Semantic and syntactic aspects of the mass/count distinction: a case study of semantic dementia

Semantic and syntactic contributions to processing of mass and count nouns were assessed by examining the performance of a patient suffering from a pure semantic deficit. Semantic and syntactic processing was evaluated on grammaticality judgement and sentence-picture matching tasks, respectively, where each task involved mass and count readings of metonymic nouns. While the patient did not show impaired performance on the grammaticality judgment task, he manifested difficulties in making mass/count distinctions in the sentence-picture matching task. It is thus argued that while distributionally the mass/count distinction may be established on a purely syntactic basis, cognitive processing of mass/count information requires both intact syntactic and semantic knowledge.     

Modeling spatial knowledge

A person's cognitive map, or knowledge of large-scale space, is built up from observations gathered as he travels through the environment. It acts as a problem solver to find routes and relative positions, as well as describing the current location. The TOUR model captures the multiple representations that make up the cognitive map, the problem-solving strategies it uses, and the mechanisms for assimilating new information. The representations have rich collections of states of partial knowledge, which support many of the performance characteristics of common-sense knowledge.     

Thematic role properties of subjects and objects

This paper tests two claims about the thematic roles Agent and Patient: first, that they can be decomposed into more primitive features, as laid out in Dowty's (1991) Proto-Roles Hypothesis; and second, that these properties can be inferred directly from the grammatical roles subject and object. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants rated the Proto-Roles properties of the subject and object of transitive sentences with real verbs. Subjects were rated as more Agent-like than objects, while objects were rated as more Patient-like than subjects. Experiment 3 used transitive sentences with nonsense content words (e.g. "The rom mecked the zarg"). Even in the absence of a known verb, the results were the same. Experiment 4 examined the corollary prediction that subjects and objects should not differ on grammatically irrelevant properties (e.g. "being liquid"); this prediction was confirmed. In Experiment 5, verbs that do not permit objects (e.g. "fall," "erupt") were placed in the transitive frame. Results were the same as in Experiments 1 through 3. Moreover, the semantics of the verb were altered by the frame, indicating that participants tried to fuse the semantics of the verb with those of the frame. Possible sources of these inferences are considered.     

Language, thought, and real nouns

We test the claim that acquiring a mass-count language, like English, causes speakers to think differently about entities in the world, relative to speakers of classifier languages like Japanese. We use three tasks to assess this claim: object-substance rating, quantity judgment, and word extension. Using the first two tasks, we present evidence that learning mass-count syntax has little effect on the interpretation of familiar nouns between Japanese and English, and that speakers of these languages do not divide up referents differently along an individuation continuum, as claimed in some previous reports [Gentner, D., & Boroditsky, L. (2001). Individuation, relativity, and early word learning. In M. Bowerman, & S. Levinson (Eds.), Language acquisition and conceptual development (pp. 215-256). Cambridge University Press]. Instead, we argue that previous cross-linguistic differences [Imai, M., & Gentner, D. (1997). A cross-linguistic study of early word meaning: Universal ontology and linguistic influence. Cognition, 62, 169-200] are attributable to “lexical statistics” [Gleitman, L., & Papafragou, A. (2005). Language and thought. In K. Holyoak, & R. Morrison (Eds.), Cambridge handbook of thinking and reasoning (pp. 633-661). Cambridge University Press]. Speakers of English are more likely to think that a novel ambiguous expression like “the blicket” refers to a kind of object (relative to speakers of Japanese) because speakers of English are likely to assume that “blicket” is a count noun rather than a mass noun, based on the relative frequency of each kind of word in English. This is confirmed by testing Mandarin-English bilinguals with a word extension task. We find that bilinguals tested in English with mass-count ambiguous syntax extend novel words like English monolinguals (and assume that a word like “blicket” refers to a kind of object). In contrast, bilinguals tested in Mandarin are significantly more likely to extend novel words by material. Thus, online lexical statistics, rather than non-linguistic thought, mediate cross-linguistic differences in word extension. We suggest that speakers of Mandarin, English, and Japanese draw on a universal set of lexical meanings, and that mass-count syntax allows speakers of English to select among these meanings.     

English-speaking children's comprehension of relative clauses: evidence for general-cognitive and language-specific constraints on development

Children must possess some ability to process input in a meaningful manner to acquire language. The present study reports on data from an experiment investigating 3- to 5-year-old English-speaking children's understanding of restrictive relative clauses manipulated for embeddedness and focus. The results of the study showed that English-speaking children acquire right-branching before center-embedded structures. Comparisons made with data from Portuguese-speaking children suggest general-cognitive and language-specific constraints on development, and with respect to English, a clause expansion approach to processing in development.     

What's different in second-language processing? Evidence from event-related brain potentials

German sentences which were either correct, contained a selectional restriction violation, or a word category violation were presented auditorily to 16 native speakers of German (L1 group) and to 16 native speakers of Russian, who had learned German after the age of 10 (L2 group). Semantic violations elicited an N400 effect for both groups, but with a reduced amplitude and a longer peak latency in the L2 group. Compared to correct sentences, sentences with a phrase structure violation elicited an early anterior negativity followed by a broad centro-parietal positivity in native speakers. By contrast, there was no differential modulation of the early anterior negativity in the L2 group. A late positivity was also elicited in the second language learners, but it was slightly delayed compared to that shown by native speakers. This pattern is discussed in terms of different degrees of automaticity with respect to the subprocesses involved in sentence comprehension.