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This article focuses on the practical problems that go along with the sequencing of older non-standardised spelling forms into consonant and vowel graphemes. The issue of segmental parsing is important in research on the development of Dutch spelling, mostly drawing from thirteenth and fourteenth century charter spellings. The research aims are introduced in part 1, and then the problems of defining graphs and then syllables are discussed in part 2. These problems stem from the theoretical graphemic level, but have a very direct impact on the practical level, as they hinder the automatic parsing of tokens in the corpus, as discussed in part 3. The goal of this article is to provide partial solutions in parsing of non-standardised language data for graphemic research.

This chapter tackles the Chaha group, which consists of the Gurage varieties Chaha, Ezha, Gumer, and Gura. Labialization and palatalization abound across the Chaha group’s varieties both in lexicon and morphology. The depalatalization happens in the jussive base of verbs with palatal elements and weak verbs with final vocoid consonants I and U. Unlike Chaha, Gura, and Gumer, Ezha preserved gemination. Plural references of the language also manifest through pronominal means of verb agreement, possessive suffixes, and over pronouns.

One limitation of corpus-based research into the epicentre hypothesis is that it only provides information on structural similarity/difference of varieties but not on the role that attitudes may play in the choice of variants in a pluricentric language. In our case study on verb complementation patterns, we use simulation as a complementary methodology. We build an agent-based model for two speaker communities with English as a second language (ESL) which allows for attitudes towards American and British English to affect the choice of verb complementation. This approach enables us to gauge the likely effect that attitudes towards potential epicentres might have on the choice of variants and to predict patterns of variation we should see in language use. We provide preliminary data from the News On the Web corpus to test whether the predictions are, in fact, borne out. only published online, no volume/issue number ispartof: World Englishes vol:41 issue:3 pages:377-399 status: Published online

In this paper, we focus on partitive articles (PAs), i.e., determiners which, generally, have an indefinite interpretation, and on one of their potential correlates, i.e., invariable de, in Francoprovençal, a non-standardized, highly endangered Gallo-Romance language (cf. Zulato, Kasstan & Nagy 2018), and show the fine-grained spatial distribution of these elements in the Swiss and Aosta Valley (Italy) varieties. Presenting several maps based on fieldwork data from Valais (Switzerland) and the Aosta Valley (Italy), we demonstrate that the spatial distribution of PAs and de is more complex than reported in the literature: we complement the basic subdivision of Francoprovençal into two types, Francoprovençal A and B (cf. Kristol 2014, 2016), with a more nuanced picture, in which the morphosyntactic features of PAs play a crucial role: in Francoprovençal A, the presence of PAs depends on the syntactic context whereas, in Francoprovençal B, their presence is limited mainly to two areas, in which singular and plural PAs do not occur together (one area only has singular PAs whereas the other one only has plural PAs). We also show that there is no correlation between phonologically overt plural marking on nouns and absence of PAs; however, we found a correlation between overt sigmatic number marking on nouns and absence of PAs.

The aim of this chapter is to explore the potential of social media for user participation from different perspectives. This includes technical factors that determine how much participation is possible on a given platform as well as the degree and forms of participation that can actually be observed. The chapter also addresses the relation between user involvement that results from interaction and other involvement strategies that can be found on social media, such as the presence of personal content and language of immediacy. It concludes with a case study that illustrates how different involvement strategies are combined in political communication on a social networking site.

Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics. In a narrow sense it studies the way in which the linguistic properties of an utterance interact with its context to provide situational interpretations for the recipient of the utterance. In a wider sense, pragmatics studies all aspects of language use in an interactional and a social context. Historical pragmatics as a well-established subfield of pragmatics focuses on language use in historical contexts. This includes the study of usage patterns at particular points in the history of a given language, the study of the diachronic developments of such usage patterns and the study of the underlying principles of such developments. Work on historical pragmatics has a long history but until the mid-1990s relevant publications were rare and did not describe themselves as historical pragmatics. In the second half of the 1990s and in the early 2000s, the field quickly established itself as an important branch of pragmatics. Several factors were instrumental in this development. After the early focus of pragmatics on philosophical methods on the one hand and on spontaneous face-to-face interactions on the other, it opened its scope to a broader range of data, including written data. At the same time, the 1990s brought an increased availability of language corpora and, in particular, the availability of historical corpora. This opened up new ways of investigating language histories. In the early work of historical pragmatics, researchers regularly justified their choice of data. Plays, courtroom proceedings, and personal correspondence were considered to be particularly good, albeit imperfect, approximations to natural spoken interactions and therefore the privileged data for historical pragmatics. Today, data is no longer assessed solely in terms of its proximity to natural spoken interaction, but each type of data is considered in its own right and within its own communicative contexts. Topics of interest in historical pragmatics have always covered a broad range of pragmatic entities, including speech actions (greetings, promises, requests, apologies, and the like), discourse markers and interjections, nominal and pronominal terms of address, and issues of politeness and impoliteness. Researchers investigate such elements at specific points in time or in their diachronic developments over longer periods. And they also try to isolate general underlying principles of diachronic change that explain these developments within a larger theoretical framework.

Visual material plays a central role in lectures to illustrate the spoken word or to show objects of knowledge. Historically, the question arises as to when which methods were used and what their functions were and still are today. In a further diagrammatic perspective on the setting of the lecture, however, other aspects of pictoriality must be included: For example, there is a tradition of storing, commenting on, processing and editing lectures by the audience, which leads, for example, to transcripts that transform the lecture medially. Yet these techniques are embedded in an ensemble of diagrammatic practices of lecture organisation, which can be understood as „instructions for use“ for both lecturers and listeners. From a diagrammatic perspective, it becomes clear that the diagrammatic orders applied in and by lectures are not simply ornaments of the lecture, but have a knowledge-constitutive effect.

Telling apart family-internal developments from contact-induced changes and socio-geographically conditioned areal trends is still one of the main challenges in tracing the development - and stability - of languages. Notably prima facie contact phenomena might turn out to have resulted from the interaction of a variety of sources upon closer inspection; assessing their interaction is a crucial requirement for comprehending the dynamics of change. Based on the example of simplification patterns in the system of short personal pronouns observed in the Balkan Slavic dialects located in the territory of North Macedonian and Greece, the present paper illustrates the necessity of identifying the multiplicity of triggers and their interaction, thereby making a case for the relevance of small-scale, transient patterns in understanding diachronic processes. In particular, it places the simplifications within the pronominal system into the larger context of differential object indexing by preverbal pronominal elements in the Balkan languages. With the loss of agreement distinctions on pronouns being characteristic for the last phase in the emergence of object indexing, both processes appear to be closely related. Obviously, in this case, the convergence of various different processes has created a favorable environment for the mutual reinforcement and stabilization of two otherwise highly volatile phenomena.

State-of-the-art mobile pedestrian navigation systems often employ GPS or other positioning methods for continuous tracking of users, and thus provide them with in-situ turn-by-turn route guidance along a desired route. However, studies have shown that user experience and acquisition of spatial knowledge decrease due to the "blind" following of such turn-by-turn navigation systems. This paper proposes a novel interface concept for mobile pedestrian navigation systems that provide navigation guidance without restricting the users to a predefined route. Specifically, the proposed novel user interface was based on the concept of the Potential Route Area (PRA), which defines a dynamic area consisting of all potential routes not longer than a certain detour the user is willing to accept. Within that area, the user can freely choose his/her own route and alter it anytime, and can still arrive at the destination within the desired detour tolerance. As a proof of concept, the proposed PRA-based system was then tested against a conventional turn-by-turn navigation system, represented by Google Maps, in a real-world navigation experiment, which revealed that the acquisition of spatial knowledge and user experience were substantially improved when using the PRA-based system. This can be explained by the fact that the PRA-based system provides its users with more freedom in choosing their own route.

