Publications

Abstract

Research on spoken word production has been approached from two angles. In one research tradition, the analysis of spontaneous or induced speech errors led to models that can account for speech error distributions. In another tradition, the measurement of picture naming latencies led to chronometric models accounting for distributions of reaction times in word production. Both kinds of models are, however, dealing with the same underlying processes: (1) the speaker’s selection of a word that is semantically and syntactically appropriate; (2) the retrieval of the word’s phonological properties; (3) the rapid syllabification of the word in context; and (4) the preparation of the corresponding articulatory gestures. Models of both traditions explain these processes in terms of activation spreading through a localist, symbolic network. By and large, they share the main levels of representation: conceptual/semantic, syntactic, phonological and phonetic. They differ in various details, such as the amount of cascading and feedback in the network. These research traditions have begun to merge in recent years, leading to highly constructive experimentation. Currently, they are like two similar knives honing each other. A single pair of scissors is in the making.

Abstract

In this article, we present an account of developmental data regarding the acquisition of syllable types. The data come from a longitudinal corpus of phonetically transcribed speech of 12 children acquiring Dutch as their first language. A developmental order of acquisition of syllable types was deduced by aligning the syllabified data on a Guttman scale. This order could be analyzed as following from an initial ranking and subsequent rerankings in the grammar of the structural constraints ONSET, NO-CODA, *COMPLEX-O, and *COMPLEX-C; some local conjunctions of these constraints; and a faithfulness constraint FAITH. The syllable type frequencies in the speech surrounding the language learner are also considered. An interesting correlation is found between the frequencies and the order of development of the different syllable types.

Abstract

The present paper studies how, in deictic expressions, the temporal interdependency of speech and gesture is realized in the course of motor planning and execution. Two theoretical positions were compared. On the “interactive” view the temporal parameters of speech and gesture are claimed to be the result of feedback between the two systems throughout the phases of motor planning and execution. The alternative “ballistic” view, however, predicts that the two systems are independent during the phase of motor execution, the temporal parameters having been preestablished in the planning phase. In four experiments subjects were requested to indicate which of an array of referent lights was momentarily illuminated. This was done by pointing to the light and/or by using a deictic expression (this/that light). The temporal and spatial course of the pointing movement was automatically registered by means of a Selspot opto-electronic system. By analyzing the moments of gesture initiation and apex, and relating them to the moments of speech onset, it was possible to show that, for deictic expressions, the ballistic view is very nearly correct.

Abstract

It is quite normal for us to produce one or two million word tokens every year. Speaking is a dear occupation and producing words is at the core of it. Still, producing even a single word is a highly complex affair. Recently, Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer (1999) reviewed their theory of lexical access in speech production, which dissects the word-producing mechanism as a staged application of various dedicated operations. The present paper begins by presenting a bird eye's view of this mechanism. We then square the complexity by asking how speakers control multiple access in generating simple utterances such as a table and a chair. In particular, we address two issues. The first one concerns dependency: Do temporally contiguous access procedures interact in any way, or do they run in modular fashion? The second issue concerns temporal alignment: How much temporal overlap of processing does the system tolerate in accessing multiple content words, such as table and chair? Results from picture-word interference and eye tracking experiments provide evidence for restricted cases of dependency as well as for constraints on the temporal alignment of access procedures.

Abstract

This article explores the relation between language and cognition by examining the case of "absolute" (cardinal direction) spatial description in the Australian aboriginal language Guugu Yimithirr. This kind of spatial description is incongruent with the "relative" (e.g., left/right/front/back) spatial description familiar in European languages. Building on Haviland's 1993 analysis of Guugu Yimithirr directionals in speech and gesture, a series of informal experiments were developed. It is shown that Guugu Yimithirr speakers predominantly code for nonverbal memory in "absolute" concepts congruent with their language, while a comparative sample of Dutch speakers do so in "relative" concepts. Much anecdotal evidence also supports this. The conclusion is that Whorfian effects may in fact be demonstrable in the spatial domain.

Abstract

The theory of basic color terms was a crucial factor in the demise of linguistic relativity. The theory is now once again under scrutiny and fundamental revision. This article details a case study that undermines one of the central claims of the classical theory, namely that languages universally treat color as a unitary domain, to be exhaustively named. Taken together with other cases, the study suggests that a number of languages have only an incipient color terminology, raising doubts about the linguistic universality of such terminology.

Abstract

We propose that the choice between the auxiliaries hebben 'have' and zijn 'be' in Dutch is determined by a particular semantic feature of verbs. In particular we propose a feature of meaning [IEPS] for 'inferable eventual position or state' that characterizes whether the action denoted by the verb allows us to determine the eventual position or state of the verb's highest argument. It is argued that only verbs which exhibit the feature [+IEPS] or which obtain the feature compositionally in the syntax select zijn as their auxiliary. Our analysis is then compared to a number of other analyses of auxiliary selection in Dutch.

Abstract

Mutations of the renal-specific chloride channel (CLCN5) gene, which is located on chromosome Xp11.22, are associated with hypercalciuric nephrolithiasis (kidney stones) in the Northern European and Japanese populations. CLCN5 encodes a 746 amino acid channel (CLC-5) that has approximately 12 transmembrane domains, and heterologous expression of wild-type CLC-5 in Xenopus oocytes has yielded outwardly rectifying chloride currents that were markedly reduced or abolished by these mutations. In order to assess further the structural and functional relationships of this recently cloned chloride channel, additional CLCN5 mutations have been identified in five unrelated families with this disorder. Three of these mutations were missense (G57V, G512R and E527D), one was a nonsense (R648Stop) and one was an insertion (30:H insertion). In addition, two of the mutations (30:H insertion and E527D) were demonstrated to be de novo, and the G57V and E527D mutations were identified in families of Afro-American and Indian origin, respectively. The G57V and 30:H insertion mutations represent the first CLCN5 mutations to be identified in the N-terminus region, and the R648Stop mutation, which has been observed previously in an unrelated family, suggests that this codon may be particularly prone to mutations. Heterologous expression of the mutations resulted in a marked reduction or abolition of the chloride currents, thereby establishing their functional importance. These results help to elucidate further the structure-function relationships of this renal chloride channel.

