Search Results (71)

Faced with the challenges of cross-cultural communication of public opinion in emergency events, traditional sentiment recognition methods struggle to accurately capture the complex semantics under multi-lingual and multi-symbol systems. This paper takes the powerful 7.7-magnitude earthquake that struck Myanmar in 2025 as a case study. It constructs a multi-dimensional public opinion annotation framework that integrates four types of semantic information—time, space, subject, and sentiment—by extracting data from multi-source textual materials, including social media, news reports, and government announcements. Building on this foundation, we design an improved Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) model that incorporates cultural features to enhance sentiment recognition performance in low-resource cross-linguistic scenarios. Experimental results show that the model outperforms traditional methods in terms of sentiment classification accuracy, cultural semantic deviation rate and metaphor recognition ability. Furthermore, the research reveals the coupling mechanism of public opinion communication of “cultural modulation–agenda game”, and clarifies the influence paths and weight distributions among multiple subjects. The research results provide theoretical support and practical paths for improving the governance capacity of cross-border public opinion in emergency events and the construction of multilingual monitoring models. Full article

A major question in L1 attrition research is whether cross-linguistic influence from a speaker’s second language onto their first constitutes only a temporary, superficial effect or whether it can also lead to a structural change, often discussed as a distinction between effects on language processing as opposed to changes to the mental representation of grammatical properties. Some have argued that L1 grammars of adult L2 speakers are entirely impervious to change, while others stated that some of the available findings can be interpreted as grammatical representations themselves being vulnerable. This paper contributes to the question of how we can distinguish between these two types of attrition. I argue that it is challenging to use behavioral differences across tasks as well as experimental results showing optionality between L1 and L2 options to distinguish between a superficial and a structural change. Instead, situations where properties of an attriter’s L1 grammar converge on the L2 constitute the clearest case of structural change as these cannot be explained as temporary effects of L2 influence. Using data from an earlier study on attrition found in Romanian native speakers living in Italy, I furthermore challenge the claim that L2 convergence only occurs in rare situations where attriters lose contact with the L1. To better understand the contexts in which attrition at the level of representation may be possible, I suggest that future studies focus on (1) a variety of linguistic properties where the L1 allows a grammatical construction or interpretation also in situations where it is not used in the L2, (2) properties where options from both the L1 and the L2 are less likely to co-exist in an attritred grammar and (3) consistently include analyses of individual response patterns. Full article

Despite significant advances in AI language models, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) remains a linguistically complex domain in which apparent fluency often masks deeper grammatical instability. This study investigates recurrent grammatical error patterns in ChatGPT-generated Arabic texts, focusing on how these patterns reflect underlying morpho-syntactic challenges and the constraints of probabilistic language generation. Adopting a qualitative, pattern-oriented analytical framework, the study draws on online focus group discussions with secondary-level Arabic teachers, who served as expert linguistic evaluators. Participants collaboratively examined a set of AI-generated texts to identify and interpret systematic grammatical deviations across five key domains: agreement, inflection and case marking, sentence structure, prepositions and transitivity, and cross-linguistic influence. The findings indicate that grammatical errors in AI-generated Arabic are not random but occur as recurring, structured patterns, particularly in contexts involving long-distance dependencies and morphologically complex constructions. These patterns suggest a reliance on surface-level fluency at the expense of deeper grammatical coherence, reflecting limitations in maintaining consistent morpho-syntactic relationships. This study contributes by identifying and characterizing systematic grammatical patterns in AI-generated MSA as interpreted through expert linguistic judgment, offering a qualitative perspective that complements existing quantitative approaches and advances understanding of how large language models engage with morphologically rich languages. Full article

Background: Given the central role of writing and typing in contemporary communication, integrating writing assessments into clinical practice is crucial for improving the diagnosis and management of primary progressive aphasia (PPA). This scoping review summarizes evidence on writing abilities in PPA, examining task types, their strengths and limitations, the linguistic features of stimuli, and the influence of language differences. Methods: A literature search was conducted using the Google Scholar and PubMed databases. We included papers published in peer-reviewed journals and written in English that present data from at least one PPA subject and report a quantitative score relative to a writing task. Fifty-one studies were included (forty-seven behavioral; four with neuroimaging). Results: Overall, the literature is fragmented, with marked variability in task design and the control of psycholinguistic variables. Writing to dictation is the most frequently used task but fails to capture the full spectrum of writing impairments, whereas tasks tapping lexico-semantic, morpho-syntactic, and discourse-level abilities are rarely employed. At the syndromic description level, svPPA typically shows surface dysgraphia, nfvPPA presents phonological dysgraphia and agrammatic writing, and lvPPA displays mixed error profiles. Neuroimaging findings are highly heterogeneous. Conclusions: The review underscores the need for systematic, linguistically grounded approaches to writing assessments in PPA to enhance diagnostic precision and cross-linguistic comparability. Full article

