Presentations

Abstract

The central niche for language use is social interaction: this is the context in which language is
learned, most heavily used, and doubtless evolved. Interactive language use has well defined
properties which look strongly universal. Amongst these is turn-taking or the rapid alternation
of speakers. Investigations of turn-taking reveal rather stable temporal parameters, with
alternating short bursts of speech (averaging c. 2 secs), separated by modal gaps of only 200 ms
or less. Given the latencies involved in language production (c. 600 ms for a single word, 1500
ms for a simple clause) this implies an overlap in comprehension and production by the
addressee towards the end of the incoming turn, an implication confirmed by neuroimaging
and other measures. Such multitasking must involve a high cognitive load. Looking at the
development of turn-taking in infancy and childhood, one can see relatively quick responses in
the early months slowing down as ever more complex language has to be crammed into short
turns, with children struggling to meet adult norms even in middle childhood. The intensive
processing required by turn-taking suggests it might be a kind of “fossil” with temporal
properties inherited from our primate ancestors before complex vocal language gradually
developed, filling short turns with increasingly complex structures. A glance across our primate
cousins gives some reasons to think this is a plausible scenario.

Abstract

This paper studies communication among deaf sign language users with highly divergent linguistic backgroun
ds
who have no signed or written language in common. It constitutes the earliest, least conventionalised stages of
improvised communication, called ”cross
-
signing” (Zeshan 2015), as opposed to the semi
-
conventionalised
contact language International Sign (
e.g. Supalla & Webb 1995). The specific focus here is on the evolution of the
shared repertoire amongst signers over several weeks as they co
-
construct meaning across linguistic and
cultural boundaries. We look at two possible factors influencing the selec
tion of expressive forms (cf. Tamariz et
al. 2014): content
-
bias (where the more iconically
-
motivated, and/or easily
-
articulated form is selected) and
coordination
-
bias (where participants attempt to match each other’s usag
e). The data set consists of a 320
-
minute corpus of first encounters between dyads of signers of Nepali Sign Language, Indian Sign Language,
Jordanian Sign Language and Indonesian Sign Language. Recordings took place at the first meeting, after one
week, a
nd after three weeks. The participants vary naturally with regard to their linguistic and international
experience as well as their age of sign language acquisition. In addition to spontaneous conversations, we
collected structured dialogues using a Direct
or
-
Matcher task. In this language elicitation game, the Director has
the coloured images and the Matcher has identical but black and white images alongside a set of colour chips
from which they need to select based on the Director’s descriptions. We coded
and examined the various colour
expressions exploited by the participants. The semantic field of colour was chosen for this investigation into the
evolution of shared communication for two reasons: the visual domain of colour retains sufficient levels of
a
bstraction while affording signers with iconic potential.
Participants initially used a range of strategies, including pointing, articulating signs for common objects with
that colour (e.g. referring to a common iconic sign for ‘tree’ and pointing to the b
ase to mean ‘brown’), and their
own native variants. However, three weeks later these individuals all start using the same forms, e.g. the Indian
signer’s variant for ‘green’ and the Nepali signer’s improvised ‘tree
-
trunk’ variant for ‘brown’. The iconic
m
otivation of the latter and the ease of articulation of the former suggest that the content
-
bias is in play. The
coordination
-
bias also seems influential in the group’s eventual selection of one variant (cf. Tamariz et al. 2014).
We explore these and furth
er factors that may affect the two biases in the selection of forms within our data.
We also consider participants’ meta
-
linguistic skills (Zeshan 2013) and fluency in multiple sign
languages (Byun
et al. in preparation).

Abstract

There is some evidence that systems of minimal response (‘feedback’, ‘back-channel’, ‘reactive tokens’) may vary systematically across speakers of different languages and cultural backgrounds (e.g., Maynard, 1986; Clancy et al., 1996). The questions we address here are these: what is the nature of such differences? And what difference do they make to how do these differences affect the interactional system as a whole? We explore this these questions by looking in detail at conversational data from two languages and cultures: Y ́elˆı Dnye, spoken on Rossel Island (Papua New Guinea), and Tzeltal Mayan, spoken in southern Mexico. The Rossel system is gaze-based, interlocutors tend to maintain a high level of mutual gaze, and a large proportion of feedback signals – many nonverbal – occur during the production of the turn that is being reacted to. Tzeltal speakers, in contrast, practice gaze avoidance, and produce very few visual feedback signals, but instead relying on frequent verbal response signals at the end of each TCU, and an elaborate convention of repeating (parts of) the prior turn to display understanding and agreement. We outline the repertoire of response tokens for each language, illustrate their differential usage, and suggest some consequences of these properties of turn-taking systems for interactional style and for on- line processing

