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The paper presents a production experiment investigating the phonetic parameters speakers employ to differentiate Yes-No questions from string-identical statements in Akan, a West-African two-tone Kwa language. Results show that, in comparison to the statement, speakers use a higher pitch register throughout the utterance as a global parameter, and falling f0, longer duration and higher intensity as local parameters on the final syllable of the Yes-No question. Further, two perception experiments (forced-choice identification and gating) investigate the perceptual relevance of the global parameter and the local final parameters. Results show that listeners cannot assess the higher pitch register information to identify the mode of a sentence early on. Rather, identification takes place when the local phonetic parameters on the final vowel are available. The findings point to the superiority of language-specific cues in sentence mode perception. It is suggested that Akan uses a low boundary tone that associates with the right edge of the intonation phrase (L%) in Yes-No questions. The results are discussed from the point of view of question intonation typology in African languages. It is argued that a classification along the lines of functionally relevant cues is preferable to an impressionistic analysis.
BackgroundClinical swallowing assessment is largely limited to qualitative assessment of behavioural observations. There are limited quantitative data that can be compared with a healthy population for identification of impairment. The Test of Masticating and Swallowing Solids (TOMASS) was developed as a quantitative assessment of solid bolus ingestion. AimsThis research programme investigated test development indices and established normative data for the TOMASS to support translation to clinical dysphagia assessment. Conclusions & ImplicationsThe TOMASS is presented as a valid, reliable and broadly normed clinical assessment of solid bolus ingestion. Clinical application may help identify dysphagic patients at bedside and provide a non-invasive, but sensitive, measure of functional change in swallowing.
We present a computational evaluation of three hypotheses about sources of deficit in sentence comprehension in aphasia: slowed processing, intermittent deficiency, and resource reduction. The ACT-R based Lewis and Vasishth (2005) model is used to implement these three proposals. Slowed processing is implemented as slowed execution time of parse steps; intermittent deficiency as increased random noise in activation of elements in memory; and resource reduction as reduced spreading activation. As data, we considered subject vs. object relative sentences, presented in a self-paced listening modality to 56 individuals with aphasia (IWA) and 46 matched controls. The participants heard the sentences and carried out a picture verification task to decide on an interpretation of the sentence. These response accuracies are used to identify the best parameters (for each participant) that correspond to the three hypotheses mentioned above. We show that controls have more tightly clustered (less variable) parameter values than IWA; specifically, compared to controls, among IWA there are more individuals with slow parsing times, high noise, and low spreading activation. We find that (a) individual IWA show differential amounts of deficit along the three dimensions of slowed processing, intermittent deficiency, and resource reduction, (b) overall, there is evidence for all three sources of deficit playing a role, and (c) IWA have a more variable range of parameter values than controls. An important implication is that it may be meaningless to talk about sources of deficit with respect to an abstract verage IWA; the focus should be on the individual's differential degrees of deficit along different dimensions, and on understanding the causes of variability in deficit between participants.
A weight normalization procedure, commonly called pushing, is introduced for weighted tree automata (wta) over commutative semifields. The normalization preserves the recognized weighted tree language even for nondeterministic wta, but it is most useful for bottom-up deterministic wta, where it can be used for minimization and equivalence testing. In both applications a careful selection of the weights to be redistributed followed by normalization allows a reduction of the general problem to the corresponding problem for bottom-up deterministic unweighted tree automata. This approach was already successfully used by Mohri and Eisner for the minimization of deterministic weighted string automata. Moreover, the new equivalence test for two wta M and M′ runs in time O((|M|+|M′|)⋅log(|Q|+|Q′|)), where Q and Q′ are the states of M and M′, respectively, which improves the previously best run-time O(|M|⋅|M′|).
Background: In probable Alzheimer’s disease (AD), different memory systems, executive functioning, visuospatial recognition, and language are impaired. Regarding the latter, only a few studies have investigated morphosyntactic production thus far.
