Subject–Verb Number Agreement in Bilingual Processing: (Lack of) Age of Acquisition and Proficiency Effects

Children acquire language more easily than adults, though it is controversial whether this faculty declines as a result of a critical period or something else. To address this question, we investigate the role of age of acquisition and proficiency on morphosyntactic processing in adult monolinguals and bilinguals. Spanish monolinguals and intermediate and advanced early and late bilinguals of Spanish read sentences with adjacent subject–verb number agreements and violations and chose one of four pictures. Eye-tracking data revealed that all groups were sensitive to the violations and attended more to more salient plural and preterit verbs than less obvious singular and present verbs, regardless of AoA and proficiency level. We conclude that the processing of adjacent SV agreement depends on perceptual salience and language use, rather than AoA or proficiency. These findings support usage-based theories of language acquisition.

Neurophysiology of non-native sound discrimination: Evidence from German vowels and consonants in successive French–German bilinguals using an MMN oddball paradigm

The present electroencephalographical multi-speaker MMN oddball experiment was designed to study the phonological processing of German native and non-native speech sounds. Precisely, we focused on the perception of German /ɪ-iː/, /ɛ-ɛː/, /a-aː/ and the fricatives [ʃ] and [ç] in German natives (GG) and French learners of German (FG). As expected, our results showed that GG were able to discriminate all the critical vowel contrasts. In contrast, FG, despite their high L2 proficiency level, were only marginally sensitive to vowel length variations. Finally, neither GG nor FG discriminated the opposition between [ʃ] and [ç], as revealed by the absence of MMN response. This latter finding was interpreted in terms of low perceptual salience. Taken together, the present findings lend partial support to the Perceptual Assimilation Model for late bilinguals (PAM-L2) for speech perception of non-native phonological contrasts.

Focus Attracts Attachment

There is growing evidence that pitch accents as well as prosodic boundaries can affect syntactic attachment. But is this an effect of their perceptual salience (the Salience Hypothesis), or is it because accents mark the position of focus (the Focus Attraction Hypothesis)? A pair of auditory comprehension experiments shows that focus position, as indicated by preceding wh-questions instead of by pitch accents, affects attachment by drawing the ambiguous phrase to the focus. This supports the Focus Attraction Hypothesis (or a pragmatic version of salience) for both these results and previous results of accents on attachment. These experiments show that information structure, as indicated with prosody or other means, influences sentence interpretation, and suggests a view on which modifiers are drawn to the most important information in a sentence.

When the Body Belies the Words: Embodied Agency With darf/kann ich? (“May/Can I?”) in German

Research on multimodal interaction has shown that simultaneity of embodied behavior and talk is constitutive for social action. In this study, we demonstrate different temporal relationships between verbal and embodied actions. We focus on uses of German darf/kann ich? (“may/can I?”) in which speakers initiate, or even complete the embodied action that is addressed by the turn before the recipient's response. We argue that through such embodied conduct, the speaker bodily enacts high agency, which is at odds with the low deontic stance they express through their darf/kann ich?-TCUs. In doing so, speakers presuppose that the intersubjective permissibility of the action is highly probable or even certain. Moreover, we demonstrate how the speaker's embodied action, joint perceptual salience of referents, and the projectability of the action addressed with darf/kann ich? allow for a lean syntactic design of darf/kann ich?-TCUs (i.e., pronominalization, object omission, and main verb omission). Our findings underscore the reflexive relationship between lean syntax, sequential organization and multimodal conduct.

Identifying Songs from their Piano-Driven Opening Chords

It is currently believed that timbre plays a primary role in the identification of songs from very brief excerpts of music. However, its specific contribution, and those of other characteristics of the music, remain unclear. The aim of the present study was to investigate the contributions of timbre and chord type, voicing, and duration to participants’ ability to identify songs from their opening chords, played on the piano alone or on the piano and one other instrument. Ninety-three participants were asked to identify 20 songs from their opening chords. They were also asked to estimate the similarity between pairs of chords. We evaluated the contribution of 10 characteristics of chords to song identification rates, including brightness, pitch register, and duration, because of their high perceptual salience, and others chosen on the basis of theoretical predictions relating to auditory long-term memory. Song identification rates were associated with the chords’ brightness, familiarity and, to a lesser extent, pitch register, but not participants’ musical background. The results of the study suggest that listeners with and without musical training can identify songs from their opening chords, cued by both their timbral and non-timbral characteristics.

The motivational role of affect in an ecological model

Drawing from empirical literature on ecological psychology, affective neuroscience, and philosophy of mind, this article describes a model of affect-as-motivation in the intentional bond between organism and environment. An epistemological justification for the motivating role of emotions is provided through articulating the perceptual context of emotions as embodied, situated, and functional, and positing perceptual salience as a biasing signal in an affordance competition model. The motivational role of affect is pragmatically integrated into discussions of action selection in the neurosciences.

Acoustics of the banjo: measurements and sound synthesis

Measurements of vibrational response of an American 5-string banjo and of the sounds of played notes on the instrument are presented, and contrasted with corresponding results for a steel-string guitar. A synthesis model, fine-tuned using information from the measurements, has been used to investigate what acoustical features are necessary to produce recognisable banjo-like sound, and to explore the perceptual salience of a wide range of design modifications. Recognisable banjo sound seems to depend on the pattern of decay rates of “string modes”, the loudness magnitude and profile, and a transient contribution to each played note from the “body modes”. A formant-like feature, peaking around 500–800 Hz on the banjo tested, is found to play a key role. At higher frequencies the dynamic behaviour of the bridge produces additional formant-like features, reminiscent of the “bridge hill” of the violin, and these also produce clear perceptual effects.

Bottom-up perceptual salience and top-down retro-cues concurrently determine state in visual working memory

Recent studies have demonstrated that in visual working memory (VWM), only items in an active state can guide attention. Further evidence has revealed that items with higher perceptual salience or items prioritised by a valid retro-cue in VWM tend to be in an active state. However, it is unclear which factor (perceptual salience or retro-cues) is more important for influencing the item state in VWM or whether the factors can act concurrently. Experiment 1 examined the role of perceptual salience by asking participants to hold two features with relatively different perceptual salience (colour vs. shape) in VWM while completing a visual search task. Guidance effects were found when either colour or both colour and shape in VWM matched one of the search distractors but not when shape matched. This demonstrated that the more salient feature in VWM can actively guide attention, while the less salient feature cannot. However, when shape in VWM was cued to be more relevant (prioritised) in Experiment 2, we found guidance effects in both colour-match and shape-match conditions. That is, both more salient but non-cued colour and less salient but cued shape could be active in VWM, such that attentional selection was affected by the matching colour or shape in the visual search task. This suggests that bottom-up perceptual salience and top-down retro-cues can jointly determine the active state in VWM.

Cue reliability, salience and early comprehension of agreement: Evidence from Greek

Previous studies across languages (English, Spanish, French) have argued that perceptual salience and cue reliability can explain cross-linguistic differences in early comprehension of verbal agreement. Here we tested this hypothesis further by investigating early comprehension in Greek, where markers have high salience and reliability (compared to Spanish and English) predicting early comprehension, as in French. We investigated two and three-year-old Greek-speaking children's ability to distinguish third person singular and plural agreement in a picture-selection task. We also examined the frequency of these morphemes in child-directed speech to address input effects. Results showed that three-year-olds are sensitive to both singular and plural agreement, earlier than children acquiring English and Spanish, but later than French, and despite singular agreement being more frequent than plural agreement in the child corpus. These findings provide further support for the role of salience and reliability during early acquisition, while highlighting a potential effect of morpheme position.