http://hdl.handle.net/1842/1745 2013-05-21T12:06:11Z 2013-05-21T12:06:11Z Notaker, Nikolai http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6549 2013-01-08T15:57:26Z 2010-11-24T00:00:00Z

Title: Agency and argument realization in early child Inuktitut Authors: Notaker, Nikolai Abstract: Argument realization, and particularly argument omission, is a subject that has been widely studied in the field of child language research, and several different theories have been put forth to explain this phenomenon. In this study, semantic agency is proposed as a contributing factor. To test this, corpus data of four children acquiring Inuktitut were coded for agency on the grammatical subjects produced by the children. Statistical analyses were performed to assess the relationship between subject argument form and agency. A qualitative analysis of the verb semantics associated with non-agent subjects was also performed. While the analyses yielded some statistically significant results, no clear relationship between these factors could be identified. The qualitative analysis, on the other hand, did appear to reveal a weak trend in terms of a relationship between verb semantics and argument realization. The findings are discussed in terms of the broader aspects of the development of agency, transitivity, and ergativity.

2010-11-24T00:00:00Z Simms, Terence http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6168 2012-07-13T15:31:58Z 2011-08-31T00:00:00Z

Title: Investigating Non-Uniqueness in the Acoustic-Articulatory Inversion Mapping Authors: Simms, Terence Abstract: The task of inferring articulatory configurations from a given acoustic signal is a problem for which a reliable and accurate solution has been lacking for a number of decades. The changing shape of the vocal-tract is responsible for altering the parameters of sound. Each different configuration of articulators will regularly lead to a single distinct sound being produced (a unique mapping from the articulator to the acoustics). Therefore, it should be possible to take an acoustic signal and invert the process, giving the exact vocal-tract shape for a given sound. This would have wide-reaching applications in the field of speech and language technology, such as in improving facial animation and speech recognition systems. Using vocal-tract information inferred from the acoustic signal can facilitate a richer understanding of the actual constraints in articulator movement. However, research concerned with the inversion mapping has revealed that there is often a multi-valued mapping from the acoustic domain to the articulatory domain. Work in identifying and resolving this non-uniqueness thus far has been somewhat successful, with Mixture-Density Networks (MDN) and articulator trajectory systems presenting probabilistic methods of finding the most likely articulatory configuration for a given signal. Using an subset of an EMA corpus, along with a combination of an instantaneous inversion mapping and a non-parametric clustering algorithm, I aim to quantify the extent to which acoustically similar vectors to a given phone can exhibit qualitatively different vocal-tract shapes. Categorical identification of acoustically similar sounds that can have shown a multi-valued mapping in the articulatory domain, as well as identifying which articulators this occurs for, could be key to resolving issues in the reliability and quality of the inversion mapping.

2011-08-31T00:00:00Z King, Rosalind http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6152 2012-07-13T14:36:12Z 2011-11-23T00:00:00Z

Title: Exploring expressivity: A closer look at the evolution of linguistic structure Authors: King, Rosalind Abstract: Compositionality, a unique and fundamental property of human language, emerges from the pressures placed on language as it is learnt and used by consecutive generations – the pressure for learnability, arising from the transmission process, and a pressure for expressivity imposed by the use of language to convey meaning. This study uses human diffusion chains to explore the contribution that learning and communication make to the cultural evolution of linguistic structure. Languages are exposed to either a learning pressure, a communication pressure, or both. The language in the communication chain became expressive and showed varying degrees of structure, in some cases deliberately introduced as an aid to comprehension. This puts the focus back on the cognitive processes of language users, and emphasises the role of recipient design in the emergence of structure in language. The languages in the learning conditions struggled to maintain a significant degree of structure, contrary to expectations. However, the development of the languages provides clues about the way that language adapts in response to the particular communicative and learning environment.

2011-11-23T00:00:00Z Silvey, Catriona http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6110 2012-07-12T15:50:01Z 2011-11-23T00:00:00Z

Title: Cross-situational inference and meaning space structure Authors: Silvey, Catriona Abstract: Humans use language to direct each other’s attention to complex meanings. Researchers hold differing opinions on the evolutionary origin of these meanings: some hypothesise that human ancestors had innate, pre-linguistic concepts, similar to the referents of present-day nouns and verbs; others that simple meanings were broken down from initially complex meanings associated with specific situations. Experimental investigations of language evolution, meanwhile, have generally assumed a structured, pre-existing meaning space. This dissertation argues that a closer look at the ostensive-inferential nature of human communication supports a different account of the emergence of meanings and challenges the assumption of a pre-existing meaning space. Building on an experimental paradigm from Xu & Tenenbaum (2007), participants were presented with scenes of complex events to test how their meaning inferences were affected by the interaction of suspicious patterns in training input with their world knowledge. The results showed that the complexity of meaning lexicalised depended on this interaction, with substantial variation caused by both differing salience effects of events and differing world knowledge of participants. This result shows that meaning grounding in humans is not simply a matter of matching words to pre-existing cognitive concepts, or of associating a word with a specific recurring situation, but is an intelligent process crucially sensitive to the speaker’s intention to communicate. Further investigation is called for into the role of communication in forming a meaning space, and what determines this meaning space’s structure.

2011-11-23T00:00:00Z