Anomalous transfer of syntax between languages (original) (raw)

2014, The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience

Each human language possesses a set of distinctive syntactic rules. Here, we show that balanced Welsh-English bilinguals reading in English unconsciously apply a morphosyntactic rule that only exists in Welsh. The Welsh soft mutation rule determines whether the initial consonant of a noun changes based on the grammatical context (e.g., the feminine noun cath--"cat" mutates into gath in the phrase y gath--"the cat"). Using event-related brain potentials, we establish that English nouns artificially mutated according to the Welsh mutation rule (e.g., "goncert" instead of "concert") require significantly less processing effort than the same nouns implicitly violating Welsh syntax. Crucially, this effect is found whether or not the mutation affects the same initial consonant in English and Welsh, showing that Welsh syntax is applied to English regardless of phonological overlap between the two languages. Overall, these results demonstrate for the ...

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Cognitive Brain Research, 2001

The ERP (event-related potential) violation paradigm was used to investigate brain responses to morphologically correct and incorrect verb forms of Catalan. Violations of stem formation and inflectional processes were examined in separate experimental conditions. Our most interesting finding is that misapplications of stem formation rules elicit an early left preponderant negativity. This complements our previous ERP results on morphological violations

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Category-specific effects in Welsh mutation

Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 2020

In this paper we investigate category-specific effects through the lens of Welsh mutation. Smith (2011) and Moreton et al. (2017) show that English distinguishes nouns and proper nouns in an experimental blending task. Here we show that Welsh distinguishes nouns, verbs, personal names, and place names in the mutation system. We demonstrate these effects experimentally in a translation task designed to elicit mutation intuitions and in several corpus studies. In addition, we show that these effects correlate with lexical frequency. Deeper statistical analysis and a review of the English data suggests that frequency is a more explanatory factor than part of speech in both languages. We therefore argue that these category-specific effects can be reduced to lexical frequency effects.

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Code-switching – Experimental Answers to Theoretical Questions. In honor of Kay González-Vilbazo, 2018

A critical question about bilingualism is how two or more languages are processed in the bilingual mind (e.g., Kroll, Bobb, & Hoshino, 2014). Previous research shows that bilinguals’ languages interact, at least at the lexical and phonological levels. Relatively little research has addressed whether this occurs at the syntactic level during sentence processing. One event-related potential study with Welsh-English bilinguals showed co-activation of syntactic properties of one language that affected processing of the other language (Sanoudaki & Thierry, 2014, 2015). The current study replicates Sanoudaki and Thierry with Spanish-English bilinguals, and the results largely reproduce their findings of syntactic co-activation during sentence processing. These converging results have implications for theories about bilingual language processing regarding how syntax may interact in the bilingual mind.

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Electrophysiological correlates of noun-noun compound processing by non-native speakers of English

Proceedings of the First Workshop on Computational Approaches to Compound Analysis (ComAComA 2014), 2014

De Cat, C., R. H. Baayen, and E. Klepousniotou We report on an experimental study of the processing of noun-noun compounds by native and non-native speakers of English, based on Event-Related Potentials recorded during a mask-primed lexical decision task. Analysis was by generalised linear mixed-effect modelling and generalised additive mixed modelling. Non-native processing is found to display headedness effects induced by the mothertongue. The frequency of the constituent nouns and of the intended compounds are also shown to have an effect on processing.

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