Joost van de Weijer

Lund University | LU · Centre for Languages and Literature

This chapter presents the results of a production experiment testing the recursivity of prosodic realization of focus in Tokyo Japanese. Tokyo Japanese wh -questions obligatorily exhibit focus prosody, which starts from a wh -phrase (WH) and continues until the question particle (Q) that binds the wh -phrase (Deguchi & Kitagawa, 2002; Ishihara, 200...

Adjectives that are used to describe sensory experiences are often used to express more than one modality. The adjective sweet , for instance, may primarily be associated with taste (i.e., taste is the dominant modality of sweet), but it can also be used for smell, sound or sight, and possibly even for touch. It has also been shown that some sensor...

Negation is frequently used in natural language, yet relatively little is known about its processing. More importantly, what is known regarding the neurophysiological processing of negation is mostly based on results of studies using written stimuli (the word-by-word paradigm). While the results of these studies have suggested processing costs in c...

A match-action cut in feature films connects two shots of a single continuous movement. This type of editing often goes unnoticed and is arguably the most effective form of continuity editing. However, the literature offers little agreement on editing best practice and, by implication, on how our perceptual system deals with disjointed moving image...

This study addresses the postulate of non-conventionality of pantomime, inherent in pantomimic scenarios of language origin. Since lack of semiotic conventions does not preclude micro-conventions resulting from cultural differences, pantomimes should be easier to interpret when the actor and recipient share the same culture than between two differe...

Aim: Students with hearing loss (HL) often fall behind hearing peers in complex language tasks such as narrative writing. This study explored the effects of school grade, gender, cognitive and linguistic predisposition and audiological factors on narrative text quality in this target group. Method: Eleven students with HL in Grades 5-6 and 7-8 (...

As humans interact in the world, they often orient one another's attention to objects through the use of spoken demonstrative expressions and head and/or hand movements to point to the objects. Although indicating behaviors have frequently been studied in lab settings, we know surprisingly little about how demonstratives and pointing are used to co...

This study is concerned with the integration of negation in relation to two models of the processing of negation: (i) the two-step model (Lüdtke et al., 2008), according to which negation involves two representations where negation is ignored in the first representation, and (ii) the pragmatic view (Nieuwland & Kuperberg, 2008), which posits that n...

The present study looked at the extent to which 2-year-old children benefited from information conveyed by viewing a hiding event through an opening in a cardboard screen, seeing it as live video, as pre-recorded video, or by way of a mirror. Being encouraged to find the hidden object by selecting one out of two cups, the children successfully pick...

Human communication can be either monosemiotic or polysemiotic, depending on whether it combines ensembles of representations from one or more semiotic systems such as language, gesture and depiction. Each semiotic system has its unique storytelling potentials, which makes intersemiotic translation from one system to another challenging. We investi...

Aim: Self-efficacy for writing is an important motivational factor and considered to predict writing performance. Self-efficacy for narrative writing has been sparsely studied, and few studies focus on the effects of writing intervention on self-efficacy. Additionally, there is a lack of validated measures of self-efficacy for elementary school stu...

In this paper we discuss a number of factors that bear on the question if a Chinese given name is more likely to refer to a female or a male. In some cases this can be determined (with some degree of confidence) – in others it cannot. We identify the relevant factors as 1) gender-identifying characters or radicals; 2) sound symbolism and 3) redupli...

This study examines cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in adult Italian-German bilinguals based on the production of gemination, a phenomenon that exists in Italian but not in German. We analyzed the spontaneous Italian speech of two groups of Italian-German bilinguals (heritage speakers of Italian and Italian-dominant bilinguals) and a monolingual I...

This study investigates domestic cat meows in different contexts and mental states. Measures of fundamental frequency (f0) and duration as well as f0 contours of 780 meows from 40 cats were analysed. We found significant effects of recording context and of mental state on f0 and duration. Moreover, positive (e.g. affiliative) contexts and mental st...

This study investigates whether L1 attrition effects on anaphora resolution decrease with L1 re-immersion. A group of 20 Italian-Swedish late bilinguals was tested once before and once after their summer vacation in Italy, and compared with a control group of 21 Italian monolinguals that was also tested once before and once after a similar time int...

This study investigates domestic cat meows in different contexts and mental states. Measures of fundamental frequency (f0) and duration as well as f0 contours of 780 meows from 40 cats were analysed. We found significant effects of recording context and of mental state on f0 and duration. Moreover, positive (e.g. affiliative) contexts and mental st...

