This thesis explores the relationship between inhalation amplitude and turn-taking in spontaneous multiparty conversations held in Estonian. Respiratory activity is recorded with Respiratory Inductance Plethysmography. The main focus is on how inhalation amplitude varies between the inhalations produced directly before turn onset compared to the following inhalations within the same speaking turn. The results indicate a significant difference in amplitude, realised mainly by an increase in inhalation end lung volume values. One of the possible functions of this pattern is to signal an intention of taking the conversational turn. Another could be a phrasing or grouping function connected to lower inhalation amplitudes within turns.

Creakiness is a well-known turn-taking cue and has been observed to systematically accompany phrase and turn ends in several languages. In Estonian, creaky voice is frequently used by all speakers without any obvious evidence for its systematic use as a turn-taking cue. Rather, it signals a lack of prominence and is favored by lengthening and later timing in phrases. In this paper, we analyze the occurrence of creak with respect to properties of the respiratory cycle. We show that creak is more likely to accompany longer exhalations. Furthermore, the results suggest there is little difference in lung volume values regardless of the presence of creak, indicating that creaky voice might be employed to preserve air over the course of longer utterances. We discuss the results in connection to processes of speech planning in spontaneous speech.

The present study investigated the timing of backchannel onsets within speaker’s own and dialogue partner’s breathing cycle in two spontaneous conversations in Estonian. Results indicate that backchannels are mainly produced near the beginning, but also in the second half of the speaker’s exhalation phase. A similar tendency was observed in short non-backchannel utterances, indicating that timing of backchannels might be determined by their duration rather than their pragmatic function. By contrast, longer non-backchannel utterances were initiated almost exclusively right at the beginning of the exhalation. As expected, backchannels in the conversation partner’s breathing cycle occurred predominantly towards the end of the exhalation or at the beginning of the inhalation. 

This article provides a first quantitative overview of the timing and volume-related properties of breath holds in spontaneous conversations. Firstly, we investigate breath holds based on their position within the coinciding respiratory interval amplitude. Secondly, we investigate breath holds based on their timing within the respiratory intervals and in relation to communicative activity following breath holds. We hypothesise that breath holds occur in different regions of the lung capacity range and at different times during the respiratory phase, depending on the conversational and physiological activity following breath holds. The results suggest there is not only considerable variation in both the time and lung capacity scales, but detectable differences are also present in breath holding characteristics involving laughter and speech preparation, while breath holds coinciding with swallowing are difficult to separate from the rest of the data based on temporal and volume information alone.

This study explores the relationship between inhalation amplitude and turn management in four approximately 20 minute long spontaneous multiparty conversations in Estonian. The main focus of interest is whether inhalation amplitude is greater before turn onset than in the following inhalations within the same speaking turn. The results show that inhalations directly before turn onset are greater in amplitude than those later in the turn. The difference seems to be realized by ending the inhalation at a greater lung volume value, whereas the initial lung volume before inhalation onset remains roughly the same across a single turn. The findings suggest that the increased inhalation amplitude could function as a cue for claiming the conversational floor.

This thesis explores the development of parallel treebanks, collections of language data consisting of texts and their translations, with syntactic annotation and alignment, linking words, phrases, and sentences to show translation equivalence. We describe the semi-manual annotation of the SMULTRON parallel treebank, consisting of 1,000 sentences in English, German and Swedish. This description is the starting point for answering the first of two questions in this thesis.

• What issues need to be considered to achieve a high-quality, consistent,parallel treebank?

The units of annotation and the choice of annotation schemes are crucial for quality, and some automated processing is necessary to increase the size. Automatic quality checks and evaluation are essential, but manual quality control is still needed to achieve high quality.

Additionally, we explore improving the automatically created annotation for one language, using information available from the annotation of the other languages. This leads us to the second of the two questions in this thesis.

• Can we improve automatic annotation by projecting information available in the other languages?

Experiments with automatic alignment, which is projected from two language pairs, L1–L2 and L1–L3, onto the third pair, L2–L3, show an improvement in precision, in particular if the projected alignment is intersected with the system alignment. We also construct a test collection for experiments on annotation projection to resolve prepositional phrase attachment ambiguities. While majority vote projection improves the annotation, compared to the basic automatic annotation, using linguistic clues to correct the annotation before majority vote projection is even better, although more laborious. However, some structural errors cannot be corrected by projection at all, as different languages have different wording, and thus different structures.

The purpose is to investigate the characteristics that may be considered in academic Swedish Sign Language and which in turn will help a larger number of students produce their essays in academic Swedish Sign Language. Recorded material from lectures, made by four deaf graduates and from the Sign Language corpus, where two deaf academics were also involved, and some randomly chosen in-formants, were investigated. The results from the academic Swedish Sign Language were compared to the characteristics that identify with the academic American Sign Language. There need to be more knowledge and research on this subject.

Studien belyser och diskuterar hur undervisning i engelska inom grundskola och gymnasium samt antagningsregler till högskola kan påverka möjligheten att utbilda sig i tekniska ämnen för personer med dyslexi. Studien belyser att det finns en hel del som tyder på att undervisningen i engelska i grundskola och gymnasium ofta inte är anpassad till de elever som har fonologiska svårigheter, och att detta kan få avgörande betydelse för deras framtid.

I en första delstudie görs en enkätundersökning bland engelsklärare i grundskola och gymnasium för att se om de har goda möjligheter att undervisa elever med dyslexi. Undersökningen visar bland annat att det har funnits brister på lärarhögskolor när det gäller utbildningen om läs- och skrivsvårigheter/dyslexi.

