Linguistic Intuitions: Error Signals and the Voice of Competence

Linguistic intuitions are a central source of evidence across a variety of linguistic domains. They have also long been a source of controversy. This chapter aims to illuminate the etiology and evidential status of at least some linguistic intuitions by relating them to error signals of the sort posited by accounts of on-line monitoring of speech production and comprehension. The suggestion is framed as a novel reply to Michael Devitt’s claim that linguistic intuitions are theory-laden “central systems” responses, rather than endorsed outputs of a modularized language faculty (the “Voice of Competence”). Along the way, it is argued that linguistic intuitions may not constitute a natural kind with a common etiology; and that, for a range of cases, the process by which intuitions used in linguistics are generated amounts to little more than comprehension

Grammatical sensitivity and working memory in children with language impairment

Children with primary language impairment (LI) show a deficit in processing various grammatical structures, verb inflections, and syntactically complex sentences among other things (Clahsen-Hansen 1997; Leonard et al. 1997). Cross-linguistic research has shown that the pattern of performance is language-specific. We examined grammatical sensitivity to word order and agreement violations in 50 Hungarian-speaking children with and without LI. The findings suggest a strong association between sensitivity to grammatical violations and working memory capacity. Variations in working memory performance predicted grammatical sensitivity. Hungarian participants with LI exhibited a weakness in detecting both agreement and word order violations

Recognizing cited facts and principles in legal judgements

In common law jurisdictions, legal professionals cite facts and legal principles from precedent cases to support their arguments before the court for their intended outcome in a current case. This practice stems from the doctrine of stare decisis, where cases that have similar facts should receive similar decisions with respect to the principles. It is essential for legal professionals to identify such facts and principles in precedent cases, though this is a highly time intensive task. In this paper, we present studies that demonstrate that human annotators can achieve reasonable agreement on which sentences in legal judgements contain cited facts and principles (respectively, κ=0.65 and κ=0.95 for inter- and intra-annotator agreement). We further demonstrate that it is feasible to automatically annotate sentences containing such legal facts and principles in a supervised machine learning framework based on linguistic features, reporting per category precision and recall figures of between 0.79 and 0.89 for classifying sentences in legal judgements as cited facts, principles or neither using a Bayesian classifier, with an overall κ of 0.72 with the human-annotated gold standard

Judging grammaticality: experiments in sentence classification

A classifier which is capable of distinguishing a syntactically well formed sentence from a syntactically ill formed one has the potential to be useful in an L2 language-learning context. In this article, we describe a classifier which classifies English sentences as either well formed or ill formed using information gleaned from three different natural language processing techniques. We describe the issues involved in acquiring data to train such a classifier and present experimental results for this classifier on a variety of ill formed sentences. We demonstrate that (a) the combination of information from a variety of linguistic sources is helpful, (b) the trade-off between accuracy on well formed sentences and accuracy on ill formed sentences can be fine tuned by training multiple classifiers in a voting scheme, and (c) the performance of the classifier is varied, with better performance on transcribed spoken sentences produced by less advanced language learners

Are you sure?: using the error-related negativity to examine adult L2 learning

Previous investigations of second language (L2) learners’ proficiency have focused on explicit measures of overt responses. Recent data have shown discrepancies between L2 learners’ overtly measured behaviors and covertly measured implicit processes (McLaughlin, Inoue, & Loveless, 2000). Event-related potentials (ERPs) have been used as a covert measure of implicit sensitivity. Prior studies have focused on the P600 component as a measure of sensitivity to syntactic violations in L2 (Tokowicz & MacWhinney, 2005; Tolentino & Tokowicz, 2012). Tokowicz and MacWhinney (2005) used the P600 to index cross-language similarity effects, and found that GJT accuracy scores were lowest in conditions with features unique to L2, however, the ERP responses were the strongest to unique features. This suggests that L2 learners possess implicit sensitivity to L2 violations that is not always indicated by their overt behaviors. The present study looks at another ERP component, the error-related negativity (ERN), which is elicited in response to error processing (Sebastián-Gallés, Rodríguez-Fornells, Diego-Balaguer, & Díaz, 2006). We reprocessed previously collected ERP data from Tolentino and Tokowicz (2012; unpublished data) to see if an ERN is present, which would indicate that L2 learners are sensitive to L2 violations. The ERN will be investigated as a function of stimulus grammaticality, response accuracy, electrode site and laterality. We found a significant four way interaction between these variables, as well as significant contrasts in mean amplitudes at certain electrodes. Additionally, we found a positive component elicited in response to errors made in the judgment on ungrammatical stimuli, suggesting the context and the type of error influences how errors are processed. Overall, our data indicate that L2 learners are sensitive to L2 violations, and are at some level aware, not only of what is grammatical, but also what is ungrammatical

Lesions impairing regular versus irregular past tense production

We investigated selective impairments in the production of regular and irregular past tense by examining language performance and lesion sites in a sample of twelve stroke patients. A disadvantage in regular past tense production was observed in six patients when phonological complexity was greater for regular than irregular verbs, and in three patients when phonological complexity was closely matched across regularity. These deficits were not consistently related to grammatical difficulties or phonological errors but were consistently related to lesion site. All six patients with a regular past tense disadvantage had damage to the left ventral pars opercularis (in the inferior frontal cortex), an area associated with articulatory sequencing in prior functional imaging studies. In addition, those that maintained a disadvantage for regular verbs when phonological complexity was controlled had damage to the left ventral supramarginal gyrus (in the inferior parietal lobe), an area associated with phonological short-term memory. When these frontal and parietal regions were spared in patients who had damage to subcortical (n = 2) or posterior temporo-parietal regions (n = 3), past tense production was relatively unimpaired for both regular and irregular forms. The remaining (12th) patient was impaired in producing regular past tense but was significantly less accurate when producing irregular past tense. This patient had frontal, parietal, subcortical and posterior temporo-parietal damage, but was distinguished from the other patients by damage to the left anterior temporal cortex, an area associated with semantic processing. We consider how our lesion site and behavioural observations have implications for theoretical accounts of past tense production