Papers by Uriel Cohen Priva
Cognitive Science, 2016
As new concepts and discoveries accumulate over time, the amount of information available to spea... more As new concepts and discoveries accumulate over time, the amount of information available to speakers increases as well. One would expect that an utterance today would be more informative than an utterance 100 years ago (basing information on surprisal; Shannon, 1948), given the increase in technology and scientific discoveries. This prediction, however, is at odds with recent theories regarding information in human language use, which suggest that speakers maintain a somewhat constant information rate over time. Using the Google Ngram corpus (Michel et al., 2011), we show for multiple languages that changes in lexical information (a unigram model) are actually negatively correlated with changes in structural information (a trigram model), supporting recent proposals on information theoretic constraints. keywords: information rate, information theory, Google
Lexicons utilize a fraction of licit structures. Different theories predict either that lexicons ... more Lexicons utilize a fraction of licit structures. Different theories predict either that lexicons prioritize contrastiveness or structural economy. Study 1 finds that the monosyllabic lexicon of Mandarin is no more distinctive than a randomly sampled baseline using the phonological inventory. Study 2 finds that the lexicons of Mandarin and American English have fewer phonotactically complex words than the random baseline: Words tend not to have multiple low-probability components. This suggests that phonological constraints can have superadditive penalties for combined violations, consistent with e.g. Albright (ms.).
Three experiments explored the effect of medium of presentation (pictures, words) and psychologic... more Three experiments explored the effect of medium of presentation (pictures, words) and psychological distance (proximal, distal) on episodic memory. In particular, we predicted that memory would be better for congruent combinations of medium and distance (i.e., pictures of psychologically proximal entities and verbal labels of psychologically distal entities) than incongruent combinations (i.e., pictures of psychologically distal entities and verbal labels of psychologically proximal entities). Our results support this hypothesis. In Experiments 1 and 2, recall was better when medium and temporal distance were congruent than not. In Experiment 3 people recognition was better when medium and spatial distance were congruent than not. These findings suggest that the decay of memory for details over time is a specific case of a broader principle that governs our memory system and is based on psychological distance between the individual and the target entity. More broadly, these results ...
Do characteristics of individuals affect how much they converge, such that some speakers consiste... more Do characteristics of individuals affect how much they converge, such that some speakers consistently convergemore than others? Are there aspects of conversations or interlocutors that elicit more or less convergence? One might expect variation in factors like attention to detail or sociability to produce individual tendencies in convergence, while factors like attention and arousal could produce conversation-specific or interlocutor-specific patterns, if certain individuals are more likely to inspire attention or excitement. We present data on convergence in the Switchboard corpus, compared across speakers and across several measures. We find little evidence for individual tendencies in convergence or for conversation-specific convergence tendencies across measures. However, there is consistency in convergence elicited by particular interlocutors, across measures and across conversations. These results indicate that the context of the particular conversational partner plays a large...
Cognitive Science, 2018
Recent research has seen a surge in interest in the role of the individual in sound change proces... more Recent research has seen a surge in interest in the role of the individual in sound change processes. Do fast speakers have a unique role in sound change processes? Fast speech leads to greater rates of lenition (reduction). But should it mean that fast talkers would be more likely to lenite even when speaking slowly? In two corpus studies we show that even when fast talkers speak more slowly they are (a) more likely to omit segments and (b) more likely to perform variable reduction of consonants. This draws attention to habitual speech rate as a likely factor in the actuation of lenition processes. keywords: lenition, speech rate, individual differences
Cognitive Science, 2018
We present data on convergence in the Switchboard corpus, addressing differences across measures ... more We present data on convergence in the Switchboard corpus, addressing differences across measures and across speakers. We measured convergence in four characteristics, to test consistency in related and unrelated measures: F0 median, F0 variance, speech rate, and odds of the fillers uh and um. Convergence was significant in all measures and exhibited variation both between individuals and within individuals. Most notably, convergence in one measure was not predictive of convergence in other measures, except between closely related measures. The results demonstrate some of the limitations of generalizing convergence results from one measure to other measures. keywords: convergence, individual differences, pitch, speech rate, fillers
Different languages present us with rather different likelihoods of deleting consonants. The very... more Different languages present us with rather different likelihoods of deleting consonants. The very common deletion processes that target /t/ and /d/ in various English dialects have been discussed in detail in linguistic research, but English does not exhibit other well-known phonological processes such as /s/ deletion, a process that is very common in a number of Romance languages. A curious linguist might therefore want to know what leads to the observed in-language typology of deletion processes in any language. This paper traces some of the reasons for the in-language typology of deletion processes in English to phone informativity, a concept first introduced in Cohen Priva & Jurafsky (2008). Phone informativity tries to approximate the usefulness of recognizing a phone for what it is: how useful it is for language users to understand that some segment in a sequence of segments they hear is a /t/, for instance, rather than some other phone. This approximation is done by assessing...
