What exactly is Universal Grammar, and has anyone seen it?

Corpus of Mandarin Child Language: a preliminary study on the acquisition of semantic content categories in Mandarin-speaking preschoolers

In studying language acquisition in children, sizable research studies have been focusing on the investigation of form and lexical semantics. This study aims to establish a child language database annotated both syntactically with part of speech and semantically with semantic content category to supplement the study of child language acquisition in the semantic domain beyond lexical level. The Corpus of Mandarin Child Language (CMCL) that documented the production of different semantic content categories by Mandarin-speaking children was established. Naturalistic language samples of 82 native Mandarin-speaking children aged 25-60 months, divided into three age groups, were obtained. The corresponding semantic content categories coded in each utterance were tagged according to previous studies, in addition to the annotations of part of speech. MLU and lexical diversity were examined and the usage and acquisition of different semantic content categories were also analyzed. The results regarding syntactic complexity and lexical diversity replicated the typical language acquisition pattern from previous studies, which supported the validity of the data obtained in the CMCL. To investigate the trajectory of acquisition of various semantic content categories by age, a 90% acquisition criterion was used. Our findings regarding the acquisition order of semantic content category were basically in line with previous studies in general, with some minor differences. This acquisition order observed is largely explained by the cognitive and syntactic complexity associated with the semantic content category, with additional influence from language specific properties and cultural specific factors of Mandarin. In addition, with the tags in both part-of-speech and semantic content category, the CMCL potentially provides a platform for examining the form-content interface in early child language acquisition, which also implies significantly on the theoretical and clinical ground.

Large Language Models Demonstrate the Potential of Statistical Learning in Language

To what degree can language be acquired from linguistic input alone? This question has vexed scholars for millennia and is still a major focus of debate in the cognitive science of language. The complexity of human language has hampered progress because studies of language-especially those involving computational modeling-have only been able to deal with small fragments of our linguistic skills. We suggest that the most recent generation of Large Language Models (LLMs) might finally provide the computational tools to determine empirically how much of the human language ability can be acquired from linguistic experience. LLMs are sophisticated deep learning architectures trained on vast amounts of natural language data, enabling them to perform an impressive range of linguistic tasks. We argue that, despite their clear semantic and pragmatic limitations, LLMs have already demonstrated that human-like grammatical language can be acquired without the need for a built-in grammar. Thus, while there is still much to learn about how humans acquire and use language, LLMs provide full-fledged computational models for cognitive scientists to empirically evaluate just how far statistical learning might take us in explaining the full complexity of human language.

Aptitude and experience as predictors of grammatical proficiency in adult Greek-English bilinguals

It has been shown that individuals exhibit great variability in second language (L2) ultimate attainment. Some speakers reach native-like proficiency, others only achieve a rudimentary command and many lie in the middle. Individual differences research has partly attributed different degrees of L2 attainment to (language) aptitude. Initially considered irrelevant for first language (L1) acquisition, aptitude was viewed as a compensatory ability for adults' disadvantage in L2 learning. In this line of thought, adults and children are viewed as fundamentally different and rely on different language learning mechanisms. However, aptitude might not be so irrelevant for the L1. Together with input the two factors are found to account for individual differences not only in L2 but also L1 development. Recent research has specifically shown that native grammatical attainment may be modulated by aptitude and input. In this respect, the aim of the current study is to examine the effects of these two predictors (namely input and aptitude) on both L1 and L2 grammatical attainment in the same speakers. Our participants (N = 75) were all native speakers of Greek who learned English as a foreign language in their home country and immigrated to the United Kingdom in adulthood (mean age of arrival = 27.3, SD = 6.4). Grammatical proficiency was measured through a grammaticality judgement task administered in both the L1 and the L2. Aptitude was measured through the Sentence Pairs task (based on the Words In Sentences test from the MLAT battery). Amount of input was measured using the traditional measure, length of residence (LoR) and a new cumulative measure that spanned across the participants' life. The two measures were pitted against each other in the analysis. We found robust effects of aptitude in both the L1 and the L2, with the effect being even stronger for the L1. As expected, our new cumulative measure of exposure proved to be a better predictor of individual differences in grammatical proficiency. Last but not least, the effects of input were larger for the L2 than the L1.