81 % av de 33 lärare som har engelska i sin utbildning svarar att de inte har fått kunskap om läs- och skrivsvårigheter/dyslexi som hjälper dem i undervisningen i engelska. Undersökningen visar också att flera kommuner inte ger lärarna den fortbildning de behöver och att många lärare upplever en vardag med tidsbrist, för få alternativa verktyg och för stora undervisningsgrupper.

I en andra delstudie belyses framgångsfaktorer i engelska för elever med dyslexi. Fyra högskolestudenter som har dyslexi djupintervjuas, samtliga går fjärde året på utbildningen till civilingenjör. Två av studenterna har MVG i engelska B från gymnasiet och två har inte läst engelska B.

I en tredje studie görs en jämförelse mellan gymnasiebetygen i engelska för 30 studenter med dyslexi på civilingenjörsprogrammet och en kontrollgrupp. Studien visar bland annat att det är 10 % av dyslektikerna som inte skulle ha kommit in på utbildningen på grundval av sina betyg om de hade sökt hösten 2010 när det är nya antagningsregler med högre språkkrav.

SPRINT is a language intervention project aimed to study the outcome of a parental home training program on children’s language development and future reading and writing skills. This study, which derives data from the SPRINT project, intended to examine the possible effects of a parental-based film intervention. It was conducted on toddlers aged 18-21 months from the Stockholm area with at least one parent who has Swedish as a first language. Parents of 78 children participated in the study and filled in 3 SECDI-w&s questionnaires rating their children's productive vocabulary. Children were randomized to either the intervention or the control group. Results indicated that the interventiongroup demonstrated significantly higher scores over time, F (2,78) = 5,192, p < .007. In the light of previous research it is concluded that this intervention contributes to an increase in productive vocabulary. However, the scores of the intervention group did not exceed the average range for Swedish children in the same age span. Furthermore the possible impact of parental education and thepresence of siblings on productive vocabulary was discussed.

Neuronal activity of monolingual and bilinguals to environmental sounds and words that are semantically related to them were studied using the mismatch negativity (MMN) component of event-related potentials. MMN was expected to reflect the language selection process in bilinguals on the bases of semantics and phonology. In this regard, as lexical stimuli, interlingual homophones ‘car’ and ‘kar’ (snow) were presented together with semantically related environmental sounds in a passive auditory oddball paradigm. The lexical stimuli were recorded by a native English speaker. Three Turkish-English late bilinguals and one native English speaker participated in the study. An early MMN was elicited in both groups with a distribution over the fronto-central and central areas across the scalp with highest peak amplitude at -2.5 with a 113 ms latency. This response indicates that participants of the study were sensitive to the acoustic changes in two different types of stimuli. The further investigation of the interplay between environmental sounds and semantics displayed no conclusive result due to lack of data. Finally, the brain responses gathered from the bilinguals were not enough to draw a conclusion. Whether the bilinguals were sensitive to the sub-phonemic cues in the presented auditory lexical stimuli or not were inconclusive.

This thesis is a description of some aspects of the grammar of Sɛlɛɛ, a Ghana-Togo-Mountain (GTM) language, based on my own fieldwork. The thesis consists of an introduction and five papers.

Paper (I), Noun classes in Sεlεε, describes the noun class system of Sɛlɛɛ. It consists of eight noun class prefixes, four marking singular and four plural. They are paired in irregular ways to form eight genders (singular-plural pairs). Nouns agree with determiners, numerals and interrogative qualifiers within the noun phrase and can be indexed on the predicate. Nouns are allocated to classes/genders based partly on semantic notions.

Paper (II), Sεlεε (with Francesca Di Garbo), details the morphological encoding of diminution in Sɛlɛɛ either by the suffixes -bi, -bii, -mii, -e or -nyi alone or in combination with noun class shift. Augmentation is not expressed morphologically.

Paper (III), The tense and aspect system of Sεlεε: A preliminary analysis, shows that Sɛlɛɛ, unlike most Kwa languages, has a rather elaborate tense system encompassing present, hodiernal, pre-hodiernal and future tenses. The aspectual categories are progressive, habitual and perfect. Both categories often amalgamate with first person singular subject clitics.

Paper (IV), Standard negation in Sεlεε, deals with the negation of declarative verbal main clauses. This is primarily encoded by a high tone, sometimes combined with segmental morphemes, portmanteau negative tense-aspect morphemes and vowel lengthening. Each tense-aspect category has at least one particular negation strategy.

Paper (V), Unravelling temperature terms in Sεlεε (with Francesca Di Garbo), investigates the grammatical constructions employed for temperature evaluations. Personal feeling is only encoded via subjects, while ambient and tactile evaluations are construed attributively and predicatively.

A comparison of Selee and other GTM languages revealed similar noun morphologies but very different verbal morphologies.

This paper describes the noun class system of Sl, a Na-Togo, Kwa (Niger-Congo) language spoken in the Volta Region of Ghana. As shown in this paper, Sl hasa noun class system with an equal number of singular and plural classes that are paired inirregular ways. The singular-plural pairs are referred to as genders. Nouns normally agreewith certain modifiers within the noun phrase. The agreement targets are determiners,numerals, interrogative pronouns and some adjectives. Outside the noun phrase, nounclasses may be indexed on the verb to signal long distance anaphora, a strategy thatspeakers rarely use. The paper provides a detailed account of possible semantic andcultural motivations for the assignment of nouns to a particular gender and/or class.

