Publications

Displaying 1 - 100 of 1235
  • Ghaleb, E., Burenko, I., Rasenberg, M., Pouw, W., Uhrig, P., Holler, J., Toni, I., Ozyurek, A., & Fernandez, R. (in press). Cospeech gesture detection through multi-phase sequence labeling. In IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV).
  • Hintz, F., & Meyer, A. S. (Eds.). (2024). Individual differences in language skills [Special Issue]. Journal of Cognition, 7(1).
  • Silverstein, P., Bergmann, C., & Syed, M. (Eds.). (2024). Open science and metascience in developmental psychology [Special Issue]. Infant and Child Development, 33(1).
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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).
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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).
  • Cheung, C.-Y., Yakpo, K., & Coupé, C. (2022). A computational simulation of the genesis and spread of lexical items in situations of abrupt language contact. 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. 115-122). Nijmegen: Joint Conference on Language Evolution (JCoLE).

    Abstract

    The current study presents an agent-based model which simulates the innovation and
    competition among lexical items in cases of language contact. It is inspired by relatively
    recent historical cases in which the linguistic ecology and sociohistorical context are highly complex. Pidgin and creole genesis offers an opportunity to obtain linguistic facts, social dynamics, and historical demography in a highly segregated society. This provides a solid ground for researching the interaction of populations with different pre-existing language systems, and how different factors contribute to the genesis of the lexicon of a newly generated mixed language. We take into consideration the population dynamics and structures, as well as a distribution of word frequencies related to language use, in order to study how social factors may affect the developmental trajectory of languages. Focusing on the case of Sranan in Suriname, our study shows that it is possible to account for the
    composition of its core lexicon in relation to different social groups, contact patterns, and
    large population movements.
  • Dingemanse, M., Liesenfeld, A., & Woensdregt, M. (2022). Convergent cultural evolution of continuers (mhmm). 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. 160-167). Nijmegen: Joint Conference on Language Evolution (JCoLE). doi:10.31234/osf.io/65c79.

    Abstract

    Continuers —words like mm, mmhm, uhum and the like— are among the most frequent types of responses in conversation. They play a key role in joint action coordination by showing positive evidence of understanding and scaffolding narrative delivery. Here we investigate the hypothesis that their functional importance along with their conversational ecology places selective pressures on their form and may lead to cross-linguistic similarities through convergent cultural evolution. We compare continuer tokens in linguistically diverse conversational corpora and find languages make available highly similar forms. We then approach the causal mechanism of convergent cultural evolution using exemplar modelling, simulating the process by which a combination of effort minimization and functional specialization may push continuers to a particular region of phonological possibility space. By combining comparative linguistics and computational modelling we shed new light on the question of how language structure is shaped by and for social interaction.
  • Dingemanse, M., & Liesenfeld, A. (2022). From text to talk: Harnessing conversational corpora for humane and diversity-aware language technology. In S. Muresan, P. Nakov, & A. Villavicencio (Eds.), Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2022) (pp. 5614 -5633). Dublin, Ireland: Association for Computational Linguistics.

    Abstract

    Informal social interaction is the primordial home of human language. Linguistically diverse conversational corpora are an important and largely untapped resource for computational linguistics and language technology. Through the efforts of a worldwide language documentation movement, such corpora are increasingly becoming available. We show how interactional data from 63 languages (26 families) harbours insights about turn-taking, timing, sequential structure and social action, with implications for language technology, natural language understanding, and the design of conversational interfaces. Harnessing linguistically diverse conversational corpora will provide the empirical foundations for flexible, localizable, humane language technologies of the future.
  • Dona, L., & Schouwstra, M. (2022). The Role of Structural Priming, Semantics and Population Structure in Word Order Conventionalization: A Computational Model. 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. 171-173). Nijmegen: Joint Conference on Language Evolution (JCoLE).
  • Fletcher, J., Kidd, E., Stoakes, H., & Nordlinger, R. (2022). Prosodic phrasing, pitch range, and word order variation in Murrinhpatha. In R. Billington (Ed.), Proceedings of the 18th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (pp. 201-205). Canberra: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association.

    Abstract

    Like many Indigenous Australian languages, Murrinhpatha has flexible word order with no apparent configurational syntax. We analyzed an experimental corpus of Murrinhpatha utterances for associations between different thematic role orders, intonational phrasing patterns and pitch downtrends. We found that initial constituents (Agents or Patients) tend to carry the highest pitch targets (HiF0), followed by patterns of downstep and declination. Sentence-final verbs always have lower Hif0 values than either initial or medial Agents or Patients. Thematic role order does not influence intonational
    patterns, with the results suggesting that Murrinhpatha has positional prosody, although final nominals can disrupt global
    pitch downtrends regardless of thematic role.
  • Galke, L., & Scherp, A. (2022). Bag-of-words vs. graph vs. sequence in text classification: Questioning the necessity of text-graphs and the surprising strength of a wide MLP. In S. Muresan, P. Nakov, & A. Villavicencio (Eds.), Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 4038-4051). Dublin: Association for Computational Linguistics. doi:10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.279.
  • Galke, L., Cuber, I., Meyer, C., Nölscher, H. F., Sonderecker, A., & Scherp, A. (2022). General cross-architecture distillation of pretrained language models into matrix embedding. In Proceedings of the IEEE Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN 2022), part of the IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI 2022). doi:10.1109/IJCNN55064.2022.9892144.

    Abstract

    Large pretrained language models (PreLMs) are rev-olutionizing natural language processing across all benchmarks. However, their sheer size is prohibitive for small laboratories or for deployment on mobile devices. Approaches like pruning and distillation reduce the model size but typically retain the same model architecture. In contrast, we explore distilling PreLMs into a different, more efficient architecture, Continual Multiplication of Words (CMOW), which embeds each word as a matrix and uses matrix multiplication to encode sequences. We extend the CMOW architecture and its CMOW/CBOW-Hybrid variant with a bidirectional component for more expressive power, per-token representations for a general (task-agnostic) distillation during pretraining, and a two-sequence encoding scheme that facilitates downstream tasks on sentence pairs, such as sentence similarity and natural language inference. Our matrix-based bidirectional CMOW/CBOW-Hybrid model is competitive to DistilBERT on question similarity and recognizing textual entailment, but uses only half of the number of parameters and is three times faster in terms of inference speed. We match or exceed the scores of ELMo for all tasks of the GLUE benchmark except for the sentiment analysis task SST-2 and the linguistic acceptability task CoLA. However, compared to previous cross-architecture distillation approaches, we demonstrate a doubling of the scores on detecting linguistic acceptability. This shows that matrix-based embeddings can be used to distill large PreLM into competitive models and motivates further research in this direction.
  • Gamba, M., De Gregorio, C., Valente, D., Raimondi, T., Torti, V., Miaretsoa, L., Carugati, F., Friard, O., Giacoma, C., & Ravignani, A. (2022). Primate rhythmic categories analyzed on an individual basis. 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. 229-236). Nijmegen: Joint Conference on Language Evolution (JCoLE).

