Age Preservation of the Syntactic Processor in Production

Two experiments are reported on the influence of cognitive aging on grammatical choice in language production. In both experiments, participants from two age-groups (young and old) produced sentences in a formulation task (V. Ferreira, 1996) that contrasted conditions allowing a choice between alternative sentence arrangements (i.e., double object or prepositional dative) or that permitted no choice (i.e., prepositional dative only). Experiment 1 showed that older adults were able to formulate the alternative sentence arrangements with the same speed and fluency as young adults. Experiment 2 showed that cueing attention to one of the two object nouns to be included in the sentence resulted in the earlier expression of the cued noun in choice conditions, but with little evidence of a response time or dysfluency cost in the no-choice condition. As in Experiment 1, there were no substantive age differences in latencies or dysfluencies. These results support existing models for the mechanisms that choose between grammatical alternatives and bind phrases to available argument positions and provide evidence that older adults are not impaired in their use of these mechanisms.     

Age constraints on first versus second language acquisition: evidence for linguistic plasticity and epigenesis

Does age constrain the outcome of all language acquisition equally regardless of whether the language is a first or second one? To test this hypothesis, the English grammatical abilities of deaf and hearing adults who either did or did not have linguistic experience (spoken or signed) during early childhood were investigated with two tasks, timed grammatical judgement and untimed sentence to picture matching. Findings showed that adults who acquired a language in early life performed at near-native levels on a second language regardless of whether they were hearing or deaf or whether the early language was spoken or signed. By contrast, deaf adults who experienced little or no accessible language in early life performed poorly. These results indicate that the onset of language acquisition in early human development dramatically alters the capacity to learn language throughout life, independent of the sensory-motor form of the early experience.     

Flexing Gender Perception: Brain Potentials Reveal the Cognitive Permeability of Grammatical Information

A growing body of recent research suggests that verbal categories, particularly labels, impact categorization and perception. These findings are commonly interpreted as demonstrating the involvement of language on cognition; however, whether these assumptions hold true for grammatical structures has yet to be investigated. In the present study, we investigated the extent to which linguistic information, namely, grammatical gender categories, structures cognition to subsequently influence categorical judgments and perception. In a nonverbal categorization task, French–English bilinguals and monolingual English speakers made gender-associated judgments about a set of image pairs while event-related potentials were recorded. The image sets were composed of an object paired with either a female or male face, wherein the object was manipulated for their conceptual gender relatedness and grammatical gender congruency to the sex of the following target face. The results showed that grammatical gender modulated the N1 and P2/VPP, as well as the N300 exclusively for the French–English bilinguals, indicating the inclusion of language in the mechanisms associated with attentional bias and categorization. In contrast, conceptual gender information impacted the monolingual English speakers in the later N300 time window given the absence of a comparable grammatical feature. Such effects of grammatical categories in the early perceptual stream have not been found before, and further provide grounds to suggest that language shapes perception.     

TELLING SOMETHING WE CAN'T KNOW:

An interpersonal verb such as annoy or admire can be categorized according to whether its grammatical subject or grammatical object initiates the interaction described by the verb Such a verb can also be categorized according to whether a derived adjective describes its grammatical subject (eg., annoying ) or its grammatical object (eg., admirable ) Although there has been much speculation (eg., Brown & Fish, 1983) that these and other characteristics of these verbs shed light on basic principles of human social interaction, we argue that research to date has failed to demonstrate directly any real-time consequences of these verbs during language comprehension. We present evidence that the initiating-reacting distinction predicts on-line changes in the accessibility of these verbs' arguments, but that the existence of a derived adjective does not. We conclude that tasks that question subjects explicitly about language may fail to reflect the ordinary processes of language comprehension     

Mapping Words to the World in Infancy: Infants' Expectations for Count Nouns and Adjectives

Three experimentsdocumentthat 14-month-old infants'construal of objects (e.g., purple animals) is influenced by naming, that they can distinguish between the grammatical form noun and adjective, and that they treat this distinction as relevant to meaning. In each experiment, infants extended novel nouns (e.g., "This one is a blicket") specifically to object categories (e.g., animal), and not to object properties (e.g., purple things). This robust noun-category link is related to grammatical form and not to surface differences in the presentation of novelwords (Experiment 3). Infants'extensions of novel adjectives (e.g., "This one is blickish") were more fragile: They extended adjectives specifically to object properties when the property was color (Experiment 1), but revealed a less precise mapping when the property was texture (Experiment 2). These results reveal that by 14 months, infants distinguish between grammatical forms and utilize these distinctions in determining the meaning of novel words.     

