Publications

Speakers tend to speak clearly in noisy environments, while they tend to reserve effort by shortening word duration in predictable contexts. It is unclear how these two communicative demands are met. The current study investigates the acoustic realizations of syllables in predictable vs unpredictable contexts across different background noise levels. Thirty-eight German native speakers produced 60 CV syllables in two predictability contexts in three noise conditions (reference = quiet, 0 dB and −10 dB signal-to-noise ratio). Duration, intensity (average and range), F0 (median), and vowel formants of the target syllables were analysed. The presence of noise yielded significantly longer duration, higher average intensity, larger intensity range, and higher F0. Noise levels affected intensity (average and range) and F0. Low predictability syllables exhibited longer duration and larger intensity range. However, no interaction was found between noise and predictability. This suggests that noise-related modifications might be independent of predictability-related changes, with implications for including channel-based and message-based formulations in speech production.

• ibrahim_etal_jasa2022     (1.49MB)
• https://asa.scitation.org/doi/10.1121/10.0013413
• https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0013413

@article{ibrahim_etal_jasa2022,
title = {The combined effects of contextual predictability and noise on the acoustic realisation of German syllables},
author = {Omnia Ibrahim and Ivan Yuen and Marjolein van Os and Bistra Andreeva and Bernd M{\"o}bius},
url = {https://asa.scitation.org/doi/10.1121/10.0013413},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0013413},
year = {2022},
date = {2022-08-10},
journal = {The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America},
volume = {152},
number = {2},
abstract = {Speakers tend to speak clearly in noisy environments, while they tend to reserve effort by shortening word duration in predictable contexts. It is unclear how these two communicative demands are met. The current study investigates the acoustic realizations of syllables in predictable vs unpredictable contexts across different background noise levels. Thirty-eight German native speakers produced 60 CV syllables in two predictability contexts in three noise conditions (reference = quiet, 0 dB and −10 dB signal-to-noise ratio). Duration, intensity (average and range), F0 (median), and vowel formants of the target syllables were analysed. The presence of noise yielded significantly longer duration, higher average intensity, larger intensity range, and higher F0. Noise levels affected intensity (average and range) and F0. Low predictability syllables exhibited longer duration and larger intensity range. However, no interaction was found between noise and predictability. This suggests that noise-related modifications might be independent of predictability-related changes, with implications for including channel-based and message-based formulations in speech production.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {article}
}

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@article{kudera_etal2022_cues,
title = {Phonetic cues in auditory identification of Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, and Russian language of origin},
author = {Jacek Kudera and Irina Stenger and Bernd M{\"o}bius and Tania Avgustinova and Dietrich Klakow},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
journal = {Language and Speech},
pubstate = {forthcoming},
type = {article}
}

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@article{Ibrahim_etal2022_syllables,
title = {The combined effects of contextual predictability and noise on the acoustic realisation of German syllables},
author = {Omnia Ibrahim and Ivan Yuen and Marjolein van Os and Bistra Andreeva and Bernd M{\"o}bius},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
journal = {Journal of the Acoustical Society of America},
pubstate = {forthcoming},
type = {article}
}

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The aim of this study was to examine the role of attention in understanding linguistic information even in a noisy environment. To assess the role of attention, we varied task instructions in two experiments in which participants were instructed to listen to short sentences and thereafter to type in the last word they heard or to type in the whole sentence. We were interested in how these task instructions influence the interplay between top-down prediction and bottom-up perceptual processes during language comprehension. Therefore, we created sentences that varied in the degree of predictability (low, medium, and high) as well as in the degree of speech degradation (four, six, and eight noise-vocoding channels). Results indicated better word recognition for highly predictable sentences for moderate, though not for high, levels of speech degradation, but only when attention was directed to the whole sentence. This underlines the important role of attention in language comprehension.

