Closed-class Items Research Articles

Input-output effects in the bilingual first language acquisition of English and Polish

Abstract This diary study looks at the acquisition of early words in two bilingual sisters (0;9–2;03.22 and 0;9–1;09.13) exposed to English and Polish from birth. It examines whether their parents’ input recorded on video can explain the proportions of different types of words learnt. Their bias for social words is explained by these words being heard in isolation; that for nouns by competitive proportions of noun types heard in the input. Contrarily, the late acquisition of closed-class items is explained by their high usage rates as part of constructions. Meanwhile, high numbers of early verbs in both children’s Polish are explained by inflected Polish verbs being heard (a) in isolation and (b) at the beginning and end of utterances more frequently than their uninflected English counterparts. These results are discussed within the context of the usage-based theory, with focus on the impact of word types for the acquisition of word groups.

Person as an inflectional category

AbstractThe category of person has both inflectional and lexical aspects, and the distinction provides a finely graduated grammatical trait, relatively stable in both families and areas, and revealing for both typology and linguistic geography. Inflectional behavior includes reference to speech-act roles, indexation of arguments, discreteness from other categories such as number or gender, assignment and/or placement in syntax, arrangement in paradigms, and general resemblance to closed-class items. Lexical behavior includes sharing categories and/or forms and/or syntactic behavior with major lexical classes (usually nouns) and generally resembling open-class items. Criteria are given here for typologizing person as more vs. less inflectional, some basic typological correlations are tested, and the worldwide linguistic-geographical distribution is mapped.

Grammatical Class Effects Across Impaired Child and Adult Populations.

The aims of this study are to compare quantitative and qualitative differences for noun/verb retrieval across language-impaired groups, examine naming errors with reference to psycholinguistic models of word processing, and shed light on the nature of the naming deficit as well as determine relevant group commonalities and differences. This includes an attempt to establish whether error types differentiate language-impaired children from adults, to determine effects of psycholinguistic variables on naming accuracies, and to link the results to genetic mechanisms and/or neural circuitry in the brain. A total of 89 (language-)impaired participants took part in this report: 24 adults with acquired aphasia, 20 adults with schizophrenia-spectrum disorder, 31 adults with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis, and 14 children with specific language impairment. The results of simultaneous multiple regression analyses for the errors in verb naming compared to the psycholinguistic variables for all language-impaired groups are reported and discussed in relation to models of lexical processing.This discussion will lead to considerations of genetic and/or neurobiological underpinnings: Presence of the noun–verb dissociation in focal and non-focal brain impairment make localization theories redundant, but support for wider neural network involvement.The patterns reported cannot be reduced to any one level of language processing, suggesting multiple interactions at different levels (e.g., receptive vs. expressive language abilities).Semantic-conceptual properties constrain syntactic properties with implications for phonological word form retrieval.Competition needs to be resolved at both conceptual and phonological levels of representation.Moreover, this study may provide a cross-pathological baseline that can be probed further with respect to recent suggestions concerning a reconsideration of open- vs. closed-class items, according to which verbs may actually fall into the latter rather than the standardly received former class.

Supporting Language Learners with the Meanings of Closed Class Items

The process of language learning involves the mastery of countless tasks: making the constituent sounds of the language being learned, learning the grammatical patterns, and acquiring the requisite vocabulary for reception and production. While a plethora of computational tools exist to facilitate the first and second of these tasks, a number of challenges arise with respect to enabling the third. This paper describes a tool that has been designed to support language learners with the challenge of understanding the use of closed-class lexical items. The process of learning the Arabic for office is (mktb) is relatively simple and should be possible by means of simple repetition of the word. However, it is much more difficult to learn and correctly use the Arabic equivalent of the word on. The current paper describes a mechanism for the delivery of diagnostic information regarding specific lexical examples, with the aim of clearly demonstrating why a particular translation of a given closed-class item may be appropriate in certain situations but not others, thereby helping learners to understand and use the term correctly.

