Displaying 1 - 100 of 3005
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Araújo, S., Reis, A., Faísca, L., & Petersson, K. M. (in press). Brain sensitivity to words and the “word recognition potential”. In D. Marques, & J. H. Toscano (
Eds. ), De las neurociencias a la neuropsicologia: el estúdio del cerebro humano. Barranquilla, Colombia: Corporación Universitaria Reformada. -
Bauer, B. L. M. (in press). Evolution of counting systems. In E. Aldridge, A. Breitbarth, K. É. Kiss, A. Ledgeway, J. Salmon, & A. Simonenko (
Eds. ), Wiley Blackwell companion to diachronic linguistics. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. -
Bauer, B. L. M. (in press). Latin varieties and the study of language. Social stratification in language evolution. In Latin vulgaire - latin tardif XIV. Turnhout: Brepols.
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Mishra, C., Skantze, G., Hagoort, P., & Verdonschot, R. G. (in press). Perception of emotions in human and robot faces: Is the eye region enough? In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Social Robotics +AI (ICSR 2024).
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Rubio-Fernandez, P. (in press). Cultural evolutionary pragmatics: An empirical approach to the relation between language and social cognition. In B. Geurts, & R. Moore (
Eds. ), The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. -
Slonimska, A., & Özyürek, A. (in press). Methods to study evolution of iconicity in sign languages. In L. Raviv, & C. Boeckx (
Eds. ), The Oxford Handbook of Approaches to Language Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. -
Snijders, T. M., & Menn, K. H. (in press). Maturational constraints on tracking of temporal attention in infant language acquisition. In L. Meyer, & A. Strauss (
Eds. ), Rhythms of Speech and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Additional information
link to preprint -
De Vos, C. (in press). Language of perception in Kata Kolok. In A. Majid, & S. C. Levinson (
Eds. ), The Oxford Handbook of the Language of Perception. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Abstract
This study describes the sensory lexicon on the domains of colour, taste, shape, smell and touch of a rural sign language called Kata Kolok (KK). Taste was highly codable for Kata Kolok signers, who used a dedicated set of signs and facial expressions to indicate each of the taste stimuli. The second most codable perceptual domain was shape, for which signers often used classifiers and tracing gestures that reflected the shape of the object directly. Smell had a comparatively intermediate level of codability, but this was due, for the most part, to the use of evaluative terms. Although Kata Kolok has a dedicated set of colour signs, these leave large parts of the colour spectrum unnamed, resulting in low degrees of codability in this sensory domain. Unnamed colours were frequently described by iconic-indexical forms such as object labelling and pointing strategies. Touch was the least codable domain for Kata Kolok, which resulted in a wide range of iconically motivated constructions including a restricted set of domain-specific lexical signs, classifiers, tracing gestures, object labelling, and general evaluative terms. -
Dulyan, L., Guzmán Chacón, E. G., & Forkel, S. J. (2025). Navigating neuroanatomy. In J. H. Grafman (
Ed. ), Encyclopedia of the human brain (2nd ed.). Amsterdam: Elsevier.Abstract
This chapter introduces the origins and development of our current anatomical terminology. It scrutinizes the historical evolution and etymological significance of the over 1900 official anatomical terms in the current nomenclature, underscoring their impact on the contemporary comprehension of cognitive neuroanatomy. The chapter traces unification efforts from the Basel Nomina Anatomica in 1895 to the 1998 Terminologia Anatomica, noting challenges arising from outdated terminology in light of recent anatomical advancements.
Highlighting the influence of terminologies on interpretations of brain anatomy, the chapter explores several anatomical mapping methods such as surface, sectional, connectional, and functional anatomy. It illuminates discrepancies and controversies, exemplified by divergent interpretations of the number of brain lobes and the definitions of 'Broca' and 'Wernicke' areas.
The chapter explores anatomical terms' historical and cultural underpinnings, encompassing mythonyms, eponyms, and cultural influences on nomenclature. It critically examines the implications of these terminologies on contemporary research and shows that Large Language Models mirror these discrepancies. It underscores the need for more inclusive and culturally sensitive approaches in anatomical education.
Lastly, we advocate for updating anatomical nomenclature, suggesting that a deeper understanding of these terminologies could provide insights and aid in resolving ongoing debates in the field. This examination sheds light on historical knowledge and emphasizes the dynamic interplay between language, culture, and anatomy in shaping our comprehension of the neurobiology of the brain and how we navigate neuroanatomy in the 21st century. -
Akamine, S., Ghaleb, E., Rasenberg, M., Fernandez, R., Meyer, A. S., & Özyürek, A. (2024). Speakers align both their gestures and words not only to establish but also to maintain reference to create shared labels for novel objects in interaction. In L. K. Samuelson, S. L. Frank, A. Mackey, & E. Hazeltine (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) (pp. 2435-2442).Abstract
When we communicate with others, we often repeat aspects of each other's communicative behavior such as sentence structures and words. Such behavioral alignment has been mostly studied for speech or text. Yet, language use is mostly multimodal, flexibly using speech and gestures to convey messages. Here, we explore the use of alignment in speech (words) and co-speech gestures (iconic gestures) in a referential communication task aimed at finding labels for novel objects in interaction. In particular, we investigate how people flexibly use lexical and gestural alignment to create shared labels for novel objects and whether alignment in speech and gesture are related over time. The present study shows that interlocutors establish shared labels multimodally, and alignment in words and iconic gestures are used throughout the interaction. We also show that the amount of lexical alignment positively associates with the amount of gestural alignment over time, suggesting a close relationship between alignment in the vocal and manual modalities.Additional information
link to eScholarship -
Ben-Ami, S., Shukla, Vishakha, V., Gupta, P., Shah, P., Ralekar, C., Ganesh, S., Gilad-Gutnick, S., Rubio-Fernández, P., & Sinha, P. (2024). Form perception as a bridge to real-world functional proficiency. In L. K. Samuelson, S. L. Frank, M. Toneva, A. Mackey, & E. Hazeltine (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) (pp. 6094-6102).Abstract
Recognizing the limitations of standard vision assessments in capturing the real-world capabilities of individuals with low vision, we investigated the potential of the Seguin Form Board Test (SFBT), a widely-used intelligence assessment employing a visuo-haptic shape-fitting task, as an estimator of vision's practical utility. We present findings from 23 children from India, who underwent treatment for congenital bilateral dense cataracts, and 21 control participants. To assess the development of functional visual ability, we conducted the SFBT and the standard measure of visual acuity, before and longitudinally after treatment. We observed a dissociation in the development of shape-fitting and visual acuity. Improvements of patients' shape-fitting preceded enhancements in their visual acuity after surgery and emerged even with acuity worse than that of control participants. Our findings highlight the importance of incorporating multi-modal and cognitive aspects into evaluations of visual proficiency in low-vision conditions, to better reflect vision's impact on daily activities.Additional information
link to eScholarship -
Cheung, C.-Y., Kirby, S., & Raviv, L. (2024). The role of gender, social bias and personality traits in shaping linguistic accommodation: An experimental approach. In J. Nölle, L. Raviv, K. E. Graham, S. Hartmann, Y. Jadoul, M. Josserand, T. Matzinger, K. Mudd, M. Pleyer, A. Slonimska, & S. Wacewicz (
Eds. ), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference (EVOLANG XV) (pp. 80-82). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences. doi:10.17617/2.3587960. -
Cos, F., Bujok, R., & Bosker, H. R. (2024). Test-retest reliability of audiovisual lexical stress perception after >1.5 years. In Y. Chen, A. Chen, & A. Arvaniti (
Eds. ), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2024 (pp. 871-875). doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2024-176.Abstract
In natural communication, we typically both see and hear our conversation partner. Speech comprehension thus requires the integration of auditory and visual information from the speech signal. This is for instance evidenced by the Manual McGurk effect, where the perception of lexical stress is biased towards the syllable that has a beat gesture aligned to it. However, there is considerable individual variation in how heavily gestural timing is weighed as a cue to stress. To assess within-individualconsistency, this study investigated the test-retest reliability of the Manual McGurk effect. We reran an earlier Manual McGurk experiment with the same participants, over 1.5 years later. At the group level, we successfully replicated the Manual McGurk effect with a similar effect size. However, a correlation of the by-participant effect sizes in the two identical experiments indicated that there was only a weak correlation between both tests, suggesting that the weighing of gestural information in the perception of lexical stress is stable at the group level, but less so in individuals. Findings are discussed in comparison to other measures of audiovisual integration in speech perception. Index Terms: Audiovisual integration, beat gestures, lexical stress, test-retest reliability -
Dang, A., Raviv, L., & Galke, L. (2024). Testing the linguistic niche hypothesis in large with a multilingual Wug test. In J. Nölle, L. Raviv, K. E. Graham, S. Hartmann, Y. Jadoul, M. Josserand, T. Matzinger, K. Mudd, M. Pleyer, A. Slonimska, & S. Wacewicz (
Eds. ), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference (EVOLANG XV) (pp. 91-93). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences. -
Dang, A., Raviv, L., & Galke, L. (2024). Morphology matters: Probing the cross-linguistic morphological generalization abilities of large language models through a Wug Test. In CMCL 2024 - 13th Edition of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Workshop (pp. 177-188). Kerrville, TX, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).
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Defina, R., Dingemanse, M., & Van Putten, S. (2024). Linguistic fieldwork as team science. In E. Aboh (
Ed. ), Predication in African Languages (pp. 20-42). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi:10.1075/slcs.235.01def.Abstract
Linguistic fieldwork is increasingly moving forward from the traditional model of lone fieldworker with a notebook to collaborative projects with key roles for native speakers and other experts and involving the use of different kinds of stimulus-based elicitation methods as well as extensive video documentation. Several cohorts of colleagues and students have been influenced by this inclusive and interdisciplinary view of linguistic fieldwork. We describe the challenges and benefits of doing multi-methods collaborative fieldwork. As linguistics inevitably moves into the direction of multiple methods, interdisciplinarity and team science, now is the time to reflect critically on how best to contribute to a cumulative science of language. -
Dona, L., & Schouwstra, M. (2024). Balancing regularization and variation: The roles of priming and motivatedness. In J. Nölle, L. Raviv, K. E. Graham, S. Hartmann, Y. Jadoul, M. Josserand, T. Matzinger, K. Mudd, M. Pleyer, A. Slonimska, & S. Wacewicz (
Eds. ), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference (EVOLANG XV) (pp. 130-133). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences. -
Galke, L., Ram, Y., & Raviv, L. (2024). Learning pressures and inductive biases in emergent communication: Parallels between humans and deep neural networks. In J. Nölle, L. Raviv, K. E. Graham, S. Hartmann, Y. Jadoul, M. Josserand, T. Matzinger, K. Mudd, M. Pleyer, A. Slonimska, & S. Wacewicz (
Eds. ), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference (EVOLANG XV) (pp. 197-201). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences. -
Ghaleb, E., Rasenberg, M., Pouw, W., Toni, I., Holler, J., Özyürek, A., & Fernandez, R. (2024). Analysing cross-speaker convergence through the lens of automatically detected shared linguistic constructions. In L. K. Samuelson, S. L. Frank, A. Mackey, & E. Hazeltine (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) (pp. 1717-1723).Abstract
Conversation requires a substantial amount of coordination between dialogue participants, from managing turn taking to negotiating mutual understanding. Part of this coordination effort surfaces as the reuse of linguistic behaviour across speakers, a process often referred to as alignment. While the presence of linguistic alignment is well documented in the literature, several questions remain open, including the extent to which patterns of reuse across speakers have an impact on the emergence of labelling conventions for novel referents. In this study, we put forward a methodology for automatically detecting shared lemmatised constructions---expressions with a common lexical core used by both speakers within a dialogue---and apply it to a referential communication corpus where participants aim to identify novel objects for which no established labels exist. Our analyses uncover the usage patterns of shared constructions in interaction and reveal that features such as their frequency and the amount of different constructions used for a referent are associated with the degree of object labelling convergence the participants exhibit after social interaction. More generally, the present study shows that automatically detected shared constructions offer a useful level of analysis to investigate the dynamics of reference negotiation in dialogue.Additional information
link to eScholarship -
Ghaleb, E., Burenko, I., Rasenberg, M., Pouw, W., Uhrig, P., Holler, J., Toni, I., Ozyurek, A., & Fernandez, R. (2024). Cospeech gesture detection through multi-phase sequence labeling. In Proceedings of IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV 2024) (pp. 4007-4015).
