The encoding of countability and numerosity in nominal morphology

The aim of this research was to examine the role of Number morphology for what concerns the encoding of information about the numerosity and countability of referents. The issue was approached both from a theoretical and from an experimental point of view. Number morphology is a widespread category and only few languages in the world seem to completely lack it (Corbett, 2000). Why is Number such a common feature among natural languages? In general, it can be assumed that language grammaticalises only some of all the possible information present in the referential world. The fact that information about numerosity is rammaticalised in such a widespread way in natural languages may mirror the salient role that such information has from a biological point of view, i.e. the fact that this information stems from cognitive processes that are biologically relevant in order to behave successfully in a given environment (Hauser & Spelke 2004). Language provides the means to communicate salient information readily. Morphology is one of these means in general, and Number morphology is the one specifically set for the encoding of the information about numerosity of referents. Number morphology is designed to convey salient information expressing numerosities, but this possibility takes place only when the noun is linked to a countable interpretation. Within morphological Number systems, countability plays a crucial role: in fact, in absence of countability, nouns are not inflected but assigned a Number value by default. Although the great amount of interest dedicated to countability both by theoretical and experimental approaches, no account has fully succeeded in explaining countability and its relation with morphological Number. In the present thesis we propose a formal model and provide empirical data - collected in quantitative morphology, psycholinguistics and language acquisition – in order to support the idea that in encoding countability more than one factor comes into play: namely, core grammar rules, effects of non-strictly grammatical processing of linguistic stimuli, and effects related to non-verbal cognitive processes that deal with the information encoded into language

Unnatural language processing: How do language models handle machine-generated prompts?

Language model prompt optimization research has shown that semantically and grammatically well-formed manually crafted prompts are routinely outperformed by automatically generated token sequences with no apparent meaning or syntactic structure, including sequences of vectors from a model's embedding space. We use machine-generated prompts to probe how models respond to input that is not composed of natural language expressions. We study the behavior of models of different sizes in multiple semantic tasks in response to both continuous and discrete machine-generated prompts, and compare it to the behavior in response to human-generated natural-language prompts. Even when producing a similar output, machine-generated and human prompts trigger different response patterns through the network processing pathways, including different perplexities, different attention and output entropy distributions, and different unit activation profiles. We provide preliminary insight into the nature of the units activated by different prompt types, suggesting that only natural language prompts recruit a genuinely linguistic circuit.Comment: Findings of EMNLP 2023 Camera-Read

Effects of animacy on the processing of morphological Number: a cognitive inheritance?

Language encodes into morphology part of the information present in the referential world. Some features are marked in the great majority of languages, such as the numerosity of the referents that is encoded in morphological Number. Other features do not surface as frequently in morphological markings, yet they are pervasive in natural languages. This is the case of animacy, that can ground Gender systems as well as constrain the surfacing of Number. The diffusion of numerosity and animacy could mirror their biological salience at the extra-linguistic cognitive level. Human extra-linguistic numerical abilities are phylogenetically ancient and are observed in non-human animal species, especially when counting salient animate entities such as social companions. Does the saliency of animacy influence the morphological encoding of Number in language processing? We designed an experiment to test the encoding of morphological Number in language processing in relation to animacy. In Italian, Gender and Number are mandatorily expressed in a fusional morpheme. In some nouns denoting animate referents, Gender encodes the sex of referents and is semantically interpretable. In some other animate nouns and in inanimate nouns, Gender is uninterpretable at the semantic level. We found that it is easier to inflect for Number nouns when the inflectional morpheme is interpretable with respect to a semantic feature related to animacy. We discuss the possibility that the primacy of animacy in counting is mirrored in morphological processing and that morphology is designed to easily express information that is salient from a cognitive point of view

Referential communication in heterogeneous communities of pre-trained visual deep networks

As large pre-trained image-processing neural networks are being embedded in autonomous agents such as self-driving cars or robots, the question arises of how such systems can communicate with each other about the surrounding world, despite their different architectures and training regimes. As a first step in this direction, we systematically explore the task of \textit{referential communication} in a community of heterogeneous state-of-the-art pre-trained visual networks, showing that they can develop, in a self-supervised way, a shared protocol to refer to a target object among a set of candidates. This shared protocol can also be used, to some extent, to communicate about previously unseen object categories of different granularity. Moreover, a visual network that was not initially part of an existing community can learn the community's protocol with remarkable ease. Finally, we study, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the properties of the emergent protocol, providing some evidence that it is capturing high-level semantic features of objects

