Cross-linguistic transfer and borrowing in bilinguals

2007 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 369-390 ◽  
Author(s):  
VIORICA MARIAN ◽  
MARGARITA KAUSHANSKAYA
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Access ◽  
Language Production ◽  
Semantic Representation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Grammatical Category ◽  
Syntactic Structures ◽  
Abstract Nouns ◽  
Concrete Nouns ◽  
Linguistic Transfer ◽  
Language Environment

Cross-linguistic borrowing (overt use of words from the other language) and transfer (use of semantic or syntactic structures from the other language without active switching to that language) were examined during language production in Russian–English bilinguals. Grammatical category (noun/verb) and level of concreteness were found to influence language interaction. More cross-linguistic borrowings were found for nouns than for verbs and more cross-linguistic transfers were found for verbs than for nouns, suggesting that grammatical categories are differentially vulnerable to covert and overt language interaction. Moreover, concrete nouns and verbs were transferred more than abstract nouns and verbs, suggesting that level of concreteness influences lexical access in bilinguals. Overall, bilinguals transferred more when speaking their second and less proficient language and borrowed more when speaking their first and less recent language (especially if the described event took place in the other language). We suggest that language architecture (e.g., semantic representation, lexical access) and language environment influence the nature of cross-linguistic interaction.

Are Emotions Abstract or Concrete?

2017 ◽  
Vol 64 (5) ◽  
pp. 315-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xu Xu ◽  
Chunyan Kang ◽  
Kaia Sword ◽  
Taomei Guo
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Decision ◽  
Lexical Decision Task ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Event Related Potential ◽  
Decision Task ◽  
N400 Amplitude ◽  
Abstract Nouns ◽  
Concrete Nouns ◽  
Emotion Concepts ◽  
Healthy Participants

Abstract. The ability to identify and communicate emotions is essential to psychological well-being. Yet research focusing exclusively on emotion concepts has been limited. This study examined nouns that represent emotions (e.g., pleasure, guilt) in comparison to nouns that represent abstract (e.g., wisdom, failure) and concrete entities (e.g., flower, coffin). Twenty-five healthy participants completed a lexical decision task. Event-related potential (ERP) data showed that emotion nouns elicited less pronounced N400 than both abstract and concrete nouns. Further, N400 amplitude differences between emotion and concrete nouns were evident in both hemispheres, whereas the differences between emotion and abstract nouns had a left-lateralized distribution. These findings suggest representational distinctions, possibly in both verbal and imagery systems, between emotion concepts versus other concepts, implications of which for theories of affect representations and for research on affect disorders merit further investigation.

Lexical Access Problems Lead to Disfluencies in Speech

2010 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 169-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert J. Hartsuiker ◽  
Lies Notebaert
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Access ◽  
Picture Naming ◽  
Language Production ◽  
Line Drawings ◽  
Name Agreement ◽  
Access Problems ◽  
Agreement Condition

A picture naming experiment in Dutch tested whether disfluencies in speech can arise from difficulties in lexical access. Speakers described networks consisting of line drawings and paths connecting these drawings, and we manipulated picture name agreement. Consistent with our hypothesis, there were more pauses and more self-corrections in the low name agreement condition than the high name agreement condition, but there was no effect on repetitions. We also considered determiner frequency. There were more self-corrections and more repetitions when the picture name required the less frequent (neuter-gender) determiner “het” than the more frequent (common-gender) determiner “de”. These data suggest that difficulties in distinct stages of language production result in distinct patterns of disfluencies.

Intonational differences between the reduplicative babbling of French- and English-learning infants

1991 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 501-516 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. H. Whalen ◽  
Andrea G. Levitt ◽  
Qi Wang
Keyword(s):  
Fundamental Frequency ◽  
The Other ◽  
English Learning ◽  
Complex Contour ◽  
Language Groups ◽  
French And English ◽  
Target Languages ◽  
Perceptual Assessment ◽  
Language Environment

ABSTRACTThe two- and three-syllable reduplicative babbling of five French-learning and five English-learning infants (0;5 to 1; 1) was examined in two ways for intonational differences. The first measure was a categorization into one of five categories (RISING, FALLING, RISE-FALL, FALL-RISE, LEVEL) by expert listeners. The second was the fundamental frequency (F0) from the early, middle and late portion of each syllable. Both measures showed significant differences between the two language groups. 65% of the utterances from both groups were classified as either rising of falling. For the French children, these were divided equally into the rising and the falling categories, while 75% of those utterances for the English children were judged to have falling intonation. Proportions of the other three categories were not significantly different by language environment. In both languages, though, three-syllable utterances were more likely to have a complex contour than two-syllable ones. Analysis of the F0patterns confirmed the perceptual assessment. Several aspects of the target languages help explain these intonational differences in prelinguistic babbling.