Abstract
Gestures are integral components of face-to-face communication. They unfold over time, often following predictable movement phases of preparation, stroke, and re-
traction. Yet, the prevalent approach to automatic gesture detection treats the problem as binary classification, classifying a segment as either containing a gesture or not, thus failing to capture its inherently sequential and contextual nature. To address this, we introduce a novel framework that reframes the task as a multi-phase sequence labeling problem rather than binary classification. Our model processes sequences of skeletal movements over time windows, uses Transformer encoders to learn contextual embeddings, and leverages Conditional Random Fields to perform sequence labeling. We evaluate our proposal on a large dataset of diverse co-speech gestures in task-oriented face-to-face dialogues. The results consistently demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms strong baseline models in detecting gesture strokes. Furthermore, applying Transformer encoders to learn contextual embeddings from movement sequences substantially improves gesture unit detection. These results highlight our framework’s capacity to capture the fine-grained dynamics of co-speech gesture phases, paving the way for more nuanced and accurate gesture detection and analysis. -
Grosseck, O., Perlman, M., Ortega, G., & Raviv, L. (2024). The iconic affordances of gesture and vocalization in emerging languages in the lab. In J. Nölle, L. Raviv, K. E. Graham, S. Hartmann, Y. Jadoul, M. Josserand, T. Matzinger, K. Mudd, M. Pleyer, A. Slonimska, & S. Wacewicz (
Eds. ), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference (EVOLANG XV) (pp. 223-225). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences. -
Hintz, F., & Meyer, A. S. (
Eds. ). (2024). Individual differences in language skills [Special Issue]. Journal of Cognition, 7(1). -
Joshi, A., Mohanty, R., Kanakanti, M., Mangla, A., Choudhary, S., Barbate, M., & Modi, A. (2024). iSign: A benchmark for Indian Sign Language processing. In L.-W. Ku, A. Martins, & V. Srikumar (
Eds. ), Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024 (pp. 10827-10844). Bangkok, Thailand: Association for Computational Linguistics.Abstract
Indian Sign Language has limited resources for developing machine learning and data-driven approaches for automated language processing. Though text/audio-based language processing techniques have shown colossal research interest and tremendous improvements in the last few years, Sign Languages still need to catch up due to the need for more resources. To bridge this gap, in this work, we propose iSign: a benchmark for Indian Sign Language (ISL) Processing. We make three primary contributions to this work. First, we release one of the largest ISL-English datasets with more than video-sentence/phrase pairs. To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest sign language dataset available for ISL. Second, we propose multiple NLP-specific tasks (including SignVideo2Text, SignPose2Text, Text2Pose, Word Prediction, and Sign Semantics) and benchmark them with the baseline models for easier access to the research community. Third, we provide detailed insights into the proposed benchmarks with a few linguistic insights into the working of ISL. We streamline the evaluation of Sign Language processing, addressing the gaps in the NLP research community for Sign Languages. We release the dataset, tasks and models via the following website: https://exploration-lab.github.io/iSign/
Additional information
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Josserand, M., Pellegrino, F., Grosseck, O., Dediu, D., & Raviv, L. (2024). Adapting to individual differences: An experimental study of variation in language evolution. In J. Nölle, L. Raviv, K. E. Graham, S. Hartmann, Y. Jadoul, M. Josserand, T. Matzinger, K. Mudd, M. Pleyer, A. Slonimska, & S. Wacewicz (
Eds. ), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference (EVOLANG XV) (pp. 286-289). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences. -
Lammertink, I., De Heer Kloots, M., Bazioni, M., & Raviv, L. (2024). Learnability effects in children: Are more structured languages easier to learn? In J. Nölle, L. Raviv, K. E. Graham, S. Hartmann, Y. Jadoul, M. Josserand, T. Matzinger, K. Mudd, M. Pleyer, A. Slonimska, & S. Wacewicz (
Eds. ), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference (EVOLANG XV) (pp. 320-323). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences. -
Lee, S.-H.-y., Ünal, E., & Papafragou, A. (2024). Forming event units in language and cognition: A cross-linguistic investigation. In L. K. Samuelson, S. L. Frank, A. Mackey, & E. Hazeltine (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) (pp. 1885-1892).Abstract
Humans are surrounded by dynamic, continuous streams of stimuli, yet the human mind segments these stimuli and organizes them into discrete event units. Theories of language production assume that segmenting and construing an event provides a starting point for speaking about the event (Levelt, 1989; Konopka & Brown-Schmidt, 2018). However, the precise units of event representation and their mapping to language remain elusive. In this work, we examine event unit formation in linguistic and conceptual event representations. Given cross-linguistic differences in motion event encoding (satellite vs. verb-framed languages), we investigate the extent to which such differences in forming linguistic motion event units affect how speakers of different languages form cognitive event units in non-linguistic tasks. We test English (satellite-framed) and Turkish (verb-framed) speakers on verbal and non-verbal motion event tasks. Our results show that speakers do not rely on the same event unit representations when verbalizing motion vs. identifying motion event units in non-verbal tasks. Therefore, we suggest that conceptual and linguistic event representations are related but distinct levels of event structure.Additional information
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8wq230f5 -
Levinson, S. C. (2024). Culture as cognitive technology: An evolutionary perspective. In G. Bennardo, V. C. De Munck, & S. Chrisomalis (
Eds. ), Cognition in and out of the mind: Advances in cultural model theory (pp. 241-265). London: Palgrave Macmillan.Abstract
Cognitive anthropology is in need of a theory that extends beyond cultural model theory and explains both how culture has transformed human cognition and the curious ontology of culture itself, for, as Durkheim insisted, culture cannot be reduced to psychology. This chapter promotes a framework that deals with both the evolutionary question and the ontological problem. It is argued that at least a central part of culture should be conceived of in terms of cognitive technology. Beginning with obvious examples of cognitive artifacts, like those used in measurement, way-finding, time-reckoning and numerical calculation, the chapter goes on to consider extensions to our communication systems, emotion-modulating systems and the cognitive division of labor. Cognitive artifacts form ‘coupled systems’ that amplify individual psychology, lying partly outside the head, and are honed by cultural evolution. They make clear how culture gave human cognition an evolutionary edge. -
Liesenfeld, A., & Dingemanse, M. (2024). Rethinking open source generative AI: open-washing and the EU AI Act. In The 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’24) (pp. 1774-1784). ACM.
