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This study investigated how heritage Spanish-English bilinguals integrate their cue hierarchies to process simple sentences in both Spanish and English. Sentence interpretation is achieved by weighing the various cues that are present in the sentence against that language's cue hierarchy. The Unified Competition Model (UCM) suggests that bilinguals show a variety of patterns in sentence interpretation strategies depending on language proficiency. Previous research on heritage Spanish-English bilinguals and late bilinguals has demonstrated differences in cue utilization and sentence interpretation compared to monolinguals. However, good-enough processing suggests that when a sentence does not meet certain heuristics, like the first-noun agent heuristic, a semantic representation of the sentence will be processed instead of a syntactic one. Even with reliable sentential-level cues such as word order, a plausible semantic representation of the sentence is favored. This is especially the case with inanimate-inanimate (IA-IA) sentences, like in the present study, in which there is less reversibility of thematic roles without competing with semantic plausibility. For this study, participants (n = 32) read a total of 80 inanimate sentences in English and Spanish with subject-verb-object and object-verb-subject (OVS) word orders, indicated the subject of the sentences, and completed language proficiency and dominance tasks. When reading Spanish sentences, participants read the OVS word order faster. English proficiency was a significant predictor of sentence reading time and choice selection time but did not predict word choice. The results suggest that IA-IA sentences pose challenges for cue utilization and thematic role assignment due to semantic limitations. This study found that participantsmay prioritize semantic plausibility over syntactic representations in sentence processing, supporting a good-enough processing model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The typology of word order in Hindi (Subject-Object-Verb, SOV) differs from that of English (Subject-Verb-Object, SVO). Bilinguals whose two languages have conflicting word order provide a unique opportunity to understand how word order affects language processing. Earlier behavioural and event-related brain potential (ERP) studies with Spanish-Basque bilinguals showed longer reading times and more errors in the comprehension of OSV sentences than SOV sentences in Basque language, indicating that non-canonical word orders (OSV) were difficult to process than canonical word order (SOV). Purpose: This study was designed to explore how the difference in word order in Hindi and English languages affects N400 parameters in proficient Hindi−English bilinguals, using semantic congruity paradigm. Methods: Twenty-five proficient Hindi−English bilingual subjects were asked to silently read the congruent and incongruent sentences presented in one word at a time in both the languages. ERPs were recorded from midline frontal, central and parietal sites. Results: The mean amplitude of the N400 effect at the parietal sites in Hindi−English proficient bilinguals was larger for English than for Hindi but there was no significant difference in the N400 latencies. Conclusion: Hindi−English bilingual subjects processed SOV and SVO sentences with equal ease as evidenced by the N400 latencies. Higher amplitude of the N400 effect with English sentences indicate that placing 'Object' as the final word makes sentences more predictable than verb as the final word. Understanding the word order difference might help to unravel the neurophysiological mechanisms of language comprehension and may offer some insights in terms of functional advantage of a particular word order in bilinguals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Word order is crucial when we study the functions of words in different sentences and constructions. The position of words in sentences and their function are closely observed in comparative studies. Function is not solely determined by the position of words in sentences. There are languages with fixed word order (like English language) and languages with flexible word order (like Albanian language). An important difference discussed in this paper is that English is a non-null subject language which means that subjects are grammatically mandatory. On the other hand, Albanian language is a null subject language and there are various sentences without a subject. Having in mind that the term empty subject is some how new in English, questions are raised whether there are empty subjects in other languages and if they are recognized as syntactic constituents. The empty subject expressed with the pronoun ‘it’ is used to introduce a clause or provide a grammatical structure with no clear referent, but serves as a grammatical necessity. Examples with empty subjects in English language are translated to Albanian language in order to see if there are similarities or differences, or if there are empty subjects in Albanian language. However, the analysis in this paper found no such equivalents in translated sentences to Albanian language, especially when talking about empty subjects.Subjects in Albanian language are expressed explicitly and clearly and there is no need of an empty subject when the grammar of Albanian language and the word order allows sentences with no subject. Subjects, whether they are real or empty subjects (semantically empty), are usually found in the initial position in English. While this is generally true in English language, with some exceptions, it is not always the case with Albanian language because of the word order and null subject properties. Empty subjects have been studied for some time in English language, but there are not vast studies comparing empty subjects in English and Albanian language. The pronoun ‘it’ is an essential feature of English language to refer to time, weather, emotions and more (It is ten o’clock. It is sunny. It is unbelievable!). The pronoun ‘it’ in English language is not used only to express empty/dummy subjects. It can also be used as anticipatory ‘it’, which means that ‘it’ can be used to refer to a real subject found after the verb (It is likely that we will be late.). These are not rare occasions in English, but when these sentences are translated from English to Albanian language there are differences, including different word order or no subject at all in Albanian language (It is late./Është vonë.). Another important use of the pronoun ‘it’ is that it can be used in passive constructions as an empty subject (It is believed that he is guilty./Besohet se është me faj.) and the real subject is extraposed. Empty subject ‘it’ can be challenging for non-native speakers to master its varied uses and functions. Learners must master the use of ‘it’ in a variety of contexts and understand nuances and differences in meaning with translated sentences from English to Albanian language.The analysis of similarities and differences highlights divergences between these two languages. These findings contribute to understand the syntax and semantics of English and Albanian language by highlighting