Online comprehension of conditionals in context: A self-paced reading study on wenn (‘if’) versus nur wenn (‘only if’) in German

Neuropsychologia

Neural circuits related to language exhibit a remarkable ability to reorganize and adapt in response to visual deprivation. Particularly, early and late blindness induce distinct neuroplastic changes in the visual cortex, repurposing it for language and semantic processing. Interestingly, these functional changes provoke a unique cognitive advantage – enhanced verbal working memory, particularly in early blindness. Yet, the underlying neuromechanisms and the impact on language and memory-related circuits remain not fully understood. Here, we applied a brain-constrained neural network mimicking the structural and functional features of the frontotemporal-occipital cortices, to model conceptual acquisition in early and late blindness. The results revealed differential expansion of conceptual-related neural circuits into deprived visual areas depending on the timing of visual loss, which is most prominent in early …

Cognition

Comprehenders are known to generate expectations about upcoming linguistic input at the sentence and discourse level. However, most previous studies on prediction focused mainly on word-induced brain activity rather than examining neural activity preceding a critical stimulus in discourse processing, where prediction actually takes place. In this EEG study, participants were presented with multiple sentences resembling a discourse including conditional sentences with either only if or if, which are characterized by different semantics, triggering stronger or weaker predictions about the possible continuation of the presented discourses, respectively. Results revealed that discourses including only if, as compared to discourses with bare if, triggered an increased predictive neural activity before the expected critical word, resembling the readiness potential. Moreover, word-induced P300 brain responses were found …

Cognition

Comprehenders are known to generate expectations about upcoming linguistic input at the sentence and discourse level. However, most previous studies on prediction focused mainly on word-induced brain activity rather than examining neural activity preceding a critical stimulus in discourse processing, where prediction actually takes place. In this EEG study, participants were presented with multiple sentences resembling a discourse including conditional sentences with either only if or if, which are characterized by different semantics, triggering stronger or weaker predictions about the possible continuation of the presented discourses, respectively. Results revealed that discourses including only if, as compared to discourses with bare if, triggered an increased predictive neural activity before the expected critical word, resembling the readiness potential. Moreover, word-induced P300 brain responses were found …

What makes human communication exceptional is the ability to grasp speaker’s intentions beyond what is said verbally. How the brain processes communicative functions is one of the central concerns of the neurobiology of language and pragmatics. Linguistic-pragmatic theories define these functions as speech acts, and various pragmatic traits characterise them at the levels of propositional content, action sequence structure, related commitments and social aspects. Here I discuss recent neurocognitive studies, which have shown that the use of identical linguistic signs in conveying different communicative functions elicits distinct and ultra-rapid neural responses. Interestingly, cortical areas show differential involvement underlying various pragmatic features related to theory-of-mind, emotion and action for specific speech acts expressed with the same utterances. Drawing on a neurocognitive model, I posit that …

Methods:Here, we used brain-constrained neural network of the frontotemporal and occipital cortices mimicking key neuroanatomical distinctions between human and non-human primates. Results: Our comparative analysis of models shows that the human model, characterized by denser inter-area connectivity, gives rise to larger cell assemblies with distinct semantic-specific topography compared to the less densely connected monkey models. Additionally, by simulating auditory word recognition, we observed the emergence of verbal working memory by longer neural reverberation activity in the human architecture compared to those of monkeys. Interestingly, these observations are consistent across different model types, including a basic meanfield and a spiking neural model.Conclusions:These findings shed light on the structural underpinnings of human-specific verbal working memory, a crucial feature for the acquisition of an expansive vocabulary.

Cerebral Cortex

Although teaching animals a few meaningful signs is usually time-consuming, children acquire words easily after only a few exposures, a phenomenon termed “fast-mapping.” Meanwhile, most neural network learning algorithms fail to achieve reliable information storage quickly, raising the question of whether a mechanistic explanation of fast-mapping is possible. Here, we applied brain-constrained neural models mimicking fronto-temporal-occipital regions to simulate key features of semantic associative learning. We compared networks (i) with prior encounters with phonological and conceptual knowledge, as claimed by fast-mapping theory, and (ii) without such prior knowledge. Fast-mapping simulations showed word-specific representations to emerge quickly after 1–10 learning events, whereas direct word learning showed word-meaning mappings only after 40–100 events. Furthermore, hub regions …

Proceedings of the 27th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue

We present a collection of (currently) about 5.500 commands directed to voice-controlled virtual assistants (VAs) by sixteen initial users of a VA system in their homes. The collection comprises recordings captured by the VA itself and with a conditional voice recorder (CVR) selectively capturing recordings including the VA-directed commands plus some surrounding context. Next to a description of the collection, we present initial findings on the patterns of use of the VA systems during the first weeks after installation, including usage timing, the development of usage frequency, distributions of sentence structures across commands, and (the development of) command success rates. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the applied collection-specific recording approach and describe potential research questions that can be investigated in the future, based on the collection, as well as the merit of combining quantitative corpus linguistic approaches with qualitative in-depth analyses of single cases.

