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This study examined and compared the comprehension of Mandarin ditransitive constructions in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and children with autism spectrum disorder plus language impairment (ALI). Eighteen children with DLD, 17 children with ALI, and 27 age-matched typically developing (TDA) children, participated in a sentence-picture matching task on four patterns of Mandarin ditransitive constructions. Both children with DLD and children with ALI received significantly lower accuracy than TDA children in general and their most common errors were thematic role reversals. However, while children with ALI evinced a generalized deficit in all four patterns, only the comprehension of S1 (Subj. + V gei  + IO + DO) and S3 (Subj. +  gei  + IO + V + DO) was affected in children with DLD, with that of S2 (Subj. + V + DO +  gei  + IO) and S4 (Subj. + V + IO + DO) preserved in this population. Additionally, thematic role reversal errors were more dominant in children with DLD than in children with ALI who also committed a relatively higher proportion of Wrong Theme and No Recipient errors. It is concluded that the primary deficit of children with DLD lies in representing dependent relationships between the arguments and the verb as involved in thematic role assignment, but this is less critical in children with ALI, with their performance on the comprehension task possibly also related to other factors associated with the condition. To enhance the development of ditransitive constructions, intervention efforts for children with DLD and children with ALI could focus on strengthening the connection between each argument and its thematic role.

The present study investigates the scope of metaphors evoked by the culinary term in American English and its Peninsular Spanish equivalent . The data analysed was extracted from the and the . The target frames evoked and the frame elements involved in the metaphorical mappings were used to identify and analyse the metaphorical expressions. Furthermore, the type of process and thematic roles performed by the frame elements in the conceptual projections were examined to make divergences explicit. Our results suggest that metaphor diversity is broader in American English, as the source frame evoked by expresses metaphorically a larger number of target frames than in Peninsular Spanish. Consequently, these lexical items are not exact equivalents. Each language seems to place the experiential focus on different frame elements and thematic roles to create their metaphorical mappings, which points to differential cognitive preferences between both cultures.

We investigated whether Tagalog-speaking children incrementally interpret the first noun as the agent, even if verbal and nominal markers for assigning thematic roles are given early in Tagalog sentences. We asked five- and seven-year-old children and adult controls to select which of two pictures of reversible actions matched the sentence they heard, while their looks to the pictures were tracked. Accuracy and eye-tracking data showed that agent-initial sentences were easier to comprehend than patient-initial sentences, but the effect of word order was modulated by voice. Moreover, our eye-tracking data provided evidence that, by the first noun phrase, seven-year-old children looked more to the target in the agent-initial compared to the patient-initial conditions, but this word order advantage was no longer observed by the second noun phrase. The findings support language processing and acquisition models which emphasize the role of frequency in developing heuristic strategies (e.g., Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006).

NP1 in the position of the subject of the mandarin BA construction denoting causation is usually occupied by patientlike roles and NP2 immediately following BA is usually occupied by agentlike roles. The causative relation between NP1 and NP2, with the former being the Cause, and the latter the Affectee, derives from the word BA, which triggers in the lexicon the morpholexical operation of causativization when it unites with the predicate. The operation involves either assignment of causative roles Cause and Affectee to the existent thematic roles or insertion of a new role Cause to the thematic structure, with the prominence of Cause or the thematic role assigned Cause always being over the other roles. Having undergone this morpholexical operation, the thematic structure correctly maps to and generates the grammatical functional structure according to the general principles and conditions stipulated by the Lexical Mapping Theory (LMT). The result of this research shows that even for a construction as unique as the mandarin BA construction denoting causation compared with any other languages, LMT is still well applicable in explaining its role-function mapping.

Understanding is at the core of sentence comprehension. The actors that contribute to the verb meaning are labeled thematic roles. We used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to verify the possible impact of verb semantics on the thematic role encoding process that has been shown to involve the posterior portion of the left posterior parietal sulcus (PPS; ). Sixteen participants underwent TMS and sham stimulation sessions while performing an agent-decision task, in which they had to decide by key press which of the two arguments was the agent of visually presented sentences or pseudo-sentences. The (pseudo)sentences were all reversible and were presented in the active or passive diathesis. Double pulse TMS was delivered to the posterior part of the intraparietal sulcus in an event-related fashion, at two different time windows: 200–400 ms (T1) or 600–800 ms (T2) time-locked to the presentation of the (pseudo)sentence. Results showed that TMS increased accuracy on passive sentences and pseudo-sentences as compared to active sentences and to the baseline, sham condition. Indeed, the presence of a verb with a full semantic representation was not a necessary precondition for the TMS-induced facilitation of passive (pseudo)sentences. Stimulation timing had no effect on accuracy for sentences vs. pseudo-sentences. These observations support the idea that the posterior parietal site is recruited when the correct interpretation of a sentence requires reanalysis of temporarily encoded thematic roles (as in reversible passive sentences) even when the verb is not an entry in the lexicon and hence does not have a semantic representation. Results are consistent with previous evidence and deserve further investigation in larger experimental samples. Increasing the number and variety of stimulus sentences, and administering TMS to additional control sites will be key to further articulate the conclusions allowed by these initial findings.