Aims: This study, which is a follow-up on Fyndanis, V., Manouilidou, C., Koufou, E., Karampekios, S., and Tsapakis, E. M. (2013). Agrammatic patterns in Alzheimer's disease: Evidence from tense, agreement, and aspect. Aphasiology, 27, 178–200. doi:10.1080/02687038.2012.705814, investigates whether verb-related morphosyntactic production is (selectively) impaired in AD focusing on two highly inflected languages, Greek and Italian. The morphosyntactic phenomena explored are subject–verb Agreement, Tense/Time Reference, and Mood. Focusing on these phenomena allows us to investigate if recent hypotheses, originally developed in aphasia research, can also capture results related to AD. We tested the hypotheses discussed in Fyndanis, V., Manouilidou, C., Koufou, E., Karampekios, S., and Tsapakis, E. M. (2013). Agrammatic patterns in Alzheimer's disease: Evidence from tense, agreement, and aspect. Aphasiology, 27, 178–200. doi:10.1080/02687038.2012.705814, that is, the Interpretable Features’ Impairment Hypothesis (IFIH) (e.g., Fyndanis, V., Varlokosta, S., & Tsapkini, K. 2012. Agrammatic production: Interpretable features and selective impairment in verb inflection. Lingua, 122, 1134–1147. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2012.05.004) and the PAst DIscourse LInking Hypothesis (PADILIH; Bastiaanse, R., Bamyaci, E., Hsu, C., Lee, J., Yarbay Duman, T., & Thompson, C. K. 2011. Time reference in agrammatic aphasia: A cross-linguistic study. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 24, 652–673. doi:10.1016/j.jneuroling.2011.07.001).
Methods & Procedures: Two sentence completion tasks testing the production of subject-verb Agreement, Tense/Time Reference, and Mood were administered to 16 Greek-speaking and 10 Italian-speaking individuals with mild-to-moderate AD, as well as to 16 Greek-speaking and 11 Italian-speaking neurologically intact individuals who were matched with the participants with AD on age and education. Mixed-effects models were fitted to the data.
Outcomes & Results: At the group level, both the Greek and Italian participants with AD performed worse than the controls. Both AD groups revealed selective patterns of morphosyntactic production (Greek: Agreement/Mood > Time Reference; Italian: Agreement > Time Reference > Mood). Past Reference and Future Reference did not dissociate in either of the two AD groups. Nevertheless, in all four participants with AD who showed dissociations, Past Reference was more impaired than Future Reference.
Conclusions: The results indicate that the production of verb-related morphosyntactic categories can be impaired in mild-to-moderate AD. The different patterns observed in the two languages are partly attributable to the different way these languages encode Mood. The group results (of both the Greek-and Italian-speaking participants with AD) do not lend support to the PADILIH, whereas only the results of the Italian AD group are fully consistent with the IFIH. However, the individual data are consistent with the PADILIH, and the IFIH is informed by the present data and modified accordingly so that it can capture cross-linguistic patterns of morphosyntactic impairment.
In connected speech, many words are produced with a pronunciation that differs from the canonical form. How the speech recognition system deals with this variation is a fundamental issue in the language processing literature. The present study examines the roles of variant type, variant frequency, and context in the processing of French words with a canonical (schwa variant, e.g. semaine “week”) and a non-canonical pronunciation (no-schwa variant, s’maine). It asks whether the processing of canonical pronunciations is faster than the processing of non-canonical ones. Results of three lexical decision experiments reveal that more frequent variants are recognised more quickly, and that there is no advantage for canonical forms once variant frequency is accounted for. Two of these experiments further failed to find evidence that the context in which the words are presented modulate the effect of variant type. These findings are discussed in the light of spoken word recognition models.
For Charles Goodwin, Chuck
(2018)
This appreciation will not be a testimonial to Chuck’s numerous publications and research achievements – I am sure that others will have a lot to say about those. Instead, I will say something about how I personally experienced and think of him, as a researcher personality, based on the limited time and the few occasions that we have had together.
