ABSTRACT Traditional computational accounts of gender representation and learning (eg, Carroll, 1... more ABSTRACT Traditional computational accounts of gender representation and learning (eg, Carroll, 1989, 1995) differ radically from cue-based and connectionist accounts. The latter but not the former predicts that access to noun gender will vary depending on the reliability of ...
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 01690965 2012 755555, Nov 12, 2013
Does speaker emotion affect degree of ambiguity in referring expressions? We used referential com... more Does speaker emotion affect degree of ambiguity in referring expressions? We used referential communication tasks preceded by mood induction to examine whether positive emotional valence may be linked to ambiguity of referring expressions. In Experiment 1, participants had to identify sequences of objects with homophonic labels (e.g., the animal bat, a baseball bat) for hypothetical addressees. This required modification of the homophones. Happy speakers were less likely to modify the second homophone to repair a temporary ambiguity (i.e., they were less likely to say . . . first cover the bat, then cover the baseball bat . . .). In Experiment 2, participants had to identify one of two identical objects in an object array, which required a modifying relative clause (the shark that's underneath the shoe). Happy speakers omitted the modifying relative clause twice as often as neutral speakers (e.g., by saying Put the shark underneath the sheep), thereby rendering the entire utterance ambiguous in the context of two sharks. The findings suggest that one consequence of positive mood appears to be more ambiguity in speech. This effect is hypothesised to be due to a less effortful processing style favouring an egocentric bias impacting perspective taking or monitoring of alignment of utterances with an addressee's perspective.
Abstract 1. re-investigate the empirical basis of the conclusions [of the postulate of McConkie e... more Abstract 1. re-investigate the empirical basis of the conclusions [of the postulate of McConkie et al (1988) that text is parsed into units at the word level and that selection of initial fixation positions is strictly word based]/address a number of additional questions related to the determination of initial fixation position points in reading
Serbian and Russian children produce fewer adjective-noun gender-agreement errors with diminutive... more Serbian and Russian children produce fewer adjective-noun gender-agreement errors with diminutive nouns (e.g. ribica 'little fish') than with their simplex counterparts (e.g. riba 'fish'). This study explores factors responsible for the diminutive advantage, using a gender-agreement task with Serbian-speaking children (N=24, mean age 4;4). Over four sessions, children were introduced to pictures of unfamiliar objects and animals that were labelled using novel nouns, varying in grammatical gender and derivational status, with half of the nouns introduced in simplex form and the other half in pseudo-diminutive form. Pseudo-diminutives were artificial derivations that mimic the regular morphological gender marking of Serbian diminutives, using unfamiliar artificial suffixes (–upa for feminine, –uf for masculine). Results indicated a pseudo-diminutive advantage for gender agreement by Session 2, suggesting that low-level schema extraction is a relatively fast process, ba...
Diminutive derivations (e.g., froggy, bootie) constitute morphophonologically similar clusters of... more Diminutive derivations (e.g., froggy, bootie) constitute morphophonologically similar clusters of words in child-directed speech and serve as low-level schema for learning morphological regularities. Previous research has demonstrated that by regularizing noun endings, diminutives (e.g., Russian: domik, svechka) facilitate word-boundary identification and the acquisition of inflectional morphology. In this study, adult native speakers of English (N = 77) were exposed to diminutive and simplex transparently gender-marked nouns instantiating Russian case-marking and adjective-noun genderagreement patterns, over six 1-hour language-learning sessions. They were subsequently tested on their ability to extend grammatical patterns to new items and vocabulary recall. Learners showed equivalent learning of the trained phrases containing diminutive and simplex nouns but were more accurate in generalizing morphological patterns to diminutive nouns. Furthermore, learners showed a diminutive advantage in vocabulary retention. By increasing the invariant parts of words, diminutive derivations may reduce the amount of phonological material to be memorized and, subsequently, enhance word learning.
Two experiments are reported that test the hypothesis that a reader can make use of the size of t... more Two experiments are reported that test the hypothesis that a reader can make use of the size of the semantic domain activated by a sentence context when inferring the meaning of a partially known word. We investigated words at three levels of knowledge: known, frontier, and unknown (e.g., Durso & Shore, 1991). Experiment 1 demonstrated that participants have knowledge about the meanings of words that they deny are part of the language (the unknown level), and that they make use of relative differences in the size of the semantic domains tapped by two sentences when asked to decide on correct usage of these unknown words. Experiment 2 demonstrated that participants have knowledge about the general semantic constraints operating on their unknown words, even when relative differences in size of semantic domains are controlled. Implications for the role of contextual constraints in vocabulary acquisition are discussed.
