Syllables and morphemes: contrasting frequency effects in Spanish

Three types of sublexical units were studied in Spanish visual word recognition: the syllable, the basic orthographic syllabic structure (BOSS), and the root morpheme. In Experiment 1, using a lexical-decision task, a typical inhibitory effect of the first-syllable frequency was found (while keeping constant the BOSS frequency) as well as the word-frequency effect. Experiment 2 examined the role of both the BOSS frequency and the word frequency, also in a lexical-decision task. Syllable frequency was controlled. Both the BOSS frequency and the word frequency showed facilitatory effects. However, in Experiments 3A and 3B, a facilitatory effect of the root frequency (when controlling for BOSS frequency) and a null effect of BOSS frequency (when controlling for root frequency) were found, suggesting that the BOSS effect is in fact reflecting a morpheme effect. A review of the current models shows that it is difficult to integrate syllables and morphemes in a unique model.     

The processing of free and bound gender-marked morphemes in speech production: evidence from Dutch

In many languages, the production of noun phrases requires the selection of gender-marked elements like determiners or inflectional suffixes. There is a recent debate as to whether the selection of freestanding gender-marked elements, such as determiners, follows the same processing mechanisms as the selection of bound gender-marked morphemes, such as adjective suffixes. Most of the evidence on which this debate is based relates to the gender-congruency effect in picture-word interference experiments. In the present article, the authors address this issue with a pure picture-naming task, extending previous work in German (H. Schriefers, J. D. Jescheniak, & A. Hantsch, 2005). The results of the present study on noun phrase production in Dutch show that both types of gender-marked morphemes are selected via the same basic processing mechanisms.     

The gender congruency effect and the selection of freestanding and bound morphemes: evidence from croatian

The authors report 3 picture-word interference experiments in which they explore some properties of the agreement process in speech production. In Experiment 1, Croatian speakers were asked to produce utterances in which the noun's gender value had an impact on the selection of gender-marked freestanding morphemes (pronouns) while ignoring the presentation of same- or different-gender distractor words. In Experiments 2 and 3, Croatian speakers were asked to name the same pictures using noun phrases in which the noun's gender value surfaced as an inflectional suffix. Different-gender distractors interfered more than same-gender distractors (the gender congruency effect) in Experiment 1, but not in Experiments 2 and 3. These contrasting results show that the cause of the gender congruency effect is not at the level where lexical-grammatical information is selected but at the level of selection of freestanding morphemes.     

A cross-sectional study of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes in child speech

Speech samples were taken from 21 children aged 16–40 months covering a wide range of mean utterance length. Presence or absence of 14 grammatical morphemes in linguistic and nonlinguistic obligatory contexts was scored. Order of acquisition of the morphemes was determined using two different criteria. The rank-orderings obtained correlated very highly with a previously determined order of acquisition for three children studied longitudinally. Age did not add to the predictiveness of mean length of utterance alone for grammatical development in terms of which morphemes were correctly used. The approximately invariant order of acquisition for the fourteen morphemes is discussed in terms of three possible determinants of this order. Frequency of use in parental speech showed no correlation with order of acquisition, but grammatical and semantic complexity both correlated highly with acquisition order.This research was supported in part by PHS grant HD-02908 from the National Institute of Child Health and Development.     

Morphological analysis of disrupted morphemes: Evidence from Hebrew

In concatenative languages such as English, the morphemes of a word are linked linearly so that words formed from the same base morpheme also resemble each other along orthographic dimensions. In Hebrew, by contrast, the morphemes of a word can be but are not generally concatenated. Instead, a pattern of vowels is infixed between the consonants of the root morpheme. Consequently, the shared portion of morphologically-related words in Hebrew is not always an orthographic unit. In a series of three experiments using the repetition priming task with visually presented Hebrew materials, primes that were formed from the same base morpheme and were morphologically-related to a target facilitated target recognition. Moreover, morphologically-related prime and target pairs that contained a disruption to the shared orthographic pattern showed the same pattern of facilitation as did nondisrupted pairs. That is, there was no effect over successive prime and target presentations, of disrupting the sequence of letters that constitutes the base morpheme or root. In addition, facilitation was similar across derivational, inflectional and identical primes. The conclusion of the present study is that morphological effects in word recognition are distinct from the effects of shared structure.     

