Feature reassembly and L1 preemption: Acquiring CLLD in L2 Italian and L2 Romanian.

This study investigates feature acquisition and feature reassembly associated with Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD). The article compares the acquisition of CLLD in second language (L2) Italian to L2 Romanian to examine effects of first language (L1) transfer, construction frequency and the type of interface involved (external vs. internal interface) within the same syntactic construction. The results from an acceptability judgment task and a written elicitation task show that while English near-native speakers of Italian/Romanian acquired the L2 constraints on CLLD, which is [+anaphor] for Italian and [+specific] for Romanian, data from both Romanian L2 learners of Italian and Italian L2 learners of Romanian showed persistent L1 transfer effects. Target-like acquisition for these groups requires both grammatical expansion and retraction; Romanian CLLD requires the addition of an L1-unavailable [+specific] feature and the loss of a [+anaphor] feature, while Italian CLLD requires the addition of an L1-unavailable [+anaphor] and the loss of a [+specific] feature. The reported findings extend evidence in favour of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis to the syntax-discourse interface, as reassembly of interpretational features associated with CLLD proved more difficult than feature acquisition. While learners at the near-native levels were able to broaden the contexts that allow a clitic in the L2 (grammatical expansion), L1 preemption difficulties were attested as well. This was the case regardless of the frequency of the relevant construction in the input and the type of L2 feature that needed to be added/removed.

Frequent vs. infrequent words shape toddlers' real-time sentence comprehension.

We examined how noun frequency and the typicality of surrounding linguistic context contribute to children's real-time comprehension. Monolingual English-learning toddlers viewed pairs of pictures while hearing sentences with typical or atypical sentence frames (Look at the… vs. Examine the…), followed by nouns that were higher- or lower-frequency labels for a referent (horse vs. pony). Toddlers showed no significant differences in comprehension of nouns in typical and atypical sentence frames. However, they were less accurate in recognizing lower-frequency nouns, particularly among toddlers with smaller vocabularies. We conclude that toddlers can recognize nouns in diverse sentence contexts, but their representations develop gradually.

Zipf's Law of Abbreviation holds for individual characters across a broad range of writing systems.

Zipf's Law of Abbreviation - the idea that more frequent symbols in a code are simpler than less frequent ones - has been shown to hold at the level of words in many languages. We tested whether it holds at the level of individual written characters. Character complexity is similar to word length in that it requires more cognitive and motor effort for producing and processing more complex symbols. We built a dataset of character complexity and frequency measures covering 27 different writing systems. According to our data, Zipf's Law of Abbreviation holds for every writing system in our dataset - the more frequent characters have lower degrees of complexity and vice-versa. This result provides further evidence of optimization mechanisms shaping communication systems.

Spatiotemporal parameters for energy efficient kilohertz-frequency nerve block with low onset response.

BACKGROUND: Electrical nerve conduction block has great potential for treatment of disease through reversible and local inactivation of somatic and autonomic nerves. However, the relatively high energy requirements and the presence of undesired excitation at the onset of the kilohertz-frequency (KHF) signals used for block pose obstacles to effective translation. Frequency, electrode geometry, and waveform shape are known to influence block threshold and onset response, but available data provide a limited understanding of how to select these parameters to optimize nerve block. METHODS: We evaluated KHF nerve block in rat tibial nerve across frequencies (5-60 kHz), electrode geometries (monopolar, bipolar, and tripolar), and waveform shapes. We present a novel Fourier-based method for constructing composite signals that systematically sample the KHF waveform design space. RESULTS: The lowest frequencies capable of blocking (5-16 kHz) were not the most energy-efficient among the tested frequencies. Further, bipolar cuffs required the largest current and power to block, monopolar cuffs required the lowest current, and both tripolar and monopolar cuffs required the lowest power. Tripolar cuffs produced the smallest onset response across frequencies. Composite signals comprised of a first harmonic sinusoid at fundamental frequency (f0) superposed on a second harmonic sinusoid at 2f0 could block at lower threshold and lower onset response compared to the constituent sinusoids alone. This effect was strongly dependent on the phase of the second harmonic and on the relative amplitudes of the first and second harmonics. This effect was also dependent on electrode geometry: monopolar and tripolar cuffs showed clear composite signal effects in most experiments; bipolar cuffs showed no clear effects in most experiments. CONCLUSIONS: Our data provide novel information about block threshold and onset response at the boundary of frequencies that can block. Our results also show an interaction between spatial (cuff geometry) and temporal (frequency and waveform shape) parameters. Finally, while previous studies suggested that temporal parameters could reduce onset response only in exchange for increased block threshold (or vice versa), our results show that waveform shape influences KHF response in ways that can be exploited to reduce both energy and onset responses.

