Evidence of voice modulation as spoken gestures

ScienceNOW has a report on the work of Howard Nussbaum and colleagues on how listeners can hear the modulation of a speaker's voice when the speaker is describing a fast-moving object or a slow-moving object even though what they are saying is exactly the same. The article, which is available in JML, demonstrates an unconsidered aspect of spoken language, and further distends the abilities of amodal theories of account for these results. Notice how I have not written the amodal theory (see Machery), however, I think it would be quite difficult for any amodal hypothesis to come up with an explanation for these data. Although I am certain that the field will see a post hoc explanation from the amodal camp soon.

Moving truck is on its way

Hey everyone,

Just to show I don't have my nose in a journal all the time, I wanted to post about how my move is going. It took Monica and I and a few friends about 3 days to pack the moving truck, but we are finally done with that part. I am flying out by myself on Saturday to Merced (thanks again Joel for picking me up!), and the moving truck should be there soon after. Once that is unpacked, I'm flying back to Atlanta on the 5th to get Monica and drive to Wisconsin for a short break before orientation starts.

I hope that I get a chance to meet a few of you next week. If anyone wants to get together let me know. Hope you all are enjoying the rest of your summer.

FREE AJAX based Word Processor

For any of you waiting to do collaborative manuscripts online, because Google's newly acquired Writely has not been accepting new users for the last 4 months, there is an AJAX-based Word processor available now. Here's the original story via Digg:

"This seems to be what everyone thought Google was going to do, but someone else has now beaten them to it. AjaxWrite is just as it sounds a Ajax based Word clone. It seems to have the basic functions that I would need. But I can already tell it is not as functional as word. I like the ability to save as PDF, that's a nice touch."

NIH Update: Senate approves another 0.7%

On the 18th the Senate recommended a $28.5 billion spending bill for the NIH. That recommendation is an increase of only 0.7% of the amount that passed in the House. According to ScienceNow the NIH lobbyists are pushing for another $2 billion. The $141 billion spending bill, which funds NIH's parent department and other Cabinet-level departments was before a full appropriations committee today. If anyone has any further developments, then please post them in the comments.

Reducing life span by knocking out the gene associated with the body's internal clock

Lately I have been a bit cynical about the penultimaticity of the double-dissociation finding in experimental psychology. Although, maybe I am just sick of its overabundance in neuropsychology (and pretty much sick of their findings and conclusions in general these days). That said I wish the investigators in this article in ScienceNOW (abstract is here) would have flipped to the other side of coin.

What they have found is that mice with the BMAL1 gene knocked out, lived on average 18 weeks shorter and displayed behavior and neurobiological pathologies usually found in much older mice. I think that it would not be incorrect for me to conclude that these mice lived accelerated lives, out of sync with normal circadian rhythms. The other side of the coin would be to show that by manipulating the gene in some way they could increase the life span or slow down the circadian rhythms of the mice. In the big picture that would be what people care about, and not how to shorter life spans. That said, these results show an interesting link between circadian rhythms and life span.

Content vs. Identity in language comprehension

The sensibility of a statement depends on the context, including who is making the statement. An article in ScienceNOW reports on a paper presented at the 5th Forum of European Neurosciences, where the presenters investigated the assumption that the brain processes the content of what has been said and then the information about who said it afterward in a serial fashion.


Using EEG, the researchers found a spike 200 to 300ms after the onset of an unexpected word given a particular speaker. The example used in the story was, "I wish I looked like Britney Spears.", where "Britney" was unexpected for a male talker vs. a female talker. That sentence itself raising interest questions about social expectation and sexual orientation, but that aside, the more general finding is that people do not comprehend language in a vacuum.

Here is the conference abstract:

First author: Van Berkum, Jos (speaker)

Symposium S05-3 (session 031). Sun 09/07, 09:45 - Hall F1
Language from a brain perspective
Abstract A031.3, published in FENS Forum Abstracts, vol. 3, 2006.
Ref.: FENS Abstr., vol.3, A031.3, 2006