cross-linguistic variations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies have shown that iconicity can provide a benefit to non-signers during the learning of single signs, but other aspects of signed messages that might also be beneficial have received less attention. In particular, do other features of signed languages help support comprehension of a message during the process of language learning? The following exploratory study investigates the comprehension of sentences in two signed and two spoken languages by non-signers and by American Sign Language (ASL) learners. The design allows for the examination of message comprehension, with a comparison of unknown spoken and signed languages. Details of the stimulus sentences are provided in order to contextualize features of the signing that might be providing benefits for comprehension. Included in this analysis are aspects of the sentences that are iconic and spatially deictic – some of which resemble common gestural forms of communication. The results indicate that iconicity and referential points in signed language likely assist with comprehension of sentences, even for non-signers and for a signed language that the ASL signers have not studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The immediately preverbal position has been argued to be the default focus position in Turkish. In absence of any overt focus markers, the constituent in this position is considered to carry sentential stress and neutral information for canonical word-order sentences and focus is projected to the whole sentence in the form of broad focus. In non-canonical word-order sentences, the immediately preverbal constituent is presumed to carry focal stress and the focused constituent would receive narrow focus. This paper tested this claim experimentally. The paper also investigated if there were any differences in the cognitive operations associated with processing and revising focus in canonical and non-canonical sentences. There were a sentence completion task and an eye-tracking experiment. The sentence completion data and the eye-tracking data supported the theoretical predictions: the immediately preverbal position was associated with default focus in Turkish when no pitch accentuation or other focus markers were available. The eye-tracking data further showed that changes to word-order were perceived as cues for broad versus narrow focus marking. The participants' processing of and revision from narrow focus were costlier than processing broad focus and assigning narrow focus for the first time. We argue, in line with previous research, that this may be due to deeper encoding of focused information in memory or heavier memory load resulting from keeping a set of alternatives of the focused constituent when it has contrastive meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper strives to overcome the issues of achieving a VSO word order in negated sentences in Standard Arabic. A possible solution would be to split the Negative projection into two, where the higher head hosts the negative particle, and the lower head has the ability to attract and host the verb, which falls within the scope of the negative particle. Splitting the negative projection proved to be sufficient to maintain the integrity and validity of the other theories available in the Minimalist Program. Moreover, it allows for a distinction between the A-movement operation, where verbs move over the Subject to a higher position resulting in a VSO word order, and the A'-Movement operation of a fronted Determiner Phrase (DP) is moved to the utmost left for focal purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates propositional hyperintensionality in counterfactuals. It starts with a scenario describing two children playing on a seesaw and studies the truth-value predictions for counterfactuals by four different semantic theories. The theories in question are Kit Fine's truthmaker semantics, Luis Alonso-Ovalle's alternative semantics, inquisitive semantics and Paolo Santorio's syntactic truthmaker semantics. These predictions suggest that the theories that distinguish more of a given set of intensionally equivalent sentences (Fine and Alonso-Ovalle's) fare better than those that do not (inquisitive semantics and Santorio's). Then we investigate how inquisitive semantics and Santorio can respond to these results. They can respond to them by helping themselves to considerations from Hurford disjunctions, disjunctions whose disjuncts stand in an entailment relation to one another. I argue that considerations from Hurford disjunctions are ad hoc modifications to less fine-grained theories to predict the expected results and they are not independently motivated. I conclude that the scenarios suggest a need for more fine-grained theories of sentential meaning in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue that the phenomenon of 'extra be' (e.g. That's the thing, is we lost) can be analyzed in terms of specifying coordination. Specifically, 'extra be' derives from a 'colon phrase' (:P) structure, where Spec-:P is a host sentence and Comp-:P is a pseudocleft adding information to the host. 'Extra be' arises when the head T of the pseudocleft raises to :0, an operation that is possible only under specific circumstances involving ellipsis in the pseudocleft. I motivate this analysis by first considering a set of syntactic, prosodic, and semantic properties exhibited by extra be sentences, including properties of 'extra be' itself, properties of the post-copular specificational phrase, and locality conditions in the construction. I then develop the analysis described above, emphasizing in particular the assignment of a uniform structure to both extra be sentences and their 'extra be'-less counterparts (compare: That's the thing {: / is} we lost). Finally, I compare key features of the new analysis with those of previous proposals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at investigating word-order and its rhetorical and stylistic functions in Arabic Language. It discusses its forms and patterns from a semantic and syntactic point of view. Therefore, the study will concentrate on the following issues: 1- Types of sentences: (a) Nominal, beginning with a noun. (b) Verbal, beginning with a verb. (c) Local sentence, in which an adverbial expression begins the sentence. (d) Conditional sentences. 2- The Construction Theory, which concentrates on the acquisition of words and phrases according to the correct usage. It does not neglect the meaning of the words in isolation, but is concerned with their meaning in context. 3- Disconnection and Connection: This phenomenon gives the Arabic Language the freedom to produce various stylistic structures that the speaker can use to express directly the intended meaning. 