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

The offer of some cake can be declined by saying “I am on a diet” – an indirect reply. Here, we asked whether certain well-established psychological and conceptual features are linked to the (in)directness of speech acts – an issue unexplored so far. Subjects rated direct and indirect speech acts performed by the same critical linguistic forms in different dialogic contexts. We find that indirect replies were understood with less certainty, were less predictable by, less coherent with and less semantically similar to their context question. These effects were smaller when direct and indirect replies were matched for the type of speech acts for which they were used, compared to when they were not speech act matched. Crucially, all measured cognitive dimensions were strongly associated with each other. These findings suggest that indirectness goes hand-in-hand with a set of cognitive features, which should be taken into …

Scientific reports

Understanding language semantically related to actions activates the motor cortex. This activation is sensitive to semantic information such as the body part used to perform the action (e.g. arm-/leg-related action words). Additionally, motor movements of the hands/feet can have a causal effect on memory maintenance of action words, suggesting that the involvement of motor systems extends to working memory. This study examined brain correlates of verbal memory load for action-related words using event-related fMRI. Seventeen participants saw either four identical or four different words from the same category (arm-/leg-related action words) then performed a nonmatching-to-sample task. Results show that verbal memory maintenance in the high-load condition produced greater activation in left premotor and supplementary motor cortex, along with posterior-parietal areas, indicating that verbal memory circuits …

Cerebral Cortex

During conversations, speech prosody provides important clues about the speaker’s communicative intentions. In many languages, a rising vocal pitch at the end of a sentence typically expresses a question function, whereas a falling pitch suggests a statement. Here, the neurophysiological basis of intonation and speech act understanding were investigated with high-density electroencephalography (EEG) to determine whether prosodic features are reflected at the neurophysiological level. Already approximately 100 ms after the sentence-final word differing in prosody, questions, and statements expressed with the same sentences led to different neurophysiological activity recorded in the event-related potential. Interestingly, low-pass filtered sentences and acoustically matched nonvocal musical signals failed to show any neurophysiological dissociations, thus suggesting that the physical intonation alone …

Neural network models are potential tools for improving our understanding of complex brain functions. To address this goal, these models need to be neurobiologically realistic. However, although neural networks have advanced dramatically in recent years and even achieve human-like performance on complex perceptual and cognitive tasks, their similarity to aspects of brain anatomy and physiology is imperfect. Here, we discuss different types of neural models, including localist, auto-associative, hetero-associative, deep and whole-brain networks, and identify aspects under which their biological plausibility can be improved. These aspects range from the choice of model neurons and of mechanisms of synaptic plasticity and learning to implementation of inhibition and control, along with neuroanatomical properties including areal structure and local and long-range connectivity. We highlight recent advances in …

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research

In this paper, the meaning and processing of the German conditional connectives (CCs) such as wenn ‘if’ and nur wenn ‘only if’ are investigated. In Experiment 1, participants read short scenarios containing a conditional sentence (i.e., If P, Q.) with wenn/nur wenn ‘if/only if’ and a confirmed or negated antecedent (i.e., P/not-P), and subsequently completed the final sentence about Q (with or without negation). In Experiment 2, participants rated the truth or falsity of the consequent Q after reading a conditional sentence with wenn or nur wenn and a confirmed or negated antecedent (i.e., If P, Q. P/not-P. // Therefore, Q?). Both experiments showed that neither wenn nor nur wenn were interpreted as biconditional CCs. Modus Ponens (If P, Q. P. // Therefore, Q) was validated for wenn, whereas it was not validated in the case of nur wenn. While Denial of the Antecedent (If P, Q. not-P. // Therefore, not-Q.) was validated in …