Sensitivity to salience
(2018)
Sentence comprehension is optimised by indicating entities as salient through linguistic (i.e., information-structural) or visual means. We compare how salience of a depicted referent due to a linguistic (i.e., topic status) or visual cue (i.e., a virtual person's gaze shift) modulates sentence comprehension in German. We investigated processing of sentences with varying word order and pronoun resolution by means of self-paced reading and an antecedent choice task, respectively. Our results show that linguistic as well as visual salience cues immediately speeded up reading times of sentences mentioning the salient referent first. In contrast, for pronoun resolution, linguistic and visual cues modulated antecedent choice preferences less congruently. In sum, our findings speak in favour of a significant impact of linguistic and visual salience cues on sentence comprehension, substantiating that salient information delivered via language as well as the visual environment is integrated in the current mental representation of the discourse.
Background: Comprehension of non-canonical sentences is frequently characterised by chance level performance in people with aphasia (PWA). Chance level performance has been interpreted as guessing, but online data does not support this rendering. It is still not clear whether the incorrect sentence processing is guided by the compensatory strategies that PWA might employ to overcome linguistic difficulties.Aims: We aim to study to what extent people with non-fluent aphasia are aware of their sentence comprehension deficits.Methods & Procedures: This study combined offline and online data to investigate the effect of word order and error-awareness on sentence comprehension in a group of PWA and non-brain damaged (NBD) participants. The offline tasks involved auditory sentence picture-matching immediately followed by a confidence rating (CR). Participants were asked to judge the perceived correctness of their previous answer. Online data consisted of eye-tracking.Outcomes & Results: Replicating previous findings, PWA had significantly worse comprehension of Theme-Agent order compared to Agent-Theme order sentences. Controls showed ceiling level sentence comprehension. CR was a poor predictor of response accuracy in PWA, but moderate-good in NBD. A total of 6.8% of judgements were classified as guessing by PWA. Post hoc gaze data analysis indicated that CR was a predictor of the fixation pattern during the presentation of the linguistic stimuli.Conclusions: Results suggest that PWA were mostly unaware of their sentence comprehension errors and did not consciously employ strategies to compensate for their difficulties.
That’s not quite it
(2018)
We present a novel empirical study on German directly comparing the exhaustivity inference in es-clefts to exhaustivity inferences in definite pseudoclefts, exclusives, and plain intonational focus constructions. We employ mouse-driven verification/falsification tasks in an incremental information-retrieval paradigm across two experiments in order to assess the strength of exhaustivity in the four sentence types. The results are compatible with a parallel analysis of clefts and definite pseudoclefts, in line with previous claims in the literature (Percus 1997, Buring & Kriz 2013). In striking contrast with such proposals, in which the exhaustivity inference is conventionally coded in the cleft-structure in terms of maximality/homogeneity, our study found that the exhaustivity inference is not systematic or robust in es-clefts nor in definite pseudoclefts: Whereas some speakers treat both constructions as exhaustive, others treat both constructions as non-exhaustive. In order to account for this unexpected finding, we argue that the exhaustivity inference in both clefts and definite pseudoclefts-specifically those with the compound definite derjenige - is pragmatically derived from the anaphoric existence presupposition that is common to both constructions.
The article takes up on the observations made byKenesei (1994) regarding the position of the Hungarian interrogative marker -e in the clause and its distribution across clause types. Specifically, there are three crucial points: (i) the marker -e is related to the CP-domain, where clause typing is encoded; (ii) -e is obligatory in embedded clauses and optional in main clauses; (iii) -e is licensed in finite clauses only. I argue that certain clause-typing properties are reflected in the Hungarian clause in a lower functional domain, FP. In particular, finiteness and the interrogative nature of the clause are encoded here, as also indicated by focussing in non-interrogative clauses and by constituent questions, respectively. The marker -e is base-generated in the F head, as opposed to a designated FocP or TP/IP, allowing it to fulfil its clause-typing functions. Base-generation is crucial (as opposed to lowering from C) since it is able to capture the relatedness between -e and finiteness: -e is specified as [fin] and while the FP may be generated to host focussed constituents (including wh-elements) in non-finite clauses, a lexically [fin] head cannot be inserted.