4- Rhetorical and stylistic functions of word-order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psycholinguistic theories are based on a very small set of unrepresentative languages, so it is as yet unclear how typological variation shapes mechanisms supporting language use. In this article we report the first on-line experimental study of sentence production in an Australian free word order language: Murrinhpatha. Forty-six adult native speakers of Murrinhpatha described a series of unrelated transitive scenes that were manipulated for humanness (±human) in the agent and patient roles while their eye movements were recorded. Speakers produced a large range of word orders, consistent with the language having flexible word order, with variation significantly influenced by agent and patient humanness. An analysis of eye movements showed that Murrinhpatha speakers’ first fixation on an event character did not alone determine word order; rather, early in speech planning participants rapidly encoded both event characters and their relationship to each other. That is, they engaged in relational encoding, laying down a very early conceptual foundation for the word order they eventually produced. These results support a weakly hierarchical account of sentence production and show that speakers of a free word order language encode the relationships between event participants during earlier stages of sentence planning than is typically observed for languages with fixed word orders. Psycholinguistic theories are based on a very small set of unrepresentative languages, so it is as yet unclear how typological variation shapes mechanisms supporting language use. In this article we report the first on-line experimental study of sentence production in an Australian free word order language: Murrinhpatha. Forty-six adult native speakers of Murrinhpatha described a series of unrelated transitive scenes that were manipulated for humanness (±human) in the agent and patient roles while their eye movements were recorded. Speakers produced a large range of word orders, consistent with the language having flexible word order, with variation significantly influenced by agent and patient humanness. An analysis of eye movements showed that Murrinhpatha speakers’ first fixation on an event character did not alone determine word order; rather, early in speech planning participants rapidly encoded both event characters and their relationship to each other. That is, they engaged in relational encoding, laying down a very early conceptual foundation for the word order they eventually produced. These results support a weakly hierarchical account of sentence production and show that speakers of a free word order language encode the relationships between event participants during earlier stages of sentence planning than is typically observed for languages with fixed word orders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Confronting and deferent, as linguistic devices, have important functions in deciding the meaning of a text. Sentences in any language are structured according to particular criteria defined by grammarians. The probable variations in word order resulting from of confronting or deferring specific sentence components may be problematic for both language users and learners of English and Arabic. Thus, the present study basically aims to identify the main processes of confronting and deferent in both English and Arabic, to identify sentence patterns in which confronting and deferent take place, and to identify sentence components involved in confronting and deferent in both English and Arabic. All these topics are discussed with reference to the Glorious Quran. To this end, Palmer (1981), Qurik et al. (1985), Al Museeri (2005), and Hammami et al. (2008) have been adopted to analyze the data in a qualitative method. The study revealed that confronting and deferent are just two of various strategies used to achieve variety in communication and expression. Although there are numerous variations between the two languages in this respect, they also have some similarities. Among these similarities is that both languages involve the shifting of components into beginning or final position to achieve specific goals such as emphasis, suspense, etc. There are many types of confronting and deferent processes in the two languages based on sentence components and sentence patterns involved in confronting and deferent. The components that can be involved in confronting and deferent in the two languages are the subject and predicate, subject and object, adverbs, pronouns, and several other elements. These confronting and deferent cases are found in nominal, verbal, prepositional phrases, and adjective phrases. This study is a call for EFL learners, EFL teachers, and those who are concerned with linguistic research and textbook writing to take into consideration the strategies used in different text types to achieve various communicative goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Syntax is a set of rules and tools that relate to specific languages and form units of speech. Syntax examines the rules and laws of the material language of thought, and its main problem is coherence. Syntax is a section of grammar that studies the processes of speech formation. Here, first of all, the sequence and correspondence of words in a sentence is studied. In addition, as part of the text as an utterance and as a free unit of language, the general features of the sentence are also at the focus of syntax. Among the urgent problems of expressive syntax is the study of the intensity of the structure of the text, the identification of language as an object of speech activity, the study of the pragmatic aspects of speech, oral speech, the relationship between the speaker and the addressee, speech amplifiers and their effects [2]. O. Aleksandrova writes about the characteristics of these terminological units that the term "expressive syntax" is appropriate to call the doctrine of the formation of expressive and effective speech, the subject of which is the linguistic basis of expressive speech, and the term "stylistic syntax" refers to the methodology of stylistics. Be that as it may, the stylistic approach always consists in identifying the potential (hidden) expression of certain means of everyday language [3]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial grammar learning (AGL) paradigms are used extensively to characterise (neuro)cognitive bases of language learning. However, despite their effectiveness in characterising the capacity to learn complex structured sequences, AGL paradigms lack ecological validity and typically do not account for cross-linguistic differences in sentence comprehension. Here, we describe a new modified miniature language paradigm – Mini Pinyin – that mimics natural language as it is based on an existing language (Mandarin Chinese) and includes both structure and meaning. Mini Pinyin contains a number of cross-linguistic elements, including varying word orders and classifier-noun rules. To evaluate the effectiveness of Mini Pinyin, 76 (mean age = 24.9; 26 female) monolingual native English speakers completed a learning phase followed by a sentence acceptability judgement task. Generalised mixed effects modelling revealed that participants attained a moderate degree of accuracy on the judgement task, with performance scores ranging from 25% to 100% accuracy depending on the word order of the sentence. Further, sentences compatible with the canonical English word order were learned more efficiently than non-canonical word orders. We controlled for inter-individual differences in