Linguistic Complexity and Planning Effects on Word Duration in Hindi Read Aloud Speech

Our study investigates the impact of linguistic complexity and planning on word durations in Hindi read aloud speech. Reading aloud involves both comprehension and production processes, and we use measures defined by two influential theories of sentence comprehension, Surprisal Theory and Dependency Locality Theory, to model the time taken to enunciate individual words. We model planning processes using an information-theoretic measure we call FORWARD SURPRISAL, inspired by surprisal theory which has been prominent in recent psycholinguistic work. Forward surprisal aims to capture articulatory planning when readers incorporate parafoveal viewing during reading aloud. Using a Linear Mixed Model containing memory and surprisal costs as predictors of word duration in read aloud speech (parts-of-speech and speakers being intercept terms), we investigate the following hypotheses: 1. High values of linguistic complexity measures (lexical+PCFG surprisal and DLT memory costs) lead to high word durations. 2. High values of forward lexical surprisal tend to induce high word durations. 3. High-frequency words are read aloud faster than low-frequency words. We validate the above hypotheses using data from the TDIL corpus of read aloud speech. Further, using a Generalized Linear Model to predict content and function word labels we show that lexical surprisal measures do not help distinguish between these 2 classes. Thus reading aloud might not involve distinct access strategies for content and function words, unlike spontaneous speech

On becoming a physicist of mind

In 1976, the German Max Planck Society established a new research enterprise in psycholinguistics, which became the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. I was fortunate enough to be invited to direct this institute. It enabled me, with my background in visual and auditory psychophysics and the theory of formal grammars and automata, to develop a long-term chronometric endeavor to dissect the process of speaking. It led, among other work, to my book Speaking (1989) and to my research team's article in Brain and Behavioral Sciences “A Theory of Lexical Access in Speech Production” (1999). When I later became president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, I helped initiate the Women for Science research project of the Inter Academy Council, a project chaired by my physicist sister at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. As an emeritus I published a comprehensive History of Psycholinguistics (2013). As will become clear, many people inspired and joined me in these undertakings

Recognizing Speech in a Novel Accent: The Motor Theory of Speech Perception Reframed

The motor theory of speech perception holds that we perceive the speech of another in terms of a motor representation of that speech. However, when we have learned to recognize a foreign accent, it seems plausible that recognition of a word rarely involves reconstruction of the speech gestures of the speaker rather than the listener. To better assess the motor theory and this observation, we proceed in three stages. Part 1 places the motor theory of speech perception in a larger framework based on our earlier models of the adaptive formation of mirror neurons for grasping, and for viewing extensions of that mirror system as part of a larger system for neuro-linguistic processing, augmented by the present consideration of recognizing speech in a novel accent. Part 2 then offers a novel computational model of how a listener comes to understand the speech of someone speaking the listener's native language with a foreign accent. The core tenet of the model is that the listener uses hypotheses about the word the speaker is currently uttering to update probabilities linking the sound produced by the speaker to phonemes in the native language repertoire of the listener. This, on average, improves the recognition of later words. This model is neutral regarding the nature of the representations it uses (motor vs. auditory). It serve as a reference point for the discussion in Part 3, which proposes a dual-stream neuro-linguistic architecture to revisits claims for and against the motor theory of speech perception and the relevance of mirror neurons, and extracts some implications for the reframing of the motor theory

Frequency drives lexical access in reading but not in speaking: the frequency-lag hypothesis

To contrast mechanisms of lexical access in production versus comprehension we compared the effects of word frequency (high, low), context (none, low constraint, high constraint), and level of English proficiency (monolingual, Spanish-English bilingual, Dutch-English bilingual) on picture naming, lexical decision, and eye fixation times. Semantic constraint effects were larger in production than in reading. Frequency effects were larger in production than in reading without constraining context but larger in reading than in production with constraining context. Bilingual disadvantages were modulated by frequency in production but not in eye fixation times, were not smaller in low-constraint contexts, and were reduced by high-constraint contexts only in production and only at the lowest level of English proficiency. These results challenge existing accounts of bilingual disadvantages and reveal fundamentally different processes during lexical access across modalities, entailing a primarily semantically driven search in production but a frequency-driven search in comprehension. The apparently more interactive process in production than comprehension could simply reflect a greater number of frequency-sensitive processing stages in production

