•  18
    Notions of arbitrariness
    Mind and Language. forthcoming.
    Arbitrariness is a distinctive feature of human language, and a growing body of comparative work is investigating its presence in animal communication. But what is arbitrariness, exactly? We propose to distinguish four notions of semiotic arbitrariness: a notion of opaque association between sign forms and semiotic functions, one of sign-function mapping optionality, one of acquisition-dependent sign-function coupling, and one of lack of motivatedness. We characterize these notions, illustrate t…Read more
  •  38
    Notions of arbitrariness
    Mind and Language 38 (4): 1120-1137. 2022.
    Arbitrariness is a distinctive feature of human language, and a growing body of comparative work is investigating its presence in animal communication. But what is arbitrariness, exactly? We propose to distinguish four notions of semiotic arbitrariness: a notion of opaque association between sign forms and semiotic functions, one of sign‐function mapping optionality, one of acquisition‐dependent sign‐function coupling, and one of lack of motivatedness. We characterize these notions, illustrate t…Read more
  •  29
    More than words : evidence for a Stroop effect of prosody in emotion word processing
    with Sebastian Ocklenburg, Daniel L. Bowling, Larissa Heege, Onur Güntürkün, Albert Newen, and Bart de Boer
    Cognition and Emotion 31 (5): 879-891. 2017.
  •  20
    Seeking Temporal Predictability in Speech: Comparing Statistical Approaches on 18 World Languages
    with Yannick Jadoul, Andrea Ravignani, Bill Thompson, and Bart de Boer
    Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 10 196337. 2016.
    Temporal regularities in speech, such as interdependencies in the timing of speech events, are thought to scaffold early acquisition of the building blocks in speech. By providing on-line clues to the location and duration of upcoming syllables, temporal structure may aid segmentation and clustering of continuous speech into separable units. This hypothesis tacitly assumes that learners exploit predictability in the temporal structure of speech. Existing measures of speech timing tend to focus o…Read more
  •  8
    Computo ergo Sum
    Biological Theory 9 (1): 115-118. 2014.
  •  19
    Specifically Human: Going Beyond Perceptual Syntax (review)
    Biosemiotics 7 (1): 111-123. 2014.
    The aim of this paper is to help refine the definition of humans as “linguistic animals” in light of a comparative approach on nonhuman animals’ cognitive systems. As Uexküll & Kriszat (1934/1992) have theorized, the epistemic access to each species-specific environment (Umwelt) is driven by different biocognitive processes. Within this conceptual framework, I identify the salient cognitive process that distinguishes each species typical perception of the world as the faculty of language meant i…Read more