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To learn a language infants must learn to link arbitrary sounds to their meaning. While words are the clearest example of this link, they are not the only component of language; morphological regularities (e.g., the plural -s suffix in English) carry meaning as well. Comprehensive theories of language acquisition must account for how infants build links between these other parts of language and their meaning. Here, we investigated the acquisition of morphology in infants learning Italian, a language with a rich inflectional morphology that marks both gender and number on both the article and final vowel of nouns. We demonstrate that infants can build these links between concepts and morphological regularities much earlier than previously thought. Italian-learning 12-18- and 24-month-olds were shown pairs of images of faces that differed either in number (1 female vs. 2 females; 1 male vs. 2 males) or gender (1 female vs. 1 male; 2 females vs. 2 males). On each trial infants were directed to look at one of the images with the morphological regularities as the only distinguishing cue. Overall, across all ages, the infants looked to the labeled image, indicating that they had at least some understanding of the morphology. While infants succeeded on both gender comparisons, they only showed evidence of understanding the feminine number distinction. These results indicate that in the early stages of language acquisition, infants are able to identify recurring morphemes and to map those morphological regularities to the concepts that they mark in the language. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The study aims to explore whether regular inflectional morphology is affected in children/adolescents with Down syndrome (DS). German past participle forms were elicited for ten regular and ten irregular inflected verbs as well as for five novel verbs. Data were collected from a group of 21 monolingual German children and adolescents with DS (chronological age M = 11;03 years) and a group of 21 typically developing monolingual German children (chronological age M = 4;03 years) matched in chronological age to the nonverbal mental age of the DS group (mental age DS group M = 4;05 years). Data analysis indicated that eight children/adolescents with DS displayed a deficit in acquiring the regular participle marker -t and in applying it as default inflection in German participle formation. In contrast, a group of 13 individuals with DS performed similar to the typically developing control children. They had successfully acquired the regular participle affix -t and readily applied it as default inflection to produce participles for irregular verbs and novel verbs. The data indicate that the acquisition of regular inflectional morphology is not outside the scope of individuals with DS and succeeded in many affected individuals. However, a substantial number of individuals with DS displayed a selective deficit with regular default inflection. The occurrence of a selective deficit with regular default inflection in individuals with DS supports dualistic views to inflection, according to which two different cognitive components are involved in regular and irregular inflection that can be selectively affected in language disorders.

Anti-frequency effect is an alienated frequency effect on the process of inflected morphology. The present study examined the mental reality of anti-frequency effect on Japanese morphological production through two naming paradigm experiments, and compared the mechanisms of both native speakers and non-native speakers. The results indicate that there is a significant difference between native speakers and non-native speakers on the mechanisms of anti-frequency effect. Native speakers showed a strong anti-frequency process in both word and picture naming experiments, without being affected by any of the intra-linguistic (morphological complexity) and extra-linguistic factors (cognitive costs), while the L2 learners showed a morphology-based instability and paradigm dependence, and differed from anti-frequency process in terms of vector, distribution, and intensity. The findings suggest that the difference of mechanisms in anti-frequency effect is due to the difference of L1-L2 processing automation level, and its intensity is affected by the activation threshold interval.

While cognitive changes in aging and neurodegenerative disease have been widely studied, language changes in these populations are less well understood. Inflecting novel words in a language with complex inflectional paradigms provides a good opportunity to observe how language processes change in normal and abnormal aging. Studies of language acquisition suggest that children inflect novel words based on their phonological similarity to real words they already know. It is unclear whether speakers continue to use the same strategy when encountering novel words throughout the lifespan or whether adult speakers apply symbolic rules. We administered a simple speech elicitation task involving Finnish‐conforming pseudo‐words and real Finnish words to healthy older adults, individuals with mild cognitive impairment, and individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) to investigate inflectional choices in these groups and how linguistic variables and disease severity predict inflection patterns. Phonological resemblance of novel words to both a regular and an irregular inflectional type, as well as bigram frequency of the novel words, significantly influenced participants' inflectional choices for novel words among the healthy elderly group and people with AD. The results support theories of inflection by phonological analogy (single‐route models) and contradict theories advocating for formal symbolic rules (dual‐route models). While cognitive changes in aging and neurodegenerative disease have been widely studied, language changes in these populations are less well understood. Inflecting novel words in a language with complex inflectional paradigms provides a good opportunity to observe how language processes change in normal and abnormal aging. Studies of language acquisition suggest that children inflect novel words based on their phonological similarity to real words they already know. It is unclear whether speakers continue to use the same strategy when encountering novel words throughout the lifespan or whether adult speakers apply symbolic rules. We administered a simple speech elicitation task involving Finnish-conforming pseudo-words and real Finnish words to healthy older adults, individuals with mild cognitive impairment, and individuals with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) to investigate inflectional choices in these groups and how linguistic variables and disease severity predict inflection patterns. Phonological resemblance of novel words to both a regular and an irregular inflectional type, as well as bigram frequency of the novel words, significantly influenced participants’ inflectional choices for novel words among the healthy elderly group and people with AD. The results support theories of inflection by phonological analogy (single-route models) and contradict theories advocating for formal symbolic rules (dual-route models).