Cognate facilitation effects in bilingual children of varying language dominance

A widely accepted theory is that bilinguals activate both of their languages regardless of which is in use. Though there is abundant research on this phenomenon in bilingual adults, less research has focused on bilingual children. Cognates (i.e., words that share meaning and sound across languages) have frequently been used to explore language co-activation. The present study investigates cognate facilitation effects in child bilinguals of varying language dominance. Spanish-English bilingual children between 6 and 10 years old performed a picture-naming task that included pictures of cognates and non-cognates. Children who were more English-dominant experienced larger cognate facilitation effects when producing words in their non-dominant language but not in their dominant language. In contrast, children with more balanced dominance did not experience cognate facilitation effects in either language. The findings from this study may have implications for the development of the bilingual lexicon.Psycholog

Lexis or parsing? A corpus-based study of syntactic complexity and its effect on disfluencies in interpreting

Cognitive load is probably one of the most cited topics in research on simultaneous interpreting, but it is still poorly understood due to the lack of proper empirical tests. It is a central concept in Gile’s (2009) Efforts Model as well as Seeber’s (2011) Cognitive Load Model. Both models invariably conceptualize interpreting as a dynamic equilibrium between the cognitive resources/capacities and cognitive demands that are involved in listening and comprehension, production and memory storage. In cases when the momentary demands exceed the interpreter’s available capacities, there is an information overload which typically results in a disfluent or erroneous interpretation. While Gile (2008) denies his Efforts Model is a theory that can be tested, Seeber & Kerzel (2012) put Seeber’s Cognitive Load Model to the test using pupillometry in an experimental interpretation task. In a series of recent corpus-based studies Plevoets & Defrancq (2016, 2018) and Defrancq & Plevoets (2018) used filled pauses to investigate cognitive load in simultaneous interpreters, based on the widely shared assumption in the psycholinguistic literature that silent and filled pauses are ‘windows’ on cognitive load in monolingual speech (Arnold et al. 2000; Bortfeld et al. 2001; Clark & Fox Tree 2002; Levelt 1983; Watanabe et al. 2008). The studies found empirical support for increased cognitive load in simultaneous interpreting in the form of higher frequencies of filled pauses. However, the studies also showed that filled pauses in interpreting are caused mainly by problems with lexical retrieval. Plevoets & Defrancq (2016) observed that interpreters produce more instances of the filled pause uh(m) when the lexical density of their own output is higher. Plevoets & Defrancq (2018) demonstrated that the frequency of uh(m) in interpreting increases when the lexical density of the source text is also higher but it decreases when there are more formulaic sequences. This effect of formulaicity was found in both the source texts and the target texts. Other known obstacles in interpreting, such as the presence of numbers and rate of delivery do not significantly affect the frequency of filled pauses (although source speech delivery rate reached significance in one of the analyses). These results point to the problematic retrieval or access of lexical items as the primary source of cognitive load for interpreters. Finally, in a study of filled pauses occurring between the members of morphological compounds, Defrancq & Plevoets (2018) showed that interpreters produced more uh(m)’s than non-interpreters when the average frequency of the compounds was high as well as when the average frequency of the component members was high. This also demonstrates that lexical retrieval, which is assumed to be easier for more frequent items, is hampered in interpreting. This study critically examines the results of the previous studies by analyzing the effect of another non-lexical parameter on the production of filled pauses in interpreting, viz. syntactic complexity. Subordinating constructions are a well-known predictor of processing cost (cognitive load) in both L1 research (Gordon, Luper & Peterson 1986; Gordon & Luper 1989) and L2 research (Norris & Ortega 2009; Osborne 2011). In interpreting, however, Dillinger (1994) and Setton (1999: 270) did not find strong effects of the syntactic embedding of the source texts on the interpreters’ performance. As a consequence, this paper will take a closer look on syntactic complexity and it will do so by incorporating the number of hypotactic clauses into the analysis. The study is corpus-based and makes use of both a corpus of interpreted language and a corpus of non-mediated speech. The corpus of interpreted language is the EPICG corpus, which is compiled at Ghent University between 2010 and 2013. It consists of French, Spanish and Dutch interpreted speeches in the European Parliament from 2006 until 2008, which are transcribed according to the VALIBEL guidelines (Bachy et al. 2007). For the purposes of this study a sub-corpus of French source speeches and their Dutch interpretations is used, amounting to a total of 140 000 words. This sub-corpus is annotated for lemmas, parts-of-speech and chunks (Van de Kauter et al. 2013), and it is sentence-aligned with WinAlign (SDL Trados WinAlign 2014). The corpus of non-mediated speech is the sub-corpus of political debates of the Spoken Dutch Corpus (Oostdijk 2000). The corpus was compiled between 1998 and 2003, and it is annotated for lemmas and parts-of-speech. The political sub-corpus contains 220 000 words of Netherlandic Dutch and 140 000 words of Belgian Dutch. The data are analysed with a Generalized Additive Mixed-effects Model (Wood 2017) in which the frequency of the disfluency uh(m) is predicted in relation to delivery rate, lexical density, percentage of numbers, formulaicity and syntactic complexity. Delivery rate is measured as the number of words per minute, lexical density as the number of content words per utterance length, percentage of numbers as the numbers of numbers per utterance length and formulaicity as the number of n-grams per utterance length. The new predictor, syntactic complexity, is measured as the number of subordinate clauses per utterance length. Because all five predictors are numeric variables, their effects are modelled with smoothing splines which automatically detect potential nonlinear patterns in the data. The observations are at utterance-level and are nested within the speeches, so the possible between-speech variation is accounted for with a random factor. The preliminary results confirm the hypothesis: while lexical density and formulaicity show similar (positive, resp. negative) effects to what is reported in previous research, the syntactic complexity of the source text is ‘border-significant’ and the syntactic complexity of the target is non-significant. There are some sporadic differences among certain types of subordinate clauses, but the general conclusion is indeed that syntactic complexity is not such a strong trigger of cognitive load in interpreting in comparison to lexically-related factors. That calls for a model of interpreting in which depth of processing plays only a marginal role