Cognition, 2019
Recent research has shown that toddlers' lexical representations are phonologically detailed, qua... more Recent research has shown that toddlers' lexical representations are phonologically detailed, quantitatively much like those of adults. Studies in this article explore whether toddlers' and adults' lexical representations are qualitatively similar. Psycholinguistic claims (Lahiri & Marslen-Wilson, 1991; Lahiri & Reetz, 2002, 2010) based on underspecification (Kiparsky, 1982 et seq.) predict asymmetrical judgments in lexical processing tasks; these have been supported in some psycholinguistic research showing that participants are more sensitive to noncoronal-to-coronal (pop → top) than to coronal-to-noncoronal (top → pop) changes or mispronunciations. Three experiments using on-line visual world procedures showed that 19-month-olds and adults displayed sensitivities to both noncoronal-to-coronal and coronal-to-noncoronal mispronunciations of familiar words. No hints of any asymmetries were observed for either age group. There thus appears to be considerable developmental continuity in the nature of early and mature lexical representations. Discrepancies between the current findings and those of previous studies appear to be due to methodological differences that cast doubt on the validity of claims of psycholinguistic support for underspecification.
Cognition, Mar 1, 2017
Speakers dynamically adjust their speech rate throughout conversations. These adjustments have be... more Speakers dynamically adjust their speech rate throughout conversations. These adjustments have been linked to cognitive and communicative limitations: for example, speakers speak words that are contextually unexpected (and thus add more information) with slower speech rates. This raises the question whether limitations of this type vary wildly across speakers or are relatively constant. The latter predicts that across speakers (or conversations), speech rate and the amount of information content are inversely correlated: on average, speakers can either provide high information content or speak quickly, but not both. Using two corpus studies replicated across two corpora, I demonstrate that indeed, fast speech correlates with the use of less informative words and syntactic structures. Thus, while there are individual differences in overall information throughput, speakers are more similar in this aspect than differences in speech rate would suggest. The results suggest that informati...
Studies of variable lenition patterns converged on two phonetic properties as characteristic of l... more Studies of variable lenition patterns converged on two phonetic properties as characteristic of lenition: reduced duration and increased intensity. However, the causal precedence of the two factors remains unclear. We focus on the causal structure of variable lenition. Study 1 examines the relationship between three correlates of lenition: speech rate, stress, and low information content, and their effect on reduced duration and increased intensity. We find that though increased intensity is more prototypically viewed as the core aspect of lenition, the effect of the three correlates on intensity is mediated by duration. Study 2 shows that all frequent lenition processes in the Buckeye corpus involve durational reduction. The contribution of this paper is a proposal with a fairly simple principle, with few auxiliary assumptions: Reduced duration precedes increased intensity in variable lenition.
Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology
Linguistic convergence is the phenomenon in which interlocutors' speech characteristics become mo... more Linguistic convergence is the phenomenon in which interlocutors' speech characteristics become more similar to each other's. One of the methods frequently used to measure convergence is the difference-indifference (DID) approach, comparing change in absolute distance between a subject and an interlocutor or model talker. We show that this approach is not a reliable measure of convergence when the starting values of the subject and the interlocutor or model talker are close, which can result in the measurement of apparent divergence, while extreme starting points can result in overestimation of convergence. These biases are of particular concern in studies that look for individual differences in convergence. We propose an alternative approach, linear combination, which does not have the same biases, and demonstrate the advantages of this method using data from convergence studies of four linguistic characteristics and simulated data.
Linguistics Vanguard
It has long been noted that language production seems to reflect a correlation between message re... more It has long been noted that language production seems to reflect a correlation between message redundancy and signal reduction. More frequent words and contextually predictable instances of words, for example, tend to be produced with shorter and less clear signals. The same tendency is observed in the language code (e.g. the phonological lexicon), where more frequent words and words that are typically contextually predictable tend to have fewer segments or syllables. Average predictability in context (informativity) also seems to be an important factor in understanding phonological alternations. What has received little attention so far is the relation between various information-theoretic indices – such as frequency, contextual predictability, and informativity. Although each of these indices has been associated with different theories about the source of the redundancy-reduction link, different indices tend to be highly correlated in natural language, making it difficult to tease...