Abstract

In 5 experiments, listeners heard words and nonwords, some cross-spliced so that they contained acoustic-phonetic mismatches. Performance was worse on mismatching than on matching items. Words cross-spliced with words and words cross-spliced with nonwords produced parallel results. However, in lexical decision and 1 of 3 phonetic decision experiments, performance on nonwords cross-spliced with words was poorer than on nonwords cross-spliced with nonwords. A gating study confirmed that there were misleading coarticulatory cues in the cross-spliced items; a sixth experiment showed that the earlier results were not due to interitem differences in the strength of these cues. Three models of phonetic decision making (the Race model, the TRACE model, and a postlexical model) did not explain the data. A new bottom-up model is outlined that accounts for the findings in terms of lexical involvement at a dedicated decision-making stage.

Abstract

A comparison of Merge, a model of comprehension, and WEAVER, a model of production, raises five issues: (1) merging models of comprehension and production necessarily creates feedback; (2) neither model is a comprehensive account of word processing; (3) the models are incomplete in different ways; (4) the models differ in their handling of competition; (5) as opposed to WEAVER, Merge is a model of metalinguistic behavior.

Abstract

The production and interpretation of pronouns involves the identification of a mental referent and, in connected speech or text, a discourse antecedent. One of the few overt signals of the relationship between a pronoun and its antecedent is agreement in features such as number and grammatical gender. To examine how speakers create these signals, two experiments tested conceptual, lexical. and morphophonological accounts of pronoun production in Dutch. The experiments employed sentence completion and continuation tasks with materials containing noun phrases that conflicted or agreed in grammatical gender. The noun phrases served as the antecedents for demonstrative pronouns tin Experiment 1) and relative pronouns tin Experiment 2) that required gender marking. Gender errors were used to assess the nature of the processes that established the link between pronouns and antecedents. There were more gender errors when candidate antecedents conflicted in grammatical gender, counter to the predictions of a pure conceptual hypothesis. Gender marking on candidate antecedents did not change the magnitude of this interference effect, counter to the predictions of an overt-morphology hypothesis. Mirroring previous findings about pronoun comprehension, the results suggest that speakers of gender-marking languages call on specific linguistic information about antecedents in order to select pronouns and that the information consists of specifications of grammatical gender associated with the lemmas of words.

Abstract

The central thesis of the target article was that feedback is never necessary in spoken word recognition. The commentaries present no new data and no new theoretical arguments which lead us to revise this position. In this response we begin by clarifying some terminological issues which have lead to a number of significant misunderstandings. We provide some new arguments to support our case that the feedforward model Merge is indeed more parsimonious than the interactive alternatives, and that it provides a more convincing account of the data than alternative models. Finally, we extend the arguments to deal with new issues raised by the commentators such as infant speech perception and neural architecture.

Abstract

Top-down feedback does not benefit speech recognition; on the contrary, it can hinder it. No experimental data imply that feedback loops are required for speech recognition. Feedback is accordingly unnecessary and spoken word recognition is modular. To defend this thesis, we analyse lexical involvement in phonemic decision making. TRACE (McClelland & Elman 1986), a model with feedback from the lexicon to prelexical processes, is unable to account for all the available data on phonemic decision making. The modular Race model (Cutler & Norris 1979) is likewise challenged by some recent results, however. We therefore present a new modular model of phonemic decision making, the Merge model. In Merge, information flows from prelexical processes to the lexicon without feedback. Because phonemic decisions are based on the merging of prelexical and lexical information, Merge correctly predicts lexical involvement in phonemic decisions in both words and nonwords. Computer simulations show how Merge is able to account for the data through a process of competition between lexical hypotheses. We discuss the issue of feedback in other areas of language processing and conclude that modular models are particularly well suited to the problems and constraints of speech recognition.

Abstract

We propose that word recognition in continuous speech is subject to constraints on what may constitute a viable word of the language. This Possible-Word Constraint (PWC) reduces activation of candidate words if their recognition would imply word status for adjacent input which could not be a word - for instance, a single consonant. In two word-spotting experiments, listeners found it much harder to detectapple,for example, infapple(where [f] alone would be an impossible word), than invuffapple(wherevuffcould be a word of English). We demonstrate that the PWC can readily be implemented in a competition-based model of continuous speech recognition, as a constraint on the process of competition between candidate words; where a stretch of speech between a candidate word and a (known or likely) word boundary is not a possible word, activation of the candidate word is reduced. This implementation accurately simulates both the present results and data from a range of earlier studies of speech segmentation.

Abstract

Two recent studies (Coulson et al., 1998;Osterhout et al., 1996)examined the
relationship between the event-related brain potential (ERP) responses to linguistic syntactic anomalies (P600/SPS) and domain-general unexpected events (P300). Coulson et al. concluded that these responses are highly similar, whereas Osterhout et al. concluded that they are distinct. In this comment, we evaluate the relativemerits of these claims. We conclude that the available evidence indicates that the ERP response to syntactic anomalies is at least partially distinct from the ERP response to unexpected anomalies that do not involve a grammatical violation

Abstract

Two experiments examined the processing of Tokyo Japanese pitchaccent distinctions by native speakers of Japanese from two accentlessvariety areas. In both experiments, listeners were presented with Tokyo Japanese speech materials used in an earlier study with Tokyo Japanese listeners, who clearly exploited the pitch-accent information in spokenword recognition. In the "rst experiment, listeners judged from which of two words, di!ering in accentual structure, isolated syllables had been extracted. Both new groups were, overall, as successful at this task as Tokyo Japanese speakers had been, but their response patterns differed from those of the Tokyo Japanese, for instance in that a bias towards H judgments in the Tokyo Japanese responses was weakened in the present groups' responses. In a second experiment, listeners heard word fragments and guessed what the words were; in this task, the speakers from accentless areas again performed significantly above chance, but their responses showed less sensitivity to the information in the input, and greater bias towards vocabulary distribution frequencies, than had been observed with the Tokyo Japanese listeners. The results suggest that experience with a local accentless dialect affects the processing of accent for word recognition in Tokyo Japanese, even for listeners with extensive exposure to Tokyo Japanese.

