Does headedness affect processing? A new look at the VO–OV contrast

Research on subject-verb agreement production in SVO languages has shown that objects moved pre-verbally sometimes trigger attraction, i.e., erroneous agreement of the verb with the object rather than the subject. Moreover, objects c-commanding one of the agreement positions in the hierarchical structure were found to generate stronger attraction than those linearly preceding them. Evidence for the role of c-command comes from the observation that the accusative clitic in French triggers stronger attraction than the preverbal dative pronoun and the PP modifier (Franck et al. 2006; 2010). In this study, we report the results of an experiment in Persian (an SOV language) in which subject–verb agreement was elicited by presenting sentences in Rapid Serial Visual Presentation procedure (RSVP) followed by verb selection (Staub 2009; 2010). We compared attraction errors induced by pre-verbal accusatives versus datives in the canonical SOV word order as well as the OSV word order. Corroborating Franck et al. (2006; 2010), we found stronger attraction when the pre-verbal object occupies a c-commanding position in the hierarchical structure than when it simply precedes one of the agreement positions in the linear string. We also found stronger attraction in the OSV word order as compared to the canonical SOV word order. This finding is attributed to the real-time processes of erroneous structure building and/or erroneous controller selection during subject-verb agreement computation.

Question Answering is an important aspect of language processing. While much research has been done for other languages, low-resourced languages such as Swahili have not been studied much, despite it being an important language spoken in East Africa. Due to lack of language resources, we rely on syntactic analysis of raw text to create rules that extract Subject-Predict-Object to then create a semantic network of Swahili, since Swahili is Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) language. We then use SPARQL to query the network. We got our test corpus from public websites with Swahili Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) and some Swahili reading comprehension story books. Results for story books show that the semantic network can correctly answer on average three of the five set questions for each sample text. Shortcomings of our method is mainly related to inadequacies of preprocessing tools, where further research is needed. Our method should be applicable in creating networks for any low-resourced language that follows the SVO language pattern, which can then be queried.

Search, Structure or Statistics? A Comparative Study of Memoryless Heuristics for Syntax Acquisition William Gregory Sakas (sakas@hunter.cuny.edu) Department of Computer Science, Hunter College, CUNY Ph.D. Programs in Linguistics and Computer Science, The Graduate Center, CUNY 695 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10021 USA Eiji N ishimoto (enishimoto@gc.cuny.edu) Ph.D. Program in Linguistics, The Graduate Center, CUNY 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016 USA Abstract Although several studies propose computational models of tlie process by which children acquire the syntax of their native language, most focus on a single algorithm applied in a single domain. Typically, the focus is learnability — under what conditions an algorithm can or cannot acquire the grammar of the target (native) language. Here, we present a comparative study of 12 algorithmic heuristics that are run in a domain that consists of 16 abstract languages each generated by a dijferent grammar specified in Chomsky’s principles and parameters fiamework. The heuristics consist of botl1 those used in previously established models and new variations that we introduce. In contrast to a leamability study, our focus is feasibility — how much time and/or eifort is required to achieve the target grammar. We find that the best heuristics make use of structural information obtained by parsing input sentences during the course of learning, that the performance of statistically- based heuristics are next in line, and finally, that heuristics that make use of hill-climbing search and a simple can-parse/can’t- parse outcome from the parsing mechanism perform least well. Background Principles and Parameters Chomsky (1981 and elsewhere) has proposed that all natural languages share the same innate universal principles (Universal Grammar - UG) and differ only with respect to the settings of a finite number of (binary) parameters. For example, all languages have a subject of some sort, but whether a language's grammar dictates that the subject must be overt is determined by the setting of the null subject parameter. The null subject parameter is set ofl ir1 English and on m Spanish. The syntactic component of a grammar m the principles and parameters (PP Briscoe, 2000; Clark, 1992; Fodor, 1998a; Gibson & Wexler, 1994; Yang, 2000; among others), and although it has proved linguistically fiuitfiil to construct parametric analyses, it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to construct a workable model of parametric syntax acquisition. Parametric Ambiguity and the Need for Heuristics A sentence is parametrically ambiguous if it is licensed by two or more distinct combinations of parameter values. Parametric ambiguity is rampant ir1 natural language. For example, a sequence of the form Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) is parametrically ambiguous between underlying SVO order as in English, and verb second (V2) order as m German.1 Although SVO sentences can be parsed by either grammar, the derivations will be different due to the different parameter settings. By contrast, a VOS sentence is not parametrically ambiguous with respect to the V2 parameter. It can be licensed only by the -V2 value (since the second token is not a verb or auxiliary). Ambiguity is a natural enemy of efficient language acquisition. The key problem is that, due to ambiguity, there does not exist a one-to-one correspondence between the linear left-to- right word order of an input sequence and the correct parameter values for the target grammar (as described above for an SVO sentence with respect to + or -V2). So, even if the learner hypothesizes parameter values which license the single, current input sentence, those values may ultimately be incorrect for Gag. In the face of parametric ambiguity, efficient search heuristics must be employed to guide the learner towards the target grammar as sentences are progressively consumed by the learner. The remainder of the paper presents a comparative study of 12 search heuristics that are incorporated into current parameter- setting models of language acquisition. Overview A Measure of Feasibility As a simple example of a learning heuristic and of our simulation approach, consider a domain of 4 parameters and a memoryless 1 See Appendix for the linguistic details of how we implement the V2 parameter.