    Abstract

    Rhythm is a fundamental feature characterizing communicative displays, and recent studies showed that primate songs encompass categorical rhythms falling on small integer ratios observed in humans. We individually assessed the presence and sexual dimorphism of rhythmic categories, analyzing songs emitted by 39 wild indris. Considering the intervals between the units given during each song, we extracted 13556 interval ratios and found three peaks (at around 0.33, 0.47, and 0.70). Two peaks indicated rhythmic categories corresponding to small integer ratios (1:1, 2:1). All individuals showed a peak at 0.70, and
    most showed those at 0.47 and 0.33. In addition, we found sex differences in the peak at 0.47 only, with males showing lower values than females. This work investigates the presence of individual rhythmic categories in a non-human species; further research may highlight the significance of rhythmicity and untie selective pressures that guided its evolution across species, including humans.
  • Hintz, F., Voeten, C. C., McQueen, J. M., & Meyer, A. S. (2022). Quantifying the relationships between linguistic experience, general cognitive skills and linguistic processing skills. In J. Culbertson, A. Perfors, H. Rabagliati, & V. Ramenzoni (Eds.), Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2022) (pp. 2491-2496). Toronto, Canada: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Humans differ greatly in their ability to use language. Contemporary psycholinguistic theories assume that individual differences in language skills arise from variability in linguistic experience and in general cognitive skills. While much previous research has tested the involvement of select verbal and non-verbal variables in select domains of linguistic processing, comprehensive characterizations of the relationships among the skills underlying language use are rare. We contribute to such a research program by re-analyzing a publicly available set of data from 112 young adults tested on 35 behavioral tests. The tests assessed nine key constructs reflecting linguistic processing skills, linguistic experience and general cognitive skills. Correlation and hierarchical clustering analyses of the test scores showed that most of the tests assumed to measure the same construct correlated moderately to strongly and largely clustered together. Furthermore, the results suggest important roles of processing speed in comprehension, and of linguistic experience in production.
  • Hoeksema, N., Hagoort, P., & Vernes, S. C. (2022). Piecing together the building blocks of the vocal learning bat brain. 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. 294-296). Nijmegen: Joint Conference on Language Evolution (JCoLE).
  • Kan, U., Gökgöz, K., Sumer, B., Tamyürek, E., & Özyürek, A. (2022). Emergence of negation in a Turkish homesign system: Insights from the family context. 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. 387-389). Nijmegen: Joint Conference on Language Evolution (JCoLE).
  • Kohatsu, T., Akamine, S., Sato, M., & Niikuni, K. (2022). Individual differences in empathy affect perspective adoption in language comprehension. In Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of Japanese Cognitive Science Society (pp. 652-656). Tokyo: Japanese Cognitive Science Society.
  • Liesenfeld, A., & Dingemanse, M. (2022). Bottom-up discovery of structure and variation in response tokens (‘backchannels’) across diverse languages. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2022 (pp. 1126-1130).

    Abstract

    Response tokens (also known as backchannels, continuers, or feedback) are a frequent feature of human interaction, where they serve to display understanding and streamline turn-taking. We propose a bottom-up method to study responsive behaviour across 16 languages (8 language families). We use sequential context and recurrence of turns formats to identify candidate response tokens in a language-agnostic way across diverse conversational corpora. We then use UMAP clustering directly on speech signals to represent structure and variation. We find that (i) written orthographic annotations underrepresent the attested variation, (ii) distinctions between formats can be gradient rather than discrete, (iii) most languages appear to make available a broad distinction between a minimal nasal format `mm' and a fuller `yeah’-like format. Charting this aspect of human interaction contributes to our understanding of interactional infrastructure across languages and can inform the design of speech technologies.
  • Liesenfeld, A., & Dingemanse, M. (2022). Building and curating conversational corpora for diversity-aware language science and technology. In F. Béchet, P. Blache, K. Choukri, C. Cieri, T. DeClerck, S. Goggi, H. Isahara, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, H. Mazo, & J. Odijk (Eds.), Proceedings of the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2022) (pp. 1178-1192). Marseille, France: European Language Resources Association.

    Abstract

    We present an analysis pipeline and best practice guidelines for building and curating corpora of everyday conversation in diverse languages. Surveying language documentation corpora and other resources that cover 67 languages and varieties from 28 phyla, we describe the compilation and curation process, specify minimal properties of a unified format for interactional data, and develop methods for quality control that take into account turn-taking and timing. Two case studies show the broad utility of conversational data for (i) charting human interactional infrastructure and (ii) tracing challenges and opportunities for current ASR solutions. Linguistically diverse conversational corpora can provide new insights for the language sciences and stronger empirical foundations for language technology.
  • Merkx, D., Frank, S. L., & Ernestus, M. (2022). Seeing the advantage: Visually grounding word embeddings to better capture human semantic knowledge. In E. Chersoni, N. Hollenstein, C. Jacobs, Y. Oseki, L. Prévot, & E. Santus (Eds.), Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL 2022) (pp. 1-11). Stroudsburg, PA, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).

    Abstract

    Distributional semantic models capture word-level meaning that is useful in many natural language processing tasks and have even been shown to capture cognitive aspects of word meaning. The majority of these models are purely text based, even though the human sensory experience is much richer. In this paper we create visually grounded word embeddings by combining English text and images and compare them to popular text-based methods, to see if visual information allows our model to better capture cognitive aspects of word meaning. Our analysis shows that visually grounded embedding similarities are more predictive of the human reaction times in a large priming experiment than the purely text-based embeddings. The visually grounded embeddings also correlate well with human word similarity ratings.Importantly, in both experiments we show that he grounded embeddings account for a unique portion of explained variance, even when we include text-based embeddings trained on huge corpora. This shows that visual grounding allows our model to capture information that cannot be extracted using text as the only source of information.
  • Mishra, C., & Skantze, G. (2022). Knowing where to look: A planning-based architecture to automate the gaze behavior of social robots. In Proceedings of the 31st IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) (pp. 1201-1208). doi:10.1109/RO-MAN53752.2022.9900740.