Cerebral Cortex

With strong and valid predictions, grasping a message is easy, whereas more demanding processing is required in the absence of robust expectations. We here demonstrate that brain correlates of the interplay between prediction and perception mechanisms in the understanding of meaningful sentences. Sentence fragments that strongly predict subsequent words induced anticipatory brain activity preceding the expected words; this potential was absent if context did not strongly predict subsequent words. Subjective reports of certainty about upcoming words and objective corpus-based measures correlated with the size of the anticipatory signal, thus establishing its status as a semantic prediction potential (SPP). Crucially, there was an inverse correlation between the SPP and the N400 brain response. The main cortical generators of SPP and N400 were found in inferior prefrontal cortex and posterior …

Proceedings of the 25th workshop on the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue, SemDial25

In conversation, speakers need to plan and comprehend language in parallel in order to meet the tight timing constraints of turn taking. Given that language comprehension and speech production planning both require cognitive resources and engage overlapping neural circuits, these two tasks may interfere with one another in dialogue situations. Interference effects have been reported on a number of linguistic processing levels, including lexicosemantics. This paper reports a study on semantic processing efficiency during language comprehension in overlap with speech planning, where participants responded verbally to questions containing semantic illusions. Participants rejected a smaller proportion of the illusions when planning their response in overlap with the illusory word than when planning their response after the end of the question. The obtained results indicate that speech planning interferes with language comprehension in dialogue situations, leading to reduced semantic processing of the incoming turn. Potential explanatory processing accounts are discussed.

Cortex

People normally know what they want to communicate before they start speaking. However, brain indicators of communication are typically observed only after speech act onset, and it is unclear when any anticipatory brain activity prior to speaking might first emerge, along with the communicative intentions it possibly reflects. Here, we investigated brain activity prior to the production of different speech act types, request and naming actions performed by uttering single words embedded into language games with a partner, similar to natural communication. Starting ca. 600 msec before speech onset, an event-related potential maximal at fronto-central electrodes, which resembled the Readiness Potential, was larger when preparing requests compared to naming actions. Analysis of the cortical sources of this anticipatory brain potential suggests a relatively stronger involvement of fronto-central motor regions for …

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

In the field of neurobiology of language, neuroimaging studies are generally based on stimulation paradigms consisting of at least two different conditions. Designing those paradigms can be very time-consuming and this traditional approach is necessarily data-limited. In contrast, in computational and corpus linguistics, analyses are often based on large text corpora, which allow a vast variety of hypotheses to be tested by repeatedly re-evaluating the data set. Furthermore, text corpora also allow exploratory data analysis in order to generate new hypotheses. By drawing on the advantages of both fields, neuroimaging and computational corpus linguistics, we here present a unified approach combining continuous natural speech and MEG to generate a corpus of speech-evoked neuronal activity.

Neurosurgery

In the 1960s, optical magnification and the concept of microsurgery entered the operating room and revolutionized the effectiveness and safety of neurosurgical procedures. By utilizing natural anatomic pathways within the brain, the new conceptual foundation, combined with the technological advances in surgical microscopy, allowed manually invading the brain with fewer harmful effects. In recent years, the rapidly growing field of computational neuroscience has opened up new perspectives for exploring brain function at the micro and macro scales. Neural network simulations approximate the mechanistic prerequisites of even the highest cognitive functions by modeling their material basis in terms of neural systems. 1 Those systems are characterized by interactive, distributed, dynamic, and adaptable processing within neuron populations interlinked by local and long-distance connectivity within and across …

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

To ensure short gaps between turns in conversation, next speakers regularly start planning their utterance in overlap with the incoming turn. Three experiments investigate which stages of utterance planning are executed in overlap. E1 establishes effects of associative and phonological relatedness of pictures and words in a switch-task from picture naming to lexical decision. E2 focuses on effects of phonological relatedness and investigates potential shifts in the time-course of production planning during background speech. E3 required participants to verbally answer questions as a base task. In critical trials, however, participants switched to visual lexical decision just after they began planning their answer. The task-switch was time-locked to participants' gaze for response planning. Results show that word form encoding is done as early as possible and not postponed until the end of the incoming turn. Hence …

Linguistics Vanguard

Scientists of multimodal communication have no established policy or default tool for sharing de-identified audiovisual recordings. Recently, new technology has been developed that enables researchers to de-identify voice and appearance. These software tools can produce output in JSON format that specifies bodypose and face and hand keypoints in numerical form, suitable for computer search, machine learning, and sharing. The Red Hen Anonymizer is a new tool for de-identification. This article presents the Red Hen Anonymizer and discusses guidelines for its use.