Transparent orthographies, such as Bulgarian and Italian, feature highly consistent grapheme-phoneme correspondences, enabling rapid acquisition of decoding skills. Despite belonging to different language families and using distinct scripts (i.e., Cyrillic vs. Latin), these languages provide an ideal framework to investigate whether orthographic transparency can outweigh script differences in shaping reading development. We conducted a cross-sectional study with primary school children from Grades 2 to 5 in Bulgaria and Italy. Reading performance was recorded using a novel finger-tracking technique, which allows the capture of temporal dynamics of reading in a portable, low-cost, and classroom-friendly format. Measures of reading time and text comprehension accuracy were compared across grades and languages. Developmental trajectories for both speed and comprehension accuracy showed remarkable similarity across Bulgarian and Italian, with both languages exhibiting steady improvement from grade 2 to grade 5. Our cross-linguistic results showed that reading development in primary school children follows both universal and language-specific trajectories. While broad developmental trajectories were similar, cross-linguistic differences emerged in the impact of morphological complexity, pointing to both universal and language-specific mechanisms. Our findings indicate that orthographic transparency may exert a stronger influence on early reading development than script type, even across languages from different families. The study also highlights the potential of finger-tracking for large-scale literacy research. Establishing comparable developmental benchmarks in transparent orthographies may inform cross-linguistic screening tools and early interventions. Full article

This study investigates how cross-linguistic differences in spatial cognition affect Chinese learners’ acquisition of French in the conflict domain of page turning, which is encoded in opposite ways by French and Mandarin. Two hundred and sixty-one Chinese university students completed a video-based spatial task in both languages, comprising both comprehension and production components. The results revealed a marked asymmetry in spatial cognition between the first language (L1) and second language (L2): while learners consistently relied on stabilised Mandarin-based construals, their French responses remained strongly shaped by L1 frames of reference. We found no significant association between global French proficiency and success in the French spatial tasks, indicating that higher proficiency does not automatically entail conceptual restructuring in this domain. Meanwhile, a small to moderate negative correlation between French and Mandarin scores indicated a subtle L2-to-L1 influence, whereby adopting French-conventional spatial construals was accompanied by reduced alignment with Mandarin-conventional patterns. These findings contribute to research on bidirectional cross-linguistic influence in spatial cognition by documenting L2-to-L1 effects in late, classroom-based learners. They also point to the need for pedagogical approaches that explicitly target spatial conceptualisation—through contrastive reflection and embodied practice—rather than focusing solely on the formal properties of spatial expressions. Full article

Interpreting event completion is a core difficulty in second language acquisition, as it underpins temporal reference and communication. This study investigates how L1 Urdu Pakistani learners of English acquire telicity, a semantic property that distinguishes completed and ongoing events. The analysis centers on bounded and unbounded object noun phrases (NPs) in marking telic/atelic events within accomplishment predicates. In English, telicity is compositionally encoded through verb types, object NPs, and temporal adverbials, whereas Urdu relies on aspectual morphology, creating challenges for learners in mapping event completion. The study is framed within the Full Transfer Full Access (FTFA) model and the Interpretability Hypothesis (IH). Data were collected through an Acceptability Judgment Task (AJT) administered to Pakistani ESL learners at elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels, alongside a native English control group. Results support the FTFA model, revealing a significant developmental trajectory where accuracy in distinguishing telic/atelic contrasts increases with proficiency. At the elementary level, an L1-based accuracy gradient emerged across NP types, reflecting the transfer of Urdu nominal underspecification. While advanced learners demonstrated successful restructuring in bounded contexts, partial support for the IH was found in atelic contexts. Continued divergence from native judgements in unbounded NP conditions highlights a persistent mapping deficit at the syntax–semantics interface. The study advances second language event semantics, emphasizing the role of object structure and cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of L2 event boundaries. Full article

