The Neurophysiology of Language Processing Shapes the Evolution of Grammar: Evidence from Case Marking

Do principles of language processing in the brain affect the way grammar evolves over time or is language change just a matter of socio-historical contingency? While the balance of evidence has been ambiguous and controversial, we identify here a neurophysiological constraint on the processing of language that has a systematic effect on the evolution of how noun phrases are marked by case (i.e. by such contrasts as between the English base form she and the object form her). In neurophysiological experiments across diverse languages we found that during processing, participants initially interpret the first base-form noun phrase they hear (e.g. she…) as an agent (which would fit a continuation like … greeted him), even when the sentence later requires the interpretation of a patient role (as in … was greeted). We show that this processing principle is also operative in Hindi, a language where initial base-form noun phrases most commonly denote patients because many agents receive a special case marker ("ergative") and are often left out in discourse. This finding suggests that the principle is species-wide and independent of the structural affordances of specific languages. As such, the principle favors the development and maintenance of case-marking systems that equate base-form cases with agents rather than with patients. We confirm this evolutionary bias by statistical analyses of phylogenetic signals in over 600 languages worldwide, controlling for confounding effects from language contact. Our findings suggest that at least one core property of grammar systematically adapts in its evolution to the neurophysiological conditions of the brain, independently of socio-historical factors. This opens up new avenues for understanding how specific properties of grammar have developed in tight interaction with the biological evolution of our species.     

The Gender Gap in Second Language Acquisition: Gender Differences in the Acquisition of Dutch among Immigrants from 88 Countries with 49 Mother Tongues

Gender differences were analyzed across countries of origin and continents, and across mother tongues and language families, using a large-scale database, containing information on 27,119 adult learners of Dutch as a second language. Female learners consistently outperformed male learners in speaking and writing proficiency in Dutch as a second language. This gender gap remained remarkably robust and constant when other learner characteristics were taken into account, such as education, age of arrival, length of residence and hours studying Dutch. For reading and listening skills in Dutch, no gender gap was found. In addition, we found a general gender by education effect for all four language skills in Dutch for speaking, writing, reading, and listening. Female language learners turned out to profit more from higher educational training than male learners do in adult second language acquisition. These findings do not seem to match nurture-oriented explanatory frameworks based for instance on a human capital approach or gender-specific acculturation processes. Rather, they seem to corroborate a nature-based, gene-environment correlational framework in which language proficiency being a genetically-influenced ability interacting with environmental factors such as motivation, orientation, education, and learner strategies that still mediate between endowment and acquiring language proficiency at an adult stage.     

Source- and product-oriented strategies in L2 acquisition of plural marking in German

This article deals with the acquisition of the German plural system. It raises the question how morphologically complex words are represented in the mental grammar and in the lexicon of children and how this representation emerges.There are several theoretical accounts dealing with this question. These accounts are basically of two kinds. One approach models the German number system as rule-based; i.e. source-oriented rules are postulated that operate on the singular form of the noun. The second approach is schema-based. Essential to this approach is the idea that speakers form the plural of a given noun according to prototypical plural shapes. Empirical evidence can be found for both approaches, but neither of them seems to be able to fully explain acquisitional paths on its own.On the basis of the analysis of acquisitional data, this article argues for an expanded schema account that embraces both source- and product-oriented mechanisms. We propose an acquisition model according to which learners start out with storing plural forms holistically in an associative network; then they abstract product-oriented schemas from these stored forms that focus on the typical gestalts of German plural forms. In a last step, they establish source-oriented schemas that relate singular schemas with plural schemas.The data for this study were gathered in a nonce word elicitation experiment from children aged 6 to 10 learning German either as their native or second language. In the latter case, the children’s L1 was either Russian or Turkish.     

Gender features and interpretation: a case study

Are features on nouns associated with an interpretation? This is debated in the case of number, where some say that number features on nouns are interpreted, and others say that they are a mere reflex of an interpreted feature located elsewhere. This paper looks at gender features in Italian, where the gender a noun can have is not arbitrary, and it seeks to account for the restrictions that gender seems to impose on interpretation. It argues that gender features on Italian nouns are indeed associated with an interpretation. At the same time, however, there is a special process, subject to various conditions, that has the result that in certain contexts their contribution can be ignored. The paper thus defends a view on which interpretable elements can sometimes go uninterpreted. Gender features are among the elements that can do so.     

