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286
The case for motor involvement in perceiving conspecifics
- Psychological Bulletin
, 2005
"... Perceiving other people’s behaviors activates imitative motor plans in the perceiver, but there is disagreement as to the function of this activation. In contrast to other recent proposals (e.g., that it subserves overt imitation, identification and understanding of actions, or working memory), here ..."
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Cited by 136 (2 self)
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Perceiving other people’s behaviors activates imitative motor plans in the perceiver, but there is disagreement as to the function of this activation. In contrast to other recent proposals (e.g., that it subserves overt imitation, identification and understanding of actions, or working memory), here it is argued that imitative motor activation feeds back into the perceptual processing of conspecifics’ behaviors, generating top-down expectations and predictions of the unfolding action. Furthermore, this account incorporates recent ideas about emulators in the brain—mental simulations that run in parallel to the external events they simulate—to provide a mechanism by which motoric involvement could contribute to perception. Evidence from a variety of literatures is brought to bear to support this account of perceiving human body movement.
Frequency effects in language processing: A review with implications for theories of implicit and explicit language acquisition
- Studies in Second Language Acquisition 24/2
"... This article shows how language processing is intimately tuned to input frequency. Examples are given of frequency effects in the processing of phonology, phonotactics, reading, spelling, lexis, mor-phosyntax, formulaic language, language comprehension, grammat-icality, sentence production, and synt ..."
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Cited by 104 (15 self)
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This article shows how language processing is intimately tuned to input frequency. Examples are given of frequency effects in the processing of phonology, phonotactics, reading, spelling, lexis, mor-phosyntax, formulaic language, language comprehension, grammat-icality, sentence production, and syntax. The implications of these effects for the representations and developmental sequence of SLA are discussed. Usage-based theories hold that the acquisition of lan-guage is exemplar based. It is the piecemeal learning of many thou-sands of constructions and the frequency-biased abstraction of regularities within them. Determinants of pattern productivity include the power law of practice, cue competition and constraint satisfac-tion, connectionist learning, and effects of type and token frequency. The regularities of language emerge from experience as categories and prototypical patterns. The typical route of emergence of con-structions is from formula, through low-scope pattern, to construction. Frequency plays a large part in explaining sociolinguistic variation and language change. Learners ’ sensitivity to frequency in all these domains has implications for theories of implicit and explicit learning and their interactions. The review concludes by considering the his-tory of frequency as an explanatory concept in theoretical and ap-plied linguistics, its 40 years of exile, and its necessary reinstatement as a bridging variable that binds the different schools of language ac-quisition research.
Perceptual learning for speech: Is there a return to normal
- Cognitive Psychology
, 2005
"... Recent work on perceptual learning shows that listeners phonemic representations dynami-cally adjust to reflect the speech theyhear (Norris,McQueen,&Cutler, 2003).We investigate how the perceptual systemmakes such adjustments, andwhat (if anything) causes the representations to return to their ..."
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Cited by 76 (3 self)
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Recent work on perceptual learning shows that listeners phonemic representations dynami-cally adjust to reflect the speech theyhear (Norris,McQueen,&Cutler, 2003).We investigate how the perceptual systemmakes such adjustments, andwhat (if anything) causes the representations to return to their pre-perceptual learning settings. Listeners are exposed to a speaker whose pro-nunciationof aparticular sound (either /s / or /S/) is ambiguous (e.g., halfwaybetween /s / and /S/). After exposure, participants are tested for perceptual learning on two continua that range from /s / to /S/, one in the Samevoice they heardduring exposure, andone in aDifferent voice. Toassess how representations revert to their prior settings, half of Experiment 1s participants were tested immediately after exposure; the other half performed a 25-min silent intervening task. The per-ceptual learning effect was actually larger after such a delay, indicating that simply allowing time to pass does not cause learning to fade. The remaining experiments investigate differentways that the systemmight unlearn a persons pronunciations: listeners hear the Same or aDifferent speak-er for 25 min with either: no relevant (i.e., good) /s / or /S / input (Experiment 2), one of the rel-evant inputs (Experiment 3), or both relevant inputs (Experiment 4).The results support a viewof phonemic representations as dynamic and flexible, and suggest that they interact with both high-
On phonetic convergence during conversational interaction,”
- J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
, 2006
"... Following research that found imitation in single-word shadowing, this study examines the degree to which interacting talkers increase similarity in phonetic repertoire during conversational interaction. Between-talker repetitions of the same lexical items produced in a conversational task were exa ..."
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Cited by 75 (0 self)
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Following research that found imitation in single-word shadowing, this study examines the degree to which interacting talkers increase similarity in phonetic repertoire during conversational interaction. Between-talker repetitions of the same lexical items produced in a conversational task were examined for phonetic convergence by asking a separate set of listeners to detect similarity in pronunciation across items in a perceptual task. In general, a listener judged a repeated item spoken by one talker in the task to be more similar to a sample production spoken by the talker's partner than corresponding pre-and postinteraction utterances. Both the role of a participant in the task and the sex of the pair of talkers affected the degree of convergence. These results suggest that talkers in conversational settings are susceptible to phonetic convergence, which can mark nonlinguistic functions in social discourse and can form the basis for phenomena such as accent change and dialect formation.
Speech errors, phonotactic constraints, and implicit learning: a study of the role of experience in language production
- Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
, 2000
"... Speech errors follow the phonotactics of the language being spoken. For example, in English, if [n] is mispronounced as [n], the [q] will always appear in a syllable coda. The authors created an analogue to this phenomenon by having participants recite lists of consonant-vowel-consonant syllables in ..."
