Background/Objectives: In human language, speech sound units, referred to as segments, are rigidly ordered. Certain orderings are typologically common, while others are typologically rare. This pattern has led linguists to posit a scalar segment-intrinsic feature, referred to as “sonority,” and a hierarchy relating to ordering referred to as the “sonority hierarchy.” In generative phonology, it has been proposed that the sonority hierarchy is present in the innate underlying grammar as the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP) and variations thereof. In grammar-based approaches it is common for speech sounds to be abstractly classified based on manner with obstruents being the least sonorous and vowels being most sonorous and with three levels of adherence to the SSP: 1 strict adherence with a sonority rise as in the sequence /pla/, 2 slight adherence/slight violation with a sonority plateau as in /pta/ or /mna/, and 3 violation with a sonority fall before the vowel as in /lpa/. Some linguists have proposed that segmental ordering is the result of generalized pressures relating to speech perception, cognitive processing, and gestural coordination, and therefore not part of the underlying grammar. This study examines the relative contribution of perceptual salience (defined as loudness and segmental recoverability) to segmental ordering. Methods: We used eye-tracking in the visual world paradigm to track real-time processing of perception of novel consonant clusters. We compared whether salience or sonority had a stronger association with how participants simplify clusters in perception, where salience and sonority had different predictions. Results: We found that participants looked more towards salience-predicted competitors than sonority-predicted ones prior to focusing on the target. Conclusions: This finding is in line with theories based on acoustic and auditory salience being the strongest predictors of perceptual ease.

In our study, we examine children's and adults' interpretation of argument wh-questions requiring syntactic revision using a questions-after-stories procedure, leading to three major findings. First, children aged 7-8 years, but not 5-6-year-olds, were found to preferably attach the fronted wh-element to the first available gap, rather than the second, indicating an adultlike incremental parsing strategy of active gap filling. Second, older children show a similar rate of revision as adults, higher than younger children, although a substantial rate of misinterpretations remains. Third, we find a significant link between the rate of revision and cognitive control skills measured with an N-back task. Implications for theories of language development and parsing are discussed.

Syntactic adaptation effects have been demonstrated for an expanding list of structure types, but the mechanism underlying this effect is still being explored. In the current work on filler-gap dependency processing, we examined whether exposing participants to a less common gap location—prepositional object (PO) gaps—altered their gap predictions, and whether these effects would transfer across tasks when this input was presented in a quasi-naturalistic way (i.e., by reading stories). In Experiment 1, we demonstrated that comprehenders dampened their direct object (DO) gap predictions following exposure to PO gaps. However, Experiments 2A and 2B suggest that these adaptation effects did not transfer when the quasi-naturalistic exposure phase was presented as a separate task (Experiment 2A) and when they also needed to generalize from a syntactic to a semantic measure of direct object gap predictions (i.e., filled gap vs. plausibility mismatch sentences; Experiment 2B). Overall, these experiments add filler-gap dependency processing, as well as the gap predictions associated with it, to the growing list of structures demonstrating adaptation effects, while also suggesting that this effect may be specific to a singular experimental task environment.

Agreement attraction, i.e., the production or acceptance of a verb that agrees with a noun other than the subject of the sentence, can be viewed as a process in which conflicting cues activate competing representations. The aftermath of such competition, in terms of cognitive processes, remains unclear. Using a novel referential communication task for eliciting agreement errors and both group-level manipulation of control demands and a detailed analysis of individual differences, we provide converging evidence for the role of monitoring and inhibitory control processes in agreement attraction for singular-subject sentences. We further demonstrate the dependence of producing plural verbs on such processes, suggesting the singular form is the prepotent default form. Collectively, these findings provide a clear demonstration for the role of monitoring and control processes in agreement computations, and more generally syntactic operations in sentence production.