Reviewed by: Perspectives on Arabic linguistics: Papers from the annual symposia on Arabic linguistics, vol. XXII–XXIII: College Park, Maryland, 2008 and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 2009 Janet C. E. Watson Perspectives on Arabic linguistics: Papers from the annual symposia on Arabic linguistics, vol. XXII–XXIII: College Park, Maryland, 2008 and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 2009. Ed. by Ellen Broselow and Hamid Ouali. (Current issues in linguistic theory 317.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011. Pp. xxviii, 295. $165 (Hb). Within the series of peer-reviewed proceedings resulting from the Arabic Linguistics Society meetings, this volume brings together papers on Arabic phonetics and phonology, morphology and syntax, and language acquisition, learning, and contact. Part of its aim is also to showcase the contribution of Arabic linguistics to research on linguistics in general. Facts from Arabic and traditional approaches to Arabic linguistics have played an increasingly significant role in the testing and development of linguistic theory: the index of the Handbook of phonological theory (Goldsmith et al. 2011), for example, lists forty-two references to Arabic as opposed to twenty-nine for French, twenty-two for German, and twenty-eight for American English. Arabic data have contributed significantly to theoretical work in all major areas of linguistics: within phonology and phonetics, the rich set of postvelar consonants raised issues of local and long-distance harmony domains, and the articulatory, acoustic, and auditory correlates of what has traditionally been known as ‘emphasis’; Arabic nonconcatenative word formation has been crucial in the development of templatic morphology, and in recent years raised the question of whether the apparent root-and-pattern morphology of Arabic (and other Semitic languages) is really so different from (more standard) linear morphology; verbless nominal clauses, word order, and the sensitivity of agreement in Standard Arabic to the relative position of the subject and verb have prompted many solutions within generative and functionalist syntax; the interplay within the Arab world of different language registers has stimulated research on the effects of diglossia, language contact, and language change; and the degree of variation exhibited particularly within phonological systems across the Arab world has led to considerable research on the patterns and typology of word stress and syllabification within various phonological paradigms. The volume begins with a state-of-the-art introduction to the compilation, the role of Arabic within linguistic theory, and current trends in Arabic linguistics. The papers on phonetics and phonology in Part 1 deal with word stress and language processing (Rajaa Aquil), voicing assimilation (Rawiah S. Kabrah), the phonology-syntax interface and phrasal syncope (Mahasen Hasan Abu-Mansour), and intonation (Dina El Zarka). The papers on morphology and syntax in Part 2 examine mood (Tommi Leung), agreement, ‘Pro drop’ and reciprocal expressions (Abdelkader [End Page 896] Fassi Fehri), Palestinian comparatives (Yaron McNabb and Christopher Kennedy), the analysis of kan in Moroccan Arabic (Nizha Chater-Moumni), and the split-CP hypothesis (Murtadha J. Bakir). The papers on language acquisition, learning, and contact in Part 3 focus on aspects of language contact (Mary Ann Walter), voice onset time (VOT) production in Arabic-English bilingual children (Eman Saadah), phonological processing in a diglossic environment (Elinor Saiegh-Haddad), and the acquisition of SVO and VSO word order (Reem Khamis-Dakwar). I consider a selection of these papers here. In Part 1, Rajaa Aquil’s paper describes an empirical ‘word spotting’ study used to test the claim that Cairene Arabic (CA) is a stress-timed language. This paper examines the extent to which native speakers of CA are able to spot attested CA words within nonsense words. In the experiment, CA words of the structure CVCC were embedded in nonsense words followed by weak syllable (SW), followed by stressed syllable (SS), and followed by epenthetic vowel then stressed syllable (SwS). The CA word occupies the stressed syllable of the nonsense word only in the case of SW. The results show processing is significantly quicker when a CA word is followed by a weak syllable than when followed by a stressed syllable...

