Understudied Language Research Articles

Linguistic landscape in russian-speaking schools of Visaginas

The article describes the sociolinguistic situation in Visaginas, while also introducing the main theoretical provisions and terms of sociolinguistics (sociolinguistic situation, language policy, linguistic landscape, enculturation, etc.). The analytical part examines specific data – cultural signs compiled in the Russian-speaking schools in Visaginas – allowing the linguistic landscape to be examined through the lens of enculturation. The linguistic landscape analysis and the comparison approach were applied within the course of work. 1,142 units ‒ symbols of Russian and Lithuanian cultures compiled in three educational institutions with the Russian language of tuition – were analyzed. The material that had been classified in accordance with the groups (visual, complex, textual signs) allowed us to establish the predominance of the Lithuanian culture in the educational institutions of Visaginas Town. It also showed the presence of the signs of culture of different types.The importance of this research stems from the understudied language landscape, particularly in educational institutions. Furthermore, it should be noted that the educational linguistic environment of Visaginas has never been studied before.

GPT is an effective tool for multilingual psychological text analysis

The social and behavioral sciences have been increasingly using automated text analysis to measure psychological constructs in text. We explore whether GPT, the large-language model (LLM) underlying the AI chatbot ChatGPT, can be used as a tool for automated psychological text analysis in several languages. Across 15 datasets (n = 47,925 manually annotated tweets and news headlines), we tested whether different versions of GPT (3.5 Turbo, 4, and 4 Turbo) can accurately detect psychological constructs (sentiment, discrete emotions, offensiveness, and moral foundations) across 12 languages. We found that GPT (r = 0.59 to 0.77) performed much better than English-language dictionary analysis (r = 0.20 to 0.30) at detecting psychological constructs as judged by manual annotators. GPT performed nearly as well as, and sometimes better than, several top-performing fine-tuned machine learning models. Moreover, GPT's performance improved across successive versions of the model, particularly for lesser-spoken languages, and became less expensive. Overall, GPT may be superior to many existing methods of automated text analysis, since it achieves relatively high accuracy across many languages, requires no training data, and is easy to use with simple prompts (e.g., "is this text negative?") and little coding experience. We provide sample code and a video tutorial for analyzing text with the GPT application programming interface. We argue that GPT and other LLMs help democratize automated text analysis by making advanced natural language processing capabilities more accessible, and may help facilitate more cross-linguistic research with understudied languages.

Subject position in Greek and Spanish monolingual and bilingual production: Exploring the influence of verb type and definiteness

ABSTRACT This research study aims to capture linguistic variation in subject distribution in monolingual and bilingual speakers of an understudied language combination of two null subject languages, following the premises of the Interface Hypothesis (IH). Greek and Chilean Spanish are examined with a focus on subject-verb (SV) inversion in neutral contexts as influenced by two factors: verb type and subject definiteness. Oral semi-structured narratives were elicited from 116 participants: Greek and Spanish monolinguals (N = 40) and Greek-Spanish bilinguals (N = 86), namely immigrants, heritage speakers (HS), and L2 speakers of Greek. The findings show crosslinguistic differences between Greek and Spanish regarding verb-subject(-object) [VS(O)] orders, which are allowed more liberally in Greek than in Spanish. The bilingual groups behaved similarly on subject placement regarding verb type. The effect of definiteness, which was statistically significant in all the other groups, was not obtained in the HS data, indicating a relaxed distinction between definite and indefinite subjects in the heritage grammar. The findings are discussed in the light of the Interface Hypothesis (IH) and provide valuable insights into bilingual language production in relation to vulnerability in heritage and bilingual grammars, involving an insufficiently researched linguistic phenomenon.

