German inflection: single route or dual route?

The German plural system has recently become a focal point for conflicting theories of language, both linguistic and cognitive. Marcus et al. (1995) highlight the German plural as support for the dual-route account of inflectional morphology first proposed by Pinker and colleagues (Pinker & Prince, 1988). On the dual-route account, inflectional morphology is universally subserved by a symbolic rule route which deals with regular inflection and an associative memory component which deals with irregular inflection. This contrasts with single-route connectionist systems. We seek to counter supposed evidence for the dual-route account through large-scale simulations as well as through experimental data. We argue that, in its current form, the dual-route account is incapable of generating experimental data provided by Marcus et al. (1995) as support. Finally, we provide direct quantitative comparisons between single-route and dual-route models of German plural inflection and find single-route performance superior on these tests.     

The role of meaning in inflection: why the past tense does not require a rule

How do we produce the past tenses of verbs? For the last 20 years this question has been the focal domain for conflicting theories of language, knowledge representation, and cognitive processing. On one side of the debate have been similarity-based or single-route approaches that propose that all past tenses are formed simply through phonological analogies to existing past tenses stored in memory. On the other side of the debate are rule-based or dual-route approaches which agree that phonological analogy is important for producing irregular past tenses (e.g., think-->thought), but argue that regular past tenses (e.g., walk-->walked) are generated via a +ed rule and that a principled account of regular inflection can only be given by recourse to explicit rules. This debate has become a crucial battleground for arguments concerning the necessity and importance of abstract mental rules, embracing not only language processing, but also the of nature cognition itself. However, in centering on the roles of phonological similarity and rules, the past tense debate has largely ignored the possible role of semantics in determining inflection. This paper presents five studies that demonstrate a striking and decisive role of semantic similarity in inflection. In fact, semantic factors appear to be more important in inflection than the grammatical considerations put forward by the dual-route account. Further, these new findings provide a new way of discriminating between the claims of single-route (similarity-based) and dual-route (rule-based) approaches. It appears that inflection is carried out through analogical reminding based on semantic and phonological similarity and that a rule-based route is not necessary to account for past tense inflection.     

A computer model of inflection learning

This paper presents a computer program that creates and modifies inflectional paradigms. A paradigm is a linguistic device used to index lexical entries that share a common inflection along a given dimension such as tense or case. Paradigms are useful because they offer a convenient method for predicting the form of a novel word and for explaining some aspects of language development. The model presented here is based on Pinker’s (1984) inflection learning theory. The model covers a subset of the rules for learning inflectional paradigms that are outlined in the theory. The primary concern of the model is to understand how elements that are crucial to the theory, such as lexical entries and feature equations, may interact to form and expand word-specific paradigms. The model also represents an attempt to assess implementation details not specified by the theory. A brief overview of the model is given, followed by a sample run. Finally, some practical and theoretical considerations, such as the structure of paradigms, paradigm assignment to novel words, and suppletion, are discussed.     

汉语母语者英语动词三种屈折变化形式加工机制的差异

采用ERP技术考察了汉语母语者,英语动词三种屈折变化形式加工机制的差异。结果发现,英语动词进行式的屈折变化形式- ing的错误使用诱发了P600成分;完成式的屈折变化形式- ed的错误使用诱发了N400成分;完成式中没有明显屈折变化标识的不规则词的错误使用没有诱发典型的ERP成分。研究结果表明：对于缺乏英语使用环境、母语为汉语的晚期英语学习者来说,屈折变化形式- ing,完成式规则动词的变化形式- ed和没有明显形态变化标识的不规则动词的变化形式具有不同的加工机制,前者可能处于由陈述性记忆系统向程序性记忆系统加工的转变过程中,而后两者更多地由陈述性系统进行加工。这种加工机制的差异可能与动词屈折变化规则的复杂程度有关。     