Abstract

Along with complexity, the extent of the variability of human language across social groups is unprecedented in the animal kingdom, and we need to understand how this is possible. An underdetermined innate basis is plausible, but there is no consensus about what it is (other than vocal learning and the vocal apparatus), or how it would make it possible to learn varied languages. An alternative, and potentially complementary, explanation suggests that there is a set of communicative instincts and motivations that together make it possible for the infant to bootstrap into the local language, whatever it may be. Some evidence for this is as follows. First, the organization of informal interactive human communication – the core niche for language use – looks much less variable than languages. Thus all language users in this niche take rapid turns at talking even though the speed of this is highly demanding. Similarly, all users avail themselves of the same mechanisms for repairing miscommunication, and use the same restricted system for building coherent dialogues. Second, long before infants have any linguistic knowledge, they take part in ‘proto-conversations’ that exhibit these same universal organizations. Third, where normal spoken language is not accessible to individuals (as when they are profoundly deaf), they still share the same communicative infrastructure. Finally, there are some signs of phylogenetic parallels in other primates. If this is correct, Darwin’s characterization of language as “an instinct to acquire an art” may have its root in communicative instincts as much as specific instincts about language structure

Abstract

Recent work in the L&C department in MPI Nijmegen has explored the processing implications of the core ecological niche for language learning and use, namely interactive conversation. It turns out that the rapidity of turn-exchange puts extreme requirements on predictive comprehension and speedy production, reflected e.g. in the trouble kids have to approach adult norms. This strong functional pressure must have implications for language typology. But what exactly? This paper explores what we have recently found out about differing processing in different word orders, and the ways in which the tough processing requirements of conversation can be buffered.

Abstract

Within the confines of this mini-plenary I’ll try to sketch how turn-taking may have played a crucial role
in molding the origins and shape of language. First, I’ll run through some of our recent findings that
reveal the intensive cognitive processing that underlies turn-taking – measuring response-timing, gaze,
the acoustics, breathing, and EEG. These findings suggest that the turn-taking system stretches cognitive
processing to the limit. Asking why the system is the way it is, I’ll advance the argument that language as
we now know it may have emerged from the growth of a rich information-encoding system in the context
of an antecedent turn-taking system, so that increasingly complex messages became squeezed into short
turns, with the consequence of extreme compression, inference enrichment of the Gricean kind, tendency
for fixed word orders, etc. Some support for this account can also be found in ontogenetic and
phylogenetic studies of turn-taking.

Abstract

The diversity of languages contrasts with the universality of much of the communicational infrastructure that makes language possible. An important component of this infrastructure is the turn-taking system of conversation, the Stephen Levinsoncore ecological niche for language use. This system puts intense pressure on language processing: cross-linguistically, we mostly respond within 200 milliseconds, even though language encoding takes at least three times as long. It can be shown using many different measures (e.g. response times, breathing, EEG) that we beat the clock by predicting what the other is going to say and starting production as soon as we can. This raises interesting questions about why this system is the way it is, what functional pressures it puts on language structure and language diversity, and how it originated, which I will briefly address. I will argue that the current system can best be understood within an evolutionary context in which the turn-taking system was antecedent to the complexities of modern language so that increasingly complex messages became squeezed into short turns, with the consequence of extreme compression, inference enrichment of the Gricean kind, a tendency for fixed word orders, amongst other things. Some support for this account can be found in ontogenetic and phylogenetic studies of turn-taking which I will briefly review.