Linguistics Vanguard

This study explored linguistic resources that people employ to express their perceptions and opinions of a fragrance. Several natural language processing (NLP) techniques were used, including sentiment analysis, topic modelling, and supervised classification. The data were collected from the website of Fragrantica, popular among perfume lovers, and the reviews pertained to a niche market fragrance. The findings from the sentiment analysis revealed that the positive reviews contained a greater percentage of lexis referring to the social world, social processes, sexuality, leisure, and mental states. In the negative reviews, the prevalent lexis concerned health, illness, and social conflict. The topic modelling analysis indicated that the positive reviews centred on issues related to the experience of wearing the perfume, its sensual character, and its olfactory qualities. The negative reviews focused on skin chemistry …

Linguistics Vanguard

Based on data drawn from two corpora collected in Orléans, France, in two waves (ESLO 1, 1968–1971; ESLO 2, 2008–) over a 40-year period, this paper investigated the use of quoi as a discourse marker (DM) in the speech of 234 French native speakers. Our results indicate that the DM quoi has increased in frequency in the more recent corpus. The distribution of its discursive functions has changed between the two corpora. Meanwhile, we also demonstrate that the DM quoi is mainly used in final position and this tendency continues to increase in ESLO 2. Regarding the relation between function and particle position, the planning function is the only function favored by medial position in ESLO 1, while in ESLO 2, the quantification function also becomes one of the favored functions in this position. We suggest that this might indicate potential competition for the same position. Meanwhile, we also point out that the …

Linguistics Vanguard

We analyse variation in vowel production within monologues produced by speakers in a quiet, well-controlled environment. Using principal component analysis (PCA) and generalized additive mixed models (GAMMs), applied to a large corpus of naturalistic recordings of New Zealand English speakers, we show that the first formant of monophthongs varies significantly with variation in a speaker’s relative amplitude. We also find that amplitude variation is used, potentially agentively, to mark the beginning and ending of topical sections within single-speaker monologues. These results have significant methodological consequences for the study of vocalic variation in the context of research on speaker style and language variation and change. While laboratory research has shown a connection between variation in F1 and amplitude in loud environments or with distant interlocutors, this has not been seen in quiet …

Linguistics Vanguard

The neural architectures of language models are becoming increasingly complex, especially that of Transformers, based on the attention mechanism. Although their application to numerous natural language processing tasks has proven to be very fruitful, they continue to be models with little or no interpretability and explainability. One of the tasks for which they are best suited is the encoding of the contextual sense of words using contextualized embeddings. In this paper we propose a transparent, interpretable, and linguistically motivated strategy for encoding the contextual sense of words by modeling semantic compositionality. Particular attention is given to dependency relations and semantic notions such as selection preferences and paradigmatic classes. A partial implementation of the proposed model is carried out and compared with Transformer-based architectures for a given semantic task, namely the …

Linguistics Vanguard

The Bear in a Window project captures Australian children’s experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. We focused on children’s experiences of lockdown, or extended periods of home confinement, ranging from one to 100 days at a time between 2020 and 2021. Using the online experimental platform, Gorilla, we invited children aged 3–12 to record themselves telling stories about the positives and negatives of life in lockdown to our mascot, Covey Bear. Recordings were saved on the Gorilla server and orthographically and automatically transcribed using Sonix, with manual correction. Preliminary analyses of 18 children’s recordings illustrate several emergent topics, reflecting children’s experiences of the pandemic in the areas of health and wellbeing; education and online learning; digital engagement; family and friends; relationships; and mealtimes and food. We found that in their storytelling, children engaged …

Linguistics Vanguard

Grounded language processing is a crucial component in many artificial intelligence systems, as it allows agents to communicate about their physical surroundings. State-of-the-art approaches typically employ deep learning techniques that perform end-to-end mappings between natural language expressions and representations grounded in the environment. Although these techniques achieve high levels of accuracy, they are often criticized for their lack of interpretability and their reliance on large amounts of training data. As an alternative, we propose a fully interpretable, data-efficient architecture for grounded language processing. The architecture is based on two main components. The first component comprises an inventory of human-interpretable concepts learned through task-based communicative interactions. These concepts connect the sensorimotor experiences of an agent to meaningful symbols that …

