Search

Infant-directed speech (IDS) is known to be characterised by phonetic and prosodic cues along with reduced vocabulary and syntax compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). However, there is considerable variation between mothers in the degree of lexical and syntactic reduction of their IDS. The present study aims to investigate the correspondences of the inter-individual variation of maternal IDS at 6 and 18 months with infants’ language development at 18 months. 109 dyads of mothers and their firstborn infants participated in the study. Mothers’ ID and AD storytelling based on standard picture stimuli were recorded at 6 and 18 months of their infants’ age. We analysed measures of speech quantity (number of utterances and words), syntactic complexity (mean length of utterance), and lexical diversity (type-token ratio). Language growth was measured bimonthly using the Hungarian adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates CDI W&G form. The results did not reveal any association between characteristics of mothers’ ID narratives and their infants’ concurrent language skills at 18 months. However, we found a longitudinal link between a distinct pattern of linguistic simplification in maternal ID storytelling at 6 months and the development of expressive vocabulary in infants at 18 months. Infants whose mother tends to reduce both lexical and syntactic complexity of ID narratives the most are more likely to exhibit higher language outcomes. Further research is warranted to explore the background factors and longer-term effects of this maternal strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While formal L3 morphosyntactic acquisition research has focused on the roles of the L1 versus L2 during the L3 initial stages, we examine their roles during development. Specifically, we explore whether the L3 (here, Portuguese) revision process after non-facilitative transfer differs whether the initial L3 representation reflects the L1 or L2. If this initial L3 representation is the same for a group whose source is their L1 and a group whose source is their L2, it is plausible to predict similar developmental processes between groups. However, recent data have shown between-group developmental differences despite a similar L3 starting point. In an effort to isolate the variable(s) behind such differences, we investigate the roles of dominance and formal instruction via two sets of L3 morphosyntactic judgments. The first set excludes dominance, with similar patterns in English-dominant versus Spanish-dominant L1 Spanish data. The second set excludes formal instruction, whereby L2 Spanish data shows L3 convergence for a property not explicitly taught and L1 Spanish data does not. As an initial hypothesis for further exploration of between-group differences, we propose the Cumulative Input Threshold Hypothesis: The rate of developmental recovery from non-facilitative transfer is inversely related to lifetime input of the source language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous work has established that neural oscillations can temporally synchronise with the occurrence of multi-unit linguistic representations but that neural synchrony to phrase boundaries is reduced in the absence of lexical content. In this study, we extend these findings to test whether reducing parsing ambiguity eliminates the reduction in phrase tracking associated with a lack of lexical content. Building on previous work, we reduced word-level parsing ambiguity by visually presenting sentences, and we reduced phrase-level parsing ambiguities by using the caused-motion construction for all sentences. Results indicated no difference in word or phrase-level tracking when comparing English and jabberwocky stimuli. We interpret this finding as indicating that tracking phrase structure can take place in the absence of content words if parsing ambiguities are sufficiently reduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is unclear whether individuals with agrammatic aphasia have particularly disrupted prosody, or in fact have relatively preserved prosody they can use in a compensatory way. A targeted literature review was undertaken to examine the evidence regarding the capacity of speakers with agrammatic aphasia to produce prosody. The aim was to answer the question, how much prosody can a speaker “do” with limited syntax? The literature was systematically searched for articles examining the production of grammatical prosody in people with agrammatism, and yielded 16 studies that were ultimately included in this review. Participant inclusion criteria, spoken language tasks, and analysis procedures vary widely across studies. The evidence indicates that timing aspects of prosody are disrupted in people with agrammatic aphasia, while the use of pitch and amplitude cues is more likely to be preserved in this population. Some, but not all, of these timing differences may be attributable to motor speech programming deficits (AOS) rather than aphasia, as these conditions frequently co-occur. Many of the included studies do not address AOS and its possible role in any observed effects. Finally, the available evidence indicates that even speakers with severe aphasia show a degree of preserved prosody in functional communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the verb-initial independent declarative clauses with overt subjects (V1) in the Old English Bede on which the most complete witnesses disagree. It identifies the syntactic and textual environments in which the V1 clauses are altered or omitted and the types of changes they undergo. The article demonstrates that the majority of the alterations and omissions are recorded in the later manuscripts B and Ca. Most of them reflect the change to the V2 and V3 word order and the rise of the þa VS clauses in the V1 textual environments (e.g. reported discourse). Besides these widely attested developments in syntax and textual organisation, the corpus also exhibits the alterations that can be attributed to the individual scribes who modify or omit the V1 clauses to align the Old English translation with the Latin, eliminate asyndetic parataxis, homogenise the style, and streamline the narrative. The variants and scribal interventions uncovered by the present inquiry not only help form a more complete picture of the transmission and uses of the manuscripts of the Old English Bede but also contribute to the diachronic and synchronic study of the Old English language and style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to evaluate the effect of linguistic complexity and individual background variables (i.e. linguistic and cognitive abilities, degree of autistic traits, and sex) on speech disfluencies in autistic young adults and controls. Thirty-two 19- to 33-year-old autistic adults and 35 controls participated in this study. The frequency of disfluencies and stuttering severity were evaluated based on a narrative speech task. Linguistic complexity was assessed by evaluating the syntactic structures of the narratives. Cognitive and linguistic abilities were assessed using the General Ability Index (GAI), Verbal Comprehension Index (VCI) and Perceptual Reasoning Index (PRI) from the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale IV. Autistic traits were measured using the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ). Multiple-linear regression analyses (syntactic complexity, GAI, AQ, sex, and group status as predictors) showed that (a) syntactic complexity predicted total and stuttering-like disfluencies and stuttering severity, (b) GAI predicted typical disfluencies, and (c) sex predicted total, typical, and stuttering-like disfluencies. Additional correlation analyses revealed negative association between PRI and disfluencies in the control group but not in the autistic group. No connection was found between AQ and disfluencies. It seems that while some connections between disfluencies and individual cognitive features were found, some of the possible contributing factors for greater speech disfluency might differ between autistic and typical speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Connected speech is often used to assess many aspects of an individual's language abilities after stroke. However, it is unknown the degree to which elicitation