An overview of the self-organizing map algorithm, on which the papers in this issue are based, is presented in this article.

The Self-Organizing Map

The generation of words in speech involves a number of processing stages. There is, first, a stage of conceptual preparation; this is followed by stages of lexical selection, phonological encoding, phonetic encoding and articulation. In addition, the speaker monitors the output and, if necessary, self-corrects. Major parts of the theory have been computer modelled. The paper concentrates on experimental reaction time evidence in support of the theory.

/pdf/a-theory-of-lexical-access-in-speech-production-56yj14t9eb.pdf

A theory of lexical access in speech production

Currently, computational linguists and cognitive scientists working in the area of discourse and dialogue argue that their subjective judgments are reliable using several different statistics, none of which are easily interpretable or comparable to each other. Meanwhile, researchers in content analysis have already experienced the same difficulties and come up with a solution in the kappa statistic. We discuss what is wrong with reliability measures as they are currently used for discourse and dialogue work in computational linguistics and cognitive science, and argue that we would be better off as a field adopting techniques from content analysis.

Assessing agreement on classification tasks: the kappa statistic

Many people have argued that the evolution of the human language faculty cannot be explained by Darwinian natural selection. Chomsky and Gould have suggested that language may have evolved as the by-product of selection for other abilities or as a consequence of as-yet unknown laws of growth and form. Others have argued that a biological specialization for grammar is incompatible with every tenet of Darwinian theory – that it shows no genetic variation, could not exist in any intermediate forms, confers no selective advantage, and would require more evolutionary time and genomic space than is available. We examine these arguments and show that they depend on inaccurate assumptions about biology or language or both. Evolutionary theory offers clear criteria for when a trait should be attributed to natural selection: complex design for some function, and the absence of alternative processes capable of explaining such complexity. Human language meets these criteria: Grammar is a complex mechanism tailored to the transmission of propositional structures through a serial interface. Autonomous and arbitrary grammatical phenomena have been offered as counterexamples to the position that language is an adaptation, but this reasoning is unsound: Communication protocols depend on arbitrary conventions that are adaptive as long as they are shared. Consequently, language acquisition in the child should systematically differ from language evolution in the species, and attempts to analogize them are misleading. Reviewing other arguments and data, we conclude that there is every reason to believe that a specialization for grammar evolved by a conventional neo-Darwinian process.

http://www.biolinguagem.com/ling_cog_cult/pinker_bloom_1990_naturallanguage_naturalselection.pdf

Natural language and natural selection

1 Workshop at which this work was first presented (Utrecht, June 22-24, 1994). For comments on this material, we are grateful to them and the other workshop participants, especially Austin have provided valuable feedback; and the comments, questions, and suggestions from the participants in the (eventually joint) UMass and Rutgers Correspondence Theory seminars were particularly important for the development of this work. For useful discussion of numerous points, we would like to thank

/pdf/faithfulness-and-reduplicative-identity-4ruq4a6e4p.pdf

Faithfulness and reduplicative identity

"Japanese Tone Structure" provides a thorough, phonetically grounded description of accent and intonation in Tokyo Japanese and uses it to develop an explicit account of surface phonological representation. The unusual amount of quantitative phonetic data analyzed and its testing in a detailed model make this an important new study for theoretical phonologists, phoneticians, and specialists in Japanese.The authors' broader purpose, however, is to develop a general theory of surface representation that can capture salient facts about prosodic structure in all languages and provide a suitable input to phonetic rules. The theory integrates autosegmental principles into a metrical account of prosodic structures in an explicit formalism. The work establishes phonology and phonetics as a productive area in cognitive science.Janet B. Pierrehumbert is a member of the technical staff in the Department of Artificial Intelligence Research at AT&T Bell Laboratories. Mary E. Beckman is an Assistant Professor in the Department. of Linguistics at Ohio State University. "Japanese Tone Structure" is a Linguistic Inquiry Monograph.

Japanese Tone Structure

TOBI: a standard for labeling English prosody.

Comparisons between Japanese and English prosodics have usually either focused on the strikingly apparent phonetic differences between the stress patterns of English and the tonal accent patterns of Japanese or concentrated upon formal similarities between the abstract arrangements of the stresses and tones. A recent investigation of tone structure in Japanese (Pierrehumbert & Beckman forthcoming), however, has convinced us that if the proper prosodic phenomena are compared, far more pervasive similarities can be discovered and of a much more concrete sort than hitherto suspected. In particular, there is now extensive evidence that Japanese tonal patterns are very sparsely specified, which suggests that they are much more similar to English intonational structures than earlier descriptions would have allowed.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S095267570000066X

Mary E. Beckman

Papers

Japanese Tone Structure

TOBI: a standard for labeling English prosody.

Intonational structure in Japanese and English

Japanese Tone Structure

Stress and Non Stress Accent