Abstract

In spoken interactions, interlocutors carefully plan and time their utterances, minimising gaps and overlaps between consecutive turns.1 Cross-linguistic comparison indicates that spoken languages vary minimally in their turn timing.2 Pre-linguistic vocal turn taking has also been attested in the first six months of life.3 These observations suggest that the turn-taking system provides a universal basis for our linguistic capacities.4 It remains an open question, however, whether precisely-timed turn taking is solely a property of speech. It has previously been argued that, unlike speakers, signers do not attend to the one-at-a-time principle, and instead form a collaborative turn-taking floor with their interlocutors, thus having a higher degree of social tolerance for overlap.5 But recent corpus analyses of Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) have revealed that, although simultaneous signing is more frequent in NGT than overlapping speech in spoken languages, the additional overlap may come as a consequence of having larger and thus slower articulators.6 The beginnings and ends of signed utterances are bookended by preparatory and retractive movements — phonetically necessary articulations that do not add to the interpretation of the utterance.7 When turn timing is calculated on the basis of stroke-to-stroke turn boundaries, NGT turn timing and turn overlap are consistent with documented averages for spoken turn taking.6 This paper presents new experimental evidence supporting the psychological reality of stroke-to-stroke turn boundaries for signers by using an adapted button-press paradigm, originally developed for measuring spoken turn prediction.8 Our results indicate that signers indeed anticipated turn boundaries at the ends of turn-final strokes. These findings are the first to experimentally support the idea that signers use something like stroke-to-stroke turn boundaries to coordinate conversational turns. They also suggest that linguistic processing, represented by participant age and age of acquisition, plays a role in the ability to use precisely-timed turns in conversation.

Abstract

In spontane gesprekken wisselen gebaarders steeds vlug van beurt. Gebarentaalgebruikers moeten daarom steeds op het juiste moment naar de juiste persoon kijken. Hoe voorspellen gebaarders wanneer de beurt gaat wisselen en wie deze overneemt? Wij hebben de eerste vraag onderzocht door verschillende groepen gebarentaalgebruikers (doven en horenden, jong en oud, verschillende regios) te testen. Omdat er in Nijmegen weinig (dove) gebaarders wonen, hebben we dit gedaan in ons lab op wielen: de Gebarenbus.

Abstract

In experimental psycholinguistics, research has focused overwhelmingly on either language comprehension or language production. However, the ultimate goal should be to identify the cognitive mechanisms that occur during the actual use of comprehension and production in everyday life, for example in conversation. Turn-taking (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974) and action-sequencing (Schegloff, 2007) are essential mechanisms in everyday communication, but have not been studied much yet in the domain of experimental psycholinguistics (but see De Ruiter, Mitterer, & Enfield, 2006; Magyari & De Ruiter, 2012; Roberts, Francis, & Morgan, 2006). CA, on the other hand, has focused extensively on these mechanisms, via observing the behavior of conversationalists. To bring these two research domains closer together, in the present study, we aim to look at the cognitive processes that form the foundations for observable turn-taking and action-sequencing behavior in social interaction. We used electroencephalography (EEG), a method that measures electrical brain activity with a very good time resolution, to address this question. In EEG, experimental control is necessary to identify patterns of brain activity related to specific cognitive processes. Using an interactive quiz paradigm in Dutch, we investigated the processes underlying turn-taking in question-answer sequences, while still exerting enough experimental control over both the presented questions and expected answers. Participants were asked quiz questions by a research assistant while their EEG was measured. These questions were in fact pre-recorded, but participants believed they were asked live and they did receive live feedback from the assistant. We compared 'early questions' such as "Which character, also called 007, appears in the famous movies?" in which answer planning could start early in the question (at "007") with matched 'late questions' like "Which character from the famous movies, is also called 007?" in which answer planning could only start at the last word. Reaction times were longer for answers ("James Bond") to late than to early questions. Averaging the EEG signal to the critical word ("007" in the example) in both types of questions, we first see a small N400 effect (Kutas & Hillyard, 1980), a negative effect after about 400 milliseconds, which has been related to processing of unexpected words in a sentence. After this negativity, a large positive effect emerges which appears to be sustained until the response. We tentatively interpret this positivity to reflect a cognitive process associated with the response, such as the retrieval of the answer or the planning of production. These results thus show that in a question-answer sequence, speakers appear to start planning their response immediately when they have enough information to do so. Further results in the domain of brain oscillations and localizations of the effects in the brain will also be discussed. These results imply that cognitive processes might have a different timing than interactional processes. In some cases (as in our 'early questions'), the cognitive processes might be ready while interactionally the answer has to be postponed until the speaker finished speaking, possibly freeing up cognitive resources for a better timing of the response, for example. In other cases, cognitive processes might still be ongoing while the speaker has already finished her turn, for example when the question is difficult, calling for other interactional mechanisms such as the use of fillers. Future studies might employ the patterns of brain activation found to determine the presence and timing of cognitive processes within different types of action-sequences.

