Publications

Abstract

Culture, a pillar of the remarkable ecological success of humans, is increasingly recognized as a powerful force structuring nonhuman animal populations. A key gap between these two types of culture is quantitative evidence of symbolic markers—seemingly arbitrary traits that function as reliable indicators of cultural group membership to conspecifics. Using acoustic data collected from 23 Pacific Ocean locations, we provide quantitative evidence that certain sperm whale acoustic signals exhibit spatial patterns consistent with a symbolic marker function. Culture segments sperm whale populations into behaviorally distinct clans, which are defined based on dialects of stereotyped click patterns (codas). We classified 23,429 codas into types using contaminated mixture models and hierarchically clustered coda repertoires into seven clans based on similarities in coda usage; then we evaluated whether coda usage varied with geographic distance within clans or with spatial overlap between clans. Similarities in within-clan usage of both “identity codas” (coda types diagnostic of clan identity) and “nonidentity codas” (coda types used by multiple clans) decrease as space between repertoire recording locations increases. However, between-clan similarity in identity, but not nonidentity, coda usage decreases as clan spatial overlap increases. This matches expectations if sympatry is related to a measurable pressure to diversify to make cultural divisions sharper, thereby providing evidence that identity codas function as symbolic markers of clan identity. Our study provides quantitative evidence of arbitrary traits, resembling human ethnic markers, conveying cultural identity outside of humans, and highlights remarkable similarities in the distributions of human ethnolinguistic groups and sperm whale clans.

Abstract

Previous research suggests that literacy, specifically learning alphabetic letter-to-phoneme mappings, modifies online speech processing, and enhances brain responses, as indexed by the blood-oxygenation level dependent signal (BOLD), to speech in auditory areas associated with phonological processing (Dehaene et al., 2010). However, alphabets are not the only orthographic systems in use in the world, and hundreds of millions of individuals speak languages that are not written using alphabets. In order to make claims that literacy per se has broad and general consequences for brain responses to speech, one must seek confirmatory evidence from non-alphabetic literacy. To this end, we conducted a longitudinal fMRI study in India probing the effect of literacy in Devanagari, an abugida, on functional connectivity and cerebral responses to speech in 91 variously literate Hindi-speaking male and female human participants. Twenty-two completely illiterate participants underwent six months of reading and writing training. Devanagari literacy increases functional connectivity between acoustic-phonetic and graphomotor brain areas, but we find no evidence that literacy changes brain responses to speech, either in cross-sectional or longitudinal analyses. These findings shows that a dramatic reconfiguration of the neurofunctional substrates of online speech processing may not be a universal result of learning to read, and suggest that the influence of writing on speech processing should also be investigated.

Abstract

Alexithymia concerns a difficulty identifying and communicating one’s own emotions, and a tendency towards externally-oriented thinking. Recent work argues that such alexithymic traits are due to altered arousal response and poor subjective awareness of “objective” arousal responses. Although there are individual differences within the general population in identifying and describing emotions, extant research has focused on highly alexithymic individuals. Here we investigated whether mean arousal and concordance between subjective and objective arousal underpin individual differences in alexithymic traits in a general population sample. Participants rated subjective arousal responses to 60 images from the International Affective Picture System whilst their skin conductance was recorded. The Autism Quotient was employed to control for autistic traits in the general population. Analysis using linear models demonstrated that mean arousal significantly predicted Toronto Alexithymia Scale scores above and beyond autistic traits, but concordance scores did not. This indicates that, whilst objective arousal is a useful predictor in populations that are both above and below the cut-off values for alexithymia, concordance scores between objective and subjective arousal do not predict variation in alexithymic traits in the general population.

Abstract

Research on imitation in infancy has primarily focused on what and when infants imitate. More recently, however, the question why infants imitate has received renewed attention, partly motivated by the finding that infants sometimes selectively imitate the actions of others and sometimes faithfully imitate, or overimitate, the actions of others. The present study evaluates the hypothesis that this varying imitative behavior is related to infants' social traits. To do so, we assessed faithful and selective imitation longitudinally at 12 and 15 months, and extraversion at 15 months. At both ages, selective imitation was dependent on the causal structure of the act. From 12 to 15 months, selective imitation decreased while faithful imitation increased. Furthermore, infants high in extraversion were more faithful imitators than infants low in extraversion. These results demonstrate that the onset of faithful imitation is earlier than previously thought, but later than the onset of selective imitation. The observed relation between extraversion and faithful imitation supports the hypothesis that faithful imitation is driven by the social motivations of the infant. We call this relation the King Louie Effect: like the orangutan King Louie in The Jungle Book, infants imitate faithfully due to a growing interest in the interpersonal nature of interactions.

Abstract

Allergic disease is very common and carries substantial public-health burdens. We conducted a meta-analysis of genome-wide associations with self-reported cat, dust-mite and pollen allergies in 53,862 individuals. We used generalized estimating equations to model shared and allergy-specific genetic effects. We identified 16 shared susceptibility loci with association P<5×10(-8), including 8 loci previously associated with asthma, as well as 4p14 near TLR1, TLR6 and TLR10 (rs2101521, P=5.3×10(-21)); 6p21.33 near HLA-C and MICA (rs9266772, P=3.2×10(-12)); 5p13.1 near PTGER4 (rs7720838, P=8.2×10(-11)); 2q33.1 in PLCL1 (rs10497813, P=6.1×10(-10)), 3q28 in LPP (rs9860547, P=1.2×10(-9)); 20q13.2 in NFATC2 (rs6021270, P=6.9×10(-9)), 4q27 in ADAD1 (rs17388568, P=3.9×10(-8)); and 14q21.1 near FOXA1 and TTC6 (rs1998359, P=4.8×10(-8)). We identified one locus with substantial evidence of differences in effects across allergies at 6p21.32 in the class II human leukocyte antigen (HLA) region (rs17533090, P=1.7×10(-12)), which was strongly associated with cat allergy. Our study sheds new light on the shared etiology of immune and autoimmune disease.

Abstract

This book is a collection of papers inspired by the linguistics career of Ivan Sag, written to celebrate his many contributions to the field. Ivan has been a professor of linguistics at Stanford University since 1979, has been the directory of the Symbolic Systems program (2005-2009), has authored, co-authored, or edited fifteen volumes in linguistics, and has been at the forefront of non-transformational approaches to syntax. Reflecting the breath of Ivan's theoretical interests and approaches to linguistic problems, the papers here tackle a range of grammar-related issues using corpora, intuitions, and laboratory experiments. They are united by their use of and commitment to rich datasets and the shared perspective that the best theories of grammar attempt to account for the full diversity and complexity of language data.

Abstract

Height-pitch associations are claimed to be universal and independent of language, but this claim remains controversial. The present study sheds new light on this debate with a multimodal analysis of individual sound and melody descriptions obtained in an interactive communication paradigm with speakers of Dutch and Farsi. The findings reveal that, in contrast to Dutch speakers, Farsi speakers do not use a height-pitch metaphor consistently in speech. Both Dutch and Farsi speakers’ co-speech gestures did reveal a mapping of higher pitches to higher space and lower pitches to lower space, and this gesture space-pitch mapping tended to co-occur with corresponding spatial words (high-low). However, this mapping was much weaker in Farsi speakers than Dutch speakers. This suggests that cross-linguistic differences shape the conceptualization of pitch and further calls into question the universality of height-pitch associations.

Abstract

The view put forward here is that visual bodily signals play a core role in human communication and the coordination of minds. Critically, this role goes far beyond referential and propositional meaning. The human communication system that we consider to be the explanandum in the evolution of language thus is not spoken language. It is, instead, a deeply multimodal, multilayered, multifunctional system that developed—and survived—owing to the extraordinary flexibility and adaptability that it endows us with. Beyond their undisputed iconic power, visual bodily signals (manual and head gestures, facial expressions, gaze, torso movements) fundamentally contribute to key pragmatic processes in modern human communication. This contribution becomes particularly evident with a focus that includes non-iconic manual signals, non-manual signals and signal combinations. Such a focus also needs to consider meaning encoded not just via iconic mappings, since kinematic modulations and interaction-bound meaning are additional properties equipping the body with striking pragmatic capacities. Some of these capacities, or its precursors, may have already been present in the last common ancestor we share with the great apes and may qualify as early versions of the components constituting the hypothesized interaction engine.

Abstract

The given-new contract entails that speakers must distinguish for their addressee whether references are new or already part of their dialogue. Past research had found that, in a monologue to a listener, speakers shortened repeated words. However, the notion of the given-new contract is inherently dialogic, with an addressee and the availability of co-speech gestures. Here, two face-to-face dialogue experiments tested whether gesture duration also follows the given-new contract. In Experiment 1, four experimental sequences confirmed that when speakers repeated their gestures, they shortened the duration significantly. Experiment 2 replicated the effect with spontaneous gestures in a different task. This experiment also extended earlier results with words, confirming that speakers shortened their repeated words significantly in a multimodal dialogue setting, the basic form of language use. Because words and gestures were not necessarily redundant, these results offer another instance in which gestures and words independently serve pragmatic requirements of dialogue.

Abstract

The Lexical Retrieval Hypothesis proposes that gestures function at the level of speech production, aiding in the retrieval of lexical items from the mental lexicon. However, empirical evidence for this account is mixed, and some critics argue that a more likely function of gestures during lexical retrieval is a communicative one. The present study was designed to test these predictions against each other by keeping lexical retrieval difficulty constant while varying social context. Participants' gestures were analysed during tip of the tongue experiences when communicating with a partner face-to-face (FTF), while being separated by a screen, or on their own by speaking into a voice recorder. The results show that participants in the FTF context produced significantly more representational gestures than participants in the solitary condition. This suggests that, even in the specific context of lexical retrieval difficulties, representational gestures appear to play predominantly a communicative role.