Abstract
The past year has seen a steep rise in generative AI systems that claim to be open. But how open are they really? The question of what counts as open source in generative AI is poised to take on particular importance in light of the upcoming EU AI Act that regulates open source systems differently, creating an urgent need for practical openness assessment. Here we use an evidence-based framework that distinguishes 14 dimensions of openness, from training datasets to scientific and technical documentation and from licensing to access methods. Surveying over 45 generative AI systems (both text and text-to-image), we find that while the term open source is widely used, many models are `open weight' at best and many providers seek to evade scientific, legal and regulatory scrutiny by withholding information on training and fine-tuning data. We argue that openness in generative AI is necessarily composite (consisting of multiple elements) and gradient (coming in degrees), and point out the risk of relying on single features like access or licensing to declare models open or not. Evidence-based openness assessment can help foster a generative AI landscape in which models can be effectively regulated, model providers can be held accountable, scientists can scrutinise generative AI, and end users can make informed decisions. -
Long, M., & Rubio-Fernandez, P. (2024). Beyond typicality: Lexical category affects the use and processing of color words. In L. K. Samuelson, S. L. Frank, M. Toneva, A. Mackey, & E. Hazeltine (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) (pp. 4925-4930).Abstract
Speakers and listeners show an informativity bias in the use and interpretation of color modifiers. For example, speakers use color more often when referring to objects that vary in color than to objects with a prototypical color. Likewise, listeners look away from objects with prototypical colors upon hearing that color mentioned. Here we test whether speakers and listeners account for another factor related to informativity: the strength of the association between lexical categories and color. Our results demonstrate that speakers and listeners' choices are indeed influenced by this factor; as such, it should be integrated into current pragmatic theories of informativity and computational models of color reference.Additional information
link to eScholarship -
Lupyan, G., & Raviv, L. (2024). A cautionary note on sociodemographic predictors of linguistic complexity: Different measures and different analyses lead to different conclusions. In J. Nölle, L. Raviv, K. E. Graham, S. Hartmann, Y. Jadoul, M. Josserand, T. Matzinger, K. Mudd, M. Pleyer, A. Slonimska, & S. Wacewicz (
Eds. ), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference (EVOLANG XV) (pp. 345-348). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences. -
Matteo, M., & Bosker, H. R. (2024). How to test gesture-speech integration in ten minutes. In Y. Chen, A. Chen, & A. Arvaniti (
Eds. ), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2024 (pp. 737-741). doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2024-149.Abstract
Human conversations are inherently multimodal, including auditory speech, visual articulatory cues, and hand gestures. Recent studies demonstrated that the timing of a simple up-and-down hand movement, known as a beat gesture, can affect speech perception. A beat gesture falling on the first syllable of a disyllabic word induces a bias to perceive a strong-weak stress pattern (i.e., “CONtent”), while a beat gesture falling on the second syllable combined with the same acoustics biases towards a weak-strong stress pattern (“conTENT”). This effect, termed the “manual McGurk effect”, has been studied in both in-lab and online studies, employing standard experimental sessions lasting approximately forty minutes. The present work tests whether the manual McGurk effect can be observed in an online short version (“mini-test”) of the original paradigm, lasting only ten minutes. Additionally, we employ two different response modalities, namely a two-alternative forced choice and a visual analog scale. A significant manual McGurk effect was observed with both response modalities. Overall, the present study demonstrates the feasibility of employing a ten-minute manual McGurk mini-test to obtain a measure of gesture-speech integration. As such, it may lend itself for inclusion in large-scale test batteries that aim to quantify individual variation in language processing. -
Mishra, C., Nandanwar, A., & Mishra, S. (2024). HRI in Indian education: Challenges opportunities. In H. Admoni, D. Szafir, W. Johal, & A. Sandygulova (
Eds. ), Designing an introductory HRI course (workshop at HRI 2024). ArXiv. doi:10.48550/arXiv.2403.12223.Abstract
With the recent advancements in the field of robotics and the increased focus on having general-purpose robots widely available to the general public, it has become increasingly necessary to pursue research into Human-robot interaction (HRI). While there have been a lot of works discussing frameworks for teaching HRI in educational institutions with a few institutions already offering courses to students, a consensus on the course content still eludes the field. In this work, we highlight a few challenges and opportunities while designing an HRI course from an Indian perspective. These topics warrant further deliberations as they have a direct impact on the design of HRI courses and wider implications for the entire field. -
Moser, C., Tarakçı, B., Ünal, E., & Grigoroglou, M. (2024). Multimodal descriotion of Instrument events in English and Turkish. In L. K. Samuelson, S. L. Frank, A. Mackey, & E. Hazeltine (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) (pp. 341-348).Abstract
Daily experiences are conceptualized as events involving multiple participants and their relations (i.e., thematic roles). When describing events, speakers often do not include all event participants involved. Here, we explore how underlying conceptual requirements and language-specific encoding options influence the content of event descriptions in speech and gesture in two typologically different languages (English,
Turkish). Focusing on conceptually peripheral instruments whose status is highly debated, we manipulated the conceptual status of event participants by including events that ‘require’ or ‘allow’ otherwise syntactically optional instruments. Results showed that the require-allow distinction did not manifest uniformly in Turkish and English in speech, gesture, or when both modalities were considered. However, mention of highly optional event participants (e.g., allowed instruments) was
affected by language-specific syntactic encoding options. We conclude that, under more naturalistic elicitation conditions, planning descriptions of instrument events is more heavily affected by language-specific encoding than conceptual prominence of the roles.Additional information
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/31h4s3qp -
Motiekaitytė, K., Grosseck, O., Wolf, L., Bosker, H. R., Peeters, D., Perlman, M., Ortega, G., & Raviv, L. (2024). Iconicity and compositionality in emerging vocal communication systems: a Virtual Reality approach. In J. Nölle, L. Raviv, K. E. Graham, S. Hartmann, Y. Jadoul, M. Josserand, T. Matzinger, K. Mudd, M. Pleyer, A. Slonimska, & S. Wacewicz (
Eds. ), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference (EVOLANG XV) (pp. 387-389). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences. -
Peirolo, M., Meyer, A. S., & Frances, C. (2024). Investigating the causes of prosodic marking in self-repairs: An automatic process? In Y. Chen, A. Chen, & A. Arvaniti (
Eds. ), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2024 (pp. 1080-1084). doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2024-218.Abstract
Natural speech involves repair. These repairs are often highlighted through prosodic marking (Levelt & Cutler, 1983). Prosodic marking usually entails an increase in pitch, loudness, and/or duration that draws attention to the corrected word. While it is established that natural self-repairs typically elicit prosodic marking, the exact cause of this is unclear. This study investigates whether producing a prosodic marking emerges from an automatic correction process or has a communicative purpose. In the current study, we elicit corrections to test whether all self-corrections elicit prosodic marking. Participants carried out a picture-naming task in which they described two images presented on-screen. To prompt self-correction, the second image was altered in some cases, requiring participants to abandon their initial utterance and correct their description to match the new image. This manipulation was compared to a control condition in which only the orientation of the object would change, eliciting no self-correction while still presenting a visual change. We found that the replacement of the item did not elicit a prosodic marking, regardless of the type of change. Theoretical implications and research directions are discussed, in particular theories of prosodic planning. -
Plate, L., Fisher, V. J., Nabibaks, F., & Feenstra, M. (2024). Feeling the traces of the Dutch colonial past: Dance as an affective methodology in Farida Nabibaks’s radiant shadow. In E. Van Bijnen, P. Brandon, K. Fatah-Black, I. Limon, W. Modest, & M. Schavemaker (
Eds. ), The future of the Dutch colonial past: From dialogues to new narratives (pp. 126-139). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. -
de Reus, K., Benítez-Burraco, A., Hersh, T. A., Groot, N., Lambert, M. L., Slocombe, K. E., Vernes, S. C., & Raviv, L. (2024). Self-domestication traits in vocal learning mammals. In J. Nölle, L. Raviv, K. E. Graham, S. Hartmann, Y. Jadoul, M. Josserand, T. Matzinger, K. Mudd, M. Pleyer, A. Slonimska, & S. Wacewicz (
Eds. ), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference (EVOLANG XV) (pp. 105-108). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences. -
Rohrer, P. L., Bujok, R., Van Maastricht, L., & Bosker, H. R. (2024). The timing of beat gestures affects lexical stress perception in Spanish. In Y. Chen, A. Chen, & A. Arvaniti (
Eds. ), Proceedings Speech Prosody 2024 (pp. 702-706). doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2024-142.Abstract
It has been shown that when speakers produce hand gestures, addressees are attentive towards these gestures, using them to facilitate speech processing. Even relatively simple “beat” gestures are taken into account to help process aspects of speech such as prosodic prominence. In fact, recent evidence suggests that the timing of a beat gesture can influence spoken word recognition. Termed the manual McGurk Effect, Dutch participants, when presented with lexical stress minimal pair continua in Dutch, were biased to hear lexical stress on the syllable that coincided with a beat gesture. However, little is known about how this manual McGurk effect would surface in languages other than Dutch, with different acoustic cues to prominence, and variable gestures. Therefore, this study tests the effect in Spanish where lexical stress is arguably even more important, being a contrastive cue in the regular verb conjugation system. Results from 24 participants corroborate the effect in Spanish, namely that when given the same auditory stimulus, participants were biased to perceive lexical stress on the syllable that visually co-occurred with a beat gesture. These findings extend the manual McGurk effect to a different language, emphasizing the impact of gestures' timing on prosody perception and spoken word recognition. -
Rohrer, P. L., Hong, Y., & Bosker, H. R. (2024). Gestures time to vowel onset and change the acoustics of the word in Mandarin. In Y. Chen, A. Chen, & A. Arvaniti (
Eds. ), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2024 (pp. 866-870). doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2024-175.Abstract
Recent research on multimodal language production has revealed that prominence in speech and gesture go hand-in-hand. Specifically, peaks in gesture (i.e., the apex) seem to closely coordinate with peaks in fundamental frequency (F0). The nature of this relationship may also be bi-directional, as it has also been shown that the production of gesture directly affects speech acoustics. However, most studies on the topic have largely focused on stress-based languages, where fundamental frequency has a prominence-lending function. Less work has been carried out on lexical tone languages such as Mandarin, where F0 is lexically distinctive. In this study, four native Mandarin speakers were asked to produce single monosyllabic CV words, taken from minimal lexical tone triplets (e.g., /pi1/, /pi2/, /pi3/), either with or without a beat gesture. Our analyses of the timing of the gestures showed that the gesture apex most stably occurred near vowel onset, with consonantal duration being the strongest predictor of apex placement. Acoustic analyses revealed that words produced with gesture showed raised F0 contours, greater intensity, and shorter durations. These findings further our understanding of gesture-speech alignment in typologically diverse languages, and add to the discussion about multimodal prominence. -
Ronderos, C. R., Zhang, Y., & Rubio-Fernandez, P. (2024). Weighted parameters in demonstrative use: The case of Spanish teens and adults. In L. K. Samuelson, S. L. Frank, M. Toneva, A. Mackey, & E. Hazeltine (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) (pp. 3279-3286).Additional information
link to eScholarship -
Rubio-Fernandez, P., Long, M., Shukla, V., Bhatia, V., Mahapatra, A., Ralekar, C., Ben-Ami, S., & Sinha, P. (2024). Multimodal communication in newly sighted children: An investigation of the relation between visual experience and pragmatic development. In L. K. Samuelson, S. L. Frank, M. Toneva, A. Mackey, & E. Hazeltine (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) (pp. 2560-2567).Abstract
We investigated the relationship between visual experience and pragmatic development by testing the socio-communicative skills of a unique population: the Prakash children of India, who received treatment for congenital cataracts after years of visual deprivation. Using two different referential communication tasks, our study investigated Prakash' children ability to produce sufficiently informative referential expressions (e.g., ‘the green pear' or ‘the small plate') and pay attention to their interlocutor's face during the task (Experiment 1), as well as their ability to recognize a speaker's referential intent through non-verbal cues such as head turning and pointing (Experiment 2). Our results show that Prakash children have strong pragmatic skills, but do not look at their interlocutor's face as often as neurotypical children do. However, longitudinal analyses revealed an increase in face fixations, suggesting that over time, Prakash children come to utilize their improved visual skills for efficient referential communication.Additional information
link to eScholarship -
Sander, J., Çetinçelik, M., Zhang, Y., Rowland, C. F., & Harmon, Z. (2024). Why does joint attention predict vocabulary acquisition? The answer depends on what coding scheme you use. In L. K. Samuelson, S. L. Frank, M. Toneva, A. Mackey, & E. Hazeltine (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) (pp. 1607-1613).Abstract