Repetition, but not acoustic differentiation, facilitates pseudohomophone learning by children.

Children's ability to learn words with multiple meanings may be hindered by their adherence to a one-to-one form-to-meaning mapping bias. Previous research on children's learning of a novel meaning for a familiar word (sometimes called a pseudohomophone) has yielded mixed results, suggesting a range of factors that may impact when children entertain a new meaning for a familiar word. One such factor is repetition of the new meaning (Storkel & Maekawa, 2005) and another is the acoustic differentiation of the two meanings (Conwell, 2017). This study asked 72 4-year-old English-learning children to assign novel meanings to familiar words and manipulated how many times they heard the words with their new referents as well as whether the productions were acoustically longer than typical productions of the words. Repetition supported the learning of a pseudohomophone, but acoustic differentiation did not.

A verb-frame frequency account of constraints on long-distance dependencies in English.

Going back to Ross (1967) and Chomsky (1973), researchers have sought to understand what conditions permit long-distance dependencies in language, such as between the wh-word what and the verb bought in the sentence 'What did John think that Mary bought?'. In the present work, we attempt to understand why changing the main verb in wh-questions affects the acceptability of long-distance dependencies out of embedded clauses. In particular, it has been claimed that factive and manner-of-speaking verbs block such dependencies (e.g., 'What did John know/whisper that Mary bought?'), whereas verbs like think and believe allow them. Here we provide 3 acceptability judgment experiments of filler-gap constructions across embedded clauses to evaluate four types of accounts based on (1) discourse; (2) syntax; (3) semantics; and (4) our proposal related to verb-frame frequency. The patterns of acceptability are most simply explained by two factors: verb-frame frequency, such that dependencies with verbs that rarely take embedded clauses are less acceptable; and construction type, such that wh-questions and clefts are less acceptable than declaratives. We conclude that the low acceptability of filler-gap constructions formed by certain sentence complement verbs is due to infrequent linguistic exposure.

Input effects in the acquisition of verb inflection: Evidence from Emirati Arabic.

This study investigates the acquisition of the Imperfective verb inflection paradigm in Emirati Arabic (EA), to determine whether the learning process is sensitive to the phonological and typological properties of the input. We collected data from 48 participants aged 2;7 to 5;9 years, using an elicited production paradigm. Input frequencies of inflectional contexts, verb types and tokens were obtained from corpora of child-directed and adult EA. Children's accuracy was inversely related to the input frequency of inflectional contexts, but not related to type and token frequency or phonological neighborhood density. Token frequency interacted with age, such that younger children performed considerably worse on low-frequency tokens, but older children performed equally well on high- and low-frequency tokens. We conclude that learning is input-driven, but that a sufficiently regular paradigm allows children to eventually generalise across all items earlier than in previously studied European languages.

Can prediction and retrodiction explain whether frequent multi-word phrases are accessed 'precompiled' from memory or compositionally constructed on the fly?

An important debate on the architecture of the language faculty has been the extent to which it relies on a compositional system that constructs larger units from morphemes to words to phrases to utterances on the fly and in real time using grammatical rules; or a system that chunks large preassembled, stored units of language from memory; or some combination of both approaches. Good empirical evidence exists for both 'computed' and 'large stored' forms in language, but little is known about what shapes multi-word storage/ access or compositional processing. Here we explored whether predictive and retrodictive processes are a likely determinant of multi-word storage/ processing. Our results suggest that forward and backward predictability are independently informative in determining the lexical cohesiveness of multi-word phrases. In addition, our results call for a reevaluation of the role of retrodiction in contemporary language processing accounts (cf. Ferreira and Chantavarin, 2018).

Hierarchical Inference in Sound Change: Words, Sounds, and Frequency of Use.

