27 octubre, 2025
Autors:
Natalia Jardón Pérez, Elena Marx & Eva Wittenberg
Títol:
Is there a perfect state? Experimental evidence from English and Spanish for the perfect-as-state hypothesisEditorial: Glossa: a journal of general linguistics
Data de publicació: 24 d'octubre de 2025
Més informacióThe distinction between past and perfect has been subject to theoretical debate for decades. Some of the most prominent accounts argue that the perfect turns the mental representation of a past event into the mental representation of a state, based on a past event: the perfect-as-state hypothesis. This subtle distinction is notoriously difficult to trace, and has only been argued for using linguistic tests. Here, we provide evidence from two psycholinguistic experiments (total N=960), each in English and in Spanish, that operationalize stativity through event individuation. Our results show that compared to the past, the perfect leads to event construals that have more in common with states, both in English and in Spanish. These data constitute the first documentation of different event construals based on tenses that only differ in the subtlest of semantic distinctions.
18 març, 2026
Autors:
Pantelidou, Nikoleta, Evelina Leivada, Raquel Montero, Paolo Morosi
Títol:
Community size rather than grammatical complexity better predicts Large Language Model accuracy in a novel Wug TestEditorial: PLoS One 21(3)
Col·lecció: PLoS OneData de publicació: 2026
Text complet
Abstract
The linguistic abilities of Large Language Models are a matter of ongoing debate. This study contributes to this discussion by investigating model performance in a morphological generalization task that involves novel words. Using a multilingual adaptation of the Wug Test, six models were tested across four partially unrelated languages (Catalan, English, Greek, and Spanish) and compared with human speakers. The aim is to determine whether model accuracy approximates human competence and whether it is shaped primarily by linguistic complexity or by the size of the linguistic community, which affects the quantity of available training data. Consistent with previous research, the results show that the models are able to generalize morphological processes to unseen words with human-like accuracy. However, accuracy patterns align more closely with community size and data availability than with structural complexity, refining earlier claims in the literature. In particular, languages with larger speaker communities and stronger digital representation, such as Spanish and English, revealed higher accuracy than less-resourced ones like Catalan and Greek. Overall, our findings suggest that model behavior is mainly driven by the richness of linguistic resources rather than by sensitivity to grammatical complexity, reflecting a form of performance that resembles human linguistic competence only superficially.
Citation: Pantelidou N, Leivada E, Montero R, Morosi P (2026) Community size rather than grammatical complexity better predicts Large Language Model accuracy in a novel Wug Test. PLoS One 21(3): e0343164. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0343164
Editor: Wei Lun Wong, National University of Malaysia Faculty of Education: Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia Fakulti Pendidikan, MALAYSIA
Received: October 16, 2025; Accepted: February 2, 2026; Published: March 11, 2026
Copyright: © 2026 Pantelidou et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Data Availability: All data files are available from the OSF database (https://osf.io/4z5n6/).
Funding: EL acknowledges funding from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation & Universities MCIN/AEI/https://doi.org/10.13039/501100011033) under the research project CNS2023-144415. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
9 juny, 2026
Autors:
Teresa Cabré, Maria Ohannesian, Francesc Torres-Tamarit
Títol:
Los verbos acabados en -uir y las desinencias verbales del español.Editorial: Verba
Col·lecció: VerbaData de publicació: Juny 2026
Més informacióThis paper proposes a morphological segmentation of the regular Spanish verbal paradigm that significantly simplifies its analysis. In the proposed model, the thematic vowel (TV) is always present in the underlying representation of all verbal forms of the three conjugations, either as stressed or as pre-accented. This analysis offers several advantages over more traditional approaches, such as those represented by recent grammars by the Royal Spanish Academy, since it allows the morphological structure of the three regular conjugations to be unified, including verbs whose root ends in a vowel, like those ending in -uir, with an /i/ following the root that has usually been analysed as an antihiatic epenthetic segment. The model also establishes that the thematic vowel of the first, second, and third conjugations is respectively /a/, /e/, and /i/ throughout the present stem and in forms historically derived from the infinitive. In the rest of the paradigm, the first conjugation maintains /a/, whereas the second and third display a common pattern with the alternation /i ~ je/, interpreted synchronically as allomorphy. Surface differences derive from general phonological principles of Spanish, in particular stress assignment and the productive process of stem-final vowel deletion. Tense-aspect-mood morphemes are also regularised.
16 setembre, 2019
Autors:
Jingtao Zhu i Anna Gavarró
Títol:
Testing language acquisition models: null and overt topics in MandarinEditorial: Journal of Child Language, vol.46(4). Cambridge University Press
Data de publicació: Juliol 2019
Més informacióParameter setting is either precipitous (Gibson & Wexler, 1994) or it is gradual in response to input frequency (Yang, 2002, 2004). In this study, we compare these models against the empirical domain of subject and (direct) object drop in Mandarin. We conducted a corpus-based study of the speech of 47 Mandarin-speaking children aged 1;2–6;5, and their caregivers, from the CHILDES database. The results show that before age 1;8 all the children used null subjects and null objects in a target-like fashion, which reveals that the parameter that governs null topics is set from very early on, even if the presence of disambiguating evidence for [+Null Topic] patterns is low. Besides, children's ba constructions, which require an overt object, reliably included this object from the first occurrence although its frequency was scarce in the input. Our results indicate that the setting of certain parameters occurred early independently of the input.