Modelling child comprehension: A case of suffixal passive construction in Korean

The present study investigates a computational model's ability to capture monolingual children's language behaviour during comprehension in Korean, an understudied language in the field. Specifically, we test whether and how two neural network architectures (LSTM, GPT-2) cope with a suffixal passive construction involving verbal morphology and required interpretive procedures (i.e., revising the mapping between thematic roles and case markers) driven by that morphology. To this end, we fine-tune our models via patching (i.e., pre-trained model + caregiver input) and hyperparameter adjustments, and measure their binary classification performance on the test sentences used in a behavioural study manifesting scrambling and omission of sentential components to varying degrees. We find that, while these models’ performance converges with the children's response patterns found in the behavioural study to some extent, the models do not faithfully simulate the children's comprehension behaviour pertaining to the suffixal passive, yielding by-model, by-condition, and by-hyperparameter asymmetries. This points to the limits of the neural networks’ capacity to address child language features. The implications of this study invite subsequent inquiries on the extent to which computational models reveal developmental trajectories of children's linguistic knowledge that have been unveiled through corpus-based or experimental research.

The role of differential cross-linguistic influence and other constraints in predictive L2 gender processing

Previous studies on the use of morphosyntactic gender cues for linguistic prediction show that non-native speakers’ use of grammatical gender information is influenced by various factors. In the present study, we examined the influence of differential cross-linguistic influence (DCLI), knowledge of L2 lexical gender, gender congruency, and L2 fluency. To this end, we investigated L1 Oromo L2 Amharic speakers as well as L1 Amharic speakers, using the Visual World Paradigm (VWP) and supplementary offline experiments. We investigated two groups of L2 Amharic speakers, i.e., L1 Eastern Oromo L2 Amharic and L1 Western Oromo L2 Amharic speakers. The Eastern Oromo dialect patterns with Amharic in terms of gender agreement unlike the Western Oromo dialect which does not have grammatical gender. Analyses of the participants’ proportion of eye fixations show that early exposure to the gendered Eastern Oromo dialect facilitates predictive L2 gender processing. L2 fluency, the speakers’ knowledge of L2 lexical gender, and specific properties of the gender cues modulate predictive L2 gender processing. However, there is no significant influence of lexical gender congruency. The study has ecological significance as it presents empirical data from understudied languages.

Variable Acceptability of Differential Object Marking in Bilingual Galician–Spanish Speakers: An Exploratory Study

This paper presents an initial study of the acceptability of differential object marking (DOM) by Galician–Spanish bilinguals in Galicia. The research explores judgments provided by these bilinguals (n = 69) on DOM in both Galician and Spanish and it also explores data from a monolingual Spanish control group (n = 12). The surveys target contexts covering key syntactic and semantic–pragmatic contexts for DOM in Galician and Spanish, based on the existing literature. The Galician data reveal a tendency towards reduced acceptability of DOM compared to Spanish, but without a generalized rejection of DOM in any of the contexts. The Spanish data show variability in both groups. The study contributes insights from an under-studied language pair and aims to open avenues for further work. More generally, it enhances our understanding of DOM in bilingual grammars, particularly in microcontact situations.

Introduction to the Forum: Assessment of Understudied Languages

Purpose: This introduction provides background information about the Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups (SIG 14: Cultural and Linguistic Diversity) Forum: Speech and Language Assessment Protocols for Understudied Languages and a preview of the articles published.

Dialect Recognition via Lexical Processing: Is It a Viable Litmus Test?

For decades, linguists have been working to formulate an objective means of distinguishing dialects from languages, but dialect recognition has largely remained a subjective enterprise. Only recently have some studies proposed a processing-based psycholinguistic approach toward dialect recognition. These studies argued that dialect words are stored as a co-dependent representation, not as an independent representation of the words of bilingual speakers. Based on these studies, we investigated the lexical selection and processing mechanisms of bilingual and bidialectal speakers of two understudied languages, Oromo and Amharic, using the picture–word interference paradigm. We found independent lexical representations for both the bilingual and the bidialectal groups, which implies the involvement of the same cognitive mechanisms in both language and dialect processing. Thus, we argue that bidialectal speakers have flexible lexical representation and selection mechanisms that are dependent on the speakers’ previous language experience. Here, we propose a dynamic lexical selection model that accommodates diverse dialect ecologies.

