Controversies about CP: a comparison of language acquisition and language impairments in Broca's aphasia

In both language acquisition research and the study of language impairments in Broca's aphasia there is an ongoing debate whether or not phrase-structure representations contain the Complementizer Phrase (CP) layer. To shed some light on this debate, I will provide data on German child language and on German agrammatic Broca's aphasia. Analyses of subordinate clauses, wh-questions, and verb placement indicate that early child grammars do not generate the CP layer yet, whereas the ability to project the CP layer is retained in agrammatism.     

The processing of rhythmic structures in music and prosody by children with developmental dyslexia and developmental language disorder

Rhythm perception seems to be crucial to language development. Many studies have shown that children with developmental dyslexia and developmental language disorder have difficulties in processing rhythmic structures. In this study, we investigated the relationships between prosody and musical processing in Italian children with typical and atypical development. The tasks aimed to reproduce linguistic prosodic structures through musical sequences, offering a direct comparison between the two domains without violating the specificities of each one. About 16 Typically Developing children, 16 children with a diagnosis of Developmental Dyslexia, and 16 with a diagnosis of developmental language disorder (age 10–13 years) participated in the experimental study. Three tasks were administered: an association task between a sentence and its humming version, a stress discrimination task (between couples of sounds reproducing the intonation of Italian trisyllabic words), and an association task between trisyllabic nonwords with different stress position and three‐notes musical sequences with different musical stress. Children with developmental language disorder perform significantly lower than Typically Developing children on the humming test. By contrast, children with developmental dyslexia are significantly slower than TD in associating nonwords with musical sequences. Accuracy and speed in the experimental tests correlate with metaphonological, language, and word reading scores. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed within a multidimensional model of neurodevelopmental disorders including prosodic and rhythmic skills at word and sentence level.     

Familiar words can serve as a semantic seed for syntactic bootstrapping

Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. But how do they learn which contexts are linked to which semantic features in the first place? We investigate if 3‐ to 4‐year‐old children (n = 60) can learn about a syntactic context from tracking its use with only a few familiar words. After watching a 5‐min training video in which a novel function word (i.e., ‘ko’) replaced either personal pronouns or articles, children were able to infer semantic properties for novel words co‐occurring with the newly learned function word (i.e., objects vs. actions). These findings implicate a mechanism by which a distributional analysis, associated with a small vocabulary of known words, could be sufficient to identify some properties associated with specific syntactic contexts.     

小学生羞怯特质预测及语言风格模型构建

收集在线教学平台上1306名小学生的作文、日记及评论, 采用自然语言处理技术进行文本分析, 并应用机器学习模型实现对羞怯特质的自动预测, 构建小学生羞怯行为、认知和情绪的语言风格模型。研究发现：(1)扩充的心理词典适合分析小学生文本; (2)分别存在羞怯行为、认知和情绪问题的学生其日常用语既有共性也有特性, 且与普通学生存在差异; (3)羞怯各维度在不同分类器上达到较好的预测效果, 其中随机森林模型的整体表现相对最好。     

Amount of Learning and Signal Stability Modulate Emergence of Structure and Iconicity in Novel Signaling Systems

Iterated language learning experiments that explore the emergence of linguistic structure in the laboratory vary considerably in methodological implementation, limiting the generalizability of findings. Most studies also restrict themselves to exploring the emergence of combinatorial and compositional structure in isolation. Here, we use a novel signal space comprising binary auditory and visual sequences and manipulate the amount of learning and temporal stability of these signals. Participants had to learn signals for meanings differing in size, shape, and brightness; their productions in the test phase were transmitted to the next participant. Across transmission chains of 10 generations each, Experiment 1 varied how much learning of auditory signals took place, and Experiment 2 varied temporal stability of visual signals. We found that combinatorial structure emerged only for auditory signals, and iconicity emerged when the amount of learning was reduced, as an opportunity for rote-memorization hampers the exploration of the iconic affordances of the signal space. In addition, compositionality followed an inverted u-shaped trajectory raising across several generations before declining again toward the end of the transmission chains. This suggests that detection of systematic form-meaning linkages requires stable combinatorial units that can guide learners toward the structural properties of signals, but these combinatorial units had not yet emerged in these unfamiliar systems. Our findings underscore the importance of systematically manipulating training conditions and signal characteristics in iterated language learning experiments to study the interactions between the emergence of iconicity, combinatorial and compositional structure in novel signaling systems.     