    Abstract

    Gaze cues play an important role in human communication and are used to coordinate turn-taking and joint attention, as well as to regulate intimacy. In order to have fluent conversations with people, social robots need to exhibit humanlike gaze behavior. Previous Gaze Control Systems (GCS) in HRI have automated robot gaze using data-driven or heuristic approaches. However, these systems tend to be mainly reactive in nature. Planning the robot gaze ahead of time could help in achieving more realistic gaze behavior and better eye-head coordination. In this paper, we propose and implement a novel planning-based GCS. We evaluate our system in a comparative within-subjects user study (N=26) between a reactive system and our proposed system. The results show that the users preferred the proposed system and that it was significantly more interpretable and better at regulating intimacy.
  • Raviv, L., Jacobson, S. L., Plotnik, J. M., Bowman, J., Lynch, V., & Benítez-Burraco, A. (2022). Elephants as a new animal model for studying the evolution of language as a result of self-domestication. 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. 606-608). Nijmegen: Joint Conference on Language Evolution (JCoLE).
  • de Reus, K., Carlson, D., Lowry, A., Gross, S., Garcia, M., Rubio-García, A., Salazar-Casals, A., & Ravignani, A. (2022). Body size predicts vocal tract size in a mammalian vocal learner. 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. 154-156). Nijmegen: Joint Conference on Language Evolution (JCoLE).
  • Scholman, M., Tianai, D., Yung, F., & Demberg, V. (2022). DiscoGeM: A crowdsourced corpus of genre-mixed implicit discourse relations. In N. Calzolari, F. Béchet, P. Blache, K. Choukri, C. Cieri, T. DeClerck, S. Goggi, H. Isahara, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, H. Mazo, J. Odijk, & S. Piperidis (Eds.), Proceedings of the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2022) (pp. 3281-3290). Marseille, France: European Language Resources Association.

    Abstract

    We present DiscoGeM, a crowdsourced corpus of 6,505 implicit discourse relations from three genres: political speech,
    literature, and encyclopedic texts. Each instance was annotated by 10 crowd workers. Various label aggregation methods
    were explored to evaluate how to obtain a label that best captures the meaning inferred by the crowd annotators. The results
    show that a significant proportion of discourse relations in DiscoGeM are ambiguous and can express multiple relation senses.
    Probability distribution labels better capture these interpretations than single labels. Further, the results emphasize that text
    genre crucially affects the distribution of discourse relations, suggesting that genre should be included as a factor in automatic
    relation classification. We make available the newly created DiscoGeM corpus, as well as the dataset with all annotator-level
    labels. Both the corpus and the dataset can facilitate a multitude of applications and research purposes, for example to
    function as training data to improve the performance of automatic discourse relation parsers, as well as facilitate research into
    non-connective signals of discourse relations.
  • Severijnen, G. G., Bosker, H. R., & McQueen, J. M. (2022). Acoustic correlates of Dutch lexical stress re-examined: Spectral tilt is not always more reliable than intensity. In S. Frota, M. Cruz, & M. Vigário (Eds.), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2022 (pp. 278-282). doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2022-57.

    Abstract

    The present study examined two acoustic cues in the production
    of lexical stress in Dutch: spectral tilt and overall intensity.
    Sluijter and Van Heuven (1996) reported that spectral tilt is a
    more reliable cue to stress than intensity. However, that study
    included only a small number of talkers (10) and only syllables
    with the vowels /aː/ and /ɔ/.
    The present study re-examined this issue in a larger and
    more variable dataset. We recorded 38 native speakers of Dutch
    (20 females) producing 744 tokens of Dutch segmentally
    overlapping words (e.g., VOORnaam vs. voorNAAM, “first
    name” vs. “respectable”), targeting 10 different vowels, in
    variable sentence contexts. For each syllable, we measured
    overall intensity and spectral tilt following Sluijter and Van
    Heuven (1996).
    Results from Linear Discriminant Analyses showed that,
    for the vowel /aː/ alone, spectral tilt showed an advantage over
    intensity, as evidenced by higher stressed/unstressed syllable
    classification accuracy scores for spectral tilt. However, when
    all vowels were included in the analysis, the advantage
    disappeared.
    These findings confirm that spectral tilt plays a larger role
    in signaling stress in Dutch /aː/ but show that, for a larger
    sample of Dutch vowels, overall intensity and spectral tilt are
    equally important.
  • Slonimska, A., Özyürek, A., & Capirci, O. (2022). Simultaneity as an emergent property of sign languages. 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. 678-680). Nijmegen: Joint Conference on Language Evolution (JCoLE).
  • Tsutsui, S., Wang, X., Weng, G., Zhang, Y., Crandall, D., & Yu, C. (2022). Action recognition based on cross-situational action-object statistics. In Proceedings of the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL 2022).

    Abstract

    Machine learning models of visual action recognition are typically trained and tested on data from specific situations where actions are associated with certain objects. It is an open question how action-object associations in the training set influence a model's ability to generalize beyond trained situations. We set out to identify properties of training data that lead to action recognition models with greater generalization ability. To do this, we take inspiration from a cognitive mechanism called cross-situational learning, which states that human learners extract the meaning of concepts by observing instances of the same concept across different situations. We perform controlled experiments with various types of action-object associations, and identify key properties of action-object co-occurrence in training data that lead to better classifiers. Given that these properties are missing in the datasets that are typically used to train action classifiers in the computer vision literature, our work provides useful insights on how we should best construct datasets for efficiently training for better generalization.
  • Woensdregt, M., Jara-Ettinger, J., & Rubio-Fernandez, P. (2022). Language universals rely on social cognition: Computational models of the use of this and that to redirect the receiver’s attention. In J. Culbertson, A. Perfors, H. Rabagliati, & V. Ramenzoni (Eds.), Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2022) (pp. 1382-1388). Toronto, Canada: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Demonstratives—simple referential devices like this and that—are linguistic universals, but their meaning varies cross-linguistically. In languages like English and Italian, demonstratives are thought to encode the referent’s distance from the producer (e.g., that one means “the one far away from me”),
    while in others, like Portuguese and Spanish, they encode relative distance from both producer and receiver (e.g., aquel means “the one far away from both of us”). Here we propose that demonstratives are also sensitive to the receiver’s focus of attention, hence requiring a deeper form of social cognition
    than previously thought. We provide initial empirical and computational evidence for this idea, suggesting that producers use
    demonstratives to redirect the receiver’s attention towards the intended referent, rather than only to indicate its physical distance.
  • Zhang, Y., & Yu, C. (2022). Examining real-time attention dynamics in parent-infant picture book reading. In J. Culbertson, A. Perfors, H. Rabagliati, & V. Ramenzoni (Eds.), Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2022) (pp. 1367-1374). Toronto, Canada: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Picture book reading is a common word-learning context from which parents repeatedly name objects to their child and it has been found to facilitate early word learning. To learn the correct word-object mappings in a book-reading context, infants need to be able to link what they see with what they hear. However, given multiple objects on every book page, it is not clear how infants direct their attention to objects named by parents. The aim of the current study is to examine how infants mechanistically discover the correct word-object mappings during book reading in real time. We used head-mounted eye-tracking during parent-infant picture book reading and measured the infant's moment-by-moment visual attention to the named referent. We also examined how gesture cues provided by both the child and the parent may influence infants' attention to the named target. We found that although parents provided many object labels during book reading, infants were not able to attend to the named objects easily. However, their abilities to follow and use gestures to direct the other social partner’s attention increase the chance of looking at the named target during parent naming.
  • Amatuni, A., Schroer, S. E., Zhang, Y., Peters, R. E., Reza, M. A., Crandall, D., & Yu, C. (2021). In-the-moment visual information from the infant's egocentric view determines the success of infant word learning: A computational study. In T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (Eds.), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021) (pp. 265-271). Vienna: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Infants learn the meaning of words from accumulated experiences of real-time interactions with their caregivers. To study the effects of visual sensory input on word learning, we recorded infant's view of the world using head-mounted eye trackers during free-flowing play with a caregiver. While playing, infants were exposed to novel label-object mappings and later learning outcomes for these items were tested after the play session. In this study we use a classification based approach to link properties of infants' visual scenes during naturalistic labeling moments to their word learning outcomes. We find that a model which integrates both highly informative and ambiguous sensory evidence is a better fit to infants' individual learning outcomes than models where either type of evidence is taken alone, and that raw labeling frequency is unable to account for the word learning differences we observe. Here we demonstrate how a computational model, using only raw pixels taken from the egocentric scene image, can derive insights on human language learning.
  • Bodur, K., Branje, S., Peirolo, M., Tiscareno, I., & German, J. S. (2021). Domain-initial strengthening in Turkish: Acoustic cues to prosodic hierarchy in stop consonants. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2021 (pp. 1459-1463). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2021-2230.