This paper, positioned within the study of immigrant language varieties in Canada, examines mismo si (‘even if’), an understudied grammatical feature of Spanish in contact with French in Montreal. The phenomenon is analyzed cross-linguistically and within the theoretical framework of Distributed Morphology, approaching it from two complementary perspectives: (1) a sociolinguistic analysis of Spanish-French bilinguals in Montreal, and (2) a formal investigation of its structural properties. Mismo si, equivalent to Standard Spanish aunque and incluso si (‘even though’), is a lexical transfer from the French conjunction même si and conveys a concessive meaning. The evidence shows that this structure constitutes a distinctive linguistic adaptation to the bilingual sociolinguistic environment of Montreal. The article is organized in two sections: the first presents a qualitative and quantitative analysis of mismo si occurrences in the COLEM corpus (Corpus Oral de la Lengua Española en Montreal), while the second offers a formal examination of this contact-induced structure. Full article

Effective turn-taking is fundamental to conversational interactions, shaping the fluidity of communication across human dialogues and interactions with spoken dialogue systems (SDS). Despite its apparent simplicity, conversational turn-taking involves complex timing mechanisms influenced by various linguistic, prosodic, and multimodal cues. This review synthesises recent theoretical insights and practical advancements in understanding and modelling conversational timing dynamics, emphasising critical phenomena such as voice activity (VA), turn floor offsets (TFO), and predictive turn-taking. We first discuss foundational concepts, such as voice activity detection (VAD) and inter-pausal units (IPUs), and highlight their significance for systematically representing dialogue states. Central to the challenge of interactive systems is distinguishing moments when conversational roles shift versus when they remain with the current speaker, encapsulated by the concepts of “hold” and “shift”. The timing of these transitions, measured through Turn Floor Offsets (TFOs), aligns closely with minimal human reaction times, suggesting biological underpinnings while exhibiting cross-linguistic variability. This review further explores computational turn-taking heuristics and models, noting that simplistic strategies may reduce interruptions yet risk introducing unnatural delays. Integrating multimodal signals, prosodic, verbal, visual, and predictive mechanisms is emphasised as essential for future developments in achieving human-like conversational responsiveness. Full article

Studies of children’s narratives have shown that selecting appropriate forms to reintroduce a referent compared to retaining a referent is challenging because it requires the integration of different accessibility features. Bilingual children are more explicit than their monolingual peers when it comes to referent selection, especially in the context of reintroduction in null-argument languages. Whether different accessibility features influence referent choice in the context of reintroduction in bilingual and monolingual children remains to be investigated. Japanese narratives were elicited from Japanese–English school-age early bilinguals (n = 13) and their monolingual peers (n = 8) using a wordless picture book and video clip, and the linguistic means of referent reintroduction were analyzed in terms of recency, ambiguity, and pragmatic predictability. The analysis revealed that in terms of recency, bilinguals used more noun phrases (NPs) than null forms when the referent was highly accessible, thus exhibiting overexplicitness, whereas in terms of ambiguity, bilinguals used more NPs for less accessible referents, while monolinguals were not as explicit. Both groups were sensitive to accessibility. We argue that bilinguals are selectively redundant, suggesting that the overproduction is not due to the load of processing two languages but is a manifestation of cross-linguistic influence modulated by accessibility features. The results emphasize the importance of considering discourse features in identifying overexplicitness. Full article

Previous research shows that L2 learning can cause non-nativeness in the L1 of adult learners. These effects vary across segments, even across members of the same natural class (e.g., voiceless or voiced stops) differing in the presence or absence of transfer, the direction (‘assimilation’ toward L2 or ‘dissimilation’ away from it), and the magnitude of shift. However, little is known about how multiple phonetic cues within a single segment jointly exhibit transfer, or about the cross-linguistic linkages formed at this fine-grained, cue-specific level of phonetic structure. This study investigates phonetic backward transfer by analyzing production of three cues, voice onset time, voicing during closure, and relative burst intensity, across voiced stops /b d g/. Conducted among first-generation bilingual Indian immigrants in Glasgow, it explores how their native varieties (Hindi and Indian English) are influenced by the dominant host variety (Glaswegian English) with reference to the revised Speech Learning Model and its predictions of assimilation, dissimilation, and no change. Two control groups (Indians and Glaswegians) and an experimental group (Glasgow Indians) were recorded reading in English and Hindi words containing the three voiced stops. Findings reveal cue-specific variability, highlighting the multidimensional nature of CLI and challenging segment-level generalizations in models of phonetic transfer. Full article

