To dash or to dawdle: verb-associated speed of motion influences eye movements during spoken sentence comprehension

In describing motion events verbs of manner provide information about the speed of agents or objects in those events. We used eye tracking to investigate how inferences about this verb-associated speed of motion would influence the time course of attention to a visual scene that matched an event described in language. Eye movements were recorded as participants heard spoken sentences with verbs that implied a fast (“dash”) or slow (“dawdle”) movement of an agent towards a goal. These sentences were heard whilst participants concurrently looked at scenes depicting the agent and a path which led to the goal object. Our results indicate a mapping of events onto the visual scene consistent with participants mentally simulating the movement of the agent along the path towards the goal: when the verb implies a slow manner of motion, participants look more often and longer along the path to the goal; when the verb implies a fast manner of motion, participants tend to look earlier at the goal and less on the path. These results reveal that event comprehension in the presence of a visual world involves establishing and dynamically updating the locations of entities in response to linguistic descriptions of events

On staying grounded and avoiding Quixotic dead ends

The 15 articles in this special issue on The Representation of Concepts illustrate the rich variety of theoretical positions and supporting research that characterize the area. Although much agreement exists among contributors, much disagreement exists as well, especially about the roles of grounding and abstraction in conceptual processing. I first review theoretical approaches raised in these articles that I believe are Quixotic dead ends, namely, approaches that are principled and inspired but likely to fail. In the process, I review various theories of amodal symbols, their distortions of grounded theories, and fallacies in the evidence used to support them. Incorporating further contributions across articles, I then sketch a theoretical approach that I believe is likely to be successful, which includes grounding, abstraction, flexibility, explaining classic conceptual phenomena, and making contact with real-world situations. This account further proposes that (1) a key element of grounding is neural reuse, (2) abstraction takes the forms of multimodal compression, distilled abstraction, and distributed linguistic representation (but not amodal symbols), and (3) flexible context-dependent representations are a hallmark of conceptual processing

Why Um Helps Auditory Word Recognition: The Temporal Delay Hypothesis

Several studies suggest that speech understanding can sometimes benefit from the presence of filled pauses (uh, um, and the like), and that words following such filled pauses are recognised more quickly. Three experiments examined whether this is because filled pauses serve to delay the onset of upcoming words and these delays facilitate auditory word recognition, or whether the fillers themselves serve to signal upcoming delays in a way which informs listeners' reactions. Participants viewed pairs of images on a computer screen, and followed recorded instructions to press buttons corresponding to either an easy (unmanipulated, with a high-frequency name) or a difficult (visually blurred, low-frequency) image. In all three experiments, participants were faster to respond to easy images. In 50% of trials in each experiment, the name of the image was directly preceded by a delay; in the remaining trials an equivalent delay was included earlier in the instruction. Participants were quicker to respond when a name was directly preceded by a delay, regardless of whether this delay was filled with a spoken um, was silent, or contained an artificial tone. This effect did not interact with the effect of image difficulty, nor did it change over the course of each experiment. Taken together, our consistent finding that delays of any kind help word recognition indicates that natural delays such as fillers need not be seen as ‘signals’ to explain the benefits they have to listeners' ability to recognise and respond to the words which follow them

Ecological expected utility and the mythical neural code

Neural spikes are an evolutionarily ancient innovation that remains nature’s unique mechanism for rapid, long distance information transfer. It is now known that neural spikes sub serve a wide variety of functions and essentially all of the basic questions about the communication role of spikes have been answered. Current efforts focus on the neural communication of probabilities and utility values involved in decision making. Significant progress is being made, but many framing issues remain. One basic problem is that the metaphor of a neural code suggests a communication network rather than a recurrent computational system like the real brain. We propose studying the various manifestations of neural spike signaling as adaptations that optimize a utility function called ecological expected utility

Beyond word frequency: Bursts, lulls, and scaling in the temporal distributions of words