This study examines whether vocal cues can be used to reliably infer speaker happiness. Two-hundr... more This study examines whether vocal cues can be used to reliably infer speaker happiness. Two-hundred speakers were asked to perform a simple referential communication task and to rate their current emotional state. A range of vocal cues was traced through the speech chain using path analysis. The results indicate that reported happiness of the speakers and perceived happiness of the
ABSTRACT Traditional computational accounts of gender representation and learning (eg, Carroll, 1... more ABSTRACT Traditional computational accounts of gender representation and learning (eg, Carroll, 1989, 1995) differ radically from cue-based and connectionist accounts. The latter but not the former predicts that access to noun gender will vary depending on the reliability of ...
How does children's limited processing capacity affect cultural transmission of complex informati... more How does children's limited processing capacity affect cultural transmission of complex information? We show that over the course of iterated reproduction of twodimensional random dot patterns transmission accuracy increased to a similar extent in 5-to 8-year-old children and adults whereas algorithmic complexity decreased faster in children. Thus, children require more structure to render complex inputs learnable. In line with the Less-Is-More hypothesis, we interpret this as evidence that children's processing limitations affecting working memory capacity and executive control constrain the ability to represent and generate complexity, which, in turn, facilitates emergence of structure. This underscores the importance of investigating the role of children in the transmission of complex cultural traits.
This study explores whether speaker emotion influences communicative effectiveness. Two hundred p... more This study explores whether speaker emotion influences communicative effectiveness. Two hundred participants rated their current emotional state and gave a description of a route on a simple map. The quality of the linguistic content of the descriptions was assessed using Latent Semantic Analysis. Six hundred participants provided route drawings based on the map descriptions. Median route deviation served as a measure of communicative effectiveness. Eighty additional participants rated invariant parts of the descriptions for perceived speaker happiness. Path analysis revealed that while speaker emotion did not affect the linguistic content of the descriptions, it had an effect on communicative effectiveness both through the effects of vocal cues directly as well as mediated by perceived happiness of speech. Specifically, higher first formants were associated with higher reported and perceived happiness as well as higher communicative effectiveness. Jitter, on the other hand, was negatively related to the perception of happiness and positively related to communicative effectiveness. These findings suggest that mood-related modulation of phonation and articulation can influence the effectiveness of communication in addition to message content.
Prenatal testosterone exposure exerts organisational effects on brain development that can shape ... more Prenatal testosterone exposure exerts organisational effects on brain development that can shape a host of behavioural traits. One trait that is negatively affected by increased prenatal testosterone exposure is social functioning. In normally developing children, fetal testosterone ...
Does speaker emotion affect degree of ambiguity in referring expressions? We used referential com... more Does speaker emotion affect degree of ambiguity in referring expressions? We used referential communication tasks preceded by mood induction to examine whether positive emotional valence may be linked to ambiguity of referring expressions. In Experiment 1, participants had to identify sequences of objects with homophonic labels (e.g., the animal bat, a baseball bat) for hypothetical addressees. This required modification of the homophones. Happy speakers were less likely to modify the second homophone to repair a temporary ambiguity (i.e., they were less likely to say . . . first cover the bat, then cover the baseball bat . . .). In Experiment 2, participants had to identify one of two identical objects in an object array, which required a modifying relative clause (the shark that's underneath the shoe). Happy speakers omitted the modifying relative clause twice as often as neutral speakers (e.g., by saying Put the shark underneath the sheep), thereby rendering the entire utterance ambiguous in the context of two sharks. The findings suggest that one consequence of positive mood appears to be more ambiguity in speech. This effect is hypothesised to be due to a less effortful processing style favouring an egocentric bias impacting perspective taking or monitoring of alignment of utterances with an addressee's perspective.
In previous research, acoustic characteristics of the male voice have been shown to signal variou... more In previous research, acoustic characteristics of the male voice have been shown to signal various aspects of mate quality and threat potential. But the human voice is also a medium of linguistic communication. The present study explores whether physical and vocal indicators of male mate quality and threat potential are linked to effective communicative behaviors such as vowel differentiation and use of more salient phonetic variants of consonants. We show that physical and vocal indicators of male threat potential, height and formant position, are negatively linked to vowel space size, and that height and levels of circulating testosterone are negatively linked to the use of the aspirated variant of the alveolar stop consonant /t/. Thus, taller, more masculine men display less clarity in their speech and prefer phonetic variants that may be associated with masculine attributes such as toughness. These findings suggest that vocal signals of men's mate quality and/or dominance are not confined to the realm of voice acoustics but extend to other aspects of communicative behavior, even if this means a trade-off with speech patterns that are considered communicatively advantageous, such as clarity and indexical cues to higher social class.
