Search Results (44)

The article investigates children’s agent-first bias in sentence comprehension. Agent-first bias refers to the phenomenon in which children (or adults) tend to assign the agent role to the first noun phrase (NP) in a sentence. Previous studies suggest that children acquiring Indo-European languages like English exhibit the agent-first bias from early on, while children acquiring other languages may do so only during later stages of language development. However, little is understood about whether children acquiring Mandarin, a language with distinct typological features, also exhibit the agent-first bias. To fill this gap, we conducted two studies to examine children’s thematic role assignment in Mandarin noun–verb (NV) constructions and BEI-passive constructions. In the corpus study, our analysis of the child-directed utterances showed that for NV constructions, the NPs appeared more often as agents than patients, while for BEI-passive constructions, the NPs consistently served as patients. In the experimental study, we examined how 3- to 5-year-old children comprehended the two constructions, using a picture selection task. The results were consistent with the corpus findings. More specifically, when comprehending NV constructions, children as young as age 3 exhibited the agent-first bias, and this bias was stronger in the older children and adults. By contrast, when comprehending BEI-passive constructions, the children tended to interpret the NPs as patients. Taken together, these findings indicate a developmental trajectory of the agent-first bias in Mandarin-speaking children. We discuss these findings in relation to typological features across languages as well as the potential influences of input information and the passive marker BEI on children’s thematic role assignment. Full article

Quantitative phylogenetics in historical linguistics has relied almost entirely on lexical cognate data. This study asks a different question: how much genealogical signal can be recovered from structural features extracted from annotated corpora, and whether it survives at deep time depths. We compute 29 structural features—including Shannon entropies of dependency direction and of dependency-relation distributions, relation-specific directionality ratios, dependency-distance measures, and constructional ratios—across 25 Transeurasian languages from the five proposed groups (Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Japonic, and Koreanic) and three outgroups (Chinese, Vietnamese, and Hindi), 28 languages in all. Most of the Tungusic and Mongolic languages have no running-text corpus, so we built new Universal Dependencies treebanks for them by glossing example sentences from reference grammars; thirteen are used here. Each feature was tested for phylogenetic signal (Pagel’s λ and Blomberg’s K, with FDR correction) under four competing reference topologies, and the features that passed were used for tree inference (Bayesian inference in MrBayes, with Neighbor-Joining as a check). The same pipeline was first run on Indo-European in a companion study, where it recovers only individual subgroups and does not resolve a stable tree. At the depth proposed for the Transeurasian family (a Proto-Transeurasian root of about 9000 years before present), the structural signal was not enough to reconstruct the family’s internal relationships. The signal tests favoured a flat three-way division of the major branches (7 strict/20 relaxed features) over any nested hypothesis (≤2 strict features each), and the strongest signal lay in core word-order parameters (e.g., object direction, λ = 1.00, K = 6.06). But both Bayesian and distance-based inference returned near-complete polytomies: although the chains converged (ASDSF < 0.01), no branch reached a posterior probability above 0.75, and none of the three multi-language branches (Turkic, Mongolic, or Tungusic) was recovered. The outgroup test made the reason clear: Hindi, which is Indo-European but SOV, grouped with the head-final Transeurasian languages rather than with the other two (head-initial) outgroups, so the features are tracking typological similarity, not shared descent, at this depth. The study contributes 13 new treebanks for poorly documented languages, a reproducible framework for testing how much genealogical signal structural features carry, and direct evidence that, at Transeurasian time depths, this signal reflects typology rather than genealogy. Full article

Traditional grammatical theories, particularly those rooted in Indo-European languages, conceptualize the clause as a fundamental syntactic unit consisting of a verb and its overt arguments. However, studies of spontaneous conversation across diverse languages reveal that interactants often organize utterances around predicates, omitting explicit subjects and objects when referents are recoverable from context. By combining Conversation Analysis with frequency analysis, the present study illustrates that the preference for predicate-centered utterances in Korean conversation is robust, even in sequential environments where interactants have addressed understanding problems arising from argument omission through repair sequences. Specifically, interactants tend to maintain predicate-centered utterances after repair, showing little inclination to shift toward using overt arguments. These findings support the view that predicates serve as the central unit of utterance construction and underscore the need to re-examine the nature of grammar to fully account for the context-sensitive and interactional dynamics of language use. Full article