Abstract

While people around the world mentally represent time in terms of space, there is substantial cross-cultural
variability regarding which temporal constructs are mapped onto which parts in space. Do particular spatial
layouts of time – as expressed through metaphors in language – shape temporal focus? We trained native
English speakers to use spatiotemporal metaphors in a way such that the flow of time is reversed, representing
the future behind the body (out of visible space) and the past ahead of the body (within visible space). In a
task measuring perceived relevance of past events, people considered past events and present (or immediate
past) events to be more relevant after using the reversed metaphors compared to a control group that used canonical metaphors spatializing the past behind and the future ahead of the body (Experiment 1). In a control measure in which temporal information was removed, this effect disappeared (Experiment 2). Taken
together, these findings suggest that the degree to which people focus on the past may be shaped by the
visibility of the past in spatiotemporal metaphors used in language.

Abstract

Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a highly heritable disorder and several genes increasing disease risk have been identified. The dopamine transporter gene, SLC6A3/DAT1, has been studied most extensively in ADHD research. Interestingly, a different haplotype of this gene (formed by genetic variants in the 3' untranslated region and intron 8) is associated with childhood ADHD (haplotype 10-6) and adult ADHD (haplotype 9-6). The expression of DAT1 is highest in striatal regions in the brain. This part of the brain is of interest to ADHD because of its role in reward processing is altered in ADHD patients; ADHD patients display decreased striatal activation during reward processing. To better understand how the DAT1 gene exerts effects on ADHD, we studied the effect of this gene on reward-related brain functioning in the area of its highest expression in the brain, the striatum, using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In doing so, we tried to resolve inconsistencies observed in previous studies of healthy individuals and ADHD-affected children. In a sample of 87 adult ADHD patients and 77 healthy comparison subjects, we confirmed the association of the 9-6 haplotype with adult ADHD. Striatal hypoactivation during the reward anticipation phase of a monetary incentive delay task in ADHD patients was again shown, but no significant effects of DAT1 on striatal activity were found. Although the importance of the DAT1 haplotype as a risk factor for adult ADHD was again demonstrated in this study, the mechanism by which this gene increases disease risk remains largely unknown.

Abstract

Abstract Neuroimaging has been extensively used to study brain structure and function in individuals with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) over the past decades. Two of the main shortcomings of the neuroimaging literature of these disorders are the small sample sizes employed and the heterogeneity of methods used. In 2013 and 2014, the ENIGMA-ADHD and ENIGMA-ASD working groups were respectively, founded with a common goal to address these limitations. Here, we provide a narrative review of the thus far completed and still ongoing projects of these working groups. Due to an implicitly hierarchical psychiatric diagnostic classification system, the fields of ADHD and ASD have developed largely in isolation, despite the considerable overlap in the occurrence of the disorders. The collaboration between the ENIGMA-ADHD and -ASD working groups seeks to bring the neuroimaging efforts of the two disorders closer together. The outcomes of case–control studies of subcortical and cortical structures showed that subcortical volumes are similarly affected in ASD and ADHD, albeit with small effect sizes. Cortical analyses identified unique differences in each disorder, but also considerable overlap between the two, specifically in cortical thickness. Ongoing work is examining alternative research questions, such as brain laterality, prediction of case–control status, and anatomical heterogeneity. In brief, great strides have been made toward fulfilling the aims of the ENIGMA collaborations, while new ideas and follow-up analyses continue that include more imaging modalities (diffusion MRI and resting-state functional MRI), collaborations with other large databases, and samples with dual diagnoses.

Abstract

A recent trend in psycholinguistic research has been to posit prediction as an essential function of language processing. The present paper develops a linguistic perspective on viewing prediction in terms of pre-activation. We describe what predictions are and how they are produced. Our basic premises are that (a) no prediction can be made without knowledge to support it; and (b) it is therefore necessary to characterize the precise form of that knowledge, as revealed by a suitable theory of linguistic representations. We describe the Parallel Architecture (PA: Jackendoff, 2002; Jackendoff and Audring, 2020), which makes explicit our commitments about linguistic representations, and we develop an account of processing based on these representations. Crucial to our account is that what have been traditionally treated as derivational rules of grammar are formalized by the PA as lexical items, encoded in the same format as words. We then present a theory of prediction in these terms: linguistic input activates lexical items whose beginning (or incipit) corresponds to the input encountered so far; and prediction amounts to pre-activation of the as yet unheard parts of those lexical items (the remainder). Thus the generation of predictions is a natural byproduct of processing linguistic representations. We conclude that the PA perspective on pre-activation provides a plausible account of prediction in language processing that bridges linguistic and psycholinguistic theorizing.

Abstract

Typical adults read remarkably quickly. Such fast reading is facilitated by brain processes that are sensitive to both word frequency and contextual constraints. It is debated as to whether these attributes have additive or interactive effects on language processing in the brain. We investigated this issue by analysing existing magnetoencephalography data from 99 participants reading intact and scrambled sentences. Using a cross-validated model comparison scheme, we found that lexical frequency predicted the word-by-word elicited MEG signal in a widespread cortical network, irrespective of sentential context. In contrast, index (ordinal word position) was more strongly encoded in sentence words, in left front-temporal areas. This confirms that frequency influences word processing independently of predictability, and that contextual constraints affect word-by-word brain responses. With a conservative multiple comparisons correction, only the interaction between lexical frequency and surprisal survived, in anterior temporal and frontal cortex, and not between lexical frequency and entropy, nor between lexical frequency and index. However, interestingly, the uncorrected index*frequency interaction revealed an effect in left frontal and temporal cortex that reversed in time and space for intact compared to scrambled sentences. Finally, we provide evidence to suggest that, in sentences, lexical frequency and predictability may independently influence early (<150ms) and late stages of word processing, but interact during later stages of word processing (>150-250ms), thus helping to converge previous contradictory eye-tracking and electrophysiological literature. Current neuro-cognitive models of reading would benefit from accounting for these differing effects of lexical frequency and predictability on different stages of word processing.

Abstract

Traditional experiments indicate that prediction is important for efficient speech processing. In three virtual reality visual world paradigm experiments, we tested whether such findings hold in naturalistic settings (Experiment 1) and provided novel insights into whether disfluencies in speech (repairs/hesitations) inform one’s predictions in rich environments (Experiments 2–3). Experiment 1 supports that listeners predict upcoming speech in naturalistic environments, with higher proportions of anticipatory target fixations in predictable compared to unpredictable trials. In Experiments 2–3, disfluencies reduced anticipatory fixations towards predicted referents, compared to conjunction (Experiment 2) and fluent (Experiment 3) sentences. Unexpectedly, Experiment 2 provided no evidence that participants made new predictions from a repaired verb. Experiment 3 provided novel findings that fixations towards the speaker increase upon hearing a hesitation, supporting current theories of how hesitations influence sentence processing. Together, these findings unpack listeners’ use of visual (objects/speaker) and auditory (speech/disfluencies) information when predicting upcoming words.

Abstract

How individuals learn complex regularities in the environment and generalize them to new instances is a key question in cognitive science. Although previous investigations have advocated the idea that learning and generalizing depend upon separate processes, the same basic learning mechanisms may account for both. In language learning experiments, these mechanisms have typically been studied in isolation of broader cognitive phenomena such as memory, perception, and attention. Here, we show how learning and generalization in language is embedded in these broader theories by testing learners on their ability to chunk nonadjacent dependencies—a key structure in language but a challenge to theories that posit learning through the memorization of structure. In two studies, adult participants were trained and tested on an artificial language containing nonadjacent syllable dependencies, using a novel chunking-based serial recall task involving verbal repetition of target sequences (formed from learned strings) and scrambled foils. Participants recalled significantly more syllables, bigrams, trigrams, and nonadjacent dependencies from sequences conforming to the language’s statistics (both learned and generalized sequences). They also encoded and generalized specific nonadjacent chunk information. These results suggest that participants chunk remote dependencies and rapidly generalize this information to novel structures. The results thus provide further support for learning-based approaches to language acquisition, and link statistical learning to broader cognitive mechanisms of memory.

Abstract

Listeners find it relatively difficult to recognize words that are similar-sounding to other known words. In contrast, when asked to identify spoken nonwords, listeners perform better when the nonwords are similar to many words in their language. These effects of sound similarity have been assessed in multiple ways, and both sublexical (phonotactic probability) and lexical (neighborhood) effects have been reported, leading to models that incorporate multiple stages of processing. One prediction that can be derived from these models is that there may be differences among individuals in the size of these similarity effects as a function of working memory abilities. This study investigates how item-individual characteristics of nonwords (both phonotactic probability and neighborhood density) interact with listener-individual characteristics (such as cognitive abilities and hearing sensitivity) in the perceptual identification of nonwords. A set of nonwords was used in which neighborhood density and phonotactic probability were not correlated. In our data, neighborhood density affected identification more reliably than did phonotactic probability. The first study, with young adults, showed that higher neighborhood density particularly benefits nonword identification for those with poorer attention-switching control. This suggests that it may be easier to focus attention on a novel item if it activates and receives support from more similar-sounding neighbors. A similar study on nonword identification with older adults showed increased neighborhood density effects for those with poorer hearing, suggesting that activation of long-term linguistic knowledge is particularly important to back up auditory representations that are degraded as a result of hearing loss.

