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The referent of a nonreflexive pronoun depends on context, but the nature of these contextual restrictions is controversial. For instance, in causal dependent clauses, the preferred referent of a pronoun varies systematically with the verb in the main clause (Sally frightens Mary because she … vs. Sally loves Mary because she …). Several theories claim that verbs with similar meanings across languages should show similar pronoun resolution effects, but these claims run contrary to recent analyses on which much of linguistic and nonlinguistic cognition is susceptible to cross-cultural variation, and in fact there is little data in the literature to decide the question one way or another. Analysis of data in eight languages representing four historically unrelated language families reveals consistent pronoun resolution biases for emotion verbs, suggesting that the information upon which implicit causality pronoun resolution biases are derived is stable across languages and cultures.

Bilingualism varies greatly in terms of language background, age of acquisition, and learning environment, making it complex to study the relationship between language and brain structure. Age of acquisition and linguistic proficiency are both crucial factors in language acquisition research and are closely related. To better understand the relationship between bilingualism and brain structure, we created a dataset of 2,000+ brain 3D images from bilinguals and monolinguals and trained a neural network (Contrastive Variational Autoencoder, CVAE) to distinguish bilingual-specific neuroanatomical variations from those shared by monolingual groups. The initial results reveal that the common variation (e.g. scanner and sex) in brain structure shared by two groups can be identified by CVAE. More importantly, CVAE disentangled linguistic proficiency from the common variation but not age of acquisition. It suggests that compared to age of acquisition, linguistic proficiency is more correlated with brain’s structure.

The impact of an individual's first language (L1) on their acquisition of a second language (L2) is widely recognized in the field of psycholinguistics. However, previous research has focused on limited L1-L2 pairs, leaving questions about how different linguistic structures, such as genetic relationship, phonology, or syntax, can either facilitate or impede the learning of a new language. In our current study, we aimed to address these gaps by analyzing standardized English assessment scores of English Language Learners (ELLs) from 46 international schools across 30 countries. We compared linguistic similarities between more than 40 L1s and examined how different linguistic structures of the L1 influenced the acquisition of L2, specifically in terms of genetic, phonological, and syntactic similarities. Our findings indicate that older ELLs learn English at a faster rate than younger ELLs, and among older ELLs, those who speak an L1 that shares linguistic similarities with English acquire the language faster than ELLs whose L1 is less closely related to English. These results highlight the transfer of linguistic knowledge from L1 to L2 and emphasize the importance of age of acquisition in L2 learning. Our study has important theoretical and pedagogical implications for research on second language acquisition.

Humans, even from infancy, are capable of unsupervised (“sta- tistical”) learning of linguistic information. However, it re- mains unclear which of the myriad algorithms for unsuper- vised learning captures human abilities. This matters because unsupervised learning algorithms vary greatly in how much can be learned how quickly. Thus, which algorithm(s) humans use may place a strong bound on how much of language can ac- tually be learned in an unsupervised fashion. As a step towards more precisely characterizing human unsupervised learning capabilities, we quantitatively synthesize the literature on adult unsupervised (“statistical”) word segmentation. Unfortunately, most confidence intervals were very large, and few moderators were found to be significant. These findings are consistent with prior work suggesting low power and precision in the litera- ture. Constraining theory will require more, higher-powered studies.

Second-language (L2) learning is characterized by both positive and negative transfer from the first language (L1). However, psycholinguistic studies focus on a few syntactic phenomena and L1-L2 pairs at a time, resulting in an incomplete picture. We apply machine learning to seven learner corpora in English and Spanish with 39 language pairs, showing that statistical models combined with simple $n$-grams of part-of-speech tags and syntactic dependency relations achieve good performance in recovering the L1, indicating structural transfer from L1 to L2. Further machine learning using a rich hand-curated linguistic feature set allowed us to identify aspects of L2 linguistic structure particularly influenced by L1 (verbal morphology, average dependency tree parse depth, and headedness of clausal structures) as well as those with minimal influence (distributions of dependency relations, basic word orders, or non-projective dependencies).

Children learn language more easily than adults, though when and why this ability declines have been obscure for both empirical reasons (underpowered studies) and conceptual reasons (measuring the ultimate attainment of learners who started at different ages cannot by itself reveal changes in underlying learning ability). We address both limitations with a dataset of unprecedented size (669,498 native and non-native English speakers) and a computational model that estimates the trajectory of underlying learning ability by disentangling current age, age at first exposure, and years of experience. This allows us to provide the first direct estimate of how grammar-learning ability changes with age, finding that it is preserved almost to the crux of adulthood (17.4 years old) and then declines steadily. This finding held not only for "difficult" syntactic phenomena but also for "easy" syntactic phenomena that are normally mastered early in acquisition. The results support the existence of a sharply-defined critical period for language acquisition, but the age of offset is much later than previously speculated. The size of the dataset also provides novel insight into several other outstanding questions in language acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In acquiring language, children must learn to appropriately place the different participants of an event (e.g., causal agent, affected entity) into the correct syntactic positions (e.g., subject, object) so that listeners will know who did what to whom. While many of these mappings can be characterized by broad generalizations, both within and across languages (e.g., semantic agents tend to be mapped onto syntactic subjects), not all verbs fit neatly into these generalizations. One particularly striking example is verbs of psychological state: The experiencer of the state can appear as either the subject (Agnes fears/hates/loves Bartholomew) or the direct object (Agnes frightens/angers/delights Bartholomew). The present studies explore whether this apparent variability in subject/object mapping may actually result from differences in these verbs' underlying meanings. Specifically, we suggest that verbs like fear describe a habitual attitude towards some entity whereas verbs like frighten describe an externally caused emotional episode. We find that this distinction systematically characterizes verbs in English, Mandarin, and Korean. This pattern is generalized to novel verbs by adults in English, Japanese, and Russian, and even by English-speaking children who are just beginning to acquire psych verbs. This results support a broad role for systematic mappings between semantics and syntax in language acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]