Chinese Children's Knowledge of Topicalization : Experimental Evidence from a Comprehension Study

There is a debate as to whether topic structures in Chinese involve A'-movement or result from base-generation of the topic in the left periphery. If Chinese topicalization was derived by movement, under the assumptions of Friedmann et al.'s Relativized Minimality (Lingua 119:67-88, ), we would expect children's comprehension of object topicalization (with OSV order) to be worse than their comprehension of subject topicalization (with SVO order). This study examined 146 Mandarin-speaking children from age three to age six by means of a picture-sentence matching task with an appropriate context. The results showed a subject/object asymmetry when the topic marker is overt, and no asymmetry when the topic marker is covert. This suggests that the presence or absence of topic markers play an important role in children's comprehension of topicalization. We propose that both structures involve movement in the adult grammar, but not in the child grammar, at least initially. Sentences without overt topic markers are base-generated on a par with gapless sentences with a topic, and the base-generation analysis is abandoned as soon as children learn the syntax and semantics of topic markers, which function as attractors of topics

Statistical learning of tonal cues

This study investigated statistical learning in a natural tonal language, and whether executive functions has an impact on language learning in such learning conditions. In addition, the study investigates whether learning happens with awareness. The 40 adults that participated were exposed for Thai sentences in a language learning experiment. A self-report questionnaire was administered to examine the participants’ awareness. They were then tested with four cognitive tests which measures attention, inhibition, verbal fluency and working memory. The results show that adults are able to discriminate familiarized words from novel words, in addition to having a preference for tonal cues. The results from the self-report questionnaire revealed that those who had detected certain patterns related to tone did not overall perform better in the language learning experiment than those who did not. There were no systematic correlations between executive functions and the results from the language learning experiment. The results support previous statistical learning studies which show that participants are able to discriminate familiarized word from novel words.Denne studien undersøker statistisk læring i et naturlig tonespråk, samt om eksekutive funksjoner har en innvirkning på språklæring i en slik læringssituasjon. I tillegg til dette, undersøker studien i hvilken grad språklæringen skjer ved bevissthet. De 40 voksne som deltok i studien ble eksponert for setninger på thai i et språklæringseksperiment. Et selvrapporteringsskjema ble brukt for å undersøke deltakernes bevissthet (eller fraværet av bevissthet) om læringen. Videre ble de testet med fire kognitive tester som måler oppmerksomhet, inhibisjon, verbal flyt og arbeidsminne. Resultatene viste at voksne var i stand til å skille familiariserte ord fra nye ord, i tillegg til å ha en preferanse for tonale mønstre. Resultatene fra selvrapporteringsskjemaet viste ingen generelle sammenhenger mellom svarene de avga på spørreskjemaet, og hvordan deltakerne gjorde det under språklæringseksperimentet. Det var heller ingen systematiske korrelasjoner mellom eksekutive funksjoner og resultatene av læringseksperimentet. Resultatene støtter tidligere funn i studier på statistisk læring, som viser at deltakere er i stand til å skille familiariserte ord fra nye ord.Masteroppgave i logopediLOGO345MAPS-LOG0

Relative clauses in Cantonese-English bilingual children: Typological challenges and processing motivations

Findings from a longitudinal study of bilingual children acquiring Cantonese and English pose a challenge to the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH; Keenan & Comrie, 1977), which predicts that object relatives should not be acquired before subject relatives. In the children's Cantonese, object relatives emerged earlier than or simultaneously with subject relatives, and in their English, prenominal relatives based on Cantonese emerged first, with object relatives followed by subject relatives. These findings are discussed in light of findings on the typology and acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) and the underlying processing motivations of the NPAH. Prenominal object relatives in the bilingual children's Cantonese and English have the same word order as main clauses and can be analyzed as internally headed RCs. The reconceptualization of RCs as attributive clauses (Comrie, 1998a, 1998b, 2002) is supported by children's early RCs lacking a strict grammatical relationship between the head noun and the predicate. Furthermore, as observed by Diessel and Tomasello (2000, 2005) for English, bilingual children's earliest RCs consist of isolated noun phrases (NPs). The early object relatives produced by bilingual children are therefore essentially NPs with the linear order of a main clause, resulting in a configuration that is conducive to early production. © 2007 Cambridge University Press.published_or_final_versio

2kenize: Tying Subword Sequences for Chinese Script Conversion

Simplified Chinese to Traditional Chinese character conversion is a common preprocessing step in Chinese NLP. Despite this, current approaches have poor performance because they do not take into account that a simplified Chinese character can correspond to multiple traditional characters. Here, we propose a model that can disambiguate between mappings and convert between the two scripts. The model is based on subword segmentation, two language models, as well as a method for mapping between subword sequences. We further construct benchmark datasets for topic classification and script conversion. Our proposed method outperforms previous Chinese Character conversion approaches by 6 points in accuracy. These results are further confirmed in a downstream application, where 2kenize is used to convert pretraining dataset for topic classification. An error analysis reveals that our method's particular strengths are in dealing with code-mixing and named entities.Comment: Accepted to ACL 202

