Cross-linguistic Variation Research Articles

The interaction of central and peripheral processing in L2 handwritten production: Evidence from cross-linguistic variations

Abstract The current study explores the interplay between central and peripheral processes in second language (L2) handwriting among bilinguals with diverse orthographic backgrounds. Our investigation delves into the cross-linguistic transfer effect in Spanish–English and Chinese–English bilinguals, emphasizing lexical frequency and phoneme-grapheme (P-O) consistency in spelling-to-dictation and immediate copying tasks. Results reveal that the interaction between central and peripheral processes in L2 handwritten production is shaped by the bilinguals' native language (L1) orthographic characteristics. Spanish–English bilinguals exhibited sensitivity to P-O consistency and the spread of this effect from central to peripheral processes throughout both tasks. Conversely, Chinese–English bilinguals showed heightened sensitivity to lexical frequency during orthographic planning and motor execution, particularly in the immediate copying task. In a broader context, these findings suggest that the parallel and cascading coordination of the L2 writing system is modulated by cross-linguistic variations. The implications of our findings hold relevance for handwriting production and bilingualism research.

The semantics of the polysemic Amharic wordfit‘face’

AbstractThis study examines the figurative conceptualization of the polysemic Amharic wordfit‘face.’ Based primarily on the “lexical approach,” the study shows how the meaning of “face” extends metaphorically and metonymically to such abstract concepts as time, emotions, and the intellect. Most of the face-related words in Amharic are also found in other languages, though cross-linguistic differences also exist. In the comparative study of body-part terms, a new approach is proposed, the “encompassing approach,” which claims that the contrastive study of body-part terms cannot be confined to a single term. Rather, it needs to consider the potential association between individual parts and specific cognitive processes. Once these processes are considered, the cross-linguistic variations between related body-part terms become marginal. We conclude that the (near)-universal status of body parts cannot be measured by examining the explicit use of a given part only.

The Missing VP Illusion in Spanish: Assessing the Role of Language Statistics and Working Memory.

In English, double center-embedded sentences yield a so-called "missing VP illusion": When they are ungrammatical due to a missing verb, they are judged as equally or even more acceptable than their grammatical counterparts. The illusion is often attributed to working memory limitations. Additionally, it has been suggested that statistical differences across languages-e.g., the lower frequency of consecutive verb clusters in verb-initial languages-play a role, since languages with verb-final embedded clauses are less susceptible to the illusion than English. In two speeded acceptability experiments, we demonstrate that the illusion arises in Spanish, a verb-initial language. We also find that the strength of the illusion is modulated by the number of consecutive verbs, consistent with the involvement of language statistics. By contrast, we do not find that participants' working memory modulates the illusion, failing to support a role of memory limitations. Our results support the generalization that cross-linguistic variation in the missing VP illusion is associated with language statistics and verb position and they demonstrate that this is the case even in languages in which word order is not a reliable processing cue.

Another voice for another language?

Abstract This study examines crosslinguistic vocal register variations (pitch level and range) within speakers of L1 French-L2 English and L1 English-L2 French. Participants were recorded on three tasks: reading aloud, video retelling, and free speech, in both French and English. A separate analysis of the f 0 of voiced pauses in relation to vocal register is presented. The main hypothesis is that French is spoken on a higher vocal register than English, the difference being due to the divergent prosodic systems of the two languages, as opposed to an effect of the language status for the speaker (L1 or L2). The results partially confirm it, although the L1 and the task type influence the language effect. In addition, results indicate that pitch level and pitch range can vary independently; that the task has a significant effect on vocal register; and that the f 0 of voiced pauses is lower than the average speaking f 0, thus impacting its measure and raising methodological issues for the study of vocal register.