• https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/language-and-cognition/article/abs/predictability-effects-in-degraded-speech-comprehension-are-reduced-as-a-function-of-attention/98F4E3A4A3FC0B7E00C8E1536D986853
• https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2022.16

@article{bhandari_demberg_kray_2022,
title = {Predictability effects in degraded speech comprehension are reduced as a function of attention},
author = {Pratik Bhandari and Vera Demberg and Jutta Kray},
url = {https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/language-and-cognition/article/abs/predictability-effects-in-degraded-speech-comprehension-are-reduced-as-a-function-of-attention/98F4E3A4A3FC0B7E00C8E1536D986853},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2022.16},
year = {2022},
date = {2022-07-22},
journal = {Language and Cognition},
pages = {1-18},
publisher = {Cambridge University Press},
abstract = {The aim of this study was to examine the role of attention in understanding linguistic information even in a noisy environment. To assess the role of attention, we varied task instructions in two experiments in which participants were instructed to listen to short sentences and thereafter to type in the last word they heard or to type in the whole sentence. We were interested in how these task instructions influence the interplay between top-down prediction and bottom-up perceptual processes during language comprehension. Therefore, we created sentences that varied in the degree of predictability (low, medium, and high) as well as in the degree of speech degradation (four, six, and eight noise-vocoding channels). Results indicated better word recognition for highly predictable sentences for moderate, though not for high, levels of speech degradation, but only when attention was directed to the whole sentence. This underlines the important role of attention in language comprehension.},
pubstate = {published},
type = {article}
}

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@inproceedings{Przybyl_interpreting_2022,
title = {EPIC UdS - Creation and applications of a simultaneous interpreting corpus},
author = {Heike Przybyl and Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski and Katrin Menzel and Stefan Fischer and Elke Teich},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the  13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022)},
pages = {1193–1200},
address = {Marseille, France, 20-25 June 2022},
pubstate = {forthcoming},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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• https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.150

@inproceedings{ortmann2022,
title = {Fine-Grained Error Analysis and Fair Evaluation of Labeled Spans},
author = {Katrin Ortmann},
url = {https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.150},
year = {2022},
date = {2022-06-21},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC)},
pages = {1400-1407},
publisher = {European Language Resources Association},
address = {Marseille, France},
pubstate = {published},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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@article{menzel_2022_diachronicperspective,
title = {Synthetic and analytic adjective negation in English scientific journal articles: A diachronic perspective},
author = {Katrin Menzel and Marie-Pauline Krielke and Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
pages = {157-213},
publisher = {Trnava: University of SS Cyril and Methodius in Trnava},
volume = {2022, VII(1)},
pubstate = {published},
type = {article}
}

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In an eye-tracking-while-reading study, we investigated adult monolinguals’ (N=80) processing of two-clause sentences embedded in short narratives. Three principles theorized to guide comprehension of complex sentences were contrasted: one operating at the clause level, namely clause structure (main clause – subordinate clause or vice versa), and two operating at the discourse-level, namely givenness (given-new vs. new-given) and event order (chronological vs. reverse order). The results indicate that clause structure mainly affects early stages of processing, whereas the two principles operating at the discourse level are more important during later stages and for reading times of the entire sentence. Event order was found to operate relatively independently of the other principles. Givenness was found to overrule clause structure, a phenomenon that can be related to the grounding function of preposed subordinate clauses. We propose a new principle to reflect this interaction effect: the grounding principle.

• https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/170024/

@article{Merel_Rules_2022,
title = {Discourse Rules:The Effects of Clause Order Principles on the Reading Process},
author = {Merel Scholman and Liam Blything and Kate Cain and Jacqueline Evers-Vermeul},
url = {https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/170024/},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
journal = {Language, Cognition and Neuroscience},
abstract = {In an eye-tracking-while-reading study, we investigated adult monolinguals’ (N=80) processing of two-clause sentences embedded in short narratives. Three principles theorized to guide comprehension of complex sentences were contrasted: one operating at the clause level, namely clause structure (main clause - subordinate clause or vice versa), and two operating at the discourse-level, namely givenness (given-new vs. new-given) and event order (chronological vs. reverse order). The results indicate that clause structure mainly affects early stages of processing, whereas the two principles operating at the discourse level are more important during later stages and for reading times of the entire sentence. Event order was found to operate relatively independently of the other principles. Givenness was found to overrule clause structure, a phenomenon that can be related to the grounding function of preposed subordinate clauses. We propose a new principle to reflect this interaction effect: the grounding principle.},
pubstate = {forthcoming},
type = {article}
}