Abstract

Rhythmic stimulation can be applied to modulate neuronal oscillations. Such ‘entrainment’ is optimized when stimulation frequency is individually calibrated based on magneto/encephalography markers. It remains unknown how consistent such individual markers are across days/sessions, within a session, or across cognitive states, hemispheres and estimation methods, especially in a realistic, practical, lab setting. We here estimated individual alpha frequency (IAF) repeatedly from short electroencephalography (EEG) measurements at rest or during an attention task (cognitive state), using single parieto-occipital electrodes in 24 participants on 4 days (between-sessions), with multiple measurements over an hour on 1 day (within-session). First, we introduce an algorithm to automatically reject power spectra without a sufficiently clear peak to ensure unbiased IAF estimations. Then we estimated IAF via the traditional ‘maximum’ method and a ‘Gaussian fit’ method. IAF was reliable within- and between-sessions for both cognitive states and hemispheres, though task-IAF estimates tended to be more variable. Overall, the ‘Gaussian fit’ method was more reliable than the ‘maximum’ method. Furthermore, we evaluated how far from an approximated ‘true’ task-related IAF the selected ‘stimulation frequency’ was, when calibrating this frequency based on a short rest-EEG, a short task-EEG, or simply selecting 10 Hz for all participants. For the ‘maximum’ method, rest-EEG calibration was best, followed by task-EEG, and then 10 Hz. For the ‘Gaussian fit’ method, rest-EEG and task-EEG-based calibration were similarly accurate, and better than 10 Hz. These results lead to concrete recommendations about valid, and automated, estimation of individual oscillation markers in experimental and clinical settings.

Abstract

Transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) can be used to study causal contributions of oscillatory brain mechanisms to cognition and behavior. For instance, individual alpha frequency (IAF) tACS was reported to enhance alpha power and impact visuospatial attention performance. Unfortunately, such results have been inconsistent and difficult to replicate. In tACS, stimulation generally involves one frequency, sometimes individually calibrated to a peak value observed in an M/EEG power spectrum. Yet, the ‘peak’ actually observed in such power spectra often contains a broader range of frequencies, raising the question whether a biologically calibrated tACS protocol containing this fuller range of alpha-band frequencies might be more effective. Here, we introduce ‘Broadband-alpha-tACS’, a complex individually calibrated electrical stimulation protocol. We band-pass filtered left posterior resting-state EEG data around the IAF (+/- 2 Hz), and converted that time series into an electrical waveform for tACS stimulation of that same left posterior parietal cortex location. In other words, we stimulated a brain region with a ‘replay’ of its own alpha-band frequency content, based on spontaneous activity. Within-subjects (N=24), we compared to a sham tACS session the effects of broadband-alpha tACS, power-matched spectral inverse (‘alpha-removed’) control tACS, and individual alpha frequency tACS, on EEG alpha power and performance in an endogenous attention task previously reported to be affected by alpha tACS. Broadband-alpha-tACS significantly modulated attention task performance (i.e., reduced the rightward visuospatial attention bias in trials without distractors, and reduced attention benefits). Alpha-removed tACS also reduced the rightward visuospatial attention bias. IAF-tACS did not significantly modulate attention task performance compared to sham tACS, but also did not statistically significantly differ from broadband-alpha-tACS. This new broadband-alpha tACS approach seems promising, but should be further explored and validated in future studies.

Abstract

A foundational assumption of human communication is that speakers should say as much as necessary, but no more. Yet, people routinely produce redundant adjectives and their propensity to do so varies cross-linguistically. Here, we propose a computational theory, whereby speakers create referential expressions designed to facilitate listeners’ reference resolution, as they process words in real time. We present a computational model of our account, the Incremental Collaborative Efficiency (ICE) model, which generates referential expressions by considering listeners’ real-time incremental processing and reference identification. We apply the ICE framework to physical reference, showing that listeners construct expressions designed to minimize listeners’ expected visual search effort during online language processing. Our model captures a number of known effects in the literature, including cross-linguistic differences in speakers’ propensity to over-specify. Moreover, the ICE model predicts graded acceptability judgments with quantitative accuracy, systematically outperforming an alternative, brevity-based model. Our findings suggest that physical reference production is best understood as driven by a collaborative goal to help the listener identify the intended referent, rather than by an egocentric effort to minimize utterance length.

Abstract

Language sometimes requires tracking the same participant in different thematic roles across multiple visual events (e.g., The girl that another girl pushed chased a third girl). To better understand how vision and language interact in role tracking, participants described videos of multiple randomly moving circles where two push events were presented. A circle might have the same role in both push events (e.g., agent) or different roles (e.g., agent of one push and patient of other push). The first three studies found higher production accuracy for the same role conditions compared to the different role conditions across different linguistic structure manipulations. The last three studies compared a featural account, where role information was associated with particular circles, or a relational account, where role information was encoded with particular push events. These studies found no interference between different roles, contrary to the predictions of the featural account. The foil was manipulated in these studies to increase the saliency of the second push and it was found that this changed the accuracy in describing the first push. The results suggest that language-related thematic role processing uses a relational representation that can encode multiple events.

Abstract

An audio and video corpus of speech addressed to 28 11-month-olds is described. The corpus allows comparisons between adult speech directed towards infants, familiar adults and unfamiliar adult addressees, as well as of caregivers’ word teaching strategies across word classes. Summary data show that infant-directed speech differed more from speech to unfamiliar than familiar adults; that word teaching strategies for nominals versus verbs and adjectives differed; that mothers mostly addressed infants with multi-word utterances; and that infants’ vocabulary size was unrelated to speech rate, but correlated positively with predominance of continuous caregiver speech (not of isolated words) in the input.

Abstract

This special issue “Evolutionary Approaches to Cross-Cultural Anthropology” brings together scholars from the fields of behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, and cultural evolution whose cross-cultural work draws on evolutionary theory and methods. The papers here are a subset of those presented at a symposium we organized for the 2011 meeting of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research held in Charleston, South Carolina. Collectively, our authors show how an engagement with cultural variation has enriched evolutionary anthropology, and these papers showcase how cross-cultural research can benefit from the theoretical and methodological contributions of an evolutionary approach.

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Cognitive consequences at school age associated with prenatal methylmercury (MeHg) exposure may need to take into account nutritional and sociodemographic cofactors as well as relevant genetic polymorphisms. METHODS: A subsample (n = 1,311) of the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (Bristol, UK) was selected, and mercury (Hg) concentrations were measured in freeze-dried umbilical cord tissue as a measure of MeHg exposure. A total of 1135 children had available data on 247 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) within relevant genes, as well as the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children Intelligence Quotient (IQ) scores at age 8 years. Multivariate regression models were used to assess the associations between MeHg exposure and IQ and to determine possible gene-environment interactions. RESULTS: Hg concentrations indicated low background exposures (mean = 26 ng/g, standard deviation = 13). Log10-transformed Hg was positively associated with IQ, which attenuated after adjustment for nutritional and sociodemographic cofactors. In stratified analyses, a reverse association was found in higher social class families (for performance IQ, P value for interaction = 0.0013) among whom there was a wider range of MeHg exposure. Among 40 SNPs showing nominally significant main effects, MeHg interactions were detected for rs662 (paraoxonase 1) and rs1042838 (progesterone receptor) (P <} 0.05) and for rs3811647 (transferrin) and rs2049046 (brain-derived neurotrophic factor) (P {< 0.10). CONCLUSIONS: In this population with a low level of MeHg exposure, there were only equivocal associations between MeHg exposure and adverse neuropsychological outcomes. Heterogeneities in several relevant genes suggest possible genetic predisposition to MeHg neurotoxicity in a substantial proportion of the population. Future studies need to address this possibility.

Abstract

The current study investigates auditory-motor coupling in musically trained participants using a Stroop-type task that required the execution of simple finger sequences according to aurally presented number sequences (e.g., "2," " 4," "5," "3," "1"). Digital remastering was used to manipulate the pitch contour of the number sequences such that they were either congruent or incongruent with respect to the resulting action sequence. Conservatoire-level violinists showed a strong effect of congruency manipulation (increased response time for incongruent vs. congruent trials), in comparison to a control group of non-musicians. In Experiment 2, this paradigm was used to determine whether pedagogical background would influence this effect in a group of young violinists. Suzuki-trained violinists differed significantly from those with no musical background, while traditionally-trained violinists did not. The findings extend previous research in this area by demonstrating that obligatory audio-motor coupling is directly related to a musicians' expertise on their instrument of study and is influenced by pedagogy.

Abstract

Both emotion and reward are primary modulators of cognition: Emotional word content enhances word processing, and reward expectancy similarly amplifies cognitive processing from the perceptual up to the executive control level. Here, we investigate how these primary regulators of cognition interact. We studied how the anticipation of gain or loss modulates the neural time course (event-related potentials, ERPs) related to processing of emotional words. Participants performed a semantic categorization task on emotional and neutral words, which were preceded by a cue indicating that performance could lead to monetary gain or loss. Emotion-related and reward-related effects occurred in different time windows, did not interact statistically, and showed different topographies. This speaks for an independence of reward expectancy and the processing of emotional word content. Therefore, privileged processing given to emotionally valenced words seems immune to short-term modulation of reward. Models of language comprehension should be able to incorporate effects of reward and emotion on language processing, and the current study argues for an architecture in which reward and emotion do not share a common neurobiological mechanism

Abstract

Expressing Left-Right relations is challenging for speaking-children. Yet, this challenge was absent for signing-children, possibly due to iconicity in the visual-spatial modality of expression. We investigate whether there is also a modality advantage when speaking-children’s co-speech gestures are considered. Eight-year-old child and adult hearing monolingual Turkish speakers and deaf signers of Turkish-Sign-Language described pictures of objects in various spatial relations. Descriptions were coded for informativeness in speech, sign, and speech-gesture combinations for encoding Left-Right relations. The use of co-speech gestures increased the informativeness of speakers’ spatial expressions compared to speech-only. This pattern was more prominent for children than adults. However, signing-adults and children were more informative than child and adult speakers even when co-speech gestures were considered. Thus, both speaking- and signing-children benefit from iconic expressions in visual modality. Finally, in each modality, children were less informative than adults, pointing to the challenge of this spatial domain in development.