Abstract

Evaluation plays a role in the telling and understanding of narratives, in communicative interaction, emotional understanding, and in psychological well-being. This article reports a study of evaluation by describing how readers monitor the concerns of characters over the course of a narrative. The main hypothesis is that readers tract the well-being via the expression of a character's internal states. Reader evaluations were revealed in think aloud protocols obtained during reading of narrative texts, one sentence at a time. Five kinds of evaluative inferences were found: appraisals (good versus bad), preferences (like versus don't like), emotions (happy versus frustrated), goals (want versus don't want), or purposes (to attain or maintain X versus to prevent or avoid X). Readers evaluated all sentences. The mean rate of evaluation per sentence was 0.55. Positive and negative evaluations over the course of the story indicated that things initially went badly for characters, improved with the formulation and execution of goal plans, declined with goal failure, and improved as characters formulated new goals and succeeded. The kind of evaluation made depended upon the episodic category of the event and the event's temporal location in the story. Evaluations also served to explain or predict events. In making evaluations, readers stayed within the frame of the story and perspectives of the character or narrator. They also moved out of the narrative frame and addressed evaluations towards the experimenter in a communicative context.

Abstract

Understanding the role of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) in learning and memory is an important problem in cognitive neuroscience. Memory and learning processes that depend on the function of the MTL and related diencephalic structures (e.g., the anterior and mediodorsal thalamic nuclei) are defined as declarative. We have studied the MTL activity as indicated by regional cerebral blood flow with positron emission tomography and statistical parametric mapping during recall of abstract designs in a less practiced memory state as well as in a well-practiced (well-encoded) memory state. The results showed an increased activity of the MTL bilaterally (including parahippocampal gyrus extending into hippocampus proper, as well as anterior lingual and anterior fusiform gyri) during retrieval in the less practiced memory state compared to the well-practiced memory state, indicating a dynamic role of the MTL in retrieval during the learning processes. The results also showed that the activation of the MTL decreases as the subjects learn to draw abstract designs from memory, indicating a changing role of the MTL during recall in the earlier stages of acquisition compared to the well-encoded declarative memory state.

Abstract

In the present PET study we explore some functional aspects of the interaction between attentional/control processes and learning/memory processes. The network of brain regions supporting recall of abstract designs were studied in a less practiced and in a well practiced state. The results indicate that automaticity, i.e., a decreased dependence on attentional and working memory resources, develops as a consequence of practice. This corresponds to the practice related decreases of activity in the prefrontal, anterior cingulate, and posterior parietal regions. In addition, the activity of the medial temporal regions decreased as a function of practice. This indicates an inverse relation between the strength of encoding and the activation of the MTL during retrieval. Furthermore, the pattern of practice related increases in the auditory, posterior insular-opercular extending into perisylvian supra marginal region, and the right mid occipito-temporal region, may reflect a lower degree of inhibitory attentional modulation of task irrelevant processing and more fully developed representations of the abstract designs, respectively. We also suggest that free recall is dependent on bilateral prefrontal processing, in particular non-automatic free recall. The present results cofirm previous functional neuroimaging studies of memory retrieval indicating that recall is subserved by a network of interacting brain regions. Furthermore, the results indicate that some components of the neural network subserving free recall may have a dynamic role and that there is a functional restructuring of the information processing networks during the learning process.

Abstract

Recent event-related FMRI studies indicate that the prefrontal (PFC) and the medial temporal lobe (MTL) regions are more active during effective encoding than during ineffective encoding. The within-subject design and the use of well-educated young college students in these studies makes it important to replicate these results in other study populations. In this PET study, we used an auditory word-pair association cued-recall paradigm and investigated a group of healthy upper middle-aged/older illiterate women. We observed a positive correlation between cued-recall success and the regional cerebral blood flow of the left inferior PFC (BA 47) and the MTLs. Specifically, we used the cuedrecall success as a covariate in a general linear model and the results confirmed that the left inferior PFC and the MTLare more active during effective encoding than during ineffective encoding. These effects were observed during encoding of both semantically and phonologically related word pairs, indicating that these effects are robust in the studied population, that is, reproducible within group. These results generalize the results of Brewer et al. (1998, Science 281, 1185– 1187) and Wagner et al. (1998, Science 281, 1188–1191) to an upper middle aged/older illiterate population. In addition, the present study indicates that effective relational encoding correlates positively with the activity of the anterior medial temporal lobe regions.

Abstract

A fundamental problem in the study of learning is that learning-related changes may be confounded by nonspecific time effects. There are several strategies for handling this problem. This problem may be of greater significance in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) compared to positron emission tomography (PET). Using the general linear model, we describe, compare, and discuss two approaches for separating learning-related from nonspecific time effects. The first approach makes assumptions on the general behavior of nonspecific effects and explicitly models these effects, i.e., nonspecific time effects are incorporated as a linear or nonlinear confounding covariate in the statistical model. The second strategy makes no a priori assumption concerning the form of nonspecific time effects, but implicitly controls for nonspecific effects using an interaction approach, i.e., learning effects are assessed with an interaction contrast. The two approaches depend on specific assumptions and have specific limitations. With certain experimental designs, both approaches may be used and the results compared, lending particular support to effects that are independent of the method used. A third and perhaps better approach that sometimes may be practically unfeasible is to use a completely temporally balanced experimental design. The choice of approach may be of particular importance when learning related effects are studied with fMRI.

