Publications

Abstract

Infants, children and adults are capable of implicitly extracting regularities from their environment through statistical learning (SL). SL is present from early infancy and found across tasks and modalities, raising questions about the domain generality of SL. However, little is known about its’ developmental trajectory: Is SL fully developed capacity in infancy, or does it improve with age, like other cognitive skills? While SL is well established in infants and adults, only few studies have looked at SL across development with conflicting results: some find age-related improvements while others do not. Importantly, despite its postulated role in language learning, no study has examined the developmental trajectory of auditory SL throughout childhood. Here, we conduct a large-scale study of children's auditory SL across a wide age-range (5-12y, N=115). Results show that auditory SL does not change much across development. We discuss implications for modality-based differences in SL and for its role in language acquisition.

Abstract

Recent work suggests that cultural transmission can lead to the emergence of linguistic structure as speakers’ weak individual biases become amplified through iterated learning. However, to date, no published study has demonstrated a similar emergence of linguistic structure in children. This gap is problematic given that languages are mainly learned by children and that adults may bring existing linguistic biases to the task. Here, we conduct a large-scale study of iterated language learning in both children and adults, using a novel, child-friendly paradigm. The results show that while children make more mistakes overall, their languages become more learnable and show learnability biases similar to those of adults. Child languages did not show a significant increase in linguistic structure over time, but consistent mappings between meanings and signals did emerge on many occasions, as found with adults. This provides the first demonstration that cultural transmission affects the languages children and adults produce similarly.

Abstract

The relationship between individual cognition and cultural phenomena at the society level can be transformed by cultural transmission (Kirby, Dowman, & Griffiths, 2007). Top-down models of this process have typically assumed that individuals only adopt a single linguistic trait. Recent extensions include ‘bilingual’ agents, able to adopt multiple linguistic traits (Burkett & Griffiths, 2010). However, bilingualism is more than variation within an individual: it involves the conditional use of variation with different interlocutors. That is, bilingualism is a property of a population that emerges from use. A bottom-up simulation is presented where learners are sensitive to the identity of other speakers. The simulation reveals that dynamic social structures are a key factor for the evolution of bilingualism in a population, a feature that was abstracted away in the top-down models. Top-down and bottom-up approaches may lead to different answers, but can work together to reveal and explore important features of the cultural transmission process.

Abstract

The question of whether intonation events have a categorical mental representation has long been a puzzle in prosodic research, and one that experiments testing production and perception across category boundaries have failed to definitively resolve. This paper takes the alternative approach of looking for evidence of structure within a postulated category by testing for a Perceptual Magnet Effect (PME). PME has been found in boundary tones but has not previously been conclusively found in pitch accents. In this investigation, perceived goodness and discriminability of re-synthesised Dutch nuclear rise contours (L*H H%) were evaluated by naive native speakers of Dutch. The variation between these stimuli was quantified using a polynomial-parametric modelling approach (i.e. the SOCoPaSul model) in place of the traditional approach whereby excursion size, peak alignment and pitch register are used independently of each other to quantify variation between pitch accents. Using this approach to calculate the acoustic-perceptual distance between different stimuli, PME was detected: (1) rated goodness, decreased as acoustic-perceptual distance relative to the prototype increased, and (2) equally spaced items far from the prototype were less frequently generalised than equally spaced items in the neighbourhood of the prototype. These results support the concept of categorically distinct intonation events.

Abstract

Many previous studies have shown that both infants and adults are skilled statistical learners. Because statistical learning is affected by attention, learners' ability to manage their attention can play a large role in what they learn. However, it is still unclear how learners allocate their attention in order to gain information in a visual environment containing multiple objects, especially how prior visual experience (i.e., familiarly of objects) influences where people look. To answer these questions, we collected eye movement data from adults exploring multiple novel objects while manipulating object familiarity with global (frequencies) and local (repetitions) regularities. We found that participants are sensitive to both global and local statistics embedded in their visual environment and they dynamically shift their attention to prioritize some objects over others as they gain knowledge of the objects and their distributions within the task.

Abstract

In this paper, I will argue that although the study of multimodal interaction offers exciting new prospects for Human Computer Interaction and human-human communication research, language is the primary form of communication, even in multimodal systems. I will support this claim with theoretical and empirical arguments, mainly drawn from human-human communication research, and will discuss the implications for multimodal communication research and Human-Computer Interaction.

