178 research outputs found

    On the nature of crosslinguistic influence: root infinitives revisited

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    Producción CientíficaRoot Infinitives (RI) in Spanish have an infinitival marker, while in English they are bare forms. For languages like English, the RI stage has been said to be longer and to have a higher incidence than in Spanish. Within Liceras, Bel, and Perales’ (2006) typology of an RI universal stage, Spanish is a [+Person (P), +Infinitival marker (R)] language while English is [−P, −R]. Our analysis of the English and Spanish RIs produced by English-Spanish bilingual children and English and Spanish monolingual children reveals no interfering influence from English into Spanish and no positive influence from Spanish into English, which suggests that the degree of lexical transparency of the [+P, +R] features of Spanish is not strong enough to trigger acceleration in overcoming the bilingual English RI stage.Junta de Castilla y León y ERDF (European Regional Development Fund), (programa de apoyo a proyectos de investigación - Ref.VA009P17)Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades y ERDF (European Regional Development Fund), (ref. PGC2018-097693-B-I00)Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología (HUM2007-62213) and ERDF (European Regional Development Fund) (BFF2002-00442)

    Using distributional statistics to acquire morphophonological alternations: evidence from production and perception

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    Morphophonological alternations, such as the voicing alternation that arises in a morphological paradigm due to final-devoicing in Dutch, are notoriously difficult for children to acquire. This has previously been attributed to their unpredictability. In fact, the presence or absence of a voicing alternation is partly predictable if the phonological context of the word is taken into account, and adults have been shown to use this information (Ernestus and Baayen, 2003). This study investigates whether voicing alternations are predictable from the child’s input, and whether children can make use of this information. A corpus study of child-directed speech establishes that the likelihood of a stem-final obstruent alternating is somewhat predictable on the basis of the phonological properties of the stem. In Experiment 1 Dutch 3-year-olds’ production accuracy in a plural-elicitation task is shown to be sensitive to the distributional statistics. However, distributional properties do not play a role in children’s sensitivity to mispronunciations of voicing in a Preferential Looking Task in Experiment 2

    Directional adposition use in English, Swedish and Finnish

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    Directional adpositions such as to the left of describe where a Figure is in relation to a Ground. English and Swedish directional adpositions refer to the location of a Figure in relation to a Ground, whether both are static or in motion. In contrast, the Finnish directional adpositions edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) solely describe the location of a moving Figure in relation to a moving Ground (Nikanne, 2003). When using directional adpositions, a frame of reference must be assumed for interpreting the meaning of directional adpositions. For example, the meaning of to the left of in English can be based on a relative (speaker or listener based) reference frame or an intrinsic (object based) reference frame (Levinson, 1996). When a Figure and a Ground are both in motion, it is possible for a Figure to be described as being behind or in front of the Ground, even if neither have intrinsic features. As shown by Walker (in preparation), there are good reasons to assume that in the latter case a motion based reference frame is involved. This means that if Finnish speakers would use edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) more frequently in situations where both the Figure and Ground are in motion, a difference in reference frame use between Finnish on one hand and English and Swedish on the other could be expected. We asked native English, Swedish and Finnish speakers’ to select adpositions from a language specific list to describe the location of a Figure relative to a Ground when both were shown to be moving on a computer screen. We were interested in any differences between Finnish, English and Swedish speakers. All languages showed a predominant use of directional spatial adpositions referring to the lexical concepts TO THE LEFT OF, TO THE RIGHT OF, ABOVE and BELOW. There were no differences between the languages in directional adpositions use or reference frame use, including reference frame use based on motion. We conclude that despite differences in the grammars of the languages involved, and potential differences in reference frame system use, the three languages investigated encode Figure location in relation to Ground location in a similar way when both are in motion. Levinson, S. C. (1996). Frames of reference and Molyneux’s question: Crosslingiuistic evidence. In P. Bloom, M.A. Peterson, L. Nadel & M.F. Garrett (Eds.) Language and Space (pp.109-170). Massachusetts: MIT Press. Nikanne, U. (2003). How Finnish postpositions see the axis system. In E. van der Zee & J. Slack (Eds.), Representing direction in language and space. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Walker, C. (in preparation). Motion encoding in language, the use of spatial locatives in a motion context. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Lincoln, Lincoln. United Kingdo

    Exploring Language Mechanisms: The Mass-Count Distinction and The Potts Neural Network