The on-line resolution of the sentence complement/relative clause ambiguity: evidence from Spanish

Two self-paced reading experiments investigated syntactic ambiguity resolution in Spanish. The experiments examined the way in which Spanish subjects initially interpret sentences that are temporarily ambiguous between a sentence complement and a relative clause interpretation. Experiment 1 examined whether the sentence complement preference found in English is observed in Spanish speaking subjects. In Experiment 2, verbal mood was manipulated in order to study the influence of verb-specific information on sentence processing. Since subcategorization for a subjunctive complement clause is generally assumed to be a lexical property of some verbs, the manipulation of the mood of the embedded verb affords us an interesting and novel way to examine the influence of lexical information on syntactic ambiguity resolution. Experiment 1 showed that Spanish speakers initially interpret the ambiguous that-clause as a sentence complement. Experiment 2 showed that verb-specific information, in particular, the information that specificies that a verb subcategorizes for a subjunctive complement, is accessed and used rapidly and affects the ambiguity resolution process. The results are discussed in relation to current models of sentence processing.     

The phonological-distributional coherence hypothesis: Cross-linguistic evidence in language acquisition

Several phonological and prosodic properties of words have been shown to relate to differences between grammatical categories. Distributional information about grammatical categories is also a rich source in the child’s language environment. In this paper we hypothesise that such cues operate in tandem for developing the child’s knowledge about grammatical categories. We term this the Phonological-Distributional Coherence Hypothesis (PDCH). We tested the PDCH by analysing phonological and distributional information in distinguishing open from closed class words and nouns from verbs in four languages: English, Dutch, French, and Japanese. We found an interaction between phonological and distributional cues for all four languages indicating that when distributional cues were less reliable, phonological cues were stronger. This provides converging evidence that language is structured such that language learning benefits from the integration of information about category from contextual and sound-based sources, and that the child’s language environment is less impoverished than we might suspect.     

The phonological-distributional coherence hypothesis: cross-linguistic evidence in language acquisition

Several phonological and prosodic properties of words have been shown to relate to differences between grammatical categories. Distributional information about grammatical categories is also a rich source in the child's language environment. In this paper we hypothesise that such cues operate in tandem for developing the child's knowledge about grammatical categories. We term this the Phonological-Distributional Coherence Hypothesis (PDCH). We tested the PDCH by analysing phonological and distributional information in distinguishing open from closed class words and nouns from verbs in four languages: English, Dutch, French, and Japanese. We found an interaction between phonological and distributional cues for all four languages indicating that when distributional cues were less reliable, phonological cues were stronger. This provides converging evidence that language is structured such that language learning benefits from the integration of information about category from contextual and sound-based sources, and that the child's language environment is less impoverished than we might suspect.     

The time course for language acquisition in biologically distinct populations: evidence from deaf individuals

The present study provides evidence that individuals who have different patterns of cerebral lateralization and who develop along different maturational time courses can attain comparable levels of language proficiency. Right-handed individuals with left-handed family members (left-handed familials, LHFs) showed a shorter sensitive period for language acquisition than did right-handed individuals with only right-handed family members (right-handed familials, RHFs). The shorter sensitive period for LHFs may be due to a focus on non-linguistic, word-based conceptual information during language acquisition. RHFs may focus on grammatical relations during language acquisition, which matures later than lexical knowledge. This suggests that there may be different patterns of cerebral lateralization for language in all normal populations as a function of familial handedness.     