Abstract

The objective of this study was to investigate the central processing of dynamic mechanical allodynia in patients with mononeuropathy. Regional cerebral bloodflow, as an indicator of neuronal activity, was measured with positron emission tomography. Paired comparisons were made between three different states; rest, allodynia during brushing the painful skin area, and brushing of the homologous contralateral area. Bilateral activations were observed in the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) and the secondary somatosensory cortex (S2) during allodynia compared to rest. The S1 activation contralateral to the site of the stimulus was more expressed during allodynia than during innocuous touch. Significant activations of the contralateral posterior parietal cortex, the periaqueductal gray (PAG), the thalamus bilaterally and motor areas were also observed in the allodynic state compared to both non-allodynic states. In the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) there was only a suggested activation when the allodynic state was compared with the non-allodynic states. In order to account for the individual variability in the intensity of allodynia and ongoing spontaneous pain, rCBF was regressed on the individually reported pain intensity, and significant covariations were observed in the ACC and the right anterior insula. Significantly decreased regional blood flow was observed bilaterally in the medial and lateral temporal lobe as well as in the occipital and posterior cingulate cortices when the allodynic state was compared to the non-painful conditions. This finding is consistent with previous studies suggesting attentional modulation and a central coping strategy for known and expected painful stimuli. Involvement of the medial pain system has previously been reported in patients with mononeuropathy during ongoing spontaneous pain. This study reveals a bilateral activation of the lateral pain system as well as involvement of the medial pain system during dynamic mechanical allodynia in patients with mononeuropathy.

Abstract

It has previously been suggested that the activity in sensory regions of the brain can be modulated by attentional mechanisms during parallel cognitive processing. To investigate whether such attention-related modulations are present in the processing of pain, the regional cerebral blood ¯ow was measured using [15O]butanol and positron emission tomography in conditions involving both pain and parallel cognitive demands. The painful stimulus consisted of the standard cold pressor test and the cognitive task was a computerised perceptual maze test. The activations during the maze test reproduced findings in previous studies of the same cognitive task. The cold pressor test evoked signi®cant activity in the contralateral S1, and bilaterally in the somatosensory association areas (including S2), the ACC and the mid-insula. The activity in the somatosensory association areas and periaqueductal gray/midbrain were significantly modified, i.e. relatively decreased, when the subjects also were performing the maze task. The altered activity was accompanied with significantly lower ratings of pain during the cognitive task. In contrast, lateral orbitofrontal regions showed a relative increase of activity during pain combined with the maze task as compared to only pain, which suggests the possibility of the involvement of frontal cortex in modulation of regions processing pain

Abstract

In this study we test a number of different claims about the nature of stylistic variation at the “single-word” stage by examining the relation between variation in early vocabulary composition, variation in early language use, and variation in the structural and functional propreties of mothers' child-directed speech. Maternal-report and observational data were collected for 26 children at 10, 50, and 100 words, These were then correlated with a variety of different measures of maternal speech at 10 words, The results show substantial variation in the percentage of common nouns and unanalyzed phrases in children's vocabularies, and singficant relations between this variation and the way in which language is used by the child. They also reveal singficant relations between the way in whch mothers use language at 10 words and the way in chich their children use language at 50 words and between certain formal properties of mothers speech at 10 words and the percentage of common nouns and unanalyzed phrases in children's early vocabularies, However, most of these relations desappear when an attempt is made to control for ossible effects of the child on the mother at Time 1. The exception is a singficant negative correlation between mothers tendency to produce speech that illustrates word boundaries and the percentage of unanalyzed phrases at 50 and 100 words. This suggests that mothers whose sprech provides the child with information about where new words begin and end tend to have children with few unanalyzed. phrases in their early vocabularies.

Abstract

In this paper hypothesis‐testing behaviour is compared to risk‐taking behaviour. It is proposed that choosing a suitable test for a given hypothesis requires making a preposterior analysis of two aspects of such a test: the probability of obtaining supporting evidence and the evidential value of this evidence. This consideration resembles the one a gambler makes when choosing among bets, each having a probability of winning and an amount to be won. A confirmatory testing strategy can be defined within this framework as a strategy directed at maximizing either the probability or the value of a confirming outcome. Previous theories on testing behaviour have focused on the human tendency to maximize the probability of a confirming outcome. In this paper, two experiments are presented in which participants tend to maximize the confirming value of the test outcome. Motivational factors enhance this tendency dependent on the context of the testing situation. Both this result and the framework are discussed in relation to other studies in the field of testing behaviour.

Abstract

This study investigated characteristics of motor cortex activation and response generation in Parkinson's disease with measures of electrocortical activity (lateralized readiness potential [LRP]), electromyographic activity (EMG), and isometric force in a noise-compatibility task. When presented with stimuli consisting of incompatible target and distracter elements asking for responses of opposite hands, patients were less able than control subjects to suppress activation of the motor cortex controlling the wrong response hand. This was manifested in the pattern of reaction times and in an incorrect lateralization of the LRP. Onset latency and rise time of the LRP did not differ between patients and control subjects, but EMG and response force developed more slowly in patients. Moreover, in patients but not in control subjects, the rate of development of EMG and response force decreased as reaction time increased. We hypothesize that this dissociation between electrocortical activity and peripheral measures in Parkinson's disease is the result of changes in motor cortex function that alter the relation between signal-related and movement-related neural activity in the motor cortex. In the LRP, this altered balance may obscure an abnormal development of movement-related neural activity.

Abstract

Lexical access in speaking consists of two major steps: lemma retrieval and word-form encoding. In Roelofs (Roelofs, A. 1992a. Cognition 42. 107-142; Roelofs. A. 1993. Cognition 47, 59-87.), I described a model of lemma retrieval. The present paper extends this work by presenting a comprehensive model of the second access step, word-form encoding. The model is called WEAVER (Word-form Encoding by Activation and VERification). Unlike other models of word-form generation, WEAVER is able to provide accounts of response time data, particularly from the picture-word interference paradigm and the implicit priming paradigm. Its key features are (1) retrieval by spreading activation, (2) verification of activated information by a production rule, (3) a rightward incremental construction of phonological representations using a principle of active syllabification, syllables are constructed on the fly rather than stored with lexical items, (4) active competitive selection of syllabic motor programs using a mathematical formalism that generates response times and (5) the association of phonological speech errors with the selection of syllabic motor programs due to the failure of verification.

