Presentations

Abstract

In psycholinguistic experiments on language processing, researchers have traditionally focused on either comprehension or production. However, real-life, communicative language use happens most often in an interactive setting, involving rapid turn-taking between interlocutors. In such a setting, listening to a turn probably overlaps with preparing an answer to this turn. In the current EEG experiment, participants answered quiz questions, asked by the experimenter. Unknowingly to participants, these questions were pre-recorded, while the experimenter gave live feedback on participants’ answers. Questions appeared in two different conditions. Participants could confidently guess the answer to the question either halfway through the question (e.g., "Which character, also known as James Bond, appears in the famous movies?"), or only when they heard the last word(s) (e.g., "Which character, who appears in the famous movies, is also known as James Bond?"). ERP results showed a small N400 effect, followed by a large positivity at the moment within the question that the answer started to become apparent (the critical point). In the frequency domain, an alpha/mu desynchronization effect was found, starting within 500 milliseconds after the critical point. A follow-up control-experiment in which participants only listened to the questions and tried to remember them, showed a qualitatively similar pattern in the ERPs, but with a larger N400 and a smaller positivity. The alpha/mu desynchronization effect was absent or at least very much redu ced. We tentatively interpret the alpha/mu desynchronization from the main experiment as a signal of response preparation, starting quickly after an appropriate response can be retrieved

Abstract

Combining data from two longitudinal studies of young children, we track the development of turn-timing in spontaneous infant-caregiver interactions. We focus on three aspects of timing: overlap, gap, and delay marking. We find evidence for early development of turn-timing skills, in-line with the Interaction Engine Hypothesis. (see attached .pdf for our 2-page abstract)

Abstract

This presentation will report on the findings of a large-scale comparative project on other-initiated repair in 12 languages, representing major and minor languages of Europe, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Australia, South America, and Papua New Guinea (and including a sign language). This comparative project is based on a multilanguage corpus of video-recorded interaction in informal settings in homes and villages, among family and friends. Building on findings from qualitative work, a research team in the "Interactional Foundations of Language" Project at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen has developed a detailed coding scheme for the systematic comparison of other-initiated repair sequences across languages. These languages belong to different language families, have different typological profiles, and are spoken by members of distinctly different cultures. Despite the diversity of languages and cultures represented, the findings of this study show a striking set of commonalities in the sequential and formal organization of other-initiated repair. This lends some support to an ''interactional infrastructure'' hypothesis, which suggests that interactional structures are more likely to be universal than lexico-grammatical structures. At the same time, however, we also observe differences across the languages in how the common system of possibilities for other-initiated repair is used: for example, while most if not all languages allow speakers to use both an interjection ("Huh?") and a WH-word ("What?") strategy for ''open-class other-initiation of repair'', the relative frequency of these strategies varies, with English showing quite common use of ''What?'' for this function, but with many other languages almost exclusively using a ''Huh?'' strategy. The presentation will summarize and explain findings of the coding study, with reference not only to the different strategies available for other-initiation of repair, but also the kinds of repair operations that can be carried out as a function of the choice of repair initiator. There will also be some discussion of the relevance of these results to our understanding of the cultural status of rights and responsibilities in the domain of social agency.

Abstract

To develop into competent communicators infants need to learn to appropriately time their turns in social interaction. Few studies have assessed the actual timing of turn-taking in infant development and debate continues about whether infants actively contribute to the turn-taking. In order to assess whether changes in infants’ vocal turntaking abilities as they get older are really attributable to infants’ improving skills, we analyzed video recordings of 12 mother-infant dyads in free-play interactions longitudinally at 12 and 18 months. Findings indicate that in the first half of the second year of life infants become more skilled in taking turns in vocal exchanges, as evidenced by decreasing onset times of their turns as well as a decrease in the percentage of onsets produced in overlap with their mothers. These changes are not explained by the mothers providing more opportunities to their infants to take their turn. The mean number of utterances produced by the mother did not differ significantly at 12 and 18 months, mothers did not shorten their utterances, nor did they increase the pauses between their consecutive turns. We therefore conclude that infants play an active part in vocal turn-taking exchanges with their mothers and its developmental progress.