Priming Sentence Production in Adolescents and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyper-Activity Disorder

Theoretical accounts of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) posit a prominent role for problems in response inhibition (Nigg 2006). A key avenue for impulsivity in children with ADHD is inappropriate language expression. In this study, we sought to determine whether poor inhibitory control affects language production in adolescents and adults with ADHD. One hundred and ninety-five participants (13–35 years old; 65% male) were presented with two pictures and a verb, and their task was to form a sentence. If deficits in response inhibition affect language production, then participants with ADHD should be more likely than non-ADHD controls to begin speaking before having formulated a plan that will allow a grammatical continuation. The results showed that the ADHD-combined subtype, in particular, was more likely to produce an ungrammatical sequence. Effects were not moderated by age or gender. These data suggest that response suppression deficits in ADHD adversely affect the basic processes of sentence formation.     

Using sound to solve syntactic problems: the role of phonology in grammatical category assignments.

One ubiquitous problem in language processing involves the assignment of words to the correct grammatical category, such as noun or verb. In general, semantic and syntactic cues have been cited as the principal information for grammatical category assignment, to the neglect of possible phonological cues. This neglect is unwarranted, and the following claims are made: (a) Numerous correlations between phonology and grammatical class exist, (b) some of these correlations are large and can pervade the entire lexicon of a language and hence can involve thousands of words, (c) experiments have repeatedly found that adults and children have learned these correlations, and (d) explanations for how these correlations arose can be proposed and evaluated. Implications of these phenomena for language representation and processing are discussed.     

Ambiguity in sentence processing

As listeners and readers, we rarely notice the ambiguities that pervade our everyday language. When we hear the proverb `Time flies like an arrow' we might ponder its meaning, but not the fact that there are almost 100 grammatically permissible interpretations of this short sentence. On occasion, however, we do notice sentential ambiguity: headlines, such as `Two Sisters Reunited After 18 Years in Checkout Counter', are amusing because they so consistently lead to the unintended interpretation (presumably, the sisters did not spend 18 years at the checkout). It is this consistent preference for one interpretation-and one grammatical structure-rather than another that has fuelled research into sentence processing for more than 20 years. Until relatively recently, the dominant belief had been that these preferences arise from general principles that underlie our use of grammar, with certain grammatical constructions being preferred over others. There has now accrued, however, a considerable body of evidence demonstrating that these preferences are not absolute, but can change in particular circumstances. With this evidence have come new theories of sentence processing, some of which, at first glance, radically question the standard notions of linguistic representation, grammar and understanding.     

Extralinguistic control of language comprehension and production in the nonfluent child

The study investigated (1) the developmental progression postulated to exist between comprehension and production of sentences having the same grammatical form, and (2) the effects of syntactic, semantic, and extralinguistic variables on comprehension and production in nursery-school children. Comprehension trials required choices among four puzzle piece alternatives for which (a) both subject and object pieces differed (Phase I) or (b) only grammatical subject pictures differed (Phase II). During production trials children were asked to label preconstructed puzzles. Results indicated the comprehension-production relationship to vary as a function of age, sentence prepositions, and phases. Differential effects of semantic and extralinguistic variables during comprehension were found primarily for the youngest children, suggesting that logical relations among agent-actor-object were not sole controllers of language comprehension. Nonsyntactic control of production responses was not found.     

Different effects of dual task demands on the speech of young and older adults

Young and older adults provided language samples in response to elicitation questions while concurrently performing 3 different tasks. The language samples were scored on three dimensions: fluency, grammatical complexity, and content. Previous research had suggested the hypothesis that the restricted speech register of older adults is buffered from the costs of dual task demands. This hypothesis was tested by comparing language samples collected during a baseline condition with those produced while the participants were performing the concurrent tasks. The results indicate that young and older adults adopt different strategies when confronted with dual task demands. Young adults shift to a restricted speech register when confronted with dual task demands. Older adults, who were already using a restricted speech register, became less fluent although the grammatical complexity and informational content of their speech was preserved. Hence, some but not all aspects of older adults' speech are buffered from dual task demands.     

Psychology is not primarily Empirical Science: A Comparison of Cultures in the Lexical Hypothesis Tradition as a Failure of Introspection

A large part of psychology has become an empirical science that assumes that there might exist one set of research methods suitable for psychological research in all human cultures. Research questions, methods, and theories formulated from one cultural perspective are not thoroughly introspectively examined when being used in another cultural environment. This leads to research that answers questions that are not meaningful in such environments. Research coming from the lexical hypothesis tradition is given as an example. The original research in English language decided that the lexicon was enough to represent language structures for the purpose of examining how language reflects personality; however, some languages might use specific grammatical structures to reflect personality, so the lexicon is not enough to adequately represent these languages. Despite this, researchers still follow the research method developed for the English language. The Czech and Korean languages are examples of this approach. A solution to this problem is the thorough use of introspection during the formulation of research questions.     