Abstract

The present paper reports an analysis of correct wh-question production and subject–auxiliary inversion errors in one child's early wh-question data (age 2; 3.4 to 4; 10.23). It is argued that two current movement rule accounts (DeVilliers, 1991; Valian, Lasser & Mandelbaum, 1992) cannot explain the patterning of early wh-questions. However, the data can be explained in terms of the child's knowledge of particular lexically-specific wh-word+auxiliary combinations, and the pattern of inversion and uninversion predicted from the relative frequencies of these combinations in the mother's speech. The results support the claim that correctly inverted wh-questions can be produced without access to a subject–auxiliary inversion rule and are consistent with the constructivist claim that a distributional learning mechanism that learns and reproduces lexically-specific formulae heard in the input can explain much of the early multi-word speech data. The implications of these results for movement rule-based and constructivist theories of grammatical development are discussed.

Abstract

Recent studies of wh-question acquisition have tended to come from the nativist side of the language acquisition debate with little input from a constructivist perspective. The present work was designed to redress the balance, first by presenting a detailed description of young children's wh-question acquisition data, second, by providing detailed critiques of two nativist theories of wh- question acquisition, and third, by presenting a preliminary account of young children's wh-question development from a constructivist perspective. Analyses of the data from twelve 2 to 3 year old children collected over a year and of data from an older child (Adam from the Brown corpus, 1973) are described and three conclusions are drawn. First it is argued that the data suggest that children's knowledge of how to form wh-questions builds up gradually as they learn how to combine lexical items such as wh-words and auxiliaries in specific ways. Second, it is concluded that two nativist theories of grammatical development (Radford, 1990, 1992, 1995, 1996, Valian, Lasser & Mandelbaum, 1992) fail to account successfully for the wh-question data produced by the children. Third, it is asserted that the lexically-specific nature of children's early wh-questions is compatible with a lexical constructivist view of development, which proposes that the language learning mechanism learns by picking up high frequency lexical patterns from the input. The implications of these conclusions for theories of language development and future research are discussed.

Abstract

Capacity limited memory systems need to gradually forget old information in order to avoid catastrophic forgetting where all stored information is lost. This can be achieved by allowing new information to overwrite old, as in the so-called palimpsest memory. This paper describes a new such learning rule employed in an attractor neural network. The network does not exhibit catastrophic forgetting, has a capacity dependent on the learning time constant and exhibits recency e!ects in retrieval

Abstract

A series of experiments was carried out to investigate the syllable affiliation of intervocalic consonants following short vowels, long vowels, and schwa in Dutch. Special interest was paid to words such as letter ['leter] ''id.,'' where a short vowel is followed by a single consonant. On phonological grounds one may predict that the first syllable should always be closed, but earlier psycholinguistic research had shown that speakers tend to leave these syllables open. In our experiments, bisyllabic word forms were presented aurally, and participants produced their syllables in reversed order (Experiments 1 through 5), or repeated the words inserting a pause between the syllables (Experiment 6). The results showed that participants generally closed syllables with a short vowel. However, in a significant number of the cases they produced open short vowel syllables. Syllables containing schwa, like syllables with a long vowel, were hardly ever closed. Word stress, the phonetic quality of the vowel in the first syllable, and the experimental context influenced syllabification. Taken together, the experiments show that native speakers syllabify bisyllabic Dutch nouns in accordance with a small set of prosodic output constraints. To account for the variability of the results, we propose that these constraints differ in their probabilities of being applied.

Abstract

Speakers can use pronouns when their conceptual referents are accessible from the preceding discourse, as in 'The flower is red. It turns blue'. Theories of language production agree that in order to produce a noun semantic, syntactic, and phonological information must be accessed. However, little is known about lexical access to pronouns. In this paper, we propose a model of pronoun access in German. Since the forms of German pronouns depend on the grammatical gender of the nouns they replace, the model claims that speakers must access the syntactic representation of the replaced noun (its lemma) to select a pronoun. In two experiments using the lexical decision during naming paradigm [Levelt, W.J.M., Schriefers, H., Vorberg, D., Meyer, A.S., Pechmann, T., Havinga, J., 1991a. The time course of lexical access in speech production: a study of picture naming. Psychological Review 98, 122-142], we investigated whether lemma access automatically entails the activation of the corresponding word form or whether a word form is only activated when the noun itself is produced, but not when it is replaced by a pronoun. Experiment 1 showed that during pronoun production the phonological form of the replaced noun is activated. Experiment 2 demonstrated that this phonological activation was not a residual of the use of the noun in the preceding sentence. Thus, when a pronoun is produced, the lemma and the phonological form of the replaced noun become reactivated.

Abstract

Visiting the Trobriand Islands is advertised as being the highlight of a trip for tourists to Papua New Guinea who want, and can afford, to experience this 'ultimate adventure' with 'expeditionary cruises aboard the luxurious Melanesian Discoverer. The advertisements also promise that the tourists can 'meet the friendly people' and 'observe their unique culture, dances, and art'. During my research in Kaibola and Nuwebila, two neighbouring villages on the northern tip of Kiriwina Island, I studied and analysed the encounters of tourists with Trobriand Islanders, who sing and dance for the Europeans. The analyses of the islanders' tourist performances are based on Erving Goffman's now classic study The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which was first published in 1959. In this study Goffmann analyses the structures of social encounters from the perspective of the dramatic performance. The situational context within which the encounter between tourists and Trobriand Islanders takes place frames the tourists as the audience and the Trobriand Islanders as a team of performers. The inherent structure of the parts of the overall performance presented in the two villages can be summarized - within the framework of Goffman's approach - in analogy with the structure of drama. We find parts that constitute the 'exposition', the 'complication', and the 'resolution' of a drama; we even observe an equivalent to the importance of the 'Second Act Curtain' in modern drama theory. Deeper analyses of this encounter show that the motives of the performers and their 'art of impression management' are to control the impression their audience receives in this encounter situation. This analysis reveals that the Trobriand Islanders sell their customers the expected images of what Malinowski (1929) once termed the '...Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia' in a staged 'illusion'. With the conscious realization of the part they as performers play in this encounter, the Trobriand Islanders are in a position that is superior to that of their audience. Their merchandise or commodity is 'not real', as it is sold 'out of its true cultural context'. It is staged - and thus cannot be taken by any customer whatsoever because it (re)presents just an 'illusion'. The Trobriand Islanders know that neither they nor the core aspects of their culture will suffer any damage within a tourist encounter that is defined by the structure and the kind of their performance. Their pride and self-confidence enable them to bring their superior position into play in their dealings with tourists. With their indigenous humour, they even use this encounter for ridiculing their visitors. It turns out that the encounter is another manifestation of the Trobriand Islanders' self-consciousness, self-confidence, and pride with which they manage to protect core aspects of their cultural identity, while at the same time using and 'selling' parts of their culture as a kind of commodity to tourists.

