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

Mhmm over time

19 May 2022

Even apparently universal patterns (like the use of ‘mhm’ during tellings) can show important cross-cultural differences. A. Continuers (marked ○) are among the most frequent recipient behaviours in both English and Korean, shown here in four 80 second stretches of tellings. B. However, the relative frequency of continuers is about twice as high in Korean based on 100 random samples of 80 second segments in both languages: on average, 21% of turns are continuers in Korean, against 9% of turns in English (measures expressed this way to control for speech rate differences).

Dingemanse, M., & Liesenfeld, A. (2022). From text to talk: Harnessing conversational corpora for humane and diversity-aware language technology. Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), 5614–5633. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.385 Download

The iconicity boom

10 March 2021

Proportional number of publications cataloged in Web of Science (1900–2017), showing concurrent upsurges in six topics related to iconicity (corrected for overall publication volume).

Nielsen, A. K. S., & Dingemanse, M. (2021). Iconicity in Word Learning and Beyond: A Critical Review. Language and Speech, 64(1), 52–72. https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830920914339 Download