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

Ken Hale argued forcefully that linguistic diversity provides a crucial resource for linguistics. If we take this lesson seriously, this diversity provides the opportunity to recast the language sciences in a Darwinian mold — for we are the only species whose communication system differs fundamentally across social groups in both form and meaning. Starting from work by myself and colleagues in Island Melanesia, I argue that the patterns of diversity can be understood almost entirely in terms of cultural evolution over deep time. Language universals — understood as constraints specific to the language capacity — do not seem to strongly constrain these patterns: Absolute universals are almost always confronted by counterevidence, and Greenbergian statistical universals also turn out to be less robust than presumed. The puzzle that then arises is what exactly endows humans and humans alone with the language capacity? I argue that humans share an innate infrastructure for language which is largely pragmatic and ethological in character: the capacity for vocal learning, multimodal signaling, turn-taking, and especially intention-recognition. These capacities allow infants to bootstrap themselves into the local language. I suggest that the future for the language sciences involves embracing the diversity, and exploring how on the one hand one species can support such a diverse range of communication systems, and how conversely, within a speech community, internal variation can be damped down to produce relative uniformity.

Abstract

The language sciences are currently non-Darwinian for a range of historical reasons, but the most important is that theory has been dominated by the paradigm inherited from the birth of the Cognitive Sciences in the 1950s. In that paradigm, language is viewed as largely invariant algebraic system running on an innate symbol manipulation machine, whose origin is (more or less) an evolutionary freak. This paradigm ignores a key property of human language: it is the only known animal communication system that varies in form and meaning across social groups. Meanwhile empirical work on the languages of the world has accumulated to a point where a paradigm change is clearly necessary. The recent work points to linguistic diversity at every level, with family resemblances largely accounted for by common cultural descent. Exceptionless universals of language now seem vanishingly rare. If cultural evolution accounts for language diversity, what accounts for the common core and the universal use of language across the species? I'll argue that humans are endowed with an 'interaction engine', a shared foundation for communicative interaction which bootstraps infants into the local language tradition, and which no doubt has deep phylogenetic roots.

Abstract

Why is it that language is good at describing certain states of affairs (e.g., the kinship relation between me and my grandfather), but very limited in others (e.g., describing smells)? Ineffability – the difficulty or impossibility of putting certain experiences into words – is a topic that has been relatively neglected within the cognitive sciences. But limits on the ability to express sensorial experiences in words can tell us important things about how the mind works, how different modalities do or do not talk to one another, and how language does, or does not, interact with other mental faculties. This talk presents the results of a large-scale cross-linguistic investigation of how different perceptual domains are coded across languages and cultures. Speakers from more than a dozen languages – including three sign-languages – were asked to describe a standardized set of stimuli of color patches, geometric shapes, simple sounds, tactile textures, smells and tastes. The languages are typologically, genetically and geographically diverse, representing a wide-range of cultures. We examine how codable the different sensory modalities are by comparing how consistent speakers are in how they describe the materials in each modality. The results suggest that differential codability may be at least partly the result of cultural preoccupation. This shows that the senses are not just physiological phenomena but are constructed through linguistic, cultural and social practices.