    Abstract

    Studies have shown that cross-linguistically, consonants at the left edge of higher-level prosodic boundaries tend to be more forcefully articulated than those at lower-level boundaries, a phenomenon known as domain-initial strengthening. This study tests whether similar effects occur in Turkish, using the Autosegmental-Metrical model proposed by Ipek & Jun [1, 2] as the basis for assessing boundary strength. Productions of /t/ and /d/ were elicited in four domain-initial prosodic positions corresponding to progressively higher-level boundaries: syllable, word, intermediate phrase, and Intonational Phrase. A fifth position, nuclear word, was included in order to better situate it within the prosodic hierarchy. Acoustic correlates of articulatory strength were measured, including closure duration for /d/ and /t/, as well as voice onset time and burst energy for /t/. Our results show that closure duration increases cumulatively from syllable to intermediate phrase, while voice onset time and burst energy are not influenced by boundary strength. These findings provide corroborating evidence for Ipek & Jun’s model, particularly for the distinction between word and intermediate phrase boundaries. Additionally, articulatory strength at the left edge of the nuclear word patterned closely with word-initial position, supporting the view that the nuclear word is not associated with a distinct phrasing domain
  • Coopmans, C. W., De Hoop, H., Kaushik, K., Hagoort, P., & Martin, A. E. (2021). Structure-(in)dependent interpretation of phrases in humans and LSTMs. In Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL 2021) (pp. 459-463).

    Abstract

    In this study, we compared the performance of a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network to the behavior of human participants on a language task that requires hierarchically structured knowledge. We show that humans interpret ambiguous noun phrases, such as second blue ball, in line with their hierarchical constituent structure. LSTMs, instead, only do
    so after unambiguous training, and they do not systematically generalize to novel items. Overall, the results of our simulations indicate that a model can behave hierarchically without relying on hierarchical constituent structure.
  • Cutler, A., Aslin, R. N., Gervain, J., & Nespor, M. (Eds.). (2021). Special issue in honor of Jacques Mehler, Cognition's founding editor [Special Issue]. Cognition, 213.
  • Evans, N., Levinson, S. C., & Sterelny, K. (Eds.). (2021). Thematic issue on evolution of kinship systems [Special Issue]. Biological theory, 16.
  • Eviatar, Z., & Huettig, F. (Eds.). (2021). Literacy and writing systems [Special Issue]. Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science.
  • Falk, J. J., Zhang, Y., Scheutz, M., & Yu, C. (2021). Parents adaptively use anaphora during parent-child social interaction. In T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (Eds.), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021) (pp. 1472-1478). Vienna: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Anaphora, a ubiquitous feature of natural language, poses a particular challenge to young children as they first learn language due to its referential ambiguity. In spite of this, parents and caregivers use anaphora frequently in child-directed speech, potentially presenting a risk to effective communication if children do not yet have the linguistic capabilities of resolving anaphora successfully. Through an eye-tracking study in a naturalistic free-play context, we examine the strategies that parents employ to calibrate their use of anaphora to their child's linguistic development level. We show that, in this way, parents are able to intuitively scaffold the complexity of their speech such that greater referential ambiguity does not hurt overall communication success.
  • Galke, L., Franke, B., Zielke, T., & Scherp, A. (2021). Lifelong learning of graph neural networks for open-world node classification. In Proceedings of the 2021 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN). Piscataway, NJ: IEEE. doi:10.1109/IJCNN52387.2021.9533412.

    Abstract

    Graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as the standard method for numerous tasks on graph-structured data such as node classification. However, real-world graphs are often evolving over time and even new classes may arise. We model these challenges as an instance of lifelong learning, in which a learner faces a sequence of tasks and may take over knowledge acquired in past tasks. Such knowledge may be stored explicitly as historic data or implicitly within model parameters. In this work, we systematically analyze the influence of implicit and explicit knowledge. Therefore, we present an incremental training method for lifelong learning on graphs and introduce a new measure based on k-neighborhood time differences to address variances in the historic data. We apply our training method to five representative GNN architectures and evaluate them on three new lifelong node classification datasets. Our results show that no more than 50% of the GNN's receptive field is necessary to retain at least 95% accuracy compared to training over the complete history of the graph data. Furthermore, our experiments confirm that implicit knowledge becomes more important when fewer explicit knowledge is available.
  • Galke, L., Seidlmayer, E., Lüdemann, G., Langnickel, L., Melnychuk, T., Förstner, K. U., Tochtermann, K., & Schultz, C. (2021). COVID-19++: A citation-aware Covid-19 dataset for the analysis of research dynamics. In Y. Chen, H. Ludwig, Y. Tu, U. Fayyad, X. Zhu, X. Hu, S. Byna, X. Liu, J. Zhang, S. Pan, V. Papalexakis, J. Wang, A. Cuzzocrea, & C. Ordonez (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (pp. 4350-4355). Piscataway, NJ: IEEE.