This paper discusses standard negation in Sɛlɛɛ. Sɛlɛɛ is a Ghana-Togo Mountain (GTM) Language of the Kwa group of the Niger Congo family. Standard negation is the negation of declarative verbal clauses. Different strategies are used in Sɛlɛɛ to negate declarative verbal main clauses depending on the tense and aspect category of the verb. The basic negation strategy used in standard negation is tonal alternation, with or without other negation markers. The other strategies are the use of portmanteau morphemes, affixes and vowel lengthening. Interestingly, in one and the same tense paradigm, different persons can select different negation strategies. There is syncretism among the 1st person singular forms of the negative recent past, the negative habitual and the negative perfect.

This talk deals with the conceptualisation of temperature in some of the Ghanaian languages as reflected in their systems of central temperature terms, such as hot, cold, to freeze, etc. We will discuss these systems in the light of a large-scale cross-linguistic collaborative project, involving 35 researchers (including the present authors) and covering more than 50 genetically, areally and typologically diverse languages (Koptjevskaja-Tamm ed. 2015). The key questions addressed here are how the different languages carve up the temperature domain by means of their linguistic expressions, and how the temperature expressions are used outside of the temperature domain. Languages cut up the temperature domain among their expressions according to three main dimensions: TEMPERATURE VALUES (e.g., warming vs. cooling temperatures, or excessive heat vs. pleasant warmth), FRAMES OF TEMPERATURE EVALUATION (TACTILE, The stones are cold; AMBIENT, It is cold here; and PERSONAL-FEELING, I am cold), and ENTITIES whose “temperature” is evaluated.  Although the temperature systems are often internally heterogeneous, we may still talk about the main temperature value distinctions for the whole system. The Ghanaian languages favour the cross-linguistically preferred two-value systems, with water often described by a more elaborated system. An interesting issue concerns conventionalisation and frequency of expressions with a primary meaning outside of the temperature domain, for temperature uses. For instance, the conventionalised expressions for talking about ‘warm/hot’ in Ewe involve sources of heat (‘fire’) and bodily exuviae (‘sweat’). The Ghanaian languages often manifest numerous extended uses of their temperature terms. However, strikingly, none of them conforms to one of the most widely quoted conceptual metaphors, “affection is warmth” (Lakoff & Johnson 1999:50), which is also true for many other languages in (West) Africa and otherwise.

This paper investigates the encoding of temperature in Sɛlɛɛ, a Niger-Congo language of the Kwa group, spoken in Ghana. The lexicon of temperature in Sɛlɛɛ consists of six central and two non-central temperature terms, distributed among the word classes of nouns, adjectives and verbs. The grammatical constructions associated with temperature evaluation vary according to the word-class status of each temperature term and its contexts of use. The distribution of the different grammatical constructions according to different types of temperature evaluation is discussed in the paper. Metaphorical uses of temperature-related terms are also discussed in the context of neighbouring and highly related languages. Finally, special patterns of temperature evaluation in connection with water are surveyed.

Ideophones are widely used in Japanese and are important to learn, but present big challenges for L2 speakers. This study investigates the contexts that ideophones in Japanese occur in, specifically what verbs are often modified by ideophones and those ideophones. A Japanese blog corpus consisting of 5.5 billion tokens was split up into tokens, tagged with part of speech and dependency relations and then searched. At a significance level of 0.001, 2398 verbs were found to often be modified by ideophones, and 52179 collocations of verbs and ideophones were found. The number of unique ideophones were 756. This shows that ideophones are used in many contexts where there is a relationship between ideophone and verb. The 20 highest ranked collocations were examined. Most contained depictions of sensory imagery normally not expressed by ideophones in many languages, and which might therefore be difficult for many L2 speakers.

Ett ord kan ha flera betydelser, vilket innebär att betydelsen är beroende av kontexten där ordet används. I denna korpusbaserade studie undersöks adjektiven svår, komplicerad, hård och tung som, antingen i sin grundläggande eller metaforiska betydelse, relaterar till den semantiska domänen SVÅRIGHETER. I enlighet med Rakhilina och Reznikovas (2016) frame-metod ämnas adjektivens kontexter, och således även betydelser, beskrivas genom att identifiera vilka substantiv som respektive adjektiv vanligen kombineras med i svensk bloggtext. De kombinatoriska möjligheterna (och begränsningarna) ställs både i relation till varandra, samt i ett bredare perspektiv till tidigare forskning om motsvarande lexem på andra språk. Adjektiven svår och komplicerad tenderar att samförekomma med en relativt bred variation av substantiv, medan adjektiven hård och tung ofta används med arbetsrelaterade eller tidsrelaterade substantiv. Flest likheter hittades å ena sidan mellan svår och komplicerad, å andra sidan mellan hård och tung. Skillnaderna var annars mer påfallande, trots många gemensamma kollokat, eftersom adjektiven även kunde associeras till olika bibegrepp. Studiens upptäckter ger särskilt stöd för att det mellan skilda språk finns olika associationer mellan SVÅRIGHETER och de lexem som relaterar till domänen, och därmed ges ytterligare anledning för framtida studier att undersöka kontexterna där lexemen används.

Several studies have shown slight differences in language skills between genders, favouring females. In order to investigate gender differences in speech production for Swedish children, the productive vocabulary size of 295 children, aged 18-24 months, was measured by the validated instrument SECDI-2. The size of the productive vocabulary was found to grow rapidly during this age. Significant gender differences were found at 21 and 24 months, but not at 18 months. The girls’ mean scores were higher.

This paper investigates the semantic prosody of three causal connectives: due to, owing to and because of in seven varieties of the English language. While research in the domain of English causality exists, we are not aware of studies that would cover the domain of causal connectives in English. Our claim is that connectives such as because of link two arguments, (at least) one of which will include a phrase that contributes to the interpretation of the relation as positive or negative, and hence define the prosody of the connective used. As our results demonstrate, the majority of the prosodies identified are negative for all three connectives; the proportions are stable across the varieties of English studied, and contrary to our expectations, we find no significant differences between the functions of the connectives and discourse preferences. Further, we investigate whether automatizing the sentiment annotation procedure via a simple language-model based classifier is possible. The initial results highlights the complexity of the task and the need for complicated systems, probably aided with other related datasets to achieve reasonable performance.