This article examines the Latin construction i nunc et V_imp from the perspective of diachronic analyzability. The expression consists of two imperative forms with identical morphological marking—the first a motion verb (V1), the second a lexical verb—linked by the conjunction et. Rather than encoding a literal directive sequence, the construction conveys a rhetorical exhortative value that systematically guides discourse interpretation in a direction different from that suggested by its surface form. Although attested from the Imperial period onward, the construction is analyzed against the background of serial imperatives with a motion verb in initial position and verbal pseudocoordination, patterns documented not only in Archaic Latin but also in other historical Indo-European languages. On the basis of an exhaustive corpus, the study assesses the contribution of each constituent in order to account for the construction’s global value. The analysis shows that i nunc et V_imp displays an uneven degree of analyzability: while its components remain formally and syntactically transparent, its semantic and pragmatic analyzability is reduced, as the elements do not contribute compositionally to propositional content but function as a pragmatically unitized block. Overall, the article highlights the central role of analyzability in diachronic change, including processes of unitization and constructional de/recategorization. Full article

With the rapid development of public digital cultural resources, the lack of cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) services catering to multilingual users in practical applications has created significant language barriers. This hinders the promotion of public digital culture and results in the underutilization of relevant resources. To address this need, this paper constructs M-APE, a shared semantic model that operates without reliance on parallel corpora. Through a three-step process comprising the generation, fine-tuning, and optimization of a shared semantic space, M-APE establishes a common semantic framework for diverse languages. The model utilizes a Chinese semantic space, transferred and trained on authentic public cultural corpora, as its input. Evaluation based on bilingual dictionary induction quality demonstrates that M-APE significantly enhances semantic sharing performance between Chinese and Indo-European languages, represented here by English and French, achieving an average cross-family transformation accuracy of 56.6%. Furthermore, focusing on the CLIR needs of multilingual users within China’s public cultural engineering projects, this study develops a Chinese-English-French cross-lingual information retrieval framework by integrating M-APE into public cultural domain tasks. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method achieves superior cross-lingual retrieval performance in terms of average metrics. Full article

Down syndrome (DS) is associated with persistent language impairments that extend beyond early childhood, yet evidence from agglutinative languages remains limited. While morphosyntactic weaknesses have been well-documented in Indo-European languages, less is known about how such difficulties are manifested in Turkish, a language in which grammatical relations are primarily marked through morphology. In addition, short-term memory (STM) limitations, particularly in verbal domains, are characteristic of DS and may contribute to language outcomes. This study examined the interaction between morphosyntax and STM in Turkish-speaking children and adolescents with DS. A cross-sectional observational design was employed, including 12 monolingual Turkish-speaking participants with DS (aged 6;7–15;11) and 10 TD peers matched on nonverbal mental age. Participants completed standardized assessments of syntax and morphology, spontaneous language sampling, and STM tasks assessing verbal and visual memory. Children with DS performed significantly below controls on syntactic comprehension and production as well as morphological measures, with larger effects observed for syntax. Noun morphology was less accurate than verb morphology, likely reflecting increased morphophonological complexity. Regression analyses indicated that auditory digit span predicted sentence comprehension, whereas nonword repetition predicted morphological production indexed by mean length of utterance in morphemes. Substantial inter-individual variability was observed within the DS group. These findings suggest that morphosyntactic outcomes in Turkish-speaking children with DS are closely linked to verbal STM capacities and vary considerably across individuals, underscoring the importance of integrated assessment and individualized intervention planning. Future research with larger samples is warranted to confirm and extend these preliminary findings. Findings should be interpreted cautiously due to the limited sample size and are presented as preliminary descriptive evidence. This study provides initial data on Turkish-speaking individuals with Down syndrome. Full article