Models of language processing assume that the cognitive cost to integrate a noun with a verb depends on the distance between the noun and the verb. Such models predict that subjects require more cognitive effort than objects in SOV languages, such as Japanese. This study tests that prediction by investigating apparent cognitive effort differences in topic, nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, and predicative noun usage, using two corpora of spoken Japanese. A cognitive effort index score was determined for each text in the two corpora. The correlations between index scores and usage rates for each grammatical role were determined. Accusative, dative, and genitive noun usage significantly correlated with cognitive effort index scores, but topic, nominative, and predicate noun usage rates did not. These results suggest that the cognitive cost of noun integration depends not only on distance but also on the grammatical role of the noun.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of structured story reading intervention, Story reTelling and higher order thinking for English Language and Literacy Acquisition (STELLA), delivered to 38 Hispanic English language learners (ELL) placed in an enhanced transitional bilingual programme over 2 years from first to second grade as compared with 34 control students placed in a typical practice transitional bilingual programme during the same time period. Both treatment and comparison ELL students' retellings of two stories in Spanish and English were measured by five story elements. Findings were that (a) students receiving intervention outperformed their comparison peers in all five story elements in English and Spanish of both stories; (b) students showed stronger ability in their native language in four of five story elements; and (c) students performed at a higher level in the narrative‐informational story than a narrative story in both languages. Educational implications are discussed.

First paragraph: MacDonald (2013) proposes that distributional properties of language and processing biases in language comprehension can to a large extent be attributed to consequences of the language production process. In essence, the account is derived from the principle of least effort that was formulated by Zipf, among others (Zipf, 1949; Levelt, 2013). However, in Zipf's view the outcome of the least effort principle was a compromise between least effort for the speaker and least effort for the listener, whereas MacDonald puts most of the burden on the production process.

The article deals with the problem of master students’ competence for speech production on the topic of their scientific work when they are completing the first year of masters’ courses and at the final stage of learning the English language as a second language. The objective of the paper is to find out the level of readiness to produce utterances in English in the professional context concerning master’s scientific work, to analyse the ability to explain the objective of the work and to demonstrate theoretical background in the second language. In the study, 116 masters’ students of four different masters’ courses (radio electronics, environmental safety, technological machinery and design) were asked to complete a survey concerning the topic, purpose and theoretical foundations of their future thesis. As a result of written statements analysis, it was revealed that despite numerous grammar mistakes (word order, use of grammar tenses, etc.) and spelling, the majority of students are able to formulate the topic of their work. 76% of test persons can clearly formulate the objectives of their work in the second language, while a quarter of the students confuse it with the object or the result of the study. Only 3% of students can explain in English which theories and scientific works are used in their research projects. That is why an integrated approach to teaching English is needed to improve the ability of masters’ students to produce professional speech for future successful communication in their professional field.

Form-oriented inflectional errors in language processing

Cross-lingual text classification (CLTC) refers to the task of classifying documents in different languages into the same taxonomy of categories. An open challenge in CLTC is to classify documents for the languages where labeled training data are not available. Existing approaches rely on the availability of either high-quality machine translation of documents (to the languages where massively training data are available), or rich bilingual dictionaries for effective translation of trained classification models (to the languages where labeled training data are lacking). This paper studies the CLTC challenge under the assumption that neither condition is met. That is, we focus on the problem of translating classification models with highly incomplete bilingual dictionaries. Specifically, we propose two new approaches that combines unsupervised word embedding in different languages, supervised mapping of embedded words across languages, and probabilistic translation of classification models. The approaches show significant performance improvement in CLTC on a benchmark corpus of Reuters news stories (RCV1/RCV2) in English, Spanish, German, French and Chinese and an internal dataset in Uzbek, compared to representative baseline methods using conventional bilingual dictionaries or highly incomplete ones.

OPINION article Front. Hum. Neurosci., 01 June 2016Sec. Speech and Language Volume 10 - 2016 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00249