Analogy is assumed to be the cognitive mechanism speakers resort to in order to inflect an unknown form of a lexeme based on knowledge of other words in a language. In this process, an analogy is formed between word forms within an inflectional paradigm but also across paradigms. As neural network models for inflection are typically trained only on lemma-target form pairs, we propose three new ways to provide neural models with additional source forms to strengthen analogy-formation, and compare our methods to other approaches in the literature. We show that the proposed methods of providing a Transformer sequence-to-sequence model with additional analogy sources in the input are consistently effective, and improve upon recent state-of-the-art results on 46 languages, particularly in low-resource settings. We also propose a method to combine the analogy-motivated approach with data hallucination or augmentation. We find that the two approaches are complementary to each other and combining the two approaches is especially helpful when the training data is extremely limited.

Many languages have developed a specialized tool for coding spatial background aspects of events: associated motion morphology. This sparsely investigated verb inflection allows speakers to specify that the situation described by a verb takes place against the background of a motion event, as in “sing (while coming)”. Associated-motion systems typically include deictic information, and when verb inflection requires distinctions between motion in different directions, a thinking-for-speaking account would predict cognitive consequences in the shape of heightened memory for direction. To evaluate this hypothesis, we compare encoding of and memory for direction in an endangered Otopamean language, Acazulco Otomí (Mexico). First, we examine diversity and frequency in the use of associated-motion inflection in pilgrim narratives. Then, we investigate the potential cognitive correlates with a psycholinguistic recognition-memory experiment measuring change-detection performance. Linguistic encoding of background direction was found to support memory for direction, but the sample size was small, and the experiment further indicated that both the associated-motion inflection and its corresponding attention patterns are in a process of dissolution. This echoes findings in Arrernte and Mojeño Trinitario, and we discuss why associated motion might be an especially vulnerable category in language-endangerment contexts.

Background Clinical symptoms of multiple sclerosis (MS) are variable and may include cognitive impairment, which can be assessed with the verbal fluency test (VFT). This test is evaluated by counting words spoken during a 2-min period, which is not a functional approach. Objective The objectives of this observational study were to: (1) determine new parameters that reflect communication and cognitive functions in persons with multiple sclerosis (PwMS) considering the evaluation of real-time word production in the VFT; (2) compare the results with those of a control group; and (3) evaluate the impact of including errors. Methods A phonological fluency test (“letter P”) and a semantic fluency test (“animals”) were used. The real-time word production was recorded. The main variables studied were the total number of words, first word delay, moment of inflection of the curve corresponding to the change in the cognitive process, speed of word production before inflection, and maximum delay between 2 consecutive words. These variables were studied by taking into account or not errors. Results We included 68 PwMS and 33 healthy controls. VFT results were impaired in PwMS. The total number of words, first word delay, speed before inflection, and maximum delay were relevant to the study of phonologic fluency. For studying semantic fluency, the total number of words, first word delay, speed before inflection, and inflection time of the curve seemed relevant. Taking into account errors was significant only for total number of words. Conclusion Taking into account errors in evaluating real-time word production in PwMS is of interest only for the total number of words performed but has no impact on the variables studied. These variables should be used to quantitatively evaluate verbal fluency with the objective of evaluating functionally relevant parameters (communication).

Speaking a late-acquired second language (L2) involves increased cognitive demands, as has been shown mainly in young and middle-aged adults. To investigate grammatical inflection in older L2 speakers, we acquired behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging data, while L1 and L2 speakers performed a grammaticality judgment task. L2 speakers showed higher error rates than native speakers, specifically when incorrect forms had to be rejected. Poorer performance in L2 speakers was accompanied by increased activity in the medial superior frontal gyrus (SFG), indicating the additional recruitment of executive control mechanisms. In addition, post-hoc within-group comparisons of behavioral and neural correlates provide evidence for dual-mechanism models in older adults, suggesting that language processing involves both procedural and declarative memory systems. Moreover, we demonstrated that speaking an L2 requires more executive control and relies to a lesser extent on the procedural memory system than speaking one's own native language.

The cognitive mechanisms needed to account for the English past tense have long been a subject of debate in linguistics and cognitive science. Neural network models were proposed early on, but were shown to have clear flaws. Recently, however, Kirov and Cotterell (2018) showed that modern encoder-decoder (ED) models overcome many of these flaws. They also presented evidence that ED models demonstrate humanlike performance in a nonce-word task. Here, we look more closely at the behaviour of their model in this task. We find that (1) the model exhibits instability across multiple simulations in terms of its correlation with human data, and (2) even when results are aggregated across simulations (treating each simulation as an individual human participant), the fit to the human data is not strong---worse than an older rule-based model. These findings hold up through several alternative training regimes and evaluation measures. Although other neural architectures might do better, we conclude that there is still insufficient evidence to claim that neural nets are a good cognitive model for this task., Comment: Accepted at ACL 2019