Previous work has reported that children creatively make syntactic errors that are ungrammatical in their target language, but are grammatical in another language. One of the most well-known examples ismedial wh-questionerrors in English-speaking children's wh-questions (e.g.,What do you think who the cat chased?from Thornton, 1990). The evidence for this non-target-like structure in both production and comprehension has been taken to support the existence of innate, syntactic parameters that define all possible grammatical variation, which serve as a top-down constraint guiding children's language acquisition process. The present study reports new story-based production and comprehension experiments that challenge this interpretation. While we replicated previous observations of medial wh-question errors in children's sentence production (Experiment 1), we saw a reduction in evidence indicating that English-speaking children assign interpretations that conform to the medial wh-question pattern (Experiment 2). Crucially, we found no correlation between production and comprehension errors (Experiment 3). We suggest that these errors are the result of children's immature sentence production mechanisms rather than immature grammatical knowledge.

People born blind habitually experience linguistic utterances in the absence of visual cues and activate "visual" cortices during sentence comprehension. Do blind individuals show superior performance on sentence processing tasks? Congenitally blind (n=25) and age and education matched sighted (n=52) participants answered yes/no who-did-what-to-whom questions for auditorily-presented sentences, some of which contained a grammatical complexity manipulation (long-distance movement dependency or garden path). Short-term memory was measured with a forward and backward letter-spans. A battery of control tasks included two speeded math tasks and vocabulary and reading tasks from Woodcock Johnson III. The blind group outperformed the sighted on the sentence comprehension task, particularly for garden-path sentences, and on short-term memory span tasks, but performed similar to the sighted on control tasks. Sentence comprehension performance was not correlated with span performance, suggesting independent enhancements.

For a long time Japanese was taken to be a language lacking a subject-object asymmetry in subextraction. Two recent experimental studies have challenged this conclusion suggesting that Japanese complex NP (CNP) subjects are more opaque to subextraction than CNP objects (Jurka 2010; Jurka et al. 2011). Given the significance of this claim for the cross-linguistic landscape of subextraction phenomena, this study further explores the nature of subextraction phenomena in Japanese with three acceptability judgment experiments. We show that overt subextraction (scrambling) out of CNP subjects and objects results in similar acceptability ratings once the relative weight and order of constituents are properly controlled for. Recent experimental work which suggested that Japanese has a subject-object asymmetry to subextraction predicted that wh-in-situ adjuncts should lead to greater degradation for subextraction out of subjects as compared to subextraction out of objects. To test this prediction, we also present novel experimental data on wh-in-situ phrases inside subjects and objects in Japanese. Our results show that the argument/adjunct status of wh-in-situ phrases does not interact with the subject/object status of the CNPs, further invalidating the recent claims. Together these findings support the traditional view that Japanese has no subject-object asymmetry in subextraction, whether overt or covert. Having restored the status of Japanese as a language with no subject-object asymmetry in subextraction, we discuss possible reasons that could account for the absence of such an asymmetry. We suggest that the lack of asymmetry is due to Japanese subjects’ inability to satisfy the EPP on T/C; we further contend that cross-linguistic variation in subject transparency follows from whether or not the feature D comes from subjects.

Children's sentence interpretations often lack flexibility. For example, when French-speaking adults and children hear ambiguouswh-questions likeWhere did Annie explain that she rode herhorse?, they preferentially associate thewh-phrase with the first verb and adopt the main clause interpretation (e.g.,She explained at the campsite). This preferred association results in shorter syntactic dependencies compared to second verb associations (i.e., the embedded clause interpretation:She rode in the forest). Moreover, this bias toward shorter dependencies persists in "filled-gap"wh-questions, where the preferred interpretation is blocked by a prepositional phrase (e.g.,Where did Annie explainat the campsitethat she rode her horse?). Here, adults preferentially suppress their main clause bias and adopt embedded clause interpretations, whereas children still prefer their initial interpretations. The present study investigates how English-speaking children interpret ambiguous and filled-gapwh-questions. Cross-linguistic evidence suggests that children struggle to adopt second verb associations when first verb interpretations are unavailable. In five story-based experiments, we show that English-speaking children prefer main clause (first verb) interpretations in bothwh-question conditions-although they seem to adopt more second verb associations than has been previously reported for children in other languages. We also document a novel repair strategy used by adults and children in which they describewhowas at the main clause event rather thanwhereit occurred. Taken together, our findings highlight the cross-linguistic stability of children's shorter dependency biases and suggest that children's abilities to inhibit preferred interpretations may be shaped by the development of language-specific syntactic knowledge.