Online Assessment of Morphological Awareness in Grades 2-4: Its Development and Relation to Reading Comprehension

The aims of the study are to construct an online instrument to assess different aspects of morphological awareness and to examine its development and its relation to reading comprehension in grades 2–4 in Hungarian children. Altogether, 4134 students were tested. The online test evaluated inflectional, derivational, and compound morphological skills with five subtests. The instrument proved to be reliable. CFA examinations revealed that the five subtests were empirically distinguishable dimensions. Inflectional, derivational, and compound morphology as the three main dimensions of morphological awareness were also empirically supported by our data. Morphological awareness skills improved significantly and developed in parallel with reading skills throughout grades 2–4. The increase in the development of morphological awareness from grade 2 to grade 3 tends to be faster than the growth between grade 3 and 4. Positive moderate correlations were found between morphological skills and reading comprehension and the relationships seem to be stable throughout the three grades. The most significant predictor of reading comprehension is the Affix Identification for Nonwords subtest. Our study showed that morphological awareness could be assessed efficiently through online media and drew attention to the importance of morphological awareness in the development of reading comprehension and linguistic intelligence.

An Egyptian patient story: multilingual role in post-stroke aphasia recovery

Background

Ischemic strokes are common neurological disease and unless being managed fast enough within hours of onset a permanent deficit usually results. Such deficit impairs the patient independency to a great extent. Aphasia affects more than a quarter of acute stroke cases. Initially it is more prominent and with time its severity may subside, yet to which degree and what factors play a role in this severity reduction still needs further studies and is under postulations.

Case presentation

Multilingual role in post-stroke aphasia recovery is presented in this case report where a trilingual female who acquired a foreign accent and who involuntarily uses code switching between Arabic, French and English in order to linguistically communicate; thus overcoming post-stroke language communication problems. The neurolinguistics data are taken from the results of the application of the Western Aphasia Battery-Revised scale in Cairene Dialect, in addition to extra language exercises including repetition, picture description and conversation with the patient. Linguistic analysis includes the investigation of morph syntactic constructions, phonetic deviations and semantic paraphasia. Linguistic analysis also revealed that the patient’s aphasia disorder is of the conduction type and that she resorts to her second language (L2) namely French or her third language (L3) namely English if she finds it difficult to produce the Arabic word.

Conclusion

Cognitive reserve and multilingualism may have a role in post-stroke aphasia recovery.

One model for the learning of language

A major goal of linguistics and cognitive science is to understand what class of learning systems can acquire natural language. Until recently, the computational requirements of language have been used to argue that learning is impossible without a highly constrained hypothesis space. Here, we describe a learning system that is maximally unconstrained, operating over the space of all computations, and is able to acquire many of the key structures present in natural language from positive evidence alone. We demonstrate this by providing the same learning model with data from 74 distinct formal languages which have been argued to capture key features of language, have been studied in experimental work, or come from an interesting complexity class. The model is able to successfully induce the latent system generating the observed strings from small amounts of evidence in almost all cases, including for regular (e.g., aⁿ , [Formula: see text], and [Formula: see text]), context-free (e.g., [Formula: see text], and [Formula: see text]), and context-sensitive (e.g., [Formula: see text], and xx) languages, as well as for many languages studied in learning experiments. These results show that relatively small amounts of positive evidence can support learning of rich classes of generative computations over structures. The model provides an idealized learning setup upon which additional cognitive constraints and biases can be formalized.

Constructivist Approaches to First Language Acquisition

Constructivist approaches to language acquisition predict that form-function mappings are derived from distributional patterns in the input, and their contextual embedding. This requires a detailed analysis of the input, and the integration of information from different contingencies. Regarding the acquisition of morphology, it is shown which types of information leads to the induction of (lexical) categories, and to paradigm building. Regarding the acquisition of word order, it is shown how languages with fixed or variable word order profit from stable syntactic hyperschemas, but require a more detailed analyses of the form-function contingencies to identify the underlying, more specific semantic, syntactic and morphological patterns. At a theoretical level, it is shown how findings from acquisition and processing converge into new linguistic theories that aim to account for regular as well as irregular phenomena in language.

A Gestalt Theory Approach to Structure in Language

The fact that human language is highly structured and that, moreover, the way it is structured shows striking similarities in the world’s languages has been addressed from two different perspectives. The first, and more traditional, generative hypothesis is that the similarities are due to an innate language faculty. There is an inborn ‘grammar’ with universal principles that manifest themselves in each language and cross-linguistic variation arises due to a different parameter setting of universal principles. A second perspective is that there is no inborn, innate language faculty, but that instead structure emerges from language usage. This paper purports to develop and illustrate a third perspective, according to which the structural similarities in human languages are the result of the way the cognitive system works in perception. The essential claim is that structural properties follow from the limitations of human cognition in focus.

