The Role of Multiword Building Blocks in Explaining L1-L2 Differences

Developmental changes in the word co-occurrences of Spanish-English bilingual children with and without developmental language disorder

PURPOSE

The study aimed to understand how bilingual children with typical language development (TLD) and those with developmental language disorder (DLD) use frequent word co-occurrences in their narratives.

METHOD

We studied the change over time in the word co-occurrences used by 30 Spanish-English bilingual children with and without DLD (experimental group). An additional normative group consisted of 98 TLD Spanish-English bilingual first graders. Children narrated two Spanish and two English stories in kindergarten and first grade. Employing a Python program on the transcribed narratives, we extracted all adjacent two-word and three-word co-occurrences. From the normative group, the 90 most frequently occurring two-word and 90 most frequently occurring three-word co-occurrences were extracted. The type and tokens of word co-occurrences each child in the experimental group produced out of the 180 identified word co-occurrences were analysed.

RESULT

Overall, children at first grade produced more word co-occurrences types than in kindergarten. Children with DLD used fewer types of word co-occurrences but produced them as often as than their TLD peers. Children with DLD increased their word co-occurrences from kindergarten to first grade at the same rate although at a lower frequency. Children in both groups produced similar types and tokens of word co-occurrences in both Spanish and English, except tokens of two word co-occurrences. Children produced two word co-occurrences more often in English than in their Spanish narratives.

CONCLUSION

The results shed light on children with DLD's deficits in production of word co-occurrences, indirectly reflecting possible deficits in statistical pattern detection.

Infant-directed speech becomes less redundant as infants grow: Implications for language learning

Do speakers use less redundant language with more proficient interlocutors? Both the communicative efficiency framework and the language development literature predict that speech directed to younger infants should be more redundant than speech directed to older infants. Here, we test this by quantifying redundancy in infant-directed speech using entropy rate - an information-theoretic measure reflecting average degree of repetitiveness. While IDS is often described as repetitive, entropy rate provides a novel holistic measure of redundancy in this speech genre. Using two developmental corpora, we compare entropy rates of samples taken from different ages. We find that parents use less redundant speech when talking to older children, illustrating an effect of perceived interlocutor proficiency on redundancy. The developmental decrease in redundancy reflects a decrease in lexical repetition, but also a decrease in repetitions of multi-word sequences, highlighting the importance of larger sequences in early language learning.

Expanding the emergentist Account:Reply to open peer commentaries

Emergentism provides a framework for understanding how language learning processes vary across developmental age and linguistic levels, as shaped by core mechanisms and constraints from cognition, entrenchment, input, transfer, social support, motivation, and neurology. As our commentators all agree, this landscape is marked by intense variability arising from the complexity. These mechanisms interact in collaborative and competitive ways during actual moments of language use. To better understand these interactions and their effects, we need much richer longitudinal data regarding both input and output during actual contexts of usage. We believe that modern technology can eventually provide this data (Flege & Bohn, 2021) in ways that will allow us to more fully populate an emergent landscape.

PHOR-in-One: A multilingual lexical database with PHonological, ORthographic and PHonographic word similarity estimates in four languages

A large body of research seeking to explore how form affects lexical processing in bilinguals has suggested that orthographically similar translations (e.g., English-Portuguese "paper-papel") are responded to more quickly and accurately than words with little to no overlap (e.g., English-Portuguese "house-casa"). One of the most prominent algorithms to estimate orthographic similarity, the normalized Levenshtein distance (NLD), returns an index of the proportion of identical characters of two strings, and is an efficient and invaluable tool for the selection, manipulation, and control of verbal stimuli. Notwithstanding its many advantages for second-language research, the absence of a comparable measure for phonology has resulted in the adoption of different strategies to assess the degree of interlanguage phonological similarity across the literature, with profound implications for the interpretation of results on the relative role of orthographic and phonological similarity in bilingual lexical access. In the present work, we introduce PHOR-in-One, a multilingual lexical database with a set of phonological and orthographic NLD estimates for 6160 translation equivalents in American and British English, European Portuguese, German and Spanish in a total of 30,800 words. We also propose a new measure of phonographic NLD, a pooled index of orthographic and phonological similarity, particularly useful for researchers interested in controlling for and/or manipulating both estimates at once. PHOR-in-One includes a comprehensive characterization of its lexical entries, namely Part-of-Speech-dependent and independent frequency counts, number of letters and phonemes, and phonetic transcription. PHOR-in-One is thus a valuable tool to support bilingual and multilingual research.