methods differ in generating structural and syntactic aspects of connected speech, two critical components of successful communication. Quantifying the degree to which elicitation methods differ in eliciting structurally, syntactically, and lexically complex connected speech at the earliest stage of stroke before reorganization and rehabilitation of function independent of clinical diagnosis of aphasia has not been examined to date. Addressing this gap has implications for early clinical intervention as well as empirical studies of connected speech production. We compared two common elicitation methods, picture description and storytelling on lexical, structural, and syntactic measures of connected speech in speakers during the acute stage of left hemisphere stroke. We measured connected speech using an automated quantitative production analysis approach (Fromm et al., 2021) in 71 native-English speaking participants (27 female; 59 ± 13 years) within an average 3.9 days from left hemisphere stroke onset. We tested the degree of agreement and consistency between elicitation methods for lexical, structural, and syntactic measures of connected speech, as well as the degree of concordance in classifying deficits across individuals. Storytelling elicited significantly more words and more structurally complex, lexically diverse, and syntactically accurate speech in comparison to picture description. Elicitation methods differed in measuring outcomes across participants for the lexical and syntactic, but not structural complexity aspects of connected speech where storytelling classified more participants with impairments in comparison to picture description. These differences suggest storytelling provides assessment of connected speech abilities more reflective of real-world abilities where its use is particularly critical for examining individual differences and providing diagnoses of acute stroke language deficits. As a result, using storytelling as a connected speech elicitation method more effectively captures a patient's language capabilities after stroke, consequently informing clinical diagnosis and treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this project was to examine age-related use of action, metacognitive, and metalinguistic verbs because factors related to verb transparency are thought to impact word learning. Performance on fictional, oral narratives elicited using a single-episode picture was evaluated for 84 children with typical language (TL) and 38 age-matched children with a Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) ranging in age from 5;1 to 14;4 years of age. Narrative samples were transcribed and coded for occurrences of action verbs (AV), metacognitive verbs (MCV), and metalinguistic verbs (MLV). The total number of verbs used and the number of different verbs produced in each category were examined across ages, as was the difference in verb usage patterns across language ability groups. A statistically significant increase in the overall use of action, MCV, and MLV with age was observed. TL children used a wider variety of each verb type as compared to those with DLD. Age-related progression for verb use was observed in the fictional narrative generation task by both groups of children. However, despite similar rates of total verb use, children with DLD produced fewer different verbs in the three categories. These findings indicate the total number of verbs used is similar in children with TL and DLD, but there is a difference in the number of different verbs used in functional tasks such as narratives for children with DLD. These results also indicate a need for ongoing examination of the factors not only impacting verb acquisition but also use in communication tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PurposeMethodResultsConclusionsThis study aimed to develop a fine-grained measure for evaluating syntactic abilities in Mandarin-speaking children for educational and clinical purposes as a supplement to MLU.In total, 99 typically developing children, aged 2;0 to 5;11, living in Taipei, Taiwan, participated in this study. Spontaneous language samples were elicited in free-play situations. The first 100 intelligible utterances were coded with a newly developed scheme: the Mandarin Assessment of Productive Syntax-Revised (MAPS-R). For the examination of concurrent validity, MLU was also computed.Significant age-related differences were observed in both MLU and MAPS-R scores. Strong correlations were found between MLU and MAPS-R scores, confirming the validity of MAPS-R as a measure of syntactic development. MAPS-R further revealed that Mandarin-speaking children expanded noun phrases with the general classifier ‘GE’ very early on, followed by a locative expression. Verb expansions began with resultative complements and aspect markers. Sentences with complex predication structures, such as serial verbs/pivotal sentences, were still not widely used when the MLU value is below 4.5.The study showed that MAPS-R is a reliable and valid measure that can provide a rich profile of the syntactic development of Mandarin-speaking children. It can be a useful reference for speech therapists to set a baseline for developing language intervention plans and to monitor their outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many people with aphasia (PWA) show deficits in sentence production and comprehension, in part, due to an inefficient mapping between messages and syntactic structures. Structural priming—the tendency to repeat previously encountered sentence structures—has been shown to support implicit syntactic learning within and across production and comprehension modalities in healthy adults. Structural priming is also effective in facilitating sentence production and comprehension in PWA. However, less is known about whether priming in one modality changes PWA's performance in the other modality, crucial evidence needed for applying structural priming as a cost-effective intervention strategy for PWA. This study examined (a) whether production to comprehension cross-modality priming is effective in PWA, (b) whether priming-induced changes in syntactic comprehension lasted in the absence of an immediate prime, and (c) whether there is a significant correlation between individuals' priming effects and the change in their comprehension following priming. Thirteen PWA and 13 age-matched control participants completed a pre-test, a production-to-comprehension priming block, and a post-test. In the pre- and post-tests, participants completed a sentence-picture matching task with sentences involving interpretations of an ambiguous prepositional phrase (e.g., The teacher is poking the monk with a bat). Participants were free to choose a picture corresponding to a high attachment (HA; e.g., the teacher is using the bat to poke the monk) or a low attachment (LA; e.g., the monk is holding the bat) interpretation. In the priming block, participants produced LA sentences as primes and then completed a sentence-picture matching task for comprehension targets, similar to the pre-test. Age-matched controls and PWA showed a significant priming effect when comparing the priming block to the pre-test. In both groups, the priming effect persisted when comparing picture selections in the pre- and post-tests. At the individual level, age-matched controls who showed larger priming effects also selected more LA pictures in the post-test compared to the pre-test, indicating that the priming effect accounted for the magnitude of change from the pre- to post-test. This correlation was also found in PWA. These findings suggest that production-to-comprehension structural priming is effective and persistent in PWA and controls, in line with the view that structural priming is a form of implicit learning. Further, the findings suggest that syntactic representations are shared between modalities, and therefore, production influences future comprehension. Cross-modality structural priming may have clinical potential to improve sentence processing in PWA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Structural priming- speakers' unconscious tendency to echo previously encountered message-structure mappings - is thought to reflect the processes of implicit language learning that occur throughout the lifespan. Recently, structural