scholarly journals The Proposition Bank: An Annotated Corpus of Semantic Roles

2005 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha Palmer ◽  
Daniel Gildea ◽  
Paul Kingsbury
Keyword(s):  
Automatic System ◽  
Semantic Representation ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Practical Approach ◽  
Semantic Role ◽  
Syntactic Parsing ◽  
Semantic Roles ◽  
Syntactic Structures ◽  
Annotation Process ◽  
Types Of Information

The Proposition Bank project takes a practical approach to semantic representation, adding a layer of predicate-argument information, or semantic role labels, to the syntactic structures of the Penn Treebank. The resulting resource can be thought of as shallow, in that it does not represent coreference, quantification, and many other higher-order phenomena, but also broad, in that it covers every instance of every verb in the corpus and allows representative statistics to be calculated. We discuss the criteria used to define the sets of semantic roles used in the annotation process and to analyze the frequency of syntactic/semantic alternations in the corpus. We describe an automatic system for semantic role tagging trained on the corpus and discuss the effect on its performance of various types of information, including a comparison of full syntactic parsing with a flat representation and the contribution of the empty “trace” categories of the treebank.

Minimodel of semantic synthesis of Russian sentences

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-136
Author(s):  
Lidija Iordanskaja ◽  
Igor Mel’čuk
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Representation ◽  
Conceptual Representation ◽  
Syntactic Structures ◽  
Approximate Matching ◽  
Sufficient Detail

Abstract A formal linguistitic model is presented, which produces, for a given conceptual representation of an extralinguistic situation, a corresponding semantic representation [SemR] that, in its turn, underlies the deep-syntactic representations of four near-synonymous Russian sentences expressing the starting information. Two full-fledged lexical entries are given for the lexemes besporjadki ‘disturbance’ and stolknovenie ‘clash(N)’, appearing in these sentences. Some principles of lexicalization – that is, matching the formal lexicographic definitions to the starting semantic representation in order to produce the deep-syntactic structures of the corresponding sentences – are formulated and illustrated; the problem of approximate matching is dealt with in sufficient detail.

On some constraints on right dislocation in Japanese

2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 303-326
Author(s):  
Tomoyuki Yoshida ◽  
Misaki Harada
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Main Function ◽  
Syntactic Structures ◽  
The Right ◽  
Phonological Phrase ◽  
Additional Constraints

AbstractThis paper takes up some constraints on right dislocation in Japanese (JRD) and shows that some of them are sensitive to the presence of an overt correlate for the right-dislocated element while others are not. Adopting a commonly proposed biclausal analysis of JRD, we propose that there are two ways to derive JRD patterns. One involves movement of the right-dislocated element and the other involves no such movement. We show how these two derivations account for island sensitivity and the interpretation of nominal modifiers and adverbs in JRD. The main function of overt correlates in all these cases is to signal where dislocated elements should be interpreted in various syntactic structures. For constraints that are not affected by the presence of overt correlates, we focus on the ones related to phonological phrasing and domains to which multiple RD applies. We show that a binarity constraint can be observed, where it is required for right-dislocated elements to be grouped into two phonological phrases. We then discuss two additional constraints on multiple RD: one on the composition of elements in a phonological phrase, and the other on the domain where multiple RD takes place.

scholarly journals Visual word recognition: evidence for a serial bottleneck in lexical access

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex L. White ◽  
Geoffrey M. Boynton ◽  
John Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Access ◽  
Visual Processing ◽  
Semantic Processing ◽  
The Other ◽  
Focused Attention ◽  
Capacity Limits ◽  
Semantic Categorization ◽  
Serial Processing ◽  
Trial Stimulus ◽  
Limited Accuracy

Reading is a demanding task, constrained by inherent processing capacity limits. Do those capacity limits allow for multiple words to be recognized in parallel? In a recent study, we measured semantic categorization accuracy for nouns presented in pairs. The words were replaced by post-masks after an interval that was set to each subject’s threshold, such that with focused attention they could categorize one word with ~80% accuracy. When subjects tried to divide attention between both words, their accuracy was so impaired that it supported a serial processing model: on each trial, subjects could categorize one word but had to guess about the other (White, Palmer & Boynton, 2018). In the experiments reported here, we investigated how our previous result generalizes across two tasks that require lexical access but vary in the depth of semantic processing (semantic categorization and lexical decision), and across different masking stimuli, word lengths, lexical frequencies and visual field positions. In all cases, the serial processing model was supported by two effects: (1) a sufficiently large accuracy deficit with divided compared to focused attention; and (2) a trial-by-trial stimulus processing tradeoff, meaning that the response to one word was more likely to be correct if the response to the other was incorrect. However, when the task was to detect colored letters, neither of those effects occurred, even though the post-masks limited accuracy in the same way. Altogether, the results are consistent with the hypothesis that visual processing of words is parallel but lexical access is serial.