Visual imagery has been suggested to recruit occipital cortex via feedback projections from fronto-parietal regions, suggesting that these feedback projections might be exploited to boost recruitment of occipital cortex by means of real-time neurofeedback. To WA this prediction, we instructed a group of healthy participants to perform peripheral visual imagery while they received real-time auditory feedback based on the BOLD signal from either early visual cortex or the medial superior parietal lobe. We examined the amplitude and temporal aspects of the BOLD response in the two regions. Moreover, we compared the impact of self-rated mental focus and vividness of visual imagery on the BOLD responses in these two areas. We found that both early visual cortex and the medial superior parietal cortex are susceptible to auditory neurofeedback within a single feedback session per region. However, the signal in parietal cortex was sustained for a longer time compared to the signal in occipital cortex. Moreover, the BOLD signal in the medial superior parietal lobe was more affected by focus and vividness of the visual imagery than early visual cortex. Our results thus demonstrate that (a) participants can learn to self-regulate the BOLD signal in early visual and parietal cortex within a single session, (b) that different nodes in the visual imagery network respond differently to neurofeedback, and that (c) responses in parietal, but not in occipital cortex are susceptible to self-rated vividness of mental imagery. Together, these results suggest that medial superior parietal cortex might be a suitable candidate to provide real-time feedback to patients suffering from visual field defects.

A high proportion of repetitions is one of the distinctive features of child-directed speech (CDS). Research has shown that the percentage of repetitions in CDS varies over time depending on the age of the child. In addition, it is suggested that repetitions in CDS correlate with child language development. The aim of the study was to investigate the possible variations over time in the percentage of repetitions in CDS during the child’s first year, and to try to find a connection between repetitions and the child’s language development. Repetitions in parent speech in ten parent-child dyads as the children were 3, 6, 9 and 12 months old were investigated quantitatively. Exact and varying self-repetitions and exact and varying repetitions of the child’s utterances were investigated and compared to the same children’s linguistic level at 18 months of age. The results showed that the percentage of exact self-repetitions was more than 30 percent lower at the age of 12 months than at 3, 6 and 9 months of age. The total percentage of repetitions of the child’s utterances increased more than four times from 3 to 12 months of age. A connection was found between the repetitions during the child’s first year and the child’s language development, indicating that a low percentage of exact self-repetitions at 6 to 9 months of age correlated with a high vocabulary at 18 months of age. A link between the expressive language of the child and the repetitions in parents’ speech was suggested.

Turn-final gaze at the interlocutor has been suggested to fill different functions in conversation: being monitoring, regulatory or response-seeking. 16 Swedish toddlers use of turn-final gaze in dyadic interaction with their parents was investigated at the ages 1;0, 1;6, 2;0, 2;6 and 3;0. The turn-final gaze behaviour was investigated for correlations to child age and language level. Additionally, child turn-final gaze in turn-final questions, in turns longer than 5 seconds and in different interaction contexts was examined.Results showed that the use of active turn final gaze increased over ages 1;0-2;0. No correlations between child use of turn-final gaze and child language level could be found. In turn-final questions, 93% of the turn-final gaze was active, i.e. was not present at the start of the turn. Turn-final gaze was used both during conversation and object-oriented interaction at all ages.A monitoring-response-seeking function of turn-final gaze was proposed to be used by the toddlers as a means to get the parent’s encouragement and approval of the child’s interactive language use. Additionally, the importance of choosing a suitable measure type of turn-final gaze while investigating small children was stressed.

Repetitions in child-directed speech (CDS) have been shown to vary over time, and are suggested to affect first language acquisition. Correlations between verbal contents of repetitions in CDS and children’s language development have been suggested. The verbal contents of repetitions in Swedish CDS have not yet been investigated.

The aim of this study was to examine the verbal contents of repetitions in Swedish CDS during the child’s first 2 years and possible changes in proportions of repetitions during the same time span. Verbal contents of repetitions in parents’ speech in 10 parent-child dyads as the children were 3, 6, 9, 12 and 24 months old were investigated focusing on word classes, sentence types and whole-constituent change. The results were compared to the children’s productive vocabularies at the age of 30 months. Possible occurrences of item-based constructions and frequent frames in the repetitions were also examined.

The overall results revealed patterns concerning change in verbal contents in repetitions over time and correlations between verbal contents in repetitions and child language development. Two proposals were made: parents adjust the complexity of their speech to linguistic developmental stages of their children, and linguistic variation in the input increases as the child grows older.

Stimulus degradation adds to working memory load during speech processing. We investigated whether this applies to sign processing and, if so, whether the mechanism implicates secondary auditory cortex. We conducted an fMRI experiment where 16 deaf early signers (DES) and 22 hearing non-signers performed a sign-based n-back task with three load levels and stimuli presented at high and low resolution. We found decreased behavioral performance with increasing load and decreasing visual resolution, but the neurobiological mechanisms involved differed between the two manipulations and did so for both groups. Importantly, while the load manipulation was, as predicted, accompanied by activation in the frontoparietal working memory network, the resolution manipulation resulted in temporal and occipital activation. Furthermore, we found evidence of cross-modal reorganization in the secondary auditory cortex: DES had stronger activation and stronger connectivity between this and several other regions. We conclude that load and stimulus resolution have different neural underpinnings in the visual–verbal domain, which has consequences for current working memory models, and that for DES the secondary auditory cortex is involved in the binding of representations when task demands are low.