On the Absence of Certain Island Effects in Mende

The distinction between weak and strong islands has been extensively explored in the literature from both a descriptive and analytical perspective. In this paper, I document and analyze island constructions and constraints in Mende, an understudied Mande language spoken in Sierra Leone. Mende has both weak islands (left branch and wh-islands) and strong islands (adjunct clauses, sentential subjects, and coordinate structures). Intriguingly, it has a third class of islands, that I call mixed islands which show a subject–non-subject asymmetry in allowing for movement out of relative clauses, only when they modify the subject. As such, subject-modifying RCs cannot be classified as (strong/weak) islands in Mende. This is the first systematic work on islands and island constraints in the Mande language family, and, as such, it brings novel data from an understudied language family to bear on our understanding of A-bar dependencies and the study of island escape in African languages. It also calls into question a neat paradigm of cross-linguistic island constraints. Importantly, this work also lays down a baseline for future research on island constraints in the broader Mande language family. In order to discuss island constraints, this paper also lays out the first analysis of relative clauses in Mende, while integrating new research on the left periphery, focus constructions, and wh-constructions.

It is not what you say but how you say it: Evidence from Russian shows robust effects of the structural prior on noisy channel inferences.

Under the noisy-channel framework of language comprehension, comprehenders infer the speaker's intended meaning by integrating the perceived utterance with their knowledge of the language, the world, and the kinds of errors that can occur in communication. Previous research has shown that, when sentences are improbable under the meaning prior (implausible sentences), participants often interpret them nonliterally. The rate of nonliteral interpretation is higher when the errors that could have transformed the intended utterance into the perceived utterance are more likely. However, previous experiments on noisy channel processing mostly relied on implausible sentences, and it is unclear whether participants' nonliteral interpretations were evidence of noisy channel processing or the result of trying to conform to the experimenter's expectations in an experiment with nonsensical sentences. In the current study, we used the unique properties of Russian, an understudied language in the psycholinguistics literature, to test noisy-channel comprehension using only simple plausible sentences. The prior plausibility of sentences was tied only to their word order; subject-verb-object (SVO) sentences were more probable under the structural prior than object-verb-subject (OVS) sentences. In two experiments, we show that participants often interpret OVS sentences nonliterally, and the probability of nonliteral interpretations depended on the Levenshtein distance between the perceived sentence and the (potentially intended) SVO version of the sentence. The results show that the structural prior guides people's final interpretation, independent of the presence of semantic implausibility. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

“We Pau ?”: Culturally Responsive Language Assessment of Pidgin (Hawaiʻi Creole)–Speaking Children

Purpose: The purpose of this tutorial is to introduce speech-language pathologists to the salient characteristic of the creole language of Hawaiʻi. This language variety is called Hawaiʻi Creole by linguists, but speakers of the language variety generally call it Pidgin. Conclusions: This tutorial reviews the available literature on this understudied language variety to provide a brief overview of Pidgin's historical development and social context and its clinically salient linguistic features. Suggestions for culturally and linguistically responsive assessment of Pidgin-speaking children as well as suggestions for further reading on Pidgin are also provided.

NSP-SCD: A corpus construction protocol for child-directed print in understudied languages

