It is widely assumed that human learning and the structure of human languages are intimately related. This relationship is frequently suggested to derive from a language-specific biological endowment, which encodes universal, but communicatively arbitrary, principles of language structure (a Universal Grammar or UG). How might such a UG have evolved? We argue that UG could not have arisen either by biological adaptation or non-adaptationist genetic processes, resulting in a logical problem of language evolution. Specifically, as the processes of language change (...) are much more rapid than processes of genetic change, language constitutes a both over time and across different human populations, and, hence, cannot provide a stable environment to which language genes could have adapted. We conclude that a biologically determined UG is not evolutionarily viable. Instead, the original motivation for UG arises because language has been shaped to fit the human brain, rather than vice versa. Following Darwin, we view language itself as a complex and interdependent which evolves under selectional pressures from human learning and processing mechanisms. That is, languages themselves are shaped by severe selectional pressure from each generation of language users and learners. This suggests that apparently arbitrary aspects of linguistic structure may result from general learning and processing biases deriving from the structure of thought processes, perceptuo-motor factors, cognitive limitations, and pragmatics. (shrink)

It has long been believed across languages that the Agent‐First strategy, a comprehension heuristic that maps the first noun onto the agent role, is a general cognitive bias which applies automatically and faithfully to children's comprehension. The present study asks how this strategy interplays with such grammatical cues as the number of overt arguments and the presence of case‐marking in Korean, an SOV language with case‐marking by dedicated markers. To investigate whether and how these cues affect the operation of this (...) strategy, we measure children's comprehension of a transitive construction (with scrambling and omission of sentential components) in a novel experimental setting where arguments and case markers were obscured to varying degrees through acoustic masking. We find that children do not demonstrate the agent‐first interpretation strongly in the noun–verb pattern without case‐marking, showing their uncertainty about the thematic role of the nominal when it is both the only argument in the sentence and lacks case‐marking. They perform significantly better in the patterns with additional cues, the impact of which is asymmetric by age and by the nature of alignment between cues from word order and case‐marking. These findings suggest that, for Korean‐speaking children's comprehension of a transitive construction, the Agent‐First strategy is activated properly only in conjunction with other types of interpretive cues. (shrink)

We found a direct relationship between variation in informants' grammaticality intuitions about pronoun coreference and variation in the same informants' use of a clause segmentation strategy during sentence perception. It has been proproposed that ‘c‐command’, a structural principle defined in terms of constituent dominance relations, constrains within‐sentence coreference between pronouns and noun antecedents. The relative height of the pronoun and the noun in the phrase structure hierarchy determines whether the c‐command constraint blocks coreference: Coreference is allowed only when the complement (...) structure containing the noun is attached higher than the pronoun. We collected informants' judgments on pronoun‐noun coreference in which the noun antecedent was contained in a complement structure dominated by either the Sentence‐node (S‐node) (higher than the pronoun) or the Verb‐phrase‐node (VP‐node) (not higher than the pronoun). We also assessed each informant's perceptual clause‐closure tendency using an auditory word‐monitor paradigm. Informants who strongly segmented clauses in the perceptual task did not differentiate between an S‐ and VP‐attachment of sentence complements, as revealed in their coreference judgments, but rather appeared to attach all sentence complements to the S‐node. Informants with relatively weak perceptual segmentation differentiated their coreference judgments according to the node attachment of the complement structure. These results indicate that the linguistic universal controlling within‐sentence coreference applies to the perceptually available structure for a sequence, not to its pure linguistic structure. Hence, linguistic intuitions result from the interaction of three independent faculties: language‐specific knowledge, perceptual processes, and linguistic universals. (shrink)

Our target article argued that a genetically specified Universal Grammar (UG), capturing arbitrary properties of languages, is not tenable on evolutionary grounds, and that the close fit between language and language learners arises because language is shaped by the brain, rather than the reverse. Few commentaries defend a genetically specified UG. Some commentators argue that we underestimate the importance of processes of cultural transmission; some propose additional cognitive and brain mechanisms that may constrain language and perhaps differentiate humans from nonhuman (...) primates; and others argue that we overstate or understate the case against co-evolution of language genes. In engaging with these issues, we suggest that a new synthesis concerning the relationship between brains, genes, and language may be emerging. (shrink)

In this paper, we present an overview of existing parallel corpora for Automatic Text Simplification (ATS) in different languages focusing on the approach adopted for their construction. We make the main distinction between manual and (semi)–automatic approaches in order to investigate in which respect complex and simple texts vary and whether and how the observed modifications may depend on the underlying approach. To this end, we perform a two-level comparison on Italian corpora, since this is the only language, with the (...) exception of English, for which there are large parallel resources derived through the two approaches considered. The first level of comparison accounts for the main types of sentence transformations occurring in the simplification process, the second one examines the results of a linguistic profiling analysis based on Natural Language Processing techniques and carried out on the original and the simple version of the same texts. For both levels of analysis, we chose to focus our discussion mostly on sentence transformations and linguistic characteristics that pertain to the morpho-syntactic and syntactic structure of the sentence. (shrink)

In this article we evaluate claims that language structure adapts to sociolinguistic environment. We present the results of two typological case studies examining the effects of the number of native (=L1) speakers and the proportion of adult second language (=L2) learners on language structure. Data from more than 300 languages suggest that testing the effect of population size and proportion of adult L2 learners on features of verbal and nominal complexity produces conflicting results on different grammatical features. The results show (...) that verbal inflectional synthesis adapts to the sociolinguistic environment but the number of genders does not. The results also suggest that modeling population size together with proportion of L2 improves model fit compared to modeling them independently of one another. We thus argue that surveying population size alone may be insufficient to detect possible adaptation of linguistic structure to the sociolinguistic environment. Rather, other features, such as proportion of L2 speakers, prestige and social network density, should be studied, and if demographic numeric data are used, they should not be used in isolation but rather in competition with other sociolinguistic features. We also suggest that not all types of language structures within a given grammatical domain are equally sensitive to the effect of sociolinguistic variables, and that more exploratory studies are needed before we can arrive at a reliable set of grammatical features that may be potentially most (and least) adaptive to social structures. (shrink)