This study investigates domestic cat meows in different contexts and mental states. Measures of fundamental frequency (f0) and duration as well as f0 contours of 780 meows from 40 cats were analysed. We found significant effects of recording context and of mental state on f0 and duration. Moreover, positive (e.g. affiliative) contexts and mental st...

Production studies show that anaphoric reference is bimodal. Speakers can introduce a referent in speech by also using a localizing gesture, assigning a specific locus in space to it. Referring back to that referent, speakers then often accompany a spoken anaphor with a localizing anaphoric gesture (i.e., indicating the same locus). Speakers thus c...

In the project Melody in Human-Cat Communication (Meowsic) we are using established phonetic methods to collect, annotate, pre-process and analyse domestic cat-human vocal communication. This article describes these methods, and also presents results of meow vocalisations in four different mental states showing variation in fundamental frequency (f...

In this paper, we have investigated, by means of quantitative and statistical methods, stability and change in cultural vocabulary of Indo-European in Europe, with a focus on agriculture. For this purpose we have created a culture vocabulary list with lexical head words, organized into subcategories based on their role and function in a cultural sy...

In two miniature artificial language learning experiments, we compare the processing of narrow and broad negation, corresponding to prefixal negation (unhappy) and free‐standing negation (not happy) respectively, with that of non‐negation (happy). Three artificial prefixes were invented to express the three meanings above. The meaning scope express...

The acquisition of preverbal liaison (e.g. ils arrivent /ilzaʀiv/) in second language (L2) French has rarely been explored in detail in previous studies on obligatory liaison. In this study, we conducted an elicited imitation test in order to study the influence of proficiency level, modality (spoken or written), and verb frequency on the use of pr...

Leonard Talmy’s influential binary motion event typology has encountered four main challenges: (a) additional language types; (b) extensive “type-internal” variation; (c) the role of other relevant form classes than verbs and “satellites;” and (d) alternative definitions of key semantic concepts like Motion, Path and Manner. After reviewing these i...

Observational learning is a successful method for improving writing skills in various genres. We explore effects of a five lesson intervention series based on peer observation. Fifty-five Swedish 5th-grade students aged 10–12 years followed this intervention programme. The students watched short film clips with peers working with texts. Each lesson...

After many years in a second language (L2)-environment, speakers may experience a change in their native language (L1), known as attrition. Our research question is whether L1 attrition effects are temporary or permanent. In order to address this question, we investigated whether L1 attrition effects on anaphora resolution decrease with L1 re-immer...

After many years in a second language (L2)-environment, speakers may experience a change in their native language (L1), known as attrition. Our research question is whether L1 attrition effects are temporary or permanent. In order to address this question, we investigated whether L1 attrition effects on anaphora resolution decrease with L1 re-immer...

We investigate whether L1 attrition effects on anaphora resolution decrease with L1 re-immersion, by testing 20 Italian-Swedish late bilinguals and 21 Italian monolinguals. According to the “Position of Antecedent Strategy” (Carminati, 2002), Italian speakers prefer a null pronoun in a topic-continuity context (i.e., when there is no change in subj...

The recently funded, five-year, project Melody in Human-Cat Communication (Meowsic) has received vast media attention, both nationally and around the world. In this paper we summarize how our activities got started, our published results so far, the present situation and how we envision our planned, future research, including some of the core hypot...

We investigate whether adult native speakers of Italian who left Italy after puberty and lived in Sweden for at least seven years (late bilinguals) display effects of L1 attrition, and whether they show recovery effects after a re-immersion to Italian, during their summer holidays.

Observational learning has shown to be a successful intervention for writing. Until now, however, studies have only been performed with normal-hearing participants, usually high school or university students. Additionally, there have been conflicting results in whether subjective text quality correlates with one or more objectively measured text ch...

Placement errors of object clitics (OCL) in French have been documented in 2L1 and L2 but not in L1 acquisition (Granfeldt, 2012; Hamann & Belletti, 2006). In the present study, we investigate whether placement errors of third person singular OCLs may be due to cross-linguistic influence. We exposed bilingual children (successive L1 French/L2 Itali...

A persistent controversy in language evolution research has been whether language emerged in the gestural-visual or in the vocal-auditory modality. A “dialectic” solution to this age-old debate has now been gaining ground: language was fully multimodal from the start, and remains so to this day. In this paper, we show this solution to be too simpli...

In this eye-tracking and drawing study, we investigate the perceptual grounding of different types of spatial dimensions such as dense-sparse and top-bottom, focusing both on the participants' experiences of the opposite regions, e.g., O1: dense; O2: sparse, and the region that is experienced as intermediate, e.g., INT: neither dense nor sparse. Si...

