Form and function in children's understanding of ironic utterances

Children's use of contextual discrepancy and stressed intonation to interpret literal form and illocutionary function in the use of ironic utterances was examined in two experiments. First and third grade children (6 and 8 years of age, respectively) and college adults were read short stories consisting of an utterance by a speaker and contextual information that was either neutral or that biased an ironic or literal interpretation of the utterance. The intonation of the utterance was either stressed or unstressed. Questions were asked about the literal form of the utterance, and the speaker's attitude in using the utterance. The results suggest that evaluation of the literal form and inference to the speaker's intended use of an utterance are independent components of irony comprehension in children: that contextual discrepancy and intonation function differently in cueing these processes; and that children and adults differ both in accomplishing these processes and in the use of these cues.     

Syntactic structure and acoustic pattern in speech perception Arthur Wingfield

The interaction of syntactic structure and acoustic pattern in perceptual segmentation of heard speech was investigated using sentences recorded with intonation patterns appropriate to their underlying structure and sentences where intonation was placed in direct conflict with the underlying structure. Speech samples were monitored through dichotic earphones with messages switched from one ear to the other either between or within major linguistic constituents. Analysis of errors in source localization and in sentence reproduction suggested a primary role of acoustic pattern in segmentation is to cue underlying syntactic structure. Two subsidiary experiments provided evidence that observed effects were related to active perceptual processing of the speech signal.     

Pitch Cues for the Recognition of Yes-No Questions in French

Linguistic studies of the intonation of Yes–No questions in French show that, in questions containing more than two stress groups, interrogative intonation is characterized by a sequence of lowered pitches or downstepped tones which precede the final rise. The gating paradigm was used here to determine whether subjects listening to French NP utterances containing three stress groups could indicate whether the utterance was an statement or a question before the final rise was heard. Although the task was difficult, findings indicate that listeners can in fact to a certain extent, recognize with mid confidence ratings, the intonational device of a question while they were hearing the downstepped tones preceding the final rise.     

Real-time comprehension processes in agrammatism: A case study

The ability of an agrammatic patient to construct structural syntactic and interpretative representations on-line was tested in two experiments. The first focused on global representations spanning an entire utterance, while the second examined lexical syntactic and semantic constraints on verb-argument relations. An off-line version of the second experiment was also carried out. There were two major findings. First, the patient could construct a semantic, but not syntactic, representation of an utterance. Second, he was much more dependent than normal upon pragmatic information. These results are discussed with respect to current claims about the nature of agrammatic comprehension deficits.     

Phoneme-monitoring reaction time as a function of preceding intonation contour

An acoustically invariant one-word segment occurred in two versions of one syntactic context. In one version, the preceding intonation contour indicated that a stress would fall at the point where this word occurred. In the other version, the preceding contour predicted reduced stress at that point. Reaction time to the initial phoneme of the word was faster in the former case, despite the fact that no acoustic correlates of stress were present. It is concluded that a part of the sentence comprehension process is the prediction of upcoming sentence accents.     

Syntactic priming in language production

People have a tendency to repeat the types of sentences they use during language production. Recent experimental work has shown that this phenomenon is at least partly due to ‘syntactic priming’, whereby the act of processing an utterance with a particular form facilitates processing a subsequent utterance with the same or a related form. In this review, we first provide an overview of the evidence for syntactic priming. The review will then explore the implications of this research for three different areas of language theory: the possible functional significance of syntactic priming in coordinating speakers during dialogue, the mechanisms underlying sentence production, and the nature of linguistic representation.     

The production and understanding of utterances in dyadic communication

Verbal communication in four dyads was analyzed with respect to syntactic form and cognitive and affective functions. Quantitative and qualitative methods were proposed to study these aspects of language behaviour. Utterances which conveyed a negative affective evaluation tended to be syntactically and cognitively complex. The cognitive and affective functions of a speaker's utterance tended to influence the syntactic quality of the listener's following utterance more than what the listener said in his own previous utterance. An investigation of the relationships between the personality characteristics flexibility, intelligence and verbal competence, and language variables suggested that flexible subjects often used utterances which expressed a positive evaluation. Furthermore, flexible subjects tended to influence the listener more by what they said than intelligent and verbally competent subjects did. It was concluded that this kind of functional analysis of language should be more adequate for psychological inquiry than in particular that of the transformational generative theory of language.     