statistical learning ability, which accounted for ~20% of the variance in performance on the sentence judgement task. We provide stimuli and statistical analysis scripts as open-source resources and discuss how future research can utilise this paradigm to study the neurobiological basis of language learning. Mini Pinyin affords a convenient tool for improving the future of language learning research by building on the parameters of traditional AGL or existing miniature language paradigms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of finding the similarity between natural language sentences is crucial for many applications in Natural Language Processing (NLP). An accurate calculation of similarity between sentences is highly needed. Many approaches depend on word-to-word similarity to measure sentence similarity. This paper proposes a new approach to improve the accuracy of the sentence similarity calculation. The proposed approach combines different similarity measures in the calculation of sentence similarity. In addition to traditional word-to-word similarity measure, the proposed approach exploits sentence semantic structure. Discourse representation structure (DRS) which is a semantic representation for natural sentences is generated and used to calculated structure similarity. Furthermore, word order similarity is measured to consider the order of words in sentences. Experiments show that exploiting structural information achieves good results. Moreover, the proposed method outperforms the current approaches on a standard benchmark dataset achieving 0.8813 Pearson correlation with human similarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At present, the field of parsing is occupied by statistical-based methods, and a large number of parsing methods used in English are applied to Chinese. Because of the difference between Chinese and English, it exposes a lot of shortcomings. In dependency parsing, there are many verbs in Chinese sentences, but dependency parsing only uses one core verb, which is not in line with the characteristics of Chinese. Based on the knowledge of Chinese grammar, statistics, and the hierarchical analysis theory of Chinese dichotomy of Zhu Dexi and Lu Jianming, this paper proposes a hierarchical word order-based decomposition of Chinese simple sentences. This method makes up for the deficiency of dependency parsing, and deeply combines the theory of Chinese grammar to decompose Chinese sentences hierarchically in order to extract sentences provides a better basis. Experiments were carried out on the People's Daily corpus labeled manually by Peking University from January to June 1998. The correct decomposition rate reached 46.692%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arabic sign language (ArSL) is a full natural language that is used by the deaf in Arab countries to communicate in their community. Unfamiliarity with this language increases the isolation of deaf people from society. This language has a different structure, word order, and lexicon than Arabic. The translation between ArSL and Arabic is a complete machine translation challenge, because the two languages have different structures and grammars. In this work, we propose a rule-based machine translation system to translate Arabic text into ArSL. The proposed system performs a morphological, syntactic, and semantic analysis on an Arabic sentence to translate it into a sentence with the grammar and structure of ArSL. To transcribe ArSL, we propose a gloss system that can be used to represent ArSL. In addition, we develop a parallel corpus in the health domain, which consists of 600 sentences, and will be freely available for researchers. We evaluate our translation system on this corpus and find that our translation system provides an accurate translation for more than 80% of the translated sentences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper exhibits the ways in which English let's is borrowed into contemporary Japanese. It shows that, in addition to the insertion of English phrases containing let's into a matrix of Japanese, let's alone is borrowed, whose process involves relexification. This relexification, however, diverges from the standard one, because the English word order introduced by let's is also borrowed into Japanese. In other words, a verbal element always comes after let's, while the Japanese word order is basically SOV. Hortative and volition are expressed in Japanese usually by a sentence final particle -yoo or -oo, which is attached to verbs. Let's, or rettsu in Japanese, relexifies this Japanese sentence final particle, when rettsu is followed by a verb (e.g. Rettsu ikou 'lit. Let's go') or a verbal noun (Rettsu kukkingu 'lit. Let's cooking'). When rettsu is followed by a simple noun (Rettsu buraunii 'lit. Let's brownie'), rettsu relexifies a Japanese verbal element as well as the sentence final particle. In cases such as the latter, the simple noun following rettsu needs to satisfy the first sister principle of the implicit verb relexified by rettsu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In E-C translation instruction studies, the influence of the sentence length has been extensively explored by the translation theorists. Most of them come to the conclusion that the sentence average length in translational Chinese is longer than that of the original Chinese, but few of them has explained how the long sentences are constructed and why. By comparing the differences in the sentence length and the internal grammatical structures of the long sentences between original Chinese and translational Chinese, this paper will verify the fact that the difference in the orders of the noun modifiers in English and Chinese contributes to the long sentences in translational Chinese, which should be particularly instructed in E-C Translation lessons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a Feature-enhanced Attention Network to improve the performance of target-dependent Sentiment classification (FANS). Specifically, we first learn the feature-enhanced word representations by leveraging the unigram features, part of speech features and word position features. Second, we develop an multi-view co-attention network to learn a better multi-view sentiment-aware and target-specific sentence representation via interactively modeling the context words, target words and sentiment words. We conduct experiments to verify the effectiveness of our model on two real-world datasets in both English and Chinese. The experimental results demonstrate that FANS has robust superiority over competitors and sets state-of-the-art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated Dutch-speaking four- to five-year-olds' use of word order and prosody in distinguishing focus types (broad focus, narrow focus, and contrastive narrow focus) via an interactive answer-reconstruction game. We have found an overall preference for the unmarked word order SVO and no evidence for the use of OVS to distinguish focus types. But the children used pitch and duration in the subject-nouns to distinguish focus types in SVO sentences. These findings show that Dutch-speaking four- to five-year-olds differ from their German- and Finnish-speaking