The cat (Felis catus, Linneaus 1758) has lived around or with humans for at least 10,000 years, and is now one of the most popular pets of the world with more than 600 million individuals [1], [2]. Domestic cats have developed a more extensive, variable and complex vocal repertoire than most other members of the Carnivora, which may be explained by...

Previous work in the areas of organizational trust repair and crisis communication has provided conflicting answers to the question of whether denial can be more effective than apology in repairing stakeholder trust in a company following an integrity-based violation. This article reports the results of an experiment designed to (i) test the effect...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present an experimental study which aims at assessing the potentially misleading effect of graphic elements on food packaging. The authors call these elements potentially misleading elements (PMEs) as they can give customers false expectations. They are either highlighted numerical information (30 per cent f...

To design an experiment that will yield sufficient power, it is important to understand your measurement device and the data quality it produces. Recent work has provided a complete exposé of eye-tracking data quality as a function of screen location and participant characteristics for a series of popular eye-trackers.These results are however base...

According to film mythology, the Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov conducted an experiment in which he combined a close-up of an actor's neutral face with three different emotional contexts: happiness, sadness, and hunger. The viewers of the three film sequences reportedly perceived the actor's face as expressing an emotion congruent with the given con...

With contributions from leading scholars of bilingualism, Language Dominance in Bilinguals is the first publication to survey different approaches to language dominance, along with suggested avenues for further research. It illustrates how a critical approach to the notion of language dominance, as well as its operationalisation and measurement, ca...

Aims and objectives In this study, we investigated crosslinguistic influence in the phonetic systems of simultaneous bilinguals (2L1s) during adulthood. Methodology Specifically, we analyzed the voice onset time (VOT) of the voiceless stop /k/ in the spontaneous speech of 14 German–French bilinguals who grew up in France or Germany. We looked at b...

Recent research suggests that multilingual students tend to use their complete language repertoires, particularly their L1, when writing in a non-native language (e.g. Cenoz & Gorter 2011; Wang 2003). While there is some international research on the L2 and L3 writing process among bilinguals, the L2/L3 writing process of bilingual and multilingual...

This study has two goals: First, to give an account of the semantic organization of individually used antonymic adjectives in discourse and second, based on those findings and previous work on antonymic meanings, to contribute to a comprehensive theoretical account of their representation within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. The hypothesi...

The study reported in this paper examines foreign accent (FA) in adult simultaneous bilinguals (2L1ers). Specifically, we investigate how accent is affected if a first language is acquired as a minority (heritage) language as compared to a majority (dominant) language. We compare the perceived FA in both languages of 38 adult 2L1ers (German-French...

This study examined human listeners' ability to classify do-mestic cat vocalisations (meows) recorded in two different con-texts; during feeding time (food related meows) and while wait-ing to visit a veterinarian (vet related meows). A pitch anal-ysis showed a tendency for food related meows to have ris-ing F0 contours, while vet related meows ten...

All languages have phonosemantically motivated lexemes, often referred to as sound symbolism. As noticed already by Jespersen (1922), certain semantic domains are more likely to be phonosemantically motivated than others; in particular this concerns semantic qualities closely connected to sensory perception (e.g. size, texture). Motivated form-mean...

The R Project for Statistical Computing is one of the most comprehensive and widely used software options for statistical analysis. Moreover, it is open source, freely available and entirely cross-platform. It is for these reasons that the following chapters all employ R to demonstrate the application and interpretation of statistics. Like the comm...

Previous research on antonyms has shown that some pairings form more felicitous couplings than others. Following up on that research, we conducted two semantic categorization experiments using Event Related Potentials to establish whether there are neurophysiological differences related to levels of antonym canonicity. In Experiment 1, the members...

In order to explore verbal–nonverbal integration, we investigated the influence of cognitive and linguistic ability on gaze behavior during spoken language conversation between children with mild-to-moderate hearing impairment (HI) and normal-hearing (NH) peers. Ten HI–NH and 10 NH-NH dyads performed a referential communication task requiring descr...

The present study focuses on the characteristics of subject-verb agreement in number in spoken and written French, two morphological systems that are very different. In particular, we investigate the impact of frequency of forms and morphological patterns in the input on the acquisition of number agreement in monolingual and bilingual French-speaki...

To investigate gaze behavior during communication between children with hearing impairment (HI) and normal-hearing (NH) peers. 10 HI-NH and 10 NH-NH dyads performed a referential communication task requiring description of faces. During task performance, eye movements and speech were tracked. Using verbal event (questions, statements, back channeli...

