Sequential context of continuers

25 September 2022

A Candidate continuer forms in 10 unrelated languages, B shown in their natural sequential ecology (annotations as in the original data), C with spectrograms and pitch traces of representative tokens made using the Parselmouth interface to Praat (Jadoul et al., 2018; Boersma & Weenink, 2013).

Dingemanse, M., Liesenfeld, A., & Woensdregt, M. (2022). Convergent cultural evolution of continuers (mmhm). The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Language Evolution (JCoLE), 61–67. Download

Clustering response tokens

14 September 2022

Response tokens like English mhmm, uhuhh, yeah or Catalan mm, sí, vale are tricky to study in the wild: their phonetic realizations can be quite different from how they are transcribed. Here we use UMAP, a method for dimensionality reduction used in bioacoustics and other fields, to explore the shape of inventories of response tokens in 16 languages. Every point represents a single response token; the closer two points are the more similar they are acoustically. Spectrograms drawn around the rim of the plots provide a direct view of the acoustic structure of tokens and enable quick sanity checks.

Liesenfeld, A., & Dingemanse, M. (2022). Bottom-up discovery of structure and variation in response tokens (‘backchannels’) across diverse languages. Proceedings of Interspeech 2022, 1126–1130. https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2022-11288 Download

Vowel-colour associations

24 April 2022

L: The vowel space with colour associations by a synaesthete. R: The same vowels displayed according to tongue position when produced. Visualization: Christine Cuskley & Mark Dingemanse. For an interactive version of this visual, see here.

van Leeuwen, T., & Dingemanse, M. (2022). Samenwerkende zintuigen. In S. Dekker & H. Kause (Eds.), Wetenschappelijke doorbraken de klas in! (pp. 85–116). Wetenschapsknooppunt Radboud Universiteit. Download
Cuskley, C., Dingemanse, M., Kirby, S., & van Leeuwen, T. M. (2019). Cross-modal associations and synesthesia: Categorical perception and structure in vowel–color mappings in a large online sample. Behavior Research Methods, 51(4), 1651–1675. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-019-01203-7 Download

How ideophones stand out

24 April 2017

Pitch trace of a Japanese utterance starting with two tokens of the ideophone zabɯ:n ‘splash’, showing how they are produced in the upper part of the speaker’s pitch range, and how their articulation is drawn out relative to other non-ideophonic elements in the utterance. This illustrates the special treatment that ideophones often get in everyday speech, which makes them stand out from the surrounding material.

Dingemanse, M., & Akita, K. (2017). An inverse relation between expressiveness and grammatical integration: on the morphosyntactic typology of ideophones, with special reference to Japanese. Journal of Linguistics, 53(3), 501–532. https://doi.org/10.1017/S002222671600030X Download