ILCB

Prosodic phrasing and ambiguity resolution as revealed by brain potentials by Karsten Steinhauer
2013-05-24 16:00 - 17:30 (Europe/Paris) | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Prosodic phrasing and ambiguity resolution as revealed by brain potentials by Karsten Steinhauer (McGill University, School of Communication Sciences & Disorders, Montréal)
Prosodic phrasing has a major impact on our interpretation of utterances. For example, the sentence ""Mary said Peter's brother was the nicest girl at the party"" results in confusion, unless it is presented with prosodic boundaries before and after ""said Peter's brother"". Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) provide an excellent tool to investigate the temporal dynamics of language processing in real-time. In the domain of prosody, distinct ERP components immediately reflect both the processing of prosodic boundaries as well as the subsequent integration of prosody with other types of linguistic information. In my talk, I will give an overview of this research area. After a brief introduction to ERPs, I will review a number of auditory and visual ERP studies and address questions such as: How much time does our brain need to take advantage of prosodic cues? When do children's brains learn to use this information? Does prosodic information play a role during silent reading? Are the brain mechanisms underlying prosodic phrasing in speech comparable to those involved in musical phrasing? How do we integrate multiple (conflicting) boundaries within the same utterance?

Sonifying handwriting movements for the diagnosis and the rehabilitation of movement disorders by Jérémy DANNA
2013-04-12 16:00 - 18:00 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Sonifying handwriting movements for the diagnosis and the rehabilitation of movement disorders by Jérémy DANNA (BLRI)
Except for the slight scratching of the pen, handwriting is a silent activity. Transforming it into an audible activity might sound curious. However, because audition is particularly appropriate for the perception of fine temporal and dynamical differences, using sounds to gain information about handwriting movements seems judicious. We use the sonification that consists in adding synthetic sounds to silent movements in order to provide support for information processing activities. The idea is to associate a melodious sound, which flows, to a fluent handwriting, and a dissonant sound, which squeaks, to a jerky handwriting. By sonifying the relevant variables of handwriting in dysgraphic children or in Parkinsonian patients, it could be possible to detect their handwritings troubles 'by ear' only.

My talk will be organized in two parts. First, I will expose an experiment showing that adding relevant auditory information is sufficient for discriminating the handwriting of dysgraphic children and the skilled handwriting of proficient children 'by ear' only. I will also present an experiment in progress in which real-time auditory feedback are supplied to help dysgraphic children to improve their handwriting movements. Secondly, I will present the BLRI project that consists in using computerized analysis and sonification of handwriting movements for the early diagnosis of Parkinson Disease.

Runt yak wahoo : baboon speak by Caralyn KEMP
2013-04-12 16:00 - 17:30 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Runt yak wahoo : baboon speak by Caralyn KEMP (BLRI)
Primates vocalise to maintain contact with conspecifics, warn of predators, alert group members to food and to advertise territory, sexual availability and size, but we know surprisingly little about how and why these calls are produced. Can they be varied and is this context dependent? Are these calls vocal responses to emotional states or can they be produced voluntarily? How does the production of these calls compare to human speech? Studying these questions not only helps us to understand what our closest relatives are saying, but also helps us to understand the evolution of our own speech. As part of a larger study considering these questions, I am examining the vocalisations of a captive group of Guinea baboons at the Primate Cognition and Behavior Platform in Rousset. The main goal of this aspect of the project is to produce a large-scale database in order to 1) characterise the vocal repertoire of this baboon species, 2) determine the acoustic features of the vocalisations, and 3) test the descriptive adequacy of existing categories. Determining the precise repertoire of baboon vocalisations will allow us to specify the 'acoustic space' that the vocal track of baboons can produce and how this compares to human vowel production. Taking into consideration the social context in which these vocalisations are produced and how specific situations alter vocal production, we aim to determine whether the baboons are capable of producing these calls voluntarily.