Looking differently at locative events: the cognitive impact of linguistic preferences

Abstract While the Talmian dichotomy between satellite-framed and verb-framed languages has been amply studied for motion events, it has been less discussed for locative events, even if Talmy considers these to be included in motion events. This paper discusses such locative events, starting from the significant cross-linguistic variation among Dutch, French, and English. Dutch habitually encodes location via cardinal posture verbs (CPVs; ‘SIT’, ‘LIE’, ‘STAND’) expressing the orientation of the Figure, French prefers orientation-neutral existence verbs like être ‘be’ and English – unlike for motion events – straddles the middle with a marked preference for be but the possibility to occasionally rely on CPVs. Through the analysis of recognition performances and gazing behaviours in a non-verbal recognition task, this study confirms a (subtle) cognitive impact of different linguistic preferences on the mental representation of locative events. More specifically, they confirm the continuum suggested by Lemmens (2005, Parcours linguistiques. Domaine anglais (pp. 223–244). Publications de l’Université St Etienne.) for the domain of location with French on the one extreme and Dutch on the other with English in-between, behaving like French in some contexts but like Dutch in others.

Turkish correlatives in monolingual Turkish and bilingual Turkish-German grammar

Our paper presents an experimental study on multiple correlatives in Turkish. The research questions that guided our study are twofold: (a) What are the presuppositions of multiple correlatives in Turkish? (b) Is there a difference between monolingual Turkish speakers and bilingual Turkish-German speakers with respect to multiple correlatives? Question (a) targets the presuppositions of interrogative-based correlatives. Since the presuppositions of multiple questions are crosslinguistically variable, are the presuppositions of correlatives based on them variable in a parallel way? Question (b) targets crosslinguistic variability in the acceptability of multiple correlatives. While Turkish permits them, German does not. Does this variability affect bilingual speakers’ grammars? Our results indicate that (a) multiple correlatives share the presuppositions of the questions they contain and (b) bilingual speakers’ grammar of correlatives is different from that of monolingual speakers. The paper sheds a new light on crosslinguistic variation in the domain of questions and correlatives and on bilingual grammar.

On null-subject languages and the Overt Pronoun Constraint: A comparison of English, Mandarin and Japanese

This study reports on findings from two experiments investigating the interpretive patterns of overt pronouns in an embedded subject position with three types of matrix subjects (i.e. a referential NP, a quantified NP, or a wh-phrase) in Mandarin, English, and Japanese. According to the Overt Pronoun Constraint (OPC), overt pronouns in null-subject languages cannot have bound-variable interpretation, i.e. they cannot be bound by a quantified NP or a wh-phrase. This constraint has been assumed to be universal and accessible for learners at early stages of second language (L2) acquisition. The results of Experiment 1 show that, although Mandarin is a null-subject language, Mandarin and English native speakers as well as L2 learners of both languages demonstrated similar patterns of interpretation, accepting both coreference readings and bound-variable readings, the latter being contrary to the prediction of the OPC. The results of Experiment 2 show that Japanese native speakers differed from Mandarin native speakers in that the former accepted both coreference readings and bound-variable readings at chance levels. These findings clearly demonstrate that the OPC cannot be characterized as a property of null-subject languages generally, given the lack of effect in Mandarin, and there are cross-linguistic variations in interpretive patterns for overt pronouns among languages that exhibit the effect.

Precedence clauses in the world’s languages: negative markers need not be expletive

AbstractLarge-scale typological work on negation has so far ignored negation in adverbial clause-linkage. The present work makes inroads into this territory by analyzing the world-wide cross-linguistic variation in the expression of negation in precedence clauses (e.g. ‘before he arrived, we had already gone home’) in a variety sample of 155 languages. The research demonstrates that even when languages employ a clause-linking marker for conveying temporal precedence, negative markers may play an important role in that they may be obligatory, optional, or forbidden in the precedence clause. It is proposed that whether the clause-linking marker is semantically monofunctional or polyfunctional is the key to this puzzle. As for precedence clauses containing polyfunctional clause-linking markers and negative markers, it is shown that negation must not be considered expletive. With respect to precedence clauses occurring with monofunctional markers, it is proposed that the precedence clause tends not to license a negative marker. Moreover, it is shown that optional negative markers in precedence clauses may have an evaluative sense, which reflects the epistemic stance of the speaker. The paper also explores whether the analysis of precedence clauses put forward in the present research can be generalized to other adverbial clause-linkage constructions: negative concomitance clauses (e.g. ‘I cooked the soup without stirring it even once’).