Abstract

Oral communication often takes place in noisy environments, which challenge spoken-word recognition. Previous research has suggested that the presence of background noise extends the number of candidate words competing with the target word for recognition and that this extension affects the time course and accuracy of spoken-word recognition. In this study, we further investigated the temporal dynamics of competition processes in the presence of background noise, and how these vary in listeners with different language proficiency (i.e., native and non-native) using computational modeling. We developed ListenIN (Listen-In-Noise), a neural-network model based on an autoencoder architecture, which learns to map phonological forms onto meanings in two languages and simulates native and non-native spoken-word comprehension. Simulation A established that ListenIN captures the effects of noise on accuracy rates and the number of unique misperception errors of native and non-native listeners in an offline spoken-word identification task (Scharenborg et al., 2018). Simulation B showed that ListenIN captures the effects of noise in online task settings and accounts for looking preferences of native (Hintz & Scharenborg, 2016) and non-native (new data collected for this study) listeners in a visual-world paradigm. We also examined the model’s activation states during online spoken-word recognition. These analyses demonstrated that the presence of background noise increases the number of competitor words which are engaged in phonological competition and that this happens in similar ways intra- and interlinguistically and in native and non-native listening. Taken together, our results support accounts positing a ‘many-additional-competitors scenario’ for the effects of noise on spoken-word recognition.

Abstract

Developmental stuttering is a fluency disorder that adversely affect many aspects of a person's life. Recent transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) studies have shown promise to improve fluency in people who stutter. To date, bihemispheric tDCS has not been investigated in this population. In the present study, we aimed to investigate the effects of single-session bihemispheric and unihemispheric cathodal tDCS on fluency in adults who stutter. We predicted that bihemispheric tDCS with anodal stimulation to the left IFG and cathodal stimulation to the right IFG would improve fluency better than the sham and cathodal tDCS to the right IFG. Seventeen adults who stutter completed this single-blind, crossover, sham-controlled tDCS experiment. All participants received 20 min of tDCS alongside metronome-timed speech during intervention sessions. Three tDCS interventions were administered: bihemispheric tDCS with anodal stimulation to the left IFG and cathodal stimulation to the right IFG, unihemispheric tDCS with cathodal stimulation to the right IFG, and sham stimulation. Speech fluency during reading and conversation was assessed before, immediately after, and one week after each intervention session. There was no significant fluency improvement in conversation for any tDCS interventions. Reading fluency improved following both bihemispheric and cathodal tDCS interventions. tDCS montages were not significantly different in their effects on fluency.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting closure of daycare centers worldwide, led to unprecedented changes in children’s learning environments. This period of increased time at home with caregivers, with limited access to external sources (e.g., daycares) provides a unique opportunity to examine the associations between the caregiver-child activities and children’s language development. The vocabularies of 1742 children aged8-36 months across 13 countries and 12 languages were evaluated at the beginning and end of the first lockdown period in their respective countries(from March to September 2020). Children who had less passive screen exposure and whose caregivers read more to them showed larger gains in vocabulary development during lockdown, after controlling for SES and other caregiver-child activities. Children also gained more words than expected (based on normative data) during lockdown; either caregivers were more aware of their child’s development or vocabulary development benefited from intense caregiver-child interaction during lockdown.

Abstract

Transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) at 10 Hz has been shown to modulate spatial attention. However, the frequency-specificity and the oscillatory changes underlying this tACS effect are still largely unclear. Here, we applied high-definition tACS at individual alpha frequency (IAF), two control frequencies (IAF+/-2Hz) and sham to the left posterior parietal cortex and measured its effects on visuospatial attention performance and offline alpha power (using electroencephalography, EEG). We revealed a behavioural and electrophysiological stimulation effect relative to sham for IAF but not control frequency stimulation conditions: there was a leftward lateralization of alpha power for IAF tACS, which differed from sham for the first out of three minutes following tACS. At a high value of this EEG effect (moderation effect), we observed a leftward attention bias relative to sham. This effect was task-specific, i.e., it could be found in an endogenous attention but not in a detection task. Only in the IAF tACS condition, we also found a correlation between the magnitude of the alpha lateralization and the attentional bias effect. Our results support a functional role of alpha oscillations in visuospatial attention and the potential of tACS to modulate it. The frequency-specificity of the effects suggests that an individualization of the stimulation frequency is necessary in heterogeneous target groups with a large variation in IAF.

Abstract

Visuospatial attention can either be voluntarily directed (endogenous/top-down attention) or automatically triggered (exogenous/bottom-up attention). Recent research showed that dorsal parietal transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) at alpha frequency modulates the spatial attentional bias in an endogenous but not in an exogenous visuospatial attention task. Yet, the reason for this task-specificity remains unexplored. Here, we tested whether this dissociation relates to the proposed differential role of the dorsal attention network (DAN) and ventral attention network (VAN) in endogenous and exogenous attention processes respectively. To that aim, we targeted the left and right dorsal parietal node of the DAN, as well as the left and right ventral temporoparietal node of the VAN using tACS at the individual alpha frequency. Every participant completed all four stimulation conditions and a sham condition in five separate sessions. During tACS, we assessed the behavioral visuospatial attention bias via an endogenous and exogenous visuospatial attention task. Additionally, we measured offline alpha power immediately before and after tACS using electroencephalography (EEG). The behavioral data revealed an effect of tACS on the endogenous but not exogenous attention bias, with a greater leftward bias during (sham-corrected) left than right hemispheric stimulation. In line with our hypothesis, this effect was brain area-specific, i.e., present for dorsal parietal but not ventral temporoparietal tACS. However, contrary to our expectations, there was no effect of ventral temporoparietal tACS on the exogenous visuospatial attention bias. Hence, no double dissociation between the two targeted attention networks. There was no effect of either tACS condition on offline alpha power. Our behavioral data reveal that dorsal parietal but not ventral temporoparietal alpha oscillations steer endogenous visuospatial attention. This brain-area specific tACS effect matches the previously proposed dissociation between the DAN and VAN and, by showing that the spatial attention bias effect does not generalize to any lateral posterior tACS montage, renders lateral cutaneous and retinal effects for the spatial attention bias in the dorsal parietal condition unlikely. Yet the absence of tACS effects on the exogenous attention task suggests that ventral temporoparietal alpha oscillations are not functionally relevant for exogenous visuospatial attention. We discuss the potential implications of this finding in the context of an emerging theory on the role of the ventral temporoparietal node.

Abstract

Rede, uitgesproken bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van lector in de taalpsychologie aan de Katholieke Universiteit te Nijmegen op Vrijdag 10 juni 1977

Abstract

A series of experiments is reported in which subjects describe simple visual scenes by means of both sentential and non-sentential responses. The data support the following statements about the lexicalization (word finding) process. (1) Words used by speakers in overt naming or sentence production responses are selected by a sequence of two lexical retrieval processes, the first yielding abstract pre-phonological items (Ll -items), the second one adding their phonological shapes (L2-items). (2) The selection of several Ll-items for a multi-word utterance can take place simultaneously. (3) A monitoring process is watching the output of Ll-lexicalization to check if it is in keeping with prevailing constraints upon utterance format. (4) Retrieval of the L2-item which corresponds with a given LI-item waits until the Ld-item has been checked by the monitor, and all other Ll-items needed for the utterance under construction have become available. A coherent picture of the lexicalization process begins to emerge when these characteristics are brought together with other empirical results in the area of naming and sentence production, e.g., picture naming reaction times (Seymour, 1979), speech errors (Garrett, 1980), and word order preferences (Bock, 1982).

Abstract

Science is currently under-utilized as a tool for effective policy and program design. A key part of this research-to-practice gap lies in the ineffectiveness of current models of science translation. Drawing on theory and methods from anthropology and cognitive linguistics, this study explores the role of cultural models and metaphor in the practice of science communication and translation. Qualitative interviews and group sessions, along with quantitative framing experiments, were used to design and test the effectiveness of a set of explanatory metaphors in translating the science of executive function. Developmental and cognitive scientists typically define executive function as a multi-dimensional set of related abilities that include working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility. The study finds one metaphor in particular—the brain's air traffic control system—to be effective in bridging gaps between expert and public understandings on this issue and in so doing improving the accessibility of scientific information to members of the public as they reason about public policy issues. Findings suggest both a specific tool that can be used in efforts to translate the science of executive function and a theory and methodology that can be employed to design and test metaphors as communication devices on other science and social issues.

Abstract

A comprehensive theory of child language acquisition requires an evidential base that is representative of the typological diversity present in the world’s 7000 or so languages. However, languages are dying at an alarming rate, and the next 50 years represents the last chance we have to document acquisition in many of them. Here, we take stock of the last 45 years of research published in the four main child language acquisition journals: Journal of Child Language, First Language, Language Acquisition and Language Learning and Development. We coded each article for several variables, including (1) participant group (mono vs multilingual), (2) language(s), (3) topic(s) and (4) country of author affiliation, from each journal’s inception until the end of 2020. We found that we have at least one article published on around 103 languages, representing approximately 1.5% of the world’s languages. The distribution of articles was highly skewed towards English and other well-studied Indo-European languages, with the majority of non-Indo-European languages having just one paper. A majority of the papers focused on studies of monolingual children, although papers did not always explicitly report participant group status. The distribution of topics across language categories was more even. The number of articles published on non-Indo-European languages from countries outside of North America and Europe is increasing; however, this increase is driven by research conducted in relatively wealthy countries. Overall, the vast majority of the research was produced in the Global North. We conclude that, despite a proud history of crosslinguistic research, the goals of the discipline need to be recalibrated before we can lay claim to truly a representative account of child language acquisition.