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Most theories of pragmatics and language processing predict that speakers avoid excessive informational redundancy. Informationally redundant utterances are, however, quite common in natural dialogue. From a comprehension standpoint, it remains unclear how comprehenders interpret these utterances, and whether they make attempts to reconcile the ‚dips‘ in informational utility with expectations of ‚appropriate‘ or ‚rational‘ speaker informativity. We show that informationally redundant (overinformative) utterances can trigger pragmatic inferences that increase utterance utility in line with comprehender expectations. In a series of three studies, we look at utterances which refer to stereotyped event sequences describing common activities (scripts). When comprehenders encounter utterances describing events that can be easily inferred from prior context, they interpret them as signifying that the event conveys new, unstated information (i.e. an event otherwise assumed to be habitual, such as paying the cashier when shopping, is reinterpreted as non-habitual). We call these inferences atypicality inferences. Further, we show that the degree to which these atypicality inferences are triggered depends on the framing of the utterance. In the absence of an exclamation mark or a discourse marker indicating the speaker’s specific intent to communicate the given information, such inferences are far less likely to arise. Overall, the results demonstrate that excessive conceptual redundancy leads to comprehenders revising the conversational common ground, in an effort to accommodate unexpected dips in informational utility.

• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35580451/
• https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105159

@inproceedings{Kravtchenko_redundant_2022,
title = {Informationally redundant utterances elicit pragmatic inferences},
author = {Ekaterina Kravtchenko and Vera Demberg},
url = {https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35580451/},
doi = {https://doi.org/ 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105159},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
booktitle = {Cognition. 2022 May 14},
abstract = {Most theories of pragmatics and language processing predict that speakers avoid excessive informational redundancy. Informationally redundant utterances are, however, quite common in natural dialogue. From a comprehension standpoint, it remains unclear how comprehenders interpret these utterances, and whether they make attempts to reconcile the 'dips' in informational utility with expectations of 'appropriate' or 'rational' speaker informativity. We show that informationally redundant (overinformative) utterances can trigger pragmatic inferences that increase utterance utility in line with comprehender expectations. In a series of three studies, we look at utterances which refer to stereotyped event sequences describing common activities (scripts). When comprehenders encounter utterances describing events that can be easily inferred from prior context, they interpret them as signifying that the event conveys new, unstated information (i.e. an event otherwise assumed to be habitual, such as paying the cashier when shopping, is reinterpreted as non-habitual). We call these inferences atypicality inferences. Further, we show that the degree to which these atypicality inferences are triggered depends on the framing of the utterance. In the absence of an exclamation mark or a discourse marker indicating the speaker's specific intent to communicate the given information, such inferences are far less likely to arise. Overall, the results demonstrate that excessive conceptual redundancy leads to comprehenders revising the conversational common ground, in an effort to accommodate unexpected dips in informational utility.},
keywords = {Accommodation; Context-dependent implicatures; Experimental pragmatics; Psycholinguistics; Redundancy},
pubstate = {forthcoming},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Developmental and longitudinal studies with children increasingly use pictorial stimuli in cognitive, psychologic, and psycholinguistic research. To enhance validity and comparability within and across those studies, the use of normed pictures is recommended. Besides, creating picture sets and evaluating them in rating studies is very time consuming, in particular regarding samples of young children in which testing time is rather limited. As there is an increasing number of studies that investigate young German children’s semantic language processing with colored clipart stimuli, this work provides a first set of 247 colored cliparts with ratings of German native speaking children aged 4 to 6 years. We assessed two central rating aspects of pictures: Name agreement (Do pictures elicit the intended name of an object?) and semantic categorization (Are objects classified as members of the intended semantic category?). Our ratings indicate that children are proficient in naming and even better in semantic categorization of objects, whereas both seems to improve with increasing age of young childhood. Finally, this paper discusses some features of pictorial objects that might be important for children’s name agreement and semantic categorization and could be considered in future picture rating studies.

• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691822000737
• https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2022.103558

@article{Sommerfeld_of_2022,
title = {Ratings of name agreement and semantic categorization of 247 colored clipart pictures by young German children},
author = {Linda Sommerfeld and Maria Staudte and Jutta Kray},
url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691822000737},
doi = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2022.103558},
year = {2022},
date = {2022-05-29},
journal = {Acta Psychologica},
pages = {103558},
volume = {226},
abstract = {Developmental and longitudinal studies with children increasingly use pictorial stimuli in cognitive, psychologic, and psycholinguistic research. To enhance validity and comparability within and across those studies, the use of normed pictures is recommended. Besides, creating picture sets and evaluating them in rating studies is very time consuming, in particular regarding samples of young children in which testing time is rather limited. As there is an increasing number of studies that investigate young German children's semantic language processing with colored clipart stimuli, this work provides a first set of 247 colored cliparts with ratings of German native speaking children aged 4 to 6 years. We assessed two central rating aspects of pictures: Name agreement (Do pictures elicit the intended name of an object?) and semantic categorization (Are objects classified as members of the intended semantic category?). Our ratings indicate that children are proficient in naming and even better in semantic categorization of objects, whereas both seems to improve with increasing age of young childhood. Finally, this paper discusses some features of pictorial objects that might be important for children's name agreement and semantic categorization and could be considered in future picture rating studies.},
keywords = {Name agreement, Semantic categorization, Picture naming, Picture ratings, Children, Age differences},
pubstate = {forthcoming},
type = {article}
}

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• Höltje.Mecklinger.BR.2022     (1.96MB)
• https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/brain-research
• https://doi.org/10.1016

@article{Höltje_and_2022,
title = {Benefits and costs of predictive processing: How sentential constraint and word expectedness affect memory formation},
author = {Gerrit H{\"o}ltje and Axel Mecklinger},
url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/brain-research},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
journal = {Science Direct},
publisher = {Experimental Neuropsychology Unit, Department of Psychology},
address = {Saarland University, Saarbr{\"u}cken, Germany},
pubstate = {forthcoming},
type = {article}
}

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@inproceedings{Yan_2022_fixation,
title = {Modeling fixation behavior in reading with character-level neural attention},
author = {Songpeng Yan and Michael Hahn and Frank Keller},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
booktitle = {In Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci)},
address = {July 27 – 30, 2022 Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Toronto, Canada},
pubstate = {forthcoming},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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@inproceedings{Rathi_2022_patterns,
title = {Explaining patterns of fusion in morphological paradigms using the memory–surprisal tradeoff},
author = {Neil Rathi and Michael Hahn and Richard Futrell},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
booktitle = {In Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci)},
address = {July 27 – 30, 2022 Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Toronto, Canada},
pubstate = {forthcoming},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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Recently neural network based approaches to knowledge-intensive NLP tasks, such as question answering, started to rely heavily on the combination of neural retrievers and readers. Retrieval is typically performed over a large textual knowledge base (KB) which requires significant memory and compute resources, especially when scaled up. On HotpotQA we systematically investigate reducing the size of the KB index by means of dimensionality (sparse random projections, PCA, autoencoders) and numerical precision reduction.
Our results show that PCA is an easy solution that requires very little data and is only slightly worse than autoencoders, which are less stable. All methods are sensitive to pre- and post-processing and data should always be centered and normalized both before and after dimension reduction. Finally, we show that it is possible to combine PCA with using 1bit per dimension. Overall we achieve (1) 100× compression with 75%, and (2) 24× compression with 92% original retrieval performance.

