Seeing sentence boundaries

Fenlon, J; Denmark, T; Campbell, Ruth; Woll, Bencie

doi:10.1075/sll.10.2.06fen

Cited by 40 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…That study also aims to identify the visual information signers rely on to determine utterance boundaries online, on the basis of linguistic annotations of the visible cues in this additional data set. On a par with previous work on spoken languages , we hypothesize that in addition to lexical content and syntax , phonetic and prosodic markers such as signing speed or height (Wilbur, 2009;Russell et al, 2011), as well as visual intonation on the f a c em a yp l a yar o l e ( Reilly et al, 1990;Nespor and Sandler, 1999;Fenlon et al, 2007;Dachkovsky and Sandler, 2009;Dachkovsky et al, 2013) in the online prediction of stroke-tostroke turn boundaries. This paper has centered on question-answer sequences within a relatively limited data set.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 58%

Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Interaction

Holler

Kendrick

Casillas

et al. 2016

Frontiers Research Topics

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The core use of language is in face-to-face conversation. This is characterized by rapid turn-taking. This turn-taking poses a number central puzzles for the psychology of language. Consider, for example, that in large corpora the gap between turns is on the order of 100 to 300 ms, but the latencies involved in language production require minimally between 600ms (for a single word) or 1500 ms (for as simple sentence). This implies that participants in conversation are predicting the ends of the incoming turn and preparing in advance. But how is this done? What aspects of this prediction are done when? What happens when the prediction is wrong? What stops participants coming in too early? If the system is running on prediction, why is there consistently a mode of 100 to 300 ms in response time? The timing puzzle raises further puzzles: it seems that comprehension must run parallel with the preparation for production, but it has been presumed that there are strict cognitive limitations on more than one central process running at a time. How is this bottleneck overcome? Far from being 'easy' as some psychologists have suggested, conversation may be one of the most demanding cognitive tasks in our everyday lives. Further questions naturally arise: how do children learn to master this demanding task, and what is the developmental trajectory in this domain? Research shows that aspects of turn-taking such as its timing are remarkably stable across languages and cultures, but the word order of languages varies enormously. How then does prediction of the incoming turn work when the verb (often the informational nugget in a clause) is at the end? Conversely, how can production work fast enough in languages that have the verb at the beginning, thereby requiring early planning of the whole clause? What happens when one changes modality, as in sign languages -- with the loss of channel constraints is turn-taking much freer? And what about face-to-face communication amongst hearing individuals -- do gestures, gaze, and other body behaviors facilitate turn-taking? One can also ask the phylogenetic question: how did such a system evolve? There seem to be parallels (analogies) in duetting bird species, and in a variety of monkey species, but there is little evidence of anything like this among the great apes. All this constitutes a neglected set of problems at the heart of the psychology of language and of the language sciences. This research topic welcomes contributions from right across the board, for example from psycholinguists, developmental psychologists, students of dialogue and conversation analysis, linguists interested in the use of language, phoneticians, corpus analysts and comparative ethologists or psychologists. We welcome contributions of all sorts, for example original research papers, opinion pieces, and reviews of work in subfields that may not be fully understood in other subfields

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 58%

Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Interaction

Holler

Kendrick

Casillas

et al. 2016

Frontiers Research Topics

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“…For example, researchers are exploring whether speakers use gesture in spoken language prosody, called audio-visual prosody (Krahmer & Swerts 2005, 2007); these patterns can then be compared with the patterns found in sign language prosody to explore similarities and differences. As another example, researchers are exploring the ability of nonsigners (who have only their skills as gesturers to draw on) to understand patterns in sign language—sign language prosody (Fenlon et al 2007, Brentari et al 2011) and sign language structures that encode notions of telicity (Strickland et al 2015). Researchers are also exploring whether hearing people who have experience using cospeech gesture will have a different “accent” when they sign, not because they learned to sign as a second language but simply because they have had extensive cospeech gesture experience.…”

Section: Surprising Results and Further Implications Of Work On Lamentioning

confidence: 99%

Language Emergence

Brentari

Goldin‐Meadow

2017

Annu. Rev. Linguist.

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Language emergence describes moments in historical time when nonlinguistic systems become linguistic. Because language can be invented de novo in the manual modality, this offers insight into the emergence of language in ways that the oral modality cannot. Here we focus on homesign, gestures developed by deaf individuals who cannot acquire spoken language and have not been exposed to sign language. We contrast homesign with (a) gestures that hearing individuals produce when they speak, as these cospeech gestures are a potential source of input to homesigners, and (b) established sign languages, as these codified systems display the linguistic structure that homesign has the potential to assume. We find that the manual modality takes on linguistic properties, even in the hands of a child not exposed to a language model. But it grows into full-blown language only with the support of a community that transmits the system to the next generation.*

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“…In fact, Fenlon et al (2007) found that native signers and non-signers were able to identify sentence boundaries in a sign language with which they were unfamiliar. Using video clips of narratives in an unfamiliar sign language, Fenlon and colleagues asked participants to push a button when they thought they saw a sentence boundary.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We coded three manual features – holds, repetitions, and emphatic movements – each of which has been shown to play a role in sign language prosody (Nespor & Sandler 1999; Fenlon et al 2007; Wilbur & Martínez 2002). As described earlier, dropping the hand and/or pausing (i.e., a relax in handshape without subsequently dropping the hands) were used to identify the ends of utterances in our coding system (Goldin-Meadow & Mylander 1984).…”

Section: 4 Coding Prosody In Homesignmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosody in a communication system developed without a language model

Applebaum

Coppola²,

Goldin‐Meadow³

2014

SL&L

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Prosody, he “music” of language, is an important aspect of all natural languages, spoken and signed. We ask here whether prosody is also robust across learning conditions. If a child were not exposed to a conventional language and had to construct his own communication system, would that system contain prosodic structure? We address this question by observing a deaf child who received no sign language input and whose hearing loss prevented him from acquiring spoken language. Despite his lack of a conventional language model, this child developed his own gestural system. In this system, features known to mark phrase and utterance boundaries in established sign languages were used to consistently mark the ends of utterances, but not to mark phrase or utterance internal boundaries. A single child can thus develop the seeds of a prosodic system, but full elaboration may require more time, more users, or even more generations to blossom.

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Seeing sentence boundaries

Cited by 40 publications

References 22 publications

Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Interaction

Turn-Taking in Human Communicative Interaction

Language Emergence

Prosody in a communication system developed without a language model

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