priming has also been used as a means to facilitate language re-learning in age-related language disorders such as aphasia. However, little evidence is available on whether structural priming remains effective in healthy aging, limiting clinical translation of the structural priming paradigm. This study examined the impact of aging on the strength and longevity of abstract structural priming and lexical boost effects. Twenty-four young and 24 older adults participated in a collaborative picture-matching task where the participant and experimenter took turns describing picture cards using transitive and dative sentences. In Experiment 1, a target was elicited immediately following a prime (0-lag), whereas two filler items were embedded between a prime and a target sentence in Experiment 2 (2-lag) to examine longer-term priming effects. In both experiments, the verb was repeated for half of the prime-target pairs to examine lexical boost on structural priming. At immediate priming, older adults showed both abstract structural priming and lexical boost in transitives and datives, similar to young adults. At longer-term priming, only abstract priming effects were significant in both groups of participants, with no evidence of age-related reduction in priming. Both lexically-specific and independent mechanisms of structural priming remain resilient in older adults, supporting the view that structural priming reflects life-long language learning. Further, the findings provide empirical basis for applying structural priming to elderly clinical populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During communicative face-to-face interactions, emotional expressions are typically processed along with auditory speech. Although previous research has demonstrated the interaction between emotion and linguistic processes, so far no study has focused on the effect of the speaker's emotional facial expression on natural language processing. In the present event-related potential (ERP) study, participants listened to spoken sentences while seeing the portrait of the speaker's face with either happy, neutral, or fearful emotional expression. In Study 1A, the N400 effect, a neural marker of semantic comprehension, was unaffected by the speaker's emotional expression. In Study 1B, we manipulated morphosyntactic agreement. The P600 effect was boosted by the happy emotional expression. This may be interpreted as reflecting additional effort in linguistic reanalysis, in line with the heuristic processing style that characterises positive emotions. The present results demonstrate an influence of the speaker's emotional facial expressions on non-emotional language processing during audiovisual communicative interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the defining properties of human language is the abundance of potentially unbounded dependencies between elements in a sentence. And yet, how speakers formulate dependencies in sentence production is still poorly understood. Here we examine the timing of verb planning in sentences involving across-the-board and parasitic gap constructions. Using a new task we call the Sentence-Word Interference task, we show that speakers plan the verb of a secondary clause before sentence onset, but selectively when producing across-the-board sentences and not when producing parasitic gap sentences. Based on this timing contrast, we argue that speakers plan verbs predominantly before the production of their dependents, but only when verbs and their dependents engage in both conceptual and direct syntactic relationships. More broadly, the current study suggests that sentence planning is constrained by syntactic relationships that are not reducible to conceptual relationships or to surface word order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the role of sentence stress on the comprehension of sentences with clitic pronouns (unstressed morphemes and a typical feature of Romance languages) by children with cochlear implants (CIs). Thirteen children (seven girls) with CIs and 15 children (seven girls) with NH between eight and 12 years who are monolingual speakers of Brazilian Portuguese participated on a computerized sentence comprehension task that involved manipulation of stress placement of possible antecedent words to clitic pronouns. Children with CIs were significantly less accurate than children with NH in comprehending sentences with clitics, regardless of sentence stress. For children with NH, stress on the correct antecedent significantly increased sentence comprehension accuracy. For children with CI, there was no significant effect of sentence stress on selecting the correct antecedent for clitic pronouns. Comprehension of sentences with clitic pronouns is challenging for children with CIs and this challenge holds cross-linguistically. Furthermore, children with CIs do not use prosodic information to support comprehension of sentences with clitics similarly to NH children. Language-specific syntactic, morphosyntactic, and prosodic contrasts affecting sentence comprehension need to be assessed in children with CIs to plan an effective intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language comprehension proceeds at a very fast pace. It is argued that context influences the speed of language comprehension by providing informative cues. How syntactic contextual information influences the processing of incoming words is, however, less known. Here we employed a masked syntactic priming paradigm in four behavioural experiments in the German language to test whether masked primes automatically influence the categorisation of nouns and verbs. We found robust syntactic priming effects with masked primes but only when verbs were morpho-syntactically marked. Furthermore, we found that, compared to baseline, primes slow down target categorisation when the relationship between prime and target is syntactically incorrect, rather than speeding it up when the relationship is syntactically correct. This argues in favour of an inhibitory nature of syntactic priming. Overall, the data indicate that humans automatically extract syntactic features from the context to guide the analysis of incoming words during online language processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schizophrenia is a chronic, debilitating disorder characterised by distorted thinking, perceptions, behaviours, and even language impairments. We investigated the linguistic anomalies in Korean schizophrenia patients compared to non-psychotic psychiatric controls to determine whether the linguistic anomalies in English speakers with schizophrenia were replicated in Korean speakers. Thirty-four schizophrenia patients and 70 non-psychotic psychiatric controls were included in this study. The SCT was utilised as the text data for analysis. For linguistic analysis, we evaluated texts regarding semantics and syntax. We separately counted the number of semantic or syntactic errors in the written texts of study participants and compared them between patients and controls. Schizophrenia patients showed significantly more semantic errors (p <.001) and syntactic errors (p <.001) per 1,000 characters than non-psychotic psychiatric controls. Specifically, inappropriate word or syntactic component selection is noticeable in schizophrenia patients. These differences were still significant after adjusting for general intelligence measured by the K-WAIS-IV. Schizophrenia patients showed both semantic and syntactic errors in written language. Moreover, these errors seemed to be partly independent of general intelligence. Notably, patients showed a noticeable number of syntactic errors. Further investigation into the language of patients with schizophrenia and schizophrenia-spectrum disorders is required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the idea of the "potentiality" of language phenomena as expressed by Vilém Mathesius in 1911, and its relation to the debate on the general or basic concept of a linguistic category, discussed by Roman Jakobson, Louis Hjelmslev and others around 1935. We track the concept of potentiality in Roman Jakobson's and Louis Hjelmslev's texts from the period, then we point out similarities with ideas expressed by Émile Benveniste around the same time. Next, we examine Mathesius' very different idea of potentiality