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    The aim of this thesis is to explore language mechanisms in two aspects. First, the statistical properties of syntax and semantics, and second, the neural mechanisms which could be of possible use in trying to understand how the brain learns those particular statistical properties. In the first part of the thesis (part A) we focus our attention on a detailed statistical study of the syntax and semantics of the mass-count distinction in nouns. We collected a database of how 1,434 nouns are used with respect to the mass-count distinction in six languages; additional informants characterised the semantics of the underlying concepts. Results indicate only weak correlations between semantics and syntactic usage. The classification rather than being bimodal, is a graded distribution and it is similar across languages, but syntactic classes do not map onto each other, nor do they reflect, beyond weak correlations, semantic attributes of the concepts. These findings are in line with the hypothesis that much of the mass/count syntax emerges from language- and even speaker-specific grammaticalisation. Further, in chapter 3 we test the ability of a simple neural network to learn the syntactic and semantic relations of nouns, in the hope that it may throw some light on the challenges in modelling the acquisition of the mass-count syntax. It is shown that even though a simple self-organising neural network is insufficient to learn a mapping implementing a syntactic- semantic link, it does however show that the network was able to extract the concept of 'count', and to some extent that of \u2018mass\u2019 as well, without any explicit definition, from both the syntactic and from the semantic data. The second part of the thesis (part B) is dedicated to studying the properties of the Potts neural network. The Potts neural network with its adaptive dynamics represents a simplified model of cortical mechanisms. Among other cognitive phenomena, it intends to model language production by utilising the latching behaviour seen in the network. We expect that a model of language processing should robustly handle various syntactic- semantic correlations amongst the words of a language. With this aim, we test the effect on storage capacity of the Potts network when the memories stored in it share non trivial correlations. Increase in interference between stored memories due to correlations is studied along with modifications in learning rules to reduce the interference. We find that when strongly correlated memories are incorporated in the storage capacity definition, the network is able to regain its storage capacity for low sparsity. Strong correlations also affect the latching behaviour of the Potts network with the network unable to latch from one memory to another. However latching is shown to be restored by modifying the learning rule. Lastly, we look at another feature of the Potts neural network, the indication that it may exhibit spin-glass characteristics. The network is consistently shown to exhibit multiple stable degenerate energy states other than that of pure memories. This is tested for different degrees of correlations in patterns, low and high connectivity, and different levels of global and local noise. We state some of the implications that the spin-glass nature of the Potts neural network may have on language processing

    Comparative psychosyntax

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    Every difference between languages is a “choice point” for the syntactician, psycholinguist, and language learner. The syntactician must describe the differences in representations that the grammars of different languages can assign. The psycholinguist must describe how the comprehension mechanisms search the space of the representations permitted by a grammar to quickly and effortlessly understand sentences in real time. The language learner must determine which representations are permitted in her grammar on the basis of her primary linguistic evidence. These investigations are largely pursued independently, and on the basis of qualitatively different data. In this dissertation, I show that these investigations can be pursued in a way that is mutually informative. Specifically, I show how learnability con- cerns and sentence processing data can constrain the space of possible analyses of language differences. In Chapter 2, I argue that “indirect learning”, or abstract, cross-contruction syntactic inference, is necessary in order to explain how the learner determines which complementizers can co-occur with subjects gaps in her target grammar. I show that adult speakers largely converge in the robustness of the that-trace effect, a constraint on complementation complementizers and subject gaps observed in lan- guages like English, but unobserved in languages like Spanish or Italian. I show that realistic child-directed speech has very few long-distance subject extractions in En- glish, Spanish, and Italian, implying that learners must be able to distinguish these different hypotheses on the basis of other data. This is more consistent with more conservative approaches to these phenomena (Rizzi, 1982), which do not rely on ab- stract complementizer agreement like later analyses (Rizzi, 2006; Rizzi & Shlonsky, 2007). In Chapter 3, I show that resumptive pronoun dependencies inside islands in English are constructed in a non-active fashion, which contrasts with recent findings in Hebrew (Keshev & Meltzer-Asscher, ms). I propose that an expedient explanation of these facts is to suppose that resumptive pronouns in English are ungrammat- ical repair devices (Sells, 1984), whereas resumptive pronouns in island contexts are grammatical in Hebrew. This implies that learners must infer which analysis is appropriate for their grammars on the basis of some evidence in linguistic envi- ronment. However, a corpus study reveals that resumptive pronouns in islands are exceedingly rare in both languages, implying that this difference must be indirectly learned. I argue that theories of resumptive dependencies which analyze resump- tive pronouns as incidences of the same abstract construction (e.g., Hayon 1973; Chomsky 1977) license this indirect learning, as long as resumptive dependencies in English are treated as ungrammatical repair mechanisms. In Chapter 4, I compare active dependency formation processes in Japanese and Bangla. These findings suggest that filler-gap dependencies are preferentially resolved with the first position available. In Japanese, this is the most deeply em- bedded clause, since embedded clauses always precede the embedding verb(Aoshima et al., 2004; Yoshida, 2006; Omaki et al., 2014). Bangla allows a within-language comparison of the relationship between active dependency formation processes and word order, since embedded clauses may precede or follow the embedding verb (Bayer, 1996). However, the results from three experiments in Bangla are mixed, suggesting a weaker preference for a lineary local resolution of filler-gap dependen- cies, unlike in Japanese. I propose a number of possible explanations for these facts, and discuss how differences in processing profiles may be accounted for in a variety of ways. In Chapter 5, I conclude the dissertation