    Abstract

    COVID-19 research datasets are crucial for analyzing research dynamics. Most collections of COVID-19 research items do not to include cited works and do not have annotations
    from a controlled vocabulary. Starting with ZB MED KE data on COVID-19, which comprises CORD-19, we assemble a new dataset that includes cited work and MeSH annotations for all records. Furthermore, we conduct experiments on the analysis of research dynamics, in which we investigate predicting links in a co-annotation graph created on the basis of the new dataset. Surprisingly, we find that simple heuristic methods are better at
    predicting future links than more sophisticated approaches such as graph neural networks.
  • Greenfield, M. D., Honing, H., Kotz, S. A., & Ravignani, A. (Eds.). (2021). Synchrony and rhythm interaction: From the brain to behavioural ecology [Special Issue]. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences, 376.
  • Harmon, Z., Barak, L., Shafto, P., Edwards, J., & Feldman, N. H. (2021). Making heads or tails of it: A competition–compensation account of morphological deficits in language impairment. In T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (Eds.), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021) (pp. 1872-1878). Vienna: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) regularly use the base form of verbs (e.g., dance) instead of inflected forms (e.g., danced). We propose an account of this behavior in which children with DLD have difficulty processing novel inflected verbs in their input. This leads the inflected form to face stronger competition from alternatives. Competition is resolved by the production of a more accessible alternative with high semantic overlap with the inflected form: in English, the bare form. We test our account computationally by training a nonparametric Bayesian model that infers the productivity of the inflectional suffix (-ed). We systematically vary the number of novel types of inflected verbs in the input to simulate the input as processed by children with and without DLD. Modeling results are consistent with our hypothesis, suggesting that children’s inconsistent use of inflectional morphemes could stem from inferences they make on the basis of impoverished data.
  • Hintz, F., Voeten, C. C., McQueen, J. M., & Scharenborg, O. (2021). The effects of onset and offset masking on the time course of non-native spoken-word recognition in noise. In T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (Eds.), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021) (pp. 133-139). Vienna: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Using the visual-word paradigm, the present study investigated the effects of word onset and offset masking on the time course of non-native spoken-word recognition in the presence of background noise. In two experiments, Dutch non-native listeners heard English target words, preceded by carrier sentences that were noise-free (Experiment 1) or contained intermittent noise (Experiment 2). Target words were either onset- or offset-masked or not masked at all. Results showed that onset masking delayed target word recognition more than offset masking did, suggesting that – similar to natives – non-native listeners strongly rely on word onset information during word recognition in noise.

    Additional information

    Link to Preprint on BioRxiv
  • Karadöller, D. Z., Sumer, B., Ünal, E., & Ozyurek, A. (2021). Spatial language use predicts spatial memory of children: Evidence from sign, speech, and speech-plus-gesture. In T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (Eds.), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021) (pp. 672-678). Vienna: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    There is a strong relation between children’s exposure to
    spatial terms and their later memory accuracy. In the current
    study, we tested whether the production of spatial terms by
    children themselves predicts memory accuracy and whether
    and how language modality of these encodings modulates
    memory accuracy differently. Hearing child speakers of
    Turkish and deaf child signers of Turkish Sign Language
    described pictures of objects in various spatial relations to each
    other and later tested for their memory accuracy of these
    pictures in a surprise memory task. We found that having
    described the spatial relation between the objects predicted
    better memory accuracy. However, the modality of these
    descriptions in sign, speech, or speech-plus-gesture did not
    reveal differences in memory accuracy. We discuss the
    implications of these findings for the relation between spatial
    language, memory, and the modality of encoding.
  • Koutamanis, E., Kootstra, G. J., Dijkstra, T., & Unsworth., S. (2021). Lexical priming as evidence for language-nonselective access in the simultaneous bilingual child's lexicon. In D. Dionne, & L.-A. Vidal Covas (Eds.), BUCLD 45: Proceedings of the 45th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 413-430). Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Levshina, N., & Moran, S. (Eds.). (2021). Efficiency in human languages: Corpus evidence for universal principles [Special Issue]. Linguistics Vanguard, 7(s3).
  • Mamus, E., Speed, L. J., Ozyurek, A., & Majid, A. (2021). Sensory modality of input influences encoding of motion events in speech but not co-speech gestures. In T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (Eds.), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021) (pp. 376-382). Vienna: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Visual and auditory channels have different affordances and
    this is mirrored in what information is available for linguistic
    encoding. The visual channel has high spatial acuity, whereas
    the auditory channel has better temporal acuity. These
    differences may lead to different conceptualizations of events
    and affect multimodal language production. Previous studies of
    motion events typically present visual input to elicit speech and
    gesture. The present study compared events presented as audio-
    only, visual-only, or multimodal (visual+audio) input and
    assessed speech and co-speech gesture for path and manner of
    motion in Turkish. Speakers with audio-only input mentioned
    path more and manner less in verbal descriptions, compared to
    speakers who had visual input. There was no difference in the
    type or frequency of gestures across conditions, and gestures
    were dominated by path-only gestures. This suggests that input
    modality influences speakers’ encoding of path and manner of
    motion events in speech, but not in co-speech gestures.
  • Merkx, D., & Frank, S. L. (2021). Human sentence processing: Recurrence or attention? In E. Chersoni, N. Hollenstein, C. Jacobs, Y. Oseki, L. Prévot, & E. Santus (Eds.), Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL 2021) (pp. 12-22). Stroudsburg, PA, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). doi:10.18653/v1/2021.cmcl-1.2.

    Abstract

    Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have long been an architecture of interest for computational models of human sentence processing. The recently introduced Transformer architecture outperforms RNNs on many natural language processing tasks but little is known about its ability to model human language processing. We compare Transformer- and RNN-based language models’ ability to account for measures of human reading effort. Our analysis shows Transformers to outperform RNNs in explaining self-paced reading times and neural activity during reading English sentences, challenging the widely held idea that human sentence processing involves recurrent and immediate processing and provides evidence for cue-based retrieval.
  • Merkx, D., Frank, S. L., & Ernestus, M. (2021). Semantic sentence similarity: Size does not always matter. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2021 (pp. 4393-4397). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2021-1464.

    Abstract

    This study addresses the question whether visually grounded speech recognition (VGS) models learn to capture sentence semantics without access to any prior linguistic knowledge. We produce synthetic and natural spoken versions of a well known semantic textual similarity database and show that our VGS model produces embeddings that correlate well with human semantic similarity judgements. Our results show that a model trained on a small image-caption database outperforms two models trained on much larger databases, indicating that database size is not all that matters. We also investigate the importance of having multiple captions per image and find that this is indeed helpful even if the total number of images is lower, suggesting that paraphrasing is a valuable learning signal. While the general trend in the field is to create ever larger datasets to train models on, our findings indicate other characteristics of the database can just as important.
  • Mudd, K., Lutzenberger, H., De Vos, C., & De Boer, B. (2021). Social structure and lexical uniformity: A case study of gender differences in the Kata Kolok community. In T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (Eds.), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021) (pp. 2692-2698). Vienna: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Language emergence is characterized by a high degree of lex-
    ical variation. It has been suggested that the speed at which
    lexical conventionalization occurs depends partially on social
    structure. In large communities, individuals receive input from
    many sources, creating a pressure for lexical convergence.
    In small, insular communities, individuals can remember id-
    iolects and share common ground with interlocuters, allow-
    ing these communities to retain a high degree of lexical vari-
    ation. We look at lexical variation in Kata Kolok, a sign lan-
    guage which emerged six generations ago in a Balinese vil-
    lage, where women tend to have more tightly-knit social net-
    works than men. We test if there are differing degrees of lexical
    uniformity between women and men by reanalyzing a picture
    description task in Kata Kolok. We find that women’s produc-
    tions exhibit less lexical uniformity than men’s. One possible
    explanation of this finding is that women’s more tightly-knit
    social networks allow for remembering idiolects, alleviating
    the pressure for lexical convergence, but social network data
    from the Kata Kolok community is needed to support this ex-
    planation.
  • Pouw, W., Wit, J., Bögels, S., Rasenberg, M., Milivojevic, B., & Ozyurek, A. (2021). Semantically related gestures move alike: Towards a distributional semantics of gesture kinematics. In V. G. Duffy (Ed.), Digital human modeling and applications in health, safety, ergonomics and risk management. human body, motion and behavior:12th International Conference, DHM 2021, Held as Part of the 23rd HCI International Conference, HCII 2021 (pp. 269-287). Berlin: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-77817-0_20.
  • Li, Y., Wu, S., Shi, S., Tong, S., Zhang, Y., & Guo, X. (2021). Enhanced inter-brain connectivity between children and adults during cooperation: a dual EEG study. In 43RD ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE IEEE ENGINEERING IN MEDICINE & BIOLOGY SOCIETY (EMBC) (pp. 6289-6292). doi:10.1109/EMBC46164.2021.9630330.

