Salmons & Gavarró (2022). Intervention effects in Catalan agrammatism

Autors:

Io Salmons & Anna Gavarró

Títol:

Intervention effects in Catalan agrammatism

Editorial: Glossa: a journal of general linguistics (Open Library of Humanities)
Data de publicació: 31 de desembre del 2022

Text complet

The goal of the present study is to test the agrammatic comprehension of clitic left dislocation and contrastive focus in Catalan, in order to evaluate the Generalised Minimality hypothesis of Grillo (2009). According to this hypothesis, the comprehension deficit observed in agrammatism is the result of the underspecification of scope-discourse features giving rise to generalised intervention effects. We conducted two sentence-picture matching tasks to assess the comprehension of clitic left dislocation and contrastive focus with nine and seven Broca’s aphasic subjects, respectively, as well as control participants. The results show that the comprehension of SVO sentences and object clitics was preserved, whereas the comprehension of object dislocations and object focalisations was compromised. These findings are consistent with the analysis of the deficit as an instance of generalised intervention effects. Yet, we also examined the prediction that a relevant syntactic feature mismatch between the subject and the object would suffice to block generalised minimality effects; in particular, the number features of subject and object were controlled for. The agrammatic subjects’ performance on mismatched sentences did not differ from their performance on sentences where the subject and the object were matched in number. These findings call the hypothesis into question and stress the need for future research.

Margaza & Gavarró (2023). Subject position and verb class in L2 Greek and L2 Spanish

Autors:

Panagiota Margaza & Anna Gavarró

Títol:

Subject position and verb class in L2 Greek and L2 Spanish

Editorial: Second Language Research (Sage Journals)
Data de publicació: 24 de maig del 2023

Més informació

Greek and Spanish are two languages that display a similar subject distribution with unergative/unaccusative verbs, but different word orders with focused subjects (SV in Greek and VS in Spanish). Here we consider subject–verb word order in second language (L2) Greek and L2 Spanish in order to test the Interface Hypothesis (IH). To this end, we report a word-order selection task, with a Greek and a Spanish version. The two versions of the task were administered to L2 intermediate and advanced learners and native speakers of Greek and Spanish. The results show that the first language (L1) Spanish learners of Greek approximated more closely native word orders than the L1 Greek learners of Spanish. For the Spanish learners of Greek, the advanced group performed at ceiling, while the intermediate group performed native-like only with unergatives in neutral and direct interrogative subject-focused contexts. On the other hand, for the Greek learners of Spanish, the intermediate group failed in all contexts, while the advanced group performed native-like with unaccusatives in neutral contexts. This asymmetry between L2 Greek and L2 Spanish reveals that the L1–L2 combination determines the learners’ performance, and this is unexpected under the IH.

Gavarró & Keidel (2024). Subject-verb agreement: Three experiments on Catalan

Autors:

Anna Gavarró & Alejandra Keidel

Títol:

Subject-verb agreement: Three experiments on Catalan

Editorial: First Language (Sage Journals)
Data de publicació: Agost, 2024
Pàgines: 22

Text complet

This study delves into the syntactic parsing abilities of children and infants exposed to Catalan as their first language. Focusing first on ages 3 to 6, we conducted two sentence-picture matching tasks. In experiment 1, 3 to 4-year-old children failed in identifying singular third-person subjects within null-subject sentences, although they performed above chance in all other scenarios, including plural third-person subjects and sentences with overt full DP subjects. This is reminiscent of the results of Pérez-Leroux for Spanish. In experiment 2, with the same design but involving numeral distractors, children’s performance was above chance level across all conditions from age 3 to 4. Then, in experiment 3, we moved to a younger age range with the help of eye-tracking techniques. The findings revealed that infants at 22 months had the ability to parse subject–verb agreement in sentences with third-person null subjects, and at 19 months there was evidence of parsing for third-person plural null subjects. These findings are inconsistent with the perception of children grappling with syntactic agreement computation. We argue that instances of underperformance in subject–verb agreement parsing identified in the literature often stem from task-related and pragmatic issues rather than core syntactic delay. If so, the putative asymmetry between early production of verbal inflection and late comprehension disappears; rather, the results suggest early establishment of matching operations and mastery of language-specific agreement properties before production starts.

Salmons, Muntané-Sanchez, & Gavarró (2024). An analysis of descriptions by Catalan-speaking individuals with aphasia

Autors:

Salmons, Muntané-Sanchez, & Gavarró

Títol:

An analysis of descriptions by Catalan-speaking individuals with aphasia

Editorial: Aphasiology
Data de publicació: 20-11-2024

Més informació

Background
Description tasks are used to evaluate and investigate the production abilities of people with language impairments such as aphasia.

Aims
The goal of the present study is to investigate the production abilities of Catalan-speaking individuals with aphasia (IWA), as well as a smaller sample of individuals with cognitive impairment (IWCI), in comparison with those of healthy controls. A second goal is to evaluate whether the scoring system of the Catalan version of the CAT (CAT-CAT) is helpful to discriminate different patterns of language impairment.

Methods and procedure
In the study, 109 control subjects, 20 IWA and 4 IWCI were asked to orally describe a picture from the CAT-CAT. The scoring method consisted in a closed-rating system that evaluates productivity, discourse efficiency, fluency, grammatical complexity and grammaticality.

Results
The results show that the overall scores of the control subjects were significantly higher than those of the experimental groups; the difference between the two experimental groups was not significant. Yet, the group of IWA showed greater intersubject variability than the group of IWCI. Also, the IWA were consistently worse in fluency, grammaticality and grammatical complexity than the IWCI, which indicated a different pattern of performance between the two groups.

Conclusions
Our findings therefore show that the oral picture description of the CAT-CAT is sensitive to the language impairment of subjects with aphasia and cognitive impairment. Moreover, the rating system put forward allows us to uncover different patterns of language impairment, since it includes variables to evaluate separately content and discourse efficiency on the one hand, and grammatical features on the other hand.

Nazzal, Zhu, & Gavarró (2025). Early knowledge of word order in Palestinian Arabic: An eye-tracking study

Autors:

Nazzal, Zhu, & Gavarró

Títol:

Early knowledge of word order in Palestinian Arabic: An eye-tracking study

Editorial: Language Acquisition
Data de publicació: 19-02-2025

Més informació

This paper addresses the underexplored realm of early parameter setting in language acquisition before the two-word stage, in a less researched language, Palestinian Arabic. Building on Franck et al.’s (2013) exploration of the verb–direct or indirect object/direct or indirect object–verb (VO/OV) parameter in infants exposed to French, we investigate the acquisition of the VO order (as opposed to OV) in 17-month-old native Palestinian Arabic infants using a combination of the preferential looking paradigm, the weird word order paradigm, and pseudo-verbs. The results from our study show that Palestinian Arabic infants have established VO by the age of 1;5 and ignore sequences of ungrammatical OV. This pattern is different from that of the adults, who do not ignore ungrammatical sequences. Additionally, we find no correlation between the infants’ performance and vocabulary size or age within the range tested. The infants in the study constitute, with Mandarin infants in a similar study, the youngest age group to show sensitivity to the VO/OV contrast.