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According to the Language Familiarity Effect (LFE), people are better at discriminating between speakers of their native language. Although this cognitive effect was largely studied in the literature, experiments have only been conducted on a limited number of language pairs and their results only show the presence of the effect without yielding a gradual measure that may vary across language pairs. In this work, we show that the computational model of LFE introduced by Thorburn, Feldman, and
Schatz (2019) can address these two limitations. In a first experiment, we attest to this model&#39;s capacity to obtain a gradual measure of the LFE by replicating behavioural findings on native and accented speech. In a second experiment, we evaluate LFE on a large number of language pairs, including many which have never been tested on humans. We show that the effect is replicated across a wide array of languages, providing further evidence of its universality. Building on the gradual measure of LFE, we also show that languages belonging to the same family yield smaller scores, supporting the idea of an effect of language distance on LFE.


CogSci 2022

Is the Language Familiarity Effect gradual ? A computational modelling approach

According to the Language Familiarity Effect (LFE), people are better at discriminating between speakers of their native language. Although this cognitive effect was largely studied in the literature, experiments have only been conducted on a limited number of language pairs and their results only show the presence of the effect without yielding a gradual measure that may vary across language pairs. In this work, we show that the computational model of LFE introduced by Thorburn, Feldman, and
Schatz (2019) can address these two limitations. In a first experiment, we attest to this model's capacity to obtain a gradual measure of the LFE by replicating behavioural findings on native and accented speech. In a second experiment, we evaluate LFE on a large number of language pairs, including many which have never been tested on humans. We show that the effect is replicated across a wide array of languages, providing further evidence of its universality. Building on the gradual measure of LFE, we also show that languages belonging to the same family yield smaller scores, supporting the idea of an effect of language distance on LFE.


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Each grammatical construction has its own function, and typically multiple constructions are combined to express a message. When the functions of two constructions conflict in a way that cannot be reconciled, their combination is judged ungrammatical. Here we consider one such type of case: “syntactic island violations.” Specifically, we consider combinations of wh-questions with 11 other constructions. Wh-questions request direct information about a particular constituent. Using a new Discourse task, we quantify how directly 11 constructions convey information in simple declarative sentences. Results demonstrate acceptability judgments on the wh-questions correlate with the degree to which the 11 constructions convey information directly. Thus, we argue that degrees of unacceptability of “island violations” result from the extent to which the discourse functions of the constructions involved conflict (N=240).

Islands effects without extraction: the discourse functions of constructions predicts island status

Why do readers typically fixate near the center of a word, with a bias towards word onset? Alhama, Siegelman, Frost, & Armstrong (2019) proposed an account based on (1) perceptual constraints that reduce the likelihood of perceiving a letter the further it is from the fixated location, and (2) the information available from the perceived letters for identifying the word. We expand this work to predict the fixation location distributions of 7-letter words for 43 languages from 9 language families. We found that in the majority of the languages, words were most likely to be correctly recognized when fixating near the center, slightly toward onset. However, there were deviations from this trend, such as predicting more accurate recognition when fixating slightly towards offset in Slavic languages. Our results provide novel predictions for experimental work that considers a flexible language system that optimizes initial fixations based on information theory constraints.

Predicting Fixation Locations in 43 Languages based on Perceptual Constraints and Information Theory

In two eye-tracking pilots during reading, we investigated real-time processing of formality-register congruence and subject-verb morphosyntactic congruence, and their relation. Participants read, in German, two context sentences conveying a formal or informal situation, followed by a target sentence containing a high- or low-register verb (e.g., Engl. transl. "The policeman detained the activist" vs. "The policeman grabbed the activist") which matched or mismatched context formality. The second pilot additionally manipulated subject-verb morphosyntactic congruence (e.g., Engl. transl. "*The policeman detain the activist"; "*The policeman grabbed the activist"). We observed main effects of formality-register and morphosyntactic congruence on verb reading times, as well as an interaction effect at the post-verbal object noun. Higher degrees of context and target sentence formality resulted in longer reading times. Ongoing investigation will further clarify our pilot findings, which suggest some interference between formality-register and morphosyntactic congruence processing.

(How) Do Register and Morphosyntactic Congruence Effects Interact during Sentence Reading? Two Eye-Tracking Pilot Studies

In an eye-tracking during reading experiment, we examined how rapidly two types of photo-sentence relations impact sentence comprehension. The relation between a photo of a cultural figure and a year in an ensuing sentence (either the cultural figure in the photo was either alive in that year or not) was contrasted with relations between the same photo and achievements or facts about the cultural figure (e.g., a film they had vs. had not starred in). Longer reading times were observed at the regions containing mismatching year or fact, with more robust effects when data were filtered to include only trials in which participants had accurate prior knowledge about the cultural figure, their accomplishments, and their lifetime. These findings indicate that specific long-term knowledge is activated by a picture of a known figure and is rapidly available during language processing.

