Catégorie d'événements : Séminaire

Séminaire

organisé par l’équipe de recherche S2S et le Groupe transversal prosodie (GTP)

Pilar Prieto

ICREA-Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Relationship between prosodic and gestural marking of pragmatic operations: Do intonational and gestural signals act as sister systems?

Résumé :
In face-to-face communication, speakers jointly use a variety of prosodic and gestural patterns to convey pragmatic meaning. The main goal of this talk will be to assess whether they  function as sister systems in the marking of pragmatic operations, both from a production and a perception perspective. First, the results from three production studies tend to show a co-dependency between prosody and gesture as markers of polite stance, speech act information (more concretely reject operators, e.g. disagreement and incredulity questions), as well as information structure marking. Second, results from two cross-modal perception experiments complement this view, pointing to clear trade-off effects between the two and a stronger reliance on the visual information in the interpretation of pragmatic meaning. All in all, both production and perception results point to the view that prosodic and gestural markers of pragmatic operations are strongly interdependent and that speakers modulate them in controlled but flexible ways in everyday production. In general, a more fine-grained approach to multimodal language is needed that fully integrates the role of intonation and gestural signals as sister systems.

References: Brown, L. – Prieto, P. (2021). “Gesture and prosody in multimodal communication”. In: M.Haugh, D. Kadar, & M. Terkourafi (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, 430-453 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Séminaire

Organisé par l'équipe de recherche SYSTUS

Avec l'intervention de

Marc Allassonnière-Tang

(Laboratoire d’Eco-Anthropologie – Diversité et évolution culturelles, Paris)

Olena Shcherbakova

(Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, Department Linguistics and Cultural Evolution, Leipzig)

The evolutionary pathways of complexity in gender systems: Are more assignment rules better sustained by more agreement patterns?

Résumé :
Humans categorize the experience they encounter in various ways, which is mirrored, for instance, in grammatical gender systems of languages. In such systems, nouns are grouped based on whether they refer to masculine/feminine beings, (non-)humans, (in)animate entities, or objects with specific shapes. Languages differ greatly in how many gender assignment rules are incorporated in gender systems and how many word classes carry gender marking (gender agreement patterns). It has been suggested that these two dimensions are positively associated as numerous assignment rules are better sustained by numerous agreement patterns. We test this claim by analyzing the correlated evolution (Continuous method in BayesTraits) and making the causal inferences about the relationships (phylogenetic path analysis) between these two dimensions in 482 languages from the global Grambank database. By applying these methods to linguistic data matched to phylogenetic trees (a world tree and individual families), we evaluate whether various types of gender assignment rules (semantic, phonological, and unpredictable) are causally linked to more gender agreement patterns on the global level and in individual language families. Our results on the world language tree suggest that semantic rules are weakly positively correlated with gender agreement and that the development of agreement patterns is facilitated by different rules in individual families. For example, in Indo-European languages, more agreement patterns are caused by the presence of phonological and unpredictable rules, while in Bantu languages, the driving force of agreement patterns is the variety of semantic rules. Our study shows that the relationships between agreement and rules are family-specific and yields support to the idea that more distinct rules and/or rule types might be more robust in languages with more pervasive gender agreement.

Séminaire inter-équipe

Organisé par les équipes de recherche S2S et LSD

Vendredi 24 novembre 2023, de 9h30 à 12h30, en salle de conférences B011 au LPL

Programme :

9h30-10h30 : Angèle Brunellière (SCALab, Université de Lille) : L’adaptation des représentations linguistiques à l'issue d’une interaction sociale

Résumé : Lors d'une interaction sociale, les interlocuteurs construisent des concepts partagés dans le but d'atteindre plus facilement une compréhension mutuelle. Il reste alors à comprendre comment des concepts partagés construits pendant une interaction sociale sont intégrés au niveau représentationnel et s'ils affectent les représentations linguistiques pré-existantes des interlocuteurs. Au cours de ce séminaire, je présenterai un ensemble d'études menées en laboratoire au cours desquelles nous cherchons à savoir si de nouvelles informations partagées pendant une interaction sociale peuvent amener à une adaptation des représentations phonologiques et sémantiques après l'interaction par l'utilisation de mesures comportementales et électrophysiologiques à travers une multitude de tâches (par exemple, discrimination, reconnaissance, lecture). L'ensemble de ces travaux apportent une meilleure compréhension dans les liens entre mémoire et interaction sociale en caractérisant la nature dynamique des représentations linguistiques stockées en mémoire à long terme et en considérant la notion de concepts partagés au niveau représentationnel.

10h30-11h : pause café

11h-11h20: James German (LPL) : Implicit social cues influence the interpretation of intonation

Résumé : Individuals may have significant experience with more than one variety of their native language. If the “non-native” varieties are saliently linked to specific social identities, then an individual’s production or perception can be biased towards a particular variety through contextual cues that exemplify the associated identity. Here we explore whether the interpretation of intonational patterns by Singapore English (SgE) listeners is influenced by implicit social cues linked to either Singaporean or American cultural identity. Crucially, the relationship between accentuation and pronoun reference is robust in American English, but weak in SgE. This relationship depends on the fact that in AmE, the distribution of pitch accents depends on information structure, while SgE prosody is edge-based, i.e., prominence is determined primarily by phrasing. Consequently, the prominence of a pronoun depends on its position in a phrase and is not related to information structure. Together, these facts predict that SgE listeners are less sensitive to prominence in computing pronoun reference than AmE listeners. Nevertheless, most SgE individuals have substantial contact with AmE, suggesting that their system may adapt based on the regional identity of the speaker and other cues. In our study, SgE listeners heard sentences which varied in the accentual status of the object pronoun and then chose from paraphrases reflecting different interpretations of the pronoun. Two groups of participants were exposed before and during the experiment to either a “Singaporean” cue or an “American” cue in the form of cover images from popular television series, in such a way that they were not linked to speaker’s identity. Our hypothesis was that if implicit socio-contextual cues bias listeners toward specific systems, then they should show more sensitivity to accentual status in the American condition than in the Singaporean condition. The results confirmed our hypothesis and point towards an exemplar basis for the representation of the intonation-meaning interface.