The 'Soarchmjitter'. The use of a Frisian lingual measurement instrument in care of the elderly

In this article a research has been described funded by the province Fryslan. The aim of this research project is bipartite. First, to determine the reliability and the validity of the instrument and, secondly, to inquire the involved residents living in old people's homes after the valuation of the use of the Frisian language in the care. The research is conducted among 73 residents living in nine old people's homes in the province Fryslan. On two moments in time residents of the old people's homes are asked to fill in a questionnaire with regard to their own care (in)dependency and once with regard to the use of the Frisian language in the care. Reliability analysis shows with regard to internal consistency high Cronbach's alpha values. Test-retest reliability (Cohen's kappa and Spearman Correlation) reveals fair to moderate values. Factor analysis (principal components analysis) results in a one-factor solution. According to the residents, the 'Soarchmjitter' gives a good picture of their care dependency and its questions and answers join their needs. It can be concluded that the 'Soarchmjitter' is a useful instrument to communicate in the own spoken language of the resident and to come in this way to an agreement with nurses about their care demands.     

Preference for linking element -en- in Dutch noun-noun compounds: native speakers and second language learners of Dutch

In Dutch, variation occurs in the formation of noun-noun compound words. Some compounds always add the linking element -en- between the two nouns; some compounds never use such a linking element; and still others allow both options. The element -en- is homophonous with the regular plural ending in Dutch, and we therefore investigated if plural semantics creates a preference for the linking element -en- in novel Dutch noun-noun compounds. We also investigated if the preference for linking -en- is influenced by just meaning (i.e., a semantic plural), form (i.e., a formal plural), or perhaps both. The influence of native language on preferences for Dutch compounds was also investigated. In study 1, we tested native speakers of Dutch; in study 2, Frisian-Dutch bilinguals; and, in study 3, speakers of German with Dutch as a second language. Plurality played a role in the preferences for Dutch compound formation in all tested groups. For native speakers of Dutch, Frisian, and German, moreover, the preference for a linking element in novel Dutch compounds was influenced by both the semantic plural and the formal plural. However, these effects were smaller for the native speakers of German. These findings confirm the findings of earlier studies (e.g. Schreuder et al. in Language and Cognitive Processes 13(5):551–573, 1998) showing linking -en- to carry an intrinsic plural meaning. Kiparsky’s level-ordering hypothesis (Linguistics in the morning calm, pp. 3–91, 1982) and Pinker’s words-and-rules theory (Words and rules: the ingredients of language, 1999) are re-considered in light of the present findings.     

Policy Language in Restoration Ecology

Relating restoration ecology to policy is one of the aims of the Society for Ecological Restoration and its journal Restoration Ecology. As an interdisciplinary team of researchers in both ecological science and political science, we have struggled with how policy‐relevant language is and could be deployed in restoration ecology. Using language in scientific publications that resonates with overarching policy questions may facilitate linkages between researcher investigations and decision‐makers' concerns on all levels. Climate change is the most important environmental problem of our time and to provide policymakers with new relevant knowledge on this problem is of outmost importance. To determine whether or not policy‐specific language was being included in restoration ecology science, we surveyed the field of restoration ecology from 2008 to 2010, identifying 1,029 articles, which we further examined for the inclusion of climate change as a key element of the research. We found that of the 58 articles with “climate change” or “global warming” in the abstract, only 3 identified specific policies relevant to the research results. We believe that restoration ecologists are failing to include themselves in policy formation and implementation of issues such as climate change within journals focused on restoration ecology. We suggest that more explicit reference to policies and terminology recognizable to policymakers might enhance the impact of restoration ecology on decision‐making processes.     

ERPs to subclasses of nouns and verbs

The present findings show the existence of significant differences in latency and amplitude of some waves of ERPs to three subclasses of nouns or verbs. Latency LP3 of ERPs to action verbs was shorter than latency of the same wave to abstract verbs. In nouns the relation was a similar (manipulable objects versus abstract ones). The amplitude of early positive components (P1, P2) and BN3 wave also depended on semantic attributes of nouns and verbs. Some waves of ERPs to motion verbs in our experiment had significantly higher amplitude than the same waves of ERPs to nonmanipulable objects. Also revealed was interaction between some ERP features and the subject's gender. It was primarily the amplitude of BP2, the size of which depended on gender in all cases--BP2 amplitude was significantly higher in females then in males. In the other components (BP1, BP4, BN2 and BN4) there were fewer significant differences and if they do occurred, then their amplitude was higher in males than in females. In some cases, gender also affected latency of waves LP2, LN1 and LN4 of ERPs to the same noun or verb subclass--latencies of these waves were shorter in females.     

Eye movement parameters in reading sentences with syntactic ambiguities in Russian

We studied eye movement parameters in reading syntactically ambiguous sentences with the feminine variant of relative clause in Russian. A priori difficulty in analyzing the structure of the sentence leads to the increased time of its reading, compared with the time of reading control (unambiguous) sentences. The time of reading increases due to higher frequencies of regressive saccades made by the subjects for rereading the ambiguous fragments of the sentence. This fact, in turn, leads to an increased number of fixations and their longer duration. The total reading time for the particular words that make up the ambiguous fragment depended on disambiguation result (the type of closure). When the subjects attached the subordinate clause to the first noun of the noun group (early closure), the time of reading this noun increased, compared to the reading time required for the second noun. When the subjects chose the second noun (late closure), the time of reading either of the two did not differ. Our results indicate that the increased time of reading the first noun of the noun group attached to the subordinate clause depends on the prevalence of early closure in the Russian language.     