Speech perception across the adult lifespan with clinically normal hearings by Christian FULLGRABE
2013-04-05 16:00 - 18:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Speech perception across the adult lifespan with clinically normal hearings by Christian FULLGRABE (MRC Institute of Hearing Research, Nottingham, UK)
Subjective reports suggest that older listeners experience increased listening difficulties in noisy environments, and experimental investigations seem to confirm this age-dependent deficit. However, older persons are generally unaware of their peripheral hearing status (i.e., the presence of a hearing loss) and most published studies used lax audiometric inclusion criteria. Hence, lower speech intelligibility could, at least partially, be explained by a reduction in audibility with age. Also, most aging studies limited their age comparison to groups of ""young"" (e.g. ≤ 30 years) and ""older"" listeners (e.g. ≥ 60 years), making it impossible to pinpoint the onset of the putative age effect. This talk will present two cross-sectional investigations of central age effects on speech perception, using participants with clinically normal hearing. Performance on supra-threshold temporal-processing and a battery of cognitive tasks (including tests of processing speed, working memory and attention) was assessed, and compared with speech identification in quiet and in different (steady and fluctuating) background noises. To determine when during adulthood a decline with age in these abilities first becomes apparent, participants were sampled continuously from the entire adult age range (18-91 years). Despite a large individual variability, the results show an age-dependent decline in speech identification, especially above 70 years. Sensitivity to temporal information and cognitive performance deteriorated as early as middle age, and both correlated with speech-in-noise perception.

Simplicity and Expressivity Compete in Cultural Evolution : Linguistic Structure is the Result by Simon KIRBY
2013-02-15 11:00 - 13:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Simplicity and Expressivity Compete in Cultural Evolution : Linguistic Structure is the Result by Simon KIRBY (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Language, like other human behaviours, exhibits striking systematic structure. For example, two central design features of human language are the way in which sentences are composed of recombinable words, and the way in which those words in turn are created out of combinations of reusable sounds. These properties make language unique among communication systems and enable us to convey an open-ended array of messages.

Recently, researchers have turned to cultural evolution as a possible mechanism to explain systematic structure such as this in language. In this talk, I will briefly present a series of experiments and a computational model that demonstrate why this is a promising avenue for research. Using diffusion chain methods in the laboratory, we can observe how behaviour evolves as it is transmitted through repeated cycles of learning and production (a process known as ""iterated learning""). Across a wide range of experimental contexts, we observe an apparent universal: behaviour transmitted by iterated learning becomes increasingly compressible. When combined with a pressure to also be expressive, this may be sufficient to deliver up the structural design features of language.

Although this work is focussed on human language as a test case, the conclusions are quite general. Cultural transmission by iterated learning is an adaptive process that delivers systematic structure for free.

Decomposition makes things worse: A discrimination learning approach to the time course of understanding compounds in reading by Harald Baayen
2013-02-15 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Decomposition makes things worse: A discrimination learning approach to the time course of understanding compounds in reading by (Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen, Allemagne)
The current literature on morphological processing is dominated by the view that reading a complex word is a two-staged process, with an early blind morphemic decomposition process followed by a late process of semantic recombination (Taft, 2004; Rastle and Davis, 2008a). Various behavioral and magneto- and electroencephalography studies suggest semantic recombination would take place approximately 300-500 ms post onset of the visual stimulus (Lavric et al., 2007). However, eye-tracking studies show that both simple and complex words are read at a rate of 4 to 5 words/second (Rayner, 1998). We report an eye-tracking experiment tracing the reading of English compounds in simple sentences. For about 33% of the trials, a single fixation sufficed for understanding the meaning of the compound. For such trials, the meaning of the compound was available already some 140 ms after the eye first landed on the modifier. All first fixations also revealed an effect of the semantic relatedness of the modifier and head constituents, gauged with a latent
semantic analysis (LSA) similarity measure. These results indicate a much earlier involvement of semantics than predicted by the first-form-then-meaning scenario. Second and subsequent fixation durations revealed that at later processing stages very different semantic processes were involved, gauged by modifier-compound and head-compound LSA similarity measures. Computational modeling of the first fixation with naive discrimination learning (Baayen et al., 2011) indicated that the early (and only the early) semantic effect arises due to the model's connection weights' sensitivity to the collocational co-occurence statistics of orthographic and semantic information carried by word trigrams. We understand the LSA effects arising at later fixations as
reflecting semantic processes seeking to resolve the uncertainty about the targeted meaning that arises as an unintended and time-costly side effect of later fixations causing the head's meaning to be co-activated along with the compound's meaning. Instead of viewing blind morphological decomposition as the gateway through which meaning can be reached, we think that when the meaning of the head becomes available, due to the (non-morphological) nature of visual information uptake when the initial landing position of the eye is non-optimal, understanding comes with greater cognitive costs: Decomposition makes things worse. We speculate that the late semantic effects in the electrophysiological literature, especially those around the N400 time window, reflect late semantic cleaning operations.