Despite decades of study, we still know less than we would like about the association between joint attention (JA) and language acquisition. This is partly because of disagreements on how to operationalise JA. In this study, we examine the impact of applying two different, influential JA operationalisation schemes to the same dataset of child-caregiver interactions, to determine which yields a better fit to children's later vocabulary size. Two coding schemes— one defining JA in terms of gaze overlap and one in terms of social aspects of shared attention—were applied to video-recordings of dyadic naturalistic toy-play interactions (N=45). We found that JA was predictive of later production vocabulary when operationalised as shared focus (study 1), but also that its operationalisation as shared social awareness increased its predictive power (study 2). Our results emphasise the critical role of methodological choices in understanding how and why JA is associated with vocabulary size. -
Silverstein, P., Bergmann, C., & Syed, M. (
Eds. ). (2024). Open science and metascience in developmental psychology [Special Issue]. Infant and Child Development, 33(1). -
Trujillo, J. P. (2024). Motion-tracking technology for the study of gesture. In A. Cienki (
Ed. ), The Cambridge Handbook of Gesture Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. -
Uluşahin, O., Bosker, H. R., McQueen, J. M., & Meyer, A. S. (2024). Knowledge of a talker’s f0 affects subsequent perception of voiceless fricatives. In Y. Chen, A. Chen, & A. Arvaniti (
Eds. ), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2024 (pp. 432-436).Abstract
The human brain deals with the infinite variability of speech through multiple mechanisms. Some of them rely solely on information in the speech input (i.e., signal-driven) whereas some rely on linguistic or real-world knowledge (i.e., knowledge-driven). Many signal-driven perceptual processes rely on the enhancement of acoustic differences between incoming speech sounds, producing contrastive adjustments. For instance, when an ambiguous voiceless fricative is preceded by a high fundamental frequency (f0) sentence, the fricative is perceived as having lower a spectral center of gravity (CoG). However, it is not clear whether knowledge of a talker’s typical f0 can lead to similar contrastive effects. This study investigated a possible talker f0 effect on fricative CoG perception. In the exposure phase, two groups of participants (N=16 each) heard the same talker at high or low f0 for 20 minutes. Later, in the test phase, participants rated fixed-f0 /?ɔk/ tokens as being /sɔk/ (i.e., high CoG) or /ʃɔk/ (i.e., low CoG), where /?/ represents a fricative from a 5-step /s/-/ʃ/ continuum. Surprisingly, the data revealed the opposite of our contrastive hypothesis, whereby hearing high f0 instead biased perception towards high CoG. Thus, we demonstrated that talker f0 information affects fricative CoG perception. -
Ünal, E., Barış, C., & Tarakçı, B. (2024). Boundednes is represented in visual and auditory event cognition. In L. K. Samuelson, S. L. Frank, A. Mackey, & E. Hazeltine (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) (pp. 2612-2618).Abstract
Viewers are sensitive to the distinction between visual events with an internal structure leading to a well-defined endpoint (bounded events) and events lacking this structure and a well-defined endpoint (unbounded events). Here, we asked whether boundedness could be represented in the auditory modality in a way similar to the visual modality. To investigate this question, we trained participants with visual and auditory events on bounded or unbounded event categories in a category identification task. Later, we tested whether they could abstract the internal temporal structure of events and extend the (un)boundedness category to new examples in the same modality. These findings suggest that the principles and constraints that apply to the basic units of human experience in the visual modality have their counterparts in the auditory modality.Additional information
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/15x9f213 -
Ünal, E., & Tınaz, B. (2024). Event segmentation in language and cognition. In L. K. Samuelson, S. L. Frank, A. Mackey, & E. Hazeltine (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) (pp. 184-191).Abstract
We examine the relation between event segmentation in language and cognition in the domain of motion events, focusing on Turkish, a verb-framed language that segments motion paths in separate linguistic units (verb clauses). We compare motion events that have a path change to those that did not have a path change. In the linguistic task, participants were more likely to use multiple verb phrases when describing events that had a path change compared to those that did not have a path change. In the non-linguistic Dwell Time task, participants viewed self-paced slideshows of still images sampled from the motion event videos in the linguistic task. Dwell times for slides corresponding to path changes were not significantly longer than those for temporally similar slides in the events without a path change. These findings suggest that event units in language may not have strong and stable influences on event segmentation in cognition.Additional information
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6nm5b85t -
van der Burght, C. L., & Meyer, A. S. (2024). Interindividual variation in weighting prosodic and semantic cues during sentence comprehension – a partial replication of Van der Burght et al. (2021). In Y. Chen, A. Chen, & A. Arvaniti (
Eds. ), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2024 (pp. 792-796). doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2024-160.Abstract
Contrastive pitch accents can mark sentence elements occupying parallel roles. In “Mary kissed John, not Peter”, a pitch accent on Mary or John cues the implied syntactic role of Peter. Van der Burght, Friederici, Goucha, and Hartwigsen (2021) showed that listeners can build expectations concerning syntactic and semantic properties of upcoming words, derived from pitch accent information they heard previously. To further explore these expectations, we attempted a partial replication of the original German study in Dutch. In the experimental sentences “Yesterday, the police officer arrested the thief, not the inspector/murderer”, a pitch accent on subject or object cued the subject/object role of the ellipsis clause. Contrasting elements were additionally cued by the thematic role typicality of the nouns. Participants listened to sentences in which the ellipsis clause was omitted and selected the most plausible sentence-final noun (presented visually) via button press. Replicating the original study results, listeners based their sentence-final preference on the pitch accent information available in the sentence. However, as in the original study, individual differences between listeners were found, with some following prosodic information and others relying on a structural bias. The results complement the literature on ellipsis resolution and on interindividual variability in cue weighting. -
Yang, J., Zhang, Y., & Yu, C. (2024). Learning semantic knowledge based on infant real-time. In L. K. Samuelson, S. L. Frank, M. Toneva, A. Mackey, & E. Hazeltine (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) (pp. 741-747).Abstract
Early word learning involves mapping individual words to their meanings and building organized semantic representations among words. Previous corpus-based studies (e.g., using text from websites, newspapers, child-directed speech corpora) demonstrated that linguistic information such as word co-occurrence alone is sufficient to build semantically organized word knowledge. The present study explored two new research directions to advance understanding of how infants acquire semantically organized word knowledge. First, infants in the real world hear words surrounded by contextual information. Going beyond inferring semantic knowledge merely from language input, we examined the role of extra-linguistic contextual information in learning semantic knowledge. Second, previous research relies on large amounts of linguistic data to demonstrate in-principle learning, which is unrealistic compared with the input children receive. Here, we showed that incorporating extra-linguistic information provides an efficient mechanism through which semantic knowledge can be acquired with a small amount of data infants perceive in everyday learning contexts, such as toy play.Additional information
link to eScholarship -
Zhou, Y., van der Burght, C. L., & Meyer, A. S. (2024). Investigating the role of semantics and perceptual salience in the memory benefit of prosodic prominence. In Y. Chen, A. Chen, & A. Arvaniti (
Eds. ), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2024 (pp. 1250-1254). doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2024-252.Abstract
Prosodic prominence can enhance memory for the prominent words. This mnemonic benefit has been linked to listeners’ allocation of attention and deeper processing, which leads to more robust semantic representations. We investigated whether, in addition to the well-established effect at the semantic level, there was a memory benefit for prominent words at the phonological level. To do so, participants (48 native speakers of Dutch), first performed an accent judgement task, where they had to discriminate accented from unaccented words, and accented from unaccented pseudowords. All stimuli were presented in lists. They then performed an old/new recognition task for the stimuli. Accuracy in the accent judgement task was equally high for words and pseudowords. In the recognition task, performance was, as expected, better for words than pseudowords. More importantly, there was an interaction of accent with word type, with a significant advantage for accented compared to unaccented words, but not for pseudowords. The results confirm the memory benefit for accented compared to unaccented words seen in earlier studies, and they are consistent with the view that prominence primarily affects the semantic encoding of words. There was no evidence for an additional memory benefit arising at the phonological level. -
Zora, H., Bowin, H., Heldner, M., Riad, T., & Hagoort, P. (2024). The role of pitch accent in discourse comprehension and the markedness of Accent 2 in Central Swedish. In Y. Chen, A. Chen, & A. Arvaniti (
Eds. ), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2024 (pp. 921-925). doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2024-186.Abstract
In Swedish, words are associated with either of two pitch contours known as Accent 1 and Accent 2. Using a psychometric test, we investigated how listeners judge pitch accent violations while interpreting discourse. Forty native speakers of Central Swedish were presented with auditory dialogues, where test words were appropriately or inappropriately accented in a given context, and asked to judge the correctness of sentences containing the test words. Data indicated a statistically significant effect of wrong accent pattern on the correctness judgment. Both Accent 1 and Accent 2 violations interfered with the coherent interpretation of discourse and were judged as incorrect by the listeners. Moreover, there was a statistically significant difference in the perceived correctness between the accent patterns. Accent 2 violations led to a lower correctness score compared to Accent 1 violations, indicating that the listeners were more sensitive to pitch accent violations in Accent 2 words than in Accent 1 words. This result is in line with the notion that Accent 2 is marked and lexically represented in Central Swedish. Taken together, these findings indicate that listeners use both Accent 1 and Accent 2 to arrive at the correct interpretation of the linguistic input, while assigning varying degrees of relevance to them depending on their markedness. -
Agirrezabal, M., Paggio, P., Navarretta, C., & Jongejan, B. (2023). Multimodal detection and classification of head movements in face-to-face conversations: Exploring models, features and their interaction. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (
Eds. ), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527200.Abstract
In this work we perform multimodal detection and classification
of head movements from face to face video conversation data.
We have experimented with different models and feature sets
and provided some insight on the effect of independent features,
but also how their interaction can enhance a head movement
classifier. Used features include nose, neck and mid hip position
coordinates and their derivatives together with acoustic features,
namely, intensity and pitch of the speaker on focus. Results
show that when input features are sufficiently processed by in-
teracting with each other, a linear classifier can reach a similar
performance to a more complex non-linear neural model with
several hidden layers. Our best models achieve state-of-the-art
performance in the detection task, measured by macro-averaged
F1 score. -
Cabrelli, J., Chaouch-Orozco, A., González Alonso, J., Pereira Soares, S. M., Puig-Mayenco, E., & Rothman, J. (2023). Introduction - Multilingualism: Language, brain, and cognition. In J. Cabrelli, A. Chaouch-Orozco, J. González Alonso, S. M. Pereira Soares, E. Puig-Mayenco, & J. Rothman (
Eds. ), The Cambridge handbook of third language acquisition (pp. 1-20). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108957823.001.Abstract
This chapter provides an introduction to the handbook. It succintly overviews the key questions in the field of L3/Ln acquisition and summarizes the scope of all the chapters included. The chapter ends by raising some outstanding questions that the field needs to address. -
Caplan, S., Peng, M. Z., Zhang, Y., & Yu, C. (2023). Using an Egocentric Human Simulation Paradigm to quantify referential and semantic ambiguity in early word learning. In M. Goldwater, F. K. Anggoro, B. K. Hayes, & D. C. Ong (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2023) (pp. 1043-1049).Abstract
In order to understand early word learning we need to better understand and quantify properties of the input that young children receive. We extended the human simulation paradigm (HSP) using egocentric videos taken from infant head-mounted cameras. The videos were further annotated with gaze information indicating in-the-moment visual attention from the infant. Our new HSP prompted participants for two types of responses, thus differentiating referential from semantic ambiguity in the learning input. Consistent with findings on visual attention in word learning, we find a strongly bimodal distribution over HSP accuracy. Even in this open-ended task, most videos only lead to a small handful of common responses. What's more, referential ambiguity was the key bottleneck to performance: participants can nearly always recover the exact word that was said if they identify the correct referent. Finally, analysis shows that adult learners relied on particular, multimodal behavioral cues to infer those target referents. -
Chevrefils, L., Morgenstern, A., Beaupoil-Hourdel, P., Bedoin, D., Caët, S., Danet, C., Danino, C., De Pontonx, S., & Parisse, C. (2023). Coordinating eating and languaging: The choreography of speech, sign, gesture and action in family dinners. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (
Eds. ), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527183.Abstract
In this study, we analyze one French signing and one French speaking family’s interaction during dinner. The families composed of two parents and two children aged 3 to 11 were filmed with three cameras to capture all family members’ behaviors. The three videos per dinner were synchronized and coded on ELAN. We annotated all participants’ acting, and languaging.