The Tick-Tock of Language: Is Language Processing Sensitive to Circadian Rhythmicity and Elevated Sleep Pressure?

The master circadian pacemaker emits signals that trigger organ-specific oscillators and, therefore, constitutes a basic biological process that enables organisms to anticipate daily environmental changes by adjusting behavior, physiology, and gene regulation. Although circadian rhythms are well characterized on a physiological level, little is known about circadian modulations of higher cognitive functions. Thus, we investigated circadian repercussions on language performance at the level of minimal syntactic processing by means of German noun phrases in ten young healthy men under the unmasking conditions of a 40 h constant-routine protocol. Language performance for both congruent and incongruent noun phrases displayed a clear diurnal rhythm with a peak performance decrement during the biological night. The nadirs, however, differed such that worst syntactic processing of incongruent noun phrases occurred 3 h earlier (07:00 h) than that of congruent noun phrases (10:00 h). Our results indicate that language performance displays an internally generated circadian rhythmicity with optimal time for parsing language between 3 to 6 h after the habitual wake time, which usually corresponds to 10:00–13:00 h. These results may have important ramifications for establishing optimal times for shiftwork changes or testing linguistically impaired people.     

Do surname differences mirror dialect variation?

Our focus in this paper is the analysis of surnames, which have been proven to be reliable genetic markers because in patrilineal systems they are transmitted along generations virtually unchanged, similarly to a genetic locus on the Y chromosome. We compare the distribution of surnames to the distribution of dialect pronunciations, which are clearly culturally transmitted. Because surnames, at the time of their introduction, were words subject to the same linguistic processes that otherwise result in dialect differences, one might expect their geographic distribution to be correlated with dialect pronunciation differences. In this paper we concentrate on the Netherlands, an area of only 40,000 km2, where two official languages are spoken, Dutch and Frisian. We analyze 19,910 different surnames, sampled in 226 locations, and 125 different words, whose pronunciation was recorded in 252 sites. We find that, once the collinear effects of geography on both surname and cultural transmission are taken into account, there is no statistically significant association between the two, suggesting that surnames cannot be taken as a proxy for dialect variation, even though they can be safely used as a proxy for Y-chromosome genetic variation. We find the results historically and geographically insightful, hopefully leading to a deeper understanding of the role that local migrations and cultural diffusion play in surname and dialect diversity.     

Phrase frequency effects in language production

A classic debate in the psychology of language concerns the question of the grain-size of the linguistic information that is stored in memory. One view is that only morphologically simple forms are stored (e.g., 'car', 'red'), and that more complex forms of language such as multi-word phrases (e.g., 'red car') are generated on-line from the simple forms. In two experiments we tested this view. In Experiment 1, participants produced noun+adjective and noun+noun phrases that were elicited by experimental displays consisting of colored line drawings and two superimposed line drawings. In Experiment 2, participants produced noun+adjective and determiner+noun+adjective utterances elicited by colored line drawings. In both experiments, naming latencies decreased with increasing frequency of the multi-word phrase, and were unaffected by the frequency of the object name in the utterance. These results suggest that the language system is sensitive to the distribution of linguistic information at grain-sizes beyond individual words.     

Modelling semantic transparency

We present models of semantic transparency in which the perceived transparency of English noun–noun compounds, and of their constituent words, is predicted on the basis of the expectedness of their semantic structure. We show that such compounds are perceived as more transparent when the first noun is more frequent, hence more expected, in the language generally; when the compound semantic relation is more frequent, hence more expected, in association with the first noun; and when the second noun is more productive, hence more expected, as the second element of a noun–noun compound. Taken together, our models of compound and constituent transparency lead us to two conclusions. Firstly, although compound transparency is a function of the transparencies of the constituents, the two constituents differ in the nature of their contribution. Secondly, since all the significant predictors in our models of compound transparency are also known predictors of processing speed, perceived transparency may itself be a reflex of ease of processing.     