Speech scientists have long noted that the qualities of naturally-produced vowels do not remain constant over their durations regardless of being nominally "monophthongs" or "diphthongs". Recent acoustic corpora show that there are consistent patterns of first (F1) and second (F2) formant frequency change across different vowel categories. The three Australian English (AusE) close front vowels /i:, 1, i/ provide a striking example: while their midpoint or mean F1 and F2 frequencies are virtually identical, their spectral change patterns distinctly differ. The results indicate that, despite the distinct patterns of spectral change of AusE /i:, i, la/ in production, its perceptual relevance is not uniform, but rather vowel-category dependent.
We investigated online electrophysiological components of distributional learning, specifically of tones by listeners of a non tonal language. German listeners were presented with a bimodal distribution of syllables with lexical tones from a synthesized continuum based on Cantonese level tones. Tones were presented in sets of four standards (within-category tokens) followed by a deviant (across-category token). Mismatch negativity (MMN) was measured. Earlier behavioral data showed that exposure to this bimodal distribution improved both categorical perception and perceptual acuity for level tones [I]. In the present study we present analyses of the electrophysiological response recorded during this exposure, i.e., the development of the MMN response during distributional learning. This development over time is analyzed using Generalized Additive Mixed Models and results showed that the MMN amplitude increased for both within and across-category tokens, reflecting higher perceptual acuity accompanying category formation. This is evidence that learners zooming in on phonological categories undergo neural changes associated with more accurate phonetic perception.
Voice onset time (VOT), a primary cue for voicing in many languages including English and German, is known to vary greatly between speakers, but also displays robust within-speaker consistencies, at least in English. The current analysis extends these findings to German. VOT measures were investigated from voiceless alveolar and velar stops in CV syllables cued by a visual prompt in a cue-distractor task. Comparably to English, a considerable portion of German VOT variability can be attributed to the syllable’s vowel length and the stop’s place of articulation. Individual differences in VOT still remain irrespective of speech rate. However, significant correlations across places of articulation and between speaker-specific mean VOTs and standard deviations indicate that talkers employ a relatively unified VOT profile across places of articulation. This could allow listeners to more efficiently adapt to speaker-specific realisations.
This article presents a corpus-based evaluation of 13 lexical diversity metrics as measures of longitudinal progression in written productions of learners of French as third language (L3). Our case study (24 learners, 3 productions per learner in the course of 3 months) deals with a semi-longitudinal corpus, where each of the productions is supposed to be more complex than the previous one. Random forests (Breiman, 2001; Hothorn et al., 2019) are used in order to see whether lexical diversity metric scores capture enough vocabulary diversity progression to predict the production wave. We report that lexical diversity metrics capture lexical progression through the three productions of each student. In particular, two metrics appear to be the most informative for lexical progression: Herdan’s C and Yule’s K.
Deep learning is a sub-field of machine learning that has recently gained substantial popularity in various domains such as computer vision, automatic speech recognition, natural language processing, and bioinformatics. Deep-learning techniques are able to learn complex feature representations from raw signals and thus also have potential to improve signal processing in the context of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). However, they typically require large amounts of data for training - much more than what can often be provided with reasonable effort when working with brain activity recordings of any kind. In order to still leverage the power of deep-learning techniques with limited available data, special care needs to be taken when designing the BCI task, defining the structure of the deep model, and choosing the training method. This chapter presents example approaches for the specific scenario of music-based brain-computer interaction through electroencephalography - in the hope that these will prove to be valuable in different settings as well. We explain important decisions for the design of the BCI task and their impact on the models and training techniques that can be used. Furthermore, we present and compare various pre-training techniques that aim to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. Finally, we discuss approaches to interpret the trained models.