The placement of the head that maximizes predictability. An information theoretic approach

The minimization of the length of syntactic dependencies is a well-established principle of word order and the basis of a mathematical theory of word order. Here we complete that theory from the perspective of information theory, adding a competing word order principle: the maximization of predictability of a target element. These two principles are in conflict: to maximize the predictability of the head, the head should appear last, which maximizes the costs with respect to dependency length minimization. The implications of such a broad theoretical framework to understand the optimality, diversity and evolution of the six possible orderings of subject, object and verb are reviewed.Comment: in press in Glottometric

Prompting is not a substitute for probability measurements in large language models

Prompting is now a dominant method for evaluating the linguistic knowledge of large language models (LLMs). While other methods directly read out models' probability distributions over strings, prompting requires models to access this internal information by processing linguistic input, thereby implicitly testing a new type of emergent ability: metalinguistic judgment. In this study, we compare metalinguistic prompting and direct probability measurements as ways of measuring models' linguistic knowledge. Broadly, we find that LLMs' metalinguistic judgments are inferior to quantities directly derived from representations. Furthermore, consistency gets worse as the prompt query diverges from direct measurements of next-word probabilities. Our findings suggest that negative results relying on metalinguistic prompts cannot be taken as conclusive evidence that an LLM lacks a particular linguistic generalization. Our results also highlight the value that is lost with the move to closed APIs where access to probability distributions is limited.Comment: Camera-ready version for EMNLP 202

Non-adjacent dependency learning in Cantonese-speaking children with and without a history of specific language impairment

Purpose: This study investigated non-adjacent dependency learning in Cantonese-speaking children with and without a history of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in an artificial linguistic context. Method: Sixteen Cantonese-speaking children with SLI history and 16 Cantonese-speaking children with typical language development (TLD) were tested with a non-adjacent dependency learning task using artificial languages that mimic Cantonese. Results: Children with TLD performed above chance and were able to discriminate between trained and untrained non-adjacent dependencies. However, children with SLI history performed at chance and were not able to differentiate trained versus untrained non-adjacent dependencies. Conclusions: These findings, together with previous findings with English-speaking adults and adolescents with language impairments, suggested that individuals with atypical language development, regardless of age, diagnostic status, language and culture, showed difficulties in learning non-adjacent dependencies. This study provides evidence for early impairments to statistical learning in individuals with atypical language development

The acquisition of prepositional relative clauses in european portuguese by native chinese speakers

