Publications

Displaying 1 - 100 of 270
  • Alhama, R. G., Scha, R., & Zuidema, W. (2014). Rule learning in humans and animals. In E. A. Cartmill, S. Roberts, H. Lyn, & H. Cornish (Eds.), The evolution of language: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference (EVOLANG 10) (pp. 371-372). Singapore: World Scientific.
  • 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.
  • Almeida, L., Amdal, I., Beires, N., Boualem, M., Boves, L., Den Os, E., Filoche, P., Gomes, R., Knudsen, J. E., Kvale, K., Rugelbak, J., Tallec, C., & Warakagoda, N. (2002). Implementing and evaluating a multimodal tourist guide. In J. v. Kuppevelt, L. Dybkjær, & N. Bernsen (Eds.), Proceedings of the International CLASS Workshop on Natural, Intelligent and Effective Interaction in Multimodal Dialogue System (pp. 1-7). Copenhagen: Kluwer.
  • Aristar-Dry, H., Drude, S., Windhouwer, M., Gippert, J., & Nevskaya, I. (2012). „Rendering Endangered Lexicons Interoperable through Standards Harmonization”: The RELISH Project. In N. Calzolari (Ed.), Proceedings of LREC 2012: 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 766-770). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

    Abstract

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

    Abstract

    Analysis of the functions of nominal apposition in a number of Latin authors representing different periods, genres, and
    linguistic registers shows (1) that nominal apposition in Latin had a wide variety of functions; (2) that genre had some
    effect on functional use; (3) that change did not affect semantic fields as such; and (4) that with time the occurrence of
    apposition increasingly came to depend on the semantic field and within the semantic field on the individual lexical items.
    The ‘per-word’ treatment –also attested for the structural development of nominal apposition– underscores the specific
    characteristics of nominal apposition as a phenomenon at the cross-roads of syntax and derivational morphology
  • Bauer, B. L. M. (2014). Indefinite HOMO in the Gospels of the Vulgata. In P. Molinell, P. Cuzzoli, & C. Fedriani (Eds.), Latin vulgaire – latin tardif X (pp. 415-435). Bergamo: Bergamo University Press.
  • Benazzo, S., Flecken, M., & Soroli, E. (Eds.). (2012). Typological perspectives on language and thought: Thinking for speaking in L2. [Special Issue]. Language, Interaction and Acquisition, 3(2).
  • Bergmann, C., Ten Bosch, L., & Boves, L. (2014). A computational model of the headturn preference procedure: Design, challenges, and insights. In J. Mayor, & P. Gomez (Eds.), Computational Models of Cognitive Processes (pp. 125-136). World Scientific. doi:10.1142/9789814458849_0010.

    Abstract

    The Headturn Preference Procedure (HPP) is a frequently used method (e.g., Jusczyk & Aslin; and subsequent studies) to investigate linguistic abilities in infants. In this paradigm infants are usually first familiarised with words and then tested for a listening preference for passages containing those words in comparison to unrelated passages. Listening preference is defined as the time an infant spends attending to those passages with his or her head turned towards a flashing light and the speech stimuli. The knowledge and abilities inferred from the results of HPP studies have been used to reason about and formally model early linguistic skills and language acquisition. However, the actual cause of infants' behaviour in HPP experiments has been subject to numerous assumptions as there are no means to directly tap into cognitive processes. To make these assumptions explicit, and more crucially, to understand how infants' behaviour emerges if only general learning mechanisms are assumed, we introduce a computational model of the HPP. Simulations with the computational HPP model show that the difference in infant behaviour between familiarised and unfamiliar words in passages can be explained by a general learning mechanism and that many assumptions underlying the HPP are not necessarily warranted. We discuss the implications for conventional interpretations of the outcomes of HPP experiments.
  • Bergmann, C., Boves, L., & Ten Bosch, L. (2012). A model of the Headturn Preference Procedure: Linking cognitive processes to overt behaviour. In Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE Conference on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics (IEEE ICDL-EpiRob 2012), San Diego, CA.

    Abstract

    The study of first language acquisition still strongly relies on behavioural methods to measure underlying linguistic abilities. In the present paper, we closely examine and model one such method, the headturn preference procedure (HPP), which is widely used to measure infant speech segmentation and word recognition abilities Our model takes real speech as input, and only uses basic sensory processing and cognitive capabilities to simulate observable behaviour.We show that the familiarity effect found in many HPP experiments can be simulated without using the phonetic and phonological skills necessary for segmenting test sentences into words. The explicit modelling of the process that converts the result of the cognitive processing of the test sentences into observable behaviour uncovered two issues that can lead to null-results in HPP studies. Our simulations show that caution is needed in making inferences about underlying language skills from behaviour in HPP experiments. The simulations also generated questions that must be addressed in future HPP studies.
  • Blasi, D. E., Christiansen, M. H., Wichmann, S., Hammarström, H., & Stadler, P. F. (2014). Sound symbolism and the origins of language. In E. A. Cartmill, S. Roberts, H. Lyn, & H. Cornish (Eds.), The evolution of language: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference (EVOLANG 10) (pp. 391-392). Singapore: World Scientific.
  • Bocanegra, B. R., Poletiek, F. H., & Zwaan, R. A. (2014). Asymmetrical feature binding across language and perception. In Proceedings of the 7th annual Conference on Embodied and Situated Language Processing (ESLP 2014).
  • Bögels, S., Barr, D., Garrod, S., & Kessler, K. (2013). "Are we still talking about the same thing?" MEG reveals perspective-taking in response to pragmatic violations, but not in anticipation. In M. Knauff, N. Pauen, I. Sebanz, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2013) (pp. 215-220). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. Retrieved from http://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2013/papers/0066/index.html.

    Abstract

    The current study investigates whether mentalizing, or taking the perspective of your interlocutor, plays an essential role throughout a conversation or whether it is mostly used in reaction to misunderstandings. This study is the first to use a brain-imaging method, MEG, to answer this question. In a first phase of the experiment, MEG participants interacted "live" with a confederate who set naming precedents for certain pictures. In a later phase, these precedents were sometimes broken by a speaker who named the same picture in a different way. This could be done by the same speaker, who set the precedent, or by a different speaker. Source analysis of MEG data showed that in the 800 ms before the naming, when the picture was already on the screen, episodic memory and language areas were activated, but no mentalizing areas, suggesting that the speaker's naming intentions were not anticipated by the listener on the basis of shared experiences. Mentalizing areas only became activated after the same speaker had broken a precedent, which we interpret as a reaction to the violation of conversational pragmatics.
  • Bohnemeyer, J. (2004). Argument and event structure in Yukatek verb classes. In J.-Y. Kim, & A. Werle (Eds.), Proceedings of The Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas. Amherst, Mass: GLSA.