The current study investigates how locative clauses and existential constructions are realized and differentiated in the language of Khowar [ISO 693–3: khw] (Hindu Kush Indo-Aryan, HKIA). Khowar is one of several under-researched languages in the Hindu Kush, and as of yet there is no comprehensive description of its linguistic structure. The data for this study was provided by Afsar Ali Khan (local linguist and native speaker of Khowar), in the form of a collection of transcribed traditional Khowar stories, told by speakers in the community. Samples of locative clauses and existential constructions were collected from the corpus, mainly by use of the concordance tool of Toolbox, after which an analysis was carried out. The results show that word order is the main strategy for differentiating locational-existential constructions and locative clauses in Khowar, that semantically bleached posture verbs are not a present strategy for creating locative clauses nor existential constructions, and that there are certain story-opening sequences with existential constructions that are typical of the genre represented by the data. Future research is suggested to focus on negative existentials in Khowar, the full distributional pattern of the actual and inferential copula in other types of non-verbal predication, and the extended use of the 3rd person singular past tense form of the actual copula, ɔʃɔj, which is no longer sensitive to the animacy distinction otherwise present in the Khowar verbal system.

In this study, we outline a methodology to quantify the degree of similarity between pairs of f0 distributions based on the Anderson-Darling measure that underlies its namesake goodness-of-fit test. The procedure emphasizes differences due to more fine-grained f0 modulations rather than differences in measures of central tendency, such as the mean and median. In order to assess the procedure’s usefulness for speaker comparison, we applied it to a multilingual corpus in which participants contributed speech delivered in three speaking styles. The similarity measure was calculated separately as function of speaking style and speaker. Between-speaker variability (different speakers, same style) in distribution similarity varied significantly between styles — spontaneous interview shows greater variability than read sentences and word list in five languages (English, French, Italian, Portuguese and Swedish); in Estonian and German, read sentences yield more variability. Within-speaker variability (same speaker, different styles) levels are lower than between-speaker in the style that exhibit the greatest variability. The results point to the potential use of the proposed methodology as a way to identify possible idiosyncratic traits in f0 distributions. Also, they further demonstrate the effect of speaking styles on intonation patterns.

We investigated long-term mean, median and base value of F0 to estimate how long it takes their variability to stabilize. Change point analysis was used to locate stabilization points. In one experiment, stabilization points were calculated in recordings of the same text spoken in 26 languages. Average stabilization points are 5 seconds for base value and 10 seconds for mean and median. Variance after the stabilization point was reduced around 40 times for mean and median and more than 100 times for the base value. In another experiment, four speakers read two different texts each. Stabilization points for the same speaker across the texts do not exactly coincide as would be ideally expected. Average change point dislocation is 2.5 seconds for the base value, 3.4 for the median and 9.5 for the mean. After stabilization, individual differences in the three measures obtained from the two texts are 2% on average. Present results show that stabilization points in long-term measures of F0 occur earlier than suggested in the previous literature.

In this study, we compared three long-term fundamental frequency estimates — mean, median and base value — with respect to how fast they approach a stable value, as a function of language, speaking style and speaker. The base value concept was developed in search for an f0 value which should be invariant under prosodic variation. It has since also been tested in forensic phonetics as a possible speaker-specific f0 value. Data used in this study — recorded speech by male and female speakers in seven languages and three speaking styles, spontaneous, phrase reading and word list reading — had been recorded for a previous project. Average stabilisation times for the mean, median and base value are 9.76, 9.67 and 8.01 s. Base values stabilise significantly faster. Languages differ in both average and variability of the stabilisation times. Values range from 7.14 to 11.41 (mean), 7.5 to 11.33 (median) and 6.74 to 9.34 (base value). Spontaneous speech yields the most variable stabilisation times for the three estimators in Italian and Swedish, for the median in French and Portuguese and base value in German. Speakers within each language do not differ significantly in terms of stabilisation time variability for the three estimators.

In this study, we expand on previous experiments designed with the aim of determining the minimum length that an audio sample should have in order for the speaking rate derived from it to be representative of the sample as a whole. We compare two different approaches to establishing that the time series of the cumulative speaking rate calculated over the audio sample has reached stability. We also compare the effect on stabilization time of four other factors that may affect the way speaking rate is calculated. The results show that all factors tested have significant effects, although of limited practical concern. Overall, average stability time is 12.1 seconds, with the bulk of the distribution lying between 7.9 and 16.2 s.

This is a lexical typological pilot study that examines the concept of LIFE in eleven different languages. The main material consists of texts retrieved from the Bible, the New Testament. The study is based on the Koine-Greek lexemes for life, ζωή (zōḗ), ψυχή (psūkhḗ) and βῐ́ος (bíos). Probabilistic semantic maps have been created through multidimensional scaling for each language and have been analyzed with partitioning around medoids pam(). The results show two interesting phenomena. Firstly, zōḗ has been translated most consistently. psūkhḗ and bíos have been translated with more va- riation in most languages where several different lexemes have been used, and this indicates that their meaning is more varied. The Koine-Greek lexemes form a concep- tual structure, which means that the various concepts of LIFE is arranged according to a narrower and broader meaning. Secondly the results also show that the languages adapt their vocabulary to mimic this structure, it is most evident in languages with several lexemes for LIFE and how they are used to translate the three Koine-Greek lexemes.