Observations on the Progression of Gestures with L2 Proficiency: A Call for Further Research

Gestures in learners of second languages (L2) are still an understudied field. Most studies comparing the same individuals gesturing in their L2 and in the mother tongue (L1) report a higher frequency of gestures in the L2, however, the reason for this difference is not yet clear. Aside from idiosyncratic and cultural variations, differences in language type, such as syllabic duration and functional load and syntactical structure, as well as differences in the proficiency of the speaker are likely to affect the production of gestures in terms of their frequency and function. The many variables to be considered obscure the role of proficiency and the integration of gesture-speech-idea in L2 speakers. These variables are only controlled in a handful of longitudinal studies comparing speakers' gestures at two or more points in the proficiency continuum. With this paper, we seek to add our observations to this corpus, using the data collected under the case study of a Cantonese learner of English, to reflect on a number of existing theoretical constructs. We propose a number of ideas that need further research, as well as a number of variables that need to be better understood in order to advance L2 gesture research. As our observations are based on the narrations of one individual, our generalizations are theoretical at this point as our results cannot to be extrapolated to all L2 learners, instead, they are intended to highlight a number of areas related to L2 gesture production and how this might change with proficiency, that require further study.

Effects of L1-L2 congruency, collocation type, and restriction on processing L2 collocations

The present study investigated the effects of L1-L2 congruency, collocation type, and restriction on L2 collocational processing. Advanced Chinese learners of English and native English-speaking controls performed an online acceptability judgment task to investigate how advanced L2 learners processed congruent (sharing the same meaning and structure in L1 language) collocations and English-only (not equivalent in L1 construction) collocations with the same node (right) word and a different collocate (left). The experimental materials included verb-noun (VN), adjective-noun (AN) collocations, free (less fixed), and restricted (more fixed) collocations chosen from BNC. The results revealed that (i) The non-native speakers were sensitive to L1-L2 congruency, but the native speakers were not. (ii) The native speakers were sensitive to collocation restriction, whereas the non-native speakers were not. These results lend initial support to the mapping hypothesis and open choice principle of L2 collocational processing for Chinese English learners.

Individual differences in artificial and natural language statistical learning

Statistical learning (SL) is considered a cornerstone of cognition. While decades of research have unveiled the remarkable breadth of structures that participants can learn from statistical patterns in experimental contexts, how this ability interfaces with real-world cognitive phenomena remains inconclusive. These mixed results may arise from the fact that SL is often treated as a general ability that operates uniformly across all domains, typically assuming that sensitivity to one kind of regularity implies equal sensitivity to others. In a preregistered study, we sought to clarify the link between SL and language by aligning the type of structure being processed in each task. We focused on the learning of trigram patterns using artificial and natural language statistics, to evaluate whether SL predicts sensitivity to comparable structures in natural speech. Adults were trained and tested on an artificial language incorporating statistically-defined syllable trigrams. We then evaluated their sensitivity to similar statistical structures in natural language using a multiword chunking task, which examines serial recall of high-frequency word trigrams-one of the building blocks of language. Participants' aptitude in learning artificial syllable trigrams positively correlated with their sensitivity to high-frequency word trigrams in natural language, suggesting that similar computations span learning across both tasks. Short-term SL taps into key aspects of long-term language acquisition when the statistical structures-and the computations used to process them-are comparable. Better aligning the specific statistical patterning across tasks may therefore provide an important steppingstone toward elucidating the relationship between SL and cognition at large.

Preverbal infants' sensitivity to grammatical dependencies

During their first months of life, infants can already distinguish function words (e.g., pronouns and determiners) from content words (e.g., verbs and nouns). Little research has explored preverbal infants' sensitivity to the relationships between these word categories. This preregistered study examines whether French-learning 8- and 11-month-olds track the grammatical dependencies between determiners and nouns as well as pronouns and verbs. Using the Visual Fixation Procedure, infants were presented with lists containing either grammatical (e.g., tu manges "you eat", des biberons "some bottles") or ungrammatical (e.g., des manges "some eat", tu biberons "you bottle") phrases. In Experiment 1 (N = 59), the lists involved common nouns and verbs, while in Experiment 2 (N = 28), only common verbs were used. Eleven-month-olds showed a clear preference for correct over incorrect co-occurrences in both experiments, while 8-month-olds showed a trend in the same direction. These results suggest that before their first birthday, infants' storage and access of words and word sequences are sufficiently sophisticated to include the means to track categorical dependencies. This early sensitivity to co-occurrence patterns may be greatly beneficial for constraining lexical access and later on for learning novel words' syntactic and semantic properties.

