Word frequency cues word order in adults: cross-linguistic evidence

Word frequency is a cue to word order for adults: Validating an online method with speakers of Italian and Turkish for more inclusive psycholinguistic testing

Acquiring the relative order of function and content words is a fundamental aspect of language development, and previous studies show that infants develop prelexical representations of this word order. As functors are more frequent than content words, they serve as anchors with respect to which the positions of other words can readily be encoded. This frequency-based bootstrapping strategy has been shown to be used both by infants and adults. However, only a handful of languages, mainly spoken in Western countries, have been tested so far. One hurdle to more inclusive testing is the lack of laboratory facilities in some geographical areas of the world. Online testing is a useful tool to overcome this difficulty. The current study, therefore, implements and validates an online version of an artificial grammar learning paradigm originally developed for laboratory use to test the frequency-based anchoring effect on adults in typologically different languages, Italian and Turkish. Italian has functor-initial word order, while Turkish is functor-final. Our study thus has two related goals. We test whether previous lab-based results by Gervain et al. (2013) with Italian adults are replicable using online testing. Additionally, we leverage online testing to assess a hitherto understudied language, Turkish, which has opposite word order properties compared to Italian. Our findings indicate that online testing can efficiently reproduce laboratory-based results: Italian adults in our online study show similar word order preferences to those tested in the laboratory earlier. Further, we found that Turkish participants have opposite word order preferences, as we predicted. These findings pave the way for testing the frequency-based bootstrapping hypothesis on a more inclusive and diverse sample of languages than previously available.

The influence of language-specific properties on the role of consonants and vowels in a statistical learning task of an artificial language: A cross-linguistic comparison

The contribution of consonants and vowels in spoken word processing has been widely investigated, and studies have found a phenomenon of a Consonantal bias (C-bias), indicating that consonants carry more weight than vowels. However, across languages, various patterns have been documented, including that of no preference or a reverse pattern of Vowel bias. A central question is how the manifestation of the C-bias is modulated by language-specific factors. This question can be addressed by cross-linguistic studies. Comparing native Hebrew and native English speakers, this study examines the relative importance of transitional probabilities between non-adjacent consonants as opposed to vowels during auditory statistical learning (SL) of an artificial language. Hebrew is interesting because its complex Semitic morphological structure has been found to play a central role in lexical access, allowing us to examine whether morphological properties can modulate the C-bias in early phases of speech perception, namely, word segmentation. As predicted, we found a significant interaction between language and consonant/vowel manipulation, with a higher performance in the consonantal condition than in the vowel condition for Hebrew speakers, namely, C-bias, and no consonant/vowel asymmetry among English speakers. We suggest that the observed interaction is morphologically anchored, indicating that phonological and morphological processes interact during early phases of auditory word perception.

Differentiating Interpreting Types: Connecting Complex Networks to Cognitive Complexity

Prominent interpreting models have illustrated different processing mechanisms of simultaneous interpreting and consecutive interpreting. Although great efforts have been made, a macroscopic examination into interpreting outputs is sparse. Since complex network is a powerful and feasible tool to capture the holistic features of language, the present study adopts this novel approach to investigate different properties of syntactic dependency networks based on simultaneous interpreting and consecutive interpreting outputs. Our results show that consecutive interpreting networks demonstrate higher degrees, higher clustering coefficients, and a more important role of function words among the central vertices than simultaneous interpreting networks. These findings suggest a better connectivity, better transitivity, and a lower degree of vocabulary richness in consecutive interpreting outputs. Our research provides an integrative framework for the understanding of underlying mechanisms in diverse interpreting types.

Learning word order: early beginnings

We examine the beginning of the acquisition of the relative order of function and content words, a fundamental but cross-linguistically highly variable aspect of grammar. A review of the existing empirical literature shows that infants as young as 8 months of age can distinguish between functors and content words, and have a rudimentary knowledge of the order of these two universal lexical categories in their native language. Furthermore, human adults and non-human animals such as rodents process the same linguistic information differently from infants, emphasizing the developmental relevance of bootstrapping function/content word order from surface cues available in the input. We discuss the implications of these findings for a synergistic view of language acquisition, considering how grammar acquisition interacts with word learning.