    Abstract

    In Yukatek Maya, event types are lexicalized in verb roots and stems that fall into a number of different form classes on the basis of (a) patterns of aspect-mood marking and (b) priviledges of undergoing valence-changing operations. Of particular interest are the intransitive classes in the light of Perlmutter’s (1978) Unaccusativity hypothesis. In the spirit of Levin & Rappaport Hovav (1995) [L&RH], Van Valin (1990), Zaenen (1993), and others, this paper investigates whether (and to what extent) the association between formal predicate classes and event types is determined by argument structure features such as ‘agentivity’ and ‘control’ or features of lexical aspect such as ‘telicity’ and ‘durativity’. It is shown that mismatches between agentivity/control and telicity/durativity are even more extensive in Yukatek than they are in English (Abusch 1985; L&RH, Van Valin & LaPolla 1997), providing new evidence against Dowty’s (1979) reconstruction of Vendler’s (1967) ‘time schemata of verbs’ in terms of argument structure configurations. Moreover, contrary to what has been claimed in earlier studies of Yukatek (Krämer & Wunderlich 1999, Lucy 1994), neither agentivity/control nor telicity/durativity turn out to be good predictors of verb class membership. Instead, the patterns of aspect-mood marking prove to be sensitive only to the presence or absense of state change, in a way that supports the unified analysis of all verbs of gradual change proposed by Kennedy & Levin (2001). The presence or absence of ‘internal causation’ (L&RH) may motivate the semantic interpretation of transitivization operations. An explicit semantics for the valence-changing operations is proposed, based on Parsons’s (1990) Neo-Davidsonian approach.
  • Bone, D., Ramanarayanan, V., Narayanan, S., Hoedemaker, R. S., & Gordon, P. C. (2013). Analyzing eye-voice coordination in rapid automatized naming. In F. Bimbot, C. Cerisara, G. Fougeron, L. Gravier, L. Lamel, F. Pelligrino, & P. Perrier (Eds.), INTERSPEECH-2013: 14thAnnual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 2425-2429). ISCA Archive. Retrieved from http://www.isca-speech.org/archive/interspeech_2013/i13_2425.html.

    Abstract

    Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) is a powerful tool for pre- dicting future reading skill. A person’s ability to quickly name symbols as they scan a table is related to higher-level reading proficiency in adults and is predictive of future literacy gains in children. However, noticeable differences are present in the strategies or patterns within groups having similar task comple- tion times. Thus, a further stratification of RAN dynamics may lead to better characterization and later intervention to support reading skill acquisition. In this work, we analyze the dynamics of the eyes, voice, and the coordination between the two during performance. It is shown that fast performers are more similar to each other than to slow performers in their patterns, but not vice versa. Further insights are provided about the patterns of more proficient subjects. For instance, fast performers tended to exhibit smoother behavior contours, suggesting a more sta- ble perception-production process.
  • Bowerman, M., Brown, P., Eisenbeiss, S., Narasimhan, B., & Slobin, D. I. (2002). Putting things in places: Developmental consequences of linguistic typology. In E. V. Clark (Ed.), Proceedings of the 31st Stanford Child Language Research Forum. Space in language location, motion, path, and manner (pp. 1-29). Stanford: Center for the Study of Language & Information.

    Abstract

    This study explores how adults and children describe placement events (e.g., putting a book on a table) in a range of different languages (Finnish, English, German, Russian, Hindi, Tzeltal Maya, Spanish, and Turkish). Results show that the eight languages grammatically encode placement events in two main ways (Talmy, 1985, 1991), but further investigation reveals fine-grained crosslinguistic variation within each of the two groups. Children are sensitive to these finer-grained characteristics of the input language at an early age, but only when such features are perceptually salient. Our study demonstrates that a unitary notion of 'event' does not suffice to characterize complex but systematic patterns of event encoding crosslinguistically, and that children are sensitive to multiple influences, including the distributional properties of the target language, in constructing these patterns in their own speech.
  • Brandt, M., Nitschke, S., & Kidd, E. (2012). Experience and processing of relative clauses in German. In A. K. Biller, E. Y. Chung, & A. E. Kimball (Eds.), Proceedings of the 36th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 36) (pp. 87-100). Boston, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Broeder, D., Brugman, H., Oostdijk, N., & Wittenburg, P. (2004). Towards Dynamic Corpora: Workshop on compiling and processing spoken corpora. In M. Lino, M. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa, & R. Silva (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004) (pp. 59-62). Paris: European Language Resource Association.
  • Broeder, D., Wittenburg, P., & Crasborn, O. (2004). Using Profiles for IMDI Metadata Creation. In M. Lino, M. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa, & R. Silva (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004) (pp. 1317-1320). Paris: European Language Resources Association.
  • Broeder, D., Van Uytvanck, D., & Senft, G. (2012). Citing on-line language resources. In N. Calzolari (Ed.), Proceedings of LREC 2012: 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 1391-1394). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

    Abstract

    Although the possibility of referring or citing on-line data from publications is seen at least theoretically as an important means to provide immediate testable proof or simple illustration of a line of reasoning, the practice has not been wide-spread yet and no extensive experience has been gained about the possibilities and problems of referring to raw data-sets. This paper makes a case to investigate the possibility and need of persistent data visualization services that facilitate the inspection and evaluation of the cited data.
  • Broeder, D., Declerck, T., Romary, L., Uneson, M., Strömqvist, S., & Wittenburg, P. (2004). A large metadata domain of language resources. In M. Lino, M. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa, & R. Silva (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004) (pp. 369-372). Paris: European Language Resources Association.
  • Broeder, D., Nava, M., & Declerck, T. (2004). INTERA - a Distributed Domain of Metadata Resources. In M. Lino, M. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa, & R. Silva (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Spoken Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004) (pp. 369-372). Paris: European Language Resources Association.
  • Broeder, D., Offenga, F., & Willems, D. (2002). Metadata tools supporting controlled vocabulary services. In M. Rodriguez González, & C. Paz SuárezR Araujo (Eds.), Third international conference on language resources and evaluation (pp. 1055-1059). Paris: European Language Resources Association.

    Abstract

    Within the ISLE Metadata Initiative (IMDI) project a user-friendly editor to enter metadata descriptions and a browser operating on the linked metadata descriptions were developed. Both tools support the usage of Controlled Vocabulary (CV) repositories by means of the specification of an URL where the formal CV definition data is available.
  • Broeder, D., Wittenburg, P., Declerck, T., & Romary, L. (2002). LREP: A language repository exchange protocol. In M. Rodriguez González, & C. Paz Suárez Araujo (Eds.), Third international conference on language resources and evaluation (pp. 1302-1305). Paris: European Language Resources Association.

    Abstract

    The recent increase in the number and complexity of the language resources available on the Internet is followed by a similar increase of available tools for linguistic analysis. Ideally the user does not need to be confronted with the question in how to match tools with resources. If resource repositories and tool repositories offer adequate metadata information and a suitable exchange protocol is developed this matching process could be performed (semi-) automatically.
  • Broeder, D., Schuurman, I., & Windhouwer, M. (2014). Experiences with the ISOcat Data Category Registry. In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, T. Declerck, H. Loftsson, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, A. Moreno, J. Odijk, & S. Piperidis (Eds.), Proceedings of LREC 2014: 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 4565-4568).
  • Broeder, D., Van Uytvanck, D., Gavrilidou, M., Trippel, T., & Windhouwer, M. (2012). Standardizing a component metadata infrastructure. In N. Calzolari (Ed.), Proceedings of LREC 2012: 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 1387-1390). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

    Abstract

    This paper describes the status of the standardization efforts of a Component Metadata approach for describing Language Resources with metadata. Different linguistic and Language & Technology communities as CLARIN, META-SHARE and NaLiDa use this component approach and see its standardization of as a matter for cooperation that has the possibility to create a large interoperable domain of joint metadata. Starting with an overview of the component metadata approach together with the related semantic interoperability tools and services as the ISOcat data category registry and the relation registry we explain the standardization plan and efforts for component metadata within ISO TC37/SC4. Finally, we present information about uptake and plans of the use of component metadata within the three mentioned linguistic and L&T communities.
  • Broersma, M. (2002). Comprehension of non-native speech: Inaccurate phoneme processing and activation of lexical competitors. In ICSLP-2002 (pp. 261-264). Denver: Center for Spoken Language Research, U. of Colorado Boulder.