Do Children Use Multi-Word Information in Real-Time Sentence Comprehension?

Meaning in language emerges from multiple words, and children are sensitive to multi-word frequency from infancy. While children successfully use cues from single words to generate linguistic predictions, it is less clear whether and how they use multi-word sequences to guide real-time language processing and whether they form predictions on the basis of multi-word information or pairwise associations. We address these questions in two visual-world eye-tracking experiments with 5- to 8-year-old children. In Experiment 1, we asked whether children generate more robust predictions for the sentence-final object of highly frequent sequences (e.g., "Throw the ball"), compared to less frequent sequences (e.g., "Throw the book"). We further examined if gaze patterns reflect event knowledge or phrasal frequency by comparing the processing of phrases that have the same event structure but differ in multi-word content (e.g., "Brush your teeth" vs. "Brush her teeth"). In the second study, we employed a training paradigm to ask if children are capable of generating predictio.ns from novel multi-word associations while controlling for the overall frequency of the sequences. While the results of Experiment 1 suggested that children primarily relied on event associations to generate real-time predictions, those of Experiment 2 showed that the same children were able to use recurring novel multi-word sequences to generate real-time linguistic predictions. Together, these findings suggest that children can draw on multi-word information to generate linguistic predictions, in a context-dependent fashion, and highlight the need to account for the influence of multi-word sequences in models of language processing.

Models of Language and Multiword Expressions

Traditional accounts of language postulate two basic components: words stored in a lexicon, and rules that govern how they can be combined into meaningful sentences, a grammar. But, although this words-and-rules framework has proven itself to be useful in natural language processing and cognitive science, it has also shown important shortcomings when faced with actual language use. In this article, we review evidence from language acquisition, sentence processing, and computational modeling that shows how multiword expressions such as idioms, collocations, and other meaningful and common units that comprise more than one word play a key role in the organization of our linguistic knowledge. Importantly, multiword expressions straddle the line between lexicon and grammar, calling into question how useful this distinction is as a foundation for our understanding of language. Nonetheless, finding a replacement for the foundational role the words-and-rules approach has played in our theories is not straightforward. Thus, the second part of our article reviews and synthesizes the diverse approaches that have attempted to account for the central role of multiword expressions in language representation, acquisition, and processing.

Neurodidactics of Languages: Neuromyths in Multilingual Learners

From the perspective of neuroscience applied to education and the teaching of foreign languages, this exploratory study analyzes the beliefs and conceptions about the functioning of the brain and language learning in students enrolled in Education degrees at the Melilla campus of the University of Granada. The sample consisted of 397 participants. The data collection was carried out by means of a questionnaire designed for this purpose, consisting of questions related to the context and linguistic background of the respondents and to educational neuromyths regarding language learning. The data were analyzed using the SPSS version 27 statistical software, and univariate and bivariate analyses were carried out according to the three grouping dimensions: (a) brain functioning, (b) multiple intelligences and learning styles, and (c) language learning. The results indicate the prevalence of neuromyths related to general concepts, which determine the learning comprehension. This corroborates the findings of research studies in other contexts. Although the participants do not show a prevalence of neuromyths regarding foreign language learning, presumably due to their experiences in multilingual contexts, which constitutes the main contribution of this study.

The Starting Big approach to language learning

The study of language acquisition has a long and contentious history: researchers disagree on what drives this process, the relevant data, and the interesting questions. Here, I outline the Starting Big approach to language learning, which emphasizes the role of multiword units in language, and of coarse-to-fine processes in learning. I outline core predictions and supporting evidence. In short, the approach argues that multiword units are integral building blocks in language; that such units can facilitate mastery of semantically opaque relations between words; and that adults rely on them less than children, which can explain (some of) their difficulty in learning a second language. The Starting Big approach is a theory of how children learn language, how language is represented, and how to explain differences between first and second language learning. I discuss the learning and processing models at the heart of the approach and their cross-linguistic implications.

Activation of Literal Word Meanings in Idioms: Evidence from Eye-tracking and ERP Experiments

How the language processing system handles formulaic language such as idioms is a matter of debate. We investigated the activation of constituent meanings by means of predictive processing in an eye-tracking experiment and in two ERP experiments (auditory and visual). In the eye-tracking experiment, German-speaking participants listened to idioms in which the final word was excised (Hannes let the cat out of the . . .). Well before the offset of these idiom fragments, participants fixated on the correct idiom completion (bag) more often than on unrelated distractors (stomach). Moreover, there was an early fixation bias towards semantic associates (basket) of the correct completion, which ended shortly after the offset of the fragment. In the ERP experiments, sentences (spoken or written) either contained complete idioms, or the final word of the idiom was replaced with a semantic associate or with an unrelated word. Across both modalities, ERPs reflected facilitated processing of correct completions across several regions of interest (ROIs) and time windows. Facilitation of semantic associates was only reliably evident in early components for auditory idiom processing. The ERP findings for spoken idioms compliment the eye-tracking data by pointing to early decompositional processing of idioms. It seems that in spoken idiom processing, holistic representations do not solely determine lexical processing.

