Structures Formelles du Langage

Abstract This study investigates incremental processing of subject and object relatives in Italian by comparing two experimental paradigms. Previous research has shown that object relatives are more difficult to process than subject relatives, but the source and timing of this object disadvantage remain debated. Two experiments were conducted using the same linguistic stimuli. Experiment 1 employed a novel mixed design: a lexical maze task for the relative clause combined with a self-paced reading task for the matrix clause. Experiment 2 used a self-paced reading paradigm. Results confirmed a disadvantage for object relatives across both tasks. Critically, the modified maze task revealed that this difficulty emerges immediately after the complementizer and persists in later regions, a finding that was not evident in the self-paced reading task or in previous maze task studies. This shows the greater temporal resolution of the maze paradigm for identifying the locus of syntactic difficulty in incremental processing. Although frequency-based surprisal and memory-based integration accounts explain portions of data, we consider two approaches that can offer a unified account for both early and late effects: an extension of featural relativized minimality and the cue-based retrieval account. We conclude by indicating how future research can disentangle the two accounts.

RiComprendo was designed as a comprehensive tool to evaluate comprehension of various syntactic structures with a sentence-to-picture matching-task. The study sets normative data and investigates the influence of demographic characteristics and sentence types. Two-hundred-ten right-handed healthy Italian native speakers were included. RiComprendo was administered via E-Prime, collecting both accuracy and response time (RTs) data. Adjusted scores for age and education and equivalent scores for each sentence type (i.e., simple active sentences, passives, peripheral and center-embedded subject and object relatives, and coordination) were computed. The effect of sentence type, age and education on accuracy and RTs was investigated through generalized linear mixed models. Item difficulty was tested with an Item Response Theory (IRT) model. Normative data and a spreadsheet for scores automatic computation are provided. The mixed models identified a significant impact of sentence type both on accuracy and RTs. Simple sentences presented high accuracy, while the worst performance was found with center-embedded object relatives. Higher education was significantly associated with better accuracy, while older age was associated with longer RTs and with a marginally negative effect on accuracy. Sentence comprehension is influenced by structural complexity and demographic characteristics (age and education). Providing normative data for different sentence types, RiComprendo enables the evaluation of effects of specific syntactic properties (i.e., canonicity, number of clauses, filler-gap dependencies, intervention, center-embedding). RiComprendo could serve as a valuable tool for testing the comprehension of complex sentences in research and clinical settings, informing in-depth functional assessment and tailored intervention.

Our study investigates the role of vowel duration as a cue for focus marking in both L1 and L2 Italian and French. We aim to compare our data to highlight potential influences of the native language on L2 productions in the use of this cue. The analysis involves task-elicited speech from 60 partici- pants: 15 native Italian speakers, 15 native French speakers, 15 French learners of Italian (L2), and 15 Italian learners of French (L2). Participants produced the same target constituent under four information-structural conditions: background, broad fo- cus, identification focus, and correction focus. Results reveal that the information-structural function significantly influences stressed vowel duration in native Italian, with identification- focus and correction-focus constituents bearing longer duration than background and broad focus. However, the same pattern does not hold in native French. Crucially, this distinction is mirrored in the production of non-native speakers. While Italian learners of L2 French, in fact, modulate duration based on the informational role of the constituent, French learners of Italian L2 do not. We discuss these findings in relation to previous find- ings on other prosodic and syntactic markers of focus. Results are commented in light of typological differences in discourse- prominence marking and theories of L2 prosody acquisition.

Abstract Gender inclusive writing, a term that refers to a wide range of feminist linguistic practices aimed at reducing linguistic androcentrism, has been the topic of heated debates in France. Recent experimental studies have investigated its interpretation and showed that inclusive forms with the point médian (“étudiant·e·s”) and repetition (“étudiants et étudiantes”) feminize participants’ mental representations compared to the generic masculine (“étudiants”). In this article, we bring novel results from three experiments investigating the interpretation of these two inclusive forms in a more detailed context (university brochures). We find that the point médian is subject to “context dilution” effects: its meaning disappears in rich contexts, while repetition consistently changes readers’ mental representations, provided it is used systematically. We argue that our results show the necessity of looking at more ecological contexts in experimental (socio)linguistics for understanding the interpretation and processing of socially important linguistic variants.

The assumption that Portuguese stress is weight-sensitive is supported by strong arguments. However, oxytones ending with open syllables remain a major problem for this claim, unless vowels can be independently proved to be heavy without being long. It will be seen how the behaviour of /Vr/-rhymes in European Portuguese, which is not satisfactorily accounted for by standard models, shows that weight and length are distinct aspects, and solves the problem of oxytones. The price to be paid is a theory of phonological representations in which sonority is based on structure, not on features.

International audience

Gender inclusive writing, a term that refers to a wide range of feminist linguistic practices aimed at reducing linguistic androcentrism, has been the topic of heated debates in France. Recent experimental studies have investigated its interpretation and showed that inclusive forms with the point médian (“étudiant·e·s”) and repetition (“étudiants et étudiantes”) feminize participants’ mental representations compared to the generic masculine (“étudiants”). In this paper, we bring novel results from three experiments investigating the interpretation of these two inclusive forms in a more detailed context (university brochures). We find that the point médian is subject to “context dilution” effects: its meaning disappears in rich contexts, while repetition consistently changes readers’ mental representations, provided it is used systematically. We argue that our results show the necessity of looking at more ecological contexts in experimental (socio)linguistics for understanding the interpretation and processing of socially important linguistic variants.

Transitive softening in Russian is a type of consonant mutation resulting from an underlying [CjV] cluster. There exist two closed classes of verbs where it occurs in the present tense in the absence of a clear source for a glide: five verbs with the thematic suffix ‑o‑, which can be illustrated by the verb kolótʲ ‘to stab’, and some 100 verbs with the thematic suffix ‑a‑, which can be illustrated by the verb pisátʲ ‘to write’. To explain how [o] and [a] end up as glides, I propose that the vowels in question change into their front counterparts as a result of the same process as that responsible for the stem ablaut in the verb molótʲ ‘to grind’ (1sg: melʲú). I argue that the hypothesis that ablaut can apply to thematic vowels as well as to stems makes it possible to account for another Russian verb exhibiting an unexpected behavior in the present tense (revétʲ ‘to bellow’). Since the latter part of the argument introduces ablauts involving more than one feature, the remainder of the paper is dedicated to the discussion of how multiple feature changes should be formalized.

Les possibilités grandissantes pour la recherche en langues de spécialité confrontent les terminologues à des données de plus en plus vastes et hétérogènes, un contexte où les outils prêts à l'emploi s’avèrent insuffisants. Ce travail examine le potentiel de R, un langage de programmation populaire, pour analyser des corpus spécialisés complexes. Dans cet article, nous montrons comment identifier des indices de variation diastratique, phénomène compris ici comme la coexistence de différents usages linguistiques parmi des communautés d’experts d’un même domaine. Puisque l’un des points forts de R est sa capacité de s’adapter tant aux techniques des statistiques qu’à celles de l’apprentissage automatique, chacune de ces deux sphères fait l’objet d’une série de tests : l’une plonge dans la technique de l’analyse factorielle des correspondances, alors que l’autre s’appuie sur la sémantique distributionnelle. Nos exemples permettent d’alimenter la réflexion sur les possibilités offertes par différents outils gratuits et courants pour l’analyse terminologique. Notre démarche fait en particulier ressortir un besoin de formation des terminologues aux méthodes statistiques ou de collaboration étroite avec d’autres spécialistes de ces approches.