Language and Linguistics Compass最新文献

This article provides an overview of what is known as the noun phrase (NP) versus determiner phrase (DP) debate. I first revisit the arguments by which a language would be assigned an NP or rather a DP structure, followed by the proper characterisation, function and features of determiners. I then summarise the typological endeavour of Bošković, surveying some of the syntactic and semantic correlates of the NP versus DP parameter and applying four of the diagnostics Bošković developed to Turkish as well as providing examples from other languages such as Korean, Vietnamese and Lithuanian. For each diagnostic, I provide some counterarguments that cast doubt on the validity of those diagnostics. I conclude, in line with Kornfilt (2017, 2018) that proposing correlations between an NP or a DP status of the nominal domain and a certain clustering of syntactic or semantic properties should be abandoned.

Text comprehension theories propose that readers try to achieve a coherent representation of the situation depicted in a text. When reading multiple texts on the same topic, however, achieving a coherent representation of a situation poses additional challenges. Different sources may offer inconsistent descriptions or interpretations of the situation, or even contradict one another. Thus, additional assumptions are needed to explain how readers build a coherent representation of a situation when reading multiple individual texts on the same subject. This paper reviews research contributions from the psychology of text comprehension on how readers integrate inconsistent information from multiple sources. We concentrate on two key processes: The construction of an interconnected representation of sources and text contents, and the evaluation of the acquired information. We begin by briefly discussing the standard approach of single-text comprehension theories to representational coherence. Then, we examine the Documents Model Framework and other, associated proposals that claim that readers can achieve coherence of divergent text contents by constructing a representation of the texts which integrates information about the sources of the contents. We also consider the role of source evaluation as a reader strategy for constructing a single, coherent solution. Finally, we discuss theoretical and practical implications and we make suggestions for further readings.

Deaf individuals have unique sensory and linguistic experiences that influence how they read and become skilled readers. This review presents our current understanding of the neurocognitive underpinnings of reading skill in deaf adults. Key behavioural and neuroimaging studies are integrated to build a profile of skilled adult deaf readers and to examine how changes in visual attention and reduced access to auditory input and phonology shape how they read both words and sentences. Crucially, the behaviours, processes, and neural circuity of deaf readers are compared to those of hearing readers with similar reading ability to help identify alternative pathways to reading success. Overall, sensitivity to orthographic and semantic information is comparable for skilled deaf and hearing readers, but deaf readers rely less on phonology and show greater engagement of the right hemisphere in visual word processing. During sentence reading, deaf readers process visual word forms more efficiently and may have a greater reliance on and altered connectivity to semantic information compared to their hearing peers. These findings highlight the plasticity of the reading system and point to alternative pathways to reading success.

Perceptual dialectology is the study of the thoughts, beliefs and attitudes that nonlinguists have about their dialect landscapes. The field foregrounds these perceptions which have been historically presumed to be of only peripheral significance in linguistic research. One of the most influential tools for studying the perceptions of nonlinguists has been the mental map task, in which participants are asked to indicate on a map where specific varieties of a language can be found, providing a label for each region delimited. This article examines the history of mental mapping in perceptual dialectology, explores recent advances in the collection, analysis and processing of such maps using Geographic Information Systems tools and other technological advancements, and provides insights about how these advances are allowing researchers to answer more questions about connections between language use, language perception, place, people and identities.

Age is one of the key variables in the field of language variation and change (LVC). The vast majority of experimental work generally views a speaker's date of birth—chronological age—as a good reflection of both their social age, for example, which generation they identify with and how strongly and their biological age, that is, the physiological age of their body. This paper aims to provide the reader with tools to tease apart these three ways of conceptualising the variable of age. It reviews qualitative and quantitative methods from fields adjacent to LVC that will enable linguists of different theoretical interests to tap into biological and social aspects of ageing. In doing so, it provides a practical manual for linguists wishing to work from a more multifaceted understanding of one of the key variables in many linguistic subfields.