The article deals with some peculiarities of musical-auditory notions as the main form of musical thinking and observes their intonational essence in the context of intensive musical activity of a person. The author emphasizes the great importance of the musical thinking studies of B. Asafyev, M. Aranovsky, B. Teplov, Y. Zagarelly and others, takes into consideration general laws of psychology as well, in accordance with the above-mentioned researchers’ works: musical thinking is an artistic thinking within the framework of the art of music. The form of musical thinking is the musical- auditory notions that are formed in the process of musical activity as a result of interpretation of acoustic impressions. The author points out that the sound nature of music art causes the peculiarities of music impressions, being formed on the ground of the personal music-listening experience. Sound images are produced by the music previously perceived. The essence of these images is music inflection that, in the course of comprehension of music phenomena, becomes the base for the musical-auditory notions emergence. The author states that the musical-auditory notions formation, motive and visual images appear on the ground of personal sensory perceptions and cognitive experience in the course of music activity. Based on the musicological works the author defines the substance of the musical-auditory notions as intonational process that reflects the features of musical thinking in the sociocultural context of the historical development of musical art.

Language reflects sociocultural structures, such as gender, and affects individuals' perceptions and cognitions. In gendered languages, male-inflected parts of speech are generally used for both sexes (i.e., masculine generics), thus proliferating stereotypes, inequality, and misattributions. We hypothesized that masculine-generic inflection in a questionnaire would bias women's reports compared with a gender-neutral inflection (e.g., "he or she"). We tested our prediction using an academic motivation questionnaire. We found that women reported lower task value and intrinsic goal orientation in the masculine-generic form compared with the gender-neutral form, and lower self-efficacy than men in the masculine-generic form. These findings suggest that questionnaires and surveys written in gendered languages or translated into them may contain construct-irrelevant variance that may undermine the validity of their scores' interpretations, thus risking the possibility of false conclusions.

Semantic prosody has been a hot issue in corpus linguistics since it has been put forward in the early 1990s. Some theories suggest that some words in specific context are subject to semantic inflection. However, this paper argues that semantic prosody appears in not only collocation, but also words and their internal affixes. In this paper, we chose the most commonly used quasi-affix “Zu” as the research object. Our study explores the semantic prosody tendencies of “X_zu” and analyzes the cognition mechanism of the words constructed as “X_zu”. The analysis shows that the words of “X_zu” implicating negative meanings appear more frequently than those with positive ones based on a large scale corpus.

Contrairement à une idée reçue, héritée des traditions formalistes et structuralistes, la dimension verbale de la représentation de l’action, et notamment le choix des temps et des modes, est loin d’être indifférente pour définir l’intrigue du récit. Les approches rhétoriques et cognitivistes considèrent l’intrigue comme une matrice de possibilités, dont la fonction est de susciter dans l’auditoire le « désir cognitif » d’un dénouement. Dès lors, les formes du discours, et notamment la manière dont les procès sont représentés verbalement, jouent évidemment un rôle essentiel dans l’excitation ou la neutralisation de ce désir. Cet article a pour but de déterminer les affinités entre les formes verbales (qui incluent aussi bien les « temps » de l’indicatif que les « modes ») et leur fonction dans l’intrigue. Challenging previous assertions, inherited from the formalist and structuralist traditions, the author of this article argues in favour of the importance of the role played by the choice of tense and aspect in defining the plot of a narrative. The rhetorical and cognitive approaches consider the plot as a matrix of possibilities, function of which is to awaken a cognitive desire on the part of the reader with respect to the unravelling of the plot. It follows therefore that the formal aspect of the narrative, and more particularly the way in which the various events are represented, plays a key role in the stimulation or neutralisation of this desire. The aim of this article is to determine the affinities between the verbal forms (tense/mode/aspect) and their fonction in the plot.

Le but de ce travail est d’étudier l’emploi du conditionnel dans la construction « ne saurait » en français, tel qu’il apparaît dans ce crime ne saurait rester impuni. Nous montrerons que le verbe savoir lorsqu’il est utilisé au conditionnel et précédé de la négation « ne », perd son sens dynamique de « capacité à » pour acquérir un sens épistémique de « possibilité », plus précisément « d’impossibilité » : ne saurait équivaut à il est impossible que (+ proposition). On observera que cette construction, autorise l’emploi d’un sujet non animé suivi d’un verbe infinitif de type passif. The object of this paper is the study of use of the conditional in the construction « ne saurait » in French as it occurs in constructions such as « ce crime ne saurait rester impuni ». It will be shown how, when it is used in the conditional and preceded by the negative particle “ne”, the verb loses its dynamic sense of “capacity “ and acquires an epistemic meaning of “possibility”, more specifically “impossibility” : ne saurait is the equivalent of il est impossible que (+ proposition). It is worth noting that this construction can function with an inanimate subject and an infinitive verb in the passive voice.