peers, who show evidence of varying choice of word order to mark specific focus types, and use prosody to distinguish focus types in subject and object nouns in both SVO and OVS sentences. These comparisons suggest that typological differences in the relative importance between word order and prosody can lead to differences in children's use of word order and prosody in unmarked and marked word orders. A more equal role of word order and prosody in the ambient language can stimulate more extensive use of prosody in the marked word order, whereas a more limited role of word order can restrict the use of prosody in the unmarked word order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the status of so-called verb-final declaratives in Otfrid’s Evangelienbuch, with a focus on whether clauses in which there is no apparent subordinator and the finite verb occurs later than the expected verb-first or verb-second position can be treated as verb-third (V3) clauses, as they are defined for Old High German in works such as Axel (2007) and Tomaselli (1995). Drawing on a set of 746 clauses, I argue that there is no evidence that the finite verbs in these clauses have undergone verb movement, as is claimed in the aforementioned works, nor are the asyndetic verb-late clauses with a verb in surface third position consistent with the patterns identified in the generative literature for the V3 type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perceptual salience has been proposed as an essential factor in the order in which various linguistic phenomena are acquired. This study examines its influence on the acquisition sequence of a single construction, which is the Arabic construct state. Mapping certain English constructions to the definite Arabic construct state entails restructuring head direction (a feature of high salience) and the position of the definite marker (a feature of low salience). Results from a prompted sentence completion task suggested that early English-speaking learners of Arabic were sensitive to head direction but not definiteness. Analysis of intermediate and advanced groups captured the acquisition sequence of the Arabic construct state, proceeding in two gradual phases. During the first phase, English-speaking learners restructure head direction. Only later do they adjust definiteness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A clinical feature of the nonfluent/agrammatic variant of primary progressive aphasia (naPPA) is asyntactic comprehension. Previous studies have suggested that patients with asyntactic comprehension will probably rely on heuristics, such as considering the first noun as the agent. Japanese is a subject–object–verb language with a flexible word order and overt morphology; therefore, as subject-initial word order can be reordered by a transformation termed as scrambling, the flexible word order and rich morphology in Japanese may affect the sentence comprehension deficits in naPPA. This study aims to clarify the effects of word order and morphological information, such as case particle or verb inflection, on the comprehension of Japanese sentences in naPPA. Four patients with naPPA and 14 age-matched healthy controls were tested. Sentence comprehension was assessed using picture–sentence verification tasks with semantically reversible sentences. Four different sentence types were tested: subject-initial active (agent-first), scrambled active (theme-first), subject-initial passive (theme-first), and scrambled passive (agent-first). Compared with healthy controls, all patients demonstrated lower performance accuracy for the noncanonical sentences; however, there were no significant differences in performance accuracy for the canonical sentences. For the noncanonical sentences, all patients performed at significantly above chance levels for both the subject-initial and scrambled passive sentences but performed at chance levels for the scrambled active sentences. These results indicated that patients with naPPA would not only resort to the heuristics based on word order but will also intermittently use morphological information, and the heuristics would conflict with morphological information for the scrambled active sentences, which affects sentence comprehension deficits in naPPA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comprehension of transitive sentences relies on different kinds of information, like word order, case marking, and animacy contrasts between arguments. When no formal cues like case marking or number congruency are available, a contrast in animacy helps the parser to decide which argument is the grammatical subject and which the object. Processing costs are enhanced when neither formal cues nor animacy contrasts are available in a transitive sentence. We present an ERP study on the comprehension of grammatical transitive German sentences, manipulating animacy contrasts between subjects and objects as well as the verbal case marking pattern. Our study shows strong object animacy effects even in the absence of violations, and in addition suggests that this effect of object animacy is modulated by the verbal case marking pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examined native and non-native English speakers' processing of indirect object wh-dependencies using a filled-gap paradigm while recording event-related potentials (ERPs). The non-native group was comprised of native German-speaking, proficient non-native speakers of English. Both participant groups showed evidence of linking fronted indirect objects to the subcategorizing verb when this was encountered, reflected in an N400 component. Evidence for continued filler activation beyond the verb was seen only in the non-native group, in the shape of a prolonged left-anterior negativity. Both participant groups showed sensitivity to filled indirect object gaps reflected in a P600 response, which was more pronounced and more globally distributed in our non-native group. Taken together, our results indicate that resolving indirect object dependencies is a two-step process in both native and non-native sentence comprehension, with greater processing cost incurred in non-native compared to native comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: With Aim 1, we compared the comprehension of and sensitivity to canonical and noncanonical word order structures in school-age children with specific language impairment (SLI) and same-age typically developing (TD) children. Aim 2 centered on the developmental improvement of sentence comprehension in the groups. With Aim 3, we compared the comprehension error patterns of the groups. Method: Using a "Whatdunit" agent selection task, 117 children with SLI and 117 TD children (ages 7:0-11:11, years:months) propensity matched on age, gender, mother's education, and family income pointed to the picture that best represented the agent in semantically implausible canonical structures (subject-verb-object, subject relative) and noncanonical structures (passive, object relative). Results: The SLI group performed worse than the TD group across sentence types. TD children demonstrated developmental improvement across each sentence type, but children with SLI showed improvement only for canonical