One can be some but some cannot be one: ERP correlates of numerosity incongruence are different for singular and plural

Humans can communicate information on numerosity by means of number words (e.g., one hundred, a couple), but also through Number morphology (e.g., through the singular vs the plural forms of a noun). Agreement violations involving Number morphology (e.g., *one apples) are well known to elicit specific ERP components such as the Left Anterior Negativity (LAN); yet, the relationship between a morphological Number value (e.g., singular vs plural) and its referential numerosity has rarely been considered in the literature. Moreover, even if agreement violations have been proven to be very useful, they do not typically characterise everyday language usage, thus narrowing the scope of the results. In this study we investigated Number morphology from a different perspective, by focusing on the ERP correlates of congruence and incongruence between a depicted numerosity and noun phrases. To this aim we designed a picture\u2013phrase matching paradigm in Italian. In each trial, a picture depicting one or four objects was followed by a grammatically well-formed phrase made up of a quantifier and a content noun inflected either in the singular or in the plural. When analysing ERP time-locked to the content noun, plural phrases after pictures presenting one object elicited a larger negativity, similar to a LAN effect. No significant congruence effect was found in the case of the phrases whose morphological Number value conveyed a numerosity of one. Our results suggest that: 1) incongruence elicits a LAN-like negativity independently from the grammaticality of the utterances and irrespectively of the P600 component; 2) the reference to a numerosity can be partially encoded in an incremental way when processing Number morphology; and, most importantly, 3) the processing of the morphological Number value of plural is different from that of singular as the former shows a narrower interpretability than the latter

Lexical categories or frequency effects? A feedback from quantitative methods applied to psycholinguistic models in two studies on Italian

Abstract English. We examined two issues concerning Italian Number morphology: the phenomena related to mass and count nouns and to the plural dominance. By taking into account quantitative data from corpora and subjective frequency ratings in three mixed effect models, we found that differences in participants' performance in two lexical decision tasks could be better captured as differences in frequency rather than in terms of effects of lexical categories. Italiano. In questo studio sono stati posti a confronto due fenomeni pertinenti alla morfologia nominale di Numero in italiano: la contabilità dei nomi e la dominanza plurale. Integrando i dati quantitativi provenienti dai corpora e da due studi di rating in un'analisi statistica condotta tramite modelli a effetti misti, risulta che le differenze nella prestazione dei partecipanti in due studi di decisione lessicale sono riconducibili a effetti di frequenza piuttosto che alla presenza di tratti lessicali categoriali

One can be some but some cannot be one: ERP correlates of numerosity incongruence are different for singular and plural

Humans can communicate information on numerosity by means of number words (e.g. one hundred, a couple), but also through Number morphology (e.g. through the singular vs. the plural forms of a noun). Agreement violations involving Number morphology (e.g. *one apples) are well known to elicit specific ERP components such as the Left Anterior Negativity (LAN); yet, the relationship between a morphological Number value (e.g. singular vs. plural) and its referential numerosity has been scantly considered in the literature. Moreover, even if agreement violations have been proved very useful, they do not typically characterise the everyday language usage, thus narrowing the scope of the results. In this study we investigated Number morphology from a different perspective, by focusing on the ERP correlates of congruence and incongruence between a depicted numerosity and noun phrases. To this aim we designed a picture–phrase matching paradigm in Italian. In each trial, a picture depicting one or four objects was followed by a grammatical phrase made up of a quantifier and a content noun inflected either in the singular or in the plural. When analysing ERP time-locked to the content noun, plural phrases after pictures presenting one object elicited a larger negativity, similar to a LAN effect. No significant congruence effect was found in the case of the phrases whose morphological Number value conveyed a numerosity of one. Considering the LAN as an index of morpho-syntactic incongruence, these results suggest that 1) LAN-like effects can be triggered independently from the grammaticality of the utterances and irrespective the P600 component; 2) the reference to a numerosity can be partially encoded in an incremental way when processing Number morphology; and, most importantly, 3) the processing of the morphological Number value of plural is different from that of singular as the former shows a narrower interpretability than the latter