Phrasal Learning Is a Horse Apiece: No Recognition Memory Advantages for Idioms in L1 and L2 Adult Learners

Native (L1) and to some extent non-native (L2) speakers have shown processing advantages for idioms compared to novel literal phrases, and there is limited evidence that this advantage also extends to memory in L1 children. This study investigated whether these advantages generalize to recognition memory in adults. It employed a learning paradigm to test whether there is a recognition memory advantage for idioms compared to literal phrases in adult L1 and L2 learners considering both form and meaning recognition. Additionally, we asked whether the presence of unfamiliar vocabulary interferes with phrasal learning by looking at recall of such unfamiliar words. When encountering new idioms, L2 learners often must cope with both figurative meaning and unfamiliar vocabulary. While single word meaning need not interfere with idiomatic meaning, it is a building block for the meaning of literal phrases. In Experiment 1, L2 learners showed equal recall for the form and meaning of literal and idiomatic phrases in which either all words were highly familiar, or one word was unfamiliar. However, unfamiliar words decreased overall recognition and were also remembered significantly better in literal compared to idiomatic phrases. In Experiment 2, L1 speakers also showed no recall differences between phrase types, but they displayed a trending increase in recognition in the presence of unfamiliar words. We conclude that there is no inherent recognition memory advantage for idioms based on figurativeness alone, and word- and phrasal meaning interact differently in learner groups.

Similarities and Differences Between Native and Non-native Speakers' Processing of Formulaic Sequences: A Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) Study

The present study reported an experiment examining whether both native speakers (NSs) and non-native speakers (NNSs) give formulaic sequences (FSs) priority over novel phrases in processing, as the dual route model has postulated. In this experiment, NSs and NNSs were asked to read Japanese versions of semi-transparent restricted collocations (e.g., kenka-o uru 'pick a fight (acc)'), novel phrases (e.g., tomato-o uru 'sell tomatoes (acc)'), and violated phrases (e.g., kenka-o sagasu 'find out a fight (acc)'); and they judged the naturalness of these sequences. Participants' reaction times were measured, as well as their cortical activation. The results revealed that, for the NSs, collocations required shorter reaction times and elicited less cortical activation than the novel stimuli. For NNSs, collocations similarly required shorter reaction times, but they elicited greater cortical activation than novel phrases. These results support the dual route model, both for NSs and NNSs.

Pre-eminence of determining factors in second language learning: An educator's perspective from Spain

Second language acquisition as a process is subject to factors related to the student, the teacher, the learning structure and learning organisation, and also to the learning environment. The research hereby presented aims to establish the relevance of the above-mentioned factors in the process of second language learning. The study addresses the point of view of teachers, as their perspective concerning the learning process is privileged. If it were not to be included in a scientific process, this detailed and contextual knowledge would not be able to contribute to the improvement of teaching. The data obtained will allow for the designing of teaching strategies focused on learners' needs and requirements. This is a descriptive, observational and cross-sectional study with the participation of 216 practicing teachers within the Community of Madrid in Spain. The information was collected through an online questionnaire using the Google Drive tool Google Forms. Then, it was analysed and validated with IBM SPSS Statistics 25.0. The outcomes of the study show that the factors linked to the teacher are the most dominant for those educators in the Community of Madrid. Regarding the teacher-student relationship, the use of teaching resources and materials adequate for learning, together with the communication, strategies used, the linguistic input received by the students and the planning of lessons, are factors showing the greatest capacity to determine the process of teaching and learning a second language.

'Clap your hands' or 'take your hands'? One-year-olds distinguish between frequent and infrequent multiword phrases

Although words are often described as the basic building blocks of language, there is growing evidence that multiword sequences also play an integral role in language learning and processing. It is not known, however, whether children become sensitive to multiword information at an age when they are still building knowledge of individual words. Using a central fixation paradigm, the present study examined whether infants between 11 and 12 months (N = 36) distinguish between three-word sequences (trigrams) with similar substring frequencies but different multiword frequency in infant-directed speech (e.g., high frequency: 'clap your hands' vs. low frequency: 'take your hands'). Infants looked significantly longer at frequent trigrams compared to infrequent ones. This provides the first evidence that infants at the cusp of one-word production are already sensitive to the frequency of multiword sequences, and suggests they represent linguistic units of varying sizes from early on, raising the need to evaluate knowledge of both words and larger sequences during development.