    Abstract

    Native speakers of Dutch with English as a second language and native speakers of English participated in an English lexical decision experiment. Phonemes in real words were replaced by others from which they are hard to distinguish for Dutch listeners. Non-native listeners judged the resulting near-words more often as a word than native listeners. This not only happened when the phonemes that were exchanged did not exist as separate phonemes in the native language Dutch, but also when phoneme pairs that do exist in Dutch were used in word-final position, where they are not distinctive in Dutch. In an English bimodal priming experiment with similar groups of participants, word pairs were used which differed in one phoneme. These phonemes were hard to distinguish for the non-native listeners. Whereas in native listening both words inhibited each other, in non-native listening presentation of one word led to unresolved competition between both words. The results suggest that inaccurate phoneme processing by non-native listeners leads to the activation of spurious lexical competitors.
  • Broersma, M., & Kolkman, K. M. (2004). Lexical representation of non-native phonemes. In S. Kin, & M. J. Bae (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (Interspeech 2004-ICSLP) (pp. 1241-1244). Seoul: Sunjijn Printing Co.
  • Broersma, M. (2012). Lexical representation of perceptually difficult second-language words [Abstract]. Program abstracts from the 164th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 132(3), 2053.

    Abstract

    This study investigates the lexical representation of second-language words that contain difficult to distinguish phonemes. Dutch and English listeners' perception of partially onset-overlapping word pairs like DAFFOdil-DEFIcit and minimal pairs like flash-flesh, was assessed with two cross-modal priming experiments, examining two stages of lexical processing: activation of intended and mismatching lexical representations (Exp.1) and competition between those lexical representations (Exp.2). Exp.1 shows that truncated primes like daffo- and defi- activated lexical representations of mismatching words (either deficit or daffodil) more for L2 than L1 listeners. Exp.2 shows that for minimal pairs, matching primes (prime: flash, target: FLASH) facilitated recognition of visual targets for L1 and L2 listeners alike, whereas mismatching primes (flesh, FLASH) inhibited recognition consistently for L1 listeners but only in a minority of cases for L2 listeners; in most cases, for them, primes facilitated recognition of both words equally strongly. Importantly, all listeners experienced a combination of facilitation and inhibition (and all items sometimes caused facilitation and sometimes inhibition). These results suggest that for all participants, some of the minimal pairs were represented with separate, native-like lexical representations, whereas other pairs were stored as homophones. The nature of the L2 lexical representations thus varied strongly even within listeners.
  • Brugman, H., Levinson, S. C., Skiba, R., & Wittenburg, P. (2002). The DOBES archive: It's purpose and implementation. In P. Austin, H. Dry, & P. Wittenburg (Eds.), Proceedings of the international LREC workshop on resources and tools in field linguistics (pp. 11-11). Paris: European Language Resources Association.
  • Brugman, H., Crasborn, O., & Russel, A. (2004). Collaborative annotation of sign language data with Peer-to-Peer technology. In M. Lino, M. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa, & R. Silva (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Language Evaluation (LREC 2004) (pp. 213-216). Paris: European Language Resources Association.
  • Brugman, H., & Russel, A. (2004). Annotating Multi-media/Multi-modal resources with ELAN. In M. Lino, M. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa, & R. Silva (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Language Evaluation (LREC 2004) (pp. 2065-2068). Paris: European Language Resources Association.
  • Brugman, H., Spenke, H., Kramer, M., & Klassmann, A. (2002). Multimedia annotation with multilingual input methods and search support.
  • Brugman, H., Wittenburg, P., Levinson, S. C., & Kita, S. (2002). Multimodal annotations in gesture and sign language studies. In M. Rodriguez González, & C. Paz Suárez Araujo (Eds.), Third international conference on language resources and evaluation (pp. 176-182). Paris: European Language Resources Association.

    Abstract

    For multimodal annotations an exhaustive encoding system for gestures was developed to facilitate research. The structural requirements of multimodal annotations were analyzed to develop an Abstract Corpus Model which is the basis for a powerful annotation and exploitation tool for multimedia recordings and the definition of the XML-based EUDICO Annotation Format. Finally, a metadata-based data management environment has been setup to facilitate resource discovery and especially corpus management. Bt means of an appropriate digitization policy and their online availability researchers have been able to build up a large corpus covering gesture and sign language data.
  • Burenhult, N. (2004). Spatial deixis in Jahai. In S. Burusphat (Ed.), Papers from the 11th Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society 2001 (pp. 87-100). Arizona State University: Program for Southeast Asian Studies.
  • Cablitz, G. (2002). The acquisition of an absolute system: learning to talk about space in Marquesan (Oceanic, French Polynesia). In E. V. Clark (Ed.), Space in language location, motion, path, and manner (pp. 40-49). Stanford: Center for the Study of Language & Information (Electronic proceedings.
  • Casillas, M., & Frank, M. C. (2012). Cues to turn boundary prediction in adults and preschoolers. In S. Brown-Schmidt, J. Ginzburg, & S. Larsson (Eds.), Proceedings of SemDial 2012 (SeineDial): The 16th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (pp. 61-69). Paris: Université Paris-Diderot.

    Abstract

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

    Abstract

    We investigate children’s online predictive processing as it occurs naturally, in conversation. We showed 1–7 year-olds short videos of improvised conversation between puppets, controlling for available linguistic information through phonetic manipulation. Even one- and two-year-old children made accurate and spontaneous predictions about when a turn-switch would occur: they gazed at the upcoming speaker before they heard a response begin. This predictive skill relies on both lexical and prosodic information together, and is not tied to either type of information alone. We suggest that children integrate prosodic, lexical, and visual information to effectively predict upcoming linguistic material in conversation.
  • Chen, A., Gussenhoven, C., & Rietveld, T. (2002). Language-specific uses of the effort code. In B. Bel, & I. Marlien (Eds.), Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Speech Prosody (pp. 215-218). Aix=en-Provence: Université de Provence.

    Abstract

    Two groups of listeners with Dutch and British English language backgrounds judged Dutch and British English utterances, respectively, which varied in the intonation contour on the scales EMPHATIC vs. NOT EMPHATIC and SURPRISED vs. NOT SURPRISED, two meanings derived from the Effort Code. The stimuli, which differed in sentence mode but were otherwise lexically equivalent, were varied in peak height, peak alignment, end pitch, and overall register. In both languages, there are positive correlations between peak height and degree of emphasis, between peak height and degree of surprise, between peak alignment and degree of surprise, and between pitch register and degree of surprise. However, in all these cases, Dutch stimuli lead to larger perceived meaning differences than the British English stimuli. This difference in the extent to which increased pitch height triggers increases in perceived emphasis and surprise is argued to be due to the difference in the standard pitch ranges between Dutch and British English. In addition, we found a positive correlation between pitch register and the degree of emphasis in Dutch, but a negative correlation in British English. This is an unexpected difference, which illustrates a case of ambiguity in the meaning of pitch.
  • Chen, A. (2014). Production-comprehension (A)Symmetry: Individual differences in the acquisition of prosodic focus-marking. In N. Campbell, D. Gibbon, & D. Hirst (Eds.), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2014 (pp. 423-427).