Abstract

We investigated the time course of sentence formulation in Tagalog, a verb-initial language in which the verb obligatorily agrees with one of its arguments. Eye-tracked participants described pictures of transitive events. Fixations to the two characters in the events were compared across sentences differing in agreement marking and post-verbal word order. Fixation patterns show evidence for two temporally dissociated phases in Tagalog sentence production. The first, driven by verb agreement, involves early linking of concepts to syntactic functions; the second, driven by word order, involves incremental lexical encoding of these concepts. These results suggest that even the earliest stages of sentence formulation may be guided by a language's grammatical structure.

Abstract

Most of the study of basic emotion expressions has focused on facial expressions and little work has been done to specifically investigate happiness, the only positive of the basic emotions (Ekman & Friesen, 1971). However, a theoretical suggestion has been made that happiness could be broken down into discrete positive emotions, which each fulfil the criteria of basic emotions, and that these would be expressed vocally (Ekman, 1992). To empirically test this hypothesis, 20 participants categorised 80 paralinguistic sounds using the labels achievement, amusement, contentment, pleasure and relief. The results suggest that achievement, amusement and relief are perceived as distinct categories, which subjects accurately identify. In contrast, the categories of contentment and pleasure were systematically confused with other responses, although performance was still well above chance levels. These findings are initial evidence that the positive emotions engage distinct vocal expressions and may be considered to be distinct emotion categories.

Abstract

Older listeners with high-frequency hearing loss rely more on intensity for categorisation of /s/ than normal-hearing older listeners. This study addresses the question whether this increased reliance comes about immediately when the need
arises, i.e., in the face of a spectrally-degraded signal. A phonetic categorisation task was carried out using intensitymodulated fricatives in a clean and a low-pass filtered condition with two younger and two older listener groups.
When high-frequency information was removed from the speech signal, younger listeners started using intensity as a cue. The older adults on the other hand, when presented with the low-pass filtered speech, did not rely on intensity differences for fricative identification. These results suggest that the reliance on intensity shown by the older hearingimpaired adults may have been acquired only gradually with
longer exposure to a degraded speech signal.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the ability of SpeM, our recognition system based on the combination of an automatic phone recogniser and a wordsearch module, to determine as early as possible during the word recognition process whether a word is likely to be recognised correctly (this we refer to as ‘on-line’ early word recognition). We present two measures that can be used to predict whether a word is correctly recognised: the Bayesian word activation and the amount of available (acoustic) information for a word. SpeM was tested on 1,463 polysyllabic words in 885 continuous speech utterances. The investigated predictors indicated that a word activation that is 1) high (but not too high) and 2) based on more phones is more reliable to predict the correctness of a word than a similarly high value based on a small number of phones or a lower value of the word activation.

Abstract

Joint attention has long been accepted as constituting a privileged circumstance in which word learning prospers. Consequently research has investigated the role that maternal responsiveness to infant attention plays in predicting language outcomes. However there has been a recent expansion in research implicating similar predictive effects from individual differences in infant behaviours. Emerging from the foundations of such work comes an interesting question: do the relative contributions of the mother and infant to joint attention episodes impact upon language learning? In an attempt to address this, two joint attention behaviours were assessed as predictors of vocabulary attainment (as measured by OCDI Production Scores). These predictors were: mothers encouraging attention to an object given their infant was already attending to an object (maternal follow-in); and infants looking to an object given their mothers encouragement of attention to an object (infant follow-in). In a sample of 14-month old children (N=36) we compared the predictive power of these maternal and infant follow-in variables on concurrent and later language performance. Results using Growth Curve Analysis provided evidence that while both maternal follow-in and infant follow-in variables contributed to production scores, infant follow-in was a stronger predictor. Consequently it does appear to matter whose final contribution establishes joint attention episodes. Infants who more often follow-in into their mothers’ encouragement of attention have larger, and faster growing vocabularies between 14 and 18-months of age.

Abstract

Previous studies have indicated that vocal and facial expressions of the ‘basic’ emotions share aspects of processing. Thus amygdala damage compromises the perception of fear and anger from the face and from the voice. In the current study we tested the hypothesis that there exist positive basic emotions, expressed mainly in the voice (Ekman, 1992). Vocal stimuli were produced to express the specific positive emotions of amusement, achievement, pleasure, contentment and relief.