How the Size of Our Social Network Influences Our Semantic Skills

People differ in the size of their social network, and thus in the properties of the linguistic input they receive. This article examines whether differences in social network size influence individuals’ linguistic skills in their native language, focusing on global comprehension of evaluative language. Study 1 exploits the natural variation in social network size and shows that individuals with larger social networks are better at understanding the valence of restaurant reviews. Study 2 manipulated social network size by randomly assigning participants to learn novel evaluative words as used by two (small network) versus eight (large network) speakers. It replicated the finding from Study 1, showing that those exposed to a larger social network were better at comprehending the valence of product reviews containing the novel words that were written by novel speakers. Together, these studies show that the size of one's social network can influence success at language comprehension. They thus open the door to research on how individuals’ lifestyle and the nature of their social interactions can influence linguistic skills.     

汉语口语词汇产生中的多重音韵激活：单词翻译任务的ERP研究

口语词汇产生过程中, 非目标词是否会产生音韵激活是独立两阶段模型和交互激活模型的争论焦点之一。研究运用事件相关电位技术, 考察了被试在翻译命名任务中是否受到背景图片音韵或语义干扰词的影响。行为反应时中未发现显著的音韵效应, 而语义效应显著, 表明非目标词不会产生音韵激活。事件相关电位的结果显示在目标单词呈现后的400~600 ms时间窗口中出现了显著的语义效应, 在600~700 ms时间窗口内出现了边缘显著的语义效应和音韵效应, 均表现为相关条件比无关条件波幅更正。上述结果表明在将英语翻译成汉语的过程中, 尽管在脑电上呈现出可能存在微弱的多重音韵激活, 但行为结果并不会显示出非目标项的音韵激活。研究结果支持了汉语口语词汇产生遵循独立两阶段模式的观点。     

The effect of phonological realization of inflectional morphology on verbal agreement in French: evidence from ERPs

The present study examined the impact of the phonological realization of morphosyntactic agreement within the inflectional phrase (IP) in written French, as revealed by ERPs. In two independent experiments, we varied the presence vs. absence of phonological cues to morphological variation. Of interest was whether a graded ERP response to these different conditions could be found in native speakers (Experiment 1), and whether non-native learners would benefit from the presence of phonological cues (Experiment 2). The results for native French speakers showed that compared to grammatically correct instances, phonologically realized inflectional errors produced a significant P600 response, which was statistically larger than that produced by errors that were silent. German L1-French L2 learners showed similar benefits of the phonological realization of morphemes. Phonologically realized errors produced a robust P600 response whereas silent errors produced no robust effects. Implications of these results are discussed in reference to previous studies of L2 acquisition of morphosyntax.     

母语者与二语者屈折词和派生词语素加工的差异

语素是构成词汇的最小功能单位,是能够表达独立语义的最小成分。语素加工是指基于一定的构词规则,将语素复杂词汇进一步分解为多个语素,通过加工和重组语素,建构起对整词意义的理解。有关英语语素加工的研究发现,不仅母语者和二双语者的加工模式存在很大差异,对于屈折和派生这两种英语中重要的语素复杂词汇,其加工模式也存在较大差异,本文重点讨论了英语母语者与英语二语者对屈折和派生词加工模式的差异、成因以及影响因素。最后提出了今后需要进一步研究的问题。     

The competition–compensation account of developmental language disorder

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) regularly use the bare form of verbs (e.g., dance) instead of inflected forms (e.g., danced). We propose an account of this behavior in which processing difficulties of children with DLD disproportionally affect processing novel inflected verbs in their input. Limited experience with inflection in novel contexts leads the inflection to face stronger competition from alternatives. Competition is resolved through a compensatory behavior that involves producing a more accessible alternative: in English, the bare form. We formalize this hypothesis within a probabilistic model that trades off context-dependent versus independent processing. Results show an over-reliance on preceding stem contexts when retrieving the inflection in a model that has difficulty with processing novel inflected forms. We further show that following the introduction of a bias to store and retrieve forms with preceding contexts, generalization in the typically developing (TD) models remains more or less stable, while the same bias in the DLD models exaggerates difficulties with generalization. Together, the results suggest that inconsistent use of inflectional morphemes by children with DLD could stem from inferences they make on the basis of data containing fewer novel inflected forms. Our account extends these findings to suggest that problems with detecting a form in novel contexts combined with a bias to rely on familiar contexts when retrieving a form could explain sequential planning difficulties in children with DLD.

