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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.