The present study focuses on the acquisition of subject–verb agreement in number in spoken French. We compare production and comprehension of singular and plural verb forms in French monolingual and French-Swedish bilingual children (n = 58) aged five to ten. Overall, the results demonstrate that subject–verb agreement in number is a challenge to a...

abstraCt: this study investigates speakers' assessment of the evaluative polarity of the members of eight antonym pairs, e.g., fast-slow and warm-cold, that are not inherently evaluative, unlike antonyms such as good-bad, ugly-beautiful. the contentful structures foregrounded by fast-slow and warm-cold are speed and temperature, repectively, but th...

Recording eye movement data with high quality is often a prerequisite for producing valid and replicable results and for drawing well-founded conclusions about the oculomotor system. Today, many aspects of data quality are often informally discussed among researchers but are very seldom measured, quantified, and reported. Here we systematically inv...

Antonyms are related in meaning but also frequently co-occur within each other's context. Taken together, these two characteristics determine the rating a pair of adjectives receives on a scale from very bad antonyms to very good antonyms. The antonyms that co-occur frequently (more often than chance would predict) and show a clear relatedness in m...

This study investigates gaze behaviour in child dialogues. In earlier studies the authors have investigated the use of requests for clarification and responses in order to study the co-creation of understanding in a referential communication task. By adding eye tracking, this line of research is now expanded to include non-verbal contributions in c...

ABSTRACT: This study investigates speakers’ assessment of the evaluative polarity of the members of eight antonym pairs, e.g., fast–slow and warm–cold, that are not inherently evaluative, unlike antonyms such as good–bad, ugly–beautiful. The contentful structures foregrounded by fast–slow and warm–cold are SPEED and TEMPERATURE, repectively, but th...

In a series of three experiments, we investigated whether proper names (like John, Anna, Henry) are more easily identifiable in spoken language than common nouns. In the first two experiments, participants listened to utterances in an unfamiliar language, and had to guess which of two words was a name. In the third experiment, listeners had to sele...

Antonyms are related in meaning but also frequently co-occur within each other’s context. Taken together, these two characteristics determine the rating a pair of adjectives receives on a scale from very bad antonyms to very good antonyms. The antonyms that co-occur frequently (more often than chance would predict) and show a clear relatedness in m...

Holmqvist, K., Nyström, N., Andersson, R., Dewhurst, R., Jarodzka, H., & Van de Weijer, J. (Eds.) (2011). Eye tracking: a comprehensive guide to methods and measures, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Experimental work with infants shows that this knowledge develops at a very early age. Jusczyk, Friederici, Wessels, Svenkerud and Jusczyk 1993, for instance, demonstrated that infants at the age of nine months have knowledge of the sounds that occur in their native language. In this experiment, a group of American infants and a group of Dutch infa...

Several factors determine the ease and accuracy with which we can estimate a speaker's age. The question addressed in our study is to what extent visual and auditory cues compete with each other. We investigated this question in a series of five related experiments. In the first four experiments, subjects estimated the age of 14 female speakers, ei...

Speech variation of speakers is a crucial issue for speaker recognition and identification, especially for forensic practice. Greater intra-speaker variation is one main reason for incorrect speaker identification in real forensic situations. Understanding the stability of acoustic parameters and their variation in speech is therefore significant f...

This paper examines data from English, Swedish and German in order to find a theoretical distribution that describes the observed relation between word length and frequency. In Swedish and English, most word tokens consist of three letters only, while shorter or longer words occur less frequently. We found that the equation with the general form fe...

Questions addressed to a prelinguistic infant do not have the same function as those addressed to an adult. In this study, I investigated whether, as a consequence of this differing function, infant-directed questions have a terminal rise equally of- ten as adult-directed questions. I analyzed a sample of infant-directed and adult- directed Yes-No...

This paper concerns the language that one infant heard when she was between six and nine months old. In order to obtain a realistic picture of the input an attempt was made to record all the language that was spoken to and around her while she was awake. The paper starts with a description of how and where the project was carried out, and concludes...

F1 and F2 frequencies of the vowels /i/, /a/ and /u/ were measured in speech directed to an infant and to adults. The vowels were taken from content words as well as function words. The results showed that the vowel triangles in speech to the infant were expanded compared to those in speech to adults, but only in the content words. For function wor...

Thesis (doctoral)--Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen, 1999. Includes bibliographical references (p. [139]-147).

Pitch, intonation, and speech rate were analyzed in a collection of everyday speech heard by one Dutch infant between the ages of six and nine months. Components of each of these variables were measured in the speech of three adult speakers (mother, father, baby-sitter) when they addressed the infant, and when they addressed another adult. The resu...