A lexical advantage in four-year-old children's word repetition

This study examined a potential lexicality advantage in young children's early speech production: do children produce sound sequences less accurately in nonwords than real words? Children aged 3;3-4;4 completed two tasks: a real word repetition task and a corresponding nonword repetition task. Each of the 23 real words had a paired consonant-vowel sequence in the nonword in word-initial position (e.g., 'su' in ['sutkes] 'suitcase' and ['sudrɑs]). The word-initial consonant-vowel sequences were kept constant between the paired words. Previous work on this topic compared different sequences of paired sounds, making it hard to determine if those results were due to a lexical or phonetic effect. Our results show that children reliably produced consonant-vowel sequences in real words more accurately than nonwords. The effect was most pronounced in children with smaller receptive vocabularies. Together, these results reinforce theories arguing for interactions between vocabulary size and phonology in language development.

Native language inhibition predicts more successful second language learning: Evidence of two ERP pathways during learning

How some individuals succeed in learning a second language as adults is still an unsolved question in cognitive neuroscience. At the brain level, adults' electrophysiological responses to input in a second language may differ after completing different types of training. However, there is limited understanding of what neural pathways are activated as learning unfolds, and which patterns of activation lead to successful learning. Using brain event-related potentials, this study explored whether individual brain responses to practice difficulty during second language learning predict learning outcomes. English-speaking learners of Spanish practiced completing newly learned phrases in their second language. For some learners, all the choices presented during practice were "easy" because non-target choices were unrelated distractors. In the more "difficult" practice mode, however, learners had to avoid choosing a competing word that would be acceptable based on their native language, but not in the second language being learned. Performance during practice was similar in both groups of learners. Critically, divergence in event-related potentials indicated alternative strategies to practice, based on the level of difficulty. At the group level, learners completing the easier practice revealed increased monitoring when making responses; in the difficult condition, learners showed inhibition of their native language (i.e., an N400 for phrases congruent with the native language) to avoid interference during word selection. Individual brain responses indexing the degree of native language inhibition predicted learning rates in tests.

Meaningfulness Beats Frequency in Multiword Chunk Processing

Whereas a growing bulk of work has demonstrated that both adults and children are sensitive to frequently occurring word sequences, little is known about the potential role of meaning in the processing of such multiword chunks. Here, we take a first step toward assessing the contribution of meaningfulness in the processing of multiword sequences, using items that varied in chunk meaningfulness. In a phrasal-decision study, we compared reaction times for triads of three-word sequences, corresponding to idiomatic expressions, compositional phrases, and phrasal fragments, while controlling for phrase and substring frequencies. Chunk meaningfulness, as assessed by a separate subjective rating study, was found to speed up decision times for all three types of strings: The more meaningful a multiword sequence was judged to be, the faster it was processed, independently of whether it was idiomatic, compositional in nature, or a phrasal fragment. These results highlight the importance of taking meaning into account when considering the processing of multiword chunks, consistent with predictions of construction-based approaches to language.

The Effects of Frequency and Predictability on Repetition in Children With Developmental Language Disorder

Purpose Studies have shown that children with typical development (TD) respond to frequency and predictability when repeating nonidiomatic multiword sequences (e.g., go wash your hands). We extended these findings by explicitly examining the interaction between frequency and predictability in a repetition task for children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and children with TD. Method We created 48 four-word phrases, manipulating two factors: the frequency of occurrence of the entire four-word phrase (e.g., look in the mirror vs. look in the basket) and the predictability of the fourth word in the phrase given the preceding three words (e.g., corn on the ___ vs. look in the ___). These phrases were presented in a repetition task to 17 children with DLD (M age = 58.89 months), 19 same-age children with TD (M age = 59.79 months), and 17 younger children with TD matched to the DLD group on nonword repetition and mean length of utterance (M age = 38.94 months). Children's repetitions were judged for the presence or absence of word and morphological errors. Only the first three words of the sequence were scored (e.g., look in the). Results We found a main effect of sequence frequency, with high-frequency sequences being repeated more accurately than low-frequency sequences, modulated by a significant interaction with predictability, where the effect of sequence frequency was larger for sequences with high-predictability contexts than for sequences with low-predictability contexts. We also found a significant effect of group, with children with DLD demonstrating poorer overall performance, particularly when compared to the same-age group with TD. Conclusions Frequency and predictability are strong predictors of language production in children with TD. These factors also have effects for children with DLD, raising important clinical questions about the design of facilitative contexts for the teaching of difficult linguistic forms.