Child-directed print corpora enable systematic psycholinguistic investigations, but this research infrastructure is not available in many understudied languages. Moreover, researchers of understudied languages are dependent on manual tagging because precise automatized parsers are not yet available. One plausible way forward is to limit the intensive work to a small-sized corpus. However, with little systematic enquiry about approaches to corpus construction, it is unclear how robust a small corpus can be made. The current study examines the potential of a non-sequential sampling protocol for small corpus development (NSP-SCD) through a cross-corpora and within-corpus analysis. A corpus comprising 17,584 words was developed by applying the protocol to a larger corpus of 150,595 words from children’s books for 3-to-10-year-olds. While the larger corpus will by definition have more instances of unique words and unique orthographic units, still, the selectively sampled small corpus approximated the larger corpus for lexical and orthographic diversity and was equivalent for orthographic representation and word length. Psycholinguistic complexity increased by book level and varied by parts of speech. Finally, in a robustness check of lexical diversity, the non-sequentially sampled small corpus was more efficient compared to a same-sized corpus constructed by simply using all sentences from a few books (402 books vs. seven books). If a small corpus must be used then non-sequential sampling from books stratified by book level makes the corpus statistics better approximate what is found in larger corpora. Overall, the protocol shows promise as a tool to advance the science of child language acquisition in understudied languages.

Comparative pedagogies in mother tongue education: Türkiye and Indonesia

This study examines mother tongue education pedagogical discourses in Türkiye and Indonesia to address understudied language instruction policy dynamics and their practical implications in diverse educational settings. The study examined mother tongue education and its complex effects on cultural identity and educational outcomes in light of global and local linguistic landscapes. This study examined Turkish and Indonesian pedagogical discourses and classroom interactions in selected samples. Comparative written discourse analysis was performed on selected texts from Turkish and Indonesian 7th-grade secondary school textbooks. Classroom interaction was examined using in-class observations of 7th-grade secondary school students from both countries. The study used Teun van Dijk's Critical Discourse Analysis method for written discourse analysis and Flander's Interaction Analysis matrix for intra-class interaction patterns. The study compares written and oral secondary school pedagogical discourses in both countries using selected examples to determine their similarities and differences. This allows two large and powerful educational systems to benefit from each other. The study finds significant differences in mother tongue education program implementation and outcomes by comparing policy documents, teacher narratives, and classroom practices, highlighting the complex relationship between language policy, instructional methodology, and educational equity. The findings emphasize the need for context-sensitive language education policies that respect linguistic diversity and promote inclusive education. This research enhances mother tongue education research and provides actionable insights for educators, curriculum designers, and policymakers in Türkiye and Indonesia to promote reforms that consider learners' sociocultural and linguistic realities.

Simon Fraser University Speech Error Database (SFUSED) Cantonese: Methods, design, and usage

The Simon Fraser University Speech Error Database (SFUSED) is a multi-purpose database of speech errors based in audio recordings. The motivation for SFUSED Cantonese, a component of this database, is to create a linguistically rich data set for exploring language production processes in Cantonese, an under-studied language. We describe in detail the methods used to collect, analyze, and explore the database, including details of team workflows, time budgets, data quality, and explicit linguistic and processing assumptions. In addition to showing how to use the database, this account supports future research with a template for investigating additional under-studied languages, and it gives fresh perspective on the benefits and drawbacks of collecting speech error data from spontaneous speech. All of the data and supporting materials are available as open access data sets.

Prominence and focus: The tension between acoustic cues and phonological structure

Across many languages, prosodic prominence signals focus. For example, “Does SHE like it?” has different implications to “Does she LIKE it?” (capitals indicate prominence), as the prominence marks focus and therefore a different implied contrast (with she versus like). In prosody research, there has always been a tension in the extent to which prominence is marked directly by psychoacoustic cues (higher pitch, loudness, length, etc.), which may be universal across languages, versus prominence being part of phonological structure, and therefore language-specific (e.g., Ladd, 2008). I review my research on the production and perception of focus in the understudied Polynesian languages Samoan and te reo Māori (Calhoun, 2015, 2016; Calhoun et al., 2021, 2023, in press), as well as other diverse languages (e.g. see Kügler & Calhoun, 2020). This research shows very clearly that cues to prominence vary substantially across languages and must be related to the phonological system of a given language. Nonetheless, questions about whether psychoacoustic cues directly signal focus, or its pragmatic sister, (paralinguistic) emphasis, alongside or within phonological structure, remain unresolved (e.g., Ladd and Arvaniti, 2023). I consider recent research offering new approaches to resolving this tension in relation to results from understudied languages.

