At grammatical faculty of language, flies outsmart men.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Stoop R
PROVIDER: S-EPMC3751931 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Psycholinguistic investigations of the way readers and speakers perceive gender have shown several biases associated with how gender is linguistically realized in language. Although such variations across languages offer interesting grounds for legitimate cross-linguistic comparisons, pertinent characteristics of grammatical systems - especially in terms of their gender asymmetries - have to be clearly identified. In this paper, we present a language index for researchers interested in the effect of grammatical gender on the mental representations of women and men. Our index is based on five main language groups (i.e., grammatical gender languages, languages with a combination of grammatical gender and natural gender, natural gender languages, genderless languages with few traces of grammatical gender and genderless languages) and three sets of specific features (morphology, masculine-male generics and asymmetries). Our index goes beyond existing ones in that it provides specific dimensions relevant to those interested in psychological and sociological impacts of language on the way we perceive women and men. We also offer a critical discussion of any endeavor to classify languages according to grammatical gender.
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Project description:Purpose Conducting in-depth grammatical analyses based on language samples can be time consuming. Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS) and the Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) analyses provide detailed information regarding the grammatical profiles of children and can be conducted using free computer-based software. Here, we provide a tutorial to support clinicians' use of computer-based analyses to aid diagnosis and develop and monitor treatment goals. Method We analyzed language samples of a 5-year-old with developmental language disorder and an adolescent with Down syndrome using computer-based software, Computerized Language Analysis. We focused on DSS and IPSyn analyses. The tutorial includes step-by-step procedures for conducting the analyses. We also illustrate how the analyses may be used to assist in diagnosis, develop treatment goals focused on grammatical targets, and monitor progress on these treatment goals. Conclusion Clinicians should consider using Computerized Language Analysis's IPSyn and DSS analyses to support grammatical language assessments used to aid diagnosis, develop treatment goals, and monitor progress on these treatment goals. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12021141.
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Project description:Linguistic and cognitive abilities manifest huge heterogeneity in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Some children present with commensurate language and cognitive abilities, while others show more variable patterns of development. Using spontaneous language samples, we investigate the presence and extent of grammatical language impairment in a heterogeneous sample of children with ASD. Findings from our sample suggest that children with ASD can be categorized into three meaningful subgroups: those with normal language, those with marked difficulty in grammatical production but relatively intact vocabulary, and those with more globally low language abilities. These findings support the use of sensitive assessment measures to evaluate language in autism, as well as the utility of within-disorder comparisons, in order to comprehensively define the various cognitive and linguistic phenotypes in this heterogeneous disorder.
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Project description:Purpose Early Interventions in Reading (Vaughn et al., 2006), the only literacy intervention with demonstrated effectiveness for U.S. dual language learners, was enhanced to support the development of oral language (vocabulary, grammar, and narrative) and literacy, which we refer to as "Language and Literacy Together." The primary focus of this study is to understand the extent to which grammatical skills of bilinguals with risk for language and/or reading difficulties improve in the Language and Literacy Together intervention. Method Fifteen first-grade dual language learners with risk for language and/or reading difficulties participated in an enhanced version of Early Interventions in Reading in Spanish. Children completed pre- and postintervention evaluations in Spanish and English, including grammatical testing from the Bilingual English Spanish Oral Screener (Peña et al., 2008) and narrative evaluation Test of Narrative Language story prompts (Gillam & Pearson, 2004; Gillam et al., n.d.). Data from six comparison participants with typical language skills who completed pre- and posttesting demonstrate the stability of the measures. Results The intervention group made gains in English and Spanish as evidenced by significant increases in their cloze and sentence repetition accuracy on the Bilingual English Spanish Oral Screener Morphosyntax subtest. They increased productivity on their narratives in Spanish and English as indexed by mean length of utterance in words but did not make gains in their overall grammaticality. Conclusions Structured intervention that includes an emphasis on grammatical elements in the context of a broader intervention can lead to change in the production of morphosyntax evident in both elicited constructions and narrative productivity as measured by mean length of utterance in words. Additional work is needed to determine if and how cross-linguistic transfer might be achieved for these learners.
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Project description:In this study, I report three experiments that examined whether words from one language of bilinguals can use the syntactic features form the other language, and how such syntactic co-activation might influence syntactic processing. In other words, I examined whether there are any cases in which an inherent syntactic feature a lexical item is inhibited and the syntactic feature that belongs to the other language is used, instead. In the non-switch condition in Experiments 1 and 2, Persian-English bilinguals described pictures using an adjective-noun string from the same language requested. In the switch condition, they used a noun and an adjective from the other language. In the switch condition in Experiment 3, participants used only the adjective of a noun phrase from the other language. The results showed that bilinguals may inhibit the activation of a word's syntactic feature and use the syntactic property from the other language, instead [e.g., pir?hane (shirt-N) black]. As the combinatorial node (the node that specifies different kinds of syntactic structures in which a word can be used) of a used adjective retains activation at least temporarily, bilinguals are more likely to use the same combinatorial node even with an adjective from the other language. Cross-language syntactic interference increased in the switch conditions. Moreover, more inappropriate responses were observed when switching from bilinguals' L2 to L1. The results also revealed that different experimental contexts may lead to different patterns of the control mechanism. The results will be interpreted in terms of Hartsuiker and Pickering's (2008) model of syntactic representation.
