abstract

    Scholars disagree about the extent to which language can tell us
    about conceptualisation of the world. Some believe that language
    is a direct window onto concepts: Having a word ‘‘bird’’, ‘‘table’’ or
    ‘‘sour’’ presupposes the corresponding underlying concept, BIRD,
    TABLE, SOUR. Others disagree. Words are thought to be uninformative,
    or worse, misleading about our underlying conceptual representations;
    after all, our mental worlds are full of ideas that we
    struggle to express in language. How could this be so, argue sceptics,
    if language were a direct window on our inner life? In this presentation,
    I consider what language can tell us about the
    conceptualisation of taste. By considering linguistic data from
    twenty unrelated cultures – varying in subsistence mode (huntergatherer
    to industrial), ecological zone (rainforest jungle to desert),
    dwelling type (rural and urban), and so forth – I argue any single language is, indeed, impoverished about what it can reveal about
    taste. But recurrent lexicalisation patterns across languages can
    provide valuable insights about human taste experience. Moreover,
    language patterning is part of the data that a good theory of taste
    perception has to be answerable for. Taste researchers, therefore,
    cannot ignore the crosslinguistic facts.
  • Majid, A., Boroditsky, L., & Gaby, A. (Eds.). (2012). Time in terms of space [Research topic] [Special Issue]. Frontiers in cultural psychology. Retrieved from http://www.frontiersin.org/cultural_psychology/researchtopics/Time_in_terms_of_space/755.

    Abstract

    This Research Topic explores the question: what is the relationship between representations of time and space in cultures around the world? This question touches on the broader issue of how humans come to represent and reason about abstract entities – things we cannot see or touch. Time is a particularly opportune domain to investigate this topic. Across cultures, people use spatial representations for time, for example in graphs, time-lines, clocks, sundials, hourglasses, and calendars. In language, time is also heavily related to space, with spatial terms often used to describe the order and duration of events. In English, for example, we might move a meeting forward, push a deadline back, attend a long concert or go on a short break. People also make consistent spatial gestures when talking about time, and appear to spontaneously invoke spatial representations when processing temporal language. A large body of evidence suggests a close correspondence between temporal and spatial language and thought. However, the ways that people spatialize time can differ dramatically across languages and cultures. This research topic identifies and explores some of the sources of this variation, including patterns in spatial thinking, patterns in metaphor, gesture and other cultural systems. This Research Topic explores how speakers of different languages talk about time and space and how they think about these domains, outside of language. The Research Topic invites papers exploring the following issues: 1. Do the linguistic representations of space and time share the same lexical and morphosyntactic resources? 2. To what extent does the conceptualization of time follow the conceptualization of space?
  • Malaisé, V., Aroyo, L., Brugman, H., Gazendam, L., De Jong, A., Negru, C., & Schreiber, G. (2006). Evaluating a thesaurus browser for an audio-visual archive. In S. Staab, & V. Svatek (Eds.), Managing knowledge in a world of networks (pp. 272-286). Berlin: Springer.
  • Melinger, A., Schulte im Walde, S., & Weber, A. (2006). Characterizing response types and revealing noun ambiguity in German association norms. In Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Trento: Association for Computational Linguistics.

    Abstract

    This paper presents an analysis of semantic association norms for German nouns. In contrast to prior studies, we not only collected associations elicited by written representations of target objects but also by their pictorial representations. In a first analysis, we identified systematic differences in the type and distribution of associate responses for the two presentation forms. In a second analysis, we applied a soft cluster analysis to the collected target-response pairs. We subsequently used the clustering to predict noun ambiguity and to discriminate senses in our target nouns.
  • Meyer, A. S., & Wheeldon, L. (Eds.). (2006). Language production across the life span [Special Issue]. Language and Cognitive Processes, 21(1-3).
  • Mitterer, H. (Ed.). (2012). Ecological aspects of speech perception [Research topic] [Special Issue]. Frontiers in Cognition.

    Abstract

    Our knowledge of speech perception is largely based on experiments conducted with carefully recorded clear speech presented under good listening conditions to undistracted listeners - a near-ideal situation, in other words. But the reality poses a set of different challenges. First of all, listeners may need to divide their attention between speech comprehension and another task (e.g., driving). Outside the laboratory, the speech signal is often slurred by less than careful pronunciation and the listener has to deal with background noise. Moreover, in a globalized world, listeners need to understand speech in more than their native language. Relatedly, the speakers we listen to often have a different language background so we have to deal with a foreign or regional accent we are not familiar with. Finally, outside the laboratory, speech perception is not an end in itself, but rather a mean to contribute to a conversation. Listeners do not only need to understand the speech they are hearing, they also need to use this information to plan and time their own responses. For this special topic, we invite papers that address any of these ecological aspects of speech perception.

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