Our quantitative analyses show how family members collaboratively manage multiple streams of activity through the embodied performances of dining and interacting. We uncover different profiles according to participants’ modality of expression and status (focusing on the mother and the younger child). The hearing participants’ co-activity management illustrates their monitoring of dining and conversing and how they progressively master the affordances of the visual and vocal channels to maintain the simultaneity of the two activities. The deaf mother skillfully manages to alternate smoothly between dining and interacting. The deaf younger child manifests how she is in the process of developing her skills to manage multi-activity. Our qualitative analyses focus on the ecology of visual-gestural and audio-vocal languaging in the context of co-activity according to language and participant. We open new perspectives on the management of gaze and body parts in multimodal languaging. -
Corps, R. E. (2023). What do we know about the mechanisms of response planning in dialog? In Psychology of Learning and Motivation (pp. 41-81). doi:10.1016/bs.plm.2023.02.002.
Abstract
During dialog, interlocutors take turns at speaking with little gap or overlap between their contributions. But language production in monolog is comparatively slow. Theories of dialog tend to agree that interlocutors manage these timing demands by planning a response early, before the current speaker reaches the end of their turn. In the first half of this chapter, I review experimental research supporting these theories. But this research also suggests that planning a response early, while simultaneously comprehending, is difficult. Does response planning need to be this difficult during dialog? In other words, is early-planning always necessary? In the second half of this chapter, I discuss research that suggests the answer to this question is no. In particular, corpora of natural conversation demonstrate that speakers do not directly respond to the immediately preceding utterance of their partner—instead, they continue an utterance they produced earlier. This parallel talk likely occurs because speakers are highly incremental and plan only part of their utterance before speaking, leading to pauses, hesitations, and disfluencies. As a result, speakers do not need to engage in extensive advance planning. Thus, laboratory studies do not provide a full picture of language production in dialog, and further research using naturalistic tasks is needed. -
Creemers, A. (2023). Morphological processing in spoken-word recognition. In D. Crepaldi (
Ed. ), Linguistic morphology in the mind and brain (pp. 50-64). New York: Routledge.Abstract
Most psycholinguistic studies on morphological processing have examined the role of morphological structure in the visual modality. This chapter discusses morphological processing in the auditory modality, which is an area of research that has only recently received more attention. It first discusses why results in the visual modality cannot straightforwardly be applied to the processing of spoken words, stressing the importance of acknowledging potential modality effects. It then gives a brief overview of the existing research on the role of morphology in the auditory modality, for which an increasing number of studies report that listeners show sensitivity to morphological structure. Finally, the chapter highlights insights gained by looking at morphological processing not only in reading, but also in listening, and it discusses directions for future research -
Dingemanse, M. (2023). Ideophones. In E. Van Lier (
Ed. ), The Oxford handbook of word classes (pp. 466-476). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Abstract
Many of the world’s languages feature an open lexical class of ideophones, words whose marked forms and sensory meanings invite iconic associations. Ideophones (also known as mimetics or expressives) are well-known from languages in Asia, Africa and the Americas, where they often form a class on the same order of magnitude as other major word classes and take up a considerable functional load as modifying expressions or predicates. Across languages, commonalities in the morphosyntactic behaviour of ideophones can be related to their nature and origin as vocal depictions. At the same time there is ample room for linguistic diversity, raising the need for fine-grained grammatical description of ideophone systems. As vocal depictions, ideophones often form a distinct lexical stratum seemingly conjured out of thin air; but as conventionalized words, they inevitably grow roots in local linguistic systems, showing relations to adverbs, adjectives, verbs and other linguistic resources devoted to modification and predication -
Dingemanse, M. (2023). Interjections. In E. Van Lier (
Ed. ), The Oxford handbook of word classes (pp. 477-491). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Abstract
No class of words has better claims to universality than interjections. At the same time, no category has more variable content than this one, traditionally the catch-all basket for linguistic items that bear a complicated relation to sentential syntax. Interjections are a mirror reflecting methodological and theoretical assumptions more than a coherent linguistic category that affords unitary treatment. This chapter focuses on linguistic items that typically function as free-standing utterances, and on some of the conceptual, methodological, and theoretical questions generated by such items. A key move is to study these items in the setting of conversational sequences, rather than from the “flatland” of sequential syntax. This makes visible how some of the most frequent interjections streamline everyday language use and scaffold complex language. Approaching interjections in terms of their sequential positions and interactional functions has the potential to reveal and explain patterns of universality and diversity in interjections. -
Dong, T., & Toneva, M. (2023). Modeling brain responses to video stimuli using multimodal video transformers. In Proceedings of the Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience (CCN 2023) (pp. 194-197).
Abstract
Prior work has shown that internal representations of artificial neural networks can significantly predict brain responses elicited by unimodal stimuli (i.e. reading a book chapter or viewing static images). However, the computational modeling of brain representations of naturalistic video stimuli, such as movies or TV shows, still remains underexplored. In this work, we present a promising approach for modeling vision-language brain representations of video stimuli by a transformer-based model that represents videos jointly through audio, text, and vision. We show that the joint representations of vision and text information are better aligned with brain representations of subjects watching a popular TV show. We further show that the incorporation of visual information improves brain alignment across several regions that support language processing. -
Drijvers, L., & Mazzini, S. (2023). Neural oscillations in audiovisual language and communication. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Neuroscience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780190264086.013.455.
Abstract
How do neural oscillations support human audiovisual language and communication? Considering the rhythmic nature of audiovisual language, in which stimuli from different sensory modalities unfold over time, neural oscillations represent an ideal candidate to investigate how audiovisual language is processed in the brain. Modulations of oscillatory phase and power are thought to support audiovisual language and communication in multiple ways. Neural oscillations synchronize by tracking external rhythmic stimuli or by re-setting their phase to presentation of relevant stimuli, resulting in perceptual benefits. In particular, synchronized neural oscillations have been shown to subserve the processing and the integration of auditory speech, visual speech, and hand gestures. Furthermore, synchronized oscillatory modulations have been studied and reported between brains during social interaction, suggesting that their contribution to audiovisual communication goes beyond the processing of single stimuli and applies to natural, face-to-face communication.
There are still some outstanding questions that need to be answered to reach a better understanding of the neural processes supporting audiovisual language and communication. In particular, it is not entirely clear yet how the multitude of signals encountered during audiovisual communication are combined into a coherent percept and how this is affected during real-world dyadic interactions. In order to address these outstanding questions, it is fundamental to consider language as a multimodal phenomenon, involving the processing of multiple stimuli unfolding at different rhythms over time, and to study language in its natural context: social interaction. Other outstanding questions could be addressed by implementing novel techniques (such as rapid invisible frequency tagging, dual-electroencephalography, or multi-brain stimulation) and analysis methods (e.g., using temporal response functions) to better understand the relationship between oscillatory dynamics and efficient audiovisual communication. -
Düngen, D., Sarfati, M., & Ravignani, A. (2023). Cross-species research in biomusicality: Methods, pitfalls, and prospects. In E. H. Margulis, P. Loui, & D. Loughridge (
Eds. ), The science-music borderlands: Reckoning with the past and imagining the future (pp. 57-95). Cambridge, MA, USA: The MIT Press. doi:10.7551/mitpress/14186.003.0008. -
Ekerdt, C., Takashima, A., & McQueen, J. M. (2023). Memory consolidation in second language neurocognition. In K. Morgan-Short, & J. G. Van Hell (
Eds. ), The Routledge handbook of second language acquisition and neurolinguistics. Oxfordshire: Routledge.Abstract
Acquiring a second language (L2) requires newly learned information to be integrated with existing knowledge. It has been proposed that several memory systems work together to enable this process of rapidly encoding new information and then slowly incorporating it with existing knowledge, such that it is consolidated and integrated into the language network without catastrophic interference. This chapter focuses on consolidation of L2 vocabulary. First, the complementary learning systems model is outlined, along with the model’s predictions regarding lexical consolidation. Next, word learning studies in first language (L1) that investigate the factors playing a role in consolidation, and the neural mechanisms underlying this, are reviewed. Using the L1 memory consolidation literature as background, the chapter then presents what is currently known about memory consolidation in L2 word learning. Finally, considering what is already known about L1 but not about L2, future research investigating memory consolidation in L2 neurocognition is proposed. -
Ferré, G. (2023). Pragmatic gestures and prosody. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (
Eds. ), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527215.Abstract
The study presented here focuses on two pragmatic gestures:
the hand flip (Ferré, 2011), a gesture of the Palm Up Open
Hand/PUOH family (Müller, 2004) and the closed hand which
can be considered as the opposite kind of movement to the open-
ing of the hands present in the PUOH gesture. Whereas one of
the functions of the hand flip has been described as presenting
a new point in speech (Cienki, 2021), the closed hand gesture
has not yet been described in the literature to the best of our
knowledge. It can however be conceived of as having the oppo-
site function of announcing the end of a point in discourse. The
object of the present study is therefore to determine, with the
study of prosodic features, if the two gestures are found in the
same type of speech units and what their respective scope is.