Abstract

Aboriginal languages threatened by speakers poor economic and social conditions; some may survive through support for community development, language maintenance, bilingual education and training of Aboriginal teachers and linguists, and nonAboriginal teachers of Aboriginal and Islander students.

Abstract

The temporal distribution of perceptually relevant information for consonant recognition in British English VCVs is investigated. The information distribution in the vicinity of consonantal closure and release was measured by presenting initial and final portions, respectively, of naturally produced VCV utterances to listeners for categorization. A multidimensional scaling analysis of the results provided highly interpretable, four-dimensional geometrical representations of the confusion patterns in the categorization data. In addition, transmitted information as a function of truncation point was calculated for the features manner place and voicing. The effects of speaker, vowel context, stress, and distinctive feature on the resulting information distributions were tested statistically. It was found that, although all factors are significant, the location and spread of the distributions depends principally on the distinctive feature, i.e., the temporal distribution of perceptually relevant information is very different for the features manner, place, and voicing.

Abstract

We present results from cross-modal priming experiments on German participles and noun plurals. The experiments produced parallel results for both inflectional systems. Regular inflection exhibits full priming whereas irregularly inflected word forms show only partial priming: after hearing regularly inflected words (-t participles and -s plurals), lexical decision times on morphologically related word forms (presented visually) were similar to reaction times for a base-line condition in which prime and target were identical, but significantly shorter than in a control condition where prime and target were unrelated. In contrast, prior presentation of irregular words (-n participles and -er plurals) led to significantly longer response times on morphologically related word forms than the prior presentation of the target itself. Hence, there are clear priming differences between regularly and irregularly inflected German words. We compare the findings on German with experimental results on regular and irregular inflection in English and Italian, and discuss theoretical implications for single versus dual-mechanism models of inflection.

Abstract

Finnish vowel harmony rules require that if the vowel in the first syllable of a word belongs to one of two vowel sets, then all subsequent vowels in that word must belong either to the same set or to a neutral set. A harmony mismatch between two syllables containing vowels from the opposing sets thus signals a likely word boundary. We report five experiments showing that Finnish listeners can exploit this information in an on-line speech segmentation task. Listeners found it easier to detect words likehymyat the end of the nonsense stringpuhymy(where there is a harmony mismatch between the first two syllables) than in the stringpyhymy(where there is no mismatch). There was no such effect, however, when the target words appeared at the beginning of the nonsense string (e.g.,hymypuvshymypy). Stronger harmony effects were found for targets containing front harmony vowels (e.g.,hymy) than for targets containing back harmony vowels (e.g.,paloinkypaloandkupalo). The same pattern of results appeared whether target position within the string was predictable or unpredictable. Harmony mismatch thus appears to provide a useful segmentation cue for the detection of word onsets in Finnish speech.

Abstract

In this study the N400 component of the event-related potential was used to investigate spoken sentence understanding in Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics. The aim of the study was to determine whether spoken sentence comprehension problems in these patients might result from a deficit in the on-line integration of lexical information. Subjects listened to sentences spoken at a normal rate. In half of these sentences, the meaning of the final word of the sentence matched the semantic specifications of the preceding sentence context. In the other half of the sentences, the sentence-final word was anomalous with respect to the preceding sentence context. The N400 was measured to the sentence-final words in both conditions. The results for the aphasic patients (n = 14) were analyzed according to the severity of their comprehension deficit and compared to a group of 12 neurologically unimpaired age-matched controls, as well as a group of 6 nonaphasic patients with a lesion in the right hemisphere. The nonaphasic brain damaged patients and the aphasic patients with a light comprehension deficit (high comprehenders, n = 7) showed an N400 effect that was comparable to that of the neurologically unimpaired subjects. In the aphasic patients with a moderate to severe comprehension deficit (low comprehenders, n = 7), a reduction and delay of the N400 effect was obtained. In addition, the P300 component was measured in a classical oddball paradigm, in which subjects were asked to count infrequent low tones in a random series of high and low tones. No correlation was found between the occurrence of N400 and P300 effects, indicating that changes in the N400 results were related to the patients' language deficit. Overall, the pattern of results was compatible with the idea that aphasic patients with moderate to severe comprehension problems are impaired in the integration of lexical information into a higher order representation of the preceding sentence context.

Abstract

Although children's knowledge of the sound patterns of words has been a focus of debate for many years, little is known about the lexical representations very young children use in word recognition. In particular, researchers have questioned the degree of specificity encoded in early lexical representations. The current study addressed this issue by presenting 18–23-month-olds with object labels that were either correctly pronounced, or mispronounced. Mispronunciations involved replacement of one segment with a similar segment, as in ‘baby–vaby’. Children heard sentences containing these words while viewing two pictures, one of which was the referent of the sentence. Analyses of children's eye movements showed that children recognized the spoken words in both conditions, but that recognition was significantly poorer when words were mispronounced. The effects of mispronunciation on recognition were unrelated to age or to spoken vocabulary size. The results suggest that children's representations of familiar words are phonetically well-specified, and that this specification may not be a consequence of the need to differentiate similar words in production.