    Abstract

    Previous work based on different groups of children has shown that four- to five-year-old children are similar to adults in both producing and comprehending the focus-toaccentuation mapping in Dutch, contra the alleged productionprecedes- comprehension asymmetry in earlier studies. In the current study, we addressed the question of whether there are individual differences in the production-comprehension (a)symmetricity. To this end, we examined the use of prosody in focus marking in production and the processing of focusrelated prosody in online language comprehension in the same group of 4- to 5-year-olds. We have found that the relationship between comprehension and production can be rather diverse at an individual level. This result suggests some degree of independence in learning to use prosody to mark focus in production and learning to process focus-related prosodic information in online language comprehension, and implies influences of other linguistic and non-linguistic factors on the production-comprehension (a)symmetricity
  • Chen, A., Chen, A., Kager, R., & Wong, P. (2014). Rises and falls in Dutch and Mandarin Chinese. In C. Gussenhoven, Y. Chen, & D. Dediu (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Language (pp. 83-86).

    Abstract

    Despite of the different functions of pitch in tone and nontone languages, rises and falls are common pitch patterns across different languages. In the current study, we ask what is the language specific phonetic realization of rises and falls. Chinese and Dutch speakers participated in a production experiment. We used contexts composed for conveying specific communicative purposes to elicit rises and falls. We measured both tonal alignment and tonal scaling for both patterns. For the alignment measurements, we found language specific patterns for the rises, but for falls. For rises, both peak and valley were aligned later among Chinese speakers compared to Dutch speakers. For all the scaling measurements (maximum pitch, minimum pitch, and pitch range), no language specific patterns were found for either the rises or the falls
  • Cho, T., & McQueen, J. M. (2004). Phonotactics vs. phonetic cues in native and non-native listening: Dutch and Korean listeners' perception of Dutch and English. In S. Kin, & M. J. Bae (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (Interspeech 2004-ICSLP) (pp. 1301-1304). Seoul: Sunjijn Printing Co.

    Abstract

    We investigated how listeners of two unrelated languages, Dutch and Korean, process phonotactically legitimate and illegitimate sounds spoken in Dutch and American English. To Dutch listeners, unreleased word-final stops are phonotactically illegal because word-final stops in Dutch are generally released in isolation, but to Korean listeners, released final stops are illegal because word-final stops are never released in Korean. Two phoneme monitoring experiments showed a phonotactic effect: Dutch listeners detected released stops more rapidly than unreleased stops whereas the reverse was true for Korean listeners. Korean listeners with English stimuli detected released stops more accurately than unreleased stops, however, suggesting that acoustic-phonetic cues associated with released stops improve detection accuracy. We propose that in non-native speech perception, phonotactic legitimacy in the native language speeds up phoneme recognition, the richness of acousticphonetic cues improves listening accuracy, and familiarity with the non-native language modulates the relative influence of these two factors.
  • Cho, T., & Johnson, E. K. (2004). Acoustic correlates of phrase-internal lexical boundaries in Dutch. In S. Kin, & M. J. Bae (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (Interspeech 2004-ICSLP) (pp. 1297-1300). Seoul: Sunjin Printing Co.

    Abstract

    The aim of this study was to determine if Dutch speakers reliably signal phrase-internal lexical boundaries, and if so, how. Six speakers recorded 4 pairs of phonemically identical strong-weak-strong (SWS) strings with matching syllable boundaries but mismatching intended word boundaries (e.g. reis # pastei versus reispas # tij, or more broadly C1V2(C)#C2V2(C)C3V3(C) vs. C1V2(C)C2V2(C)#C3V3(C)). An Analysis of Variance revealed 3 acoustic parameters that were significantly greater in S#WS items (C2 DURATION, RIME1 DURATION, C3 BURST AMPLITUDE) and 5 parameters that were significantly greater in the SW#S items (C2 VOT, C3 DURATION, RIME2 DURATION, RIME3 DURATION, and V2 AMPLITUDE). Additionally, center of gravity measurements suggested that the [s] to [t] coarticulation was greater in reis # pa[st]ei versus reispa[s] # [t]ij. Finally, a Logistic Regression Analysis revealed that the 3 parameters (RIME1 DURATION, RIME2 DURATION, and C3 DURATION) contributed most reliably to a S#WS versus SW#S classification.
  • Chu, M., & Kita, S. (2012). The nature of the beneficial role of spontaneous gesture in spatial problem solving [Abstract]. Cognitive Processing; Special Issue "ICSC 2012, the 5th International Conference on Spatial Cognition: Space and Embodied Cognition". Oral Presentations, 13(Suppl. 1), S39.

    Abstract

    Spontaneous gestures play an important role in spatial problem solving. We investigated the functional role and underlying mechanism of spontaneous gestures in spatial problem solving. In Experiment 1, 132 participants were required to solve a mental rotation task (see Figure 1) without speaking. Participants gestured more frequently in difficult trials than in easy trials. In Experiment 2, 66 new participants were given two identical sets of mental rotation tasks problems, as the one used in experiment 1. Participants who were encouraged to gesture in the first set of mental rotation task problemssolved more problems correctly than those who were allowed to gesture or those who were prohibited from gesturing both in the first set and in the second set in which all participants were prohibited from gesturing. The gestures produced by the gestureencouraged group and the gesture-allowed group were not qualitatively different. In Experiment 3, 32 new participants were first given a set of mental rotation problems and then a second set of nongesturing paper folding problems. The gesture-encouraged group solved more problems correctly in the first set of mental rotation problems and the second set of non-gesturing paper folding problems. We concluded that gesture improves spatial problem solving. Furthermore, gesture has a lasting beneficial effect even when gesture is not available and the beneficial effect is problem-general.We suggested that gesture enhances spatial problem solving by provide a rich sensori-motor representation of the physical world and pick up information that is less readily available to visuo-spatial processes.
  • Clark, N., & Perlman, M. (2014). Breath, vocal, and supralaryngeal flexibility in a human-reared gorilla. In B. De Boer, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of Evolang X, Workshop on Signals, Speech, and Signs (pp. 11-15).