Objectives: In this pilot study, we evaluated the use of electrophysiological measures at rest as paradigm-independent predictors of second language (L2) development for the first time in older adult learners. We then assessed EEG correlates of the learning outcome in a language-switching paradigm after the training, which to date has only been done in younger adults and at intermediate to advanced L2 proficiency. Methods: Ten (Swiss) German-speaking adults between 65–74 years of age participated in an intensive 3-week English training for beginners. A resting-state EEG was recorded before the training to predict the ensuing L2 development (Experiment 1). A language-switching ERP experiment was conducted after the training to assess the learning outcome (Experiment 2). Results: All participants improved their L2 skills but differed noticeably in their individual development. Experiment 1 showed that beta1 oscillations at rest (13–14.5 Hz) predicted these individual differences. We interpret resting-state beta1 oscillations as correlates of attentional capacities and semantic working memory that facilitate the extraction and processing of novel forms and meanings from the L2 input. In Experiment 2, we found that language switching from the L2 into the native language (L1) elicited an N400 component, which was reduced in the more advanced learners. Thus, for learners beginning the acquisition of an L2 in third age, language switching appears to become less effortful with increasing proficiency, suggesting that the lexicons of the L1 and L2 become more closely linked. Conclusions: In sum, our findings extend the available evidence of neurological processes in L2 learning from younger to older adults, suggesting that electrophysiological mechanisms are similar across the lifespan.

We study involuntary micro-movements of both eyes, in addition to saccadic macro-movements, as biometric characteristic. We develop a deep convolutional neural network that processes binocular eye-tracking signals and verifies the viewer’s identity. In order to detect presentation attacks, we develop a model in which the movements are a response to a controlled stimulus. The model detects replay attacks by processing both the controlled but randomized stimulus and the ocular response to this stimulus. We acquire eye movement data from 150 participants, with 4 sessions per participant and conduct experiments on this new and legacy data sets with varying tracker precision and sampling rate. We observe that the model detects replay attacks reliably. For identification and identity verification, the model attains substantially lower error rates than prior work. We explore the relationships between training population size, training data volume, types of visual stimuli, number of training and enrollment sessions, interval between enrollment and probe sessions on one hand and the model performance on the other hand.

Hearing loss (HL) in older adults is associated with a decline in performance on cognitive tasks and the risk of developing dementia. However, very few studies have investigated sex-related effects on these associations. A previous study of cognitively healthy older adults showed an association between HL and lower cognitive performance in females only. In the present study, we examined the effects of sex and hearing on cognition in individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). We predicted that females with HL would be more likely to show poorer performance on the cognitive measures compared to females with normal hearing (NH), while cognitive performance in males would not depend on hearing. We further predicted that these auditory-cognitive associations would not depend on test modality, and would thus be observed in females for both auditory and visual tests.Participants were 101 older adults with amnestic MCI (M = 71 years, 45% females) in the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging (CCNA) COMPASS-ND study. Performance on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), Rey Auditory Verbal Learning (RAVLT), and Brief Visuospatial Memory Test-Revised (BVMT-R) was analyzed to investigate sex-related differences and/or hearing-related differences. Participants were categorized as having NH or HL using two different measures: pure-tone hearing screening results (normal based on a pure-tone threshold25 dB HL at 2000 Hz in the worse ear) and speech-in-noise speech reception thresholds (SRTs; normal-10 dB SNR on the Canadian Digit Triplet Test [CDTT]).Males and female groups did not differ in age, years of education, or other relevant covariates. Yet, females with better hearing on either pure-tone or speech-in-noise measures outperformed their worse hearing counterparts on the MoCA total score. Additionally, females with better hearing were more likely to recall several words on the MoCA delayed recall trial relative to those with worse hearing. Females with NH showed significant correlations between CDTT SRTs and both MoCA and RAVLT scores, while no correlations were observed in males. In contrast, males but not females showed an effect of hearing group on BVMT-R test status.There were sex-specific differences in auditory-cognitive associations in individuals with MCI. These associations were mostly observed in females and on auditory tests. Potential mechanisms and implications are discussed.

