Canonical Order Research Articles

Neural correlates of processing case in adults and children.

Neural correlates of processing case in adults and children.

Impact of the intrinsic complexity and prior linguistic knowledge on the acquisition of relative clauses

The study explores the extent to which the intrinsic complexity of relative clauses (RCs) and prior linguistic knowledge impact the acquisition of RCs by L2 learners. The study investigates the main sources of the erroneous and avoided types of English RCs produced by Persian-speaking learners of English at three proficiency levels. The data elicitation task was a translation test comprised of six types of RCs modeled on the RC types in the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy. To analyze the data, the occurrence frequencies of the correctly and erroneously formed RCs were counted and the avoided RCs were identified in each RC type. Then, a precise error analysis was done. The statistical analysis of 3840 RCs showed that the most common error types were (i) forming English RCs with resumptive pronouns and (ii) altering more-marked RCs with non-canonical word order to less-marked RCs with canonical word order. The errors are interpreted as evidence for the impact of both L1 transfer and the universal intrinsic constraints of RCs. The analysis of the avoided RC types, mostly the more marked RCs, indicates that avoidance is mainly linked to the universal intrinsic constraints of RCs.

«В Церкви Христовой не может быть допускаемо и не должно быть терпимо никакое самочиние и своеволие…» Документы Патриарха Тихона об украинских церковных делах 1918–1919 гг. из фонда Канцелярии Святейшего Синода

Documents from the fund of the Office of the Synod of the Russian State Historical Archive (RSHA. F. 796) characterizing the position of His Holiness Patriarch Tikhon, the Holy Synod and the Supreme Church Council of the Orthodox Russian Church on a number of issues of Church life in Ukraine in 1917-1918 are introduced into scientific circulation. Among the documents: letters from Patriarch Tikhon to the Ukrainian Ministers of Confessions in 1918 on the issue of episcopal supervision in some border Belarusian counties; reports to the Patriarch of the temporarily managing the Kiev diocese, Bishop Nazariy (Blinov) of Cherkasy on the Church affairs in Ukraine and especially in Kiev from late 1918 to mid-1919 with proposals for the organization of a new temporary Supreme Administration of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and on measures to calm down local nationalist activists; decisions of the Supreme Church Administration of the Orthodox Russian Church headed by the Patriarch on these proposals. The documents characterize St. Tikhon, on the one hand, as an Archpastor who cares about the spiritual well-being of his multinational flock, and on the other hand, as an adherent of the Canonical order, a supporter of Conciliar solutions to complex problems of Church life and an opponent of arbitrary actions (in particular, for nationalist reasons).

THE EVALUATIVE STANCE IN THE SPEECHES OF THE PHILIPPINE VICE PRESIDENT: A REFLECTION OF SOCIOCULTURAL VALUE

The study critically examined the Vice President’s speeches to determine the textual structure and evaluative stance of the Vice President’s speeches. The study revealed the textual structure of the speeches, mechanized by the Canonical Order of Spans and Textual Relation Classification: the nucleus before satellite and the satellite before nucleus order. The findings also showed that the evaluative stance in the speeches was revealed through evaluative language strategies: nomination, predication, thematization, stylization, topical segmentation, and completeness of the sentence. Furthermore, the results of this study also revealed that the Filipino values and ideology portrayed in the speeches are the Persistence of Family Ties and Raise the Standard of Living. Hence, the study's results determined how the audience may recognize the true meaning and detect the influence of a political leader’s language in relaying information and providing their socio-cultural values system. The study also emphasizes that speeches resonate by aligning with the audience’s values, enhancing emotional connections, and influencing beliefs and ideologies. Keywords: Textual Structure, Evaluative Stance, Vice President Speeches, Critical Discourse Analysis, Socio-cultural Value