Contrairement à la langue moderne qui emploie systématiquement le subjonctif après je crois que, la langue ancienne offre la possibilité d’un choix entre l’indicatif et le subjonctif. L’étude de cette opposition complémentaire s’appuie sur un relevé d’occurrences effectué dans plusieurs textes dramatiques du Moyen Âge et du début du XVIe siècle. Elle établit que la séquence {je croi que + SP} paraît plus fréquente en moyen français et se spécialise vraisemblablement en {je croi que + estre au SP}. La valeur modalisatrice de cet emploi du subjonctif semble échapper aux conclusions de G. Moignet et marquer la négation d’une relation d’implication assumée par la pensée commune. Unlike the situation in contemporary French, where the subjunctive is used systematically after je crois que, Medieval French offers a choice between the indicative and the subjunctive. The investigation of what is a complementary opposition is based on a corpus of occurrences taken from a representative selection of Middle French and early XIVth century Medieval plays. The study, which concentrates on (Je croi que + estre au SP), suggests that the sequence (je crois que + SP) was more frequent in Middle French. The modalising force of this use of the subjunctive, which marks the negation of something which is considered common knowledge, seems to have excaped the attention of the Medieval scholar, G. Moignet.

Cet article fournit une analyse de processus, de nature cyclique, qui ont affecté le sort de l’infixe (latin) -ID(I)- en ladin dolomitique (variété « rhéto-romane »). Ce morphème, de nature dérivationnelle, a fait l’objet d’un processus d’intégration flexionnelle dans les verbes de la première conjugaison en ladin dolomitique, mais cette intégration (partielle) présente une intéressante variation diatopique et dastratique (examinée ici sur la base d’une enquête dialectologique), à laquelle s’ajoute l’action de facteurs glottopolitiques (en rapport avec le statut des différentes variétés ladines), lexicaux (opposition entre verbes héréditaires et néologismes), et sémantico-pragmatiques (exploitation fonctionnelle de l’infixation pour marquer des oppositions aspectuelles).

L'objectif de cette étude est d'explorer dans quelle mesure les mêmes structures de la modalité sont appliquées dans la traduction des discours littéraires de l'anglais vers le français. Par le biais des analyses de traductions effectuées à partir du 19e siècle jusqu'à la période actuelle, l'étude examine la façon dont les stratégies de la traduction auraient pu changer dans le temps. A l'aide d'une approche cognitive, elle évalue le rôle des espaces mentaux dans les choix des traductions et développe des modèles cognitifs diachroniques des schémas en question. This study investigates the extent to which the same structures of modality are used in the translation of literary discourse from English into French. By examining translations from the 19th century until the present-day period, it explores how translation strategies may have changed through time. With the aid of a cognitive approach to the analysis, the aim of the investigation is to evaluate the role of mental spaces in translation choices and to develop diachronic cognitive models of the patterns involved.

L’objet de cet article est d’expliquer en français et en arabe les valeurs d’emploi illustrées par l’auxiliaire de modalité anglais “must”. L’étude se limite à l’opposition déontique/épistémique établie par la linguistique anglaise. Après avoir passé en revue les divers points de vue théoriques sur la question dans les trois langues, un échantillon d’exemples fait l’objet d’une analyse détaillée. Le système grammaticalisé des auxiliaires de modalité anglais est opposé au système semi-grammaticalisé français des verbes en -oir (devoir), où les changements de temps et d’aspect affectent le sens (il doit/il a dû/il devait). Il apparaît que le système arabe se limite à une disposition syntaxique où, en reprenant le vocabulaire de Charles Bally, le modus (“qualification”) modifie le dictum (“proposition”). The aim of this article is to set out the various ways in which Arabic, English and French handle the notions expressed by what English grammarians tend to define as the deontic and epistemic sense effects of the English modal “must”. Once the dominant theoretical stances have been reviewed, the study procedes contrastively from a series of representative examples. The grammaticalized English system of modal auxilaires are compared to the semi-gramaticalized French system of the verbs in –oir (devoir), where modifications in tense and aspect affect meaning (il doit/ il a dû / il devait). The Arabic system in contrast opts for a syntactic arrangement in terms of what Charles Bally defines as modus (“qualification”) and dictum (proposition).

English mother tongue speakers begin second language learning with a built-in disadvantage, namely their mother tongue. It contains no concept of gender in the grammatical sense; its verb system uses multiple instead of single forms; grammatical inflection is reduced to who/whom/whose. This paper will address firstly the problem of language distance and the implied necessity to create new cognitive processes; secondly it will analyze some simple, yet seemingly effective, computer programs available on the UK market for FLL; thirdly it will suggest that the micro computer can help students develop necessary process of thought and analysis that are absent in their own language but which are needed for a "natural" mastery of a second language.

Contains fulltext : 115415.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) A controversial issue in neuro- and psycholinguistics is whether regular past-tense forms of verbs are stored lexically or generated productively by the application of abstract combinatorial schemas, for example affixation rules. The success or failure of models in accounting for this particular issue can be used to draw more general conclusions about cognition and the degree to which abstract, symbolic representations and rules are psychologically and neurobiologically real. This debate can potentially be resolved using a neurophysiological paradigm, in which alternative predictions of the brain response patterns for lexical and syntactic processing are put to the test. We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to record neural responses to spoken monomorphemic words ('hide'), pseudowords ('smide'), regular past-tense forms ('cried') and ungrammatical (overregularised) past-tense forms ('flied') in a passive listening oddball paradigm, in which lexically and syntactically modulated stimuli are known to elicit distinct patterns of the mismatch negativity (MMN) brain response. We observed an enhanced ('lexical') MMN to monomorphemic words relative to pseudowords, but a reversed ('syntactic') MMN to ungrammatically inflected past tenses relative to grammatical forms. This dissociation between responses to monomorphemic and bimorphemic stimuli indicates that regular past tenses are processed more similarly to syntactic sequences than to lexically stored monomorphemic words, suggesting that regular past tenses are generated productively by the application of a combinatorial scheme to their separately represented stems and affixes. We suggest discrete combinatorial neuronal assemblies, which bind classes of sequentially occurring lexical elements into morphologically complex units, as the neurobiological basis of regular past tense inflection. 9 p.