We introduce two experiments that explored syntactic and semantic processing of spoken sentences ... more We introduce two experiments that explored syntactic and semantic processing of spoken sentences by native and non-native speakers. In the first experiment, the neural substrates corresponding to detection of syntactic and semantic violations were determined in native speakers of two typologically different languages using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The results show that the underlying neural response of participants to stimuli across different native languages is quite similar. In the second experiment, we investigated how non-native speakers of a language process the same stimuli presented in the first experiment. First, the results show a more similar pattern of increased activation between native and non-native speakers in response to semantic violations than to syntactic violations. Second, the non-native speakers were observed to employ specific portions of the frontotemporal language network differently from those employed by native speakers. These regions included the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), superior temporal gyrus (STG), and subcortical structures of the basal ganglia. Hum Brain Mapp 25: 266 -286, 2005. ᭜ Processing Lexical Information in L1 and L2 ᭜ ᭜ 267 ᭜ ᭜ Rü schemeyer et al. ᭜ ᭜ 268 ᭜ ᭜ Processing Lexical Information in L1 and L2 ᭜ ᭜ 269 ᭜ ᭜ Processing Lexical Information in L1 and L2 ᭜ ᭜ 273 ᭜ ᭜ Processing Lexical Information in L1 and L2 ᭜ ᭜ 275 ᭜ ᭜ Processing Lexical Information in L1 and L2 ᭜ ᭜ 283 ᭜ ᭜ Rü schemeyer et al. ᭜ ᭜ 284 ᭜ ᭜ Processing Lexical Information in L1 and L2 ᭜ ᭜ 285 ᭜
ABSTRACT Traditional computational accounts of gender representation and learning (eg, Carroll, 1... more ABSTRACT Traditional computational accounts of gender representation and learning (eg, Carroll, 1989, 1995) differ radically from cue-based and connectionist accounts. The latter but not the former predicts that access to noun gender will vary depending on the reliability of ...
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 01690965 2012 755555, Nov 12, 2013
Does speaker emotion affect degree of ambiguity in referring expressions? We used referential com... more Does speaker emotion affect degree of ambiguity in referring expressions? We used referential communication tasks preceded by mood induction to examine whether positive emotional valence may be linked to ambiguity of referring expressions. In Experiment 1, participants had to identify sequences of objects with homophonic labels (e.g., the animal bat, a baseball bat) for hypothetical addressees. This required modification of the homophones. Happy speakers were less likely to modify the second homophone to repair a temporary ambiguity (i.e., they were less likely to say . . . first cover the bat, then cover the baseball bat . . .). In Experiment 2, participants had to identify one of two identical objects in an object array, which required a modifying relative clause (the shark that's underneath the shoe). Happy speakers omitted the modifying relative clause twice as often as neutral speakers (e.g., by saying Put the shark underneath the sheep), thereby rendering the entire utterance ambiguous in the context of two sharks. The findings suggest that one consequence of positive mood appears to be more ambiguity in speech. This effect is hypothesised to be due to a less effortful processing style favouring an egocentric bias impacting perspective taking or monitoring of alignment of utterances with an addressee's perspective.
Abstract 1. re-investigate the empirical basis of the conclusions [of the postulate of McConkie e... more Abstract 1. re-investigate the empirical basis of the conclusions [of the postulate of McConkie et al (1988) that text is parsed into units at the word level and that selection of initial fixation positions is strictly word based]/address a number of additional questions related to the determination of initial fixation position points in reading
Serbian and Russian children produce fewer adjective-noun gender-agreement errors with diminutive... more Serbian and Russian children produce fewer adjective-noun gender-agreement errors with diminutive nouns (e.g. ribica 'little fish') than with their simplex counterparts (e.g. riba 'fish'). This study explores factors responsible for the diminutive advantage, using a gender-agreement task with Serbian-speaking children (N=24, mean age 4;4). Over four sessions, children were introduced to pictures of unfamiliar objects and animals that were labelled using novel nouns, varying in grammatical gender and derivational status, with half of the nouns introduced in simplex form and the other half in pseudo-diminutive form. Pseudo-diminutives were artificial derivations that mimic the regular morphological gender marking of Serbian diminutives, using unfamiliar artificial suffixes (–upa for feminine, –uf for masculine). Results indicated a pseudo-diminutive advantage for gender agreement by Session 2, suggesting that low-level schema extraction is a relatively fast process, ba...