Drawing from a corpus of three TED Talks in French the
prosodic characteristics of the speech that accompanies the two
gestures will be examined. The hypothesis developed in the
present paper is that their scope should be reflected in the
prosody of accompanying speech, especially pitch key, tone,
and relative pitch range. The prediction is that hand flips and
closing hand gestures are expected to be located at the periph-
ery of Intonation Phrases (IPs), Inter-Pausal Units (IPUs) or
more conversational Turn Constructional Units (TCUs), and are
likely to be co-occurrent with pauses in speech. But because of
the natural slope of intonation in speech, the speech that accom-
pany early gestures in Intonation Phrases should reveal different
features from the speech at the end of intonational units. Tones
should be different as well, considering the prosodic structure
of spoken French. -
Gamba, M., Raimondi, T., De Gregorio, C., Valente, D., Carugati, F., Cristiano, W., Ferrario, V., Torti, V., Favaro, L., Friard, O., Giacoma, C., & Ravignani, A. (2023). Rhythmic categories across primate vocal displays. In A. Astolfi, F. Asdrubali, & L. Shtrepi (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 10th Convention of the European Acoustics Association Forum Acusticum 2023 (pp. 3971-3974). Torino: European Acoustics Association.Abstract
The last few years have revealed that several species may share the building blocks of Musicality with humans. The recognition of these building blocks (e.g., rhythm, frequency variation) was a necessary impetus for a new round of studies investigating rhythmic variation in animal vocal displays. Singing primates are a small group of primate species that produce modulated songs ranging from tens to thousands of vocal units. Previous studies showed that the indri, the only singing lemur, is currently the only known species that perform duet and choruses showing multiple rhythmic categories, as seen in human music. Rhythmic categories occur when temporal intervals between note onsets are not uniformly distributed, and rhythms with a small integer ratio between these intervals are typical of human music. Besides indris, white-handed gibbons and three crested gibbon species showed a prominent rhythmic category corresponding to a single small integer ratio, isochrony. This study reviews previous evidence on the co-occurrence of rhythmic categories in primates and focuses on the prospects for a comparative, multimodal study of rhythmicity in this clade. -
Green, K., Osei-Cobbina, C., Perlman, M., & Kita, S. (2023). Infants can create different types of iconic gestures, with and without parental scaffolding. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (
Eds. ), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527188.Abstract
Despite the early emergence of pointing, children are generally not documented to produce iconic gestures until later in development. Although research has described this developmental trajectory and the types of iconic gestures that emerge first, there has been limited focus on iconic gestures within interactional contexts. This study identified the first 10 iconic gestures produced by five monolingual English-speaking children in a naturalistic longitudinal video corpus and analysed the interactional contexts. We found children produced their first iconic gesture between 12 and 20 months and that gestural types varied. Although 34% of gestures could have been imitated or derived from adult or child actions in the preceding context, the majority were produced independently of any observed model. In these cases, adults often led the interaction in a direction where iconic gesture was an appropriate response. Overall, we find infants can represent a referent symbolically and possess a greater capacity for innovation than previously assumed. In order to develop our understanding of how children learn to produce iconic gestures, it is important to consider the immediate interactional context. Conducting naturalistic corpus analyses could be a more ecologically valid approach to understanding how children learn to produce iconic gestures in real life contexts. -
Hamilton, A., & Holler, J. (
Eds. ). (2023). Face2face: Advancing the science of social interaction [Special Issue]. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences. Retrieved from https://royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/2023/378/1875.Abstract
Face to face interaction is fundamental to human sociality but is very complex to study in a scientific fashion. This theme issue brings together cutting-edge approaches to the study of face-to-face interaction and showcases how we can make progress in this area. Researchers are now studying interaction in adult conversation, parent-child relationships, neurodiverse groups, interactions with virtual agents and various animal species. The theme issue reveals how new paradigms are leading to more ecologically grounded and comprehensive insights into what social interaction is. Scientific advances in this area can lead to improvements in education and therapy, better understanding of neurodiversity and more engaging artificial agents -
Hellwig, B., Allen, S. E. M., Davidson, L., Defina, R., Kelly, B. F., & Kidd, E. (
Eds. ). (2023). The acquisition sketch project [Special Issue]. Language Documentation and Conservation Special Publication, 28.Abstract
This special publication aims to build a renewed enthusiasm for collecting acquisition data across many languages, including those facing endangerment and loss. It presents a guide for documenting and describing child language and child-directed language in diverse languages and cultures, as well as a collection of acquisition sketches based on this guide. The guide is intended for anyone interested in working across child language and language documentation, including, for example, field linguists and language documenters, community language workers, child language researchers or graduate students. -
Jadoul, Y., Düngen, D., & Ravignani, A. (2023). Live-tracking acoustic parameters in animal behavioural experiments: Interactive bioacoustics with parselmouth. In A. Astolfi, F. Asdrubali, & L. Shtrepi (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 10th Convention of the European Acoustics Association Forum Acusticum 2023 (pp. 4675-4678). Torino: European Acoustics Association.Abstract
Most bioacoustics software is used to analyse the already collected acoustics data in batch, i.e., after the data-collecting phase of a scientific study. However, experiments based on animal training require immediate and precise reactions from the experimenter, and thus do not easily dovetail with a typical bioacoustics workflow. Bridging this methodological gap, we have developed a custom application to live-monitor the vocal development of harbour seals in a behavioural experiment. In each trial, the application records and automatically detects an animal's call, and immediately measures duration and acoustic measures such as intensity, fundamental frequency, or formant frequencies. It then displays a spectrogram of the recording and the acoustic measurements, allowing the experimenter to instantly evaluate whether or not to reinforce the animal's vocalisation. From a technical perspective, the rapid and easy development of this custom software was made possible by combining multiple open-source software projects. Here, we integrated the acoustic analyses from Parselmouth, a Python library for Praat, together with PyAudio and Matplotlib's recording and plotting functionality, into a custom graphical user interface created with PyQt. This flexible recombination of different open-source Python libraries allows the whole program to be written in a mere couple of hundred lines of code -
Jordanoska, I. (2023). Focus marking and size in some Mande and Atlantic languages. In N. Sumbatova, I. Kapitonov, M. Khachaturyan, S. Oskolskaya, & V. Verhees (
Eds. ), Songs and Trees: Papers in Memory of Sasha Vydrina (pp. 311-343). St. Petersburg: Institute for Linguistic Studies and Russian Academy of Sciences.Abstract
This paper compares the focus marking systems and the focus size that can be expressed by the different focus markings in four Mande and three Atlantic languages and varieties, namely: Bambara, Dyula, Kakabe, Soninke (Mande), Wolof, Jóola Foñy and Jóola Karon (Atlantic). All of these languages are known to mark focus morphosyntactically, rather than prosodically, as the more well-studied Germanic languages do. However, the Mande languages under discussion use only morphology, in the form of a particle that follows the focus, while the Atlantic ones use a more complex morphosyntactic system in which focus is marked by morphology in the verbal complex and movement of the focused term. It is shown that while there are some syntactic restrictions to how many different focus sizes can be marked in a distinct way, there is also a certain degree of arbitrariness as to which focus sizes are marked in the same way as each other. -
Jordanoska, I., Kocher, A., & Bendezú-Araujo, R. (
Eds. ). (2023). Marking the truth: A cross-linguistic approach to verum [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft, 42(3). Retrieved from https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/zfsw/42/3/html. -
Kanakanti, M., Singh, S., & Shrivastava, M. (2023). MultiFacet: A multi-tasking framework for speech-to-sign language generation. In E. André, M. Chetouani, D. Vaufreydaz, G. Lucas, T. Schultz, L.-P. Morency, & A. Vinciarelli (
Eds. ), ICMI '23 Companion: Companion Publication of the 25th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (pp. 205-213). New York: ACM. doi:10.1145/3610661.3616550.Abstract
Sign language is a rich form of communication, uniquely conveying meaning through a combination of gestures, facial expressions, and body movements. Existing research in sign language generation has predominantly focused on text-to-sign pose generation, while speech-to-sign pose generation remains relatively underexplored. Speech-to-sign language generation models can facilitate effective communication between the deaf and hearing communities. In this paper, we propose an architecture that utilises prosodic information from speech audio and semantic context from text to generate sign pose sequences. In our approach, we adopt a multi-tasking strategy that involves an additional task of predicting Facial Action Units (FAUs). FAUs capture the intricate facial muscle movements that play a crucial role in conveying specific facial expressions during sign language generation. We train our models on an existing Indian Sign language dataset that contains sign language videos with audio and text translations. To evaluate our models, we report Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and Probability of Correct Keypoints (PCK) scores. We find that combining prosody and text as input, along with incorporating facial action unit prediction as an additional task, outperforms previous models in both DTW and PCK scores. We also discuss the challenges and limitations of speech-to-sign pose generation models to encourage future research in this domain. We release our models, results and code to foster reproducibility and encourage future research1. -
Laparle, S. (2023). Moving past the lexical affiliate with a frame-based analysis of gesture meaning. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (
Eds. ), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527218.Abstract
Interpreting the meaning of co-speech gesture often involves
identifying a gesture’s ‘lexical affiliate’, the word or phrase to
which it most closely relates (Schegloff 1984). Though there is
work within gesture studies that resists this simplex mapping of
meaning from speech to gesture (e.g. de Ruiter 2000; Kendon
2014; Parrill 2008), including an evolving body of literature on
recurrent gesture and gesture families (e.g. Fricke et al. 2014; Müller 2017), it is still the lexical affiliate model that is most ap-
parent in formal linguistic models of multimodal meaning(e.g.
Alahverdzhieva et al. 2017; Lascarides and Stone 2009; Puste-
jovsky and Krishnaswamy 2021; Schlenker 2020). In this work,
I argue that the lexical affiliate should be carefully reconsidered
in the further development of such models.
In place of the lexical affiliate, I suggest a further shift
toward a frame-based, action schematic approach to gestural
meaning in line with that proposed in, for example, Parrill and
Sweetser (2004) and Müller (2017). To demonstrate the utility
of this approach I present three types of compositional gesture
sequences which I call spatial contrast, spatial embedding, and
cooperative abstract deixis. All three rely on gestural context,
rather than gesture-speech alignment, to convey interactive (i.e.
pragmatic) meaning. The centrality of gestural context to ges-
ture meaning in these examples demonstrates the necessity of
developing a model of gestural meaning independent of its in-
tegration with speech. -
Levinson, S. C. (2023). On cognitive artifacts. In R. Feldhay (
Ed. ), The evolution of knowledge: A scientific meeting in honor of Jürgen Renn (pp. 59-78). Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.Abstract
Wearing the hat of a cognitive anthropologist rather than an historian, I will try to amplify the ideas of Renn’s cited above. I argue that a particular subclass of material objects, namely “cognitive artifacts,” involves a close coupling of mind and artifact that acts like a brain prosthesis. Simple cognitive artifacts are external objects that act as aids to internal
computation, and not all cultures have extended inventories of these. Cognitive artifacts in this sense (e.g., calculating or measuring devices) have clearly played a central role in the history of science. But the notion can be widened to take in less material externalizations of cognition, like writing and language itself. A critical question here is how and why this close coupling of internal computation and external device actually works, a rather neglected question to which I’ll suggest some answers.Additional information
link to book -
Levshina, N. (2023). Testing communicative and learning biases in a causal model of language evolution:A study of cues to Subject and Object. In M. Degano, T. Roberts, G. Sbardolini, & M. Schouwstra (
Eds. ), The Proceedings of the 23rd Amsterdam Colloquium (pp. 383-387). Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam. -
Levshina, N. (2023). Word classes in corpus linguistics. In E. Van Lier (
Ed. ), The Oxford handbook of word classes (pp. 833-850). Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198852889.013.34.Abstract
Word classes play a central role in corpus linguistics under the name of parts of speech (POS). Many popular corpora are provided with POS tags. This chapter gives examples of popular tagsets and discusses the methods of automatic tagging. It also considers bottom-up approaches to POS induction, which are particularly important for the ‘poverty of stimulus’ debate in language acquisition research. The choice of optimal POS tagging involves many difficult decisions, which are related to the level of granularity, redundancy at different levels of corpus annotation, cross-linguistic applicability, language-specific descriptive adequacy, and dealing with fuzzy boundaries between POS. The chapter also discusses the problem of flexible word classes and demonstrates how corpus data with POS tags and syntactic dependencies can be used to quantify the level of flexibility in a language. -
Liesenfeld, A., Lopez, A., & Dingemanse, M. (2023). Opening up ChatGPT: Tracking Openness, Transparency, and Accountability in Instruction-Tuned Text Generators. In CUI '23: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces. doi:10.1145/3571884.3604316.
Abstract
Large language models that exhibit instruction-following behaviour represent one of the biggest recent upheavals in conversational interfaces, a trend in large part fuelled by the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT, a proprietary large language model for text generation fine-tuned through reinforcement learning from human feedback (LLM+RLHF). We review the risks of relying on proprietary software and survey the first crop of open-source projects of comparable architecture and functionality. The main contribution of this paper is to show that openness is differentiated, and to offer scientific documentation of degrees of openness in this fast-moving field. We evaluate projects in terms of openness of code, training data, model weights, RLHF data, licensing, scientific documentation, and access methods. We find that while there is a fast-growing list of projects billing themselves as 'open source', many inherit undocumented data of dubious legality, few share the all-important instruction-tuning (a key site where human labour is involved), and careful scientific documentation is exceedingly rare. Degrees of openness are relevant to fairness and accountability at all points, from data collection and curation to model architecture, and from training and fine-tuning to release and deployment.