Background/Objectives: This study sets out to explore how L1 Mandarin speakers with varying lengths of L2 experience perceived English focus interrogative tune, L*H-H%, within the framework of the autosegmental–metrical model. Methods: Eighteen Mandarin speakers with varying lengths of residence in the United States and eighteen English native speakers were invited to perceive prosodic prominence and judge the naturalness of focus prosody tunes. Results: For the perception of on-focus pitch accent L*, Mandarin speakers performed well in the prominence detection task but not in the focus identification task. For post-focus edge tones, we found that phrase accents were more susceptible to L1 influences than boundary tones due to the varying degrees of cross-linguistic similarity between these intonational categories. The results also show that even listeners with extended L2 experience were not proficient in their perception of L2 interrogative focus tunes. Conclusions: This study reveals the advantage of considering the degree of L1-L2 similarity and the necessity to examine cross-linguistic influences on L2 perception of prosody separately in phonological and phonetic dimensions. Full article

Acquiring prosodic focus marking in a second language (L2) is difficult for learners whose native language utilizes strategies that differ from those of the target language. German typically uses pitch accents (L+H*/H*) to mark focus, while (Modern Standard) Arabic preferably employs a syntactic strategy (word order) or lexical means. In Syrian Arabic, a variety which is predominantly oral, pitch accents are used to mark focus, but the distribution and types are different from German. The present study investigates how Syrian Arabic learners of German prosodically mark focus in L2 German. A question–answer paradigm was used to elicit German subject-verb-object (SVO)-sentences with broad, narrow, or contrastive focus. Productions of advanced (C1, N = 17) and intermediate (B1/B2, N = 8) Syrian Arabic learners were compared to those of German controls (N = 12). Like the controls, both learner groups successfully placed pitch accents on focused constituents. However, learners, especially those with lower proficiency, used more pitch accents in non-focal regions than the controls, revealing challenges in de-accentuation. These may result from the larger number of phrase boundaries in learners’ productions, which in turn might be explained by transfer from the L1 or aspects of general fluency. Learners also differed from the controls with respect to accent type. They predominantly used H* for narrow or contrastive focus (instead of L+H*); proficiency effects played only a minor role here. Our study hence reveals an intricate interplay between cross-linguistic influence and proficiency in the L2 acquisition of prosodic focus marking, targeting a language pair so far underrepresented in the literature (German vs. Syrian Arabic). Full article

For heritage speakers (HSs), expectations of influence from the community’s dominant language are pervasive. An alternative account for heritage language variability is that HSs are demonstrating sociolinguistic competence: HSs may either initiate or carry forward a pattern of variation from the homeland variety. We illustrate the importance of this consideration, querying whether /u/-fronting in Heritage Korean is best interpreted as influence from Toronto English, where /u/-fronting also occurs, or a continuation of an ongoing vowel shift in Homeland (Seoul) Korean that also involves /ɨ/-fronting and /o/-fronting. How can patterns of social embedding untangle this question that is central to better understanding sociolinguistic competence in HSs? For Korean vowels produced in sociolinguistic interviews by Heritage (8 adult immigrants, 8 adult children of immigrants) and 10 Homeland adults, F1 and F2 were measured (13,232 tokens of /o/, 6810 tokens of /u/, and 20,637 tokens of /ɨ/), normalized and subjected to linear regression. Models predict effects of gender, age, orientation toward Korean language and culture, the speaker’s average F2 for the other shifting vowels, and duration. These models highlight HS’s sociolinguistic competence: Heritage speakers share linguistic and social patterns with Homeland Korean speakers that are absent in English. Additionally, heritage speakers lack the effects of factors attested in the English change. Full article

The literature on bilingual language development often reports cases of cross-linguistic interaction of the two languages being acquired. In this paper, we investigate possible cross-linguistic interaction outputs in the development of branching onsets in the bilingual acquisition of French and Portuguese. Thirty French–Portuguese bilingual children, aged between 3;6 and 6;1, participated in our study. Their elicited productions were collected using two picture naming tasks containing 29 clusters in French and 57 clusters in Portuguese. Almost all the children acquire branching onsets earlier in French than in Portuguese, independently of the quality of cluster type (Consonant + Rhotic (Cr) clusters vs. Consonant + Lateral (Cl) clusters). Epenthesis is more present in Portuguese than in French. Shared structures in both languages are not acquired at the same time. These results show that bilingual children follow separate patterns of development, close to the ones reported for monolinguals, during the acquisition of their two languages. Moreover, the bilingual children show higher rates of development of clusters in Portuguese than the ones reported for monolinguals, suggesting an accelerated acquisition of clusters in Portuguese due to a positive influence of French. Full article