Competing models of liaison acquisition:Evidence from corpus and experimental data

Given that nouns rarely appear in isolation in French, infants acquiring the language must often retrieve the underlying representation of vowel-initial lexical forms from liaison contexts which provide conflicting information about their initial phoneme. Given this ambiguity, how do learners represent these nouns in their lexicon, and how do these representations change as their knowledge of liaison and the lexicon become more adult-like? To explore this question, we analyze the types of errors children make, in both naturalistic and elicited speech, and how these are affected by input frequency. In doing so, we evaluate two major proposals for how children’s early representations of liaison develop. The first model, couched in a constructionist framework, predicts relatively late mastery of liaison (age 5 or older) and heavy dependence on the contexts in which a particular noun appears in the input. The second model, takes an approach to liaison development which integrates it more closely with general phonological development, and predicts relatively early mastery (by age 3). The results of a corpus study reveal that by age 3 children are correctly producing liaison in the nominal domain and that their production errors are consistent with a phonological model of liaison acquisition. An elicitation task demonstrates that 3-year-olds’ succeed at learning and correctly apply their knowledge of liaison to new nouns following brief exposure, though their productions continue to be influenced by nouns’ input distributions. Taken together, our findings suggest that by age 3 children are well on their way to adult-like representations of liaison. A phonologically-based model, incorporating the effect of distributional context on early errors, provides a better overall fit to the data we present.

Hispanic Male Self-efficacy and Its Effect on Persistence

The Hispanic male population has experienced a decline in four-year college enrollment rates and bachelor degree completion within the past ten years. To address this issue, this study focused on Hispanic male college freshman students, self-efficacy, and persistence in a South Texas four-year higher education institution. The study utilized an explanatory sequential mixed-methods approach. For the quantitative analysis, an efficacy survey, College Self-Efficacy Inventory, of Hispanic male students enrolled in mandatory freshman courses was analyzed. A logistic regression analysis was conducted to determine what amount of the total variance in persistence may be accounted for by self-efficacy. Qualitative data was collected through group and individual interviews with persistent students and non-persistent students. Themes that emerged from the qualitative data analysis explained the experiences of the students during their first year of college and the contributing factors that led to persistence or non-persistence decisions. The results of the quantitative analysis concluded that there was no significant amount of variance in persistence of students accounted for by self-efficacy. The qualitative themes that emerged from the student groups were family influences, campus relationships, student connections and resources, and living environment

Nobody doesn’t like negative concord

Languages vary with respect to whether sentences with two negative elements give rise to double negation or negative concord meanings. We explore an influential hypothesis about what governs this variation: namely, that whether a language exhibits double negation or negative concord is partly determined by the phonological and syntactic nature of its negative marker (Zeijlstra 2004; Jespersen 1917). For example, one version of this hypothesis argues that languages with affixal negation must be negative concord (Zeijlstra 2008). We use an artificial language learning experiment to investigate whether English speakers are sensitive to the status of the negative marker when learning double negation and negative concord languages. Our findings fail to provide evidence supporting this hypothesised connection. Instead, our results suggest that learners find it easier to learn negative concord languages compared to double negation languages independently of whether the negative marker is an adverb or an affix. This is in line with evidence from natural language acquisition (Thornton et al. 2016)

Thinking through syntax: Expanding the scope of "thinking for speaking"

The "thinking for speaking" hypothesis proposes that our language can influence cognition during language produc- tion or interpretation, directing our attention to the grammat- ical and/or semantic categories readily codable in our lan- guage. Beyond the codability of grammatical and semantic categories, the role of syntactic hierarchy–a core feature of human language—has not been studied so far. This study addresses this gap by investigating the effect of learning dif- ferent complex noun phrase (NP) structures on English na- tive participants' similarity judgments of objects which dif- fered in color or number. In Experiment 1, as the training proceeded, participants who learned to describe novel objects following an unusual NP structure that highlights the dimen- sion of number over color were more likely to judge objects matching on number; by contrast the judgments of partici- pants who learned a more typical NP structure that highlights color over number did not change significantly over time. The training-specific effect observed in Experiment 1 failed to emerge in Experiment 2 where online language involvement was reduced. These results extend the scope of "thinking for speaking", suggesting that hierarchical structure in syntax may also influence cognition during language use. They also shed light on the potential for cognitive flexibility in representations of the NP

Trees neural those:RNNs can learn the hierarchical structure of noun phrases

Humans use both linear and hierarchical representations in language processing, and the exact role of each has been debated. One domain where hierarchical processing is important is noun phrases. English noun phrases have a fixed order of prenominal modifiers: demonstratives - numerals - adjectives (these two green vases). However, when English speakers learn an artificial language with postnominal modifiers, instead of reproducing this linear order they preserve the distance between each modifier and the noun (vases green two these). This has been explained by a hierarchical homomorphism bias. Here, we investigate whether RNNs exhibit this bias. We pre-train one linear and two hierarchical models on English and expose them to a small artificial language. We then test them on noun phrases from a study with humans and find that only the hierarchical models can exhibit the bias, supporting the idea that homomorphic word order preferences arise from hierarchical, and not linear relations

Are linguists better subjects?

Who are the best subjects for judgment tasks intended to test grammatical hypotheses? Michael Devitt ( [2006a] , [2006b] ) argues, on the basis of a hypothesis concerning the psychology of such judgments, that linguists themselves are. We present empirical evidence suggesting that the relevant divide is not between linguists and non-linguists, but between subjects with and without minimally sufficient task-specific knowledge. In particular, we show that subjects with at least some minimal exposure to or knowledge of such tasks tend to perform consistently with one another—greater knowledge of linguistics makes no further difference—while at the same time exhibiting markedly greater in-group consistency than those who have no previous exposure to or knowledge of such tasks and their goal

You say yes, I say no:Investigating the link between meaning and form in response particles

International audienceResponse particles, like English ‘yes’ and ‘no’, are used to respond to polar questions or assertions and are found in all languages. However, the number of particles and the specific meanings they convey vary across languages. For example, in some languages particles mainly convey whether the response itself is positive or negative, while in others they convey whether the response is agreeing or disagreeing with previous discourse. Further, some languages have two response particles, while others have three, or even four. Recent work suggests that how meanings tend to be mapped to forms cross-linguistically might nevertheless be constrained. Roelofsen & Farkas (2015) suggest that indicating disagreement with a negative question or assertion (e.g., A: ‘Ally doesn’t eat meat.’ B: ‘Yes, he does.’) is more marked than indicating agreement with a positive assertion (e.g., A: ‘Ally eats meat.’ B: ‘Yes, he does’.). This difference in semantic markedness is argued to lead to a difference in form: more marked meanings are mapped to more specialized forms. Here we investigate this hypothesis in a series of behavioral experiments. Across our experiments, we find that participants are indeed sensitive to the differences in meaning that particles can convey. However, not all of the differences implicated by the hierarchy hypothesized in Roelofsen & Farkas (2015) are supported by our results, and we find evidence highlighting an unexpected special role for Positive Agreement—the least marked meaning

Person of interest:Experimental investigations into the learnability of person systems

Person systems convey the roles entities play in the context of speech (e.g., speaker, addressee). Like other linguistic category systems, not all ways of partitioning the person space are equally likely cross-linguistically. Different theories have been pro- posed to constrain the set of possible person partitions that humans can represent, explaining their typological distribution. This paper introduces an artificial language learning methodology to investigate the existence of universal constraints on person systems. We report the results of three experiments that inform these theoretical approaches by generating behavioural evidence for the impact of constraints on the learnability of different person partitions. Our findings constitute the first experimental evidence for learnability differences in this domain