Language and Linguistics Compass最新文献

Recently, much psycholinguistic research has been devoted to examining cognitive mechanisms engaged in language processing in the bilingual context, as this might provide in-depth insights into how different languages interact with one another as well as how and to what extent language competence affects cognition. At the same time, along with such a growing interest in studying bilingual populations, psycholinguistics as a discipline has been rapidly developing owing to the more and more widespread use of physiological research methods. Particularly, electroencephalography (EEG) has received much scholarly attention, as it can elucidate the exact time course of language processing. The present contribution explores current trends in EEG research on bilingual language processing and discusses how event-related potential (ERP) studies and their findings have been extended from the monolingual to the bilingual context. To this end, the paper discusses selected ERP experiments into language co-activation across different modalities, bilingual executive control, electrophysiological correlates of new meaning construction, neural changes accompanying foreign language learning, and the automaticity of emotional responding in bilingual speakers.

Recently, there has been an increased interest in demographically grounded bias in natural language processing (NLP) applications. Much of the recent work has focused on describing bias and providing an overview of bias in a larger context. Here, we provide a simple, actionable summary of this recent work. We outline five sources where bias can occur in NLP systems: (1) the data, (2) the annotation process, (3) the input representations, (4) the models, and finally (5) the research design (or how we conceptualize our research). We explore each of the bias sources in detail in this article, including examples and links to related work, as well as potential counter-measures.

Research in discourse processing has provided us with a strong foundation for understanding the characteristics of text and discourse, as well as their influence on our processing and representation of texts. However, recent advances in computational techniques have allowed researchers to examine discourse processes in new ways. The purpose of the current paper is to build on prior work in this domain and describe how new methodologies that consider the multi-dimensional nature of texts can serve as a complement to the existing literature. We focus on natural language processing (NLP) methodologies, in which computers calculate information about the linguistic and semantic properties of language data. We first provide a context for the origins of computational discourse analysis through the integration of research across computer science and psychology. We then provide an overview of different NLP methodologies and describe prior work that has leveraged these techniques to advance theoretical perspectives of discourse comprehension and production. Finally, we propose new areas of research that integrate these advances with traditional research methodologies in the field.

When the COVID-19 pandemic halted in-person data collection, many linguists adopted modern technologies to replace traditional methods, including speaker-led options in which participants record themselves using their own personal computers or smartphones and then email or upload the sound files to online storage sites for researchers to retrieve later. This study evaluated the suitability of such ‘home-made’ recordings for phonetic analysis of vowel space configurations, mergers, and nasalization by comparing simultaneous recordings from several popular personal devices (Macbook, PC laptop, iPad, iPhone and Android smartphone) to those taken from professional equipment (H4n field recorder, Focusrite with Audio Technica 2021 microphone). All personal devices conveyed vowel arrangements and nasalization patterns relatively faithfully (especially laptops), but absolute measurements varied, particularly for the female speaker and in the 750–1500 Hz range, which affected the locations (F1 × F2) of low and back vowels and reduced nasalization measurements (A1−P0) for the female's pre-nasal vowels. Based on these results, we assess the validity of remote recording using these consumer devices and offer recommendations for best practices for collecting high fidelity acoustic phonetic data from a distance.

Most readers have had the experience of initially failing to notice an omission or repetition of a function word, or a transposition of two adjacent words. In the present article, we review recent research investigating this phenomenon. We emphasize that failure to notice such errors is of substantial theoretical interest, given what we have learned about how systematically and incrementally readers inspect and process text. We endorse the idea that a process of rational inference may play a critical role, while we cast doubt on the idea that failure to notice errors arises from parallel processing of multiple words. We review a number of recent studies from our own laboratory that have investigated the relationship between eye movements during reading and noticing, or failing to notice, an error. While the conclusions from these studies are broadly consistent with a rational inference account, we find that when readers fail to notice an error, their eye movements generally show no indication that the error was registered at all. On its surface, this finding may be viewed as inconsistent with the idea that the rational inference process that enables readers to overlook errors is genuinely post-perceptual. We suggest a mechanism by which eye movement control models could account for this finding.

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.