    Abstract

    Previous fNIRS studies have suggested that adult-child cooperation is accompanied by increased inter-brain synchrony. However, its reflection in the electrophysiological synchrony remains unclear. In this study, we designed a naturalistic and well-controlled adult-child interaction paradigm using a tangram solving video game, and recorded dual-EEG from child and adult dyads during cooperative and individual conditions. By calculating the directed inter-brain connectivity in the theta and alpha bands, we found that the inter-brain frontal network was more densely connected and stronger in strength during the cooperative than the individual condition when the adult was watching the child playing. Moreover, the inter-brain network across different dyads shared more common information flows from the player to the observer during cooperation, but was more individually different in solo play. The results suggest an enhancement in inter-brain EEG interactions during adult-child cooperation. However, the enhancement was evident in all cooperative cases but partly depended on the role of participants.
  • Vernes, S. C., Janik, V. M., Fitch, W. T., & Slater, P. J. B. (Eds.). (2021). Vocal learning in animals and humans [Special Issue]. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences, 376.
  • Zhang, Y., Ding, R., Frassinelli, D., Tuomainen, J., Klavinskis-Whiting, S., & Vigliocco, G. (2021). Electrophysiological signatures of second language multimodal comprehension. In T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (Eds.), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021) (pp. 2971-2977). Vienna: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Language is multimodal: non-linguistic cues, such as prosody,
    gestures and mouth movements, are always present in face-to-
    face communication and interact to support processing. In this
    paper, we ask whether and how multimodal cues affect L2
    processing by recording EEG for highly proficient bilinguals
    when watching naturalistic materials. For each word, we
    quantified surprisal and the informativeness of prosody,
    gestures, and mouth movements. We found that each cue
    modulates the N400: prosodic accentuation, meaningful
    gestures, and informative mouth movements all reduce N400.
    Further, effects of meaningful gestures but not mouth
    informativeness are enhanced by prosodic accentuation,
    whereas effects of mouth are enhanced by meaningful gestures
    but reduced by beat gestures. Compared with L1, L2
    participants benefit less from cues and their interactions, except
    for meaningful gestures and mouth movements. Thus, in real-
    world language comprehension, L2 comprehenders use
    multimodal cues just as L1 speakers albeit to a lesser extent.
  • Zhang, Y., Amatuni, A., Cain, E., Wang, X., Crandall, D., & Yu, C. (2021). Human learners integrate visual and linguistic information cross-situational verb learning. In T. Fitch, C. Lamm, H. Leder, & K. Teßmar-Raible (Eds.), Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2021) (pp. 2267-2273). Vienna: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Learning verbs is challenging because it is difficult to infer the precise meaning of a verb when there are a multitude of relations that one can derive from a single event. To study this verb learning challenge, we used children's egocentric view collected from naturalistic toy-play interaction as learning materials and investigated how visual and linguistic information provided in individual naming moments as well as cross-situational information provided from multiple learning moments can help learners resolve this mapping problem using the Human Simulation Paradigm. Our results show that learners benefit from seeing children's egocentric views compared to third-person observations. In addition, linguistic information can help learners identify the correct verb meaning by eliminating possible meanings that do not belong to the linguistic category. Learners are also able to integrate visual and linguistic information both within and across learning situations to reduce the ambiguity in the space of possible verb meanings.
  • Zimianiti, E., Dimitrakopoulou, M., & Tsangalidis, A. (2021). Τhematic roles in dementia: The case of psychological verbs. In A. Botinis (Ed.), ExLing 2021: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference of Experimental Linguistics (pp. 269-272). Athens, Greece: ExLing Society.

    Abstract

    This study investigates the difficulty of people with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), mild and moderate Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in the production and comprehension of psychological verbs, as thematic realization may involve both the canonical and non-canonical realization of arguments. More specifically, we aim to examine whether there is a deficit in the mapping of syntactic and semantic representations in psych-predicates regarding Greek-speaking individuals with MCI and AD, and whether the linguistic abilities associated with θ-role assignment decrease as the disease progresses. Moreover, given the decline of cognitive abilities in people with MCI and AD, we explore the effects of components of memory (Semantic, Episodic, and Working Memory) on the assignment of thematic roles in constructions with psychological verbs.
  • Alhama, R. G., Rowland, C. F., & Kidd, E. (2020). Evaluating word embeddings for language acquisition. In E. Chersoni, C. Jacobs, Y. Oseki, L. Prévot, & E. Santus (Eds.), Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (pp. 38-42). Stroudsburg, PA, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). doi:10.18653/v1/2020.cmcl-1.4.

    Abstract

    Continuous vector word representations (or
    word embeddings) have shown success in cap-turing semantic relations between words, as evidenced by evaluation against behavioral data of adult performance on semantic tasks (Pereira et al., 2016). Adult semantic knowl-edge is the endpoint of a language acquisition process; thus, a relevant question is whether these models can also capture emerging word
    representations of young language learners. However, the data for children’s semantic knowledge across development is scarce. In this paper, we propose to bridge this gap by using Age of Acquisition norms to evaluate word embeddings learnt from child-directed input. We present two methods that evaluate word embeddings in terms of (a) the semantic neighbourhood density of learnt words, and (b) con-
    vergence to adult word associations. We apply our methods to bag-of-words models, and find that (1) children acquire words with fewer semantic neighbours earlier, and (2) young learners only attend to very local context. These findings provide converging evidence for validity of our methods in understanding the prerequisite features for a distributional model of word learning.
  • Asano, Y., Yuan, C., Grohe, A.-K., Weber, A., Antoniou, M., & Cutler, A. (2020). Uptalk interpretation as a function of listening experience. In N. Minematsu, M. Kondo, T. Arai, & R. Hayashi (Eds.), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2020 (pp. 735-739). Tokyo: ISCA. doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2020-150.