Representation of inflected nouns in the internal lexicon

The lexical representation of Serbo-Croatian nouns was investigated in a lexical decision task. Because Serbo-Croatian nouns are declined, a noun may appear in one of several grammatical cases distinguished by the inflectional morpheme affixed to the base form. The grammatical cases occur with different frequencies, although some are visually and phonetically identical. When the frequencies of identical forms are compounded, the ordering of frequencies is not the same for masculine and feminine genders. These two genders are distinguished further by the fact that the base form for masculine nouns is an actual grammatical case, the nominative singular, whereas the base form for feminine nouns is an abstraction in that it cannot stand alone as an independent word. Exploiting these characteristics of the Serbo-Croatian language, we contrasted three views of how a noun is represented: (1) the independent-entries hypothesis, which assumes an independent representation for each grammatical case, reflecting its frequency of occurrence; (2) the derivational hypothesis, which assumes that only the base morpheme is stored, with the individual cases derived from separately stored inflectional morphemes and rules for combination; and (3) the satellite-entries hypothesis, which assumes that all cases are individually represented, with the nominative singular functioning as the nucleus and the embodiment of the noun’s frequency and around which the other cases cluster uniformly. The evidence strongly favors the satellite-entries hypothesis.     

Intergenerational influence and ontogenetic development in the emergence of spatial grammar in Nicaraguan Sign Language

The recent emergence of a new sign language among deaf children and adolescents in Nicaragua provides an opportunity to study how grammatical features of a language arise and spread, and how new language environments are constructed. The grammatical regularities that underlie language use reside largely outside the domain of explicit awareness. Nevertheless, knowledge of these regularities must be transmitted from one generation to the next to survive as part of the language. During this transmission, language form and use is shaped by both the characteristics of ontogenetic development within individual users and by historical changes in patterns of interaction between users. To capture this process, the present study follows the emergence of spatial modulations in Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL). A comprehension task examining interpretations of spatially modulated verbs reveals that new form-function mappings arise among children who functionally differentiate previously equivalent forms. The new mappings are then acquired by their age peers (who are also children), and by subsequent generations of children who learn the language, but not by adult contemporaries. As a result, language emergence is characterized by a convergence on form within each age cohort, and a mismatch in form from one age cohort to the cohort that follows. In this way, each age cohort, in sequence, transforms the language environment for the next, enabling each new cohort of learners to develop further than its predecessors.     

Different Effects of Dual Task Demands on the Speech of Young and Older Adults

Abstract

Young and older adults provided language samples in response to elicitation questions while concurrently performing 3 different tasks. The language samples were scored on three dimensions: fluency, grammatical complexity, and content. Previous research has shown that older adults use a restricted speech register that is grammatically less complex than young adults’ and has suggested that this restricted speech register is buffered from the costs of dual task demands. This hypothesis was tested by comparing language samples collected during a baseline condition with those produced while the participants were performing the concurrent tasks. The results indicate that young and older adults adopt different strategies when confronted with dual task demands. Young adults shift to a restricted speech register when confronted with dual task demands. Older adults, who were already using a restricted speech register, became less fluent although the grammatical complexity and informational content of their speech was preserved. Hence, some but not all aspects of older adults’ speech are buffered from dual task demands.     

Age of acquisition effects on the functional organization of language in the adult brain

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we neuroimaged deaf adults as they performed two linguistic tasks with sentences in American Sign Language, grammatical judgment and phonemic-hand judgment. Participants’ age-onset of sign language acquisition ranged from birth to 14 years; length of sign language experience was substantial and did not vary in relation to age of acquisition. For both tasks, a more left lateralized pattern of activation was observed, with activity for grammatical judgment being more anterior than that observed for phonemic-hand judgment, which was more posterior by comparison. Age of acquisition was linearly and negatively related to activation levels in anterior language regions and positively related to activation levels in posterior visual regions for both tasks.     