Quantitative models of early language acquisition by Emmanuel Dupoux
2012-12-21 08:00 - 17:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Quantitative models of early language acquisition by Emmanuel Dupoux
The past 40 years of psycholinguistic research has shown that infants learn their first language at an impressive speed. During the first year of life, even before they start to talk, infants converge on the basic building blocks of the phonological structure of their language. Yet, the mechanisms that they use to achieve this early phonological acquisition are still not well known. We show that a modeling approach based on machine learning algorithms and speech technology applied to large speech databases can help to shed light on the early pattern of development. First, we argue that because of acoustic variability, phonemes cannot be acquired directly from the acoustic signal; only highly context dependent and talker dependent phones or phones fragments can be extracted in a bottom-up way. Second, words cannot be acquired directly from the acoustic signal either, but a small number of protowords or sentence fragments can be extracted on the basis of repetition frequency. Third, these two kinds of protolinguistic units can interact with one another in order to converge with more abstract units. The proposal is therefore that the different levels of the phonological system are acquired in parallel, through increasingly more precise approximations. This accounts for the largely overlapping development of lexical and phonological knowledge during the first year of life.

Cartographie des fonctions du Langage par stimulation électrique corticale by Jean-François Demonet
2012-11-23 16:00 - 18:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France

Sound change and its relationship to variation in production and categorization in perception by Jonathan Harrington
2012-10-29 10:00 - 17:00 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Sound change and its relationship to variation in production and categorization in perception by Jonathan Harrington (Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich, Germany)
In some models (Lindblom et al, 1995; Bybee, 2002), sound change is associated with the type of synchronic reduction that occurs in prosodically weak and semantically predictable contexts. In other models (Ohala, 1993), sound change can be brought about through listeners’ misperception of coarticulation in speech production. The talk will draw upon both models in order to explore whether coarticulatory misperception is more likely in prosodically weak contexts. In order to do so, the magnitude of trans-consonantal vowel coarticulation was investigated in /pV1pV2l/ non-words with the pitch-accent falling either on the first or second syllable and in which V1 = /ʊ, ʏ/ and V2 = /e, o/. The analysis of these words produced by 20 L1-German speakers showed that prosodic weakening caused vowel undershoot in /ʊ/ but had little effect on V2-on-V1 coarticulation. In a perception experiment, a V1 = /ʊ-ʏ/ continuum was synthesised and the same speakers made forced choice judgements to the same non-words with the prosody manipulated such that stress was perceived on V1 or on V2. Listeners compensated for V2-on-V1 coarticulation; however, the magnitude of compensation was less in the prosodically weak than in the strong context. The general conclusion is that segmental context influences both the dynamics of speech production and perceptual categorization, but not always in the same way: it is this divergence between the two which may be especially likely in prosodically weak contexts and which may, in turn, facilitate sound change.

ReferencesBybee, J. (2002). Word frequency and context of use in the lexical diffusion of phonetically conditioned sound change. Language Variation Change, 14, 261–290. Lindblom, B., Guion, S., Hura, S., Moon, S. J., and Willerman, R. (1995). Is sound change adaptive? Rivista di Linguistica, 7, 5–36. Ohala, J. J. (1993). Sound change as nature’s speech perception experiment. Speech Communication, 13, 155–161.

The communicative basis of word order by Ted GIBSON
2012-10-19 16:00 - 18:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
The communicative basis of word order by Ted GIBSON (MIT)
Some recent evidence suggests that subject-object-verb (SOV) may be the default word order for human language. For example, SOV is the preferred word order in a task where participants gesture event meanings (Goldin-Meadow et al. 2008). Critically, SOV gesture production occurs not only for speakers of SOV languages, but also for speakers of SVO languages, such as English, Chinese, Spanish (Goldin-Meadow et al. 2008) and Italian (Langus & Nespor, 2010). The gesture-production task therefore plausibly reflects default word order independent of native language. However, this leaves open the question of why there are so many SVO languages (41.2% of languages; Dryer, 2005). We propose that the high percentage of SVO languages cross-linguistically is due to communication pressures over a noisy channel (Jelinek, 1975; Brill & Moore, 2000; Levy et al. 2009). In particular, we propose that people understand that the subject will tend to be produced before the object (a near universal cross-linguistically; Greenberg, 1963). Given this bias, people will produce SOV word order – the word order that Goldin-Meadow et al. show is the default – when there are cues in the input that tell the comprehender who the subject and the object are. But when the roles of the event participants are not disambiguated by the verb, then the noisy channel model predicts either (i) a shift to the SVO word order, in order to minimize the confusion between SOV and OSV, which are minimally different; or (ii) the invention of case marking, which can also disambiguate the roles of the event participants. We test the predictions of this hypothesis and provide support for it using gesture experiments in English, Japanese and Korean. We also provide evidence for the noisy channel model in language understanding in English.

