Agreement and Interference in Direct Object Clitic Production in Italian Monolingual Children

Italian speaking typically developing children optionally omit third person direct object clitics (3DO) until at least age 4 years. In a set of two studies, we investigated whether clitic omissions depend on intervention phenomena. We discussed a model of syntactic intervention in 3DO clitic production in which the subject of a sentence might intervene in clitic production at an intermediate stage of the sentence derivation, when the clitic moves from its initial merging position to a higher position above the subject. We argued that omissions and errors in 3DO clitic productions arise when retrieving from memory the clitic to achieve an agreement relation in a context of syntactic intervention. We argued that working memory limitations impact on the clitic retrieving operation cued by lexical and representational features. In Study 1, we elicited the production of third singular clitics in sentences with a full lexical subject. The third singular subject and the third singular clitic were matched or not in gender. Results of Study 1 showed that when there is a gender feature mismatch between the subject and the 3DO clitic children optionally make clitic gender errors or even replace the 3DO clitic with a post-verbal full DP. We argued that these results could be explained in an intervention model in which the external verb lexical argument (the lexical subject) is erroneously retrieved for achieving the agreement operation involving the movement of the clitic to its surface position. In Study 2 we investigated whether the problems in clitic production found in Study 1 depend on phonological priming or structural intervention. We elicited the production of third singular clitics in sentences with a silent pro subject. As in Study 1, the third singular subject and the third singular clitic were matched or not in gender. Results of Study 2 showed that in sentences with a mismatch in gender features between the null subject and the clitic, children tend to produce a clitic with the incorrect gender or to optionally replace it with a full lexical post-verbal DP, regardless of the gender of the target clitic. This suggests that a null subject intervenes in the same way a lexical subject does in the derivation of clitics and, consequently, that the gender features inherited by a null subject via its anaphoric link with its antecedent have the same grammatical status of gender features conveyed at a lexical level. Overall results indicate that the interference errors are not dependent on phonological attraction but rather have a structural nature and are modulated by short-term memory resources

Processing code-blending beyond the lexical level: evidence for a double syntactic derivation?

Bimodal bilinguals master languages in two modalities, spoken and signed, and can use them simultaneously due to the independence of the articulators. This behavior, named code-blending, is one of the hallmarks of bimodal bilingualism. Lexical experiments on production and comprehension in American Sign Language/English showed that blending is not cognitively costly and facilitates lexical access. In this work, we replicated the blending advantage in lexical comprehension for hearing bimodal bilinguals with two other language pairs, French Sign Language (LSF)/French and Italian Sign Language (LIS)/Italian, and we explored whether the facilitation is also found at the sentential level. Results show that blended utterances for languages with incongruent word order like LIS/Italian were processed slower than monolingual utterances, while no difference was found when the word orders are congruent (LSF/French). We discuss these findings in light of linguistic theories of syntactic structure derivation in bimodal bilinguals

Short-Term Memory and Sign Languages. Sign Span and its Linguistic Implications

In this paper we discuss two distinct, although related questions. The first question is what explains the well-known fact that short-term memory (span) is lower for signs than for words. We review some explanations that have been proposed for this fact at the light of the results of a novel experiment involving gating of signs. The second question is how signers can process fully-fledged grammatical systems like sign languages even if they rely on a limited short-term memory. In order to deal with this issue, we discuss the distribution in sign languages of the configuration that is most challenging for short-term memory, namely center embedding. The conclusion is that center embedding is possible only if special strategies based on the use of space are used that are likely to reduce the short-term memory burden

Performance of Deaf Participants in an Abstract Visual Grammar Learning Task at Multiple Formal Levels: Evaluating the Auditory Scaffolding Hypothesis

Previous research has hypothesized that human sequential processing may be dependent upon hearing experience (the “auditory scaffolding hypothesis”), predicting that sequential rule learning abilities should be hindered by congenital deafness. To test this hypothesis, we compared deaf signer and hearing individuals’ ability to acquire rules of different computational complexity in a visual artificial grammar learning task using sequential stimuli. As a group, deaf participants succeeded at all levels of the task; Bayesian analysis indicates that they successfully acquired each of several target grammars at ascending levels of the formal language hierarchy. Overall, these results do not support the auditory scaffolding hypothesis. However, age- and education-matched hearing participants did outperform deaf participants in two out of three tested grammars. We suggest that this difference may be related to verbal recoding strategies in the two groups. Any verbal recoding strategies used by the deaf signers would be less effective because they would have to use the same visual channel required for the experimental task

Comprehension of double-center embedded relatives in Italian: a case for hierarchical intervention

Object relatives are more difficult to process than subject relatives. Several sentence processing models have been proposed to explain this difference. As double-center embedding relatives contain several long-distance dependencies, they are an ideal configuration to compare sentence processing models. The main aim of the present study was to compare the predictions of the featural Relativized Minimality approach with the ones of other relevant sentence processing models. 57 Italian-speaking healthy adults answered comprehension questions concerning the first, second, or third verb to appear in both double-center embedding and control sentences. Results show that questions concerning the matrix verb of double-center embedding structures were significantly easier and were associated with faster response times than questions concerning the embedded verbs. Furthermore, in object double-center embedding relatives the questions concerning the verb of the most embedded clause were easier than the ones concerning the verb of the intermediate embedded clause. This pattern of results is consistent with featural Relativized Minimality but cannot be fully explained by other sentence processing models

Artificial Grammar Learning Capabilities in an Abstract Visual Task Match Requirements for Linguistic Syntax

Whether pattern-parsing mechanisms are specific to language or apply across multiple cognitive domains remains unresolved. Formal language theory provides a mathematical framework for classifying pattern-generating rule sets (or “grammars”) according to complexity. This framework applies to patterns at any level of complexity, stretching from simple sequences, to highly complex tree-like or net-like structures, to any Turing-computable set of strings. Here, we explored human pattern-processing capabilities in the visual domain by generating abstract visual sequences made up of abstract tiles differing in form and color. We constructed different sets of sequences, using artificial “grammars” (rule sets) at three key complexity levels. Because human linguistic syntax is classed as “mildly context-sensitive,” we specifically included a visual grammar at this complexity level. Acquisition of these three grammars was tested in an artificial grammar-learning paradigm: after exposure to a set of well-formed strings, participants were asked to discriminate novel grammatical patterns from non-grammatical patterns. Participants successfully acquired all three grammars after only minutes of exposure, correctly generalizing to novel stimuli and to novel stimulus lengths. A Bayesian analysis excluded multiple alternative hypotheses and shows that the success in rule acquisition applies both at the group level and for most participants analyzed individually. These experimental results demonstrate rapid pattern learning for abstract visual patterns, extending to the mildly context-sensitive level characterizing language. We suggest that a formal equivalence of processing at the mildly context sensitive level in the visual and linguistic domains implies that cognitive mechanisms with the computational power to process linguistic syntax are not specific to the domain of language, but extend to abstract visual patterns with no meaning

AGL - Deaf

Performance of deaf participants in an abstract visual grammar learning task at multiple formal levels: Evaluating the auditory scaffolding hypothesis - Material

CONTENT QUESTIONS COMPREHENSION TASK IN LIS (SYNTCQLIS)

Age of exposure and subject/object asymmetries when wh-movement goes rightward: the case of LIS interrogatives Materials, data and analysi