Linguistics Vanguard

Previous research has shown that bilinguals process nouns that have the same grammatical gender in their two languages faster than nouns that differ in gender between L1 and L2. This finding, referred to as the gender congruency effect, has so far only been documented in L2. Hence, the aim of the present study was to examine whether late unbalanced bilinguals would also show gender congruency effects in their L1. To that end, 44 L1 Polish/L2 German bilinguals were tested in a gender decision task in Polish, which included gender-congruent and gender-incongruent nouns. The results revealed a robust gender congruency effect in L1, which was limited to bilinguals with very high L2 proficiency. This indicates that bilinguals activate grammatical gender information in L2 when accessing gender in L1, providing that they are highly proficient in L2. More broadly, the study demonstrates that foreign language …

Linguistics Vanguard

This article presents the Brazilian Portuguese-Russian (BraPoRus) corpus, whose goal is to collect, analyze, and preserve for posterity the spoken heritage Russian still used today in Brazil by approximately 1,500 elderly bilingual heritage Russian–Brazilian Portuguese speakers. Their unique 100-year-old variety of moribund Russian is disappearing because it has not been passed to their descendants born in Brazil. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we remotely collected 170 h of speech samples in heritage Russian from 26 participants (M age = 75.7 years) in naturalistic settings using Zoom or a phone call. To estimate the quality of collected data, we focus on two methodological challenges, automatic transcription and acoustic quality of remote recordings. First, we find that among commercially available transcription programs, Sonix far outperforms Google Transcribe and Vocalmatic on the measure of word …

Linguistics Vanguard

The goal of the current work was to develop and validate web-based measures for assessing English vocabulary knowledge. Two existing paper-and-pencil assessments, the Vocabulary Size Test (VST) and the Word Familiarity Test (WordFAM), were modified for web-based administration. In Experiment 1, participants (n = 100) completed the web-based VST. In Experiment 2, participants (n = 100) completed the web-based WordFAM. Results from these experiments confirmed that both tasks (1) could be completed online, (2) showed expected sensitivity to English frequency patterns, (3) exhibited high internal consistency, and (4) showed an expected range of item discrimination scores, with low frequency items exhibiting higher item discrimination scores compared to high frequency items. This work provides open-source English vocabulary knowledge assessments with normative data that researchers can use …

Linguistics Vanguard

Contact between languages has become increasingly recognized as a major source of historical change, as linguistic properties are introduced from one language into another. Yet contact does not necessarily lead to such changes. In fact, arguably most of the properties that contrast between two languages in contact at a given place and time do not change. This paper argues that historical and contact linguistics should now look more systematically at different kinds of bilingualism rather than contact per se and should incorporate recent sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic findings from this literature, since these can help us understand both when change occurs and when it does not. In this context we build on the general model of bilingualism, CASP (short for “complex adaptive system principles”), proposed by Filipović and Hawkins and explore its predictions for whether and when changes will occur in one or …

Linguistics Vanguard

Romance stem alternations have been argued to represent exclusively morphological objects (or “morphomes”) independent from semantic and syntactic categories. This conclusion has been based on feature-value analyses of the inflected forms, and definitions of natural classes that are theoretically driven and about which no consensus exists. Individual examples of morphomes are thus frequently challenged, while their autonomously morphological nature has never been tested quantitatively or experimentally. This is the purpose of the present study. We use context-based embeddings to explore the semantic profile of Spanish verb stem alternations. At the paradigmatic level, our findings suggest that Spanish morphomes’ cells are characterized by significantly above-chance distributional-semantic similarity. At the lexical level, similarly, verbs that show more similar patterns of alternation have also been found …

Linguistics Vanguard

Grounded language processing is a crucial component in many artificial intelligence systems, as it allows agents to communicate about their physical surroundings. State-of-the-art approaches typically employ deep learning techniques that perform end-to-end mappings between natural language expressions and representations grounded in the environment. Although these techniques achieve high levels of accuracy, they are often criticized for their lack of interpretability and their reliance on large amounts of training data. As an alternative, we propose a fully interpretable, data-efficient architecture for grounded language processing. The architecture is based on two main components. The first component comprises an inventory of human-interpretable concepts learned through task-based communicative interactions. These concepts connect the sensorimotor experiences of an agent to meaningful symbols that …

Linguistics Vanguard

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that alternative methods of data collection are necessary to continue working in certain fields of linguistics. This is a challenge for (socio)phoneticians and phonologists who have to rely on good quality sound but cannot do fieldwork or gather recordings in a traditional manner. In this paper, I show that audio recordings made via social media can help alleviate this problem. To this end, I compared samples from five speakers of dialectal Spanish recorded in a laboratory setting and via a social media application (WhatsApp). The analysis of temporal and spectral characteristics of consonants in postvocalic position shows that recordings made via social media can be successfully used for at least some types of sociophonetic analysis. They also provide some additional advantages for researchers: ease of data collection, potentially large speech corpora, and access to authentic …