This paper aims examines the role of hierarchical inference in sound change. Through hierarchical inference, a language learner can distribute credit for a pronunciation between the intended phone and the larger units in which it is embedded, such as triphones, morphemes, words and larger syntactic constructions and collocations. In this way, hierarchical inference resolves the longstanding debate about the unit of sound change: it is not necessary for change to affect only sounds, or only words. Instead, both can be assigned their proper amount of credit for a particular pronunciation of a phone. Hierarchical inference is shown to generate novel predictions for the emergence of stable variation. Under standard assumptions about linguistic generalization, it also generates a counterintuitive prediction of a U-shaped frequency effect in an advanced articulatorily-motivated sound change. Once the change has progressed far enough for the phone to become associated with the reduced pronunciation, novel words will be more reduced than existing words that, for any reason, have become associated with the unreduced variant. Avoiding this prediction requires learners to not consider novel words to be representative of the experienced lexicon. Instead, learners should generalize to novel words from other words that are likely to exhibit similar behavior: rare words, and the words that occur in similar contexts. Directions for future work are outlined.

Order effects in bilingual recognition memory partially confirm predictions of the frequency-lag hypothesis.

The present study examined task order, language, and frequency effects on list memory to investigate how bilingualism affects recognition memory. In Experiment 1, 64 bilinguals completed a recognition memory task including intermixed high and medium frequency words in English and another list in Spanish. In Experiment 2, 64 bilinguals and 64 monolinguals studied lists with only high frequency English words and a separate list with only low frequency English words, in counterbalanced order followed by a recognition test. In Experiment 1, bilinguals who completed the task in the dominant language first outperformed bilinguals tested in the nondominant language first, and order effects were not stronger in the dominant language. In Experiment 2, participants who were tested with high frequency word lists first outperformed those tested with low frequency word lists first. Regardless of language and testing order, memory for English and high frequency words was lower than memory for Spanish and medium frequency (in Experiment 1) or low frequency (in Experiment 2) words. Order effects on recognition memory patterned differently from previously reported effects on picture naming in ways that do not suggest between language interference and instead invite an analogy between language dominance and frequency of use (i.e., dominant language = higher frequency) as the primary factor affecting bilingual recognition memory.

Acquiring diminutive allomorphs: taking item-specific characteristics into account.

Phonological characteristics and frequencies of stems and allomorphs have been explored as possible factors causing differences in production accuracies between allomorphic forms. However, previous findings are not consistent and the relative contributions of these factors are unclear. This study investigated target and erroneous productions of the Dutch diminutive, which has five allomorphs with varying type frequencies and of which the selection depends on the phonological characteristics of the stems. Typically developing children (N = 115, 5;1-10;3) were tested on their production of real and nonce diminutives. Linear mixed effects modelling was used to analyse the data taking nonverbal IQ into account. Type frequencies of the allomorphs and differences in phonological characteristics of the stems were found to be related to differences in production accuracies between the allomorphs. However, phonological characteristics of the stems appeared to have a bigger impact, mainly due to the phonological complexity of these characteristics.

Token Frequency Effects in Homophone Production: An Elicitation Study.

In natural production, adults differentiate homophones prosodically as a function of the frequency of their intended meaning. This study compares adult and child productions of homophones to determine whether prosodic differentiation of homophones changes over development. Using a picture-based story-completion paradigm, isolated tokens of homophones were elicited from English-learning children and adult native English speakers. These tokens were measured for duration, vowel duration, pitch, pitch range, and vowel quality. Results indicate that less frequent meanings of homophones are longer in duration than their more frequent counterparts in both adults and children. No other measurement differed as a function of meaning frequency. As speakers of all ages produce longer tokens of lower frequency homophones, homophone differentiation does not change over development, but is included in children's early lexicons. These findings indicate that production planning processes alone may not fully account for differences in homophone duration, but rather that the differences could be learned and represented from experience even in the early stages of lexical acquisition.

Modeling the effect of carbon-dioxide gas on cavitation.