English reflexives like herself tend to associate with a structurally prominent local antecedent in online processing. However, past work has primarily investigated reflexives in canonical direct object positions. The present study investigates cataphoric reflexives in fronted wh-predicates (e.g., The mechanic that James hired predicted how annoyed with himself the insurance agent would be). Here, the reflexive is encountered in advance of its grammatical antecedent. We ask two questions. First, will readers engage an anaphoric (backwards-looking) or cataphoric (forwards-looking) search for an antecedent? Two, how similar is this process to the retrieval process for direct object reflexives? In two eye-tracking experiments, we found that readers initially interpret a cataphoric reflexive anaphorically, and tend to associate the reflexive with the more recently encountered antecedent. We propose that structural guidance for reflexive resolution occurs only when the necessary configurational syntactic information is available when the reflexive is encountered.

Much work has demonstrated that children are able to use bottom-up linguistic cues to incrementally interpret sentences, but there is little understanding of the extent to which children's comprehension mechanisms are guided by top-down linguistic information that can be learned from distributional regularities in the input. Using a visual world eye tracking experiment and a corpus analysis, the current study investigates whether 5- and 6-year-old children incrementally assign interpretations to temporarily ambiguous wh-questions like What was Emily eating the cake with_? In the visual world eye-tracking experiment, adults demonstrated evidence for active dependency formation at the earliest region (i.e., the verb region), while 6-year-old children demonstrated a spill-over effect of this bias in the subsequent NP region. No evidence for this bias was found in 5-year-olds, although the speed of arrival at the ultimately correct instrument interpretation appears to be modulated by the vocabulary size. These results suggest that adult-like active formation of filler-gap dependencies begins to emerge around age 6. The corpus analysis of filler-gap dependency structures in adult corpora and child corpora demonstrate that the distributional regularities in either corpora are equally in favor of early, incremental completion of filler-gap dependencies, suggesting that the distributional information in the input is either not relevant to this incremental bias, or that 5-year-old children are somehow unable to recruit this information in real-time comprehension. Taken together, these findings shed light on the origin of the incremental processing bias in filler-gap dependency processing, as well as on the role of language experience and cognitive constraints in the development of incremental sentence processing mechanisms.

Language processing depends on a left-lateralized network of frontotemporal cortical regions. This network is remarkably consistent across individuals and cultures. However, there is also evidence that developmental factors, such as delayed exposure to language, can modify this network. Recently, it has been found that, in congenitally blind individuals, the typical frontotemporal language network expands to include parts of “visual” cortices. Here, we report that blindness is also associated with reduced left lateralization in frontotemporal language areas. We analyzed fMRI data from two samples of congenitally blind adults (n = 19 and n = 13) and one sample of congenitally blind children (n = 20). Laterality indices were computed for sentence comprehension relative to three different control conditions: solving math equations (Experiment 1), a memory task with nonwords (Experiment 2), and a “does this come next?” task with music (Experiment 3). Across experiments and participant samples, the frontotemporal language network was less left-lateralized in congenitally blind than in sighted individuals. Reduction in left lateralization was not related to Braille reading ability or amount of occipital plasticity. Notably, we observed a positive correlation between the lateralization of frontotemporal cortex and that of language-responsive occipital areas in blind individuals. Blind individuals with right-lateralized language responses in frontotemporal cortices also had right-lateralized occipital responses to language. Together, these results reveal a modified neurobiology of language in blindness. Our findings suggest that, despite its usual consistency across people, the neurobiology of language can be modified by nonlinguistic experiences.