Humans share sensory systems with a common anatomical blueprint, but individual sensory experience nevertheless varies. In olfaction, it is not known to what degree sensory perception, particularly the perception of odor pleasantness, is founded on universal principles dictated by culture or merely a matter of personal taste. To address this, we asked 225 individuals from 9 diverse nonwestern cultures—hunter-gatherer to urban dwelling—to rank the monomolecular odorants from most to least pleasant. Contrary to expectations, culture explained only 6% of the variance in pleasantness rankings, whereas individual variability or personal taste explained 54%. Importantly, there was substantial global consistency, with molecular identity explaining 41% of the variance in odor pleasantness rankings. Critically, these universal rankings were predicted by the physicochemical properties of out-of-sample molecules and out-of-sample pleasantness ratings given by a tenth group of western urban participants. Taken together, this shows human olfactory perception is strongly constrained by universal principles.

Compared to adults, children are less effective at designing their utterances to suit the informational needs of their audience. This listener-catering behaviour, known as audience design, has been hypothesized to rely on domain general cognitive mechanisms, such as working memory and cognitive flexibility. Considering that adolescence is an important period of sociocognitive growth, research on the development of audience design beyond childhood is surprisingly scant. The aim of this study was to trace the development of audience design in early and middle adolescence, and test its reliance on cognitive control function. Participants (11–12 and 15–16 years) performed two tasks assessing (1) the ability to adjust referential expressions to inferred knowledge of hearers and (2) cognitive control function. The findings suggest that the ability to take into account the informational needs of listeners during utterance formation develops considerably between early and middle adolescence. Although performance on both tasks was higher in the middle adolescent group, the study provides no evidence for a reliance of the measured audience design behaviour on cognitive control function. Future research should aim to determine whether the development of audience design in adolescence is facilitated by an increased efficacy of knowledge state attribution processes.

Conversation is the primary mode of language use. A key feature of conversation is turn-taking, during which interlocutors rapidly switch between speaker and listener roles without conscious effort. As previous neuroimaging studies have investigated language comprehension in isolated contexts, little is known regarding the neurocognitive bases of language use in reciprocal interaction. The present fMRI study investigates turn-taking, production, and comprehension processes, by utilizing existing conversational data between participants (N = 23) and a confederate outside the scanner. Turn initiations were associated with regions (the medial prefrontal cortex and the middle frontal gyrus) outside of the perisylvian core language network. Production and comprehension were both associated with core language regions in the temporal lobes, but activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus was mainly associated with production. Activation in the fusiform face area was linked to comprehension. The current findings suggest that (1) the coordination of speaker change is dependent on pragmatic processes that have been relatively overlooked in models of speech preparation, and (2) listeners are aided by their interlocutor's facial gestures when processing speech input during conversation. In addition, the results indicate that production and comprehension processes may differ (e.g., on the syntactic level), even in conversation.

INTRODUCTION: Conversation is the most ubiquitous form of language use. A hallmark of conversation is turn-taking, in which speakers rapidly alternate between speaker and listener roles without conscious effort, while simultaneously planning their upcoming turn. Since previous neurolinguistic studies have mainly investigated single or few linguistic processes in isolated environments that lack resemblance to real-world language use, the neurobiology of turntaking, production, and comprehension during real-time conversation is currently under-explored. In this fMRI investigation, we asked whether turn initiations would activate areas outside the classical perisylvian core language network and whether we would observe differences in activation during conversational production vs. conversational comprehension. METHODS: We utilized a publicly available fMRI dataset in which participants (N = 23) engaged in unscripted conversations via an audio-video link with a confederate outside the scanner. Each conversation (24 per participant) lasted for one minute. Conversational events were defined from the participant’s perspective. These events included turn initiations, defined as a 600 ms time window whose offset coincided with the onset of the participant’s turn. The duration of turn initiations was based on the reported minimum latency of speech preparation. The other events investigated in this study were production (defined as participant speech), and comprehension (defined as confederate speech). RESULTS: Turn initiations were associated with frontal regions outside of the classical perisylvian core language network. One cluster (2796 voxels, significant with FWE-correction used throughout) was observed in the medial prefrontal cortex bilaterally, spanning from the dorsal portion to the most ventral anterior cingulate cortex. Activation during turn initiations was also observed in the left middle frontal gyrus. Furthermore, both production and comprehension during conversation were associated with core language regions in the bilateral temporal lobes, but activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) was only present for production. Moreover, larger parts of the occipital cortex, and specifically the fusiform face area, were activated in comprehension than in production. DISCUSSION: We suggest that the observed frontal activation during turn initiations reflects sociopragmatic processes involved in intention processing and attentional control – processes that have not previously been localized outside the core perisylvian language network but have been hypothesized to play a crucial role in speech preparation during interaction. Furthermore, we interpret the fusiform face area activation during comprehension as an indication that listeners are aided by their interlocutor’s facial gestures specifically when comprehending speech input during real-time conversation. Finally, LIFG activation in conversational production but not comprehension may reflect the syntactic and semantic heuristics at play in conversational comprehension, minimizing the need for a full syntactic parse. The utilization of such heuristics may be a possible prerequisite for consistently meeting the expectations of timing in turn-taking.

A key question in neurolinguistics is whether language production and comprehension share neural infrastructure, but this question has not been addressed in the context of actual conversation. We utilized a public fMRI dataset where participants (N=24) engaged in unscripted conversations with a confederate outside the scanner via an audio-video link. We provide evidence indicating that production and comprehension, in a conversational setting, diverge with respect to how they modulate the recruitment of regions in the left-lateralized perisylvian language network. Activity in the left inferior frontal gyrus was stronger in production than in comprehension. Compared to production, comprehension showed stronger recruitment of the left anterior middle temporal gyrus and superior temporal sulcus, but this was not the case for the posterior aspect of these loci. Although our results are reminiscent of the classic Broca-Wernicke model, the anterior temporal activation is a notable difference from that model. This is one of the findings which may be a consequence of the conversational setting, another being that conversational production activated what we interpret as higher-level socio-pragmatic processes. In conclusion, we present evidence supporting that the above-mentioned frontal vs temporal regions in the language network are functionally segregated during conversation.