Age of acquisition affects object recognition: evidence from visual duration thresholds

The impact of age of acquisition (AoA) on object recognition was explored in three experiments measuring visual duration threshold (VDT) for the identification of pictures labelled with early and late acquired names. Participants viewed briefly displayed images preceded and followed by a pattern mask. The minimum display duration required for correct identification was shorter for pictures labelled with early names than for those labelled with late names. In Experiments 2 and 3 we explored the effects of two forms of visual degradation on VDT for pictures with early and late acquired names. Both degradation by superimposed visual elements, and degradation by contrast reduction extended VDT, but only the former interacted with AoA. We conclude that both AoA and degradation by superimposed visual elements affect the efficiency of visual object recognition, but only degradation by contrast and not AoA affects the efficiency of earlier pre-recognition processes.     

Another word on parsing relative clauses: Eyetracking evidence from Spanish and English

Ambiguity as to what the relative clause modifies in phrases such as Someone shot the maid of the actress who was divorced/Alguien disparó contra la criada de la actriz que estaba divorciada tends to be resolved differently in different languages (and in different forms of complex noun phrases). In English, there is a weak but seldom significant tendency for the relative clause to be taken as modifying the second noun phrase, the actress, but in Spanish, several researchers have found a significant preference for the relative clause's modifying the first noun phrase, la criada. The present experiments compare Spanish and English readers' eye movements while reading exactly comparable sentences in their native languages and find a significant reading time advantage in Spanish when it is forced to modify the first noun phrase, but in English when the relative clause is forced to modify the second noun phrase. Theoretical implications of the findings for previous explanations of the phenomenon are discussed.     

Stem allomorphy in the Spanish mental lexicon: evidence from behavioral and ERP experiments

This study presents results from a nonce-word elicited production task and a reading experiment using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) investigating finite forms of Spanish verbs which consist of marked stems and regular person and number agreement suffixes. The first experiment showed that unmarked stems are productively extended to nonce words, whereas marked stems generalize more restrictively to nonce words, based on lexical similarity to existing stem forms. The second experiment yielded a lexical ERP signature for stem violations and an ERP pattern signaling morpho-syntactic (rule-based) processing for suffix violations. We argue that stem allomorphy is lexically represented in the Spanish mental lexicon, with marked stems forming subnodes of structured lexical entries.     

The contribution of short-term memory for serial order to early reading acquisition: evidence from a longitudinal study

Early reading acquisition skills have been linked to verbal short-term memory (STM) capacity. However, the nature of this relationship remains controversial because verbal STM, like reading acquisition, depends on the complexity of underlying phonological processing skills. This longitudinal study addressed the relation between STM and reading decoding acquisition by distinguishing between STM for item information and STM for order information based on recent studies showing that STM for item information, but not STM for order information, recruits underlying phonological representations. If there is a specific link between STM and reading decoding acquisition, STM for order information should be an independent predictor of reading decoding acquisition. Tasks maximizing STM for serial order or item information, measures of phonological abilities, and reading tests were administered to children followed from kindergarten through first grade. We observed that order STM capacity, but not item STM capacity, predicted independent variance in reading decoding abilities 1 year later. These results highlight the specific role of STM for order in reading decoding acquisition and argue for a causal role of order STM capacity in reading acquisition. Mechanisms relating STM for order information and reading acquisition are discussed.     

The irreversibility of sensitive period effects in language development: evidence from second language acquisition in international adoptees

The question of a sensitive period in language acquisition has been subject to extensive research and debate for more than half a century. While it has been well established that the ability to learn new languages declines in early years, the extent to which this outcome depends on biological maturation in contrast to previously acquired knowledge remains disputed. In the present study, we addressed this question by examining phonetic discriminatory abilities in early second language (L2) speakers of Swedish, who had either maintained their first language (L1) (immigrants) or had lost it (international adoptees), using native speaker controls. Through this design, we sought to disentangle the effects of the maturational state of the learner on L2 development from the effects of L1 interference: if additional language development is indeed constrained by an interfering L1, then adoptees should outperform immigrant speakers. The results of an auditory lexical decision task, in which fine vowel distinctions in Swedish had been modified, showed, however, no difference between the L2 groups. Instead, both L2 groups scored significantly lower than the native speaker group. The three groups did not differ in their ability to discriminate non‐modified words. These findings demonstrate that L1 loss is not a crucial condition for successfully acquiring an L2, which in turn is taken as support for a maturational constraints view on L2 acquisition. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/1J9X50aePeU     