Infants track word forms in early word–object associations

A central component of language development is word learning. One characterization of this process is that language learners discover objects and then look for word forms to associate with these objects (Mcnamara, 1984 ; Smith, 2000 ). Another possibility is that word forms themselves are also important, such that once learned, hearing a familiar word form will lead young word learners to look for an object to associate with it (Juscyzk, 1997 ). This research investigates the relative weighing of word forms and objects in early word–object associations using the anticipatory eye‐movement paradigm (AEM; McMurray & Aslin, 2004 ). Eighteen‐month‐old infants and adults were taught novel word–object associations and then tested on ambiguous stimuli that pitted word forms and objects against each other. Results revealed a change in weighing of these components across development. For 18‐month‐old infants, word forms weighed more in early word–object associative learning, while for adults, objects were more salient. Our results suggest that infants preferentially use word forms to guide the process of word–object association.     

Longitudinal change in language production: effects of aging and dementia on grammatical complexity and propositional content.

Mixed modeling was used to examine longitudinal changes in linguistic ability in healthy older adults and older adults with dementia. Language samples, vocabulary scores, and digit span scores were collected annually from healthy older adults and semiannually from older adults with dementia. The language samples were scored for grammatical complexity and propositional content. For the healthy group, age-related declines in grammatical complexity and propositional content were observed. The declines were most rapid in the mid 70s. For the group with dementia, grammatical complexity and propositional content also declined over time, regardless of age. Rates of decline were uniform across individuals. These analyses reveal how both grammatical complexity and propositional content are related to late-life changes in cognition in healthy older adults aswell as those with dementia. Alzheimer's disease accelerates this decline, regardless of age.     

Granularity and the acquisition of grammatical gender: how order-of-acquisition affects what gets learned

Why do adult language learners typically fail to acquire second languages with native proficiency? Does prior linguistic experience influence the size of the “units” adults attend to in learning, and if so, how does this influence what gets learned? Here, we examine these questions in relation to grammatical gender, which adult learners almost invariably struggle to master. We present a model of learning that predicts that exposure to smaller units (such as nouns) before exposure to larger linguistic units (such as sentences) can critically impair learning about predictive relations between units: such as that between a noun and its article. This prediction is then confirmed by a study of adult participants learning grammatical gender in an artificial language. Adults learned both nouns and their articles better when they were first heard nouns used in context with their articles prior to hearing the nouns individually, compared with learners who first heard the nouns in isolation, prior to hearing them used in context. In the light of these results, we discuss the role gender appears to play in language, the importance of meaning in artificial grammar learning, and the implications of this work for the structure of L2-training.     

学龄期普通话特异性语言损伤儿童体习得——来自词汇体和语法体组合加工的证据

采用自定步速阅读范式，探讨了7~10岁普通话特异性语言损伤儿童对词汇体和语法体组合语义一致和不一致情况的加工表现。被试分为特异性语言损伤儿童，实龄匹配儿童和语言能力匹配儿童三组，结果表明7~10岁的特异性语言损伤儿童与年幼的语言能力匹配组儿童一样，词汇体和语法体一致条件下的加工快于不一致条件，两组儿童的表现均符合词汇体假设；与此不同，实龄匹配儿童的加工速度整体均快于以上两组儿童，且词汇体和语法体一致与不一致条件下的加工速度无显著差异。上述结果表明，普通话7~10岁特异性语言损伤儿童对词汇体和语法体组合合法性的习得仍不成熟，语法体的加工仍受词汇体影响，处于语法体能力发展的早期阶段。     

The apes’ edge: positional learning in chimpanzees and humans

A wide variety of organisms produce actions and signals in particular temporal sequences, including the motor actions recruited during tool-mediated foraging, the arrangement of notes in the songs of birds, whales and gibbons, and the patterning of words in human speech. To accurately reproduce such events, the elements that comprise such sequences must be memorized. Both memory and artificial language learning studies have revealed at least two mechanisms for memorizing sequences, one tracking co-occurrence statistics among items in sequences (i.e., transitional probabilities) and the other one tracking the positions of items in sequences, in particular those of items in sequence-edges. The latter mechanism seems to dominate the encoding of sequences after limited exposure, and to be recruited by a wide array of grammatical phenomena. To assess whether humans differ from other species in their reliance on one mechanism over the other after limited exposure, we presented chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and human adults with brief exposure to six items, auditory sequences. Each sequence consisted of three distinct sound types (X, A, B), arranged according to two simple temporal rules: the A item always preceded the B item, and the sequence-edges were always occupied by the X item. In line with previous results with human adults, both species primarily encoded positional information from the sequences; that is, they kept track of the items that occurred in the sequence-edges. In contrast, the sensitivity to co-occurrence statistics was much weaker. Our results suggest that a mechanism to spontaneously encode positional information from sequences is present in both chimpanzees and humans and may represent the default in the absence of training and with brief exposure. As many grammatical regularities exhibit properties of this mechanism, it may be recruited by language and constrain the form that certain grammatical regularities take.