Spin-Stripe Order Tied to the Pseudogap Phase in La1.8−xEu0.2SrxCuO4

Although spin and charge stripes in high-Tc cuprates have been extensively studied, the exact range of carrier concentration over which they form a static order remains uncertain, complicating efforts to understand their significance. The problem is challenging due to the combined effects of quenched disorder and competition with superconductivity—both significant in cuprates—which add to the inherent difficulty of determining phase boundaries. In La2−xSrxCuO4 (LSCO) and in zero external magnetic field, static spin stripes are confined to a doping range well below p*, the pseudogap boundary at zero temperature. However, when high fields suppress the competing effect of superconductivity, spin-stripe order is found to extend up to p*. Here, we investigate La1.8−xEu0.2SrxCuO4 (Eu-LSCO) using La139 nuclear magnetic resonance and observe field-dependent spin fluctuations suggesting a similar competition between superconductivity and spin order as in LSCO. Nevertheless, we find that static spin stripes are present practically up to p* irrespective of field strength: The stronger stripe order in Eu-LSCO prevents superconductivity from enforcing a nonmagnetic ground state, except very close to p*. Thus, spin-stripe order is consistently bounded by p* in both LSCO and Eu-LSCO, despite their differing balances between stripe order and superconductivity. This indicates that the canonical stripe order, where spins and charges are intertwined in a static pattern, is fundamentally tied to the pseudogap phase, though the exact nature of this connection has yet to be elucidated. Any stripe order beyond the pseudogap endpoint must then be of a different nature: Either spin and charge orders remain intertwined, but both fluctuating, or only spin order fluctuates while charge order remains static. The presence of spin-stripe order up to p* and the pervasive, slow, and field-dependent spin-stripe fluctuations, as well as the electronic inhomogeneity documented in this work, must all be carefully considered in discussions of Fermi surface transformations, putative quantum criticality, and strange metal behavior. Published by the American Physical Society 2025

Rational language comprehension depends on priors about both meaning and structure.

Language comprehension relies on integrating the perceived utterance with prior expectations. Previous investigations of expectations about sentence structure (the structural prior) have found that comprehenders often interpret rare constructions nonliterally. However, this work has mostly relied on analytic languages like English, where word order is the main way to indicate syntactic relations in the sentence. This raises the possibility that the structural prior over word order is not a universal part of the sentence processing toolkit, but rather a tool acquired only by speakers of languages where word order has special importance as the main source of syntactic information in the sentence. Moving away from English to make conclusions about more general cognitive strategies (Blasi et al., 2022), we investigate whether the structural prior over word order is a part of language processing more universally using Hindi and Russian, synthetic languages with flexible word order. We conducted two studies in Hindi (Ns = 50, 57, the latter preregistered) and three studies with the same materials, translated, in Russian (Ns = 50, 100, 100, all preregistered), manipulating plausibility and structural frequency. Structural frequency was manipulated by comparing simple clauses with the canonical word order (subject-object-verb in Hindi, subject-verb-object in Russian) to ones with a noncanonical (low frequency) word order (object-subject-verb in Hindi, object-verb-subject in Russian). We found that noncanonical sentences were interpreted nonliterally more often than canonical sentences, even though we used flexible-word-order languages. We conclude that the structural prior over word order is always evaluated in language processing, regardless of language type. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Focalization in situ and the absence of covert focus movement in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract Brazilian Portuguese allows focalization in situ, in the sense that any sub-constituent of the sentence can be focalized in the canonical order, being solely marked in the prosody. The paper addresses the question of whether foci in situ must undergo covert movement to a dedicated focus position, in order to assess the validity of the Focus Criterion in this language. First, it is argued that postverbal focalization is done truly in situ in overt syntax, without involving movement (either overtly or covertly) to a dedicated focus position (FocP) in the periphery of vP. Then, based on phenomena involving negative concord and contrastive topicalization, it is argued that focalization in situ does not involve covert movement to a dedicated focus position (FocP) in the periphery of CP. The paper therefore maintains that the Focus Criterion is not operative in Brazilian Portuguese.

Cognitive Performance Among Older Adults with Subjective Cognitive Decline.

Objectives: The main objective of this cross-sectional study was to investigate if there are significant differences in cognition between a group of older adults with subjective cognitive decline (SCD) and cognitively intact controls. Methods: An initial sample of 132 older people underwent an extensive neuropsychological evaluation (memory, executive functions, and language) and were classified according to diagnostic criteria. Two groups of 33 subjects each, controls and SCD, were formed using an a priori case-matching procedures in different variables: age, biological sex, years of education, cognitive reserve, and Mini-Mental State Exam. Results: The mean age and standard deviation in the control group were equal to 70.39 ± 4.31 years, while in the SCD group, they were 70.30 ± 4.33 years. The number of males (n = 9) and females (n = 24) was equal in both groups; the means of years of education were also quite similar. SCD participants have a significantly lower mood than the controls. Significant differences between groups were obtained in delayed recall, inhibitory control, and comprehension of sentences not fitted to canonical word order in Spanish. A logistic regression revealed that a lower score on the Stroop's interference condition is associated with a higher likelihood of having SCD. Finally, ROC analysis provided a model that performs better than random chance, and a cut-off score in Stroop's interference condition equal to 49 was suggested for clinically differentiating the two groups. Conclusions: This study highlights that, compared to a matched control group, participants with SCD showed subtle but significant neuropsychological differences.