Three experiments investigated the ability of eight-year old children with poor language comprehension to produce past tense forms of verbs. Twenty children selected as poor comprehenders were compared to 20 age-matched control children. Although the poor comprehenders performed less well than controls on a range of tasks considered to tap verbal-semantic abilities, the two groups showed equivalent phonological skills. Poor comprehenders performed as well as control children when asked to inflect novel verbs and regular verbs. In contrast, poor comprehenders were less skilled than controls at inflecting both high frequency and low frequency irregular verbs. Although the predominant error pattern for all children was to over-regularize, this was most marked in the poor comprehenders; control children were more likely to produce errors that contained knowledge of the irregular form than poor comprehenders. In addition, the ability to inflect irregular verbs was related to individual differences in verbal-semantic skills. These findings are discussed within a framework in which verb inflection is related to underlying language skills in both the phonological and semantic domains.

In this article we discuss methods for investigating grammatical processing in bilinguals. We will present a methodological approach that relies on: (i) linguistic theory (in our case, morphology) for the construction of experimental materials; (ii) a design that allows for direct (within-experiment, within-participant, and within-item) comparisons of the critical conditions; and (iii) data analysis techniques that make both linear and non-linear gradient effects visible. We review recent studies of masked morphological priming in bilinguals in which the application of these methodological principles revealed highly selective interactions of age of acquisition (and the native/non-native contrast) with the linguistic distinction between inflection and derivation. We believe that such considerations are not only relevant for grammatical processing experiments, but also for studying bilingualism, and its potential cognitive advantages, more generally.

Neuroimaging studies of English suggest that speech comprehension engages two interdependent systems: a bilateral fronto-temporal network responsible for general perceptual and cognitive processing, and a specialised left-lateralised network supporting specifically linguistic processing. Using fMRI we test this hypothesis in Polish, a Slavic language with rich and diverse morphology. We manipulated general perceptual complexity (presence or absence of an onset-embedded stem, e.g. kotlet 'cutlet' vs. kot 'cat') and specifically linguistic complexity (presence of an inflectional affix, e.g. dom 'house, Nom' vs. dom-u 'house, Gen'). Non-linguistic complexity activated a bilateral network, as in English, but we found no differences between inflected and uninflected nouns. Instead, all types of words activated left inferior frontal areas, suggesting that all Polish words can be considered linguistically 'complex' in processing terms. The results support a dual network hypothesis, but highlight differences between languages like English and Polish, and underline the importance of cross-linguistic comparisons.

We present a neural network model of learning and processing the English past tense that is based on the notion that experience-dependent cortical development is a core aspect of cognitive development. During learning the model adds and removes units and connections to develop a task-specific final architecture. The model provides an integrated account of characteristic errors during learning the past tense, adult generalization to pseudoverbs, and dissociations between verbs observed after brain damage in aphasic patients. We put forward a theory of verb inflection in which a functional processing architecture develops through interactions between experience-dependent brain development and the structure of the environment, in this case, the statistical properties of verbs in the language. The outcome of this process is a structured processing system giving rise to graded dissociations between verbs that are easy and verbs that are hard to learn and process. In contrast to dual-mechanism accounts of inflection, we argue that describing dissociations as a dichotomy between regular and irregular verbs is a post hoc abstraction and is not linked to underlying processing mechanisms. We extend current single-mechanism accounts of inflection by highlighting the role of structural adaptation in development and in the formation of the adult processing system. In contrast to some single-mechanism accounts, we argue that the link between irregular inflection and verb semantics is not causal and that existing data can be explained on the basis of phonological representations alone. This work highlights the benefit of taking brain development seriously in theories of cognitive development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

This study adjudicates between two opposing accounts of morphological productivity, using English past‐tense as its test case. The single‐route model (e.g., Bybee & Moder, 1983) posits that both regular and irregular past‐tense forms are generated by analogy across stored exemplars in associative memory. In contrast, the dual‐route model (e.g., Prasada & Pinker, 1993) posits that regular inflection requires use of a formal “add ‐ed” rule that does not require analogy across regular past‐tense forms. Children (aged 3–4; 5–6; 6–7; 9–10) saw animations of an animal performing a novel action described with a novel verb (e.g., gezz; chake). Past‐tense forms of novel verbs were elicited by prompting the child to describe what the animal “did yesterday.” Collapsing across age group (since no interaction was observed), the likelihood of a verb being produced in regular past‐tense form (e.g., gezzed; chaked) was positively associated with the verb's similarity to existing regular verbs, consistent with the single‐route model only. Results indicate that children's acquisition of the English past‐tense is best explained by a single‐route analogical mechanism that does not incorporate a role for formal rules.