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Word learning research has shown that learners constrain the hypothesis space for word meanings by using multiple sources of information, such as cross-situational regularities of word-context co-occurrences or syntactic cues, like the number of arguments. These studies typically focus on word meaning development where these cues can be helpful but not necessary. As such, it sheds little light on the acquisition of anaphors, which requires tracking syntactic dependencies across situations. To test whether or how learners track this information, we conducted a novel anaphor learning experiment with English and Japanese speakers, manipulating cross-situational regularities in anaphors and their syntactic dependencies. Results show both English and Japanese speakers closely track the frequency of interpretive possibilities for novel anaphors. However, they demonstrate difficulties learning long-distance reflexives, which are compatible with either local or non-local antecedents. This suggests that successful anaphor learning requires more than cross-situational regularities of interpretive possibilities.

The Editors of FEBS Open Bio would like to thank all those who have given their time and expertise to review articles submitted for publication in Volume 8. Although FEBS Open Bio does not seek to judge the importance of submissions, our reviewers carefully scrutinize the experimental design and results of all papers, and challenge authors about their conclusions. The names of these reviewers are listed below; we apologize if we have inadvertently omitted anyone.

Subject-object asymmetry has played a particularly prominent role in studies of long-distance dependencies. In the great majority of languages, objects are found to be transparent to subextraction, while subjects are opaque to this operation. Subextraction is an operation under which a constituent is displaced out of the larger phrase in which it is embedded, leaving a gap at the base position (Corver to appear, and references therein):

In wh-questions that form a syntactic dependency between the fronted wh-phrase and its thematic position, acceptability is severely degraded when the dependency crosses another wh-phrase. It is well known that the acceptability degradation in wh-island violation ameliorates in certain contexts, but the source of this variation remains poorly understood. In the syntax literature, an influential theory - Featural Relativized Minimality - has argued that the wh-island effect is modulated exclusively by the distinctness of morpho-syntactic features in the two wh-phrases, but psycholinguistic theories of memory encoding and retrieval mechanisms predict that semantic properties of wh-phrases should also contribute to wh-island amelioration. We report four acceptability judgment experiments that systematically investigate the role of morpho-syntactic and semantic features in wh-island violations. The results indicate that the distribution of wh-island amelioration is best explained by an account that incorporates the distinctness of morpho-syntactic features as well as the semantic denotation of the wh-phrases. We argue that an integration of syntactic theories and perspectives from psycholinguistics can enrich our understanding of acceptability variation in wh-dependencies.

Human cortex is comprised of specialized networks that support functions, such as visual motion perception and language processing. How do genes and experience contribute to this specialization? Studies of plasticity offer unique insights into this question. In congenitally blind individuals, “visual” cortex responds to auditory and tactile stimuli. Remarkably, recent evidence suggests that occipital areas participate in language processing. We asked whether in blindness, occipital cortices: (1) develop domain-specific responses to language and (2) respond to a highly specialized aspect of language–syntactic movement. Nineteen congenitally blind and 18 sighted participants took part in two fMRI experiments. We report that in congenitally blind individuals, but not in sighted controls, “visual” cortex is more active during sentence comprehension than during a sequence memory task with nonwords, or a symbolic math task. This suggests that areas of occipital cortex become selective for language, relative to other similar higher-cognitive tasks. Crucially, we find that these occipital areas respond more to sentences with syntactic movement but do not respond to the difficulty of math equations. We conclude that regions within the visual cortex of blind adults are involved in syntactic processing. Our findings suggest that the cognitive function of human cortical areas is largely determined by input during development. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Human cortex is made up of specialized regions that perform different functions, such as visual motion perception and language processing. How do genes and experience contribute to this specialization? Studies of plasticity show that cortical areas can change function from one sensory modality to another. Here we demonstrate that input during development can alter cortical function even more dramatically. In blindness a subset of “visual” areas becomes specialized for language processing. Crucially, we find that the same “visual” areas respond to a highly specialized and uniquely human aspect of language–syntactic movement. These data suggest that human cortex has broad functional capacity during development, and input plays a major role in determining functional specialization.