    Abstract

    “Gesture-first” theories dismiss ancestral great apes’ vocalization as a substrate for language evolution based on the claim that extant apes exhibit minimal learning and volitional control of vocalization. Contrary to this claim, we present data of novel learned and voluntarily controlled vocal behaviors produced by a human-fostered gorilla (G. gorilla gorilla). These behaviors demonstrate varying degrees of flexibility in the vocal apparatus (including diaphragm, lungs, larynx, and supralaryngeal articulators), and are predominantly performed in coordination with manual behaviors and gestures. Instead of a gesture-first theory, we suggest that these findings support multimodal theories of language evolution in which vocal and gestural forms are coordinated and supplement one another
  • Collins, J. (2012). The evolution of the Greenbergian word order correlations. In T. C. Scott-Phillips, M. Tamariz, E. A. Cartmill, & J. R. Hurford (Eds.), The evolution of language. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference (EVOLANG9) (pp. 72-79). Singapore: World Scientific.
  • Connell, L., Cai, Z. G., & Holler, J. (2012). Do you see what I'm singing? Visuospatial movement biases pitch perception. In N. Miyake, D. Peebles, & R. P. Cooper (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2012) (pp. 252-257). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    The nature of the connection between musical and spatial processing is controversial. While pitch may be described in spatial terms such as “high” or “low”, it is unclear whether pitch and space are associated but separate dimensions or whether they share representational and processing resources. In the present study, we asked participants to judge whether a target vocal note was the same as (or different from) a preceding cue note. Importantly, target trials were presented as video clips where a singer sometimes gestured upward or downward while singing that target note, thus providing an alternative, concurrent source of spatial information. Our results show that pitch discrimination was significantly biased by the spatial movement in gesture. These effects were eliminated by spatial memory load but preserved under verbal memory load conditions. Together, our findings suggest that pitch and space have a shared representation such that the mental representation of pitch is audiospatial in nature.
  • Cooper, N., & Cutler, A. (2004). Perception of non-native phonemes in noise. In S. Kin, & M. J. Bae (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (Interspeech 2004-ICSLP) (pp. 469-472). Seoul: Sunjijn Printing Co.

    Abstract

    We report an investigation of the perception of American English phonemes by Dutch listeners proficient in English. Listeners identified either the consonant or the vowel in most possible English CV and VC syllables. The syllables were embedded in multispeaker babble at three signal-to-noise ratios (16 dB, 8 dB, and 0 dB). Effects of signal-to-noise ratio on vowel and consonant identification are discussed as a function of syllable position and of relationship to the native phoneme inventory. Comparison of the results with previously reported data from native listeners reveals that noise affected the responding of native and non-native listeners similarly.
  • 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).
  • Crasborn, O., & Sloetjes, H. (2014). Improving the exploitation of linguistic annotations in ELAN. In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, T. Declerck, H. Loftsson, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, A. Moreno, J. Odijk, & S. Piperidis (Eds.), Proceedings of LREC 2014: 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 3604-3608).

    Abstract

    This paper discusses some improvements in recent and planned versions of the multimodal annotation tool ELAN, which are targeted at improving the usability of annotated files. Increased support for multilingual documents is provided, by allowing for multilingual vocabularies and by specifying a language per document, annotation layer (tier) or annotation. In addition, improvements in the search possibilities and the display of the results have been implemented, which are especially relevant in the interpretation of the results of complex multi-tier searches.
  • Crasborn, O., Hulsbosch, M., Lampen, L., & Sloetjes, H. (2014). New multilayer concordance functions in ELAN and TROVA. In Proceedings of the Tilburg Gesture Research Meeting [TiGeR 2013].

    Abstract

    Collocations generated by concordancers are a standard instrument in the exploitation of text corpora for the analysis of language use. Multimodal corpora show similar types of patterns, activities that frequently occur together, but there is no tool that offers facilities for visualising such patterns. Examples include timing of eye contact with respect to speech, and the alignment of activities of the two hands in signed languages. This paper describes recent enhancements to the standard CLARIN tools ELAN and TROVA for multimodal annotation to address these needs: first of all the query and concordancing functions were improved, and secondly the tools now generate visualisations of multilayer collocations that allow for intuitive explorations and analyses of multimodal data. This will provide a boost to the linguistic fields of gesture and sign language studies, as it will improve the exploitation of multimodal corpora.
  • Cristia, A., & Peperkamp, S. (2012). Generalizing without encoding specifics: Infants infer phonotactic patterns on sound classes. In A. K. Biller, E. Y. Chung, & A. E. Kimball (Eds.), Proceedings of the 36th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 36) (pp. 126-138). Somerville, Mass.: Cascadilla Press.

    Abstract

    publication expected April 2012
  • Cutler, A., Norris, D., & Sebastián-Gallés, N. (2004). Phonemic repertoire and similarity within the vocabulary. In S. Kin, & M. J. Bae (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (Interspeech 2004-ICSLP) (pp. 65-68). Seoul: Sunjijn Printing Co.

    Abstract

    Language-specific differences in the size and distribution of the phonemic repertoire can have implications for the task facing listeners in recognising spoken words. A language with more phonemes will allow shorter words and reduced embedding of short words within longer ones, decreasing the potential for spurious lexical competitors to be activated by speech signals. We demonstrate that this is the case via comparative analyses of the vocabularies of English and Spanish. A language which uses suprasegmental as well as segmental contrasts, however, can substantially reduce the extent of spurious embedding.
  • Cutler, A., McQueen, J. M., Jansonius, M., & Bayerl, S. (2002). The lexical statistics of competitor activation in spoken-word recognition. In C. Bow (Ed.), Proceedings of the 9th Australian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (pp. 40-45). Canberra: Australian Speech Science and Technology Association (ASSTA).

    Abstract

    The Possible Word Constraint is a proposed mechanism whereby listeners avoid recognising words spuriously embedded in other words. It applies to words leaving a vowelless residue between their edge and the nearest known word or syllable boundary. The present study tests the usefulness of this constraint via lexical statistics of both English and Dutch. The analyses demonstrate that the constraint removes a clear majority of embedded words in speech, and thus can contribute significantly to the efficiency of human speech recognition
  • 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. (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., & Bruggeman, L. (2013). Vocabulary structure and spoken-word recognition: Evidence from French reveals the source of embedding asymmetry. In Proceedings of INTERSPEECH: 14th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 2812-2816).

    Abstract

    Vocabularies contain hundreds of thousands of words built from only a handful of phonemes, so that inevitably longer words tend to contain shorter ones. In many languages (but not all) such embedded words occur more often word-initially than word-finally, and this asymmetry, if present, has farreaching consequences for spoken-word recognition. Prior research had ascribed the asymmetry to suffixing or to effects of stress (in particular, final syllables containing the vowel schwa). Analyses of the standard French vocabulary here reveal an effect of suffixing, as predicted by this account, and further analyses of an artificial variety of French reveal that extensive final schwa has an independent and additive effect in promoting the embedding asymmetry.
  • Dalli, A., Tablan, V., Bontcheva, K., Wilks, Y., Broeder, D., Brugman, H., & Wittenburg, P. (2004). Web services architecture for language resources. In M. Lino, M. Xavier, F. Ferreira, R. Costa, & R. Silva (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC2004) (pp. 365-368). Paris: ELRA - European Language Resources Association.
  • Dediu, D., & Levinson, S. C. (2014). Language and speech are old: A review of the evidence and consequences for modern linguistic diversity. In E. A. Cartmill, S. G. Roberts, H. Lyn, & H. Cornish (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference (pp. 421-422). Singapore: World Scientific.
  • Defina, R., & Majid, A. (2012). Conceptual event units of putting and taking in two unrelated languages. In N. Miyake, D. Peebles, & R. Cooper (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2012) (pp. 1470-1475). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    People automatically chunk ongoing dynamic events into discrete units. This paper investigates whether linguistic structure is a factor in this process. We test the claim that describing an event with a serial verb construction will influence a speaker’s conceptual event structure. The grammar of Avatime (a Kwa language spoken in Ghana)requires its speakers to describe some, but not all, placement events using a serial verb construction which also encodes the preceding taking event. We tested Avatime and English speakers’ recognition memory for putting and taking events. Avatime speakers were more likely to falsely recognize putting and taking events from episodes associated with takeput serial verb constructions than from episodes associated with other constructions. English speakers showed no difference in false recognitions between episode types. This demonstrates that memory for episodes is related to the type of language used; and, moreover, across languages different conceptual representations are formed for the same physical episode, paralleling habitual linguistic practices
  • Dimroth, C., & Lasser, I. (Eds.). (2002). Finite options: How L1 and L2 learners cope with the acquisition of finiteness [Special Issue]. Linguistics, 40(4).
  • Dingemanse, M., Hammond, J., Stehouwer, H., Somasundaram, A., & Drude, S. (2012). A high speed transcription interface for annotating primary linguistic data. In Proceedings of 6th Workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities (pp. 7-12). Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.