Non-associative fear acquisition: a review of the evidence from retrospective and longitudinal research

It is axiomatic that the capacity to experience fear is adaptive, enabling rapid and energetic response to imminent threat or danger. Despite the generally accepted utility of functional fear, the nature of maladaptive fear remains controversial. There is still no consensus about how specific fears and phobias are acquired and modulated. Two major schools of thought are apparent: those suggesting dysfunctional fear arises largely as the result of associative-conditioning processes versus those who favour more biologically based etiological explanations. In this regard, the non-associative model of fear acquisition postulates the existence of a limited number of innate, evolutionary-relevant fears, while emphasising conditioning modes of onset for evolutionary-neutral fears. Recent retrospective and longitudinal studies have tested predictions from the non-associative model. In general, findings support non-associative hypotheses and are difficult to reconcile with neo-conditioning explanations of fear acquisition. These data suggest that four pathways to fear may provide the most parsimonious theory of fear etiology. The theoretical and practical implications of adding a fourth, non-associative path to Rachman's (Behav. Res. Ther. (1977) 15, 375-387) three 'associative' pathways are discussed. Unresolved issues requiring further investigation are considered.     

First language acquisition differs from second language acquisition in prelingually deaf signers: evidence from sensitivity to grammaticality judgement in British Sign Language

Age of acquisition (AoA) effects have been used to support the notion of a critical period for first language acquisition. In this study, we examine AoA effects in deaf British Sign Language (BSL) users via a grammaticality judgment task. When English reading performance and nonverbal IQ are factored out, results show that accuracy of grammaticality judgement decreases as AoA increases, until around age 8, thus showing the unique effect of AoA on grammatical judgement in early learners. No such effects were found in those who acquired BSL after age 8. These late learners appear to have first language proficiency in English instead, which may have been used to scaffold learning of BSL as a second language later in life.     

Naming practices and the acquisition of key biological concepts: evidence from English and Indonesian

Children's acquisition of fundamental biological concepts (living thing, animal, plant) is shaped by the way these concepts are named. In English, but not Indonesian, the name "animal" is polysemous: One sense includes all animate objects, and the other excludes humans. Because names highlight object categories, if the same name ("animal") points to two different, hierarchically related biological concepts, children should have difficulty settling on the scope of that term and its close neighbors (e.g., "alive"). Experiments with 4- to 9-year-old English- and Indonesian-speaking children revealed that "alive" poses unique interpretive challenges, especially for English-speaking children. When asked to identify entities that are "alive," older Indonesian-speaking children selected both plants and animals, but their English-speaking counterparts tended to exclude plants, which suggests that they may have misaligned "alive" with one of the "animal" senses. This work underscores the importance of considering language and cultural factors in studying the acquisition of fundamental concepts about the biological world.     

Two operations in character recognition: Some evidence from reaction-time measurements

Theories of the recognition of a visual character may be divided into three sets.defined by the way in which the stimulus is encoded before being compared to a memorized target character. A character-classification experiment was performed in which the test stimuli were characters that were either intact or degraded by a superimposed pattern. Analyses of reaction-times in the experiment lead to the rejection of two of the three sets of theories. There appear to be at least two separate operations in the recognition or classification of a character. The first encodes the visual stimulus as an abstracted representation of its physical properties. The second, which may occur more than once, compares such a stimulus representation to a memory representation, producing either a match or a mismatch. A theory of high-speed exhaustive scanning in memory underlies the experiment and is given new support. The method of reaction-time analysis that is introduced, an elaboration of the Uelmholtz-Donders subtraction method, may be applicable to the general problem of the invariance ofperceived form under certain transfomations of the stimulus.