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Native adult speakers of a language can produce grammatical sentences fluently, effortlessly, and with relatively few errors. These characteristics make the highly-practiced task of speaking a viable candidate for an automatic process, i.e., one independent of cognitive control. However, recent studies have suggested that some aspects of production, such as lexical retrieval and tailoring speech to an addressee, may depend on the speaker’s inhibitory control abilities. Less clear is the dependence of syntactic operations on inhibitory control processes. Using both a direct manipulation of inhibitory control demands and an analysis of individual differences, we show that one of the most common syntactic operations, producing the correct subject-verb agreement, requires inhibitory control when a singular subject noun competes with a plural local noun as in “The snake next to the purple elephants is green.”. This finding calls for the integration of inhibitory control mechanisms into models of agreement production, and more generally into theories of syntactic production.
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Analogy in contact: Modeling Maltese plural inflection
Maltese is often described as having a hybrid morphological system resulting from extensive contact between Semitic and Romance language varieties. Such a designation reflects an etymological divide as much as it does a larger tradition in the literature to consider concatenative and non-concatenative morphological patterns as distinct in the language architecture. Using a combination of computational modeling and information theoretic methods, we quantify the extent to which the phonology and etymology of a Maltese singular noun may predict the morphological process (affixal vs. templatic) as well as the specific plural allomorph (affix or template) relating a singular noun to its associated plural form(s) in the lexicon. The results indicate phonological pressures shape the organization of the Maltese lexicon with predictive power that extends beyond that of a word’s etymology, in line with analogical theories of language change in contact.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2217554
- PAR ID:
- 10451151
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
- Volume:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 2834-1007
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 35-46
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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