Among the painted wooden tablets found at Dandan Oilik (Khotan), possibly dated to the seventh–eighth century, A. Stein and other scholars pointed to the presence of non-Indian deities that could be rooted in the pre-Buddhist Khotanese religious milieu. Since the language spoken in ancient Khotan belonged to the Eastern Iranian branch of the so-called Indo-European languages, it seemed obvious to some experts to imagine that the local deities depicted on those wooden tablets had an Iranian background. Newly excavated mural paintings from small Buddhist temples in the region of Khotan allowed us to better consider some of these local deities, who presented unique elements and symbolic animals possibly related to other eastern Iranian forms of so-called Zoroastrianism, such as the religion of pre-Islamic Sogdiana and Chorasmia. Full article

Background/Objectives: Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is characterised by progressive decline in language and communication. However, existing diagnostic frameworks and assessment tools are largely based on Indo-European languages, which limits their applicability to Chinese bilingual speakers whose linguistic profiles differ markedly in tonal phonology, logographic writing, and bilingual organisation. This review aimed to (a) describe how PPA presents in Chinese bilingual speakers, (b) evaluate how well current speech–language and neuropsychological assessments capture these impairments, and (c) identify linguistically and culturally informed strategies to improve clinical practice. Methods: A systematic review was conducted in accordance with the PRISMA-ScR guidelines. Four databases (PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, PsycINFO) were searched, complemented by backward and forward citation chaining. Eight empirical studies met the inclusion criteria. Data were extracted on participant characteristics, PPA variant, language background, speech–language and writing profiles, and assessment tools used. Thematic analysis was applied to address the research questions. Results: Across variants, Chinese bilingual speakers demonstrated universal PPA features expressed through language-specific pathways. Mandarin speakers exhibited tone-segment integration errors, tonal substitution, and disruptions in logographic writing. Lexical-semantic degradation reflected homophony and compounding characteristics. Bilingual individuals showed parallel or asymmetric decline influenced by dominance and usage. Standard English-based naming, repetition, and writing assessments did not reliably capture tone accuracy, radical-level writing errors, or bilingual patterns. Sociocultural factors, including stigma, delayed help-seeking, and family-centred care expectations, further shaped diagnostic pathways. Conclusions: Chinese PPA cannot be meaningfully assessed using tools designed for Indo-European languages. Findings highlight the need for tone-sensitive repetition tasks, logographic writing assessments, bilingual diagnostic protocols, and culturally responsive communication-partner support. This review provides a comprehensive synthesis to date on Chinese bilingual PPA and establishes a foundation for linguistically inclusive diagnostic and clinical models. Full article

Despite the oligotrophic conditions of the southeastern Levantine Sea and northern Red Sea, six lobster species—five slipper lobsters (Scyllaridae) and one spiny lobster (Palinuridae)—maintain permanent, reproducing populations in the study area. Additionally, there are isolated records of four other sporadic lobster species. In the southeastern Mediterranean, permanent species include the Mediterranean slipper lobster,Scyllarides latus, small European locust lobster, Scyllarus arctus, and pygmy locust lobster, Scyllarus pygmaeus. In the northern Red Sea, they include the clamkiller slipper lobster, Scyllarides tridacnophaga, Lewinsohn locust slipper lobster, Eduarctus lewinsohni, and pronghorn spiny lobster, Panulirus penicillatus. This review synthesizes current knowledge of their biology and ecology, including distribution, habitat, reproduction and development, feeding, predators and anti-predatory adaptations, behavior, sensory modalities, environmental impacts, threats, and conservation. Recent advances focus mainly on larger, commercially valuable species (S. latus, S. tridacnophaga, P. penicillatus), while major gaps remain for oceanic post-embryonic stages and the nektonic nisto postlarva, as well as for smaller, often cryptic species (S. arctus, S. pygmaeus, E. lewinsohni). Addressing these gaps will require targeted research, using modern methodologies, in coastal, deep, and open waters, coupled with citizen-science surveys. While many Indo-Pacific decapods have been established in the Mediterranean, no immigrant lobster species have successfully colonized Levant waters, despite rare records of three non-indigenous species (NIS). However potential NIS predators and shifts in mollusk compositions, the main prey of some native lobsters, may affect the latter. Large lobsters remain targeted by fisheries despite protective regulations, which are not always effective or obeyed. No-take marine protected areas (MPAs) or nature reserves can be effective if sufficiently large and well-managed. Habitat loss from marine construction can be partly compensated by stable, environmentally safe artificial reefs tailored to lobster behavioral ecology. The categories of the studied lobsters’ species in the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, last updated over fifteen years ago, should be re-evaluated. Full article