Abstract

In order to produce relevant responses in conversation, participants monitor turns at talk for the actions they perform, actions such as requests, offers, complaints, etc. (Schegloff, 2007). However, the link between turn construction and action is not straightforward. Turns at talk do not contain discrete ‘illocutionary force indicators’, and what subtle action cues are available, such as interrogative syntax, can be overridden by top-down factors like epistemic status (Heritage, 2012). Given that utterances are often underspecified for action, how is it that participants recognize actions so efficiently, as evidenced by the extraordinarily fast transitions between turns (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974; Stivers et al., 2009; Levinson, 2013)? As the first step in investigating the cognitive underpinnings of action recognition in conversation, we conducted Event-Related Potential (ERP) experiments using short scripted dialogues in Dutch. The excellent time resolution of ERPs allows us to track listeners’ brain responses as utterances unfold. The critical utterances were assertions (e.g., “I have a credit card”) produced in three sequential environments, affording different ascriptions of the action; as an answer to a question, as an indirect rejection, or as a pre-offer. In each case the assertion is used as a vehicle for some other action, and it is “part of competent membership in the society/culture and being a competent interactant to analyze assertions of this sort for what (else) they may be doing at this moment, at this juncture of the interaction, in this specific sequential context” (Schegloff, 2007, p. 35). We tapped into this competence by exploring the time-course of action recognition, using the following rationale: If comprehension at the action level takes place early in the incoming utterance, enabling quick turn transitions, we should find ERP differences between the actions at the first word or the verb. On the other hand, if action comprehension requires analysis of the complete utterance, ERP effects are expected to predominantly occur at the final word. The results indicate that recipients tune in to the action of an utterance as early as 400 ms after first word onset. However, the time-course of speech act comprehension depends on the specific action. Rejections elicit an ERP effect at the first word and the verb, but not at the final word. We take this to show that when the utterance is a second pair part in an adjacency pair sequence – as was the case in the rejections – recipients seem to recognize the action before the final word, even though the final word is a critical part of the propositional content. The pre-offers, on the other hand, do elicit an ERP component at the end of the utterance, suggesting that analysis of the entire turn is needed to understand the action. These findings indicate that utterance interpretation is sensitive to specific actions and how they are organized in sequences. By bridging conversation analysis and neuropragmatics we have come one step closer to understanding language comprehension in its natural habitat, where action is omnirelevant (Schegloff, 1995).