    Abstract

    We present a new transcription mode for the annotation tool ELAN. This mode is designed to speed up the process of creating transcriptions of primary linguistic data (video and/or audio recordings of linguistic behaviour). We survey the basic transcription workflow of some commonly used tools (Transcriber, BlitzScribe, and ELAN) and describe how the new transcription interface improves on these existing implementations. We describe the design of the transcription interface and explore some further possibilities for improvement in the areas of segmentation and computational enrichment of annotations.
  • Dingemanse, M., Torreira, F., & Enfield, N. J. (2014). Conversational infrastructure and the convergent evolution of linguistic items. In E. A. Cartmill, S. G. Roberts, H. Lyn, & H. Cornish (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference (pp. 425-426). Singapore: World Scientific.
  • Dingemanse, M., Verhoef, T., & Roberts, S. G. (2014). The role of iconicity in the cultural evolution of communicative signals. In B. De Boer, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of Evolang X, Workshop on Signals, Speech, and Signs (pp. 11-15).
  • Dingemanse, M., & Majid, A. (2012). The semantic structure of sensory vocabulary in an African language. In N. Miyake, D. Peebles, & R. P. Cooper (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2012) (pp. 300-305). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

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

    Abstract

    Spatial congruity effects have often been interpreted as evidence for metaphorical thinking, but an alternative markedness-based account challenges this view. In two experiments, we directly compared metaphor and markedness explanations for spatial congruity effects, using musical pitch as a testbed. English speakers who talk about pitch in terms of spatial height were tested in speeded space-pitch compatibility tasks. To determine whether space-pitch congruency effects could be elicited by any marked spatial continuum, participants were asked to classify high- and low-frequency pitches as 'high' and 'low' or as 'front' and 'back' (both pairs of terms constitute cases of marked continuums). We found congruency effects in high/low conditions but not in front/back conditions, indicating that markedness is not sufficient to account for congruity effects (Experiment 1). A second experiment showed that congruency effects were specific to spatial words that cued a vertical schema (tall/short), and that congruity effects were not an artifact of polysemy (e.g., 'high' referring both to space and pitch). Together, these results suggest that congruency effects reveal metaphorical uses of spatial schemas, not markedness effects.
  • Dolscheid, S., Willems, R. M., Hagoort, P., & Casasanto, D. (2014). The relation of space and musical pitch in the brain. In P. Bello, M. Guarini, M. McShane, & B. Scassellati (Eds.), Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2014) (pp. 421-426). Austin, Tx: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Numerous experiments show that space and musical pitch are
    closely linked in people's minds. However, the exact nature of
    space-pitch associations and their neuronal underpinnings are
    not well understood. In an fMRI experiment we investigated
    different types of spatial representations that may underlie
    musical pitch. Participants judged stimuli that varied in
    spatial height in both the visual and tactile modalities, as well
    as auditory stimuli that varied in pitch height. In order to
    distinguish between unimodal and multimodal spatial bases of
    musical pitch, we examined whether pitch activations were
    present in modality-specific (visual or tactile) versus
    multimodal (visual and tactile) regions active during spatial
    height processing. Judgments of musical pitch were found to
    activate unimodal visual areas, suggesting that space-pitch
    associations may involve modality-specific spatial
    representations, supporting a key assumption of embodied
    theories of metaphorical mental representation.
  • Dolscheid, S., Hunnius, S., Casasanto, D., & Majid, A. (2012). The sound of thickness: Prelinguistic infants' associations of space and pitch. In N. Miyake, D. Peebles, & R. P. Cooper (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2012) (pp. 306-311). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    People often talk about musical pitch in terms of spatial metaphors. In English, for instance, pitches can be high or low, whereas in other languages pitches are described as thick or thin. According to psychophysical studies, metaphors in language can also shape people’s nonlinguistic space-pitch representations. But does language establish mappings between space and pitch in the first place or does it modify preexisting associations? Here we tested 4-month-old Dutch infants’ sensitivity to height-pitch and thickness-pitch mappings in two preferential looking tasks. Dutch infants looked significantly longer at cross-modally congruent stimuli in both experiments, indicating that infants are sensitive to space-pitch associations prior to language. This early presence of space-pitch mappings suggests that these associations do not originate from language. Rather, language may build upon pre-existing mappings and change them gradually via some form of competitive associative learning.
  • 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.
  • Drozdova, P., Van Hout, R., & Scharenborg, O. (2014). Phoneme category retuning in a non-native language. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2014: 15th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 553-557).

    Abstract

    Previous studies have demonstrated that native listeners
    modify their interpretation of a speech sound when a talker
    produces an ambiguous sound in order to quickly tune into a
    speaker, but there is hardly any evidence that non-native
    listeners employ a similar mechanism when encountering
    ambiguous pronunciations. So far, one study demonstrated
    this lexically-guided perceptual learning effect for nonnatives,
    using phoneme categories similar in the native
    language of the listeners and the non-native language of the
    stimulus materials. The present study investigates the question
    whether phoneme category retuning is possible in a nonnative
    language for a contrast, /l/-/r/, which is phonetically
    differently embedded in the native (Dutch) and nonnative
    (English) languages involved. Listening experiments indeed
    showed a lexically-guided perceptual learning effect.
    Assuming that Dutch listeners have different phoneme
    categories for the native Dutch and non-native English /r/, as
    marked differences between the languages exist for /r/, these
    results, for the first time, seem to suggest that listeners are not
    only able to retune their native phoneme categories but also
    their non-native phoneme categories to include ambiguous
    pronunciations.
  • Drude, S., Trilsbeek, P., & Broeder, D. (2012). Language Documentation and Digital Humanities: The (DoBeS) Language Archive. In J. C. Meister (Ed.), Digital Humanities 2012 Conference Abstracts. University of Hamburg, Germany; July 16–22, 2012 (pp. 169-173).

    Abstract

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

    Abstract

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

    Abstract

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

    Abstract

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

    Abstract

    Language resource centers allow researchers to reliably deposit their structured data together with associated meta data and run services operating on this deposited data. We are looking into possibilities to create long-term persistency of both the deposited data and the services operating on this data. Challenges, both technical and non-technical, that need to be solved are the need to replicate more than just the data, proper identification of the digital objects in a distributed environment by making use of persistent identifiers and the set-up of a proper authentication and authorization domain including the management of the authorization information on the digital objects. We acknowledge the investment that most language resource centers have made in their current infrastructure. Therefore one of the most important requirements is the loose coupling with existing infrastructures without the need to make many changes. This shift from a single language resource center into a federated environment of many language resource centers is discussed in the context of a real world center: The Language Archive supported by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
  • Enfield, N. J. (2002). Parallel innovation and 'coincidence' in linguistic areas: On a bi-clausal extent/result constructions of mainland Southeast Asia. In P. Chew (Ed.), Proceedings of the 28th meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Special session on Tibeto-Burman and Southeast Asian linguistics (pp. 121-128). Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society.
  • Enfield, N. J. (2004). Areal grammaticalisation of postverbal 'acquire' in mainland Southeast Asia. In S. Burusphat (Ed.), Proceedings of the 11th Southeast Asia Linguistics Society Meeting (pp. 275-296). Arizona State University: Tempe.
  • Ernestus, M., Kočková-Amortová, L., & Pollak, P. (2014). The Nijmegen corpus of casual Czech. In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, T. Declerck, H. Loftsson, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, A. Moreno, J. Odijk, & S. Piperidis (Eds.), Proceedings of LREC 2014: 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 365-370).

