Stress “Deafness” Reveals Absence of Lexical Marking of Stress or Tone in the Adult Grammar

A Sequence Recall Task with disyllabic stimuli contrasting either for the location of prosodic prominence or for the medial consonant was administered to 150 subjects equally divided over five language groups. Scores showed a significant interaction between type of contrast and language group, such that groups did not differ on their performance on the consonant contrast, while two language groups, Dutch and Japanese, significantly outperformed the three other language groups (French, Indonesian and Persian) on the prosodic contrast. Since only Dutch and Japanese words have unpredictable stress or accent locations, the results are interpreted to mean that stress “deafness” is a property of speakers of languages without lexical stress or tone markings, as opposed to the presence of stress or accent contrasts in phrasal (post-lexical) constructions. Moreover, the degree of transparency between the locations of stress/tone and word boundaries did not appear to affect our results, despite earlier claims that this should have an effect. This finding is of significance for speech processing, language acquisition and phonological theory.     

Wordhood and the interplay of linguistic levels in synthetic languages. An empirical study on Wichi (Mataguayan,Gran Chaco)

On the basis of data from the synthetic and agglutinative South American language Wichi (Mataguayan, Argentina/Bolivia), I argue in favor of regarding interface phenomena as typological variables. In particular, in this paper I discuss what type of interactions these are, arguing that they do not affect wordhood but do contribute to its formation. I will defend the hypothesis that linguistic level interactions within the word are of two types and different in nature: overlapping on the one hand and conditioning and alteration on the other. Conditioning only takes place in morphophonological and morphosemantic interactions and it follows the wordhood requirements of the language. Conversely, the interaction of morphology with all linguistic levels shows overlapping of units: the phonological word and the grammatical word in the morphophonological relation; the word and the simple clause or nominal phrase in the morphosyntactic relation; and the word and the semantic unit in the morphosemantic relation. This explains why the word is generally defined by phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic criteria. It is to be hoped that the conclusions arrived at in this paper would contribute to deepen our knowledge of the notion of wordhood in synthetic languages in South America as well as our understanding of language structure and functioning.     

Phonological,grammatical, and written words in Wichi

This article aims at investigating the linguistic criteria to determine what a word is in Wichi (Matacoan), a polysynthetic and agglutinative language spoken in the Gran Chaco Region, in South America. The main phonological criteria proposed are phonological rules and stress. We also apply some grammatical criteria that have been proposed cross linguistically, some of which are useful to determine the boundaries of grammatical words in Wichi. Finally, we explore the relationship between the phonological and grammatical word with the written word. We base our analysis of written words on a textbook (Tsalanawu) used in many bilingual schools in Northeastern Argentina.     

Mental lexicon and derivational rules

Lexical decision task in an event-related potential experiment was used in order to determine the organization of mental lexicon regarding the polimorphemic words: are they stored as unanalyzable items or as separate morphemes? The results indicate the later: while monomorphemic words elicit N400 component, usually related to lexical-semantic processing, prefixed words and prefixed pseudo-words elicit left anterior negativity (LAN), usually related to grammatical (morphosyntactic) processes. These components indicate that the speakers apply grammatical (i.e., word-formation) rules and combine morphemes in order to obtain lexical meaning of the prefixed word.     

A “Bat” Is Easier to Learn than a “Tab”: Effects of Relative Phonotactic Frequency on Infant Word Learning

Many studies have shown that during the first year of life infants start learning the prosodic, phonetic and phonotactic properties of their native language. In parallel, infants start associating sound sequences with semantic representations. However, the question of how these two processes interact remains largely unknown. The current study explores whether (and when) the relative phonotactic probability of a sound sequence in the native language has an impact on infants’ word learning. We exploit the fact that Labial-Coronal (LC) words are more frequent than Coronal-Labial (CL) words in French, and that French-learning infants prefer LC over CL sequences at 10 months of age, to explore the possibility that LC structures might be learned more easily and thus at an earlier age than CL structures. Eye movements of French-learning 14- and 16-month-olds were recorded while they watched animated cartoons in a word learning task. The experiment involved four trials testing LC sequences and four trials testing CL sequences. Our data reveal that 16-month-olds were able to learn the LC and CL words, while14-month-olds were only able to learn the LC words, which are the words with the more frequent phonotactic pattern. The present results provide evidence that infants’ knowledge of their native language phonotactic patterns influences their word learning: Words with a frequent phonotactic structure could be acquired at an earlier age than those with a lower probability. Developmental changes are discussed and integrated with previous findings.     