In this paper, we apply an information-theoretic method proposed by Ryabko and Savina (therefore called the RS-method), based on the use of data compression, to recognize the individual author’s style of a writer across four languages from different language groups and families. In this paper, the presented method was used to study fiction texts in Russian (East Slavic group of languages of the Indo-European language family), Amharic (South Ethiosemitic group of the Semitic language family), Chinese (Sinitic group of the Sino-Tibetan language family) and English (West Germanic language group of the Indo-European language family). It was found that the amount of data necessary for recognizing an author’s style is almost the same for all four languages, i.e., the amount of data is invariant across different language groups. The results obtained are of interest to computer science, literary studies, linguistics and, in particular, computational linguistics. Full article

Bactrocera dorsalis (Hendel, 1912) (Diptera: Tephritidae) is considered a highly invasive fruit fly species already widespread in Indo-Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. In recent years, this species has extended its range into new regions previously considered unsuitable, posing an alarming new risk for the subtropical regions of Europe. This review aimed to assess the potential risk of B. dorsalis invasion into the fruit industry in the Iberian Peninsula, the southwesternmost tip of Europe. With the collected information from published scientific knowledge on B. dorsalis’s distribution, biology, climatic tolerance, host plant diversity, and recent invasion pathways, we have provided an assessment of the possibilities of introducing this alarming fruit fly species to the Iberian Peninsula. In this review, we found that B. dorsalis has been recently reported in several adjacent European countries such as France, Italy, and Austria, and it serves as a warning signal to the Iberian Peninsula for the possible risks that this species poses in the future. Considering this persistent threat posed by B. dorsalis, we reviewed its potential future threat by considering the status of the fruit industry and Mediterranean climate in the Iberian Peninsula. We also considered the findings of recent climatic forecasting models. This review provides a theoretical basis for the prospective intrusion of B. dorsalis into the Iberian Peninsula’s fruit industry, as well as the potential impact following its establishment, together with recommendations for restricting the introduction and spread. Full article

The middle construction (MC) is a term originally used to account for derived intransitives in the generative tradition and is well-documented in many Indo-European languages. While diverse views exist on the Chinese MC, some scholars have argued that Chinese [patient-subj V-qilai AP] sentences share traits with the English MC. Although diachronic literature on the development of the Chinese MC is limited, examining the grammaticalization of directional verb phrases like V-qilai provides valuable insights into its evolution. Building on previous analyses, I identify [patient-subj V-qilai AP] as the Chinese MC with V-qilai as its marker. Through an analysis of Classical Chinese data and the approach of constructional assemblies, I propose that the Chinese MC originated from assembled constructions comprising a subject, a directional verb phrase, and a descriptive construction. Over time, these assemblies evolved, with shifts in subject roles, motion interpretation, and descriptive functions, resulting in the emergence of the MC. Quantitative analysis of Classical data indicates the absence of the MC before 1900, suggesting its development through a gradual increase in the frequency of interconnected assemblies. By tracing the development of the Chinese MC, this research enhances our understanding of how middle voice mechanisms emerge across languages. Full article