Intonation and meaning

A general theory of meaning is introduced, based on a distinction between the content of a mental act and its mode of arousal. The distinction is extended to speech acts and to the role of intonation in determining their mode of utterance. Difference judgments based on intonation are used to produce a mode space with dimensions of Credence, Option, Salience, Arousal, and Weak Belief. It is argued that the modal function of intonations should not be restricted to the enrichment of declarations. The distinction between mode and content is used to separate the specficially linguistic content of intonations from other contents which they convey perceptually and by implication.This research was supported by a Canada Council Doctoral Fellowship) (W70 3030, W71 4373).     

A dynamic phonological model derived from the intonational analysis of a jargon aphasic patient

This study is a detailed phonological and intonational analysis of one subject's jargon productions. The cohesiveness and complexity of the intonation patterns and appropriateness of the gestures lead to the hypothesis that the jargon productions are due to phonological problems as opposed to semantic or syntactic problems. A psycholinguistic model containing a dynamic phonological component is hypothesized to account for this subject's jargon.     

Gestalt compositionality and instruction-based meaning construction

We would like to propose a new model of meaning construction based on language comprehension considered as a dynamic process during which the meaning of each linguistic unit and the global meaning of the sentence are determined simultaneously. This model, which may be called “gestalt compositionality,” is radically opposed to the classic compositional mechanism advocated by linguistic formalism based on the primacy of syntax. The process considers the syntactic structure of an utterance as the product of meaning construction rather than its source. The comprehension of an utterance is consequently directly based on the interaction between the different basic components of this utterance: lexical units, grammatical markers, positional relations between units, and more generally, basic “constructions” in the sense of Construction Grammar. Thus, meaning is really the result of a gestalt compositional process insomuch as the contribution of each basic component depends on the contribution of the other components present in the utterance. We show a first attempt at modeling from French and English examples.     

Actions and affordances in syntactic ambiguity resolution

In 2 experiments, eye movements were monitored as participants followed instructions containing temporary syntactic ambiguities (e.g., "Pour the egg in the bowl over the flour"). The authors varied the affordances of task-relevant objects with respect to the action required by the instruction (e.g., whether 1 or both eggs in the visual workspace were in liquid form, allowing them to be poured). The number of candidate objects that could afford the action was found to determine whether listeners initially misinterpreted the ambiguous phrase ("in the bowl") as specifying a location. The findings indicate that syntactic decisions are guided by the listener's situation-specific evaluation of how to achieve the behavioral goal of an utterance.     

Relative salience of intonation fall and pause as cues to the perceptual segmentation of speech in an unfamiliar language

The modification of subjects' attention by two prosodic features was investigated using their reaction times to a nonspeech stimulus which coincided with these features. By using a foreign language unfamiliar to the subjects (Czechoslovakian), the influence of semantic and syntactic knowledge was controlled. The results indicate that for native speakers of English intonation fall is a relatively more important cue to the perceptual segmentation of speech than is pause.     

Processing distinctions between stems and affixes: evidence from a non-fluent aphasic patient

In this paper, we study the ability of a non-fluent aphasic patient, BN, to comprehend morphologically complex words when they appear in utterance contexts. We first establish that he is insensitive to the contextual appropriateness of both derived and inflected words. In a further experiment we show that he has no difficulty processing the stems of complex words and conclude that his problem is with the bound morphemes themselves. We then ask whether this problem is due to his inability to access either the phonological form of a morphologically complex word or its semantic and/or syntactic content. We find that only the access of semantic and syntactic content is impaired. We conclude from these six studies that: (a) BN presents a counter-example to the claim that non-fluent patients have particular difficulty with those aspects of morphology which have a syntactic function; (b) BN processes both derived and inflected words by mapping the sensory input onto the entire full-form of a complex word, but the semantic and syntactic content of the stem alone is accessed and integrated into the context. The semantic and syntactic implications of the suffix are never evaluated. This implies separate representation of the stems and suffixes of some types of morphologically complex words.     