Abstract

Our original target article highlighted some significant shortcomings in the current state of child language research: a large skew in our evidential base towards English and a handful of other Indo-European languages that partly has its origins in a lack of researcher diversity. In this article, we respond to the 21 commentaries on our original article. The commentaries highlighted both the importance of attention to typological features of languages and the environments and contexts in which languages are acquired, with many commentators providing concrete suggestions on how we address the data skew. In this response, we synthesise the main themes of the commentaries and make suggestions for how the field can move towards both improving data coverage and opening up to traditionally under-represented researchers.

Abstract

This article reviews research that has investigated the role of verbal working memory (VWM) in sentence comprehension in both typical and atypical developmental populations. Two theoretical approaches that specify different roles for VWM in sentence comprehension are considered: (i) capacity-limit approaches, which treat VWM as a theoretical primitive that causally constrains language processing and acquisition, and (ii) the experience-based approach, which argues that VWM is an emergent property of long-term linguistic knowledge. The empirical literature relevant to these different approaches is then reviewed. Although there has been considerable recent research on the topic, it is concluded that the current role of working memory in sentence comprehension in development is unclear, calling for a greater number of controlled systematic developmental studies on the topic.

Abstract

Infant pointing has long been identified as an important precursor and predictor of language development. Infants typically begin to produce index finger pointing around the time of their first birthday and previous research has shown that both the onset and the frequency of pointing can predict aspects of productive and receptive language. The current study used a multivariate meta-analytic approach to estimate the strength of the relationship between infant pointing and language. We identified 30 papers published between 1984 and 2019 that met our stringent inclusion criteria, and 25 studies (comprising 77 effect sizes) with samples ≥10 were analysed. Methodological quality of the studies was assessed to identify potential sources of bias. We found a significant but small overall effect size of r = 0.20. Our findings indicate that the unique contribution of pointing to language development may be less robust than has been previously understood, however our stringent inclusion criteria (as well as our publication bias corrections), means that our data represent a more conservative estimate of the relationship between pointing and language. Moderator analysis showed significant group differences in favour of effect sizes related to language comprehension, non-vocabulary measures of language, pointing assessed after 18 months of age and pointing measured independent of speech. A significant strength of this study is the use of multivariate meta-analysis, which allowed us to utilise all available data to provide a more accurate estimate. We consider the findings in the context of the existing research and discuss the general limitations in this field, including the lack of cultural diversity.

Abstract

This research investigated the developing inter-relationships between language, graphic symbolism and symbolic play both concurrently and longitudinally from the fourth to the fifth year of childhood. Sixty children (n = 60) aged between 3 and 4 years completed multiple assessments of language and assessments of graphic symbolism, symbolic play and non-verbal intelligence. A year later, 31 children (n = 31) were re-tested using the same assessments. The findings revealed that skills within each symbolic domain were inter-related during the fourth year, appearing to develop in a domain-general type fashion based upon a common underlying symbolic mechanism. However, between the fourth and the fifth years, only language had predictive validity, suggesting a shift towards the verbal mediation of symbolic play and graphic symbolism as language becomes progressively internalized (Vygotsky, 1962, 1978).

Abstract

Warning others about unexpected negative action outcomes is a paradigm case of communicative helping and prospective action understanding. The current study addressed the ontogeny of warning in infants’ gestural communication. We found that 12- and 18-month-olds (n = 84) spontaneously warned an adult by pointing out to her an aversive object hidden in her way (Problem condition). In control conditions the object was either positive (No Problem condition) or the adult had witnessed its’ placing (Problem known condition), which resulted in significantly less pointing. Results show that infants intervene spontaneously and with foresight through communication, in order to help others avoid a problem before it has occurred. These acts of warning entail an understanding of others’ negatively defined goals (to avoid an outcome) and their incorrect representations of reality. Findings support theories of altruism and social-pragmatic competencies in infancy.

Abstract

People tend to associate the abstract concepts of “good” and “bad” with their fluent and disfluent sides of space, as determined by their natural handedness or by experimental manipulation (Casasanto, 2011). Here we investigated influences of spatial perspective taking on the spatialization of “good” and “bad.” In the first experiment, participants indicated where a schematically drawn cartoon character would locate “good” and “bad” stimuli. Right-handers tended to assign “good” to the right and “bad” to the left side of egocentric space when the character shared their spatial perspective, but when the character was rotated 180° this spatial mapping was reversed: good was assigned to the character’s right side, not the participant’s. The tendency to spatialize valence from the character’s perspective was stronger in the second experiment, when participants were shown a full-featured photograph of the character. In a third experiment, most participants not only spatialized “good” and “bad” from the character’s perspective, they also based their judgments on a salient attribute of the character’s body (an injured hand) rather than their own body. Taking another’s spatial perspective encourages people to compute space-valence mappings using an allocentric frame of reference, based on the fluency with which the other person could perform motor actions with their right or left hand. When people reason from their own spatial perspective, their judgments depend, in part, on the specifics of their bodies; when people reason from someone else’s perspective, their judgments may depend on the specifics of the other person’s body, instead. - See more at: http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00266

Abstract

The problem of poor reproducibility of scientific findings has received much attention over recent years, in a variety of fields including psychology and neuroscience. The problem has been partly attributed to publication bias and unwanted practices such as p‐hacking. Low statistical power in individual studies is also understood to be an important factor. In a recent multisite collaborative study, we mapped brain anatomical left–right asymmetries for regional measures of surface area and cortical thickness, in 99 MRI datasets from around the world, for a total of over 17,000 participants. In the present study, we revisited these hemispheric effects from the perspective of reproducibility. Within each dataset, we considered that an effect had been reproduced when it matched the meta‐analytic effect from the 98 other datasets, in terms of effect direction and significance threshold. In this sense, the results within each dataset were viewed as coming from separate studies in an “ideal publishing environment,” that is, free from selective reporting and p hacking. We found an average reproducibility rate of 63.2% (SD = 22.9%, min = 22.2%, max = 97.0%). As expected, reproducibility was higher for larger effects and in larger datasets. Reproducibility was not obviously related to the age of participants, scanner field strength, FreeSurfer software version, cortical regional measurement reliability, or regional size. These findings constitute an empirical illustration of reproducibility in the absence of publication bias or p hacking, when assessing realistic biological effects in heterogeneous neuroscience data, and given typically‐used sample sizes.

Abstract

Left-right asymmetry of the human brain is one of its cardinal features, and also a complex, multivariate trait. Decades of research have suggested that brain asymmetry may be altered in psychiatric disorders. However, findings have been inconsistent and often based on small sample sizes. There are also open questions surrounding which structures are asymmetrical on average in the healthy population, and how variability in brain asymmetry relates to basic biological variables such as age and sex. Over the last four years, the ENIGMA-Laterality Working Group has published six studies of grey matter morphological asymmetry based on total sample sizes from roughly 3,500 to 17,000 individuals, which were between one and two orders of magnitude larger than those published in previous decades. A population-level mapping of average asymmetry was achieved, including an
intriguing fronto-occipital gradient of cortical thickness asymmetry in healthy brains. ENIGMA’s multidataset approach also supported an empirical illustration of reproducibility of hemispheric differences across datasets. Effect sizes were estimated for grey matter asymmetry based on large, international,
samples in relation to age, sex, handedness, and brain volume, as well as for three psychiatric disorders:Autism Spectrum Disorder was associated with subtly reduced asymmetry of cortical thickness at regions spread widely over the cortex; Pediatric Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder was associated with altered subcortical asymmetry; Major Depressive Disorder was not significantly associated with changes
of asymmetry. Ongoing studies are examining brain asymmetry in other disorders. Moreover, a groundwork has been laid for possibly identifying shared genetic contributions to brain asymmetry and disorders.

Abstract

The ability to extract word forms from continuous speech is a prerequisite for constructing a vocabulary and emerges in the first year of life. Electrophysiological (ERP) studies of speech segmentation by 9- to 12-month-old listeners in several languages have found a left-localized negativity linked to word onset as a marker of word detection. We report an ERP study showing significant evidence of speech segmentation in Dutch-learning 7-month-olds. In contrast to the left-localized negative effect reported with older infants, the observed overall mean effect had a positive polarity. Inspection of individual results revealed two participant sub-groups: a majority showing a positive-going response, and a minority showing the left negativity observed in older age groups. We retested participants at age three, on vocabulary comprehension and word and sentence production. On every test, children who at 7 months had shown the negativity associated with segmentation of words from speech outperformed those who had produced positive-going brain responses to the same input. The earlier that infants show the left-localized brain responses typically indicating detection of words in speech, the better their early childhood language skills.

Abstract

In spoken language, pitch accent can mark certain information as focus, whereby more attentional resources are allocated to the focused information. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, this study examined whether pitch accent, used for marking focus, recruited general attention networks during sentence comprehension. In a language task, we independently manipulated the prosody and semantic/pragmatic congruence of sentences. We found that semantic/pragmatic processing affected bilateral inferior and middle frontal gyrus. The prosody manipulation showed bilateral involvement of the superior/inferior parietal cortex, superior and middle temporal cortex, as well as inferior, middle, and posterior parts of the frontal cortex. We compared these regions with attention networks localized in an auditory spatial attention task. Both tasks activated bilateral superior/inferior parietal cortex, superior temporal cortex, and left precentral cortex. Furthermore, an interaction between prosody and congruence was observed in bilateral inferior parietal regions: for incongruent sentences, but not for congruent ones, there was a larger activation if the incongruent word carried a pitch accent, than if it did not. The common activations between the language task and the spatial attention task demonstrate that pitch accent activates a domain general attention network, which is sensitive to semantic/pragmatic aspects of language. Therefore, attention and language comprehension are highly interactive.

