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Findings around the cognitive resources needed to compose text have helped shape current models of writing. Some of these models predict that text generation is constrained by two groups of skills: transcription (i.e., spelling and handwriting) and executive functions (EFs). While the constraining role of transcription on text generation is robust, the relationship between writing and EFs is more scarce. Some studies suggest that the impact of EFs on writing development is not only direct, but also indirect, through transcription skills. However, few studies have analyzed these effects over a sufficiently wide developmental period. In this paper, we examined transcription and EF skills in a large sample of beginner (G2), intermediate (G4), and upper-intermediate (G8) children ( N  = 1337). Each participant produced a narrative and an opinion essay. In addition, we collected measures of the low-level EFs of inhibition and updating of working memory, as well as measures of handwriting fluency and spelling accuracy. Results showed that EFs impacted text generation directly and indirectly via transcription skills, especially via handwriting. Transcription skills constrained text generation across grade levels and its weight was similar from the youngest through to the oldest age group. We conclude that EFs support low-level writing skills, as well as key processes involved in children’s text composing (i.e., knowledge-telling processes). Relevant educational implications are discussed.

  This paper examines the 3rd person clitic combinations found in a digital corpus of Catalan texts dating from the 11th century to the first half of the 18th (the CICA) and attempts to clarify the origin of the current clitic system of colloquial non-Valencian Catalan. Scrutiny of the database shows that the locative HI (i.e., hi or its variants í/y/hic) replaced the canonical dative clitic of 3rd person clusters in the 14th century in both singular and plural forms, contrary to what has previously been claimed. The medieval patterns of usage that the data reveal are very close to those occurring in colloquial non-Valencian Catalan as it is spoken nowadays, as opposed to those seen in Valencian Catalan, where a locative clitic is no longer present. On the basis of this data, we argue that the incompatibility of plural morpheme combinations in Old—among other reasons—forced the generalization of the morpheme /i/ as a dative marker, thus converting it into the true ‘elsewhere’ item of the Catalan clitic system. The similarity between medieval and modern colloquial non-Valencian Catalan clitic forms allows us to analyze them in the same way. Specifically, we suggest there is only one clitic area for these clusters in which the HI works as a place nominal located structurally in the nominal layer.

Building a text is a multidimensional endeavor. Writers must work simultaneously on the content of the text, its discursive organization, the structure of the sentences, and the individual words themselves. Knowledge of vocabulary is central to this endeavor. This study intends (1) to trace the development of writer’s vocabulary depth, their vocabulary fluency in writing, and the features of the text they produce (productivity, lexical richness, and text structure) through elementary school and (2) to determine the contribution of the writer’s performance and the text features to the quality of the text. One hundred and eighty bilingual Spanish/Catalan speakers from first, third, and sixth grade took part in the study. They participated in three researcher-created tasks; a synonyms/antonyms task to orally assess vocabulary depth; a semantic orthographic fluency task to examine their vocabulary fluency in writing; and a text writing task to evaluate text quality. Data was analyzed using structural equation modeling in order to examine the relationship between the target writer’s performance and the text features of the written compositions, and the externally evaluated text quality. Results revealed that both writer’s performance on vocabulary depth and semantic orthographic fluency and text features improved with school level. However, the capacity to establish meaning relations between words contributed more directly to the quality of texts than the speed to find words with a specific phonographic correspondence. External evaluation of text quality was more variable for younger students than for older students and was affected by school level mediated by writer performance and text features.

This study investigates the application of a state-of-the-art zero-shot and few-shot natural language processing (NLP) technique for text classification tasks in Catalan, a moderately under-resourced language. The approach involves reformulating the downstream task as textual entailment, which is then solved by an entailment model. However, unlike English, where entailment models can be trained on huge Natural Language Inference (NLI) datasets, the lack of such large resources in Catalan poses a challenge. In this context, we comparatively explore training on monolingual and (larger) multilingual resources, and identify the strengths and weaknesses of monolingual and multilingual individual components of entailment models: pre-trained language model and NLI training dataset. Furthermore, we propose and implement a simple task transfer strategy using open Wikipedia resources that demonstrates significant performance improvements, providing a practical and effective alternative for languages with limited or no NLI datasets

A rich tradition of studies on languages with differential object marking (DOM) is available in the literature. Languages like Spanish or Romanian are frequently cited in discussions about DOM, but Valencian is seldom mentioned in this context. This oversight may stem from a lack of familiarity with the Valencian language and an over-reliance on guidelines set by textbooks and official prescriptive grammars—in the case of Valencian, by the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua—which drafts the linguistic regulations of the Valencian language. This study aimed to analyze the usage of the DOM in Valencian and explore the social variables that help explain this usage (sex, age, and education). To achieve this goal, Spanish–Valencian bilingual participants completed an oral production task to evaluate their use of DOM in Valencian. Statistical analysis revealed that Valencian is a DOM language that marks direct objects that refer to humans and definite entities. These results point to the linguistic ideologies in Valencia that attempt to artificially create linguistic differentiation between Valencian and Spanish, the co-official languages in the region. Furthermore, the results emphasize the limitations of top-down prescriptive policies in modifying vernacular linguistic varieties.