Abstract

The results of an eye-tracking experiment are presented in which Dutch listeners' eye movements were monitored as they heard sentences and saw four pictured objects. Participants were instructed to click on the object mentioned in the sentence. In the critical sentences, a stop-initial target (e.g., "pot") was preceded by an [s], thus causing ambiguity regarding whether the sentence refers to a stop-initial or a cluster-initial word (e.g., "spot"). Participants made fewer fixations to the target pictures when the stop and the preceding [s] were cross-spliced from the cluster-initial word than when they were spliced from a different token of the sentence containing the stop-initial word. Acoustic analyses showed that the two versions differed in various measures, but only one of these - the duration of the [s] - correlated with the perceptual effect. Thus, in this context, the [s] duration information is an important factor guiding word recognition.

Abstract

ELAN is a multimedia annotation tool developed by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. It is applied in a variety of research areas. This paper presents a general overview of the tool and new developments as the calculation of inter-rater reliability, a commentary framework, semi-automatic segmentation and labeling and export to Theme.

Abstract

Recent empirical evidence suggests that language-mediated eye gaze is partly determined by level of formal literacy training. Huettig, Singh and Mishra (2011) showed that high-literate individuals' eye gaze was closely time locked to phonological overlap between a spoken target word and items presented in a visual display. In contrast, low-literate individuals' eye gaze was not related to phonological overlap, but was instead strongly influenced by semantic relationships between items. Our present study tests the hypothesis that this behavior is an emergent property of an increased ability to extract phonological structure from the speech signal, as in the case of high-literates, with low-literates more reliant on more coarse grained structure. This hypothesis was tested using a neural network model, that integrates linguistic information extracted from the speech signal with visual and semantic information within a central resource. We demonstrate that contrasts in fixation behavior similar to those observed between high and low literates emerge when models are trained on speech signals of contrasting granularity.

Abstract

We conceptualize objects based on sensory and motor information gleaned from real-world experience. But to what extent is such conceptual information structured according to higher level linguistic features too? Here we investigate whether classifiers, a grammatical category, shape the conceptual representations of objects. In three experiments native Mandarin speakers (speakers of a classifier language) and native Dutch speakers (speakers of a language without classifiers) judged the similarity of a target object (presented as a word or picture) with four objects (presented as words or pictures). One object shared a classifier with the target, the other objects did not, serving as distractors. Across all experiments, participants judged the target object as more similar to the object with the shared classifier than distractor objects. This effect was seen in both Dutch and Mandarin speakers, and there was no difference between the two languages. Thus, even speakers of a non-classifier language are sensitive to object similarities underlying classifier systems, and using a classifier system does not exaggerate these similarities. This suggests that classifier systems simply reflect, rather than affect, conceptual structure.

Abstract

Language interacts with olfaction in exceptional ways. Olfaction is believed to be weakly linked with language, as demonstrated by our poor odor naming ability, yet olfaction seems to be particularly susceptible to linguistic descriptions. We tested the boundaries of the influence of language on olfaction by focusing on a non-lexical aspect of language (grammatical gender). We manipulated the grammatical gender of fragrance descriptions to test whether the congruence with fragrance gender would affect the way fragrances were perceived and remembered. Native French and German speakers read descriptions of fragrances containing ingredients with feminine or masculine grammatical gender, and then smelled masculine or feminine fragrances and rated them on a number of dimensions (e.g., pleasantness). Participants then completed an odor recognition test. Fragrances were remembered better when presented with descriptions whose grammatical gender matched the gender of the fragrance. Overall, results suggest grammatical manipulations of odor descriptions can affect odor cognition

Abstract

This paper presents a quantitative analysis of the
turn-taking mechanism evidenced in 93 telephone
dialogues that were taken from the 9-million-word
Spoken Dutch Corpus. While the first part of the paper
focuses on the temporal phenomena of turn taking, such
as durations of pauses and overlaps of turns in the
dialogues, the second part explores the discoursefunctional
aspects of utterances in a subset of 8
dialogues that were annotated especially for this
purpose. The results show that speakers adapt their turntaking
behaviour to the interlocutor’s behaviour.
Furthermore, the results indicate that male-male dialogs
show a higher proportion of overlapping turns than
female-female dialogues.