Abstract

The insight that language and other social behavior should be analyzed sequentially – unit-by-unit, turn-by-turn, action-by-action – is arguably the central methodological innovation of conversation analysis. The force of this insight motivated early investigations into the sequential organization of phenomena such as laughter (Jefferson et al. 1977), jokes (Sacks 1974a, 1978), and story-telling (Sacks 1974b; Jefferson 1978). Although sequentiality is a general concern in all conversation-analytic research, it has been the primary object of study in a line of work on one specific form of sequence organization, the adjacency pair (Schegloff 1968, 1972, 1980, 1988, 2007; Schegloff and Sacks 1973). An adjacency pair is a sequential structure of two actions, produced by two participants, where the second action is contingent upon and normatively obliged by the production of the first (e.g., greeting-greeting, question-answer, request-acceptance/rejection). Though not all courses of action are organized through adjacency pairs, adjacency pairs are used to manage many basic social and communicative contingencies, including the transfer of goods, services, and information (offers, requests, statements, questions), and the initiation and termination of social encounters (openings, closings), among others (Schegloff and Sacks 1973).
The rich tradition of research on the adjacency pair and its organization has been based almost exclusively on audio and video recordings of social interaction made in the U.S. and U.K. Psychologists warn us that research on WEIRD people, that is, people form Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies, may not generalize beyond this niche of outliers to the species as a whole (Henrich et al. 2010). While previous comparative research gives us reason to suspect that, unlike some psychological experiments, the core findings of conversation analysis successfully generalize beyond Anglo-American culture (see, e.g., Sidnell 2007, 2009; Stivers et al. 2009; Dingemanse and Floyd, in press), the linguistic and cultural universality of sequence organization remains an open question.
In this talk, we report on a collaborative investigation of sequence organization in 12 languages from distinct linguistic stocks and different geographical areas. We begin with a basic empirical question: Is sequence organization, as described by Schegloff (2007), universal? To answer this, we draw on video recordings of everyday social interaction made in fieldsites across the globe, with speakers of the following languages: ǂAkhoe Haiǀǀom (Khoisan; Namibia), Cha’palaa (Barbacoan; Ecuador), English (Germanic; U.S. and U.K.), Italian (Romance; Italy), Japanese (Japonic; Japan), LSA (sign language; Argentina), Mandarin Chinese (Sinitic; Taiwan), Siwu (Kwa; Ghana), Turkmen (Turkic; Turkmenistan), Tzeltal (Mayan; Mexico), Yélî Dnye (isolate; Papua New Guinea), and Yurakaré (isolate; Bolivia).
With the model of sequence organization in English as our point of departure (Schegloff 2007), we examine the structures that the speakers of these languages use to construct courses of action – unit-by-unit, turn-by-turn, action-by-action. While the primary object of study is the adjacency pair and its systematic expansion (Schegloff 2007; Levinson 2013), we also explore culture-specific forms of action-sequencing, such as the proliferation of repetitional post-expansions in Tzeltal, which can span six turns or more, and “broadcasting” in ǂAkhoe Haiǀǀom, in which speakers produce multi-unit tellings that neither occasion displays of recipiency nor solicit responses from those around them.
The results of our preliminary investigation reveal that all languages in the sample make use of the basic machinery of the adjacency pair and its expansion. In each language, we observe not only base adjacency pair sequences, but also pre-expansions, insert expansions, and post-expansions, as well as subtypes of these (see Schegloff 2007). The occurrence of these structures across a diverse sample of unrelated languages and cultures leads us to conclude that the structures do not belong to “language” or “culture” per se, but rather to a universal infrastructure for social interaction, an interaction engine (Levinson 2006) that all humans and human societies have in common and for which precursors may even be found among our nearest cousins, the apes (Rossano 2013). In agreement with Schegloff (2006), we propose that these structures emerge as solutions to recurrent socio-interactional problems, which are themselves basic to human sociality.

Abstract

This talk will focus on a central property of interactional uses of language, namely turn-taking, and show how this has major implications for language processing. I’ll sketch how the PI Group ‘Interactional Foundations of Language’ is exploring these issues, using insights arising from many different domains (prosody, breathing, gaze, cross-linguistic and cross-modal studies, human development) and many different methods (corpus studies, perception experiments, eyetracking, brain imaging). I’ll outline an interim model of how we think it all works, and (time-permitting) broach some implications for language typology, and ask where such a system comes from.

Abstract

The path-breaking paper by Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson (1974) on turn-taking was a crucial foundation stone in the establishment of CA: turn-taking gives conversation its essential character and its analysis can be exploited to shed light on 101 further topics. Despite continuing work by a handful of scholars, we have thus learnt to take the phenomenon largely for granted. But recent work now shows just how extraordinary the turn - taking phenomenon is from a cognitive perspective, and makes clear that there is still a great deal to be explained about how the system actually works in detail (e.g. how turn-ends are actually projected). In this paper,drawing on the joint work of our MPI Nijmegen research project, I will bring many different avenues of investigation – from human development, the phonetics of breathing and intonation, psycholog ical experimentation, brain -imaging and cross -cultural and cross -linguistic perspectives –to bear on the underlying issues about how the system works in real time. One central psycholinguistic puzzle is that speech encoding is very slow, but turn -transition very fast, implying much more extensive projection than had been commonly imagined. These different lines of investigation also hint at a phylogenetically ancient interactive system that may have played a central role in the evolution of language.

Abstract

Dediu and Levinson (2013) argue that Neandertals had essentially modern language and speech, and that they were in genetic contact with the ancestors of modern humans during our dispersal out of Africa. This raises the possibility of cultural and linguistic contact between the two human lineages. If such contact did occur, then it might have influenced the cultural evolution of the languages. Since the genetic traces of contact with Neandertals are limited to the populations outside of Africa, Dediu & Levinson predict that there may be structural differences between the present-day languages derived from languages in contact with Neanderthals, and those derived from languages that were not influenced by such contact. Since the signature of such deep contact might reside in patterns of features, they suggested that machine learning methods may be able to detect these differences. This paper attempts to test this hypothesis and to estimate particular linguistic features that are potential candidates for carrying a signature of Neandertal languages.

