Language and Linguistics Compass最新文献

The ability to correctly interpret complex syntax and long sentences is gradually impaired as people age. Typical ageing is characterised by working memory deficits, which are thought to play an important role in determining whether syntax can be comprehended correctly, and neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) are thought to exacerbate these limitations. Furthermore, declines in processing speed appear to cause increasing difficulty in the proper allocation of cognitive resources necessary for sentence processing. Typically ageing adults may compensate for these deficits successfully when interpreting sentences using semantics or intact cognitive functions, but AD patients may exhibit deficits too severe for this to occur. The causes of syntax comprehension deficits in Alzheimer's are still contested, and may consist of language-specific impairments or deficits in general cognition impacting linguistic behaviour. In this review, we aim to give an overview of the main markers of cognitive ageing and AD in the domain of sentence comprehension, as well as discuss potential underlying factors that may affect sentence comprehension in older speakers and Alzheimer's patients.

Answering a question that is grounded in an image is a crucial ability that requires understanding the question, the visual context, and their interaction at many linguistic levels: among others, semantics, syntax and pragmatics. As such, visually-grounded questions have long been of interest to theoretical linguists and cognitive scientists. Moreover, they have inspired the first attempts to computationally model natural language understanding, where pioneering systems were faced with the highly challenging task—still unsolved—of jointly dealing with syntax, semantics and inference whilst understanding a visual context. Boosted by impressive advancements in machine learning, the task of answering visually-grounded questions has experienced a renewed interest in recent years, to the point of becoming a research sub-field at the intersection of computational linguistics and computer vision. In this paper, we review current approaches to the problem which encompass the development of datasets, models and frameworks. We conduct our investigation from the perspective of the theoretical linguists; we extract from pioneering computational linguistic work a list of desiderata that we use to review current computational achievements. We acknowledge that impressive progress has been made to reconcile the engineering with the theoretical view. At the same time, we claim that further research is needed to get to a unified approach which jointly encompasses all the underlying linguistic problems. We conclude the paper by sharing our own desiderata for the future.

The paper introduces the principle Maximise Presupposition and its cognates. The main focus of the literature and this article is on the inferences that arise as a result of reasoning with Maximise Presupposition (‘anti-presuppositions’). I will review the arguments put forward for distinguishing them from other inference types, most notably presuppositions and conversational implicatures. I will zoom in on three main issues regarding Maximise Presupposition and these inferences critically discussed in the literature: epistemic strength(ening), projection, and the role of alternatives. I will discuss more recent views which argue for either a uniform treatment of anti-presuppositions and implicatures and/or a revision of the original principle in light of new data and developments in pragmatics.

The northern half of the Andes—from Venezuela to Northern Peru—has seen dramatic losses of language diversity since the 16th century. Even so, the region's linguistic fabric is complex and multifaceted, and the impression of relatively low levels of diversity vis-à-vis Amazonia is to a perhaps considerable extent the result of different post-conquest trajectories rather than a reflection of pre-existing differences. As in Amazonia, branches of widespread families—Chibchan, Quechuan, but also far western outliers of Cariban—coexist with more local language families—principally Barbacoan and Chocoan—as well as a multitude of isolates, in particular on the eastern lowland-facing slopes of the Andes. Recent and ongoing projects of language documentation and description, as well as reconstitution of colonial sources, are contributing to profiling the linguistic diversity more sharply and more securely. Even at the present state of research, it is patent that the patchwork of languages of the Northern Andes, where evidence is available, evinces strong hallmarks of micro- and meso-level language contact, leading to the emergence of distinctive profiles on regional levels that call into question the idea of a reified ‘Andean’ language type. Furthermore, there is a striking signal of spatially structured typological variation throughout the Andes that is in need of explanation and interdisciplinary contextualization. This article surveys the state of the art on language classification and language contact studies for the Northern Andes, and also discusses how they may inform an interdisciplinary prehistory.

Australian Aboriginal English (AAE) is an enregistered contact-based variety spoken by 80% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This paper offers an overview of some of the features that characterise AAE as recorded in our corpus of naturally occurring interactions in Nyungar country, Southwest Western Australia. Led by Nyungar researcher Glenys Collard, our fieldwork rests on three pillars: (1) the data originate from group recording sessions, as culturally appropriate in the community; (2) speakers are recruited in venues such as medical centres and Perth city parks; (3) data collection is based on ‘yarning’: ‘a process of […] communicating and passing on history and knowledge’ (Terszak, 2008, p. 90). Our approach is strongly grounded in indigenous knowledge-sharing practices. We discuss how the traditional underpinnings of yarning as a culturally entrenched modality have made it possible to tap into the community's vernacular and to capture the urgent concerns and silenced histories of Aboriginal English speakers.

A large proportion of thoughts are internally generated. Of these, mind wandering—when attention shifts away from the current activity to an internal stream of thought—is frequent during reading and is negatively related to comprehension outcomes. Our goal is to review research on mind wandering during reading with an interdisciplinary and integrative lens that spans the cognitive, behavioural, computing and intervention sciences. We begin with theoretical developments on mind wandering, both in general and in the context of reading. Next, we discuss psychological research on how the text, context and reader interact to influence mind wandering and on associations between mind wandering and reading outcomes. We integrate the findings in a (working) theoretical account of mind wandering during reading. We then turn to computational models of mind wandering, including a short tutorial with examples on how to use machine learning to construct these models. Finally, we discuss emerging intervention research aimed at proactively reducing the occurrence of mind wandering or mitigating its effects. We conclude with open questions and directions for future research.

There has been considerable investigation of the roles that linguistic and world knowledge play during language comprehension. This investigation is important because its results have ramifications for both basic questions about how the mature intact language comprehension system functions and for applied questions regarding how comprehension systems that are impaired by aphasia might function. In the current paper, we review debates and research related to the representation and use of linguistic and world knowledge in language comprehension and then describe a recent computational model that takes both world and linguistic knowledge into account in predicting language comprehension difficulty. We then review empirical work that attempts to characterize the interactions and potential trade-offs between world and linguistic knowledge during language comprehension, and relate this work to the computational model previously described. We conclude with a brief overview of a few open questions regarding the representation of linguistic and world knowledge.