Abstract

The article considers the pragmatics of silence image in English poetry. Silence being a communicative unit is
associated with verbal and non-verbal communication. The purpose of the article is to study the discursive and
communicative-pragmatic nature of poetical images of silence in the English-language literary discourse. The universal
and cultural functions of this notion were analysed and the main approaches to the poetical silence study were
determined. It became clear that the phenomenon of Nature Silence can be actualised with the help of Nature and other
landscape images in the field of English literary discourse. Such images must belong to the paradigm of English
landscape images represented by Earthy, Aerial and Celestial substantial nature symbols. In terms of
discourse-communicative approach to the study of communicative silence, these elements play an important role of the
main producers of Nature Silence. This work proposes the new pragmatic and communicative approach of
understanding the Nature silence in English literary discourse. The main verbal units that can actualise the poetical
image of silence are characterised by the permanent correlation with the different symbols of nature, showing the
dominant and peripheral characteristics. Being the pragmatic realisation of silence image, motives of Nature Silence
may be considered both as dominant and background.

Abstract

Theories of language acquisition vary significantly in their assumptions regarding the content of children’s early syntactic representations and how they subsequently develop towards the adult state. An important methodological tool in tapping syntactic knowledge is priming. In the current paper, we report the first longitudinal investigation of syntactic priming in children, to test the competing predictions of three different theoretical accounts. A sample of 106 children completed a syntactic priming task testing the English active/passive alternation every six months from 36 months to 54 months of age. We tracked both the emergence and development of the abstract priming effect and lexical boost effect. The lexical boost effect emerged late and increased in magnitude over development, whilst the abstract priming effect emerged early and, in a subsample of participants who produced at least one passive at 36 months, decreased in magnitude over time. In addition, there was substantial variation in the emergence of abstract priming amongst our sample, which was significantly predicted by language proficiency measured six months prior. We conclude that children’s representation of the passive is abstracted early, with lexically dependent priming coming online only later in development. The results are best explained by an implicit learning account of acquisition (Chang, F., Dell, G., S., & Bock, K. 2006. Becoming Syntactic. Psychological Review, 113, 234–272), which induces dynamic syntactic representations from the input that continue to change across developmental time.

Abstract

Recent experimental findings suggest stable individual differences in the perception of auditory stimuli lacking energy at the fundamental frequency (F0), here called missing fundamental (MF) tones. Specifically, some individuals readily identify the pitch of such tones with the missing F0 ("F0 listeners"), and some base their judgment on the frequency of the partials that make up the tones ("spectral listeners"). However, the diversity of goals and methods in recent research makes it difficult to draw clear conclusions about individual differences. The first purpose of this article is to discuss the influence of methodological choices on listeners' responses. The second goal is to report findings on individual differences in our own studies of the MF phenomenon. In several experiments, participants judged the direction of pitch change in stimuli composed of two MF tones, constructed so as to reveal whether the pitch percept was based on the MF or the partials. The reported difference between F0 listeners and spectral listeners was replicated, but other stable patterns of responses were also observed. Test-retest reliability is high. We conclude that there are genuine, stable individual differences underlying the diverse findings, but also that there are more than two general types of listeners, and that stimulus variables strongly affect some listeners' responses. This suggests that it is generally misleading to classify individuals as "F0 listeners" or "spectral listeners." It may be more accurate to speak of two modes of perception ("F0 listening" and "spectral listening"), both of which are available to many listeners. The individual differences lie in what conditions the choice between the two modes.

Abstract

Cognitive linguists suggest that understanding metaphors requires activation of conceptual mappings between the involved concepts. We tested whether mappings are indeed in use during metaphor comprehension, and what mapping means as a cognitive process with Event-Related Potentials. Participants read literal, conventional metaphorical, novel metaphorical, and anomalous target sentences preceded by primes with related or unrelated mappings. Experiment 1 used sentence-primes to activate related mappings, and Experiment 2 used simile-primes to induce comparison thinking. In the unprimed conditions of both experiments, metaphors elicited N400s more negative than the literals. In Experiment 1, related sentence-primes reduced the metaphor-literal N400 difference in conventional, but not in novel metaphors. In Experiment 2, related simile-primes reduced the metaphor-literal N400 difference in novel, but not clearly in conventional metaphors. We suggest that mapping as a process occurs in metaphors, and the ways in which it can be facilitated by comparison differ between conventional and novel metaphors.

Abstract

Hierarchical centre-embedded structures pose a large difficulty for language learners due to their complexity. A recent artificial grammar learning study (Lai & Poletiek, 2011) demonstrated a starting-small (SS) effect, i.e., staged-input and sufficient exposure to 0-level-of-embedding exemplars were the critical conditions in learning AnBn structures. The current study aims to test: (1) a more sophisticated type of SS (a gradually rather than discretely growing input), and (2) the frequency distribution of the input. The results indicate that SS optimally works under other conditional cues, such as a skewed frequency distribution with simple stimuli being more numerous than complex ones.

Abstract

Introduction: Mood is a constant in our daily life and can permeate all levels of cognition. We examined whether and how mood influences the processing of discourse content that is relatively neutral and not loaded with emotion. During discourse processing, readers have to constantly strike a balance between what they know in long term memory and what the current discourse is about. Our general hypothesis is that mood states would affect this balance. We hypothesized that readers in a positive mood would rely more on default world knowledge, whereas readers in a negative mood would be more inclined to analyze the details in the current discourse.

Methods: Participants were put in a positive and a negative mood via film clips, one week apart. In each session, after mood manipulation, they were presented with sentences in discourse materials. We created sentences such as “With the lights on you can see...” that end with critical words (CWs) “more” or “less”, where general knowledge supports “more”, not “less”. We then embedded each of these sentences in a wider discourse that does/does not support the CWs (a story about driving in the night vs. stargazing). EEG was recorded throughout.

Results: The results showed that first, mood manipulation was successful in that there was a significant mood difference between sessions. Second, mood did not modulate the N400 effects. Participants in both moods detected outright semantic violations and allowed world knowledge to be overridden by discourse context. Third, mood modulated the LPC (Late Positive Component) effects, distributed in the frontal region. In negative moods, the LPC was sensitive to one-level violation. That is, CWs that were supported by only world knowledge, only discourse, and neither, elicited larger frontal LPCs, in comparison to the condition where CWs were supported by both world knowledge and discourse.

Discussion: These results suggest that mood does not influence all processes involved in discourse processing. Specifically, mood does not influence lexical-semantic retrieval (N400), but it does influence elaborative processes for sensemaking (P600) during discourse processing. These results advance our understanding of the impact and time course of mood on discourse.

Abstract

In this paper we examine whether experience with spatial metaphors for time has an influence on people’s representation of time. In particular we ask whether spatiotemporal metaphors can have both chronic and immediate effects on temporal thinking. In Study 1, we examine the prevalence of ego-moving representations for time in Mandarin speakers, English speakers, and Mandarin-English (ME) bilinguals. As predicted by observations in linguistic analyses, we find that Mandarin speakers are less likely to take an ego-moving perspective than are English speakers. Further, we find that ME bilinguals tested in English are less likely to take an ego-moving perspective than are English monolinguals (an effect of L1 on meaning-making in L2), and also that ME bilinguals tested in Mandarin are more likely to take an ego-moving perspective than are Mandarin monolinguals (an effect of L2 on meaning-making in L1). These findings demonstrate that habits of metaphor use in one language can influence temporal reasoning in another language, suggesting the metaphors can have a chronic effect on patterns in thought. In Study 2 we test Mandarin speakers using either horizontal or vertical metaphors in the immediate context of the task. We find that Mandarin speakers are more likely to construct front-back representations of time when understanding front-back metaphors, and more likely to construct up-down representations of time when understanding up-down metaphors. These findings demonstrate that spatiotemporal metaphors can also have an immediate influence on temporal reasoning. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that the metaphors we use to talk about time have both immediate and long-term consequences for how we conceptualize and reason about this fundamental domain of experience.

Abstract

The Human Connectome Project (HCP) seeks to map the structural and functional connections between network elements in the human brain. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) provides a temporally rich source of information on brain network dynamics and represents one source of functional connectivity data to be provided by the HCP. High quality MEG data will be collected from 50 twin pairs both in the resting state and during performance of motor, working memory and language tasks. These data will be available to the general community. Additionally, using the cortical parcellation scheme common to all imaging modalities, the HCP will provide processing pipelines for calculating connection matrices as a function of time and frequency. Together with structural and functional data generated using magnetic resonance imaging methods, these data represent a unique opportunity to investigate brain network connectivity in a large cohort of normal adult human subjects. The analysis pipeline software and the dynamic connectivity matrices that it generates will all be made freely available to the research community.

Abstract

Executive functioning (EF) plays a major role in many domains of human behaviour, including self-regulation, academic achievement, and even sports expertise. While a significant proportion of cross-sectional research has focused on the developmental pathways of EF, the existing literature is fractionated due to a wide range of methodologies applied to narrow age ranges, impeding comparison across a broad range of age groups. The current study used a cross-sectional design to investigate the factor structure of EF within late childhood and adolescence. A total of 2166 Flemish children and adolescents completed seven tasks of the Cambridge Brain Sciences test battery. Based on the existing literature, a Confirmatory Factor Analysis was performed, which indicated that a unitary factor model provides the best fit for the youngest age group (7–12 years). For the adolescents (12–18 years), the factor structure consists of four different components, including working memory, shifting, inhibition and planning. With regard to differences between early (12–15 years) and late (15–18 years) adolescents, working memory, inhibition and planning show higher scores for the late adolescents, while there was no difference on shifting. The current study is one of the first to administer the same seven EF tests in a considerably large sample of children and adolescents, and as such contributes to the understanding of the developmental trends in EF. Future studies, especially with longitudinal designs, are encouraged to further increase the knowledge concerning the factor structure of EF, and the development of the different EF components.

