linguistics

Understanding the interplay between speech and gesture is crucial for linguistic and cognitive research. The current prototype, available on GitHub, aims to automate the analysis of temporal alignment between spoken demonstrative pronouns and pointing gestures in video recordings. By integrating computer vision (via Google’s MediaPipe) and speech recognition (using language-specific Vosk models) using Python, the workflow provides enriched video annotations and alignment data, offering valuable insights into deictic communication.

Researchers often make participants jump through hoops. Due to our personal blind spots, it seems easier to realise the full extent of these acrobatics when we consider the work of other researchers. In linguistic research, the acrobatics are often spurred by unnatural grammatical constructions.

To err is human, but when it comes to creating research materials, mistakes can be reduced by sharing more of our work and by using some helpful tools. For instance, we can make our research materials FAIRer—that is, more Findable, Accessible, …

An R script for preprocessing frequency list data from the Norwegian Web as Corpus (NoWaC), including instructions for downloading and preparing the corpus data.

Slideshare Labotka, D., Sabo, E., Bonais, R., Gelman, S. A., & Baptista, M. (2023). Testing the effects of congruence in adult multilingual acquisition with implications for creole genesis. Cognition, 235, 105387. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105387

Analysis of how Google Translate handles pronominal object clitics in preverbal position in Romance languages, which serve to emphasize the agent and require marked translations to preserve this focus in English.

Slideshare Jost, E., Brill-Schuetz, K., Morgan-Short, K., & Christiansen, M. H. (2019). Input complexity affects long-term retention of statistically learned regularities in an artificial language learning task. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 13, 358. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2019.00358

Linguistic relativity is the influence of language on other realms of cognition. For instance, the way movement is expressed in a person’s native language may influence how they perceive movement. Motion event encoding (MEE) is usually framed as a …

This app presents linguistic data over several tabs. The code combines the great front-end of Flexdashboard—based on R Markdown and yielding an unmatched user interface—, with the great back-end of Shiny—allowing users to download sections of data they select, in various formats. The hardest nuts to crack included modifying the rows/columns orientation without affecting the functionality of tables. A cool, recent finding was the reactable package. A nice feature, allowed by Flexdashboard, was the use of quite different formats in different tabs.

Part of the toolkit of language researchers is formed of stimuli that have been rated on various dimensions. The current study presents modality exclusivity norms for 336 properties and 411 concepts in Dutch. Forty-two respondents rated the auditory, …

The topic of language evolution is characterised by the scarcity of records, but also by a large flow of research produced within multiple subtopics and perspectives. Over the past few decades, significant advancement has been made on the …