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Cited by 64 (2 self)
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Speech errors follow the phonotactics of the language being spoken. For example, in English, if [n] is mispronounced as [n], the [q] will always appear in a syllable coda. The authors created an analogue to this phenomenon by having participants recite lists of consonant-vowel-consonant syllables in 4 sessions on different days. In the first 2 experiments, some consonants were always onsets, some were always codas, and some could be both. In a third experiment, the set of possible onsets and codas depended on vowel identity. In all 3 studies, the production errors that occurred respected the "phono-tactics " of the experiment The results illustrate the implicit learning of the sequential constraints present in the stimuli and show that the language production system adapts to recent experience. We know that "king " is a word of English and that, as far as we can tell, "hing " is not. However, most people would not be greatly surprised to hear that "hing " is a word that they just do not know. This is because [hlrj] is well formed. Each of its phonemes occur in English, and their ordering is consistent with English phono-tactics, the constraints that define the language's sound sequences. Just as it is apparent that "hing " is a possible word, it is even
The emergence of words: Attentional learning in form and meaning
- Cognitive Science
, 2005
"... Children improve at word learning during the 2nd year of life—sometimes dramatically. This fact has suggested a change in mechanism, from associative learning to a more referential form of learning. This article presents an associative exemplar-based model that accounts for the improvement without a ..."
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Cited by 53 (0 self)
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Children improve at word learning during the 2nd year of life—sometimes dramatically. This fact has suggested a change in mechanism, from associative learning to a more referential form of learning. This article presents an associative exemplar-based model that accounts for the improvement without a change in mechanism. It provides a unified account of children’s growing abilities to (a) learn a new word given only 1 or a few training trials (“fast mapping”); (b) acquire words that differ only slightly in phonological form; (c) generalize word meanings preferentially along particular dimensions, such as object shape (the “shape bias”); and (d) learn 2nd labels for already-named objects, despite a persisting resistance to doing so (“mutual exclusivity”). The model explains these improvements in terms of in-creased attention to relevant aspects of form and meaning, which reduces memory interference. The in-teraction of associations and reference in word learning is discussed.
The simulating social mind: the role of the mirror neuron system and simulation in the social and communicative deficits of autism spectrum disorders.
- Psychological Bulletin
, 2007
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Stress changes the representational landscape: evidence from word segmentation
- COGNITION
, 2005
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Against formal phonology
- Language
, 2005
"... Chomsky and Halle (1968) and many formal linguists rely on the notion of a universally available phonetic space defined in discrete time. This assumption plays a central role in phonological theory. Discreteness at the phonetic level guarantees the discreteness of all other levels of language. But d ..."
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Cited by 38 (13 self)
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Chomsky and Halle (1968) and many formal linguists rely on the notion of a universally available phonetic space defined in discrete time. This assumption plays a central role in phonological theory. Discreteness at the phonetic level guarantees the discreteness of all other levels of language. But decades of phonetics research demonstrate that there exists no universal inventory of phonetic objects. We discuss three kinds of evidence: first, phonologies differ incommensurably. Second, some phonetic characteristics of languages depend on intrinsically temporal patterns, and, third, some linguistic sound categories within a language are different from each other despite a high degree of overlap that precludes distinctness. Linguistics has mistakenly presumed that speech can always be spelled with letter-like tokens. A variety of implications of these conclusions for research in phonology are discussed.* The generative paradigm of language description (Chomsky 1964, 1965, Chomsky & Halle 1968) has dominated linguistic thinking in the United States for many years. Its specific claims about the phonetic basis of linguistic analysis still provide the cornerstone of most linguistic research. Many criticisms have been raised against the phonetic claims of the Sound pattern of English (Chomsky & Halle 1968), some from early on
In Defense of Abstractionist Theories of Repetition Priming and Word Identification
"... There is a great deal of interest in characterizing the representations and processes that support visual word priming and written word identification more generally. On one view, these phenomena are supported by abstract orthographic representations that map together visually dissimilar exemplars o ..."
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Cited by 37 (1 self)
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There is a great deal of interest in characterizing the representations and processes that support visual word priming and written word identification more generally. On one view, these phenomena are supported by abstract orthographic representations that map together visually dissimilar exemplars of letters and words (e.g., the letters A/a map onto a common abstract letter code a*). On a second view, orthographic codes consist in a collection of episodic representations of words that interact in such a way that it sometimes looks as if there are abstract codes. P.L. Tenpenny (1995) contrasted these general approaches, and concluded by endorsing the episodic account, arguing that no evidence demands that we posit abstract orthographic representations. This review re-considers the evidence, and argues that a variety of priming and non-priming research strongly supports the conclusion that abstract orthographic codes exist and support priming and word identification. On this account, episodic representations are represented separately from abstract orthographic knowledge, and contribute minimally to these functions. In defense of abstractionist theories of repetition priming and word identification There is a great deal of interest in characterizing the representations and processes that support the improved processing of stimuli repeated during an experiment; the so-called repetition priming effect. Indeed, two different types of repetition priming have been intensively studied from two quite different perspectives. On the one hand, researchers interested in memory have tended to focus on long-term repetition priming, in which facilitation can last minutes, hours, and sometimes longer (Sloman, Hayman, Ohta, Law, & Tulving, 1988). For example, participants are generally f...