as the state of linguistic expressions that may be otherwise. However, by tracking the problem through Mathesius' later texts, I follow how his theorization gradually develops to converge with Jakobson's. I will stress the importance for Mathesius as a professor of English philology of the problem of the sentence, with a focus on the Focus-Topic articulation theory in the whole process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frontal lobe organisation displays a functional gradient, with overarching processing goals located in parts anterior to more subordinate goals, processed more posteriorly. Functional specialisation for syntax and phonology within language relevant areas has been supported by meta-analyses and reviews, but never directly tested experimentally. We tested for organised functional specialisation by manipulating syntactic case and phonotactics, creating violations at the end of otherwise matched and predictable sentences. Both violations led to increased activation in expected language regions. We observe the clearest signs of a functional gradient for language processing in the medial frontal cortex, where syntactic violations activated a more anterior portion compared to the phonotactic violations. A large overlap of syntactic and phonotactic processing in the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) supports the view that general structured sequence processes are located in this area. These findings are relevant for understanding how sentence processing is implemented in hierarchically organised processing steps in the frontal lobe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies that measure the effectiveness of language-training program for children's language development do not clearly identify in adult-child interaction which characteristics of educators' language are most effective, particularly for children over 4 years of age who need to develop complex syntactic skills. Our study aimed to analyze the language use of 26 educators (with different professions: teachers, animators, and employees) participating in French language-training program for preschoolers. This training was based on linguistic research on language acquisition and focused on syntax. A total of 131 children were recorded in adult-child joint narration in a dyadic interaction across six French cities and 20 preschools. The statistical analysis of the linguistic and pragmatic properties of the educators' language while interacting with children demonstrated that the educators changed their language practices after training. This study also revealed that syntax complexity of educators' input has a significant impact on syntax development of children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores an idea of 'disaster' ('sciagura') that figures prominently in Leopardi's early Canzoni (1818–22). While English versions have generally rendered this word as 'unhappiness', 'woes', 'ills' etc., the emphasis on lyric melancholy misses Leopardi's sense of a universal 'calamity' that is closely bound up with the acquisition of language and with humanity's increasing separation from nature. The article finds suggestive analogies between Leopardi's handling of this nexus of ideas and Maurice Blanchot's much later concept of disaster which is similarly geared to a perception of language as something 'neutral' and 'external'. The article goes on to examine the elevated style and 'unnatural' syntax of the Canzoni as a means by which Leopardi cultivates his own version of an impersonal sublime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-adult-like linguistic behavior in children is sometimes taken as evidence for endogenous factors that drive selection of grammatical features from the child's hypothesis space of possible grammars. Analyses of English-acquiring children's productions of medial wh-phrases exemplify this trend in particular. We provide an alternative account of these productions as performance errors arising from underdeveloped cognitive inhibition. We offer experimental evidence in favor of our failure of inhibition account. The results argue against treating these errors as reflecting incomplete or non-target acquisition of grammatical features. Instead, the results support a theory of how these errors arise and are subsequently purged from children's productions that reduces to a theory of how cognitive inhibition develops during childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of agreement processing typically focus on the mechanisms by which comprehenders relate the morphological features of the agreement-controlling NP and those of the verb. However, agreement is fundamentally a syntactic relation. In this paper, I examine the processing of default agreement with clausal subjects ("[cp That the doctors studied hard] was reassuring") vs. the processing of agreement with near-synonymous NPs ("[np The fact that the doctors studied hard] was reassuring"). In the NP subject case, there is a syntactic agreement dependency between the head noun fact and the verb was but not in the the CP case. I show that the agreement processing profile for CP subjects differs from those of NP subjects. This suggests that agreement configurations with similar morphology and semantics may be processed using different strategies when embedded in different syntactic structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report the reading performance of an Italian speaker with egocentric Neglect Dyslexia on sentences with Negative Concord structures, which contain a linguistic cue to the presence of a preceding negative marker and compare it to sentences with no such cue. As predicted, the frequency of reading the whole sentence, including the initial negative marker non, was higher in Negative Concord structures than in sentences which also started with non, but crucially, lacked the medially positioned linguistic cue to the presence of non. These data support the claim that the presence of linguistic cues to sentence structure modulates attention during reading in Neglect Dyslexia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the current research was to compare the lexical–grammatical skills of two-year-old children with and without repaired cleft palate (CP), accounting for the effect of variables such as vocabulary size at 18 months of age, maternal education level, and gender. Participants included 52 children with CP and 25 typically developing (TD) children. The CDI-WS was employed to measure vocabulary and grammatical skills. Significant differences were observed between the CP and TD groups with respect to the number of words, word forms (irregular nouns and verbs), word endings (overuse of plural (-s) and past tense (-ed) markers), the mean number of morphemes in their three longest utterances (M3L), and sentence complexity. In addition, compared to TD children, significantly smaller proportions of children with CP were observed to use words to talk about past and future events or use words to talk about an absent object. The difference between the CP and TD groups in terms of the size of vocabulary at 24 months of age remained statistically significant in the multivariable model. Among all predictors, the size of vocabulary at 18 months of age was identified as the most robust precursor of lexical and grammatical skills at 24 months of age. Gender was identified as a predictor of the M3L measure as an index for syntactic ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article considers whether the sequence of words his ꝥ folc in the Taunton Fragment homily for the eighth Sunday after Pentecost is an instance of the exceptionally rare Possessive+Demonstrative+Noun construction. This possibility is underpinned by the manuscript's late date and numerous copying errors. It is, however, weakened by the fact that is unstable in the Taunton Fragment and that the possessive is not required by either context or co-text. In the absence of the possessive in the Latin witnesses to the Homiliary of Angers as well as other Old English renditions of Mark 8.3, the analysis of as the possessive and his ꝥ folc as the Possessive+Demonstrative construction seems unlikely. Alternatively, may be an orthographic variant of the verb is. This possibility is bolstered by the instability of and multiple incomplete