A World Unto Itself: Human Communication as Active Inference

Recent theoretical work in developmental psychology suggests that humans are predisposed to align their mental states with those of other individuals. One way this manifests is in cooperative communication; that is, intentional communication aimed at aligning individuals' mental states with respect to events in their shared environment. This idea has received strong empirical support. The purpose of this paper is to extend this account by proposing an integrative model of the biobehavioral dynamics of cooperative communication. Our formulation is based on active inference. Active inference suggests that action-perception cycles operate to minimize uncertainty and optimize an individual's internal model of the world. We propose that humans are characterized by an evolved adaptive prior belief that their mental states are aligned with, or similar to, those of conspecifics (i.e., that 'we are the same sort of creature, inhabiting the same sort of niche'). The use of cooperative communication emerges as the principal means to gather evidence for this belief, allowing for the development of a shared narrative that is used to disambiguate interactants' (hidden and inferred) mental states. Thus, by using cooperative communication, individuals effectively attune to a hermeneutic niche composed, in part, of others' mental states; and, reciprocally, attune the niche to their own ends via epistemic niche construction. This means that niche construction enables features of the niche to encode precise, reliable cues about the deontic or shared value of certain action policies (e.g., the utility of using communicative constructions to disambiguate mental states, given expectations about shared prior beliefs). In turn, the alignment of mental states (prior beliefs) enables the emergence of a novel, contextualizing scale of cultural dynamics that encompasses the actions and mental states of the ensemble of interactants and their shared environment. The dynamics of this contextualizing layer of cultural organization feedback, across scales, to constrain the variability of the prior expectations of the individuals who constitute it. Our theory additionally builds upon the active inference literature by introducing a new set of neurobiologically plausible computational hypotheses for cooperative communication. We conclude with directions for future research.

Human Linguisticality and the Building Blocks of Languages

This paper discusses the widely held idea that the building blocks of languages (features, categories, and architectures) are part of an innate blueprint for Human Language, and notes that if one allows for convergent cultural evolution of grammatical structures, then much of the motivation for it disappears. I start by observing that human linguisticality (=the biological capacity for language) is uncontroversial, and that confusing terminology ("language faculty," "universal grammar") has often clouded the substantive issues in the past. I argue that like musicality and other biological capacities, linguisticality is best studied in a broadly comparative perspective. Comparing languages like other aspects of culture means that the comparisons are of the Greenbergian type, but many linguists have presupposed that the comparisons should be done as in chemistry, with the presupposition that the innate building blocks are also the material that individual grammars are made of. In actual fact, the structural uniqueness of languages (in lexicon, phonology, and morphosyntax) leads us to prefer a Greenbergian approach to comparison, which is also more in line with the Minimalist idea that there are very few domain-specific elements of the biological capacity for language.

Constructing a Consensus on Language Evolution? Convergences and Differences Between Biolinguistic and Usage-Based Approaches

Two of the main theoretical approaches to the evolution of language are biolinguistics and usage-based approaches. Both are often conceptualized as belonging to seemingly irreconcilable "camps." Biolinguistic approaches assume that the ability to acquire language is based on a language-specific genetic foundation. Usage-based approaches, on the other hand, stress the importance of domain-general cognitive capacities, social cognition, and interaction. However, there have been a number of recent developments in both paradigms which suggest that biolinguistic and usage-based approaches are actually moving closer together. For example, theoretical advancements such as evo-devo and complex adaptive system theory have gained traction in the language sciences, leading to changed conceptions of issues like the relative influence of "nature" and "nurture." In this paper, we outline points of convergence between current minimalist biolinguistic and usage-based approaches regarding four contentious issues: (1) modularity and domain specificity; (2) innateness and development; (3) cultural and biological evolution; and (4) knowledge of language and its description. We show that across both paradigms, researchers have come to increasingly embrace more complex views of these issues. They also have come to appreciate the view that biological and cultural evolution are closely intertwined, which lead to an increased amount of common ground between minimalist biolinguistics and usage-based approaches.