Abstract

The murine homologue of the human chloride channel gene, CLCN5, defects in which are responsible for Dent disease, has been cloned and characterized. We isolated the entire coding region of mouse Clcn5 cDNA and approximately 45 kb of genomic sequence embracing the gene. To study its transcriptional control, the 5' upstream sequences of the mouse Clcn5 gene were cloned into a luciferase reporter vector. Deletion analysis of 1.5 kb of the 5' flanking sequence defined an active promoter region within 128 bp of the putative transcription start site, which is associated with a TATA motif but lacks a CAAT consensus. Within this sequence, there is a motif with homology to a purine-rich sequence responsible for the kidney-specific promoter activity of the rat CLC-K1 gene, another member of the chloride-channel gene family expressed in kidney. An enhancer element that confers a 10- to 20-fold increase in the promoter activity of the mouse Clcn5 gene was found within the first intron. The organization of the human CLCN5 and mouse Clcn5 gene structures is highly conserved, and the sequence of the murine protein is 98% similar to that of human, with its highest expression seen in the kidney. This study thus provides the first identification of the transcriptional control region of, and the basis for an understanding of the regulatory mechanism that controls, this kidney-specific, chloride-channel gene.

Abstract

A growing number of researchers in the sentence processing community are using eye movements to address issues in spoken language comprehension. Experiments using this paradigm have shown that visually presented referential information, including properties of referents relevant to specific actions, influences even the earliest moments of syntactic processing. Methodological concerns about task-specific strategies and the linking hypothesis between eye movements and linguistic processing are identified and discussed. These concerns are addressed in a review of recent studies of spoken word recognition which introduce and evaluate a detailed linking hypothesis between eye movements and lexical access. The results provide evidence about the time course of lexical activation that resolves some important theoretical issues in spoken-word recognition. They also demonstrate that fixations are sensitive to properties of the normal language-processing system that cannot be attributed to task-specific strategies

Abstract

This paper presents electrophysiological data on the on-line processing of open- and closed-class words in patients with Broca’s aphasia with agrammatic comprehension. Event-related brain potentials were recorded from the scalp when Broca patients and nonaphasic control subjects were visually presented with a story in which the words appeared one at a time on the screen. Separate waveforms were computed for open- and closed-class words. The non-aphasic control subjects showed clear differences between the processing of open- and closed-class words in an early (210-375 ms) and a late (400-700 ms) time-window.The early electrophysiological differences reflect the first manifestation of the availability of word-category information from the mental lexicon. The late differences presumably relate to post-lexical semantic and syntactic processing. In contrast to the control subjects, the Broca patients showed no early vocabulary class effect and only a limited late effect. The results suggest that an important factor in the agrammatic comprehension deficit of Broca’s aphasics is a delayed and/or incomplete availability of word-class information.

Abstract

In this paper we investigate acoustic differences between vowels in syllables that do or do not carry lexical stress. In doing so, we concentrated on segmental acoustic phonetic features that are conventionally assumed to differ between stressed and unstressed syllables, viz. Duration, Energy and Spectral Tilt. The speech material in this study differs from the type of material used in previous research: instead of specially constructed sentences we used phonetically rich sentences from the Dutch POLYPHONE corpus. Most of the Duration, Energy and Spectral Tilt features that we used in the investigation show statistically significant differences for the population means of stressed and unstressed vowels. However, it also appears that the distributions overlap to such an extent that automatic detection of stressed and unstressed syllables yields correct classifications of 72.6% at best. It is argued that this result is due to the large variety in the ways in which the abstract linguistic feature `lexical stress' is realized in the acoustic speech signal. Our findings suggest that a lexical stress detector has little use for a single pass decoder in an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, but could still play a useful role as an additional knowledge source in a multi-pass decoder.

Abstract

An event-related brain potentials experiment was carried out to examine the interplay of referential and structural factors during sentence processing in discourse. Subjects read (Dutch) sentences beginning like “David told the girl that … ” in short story contexts that had introduced either one or two referents for a critical singular noun phrase (“the girl”). The waveforms showed that within 280 ms after onset of the critical noun the reader had already determined whether the noun phrase had a unique referent in earlier discourse. Furthermore, this referential information was immediately used in parsing the rest of the sentence, which was briefly ambiguous between a complement clause (“ … that there would be some visitors”) and a relative clause (“ … that had been on the phone to hang up”). A consistent pattern of P600/SPS effects elicited by various subsequent disambiguations revealed that a two-referent discourse context had led the parser to initially pursue the relative-clause alternative to a larger extent than a one-referent context. Together, the results suggest that during the processing of sentences in discourse, structural and referential sources of information interact on a word-by-word basis.

Abstract

The temporal properties of semantic and phonological processes in speech production were investigated in a new experimental paradigm using movement-related brain potentials. The main experimental task was picture naming. In addition, a 2-choice reaction go/no-go procedure was included, involving a semantic and a phonological categorization of the picture name. Lateralized readiness potentials (LRPs) were derived to test whether semantic and phonological information activated motor processes at separate moments in time. An LRP was only observed on no-go trials when the semantic (not the phonological) decision determined the response hand. Varying the position of the critical phoneme in the picture name did not affect the onset of the LRP but rather influenced when the LRP began to differ on go and no-go trials and allowed the duration of phonological encoding of a word to be estimated. These results provide electrophysiological evidence for early semantic activation and later phonological encoding.

Abstract

We report a series of experiments examining the effects on word processing of insertion of an optional epenthetic vowel in word-final consonant clusters in Dutch. Such epenthesis turns film, for instance, into film. In a word-reversal task listeners treated words with and without epenthesis alike, as monosyllables, suggesting that the variant forms both activate the same canonical representation, that of a monosyllabic word without epenthesis. In both lexical decision and word spotting, response times to recognize words were significantly faster when epenthesis was present than when the word was presented in its canonical form without epenthesis. It is argued that addition of the epenthetic vowel makes the liquid consonants constituting the first member of a cluster more perceptible; a final phoneme-detection experiment confirmed that this was the case. These findings show that a transformed variant of a word, although it contacts the lexicon via the representation of the canonical form, can be more easily perceptible than that canonical form.