Cognitive decline assessment in speakers of understudied languages.

Cognitive decline is a marker for dementia, assessed with neuropsychological tests.There is a lack of culturally valid tests for speakers of understudied languages.For example, suboptimal cognitive tests are used in the Middle East and North Africa region.Linguistic diversity should be considered in the development of cognitive tests.

Bilingual mothers and children gesture differently across native and second languages

Children from bilingual families are typically exposed to more diverse communication practices compared to those from monolingual households. Characterizing bilinguals’ gesture use can provide insight into children’s developmental trajectory in their two languages and the cross-linguistic effects of scaffolding from adults. Gestural patterns of Thai-English bilingual mothers and their preschool-age children were examined in three communicative tasks (prompted reminiscing, book sharing, and toy play) during two sessions (one in Thai and one in English). Gestures were categorized into representational, deictic, conventional, beat, and all. The results revealed that, as early as preschool, bilinguals gesticulate differently in their two languages. The findings highlight the importance of evaluating bilinguals’ nonverbal communication in both languages for a comprehensive picture of their linguistic profiles, especially among speakers of understudied languages. Our understanding of how gestures and speech function as an integrated communicative system would be incomplete without the inclusion of linguistic populations that are underrepresented in research.

Lateralization of emotion word in the first and second language: Evidence from Turkish-English bilinguals

As interest in cognitive sciences has grown over the years, language representation in the brain has increasingly become the subject of psycholinguistic studies. In contrast to the relatively clear picture in monolingual language processing, there is still much controversy over bilinguals’ processing of their two languages. The goal of this paper is therefore to provide more evidence on the way emotion words are processed and represented in the brain in late bilinguals. The study seeks to answer three questions: 1. Are positive words processed faster than negative and neutral words in both languages of bilinguals? 2. Is there a difference in the speed in which emotion words are processed in the first (L1) and second language (L2) of bilinguals? 3. How are emotion words represented in the bilingual brain? Participants were late Turkish-English bilinguals (N = 57). We used a visual hemi-field paradigm, in which the stimuli were presented either on the right or left of a computer screen. By pressing the designated keys, the participants performed a lexical decision task in which they determined whether the visually presented L1 and L2 words were real words or non-words. The first result showed that positive words are processed faster than negative and neutral words in both languages of bilinguals, providing further support for the differential processing of emotion words. Second, longer response times were found for L2 as compared to L1. Finally, we found bilateral hemispheric representation for both English and Turkish. These results contribute to the psycholinguistic literature by providing evidence from the relatively understudied language pairs such as English and Turkish.

The Effects of Cross-Language Differences on Bilingual Production and/or Perception of Sentence-Level Intonation

We put together this Special Issue with the goal of collecting state-of-the art articles on the intonational patterns of different types of bilinguals, with a particular focus on understudied language pairings, and we believe that we have succeeded [...]

Negation in the Huarpean Languages: Millcayac and Allentiac

This study describes and compares standard negation in the Huarpean languages, Millcayac and Allentiac. Furthermore, it proposes possible diachronic paths that led to the synchronic stage described herein and identifies possible contact-induced changes. This synchronic description is based on the revision and analysis of the grammars, vocabularies, and religious texts written by Luis de Valdivia. The features considered are (1) type of negative marker, (2) order of negative marker and verb, (3) structure of the negative construction, and (4) type of prohibitive constructions. The analysis shows that standard negation in Allentiac is expressed by a preverbal particle and has a symmetric structure. In Millcayac, standard negation is expressed by suffixation and has an asymmetric structure. In terms of diachrony, it is proposed that Allentiac is more conservative, and Millcayac’s divergence could have been accelerated by contact with Mapudungun. This study is a contribution to the description of these under-studied languages.