sentences. Both groups chose the object noun as agent significantly more often than the noun appearing in a prepositional phrase. Conclusions: In the absence of semantic-pragmatic cues, comprehension of canonical and noncanonical sentences by children with SLI is limited, with noncanonical sentence comprehension being disproportionately limited. The children's ability to make proper semantic role assignments to the noun arguments in sentences, especially noncanonical, is significantly hindered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Languages employ different strategies to transmit structural and grammatical information. While, for example, grammatical dependency relationships in sentences are mainly conveyed by the ordering of the words for languages like Mandarin Chinese, or Vietnamese, the word ordering is much less restricted for languages such as Inupiatun or Quechua, as these languages (also) use the internal structure of words (e.g. inflectional morphology) to mark grammatical relationships in a sentence. Based on a quantitative analysis of more than 1,500 unique translations of different books of the Bible in almost 1,200 different languages that are spoken as a native language by approximately 6 billion people (more than 80% of the world population), we present large-scale evidence for a statistical trade-off between the amount of information conveyed by the ordering of words and the amount of information conveyed by internal word structure: languages that rely more strongly on word order information tend to rely less on word structure information and vice versa. Or put differently, if less information is carried within the word, more information has to be spread among words in order to communicate successfully. In addition, we find that–despite differences in the way information is expressed–there is also evidence for a trade-off between different books of the biblical canon that recurs with little variation across languages: the more informative the word order of the book, the less informative its word structure and vice versa. We argue that this might suggest that, on the one hand, languages encode information in very different (but efficient) ways. On the other hand, content-related and stylistic features are statistically encoded in very similar ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to expound on case licensing and word order alternation in Standard Arabic within the optimality theory framework. To these ends, pre- and post-verbal DPs in both SV and VS word orders, along with DPs in verbless sentences and in isolation have been considered. Findings reveal, among other things, that NOM, which is the default case in Standard Arabic, is assigned to all DPs in isolation and verbless sentences, and to preverbal DPs in SV patterns. This study also purports that DPs in SV orders are basegenerated in Spec TP while they are base-generated in Spec VP in VS patterns. Accordingly, the SV structure is not derived from the VS pattern by A-movement. Rather, they are derived from two distinct patterns as the movement of the preverbal DPs in SV order is incompatible with the A-movement analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study offers an experimental perspective to investigate the word order and animacy effects of intransitives in Turkish, an agglutinative language with a canonical, flexible Subject-Object-Verb order. Four experiments were conducted to investigate a total of 528 Turkish speakers' acceptability judgments using rating scales (Experiments 1 and 3; 7-point Likert scales) and forced choice tasks (Experiments 2 and 4; choosing one of two sentences) for various orders of linguistic forms in a simple intransitive sentence. Results from scalar acceptability judgments showed that there were significant main effects of order and subject, indicating that participants gave significantly higher ratings to SV sentences than VS sentences and that their ratings changed significantly according to the animacy of the subjects. Results from the forced choice tasks showed that participants preferred SV sentences to VS sentences. These findings suggest that Turkish speakers prefer SV order over VS order even though both are readily available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Verhagen's thesis on the relative order of nominal arguments and sentence adverbials in the middle field of the clause argued that the order variation found in Dutch can be described in a more insightful way within a functional approach than within a formal, generative grammar. This was true in the 1980s, when generative grammar was concerned with competence only. In current generative grammar, however, the output of the computational system is interpreted and filtered by the performance systems, which opens the possibility of formally accounting for certain aspects of meaning and intonation. I will argue that this refutes Verhagen's claim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on filler-gap dependencies has revealed that there are constraints on possible gap sites, and that real-time sentence processing is sensitive to these constraints. This work has shown that comprehenders have preferences for potential gap sites, and immediately detect when these preferences are not met. However, neither the mechanisms that select preferred gap sites nor the mechanisms used to detect whether these preferences are met are well-understood. In this paper, we report on three experiments in Bangla, a language in which gaps may occur in either a pre-verbal embedded clause or a post-verbal embedded clause. This word order variation allows us to manipulate whether the first gap linearly available is contained in the same clause as the filler, which allows us to dissociate structural locality from linear locality. In Experiment 1, an untimed ambiguity resolution task, we found a global bias to resolve a filler-gap dependency with the first gap linearly available, regardless of structural hierarchy. In Experiments 2 and 3, which use the filled-gap paradigm, we found sensitivity to disruption only when the blocked gap site is both structurally and linearly local, i.e., the filler and the gap site are contained in the same clause. This suggests that comprehenders may not show sensitivity to the disruption of all preferred gap resolutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates preverbal structural and semantic processing in Japanese, a head-final language, using the maze task. Two sentence types were tested-simple scrambled sentences (Experiment 1) and control sentences (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 showed that even for simple, mono-clausal Japanese sentences, (1) there are online processing costs associated with parsing noncanonical word orders and (2) these costs are incurred during the incremental integration of constituents into developing sentence representations. Experiment 2 indicated (1) that antecedents are provisionally assigned to empty subjects in Japanese control sentences before verb information becomes available and (2) that this process is guided by an object control bias. Taken together, these findings are interpreted to suggest an important role for preverbal analysis in the processing