Abstract

The theory of evolution is “unreasonably effective” (in Wigner’s terms) in that it seems to apply to both biological evolution and cultural change -- domains that might seem completely unrelated. Nowhere is this parallelism clearer than in the domain of language, where there is both an evolved biological basis for language and processes of cultural evolution that lie behind the diversification of languages. Language is clearly a bio-cultural hybrid -- we are biologically equipped for language in general, but inherit the specific cultural form of the languages in which we are socialized. This symposium explores the genetic foundations of language, the phylogenetic patterns of cultural diversification in language, and the ongoing interplay between biological and cultural evolution. Individual papers will address the relation between linguistic ability, brain, and genes; the biological basis for communicative interaction; the phylogenetic patterns in language diversification both in form and content; the effects of population genetics on language diversification; and the case of village sign languages: the interplay between genetics and language type. The papers suggest that one reason that evolutionary theory applies so well to both biological and cultural phenomena is that the two are intertwined and in ongoing interaction. Organizer: Stephen C. Levinson, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Co-Organizer: Karen Emmorey, Ph.D., San Diego State University Discussant: Dan Dediu, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Speakers: Simon E. Fisher, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Language, Evolution, and the Genomics Revolution Russell Gray, University of Auckland Evolutionary Principles and the Diversification of Linguistic Form Carol Padden, University of California Culture Before Genes: The Case of a Village Sign Language

Abstract

de novo languages – only sign languages: village sign languages & home sign How do you build a language from the ground up? Is there a ‘starting base’? If so, what is it? What elements get innovated in what order, and why? How quickly does system get imposed? For real language isolates like village sign systems, what apogee of structure is got in c. 5-7 generations? Strand (1) from gesture to home sign (seeding of sign, iconicity, single generation…)Strand (2) village sign languages (5+ generations, small demography, 2nd L signers…, effects of local gesture systems)Strand (3) urban community sign languages with recent take-off (large demography, connections to other sign languages, systematic exploitation of the manual medium) Strand (4) genes & language: feedback relations

Abstract

Supplementary material: Stephen C. Levinson's keynote lecture, "Exploring language diversity: Wohin?", as recorded (05-06-2013) and broadcast (25-09-2013) by DRadio Wissen. * To save and/or listen to the mp3 file: please right-click on the link, and select the 'Save Link As...' option. * Source: http://www.dradiowissen.de/ Length: 45 min.

Abstract

The properties that make our species special, namely language, technology and culture, are all ‘bio-cultural hybrids’ interweaving biology (e.g. anatomy of vocal tract and hand, cooperative instincts) and cultural diversity. But at the birth of the cognitive sciences a radical idealization was made, namely the assumption of THE human mind, a singular system shared by all humans. This idealization, useful at the time, now hampers the understanding of our species, whose success is predicated on diverse cultural adaptations. This paper will illustrate how in the language domain, different languages require different algorithms served by different neural networks, yielding differing minds and brains.

Abstract

This paper approaches the issues surrounding the relationship between language and music tangentially, by arguing that the language sciences have largely misconstrued the nature of their object of study – when language is correctly repositioned as a quite elaborate cultural superstructure resting on two biological columns as it were, the relationship to music looks rather different.

Abstract

This paper addresses the phenomenon of single turns, even single turn-constructional units, that perform multiple speech acts or social actions. The paper reviews the main approaches - ''indirect speech acts'' as treated in linguistic pragmatics, and the ''vehicle'' approach as in conversation analysis - and argues that both of these are inadequate. Instead a solution is sought in the hierarchical nature of action planning, and it is shown that this approach sheds considerable light on multi-action turns. The simplest cases involve pre-sequences, but more complex cases involving extended ''projects'' by participants are also reviewed. It seems that there is no principled limit to the number of actions that a single turn-construcional unit can perform - certainly cases of up to four such actions can be found. The implications for speech act theory and conversation analysis are spelled out.

Abstract

Recursion has become a lamp for the linguistic moths – it has become an obsession far from the centre of what linguistics should be focused on. It plays a limited role in the structure of many languages, indefinite recursion is of course never actually displayed, and what is exemplified could therefore always be modeled in practice by finite state devices. There are many more central puzzles to focus on, like the diverse specific structures mapped on strings, rather than the mechanisms that generate unstructured string-sets. Embedded clauses have been the main focus of interest, but it is noteworthy that (a) many languages offer very limited embedding possibilities; (b) some which do have embedding effectively cap embedding at one deep; (c) almost any such embeddings can be paraphrased by parataxis (strings of adjoined clauses as in veni, vidi, vici). Parataxis is why many languages can lack embedded clauses of different kinds without any loss of expressive power: the expressive power is always present in the pragmatics whether or not it is there in the syntax. To make the point that expressive power lies in the pragmatics, I’ll examine centre-embedding in interactive discourse. Centre-embedding has the virtue that it is easily distinguished from parataxis – which is not the case for edge-recursion in many languages. Centre-embedding in clauses is effectively capped at two deep in all spoken languages (very occasionally three deep in written), apparently by memory and parsing limitations. But centre-embedding in interactive discourse can break this barrier, and does so routinely. The explanation for this is actually unclear, but the phenomenon would seem to show the advantages of distributed cognition. Rather than thinking of recursion as the performance-limited “externalization” of an individual competence, the discourse phenomena suggest that interactive language usage, where centre-embedding is hyper-trophied, is the natural home base and the ultimate source of complex recursion in the grammatical system.