Psychopathy is associated with severe deviations in social behavior and cognition. While previous research described such cognitive and neural alterations in the processing of rather specific social information from human expressions, some open questions remain concerning central and differential neurocognitive deficits underlying psychopathic behavior. Here we investigated three rather unexplored factors to explain these deficits, first, by assessing psychopathy subtypes in social cognition, second, by investigating the discrimination of social communication sounds (speech, non-speech) from other non-social sounds, and third, by determining the neural overlap in social cognition impairments with autistic traits, given potential common deficits in the processing of communicative voice signals. The study was exploratory with a focus on how psychopathic and autistic traits differentially influence the function of social cognitive and affective brain networks in response to social voice stimuli. We used a parametric data analysis approach from a sample of 113 participants (47 male, 66 female) with ages ranging between 18 and 40 years (mean 25.59, SD 4.79). Our data revealed four important findings. First, we found a phenotypical overlap between secondary but not primary psychopathy with autistic traits. Second, primary psychopathy showed various neural deficits in neural voice processing nodes (speech, non-speech voices) and in brain systems for social cognition (mirroring, mentalizing, empathy, emotional contagion). Primary psychopathy also showed deficits in the basal ganglia (BG) system that seems specific to the social decoding of communicative voice signals. Third, neural deviations in secondary psychopathy were restricted to social mirroring and mentalizing impairments, but with additional and so far undescribed deficits at the level of auditory sensory processing, potentially concerning deficits in ventral auditory stream mechanisms (auditory object identification). Fourth, high autistic traits also revealed neural deviations in sensory cortices, but rather in the dorsal auditory processing streams (communicative context encoding). Taken together, social cognition of voice signals shows considerable deviations in psychopathy, with differential and newly described deficits in the BG system in primary psychopathy and at the neural level of sensory processing in secondary psychopathy. These deficits seem especially triggered during the social cognition from vocal communication signals., Translational Psychiatry, 12 (1), ISSN:2158-3188

Mainly based on data from Old Spanish and Modern Francoprovençal, this paper discusses a hitherto underresearched use of the Romance definite article that cannot straightforwardly be explained by recurring to any of the standard analyses of semantic definiteness, i.e., maximality and/or familiarity. We show that such weakly referential definites are definites with representative object interpretations licensed by the kind-oriented mode of talk and not short weak definites. They denote inherently non-specific, semantically number neutral regular objects whose only co(n)textual relevance is their being typical instantiations of their corresponding kind. Representative object definites are shown to be favored by ‘habitual’ readings of the predicate (and text genres like recipes, treatises, narratives about what people used to do in former times, etc.). In Francoprovençal, this is the case especially in the scope of non-perfective verb tenses in prepositional or presentational complements and sometimes in direct objects. In Old Spanish, non-maximal definites often occur in the scope of non-assertive mood (imperative/subjunctive, due to the genre of recipes), while, at the same time, introducing important discourse referents. In addition, in the latter language such definites are demonstrated to be positively susceptible to priming by preceding non-maximal definites.

Morphological systems often reuse the same forms in different functions, creating what is known as syncretism. While syncretism varies greatly, certain cross-linguistic tendencies are apparent. Patterns where all syncretic forms share a morphological feature value (e.g., first person, or plural number) are most common cross-linguistically, and this preference is mirrored in results from learning experiments. While this suggests a general bias towards natural (featurally homogeneous) over unnatural (featurally heterogeneous) patterns, little is yet known about gradients in learnability and distributions of different kinds of unnatural patterns. In this paper we assess apparent cross-linguistic asymmetries between different types of unnatural patterns in person-number verbal agreement paradigms and test their learnability in an artificial language learning experiment. We find that the cross-linguistic recurrence of unnatural patterns of syncretism in person-number paradigms is proportional to the amount of shared feature values (i.e., semantic similarity) amongst the syncretic forms. Our experimental results further suggest that the learnability of syncretic patterns also mirrors the paradigm’s degree of feature-value similarity. We propose that this gradient in learnability reflects a general bias towards similarity-based structure in morphological learning, which previous literature has shown to play a crucial role in word learning as well as in category and concept learning more generally. Rather than a dichotomous natural/unnatural distinction, our results thus support a more nuanced view of (un)naturalness in morphological paradigms and suggest that a preference for similarity-based structure during language learning might shape the worldwide transmission and typological distribution of patterns of syncretism.

Different methods to acquire a language can contribute differently to learning success. In the present study we tested the success of L2 stress contrasts acquisition, when ab initio learners were taught or not about the theoretic nature of L2 stress contrasts. In two 4-hour perceptual training methods, French-speaking listeners received either (a) explicit instructions about Spanish stress patterns and perception activities commonly used in L2 pronunciation courses or (b) no explicit instructions and a unique perception activity, a shape/word matching task. Results showed that French-speaking listeners improved their ability to identify and discriminate stress contrasts in Spanish after training. However, there was no significant difference between explicit and non-explicit training nor was there an effect on stress processing under different phonetic variability conditions. This suggests that in L2 stress acquisition, non-explicit training may benefit ab initio learners as much as explicit instruction and activities used in L2 pronunciation courses.