scholarly journals Reality status in Kampan languages and its partial loss in Ucayali-Pajonal Ashéninka

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. e019007
Author(s):  
Toni Pedrós
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Binary Opposition ◽  
Grammatical Category ◽  
Partial Loss ◽  
Verb Classes ◽  
Grammatical Change

The Kampan languages have the grammatical feature called reality status, which consists of obligatory verbal affixes that express a binary opposition between realized and unrealized events. Although the validity of this grammatical category has been questioned for its lack of consistency cross-linguistically, the pan-Kampan system has been presented as an example of a canonical reality status opposition. This article examines and compares the almost identical reality status systems of all Kampan languages, and then, based on dedicated fieldwork, goes on to describe the change that Ucayali-Pajonal Ashéninka has undergone. This change consists in the loss of the reality status system in most I-class verbs, the largest by far of the two verb classes typical of Kampan languages, and makes Ucayali-Pajonal Ashéninka divergent in this aspect from the other Kampan languages. This loss shows a grammatical change taking place and therefore poses some questions about the evolution of such a grammatical feature, which are analyzed in the conclusions.

scholarly journals Temporal patterns of words with and without suffixes in spontaneous Hungarian

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-70
Author(s):  
Mária Gósy ◽  
Ákos Gocsál
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Access ◽  
Semantic Representation ◽  
Temporal Patterns ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Lexical Representations ◽  
Temporal Properties ◽  
Specific Factors

Temporal properties of words are defined by physiological, psychical, and language-specific factors. Lexical representations are assumed to be stored either in a morphologically decomposed form or in a conceptually non-decomposed form. We assumed that the duration of words with and without suffixes would refer to the route of their lexical access. Measured durations of Hungarian nouns with various lengths produced by 10 speakers in spontaneous utterances revealed significant differences, depending on the words’ morphological structures. Durations of monomorphemic nouns were shorter than those of multimorphemic nouns, irrespective of the number of syllables they contained. Our interpretation is that multimorphemic words are accessed decompositionally in spontaneous speech, meaning that stem activation of the semantic representation is followed by activation of one or more suffixes. Durational differences of monomorphemic and multimorphemic words were not stable across word lengths. The number of suffixes did not influence the words’ temporal patterns. Kokkuvõte. Mária Gósy ja Ákos Gocsál: Sufiksiga ja sufiksita sõnade ajaline struktuur spontaanses ungari keeles. Sõnade ajalised omadused sõltuvad füsioloogilistest, psühholoogilistest ja keelespetsiifilistest teguritest. Eelduste kohaselt on sõnad mentaalses leksikonis representeeritud kas morfeemideks analüüsituna või tervikmõistena. Uurimuses lähtuti eeldusest, et sufiksiga ja sufiksita sõnade kestus viitab sellele, kuidas juurdepääs neile toimub. Mõõdeti kümne kõneleja spontaansetes lausungites produtseeritud eri pikkusega ungari nimisõnade kestust. Ilmnes, et kestus sõltus oluliselt sõna morfoloogilisest ülesehitusest. Tüvisõnade kestus oli tuletiste omast lühem, sõltumata silpide arvust sõnas. Järelduseks saadi, et juurdepääs tuletistele toimub spontaanses kõnes osade kaupa: tüve semantilise representatsiooni aktiveerimisele järgneb sufiksi või sufiksite aktiveerimine. Tüvisõnade ja tuletiste kestuserinevused olid eri pikkusega sõnade puhul erinevad. Sufiksite arv sõna ajalist struktuuri ei mõjutanud. Märksõnad: kestus, nimisõnad, tüvisõnad ja tuletised, leksikaalne juurdepääs, spontaansed lausungid

Syntactic structures of Mandarin purposives

Linguistics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-126
Author(s):  
Wei-wen Roger Liao ◽  
Tzong-hong Jonah Lin
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
The Other ◽  
Linear Ordering ◽  
Verb Movement ◽  
Syntactic Structures ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
The Right

Abstract This paper investigates three constructions in Mandarin, all of which convey a purposive/teleological meaning, including the lai purposive, the hao purposive, and the bare purposive. Despite the fact that each type of purposive clause in Mandarin occurs at the right edge of a sentence, it is argued that none of the purposive clause is a genuine right adjunct in the underlying syntactic structure. On the other hand, our analysis shows that the lai purposive employs complementation of a secondary predicate, the hao purposive involves conjunction of two clauses, and the bare purposive should be analyzed as left adjunction that is stranded in the right edge after verb movement. The evidence for our analysis is drawn from subject and object gaps, the ba-construction in Mandarin, agentivity, and linear ordering of multiple purposive clauses. This work thus demonstrates representative cases where a structure that appears to involve right adjunction may in fact employ no right adjunction at all. The conclusion is thus consistent with the prediction of Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA).

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