Abstract

In this talk we suggest that the constraints on language processing and planning imposed by the structuring of interaction into turns at talk can affect the evolution of structural features of languages, such as basic word order. Speakers strive to reduce gaps and overlap between turns at talk (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974). Indeed, most gaps between turns are shorter than the minimum reaction time from planning to speak to actually speaking, suggesting that speakers project turn endings, and begin planning responses before the previous turn has ended. Recent research has demonstrated variation in the timing of turn-taking between speakers of different languages (Stivers et al., 2009). There is also variation between languages in the structure of individual turns, such as the basic order of subject, object and verb. There may be links between these two phenomena (Schegloff, 1996), mediated by the speaker’s planning of an utterance or the listener’s projection of the utterance. For instance, in Japanese, the verb appears at the end of an utterance, making projection difficult for the listener (Tanaka, 2000). Interestingly, the shortest average gaps occur for a verb-initial language (Tzeltal), which should make planning for the speaker difficult. We take a cultural evolutionary approach to this puzzle. If the basic timing of turn-taking is a fundamental principle of human languages (Levinson, 2006), then linguistic structures may have adapted to the constraints of turn-taking. For example, if the verb provides the syntactic frame for a sentence, then its position in the sentence might adapt to several pressures: verbs in final position give speakers more time to plan the most complex component of the turn; verbs in initial position allow recipients to project the shape of the turn relatively early. If speakers use the same configuration in a sequence of turns, then the amount of time for planning between each turn is optimised – what we call the principle of symmetry. Another constraint is that verbs in medial position are less vulnerable to overlap on the margins of the turn. We present a cultural evolutionary model as a proof of this concept. While many explanations of the origins and structure of language focus on constraints on individual cognition, this hypothesis suggests that constraints of interaction between individuals can also shape the distribution of structural features that we observe in the world’s languages.

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

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

Abstract

Recent work in semantic and syntactic typology reinforces the idea that most of the structure of languages and especially the patterned variation across them is cultural rather than innate. This leaves somewhat unexplained why humans have languages of a kind that other species don’t. The explanation, I’ll argue, is that there is a rich underlying universal infrastructure of communicational abilities that must fundamentally affect the way languages are organized. I’ll review two aspects of this infrastructure: turn-taking and speech act coding and explore how this communication perspective might have substantial consequences for how we think about language structure.

Abstract

This paper begins from the observation that human communication systems are unique in the animal world in varying on every level of form and meaning across social groups. There are some 7000 languages, each differing in sound systems, syntax, word formation and meaning distinctions. New information about the range of diversity and its historical origins has undercut the view that language diversity is tightly constrained by “universal grammar” or a language-specialized faculty or mental module. Instead languages seem rather to be historical accretions of finely honed practices, the product of cultural evolution and diversification over millennia.

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.

Abstract

Action in interaction Since the core matrix for language use is interaction, the main job of language is not to express propositions or abstract meanings, but to deliver actions. For in order to respond in interaction we have to ascribe to the prior turn a primary ‘action’ – variously thought of as an ‘illocution’, ‘speech act’, ‘move’, etc. – to which we then respond. The analysis of interaction also relies heavily on attributing actions to turns, so that, e.g., sequences can be characterized in terms of actions and responses. Yet the process of action ascription remains way understudied. We don’t know much about how it is done, when it is done, nor even what kind of inventory of possible actions might exist, or the degree to which they are culturally variable. The study of action ascription remains perhaps the primary unfulfilled task in the study of language use, and it needs to be tackled from conversationanalytic,psycholinguistic, cross-linguistic and anthropological perspectives. In this talk I try to take stock of what we know, and derive a set of goals for and constraints on an adequate theory. Such a theory is likely to employ, I will suggest, a top-down plus bottom-up account of action perception, and a multi-level notion of action which may resolve some of the puzzles that have repeatedly arisen.

Abstract

Linguistic diversity and the 'interaction engine'. In this lecture I argue that our new insights into linguistic diversity require a rethink about the foundations of language. In the first part of the lecture, I outline why strong theories of language universals now look untenable. Combining typological and phylogenetic data suggests that languages are largely structured by cultural evolution, rather than a specific ‘language instinct’. In the second part, I turn to the implications: What then is the nature of the human endowment for language? I argue that there is a substantial infrastructure for language, which is distinct from language itself, and strongly universal, the ‘interaction engine’ of the title. The infrastructure involves speech capacities of course (vocal learning, vocal apparatus), intention-recognition systems (the pragmatics of Gricean meaningnn), and ethological properties of communicative interaction (turn-taking, structured interaction sequences, multimodal signals, etc.). A working hypothesis is that this base, together with general (non-language-specialized) properties of human cognition, provides enough foundation for infants to bootstrap into their local cultural linguistic tradition.

