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We test the comprehension of transitive sentences in very young learners of Mandarin Chinese using a combination of the weird word order paradigm with the use of pseudo-verbs and the preferential looking paradigm, replicating the experiment of Franck et al. (2013) on French. Seventeen typically-developing Mandarin infants (mean age: 17.4 months) participated and the same experiment was conducted with eighteen adults. The results show that hearing well-formed NP-V-NP sentences triggered infants to fixate more on a transitive scene than on a reflexive scene. In contrast, when they heard deviant NP-NP-V sequences, no such preference pattern was found, a performance pattern that is adult-like. This is at variance with some of the results from Candan et al. (2012), who only found evidence for canonical word order comprehension at almost age 3 when considering fixation time. Furthermore, within the age range tested, performance showed no effect of age or vocabulary size.

Agreement is a morphosyntactic dependency which is sensitive to the hierarchical structure of the clause and is constrained by the structural distance that separates the elements involved in this relation. In this paper we present two experiments, providing new evidence that Italian-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), as well as Typically Developing (TD) children, are sensitive to the same hierarchical and locality factors that characterise agreement in adult grammars. This sensitivity holds even though DLD children show accrued difficulties in more complex agreement configurations. In the first experiment, a forced-choice task was used to establish whether children are more affected in the computation of S-V agreement when an element intervenes hierarchically or linearly in the agreement relation: DLD children are more subject to attraction errors when the attractor intervenes hierarchically, indicating that DLD children discriminate between hierarchical and linear configurations. The second experiment, also conducted through a forced-choice task, shows that the computation of agreement in DLD children is more 'fragile' than in TD children (and also in children with a primary impairment in the phonological domain), in that it is more sensitive to the factors of complexity identified in Moscati and Rizzi's (2014) typology of agreement configurations. To capture the agreement pattern found in DLD children, we put forth a novel hypothesis: the Fragile Computation of Agreement Hypothesis. Its main tenet is that DLD children make use of the same grammatical operations employed by their peers, as demonstrated in Experiment 1, but difficulties increase as a function of the complexity of the agreement configuration.

Linguists propose the existence of linguistic trees and define the merge operation to construct complex sentences from simpler elements. Previous neuroimaging studies, primarily utilizing 3T scanners, have identified an extensive fronto-temporal network involved in forming linguistic structures and executing merge operations. Intracranial recordings in these areas reveal a more distributed picture, with adjacent regions undertaking diverse linguistic tasks.We designed a 7T fMRI visual task to investigate the neural coding of syntactic operations. In healthy French-speaking participants, we initially identified the language network using a localizer. Subsequently, we employed short 3-word stimuli, presented briefly (200ms), to explore the response profiles within the language network. These stimuli included control conditions, affirmative statements, and interrogative sentences, all matched for letter and character count.Preliminary results indicate that 200ms is sufficient to differentiate between sentences and non-sentences, and suggest a finely-tuned specialization for syntactic operations within language network subregions.

Existing psycholinguistic models typically describe agreement relations as monolithic phenomena amounting to mechanisms that check mere feature consistency. This eye-tracking study aimed at widening this perspective by investigating the time spent reading subject-verb (number, person) and adverb-verb (tense) violations on an inflected verb during sentence comprehension in Spanish. Results suggest that (i) distinct processing mechanisms underlie the analysis of subject-verb and adverb-verb relations, (ii) the parser is sensitive to the different interpretive properties that characterise the person, number and tense features encoded in the verb (i.e. anchoring to discourse for person and tense interpretation, as opposed to anchoring to cardinality information for number), and (iii) the (local, distal) position of the agreement controller with respect to the verb affects the interpretation of these dependencies. An account is proposed that capitalises on the importance of enriching current sentence processing formalizations using a feature and relation-based approach.

The article focuses on morpho-syntactic aspects used in linguistics for the study of monkey languages. Evidences showing sign combinations found in monkey languages are offered. Campbell monkey's combination of sign -oo with krak (leopard alert) and hok (eagle alert) is discussed. Sign combinations being used by Black-and-White Colobus monkeys, female Diana monkeys and Titi monkeys.

Combining the labeling algorithm of with bare phrase structure raises the question of how heads (simple or complex) and phrases can be distinguished. I propose a notational device which draws the distinction in a way which solves technical problems for the labeling algorithm. Focusing on phrasal movement, I show how the 'halting problem' for wh-movement, and in particular the freezing effects arising in criterial positions, can be derived from labeling and a maximality principle, restricting movement to maximal elements with a given label. Looking then at head movement, I argue that it can be made consistent with the No Tampering condition, and work out the labeling algorithm for structures derived by head movement. Finally, I argue that the ban against excorporation in head movement can be analyzed as a case of freezing, and traced back, much as freezing in phrasal movement, to the maximality principle relativized to the head - phrase distinction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern linguistics has highlighted the fundamental invariance of human language: A rich invariant structure has emerged from comparative studies nourished by sophisticated formal models; languages also differ along important dimensions, but variation is constrained in severe and systematic ways. I illustrate this research direction in the domains of island constraints, word order restrictions, and the expression of referential dependencies. Both language invariance and language variability within systematic limits are highly relevant for the cognitive sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]