It is commonly assumed that patterns of syncretism in inflectional paradigms are restricted in some way. In this article, I show how such restrictions can reflect cognitive constraints on language learning. Namely, I construct a learning algorithm that is biased toward certain types of affix distributions in paradigms, thereby rendering them systematic. In developing this algorithm, I rely on the traditional notions of underspecification and blocking, but recast them in terms of learners' biases toward generalization strategies based on cross-situational intersections and default reasoning. This algorithm allows us to test claims about systematicity of syncretism using typological data and language acquisition studies. In the last part of the article, I present a crosslinguistic survey of verbal agreement paradigms that supports the algorithm's predictions.

Allomorphy is a phenomenon that occurs in many languages. Several psycholinguistic studies have shown that allomorphy, if present, co-determines cognitive processing. In the present paper we discuss allomorphic variations of Serbian instrumental singular form of pseudo-nouns as emerging from analogical learning. We compare the predictions derived from memory-based language processing models with results from a previous experimental study with adult Serbian native speakers. Results confirm that the production of suffix allomorphs in Serbian instrumental singular masculine nouns can be accounted for by memory-based learning and simple analogical inferences. The present findings are in line with a growing body of research showing that memory-based learning models make relevant predictions about the cognitive processes involved in various linguistic phenomena.

In a new series of experiments with the picture-word interference paradigm, we replicated the grammatical gender interference effect in bare noun production in Italian: naming times are slower to picture-word noun pairs sharing the same gender. This effect is independent from the morphological transparency for gender, but responses are significantly slower when the distracters are transparent for gender. Overall, the pattern of results supports the assumption that in bare noun production grammatical gender is always selected, at least in languages like Italian. We assume that the differential effects of the nominal endings are due to the mechanisms involved in the recognition of grammatical gender of the distracter nouns which are sensitive to the morphological transparency for gender: lexical representation of transparent written words leads to a higher level of activation, thus resulting in stronger gender interference.

The aim of the study was to investigate how the input modality affects the processing of a morphologically complex word. The processing of Finnish inflected vs. monomorphemic words and pseudowords was examined during a lexical decision task, using behavioral responses and event-related potentials. The stimuli were presented in two modalities, visually and auditorily, to two groups of participants. Half of the words and pseudowords carried a case-inflection. At the behavioral level, the inflected words elicited a processing cost with longer decision latencies and higher error rates. At the neural level, pseudowords elicited an N400 effect, which was more pronounced in the visual modality. Inflected words elicited an N400 effect in both modalities, which, however, differed in topography and latency. The N400 effect for inflected words most probably reflects access and possible integration of the stem and suffix. The results suggest that the inflectional processing cost stems from the later, lexical-semantic stage of processing in both modalities. The ERP responses to inflected pseudowords did not differ from the ERP responses to monomorphemic pseudowords in either modality, suggesting that combinatorial case-inflection processing requires a real word stem in order to proceed.

A group of 20 patients with probable Alzheimer disease (AD) and a control group were tested in a verb generation task, in a verb synonym task and several cognitive tests. Three types of verbs and novel verbs were presented in simple sentence frames, in two different conditions. In one condition participants were presented with the verb in the infinitive, providing information about the conjugation of the verb and the most likely type of past participle mapping required. The second was an ambiguous condition in which the suffix of the input verb did not provide any clue to the conjugation. The aim was to investigate if different types of verbs and input mapping affected patients' performance, and to what extent the deficit increased when the illness became more severe. Dependent measures were accuracy rates, rates of different morpho-phonological transformations and error type rates. Patients showed a more marked deficit in verb generation, when input was ambiguous. Correlation between the verb synonym test and accuracy in verb generation indicated that a deficit in lexical-semantic memory was partially responsible for impaired performance. Data suggest that patients maintained information about frequency distribution of different verb types and verb classes in each conjugation, but were impaired in operating complex phonological transformations.

Background: This study explored the relation between the production of determiners and case markers and the production of verbs and verb inflections in agrammatism. Determiners and case markers require case and therefore depend on the existence of case‐assigning constituents. The project on case assignment in Dutch has been carried out under auspices of the Graduate School of Behavioral and Cognitive Neurosciences in Groningen (BCN) and the Center for Language and Cognition in Groningen (CLCG). Naama Friedmann was supported by a university grant for the encouragement of research. We are grateful to Roel Jonkers for providing the Dutch data, and to Roelien Bastiaanse and Aviah Gvion for their comments on a previous version of this paper. Aims: Since verbs and verb inflections are case assigners, and are impaired in agrammatism, we tested whether the presence of verbs and verb inflection affects the production of determiners and case markers in Dutch and Hebrew agrammatism. Methods & Procedures: A total of ...