corrections in the Taunton Fragment. An addition of the auxiliary in the homily for the eighth Sunday after Pentecost is paralleled by the similar change in the homily for the fifth Sunday after Pentecost. This alteration aligns the Taunton Fragment rendition of Mark 8.3 with Ælfric's. In light of this internal and external evidence, is more likely to represent the verb is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous investigations on sentence production in English-speaking individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) have yielded mixed conclusions based on their findings. While some studies found comparable sentence complexity between speakers with TBI and control speakers, others reported more syntactic and lexical errors, reduced sentence complexity, and erroneous word order transpositions in the sentence production of speakers with TBI. These contradictory findings could possibly be due to the use of language measures that were less sensitive to subtle syntactic impairments among speakers with TBI. In this preliminary report, the language samples obtained from 11 Cantonese-speaking participants with mild-moderate TBI in Guangzhou, with a mean age of 37.6 and mean years of education of 10 years, and nine control speakers with a similar age range and education background were analyzed using in-depth linguistic-oriented frameworks adopted from pervious works in Cantonese. The results indicated that the TBI group produced more errors, different varieties of sentence types, and lower syntactic complexity in their sentence production compared with the control group. The findings suggested that the more refined and linguistic-oriented measures used in the present study were more sensitive in identifying the subtle syntactic impairments produced by the participants with TBI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has long been recognised that phrases and sentences are organised hierarchically, but many computational models of language treat them as sequences of words without computing constituent structure. Against this background, we conducted two experiments which showed that participants interpret ambiguous noun phrases, such as second blue ball, in terms of their abstract hierarchical structure rather than their linear surface order. When a neural network model was tested on this task, it could simulate such "hierarchical" behaviour. However, when we changed the training data such that they were not entirely unambiguous anymore, the model stopped generalising in a human-like way. It did not systematically generalise to novel items, and when it was trained on ambiguous trials, it strongly favoured the linear interpretation. We argue that these models should be endowed with a bias to make generalisations over hierarchical structure in order to be cognitively adequate models of human language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although subject-complement statements like "girls are as good as boys at math" appear to express gender equality, people infer a gender difference: the group in the complement position (boys) is judged superior. We investigated (1) whether this syntactic framing effect generalizes to other socially charged inferences and (2) whether awareness of the bias implied by the syntax mitigates its influence. Across four preregistered experiments (N = 2,734), we found reliable framing effects on inferences about both math ability and terrorist behavior, but only for the small subset of participants (∼30%) who failed to identify the influence of the subject-complement statements on their judgments. Most participants did recognize this influence, and these participants showed reduced or even reversed framing effects; they were also more likely to explicitly judge subject-complement syntax as biased. Our findings suggest that this syntax perpetuates stereotypes only when people are oblivious to, or unmotivated to interrogate, its implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a semantically and pragmatically oriented typological generalisation, which is named the orientation principle. It entails that the position of connectives, as defined as a single lexical category including adpositions and conjunctions, provides an explanatory principle for a number of harmonic correlations in crosslinguistic data. A reanalysis of the data guided by this insight is proposed as an alternative to processing approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between the distribution of nominalizers in Lhasa Tibetan and the argument/adjunct property of relevant syntactic elements is approached from a generative perspective. The distribution of nominalizers in Lhasa Tibetan demonstrates a regular pattern. Some nominalizers are bi-functional in that they can mark both participant and event nominalizations while others are uni-functional in that they can only mark participant nominalizations. It is found that the difference between the two types of nominalizers correlates to whether the nominalizer (NML) is argument-associated or adjunct-associated. An account of the correlation is developed in the theoretical framework of generative grammar. It is argued that the syntactic derivation of an NML-phrase gives rise to a binding relationship between the nominalizer and the suppressed element in the source constituent Aspect Phrase (AspP) or the AspP itself, leading to a condition on its semantic interpretation. The condition is satisfied in a participant NML-phrase headed by a nominalizer of either type and in an event NML-phrase headed by a bi-functional nominalizer. It is not in an event NML-phrase headed by a uni-functional nominalizer for the reason that in the calculation of event semantics arguments align with events while adjuncts align with predicates. Specifically, a bi-functional nominalizer, being argument-associated, semantically matches both a suppressed argument in a participant NML-phrase and the source constituent AspP, whereas a uni-functional one, being adjunct-associated, semantically matches a suppressed adjunct in a participant NML-phrase but not the source constituent AspP. Consequently, no event NML-phrase headed by an adjunct-associated nominalizer is found in this language. The findings of this study have implications for both analyzing the distribution of nominalizers in other Tibeto-Burman languages and the syntactic and semantic mechanisms that constrain them, and for classifying the argument/adjunct asymmetry, which is fundamental in most current linguistic frameworks as well as research on human sentence processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourse studies investigating differences in the socio-communicative profiles of autistic (ASD) and neurotypical (NT) individuals have mostly relied on orthographic transcriptions, without taking prosodic information into account. However, atypical prosody is ubiquitous in ASD and a more accurate representation of their discourse abilities should also include prosodic cues. This exploratory study addresses this gap by segmenting the spoken discourse of 12 ASD and NT adults using the framework of Basic Discourse Units (BDUs). BDUs result from the mapping of syntactic boundaries on prosodic units, which can coincide in different ways and are associated with different discourse strategies. We hypothesized that the discourse of ASD adults would display more atypical strategies than NT adults, reflecting a 'pedantic' style and more difficulties in managing ongoing discourse. While ASD adults did not produce more discourse units associated with didactic or pedantic strategies than NT adults, they did produce less units associated with strategies of interactional regulation. This study provides initial evidence that multidimensional linguistic units, such as BDUs can help differentiate speech delivery strategies of ASD adults from those of their NT peers, even based on simple prosodic cues like silent pauses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Awake brain surgery, combined with neurophysiological evaluation and intraoperative mapping, is one of the preferential lines of treatment when approaching low-grade gliomas. Speech and language assessment is used while applying Direct Electrical Stimulation (DES) and during the resection of a lesion/tumour, as it allows to establish related eloquent areas and optimise the extent of the resection and avoid impairments. Patients need to be assessed pre, intra and post-surgery, but in under resourced countries such as Portugal, there are still no standardised and validated tools to conduct this type of evaluation. To address this need, the tasks of the Dutch Linguistic Intraoperative Protocol (DuLIP) were adapted to European Portuguese, and the resulting materials were standardised for a group of 144 Portuguese participants. For each task, the impact of age, gender and schooling were measured. The resulting Portuguese version of the DuLIP (DuLIP-EP) consists of 17 tasks, including phonological, syntactic, semantic, naming and articulatory tests. No significant differences were found between male and female participants. However, schooling influenced phonological and syntactic fluency, object naming and verb generation. Schooling and age had a significant impact on semantic fluency and reading with semantic odd word out tasks. This is the first contribution to the standardisation of a tool that can be used during an awake brain surgery in Portugal, which includes a new phonological odd word out task that is not currently available in the Dutch version. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides the first systematic investigation of the role of insubordination, the diachronic conventionalization of formally subordinate clauses as main clauses, in the syntax and semantics of the Ancient Greek sentence. Since diachronic studies are still a desideratum, this paper details the insubordination of if- and that-clauses from Archaic to Post-Classical Greek. Firstly, a principled diachronic analysis of the insubordination of various if-wishes (with ϵἰ, ϵἰ/αἲ γάρ and ϵἴθϵ/αἴθϵ (γάρ)) and that-wishes (with ὡς and ἵνα) is performed using both functional (discursive vs syntactic independence) and formal criteria (vocatives, particles, sentence complexity, mood extensions) in order to determine their relative degree of conventionalization of the main clause use. Subsequently, insubordinate directive, assertive and evaluative constructions (with ϵἰ, ἐάν, ὅπως and ἵνα) from Archaic, Classical and Post-Classical Greek are analysed before presenting a diachronic constructional typology of insubordination and suggestions for future avenues of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This close reading examines the ways – metrical, stylistic, syntactic, dictional – in which Berowne fails to turn over a new leaf in the couplet at 5.2.414–5 of Love's Labour's Lost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kriol is an English-lexified creole spoken throughout the northern regions of Australia since the beginning of the twentieth century. With documentation and description of the language commencing only in the later decades of the twentieth century, many aspects of Kriol grammar remain under-described, especially within the domains of syntax and pragmatics. This study documents and describes subject elision in Kriol, a process where subject NPs are elided in a range of syntactic and discourse contexts. Through qualitative methods we describe the environments wherein subjects are elided and consider the relationship between elision licensed by the syntactic context, and elision licensed by the discourse context. The analysis reveals that subject elision can be licensed through antecedent–anaphora relations at the level of syntax and through the encoding of unambiguous, continued topics following the beginning of a narrative episode at the level of discourse. We then consider the role of substrate and lexifier sources to account for how subject elision categories may have arisen in Kriol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the Narrator in Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742) explains: "Those little Spaces between our Chapters may be looked upon as an Inn or Resting-Place." An inn is a prepositional sort of building: it is between here and there; one travels to or from it; it links villages and towns and cities; it is on the road and on the way. Inns became increasingly important in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century landscapes, depending commercially on their architectural uniqueness, even eccentricity. This essay examines the ways in which Fielding's textual structures borrow the architectural as well as syntactical grammar of inns as part of a distinctly modern effort (in the words of the landscape gardener John Claudius Loudon) to "form new combinations on every movement of the spectator" (1806). From chapter headings, tables of contents, and spatial descriptions, on the one hand, to the shapes of syntax, paragraph, and plot, on the other, Fielding's novels generate fresh perspectives from the act of reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A crucial issue in the debate about the correct treatment of natural language tense concerns covert variables: do we have reason to think there are any in the syntax, as the quantifier theorist maintains? If not, it seems we can quickly discount the quantifier theory from consideration, without even considering the data in its favour. And, indeed, there is a good reason to doubt that there are such variables: contemporary syntactic theory, notably, does not seem to posit them. I respond to this argument going from the premise that positing covert variables is illicit to the conclusion that quantifier theories of tense are false. I argue that the argument fails by suggesting a non-committal understanding of the process of positing covert variables. On this view, even if we are not doing fundamental syntax in so positing, nevertheless there is a reason to think we are doing something theoretically productive, because it seems like an important part of the practice of semantics and because it seems like semantics is a discipline which is making progress. The progress of semantics supports the methodology of positing variables at its heart; the quantifier theorist of tense, accordingly, need not worry about their syntactic commitments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research traces the architectural spatial and curatorial intentions of (RTM) in Jordan, focusing on the arrangement of the displays and the morphology of the layout as pedagogical tools for unfolding the narrative. A case study approach was taken, with three modes of inspection: (1) a survey documenting RTM's interiority and spatial organisation; (2) a syntactic-analytic-layer to examine how the museum's permeability and visibility structures control visitors' experiences; (3) an ethnographic-analytic-layer, with observations and interviews to document visitors' exploratory behaviours. The museum employs a combination of architectural and internal semiotic settings. In some instances, strictly defined sequences of movement and visual frames impose a chronological-historical message. In others, RTM privileges well-defined sequences of exploration along less intricate subdivisions to confront visitors with choreographed thematic displays of contemporary and international messages. This study proposes a new methodology for investigating tank museums, situating the traditional ethnographic approach inside a broader morphological-syntactical alternative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many languages of northern Australia with coverb constructions, it is difficult to draw a distinction between predication and adverbial modification because coverbs appear to be both predicates and modifiers. We present evidence from Wagiman that a distinction between predication and modification can be drawn syntactically. We argue that Wagiman has two necessarily predicational positions and at least one adverbial position. One predicational position is obligatorily filled by the inflecting verb, the second can be filled by a coverb when it has a predicative function. The merger of this predicational coverb and the verb results in a complex predicate. A coverb can also be located in the adverbial position when it modifies the predicate. Using the minimalist framework, we test our proposal when two coverbs appear in the same clause, one adverbial and one predicational. This analysis has wider typological implications. We demonstrate that the novel adverbial analysis for clauses with two coverbs is also supported