The access of adult learners of a second language (L2) to Universal Grammar (UG) has been widely studied in generative L2 acquisition research. Following the Representational Deficit Hypothesis (RDH), certain features not available in the native language (L1) are not accessible in adult L2 acquisition (Hawkins, 2005; Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou, 2007, among others). On the contrary, according to the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH), adults can access UG to acquire configurations that are not present in their L1 nor in the explicit input (e.g. Lardiere, 2008; Slabakova, 2016). This dissertation aims at contributing to this debate through the study of the L2 acquisition of prepositional relative clauses (RCs) in European Portuguese (EP) by Mandarin Chinese (MC) native speakers. EP displays wh-movement in prepositional RCs formed with standard Pied-Piping (PiP) and non-standard P-Chopping (P-Chop). Non-standard resumptive RCs do not involve movement (Alexandre, 2000). In MC, prepositional RCs involve a mandatory resumptive pronoun (RP), without movement. P-Chop is also attested in the L2 acquisition of prepositional RCs and wh-questions (Klein, 1993; Jourdain, 1996; Perpiñán, 2010), being analyzed as a developmental stage (Perpiñán, 2010, 2020) or evidence of a wild grammar (Klein, 1993). In MC, prepositional RCs display a mandatory resumptive pronoun (Pan, 2016a, 2016b, a.o.), not involving movement (Wen, 2020). The main goals of this dissertation are to understand if MC learners of EP L2: 1) transfer resumption from the L1 into the L2; 2) can acquire new functional features or reorganize (reassemble) L1 features to configure wh-movement in the L2, producing and accepting PiP and P-Chop RCs; 3) show a developmental path in the acquisition of prepositional RCs. To achieve these goals, an oral production task and two self-paced reading acceptability judgement tasks (SPR-AJTs) were used. One SPR-AJT targets relativization strategies and the other focuses on the learner’s implicit knowledge of wh-movement, both contrasting argument and adjunct prepositional RCs. Intermediate (n=36) and advanced (n=36) native MC learners of EP L2, and native EP speakers (N=30) participated in this study. Results show that: 1) learners do not transfer resumption from their L1; 2) both groups of learners produce and accept preferentially PiP RCs; 3) intermediate learners have larger percentages of production of P-Chop with adjuncts than advanced learners; 4) in island configurations, argument RCs are rated worse than adjunct RCs; and 5) RPs do not rescue islands for any group. Overall, these results support the FRH, indicating that L2ers are able to acquire the features that trigger wh-movement, producing PiP and P-Chop. The results also corroborate that P-Chop exists as a developmental stage (Perpiñán, 2010, 2020), with distinct properties from P-Chop in native EP, arguing against previous research that treats P-Chop as evidence of a wild grammar (e.g., Klein, 1993). Finally, the results with syntactic islands challenge the idea that RPs improve these structures in both native and non-native grammars. The convergence between EP natives and Chinese speakers rejecting argument RCs more assertively than adjunct RC also indicates that adult Chinese learners are sensitive to the same grammatical constraints and processing principles of native speakers, and that L2 learners are able to reassemble the wh-features accordingly.O acesso de aprendentes adultos de uma segunda língua (L2) à Gramática Universal (GU) tem sido muito estudado no âmbito da gramática generativa. De acordo com a Hipótese de Défice Representacional (RDH, em inglês) (Hawkins, 2005; Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou, 2007, e.o.), determinados elementos não adquiridos na língua nativa (L1) não estão acessíveis na aquisição de uma L2 na idade adulta. Pelo contrário, a Hipótese de Reconfiguração de Traços (FRH, em inglês) (Lardiere, 2005, 2008, 2009) defende que os falantes adultos de uma L2 podem aceder à GU para adquirir elementos novos, não disponibilizados na sua L1. A presente dissertação pretende contribuir para este debate através do estudo da aquisição de orações relativas preposicionadas em português europeu (PE) L2 por falantes nativos de chinês mandarim (CM). Em PE, as frases relativas preposicionadas envolvem movimento-wh quando são formadas através das estratégias de arrastamento da preposição (PiP) (standard) e cortadora (não standard). Podem ainda ser formadas, não convencionalmente, com um pronome resumptivo (PR), não implicando movimento (Alexandre, 2000). A estratégia cortadora é igualmente descrita na aquisição de L2 de relativas e interrogativas preposicionadas (Klein, 1993; Jourdain, 1996; Perpiñán, 2010), sendo analisada como uma fase de desenvolvimento (Perpiñán, 2010, 2020) ou uma gramática selvagem (Klein, 1993). Em CM, as frases relativas preposicionadas são formadas com um elemento resumptivo obrigatório (Pan, 2016a, 2016b), não envolvendo movimento (Wen, 2020). Nesta dissertação, pretende-se compreender se os falantes nativos de CM, aprendentes de PE L2: 1) transferem a estratégia resumptiva da sua L1 para a L2; 2) adquirem novos traços ou reconfiguram traços existentes na L1 para adquirir o movimento-wh na L2, produzindo e aceitando frases relativas com PiP e cortadoras; 3) mostram um percurso de desenvolvimento na aquisição de frases relativas preposicionadas. Para responder a estas questões, foram aplicadas uma tarefa de produção oral e duas tarefas de julgamento de aceitabilidade com leitura automonitorizada (SPR-AJT, em inglês). Uma das tarefas SPR-AJT visa as estratégias de relativização e a outra testa o conhecimento implícito de movimento-wh. Ambas as experiências SPR-AJT contrastam relativas preposicionadas argumentais e adjuntas. Quanto aos participantes neste estudo, eles distribuem-se por falantes nativos de CM, aprendentes intermédios (n= 36) e avançados (n= 36) de PE e falantes nativos de PE (n= 30), o grupo de controlo. Os resultados mostram que: 1) os aprendentes não transferem a estratégia resumptiva da sua L1 para a L2; 2) os dois grupos de aprendentes produzem e aceitam preferencialmente PiP; 3) os falantes intermédios apresentam percentagens mais altas de produção da estratégia cortadora com adjuntos do que com argumentos; 4) as frases relativas argumentais formadas com extrações de ilhas são pior classificadas por todos os grupos do que as adjuntas; 5) os PRs não melhoram as extrações de ilhas para nenhum grupo. Estes resultados corroboram a FRH, indicando que os aprendentes de uma L2 podem adquirir os traços que desencadeiam o movimento-wh. Os resultados também indicam que a estratégia cortadora (P-Chop) surge como uma fase de desenvolvimento na L2 (Perpiñán, 2010, 2020), tendo propriedades distintas da estratégia cortadora no PE L1, contra a proposta de gramática selvagem (Klein, 1993). Os resultados com as ilhas sintáticas desafiam os estudos que indicam que os PRs melhoram a aceitabilidade destas construções, na gramática nativa e não nativa. Finalmente, a convergência dos falantes nativos e não nativos na rejeição mais expressiva de frases relativas argumentais do que adjuntas, nas ilhas sintáticas, indica que os aprendentes são sensíveis a restrições gramaticais e princípios de processamento idênticos aos dos falantes nativos, e que os aprendentes acedem à UG para reconfigurar adequadamente os traços que definem o movimento-wh na L2