    Abstract

    This article introduces a new speech corpus, the Nijmegen Corpus of Casual Czech (NCCCz), which contains more than 30 hours of high-quality recordings of casual conversations in Common Czech, among ten groups of three male and ten groups of three female friends. All speakers were native speakers of Czech, raised in Prague or in the region of Central Bohemia, and were between 19 and 26 years old. Every group of speakers consisted of one confederate, who was instructed to keep the conversations lively, and two speakers naive to the purposes of the recordings. The naive speakers were engaged in conversations for approximately 90 minutes, while the confederate joined them for approximately the last 72 minutes. The corpus was orthographically annotated by experienced transcribers and this orthographic transcription was aligned with the speech signal. In addition, the conversations were videotaped. This corpus can form the basis for all types of research on casual conversations in Czech, including phonetic research and research on how to improve automatic speech recognition. The corpus will be freely available
  • Filippi, P. (2014). Linguistic animals: understanding language through a comparative approach. In E. A. Cartmill, S. Roberts, H. Lyn, & H. Crnish (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference (pp. 74-81). doi:10.1142/9789814603638_0082.

    Abstract

    With the aim to clarify the definition of humans as “linguistic animals”, in the present paper I functionally distinguish three types of language competences: i) language as a general biological tool for communication, ii) “perceptual syntax”, iii) propositional language. Following this terminological distinction, I review pivotal findings on animals' communication systems, which constitute useful evidence for the investigation of the nature of three core components of humans' faculty of language: semantics, syntax, and theory of mind. In fact, despite the capacity to process and share utterances with an open-ended structure is uniquely human, some isolated components of our linguistic competence are in common with nonhuman animals. Therefore, as I argue in the present paper, the investigation of animals' communicative competence provide crucial insights into the range of cognitive constraints underlying humans' ability of language, enabling at the same time the analysis of its phylogenetic path as well as of the selective pressures that have led to its emergence.
  • Filippi, P., Gingras, B., & Fitch, W. T. (2014). The effect of pitch enhancement on spoken language acquisition. In E. A. Cartmill, S. Roberts, H. Lyn, & H. Crnish (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference (pp. 437-438). doi:10.1142/9789814603638_0082.

    Abstract

    The aim of this study is to investigate the word-learning phenomenon utilizing a new model that integrates three processes: a) extracting a word out of a continuous sounds sequence, b) inducing referential meanings, c) mapping a word onto its intended referent, with the possibility to extend the acquired word over a potentially infinite sets of objects of the same semantic category, and over not-previously-heard utterances. Previous work has examined the role of statistical learning and/or of prosody in each of these processes separately. In order to examine the multilayered word-learning task, we integrate these two strands of investigation into a single approach. We have conducted the study on adults and included six different experimental conditions, each including specific perceptual manipulations of the signal. In condition 1, the only cue to word-meaning mapping was the co-occurrence between words and referents (“statistical cue”). This cue was present in all the conditions. In condition 2, we added infant-directed-speech (IDS) typical pitch enhancement as a marker of the target word and of the statistical cue. In condition 3 we placed IDS typical pitch enhancement on random words of the utterances, i.e. inconsistently matching the statistical cue. In conditions 4, 5 and 6 we manipulated respectively duration, a non-prosodic acoustic cue and a visual cue as markers of the target word and of the statistical cue. Systematic comparisons between learning performance in condition 1 with the other conditions revealed that the word-learning process is facilitated only when pitch prominence consistently marks the target word and the statistical cue…
  • Fitch, W. T., Friederici, A. D., & Hagoort, P. (Eds.). (2012). Pattern perception and computational complexity [Special Issue]. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 367 (1598).
  • Flecken, M., & Gerwien, J. (2013). Grammatical aspect modulates event duration estimations: findings from Dutch. In M. Knauff, M. Pauen, N. Sebanz, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2013) (pp. 2309-2314). Austin,TX: Cognitive Science Society.
  • Floyd, S. (2004). Purismo lingüístico y realidad local: ¿Quichua puro o puro quichuañol? In Proceedings of the Conference on Indigenous Languages of Latin America (CILLA)-I.
  • Francisco, A. A., Jesse, A., Groen, M. a., & McQueen, J. M. (2014). Audiovisual temporal sensitivity in typical and dyslexic adult readers. In Proceedings of the 15th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH 2014) (pp. 2575-2579).

    Abstract

    Reading is an audiovisual process that requires the learning of systematic links between graphemes and phonemes. It is thus possible that reading impairments reflect an audiovisual processing deficit. In this study, we compared audiovisual processing in adults with developmental dyslexia and adults without reading difficulties. We focused on differences in cross-modal temporal sensitivity both for speech and for non-speech events. When compared to adults without reading difficulties, adults with developmental dyslexia presented a wider temporal window in which unsynchronized speech events were perceived as synchronized. No differences were found between groups for the non-speech events. These results suggests a deficit in dyslexia in the perception of cross-modal temporal synchrony for speech events.
  • De la Fuente, J., Santiago, J., Roma, A., Dumitrache, C., & Casasanto, D. (2012). Facing the past: cognitive flexibility in the front-back mapping of time [Abstract]. Cognitive Processing; Special Issue "ICSC 2012, the 5th International Conference on Spatial Cognition: Space and Embodied Cognition". Poster Presentations, 13(Suppl. 1), S58.

    Abstract

    In many languages the future is in front and the past behind, but in some cultures (like Aymara) the past is in front. Is it possible to find this mapping as an alternative conceptualization of time in other cultures? If so, what are the factors that affect its choice out of the set of available alternatives? In a paper and pencil task, participants placed future or past events either in front or behind a character (a schematic head viewed from above). A sample of 24 Islamic participants (whose language also places the future in front and the past behind) tended to locate the past event in the front box more often than Spanish participants. This result might be due to the greater cultural value assigned to tradition in Islamic culture. The same pattern was found in a sample of Spanish elders (N = 58), what may support that conclusion. Alternatively, the crucial factor may be the amount of attention paid to the past. In a final study, young Spanish adults (N = 200) who had just answered a set of questions about their past showed the past-in-front pattern, whereas questions about their future exacerbated the future-in-front pattern. Thus, the attentional explanation was supported: attended events are mapped to front space in agreement with the experiential connection between attending and seeing. When attention is paid to the past, it tends to occupy the front location in spite of available alternative mappings in the language-culture.
  • Ganushchak, L. Y., & Acheson, D. J. (Eds.). (2014). What's to be learned from speaking aloud? - Advances in the neurophysiological measurement of overt language production. [Research topic] [Special Issue]. Frontiers in Language Sciences. Retrieved from http://www.frontiersin.org/Language_Sciences/researchtopics/What_s_to_be_Learned_from_Spea/1671.