One of the controlling parameters of the physical and chemical effects produced by acoustic cavitation is the use of dissolved gas as it affects the temperature and pressure obtained at cavity collapse and, the reactions happening in a bubble. It also enhances the nucleation rates by decreasing the threshold required for cavitation by providing dissolved gas nuclei. The present study looks into the effect of carbon dioxide gas on cavitation using a diffusion limited model. The model couples the dynamics of a single bubble with 11 chemical reactions involving 8 reactive species. The effect of mass transport (diffusion of water vapor and radical species) and heat transport (by conduction) is included in the model. Simulations were carried out for different initial compositions of an Ar-CO2- bubble and the results were compared with an experimental study reported in the earlier literature. The results have indicated that intensity of collapse decreases with an increase in CO2 composition in the bubble thereby decreasing the yield of the oxidizing radicals like OH. This is due to the lower polytropic coefficient and higher specific heat of CO2 compared to that of argon. Also, the bubbles grows to a larger extent with an increase in the dissolved CO2 concentration thereby accommodating higher amounts of water vapor and ultimately decreasing the temperature obtained at collapse. Simulations were done for a bubble containing a mole fraction of 95% Ar and 5% CO2 at different values of driving frequencies (213, 355, 647 and 1000kHz) and driving pressure amplitudes (3.22, 5, 7.5 and 10bar). Higher production rate of OH radicals was predicted at a lower driving frequency, for a given driving pressure amplitude and it increased with an increase in the driving pressure amplitude. At a given driving pressure amplitude, the yield of OH radicals decreased with an increase in the CO2 concentration in the bubble for all the driving frequencies used in the simulations.

The Role of Lexical Frequency in the Acceptability of Syntactic Variants: Evidence From that-Clauses in Polish.

A number of studies report that frequency is a poor predictor of acceptability, in particular at the lower end of the frequency spectrum. Because acceptability judgments provide a substantial part of the empirical foundation of dominant linguistic traditions, understanding how acceptability relates to frequency, one of the most robust predictors of human performance, is crucial. The relation between low frequency and acceptability is investigated using corpus- and behavioral data on the distribution of infinitival and finite that-complements in Polish. Polish verbs exhibit substantial subordination variation and for the majority of verbs taking an infinitival complement, the that-complement occurs with low frequency (<0.66 ipm). These low-frequency that-clauses, in turn, exhibit large differences in how acceptable they are to native speakers. It is argued that acceptability judgments are based on configurations of internally structured exemplars, the acceptability of which cannot reliably be assessed until sufficient evidence about the core component has accumulated.

Social Media and Language Processing: How Facebook and Twitter Provide the Best Frequency Estimates for Studying Word Recognition.

Corpus-based word frequencies are one of the most important predictors in language processing tasks. Frequencies based on conversational corpora (such as movie subtitles) are shown to better capture the variance in lexical decision tasks compared to traditional corpora. In this study, we show that frequencies computed from social media are currently the best frequency-based estimators of lexical decision reaction times (up to 3.6% increase in explained variance). The results are robust (observed for Twitter- and Facebook-based frequencies on American English and British English datasets) and are still substantial when we control for corpus size.

The impact of frequency on the performance of microwave ablation.

PURPOSE: The use of higher frequencies in percutaneous microwave ablation (MWA) may offer compelling interstitial antenna design advantages over the 915 MHz and 2.45 GHz frequencies typically employed in current systems. To evaluate the impact of higher frequencies on ablation performance, we conducted a comprehensive computational and experimental study of microwave absorption and tissue heating as a function of frequency. METHODS: We performed electromagnetic and thermal simulations of MWA in ex vivo and in vivo porcine muscle at discrete frequencies in the 1.9-26 GHz range. Ex vivo ablation experiments were performed in the 1.9-18 GHz range. We tracked the size of the ablation zone across frequency for constant input power and ablation duration. Further, we conducted simulations to investigate antenna feed line heating as a function of frequency, input power, and cable diameter. RESULTS: As the frequency was increased from 1.9 to 26 GHz the resulting ablation zone dimensions decreased in the longitudinal direction while remaining relatively constant in the radial direction; thus at higher frequencies the overall ablation zone was more spherical. However, cable heating at higher frequencies became more problematic for smaller diameter cables at constant input power. CONCLUSION: Comparably sized ablation zones are achievable well above 1.9 GHz, despite increasingly localised power absorption. Specific absorption rate alone does not accurately predict ablation performance, particularly at higher frequencies where thermal diffusion plays an important role. Cable heating due to ohmic losses at higher frequencies may be controlled through judicious choices of input power and cable diameter.