Research Highlights

• Generalization difficulties with inflectional morphemes in children with Developmental Language Disorder arise from these children's limited experience with novel inflected forms.
• Limited experience with a form in novel contexts could lead to a storage bias where retrieving a form often requires relying on familiar preceding stems.
• While generalization in typically developing models remains stable across a range of model parameters, certain parameter values in the impaired models exaggerate difficulties with generalization.
• Children with DLD compensate for these retrieval difficulties through accessibility-driven language production: they produce the most accessible form among the alternatives.

     

Frequency and Category Factors in the Reduction and Assimilation of Function Words: EPG and Acoustic Measures

Many studies have observed phonetic and phonological differences between function words and content words. However, as many of the most commonly cited function words are also very high in frequency, it is unclear whether these differences are the result of syntactic category or word frequency. This study attempts to determine whether syntactically defined function words are indeed phonologically and phonetically reduced or assimilated when word frequency is balanced. Three experiments were designed to distinguish the relative contributions of the factors of category and frequency on phonetic and phonological reduction and assimilation. Overall results suggest that syntactic category and word frequency interact with phonetic and phonological processes in a more complex way than previously believed. Experiment 1 measured final t/d dropping, a reduction process, using electropalatography (EPG). Experiment 2 examined vowel reduction using acoustic measures. In Experiment 3, palatalization, an assimilation process, was examined using EPG. Results showed that t/d dropping responds to the factor of syntactic category, whereas palatalization is affected by word frequency; vowel reduction responded to both factors, with a dominant syntactic category effect and a secondary within-category frequency effect. The implications of these findings for models of lexical representation and theories of language acquisition are discussed.     

Visual word recognition in bilinguals: evidence from masked phonological priming

Bilingual written language representation was investigated with the masked phonological priming paradigm. Pseudohomophonic and control primes of French target words were used to show that Dutch-French bilinguals exhibit the same pattern of phonological and orthographic priming as native French speakers, which suggests that the same processes underlie first-and second-language processing. It was also found that for bilinguals, but not monolinguals, it is possible to prime a target word of the second language with a homophonic stimulus (either word or nonword) of the first language. This interlingual phonological priming effect was of the same size as the intralingual priming effect. Implications for theories of bilingual written language representation and for the interpretation of the masked phonological priming paradigm are discussed.     

Language deficits in pre-symptomatic Huntington's disease: evidence from Hungarian

A limited number of studies have investigated language in Huntington’s disease (HD). These have generally reported abnormalities in rule-governed (grammatical) aspects of language, in both syntax and morphology. Several studies of verbal inflectional morphology in English and French have reported evidence of over-active rule processing, such as over-suffixation errors (e.g., walkeded) and over-regularizations (e.g., digged). Here we extend the investigation to noun inflection in Hungarian, a Finno-Ugric agglutinative language with complex morphology, and to genetically proven pre-symptomatic Huntington’s disease (pre-HD). Although individuals with pre-HD have no clinical, motor or cognitive symptoms, the underlying pathology may already have begun, and thus sensitive behavioral measures might reveal already-present impairments. Indeed, in a Hungarian morphology production task, pre-HD patients made both over-suffixation and over-regularization errors. The findings suggest the generality of over-active rule processing in both HD and pre-HD, across languages from different families with different morphological systems, and for both verbal and noun inflection. Because the neuropathology in pre-HD appears to be largely restricted to the caudate nucleus and related structures, the findings further implicate these structures in language, and in rule-processing in particular. Finally, the need for effective treatments in HD, which will likely depend in part on the ability to sensitively measure early changes in the disease, suggests the possibility that inflectional morphology, and perhaps other language measures, may provide useful diagnostic, tracking, and therapeutic tools for assessing and treating early degeneration in pre-HD and HD.     

