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298
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 137 (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.
Auditory-visual integration of talker gender in vowel perception.
- Journal of Phonetics
, 1999
"... The experiments reported here used auditory}visual mismatches to compare three approaches to speaker normalization in speech perception: radical invariance, vocal tract normalization, and talker normalization. In contrast to the "rst two, the talker normalization theory assumes that listeners& ..."
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Cited by 64 (3 self)
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The experiments reported here used auditory}visual mismatches to compare three approaches to speaker normalization in speech perception: radical invariance, vocal tract normalization, and talker normalization. In contrast to the "rst two, the talker normalization theory assumes that listeners' subjective, abstract impressions of talkers play a role in speech perception. Experiment 1 found that the gender of a visually presented face a!ects the location of the phoneme boundary between [υ] and [S] in the perceptual identi"cation of a continuum of auditory}visual stimuli ranging from hood to hud. This e!ect was found for both &&stereotypical'' and &&non-stereotypical'' male and female voices. The experiment also found that voice stereotypicality had an e!ect on the phoneme boundary. The di!erence between male and female talkers was greater when the talkers were rated by listeners as &&stereotypical''. Interestingly, for the two female talkers in this experiment, rated stereotypicality was correlated with voice breathiness rather than vowel fundamental frequency. Experiment 2 replicated and extended experiment 1 and tested whether the visual stimuli in experiment 1 were being perceptually integrated with the acoustic stimuli. In addition to the e!ects found in experiment 1, there was a boundary e!ect for the visually presented word: listeners responded hood more frequently when the acoustic stimulus was paired with a movie clip of a talker saying hood. Experiment 3 tested the abstractness of the talker information used in speech perception. Rather than seeing movie clips of male and female talkers, listeners were instructed to imagine a male or female talker while performing an audio-only identi"cation task with a gender-ambiguous hood-hud continuum. The phoneme boundary di!ered as a function of the imagined gender of the talker. The results from these experiments suggest that listeners integrate abstract gender information with phonetic information in speech perception. This conclusion supports the talker normalization theory of perceptual speaker normalization.
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 simulating social mind: the role of the mirror neuron system and simulation in the social and communicative deficits of autism spectrum disorders.
- Psychol. Bull.
, 2007
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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.
Stress changes the representational landscape: Evidence from word segmentation.
- Cognition,
, 2005
"... Abstract Over the past couple of decades, research has established that infants are sensitive to the predominant stress pattern of their native language. However, the degree to which the stress pattern shapes infants' language development has yet to be fully determined. Whether stress is merel ..."
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Cited by 45 (10 self)
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Abstract Over the past couple of decades, research has established that infants are sensitive to the predominant stress pattern of their native language. However, the degree to which the stress pattern shapes infants' language development has yet to be fully determined. Whether stress is merely a cue to help organize the patterns of speech or whether it is an important part of the representation of speech sound sequences has still to be explored. Building on research in the areas of infant speech perception and segmentation, we asked how several months of exposure to the target language shapes infants' speech processing biases with respect to lexical stress. We hypothesize that infants represent stressed and unstressed syllables differently, and employed analyses of child-directed speech to show how this change to the representational landscape results in better distribution-based word segmentation as well as an advantage for stress-initial syllable sequences. A series of experiments then tested 9-and 7-month-old infants on their ability to use lexical stress without any other cues present to parse sequences from an artificial language. We found that infants adopted a stress-initial syllable strategy and that they appear to encode stress information as part of their proto-lexical representations. Together, the results of these studies suggest that stress information in the ambient language not only shapes how statistics are calculated over the speech input, but that it is also encoded in the representations of parsed speech sequences. q
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 39 (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