Background: Zipf's discovery that word frequency distributions obey a power law established parallels between biological and physical processes, and language, laying the groundwork for a complex systems perspective on human communication. More recent research has also identified scaling regularities in the dynamics underlying the successive occurrences of events, suggesting the possibility of similar findings for language as well. Methodology/Principal Findings: By considering frequent words in USENET discussion groups and in disparate databases where the language has different levels of formality, here we show that the distributions of distances between successive occurrences of the same word display bursty deviations from a Poisson process and are well characterized by a stretched exponential (Weibull) scaling. The extent of this deviation depends strongly on semantic type -- a measure of the logicality of each word -- and less strongly on frequency. We develop a generative model of this behavior that fully determines the dynamics of word usage. Conclusions/Significance: Recurrence patterns of words are well described by a stretched exponential distribution of recurrence times, an empirical scaling that cannot be anticipated from Zipf's law. Because the use of words provides a uniquely precise and powerful lens on human thought and activity, our findings also have implications for other overt manifestations of collective human dynamics

An architecture for fluid real-time conversational agents: Integrating incremental output generation and input processing

Kopp S, van Welbergen H, Yaghoubzadeh R, Buschmeier H. An architecture for fluid real-time conversational agents: Integrating incremental output generation and input processing. Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces. 2014;8:97-108.Embodied conversational agents still do not achieve the fluidity and smoothness of natural conversational interaction. One main reason is that current system often respond with big latencies and in inflexible ways. We argue that to overcome these problems, real-time conversational agents need to be based on an underlying architecture that provides two essential features for fast and fluent behavior adaptation: a close bi-directional coordination between input processing and output generation, and incrementality of processing at both stages. We propose an architectural framework for conversational agents [Artificial Social Agent Platform (ASAP)] providing these two ingredients for fluid real-time conversation. The overall architectural concept is described, along with specific means of specifying incremental behavior in BML and technical implementations of different modules. We show how phenomena of fluid real- time conversation, like adapting to user feedback or smooth turn-keeping, can be realized with ASAP and we describe in detail an example real-time interaction with the implemented system

Neurophysiological evidence for rapid processing of verbal and gestural information in understanding communicative actions

During everyday social interaction, gestures are a fundamental part of human communication. The communicative pragmatic role of hand gestures and their interaction with spoken language has been documented at the earliest stage of language development, in which two types of indexical gestures are most prominent: the pointing gesture for directing attention to objects and the give-me gesture for making requests. Here we study, in adult human participants, the neurophysiological signatures of gestural-linguistic acts of communicating the pragmatic intentions of naming and requesting by simultaneously presenting written words and gestures. Already at ~150 ms, brain responses diverged between naming and request actions expressed by word-gesture combination, whereas the same gestures presented in isolation elicited their earliest neurophysiological dissociations significantly later (at ~210 ms). There was an early enhancement of request-evoked brain activity as compared with naming, which was due to sources in the frontocentral cortex, consistent with access to action knowledge in request understanding. In addition, an enhanced N400-like response indicated late semantic integration of gesture-language interaction. The present study demonstrates that word-gesture combinations used to express communicative pragmatic intentions speed up the brain correlates of comprehension processes – compared with gesture-only understanding – thereby calling into question current serial linguistic models viewing pragmatic function decoding at the end of a language comprehension cascade. Instead, information about the social-interactive role of communicative acts is processed instantaneously

Seeing Emotion with Your Ears: Emotional Prosody Implicitly Guides Visual Attention to Faces

Interpersonal communication involves the processing of multimodal emotional cues, particularly facial expressions (visual modality) and emotional speech prosody (auditory modality) which can interact during information processing. Here, we investigated whether the implicit processing of emotional prosody systematically influences gaze behavior to facial expressions of emotion. We analyzed the eye movements of 31 participants as they scanned a visual array of four emotional faces portraying fear, anger, happiness, and neutrality, while listening to an emotionally-inflected pseudo-utterance (Someone migged the pazing) uttered in a congruent or incongruent tone. Participants heard the emotional utterance during the first 1250 milliseconds of a five-second visual array and then performed an immediate recall decision about the face they had just seen. The frequency and duration of first saccades and of total looks in three temporal windows ([0–1250 ms], [1250–2500 ms], [2500–5000 ms]) were analyzed according to the emotional content of faces and voices. Results showed that participants looked longer and more frequently at faces that matched the prosody in all three time windows (emotion congruency effect), although this effect was often emotion-specific (with greatest effects for fear). Effects of prosody on visual attention to faces persisted over time and could be detected long after the auditory information was no longer present. These data imply that emotional prosody is processed automatically during communication and that these cues play a critical role in how humans respond to related visual cues in the environment, such as facial expressions