The past and future of the past tense

What is the interaction between storage and computation in language processing? What is the psychological status of grammatical rules? What are the relative strengths of connectionist and symbolic models of cognition? How are the components of language implemented in the brain? The English past tense has served as an arena for debates on these issues. We defend the theory that irregular past-tense forms are stored in the lexicon, a division of declarative memory, whereas regular forms can be computed by a concatenation rule, which requires the procedural system. Irregulars have the psychological, linguistic and neuropsychological signatures of lexical memory, whereas regulars often have the signatures of grammatical processing. Furthermore, because regular inflection is rule-driven, speakers can apply it whenever memory fails.     

Dutch plural inflection: the exception that proves the analogy

We develop the view that inflection is driven partly by non-phonological analogy and that non-phonological information is of particular importance to the inflection of non-canonical roots, which in the view of [Marcus, G. F., Brinkmann, U., Clahsen, H., Wiese, R., & Pinker, S. (1995). German inflection: the exception that proves the rule. Cognitive Psychology, 29, 189-256.] are inflected by a symbolic rule process. We used the Dutch plural to evaluate these claims. An analysis of corpus data shows that a model using non-phonological information (orthography) produces significantly fewer errors on plurals of non-canonical Dutch nouns, in particular borrowings, than a model that includes only phonological information. Moreover, we show that a double default system, as proposed by Pinker [Pinker, S. (1999). Words and rules. London: Phoenix.], does not offer an advantage over the latter model. A second study, examining the use of orthography in an online plural production task, shows that, in Dutch, the chosen pseudoword plural is significantly affected by non-phonological information. A final simulation study confirms that these results are in line with a model of inflectional morphology that explains the inflection of non-canonical roots by non-phonological analogy instead of by a default rule process.     

A mouse with a roof? effects of phonological neighbors on processing of words in sentences in a non-native language

The architecture of the language processing system for speakers of more than one language remains an intriguing topic of research. A common finding is that speakers of multiple languages are slower at responding to language stimuli in their non-native language (L2) than monolingual speakers. This may simply reflect participants' unfamiliarity with words in the L2, however it may also be the reflection of interference from competing lexical alternatives both across and within the participants' multiple languages. In the current studies (one behavioral, one electrophysiological) we investigate how interference from phonologically similar words within the L2 alone may account for problems in auditory language comprehension in non-native speakers. To this end a cross modal lexical priming (CMLP) paradigm was implemented, which allowed us to look for effects of spoken word primes embedded in sentences on the recognition of target stimuli. Specifically, we investigated whether a word such as mouse, which has a close phonological neighbor, house, would show a modulating effect on recognition of a word semantically related to house but not to mouse (i.e., roof). We hypothesized that L2 speakers, less efficient at categorizing phonemes in their L2 would show a difference in the processing of roof preceded by mouse as compared to roof preceded by another unrelated word, such as lamp, due to a residual co-activation of the phonological neighbor mouse. Furthermore, L1 speakers, highly proficient at recognizing phonemes in their native tongue, should show no such effect. The results of both studies clearly support our hypothesis, indicating that phonological neighbors in the L2 may greatly interfere with L2 word recognition.     

Effects of dialect on merger perception: ERP and behavioral correlates

Native speakers of a language are often unable to consciously perceive, and have altered neural responses to, phonemic contrasts not present in their language. This study examined whether speakers of dialects of the same language with different phoneme inventories also show measurably different neural responses to contrasts not present in their dialect. Speakers with (n=11) and without (n=11) an American English I/E (pin/pen) vowel merger in speech production were asked to discriminate perceptually between minimal pairs of words that contrasted in the critical vowel merger and minimal pairs of control words while their event-related potential (ERPs) were recorded. Compared with unmerged dialect speakers, merged dialect speakers were less able to make behavioral discriminations and exhibited a reduced late positive ERP component (LPC) effect to incongruent merger vowel stimuli. These results indicate that between dialects of a single language, the behavioral response differences may reflect neural differences related to conscious phonological decision processes.     