Approaching issues through the lens of non-negotiable values increases the perceived intractabili... more Approaching issues through the lens of non-negotiable values increases the perceived intractability of debate (Baron & Spranca, 1997), while focusing on concrete consequences of policies instead results in the moderation of extreme opinions (Fernbach et al., 2013) and greater likelihood of conflict resolution (Baron & Leshner, 2000). Using comments on the popular social media platform Reddit from January 2006 until September 2017, we show how changes in the framing of same-sex marriage in public discourse relate to changes in public opinion. We use a topic model to show that the contribution of certain protected-values-based topics to the debate (religious arguments and freedom of opinion) increased prior to the emergence of a public consensus in support of same-sex marriage (Gallup, 2017), and declined afterwards. In contrast, discussion of certain consequentialist topics (the impact of politicians’ stance and same-sex marriage as a matter of policy) showed the opposite pattern. Ou...
Journal of Memory and Language
Is American English schwa's position determined solely by coarticulatory pressures? There is curr... more Is American English schwa's position determined solely by coarticulatory pressures? There is currently disagreement between articulation-based and acoustic-based studies (Browman & Goldstein, 1994; Flemming, 2009). In two acoustic corpus studies using the Switchboard and Buckeye corpora, we find that vowels head toward a central high vowel position when subject to increased coarticulatory pressures, rather than toward the position occupied by American English schwa. Even lexical schwa vowels shift to lower F1 values when their duration is relatively short. Our findings are consistent with schwa occupying a perceptually but not articulatorily neutral position. As such, they bear on vowel neutralization patterns, and suggest that unstressed syllables may convey specific information: that they are not stressed.
Cognition, 2019
Recent research has shown that toddlers’ lexical representations are phonologically
detailed, qua... more Recent research has shown that toddlers’ lexical representations are phonologically
detailed, quantitatively much like those of adults. Studies in this article explore whether toddlers’ and adults’ lexical representations are qualitatively similar. Psycholinguistic claims (Lahiri & Marslen-Wilson, 1991; Lahiri & Reetz, 2002, 2010) based on underspecification (Kiparsky, 1982 et seq.) predict asymmetrical judgments in lexical processing tasks; these have been supported in some psycholinguistic research showing that participants are more sensitive to noncoronal-to-coronal (pop → top) than to coronal-to-noncoronal (top → pop) changes or mispronunciations. Three experiments using on-line visual world procedures showed that 19- month-olds and adults displayed sensitivities to both noncoronal-to-coronal and coronal-to- noncoronal mispronunciations of familiar words. No hints of any asymmetries were observed for either age group. There thus appears to be considerable developmental continuity in the nature of early and mature lexical representations. Discrepancies between the current findings and those of previous studies appear to be due to methodological differences that cast doubt on the validity of claims of psycholinguistic support for underspecification.
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Papers by Uriel Cohen Priva
detailed, quantitatively much like those of adults. Studies in this article explore whether toddlers’ and adults’ lexical representations are qualitatively similar. Psycholinguistic claims (Lahiri & Marslen-Wilson, 1991; Lahiri & Reetz, 2002, 2010) based on underspecification (Kiparsky, 1982 et seq.) predict asymmetrical judgments in lexical processing tasks; these have been supported in some psycholinguistic research showing that participants are more sensitive to noncoronal-to-coronal (pop → top) than to coronal-to-noncoronal (top → pop) changes or mispronunciations. Three experiments using on-line visual world procedures showed that 19- month-olds and adults displayed sensitivities to both noncoronal-to-coronal and coronal-to- noncoronal mispronunciations of familiar words. No hints of any asymmetries were observed for either age group. There thus appears to be considerable developmental continuity in the nature of early and mature lexical representations. Discrepancies between the current findings and those of previous studies appear to be due to methodological differences that cast doubt on the validity of claims of psycholinguistic support for underspecification.
detailed, quantitatively much like those of adults. Studies in this article explore whether toddlers’ and adults’ lexical representations are qualitatively similar. Psycholinguistic claims (Lahiri & Marslen-Wilson, 1991; Lahiri & Reetz, 2002, 2010) based on underspecification (Kiparsky, 1982 et seq.) predict asymmetrical judgments in lexical processing tasks; these have been supported in some psycholinguistic research showing that participants are more sensitive to noncoronal-to-coronal (pop → top) than to coronal-to-noncoronal (top → pop) changes or mispronunciations. Three experiments using on-line visual world procedures showed that 19- month-olds and adults displayed sensitivities to both noncoronal-to-coronal and coronal-to- noncoronal mispronunciations of familiar words. No hints of any asymmetries were observed for either age group. There thus appears to be considerable developmental continuity in the nature of early and mature lexical representations. Discrepancies between the current findings and those of previous studies appear to be due to methodological differences that cast doubt on the validity of claims of psycholinguistic support for underspecification.