Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

This paper argues that neurolinguistics has the potential to yield insights that can feed back into corpus-based Cognitive Linguistics. It starts by discussing how far the cognitive realism of probabilistic statements derived from corpus data currently goes. Against this background, it argues that the cognitive realism of usage-based models could be further enhanced through deeper engagement with neurolinguistics, but also highlights a number of common misconceptions about what neurolinguistics can and cannot do for linguistic theorizing.

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 4 Seiten: 493-505.

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 4 Seiten: 447-463.

Impaired performance in verbal fluency tasks is a frequent observation in Parkinson’s disease. As to the nature of the underlying cognitive deficit, it is commonly attributed to a frontal-type dysexecutive syndrome due to nigrostriatal dopamine depletion. Whereas dopaminergic medication typically improves VF performance in PD, e.g., by ameliorating impaired lexical switching, its effect on semantic network activation is unclear. Data from priming studies suggest that dopamine causes a faster decay of semantic activation spread. The aim of the current study was (...) to examine the impact of dopaminergic medication on the dynamic change of word frequency during VF performance as a measure of semantic spreading activation. To this end, we performed a median split analysis of word frequency during phonemic and semantic VF task performance in a PD group tested while receiving dopaminergic medication as well as after drug withdrawal, and in a sample of age-matched healthy volunteers. Dopaminergic medication in the PD group significantly affected phonemic VF with improved word production as well as increased error-rates. The expected decrease of word frequency during VF task performance was significantly smaller in the PD group ON medication than in healthy volunteers across semantic and phonemic VF. No significant group-difference emerged between controls and the PD group in the OFF condition. The comparison between both treatment conditions within the PD group did not reach statistical significance. The observed pattern of results indicates a faster decay of semantic network activation during lexical access in PD patients on dopaminergic medication. In view of improved word generation, this finding is consistent with a concept of more focused neural activity by an increased signal-to-noise ratio due to dopaminergic neuromodulation. However, the effect of dopaminergic stimulation on VF output suggests a trade-off between these beneficial effects and increased error-rates. (shrink)

Recent evidence suggests that probabilistic grammars may be modulated by communication mode and genre. Accordingly, the question arises how complex language users’ lectal competence is, where complexity is proportional to the extent to which choice-making processes depend on the situation of language use. Do probabilistic constraints vary when we talk to a friend compared to when we give a speech? Are differences between spoken and written language larger than those within each mode? In the present study, we aim to approach (...) these questions systematically. Guided by theorizing in cognitive (socio)linguistics and using logistic regression based on corpus materials, we analyzed the dative alternation with give (The government gives farmers money vs. The government gives money to farmers) in four broad registers of English: spoken informal, spoken formal, written informal, and written formal. Corpus analysis was supplemented with a scalar rating experiment. Results suggest that language users’ probabilistic grammars vary as a function of register. (shrink)

This study addressed the question of whether L2 learners are able to utilize verb’s argument structure information in online structural analysis. Previous L2 research has shown that L2 learners have difficulty in using verb’s intransitive information to guide online syntactic processing. This is true even though L2 learners have grammatical knowledge that is correct and similar to that of native speakers. In the present study, we contrasted three hypotheses, the initial inaccessibility account, the intransitivity overriding account, and the fuzzy subcategorization (...) frame account, to investigate whether L2 learner’s knowledge of intransitive verbs is in fact ignored in L2 online structural analysis. The initial inaccessibility account and the fuzzy subcategorization frame account predicted that L2 learners cannot access intransitivity information in building syntactic structures in any situation. The intransitivity overriding account predicted that intransitivity information is accessed in L2 parsing, but this process is overridden by the strong transitivity preference when a verb is followed by a noun phrase. Importantly, the intransitivity overriding account specifically predicted that L2 learners would be able to use intransitive information in online syntactic processing when a noun phrase does not appear immediately following a verb. We tested the three accounts in an eye-tracking reading experiment using filler-gap dependency structures. We manipulated verb’s transitivity information and lexically based plausibility information and tested English native speakers as a control L1 group and Japanese-English L2 participants. The results showed that L2 learners as well as native speakers processed sentences differently depending on the subcategorization information of the verb, and adopted transitive analysis only when the verb was optionally transitive, providing support for the intransitivity overriding. The results further demonstrated that L2 learners had strong expectations for the transitive structure, which is consistent with the view proposed by the hyper-active gap-filling hypothesis. In addition, the results showed that the semantic mismatch in the incorrect transitive analysis facilitated native speaker’s processing but caused difficulty for L2 learners. Together, the current study provides evidence that L2 learners use intransitive information of the verbs to guide their structural analysis when there are no overriding constraints. (shrink)

This paper develops a construction-based dialectometry capable of identifying previously unknown constructions and measuring the degree to which a given construction is subject to regional variation. The central idea is to learn a grammar of constructions using construction grammar induction and then to use these constructions as features for dialectometry. This offers a method for measuring the aggregate similarity between regional CxGs without limiting in advance the set of constructions subject to variation. The learned CxG is evaluated on how well (...) it describes held-out test corpora while dialectometry is evaluated on how well it can model regional varieties of English. The method is tested using two distinct datasets: First, the International Corpus of English representing eight outer circle varieties; Second, a web-crawled corpus representing five inner circle varieties. Results show that the method produces a grammar with stable quality across sub-sets of a single corpus that is capable of distinguishing between regional varieties of English with a high degree of accuracy, thus supporting dialectometric methods for measuring the similarity between varieties of English and measuring the degree to which each construction is subject to regional variation. This is important for cognitive sociolinguistics because it operationalizes the idea that competition between constructions is organized at the functional level so that dialectometry needs to represent as much of the available functional space as possible. (shrink)