11h25-11h45 : Emilia Kerr (LPL), Benjamin Morillon (INS), Kristof Strijkers (LPL) : Does prediction drive neural alignment in conversation

Résumé : Recent studies on neural alignment in language (i.e., brain-to-brain synchronisation between interlocutors) have shown that successful communication relies on the synchronization of the same brain regions in both speakers. However, more explicit mechanistic links between neural alignment and specific linguistic functions of the communicative signal remain to be established. This project relies on the hypothesis that the degree of neural synchronization between interlocutors depends on the degree of predictive processing: the more predictability between speaker and listener, the more their brain responses will align and display similar oscillatory dynamics (Pickering & Gambi, 2018). We are testing this hypothesis by isolating word semantics (e.g., animal vs. tool word category) in an experimental set-up where (a) prediction effects are tested at the behavioral level; (b) brain activity (EEG) of two interlocutors engaging in simple conversations is recorded simultaneously and analysed in an event-related fashion (i.e., at the word component level instead of the whole communicative signal). Experiment 1 presents a novel interactional task where participants are involved in an association game where speaker A names a picture (either an animal or a tool) and speaker B needs to respond with a semantically related word. Importantly, the predictability for the upcoming object is manipulated, i.e., prior to picture naming, participants hear either a highly predictable or non-predictable sentence up to the final word, which is then finished by speaker A naming an object. Data has been collected from 20 dyads, and the analyses of speech onsets showed a significant reduction of response latencies in the predictable condition, both for speaker A and speaker B. This demonstrates that semantic predictions influence dyadic interaction. In Experiment 2 (being currently analysed) participants are playing the same association game but without predictive priming, i.e., speaker A sees a picture and names it, and speaker B replies with an association. The relevant factor to explore now is whether we can find meaning-specific brain-to-brain synchronisation between tools vs. animals brain regions, which is the defining dimension by which participants need to perform the task. Importantly, tools vs. animals have well-know cortical dissociations in the brain (e.g., Grisoni et al., 2021). Apart from that, while we have no control about the exact words that an interlocutor will reply, we do control the semantic categories of the words, and therefore, this allows us to explore whether we can find brain-to-brain synchrony for specific word meanings (instead of for ‘language’ in general). The analyses methods that we are currently implementing include Riemannian geometry-based EEG decoding and source localisation. Experiment 3, also a dual EEG set-up, will test the hypothesis that this co-activation will be more in synchrony when semantic predictions have primed the target word.

References:
Grisoni, L., Tomasello, R., Pulvermüller, F. (2021). Correlated Brain Indexes of Semantic Prediction and Prediction Error: Brain Localization and Category Specificity. Cerebral Cortex, 31 (3), 1553–1568.
Pickering, M. J., & Gambi, C. (2018). Predicting while comprehending language: A theory and review. Psychological Bulletin, 144(10), 1002–1044.

11h50-12h10 : Auriane Boudin, Roxane Bertrand, Philippe Blache, Stéphane Rauzy (LPL) : Le feedback dans tous ses états

Résumé : Longtemps relégués au statut d'élément secondaire dans la conversation, les feedbacks sont aujourd'hui reconnus comme jouant un rôle essentiel dans les interactions. Toutefois, de nombreuses interrogations subsistent. Cette présentation aborde le concept de feedback et explore son rôle dans les interactions tant en conditions normales qu'altérées.

12h15-12h30 : clôture/discussion générale

A partir de 12h30 : Bagels offerts par le LPL

Séminaire de

Marianne Jover

(Centre PsyCLÉ, AMU)

Vendredi 24 novembre de 14h30 à 16h00 au LPL en salle de conférences B011

Ce séminaire est organisé dans le cadre de l'Axe Transversal Pathologie du LPL et ouvert à tous.

Apport de l’étude de la comorbidité à la compréhension des troubles du neurodéveloppement

La grande fréquence de la comorbidité entre les troubles du neurodéveloppement est très largement documentée (Kaplan et al., 2001). L’explication et les implications de ce phénomène sont encore l’objet de beaucoup de questions, comme en témoigne le récent thème de recherche déployé dans la revue Frontiers in Neurosciences par Moll, et al. (2021). A l’aide de travaux menés avec différents collaborateurs sur la dyslexie et le trouble développemental de la coordination, j’exposerai l’idée selon laquelle la comorbidité constitue une situation fructueuse pour comprendre les troubles du neurodéveloppement (Cignetti et al., 2018, Maziero et al., 2020, Bellocchi et al., 2021, Huau et Jover, 2021). L’étude de la comorbidité révèle les mécanismes sous-jacents qui unissent les différents troubles, mais également ceux responsables des présentations diverses d’un même trouble. Plusieurs modèles existent qui repositionnent le développement au centre du processus pathogénique (Dewey, 2018, McGrath et al., 2020). Les répercussions de ces modèles sur les méthodologies de recherche et les classifications nosographiques seront envisagées dans un dernier temps de la présentation