Attentional semantics of deictic locatives

Since Bühler’s influential work on context-dependent, deictic expressions, much research has been devoted to the underlying concepts and cross-linguistic variation of linguistic deixis. Focussing on the semantics of deictic locatives like here and there, the present article starts with an overview of deictic theories and phenomena. It is shown that proposals which either utilize the semantic idea of abstract pointing from some reference point (origin, ground), or the pragmatic concept of joint attention, do not explain the data sufficiently. As an alternative, specific parts of Takubo’s theory of deixis are then combined with an attentional semantics according to which “selective attention” plays an essential role in cognition and for language. It is argued that deictics as description-lean terms rather express basic aspects of attentional reference to an entity of some (cognitive) domain than specific content related to pointing or anchoring. Finally, further aspects and possible extensions of the novel attentional semantics of deictics are discussed.

Truth be told: a corpus-based study of the cross-linguistic colexification of representational and (inter)subjective meanings

Abstract The study of crosslinguistic variation in word meaning often focuses on representational and concrete meanings. We argue other kinds of word meanings (e.g., abstract and (inter)subjective meanings) can be fruitfully studied in translation corpora, and present a quantitative procedure for doing so. We focus on the cross-linguistic patterns for lemmas pertaining to truth and reality (English true and real), as these abstract meanings been found to frequently colexify with particular (inter)subjective meanings. Applying our method to a corpus of translated subtitles of TED talks, we show that (1) the abstract-representational meanings are colexified in patterned ways, that, however, are more complex than previously observed (some languages not splitting a ‘true’-like from ‘real’-like terms; many languages displaying further splits of representational meanings); (2) some non-representational meanings strongly colexify with representational meanings of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’, while others also often colexify with other fields.

The Plural is Unmarked: Evidence from Turkish, Hungarian and German

Quantity distinctions are morphologically indicated in the majority of languages.However, the marking of these distinctions exhibits a high degree of cross-linguistic variation with respect to the number of quantity categories, their agreement properties, and the morphemes themselves. Furthermore, number marking on numerically quantified nouns varies across languages: for instance, while German and English use plural number marking with numerals other than “one” (for example, “two books”), Turkish and Hungarian use singular number marking with all numerals. Recent work has discussed how to explain number marking with numerals. In particular, Bale and Khanjian (2014) propose that the quantity concepts of the two types of languages vary semantically. We present novel evidence from a cross-linguistic study of Hungarian, Turkish and German child language, and argue that the quantity concepts do not vary, and the variation between languages must have a morphosyntactic explanation. 

Revisiting gradability in American Sign Language (ASL)

This paper addresses gradability in American Sign Language (ASL). The literature has argued that languages may or may not introduce degree variables, i.e., there is cross-linguistic variation as to whether languages should be analyzed as degree- or degreeless. For ASL, the degree-based analysis has been assumed or explicitly proposed. For example, due to the visual nature of ASL (as a language that uses the physical signing space), it has been suggested that it may be able to readily represent scales iconically in the signing space. In contrast, we argue that ASL is a degreeless language, which further means that its modality does not necessarily readily translate into the iconic representation of scales in the signing space. Our discussion is based on a comprehensive examination of 31 adjectives across different constructions (e.g., different comparison strategies, questions targeting degrees, crisp judgments, etc.). We offer evidence from elicitation data from 6 consultants with different profiles.

Analogy in Inflection

Analogy has returned to prominence in the field of inflectional morphology as a basis for new explanations of inflectional productivity. Here we review the rising profile of analogy, identifying key theoretical and methodological developments, areas of success, and priorities for future work. In morphological theory, work within so-called abstractive approaches places analogy at the center of productive processes, though significant conceptual and technical details remain to be settled. The computational modeling of inflectional analogy has a rich and diverse history, and attention is now increasingly directed to understanding inflectional systems through their internal complexity and cross-linguistic diversity. A tension exists between the prima facie promise of analogy to lead to new explanations and its relative lack of theoretical articulation. We bring this to light as we examine questions regarding inflectional defectiveness and whether analogy is reducible to grammar optimization resulting from simplicity biases in learning and language use.