Recent studies by Bastiaanse and colleagues found that time reference is selectively impaired in people with nonfluent agrammatic aphasia, with reference to the past being more difficult to process than reference to the present or to the future. To account for this dissociation, they formulated the PAst DIscourse LInking Hypothesis (PADILIH), which posits that past reference is more demanding than present/future reference because it involves discourse linking. There is some evidence that this hypothesis can be applied to people with fluent aphasia as well. However, the existing evidence for the PADILIH is contradictory, and most of it has been provided by employing a test that predominantly taps retrieval processes, leaving largely unexplored the underlying ability to encode time reference-related prephonological features. Within a cross-linguistic approach, this study tests the PADILIH by means of a sentence completion task that 'equally' taps encoding and retrieval abilities. This study also investigates if the PADILIH’s scope can be extended to fluent aphasia. Greek- and Italian-speaking individuals with aphasia participated in the study. The Greek group consisted of both individuals with nonfluent agrammatic aphasia and individuals with fluent aphasia, who also presented signs of agrammatism. The Italian group consisted of individuals with agrammatic nonfluent aphasia only. The two Greek subgroups performed similarly. Neither language group of participants with aphasia exhibited a pattern of performance consistent with the predictions of the PADILIH. However, a double dissociation observed within the Greek group suggests a hypothesis that may reconcile the present results with the PADILIH.
Infants as young as six months are sensitive to prosodic phrase boundaries marked by three acoustic cues: pitch change, final lengthening, and pause. Behavioral studies suggest that a language-specific weighting of these cues develops during the first year of life; recent work on German revealed that eight-month-olds, unlike six-month-olds, are capable of perceiving a prosodic boundary on the basis of pitch change and final lengthening only. The present study uses Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to investigate the neuro-cognitive development of prosodic cue perception in German-learning infants. In adults’ ERPs, prosodic boundary perception is clearly reflected by the so-called Closure Positive Shift (CPS). To date, there is mixed evidence on whether an infant CPS exists that signals early prosodic cue perception, or whether the CPS emerges only later—the latter implying that infantile brain responses to prosodic boundaries reflect acoustic, low-level pause detection.
We presented six- and eight-month-olds with stimuli containing either no boundary cues, only a pitch cue, or a combination of both pitch change and final lengthening. For both age groups, responses to the former two conditions did not differ, while brain responses to prosodic boundaries cued by pitch change and final lengthening showed a positivity that we interpret as a CPS-like infant ERP component. This hints at an early sensitivity to prosodic boundaries that cannot exclusively be based on pause detection. Instead, infants’ brain responses indicate an early ability to exploit subtle, relational prosodic cues in speech perception—presumably even earlier than could be concluded from previous behavioral results.
This study investigated Dutch-speaking four- to five-year-olds’ use of word order and prosody in distinguishing focus types (broad focus, narrow focus, and contrastive narrow focus) via an interactive answer-reconstruction game. We have found an overall preference for the unmarked word order SVO and no evidence for the use of OVS to distinguish focus types. But the children used pitch and duration in the subject-nouns to distinguish focus types in SVO sentences. These findings show that Dutch-speaking four- to five-year-olds differ from their German- and Finnish-speaking peers, who show evidence of varying choice of word order to mark specific focus types, and use prosody to distinguish focus types in subject and object nouns in both SVO and OVS sentences. These comparisons suggest that typological differences in the relative importance between word order and prosody can lead to differences in children’s use of word order and prosody in unmarked and marked word orders. A more equal role of word order and prosody in the ambient language can stimulate more extensive use of prosody in the marked word order, whereas a more limited role of word order can restrict the use of prosody in the unmarked word order.