Abstract

Using real-time eye-movement measures, we asked how a fantastical discourse context competes with stored representations of real-world events to influence the moment-by-moment interpretation of a story by 7-year-old children and adults. Seven-year-olds were less effective at bypassing stored real-world knowledge during real-time interpretation than adults. Our results suggest that children privilege stored semantic knowledge over situation-specific information presented in a fictional story context. We suggest that 7-year-olds’ canonical semantic and conceptual relations are sufficiently strongly rooted in statistical patterns in language that have consolidated over time that they overwhelm new and unexpected information even when the latter is fantastical and highly salient.

Abstract

Objective Wnt signalling is critical for normal intestinal development and homeostasis. Wnt dysregulation occurs in almost all human and murine intestinal tumours and an optimal but not excessive level of Wnt activation is considered favourable for tumourigenesis. The authors assessed effects of pan-intestinal Wnt activation on tissue homeostasis, taking into account underlying physiological Wnt activity and stem-cell number in each region of the bowel. Design The authors generated mice that expressed temporally controlled, stabilised β-catenin along the crypt–villus axis throughout the intestines. Physiological Wnt target gene activity was assessed in different regions of normal mouse and human tissue. Human intestinal tumour mutation spectra were analysed. Results In the mouse, β-catenin stabilisation resulted in a graduated neoplastic response, ranging from dysplastic transformation of the entire epithelium in the proximal small bowel to slightly enlarged crypts of non-dysplastic morphology in the colorectum. In contrast, stem and proliferating cell numbers were increased in all intestinal regions. In the normal mouse and human intestines, stem-cell and Wnt gradients were non-identical, but higher in the small bowel than large bowel in both species. There was also variation in the expression of some Wnt modulators. Human tumour analysis confirmed that different APC mutation spectra are selected in different regions of the bowel. Conclusions There are variable gradients in stem-cell number, physiological Wnt activity and response to pathologically increased Wnt signalling along the crypt-villus axis and throughout the length of the intestinal tract. The authors propose that this variation influences regional mutation spectra, tumour susceptibility and lesion distribution in mice and humans.

Abstract

In this article, we propose a novel image segmentation method called the whole mesh deformation (WMD) model, which aims at addressing the problems of modern medical imaging. Such problems have raised from the combination of several factors: (1) significant growth of medical image volumes sizes due to increasing capabilities of medical acquisition devices; (2) the will to increase the complexity of image processing algorithms in order to explore new functionality; (3) change in processor development and turn towards multi processing units instead of growing bus speeds and the number of operations per second of a single processing unit. Our solution is based on the concept of deformable models and is characterized by a very effective and precise segmentation capability. The proposed WMD model uses a volumetric mesh instead of a contour or a surface to represent the segmented shapes of interest, which allows exploiting more information in the image and obtaining results in shorter times, independently of image contents. The model also offers a good ability for topology changes and allows effective parallelization of workflow, which makes it a very good choice for large datasets. We present a precise model description, followed by experiments on artificial images and real medical data.

Abstract

The way we process language is influenced by our experience. We are more likely to attend to features that proved to be useful in the past. Importantly, the size of individuals’ social network can influence their experience, and consequently, how they process language. In the case of voice recognition, having a larger social network might provide more variable input and thus enhance the ability to recognise new voices. On the other hand, learning to recognise voices is more demanding and less beneficial for people with a larger social network as they have more speakers to learn yet spend less time with each. This paper tests whether social network size influences voice recognition, and if so, in which direction. Native Dutch speakers listed their social network and performed a voice recognition task. Results showed that people with larger social networks were poorer at learning to recognise voices. Experiment 2 replicated the results with a British sample and English stimuli. Experiment 3 showed that the effect does not generalise to voice recognition in an unfamiliar language suggesting that social network size influences attention to the linguistic rather than non-linguistic markers that differentiate speakers. The studies thus show that our social network size influences our inclination to learn speaker-specific patterns in our environment, and consequently, the development of skills that rely on such learned patterns, such as voice recognition.

Abstract

Learning a second language influences speakers’ first language, but there is great variability in the degree of influence that speakers exhibit. We show that some of this variability is due to individual differences in inhibitory skill. Particularly, we propose that poorer inhibitory skill leads to greater activation of competing items from the language not in use, and that this greater co-activation ultimately leads to greater influence of the co-activated items on one another. Specifically, we show that bilinguals with lower inhibitory skill exhibit greater influence of the second language on the first. Late English–French bilinguals residing in France produced and perceived Voice Onset Time of voiceless stops in English in a more French-like manner, the lower their inhibitory skill was. We discuss the implications of these results for the role of inhibitory skill in shaping representation in bilingual as well as monolingual language processing.

Abstract

Describes the history of the field in terms of its multidisciplinary "roots" so that readers from different disciplines can concentrate on, or selectively read, the corresponding chapters. * Explores the history of research on brain and language, making the book valuable for aphasiologists, communication scientists and neuroscientists of language. * Covers the history of linguistic approaches to psycholinguistics - making the book of interest to both theoretical and applied linguists. * Written by a scientist whose own contribution to the field has been seminal, resulting in a work that will be seen as the definitive of psycholinguistics, for many years to come How do we manage to speak and understand language? How do children acquire these skills and how does the brain support them?These psycholinguistic issues have been studied for more than two centuries. Though many Psycholinguists tend to consider their history as beginning with the Chomskyan "cognitive revolution" of the late 1950s/1960s, the history of empirical psycholinguistics actually goes back to the end of the 18th century. This is the first book to comprehensively treat this "pre-Chomskyan" history. It tells the fascinating history of the doctors, pedagogues, linguists and psychologists who created this discipline, looking at how they made their important discoveries about the language regions in the brain, about the high-speed accessing of words in speaking and listening, on the child's invention of syntax, on the disruption of language in aphasic patients and so much more. The book is both a history of ideas as well of the men and women whose intelligence, brilliant insights, fads, fallacies, cooperations, and rivalries created this discipline. Psycholinguistics has four historical roots, which, by the end of the 19th century, had merged. By then, the discipline, usually called the psychology of language, was established. The first root was comparative linguistics, which raised the issue of the psychological origins of language. The second root was the study of language in the brain, with Franz Gall as the pioneer and the Broca and Wernicke discoveries as major landmarks. The third root was the diary approach to child development, which emerged from Rousseau's Émile. The fourth root was the experimental laboratory approach to speech and language processing, which originated from Franciscus Donders' mental chronometry. Wilhelm Wundt unified these four approaches in his monumental Die Sprache of 1900. These four perspectives of psycholinguistics continued into the 20th century but in quite divergent frameworks. There was German consciousness and thought psychology, Swiss/French and Prague/Viennese structuralism, Russian and American behaviorism, and almost aggressive holism in aphasiology. As well as reviewing all these perspectives, the book looks at the deep disruption of the field during the Third Reich and its optimistic, multidisciplinary re-emergence during the 1950s with the mathematical theory of communication as a major impetus. A tour de force from one of the seminal figures in the field, this book will be essential reading for all linguists, psycholinguists, and psychologists with an interest in language. Readership: Linguists, psychologists, aphasiologists, communication scientists, cognitive (neuro-)scientists, whether professionals or graduate students. Historians of science

Abstract

Making a self-repair in speech typically proceeds in three phases. The first phase involves the monitoring of one’s own speech and the interruption of the flow of speech when trouble is detected. From an analysis of 959 spontaneous self-repairs it appears that interrupting follows detection promptly, with the exception that correct words tend to be completed. Another finding is that detection of trouble improves towards the end of constituents. The second phase is characterized by hesitation, pausing, but especially the use of so-called editing terms. Which editing term is used depends on the nature of the speech trouble in a rather regular fashion: Speech errors induce other editing terms than words that are merely inappropriate, and trouble which is detected quickly by the speaker is preferably signalled by the use of ‘uh’. The third phase consists of making the repair proper The linguistic well-formedness of a repair is not dependent on the speaker’s respecting the integriv of constituents, but on the structural relation between original utterance and repair. A bi-conditional well-formedness rule links this relation to a corresponding relation between the conjuncts of a coordination. It is suggested that a similar relation holds also between question and answer. In all three cases the speaker respects certain Istructural commitments derived from an original utterance. It was finally shown that the editing term plus the first word of the repair proper almost always contain sufficient information for the listener to decide how the repair should be related to the original utterance. Speakers almost never produce misleading information in this respect. It is argued that speakers have little or no access to their speech production process; self-monitoring is probably based on parsing one’s own inner or overt speech.

Abstract

Spontaneous self-corrections in speech pose a communication problem; the speaker must make clear to the listener not only that the original Utterance was faulty, but where it was faulty and how the fault is to be corrected. Prosodic marking of corrections - making the prosody of the repair noticeably different from that of the original utterance - offers a resource which the speaker can exploit to provide the listener with such information. A corpus of more than 400 spontaneous speech repairs was analysed, and the prosodic characteristics compared with the syntactic and semantic characteristics of each repair. Prosodic marking showed no relationship at all with the syntactic characteristics of repairs. Instead, marking was associated with certain semantic factors: repairs were marked when the original utterance had been actually erroneous, rather than simply less appropriate than the repair; and repairs tended to be marked more often when the set of items encompassing the error and the repair was small rather than when it was large. These findings lend further weight to the characterization of accent as essentially semantic in function.