Abstract

This paper combines two different approaches to modeling reaction time data from lexical decision experiments, viz. a dataoriented statistical analysis by means of a linear mixed effects model, and a process-oriented computational model of human speech comprehension. The linear mixed effect model is implemented by lmer in R. As computational model we apply DIANA, an end-to-end computational model which aims at modeling the cognitive processes underlying speech comprehension. DIANA takes as input the speech signal, and provides as output the orthographic transcription of the stimulus, a word/non-word judgment and the associated reaction time. Previous studies have shown that DIANA shows good results for large-scale lexical decision experiments in Dutch and North-American English. We investigate whether predictors that appear significant in an lmer analysis and processes implemented in DIANA can be related and inform both approaches. Predictors such as ‘previous reaction time’ can be related to a process description; other predictors, such as ‘lexical neighborhood’ are hard-coded in lmer and emergent in DIANA. The analysis focuses on the interaction between subject variables and task variables in lmer, and the ways in which these interactions can be implemented in DIANA.

Abstract

On the basis of two-speaker spontaneous conversations, it is shown that the distributions of both pauses and speech-overlaps of telephone and faceto-face dialogues have different statistical properties. Pauses in a face-to-face
dialogue last up to 4 times longer than pauses in telephone conversations in functionally comparable conditions. There is a high correlation (0.88 or larger) between the average pause duration for the two speakers across face-to-face
dialogues and telephone dialogues. The data provided form a first quantitative analysis of the complex turn-taking mechanism evidenced in the dialogues available in the 9-million-word Spoken Dutch Corpus.

Abstract

In spontaneous conversations, words are often produced in reduced form compared to formal careful speech. In English, for instance, ’probably’ may be pronounced as ’poly’ and ’police’ as ’plice’. Reduced forms are very common, and native listeners usually do not have any problems with interpreting these reduced forms in context. Non-native listeners, however, have great difficulties in comprehending reduced forms. In order to investigate the problems in comprehension that non-native listeners experience, a dictation experiment was conducted in which sentences were presented auditorily to non-natives either in full (unreduced) or reduced form. The types of errors made by the L2 listeners reveal aspects of the cognitive processes underlying this dictation task. In addition, we compare the errors made by these human participants with the type of word errors made by DIANA, a recently developed computational model of word comprehension.

Abstract

This paper describes a computational model of speech comprehension that takes the acoustic signal as input and predicts reaction times as observed in an auditory lexical decision task. By doing so, we explore a new generation of end-to-end computational models that are able to simulate the behaviour of human subjects participating in a psycholinguistic experiment. So far, nearly all computational models of speech comprehension do not start from the speech signal itself, but from abstract representations of the speech signal, while the few existing models that do start from the acoustic signal cannot directly model reaction times as obtained in comprehension experiments. The main functional components in our model are the perception stage, which is compatible with the psycholinguistic model Shortlist B and is implemented with techniques from automatic speech recognition, and the decision stage, which is based on the linear ballistic accumulation decision model. We successfully tested our model against data from 20 participants performing a largescale auditory lexical decision experiment. Analyses show that the model is a good predictor for the average judgment and reaction time for each word.

Abstract

We are often in a bilingual situation (e.g., overhearing a conversation in the train). We investigated whether first (L1) and second language (L2) phonologies are automatically activated. A masked priming paradigm was used, with Russian words as targets and either Russian or English words as primes. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while Russian (L1) – English (L2) bilinguals read aloud L1 target words (e.g. РЕЙС /reis/ ‘fl ight’) primed with either L1 (e.g. РАНА /rana/ ‘wound’) or L2 words (e.g. PACK). Target words were read faster when they were preceded by phonologically related L1 primes but not by orthographically related L2 primes. ERPs showed orthographic priming in the 125-200 ms time window. Thus, both L1 and L2 phonologies are simultaneously activated during L1 reading. The results provide support for non-selective models of bilingual reading, which assume automatic activation of the non-target language phonology even when it is not required by the task.

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a CLARIN-compatible repository solution that fulfils
both the long-term preservation requirements as well as the current day discoverability and usability
needs of an online data repository of language resources. The widely used Fedora Commons
open source repository framework, combined with the Islandora discovery layer, forms
the basis of the solution. On top of this existing solution, additional modules and tools are developed
to make it suitable for the types of data and metadata that are used by the participating
partners.

