Parallels in romance nominal and clausal microvariation

This article explores parallels in the dimensions of microvariation characterizing the functional structure and organization of the Romance nominal and clausal groups. Within a parameter hierarchy approach it is argued that observed synchronic and diachronic variation across both domains can be readily captured in terms of a single set of higher- and above all lower-level parametric options. This parallelism constitutes a welcome finding in that it points to how the available parametric space can be constrained and defined in terms of a set of common transcategorial principles and options.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Editura Academiei Române via http://www.lingv.ro/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=137%3Arrlarhiva2015&catid=36%3Areviste-ilb&Itemid=9

Differential Object Marking and the properties of D in the dialects of the extreme south of Italy

This paper discusses two case studies of microvariation in accusative marking in the Italo-Romance varieties of the extreme south of Italy. In particular, the diatopic variation displayed by the dialects of southern Calabria gives rise to peculiar patterns of alternation between presence or absence of the marker a ‘to’ in flagging the accusative. The realisation of accusative case is partially governed by semantic and referential features, i.e. specificity and animacy. In addition, the nature of the realisation of the D head results in a degree of competition between zero marking and analytic accusative marking with a. Given the century-long co-existence of Latin/Romance and Greek in southern Calabria, the relevant morphosyntactic patterns in Case-marking will also be examined from a language contact perspective. We will highlight how the relevant outcomes do not simply involve borrowing mechanisms or template copying from the lending variety but, rather, produce hybrid structures no longer ascribable to a purely Romance or Greek grammar.The Leverhulme Trust; Project Title: Fading voices in Southern Italy: investigating language contact in Magna Graecia; Research Project RPG-2015-28

Changing alignments in the Greek of southern Italy

Abstract This article investigates a peculiar pattern of subject case-marking in the Greek of southern Italy. Recent fieldwork with native speakers, coupled with the consultation of some written sources, reveals that, alongside prototypical nominative subjects, Italo-Greek also licenses accusative subjects, despite displaying a predominantly nominative-accusative alignment. Far from being random replacements within a highly attrited grammar, the distribution of these accusative subjects obeys specific structural principles, revealing similarities with historical attestations of the so-called “extended accusative” in early Indo-European. On the basis of these data, Italo-Greek is argued to be undergoing a progressive shift towards an active-stative alignment, a claim supported by additional evidence from auxiliary selection, adverb agreement and sentential word order.Leverhulme Trus

Poor encoding of position by contrast-defined motion

Second-order (contrast-defined) motion stimuli lead to poor performance on a number of tasks, including discriminating form from motion and visual search. To investigate this deficiency, we tested the ability of human observers to monitor multiple regions for motion, to code the relative positions of shapes defined by motion, and to simultaneously encode motion direction and location. Performance with shapes from contrast-defined motion was compared with that obtained from luminance-defined (first-order) stimuli. When the position of coherent motion was uncertain, direction-discrimination thresholds were elevated similarly for both luminance-defined and contrast-defined motion, compared to when the stimulus location was known. The motion of both luminance- and contrast-defined structure can be monitored in multiple visual field locations. Only under conditions that greatly advantaged contrast-defined motion, were observers able to discriminate the positional offset of shapes defined by either type of motion. When shapes from contrast-defined and luminance-defined motion were presented under comparable conditions, the positional accuracy of contrast-defined motion was found to be poorer than its luminance-defined counterpart. These results may explain some, but possibly not all, of the deficits found previously with second-order motion

Manciati siti? Middle constructions with resultative-stative participles in Italian and in the southern Italian-Romance varieties

This is the accepted manuscript. The final version is available at http://www.cairn.info/revue-langages-2014-2-page-63.htm

Psychophysical correlates of global motion processing in the aging visual system: a critical review

The consequences of visual decline in aging have a fundamental and wide-reaching impact on age-related quality of life. It is of concern therefore that evidence suggests that normal aging is accompanied by impairments in the ability to effectively encode global motion. Global motion perception is a fundamentally important process. It enables us to determine the overall velocity of spatially extensive objects in the world and provides us with information about our own body movements. Here, we review what is currently known about the effects of age on performance for encoding the global motion information available in random dot kinematograms (RDKs), a class of stimuli widely used to probe the mechanisms underlying motion perception. We conclude that age-related deficits in global motion perception are not all encompassing. Rather, they appear to be specific to certain stimulus conditions. We also examine evidence for an interaction between age and gender and consider the efficacy of techniques such as visual perceptual learning that may attenuate some of the visual deficits in the older adult population