    Linguistic constraints on statistical word segmentation: The role of consonants in Arabic and English

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    Statistical learning is often taken to lie at the heart of many cognitive tasks, including the acquisition of language. One particular task in which probabilistic models have achieved considerable success is the segmentation of speech into words. However, these models have mostly been tested against English data, and as a result little is known about how a statistical learning mechanism copes with input regularities that arise from the structural properties of different languages. This study focuses on statistical word segmentation in Arabic, a Semitic language in which words are built around consonantal roots. We hypothesize that segmentation in such languages is facilitated by tracking consonant distributions independently from intervening vowels. Previous studies have shown that human learners can track consonant probabilities across intervening vowels in artificial languages, but it is unknown to what extent this ability would be beneficial in the segmentation of natural language. We assessed the performance of a Bayesian segmentation model on English and Arabic, comparing consonant-only representations with full representations. In addition, we examined to what extent structurally different proto-lexicons reflect adult language. The results suggest that for a child learning a Semitic language, separating consonants from vowels is beneficial for segmentation. These findings indicate that probabilistic models require appropriate linguistic representations in order to effectively meet the challenges of language acquisition

    Word order, referential expression, and case cues to the acquisition of transitive sentences in Italian

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    In Study 1 we analyzed Italian child-directed-speech (CDS) andselected the three most frequent active transitive sentence frames usedwith overt subjects. In Study 2 we experimentally investigated howItalian-speaking children aged 2;6, 3;6, and 4;6 comprehended theseorders with novel verbs when the cues of animacy, gender, and subject–verb agreement were neutralized. For each trial, children chosebetween two videos (e.g., horse acting on cat versus cat acting onhorse), both involving the same action. The children aged 2;6comprehended S+object-pronoun+V (SOPROV) significantly betterthan S+V+object-noun (SVONOUN). We explain this in terms of cue collaboration between a low cost cue (CASE) and the FIRST ARGUMENT=AGENT cue which we found to be reliable 76% of the time. The mostdifficult word order for all age groups was the object-pronoun+V+S(OPROVS). We ascribe this difficulty to cue conflict between the twomost frequent transitive frames found in CDS, namely V+objectnounand object-pronoun+V

    Discrimination in lexical decision.

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    In this study we present a novel set of discrimination-based indicators of language processing derived from Naive Discriminative Learning (ndl) theory. We compare the effectiveness of these new measures with classical lexical-distributional measures-in particular, frequency counts and form similarity measures-to predict lexical decision latencies when a complete morphological segmentation of masked primes is or is not possible. Data derive from a re-analysis of a large subset of decision latencies from the English Lexicon Project, as well as from the results of two new masked priming studies. Results demonstrate the superiority of discrimination-based predictors over lexical-distributional predictors alone, across both the simple and primed lexical decision tasks. Comparable priming after masked corner and cornea type primes, across two experiments, fails to support early obligatory segmentation into morphemes as predicted by the morpho-orthographic account of reading. Results fit well with ndl theory, which, in conformity with Word and Paradigm theory, rejects the morpheme as a relevant unit of analysis. Furthermore, results indicate that readers with greater spelling proficiency and larger vocabularies make better use of orthographic priors and handle lexical competition more efficiently
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