Complex Possessive Pronouns in West Flemish and German

In this article we discuss a contrastive, morphological agreement pattern exhibited by singular possessive pronouns in West Flemish and German. While West Flemish zen (‘his’) and eur (‘her’) require a suffix -en to mark masculine agreement, they are unmarked for feminine agreement. Conversely, German sein (‘his’) and ihr (‘her’) require a suffix -e to mark feminine agreement, but they are unmarked for masculine agreement. Put differently, in both languages only one gender is marked for agreement, and West Flemish marks a different gender than German. To account for this intra- and cross-linguistic variation, we argue for a fine-grained analysis, couched in Nanosyntax (Starke 2009 et seq.), of the possessive pronouns and their agreement markers.

Nominal linkers in Iranian languages: An introduction

In some languages, a noun is linked to some of its modifiers and complements via a linking element. The cross-linguistic variation that is observed with respect to the properties and functions of nominal linkers has made their study an excellent area of research contributing to both the theory and the typology of linkers, and more broadly, to the study of nominals. Despite the importance of nominal linkers, however, a collection that solely focuses on this phenomenon has been noticeably absent in the literature. The use of nominal linkers is a prevalent feature in many Iranian languages. In this volume, we provide a description of a wide range of patterns of nominal linkers in eleven Iranian languages, delving into the intriguing behaviour of such elements and their interaction with other morphosyntactic markers. The papers in this volume are the result of research conducted under the “The Syntax of Nominal Linkers” project at the University of Toronto, funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Grant (#435-2018-0527). To our knowledge, this volume is the first of its kind dedicated entirely to a single phenomenon in Iranian linguistics. We hope that this volume serves as a valuable resource for a wide range of readers, including researchers interested in nominal modification, nominal linkers, and nominal structures in general, as well as researchers and language instructors interested in Iranian languages.

Intermediate perfects

Abstract The cross-linguistic variation in distribution and meaning of perfect constructions building on have + past participle in Western European languages has been analysed in terms of the aoristic drift, the shift from resultative via perfect to perfective past meaning that takes us from ‘classical’ perfect languages like English to ‘liberal’ perfect languages like French. This paper challenges the (often implicit) assumption that there is a single path along the aoristic drift, resulting in a linear perfect scale. Data coming from translation corpora reveal that the perfect in three ‘intermediate’ languages (Dutch, Catalan and Breton) is sensitive to lexical aspect (state vs. event), narrativity and hodiernal vs. pre-hodiernal past time reference. These meaning ingredients appear in different combinations in the three languages, thereby establishing them as independent dimensions of variation. The conclusion that there are multiple paths along the aoristic drift has implications for the cross-linguistic semantics of tense and aspect.

The pragmatics of exhaustivity in embedded questions: an experimental comparison of know and predict in German and English.

We present a cross-linguistic experimental study that explores the exhaustivity properties of questions embedded under wissen/to know and korrekt vorhersagen/to correctly predict in German and English. While past theoretical literature has held that such embedded questions should only be interpreted as strongly exhaustive (SE), recent experimental findings suggest an intermediate exhaustive (IE) interpretation is also available and plausible. Participants were confronted with a decision problem involving the different exhaustive readings and received a financial incentive based on their performance. We employed Bayesian analysis to create probabilistic models of participants' beliefs, linking their responses to readings based on utility maximization in simple decision problems. For wissen/to know, we found that the SE reading was most probable in both languages, aligning with early theoretical literature. However, we also attested to the presence of IE readings. For korrekt vorhersagen in German, the IE reading was most probable, whereas for the English phrase "to correctly predict," a preference for the SE reading was observed. This cross-linguistic variation correlates with independent corpus data, indicating that German vorhersagen and English to predict are not lexically equivalent. By including an explicit pragmatic component, our study complements previous work that has focused solely on the principled semantic availability of given readings.