-
Liesenfeld, A., Lopez, A., & Dingemanse, M. (2023). The timing bottleneck: Why timing and overlap are mission-critical for conversational user interfaces, speech recognition and dialogue systems. In Proceedings of the 24rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDial 2023). doi:10.18653/v1/2023.sigdial-1.45.
Abstract
Speech recognition systems are a key intermediary in voice-driven human-computer interaction. Although speech recognition works well for pristine monologic audio, real-life use cases in open-ended interactive settings still present many challenges. We argue that timing is mission-critical for dialogue systems, and evaluate 5 major commercial ASR systems for their conversational and multilingual support. We find that word error rates for natural conversational data in 6 languages remain abysmal, and that overlap remains a key challenge (study 1). This impacts especially the recognition of conversational words (study 2), and in turn has dire consequences for downstream intent recognition (study 3). Our findings help to evaluate the current state of conversational ASR, contribute towards multidimensional error analysis and evaluation, and identify phenomena that need most attention on the way to build robust interactive speech technologies. -
Nabrotzky, J., Ambrazaitis, G., Zellers, M., & House, D. (2023). Temporal alignment of manual gestures’ phase transitions with lexical and post-lexical accentual F0 peaks in spontaneous Swedish interaction. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (
Eds. ), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527194.Abstract
Many studies investigating the temporal alignment of co-speech
gestures to acoustic units in the speech signal find a close
coupling of the gestural landmarks and pitch accents or the
stressed syllable of pitch-accented words. In English, a pitch
accent is anchored in the lexically stressed syllable. Hence, it is
unclear whether it is the lexical phonological dimension of
stress, or the phrase-level prominence that determines the
details of speech-gesture synchronization. This paper explores
the relation between gestural phase transitions and accentual F0
peaks in Stockholm Swedish, which exhibits a lexical pitch
accent distinction. When produced with phrase-level
prominence, there are three different configurations of
lexicality of F0 peaks and the status of the syllable it is aligned
with. Through analyzing the alignment of the different F0 peaks
with gestural onsets in spontaneous dyadic conversations, we
aim to contribute to our understanding of the role of lexical
prosodic phonology in the co-production of speech and gesture.
The results, though limited by a small dataset, still suggest
differences between the three types of peaks concerning which
types of gesture phase onsets they tend to align with, and how
well these landmarks align with each other, although these
differences did not reach significance. -
Offrede, T., Mishra, C., Skantze, G., Fuchs, S., & Mooshammer, C. (2023). Do Humans Converge Phonetically When Talking to a Robot? In R. Skarnitzl, & J. Volin (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 3507-3511). Prague: GUARANT International.Abstract
Phonetic convergence—i.e., adapting one’s speech
towards that of an interlocutor—has been shown
to occur in human-human conversations as well as
human-machine interactions. Here, we investigate
the hypothesis that human-to-robot convergence is
influenced by the human’s perception of the robot
and by the conversation’s topic. We conducted a
within-subjects experiment in which 33 participants
interacted with two robots differing in their eye gaze
behavior—one looked constantly at the participant;
the other produced gaze aversions, similarly to a
human’s behavior. Additionally, the robot asked
questions with increasing intimacy levels.
We observed that the speakers tended to converge
on F0 to the robots. However, this convergence
to the robots was not modulated by how the
speakers perceived them or by the topic’s intimacy.
Interestingly, speakers produced lower F0 means
when talking about more intimate topics. We
discuss these findings in terms of current theories of
conversational convergence. -
Pereira Soares, S. M., Chaouch-Orozco, A., & González Alonso, J. (2023). Innovations and challenges in acquisition and processing methodologies for L3/Ln. In J. Cabrelli, A. Chaouch-Orozco, J. González Alonso, S. M. Pereira Soares, E. Puig-Mayenco, & J. Rothman (
Eds. ), The Cambridge handbook of third language acquisition (pp. 661-682). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108957823.026.Abstract
The advent of psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic methodologies has provided new insights into theories of language acquisition. Sequential multilingualism is no exception, and some of the most recent work on the subject has incorporated a particular focus on language processing. This chapter surveys some of the work on the processing of lexical and morphosyntactic aspects of third or further languages, with different offline and online methodologies. We also discuss how, while increasingly sophisticated techniques and experimental designs have improved our understanding of third language acquisition and processing, simpler but clever designs can answer pressing questions in our theoretical debate. We provide examples of both sophistication and clever simplicity in experimental design, and argue that the field would benefit from incorporating a combination of both concepts into future work. -
Raviv, L., & Kirby, S. (2023). Self domestication and the cultural evolution of language. In J. J. Tehrani, J. Kendal, & R. Kendal (
Eds. ), The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198869252.013.60.Abstract
The structural design features of human language emerge in the process of cultural evolution, shaping languages over the course of communication, learning, and transmission. What role does this leave biological evolution? This chapter highlights the biological bases and preconditions that underlie the particular type of prosocial behaviours and cognitive inference abilities that are required for languages to emerge via cultural evolution to begin with. -
Sander, J., Lieberman, A., & Rowland, C. F. (2023). Exploring joint attention in American Sign Language: The influence of sign familiarity. In M. Goldwater, F. K. Anggoro, B. K. Hayes, & D. C. Ong (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2023) (pp. 632-638).Abstract
Children’s ability to share attention with another social partner (i.e., joint attention) has been found to support language development. Despite the large amount of research examining the effects of joint attention on language in hearing population, little is known about how deaf children learning sign languages achieve joint attention with their caregivers during natural social interaction and how caregivers provide and scaffold learning opportunities for their children. The present study investigates the properties and timing of joint attention surrounding familiar and novel naming events and their relationship to children’s vocabulary. Naturalistic play sessions of caretaker-child-dyads using American Sign Language were analyzed in regards to naming events of either familiar or novel object labeling events and the surrounding joint attention events. We observed that most naming events took place in the context of a successful joint attention event and that sign familiarity was related to the timing of naming events within the joint attention events. Our results suggest that caregivers are highly sensitive to their child’s visual attention in interactions and modulate joint attention differently in the context of naming events of familiar vs. novel object labels. -
Sekine, K., & Kajikawa, T. (2023). Does the spatial distribution of a speaker's gaze and gesture impact on a listener's comprehension of discourse? In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (
Eds. ), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527208.Abstract
This study investigated the impact of a speaker's gaze direction
on a listener's comprehension of discourse. Previous research
suggests that hand gestures play a role in referent allocation,
enabling listeners to better understand the discourse. The
current study aims to determine whether the speaker's gaze
direction has a similar effect on reference resolution as co-
speech gestures. Thirty native Japanese speakers participated in
the study and were assigned to one of three conditions:
congruent, incongruent, or speech-only. Participants watched
36 videos of an actor narrating a story consisting of three
sentences with two protagonists. The speaker consistently
used hand gestures to allocate one protagonist to the lower right
and the other to the lower left space, while directing her gaze to
either space of the target person (congruent), the other person
(incongruent), or no particular space (speech-only). Participants
were required to verbally answer a question about the target
protagonist involved in an accidental event as quickly as
possible. Results indicate that participants in the congruent
condition exhibited faster reaction times than those in the
incongruent condition, although the difference was not
significant. These findings suggest that the speaker's gaze
direction is not enough to facilitate a listener's comprehension
of discourse. -
Senft, G. (2023). The system of classifiers in Kilivila - The role of these formatives and their functions. In M. Allassonnière-Tang, & M. Kilarski (
Eds. ), Nominal Classification in Asia and Oceania. Functional and diachronic perspectives (pp. 10-29). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi:10.1075/cilt.362.02sen.Abstract
This paper presents the complex system of classifiers in Kilivila, the language of the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea. After a brief introduction to the language and its speakers, the classifier system is briefly described with respect to the role of these formatives for the word formation of Kilivila numerals, adjectives, demonstratives and one form of an interrogative pronoun/adverb. Then the functions the classifier system fulfils with respect to concord, temporary classification, the unitizing of nominal expressions, nominalization, indication of plural, anaphoric reference as well as text and discourse coherence are discussed and illustrated. The paper ends with some language specific and cross-linguistic questions for further research. -
Severijnen, G. G. A., Bosker, H. R., & McQueen, J. M. (2023). Syllable rate drives rate normalization, but is not the only factor. In R. Skarnitzl, & J. Volín (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2023) (pp. 56-60). Prague: Guarant International.Abstract
Speech is perceived relative to the speech rate in the context. It is unclear, however, what information listeners use to compute speech rate. The present study examines whether listeners use the number of
syllables per unit time (i.e., syllable rate) as a measure of speech rate, as indexed by subsequent vowel perception. We ran two rate-normalization experiments in which participants heard duration-matched word lists that contained either monosyllabic
vs. bisyllabic words (Experiment 1), or monosyllabic vs. trisyllabic pseudowords (Experiment 2). The participants’ task was to categorize an /ɑ-aː/ continuum that followed the word lists. The monosyllabic condition was perceived as slower (i.e., fewer /aː/ responses) than the bisyllabic and
trisyllabic condition. However, no difference was observed between bisyllabic and trisyllabic contexts. Therefore, while syllable rate is used in perceiving speech rate, other factors, such as fast speech processes, mean F0, and intensity, must also influence rate normalization. -
Siahaan, P., & Wijaya Rajeg, G. P. (2023). Multimodal language use in Indonesian: Recurrent gestures associated with negation. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (
Eds. ), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527196.Abstract
This paper presents research findings on manual gestures
associated with negation in Indonesian, utilizing data sourced
from talk shows available on YouTube. The study reveals that
Indonesian speakers employ six recurrent negation gestures,
which have been observed in various languages worldwide.
This suggests that gestures exhibiting a stable form-meaning
relationship and recurring frequently in relation to negation are
prevalent around the globe, although their distribution may
differ across cultures and languages. Furthermore, the paper
demonstrates that negation gestures are not strictly tied to
verbal negation. Overall, the aim of this paper is to contribute
to a deeper understanding of the conventional usage and cross-
linguistic distribution of recurrent gestures. -
Stern, G. (2023). On embodied use of recognitional demonstratives. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (
Eds. ), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527204.Abstract
This study focuses on embodied uses of recognitional
demonstratives. While multimodal conversation analytic
studies have shown how gesture and speech interact in the
elaboration of exophoric references, little attention has been
given to the multimodal configuration of other types of
referential actions. Based on a video-recorded corpus of
professional meetings held in French, this qualitative study
shows that a subtype of deictic references, namely recognitional
references, are frequently associated with iconic gestures, thus
challenging the traditional distinction between exophoric and
endophoric uses of deixis. -
Uhrig, P., Payne, E., Pavlova, I., Burenko, I., Dykes, N., Baltazani, M., Burrows, E., Hale, S., Torr, P., & Wilson, A. (2023). Studying time conceptualisation via speech, prosody, and hand gesture: Interweaving manual and computational methods of analysis. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (
Eds. ), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527220.Abstract
This paper presents a new interdisciplinary methodology for the
analysis of future conceptualisations in big messy media data.