Socio-economic status,executive functions,and theory of mind ability in adolescents: Relationships with language ability and cortisol

Socio-economic status (SES) is linked to the development of cognitive abilities, particularly language and executive processes. It is unclear whether these represent a single or independent correlates. We studied 110 Ecuadorian youths aged 12–17 with measures of SES, language, executive function, and theory of mind (ToM), a.k.a. mentalizing. A subsample gave hair samples to estimate recent cortisol levels. Restricting analyses to reliable measures, SES was highly associated with language skill, and to a lesser extent with executive function and ToM performance. However, those latter associations were attenuated and non-significant when language ability was controlled for statistically. Systemic cortisol levels were not associated with SES, but were significantly and negatively correlated with ToM, independent of variation in language skills. We conclude that language development underlies most of the impact of SES on executive function and ToM ability of adolescents, but that stress-related cortisol may have an independent, direct effect on mentalizing.     

Individual differences in performance and learning of visual anticipation in expert field hockey goalkeepers

The study of anticipation in truly expert performers can provide insight into how they cope with extreme time constraints. The purpose of this dual-experiment paper was to investigate individual differences; in anticipation of the penalty corner drag-flick, its trainability, and transfer of improvement to field settings. Australian international and national male field-hockey goalkeepers participated. In experiment 1, international and national goalkeepers (n = 11) completed a penalty corner drag-flick temporal occlusion task that presented; defensive runner positioning at the penalty spot, drag-flicker kinematics, and ball flight. Results indicated seven goalkeepers integrated runner contextual and drag-flicker kinematic information to anticipate above chance. The cause of individual differences was independent pick-up of run and kinematic cues that presented greater opportunity to integrate sources for anticipation. In experiment 2, a sub-sample of goalkeepers participated and received temporal occlusion training or no training. Results indicated individualized improvement in anticipation across video, field, and competition assessments for those that received the intervention, but not controls. Improvements on video test were retained for six months. An individual differences approach can identify deficiencies in anticipation, which can be improved through perceptual training that transfers to motor responses. This contributes to theoretical and practical knowledge to develop anticipation skill.     

二语具身认知：自动激活还是母语中介?

语言具身认知强调语言加工不是纯粹抽象符号的内部表征, 身体和环境也在其中发挥着重要作用。已有研究多来自母语(L1)领域, 二语(L2)认知中是否存在该效应及其发生机制依然存在争论。在总结行为和神经电生理学方面L2具身效应的存在的证据的基础上, 结合相关研究, 我们提出“自动激活”和“母语中介”两种假说, 并分析和评价两种假说的优缺点和影响因素。最后讨论了该领域存在的问题并就未来研究取向进行展望, 希望有助于完善语言具身认知理论, 增进对双语表征机制的了解, 有效提升L2教学。     

第二语言学习者形态复杂词的加工机制

大多数语言中, 形态复杂词所占的比例很高。形态复杂词形-义映射的规律性使得读者不仅能直接从心理词典中提取整词语义, 还可以利用形态规则来建构词语的语义。研究发现, 母语者可以利用形态规则来加工复杂词, 但第二语言(二语)学习者的研究结果存在较大的分歧, 且表现出和母语者不一样的结果模式。基于补充学习系统理论和情景性二语者假设, 我们尝试提出了二语形态复杂词加工机制的观点, 并据此解释研究分歧出现的原因。未来的研究需要探究词汇形态家族大小等因素对二语形态复杂词加工的影响, 以及揭示二语形态复杂词加工的神经机制。