    Abstract

    Researchers have long avoided neurophysiological experiments of overt speech production due to the suspicion that artifacts caused by muscle activity may lead to a bad signal-to-noise ratio in the measurements. However, the need to actually produce speech may influence earlier processing and qualitatively change speech production processes and what we can infer from neurophysiological measures thereof. Recently, however, overt speech has been successfully investigated using EEG, MEG, and fMRI. The aim of this Research Topic is to draw together recent research on the neurophysiological basis of language production, with the aim of developing and extending theoretical accounts of the language production process. In this Research Topic of Frontiers in Language Sciences, we invite both experimental and review papers, as well as those about the latest methods in acquisition and analysis of overt language production data. All aspects of language production are welcome: i.e., from conceptualization to articulation during native as well as multilingual language production. Focus should be placed on using the neurophysiological data to inform questions about the processing stages of language production. In addition, emphasis should be placed on the extent to which the identified components of the electrophysiological signal (e.g., ERP/ERF, neuronal oscillations, etc.), brain areas or networks are related to language comprehension and other cognitive domains. By bringing together electrophysiological and neuroimaging evidence on language production mechanisms, a more complete picture of the locus of language production processes and their temporal and neurophysiological signatures will emerge.
  • Gebre, B. G., Wittenburg, P., & Heskes, T. (2013). Automatic sign language identification. In Proceeding of the 20th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) (pp. 2626-2630).

    Abstract

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

    Abstract

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

    Abstract

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

    Abstract

    This paper presents a Native Language Identification (NLI) system based on TF-IDF weighting schemes and using linear classifiers - support vector machines, logistic regressions and perceptrons. The system was one of the participants of the 2013 NLI Shared Task in the closed-training track, achieving 0.814 overall accuracy for a set of 11 native languages. This accuracy was only 2.2 percentage points lower than the winner's performance. Furthermore, with subsequent evaluations using 10-fold cross-validation (as given by the organizers) on the combined training and development data, the best average accuracy obtained is 0.8455 and the features that contributed to this accuracy are the TF-IDF of the combined unigrams and bigrams of words.
  • Gebre, B. G., Wittenburg, P., Heskes, T., & Drude, S. (2014). Motion history images for online speaker/signer diarization. In Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) (pp. 1537-1541). Piscataway, NJ: IEEE.

    Abstract

    We present a solution to the problem of online speaker/signer diarization - the task of determining "who spoke/signed when?". Our solution is based on the idea that gestural activity (hands and body movement) is highly correlated with uttering activity. This correlation is necessarily true for sign languages and mostly true for spoken languages. The novel part of our solution is the use of motion history images (MHI) as a likelihood measure for probabilistically detecting uttering activities. MHI is an efficient representation of where and how motion occurred for a fixed period of time. We conducted experiments on 4.9 hours of a publicly available dataset (the AMI meeting data) and 1.4 hours of sign language dataset (Kata Kolok data). The best performance obtained is 15.70% for sign language and 31.90% for spoken language (measurements are in DER). These results show that our solution is applicable in real-world applications like video conferences.

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  • Gebre, B. G., Wittenburg, P., Drude, S., Huijbregts, M., & Heskes, T. (2014). Speaker diarization using gesture and speech. In H. Li, & P. Ching (Eds.), Proceedings of Interspeech 2014: 15th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 582-586).

    Abstract

    We demonstrate how the problem of speaker diarization can be solved using both gesture and speaker parametric models. The novelty of our solution is that we approach the speaker diarization problem as a speaker recognition problem after learning speaker models from speech samples corresponding to gestures (the occurrence of gestures indicates the presence of speech and the location of gestures indicates the identity of the speaker). This new approach offers many advantages: comparable state-of-the-art performance, faster computation and more adaptability. In our implementation, parametric models are used to model speakers' voice and their gestures: more specifically, Gaussian mixture models are used to model the voice characteristics of each person and all persons, and gamma distributions are used to model gestural activity based on features extracted from Motion History Images. Tests on 4.24 hours of the AMI meeting data show that our solution makes DER score improvements of 19% on speech-only segments and 4% on all segments including silence (the comparison is with the AMI system).
  • Gebre, B. G., Wittenburg, P., & Heskes, T. (2013). The gesturer is the speaker. In Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2013) (pp. 3751-3755).

    Abstract

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

    Abstract

    Automatic annotation of gesture strokes is important for many gesture and sign language researchers. The unpredictable diversity of human gestures and video recording conditions require that we adopt a more adaptive case-by-case annotation model. In this paper, we present a work-in progress annotation model that allows a user to a) track hands/face b) extract features c) distinguish strokes from non-strokes. The hands/face tracking is done with color matching algorithms and is initialized by the user. The initialization process is supported with immediate visual feedback. Sliders are also provided to support a user-friendly adjustment of skin color ranges. After successful initialization, features related to positions, orientations and speeds of tracked hands/face are extracted using unique identifiable features (corners) from a window of frames and are used for training a learning algorithm. Our preliminary results for stroke detection under non-ideal video conditions are promising and show the potential applicability of our methodology.
  • Gebre, B. G., Crasborn, O., Wittenburg, P., Drude, S., & Heskes, T. (2014). Unsupervised feature learning for visual sign language identification. In Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Vol 2 (pp. 370-376). Redhook, NY: Curran Proceedings.

    Abstract

    Prior research on language identification focused primarily on text and speech. In this paper, we focus on the visual modality and present a method for identifying sign languages solely from short video samples. The method is trained on unlabelled video data (unsupervised feature learning) and using these features, it is trained to discriminate between six sign languages (supervised learning). We ran experiments on video samples involving 30 signers (running for a total of 6 hours). Using leave-one-signer-out cross-validation, our evaluation on short video samples shows an average best accuracy of 84%. Given that sign languages are under-resourced, unsupervised feature learning techniques are the right tools and our results indicate that this is realistic for sign language identification.
  • Gentzsch, W., Lecarpentier, D., & Wittenburg, P. (2014). Big data in science and the EUDAT project. In Proceeding of the 2014 Annual SRII Global Conference.
  • Gijssels, T., Bottini, R., Rueschemeyer, S.-A., & Casasanto, D. (2013). Space and time in the parietal cortex: fMRI Evidence for a meural asymmetry. In M. Knauff, M. Pauen, N. Sebanz, & I. Wachsmuth (Eds.), Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2013) (pp. 495-500). Austin,TX: Cognitive Science Society. Retrieved from http://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2013/papers/0113/index.html.

    Abstract

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

    Abstract

    Recognizing the speech acts in our interlocutors’ utterances is a crucial prerequisite for conversation. However, it is not a trivial task given that the form and content of utterances is frequently underspecified for this level of meaning. In the present study we investigate participants’ competence in categorizing speech acts in such action-underspecific sentences and explore the time-course of speech act inferencing using a self-paced reading paradigm. The results demonstrate that participants are able to categorize the speech acts with very high accuracy, based on limited context and without any prosodic information. Furthermore, the results show that the exact same sentence is processed differently depending on the speech act it performs, with reading times starting to differ already at the first word. These results indicate that participants are very good at “getting” the speech acts, opening up a new arena for experimental research on action recognition in conversation.

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