Diminutive derivations (e.g., froggy, bootie) constitute morphophonologically similar clusters of... more Diminutive derivations (e.g., froggy, bootie) constitute morphophonologically similar clusters of words in child-directed speech and serve as low-level schema for learning morphological regularities. Previous research has demonstrated that by regularizing noun endings, diminutives (e.g., Russian: domik, svechka) facilitate word-boundary identification and the acquisition of inflectional morphology. In this study, adult native speakers of English (N = 77) were exposed to diminutive and simplex transparently gender-marked nouns instantiating Russian case-marking and adjective-noun genderagreement patterns, over six 1-hour language-learning sessions. They were subsequently tested on their ability to extend grammatical patterns to new items and vocabulary recall. Learners showed equivalent learning of the trained phrases containing diminutive and simplex nouns but were more accurate in generalizing morphological patterns to diminutive nouns. Furthermore, learners showed a diminutive advantage in vocabulary retention. By increasing the invariant parts of words, diminutive derivations may reduce the amount of phonological material to be memorized and, subsequently, enhance word learning.
Two experiments are reported that test the hypothesis that a reader can make use of the size of t... more Two experiments are reported that test the hypothesis that a reader can make use of the size of the semantic domain activated by a sentence context when inferring the meaning of a partially known word. We investigated words at three levels of knowledge: known, frontier, and unknown (e.g., Durso & Shore, 1991). Experiment 1 demonstrated that participants have knowledge about the meanings of words that they deny are part of the language (the unknown level), and that they make use of relative differences in the size of the semantic domains tapped by two sentences when asked to decide on correct usage of these unknown words. Experiment 2 demonstrated that participants have knowledge about the general semantic constraints operating on their unknown words, even when relative differences in size of semantic domains are controlled. Implications for the role of contextual constraints in vocabulary acquisition are discussed.
This study examines whether vocal cues can be used to reliably infer speaker happiness. Two-hundr... more This study examines whether vocal cues can be used to reliably infer speaker happiness. Two-hundred speakers were asked to perform a simple referential communication task and to rate their current emotional state. A range of vocal cues was traced through the speech chain using path analysis. The results indicate that reported happiness of the speakers and perceived happiness of the
ABSTRACT Traditional computational accounts of gender representation and learning (eg, Carroll, 1... more ABSTRACT Traditional computational accounts of gender representation and learning (eg, Carroll, 1989, 1995) differ radically from cue-based and connectionist accounts. The latter but not the former predicts that access to noun gender will vary depending on the reliability of ...
How does children's limited processing capacity affect cultural transmission of complex informati... more How does children's limited processing capacity affect cultural transmission of complex information? We show that over the course of iterated reproduction of twodimensional random dot patterns transmission accuracy increased to a similar extent in 5-to 8-year-old children and adults whereas algorithmic complexity decreased faster in children. Thus, children require more structure to render complex inputs learnable. In line with the Less-Is-More hypothesis, we interpret this as evidence that children's processing limitations affecting working memory capacity and executive control constrain the ability to represent and generate complexity, which, in turn, facilitates emergence of structure. This underscores the importance of investigating the role of children in the transmission of complex cultural traits.
This study explores whether speaker emotion influences communicative effectiveness. Two hundred p... more This study explores whether speaker emotion influences communicative effectiveness. Two hundred participants rated their current emotional state and gave a description of a route on a simple map. The quality of the linguistic content of the descriptions was assessed using Latent Semantic Analysis. Six hundred participants provided route drawings based on the map descriptions. Median route deviation served as a measure of communicative effectiveness. Eighty additional participants rated invariant parts of the descriptions for perceived speaker happiness. Path analysis revealed that while speaker emotion did not affect the linguistic content of the descriptions, it had an effect on communicative effectiveness both through the effects of vocal cues directly as well as mediated by perceived happiness of speech. Specifically, higher first formants were associated with higher reported and perceived happiness as well as higher communicative effectiveness. Jitter, on the other hand, was negatively related to the perception of happiness and positively related to communicative effectiveness. These findings suggest that mood-related modulation of phonation and articulation can influence the effectiveness of communication in addition to message content.
Prenatal testosterone exposure exerts organisational effects on brain development that can shape ... more Prenatal testosterone exposure exerts organisational effects on brain development that can shape a host of behavioural traits. One trait that is negatively affected by increased prenatal testosterone exposure is social functioning. In normally developing children, fetal testosterone ...
