articles
What did you read in 2015?
Another year has passed and academic platform bombard us with end-of-year summaries. So, here are the most-read HLP Lab papers of 2015. Congratulations to Dave Kleinschmidt, who according to ResearchGate leads the 2015 HLP Lab pack with his beautiful paper on the ideal adapter framework for speech perception, adaptation, and generalization. The paper was cited 22 times in the first 6 months of being published! Well deserved, I think … as a completely neutral (and non-ideal) observer ;).
Academia.edu mostly agreed, Read the rest of this entry »
The (in)dependence of pronunciation variation on the time course of lexical planning
Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience just published Esteban Buz’s paper on the relation between the time course of lexical planning and the detail of articulation (as hypothesized by production ease accounts).
Several recent proposals hold that much if not all of explainable pronunciation variation (variation in the realization of a word) can be reduced to effects on the ease of lexical planning. Such production ease accounts have been proposed, for example, for effects of frequency, predictability, givenness, or phonological overlap to recently produced words on the articulation of a word. According to these account, these effects on articulation are mediated through parallel effects on the time course of lexical planning (e.g., recent research by Jennifer Arnold, Jason Kahn, Duane Watson, and others; see references in paper).
This would indeed offer a parsimonious explanation of pronunciation variation. However, the critical test for this claim is a mediation analysis, Read the rest of this entry »
CUNY 2015 plenary
As requested by some, here are the slides from my 2015 CUNY Sentence Processing Conference plenary last week:
I’m posting them here for discussion purposes only. During the Q&A several interesting points were raised. For example Read the rest of this entry »
Speech recognition: Recognizing the familiar, generalizing to the similar, and adapting to the novel
At long last, we have finished a substantial revision of Dave Kleinschmidt‘s opus “Robust speech perception: Recognize the familiar, generalize to the similar, and adapt to the novel“. It’s still under review, but we’re excited about it and wanted to share what we have right now.
The paper builds on a large body of research in speech perception and adaptation, as well as distributional learning in other domains to develop a normative framework of how we manage to understand each other despite the infamous lack of invariance. At the core of the proposal stands the (old, but often under-appreciated) idea that variability in the speech signal is often structured (i.e., conditioned on other variables in the world) and that an ideal observer should take advantage of that structure. This makes speech perception a problem of inference under uncertainty at multiple different levels Read the rest of this entry »
HLP Lab and collaborators at CMCL, ACL, and CogSci
The summer conference season is coming up and HLP Lab, friends, and collaborators will be presenting their work at CMCL (Baltimore, joint with ACL), ACL (Baltimore), CogSci (Quebec City), and IWOLP (Geneva). I wanted to take this opportunity to give an update on some of the projects we’ll have a chance to present at these venues. I’ll start with three semi-randomly selected papers. Read the rest of this entry »
Socially-mediated syntactic alignment
The first step in our OSU-Rochester collaboration on socially-mediated syntactic alignment has been submitted a couple of weeks ago. Kodi Weatherholtz in Linguistics at The Ohio State University took the lead in this project together with Kathryn Campbell-Kibler (same department) and me.
We collected spoken picture descriptions via Amazon’s crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk to investigate how social attitude towards an interlocutor and conflict management styles affected syntactic priming. Our paradigm combines Read the rest of this entry »
Perspective paper on second (and third and …) language learning as hierarchical inference
We’ve just submitted a perspective paper on second (and third and …) language learning as hierarchical inference that I hope might be of interest to some of you (feedback welcome).
- Pajak, B., Fine, A.B., Kleinschmidt, D., and Jaeger, T.F. submitted. Learning additional languages as hierarchical probabilistic inference: insights from L1 processing. submitted for review to Language Learning.
We’re building on Read the rest of this entry »
Optional plural-marking in Yucatec
After many years of data collection, translation, annotation, and analysis, our first longer paper based on our field-based studies of language production in Yucatec Maya is about to appear in print:
- Butler, L. K., Bohnemeyer, J. B., and Jaeger, T. F. to appear. Plural marking in Yucatec Maya at the syntax-processing interface. In Machicao y Priemer, A., Nolda, A. & Sioupi, A. (eds.) Zwischen Kern und Peripherie (Studia Grammatica, volume 75). Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.
The paper discusses speakers’ production preferences in optional plural-marking on nouns and verbs in Yucatec. Yucatec plural-marking is typologically interesting in that there seem to be environments in which plural-marking on either or even both the noun and verb can be omitted without loss of plural meaning.
Lindsay Butler’s thesis (at the University of Arizona) focused on the syntactic theory behind optional plural-marking in Yucatec and what it tells us about the typology of plural-marking. If you’re interested in this topic, you might also find the following article of interest, which provides a broader introduction to the relevant grammatical constraints in Yucatec plural-marking. I will add links soon, but in the meantime feel to ask for a copy:
- Bohnemeyer, J. B., Butler, L. K., and Jaeger, T. F. submitted. Head-marking and agreement: Evidence from Yucatec Maya.
Syntactic expectation adaptation (update your beliefs!)
At long last, Alex Fine‘s paper on syntactic adaptation expectation is about to appear in PLOS One. You can download the pre-proof from our academia.edu page (the final version will be linked there as soon as it’s available):
- Fine, A. B., Jaeger, T. F., Farmer, T. , and Qian, T. 2013. Rapid expectation adaptation during syntactic comprehension. PLoS One.
