The 46th Language Lunch
Date: 2015-02-19
Location: G.07 Informatics Forum
The source of ‘said’, the overlooked English determiner
Brett,Reynolds; None; None
Dictionaries almost universally list said as an adjective in cases like a true copy of (the) said document, and the fact that the is optional or even redundant for some speakers is broadly overlooked. Based on syntactic and semantic evidence, I argue that the said should be considered a complex determiner and that said qualifies as a determiner in its own right, which is unexpected from a word starting life as a past participle. Interestingly, the same phenomenon can be found in Spanish and German among other European languages. I show that calquing from French and Latin texts in the 14th century is almost certainly the source of the English innovation.I tentatively conclude that new members of the so-called ?closed classes? can be added directly through language contact in the written channel.
Rating Naturalness in Speech Synthesis: The Effect of Style and Expectation
Rasmus,Dall; None; None
In this work I present evidence that speech produced spontaneously in a conversation is considered more natural than read prompts. I also explore the relationship between participants’ expectations of the speech style under evaluation and their actual ratings. In successive listening tests subjects rated the naturalness of either spontaneously produced, read aloud or written sentences, with instructions toward either conversational, reading or general naturalness. It was found that, when presented with spontaneous or read aloud speech, participants consistently rated spontaneous speech more natural – even when asked to rate naturalness in the reading case. Presented with only text, participants generally preferred transcriptions of spontaneous utterances, except when asked to evaluate naturalness in terms of reading aloud. This has implications for the application of MOS-scale naturalness ratings in Speech Synthesis, and po- tentially on the type of data suitable for use both in general TTS, dialogue systems and specifically in Conversational TTS, in which the goal is to reproduce speech as it is produced in a spontaneous conversational setting.
Dissecting the semantic network: fMRI evidence for opposing context effects in regions involved in representation vs. control
Paul,Hoffman; None; None
Effective verbal comprehension requires representations of word meanings and executive processes that regulate access to this knowledge in a context-appropriate manner. Neuropsychological studies indicate that these two elements depend on different brain regions and can be impaired independently. We investigated the neural basis of these functions using distortion-corrected fMRI. 19 healthy subjects were scanned while completing a synonym-judgement comprehension task with concrete and abstract words. Each judgement was preceded by a sentence cue that manipulated the executive control demands of the semantic judgement. On some trials, the cue was irrelevant to the judgement, placing maximum demands on executive control processes. On others, the cue placed the target word in a specific linguistic context, reducing the executive demands of selecting the context-appropriate meaning. A network of regions were involved in the task, including inferior frontal gyrus, inferior parietal cortex, posterior temporal regions and superior and ventral areas within the anterior temporal lobe. Further analysis revealed a triple dissociation within this semantic network. (1) inferior prefrontal cortex was most active when irrelevant cues were provided, indicating involvement in executive regulation of meaning and suppression of irrelevant information, (2) superior anterior temporal lobe was most active when cues were contextually relevant, suggesting a role in integrating word meaning with preceding context, (3) ventral anterior temporal lobe was strongly active for both types of cue, consistent with its role in context-invariant representations of meaning. These differing responses to contextual constraints align with neuropsychological and TMS data and indicate functional specialisation within the semantic network.
An Exploratory Investigation of Eye and Mouse Movements in Speaker Reliability Judgement
Jia,Ern Loy; None; None
When do listeners form pragmatic interpretations about a speech signal when processing linguistic input? We use an exploratory eye- and mouse-tracking paradigm to investigate listener comprehension in a reliability judgement task. Participants viewed visual displays while listening to a speaker tell them which object to click on in order to gain a prize. The speaker was presented as being sometimes dishonest, and critical utterances were fluent (The treasure is behind the…) or disfluent (Um, the treasure is behind the…). Time course data showed that listeners were more likely to direct their gaze and move the mouse towards the distractor object during disfluent utterances, with effects emerging soon after the point of disambiguation. The results indicate that listeners can and do make rapid global judgements about a speaker’s reliability depending on how the linguistic information is conveyed.