The encoding of countability and numerosity in nominal morphology

The aim of this research was to examine the role of Number morphology for what concerns the encoding of information about the numerosity and countability of referents. The issue was approached both from a theoretical and from an experimental point of view. Number morphology is a widespread category and only few languages in the world seem to completely lack it (Corbett, 2000). Why is Number such a common feature among natural languages? In general, it can be assumed that language grammaticalises only some of all the possible information present in the referential world. The fact that information about numerosity is rammaticalised in such a widespread way in natural languages may mirror the salient role that such information has from a biological point of view, i.e. the fact that this information stems from cognitive processes that are biologically relevant in order to behave successfully in a given environment (Hauser & Spelke 2004). Language provides the means to communicate salient information readily. Morphology is one of these means in general, and Number morphology is the one specifically set for the encoding of the information about numerosity of referents. Number morphology is designed to convey salient information expressing numerosities, but this possibility takes place only when the noun is linked to a countable interpretation. Within morphological Number systems, countability plays a crucial role: in fact, in absence of countability, nouns are not inflected but assigned a Number value by default. Although the great amount of interest dedicated to countability both by theoretical and experimental approaches, no account has fully succeeded in explaining countability and its relation with morphological Number. In the present thesis we propose a formal model and provide empirical data - collected in quantitative morphology, psycholinguistics and language acquisition – in order to support the idea that in encoding countability more than one factor comes into play: namely, core grammar rules, effects of non-strictly grammatical processing of linguistic stimuli, and effects related to non-verbal cognitive processes that deal with the information encoded into language.Questa ricerca ha lo scopo di esaminare il ruolo della morfologia di Numero per quanto riguarda la codifica della numerosità e della contabilità. La questione è stata affrontata sia dal punto di vista teorico che dal punto di vista sperimentale. La morfologia di Numero è una categoria tipologicamente molto diffusa e solo poche lingue al mondo sembrano esserne completamente prive (Corbett, 2000). Dove va ricercato il motivo di una tale diffusione? In generale, si può ritenere che la lingua grammaticalizzi solo alcune di tutte le possibili informazioni presenti nel mondo referenziale. Il fatto che le informazioni relative alla numerosità siano grammaticalizzate in modo così diffuso nelle lingue può rispecchiare il ruolo saliente che tali informazioni hanno da un punto di vista biologico, cioè il fatto che tali informazioni derivino da processi cognitivi che sono necessari per comportarsi con successo rispetto all’ambiente (Hauser & Spelke 2004). La lingua fornisce i mezzi per comunicare prontamente le informazioni salienti. La morfologia è uno di questi mezzi, in generale, e la morfologia di Numero è il mezzo specificamente deputato alla codifica delle informazioni sulla numerosità dei referenti. La flessione nominale, e quindi la codifica di informazioni riguardo alla numerosità, è presente solo quando il nome è legato ad una interpretazione contabile. All'interno dei sistemi morfologici di Numero, la contabilità gioca quindi un ruolo cruciale: infatti, in assenza di contabilità, ai sostantivi è assegnato un valore di Numero per default. Nonostante l’ampio interesse dedicato alla contabilità sia a livello teorico che sperimentale, nessun approccio è riuscito a dare una spiegazione del tutto coerente della contabilità e della sua relazione con la morfologia di Numero. Nella presente tesi si propone un modello formale e vengono forniti dati empirici - raccolti in due studi di morfologia quantitativa, due di psicolinguistica e uno studio in acquisizione - sostenendo l'idea che nella codifica linguistica della contabilità e delle numerosità entri in gioco più di un fattore: non solo un set di regole della core grammar, ma anche effetti dell’elaborazione cognitiva di stimoli linguistici, ed effetti legati ai processi cognitivi non verbali che si occupano di informazioni codificate nel linguaggio

Cognitive and communicative pressures in the emergence of grammatical structure: A closer look at whether number sense is encoded in privileged ways

open3siembargoed_20210707Franzon F.; Zanini C.; Rugani R.Franzon, F.; Zanini, C.; Rugani, R

Do non-verbal number systems shape grammar? Numerical cognition and Number morphology compared

Number morphology (e.g., singular vs. plural) is a part of the grammar that captures numerical information. Some languages have morphological Number values, which express few (paucal), two (dual), three (trial) and sometimes (possibly) four (quadral). Interestingly, the limit of the attested morphological Number values matches the limit of non-verbal numerical cognition. The latter is based on two systems, one estimating approximate numerosities and the other computing exact numerosities up to three or four. We compared the literature on nonverbal number systems with data on Number morphology from 218 languages. Our observations suggest that nonverbal numerical cognition is reflected as a core part of language