of displaced constituents and of referential properties for empty elements in head-final languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report the results from an eye-movement monitoring study investigating how native and non-native speakers of English process temporarily ambiguous sentences such asWhile the gentleman was eating the burgers were still being reheated in the microwave, in which an initially plausible direct-object analysis is first ruled out by a syntactic disambiguation (were) and also later on by semantic information (being reheated). Both participant groups showed garden-path effects at the syntactic disambiguation, with native speakers showing significantly stronger effects of ambiguity than non-native speakers in later eye-movement measures but equally strong effects in first-pass reading times. Ambiguity effects at the semantic disambiguation and in participants’ end-of-trial responses revealed that for both participant groups, the incorrect direct-object analysis was frequently maintained beyond the syntactic disambiguation. The non-native group showed weaker reanalysis effects at the syntactic disambiguation and was more likely to misinterpret the experimental sentences than the native group. Our results suggest that native language (L1) and non-native language (L2) parsing are similar with regard to sensitivity to syntactic and semantic error signals, but different with regard to processes of reanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper reported two studies which compared the roles of word order and morphosyntactic skills in reading comprehension among Chinese elementary school children. In Study 1, we found that over and above the effects of age, nonverbal intelligence and word reading, word order skill was a stable predictor of reading performance throughout grades 1 to 6, whereas morphosyntactic skill was associated with reading comprehension at grades 3 and 4. Study 2 was a three-year longitudinal study which showed that morphosyntactic but not word order skill at grade 2 longitudinally predicted sentence comprehension at grade 3 beyond the control variables and the auto-regressor; word order rather than morphosyntactic skill at grade 2 contributed significant variances to passage comprehension at grades 3 and 4. The findings suggested a differential dependence of reading on word order and morphosyntactic skills at different ages and in reading comprehension at different levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our research investigated how the long-before-short (LbS) preference affects sentence production and sentence comprehension, including the interconnectedness between the behavior of speakers and comprehenders by manipulating the relative length of the direct or indirect objects in ditransitive sentences in Korean. As a result, significant LbS preferences were observed not only in the production study where participants were asked to arrange the pre-given sentence fragments orally, but also in the comprehension study where the eye-movements of the participants were measured for reading the complete sentences. Moreover, our linear mixed-effect model revealed that the behavior of the speakers and comprehenders were closely related in a way that the structures speakers were more likely to produce were easier for comprehenders to understand. Our results are attributable to a language universal processing strategy to pack the heads of arguments and the predicate as closely as possible, for the facilitation of argument integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the effects of form-focused instruction (FFI) on the acquisition of subject-verb inversion word order in declarative sentences in German. A group of U.S. college students who participated in a semester-long study abroad program in Germany and were comparable in terms of preprogram oral proficiency levels and accuracy scores in the use of the target structure in spontaneous production was split into experimental and control groups. During one-hour sessions outside of the regular, content-based courses, all students engaged in incidental FFI. The experimental group also received short treatments of instructor-planned FFI on inversion during these extra sessions. Official ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interviews were used to obtain spontaneous speech samples before and after the program, and data on frequency and accuracy in the use of the target structure were extracted from these samples. The experimental group had significantly higher accuracy scores than the control group at the end of the program. The findings suggest that isolated FFI provided in intensive, planned lesson modules targeting a specific structure may help learners progress faster toward accurate use of this structure in spontaneous speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies indicate that speakers signal the informational status of referents through a combination of intonation, word order and lexical realisation. In this paper, I argue for a non-binary view of information structure with referents being (1) hearer and discourse new, (2) discourse new but hearer given and (3) hearer and discourse given. Thus there can be no simple one-to-one relationship between information structure, lexical realisation and accenting. In the spoken data examined, evidence was found to substantiate a relationship between referential distance and lexical realisation but not between referential distance and tonic accenting. Tonic accents signal speakers' subjective projection of the importance of a referent but the exact informational meaning signalled by the referent depends on a combination of tonic accent, tone choice, key, linear position and lexical realisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study is an attempt to evaluate empirical adequacy of MacSwan (2000, 2005, 2009, 2010) proposal that feature strength of V0 determines SVO/SOV order of constituents in intra-sentential code-switching (CS). In order to determine the potential of this proposal in predicting switching patterns, it employs a corpus of naturally-occurring Urdu/English CS. The corpus consists of 1767 sentences in the form of 29 recorded interactions among 42 competent Urdu/English bilinguals in natural settings. The examination of the data under consideration reveals that SVO/SOV order of constituents in Urdu/English CS is not determined by feature strength of V0. The data provide multiple instances of complement DP placed at pre-head position, resulting in OV order, in VP in spite of having an English V0s as its head which requires OV order due to its weak feature. MacSwan s claim that V0 and 10 must be supplied by a single lexicon because of restriction on word-internal switching is also falsified by the empirical evidence from the data. The data provide numerous mixed sentences in which V0 and f are supplied by two different languages instead of one as claimed by MacSwan; hence, they must have same feature strength. Thus, SV/VS orders also depend upon feature strength of Urdu or English V0 in MacSwan' terms. However, the data examined demonstrate that SV order remains fixed no matter it is English T0 sharing weak feature or Urdu T0 sharing strong