    Abstract

    The term “uptalk” describes utterance-final pitch rises that carry no sentence-structural information. Uptalk is usually dialectal or sociolectal, and Australian English (AusEng) is particularly known for this attribute. We ask here whether experience with an uptalk variety affects listeners’ ability to categorise rising pitch contours on the basis of the timing and height of their onset and offset. Listeners were two groups of English-speakers (AusEng, and American English), and three groups of listeners with L2 English: one group with Mandarin as L1 and experience of listening to AusEng, one with German as L1 and experience of listening to AusEng, and one with German as L1 but no AusEng experience. They heard nouns (e.g. flower, piano) in the framework “Got a NOUN”, each ending with a pitch rise artificially manipulated on three contrasts: low vs. high rise onset, low vs. high rise offset and early vs. late rise onset. Their task was to categorise the tokens as “question” or “statement”, and we analysed the effect of the pitch contrasts on their judgements. Only the native AusEng listeners were able to use the pitch contrasts systematically in making these categorisations.
  • De Boer, B., Thompson, B., Ravignani, A., & Boeckx, C. (2020). Analysis of mutation and fixation for language. In A. Ravignani, C. Barbieri, M. Flaherty, Y. Jadoul, E. Lattenkamp, H. Little, M. Martins, K. Mudd, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference (Evolang13) (pp. 56-58). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences.
  • Doumas, L. A. A., Martin, A. E., & Hummel, J. E. (2020). Relation learning in a neurocomputational architecture supports cross-domain transfer. In S. Denison, M. Mack, Y. Xu, & B. C. Armstrong (Eds.), Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Virtual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2020) (pp. 932-937). Montreal, QB: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Humans readily generalize, applying prior knowledge to novel situations and stimuli. Advances in machine learning have begun to approximate and even surpass human performance, but these systems struggle to generalize what they have learned to untrained situations. We present a model based on wellestablished neurocomputational principles that demonstrates human-level generalisation. This model is trained to play one video game (Breakout) and performs one-shot generalisation to a new game (Pong) with different characteristics. The model
    generalizes because it learns structured representations that are functionally symbolic (viz., a role-filler binding calculus) from unstructured training data. It does so without feedback, and without requiring that structured representations are specified a priori. Specifically, the model uses neural co-activation to discover which characteristics of the input are invariant and to learn relational predicates, and oscillatory regularities in network firing to bind predicates to arguments. To our knowledge,
    this is the first demonstration of human-like generalisation in a machine system that does not assume structured representa-
    tions to begin with.
  • Ergin, R., Raviv, L., Senghas, A., Padden, C., & Sandler, W. (2020). Community structure affects convergence on uniform word orders: Evidence from emerging sign languages. In A. Ravignani, C. Barbieri, M. Flaherty, Y. Jadoul, E. Lattenkamp, H. Little, M. Martins, K. Mudd, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference (Evolang13) (pp. 84-86). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences.
  • Harmon, Z., & Kapatsinski, V. (2020). The best-laid plan of mice and men: Competition between top-down and preceding-item cues in plan execution. In S. Denison, M. Mack, Y. Xu, & B. C. Armstrong (Eds.), Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2020) (pp. 1674-1680). Montreal, QB: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    There is evidence that the process of executing a planned utterance involves the use of both preceding-context and top-down cues. Utterance-initial words are cued only by the top-down plan. In contrast, non-initial words are cued both by top-down cues and preceding-context cues. Co-existence of both cue types raises the question of how they interact during learning. We argue that this interaction is competitive: items that tend to be preceded by predictive preceding-context cues are harder to activate from the plan without this predictive context. A novel computational model of this competition is developed. The model is tested on a corpus of repetition disfluencies and shown to account for the influences on patterns of restarts during production. In particular, this model predicts a novel Initiation Effect: following an interruption, speakers re-initiate production from words that tend to occur in utterance-initial position, even when they are not initial in the interrupted utterance.
  • Hashemzadeh, M., Kaufeld, G., White, M., Martin, A. E., & Fyshe, A. (2020). From language to language-ish: How brain-like is an LSTM representation of nonsensical language stimuli? In T. Cohn, Y. He, & Y. Liu (Eds.), Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020 (pp. 645-655). Association for Computational Linguistics.

    Abstract

    The representations generated by many mod-
    els of language (word embeddings, recurrent
    neural networks and transformers) correlate
    to brain activity recorded while people read.
    However, these decoding results are usually
    based on the brain’s reaction to syntactically
    and semantically sound language stimuli. In
    this study, we asked: how does an LSTM (long
    short term memory) language model, trained
    (by and large) on semantically and syntac-
    tically intact language, represent a language
    sample with degraded semantic or syntactic
    information? Does the LSTM representation
    still resemble the brain’s reaction? We found
    that, even for some kinds of nonsensical lan-
    guage, there is a statistically significant rela-
    tionship between the brain’s activity and the
    representations of an LSTM. This indicates
    that, at least in some instances, LSTMs and the
    human brain handle nonsensical data similarly.
  • De Heer Kloots, M., Carlson, D., Garcia, M., Kotz, S., Lowry, A., Poli-Nardi, L., de Reus, K., Rubio-García, A., Sroka, M., Varola, M., & Ravignani, A. (2020). Rhythmic perception, production and interactivity in harbour and grey seals. In A. Ravignani, C. Barbieri, M. Flaherty, Y. Jadoul, E. Lattenkamp, H. Little, M. Martins, K. Mudd, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference (Evolang13) (pp. 59-62). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences.
  • Hoeksema, N., Villanueva, S., Mengede, J., Salazar-Casals, A., Rubio-García, A., Curcic-Blake, B., Vernes, S. C., & Ravignani, A. (2020). Neuroanatomy of the grey seal brain: Bringing pinnipeds into the neurobiological study of vocal learning. In A. Ravignani, C. Barbieri, M. Flaherty, Y. Jadoul, E. Lattenkamp, H. Little, M. Martins, K. Mudd, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference (Evolang13) (pp. 162-164). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences.
  • Hoeksema, N., Wiesmann, M., Kiliaan, A., Hagoort, P., & Vernes, S. C. (2020). Bats and the comparative neurobiology of vocal learning. In A. Ravignani, C. Barbieri, M. Flaherty, Y. Jadoul, E. Lattenkamp, H. Little, M. Martins, K. Mudd, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference (Evolang13) (pp. 165-167). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences.
  • Khoe, Y. H., Tsoukala, C., Kootstra, G. J., & Frank, S. L. (2020). Modeling cross-language structural priming in sentence production. In T. C. Stewart (Ed.), Proceedings of the 18th Annual Meeting of the International Conference on Cognitive Modeling (pp. 131-137). University Park, PA, USA: The Penn State Applied Cognitive Science Lab.