Word Formation Is Aware of Morpheme Family Size

Words are built from smaller meaning bearing parts, called morphemes. As one word can contain multiple morphemes, one morpheme can be present in different words. The number of distinct words a morpheme can be found in is its family size. Here we used Birth-Death-Innovation Models (BDIMs) to analyze the distribution of morpheme family sizes in English and German vocabulary over the last 200 years. Rather than just fitting to a probability distribution, these mechanistic models allow for the direct interpretation of identified parameters. Despite the complexity of language change, we indeed found that a specific variant of this pure stochastic model, the second order linear balanced BDIM, significantly fitted the observed distributions. In this model, birth and death rates are increased for smaller morpheme families. This finding indicates an influence of morpheme family sizes on vocabulary changes. This could be an effect of word formation, perception or both. On a more general level, we give an example on how mechanistic models can enable the identification of statistical trends in language change usually hidden by cultural influences.     

Connectivity,Not Frequency,Determines the Fate of a Morpheme

Morphemes are the smallest meaningful parts of words and therefore represent a natural unit to study the evolution of words. To analyze the influence of language change on morphemes, we performed a large scale analysis of German and English vocabulary covering the last 200 years. Using a network approach from bioinformatics, we examined the historical dynamics of morphemes, the fixation of new morphemes and the emergence of words containing existing morphemes. We found that these processes are driven mainly by the number of different direct neighbors of a morpheme in words (connectivity, an equivalent to family size or type frequency) and not its frequency of usage (equivalent to token frequency). This contrasts words, whose survival is determined by their frequency of usage. We therefore identified features of morphemes which are not dictated by the statistical properties of words. As morphemes are also relevant for the mental representation of words, this result might enable establishing a link between an individual’s perception of language and historical language change.     

Memory in the neonate brain

Background

The capacity to memorize speech sounds is crucial for language acquisition. Newborn human infants can discriminate phonetic contrasts and extract rhythm, prosodic information, and simple regularities from speech. Yet, there is scarce evidence that infants can recognize common words from the surrounding language before four months of age.

Methodology/Principal Findings

We studied one hundred and twelve 1-5 day-old infants, using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). We found that newborns tested with a novel bisyllabic word show greater hemodynamic brain response than newborns tested with a familiar bisyllabic word. We showed that newborns recognize the familiar word after two minutes of silence or after hearing music, but not after hearing a different word.

Conclusions/Significance

The data show that retroactive interference is an important cause of forgetting in the early stages of language acquisition. Moreover, because neonates forget words in the presence of some –but not all– sounds, the results indicate that the interference phenomenon that causes forgetting is selective.     

Gestural coordination at prosodic boundaries and its role for prosodic structure and speech planning processes

Prosodic structure is a grammatical component that serves multiple functions in the production, comprehension and acquisition of language. Prosodic boundaries are critical for the understanding of the nature of the prosodic structure of language, and important progress has been made in the past decades in illuminating their properties. We first review recent prosodic boundary research from the point of view of gestural coordination. We then go on to tie in this work to questions of speech planning and manual and head movement. We conclude with an outline of a new direction of research which is needed for a full understanding of prosodic boundaries and their role in the speech production process.     

When Correction Turns Positive: Processing Corrective Prosody in Dutch

Current research on spoken language does not provide a consistent picture as to whether prosody, the melody and rhythm of speech, conveys a specific meaning. Perception studies show that English listeners assign meaning to prosodic patterns, and, for instance, associate some accents with contrast, whereas Dutch listeners behave more controversially. In two ERP studies we tested how Dutch listeners process words carrying two types of accents, which either provided new information (new information accents) or corrected information (corrective accents), both in single sentences (experiment 1) and after corrective and new information questions (experiment 2). In both experiments corrective accents elicited a sustained positivity as compared to new information accents, which started earlier in context than in single sentences. The positivity was not modulated by the nature of the preceding question, suggesting that the underlying neural mechanism likely reflects the construction of an interpretation to the accented word, either by identifying an alternative in context or by inferring it when no context is present. Our experimental results provide strong evidence for inferential processes related to prosodic contours in Dutch.     

Inner speech during silent reading reflects the reader's regional accent

While reading silently, we often have the subjective experience of inner speech. However, there is currently little evidence regarding whether this inner voice resembles our own voice while we are speaking out loud. To investigate this issue, we compared reading behaviour of Northern and Southern English participants who have differing pronunciations for words like 'glass', in which the vowel duration is short in a Northern accent and long in a Southern accent. Participants' eye movements were monitored while they silently read limericks in which the end words of the first two lines (e.g., glass/class) would be pronounced differently by Northern and Southern participants. The final word of the limerick (e.g., mass/sparse) then either did or did not rhyme, depending on the reader's accent. Results showed disruption to eye movement behaviour when the final word did not rhyme, determined by the reader's accent, suggesting that inner speech resembles our own voice.     