The paper presents a novel framework that ties together syntactic comprehension and implicit learning. We tie together work on expectation-based sentence understanding, syntactic priming in comprehension, statistical learning, and speaker-specificity in syntactic comprehension.
In two self-paced reading studies, we show that readers rapidly adjust their expectations for specific syntactic structures to converge on the statistics of the current environment. They do so based on both previous experience and recent experience within the experiment. Read the rest of this entry »
Our Special Issue is coming out: Parsimony and Redundancy in Models of Language
It’s almost done! After about two years of work, our Special Issue on Parsimony and Redundancy in Models of Language (Wiechmann, Kerz, Snider & Jaeger 2013) is about to come out in Language and Speech, Vol 56(3). The brunt of the editorial work in putting this together was mastered by Daniel Wiechman, who just started his new position at the University of Amsterdam, and Elma Kerz, in the Department of Anglistik at the University of Aachen.
I am excited about this Special Issue, which –I think– brings together a variety of positions on representational redundancy and parsimony in linguistic theory building as well as the role of redundancy in the development of language over time. Some contributions discuss different computational and representational architectures, other contributions test these theories or investigate specific assumptions about the nature of linguistic representations. Read the rest of this entry »
Effects of phonological overlap on fluency, speech rate, and word order in unscripted sentence production
The last two papers based on Katrina Furth’s and Caitie Hilliard’s work back when they were at Rochester just came out in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition and the journal Frontiers in Psychology.
The JEP:LMC paper investigates how lemma selection (i.e., word choice) is affected by phonological overlap. We find evidence for a (weak) bias against sequences of phonologically onset overlapping words. That is, when speakers have a choice, they seem to prefer sentences like “Hannah gave the hammer to the boy”, rather than “Hannah handed the hammer to the boy”. This suggests very early effects of phonology on lexical production, which seem to be incompatible with strictly serial models of word production.
Jaeger, T. F., Furth, K., and Hilliard, C. 2012. Phonological overlap affects lexical selection during sentence production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 38(5), 1439-1449. [doi: 10.1037/a0027862]
The Frontiers paper investigates Read the rest of this entry »
Language is shaped by brain’s desire for clarity and ease
Congratulations to Masha Fedzechkina on her article on a bias for efficient information transfer during language learning that has just appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (link to article).
Here’s some news coverage
- Thanks to the extended podcast coverage by the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, which present an interesting take on our study (a couple of details about ambiguity vs. uncertainty are a bit off, but the general message is captured well). Have a look at minutes 13:30 to 22:02. Thanks to Nick Kloehn for making us aware of this piece.
- www.eurekalert.org (e.g., here).
- Check out an extended article on ScienceOmega (Language learning balances clarity and effort)
- Universities at which the research was conducted:
- University of Rochester (Language is shaped by brain’s desire for clarity and ease)
- Georgetown University (PNAS Study: Language Structure Arises from Balance of Clear and Effective Communication).
- Blogs and more: Futurity, Phys.org, ScienceBlog, Science Daily, E-Science News , Sify, TruthDive , BioSpace
More to come soon.
Errata: We are sorry that in our paper we forgot to acknowledge the help of three undergraduate research assistants, Andy Wood, Irene Minkina, and Cassandra Donatelli, in preparing the video animations used during our artificial language learning task.
Two new HLP lab papers and some thoughts on implicit learning
I am happy to report on two new HLP lab papers on implicit learning in language and beyond that recently were accepted for publication:
- Qian, T., Jaeger, T. F., and Aslin, R. 2012. Learning to Represent a Multi-Context Environment: More than Detecting Changes. Frontiers in Psychology 3.
- Fine, A. B. and Jaeger, T. F. in press. Evidence for implicit learning in adult language processing. Cognitive Science.
The first paper by Ting Qian is an opinion piece on learning and theories of learning in a world in which evidence is presented sequentially and where deviations from the expected always carry with them ambiguity about the cause of such deviation. So, how do learners figure out how to construct sufficiently adequate (i.e. good in coverage, though not necessarily accurate in terms of assumptions about the causes) causal theories of the world?
The serial founder hypothesis and word order universals
Check out this article in ScienceNews summarizing commentaries on two recent language studies in Science (Atkinson, 2011: ) and Nature (Dunn et al., 2011). Each of the studies has received a lot of attention and they are the subject of two special issues in press for Linguistic Typology, to which HLP Lab contributed on three articles. I will add a link to the special issue(s) once it comes out. Read the rest of this entry »
More papers relevant to questions about information density
And while I am at it, let me post three more papers that are interesting for anyone interested in uniform information density and, more generally, theories of communicatively efficient language production (though most of you may already know these papers):
- They call it speech information rate, but it’s essentially the same: Pellegrine, F., Coupe, C., and Marsico, E. 2011. A cross-linguistic perspective on speech information rate. Language 87(3), 539-558.
- Maurits, L., Perfors, A., and Navarro, D. 2010. Why are some word orders more common than others. A uniform information density account. NIPS.
- S.T. Piantadosi, H. Tily, and E. Gibson. 2011. Word lengths are optimized for efficient communication.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(9):3526.
HLP/Jaeger lab blog 