Activation of biographical information via picture of cultural figures during comprehension: evidence from eye-tracking during reading

We explore contextual adaptation of referring expressions with respect to referential ambiguity and communicative intention. We focus not only on whether people adapt, but also on how by contrasting lexical specification (e.g., "batter") and syntactic modification (e.g., "man in white pants") when discriminating between objects in natural scenes (e.g., a batter wearing white pants and a referee). There are three main results. First, we replicate that speakers adapt their expressions to avoid ambiguity. Second, communicative intention has an effect: participants tended to use more specific names in a discrimination task than in a descriptive task, even without referential ambiguity in the context. Third, when given the choice, participants tended to prefer more specific words over adding modification - that is, using lexical rather than syntactic means to resolve ambiguity. This suggests that it may be less demanding to increase informativity of referring expressions with lexical specification than syntactic modification.

Effects of task and visual context on referring expressions using natural scenes

End-to-end sign language understanding and generation models do not accurately represent the prosody of the languages. This lack of temporal and spatial variation in generated signs leads to poor quality and lower human perception. We seek to improve prosody in automatic models that understand sign language by modeling intensification in a data-driven manner with strategies grounded in the linguistics of sign language by enhancing the representation of intensity modifiers in gloss annotations. In this work, we identify four major categories for sign intensification across two different sign languages. Through an extensive data exploration, we compare annotated datasets for German Sign Language and British Sign Language for intensification. We analyze the effects of the domain of the dataset on the intensifier abundance and the changes of intensifier use across different sign languages.

Learning cognitive and linguistic prosodic categories for automatic cross-lingual sign language understanding

When a language offers multiple options for expressing the same meaning, what principles govern a speaker's choice? Two well-known principles proposed for explaining wide-ranging speaker preference are Uniform Information Density and Availability-Based Production. Here we test the predictions of these theories in a previously uninvestigated case of speaker choice.
Russian has two ways of expressing the comparative: an \textsc{explicit} option (\textit{Ona bystree chem ja}/She fast{\sc-comp} than me{\sc-nom}) and a \textsc{genitive} option (\textit{Ona bystree menya/She fast{\sc-comp} me{\sc-gen}}). We lay out several potential predictions of each theory for speaker choice in the Russian comparative construction, including effects of post-comparative word predictability, phrase length, syntactic complexity, and semantic association between the comparative adjective and subsequent noun. In a corpus study, we find that the explicit construction is used preferentially when the post-comparative noun phrase is longer, has a relative clause, and is less semantically associated with the comparative adjective. A follow-up production experiment using visual scene stimuli to elicit comparative sentences replicates the corpus finding that Russian native speakers prefer the explicit form when post-comparative phrases are longer. These findings offer no clear support for the predictions of Uniform Information Density, but are broadly supportive of Availability-Based Production, with the explicit option serving as an unreduced form that eases speakers' planning of complex or low-availability utterances. Code for this study is available at https://github.mit.edu/thclark/russian_uid


Evidence for Availability Effects on Speaker Choice in the Russian Comparative Alternation

While the grammatical use of space for referential strategies is attested across many sign languages of Western Europe, Kata Kolok, a rural sign language used in Northern Bali, has not developed anaphoric pointing in space nor agreement verbs (Engberg-Pedersen, 1993; Liddell, 2003; de Vos, 2012). To find out whether such typological differences can be explained by differences in the respective co-speech gesture systems, this preregistered study is collecting data for a cross-cultural comparison. Building on Motamedi et al. (2021), we are conducting studies in Bali and the Netherlands using an iterated learning silent gesture paradigm in which hearing people communicate transitive events using only gestures. Preliminary data indeed suggest that our Balinese participants do not employ space the same way our Dutch participants do. We will present comparative analyses and evaluate the role of co-speech gesture systems in sign language emergence in the lab or when evolving from spontaneous interaction.

Cross-cultural differences in the emergence of referential strategies in artificial sign languages

An important step in children's socio-cognitive development is learning how to engage in coordinated conversations. This requires not only becoming competent speakers but also active listeners. This paper studies children's use of backchannel signaling (e.g., "yeah!" or a head nod) when in the listener's role during conversations with their caregivers via video call. While previous work had found backchannel to be still immature in middle childhood (i.e., 6 to 11 years of age), our use of both more natural/spontaneous conversational settings and more adequate controls allowed us to reveal that school-age children are strikingly close to adult-level mastery in many measures of backchanneling. The broader impact of this paper is to highlight the crucial role of social context in evaluating children's conversational abilities.

Backchannel Behavior in Child-Caregiver Zoom-Mediated Conversations

Listeners struggle to identify talkers with a different accent than their own, a phenomenon known as the Other Accent Effect (OAE). But for reasons that are not well understood, the OAE is not consistently observed in all studies. Comprehension-related processing demands offer one explanation, such that other-accented talkers who are more easily understood are also easier to recognize. Here, we test this hypothesis using a forensic-style voice line-up. We examine native English-speaking adults’ ability to recognize talkers from four accent groups, manipulating comprehension-related processing demands by presenting listeners with predictable sentences and subtitles (low-demand condition), or variable sentences without subtitles (high-demand condition). As predicted, the OAE was only observed for talkers with non-native accents. But crucially, our comprehension manipulation had no impact on talker recognition accuracy of any accent type. We conclude that comprehension ease is likely not a key factor driving the OAE. Other possible explanations are discussed.

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Is the Language Familiarity Effect gradual ? A computational modelling approach

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Islands effects without extraction: the discourse functions of constructions predicts island status

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