Indirect passives and the selection of English participles

Previous studies of the English passive have not recognized a subtype whose auxiliaries are not simply be or get, but transitive grammatical verbs, in particular have, get, want, need, see or hear. These “indirect passives,” as I call them, are shown here to be verbal and not adjectival, and to not consist of embedded passive clauses containing simple passives, such as reduced relatives or other types of “small clauses.” Rather, indirect passives are structurally parallel to the traditional (“direct”) passives, except that their auxiliaries are transitive rather than intransitive verbs. Both passive and active participle phrases, of all subtypes, are argued here to be adjective phrases (APs), whose verbs have word-internal right hand heads, the As -en and -ing. Passive auxiliaries in both direct and indirect passives are then grammatical verbs that select adjective phrase complements.The limitation of passive auxiliaries to grammatical rather than open class verbs provides crucial evidence for dividing lexicons into two components, whose members enter syntactic derivations differently. Open class items, including the -en and -ing heads of lexically stored adjectives, enter trees only when derivational phases begin, while closed class items, including auxiliaries and the inflectional endings -en and -ing, can also enter derivations “late,”after a phasal domain is sent to Logical Form. Their “empty A heads” are neither interpreted as properties nor visible during the next derivational phase τ, prior to the late insertion of closed class items on τ. Consequently, even though they are distributionally and often morphologically APs, the inflectional participles (so called verbal passives and progressives) all exhibit familiar internal V-headed syntactic patterns.

The selection of closed-class elements during language production: a reassessment of the evidence and a new look on new data

Are closed-class items such as free-standing determiners and bound inflectional morphemes selected by a competitive or a noncompetitive mechanism? Jescheniak, Schriefers, and Lemhöfer provide a survey of the literature on this topic involving studies employing the picture–word interference and simple picture naming tasks. They claim that the extant evidence supports a competitive lexical selection mechanism for both types of closed-class items. In this commentary, we critically evaluate their proposal and present new empirical data. We come to the conclusion that the available data do not allow a straightforward interpretation in terms of a particular hypothesis of lexical selection. We highlight the need to consider answers to the theoretical question within a broader research context.

Exploiting Separation of Closed-Class Categories for Arabic Tokenization and Part-of-Speech Tagging

Research on the problem of morphological disambiguation of Arabic has noted that techniques developed for lexical disambiguation in English do not easily transfer over, since the affixation present in Arabic creates a very different tag set than for English, encoding both inflectional morphology and more complex tokenization sequences. This work takes a new approach to this problem based on a distinction between the open-class and closed-class categories of tokens, which differ both in their frequencies and in their possible morphological affixations. This separation simplifies the morphological analysis problem considerably, making it possible to use a Conditional Random Field model for joint tokenization and “core” part-of-speech tagging of the open-class items, while the closed-class items are handled by regular expressions. This work is therefore situated between data-driven approaches and those that use a morphological analyzer. For the tasks of tokenization and core part-of-speech tagging, the resulting system outperforms, on the given test set, a system that incorporates a morphological analyzer. We also evaluate the effects of the differences on parser performance when the tagger output is used for parser input.

The relation between content and structure in language production: An analysis of speech errors in semantic dementia

In order to explore the impact of a degraded semantic system on the structure of language production, we analysed transcripts from autobiographical memory interviews to identify naturally-occurring speech errors by eight patients with semantic dementia (SD) and eight age-matched normal speakers. Relative to controls, patients were significantly more likely to (a) substitute and omit open class words, (b) substitute (but not omit) closed class words, (c) substitute incorrect complex morphological forms and (d) produce semantically and/or syntactically anomalous sentences. Phonological errors were scarce in both groups. The study confirms previous evidence of SD patients’ problems with open class content words which are replaced by higher frequency, less specific terms. It presents the first evidence that SD patients have problems with closed class items and make syntactic as well as semantic speech errors, although these grammatical abnormalities are mostly subtle rather than gross. The results can be explained by the semantic deficit which disrupts the representation of a pre-verbal message, lexical retrieval and the early stages of grammatical encoding.

Prosodic patterns in Hebrew child-directed speech

The study examines prosodic characteristics of Hebrew speech directed to children between 0 ; 9-3 ; 0 years, based on longitudinal samples of 228,946 tokens (8,075 types). The distribution of prosodic patterns - the number of syllables and stress patterns - is analyzed across three lexical categories, distinguishing not only between open- and closed-class items, but also between these two categories and a third, innovative, class, referred to as between-class items. Results indicate that Hebrew CDS consists mainly of mono- and bisyllabic words, with differences between lexical categories; and that the most common stress pattern is word-final, with parallel distributions found for all categories. Additional analyses showed that verbs take word-final stress, but nouns are both trochaic and iambic. Finally, a developmental analysis indicates a significant increase in the number of iambic words in CDS. These findings have clear implications regarding the use of prosody for word segmentation and assignment of lexical class in infancy.