Abstract

The language sciences are about to undergo dramatic changes. The cognitive sciences have taken their object of enquiry to be the characterization of The Human Mind, and the language sciences have focused on the characterization of The Language Instinct, or Universal Grammar. This abstraction away from variation and diversity is now significantly inhibiting research – after all, diversity at all levels is a unique feature of our communication system compared to all other species. Further, the universals which have been the goal of linguistic research have evaporated in the face of increasing information about linguistic diversity and language change. The alternative Darwinian paradigm embraces the new facts about cognitive and linguistic diversity, viewing variation as the fuel for evolution, and adopts a diachronic perspective in which we can ask about the relative roles of biological and cultural evolution and their interaction. New findings suggest that language diversity is largely a product of cultural evolution under the constraints of general cognitive capacities rather than being tightly constrained by either Universal Grammar or Greenbergian universals.

Abstract

How are the senses structured by the languages we speak, the cultures we inhabit? To what extent is the encoding of perceptual experiences in languages a matter of how the mind/brain is “wired-up” and to what extent is it a question of local cultural preoccupation? The “Language of Perception” project tests the hypothesis that some perceptual domains may be more “ineffable” – i.e. difficult or impossible to put into words – than others. While cognitive scientists have assumed that proximate senses (olfaction, taste, touch) are more ineffable than distal senses (vision, hearing), anthropologists have illustrated the exquisite variation and elaboration the senses achieve in different cultural milieus. The project is designed to test whether the proximate senses are universally ineffable – suggesting an architectural constraint on cognition – or whether they are just accidentally so in Indo-European languages, so expanding the role of cultural interests and preoccupations. To address this question, a standardized set of stimuli of color patches, geometric shapes, simple sounds, tactile textures, smells and tastes have been used to elicit descriptions from speakers of more than twenty languages—including three sign languages. The languages are typologically, genetically and geographically diverse, representing a wide-range of cultures. The communities sampled vary in subsistence modes (hunter-gatherer to industrial), ecological zones (rainforest jungle to desert), dwelling types (rural and urban), and various other parameters. We examine how codable the different sensory modalities are by comparing how consistent speakers are in how they describe the materials in each modality. Our current analyses suggest that taste may, in fact, be the most codable sensorial domain across languages, followed closely by visual phenomena, such as colour and shape. Olfaction appears to be the least codable across cultures. Nevertheless, we have identified exquisite elaboration in the olfactory domains in some cultural settings, contrary to some contemporary predictions within the cognitive sciences. These 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.

Abstract

How are the senses structured by the languages we speak, the cultures we inhabit? To what extent is the encoding of perceptual experiences in languages a matter of how the mind/brain is ―wired-up‖ and to what extent is it a question of local cultural preoccupation? The ―Language of Perception‖ project tests the hypothesis that some perceptual domains may be more ―ineffable‖ – i.e. difficult or impossible to put into words – than others. While cognitive scientists have assumed that proximate senses (olfaction, taste, touch) are more ineffable than distal senses (vision, hearing), anthropologists have illustrated the exquisite variation and elaboration the senses achieve in different cultural milieus. The project is designed to test whether the proximate senses are universally ineffable – suggesting an architectural constraint on cognition – or whether they are just accidentally so in Indo-European languages, so expanding the role of cultural interests and preoccupations. To address this question, a standardized set of stimuli of color patches, geometric shapes, simple sounds, tactile textures, smells and tastes have been used to elicit descriptions from speakers of more than twenty languages—including three sign languages. The languages are typologically, genetically and geographically diverse, representing a wide-range of cultures. The communities sampled vary in subsistence modes (hunter-gatherer to industrial), ecological zones (rainforest jungle to desert), dwelling types (rural and urban), and various other parameters. We examine how codable the different sensory modalities are by comparing how consistent speakers are in how they describe the materials in each modality. Our current analyses suggest that taste may, in fact, be the most codable sensorial domain across languages. Moreover, we have identified exquisite elaboration in the olfactory domains in some cultural settings, contrary to some contemporary predictions within the cognitive sciences. These 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.

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.