Morphology, language and the brain: the decompositional substrate for language comprehension

This paper outlines a neurocognitive approach to human language, focusing on inflectional morphology and grammatical function in English. Taking as a starting point the selective deficits for regular inflectional morphology of a group of non-fluent patients with left hemisphere damage, we argue for a core decompositional network linking left inferior frontal cortex with superior and middle temporal cortex, connected via the arcuate fasciculus. This network handles the processing of regularly inflected words (such as joined or treats), which are argued not to be stored as whole forms and which require morpho-phonological parsing in order to segment complex forms into stems and inflectional affixes. This parsing process operates early and automatically upon all potential inflected forms and is triggered by their surface phonological properties. The predictions of this model were confirmed in a further neuroimaging study, using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), on unimpaired young adults. The salience of grammatical morphemes for the language system is highlighted by new research showing that similarly early and blind segmentation also operates for derivationally complex forms (such as darkness or rider). These findings are interpreted as evidence for a hidden decompositional substrate to human language processing and related to a functional architecture derived from non-human primate models.     

Language Individuation and Marker Words: Shakespeare and His Maxwell's Demon

Background

Within the structural and grammatical bounds of a common language, all authors develop their own distinctive writing styles. Whether the relative occurrence of common words can be measured to produce accurate models of authorship is of particular interest. This work introduces a new score that helps to highlight such variations in word occurrence, and is applied to produce models of authorship of a large group of plays from the Shakespearean era.

Methodology

A text corpus containing 55,055 unique words was generated from 168 plays from the Shakespearean era (16th and 17th centuries) of undisputed authorship. A new score, CM1, is introduced to measure variation patterns based on the frequency of occurrence of each word for the authors John Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton and William Shakespeare, compared to the rest of the authors in the study (which provides a reference of relative word usage at that time). A total of 50 WEKA methods were applied for Fletcher, Jonson and Middleton, to identify those which were able to produce models yielding over 90% classification accuracy. This ensemble of WEKA methods was then applied to model Shakespearean authorship across all 168 plays, yielding a Matthews'' correlation coefficient (MCC) performance of over 90%. Furthermore, the best model yielded an MCC of 99%.

Conclusions

Our results suggest that different authors, while adhering to the structural and grammatical bounds of a common language, develop measurably distinct styles by the tendency to over-utilise or avoid particular common words and phrasings. Considering language and the potential of words as an abstract chaotic system with a high entropy, similarities can be drawn to the Maxwell''s Demon thought experiment; authors subconsciously favour or filter certain words, modifying the probability profile in ways that could reflect their individuality and style.     

A DNA assembly model of sentence generation

Recent results of corpus-based linguistics demonstrate that context-appropriate sentences can be generated by a stochastic constraint satisfaction process. Exploiting the similarity of constraint satisfaction and DNA self-assembly, we explore a DNA assembly model of sentence generation. The words and phrases in a language corpus are encoded as DNA molecules to build a language model of the corpus. Given a seed word, the new sentences are constructed by a parallel DNA assembly process based on the probability distribution of the word and phrase molecules. Here, we present our DNA code word design and report on successful demonstration of their feasibility in wet DNA experiments of a small scale.     

Do Chinese Readers Follow the National Standard Rules for Word Segmentation during Reading?

We conducted a preliminary study to examine whether Chinese readers’ spontaneous word segmentation processing is consistent with the national standard rules of word segmentation based on the Contemporary Chinese language word segmentation specification for information processing (CCLWSSIP). Participants were asked to segment Chinese sentences into individual words according to their prior knowledge of words. The results showed that Chinese readers did not follow the segmentation rules of the CCLWSSIP, and their word segmentation processing was influenced by the syntactic categories of consecutive words. In many cases, the participants did not consider the auxiliary words, adverbs, adjectives, nouns, verbs, numerals and quantifiers as single word units. Generally, Chinese readers tended to combine function words with content words to form single word units, indicating they were inclined to chunk single words into large information units during word segmentation. Additionally, the “overextension of monosyllable words” hypothesis was tested and it might need to be corrected to some degree, implying that word length have an implicit influence on Chinese readers’ segmentation processing. Implications of these results for models of word recognition and eye movement control are discussed.     

