Related papers: Um, er: How meaning varies between speech and its …
Subjective and objective experiments are conducted to understand the extent to which a speaker's gender influences the acoustics of unvoiced (U) sounds. U segments of utterances are replaced by the corresponding segments of a speaker of…
Most languages use the relative order between words to encode meaning relations. Languages differ, however, in what orders they use and how these orders are mapped onto different meanings. We test the hypothesis that, despite these…
Explainable AI methods facilitate the understanding of model behaviour, yet, small, imperceptible perturbations to inputs can vastly distort explanations. As these explanations are typically evaluated holistically, before model deployment,…
A sharp tension exists about the nature of human language between two opposite parties: those who believe that statistical surface distributions, in particular using measures like surprisal, provide a better understanding of language…
Uncertainty of scientific findings are typically reported through statistical metrics such as $p$-values, confidence intervals, etc. The magnitude of this objective uncertainty is reflected in the language used by the authors to report…
Which statistical features distinguish a meaningful text (possibly written in an unknown system) from a meaningless set of symbols? Here we answer this question by comparing features of the first half of a text to its second half. This…
Coherent discourse is distinguished from a mere collection of utterances by the satisfaction of a diverse set of constraints, for example choice of expression, logical relation between denoted events, and implicit compatibility with…
The aim of the study is to investigate the complex mechanisms of speech perception and ultimately decode the electrical changes in the brain accruing while listening to speech. We attempt to decode heard speech from intracranial…
The uniform information density (UID) hypothesis proposes that speakers aim to distribute information evenly throughout a text, balancing production effort and listener comprehension difficulty. However, language typically does not maintain…
We report a controlled study investigating the effect of visual information (i.e., seeing the speaker) on spoken language comprehension. We compare the ERP signature (N400) associated with each word in audio-only and audio-visual…
Theoretically as well as experimentally it is investigated how people represent their knowledge in order to make decisions or to share their knowledge with others. Experiment 1 probes into the ways how people 6ather information about the…
Covert speech, the silent production of words in the mind, has been studied increasingly to understand and decode thoughts. This task has often been compared to speech perception as it brings about similar topographical activation patterns…
A theoretical framework is proposed for the understanding of verbal perception -- the conversion of words into meaning, modeled as a compromise between lexical demands and contextual constraints -- and the theory is tested against…
The analysis of thousands of time series in different languages reveals that word usage presents oscillations with a prevalence of 16-year cycles, mounted on slowly varying trends. These components carry different information: while similar…
Recognizing a basic difference between the semiotics of humans and machines presents a possibility to overcome the shortcomings of current speech assistive devices. For the machine, the meaning of a (human) utterance is defined by its own…
A common task in computational text analyses is to quantify how two corpora differ according to a measurement like word frequency, sentiment, or information content. However, collapsing the texts' rich stories into a single number is often…
Like students facing hard exam questions, large language models sometimes guess when uncertain, producing plausible yet incorrect statements instead of admitting uncertainty. Such "hallucinations" persist even in state-of-the-art systems…
Linguistic laws constitute one of the quantitative cornerstones of modern cognitive sciences and have been routinely investigated in written corpora, or in the equivalent transcription of oral corpora. This means that inferences of…
The speech-to-song illusion is a robust psychological phenomenon whereby a spoken sentence sounds increasingly more musical as it is repeated. Despite decades of research, a complete formal account of this transformation is still lacking,…
Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…