Lossy-Context Surprisal: An Information-Theoretic Model of Memory Effects in Sentence Processing

A key component of research on human sentence processing is to characterize the processing difficulty associated with the comprehension of words in context. Models that explain and predict this difficulty can be broadly divided into two kinds, expectation-based and memory-based. In this work, we present a new model of incremental sentence processing difficulty that unifies and extends key features of both kinds of models. Our model, lossy-context surprisal, holds that the processing difficulty at a word in context is proportional to the surprisal of the word given a lossy memory representation of the context-that is, a memory representation that does not contain complete information about previous words. We show that this model provides an intuitive explanation for an outstanding puzzle involving interactions of memory and expectations: language-dependent structural forgetting, where the effects of memory on sentence processing appear to be moderated by language statistics. Furthermore, we demonstrate that dependency locality effects, a signature prediction of memory-based theories, can be derived from lossy-context surprisal as a special case of a novel, more general principle called information locality.

Semantic Memory and the Hippocampus: Revisiting, Reaffirming, and Extending the Reach of Their Critical Relationship

Since Tulving proposed a distinction in memory between semantic and episodic memory, considerable effort has been directed towards understanding their similar and unique features. Of particular interest has been the extent to which semantic and episodic memory have a shared dependence on the hippocampus. In contrast to the definitive evidence for the link between hippocampus and episodic memory, the role of the hippocampus in semantic memory has been a topic of considerable debate. This debate stems, in part, from highly variable reports of new semantic memory learning in amnesia ranging from profound impairment to full preservation, and various degrees of deficit and ability in between. More recently, a number of significant advances in experimental methods have occurred, alongside new provocative data on the role of the hippocampus in semantic memory, making this an ideal moment to revisit this debate, to re-evaluate data, methods, and theories, and to synthesize new findings. In line with these advances, this review has two primary goals. First, we provide a historical lens with which to reevaluate and contextualize the literature on semantic memory and the hippocampus. The second goal of this review is to provide a synthesis of new findings on the role of the hippocampus and semantic memory. With the perspective of time and this critical review, we arrive at the interpretation that the hippocampus does indeed make necessary contributions to semantic memory. We argue that semantic memory, like episodic memory, is a highly flexible, (re)constructive, relational and multimodal system, and that there is value in developing methods and materials that fully capture this depth and richness to facilitate comparisons to episodic memory. Such efforts will be critical in addressing questions regarding the cognitive and neural (inter)dependencies among forms of memory, and the role that these forms of memory play in support of cognition more broadly. Such efforts also promise to advance our understanding of how words, concepts, and meaning, as well as episodes and events, are instantiated and maintained in memory and will yield new insights into our two most quintessentially human abilities: memory and language.

The Neural Correlates of Conflict Detection and Resolution During Multiword Lexical Selection: Evidence from Bilinguals and Monolinguals

Previous studies have identified the Event Related Potential (ERP) components of conflict detection and resolution mechanisms in tasks requiring lexical selection at the individual word level. We investigated the brain potentials associated with these mechanisms in a lexical selection task based on multiword units made up of verb-noun combinations (e.g., eat breakfast, skip school). Native and non-native English speakers were asked to select a familiarized target verb-noun sequence (eat breakfast) between two choices. Trials were low-conflict, with only one plausible candidate (e.g., eat - shoot - breakfast) or high-conflict, with two plausible verbs (e.g., eat - skip - breakfast). Following the presentation of the noun, native English speakers showed a biphasic process of selection, with a conflict-detection centro-parietal negativity between 500 and 600 ms (Ninc), followed by a right frontal effect (RFE) between 600 and 800 ms preceding responses. Late Spanish-English bilinguals showed a similar but more sustained and more widespread effect. Additionally, brain activity was only significantly correlated with performance in native speakers. Results suggest largely similar basic mechanisms, but also that different resources and strategies are engaged by non-native speakers when resolving conflict in the weaker language, with a greater focus on individual words than on multiword units.