Linguistics Vanguard

Based on data drawn from two corpora collected in Orléans, France, in two waves (ESLO 1, 1968–1971; ESLO 2, 2008–) over a 40-year period, this paper investigated the use of quoi as a discourse marker (DM) in the speech of 234 French native speakers. Our results indicate that the DM quoi has increased in frequency in the more recent corpus. The distribution of its discursive functions has changed between the two corpora. Meanwhile, we also demonstrate that the DM quoi is mainly used in final position and this tendency continues to increase in ESLO 2. Regarding the relation between function and particle position, the planning function is the only function favored by medial position in ESLO 1, while in ESLO 2, the quantification function also becomes one of the favored functions in this position. We suggest that this might indicate potential competition for the same position. Meanwhile, we also point out that the …

Linguistics Vanguard

Online testing for behavioral research has become an increasingly used tool. Although more researchers have been using online data collection methods, few studies have assessed the replicability of findings for speech intelligibility tasks. Here we assess intelligibility in quiet and two noise-added conditions for several different accents of English (Midland American, Standard Southern British, Scottish, German-accented, Mandarin-accented, Japanese-accented, and Hindi-English bilingual). Participants were tested in person at a museum-based laboratory and online. Results showed little to no difference between the two settings for the easier noise condition and in quiet, but large performance differences in the most difficult noise condition with an advantage for the participants tested online. Technology-based variables did not appear to drive the setting effect, but experimenter presence may have influenced …

Linguistics Vanguard

This paper describes the Plains Cree phenomenon of Order as a form of alternation not yet described as such in the literature. First, we provide a brief description of relevant Plains Cree grammar and Order as a phenomenon. This is followed by an overview of how the concept of alternation has been used in linguistics as an analytic tool. Finally, we discuss how conceiving of Order as an alternation allows for not only a better understanding of the phenomenon, but also results in a new type of alternation. We name this type of alternation a paradigmatic alternation and define it as any alternation where some lexeme can make use of two or more alternative paradigms of the same size and shape but with different morphological exponents, while representing the same set of grammatical features. We exemplify this with Plains Cree, where subject/object agreement has two distinct paradigms which verbs can take while …

Linguistics Vanguard

We analyse variation in vowel production within monologues produced by speakers in a quiet, well-controlled environment. Using principal component analysis (PCA) and generalized additive mixed models (GAMMs), applied to a large corpus of naturalistic recordings of New Zealand English speakers, we show that the first formant of monophthongs varies significantly with variation in a speaker’s relative amplitude. We also find that amplitude variation is used, potentially agentively, to mark the beginning and ending of topical sections within single-speaker monologues. These results have significant methodological consequences for the study of vocalic variation in the context of research on speaker style and language variation and change. While laboratory research has shown a connection between variation in F1 and amplitude in loud environments or with distant interlocutors, this has not been seen in quiet …

Linguistics Vanguard

This paper aims to quantify distances between varieties of Mandarin (diachronic, regional, and situational) as a function of the similarity in the choice between syntactic variants in the Mandarin theme-recipient alternation (yŭ/gěi dative alternation). We use a novel corpus-based method, Variation-Based Distance and Similarity Modeling, which draws inspiration from work in comparative sociolinguistics and quantitative dialectometry. Analysis reveals that, while there is a relatively stable probabilistic grammar across the investigated varieties, historical varieties do exhibit a relatively higher degree of heterogeneity than synchronic varieties. Despite the overall high similarity of the latter, we identify substantial probabilistic differences between fictional writings of Modern Mainland Mandarin and all other synchronic varieties. Our findings thus provide evidence in support of the hypothesis that the transition from Early …

Linguistics Vanguard

We analyse variation in vowel production within monologues produced by speakers in a quiet, well-controlled environment. Using principal component analysis (PCA) and generalized additive mixed models (GAMMs), applied to a large corpus of naturalistic recordings of New Zealand English speakers, we show that the first formant of monophthongs varies significantly with variation in a speaker’s relative amplitude. We also find that amplitude variation is used, potentially agentively, to mark the beginning and ending of topical sections within single-speaker monologues. These results have significant methodological consequences for the study of vocalic variation in the context of research on speaker style and language variation and change. While laboratory research has shown a connection between variation in F1 and amplitude in loud environments or with distant interlocutors, this has not been seen in quiet …