Evelina FEDORENKO
2012-10-19 11:00 - 12:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Evelina FEDORENKO (MIT)

What cognitive and neural mechanisms do we use to understand language? Since Broca's and Wernicke's seminal discoveries in the 19th century, a broad array of brain regions have been implicated in linguistic processing spanning frontal, temporal and parietal lobes, both hemispheres, and subcortical and cerebellar structures. However, characterizing the precise contribution of these different structures to linguistic processing has proven challenging. In this talk I will argue that high-level linguistic processing - including understanding individual word meanings and combining them into more complex structures/meanings - is accomplished by the joint engagement of two functionally and computationally distinct brain systems. The first is comprised of the classic “language regions” on the lateral surfaces of left frontal and temporal lobes that appear to be functionally specialized for linguistic processing (e.g., Fedorenko et al., 2011; Monti et al., 2009, 2012). And the second is the fronto-parietal ""multiple demand"" network, a set of regions that are engaged across a wide range of cognitive demands (e.g., Duncan, 2001, 2010). Most past neuroimaging work on language processing has not explicitly distinguished between these two systems, especially in the frontal lobes, where subsets of each system reside side by side within the region referred to as “Broca’s area” (Fedorenko et al., in press). Using methods which surpass traditional neuroimaging methods in sensitivity and functional resolution (Fedorenko et al., 2010; Nieto-Castañon & Fedorenko, in press; Saxe et al., 2006), we are beginning to characterize the important roles played by both domain-specific and domain-general brain regions in linguistic processing.

Rudiments de langage chez les primates non-humains ? by Alban LEMASSON
2012-10-12 16:00 - 17:30 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Rudiments de langage chez les primates non-humains ? by Alban LEMASSON (Université de Rennes 1, Institut universitaire de France)
La communication vocale des primates non-humains a longtemps été considérée comme déterminée uniquement génétiquement et émotionnellement, encourageant les théoriciens de l’origine du langage humain à en rechercher les précurseurs ailleurs, notamment dans les gestes des grands singes. Pourtant, les études menées au cours des dix dernières années, particulièrement sur les cris des cercopithèques forestiers, démontrent un parallèle avec plusieurs caractéristiques fondamentales du langage (p.ex. sémantique, affixation, syntaxe, prosodie, conversation, accommodation et convergence vocale). Les différences entre le langage humain et la communication vocale des singes, qui sont des actes sociaux comparables, seraient donc plus d’ordre quantitatif que qualitatif

Not all skilled readers have cracked the code: The role of lexical expertise in skilled reading by Sally Andrews
2012-09-28 16:00 - 18:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Not all skilled readers have cracked the code: The role of lexical expertise in skilled reading by Sally Andrews (University of Sydney)
Most theories and computational models of skilled reading have been built upon average data for unselected samples of university students, reflecting an implicit assumption that all skilled readers read in the same way. I will review evidence that challenges this assumption by demonstrating that individual differences in measures of written language proficiency predict systematic variability in both the early stages of lexical retrieval indexed by masked priming, and in tasks assessing the contribution of lexical retrieval to sentence processing. These data highlight the critical role played by precise lexical representations in supporting optimally efficient reading.

Entropy Reduction and Asian Language by John Hale
2012-09-25 10:00 - 12:00 | Salle de conférences, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Entropy Reduction and Asian Language by John Hale (Cornell University, NY, USA)
This talk presents a particular conceptualization of human language understanding as information processing. From this viewpoint, understanding a sentence word-by-word is a kind of incomplete perception problem in which comprehenders over time become more certain about the linguistic structure of the utterance they are trying to understand. The Entropy Reduction hypothesis holds that the scale of these certainty-increases reflects psychological effort. This claim revives the application of information theory to psycholinguistics, which languished since the 1950s. But in contrast to that earlier work, modern applications of information theory to language-understanding now use generative grammars to specify the relevant structures and their probabilities. This representation makes it possible to apply standard techniques from computational linguistics to work out weighted ""expectations"" about as-yet-unheard words. The talk exemplifies the general theory using examples from Chinese, Japanese & Korean. The prenomial character of relative clauses in these languages is an important test case for any general cognitive theory of sentence processing.