• Paper     (0.69MB)
• https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.02906

@inproceedings{Zouhar_2022_Base,
title = {Knowledge Base Index Compression via Dimensionality and Precision Reduction},
author = {Vil{\'e}m Zouhar and Marius Mosbach and Miaoran Zhang and Dietrich Klakow},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.02906},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
publisher = {Spa-NLP workshop at ACL 2022},
address = {22nd-27th May 2022 Dublin, Ireland},
abstract = {Recently neural network based approaches to knowledge-intensive NLP tasks, such as question answering, started to rely heavily on the combination of neural retrievers and readers. Retrieval is typically performed over a large textual knowledge base (KB) which requires significant memory and compute resources, especially when scaled up. On HotpotQA we systematically investigate reducing the size of the KB index by means of dimensionality (sparse random projections, PCA, autoencoders) and numerical precision reduction. Our results show that PCA is an easy solution that requires very little data and is only slightly worse than autoencoders, which are less stable. All methods are sensitive to pre- and post-processing and data should always be centered and normalized both before and after dimension reduction. Finally, we show that it is possible to combine PCA with using 1bit per dimension. Overall we achieve (1) 100× compression with 75%, and (2) 24× compression with 92% original retrieval performance.},
pubstate = {forthcoming},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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• 2021.emnlp-main.793     (0.25MB)
• https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.793/
• https://doi.org/10.18653

@inproceedings{Rathi_2021_information,
title = {An information-theoretic characterization of morphological fusion},
author = {Neil Rathi and Michael Hahn and Richard Futrell},
url = {https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.793/},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.18653},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Association for Computational Linguistics},
pages = {10115–10120},
address = {Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic},
pubstate = {forthcoming},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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• opmi_a_00051     (1.51MB)
• https://direct.mit.edu/opmi/article/doi/10.1162/opmi_a_00051/109033/Morpheme-Ordering-Across-Languages-Reflects
• https://doi.org/10.1162

@article{Hahn_2022_ordering,
title = {Morpheme ordering across languages reflects optimization for memory efficiency},
author = {Michael Hahn and Rebecca Mathew and Judith Degen},
url = {https://direct.mit.edu/opmi/article/doi/10.1162/opmi_a_00051/109033/Morpheme-Ordering-Across-Languages-Reflects},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1162},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
journal = {Open Mind: Discoveries in Cognitive Science},
pages = {208-232},
publisher = {MIT Press Direct},
address = {OpenMind (2022)},
volume = {5},
pubstate = {published},
type = {article}
}

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• https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2122604119

@article{Hahn_2022_word,
title = {Crosslinguistic word order variation reflects evolutionary pressures of dependency and information locality},
author = {Michael Hahn and Yang Xu},
url = {https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2122604119},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
journal = {National Academy of Sciences (NAS)},
publisher = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America},
pubstate = {published},
type = {article}
}

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• https://2022.naacl.org/?msclkid=d01343eec0e211ec848495b8921c6e80

@inproceedings{Chowdhury_2022_Debiasing,
title = {Towards Debiasing Translation Artifacts},
author = {Koel Dutta Chowdhury and Rricha Jalota and Josef van Genabith and Cristina Espa{\~n}a i Bonet},
url = {https://2022.naacl.org/?msclkid=d01343eec0e211ec848495b8921c6e80},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
publisher = {NAACL 2022 DFKI & SFB 1102},
address = {Seattle, Washington},
pubstate = {forthcoming},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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• https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/cogsci-2022/

@inproceedings{Mayn_2022_of,
title = {Pragmatics of Metaphor Revisited: Modeling the Role of Degree and Salience in Metaphor Understanding},
author = {Alexandra Mayn and Vera Demberg},
url = {https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/cogsci-2022/},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
publisher = {LREC 2022},
address = {Toronto, Canada},
pubstate = {forthcoming},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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• https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/cogsci-2022/

@inproceedings{Kravtchenko_2022_atypicality,
title = {Modeling atypicality inferences in pragmatic reasoning},
author = {Ekaterina Kravtchenko and Vera Demberg},
url = {https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/cogsci-2022/},
year = {2022},
date = {2022},
publisher = {CogSci 2022},
address = {Toronto, Canada},
pubstate = {forthcoming},
type = {inproceedings}
}

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