Abstract

The present paper studies how, in deictic expressions, the temporal interdependency of speech and gesture is realized in the course of motor planning and execution. Two theoretical positions were compared. On the “interactive” view the temporal parameters of speech and gesture are claimed to be the result of feedback between the two systems throughout the phases of motor planning and execution. The alternative “ballistic” view, however, predicts that the two systems are independent during the phase of motor execution, the temporal parameters having been preestablished in the planning phase. In four experiments subjects were requested to indicate which of an array of referent lights was momentarily illuminated. This was done by pointing to the light and/or by using a deictic expression (this/that light). The temporal and spatial course of the pointing movement was automatically registered by means of a Selspot opto-electronic system. By analyzing the moments of gesture initiation and apex, and relating them to the moments of speech onset, it was possible to show that, for deictic expressions, the ballistic view is very nearly correct.

Abstract

The deep structural diversity of languages suggests that our language capacities are not based on
any single template but rather on an underlying ability and motivation for infants to acquire a
culturally transmitted system. The hypothesis is that this ability has an interactional base that has
discernable precursors in other primates. In this paper I explore a specific evolutionary route for the
most puzzling aspect of this interactional base in humans, namely the development of an empathetic
intentional stance. The route involves a generalization of mother-infant interaction patterns to all
adults via a process (‘ cuteness selection’ ) analogous to, but distinct from, RA Fisher’s runaway
sexual selection. This provides a cornerstone for the carrying capacity for language.

Abstract

This is a comprehensive description of a language spoken some 450 km offshore from the mainland of Papua New Guinea. The language is remarkable for its phonological, morphological and syntactic complexity. As the sole surviving member of its language family, and with little historical contact with surrounding languages, the language provides evidence of the kind of languages spoken in this part of the world before the Austronesian expansion.

The grammar provides detailed information on the phoneme inventory, morphology, syntax and select semantic fields. Remarkable features include a 90 phoneme inventory including unique sounds, a morphology with thousands of non-compositional portmanteau elements, complex rules for negation, and extensive ergative syntax. Unusual patterns are also found in the organization of semantic fields, for example in partonymies of the body, taxonomies of the natural world, verbal semantics and kinship terms. The combination of linguistic ‘rara’ suggest that linguistic evolution under low contact can yield baroque and unusual patterns. The volume should be of special interest to linguists, typologists, sociolinguists, anthropologists and researchers in Oceania and Melanesia.

Abstract

This review describes some recent, unexpected findings concerning variation in spatial language across cultures, and places them in the context of the general anthropology of space on the one hand, and theories of spatial cognition in the cognitive sciences on the other. There has been much concern with the symbolism of space in anthropological writings, but little on concepts of space in practical activities. This neglect of everyday spatial notions may be due to unwitting ethnocentrism, the assumption in Western thinking generally that notions of space are universally of a single kind. Recent work shows that systems of spatial reckoning and description can in fact be quite divergent across cultures, linguistic differences correlating with distinct cognitive tendencies. This unexpected cultural variation raises interesting questions concerning the relation between cultural and linguistic concepts and the biological foundations of cognition. It argues for more sophisticated models relating culture and cognition than we currently have available.

Abstract

There has been a recent spate of work on recursion as a central design feature of language. This short report points out that there is little evidence that unlimited recursion, understood as center-embedding, is typical of natural language syntax. Nevertheless, embedded pragmatic construals seem available in every language. Further, much deeper center-embedding can be found in dialogue or conversation structure than can be found in syntax. Existing accounts for the 'performance' limitations on center-embedding are thus thrown into doubt. Dialogue materials suggest that center-embedding is perhaps a core part of the human interaction system, and is for some reason much more highly restricted in syntax than in other aspects of cognition.

Abstract

This paper describes the linguistic description of time, the accompanying gestural system, and the “mental time lines” found in the speakers of Yélî Dnye, an isolate language spoken offshore from Papua New Guinea. Like many indigenous languages, Yélî Dnye has no fixed anchoring of time and thus no calendrical time. Instead, time in Yélî Dnye linguistic
description is primarily anchored to the time of speaking, with six diurnal tenses and special nominals for n days from coding time; this is supplemented with special constructions for overlapping events. Consequently there is relatively little cross-over or metaphor from space to time. The gesture system, on the other hand, uses pointing to sun position to indicate time of day and may make use of systematic time lines. Experimental evidence fails to show a single robust axis used for mapping time to space. This suggests that there may not be a strong, universal tendency for systematic space-time mappings.

Abstract

Zipf’s law of abbreviation, which posits a negative correlation between word frequency and length, is one of the most famous and robust cross-linguistic generalizations. At the same time, it has been shown that contextual informativity (average surprisal given previous context) is more strongly correlated with word length, although this tendency is not observed consistently, depending on several methodological choices. The present study examines a more diverse sample of languages than the previous studies (Arabic, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Russian, Spanish and Turkish). I use large web-based corpora from the Leipzig Corpora Collection to estimate word lengths in UTF-8 characters and in phonemes (for some of the languages), as well as word frequency, informativity given previous word and informativity given next word, applying different methods of bigrams processing. The results show different correlations between word length and the corpus-based measure for different languages. I argue that these differences can be explained by the properties of noun phrases in a language, most importantly, by the order of heads and modifiers and their relative morphological complexity, as well as by orthographic conventions

Abstract

We investigate the correlations between A- and P-lability for verbal arguments with other typological parameters using large, syntactically annotated corpora of online news in 28 languages. To estimate how much lability is observed in a language, we measure associations between Verbs or Verb + Noun combinations and the alternating constructions in which they occur. Our correlational analyses show that high P-lability scores correlate strongly with the following parameters: little or no case marking; weaker associations between lexemes and the grammatical roles A and P; rigid order of Subject and Object; and a high proportion of verb-medial clauses (SVO). Low P-lability correlates with the presence of case marking, stronger associations between nouns and grammatical roles, relatively flexible ordering of Subject and Object, and verb-final order. As for A-lability, it is not correlated with any other parameters. A possible reason is that A-lability is a result of more universal discourse processes, such as deprofiling of the object, and also exhibits numerous lexical and semantic idiosyncrasies. The fact that P-lability is strongly correlated with other parameters can be interpreted as evidence for a more general typology of languages, in which some tend to have highly informative morphosyntactic and lexical cues, whereas others rely predominantly on contextual environment, which is possibly due to fixed word order. We also find that P-lability is more strongly correlated with the other parameters than any of these parameters are with each other, which means that it can be a very useful typological variable.

Abstract

There is ample psycholinguistic evidence that speakers behave efficiently, using shorter and less effortful constructions when the meaning is more predictable, and longer and more effortful ones when it is less predictable. However, the Principle of No Synonymy requires that all formally distinct variants should also be functionally different. The question is how much two related constructions should overlap semantically and pragmatically in order to be used for the purposes of efficient communication. The case study focuses on want to + Infinitive and its reduced variant with wanna, which have different stylistic and sociolinguistic connotations. Bayesian mixed-effects regression modelling based on the spoken part of the British National Corpus reveals a very limited effect of efficiency: predictability increases the chances of the reduced variant only in fast speech. We conclude that efficient use of more and less effortful variants is restricted when two variants are associated with different registers or styles. This paper also pursues a methodological goal regarding missing values in speech corpora. We impute missing data based on the existing values. A comparison of regression models with and without imputed values reveals similar tendencies. This means that imputation is useful for dealing with missing values in corpora.

Abstract

The present paper discusses connectivity and proximity maps of causative constructions and combines them with different types of typological data. In the first case study, I show how one can create a connectivity map based on a parallel corpus. This allows us to solve many problems, such as incomplete descriptions, inconsistent terminology and the problem of determining the semantic nodes. The second part focuses on proximity maps based on Multidimensional Scaling and compares the most important semantic distinctions, which are inferred from a parallel corpus of film subtitles and from grammar descriptions. The results suggest that corpus-based maps of tokens are more sensitive to cultural and genre-related differences in the prominence of specific causation scenarios than maps based on constructional types, which are described in reference grammars. The grammar-based maps also reveal a less clear structure, which can be due to incomplete semantic descriptions in grammars. Therefore, each approach has its shortcomings, which researchers need to be aware of.

Abstract

Over the last few years, the number of corpora that can be used for language comparison has dramatically increased. The corpora are so diverse in their structure, size and annotation style, that a novice might not know where to start. The present paper charts this new and changing territory, providing a few landmarks, warning signs and safe paths. Although no corpora corpus at present can replace the traditional type of typological data based on language description in reference grammars, they corpora can help with diverse tasks, being particularly well suited for investigating probabilistic and gradient properties of languages and for discovering and interpreting cross-linguistic generalizations based on processing and communicative mechanisms. At the same time, the use of corpora for typological purposes has not only advantages and opportunities, but also numerous challenges. This paper also contains an empirical case study addressing two pertinent problems: the role of text types in language comparison and the problem of the word as a comparative concept.

Abstract

The paper demonstrates how verb and noun classes can be used as a common interface in contrastive Construction Grammar. It presents an innovative approach to the contrastive analysis of constructional spaces (sets of constructions covering a certain semantic domain). We compare English and Dutch analytic causatives by using the statistical technique of multiple correspondence analysis applied to data from large monolingual corpora. The method allows us to explore the common conceptual space of the constructions, in particular the salient semantic dimensions and causation types, which emerge on the basis of co-occurring semantic classes of the nominal and verbal slot fillers in constructional exemplars. The formal patterns of the constructions at different levels of specificity are projected onto this space. Our analyses show that an average Dutch analytic causative refers to more indirect and abstract causation with fewer animate than its English counterpart. We have also found that the languages “cut” the common conceptual space in unique ways, although the semantic areas of many English and Dutch constructions overlap substantially. Nevertheless, the form-meaning mapping in the two languages displays commonalities. Both English and Dutch constructions with prepositionally marked or implicit causees are strongly associated with animate causees. We have also observed a correlation between the directness of causation and the crosslinguistic hierarchy of affectedness marking proposed by Kemmer and Verhagen (1994).