Decrypting noncoding RNA interactions, structures, and functional networks

The world of noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) is composed of an enormous and growing number of transcripts, ranging in length from tens of bases to tens of kilobases, involved in all biological processes and altered in expression and/or function in many types of human disorders. The premise of this review is the concept that ncRNAs, like many large proteins, have a multidomain architecture that organizes them spatially and functionally. As ncRNAs are beginning to be imprecisely classified into functional families, we review here how their structural properties might inform their functions with focus on structural architecture–function relationships. We will describe the properties of “interactor elements” (IEs) involved in direct physical interaction with nucleic acids, proteins, or lipids and of “structural elements” (SEs) directing their wiring within the “ncRNA interactor networks” through the emergence of secondary and/or tertiary structures. We suggest that spectrums of “letters” (ncRNA elements) are assembled into “words” (ncRNA domains) that are further organized into “phrases” (complete ncRNA structures) with functional meaning (signaling output) through complex “sentences” (the ncRNA interactor networks). This semiotic analogy can guide the exploitation of ncRNAs as new therapeutic targets through the development of IE-blockers and/or SE-lockers that will change the interactor partners’ spectrum of proteins, RNAs, DNAs, or lipids and consequently influence disease phenotypes.

Functionally Equivalent Variants in a Non-standard Variety and Their Implications for Universal Grammar: A Spontaneous Speech Corpus

Findings from the field of experimental linguistics have shown that a native speaker may judge a variant that is part of her grammar as unacceptable, but still use it productively in spontaneous speech. The process of eliciting acceptability judgments from speakers of non-standard languages is sometimes clouded by factors akin to prescriptive notions of grammatical correctness. It has been argued that standardization enhances the ability to make clear-cut judgments, while non-standardization may result to grammatical hybridity, often manifested in the form of functionally equivalent variants in the repertoire of a single speaker. Recognizing the importance of working with corpora of spontaneous speech, this work investigates patterns of variation in the spontaneous production of five neurotypical, adult speakers of a non-standard variety in terms of three variants, each targeting one level of linguistic analysis: syntax, morphology, and phonology. The results reveal the existence of functionally equivalent variants across speakers and levels of analysis. We first discuss these findings in relation to the notions of competing, mixed, and fused grammars, and then we flesh out the implications that different values of the same variant carry for parametric approaches to Universal Grammar. We observe that intraspeaker realizations of different values of the same variant within the same syntactic environment are incompatible with the ‘triggering-a-single-value’ approach of parametric models, but we argue that they are compatible with the concept of Universal Grammar itself. Since the analysis of these variants is ultimately a way of investigating the status of Universal Grammar primitives, we conclude that claims about the alleged unfalsifiability of (the contents of) Universal Grammar are unfounded.

The Inhibitory Mechanism in Learning Ambiguous Words in a Second Language

Ambiguous words are hard to learn, yet little is known about what causes this difficulty. The current study aimed to investigate the relationship between the representations of new and prior meanings of ambiguous words in second language (L2) learning, and to explore the function of inhibitory control on L2 ambiguous word learning at the initial stage of learning. During a 4-day learning phase, Chinese–English bilinguals learned 30 novel English words for 30 min per day using bilingual flashcards. Half of the words to be learned were unambiguous (had one meaning) and half were ambiguous (had two semantically unrelated meanings learned in sequence). Inhibitory control was introduced as a subject variable measured by a Stroop task. The semantic representations established for the studied items were probed using a cross-language semantic relatedness judgment task, in which the learned English words served as the prime, and the targets were either semantically related or unrelated to the prime. Results showed that response latencies for the second meaning of ambiguous words were slower than for the first meaning and for unambiguous words, and that performance on only the second meaning of ambiguous words was predicted by inhibitory control ability. These results suggest that, at the initial stage of L2 ambiguous word learning, the representation of the second meaning is weak, probably interfered with by the representation of the prior learned meaning. Moreover, inhibitory control may modulate learning of the new meanings, such that individuals with better inhibitory control may more effectively suppress interference from the first meaning, and thus learn the new meaning more quickly.

Structures, Not Strings: Linguistics as Part of the Cognitive Sciences

There are many questions one can ask about human language: its distinctive properties, neural representation, characteristic uses including use in communicative contexts, variation, growth in the individual, and origin. Every such inquiry is guided by some concept of what 'language' is. Sharpening the core question--what is language?--and paying close attention to the basic property of the language faculty and its biological foundations makes it clear how linguistics is firmly positioned within the cognitive sciences. Here we will show how recent developments in generative grammar, taking language as a computational cognitive mechanism seriously, allow us to address issues left unexplained in the increasingly popular surface-oriented approaches to language.