Si tous les chemins mènent à Rome, ils ne se valent pas tous. Le problème d'accès lexical en production by Michael ZOCK
2012-09-21 16:00 - 18:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Si tous les chemins mènent à Rome, ils ne se valent pas tous. Le problème d’accès lexical en production by Michael ZOCK (Laboratoire d’Informatique Fondamentale, CNRS & Aix-Marseille Université)
Tout le monde a déjà rencontré le problème suivant : on cherche un mot (ou le nom d'une personne) que l’on connaît, sans être en mesure d’y accéder à temps. Les travaux des psychologues ont montré que les personnes se trouvant dans cet état savent énormément de choses concernant le mot recherché (sens, nombre de syllabes, origine, etc.), et que les mots avec lequel ils le confondent lui ressemblent étrangement (lettre ou son initial, catégorie syntaxique, champ sémantique, etc.). Mon objectif (à long terme) est de réaliser un programme tirant bénéfice de cet état de faits pour assister un locuteur ou rédacteur à (re)trouver le mot qu’il a sur le bout de la langue. À cette fin, je prévois d’ajouter à un dictionnaire électronique existant un index d’association (collocations rencontrées dans un grand corpus). Autrement dit, je propose de construire un dictionnaire analogue à celui des êtres humains, qui, outre les informations conventionnelles (définition, forme écrite, informations grammaticales) contiendrait des liens (associations), permettant de naviguer entre les idées (concepts) et leurs expressions (mots). Un tel dictionnaire permettrait donc l’accès à l’information recherchée soit par la forme (lexicale : analyse), soit par le sens (concepts : production), soit par les deux. Ma démarche est fondée sur plusieurs hypothèses. 1° Les stratégies de recherche dans notre dictionnaire mental dépendent, bien entendu, de la représentation des mots dans notre cerveau. Hélas, on n'a toujours pas une carte précise de cette organisation. Quant à la recherche on pourrait dire qu'elle s'opère essentiellement sur deux axes : Le premier décrit le passage des idées à leurs expression (idées, forme, sons). Cette vision représente l'ordre naturel des « choses » : partant du sens on va vers l'expression (forme sonore ou graphique du mot) en passant par les concepts lexicaux (lèmmes dans la théorie de Levelt). Le deuxième axe est plus proche de ce qu'on peut considérer comme une forme d'organisation de mots. Il représente leur usage (fréquent/typique) dans le discours. C'est un graphe de co-occurences ou d'associations. Il y a donc deux idées complémentaires : (a) l'expression des idées au sens restreint (passage des concepts aux mots) et (b) les rôles que ces idées (concepts/mots) peuvent jouer dans le cadre d'une phrase (discours, contextes possibles des mots). Ce contexte précise d'ailleurs souvent le sens des mots. Si le 1er axe représente la voie naturelle en production, voie empruntée pratiquement en toutes circonstances (plan A), le 2ème axe (voie associative) est la voie de rechange (plan-B), utilisée en cas d'échec du plan A. Le premier processus est automatique (rapide et inconscient), tandis que le second est contrôlé, donc lent est accessible à notre conscience. C'est lui qui m'intéresse, car il reflète la situation dans laquelle un auteur se trouve lorsqu'il fait appel à un dictionnaire ou thesaurus. 2° Le dictionnaire mental est un vaste réseau dont les noeuds sont des concepts ou mots (lemmes ou expressions) et les liens essentiellement des associations. Etant donné que tout est lié, tout peut être trouvén du moins en principe : il suffit de suivre des bons liens. Chercher un mot consisterait donc d?entrer dans ce réseau, puis de suivre les liens pour (re)trouver le terme faisant obstruction. 3° Le dictionnaire mental est à la fois un dictionnaire et une encyclopédie. Etant donné que les mots sont utilisés pour coder des connaissances du monde, ces dernières peuvent être sollicitées pour nous aider à retrouver le mot recherché (ainsi le terme 'baguette' pourrait-il être obtenu à partir de 'restaurant chinois' ou à partir de 'type de couvert'). Tout nous fera penser à qc, tout est associé à qc. De ce fait, tout est susceptible d'être évoqué par un terme lié, fût-il indirect (chaîne associative; recherche à plusieurs pas). 4° Les informations permettant d'effectuer ce type de navigation (atlas sémantique) se trouvent non seulement dans notre cerveau, mais aussi dans nos productions (manifestation linguistiques : phrases, textes). Comme ces traces constituent une forme d'extériorisation de l'organisation des idées (concepts/mots) dans notre cerveau, on peut s'en servir pour créer un modèle analogue. Ceci donnera un atlas ou une carte sémantique permettant alors aux auteurs de s'orienter pour trouver le mot qui leur fait (momentanément) défaut. Voici mon ambition. L’objectif de cet exposé est de montrer comment on pourrait construire une telle ressource et comment s'en servir.