Finding Phrases: The Interplay of Word Frequency, Phrasal Prosody and Co-speech Visual Information in Chunking Speech by Monolingual and Bilingual Adults

The audiovisual speech signal contains multimodal information to phrase boundaries. In three artificial language learning studies with 12 groups of adult participants we investigated whether English monolinguals and bilingual speakers of English and a language with opposite basic word order (i.e., in which objects precede verbs) can use word frequency, phrasal prosody and co-speech (facial) visual information, namely head nods, to parse unknown languages into phrase-like units. We showed that monolinguals and bilinguals used the auditory and visual sources of information to chunk "phrases" from the input. These results suggest that speech segmentation is a bimodal process, though the influence of co-speech facial gestures is rather limited and linked to the presence of auditory prosody. Importantly, a pragmatic factor, namely the language of the context, seems to determine the bilinguals' segmentation, overriding the auditory and visual cues and revealing a factor that begs further exploration.

Quantifying Interpreting Types: Language Sequence Mirrors Cognitive Load Minimization in Interpreting Tasks

Most interpreting theories claim that different interpreting types should involve varied processing mechanisms and procedures. However, few studies have examined their underlying differences. Even though some previous results based on quantitative approaches show that different interpreting types yield outputs of varying lexical and syntactic features, the grammatical parsing approach is limited. Language sequences that form without relying on parsing or processing with a specific linguistic approach or grammar excel other quantitative approaches at revealing the sequential behavior of language production. As a non-grammatically-bound unit of language sequences, frequency motif can visualize the local distribution of content and function words, and can also statistically classify languages and identify text types. Thus, the current research investigates the distribution, length and position-dependent properties of frequency motifs across different interpreting outputs in pursuit of the sequential generation behaviors. It is found that the distribution, the length and certain position-dependent properties of the specific language sequences differ significantly across simultaneous interpreting and consecutive interpreting output. The features of frequency motifs manifest that both interpreting output is produced in the manner that abides by the least effort principle. The current research suggests that interpreting types can be differentiated through this type of language sequential unit and offers evidence for how the different task features mediate the sequential organization of interpreting output under different demand to achieve cognitive load minimization.

Developmental Constraints on Learning Artificial Grammars with Fixed, Flexible and Free Word Order

Human learning, although highly flexible and efficient, is constrained in ways that facilitate or impede the acquisition of certain systems of information. Some such constraints, active during infancy and childhood, have been proposed to account for the apparent ease with which typically developing children acquire language. In a series of experiments, we investigated the role of developmental constraints on learning artificial grammars with a distinction between shorter and relatively frequent words ('function words,' F-words) and longer and less frequent words ('content words,' C-words). We constructed 4 finite-state grammars, in which the order of F-words, relative to C-words, was either fixed (F-words always occupied the same positions in a string), flexible (every F-word always followed a C-word), or free. We exposed adults (N = 84) and kindergarten children (N = 100) to strings from each of these artificial grammars, and we assessed their ability to recognize strings with the same structure, but a different vocabulary. Adults were better at recognizing strings when regularities were available (i.e., fixed and flexible order grammars), while children were better at recognizing strings from the grammars consistent with the attested distribution of function and content words in natural languages (i.e., flexible and free order grammars). These results provide evidence for a link between developmental constraints on learning and linguistic typology.

Hierarchical levels of representation in language prediction: The influence of first language acquisition in highly proficient bilinguals

