Language and Cognition

One central problem in the study of human language is language use, understanding how disparate linguisitc structures are deployed in real time to construct coherent and cohesive discourse. Work in language and cognition investigates how general cognitive systems, in particular attention and memory, are deployed during language production and comprehension. At Oregon, research in language and cognition covers a very broad array of topics: attention and grammar, phonetic categorization, auditory and cognitive constraints on phonological systems, and attention in second language grammar and phonology.

Acquisition of Tone (Guion)
In collaboration with Dr. Wayland of the University of Florida, Dr. Guion is investigating the acquisition of Thai tone by speakers of English, a non-tone language, and Mandarin, a tone language. The contribution of perceptual sensitivity to tonal cues and effects of long-term tonal representations on the acquisition of new tone patterns is under study.

Cross-Linguistic Perception and Phonetic Category Acquisition (Guion)
In collaboration with Dr. Fleege of the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Dr. Akahane-Yamada of ATR in Kyoto, Dr. Guion has investigated the effect of the perceptual assimilation of first and second language phonological categories on second language learning. In investigations focusing on native Japanese learners of English, they have found that English sounds that are more assimilated to Japanese sounds are less likely to be learned than those that were less assimilated. In continuing work on a longitudinal study involving both adults and children the researchers are investigating the effect of age of acquisition on both production and perception in the second language.

Event Representations, Event Boundaries, and Linguistic Priming (Pederson and Baldwin [Psychology])
Many claims exist in the literature that clause boundaries in sentences correspond to conceptual segmentation of complex events. This project, which is just underway, explores the effect of linguistic priming on sensitivity to event boundaries in video stimuli. Currently work is conducted with local English speakers, but this project is planned to include cross-linguistic comparison.

Event Representations in Mind and Language (Tomlin)
Linguists routinely appeal to notions of the event to explain a number of grammatical matters, including serialization, clause union, and patterns of transitivity. Tomlin is interested in puzzling out the cognitive foundations of event representations in order to base claims about events on representations that do not depend on language behavior directly. This effort is tied to the experimental investigation of clause integration and separation as speakers describe animated sequences on-line in real time. As events are separated from one another, the clauses that describe the pertinent activity tend to be more independent of one another while events that are more tightly integrated tend to see descriptions with clauses more structurally integrated as well.

FISHFILM Studies: Attention and Grammar in Language Production (Tomlin)
Tomlin has argued that the traditional pragmatic notion of clause-level theme or topic can be understood as the linguistic reflection of a more general process of attention, attention detection. The FishFilm paradigm involves speakers describing on-line in real time a sequence of animated events in which either the agent or the patient is cued to draw attention to it. Results in English align well with conventional beliefs about the function of syntactic subject and voice in managing theme or topic. Current work focuses on extending this robust paradigm to the study of other languages, including Japanese, Korean, Swedish, Finnish, Malagasy, and others.

Function of wa in Japanese (Tomlin)
The traditional treatment of the function of wa in Japanese discourse production is to identify a dual function, either to mark clause-level theme/topic or to mark clause level focus/contrast. Tomlin is investigating whether these disparate functions might be explained under a more general analysis in which the use of wa is tied to a central attentional process, attention orientation.

Interaction between Phonetics and Phonology (Redford)
This work investigates cognitive constraints on sound structure. Of specific interest is the interaction between phonological representations and phonetic instantiation. Some initial work on this topic investigates the relationship between syllable boundary judgments and production differences, and the availability of word and syllable boundary cues in infant directed speech. Current work focuses on cross-language differences in the representations of sound structure—especially on what aspects of the signal are abstracted and used in the representation and what aspects are ignored.

Language and Space: Navigation in British and American English (Pederson)
Clare Davies (Psychology, Northwestern University) and Pederson have been comparing British- and American-English speakers in navigational and direction giving tasks. Even when speakers use essentially the same language for spatial description, we find that cultural expectations of “normal” landscape features often override navigationally optimal strategies for the current landscape.