Does speaker emotion affect degree of ambiguity in referring expressions? We used referential com... more Does speaker emotion affect degree of ambiguity in referring expressions? We used referential communication tasks preceded by mood induction to examine whether positive emotional valence may be linked to ambiguity of referring expressions. In Experiment 1, participants had to identify sequences of objects with homophonic labels (e.g., the animal bat, a baseball bat) for hypothetical addressees. This required modification of the homophones. Happy speakers were less likely to modify the second homophone to repair a temporary ambiguity (i.e., they were less likely to say . . . first cover the bat, then cover the baseball bat . . .). In Experiment 2, participants had to identify one of two identical objects in an object array, which required a modifying relative clause (the shark that's underneath the shoe). Happy speakers omitted the modifying relative clause twice as often as neutral speakers (e.g., by saying Put the shark underneath the sheep), thereby rendering the entire utterance ambiguous in the context of two sharks. The findings suggest that one consequence of positive mood appears to be more ambiguity in speech. This effect is hypothesised to be due to a less effortful processing style favouring an egocentric bias impacting perspective taking or monitoring of alignment of utterances with an addressee's perspective.
In previous research, acoustic characteristics of the male voice have been shown to signal variou... more In previous research, acoustic characteristics of the male voice have been shown to signal various aspects of mate quality and threat potential. But the human voice is also a medium of linguistic communication. The present study explores whether physical and vocal indicators of male mate quality and threat potential are linked to effective communicative behaviors such as vowel differentiation and use of more salient phonetic variants of consonants. We show that physical and vocal indicators of male threat potential, height and formant position, are negatively linked to vowel space size, and that height and levels of circulating testosterone are negatively linked to the use of the aspirated variant of the alveolar stop consonant /t/. Thus, taller, more masculine men display less clarity in their speech and prefer phonetic variants that may be associated with masculine attributes such as toughness. These findings suggest that vocal signals of men's mate quality and/or dominance are not confined to the realm of voice acoustics but extend to other aspects of communicative behavior, even if this means a trade-off with speech patterns that are considered communicatively advantageous, such as clarity and indexical cues to higher social class.
We introduce two experiments that explored syntactic and semantic processing of spoken sentences ... more We introduce two experiments that explored syntactic and semantic processing of spoken sentences by native and non-native speakers. In the first experiment, the neural substrates corresponding to detection of syntactic and semantic violations were determined in native speakers of two typologically different languages using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The results show that the underlying neural response of participants to stimuli across different native languages is quite similar. In the second experiment, we investigated how non-native speakers of a language process the same stimuli presented in the first experiment. First, the results show a more similar pattern of increased activation between native and non-native speakers in response to semantic violations than to syntactic violations. Second, the non-native speakers were observed to employ specific portions of the frontotemporal language network differently from those employed by native speakers. These regions included the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), superior temporal gyrus (STG), and subcortical structures of the basal ganglia. Hum Brain Mapp 25: 266 -286, 2005. ᭜ Processing Lexical Information in L1 and L2 ᭜ ᭜ 267 ᭜ ᭜ Rü schemeyer et al. ᭜ ᭜ 268 ᭜ ᭜ Processing Lexical Information in L1 and L2 ᭜ ᭜ 269 ᭜ ᭜ Processing Lexical Information in L1 and L2 ᭜ ᭜ 273 ᭜ ᭜ Processing Lexical Information in L1 and L2 ᭜ ᭜ 275 ᭜ ᭜ Processing Lexical Information in L1 and L2 ᭜ ᭜ 283 ᭜ ᭜ Rü schemeyer et al. ᭜ ᭜ 284 ᭜ ᭜ Processing Lexical Information in L1 and L2 ᭜ ᭜ 285 ᭜
Experimental studies of the cultural evolution of language have focused on how constraints on lea... more Experimental studies of the cultural evolution of language have focused on how constraints on learning and communication drive emergence of linguistic structure. Yet language is typically transmitted by experts who adjust the input in ways that facilitates learning by novices, e.g. through child-directed speech. Using iterated language learning of binary auditory sequences, we explored how language change is affected by experts' intention to teach the language to novices. Comparison between teaching chains and simple transmission chains revealed that teaching was associated with a greater rate of innovation which led to emergence of more expressive languages consisting of shorter signals. This is the first study to show that during cultural transmission, teaching can modify, and potentially optimise, functional characteristics of language.
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