The 29th Language Lunch
Date: 2011-10-07
Location: G.07 Informatics Forum
Eye movements and perceptual span in people who stutter
Sam,Miller; Psychology; s1029768@sms.ed.ac.uk
Madeleine,Beveridge; PPLS; S0946253@sms.ed.ac.uk
Richard,Shillcock; Informatics; rcs@inf.ed.ac.uk
Recent evidence suggests that people who stutter (PWS) may display different eye movement behaviour in silent reading compared with people who do not stutter (Corcoran & Frisson, 2011). We used the moving window paradigm (McConkie & Rayner, 1975) to examine whether the size of the perceptual span (the range of effective vision used in reading) differed between people who stutter and age- and education- matched controls. Participants read sentences in which information was available from (a) the currently fixated word only, (b) the currently fixated word plus one word to the right, (c) the currently fixated word plus two words to the right, or (d) the whole sentence. Results showed that people who stutter had a smaller rightward perceptual span, compared with controls. People who stutter also showed longer reading times in all conditions, more fixations, and more regressive saccades than controls.
Disentangling Chat with Local Coherence Models
Eugene,Charniak; Computer Science – Brown University ; ec@cs.brown.edu
Micha,Elsner; Informatics; melsner@staffmail.ed.ac.uk
We evaluate several popular models of local discourse coherence for domain and task generality by applying them to chat disentanglement. Using experiments on synthetic multiparty conversations, we show that most models transfer well from text to dialogue. Coherence models improve results overall when good parses and topic models are available, and on a constrained task for real chat data.
Unsupervised syntactic chunking with acoustic cues
John,Pate; Informatics; j.k.pate@sms.ed.ac.uk
Learning to group words into phrases without supervision is a hard task for NLP systems, but infants routinely accomplish it. We hypothesize that infants use acoustic cues to prosodic structure or syntactic probability, which NLP systems typically ignore. To evaluate the utility of word duration information for phrase discovery, we present an HMM-based unsupervised chunker that learns from only transcribed words and either ToBI annotation or raw word duration measures. Unlike previous work on unsupervised parsing and chunking, we use neither gold standard part-of-speech tags nor punctuation in the input. Evaluated on the Switchboard corpus, our model outperforms baselines that exploit either lexical, acoustic, or prosodic information alone, and, despite producing a flat structure, performs competitively with a state-of-the-art unsupervised lexicalized parser. Our results support the hypothesis that acoustic-prosodic cues provide useful evidence about syntactic phrases for language-learning infants. Additionally, our results suggest that predictability effects are more useful than prosodic constituency for bootstrapping basic syntax.
Language functions in Multiple Sclerosis (MS)
Hillary,Stahl; PPLS; s1046545@sms.ed.ac.uk
Mara,Sittampalam; PPLS; xyz@inf.ed.ac.uk
Phillipa,Rewaj; PPLS; s0880973@sms.ed.ac.uk
Thomas,Bak; PPLS; thomas.bak@ed.ac.uk
There is little research on language involvement in MS, though the studies that do exist indicate a wide variety of language impairments. No comprehensive study has yet been donerninvestigating MS abilities in all the major language domains. This study used one receptive and one expressive test for each of syntax, semantics, phonology and written language to assess patterns in MS language skills. The results of the group analysis indicate that MS patients are significantly impaired in receptive syntax, word-finding, reading, non-word repetition and spelling. The patients were then divided according to MS subtype. Analysis by subtype revealed that secondary progressive patients are linguistically preserved compared to primary progressive and relapsing-remitting groups on reading, and compared to the primary progressive group on word-finding. An individual analysis showed that subsets of individuals are significantly impaired on most of the language tests used, but there are different individuals in each subset. Syntax was impaired in exactly half of each MS subtype, and double dissociations were seen between syntax and semantics.
The schwa sound as a materialist universal in the study of language use
Richard,Shillcock; Informatics; rcs@inf.ed.ac.uk
The status of universals in the study of language is under increasing scrutiny (Evans & Levinson, 2009).The materialist position on universals contrasts abstract and concrete universals.The former is the universal conventionally recognized by psychologists and linguists; it has an important but limited role to play.The latter is a real entity that is a universal by virtue of its pervasive influence in the domain.The schwa sound is suggested as a viable concrete universal in the study of language use.