for other languages in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standard neurocognitive models of language processing have tended to obviate the need for incorporating emotion processes, while affective neuroscience theories have typically been concerned with the way in which people communicate their emotions, and have often simply not addressed linguistic issues. Here, we summarise evidence from temporal and spatial brain imaging studies that have investigated emotion effects on lexical, semantic and morphosyntactic aspects of language during the comprehension of single words and sentences. The evidence reviewed suggests that emotion is represented in the brain as a set of semantic features in a distributed sensory, motor, language and affective network. Also, emotion interacts with a number of lexical, semantic and syntactic features in different brain regions and timings. This is in line with the proposals of interactive neurocognitive models of language processing, which assume the interplay between different representational levels during on-line language comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The past few decades of research in language processing provides empirical data on the dimensions of the brain–language relationship. The methodologies used to study language processing have evidenced an immense advancement over the years, tracking real-time processing events with millisecond precision. Event-related potentials is one such method which assists to visualize the neural mechanisms that underlie language processing. Different electrophysiological components mark different components of language depending on their structural and functional aspects. Since research on language processing is expanding its boundaries, the neural mechanisms for processing syntax components have been the focus of recent investigations across the languages of the world. The present review article aims to discuss the findings of studies on syntax processing besides highlighting the functional significance of P600, the electrophysiological marker of syntax processing. Methods: Electronic databases such as Pubmed, Science Direct, Research gate, PLOS, Directory of Open Access Journals were searched for relavant articles. The review process followed PRISMA guidelines for screening, identification, and selection of articles. Results: The results of the review elucidate the need for evaluating the finer details of syntax, including morpho-syntax concerning specific language structures. Studies across the languages of the world exemplify the uniqueness in the structure of different languages that may provide varied perspectives on the universality in syntax processing. Conclusion: The present review contributes a new dimension towards understanding the nature of syntax processing with respect to language specificity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neglect dyslexia (ND) is a reading disorder that impairs the left visual field. The Left periphery (LP) is the highest layer of the extended syntactic structure, and it represents the interface between communicative intention and syntactic realization. Topic and Focus are the two central projections of the LP. Sentences involving either Topic or Focus display marked structures in which a constituent, extracted from its original position, is fronted. The aim of the present study is to test whether sentences containing Topic or Focus display a facilitation effect with respect to canonical word order (SVO) sentences in the reading performance of individuals with neglect dyslexia. Nine participants with neglect dyslexia were tested in a reading task. Participants were asked to read aloud a list of 103 sentences, classified into Condition 1 (experimental condition) and Condition 2 (control condition) based on their syntactic structure. Both substitutions and omissions of letters, syllables, and words were considered as errors. Data were analysed using generalized linear mixed model (GLMM)with accuracy as the dependent variable, condition as independent variable and subjects and sentences as random intercepts. Results showed that sentences containing Topic and Focus were read with significantly less impairment than control sentences (t (100) = −2.06, p = 0.041). Our findings are consistent with previous studies on the effects of syntax in ND as they demonstrate that sentence structure has a crucial influence on driving attention in individuals with ND. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Aphasia research has been informed by linguistic theory to a great extent. Conversely, linguistic theory has also been informed by data from people with aphasia, albeit to a lesser extent. Aims: This overview to the Special Issue of Aphasiology entitled "Aphasia and linguistic theory: What we have captured so far" presents a narrative review that aims to illustrate the contribution of linguistic theory to aphasia research, and also includes a section that presents the articles making up the special issue. The narrative review, which is not exhaustive, highlights influential theoretical frameworks and linguistic constructs that have been central to accounts of language impairment in aphasia. Main Contribution: The overview illustrates the contribution of linguistic theory to aphasiology and paves the way for the development of a unified approach to aphasia, which will incorporate insights not only from theoretical linguistics, but also from other complementary fields, such as psycholinguistics, cognitive (neuro)psychology, and neuroscience of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A robust finding from language acquisition, adult processing, and individuals with language impairment is that certain types of Object Relatives (ORs) and Object Questions (OQs) are more challenging in both production and comprehension compared to their Subject counterparts. Approaches informed by linguistic theory have been proposed to clarify the source of the difficulties with these sentences in people with aphasia, with recent models supporting the idea of a grammatically based resource reduction selectively affecting sentences that require the processing of an element acting as an intervener. This work presents new evidence to the study of syntactic competence in people with acquired language disorders, from a pilot study exploring in detail the morphosyntactic competence of an Italian speaker with anomia. The clinical diagnosis of anomia in the participant revealed a deficit in lexical retrieval with no deficit at grammatical level. Morphosyntactic competence was investigated through a series of off-line tasks on both comprehension and production. The morphosyntactic abilities of the participant turned out to be for the most part intact with no difficulties such as agrammatism. However, a selective deficit in the computation of certain ORs and OQs emerged. The deficit was selective for structures with an intervener and more specifically for structures in which the featural specification of the intervening subject is included in the specification of the displaced object. Syntactic asymmetries emerged in the performance of an individual with anomia, with no apparent morphosyntactic impairment or sign of agrammatism. The deficit of the syntactic computation was selective and compatible with the grammatical Featural Relativized Minimality approach to the difficulties in the computation of sentences with an intervener. The preliminary results presented in this work suggest that the analysis of sentences with an intervener may be a sensitive test for the diagnosis of a syntactic-based impairment and that formal linguistic models may offer promising tools for exploring linguistic deficits. Further investigation is necessary to strengthen these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between structural processing in music and language can be viewed from two perspectives: whether the neural processing of music and language recruits shared neural resources, and whether musical ability is associated with neuroplastic resilience against language impairment. This study investigated music and language processing in persons who developed aphasia (PWA) following left-hemisphere stroke, and asked three questions: (1) whether musical structure processing is compromised in PWA, (2) whether there is a