A Cross-Linguistic Speech Error Investigation of Functional Complexity

This work is a systematic, cross-linguistic examination of speech errors in English, Hindi, Japanese, Spanish and Turkish. It first describes a methodology for the generation of parallel corpora of error data, then uses these data to examine three general hypotheses about the relationship between language structure and the speech production system. All of the following hypotheses were supported by the data. Languages are equally complex. No overall differences were found in the numbers of errors made by speakers of the five languages in the study. Languages are processed in similar ways. English-based generalizations about language production were tested to see to what extent they would hold true across languages. It was found that, to a large degree, languages follow similar patterns. However, the relative numbers of phonological anticipations and perseverations in other languages did not follow the English pattern. Languages differ in that speech errors tend to cluster around loci of complexity within each language. Languages such as Turkish and Spanish, which have more inflectional morphology, exhibit more errors involving inflected forms, while languages such as Japanese, with rich systems of closed-class forms, tend to have more errors involving closed-class items.

From Inventories to Computations: Open /Closed Class Items and Substantive /Functional Heads

The distinction between open and closed class items represents a fundamental bifurcation in the mental lexicon. It proved useful to express certain basic generalisations in linguistics and in the study of language acquisition and language pathology. The distinction is too rough tough: it must be refined by paying attention to the computational properties of the two classes and their division of labor in the generation of complex expressions. It will be shown how the distinction is expressed within current linguistic models of the principles and parameters / minimalist type.

Starting Over: A Preliminary Study of Early Lexical and Syntactic Development in Internationally Adopted Preschoolers

To explore early language acquisition in internationally adopted preschoolers, we collected parental reports (CDI-2) and speech samples from 14 children adopted from China between the ages of 2 years, 7 months and 5 years, 1 month. Their lexical and syntactic development was qualitatively similar to infants acquiring English as a first language: nouns and social words dominated early vocabularies; verbs and closed-class items became more frequent as vocabulary size increased; and lexical and syntactic development were tightly correlated. This research has several implications for clinicians. First, it demonstrates that parental reports provide valid information during the first year after adoption and could be useful in identifying preschool children in need of further assessment. Nine to 15 months after arrival many children reached the ceiling of the CDI-2, suggesting that this instrument has limited utility after the first year. Finally, the rapid lexical and syntactic growth of these children suggests that many of them may eventually catch up with their native-born peers.

Event-related brain potential markers of high-language proficiency in adults

The central issue addressed is whether there are electrophysiological markers for high-language proficiency in adults. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded in 19 young adults who demonstrated either “normal” or “high” language proficiency. ERPs were obtained during a sentence-processing task and analyzed for specific response components elicited by different word types. The ERPs in the normal and high-language proficiency groups were similar for early sensory related processing but differed in the later components thought to be more closely related to lexical access and post-lexical processing. The findings for the ERP waveforms suggest that adults with high-language proficiency show slightly faster lexical access over left anterior brain regions for closed class items, and a reduced reliance on contextual information contained in sentences.

Differences in brain potentials to open and closed class words: class and frequency effects

Closed class (determiners, pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions etc.) and open class (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) words have different linguistic functions and have been proposed to be processed by different neural systems. Here, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in young German-speaking subjects while they read closed class and open class words flashed upon a video-screen. In the first experiment closed class words were sorted into four different frequency categories and open class words into three categories. The words were presented in a list with the subjects’ task to detect occasional non-words. A centroparietal negativity (N400) with a peak latency of about 400 ms varied in amplitude as a function of frequency in both classes. The N400 in closed class items, however, was considerably smaller than that in open class words of similar frequency. A left anterior negativity (N280/LPN) showed some degree of frequency-sensitivity regardless of word class. Only for the very high frequency closed class words a frontal negativity with an onset of about 400 ms was obtained (N400–700). This N400–700 effect was replicated in the second study, in which medium frequency closed and open class words and very high frequency closed class words were presented at the fifth position of simple German sentences. It is suggested that neither N400 nor the left anterior negativity (N280/LPN) distinguish qualitatively between the two word classes and thus claims about different brain systems involved in the processing of open and closed class words are not substantiated electrophysiologically. The N400–700 effect is possibly related to specific grammatical functions of some closed class items, such as determiners.