Entrenchment and schematisation are the two most important cognitive processes in language acquisition. In this article, the role of the two processes, operationalised by token and type frequency, in the production of overgeneralised verb forms in Croatian preschool children is investigated using a parental questionnaire and computational simulation of language acquisition. The participants of the questionnaire were parents of children aged 3;0–5;11 years (n = 174). The results showed that parents of most children (93 %) reported the parallel use of (...) both adult-like and overgeneralised verb forms, suggesting that Croatian-speaking preschool children have not yet fully acquired the verbal system. The likelihood of overgeneralised forms being reported decreases with the age of the children and verb type frequency. The results of the computational simulation show that patterns with a higher type frequency also show a greater preference for the correct form, while lexical items show both learning and unlearning tendencies during the process. (shrink)

We examined how language supports the expression of temporality within sentence boundaries in English, which has a rich inventory of grammatical means to express temporality. Using a computational model that mimics how humans learn from exposure we explored what the use of different tense and aspect combinations reveals about the interaction between our experience of time and the cognitive demands that talking about time puts on the language user. Our model was trained on n-grams extracted from the BNC to select (...) the TA combination that fits the context best. It revealed the existence of two different sub-systems within the set of TA combinations, a “simplex” one that is supported lexically and is easy to learn, and a “complex” one that is supported contextually and is hard to learn. The finding that some TA combinations are essentially lexical in nature necessitates a rethink of tense and aspect as grammatical categories that form the axes of the temporal system. We argue that the system of temporal reference may be more fruitfully thought of as the result of learning a system that is steeped in experience and organised along a number of functional principles. (shrink)

The current study investigates how native speakers of a morphologically complex language handle uncertainty related to linguistic forms that have gaps in their inflectional paradigms. We analyze their strategies of dealing with paradigmatic defectivity and how these strategies are motivated by subjective contemporaneousness, frequency, acceptability, and other lexical and structural characteristics of words. We administered a verb production task with Finnish native speakers using verbs from a small non-productive inflectional type that has many paradigmatic gaps and asked participants to inflect (...) the verbs in a given context. Inflectional uncertainty was measured by the number of different forms the participants produced for each verb. We classified produced forms that were not expected as either synonymous or novel and measured their optimal string alignment distance to expected forms. Our analyses revealed that a usage-based approach to paradigmatic defectivity fits better with the obtained results than a classical approach typically met in dictionaries and descriptive grammars. Thus, we argue, that paradigmatic defectivity can be better described as a dynamic rather than a static system, where gaps represent a continuum of possible inflectional choices rather than a lack of an inflectional variant. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to test the claim that languages universally employ morphosyntactic marking to differentiate events of more‐ versus less‐direct causation, preferring to mark them with less‐ and more‐ overt marking, respectively (e.g., Somebody broke the window vs. Somebody MADE the window break; *Somebody cried the boy vs. Somebody MADE the boy cry). To this end, we investigated whether a recent computational model which learns to predict speakers’ by‐verb relative preference for the two causatives in English, Hebrew, (...) Hindi, Japanese, and K'iche’ Mayan is able to generalize to a sixth language on which it has never been trained: Balinese. Judgments of the relative acceptability of the less‐ and more‐transparent causative forms of 60 verbs were collected from 48 native‐speaking Balinese adults. The composite crosslinguistic computational model was able to predict these judgments, not only for verbs that it had seen, but also––in a split‐half validation test––to verbs that it had never seen in any language. A “random‐semantics” model showed only a relatively small decrement in performance with seen verbs, whose behavior can be learned on a verb‐by‐verb basis, but achieved zero correlation with human judgments when generalizing to unseen verbs. Together, these findings suggest that Balinese conceptualizes directness of causation in a similar way to these unrelated languages, and therefore constitute support for the view that the distinction between more‐ versus less‐distinct causation constitutes a morphosyntactic universal. (shrink)

A central tenet of cognitive linguistics is that adults’ knowledge of language consists of a structured inventory of constructions, including various two-argument constructions such as the active, the passive and “fronting” constructions. But how do speakers choose which construction to use for a particular utterance, given constraints such as discourse/information structure and the semantic fit between verb and construction? The goal of the present study was to build a computational model of this phenomenon for two-argument constructions in Mandarin. First, we (...) conducted a grammaticality judgment study with 60 native speakers which demonstrated that, across 57 verbs, semantic affectedness – as determined by further 16 native speakers – predicted each verb’s relative acceptability in the bei-passive and ba-active constructions, but not the Notional Passive and SVO Active constructions. Second, in order to simulate acquisition of these competing constraints, we built a computational model that learns to map from corpus-derived input to an output representation corresponding to these four constructions. The model was able to predict judgments of the relative acceptability of the test verbs in the ba-active and bei-passive constructions obtained in Study 1, with model-human correlations in the region of r = 0.5 and r = 0.3, respectively. Surprisingly, these correlations increased when lexical verb identity was removed; perhaps because this information leads to over-fitting of the training set. These findings suggest the intriguing possibility that acquiring constructions involves forgetting as a mechanism for abstracting across certain fine-grained lexical details and idiosyncrasies. (shrink)