Publications

Displaying 1 - 83 of 83
  • 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
  • Bowerman, M. (1983). Hidden meanings: The role of covert conceptual structures in children's development of language. In D. Rogers, & J. A. Sloboda (Eds.), The acquisition of symbolic skills (pp. 445-470). New York: Plenum Press.
  • Bowerman, M., & Perdue, C. (Eds.). (1990). The structure of the simple clause in language acquisition [Special Issue]. Linguistics, 28(6).
  • Butterfield, S., & Cutler, A. (1990). Intonational cues to word boundaries in clear speech? In Proceedings of the Institute of Acoustics: Vol 12, part 10 (pp. 87-94). St. Albans, Herts.: Institute of Acoustics.
  • 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.
  • 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).
  • 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., & Butterfield, S. (1989). Natural speech cues to word segmentation under difficult listening conditions. In J. Tubach, & J. Mariani (Eds.), Proceedings of Eurospeech 89: European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology: Vol. 2 (pp. 372-375). Edinburgh: CEP Consultants.

    Abstract

    One of a listener's major tasks in understanding continuous speech is segmenting the speech signal into separate words. When listening conditions are difficult, speakers can help listeners by deliberately speaking more clearly. In three experiments, we examined how word boundaries are produced in deliberately clear speech. We found that speakers do indeed attempt to mark word boundaries; moreover, they differentiate between word boundaries in a way which suggests they are sensitive to listener needs. Application of heuristic segmentation strategies makes word boundaries before strong syllables easiest for listeners to perceive; but under difficult listening conditions speakers pay more attention to marking word boundaries before weak syllables, i.e. they mark those boundaries which are otherwise particularly hard to perceive.
  • 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. (1983). Semantics, syntax and sentence accent. In M. Van den Broecke, & A. Cohen (Eds.), Proceedings of the Tenth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 85-91). Dordrecht: Foris.
  • 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.
  • Cutler, A. (1990). Syllabic lengthening as a word boundary cue. In R. Seidl (Ed.), Proceedings of the 3rd Australian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (pp. 324-328). Canberra: Australian Speech Science and Technology Association.

    Abstract

    Bisyllabic sequences which could be interpreted as one word or two were produced in sentence contexts by a trained speaker, and syllabic durations measured. Listeners judged whether the bisyllables, excised from context, were one word or two. The proportion of two-word choices correlated positively with measured duration, but only for bisyllables stressed on the second syllable. The results may suggest a limit for listener sensitivity to syllabic lengthening as a word boundary cue.
  • 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., & Van Ooijen, B. (1990). Vowels as phoneme detection targets. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (pp. 581-584).

    Abstract

    Phoneme detection is a psycholinguistic task in which listeners' response time to detect the presence of a pre-specified phoneme target is measured. Typically, detection tasks have used consonant targets. This paper reports two experiments in which subjects responded to vowels as phoneme detection targets. In the first experiment, targets occurred in real words, in the second in nonsense words. Response times were long by comparison with consonantal targets. Targets in initial syllables were responded to much more slowly than targets in second syllables. Strong vowels were responded to faster than reduced vowels in real words but not in nonwords. These results suggest that the process of phoneme detection produces different results for vowels and for consonants. We discuss possible explanations for this difference, in particular the possibility of language-specificity.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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).
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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).
  • 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.). (1989). Kindersprache [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (73).
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (1983). Intonation [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (49).
  • 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.). (1979). Sprache und Kontext [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (33).
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (1990). Sprache und Raum [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (78).
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (1985). Schriftlichkeit [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (59).
  • Klein, W., & Schlieben-Lange, B. (Eds.). (1990). Zukunft der Sprache [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (79).
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1983). The speaker's organization of discourse. In Proceedings of the XIIIth International Congress of Linguists (pp. 278-290).
  • 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.
  • Levinson, S. C. (1979). Pragmatics and social deixis: Reclaiming the notion of conventional implicature. In C. Chiarello (Ed.), Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (pp. 206-223).
  • Levshina, N., & Moran, S. (Eds.). (2021). Efficiency in human languages: Corpus evidence for universal principles [Special Issue]. Linguistics Vanguard, 7(s3).
  • 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.
  • 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).
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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., & Mufwene, S. S. (Eds.). (1990). Issues in Creole lingusitics [Special Issue]. Linguistics, 28(4).
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1985). Predicate raising and semantic transparency in Mauritian Creole. In N. Boretzky, W. Enninger, & T. Stolz (Eds.), Akten des 2. Essener Kolloquiums über "Kreolsprachen und Sprachkontakte", 29-30 Nov. 1985 (pp. 203-229). Bochum: Brockmeyer.
  • 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.
  • De Smedt, K., & Kempen, G. (1990). Discontinuous constituency in Segment Grammar. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Discontinuous Constituency. Tilburg: University of Brabant.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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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