Background/Objectives: Both language and music are capable of encoding and communicating semantic concepts, suggesting a potential overlap in neurocognitive mechanisms. Moreover, music training not only enhances domain-specific musical processing but also facilitates cross-domain language processing. However, existing research has predominantly focused on Indo-European languages, with limited evidence from paratactic languages such as Mandarin Chinese. In addition, the impact of variations in musical expertise on these shared processing mechanisms remains unclear, leaving a critical gap in our understanding of the shared neural bases for semantic processing in language and music. This event-related potential (ERP) study investigated whether Chinese sentences and musical chord sequences share semantic processing mechanisms and how musical expertise modulates these mechanisms. Methods: This study recruited 46 college students (22 musicians and 24 non-musicians). Participants read Chinese sentences presented word-by-word visually, while chord sequences were delivered auditorily, with each word temporally aligned to one chord. Sentences included semantically acceptable or unacceptable classifier–noun pairs and chord sequences ended with in-key or out-of-key chords. Participants were instructed to focus on reading sentences while ignoring the concurrent music. ERP signals were recorded, and time-locked to final words to capture neural dynamics during semantic integration. Results: The behavioral results showed that musicians were influenced by musical regularity when reading (acceptable: F(1, 44) = 25.70, p < 0.001, η_p² = 0.38; unacceptable: F(1, 44) = 11.45, p = 0.002, η_p² = 0.21), but such effect was absent in non-musicians (ps > 0.05). ERP results showed that musical semantic processing had a substantial impact on both P200 (F(1, 44) = 9.95, p = 0.003, η_p² = 0.18), N400 (musicians: F(1, 44) = 15.80, p < 0.001, η_p² = 0.26; non-musicians: F(1, 44) = 4.34, p = 0.043, η_p² = 0.09), and P600 (musicians: F(1, 44) = 5.55, p = 0.023, η_p² = 0.11; non-musicians: F(1, 44) = 8.68, p = 0.005, η_p² = 0.17) components. Furthermore, musical expertise exerted modulatory effects during later stages, as evidenced by divergent N400 and P600 latency patterns between musicians and non-musicians. Specifically, ERP amplitudes exhibited opposing trends: musicians showed an enhanced N400 and diminished P600, while non-musicians displayed a weaker N400 and stronger P600. Conclusions: Our findings provide novel evidence that Mandarin Chinese and chord sequences engage partially overlapping neural mechanisms for semantic processing both in the early (P200) and the late (N400 and P600) stages. Crucially, this study is the first to demonstrate that musical expertise may gradually reorganize these shared mechanisms, enabling two initially independent but functionally analogous semantic mechanisms into a domain-general processing system. These insights deepen our understanding of the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying linguistic and musical semantic processing and highlight how expertise shapes the neural architecture of cross-domain mechanisms. Full article

Prior research has shown that people can predict the syntactic features of an upcoming word during sentence comprehension. However, evidence for morphosyntactic predictive processing has been limited to gender or case marking in a small subset of Indo-European languages. In the current study, we implemented the eye-tracking visual world paradigm to investigate whether L1 (n = 18) and L2 (n = 40) Arabic speakers could extract number information from singular-marked verbs to anticipate the next noun. In a between-subject design, L1 and L2 speakers heard the singular verb in the simple past form (Exp 1) and the progressive past form (Exp 2). The effect of L2 proficiency (measured using a C-test and a receptive vocabulary test) on number prediction was also examined. L1 Arabic speakers showed earlier and stronger number prediction effects regardless of verb aspect. In contrast, L2 speakers exhibited delayed (Exp 1) or limited (Exp 2) prediction, suggesting a mediating role for verb aspect. Increased L2 proficiency did not influence anticipatory eye-movements during the verb region, and only emerged as significant during the noun region. These results confirm and extend earlier research on L1 and L2 number predictive processing. Full article

The poetry of distant country with different culture and language is always distinctive and fascinating. Chinese and Romanian belong to Sinitic languages of the Sino-Tibetan language family and Romance languages of the Indo-European language family, which have relatively different syntax and general imagery of literature. Therefore, in this study, we make an attempt that was rarely involved in previous poetry generation research, using modern Chinese as the carrier, and generating modern poetry with Romanian style based on pre-trained model and direct preference optimization. Using a 5-point grading system, human evaluators awarded scores ranging from 3.21 to 3.83 across seven evaluation perspectives for the generated poems, achieving 76.2% to 91.6% of the comparable scores for the Chinese translations of authentic Romanian poems. The coincidence of the 30th to the 50th most frequently occurring poetic images in both generated poems and Romanian poems can reach 58.0–63.3%. Human evaluation and comparative statistical results on poetic imagery show that direct preference optimization is of great help in improving the degree of stylization, and the model can successfully create Chinese modern poems with Romanian style. Full article