Children Probably Store Short Rather Than Frequent or Predictable Chunks: Quantitative Evidence From a Corpus Study

One of the tasks faced by young children is the segmentation of a continuous stream of speech into discrete linguistic units. Early in development, syllables emerge as perceptual primitives, and the wholesale storage of syllable chunks is one possible strategy for bootstrapping the segmentation process. Here, we investigate what types of chunks children store. Our method involves selecting syllabified utterances from corpora of child-directed speech, which we vary according to (a) their length in syllables, (b) the mutual predictability of their syllables, and (c) their frequency. We then use the number of utterances within which words are contained to predict the time course of word learning, arguing that utterances which perform well at this task are also more likely to be stored, by young children, as undersegmented chunks. Our results show that short utterances are best-suited for predicting when children acquire the words contained within them, although the effect is rather small. Beyond this, we also find that short utterances are the most likely to correspond to words. Together, the two findings suggest that children may not store many complete utterances as undersegmented chunks, with most of the units that children store as hypothesized words corresponding to actual words. However, dovetailing with an item-based account of language-acquisition, when children do store undersegmented chunks, these are likely to be short sequences-not frequent or internally predictable multi-word chunks. We end by discussing implications for work on formulaic multi-word sequences.

Structural Relationship Between Cognitive Processing and Syntactic Sentence Comprehension in Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorder

PURPOSE

We assessed the potential direct and indirect (mediated) influences of 4 cognitive mechanisms we believe are theoretically relevant to canonical and noncanonical sentence comprehension of school-age children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD).

METHOD

One hundred seventeen children with DLD and 117 propensity-matched typically developing (TD) children participated. Comprehension was indexed by children identifying the agent in implausible sentences. Children completed cognitive tasks indexing the latent predictors of fluid reasoning (FLD-R), controlled attention (CATT), complex working memory (cWM), and long-term memory language knowledge (LTM-LK).

RESULTS

Structural equation modeling revealed that the best model fit was an indirect model in which cWM mediated the relationship among FLD-R, CATT, LTM-LK, and sentence comprehension. For TD children, comprehension of both sentence types was indirectly influenced by FLD-R (pattern recognition) and LTM-LK (linguistic chunking). For children with DLD, canonical sentence comprehension was indirectly influenced by LTM-LK and CATT, and noncanonical comprehension was indirectly influenced just by CATT.

CONCLUSIONS

cWM mediates sentence comprehension in children with DLD and TD children. For TD children, comprehension occurs automatically through pattern recognition and linguistic chunking. For children with DLD, comprehension is cognitively effortful. Whereas canonical comprehension occurs through chunking, noncanonical comprehension develops on a word-by-word basis.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.7178939.

Under What Conditions Can Recursion Be Learned? Effects of Starting Small in Artificial Grammar Learning of Center-Embedded Structure

It has been suggested that external and/or internal limitations paradoxically may lead to superior learning, that is, the concepts of starting small and less is more (Elman, 1993; Newport, 1990). In this paper, we explore the type of incremental ordering during training that might help learning, and what mechanism explains this facilitation. We report four artificial grammar learning experiments with human participants. In Experiments 1a and 1b we found a beneficial effect of starting small using two types of simple recursive grammars: right‐branching and center‐embedding, with recursive embedded clauses in fixed positions and fixed length. This effect was replicated in Experiment 2 (N = 100). In Experiment 3 and 4, we used a more complex center‐embedded grammar with recursive loops in variable positions, producing strings of variable length. When participants were presented an incremental ordering of training stimuli, as in natural language, they were better able to generalize their knowledge of simple units to more complex units when the training input “grew” according to structural complexity, compared to when it “grew” according to string length. Overall, the results suggest that starting small confers an advantage for learning complex center‐embedded structures when the input is organized according to structural complexity.

Implicit Statistical Learning: A Tale of Two Literatures

Implicit learning and statistical learning are two contemporary approaches to the long-standing question in psychology and cognitive science of how organisms pick up on patterned regularities in their environment. Although both approaches focus on the learner's ability to use distributional properties to discover patterns in the input, the relevant research has largely been published in separate literatures and with surprisingly little cross-pollination between them. This has resulted in apparently opposing perspectives on the computations involved in learning, pitting chunk-based learning against probabilistic learning. In this paper, I trace the nearly century-long historical pedigree of the two approaches to learning and argue for their integration under the heading of "implicit statistical learning." Building on basic insights from the memory literature, I sketch a framework for statistically based chunking that aims to provide a unified basis for understanding implicit statistical learning.

