Papers by Uriel Cohen Priva
Linguistic Convergence Data
OSF, Mar 23, 2020
and Speech More than Words: The Effect of Multi-word Frequency and Constituency on Phonetic Duration
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
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
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
Cognitive Science, 2020
Are there individual tendencies in convergence, such that some speakers consistently converge mor... more Are there individual tendencies in convergence, such that some speakers consistently converge more than others? Similarly, are there natural “leaders,” speakers with whom others converge more? Are such tendencies consistent across different linguistic characteristics? We use the Switchboard Corpus to perform a large‐scale convergence study of speakers in multiple conversations with different interlocutors, across six linguistic characteristics. Because each speaker participated in several conversations, it is possible to look for individual differences in speakers' likelihood of converging and interlocutors' likelihood of eliciting convergence. We only find evidence for individual differences by interlocutor, not by speaker: There are natural leaders of convergence, who elicit more convergence than others across characteristics and across conversations. The lack of similar evidence for speakers who converge more than others suggests that social factors have a stronger effect...
Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology, 2019
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-in-difference (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.
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, 2019
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 speak to the growing literature, which suggests that one of the major roles of memory is prospection. Within this framing, our findings suggest that the memory system serves prospection using qualitatively different information processing devices, depending on the psychological distance of the target from the individual.
The Mental Lexicon, 2015
There is growing evidence that multiword information affects processing. In this paper, we look a... more There is growing evidence that multiword information affects processing. In this paper, we look at the effect of word and multiword frequency on the phonetic duration of words in spontaneous speech to (a) extend previous findings and (b) ask whether the relation between word and multiword information changes across the frequency continuum. If highly frequent sequences are stored holistically, then the effect of word frequency should disappear. If alternatively, increased sequence usage causes a change in the prominence of word and multiword information, we should see reduced effects of word frequency, and increased effects of sequence frequency for high frequency sequences. We first extend previous findings by showing that trigram frequency affects single word duration, even when controlling for word predictability. We then show that the effect of trigram frequency increases while the effect of word frequency decreases — but does not disappear — for highly frequent sequences. The fi...
Language and Speech, 2013
There is mounting evidence that language users are sensitive to the distributional properties of ... more There is mounting evidence that language users are sensitive to the distributional properties of multi-word sequences. Such findings expand the range of information speakers are sensitive to and call for processing models that can represent larger chains of relations. In the current paper we investigate the effect of multi-word statistics on phonetic duration using a combination of experimental and corpus-based research. We ask (a) if phonetic duration is affected by multi-word frequency in both elicited and spontaneous speech, and (b) if syntactic constituency modulates the effect. We show that phonetic durations are reduced in higher frequency sequences, regardless of constituency: duration is shorter for more frequent sequences within and across syntactic boundaries. The effects are not reducible to the frequency of the individual words or substrings. These findings open up a novel set of questions about the interaction between surface distributions and higher order properties, a...
Language and Cognitive Processes, 2012
Focusing on children's production of the dative alternation in English, we examine whether childr... more Focusing on children's production of the dative alternation in English, we examine whether children's choices are influenced by the same factors that influence adults' choices, and whether, like adults, they are sensitive to multiple factors simultaneously. We do so by using mixed-effect regression models to analyze child and child-directed datives extracted from the CHILDES corpus. Such models allow us to investigate the collective and independent effects of multiple factors simultaneously. The results show that children's choices are influenced by multiple factors (length of theme and recipient, nominal expression type of both, syntactic persistence) and pattern similarly to child-directed speech. Our findings demonstrate parallels between child and adult speech, consistent with recent acquisition research suggesting there is continuity between child and adult grammars. Furthermore, they highlight the utility of analyzing children's speech from a multi-variable perspective, and portray a learner who is sensitive to the multiple cues present in her input.
Language, 2017
What causes Indonesian to lenite word-final /k/, American English to lenite word-final /t/, and S... more What causes Indonesian to lenite word-final /k/, American English to lenite word-final /t/, and Spanish to lenite word-final /s/? This paper shows that all three observed lenition patterns can be motivated using a single principle: languages preferentially lenite segments that provide relatively low informativity compared to other languages. Compared to a diverse sample of seven languages from the LDC CALLHOME and CALLFRIEND corpora, Indonesian /k/, American English /t/, and Spanish /s/ have the lowest informativity, predicting that they would be more likely to be affected by sound change processes affecting those segments, respectively. In a subsequent regression-based corpus study, low informativity predicted the propensity of word-final lenition of all obstruents in American English after phonetic and phonological factors were controlled for. This paper therefore provides a partial solution to the famous actuation problem with respect to the actuation of lenition processes.
Uploads
Papers by Uriel Cohen Priva