Fatigue data for polyether ether ketone (PEEK) under fully-reversed cyclic loading.

In this article, the data obtained from the uniaxial fully-reversed fatigue experiments conducted on polyether ether ketone (PEEK), a semi-crystalline thermoplastic, are presented. The tests were performed in either strain-controlled or load-controlled mode under various levels of loading. The data are categorized into four subsets according to the type of tests, including (1) strain-controlled fatigue tests with adjusted frequency to obtain the nominal temperature rise of the specimen surface, (2) strain-controlled fatigue tests with various frequencies, (3) load-controlled fatigue tests without step loadings, and (4) load-controlled fatigue tests with step loadings. Accompanied data for each test include the fatigue life, the maximum (peak) and minimum (valley) stress-strain responses for each cycle, and the hysteresis stress-strain responses for each collected cycle in a logarithmic increment. A brief description of the experimental method is also given.

Number Frequency in L1 Differentially Affects Immediate Serial Recall of Numbers in L2 Between Beginning and Intermediate Learners.

A list number recall test in English (L2) was administered to both Japanese (L1) students with beginning-level English proficiency who attended evening high school and Japanese college students with intermediate-level English proficiency. The major findings were that, only for the high school group, the small numbers 1 and 2 in middle positions of lists were recalled better than the large numbers 8 and 9 and there was a significant correlation between number frequency in Japanese and recall performance. Equally intriguing was that in both groups for adjacent transposition errors, smaller numbers tended to appear in the first position and large numbers in the second; also, omission errors were commonly seen for larger numbers. These phenomena are interpreted as reflecting frequency and/or frequency-related effects. Briefly discussed were the bilingual short-term memory system, effects of number value, generality and implications of the findings, and weaknesses of the study.

Word length and frequency effects on children's eye movements during silent reading.

In the present study we measured the eye movements of a large sample of 2nd grade German speaking children and a control group of adults during a silent reading task. To be able to directly investigate the interaction of word length and frequency effects we employed controlled sentence frames with embedded target words in an experimental design in which length and frequency were manipulated independently of one another. Unlike previous studies which have investigated the interaction of word length and frequency effects in children, we used age-appropriate word frequencies for children. We found significant effects of word length and frequency for both children and adults while effects were generally greater for children. The interaction of word length and frequency was significant for children in gaze duration and total viewing time eye movement measures but not for adults. Our results suggest that children rely on sublexical decoding of infrequent words, leading to greater length effects for infrequent than frequent words while adults do not show this effect when reading children's reading materials.

Representational deficit or processing effect? An electrophysiological study of noun-noun compound processing by very advanced L2 speakers of English.

The processing of English noun-noun compounds (NNCs) was investigated to identify the extent and nature of differences between the performance of native speakers of English and advanced Spanish and German non-native speakers of English. The study sought to establish whether the word order of the equivalent structure in the non-native speakers' mothertongue (L1) had an influence on their processing of NNCs in their second language (L2), and whether this influence was due to differences in grammatical representation (i.e., incomplete acquisition of the relevant structure) or processing effects. Two mask-primed lexical decision experiments were conducted in which compounds were presented with their constituent nouns in licit vs. reversed order. The first experiment used a speeded lexical decision task with reaction time registration, and the second a delayed lexical decision task with EEG registration. There were no significant group differences in accuracy in the licit word order condition, suggesting that the grammatical representation had been fully acquired by the non-native speakers. However, the Spanish speakers made slightly more errors with the reversed order and had longer response times, suggesting an L1 interference effect (as the reverse order matches the licit word order in Spanish). The EEG data, analyzed with generalized additive mixed models, further supported this hypothesis. The EEG waveform of the non-native speakers was characterized by a slightly later onset N400 in the violation condition (reversed constituent order). Compound frequency predicted the amplitude of the EEG signal for the licit word order for native speakers, but for the reversed constituent order for Spanish speakers-the licit order in their L1-supporting the hypothesis that Spanish speakers are affected by interferences from their L1. The pattern of results for the German speakers in the violation condition suggested a strong conflict arising due to licit constituents being presented in an order that conflicts with the expected order in both their L1 and L2.