Representation and processing of multi-word expressions in the brain

Language comprehension is sensitive to the predictability of the upcoming information. Prediction allows for smooth, expedient and successful communication. While general discourse-based constraints have been investigated in detail, more specific phrase-level prediction has received little attention. We address this gap by exploring the ERPs elicited during the comprehension of English binomials - familiar and predictable multi-word expressions. In Experiment 1a, participants read binomial expressions (knife and fork), infrequent strongly associated phrases (spoon and fork), and semantic violations (theme and fork). In Experiment 1b, participants read the same stimuli without "and". Experiment 1a revealed that binomials elicited larger P300s and smaller N400s compared to the other conditions, reflecting the activation of a 'template' that matches the upcoming information (P300) and pointing to easier semantic integration (N400). In contrast, no differences were observed between binomials and associates in Experiment 1b. We conclude that distinct mechanisms underlie the processing of predicable and novel sequences.

More Than Words: The Role of Multiword Sequences in Language Learning and Use

The ability to convey our thoughts using an infinite number of linguistic expressions is one of the hallmarks of human language. Understanding the nature of the psychological mechanisms and representations that give rise to this unique productivity is a fundamental goal for the cognitive sciences. A long-standing hypothesis is that single words and rules form the basic building blocks of linguistic productivity, with multiword sequences being treated as units only in peripheral cases such as idioms. The new millennium, however, has seen a shift toward construing multiword linguistic units not as linguistic rarities, but as important building blocks for language acquisition and processing. This shift-which originated within theoretical approaches that emphasize language learning and use-has far-reaching implications for theories of language representation, processing, and acquisition. Incorporating multiword units as integral building blocks blurs the distinction between grammar and lexicon; calls for models of production and comprehension that can accommodate and give rise to the effect of multiword information on processing; and highlights the importance of such units to learning. In this special topic, we bring together cutting-edge work on multiword sequences in theoretical linguistics, first-language acquisition, psycholinguistics, computational modeling, and second-language learning to present a comprehensive overview of the prominence and importance of such units in language, their possible role in explaining differences between first- and second-language learning, and the challenges the combined findings pose for theories of language.

Thinking About Multiword Constructions: Usage-Based Approaches to Acquisition and Processing

Usage-based approaches to language hold that we learn multiword expressions as patterns of language from language usage, and that knowledge of these patterns underlies fluent language processing. This paper explores these claims by focusing upon verb-argument constructions (VACs) such as "V(erb) about n(oun phrase)." These are productive constructions that bind syntax, lexis, and semantics. It presents (a) analyses of usage patterns of English VACs in terms of their grammatical form, semantics, lexical constituency, and distribution patterns in large corpora; (b) patterns of VAC usage in child-directed speech and child language acquisition; and (c) investigations of VAC free-association and psycholinguistic studies of online processing. We conclude that VACs are highly patterned in usage, that this patterning drives language acquisition, and that language processing is sensitive to the forms of the syntagmatic construction and their distributional statistics, the contingency of their association with meaning, and spreading activation and prototypicality effects in semantic reference. Language users have rich implicit knowledge of the statistics of multiword sequences.

Formulaic Sequences as a Regulatory Mechanism for Cognitive Perturbations During the Achievement of Social Goals

This paper explores two questions central to understanding the nature of formulaic sequences: (1) What are they for? and (2) What determines how many there are? The "Communicative Impact" model draws into a single account how language is shaped by cognitive processing on the one hand and socio-interactional function on the other: Formulaic sequences play a range of coordinated roles in neutralizing unanticipated perturbations in the cognitive management of language, so the speaker's socio-interactional goals can still be achieved. One role involves compensatory actions to sustain fluency. However, these actions are themselves context-sensitive, so the balance of types of formulaic sequence will vary according to situation. The model applies equally to temporary cognitive pressure and chronic problems such as dementia and limited linguistic competency in a foreign language.

Rule-based and Word-level Statistics-based Processing of Language: Insights from Neuroscience

To flexibly convey meaning, the human language faculty iteratively combines smaller units such as words into larger structures such as phrases based on grammatical principles. During comprehension, however, it remains unclear how the brain encodes the relationship between words and combines them into phrases. One hypothesis is that internal grammatical principles governing language generation are also used to parse the hierarchical syntactic structure of spoken language during comprehension. An alternative hypothesis suggests, in contrast, that decoding language during comprehension solely relies on statistical relationships between words or strings of words, i.e., the N-gram statistics, while grammatical rules are not used and no hierarchical linguistic structures are constructed. Here, we briefly review distinctions between rule-based hierarchical models and statistics-based linear string models for comprehension, and how the neurolinguistic approach can shed light on this debate. Recent neurolinguistic studies show that tracking of probabilistic relationships between words is not sufficient to explain cortical encoding of linguistic constituent structure and support the involvement of rule-based processing during language comprehension.