    Abstract

    A central question in the psycholinguistic study of multilingualism is how syntax is shared across languages. We implement a model to investigate whether error-based implicit learning can provide an account of cross-language structural priming. The model is based on the Dual-path model of
    sentence-production (Chang, 2002). We implement our model using the Bilingual version of Dual-path (Tsoukala, Frank, & Broersma, 2017). We answer two main questions: (1) Can structural priming of active and passive constructions occur between English and Spanish in a bilingual version of the Dual-
    path model? (2) Does cross-language priming differ quantitatively from within-language priming in this model? Our results show that cross-language priming does occur in the model. This finding adds to the viability of implicit learning as an account of structural priming in general and cross-language
    structural priming specifically. Furthermore, we find that the within-language priming effect is somewhat stronger than the cross-language effect. In the context of mixed results from
    behavioral studies, we interpret the latter finding as an indication that the difference between cross-language and within-
    language priming is small and difficult to detect statistically.
  • Lattenkamp, E. Z., Linnenschmidt, M., Mardus, E., Vernes, S. C., Wiegrebe, L., & Schutte, M. (2020). Impact of auditory feedback on bat vocal development. In A. Ravignani, C. Barbieri, M. Flaherty, Y. Jadoul, E. Lattenkamp, H. Little, M. Martins, K. Mudd, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference (Evolang13) (pp. 249-251). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences.
  • Lei, L., Raviv, L., & Alday, P. M. (2020). Using spatial visualizations and real-world social networks to understand language evolution and change. In A. Ravignani, C. Barbieri, M. Flaherty, Y. Jadoul, E. Lattenkamp, H. Little, M. Martins, K. Mudd, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference (Evolang13) (pp. 252-254). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences.
  • Levshina, N. (2020). How tight is your language? A semantic typology based on Mutual Information. In K. Evang, L. Kallmeyer, R. Ehren, S. Petitjean, E. Seyffarth, & D. Seddah (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (pp. 70-78). Düsseldorf, Germany: Association for Computational Linguistics. doi:10.18653/v1/2020.tlt-1.7.

    Abstract

    Languages differ in the degree of semantic flexibility of their syntactic roles. For example, Eng-
    lish and Indonesian are considered more flexible with regard to the semantics of subjects,
    whereas German and Japanese are less flexible. In Hawkins’ classification, more flexible lan-
    guages are said to have a loose fit, and less flexible ones are those that have a tight fit. This
    classification has been based on manual inspection of example sentences. The present paper
    proposes a new, quantitative approach to deriving the measures of looseness and tightness from
    corpora. We use corpora of online news from the Leipzig Corpora Collection in thirty typolog-
    ically and genealogically diverse languages and parse them syntactically with the help of the
    Universal Dependencies annotation software. Next, we compute Mutual Information scores for
    each language using the matrices of lexical lemmas and four syntactic dependencies (intransi-
    tive subjects, transitive subject, objects and obliques). The new approach allows us not only to
    reproduce the results of previous investigations, but also to extend the typology to new lan-
    guages. We also demonstrate that verb-final languages tend to have a tighter relationship be-
    tween lexemes and syntactic roles, which helps language users to recognize thematic roles early
    during comprehension.

    Additional information

    full text via ACL website
  • MacDonald, K., Räsänen, O., Casillas, M., & Warlaumont, A. S. (2020). Measuring prosodic predictability in children’s home language environments. In S. Denison, M. Mack, Y. Xu, & B. C. Armstrong (Eds.), Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Virtual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2020) (pp. 695-701). Montreal, QB: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Children learn language from the speech in their home environment. Recent work shows that more infant-directed speech
    (IDS) leads to stronger lexical development. But what makes IDS a particularly useful learning signal? Here, we expand on an attention-based account first proposed by Räsänen et al. (2018): that prosodic modifications make IDS less predictable, and thus more interesting. First, we reproduce the critical finding from Räsänen et al.: that lab-recorded IDS pitch is less predictable compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). Next, we show that this result generalizes to the home language environment, finding that IDS in daylong recordings is also less predictable than ADS but that this pattern is much less robust than for IDS recorded in the lab. These results link experimental work on attention and prosodic modifications of IDS to real-world language-learning environments, highlighting some challenges of scaling up analyses of IDS to larger datasets that better capture children’s actual input.
  • Yu, J., Mailhammer, R., & Cutler, A. (2020). Vocabulary structure affects word recognition: Evidence from German listeners. In N. Minematsu, M. Kondo, T. Arai, & R. Hayashi (Eds.), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2020 (pp. 474-478). Tokyo: ISCA. doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2020-97.

    Abstract

    Lexical stress is realised similarly in English, German, and
    Dutch. On a suprasegmental level, stressed syllables tend to be
    longer and more acoustically salient than unstressed syllables;
    segmentally, vowels in unstressed syllables are often reduced.
    The frequency of unreduced unstressed syllables (where only
    the suprasegmental cues indicate lack of stress) however,
    differs across the languages. The present studies test whether
    listener behaviour is affected by these vocabulary differences,
    by investigating German listeners’ use of suprasegmental cues
    to lexical stress in German and English word recognition. In a
    forced-choice identification task, German listeners correctly
    assigned single-syllable fragments (e.g., Kon-) to one of two
    words differing in stress (KONto, konZEPT). Thus, German
    listeners can exploit suprasegmental information for
    identifying words. German listeners also performed above
    chance in a similar task in English (with, e.g., DIver, diVERT),
    i.e., their sensitivity to these cues also transferred to a nonnative
    language. An English listener group, in contrast, failed
    in the English fragment task. These findings mirror vocabulary
    patterns: German has more words with unreduced unstressed
    syllables than English does.
  • Mengede, J., Devanna, P., Hörpel, S. G., Firzla, U., & Vernes, S. C. (2020). Studying the genetic bases of vocal learning in bats. In A. Ravignani, C. Barbieri, M. Flaherty, Y. Jadoul, E. Lattenkamp, H. Little, M. Martins, K. Mudd, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference (Evolang13) (pp. 280-282). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences.
  • Mudd, K., Lutzenberger, H., De Vos, C., Fikkert, P., Crasborn, O., & De Boer, B. (2020). How does social structure shape language variation? A case study of the Kata Kolok lexicon. In A. Ravignani, C. Barbieri, M. Flaherty, Y. Jadoul, E. Lattenkamp, H. Little, M. Martins, K. Mudd, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference (Evolang13) (pp. 302-304). Nijmegen: The Evolution of Language Conferences.
  • Ozyurek, A. (2020). From hands to brains: How does human body talk, think and interact in face-to-face language use? In K. Truong, D. Heylen, & M. Czerwinski (Eds.), ICMI '20: Proceedings of the 2020 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (pp. 1-2). New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. doi:10.1145/3382507.3419442.

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