When participating in dialogue, speakers design their utterances to accommodate the individual needs of listeners (Bentz, et al., in prep). This feature is known as audience design (Clark & Murphy, 1982). Although audience design is central to conventional conversation, it is not known at which age speakers begin taking into account the world knowledge/frame of reference of their interlocutors. Indications from recent studies suggest that albeit preschool and first grade children engage in basic forms of perspective taking (Nadig & Sedivy, 2002), they fail to adapt their utterances in accordance with listener-specific needs in reference production (Pagmar, et al., in prep). Adult participants do however adapt their utterances, and individual differences in the adult population were not dependent on cognitive control function (Bentz, et al., in prep). The dependence on cognitive control function, e.g. switching, may be hypothesized to be greater in children. The current study aims to test the referential production of two age groups; early and mid adolescents (11;0-12;11 and 15;0-16;11), with the purpose of tracing the development of the ability to use information regarding listener-perspective during on-line referential production, and test its relation to cognitive control. The paradigm builds further on the well-established Director’s task but does not require the participants to take the visual perspective of the listener. Instead, participants are presented with a set of pictures portraying referents well-known to them, e.g. popular cartoon characters, hosts of children’s tv-shows, etc. Knowledge of the referents are controlled through post-test surveys. Furthermore, they are asked to direct listeners of two distinct groups, small children and elders, into choosing the target referent. Participants who take the frame of reference of addressees into consideration are expected to adopt different strategies when addressing the different groups, i.e., increase informativeness when denoting referents assumed to be unknown to the listener vs using less informative referential expressions (such as proper names) when denoting referents judged to be known to the listener. Cognitive control/executive function is assessed using the Wisconsin card sorting task. Results are discussed in terms of cognitive costs of switching strategies and the Gricean maxim of quantity.

The ability to adapt utterances to the world knowledge of one’s addressee is undeniably ubiquitous in human social cognition, but its development and association with other cognitive mechanisms during adolescence have not been studied. In an online production task, we measured the ability of children entering adolescence (ages 11–12, M= 11.8, 𝑁=29,17girlsN=29, 17 girls) and adolescents (ages 15–16, M = 15.9, 𝑁=29,17girlsN=29, 17 girls) to tailor referential expressions in accordance with the inferred world knowledge of their addressee—an ability we refer to as world knowledge-based audience design (AD). A post-test survey showed that both age groups held similar assumptions about the addressees’ knowledge of referents, but the younger age group did not consistently adapt their utterances in accordance with these assumptions during online production, resulting in a significantly improved AD behaviour across age groups. We also investigated the reliance of AD on executive functions (EF). Executive functioning (as reflected by performance on the Wisconsin card sorting task) increased significantly with age, but did not explain the age-related increase in AD performance. We thus provide evidence in support of an adolescent development of world knowledge-based AD over and above development of EF.

Interest is surging around the ”next-word-predictability” task that allowed large language models to reach their current capacity. It is sometimes claimed that prediction is enough to model language production. We set out to study predictability in an interactive setting. The current fMRI study used the information-theoretic measure of surprisal – the negative log-probability of a word occurring given the preceding linguistic context, estimated by a pre-trained language model (GPT-2). Surprisal has been shown to correlate with bottom-up processing located in the bilateral middle and superior temporal gyri (MTG/STG) during narrative comprehension (Willems et al., 2016). Still, surprisal has never been used to investigate conversational comprehension or any kind of language production. We hypothesized that previous results on surprisal in narrative comprehension would be replicated with conversational comprehension and that next-word- predictability would not encompass language production processes. We utilized a publicly available fMRI dataset in which participants (N=24) engaged in unscripted conversations (12 min/participant) via an audio- video link with a confederate outside the scanner. The conversational events Production, Comprehension, and Silence were modeled in a whole-brain analysis. Two parametric modulations of production and comprehension were added: (1) log-transformed context-independent word frequency (control regressor) and (2) surprisal. Production-surprisal and Comprehension-surprisal were respectively contrasted against the implicit baseline. These contrasts were compared with the contrasts Production and Comprehension vs implicit baseline. If surprisal merely indexed part of the activity in the latter, broader contrasts, this provides a handle on production and comprehension processes beyond next-word-predictability. For surprisal in conversational production, we observed statistically signi�cant clusters in the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG), the medial frontal gyrus, and the motor cortex. Importantly, Production vs implicit baseline showed bilateral STG activation while STG was not parametrically modulated by surprisal. Moreover, the bilateral MTG/STG were the only clusters active for Comprehension vs implicit baseline and they were also modulated by surprisal. For comprehension, we thus replicated the previous narrative comprehension study (Willems et al.,2016), showing that unpredictable words activate the bilateral MTG/STG also in conversational settings. Next- word-predictability is thus so far a good model for conversational comprehension. For production, however, the next-word-predictability task helped to hone in on what is sometimes considered core production machinery in LIFG. Several functional interpretations of the STG recruitment during production are possible (such as monitoring for speech errors), but the current results point in the direction of two important conclusions: (1) a functional division of the frontal and temporal cortices during production, where the frontal component is prediction-related, and (2) that language processing during production is more than prediction, at least at the word-level. We provide a functional handle on such extra-predictive processes.