Author(s) Van Berkum J. J. A. (1, 2)
Addresse(s) (1) Fac. Social & Behav. Sci., Psychonomics, Univ.
Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; (2) FC Donders centre for
Cognitive Neuroimaging, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Title Discourse and the brain.
Text We've known for some time that electroencephalography can
provide valuable information about the nature of the human language
comprehension system. However, because using brain measures is
difficult enough as it is, most language researchers have until
recently limited their use of EEG to the comprehension of
decontextualized single sentences. In my talk, I will review what we
have learned from our initial attempts to study comprehension of
sentences in a wider discourse (e. g. piece of text) by means of
event-related brain potentials. One thing we observe time and again is
that listeners and readers extremely rapidly relate the words of an
unfolding sentence to what the wider discourse is about. For example,
if the meaning of a spoken word does not fit this wider context, the
processing consequences show up in the EEG at some 150 milliseconds
after the word's acoustic onset, and well before the word has been
fully pronounced. Listeners and readers also very rapidly determine
who is being referred to by expressions such as "the girl" or "he",
sometimes within some 250-300 milliseconds. In addition, our work
reveals that listeners and readers go beyond such rapid reactive
word-by-word processing, and can actually use their knowledge of the
wider discourse proactively, to predict specific upcoming words in
real time as the sentence unfolds. Finally, the evidence suggests that
listeners immediately work out to what extent the unfolding message
fits with what they know about the speaker (or can infer from his or
her voice). The moral of all this is that even though discourse-level
computations are complex, 'high-level', and essentially open-ended,
the human brain can use them to analyze and extrapolate linguistic
input within a split second. I will argue that to keep track of the
various processes involved, the time-resolved multidimensional human
EEG is a particularly useful source of information (see also Van
Berkum, 2004, downloadable from here).

Embodiment critique in press in Cognition

Hmmm.. let's see how to be objective about this. This guy, Machery, wrote a paper critiquing the methods of what he calls neo-empiricists, or as I prefer, embodiment freaks, regarding how to deal with specific amodal hypotheses. In brief, there are three points:


First neo-empiricists' data do not rule out "the" amodal model, but merely a specific prediction of a few amodal hypotheses.

Second, the neo-empiricists' support for their claims can also be accounted for by a combination of Kosslyn-style imagery along with amodal networks. This is similar to Paivio's dual coding model.

Third, the scope of the amount of representations are amodal vs. perceptual symbol systems is a problem. Machery points out that abstract concepts such as number must be amodal representations, and thus evidence against wide-scope neo-empiricism, which claims that all representations are perceptual symbol systems. Since number is one example of an amodal representation then there is likely to be more and then the question becomes to what extent, according to Machery.

My reaction to this paper as an embodiment freak, could fill a response paper, but so far the reaction from others in my camp have decided that Machery's article is not worth the rebuttal. Here are a few reasons why I think his critique fails.

Regarding his first point, ruling out specific hypothesis in a lab setting is simply how science works. Neo-empiricists have not underestimated the ability of amodal models to be unfalsifiable. The approach to designing experiments to dissociated between amodal vs. embodied has evolved since the late 1990s, and Machery should realize that. As a whole there is a LOT of evidence that amodal theories cannot account for, and maybe he can find a few new models which can account for Barsalou's findings in (1999) and (2001), but what about Glenberg's, Kaschak's, Zwaan's, Rinck's, Spivey's, Altmann's, or Matlock's (or in fact my data)? Maybe we should ask amodal freaks to design experiments which will go down the line with each of these empirical results and rule them out as Machery has suggested neo-empiricists should do. This failure on his part to realize what he is proposing demonstrates to me his lack of understanding science.

Concerning his thoughts on imagery, I think he has an interesting point. I'll leave it at that and also say that I would rather develop a research program to look into these issues than his first proposal.

Lastly, I think the scope problem is also a good point. However, I wish he had done a little more research into where the other neo-empiricists besides Barsalou fall on his continuum (e.g., Glenberg). Actually Glenberg is mentioned in the abstract, but not again, nor is Glenberg and Kaschak (2002), which is a well-known staple of citing empirical support for embodiment theory. I myself am pushing to see if perceptual symbol systems are involved in abstract concepts, including number, and I disagree with his assumption that number concepts are amodal. So maybe I'm a wide-scope embodiment freak, but I'm curious to see how wide I can push the scope.

In conclusion I don't know if there is going to be a formal response paper anytime soon, but I can say that the embodiment people I know think that this paper is lacking a clear understanding of scientific methods.

Important dates

I noticed when I got my orientation packet that I was supposed to fill out my Statement of Legal Residence by July 17th. However, it was a little difficult to locate so I thought any of you nonresidents like me would appreciate the link.