Inhibitory control and affective valence processing in dementia of the alzheimer type

Emotional and traditional Stroop effects were contrasted in individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and age‐equated, non‐demented individuals to examine (a) differences in the speed of processing emotional versus neutral words; and (b) the extent to which the emotional valence influences interference effects. Individuals with moderate AD experienced larger traditional Stroop interference effects than did healthy elderly or individuals with mild AD. Emotional Stroop effects were evident among individuals with moderate AD and significantly greater than elderly and individuals with mild AD who exhibited minimal effects. For negative words, significant differences were only observed between individuals with moderate AD and healthy elderly. Emotional Stroop effects among individuals with AD were not statistically different for positive and negative words. The impact of stimulus intensity level and AD‐associated changes to the prefrontal cortex and amygdala on emotional Stroop effects requires further investigation.     

Rules versus statistics: insights from a highly inflected language

Inflectional morphology has been taken as a paradigmatic example of rule-governed grammatical knowledge (Pinker, 1999). The plausibility of this claim may be related to the fact that it is mainly based on studies of English, which has a very simple inflectional system. We examined the representation of inflectional morphology in Serbian, which encodes number, gender, and case for nouns. Linguists standardly characterize this system as a complex set of rules, with disagreements about their exact form. We present analyses of a large corpus of nouns which showed that, as in English, Serbian inflectional morphology is quasiregular: It exhibits numerous partial regularities creating neighborhoods that vary in size and consistency. We then asked whether a simple connectionist network could encode this statistical information in a manner that also supported generalization. A network trained on 3,244 Serbian nouns learned to produce correctly inflected phonological forms from a specification of a word's lemma, gender, number, and case, and generalized to untrained cases. The model's performance was sensitive to variables that also influence human performance, including surface and lemma frequency. It was also influenced by inflectional neighborhood size, a novel measure of the consistency of meaning to form mapping. A word-naming experiment with native Serbian speakers showed that this measure also affects human performance. The results suggest that, as in English, generating correctly inflected forms involves satisfying a small number of simultaneous probabilistic constraints relating form and meaning. Thus, common computational mechanisms may govern the representation and use of inflectional information across typologically diverse languages.     

Phonological dyslexia: a test case for reading models

Following brain damage, skilled readers may encounter more severe problems in reading nonwords than familiar words, a type of deficit referred to as phonological dyslexia. We report on 2 individuals with Alzheimer's disease who show phonological dyslexia. Although highly accurate in reading familiar words aloud (even those with irregular spelling, such as sew), they were quite impaired in nonword reading. Both patients performed well in phonological tasks involving the repetition, identification, and manipulation of phonemes of orally presented words and nonwords. These results challenge the idea, proposed in the context of connectionist and evolutionary theories, that phonological dyslexia originates from a phonological deficit. However, the results are consistent with reading models, such as the dual-route model, that attribute phonological dyslexia to a deficit that selectively affects the reading mechanisms responsible for deriving the sounds of nonwords. According to these models, such a deficit is not necessarily accompanied by a more general phonological impairment.     

Recency effects for meaning and form in word selection

Three experiments examined the contribution of phonological availability in selecting words as predicted by interactive activation models of word production. Homophonous words such as week and weak permitted a word's phonological form to be activated on priming trials without selection of its meaning or lemma. Recent production of a homophone failed to significantly increase production of its twin as a sentence completion. However, speakers were significantly more likely to complete a sentence with a recently read or generated unambiguous word. This increase in response probability was unaffected by word frequency. The results constrain the degree to which experience and phonological availability may affect word selection in spoken language production.