relationship between the processing of musical and linguistic structure, and (3) if prior musical ability is associated with post-stroke music and language task performance. Procedures included four computer-based tasks of sensitivity to structure in music and language, testing of general language impairment, and questionnaires on musical sophistication in 23 PWA. This study found that PWA's processing of musical structure was unimpaired relative to neurotypical controls. This was also the case for individuals with agrammatic aphasia, who have a specific deficit in syntactic formulation. Second, music and language structural processing performance was not correlated in the healthy or aphasic group. Third, in PWA, prior musical ability correlated positively with implicit structural processing of music and language, and negatively with aphasia severity. The relationship between musical ability (years of music lessons) and aphasia severity was stronger when combined with an additional group of 15 PWA. These findings suggest that while structural processing of music and language is dissociated in neurotypical individuals and in those with left-hemisphere damage, there may be a potential for neuroplastic effects of musical training on language impairment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Polysynthetic languages can be roughly defined as languages which have an extreme morphological complexity. They present a range of challenges to linguistic and neurolinguistics theories that are based on standard average European languages. Yet, no studies exist on aphasia in such languages, and the communities that speak them have little or no access to assessment and language therapy. Aims: The aim of this paper is to provide a first attempt at a characterisation of aphasia in a polysynthetic language, West Greenlandic. Methods and procedures: We recorded semi-spontaneous speech from five participants with aphasia and compared their speech on several parameters with that of matched non-brain-damaged control participants. These parameters included standard production measures, measures of morphological complexity, and measures of syntactic complexity. Outcomes and results: Our findings indicate that non-fluent aphasia in West Greenlandic is not associated with morphological impairment; instead, participants with aphasia produce shorter utterances, and there are trends indicating lower complexity across measures of syntax. Conclusions: While somewhat surprising from the point of view of research on aphasia in standard average European languages, our findings align well with findings from other languages with complex morphology such as Finnish, Turkish, and Japanese. Our study highlights the need for a diverse range of crosslinguistic studies to inform linguistic and neurolinguistic theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is a corpus-based study of a construction of spoken Russian consisting of the adverbial necessity modal nado/nužno 'need' followed by an accusative (genitive) complement. Although the construction has been noted in the literature, it has not received a detailed analysis, due to its colloquial nature and low frequency in the corpus. I investigate the distributional and semantic/pragmatic properties of this construction, contrasting it with the corresponding construction with nominative. I argue that the construction with accusative expresses prototypical possession (animate non-abstract possession), whereas the construction with nominative can but need not express (prototypical) possession. I also argue that the construction with accusative is inherently subjective as it expresses the perspective of some individual (typically, the speaker), whereas the construction with nominative, again, can but need not express subjectivity. I provide evidence for both claims, showing that neither alone can account for the distribution of the two constructions. Finally, I briefly discuss two other constructions, namely verbless subjunctive with nouns and the construction with an elided modal showing that they can also be analyzed as expressing prototypical possession. The proposed account, if correct, can shed light on the syntax of predicative possession, an important topic in Russian grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyse how Italian-speaking children with cochlear implants produce subject and object questions introduced by who and which+NP. The aim of the study is to analyse whether a correlation exists between the accuracy of the responses of an elicitation task of wh-questions and clinical variables (i.e. age of hearing aid fitting; age of cochlear implantation; duration of hearing experience) in a group of children with cochlear implants, in order to provide new evidences in support of the efficacy of early intervention in Italian-speaking children with hearing loss. The experimental group was composed of 10 children fitted with a cochlear implant, who were diagnosed and promptly fitted with hearing aids within the first year of life. All these participants received a cochlear implant when hearing aids did not provide enough auditory input anymore. Indeed, while the hearing aids only amplify sounds, cochlear implants directly stimulate the auditory nerve providing better auditory perception. Results were compared with those of two control groups. The first group was composed of 10 children with normal hearing and comparable chronological age, while the second group was composed of 10 children with normal hearing matched on comparable hearing experience. Children were assessed with a test for the elicitation of subject and object who and which+NP questions. Results show that the two control groups performed better than the experimental group. Moreover, some correlations were found between the accuracy of the production of complex structures and the age of fitting of the hearing aids and the hearing experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper develops computation, through dynamic grammars, as a third equivalent to syntactical and typological understanding of architectural design. Within theory of architectural design, syntactical and typological understanding of architecture are the two main scientific paradigms that explain how architecture is formed and conducted. As such the premise of the paper is to connect computational design as an equivalent understanding of architecture, one which has parity with the classical theoretical canon of the architectural design theories of the 20th century. To accomplish this, Dynamic grammars, i.e. shape grammars developed through animation are presented and analysed along with their mechanisms. Shape Grammars have been selected as a vehicle for this as they provide an excellent model of architectural composition with computational design, using simple mechanisms. A case study of constructivist design is analysed using dynamic grammars, showcasing the elegance and efficiency of the system in describing variants of design, maintaining parity in a syntactical and a typological understanding of design. The paper concludes with the characteristics that a computational understanding of architectural design has. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study was designed to compare syntactic properties and mental state language (MSL) used in narrative stories and persuasive essays written by 162 children attending the third and the fifth grades of the Italian elementary schools. Results showed as children used a higher number of total words and total propositions, independent and coordinate propositions in narrative writing compared to persuasive writing. Conversely, in persuasive essays, a major number of subordinate propositions and MSL was used. If emotional and volitional terms prevailed in narrative stories, moral terms best characterized persuasive essays. Results on age differences revealed that older children outperformed younger children on independent propositions and overall linguistic measures. Conversely, younger children used more coordinate propositions. Despite delimitations of the study, these preliminary results encourage to consider persuasive and narrative texts as valid and ecological tools to assess and promote the use of different forms of complex language during middle childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]