Language comprehension is largely supported by predictive mechanisms that account for the ease and speed with which communication unfolds. Both native and proficient non-native speakers can efficiently handle contextual cues to generate reliable linguistic expectations. However, the link between the variability of the linguistic background of the speaker and the hierarchical format of the representations predicted is still not clear. We here investigate whether native language exposure to typologically highly diverse languages (Spanish and Basque) affects the way early balanced bilingual speakers carry out language predictions. During Spanish sentence comprehension, participants developed predictions of words the form of which (noun ending) could be either diagnostic of grammatical gender values (transparent) or totally ambiguous (opaque). We measured electrophysiological prediction effects time-locked both to the target word and to its determiner, with the former being expected or unexpected. Event-related (N200-N400) and oscillatory activity in the low beta-band (15-17Hz) frequency channel showed that both Spanish and Basque natives optimally carry out lexical predictions independently of word transparency. Crucially, in contrast to Spanish natives, Basque natives displayed visual word form predictions for transparent words, in consistency with the relevance that noun endings (post-nominal suffixes) play in their native language. We conclude that early language exposure largely shapes prediction mechanisms, so that bilinguals reading in their second language rely on the distributional regularities that are highly relevant in their first language. More importantly, we show that individual linguistic experience hierarchically modulates the format of the predicted representation.

Learning multiple rules simultaneously: Affixes are more salient than reduplications

Language learners encounter numerous opportunities to learn regularities, but need to decide which of these regularities to learn, because some are not productive in their native language. Here, we present an account of rule learning based on perceptual and memory primitives (Endress, Dehaene-Lambertz, & Mehler, Cognition, 105(3), 577–614, 2007; Endress, Nespor, & Mehler, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13(8), 348–353, 2009), suggesting that learners preferentially learn regularities that are more salient to them, and that the pattern of salience reflects the frequency of language features across languages. We contrast this view with previous artificial grammar learning research, which suggests that infants “choose” the regularities they learn based on rational, Bayesian criteria (Frank & Tenenbaum, Cognition, 120(3), 360–371, 2013; Gerken, Cognition, 98(3)B67–B74, 2006, Cognition, 115(2), 362–366, 2010). In our experiments, adult participants listened to syllable strings starting with a syllable reduplication and always ending with the same “affix” syllable, or to syllable strings starting with this “affix” syllable and ending with the “reduplication”. Both affixation and reduplication are frequently used for morphological marking across languages. We find three crucial results. First, participants learned both regularities simultaneously. Second, affixation regularities seemed easier to learn than reduplication regularities. Third, regularities in sequence offsets were easier to learn than regularities at sequence onsets. We show that these results are inconsistent with previous Bayesian rule learning models, but mesh well with the perceptual or memory primitives view. Further, we show that the pattern of salience revealed in our experiments reflects the distribution of regularities across languages. Ease of acquisition might thus be one determinant of the frequency of regularities across languages.

Finding words and word structure in artificial speech: the development of infants' sensitivity to morphosyntactic regularities

To achieve language proficiency, infants must find the building blocks of speech and master the rules governing their legal combinations. However, these problems are linked: words are also built according to rules. Here, we explored early morphosyntactic sensitivity by testing when and how infants could find either words or within-word structure in artificial speech snippets embodying properties of morphological constructions. We show that 12-month-olds use statistical relationships between syllables to extract words from continuous streams, but find word-internal regularities only if the streams are segmented. Seven-month-olds fail both tasks. Thus, 12-month-olds infants possess the resources to analyze the internal composition of words if the speech contains segmentation information. However, 7-month-old infants may not possess them, although they can track several statistical relations. This developmental difference suggests that morphosyntactic sensitivity may require computational resources extending beyond the detection of simple statistics.

Does formal complexity reflect cognitive complexity? Investigating aspects of the Chomsky Hierarchy in an artificial language learning study

This study investigated whether formal complexity, as described by the Chomsky Hierarchy, corresponds to cognitive complexity during language learning. According to the Chomsky Hierarchy, nested dependencies (context-free) are less complex than cross-serial dependencies (mildly context-sensitive). In two artificial grammar learning (AGL) experiments participants were presented with a language containing either nested or cross-serial dependencies. A learning effect for both types of dependencies could be observed, but no difference between dependency types emerged. These behavioral findings do not seem to reflect complexity differences as described in the Chomsky Hierarchy. This study extends previous findings in demonstrating learning effects for nested and cross-serial dependencies with more natural stimulus materials in a classical AGL paradigm after only one hour of exposure. The current findings can be taken as a starting point for further exploring the degree to which the Chomsky Hierarchy reflects cognitive processes.