Generating Facial Expressions for Speech

This article reports results from a program that produces high-quality animation of facial expressions and head movements as automatically as possible in conjunction with meaning-based speech synthesis, including spoken intonation. The goal of the research is as much to test and define our theories of the formal semantics for such gestures, as to produce convincing animation. Towards this end, we have produced a high-level programming language for three-dimensional (3-D) animation of facial expressions. We have been concerned primarily with expressions conveying information correlated with the intonation of the voice: This includes the differences of timing, pitch, and emphasis that are related to such semantic distinctions of discourse as “focus,”“topic,” and “comment,”“theme” and “rheme,” or “given” and “new” information. We are also interested in the relation of affect or emotion to facial expression. Until now, systems have not embodied such rule-governed translation from spoken utterance meaning to facial expressions. Our system embodies rules that describe and coordinate these relations: intonation/information, intonation/affect, and facial expressions/affect. A meaning representation includes discourse information: What is contrastive/background information in the given context, and what is the “topic” or “theme” of the discourse? The system maps the meaning representation into how accents and their placement are chosen, how they are conveyed over facial expression, and how speech and facial expressions are coordinated. This determines a sequence of functional groups: lip shapes, conversational signals, punctuators, regulators, and manipulators. Our algorithms then impose synchrony, create coarticulation effects, and determine affectual signals, eye and head movements. The lowest level representation is the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), which makes the generation system portable to other facial models.     

The determination of content

I identify a notion of compositionality at the intersection of the different notions philosophers, linguists, and psychologists are concerned with. The notion is compositionality of expression content: the idea that the content of a complex expression in a context of its utterance is determined by its syntactic structure and the contents of its constituents in the contexts of their respective utterances. Traditional arguments from productivity and systematicity cannot establish that the contents of linguistic expressions are compositionally determined in this sense. I present a novel argument for this thesis.     

Informal pragmatics and linguistic creativity

Examples of successful linguistic communication give rise to two important insights: (1) it should be understood most fundamentally in terms of the pragmatic success of each individual utterance, and (2) linguistic conventions need to be understood as on a par with the non-linguistic regularities that competent language users rely upon to refer. Syntax and semantics are part of what Barwise and Perry call the context of the utterance, contributing to the pragmatics of the utterance. This full and distributed multichannel context determines meaning if anything does. On the standard account of context, context disambiguates the meaning of language, but it is at least as apt in many situations to say that language disambiguates context. In practice, the two work together, sometimes with more emphasis on one than the other. Reference should be understood in pragmatic terms (it is an act) and, since success is often achieved in non-standard, creative ways, any formalisation of pragmatics can only be partial. The need for such an inventive approach to referring traces back to the need for language to be highly efficient, with expressions underdetermining their interpretation. Next, the shared semantic and syntactic regularities, which might seem to be independent of the context of an utterance, should be understood as also being part of that context. Past usage underdetermines how terms can be used since it allows for multiple projections. Successful reference with novel uses that are disambiguated by context can become the ground for new conventions.     

Psycholinguistics discovers the operant: a review of Roger Brown's A first language: the early stages

Brown's book is selectively reviewed with the aim of noting points of similarity between Brown's psycholinguistic analysis of language acquisition and a functional analysis of verbal behavior. Brown divides early language acquisition into five stages, based on mean length of utterance in samples of child speech. His book concentrates on Stage I, when mean length of utterance first rises above 1.0, indicating that children are beginning to speak in multi-morphemic utterances, and Stage II, when mean length of utterance in morphemes is about 2.25. Multi-morphemic utterances in Stage I consist mainly of ordered sequences of uninflected nouns and verbs, the order being that of the simple declarative sentence (agent-action-indirect object-direct object-locative). The review attempts a theoretical analysis of the functional stimulus control of Stage I syntactic order, concluding that the control must originate partly in relations among events in the environment and partly in covert autoclitic verbal behavior. Increases in mean length of utterance in Stage II are mainly due to the appearance of several “grammatical morphemes” such as the progressive -ing inflection on verbs and the plural -s inflection on nouns. The review attempts a behavioral paraphrase, again in terms of tacts and autoclitics, of Brown's psycholinguistic analysis of grammatical morphemes, concluding that Stage II displays the further development, building on Stage I, of the combined control of verbal behavior by relations in the environment and covert self-generated verbal stimuli. Similarities between Brown's psycholinguistic analysis and a functional analysis of language acquisition suggest that the two viewpoints are converging on a common concern with the stimulus control of verbal behavior.