Word order effects in sentence reading.

Word order effects in sentence reading.

Shared processing strategies as a mechanism for contact-induced change in flexible constituent order

Abstract This article argues for collecting primary data using psycholinguistic methods to better explain contact-induced change in constituent order. I compare the results of acceptability judgment experiments in Hindi-Urdu, Korean, and Malayalam, asking how ratings of the six grammatical orderings of subject, object, and verb might be affected by different contexts of experience with English. Two hypotheses are considered: (1) shared constructions: ratings of SVO, the canonical order in English, will vary with respect to language contact measures, or (2) shared processing strategies: overall ratings of noncanonical orders in each language will be affected by experience with English, a less flexible language. More contact with English corresponded to a greater difference in acceptability between canonical and noncanonical orders in Korean and Malayalam. For Hindi-Urdu, language contact was operationalized via agglomerative clustering, and SVO only behaved differently from other noncanonical orders in one of four participant groups. The shared strategies hypothesis is supported in all cases but one; this variation in results aligns with the variation found in nonexperimental studies of contact effects in constituent order. Taking a gradient approach to measuring both language contact and constituent order is thus a crucial step toward specifying descriptions and explanations of contact-induced syntactic change.

Als dan or dan als?

Abstract Dutch conditional sentences can occur in canonical clause order, such that the antecedent precedes the consequent, but also in non-canonical order, with the antecedent in sentence-final position. One explanation for the existence of this variety lies in the implicatures they convey: predictive conditionals have what Reuneker (2022) labels a more direct connectedness, possibly resulting in a larger preference for the canonical order than speech act conditionals, which are known for their indirect connectedness. Clause order preference could also be influenced by the desire to optimise discourse coherency (Lee 2001). We put these two factors to the test in an online experiment and found evidence for both theories but not for their interaction. Interestingly, we also found a general preference for the canonical order across all conditions.

The obligation of repairing the harm for property offence in the 1983 Code of Canon Law

The obligation of repairing the harm is a new requirement of canon law, added to the expiatory penalty for financial offences. The study aims at clarifying the nature of the obligation of reparation of the harm, in particular whether it is an additional penalty besides the expiatory one, whether reparation of the harm replaces the expiatory penalty for financial offences in the canonical legal order. It is worth noting that the previous Book VI of the 1983 Code did not impose an obligation to repair harm arising from property offences.

Basilica: New canonical decomposition in matching theory

Abstract In matching theory, one of the most fundamental and classical branches of combinatorics, canonical decompositions of graphs are powerful and versatile tools that form the basis of this theory. However, the abilities of the known canonical decompositions, that is, the Dulmage–Mendelsohn, Kotzig–Lovász, and Gallai–Edmonds decompositions, are limited because they are only applicable to particular classes of graphs, such as bipartite graphs, or they are too sparse to provide sufficient information. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a new canonical decomposition that is applicable to all graphs and provides much finer information. This decomposition also provides the answer to the longstanding absence of a canonical decomposition that is nontrivially applicable to general graphs with perfect matchings. We focus on the notion of factor‐components as the fundamental building blocks of a graph; through the factor‐components, our new canonical decomposition states how a graph is organized and how it contains all the maximum matchings. The main results that constitute our new theory are the following: (i) a canonical partial order over the set of factor‐components, which describes how a graph is constructed from its factor‐components; (ii) a generalization of the Kotzig–Lovász decomposition, which shows the inner structure of each factor‐component in the context of the entire graph; and (iii) a canonically described interrelationship between (i) and (ii), which integrates these two results into a unified theory of a canonical decomposition. These results are obtained in a self‐contained way, and our proof of the generalized Kotzig–Lovász decomposition contains a shortened and self‐contained proof of the classical counterpart.

Prosodic features in production reflect reading comprehension skill in high school students.