The question that is addressed in this contribution is: to what extent does the language production mechanism in children differ from that in competent adult speakers? It is assumed that utterance planning in adults is a hierarchical process, in which relatively autonomous processing components successively build conceptual, syntactic and phonological representations. Each component of the production system, however, makes use of the same basic processing algorithm, the so-called frame-and-filler mechanism. The developmental question can thus be rephrased as follows: (a) Do the representations constructed at the various levels change as a function of age? (b) Do the basic planning algorithms change? Three longitudinal studies of spontaneous speech production in 1.5 to 4-year-old children are reviewed. The first study presented a child in which the transition from telegraphic speech to a morpho-syntactically more mature type of language use led to a temporary increase in speech disfluency (interruptions, repetitions, self-corrections etc.). It is argued that the disfluency peak reflects a re-arrangement of syntactic planning, which is necessitated by the development of the child's morpho-syntactic knowledge. The second study compared slips of the tongue in adults and children, particularly word and sound substitutions. Basically, the patterns found were similar for adults and children. Not only in the adults, but also in the children the linguistic elements that interact in speech errors are inherently or contextually similar. This suggests that the frame-and-filler mechanism is developmentally invariant. The third study investigated the optional realization of metrically weak syllables and morphemes in children's utterances. The results indicate that this phenomenon can be related to a constraint on phonological planning frames, viz. that only trochaeic feet are allowed. The conclusion that can be drawn from this review is that in the development of language production, the representations (planning frames) change, but the planning algorithms remain essentially the same.

Language interventions are complex behavioural interventions, making it difficult to distinguish the specific factors contributing to efficacy. The efficacy of oral language comprehension interventions varies greatly, but the reasons for this have received little attention. The aim of this meta-analysis was to examine which intervention factors are associated with efficacy (as expressed with effect sizes) regarding interventions aiming to improve oral language comprehension on its own, or together with expressive language, in children under the age of 18 with or at risk for (developmental) language disorder-(D)LD. Whether the interventions for younger and older children differ from one another regarding efficacy or factors possibly associated with efficacy were also examined. Studies (n = 46) were identified through two systematic scoping reviews. Factors associated with efficacy were categorized according to the internal characteristics of the intervention as well as factors external to the intervention. Statistical analyses were conducted to examine the association between these factors and intervention efficacy as represented by effect sizes on oral language comprehension outcome measures. Targeting language, language environment or compensatory strategies indicated efficacy, whereas aiming to improve language processing indicated no clinically significant efficacy. Targeting only receptive language was associated with larger effect sizes than targeting both receptive and expressive language. The interventions for younger (2-7 years) and older (8-13 years) children indicated a similar degree of efficacy, but the way in which these results were achieved varied, as comprehension interventions for younger and older children differed from one another. Many factors associated with effect sizes were also associated with each other making interpretation of the results complex. These indicative results suggest that it is not reasonable to target language processing, such as auditory processing or automatization, when aiming to improve oral language comprehension. Targeting receptive language only rather than both receptive and expressive language seems preferable to maximize efficacy when aiming to support solely oral language comprehension instead of targeting both expression and comprehension. The qualitative active ingredients of treatment appear to be more important than the number of intervention hours. Although children of different ages can benefit from interventions to enhance oral language comprehension, the child's age needs to be carefully considered to develop interventions that are optimal. Further research with larger data sets regarding factors contributing to efficacy is still needed before applying these results confidently to clinical practice. What is already known on this subject Little is known about the specific intervention factors associated with efficacy of comprehension interventions, and whether these differ between children of different ages. To be able to choose and create optimal comprehension interventions, a better understanding of the mechanisms of change is needed. What this paper adds to the existing knowledge The results indicate that oral comprehension skills of children aged 2-13 years with or at risk for (D)LD can be supported. Targeting language processing, such as auditory processing or automatization, does not seem reasonable when aiming to support oral comprehension. Rather, the interventions should target children's language skills related to comprehension, their language environment or provide children with compensatory strategies. The types of interventions used with younger and older children differed, such that those used with older children were more targeted, adult-directed, applied in formal activities, as well as used taught strategies and more explicit methods of instruction. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? When developing interventions for oral language comprehension, the child's age needs to be considered. Further, what is targeted in an intervention in relation to the aim of the intervention needs careful consideration. The content of the intervention (therapeutic dose form) appears to have precedence over the amount of intervention.

The Neurocognition of Language Production: Introduction to the Special Topic

This study assessed the relationships among various language processing and production abilities of 32 learning disabled adolescents. Kendall rank correlation coefficients indicated that 1 chronological age correlated negatively with performance on three of the language tests, and 2 WISC Verbal IQs correlated positively with performance on all but one of the language processing subtests and with performance on two of the language production subtests: Performance on the various language processing subtests tended to correlate positively with each other and negatively with performance on language production subtests. Measures of the accuracy of responses on the language production subtests generally correlated positively with each other and negatively with measures of speed of retrieval. These findings suggest that the learning disabled adolescents had reached a performance plateau and that developmental factors no longer produced an increase in their language abilities. They also suggest the presence of at least two distinct language deficit syndromes within the learning disabled population. These are: 1 cognitive-linguistic processing deficits characterized by reductions in morphology and syntax and in the comprehension of linguistic concepts and 2 “dysnomia” characterized by verbal paraphasias and word finding and retrieval deficits.