Language and Space: How Language Structures Space in Tamil (Pederson)
Pederson has extensively worked with Tamil speakers from different speech communities, who use markedly different spatial reference systems in language descriptions of table-top and geographic space. Correlations have been demonstrated between linguistic and non-linguistic performance in spatial array memory and reasoning experiments suggesting that the language system of ones speech community may well influence the non-linguistic encoding of even basic spatial relationships.

Literacy and Visual Categorization in Tamil (Pederson)
This project is to be published in Written Language and Literacy in 2003. It compares non-literate Tamils with Tamils literate in Tamil script or literate in both Tamil and Roman scripts in a visual categorization task using qualitative and reaction-time data. Results suggest that the specific graphemic nature of familiar scripts influences visual categorization in non-linguistic and non-written tasks.

The Nature of English Speakers’ Knowledge of Stress Patterns (Guion and Harada)
In NIH-funded research, Dr. Guion, in collaboration with Dr. Harada and J.J. Clark of the University of Oregon and Dr. Wayland of the University of Florida, has recently completed a study investigating the nature of native English-speakers’ knowledge about word stress. Traditional views hold that a set of stress rules is applied to lexical representations devoid of stress. Alternatively, stress may be a property of individual lexical items and knowledge of stress patterns may emerge from distributional regularities across the lexicon. Results from production and perception tasks which involved assigning stress to non-words and reporting on lexical neighbors of the same non-words support the hypothesis that words are stored with stress information and that stress is assigned to novel words based on similarity to stored lexical items as well as statistical knowledge about the patterning of stress placement across the lexicon.

Physical Constraints on Sound Change (Guion)
In earlier work, Dr. Guion investigated the perceptual conditioning of a very common sound change in the world’s languages whereby a velar stop (a “k”) becomes a palatoalveolar affricate (a “ch”). The results indicated that perceptual factors are important in shaping sound systems. In continuing work on physical constraints in sound change Dr. Guion, in collaboration with Dr. Wayland of the University of Florida, is investigating a case of emergent tonogensis in Khmer (i.e., the development of a tone in the language). Preliminary data suggests that a certain consonantal contrast is being replaced by a tonal contrast. Aerodynamic constraints in production are thought to be at work.

Production and Perception Constraints on Sound Structure (Redford)
This work aims to identify constraints on the production and perception of speech that explain recurrent sound patterns in child and adult language. In production, a major focus is on the interaction between the jaw and segmental articulators to explain phonetic and phonological patterns associated with syllables. In perception, a major focus is on the perceptual distinctiveness of consonants in different syllable positions.

The Role of Attention in Phonetic Category Acquisition (Guion and Pederson)
Drs. Guion and Pederson are currently investigating the effect of attention on learning new phonological categories. They have found that orienting attention to phonetic form facilitates phonetic learning of Hindi categories by naïve English speakers and that likewise orienting attention to semantic information facilitates the learning of the meaning of Hindi words. Currently, experiments are underway that investigate the effect of orienting attention toward different phonological categories (e.g., vowels vs. consonants) on the acquisition of those categories.

Sound System Development and Change (Redford)
This work uses computational models to explore the effects of constraint interaction on the development of sound patterns. Past work in this area has examined how a single set of universal constraints affect the emergence of regularities and systematic differences in mock vocabularies. Other work has examined the relative importance of different types of constraints in slowly and rapidly growing vocabularies. The models developed generate new, testable hypotheses on the nature of phonological development and change.

Tamil Gesture Project (Pederson)
This study examines videotaped Tamil narrations and conversations that have been digitized and coded using MediaTagger software (courtesy of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics). Of particular note is the interactive timing between narrator and back-channeler both in terms of the spoken word and the accompanying gesture. There is particular emphasis on the frequent and culture specific use of specialized head gesturing as a means of controlling conversational interaction.

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