More specifically, it focuses on the depictions of post-Covid
futures by RT during the pandemic, i.e. on data which are of
interest not just from the perspective of academic research but
also of policy engagement. The methodology has been
developed to support the scaling up of fine-grained data-driven
analysis of discourse utterances larger than individual lexical
units which are centred around ‘will’ + the infinitive. It relies
on the true integration of manual analytical and computational
methods and tools in researching three modalities – textual,
prosodic1, and gestural. The paper describes the process of
building a computational infrastructure for the collection and
processing of video data, which aims to empower the manual
analysis. It also shows how manual analysis can motivate the
development of computational tools. The paper presents
individual computational tools to demonstrate how the
combination of human and machine approaches to analysis can
reveal new manifestations of cohesion between gesture and
prosody. To illustrate the latter, the paper shows how the
boundaries of prosodic units can work to help determine the
boundaries of gestural units for future conceptualisations. -
Uluşahin, O., Bosker, H. R., McQueen, J. M., & Meyer, A. S. (2023). No evidence for convergence to sub-phonemic F2 shifts in shadowing. In R. Skarnitzl, & J. Volín (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2023) (pp. 96-100). Prague: Guarant International.Abstract
Over the course of a conversation, interlocutors sound more and more like each other in a process called convergence. However, the automaticity and grain size of convergence are not well established. This study therefore examined whether female native Dutch speakers converge to large yet sub-phonemic shifts in the F2 of the vowel /e/. Participants first performed a short reading task to establish baseline F2s for the vowel /e/, then shadowed 120 target words (alongside 360 fillers) which contained one instance of a manipulated vowel /e/ where the F2 had been shifted down to that of the vowel /ø/. Consistent exposure to large (sub-phonemic) downward shifts in F2 did not result in convergence. The results raise issues for theories which view convergence as a product of automatic integration between perception and production. -
Verga, L., Schwartze, M., & Kotz, S. A. (2023). Neurophysiology of language pathologies. In M. Grimaldi, E. Brattico, & Y. Shtyrov (
Eds. ), Language Electrified: Neuromethods (pp. 753-776). New York, NY: Springer US. doi:10.1007/978-1-0716-3263-5_24.Abstract
Language- and speech-related disorders are among the most frequent consequences of developmental and acquired pathologies. While classical approaches to the study of these disorders typically employed the lesion method to unveil one-to-one correspondence between locations, the extent of the brain damage, and corresponding symptoms, recent advances advocate the use of online methods of investigation. For example, the use of electrophysiology or magnetoencephalography—especially when combined with anatomical measures—allows for in vivo tracking of real-time language and speech events, and thus represents a particularly promising venue for future research targeting rehabilitative interventions. In this chapter, we provide a comprehensive overview of language and speech pathologies arising from cortical and/or subcortical damage, and their corresponding neurophysiological and pathological symptoms. Building upon the reviewed evidence and literature, we aim at providing a description of how the neurophysiology of the language network changes as a result of brain damage. We will conclude by summarizing the evidence presented in this chapter, while suggesting directions for future research. -
Vogel, C., Koutsombogera, M., Murat, A. C., Khosrobeigi, Z., & Ma, X. (2023). Gestural linguistic context vectors encode gesture meaning. In W. Pouw, J. Trujillo, H. R. Bosker, L. Drijvers, M. Hoetjes, J. Holler, S. Kadava, L. Van Maastricht, E. Mamus, & A. Ozyurek (
Eds. ), Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GeSpIn) Conference. doi:10.17617/2.3527176.Abstract
Linguistic context vectors are adapted for measuring the linguistic contexts that accompany gestures and comparable co-linguistic behaviours. Focusing on gestural semiotic types, it is demonstrated that gestural linguistic context vectors carry information associated with gesture. It is suggested that these may be used to approximate gesture meaning in a similar manner to the approximation of word meaning by context vectors. -
Witteman, J., Karaseva, E., Schiller, N. O., & McQueen, J. M. (2023). What does successful L2 vowel acquisition depend on? A conceptual replication. In R. Skarnitzl, & J. Volín (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2023) (pp. 928-931). Prague: Guarant International.Abstract
It has been suggested that individual variation in vowel compactness of the native language (L1) and the distance between L1 vowels and vowels in the second language (L2) predict successful L2 vowel acquisition. Moreover, general articulatory skills have been proposed to account for variation in vowel compactness. In the present work, we conceptually replicate a previous study to test these hypotheses with a large sample size, a new language pair and a
new vowel pair. We find evidence that individual variation in L1 vowel compactness has opposing effects for two different vowels. We do not find evidence that individual variation in L1 compactness
is explained by general articulatory skills. We conclude that the results found previously might be specific to sub-groups of L2 learners and/or specific sub-sets of vowel pairs. -
Akamine, S., Kohatsu, T., Niikuni, K., Schafer, A. J., & Sato, M. (2022). Emotions in language processing: Affective priming in embodied cognition. In Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of Japanese Cognitive Science Society (pp. 326-332). Tokyo: Japanese Cognitive Science Society.
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Avcılar, G., & Ünal, E. (2022). Linguistic encoding of inferential evidence for events. In J. Culbertson, A. Perfors, H. Rabagliati, & V. Ramenzoni (
Eds. ), Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2022) (pp. 2825-2830).Abstract
How people learn about events often varies with some events perceived in their entirety and others are inferred based on the available evidence. Here, we investigate how children and adults linguistically encode the sources of their event knowledge. We focus on Turkish – a language that obligatorily encodes source of information for past events using two evidentiality markers. Children (4- to 5-year-olds and 6- to 7- year-olds) and adults watched and described events that they directly saw or inferred based on visual cues with manipulated degrees of indirectness. Overall, participants modified the evidential marking in their descriptions depending on (a) whether they saw or inferred the event and (b) the indirectness of the visual cues giving rise to an inference. There were no differences across age groups. These findings suggest that Turkish-speaking adults’ and children’s use of evidential markers are sensitive to the indirectness of the inferential evidence for events.Additional information
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8ft2x61c -
Bauer, B. L. M. (2022). Counting systems. In A. Ledgeway, & M. Maiden (
Eds. ), The Cambridge Handbook of Romance Linguistics (pp. 459-488). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Abstract
The Romance counting system is numerical – with residues of earlier systems whereby each commodity had its own unit of quantification – and decimal. Numeral formations beyond ‘10’ are compounds, combining two or more numerals that are in an arithmetical relation, typically that of addition and multiplication. Formal variation across the (standard) Romance languages and dialects and across historical stages involves the relative sequence of the composing elements, absence or presence of connectors, their synthetic vs. analytic nature, and the degree of grammatical marking. A number of ‘deviant’ numeral formations raise the question of borrowing vs independent development, such as vigesimals (featuring a base ‘20’ instead ‘10’) in certain Romance varieties and the teen and decad formations in Romanian. The other types of numeral in Romance, which derive from the unmarked and consistent cardinals, feature a significantly higher degree of formal complexity and variation involving Latin formants and tend toward analyticity. While Latin features prominently in the Romance counting system as a source of numeral formations and suffixes, it is only in Romance that the inherited decimal system reached its full potential, illustrating its increasing prominence, reflected not only in numerals, but also in language acquisition, sign language, and post-Revolution measuring systems. -
Bauer, B. L. M. (2022). Finite verb + infinite + object in later Latin: Early brace constructions? In G. V. M. Haverling (
Ed. ), Studies on Late and Vulgar Latin in the Early 21st Century: Acts of the 12th International Colloquium "Latin vulgaire – Latin tardif (pp. 166-181). Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. -
Bruggeman, L., Yu, J., & Cutler, A. (2022). Listener adjustment of stress cue use to fit language vocabulary structure. In S. Frota, M. Cruz, & M. Vigário (
Eds. ), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2022 (pp. 264-267). doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2022-54.Abstract
In lexical stress languages, phonemically identical syllables can differ suprasegmentally (in duration, amplitude, F0). Such stress
cues allow listeners to speed spoken-word recognition by rejecting mismatching competitors (e.g., unstressed set- in settee
rules out stressed set- in setting, setter, settle). Such processing effects have indeed been observed in Spanish, Dutch and German, but English listeners are known to largely ignore stress cues. Dutch and German listeners even outdo English listeners in distinguishing stressed versus unstressed English syllables. This has been attributed to the relative frequency across the stress languages of unstressed syllables with full vowels; in English most unstressed syllables contain schwa, instead, and stress cues on full vowels are thus least often informative in this language. If only informativeness matters, would English listeners who encounter situations where such cues would pay off for them (e.g., learning one of those other stress languages) then shift to using stress cues? Likewise, would stress cue users with English as L2, if mainly using English, shift away from
using the cues in English? Here we report tests of these two questions, with each receiving a yes answer. We propose that
English listeners’ disregard of stress cues is purely pragmatic. -
Bujok, R., Meyer, A. S., & Bosker, H. R. (2022). Visible lexical stress cues on the face do not influence audiovisual speech perception. In S. Frota, M. Cruz, & M. Vigário (
Eds. ), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2022 (pp. 259-263). doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2022-53.Abstract
Producing lexical stress leads to visible changes on the face, such as longer duration and greater size of the opening of the mouth. Research suggests that these visual cues alone can inform participants about which syllable carries stress (i.e., lip-reading silent videos). This study aims to determine the influence of visual articulatory cues on lexical stress perception in more naturalistic audiovisual settings. Participants were presented with seven disyllabic, Dutch minimal stress pairs (e.g., VOORnaam [first name] & voorNAAM [respectable]) in audio-only (phonetic lexical stress continua without video), video-only (lip-reading silent videos), and audiovisual trials (e.g., phonetic lexical stress continua with video of talker saying VOORnaam or voorNAAM). Categorization data from video-only trials revealed that participants could distinguish the minimal pairs above chance from seeing the silent videos alone. However, responses in the audiovisual condition did not differ from the audio-only condition. We thus conclude that visual lexical stress information on the face, while clearly perceivable, does not play a major role in audiovisual speech perception. This study demonstrates that clear unimodal effects do not always generalize to more naturalistic multimodal communication, advocating that speech prosody is best considered in multimodal settings. -
Cambier, N., Miletitch, R., Burraco, A. B., & Raviv, L. (2022). Prosociality in swarm robotics: A model to study self-domestication and language evolution. In A. Ravignani, R. Asano, D. Valente, F. Ferretti, S. Hartmann, M. Hayashi, Y. Jadoul, M. Martins, Y. Oseki, E. D. Rodrigues, O. Vasileva, & S. Wacewicz (
Eds. ), The evolution of language: Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Language Evolution (JCoLE) (pp. 98-100). Nijmegen: Joint Conference on Language Evolution (JCoLE).
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