Identité masculine et transsexualisme

Transsexualism is a phenomenon of our culture. In the past, there were men and women who could not accept their innate sex. What is new is linked to our modern medical technology which offers patients a so-called «change of sex» using hormones and surgery; in fact it is a change in appearance, allowing the individual to «pass» as a member of the other sex. Some societies had and still have a social status for a third gender, but our transsexuals do not want to be treated as members of a third gender, they want to belong to the other gender Male-to-female and female-to-male transsexuals have the same mental functioning, characterized by splitting and denial. But there are differences, in part because society is more intolerant of feminine behaviors in men than of masculine behaviors in women. Male-to-female transsexualism includes a subgroup of subjects who, after failing in school, are unable to earn their living and live on welfare, even after surgical sex reassignment. We have learned from the study of intersexed and transsexual subjects that the feeling of belonging to a gender is a belief, a construction, in which psychological factors (interactions between the parents, the environment and the child) play an important role. Masculine or feminine identities have their roots in the sexual difference, but they are defined by each culture. A man is a male who accepts at least part of his culture’s stereotypes regarding masculinity. Even if biological factors play a role, they cannot explain the whole of gender identity and sexual orientation.     

Person and number syncretisms in Dutch

The aim of this paper is to make sense of the typologically quite exceptional pattern of person neutralization in the plural as we find it in Dutch verbal paradigms. We argue that Dutch, and most of its dialects, have a structural pattern of syncretism in their verbal paradigm: there are no person-distinctions in the plural. The main question of this paper is: where does this structural pattern of neutralization in Dutch come from, if we cannot explain it as a typologically wellattested pattern? As a first step, note that although the pattern is typologically quite odd, it conforms to another well-known generalization about paradigms: neutralization occurs in the marked half of the paradigm (see e.g. Nevins 2009). Further, we need to explain why this pattern occurs precisely in the Netherlands at this particular point in time. To this, we argue that this pattern arises as the result of a particular language acquisition strategy together with reduced evidence from the input for the fully inflected forms, probably as a result of dialect contact. This reduced evidence causes the third person, being the most frequent form, to dominate the other plural forms. In combination with limited paradigm splitting (Pinker, 1996), this explains the uniform plural that we find in most Dutch dialects.     

How Could Language Have Evolved?

The evolution of the faculty of language largely remains an enigma. In this essay, we ask why. Language''s evolutionary analysis is complicated because it has no equivalent in any nonhuman species. There is also no consensus regarding the essential nature of the language “phenotype.” According to the “Strong Minimalist Thesis,” the key distinguishing feature of language (and what evolutionary theory must explain) is hierarchical syntactic structure. The faculty of language is likely to have emerged quite recently in evolutionary terms, some 70,000–100,000 years ago, and does not seem to have undergone modification since then, though individual languages do of course change over time, operating within this basic framework. The recent emergence of language and its stability are both consistent with the Strong Minimalist Thesis, which has at its core a single repeatable operation that takes exactly two syntactic elements a and b and assembles them to form the set {a, b}.It is uncontroversial that language has evolved, just like any other trait of living organisms. That is, once—not so long ago in evolutionary terms—there was no language at all, and now there is, at least in Homo sapiens. There is considerably less agreement as to how language evolved. There are a number of reasons for this lack of agreement. First, “language” is not always clearly defined, and this lack of clarity regarding the language phenotype leads to a corresponding lack of clarity regarding its evolutionary origins. Second, there is often confusion as to the nature of the evolutionary process and what it can tell us about the mechanisms of language. Here we argue that the basic principle that underlies language''s hierarchical syntactic structure is consistent with a relatively recent evolutionary emergence.     

‘Veils and wooden clogs don't go together’

The present discourse on Islam can be regarded as a cultural racist discourse. The construction of Muslims as the ‘Other’ necessarily implies constructing a ‘Self’. This article deals with the dialectical process of reification by studying Dutch female converts to Islam. Ruptures in the relationships between converts and their relatives can illuminate Dutch national and cultural identity. Converts change important markers of identity such as name and appearance. They also trespass Dutch values connected to cultural practice such as food, feasting and funerals. The most important construction of Dutch national and cultural identity vis-à-vis converts is related to sex and gender. Veiled Muslimas in particular express that they cannot longer be ‘real Dutch’. Veiling is subordination and oppressed women are the ‘ultimate others’ of Dutch self-perception.     

Genetic biasing through cultural transmission: Do simple Bayesian models of language evolution generalise?

The recent Bayesian approaches to language evolution and change seem to suggest that genetic biases can impact on the characteristics of language, but, at the same time, that its cultural transmission can partially free it from these same genetic constraints. One of the current debates centres on the striking differences between sampling and a posteriori maximising Bayesian learners, with the first converging on the prior bias while the latter allows a certain freedom to language evolution. The present paper shows that this difference disappears if populations more complex than a single teacher and a single learner are considered, with the resulting behaviours more similar to the sampler. This suggests that generalisations based on the language produced by Bayesian agents in such homogeneous single agent chains are not warranted. It is not clear which of the assumptions in such models are responsible, but these findings seem to support the rising concerns on the validity of the “acquisitionist” assumption, whereby the locus of language change and evolution is taken to be the first language acquirers (children) as opposed to the competent language users (the adults).