Abstract

Two eye-tracking experiments examined linguistic gender effects in non-native spoken-word recognition. French participants, who knew German well, followed spoken instructions in German to click on pictures on a computer screen (e.g., Wo befindet sich die Perle, “where is the pearl”) while their eye movements were monitored. The name of the target picture was preceded by a gender-marked article in the instructions. When a target and a competitor picture (with phonologically similar names) were of the same gender in both German and French, French participants fixated competitor pictures more than unrelated pictures. However, when target and competitor were of the same gender in German but of different gender in French, early fixations to the competitor picture were reduced. Competitor activation in the non-native language was seemingly constrained by native gender information. German listeners showed no such viewing time difference. The results speak against a form-based account of the linguistic gender effect. They rather support the notion that the effect originates from the grammatical level of language processing.

Abstract

In this paper, we present empirical data from a corpus study on the linear order of subjects and objects in German main clauses. The aim was to establish the validity of three well-known ordering constraints: given complements tend to occur before new complements, definite before indefinite, and pronoun before full noun phrase complements. Frequencies of occurrences were derived for subject-first and object-first sentences from the German Negra corpus. While all three constraints held on subject-first sentences, results for object-first sentences varied. Our findings suggest an influence of grammatical functions on the ordering of verb complements.

Abstract

Language resources are valuable assets, both for institutions and researchers. To safeguard these resources requirements for repository systems and data management have been specified by various branch organizations, e.g., CLARIN and the Data Seal of Approval. This paper describes these and some additional ones posed by the authors’ home institutions. And it shows how they are met by FLAT, to provide a new home for language resources. The basis of FLAT is formed by the Fedora Commons repository system. This repository system can meet many of the requirements out-of-the box, but still additional configuration and some development work is needed to meet the remaining ones, e.g., to add support for Handles and Component Metadata. This paper describes design decisions taken in the construction of FLAT’s system architecture via a mix-and-match strategy, with a preference for the reuse of existing solutions. FLAT is developed and used by the a Institute and The Language Archive, but is also freely available for anyone in need of a CLARIN-compliant repository for their language resources.

Abstract

Previous research on basic-level object categories shows there is cross-cultural variation in basic-level concepts, arguing against the idea that the basic level reflects an objective reality. In this paper, I extend the investigation to the domain of events. More specifically, I present a case study of verbs of ingestion in Maniq illustrating a highly specific categorization of ingestion events at the basic level. A detailed analysis of these verbs reveals they tap into culturally salient notions. Yet, cultural salience alone cannot explain specificity of basic-level verbs, since ingestion is a domain of universal human experience. Further analysis reveals, however, that another key factor is the language itself. Maniq’s preference for encoding specific meaning in basic-level verbs is not a peculiarity of one domain, but a recurrent characteristic of its verb lexicon, pointing to the significant role of the language system in the structure of event concepts

Abstract

Young Infants are prolific word learners even though they are facing the challenge of referential uncertainty (Quine, 1960). Many laboratory studies have shown that infants are skilled at inferring correct referents of words from ambiguous contexts (Swingley, 2009). However, little is known regarding how they visually attend to and select the target object among many other objects in view when parents name it during everyday interactions. By investigating the looking pattern of 12-month-old infants using naturalistic first-person images with varying degrees of referential ambiguity, we found that infants’ attention is selective and they only select a small subset of objects to attend to at each learning instance despite the complexity of the data in the real world. This work allows us to better understand how perceptual properties of objects in infants’ view influence their visual attention, which is also related to how they select candidate objects to build word-object mappings.

Abstract

Psycholinguistic research has typically portrayed speech production as a relatively automatic process. This is because when errors are made, they occur as seldom as one in every thousand words we utter. However, it has long been recognised that we need some form of control over what we are currently saying and what we plan to say. This capacity to both monitor our inner speech and self-correct our speech output has often been assumed to be a property of the language comprehension system. More recently, it has been demonstrated that speech production benefits from interfacing with more general cognitive processes such as selective attention, short-term memory (STM) and online response monitoring to resolve potential conflict and successfully produce the output of a verbal plan. The conditions and levels of representation according to which these more general planning, monitoring and control processes are engaged during speech production remain poorly understood. Moreover, there remains a paucity of information about their neural substrates, despite some of the first evidence of more general monitoring having come from electrophysiological studies of error related negativities (ERNs). While aphasic speech errors continue to be a rich source of information, there has been comparatively little research focus on instances of speech repair. The purpose of this Frontiers Research Topic is to provide a forum for researchers to contribute investigations employing behavioural, neuropsychological, electrophysiological, neuroimaging and virtual lesioning techniques. In addition, while the focus of the research topic is on novel findings, we welcome submission of computational simulations, review articles and methods papers.