The dolphin’s grammatical competency: Comments on Kako (1999)

Kako (1999) reviews the evidence for syntactic competencies in several animal species exposed to artificial language systems, emphasizing the importance of core syntactic properties such as argument structure and closed-class items. We present evidence from our dolphin studies for the acquisition of the closed-class functionality of demonstratives, prepositions, conjunctions, and locatives. Sensitivity to argument structure is also evidenced by wholly untrained and consistent interpretations of the dolphin to probes of anomalous syntactic structures. These results are generated within our comprehension-based paradigm, which enables us to provide convincing objective evidence for the development and generalization of concepts by the dolphin subject. Demonstrations of animal language competencies may illuminate certain aspects of human linguistic competence by suggesting that the particular modeled subsets can derive from general cognitive mechanisms, rather than language-specific ones.

Elements of syntax in the systems of three language-trained animals

Which properties of syntax are uniquely human, and which can be acquired by other animals? Relevant evidence is provided by work with three language-trained animals: the African gray parrot Alex, who can produce and comprehend a small fragment of English; the bottle-nosed dolphins Ake and Phoenix, who can comprehend a gestural and an acoustic language, respectively; and the bonobo Kanzi, who can produce combinations of lexigrams and comprehend a significant fragment of English. The systems of these animals are examined for evidence of four core properties of syntax: discrete combinatorics, category-based rules, argument structure, and closed-class items. Additional studies that explore further what these animals can learn about these core properties are suggested.

Response to Pepperberg; Herman and Uyeyama; and Shanker, Savage-Rumbaugh, and Taylor

Whether the animals studied by Pepperberg, Herman, and Savage-Rumbaugh can learn prepositions remains an open and important question, though the dolphins’ use of demonstratives and conjuctions suggests an impressive competence for at least some closed-class items. It is unlikely that human-like brain structure can explain the capacities of these animals. Their capacities may instead be built upon the cognitive mechanisms favored by social complexity

Open class and closed class: Sentence-imitation experiments on intrasentential code-switching

ABSTRACTOne of the most striking facts about exchange errors in speech is that open class items are exchanged, but closed class items are not. This article argues that a pattern analogous to that in speech errors also appears in intrasentential code-switching. Intrasentential code-switching is the alternating use of two languages in a sentence by bilinguals. Studies of the spontaneous conversation of bilinguals have supported the claim that open class items may be codeswitched, but closed class items may not. This claim was tested by two sentence repetition experiments, one with Japanese/English bilinguals and the other with Spanish/English bilinguals. The results show that the switching of closed class items caused significantly longer response times and more errors than the switching of open class items.

Dual Processing of Open- and Closed-Class Words

A series of articles in the past two decades has suggested differential processing of open- and closed-class lexical items by normal adults. Difficulties in replicating a crucial study (Bradley, 1978), however, have weakened the dual route hypothesis. We matched 16 French open-class items to 16 closed-class items for phonological structure, word length, and relative word frequency. Three agrammatic aphasics were asked to read each word in isolation and in a sentence context. Error analysis revealed strikingly more phonological errors on closed-class than open-class items. Dysfluencies were greater on closed-class items and contributed to greater overall reading time for the closed-class words, consistent with a two-route model for the production of closed- and open-class lexical items in Broca's aphasics and, thus, normals.

Telegraphese and agrammatism: A cross-linguistic study

In this study, grammatical aspects of telegraphese (written telegram style) in normal adults are compared to agrammatic narratives in Broca's aphasia. The study is conducted in four languages: Dutch, German, Swedish, and Finnish. The background for this study is the claim, both from theoreticians and practitioners, that agrammatism can be equated with telegram style in normals. In summary, the comparisons of utterance length, grammaticality, omissions and substitutions of closed class items, and structures show that despite some superficial parallels the two registers of telegraphese and agrammatism are qualitatively different.