A key question in research on the neurobiology of language is to which extent the language production and comprehension systems share neural infrastructure, but this question has not been addressed in the context of conversation. We utilized a public fMRI dataset where 24 participants engaged in unscripted conversations with a confederate outside the scanner, via an audio-video link. We provide evidence indicating that the two systems share neural infrastructure in the left-lateralized perisylvian language network, but diverge regarding the level of activation in regions within the network. Activity in the left inferior frontal gyrus was stronger in production compared to comprehension, while comprehension showed stronger recruitment of the left anterior middle temporal gyrus and superior temporal sulcus, compared to production. Although our results are reminiscent of the classical Broca–Wernicke model, the anterior (rather than posterior) temporal activation is a notable difference from that model. This is one of the findings that may be a consequence of the conversational setting, another being that conversational production activated what we interpret as higher-level socio-pragmatic processes. In conclusion, we present evidence for partial overlap and functional asymmetry of the neural infrastructure of production and comprehension, in the above-mentioned frontal vs temporal regions during conversation.

This thesis investigates the syntactic features, functions, and diachrony of a complex predicate called ‘the inceptive construction’ which is based on a grammaticalised use of the converbs ‘get up’, ‘pick up’, ‘grasp’, and ‘take’. The languages under investigation are Amharic, Argobba, Harari, Zay, and Selt’i. The data collection that was analized consists of elicitations, audio recordings, and written texts. The analysis shows that the converbs identify the initial phase of the event encoded by a following verb. The converbs are further associated with nuances like volition, surprise, and emphasis. The rise of such interpretations as surprise and emphasis appears to depend mainly on context, while volition is inherent to the construction. The languages generally do not show much variation. However, there is a notable difference in some co-occurrence restrictions. Moreover, there is a difference in the presence/absence of certain converbs mainly in Harari and Zay, which is clearly a matter of preference between individual consultants. Regarding the origin of the inceptive construction, collocation, frequency, and speakers’ conception of the action of the converbs are possible factors that lead the verbs to grammaticalize into markers of the inception phase. Only some traces of the construction are found in an old Amharic text from the 15^th century.

The converb is the main verb form used in the inceptive construction, although other verb forms are allowed which may take a coordinating conjunction (in the cases of Amharic and Argobba) and an iterative/simultaneity marker (‘while’). The Amharic conjunction =nna ‘and’ links the light verb with the reference verb in the inceptive construction, but is also used in causal(purposive) and conditional coordination. The criteria of tense iconicity and variable positions indicate that =nna is a coordinating conjunction in the former, but a subordinator in the latter. Lastly, the converb in Amharic is shown to become insubordinated, i.e. the main verb or auxiliary it depends on gets ellipsed over time and it comes to function as a main verb. An insubordinated converb is used in the expression of surprise/exclamation, interrogation, rhetorical questioning, wishing, and the resultative/perfective. The point is it is still possible to use the notion of ‘converb’ in the inceptive construction as this is a separate historical process. 

This study explores the two Japanese temporal connectors mae ni and nai uchi ni that express the notion of ‘before.’ These have been claimed to differ in factuality and certainty (Kuno, 1973) and on pragmatic grounds in the form of speaker attitude (Hasegawa, 2015). Using The Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese, this study investigates the veracity of previous findings and aims to further deepen the understanding of what sets these two temporal connectors apart. Rather than in factuality or certainty, they are found to differ in lexical aspect and predicate class tendencies, as well as the ability to express minimal scales that work similarly to negative Horn scales in the case of nai uchi ni. As these are more informative the smaller they are, this also explains the pragmatic aspects that have been identified in previous research.

The languages spoken on northern Halmahera and surrounding small islands constitute a group of related ‘Papuan’ languages called North Halmahera. They are also, together with other Papuan and Austronesian languages, included in a proposed sprachbund which is called East Nusantara. Neuter gender and numeral classifiers have both been proposed to characterize the sprachbund. Consequently,an investigation of the noun categorisation systems in the North Halmahera languages, which is the subject of this study, can be of interest for the characterization of the sprachbund. The method for the investigation is to search for information about seven languages in existing grammatical descriptions, complemented with information which can be culled from published texts in the languages. There are mainly two categorisation systems in all the investigated languages: genders and numeral classifiers. The numerals often contain fossilized prefixes. Among the numeral classifiers, the human classifiers are special because of their origin from pronominal undergoer prefixes and the limitations of its use in some languages. Except in West Makian, there is a default classifier and a classifier for trees, and secondarily for houses, in all languages. A classifier for two-dimensional objects is also quite common. The other classifiers are used with a very limited number of nouns.

Rembong-Wangka is an Austronesian language, which together with other little described languages, belongs to the Manggaraic subgroup of Austronesian. One aim is to present information about them, as well as other languages in the area, drawn from not readily accessible sources, including archival material, and information collected by the author in Flores. An estimation of the number of speakers of Rembong-Wangka, the dialects and a map of settlements where the language is spoken, are given. The second aim is to describe adnominal possessive constructions, and the third to discuss etymologies of morphological elements in these constructions. The material to answer these questions was collected during two short field trips. Written glossed texts in a Rembong-Wangka corpus constructed by the author were used and analysed in the FLEx program.

In pronominal possession, the possessor can be expressed by pronominal enclitics or oblique pronouns. The latter of these two strategies is more emphatic. Non-pronominal possession can be expressed by juxtaposition or with a Possession Construction Marker (PCM). Juxtaposition is used mostly for non-prototypical possession or possession-like relationships and PCMs mainly for prototypical possession. The etymology of the oblique pronouns is discussed, as well as the possible etymological connections of Central Flores PCMs with different words in Rembong-Wangka.