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1. Untangling the evolution of body-part terminology in Pano: conservative versus innovative traits in body-part lexicalization

   https://doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2022.0053  

   Zariquiey, Roberto; Vera, Javier; Greenhill, Simon J.; Valenzuela, Pilar; Gray, Russell D.; List, Johann-Mattis (February 2023, Interface Focus)

   Although language-family specific traits which do not find direct counterparts outside a given language family are usually ignored in quantitative phylogenetic studies, scholars have made ample use of them in qualitative investigations, revealing their potential for identifying language relationships. An example of such a family specific trait are body-part expressions in Pano languages, which are often lexicalized forms, composed of bound roots (also called body-part prefixes in the literature) and non-productive derivative morphemes (called here body-part formatives). We use various statistical methods to demonstrate that whereas body-part roots are generally conservative, body-part formatives exhibit diverse chronologies and are often the result of recent and parallel innovations. In line with this, the phylogenetic structure of body-part roots projects the major branches of the family, while formatives are highly non-tree-like. Beyond its contribution to the phylogenetic analysis of Pano languages, this study provides significative insights into the role of grammatical innovations for language classification, the origin of morphological complexity in the Amazon and the phylogenetic signal of specific grammatical traits in language families. 

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2. Pronouns, Interrogatives, and (Quichua-Media Lengua) Code-Switching: The Eyes Have It

   https://doi.org/10.3390/languages5020011  

   Lipski, John M. (January 2020, Languages)

   This study examines the processing of two putatively problematic intra-sentential code-switching configurations, following subject pronouns and interrogatives, in a bilingual speech community in which there are no confounding grammatical differences. The languages are Ecuadoran Quichua and the mixed language known as Media Lengua, consisting of the entire Quichua morphosyntactic system but with all lexical roots replaced by their Spanish counterparts. In eye-tracking processing experiments utilizing the visual world paradigm with auditorily presented stimuli, Quichua–Media Lengua bilinguals identified the languages more quickly after pronouns and interrogatives than after lexical items, while acknowledgement of code-switches after pronouns and interrogatives was delayed in comparison with switches following lexical items. The facilitation effect of pronouns and interrogatives evidently provokes a surprise reaction when they are immediately followed by items from another language, and this relative delay may play a role in the low acceptability of code-switched utterances that otherwise violate no grammatical constraints. 

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3. Innovative Family-Based Genetically Informed Series of Analyses of Whole-Exome Data Supports Likely Inheritance for Grammar in Children with Specific Language Impairment

   https://doi.org/10.3390/children10071119  

   Andres, Erin M.; Earnest, Kathleen Kelsey; Xuan, Hao; Zhong, Cuncong; Rice, Mabel L.; Raza, Muhammad Hashim (July 2023, Children)

   Individuals with specific language impairment (SLI) struggle with language acquisition despite average non-verbal intelligence and otherwise typical development. One SLI account focuses on grammar acquisition delay. The current study aimed to detect novel rare genetic variants associated with performance on a grammar assessment, the Test of Early Grammatical Impairment (TEGI), in English-speaking children. The TEGI was selected due to its sensitivity and specificity, consistently high heritability estimates, and its absence from all but one molecular genetic study. We performed whole exome sequencing (WES) in eight families with SLI (n = 74 total) and follow-up Sanger sequencing in additional unrelated probands (n = 146). We prioritized rare exonic variants shared by individuals with low TEGI performance (n = 34) from at least two families under two filtering workflows: (1) novel and (2) previously reported candidate genes. Candidate variants were observed on six new genes (PDHA2, PCDHB3, FURIN, NOL6, IQGAP3, and BAHCC1), and two genes previously reported for overall language ability (GLI3 and FLNB). We specifically suggest PCDHB3, a protocadherin gene, and NOL6 are critical for ribosome synthesis, as they are important targets of SLI investigation. The proposed SLI candidate genes associated with TEGI performance emphasize the utility of precise phenotyping and family-based genetic study. 

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4. When classifying grammatical role, BERT doesn’t care about word order... except when it matters

   https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.acl-short.71  

   Papadimitriou, Isabel; Futrell, Richard; Mahowald, Kyle (January 2022, Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers))

   Because meaning can often be inferred from lexical semantics alone, word order is often a redundant cue in natural language. For example, the words chopped, chef, and onion are more likely used to convey “The chef chopped the onion,” not “The onion chopped the chef.” Recent work has shown large language models to be surprisingly word order invariant, but crucially has largely considered natural prototypical inputs, where compositional meaning mostly matches lexical expectations. To overcome this confound, we probe grammatical role representation in English BERT and GPT-2, on instances where lexical expectations are not sufficient, and word order knowledge is necessary for correct classification. Such non-prototypical instances are naturally occurring English sentences with inanimate subjects or animate objects, or sentences where we systematically swap the arguments to make sentences like “The onion chopped the chef”. We find that, while early layer embeddings are largely lexical, word order is in fact crucial in defining the later-layer representations of words in semantically non-prototypical positions. Our experiments isolate the effect of word order on the contextualization process, and highlight how models use context in the uncommon, but critical, instances where it matters. 

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5. The Effect of Iconicity on Weak Hand Drop in American Sign Language

   https://doi.org/10.3765/amp.v9i0.5305  

   Becker, Amelia Ann (August 2022, Proceedings of the Annual Meetings on Phonology)

   The research community generally accepts that signed and spoken languages contain both iconicity and arbitrariness. Iconicity's impact on statistical distributions of motivated forms throughout signed language lexicons is clear (e.g. Occhino, 2016). However, there has been little work to determine whether the iconic links between form and meaning are relevant only to a sign's initial formation, or if these links are stored as part of lexical representations. In the present study, 40 Deaf signers of American Sign Language were asked to rate two-handed signs in their citation form and in one-handed (reduced) forms. Twelve signs were highly iconic. For each of these highly iconic sign, a less iconic but phonologically similar sign of the same grammatical category was also chosen. Signs were presented in carrier sentences and in isolation. Participants preferred one-handed forms of the highly iconic signs over one-handed forms of their phonolgogically similar but less iconic counterparts. Thus, iconicity impacted the application of a synchronic phonological process. This finding suggests that lexical representations retain iconic form-meaning links and that these links are accessible to the phonological grammar. 

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