Voice Congruency Facilitates Word Recognition

Behavioral studies of spoken word memory have shown that context congruency facilitates both word and source recognition, though the level at which context exerts its influence remains equivocal. We measured event-related potentials (ERPs) while participants performed both types of recognition task with words spoken in four voices. Two voice parameters (i.e., gender and accent) varied between speakers, with the possibility that none, one or two of these parameters was congruent between study and test. Results indicated that reinstating the study voice at test facilitated both word and source recognition, compared to similar or no context congruency at test. Behavioral effects were paralleled by two ERP modulations. First, in the word recognition test, the left parietal old/new effect showed a positive deflection reflective of context congruency between study and test words. Namely, the same speaker condition provided the most positive deflection of all correctly identified old words. In the source recognition test, a right frontal positivity was found for the same speaker condition compared to the different speaker conditions, regardless of response success. Taken together, the results of this study suggest that the benefit of context congruency is reflected behaviorally and in ERP modulations traditionally associated with recognition memory.     

An fMRI Study of Grammatical Morpheme Processing Associated with Nouns and Verbs in Chinese

This study examined whether the degree of complexity of a grammatical component in a language would impact on its representation in the brain through identifying the neural correlates of grammatical morpheme processing associated with nouns and verbs in Chinese. In particular, the processing of Chinese nominal classifiers and verbal aspect markers were investigated in a sentence completion task and a grammaticality judgment task to look for converging evidence. The Chinese language constitutes a special case because it has no inflectional morphology per se and a larger classifier than aspect marker inventory, contrary to the pattern of greater verbal than nominal paradigmatic complexity in most European languages. The functional imaging results showed BA47 and left supplementary motor area and superior medial frontal gyrus more strongly activated for classifier processing, and the left posterior middle temporal gyrus more responsive to aspect marker processing. We attributed the activation in the left prefrontal cortex to greater processing complexity during classifier selection, analogous to the accounts put forth for European languages, and the left posterior middle temporal gyrus to more demanding verb semantic processing. The overall findings significantly contribute to cross-linguistic observations of neural substrates underlying processing of grammatical morphemes from an analytic and a classifier language, and thereby deepen our understanding of neurobiology of human language.     

Neurophysiological mechanisms involved in language learning in adults

Little is known about the brain mechanisms involved in word learning during infancy and in second language acquisition and about the way these new words become stable representations that sustain language processing. In several studies we have adopted the human simulation perspective, studying the effects of brain-lesions and combining different neuroimaging techniques such as event-related potentials and functional magnetic resonance imaging in order to examine the language learning (LL) process. In the present article, we review this evidence focusing on how different brain signatures relate to (i) the extraction of words from speech, (ii) the discovery of their embedded grammatical structure, and (iii) how meaning derived from verbal contexts can inform us about the cognitive mechanisms underlying the learning process. We compile these findings and frame them into an integrative neurophysiological model that tries to delineate the major neural networks that might be involved in the initial stages of LL. Finally, we propose that LL simulations can help us to understand natural language processing and how the recovery from language disorders in infants and adults can be accomplished.     

Swearing, euphemisms, and linguistic relativity

Participants read aloud swear words, euphemisms of the swear words, and neutral stimuli while their autonomic activity was measured by electrodermal activity. The key finding was that autonomic responses to swear words were larger than to euphemisms and neutral stimuli. It is argued that the heightened response to swear words reflects a form of verbal conditioning in which the phonological form of the word is directly associated with an affective response. Euphemisms are effective because they replace the trigger (the offending word form) by another word form that expresses a similar idea. That is, word forms exert some control on affect and cognition in turn. We relate these findings to the linguistic relativity hypothesis, and suggest a simple mechanistic account of how language may influence thinking in this context.     

Speaker Sex Influences Processing of Grammatical Gender

Spoken words carry linguistic and indexical information to listeners. Abstractionist models of spoken word recognition suggest that indexical information is stripped away in a process called normalization to allow processing of the linguistic message to proceed. In contrast, exemplar models of the lexicon suggest that indexical information is retained in memory, and influences the process of spoken word recognition. In the present study native Spanish listeners heard Spanish words that varied in grammatical gender (masculine, ending in -o, or feminine, ending in -a) produced by either a male or a female speaker. When asked to indicate the grammatical gender of the words, listeners were faster and more accurate when the sex of the speaker “matched” the grammatical gender than when the sex of the speaker and the grammatical gender “mismatched.” No such interference was observed when listeners heard the same stimuli, but identified whether the speaker was male or female. This finding suggests that indexical information, in this case the sex of the speaker, influences not just processes associated with word recognition, but also higher-level processes associated with grammatical processing. This result also raises questions regarding the widespread assumption about the cognitive independence and automatic nature of grammatical processes.