The role of contrast sensitivity in global motion processing deficits in the elderly

This study compared the effects of age on the perception of translational, radial, and rotational global motion patterns. Motion coherence thresholds were measured for judging the direction of each motion type as a function of contrast (visibility) and temporal sampling rate in young and elderly participants. Coherence thresholds decreased as dot contrast increased asymptoting at high dot contrasts but were higher in elderly compared to young participants. This equated to global motion impairment in the elderly of a factor of around 2, characterized by a shift of the threshold vs. contrast function along the horizontal axes (dot contrast). The effect of contrast interacted with the temporal sampling rate. Old participants were deleteriously affected by reduced temporal sampling particularly at low contrasts. The findings suggest that age- related changes in global motion perception may be driven principally by deficits in contrast encoding, rather than by deficits in motion integration and suggest a role for increased internal noise in the older visual system

Binocular summation of second-order global motion signals in human vision

Although many studies have examined the principles governing first-order global motion perception, the mechanisms that mediate second-order global motion perception remain unresolved. This study investigated the existence, nature and extent of the binocular advantage for encoding second-order (contrast-defined) global motion. Motion coherence thresholds (79.4 % correct) were assessed for determining the direction of radial, rotational and translational second-order motion trajectories as a function of local element modulation depth (contrast) under monocular and binocular viewing conditions. We found a binocular advantage for second-order global motion processing for all motion types. This advantage was mainly one of enhanced modulation sensitivity, rather than of motion-integration. However, compared to findings for first-order motion where the binocular advantage was in the region of a factor of around 1.7 [Hess et al., 2007, Vision Research 47, 1682-1692 & the present study], the binocular advantage for second-order global 2 motion was marginal, being in the region of around 1.2. This weak enhancement in sensitivity with binocular viewing is considerably less than would be predicted by conventional models of either probability summation or neural summation

The influence of spatial pattern on visual short-term memory for contrast

Several psychophysical studies of visual short-term memory (VSTM) have shown high-fidelity storage capacity for many properties of visual stimuli. On judgments of the spatial frequency of gratings, for example, discrimination performance does not decrease significantly, even for memory intervals of up to 30 s. For other properties, such as stimulus orientation and contrast, however, such “perfect storage” behavior is not found, although the reasons for this difference remain unresolved. Here, we report two experiments in which we investigated the nature of the representation of stimulus contrast in VSTM using spatially complex, two-dimensional random-noise stimuli. We addressed whether information about contrast per se is retained during the memory interval by using a test stimulus with the same spatial structure but either the same or the opposite local contrast polarity, with respect to the comparison (i.e., remembered) stimulus. We found that discrimination thresholds got steadily worse with increasing duration of the memory interval. Furthermore, performance was better when the test and comparison stimuli had the same local contrast polarity than when they were contrast-reversed. Finally, when a noise mask was introduced during the memory interval, its disruptive effect was maximal when the spatial configuration of its constituent elements was uncorrelated with those of the comparison and test stimuli. These results suggest that VSTMfor contrast is closely tied to the spatial configuration of stimuli and is not transformed into a more abstract representation

GreekLex 2: a comprehensive lexical database with part-of-speech, syllabic, phonological, and stress information

Databases containing lexical properties on any given orthography are crucial for psycholinguistic research. In the last ten years, a number of lexical databases have been developed for Greek. However, these lack important part-of-speech information. Furthermore, the need for alternative procedures for calculating syllabic measurements and stress information, as well as combination of several metrics to investigate linguistic properties of the Greek language are highlighted. To address these issues, we present a new extensive lexical database of Modern Greek (GreekLex 2) with part-of-speech information for each word and accurate syllabification and orthographic information predictive of stress, as well as several measurements of word similarity and phonetic information. The addition of detailed statistical information about Greek part-of-speech, syllabification, and stress neighbourhood allowed novel analyses of stress distribution within different grammatical categories and syllabic lengths to be carried out. Results showed that the statistical preponderance of stress position on the pre-final syllable that is reported for Greek language is dependent upon grammatical category. Additionally, analyses showed that a proportion higher than 90% of the tokens in the database would be stressed correctly solely by relying on stress neighbourhood information. The database and the scripts for orthographic and phonological syllabification as well as phonetic transcription are available at http://www.psychology.nottingham.ac.uk/greeklex/