Young children's prosodic fluency correlates with their reading ability, as children who are better early readers also produce more adult-like prosodic cues to syntactic and semantic structure. But less work has explored this question for high school readers, who are more proficient readers, but still exhibit wide variability in reading comprehension skill and prosodic fluency. In the current study, we investigated acoustic indices of prosodic production in high school students (N = 40; ages 13-19) exhibiting a range of reading comprehension skill. Participants read aloud a series of 12 short stories which included simple statements, wh-questions, yes-no questions, quotatives, and ambiguous and unambiguous multiclausal sentences. In addition, to assess the contribution of discourse coherence, sentences were read in either canonical or randomized order. Acoustic cues known to index prosodic phenomena-duration, fundamental frequency, and intensity-were extracted and compared across structures and participants. Results demonstrated that high school readers as a group consistently signal syntactic and semantic structure with prosody, and that reading comprehension skill, above and beyond lower-level skills, correlates with prosodic fluency, as better comprehenders produced stronger prosodic cues. However, discourse coherence did not produce consistent effects. These results strengthen the finding that prosodic fluency and reading comprehension are linked, even for older, proficient readers. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Detection of Vocabulary Delay through Syntactic Complexity in Sentence Comprehension

Objectives: This study investigated the best condition for capturing signs of vocabulary delay in children using the sentence comprehension task (SCT), which consists of active and passive sentence structures with canonical and non-canonical word order conditions; and to determine whether working memory has significant explanatory power for SCT in children with vocabulary delay. Methods: Thirty-two children participated in this study, 16 vocabulary delayed (VD) children and 16 typically developing (TD) children aged 4 to 6 years. Participants completed the SCT, which is designed to focus only on syntactic features by minimizing top-down semantic processing in sentence processing. Four working memory (WM) tasks (Non-word repetition, NWR; Sentence repetition, SR; Digit-forward span, DF; and Digit-backward span, DB) were also administered. Results: The VD group showed greater difficulties in sentence comprehension, especially in the passive-canonical (P-C) condition. However, discriminant analysis results showed that the sum of all conditions in the SCT robustly discriminated these groups. In the VD group, sentence-level WM tasks predicted the passive-canonical (P-C) complex condition in the SCT. Conclusion: The current findings suggest that the VD group had greater difficulty processing more complex sentences, and WM has significant explanatory power for understanding complex syntactic structures in the VD group.

The psychophysics of compositionality: Relational scene perception occurs in a canonical order

The psychophysics of compositionality: Relational scene perception occurs in a canonical order

Categoricity-like Properties in the First Order Realm

By classical results of Dedekind and Zermelo, second order logic imposes categoricity features on Peano Arithmetic and Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. However, we have known since Skolem’s anti-categoricity theorems that the first order formulations of Peano Arithmetic and Zermelo- Fraenkel set theory (i.e., PA and ZF) are not categorical. Here we investigate various categoricity-like properties (including tightness, solidity, and internal categoricity) that are exhibited by a distinguished class of first order theories that include PA and ZF, with the aim of understanding what is special about canonical foundational first order theories.

Associativity and commutativity of partially ordered rings

Associativity and commutativity of partially ordered rings

A decade of language processing research: Which place for linguistic diversity?

This paper surveys the linguistic diversity in psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic research by examining the languages under investigation in major international conferences from 2012 to 2023. The results showed that these studies are highly skewed towards English in particular and Indo-European languages in general. However, the overall number of languages, as well as the number and proportion of Indo-European (other than English) and non-Indo-European languages increased over time, indicating that language processing research is becoming more and more diversified. This typological bias was also found in the inspection of specific linguistic phenomena: (a) morphosyntactic alignment, richness of case morphology, canonical word order, and (b) temporal concepts. The analyses of typological bias at the general and specific levels indicate that there are gaps in various topics, and these can be filled by including more non-Indo-European languages in the investigation process. In addition, a sociolinguistic bias in language processing research emerges as the languages investigated are more often ‘Western’ languages with more than one million speakers and a shared written form. These results reflect the numerous challenges encountered when conducting experiments on less familiar languages, such as the geographic difficulty finding participants speaking these languages, the need of institutional support, as well as the difficulties in setting up collaborations with native speakers, among others.

Norm and a Singular Administrative Act

Due to the terminological confusion and dispute in contemporary doctrine regarding the nature of singular administrative acts (Canons 35-95), the paper examines the interdependence between the canonical norm and this category of acts. The research goal is set in a broader context, as the issue of canonical norms and the normative system of the canonical legal order are examined synthetically. The author expresses the view that in relation to individual administrative acts it is inappropriate to use the term “norm”, but he considers it appropriate to use the category of “acts” in the sense of legal acts. This position is based on the following arguments: first, during the codification work, consultors did not use the category of “norm” but the category “singular administrative act”; secondly, the first chapter of the Code’s fourth title is “Common Norms” (Normae communes); in the name of the fourth title, “Singular Administrative Acts”, we find the term “acts”; thirdly, in the canonical system some acts (dispensations, privileges) are issued against or in addition to the law, being exceptions to general norm.