Cross-Linguistic Influence in the Bilingual Mental Lexicon: Evidence of Cognate Effects in the Phonetic Production and Processing of a Vowel Contrast.

The present study examines cognate effects in the phonetic production and processing of the Catalan back mid-vowel contrast (/o/-/ɔ/) by 24 early and highly proficient Spanish-Catalan bilinguals in Majorca (Spain). Participants completed a picture-naming task and a forced-choice lexical decision task in which they were presented with either words (e.g., /bɔsk/ "forest") or non-words based on real words, but with the alternate mid-vowel pair in stressed position ((*)/bosk/). The same cognate and non-cognate lexical items were included in the production and lexical decision experiments. The results indicate that even though these early bilinguals maintained the back mid-vowel contrast in their productions, they had great difficulties identifying non-words and real words based on the identity of the Catalan mid-vowel. The analyses revealed language dominance and cognate effects: Spanish-dominants exhibited higher error rates than Catalan-dominants, and production and lexical decision accuracy were also affected by cognate status. The present study contributes to the discussion of the organization of early bilinguals' dominant and non-dominant sound systems, and proposes that exemplar theoretic approaches can be extended to include bilingual lexical connections that account for the interactions between the phonetic and lexical levels of early bilingual individuals

On the automaticity of language processing

People speak and listen to language all the time. Given this high frequency of use, it is often suggested that at least some aspects of language processing are highly overlearned and therefore occur “automatically”. Here we critically examine this suggestion. We first sketch a framework that views automaticity as a set of interrelated features of mental processes and a matter of degree rather than a single feature that is all-or-none. We then apply this framework to language processing. To do so, we carve up the processes involved in language use according to (a) whether language processing takes place in monologue or dialogue, (b) whether the individual is comprehending or producing language, (c) whether the spoken or written modality is used, and (d) the linguistic processing level at which they occur, that is, phonology, the lexicon, syntax, or conceptual processes. This exercise suggests that while conceptual processes are relatively non-automatic (as is usually assumed), there is also considerable evidence that syntactic and lexical lower-level processes are not fully automatic. We close by discussing entrenchment as a set of mechanisms underlying automatization