Word representations are mathematical objects that capture the semantic and syntactic properties of words in a way that is interpretable by machines. Recently, encoding word properties into low-dimensional vector spaces using neural networks has become increasingly popular. Word embeddings are now used as the main input to natural language processing (NLP) applications, achieving cutting-edge results. Nevertheless, most word-embedding studies are carried out with general-domain text and evaluation datasets, and their results do not necessarily apply to text from other domains (e.g., biomedicine) that are linguistically distinct from general English. To achieve maximum benefit when using word embeddings for biomedical NLP tasks, they need to be induced and evaluated using in-domain resources. Thus, it is essential to create a detailed review of biomedical embeddings that can be used as a reference for researchers to train in-domain models. In this paper, we review biomedical word embedding studies from three key aspects: the corpora, models and evaluation methods. We first describe the characteristics of various biomedical corpora, and then compare popular embedding models. After that, we discuss different evaluation methods for biomedical embeddings. For each aspect, we summarize the various challenges discussed in the literature. Finally, we conclude the paper by proposing future directions that will help advance research into biomedical embeddings.

This review addresses the question: How are signed languages learned by adult hearing learners? While there has been much research on second language learners of spoken languages, there has been far less work in signed languages. Comparing sign and spoken second language acquisition allows us to investigate whether learning patterns are general (across the visual and oral modalities) or specific (in only one of the modalities), and hence furthers our understanding of second-language acquisition (SLA). The paper integrates current sign language learning research into the wider field of SLA by focussing on two areas: (1) Does ‘transfer’ occur between the spoken first language and signed second language and (2) What kind of learning patterns are the same across language modalities versus unique to each modality?

We provide an update on the state of research on phonation (the production of sound by the vocal folds) since Gordon and Ladefoged's, Journal of Phonetics, 2001 29, 383–406 overview, focusing on the acoustics of breathiness, creak, and other linguistic voice qualities. We highlight cross-linguistic variation, introduce measuring techniques, and discuss the relationship between phonation and other phonological dimensions (e.g., tone, vowel quality). We also review perceptual literature, an area of phonation research that has greatly expanded recently. Taken together, the studies reviewed demonstrate that phonation types indeed lie not just on a single continuum, but in a multidimensional space.

Summer Linguistics Institute for Youth Scholars (SLIYS), held on The Ohio State University campus, offers intensive courses in linguistics to high school students from Ohio and around the world. Each year, nearly 100 students participate in 1- or 2-week-long camps where they engage in the scientific study of language and experience a realistic introduction to academics and university life. The programme's objectives are to provide students with the linguistic tools needed to understand their native language, become better learners of a foreign language and investigate unknown languages. Beyond academics, the high school camp immerses students into university life in a controlled environment providing a non-threatening experience in academia to students unfamiliar with college. This article describes the evolution of SLIYS and its current incarnation, specifically how and why it works. We discuss the goals of the programme, the structure of SLIYS and how it is sustained, how the programme is assessed, and finally we share information about the general cost of the programme and our recruiting efforts that ensure that SLIYS continues in future years.

Naturalistic reading corpora are collections of texts that were not designed to be used in specific linguistic studies and that were read by participants whose eye-movements or reading time was measured. These resources are used to study the cognitive processing of linguistic phenomena naturally present in texts, and they encourage the development of robust models of cognitive linguistic processing. These properties make the use of natural text corpora interesting for the study of pronoun and coreference resolution. In the psycholinguistic literature, many linguistic factors that have an influence on pronoun and coreference resolution have been identified but there is still a lot unknown about the interaction of these factors in naturalistic data. In addition, items used in psycholinguistic studies are short; therefore, naturalistic reading corpora are a resource to study pronoun and coreference resolution in realistic discourse. In this survey, we discuss the models for pronoun and coreference resolution that have been developed so far. We explain the methodological challenges related to the use of naturalistic data and speculate how such data can be used to evaluate theories of pronoun and coreference resolution and so lead to the development of broad coverage models in which various linguistic levels (syntax, semantics and discourse) are integrated.