A common feature of language disorders, particularly in English, is an impairment in inflectional morphology. One view claims that this deficit is caused by impaired speech processing and resulting impoverished phonological representations. We investigated the accuracy of spoken word recognition in Specific Language Impairment (SLI) using a successive forward gating paradigm, with target verbs manipulated for frequency and past tense inflection. Children with Grammatical-SLI were compared to age and language controls. We scored responses according to (1) proportion of gates to the first correct response, (2) proportion of gates to the first of three consistently correct responses. G-SLI children generally performed at the same level as age and vocabulary controls, although worse than age controls on uninflected verbs with respect to the second criterion, indicating that they activated the correct word at the same point, but took longer to reach a consistent response. Low frequency and inflection of the target word did not disadvantage G-SLI children to a greater extent than any of their controls. These results do not support the hypothesis that G-SLI children's morphological impairment is caused by poor acoustic-phonetic processing.

Cet article étudie dans une perspective contrastive l’emploi du modal anglais can et du verbe français pouvoir devant les verbes de perception dits involontaires, tels que voir ou entendre. Il remet en cause la notion de préconstruit ou de présupposition qui prévaut dans les approches inspirées par la Théorie des Opérations Enonciatives (TOE), pour privilégier le concept de chronologie notionnelle élaboré par la psychomécanique guillaumienne. La chronologie notionnelle permet d’établir une distinction entre la phase 1 et la phase 2, soit, en termes généraux, entre la puissance et l’effection ou en termes plus spécifiques, entre la capacité à voir ou à entendre et l’événement proprement dit. L’étude conclut qu’il suffit en anglais que la phase 1 soit un tant soit peu convoquée pour que can apparaisse devant un verbe de perception alors qu’en français cette phase doit être beaucoup plus clairement sollicitée et identifiée pour que pouvoir soit utilisé. This article examines, from a contrastive angle, the use of the English modal auxiliary can and the “coverb” pouvoir when introducing so-called involuntary verbs of perception, such as “see” and “hear”. It challenges the notion of “preconstruction” or “presupposition”, popular among the various models inspired by the “Theory of Enunciative Operations” (TOE), favouring the concept of a notional chronology, central to the theories of Gustave Guillaume. This approach establishes a distinction between phase 1 and phase 2, more generally between the potential and the effective, more specifically, on the pragmatic level, between the capacity to see or hear and the event itself. The study concludes that if, in the English system, can appears immediately phase 1 is triggered off, in French, this meaning must be more consciously and clearly evoked for the verb “pouvoir” to be used.

The paper tries to clarify the relationship between aesthetic experience and artworks, as well as between cognition and the pleasures of art. Starting with an analytical distinction between aesthetics and art-theory, I propose a psychologically and phylogenetically grounded description of the mental resources on which aesthetic experience draws. After tracing a tentative phylogeny of the cognitive and affective resources defining aesthetic experience, I distinguish three structural components: (a) a marked inflection towards a costly use of mental resources (characterized by costly signaling, attention-driven cognitive dynamics, perceptual learning, attentional overload and divergent cognitive style); (b) a real-time hedonic calculus evaluating the properties of the attentional processing; (c) a bi-directional feedback between attention and hedonic calculus. Finally, the paper discusses the relationship between cognitive fluency and positive aesthetic experiences, arguing that fluency can explain the aesthetic pleasures of art only in conjunction with a second and opposite source of pleasure: curiosity.

This article presents fMRI evidence bearing on dual-mechanism versus connectionist theories of inflectional morphology. Ten participants were scanned at 4 Tesla as they covertly generated the past tenses of real and nonce (nonword) verbs presented auditorily. Regular past tenses (e.g., walked, wugged) and irregular past tenses (e.g., took, slept) produced similar patterns of activation in the posterior temporal lobe in both hemispheres. In contrast, there was greater activation in left and right inferior frontal gyrus for regular past tenses than for irregular past tenses. Similar previous results have been taken as evidence for the dual-mechanism theory of the past tense (Pinker & Ullman, 2002). However, additional analyses indicated that irregulars that were phonologically similar to regulars (e.g., slept, fled, sold) produced the same level of activation as did regulars, and significantly more activation than did irregulars that were not phonologically similar to regulars (e.g., took, gave). Thus, activation patterns were predicted by phonological characteristics of the past tense rather than by the rule-governed versus exception distinction that is central to the dual-mechanism framework. The results are consistent with a constraint satisfaction model in which phonological, semantic, and other probabilistic constraints jointly determine the past tense, with different degrees of involvement for different verbs.

This study investigates the differences in the input representations of verbs and nouns in the Italian mental lexicon. One visual lexical decision experiment in which the stem homograph effect (Laudanna, Badecker, and Caramazza, 1989) was evaluated on noun and verb targets is reported. Strong inhibitory effects on verb targets preceded by stem homographs relative to nonhomographic word pairs were found. The effects on verb targets were also much more reliable than the effects on noun targets. The pattern of results provides support for the hypothesis that noun and verbs are differently represented in the orthographic input lexicon.

A series of four visual-visual priming experiments investigates the role of bound stem allomorphs in the representation and processing of Finnish case inflected nouns. Niemi et al. (1994) and Laine et al. (1994) argue that Finnish nouns are parsed into stem and affix in reception and that the bound stem allomorphs have separate (visual) lexical representations. Recently Järvikivi and Niemi (in press) have provided converging evidence for their claim based on a series of lexical decision experiments with Finnish stem allomorphs. The results from the present series of four follow-up experiments reported here showed that (isolated) bound stem allomorphs primed the recognition of the corresponding monomorphemic nouns significantly compared both to phonologically unrelated pseudowords and to phonologically minimally different pseudowords. Furthermore, not only did both phonologically transparent and opaque case inflected nouns prime the corresponding nominative singulars, but also there was no difference in priming between the two. The results are well in accordance and corroborate the hypotheses drawn from the earlier investigations. Moreover, they further indicate that bound stem allomorphs have representations on a purely formal level only, i.e., they serve as indices of and entering points to morphological/morphosyntactic information.