When perceiving the world around us, we are constantly integrating pieces of information. The integrated experience consists of more than just the sum of its parts. For example, visual scenes are defined by a collection of objects as well as the spatial relations amongst them and sentence meaning is computed based on individual word semantic but also syntactic configuration. Having quantitative models of such integrated representations can help evaluate cognitive models of both language and scene perception. Here, we focus on language, and use a behavioral measure of perceived similarity as an approximation of integrated meaning representations. We collected similarity judgments of 200 subjects rating nouns or transitive sentences through an online multiple arrangement task. We find that perceived similarity between sentences is most strongly modulated by the semantic action category of the main verb. In addition, we show how non-negative matrix factorization of similarity judgment data can reveal multiple underlying dimensions reflecting both semantic as well as relational role information. Finally, we provide an example of how similarity judgments on sentence stimuli can serve as a point of comparison for artificial neural networks models (ANNs) by comparing our behavioral data against sentence similarity extracted from three state-of-the-art ANNs. Overall, our method combining the multiple arrangement task on sentence stimuli with matrix factorization can capture relational information emerging from integration of multiple words in a sentence even in the presence of strong focus on the verb.

Two experiments used eye-tracking during reading to investigate the role of the consistency of the relative markedness alignment of noun phrases (NPs) in the processing of complex sentences in Korean. To do so, the animacy of the first NP was varied in both experiments to manipulate the relative markedness of NPs. In addition, case markings of the second NP (nominative vs. accusative) were manipulated in the first experiment and the markings of the first NP (nominative vs. topic) were manipulated in the second experiment. Results revealed that the animacy manipulation and the nominative-topicality manipulation showed measurable influence on the participants’ reading of the complex sentences. Also, the effect of the prominence misalignment caused by animacy seems to have a stronger effect on reading than the effect caused by the nominative-topicality manipulation. The experiments suggested that on-line processing of Korean complex sentences are affected by the consistency of the relative markedness alignment of NPs.

Agents have been claimed to be universally more prominent than verbal arguments with other thematic roles. Perhaps the strongest claim in this regard is that agents have a privileged role in language processing, specifically that there is a universal bias for the first unmarked argument in an utterance to be interpreted as an agent. Symmetrical voice languages such as many western Austronesian languages challenge claims about agent prominence in various ways. Inter alia, most of these languages allow for both ‘agent-first’ and ‘undergoer-first’ orders in basic transitive constructions. We argue, however, that they still provide evidence for a universal ‘agent-first’ principle. Inasmuch as these languages allow for word-order variation beyond the basic set of default patterns, such variation will always result in an agent-first order. Variation options in which undergoers are in first position are not attested. The fact that not all transitive constructions are agent-first is due to the fact that there are competing ordering biases, such as the principles dictating that word order follows constituency or the person hierarchy, as also illustrated with Austronesian data.

This paper focuses on the relational notion of prominence, in which entities of equal type are ranked according to certain prominence-lending features. In German two demonstrative forms, “der” and “dieser”, can function like personal pronouns in English. It has been proposed that processing “der” involves computing a prominence hierarchy of the prior referents, and excluding the referent with the highest prominence rank. The demonstrative “dieser” has not been extensively tested. In the current study, personal and demonstrative pronominal forms were investigated following ditransitive contexts, where three potential antecedents are available, in two rating experiments. The personal pronoun showed flexibility in that it received equally high ratings for all three antecedents in canonical configurations. The ratings for dieser followed a graded sensitivity to thematic role prominence, with lowest scores when referring to prominent antecedents (agents) and the highest scores for the least prominent antecedents (patients), with scores for the medium prominence candidate (recipients) differing from both. Der followed a similar but not identical pattern, with a less marked difference between lower prominence candidates. Positional information also has a strong influence on demonstratives. In sum, final interpretation is sensitive to fine-grained differences in prominence hierarchies.

This paper means to make a comparative study of the nominals denoting an event in Mandarin and English. I propose that although English has three types of eventive nominals — simple event nominal, Referential (R-) nominal, and Argument Structure (AS-) nominal — Mandarin has only simple event nominals. The category shifting, which is required in the derivation of R-nominals and AS-nominals in English, is an operation unavailable in Mandarin, a result caused by the lack of categorial (c-) functors by assumption. I propose that a Mandarin eventive nominal enters syntax as a category-less root and immediately gets an N category by merging as the complement to a semantic (s-) functor from the extended projection of N. It thus projects no argument structure and undergoes no V-N shift, resulting in its incapability of taking post-nominal arguments. The DPs interpreted as arguments are merged external to the nominal and are thus flexible in terms of their thematic roles. The analysis shows that there is a parametric variation based on the inventory of c-functors between Mandarin and English.