feature of its respective V0. Thus, MacSwan s proposal completely fails in predicting linear order of constituents when the languages involved have conflicting grammatical requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proficient language use requires speakers to vary word order and choose between differentways of expressing the samemeaning. Prior statistical associations between individual verbs and different word orders are known to influence speakers' choices, but the underlying neural mechanisms are unknown. Here we show that distinct neural pathways are used for verbs with different statistical associations. We manipulated statistical experience by training participants in a language containing novel verbs and two alternative word orders (agent-before-patient, AP; patient-before-agent, PA). Some verbs appeared exclusively in AP, others exclusively in PA, and yet others in both orders. Subsequently, we used sparse sampling neuroimaging to examine the neural substrates as participants generated new sentences in the scanner. Behaviorally, participants showed an overall preference for AP order, but also increased PA order for verbs experienced in that order, reflecting statistical learning. Functional activation and connectivity analyses revealed distinct networks underlying the increased PA production. Verbs experienced in both orders during training preferentially recruited a ventral stream, indicating the use of conceptual processing for mapping meaning to word order. In contrast, verbs experienced solely in PA order recruited dorsal pathways, indicating the use of selective attention and sensorimotor integration for choosing words in the right order. These results show that the brain tracks the structural associations of individual verbs and that the same structural output may be achieved via ventral or dorsal streams, depending on the type of regularities in the input. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Available corpus data show that adverbs with modifying meanings, already, also, and only, occur at the clause-final or sentence-final position more often in 'Asian Englishes' (Hong Kong English and Singapore English) than British English and Canadian English. This paper posits a link between the motivation of sentence-final adverbs in Asian English and substrate transfer due to linguistic (both grammatical and pragmatic) structures of influential non-English languages in the regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the application of structured learning methods (SLMs) to word sense disambiguation (WSD). On one hand, the semantic dependencies between polysemous words in the sentence can be encoded in SLMs. On the other hand, SLMs obtained significant achievements in natural language processing, and so it is a natural idea to apply them to WSD. However, there are many theoretical and practical problems when SLMs are applied to WSD, due to characteristics of WSD. Beginning with the method based on hidden Markov model, this paper proposes for the first time a comprehensive and unified solution for WSD based on maximum entropy Markov model, conditional random field and tree-structured conditional random field, and reduces the time complexity and running time of the proposed methods to a reasonable level by beam search, approximate training, and parallel training. The update of models brings performance improvement, the introduction of one step dependency improves performance by 1-5 percent, the adoption of non-independent features improves performance by 2-3 percent, and the extension of underlying structure to dependency parsing tree improves performance by about 1 percent. On the English all-words WSD dataset of Senseval-2004, the method based on tree-structured conditional random field outperforms the best attendee system significantly. Nevertheless, almost all machine learning methods suffer from data sparseness due to the scarcity of sense tagged data, and so do SLMs. Besides improving structured learning methods according to the characteristics of WSD, another approach to improve disambiguation performance is to mine disambiguation knowledge from all kinds of sources, such as Wikipedia, parallel corpus, and to alleviate knowledge acquisition bottleneck of WSD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linking is the theory that captures the mapping of the semantic roles of lexical arguments to the syntactic functions of the phrases that realize them. At the sentence level, linking allows us to understand “who did what to whom” in an event. In Spanish, linking has been shown to interact with word order, verb class, and case marking. The current study aims to provide the first piece of experimental evidence about the interplay between word order and verb type in Spanish. We achieve this by adopting role and reference grammar and the extended argument dependency model. Two different types of clauses were examined in a self-paced reading task: clauses with object–experiencer psychological verbs and activity verbs. These types of verbs differ in the way that their syntactic and semantic structures are linked, and thus they provide interesting evidence on how information that belongs to the syntax–semantics interface might influence the predictive and integrative processes of sentence comprehension with alternative word orders. Results indicate that in Spanish, comprehension and processing speed is enhanced when the order of the constituents in the sentence mirrors their ranking on a semantic hierarchy that encodes a verb's lexical semantics. Moreover, results show that during online comprehension, predictive mechanisms based on argument hierarchization are used rapidly to inform the processing system. Our findings corroborate already existing cross-linguistic evidence on the issue and are briefly discussed in the light of other sentence-processing models. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses a study on progressive sentence development abilities of 5th graders and their description skills. Information for the pretest-posttest quasi-experimental model control group study was gathered using the “Description Skill Scoring Rubric". The results showed progressive sentence development abilities developed the skills of the experimental students in constructing additive and subordinating sentences.

Three experiments are reported that studied the priming of word order in German. Experiment 1 demonstrated priming of the order of case-marked verb arguments. However, order of noun phrases and order of thematic roles were confounded. In Experiment 2, we therefore aimed at disentangling the impact of these two possible factors. By using primes that differed from targets in phrase structure but were parallel with regard to the order of thematic roles, we nevertheless found priming demonstrating the critical impact of thematic roles. Experiment 3 replicated the priming effects from Experiments 1 and 2 within participants and revealed no evidence for a modulation of priming by phrase structure. Consequently, our findings suggest that word order priming crucially depends on the structural outline of thematic roles rather than on the linearization of phrases. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]