Speech disturbances in schizophrenia: Assessing cross-linguistic generalizability of NLP automated measures of coherence.

Language disorders - disorganized and incoherent speech in particular - are distinctive features of schizophrenia. Natural language processing (NLP) offers automated measures of incoherent speech as promising markers for schizophrenia. However, the scientific and clinical impact of NLP markers depends on their generalizability across contexts, samples, and languages, which we systematically assessed in the present study relying on a large, novel, cross-linguistic corpus. We collected a Danish (DK), German (GE), and Chinese (CH) cross-linguistic dataset involving transcripts from 187 participants with schizophrenia (111DK, 25GE, 51CH) and 200 matched controls (129DK, 29GE, 42CH) performing the Animated Triangles Task. Fourteen previously published NLP coherence measures were calculated, and between-groups differences and association with symptoms were tested for cross-linguistic generalizability. One coherence measure, i.e. second-order coherence, robustly generalized across samples and languages. We found several language-specific effects, some of which partially replicated previous findings (lower coherence in German and Chinese patients), while others did not (higher coherence in Danish patients). We found several associations between symptoms and measures of coherence, but the effects were generally inconsistent across languages and rating scales. Using a cumulative approach, we have shown that NLP findings of reduced semantic coherence in schizophrenia have limited generalizability across different languages, samples, and measures. We argue that several factors such as sociodemographic and clinical heterogeneity, cross-linguistic variation, and the different NLP measures reflecting different clinical aspects may be responsible for this variability. Future studies should take this variability into account in order to develop effective clinical applications targeting different patient populations.

What the development of gesture with and without speech can tell us about the effect of language on thought

AbstractAdults display cross-linguistic variability in their speech in how they package and order semantic elements of a motion event. These differences can also be found in speakers’ co-speech gestures (gesturing with speech), but not in their silent gestures (gesturing without speech). Here, we examine when in development children show the differences between co-speech gesture and silent gesture found in adults. We studied speech and gestures produced by 100 children learning English or Turkish (n = 50/language) – equally divided into 5 age-groups: 3–4, 5–6, 7–8, 9–10, and 11–12 years. Children were asked to describe three-dimensional spatial event scenes (e.g., a figure crawling across carpet) first with speech and then without speech using their hands. We focused on physical motion events that elicit, in adults, cross-linguistic differences in co-speech gesture and cross-linguistic similarities in silent gesture. We found the adult pattern even in the youngest children: (1) Language shaped co-speech gesture beginning at age 3 years, showing an early effect of language on thinking for speaking (as measured by gestures that occur during the speech act). (2) Language did not affect silent gesture at any age, highlighting early limits on the effects language has on thinking and revealing a language of gesture that shows similarities across languages.

Coordination versus separation: difference of gapping between Chinese and English and its prosodic attribution

Abstract In this paper, we have analyzed a whole set of data of gapping in Mandarin Chinese from a novel point of view and fleshed out a bi-sentential derivation analysis for the formation of this construction. While taking the canonical gapping in English as a reference, we have explored some idiomatic properties of the relevant structures in Chinese and summarized core differences: the gapping constructions in English follow a strict rule of sentence grammar while those of Chinese have demonstrated kind of inter-sentential effect. We propose that such differences can be attributed to the prosodic factors: The Constraint on Sentential Intonation in Chinese (CSIC for short), firstly proposed in Feng (Feng, Shengli. 2017. Hanyu jufa zhongyin yudiao xianghu zuoyong de yufa xiaoying. ‘On grammatical effects of interactions between intonation, stress and syntax’. Yuyan Jiaoxue yu Yanjiu [Language Teaching and Linguistic Study] (1). 1–15), bans the occurrence of the coordinate [VP & VP] structures, and thus two parallel but separate sentences are used in the contexts where a sentence with VP coordination in English is used. Then, the verb in the second sentence is deleted at PF under the identity condition. Consequently, the gapping structures thus formed demonstrate their own unique properties and are different from the canonical gapping in English. The result of our discussion indicates that prosody can play a role in accounting for language specificities as well as cross-linguistic variations.