Landmarks play key roles in human wayfinding and mobile navigation systems. Existing computational landmark selection models mainly focus on outdoor environments, and aim to identify suitable landm...

A language’s grammar can be stratified, due to borrowing processes. While being a well-established term in the linguistic literature, the term ‘borrowing’ is sometimes used in a non-uniform way, particularly when it applies to bound morphological formatives. A Stratal Effect is hypothesized, which, applying to varying extent, gives rise to at least three distinct, psycholinguistically motivated types of morphological transfer. A typology of morphological spread is proposed, which consists of three main types: strictly compartmentalized co-morphologies, partially compartmentalized co-morphologies, and morphological borrowing. The widespread view that affix borrowing can be either direct or indirect is questioned and it is argued that most likely, morphological borrowing is always an intermediate process, involving the extraction of formatives and their diffusion within the lexicon.

Co-speech hand gestures are an ubiquitous form of nonverbal communication, which can express additional information that is not present in speech. Hand gestures may become more relevant when verbal production is impaired, as in speakers with post-stroke aphasia. In fact, speakers with aphasia produce more gestures than non-brain damaged speakers. Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that speakers with aphasia produce gestures that convey information essential to understand their communication. In the present study, we addressed the question whether these gestures catch the attention of their addressees. Healthy volunteers (observers) watched short video clips while their eye movements were recorded. These video clips featured speakers with aphasia and non-brain damaged speakers describing two different scenarios (buying a sweater or having witnessed an accident). Our results show that hand gestures produced by speakers with aphasia are on average attended to longer than gestures produced by non-brain damaged speakers. This effect was significant even when we controlled for the longer duration of the gestural movements in speakers with aphasia. Further, the amount of information in speech was also correlated with gesture attention. That is gestures produced by speakers with less informative speech were attended to more frequently. In conclusion, our findings suggest that listeners reallocate their attention and focus more strongly on non-verbal information from co-speech gestures if speech comprehension becomes challenging due to the speaker's verbal production deficits. These findings support a communicative function of co-speech gestures and advocate for instructing people with aphasia to communicate things in the form of gestures that cannot be expressed verbally because interlocutors take notice of these gestures., Neuropsychologia, 174, ISSN:1873-3514, ISSN:0028-3932

Second language (L2) learning has been promoted as a promising intervention to stave off age-related cognitive decline. While previous studies based on mean trends showed inconclusive results, this study is the first to investigate nonlinear cognitive trajectories across a 30-week training period. German-speaking older participants (aged 64–75 years) enrolled for a Spanish course, strategy game training (active control) or movie screenings (passive control). We assessed cognitive performance in working memory, alertness, divided attention, and verbal fluency on a weekly basis. Trajectories were modeled using Generalized Additive Mixed Models to account for temporally limited transfer effects and intra-individual variation in cognitive performance. Our results provide no evidence of cognitive improvement differing between the Spanish and either of the control groups during any phase of the training period. We did, however, observe an effect of baseline cognition, such that individuals with low cognitive baselines increased their performance more in the L2 group than comparable individuals in the control groups. We discuss these findings against the backdrop of the cognitive training literature and Complex Dynamic Systems Theory.

Abstract Emerging data in a range of non-human animal species have highlighted a latent ability to combine certain pre-existing calls together into larger structures. Currently, however, the quantification of context-specific call combinations has received less attention. This is problematic because animal calls can co-occur with one another simply through chance alone. One common approach applied in language sciences to identify recurrent word combinations is collocation analysis. Through comparing the co-occurrence of two words with how each word combines with other words within a corpus, collocation analysis can highlight above chance, two-word combinations. Here, we demonstrate how this approach can also be applied to non-human animal signal sequences by implementing it on artificially generated data sets of call combinations. We argue collocation analysis represents a promising tool for identifying non-random, communicatively relevant call combinations and, more generally, signal sequences, in animals. Significance statement Assessing the propensity for animals to combine calls provides important comparative insights into the complexity of animal vocal systems and the selective pressures such systems have been exposed to. Currently, however, the objective quantification of context-specific call combinations has received less attention. Here we introduce an approach commonly applied in corpus linguistics, namely collocation analysis, and show how this method can be put to use for identifying call combinations more systematically. Through implementing the same objective method, so-called call-ocations, we hope researchers will be able to make more meaningful comparisons regarding animal signal sequencing abilities both within and across systems.