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Project description:In the generative tradition, the language faculty has been shrinking-perhaps to include only the mechanism of recursion. This paper argues that even this view of the language faculty is too expansive. We first argue that a language faculty is difficult to reconcile with evolutionary considerations. We then focus on recursion as a detailed case study, arguing that our ability to process recursive structure does not rely on recursion as a property of the grammar, but instead emerges gradually by piggybacking on domain-general sequence learning abilities. Evidence from genetics, comparative work on non-human primates, and cognitive neuroscience suggests that humans have evolved complex sequence learning skills, which were subsequently pressed into service to accommodate language. Constraints on sequence learning therefore have played an important role in shaping the cultural evolution of linguistic structure, including our limited abilities for processing recursive structure. Finally, we re-evaluate some of the key considerations that have often been taken to require the postulation of a language faculty.
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Project description:This is the first cross-language study to reveal nouns with invariable masculine or feminine grammatical gender assignments in nine gendered languages from different groups of one linguistic family. It evidences that many cases of gender universality have semantic motivation-an entity's grammatical gender correlates with either traditional masculine/feminine connotations, or cultural and symbolic implications. The study's findings also testify thematic preferences: most masculine grammatical gender universalities are found for the nouns denoting artifacts, whereas most feminine universalities are identified for abstract concepts. The apparent existence of grammatical gender universalities has a cognitive significance. From a psycholinguistic perspective, grammatical gender is viewed as a built-in personification pattern for speakers' mental representations. This research presents cross-linguistic constants in conceptualizing the natural kinds, artifacts, and abstract concepts denoted by the considered nouns, as "male" or "female".
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Project description:Previous electrophysiological studies that have examined temporal agreement violations in (Indo-European) languages that use grammatical affixes to mark time reference, have found a Left Anterior Negativity (LAN) and/or P600 ERP components, reflecting morpho-syntactic and syntactic processing, respectively. The current study investigates the electrophysiological processing of temporal relations in an African language (Akan) that uses grammatical tone, rather than morphological inflection, for time reference. Twenty-four native speakers of Akan listened to sentences with time reference violations. Our results demonstrate that a violation of a present context by a past verb yields a P600 time-locked to the verb. There was no such effect when a past context was violated by a present verb. In conclusion, while there are similarities in both Akan and Indo-European languages, as far as the modulation of the P600 effect is concerned, the nature of this effect seems to be different for these languages.
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Project description:Facial expressions in sign languages are used to express grammatical functions, such as question marking, but can also be used to express emotions (either the signer's own or in constructed action contexts). Emotions and grammatical functions can utilize the same articulators, and the combinations can be congruent or incongruent. For instance, surprise and polar questions can be marked by raised eyebrows, while anger is usually marked by lowered eyebrows. We investigated what happens when different emotions (neutral/surprise/anger) are combined with different sentence types (statement/polar question/wh-question) in Kazakh-Russian Sign Language (KRSL), replicating studies previously made for other sign languages. We asked 9 native signers (5 deaf, 4 hearing children of deaf adults) to sign 10 simple sentences in 9 conditions (3 emotions * 3 sentence types). We used OpenPose software to track eyebrow position in the video recordings. We found that emotions and sentence types influence eyebrow position in KRSL: eyebrows are raised for polar questions and surprise, and lowered for anger. There are also some interactions between the two factors, as well as some differences between hearing and deaf native signers, namely a smaller effect of polar questions for the deaf group, and a different interaction between emotions and wh-question marking in the two groups. We thus find evidence for the complex influences on non-manual behavior in signers of sign languages, and showcase a quantitative approach to this field.
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Project description:PURPOSE:The comprehension of tense/aspect morphology by children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) was assessed via Intermodal Preferential Looking (IPL) to determine whether this population's difficulties with producing these morphemes extended to their comprehension. METHOD:Four-year-old participants were assessed twice, 4 months apart. They viewed a video that presented side-by-side ongoing and completed events paired with familiar verbs with past tense and progressive morphology. Their eye movements were recorded and coded offline; the IPL measures included percentage of looking time at, and latency of first look to, the matching scene. Spontaneous speech samples were also obtained and coded for number of words, past tense, and progressive inflections. RESULTS:Relative to their baseline preferences, these 4-year-old children with ASD looked more quickly to and longer at the matching scene for both morphemes. Children who produced more words, including progressive and past morphemes, and those who performed better on standardized language assessments demonstrated better comprehension of -ing. CONCLUSIONS:Overall, these children with ASD demonstrated consistent comprehension of grammatical aspect morphology; moreover, their degree of comprehension was found to correlate with spontaneous production and standardized test scores.
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