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1. On Difficulties of Cross-Lingual Transfer with Order Differences: A Case Study on Dependency Parsing

   https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/N19-1253  

   Ahmad, Wasi; Zhang, Zhisong; Ma, Xuezhe; Hovy, Eduard; Chang, Kai-Wei; Peng, Nanyun (January 2019, Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers))

   Different languages might have different word orders. In this paper, we investigate crosslingual transfer and posit that an orderagnostic model will perform better when transferring to distant foreign languages. To test our hypothesis, we train dependency parsers on an English corpus and evaluate their transfer performance on 30 other languages. Specifically, we compare encoders and decoders based on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and modified self-attentive architectures. The former relies on sequential information while the latter is more flexible at modeling word order. Rigorous experiments and detailed analysis shows that RNN-based architectures transfer well to languages that are close to English, while self-attentive models have better overall cross-lingual transferability and perform especially well on distant languages. 

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2. The timing of speech and gesture in two Niger-Congo languages: Implications for word-level prominence

   https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.17426  

   Franich, Kathryn; Keupdjio, Hermann; Nwosu, Vincent (January 2025, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics)

   Co-speech gestures are timed to occur with prosodically prominent syllables in several languages. In prior work in Indo-European languages, gestures are found to be attracted to stressed syllables, with gesture apexes preferentially aligning with syllables bearing higher and more dynamic pitch accents. Little research has examined the temporal alignment of co-speech gestures in African tonal languages, where metrical prominence is often hard to identify due to a lack of canonical stress correlates, and where a key function of pitch is in distinguishing between words, rather than marking intonational prominence. Here, we examine the alignment of co-speech gestures in two different Niger-Congo languages with very different word structures, Medʉmba (Grassfields Bantu, Cameroon) and Igbo (Igboid, Nigeria). Our findings suggest that the initial position in the stem tends to attract gestures in Medʉmba, while the final syllable in the word is the default position for gesture alignment in Igbo; phrase position also influences gesture alignment, but in language-specific ways. Though neither language showed strong evidence of elevated prominence of any individual tone value, gesture patterning in Igbo suggests that metrical structure at the level of the tonal foot is relevant to the speech-gesture relationship. Our results demonstrate how the speech-gesture relationship can be a window into patterns of word- and phrase-level prosody cross-linguistically. They also show that the relationship between gesture and tone (and the related notion of ‘tonal prominence’) is mediated by tone’s function in a language.  

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3. Predicting Age of Acquisition for Children's Early Vocabulary in Five Languages Using Language Model Surprisal

   https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13334  

   Portelance, Eva; Duan, Yuguang; Frank, Michael C.; Lupyan, Gary (September 2023, Cognitive Science)

   Abstract What makes a word easy to learn? Early‐learned words are frequent and tend to name concrete referents. But words typically do not occur in isolation. Some words are predictable from their contexts; others are less so. Here, we investigate whether predictability relates to when children start producing different words (age of acquisition; AoA). We operationalized predictability in terms of a word's surprisal in child‐directed speech, computed using n‐gram and long‐short‐term‐memory (LSTM) language models. Predictability derived from LSTMs was generally a better predictor than predictability derived from n‐gram models. Across five languages, average surprisal was positively correlated with the AoA of predicates and function words but not nouns. Controlling for concreteness and word frequency, more predictable predicates and function words were learned earlier. Differences in predictability between languages were associated with cross‐linguistic differences in AoA: the same word (when it was a predicate) was produced earlier in languages where the word was more predictable. 

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4. English‐learning infants developing sensitivity to vowel phonotactic cues to word segmentation

   https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13564  

   Katsuda, Hironori; Sundara, Megha (November 2024, Developmental Science)

   Abstract Previous research has shown that when domain‐general transitional probability (TP) cues to word segmentation are in conflict with language‐specific stress cues, English‐learning 5‐ and 7‐month‐olds rely on TP, whereas 9‐month‐olds rely on stress. In two artificial languages, we evaluated English‐learning infants’ sensitivity to TP cues to word segmentation vis‐a‐vis language‐specific vowel phonotactic (VP) cues—English words do not end in lax vowels. These cues were either consistent or conflicting. When these cues were in conflict, 10‐month‐olds relied on the VP cues, whereas 5‐month‐olds relied on TP. These findings align with statistical bootstrapping accounts, where infants initially use domain‐general distributional information for word segmentation, and subsequently discover language‐specific patterns based on segmented words. Research HighlightsResearch indicates that when transitional probability (TP) conflicts with stress cues for word segmentation, English‐learning 9‐month‐olds rely on stress, whereas younger infants rely on TP.In two artificial languages, we evaluated English‐learning infants’ sensitivity to TP versus vowel phonotactic (VP) cues for word segmentation.When these cues conflicted, 10‐month‐olds relied on VPs, whereas 5‐month‐olds relied on TP.These findings align with statistical bootstrapping accounts, where infants first utilize domain‐general distributional information for word segmentation, and then identify language‐specific patterns from segmented words. 

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5. Eye Movement Traces of Linguistic Knowledge in Native and Non-Native Reading

   https://doi.org/10.1162/opmi_a_00084  

   Berzak, Yevgeni; Levy, Roger (January 2023, Open Mind)

   Abstract The detailed study of eye movements in reading has shed considerable light into how language processing unfolds in real time. Yet eye movements in reading remain inadequately studied in non-native (L2) readers, even though much of the world’s population is multilingual. Here we present a detailed analysis of the quantitative functional influences of word length, frequency, and predictability on eye movement measures in reading in a large, linguistically diverse sample of non-native English readers. We find many similar qualitative effects as in L1 readers, but crucially also a proficiency-sensitive “lexicon-context tradeoff”. The most proficient L2 readers’ eye movements approach an L1 pattern, but as L2 proficiency diminishes, readers’ eye movements become less sensitive to a word’s predictability in context and more sensitive to word frequency, which is context-invariant. This tradeoff supports a rational, experience-dependent account of how context-driven expectations are deployed in L2 language processing. 

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