This paper traces the history of the English dative alternation by means of a quantitative analysis of instances of both the nominal and the prepositional construction in a corpus of Middle English (PPCME2), and compares the results to Wolk et al.’s (2013) data set from ARCHER. I show that the factors impacting the choice of one pattern over the other are subject to change over time: construction choice in Middle English is not straightforwardly predictable by the same factors at play in today’s alternation, but a clearer division based on syntactic semantic-pragmatic variables gradually emerges in the course to Late Modern English. I interpret this development as a prime case of competition, with a focus on (a) the initial emergence of functional overlap and thus competition, and (b) the subsequent creation of “functional niches” of the competing constructions.

2. überarbeitete Auflage, Kommunikatives Handeln ist interaktives Handeln. So entstehen Diskurse, in kleinen Gruppen wie in der Öffentlichkeit. Sie dienen den Teilnehmenden dazu, sich über einzelne Situationen, Texte, Medien und Sprachen hinweg zu verständigen – und damit kommunikative Schnittstellen zu bewältigen. Dabei kann einiges schief gehen. Praktiker*innen beobachten, analysieren und nutzen die Muster von Diskursen, um Risiken in kommunikativen Situationen zu minimieren und gelingende Kommunikation zu fördern.

It has been demonstrated that stress, experienced outside of a relationship, can spill into a relationship and cross over during interactions from one partner to the other. However, the mechanism of how stress cross over in real-time between partners is still unknown. To overcome this limitation, we invited 189 couples (N = 378 individuals) for two interactions and stressed either the man, the woman, or both partners between the interactions with a standardized stress-induction procedure. Vocally-encoded emotional arousal (i.e., fundamental frequency, indexed as fo) was extracted from both partners in 25,834 talk turns. Dynamical systems modeling revealed four patterns of dynamic influence prior to stress induction, which started to erode after the stress induction. This demonstrates that the initially unstressed mates become stressed during the behavioral exchange and stress crosses over from the unstressed partner to the stressed mates, interfering with their ability to down-regulate stress.

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that is highly prevalent and requires clinical specialists to diagnose. It is known that an individual's viewing behavior, reflected in their eye movements, is directly related to attentional mechanisms and higher-order cognitive processes. We therefore explore whether ADHD can be detected based on recorded eye movements together with information about the video stimulus in a free-viewing task. To this end, we develop an end-to-end deep learning-based sequence model which we pre-train on a related task for which more data are available. We find that the method is in fact able to detect ADHD and outperforms relevant baselines. We investigate the relevance of the input features in an ablation study. Interestingly, we find that the model's performance is closely related to the content of the video, which provides insights for future experimental designs., Pre-print for Proceedings of the European Conference on Machine Learning, 2022

Language is a potential source of predictors for suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs), as changes in speech characteristics, communication habits, and word choice may be indicative of increased suicide risk. We reviewed the current literature on STBs that investigated linguistic features of spoken and written language. Specifically, we performed a search in linguistic, medical, engineering, and general databases for studies that investigated linguistic features as potential predictors of STBs published in peer-reviewed journals until the end of November 2021.We included 75 studies that investigated 279,032 individuals with STBs (age = 29.53 ± 10.29, 35% females). Of those, 34 (45%) focused on lexicon, 20 (27%) on prosody, 15 (20%) on lexicon and first-person singular, four (5%) on (morpho)syntax, and two (3%) were unspecified. Suicidal thoughts were predicted by more intensifiers and superlatives, while suicidal behaviors were predicted by greater usage of pronouns, changes in the amount of verb usage, more prepend and multifunctional words, more nouns and prepositions, and fewer modifiers and numerals. A diverse field of research currently investigates linguistic predictors of STBs, and more focus is needed on their specificity for either suicidal thoughts or behaviors.