Abstract

Jescheniak and Levelt (Jescheniak, J.-D., Levelt, W.J.M. 1994. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 20 (4), 824–843) have suggested that the speed with which native speakers of a gender-marking language retrieve the grammatical gender of a noun from their mental lexicon may depend on the recency of earlier access to that same noun's gender, as the result of a mechanism that is dedicated to facilitate gender-marked anaphoric reference to recently introduced discourse entities. This hypothesis was tested in two picture naming experiments. Recent gender access did not facilitate the production of gender-marked adjective noun phrases (Experiment 1), nor that of gender-marked definite article noun phrases (Experiment 2), even though naming times for the latter utterances were sensitive to the gender of a written distractor word superimposed on the picture to be named. This last result replicates and extends earlier gender-specific picture-word interference results (Schriefers, H. 1993. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 19 (4), 841–850), showing that one can selectively tap into the production of grammatical gender agreement during speaking. The findings are relevant to theories of speech production and the representation of grammatical gender for that process.

Abstract

In two ERP experiments we investigated how and when the language comprehension system relates an incoming word to semantic representations of an unfolding local sentence and a wider discourse. In experiment 1, subjects were presented with short stories. The last sentence of these stories occasionally contained a critical word that, although acceptable in the local sentence context, was semantically anomalous with respect to the wider discourse (e.g., "Jane told the brother that he was exceptionally slow" in a discourse context where he had in fact been very quick). Relative to coherent control words (e.g., "quick"), these discourse-dependent semantic anomalies elicited a large N400 effect that began at about 200-250 ms after word onset. In experiment 2, the same sentences were presented without their original story context. Although the words that had previously been anomalous in discourse still elicited a slightly larger average N400 than the coherent words, the resulting N400 effect was much reduced, showing that the large effect observed in stories was related to the wider discourse. In the same experiment, single sentences that contained a clear local semantic anomaly elicited a standard sentence-dependent N400 effect (e.g., Kutas & Hillyard, 1980). The N400 effects elicited in discourse and in single sentences had the same time course, overall morphology, and scalp distribution. We argue that these findings are most compatible with models of language processing in which there is no fundamental distinction between the integration of a word in its local (sentence-level) and its global (discourse-level) semantic context.

Abstract

We review the implications of recent ERP evidence for when and how grammatical gender agreement constrains sentence parsing. In some theories of parsing, gender is assumed to immediately and categorically block gender-incongruent phrase structure alternatives from being pursued. In other theories, the parser initially ignores gender altogether. The ERP evidence we discuss suggests an intermediate position, in which grammatical gender does not immediately block gender-incongruent phrase structures from being considered, but is used to dispose of them shortly thereafter.

Abstract

Motor-related brain potentials were used to examine the time course of grammatical and phonological processes during noun phrase production in Dutch. In the experiments, participants named colored pictures using a no-determiner noun phrase. On half of the trials a syntactic-phonological classification task had to be performed before naming. Depending on the outcome of the classifications, a left or a right push-button response was given (go trials), or no push-button response was given (no-go trials). Lateralized readiness potentials (LRPs) were derived to test whether syntactic and phonological information affected the motor system at separate moments in time. The results showed that when syntactic information determined the response-hand decision, an LRP developed on no-go trials. However, no such effect was observed when phonological information determined response hand. On the basis of the data, it can be estimated that an additional period of at least 40 ms is needed to retrieve a word's initial phoneme once its lemma has been retrieved. These results provide evidence for the view that during speaking, grammatical processing precedes phonological processing in time.

Abstract

Based on the results of an event-related brain potentials (ERP) experiment (van Berkum, Brown, & Hagoort. 1999a, b), we have recently argued that discourse-level referential context can be taken into account extremely rapidly by the parser. Moreover, our ERP results indicated that local grammatical gender information, although available within a few hundred milliseconds from word onset, is not always used quickly enough to prevent the parser from considering a discourse-supported, but agreement-violating, syntactic analysis. In a comment on our work, Brysbaert and Mitchell (2000) have raised concerns about the methodology of our ERP experiment and have challenged our interpretation of the results. In this reply, we argue that these concerns are unwarranted and, that, in contrast to our own interpretation, the alternative explanations provided by Brysbaert and Mitchell do not account for the full pattern of ERP results.

Abstract

We present the design, implementation and simulation results of a psycholinguistic model of human syntactic processing that meets major empirical criteria. The parser operates in conjunction with a lexicalist grammar and is driven by syntactic information associated with heads of phrases. The dynamics of the model are based on competition by lateral inhibition ('competitive inhibition'). Input words activate lexical frames (i.e. elementary trees anchored to input words) in the mental lexicon, and a network of candidate 'unification links' is set up between frame nodes. These links represent tentative attachments that are graded rather than all-or-none. Candidate links that, due to grammatical or 'treehood' constraints, are incompatible, compete for inclusion in the final syntactic tree by sending each other inhibitory signals that reduce the competitor's attachment strength. The outcome of these local and simultaneous competitions is controlled by dynamic parameters, in particular by the Entry Activation and the Activation Decay rate of syntactic nodes, and by the Strength and Strength Build-up rate of Unification links. In case of a successful parse, a single syntactic tree is returned that covers the whole input string and consists of lexical frames connected by winning Unification links. Simulations are reported of a significant range of psycholinguistic parsing phenomena in both normal and aphasic speakers of English: (i) various effects of linguistic complexity (single versus double, center versus right-hand self-embeddings of relative clauses; the difference between relative clauses with subject and object extraction; the contrast between a complement clause embedded within a relative clause versus a relative clause embedded within a complement clause); (ii) effects of local and global ambiguity, and of word-class and syntactic ambiguity (including recency and length effects); (iii) certain difficulty-of-reanalysis effects (contrasts between local ambiguities that are easy to resolve versus ones that lead to serious garden-path effects); (iv) effects of agrammatism on parsing performance, in particular the performance of various groups of aphasic patients on several sentence types.

Abstract

L'A. étudie les corrélations entre structure syntaxique et fonction pragmatique dans les alternances de voix en akatek, une langue maya appartenant au sous-groupe Q'anjob'ala. Les alternances pragmatiques de voix sont les mécanismes par lesquels les langues encodent les différents degrés de topicalité des deux principaux participants d'un événement sémantiquement transitif, l'agent et le patient. A l'aide d'une analyse quantitative, l'A. évalue la topicalité de ces participants et identifie les structures syntaxiques permettant d'exprimer les quatre principales fonctions de voix en akatek : active-directe, inverse, passive et antipassive