Four subclasses of German noun plurals affixed with -n, exhibiting different degrees of predictability, are investigated in a lexical decision experiment with visual stimuli and in a cross-modal priming experiment. The lexical decision experiment compared -n plurals and irregular -er plurals to plurals with the default affix -s. Whereas the -s plurals yielded no word-form frequency effects, such effects could be observed for all other plural forms, including all subclasses of -n plurals. The priming experiment produced a different pattern. We found that the prior presentations of fully predictable -n plurals prime the stems as effectively as the stem itself, whereas -n plurals with limited predictability yielded only reduced priming effects toward their stems. These results are explained in terms of an extended dual mechanism approach, taking into account an access level and a central level of lexical processing.

Purpose In the current study, the author aimed to determine whether 4- to 6-year-old typically developing children possess requisite problem-solving and language abilities to produce, generalize, and retain a novel verb inflection when taught using an explicit, deductive teaching procedure. Method Study participants included a cross-sectional sample of 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old children with typical cognitive and language development. The 66 participants were randomly assigned to either a deductive or inductive teaching condition in which they were taught a novel gender morphological inflection across 4 sessions. Learning was assessed on the basis of performance on learning, generalization, and maintenance probes. Results Across all age groups, children were more likely to successfully use the novel gender form when taught using the deductive procedure than if taught using the inductive procedure (Φ range: .33–.73). Analyses within each age group revealed a robust effect for the 5-year-old children, with less consistent effects across the other age groups. Conclusions Study results suggest that 4- to 6-year-old children with typical language and cognitive abilities are able to make use of a deductive language teaching procedure when learning a novel gender inflection. Evidence also suggests that this effect is driven by expressive and receptive language ability.

The development of specified tense and number morphology in child Catalan and Spanish is found to correlate with the onset of overt subject use. The data come from four monolingual child Catalan-speakers (from the Serra & Sole corpus) and one monolingual child Spanish-speaker (from the Linaza corpus) who were studied longitudinally from 1:0 to 3;6, approximately. The simultaneous emergence of tense and number morphology on one hand and overt subjects on the other in the children's speech is taken as evidence that a particular aspect of Universal Grammar, Case Theory, determines the possible co-occurrences of verbal inflections and subject types in developing grammatical systems. Parallels in verbal inflectional development are found in other child languages, while such parallels are not found in regard to subject use. Possible modifications to Case Theory, which would allow a unified account of the cross-linguistic developmental patterns of subject use, are considered. The possibility of explaining the early absence of overt subjects in these null subject languages as the result of an early sentence processing deficit is explored and rejected. The children's knowledge of whether their language is a null subject or overt subject language even before acquiring adult-like verbal inflection is taken as further evidence for what has been called 'early convergence' on parameter settings.

Previous studies of long-term morphological priming have obtained a mixed pattern of results: Although some studies have found larger effects of inflected primes than of derived primes, others have found that inflections and derivations have equivalent effects. We reexamined this issue in four experiments in which the inflected and derived primes were paired with the same target words (e.g., believe, believed, believer ) and were equated in terms of their orthographic similarity to the targets. Across these experiments, inflections and derivations consistently produced equivalent levels of priming, both in the word fragment completion task (Experiments 1 and 3) and in the lexical decision task (Experiments 2 and 4). The implications of these findings for current models of the processing of morphologically complex words are discussed.

The present experiment employed a grammatical priming task to explore the possible contributions of the left and right cerebral hemispheres to the processing of grammatical agreement. Stimuli were three-word noun phrases, with the prime centered above the fixation point and the target presented laterally to one visual field after a 600-ms stimulus onset asynchrony. Number agreement between primes and targets was varied such that the article of the prime could be consistent (i.e., each narrow shoe or all narrow shoes), inconsistent (i.e., all narrow shoe or each narrow shoes) or neutral (i.e., the narrow shoe(s)) with respect to the inflection of the target. Half of the subjects provided lexical decision responses and the other half pronunciation. The bilateral priming effect, obtained only in lexical decision, suggests that both the left and the right hemispheres are sensitive to certain grammatical cues. In addition to the task difference in priming, the inclusion of a neutral condition and of pseudo-inflected nonwords allowed these effects to be attributed to postlexical mechanisms.

A central question in morphological research is whether there are whole-word representations for regularly inflected forms. A series of four lexical decision experiments addressed this question by looking at whole-word frequency effects across a range of frequency values with constant stem-cluster frequencies. Frequency effects were only found for inflected forms above a threshold of about 6 per million, whereas such effects were found for morphologically simple controls in all frequency ranges. We discuss these data in the context of two kinds of dual models and in relation to competition models proposed within the connectionist literature.